Mail.

In a bigger town or city, it would be possible, even likely, to go all day without seeing someone you know. You could just go about your business without anyone really even knowing that you were there. If you wanted to see someone you knew, you'd seek them out.

In small towns, things work exactly the opposite. This works for some people. I guess they like the feeling of community and being interconnected. The ugly side of this small town dynamic is what happens when it is flipped against someone. Those strings of gossip that connect one part of the social web to another tell the hateful spiders where their prey is and how to hurt it.

Someone, I don't know who, must have seen me coming or going from Nicole's house. One evening when she was getting home from work, she handed me a letter.

"This was in the mail." She looked at me expectantly.

The envelope was blank except for my name written in black ink. I went outside to open it - it wouldn't be the first time that they'd tried to kill me - but it was just a folded piece of yellow, lined notebook paper.

Adam,
I know that you are here. I know that you are trying to make sense of this. As long as you do not try to find me, I can help you. If you want answers, look in your mother's mailbox.

It took me a few days to decide whether I thought it was safe to go. Without help, I was getting nowhere, so in the end I mustered up the courage and went to my mother's. I pulled my car up next to the mailbox and carefully opened the box. There was nothing there. For a second, I was convinced that I'd fallen into a trap. I closed the mailbox and sped off.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if the person who wrote the letter had meant my mother's post office box instead. For security, she'd never actually used the mailbox in front of the house. All her mail had been processed through her P.O. box. There was almost no way to check the box without being seen by at least a few people. Having already possibly fallen into someone's trap, I decided to go for it anyway.

It was a Friday, at about 6:45 pm, fifteen minutes before they closed their doors for the weekend. I probably looked like a shoplifter, the way I was dressed, but at least I could hope that someone might overlook me from a distance. The little brass mailbox doors are arranged along the walls in the entryway to the post office. There was almost no one around when I went, but I could still feel my palms sweating. I went into the alcove where her mailbox was and dialed in the combination I'd found in an ancient saved e-mail.

Inside, there were a couple months worth of ads and junk mail, a few official-looking letters and a large manila envelope. The envelope was completely blank - not even an address. I left everything else and took it, closing the small door and jumbling the code. I turned out of the alcove, just a few feet from the exit, and ran into the broad, muscled chest of a man wearing a black suit. It was Pastor Charles.

"Hello, my son."

I stumbled from the shock, but kept heading for the exit. Looking back, I saw that he had turned to face me and his one good eye locked onto mine for a full second. I pushed through the doors and walked quickly to the car, my legs feeling numb from the amount of adrenaline pumping through my body.

I decided that with the good chance that someone was watching me, I couldn't just drive right back to Nicole's. Someone knew that I was staying there, but maybe not everyone knew. I drove to a secluded back road and parked. The envelope sat on the passenger seat. I picked it up. It felt dense and heavy, like it might have contained a book. I tore off the top and confirmed my suspicion, pulling out a black composition notebook.

Flipping through the notebook, I saw bible verses written in quotes, with notes, highlights and annotations written all around them. Whoever had made the notebook had been very dedicated, and had filled the entire book. Needless to say, I was disappointed. These weren't answers. I'd risked everything, and came up with someone's Bible study notes. I looked back in the envelope, but there was nothing. No name inside the notebook. No clues.

And Pastor Charles had seen me. I was done for, basically. The last time I'd seen him was at my uncle's house right after his death. He and some other members of his church had been there immediately, starting a prayer circle and kicking me out of the town. I was sure my uncle hadn't committed suicide, and if I was going to suspect anyone of his murder, it was the pastor and his loyal congregation.

And now, this fucking nonsense. Someone was playing games with me.

The Volkswagen didn't start on the first try. Sometime in that pause before trying to crank the engine over again, it hit me. The church. Pastor Charles. The townspeople.

I had to go to the church. The church was where all the answers were. It shocked me that I hadn't been thinking of it before. Trying to stay hidden and playing private eye in the shadows was going to get me nowhere. The thing that strung the mystery together was that damn church. It was even in that first photo of Marissa.

My heart and the Rabbit's engine started pumping, carrying me through the darkness and the heavy rain toward the church.

Blood On My Hands.

I killed him.

Ryan wasn't even supposed to be a part of this. The only thing he was interested in before I got there was finding out about some corrupt, small-town cops. Maybe his problem was related to mine, but it was out at the periphery. What killed him was going too close to the core with me. Delving into my problem.

All of the pain of knowing that my uncle had been killed washed back over me. The anger, and worse, the frustration of not having someone to blame. The shock at finding out that everything I'd known growing up was just a thin disguise of the ugliness going on in that town.

