Spire In The Woods | Creep Cast

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Welcome back to Creepcast.

Today,

God, dude, I feel like we're martyrs right now.

Today, we're doing something that hasn't been done

in years.

Years.

This has not graced this beautiful site.

And let me tell you, dear, beautiful, beautiful viewer, you're probably watching something that's going to get deleted very soon.

So, buckle in.

And before we go into all the introductions to this wonderful story, I just want to say thank you so much for the support on the merch drop so far.

We do have new merch right now, creepcast.store or dot shop.

I don't know, whichever one it is, put up on the screen.

There it is.

What is it?

Dot store.

I think it's dot store.

Creepcast.store.

Check it out.

We got a bunch of new stuff there.

If you want to support the channel or if you want to get some new

kicks, feel free to check it out there.

And also, please check us out on Apple Podcast and Spotify.

Check us out on Spotify there.

Give us a nice rating.

It really does help us out.

Now, without further ado, today we are reading The Spire in the Woods.

Now, Isaiah, can you give us a nice backstory of to why no one's touched the story?

Yeah, so The Spire in the Woods, also known as The Bells, is a story that was written by Tony Lundy around 2013, 2014, I believe.

And everyone really liked this story.

I don't think I ever read it, but I remember people talking this thing up as being like one of the greats.

As a matter of fact, it got so much traction that the story got optioned for a film, I believe, that Steven Spielberg was set to produce.

Steven

Steven fucking Spielberg is producing it.

Yeah.

It was going to be a huge deal.

But

when the story got optioned, because of that, the story became the copyright of the studio.

So anyone who had ever covered this story got nuked into orbit.

Like, all the creepypasta readings of it got taken down.

All of the reposting or audio versions of the story got taken down.

The story itself got removed from r slash no sleep and creepypasta.com.

R slash no sleep.

Also, the physical copy that was on Amazon has been removed.

And the only listing that I see of the Amazon book is on eBay for $250 fucking dollars.

If you have a physical copy of this, you're sitting on gold, my friends.

Okay.

Yeah, it is like lost media territory of like treasured relics, right?

Because it was a very beloved story that now you cannot buy, you cannot read anywhere because of the way optioning works.

Now, it was to be made into a movie, and to my knowledge, it's still in kind of like production hell or purgatory, so to speak, right?

Of like, we don't know where it's going.

Now, typically, this is where me and Hunter's Martyrdom comes into play.

Yes.

Typically.

With these optionings, the way it works is whenever the story goes up for option, there is an amount of time where like a company buys it and then they remove like other people who are, it's so dumb, but they remove other people talking about the story.

Are there additions of the story because it's that's what happened to my that's what happened to my cartoon Wabbit season.

Literally, Wabbit season got nuked into oblivion.

I found this out later, was because one,

they did a deep purge of everything with Wabbit bugs and everything whenever HBO Max came out because they were putting that Looney Tunes property up on it, and they were wiping everything off of the internet of it for an incentive for people to sign up for Max to watch Looney Looney Tunes

in 2020,

as if

we're children in 1965 wanting to watch Looney Tunes.

That is so absurd.

It's ridiculous.

It's very stupid.

Now, here's the thing.

You can currently, right now, still upload stuff related to Wabbit or Rabbit, right?

Because that period's done.

Yeah,

the heat around that time is done.

The heat around it's done.

So even though everyone who's talked about Spire in the Woods has been launched into orbit, we, Hunter, and I think that it has been long enough that this story can now get posted

without us immediately getting shot in the back of the head.

This is going to get deleted so quick.

So fast.

It's going to get deleted

upload with that in the title, we're gone.

Here's the thing.

It sounds like it's a fucking amazing story.

And trust me, with other stuff, like we've worked with other publishers, of course, before.

And we have, you know, if someone owns the rights of the story, we are more than happy to pay.

We work with publishers, we will pay whatever you want, read stuff for fun here.

Yes, yeah, but if it's unreasonable like this, yes, several publishers reach out to us and they're like, Look, we just want, you know, a cut.

We have never ignored that.

We've always said, Yes, absolutely.

Here's our payment.

Here's us.

We get it.

Yes.

Every time.

And you guys have been amazing because usually, whenever we read these stories,

you guys always go out and support the stories.

It's fucking awesome.

But at this current place in time, this is terrorism.

Okay.

This is Hollywood being fucking terrorist like normal.

And they've scrubbed it to where you can't even buy the fucking book, dude.

And it's an amazing story.

So I say this.

I say we fucking chassis up and we try reading the story because I want to know what it's about.

I think that you deserve to know what's about.

And I bet you anything, our boy

Tony.

Tony wants us to know

what's the story out there, dude.

You know, as much as I would love to have Steven Spielberg's fucking chody cock down my throat, I want people to read my story.

I want people to know my story.

You know what I'm saying?

As much as I love Jaws, bro.

Like, I want to get that story out there.

So that's what we're doing today.

Hunter and I are basically heroes right now.

Okay.

Yeah.

Tony's going to message us and be like, I hope you guys burn in hell.

Hunter and I are basically heroes.

Yeah.

Because like the two of us are.

Like the nukes went off, right?

It is so bad that the only audio version of this story I could find is someone ripped Mr.

Creepypasta's audio reading and uploaded it in three parts to SoundCloud.

Okay, that is like the level of devastation.

If it burns out, at least we know for now that some people got to listen to it.

And also, I'll be just completely honest: I don't want to read it.

And the only way we're reading it right now is the Wayback Machine on creepypasta.com.

We are using the Way Back Machine.

We are using the fucking Wayback Machine.

A deleted creepypasta.com page.

Yes.

It's that dire straits.

But you know what?

I say, fuck the studios.

And, you know, here's the thing, too.

We've done stuff.

We wanted to read The Troop.

And

that's in a, I think, movie deal as well right now.

That was another problem.

But, you know, we talked to the author and stuff.

And it is what it is.

Or I can't know.

I don't know if we talked to the author or the publishing people.

I think my publication is.

We talked to the publishing company.

We talked to the publishing company and they're like, oh, I don't know.

It's kind of an, it is what it is.

Which, sure, that's fine.

But

i don't even know if tony's alive i feel like the fucking wb has has taken tony i don't know where he's at we've tried reaching out to him and doing all kinds of stuff and we've had to have all these fucking like back market conversations with other youtube channels who are like bro don't do it i'm telling you it's a bunch of guys that are like oh i i've heard of tony yeah i can go through the grapevine see if it gets back well after the great cleansing no one's heard of him so you know it's been that kind of thing so i think you know what it it's the it's the great year of 2025 let's read spire in the woods dude look without any this is the equivalent look look look this is the equivalent of like in the fallout video game series like all the nukes have fallen hunter and i are the first vault dwellers to like step into the wasteland like see what's out there you know maybe we get shot in the head maybe we explode yeah and then that is a sign to the other vaults like give it some more time yeah yeah exactly a little bit exactly give it exactly it's a sign give it a damn more time youtube's copyright system are the giant demons walking around lurking like those giant monsters in Fallout, whatever.

The

death claw.

Yes.

YouTube's copyright system is the death claw walking around.

So, you know what?

There's that fucking pocket boy or whatever the fuck it's called wrapped around my wrist.

Pit boy.

Pit boy.

Maybe Hunter and I are like, you know, we're putting on our little blue jumpsuits.

We're like, all right, Hunter, let's reclaim the world.

Maybe the vault door opens and there are 15 death claws with sledgehammers waiting right outside the door.

If that's what it has to be, that's what it has has to be.

And if that's what happens, then that means give it some time.

Give it some time.

It'll be longer.

Give it some time.

All right.

Yeah, we might have a strike on our channel.

Give it some time.

That's all you have to say.

And I will say, you know, we're just prefacing this because also this is a long story.

So buckle in, guys, because today's going to be a long one.

I'm actually very excited, though.

I'm excited as well.

We'll go ahead and get into it.

Thank you guys for the support.

For the 15 of you who managed to watch this before we're beat to death.

yeah be proud stand tall

be proud stand tall and also once again creepcast.store thank you guys so much for supporting the merch supporting us on the audio platforms like apple's podcast and spotify it really does help us out we appreciate it a lot so let's do it isaiah let's get into it

part one part one robert edward kinnan killed himself in the fall of 1999 already off to a good start Oh, God.

Already.

As soon as a episode or a story begins as a suicide, I'm like, all right, I'm buckled in.

I'm ready.

So behind the death clause that are the copyright system, there's a bunch of those.

What are those?

The big wasp things from Fallout New Vegas.

I know the Centaurs.

I've never heard of it.

The big morphed humans, the Centaurs, right behind the Death Clause are those, and that is the YouTube, not copyright, the content ID system.

Because now we're talking about...

killing yourself immediately into an episode.

So if the death clause don't get us, then those centaurs back there will.

The only knowledge I have of Fallout is just Crobe Cat's videos he's done on Fallout.

That's about it.

So that's rough.

I know.

That's rough.

Fallout New Vegas is an all-timer.

That's what people say.

I think it's over.

I want to know right now: is it overhyped?

That's what I want to know.

Maybe by some people, but

I think it was...

It's one of the last.

We are so off topic.

It's one of the last old-school choose-your-own adventure kind of sandbox games.

I think that we should let's let's just literally restart with Robert Edward Kinnan killed himself let's let's just

one more time in case the in case they didn't get us in the back Robert Edward Kinnan killed himself in the fall of 1999

I wasn't there but it's where my story begins It begins with Rob, 17 years old, sitting in a burning car in the middle of a crowded parking lot one Monday night in October.

He burned for nearly four hours before the police let the firemen near enough to put out the flames and pull out his body.

I didn't know him.

Not really.

We lived in a small town.

I knew him by sight, knew his name, but I doubt we'd ever exchanged more than a few perfunctory words.

It makes me feel funny talking about him.

Like I'm not justified doing it.

But if I'm going to tell you about the spire, it's unavoidable.

I have to tell you about Robert Edward Kinnan and how the suicide notes he left behind tangled my life up with his.

Back then, we both lived in a sleepy town of New England, a little over an hour northwest of Boston, just across the New Hampshire border.

It's the sort of place that's nice to live if you're the sort of person that doesn't like doing very much.

There's really only three reasons anyone ever steps foot in my hometown.

The first is that they're on their way to Neshaw, the shopping mecca of the Northeast.

The second would be the ice cream.

We have a dairy farm where they sell the world's best ice cream.

all of it made right there on the premises.

And the third is because they bought one of those haunted New England books.

Usually, you can find our town listed in those books twice.

The first entry will likely be the story of how our high school, which is one of the 10 oldest in the country, came to have the silver specter as its mascot.

I always loved the specter.

It reflected how steeped in folklore rural New England once was, and as mascots go, It's much more interesting than the fighting fill-in-the-cat species here everywhere else seems saddled with.

Bro, I got called out by that one.

Every single town around where I grew up, I could think of the fighting bobcats, the fighting tigers, the fighting lions, the cougars.

Yeah, oh, yeah.

It was either that or the Bulldogs.

I feel like every that was my high school.

My high school was the Bulldogs.

That's funny.

I like immediately this kind of world building, how it feels, it feels like natural, right?

Like his description of it, like, well, we have the world's best ice cream.

It's also haunted.

Silver Spectre is a cool mascot.

Did he say that?

It feels very like conversation.

It's northwest of of Boston.

So, yeah, it's a very classic, kind of cold, dreary, fall.

Just picturing a fallish-tone northeast town.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Very steep.

That also explains.

That's what I was about to say.

That explains Spielberg's interest

because this feels like a classic, like, old Stephen King type film, you know?

Way back in the 1890s, there was a terrible blizzard.

A proper nor'eastern.

It dumped several feet of snow across the whole region.

There were many, many casualties, mostly the very young and very old stuck in their homes without heat.

One of the exceptions, who was neither very young nor very old, was Jennifer Wilkins.

She was a teacher trapped in the school when the blizzard hit.

What little food there was in the schoolhouse couldn't have lasted more than two days, and folks say by the 5th, she had resorted to boiling her boots to soften up the leather for eating.

It was two weeks before anyone was able to reach her.

They found her, body thin as a matchstick, wrapped up in a gray wool blanket.

If only they'd had paste in those days, she might have made it.

That's kind of mean.

It's like, oh, maybe if they had glue there, she could eat that, idiot.

That old schoolhouse is now our town rec center.

Supposedly, old Jenny still haunts its halls, wrapped in that gray wool blanket.

Her hollow, emaciated visage searching in vain for something to eat.

Once, when I was eight or nine years old, long before I knew the origins of of the Silver Specter, I went up into the Wreck Center's attic alone.

It was August, and I had snuck away from the rest of the summer reading program and my own interminable boredom.

The dusty attic was filled with broken furniture and plastic bins containing the crafting supplies for all of the daycare programs.

It would have been entirely forgettable if not for the drafts.

The summer had been hot and humid, but in the Wreck Center's attic, if you stepped in the wrong spot, it'd get so cold you could practically see your breath.

I told my mom about it.

She was the one who told me about Jenny.

I never went back up there alone.

The second story you typically find in those books is about the Blood Cemetery.

Okay, alright, now we're talking.

There we go.

Its real name is the Pine Hill Cemetery, but nobody calls it that.

They call it the Blood Cemetery because it's supposedly haunted by Abel Blood and his family.

According to legend, Abel Blood lived in the center of what is now the cemetery back when it was farmland.

He returned from the fields early one day to find his wife in bed with another man, a tall, dark-haired stranger.

Abel was stunned.

How could Mrs.

Blood, a good Christian woman, do such a thing?

Obviously, this scoundrel was forcing himself on his wife.

Abel retrieved his pitchfork and charged back into the house, his mind full of vengeance.

But as he drew near, he heard his wife, Midcoitis, proclaim her love for the black-haired stranger, and with a note of satisfaction to her call that Abel had never heard before,

Mr.

Blood saw red.

That's rough.

Not only is she calling out for him, but that note of, with a note of satisfaction, he never heard before.

That's such a fucking brutal thing.

That

I would have killed them too.

Every man listening to this just became so insecure.

He burst into the room, pitchfork held aloft, and ran ran them through.

Over and over, he plunged the fork into their tangled bodies before finally leaving them pinned, one on top of the other, to the bed beneath them.

Looking at the bloody mess he'd made, Abel found his rage had not diminished.

This seemed curious to Abel, but it dawned on him why when he spied a picture of his family on the mantle.

His children didn't look anything like him, nor like their mother.

They were all exceptionally tall, with full heads of somewhat greasy black hair.

Aw,

that'd be fucked.

That'd be so fucked.

Do you bro?

Or keep reading.

I was just, I had a thought, but keep reading.

Abel waited, standing in the puddle of blood that had only moments ago been coursing through

standing in the puddle of blood only moments ago that had been coursing through Mrs.

Blood and her lover and stewed in his ever-deepening anger.

He was a cuckold.

He had no heir.

That's so funny.

He had no heir.

He'd been raising another man's children, a man who had been betting abel's wife for years abel waited and stewed for several hours until his four children arrived home from school oh no they say his sons and eldest daughter put up a noble fight uh they were children fighting a grown man whose muscles had been hardened by a lifetime of farm labor only abel's youngest daughter barely five years old made it out of the house alive She sprinted as fast as her little legs could carry her in a desperate attempt to reach her neighbors.

But even with her head start, her little legs were no match for her father's powerful strides.

Just as she scrambled up over the stone wall separating their farm from the Hollis's, April picked up one of the stones, smashed it down on her head.

These days, if you go there, on the road that borders the cemetery, you'll see this curve full of skid marks.

People say that they are caused by cars swerving to avoid an oddly dressed little girl who runs out into the street each night.

Oh, that's cool.

I gotta say, this like this being your setup for like your haunted town is so cool.

Well, yeah,

the blood cemetery.

That's awesome.

Yeah, I just, I love the, uh, the amount of like almost folk legends, how, how thorough the folk legends are immediately in this like small, cold northeastern town.

Really fun, like, almost like sleepy hollow vibes of like, you know, the, the, the ghost of a little girl who got murdered by her cuckoo dad.

Uh, and that's why there's skid marks here because she always runs across the road right here.

Just little stuff like that's nice, but then even just like little world building stuff, too.

Like, you know, it reminds me of like almost Slingblade or something when he catches his mom having sex with somebody or whenever the dad catches his mom cheating on Heb, whatever.

I think that that's like a,

just these little, these little vignettes and little moments really add to the mystique of the town.

While it's also while it's haunting, it's really fun, isn't it?

Like, it's like a little, kind of like, like you were saying before, classic ghost story type stuff.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I think it's cool.

Back home, we had a ride of passage.

As soon as you, one of your friends, were old enough to drive, you had to trespass into the blood cemetery at night and make a rubbing of the blood family's gravestones.

I did it, and you should feel free to.

Be prepared to be disappointed because none of the bloods died on the same date.

A lot of ghost stories are like that.

Doesn't mean they're not fun, but what you come to realize as you get older is that they're mostly a form of social control.

Jennifer Wilkins really did die a horrible death, but the story of Abel Blood is nothing but a fantasy story with a rather dark, misogynistic message.

Cheat on your husband and he'll kill you.

I loved ghost stories growing up.

Loved them.

That's what gave me my not entirely unearned reputation as the spooky kid.

It was the reason that about a month after he died, Rob Kinnon's suicide note wound up in my lap.

There, buried in the middle of apologies to his family and clear evidence of severe depression, was my first push towards the spire in the woods.

The only ghost story I truly believe.

Oh,

brother.

Oh, what a, what an opening.

Now, our, now, our, our protagonist is led to believe that's 17, correct?

Or just Rob was 17 when he killed himself.

I think he was 17.

I think he was also 17.

I think they were the same age.

Okay.

Yeah, and Rob also burned to death in his car, which is a brutal way.

Well, also four hours.

Just the, yeah, just the addition of like, it was four hours before police would let them go near it or whatever.

It's just pretty, pretty fucking insane.

Yeah.

Excessively grisly, you know?

Yeah,

that's a pretty rough way to go.

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Uh-oh, let's get scared again.

In 1999, I was a sophomore in high school.

Rob was a senior.

He wasn't what you'd call real popular.

Part of it was that he wasn't born in my hometown, but moved there in the seventh grade, right when kids are at their cruelest.

The first I ever heard of him was a year later.

There was a rumor floating around that he and a mentally handicapped girl were found naked in the woods together, the implication being that he tricked her into having sex with him.

A couple of years later, I heard another that his parents were forced to move because Rob had been molested by their old priest down in Amherst.

Those are some rough rumors to spread around about a guy.

Oh, man.

To the best of my knowledge, these stories are entirely untrue.

And I'm deeply ashamed to admit that when I was in the sixth grade, I did gleefully repeat that first one.

I found it funny at the time.

The second I also repeated, just not as glibly.

I whispered it to my friends, adopting a sage tone and offering it as an explanation for why the first rumor was probably true.

I felt so damn smart.

I had the inside scoop, something interesting to say, and everyone wanted to listen to me.

I wish I kept my mouth shut.

I wasn't smart.

I was just kicking a kid while he was down, spreading the lies that may have contributed to him killing himself.

The rumors followed Rob everywhere.

He was a quiet kid.

By all accounts, very bright and kind.

And I want to be clear here, he did have people who cared about him.

Friends.

Not many, and maybe they weren't too popular either, but they were there and they were nice guys.

One of them was my ride to school, Nathan Fletch Fletcher.

Fletch and I lived in the same neighborhood.

We were never all that close, but we got along well enough.

He was a lovable goofball, always saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, but it never got him down.

He had this grin that stretched from ear to ear, and he always managed to get me excited about his latest musical discovery or restoration project.

Fletch used to buy old cars, fix them up, and resell them.

While it helped Pat his savings for college, it also meant he was stuck driving whatever hunk of junk he hadn't managed to fix up enough to sell yet.

That year, Fletcher driving a 1984 Honda Civic.

I still hate that car.

I found out something was wrong on Tuesday morning when Fletch's rust bucket didn't show up in my driveway like it usually did.

Instead, his dad, an Air Force officer, nowhere near as affable as his son, was waiting for me.

I liked Mr.

Fletcher fine.

He was a good, if not particularly affectionate father to his boys and a respectful neighbor.

But his presence in my driveway was odd, especially since I could see that Fletch wasn't in the car.

Sir, is everything okay with Nate?

Yeah, he's fine.

We're just giving him the day off from school.

Come on, grab your bag.

I'll explain on the way.

Mr.

Fletcher had turned around and started back towards his car before he'd even finished speaking.

I grabbed my backpack and hustled after him.

Did you know the cannon boy?

He asked as we pulled out of my driveway.

Not really.

I mean, I know who he is.

One of Nate's friends.

Mr.

Fletcher nodded, never taking his eye off the road.

He killed himself last night.

He said it as evenly as if he'd been announcing we needed to stop for gas.

He what?

My brain couldn't even process what I was hearing.

I'd seen Rob Kinnon in the hallway yesterday.

How could he be dead?

Mr.

Fletcher proceeded to lay out the cold, dry facts.

Rob had hand-delivered a letter to the house around 7 p.m.

Fletch wasn't home when Rob dropped it off, so he didn't open it until later that night at 9.45 or so.

Upon reading the letter, Fletch went white as a ghost and tore out of the house without permission.

He raced to, I'm going to omit this detail, just know it's the location that Rob killed himself.

But when he arrived, the car was already burning.

Apparently, the letter was a suicide note.

Nathan's too upset for school.

Something in how he said it made it seem like Mr.

Fletcher was implying there was something unmanly about his 17-year-old son being too upset to sit through pre-calculus after one of his best friends killed himself.

He should have called you.

I didn't didn't think to, and it didn't occur to me until it was too late for you to catch the bus.

Sorry about that.

My initial shock gave way to resentment.

No one could have made Rob Kinnan's suicide pleasant news, but it was difficult to imagine anyone being more callous than Mr.

Fletcher.

No wonder Fletch complained about his father so much.

Don't worry about it.

We rode the rest of the way in silence.

I got to school and found it changed.

Compared to the day before, it was an alien landscape.

It reminded me of Tartarus in Greek mythology.

A bunch of people milling about, a vacant and lost look in their eyes, unsure of what to do, what to say to one another.

Friends clustered silently in small groups.

It was like Rob's funeral was being held in the hallways.

Classes weren't canceled, but nothing was done.

Mainly, the teachers made us aware of special counseling being offered for anyone closely affected and told us that we could come to them if we ever needed to.

Their nerves were also frayed.

I recall specifically my study hall teacher, normally a very soft-spoken man, banging his hand on his desk and swearing that it was completely fucking unnecessary.

Adding a moment later that no one needs to do that.

No one.

We, all of us, drifted through the day in a haze.

You'd hug your friend and ask them how they were holding up or how well they knew Rob.

You'd hear about who was there that night at the omitted location.

It was a popular teen hangout.

And you heard about the cops that could have saved him, but didn't.

I mentioned earlier that rob kinnon was left in his burning car for four hours this is not an exaggeration it was four hours later reports said less time had passed but fletch was there screaming himself hoarse screaming at cops and firemen and anyone who would listen that that was his friend in there and he was dying it was four hours Being teenagers, we were quick to question the actions of the police, but I now believe that, while their delay proved to be without merit they made the best decision they could have with the information available to them rob hadn't lit himself on fire to be dramatic he didn't intend for there to be a fire at all rob had wanted to shoot himself but couldn't acquire a gun so he built one

this is such there's so many dynamics happening and so much is this i'm

okay This is good.

I'm very invested.

I'm getting progressively more upset that you can't find the story anymore by legitimate means.

Yeah,

it's unfortunate.

I do wonder.

It is odd, though, isn't it?

Four hours and not doing nothing.

That's extremely suspicious.

Like, the more that it's brought up, the more I'm like, well, that, like, why, why, why would you wait that long?

I think we're about to get an explanation to it.

Because it's enough that our author is saying, like,

I now understand why the police did that.

So it's got to be something, right?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, also, he would die in, God, how many, like, how many seconds of being burned alive?

I mean, it takes,

well,

it'd be shorter than four hours.

If you're 20.

But if you're on fire, you don't die that quick.

If you're being consumed, engulfed in flames, there's no way you're going to live for more than a minute, right?

I mean, you're fucking,

you would, first, I think you would suffocate.

I mean, not only would you be, your flesh is burning, but also like suffocation.

I mean, like, maybe a couple, maybe two minutes at max.

Two minutes, I would say.

I think it would depend on the heat of the flames.

That's what it was.

Yeah, like the ventilation.

Your fucking brain would melt.

Your brain would get too

blackout.

It's an awful way to go.

Oh, horrible, horrible.

Yeah, yeah.

But I do think, yeah, I think within two minutes, you're dead.

I see.

Well, let me pull up my statistics on this.

Let me pull up my catalog of times it takes people to die by different means.

Oh, well, yeah, I was trying to look something up, but it's mostly like the...

Like if you were,

if you were burning and they saved you, like, it's giving giving me the stuff afterwards, but it's not telling me, like, oh, like, if you were burning to death, it would take X amount of time for your heart to stop or whatever.

But, anyways.

Yeah, you're right.

We should conduct more research about it.

Back then, in the 90s, in a pre-9-11 world, terrorism wasn't part of the zeitgeist.

It was bad, absolutely terrible, and we knew it.

We'd had Timothy McVeigh and the failed bombing of the Twin Towers, but we hadn't entered into the neo-McCarthyism that marked much of the early 2000s, where the mere whisper of the word get you thrown off an airline or placed on a watch watch list.

And there was a certain cachet, a mystique that some of the equipment and ideas surrounding terrorism carried in the imaginations of adolescent boys, which is probably why Rob Kinnan, like virtually every other guy I knew growing up, had copies of the anarchist cookbook and the terrorist handbook, saved up to a 3.5 floppy disk that he had stashed in his room.

When he failed to get a gun, he built one.

I'm a little wary to Google it, but if my memory serves me, the instructions for it were listed in one of those text files as the homebrew blast cannon.

Rob's blast cannon consisted of little more than a lead pipe capped at one end and filled with gunpowder and bits of metal.

It did the trick, but it also launched burning gunpowder all over the interior of his car.

Some of the people at the scene thought they had seen someone else in the car with Rob, a girl, and relayed this information to Officer McCullough.

who was the first emergency responder to arrive.

Officer McCullough hadn't seen anyone else in the car.

All he saw was a burning car, crowd of teenagers who all reported having heard an explosion, and the lead pipe that had rolled out of Rob's unconscious hand and onto the passenger side of the floor.

Terrorism may not have been a big part of the zeitgeist at the time, but school shootings were.

The Columbine massacre had happened only six months prior and Officer McCullough was looking at a fairly typical teen loner, reports of an explosion, and what very well could have been an undetonated pipe bomb still in the burning car.

He made a a tough call.

It may have cost Rob Kinnon his life, but then again, he might already have been dead.

You have to ask yourself about what the officer did.

Was it worth risking more lives to find out?

So what do you think about that call?

I don't know.

It's just four hours seems excessive.

Four hours is excessive, but if all that they saw was like the pipe weapon roll into the passenger seat, you know, I mean, you could think that's a pipe bomb, right?

Oh, sure.

And also,

if Columbine was six months ago, one one of the things they did at Columbine was rig up explosives.

They didn't go off, but I mean, that was like part of the police.

I didn't think that's fair then.

That's probably fair just to make sure nothing, nobody gets fucking blown up trying to check out the car.

And if he shot himself in the head, even if it was with a makeshift gun, he's probably dead.

Probably don't send another officer close to a car that's on fire and might have a pipe bomb in it, right?

Yeah, no, that's that's true.

I remember thinking that Officer McCullough, at that point, only known to me as the cop who always gave kids a hard time for riding their bikes without a helmet, was a bastard.

And maybe he was a bastard, but if he was, it wasn't because of this.

He couldn't risk more lives.

Besides, whether or not it was a suicide, if there had been a second person in the car, where the hell was she?

Nobody who knew Robert Edward Kinnon at all, even people like me who barely knew him, believed for a second that he was out to kill a whole bunch of people.

But there was something else that could have been going on.

Rob had a crush on a girl that bordered on obsession.

It had lasted years and only seemed to be getting worse.

The girl in question, Alina, worked at the omitted location, and Rob would go out of his way to stand in her line or linger in the parking lot after hours hoping to speak with her as she was heading home.

Everyone immediately wondered if the mystery girl in the fire had been Alina.

Did he pull her into his car to once more profess his love for her and, unable to handle another rejection, take his own life before her eyes?

Or, God forbid, try to take Alina with him?

Alina's friends and co-workers shouted her name.

Alina!

Alina, where are you?

When she didn't respond, they fanned out to look for her.

It was the manager, Mrs.

Jeffrey, who found her.

Completely overwhelmed by Rob's suicide, Alina had retreated into one of the walk-in freezers.

She was bawling her eyes out as Mrs.

Jeffrey threw her coat over Alina's shoulders and led her to the manager's office.

Go, it's not your fault.

The older woman whispered into Alina's ear, but it didn't do any good.

No one else was unaccounted for, and no mystery woman was ever found.

No second bomb ever exploded and no accomplices ever turned up.

I guess we all assumed that those eyewitnesses were mistaken, that the smoke and the flames had played a trick on their eyes.

We were wrong.

I just gotta say, the way this story gives us information, where it's like, well, this is a tragic case that happened here, but Rob had a crush on a girl.

And then it like reads about the death.

And it's like, we assumed that they were mistaken.

we were wrong.

Like the like those little end of paragraph like, oh, what's this?

What's this?

It's such a fun

because every detail we're getting is interesting.

And then at the end of that information, it gives us like a little clue to new information.

It's just a very fun way to like give out a story like this.

I like it.

Yeah, the story is setting itself up really well.

Fletch wasn't in school for the rest of that week, and I didn't see him around the neighborhood either.

I hate to admit it, but it was sort of a relief.

I had no idea what I was going to say to him.

What do you really say to someone whose friend has just killed himself?

In the weeks that followed, a new form of gossip slowly crept into the hallways of the school.

Special counseling held in the cafeteria every morning before homeroom was supposed to be a safe space where anyone could share their feelings without fear of judgment and be secure in the knowledge that it would go no further.

So naturally, it was all anyone wanted to talk about.

There's a strong backlash against the kids that the other students didn't feel deserved to be there.

People who presented themselves as having been very close with Rob, but who in truth rarely spoke with him.

Several of my close friends had been at Omitted that night.

They had watched Rob burn, seen him die, and although they were deeply affected, they weren't even entirely comfortable being there amongst his handful of close friends and, of course, Alina.

I felt terrible for Alina Aminev.

Sitting there in the cafeteria, surrounded by Rob's grieving friends, listening to everyone tiptoe around blaming her.

They never came out and said it, but they talk about how girls wouldn't give him the time of day.

How someone had recently ripped out his heart.

Jesus.

And when the council, that's pretty rough.

That's brutal, man.

It's a weird place to be.

Because it's like, if someone dies, you know, the dead have settled their debts.

You don't want to talk bad about them, right?

And you want to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But at the same time, just because someone's dead doesn't mean they were virtuous, right?

So it's like...

Well, yeah.

yeah.

Well, that's just the thing is that fucking teenagers are dumb, very dumb and cruel and surface level.

So, of course, they're going to like blame this.

It's the easiest.

It's the easiest thing to leap to, you know?

So they're just going to torment Alina for no reason.

Yeah, because you don't want to

blame him.

Right.

But you want to blame something.

So a bunch of them are like, oh, well,

girls, right?

Am I right?

Girls led to a problem.

And it's like, it's kind of like an easy out because you're not thinking about the girl who is affected, who's still alive by what you're saying.

Yeah.

It's very human.

It's very natural.

And when the counselor spoke about how challenging it can be to cope with the insensitivity of other teens, many in the room cast sidelong glances in her direction, waiting for her reaction before adding in their own two cents.

The year before Rob's death, Alina had suddenly found herself with a kind of unexpected popularity.

She was born in Russia, but her parents parents had managed to immigrate to the United States when Alina was still an infant, which was during the tail end of the Cold War, so no easy feat.

Kids used to tease her about her family being Soviet spies, but when she started to come into her own, the teasing turned to flirting.

She never quite reached the ranks of our school's alpha females, but her genesse qui was undeniable.

Alina was pretty, sure, but not unattainably so.

She was smart, but not so much so that it was intimidating.

By the way, have you ever been intimidated?

Every story I read, I feel like that's like, oh, she wasn't,

she's like too smart or she's intimidatingly smart.

Have you ever got that feeling from a woman?

No.

Well, I just always assume I'm much, much more stupid than anybody that I meet.

So I'm always just like, so if anything, when I'm like, oh my, you're smart, but I don't think it's ever me being like, you don't want to talk to a peon like me.

I'm too stupid.

I've always heard that in stories it's like oh she's so smart it's intimidating it's like wouldn't you wouldn't you want that

like that'd be like oh what if like your partner what if she like was magically super good at one thing it's like sure why not like why wouldn't that be a problem if we're on the same side wouldn't that be like an asset for me why is that jealousy i'm guessing is this supposed to be the jealousy type like if it's like you're

if the man is not the breadwinner does he feel inadequate as a man or something that might be what it is that might be what like it like same note of thing i don't know i hear that in every story and it's never i i've never understood what it's talking about yeah like what do you mean intimidating that's like oh she's too beautiful i can't stand it like

it's people being insecure about being like i'm too ugly she's gonna like fuck somebody else or

maybe that's what it is you feel like you don't deserve someone who's too smart i think that's why i think inevitably that's what it boils down to yeah insecurity for sure that's more reasonable i think yeah she had fair skin and wild hair.

Her eyes would sparkle whenever she said something clever, and she had this smirk that spread like a wave from left to right across her lips.

Most alluring of all, Alina had this attitude, this way of carrying herself.

It was like she was sure wherever she was was the place to be.

It was infectious.

In short, Alina Aminev was exactly the kind of girl that an unpopular guy could fool himself into thinking he had a chance with.

God knows I did when I found myself suddenly talking to her in late November of 1999.

Alina had grown quieter in the weeks that followed Rob's death.

Even as the rest of the school began to show signs of moving on, she continued to retreat.

She quit her job and, though I don't quite remember when the season started and stopped, either quit or never signed up for cross-country that year.

She just sort of shut herself off from the world and everyone in it.

Which was why I was so surprised to see her at Drew DeLuca's birthday party.

She looked nervous.

She used to be her element, and no one at Drew's that night was inclined to blame her for Rob's death.

This was not his circle of friends, this was hers.

But whenever she approached someone or tried to join in on a conversation, she looked like a gazelle approaching a watering hole it wasn't sure was safe.

And once she was in the conversation, she mainly shifted her weight from foot to foot or fidgeted with some part of her outfit, never really engaging anyone unless they addressed her directly.

I was telling a friend of mine about a recent trip I had taken to Greenfield with Scary Carrie, the only one I could ever drag along on my ghost hunting trips.

When I felt a gentle tug on the back of my shirt, I turned around, half expecting to see DeLucas Kid's sister, but it was Alina.

Can we talk?

Oh, yeah, sure.

Outside?

She looked over my shoulder at my friend before adding,

alone,

Hunter.

You right now, you're in this position.

The Russian girl comes up to you.

It's like, can we, can we go alone?

Hell no.

Hell no.

Why not?

Get away from me, commie freak, was what I would say.

Yeah, there we go.

USA.

USA.

Then you punch her really hard.

Yeah.

All right, get the hell out of here, hammer and sickle.

I ain't trying to talk to you.

Alone?

I thought, you don't want everyone involved?

It's kind of seems a little, seems a little hypocritical, if you ask me.

Seems kind of selfish.

If it had been spring, I would have been thrilled by the prospect of Alina Aminev pulling me out of a party to talk alone.

But it wasn't spring.

It was New Hampshire in late November.

We stood on the back deck, our jackets pulled tightly around us, our breath hanging in the air, plain to see.

She said she heard from Christy McDowell that I knew a lot about ghost stories.

Christy was quite possibly my oldest friend in the world, and yes, it was true, I knew a lot about ghost stories.

I was raised Catholic and blessed with kind, warm-hearted parents whom I was always eager to please.

This meant that I took my Catholicism and my schoolwork very seriously, which eventually led to a struggle between my rational and spiritual beliefs that was only exacerbated by my growing awareness of the sexual abuse scandal and the church's subsequent cover-up.

I'd hated losing my faith.

I wanted desperately to believe as I had as a child.

So when most teenagers had shut the book on ghost stories, relegating them to little more than childhood memories or an excuse to scare a girl you wanted to put your arm around, I doubled down.

I thought if I could find something, some shred of evidence in support of the supernatural, that would keep the door to the spiritual world open for me, even if only for a time.

Of course, I didn't share all of that with Alina.

Instead, I tried to act casual.

Casual bordering on slightly disinterested.

Yeah, well, kinda.

Why?

Lina began fishing around inside her jacket.

You have to swear to me that you'll never tell anyone I showed you this.

I swore.

Alina pulled her hand out from her coat.

Her dainty fingers clutched an envelope like it was a particularly delicate piece of glass.

She handed me Rob's suicide note.

Opening the envelope and unfolding the pages felt like a profound invasion of privacy, but who could resist reading it when it was handed to you?

What were Rob Kennan's last words to the girl he'd been obsessed with for years?

The girl many of his peers believed was the reason he killed himself.

13 years have passed, leaving me with little more than an impression of what that note said, but even if I remembered it exactly, I think this would still be where I draw the line.

What I will say is that it was very earnest.

Rob had been depressed for a long time.

He felt horrible about leaving his family and friends to deal with the aftermath of his suicide, but he also felt isolated in a very profound way and more than anything, just wanted it to stop.

I also don't mind sharing that he was very effusive in his praises for Alina.

But I got the distinct impression he didn't know her as well as he thought.

He wrote about her in these florid terms, full of superlatives.

Twice he said he didn't think he could live without her, but ultimately, nothing he said was very specific.

Everyone thinks the first love of their life is the most special, most attractive person in the world, and that no one could ever appreciate them as deeply as they do.

I felt for him.

I really did.

But reading it, I didn't feel as though I'd gotten to know him any better.

Not really.

As I finished reading, I looked up and met Alina's gaze.

She was looking at me expectantly, but I wasn't making the connection.

What does this have to do with ghost stories?

Alina pointed to the bottom of one of the paragraphs expounding on why Rob wanted to take his own life.

It read.

And every hour I see her face

as she runs the endless race.

Her face?

I had assumed he was talking about Alina and her years of running track and cross-country, but if that was the case, why would he write her and not your in a letter that was to Alina?

A shiver ran up my spine.

It wasn't the cold.

It was more like someone had walked over my grave.

The endless race.

Yes.

For a split second, Alina was her former self again.

God, I was starting to think I'd imagine it.

Tell me you remember where it's from.

I mumbled the line.

And every hour I see her face and she runs the endless race.

A couple of times under my breath, I knew that I had heard it before, but where?

I was positive it was a ghost story, but I'd read literally hundreds, if not thousands, of them.

They had a tendency to bleed together.

No.

Shit.

Lena banged her fist hard against the railing of the deck.

But it's a ghost story, right?

Yeah, I know.

I know it.

I just can't.

I trailed off, racking my brain.

Alina started drifting back towards Drew's house.

If you think of it, absolutely.

I cut her off.

So much for slightly disinterested.

As she reached the door, she turned and looked at me.

She stared at me for a long time.

Longer than any pause in a conversation should be.

I think you mentioned it in the one he wrote to Nate Fletcher, too.

I stared back at Alina.

Fletcher's letter?

Yeah.

Did you find out?

That was the line I didn't think I could cross.

Yeah.

Interesting.

End of part one.

End of part one.

So, okay, so the cat, so we're getting into the meat of the story of basically

Alina is assuming, or not assuming, I don't want to say that.

Alina is saying that, is this a ghost story, almost perpetuating the idea that was Rob afflicted by some kind of entity that was driving him crazy?

Well, that's what the question is, because everyone who saw Rob died said that they saw a woman in the car.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So

I see her face running the endless race.

That must come from some ghost.

I want to say that everyone that saw them also was like a teenager or young because the officer said that he didn't see anything.

So I'm wondering, too, does that correlate?

It could just be kids.

Exactly.

It could just be kids.

Is it only kids can see him or something?

Yeah, yeah, maybe only kids can see him.

That, or like, he's the author also said that kids were the first to show up.

Yeah.

Um,

so maybe, like, there was a face there initially that disappeared when he got there.

Yeah, it just went away.

True.

So it could be that, or it could just be the kids see him.

Uh, because all the people who seem involved, at least so far in the story with the ghost itself, are the kids.

Um,

yeah.

This is an interesting dynamic because Alina has a letter from him.

A guy that clearly clearly creeped her out.

You know, was way,

he literally took his own life over her.

So way too like parasocially attached to her and stuff like that.

But the mention of the girl in the car and maybe her feeling like she maybe owes him something because the other kids have kind of like pointed a finger at her, even if wrongly, to say that she was involved somehow.

In some way, it seems like Alina was kind of friends with Rob, too.

In a way.

Like, I don't think that she totally...

I I think she was nice to him, but the idea of like,

yeah, because she was probably nice to him.

That's why Rob felt like he had a chance,

especially because Rob is a social outcast, but it also says that Rob would come to her place of work constantly and just like try to profess his love for her and stuff like that.

So that's desperation.

Desperation for sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But she still feels kind of maybe this obligation to figure out what it was about or a curiosity to figure out what it was about.

Right.

And also, I like that paragraph that was like

he said twice that he couldn't live without her, but he never said anything specific.

That is very

accurate, I think, to a lot of like high school

sessions and stuff like that.

Yeah.

And that thing about like everyone thinks that

they are never going to be able to get over their first love.

It's also true because, especially with guys, you'll hear that joke a lot where girls will be like, well, yeah, I can't date a man because he's still over the girl he broke up.

he's not over the girl he broke up with when he was 16 right um

i think it's because a lot of guys like associate that period in their life being like young dumb and like in love uh with that person so they think that they're never going to get over to that person when in reality they're just not getting over like being a kid that's in love and doesn't know that they have the potential to knowledge they're the ones who got away the great white buffalo exactly great white buffalo so it's a i just like the wording on that that felt very legitimate i love a lot of the language in the story so far.

I love the way information's doled out.

This is very, this is great.

So it's hot.

Very bought in.

It's hot.

It's hot.

It's very hot.

Very hot.

All right.

So now, part two.

A few days after Rob's suicide, a handful of young reporters showed up at school trawling for quotes.

Before the faculty could chase them out, they pushed hard for someone, anyone, to give support to the lone wolf school shooter angle.

Rob's girlfriends flatly refused to speak to the reporters, but there's a certain element among young people who only want attention, and the same kids who showed up for the grief counseling, despite never having been particularly close to Rob, were the first in line to provide quotes.

The next day, the local paper was filled with statements like, No one really knew him, says student Melissa Bonett.

For Fletch, it was a slap in the face.

What?

Because she didn't know him.

Nobody could.

About a week or so after Rob died, Fletch resumed picking me up in the morning.

I don't count?

Murph doesn't count?

Fucking bullshit.

Listening to him rant about the story in the paper made me think that maybe I should have spoken to the reporters.

I wouldn't have pretended to have had any special insight into Rob's mental state, but it might have been nice for his friends and family to have seen something simple and honest, something that didn't fit into the lone wolf narrative.

Even if it was nothing more than saying,

He had friends.

They're just not talking because they're grieving, you heartless parasite.

I wish I had done that, but I didn't.

