What Reason Do You Need

I felt a steady beat and realized it was my heart. I wasn't filled with nothing. I had something inside of me. I had a heart.

The beat grew stronger and louder until it deafened me. I dropped the gun on the ground and it broke apart, as if it was made of plaster. It wasn't a real gun. It was a pretend gun and I had been shooting pretend bullets.

Everything rushed back to me. I wasn't empty any longer - I had my soul and my dreams and my loneliness and my secrets and my guilt and I was filled to the brim.

"Why?" I asked.

"I don't like Mondays," the man in the gray suit said. "What reason do you need?"

The world twisted and turned and I found myself back in my house. I was standing in front of the television as it blared bad news about tragedy and blood.

"I don't want to go back," I said. "I don't want it to be like it was before."

"Then change," the man in the gray suit said. "There is still time." He took a pocket watch and checked it. "There will always be time."

I turned off the television and sat down. "But what do I do now?" I asked.

But the man in the gray suit was gone. I had asked an empty room in an empty house.

I wandered around the house for a bit before turning on the radio. They were playing the Doris Day version of "Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)." And I listened and thought about what I was going to do now.

I was tired and couldn't think of anything to do aside from returning to work, so I decided to go to sleep. Perhaps I'll dream up something to do. I only have the rest of my life to choose.

There's plenty of time.

"So what's the twist?" the reader asked.

"What do you mean?" the writer asked.

"The twist," the reader said. "It's the end, she's already killed all the Fears. There has to be a twist."

"Does there?"

"I bet it's all just a hallucination. I bet she's trying to commit suicide and she's trying to get ready, making herself hard and empty."

"No," the writer said. "It's not a hallucination."

"Then I bet the Man in Gray is setting her up. I bet he's trying to make her into something like himself. A Woman in Gray."

"No," the writer said. "Sorry, that's not it."

"Really? Crap. It can't be a dream. I mean, that's too cliche."

"Does there really need to be a twist?"

"Of course. I mean, she's killed the Fears. She's killed the goddamn Slender Man. And now what? Now what's going to happen? I mean, something must happen."

"Of course something's going to happen. But why does there have to be a twist?"

"Because it makes the ending a surprise. A good twist means we can look back and see everything that led up to it. A good twist changes the meaning of the entire thing."

"And a bad twist?"

"Well, that changes the meaning, too, but, you know, in a bad way. But seriously, what's the twist?"

"There is no twist."

"Really?"

"Truly."

"But what's going to happen then? I mean, what's going to happen to Elizabeth?"

"What do you think? She's killed the monsters. She's emptied herself out. What else can she do except go back to her life. Back to the life she had before."

"But...without emotions? Without feelings?"

"It's not really the life she had before. It's more of a half-life, doing the same actions, but without the same feeling. She isn't afraid, she isn't sad, and she isn't happy. She sleeps without dreaming. She can't even remember her past and she knows that she has no future. She does what she does because she has nothing else to do."

"And then?"

"And then what?"

"There has to be an 'and then.' And then the Man in Gray appeared. And then something happened. And then she died. I mean, this is a story, it has to have a proper ending."

"It does have a proper ending. This is it. This is the end of her story. She killed her monsters and, in the process, killed herself. She's not alive, not really. She's a shell. And because she doesn't care, she'll go on being a shell until the world fades away around her. She is the Endmaker and this is the ending she has made."

"That's not a good ending."

"I never said it was. But it's her ending."

"Well, it's fucking depressing. Can't you give her a better ending? You can even make the whole thing a dream if you want, I don't fucking care."

"You want a happy ending?"

"It doesn't need to be happy, it just needs to be something that isn't depressing as fuck."

"Fine."

And then there was the last monster. It stood before me, its limbs long, its face white and empty. I wondered how anyone could find this thing scary. I didn't feel fear standing before it. I felt nothing.

The street was empty. Over us was a canopy of trees, their leaves all shades of black. I had walked here directly from my encounter with the monster after death. I felt strong. I felt like I could walk up to this monster and shoot him in the head and that would be the end. I could kill him without a thought.

The last monster stood before me and did nothing at all.

What was it waiting for, an invitation? I wanted it to try and kill me. I wanted to show it how I had changed. I wanted to show it that I had no fear of death, no fear of whatever it was. I was fearless.

But the last monster stood before me and did fuck all.

I raised the gun. "Fuck you," I said and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened. There was no bullet. None had been made.

I kept the gun raised. There had to be a way to make a bullet. Before, I had made the bullets when confronted with the monster or before, with the help of the man in the gray suit, but now there was nothing. The man in the gray suit had left before I had walked here. I was alone with no bullet and a monster that did nothing.

The last monster tilted his head and looked at me. "Well?" I said. "What the fuck are you waiting for?"

It turned and started to walk away. I wasn't angry - I had no anger left - but I was disappointed. What was this all for if I couldn't kill him? I had to kill the last monster. I had to kill all the monsters. I had to save the world.

I ran after the last monster and pushed him. I'll admit, that was quite stupid.

He turned to look at me again. Why wouldn't he attack? Why? Was it because I didn't feel fear?

"It's because it no longer registers you as human," the man in the gray suit said. He stood far away, but I could hear his voice clearly. "It does not see as you see. It can see many aspects of many things, but at this moment, it sees you and does not register you as human. You are like a tree to it."

"How do I kill him then?" I asked.

"Do you have any emotions left?" he asked.

I did. I had my disappointment. I had my pride. I had my joy.

"Give them up," he said. "Pour them away. The bullet that kills it must be made from nothing. An empty bullet for a faceless monster."

His voice echoed in my head. What was left of me? What hadn't I given up yet? I would give everything away to kill this monster. The air around me felt heavy and I closed my eyes and I let everything go.

I opened my eyes and the world looked different. I felt nothing, no disappointment, no need to hurry, nothing at all.

I raised the gun and there was a bullet. It was like me. It was made of nothing.

I shot the last monster with the last bullet. It did not seemed shocked or surprised. No emotion registered on its lack of face. It stumbled and then reality around it seemed to crack and jump. One moment it was there and the next it wasn't and I knew it was dead.

I had killed it. I had killed the last monster.

I felt nothing. No joy, no sorrow.

No, wait. There was something. A sound, a steady beat. And then-

I died.

The bullet entered my body and punctured my heart. I instantly bled out. My body fell to the ground, my limbs splayed at unnatural angles. I was dead.

I was dead, but trapped. I was trapped in death. I was someplace else, someplace that was close by and impossibly far away. I wasn't in between life and death - as I said before, I was dead as a doornail - but I was in a place between. Just between.

It wasn't dark, it wasn't light. I couldn't see, since I had no eyes, but I felt calm. I felt serene.

And then I felt something grab me. I felt something pull and tug and twist.

And then I was in the world again, but I wasn't me. I was something else. I was a monster. I was the monster that came after death. It had killed me and taken my body. It stood over my dead body and grinned with my face. It had won.

Just like we had planned.

The man in the gray suit appeared. This was the first time he had shown up during one of my encounters with the monsters, but we had to plan it like this. This monster was too tricky, too cautious. The man in the gray suit could not confront him. He could only do one thing: he placed his hand over my face and healed my wounds.

Suddenly, I was alive and confronted with myself. I raised the gun and shot him with a bullet made from myself, a bullet carved from my own soul. I shot the monster with my soul and watched as it turned inside out, as it ate itself over and over again, until it was nothing more than a speck and then gone.

I stood up. I felt strong. Was this was it felt like, being without a soul?

The man in the gray suit stood before me. He raised one finger and I knew. I had one more monster left. One more monster to kill.


I wiped the blood from my shirt. I had died and been reborn.

I am free of loneliness and helplessness. I have no future and no past, no secrets and no sins. I am dreamless. I am soulless.

I am fearless.

I don't even remembering going to sleep. I must have, because I woke up in the middle of the night. To suddenly awaken from a dreamless sleep was disorienting and the darkness of the room made me forgot for a moment where I was. I thought for a moment I was somewhere else, but I couldn't remember where. I couldn't even remember my own name.

