The Cassette: Part 1 of 5

1 

Leo shed his jacket at the office door and made it to his designated desk. It had been a hectic month with all the restoration and digitisation works going on, and they were nowhere near the finish line. The footage they were required to restore and categorise were old police evidence files, or in other words, basically stuff that the police needed in order to reopen cold cases. But even with three technicians on duty today, the workload seemed endless and the pile of cassettes only growing by the second. 

"Damn it!" Sam exclaimed, swivelling his chair around. "Dude, take a look at this. Do you see what I'm seeing?" 

"What is it again?" Leo asked as he reluctantly leaned over Sam's monitor. He had just arrived after nearly forty minutes in traffic, and the last thing he wanted was to be dragged into whatever Sam had found. Unfortunately, that was often the case. 

Sam had a habit of pulling him into things at the worst possible time. Sometimes, Leo wondered if Sam was genuinely oblivious or simply liked getting a reaction out of people.  

"See what?" Leo asked. 

"That's exactly what I'm talking about. There's nothing here!" 

"Dude, I'm not following you." 

But Sam had already stopped listening, continuing to rant under his breath. "Fuck! I should've known when I saw the tape. Can't believe I just spent two hours trying to fix this thing." 

On the screen, a black image flickered occasionally, interrupted by what Leo could only describe as some sort of out-of-tune static. But the footage showed nothing. Literally nothing. Just a black screen. 

"Hey, snap out of it. What tape are you talking about?"  

Sam opened his drawer and pulled out an old cassette tape with a battered casing, as though it had been handled roughly or dropped more than once, handing it over. 

What caught his immediate attention as he twisted and turned the casing was not the damage, however, but the label. There was no title, no case identification as one might expect, save for a string of faded numbers printed on a sticker. 

"That's strange," he murmured.  

"Strange? That's one way to put it," said Sam, adding. "You think someone misplaced their stuff and this somehow got mixed in with the case files?" 

Leo donned a glove and studied the tape closely this time, trying to decipher the fading coding on it without much luck, save from three digits. How was this even possible? There had to be something tangible at least, whether that was a case name or label, that could help them categorise it. But just these digits? They meant nothing on their own. 

"Did you look it up, just in case?" 

"No match. What do you think? A misplaced cassette? Should I call those bastards in the Case Review Unit and tell them to get a grip?" 

"Well, we don't know that for sure." 

"You don't think those bastards are pulling our legs?" 

"Not exactly, no." 

"What then?" 

Leo gestured at the monitor. 

"Looks like somebody went through a lot of trouble to tamper with the footage. Look – it's not completely black." 

Sam's eyes widened as he noticed the screen flicker, revealing a brief snapshot of the real footage beneath whatever had been used to obscure it. 

"You think you can recover it?" 

Leo drew a deep breath. "I mean, I can try. But—" 

"Do you, like, think it's some kind of cursed tape or something? Like in that Japanese horror movie? Ring or whatever." 

"What are you, five?" Leo said, already carrying the tape back to his desk. "Grow up, will you?" 

Behind him, Sam threw his hands up. 

"I'm just saying, dude. Better safe than sorry, right?" 

Although recovering the footage was definitely not their priority right now, especially with the piles of cassette tapes getting only higher, he knew he wouldn't be able to concentrate on the task at hand with his mind full of questions. Besides, recovering the footage would take no less than an hour if he got it right the first time around, and then they would be able to correctly categorise the tape and carry on with their routine. 

What he did not take into consideration was the measure the person who had tampered with the tape had taken to make sure whatever the tape showed remained a mystery. After rebooting the system and software more times than he should have, the restoration process finally gave some result, albeit after four or so hours after he started, which meant it was already time for a well-deserved lunch break. 

"You're not coming?" Sam asked as he got up from his chair, ready to join the others waiting for him at the door, exaggerating his accent at the end of his speech. "Hey, talking to you, Leo. Wang Luo." 

With his eyes glued to the screen where the tape was now seconds from being restored, Leo snapped as soon as he heard the exaggerated accent taken directly from some old Hong Kong noir film. The idiot did not even know the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese, and yet still had the nerve to mock him. 

"Stop acting like a douchebag and leave." 

"What? Just trying to keep my Chinese fresh, you know?" 

Leo turned to face him a soon as he heard this, no longer able to contain his annoyance. "It's Leo, damn it! L-E-O. And you're saying it wrong! I'm from the mainland, you son of a gun! We don't say it like that over there!" 

"Main—what? Never mind. So, does that mean you're not coming?" 

"Fuck off, dude." 

"Uh-uh. Scary," Sam said, raising his hands in mock surrender. "Seems like someone's not feeling it today, guys." 

"Leave," Leo said at last, calmer now, not in the mood to entertain the other. "Just... leave me the fuck alone." 

"All right, all right. Whatever. Let's go, guys." 