I also wish I could tell you that I was the one who wrote an op-ed the following week roasting the reporters for coming into a school and pushing students still reeling from the shock of losing a classmate and espouting a whole bunch of pop-psych pseudo-scientific nonsense but that wasn't me either that was some senior i didn't know very well i'd made a few tenuous attempts at getting fletch to open up about rob the best i had managed was to get him ranting about the kids in the grief counseling sessions that didn't belong talking about them got the normally placid Fletch so angry, I thought he might have an aneurysm.

After that, I quickly gave up.

Once I resolved not to pry into Fletch's life, our morning ride settled into something almost comfortable.

Our casual friendship was like a knee recovering from an injury.

Fine so long as we didn't put any weight on it.

And that was still the state of things the day we returned to school after Drew DeLuca's birthday.

Today, tracking down the story that led me to the spire would have been a piece of cake.

For me, anyways.

For you, I've changed too many details.

I could have typed that little rhyming snippet of Rob's suicide note into Google and had my answer in seconds, but the internet wasn't as robust back then.

Well, I'm pretty sure in 1999, I was still using Hotbot.

Nonetheless, from the second I returned from Drew's until school started on Monday, I spent every waking minute scouring every haunted places book and paranormal website I could find, looking for the phrase, And every hour I see her face.

as she runs the endless race.

Or some variation.

By the end of the weekend, half the contents of my bookshelf had been redistributed throughout the house, and I had skimmed countless Geo Cities pages, scrolling past dancing ghost GIF after dancing ghost gif until my eyes bled, but still had nothing to show for it.

I knew I couldn't bring it up with Fletch.

Not directly, at any rate.

Rob's death was still a raw nerve, so I went to the only person who knew even more about ghost stories than I did.

Scary Carrie.

Growing up in the woods of New Hampshire at the foot of the White Mountains wasn't all bad.

My school had a hiking club that also taught us elementary wilderness survival skills.

It was immensely popular, mainly because it culminated in a week-long hike, which meant you got to miss a week of school.

As freshmen, my friends and I all signed up to go together that fall, but two weeks before the big event, I came down with a case of antibiotic-resistant shrep throat that had to have my tonsils removed.

Fun.

Since the program was extremely popular, each student could only partake once.

Even though I I was allowed to make up my hike the following winter, it was still a bit of a letdown, since none of my friends could come with me.

I was intensely jealous when my friends returned from the hike closer than ever with a slew of in-jokes and stories from their weeks in the woods.

But by the time I left for my hike a few months later, things in my circle of friends had already returned to normal, and I was mainly just concerned about being stuck in the woods with random classmates I had little in common with.

If you've never spent all day hiking with a large frame pack, you may not appreciate how grueling it can be.

There's a high washout rate of kids who get sick or throw in the towel and have to be picked up and taken home.

There's an even higher rate of kids who never shut up about how much their feet hurt.

And by the time we stopped for lunch on the first day, any concerns I had of loneliness were replaced by my seething hatred for that group of kids.

This is true.

Anytime you like ruck anywhere, there will be people complaining.

It's just fact.

Oh, God.

My legs help.

It's like, yes, that's the point.

Your body's not used to an extra 60 pounds on its back.

That's how it works.

It doesn't know what's going on.

Your legs are scared.

Those of us capable of keeping our mouths shut, at least about our feet, quickly bonded.

That's how I became friends with scary Carrie Peterson.

The last person on Earth I'd ever imagined I'd become close to.

Carrie was one of those unlucky people that seemed significantly designed to be picked on.

She was nearly six feet tall, quite overweight, crap at school, poor by the standards of my admittedly affluent town, and cursed with the head size of a large pumpkin.

God damn, Carrie.

Just

roasting this girl left and right.

I'd had classes with Carrie on and off for the last nine years, and before the hike, I doubt I'd spoken more than two words to her.

Although, in fairness to me, in middle school, she had deepened her own isolation from most of the class by becoming intensely goth in the baby bat way of the late 90s teens.

Okay.

Hold on.

She's a six-foot-tall goth girl.

Yeah.

All right, hold on.

She's the one in my dreams.

Well,

hold on a second.

What's everyone being mean to Carrie about?

Like, scary Carrie, why?

She's a little.

What was overweight even mean in the 90s?

Nothing.

Means nothing.

There was a blonde girl on the hike.

I think her name was Stephanie Foster.

That two hours earlier I had found very cute.

And despite her whining, I was still thinking I might like to get to know her better before she let this gem slip.

God, I just wanted to miss school.

Why do we have to walk so much?

I rolled my eyes, but didn't say anything.

Carrie, however, could not let it slide.

What the hell did you think a hike was?

All right, don't do that to Carrie.

What the hell do you think a hike was?

She's a six-foot over weight west.

What the hell do you think a hike was?

Nope, nope, nope.

See,

now you're mocking me.

Now you're mocking my people, my group.

I need you to.

What the hell?

Did you think a hike was?

That's closer.

That's better.

You're getting there.

I need you to channel your best Margaret Qualey.

I think that is...

Margaret Qually?

She's a six-foot-tall, overweight goth girl in the 90s.

She's not Margaret fucking Qually.

Overweight in the 90s means filled out.

It means great.

They had super size at McDonald's, dude.

They were big, big old girls.

All right?

It could be a big old girl.

You're right.

You're right.

Fair enough.

You know what?

What the hell did you think a hike was?

Stephanie looked at her like Carrie was something she'd scraped off the bottom of her boots.

Nobody's talking to you.

And nobody wants to fucking listen to you.

I still denounce your voice for Carrie, but Carrie's special to me.

All right, that's fine, dude.

Be stoked about it, man.

I could, Isaiah.

Isaiah.

Oh.

She's looking down at you, kissing your forehead.

You're my little sweetie.

That, other than the voice you're doing, that sounds lovely.

Obviously,

I'm a married man, and my wife is the six-foot-tall golf woman in my life, but in like high school me, a million percent.

Like, yes.

I don't know what you're making fun of.

This sounds perfectly reasonable.

I'm not giving her a voice

that's that yes but there's a tone there there is a tone of bitterness don't let your insecurity get to me man all right yeah my insecurity definitely not yours assigning your insecurity 40 year old

like a big old girl it's a goth chick just fucking lay it out there dude that's all it has to be okay

nobody wants to fucking listen to you i couldn't help it i laughed I still didn't think of Scary Carrie as a friend yet, but it was suddenly a lot harder not to like her.

After lunch, our line of hikers silently and seemingly unconsciously rearranged our marching order with the winers taking up the rear and those of us who could keep our aches and pains to ourselves leading the pack.

By dinner time, Stephanie and three other kids from her clique, perhaps unimpressed by the franks and beans we'd be having, decided to throw in the towel.

It gets dark early in winter, dark and cold.

On the fall hike, after dinner, my friends were able to wander around the campsite quite a bit, but for us, there was only one thing to

stick close to the fire and that's where carrie and i really bonded someone half-jokingly asked if anyone knew any good ghost stories there was the usual student reluctance to step up and put yourself out there to be judged and our chaperones weren't terribly interested in anything but double-checking our work setting up the tents but after a few false starts from the other kids i decided to tell an old standby a story of an old woman that lived in maine who had been caught abducting pets and small children.

It was said that she was a witch who ate the flesh of her victims and turned their bones into china.

Sick.

It's pretty cool.

Also, did you ever, I think I've talked about me doing this before, but did you ever have those moments in like high school, middle school where you like, you told stories by the fire, like at a sleepover or something?

No, not really.

Okay.

I guess I'm cooler than you.

The second I finished, Carrie started telling one of hers.

We took turns telling stories the rest of the night and continued telling stories every night after dinner for the rest of the week.

Between campsites, we walked next to each other, chatting about the kind of crap that seems important to teenagers and quizzing each other on local paranormal hotspots.

Back at school, after the hike, maintaining my friendship with Carrie proved to be tricky.

My friends never really understood the bond.

They weren't mean to her, not exactly, but despite my efforts to bring her into the fold, they never embraced her.

As for the few friends Carrie had, some couldn't mask their disdain for my taste in music and clothing, while others were the sort of kids that were desperate and clinky, two things I had always found it hard to stomach.

But Carrie was one of the only people I could talk to about losing my faith, and she was always game to get together and go on one of my very fruitless ghost hunts, so we stayed in regular contact.

I'm telling you right now, telling you right now, you've got Carrie all wrong.

In my mind, Carrie's beautiful.

She's a king.

She's a king.

I don't like your word king.

If you said queen, I'd be in agreement with you, but I feel like there is a respite to the way that you're using that word that I don't appreciate.

Okay.

The Monday after my conversation with Alina, I tracked down scary Carrie in the cafeteria setting with a few other goth kids.

We had talked a lot after Rob killed himself, in part because I knew that Carrie, from time to time, had suicidal thoughts of her own.

May have been the height of stupidity, but until Rob Kinnan actually did it, actually ended his own life, I never thought it could happen to my town.

At least not to anyone I knew.

After Rob had done it, though, I knew I couldn't let Carrie slip down the same path.

For a while, I doubled my efforts to spend time with her.

But after one particularly awkward night ghost hunting in Greenfield, well, we'd fallen back to the status quo.

Carrie, you wonder if I still you for a second?

I asked, pointing back out into the hallway behind me.

As Carrie rose to leave, Kim Murray's leaned over to one of their other friends and said, Aww.

Like she'd just seen something cute.

Carrie's face splotches of scarlet and shot Kim a look of pure hatred.

Forget it.

Forget it.

Come on.

See,

you're about to do Carrie's voice.

No, that was my throat.

Then you realized you're doing

no no no then you realize you're doing this character

you adopt a you adopt a less masculine voice for the man

i know what you were doing i know a hundred percent what you were doing

no no you can't because that was a that was a strategic sore throat my throat sore

I think I'm disgusted by your your characterization of scary carrie I think that this is a beautiful relationship I think he should embrace because that awe meant that Carrie has mentioned to her friends that she likes our author

what what is that are you in the bear noise

then that do not do the bear noise no there's no bear trap what what is your bear trap

you haven't laid out a trap

i was mooing i was mooing like a cow oh now she's a cow now she's a cow okay all right so you took her from a trucker to a cow you're moving backwards all right

no i don't need this i don't need you i don't need your your your interaction or your two cents regarding this forget it come on

I said, I didn't know what Carrie had told Kim about Greenfield, but sure didn't want to deal with it.

Once we were in the hallway and out of anyone's earshot, I recounted the events of Drew DeLuca's party.

She let you read the note he left her?

We're gonna fight, me and you.

We're gonna throw down.

Even though, just a month ago, we'd spent several hours being lectured by our guidance counselors about the differences between depression, true depression that was a psychological illness, and being sad, I think Carrie still had trouble believing anyone was more miserable than she was.

Carrie stepped closer to me and dropped her voice to a whisper.

Why'd it do it?

Was it

her fault?

You're trying to ruin this for me, and I'm not going to let you.

I'm just going to ignore you.

You're going to have to just fucking realize that's going to be scary Carrie's voice, dude.

I'm going to read this in my head.

I'm reading it in a different voice.

How?

What does she sound like in your head?

She looks like my beautiful wife.

She looks like my gorgeous wife whom I love deeply.

That's smart.

I'm going to not put that in your head.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, okay, whatever.

Shut up.

I hate you.

I trusted Carrie, but I was reluctant to share too much with her.

I hate to admit it, but in spite of having counted Carrie amongst my friends for the past year, Alina's pretty face had flipped my loyalties completely to her in one conversation.

Good man.

Cut to the chase.

Shut up.

Rob wrote something in Alina's note.

I swear it's from a ghost story, but I can't remember which one.

What'd it say?

And every hour, I see her face and she runs the endless race.

Scary Carrie shivered.

The widower's clock.

Oh, I hate that one.

You're such a little.

Okay, whatever.

Whatever.

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

While my story begins with Rob Kinnan killing himself, the story of the spire in the woods begins almost a century earlier in the former town of Enfield, Massachusetts, a few years before it was destroyed.

In the late 1920s, an elderly clockmaker from Boston married a beautiful young woman, and the two of them settled in Enfield.

He was a master craftsman, the finest in the world, able to create machines of such complexity and precision that he was often called the Da Vinci of clockworks.

No small feat considering Da Vinci himself had designed clockwork automatons.

She was a great beauty.

Refined and cultivated, Before meeting the clockmaker, she had been celebrated by the Boston Brahmin for her wit and and for throwing the very best dinner parties.

The clockmaker had amassed a great fortune, but he, like all great artists, was unsatisfied by all of the products of his lifetime of labor.

He wanted to build one more clock, a clock that would surpass even Munich's Rathaus-Glockenspiel in its artistry and complexity.

He completed his plans in the spring of 1931 and they were beautiful.

His designs were classic, yet modern, complex, yet clean.

Each hour, when the bells called out the time, the automatons would dance forth from their hidden chambers and symbolically reenact different battles of the Civil War, each day telling the story of how the North came to vanquish the South.

Lyell and Boston both desperately wanted the clock tower, as did a few of the large manufacturing and shipping companies.

But before construction could begin on any town hall, courthouse, or corporate headquarters, the depression hit.

All the suitors disappeared in short order, one after the other, leaving the clockmaker alone with his plans.

Miserable and depressed, the clockmaker feared he would die before he'd ever had the chance to see his vision complete.

He resolved that he wouldn't let that happen and began spending his considerable fortune building the tower of his own as an addition to his own house in Infield.

One day, the clock tower nearly complete, the clockmaker returned home from picking up a custom-made part.

He arrived much earlier than anticipated to discover his wife in bed with another man, one of his laborers.

The clockmaster burst into the room and screamed at his wife and her lover.

He had never been so angry or humiliated in all his life, but he didn't yet know what humiliation was.

Rather than beg his forgiveness or cower before him or even flee the room in shame, the clockmaker's wife and her lover laughed at him.

They told the clockmaker that he was an impotent old man and they were unafraid of him.

Run along back to your little Gilson Springs.

Maybe if you're nice and quiet, I'll still fix you your dinner tonight.

Oh my god, dude, that is fucked.

Whoa.

What is it?

There's a lot of cuckholding in the story, eh?

There is.

This is our second instance.

I hope there's more.

I hope.

I like a nice cuckold

horror story, dude.

Do you?

Everything

that you're interested in.

You what's fucked up about that?

It makes so much sense to me that vengeful spirits are cuckolds

you know you're actually i've never thought of it before but you're actually right it's so true i'd be mad enough to stick around oh my god i would i would burn the earth down forever

i would not leave i'd be like i'm staying right here and anyone who comes here i'm gonna mess with i'm gonna be upset i'm gonna bother him

are you sure that's not like so my kind of woman is like you know tall goth whatever your kind of woman is any woman that's with another man Yes.

Okay.

Yeah.

Cool.

Let the record show.

Let the record shut it down.

Scary Carrie, put it on the record.

Scary Carrie also does WWE

matches in her backyard.

Do you smell

scary Carrie's cooking?

She's just triple H.

Well, she's just about as fucking big as him, goddamn.

She's like, I'm 14.

This is way before, before too she's like i'm 12.

now she's six

no she's 16 i think here i thought this was years ago i

to

okay her tell this story being told is now in high school when they're both 16 17.

but he said if he said a couple years earlier they went on a hike together i imagine i was like that was a different okay yeah yeah my bad yeah where they became friends was years prior but this is now caught back up to 1999 yeah now she's like seven foot something yeah kayla kayla my wife uh she six foot in the

sixth grade, I think, seventh grade.

She like immediately shot up.

She was like six foot when she was that old, so yeah.

Cool.

Possible.

You're such a, you're such a jerk.

You're so.

You're so.

Whatever.

The clockmaker, in a state of shock, slunk back to his gears and springs, but rather than going to work on the clock, he went to work on a plan.

He removed the automatons from their posts and set all of his meager strength to coiling the huge spring that ran beneath their tracks.

He laid out his tools so they would be near at hand, and then he waited, listening to the rhythms of his marriage bed slamming again and again against the wall.

Brutal.

Oh my gosh.

Eventually, the rhythmic thuds reached their

rhythmic thuds reached their

crescendo, then fell quiet.

Soon after, he heard his wife call out to him, but he said nothing.

Her calls grew in urgency and repetitance crept into her voice.

Could she really be concerned for him?

After what she did, after what she said,

still, the clockmaker stayed silent.

When the laborer entered the room, which was little more than a giant gearbox, the clockmaker stared at him, but did not move.

The laborer leaned back out of the room and called to his lover, He's in here!

He hasn't done anything stupid, has he?

No, he's fine.

The clockmaker was not fine.

The laborer approached the clockmaker as cautiously as a man approaches an unfamiliar dog.

It's your fault, you know.

The clockmaker, his watery eyes unblinking, only responded by staring as the younger man approached him.

Fine lady like that, fancy.

You can't keep her in a cage.

Especially around here in this dreadful place, and expect she won't get bored.

It was at that exact moment that the laborer stepped across the path to the automaton's tracks, and the clockmaker yanked out the pin holding the spring coiled.

The post, unburdened of a man-sized figure brimming with heavy metal gears, raced along the track and collided with the soft flesh of the laborer's leg.

The crack of the bone splintering was even louder than the man's screams.

Clockmaker's wife called out at the sound of her lover's cries: I'm coming!

I'm coming!

The clockmaker clockmaker picked up a large wrench and moved beside the door.

As his wife rushed in, her eyes searching for her lover, the clockmaker crept up behind her and brought the wrench down on her skull.

She awoke hours later with shooting pains running through her legs.

She tried to look down, but her head was agony to move.

The clockworker stood over her, his mallet hammering the metal support rods into her thighs.

Her lover was already mounted to the post, ready to fill in for the automaton and dance when the hour struck.

Just as with the Rothaus-Glockenspiel in Munich, the clockmaker's creation was hailed as a great artistic achievement.

Crowds gathered on the formerly quiet street to watch the myriad Union and Rebel automatons zip along their tracks, round and round, in an endless race.

It was weeks before anyone noticed something wrong with two of the automatons.

Their lacquered veneer bulged in weird places and looked slick as if it were wet.

Then, one day, the finish gave way, and the crowd, which was mostly children at this point, watched in horror as two corpses zipped about the track, chasing and stabbing each other with their bayonets.

That's awesome.

That's so cool.

That's so cool.

He hooked him up to be the giant, automatic, like soldiers.

They say even after the clock was stopped and the lovers were laid to rest, all those who saw the wife's face were haunted by visions of her endlessly running along her track.

That's cool.

What a cool ghost story.

That's great.

I love that.

I didn't have to ask why Scary Carrie hated the story of the widower's clock.

She was the one who pointed out to me how ghost stories were frequently used as a form of social control.

Here was another story where an unfaithful woman was put to death by an angry husband, and crueler still, children were also punished.

Children whose only crime was having seen the corpse of the unfaithful woman, a corpse that the enraged husband put on display.

I couldn't wait to tell Lena.

I didn't have any classes with her, but we had lunch the same period.

Alina was sitting at a table with her friends.

Ordinarily, it would have been intimidating to walk up to a table of girls, most of whom were pretty and toned from years of soccer, field hockey, and track, but I could tell by the way Alina was sitting with her tray in her lap, her chair pushed back from the table, that she would like nothing more than an excuse to leave.

We were allowed to eat our lunches outside, but no one ever did during the winter.

We got some funny looks, pushing open the doors and slipping out onto the yellowing grass.

I've been looking forward to telling Alina the story of the Widower's Clock for hours, but now that I was alone with her, I hesitated to jump straight into it.

Are you okay?

Alina shifted uncomfortably.

Yeah, but I...

Well,

I haven't done so great with crowds lately, especially when I'm eating.

We were huddled in the corner of the doorway, trying to use the building to block the wind.

I was nervous as I reached out to rub her arm that I hoped was an understanding and reassuring gesture.

She didn't flinch or pull away.

She just stared at my hand for a long second before she whispered.

Thanks.

I started telling her the story exactly as Carrie told it to me, but it barely begun when the switch flipped in Alina's head and she remembered where she heard it before.

East Boston Camps.

Pretty much everyone in our town went to summer camp there when we were kids because it was only 15 minutes outside of Neshaw.

One of the counselors there had been like Carrie and me, and he used to delight in telling ghost stories to the younger campers.

He loved it when the kids were too scared to sleep and kept their cabin chaperones up all night.

For a second, I forgot why we were trying to track down the story and got lost in old memories of camp, but Alina didn't.

Do you think it has anything to do with why he killed himself?

Her voice was steady, but she fixed me with her eyes and I could see how desperate she was for me to say yes.

Desperate to believe that it wasn't her fault.

I think he suffered from depression.

Alina's lip quivered and her eyes filled with tears.

I hugged her.

Hey, listen to me.

You didn't kill him.

Alina gripped the collar of my flannel shirt and buried her head against my chest.

I stood there, holding her, as she cried.

The two of us were late to fifth period.

At the end of the day, Fletch was waiting for me in the parking lot.

He'd already turned his car on and cranked the heater up to full blast.

Even still, we were halfway home before it was warm enough for me to open up my jacket.

He stared out the window.

Dude, what's going on with you and Alina?

I turned to look at him.

His jaw was set, and for the first time in our lives, Fletch reminded me of his hard-ass father.

I really don't want to answer him.

She asked me about a ghost story.

Fletch's only answer was to let his eyes drift from the road.

He studied my face for a long moment before he finally said, Which one?

The widower's clock?

It's the one where...

I know the one.

Are you in a hurry to get home?

No.

Good.

Fletch pulled over to the side of the road, took a shuddering breath, punched the steering wheel twice, and started bawling.

It's kind of fun.

You know, it's funny.

That's actually what happens every time I go anywhere with you.

Well, luckily, it's not too often, so your fist and your lips quivering.

You know, you'd be all right.

I'm at you.

You do that every time we go anywhere.

That's true.

That's actually very true.

That's me outside the French quarters in New Orleans.

Not again!

That's why I say it as I get dragged in, my nails peeling off digging into the cement.

Every time I'm at the quarter now, I think about you looking at me going, get me out of here.

Oh, you remember that

the day that you weren't hanging out with me?

How you said you went to like a little bar area called the dungeon?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, and you said you enjoyed it there, right?

Yeah.

Okay, I was walking through the city

a couple weeks ago, and I was talking to a guy who was a tour guide, and he mentions the dungeon.

I'm like, oh, yeah, I've heard that place is cool.

And he's like, yeah, it's a BDSM club.

They tie people up upstairs and they have these whipping parties.

Listen, dude.

So I just said that.

So I just wanted to ask.

All right, we don't have to pick and prod at why i just think it's interesting how you tell me there's like this place you found that was really cool and then i later come to find out you had to go in it's a leather no absolutely not okay first off when i went in there there was no bdsm stuff it was just metal music and then it had a bar downstairs it's all like really really cool like set dressed and stuff like to look like an actual like dungeon and then upstairs it has like a kind of a chapel looking thing it was cool it was cool and there wasn't

a single and i tell you this someone

If there was people getting whipped in there, I would have liked it even more.

I would have loved it even more.

There you are.

All right.

Monster.

If I was sitting there and I could have a fucking jack and coke while a guy next to me is just like, damn, dude, getting in there harder.

Getting whipped in the back.

If old Scary Carrie was sitting next to me getting whipped in the back, come on, lay your shoulder and do it.

Then I would have loved it even more.

I'd be like, hey, give me a dirty Shirley.

I'm like, you want one, Scary Carrie?

Nah,

I'm on a diet

Trying to watch my figure.

Get me a Sprite Zero.

I'm like, there's no way I have that here.

There is no.

Like, if I, Scary Carrie, if I had to say anything, I guarantee you they do not have Sprite Zero here.

Yeah, that's exactly what's happening.

There's no way.

I'm like, I can get you a Duncan pepper.

Give me a diet.

I got a sugar.

I'm like, sure.

Give me a dungeon.

But I think that's all you can add.

Now we're watching it.

Yeah, now we're watching it.

She's like, give me a gin tonic.

I'm like, goddamn, give her a modello.

For love of God, give her a goddamn modello.

Now scratch that, Pete.

Give me a gin tonic.

Doesn't touch it the rest of the night.

I'm like, oh, yeah.

I didn't know we're at in the story.

Get out of here.

The dungeon talk really got me.

It took you over.

He let it out.

Everything that he'd been holding in at school, everything that he'd been holding in around his dad, everything.

Elena had been sad.

Fletch was purging.

During the days following Rob's suicide, seeing people break down like this was common, and it continued on longer in the morning counseling sessions.

But at some point, people put their guard back up.

What had been appropriate emotions one day was suddenly back to being taboo the next.

For people like Fletch, they weren't ready to be in that emotional space again.

Once he got the most of it out, we started talking.

Really talking.

I know it's unfair.

I know it's not.

I mean,

she always tried to be nice, but I'm sorry, I just fucking hate her.

I didn't exactly blame Fletch for how he felt.

He was a good guy.

He knew that Alina wasn't obligated to reciprocate Rob's feelings simply because he was nice to her.

But he watched his friend, dead or alive, burn for four hours, and a part of him wondered if it would have still happened if only Alina had given Rob a chance.

That's too much pressure to put on somebody.

I know.

I reminded Fletch of everything that the counselors had told us.

That feeling sad when you've been rejected is natural.

Normal behavior.

Healthy behavior.

You should feel sad whenever someone doesn't reciprocate your feelings.

It is sad.

But while there's always something that makes a person decide they want to kill themselves now and not tomorrow or last week, it's not the final straw that breaks their back.

It's all the weight that came before it.

Underlying mental illness.

Fletch looked down at his hands.

Yeah.

There was no conviction in his voice.

Fletch pulled his t-shirt up to his face and wiped the last of his tears away.

He then started the car.

We were moving, riding in silence.

After a few minutes, Fletch spoke again.

He thinks...

he thought he found it.

But the widower's clock.

It was my turn to stare at Nate.

That's impossible.

Do you want to read it?

The note he left me?

In the period of time between the end of the Civil War and the start of the 1920s, the population of Boston, Massachusetts more than tripled.

In fact, there were more people living in Boston in the 20s than there are today.

This put an amazing strain on the city's resources, particularly on their drinking water.

To solve their water problem, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts undertook a number of public work projects redirecting rivers and creating reservoirs, the largest of which is the Quabbin Reservoir in the Swift River Valley of western Massachusetts.

The Quabbin covers nearly 40 square miles and sports an impressive 180 miles of shoreline.

Creating the Quabin meant flooding much of the Swift River Valley, and the Swift River Valley was home to to four towns, Dana in the northeast and Prescott in the northwest, with Grinwich wedged between them and Infield in the southwest.

Infield, where the widower's clock was supposedly built, now sits mostly submerged by 412 billion gallons of water.

How in the hell would Robert Kinnan have found anything there at all?

What would there even be to find?

60-something odd years in a flood after the fact.

And it's not as though the Swift River Valley was flooded overnight.

The people had had years to move their homes and relocate out of the flood zone.

Why would they leave behind a whole building?

And if it was there, wouldn't a clock tower peeking up from the water tend to draw the eye?

I never felt comfortable in Fletch's house.

The first floor felt like a museum.

Mr.

Fletcher was strict, but it was Mrs.

Fletcher who wanted her house to always resemble the cover of an interior decorating magazine.

Call me crazy, but what's the point of having a house you're afraid to live in?

Fletch's room, on the other hand, had the opposite problem.

The first time I came over at Mrs.

Fletcher's insistence, I had to take my shoes off to go upstairs and then put them back on in Nate's room because while he was sure there was broken glass somewhere, Fletch wasn't quite sure where.

As you can imagine, Nathan Fletcher and his mother fought quite a bit.

Fletch gestured to his bed and I parked myself on the corner of it with the fewest dirty clothes.

What few prized possessions he owned, Fletch kept in the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk, but that's not where he pulled Rob's letter out from.

No, the letter he he kept tucked in the book on top of his nightstand.

It occurred to me that he must have been reading it often.

The evasion of privacy I felt when I read Alina's letter was nothing compared to reading Fletch's as he sat next to me.

The letter was exponentially more personal.

Rob was exposed on the page.

Reading it made me feel like I had walked in on him naked.

Whereas the letter Rob gave to Alina revealed a little about himself and next to nothing about her, this letter revealed a great deal about Rob as well as Fletch.

Fletch and Rob had bonded when Rob was new and Fletch was going through his awkward phase.

Apparently, I had been wrong about Fletch not getting down whenever he said the wrong thing.

Warm and funny and confident around his friends, Fletch had spent most of his early teens afraid to speak in public.

Maybe I hadn't noticed because he was older and I sort of looked up to him.

Or maybe I was just too absorbed in my own insecurities to see that anyone else had their own.

Either way, it was news to me.

Rob's note to Alina had expressed a measure of guilt for leaving everyone behind to deal with the aftermath aftermath of his death.

But in the letter he gave to Fletch, the guilt he articulated feeling was for having lived.

He apologized profusely for having been a burden.

He described himself alternatively as a baby and a leech, a drain on anyone foolish enough to move too close on him.

And though he knew no one would see it like he did, Rob viewed his suicide as a charitable act.

He was ridding his friends and his family of himself.

Despite my discomfort reading such a personal letter, I devoured every word.

I consumed the letter, hoping after each line that the next would finally illuminate for me what Rob Kinnan had to do with the Widower's Clock.

Finally, tucked amidst a list of his reasons why he was going to go through with it, was what I've been looking for.

I will soon join them, staring at her face as she runs the endless race.

I looked up, disappointed and annoyed with how little Rob had written about the widower's clock, to find Fletch rocking back and forth in his chair.

It made me feel like a piece of shit.

You said he thought he'd found it?

Yeah.

How?

Nathan Fletcher looked up at me with watery eyes, told me everything.

Man, I can't remember the last time I've been so like

hanging on every word of a story, you know?

Like, what's next?

What's next, yeah?

Rob's medication had his depression mostly under control over the last three years.

He still had bouts, but they were less frequent and less severe than they had been before.

Along with his much improved disposition, Rob had also been sleeping better, eating more, and his energy was way up.

But he was never exactly happy.

See, that's something most people don't understand about depression.

It's not a mood, it's a disorder.

Having the symptoms of his disorder in check didn't make Rob happy, it made him not depressed.

Rob still struggled to fit in and enjoy life.

He was still unpopular.

He was still misunderstood.

One of the few things that Robert Kinnan really enjoyed was running.

He especially enjoyed cross-country.

If I had to guess what appeal long-distance running held for Rob, I'd say that for someone who always felt their loneliness in a crowd, it must have been a relief to actually be alone.

Just him, the woods, and the next mile.

And the Quabin Reservoir offered a lot of next miles.

Rob had been exploring its trail since he was a child.

When they lived in Amherst, his family used to visit the Quabin on the weekends.

They'd hike or picnic.

Occasionally, Mr.

Kinnan would take his two sons fishing.

As a teenager, Rob looked for any excuse he could find to get down there and just go, one foot in front of the other, until sundown when visitors had to leave.

That summer, the summer of 99, Rob made a lot of excuses to visit the Quabin.

He had, for the third time, mustered up the courage to tell Alina Aminev how he felt about her.

And for the third time, he had been rebuked, this time a little less gently than before.

It left Rob with a growing impression that the love of his life found him creepy.

Running was the the only thing to get his mind off of it.

The Fletchers had three boys.

The oldest, Samuel, had gone to UMass and, after graduation, found work in the university's IT department.

Fletch visited his brother often and whenever he did, Rob would hitch a ride down to the Quabin.

Usually, Fletch would drop him off in the morning, and Rob would either get picked up by family, he still had an Amherst, or he'd call Fletch's brother from the visitor center at the south end of the Windsor Dam, and Fletch would come get him.

Once, Rob had lost track of time and found himself, after sundown, miles from the visitor center.

That's when he heard them for the first time.

Bells tolling the hour.

They were scarcely detectable, as if they traveled a great distance, and they had an odd, muffled quality that made them sound soft and deep.

Rob stopped running and listened.

He forgot all about Alina, forgot about contacting Fletch, forgot that he was an hour's drive away from the nearest person he knew.

He stood in the woods, turned into the wind to listen to this beautiful sound.

If he was anything like me when I first heard them, he was overcome by a physical sensation, a feeling like slipping under a warm blanket on a cold night.

And then they were gone.

Rob found himself once more in the dark woods with no idea how he'd get home.

There's a trailer park, somewhat unusual in Massachusetts, a couple of miles southeast of the visitor center rob was lucky enough to get picked up on the road by one of its residents she was probably barely 40 but looked like she was pushing 60 smoked continuously and was the one who told rob about what she called the spire in the woods to her man i got chills huh to her

the spire in the woods wasn't a ghost story it was simply a fact of life and like blind curves and sinkholes one that was best to be avoided she didn't have a first-hand account of her own, but she'd heard plenty of stories.

She knew that some of the boys from her trailer park enjoyed getting drunk, getting stoned, and pissing in the reservoir late at night.

They got a little thrill out of the idea that somewhere in Boston, some Harvard grad was drinking their urine.

Occasionally, one of these boys would come back to his trailer unsettled at having heard the eerie beauty of the bells.

The Quabbin Reservoir is peppered with islands.

The woman said that the source of the bells was was one of them, an island just to the north of where the old Ware Infill Road turns into Quabbin Hill.

Somewhere, hidden in the island's wild-grown trees, the peak of an old spire, the sort you might see on top of a church, juts up out of the ground.

Now and again, someone went looking for it and never came back.

Rumor around the trailer park was that, back in 1996, John Wilkins and his cousin Anna found it, but only John came back.

He killed himself about a month later.

later.

Since then, the park mothers have kept an extra close watch on their boys.

Hold on.

Wilkins is the last name of the woman who died in the school, right?

I thought so, but I'm not sure.

Yeah.

Huh.

Interesting.

Rob didn't really believe in any of it.

He wasn't like me.

Spire in the Woods wasn't a spiritual quest.

He wasn't trying to cling to the last lingering shreds of his faith.

He just wanted to hear that sound again, hear the bells as they chime the hour, have that feeling of warmth and security wash over him.

In the weeks that followed, Rob thought of nothing except the sound of the bells.

Fletch thought that Rob was embellishing the incident, letting his memory get the best of him.

But Rob was adamant that they were the most beautiful sound he'd ever heard.

He insisted that something in the aging bells, or the wind as it carried the tolling through the woods, or the acoustics of the rock and dirt surrounding the spire, lent to them an ethereal quality.

He was determined to find the spire.

Rob Rob began researching the quabbin and it wasn't long before he realized the connection between the spire and the widower's clock.

He dismissed the ghost story, but he was thrilled that a master artesian had lived in Enfield and sunk his fortune into constructing a clock tower complete with bells and chimes.

Fletch was skeptical.

If Rob had heard anything at all, it must have come from somewhere else.

A neighboring town, a proper church.

Tower bells weigh hundreds, if not thousands of pounds.

What would be ringing them?

The wind?

It would take a hurricane, but Rob was unfazed.

He was going to find the spire in the woods.

He was going to hear the bells again.

Fletch didn't see the harm in letting him try.

A week before school started, Fletch set off for Amherst with Rob in tow.

The pair of them spent the evening with Sam and his friends before cutting out around a quarter to ten and heading down Route 9 until they reached Old Ware Infield Road.

They parked the car near the trailer park and hoofed it the two miles or so up Old Ware to the shore of the reservoir near the islands, one of which, Rob was positive, housed the spire in the woods.

Each having worn swimsuits under their clothes, they simply stripped down, stashed their things, and slipped into the water.

The nearest island lay about 200 yards from the shore and Fletch, never a strong swimmer, quickly realized he didn't have it in him to make it there.

After a brief argument while treading water, Fletch turned back and Rob went on alone.

They'd agreed Fletch would meet Rob back by Route 9 at 4 a.m.

Fletch sat on the trunk of his car for hours, swatting mosquitoes and listening to the frogs and crickets.

At first he was worried about Rob, then he was pissed that Rob had gone on by himself, then he was worried again.

Fletch set the alarm on his watch around 1.30 or so, laid out on his back seat, and drifted off to sleep, wishing he was drinking at his brothers.

Fletch awoke to the passenger side door being thrown open.

Rob jumped in and slammed the door closed.

Drive!

Drive!

Fletch scrambled into the front seat, assuming park officials or the police were in hot pursuit.

He gunned the engine and pulled out of the trailer park.

Fletch was already back on Route 9 before he hazarded a glance at his friend.

Rob was panicked.

What happened?

Rob said nothing.

He just labored to catch his breath as he looked back towards the reservoir.

Rob's adrenaline slipped away as Fletch drove.

By the time they reached Sam's apartment, Rob was practically catatonic.

It took me weeks to pry it out of him, but he saw something down there.

He found the spire?

Fletch nodded.

Did he go in?

End of part two.

Brother, I tell you what, sometimes, sometimes you just feel good.

You know what I like about this so far, too, is the just the immense buildup.

Like, I just feel like the build-up is really being earned out of every, like, we're squeezing every bit of juice out of this.

You know what I mean?

Do you feel that at all?

Yeah, it's like the story

is

in a spot where it's like, we're going to get, we're going to get our worth out of this concept, right?

Yeah, no shit.

It does feel like that as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It, yeah, I've, I'm, I'm all over this right now.

This is banging.

One thing, before we get into part three, things, notes, or thoughts that I have are just like, the, the,

the use of cuck holding in the story is still, it just is brought up a lot

that I'm still wondering exactly where is that going to tie in?

Because it feels like it's brought up so much that it's, I mean, it's got to come up again, right i mean i just here's what i here's no no here's my prediction right and i think it was confirmed by the name wilkins getting brought up because that is the name of the girl that died right the teacher that died i think it's saying that a lot of the ghost stories that have been happening around this town

are just side effects of stuff that really happened right like the story gets passed around it changes hands and the details change like i don't think there ever was a blood cemetery i think what happened is people knew the story of the widower's clock, and the details got changed so much that it became the story of the blood cemetery.

So I think there was one cuckold story, which the important thing there is not the cucking, but instead the fact that a man found another man sleeping with his wife and he killed both of them and hooked them up to his like clockwork machine.

And then that story became so well known that it eventually became other stories like the blood cemetery.

I think that's where it's going, that all of these urban legends came off the true story of the widower's clock.

I see.

Yeah.

That's my prediction, at least.

I don't know if that's true or not, but.

Well, I think that...

Yeah, I'm...

Well, I'm curious, too.

So do you think that

have they confirmed that the tower in the woods?

Is that actually a thing?

Or is it just people are like, oh, it's interesting that someone put a clock tower in the woods?

We haven't seen that, though, have we?

We haven't seen it, but it sounds like it's pretty well confirmed because it says that Rob threw out the ghost story part and was just fascinated that someone built a clock tower in Enfield.

Right.

So the clock tower's got to be real.

The details about his wife cheating on him and the ghost story and all that stuff may not be, or the dead bodies hooked up to the mechanism may not be.

Considering this is a horror story, I'm going to hazard a guess and say that they are real

or something similar happened.

But it seems that...

Him being a clockmaker that built a clock is definitely real.

Okay.

I think at least.

We're in thick here, but also there's still,

you know, it's taking its time.

It's really, it's building itself out to be, I don't know, something I think, I think we're getting ready to get into it.

Because usually when we read a lot of creepyposes too, this is the big difference is that usually there's like a little hook or a little something that kind of gets you going.

Not to say that the ghost story angle hasn't been there yet, but I do think that like...

In other stories we've read, where it be left, right, game, Baraska, usually they do something to kind of show their hand to kind of entice you to be like, oh, this is, you

you know, we're leading somewhere here, right?

This story is like really building itself into that folk, like the folk tale angle is really building itself up to where I think we're going to fucking hit the gas very soon, is what is what I would assume.

Yeah, I think you're right.

I'm fully bought in right now.

All right, so with that, we are now into part three.

Part three.

Rob had reached the first island.

He had been searching fruitlessly for nearly 40 minutes when he heard them.

The bells.

Being so much closer now, they were even clearer.

Fell to his knees, letting their sensation, their warmth, wash over him.

For a moment, he knew bliss.

The bells rolled back like the ocean at low tide.

Rob found himself shivering on the ground.

He could hear nothing but frogs and crickets.

He rose on unsteady legs, sure of only one thing.

In an hour, he'd be there.

He'd be standing before the spire.

He'd hear the bells, feel them close.

He ran to the shore and dove into the waters.

Something else I want to mention is:

we get hints because our author has established that he's writing all of this in the future.

Like early on, when he was like, if we were doing this nowadays, it'd be easy because of the internet.

But in 1999, I didn't have that.

And there was that brief mention right before part two ended where he said,

if it was anything like my first time, then Rob probably felt the euphoria of it.

So that means eventually our author finds the bells and hears them.

So that's a thing to note.

Yes.

Rob emerged from the reservoir onto the rocky bank of the second and far larger island.

He stumbled barefoot through the woods, increasingly aware of how dark it was beneath the trees.

As the bell sirens call faded in his mind, he began to doubt himself.

The island was nearly two miles long and half a mile across.

He could search it all night and never find a damn thing.

The bells chimed once more.

He turned to face them.

There it was.

In the center of a grove of dead trees, the spire jutted out of the ground like a pike set to receive a charge.

Its white paint was oddly untouched by age.

Small windows adorned each of its sides, framed by the dead trees and bathed in moonlight.

Called.

Unable to resist their song, yet too overwhelmed by their warmth to walk, Rob crawled to the spire like an infant to its mother.

Pushed against the slats of the window.

They gave way and he squirmed his way inside.

Rob landed on top of a staircase.

As the bells continued to chime, he pulled his shuddering body down the stairs, deeper, deeper to the enveloping darkness within.

Until he lost himself once more in the ethereal sounds and their radiating warmth.

Once the silence returned, Rob strained in vain to see.

The air was humid and black as ink.

He could feel wood, dank and rotting, pressed against his bare calves.

It gave him the impression he was sitting Indian style inside of a living thing like Jonah in the well.

Gosh, this story's so good.

I know, right?

So crazy.

Oh, it's so good.

Oh,

the unfathomable

creature of a bell in the woods that calls to you.

Oh, it's so

good.

Okay.

Once the silence returned, Rob strained in vain to see.

I already read that.

Slowly, Rob rose to his feet.

He held his hands out in front of him and groped blindly.

He hoped he'd find a wall or a banister to the stairs, anything that would give him a clue about his surroundings.

Instead, he found nothing, forcing him to shuffle deeper into the impermeable darkness.

His outstretched fingers recoiled from the soft surface they encountered.

What was it?

He shook as he reached out, letting his hands land once more on the chest-high object in front of him.

It was wrapped in in cloth.

It only extended out to about the width of his shoulders.

The cloth hung loose over something hard that his hands couldn't identify.

Rods?

Dowels?

His probing fingers traced up the object's outer edge until he felt something he could identify.

He froze.

His fingers were in the eye socket of a skull.

His thumb rested on its teeth.

The bells rang again, if only inside Rob, as his mind's eyes showed him the endless dance.

Sat there in the dark, his unseen eyes transfixed by the clockmaker's wife as she was dragged on her post through the twirling gauntlet of union automatons.

He saw her alive and dead, the blush of youth, the maggots of decay, twitch and scream and moan as her body was pierced by countless bayonets.

He saw her face as she ran the endless race.

Oh my god.

Good God.

Oh, it's so cool.

Like poetry.

It's like fucking poetry.

Is it not?

Does that not just read poetry?

It's so good.

Oh, man.

He saw her alive and dead.

The blush of youth, the maggots of decay.

It's great.

And it's all, he's in the basement of this spire and the was and like this.

It's almost like the clockmaker, when he built this clock and he attached these bodies to it, he invited some

inhuman presence to dwell there.

It's like he made an altar for some dark entity to take part in and to like make this its vessel.

Oh, it's so good.

And it's still running beneath the earth on this island out in a flooded town.