And then I saw it. Its eyes shown on the darkness. It crouched at the end of my bed. I couldn't see its face, but I then what it was: it was the monster in my closet, the monster under my bed, the monster every child was afraid would appear in their bedroom as they slept. Its fingers traced patterns on the bed and I grabbed the gun and-

And I couldn't move. There was a whispering sound, a susuruss, a murmur that made my body go rigid and stop. The gun was in my hand, but I couldn't move. I was paralyzed as the monster reached across the bed and stroked by cheek. Its fingers were cold and sharp and I felt blood well up where it touched me.

I could see its mouth now, with its rows and rows of teeth. It was whispering, each syllable making sure my body stayed still and silent. And then the whispers changed and my body moved by itself, my arm turned and I was pointing the gun at myself, at my head.

The monster was going to win. This was not how I thought this was going to happen. This was not supposed to happen. The monster couldn't win. I had to finish this. I had to kill all the monsters.

My finger pulled the trigger and the gun clicked. No bullets. Of course. Click. Click. My finger kept pulling the trigger as the whispers rose and fell and my body obeyed without question.

I was completely and utterly helpless. I was a plaything to this creature. I was nothing. I felt the monster's fingers at my neck and I knew it was over.

And then my helplessness poured out from me. It drained from my body and in the dark of the room, I saw a glint of metal. There was a bullet, one single bullet that gleamed in the dark.

The whispers stopped from a second and before they could start again, I grabbed the bullet and put it in the gun, then turned to the monster. Its fingers were still on my throat and I could feel pain as they tightened and as I pulled the trigger, I could see its face, I could see as the bullet struck its face and it shuddered in pain.

And then darkness descended again and I was left in bed with a dead monster. I carefully removed its claws from my throat and left the room.

Outside, in the moonlight, I raised my hand into the sky. I was no longer helpless. I had no memory of being helpless, no dreams of my life when I was so afraid. This is what I wanted.

Then why do I feel nothing?

I stood in the fiction section and I waited. I waited for the staff to leave and the lights to dim. The staff didn't notice me there - that's happening to me more and more, I think. People just don't seem to notice me. Perhaps I'm turning invisible. Probably a good thing. I couldn't stay here if I wasn't.

The lights went out and now it was dark and I was surrounded by books, by stories, by page after page of words. I was waiting for a monster with another book.

The man in the gray suit told me that he wanders libraries. I've been in this library since it opened at 8 am and now it is passed 6 pm and I will not move until I see him. I know he will come here. "They will be drawn to where you are," the man in the gray suit told me. "Even if they do not know you are there, they will be drawn to their own demise."

So I waited. And then I heard a skittering, like spider legs, and, even through the dark, I could see him. He was a monster, but he looked like an old man in a crumpled suit and dark glasses.

He was sitting at a table with a large heavy book open before him. I walked forward and the sound of skittering increased. I felt something brush past me, something with long hairy legs. I took the gun out from its holster and the sound of skittering went away.

I sat down across from the old man monster. He did not look at me. He looked only at his book. Then he spoke, his voice sounding like the turning of pages: "What if I were to write your name? Would you kill me even if you were missing your memories, even if you had no past? If you could not even remember your own name or what I was, would you still kill me?"

"Yes," I said and shot him.

The bullet was made of paper and written on it was my life story, from birth to now. Everything I ever remembered was on there, every single piece of my past, my history.

The old man monster bled ink onto his book. He took one last look at it before slamming it shut and said, "I thought so." The book sunk into the table and the old man monster smiled with ink-stained teeth and said, "It is easier to die then to live. You should know that. Death comes quickly, neatly, but life is messy and hard. The man in gray is showing you how to make death, how to make an ending. But it is the life before the end where the mystery lies. Death is not a mystery, it is the end of one. Goodbye."

I left his body in the library and went outside into the cold night. I do not know what he meant, but I suppose one day I shall find out.

I walked towards the door, but by the time I had gotten there, it was gone. It had moved to another wall. I walked to the other wall and the door moved again. I did not see it move, but it was gone by the time I had gotten there, so it must have.

Every time I found the door again, it moved. The door did not like me.

Of course it didn't. There was another monster, a monster in the shape of a city, beyond that door. And I was going to kill it.

The man in the gray suit told me it would be difficult to find. "It feeds on lost souls and is used to being lost itself," he said. "But you will find it. Find a door and you will find it."

I found a door. It was different from other doors I had seen - it had a glow to it, a special attraction. It feeds on lost souls, he had said, so perhaps I am a lost soul. But once I tried to get to the door, it wouldn't let me.

I raised the gun, but then stopped. If I just shot the door, would it do any good? No, I needed to shoot the monster beyond the door. I needed to be there. The gun would lead me there, I knew it. So I held the gun forward like a flashlight and walked carefully towards the door. It stayed still until I put my hand upon the doorknob and when I turned it, the door turned itself, like a carousel, and I found myself inside the monster. Inside the city.

There was only one road, but it went everywhere, even places it shouldn't, couldn't have gone. It twisted like a Mobius strip, but the buildings were worse. There moved as soon as I looked away, twisted themselves into increasingly complicated shapes, shapes that made my head hurt. The walls of the city started to close in on me, the ground shifting beneath my feet. Rows of doors presented themselves to me, but I wasn't leaving yet. The job wasn't done.

I raised the gun high into the air and fired it. I asked the man in the gray suit how can I killed a monster the size of a city, but he told me that it wasn't the size of a city - it was the size of a world, always shifting, always changing. And he had already show me how to kill a world.

The bullet came down, but now it was bigger. Now it was a meteor, a meteor made from everything I had ever lost, coins and socks and chances and loves. I opened a door and stepped back through it as the bullet came down and the buildings crumbled and a dust cloud burst upward. The monster that was a city tried to shift and become something else, something that could survive, but this was an extinction event. Nothing survives.

I closed the door behind me and watched as it turned to dust.

I woke up with big brass band playing outside my window. I got up to look, but nothing was there. The music stopped and then began again, this time as mariachi music.

I picked up the gun by the dresser, but it felt strange. It didn't feel heavy, not like it usually does. I looked at it and it melted away into nothingness. I looked around and the room seemed to shift in size and shape. The mariachi music became louder and louder, until I could hardly think.

The gun had to be around here somewhere. I had to find it. Lights grew bright outside the window and seemed to flicker. The gun wouldn't be gone, it would be here in this room. It had to be.

Finally, I closed my eyes and outstretched my hand. I felt the rough wood of the dresser and then the cool metal of the gun and I gripped it tight.

I opened my eyes. There were ghosts screaming at me, their mouths large and malformed. There was fungus on the wall and it seemed to grow at an alarming rate. The mariachi music turned into the music from hell.

I knew what I had to do. In my hand, I made a bullet. I made it from my own voice and all the voices I had ever heard, all the sounds I had ever heard. There was the song from my eighth grade prom. There was my mother's voice calming me with a lullaby.

The bullet vibrated with sound. I placed it in the gun and turned to the wall covered in fungus. I pulled the trigger and the air itself screamed in pain. Then the screaming vanished, as did everything else. No more bright lights, no more hellish music.

Just the blissful silence.

The store sold timepieces. All kinds of timepieces - pocket watches and alarm clocks and even grandfather clocks. There was a giant grandfather clock at the back of the store, all dark wood and golden metal.

The gun led me here. I followed the tug of my new bullet. The man in the gray suit told me how to make it.

I opened the grandfather clock and look at the insides, the guts of time, the springs and levers and intricate pieces. I placed my finger inside and stopped one piece from moving. The other pieces spun around, one of them nearly taking off my finger. I pulled my hand away and the pieces of the grandfather clock spun faster and faster. I raised the gun, but there was a bright light and I closed my eyes and then-

The sun felt different. I was outside, but it felt wrong. I opened my eyes and saw that I was in some sort of junkyard. Rusted pieces of metal and wire surrounded me. I looked around and saw a gleaming tower made of what seemed like everything - every bit of scrap, even pieces of flesh and bone and sinew. I would have thrown up, but I had already shot away my revulsion.

I raised the gun. Would the bullet be able to kill something that big? One small bullet versus a tower that stretched to an unknown sky. Only one way to find out.

I had made the bullet out of my future. The man in gray told me as I did it that it was made from all the days I would have lived had I not found the gun. It was my future as a bullet. Bang bang.