He sighed, inhaling deeply to calm his nerves. Sam kept doing that, trying to put him down in front of everyone and then acting as the friendliest guy ever. The double standards, man! The double standards!  

Shaking his head, he once again shifted his focus to the monitor, where a pop-up message relayed that the footage was now restored completely and the digitised file compatible with the computer hardware. 

He clicked on the play button. 

A grainy video of what looked like some kind of interrogation room played on the screen. Apart from the constant glitching and buzzing sound from the static, nothing dramatically caught his attention. Had he not been able to hear the recorder in the background, he would have thought this was an image and not a video. 

After watching the still footage for a few minutes, playing and replaying back and forth to catch anything unusual or something that could help him categorise the file, he turned it off and decided to watch the rest at home now that he knew there wasn't anything on it that required his full attention. Thus, he uploaded the digitised file to his private account as well as on the cloud server and then resumed tackling the huge pile of tapes on his desk. 

Fast forwards five hours later, back in the single-room studio apartment, Leo powered on his computer after downing some beer. 

The rest of the footage was the same as the earlier parts, save from one single detail, one he almost missed had he not played the video back for a double-check. Something was wrong with the angle of the recorder. In the earlier parts of the footage, it was situated in the corner of the interrogation room, somewhere on the ceiling or near it, thus giving a bird's eye view of the room. But at one point, the angled tilted, albeit only slightly. It was a miracle he had noticed it at all.  

What he could not make sense of was... the how. The recorder was out of reach due to how high situated it was. No one had entered through the only door visible, either. None. And even when he considered the low possibility of there being another door out of the recorder's reach or a person somewhere in a dead angle behind the recorder, then he would be able to see shadows at least, wouldn't he? 

He rubbed his chin, thinking hard. Was he missing something? Maybe the light source was too weak? That was why it didn't quite reach all corners and, therefore, did not catch any shadows that showed up behind the recorder? But that high up? No human being could reach that high without a ladder, and the angle of the recorder should've shown him at least some parts of the ladder itself had it been used. So, how was this— 

Ring. Ring. 

Leo jolted from where he sat, almost cursing out loud from the sudden ringing. Before he answered the call, he took a gander at the clock on the wall, noticing that it was past midnight. Although the odd hour was unusual in and of itself, it wasn't this that bugged him as he saw the words on the display. An unknown caller. Who on earth would be calling at this hour? Was it from the nursing home? But as far as he knew, the facility's calling hours were between 10 AM and 5 PM. Unless—a lump formed in his throat at the thought that something terrible might have happened to his mother. 

He took the call. 

"Hello—" 

"Leo, my son! You okay? Why you never call me? Always I call you." 

Frowning, Leo changed ears. 

"Where's Mrs Campbell, Ma? How did you—" 

"Shh! Tā yào lái le!" 

"What? Ma? Ma! Who's coming? Who's—" 

"Bùyào! Don't open door! Don't—bùyào! [inaudible]" 

The call ended, cut off by his mother's screams. 

"Ma! Ma!" 

Panicked and drenched in cold sweat, Leo tried to call the number back, but no one picked up. The screen stayed unresponsive and black, the ringing looping into suffocating silence. For a few moments, he didn't move at all. Could not. 

His hand remained locked around the phone, his grip tightening without him realising it and knuckles turning white. Even his breathing came shallow and laboured. He swallowed once, then again, but his throat felt tight and dry, as though something had physically lodged there. What had just happened? Something was wrong. Very wrong. Why would his mother scream like that? Like she was... like she was... 

He forced the thought away before it could fully form, refusing to give it shape. Instead, with a jerky motion, he unlocked his phone again and scrolled through his contacts. 

The ringing went on for a while before Mrs Riley answered. He knew this was not an ideal hour to be calling her, but he needed someone to go check up on his mother, who had recently been diagnosed with psychosis related to the onset of her dementia five years prior. 

"Hello? Mrs Riley, this is Leo. Leo Wang. It's about Ma." 

"Mr Wang, I'm so, so sorry. I meant to call you as soon as I heard the news of Mrs Wang's passing, but—" 

"P-Passing? I'm not—what did you just say? Passing?" 

"You haven't heard yet? Mr Wang, we lost your mother earlier today. I'm sorry for your loss. I truly am." 

His hands shook and his vision became blurry with the suppressed tears now trying to escape. It took him a moment to calm his nerves and regain his bearing. Dead? That couldn't be true. He just—spoke to her?  

"The staff found her on the floor with a bedlinen around her throat. It looks like she couldn't take the suffering anymore." 

These words snapped him out of his bleak mind and the unanswered questions. "What?" 

"I know this is hard to accept. But—" 

"Hold on. Are you saying she... killed herself? But I don't understand! You said—no, you promised that she'd be under strict surveillance once she—" 

"I know you're hurting, Mr Wang. But there's nothing we can do to change the fact that she's gone. For the better or worse." 

