Shadow People

Never approach. Always avoid.

Signs of Presence: Sensations of being watched, especially from dark peripheries. Howling sounds ranging from whistles and whispers, to aggressive winds.

A cryptid with the ability to cross from the Other Side to our world through the bridge between physical mind and the abstract world, created by an instance of sleep paralysis.

Fascinated with the human body, many of them interact with the victims who’d summoned them. Though, lacking physical form, these interactions are never lethal, and often never felt.

Shadow people are capable of—

A car hoots out front.

I close the book and pull on my coat. With my notes tucked under my arm, I leave my home. H’Shuhn winter chill bites my cheeks and lips.

Lyera unlocks the car doors for me and I get in.

“Good afternoon,” she says.

I press my forehead to the passenger window to look up at the sky and judge the shade of the clouds.

“It’s still morning,” I say and put on my seatbelt.

She sighs a laugh.

“… Right. Sorry. Good afternoon to you too.”

She starts to drive. She wears her official greys. I suppose the uniform still holds authority when you’re off-duty.

The still winter of the forest turns to bustle as we leave home and enter the city. It’s winter here, just not still.

“So,” she begins, “How have you been?”

I look at her. “Umm… Fine.”

She nods.

It becomes still again as we enter the residential areas. All of the homes here are standard; the same structures with different colours. One front door with a small window on one side and a wide one on the other. A stone gazebo in the front with children’s paintings and carvings on the legs and crafts hanging from the beams.

Lyera pulls over in front of a house that is merely one among many… mostly. The gazebo for this one is bland. Plain stone. No painting. No carving. No dried latapomp leaves hanging. No decoration.

“Are you ready?” Lyera asks me.

I look at her. “Why would I not be?”

“I know you aren’t a fan of people or their emotions.”

I look out of the window at the house.

I open the door and step out. It’s quiet here. In a bad way. Not so much by volume, but in atmosphere. A mourning silence.

Lyera joins me. After multiple presses of the button on her car key the lock clicks and the lights flash thrice. She walks the footpath under the gazebo to the front door. I lift my collar to shield the back of my neck against the chill and follow her. She knocks firmly on the door and we wait for a bit.

I look behind us, still trying to spot any bit of a child’s touch on the gazebo.

A young woman opens the door and I turn back. Her partner stands behind her. They give me a second’s stare before looking to Lyera.

“Good morning,” Lyera says. She begins her formalities as a cop and I turn my attention back to the gazebo… There’s something faded on the legs. Vertical waves. They’d decorated, once upon a long time ago.

“Are you ready to have us look at the room?” Lyera asks.

I feel her tug my sleeve once and I return to the conversation. A stale warmth hits my face when I step in. I follow Lyera as she follows the young woman down the corridor.

The curtains drape over the windows in the lounge. No daylight and no electric light. Cushions and pillows unfluffed. Fruit flies swarm a fruit basket in the kitchen. Dishes undone. You’d think these people were ghosts, the way things are - the way they are.

Our steps echo in the corridor. I almost expect to smell antiseptic. I almost expect to hear a flatline.

The door at the end creaks open and we enter. The woman and Lyera step aside for me to come through. The man stays in the doorway.

This room is perfect. The bedding is smooth and taught. The curtains slightly parted to let rays in and the windows open for fresh air over the headboard. Toys and blocks sorted nicely on a colourful play mat made of giant foam puzzle pieces. The perfect child’s bedroom, without the child.

I feel six eyes watching me. I look at Lyera. She nods to the room.

“Oh,” I say, “Right.”

I step forward to the bed. Pits of shadow loom in the two corners beside the window. Even with H’Shuhn moonlight, they’ll stay black at night.

The smell of soldering creeps into my nose. Burning flux. A strange metal spice. I stick my tongue out to taste it and follow the trail to the play mat. I sniff the air again. The spice bites me deep in my throat and I start to cough.

Lyera rushes to me, but I hold up my hand. “I’m fine,” I say and clear my throat.

I step away from the corner, eyeing it for any visual clues. “Does your son suffer from any biological deformities?” I ask. A red stain blends with one of the red puzzle pieces of the play mat.

“He does,” the mother responds quickly, “Tricuspid atresia.” She and the father stand beside the bed, watching me.

“Do you know if your son suffered from sleep paralysis?”