The bullet sounded strange. It looked like nothing I had ever seen, gleaming brighter than the sun. I was as my future grew larger and larger, the days of my could-have-been life seeming bigger and bigger until it hit the tower and exploded.

The explosion rocked the world around me. The metal melted and the string burst into flames. Everything was burning and I had just killed my future.

Too late for regrets. Too late for anything except to move forward. The gun led me here and it led me out. I stepped backwards and found myself next to the grandfather clock, only now it looked blackened and burned, its insides melted.

Time to move on.

He wore a mask that was curved like a beak. I couldn't see his eyes through the huge black circles in the mask - perhaps he had none. Perhaps beneath the mask there wasn't anything at all, just an empty cloak.

The man in the gray suit told me how to get here. "Find a hospital," he said. "Find a place with disease. There will be people there who follow him, who serve him. You will know them. You will follow them. They will lead you to the place where he hides. The heart of him."

I did as he instructed. I found someone - a doctor - as soon as I saw him, I knew. I don't know how, but I knew. There was something about him, something in his eyes. I caught a glimpse of a tattoo on his lower wrist, a squiggly line crossed with a straight line. A stick and a serpent. I know what that meant. I've done my homework.

I followed him, followed as he drove to various hospitals, collected various samples, visited various patients. I followed as he stopped at a parking garage and started walking up the stairs. I followed him as the stairs turned from metal to stone, as the cars vanished, as the garage became a castle. I followed him to where the monster was.

The monster knew I was there immediately. The doctor turned, saw me, and his eyes widened in fear. The monster placed one hand upon the doctor's shoulder and the doctor convulsed and fell to the ground, vomiting up a stream of blood and viscera.

The monster in the beak mask looked at me. Perhaps he expected that I started to throw up as well. I could feel disease and pestilence swimming in the air around me, but I was protected. The gun protected me.

I made a bullet last night out of every illness I had ever had. Chicken pox, measles, mumps, the flu, the common cold. It was a sick bullet and it looked like a syringe. I shot the monster in the beak mask and he stared at the bullet with what I believe was disbelief. There was a strange moment when he seemed to become taller, then his cloak split down the middle and rats poured out of it. The rats all seemed sick, however, and they died almost immediately. All that was left was a torn cloak, an empty mask, and a pile of dead rats.

I didn't know how to get back to the parking garage, but I wasn't worried. The gun would show me the way. It would always show me the way to the next monster.

The two-story brownstone was charming and rustic and all those other words you use to describe houses. I walked up the red brick steps to the front door and rang the bell.

The man in the gray suit visited me last night. He told me the remaining monsters would be more difficult to find. "They have gone away," he said, "to the places they feel are safe. But no place is safe from the end."

A woman answered the door. She was middle-aged and had short brown hair. She gave me a warm smile - so unlike the others I had seen - and asked, "Can I help you?"

"I'm here to see your daughter," I said.

I made the bullet last night from grief and empty spaces. I used the feeling I had during my father's funeral, when all that was left of him was ashes. Then I carved a name into the bullet using letters I didn't recognize, letters that hurt my eyes to look at. They seemed to shift before my eyes. The man in the gray suit told me the name was needed to kill the next monster.

The woman looked at me and said, "I'm sorry, it's not a good time."

"Do you know what she is?" I asked. The woman looked quizzically at me and I saw a flash of fear. She turned to close the door, but I pushed it open and shoved her back, then ran up the stairs.

The girl was in the bedroom. It was like I had double vision - with one eye, I saw a normal girl, cute as a button, with her hair braided in a French braid, and with the other eye, I saw a girl who shouldn't exist, whose pupilless eyes took up half of her face, whose teeth were many and sharp.

I pointed the gun at her and said, "I have a bullet with your name on it." Then I pulled the trigger.

The monster didn't say anything as she died, but the woman was weeping as I left the house. I left her to her tears. I didn't have any left of my own.

Field of Bullets

It was Friday evening. The sun was going down, making the sky a dark shade of orange. The freeway was packed bumper to bumper. It was rush hour and everyone was going home for the weekend.

I felt eyes on the back of my neck and I knew it was him. I adjusted my rear view mirror and there he was, the man in the gray suit, sitting in the back of my car. "Why are you here?" I asked.

"You must be ready," he said.

"Ready for what?"

"It's happening," he said. "Now."

I looked outside, but couldn't see anything beyond the sea of cars. I looked back at the mirror but the man in the gray suit was gone. I turned back to the window and noticed that some people had completed stop their cars. They were opening up their doors and getting out. They were looking at me.

"Shit," I said. I looked around and saw that all of the people in the cars were getting out. Each one of them looked at me. Some one of them had expressions of anger, rage, some had those stitched on smiles I had seen before, and some seemed almost giddy. I noticed some of them licked their lips and blood dripped from their noses.

I got out of the car. The man to my right looked at me. I could see fire in his eyes. "You need to die," he said. "You need to burn."

I grabbed the gun and ran. Even if I put in regular bullets, there were too many of them. I would never survive this onslaught, this wave of people. So I ran.

It didn't help. There were more people ahead of me and they grabbed me and pulled at my clothes and my skin. I saw the fire in their eyes and then I saw a woman above them, a woman set against the setting sun. She wore a veil and her eyes burned into mine.

As the people grabbed me, I raised the gun and poured all of my anger into it. Then I fired a bullet made of wrath, a molten bullet, a red hot bullet. It hit the woman and the people grabbing onto me collapsed.

There were still people after me. I wasn't out of the woods yet. I could see the people who had smiles stitched on their faces, their limbs dragged haphazardly, their joints moving independently from each other. Was the woman who controlled them here? Could I use the bullet made of string?

The smiling people didn't target me then, though; that was the giddy people, the people who bled from nose and mouth. They gave me obscene looks and licked the blood from their lips. One man strode forward from the crowd and said, "The others want you dead, but I'd like to have some fun with you first. See if we can make you squeal."

I raised the gun. The man laughed. "Can you really use it?" he said. "Use up all of your love?"

He said love, but I was feeling something else. I felt a heat rising in me, a different heat then before; my vision began to turn red and my arms grew tired. The man looked at me with lust and said, "That's a good girl. C'mon, then, I can teach you to be bad."

My nose itched and I felt blood flowing down. I wiped it away with my hand and then raised the gun again. I felt my blood grow hot and then cool as all the feelings rushed forward into the gun. The man looked at me and said, "You can't kill me, dear. You can't kill love."

I shot him with a bullet made of blood. His head exploded in a shower of gore and everyone behind him collapsed into a frenzy, an orgy.

I felt tired, more tired than I had never felt before, but I couldn't stop. I began feeling the invisible strings around me like before. I took the string bullet from my pocket and I loaded the gun and I looked around. I couldn't see the smiling people, but I knew they were here.

I was pulled into the air then and then dropped onto a car. I felt the air rush out of my lungs, but I gripped the gun tight. I felt hands grabbing a hold of me, gripping me. I looked up into the sky and saw the woman with the stitched on smile. She wore a raggedy dress now and her skin appeared to be made of wood. "You can't shoot without any fingers," she said and motioned with one hand. I felt strings over my body. They felt like wires, cutting deep into me. Razor wire, she was going to cut me up with razor wire.

I couldn't move my hand, but my finger was still on the trigger, so I pulled it. The bullet went in the wrong direction, but as it moved through the air, it twisted and swept in a circle. The woman with the stitched on smile was laughing as I bled, laughing until the bullet hit her in the back of the head. Her face split and as she fell, the people holding me down fell as well.

I slowly got up. I was bleeding from a dozen places. I felt weak and tired. I wanted to stop moving and lay down and sleep, but I couldn't. I wasn't going to die here. I wasn't going to die.

As I walked down the freeway, a flock of birds swooped overhead. I shot them with a bullet made of lightning and wonder. I felt the awe leave my body as I did and the birds all died, their bodies falling from the sky.

I felt a mass of insects crawl up my legs, their mandibles chewing on my soft flesh, digging into my skin. I shot them with a bullet made of my own revulsion. Then I wiped away their corpses and kept walking.

The streetlights began to flicker and shadows stretched from their. Their dark fingers reached towards me, but I shot them with a bullet made from my own shadow. They dissipated and I noticed then, that my shadow was gone as well.