"For the better or worse?" he repeated, completely out of his mind. "How do we know she wasn't killed? That someone—" 

"Listen, I'll be in my office tomorrow. Once you've calmed down and can think straight, you're free to come and we can talk over the details. What do you think? Mr Wang? Hello?" 

He loosened his grip on the phone as a sudden thought hit him. 

"It's impossible." 

"I'm sorry? What did you just say?" 

"I just... talked to her. Heard her voice." 

"How long have you gone without sleep, Mr Wang?" 

His grip tightened again at those words. 

"What?" 

"You said you were working on digitising some files the last time we talked? Maybe—" 

"We never did. Why would I tell you something about my private life?" Then, after a brief pause, quieter now, more wary. "Who... is this?" 

The line went dead and the real Mrs Riley called, but he did not answer – just stared blankly at the display until the ringing stopped and he played the voicemail sent seconds later. 

"Mr Wang? I'm so sorry for calling you at this hour. But I just received the news of your mother's passing. Please, come to the nursing home as soon as this message reaches you. I'll be waiting." 

But Leo did not move. Instead, he curled in on himself like a child, shivering, his arms locked tightly around his body. 

His bloodshot eyes then drifted, almost against his will, towards the ajar bedroom door. In that moment, his mother's voice began to repeat in his mind, insistent and forcing itself into place, refusing to allow him to dismiss what just happened as imagination or hallucination. 

It was not. He just knew, if nothing else. 

"Don't... open the door?" 

What door? 

Sticks and Stones - Part 3 of 3

 

Photo by Dylan Hunter on Unsplash

3

Reluctantly, Christoffer started for the dumpster and climbed into it without looking back. And then, for a long time, nothing happened. He must’ve stayed in the container for several minutes when he finally dared to lift the lid and stick his head out, at which point, it had become dawn and the sky was painted in the shades of twilight.

Neither Betül nor Farouk was around when he climbed out, stinking worse than he could smell. But their absence was not the only perplexing thing. All around him, scattered at random, were what he could only call human body parts in all shapes and colours, as well as different stages of decay. Even the soil beneath his feet was full of bits of flesh here and there, sticking to his shoes like glue.

But before he could wrap his head around what had happened during those hours he stayed hidden in the container, he staggered back only for something to get caught underfoot, something that he immediately recognised upon picking up. It was a stone, one that belonged to Farouk. But what was it doing here?

He retraced his steps back to his apartment, taking in the bloody carnage all around him but unable to make sense of it. But the worst had yet to come, only he didn’t know then. When he finally arrived at the third-floor landing, the door to his apartment gave way without resistance and unlocked. Inside… nothing. Only traces of blood – a lot of it – on the striped wallpapers, on the floorboards that had become swollen. Neither his mum nor Reila was around, though. In their stead, something else was.

In the kitchen was a large pot bubbling away. As he crept closer, each step warier than the last, he lifted the shaking lid and came face-to-face with a stew made of human body parts. One of the severed fingers had a ring on it, one his mum had been gifted by his deceased father and never took off. This realisation made him stagger back, and his breath became shallow and laboured, and that was exactly when the living room door slammed shut with a deafening bang across the kitchen.

He whipped around and sprinted out the gaping front door, not looking back even once, not until he made it safely out of his apartment and was back outside. When he looked up at the third floor, however, a faceless shape waved at him from the kitchen window, and he fled that instant, springing wherever his feet took him. Once he came back to his senses, he was back at the site of the dumpster, or rather, back inside it, counting the seconds, wishing upon the stars for a miracle that this was only a nightmare and that he would soon wake up from it.

Once nighttime came, however, nothing changed. Stuck in a bad dream with nowhere to go, he climbed out and picked up more stones on the damp soul, and as if to keep himself from losing his senses completely, began to play by himself like a madman.

He must’ve played for several hours by the time he noticed the approaching footsteps and quickly hid back inside the container. Through a small gap, he saw the homeless people returning, each one of them chewing on a human body part. They settled at the dumpster site and drank all night, oblivious to his presence, and when morning came, they left.

This repeated for a few more nights, with the homeless people returning to the container with human body parts and then leaving only to return the next night. One morning, however, instead of waiting in dread for dusk to come, Christoffer decided to follow the homeless people who seemed to be unaware of him, no matter how much noise he made.

They wound up a dark pathway through an empty field or some kind of overgrown pasture no longer used and kept walking for hours on end without respite. And when darkness fell once more, the pathway came full circle, and they were back at the site of the dumpster, only now Christoffer knew where the source of all those human body parts came from.

During this nocturnal walk with no aim or purpose, the homeless people picked up wooden sticks now and then, and by the time night came, those sticks became human body parts. But the homeless people weren’t even aware of this, for they were far gone and unsound of mind to think straight and get back to their senses to realise they were caught in a loop of some kind, reliving the same day over and over, and somehow, he had ended up in that loop, too.