The corner whispers to me. The subtle sound of torn space scabbing and healing. Unusually loud for something that happened so long ago. Unusually present. The space here had been ravaged during a rift. Where did it go that it needed to use such aggression?

The mother steps forward and says, “He did. He told us that whenever it happened, a black figure would stand beside his bed and watch him.”

“It took him,” I say.

“What?” the mother and father ask.

“It came during his sleep paralysis. He was able to get up. Ran to this corner to get away from it. It took him away.”

“Took him away to where? How?” the father yells.

“I don’t know.”

“Lyera!” the mother says.

Lyera nervously looks to the couple and then to me.

“It rifted,” I say, “That’s all I know. It cornered your son and… teleported them. I don’t know where to.”

“Is there a way we can find out where?” Lyera asks me.

“There is. I know someone.”

“Is he okay?” the mother asks. She and her partner walk towards me anxiously.

“I don’t know. It depends on where it took him.”

“Detective, please! Can you get him back?” the father asks. They’re both on the verge of tears.

“Maybe. But if you want a transparent and realistic answer, I probably can’t get him back alive or in one clean piece.”

The mother sinks to her knees and the father goes down with her. Lyera rushes to me as if she’s going to scold me as the couple starts to cry.

“You cannot say that!” she whispers to me.

“Would you prefer I lied? A shadow person kidnapped the child. What hope is there?”

“Whatever hope you can give them!” She turns to the couple and tries to comfort them.

I turn to the jigsaw playmat and look at the small blood stain. The fizzle of healing space lingers in the air… Where did you go?

When Lyera finally soothes them and assures that we will do our best to find the child, we return to the car. Lyera walks out of the front door first. The mother left us for her bedroom. The father holds the door for me.

I step through the doorway.

“This hasn’t happened before,” I say to him before he closes. He looks at me. I shake my head. “It’s the first time that I know of that a shadow person kidnapped somebody. I don’t know where your son is. I don’t know that he’s dead. He could still be alive.”

He nods. “Thank you, detective.”

“I’m not a detective. I’m a scholar. Doctor is fine.”

“Doctor of what?”

“Cryptids.”

He looks confused. “A doctorate from where?”

“… Self-study.” I quickly turn and leave to join Lyera in the car.

A shadow person kidnapping and teleporting with a child… I ponder the possibilities on the drive. All of them seem like rubbish, but so do cryptids themselves. You get so used to knowing what they are that you forget that they aren’t really anything, and thus, they have the potential to be anything.

The child is dead. Whatever happened to him, we won’t find him alive if at all. The Other Side would have wiped out his undeveloped sentience and consciousness on arrival. I’m not crossing worlds for what’s left of a child’s soul.

Lyera pulls over at one of the public-greenhouses of the city - green steel frame, clear windows to even greener vegetation, spaciously tucked between a café and thrift store. Public, but privately owned and actually rarely ever open to the public. Without a name, even. It’s practically the owners garden away from home.

Lyera follows me to the door. A rope, run through a pulley system in the door frame, connects to chimes on the other side. I tug the rope twice and the chimes tinkle a song. A short woman patiently hobbles through the indoor foliage to the door.

She sees me and smiles brightly. I return it with what joy I can. She opens the door and returns into her bushes without greeting. I follow her unbeaten path through the foliage and Lyera follows me.

“I always wondered who owned this greenhouse,” she says.

We emerge on a circle of cobblestone. A foldable table stands at the centre with gardening tools and a plastic crate of glass jars. Klio stands at the opposite edge of the circle with her hands behind her back, overlooking a pond that’s green with pondweed. Despite her actual age, she always made me think of a grandmother.

I look up at the clouds through the glass roof, then step closer to the table. Lyera stays at the edge.

“Good afternoon, Klio. This is Lyera. She’s a policewoman. She’d asked me to help with the investigation of the child who’d gone missing recently because of possible cryptid involvement. Now we need your help.”

She gets down on one knee and sticks a hand out over the pond. After a moment, she stands and turns to us with an insect on her index finger. “How can I help?” she asks, holding the insect up to her eyeline.

“We were at the house today. I’d found a tear in the child’s bedroom. I suspect that a shadow person may have rifted and taken the child away.”

Klio looks past the insect to me. “The child went missing last week.”

“Yes.”

“How were you able to hear the tear?”