I can't close my eyes without seeing him and that nurse and all the blood. Seeing his face is almost worse than dreaming of my own death. Sometimes, I start to think that I didn't really know him all that well; that I don't have to care. That only makes it worse. He was a bystander, and I brought him into this.

When I left the hospital, I just picked a direction and drove. It took me to my hometown's sister town, and I waited there for my nerves to pass. The town I'm from had been the shipping point for lumber in the past. All the logs went down the river to the ocean, there. Then they were bundled and shipped to wherever they were needed. The sister town also had a river, but what had kick-started the town was the pulp factory that they'd built there. The way I'd always heard it, they'd built the factory first, and the rest of the town had been built later to support it.

With the sun just coming over the mountains, I turned and headed back to Nicole's. I couldn't keep Ryan's car - once they realized that he was missing, they'd come looking for it. I couldn't go to the police. Three men dead, including my uncle, and me as the only witness and last person to see any of them alive. Alongside that, I couldn't really explain what had happened to Ryan. Going to them with only a tiny piece of the story was a sure way to get myself locked away for the rest of my life.

It was a tough decision whether to tell Nicole the truth or not. I did what I hoped was the decent thing, and lied. I said that the police had found us at the hospital and shot Ryan. She'd heard there was a sinkhole out in the middle of the sand dunes, and she helped me bury Ryan's car there. It felt like that scene in Hitchcock's Psycho, only in slow motion.

It feels wrong to call our venture to the old hospital a success. Nobody was better off. The only thing I'd gained from going there was that I knew that Menser was a real person, and that he'd been doing trials there. I guess that was the point in going. Ryan had only gone on the off chance that this was what they'd been trying to cover up. We'd found it, I guess. But it didn't feel like were any closer to being able to shut them down. To hurt them.

The Old Hospital [Part 3]

I looked at Ryan and then back to rippling water in the doorway. No one was supposed to be there.  No one was there; we'd just been through every other room in the decrepit clinic.

A person would have had to come straight here like they knew where they were going. A person without a flashlight. A person who didn't give a shit about seeing two men with flashlights in an office in the basement of a hospital that had been abandoned for over 20 years.

Or maybe it wasn't a person.

Ryan had moved his hand to his police-issue Glock, but otherwise stood frozen. You could see the tension in his whole body, riveted in place. The ripples in the hallway dissipated. "Ryan," I whispered as quietly as I could. My voice was the first sound audible in thirty seconds, and despite my best attempt, it shattered the silence like a pane of glass. Ryan didn't respond, except for a flick of his eyes to me and then back to the door. I took it to mean that he'd heard me. "Did you see it?"

"No."

"Is someone here?"

"... Maybe."

I took my sledge from the desk and took a step around it toward where Ryan was, close to the door. I could feel the numbingly cold water up to my mid-calf swirl around my boots. And hear it. Whatever was in the hall had to have been moving very slowly in order to keep quiet.

Ryan jutted his head out into the hall. I knew he couldn't see anything. Without the flashlights, it was perfectly dark down there. He held his hand backwards like a relay runner reaching for the baton. I struck the weighty Maglite into his palm, which he pointed down the hall. Right, left. He looked back at me. "All clear."

"What was it?"

"Dunno." His face was serious, focused. His eyes flicked around in a sweep of the room. There wasn't anything we needed to bring with us. "Let's go. Slow. Quiet. It went to the end of the hall and to the right." I could barely hear Ryan's whisper. He seemed to want to make up for his low volume by moving his hands more. It looked like he was giving directions to the nearest gas station.

I nodded and followed him out into the hallway. We took one step at a time, hugging the wall, making tiny waves in the black water but remaining silent. The term "silent as the grave" forced its way into my brain. All I could hear was my own breath inside my head. The pace was excruciatingly slow.

About 40 feet past the office door we'd left was another doorway, one that was large and open to the gaping blackness. Past that door, the hallway ended against another cement wall with a dark brown window set into it. A ventilation duct, I guessed.

We slowly approached the open double doorway. The beams of the flashlights barely touched the wall inside it - more flat, gray cement. As we got closer, the light panned around the room. A couple of rusted, metal, rolling tray tables. An I.V. fluid stand.

Ryan stopped and pulled his gun from its holster. I could hear his sharp intake of breath. He held it, his arms so tense that they shook. I heard splashing from the room ahead.

"FREEZE!" The word boomed through the empty hallway.

I can't see, oh god, what is that, is that a person, what the fuck are they doing there, what the fuck are they doing what the fuck, fuck, fuck.

"Who are you?" Echoed Ryan's voice again.

I nearly lost control of my bladder when I heard the voice that responded.