By the second week, he decided to pick up some sticks himself to quench his growing hunger, and although the sticks tasted weird and gamey, like rotten flesh, he did not mind since he knew the sticks were anything but human. The taste even grew on him after the fourth fortnight, and he ended up joining the homeless people, who did not mind him following them around and mimicking them.

Then, one night, as they were having a feast by the fire, something that had never happened happened. One of the homeless people turned to him as they were about to get back on their feet and follow the dark pathway till dusk. This was the first time they ever talked or acknowledged him, as if mimicking them had somehow allowed him to become visible again.

“You stay here, climb the container.”

And so he did.

When morning came, he climbed out only to find himself back in the normal world, no longer bound by the time loop. But several years had passed since then, although he had stayed the same age as when he disappeared. Everyone he knew had long since either passed away or moved to another place – everyone save his good friends Betül and Farouk, who had grown grey and as old as the hills.

They recognised him immediately, although it took him a second to recognise them. None of them could explain what had happened that night, only that he disappeared after climbing into that dumpster. Betül had told the police what had happened, but the police refused to believe her story, and so he was registered into the system as another runaway. When they asked what exactly had happened during the time he was away, he couldn’t tell the truth – or rather – the whole truth.

The two of them passed away not long after this fated reunion, dying almost a week after one another. The entire neighbourhood was in mourning during the funeral, and Christoffer had attended it with those stones that Farouk always carried with him, the ones he found in the nightmarish loop. But as he was paying his respects to his two friends, he heard a familiar rustle in the clump of bushes near the Muslim cemetery, and he decided to take a look at what it was.

There, hiding in the bushes, were some wooden sticks arranged in a neat circle. Without realising it, he picked some up and started chewing, slowly making his way back to the funeral attended by the whole neighbourhood. When they saw him approach, they gasped collectively and pointed fingers at him. When he looked down at the stick, it had turned into a human leg dripping with fresh blood.

Then… a chilling scream.

A woman rushed from the clump of bushes with a child in her arms, one of its legs missing. When she saw him, with his teeth still dug into the tender flesh, she let out another bloodcurdling scream, and before he knew it, the people around him tackled him to the ground and kept him there until the police arrived. When the police asked for his name, he gave them the one his parents gave him, but they wouldn’t believe him, saying he couldn’t have stayed this young after all those years.

Now he was locked up in an asylum, counting the days. His psychiatrist said he had been cured of his illness and that he would be able to return to normalcy once the related paperwork had been sent off to court. In the meantime, to kill some time, he played stones by himself and occasionally chewed on his own arms to satisfy his hunger. Once he returned home, the first thing he would do was to climb into the dumpster. That way, only a child stupid enough to come near a place like that would go missing, and the police would write them off as simple runaway cases.

Sticks and Stones - Part 2 of 3

 

Photo by Foad Roshan on Unsplash

2

“Argh! I told you guys to listen to me! My mum’s going to kill me!”

Betül and Christoffer locked eyes, both apologetic, as Farouk crouched down in defeat and looked devastated as the phone kept ringing in the background. He lived two blocks away from themand would have to walk for several minutes in the gloom to get home.

Also, everyone in their neighbourhood knew that his mum was really strict. She had become so after having lost her husband in a work-related accident seven years ago, and so they feared that she might actually thrash Farouk as a form of discipline for not returning home in time to take his epilepsy pills.

Christoffer, “Hey, don’t beat yourself up too much, dude. You can just stay over at my place, and I’ll have my mum call yours, say that you had a seizure and couldn’t make it home?”

Farouk looked up with misty, bloodshot eyes.

“Then she’ll only get more upset!”

“No, I think Chris has a point. Would you rather she thinks you’ve spent the night at the playground?”

“Of course not! Are you mad!? She’ll kill me if—”

“Then, it is decided,” she said, gesturing at Christoffer. “Hey, lend me a hand and let’s bring this idiot to your place.”

“What about you?” Christoffer said as they each wrapped an arm around Farouk, who was still quite out of it to even lift a finger or move on his own.

“I’ll be fine. My apartment’s not too far from your place.”

“No, I meant, like, won’t your parents, I don’t know, say something?”

“My parents? No, why would they? It’s not like it’s the first time,” she said, changing the subject before he could inquire further. “You had a little sister, right? What was her name, again?”

“Reila,” he said, adding, “she’s not really my sister, though.”

“How so?”

“My mum remarried when I was a toddler to some Japanese guy, who dated her for the green card and then, yeah…”

“Oh, I see. But I thought you two looked pretty close the other day.”

“The other day?” Christoffer repeated, adjusting his grip on Farouk, who was dragging his feet through the pavement with a hollow look on his face as if his whole world had shattered and fallen apart right in front of him.

“Yeah, at the supermarket. You know, the one near the gas station.”

“Ah, right! Yeah, Mum brought us along grocery shopping, but I wouldn’t say we’re that close.”

“Really? Why not, though? You guys must’ve basically grown up together, like real siblings, no?”

“Reila can be… difficult, sometimes, you know?”