I had shot six bullets in the span of ten minutes. I felt more than weak. I felt empty. I walked until I couldn't and then I crawled.

The last thing I remember seeing was the man in the gray suit walking towards me. His shoes were black and shiny, their laces tied neatly. He looked down at me with a blank expression and I blacked out.

I woke up an hour ago in this hotel room. All my wounds are healed. My car is outside, my keys are on the dresser, and my clothes are neatly stacked beside the bed. I looked to see where he had put the gun and almost panicked, thinking that it was gone, that he had taken it, before I found it.

He had left the gun under my pillow.

The woman was beautiful, her face angular and symmetrical, her blond hair perfectly parted and falling down to her shoulders. She did not smile nor move a muscle on her face, she just sat down before me and said, "Hello, Elizabeth. I think we should talk."

I was sitting at a rest stop, fiddling with my phone, wondering if I should check my messages to see if anyone had called, if anyone cared where I was. And then she sat down and all the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I knew she was one of Them. The monsters.

I pulled the gun up, but she placed her hand over mine and pushed it down on the table. "No need for that," she said. "I won't harm you. I only want to talk."

"Who are you?" I asked.

"My current appellation is EAT," she said. "You've caused quite a stir. The others are talking about joining forces in order to bring you down. I thought I might try a different approach."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because," she said, "do you even know what you are doing? What's happening each time you fire that gun, each time you kill one of us?"

"I make the world safer," I said.

"You unmake yourself," she said. "You've already lost your dreams, your guilt, your loneliness, and more."

"I don't need them," I said.

"No, you don't," she said. "But they are a part of what makes you you. You haven't crossed the point of no return yet. You can still go back. You can throw away the gun and leave this all behind."

"Why would I do that?" My skin felt hot and I saw beads of sweat crawl on my flesh until they ran together, until they formed a bullet. It was a bullet made of sweat and tears and when I looked closely, I could see an ocean inside.

"Do you even know what that is made of?" EAT asked. "It is made of your change, your ability to adapt and grow. Once you fire that bullet, you won't be able to change anymore. You will be stuck as you are now. You will become more and more like him."

"Him?" I plucked the bullet from my skin and I placed it in the gun.

"The man in the gray suit," she said. "You want to know more about him, don't you? I can tell you. I can tell you everything I know, which is quite a lot. But I will only tell you if you stop, stop before you are only a shell. So now the question is: how far do you really want to go?"

I pulled the trigger and shot her in the chest. "As far as I can," I said. "As far as I am able."

Water gushed from her wound and it poured from her mouth and nose. She wiped it away with one hand and said, "So the lesson today is how to die? Interesting. I can feel my Camper fading, one by one. I tried, Elizabeth. At least I tried. And now class, are you sitting comfortably? Then let's begin."

She fell and her face hit the table and I left as the life leaked from her and spilled onto the ground.

A hand was placed over my mouth and I was pulled into an alleyway. I remember my mother warning me about alleyways, to stay away from them; she also warned me about hitchhikers and white vans and talking to strangers and how I should never answer the door when she wasn't there. Everything she ever told me flashed through my mind as I was pulled into the alley by the rough hands.

The hands belonged to a man in a long, white straitjacket  His red, scraggly hair covered his eyes, but as I turned around, my own eyes were fixated on his mouth. On his smile.

It was wider than his face. Somehow. I don't know how it was possible, but it was. It was like looking at one of those impossible objects - you don't notice how wrong it is until later, the aspect that just couldn't possibly work in real life. The staircase that goes on forever, the fork that cannot possibly exist. The smile that is wider than the face.

He had a knife in one hand and his other hand was still gripping me. He didn't say a word, but he didn't have to say anything. I knew what he wanted to do. He was what my mother had warned me about; he was the stranger I should never talk to, he was the person inside the white van, the hitchhiker on the side of the road, the man who knocks on doors to see if anyone's home. The man with the mile smile.

I took the gun from its holster and I pointed it at him, but he wasn't afraid. He slashed forward with the knife and I felt an arc of pain in my hand. I almost dropped the gun, but held onto it despite the pain.

All of my mothers words, all of the images of white vans and hitchhikers and strangers, they all poured out of me and into the gun. I watched as another bullet was made. It looked like a bright white tooth.

The man still gripped me with his other hand and he pulled me forward, pushing his knife against my throat. I felt the cold steel and then I raised the gun against his chin and I pulled the trigger.

Needless to say, he died with a smile on his face.

They all had smiles stitched on their faces. I had stopped at a fast food restaurant - I may not dream anymore, but I still eat - when I noticed that everyone around me looked...wrong. The workers behind the counter, the people flipping burgers, the people behind me, men, women, children. They were all smiling. And then I could see it: the invisible stitches in their faces.

The attacked at once. I ran, but they grabbed me. They pulled me back, threw me down. I pulled the gun out, but I had nothing to shoot, no bullet, no target. They pulled my arms up and to the side and I felt strings pull them until my feet slipped off the floor.

I was a puppet on a string.

A woman walked forward. She had the same stitched on smile, her eyes unblinking as she looked at me. "So this is her," she said. "A bit disappointing, really. I had such high hopes. Such vision. But I guess it didn't take that much to stop you. Not much at all."

My hand gripped the gun. It felt heavy, too heavy to be real. It felt like it weighed a million tons, but I couldn't let it go. It was the only thing I had.

The weight of the gun seemed to increase until the strings holding my hand couldn't sustain it and they snapped.

"Ooh," the woman said. "Wasn't expecting that. How neat!"

I raised the gun as I felt strings encircling my throat. They tightened and I couldn't breathe. My lungs burned and darkness began to crowd my vision and I knew I was helpless. I was going to die here.

And then that feeling of being helpless slipped away. It melted, along with all the strings around my body. Control? I had no control. All my control had slipped away. All my control was now bound together in one bullet. It was a bullet made of string.

Before I could pull the trigger, however, the woman snapped her fingers and everyone in the restaurant fell to the ground. I looked at their faces, each one a grimace. No more smiles.

The woman's face, however, still had the smile. She said, "Bye bye," and then the smile slipped away and she was gone.

I still have the bullet in my pocket. It's waiting to be used.

His skin was a pale, sickly color and it was pockmarked with scabs and scars. He smiled and his teeth were the color of urine.

"Why are you here?" I asked.

"You know why," he said. His voice was weak and straggly, but simultaneously strong. "I know better than the others. I know more than them about the inevitability of death. So here I am. Let's be quick about this."

"You want to die?" I asked.

"No one wants to die," he said. "Not even me. However, that does not stop the slow, inexorable push into oblivion. With every breath, every second, our death grows larger, looms closer. The others think they can avoid it, that by killing you, they can stop it. But I know better. Everything dies. Best to go out now, I say."

I held the gun up. "I need a bullet first," I said.

"You are afraid of death," he said. "Don't deny it. Use it. Everyone fears death. It's that finality, the period at the end of a life, they fear. They cannot conceive of no more moments, of no more time. Not even silence nor darkness."

As he spoke, I took that fear of death, of dying, that nervous, jittery feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I made a bullet. It was a bullet made of grave dirt and coffin wood and it was riddled with worms.

"Good," he said. "I want to feel the end. I've been apart for so long, I want to see how I come together before it's over." He smiled. "United in death. I like that. Go on then. Let me die."

I pulled the trigger. The bullet entered his body and he convulsed like he was having a seizure. As he shook, I saw afterimages of him, echoes of what was inside, as they fell into his body. There were hundreds, thousands, and then, after a minute, there was just him.

He clutched his chest. "Thank you," he said and died.

Questions & Answers

The man in the gray suit appeared to me again. I was at another motel, sitting on the edge of the pool, my jeans rolled up, my feet in the water. The water was distorting them, making them look bigger than they were and then I saw his reflection in the water.

It did not distort, not like mine. The ripples in the water did not touch his image.

I turned around, looked at him and said, "Hello."

At first I thought he wasn't really there; I thought that perhaps this was an actual dream, but then I remembered that I didn't dream anymore. I didn't dream and I didn't feel lonely and I didn't feel guilty and I didn't have any secrets or desires. I had killed them all with my special bullets.

"Hello," the man in the gray suit said.

"What am I?" I asked.

"You are the Endmaker," he said.

"And what is that?"