"Hello," a woman's voice, tonal but raspy like sandpaper brushed along a metal pipe, spoke from the darkness. "Yes? Can I help you?"

More splashing, someone's legs as they waded through the water.

"Ma'am, stop where you are."

"Ohhh, am I in some sort of trouble?"

Ryan paused, seeming unsure of how to respond. "Ma'am, it's not safe here."

"Bah," she hissed, and the wading continued.

I shifted, keeping one hand on the wall as I looked around Ryan and into the room. An old woman in all white was walking through the flooded room. Her skin was pale with a yellow tint, criss-crossed by blue and red veins, made more noticeable by the harsh white light of the flashlight. You could see her slightly yellowed teeth through her parted, thin lips. A large, angry sore on her nose drew attention from the rest of her face. Her hair was gray, pinned up in a tight bun under a small white hat. She was wearing a bright, white nurses uniform.

"Stop." Ryan called again, his voice quieter, the panic leaking out of it.

With a frustrated movement of her hands, she huffed and turned toward Ryan. "Stop! Stop? You stop! I'm working here!" She splashed through the water again, heading toward an ancient, completely rusted operating slab in the center of the huge room. As if as an afterthought, she added, "Don't make me call the police!"

Ryan looked at me, fear in his eyes. Before he even said anything, I realized that he was out of his league. "I need to call someone, we need back up - an ambulance, maybe," he said half to me, half to himself. "This is wrong, something isn't right with her."  He retreated back into the tunnel and pulled out his cell phone. "Watch her," Ryan ordered, before slipping out of sight.

The woman had reached the operating table and went to work with long, bony hands to undo the rotted leather straps there. "Ma'am? Um, do you need help?" I cautiously offered. My own voice sounding strange to me in the large room. I stepped toward her, but she didn't respond. I looked around. Most of the objects in the room were shoved against the right wall, which couldn't be seen as you approached from the hallway. It looked like about two dozen overturned desk-chairs, the type I remembered sitting in during school.  Another metal tray table held brand new leather straps, wing-nuts and attaching hardware, the only new things in the building. The back wall was lined with shelves in bad disrepair. Ryan's voice echoed from the hallway as he argued with someone.

The woman, intent on her work, gasped and sniffed, the noise bringing my focus back to her. I saw that she seemed to be crying. I walked closer, feeling a sudden unexpected compassion for the old woman. I don't think I'd ever seen a clearer diagnosis of insanity.

She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her hands out like a person with bad arthritis. I tried again, "Ma'am?"

"Your friend doesn't like me," she spat.

"Oh he's -"

"I think I know why."

She stretched the word "know" unnaturally long, as if giving a small moan of pain. She reached a finger up to the sore on her nose, drawing blood from it with a long, dirty fingernail, but giving no indication that she'd noticed. "He's afraid of me. It's because I'm - I look like a -" She frowned with sadness, unable to even say the words. She moved her left hand to cover her face and turned back toward the table, continuing to scratch with her nails.

I turned back, feeling as uncomfortable as I could possibly imagine. I looked for Ryan in the hallway, but his flashlight was just a thin glow of light around the corner. The woman was crying again, louder now. When I turned my light back to her, I saw that the entire side of her nose was now shiny and red with blood. "I was pretty once," she moaned. She was scratching her cheeks and forehead with both hands now.

"Ryan!" I called, alarmed. I heard him splash through the water, but he didn't respond. The woman, however, snapped her head toward me like a feral cat noticing a predator for the first time. She winced at some unseen pain, and gave a horrible groan.

"Ryan!" I yelled again, backing away toward the hallway. The woman reached her hands up, feeling along her emotionless face. She reached up to her hairline, just below the white nurse's cap and sunk her fingernails deep into her scalp. I could see the resistance of the skin and then the eight little *pop*s as the skin gave way, the nails sinking deep into the flesh. With a blood-curdling scream, she pulled down. The strain of it bent her neck.

I tripped backwards, landing in the hallway, splashing water onto the wall behind me. When I regained focus, the woman was sloshing forward in my direction. Her face was a mask of blood. It poured down, soaking her bleached white scrubs. Long pieces of skin stuck to her fingernails like tangled strips of scotch tape. I scrambled back to my feet, turning to run back up the way we'd come in.

I took a full step before I saw Ryan in his dark clothes, balled into the corner. Someone was standing over him in the center of the hall - another person in pure, fluorescent white. My screams reverberated off of every cement surface in the narrow hallway. I ran against the wall, backing into the corner at the end of the hall, trapped like an animal with nowhere left to run.