“Difficult? Like to elaborate on that one? How difficult can she even be for you to say this?”

“Hard to explain… Not sure where to start…”

“Well, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I just thought you looked close, but—”

“It’s just that she creeps me up, sometimes. Especially as of late. I’m not sure if it’s because she’s older or her teenage hormones acting up, but…”

“But?”

Christoffer cast a look at Farouk as if to make sure the other was too lost in his own misery to pay attention to their conversation.

“It’s like she’s possessed. I keep seeing her wake up at night, going through the entire fridge. Mum thinks I’m the one doing that and won’t believe me.”

“And your step-dad?”

“He’s, uh, not around anymore. Been dead for two years already.”

“Oh, sorry ‘bout that. I didn’t know…”

“Don’t be.”

“And you and your mum’ve been taking care of her all this time?”

“Yeah…”

“Wow, I’m not sure my mum would do that,” she said matter-of-factly before suddenly coming to a halt and seeking his confused eyes. “Hey, did you just say she was going through your fridge every night?”

“…Yeah, why?”

“So, basically, she’s hungrier than usual? Right?”

“I’m not following.”

Betül let go of Farouk and helped him settle on a wooden fence, which only reached to their ankles at either side of the pavement.

“Lamia! She must’ve been possessed by her!”

“I said she was going through the fridge, not eating children, dude.”

“Yeah, so what? Maybe that’s just how it begins? And then, when the hunger grows, she might—”

“Betül! Hemen buraya gel!”

They both turned in the direction of the kiosk just around the corner, where the silhouette of a dumpy woman with a hijab made some angry gestures at Betül. It sounded like her mum, it even looked like her from this angle, but why was her face completely swallowed by the darkness? Not to mention the way she moved her arms seemed so… stiff? Unnatural, even.

“Is that your mum?”

“I…”

“Betül!”

“Hey, you okay?” Christoffer said. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

“Huh? No, I’m… I’m fine. I’m just… confused.”

“Confused?”

As she was about to reveal what was going through her mind, Farouk suddenly rose to his feet between them. In a trance, he then pointed in the direction of the corner where the silhouette was, before going into a seizure with his eyes rolled back into the sockets. They barely caught him in time, and when the worst of the convulsions were over, the silhouette in the corner was gone, too.

“What… what was that?” Christoffer managed, his voice cracking. “Hey, talking to you, Betül! What the heck just happened?”

“I’m not—”

She never finished her sentence, or rather, could not. A nauseating odour arose from the kiosk, right at that shadowy corner, the smell a cross between charred flesh and the sweet and greasy smell of swine mingling. Then, that voice came again, this time from somewhere behind them, and Farouk went into another seizure.

“Gel! Gel! Gel!”

Behind them was nothing but darkness and several apartments lined up on one side. But not for long. Through the shadows, where the eyes could not penetrate at nighttime, several figures emerged, their chilling voices repeating like a broken record the same words over and over again.

“What do they say? Betül!”

“Come,” She met his bewildered gaze, just as fraught with dread as her own. “They are telling us to come.”

“Come? Come where?”

“I-I don’t know! How would I—”

“Reila?”

Betül followed his eyes back to the strange figures moving closer and closer to them by the second, and that was when she saw the girl she had seen at the supermarket the other day. But like her own mum, the girl’s features were hardly visible in the gloom, as if her entire body had been drowned in a sea of shadows and become one with the darkness.

And as Christoffer was about to rush towards her, Betül seized his arm. “What are you doing? Can’t you see it’s not her?”

“…What?”

“Look at them, look carefully! See, Farouk’s there too! But he’s here, isn’t he? Whatever these people are, they are mimicking people we know, trying to lure us closer!”

“How is… how is this even possible? What’s going on?”

Betül, on full alert, “Now’s not the time for asking questions! If we don’t move any time soon, we might not make it!”

“Make it?”

“Listen,” she said, “we have to hide. And that quick!”

“But where? Look at him.” Christoffer gestured at Farouk, who had finally stopped convulsing but was still unconscious. “Does it look like he can move to you?”

“Who said we’re bringing him with us?”

“Uh—what?”

“Quick! Hide in that dumpster over there! Hurry!”

Christoffer followed her gaze to the corner and arched his brows.

“Isn’t that where those homeless—”

“Stop asking questions and just go! Hurry!”

“What about you?”

“I’ll try to distract them! Now go! Go, Chris! Go!”

Sticks and Stones - Part 1 of 3

 

Photo by Luca Maffeis on Unsplash

1

”No! You missed it, dude!” Farouk snapped as the huge piece of stone failed to hit the smaller ones lined up on the sandy ground, rising to his feet from where he was crouched and utterly devastated that his team was losing. Again. “How can you even miss it twice in a row!?”

Betül rolled her eyes before picking up the carefully chosen stone with the uneven edges, one she had successfully used over the course of a year without once missing the mark. That is, until today. She couldn’t say what it was, but something felt off. Whether it was the overcast weather, the increasingly darkening sky, or just something innately inside her, she did not know, but whatever it was, it made her skin crawl and mouth run dry like her whole mouth was made of sandpaper.