“That’s why I’m here. The tear hadn’t healed yet, and the scar was violent… The shadow person was summoned by the child’s sleep paralysis, but stayed even after the child was able to move. It was able to keep itself in our world. Then it was able to rift and take the child with it. Do you know where it could have taken the child?”

Her eyes look up and her mouth pulls a smirk that shows her intrigue.

“The Other Side?” I ask.

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She shakes her head.

What?

“The child would cease,” she says, “Shadow people have no use for a ceased body.” She turns to the pond and holds her hand out. The insect flies away. She walks forward and meets me at the table.

I look over my shoulder at Lyera for any reactions. She seems lost.

“I think,” Klio says, “The only reason any cryptid would need to use aggression to cross worlds would be to tear through multiple layers of space.” She looks at me.

“… I don’t understand. Are you saying there’s another place beyond the Other Side?”

“That is a possibility, but no. Unless there is another world beyond the Other Side, I think this shadow person may have created its own personal pocket dimension.”

“Klio… That— Surely not?”

She scoffs playfully. “Have you learnt nothing in your time studying the cryptids?”

I stare down at a smooth stone in the ground, trying to take the information in. Lyera’s boots scrape the cobblestone as she steps forward. “What does that mean for the child?” she asks, “And for us?”

“For the child,” Klio says, then pauses for a moment. “… It’s good. The shadow people are fascinated by the concept of bodies. Their intention is to dissect us in the same way that a biology student may dissect a frog. If nobody has gone missing since that child, we can assume that he is still alive and the shadow person isn’t done with him. Though, he may not be well.”

“… Klio what is going on?” I ask and look up. “I found blood in the child’s room.” She doesn’t seem surprised by that. “The shadow person was able to touch the child. The concentration of its essence was immense. They are able to cross worlds at will and take people with them. They are able to make their own dimensions now.”

“Well, how do we know that they couldn’t make their own dimensions before? Again, the cryptids aren’t a science. You must remember that they are not of our world. How our universe will support their existence is unpredictable.”

I look at her. She’s right. I already know everything she’s saying, but it seems that this rabbit hole just keeps getting deeper.

“The world’s changing,” she says, “Be it the way of the universe or the prayers of the cults, the walls between our worlds are breaking and by the heat of the springs, we are entering a new era… Our dreams and our nightmares are going to walk alongside us soon enough.”

om<=>

The intensity of the tear wasn’t much, so the shadow person hadn’t gone ridiculously far. Estimated time of healing was about a week. The tear’s orientation and geometry indicated the direction.

Lyera had taken Klio to the child’s bedroom. Klio analysed the tear, made these observations and marked a map for us. Somewhere on a straight path through the forest that we walk now, the shadow person’s pocket dimension is parallel to our world.

I hold a cold glass jar with a firefly in it. This one was particularly chosen by Klio. Without wings and of unique properties, as she put it.

Lyera and I trudge through snow, using a compass to try to stay as on-the-path as we can. From the car we’ve been trying to hold 23 degrees. What I think is a few kilometres later and still not even a blink from the wingless firefly.

“How do we know we’re going the right way?” Lyera asks me. She keeps an eye on the compass in her hand.

“Because Klio said it’s somewhere along this path.”

“How do you know she didn’t make a mistake?”

“Klio doesn’t make mistakes.”

“Maybe we made a mistake. Maybe we started at the wrong point.”

“We didn’t, but if you insist, we could walk all the way back and check again.”

No response.

Not much farther, I don’t think. She said five kilometres at most.

I miss this – being this far away populace. Home is close enough that I don’t isolate myself from society, but far enough that I hardly ever speak. Out here in the woods, all you hear is the snow crunching beneath your boots. All you see is white. All you feel is cold. If you inhale too fast, you get brain freeze.

“Do you think he’s alive?”

“The child? I don’t know. To be honest, for all we know, he’s in a new state of being.”

“You seemed scared back at the greenhouse…”

I try to avoid saying anything, but the words form quicker than I can decide.

“It was scary enough knowing that they existed at all in a world separate from ours. I don’t like that our worlds will someday stop being separate.”

“How bad can it get?”

I look at her and she looks at me for a moment before looking back at the compass.

“Lyera, the shadow people aren’t the problem on the Other Side. They aren’t even the people there. They are the ants of their world. They are so insignificant, but so abundant… I’m not worried about the shadow people…”

The firefly flashes and we both freeze.

“Is that—”

“No,” I say, “Wait.”

