Jack Follman

I took a few moments to calm down a little bit and fully absorb my situation. Something about the whole situation seemed off from the get go.

Everyone in Howeville, Virginia knew about the Barnes Family Curse, but no one knew more about it than me.

The service I offered was simple. You wanted a guy beaten up, I was your guy. I caught the guy at just the right time, picked a fight with him, and won. Always won.

Like Gram and Gran’s deaths, I now had horrifying concerns about the people I was sharing my life with who were listening to old Bob Dylan records in the kitchen and probably already five drinks in.

“I don’t know what he is going to do to you, but I can’t say you don’t deserve and I don’t think anyone is going to judge either of us when they find out what you did to him and why you made him run away.”

“You have to get out. You have to get out now. Now. You are not safe.”

Tom first responded with a nervous laugh, then a hiccup, before he finally gave a soft answer.

“Something was after me. Something in that house was after me.”

I whipped around and saw nothing behind me. There was no dark figure in the room to be seen, but I could feel something there. I reached out my hand behind the couch and waved my palm around where I saw the figure on the screen, but nothing again.

That last of the wine still processing, I got up to relieve myself, but stopped as soon as I stood up next to the bed. Something was off about the room. A childish sense of fear had started to seep into my sobering mind.

Someone was in our apartment.

I immediately laid eyes upon the old man who had been in the casket, up on his feet staggering in my direction like a zombie, just about 10 feet behind me. His yellow eyes shined like a cat’s in the night and his mouth slowly dropped open as he finished another clumsy step in my direction.

Soaked from head-to-toe, I jumped up onto my feet, stood up in the knee-deep water, and looked out to the deeper water where the blue orb, looking much bigger than it had from up on the course, rested on top of the waves about 10 yards away from me.

I turned myself around in the chin-deep water. I saw what froze Sam. Swimming below the surface in the deep end, going from side-to-side was a dark figure. About the size of Sam and I, whatever it was swam swiftly and seemed to have no interest in coming up for air.

Some called it snorkeling, some called it scuba diving but it didn’t matter, they were the same thing… killing yourself to live.

I don’t really know if I was surprised or not that Chase killed himself at the time. I didn’t know him well enough to know if he was depressed or not. You could say I loved him in the good Christian way a cousin loves a cousin they see a few times a year, but that was about it.

It’s entirely possible grizzlymane415 was completely making this detail up, or it was something he had heard through word of mouth, but those goosebumps upon my arms also knew another thing most self-taught murder experts learn in their 101 class. Murderers love to brag about their work, even though they know it almost always leads to them being caught.

“The last thing he always says before he goes away. I heard the phrase so many times, I remembered it and asked Tokinari, the Japanese fellow in here, what it means. He said, you will die too. That’s what it means.”

I grabbed Ray’s hand and felt something thick and wet transfer onto mine. I looked down at it. Deep, red, blood. “You have blood all over your hand.”

I looked closely at the photo. At first glance, it was just your typical drunk high school party group photo. However, on the far right of the picture was the head and shoulders of a man I had never seen before.