Christoffer, on the other hand, was a team of his own and older than them by a year. He celebrated his miraculous win with his signature gesture, shaking his shoulders in an Egyptian dance and making loud noises to annoy Farouk on purpose – going as far as turning his back to them and shaking his butt like a real Arabian belly dancer.

“Woohoo! Losers!” he said, making a huge ‘L’ with his hand, before extending his hand. “Now give me everything you stole!”

Farouk, cheesed off, “Stole!? We won it fair and square, you little—”

“Hey, easy, you two! And you,” Betül said with a firm voice as she turned to face Farouk. “Give the guy back his stones and shut it.”

“Uh… what’s with her?” Christoffer mumbled.

“Do I look like I know?” Farouk said. “Here, these were yours, right?”

Christoffer studied each piece of stone as if it were a jewel. Farouk had fetched from his pockets a full of valuables and picked up three jagged stones seemingly at random. It was a mystery how those huge stones even fit into his pocket, not to mention on top of all those smaller ones in there, too.

“Yeah, seems like it,” Christoffer said, placing the stones inside his folded shirt since he did not have pockets of his own. “When on earth did you even win all those stones? You have no social life or something? No school?”

Farouk lifted his head with a proud smile, so much in fact that Betül thought for a brief moment that his crooked nose would stay suspended mid-air and wanted to smack him back to his senses. But she didn’t do that, of course.

“Dude, like, who do you think I am? I am the Farouk!” he said. “I always have time for victory!”

“Victory?” Betül repeated, her tone laced with sarcasm. “More like defeat! Besides today, have you ever truly won without my help? Like ever?”

Farouk met her sarcasm head-on, his eyes narrowing and lips curling into a pout. “You’re seriously going to live as if stuck in the past? What matters,” he said, grinning wide, “is what we win today, in the present. Which means, I win. Not you, sor-ry!”

“You’re so dumb, you know that?”

“Who you calling dumb!?”

As the two teammates were about to clash and get into a huge fight, one in which Betül would emerge as the winner since she was larger in build than Farouk, who hardly had any meat on him, Christoffer nimbly intervened and separated them before they could start throwing punches.

“Yo, calm down, you two! Hey, you guys hear me!? Geez! Stop it! Both of you!”

Betül ran a hand down her hair as she was the first to retreat, before Farouk too calmed down enough for Christoffer to stop holding him back. “You guys are craaaazy. How did you even end up being friends?”

“Friends? More like enemies!” Betül said, adding. “I recruited this idiot after seeing him win once, and then he just kept losing ever since!”

“You mean twice! I won twice!”

“Dude,” Betül exclaimed as she realised what he was referring to. “Winning against those homeless people… you call that a win? Like, seriously!?”

“Well, you didn’t dare, remember?”

“Yeah, but only because they are homeless, duh!” she said, adding in one single breath before he could interrupt, “and don’t act like you don’t know the rumours, you idiot!”

“What rumours?” said Christoffer.

“Don’t mind her, they’re just rumours!” said Farouk. “See! Nothing bad happened to me!”

“Just because it didn’t happen that one time, doesn’t mean it won’t happen ever! Just how stupid can you even be?”

Farouk glared, rolling up his sleeves to throw another future punch when Christoffer interrupted. “Hey, guys, what rumours?”

Betül and Farouk both turned to Christoffer at the same time as he was about to repeat himself, both of them seeing red and too furious to explain stuff to him. “SHUT IT!”

“Uh, what?” Christoffer said, the tone of his voice giving away just how offended he was at being shouted at out of nowhere. “You guys… got some loose screws or something? Dude, I was just asking.”

Betül, now a tad calmer. “You haven’t heard the rumours? Is that it?”

“Why would I ask if I knew?”

Betül then exchanged a knowing look with Farouk before gesturing each of them to come closer, so that they hunched down in a tight circle of three.

“I’m not sure where the rumours come from or who spread them,” she whispered, dragging each word on purpose to get her words across. “But I don’t doubt them. Not even for a second.”

Farouk, “Me neither.”

Christoffer, utterly confused, arched his brows low and whispered, “What do you mean? You’ve… seen something?”

Betül drew a deep breath before finally speaking, letting her brown eyes sweep over the two boys for the briefest of moments as if to prepare them for what she was about to reveal.

“I was walking home from school one day two years ago. My sister was sick, so this was my first day going home on my own, and as you both know, our apartment is right around that dumpster those homeless people hang out at, drinking and pissing all over themselves. Like, ew, so, so disgusting… Anyway, so I was walking home, and then I felt something strange, like someone watching me. So, I looked around…” She paused, letting the silence stretch on for a tad longer than either of the boys wanted. “And, then I saw one of those people was staring straight at me!”

“W-What happened next?” Farouk croaked.