"A test," he said. "A system, a weapon, a reset. You will bring about their end and they know it. So far, they have tried to kill you directly and by proxy, tried to get you to commit suicide, and tried to tempt you, but you have killed each one. You are something outside their paradigm. You are something they cannot see. You are a blind spot."

I pulled my legs out of the pool and asked, "Why me?"

"There are some questions without answers," the man said, "and some questions with an infinite amount of answers. Pick one."

"What do I do now?" I asked.

"They have tried various approaches," he said. "They will be smarter. You must keep going. You must face your limits and go beyond them. You must give them mercy and make their end."

Finally, I stood up. "Who are you?" I asked.

"That is another question without answer," he said, "or with an infinite amount. You may choose any you like."

And then he was gone, as if he was never there at all.

My reflection looked back at me and told me what a good girl I was. Look at all the pain you have caused, it told me. Look at yourself.

It was me, but it wasn't. It was more beautiful than I could ever have hoped to look. It's hair was dark brown, chestnut, and it fell in waves, curling like little snakes around its shoulders. It smiled at me and its teeth straight and white and had little points on the end.

It raised one hand -- one perfectly manicured, silky smooth hand -- and gestured for me to walk forward. "Come," it said. "You have felt pain and sorrow and heartache. Let me give you love. Let me make you something better. As I am now, so you shall be."

The mirror showed me my deepest wishes, my longings to be prettier and smarter. It showed me seducing men and women, making them kneel before me, worshiping me, kissing the scales on my feet.

I almost gave in. I almost took its hand. But when I raised my own hand, there was the gun and my reflection recoiled. And I remembered. This was not real, this was not my reflection. This was just another monster.

It hissed at me and I remembered all of my wishes, all of the darkest desires I had. The bullet that formed was sleek and mirrored. The reflection tried to pushed forward with its claws, but I had already pulled the trigger.

The mirror and what was inside it shattered into a million pieces.

As I gingerly stepped over the mirror shards, I looked down at one of them and found the reflection, its skin peeling, turning to dust and nothing. It was trying to say something. Its lips moved and I remember what it had said before:

"As I am now, so shall you be," it was saying.

I stepped on the shard and it broke apart.

The dog was blacker than night and larger than life. It unhinged its jaws and I looked into its maw and I saw every single secret I did not want to know about myself. I saw every way I was deluding myself, I saw all of my insecurities, all of my issues, all of the little lies I told myself and others.

These were things I didn't even know about myself, but the dog knew everything. He knew secrets I had forgotten; hidden moments that I never wanted to remember. He brought forth every single secret I had and I fell to my knees in front of him. He had shown me all my secrets and now he would swallow me whole.

There was a secret day I called in sick to work. I was tired and didn't want to get out of bed, so I called in sick and instead watched television all day. This was one of my secrets; I was ashamed at how mundane they were, at how banal they all seemed now. I almost wanted him to eat me up, so all my secrets could be forgotten after my death.

Almost.

My secrets bunched around me like flies and when I raised the gun, they flew into the barrel and made another bullet.

The dog growled. The gun barked. The bullet howled.

There was an eye watching me from the door of my room.

I was laying on the bed of the motel room. My back was turned to the door, but I knew the eye was watching me. There were eyes everywhere. They crawled over the floors and ceilings, over dressers and tables. They watched me, they knew my every move, my every thought.

I clutched the gun in my hand. I had emptied it of bullets - no metal would harm these eyes. They were not human eyes. They were the eyes made of sin. They saw my every fault, my every misdeed, my every wrongdoing. Killed a boy, they whispered. She killed a boy killed him dead killed him killed him murdered him killed him in cold blood murdered him to save herself she should die just die kill herself she should kill herself killer killer killer killerkillerkillerkilllerkillherkillherkillherkillher

The weight of my sins pressed down on me, but instead of letting them in, I bunched them up into a ball. I took my sins into my hand and made a bullet.

Then I turned to the door and I shot that motherfucker in the eye.

Three down. More to go.

Blackberry Winter

That's what my mother used to call it. When winter lingered into spring, when the blackberries have bloomed, but there was still snow on the ground. I remember going out into that snow, when the sun was high, and collecting blackberries for my mom. I remember coming back with my hands stained black from their juices. I remember my mom and I washing the blackberries and eating them one by one, laughing as we did. I remember the stomachache afterwards, having eaten too many blackberries, yet I still felt happy. It was a blackberry winter and I remember being happy.

After I killed someone -- a living person, an actual person with parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins -- after I had killed a living, breathing person (it was self defense, he was going to shoot you, it was self defense), I ran. I ran until my legs gave out and I collapsed onto the ground. I wanted to cry, but I was too tired, too sore, too scared to cry.

I shivered and pulled my jacket around me and dragged myself to my feet and began to walk. Walking clears my mind, walking helps me. What was I going to do? I had killed someone. But they had tried to kill me. It was clearly self defense. No one would blame me. I wouldn't go to jail. In fact, I stopped him from killing more people.

And then a question arose in my mind, a question I was sure would come up with the authorities: where had I gotten the gun?

The revolver was in my pocket. I had put it there after I had stopped running. I couldn't carry it around out in the open.

What would I say when they asked me why I had the gun? What could I tell them? I couldn't tell them that I brought it to a school. I didn't have a permit for that, I didn't even have a permit for the gun itself.

And then another thought: they would take the gun away. For some reason, this thought stuck into my brain like a thorn. They couldn't take the gun away from me. I need the gun, I thought. I need it to fight the monsters.

The monsters, they would come after me, like the man in the gray suit said. They had tried to kill me. They would do it again. The gun was my only protection. I couldn't lose it.

So what could I tell the authorities? What could I possibly say?

Nothing. I could say nothing. I could just go, leave, run away. So I did.

I made one stop before leaving -- I bought a holster, so I could carry the gun better. It had been digging into my thigh. And I've checked the news dozens of times, hundreds of times, but there's been no report about a shooting at my school. No report about dead or missing faculty members. For some reason, that made me feel worse than if there had been news reports.

There's snow on the ground, but I found a patch of blackberries by the side of the road. I plucked them all and cupped them in my hand and ate them as I walked down the road. I wanted to feel that happiness again, but I couldn't. I don't think I can be happy ever again.

It happened the last day before Spring Break.

I was working in the front office when one of the teachers brought in a sixth-grade student. He wore shabby clothing and carried a backpack that barely hung onto one shoulder. Usually, the kids who are dragged into the office look angry or annoyed, but this kid just had a blank expression on his face.

"I caught him lighting matches in the hallway," the teacher said. He put an open matchbook on the desk, half of the matches already ripped out. "I've already written him up, I just need him to see Mr. Henderson." Mr. Henderson was our vice-principal and was generally in charge of suspensions and expulsions.

My coworker Nancy, the one who owns a Glock, got up. "Mr. Henderson's busy right now," she said, "but I'll keep on eye on him until he can see him."

The teacher sat the student down on the hard yellow plastic chair beside Nancy's desk and said, "Thanks. I need to get back to my class."

"Sure thing," Nancy said. She sat back down and looked at the student. "So what were you trying to do? Burn the school down?"

"Yes," he said. His voice was flat, unaffected.

Nancy shook her head. "Why?" she asked.

I knew that was the wrong question. No good ever comes from asking why. I was right.

"She told me it would be good," he said.

"'She'?" Nancy said. "Who told you?"

"She told me she would purify this place," the student said. "She told me that this place would burn and everyone who ever hurt me would burn with it. All I had to do was one thing."

"Right," Nancy said. "I think we're going to have to call child services, too. It's obvious-"

And that's when he pulled the gun from his backpack. He shot Nancy before she had time to speak. A hole blossomed in her head and blood and brains splattered her computer screen. Then he turned the gun to me and said, "She's going to purify this place. She's going to burn all those who burned me. All I have to do is kill you. All you have to do is die."

Mr. Henderson opened his door at that moment and he saw the student with the gun and Nancy, dead at her desk, and he backed away, but not fast enough. The gun went off two more times and I saw blood on his jacket, blood on his tie.

I was paralyzed. I couldn't handle this. This wasn't a dream. I couldn't will the gun into my hand. I couldn't do anything. I just stood there and waited for death.