We pause.

I step forward. The firefly blinks twice.

“We’re close,” I say and turn to Lyera. “When we cross, you need to stay calm. Don’t question anything. Don’t think too much. Just take it as it comes. Like a dream. Okay?”

She gives a confused nod.

I grab her hand and walk straight ahead. The firefly blinks in twos, then threes, then fours. Its light starts to flutter. It walks around the jar erratically.

The light beams.

My eyes close.

My eyes open to darkness.

The firefly’s yellow glow holds strong. I feel nothing beneath my feet but I don’t feel myself falling. There is no sound. It’s just a hollow space with no echo. The perfect temperature. No heat being lost and no heat being gained. A temperature too perfect to be real, like the world takes me in as a part of its shadows.

I feel my eyes drift left while my nose drifts right. I feel my ears turn in as my ribs turn out and my legs split far apart and then it all resets. That’s the feeling of the world trying to wipe you out.

Lyera’s hand squeezes mine.

I look at her. Her other hand is balled up in a fist.

She stands stiff as stone. Only her knees tremble. Her head faces down and she stares at nothing.

“Lyera,” I say.

She doesn’t respond.

I step in front of her and lower myself to see her eyes. She squeezes tighter and my hand loses sensation. Tears are running down her cheeks and her face is turning red. She isn’t breathing.

“Lyera,” I say, louder. I wiggle the arm she holds to stimulate her. “Lyera. The child. There’s a child here. We came here looking for a child. This place is where the child is. He is here because a shadow person took him. A week ago, the son of your friend went missing. The cops couldn’t figure out what happened. Your friends believed it was a shadow person. They came to you for help.”

Drool starts to leak from her mouth. Her shoulders start to tighten.

“Lyera.” I hold up the jar and slowly swing it side to side. She blinks twice. I lower the jar. “Lyera, look at me.” I blow air in her eyes. “Lyera.”

She makes a tense heaving sound with her teeth clenched. Her eyes meet mine.

“There we go. Lyera. Your name is Lyera. What is your name?”

“L—… Leee—”

“It’s okay.” I hold up the jar. “I want to you look at the firefly. I want you to stare at its light.”

She stares at me dumbly. Her eyelids flutter then slowly her eyes drag to look at the firefly.

“Take the jar. It’s cold. It will help you.”

Her hand lets go. Her fist unclenches. The shattered compass falls to the ground like bloody feathers and lands quietly. Her arms tremble as she reaches for the jar. Her hands wrap around the jar like a flower bud closing. She stops trembling. Her eyes focus on the light and her shoulders lower.

“Is it better?”

She doesn’t say anything. She only nods.

I look around. Somewhere in the distance is a round light in the shape of an arc. I put a hand out to the side into the shadows and feel the shadows push back. Boundaries. Walls of sorts. We’re in a tunnel.

I put a hand on Lyera’s shoulder and guide her. We approach the distant light. Wisps of an icy feeling stroke exposed skin. Tongues of shadow flick off the walls and silhouette against the light at the end of the tunnel, each one inhaling as it passes an ear. I shake my head.

At the centre of the light, a structure woven out of void holds a small humanoid figure. I walk faster, pulling Lyera. The room is white. The walls are grey clouds with white glows moving through them as if they carry lightning.

We enter the room. The fuzziness of this false existence subsides, though only slightly. Lyera looks to the child.

The shadow harness suspends him. A base like tree roots grows up towards pulsating webs of blackness that squirm into the child’s body through his mouth and ears and nose. Vessels and pipes of flickering black dust pierce the child’s skin and inject themselves into his vessels. Thin, hair-like parasitic tendrils fill his capillaries and make his skin grey.

No structure supports him. He hangs only by these pipes of shadow that fester in his body.

And his chest is wide open revealing crimson insides with maggots of shadow burrowing in and out. His ribs are spread out like wings and floating in front of his chest cavity is the shadow person’s prize – the boy’s heart. The child’s eyes show no life. His heart still beats.

I look at Lyera. She stares with wide eyes at the child.

“Are you holding?” I ask her.

Her eyes dart to me and then back to the child and she nods.

The firefly’s light flickers.

“We’re running out of time,” I say and approach the child. “You need to get the child to a hospital as soon as possible.”

I place my hand on the child’s heart and guide it into place. I cup his unfolded chest and push it closed, the fractures bending like the hinges of a door.