An explosion ripped through the underground chamber. My ears were suddenly in so much pain, I could think of nothing else. I opened my eyes again to see blood run like an open faucet from the wound Ryan's face, having taken his own life. His body slowly sank beneath the surface of the water.

I was still in the corner. Solid concrete behind me. Beneath me. Above me.

A tomb. That's what this place was.

The nurse had left the operating room. She wiped the blood from her eyes, and began to stagger toward me again. Purely on animal instinct, I tried to run again; to escape. I felt the wall, solidly behind me. A sharp angle dug into my left shoulder. I punched at the brown glass of the vent with my right hand, having forgotten that I was still holding the flashlight. The window shattered, freeing years of accumulated black rot and pine needles in fetid rainwater. Everything was plunged into darkness. I dove headfirst up into the air vent. It was completely hopeless, I knew, but fear and need had taken over.

I had my head and shoulders in the hole, and groped for anything to pull myself with. Jagged pieces of glass cut across my belly. My hand brushed across something flat and metallic about four feet into the hole. I grabbed and pulled, hoisting my lower half up into the opening.  The metal handhold rotated in my hand - a fan blade. I planted my foot against the inside of the window frame and rammed my shoulder and head against the fan. The rusted metal tore away and I army-crawled further into the hole, the sides pressing uncomfortably tight against my shoulders. I pulled my legs up to my chest and away from the opening behind me. There were solid walls on three sides of me now, a thick bed of muck and pine needles beneath me. I stood up in the dark. I was able to stand almost all the way up before the arm covering my head made hard contact with a metal bar above me. Past the bar, the ceiling made a hollow metallic sound. I pushed straight up, as hard as I could, feeling the quarter-inch-thick steel cover slide away. I pulled myself up, out of the air duct, and found myself on the edge of the hospital's side parking lot.

I ran. An overdose of adrenaline commanded my legs. My body's momentum slammed into the side of Ryan's car. I yanked open the door and got in. The keys were under the visor where he'd left them. I struggled frantically to find the ignition for a minute, then started the car and tore out of the gravel parking lot. I didn't take my foot off the gas pedal until I reached the next town.

The Old Hospital [Part 2]

"Only one place left to go."

I went first, through the heavy rubber divider and down the shallow incline. At one time, the passage had been covered in 30-foot-long slip resistant rugs. Those were now visible rolled up and laying in the still water at the base of the ramp. I felt my boot threaten to slip more than once against the slick, wet surface. I reached out and touched the wall to steady myself but quickly pulled it back, wiping it on my jeans instinctively.

Everything underground was wet. The water even formed rivulets as it ran from cracks in the cement walls. I was forcibly reminded of the dreams; dreams of water filling the world, pouring from every crack and crevice; of trying to run, only postponing the inevitable; of the people who rose up out of the water and turned to look at me, to chase me; of being pulled down into the deep, turbulent green water; of being drowned; of being killed.

I told myself that this wasn't a dream - that those things couldn't hurt me in real life. What a strange thing, to be so afraid of fear itself that you try to tell yourself *this is real.* I tried to control my breathing, but the thick smell of mold kept each breath shallow.

"Hey. You with me?" asked Ryan. I locked my wide eyes onto his inquisitive ones. Somehow, they brought me back again. I think it was the humanity, the connection that told me that I wasn't alone.

"Panic attack. Sorry... I-" I wanted to explain why. To tell him about the dreams and show that I had a good reason. I didn't. "I'm good."

"You sure? We could come back tomorrow."

"No. I need to know."

"Right. Can't be much more, this place isn't that big."

The water that covered about three inches of the floor of the basement was freezing. The cold pierced through my boots and socks, and crept up my legs. The sounds of our feet splashing bounced around the walls. On our right was a doorway; locked. I guess that's why I had brought the sledgehammer. With a deafening crack that echoed into the unexplored hall, the door was blasted open.

We walked into an office with a large walk-in file room in the rear. Nothing looked like it had been moved in 20 years. Urban explorers sometimes say that they feel a high as they cross the threshold into a forgotten place. I've heard some of them talk about the smell of those places being intoxicating.

They're right.

I walked into that room with a smile. To my left, on a waterlogged wooden desk was an electric typewriter, still plugged in. A stack of papers, rippled from the wet air, sat in the "out" box. The chair behind the desk was pushed back like the person had just gotten up and walked out of the room five minutes ago. In the filing room stood three large cabinets. Surely something was there. A name, a record, a clue to what had happened.

Ryan cracked the first cabinet with his crowbar. The old, thin metal gave easily. I pulled the first drawer out, eagerly looking inside. Empty. Not even the dividers were left. The second cabinet was the same way. We thought that the third was too, until we came to the bottom drawer. A pile of papers were sprawled crookedly, half-submerged in the murky water.