Oh, gosh.

Rob shrank and shriveled, collapsing to the floor.

Like a wounded animal, he crawled and clawed his way back, back, back, back, until he hit the wall.

And even then, he didn't stop, but pushed against it with all his strength, hoping to retreat further.

His His flailing limbs struck a step, the first of many.

With what little control he had over his frenzied mind, he bolted for the surface and an escape from the moist pit of the clockmaker's wife.

Rob scrambled up the twisting stairs on all fours like a dog.

He tore his way through the window and collapsed on the ground.

The fresh air felt alien in his lungs as if it were his first breath.

He took two more as he lay there on the ground before realizing that although he hadn't a clue what time it was, he couldn't be there when the bells chimed.

He ran and swam and ran and swam and didn't look back again until he was in his car.

Fletch put his face in his hands.

I shouldn't have let him go alone.

So you believe him?

I tried to say it in as comforting a tone as I could, but I think it came out a little accusatory.

Fletch hesitated.

Yeah.

Yeah, I do.

I had so many more questions I wanted to ask, but I didn't think Fletch could take it.

Choked up several times while relaying Rob's story, and the way his shoulders were slumped reminded me of the way Rob's parents had looked at their son's funeral.

I should have gone with him, he said without looking up at me.

I let it lie.

As I left Fletch's house, every hair on my body was standing on end.

But at that point, as much as I wanted to, I still wasn't ready to accept the story of the spire in the woods.

Not a face value.

When we'd studied the fall of the house of Usher in English earlier that year, we're never talking about Poe.

The story...

Ah!

Oh,

oh, double platinum.

We gotta hang up its jersey.

It's doing too much.

We studied the fall of the house of Usher in English earlier that year.

Mrs.

Thorne had made it a point to draw our attention to two of Poe's opium references and to how Roderick Usher displayed symptoms of withdrawal.

She explained that Poe's stories frequently incorporated both blatant and subtle references to intoxicants and hallucinogens in order to enhance the sense of phantasmagoria and help more skeptical readers suspend their disbelief.

We've got analysis of Poe and drugs.

We've got the word Phantasmagoria, bro, in the rafters.

Gotta get this guy up there.

Drop his banner to be shown in the gymnasium for the rest of time, dude.

Yes, yes.

To be honest, at this point, I know this video is going to get taken down.

I know.

It's so sad.

Isn't it?

I was thinking about it.

Oh, God.

What if we find a way...

there has to be some way to get this out there?

Even just this story.

The story's too good.

I mean, I know.

It's fucking poetry, man.

Well, also, just the,

what is it?

The fucking

the description of even just like the tower itself or just like it's it's so beautiful.

Like, I mean, just the way that it's all it all presents itself is

just all

even the way too like squirming in there, crawling through, eyes in the, or fingers in the eye sockets.

it's just

it's beautiful

so good okay i knew very little about depression even less about antidepressants but at the time i didn't think it was beyond the realm of possibility that robert kinnen's encounter with the clockmaker's wife had more to do with the sudden onset of a major depressive episode than with the dead woman I spent the night reading about depression, MAO inhibitors, and SSRIs.

There were no answers, just endless possibilities.

It wasn't unheard of for major depressive episodes to be accompanied by delusions or even outright hallucinations.

Psychotic disorders were something less obvious in patients whose presenting problem was depression.

Hallucinations were rare side effects of SSRIs.

MAO inhibitors could cause serotonin syndrome, which could cause hallucinations.

And that was before getting into the countless drug interactions, which, without knowing exactly what Rob had been taking, I couldn't even begin to map out.

I knew Scary Carrie would love to hear every last detail Fletcher told me about the spire in the woods, but on Tuesday morning, I just didn't feel like tracking her down.

I wanted to talk to Alina.

The ride into school hadn't been as awkward as I had anticipated.

Fletcher, also,

a six-foot-tall goth girl also being explicitly mentioned in this story.

This video has to get shot down.

I'm like, it's too good.

It's too good.

The world, it's lining up too much.

The stars are aligning too much.

Have you ever had a meal that was was so good that you're like...

It feels illegal.

Yeah, it's like, well,

now it's going to suck because every meal after this isn't going to taste that good.

Yeah, it's never going to be as good as this.

Yeah, no, I know exactly what it is.

It's like, well, since I don't live here, this sucks because I've got to remember this now.

That's how I feel about this story at the moment.

Oh.

The ride into school hadn't been as awkward as I'd anticipated.

Fletch was quieter than usual, and I was content to stare out my window and daydream about what I was going to tell Lena.

I wondered how she'd think about Fletch's story and whether or not I should gloss over my own doubts.

I also wondered if she'd cry.

I feel embarrassed, even after all these years later, admitting it, but a part of me was hoping she would.

Then I'd have an excuse to hug her again.

Preach, brother, preach.

That's my boy.

That's my boy right there.

There he is.

What a man.

I could be.

Is that scary, Carrie, looking all?

Yeah, that's that's still scary, Carrie.

Come on, give me a hug.

Put her there.

Come on.

I could be dependable.

Comforting.

Boyfriend material.

It was the kind of fantasy that marked me as a beta male.

Whoa.

And we get mentioned a beta male in the story.

And, dude, we've got cucking twice.

If YouTube doesn't copyright this video, I will.

Yeah, I know shit.

The sort of guy who, even in his own daydreams, couldn't think of a single reason he deserved the girl.

I roved the juniors hallway and the cafeteria, but couldn't find Alina anywhere.

I heard from DeLuca that she called out sick.

I spent the rest of the day in a funk.

Carrie and I had gym seventh period, the last class of the day.

It was too cold to go out to the fields, so we had to choose between three or four indoor activities.

Ordinarily, I'd have opted for floor hockey.

the only gym class activity I'd ever enjoyed, but I felt obligated to update Carrie on what I learned about Rob and the Spire, so I joined her in the auxiliary gym for a little ping pong, a game I had no idea she was good at.

She gets, bro.

And she's good at ping-pong.

And she's good, well, god damn it.

And she's good at ping pong.

Come on.

Hey, ping-pong.

Or it could have happened exactly like that.

Or, hold on, what am I thinking here?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, leave it.

That was okay.

You did it.

Or it could have happened exactly like that.

Ping-pong, Carrie said, acing me for the third straight time.

I was surprised that scary Carrie Carrie wasn't as skeptical as I was.

I mean, sure, Carrie absolutely believed in ghosts, and of course, I desperately wanted to, but we weren't completely credulous about every story we heard.

We didn't relish wandering around graveyards and old buildings for no good reason.

We weren't looking to kill time.

We did it because we wanted to find something.

We wanted to pull back the curtain and glimpse the grandeur of creation.

We wanted to feel small in the presence of the infinite and know, if only for a moment, there's more than food, sex, and the petty minutiae of social interaction.

What it came down to was, while I believe Fletch and I believe that Fletch believed Rob, it didn't follow that I believe Rob.

It was the difference between lying and just being wrong.

Karen and I had developed criteria for identifying the more promising leads.

Inspire in the woods had a lot going against it.

Secondhand accounts.

Stories with an undercurrent of social control.

Witnesses with a history of mental illness.

There were red flags.

Rob's story had all of them.

You want to check it out?

It's kind of cold for a swim.

I just want to see if we can't hear the bells.

Yeah, maybe.

I don't know.

It's kind of far.

Yeah, look at you not doing the voice for her that time.

Thank you.

Finally.

I thought I, you know what?

I'm never going to be a good man again.

How does that sound?

You're never going to be a good man?

What does that mean?

I was giving you, I was throwing one out for you.

I don't know.

I thought

you would have that by not being overly critical of her.

I see what you were doing.

Okay.

Yeah.

I thought it'd be nice.

All right.

Okay.

Okay.

You cannot blame her.

I'm going to do this.

I'm going to do this.

No.

I'm going to do this.

I just want to see if I can hear the bells.

Yeah, maybe.

I don't know.

It's kind of far.

Of course, there was another reason I was reluctant to head all the way out to the Quabin Reservoir with Scary Carrie.

She looked at me like I just insulted her.

She knew precisely what my other reason was.

Our last ghost hunting expedition had been a disaster.

A very personal disaster.

Carrie was old for our year.

She turned 16 at the tail end of freshman year and had gotten her license the very first day of summer break.

It was perfect, save for one thing.

No car.

Carrie's parents were divorced, and her dad had moved to New Jersey for a job.

He paid his alimony and child support every month, but he just wasn't a very wealthy man.

Carrie's mom had never gone to college.

She had to work full-time at the deli counter at our local market basket just to make ends meet, which meant most days she had the car.

But at night, when the store was closed, Carrie had access to the world's oldest, crappiest station wagon.

For the most part, Carrie's newfound freedom changed her life very little.

Mainly, her trips involved picking up the members of her small group of friends and delivering them to Dan Bergens to watch anime and old horror movies in his basement.

Go ahead, say something.

Say something.

Go ahead.

I think it's cool.

I thought it was cool.

You think it's cool?

Awesome.

Now, scary Carrie's cool.

Now it's cool.

Me who believed in her up until this point.

And I'm going to be vindicating

the comment section

by history.

By the end of the story, I have been right the entire time.

You know what?

You know what, Hunter?

Bear trap.

Scary Carrie is the

bear trap.

This is a bear trap.

If you get to pull a bear trap over just reading one paragraph ahead in a story, I get to bore over Scary Carrie being cool, which I said from the get-go.

We only hung out twice that summer.

Both times Scary Carrie picked me up in what I called Ecto One, and we went ghost hunting.

Our first trip was to the Blood Cemetery.

That's how we discovered the story of Abel Blood was a steaming load.

We dressed in all black, parford, of course, in Carrie's case, yeah brother, and brought flashlights, wax paper, and crayons.

You bet your bottom dollar.

I also took the silver crucifix my parents had given me as a first communion present and my mother's Bible just in case we saw something.

It was fun scrambling over the old stone wall, sneaking through the cemetery with our flashlights held low, trying not to step on anybody's grave.

Even after seeing that the years of death didn't line up, we still checked out the curve where the ghost of the little girl supposedly ran out in front of passing cars.

The blind curve was indeed full of skid marks.

It also had, about 20 feet in front of it, a deer crossing sign.

Two or three weeks later, we went to a charity auction at the rec center and slipped up the stairs to the attic.

Stairs squeaked beneath our feet, and even though, at worst, we'd just be thrown out of the wreck center, we were terrified of getting caught.

The attic hadn't changed in the seven or so years since my last visit.

A couple of card tables housed bins full of crafting materials, a pair of filing cabinets set against the back wall gathering dust, and most importantly of all, despite it being June, there were still cold spots.

We stand just outside one of them, reach an arm in, try to define the boundary of the warm and cold air.

It was tricky.

The shift in temperature wasn't as great as I remembered from when I was a kid, and there were no hard, fine edges between the hot and cold air.

The temperature just seemed seemed to bleed from one area to another like brine in an estuary.

I experimented sticking my crucifix into the heart of the cold spot and felt nothing.

If anything, it felt like the cold spots were fading away.

Carrie suggested we try talking to the spirit, Jennifer Wilkins, while we still could.

I shrugged.

After you.

We'd forsaken most of our ghost hunting kit, as it would have been awfully conspicuous carrying around a Bible and a couple of flashlights.

Still had my crucifix, but I doubted it'd be necessary.

The stories of the silver specter were all quite tame.

We had, however, brought a couple of sticks of incense, which we lit with a very old Zippo that had once belonged to my grandfather.

Carrie had bought the incense from a New Age store.

The sort of place you'd shop at if you were inclined to believe in neo-paganism or healing crystals.

Saleswoman told her it was, look, I'm just,

dude.

Carrie is dangerously close to Kayla.

This might be my wife.

Kayla goes to these places constantly.

She dresses like this.

She looks like this.

The saleswoman told her it was supposed to make it easier for spirits to pass into our realm.

But to me, it just smelled like sandalwood.

Carrie spoke in a lifting tone.

Jennifer, are you here with us?

I burst out laughing, and Carrie went beat red.

She punched me in the arm and whispered for me to be quiet, pointing to the floor where beneath our feet the auction was taking place.

Carrie tried again.

Jennifer, Jennifer, if you can hear me, give us a sign.

We stood still in absolute silence, waiting for an answer.

It came in the form of the industrial air conditioner mounted to the ceiling of the floor below us, cycling on.

A few gaps in the floorboards lined up perfectly with one of the AC's large vents.

We couldn't stop laughing as the spirit of Jennifer Wilkins returned the cold spots to full force.

I also want to mention, since I brought it up, that I think I've mentioned this to you before, but I actually met Kayla going ghost hunting.

Really?

Have I told you?

Yeah.

Have I ever told you that?

No, you've never told me that.

The way we met is there was where I went to college, there was an abandoned elementary school nearby that there were stories that there's ghosts that haunt it.

There was a story about a teacher that had died there in like the 70s.

And it's like, oh, if you go to it, you can still see the teacher roaming the halls.

So me and three of my friends were like, okay, we're going to go check it out.

Part of the story was you had to go at midnight.

Like, you know, you had to be there between midnight and 3 a.m.

or something.

Right.

So we were meeting at a grocery store to all carpool over there.

And then one of our friends was a girl and she was like, hey, can I bring my roommate?

And we were like, yeah, we don't care.

And her roommate was Kayla.

So we all got in the car and then we went ghost hunting that night and like freaked out.

And then I also pulled a great prank on everyone that night.

Okay.

So there's a place nearby the college that

legend has it used to be an old orphanage.

I think I looked into it at one point and it wasn't an orphanage.

It was actually like a department store or something.

But it was some old brick building that burnt down in like the 60s.

Sure.

But legend has it, it's an old orphanage that's now next to a church to add to the creepy factor.

And there was this like, I guess you could say challenge.

or like ritual people could do.

So the story is you drive your car up, has to be between midnight and 4 a.m.

And you have to get out on the gravel road and you have to throw a piece of gravel towards the old burned-out building.

Okay.

Then, you get back in the car and you drive around to the other side of the abandoned school and you turn the car off.

And then, if you wait for a few minutes, you'll start to hear footsteps around the car.

After you hear the footsteps, you drive away from the school.

And if you get out and look at the car, there will be handprints all over it.

Right?

Okay.

So, that so that's that's how the legend goes.

So, me being evil,

we pull down in the car.

It's like six of us packed into a Honda, like a little like, you know, two-door thing.

We're all packed in.

We get out of the car, and everyone else goes to get a piece of gravel to throw, but I walk around to the back of the car while everyone's facing forward and start putting my hand all over the car.

That's so fucked.

Like, I laid out hand prints, and then we go do the whole thing.

Everyone's like, oh, I hear something, blah, blah, blah.

Also, this is like down a back road, middle of the night.

It's like down a back road, middle of the night.

And like, if you turn the car all the way off, it is pitch black.

You can't see anything like right outside of the car.

So it adds to the creepy factor.

So then we drive away and we pull into a McDonald's in town and we get out and they shine a flashlight and see the hand prints and the girls just started screaming.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Jesus.

Yep.

And I'm like, oh, who could have done it?

Blah, blah, blah.

Okay.

Who could have done it?

So that.

So that's the night Kayla and I met, right?

Yeah.

And then over the next several weeks, like we were friends for a couple of months and like I would talk about horror movies and I would like talk about scary stories and stuff like that.

And then we start dating.

A year after we're dating,

Kayla was over at my house for dinner.

And I had never brought up that night since then, right?

I was just like, mission accomplished.

We're sitting around the dinner table.

And my dad randomly goes, did you ever tell Kayla about the night you pranked those girls by putting your hand all over the car?

He sold you, he sold you down the river.

Sold me out.

He sold me out.

Immediately, Kayla was like, What?

And my dad goes, Oh, wait, she was one of those girls.

Oh, damn.

Kayla, I'm sorry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My dad was like, oops, sorry.

And immediately, Kayla told every one of those girls, and people were like, she's like, guess what?

Guess what?

Remember that night that we all to this day counted as a real ghost encounter?

Guess whose fault it was.

This was also all pre-Youtube, so I had no outlet for like the devilishness.

So yeah, but yeah,

Fud story.

Anyway, just to further prove that I think Scary Carrie might actually be my wife transmitted through time.

Scary Carrie.

Scary Carrie.

After that cute anecdote, this episode's definitely getting canned.

Once we'd regained our composure, Kerry and I decided to head over to the Bickfords for a bite to eat while we conducted the post-mortem on our latest failure.

Now, a deer crossing sign and an air conditioner don't necessarily disprove that the Blood Cemetery and our town wreck center are haunted, but they certainly had made us feel rather foolish.

So while I gorged myself on ex-Benedict, which I had only recently discovered, and Carrie nursed a cup of coffee, we started tossing around ideas for other expeditions.

No place local.

Gotta stay objective.

It can't be some place we've grown up thinking is haunted.

You just don't want anyone we know hearing your little sing-talking to the spirit world voice.

I'd be like, you know what, dude?

Fuck you, man.

I'm trying to keep this ship afloat.

You just don't want hearing your little voice.

You son of a bitch.

Yeah.

Carrie, in mock anger, reached over, grabbed a home fry off my plate, and threw it at me.

It had taken her a long time to get comfortable with me teasing her.

I guess after a lifetime of being mocked about her weight and appearance, the idea that it was the only way I expressed affection took some getting used to.

Also, since I've made the comparison throughout this entire video, I want to clarify: my wife is not overweight, nor do I think that.

And if she ever sees this clip, that is the one aspect of scary tears.

I was going to say, you better watch it.

I'm not attributing to my wife.

You better watch her.

I'm playing that out

clearly right now.

You've been talking about nothing but just basically you being like, Yeah, she's just like her.

And she's been like, She's a 16-year-old troglodyte.

No, no, no, no.

Look, in my head, she's 90s overweight, which means not anorexic.

That's right.

That's what it means in my head.

Yes.

Right.

Well, that only makes sense.

Yes.

So that is what I'm telling myself till further notice, until the story explicitly outlines otherwise.

There were a few places in and around Boston we wanted to check out, but most of them were landmarks or buildings that were still in use.

Neither of us was eager to get arrested, particularly not Carrie, who was going to have a hard enough time getting into college.

So Boston was out, and most of Lowell, too.

We dismissed a couple of nearby leads, the Gilson Road Cemetery, which had no actual history surrounding it, just a hodgepodge of random urban legends, and the blue lady out in Wilton, New Hampshire, who sounded somewhat promising, but was most frequently sighted during harvest moons, which we wouldn't get until late September.

Eventually, we settled on the Eunice Williams Covered Bridge in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

It had everything going for it, a traumatic death, consistent sightings, and no air conditioning.

The only downside was that, for for us, Greenfield was a solid two-hour drive each way, and that was if the MapQuest directions were up to date.

A mighty big if.

I didn't see Carrie again that summer.

Life just got in the way.

For Carrie, it was difficult to work around her mom's schedule, especially after a tiny little accident she had backing out of a space at the mall resulted in her losing her driving privileges for a month.

While for me, it was the pool Christy McDowell's parents had put in that June.

While my feelings for Christy and our other mutual mutual female friends were mostly platonic, I was 15 and they were in bikinis.

Oh, man.

Gosh.

This story, like, this guy was a teenager in the 90s.

He knows exactly.

He knows the lay of the land.

By comparison, ghost hunting just didn't seem quite as exciting.

Knowing how my friends...

Now, I'll make the counter that I was both.

I was into the girls in bikinis and the ghost hunting.

I was a man of many, many.

I was a man of many pleasures.

Which is probably why I didn't have much success with the women in the affordation.

All right.

But I catered to both flavors, so to speak.

Catered to both flavors.

I was a man of multiple palates.

All right.

Knowing how my friends felt about her, I never invited Carrie to tag along.

Of course, in fairness to me, pole parties weren't exactly her cup of tea.

When school started up again in the fall, Carrie and I resumed talking about our trip to Greenfield.

But it wasn't until Rob Kinnan killed himself and I made an effort to spend more time with her that we got around to actually going.

Carrie picked me up early one Friday evening in mid-November.

Mrs.

Peterson had opened the store that morning and would be closing the next day, meaning we had Ecto 1 all night.

We just needed to get the car back before she woke up and she'd be none the wiser.

Driving around with friends was still novel at that point in my life.

Two hours passed by in a blur of jokes and gossip and screaming along to what little music Carrie and I could agree on.

She used to have this mixtape dominated by nine-inch nails and rage against the machine.

Any thoughts on that, Hunter?

I mean, I like nine-inch nails and rage against the machine.

I like both of them.

I'm just further proving to you that there are more points in Carrie's camp than especially Alina than anyone else.

She's fine.

Uh-huh.

That was a staple of our time in Ecto One.

Yeah, whatever you say.

Bear trap.

Bear trap for me.

My bear trap.

I think we listened to it straight through two and a half times that night.

We only got turned around once and arrived at the Eunice Williams covered bridge absolutely pumped.

Pulled under the bridge, got the motor, honked once, and waited for Eunice.

Eunice Williams was not a resident of Greenfield.

She had actually lived in nearby Deerfield back in the 1600s.

At the time, Deerfield was the northwesternmost outpost of New England, deep in the heart of the former Puckumtuck nation.

Pockamtuck Nation.

I think that's right, yeah.

See, I'm not making fun of it.

You are.

That is Hunter Hancock on record making fun of Native American names.

Go ahead and write that down.

Get that poster.

Before the settlers had arrived in Deerfield, the Pockhamtuck had already been weakened by European disease and war with the Mohawk people.

When the settlers and Pockamtuck clashed over resources, the settlers easily drove the remaining Pockhamtuck from their land.

Pogumtuck, however, were not ready to admit defeat.

They allied themselves with French settlers and other French-aligned First Peoples in Canada and, in 1704, led an offensive raid against Deerfield's English settlers.

The French and Native Americans killed 56 settlers and burned much of the town to the ground.

They captured over 100 survivors and forced them to march through brutal winter conditions into Quebec.

The march would take months.

Among the captured survivors was Eunice Mather Williams, her husband, Minister John Williams, and five of their seven children.

Her infant daughter and six and a half-year-old son were both killed during the raid, but John and Eunice were determined to be strong for their other children and fellow captives.

The Williamses quoted scripture, left the group in prayer, and took turns carrying their younger children until they reached the Green River.

Eunice fell during the crossing.

Despite having survived her plunge, a Pacaptuck warrior decided that Eunice's exposure to the icy water had weakened her too much to continue the march, so he hacked her to pieces in front of her husband and their remaining children.

Legend has it that Eunice appears on the bridge over the waters where she was killed, asking any mortals she finds there of news about her children and husband.

Locals say she can be summoned simply by cutting your engine and honking your horn.

I love ghost stories like that.

That is so cool.

You think a lot of this folktale shit is real, by the way?

It might be.

It could be like local.

I bet if you googled a bunch of this stuff, there probably would be local legends of it.

It seems like it, doesn't it?

That or like Tony here has an incredibly creative mind to come up with all these people.

Well, I mean, it's fucking awesome.

It's just

so realistic that it makes you think you're like, oh, it kind of feels like this is actually something.

Yeah.

Yeah, it probably is.

I would agree.

We'd been sitting there in Ecto One with the engine off and no heat when a thought occurred to me.

Why would the ghost of a woman who died a couple of centuries before the invention of an automobile respond to a horn being honked?

I could see the gears turning in Scary Carrie's head as she processed the anachronism.

Well,

maybe she's just fuck.

I laughed as Carrie turned on the car to get the heat going again.

And you couldn't have thought of this before you drove out here?

She asked.

Well,

it doesn't mean the bridge isn't haunted.

Just that Eunice probably isn't a car gal.

We waited for a bit.

They got out of the car and poked around the bridge on foot.

I've always liked covered bridges ever since seeing Disney's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow cartoon as a kid.

And there's a nifty little plaque at this one that tells the whole story of Eunice Williams.

We scrambled down to the banks of the river.

It's not exactly the Mississippi, but it was easy to see how difficult it would have been to Ford, especially under the strange circumstances Eunice was facing.

Skipped a few pebbles, difficult feed and fast-moving water, before we got cold and decided to return to the car.

Maybe it was the increasingly likely prospect that another of our missions was going to prove to be a waste, or maybe it was just the hour and the warm air of the heater blasting in our faces, making us sleepy, but whatever the cause, our energy was fading fast and our conversation had turned serious.

Well, serious by high school standards.

Do you think Kim Murray's pretty?

Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

All right,

I'm not going to do my girl like that.

Do you think Kim Murray is pretty?

I feel too bad.

Thank you.

Thank you.

There we go.

I feel too bad.

I know.

He gets some humanity redeemed.

Look at that, kids.

Hunter gets to go to heaven.

Hunter has a heart.

They say his heart grew three sizes that day.

He died of a heart attack like sea biscuit.

Turns out your chest cavity is not nearly equipped to handle a heart three times its size, so it ripped against his inner rib cage and exploded on the podcast.

It's terrifying.

Kim Murray.

I did not think she was pretty, but that put me in a precarious position.

Physically, Kim had her faults, but objectively speaking, she was significantly more attractive than Carrie.

Aw,

I love how like red-pilled this kid is sometimes.

You're like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Like, what do you mean that she is?

Yeah, a bit pretty sometimes, but not every time?

Her cantile tilt was far off.

Her cantile tilt.

Her cupid's bow was not nearly developed enough for someone of high IQ.

Objectively speaking, she was significantly more attractive than Carrie, a girl Drew DeLuca once described with what was for Drew a considerable amount of sympathy as unfortunate looking.

Damn, man.

Poor girl.

Carrie shifted in her seat to face me.

I don't know.

Never gave it much thought.

Why?

We were at Dance the other night, and she was talking about how much she likes knowing the guys masturbate while thinking about her.

This is a topic of conversation I want to pursue.

I love that.

Whoa, okay.

Just flying in from the top, from the rafters, just straight in.

Like, okay.

That reminds me of that movie, American Beauty.

That's like one of the lines from that movie, too.

It's one of the girls is like, yeah,

you know, it's like, yeah, and I knew that guys were jacking off to me.

And she's like, gross.

She's like, no, I liked it.

Maybe it's what girls, maybe girls like it sometimes, dude.

I don't know.

Gary likes it.

She's like,

I wish the boys would fond of themselves over me.

All right.

All right.

We're reading.

So she just says,

she was talking about how much she likes it.

Those are guys to it.

And then our boy...

We don't even know our author's name yet, right?

I don't think we actually do, I don't think he's introduced.

I don't think we do, yeah.

Uh, so, but our author's like, I don't like

maybe we don't do this, or can we talk about something else?

Carrie grunted softly.

That's what I said, it's kind of gross, and you're back.

There he is.

There was a pause when Carrie spoke again.

Her voice caught in her throat.

And then Kim said, well, then I guess you're lucky you don't have to worry about anyone doing it over you.

Ah, that's

brutal.

That is rough.

Kim's also a bitch, though.

Fuck her.

Yeah.

That's, oh, man.

My cheeks burned with embarrassment.

I didn't know.

You know what?

Honestly, I was trying to say, as we were reading the story, I'm like, I'm getting flashbacks to some other story we've read.

Baraska.

Like, the way early on, like, Kim, Kimber, and like, you know, or sorry, Kimber and Kyle and stuff were described like they would have these little conversations like this and they'd be very chummy and stuff.

That's what this is reminding me of.

Yeah, that's fair.

No, I could see that my cheeks burned with embarrassment.

I didn't know what to say never imagined Carrie would share her sexual insecurities with me part because I never thought of her in sexual terms.

Oh my gosh, dude.

On some level, I don't think it ever fully processed for me that Carrie was a girl.

Well, I mean,

I feel that.

Like, you have a, you have, have like a buddy that's a girl and like all of a sudden you're like i've like never actually thought of you and that

i i remember being in high school and like middle school and stuff and there'd be like friends of mine who were girls who i've just sometimes i'd be like oh yeah i guess i could be attracted to them if i wanted to be because they're you know like you don't really think about it and then one day you're like oh yeah yeah i guess i guess i could yeah yeah i know what you mean That's not to say I was confused about her gender identity, but that because I found her unattractive, my mind had neutered her and significantly reduced her as a human being

okay well

me and you were trying to give him the benefit of

that's not what i meant and then he literally says uh my mind had significantly reduced her as a human being

dude he shoots from the hip sometimes all right

sometimes sometimes the the he goes his own way so to speak yeah big my boy's on the MGTOW for sure.

He loves being shirtless and smoking cigars on podcasts.

I was going to say, I fucking, I love this story, by the way.

I love it.

This is like a top five for me.

It's so good.

If it bombs out, I legitimately have not had this much fun reading a story in a long time.

I've been so immersed to it.

I feel like I've just been a little quiet little girl in the back of the classroom, dude.

Oh, when's it my turn for popcorn reading?

Popcorn.

Oh, fuck.

Where are we?

That was me every time.

I fucking hated that.

What's funny is, too, I was like, I was like the super, like,

um,

annoyingly studious kid.

So I'd always be like, yes, my turn.

I know exactly where we are.

I don't need to ask.

Yes, actually, you don't have to ask me because I know exactly where I am.

Ms.

Tamlin, I know exactly where we're at.

Mrs.

Tamlin.

Yes, exactly.

I know exactly where we're at, Ms.

Tamlin.

I'm just like, okay, cool.

Isaac.

And in time.

I'm ready.

I'm ready.

Just tell me.

Yeah, anytime.

Just literally tell me anytime and I'll be ready.

I love you, Ms.

Tamlin.

Yeah, whatever.

I wonder if do you think we would have gotten along in high school?

Well, also, God, you're so much younger than me.

Probably not, dude.

I'd be like, who the fuck is this young?

Well, I hope we wouldn't get along if you were like 22 and I was like in the sixth grade.

Come on.

That is so funny to imagine that you were like literally child predator age compared to me.

How old are you again?

I'm 25.

Okay, and I'm 46.

So we're

deeply, deeply different age.

21 years older than me.

I don't know because it depends on the age.

If we were in high school, I think we would have got along.

If we were in middle school, I don't think so because I was so socially awkward.

And like, where I was like raised super religious, I was like kind of afraid of like kids that listen to like heavy metal and stuff like that.

I feel like that would be prime like you've bullied me age, but if it was like later high school, I think we would have got along.

Cool, dude.

You know what?

No, I would have called the police because I would have been like, this guy is definitely

a shooter.

This guy is trying to talk to me.

Help.

Someone help.

Literally, that would be me.

That's what I sounded like.

That's how the call would have been.

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

Someone helped.

Exactly like that.

Yes, correct.

I agree.

Carrie started to cry.

Oh, this is brutal.

She started to cry, dude.

Happens.

Oh, man.

Carrie started to cry and I leaned over to give her a hug.

She let a few hushed sobs out into my throat.

She's sweating her broad back.

Come on.

As I patted her broad back.

Okay, maybe I've been a little too generous.

Her broad back.

I have not heard anyone.

Have you ever seen the movie Blindside?

Just like that, kid.

That's what he's describing.

Like, God damn, dude.

Come on.

What?

At some point, she stopped crying.

It took me a second to notice, but what I thought was her taking a shuddering breath, or maybe just a tear-covered cheek sliding over my skin, was actually Carrie kissing my neck.

Oh,

here we go.

Come on, get on in the middle.

Look, I'm so conflicted right now because it's going between my interpretation of Carrie versus what the author wants me to think.

I don't know where I'm at.

Let me give you a hickey.

Come on.

You know what?

And if she looked like my wife, if she wasn't, as the story was trying to describe her, if she was like the, dare I bring it up, the Jacobi that's in my mind right now it'd be great it'd be awesome but i feel like the author is just sueding this as a bad thing

i think he's just funny i think i think he's surprised i think that he's gonna fall for carrie dude come on we have to have hope for carrie yeah i agree i hope the story ends and it's like me and carrie are married now we have like three children god of course you would say that

why what what do you mean of course i would say that's funny you're like i hope they get married at the end like dude come on they're obviously not gonna get fucking married at the end that's it with that attitude sure of course you would say that like of course i'm the guy who wants a happy ending with two characters he likes yeah what a jerk move of me to pull yeah what a horrible idea i wanted to leap into the back seat to lurch away from carry and retreat into the furthest recess of ecto one I wanted to throw open my door, sprint to the nearest house, and demand that its occupants permit to shower.

Oh my God.

Bro.

It's not that that i couldn't dude damn he are

exaggerating it literally cannot be that bad he is over exaggerating yeah yes but i couldn't do that as it's funny it's funny

that

now now my brain's going the opposite way like i made the jokes about her being six foot goth and all that stuff now in my head she's like the uh she's like comedically beautiful like she's like stereotypical like goth girl and he's like and she's like trying to kiss his neck and he's like i've got a shower i've got to

be disgusting

I gotta get out of here.

I gotta, you gotta let me leave.

She's like, no one's keeping here.

You gotta let me leave, girl.

Come on.

And she's just like, she's like a dream boat in like fish nets and like tall boots.

And he's just like, this is the most disgusted I've ever been.

I've never, I've never been more disgusted in my entire life, Carrie, I'll be completely honest.

Gary, I'll be completely honest.

I've never been more disgusted before in my entire life.

As revolted as I was that my actions at attitudes had been so wildly misconstrued carrie was still my friend and she was vulnerable and she didn't deserve that i like has to talk himself into not being openly revolted

he's like thrown up in his mouth

hold it together oh god

i froze hoping she'd realize i wasn't reciprocating the nuzzling and kissing continued I guess she didn't, or maybe she didn't realize that this was a red flag.

We never spoke about what happened in Greenfield, but either way, she needed a clear stop sign.

I put my hands on her shoulders and gently pushed myself away from her.

Yeah.

Thank you.

She got the message.

I just, I don't know.

I don't think if you like that.

I had trouble spitting in doubt.

She nodded.

We're friends.

Uh-huh.

Sorry, I was trying to wrap that around my head.

We're friends, Jerk.

You're such a jerk.

I feel bad.

Dude, honestly, I'm not.

Scary Carrie is dynamo.

All right.

It's unfortunate what's happening.

All right.

It is unfortunate.

You earlier referred to her by cow noises.

There you are.

Come on, man.

Don't do me like that in front of Carrie.

Normally people have like an angel, a devil on their shoulder.

I think you're the devil, and every now and then I show up on your shoulder.

And I'm

like that.

Like that.

There you are.

There you go.

that's what I like that's what I like to think I do

you just mood yourself to be a good person is that what you're saying

the trip home was one of the longest car rides of my life Carrie never turned on the radio the only words out of my mouth were the turns I called off on our map quest directions

I felt shallow.

I think we both knew that I'd only said we're friends to soften the blow.

I wouldn't have dismissed the affections of any of my other female friends so readily.

Even Christy McDowell, whom I've been friends with since the third grade, I would never have pushed away like that.

Damn.

I mean, think about it.

Think about it.

I am surprised.

Honestly, I'm surprised by that.

Think about it.

What are you surprised by?

Well, just that, like, he's like,

literally anyone else, I wouldn't have pushed away from.

I thought the whole thing was that they're on, like, they're doing, like, they're snooping around.

They're investigating, right?

No, no, no.

What do you say?

Okay, Hunter, put yourself in his shoes.

If you were 15

and a girl started kissing your neck and touching you,

how rough would it have to be for you to go, um, no thanks?

I don't think I would.

I don't think I would.

Exactly.

Exactly.

That's, I can't, I can't.

I refuse to.

I could not think of a single woman I knew.

I don't give a fuck.

She could sit there.

She could be seven feet taller than me.

She's like, pick me up like I'm a little baby.

I'm like, uh-oh.

I'm like,

that's what I'd say to her.

See,

I would love that.

She'd start kissing my neck.

I'd say, get out of the car.

We'd stay out of the car.

I'm like, uppies.

I never picked me up.

I do one of these.

Uppies.

She's like, you come here.

Look, I'm like that right now.

I'm married.

So with regards, if my wife is 13 feet tall, I'd be like, uh-oh, I need, I mean, Carrie.

No, I need

uppies.

I need uppies.

Uppies.

Please say thank you.

I don't know.

Please don't hold me.

Okay, anyway.

Please don't hold me.

I love that.

Please don't hold me.

Don't touch me.

Please don't hold me.

Please don't rock me gently and kiss my forehead.

No, I'm saying that like if you were 15 years old,

how bad's it got to be for you to be like, I'll pass, especially with a girl that you're already comfortable with and hanging out with.

I'm telling you.

Well, see, that's why I would have been like, well, I mean, I'm not going to rock the boat.

It's probably what I'd say.

Now, listen, the thing is, I'm just saying, it's just, it's,

it's too real.

It's what I gotta say.

It's too real.

It's like a guy just being like, fuck, dude, I felt bad.

Could have been anyone else in the world, but it had to be her.

It had to be her.

Which again, it's funnier if you imagine she's beautiful.

She just wears dark lipsticks, so he's like, ugh.

I also feel bad too.

Well, also, I'm wondering how this is going to affect, like,

I don't know.

He has

almost no one else in his life that he can turn to right now.

So I'm wondering how if this is just going to help her off the bottom of that too much.

Yeah.

Well, this is all a flashback, right?

Because he's saying that he's awkward coming to her now to tell her about the Spire in the Woods because of how this interaction went, right?

Yeah, well, I mean, there's hope.

I'm just saying.

I don't, you know, who knows?

You're dealing with a fucking crazy clock tower out in the woods, dude.

Yeah, there's serious, someone's dead.

Someone burned to death in their car.

Like, you got to get, you got to enlist Carrie's help.

Yeah, there's someone burnt to death all you you know you're sitting there you're worried about goth pussy and stuff like that come on now what are we doing

what are we doing come on man uh the following monday i made it a point to talk to carrie in class like nothing had happened she played along for a bit but then asked me for a little space frankly i was relieved to give it to her

this kid this

dude god damn dude honestly i was happy i needed some foot i need some time i'm glad she was gone i'm glad i could get her out i'm glad i could just boot her out of this situation.

I only told a couple of people about Scary Carrie kissing my neck.

DeLuca thought it was hilarious.

He wasn't the most sensitive guy in the world.

Christy was a bit more sympathetic.

She reminded me I was entitled to have my taste.

I appreciated hearing it, but I still felt like a shit.

Dude,

when I was young, can I tell you a story?

Yeah, yeah.

Go ahead.

No, never mind.

I don't want to talk.

I don't want to tell it.

No, no, you have to do it.

I don't.

Well, I want the option to at least remove this from the episode if that's the case.

Uh,

we'll see.

Go ahead.

We, uh, when I was younger, I mean, this is like, dude, sixth grade, seventh grade, long time ago.

All right.

I went on this movie date with this girl.

Big girl.

Okay.

I mean, it was a big girl.

All right.

What can I say?

We were buddies.

We were buddies in school and stuff.

I've never heard you like this telling a story.

You're like,

he's a big girl.

All right.

What can I say?

He's a big girl.

And we were on this movie date, and I had a great time.

It was awesome.

It seriously was, it was a great time.

And it was like one of those things, too, where it's like, my mom was there or whatever.

Like, we went to a movie and, you know, she was in the rough.

Yeah.

Whatever.

Yeah.

Next day, it was nice.

Next day, one of my buddies comes up to me and he's just like, hey, I heard you went on a date with so-and-so.

And I was like,

no.

And then they're like, dude,

she said that you went on a date with her.

And I was like, yeah, I mean, like, I bet because she begged me to.

And it was,

I know, it was horrible.

I felt so bad.

I was in sixth grade.

Come on, man.

I was in sixth grade.

But I'm just saying, I feel that's why I'm like, right now, I feel like I'm like, so I have all these visual reactions because I'm like, man,

it's too real.

It's too real.

You're sitting a little too close to home.

You've been there.

You've been in that seat.

Well, and also,

it shows how fucking cruel kids are.

They are.

Kids are cruel.

And there's also the fact that when you are like that age, you don't have as much empathy.

You're not thinking about how the other person feels.

Of course.

You're constantly afraid of your social standing.

And it was horrible because my friend immediately went up to her and then she came up to me.

She's like, why are you telling people that this is all?

I know.

And I was like, what are you talking about?

And like, we like never talked.

I felt so bad.

Oh, that's so sad.

But at the same time, like, you know, you're a young guy.

You're just thinking about how other people perceive you.

You're not thinking about her.

I think that now.

Do the boys are thinking.

Do the boys are thinking about what the boys are thinking.

That's what's going through your head.

Are the boys happy with me?

That's what I'm saying.

And the fact that you're regretful and understand it now, like, obviously the story doesn't speak negatively of your character or anything.

That's just how kids are.

Which goes to further prove, like you said, that this story is accurate in the way it's describing like a 16-year-old thinking about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, I think that's fine.

I think the fact that, now, if you were talking about it now and you were like, there was a lot of things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'm not married.

I'm just like, so, oh, yeah i went on a date with this girl last week

come on dude it'd be like okay hunter let's not

come on we're gonna we need to cut that one out but you were in the sixth grade

yeah exactly i'd set out to make carrie feel better about herself and i'd done nothing of the kind and i never thought of myself as the sort of guy who judged a girl based on her looks but apparently i was

Alina didn't return to school for a whole week after our last conversation.

She told everyone who'd asked that she'd had the flu, but later confessed to me that she couldn't take being surrounded by people.

Too noisy, too overwhelming.

Too many eyes staring at her.

She needed to be alone.

I didn't see her at lunch that day, or ever again.

The anxiety she felt being surrounded by people was at its worst when she was trying to eat, so her parents arranged for her to eat in her guidance counselor's office.

When I found out, I knew it was good for Alina, but I couldn't help but feel like my days would be a little drearier without being able to see her across the cafeteria.

Her wild hair, that smirk, if it ever returned.

And that was to say nothing of the wonder that years of tracking cross-country had done for her legs.

Do you think...

Now, here's the thing, too.

Do you think that our main character is kind of falling into the same tropes as Rob?

I actually hadn't thought about that yet, but there is a little bit of the purge of him though.

The amount of time she's talking about it, he's really sinking into it to where I wonder if she's going to start perceiving him as like a Rob character and if he's going to get, you know, upset as well.

You know, I don't know.

It's some, I just feel like that connection, it feels too similar.

You know what I mean?

That's a good point.

I hadn't thought of that before.

I will say it's different because Rob like confessed his love to her several times and she kept saying well, bro, we haven't been there yet.

You know what I'm saying?

That's true.

That's true.

He could.

I'm just saying.

It could be the same track.

It could be the same.

That's all I'm saying.

That'd be an interesting similarity, especially considering how our author kind of views Rob as like a spectacle almost, like like everything that happened to him.

Whereas he could be

a confidant right now, but how easily can that change?

And I think that the answer is extremely.

Yeah, that's a good point.

I can see that.

I finally caught up with her on Friday morning.

She was at her locker.

To cut down on the amount of time she had to spend jam between chatty classmates, Alina had taken to cramming every book and binders she'd need until lunch into her backpack.

She looked like a freshman.

Hey, Alina.

She didn't look up.

Oh, hey.

I dropped down next to where she was crouching and lowered my voice.

I spoke with Fletch.

Alina froze.

I couldn't tell if she was nervous or excited.

She took a couple of deep breaths as she turned towards me.

Did you see it?

Yeah.

Basically, it said the same thing as yours.

She deflated, but I continued.

But then he told me what happened.

You gonna be at lunch?

She bit her lower lip as she considered for a second.

No.

Oh, well, we could.

What do you have last period?

Just Jim.

Can you skip it?

I never cut glass in my life.

Absolutely.

See, I'm telling you, he's a little dirty dog.

He is.

He is.

But it's like you said, it's realistic.

He's constantly thinking about girls and he's thinking about his standing and stuff like that.

This feels like a.

Okay.