“Then he waved me over, of course!”

“And did you?” asked Christoffer.

Betül broke the tight circle. “Of course I didn’t, idiot! If I did, would I be here, you think?”

“I don’t get it. What’s this whole rumour thing, then? To me, it just looks like the guy wanted to chat or something…”

“It hasn’t been long since you moved here, right?” she said.

“Yeah, it’s been about four months or so. Why do you ask?”

Farouk, “There was this girl, let’s call her Ida for convenience. One day, as she was walking home from school, she disappeared. Just like that! The whole neighbourhood tried to find her, but when night came, she was reported missing to the police. According to the rumours, someone saw her talk to one of those homeless people before she vanished!”

“She was… never found?”

“No,” Betül said, “she wasn’t! The police wrote off her case as a typical runaway, but the poor girl was only eight years old when she went off the radar, only two or so years younger than what we are today.”

“You think… there’s some truth in those rumours, then?”

“Of course!”

“But didn’t you,” Christoffer turned to face Farouk, “just say that you played and won against those homeless people? If the rumours were true, then you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

“Yeah, but I was not by myself! All the neighbourhood kids were there too! Just imagine if I’d been there all alone?” Farouk shivered at the thought. “I’d be long dead!”

“Still, something doesn’t add up. Maybe the police are right? Maybe she just—”

“An eight-year-old runaway?” said Betül, adding before he could protest. “Come on, dude! Get real! No kid that age runs away, unless…” Betül gestured them to come closer again, closing the circle, “…something else happened to her.”

“Like what…” Christoffer said, his voice cracking from the growing dread in the air around them. “…exactly?”

“You two ever heard the story of ‘Lamia’?”

“Lami—what?” said Farouk, who was getting increasingly unsettled by the stuff they were discussing as the sun fell below the horizon every passing second in the background, casting the entire playground in deep shadows.

“It’s originally a story from Greek mythology, one only a few know, and luckily for you two, I’m one of those people in the know…”

“So?” said Christoffer. “What’s the story about?”

“Okay, so there was this super pretty queen named Lamia, and Zeus, the king of the gods, liked her – like, liked liked her – and his wife, Hera, got soooo mad. She was jealous and made Lamia go totally nuts! She took away her kids and made her into this scary children-eating monster!”

“Children…”—Farouk, peeking over his shoulder at once as if something had moved in the deepening shadows and crept closer to them—“…eating monster?”

“And get this, you two,” she continued without missing a beat. “Lamia could never close her eyes, like ever, so she just wandered around all night, looking creepy and sad and angry. Then she started stealing kids from their beds, and she’d eat them! Eat them all!”

As she said the last sentence, she raised her voice on purpose, and Farouk almost had a heart attack as he jolted up with a gasp and took shelter behind Christoffer. Christoffer, although equally scared, tried to play it cool.

 “What a stupid story. Why would a monster from Greek mythology even be here, in our neighbourhood? Stop making up stuff just to scare Farouk—”

“But I’m not making any of this up!” she interjected.

“Everyone knows you’re a bookworm,” Christoffer said. “You’re just telling us stories you’ve read! Anyone can see that, so stop pretending!”

Betül, “I didn’t read about it anywhere! I swear! I heard it from someone!”

“Really? Like from whom? Come on, go ahead. Tell us!”

Farouk, sensing the growing tension between those two, with his weak and antsy voice, then tried to intervene. “Hey, uh, maybe we should go home now? It’s getting dark and—”

“I-I promised not to snitch!”

“Promised!?” snapped Christoffer. “Since when do you keep your promises?”

“Are you saying I don’t?”

“Just admit it, Betül! You’re just making stuff up to scare us!”

“I already told you—”

“Guys, listen to me, it’s getting really dark and—”

“Shut up!” they both said in sync.

And for a while, the heated conversation continued back and forth with neither of the two backing off or throwing in the towel, not until the streetlights on the playground turned on and they found themselves way past their curfew, at which point it was too late to rue the day because Farouk’s phone now rang and pulled the three friends back to reality.

The Cull - Still the Wheel Turns (Epilogue)

Photo by Nika lukava on Unsplash

I was discharged from the psychiatry ward three weeks after the police found us. In order to reintegrate into society, we promised to keep our silence about the pilot project and the fate that befell a great many.

They had no idea we caught it all on camera. I saved all the records on a USB drive, just in case history repeated itself – as it always does.

Three years later, I found myself standing in front of a classroom as a teacher. Things went back to normal. But not for long.

I thought it was all over. The project, the experiments, and my own part in all this. I was wrong. Deadly wrong.

“Is your anne taking a nap too? Just like mine?”

Ali’s voice broke the silence as I crouched in front of my mother’s grave. He stood behind me, watching as I tenderly ran my fingers through the parched soil, imagining it was her soft skin.

This was my first time visiting the place where she was put to rest. There was a time when I thought I didn’t deserve to see her. I thought she’d hate to see her murderer pay a visit. But Ali encouraged me to break this train of thought.