They looked like reports of some kind, like you might write for a college class. The cover sheets all said "Case study number: ######" in bold writing, and below that, "Philippe R. Menser, M.D." the insides were too detailed or too damaged to try to give a proper summary; in the first one, I thought that it might have been a trial for a new medication. Several were listed in the early paragraphs, but the latter pages mentioned nothing about them. Instead, they gave a long, detailed description of the mental state of the "subject," their habits, dietary preferences, etc. In all, there were about a dozen case studies, each containing 50 - 100 pages.

Ryan and I were looking through the papers spread across the desk by the light of our flashlights, trying to get a sense of what we'd found. Something in the hall caught his eye. His head snapped up and he glared intently at the water. His whole body tensed, then I saw it too.

The water in the hall was rippling. Something had just moved past us into the darkness.

The Old Hospital [Part 1]

The hospital grounds sat in the middle of the town like a bullseye. This was most likely a coincidence; the oldest parts of the town were closest to the river that formed the southern boundary and over time, the town had expanded North and East. The newest building, and the furthest North, was a medium-sized retail store that the town had fought to boycott. Towns that grow over a long period of time are devoid of any master plan, since people just add what they need when they need it. In this case, the evidence all over town could be found in the large expanses of forest and sand dunes that were left between one developed area of town and the next. If a place had been too costly to build on, it was skipped over.

After the "old" hospital, which it was still referred to, was closed in 1990, the small patches of forest around it took back the grounds in only a matter of months. The building itself fell to a different sort of wilderness. Being out of view from the street below, daring high-schoolers and vagrant meth addicts moved in. in only a few days, every one of the windows had been broken out. In a couple weeks, some had tried to burn it down. After more than 20 years, it looked like the place was about to fall down.

"The police don't really come up here any more," explained Ryan. "They just kind of drive through the parking lot and check to see if the place is still standing. If it isn't on fire or there isn't a car parked in the lot, they don't even check inside." From the passenger seat in Ryan's car, it was easy enough to see why it didn't require security to keep people out. Yellow caution tape was off-putting. The collapsed ceiling and dark, metal-screened windows were threatening. The place looked downright dangerous.

"Why doesn't someone just tear it down?" I wondered aloud.

"Money. There are always rumors that someone is going to buy it, but no one actually has." The reason for this was pretty simple. The town was dying off. People in other places had felt the "Great Recession" recession in 2008, but for the small towns along the coast, there hadn't been jobs or money for much of anyone in a generation. That was the main reason I left town five years ago.

"Well, are we going to do this?" Ryan killed the engine, casting the building in blue light from the one streetlamp over the gravel parking area. I took a sledge from the trunk I'd borrowed from Nicole's house. Ryan had brought a crowbar as well, but just in case we found anything serious in there, Ryan had brought his pistol. Guns usually make me nervous, but I counted having an armed, off-duty cop with me as a good thing.

"Now, that - " Ryan said, pointing to the chained set of double doors just to the right of a sign saying [Town] Medical Clinic, "- is the main entrance. There's no key anymore, but people have found other ways to get in." He took us around the left side of the building where we found a door propped crookedly in its frame. The nails of its hinges had pulled out of the soft, moldy wood. Once we were inside, we turned our our flashlights on and got our first look at the inside. Something about being in that place was really unsettling. Thick patches of green moss had grown over the floor and walls near the windows and  doors. Beneath the holes in the ceiling, huge ferns grew out of the dark, wet carpet. Under everything was a slimy layer of green mold. It smelled like a forest. A large beam had fallen from the ceiling across the room like a downed tree trunk, adding to the clutter and claustrophobia of the small room.

Have you ever seen the footage of scuba divers or those robotic submarines who sift through old shipwrecks and underwater buildings? That's what it reminded me of. Everything had something growing on it, and there was dust hanging in the air, unmoving. It was the silence that really drew the similarity; it was thick and oppressive, as if there were a thick, weighted blanket over everything.

That first room looked like a break room, or staff area. Against the left wall was a small kitchenette area, with cabinets along the floor and ceiling and a sink set into the counter top. Across from the door we'd just come through was a gaping black hole that had once been a doorway. Some long-ago fire had rounded its edges, leaving an oblong black portal. To the right, was a staff bathroom area, which had a couple of lockers, a shower and a toilet. We had to be careful walking across the floor. Shards of glass from the broken window and mirror in the bathroom were scattered across the carpet. Near the doorway, the fire had eaten through the floor, exposing the supports.