So I see now why people like Spielberg were attached to like the adaptation and stuff like that, or probably still are.

This is such a great coming-of-age story so far.

With like how

this is so high school, one thing that it's done differently from other creepypastas, and correct me if you think I'm wrong, I just feel like the slow burn aspect of like the setup and the character dynamics are extremely strong.

Like

it feels ridiculously strong versus one feels so well built out.

Yes, not that Baraska didn't have that, but I just feel like they really, they kind of like, I feel like whenever it was telling the story, it really needed this emphasis of like needing to give you a punch like every once in a while.

This story is just like so slowly unveiling itself.

And it's like, I mean, we, we just spent that long talking about like an awkward interaction he had with Carrie, right?

Just like a side character.

And it was interesting.

It didn't go like the story dragged or pulled anywhere.

It was like, it felt relevant.

Even if it was just set dressing, it felt important to know all of that.

Yeah.

This is such a, it's very expertly written.

I love all the characters.

I love the direction.

This is great.

This is awesome

this is like i if it if the rest of it sucks it's already top five like even with what it's built right well here's what here's my suggestion so into part three we're going into part four i think that

i don't know i hate to say like i think that in the the reveal of the story when we start getting into the thick of it because here's the thing too usually when we're reading these stories there's ooh creepy moments There's a lot of like, you know, atmosphere and stuff where you're like, oh shit, that, you know, I've kind of, you kind of like get on your toes a bit this is taking so long to where i'm thinking that the reveal is going to be so it's going to be hook line and sinker is what i thought if it if it pulls off a good scary reveal this is going to be an all-timer i mean so far out of all things we've read this is by far one of the most enjoyable so far yes yeah yeah this is stellar i'm in love

i'm in love i'm jin love

i'm jin love part four all right part four i didn't have any classes with fletch and rarely saw him in the halls but i had two classes with drew deluca and he had lunch the same period as Fletch, so I had him pass along that I wouldn't need a ride.

When 6 period let out, I made my way over to the parking lot where Alina was waiting for me next to her blue 98 Beetle.

We got in and blasted the heat.

Unlike Fletch's ancient Civic, Alina's Beetle actually warmed up pretty quick.

Everything but the silence was comfortable.

Do you...

Do you want to get it right into it?

Alina looked at me out of the corner of her eyes.

They were so blue.

She shook her head.

Not while I'm driving.

We rode in silence until we pulled up in front of a good-sized colonial house.

Is this okay?

Oh yeah.

Yeah, sure.

I just...

I don't want to talk about it in public.

It's totally fine.

Alina looked relieved as she hit the garage door opener.

It was like she thought bringing me over to her house was really putting me out.

Getting out of the car, I noticed the garage was otherwise empty.

We were alone.

Abby, an aging golden retriever that the Aminevs apparently didn't kennel, greeted us with her tail wagging and her leash in her mouth.

I have to take her out.

Make yourself at home.

Just being inside Alina's house felt so intimate.

Identity is everything to a teenager, and to bring someone else into your home was to expose a part of you that was beyond your control.

It was laying bare the environment that had produced you.

When I had first entered Fletch's house, his discomfort was evident.

His house was just a place he passed through to get to his room.

For scary Carrie, her house was a source of shame.

Mrs.

Peterson's small, ill-kept home was a constant reminder to Carrie, not just of her parents' failed marriage, but of her mother's lack of achievement, lack of education.

They were both stuck there, in a house that smelled of deli meats and the water that feta cheese is packed in.

Ew.

I know, right?

Isn't that fucking gross?

You know why I don't like that too?

It's because I know that it's definitely, it's packed in, but there's like the, it's just the juicy, wet layer that's a water that's left i fucking hate the water in the pull it out yeah i hate that dude

a smell that started in mrs peterson's work clothes but now infused everything they owned i entered alina's house with the same reverence i would a church it had a feeling to it that put you in the mood to sip hot chocolate and watch the snowfall There were candles and tea lights on the tables and holiday themed knickknacks on the walls.

The piny scent of a Christmas tree filled the air, and as I collapsed onto their overstuffed couch, it occurred to me that, for the first time all day, I felt relaxed.

After she returned, Alina led me downstairs into the game room, a finished basement dominated by a full-size pool table.

She offered me a soda from the mini fridge behind the wet bar, then we sat down on a love seat in front of the big screen TV.

Alina stared at me while I spoke.

I stared back.

It was impossible to look anywhere else.

I recounted the story Fletch had told me, as faithfully faithfully as I could.

All the while I was very conscious of where her legs were in relation to mine.

They tugged at me as if they had gravity.

That is the most teenage boy thing ever let me know.

I know.

What if I cross my legs this way and our ankles touch a little bit?

What if like I guess we're barely touched, so we're kind of like in love.

Yeah, oh, oh, she threw her arm back and like my wrist touched like a little bit below her elbow.

So we kind of

an item now.

We're basically dating.

We're basically dating.

I were, she's having my kid next month.

Yes.

I'm 16.

I'm 16.

Yes.

I will never financially recover from this

shit.

She seemed fine the whole time I talked, but the moment I was done, she began gasping for air like she'd been holding her breath.

Then the sobbing started.

I was quick to close the gap between us.

I held her for several minutes while her slender frame shook and quivered.

When she regained her composure, she slowly withdrew to her end of the love seat.

Oh god.

I'm sorry,

she said, wiping her eyes with her sleeve.

Don't be.

Such a mess.

I feel ashamed when I'm happy and like a victim when I'm ashamed.

It takes everything I've got to keep it together.

It's exhausting.

Have you talked to anyone?

Seen a.

you know.

Yeah, but she won't give me anything.

That's not a bad thing.

So you don't believe any of it?

Her right leg began bouncing up and down on the ball of her foot.

I thought you were

Mr.

Ghost Hunter.

I scoffed.

The corner of her mouth twitched as if she were about to smile, and for a fleeting second, I felt connected to her.

To the old Alina.

I didn't run around telling everyone I met why I cared so much about ghost stories.

I didn't wear anything that personal on my sleeve.

But I told Alina.

She listened and nodded and understood me.

She nodded.

Why does it matter to you if the widower's clock is real?

I need them to be wrong about me.

The people who stare at me in the halls blame me.

Like Fletch and John Murphy.

Fletch is just hurting.

He doesn't blame you, not really.

Yes, he does.

Everybody does.

All they get are these little snippets about how much Rob loved me.

I've heard them all talk about it.

they say i thought i was better than him because i live in a big house or because he wasn't a jock or because he was nerdy he loved me and i was the for rejecting him lena pulled her legs up to chest and hugged her knees i remember being struck by how much she looked like a little girl it seemed strange at the time but in hindsight at scarcely 17 lena practically was a little girl The kid realizing for the first time that her classmates felt entitled to opinions about what she did with her body and affections.

I wanted to tell her that it wasn't true, that no one really believed she was a snob about money or shallow or a bitch.

I wanted to, but I'd also heard the whispers.

The truth is,

the only thing I really know about him is that he made me uncomfortable.

I moved beside her and put my arm around her shoulder.

I could feel how tense she was as she stared straight ahead.

It's not your fault.

Her hair smelled like vanilla.

God damn it, this guy.

Calm down.

This fucking horn dog.

I know.

He's like, I touched her ankles.

Her, yo, her fucking

hair smells like Oreos.

It's awesome.

He's every time she's like crying, talking about like, and it's my body.

And I just feel like everyone else looks down on me because I've wanted to do with myself what I saw fit.

I didn't owe him anything.

And our author's like, her shaved legs.

Which is actually

kind of like well-ridden in that sense.

Like, as she is, like, we see it through, like, haha, he's like a young horn dog or whatever.

Like, put her there, bro.

Totally me.

But as she's talking about, like, how she doesn't feel like she has an agency to her own decisions because everyone's judging her based on something that really wasn't in her control and she reacted normally with, the guy is still, like, oogling her.

Well, yeah.

She's still being, she's still being idolized by another person.

She's still being

fawned after.

In a way, too, which makes our protagonist, it doesn't even seem like he's really, he's really truly listening to what she's saying.

You know what I mean?

No, no, because anytime she says something, he's like,

her legs had a gravity.

I was constantly aware of my distance from them.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is, it's, it's interesting to write that way.

And it's also not like our protagonist is evil because, again, this is like

he's a 16-year-old boy.

Yeah, yeah.

Alina, look at me.

She looked so full of uncertainty.

Scared.

I put my other hand hand on her wrist.

I'm gonna go down there to the quabbin.

She grabbed me by the shoulder and held me like I might fall.

It's okay.

I couldn't help smiling at her concern.

God damn, dude.

Come on now.

I won't go in.

We're just going to listen for the bells.

She studied my face.

We were only inches apart.

My heart was racing.

Besides, I said as I leaned in, I want to.

And I kissed her.

Yeah,

there there you go.

There you go.

Jesus Lazy Do.

There he is.

I'm going to go listen.

I'm going to go listen to the ethereal Lovecraftian bells that call out

from the time now passed.

Listen, babe, I plan on going to...

I play.

I plan on going to listen to bells only after Samooch.

Come on.

Just a kiss.

Average 16-year-old when confronted by a single Eastern European woman.

Her lips were slow to respond.

Doubts raced through me.

Was she surprised?

Was this a rejection?

Had I crossed a line?

I felt like Scary Carrie must have back in Greenfield.

But Alina didn't withdraw.

Maybe it had nothing to do with me.

Maybe it was just survivor's guilt.

Oh, that, oh,

I don't like the wording on that one.

Maybe it was just survivor's guilt.

That's rough.

After a very long couple of seconds, Alina kissed me back.

My brain went fuzzy.

I almost had to stop.

It's tough to kiss with a grin.

Damn, dude.

This guy's a player.

This guy needs to get beat up at least once.

It'll be good for him.

It'll just humble him a bit.

Dude, he's stoked.

He's happy.

Can a man not be happy?

Yeah.

I guess, I guess.

I was kissing Alina Aminev.

I slipped my fingers through her wild hair.

Alina, who ran track.

I could feel my leg pressed against hers.

Alina, who smelled like vanilla and smirked when she used to smile.

I tried to press my leg between hers, but she- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,

hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

Tried to press my leg between hers, but she kept her legs closed.

And that was fine.

I was just happy to be kissing her.

This reads like, you ever watch the show Peep Show?

No, I haven't.

It's this British comedy show.

It's like one of my favorite comedies ever.

There's a guy named Mark in that.

If any of you know what I'm talking about, this feels very mark-coated.

Anyways, go ahead.

We spent the next few minutes on that love seat.

It wasn't the sort of first kiss you imagine.

I was nervous and she was still.

At the time, I remember thinking it was more intimate than passionate, but that made sense to me.

She wasn't in a real good place.

Being with her was going to be like building a house of cards.

It'd take a slow hand and the slightest misstep could bring her crumbling down.

She wanted to drive me home before her parents returned from work.

As we were getting our coats on, I said, let's see a movie.

She didn't answer immediately.

I thought for a second she hadn't heard me.

I can't.

I can't.

I kissed her and asked again.

This man's an animal.

But it...

I mean, again, this is very like 16-year-old coded.

To be like, oh, I can do that now?

Well, guess what I'm going to do all the time?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I kissed her and asked again, but it didn't help.

What if someone sees us?

I wanted people to see us.

I didn't care what people thought about her.

I didn't even give a rat's ass what Fletch thought about her.

Please don't tell him.

Don't tell anybody.

I can't handle how they'd look at me.

She broke down.

I held her.

As I lay in bed that night, I found myself fantasizing about Alina.

It wasn't sexual.

Hell, it wasn't even about the kiss.

It was about the most mundane things.

Spooning her while we watched TV, holding her hand while we walked down the hallways at school, having little arguments over who'd sit at whose lunch table.

This is.

God, dude, I'm cringing to death.

It's too real.

It's too real.

I want to die.

This is the most high school.

I want to fucking die.

I am almost positive that when I was like 15, 14, like this was the exact kind of thoughts I was having about girls I liked.

Brutal.

Oh, it's rough.

It's rough that this this author was a 16-year-old boy and very clearly remembers what it was like because I'm getting flashbacks where he's talking about this stuff.

That's when I resolved that I had to find the spire in the woods.

Right in the middle of fantasy Alina apologizing for not wanting to sit with my friends and telling fantasy me that I was the most important thing in the world to her.

I had to find it for Alina.

To get her out from under some of the guilt she held on her shoulders.

And was it really so crazy to think there might be some truth truth to it?

Even if I was skeptical of the connection to the widower's clock, couldn't Robert Edward Kinnan have followed the sound of bells?

Couldn't he have discovered a spire sticking out of the ground?

Dude, you know, he goes from like, this is fake, to being like, well, for Alina, could it be so frivolous?

Well, I like being true.

What I like about this is that

we've been delving in the serious mode for so long that now

our boy is like, listen,

I'm going to find this shit because he's going to justify that finding the spire in the woods is going to give her,

it's going to give him the green light to be like, we can be a public couple.

It's what he's saying.

That's what that's, that's what I think is happening.

That's what he's thinking.

He's like, well, if I can find it, I'll be like the knight who slayed the dragon.

Yeah, which is awesome.

Which is awesome.

I mean, the most dangerous, foolhardy things men have ever done in history have been for God and women.

That is the only two things we've ever built altars for.

Hey,

and Pokemon cards.

Am I right, boys?

Sure.

Sure, buddy.

You know what?

That's something that I definitively will say was not for women.

Yeah, with Pokemon cards.

Sorry, ladies.

Step aside.

I got to open up my Pokemon Evolutions pack.

Just a rock hard boner while you're standing in Target.

Oh, you impressed?

Is that how you met Allison?

Yeah, I met Allison.

I was like, hello, my lady.

Just a huge, hard-on and Target thief.

The smallest cock you've ever seen protruding from basketball shorts.

Oh, you impressed?

Looks like Wilbert's tail from Charlotte's Web.

It's corkscrew.

His little corkscrew cock.

Yeah.

Maybe even found a body.

Hadn't Fletch mentioned someone had gone missing from that trailer park?

If he had found a corpse, that could have certainly pushed him over the edge.

Thoughts and a shiver up my spine.

The last couple of weeks before Christmas vacation were always filled with midterms and projects, and that year was no exception.

It was the last thing in the world either of us wanted to do, but with the group project due Monday, I had to meet Scary Carrie at the library.

We were bullshitting while I busted my rear in looking for sources for our presentation on Rob's Pierre.

I had practically carried Carrie through the first half of European history when I told her that I had changed my mind.

I wanted to visit the Quabin.

Carrie was thrilled.

Where do you want to go?

There you go again.

There you go again with that voice.

I don't know.

Sometime over break, I guess.

We should try to figure out everything about them.

Who?

The clock micron is wife.

Sure, Carrie, just don't hit me.

That would be great if the story takes that direction.

Like, she just starts punching him.

Okay, so I don't want to keep derailing, but I will say, is it not setting it up that she is going to find out about Alina?

There is going to be some kind of conflict when they're both there to where she's going to like run off or like, dare I say, even leave him or he leaves her?

100% will be a problem.

Yes.

Yeah, absolutely.

And also, it's like.

The only reason he now wants to do this is for Alina.

Yeah, dude.

Right.

Cause he.

Hey, Carrie wanted to do it from the beginning, and he's like, it's probably fake.

But now he's like, listen, dude.

Listen, dude.

Pussy blinds a man.

All right.

Oh,

the places I've gone.

The places I've gone.

I just like to imagine you're just like floating through like a portal, like, ah,

like, like, spinning, like, in circles.

Just the stupid decision, looking back in hindsight, being like, why on God's earth was I there?

Why, what was I doing?

Yeah.

What did I think was going to happen?

What kind of.

That was not a tactical decision at all?

That was not a tactical decision.

Well, that backfired.

I think back to like high school when like a girl kind of subtly implied like I should do something.

I'm like, yeah, I'll hang off the side of this boulder above like a 400-foot draft.

Why not?

Or like jumping over that ridge like that?

Like, of course.

Places I wouldn't have gone with a gun.

You would have a gun.

Break into my grandpa's house and steal his gold.

Anything for you, Rebecca.

You have like a dungeon eagle in your hand.

Me standing outside of a Bank of America with a rifle like,

okay,

putting on the Joker mask at the beginning of Dark Knight.

I've got a suicide mess on.

The crazy things I do for love.

If this makes Veronica happy,

only one of my haunted New England books told told the story of the widower's clock.

And maybe it was because I'd initially been skeptical that the story was grounded in any sort of reality.

But it honestly never occurred to me that there was anything more to know.

But if there was a clock maker, he had to have made clocks.

And if there had been a murder, there must be an obituary.

Carrie disappeared into the basement where the library kept their micro

microfiche?

Microfiche.

What is that?

Whatever.

I assume it means microfilm.

Probably.

With her gone, I was able to finish researching our paper in short order, and by the time I wandered downstairs, she found out quite a bit.

The clockmaker was a German immigrant named Adolf Reifler, born in 1857.

He was hired sometime between 1905 and 1907 to construct the clock for the custom house tower in Boston by an architect named Robert Swain Peabody.

The clock was a failure.

In an effort to show up his two brothers, who were also master clockmakers, Reifler attempted to miniaturize several of the motor's components.

While the clock ran, it failed to keep accurate time.

The clock was referred to by some as Adolph's Folly, till the mid-1930s, when Hitler's infamy outstripped Reifler's.

The bride was Robert Swain Peabody's niece, Amy Lowell Putnam, born 1892.

She was just 16 when she married Reifler, who was by that time 51 years old.

I suppose the age difference wasn't that unusual in those times, but back in 1999, when Alina was 17, the idea of her with the man in his 50s made my skin crawl.

That is so funny that he hears a story about a girl who was 16 married a 51-year-old, and he's like, oh, that's almost like Alina.

Don't you dare touch her.

Don't you touch her beautiful vanilla cupcake.

Don't, if I see my grandpa come towards my Russian flower, sweet kitten, I'll fucking kill him.

My Russian vanilla come quat.

I ain't nobody going to get near her.

It also made me regard Amy Lowell Putnam with more sympathy.

Imagine being married off at 16 to a man more than three times your age.

Imagine 20 years of marriage to that man.

Waking up to find yourself in your mid-30s, still in the heart of your sexual prime, with a husband in his 70s.

Of course, she was attracted to other men.

Couldn't find any obituary for Amy Lowell Putnam, nor for Amy Lowell Rifler, nor for Amy Putnam Rifler.

Scary Carey took it as a sign that the Putnams, Lowells, or Peabody's, all powerful families, had covered up the scandalous manner in which Amy Lowell had died.

I, on the other hand, chalked it up to the micro film being a bitch to work with.

What we did find of interest, though, was a picture of Enfield in 1938.

It depicted a large hill with most of its trees cut down, a tractor pushing aside some debris, and a lone man standing with his back to a large colonial building.

The large colonial was the only one still standing, and it had a little tower.

We couldn't tell whether or not it had a clock.

The old microfilm view screens didn't exactly have great resolution, but based on its proximity to the hill, it was easy to see how the loose soil could have enveloped it, or another building very much like it.

when the flood waters came pouring through, leaving just a spire peeking out above the earth.

We only found one more reference to Adolph Riefler, an obituary published by the Boston Globe in 1941.

I wish I could remember the date.

It mentioned that he was wanted for questioning in regards to a disappearance, but that was all.

Reiffler had died in Munich.

The cause of death was omitted, but at 84, it was probably just old age.

Riefler must have fled the country sometime in the mid-30s, at a time when the Germany he returned to must have been very different from the Germany he had originally left.

I don't know why, but somehow knowing these historical details made the story of the Widower's Clock so much more plausible.

It was no longer a story of a man with an unfaithful wife, the characters defined by nothing more than their relationship to one another.

It started to become the story of two people.

Amy Lowell Putnam, restless and starved for marital attention, shackled to an old man incapable of giving her what she needed, and proud Adolph Reifler, obsessed with proving himself after his failure designing the clock for Customs House Tower, too busy and too old to see that his young wife was up to.

Since her mom had the car that day, when we got hungry, Carrie and I had to choose between waiting for my mom to pick us up or hoofing it down to the hometown omitted house of pizza to grab a bite.

Despite the cold, we opted for the latter.

Settling into a booth, a hot slice in front of both of us, things between Carrie and me felt right again for the first time since our trip to Greenfield.

We quickly fell into discussing the plans for our trip.

We should head out early.

Nah, the quadmin's too big.

Just as the words left my mouth, Fletch plopped down right next to me, his friend Murph lingering behind him.

Hey, I didn't see you guys come in.

How long you been here?

I didn't know what I felt exactly.

Embarrassment?

shame?

But even though...

This guy's a jerk, dude.

Well, I thought he was going to be pissed up.

Well, I thought he was going to not like Fletch now because he's like, you talk shit on my girl.

I thought it was a bitch.

No, no, no, no.

No, you...

Because the last time he talked to Fletch was when Fletch let him see the letter.

Right.

And the two of them had like that whole like heart to heart about it.

So they're fine, but it's his embarrassment about being seen.

Not even in a dating sense, just seen.

Oh, you think it's still with her?

Oh, okay.

Yeah, that's what he's talking about.

Embarrassment, shame.

Yeah, yeah.

But even though there was nothing in Fletch's face to indicate that he'd heard me, I got the feeling you get when your parents tell you, we're not mad, we're just disappointed.

And this also coming off the back of immediately seeing a girl who has all this trauma about a guy who she is blamed for the death of.

And he's like, oh, her smooth legs.

I kissed her.

I kissed her twice.

I want to go.

I kissed her multiple times.

And then immediately after, he's like, oh, my Fletch sees me with this.

Listen, buddy.

The times are tough, Fletch.

Fletch, listen.

You know I'm not that guy, man.

Come on.

Fletch, have you seen the stock market lately, Fletch?

There's no time for this.

It's do or die, Fletch.

It's do or die, Fletch.

Come on, Fletch.

Come on.

Throw me a bone, Fletch.

I'd been so wrapped up in the fun of going on a ghost hunt and clicking with Scary Carrie again that I lost sight of the fact that Rob Kinnon had killed himself.

I'd forgotten that the only reason I knew about the Spire in the woods was because of his suicide notes and had actually been happy about the whole thing, while two guys who had lost a good friend, quite possibly because of the spire, were sitting right behind me.

Bruh.

I don't know.

A bit.

You want to ride helm?

I can take both of you.

I really didn't.

Sure.

Carrie said.

Carrie said.

I love that.

I love that tack in at the end.

Carrie said.

So sad.

So sad.

Because I have to say,

there's two men and a woman speaking, but I have to clarify for the audience that you are speaking of the female equation.

All right, you twisted my leg.

Fine.

Hell yeah, let's do it.

Get out of here.

Now she is neither ugly nor beautiful in my mind.

Now she is like

What is the that Sam Elliott.

It's like Sam Elliott on the other side.

Marlboro man.

Marlboro.

Come on, dude.

Yeah.

Murph had just found out that he'd been accepted via early admission to UMass Amherst.

Topic scary Carrie found intriguing.

Like many unhappy high school students, Carrie hung a lot of her hope on the idea that her life would get better in college.

She knew she didn't have the grades to get into a top-tier school.

Hell, she knew that UMass Amherst was a real reach, but she had hoped to get into UMass Lowell and transfer after a year or two.

Of course, Murph hadn't thought he'd be accepted either.

Definitely apply early.

Shows him you're serious.

And see if you can get a reference from someone who went there.

The list where all the teachers went to school in the yearbook each year.

Like half of them went to UMass.

Carrie was hanging off Murph's every word, but I wasn't paying much attention to what he was saying.

I was too busy hoping against hope that after we dropped Carrie off, Fletch would announce he wanted to hang out with Murph some more and as such, would have to drop me off next.

That didn't happen and we were soon alone together in the car.

The second the door closed behind Murph, Fletch dropped his mask, and I knew that he heard me.

You're going to Quabin?

After what I told you?

You're going to the Quabin?

Yeah.

Hold on.

I think you should read that.

I'm just making sure.

I was just making sure.

Are you fucking retarded?

All right, just making sure.

Like,

you know, I'm just trying to hold the piece here, boys.

You're not saying it.

The character in the story is so

dude come on

you you have read that this woman carries fat and you yourself made moo noises earlier so i i think this is the least

come on man

you know what what what are you trying to do to me here

fletch was a pretty big guy that coupled with the hurt and anger in his voice intimidated me into silence We drove on, listening to nothing but the heater struggling in vain to dispel the cold.

After a few miles, I found myself resenting Flesh.

Who was he to speak to me like that?

And why should I feel guilty for his sake?

He had lost a friend and he had my sympathy, but that didn't entitle him to treat me like garbage.

What'd you tell me for?

Fletch didn't answer my question.

He just kept driving.

Huh?

Why'd you tell me about it if you didn't want me to look into it?

Fletch tightened his grip on the steering wheel and ground his teeth together as if he were literally chewing over the question.

We were in our neighborhood before he finally answered.

Who else could I tell?

Did you know the school's been contacting parents of everyone who goes to the special counseling sessions?

They're reporting any early warning signs they see in the sessions.

You think I want my parents making me see somebody or sticking me on meds?

I can't go there with a fucking ghost story.

Fletch's anger had left him.

By the time we pulled into the driveway, he looked deflated.

I thought you'd believe me.

Or could disprove it or shit.

I mean, I don't know.

It seemed like both Fletch and Alina were looking to me to absolve their sins.

Alina wanted me to prove that Rob had found a spire sticking up from the ground in the middle of the woods, and it was the reason he'd taken his own life.

Fletch wanted me to tell him it was just a ghost story.

I honestly couldn't say what I believed, but I had to know.

I haven't even told Murph.

I just couldn't handle it if he blamed me for letting Rob go on his own.

What would you have done if you'd been with him?

I don't know.

Fletch wouldn't look me in the eyes.

At least he wouldn't have been alone.

Well,

you don't have to worry about us.

We just want to try to hear the bells.

It's not like we're going to swim out there or anything.

Yeah, I know.

I'm not going to let you.

I had no idea how Fletch intended to stop us.

It's not like we needed his permission to visit a public park, and I told him as much.

Fletch looked at me like I was an idiot.

If you're going, so am I.

I didn't argue.

If he felt guilty for letting Rob go looking for the spire in the woods alone, maybe being there with Carrie and me would help him get over it.

As Fletch backed out of the driveway, I realized there was another reason I didn't protest.

Scary Carrie.

Yes, things that day had felt normal again between us, but I was still gun-shy about spending that much time alone with her, especially on the shore of a moonlit lake.

And as an added bonus, now we didn't have to worry about getting Ecto-1 for the night.

Alina kept her distance at school, especially after I attempted to steal a kiss from her the Wednesday before winter break.

I had left class to use the bathroom and bumped into her on my way back.

There were these moments, a few minutes here and there, where she seemed like nothing was wrong, where her smile and her laughter would come easily.

Walking her back to class that day was one of those moments.

The corridor was nearly deserted.

Just before we reached the door to her classroom, I stopped her.

I slid one hand around her, bro, in school, yeah, man.

He's trying to, hey, listen, he wants to hold her hand.

Were you one of those people to do kiss girls in school?

I never did it.

I never did it in school.

That was way too weird.

That was way too strange.

I had,

I can't say some of them on the podcast, but I had some awful stories of guys and girls just middle, like 2 p.m., middle of economics class.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, damn.

Awful, awful times.

Just before we reached the door to her classroom, I stopped her.

I slid one hand around her slender waist and slipped the other through her hair towards her neck.

I leaned in to kiss her and she withdrew from me from my touch as if I was on fire.

Yeah, man, you're going like, you're going to 11 on the way back from class.

And just like that, the old Alina was gone and the broken one was left in her place.

Stood there apologizing to each other, her reassuring me that I had nothing to apologize for, me doing the same, before she finally backed into her classroom and shut the door.

I was thankful Thursday was our last day.

Winterbreak couldn't arrive soon enough.

By the way, this is the classic rom-com dynamic of like the guy is all about like, oh, the popular girl, the cheerleader, even though that's not Alina, but she's like the stand-in for that.

Meanwhile, he has a friend who's actually into him, who he doesn't see as attractive as the other girl.

Typical teen comedy setup.

Yeah.

Well, also, too, I like how he's just like,

she withdrew from me like I was on fire.

When it's like, I feel like the literal one thing she said was, hey, really don't want people think like people talking shit behind me.

You know what I mean?

And like

being all weird with it.

Yeah, I just want to keep everything out of public, especially why people see me.

This way he's like, got it.

So grab your waist in the hallway as you're walking into a class.

That's what she meant.

Exactly.

I saw Alina twice over the break.

Once before Carrie, Fletch and I went to the Quabin, and once after.

Alina's parents had a cabin at the foot of Shawnee Peak in Maine, where they usually spent New Year's Eve.

But that year, they decided to go up on the 27th and come back down on the 30th so Alina wouldn't miss her weekly therapy session.

The day after Christmas, she came over to our house for dinner.

My parents were wonderful.

I had warned them about how nervous and anxious she was likely to be.

I didn't say a word about the suicide notes or the spire in the woods, but I had told them that Rob had had a crush on her and that Alina wasn't coping well with his death.

That couldn't have been more understanding.

Ordinarily, my dad would have delighted in teasing anyone I brought home for the first time, but he refrained.

Instead, whenever there was a lull in the conversation, he teased my younger brother, who had got in for Christmas that year, among other things, a Furby, and insisted on bringing it to the dinner table.

Don't let me catch you feeding that thing after midnight.

My brother was too young to catch the reference and looked up, confused.

It's only 6.30.

Okay.

All right, you son of a bitch.

Go to your room.

I like the thing that's done.

That's what he says.

Hey, get the out of here.

I like the idea that one day, like 15 years from now, we're going to be old.

We're going to be sitting around with our kids at a dinner table and you're gonna be like don't feed that thing after midnight and your kid's gonna be like huh and you're just gonna beat you're gonna beat the brakes off you little son of a bitch

just right there no one blinks just completely normal hunter does this all the time well it's always midnight somewhere my mom for her part also resisted her natural instincts Usually, whenever someone came over to my house for the first time, she'd practically interrogate them, stopping just shy of shining a spotlight in their face.

This habit of hers had been particularly rough on scary Carrie, who my mom was briefly convinced was on drugs.

What do you mean?

I mean, that's, shut up.

That is a very like mom way to view a goth girl in the 90s.

Yeah, like, I bet she does drugs.

I bet she does weed.

Yeah, she does weed.

After dinner, my dad suggested that I show Alina the TV that I had gotten for Christmas the day before.

The TV that was in my room.

He really was a great great dad.

Now that, now that is a dad.

That's a player move.

That is a player move.

That is a player move.

Hey, son, why don't you show her that TV?

Get her up there.

Come on, son.

Come on.

Get her up.

What are we doing here?

Come on.

And as soon as you get up there, I'm going to have the staircase taken out.

I really like your family.

Alina said once the door shut behind us.

I scoffed.

Believe me, they were on their best behavior.

Drew DeLuca was a firm advocate of the idea that a a romantic movie was not the best movie to watch with a girl you wanted to get romantic with.

Yeah, it's way too on the nose.

For starters, most of them were, in his view, of very crappy movies, and the good ones ran the danger of actually holding a girl's interest.

What you wanted was a movie that was pleasant and charming, but light enough that you could miss a good chunk of it without feeling lost and needing to rewind.

The sort of movie you'd stumble across while watching TV on a Sunday afternoon, and finish even though it was already midway through.

I threw in Maverick.

Alina sat on the floor and I followed suit, but not before grabbing a couple of pillows off my bed.

Her movements were stiff as she settled down on the pillow.

I tried not to appear too eager

as I got down behind her and draped my arm over her waist.

What is he describing there?

He's like cuddling up to her.

He's like putting it, he's like, he's like, has his hand around her.

Oh, they're spooning.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, okay.

I was thinking she she is laid down, like, away from the TV, and he just, like, slides underneath her.

No slides underneath her.

I was like, what kind of a move is that?

Okay, but spooning.

Got it, got it.

As the movie started, I kept thinking about those fantasies I'd had the night.

Gosh.

Like you said, the story's too real.

As the movie started, I kept thinking about those fantasies I'd had the night after our first kiss about how pleasant it'd be just to lie next to Alina watching TV.

Just being near her and nothing more.

I was right, but actually, being beside her, my hand resting lightly against her flat stomach, I found other ideas even more enticing.

I pulled myself closer to her, savoring the fragrance that her vanilla-scented shampoo left in her wild hair.

My fingers crept slowly, almost imperceptibly, up her toned body.

Alina stopped my hand.

Do your parents ever come up here?

She whispered.

No, we're alone.

Actually, would you mind if we just watch this?

I haven't seen it before.

Oh,

no, that's cool.

Destroyed.

Decimated.

Fatality.

Fatality.

The war room right now losing their man's like, get him out of there.

It's all right.

Yeah, right, right.

We need.

Evac, evac.

See, that's why if you're ever trying to, if you're ever trying to, you know, do a little Netflix and chill, always put on a World War II documentary.

No interest in watching that shit, I'm telling you.

That was actually, so that was my move.

It was to put on a war movie or an action film that I knew for a second.

You can't actually put on Hamburger Hill.

No, no, no.

Never that.

You got to be subtle.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Nothing that's like she looks up and she sees a man holding his guts crying for his mom.

Nothing that intense.

Mom, mom.

Yeah,

nothing that, or nothing too loud either.

The trick is, you got to turn on a movie that you're like, oh, it's great.

People talk about all the time.

It's a classic, but you know, she's not going to care for it.

Like, um,

like a taken or like,

I'm trying to think of old war or like Band of Brothers or something, right?

Right.

Like, it's good, and she's heard of it, but she's going to lose interest, and she is going to be looking for anything else to do.

So

it'd be like, well,

I guess if you don't want to watch the movie, I guess it's something else.

You heard it here first, ladies.

Okay, what was your move?

What did you do?

I put on Green Mile.

The first time I was ever intimate with a woman, I'm not going to go into the grab the details.

Are you serious?

The first time I was ever intimate with a woman, it was when John Coffey was getting electrocuted.

So you're saying first time you ever

had a moment just over the shoulder.

It's like

no, it was literally, it was literally, keep the can you keep the lights on?

I'm afraid of the dog.

The thing where he's being executed.

So now I have a very, I have a very odd relationship with that new thing.

Dude, it's cool.

It's cool.

So actually,

since you disclosed that, one of my first, not like first kiss levels, but like one of the first intimate times I remember was Children of the Corn was on.

Okay.

Short of the corn action.

Damien in the background.

I don't like grown-ups.

Yeah, so it's very, similarly, I have very mixed feelings about that film

right now.

Like, because I remember being like super engaged in one thing, and then like it catches my attention for a second.

It's like kids screaming through town.

It's like, okay, well, maybe I'll just turn away from that.

Oh, that's funny.

Anyway, this is a really good story because every single part reminds me of that.

I'm having a PTSD.

Yeah.

I'm mad.

Like, I understand what it's like finally for a Vietnam vet.

That's how I feel.

This is your stolen valor, huh?

This is literally my stolen valor moment.

Yeah.

Okay, so she just shot him down, said that's that he's like, oh, that's cool.

I said, mentally cursing the day DeLuca had been born.

I spent the next hour knowing the agony of a man without any fresh water, stuck on a lifed raft, adrift at sea.

After the movie, my luck didn't improve much.

The crowds began to roll and I had it in my head that Alina might feel more comfortable expressing her affection for me if she felt like she was in control.

Oh, gosh.

I kissed her neck where it met.

I kissed her neck where it met her jaw and pulled her lithe little body on top of mine.

Oh my gosh.

Good.

Oh yay.

This is insane to read.

This is insane to have this voice clip of me out there on the internet.

Yeah.

The pressure of her weight pressing down on me was an excruciating pleasure.

My eyes rolled back in my head.

Conscious thought melted away.

This is exactly those books that are that you see in Barnes and Noble, like the erotic fantasy books, whatever.

This is what this feels like.

This is what the girlies like, dude.

All of our girlfriends are going to love this shit.

I mean, probably, but it doesn't mean I do.

He did what?

Oh, damn.

That's hot.

That's all the girls are saying.

All the girlfriends.

All the girl fans of Create Cast Sound and like, oh, man, that's great.

Yeah, all five of them.

Yeah.

Yeah, all five.

All seven women who tune into this podcast.

Six, excluding your wife, because mine doesn't listen to it.

My fingers found their way to the bare skin of her lower back.

I could feel the slight bumps of her vertebrae raising up her skin.

It was oddly intoxicating.

It does have a bit of a serial killer vibe, doesn't it?

The next line is, when had I become attracted to spines

too true

put her there bro.

Yeah, it goes from me and you being like oh yeah get in there bud to like wait hold on you what I brushed my cheek against hers and angled my face so our mouths aligned her lips parted tentatively I listened for the subtle changes in her breathing that would tell me when it'd be safe to make the next move.

Her breathing deepened.

I slid my hands up, up, up her back, all the way to her satiny bra strap.

I had never touched a bra before in my life and had only a vague idea of how to guide the hooks from the eyes.

I nibbled her ear as my fingers fumbling beneath Alina's shirt, and that's when I felt that she was crying.

Oh my god!

Get him out of there!

Oh no!

Man down!

Man down!

Get him out!

Send a helicopter!

Hey, hey, hey, it's okay, look.

I whispered while pulling my hands out of her shirt.

See?

Oh, I'm cold.

I've got chills everywhere.

Oh, my gosh.

She sniffled and turned her head away from me.

I was so scared.

I knew I couldn't be too eager with her.

I knew I couldn't press her too hard.

She was in a fragile state, and there I was thinking with anything but my head.

My only defense was that I just wanted to make her feel good.

That is the most 16-year-old justification.

Yeah, no shit.

I'd thought, since she liked me, she'd like my touch as much as I craved hers.

But I thought wrong on many levels.

I gently pushed her chin up to look her in the eyes.

I didn't mean to push you too fast.

You okay?

She nodded, and I held her until she pushed herself up off me.

Yeah, this you were really,

I won't say bear trapped necessarily, but you were right earlier when you were talking about the similarities between him and um Rob,

like how Rob only saw, like he thought he knew her, but didn't really know her.

Yeah, now we kind of see that with our main character where he's like, oh, I thought she liked me, but we really haven't had any indication of that.

She just wants someone to be a comfort, to comfort her in this time.

And she's putting up with your sexual advances because you're one of the only people who will talk to her about the stuff and she feels comfortable around.

And you're kind of taking advantage of that so that,

you know you can speak to her because that's what you want out of it even though she just wants some company out of it she doesn't necessarily like you exactly i mean you know

that that that's the whole that that's the whole thing is that i i i don't know it's it's like uh

the the parallels are just so there and i think to a point too to where i'm wondering does he follow follow down the same kind of like slip slippery slope as rob did with the spire in the woods thing like how much

how much does this obsession with the spire of the woods keep unraveling to him?

You know, or like, you know, to prove his love or whatever.

I don't know.

It wouldn't be out of nowhere.

It is kind of setting up that direction.

Yeah, exactly.

Alina paced around my room doing a breathing exercise her therapist had taught her.

I went downstairs to grab us a couple glasses of water.

It was less than the least I could do.

While I was in the kitchen, my dad gave me a questioning look and a thumbs up behind my mother's back.

Good man.

I shook my head no and felt like a failure.

once she was calm enough to sit down we sat on my bed far apart from one another sipping the water and talking it's not you yeah yeah don't worry about it i know you like me

bro dude oh my gosh alina gave a little nod as she stared down at her water like uh-huh yeah sure sure yeah uh-huh

this will pass People at school will move on to something else and leave you alone and you can get back to normal.

God, what a cat.

You mean you can make out and go to the movies.

What a cow.

Yeah.

You can finally get back to not being such a freak.

You can get back to not being a loser.

A loser.

Alina got up and started pacing again.

My parents don't even think I can skip a session for New Year's.

How's that for normal?

I hate that we're not going to be up at Shawnee's for New Year's.

She put the glass down on my desk.

Her hands as fidgety as her legs.

Every year, we go skiing in the morning and then drive into the North Conway to have have dinner and watch the fireworks until my mom gets too cold and wants to head back.

That's all I want.

And I can't even handle that.

What if I found something down at the Quabbin?

What if I fix this, Alina?

What if, what if all your problems are baby, baby,

baby girl?

Have you ever heard of the Quabin?

Have you ever heard of the Quabin before?

Come on.

Come on, baby girl.

Why don't you get back on top of me and I'll turn Hamburger Hill back on?

Medic!

Medic!

Just the idea of like

teenage making out and just in the background, it's like,

oh, I can't find my legs.

I don't know where my legs are.

Oh, Mama, where's my legs?

Mama, help!

Just gently, just like tear, like, he doesn't know how to kiss her, so he's just like licking her lips over and over.

dog mouth.

It's also

that scene in Hamburger Hill where he's talking about how he went home from war and like he found his wife cheating on him.

And

he like they were making fun of

the hippies were throwing like dog poop at him.

He's like, and that was all right.

And that was all right.

Like that very impactful scene.

Yeah.

He's just like fondling with a bra he's never touched before.

Alina stopped practically mid-step, and stared at me.

I hadn't noticed until just then, but she had bags under her eyes.

Will that help?

When are you going?

Tomorrow?

Alina stared at me.

The energy of the room had changed.

I could practically smell her desperation as easily as her vanilla-scented shampoo.

She needed me to find the spire in the woods and prove that it was the widower's clock.

Prove that Rob hadn't killed himself because she broke his heart, but because he'd been haunted by the ghost of Amy Lowell Putnam.

And if Alina Aminov needed it, so did I.

To hell with Fletch.

To hell with just hearing the bells.

I was going to find the spire.

Okay, into part four, into part five.

Places I wouldn't go with a gun.

Places I wouldn't go with a gun.

Yeah, that's my boy.

That's your boy already.

Okay, so

I really, I do want to say that, like, we've been joking about it going on.

I feel every one of these characters is so well thought out.

Yeah.

They feel legitimate.

I want to see them succeed.

There's kind of, there's this interesting dynamic, which our author kind of highlighted, where it's like, he's going to the spire in the woods, but for opposite reasons, because

Alina needs him to prove that the spire is real, and Fletch needs him to prove that the spire is fake.

And it's like, obviously, his loyalty lies more with Alina because he's horny, but it creates this interesting kind of this conflict with himself.

And it's neither like Fletch and Alina are both understandable, but they're also not not necessarily in the right, either of them, because Alina's like, well, I need to prove that it's not my fault and that he was possessed by some ghost thing.

And it's like, well, that's kind of, that seems like a lot on this.

And then meanwhile, Fletch is like, I need to prove my friend's not crazy and that stupid chick did it.

And it's like, well, that's also like selfish.

Yeah.

A lot of the onus comes back on your friend.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's an interesting position.

It's a very unique dynamic to have Fletcher like this.

I like Fletch a lot.

Yeah.

I think he's going to be a lot more fun.

Yeah, he seems to be one of the more legitimate actors, I think, and everything's going down because he's just reacting off emotions for a friend of his that died.

It's true.

It doesn't really have any ulterior motives like some people do.

And Carrie, I like Carrie.

I feel like she's just got dealt a bad hand.

But

she seems loyal.

She seems like a good friend, I think.

Okay.

Part five.

Are you ready, Hunter?

Part five.

What's with the bag?

Fletched ass as I tossed my duffel bag onto the back seat and got inside the car.

If memory serves, it had been 25 or so that day.

felt even colder in that little Civic.

Supplies, incense, my mom's Bible, a couple flashlights, some miscellaneous crap I borrowed from Carrie.

Fletch acknowledged he heard me with the soft grunt.