The student looked at me and then raised his gun and pulled the trigger. At the sound of the click, the world around me froze like a still image. Nothing moved, not even the air. Everything was silent and still.

The man in the gray suit was behind me, but I couldn't turn to see him. He said, "This is one of the ways they will try to avoid their own fate. The child of ice imbued a lonely pain, but the bride burns into them a pain that wants to be shared, a pain that needs to be given away on the point of a knife or the tip of a bullet. But you have will. You have momentum." I felt the weight of the gun in my hand. Had he handed it to me or was it always with me? "Use it," he said and then he was gone.

The world unfroze. The student pulled the trigger and I moved out of the way. I felt something go by my ear. I fell sideways onto the floor and when I looked up, he was there, holding his gun with two hands, pointing it at me. "I just want it to stop," he said.

"Me too," I said and raised my gun and shot him.

I don't know how there was a bullet in the gun. I hadn't made one, but then again, a special bullet wasn't needed. Just a regular one, a small piece of metal, then pushed its way through his soft tissue and into his heart. He looked surprised as he died.

I didn't know what I was supposed to do next. This wasn't like before, with the boy in my kitchen. That boy had been a monster and he had vanished afterward. But this...this boy was real. His body lay on the floor, his blood pooling beneath him. I had killed him. I had ended his life.

I looked at the gun in my hand and at the boy on the floor and I stood up. I stood up and walked out of the room. I walked and then I ran.

I ran until I couldn't run anymore.

A Walk in the Park

I met the man in the gray suit again, but it wasn't a dream. It was in real life.

Since I hadn't been sleeping that much, I've taken to going for walks at night. I'm sure that it's dangerous, I know I could get mugged, but I don't have anything else to do. So I walk.

Last night, I walked to the nearby park. There was a fountain that sprayed water during the day, but was now off. From the glare of the streetlamp, I could see pennies and nickels at the bottom of the fountain. As I was looking at them, I could feel someone standing behind me. I turned and there he was.

He looked the same as in my dream. I still can't properly describe him, except that he was wearing a gray suit and a gray hat. I can't remember what his face looked like and I did not dare not look into his eyes.

"What's happening to me?" I asked.

"You are the Endmaker," he said. "You are making their end."

"Whose end?" I said. "Who did I kill?"

"You cannot kill what does not live," he said. "They are not alive, not as you know it. You are merely ending their existence. And the gun is the means to the end."

"The end of what?"

"The end of fear," he said. "They fear you now. They cannot escape you. One by one, they will be drawn to you and you will end them. You are their extinction."

"Why?" I asked. "Why me?"

The man in the gray suit raised one hand and placed it on my shoulder again. I became sure that the thing under his glove wasn't a hand, but something else, something that merely looked like a hand; that this man wasn't a man at all but something that looked like a man and talked like a man, but was something so vastly foreign, so immensely alien that I could never hope to comprehend anything it told me.

I couldn't stand it anymore. I backed away from him and ran back to my house. I took a single glance back and he was still standing there, his hands to his side, looking at me as I ran.

I can't sleep. Ever since that dream where I killed the man (I'm pretty sure I killed him), I don't sleep that much and when I do, I wake up after a few hours.

And there's something else. Ever since I killed the child or the thing that looked like a child, I've felt something...missing. I used to feel alone, but now I don't.

When I think about being alone, I just feel...nothing.

Dream a Little Dream

I thought all my dreams would feature the man in the gray suit, but then I had one that didn't. It was perhaps even weirder than the other dreams, though.

I was folding clothes straight from the dyer. They felt warm and soft. Then I heard the singing. It wasn't the song that the child song, no, this was a different song.

"He wear no shoeshine,
He got toe jam football,
He got monkey finger,
He shoot Coca Cola,
He say I know you,
You know me,
One thing I can tell you is you got to me free."

I walked into the kitchen. I felt slow, lethargic. The floor was a crisscrossed pattern of black and white.

In the kitchen, I saw the child again. He was smiling at me and I raised the gun again and I shot him, then I shot him again. I didn't even realize I was holding the gun. The bullets hit him in the chest and the shoulder and made splashes of blood. His smile didn't leave his face.

He started to shake and then dance.

"He rollercoaster,
He got early warning,
He one mojo filter,
He say one and one and one is three,
Got to be good lookin'
'Cause he's so hard to see."

I backed away just as he exploded. Blood splattered me in the faces and I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I wasn't in my kitchen anymore. I was in a circus tent. Lights flashed around me, illuminating the black and white stripes of the tent.

I was in the center and there were rows and rows of people watching me. I could see their blank faces shaking in laughter. I heard a voice behind me.

There was a man with a megaphone. He held a tophat in one hand and had a handlebar mustache. He wore a coat of red and yellow with golden epaulettes. He looked kind of like Cesar Romero, the actor who played the Joker in the old '60s Batman series. "Ladies and germs!" he spoke into the megaphone. "Witness! The cure for the common cold! The killer of children! Gaze upon her sad face, watch as she lays in bed and cries all day long, mock her all you want! Go on!"

He turned to me and lowered his megaphone. "How did it feel? Good? Did you enjoy shooting the boy?"

"Who are you?" I asked.

"She speaks!" the man shouted into the megaphone. "She cuts straight to the point! She wants to know who I am!" The crowd tittered. The man turned back to me. "I am just a dream, my dear. Your subconscious mind at work. A fanciful reverie, you might say."

"Then I'd like to wake up," I said.

"Too bad," he said. "You are just too dangerous, my dear. Better you stay asleep."

I still had the gun in my head, so I lifted it up and pointed it at him.

"Oh, my dear," he said, "that's not the real gun, it's all part of the dream." He snapped his finger and then I wasn't holding the gun at all, I was just pointing my finger at him. "You see?"

I looked at my hand. I opened it so I could see my palm and then closed it. I didn't know what I was doing. My body - my dream body, it wasn't even my real body - was acting on its own. My fist closed and suddenly I remembered all the dreams I had ever had, each and every one of them. Dreams about school, showing up naked to work, dreams about my mother and my father, every anxiety dream I ever had, ever dream I had ever remembered or forgotten.

Then I opened my hand and there was a bullet. It gleamed like nothing I had seen. It wasn't real.

It was a dream bullet.

The man with the megaphone looked at me with anger. "You shouldn't be able to do that," he said. "This is my world."

"But this is my dream," I said. The gun appeared in my other hand and I carefully loaded in the dream bullet.

The audience of the tent stood up all at the same time and attacked. I saw men with cutlasses and women with beards and men who breathed fire and they were all rushing forward towards me. They seemed to melt together into an amalgam of every nightmare, their faces twisting into different forms, their limbs becoming amorphous.

I didn't stop, however. I aimed and pulled the trigger and time slowed, like last time. The bullet twisted in the air and it seemed to pull the crowd behind it. Not just the crowd, not just the nightmare people, but the entire circus tent, too. The backdrop peeled away as the bullet flew forward and the man with the megaphone screamed and his mouth grew bigger until it was larger than his entire body and he consumed himself.

Everything fell away then, leaving a nothingness all around me. I closed my eyes and when I opened them I was awake.

Mercygiver

I had another dream with the man in the gray suit. We were walking along a field. The ground was muddy and slick. I looked down and the field was strewn with bodies, the mud mixed with blood. Each body seemed to have a dozen arrows sticking out of it, like pins in a pincushion.

"Where are we?" I asked. "Another extinction?"

"Of sorts," he said. "It is the extinction of so-called civilized war, war with knights and fair battles. From now on, war shall be fought not with swords, but with arrows. With bullets."

"Where are we?"

"It is summer," he said. "August, 1346. This is the aftermath of a battle near the French town of Crecy. A small skirmish in the totality of history, but one with lasting consequences."

"Why are we here?"

"There had been wars before, but this was different. This war was not considered honorable, not considered noble. So many knights cut down by common men. So many knights cut down by small arrows. So many arrows."

"Why did you tell me to kill him?" I changed the subject of my questions. "How did I do it?"

"Look," he said and pointed to one of the bodies. I could see that even though he had been pierced by several arrows, he was still alive, still breathing under his armor.

And then a man approached him. He wore stitched clothes stained with dirt, his teeth rotting and yellow. He looked at the man in the ground and shook his head. Then he took out a thin dagger.