I glimpsed behind me and smiled. The cool breeze brushed against my face.

“I hope she is. Are you cold?”

Ali shook his head, carefully, and then mustered up the courage to ask me something that took me by surprise.

I stood there, at a loss for words, unable to find the right way to express myself. I could tell he knew I was having a hard time.

I wondered just how long he had been lost in this thought, contemplating this very question, and what had prevented him from voicing it sooner.

“What… happened to her?”

“It’s… it’s a long story. I don’t know where to begin…”

He squeezed my shoulder.

“It’s okay, Elin. You can tell me some other time.”

Standing up, a lopsided smile slowly appeared on my face. I wrapped my arm around him and kissed his head.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I didn’t take Ali under my wing. Instead of pursuing motherhood, I chose to be a solid pillar of support for both Ali and his brother. I wasn’t cut out for that kind of stuff, anyway.

A young couple reached out with open arms to embrace him and his baby sister. I was grateful towards them. Despite me being a stranger, they entrusted their son to my care.

I had the chance to visit them a few times too and see what kind of life Ali led.

The way they looked at the unfortunate siblings told me that he wasn’t just someone they adopted. He had become their flesh and bone. It was the same for Ali.

“Wanna grab a bite before we catch the train?” I asked to change the topic.

“No, I’m good.”

“I’ve got cash, you know,” I said, my voice trailing off as he shook his head. “How about some ice cream, then? You like ice cream.”

He shook his head again, his hair tousling with each movement. Every time I asked if we should eat something, he would do that.

Not that I was short on cash, but my earnings were just enough to make ends meet, and this little fellow seemed to know all about this. Since when did he grow up this much?

As the clock ticked closer to afternoon, we rushed to catch the train before it departed. It would take us a solid two hours to arrive at the capital, and then an additional half-hour bus ride to reach Ali’s two-storey house.

The train was packed with people, leaving little room to manoeuvre. It was a stroke of luck that we came across two empty seats, perfectly positioned to face each other in the aisle.

I plonked down next to an older man in his fifties, while Ali took a seat next to a girl of similar age. The man’s worn leather jacket emitted a faint scent of tobacco.

Since we had a long ride ahead, I plugged in my earphones and let the heavy metal music drown out the noise of the train, lulling me into a peaceful sleep.

I jolted awake roughly forty-five minutes later when the man lightly tapped me to get off the train. I moved to the window seat, taking in the breathtaking view outside, and then waved Ali over.

But he was engrossed in a conversation with the girl, so I drifted back to sleep. Once again, however, something stirred me awake. A loud, jarring noise shattered the silence.

Someone dropped a leather bag on the seat next to me. I looked around me, hoping to catch someone else’s attention, but everyone seemed too absorbed in their own affairs to pay me any mind.

There was no sign of the owner anywhere. I moved past the bag and scanned the aisle, catching snippets of hushed conversations that floated through the air.

Regardless of which direction I looked, there was no one searching for the bag. I eased back into my seat, my gaze locked on the mysterious leather bag, my thoughts racing with a thousand unanswered questions.

After waiting for nearly thirty minutes, I unzipped the bag to look for the owner’s contact information.

The weight of the bag was the first thing that immediately grabbed my attention. It was surprisingly heavy.

While trying to figure out what could be inside, something else caught me by surprise. The pungent smell.

I jumped back and moved away from the bag. There were several black trash bags inside.

Seeing my distorted expression, Ali asked if everything was all right. When his eyes landed on the leather bag, I zipped it up and excused myself.

I secured the WC door and unzipped the bag again. My hand rose to cover my nose from the pungent odour that hit me. The foul odour was one I knew all too well. So why couldn’t I bring myself to open the trash bags and check if I was right?

A chilling sensation ran through my veins, causing my blood to curdle. I drew a deep breath, my heart racing as I cautiously opened one of the trash bags, only to be overcome by a grotesque scene.

I moved away, my eyes shifting rapidly, consumed by a sense of terror. Every inch of my body shook and my mind became flooded with despairing thoughts.

Inside the black bag was a decapitated, boiled head. Its features were distorted and unrecognisable, but something told me I knew who it was.

With my thoughts scattered all over the place, I mustered the courage to reach inside the bag and place the boiled head in the sink.

 Rummaging through the black plastic bag, I found a blood-stained letter hidden inside it. My name was written on it.

The bag hadn’t been dropped by accident.

I read the letter, absorbing every word as I went through it. My hands were shaking like there was no tomorrow.

Images of the double-decker bus, the three men, and the carnage flooded my mind. The air felt heavy and thick, making it hard for me to take a full breath as my throat tightened.

My chest rose and fell with each laboured breath. My face lost colour as the tears I thought were long gone threatened to spill.

To Elin,

State Library, 1999. The Cryonics Lab.

Let’s finish what we started.

Sincerely, Mark.