We were on our way to pick up Scary Carrie.

I'll also say, I know we keep diverging the story, or I do, to talk, but that's what the podcast is for, I guess.

I like that little mention where he's like, if memory serves, it was 25 that day.

So that tells us immediately that what happened on this day was important enough that years later writing the story, he remembers what the temperature was.

So it's like, okay, well, what's about to happen?

Just a neat little like storytelling technique to pull out.

That's true.

Truth be told, while the bag did have my mother's Bible and the flashlights, the miscellaneous crap I borrowed from Carrie was actually a bicycle pump and a pool raft shaped like a small boat that I'd borrowed from Christy McDowell earlier that day.

I didn't see the sense in telling Fletch yet that I wanted to do more than just hear the bells.

At least not while we were still in my driveway, and he could back out.

Better to wait until we were down there, and the worst he could do was leave us without a ride home.

Oh, you dumb son of a bitch.

This is the pivoting point, dude.

I'm telling you.

Him not telling Fletch too.

I'm just saying, like, that's just no bueno.

Yeah.

We grabbed Carrie and we're probably on our way shortly after eight o'clock.

For the first hour or so, the drive was surprisingly pleasant.

Carrie asked asked Fletch questions about where he was hoping to go to college, which schools were his safeties, and how he was going to pay for it.

Fletch answered all of her questions and was even joking around a bit, but as we got deeper into Massachusetts, his nerves started to creep in.

He fell silent around the time we cleared Worcester.

It didn't take a mind reader to know he was thinking about Rob.

It was impossible not to.

We were retracing the steps of a boy who had killed himself.

Whatever he'd found down there, whether it was supernatural or not, not, whether it was something or nothing, Rob had blamed it for driving him to madness and death.

I'd never been scared on any of my other ghost hunting trips.

Not really.

Usually I was filled with a sense of anticipation, a giddy feeling that I could soon make a discovery that would forever change the way I saw the whole world, accompanied by a touch of anxiety that I might get caught trespassing.

Trespassing.

Trespassing.

Trespassing.

Trespassing.

That I might get caught trespassing somewhere I didn't belong.

But as we pulled into the trailer park, my heart was pounding in my chest and my palms were covered in a cold sweat.

10-13,

Flutch said, cutting the engine.

If we hustle, we might be able to hear the bells toll 11.

Karen and I nodded dumbly.

I could tell she was feeling it too.

This was different than the Blood Cemetery or the Eunice Williams covered bridge.

We were walking into the ghost story of Robert Edward Kinnan, and the only thing we knew for certain was that he was dead.

Pass me my bag.

Okay, this is him talking to Carrie.

Thank you.

I said to Carrie as we stopped.

I thought I said Carrie, my bad.

No, you know what?

I'm like, no, you don't get to redo that line.

You don't get to redo that line because that was your malice for this woman and we're leaving it.

Okay.

That's what he said to her.

Pass me my bag.

No, no, no.

You went even worse.

It's him.

It's the one that you're talking to Carrie.

Pass me my bag.

Shut up.

Fletch wordlessly led the way.

The crunch of the dead leaves beneath our feet echoed out into the forest.

Even though the moon cast more than enough light for us to see, I fished the flashlights out of my bag just to have something to do.

It hadn't snowed yet that year, or at least not at the Quabin, but it was cold.

The temperature had dropped into the high teens, and the wind ripping through the bare trees wasn't helping matters any.

It was no surprise we didn't see anyone as we crossed into the park.

We were in the middle of nowhere.

Hell, if it weren't for the metal pole that served as a gate stretched across Old Ware Infield Road, we probably could have driven in without anyone noticing.

Smell of wood smoke hung faintly on the wind.

Somewhere, miles away, people were sitting around their fireplace, probably commenting on what a good night it was for a fire.

I bet they felt cozy.

Fletch rubbed his nose and sniffled.

It could have just been the cold making his nose run a little, or maybe he smelled the smoke too.

Either way, it reminded me of something I'd read once.

Firemen say that when a person burns to death, their flesh smells like pork.

I pitied Fletch.

Thank God I hadn't been there to smell Rob burn.

By the time we reached the fork where the access road splits off from the old Ware infield, my legs felt like blocks of ice.

We hadn't been stupid.

We had warm hats and jackets, but a two, two and a half mile walk at night in late December is too much for just a pair of jeans.

Stopped my feet to warm up.

What I wouldn't give for some ski pants.

At least you brought some gloves.

Carrie said.

She had one hand buried deep in her coat pocket, the other holding the flashlight I'd given her with her sleeve pulled up, pulled down over her fingers.

Fletch cast a baleful eye in our direction.

Even though we hadn't been particularly loud or said anything disrespectful, he looked at us as if he'd caught us dancing on Rob's grave.

As far as Fletch was concerned, we were on hallowed ground.

We pressed on in silence until, just ahead of us, we heard

whispering gently through the trees.

It sounded vaguely like the Friday the 13th soundtrack was being carried on the wind across a great distance.

What the hell's that?

Carrie hissed.

Ice.

Ice makes noise.

Yep.

People think of ice as an object, solid and inert, but ice expands and contracts a great deal.

Slight variations in temperature, small eddies, and imperceptible currents prevent the water from freezing uniformly.

Little fissures turn into big cracks as the ice strains against itself until it buckles and splinters into plates.

What we were hearing was like continental drift in miniature big ice plates pressing against each other until something snapped with the resulting sound echoing over the reservoir's frozen surface.

Cleared the tree line, and sure enough, the quabbin was frozen.

I was surprised.

Bodies of water as big as the quabbin don't usually freeze until mid-January or so.

Guess we won't be needing the raft.

I thought that's when the bells chimed 11.

Bliss.

My body shuddered.

I felt like I was beneath Alina.

Her weight pressing down on the parts of me that strained to meet her.

My flesh tingled.

It was as if the smooth skin of her back that my fingertips had danced lightly across now surrounded every inch of me.

In that lingering moment, I was satan.

The bells had nourished me like a feast nourishes the starving.

I wanted nothing but to be exactly where I was, hearing exactly what I was hearing, feeling exactly what I was feeling.

Then all was silence.

I was, once more, out in the cold.

I heard them.

Gary breathed.

I turned to her and saw that she had a wistful gleam in her.

It was the first and last time I ever saw her truly happy.

Fletch fell to his knees, tears rolling down his cheeks.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

He was laboring to breathe.

That was.

That was beautiful.

I sat down beside him.

The dirt beneath us was hard as rock.

The echo coming off the eye sounded like a gentle tide lapping on the shore.

I looked up at the sky.

So far away from the light pollution of Nashaw or Boston or Lowell, I could see a myriad of stars I'd never noticed before.

It's the sort of thing that makes some feel small, but not me.

I just peeked behind realities fail and discovered.

Well, I didn't know exactly what.

Just that there were more.

Not up there around distant stars, suspended on the far side of an unfathomably great abyss, but right here.

Nothing between us and this undiscovered country but a few hundred yards of ice in an hour's time, and the bells would toll 12.

We should have left.

We said we only wanted to hear the bells.

The only reason Fletch was even there was to make sure we turned back.

I had witnessed what I'd been searching for throughout all of my ghost hunts.

I had evidence of the supernatural.

Wasn't that all I'd ever wanted?

One experience to bolster my faith?

Just one that I could point to, cling to, whenever I found myself besaged by doubts?

I'd certainly thought so, until I heard those damn bells.

I'm not sure which one of us was the first to tentatively step onto the ice.

But I recall clearly, none of us voiced an objection.

Not even Fletch.

I think I know where this is going,

because he had that line about Carrie where he said it was the first and last time I ever saw her truly.

Yeah, I mean, it seems like they're going to, it's, they're, they're going down a road they can't turn back from.

Yeah, yeah.

And we've already had all the buildup about the ice breaks easily, right?

Yeah.

The ice was slick, and we fell hard more than once.

But we were all of us New Englanders and no strangers to shuffling across an expanse of ice.

The trick was to keep your weight centered above above your feet.

We talked in clipped burst about what the bells had felt like to us, speaking in broken analogies, unable to fully share what the bells had awoken inside of us, but straining to convey it as best we could.

I only ever flew in a plane once.

My parents, even though they couldn't really afford it, took me to Disney.

They were already fighting then.

It was bad.

But on the plane, going to Disney, when it started to take off,

Carrie trailed off.

The echo was louder than we'd heard it from the shore.

In my head, when I was seven, only rich people flew anywhere, and my parents weren't fighting.

I felt lucky, you know?

You're the only man I know who would make fun of a woman on her way to the gallows.

Like,

I just wanted to.

Well, here's the problem.

The problem is I've committed too much to where if I went normal now, it would be too weird.

Don't worry, Hunter.

She's about to be out of your hair, it sounds like.

The way this is going.

Fletch grunted his acknowledgement.

What time is it?

I checked my watch.

About a quarter past.

It must have been right on top of where the ice was grinding against itself.

We froze.

Each of us strained our eyes and ears, trying to determine if the ice was safe.

We knew if the ice wasn't safe, it'd be dangerous to press on.

We knew it, but we didn't care.

Maybe you should go first.

You're the lightest.

Yeah.

I said, and shuffled ahead.

Being closer to the bells felt worth the risk.

Any risk.

Carrie and Fletch followed in my wake, neither following directly behind me so as to spread our weight across a broader area.

We pressed on.

The conversation died.

The wind blew hard across the reservoir and tore through our clothes like a knife.

We didn't care.

The sound was growing fainter.

We had crossed nearly three-quarters of the distance to the island that housed the spire.

I never heard the ice crack, just the sharp inhalation of breath for a scream that never escaped her lips.

Carrie plunged through the ice.

I turned just in time to see her head go under.

Carrie came up thrashing, but as she hit the sides of the hole, she'd made more and more of the ice broke away, expanding the hole to the size of a kiddie pool.

I shuffled my feet as fast as I could towards the edge.

Fletch screamed for me to stop.

No, no, it's not stable!

Cold water sucks the heat from your body 32 times faster than air.

Every second Carrie stayed in that water increased the likelihood her arms and legs would go numb and she wouldn't be able to pull herself out of the water even if the ice stopped breaking.

Laying on my stomach to spread as much of my weight across the surface as I could, I dragged myself over to the water's edge.

Grab on!

I held onto the shoulder strap and tossed my duffel bag into the water as close to Carrie as I could.

Her hands fumbled, already rendered useless from the heat loss, but she managed to wrap her arms tight around the bulk of the bag.

I pulled her up to the edge.

She got most of her body out of the water before the ice cracked, and she fell back in, almost taking me with her.

Strong hands grabbed my ankles and pulled me away from the hole.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Fletch grunted as he struggled for traction on the ice.

I don't know how he did it, but Fletch managed to get enough of a purchase that we were able to drag Carrie out of the water.

Thank God.

Scary...

I was getting worried there.

Scary Carrie was white as a bone and panting for breath through chattering teeth.

She struggled to get to her hands and knees.

We've got to get her out of here, Fletch said.

The pull of the bells had been broken.

What had we been thinking?

Bring the car around.

We'll meet you.

The car was easily two miles away.

Fletch nodded and was off, shuffling his feet across the ice as quickly as he could.

I was afraid to stand too close to Carrie out on the ice, but what choice did I have?

She was still struggling just to crawl.

I grabbed her by her ankles and and dragged her across until we were far enough away from the hole that I felt comfortable enough to pull her to her feet.

Still, the ice went.

As I watched Fletch slip out of sight behind the trees, it didn't sound gentle anymore.

I put her arm over my shoulder.

We shuffled along best we could.

Each time one of us slipped, I thought the ice had given out again.

My heart would race and I'd think, this is it.

This is how I'm gonna die.

But instead, we would just be slammed out against the rock hard surface.

Carrie followed my instructions.

She didn't seem confused, but she wasn't talking either.

By the time we reached the access road, her lips had turned pale blue and the water in her hair had frozen.

At the fork on Old Ware Infield Road, I insisted that we trade jackets and I gave her my hat and gloves, one of which was wet from pulling her out of the water, but I figured it was better than nothing.

Carrie fumbled and struggled to get out of her jacket.

We had to stop walking so I could help her with the zipper.

She fought me as I tried to get my hat over her enormous head

and with slurred speech complained that she was hot.

I knew what that meant.

Carrie was in trouble.

If I had had a cell phone back then, I'd have bitten the bullet and called her an ambulance, but I didn't get my first cell phone until 2001.

I made Carrie run the rest of the way, even though she moved like a drunk in an old cartoon.

Fletch saw us approaching the gate and, leaving the engine running, ran out to meet us.

How is she?

He asked, putting her arm over his shoulder.

We need to get her to a hospital.

Fletch and I were moving as quick as we could while dragging Carrie along between us.

Do you know anything around here?

You don't know where the hospital is?

I screamed as we got into the car.

Why the fuck would I know where the nearest hospital is in western Massachusetts?

Fletch put the car in drive and started heading towards Amherst, figuring they'd have a hospital there and we'd see signs for it on Route 9.

Had we gone the other way, back towards Neshaw, we'd have been at a hospital in 11 minutes.

fortunately the way we chose the nearest hospital was in northampton over an hour away

even with the heat on full blast the car was freezing practically as soon as the doors closed carrie started stripping out of her clothes you gotta get back there with her he was right before our week-long winter hike our instructor chaperones taught us what to do in the event that someone displayed any signs of hypothermia You get them out of their wet clothes, you strip down, and you get into a sleeping bag with them.

It's called passive rewarming, and carrie clearly needed it crawled over the emergency brake into the back seat with the half-naked scary carrie she didn't fight me or complain about being warm but it was difficult to get close to her she had wedged herself down on the floor mostly behind the passenger seat a space i would have never imagined could accommodate me let alone both of us you got a blanket back here or anything

I said, looking around in the mess of clutter that Carrie sat on top of.

No, but hang on.

Fletch wrestled himself out of his jacket while he drove.

It occurred to me that I could use the uninflated raft as a blanket, but when I looked for my duffel bag, I realized I must have dropped it somewhere between the reservoir and the car.

Fletch threw his jacket back to me.

It'd have to do.

I stripped down to my underwear.

Scary Carrie was completely unresponsive.

I did my best to move her into a position where I could lay next to her, draped Fletch's jacket over my shoulders and mine over our legs before spreading myself across her corpulent belly.

Crazy word.

I'd like to say I spent the next hour concerned only for the well-being of my friend, but that's not true.

A million thoughts ran through my head.

Yes, I did think about Carrie.

I thought she already looked dead and hoped that at least some of her pale complexion was just the moonlight.

I noticed how slow her breathing was.

I could barely feel her cold gut moving at all.

But I also thought about Rob and the rumor I repeated when I was in the sixth grade.

The one about how he'd been found naked in the woods with a mentally handicapped girl.

I thought about how everyone said he tricked her into sleeping with him.

And even as my friend lay beneath me, for all I knew dying, There's a small part of me that was thankful we were so far away from home and nobody would hear about this.

Shortly before 1.30 in the morning, we pulled up in front of the emergency room at Cooley Dixon Hospital.

Fletch got out of the car and ran for help.

Carrie was unconscious when a pair of nurses or orderlies or whatever they were pulled her out of the car and put her on a stretcher.

When they asked me, I couldn't remember the last time I checked to see if she was still breathing.

It had been a few minutes, at least.

They couldn't find a pulse.

No!

Fletch and I were forced to stay in the waiting room.

We couldn't do anything else for her.

Carrie was in their hands now.

In a way, that was worse, at least for us.

We were in the car.

We had a goal, something to focus on.

We had to get Carrie to a hospital.

Once we'd arrived, the adrenaline that had been coursing through our veins returned to whence it came and left us with nothing but doubts.

Could we have done more?

Would we been fast enough?

She'll be fine.

She'll be fine.

Let's rock back and forth in his chair, repeating his little mantra as if he could will it to be so.

She'll be fine.

It was over an hour before we were able to get an update.

Carrie had survived.

Oh, thank God.

Good God, dude.

I wasn't ready for that.

Oh, that was so rough.

Okay.

When they initially checked her vitals, Carrie's core temperature had fallen to 64 degrees Fahrenheit, and her heart rate had slowed to 29 beats per minute.

For a girl Carrie's age and size, you'd expect her resting heart rate to be in the neighborhood of 74 beats per minute.

The emergency room doctor felt Carrie's hypothermia was too severe for external warming techniques and elected to irrigate Carrie's stomach and colon with warm saline solution.

Every 15 minutes, the saline, by then cold, had to be pumped out and replaced with more warm saline.

We had hoped we'd be able to see her, but at that point they had only managed to raise her body temperature about four degrees.

Carrie was still unconscious.

She also had third or fourth degree frostbite on several of her fingers and toes, and one of her ankles, but they wouldn't have to worry about that tonight.

There's a saying about frostbite: frozen in January, amputated in July.

The nurse, a young, homely woman, looked at us like we were criminals.

I guess she blamed us for the state Carrie was in.

Even now, I'm not sure she was wrong.

Is there someone your friend would want us to contact?

Her mom, yeah,

I'll do it.

Payphone?

Follow me.

The nurse turned and led me back to the admittance desk.

It's funny.

As scared as I was that my friend's life was still in serious jeopardy, somehow I was also scared to be in trouble with her mom.

By extension, mine.

What can I say?

I liked perspective, and the enormity of the situation hadn't fully sunk in.

The nurse let me use one of the hospital phones.

What?

What do you want?

Why are you calling my house at 3-8 fucking o'clock in the morning?

Mrs.

Peterson screamed into the phone.

Carrie's been in an accident.

What are you talking about?

Carrie's asleep.

She's...

Hold on.

Carrie!

Carrie!

I could hear Mrs.

Peterson lumbering through her house and bellowing for her daughter.

She certainly had her faults, but lacking affection for her daughter wasn't one of them.

I'd often suspected that Mrs.

Peterson had been one of those sad sacks who had known their marriage wasn't going to last and insisted on having a kid anyway.

Not to save the marriage, but just to have one person in the world that loved them unconditionally.

What happened?

Where is she?

That is such a depressing paragraph.

I know.

Oh my god.

This is get, I'm getting beat.

I'm having barossa.

I said I had Barosca flashbacks earlier.

I'm having them right now because I'm getting sad.

All I told her was that her daughter had fallen through some ice, nothing else.

And emphasized at every turn that she was alive and being cared for, which was true, but I also promised that she'd be fine.

It was a promise I had no business making.

I just couldn't stomach hearing the hurt in her voice.

I would have said anything to make Mrs.

Peterson feel better.

I handed the phone back to the homely nurse so that she could give Mrs.

Peterson directions to the hospital.

Two and a half hours later, Ekta One's tire screeched to stop in the parking lot.

My daughter, where is she?

I could hear her even before she was through the doors.

If the kids at school thought Carrie was frightening to behold, it was only because they'd never seen her mother upset.

Mrs.

Peterson ran up to the admittance desk wearing her jacket over her bathrobe, the sweatpant she slept in peeking out over her snow boots.

Her face was red and puffy from crying, and her hair looked not just uncombed, but as if someone had tied it in knots and then dipped it in grease.

By comparison, the homely nurse looked like Helen of Troy.

She's my daughter.

You have to let me see her,

Mrs.

Peterson said, pounding the desk in front of her.

Being a mother was the reason Mrs.

Peterson got out of bed in the morning.

It was the reason she worked a thankless, poorly paying job.

And it was the reason she wasn't about to let anyone keep her from being there for her daughter.

Fletch and I jogged the short distance down the hall from the waiting room.

The hospital staff was looking nervously at Mrs.

Peterson's red face and bulging veins.

A pair of nurses moved in close behind the homely nurse to support her.

You can't see her until she's been stabilized, the nurse said, her voice quivering.

Mrs.

Peterson let out an inarticulate scream that shook her whole body.

It was a desperate noise that sounded like a wounded animal.

The homely nurse flinched.

Fletch took an involuntary step back, and one of the other nurses peeled off from the pack and ran down the hall, probably to get security.

She needn't have bothered.

After her scream, Mrs.

Peterson collapsed to the floor in tears.

I laid my hand on her shoulder and gave her a gentle shake.

Mrs.

Peterson looked up and saw that it was me.

I thought for a moment I'd receive the same treatment as the nurses.

Instead, she pulled me down on top of her and hugged me, clinging to me like I was life itself.

Mrs.

Peterson buried her face in my shoulder and cried.

I wish she had yelled at me.

And not just because my face was pressed into her hair, which smelled of sweet, deli meats, and feta cheese, I'd nearly gotten her daughter killed.

I didn't deserve to be embraced like a member of the family.

And something about the way Mrs.

Peterson so desperately held me reminded me of the trip her daughter and I had taken to Greenfield.

I'd been reckless with Carrie in so many ways.

I really like that last line

because there's so much.

Like when he was in the back of the car with her, and I didn't comment on it then, but when he made the comment about, like, I remember I used to spread that rumor about Rob hooking up with the disabled girl.

And it's like, it's not, when he mentions it, it's not just like, oh, haha, that was funny.

I'm glad no one sees me here.

It's like he's having this grown-up moment where he's like huh I guess like just because of appearances I shouldn't think of someone else like that or shouldn't spread rumors about it and now the things he normally would care about like her hair's greasier she smells bad it doesn't matter because you know what he really feels is unworthiness that a woman that a mother would give him this kind of grief and now he relates that back and says i've been reckless with carrie in so many ways which yeah it's it's like he's growing up yeah i mean it's definitely a a character.

And, you know, I think death or near death will do that to a character.

And I think in this way, you can, I think he's getting to a real point where I think that story is something that's face value.

It's like you don't really know what people are going through in that moment.

It's like spreading these false rumors and stuff and like the things that people could make out of this situation.

It's a horrible situation.

Who knows?

And now Carrie has been basically just this person he's been stringing along.

And I mean, I mean, abuse, abusing is not the right word, but just stringing along and just kind of like

reckless, recklessly befriending and kind of treating in that way.

And I think that,

yeah, these kind of situations put into perspective.

Yeah, I've been reckless with Carrie in so many ways.

It's a very, it's a very grown-up line at this point in the story.

Yeah.

Fletch helped the two of us to our feet, and we led Mrs.

Peterson back to the waiting room.

We stopped at McDonald's on the way home, but neither of us could bring ourselves to eat anything.

Fletch and I had stayed at the hospital until nearly 10 a.m.

By that time, Carrie's temperature had returned to normal, but at no point had she regained consciousness.

We would have stayed longer, but we'd been awake for nearly 24 hours at that point, and our bodies were beginning to shut down.

I left Mrs.

Peterson my parents' number and told her to call me if she needed anything.

She took it and thanked me for watching over her little girl.

Oh.

Dang, dude.

That's so

gosh.

Sitting beneath the fluorescent lights, waiting for Fletch to finish his coffee, I felt like Judas minus a silver.

I should have stayed at the hospital, but I copped out.

I couldn't stand Mrs.

Peterson being nice to me.

I should have never brought you.

It was the first thing Fletch had said in hours.

We'd have gone anyway.

I said, smearing ketchup around my tray with my hash brown so I wouldn't have to look him in the eyes.

We'd have gone.

She'd have fallen.

And you wouldn't have been there to pull her out.

I could have driven, or I could have tried to warm her, but I couldn't have done both.

Fletch didn't respond.

I guess he still felt like it was his fault.

She'd be dead right now, Fletch.

Me too, probably.

I hazarded a glance up and wished I hadn't.

He was giving me the same look I had given Mrs.

Peterson an hour earlier when she thanked me for watching over Carrie.

Neither of us were ready to be forgiven yet.

Well,

we should have left after we heard those fucking bells.

I couldn't argue with him there.

Fletch finished his coffee in silence.

After he was done, neither of us moved to get up.

It was probably around 10.30 or so at that point, and neither of us had called our parents.

We knew we should have found the nearest payphone.

We knew we couldn't hide what had happened.

Couldn't lie.

At least not about Carrie.

But even if it was only for a couple hours, we wanted to push the eventuality off for as long as possible.

Our parents would know soon enough.

We got back in the car and rolled down the windows, hoping the cold air would help keep Fletch awake long enough for the coffee to kick in.

Fletch stopped for the light at the intersection of Amherst Road and the Daniel Shays Highway.

We needed to go left, which would take us north towards New Hampshire.

Fletch hadn't hit his blinker yet.

Can I tell you something?

Fletch had struggled to get out each word.

Yeah.

A part of me wants to go back.

I want to hear them again.

So did I.

All we'd have to do is go right.

Do you.

If we did,

do you think we could get there by 11?

The light changed.

We didn't move until the car behind us started honking.

Fletch hit the blinker.

We went left.

My cheeks burned with shame.

We probably wouldn't have made it in time.

We can't.

We can't.

We can't.

We can't go back there.

Not ever.

No.

Never.

But even as I said it, I knew I would.

The bells felt like home.

Yeah.

End of part five.

Going into part six.

Oh, what a banger.

Oh, my gosh.

It seems like what's going to end up happening.

It's so good.

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead.

I feel like what's going to end up happening is

I feel like each one of them is

they're going to go there by themselves like idiots.

And they're going to get themselves in trouble.

Or he's going to be like, oh, so I went to go see Fletch.

You know, I'm going to go see Fletcher, but he was gone.

and now it's going to be like oh okay well he probably went there you know it's it's going to be it's just justifying the shit that you know you shouldn't do well he's gone so i feel like we should probably go try to look for him but in there you know it's going to be what's good i feel like it's going to be somebody's going to go there alone and they're going to try to go looking for him yeah i think um

They're going to go back at some point.

Man, it's so good to have all of that intensity around Carrie and all of that like trauma that happened.

And then them being like, we could hear the bells again.

Like, that's how enticing they are.

That's the grip they have over this group of guys.

The only positive thing that came out of Carrie almost dying is that maybe she'll be incapacitated to not go.

Yeah, I don't think Carrie will go back.

I think that Fletch and our author will.

For sure.

Potentially, I think what may happen is he tells Alina, and she wants to go.

And she's going to go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Some kind of closure or something like that.

You know what I mean?

Is this story not so good?

It's wonderful.

This is great.

Alright, well, part six.

Part 6.

My parents woke up on the morning of December 28th, 1999, to a quiet house.

Nothing unusual about that.

They were typically the first ones up.

My mother made coffee and my father turned on CNN and got on the treadmill.

My brother woke up next and my mother made him French toast.

She made some for me as well, figuring I could reheat it whenever I came down.

It was a couple of hours before my absence was felt.

No big deal.

They figured it was vacation.

They might as well let me sleep in.

Then around 11 o'clock they got a call from Miss.

Then around 11 o'clock they got a call from Mr.

Fletcher.

He was in a bad mood.

My mom covered the receiver with her hand and hollered for my dad to go wake me up.

That's when they found out I was missing.

Fletcher and I showed up in the driveway two hours later.

I'd say my parents were more annoyed than angry.

My parents weren't strict disciplinarians.

I'd slept over at Drew DeLuca's without consulting them on more than one occasion, and while they were never exactly thrilled with me, they trusted my judgment and preferred letting me exercise that judgment to being woken up by a late-night phone call looking for their permission.

When they found my bed empty, they had figured we'd stay up late playing video games or, at worst, watching Skin-A-Max movies over at some friend's or another's, and were just too tired to drive home.

Fletch's parents weren't weren't so understanding.

They'd called everyone Fletch was friends with, then called my parents looking for the names of my friends.

Nathan, you better get your butt home,

my dad said.

Then he held his thumb and forefinger up about an inch apart and added, Your dad sounds like he's about this close to going through the phone book in an alphabetic order looking for you.

He was trying to be funny, but Fletch and I weren't in much of a mood to laugh.

We exchanged one last tired look, both knowing things were going to get worse before they got any better, and parted ways.

I stood on the front steps of my house with my father watching Fletch drive off down the road.

Boy, am I glad I'm not him right now?

You didn't know the half of it.

Dad, we, uh,

I have to tell you something.

They didn't yell and they didn't scream, but the days of my parents trusting my judgment were over.

I'd stayed out all night without permission, driven deep into another state, and gone out onto unfamiliar, recently frozen ice in the middle of the night.

That was stupid.

That was so stupid.

My father got up from the table and headed for the phone.

He'd never been good at sitting still when he was agitated.

Why were you even in Amherst?

My mother asked.

We wanted to visit Sam.

I mumbled.

I'd never been a particularly good liar, but Fletch and I had agreed to leave Rob's suicide notes and the spire in the woods out of our story.

Fletch was convinced that if dad caught even the faintest whiff that his son believed in ghost stories, he'd be stuck on meds as fast as the nearest psychiatrist could write the prescription.

My mom stared straight at me.

I couldn't hold her gaze and pretend to be interested in the French toast she'd reheated for me.

That could have been you.

Do you understand?

That could have been you that fell through the ice.

And with no one around.

My mom was too choked up to finish her thought.

I want to comfort her, but I don't want her to look at me.

Yes.

You have a patient there named Carrie.

My dad stuck the phone under his chin and asked, What's Carrie's last name?

While my dad was concerned for Carrie, he was also motivated by self-interest.

I could hear it in his voice.

He had spent the first 10 years of his career working in litigation at the law firm of Ropes and Gray and believed in the importance of CYA covering your ass.

It didn't matter how slim the chances were that Mrs.

Peterson would attempt to hold our family or the Fletchers accountable for what happened to her daughter, that risk was unacceptable.

If you need any help,

he said once he got in Mrs.

Peterson on the phone, you know, around the house, driving Carrie to school.

He was feeling her out, trying to get a sense of whether or not Mrs.

Peterson blamed us for what had happened to her daughter.

Maybe dealing with the insurance company or health.

I don't know.

If you need a little help with medical bills, whatever you need, just say the word.

He also wanted to dangle the carrot.

He knew Mrs.

Peterson wouldn't be able to cover Carrie's emergency medical care out of pocket, and he doubted slicing the meat at the deli counter in market basket conferred with it amazing health insurance.

Mrs.

Peterson would need help, but it would come with strings attached.

Looking back at my father's actions, they seemed cold, and maybe they were, but isn't protecting their kids what good fathers do?

Don't they protect their children even when their children don't particularly want to be protected?

Had Mrs.

Peterson a vengeful bone in her body, I'd have deserved the brunt of everything she could muster.

Despite my exhaustion, I had trouble falling asleep.

I kept thinking about Carrie.

She was in the hospital and it was my fault.

I didn't talk her into anything, but I had involved her.

I'd brought her along and now she was the one lying in a hospital bed with her mother crying over her.

As a Catholic, you're taught that God created us as rational beings.

You're taught that he gave us the dignity to initiate and control our own actions.

That he imbued us with the ability to hold our own counsel so that we may choose our own paths.

And that we alone are responsible for the fruit that our choices bear.

I didn't believe that everything was part of a plan, and the people that did, the people who saw God's hand in every mundane earthly event, from athletes who credit Jesus for their ability to hit a curveball, to teenagers invoking the name of the Lord to secure a date on Saturday night, drove me crazy.

I never accepted predestination.

How could we have free will if, like clockwork, everything was preordained to happen?

I believed these things.

I did.

But lying there thinking of the Petersons, I couldn't stop myself from wondering if God was teaching me a lesson.

I'd been taught that God doesn't cause car accidents or tornadoes, but in that moment, I felt that God had broken the ice beneath Carrie's feet to punish me for both doubting his existence and having stolen a glimpse of the secret knowledge no one but God was meant to have.

I cried and whispered Hail Mary's and our fathers to myself until I was finally overtaken by exhaustion.

Dim light filtered in through my blinds.

The windows in my room face south, and in my semi-conscious state, I wasn't sure if the sun was rising or setting.

Stomach growled, but I couldn't bring myself to get out of bed and face my parents.

The bells tolled.

Yep, here it comes.

Here it goes.

It found us.

Yeah, he's going to be.

It's just the.

It's like it's a weird thing being ridden with guilt.

with the things happening and you know

being torn even in this like faith in this like test of faith through the the whole time, but yet still, in all this haze, the only thing that rings true is the bells chime.

The bells.

That's the only thing he's sure of right now.

Yeah.

I sat bolt upright in my bed.

The room was still and silent, and yet I could hear the bells as they continued to call out the hour.

Two, three.

They were beautiful, but I didn't lose myself in them as I had on the shore of the Quabin.

Four.

It sounded like a song stuck in your head.

Five.

He stopped.

I was still lying in bed.

Either I never set up or had lain back down without realizing it.

Had I heard them?

Or had I remembered them?

At the reservoir, we'd heard them toll 11.

Had it just been a dream?

I set up for what may have been the second time and looked at my clock.

It was five.

In the past two days, I'd only slept for three hours, but I couldn't handle being alone in the dark.

I went downstairs and spent the rest of the night studiously avoiding eye contact with my family.

Thankfully, I didn't hear the bells again that night.

The next morning, bright and early, my father drove me over to Carrie's house.

My parents had put together a care package for Mrs.

Peterson, a large basket filled with food so she wouldn't have to cook, gift cards from our local gas station to offset the back and forth to the hospital each day, and a few books to read in the waiting room.

When she opened the door, Mrs.

Peterson was so grateful that she cried.

Once she regained her composure, the two of us got into Ecto One and headed out on a two and a half hour drive to Cooley Dixon Hospital.

My dad had volunteered me to go and keep Mrs.

Peterson company.

He may have had an ulterior motive, but this was something I wanted to do.

Something I had to do.

The drive was awkward.

Under the best of circumstances, as a teenager, spending time alone with one of your friend's parents was always a little uncomfortable, and these were far from the best of circumstances.

As I learned on the drive, Carrie was in a coma.

My God.

Although Mrs.

Peterson got virtually none of the medical terms correct, her only.

I love that.

Come on, dude.

Give her a break.

I love that guy.

That little, that little pop shot he threw there.

Yeah, even though she basically got it all fucking wrong.

Every single description he gives of Mrs.

Peterson, he's like, her hair smelled like feta cheese.

She was so oily and nasty.

It's like,

anyway, then she cried over her daughter who's in a coma due to my sleeping or something.

Couldn't get any of the words right.

Probably can't even pay for this.

Thank God my dad gave her a gas card.

Yeah,

if it wasn't for that shell station visa, she probably may not even know where her daughter's at.

They could move her.

She never knows.

Probably can't afford a phone bill either.

It's like, gosh, kid.

She got

her only real exposure to medicine came from having watched a lot of ER.

Okay.

I managed to get the gist of what she was saying.

As Carrie's heart rate slowed, so had her breathing.

Her blood had failed to supply her brain with the oxygen it needed to run, and it was this lack of oxygen that probably contributed more to Carrie's blue coloration than her body temperature.

The doctors had given Mrs.

Peterson only one tiny piece of good news.

Because hypothermia lowers a body's metabolism, it reduced the likelihood that the oxygen deprivation had damaged Carrie's brain.

That was it.

That was was what we were pitting all our hopes on.

That the cold, which nearly killed her, had also slowed her brain down enough that it hadn't noticed it was suffocating.

When we arrived at the hospital, Carrie's mom led me to her new room.

I could tell from the looks the staff was giving her along the way that Mrs.

Peterson was not their favorite person.

Maybe she'd been a pain in the ass the day before, but I didn't feel like that was it.

Not exactly.

The nurses were giving Mrs.

Peterson the same looks the kids at school gave her daughter.

In movies and television, people frequently comment on how peaceful coma patients appear.

They say, it's like they're asleep, they look like an angel, or it reminds me of when they were a baby and I used to hold them.

I don't know if that was Mrs.

Peterson's impression, but it certainly wasn't mine.

Ordinarily, Carrie wore a lot of concealer to cover up her acne.

At some point between plunging beneath the ice and having saline pumped in and out of her stomach, most of it had disappeared.

She had a tube running into her nose, although I'm not sure why.

A heart rate monitor on her finger and an an IV in her arm.

And that was to say nothing of the frostbite.

Along with the big toe on her right foot and most of her left foot below the ankle, which we couldn't see beneath the blanket, ice crystals had formed in two fingers on her left hand and the thumb on the right.

The blood trapped in her finger swelled them almost to the same thickness as her wrists.

They were red and raw.

It was difficult not to stare at them.

Mrs.

Peterson believed that even in a coma, Carrie could hear us and proceeded to relive seemingly every moment of her daughter's life.

Mrs.

Peterson was not a gifted storyteller.

God.

Every time, dude.

It's like, bro, at some point, you got to be like, you know what?

My bad.

Like,

no, maybe this woman doesn't have any problems.

Maybe me, who got her daughter thrown into a river.

Maybe I'm the problem.

In her mind, nothing was too trivial.

From the time she caught Carrie washing the dishes with cold water, which is apparently something you shouldn't do, to the time they went to Applebee's for her birthday and both forgot to tell the server, then wondered why they didn't get any cake.

But what her stories liked in content, Mrs.

Peterson made up for in sentiment.

She couldn't touch Carrie's hands, so she held her daughter's upper arm as she spoke.

I'm sorry, I'm not home more.

I'd like to be.

I would.

I know how hard school's been for you.

Maybe it'd it'd been easier if I was home more.

I don't know.

But you've done so good, baby.

It called just right there.

This is so like the

because you know, the links our author has gone to to point out that they're not doing great, the Peterson family.

Um, but in spite of that, there's like um

I don't know, it's just like the sweet moments that her mom remembers is like going to Applebee's and yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's yeah, this is okay.

i'm so happy right now i'm so happy and not depressed if carrie was able to hear her mother it wasn't outwardly apparent her face didn't twitch her eyelids didn't flutter even her pulse on the heart rate monitor held steady remember in middle school you

you never thought

as mrs peterson began to break down she grabbed my wrist and pulled me to her daughter's bedside forcing my hands to replace her on carrie's arm

you never thought you'd get a boy to like you but look who's here.

Oh, fuck.

Brutal.

Brutal.

But

this story is cruel to show people.

I know.

I feel so bad.

I feel so bad for Scary Gary.

Mom, you don't even know the half of it.

She 100% told her mom, like, oh, well, this boy, he's my boyfriend.

He likes me.

100%.

100%.

What if I beat myself to death with a bat?

I don't think that's...

I don't think that's going to happen.

Would that get me out of the rest of this recording?

It might.

We'll find out.

It could.

There's a potential.

There's a potential.

There's a potential.

You would probably find a way to make me keep going.

Oh.

My cheeks burned.

I didn't know if Carrie had told her mother we were dating or if Mrs.

Peterson had just gotten the wrong idea about us, but either way, I couldn't correct her.

Not there.

Wow what an altruist you are.

I know.

What a hero.

Yeah.

I had had enough trouble rejecting Carrie when we were alone in Greenfield.

The thought of rejecting her again, this time in front of her mother, and stealing from Mrs.

Peterson whatever sense of pride she derived from her daughter having a romantic life, it's more than I can bear.

There's a special place in hell for people who humiliate children in front of their parents.

I was very aware of my hands resting on her arms.

She was so much warmer than the last time I touched her.

I've never been quick on my feet.

I had no idea what to say, especially with Mrs.

Peterson thinking I was Carrie's

boyfriend.

I took a page out of Mrs.

Peterson's playbook and stood over my unconscious friend and recounted meeting her on the hike and a few anecdotes from class.

I tried to muster up something more sentimental, but it wasn't until I pretended it was Alina laying there in front of me that any words came.

Oh.

Brutal.

I can't stop thinking about you.

I wish we could talk.

I'd do anything to make you better.

Okay, I understand that he's not attracted to Carrie.

That's whatever.

But the fact that he can't say sweet things to her in front of her mother unless he imagines a girl that he's known for two weeks and has a crush on laying there like, dude, dude.

Come on.

This girl's been your friend for a while.

Come on.

Man.

I can't stop thinking about you.

It's like, you would say that.

You would say that to your friend.

Hunter, if you were frozen to death on a bed and I was standing there, I would say, I wish we could talk.

I'd do anything to make you better.

Like, you don't need to imagine it as like a romantic partner to get those words out.

It's okay.

Maybe.

Is that what you would do if I was frozen in a hospital bed?

What would you do?

Yeah.

If you were frozen in a hospital bed, I would, if my wife was there, I wouldn't say anything.

I don't know what's going on with him.

He's acting strange.

That's what I would say.

You could have trust yourself to say what you want.

Okay, if your wife wasn't there, what would you say?

Isaiah.

Feel better, man.

Wow.

That was from the heart.

That was deep.

Hey, Isaiah, seriously.

Hey, seriously, bro.

Feel better, man.

Hey, look.

You know what?

Between me and you, I hope you don't die.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, that's all you can say.

Well, I just hope you don't die.

I'm not happy this happened to you.

Okay, not to become on too strong or anything, but I don't.

I want you to be normal again.

I would really appreciate it if you could get normal soon.

Yes, thank you.

Bye.

Okay, that's enough.

Let's get out.

Let's go to Applebee's.

Lost in the little scene I'd created for myself.

I leaned down and kissed Carrie's waxy forehead.

God.

Mrs.

Why do you have to kiss me?

Waxy, waxy forehead.

That's rough.

Mrs.

Peterson put her arms around me and squeezed.

I looked at the tears in her eyes and wondered if I'd done her a kindness by playing along.

The lie seemed harmless enough.

Carrie probably just wanted to say face with her mom, maybe make her proud.

Let her think her child was happy for her change, but eventually the truth would come out.

I wasn't attracted to Carrie.

It'd be nice if I was, but I wasn't.

You ain't got to say it right now.

She's in the hospital.

I also resented being blindsided.

If Carrie had asked my permission, had said, Look, this is embarrassing, especially after Greenville, but I need your help making my mom happy.

Is it okay if I tell her you're my boyfriend?

I might have said yes, but she hadn't.

The whole charade made me feel gross.

Oh, you mean almost like how you immediately assumed you and Alina were in a relationship because you misused the time that she gave you to kiss her?

And now you say,

Cut himself, cut himself.

Yeah, but I feel like, okay, I was 16, too, and I was also like,

you know, raging with emotions and all that.

But at the same time, I feel like if my friend who was a girl was in a hospital bed, I wouldn't be like, disgusting.

I can't pretend to like this cow.

It's too much.

He's too evil.

Elaine, oh, look who we're back talking about Alina now.

I'm starting to resent Alina because of his not resenting.

I love how you are becoming a student of the school who's hating Aletha for

reason.

I am literally Fletch right now.

Elena's family returned from Shawnee the following morning.

I would have liked to have been outside their house waiting for her when they arrived,

but I was still a month away from getting my driver's license and my parents weren't exactly in the mood to help advance my social life.

I left a message on the Aminev's machine in the morning around 10.

I called again at noon and won, but hung up both times before the machine began recording.

It was the strange poker game you play when you're in love for the first time.

You feel like you'll die if you don't speak to the object of your affection as soon as possible, but you know how crazy you'd seem if you filled up their answering machine with increasingly redundant messages.

You were so, I think you actually, the more this is going on, the more you called it about

him becoming Rob.

Like, this is a man, this is absolutely what I feel like Rob was like.

Maybe, maybe.

The trap went off.

We don't know if there's a bear in it yet.

No, that could be a cow.

That's Carrie stuck in the bear trap.

Her fucking frost-bitten ankle.

Harry, get the hell out of there, girl.

Sorry about that.

Didn't see that one, the toe brush.

You're such a jerk.

You're a terrible person.

That's Carrie and the bear trap.

That feels like a joke we've been accidentally setting up for two months.

Yeah,

Carrie and the bear trap.

perfect.

It feels kind of perfect for the story, doesn't it?

That afternoon felt like an eternity.

She called me back shortly after five, and even though I was sitting directly next to the phone, I let it ring twice so she wouldn't know I'd been sitting directly next to the phone.

I missed you.

Oh,

thanks.

Yeah, she absolutely isn't into him.