The next room was bigger, looking like it might have been a place to gather everyone at the hospital together at once. It had the most evidence that people had been living in it. Bottles, beer cans and black trash bags were in every corner and across the floor. A sleeping bag lay crumpled under the black, grated window against the far wall. Metal folding chairs were scattered about, casting long black shadows along the ground as Ryan and I shined our lights.

Through a larger door on the right-hand side of that room was a long hallway. This was the main leg of the hospital which consisted of five separate rooms with tattered, white curtains hanging in the doorways. I couldn't see all the way to the end of the hall. It looked like it just kept going and going. The wall on our left, opposite of the rooms, was made almost entirely out of metal-caged windows that looked out onto a small porch. During the daytime, you could have seen the trees and bushes beyond.

It was here that I began to have the feeling of being watched. The metal crosshatch pattern over the windows and abysmal blackness beyond made it impossible to see out. I imagined it was something like a one-way mirror. If someone had been standing outside, they could have been watching us like gerbils in a cage.

Ryan and I checked the first hospital room on our right. Everything had been stripped and removed, even the cupboard doors and drawers. A tiny slit of a window on the back wall of each room let in light from the one bluish streetlamp that illuminated the parking area outside.

Ryan went inside, and I stayed watch. Watching for what, I don't know, but I ended up staring into the blackness at the far end of the hall. Maybe it was my imagination or my anxiety, but I thought I heard something down there, a soft shuffle in the dark. There was no echo; being inside that place was like being in a vacuum. I turned off my light, and just looked and listened. My fear grew, as I focused on anything at the end of the hall. It was so dark, I could see the phosphene swirls I normally only see when I close my eyes. It was silent, but I was sure that there was someone there, at the end of the hall. My heart rate rose, I could feel it in my tense shoulders. Was that a sound? A whisper?

I was shaken out of my concentration by Ryan's hand grabbing my arm. "You okay?" I hadn't seen his flashlight illuminate the hall way around me.

"Yeah..." I didn't know whether to tell him that I'd heard something or whether I'd been just been daydreaming. "Let's split up, I'll check the front door and see what's at the end of the hallway."

"Sure," Ryan said, going into the second room. As quietly as I could, listening as I went, I went to the far end of the hall. The reason we hadn't been able to see anything at the end was that there was a wall made of strips of flat black rubber hanging from the ceiling. I parted them and shined my light through. The smell of mold invaded my sinuses. Past the curtain, the linoleum floor turned into finished, smooth cement. The hallway dropped off in a downward slope, ending in a pool of standing water.

Before the curtain, alongside the patients rooms, was a moderately-sized reception area. Light streamed in from the parking lot through the locked front doors. On the left was a tall reception desk built into the floor and wall. Behind that was a computer desk and some rusted-out file cabinets. The metal cabinets had signs of being pried open long ago. As was to be expected, nothing interesting was left. Whatever papers had been left behind had probably been burned, leaving more charred areas on the floor.

I turned to leave, but something behind the computer desk flashed, catching my eye. Fallen in the area between the desk and the wall was a glass frame of some sort. Mold had grown inside the glass, and water had damaged the printer paper inside, but you could still make out the words "visiting" near the top, and "unwanted" near the bottom right corner. Nothing with a doctor's name on it.

I left the reception area, expecting Ryan to be nearly done checking the patient rooms. I didn't see any light.

"Ryan?" I called weakly, moving back down the hall. The feeling of being watched was overwhelming and the hairs on my neck stood straight up. Ryan didn't answer. In the second room I found him standing stock-still, facing the wall, his dark flashlight in his right hand. He was staring at a broken mirror above a tiny porcelain sink. "Hey. Find something?" I asked cautiously, staying outside the doorway.

He turned his whole head ninety degrees to look at me, taking a full second to respond He shook his head like he was shaking off a dream, "No." He seemed to have snapped out of whatever trance he'd been in. "Fuck this place, man." At that moment, I was so glad to have Ryan with me. Who knows how long he or I would have sat there, staring off into space without the other there to pull them back to reality.

"Yeah. You get the feeling like we're being watched from out there?" I asked, gesturing outside the large, glassless windows.

"Now that you mention it, yeah. Thanks for that." He said with a sly smile, joining me in the hallway. "Only one place left to go." He pointed his light at the rubber curtain.

It occurs to me now that there was one more room we didn't check. The fifth patients room. We hadn't found anything in the other four, and it seemed like there was a slim chance we'd have better luck with the fifth. At least, that's what we thought at the time. Maybe that was where we went wrong.

"If They're Not an Enemy, They're a Friend."