"It was a war without prisoners," the man in the gray suit said. "The English scoured the battlefield and when they found a knight still living, they took a special knife, thin enough to put though the slits of their helmet or in weak parts of their armor. Some thrust it under the armpit and into the heart. Death was always instantaneous. Much quicker than a slow and lingering death from infection."

The man thrust his thin knife under the arm of the wounded knight. The knight gave a gasp, an exhalation of dying breath, and then he was dead. His eyes were still open.

"The weapon was called a misericorde. Mercygiver."

"That's what you gave me," I said. "You left it on my doorstep. The Endmaker."

"You misunderstand." He turned to me and I averted my eyes from his again. "It is merely a weapon. It is useless on its own. It must be wielded."

He raised his hand and placed it on my shoulder. A shudder went through my body. "It is a Mercygiver," he said. "You are the Endmaker."

I killed a child today.

Perhaps he wasn't a child. That's what the man in the gray suit told me. But he looked like a child. He looked like a little boy. He looked to be around eight years old. And I killed him.

I was so cold. It was supposed to be getting warmer, but I was getting colder. My house was an icebox, my bed was a freezer. When I woke up, I could barely open my eyes, they had nearly frozen over in my sleep. I woke up in a winter wonderland. I woke up in a cold hell.

I remember what he told me in my dream. I brought the gun down from the closet and picked it up. There was that weight again, that heaviness. I took the cold bullet I had made in my dreams and I loaded it. I thought perhaps there would a click and the gun would glow blue or something, but that didn't happen. Nothing happened. The gun was just a gun.

I hurriedly put on warmer clothes, bundling up in snow pants and a thick jacket, wrapping my neck in a woolen scarf my mother gave me before she passed away. I thought that I would just wander around my house until I found the monster I needed to kill and I would kill it.

He never told me it was a child. When I saw him, I stopped. He was in the kitchen, coloring on a piece of butcher paper. He was making broad motions with his hands and I could see a childlike smile on his face, with a gap between the front two of his teeth.

He started to sing:

"Poor Liz a-weeping,
A-weeping, a-weeping,
Poor Liz a-weeping,
On a bright winter day.

Why are you weeping?
Weeping, weeping,
Why are you weeping
On a bright winter day?

I'm weeping for a loved one,
A loved one, a loved one,
I'm weeping for a loved one,
On a bright winter day."

The song filled my ears and a pain grew in my head. An ache swelled up inside my mind and I felt like when it burst it was going to kill me. I was in so much pain, I wept and my tears froze.

Instinctively, I raised the gun. The child stopped singing. The pain started to go down, but my finger was still on the trigger.

He looked at me and said, "Poor Liz."

Then I shot him.

The bullet twisted in midair. I could see it moving, I don't know how. Perhaps it was the adrenaline. It didn't move like a regular bullet. It twisted like a corkscrew. And then it disappeared.

The boy started to laugh and then stopped abruptly. He put his hand to his chest. There was a hole in his chest. "My heart," he said. The edges of the hole began to crack like ice. The boy looked up at me. He looked like his entire body was shaking.

He said something. I think it was either "Who will come for the cold now?" or "Who will comfort the cold now?" I couldn't tell.

He broke apart in front of me. His body was made of icy flesh or fleshy ice and as it broke apart, I could see the watery veins inside of him. I couldn't look any longer, so I turned and ran.

I stayed away for as long as I could. When I came back, there was only a watery residue on the floor as a reminder.

I don't feel cold anymore. I just feel...empty.

What do I do now?

Cryogenian

In the past few days, there have been moments when I've felt an intense and extreme coldness around me. I will be working and then suddenly my skin will break out in goose flesh and I'll start shivering.

And then yesterday, I had another dream with the man in the gray suit.

I stood in a snowy field. It was nearly blinding - the snow went on for as far as I could see. There was no end to it. I knew I should have been freezing, but instead I felt nothing.

The man in the gray suit was beside me. "Where are we now?" I asked him.

"Eight hundred and fifty million years ago," he said. "It is a period called the Cryogenian, when ice and snow covered nearly the entirety of the world."

"Another extinction?"

"A birth," he said. "That's what it means. Cryogenian, a cold birth."

I looked around and then back at him. "Is this a dream or have we actually gone into the past? It feels too dreamlike to be real."

"You refer to this as the past, but that indicates that time moves," he said. "Time does not move. Time stands still. It is you who moves."

"Why are we here?" I asked.

"You will be visited by the one who gave birth to the cold," he said. "Your actions in isolating yourself have resulted in you becoming a target."

"What do I do?"

"You must protect yourself. You must use the gun."

"But it doesn't even have any bullets."

The man turned to me and I averted by eyes from his, not wanting to look into them. "It is a singular gun. You must use singular bullets. You cannot buy them. You must make them."

He gestured to the fields of snow and suddenly I knew what to do. I started wading in the snow, moving it around, trying to find places where it was harder and colder. I took scoops of it and formed it into my hands. I packed the snow together more and more and it grew smaller and smaller, going from the size of my head to my hands to finally the size of a pebble. I didn't know how I did it, how I put so much mass into it, but I did. I shaped the piece of snow until it looked the way I thought it should look.

And then I held up the bullet.

It was not a bullet made of snow, not anymore. It had become as hard as crystal, as sharp as ice.

It was a bullet made of cold.

The man turned to me then and said, "Do not listen to his songs. Do not wait for him to stop. Do not hesitate."

He said something else, but I don't remember what it was. All I remember was that when I woke up, I held in my hand a bullet so cold it burned.

The Great Dying

I check on the gun every day now. For some reason, I keep thinking that it's not going to be there when I look, but it always is. I still don't know who sent it to me or why.

I had another dream.

I was standing on a beach looking out into the waves. It was dark, but it wasn't night. I looked up into the sky and saw ashes. They were falling like snowflakes.

I turned from the water and saw a volcano. Lava poured from it, erupting in leaps and bursts. I knew I should have been worried, but I wasn't.

The man in the gray suit was looking up at the volcano as well. "Where are we now?" I asked.

"Around two hundred and fifty million years ago," he said. "It's a period called the Great Dying. Over ninety percent of all life on this planet perished."

"Was it another asteroid?"

"Is that all you take away?" he asked. "Was it something outside that entered and destroyed nearly all things? Or was it what was within? The asteroid facilitated one extinction event, but not all. This planet is not as stable as you think. It is constantly shifting, constantly destroying and rebuilding itself."

"I'm dreaming, aren't I?"

He turned to look at me and as the volcano burst, he said, "A dream is something built from your memories, your experiences. Did you ever experience an extinction, Elizabeth?"

"Who are you?"

He placed his hat onto his head and said, "I have witnessed untold extinctions, but I do not dream. I have seen the birth and death of stars and the formation and dissipation of worlds. I have seen all those things and will see them again and again. I am in all places, at all times. Dreams are for those with memories, but I have none. Who needs to remember if you never leave?"

"Who are you?" I asked again.

He stepped forward. "When I told you the asteroid was a bullet, what did you think? Did you think about what that meant? Did you try to understand? Or, perhaps, did you ask yourself: who fired it?"

I looked into his eyes then and I saw a vast universe, and I started to cry. When I woke up, I was still crying, but I wiped the tears from my eyes and got up.

I realized that was stuff on my pillow. I wiped it away with my hand, wondering how it go so dusty, but then I took another look and saw that it wasn't dust at all.

It was ash.

Strange Dream

I feel so tired and scared all the time. This can't be normal, but the more I think about it, the more scared I become. It's like a Catch-22 or a perpetual motion machine. I can't stop it even if I tried.

I had a dream last night.

I was standing near a cliff. I was barefoot and my feet were damp from the wet grass. There was a man standing in front of me, his back to me. He was standing on the edge of the cliff. He wore a gray suit and hat.

"Where am I?" I asked.

"At the end," he said.

"Who are you?"

"Names are meaningless if there is nothing in them to refer to," the man said. "I could tell you a name but you wouldn't understand it. I could say that I have been called the Eternal Witness, but you would not understand that either. Needless to say, there is very little you would understand."

"Where am I?" I asked again.

"At the end," he said again. "Look." He pointed to the sky. There was something up there, something that was streaking down to Earth. It was turning the sky red. It was growing larger. "The end comes," the man said.