He's just the one guy who's not evil to her right now because he can use her sexually.

Hey, can we meet back up and kiss more?

Can we make out more?

And can I put my leg between your legs, but you try to hold them together, but I pretend like I don't take the hint and keep forcing it.

Yeah, can we watch Good Luck Chuck on DVD and we can cuddle more on the floor in my room?

No, you'd love that.

I know you liked that last time.

She sounded tired.

Maybe she hadn't gotten that much sleep before driving home, or maybe she was drained from therapy.

Either way, it wasn't exactly the reaction I was hoping for.

I do love that from a 16-year-old guy's perspective.

Man, she probably didn't get much sleep, or it's probably her therapy, not realizing that it's like he is probably bringing her to the point of exhaustion with like how fucking needy he is.

Yeah, he is such a headache for her that, like, she is trying to show as little interest as possible and hopes that it'll drive him away.

And he's like, I bet it's the therapy for the guy that set himself on fire in front of her workplace.

I bet that's what's doing it.

He's he, he, Robin, or yeah, or our protagonist is having this discussion while he's on a tree with binoculars looking into her window.

She looks so tired tonight.

Her cantile tilt seems slightly off.

Perhaps that is something about Rob.

Too many cancel tilts.

Also, it's funny.

We've had to record this episode over the course of like three days just because it's so long.

And like every, it feels like a fee.

It feels like a fever dream the amount of time I've heard cancel tilt this week.

Is that not the thing that like those red pill guys talk about all the time?

It's like, oh, you'll never, a woman will never love you because you're like cantle tilt and something else is like two degrees off.

So you're not like prime marriage material.

So you need to be, you need to lift weights and hate women your whole life.

Right.

Yeah.

Right, right.

I 100% see our author as a cantile tilt kind of guy.

I wasn't sure what I wanted to tell her about my trip to the Quabin, or rather, I wasn't sure how to tell her.

The whole idea of going was to alleviate her guilt.

Having heard the bells, I knew that the story was at least partially true.

There was more to the spire in the woods than the side effects of an antidepressant.

But I also knew that Alina wouldn't take the news of Carrie very well.

For that matter, I wasn't taking it all that great either.

How is Maine?

Too short.

I'm trying to convince my parents to drive us back up.

If not, then tomorrow.

But my dad's sick of driving.

I wanted to tell her everything, but it had to to be face-to-face.

If she took it hard, I couldn't comfort her from.

I couldn't comfort her from halfway across town.

Not properly.

Gosh, this kid, he's like, oh, when I break this devastated news to her, I have to be there to touch her.

There was a long silence as I weighed my options.

When she broke the silence, her voice sounded small and young and distant.

Did you

find the widower's clock?

I, um,

you think you can come over tonight?

After my parents go to sleep?

Come, kitten.

Come, kitten.

Purr on my lap tonight and I'll tell you the tales of the widower's clock.

Do you think you could also wear that plaid skirt I like and stockings?

Hey, do you think you can wear those Caesar wearing panties?

I got you.

You could wear a raincoat so no one looks at you weird on the way over, but I don't want it on when you're in the house.

You take it off.

There's another silence, though not as long as the last one.

Why?

It's, well, it's not really the sort of thing you tell someone over the phone.

That is the voice.

That is the voice.

That was the desperate for...

Come on, you know?

I mean,

there it is.

The pleading, the pleading in the back of his throat.

Yeah.

I stood by my window looking out at the front lawn, its yellow grass illuminated by a couple of our tackier Christmas decorations.

The wind shook the dead branches of the tree that grew next to our driveway.

Something about the scene reminded me of the guabin and the sound of ice makes when it's quiet.

Cha-cha-cha.

It was nearly midnight, and I wondered if Carrie would dream of the bells.

Being in a coma might not be so bad if they sounded as lovely in sleep as they did in real life.

There have been times in my past when I've been lonely, considered the virtue of trading the world world for a lifetime of dreams.

Today, I'd make that trade in a heartbeat if it meant never hearing the bells again.

Headlights flashed into my window, interrupting my thoughts.

As Elena pulled her little beetle into my driveway, I crept downstairs to meet her.

Despite everything that had happened in the last couple of days, I couldn't help but feel excited.

She was shivering when I opened the door and didn't appear to have showered that day, but she

looked so beautiful, framed as she was by the Christmas lights surrounding our door, with the porch light behind her head casting a glow around her it was like she was separated from everything dark and dead outside I hugged her she hadn't worn a jacket just the sweat she probably slept in during the winter she stood stiffly as I rubbed her

she stood stiffly as I rubbed her back and arms in an effort to warm her up

I figured she was nervous about what I'd tell her, but was still disappointed she hadn't greeted me more enthusiastically.

This guy's insufferable.

He's becoming my red pill hero, honestly.

He is, he's getting

Why is she not into me?

What's her problem?

What's kind of weird is I'm almost picturing she goes up, she's like cold, you know, shivering, knocks on the door and opening up, and it's just David King standing right in the doorway.

Hello, sweet kitten.

It's been some time since I've seen you, isn't it?

Come here and warm yourself in my big strong arms.

They're still on the porch.

It's still snowing.

She's freezing.

Yeah, she's like, can I come in?

Soothe it off, my sweet little princess.

But first,

your head.

He gets down on her knee and kisses it.

He's like, you are.

I see you haven't used the vanilla scented shampoo today.

We'll have to fix that.

Don't worry.

I got you cosmic brownie body soap.

Very excited.

I led her into the kitchen and set about making us a couple of mugs of instant hot chocolate.

Alina leaned against the island behind me, but that didn't last for very long.

Before I'd even gotten the mugs into the microwave, she was pacing and chewing nervously at her lower lip.

So what happened?

I handed her a mug.

Do you want to sit?

No, no, I sat enough today.

I brought her into the den, which was further away from my parents' bedroom.

The embers in my father's wood stove still glowed brightly, and I added a couple of small pieces of candling.

Please.

Please tell me what you found.

I told her.

I told her everything.

How cold it was, what Karrion Fletch had been like, what the smell of the smoke reminded me of.

I told her about the sound the ice made, and I told her about the bells.

They were heavenly, but it.

It wasn't just the sound.

They fed something inside me.

You know that part of you, that voice in your head that kind of experiences what's happening and sees through your eyes?

She was looking at me as I spoke, and I could almost see the part of her I was talking about behind her eyes.

Like

the soul or whatever.

It was like the bells enveloped it and gave it everything it ever wanted.

Everything it was missing.

For me,

it was you.

Now that is...

That is a classic 16-year-old guy move.

To have this whole grand experience and then tie it back to her at the end, like, well, you're all I want.

Like, you're.

not.

And I want to thank you for giving me that stamp.

The most like Nicola Sparks

set up ever.

Exactly.

Eat, pray, love.

What I missed was you.

What my soul misses is you.

Everything my soul was missing was every bit of you.

I want to kiss now.

Kiss me.

So, didn't

other than Alina, because he's horny,

didn't our author get everything he wanted?

Because his whole idea was, I want to go to the bells to get some proof of the supernatural so that I can believe in the afterlife, believe in God again.

Let me tell you something, Isaiah.

Let me tell you something.

You maybe haven't grown up enough to realize this yet, but

the goalpost always changes.

Let me tell you something.

The goalpost always changes when pussy's involved.

All right.

It does.

It does.

You're right.

All right.

So you're sitting there.

I bet you anything if Alita's just like, yeah, I love the devil.

Fuck God.

I'm a bet man.

I'm a bet man.

I bet our dear old protagonist would just be like, yeah, I fucking hate God too.

I think he's kind of gay.

Here, can I touch your boob?

It would go in that direction, I think.

What you just said.

is like the stereotypical Sunday school lesson I had throughout my preteen years of like guys one day you're gonna run into a woman and she's gonna hate God and she's gonna want you to hate God and whatever whatever she said

extremely base Sunday school teacher

And what and what's really funny is that thinking about all this in hindsight you were the exact kind of person that Veggie Tells warned me about Yeah, the tomato's just like watch out for this guy

picture it's like Veggie tells that that you're on a wanted poster.

The cucumber is just like, oh,

I don't think I like this guy very much, right, guys?

And then he went over to the wanted poster, and it's just my face, like

he's going to be into heavy metal music.

He's going to talk about drugs.

Wait, no, that doesn't make any sense.

In the Bible, Jesus got some pussy in the Bible, didn't he?

No,

did he not?

Jesus had to have gotten fucking laid some pipe dudes.

This is insane.

This is insane.

Didn't he?

No.

No, he did not.

It's not that.

All right.

So it wasn't on the books, but he definitely, he fucking laid some pipe.

No, he was celibate.

That's a big deal within like

Christian belief and stuff like that.

He was celibate his whole life.

He was the last of the prophets.

Oh, he was a company.

He was a carpenter, and all the ladies called him the hammer.

Okay, okay, we got it, guys.

This is insane.

You are what if they haven't made an episode about you yet, they're about to.

god's building a church he's gonna march like a mighty all right all right

i can't interchange this

you

you and alina here

you and alina here

are the same are cut from the same cloth of the kind of people that my mom warned me about growing up very scary uh but you are right but no at the same time like his whole thing was

I want

um his whole thing was I want to know that the supernatural exists in some capacity.

Now he has evidence of that, but he doesn't really seem to be internalizing that.

No.

Even though that's what he, I mean, that's a huge deal to like see proof of like the paranormal, you know?

Yeah.

Well, to be fair, to play devil's advocate here, I don't think he really cared about anything as much until these feelings arised.

And I think in his pursuit of his faith, whatever.

the thing that was still uh stronger in the back of his mind was her so i think like

albeit that was his initial goal, I think that it had evolved by this point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I feel like I feel maybe I'm just superimposing, but if I like saw proof of ghost, I feel like that would be a bigger deal to me, you know?

Anyway.

But getting late and he likes this girl, this Russian chick, and yeah, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah.

It was a bit embarrassing describing to her how the bells had reminded me what it felt felt like to lie beneath her, but how else could I have conveyed the contentment in their presence and the need in their absence, the bliss and the longing?

It was romantic, too, I thought.

What could be more flattering for Alina to hear than my admission that my purest desire was to lie close to her, to feel her body against mine?

That quieted my soul, but she didn't react as though she were flattered.

Um, yeah, I'm sure that's exactly what you wanted to hear, dude.

Alina stared straight into the stove at the flames consuming the wood and said nothing.

It took me a moment to realize that she was probably thinking.

She was also what Rob heard in the bells.

McGuire did his soul.

She was his bliss and longing, even if she never wanted to be.

We sat in silence for a long time and watched the wood burn.

Then I told her about how we had pressed on and about what happened to Carrie.

Even though it wasn't her fault, I knew Alina would blame herself for Carrie falling through the ice.

Just like she had blamed herself for Rob's suicide.

It was a sort of negative feedback loop a person gets into when they're depressed.

Everything's their fault.

What I hadn't considered was how much I'd blamed myself.

Beyond answering a few of my parents' questions about how Mrs.

Peterson was doing, I hadn't told anyone about my return trip to the hospital.

For that matter, I hadn't really told anyone how I felt seeing Carrie turning blue or struggling to warm her up on the floor of Fletch's car.

Telling Alina about it opened up the floodgates inside me.

Lena let me speak until I couldn't get any more words out.

Then she slid along the couch to my side, wrapped me in her arms, and held me like a child.

For a moment I felt shame.

I had never judged other guys for crying.

I had sat beside Fletch when he was overcome by grief, but this was different.

Carrie hadn't died, and I was with Alina, who I wanted more than anything to think of me as a man.

I felt so small.

She ran her hand up and down my back.

Little by little, I became more aware of her and her closeness to me than I was in my emotions her face was cradled against her neck my cheek brushed hers as I moved to look up at her

her eyes looked as though she had been crying too

I kissed her and it oh come on dude we were having a moment this is like

I was like oh well she's like she's cradling him in like a comforting way because she knows that she gives comfort to him and it's like a kindness and of course he had to I don't think that was the vibe she was giving off but whatever I think he's getting ready to get into a little fucking here.

I don't, I feel like that ruins it, does it not?

I mean, obviously, not for him, but like, like, he went from like, I needed her to think of me as big and strong, but like, I felt safe with her.

I was listening to my mother,

it's propped up,

there's a fire going.

He was just, he laid his soul out there, bare and all, and they've cried together.

This is the part in every story or movie when, guess what?

The fucking love, my tears gone cold.

I'm wondering why.

Got out of bed at all.

See, exactly.

That's what's getting ready to happen.

Take my breath away.

I guess.

Whatever.

I don't know.

I just felt like that was like, that was maybe the one legitimate moment of affection he's had with Alana.

Alina thus far.

I mean, I think that he's had a legitimate affection this whole time.

I think he's just kind of a.

He's a whole lot of it.

I mean, like, that it's been reciprocated.

Because every other time, it feels like he's just pushing Alina as far as she'll go

before she says something.

But this was like she held him and let him cry.

That was like a very like.

I think the doorway's open.

I think the walls are down, dude.

I think if anything, she's manipulating him to get more of what she wants, but we'll see.

I love that.

I love that Red Bill answered.

Yeah, she did.

No, maybe that was a little bit.

I'm saying I have seen zero signs that she's attracted to him, and now she's going along with it.

Maybe.

Yeah, yeah.

All right.

He deserves to be manipulated, to be clear.

Like, for this level, Alina should be like, you know what?

Sure.

Yeah, go ahead.

Here's this.

Go find the bells.

Go get them, boy.

I kissed her, and it was like the first time.

With her lips slowed to respond.

Slowly, we inched our way back onto the couch until I was lying on top of her.

It felt like the bells.

My hand traced its way down her arms and over her shirt.

My pulse beat faster than it had before.

I was actually aware of my body, how it felt, where it was in relation to Alina's, but had lost all consciousness thought.

Aware of nothing but touch and pulse.

I slid my hand beneath her clothes.

She didn't stop me.

Her sweatpants came down easily.

She trembled.

She was nervous, so was I.

My hand shook as I took my own pants down.

I never exposed myself to anyone.

Her face was inscrutable.

I don't feel right describing the details of her body.

We were kids then.

I'm an adult now.

I didn't know what I was doing then.

I now know.

It was my first time.

I don't know if it was hers.

We don't exactly talk these days.

It was short and fumbling and awkward, but I thought at that time that it was divine.

Afterwards, I didn't want her to leave, but she got dressed anyway.

She was shaking as she pulled.

Gosh, she was shaking as she pulled up her pants and crying by the time she reached.

See, this is what I mean.

It was a legitimate moment and now it's this.

Now it's complicated, weird, and she feels uncomfortable.

She was shaking as she pulled up her pants and crying by the time she reached the door.

I thought maybe she was scared because we hadn't used a condom or that it was her survivor's guilt.

I was wrong.

Hey.

Hey, you.

She was reluctant to let me hug her.

It's okay.

We didn't do anything wrong.

She said yeah and ran her hand back through her wild hair not to get it out of her face.

But like you would if you didn't know the answer on a test.

After she left, I stood at the window for a long time staring out into the night at the place where her taillights had disappeared.

Okay, was I not right then that he shouldn't have taken it to that degree?

That it was not the time?

I mean, probably no.

I don't fucking know, dude.

I don't know.

Listen, I'm not a fucking idea.

I'm not, I have no idea.

All right.

Okay.

There's a, there's a, there's, there's mystical goddamn bells in the forest, and there's a Russian foreign exchange student and kid got set on fire.

You were all about him going for it a second ago.

To be clear,

listen, I didn't say I was going for it.

I'm just saying this is the part which bears it.

Where that happens, bear trap again.

I was like, no, this is a bear trap.

It was starting up the romantic scene, and you're like, oh, I think this will be romantic.

Like, that's not a bear trap.

I said, this is the part

in the story or movie when the getting's good, is what I said.

I didn't say I didn't want it to happen.

I'm just saying that's all the signs were there.

You are right that you didn't say you wanted it to happen, so I'll let that one lie.

I didn't sleep easily that night.

I felt like I should have been more excited than I was.

A lifetime of coming-of-age movies and pop culture had led me to believe I'd feel somehow different about myself and the world, but I didn't.

The view from my bed looked exactly as it had the night before.

Carrie was still in the hospital, and far from restoring Alina to her former self, consummating our relationship had left her as unhappy as ever.

I tried to imagine a future with Alina, one where I made her as happy as she was.

Why'd you laugh there?

Because he's just insufferable at this point.

He's just insufferable.

He's insufferable.

He's talking about the girl who likes him, who's been his friend for years, who he put in the hospital.

In the same breath, he talks about how he's trying to do the best for Alina by pushing her to the furthest possible place that she will allow him to push her every time.

I need bad things on.

Good morning.

Got your picture on my wall.

And it reminds me that it's not so bad.

It's not so bad.

And I

damn tell you.

Dear Slim, I wrote you, but you still ain't calling.

I left my page remote.

I gotta put that shit on my Spotify, dude.

I've had, I haven't listened to that shit in a long time.

Thank you.

Do you know, do you know that?

Uh, do you know the Top Gun song during that romantic scene?

Uh, take my breath away.

It's like the all-time best like hookup track in a movie ever.

Oh, yeah, is it like Super 80s and Synthi or something?

Oh, yes, of course.

Yeah, it's great.

Take my breath away.

It's so good.

The entire soundtrack's good, but anyway,

you like Dito?

I love Dito.

That song's called Thank You by Dito.

She also has that song White Flag.

You know that song?

I don't think I know that one.

If you heard it, you'd know.

White Flag, it goes like.

And I will go down with this ship.

And I will put my hands up and surrender.

There will be no white flag above my door.

Also, got to remember that you've got like 20 years on me.

So like my first exposure to Dito was when I went back to listen to

Stan.

So and like the feature there.

That was like the first time I ever heard Dito.

So

I'm a child.

You have to remember that.

I'm a child.

Well,

that's why I have to remember that you're so close to these high schoolers' ages that I have to like really keep in mind your perspective for this time.

Where's this going?

Where's this going?

Well, you're you're younger.

You're going to be like, I remember.

I barely remember my fucking high school experience.

Well,

this character was in high school in 1999, right?

I was born in 1999.

Did that just shut you down?

You know what, dude?

We don't have to fucking talk about our ages on the stupid ass podcast, right?

All right.

Anyway, I tried to imagine a future with Alina, one where I made her as happy as she made me, but I only wound up thinking about the bells.

Maybe she needed to hear them.

Well, I don't like that.

I fell asleep shortly before 3 in the morning, which, unbeknownst to me, was almost exactly when Carrie woke up screaming.

I'd love to tell you what Carrie's first words were.

Unfortunately, I can't.

When her heart had slowed down, an area of her brain located beneath her left temple hadn't received enough oxygen essentially she'd had a stroke which left her with a condition called expressive phasia

she can make sounds that was no problem and with effort she could say words but she couldn't form sentences my god

whoo man

that's

i'm happy she survived but fuck sakes and this and this

permanently maiming a girl who was your friend who cared about you yeah she's just talking to you planet of the ape style Of course, Mrs.

Peterson and I didn't know when she picked me up the morning of New Year's Eve.

All we knew was that Carrie was awake.

Mrs.

Peterson shook with laughter as we drove down 495.

She was going so fast I thought Ecto One was going to disintegrate, like one of those experimental jet planes you see in old stock footage.

Carrie's mom, beaming with pride, clapped her hand down on my knee and said, Boy, I will tell you, you got yourself one tough girl,

Bro.

What?

I'm so.

This is so sad.

Yeah, I know.

Well,

I hate that he just hasn't.

Like, at least at this point, I would just be like, oh, we're not dating.

We're just friends.

I don't think that's rude to say, is it?

That's not rude.

Oh, no, we're not dating.

She's just,

I would let Carrie say it.

I would let Carrie say it.

God, they don't know.

She's such a spineless coward.

No, no, because, like, well, yeah, well, yeah.

Hey, Carrie, tell your mom we're not dating.

She's like,

they don't know about that until they got there.

Hey, hey, Carrie, Mrs.

Peterson, I think Carrie's got something to tell you.

Funny visual.

Like a teenager who has zero accountability is like, Carrie, tell your mom we're not together.

And it's like,

yeah, she's like drooling out the side of her mouth and shit.

She's like,

She just starts crying.

It's like, no, I didn't say cry.

I said, tell your mom we're not together.

She starts barking.

And that's when our protagonist turns to Mrs.

Peters and he does, see, we're just friends.

Thanks for clearing that up, Carrie.

She's clacking back.

She's clacking her frost-bitten heels together like Dorothy.

Nobody's like home.

Nobody's like home.

Okay, I'm done.

I'm done.

Oh, my word.

I smiled back at her.

Honestly, did.

Thank you, Carrie was essentially out of the woods.

I was thrilled, but I didn't know what else to say.

Or maybe I was too busy worrying that now that she was awake, Carrie might not be quick enough on the uptake to figure out what was going on, and her mom would realize our relationship was a lie.

I wouldn't have worried had I realized how severe Carrie's aphasia was.

Mrs.

Peterson was humming arrhythmically as we pulled into the parking lot.

She walked into the hospital with a spring in her step.

She looked at the nurses like they were old friends or comrades in arms, as if to say, we've been through some rough times together, but now that all that's behind us and I couldn't have made it without you.

But she couldn't be bothered to stop and speak to any of them the look in mrs.

Peterson's eyes and the spring in her step lasted until we reached Carrie's door

mom

boy

dad

arm

wrist bad

wrist

wrist

mom

medicine

Her speech was labored.

I could see you're struggling with each syllable.

Not only, like, now she has a speech impediment, but the fact that you are still doing the gruff man voice through the speech impediment is diabolical.

Come on, man.

That's a character voice.

You're a monster, I think.

No, I'm not a monster.

I think you're irredeemable.

Come on, man.

That's the voice for the story.

Okay.

Mrs.

Peterson told me to...

Go get a doctor.

And that simple sentence.

I could literally hear the happiness drain from inside her.

The woman who had practically skipped down the hospital corridors deflated as she as she took her place by her daughter's side.

I think what I feel the worst about, at least in regards to Carrie, I saw coming in that moment.

In most regards, Mrs.

Peterson wasn't much of a person.

She was.

Oh my gosh, dude.

Oh, she wasn't, she didn't, she didn't amount to much.

Still, I thought he would say that, like, her life had less value.

She's barely human.

She's a dog.

She wasn't smart and she didn't have much of a sense of humor.

she'd never been a great conversationalist or within a stone's throw of attractive

stone's throw of attractive dungeon this kid is red tailed to high hell this kid's awful this like at first it was like oh well maybe he's you know he's a 16 year old kid he's horny whatever but now it's like no he's a bad person and her kill and her cancel tilt is totally wacky

so you get it you see where i was coming from

she was dirt poor and her personal hygiene left a lot to be desired.

In most ways, she was society's definition of a failure.

But there was an air of grace in the resigned way she stepped to her daughter's bedside.

Yes, what little light she had in her life seemed dimmer.

All the hope she'd had for her daughter had been snuffed out.

But she wasn't going anywhere.

She was going to shoulder the load and give her daughter everything she could.

I tell myself that, accident or no, Carrie and I would have drifted apart anyway during college.

After all, even if her aphasia had fully fully dissipated, there's no way we would have gone to the same school.

But the truth is that, after that morning, I never could stand to be in the same room as Carrie.

Every time she stammered or shifted her weight on her crutches, filled me with self-loathing, and I couldn't take it.

I went to the nurse's station.

They told me that they'd have to call in a doctor with a background in neurology.

About a half hour or so later, Dr.

Walsh stepped into Carrie's room.

I don't remember much about him other than that he had a silver silver hair and his bedside manner could be charitably described as detached.

Hospital,

man,

doctor,

arm,

bed, nurse.

She wants another painkiller.

You have another line?

Yeah, I know.

Okay.

All right, take your time.

Get it out.

I just love it.

I love that she's like,

never mind.

Just cut this shit.

It's cut.

It's like those injuries.

She wants another painkiller.

These people are going to lose that hand.

What were you going to say?

Nothing.

There's fucking nothing.

If we can cut it, I just need to know.

He's fucking talking to her like she's a fucking, like, he's like one of those people at a zoo that like takes care of the apes.

They're doing sign language.

And he's like, you know, Chim Jim wants a banana.

Whatever.

It's like, she's like, hospital man.

And he's like, well, she wants another painkiller.

Probably got to get rid of that hand.

I don't know.

I just.

It is very much so.

Like, Amy, want orange.

And the zookeeper is like just pelting it with oranges.

Oh.

Mrs.

Peterson asked Dr.

Walshwire.

Daughter couldn't speak properly.

And he explained to us what they expected to find once they gave Carrie a CG scan.

See, people always talk about how we don't use more than 2 or 10 or 12% of our brain, but that's a load of crap.

We use all of it, and because every part of our brain has certain tasks and functions associated with it, even a small injury can cause very serious and pronounced effects, like Carrie's expressive aphasia.

It didn't affect any other aspect of her cognition.

She probably even knew what she wanted to say, but she couldn't get the words out.

Now, luckily, the brain is fairly elastic, so given time, some of the undamaged areas surrounding the affected region could compensate and she could regain her normal speech.

Aphasia isn't uncommon in stroke victims, and we have to see a full recovery within a year.

Throughout our conversation with Dr.

Walsh, Carrie would attempt to interject.

If it seemed like she needed something or was asking a question, we would try to figure out what she was saying.

Otherwise, Mrs.

Peterson would just stroke her daughter's hair until she settled back down.

Mostly, Carrie seemed concerned with pain from her frostbite.

Just as Dr.

Walsh was excusing himself, she said something or shouted really that made my hair stand on end.

Hear!

Hear!

Sounds rigged!

Rig!

Ring!

Ring!

Ring!

Rig!

Rig!

Ring!

Rig!

Ring!

Ring!

Ring!

Rig!

Ring!

The way that you wrote the chat.

I threw on probably I probably threw on twelve more rings there

than she fell silent.

You're like, How many rings are I know?

I started counting you like, wake you, good God.

I was like, I guarantee you, this is more than eight.

Then she fell silent.

Then she fell.

Ring!

I mean, I was going to make, before you get going, I was going to make a comment about how haunting that is.

Well, first off,

it is actually a very fucking crazy moment of

a person who can't articulate himself.

Well, first off, what a hell that would be.

You know what you want to say, but you cannot physically say what you're meaning to say.

And then now you are tormented by the fact that you're like, she's probably hearing nothing but the bells ringing.

You know?

Yeah.

Yeah, like it's constantly in her head.

Because it's the last thing her brain, like with full,

it's one of the last things her brain like fully consciously remembers.

Yeah, that's a nightmare.

Nightmare scenario.

You somehow did the man gruff voice as you were saying ring.

Oh, yeah, ring!

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mrs.

Peterson looked up at Dr.

Walsh.

What does she want?

After your

voice acting 12 times.

What is what?

Huh?

Doctor.

Dr.

Walsh took out a small flashlight and shot it into Carrie's eyes.

Her pupils were unresponsive.

She may also also have damaged her auditory cortex.

We'll know more once we get her scanned.

I glanced down at my watch.

It had just turned 10.

Okay, so it was 10 ring.

So I've got 10 ring.

I said ring probably like that.

So

according to your acting, it's 23 o'clock.

Exactly.

I look down at my watch.

It's 23 o'clock.

The bell's supposed to work off military time.

It's 11 p.m.

That is the end of part six here.

Part seven.

So

it seems the

bell phenomenon, the bell

paranoia, or even the paranormal aspect of it is seeming to ramp up.

I'm wondering as the days go on, the more they don't go back to it, if it drives them more and more insane or like crazier if it just keeps like ringing non-stop.

I think

Alina's going to be.

I think what's going to happen is they're all...

You think what?

I think Alina's going for sure.

Like, I think our protagonist is going to take her there.

He might kidnap her and might throw in her trunk and take her there, knowing this guy.

God, man, come on.

I know, like, just the way of how hard he's pushing this girl.

And he, like,

if he had some level of remorse, because I don't fully blame him for what happened to Carrie.

Sure, it was his idea to go there, but she stepped out onto the ice willingly.

He didn't have to coax her or anything.

And also, when Carrie fell through, he's the one who like pulled her out, crawled across the ice to get her out, right?

So I don't fully blame him for what happened to Carrie, but just his dismissal of it

for the sake of

like obsessing over Lena and stuff like that.

I don't know.

It just doesn't sell to me.

He seems like a selfish guy, even beyond just being a horny teenager, you know?

Sure.

But maybe he'll grow out of it.

Maybe that's part of it because he has had a bit of a character swing.

Like I talked about when Carrie fell through the eyes, he had a bit of a self-recognition of where he was at.

So maybe that'll continue, I hope.

But we'll see.

I will say he's a very

complex character.

Like he's, he is an accurately written 16-year-old rather than just like, you know, a stereotypical high school movie kid, right?

Right, all right.

Part seven: most people have largely forgotten about all the hysteria surrounding the Y2K bug, and rightly so.

It was a fundamentally silly concern.

I'm not saying it was outside the realm of possibility that a few systems would crash or that there wouldn't be a couple of automated billing issues, but an embarrassingly high percentage of the population believed, like my father, that it could cause a nuclear holocaust.

We've been fighting about it since Thanksgiving.

That's not how missiles work, Dad.

Oh, so you're a nuclear technician now.

All the control systems that launch are ICBMs are computerized and they're old computers.

They're not compliant.

You don't know what will happen.

I know missiles don't launch unless they're told to.

It's not like they're sitting around in

silos going, can I launch yet?

Can I launch yet?

Huh?

Huh?

How about now?

And all the computers are sitting there going, no, no, no, no.

Wait, what year is it?

1900?

Ah, crap.

I haven't been invented yet.

Release the dogs of war.

I've been fighting with my parents for weeks to get me to go to Drew DeLuca's New Year's Eve party, but in addition to the imminent threat of thermonuclear war, they thought 15 was too young to stay out all night at a co-ed party.

Originally, they had wanted to pick me up by 10 after I brought Alina home.

My dad suddenly reversed his position.

I could stay over at Drew's.

Man, dad is such a

dad, is a team player.

The ultimate wingman, you know what?

Yeah.

You'll be alright.

You know what?

I don't have to see it until 2001 at this rate.

Have fun.

In the past, I had always been at home when the ball dropped.

Usually my brother would fall asleep around 11, and my parents had long since outgrown the compulsion to make New Year's Eve special.

This usually left me alone with Dick, Clark, and my daydreams of having someone to kiss at midnight.

Of course, that was all immaterial.

There was no way Alina would turn up at DeLuca's, and after finding out what had happened to Carrie and having to tell my parents about it, well, I didn't exactly feel like celebrating either.

My dad actually stayed up with me that year.

He was convinced the power would go out at midnight.

Part of me hoped he was right.

Sure, it might have meant the end of the world, but at least it would have taken my mind off how crappy I felt.

At midnight, the ball dropped.

So many things had happened to me that year.

So many things that I'd thought would make me feel happy or maybe just fulfilled.

But the girl I loved was still miserable.

One of my best friends had brain damage and there was nothing i could do for either one of them the world was the same miserable place it had been that morning no more no less i tried calling elena before i went to sleep but hung up when her dad answered the next day we spoke only briefly she seemed more distant than ever but assured me that it was only because her parents were in the next room At my parents' insistence, Mrs.

Peterson joined us for a late dinner on her way back from the hospital.

The dark wood surface of our dining room table was polished to a mirrored finish and and Mrs.

Peterson looked out of place sitting at it.

Her old t-shirt and stained khaki work pants reflected back up at her.

My little brother was visibly uncomfortable to be sitting across from her.

He had the same expression on his face as he had the first time we'd gone to a socks game by ourselves and, heading back to L Wife, a homeless person had sat near us on the tee.

None of us spoke much, but before leaving, Mrs.

Peterson did accept the name of a speech therapist my dad had tracked down from one of the partners at his firm earlier that day and had agreed to let us help her pay for it.

I knew he had ulterior motives, but I got the impression from the look in my dad's eyes that he did really want to help.

My dad was a bit of a shark, and I think that may have been the first time I'd ever seen him look at someone with pity.

Monday morning, I saw Fletch for the first time since Carrie had fallen through the ice.

It had only been a week, but it felt like a lifetime.

Fletch looked tired in a way you don't see often in teenagers.

He looked like my grandfather right before he decided he couldn't take any more chemo.

He looked beaten.

If he didn't know already, I didn't think he could handle an update on Carrie's condition.

We rode in silence.

School was a torture.

Everyone was laughing and smiling.

They complained of being back from break, but were eager catching up with friends, swapping stories about New Year's or Christmas, and

commiserating and commiserating about the lack of fresh powder anywhere on the East Coast that year.

They had no idea Scary Carrie was lying in a hospital bed, practically unable to speak.

At least when Rob had killed himself, his death had been so public we all went through it together.

With Carrie, aside from Kim Murray and Dan Bergen, Fletch and I were the only ones who even seemed to notice she was missing.

It's only being miserable in a crowd of happy people.

Drew teased me about having missed his party, but quickly realized I wasn't in the mood.

You alright, dude?

Not even close.

You want to talk about it?

Shaking my head was all I could do without crying.

Drew squeezed my shoulders in a half hug, and he gave me some space by turning back to our group of friends.

I disappeared wordlessly into the crowded hallway in search of the only person that could make me feel better.

I found Alina right before the bell rang for first period.

She was sitting against the lockers with Sarah Cohen.

I couldn't hear what they were saying, but based on how quickly they stopped talking, I got the impression it had been about me.

All I wanted to do was to put my arms around Alina, to melt against her and bury my face in her shoulder, to lose myself, even if just for a second, in the sensation of holding her.

But the bell rang before I could even get a word out, and Sarah dragged her off to class with scarcely a backwards glance.

The rest of the day crawled by in a meaningless cacophony of lecturing teachers and jabbering students.

With each passing minute, I felt like it was harder and harder to breathe.

I spent the last period staring at the second hand of the clock, willing it to move faster until it struck three.

That's when I heard them.

The bells.

One, I was in my den.

I was inside Alina.

Two,

writhing against her.

Felt as though I'd melt and explode all at the same time.

Three,

I never wanted the chimes to end.

But they did.

I was sitting in my desk, breathing hard.

Everyone else around me was packing up their things.

I took a moment to collect myself and followed suit.

They sounded as loud as they had from the shore of the Quabin.

As loud and as beautiful.

That Wednesday, Fletch and I were in a CarX.

Wow, that's a crazy turnaround.

I think, like,

with the bell,

it makes sense to me that one of like a feeling of ultimate euphoria is like when you're 16 and you have like your first experience with a girl.

Like that feeling of nothing's wrong in the world, everything's okay.

I don't think it's just because he's super horny for Alina.

I think it's also because like that is the closest thing his mind can trace to bliss and that's why the bells keep taking him back there yeah i mean it's utter obsession by this point yeah you know yeah not caring about anything else just euphoria sure

that wednesday fletch and i were in a car accident as on the way to school we were running a little late for some reason although i don't recall why fletch had slowed down the car to make the turn onto cold springs road and then froze letting the car drift into the trees on the side of the road for my part i was yelling but he didn't seem to notice for a full eight seconds he just sat there his foot lightly pressing the gas, his car pressed up against a grove of small pine trees, its wheels spinning up dirt and fallen needles.

I didn't need to ask what had happened.

It was eight o'clock.

He heard the bells.

When he snapped out of it, Fletch was visibly shaken.

Oh, God, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

Are you alright?

I was fine.

The only real damage was a crack in the front bumper and a bent sapling.

We'd been lucky.

If we'd been a few seconds earlier or later, it would have struck eight while Fletch was going 30 or 40 down our winding streets and the trees would have been a lot less forgiving.

Have you heard them since we were out there?

Yeah, twice.

Gary's heard them too.

I've heard them eight times.

They keep getting louder.

Fletch shuddered.

Do you think this is what happened to Rob?

The bells just kept ringing.

Kept getting louder and louder until he couldn't take it anymore.

I didn't.

The bells were too beautiful, or so I thought at the time.

I was actually a little jealous Fletch had heard them more times than I had.

We arrived after first period had already started.

Too late for me to have had any chance of seeing Alina that day.

I hadn't seen her all week, and every time I called her house, it seemed like her father answered, and I just missed her.

Awfully social for someone who still ate all her lunches with the guidance counselors.

Although in fairness to Alina, I got it.

I found the general din of the classroom intolerable and the cafeteria even worse.

Everyone else seemed so happy, so carefree.

I'm not sure when exactly I began checking the time compulsively.

May have been the day Fletch went off the road, it may have been later in the week.

Regardless, the time seemed to be the only thing I could focus on at school.

Suddenly, I was holding my breath whenever a new hour approached, each time hoping that I would hear the bells again.

I remember thinking that it was funny.

Back before I knew for sure there was something lying beyond the realm of our senses, I'd always turned to prayer.

And now, after years of seeking out the supernatural as a way of bolstering my faith, after having found the evidence that I was searching for, I found myself unable to complete so much as a simple Hail Mary without my thoughts strained to the sublime beauty of the bells.

I guess it was foolish of me to think that finding the widower's clock would reaffirm my Catholic faith.

I still didn't know if there was a God.

All I knew for sure was that there were the bells and the bells were housed in a spire in the woods on an island in a reservoir just a car right away.

I'd be getting my driver's license in a little over a a week.

I tried to dispel thoughts of returning to the Quabin, but the unhappier I was at school, the more I longed to return.

There was no question Alina was avoiding me.

I kept trying to call her and kept getting her parents.

I didn't want them to think I was a pest, so I tried to keep my calls down to one a day, but it was so hard.

I took to calling and hanging up if she didn't answer.

Pathetic, I know, but I couldn't help myself.

We were taught in Sunday school that hell's worst torture is how exquisitely your soul feels the absence of God.

And if that's true, surely a teenager's worst torture is how exquisitely they feel the absence of their first love, especially when it's a rejection.

The dirty look started on Tuesday the 11th, just over a week after we come back from break.

I gone looking for Alina in the juniors hallway, same as I had every morning, and there was Sarah Cohen, looking at me like I was filth incarnate.

stopped me dead in my tracks.

I didn't know Sarah very well, but she'd always seemed so friendly.

Seeing that disgust directed at me, it was shocking.

I wasn't real popular, but I never elicited that sort of reaction.

Mostly at school, away from my handful of friends, I was invisible.

The next day at lunch, I noticed it wasn't just Sarah.

When I went up to get my food, I noticed that the whole table of sporty girls that Alina used to sit with before Rob's suicide were staring at me.

It was the sort of reaction I'd seen people have to scary Carrie, like they simply didn't want me to be there.

While I didn't know any of these girls especially well, I had met one or two of them through Christie and thought we were on good terms.

I tried giving them a smile and tilting my head back in that hey gesture.

Some turned away quickly, a few of the others pursed their lips in an expression I couldn't read.

After that, I noticed they kept looking over at me throughout the rest of the lunch period.

I picked up my tray for a while, then left without eating.

I missed feeling invisible.

I tried calling Alina again that night.

I knew I wouldn't like hearing whatever it was she had to say, but I had to hear it.

Her answering machine picked up.

Thought about leaving a message, but didn't see the point.

How could she treat me like this?

Here we go.

Here's our, here's our, our man, our cancel, our cancel-tilt guy.

Has he been seeing her at school, by the way?

No, he says he hasn't been seeing her, and she told her lunch is in the cafeteria.

She's also a year older than him, right?

I have a, yeah, yeah.

I have a feeling that she, uh,

I think she's gone i think she went to the

uh i don't know if she's gone gone you know you don't think she's probably not there well i meant you i mean i i guess i meant like do you think she uh do you think she's gone to the bells to see them i think her parents would have just moved her to a different school

because she because

I don't think you would go to the bells unless you were obsessive, like these guys.

Because the reason they want to go back is because they've heard them.

But Alina's never heard them, so she has no supernatural draw to go to them in the first place.

Yeah, but I think that

after our protagonist told her how awesome it was, I

don't know.

I guess it's just a matter of curiosity.

Maybe you're probably, I mean,

maybe, maybe, you could be right.

We'll see.

How could she treat me like this?

All I ever wanted to do was help her and make her feel good.

I felt like someone had scooped out my insides and left me a languid husk.

I couldn't imagine a worse feeling.

I couldn't sleep.

I stared up at the ceiling and tried to convince myself that she really did care about me.

That her happiness that we were together and had made love had brought her survivor guilt rushing back.

God, I was practically praying the girl I loved was suffering from psychological problems.

I don't remember if it was three or four when I heard them.

Those bells.

They sounded so sweet and so clear.

I felt like I had after the first time I'd kissed Alina.

I saw the version of us from my daydreams walking the halls, holding hands, smiling and laughing as we argued about whose friend to sit with that day.

I felt full again.

The next thing I knew, I was waking up.

Thursday the 13th was snow day.

As desperately as I wanted to see Alina again, even just bump into her, it was a relief to not be in school.

I stayed in bed until nearly noon and then had breakfast with my brother.

It was so calm, so peaceful.

Nothing to do but play video games and watch the snowfall.

Maybe I'm romanticizing it now, but January 13th, 2000 was the last normal day of my life.

Ooh.

The story does that a lot, you know, where it's like, oh, I think it was 25 degrees that day.

That was the last time I saw Carrie happy.

Like,

there's a lot of these like, oh, what do you mean by that?

Why, why was that the last normal day?

Exactly.

Friday was my birthday.

16 years old.

It should have been one of the happiest days of my life.

But all I really felt was resolve.

I decided I had to know what was going on.

Enough was enough.

If I couldn't catch Alina at school or get her on the phone, then I'd just have to make Alina's house my first stop as a licensed driver.

Fletch and I got to school early.

Ever since the bells made him drift off the road, he insisted we leave early enough to be sure we were parked before 8 o'clock.

I skipped my locker and went straight for the juniors hallway.

Halfway there, Drew DeLuca intercepted me, pulling me into an empty classroom.

Drew was co-captain of our swim team, and the years spent swimming laps had left him absolutely ripped.

He moved me about as easily as he would have a small child when the door.

Oh,

what are you doing to me, Drew?

He moved me about as easily as he would have a small child, and when the door shut behind us, he didn't loosen his grip.

Dude, what's going on with you and Alina?

There was something very accusatory in his voice.

I tried to step back, but he yanked me forward, maintaining his uncomfortably close distance.

that's what i want to know i mumbled drew staring unblinkingly into my eyes like he was trying to see right through me as i told him about how lena had come to me at his birthday party asking me about a reference in rob suicide note about how we kissed at her house about how carried fallen through the ice and about how lena and i eventually made love i left out the part about the bells jesus christ jesus fucking christ

Drew dropped his hands from my arm and turned to walk away.

The angry edge was gone from his voice, but he didn't sound relieved.

Dude, Sarah Cohen told the whole swim team this morning that you

that you were talking, or that you that you were stalking Alina.

I sat down hard.

I felt like the room was spinning, like the wind had been knocked out of me.

You've got to back off, dude.

She's got a boyfriend.

She's a.

Who?

That guy she dated dated last summer.

What's his name?

From Bishop Gordon?

What's his name was Ryan Dorset?

They met at a track meet two years earlier.

Ryan Dorset was rich.

Ryan Dorset was tall.

Ryan Dorset was handsome.

And although I may not be the most objective source on this, Ryan Dorset was a douchebag.

First time I'd ever spoken to him, I was wearing a radio head shirt and he quizzed me about their album titles as if I was some bandwagon follower who had to justify my fandom to him.

Okay, I am, I was completely right, by the way.

That's my bear trap, that Alina was just letting him get to these degrees.

She never showed any interest in him.

She just needed him to find out more about the bells to get this out of her mind.