The first thing I did yesterday was call Ryan. A Reddit user commented on an earlier update something to the effect of "If they're not an enemy, they're a friend," and that's certainly been true of both Nicole and Ryan. Working for the police, he was obviously aware of my mysterious appearance in the lake two days ago. I hate that I've had to drag him into this, but he doesn't seem to mind. Setting aside my own questions, Ryan was the one who started raising flags about a trend of mysterious disappearances in the town before I even came into all this. In a way, I'm just the latest (and maybe most resilient) person to go down this path.

Ryan helped me stage my exodus from the town. Just as before, he was asked to follow me as I left the next day, and followed me in his squad car all the way to the next small town, about 15 minutes away. For my own part, I stayed in public places the whole day and made sure to talk to anyone I knew about how I "had to get out of here" and "couldn't wait to get home." It was maybe the one time in my life that I'd been thankful for how quick gossip spreads in a small town like this.

I drove all the way to the largest city in the area (barely over an hour away), turned in my rental car and acted like I was heading to the airport. I doubt anyone there has any idea of who I am, but I figured it's best to cover my tracks. I picked up a spray painted, beat up, old Volkswagen Rabbit from a Craigslist ad titled, "She's Ugly but Still Runs" and headed back West.

I pulled the Rabbit into Nicole's driveway at almost 11:00 pm to see that she still had most of the lights in the house on as well as the huge, old tube television in the living room. Inside, I found her on her couch, entranced by her laptop. Nicole works at the hospital (the "new" one), taking care of the disproportionate number of elderly retirees who live in the area, though she's getting up there in age as well. I guess it's just in her nature to help people - after all, she's saved my life twice now. She's not from this town. I guess there's some kind of circuit as a seasonal employee in the hottest parts of Arizona, where you can stay and work when it's cool enough to keep your sanity, and then move somewhere else during the summers. She did that for 18 years, moving twice a year. After resolving to settle down with her new husband, they bought up a piece of secluded lakefront property and a "fixer-upper." He'd gotten to about 90% of the fixing before he'd passed away. That was about three years ago.

Working at the hospital, she'd seen things that made her think something might not be right with this town. For one thing, medical records for local families were kept under a higher level of security than other patients, which restricted access to only a few senior members of the supervisory staff. The reason she said she was given was that the digitization of medical records, which had occurred in the early 1990's, was a messy process, with vestigial bugs still being found over the years. Bugs which remained unfixed even as they turned up in 2014.

Another thing that had raised Nicole's suspicions were the multiple areas of the hospital which she, as a senior nurse, hired to be put in charge of scheduling and supervising, was not allowed to enter. On Google Maps, she pointed out a section the size of a house which she said she'd never seen the inside of.

She also actually still reads the local newspaper, which is kind of an asset.

Ryan's shift ended at 12:00, and at about 12:45, I saw headlights coming up the gravel driveway. He looked a lot different wearing his civilian clothes than he had the last time I'd seen him. His black police uniform hugged his ample belly, badly exaggerating his lack of fitness. He looked a lot more comfortable in his baggy, black hoodie and jeans, though the way his eyes were darting showed that he was anything but relaxed.

We'd made up our minds to check out the old hospital first. According to Ryan, something about Marissa's death had brought about the construction of the "new" hospital in the late 1980's. Notably absent since coming back to this town is her ghost, which I saw regularly while I was at home out-of-state. The child's spirit had always appeared with a vicious scar running the length of its head. A small hospital serving a town of only a few thousand would not normally have had an operating room outfitted for invasive brain surgery. If what her apparition had told me was correct, Dr. Philippe K. Menser was the one who had been performing the surgeries on her, as well as prescribing something she called "Monster Medicine."

We weren't prepared for what we actually found.

Waking Into the Dream.

This whole situation just hit a new level of weird and terrifying.

I'm still having the dreams. Always with those fucking dreams - sinking, being closed in on, isolated and killed. Over and over. But really, the worst part about them is that for half of the time I'm dreaming, I can't even tell the difference between it and reality. I wake up, I do normal things, I move on with my day and then things take that awful turn.

Today, if I am dreaming, it just got so much worse, and I can't wake up. However, I think this was real.

I woke up (I work nights, so this was in the afternoon) and as I drove to work around 7:30 pm I saw the old man who broke into my house a few weeks ago. He was standing, dripping wet, wearing the same clothes as that day that he came into my house. Standing under the overpass behind a short, chain link fence, I could see his one good eye tracking my car. I nearly rear-ended the car in front of me because of while I watched him.

But again, that's how my dreams start. Everything's normal and then some part of reality shatters like glass and that's the first sign that something is wrong. Then it breaks more and more and by the end...

But this wasn't a dream. Maybe if I say that enough, even I'll believe it.