“W—What are you doing?” Lyera asks.

“We can’t pull the child out of the harness. It would kill him.” The skin down the centre of his chest heals like a seam of bubbling scabs. “We need to replace him.”

I stand behind the child and swipe my right hand through the shadows that attach to the child’s right forearm. They falter, letting the child’s right arm hang, and reattach to mine loosely and then pull firmly. I feel needles of ice fill my arm. “The child doesn’t have enough time for us to make plans, Lyera. The shadow person’s done with him.”

“Wait. What is happening?”

I look at her and try to bare my consciousness long enough for an explanation. “I’m going to stay here. You need to take the child out of here and get him to a hospital as soon as possible.”

“And you? Do I come back for you?”

“Don’t risk it.”

I thrash my left hand through the shadow of the child’s left arm and the harness takes mine. Lyera says things. My body hangs by the black veins like a marionette. The shadows that hold the child take me. I gag as my throat and nostrils are forced open. Morbid cold fills me. My vision becomes a black haze.

Most sense of what’s going on outside of my body disappears.

A woman’s voice yells in panic. A warm yellow flickers then flashes through the haze.

I feel as if my blood flows out of me and ice pumps in. I exhale eternally. I should be panicking, but my consciousness is carried away in the unquantized flow of the abstract world… I’m fading…

A howl approaches from somewhere far away. A deep groan like midnight winds flushing through a crack in the bedroom door.

As it comes closer it grows ever more rageful and the shadows I see grow ever darker.

The shadow tilts its head curiously.

*

`~’_.*/

*`_*-;’``~

Al’Eda screamed. The firefly flashed and we escaped. The first thing I heard as my senses realised reality were his screams.

I gave coordinates on an emergency call. I found the missing child. 10 minutes later, all of which Al’Eda screamed for, a helicopter arrived. Nothing could have gotten to us quicker through the snow.

His screams ripped through the silent snowfall as he was lifted to the helicopter. His skin was pale, but black with the webs of veins beneath. His chest deformed with each heartbeat as if a rat had been stitched inside.

The doctor waits for my response, the helicopter whirring overhead.

What do I tell her? The child had been taken by a shadow person, and was tortured in another dimension? He’d been opened up and mutilated? Shadows infested his body?

“I found him like this,” is all I say. “I’m going to look around.” I try to sound as calm and truthful as I can.

“Will you be coming with us?” she asks.

I shake my head. She looks at the jar under my arm, stained with my bloody handprint. She nods and gets onto the rope ladder. She shows a hand signal to the pilot above and the helicopter takes off with the doctor hanging on.

I take the jar out from under my arm and run through the snow, following my footprints. The firefly’s light flickers. With my right hand I take the gun from its holster.

The firefly’s light flares and the snow-white world goes shadow-black.

Everything screams at me. A static tingling dances on my skin. I feel myself being torn and contorted in some senseless way that I can’t comprehend. Every piece of my body is being pulled in the direction opposite to the piece next to it.

Black and white swirls into each other. A glimmer of yellow warms my mind and opens my eyes. I feel the cold glass of the jar in my palm. I hold onto it mentally – that sharp sensation of cold. The light of the firefly makes the back of my eyes tingle but it keeps me here. It keeps me from wherever this world is trying to take me. I feel like I’m being held together by thin strands.

I look around me for the room, holding the jar close to my face to keep me present. I see a distant, fuzzy white light and approach it. All I hear is buzzing and my head feels like it’s inflated.

The light loses its fuzziness and suddenly becomes clearer, as if it wasn’t real before. I see clear as day into the room. Sound reaches my ears through the buzzing. A horrible howl like churning from an underworld.

At the end of the black tunnel, the figure stands beside its new prey caught in the shadowy tree. Its pitch-black hunched torso is mounted on long legs like a body hanging from pylons and its arms hang to its knees. Its hands are like cruel, curling branches. Its blank head distorts like a face being blurred. Ash and soot drift around its outline.

Its head slowly grows to the ceiling as if it has a jaw that unhinges and cheeks that tear. The howl becomes a scream, like a roar being inhaled.

I raise my gun and aim at the thing. I pull the trigger. It makes no sound. The recoil sends me back and I drift. The bullet floats down the tunnel, entering the room, disappearing into the shadowy figure.