Now, it's 100% in Alina's wrong to not to do that to him if she had a boyfriend, if she had zero interest to let him push that far.

But I was right that she never showed any interest and that he was just, he was superimposing what he wanted to believe onto her this entire time.

Yeah, the also explains why she was so upset too, because maybe she thought that she was, you know.

Because she was cheating on this other guy, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, she was cheating on this other guy.

And she may have been like, well, I have to cheat on him so that I can have...

I have to cheat.

I have to cheat so that I can have, you know, more.

I can know more about the bells and figure out this whole Rob thing or whatever her justification was.

She shouldn't have done it, obviously.

But at the same time, she's a high school girl who's very scared.

So, you know.

Yeah, not a good excuse, dude.

No, it's not, it's not, that doesn't make it okay to cheat.

I'm joking.

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

Okay.

I'm trying to tell, I'm engaging with the story seriously, Hunter.

Thank you very much.

You son of a bitch.

You jerk.

Hunter's like, ha ha, you care.

Look at you.

You care.

You're engaged.

You're enjoying it.

Loser.

Okay.

How could Alina do this to me?

Take my virginity and then backslide with an old boyfriend?

How could she be so shallow?

Ryan Dorff said.

Happy birthday to me.

I love that.

Happy birthday to me, asshole.

I would have liked to have stayed hidden in that empty classroom, but the bell rang.

Emerging into the crowded hallway, I could feel people staring at me.

Whispered conversations halted at my approach.

John Landry, who was on the track team with Alina, shouldered me as I came came out of the stairwell near the gym's locker rooms.

It's weird how quickly gossip can change your whole world.

I would exactly call John Landry a friend of mine, but we had sat next to each other in bio the year before and had always gotten along well enough.

Robert Kinnen had learned, through no fault of his own, what a rumor could do to your life.

And so had Alina, which made her doing it to me somehow extra painful.

She knew how much the whispers and sidelong glances could hurt, and she was subjecting me to it anyway.

Of course, in fairness to her, what she said about me wasn't a lie.

Not exactly.

If only she had talked to me, I wouldn't have had to go to her house that day.

Oh, no.

Here we go.

Oh, no.

Here we go.

Oh, no.

Bro, your prediction earlier about maybe our main character is going to become like Rob.

You were so right.

I'm fucking telling you.

For all we know, she had the exact same circumstance with Rob.

Maybe there was another guy in middle school who killed himself.

And then she goes to Rob, like, hey, do you know about this in the suicide mode?

Just a trail of bodies behind her.

My mom picked me up from school a little early and took me to the DMV.

I passed a written exam and the driving test with flying colors.

She offered to let me drive home, but I declined.

It would turn four while we were still on the road, and I didn't want to risk an accident.

If my mom thought it was weird, she didn't say anything.

After we got home, I lied and said I wanted my first car ride to be a visit to Scary Carrie, who had been released from the hospital the week before.

Her parents thought that was sweet and even complimented me on what a good person I was.

I thanked them and forced a smile, even though I felt that inside.

I headed out for Alina's around a quarter to five.

Her parents wouldn't be home for another hour or two.

I swear to God, all I wanted was to talk to her.

I never meant for anything else to happen.

Oh no, please believe me when I say that.

Please.

Oh no, dude.

Bro, where's this about to go?

Why not?

Hunter.

I don't know.

Hunter, I'm scared.

Oh, no.

When I arrived, there was a car parked behind Alina's Blue Beetle that I didn't recognize.

I went up to the door, but here we go.

I went up to the door, but something stopped me from ringing the bell.

It was a queasy feeling.

Sort of feeling you get when you know your life's never going to be the way you want it to.

Took a closer look at the car.

It had a Bishop Girton parking pass.

The son of a bitch was there.

Like it's his fault.

Like it's this guy who definitely got cheated on.

Bitches you.

I walked through the yard around the back of the house.

Part of me wanted to catch them red-handed.

Her boyfriend wanted to catch me and her boyfriend.

Hold on.

Also, I just want to say this also parallels so heavy with the folktales earlier.

I just want to say that.

Oh my gosh.

You're right.

I didn't even think about that.

100%.

Which I love.

I just want to say, I just, I love that detail.

Dude, you are so right.

We have had both folktales, and I made the theory earlier that they're both based off the widowmaker's clock, but now we have the exact same position with our protagonist.

Bro, that's so cool.

Oh, my gosh, that's so cool.

All right, I walked through the yard around the back of the house.

A part of me wanted to catch them red-handed, though it's not clear to me what there was anything to catch.

If they were together, I couldn't exactly call it cheating because if Alana wouldn't even talk to me, clearly we weren't going out.

I guess I just had to see it with my own eyes.

I crouched down beside one of the basement windows and peered in.

There she was on the couch where we had our first kiss lying on top of Ryan Dorset.

His hands were inside her shirt and hers were working aggressively to undo his belt.

Okay.

This can't leave.

This is going to go so bad.

This is going to go so far.

I wanted to leave.

This is so bad.

Look, you saw your evidence.

Get out.

Exactly.

Just get the fuck out of there, dude.

Just get leave, dude.

It's like, yes, it sucks.

I'm sorry this happened.

Leave.

I wanted to leave.

I wanted to run away.

Scrunch my eyes close and pretend that I had never seen anything.

But I couldn't.

I was held in place by a morbid fascination.

It was almost like in a dream when you're not in control and just watching yourself from the outside.

My mind was screaming to go, but my feet stayed planted and my eyes drank in every detail.

To this day, I remember what I saw from that window.

Oh, gosh.

Oh, no.

Even better than I remember our first kiss, or the way Alina always smelled like vanilla, or how it felt when I gave her my virginity.

What I saw was Alina unfastening Dorset's pants and sliding her hand into his fly.

It was tough to see her face, but I could tell she wasn't crying.

I could tell she didn't feel conflicted about what she was doing.

I realized some months later that I'd never seen her look that way at me.

I'd always been the aggressor.

Okay, thank you.

Some accountability.

Cool.

I guess I had it noticed because at 16 years old, I had internalized the idea that that was what guys were supposed to do and that good girls were supposed to be, well, not reluctant, exactly.

I wasn't so far gone as to think girls didn't also want sex, but I believed they'd be more demure, less eager.

But at the time, standing there outside her basement window, I wasn't thinking of Alina's perspective.

I didn't consider how she felt about Ryan Dorset or what she must have thought of me.

I could only stare as they wriggled out of their clothes and watched Zelina guide a Dorset inside her.

I felt like Adolph Rifler.

There you go.

There you go, dude.

There it is.

That's when it turned five and I...

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

The bells.

That's when it turned five and I lost myself completely to the bells.

One, I felt warm, but not like before.

This was was different.

It wasn't like a blanket, it was like a fire.

Two, my heart pounded in my chest like thunder in a storm.

Three, I was acutely aware of my body, my arms and legs pumping like pistons, the wind blowing past my face.

Four, I could feel the weight of something solid in my hand.

No, no.

Five.

Once when I was 11.

Oh gosh, this is so good.

Five, once when I was 11, I had gotten into a fight at school and it took two teachers to pry me off the other boy.

I had given him a black eye and knocked out the last of his baby teeth.

Anger can also feel good.

Bloodlust can also feel like home.

When the last of the bells tolled, they were replaced by the sound of a car alarm.

Alina, only half dressed, was screaming and crying and sobbing all at the same time.

I looked up just in time to see Ryan Dorsett, wearing nothing but boxers and a pair of sneakers, punch me in the face.

I fell down hard onto the pavement of Alina's driveway, which was covered in broken glass.

Apparently, I've been smashing in his car windows with a large rock.

Okay.

Oh, I thought he was about to go in there and kill them.

Yeah, that's what I thought, too.

I thought he was about to straight up

widow maker clock, just run them through with a pitchfork.

Yeah, well, that's kind of what I, you know, that's what it was prepping up to me, I thought.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Dorset grabbed me by my jacket and pulled me up into a seated position so he could get a good grip on my throat.

Stop it!

Stop it!

Alina shrieked.

I'm sure somewhere one of her neighbors was already calling the cops.

What the fuck's the matter with you, huh?

Why'd you just leave her alone?

Dorset asked.

He maneuvered his body weight on top of me, pinning me down as his fingers dug into my neck.

It's an awful feeling having someone you don't want to be there on top of you, pressing down.

The rock was still...

Oh, no.

The rock was still in my hand, and I swung it with everything I was worth.

It hit the side of his face with a sickening crunch.

I'd broken Ryan Dorset's jaw and sent him rolling into the Aminev's snow-covered front lawn.

He must have been in shock because it took him a second to realize how hard he'd been hit and for the pain to set in.

I could see the realization, the fear in his face.

It made me feel good.

It made me feel big.

Oh, dude, we were so right about this, by the way.

Just everything.

About the red pill guy, about him wanting to be bigger.

Oh, dude.

Dorset slowly began to crawl away on his hands and knees.

I got to my feet and held the rock up high above my head.

Please, please, Alina whispered.

All the color drained from her face.

Every bit of her was trembling.

Tears rolled unchecked down each of her cheeks.

She was looking at me and what she saw scared her.

I'm so sorry.

I looked back at her.

Her eyes were red from crying.

Her lip quivered.

She looked a lot older than 17.

Suddenly the rock felt heavy and I didn't feel so big.

I let the rock fall from my hand, landed in the snow with a soft plop.

Okay.

I thought he was about to kill this guy.

I mean, from Ryan's perspective, too, he's completely justified.

Your girlfriend's like, hey, this dude's been stalking me.

And then he breaks your windows at her house.

Like, yeah, you go out there and beat the guy up.

But yeah, Alina shouldn't have played.

I can't tell how much of this is Alina's fault or how much is his, like,

because we've already said that he's misattributed her feelings towards him.

How much of this is like the bells messing with him or his perception being wrong, you know?

Yeah.

He's certainly an unreliable narrator, I think.

Well, it's all from his perspective, too, which doesn't help.

Yeah, yeah.

Ryan began to blubber in pain.

His words were unintelligible, or maybe I just don't want to remember what he said.

Blood was gushing from his mouth, stained the snow beneath him as he crawled.

I had not intended for things to turn out the way they did.

Alina was terrified of me, and that was the last thing I ever wanted her to feel, especially about me.

I opened my mouth and found no words.

I reached out towards her, desperate to comfort her, and she recoiled from me with a gasp.

Her eyes squeezed shut, bracing for an impact I could hardly blame her for fearing.

Didn't know what else to do, so I just left.

It was the last time I ever saw Alina Aminev.

Found myself on the highway with the music blaring.

I was driving fast down 495.

It had to have been at least half an hour since I'd left Alina's.

I had no memory of the intervening time.

I couldn't go home.

I couldn't.

I'd be arrested.

This wasn't like a shoving match.

Brian Dorsett would need medical attention.

He was the second person in less than a month that I'd put in the hospital.

Then again, where was I going to go?

What was I going to do?

Make a run for Canada?

Even if police wouldn't soon be looking for my mom's car, I probably had seven or eight dollars on me and access to another $250 or so in my Bay Bank savings account.

Hardly enough to get far.

I felt dead inside.

There was only one thing that could make me feel better.

I wanted to hear them again.

One last time.

For real.

I was going to the Quabin.

The sun sets early in the winter.

Hell, it had started going down even before I'd arrived at Alina's.

By the time I'd hit the Quabin, it was a little after 8.30 and dark.

I parked the car near the trailer park, as Fletch had done the night Carrie fell through the ice.

I remember wondering how close I was to where he'd parked the night Rob found the spire.

The walk to the lake took a little longer than last time.

There was about four or five inches of snow on the ground and the plows had turned the sides of the road into little snow banks a foot or so high.

It made walking on the side of the road slow going.

Luckily, I only saw one car drive by and they didn't pay much attention to me.

It was bitter cold.

I hadn't noticed at first, but with each step the wind was cutting further and further through that dead feeling.

I just kept walking.

It was like being back on the hike with Scary Carrie.

You're hyper-aware of your body, all of it aches and pains, but if you just keep walking, your brain goes blank.

It felt good not to think.

I was only about halfway between the entrance to the Guabin and the reservoir when I heard them.

So sweet, so lovely, so warm.

Suddenly it wasn't so cold anymore.

I didn't feel the wind, or at least not a winter wind.

I felt a warm breeze on my cheek.

It smelled dewy and sweet.

The full moon shone down on the lush green forest surrounding either side of the dirt road.

Had it been paved only a moment ago?

I could hear crickets.

A tiny light flitted past the corner of my eye.

Then another and another.

Fireflies dancing through the air.

It was so warm.

I took off my jacket and stood watching the fireflies trying to find one another in the hopes of mating.

Then the bells finished their call and I was standing in the snow, holding my jacket, staring at nothing.

I quickly struggled back into my jacket.

I looked back the way I came.

The moonlight bouncing off the snow bathed everything in a weak blue light.

It was beautiful, but sterile.

A much harsher environment than the one in the vision I'd just had.

I'd returned to hear the bells one last time, but looking back in that direction of the trailer park, well, there was nothing for me back there.

Nothing good at any rate.

So I turned back towards the reservoir and started walking.

One foot in front of the other.

Just me and one last mile.

When I finally reached the shore, it was nearly 9.30.

The wind had blown the snow into little drifts, leaving some patches of ice bare.

In the moonlight, it looked almost like the quabbin was made of white and blue marble.

It was scenic, but I barely noticed.

I was looking off at the larger of the two islands.

Its trees, frosted by snow, left it almost invisible against the horizon.

I wondered dimly if the bag with Christie's raft and my mother's Bible was laying somewhere out on that ice.

It had been cold that last couple of weeks and the ice was silent.

Either it had grown thicker or the snow was dampening the sound of its choo-choo-choos.

I stepped out onto the quabbin's frozen surface.

It was easiest to walk where the snow was thickest.

With each step, I drew closer to the place where Carrie had fallen through the ice, sinking deeper into my self-loathing as I did.

I almost wanted the ice to give out beneath me.

The thought of plunging into the dark depths of the freezing waters below, of having what little warmth I possessed sucked from my body, leaving me numb, physically unable to feel anything, was enticing.

I didn't want to feel.

I didn't want to think, and I didn't want to feel.

Not like this.

I'd barely caught a glimpse of Carrie's face as she fell through the ice, standing there, trying to picture it.

All I could see was Alina, and the horror I filled her with.

I considered for a long moment, stomping my feet in an effort to open up a fissure in the surface of the reservoir.

But there was something else I wanted more than the anethesizing relief the cold offered.

I wanted the bells.

Being close to their source strengthened the memory of how they made me feel when I heard them.

It was as if I had been been pulled towards them by an invisible string.

Actually, it was more like I was underwater, holding my breath, being sucked along by a gentle current.

It felt like if I ever wanted to breathe again, I had to go where the waters wanted to take me.

I had to find the spire.

Wind pushes snow around capriciously.

If the snow can catch somewhere, more snow will pile up on top of it, forming little drifts.

like sand dunes in a desert.

There's enough wind, eight inches of snow might result in some spots where the ground is barely covered and the others where the snow runs two three feet deep.

I didn't see anything that extreme that night on the frozen surface of the quabin, except for one oddly blocky little snow drift.

As I drew near, I could see, in the moonlight of a cloth strap peeking out of the snow, it was my duffel bag, the one I dropped after pulling Gary out of the water.

The bag had been soaked and left outside for weeks.

Felt like a solid block of ice and probably weighed close to 30 pounds.

I doubted there was much in there that could be salvaged.

Maybe the raft, but my mom's Bible was almost certainly done for, and the incense and various things Carrie and I had accumulated were probably ruined.

But I took it up anyway.

Leaving it there so close to the source of the bells seemed as disrespectful to me as leaving trash behind in the pews of church.

The ice and its frozen straps cracked as I slung the bag over my shoulder and pressed on.

It must have been 9.58 or 9.59 by the time I stepped off the ice and onto the shore of the large island, because I'd scarcely reached the woodline when the bells tolled 10.

I found the ankle-deep snow replaced by a broad dirt road and the snow-capped trees with colonial homes, but these colonials weren't like the McMansions that dominated my neighborhood.

No, even in the near darkness, I could see that these were much more solidly built, and each looked different enough from the others that they couldn't possibly have all been from the same plan.

The bells rang out like thunder.

I fell, shaking to my knees, letting their raw power wash over me.

I could feel the sound waves reverberating through my bones.

I was vibrating to the frequency of the universe.

It felt like staring into the true face of God.

My whole body tingled.

My whole being cracked with energy.

I wept because it was so beautiful.

I wept because I was unworthy.

I wept because I could do nothing else.

The call of the bells washed over me like a wave at the beach and sucked me into their undertow.

I thought I was leaving this world.

I thought my next breath would be at their source.

I felt like a weary traveler finally able to rest and a dreamer waking from sleep all at once.

Then the tenth bell sounded and I was lying in the snow.

It was silent, except for the wind.

And I wept for a different reason.

I was alone in the darkness, alone in the cold, in a world where I'd lost my place.

There's no way but forward.

There's nothing for me but the bells.

End of part seven.

Wow.

I, uh,

by far my favorite part so far we've read.

But I think it's just because the entire buildup and the obsession comes to like a screeching halt and he crashes basically into the lena.

Yeah.

And now he's fully, I mean, I'm wondering if, you know, how, because this part eight eight of ten and now he's like there's nothing for me but the bells i'm wondering if he's if if we're just going to be in full

forest mode now you know what i mean we could be it could also end the same way it did with rob it could it very well could i mean he is writing this year's laters though he's writing this year's later so we know that he has survived but at what cost like you know i still feel like what happens in between yeah we haven't heard from fletcher in a bit you know he's hurt he could be riding this from like a mental asylum or something because he said that was the last normal day of my life yeah he very much could.

And I think Fletcher, last time we talked to him, or Fletch, I keep saying Fletcher.

Fletch, he

earlier on, he had heard the bells eight times when Rob had only heard, or when I keep wanting to say the main character is Rob.

Fletch had heard it eight times.

That was rampant.

Yeah, exactly.

Fletch had heard the bells eight times, and our protagonist had only heard it two by that point.

So now, as it's ramping up, I'm wondering how much this obsession has affected him as well.

Part 8, Methinks?

I had no thoughts of Rob.

Out there on that island, I never considered for a moment that the bells had played a role, a large role, a huge, monstrous role in his suicide.

He'd heard them.

He found them.

In the end, he put a homemade shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

I'd like to think that if I had, I might not have pressed on.

But when I'm being honest with myself, I know I would have.

What's death compared to knowing?

But what was so great about my life that it'd be better than hearing the bells at their source?

When I stood up, I realized I wasn't at the shore of the island.

I couldn't even see the shore.

I looked around, trying to figure out how I'd gotten so deep into the woods and noticed there weren't any footsteps behind me.

But there was a deep track.

It looked like when I fell to my knees, my body had been dragged through the snow.

I should have stopped, but I didn't stop.

I pressed on.

Colonial houses, the broad dirt road I'd seen when the bells rang.

It felt like I could still perceive where they'd been.

Some of the trees, the ones nearest me, were wrong.

They were too young.

They didn't belong here.

The road was real, even if I couldn't see it.

The houses loomed on all sides, even if I couldn't see them.

Even if decades earlier they'd all been moved or destroyed, it was like the present had been superimposed on the past.

Everything I saw felt less substantial than what I knew had been there before.

I'd seen the island's true face.

I was on a road and the road would lead me to the spire.

The spire housed the bells.

And no new growth forest could hide that from me.

It was slow going.

My feet were numb.

Each time I tripped in the dark, I had to pull my hands from my warm pockets to catch myself before I hit the frozen ground.

Some snow had made it into my shoes and was melting, but like the hike where I befriended Carrie, I kept going.

Even if I wanted to complain, who would I complain to?

I trudged my way deeper and deeper into the woods.

I might have been the first person to walk there since Rob had made his way to the spire back in late August.

It's a weird feeling to be that alone.

It's not privacy, it's isolation.

When I stumbled into the clearing, I almost didn't see it.

The spire.

No shit.

Everything else around me was frosted in snow, but not the spire.

It was pristine.

It stood twice my height, its whitewashed facade nearly invisible against the snow.

The spire had clear design, four large flat faces tapering up to a sharp point, a sort of wooden spire you'd expect to see topped with a cross on a Protestant church.

I don't think I'd have seen it at all if it weren't surrounded by a half circle of withered, long dead trees that looked as though they'd been rotting for ages.

All my hair stood on end.

This was the source.

The spire in the woods housed the bells.

I approached it with reverence, like I used to approach the tabernacle after receiving communion.

There was an energy in the air, electricity.

I could sense it.

The spire was invisibly warping the space around it.

It was like when you were a kid and your teacher had you sprinkle iron fillings around a magnet.

Tonight, there'd be no deer crossing signs, no air conditioners, no dates that didn't line up on a family's tombstones.

But soon there would be the bells.

Right here,

right in front of me.

My hand shriveled as I reached out towards it.

The cold fingers traced their way across the spire's wooden surface as lovingly as they had Alina's skin.

And it was even more luxurious.

I circled around the spire, trailing my hand along its seamless joints, across its flawless paint.

I found the window with its panes kicked out.

and wished I had the skill to fix it.

Then a better thought occurred to me.

I could go in.

I could be in the room with the bells when they sounded.

I pushed my duffel bag through the window, then cautiously, gently, I poked my head in.

I didn't meet any resistance, not exactly, but the energy the spire radiated built in intensity.

My scalp tingled, my face felt flush, my brain sang with excitement, as if all my neurons were firing all at once.

Eagerly, I pressed my shoulders through the gap in the window.

It was a tight fit, and I wriggled and squeezed my way into the darkness until I managed to get my hips through.

I waited a moment for my eyes to adjust, but it was no use.

Outside, I could see by the moonlight.

The trees and their shadows stood out starkly against the white snow.

But inside, There was nothing.

I struggled to open my duffel bag.

Ice had formed between the teeth of the zipper and my fingers.

Still numb from the cold, I had trouble gripping the slider, but eventually it opened enough for me to get my fingers in and force it the rest of the way.

Flashlights were, of course, gone.

The incense was completely destroyed and my mother's Bible only fared a little better.

Half of its pages has gotten wet when I'd used the bag to pull Carrie out of the water and were now frozen together in a block.

I found my grandfather's lighter beneath a raft I borrowed from Christie.

Lighter fluid's freezing point is absurdly low, something like negative 240 degrees Fahrenheit.

So despite having been left outdoors on a frozen lake covered in snow for a month, it actually lit on the third try.

The meager orange flame seemed so bright.

I was on a small landing at the top of a flight of stairs.

The landing was no bigger than a coffee table and made of plain unfinished wood that, unlike the beautiful exterior, had been badly warped by years of trapped moisture freezing and thawing inside of it.

There was a hand railing in a similar condition.

I was hesitant to lean against it as I held the lighter out over the abyss and peered down.

The stairs wrapped around the outer wall of the spire and disappeared in the darkness.

In the flickering light, I could barely make out a heavy beam stretched across the gap between the winding stairs, two floors below me.

That had to be where the bells rung.

It never entered into my mind that I'd find anything down there but the bells.

It never occurred to me to wonder how Amy Lowell Lowell Putnam would feel about me descending into her home, into the room where her husband had threaded metal rods into her flesh while she was still very much alive, into the bowels of the clockwork that hourly displayed her to the townspeople so her friends and neighbors could be entertained as her corpse zipped along on its track.

I wish I had, but my every thought was occupied by the damn bells.

My first few steps down the weathered stairs were slow and cautious.

I test each step with my foot before fully shifting my weight, ready to pull myself back at the very first sign of danger.

They were slick, their surface covered in a fine layer of frost, and they bowed and creaked beneath me, but they held.

And with each step, I grew bolder, my pace quickening.

I do have to say, I know we're in the vibe right now, but I love how his entry into

the spire is described very similar to his first experience with Alina.

Oh, true.

And I was just saying, saying,

I kept thinking, Rob, but no, you're right.

It is

very much

entangled in.

I mean, it's very much like,

yeah, the kind of delicate dance he did with Alina as well.

It's erotic, yeah.

Like the same way he described, like, oh, I touch Alina's back, I feel her spine.

I like slowly touch her here, I move my hand here.

He was describing touching the paint of the walls and pushing his shoulders into the window and stuff like that.

It's like there's, it's romantic the way he's describing the

spire itself.

Like, that's how much his mind attributes to it

what's what's the word for it phallic it's almost phallic in a sense the way he goes into detail about it

by the time i'd reached the next landing i was coming down the stairs like a kid on christmas morning i felt like one too

eager to unwrap the presents waiting for me below i started taking the stairs two at a time The lighter's orange flame sputtered as I gained speed, threatening to blow out.

A laugh, a mirthful, childish giggle, bubbled up from deep within me.

I could just make out, faintly, the shape of the bells.

They were right there.

From the next landing, they'd be so close, I'd be able to reach out and touch the nearer of the two.

I leapt down the last three steps.

The lighter went out, and the landing collapsed beneath me.

I fell through two pitch-black stories.

My body flailed, desperate to find purchase on anything it could, but the only thing I managed to connect with was the floor.

My feet hit first and I had the queasy feeling of the wood shattering beneath me.

This time though, only one or two floorboards gave out and I came to a stop with a sickening crack as my chest slammed into the ground.

The wood floor, though bowed and weathered, didn't afford my hands any purchase, and I could feel the weight of my legs and stomach dragging the rest of me towards another fall through God only knows how much more inky blackness.

I kicked with all my strength, but couldn't get my legs up high enough to climb out of the hole I'd created.

In that moment, I can't even truly say that I felt panic.

I was a cornered rat, all claws and gnashing teeth, a primal thing, incapable of thought or feeling, covered by adrenaline and the basest of instincts, survival.

Curled my fingers into hooks and thrashed with everything I was worth, clawing my way to safety.

The pain of it all crept into my mind slowly as the adrenaline wore away.

The fall had knocked the wind out of me, and, as I'd later find out, broken two of my ribs.

I can't say how long I lay there on my back, struggling to pull air back into my lungs, but I can say that every breath I took felt like it was going to rip me open from the inside.

I gritted my teeth and attempted to sit up.

My chest felt like I was on fire.

I put my hands back behind me to push myself into a seated position and felt the sharpest pain of my life.

I'd lost three fingernails, those of my left index and middle fingers and my right ring finger, while pulling myself out of the hole in the floor.

But what really hurt, what felt even worse than my ribs, was the four-inch splinter that had stabbed beneath the nail of my right index finger and slid out to the other side just above the first joint.

So he's hanging over this threshold and he was clawing into the floorboards and just ripping wood into his fingers.

Oh, man.

I collapsed back to the ground.

My hand trembled as I brought my finger to my mouth.

I hesitated for a moment, trying to think if there was any way to avoid what I was about to do, but there wasn't.

I was four, maybe five stories below ground, in the woods, on an island, in the middle of a frozen reservoir, surrounded by more woods miles away from the nearest soul.

No one was coming to help me.

I bit down on the splinter and pulled it back out the way it'd come in.

My mind screamed the profanities my lungs couldn't bear to push out.

And it was just four slender inches, nothing compared to what Amy Lowell Putnam had endured.

Though they were raw and bloody, my fingers probed the floor around where I lay searching for the lighter.

The only thing I found was one of my fingernails embedded between two floorboards.

Oh, goddamn.

Ugh, I thought about prying it out, but couldn't imagine what good it'd do me.

It's not as though I could slide it back into place.

Once I was sure the lighter wasn't within arm's reach, I found myself wondering if I ever wanted to find it.

Part of me knew I'd eventually have to if I didn't want to starve or freeze to death beneath the spire, but it hurts so much to move.

And hadn't I come here to surrender myself to the bells one more time?

Wasn't that what I really wanted?

It was.

So I sat alone in the cold and dark waiting for the widower's clock to strike 11.

The clapper of the bells struck their surface with the force of a cannonball.

In that instant, suddenly there was light.

It was a soft light.

But after the total darkness at the bottom of the clock tower, I found the way it glinted off the innumerable gears and tracks and coils filling the room blinding, like glare of the winter sun bouncing off the snow.

A man spoke, his voice small and distant.

So,

you've heard my bells.

Oh, dude, this

story.

Because every time that the bells strike, he's transported back to the 1910s.

Yeah, yeah.

So he's, he's now that he's in the tower, Adolph's there.

All the way back

He's back in 1910 like while the bells are ringing He is back there with the man who invented them.

Yeah, because he's like basically immortalized in there, right?

Yeah, yeah, man.

This is such a cool story dude like the supernatural elements to the the way the characters are in and everything gosh this is great.

Adolph Rifler stood a bent old man before his workbench His face was wrinkled and he leaned heavily on a cane, but his eyes burned with an intensity that bellied his frail voice.

When he spoke again, I noticed his lips didn't move.

I stood almost automatically.

I was surprised to find that although I could still feel my injured ribs and see the blood trickling from my mangled fingers, I could move with relative ease.

Adolf turned back to his bench.

The stairs behind you will lead you out.

I marched across the wood floor where the hole I just created should have been.

I was dimly aware of the same dreamy feeling I'd had outside of Lena's house when I felt compelled to watch her screw Ryan Dorset.

I'm not sure if I had listened to Adolph because I wanted to, although, make no mistake, I did want desperately to see the widower's clock or because I had no choice.

It felt almost as though I was watching myself as I headed toward the stairs.

We should try the Barmakuken.

It's really quite good.

The stairs dumped me out into the middle of a well-appointed room.

An oriental rug ran down the center.

Ornately framed paintings hung on the walls between each of the windows.

It looked like quite a grand foyer, the perfect entrance to any courthouse or place of business out to impress the public.

The carpet led to a huge pair of double doors, and I went to them without a second thought.

They opened with ease, despite their size, onto a summer night at what appeared to be a party.

This is so cool.

It's so cool.

Oh, it's so cool.

There There were maybe two dozen or so men and a half dozen women, all sporting old-fashioned suits and dresses.

The sort of things they'd likely only wore to weddings and special occasions.

They all stared up over my head.

Expressions of awe plastered dumbly over their frozen faces.

I thought for a moment, just a moment, that they were staring at me.

Quickly realized they were watching what I'd come to see.

The dance of riflers' automatons.

And unbeknownst to them, his wife and her lover i made my way through the crowd the bells chimed for only the second time time seemed to have become loose more elastic my feet were moving at the proper speed but each tick of the great clock dragged out for several seconds tick

it was nauseating

talk

i took a spot beside a table full of reflesh I took a spot beside a table full of refreshments.

A man in a smart-looking uniform stood behind it, but like all the others, he had eyes only for the clock.

Helping myself to a plate of marble cake and a heavy silver fork, I turned to finally get my first glimpse of the widower's clock in all its glory.

The clock tower was illuminated by electric lights, which surprised me as I wouldn't have thought Infield had been electrified in the early 30s.

It was easily five, maybe six stories in height.

Its base was almost as broad as the width of the rifler's house, and it tapered slowly until it reached the spire.

Its wood paneling gleamed in the electric light as grand and audacious as the Tower of Babel.

It blasphemously penetrated the starlit sky.

Oh,

we go for references like he needs the clock to find God, but now the clock is the tower of Babel.

I was so good.

I'm so good.

I also like how it turned it like almost it's like turning into the fucking Great Gatsby here or something like that.

Mm-hmm.

Just this

crazy 30s party.

just remembering the clock at certain times of day, it can transport you to a better place.

If you are at the source of it, you are to the source of the clock.

It's like a portal almost where you go, like, oh,

it's so cool.

Okay.

The second floor was dominated by the tracks where the automatons hourly performed.

Adolph Riefler, for all his faults, was truly a masterful engineer.

His creation zipped along with such grace and fluidity, it was almost impossible to believe they weren't alive.

Except for two.

A sluggish southern bell and a stiff-limbed Confederate soldier.

Ironically, the two most wooden figures on stage were the only two made of actual flesh and blood.

Behind Amy Lowell and her lover, a backdrop, which must have been nearly a story in height, of a grand plantation house on fire rotated slowly into view.

The Union automatons, each equipped with small electric lights designed to look like torches, charged towards the plantation house.

They touched their torches to the cutouts painted up like cotton fields as they went.

And everywhere the torches touched, a red light turned on beneath the cutouts, illuminating the cotton flowers, revealing they were made of glass and sparkling as though they were actually on fire.

As the troops reached the plantation house, another group of automatons rose to greet them, slaves.

I cringed when I saw the slave automatons.

They were such racist caricatures.

Slaves set about beating their former owners, much to the delight of the New England audience who hooted and cheered as the rebs received their comeuppance.

Southern Belle and Confederate automatons crumpled beneath the attack, their bodies holding in on themselves in a way that was only possible if their spines had been broken in multiple locations.

The slaves grabbed Amy Lowell's corpse and dragged it offstage.

Two of the slave automatons turned as they departed, flashing toothy grins at the spectators.

Padolph Rifler was not a subtle man.

The bells rang once more, just as the Union soldiers shot the prone Confederate automaton.

The onlookers burst into applause.

Well, most of it did.

I noticed a man just off to my right side hadn't celebrated.

He looked bored, as though he'd seen this all before.

Something else was off about him, too.

He wasn't dressed like the others.

He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans.

I wasn't the only one who heard the bells.

I wasn't the only one who'd found the tower.

And I wasn't the only one watching the automaton's endless dance.

My eyes scanned the crowd.

There was an emaciated man in a park ranger's uniform, the bones of his face plainly visible beneath his skin, leaning against the end of the refreshments table.

There's a boy in a tie-dye shirt who looked to be about 13.

His slashed wrist covered his corduroys in blood, but he gave his injuries no notice.

Were they dead?

Was I?

Had the fall killed me?

Then I noticed another figure sitting alone near the woodline.

A young man with a slender build, about my height.

Skin burnt to a crisp, was the color of charcoal, and most of his jaw was missing.

Robert Edward Kinnett.

Oh my gosh.

Oh, it's like a purgatory.

Oh, if you go to the bells, you're forever there to watch the clockmakers dance.

Oh, this is

so good.

Okay.

What was left of his skin flaked off his neck as he turned his head and fixed me with his gaze?

Beneath his blackened eyelids, his watery eyes were as blue as a clear sky.

Rob pounded the ground next to him.

The bells chimed once more, and Rob and I shuddered in bliss.

Took a seat next to him.

He tried to speak, but his injuries made it impossible to understand him.

I think he was trying to apologize for killing himself, or maybe he was just sorry to see I'd followed him to the bells.

I don't know.

We sat together in silence, watching as another glass backdrop rotated into view.

The glass work of Atlanta.

The lights made it flicker as though it was on fire.

Time seemed to return to full speed, and the bells finished calling out the hour.

My body shivered and my ribs screamed.

It was pitch black once more and I was sitting with my back against something.

A wall maybe?

My ribs let me know, in no uncertain terms, that they did not appreciate this position.

Slowly, I slid down until I was lying on my back.

I couldn't fully process what I had seen.

In his note to Fletch, Rob had said, I will soon join them, staring at her face as she runs the endless race.

Had he known he'd be stuck there when he died?

Stuck watching the widower's clock?

Stuck watching Amy Lowell Putnam endlessly running around and round in the automaton her husband had concealed her in?

Was I going to be stuck too?

All I could say for sure was that the spell was broken.

I never wanted to hear the bells again.

The cold had numbed my fingers to the point where I could feel little more from my missing nails than a dull ache.

And while I was thankful for that small blessing, it also meant that hypothermia and frostbite couldn't be far behind.

I needed to find the lighter.

I needed to find a way out of there, or my questions about the afterlife would be answered all too soon.

I tried pulling myself along the ram with my arms, but the stress of my ribs was too great.

I had to push myself across the ground using my legs.

It was painful but bearable.

The darkness was so absolute.

I had no idea which way I was facing or where the hole was in the floor.

I moved slowly, dancing my fingers over the wood like an insect's antenna, hoping to find that little metal lighter that could mean the difference between life and death.

I was beginning to panic.

I'd searched an area maybe twice the length of my body and found nothing, not even the far wall.

The room had to be huge.

I could barely move.

What if the lighter had fallen through the hole I'd made when I hit the floor?

I was never going to find it.

I began mumbling prayers to myself just to keep my growing sense of despair at bay.

Hail Mary, full of grace, our Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruity of thy womb.

Jesus, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

Amen.

The Virgin Mary, the most exalted woman in all of Christianity.

What could be more comforting than praying to her, the mother of God?

Wasn't I a child in despair?

Don't all despairing children cry out for their mothers?

So why did it feel so empty to pray to her now?

I didn't know, but elected to continue my work in the oppressive silence.

My fingers were so cold and numb, the lighter didn't even register when they sent it sliding deeper into the darkness.

I only knew I'd found it because of the sound it made sliding over across the warped planks.

I flicked the flint once, nothing.

Twice and it sparked, three times and it lit.

To suddenly see the flame was like staring at the sun.

It took my eyes several seconds to adjust to when I noticed I wasn't alone.

Figures stood all around me, casting long shadows along the floor that disappeared into the edges of black beyond the lighter's reach.

I panicked.

I couldn't run.

I couldn't fight, but I scrunched up my face and braced for an impact that never came.

Slowly, I reopened my eyes, and much to my relief, realized that the figures were automatons.

After 60 some odd years of neglect, they were all in a state of disrepair.

Their plaster faces were spider-webbed with cracks, pieces, sometimes full limbs, laid in heaps around their bases.

I was surprised I hadn't encountered any of the tracks which lay everywhere on the floor, but I supposed I hadn't covered very much area lying around on my back, nor would I be able to leave by doing so.

I gritted my teeth and, despite the pain, forced myself up onto my feet.

The plaster bodies of the automaton seemed small, scarcely five feet in height, as I picked my way slowly between them.

It made Amy Lowell and her lover, having been hidden inside one of these things, seem all the more grotesque.

There was no way Adolph could have done it without chopping off their hands and feet.

One by one I climbed the stairs, taking frequent breaks when the pain in my ribs grew too intense for me.

Eventually I drew even with the bells, which appeared to be rusted fast to the thick iron rings from which they hung.

I don't know why this surprised me so much.

I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I thought they'd be made of polished silver and sparkle like starlight.

In time I reached the collapsed landing, or rather reached where it should have been.

Now there was nothing but a gap five feet across with the staircase continuing its upward climb on the far side.

It would have been easy enough to jump if my ribs weren't broken and I trusted the wood on the other side to hold my weight, but they were broken and I was terrified of taking another fall.

I sat down on the steps and cried, utterly convinced that I would die there and join Rob and Adolph and Amy Lowell in front of the widower's clock every hour on the hour for all eternity.

It wasn't fair.

Yes, I had chosen to investigate the spire in the woods, but I didn't choose to crave the bells.

I didn't choose for them to warn me when I was cold or comfort me when I was scared.

I didn't choose to black out at the sight of Alina melting around Ryan Dorset's member.

And I certainly wouldn't claim to have been in my right mind when, just an hour earlier, I chose hearing the bells one more time over searching for a way out.

The lighter closed with with a snap that echoed in the darkness.

I'd been a Catholic my whole life, but as I sat there on the edge of the broken stairs, straining to see even the faintest silver of moonlight from the window that laid beyond my reach, I knew that my faith was gone.

I had set out to find evidence that there was more to creation than could be explained by science.

And though I had certainly found that, I felt more alone in the universe than ever.

What kind of God would create a world so cruel that it contained the bells?

How could I pretend there was a design and a moral underpinning governing the universe when something as innocuous as a beautiful sound could rob you of your free will and by all indications damn you for it?

Eventually I got tired of staring into nothing.

It was too cold to keep sitting there.

I lit the Zippo and headed back down the stairs.

I needed to find a way to warm up.

My duffel bag was sitting a few feet from the hole I had created in the fall.

I pulled out the raft and briefly considered inflating it.

It would have been nice not to have to lie directly on the cold hard floor, but ultimately I decided it'd be best to use it as a blanket.

It occurred to me that there might be something useful on the floor below.

I crept as close to the edge of the hole as I dared, held the lighter over the chasm, and peered down.

It looked like most of the room below had been claimed by groundwater that had frozen solid.

If the planks that broke my ribs hadn't held, I doubt I would have survived slamming into that ice.

Line back down hurt like hell.

The raft didn't seem like it was going to do much for me, but my insulation was better than none.

Reluctantly, I closed the lighter.

It didn't have an unlimited supply of fuel.

I'd have to be careful with that.

Waiting for midnight, shivering in the dark, my mind's eye kept conjuring images of Rob Kinnan's burnt face, his one good eye watering.

I really didn't want to join him, but at the same time, I couldn't wait to be warm again.

With a deafening clang, the bells tolled.

It was midnight, and I once again found myself lying on the floor of Adolph Rifler's workroom.

You're back.

He never looked at me, just continued to scan the rows of wrenches that hung from the wall.

People don't usually come back quite so soon.

I can't get out.

The stairs broke.

I'm sorry to hear that.

His voice was filled with pity, but his unmoving lips retained their scowl.

He took a wrench from the wall and began picking his way back through the tangled mess of gears that seemed to only exist when the bells were ringing.

I followed him to a hidden corner of the room where the Southern Belle and Confederate soldier automaton stood.

Adolph's deft fingers pushed the dress down over the Southern Belle's shoulder, exposing a bolt on her back.

He slipped the wrench over it and set to work.

From beneath the lacquered wood, Amy Lowell's bones splintered and popped.

My stomach revolted at the sound, and I looked for a place to rech.

Adolf continued to smile as he gave the bolt another half turn.

You mustn't judge me too harshly, came his sad little voice.

You can't fathom the regret, the burden I carried with me for the rest of my life.

He pulled her dress down farther, pausing only briefly to admire his handiwork as he exposed the majority of the automaton's body before continuing on to the next bolt.

I loved my wife.

Despite her faults, her vanity, her frivolity, I loved her.

She was mine.

His hand slid up her body, pulling her dress back into place.

But there was no pleasing her.

He lifted her arm up by the wrist and let go.

Her hand hurt and jerked as it fell back into place.

She

yelled, his lips moving with each curse.

He grabbed the automaton by her head and twisted it violently in a way no neck could bend.

It sounded like cracking knuckles.

The automaton's blank eyes seemed to stare right at me.

They were such a lovely shade of brown.

I was lost in those eyes and thoughts of Alina until Adolph's wrench returned to work and the sound of bones crunching shook me from revelry.

You mustn't doubt my love for her,

Adolph whispered through closed lips.

What you're saying,

I was simply angry then.

It was a malady of spirit, and I admit that I have a temper, but

like squalls on the open sea, my fellow moods disappear almost as quickly as they come.

Take it against the rest of our marriage.

Not to mention the courtship.

This was a moment.

A fleeting moment.

And it wasn't as though she was blameless.

You couldn't possibly know.

Can't possibly understand the humiliation of seeing another man take what is rightfully yours.

I felt compelled to speak.

I've always hated it when someone challenged my experiences.

It makes me feel so small.

But it was more than that.

My mouth moved, and it was like I was outside of my body, listening to myself tell Adolph all about Alina, what I'd done to Ryan Dorset.

So you do understand.

He sounded relieved, as if I'd just given him absolution for his sins.

The bells told.

Adolph gave the bolt on the automaton's elbow a full turn, splintering Amy Lowell's bones.

It was loud, like a branch snapping off a tree in a storm.

He again lifted her arm and let it fall.

He must have been pleased with the result because he set down his wrench and headed towards the stairs.

I followed him without thinking.

End of part eight.

Man.

We're approaching the end here, and we are in full great Gadsby surrealist purgatory hell now with old Adolph here.

It's funny.

How do you feel about the purgatory?

The purgatory hell.