The sky began growing brighter, turning from red to white. "What's happening?" I asked.

"The fifth extinction is about to occur," the man said. "A planetary wide extinction event."

"Is that...the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs?" I asked.

"Correct," the man said. "Although it might be more accurate to call it something other than an asteroid."

As the sky became brighter, I asked, "What?"

The man in gray turned to me and as the sky exploded behind him, he said, "A bullet."

And then I woke up.

Reassurance

Today, at work, my coworker told me that she owns a Glock. She keeps it in the drawer by her bed, "just in case." In case of what, I asked her, and she shrugged. "You know," she said, "burglars, rapists." I was about to ask her if perhaps an alarm system would work better, but than I thought better of it.

I've lost count of how many school shootings there have been this month. Eight? Nine? This can't be normal. Can it? Perhaps it's not the violence I'm afraid of, but the fact that violence is now the norm. All you ever wanted to know about blood and death, news at six.

That was morbid, but I'm in a morbid mood. I came home and walked to my bedroom closet and reached up to the very top shelf where all my unwanted junk is kept and I brought down the wooden box and I opened it. And there it was. The gun.

Somehow, it is reassuring to me. I picked it up and it felt heavy, heavier than I expected. I spun the cylinder and it made a nice clicking sound as it went around.

I couldn't throw it away. Someone might have found it, digging through the trash. So I keep in my closet. I can't use it -- I'm not about to buy bullets or anything. As I said, somehow just looking at makes me feel safe.

Now I just have to figure out: safe against what?

A Sick Joke

That's what this is. That's what I received in the mail today. A stupid, sick joke.

So there was a package waiting for me when I got back to my apartment. It was wrapped in brown paper with my address scrawled on it. There was no return address, of course.

Inside was a wooden box. And inside the wooden box was a gun. A revolver. I've checked online to see what model, but I can't find it. The company who made it - printed on the side of the barrel - is called "INTERITIO," but I can't find anything about them online. There are no bullets.

There was, however, a note alongside the gun:

ENDMAKER

MERCYGIVER

That's all it had on it.

This has to be some sort of sick joke, right? Should I call the cops?

A Theory About The Nature of Conspiracy Theories

I am currently reading a book about the history of conspiracy theories, which naturally led me to think about those emails I received. I'm still receiving emails, I'm just electing not to post them here, since they are similar to the last ones.

In any case, I was thinking about those conspiracy theories and I've come to a theory about them: they are all about control or, rather, lack thereof.

A lot of people don't feel in control of their own lives, for good reason. People die everyday due to circumstances that are out of their control -- sickness, violence, accidents. So some people invent an invisible enemy, a boogeyman that does control our lives. It's not random chance that kills us, it is Them with a capital T. They control every aspect of our lives, but at least someone is in control, right? At least we're not living in an out-of-control world.

Hell, even I'm guilty of thinking like this. Making this blog in an attempt to find some reason for these shootings, when I should have just realized that the reason was "because, just because."

Because there is no invisible boogeyman. There is nobody pulling the strings. Life is a chaotic series of events. Or, as Terry Pratchett put it, "things just happen, what the hell." So our view of an ordered universe itself is actually just a civilized illusion.

Replies

How did I manage to get three crazy responses in one day? I have no idea.

Anyway, here was the first email I received:

Subject line: It's the government 

The govenrment is brainwashing our children. That's why there's so much violence. Have you looked at the movies these days? Have you played these video games? Their conditioning our children to kill, kill, kill. we should smash all the tvs and burn all these games and then when they try to teach our children that godless evolution, we will smash thier schools and make them know that GOD does not agree with them.

How did we go from violence in movies and games to evolution? I fail to see any logic in this.

Here's the next one:

Subject line: All a hoax 

That's what it is: a hoax. Those school shootings didn't really happen. Obama just set it up so he could justify taking away our guns. All those dead bodies were just lifelike mannequins. The real kids are being held in a facility somewhere and they arent allowed to talk to anyone or go anywhere. Dont believe the lies they tell you -- it's all been faked.

Yeah, it's been faked, just like 9/11 and the moon landing. Please go die in a fire.

And if you thought those last two were deranged, just read the third email:

Subject line: There Is A Man 

There is a man. He wears a gray suit and a gray bowler hat. He has a white pocketwatch. I'm not sure what it's made of, I didn't get a good glimpse at it. I was too busy running for my life. But I saw him, I know he was there. And it wasn't the first time. I found him before, in different places, different tragedies. He's always there. Looking at his watch. Check and you'll see. I'm not sure if he causes them and merely records them, but he's always there.

Creepy, right? Until I remembered that that's the plot of an episode of Fringe.

Why does this subject always seem to bring out the crazies? Why can't I talk to someone normal about this? Perhaps I should see a therapist, but that costs money, money I don't have.

I need to just stop worrying, but I can't.

Tired

It's been a long day. I work inside an office at a high school and everyone time someone walked through the door, I was afraid. I almost compulsively surf the internet now, checking the news, checking for stories of shootings. I know I shouldn't, but I just want to know. I want to know why.

But I'm tired of living inside my own head, asking myself these questions, so instead I'm going to ask anyone reading this blog: why? Why do you think these events happen? You can comment here (I have opened it up to anonymous commenting even) or you can email me: thesiliconchipinsideherhead@gmail.com.

Just give me a theory, any theory.

February 2, 1996

Location: Frontier Middle School, Moses, Washington
Victims: Three
Wounded: One

Barry Dale Loukaitis, 14-years-old, dressed as a gunslinger with .357 revolver and .25 semiautomatic pistol, walked into his fifth-period algebra class and opened fire, killing two students and the teacher. Afterwards, he said, "This sure beats the hell out of Algebra, doesn't it?" a quote from the Stephen King novel Rage. Loukaitis took the rest of his class hostage, until he was eventually subdued by the gym teacher.

Motive: Loukaitis claimed to suffer from "mood swings" and a court-appointed psychiatrist said he experienced delusional and messianic thoughts. As well, Loukaitis's mother had separated his father and had often spoken of committing suicide.

Tell Me Why

I don't understand.

There were ten school shootings in the United States in 2012. Six of them resulted in deaths.

Do you know how many school shootings there have been in 2013? Four. Four in less than one month.

Is it bullying? Drugs? Are students becoming desensitized to violence because of video games and movies? Or perhaps it's our culture itself, the fetishization of mass shootings, the obsession that our news media has over the smallest new story related to these shootings.

Or perhaps it's none of the above. Perhaps it's something else entirely, something completely unknown, invisible to us.

I don't understand.

This is my attempt to understand. This is my attempt to look back at history and try and see a pattern. Any pattern. Anything to make sense of the senseless.

January 29, 1979

Location: Cleveland Elementary School, San Diego, California
Victims: Two
Wounded: Nine

Brenda Ann Spencer, a 16-year-old teenager who lived across the street from Cleveland Elementary School, began shooting at the school from her window with a .22 caliber rifle. Afterwards, she barricaded herself in her house for seven hours before the police apprehended her.

Motive: When she was asked why she did it, Spencer replied, "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day." Later on, Spencer claimed that she was on drugs (which was denied by the police) and that her father beat and sexually abused her.

July 12, 1976

Location: California State University, Fullerton, Fullerton, California
Victims: Seven
Wounded: Two

Edward Charles Allaway, the 37-year-old custodian of the school library, purchased a semiautomatic rifle at a local Kmart, then killed seven people and wounded two in the lobby of the school library and the media center in the basement before fleeing. Allaway later turned himself in.

Motives: Allaway was diagnosed during a second trial with paranoid schizophrenia  He believed pornographers were forcing his wife to act in films. It is not known if he thought the people he killed were the pornographers or if he believed they were showing the films in the library. He is currently in the Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino.

May 6, 1940

Location: South Pasadena Junior High School, South Pasadena, California
Victims: Five
Wounded: One

Former principal of South Pasadena Junior High School, Vieling Spencer, walked into the school and shot six school officials, killing five of them, before shooting himself in the neck.

Motives: Revenge perhaps? Spencer had recently been let go from his job. Were his victims those who forced him out? Did he target them specifically or were they merely bystanders in a rampage? Unknown.