I went to work, which has been its own mess, and zombie-stumbled my way through again. I only vaguely remember my boss telling me about how I've been acting different, that he's worried about my performance. It just doesn't seem worth concentrating on, especially with my mind on the fact that the old man was back. What was he doing there?

I drove back home, arriving at about 4:30. Early morning is about the only time I enjoy it here. It's cool and calm, unlike the rest of the day. As much as I thought I wouldn't, I miss the hell out of Oregon.

This is what I was thinking when I walked up to the front door, and with key in hand, in the brief light of a passing car, I saw him through the window. He was standing, crouched on the dark stairs. I could just see his feet and torn pants, and the bottom of his old rain jacket as he sat about eye-level on the stairs above me.

At first, I didn't react other than backing away from the door. I was so shocked at what I'd seen that I couldn't even form a plan of what I wanted to do. Then I ran. It wasn't the reasonable thing to do - I should have called the police again, but with the last two times that they've come ending with my own interrogation and nothing good coming from it, I subconsciously decided against going down that road again.

So I ran. About a minute after starting, I think I forgot why I was running and just... blacked out. I guess it was sort of like being in a daydream, except there was no dream. It was actually nice.

I found myself in a small park at the end of a dead-end residential street, just as the sun was beginning to come up.  I sat on the swings while I caught my breath and called the police. The dispatcher said that they'd send someone, but that my address had a note against it in their system and that I should meet them in the parking lot that I share with the other houses in the area.

I agreed and started jogging back. How had I run this far in slacks and dress shoes?

On my right, I could see the road that I'd driven this morning, the various overpasses, exits and signs filling with red taillights of people going to work. I was really close to where I had seen the man this morning. Close enough that I could take a minute and see if anything was there, I reasoned.

I left the sidewalk and followed a dry, dusty path beneath the overpass. There were a surprising number of footprints and trash all around. People had obviously been living there. Were living there. I thought, a little further back there might have been a sleeping bag in the corner where the cement pillar met the ground. At the bottom of the hill was a small... I can't call it a pond, but it was standing water, and all around the edge where it had receded in the recent heat was trash and various debris. Everything you might expect to find except, floating near the edge was a wooden oar. I remember thinking, *what the fuck is that doing there?*

My minute was up; I turned to go, but silhouetted against the rising sun was a profoundly greasy-looking man in an old rain coat.

He moved with startling speed, having the upper ground and the element of surprise. I tried to run, but in the soft sand, I managed to take only a couple of steps before he was upon me. I crouched, bringing my center of gravity down, and then exploded my body upwards into his. The stink of alcohol, body odor, and garbage was overpowering, and he was still very wet. He fell down the hill, crashing down onto the edge of the not-pond.

Unfazed, he got up, grabbing the oar with both hands. Again I tried to run, but he was faster. He brought the oar down on the top of my head with a low, fleshy crack. Things went dark. I could feel myself being picked up and dragged, and I thought I could hear a little girl screaming...

I felt my body lifted up high into the air, and cleared up enough to make out the man screaming "... be baptized and ye shall be free!"

I was in the water again, disoriented and now unable to breathe. I opened my eyes, but the only thing I could see was the man's face and arm, under the water holding me by the throat, bringing me down further into the water. I reached for the bottom, anything to get a grip and push off of. How is it so deep?

The water started to froth and bubble around us, and soon I couldn't even see his face. I kicked wildly, and finally connected with something. He let go, and I was free-swimming in the deep water. I figured out which way was up by following the bubbles, and after another few seconds, broke the surface. The air felt cool on my fiery lungs.

I wasn't in the not-pond anymore. I was in the middle of a large lake, near a dark green fiberglass rowboat. I scrambled up onto it in my panic. Where was the man? Where was I? What the fuck just happened?

I sat in the boat, curled into a ball, just breathing for several minutes. I hadn't heard a thing break the silence on the lake around me. I peered over the edge and saw the man, floating face-down in the lake, a dozen feet from the rowboat. I took the paddle and set off toward land.

After a few paddles, I realized that this was the lake that I'd been thrown into before. I was back in Oregon - back in my hometown, even. I paddled up to the bank, toward the only house I still knew in the area, Nicole's.

After spending the day in police custody, they finally released me back to Nicole's where I'm writing this now. As I said, things have drastically escalated, and this is far from over.

I can't go back home. I'm here. And despite feeling like I've fallen into my own Twilight Zone episode, there's also a feeling of being back home... So now I'm going to get to the bottom of this thing. Nicole has agreed let me stay, so long as I try to keep her out of whatever is going on.

Tomorrow, I take my first step toward solving this. Wish me luck.