Everything plays in slow motion and in silence. The creatures head grows longer and the howl swells. Shadows rain from the black sky like clumps of dirt. The howl shakes the missing ground. My head rattles and my bones quake and the shadows rise like a flood of cold water pulling me down to peaceful death.

The end of the tunnel closes like a throat, the tongues of shadows reaching out to each other, intertwining and pulling. The figure watches me patiently – no eyes but it watches – as I drown in the shade of the world that it made and it now destroys. From all around me, the invisible tunnel collapses.

I float in darkness with the firefly’s light revealing more darkness. I’m nothing. I’m nowhere. I’m never.

I never happened… Didn’t I?

My head aches painfully, making me want to turn my stomach inside out. I want to vanish.

My head leans back and my mouth yawns open. My head slides down my spine as the bones stick out from my throat. Why is this happening?

My head aches more and my skin dissolves, letting the cold touch everything underneath.

… Just take it as it comes. Like a dream. Just take it as it comes and it will all go away. It will end. Don’t fight it. Let it end…

I see a yellow flash through my eyelids. I wake up, lying in the snow, hugging the jar. My heart beats in my ears.

That howl echoes in the back of my mind, standing right next to the image of the body in that tree of shadow. Then the thoughts of that place fade away, as if it never happened; as if my existence hadn’t almost ended.

As if I didn’t see your body hanging by black threads.

I blink. A tear rolls from each eye down each cheek.

*

`~’_.*/

*`_*-;’``~

New pipes are in his body now. These one’s aren’t made of shadows and they don’t squirm. Invasive, but not infesting. Al’Eda’s parents and family gather around the hospital bed. He’s asleep. He’s been asleep for a while.

To think that for a week now, he’d been hanging by parasitic shadows, with his chest broken open and his heart floating out…

“Excuse me,” a nurse says behind me.

“Sorry,” I say. I step out of the doorway for him to pass through.

The family looks up and goes quiet. He reassures the family that the child is going to be perfectly fine. He says that the child needs special care. What’s wrong with him isn’t hard to handle, but it needs persistence and patience.

He’s going to live.

I make my way out of the hospital, taking an elevator down.

I can’t remember the last time I believed in cryptids. I never really did. I grew up and I grew out of it. The stories our elders told us became stories; historic stories that laid the foundations of our culture.

I unlock my car and get in. I look at the book, lying on the passenger seat. Brown, damaged leather with yellowed pages and a bookmark sticking out… When we were children, you were like an elder. You knew the stories by heart. You’d tell us of the different cryptids - some so beautiful and some so horrible that we thought you made them up.

And while the rest of us grew up, you never let those stories go. You stayed behind and I always wondered why.

I open the book to the bookmark. The page shows a smudged pencil scribble of a humanoid figure.

Shadow People

Never approach. Always avoid.

Signs of Presence: Sensations of being watched, especially from dark peripheries. Howling sounds ranging from whistles and whispers, to aggressive winds.

A cryptid with the ability to cross from the Other Side to our world through the bridge between physical mind and the abstract world, created by an instance of sleep paralysis.

At the bottom of the page beneath all of your notes is a message, scribbled with frustration and in fresh ink – I know nothing…

I look at the blank head of the figure. No features. Just a deformed shadow for a head. No eyes, and yet…

“I’m not worried about the shadow people,” you said.

… If not the shadow people, then what?

I start the car and drive for the station. When I arrive, all of my colleagues approach me asking how I found the child. I excuse myself politely, then frustratedly as more keep coming. I eventually get away from them and make for the archives.

I push open the heavy wooden doors and flip the switch. The fluorescent lights buzz on. At the centre of the room is a long table with a row of 10 computers on each side. I take a seat at the closest one. I put the book down on the seat next to me and log in.

I access the database and put on filters looking for any unsolved cases. A list of familiar titles pops up. I’ve heard of them all. Some of them I’ve read about. Some of them happened while I was working here. All strange cases, all gone cold. None of them making sense.

The woman who was mutilated while her husband was asleep next to her. People still suspect the husband. He committed suicide soon after.

Various cases of missing children. Their rooms were filled with fireflies the day after their disappearance.

A whole family, from grandmother to one-year old daughter, mutilated. Each one dead in their beds. Each one torn open by unknown means.

Missing children. Mutilations. A case of nightly home invasions by tall men clad in all black… Vandalism and animal sacrifices connected to a radical spiritual group.

What was it Klio said?