I mean, I think we're so early in on it that I think it's, I don't think it's fully revealed itself yet.

By that, I mean,

I don't think that the, I don't think the complications have fully set in with whatever's supposed to be there.

You know, besides, obviously, you can't leave, but yeah, I like the

it's like obviously his connection to this girl Lena isn't as much as the connection of like someone's wife who cheats on you, but I like how it's like

very similar to a tower of babble thing, it lets him give in to his pride.

Like being here lets him be like, well, actually, I do have a good reason for what I did, blah, blah, blah.

And like, the clock maker agrees with him.

Also, like, at the start of the story, he talked about how he needed to find the bells to reaffirm his faith.

And now that he's in the bells, he feels like his faith is gone.

Well, yeah, stuck in eternity.

It's, it's the thing that you wanted, right?

It's the, I want to know that there's an afterlife that I'm going to be able to live forever.

And now he's in this place where he's like, well, holy fuck, I'm going to have to spend all eternity here.

Now it's torture.

Now it's a hell.

Yeah.

I think

I thought it was kind of interesting.

I don't know if you felt the same, but like when Adolph was fixing the automaton, the bell, the southern bell, it's like him being like, You understand, like, I'm, you know,

I loved her, you know, you just have to understand I loved her.

And the thing messes up, and he's like, you know, shiza, whatever.

But he likes the way how angry he gets, his temper, you can tell that he's going to snap it.

You can tell he's going to snap.

And I think that that's obviously why he did what he did.

And then also,

I think that it is a bit of a forewarning for his temper being tested with our protagonist, is what I'm going to assume.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think so.

Alright, well, two parts left.

You ready?

Part 9?

Yeah, I'm stoked, man.

Alright, part 9.

Adolph Rifler slid through the crowd, exchanging pleasantries with farmers and businessmen, neighbors and travelers alike.

No one seemed to notice me following in his wake.

They never looked at me or reacted to anything Adolph and I said to one another.

They also didn't seem to notice any of the others that were, like me, stuck.

Most of the conversations Adolph had had with his guest were brief.

I'd offer him the sort of enthusiastic pleasantries I imagine you hear any time a work of art is unveiled, and he'd respond graciously enough until the man he addressed as Edwin inquired about Amy Lowell's whereabouts.

Something in Edwin's tone made me think he was interested and more than paying his respects.

I haven't seen her all night.

Are you sure?

I could have sworn she was out here around 11.

Adolph's voice dripped with condecision.

The couplet Rob left in the suicide note to Alina floated to the force of my mind.

Every hour I see her face, she runs the endless race.

And I'd first heard the story of the widower's clock.

I had thought it was cruel that one could be damned just for laying eyes on Amy Lowell's corpse.

After all, we hadn't killed her.

We hadn't put her on display.

What I realized watching Edwin calling it a night was that the partygoers weren't stuck watching the endless race.

If they had been, they wouldn't have been able to leave.

No, only those of us who had heard the bells and followed them to the spire were stuck.

But why?

They'd heard the bells.

They'd heard the real bells.

Why weren't they stuck with us?

Midnight marked the end of the automatons reenactment with Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox.

Once Lee had signed the articles of surrender, the tent backdrop zipped out of view and dozens upon dozens of automatons took their curtain call, dancing behind the generals like something out of a Bisbee Berkeley musical.

The freed slaves came out in a chorus line, doing the can-can as if they were the rockettes.

The partygoers howled with laughter.

I wanted to be disgusted.

It was every bit as racist as the minstrel show, but no matter how much of Adolph Reifler's cruel indifferences was reflected in his work, the widower's clock was still too fine a thing to look away from.

When the southern bell automaton returned, I couldn't help but notice how sinuously its arms moved.

Her arms.

The bells tolled once more and I was alone again, Freezing in the dark.

It was so cold the blood from my fingers froze before it could clot.

The raft wasn't much of a blanket.

I needed to make a fire or I was going to wind up with frostbite.

Half of my mother's Bible was a chunk of ice, but the top half was dry.

I began ripping the undamaged portions out.

The delicate work was slow going with my fingers.

I twisted up the torn pages and set them in a small pile near the hole in the floor.

I wasn't worried that the floorboards would catch.

They'd absorbed far too much moisture over the years.

Besides, paper burns fast and at a fairly low temperature, especially when each page is as thin as the Bible's.

After a few minutes, my hands were quite as numb, but it was clear my meager kindling wouldn't hold out until morning.

I needed more fuel if I wanted to survive.

My ribs were thrilled to be moving again.

It would have been so much easier if the bells were ringing.

I didn't want to leave their sound, but they were like an X you just can't get over.

As bad as they are for me, even today, today, I still crave them.

The automatons hung lifeless on their post.

Their clothes had largely disintegrated.

Moisture had penetrated much of their lacquered finish, spotting them with mold.

Even though the years hadn't been kind, looking at them in the flickering glow of the lighter, they were still marvelous.

I ran my hand down the arm of a rebel soldier, almost as lovingly as Adolf had done with the automaton that encased his wife's remains.

If I wanted to survive, I'd have to burn it.

The area that had once been Adolph Reifler's workspace was littered with rusty tools and ancient gears.

I took up one of the wrenches from where it had fallen, my fingers ached just holding it, and set about dismembering the nearest automaton.

The bolts were rusted.

It was tough to get any of them to budge.

Straining against the wrench made my ribs feel like they had been replaced with broken glass and fish hooks.

But eventually the bolts turned and the arm fell to the ground.

The wood portion of the arm was no more than a quarter of an inch thick, just enough to cover the clockworks inside and hold the paint and finish.

It wouldn't burn for much longer than the paper.

I had to burn them all.

The only upside was that I wouldn't have to unscrew another bolt.

The wood was brittle enough that I could smash it to pieces with a wrench, and if I used my offhand, well, it still hurt like hell, but there wasn't anything I could do about that.

I smashed the Confederate and Union soldiers, I smashed Lee and Grant and Lincoln, I smashed women and children and slaves, and then gathered up the pieces.

I'd already ripped apart and and burnt the pages of my mother's Bible, but somehow smashing the automatons felt worse.

I felt like a small child watching the tide wash away of a beautiful sand castle.

I'm sure Adolph's going to be stoked about that.

Yeah, I'm sure next time this bell tolls in like 10 minutes, he's going to be like, oh, you destroyed all of these?

That's cool.

I'm glad you did that.

I'm very happy that that happened.

I had the thought, couldn't he...

If everything's restored when the bells are chiming, couldn't he wait for a bell chime, then work his way back up the staircase?

And then when the bells quit chiming, he'd be at the top?

I

think.

I don't know.

You would assume so.

I would think so, because like everything's back in order.

Yeah.

So the staircase would be back together, the part that he broke.

Hypothetically, we'll see.

There would never be another clock like this.

The rack that had once held Adolph's wrenches on the wall made a decent crate, and soon I had a sputtering fire.

It wasn't great, but it was warm enough that I'd live.

I draped the raft over my shoulders and slowly laid myself back down.

I was out of immediate danger and could feel my body shutting down.

I woke when the bells tolled one.

The fire was gone.

It also workshop was warm.

Before I could so much as sit up, their call ended and I was back where I'd begun.

I threw more splinters of wood on the fire and laid back down.

Sleep didn't come easy.

The automaton's nude clockwork, exposed for the first time in decades, cast intricate shadows that seemed to dance in the firelight.

I couldn't put my finger on it, but something was bothering me about them.

I woke again at two o'clock.

It was dark inside the workroom, but when the doors opened for the slave automatons to zip out, the electric lights illuminating the clock poured in.

Southern Belle hung limp on her post.

Her eyes stared blankly in my direction.

A large backdrop swung out through the door, blocking the light.

I was alone in the dark with Amy Lowell's corpse.

So wait, this isn't.

Is he talking about while the bells are ringing and he's transported back or him laying in the dark building sees the southern bell?

I think him laying in the dark building.

Okay.

At least that's what.

So there are...

Yeah, the electric lights illuminating the clock poured in.

So maybe some of it's still working 60 years later.

Maybe.

Who knows?

Once the backdrop rotated out of the light, I saw the southern bell slide out after it.

For just a split second, I thought I saw the southern bell's head swivel on her neck, as if she were tracking me with her eyes, but it had to have been the clockwork getting her in position to perform, right?

Then I realized what had been bothering me about the automatons.

Fletcher told me Rob put his fingers inside the eye sockets of a human skull, but all the automatons, before I'd smashed them up for firewood, had their lacquered faces intact.

Amy Lowell's corpse returned to its starting position, its limbs swung forward like a ragdoll's when it came to an abrupt stop.

She was looking at me again.

Could a sculpture have ubiquitous gaze, or was that only paintings?

My heart was racing as I waited for the bells to ring a second time.

Why had Adolph painted her face with such a creepy little grin?

I couldn't stop staring.

I rose to my feet and turned her head away from me.

I did it quick because I couldn't stand to touch her.

The bells tolled once more.

Was Amy Lowell's body going to be waiting for me in the dark?

Okay, so yes, this is

because he said electric light.

So this is while the bells are tolling.

He's back in the 1930s.

Okay.

He's back in the shop watching.

Because he still sees the face and he's worried that when the bells quit tolling, he'll be standing in front of a corpse.

That's just a rotted skull.

Yeah, yeah.

Amid the kindling, there were only a couple of pieces of wood large enough to use as a torch.

Took a painfully long minute, my eyes straining to detect anything out of place in the darkness, to get one of them to catch.

I held the torch aloft in my left hand, and even though I doubted in my present condition that I could ever swing it, I held one of the larger wrenches in my right.

The weight of it felt good.

It reminded me of the rock I'd used to attack Ryan Dorset.

Floorboards groaned beneath my feet as I moved from automaton to automaton, examining each in turn.

The faces weren't designed to move.

Beneath the wood, each of them had a little metal knob that could never be mistaken for a skull.

There was a stairwell in the far corner going down to the room below.

I had twice used it while the bells were ringing, but now there was nothing down there but ice.

Had Rob gone that deep?

I doubted the ground water could have been lower.

I doubted the ground water would have been lower in the summertime, but I couldn't say for sure.

Cautiously, I went down, one creaking step at a time.

Dirt and other particulates made it impossible to see much of anything in the ice, although I thought I could make out some of the furniture I'd seen on my way out to view the clock.

I was reluctant to venture too far into the room lest I slip on the ice and break another bone, but I was sure there was nothing of interest to be found.

My heart slowed.

I was relieved not to have found Amy Lowell's automaton.

Rob could have touched anything in the dark.

Maybe he was touching her automaton while the bells rang and then found himself alone in the dark after their last hole, or maybe Fletch got part of the story wrong.

Who could say?

I can.

I crept back to my fire.

wrapped the raft around me and let my exhaustion overtake me.

My fire had burnt out while I was asleep and I awoke shivering violently.

There was plenty of wood, but I was almost out of Bible pages.

As I carefully arranged a twist of paper beneath some of the thinner splinters, I heard a dreadful sound.

It was quiet, but impossible to miss, like fingernails on a chalkboard.

I froze.

The fire could wait.

The noise stopped.

I held my breath and strained my ears to listen for even the faintest sound.

Nothing.

Maybe an animal had gotten in here with me and scratched its claws against a metal surface.

A raccoon or a rat could live down here.

Maybe an owl nested in the old gears.

I wouldn't exactly call myself an animal lover, but I found the idea of another living thing being nearby very comforting.

I returned to the work at hand.

When you're building a fire, airflow is key.

If the wood presses down on the paper too much, you'll smother the flame before the wood can catch.

My hands were shaking from the cold, and it was tough getting the wood wood to sit right, but I managed it after several tries.

Just as I flicked the lighter to light the paper, the noise came again.

It was a long, dry screech.

The sort of sound a metal gate makes when its hinges need oil.

There's no way an animal was making that noise.

Do you think it's the automaton moving on its own?

I think that's what it is.

Yeah.

Pretty sure that's where it's going.

It's going to be the one.

It's going to be the one of Putnam's body, the skull that Rob reached out and grabbed.

Desperately, I groped along the ground for the wrench, ignoring the cries of pain from my raw, still bleeding nailbeds.

The sound grew closer, in fits and starts.

I couldn't find the wrench in the dark.

I could use the lighter, but it was coming from the direction of the automatons.

Couldn't have been very far away.

10 feet?

Maybe 15?

I didn't want to look.

I didn't want to see what could be making that noise.

I gave up on the wrench and crawled backwards, trying to get away.

It drew closer.

My hand found nothing but air, and I was momentarily filled with that sickening feeling of falling until my back slammed hard into the wood at the edge of the hole.

With my shoulders stretched over the ledge, the pain on my ribs was unbearable.

I had to bite my tongue to keep from crying out in pain.

The lighter was my only chance to get around the pit.

I didn't want to look.

I was shaking so badly, I nearly dropped the lighter.

And then the noise stopped.

I sat in pitch black and total silence, my heart still racing, unsure of what to do.

Light my way around the hole?

Search in the dark for the wrench?

Whatever it was didn't give me long to ponder.

The small thud of something heavy hitting the wood echoed through the room, followed by a dragging sound.

I flicked the lighter once, and nothing.

The sound grew closer.

Twice, and it lit.

Standing over me was the Southern Bell Automaton.

The polished wood veneer was badly burnt in places.

The left half of its face was broken away, revealing the hollow eye socket of Amy Lowell Putnam's skull.

I screamed until my broken ribs forced me to stop, but what remained of Amy Lowell's wooden face just stared back at me, as blank as ever.

Her head was still twisted around like it had left it at two o'clock.

Her head was still twisted around like I had left it at two o'clock.

She stepped unsteadily towards me.

Her limbs were stiff, her movements spastic and unnatural.

It was almost as if she wasn't in complete control of her own body.

The pole, which had once pulled her along the clock's tracks, making her dance, hung down from between her legs and dragged on the floor behind her.

My eyes darted down, looking for the wrench.

She was standing right over it.

For a moment, as slow as she moved, I thought I'd be able to outrun her.

But as I stood and turned to skirt the hole, she showed me I was mistaken.

Her arms sprang forward with such force they almost knocked me to the floor.

Her wooden wooden fingers dug into my shoulders, pinching my flesh against the bone.

Her face, all the while, remained as impassive as a porcelain doll's.

I couldn't bear her looking at me, so I dropped the lighter.

We struggled there in the dark, on the edge of the hole.

Crying and sniveling, I begged for my miserable life as she forced me down to my knees.

I felt the heavy metal pole that impaled her corpse brush against my leg as she continued to maneuver my body against my will.

She turned me around, forcing me first to my hands and knees before finally shoving me down onto my stomach.

Her hands pinned my shoulders to the ground.

I could feel her torso folding itself.

The remains of her spine must have been bent at a right angle.

The metal pole rose and fell, rose and fell, each time smacking the floorboards with a dull thunk.

Her chest kept twisting, like a wasp moving its abdomen into position to sting.

I didn't fully process what was happening until the pole came down hard on my inner thigh.

Amy Lowell Putnam intended to treat me to some of what she'd endured at her husband's hands.

I stopped thinking.

I stopped feeling.

I was too terrified for that.

I flailed my limbs.

I scratched at the wood floor with my remaining fingernails.

When my hand came down in the hole, I didn't even consider the consequences.

It was the only way I might possibly avoid being sodomized with whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Hold on.

Whoa,

that was not what I was thinking was about to happen.

Is that what you were thinking was about to happen?

Well, do you think sodomized?

Do you think he is it literal sodomy?

There's no way, right?

He means impaling, right?

Yeah, I think he means he's like.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah.

Dude, could you imagine?

Maybe.

I don't know.

Who knows, man?

Oh, that would be, that'd be insane.

It's like, oh, the

monster thing that kills you.

It's like, ah, the monster that sodomizes you.

I imagine it's going to maybe impale him like she was impaling.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's what I would imagine, the same way that she was like stabbed with the pitchfork.

We'll see.

I hope so, man.

That makes this way more terrifying.

It was the only way I might possibly avoid being sodomized with the automaton, and I took it.

I pulled with every last ounce of strength I could muster.

My ribs screamed in agony.

Blood started gushing from my fingers once again, but I kept pulling, dragging myself and Amy Lowell right to the very edge.

The pole came down on my leg again.

It felt like being hit by a hammer.

When she raised the pole once more, I pulled my upper body over the ledge and rolled my shoulders down.

Amy Lowell's weight must have been off balance because she went spilling over the ledge, landing on the ice below with a sickening crash.

I was back where I started, lying in the pitch black, struggling for breath.

From the hole came a small sound, almost a scratching noise, and a thud, followed by more scratching.

Amy Lowell was still moving.

Fumbled about on my hands and knees until I found the lighter.

It lit on the third try.

I held it over the hole in the floor.

Amy Lowell's head had been twisted to nearly 180 degrees in the fall.

A chunk of her skull, from just over her eye socket, had been knocked out, along with more of the southern bell veneer, but hadn't slowed her spastic movements.

Her wooded hands and feet struggled to gain purchase on the ice.

My feet started moving.

I had no clue where to go.

Where could I?

There's no way out.

I just had to get as far away from Amy Lowell Putnam as I could.

I grabbed the wrench as I passed and took the stairs.

The flames sputtered as I climbed.

I had no idea how much lighter fluid I had left and found myself wishing I had grabbed another piece of wood I could have used as a torch.

It held out though, all the way to the topmost stair I could reach.

I sat down and quietly closed the lighter.

My mistake became obvious the moment I heard her pole rise and fall on the first step of the staircase.

Thump.

I had nowhere to go.

Thump.

I was more trapped than I would have been in a wide open room below.

Bump.

I had to get out of here, out of the spire.

Bump.

I lit the zippo once more and held it aloft.

Thump.

Could I make that jump?

How stable were the beams holding up the stairs?

Bump.

Beneath the gap in the stairs, Amy Lowell's corpse continued its climb.

Bump.

It was only five feet, give or take, separating me from the surface.

Nothing.

Bump.

Of course the stairs were higher on the far side of the gap.

Thump.

And the wood probably couldn't support me landing on it.

Bump.

And I was in no condition to jump.

Bump.

There was no way I could make it.

I was stuck and she was coming for me.

Bump.

I slumped down on the top step.

All I could think was, I don't want to die.

I don't want to die.

I don't want to die.

Bump.

Then I thought that dying might be preferable to what she had planned for me.

I could just lean back and fall, splattering my brains all over the floor below.

Bump.

But what if I didn't die?

What if I only broke an arm or my legs?

She'd turn around, bump, and come get me.

Bump.

There was no running.

If I was going to survive, I'd have to fight.

I had the wrench.

I had the high ground.

Maybe I could get lucky and toss her over the edge, or worst case, take her with me.

Bump, bump, bump.

There were 18 steps between each landing.

The pole hanging down from between her legs prevented her from standing.

She had to crawl on all fours.

Her hands and feet sounded like hard-soled shoes against the wooden steps.

Each time she reached a landing, the pole would drag across the ground.

When she reached the landing below me, I sparked the lighter and set it against the wall, hoping that'd be enough to keep it from getting knocked over in the fight to come.

Amy Lowell didn't react.

She just kept climbing.

I stood and raised the wrench over my head.

My breathing was rapid and shallow.

Her head was still twisted around on her neck, staring off into the darkness.

She stopped just outside my reach.

Still as a stone, she appeared every bit as inanimate as all the the other automatons.

Was she trying to lure me in or draw me away from the edge?

Why was she just sitting there?

My arm was beginning to shake.

I couldn't hold the wrench up for much longer.

It was now or never.

Before my foot could hit the step below mine, her arms and legs uncoiled and she exploded forward.

My wrench hit feebly on her back as her wooden hands latched onto my throat.

Together, we began falling backwards towards the gap in the stairs.

Just before we slipped over the edge, the bells tolled.

My back slammed against the stairs.

The automaton was gone.

God, you lucky son of a bitch.

Perfect timing.

Incredible timing.

I was also right that if you wait for the bells, the staircase will reappear.

Just

everything fixes up.

Yep.

Yep.

My brain was still panicking.

I couldn't think of anything but her.

Where was she?

Where was Amy Lowell Putnam's body?

She was running the endless race down at the bottom of the stairs.

I scrambled to my feet, determined to put more distance between us.

The stairs were solid beneath me.

It was a good feeling.

One we take for granted most of the time.

The bells rang a second time just as I reached the slanted windows at the top of the spire.

A dizzying notion bubbled out of my subconsciousness.

If I was standing here when the bells stopped ringing, what would happen?

When the bells had finished tolling 11, I had been shunted inside, but not back to where I had begun.

Could I leave?

Could it be that simple?

I raised the wrench in my hand.

It would make short work of thin wooden slats.

But I couldn't do it.

This was the spire.

Ah, it still got him.

It still got him in his trap.

This was the spire.

The real spire, and not its decrepit remains.

It housed the bells.

The note they sang was beautiful beyond comprehension.

I knew it was crazy.

I knew it was my life on the line, but I couldn't destroy any part of the widower's clock.

Not while the bells were ringing.

You can't understand unless you've heard them ring.

The vibrations penetrate you, infuse you, permeate you.

You would do anything to hear the bells.

Sacrifice anything, no matter how much you regret it later, no matter how much they scared you, made you question your humanity.

To hear their call is to be owned by them.

I laid the wrench on the ground and began removing the slats one at a time, careful not to chip the paint.

I felt like a fool.

I knew I should have bashed my way outside.

I knew it, but I couldn't do it.

Instead, I was treating the removal of each slat as if it was an artist restoring the Mona Lisa.

The bells would ring again any second, and that'd be it.

Maybe I'd be up here on the landing.

Maybe I'd be back on the stairs where I'd started.

Maybe Amy Lowell's automaton would be with me, or maybe I'd be alone in the cold and the dark.

Finally, I removed enough slats to squeeze through into the moonlight.

Clinging to the spire for dear life, I hazarded a downward glance.

The party appeared to be over, but I could still make out those poor lost souls I'll join one day, stuck watching the endless race for all eternity.

And I could see some of the automatons illuminated by the harsh electric lights.

Two of them moving stiffly, zipping along their tracks.

The bells rang for the third and final time.

I scratched my eyes close.

If it hadn't worked, I didn't want to know.

And stepped off the ledge.

End of part nine into the final part.

Oh man.

This has been a journey, man.

This has been a journey.

I'll tell you what, we've gone from like, oh, me and Scary Carrie and like this guy killed himself and he was into this girl and like now I'm into her, but then she's a full circle.

She's cheating on me.

It feels very full circle.

We go from a guy talking about the like being enamored by ghost stories and stuff and these folk tales and everything and being completely enamored by it, losing faith in that and partially into the scary stories and pursuit of like love and that kind of things as well and all the kind of tumultuous shit that happens when you're a 15 and that kind of stuff.

And now it's come full circle back to where now he is a part of a full, he is a part of the folk tale, he is a part of the ghost story, and like he himself is becoming one of those.

Every bit of this, too, like you were saying before, it's paralleling with Alina, it's paralleling with his relationship with Carrie, it's paralleling even with the folk tales that we've read so far.

It's just interesting how it's set up all of these things delicately.

And now, all in these last couple parts, it's just kind of like perfectly presenting it all in this little box, this sandbox moment

of this horrible purgatory he's in.

It's incredibly well done.

I'm a huge, huge fan of it.

Well, old buddy, old pal, are you ready for part 10?

Let's dash towards the finish.

End of the line.

Part 10.

The first thing I was aware of was the cold, then the pain in my hands and ribs.

Then I noticed the wind.

I opened my eyes to see snow glistening in the moonlight and the long shadows cast by trees.

I'd stepped off the spire and dropped only a foot or so, falling to my knees in the snow.

My eyes brimmed with tears of joy.

I wanted to kiss the ground and throw the snow up in the air and wallow around in it like pigs in its own filth.

But then I recalled the way Scary Carey had looked at the hospital, swollen black lumps of necrotic flesh where frostbit had set in.

My mother's car was a solid hour, hour and a half's walk away, and I wasn't moving as quickly as I usually did.

I got walking as fast as I could bear.

I heard the bells, truly heard them, for the last time near the fork where the access road joins Oldware Infield Road, but they didn't fill me with warmth like they had before.

No, they stopped me dead in my tracks.

They tugged at my guts.

They called me home, but also filled me with the sensation of being watched by eyes in the darkness.

To this day, I still hear them hourly whenever I go off my meds.

There were two police officers waiting for me when I got to my mom's car.

You might think I would have run all over again.

After all, it was the fear of arrest that had sent me chasing the bells, but I didn't.

Instead, I cried.

It was cold.

I was tired.

My whole body hurt like hell.

I didn't care how much trouble I was in.

I was just happy to see real people again, people who were alive.

I learned later that the police had no idea who I was or what I had done to Ryan Dorset.

They were there because I'd parked in front of the same trailer that Fletch had parked in front of back in December.

When the owner had gotten up to go to work and seen my car outside, she called the police.

Apparently, in his haste to get the car after Carrie had fallen through the ice, Fletch had driven over one of her trash cans.

I nearly killed a kid, but I was being arrested because someone else had ruined a garbage can you could get from Home Depot for $35.

I don't recall the officers' names, but I wish I did so I could thank them.

Their attitude towards me changed immediately when they saw the condition I was in.

One of them took a blanket from the trunk and wrapped it around me.

They tried to ask me what had happened, but all I could do was cry.

I'm not sure I would have had anything to say anyway.

Explaining the bells to someone who's never heard them is like trying to explain the color blue to a dog that was blind from birth.

They ushered me into the back of their squad car and we took off for the hospital, the one Fletch and I didn't know about.

Twelve minutes later, we arrived at Mary Lane Hospital and I was admitted to the ER.

The doctors picked up where the police had left off.

What happened?

Were you in a car accident?

Were you in a fight?

But I remained unresponsive.

They ran their fingers through my hair, checking me for a concussion, but couldn't find any physical indications.

And my pupils responded normally.

It's like he's in shock.

You don't say.

Since I wasn't helping, my clothes had to be cut off of me, just in case there were injuries they weren't seeing.

The right side of my chest was one gigantic purple bruise.

I needed five stitches where the splinter had gone into my finger and another two where it had come out.

the rest of my fingers were cleaned and bandaged

then one of them had the bright idea of giving me something to help me sleep i wish they hadn't all i dreamed of was her amy lowell putnam's corpse danced on its post back and forth back and forth back and forth as the bells rang

You know, that's interesting because every other time in the story when he says her, it goes to Alina, but now it's like a new, more terrible woman has taken that place.

He's being haunted by a new woman.

Yeah.

It was late afternoon the following day before i woke up to find my parents staring at me and my wrist handcuffed to the bed they were looking at me like i was behind glass at an aquarium a particularly nasty deep sea fish that turned their stomach there was pity there too but mostly disbelief and fear i wasn't really their little boy anymore i was a thing twisted and disturbed a danger to myself and others

Seeing my parents looking at me like that hurt real bad, but it was still preferable to the blank stare of amy lowell's automaton which was my company at two o'clock and again at three

and four

ryan dorset's parents never formally charged me with assault a civil suit was settled between our families out of court as a condition to their not pressing charges i had to seek psychological help spent the next six months of my life at mclean hospital in belmont massachusetts it was probably for the best first two weeks i didn't say a word to anybody about anything i can't exactly say why.

Shame was certainly a big part of it, and I know I was afraid that they'd think I was crazy.

And again, given where I was and why, well, the SS sanity had probably already sailed.

After weeks of hearing the bells, watching the automatons reenact their tableaus, after weeks of seeing Amy Lowell dragged about on her pole, I finally broke down and told them what was happening.

A woman I'll call Dr.

Laura was assigned to me.

She was in her early 40s, her hair was always messy, and she used a lot of Yiddish expressions.

I didn't get most of her jokes, but they still made me feel like we were sharing something and that I could trust her.

She diagnosed me as bipolar, believing my attack on Ryan, my experience hearing the bells, and my belief that I'd visited a haunted clock tower in the middle of a reservoir most likely stemmed from what she called a mixed episode.

A state where symptoms of depression and mania occur simultaneously and auditory hallucinations aren't uncommon.

Her theory was horseshit, but there's no way to argue with a psychologist without sounding like one of those guys in the old horror movie screaming, I'm not mad, I'm not mad, while an orderly crams them into a straitjacket.

You just say, wow, yeah, that sounds about right, and take whatever pills they give you.

You can't win, but you can lose less badly.

And I have to admit that after they began injecting me with Haldahl, I stopped hearing the bells every hour.

She may not have believed my story.

But Dr.

Laura taught me a lot.

We would look at the decisions I regretted and examine not only only the effects of those decisions, but everything that led up to them.

What was I doing?

How was I feeling?

We'd list it all, from my emotions to my bodily sensations, and try to find the pattern that led to my worst decisions.

She helped me isolate my self-destructive triggers.

Then we discussed how I could continue on in life and accomplish my goals without stumbling blindly into those triggers.

After I got out of McLean,

we thought it was best that I didn't go back to my high school.

My mother bought the state-approved curriculum for homeschooling, and I spent the rest of high school at her kitchen table.

We had to meet with the superintendent of schools a couple of times.

He seemed perfectly happy not to have me in his school system.

Can't say I blamed him.

Must have seemed like another Robert Kinnon waiting to happen.

In September of 2000, the week before his 13th birthday, a little brother asked if he could be homeschooled too.

In his grade, he had been a fairly popular kid.

Then one day he came home with a bloody nose.

Two weeks later, later, a black eye.

Fat limp.

Limp.

He was being bullied because of me.

I remember one day in particular, with perfect clarity, an older boy had knocked him down on the hardwood floor of the gym and dislocated his shoulder.

He had to go to the hospital.

My dad went ballistic.

He directed most of his anger at Mr.

Delvino, the principal.

He even threatened to sue the school, but I got some of it too.

He gave me a look that practically screamed, this is your fault.

When he returned home that night, my brother got me alone and asked me a question.

Did you rape Alina?

Full circle, man.

Full circle with Robin.

Full circle.

Full circle with Rob.

The exact same.

I don't think they ever said that Rob Raped her.

That was an accused.

Well, they found her with the, she was like on top of her, remember?

Or whatever?

The like, wasn't it with like a disabled girl or something?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, no, you're right.

You're 100% right that was rob that the rumor was about that he had hooked up with a disabled girl yeah there's some some sexual miscreant story being passed around and now these are the these are going to be the things other people are saying about him yeah and i mean like on the one hand it's like

from from his perspective alina was cheating on her boyfriend with him and he was never privy to the boyfriend who went to a different school.

So she seems like the bad guy there.

But again, we only have this entire story from his account and he's clearly an unreliable narrator.

So maybe it was more like a coercive rape, you know?

I mean, he clearly was like the initiator and everything, and she was crying after they did it.

So, you know, that's not good.

No, yeah.

I mean, you know, as we were reading this, that may be true to some degree.

I never knew if it read that way, you know, but after all the other kinds of things and people saying like, hey, you're stalking her.

And also the guy's been going through a mental institution thing.

He could have been completely blinded and

completely misread.

Not misread, but

his perception was completely wrong.

Yeah.

It very well could have been.

He could have like, maybe in his mind, he's like, no, she wants this and stuff.

And like I was talking about, like he seems like he's forcing himself on her and she's letting him go to a certain degree.

But maybe she was scared of him.

And like he's calling her house every day and he's trying to find her after class and stuff like that.

And like.

I don't know.

Maybe maybe there wasn't.

Initially, I thought maybe there was a tinge of like she was leading him on to get what she

But again, this has all been from his perspective Maybe that wasn't there at all.

Maybe he was like backing her into this situation

Which maybe in that case the automaton use of the word sodomizing may have been the other direction because maybe if if the bells give you hallucinations, maybe it's just like what he saw like a female figure that was tormenting him.

Maybe it wasn't actually alive and moving towards him.

Maybe that was again, part of his hallucination.

Who knows?

But

I don't know.

Anyway, at first, I was shocked.

I thought I misheard him.

I was his brother, and he knew I loved Alina.

How could he ask me that?

The kids at school.

That's what some of them say.

After the incident in their yard, Alina's parents had decided to enroll her at Bishop Girton.

She hadn't wanted to.

Who wants to leave their friends behind senior year?

But between Rob Kinnan and myself, they just thought it'd be best for her to get a fresh start.

After she left, Sarah Conan had been very vocal in blaming me.

I never held that against Sarah.

I figured I deserved the fallout for what I had done to Ryan Dorset, but I hadn't seen this coming.

Denials poured out of my mouth.

Yeah, we had sex, but it wasn't.

I couldn't even say it.

She never said no.

That was true.

I never threatened her.

So was that.

I only wanted to make her feel good.

But was that the truth?

Yeah, totally.

100%.

Yeah, yeah.

Also, Isaiah is saying 100% true, as in sarcastically.

There, I don't want people to say that.

No, no, I was saying, I was saying 100% true.

We were right that this was

from his polluted perspective, and he was like forcing himself onto her.

Yeah.

100%.

That's what was happening.

What did it sound like I said?

Was it sound like I said 100% that he wanted to make her feel good?

Oh, I don't know.

I just wanted to make sure.

You never know how people are going to.

Just to clarify, for the sake of everything.

Just for the sake, so there's no

hunter immediately putting a dome of protection over me.

Like a lot of people, especially guys, I had an image in my mind of what a rapist was.

A lone predator.

Man in sunglasses and a hooded sweatshirt hiding in a dimly lit garage with a knife in one hand and an improvised gag in the other.

I had an idea that they were a breed apart, depraved and wicked.

Mean things, aware of the harm and the hurt they caused, but determined to do it anyway.

That was my idea of what a rapist was, and I didn't fit any of my own criteria.

Yes, it was true that I had wanted to make Alina happy, but each time I'd kissed her, she'd frozen up.

I took it as nerves, but I didn't stop.

Each time I'd run my hands up her body, she started to cry.

I thought it was survivor's guilt, but even if it was, pushing her clearly hadn't made her feel any better.

And when we

when I had gotten on top of her and wormed my way beneath her clothes, persisting past stillness and tears, She hadn't said no, but she never said yes.

What I had thought, what I had wanted, they didn't matter.

Not next to what I did.

It's easy to see that now.

At the time, I got defensive, unleashing a torrent of vile obscenities about a girl I'd only moments earlier considered the love of my young life.

That night, once everyone was asleep, I made my first of three suicide attempts.

I,

Hunter,

in part one or two, when you said maybe we'll see some similarities between Rob and our main character, I think that that was a whale trap.

You set a giant bear trap at the bottom of the ocean and you caught a whale in it.

You were so right, King.

You were just

batting 100 with that one.

That was great.

After we're done with the story, I have some thoughts on that.

Yeah.

That night,

I made my first of three suicide attempts.

Tiptoeing my way into the garage, I took the garden hose off the wall and pushed one end into the the tailpipe of my mom's car.

The other end I ran up through the driver's side window.

The note I left was addressed to Alina.

It read simply,

This is your fault.

It was pure projection.

I got comfortable and started the engine.

As the car began filling with exhaust, I became dimly aware of a sensation creeping up the back of my neck.

Was it the carbon monoxide?

Was I being watched?

Thump.

Had Amy Lowell been the mystery figure people saw inside Rob's car the night he killed himself?

Did she collect the souls of those she condemned?

Was that how the automaton's face had been burnt?

Let her come.

Anything's better than this.

But the thump I'd heard wasn't the sound of Amy Lowell Putnam's post on the garage floor.

It was the doorknob slamming into the wall when my brother threw open the door to the house.

He saw me and screamed bloody murder until my parents came.

The three of them could pull me out of the car.

The garage was beneath my brother's room.

He had heard the engine stirred, but didn't hear the garage door open.

So after a couple of minutes of wondering, he got up to see what was going on.

Next thing I knew, I was sitting in the living room with a splitting headache.

My mom was hugging me and crying hysterically.

It was the first time anyone had held me in nine months.

The next morning, I was back in McLean.

Dr.

Laura and I spent a lot of time talking about Alina.

I was surprised she was still willing to work with me, knowing what I'd done, but she was as patient and kind as ever.

After two months, I was still struggling to wrap my head around how anyone could think what I'd done with Alina had been wrong.

To Alina, what I had done to Alina.

Why didn't you just say no?

It was a textbook example of blaming the victim, but I genuinely didn't understand.

I would have stopped.

You can never be certain what someone else is experiencing.

That's why you have to ask and listen, not ins and not assume.

They want exactly what we want, or they'll respond exactly like we respond.

First day.

I nodded.

We weren't in a session.

Strictly speaking, Dr.

Laura probably shouldn't have been talking to me at all, and especially not about anything that was at the heart of my treatment.

But from time to time, she would.

I think she knew I needed the human contact.

Bubala, don't take this as anything but speculation.

I can't know what she was, uh, what she was thinking any better than you can, but you might want to consider that the last boy that had a crush on her had killed himself three months earlier.

Wait, I can't know.

Oh, saying like where she's coming from.

Yeah.

I liked it when she called me Bubbla.

What's that got to do with me?

She might have thought that if she said no, you'd do the same.

Alina?

If you're out there and you're reading this, I'm sorry.

I apologize unreservedly.

It was not your fault.

I take full responsibility.

If you want to press charges against me, I would not refute them.

You can get word to me through my parents.

If there's anything you want from me, anything that will bring you you the slightest amount of closure it's yours i was so stupid so hurtful so wrong i'm sorry yeah it's like he um

she probably just let him do that like it wasn't it wasn't even cheating it was like i mean it was like logistically um

but in her head she's like well The last guy that liked me killed himself, and I don't want that to happen to this guy, so I guess I should let him do stuff, you know, like yeah and that's the problem awful position for a high school girl to be in dude this is uh

another example too of like a narrative told through his perspective right really really makes you undermine a lot of the things that are being experienced or whatever or because he says something you're just kind of going along with what he was saying but

Yeah, and I do, I mentioned earlier when we were talking about it, I'm like, well, maybe there's some redemption because he's writing this years later and he has like the gift of hindsight to write this with.

And I'm right.

And, well, not I'm right.

I got what I wanted out of the story that here in the end, he's like, yeah, that was wrong.

I shouldn't have done any of that.

So

it's like progression for the character, even if it's just him writing about stuff he doesn't agree with anymore.

In May of 2003, I received my high school diploma.

My parents didn't think I could handle living on my own, but I had to get as far away from the spire and the way they looked at me and my reputation around town as I could.

My aunt lives in San Jose, California, and I managed to get into a vocational school 20 minutes from her house.

Eventually, my parents relented and let me go.

Fletch wound up getting into BC, which was a big coup for him.

As fate would have it, so did Alina.

From what I understand, the two of them actually wound up becoming pretty close.

Last time Fletch and I spoke was in November of 2002, right around Thanksgiving.

He had stopped hearing the bells before the end of his freshman year.

Oh, well, that's good, so you can get better.

You can, like, get if you're far enough away from it.

Yeah.

For a while, that's encouraging, Okay.

Two of Scary Carrie's fingers had to be amputated along with her thumb.

She also lost her left foot from around the mid-calf down.

Eventually she recovered from her aphasia but not before the school moved her into the special education program.

She never made it to college.

Mrs.

Peterson got her a job at Market Basket bagging groceries.

My mom sees her from time to time and usually does her best to avoid her register.

Neither Carrie nor her mother have asked about me since the incident.

I don't know if she still hears the bells, but I doubt it.

As for me, I'm unhappy but alive.

I only hear the bells now when I don't take my Zaprexa, but they're not too far from my mind.

Someday, I'm gonna die, and Amy Lowell Putnam's going to claim me.

There's nothing I can do to avoid it.

Part of me wishes she'd just hurry up and do it already.

The bells really do sound lovely.

And that is the end of the spire in the woods.

Good God,

what a Herculean kind of

trial that was.

You know,

at the beginning of the story, when I said, I wonder if we're going to

see

if our protagonist...

takes the same kind of turn as Rob and stuff is something that I think we find out a lot.

Like, I guess when we're younger,

I feel like when you're young,

you're too young to really understand the severity of things.

You know,

I think teenagers think they're a lot smarter than what they are.

And I think it's easy to fall into these traps.

I mean, what's kind of funny is every warning sign was written and given to us at the beginning of the story.

The way that people talked about like the rumors that build between him and you're like, oh, well, you know, I don't know.

And all these different things and how, oh, he's a psycho and all this stuff.

And you're really kind of like.

Well, that can never be me.

I wouldn't do that.

Well, not like, not only that can't be me, but you're also just like, well, who knows?

You know, I don't know.

I don't know what's going on.

But it's easy to fall into these kinds of

traps and these things that you can do to other people.

And I think

one thing I think the story does so well is, I feel like the central theme of it is like the

like, almost like sexual frustration.

seems like a like a big theme in the uh in the in the spiral it's like a coming-of-age story story but you never went anywhere you know like you're still like it's the frustrations that like teenagers have to get through but he never really got through them and a lot of that is like the sexual frustration

in a way i think he does get through them by becoming he acknowledges the things and you grow and i think the more that you grow the more that these things become more crystallized and clear and you can see them but i think the

I think the dangers of sexual frustration is kind of interesting and how that theme kind of hit on almost every character, maybe besides Fletch.

But I think

adolescence and

the ignorance of adolescence is pretty big.

But then, even too, just like I really enjoyed the parallels of like him being like, oh, she's cheating on me, the same kind of way that happened with like Adolph or even some of the other folk tales.

Like at the very beginning, that was so interesting how he became the folktale.

Yeah, I mean, our author became a victim of his own obsession.

You know what I mean?

In this way.

And even, too,

this clock tower is just kind of this phallic symbol hidden in the woods

is also just as

just as relevant when talking about, you know, your own sexual

escapades or I don't know, the kind of like guilt and tormented feeling, they're kind of hidden away in that way too, is just interesting.

And now in a way, too, you know,

I think that he had a character growth, but I think he welcomes the bells still, you know, I think that he understands what's happening.

What's interesting is we have here where we get the mention that Fletch got away, that after a few years, like he quit hearing the bells.

But now we have our main character who's still so obsessed with them that he's like, I'm going to die and she's going to take me and I can't wait for her to do it.

The bells are beautiful.

It's like, yeah, bad things happened to both of them, but one like grew from it and left that behind as a piece of of his life and the other could never move on from it so he's still as much committed to the bells now as he was back then yeah i he

it's it's so funny that he like him and rob the protagonist and rob just kind of followed into the same footsteps as adolf uh and into his obsessions as well you know and even the thing too with adolf in a way he never moved on and he like still has this kind of like weird harsh obsession with like making the automaton and stuff and the way that he treats that he's forever in that tower.

He's forever, yeah, he's forever in the tower, but he's also forever controlling in that way, too.

You know, I think it's kind of interesting.

You know what's so weird about the story, too?

Such a

God, such a like a haunting read, but I think more so just from like anxiety.

Like, I felt very anxious with all these different kinds of like the characters so well put together and the way that the characters interact with each other to where, you know, like the automaton

get him attack, like, you know, Anna, Annabelle, whatever, attacking

our protagonist at the end, it's creepy and it's crazy.

And this kind of like, you know, ghostly tower that's in the woods that's this purgatory is scary, but I found myself almost more so just like the back and forth of like, kind of like reading this diary of a kid who is just kind of not mentally well.

Going back to the world.

All of the...

Sexual experiences with Alina made me incredibly uncomfortable.

Like, just like the reading them and hearing his depiction of them was so because like you said it was like even before we knew that it wasn't as consensual as he thought it was um it was just so personal like the details or when he would talk about like laying on top of carrie like the way he would describe it and stuff it felt so felt like i was um hearing secrets i wasn't supposed to you know yeah and even the verbiage and i think that we have to give tony um

Tony Lunetti, hopefully I said that his name right, a lot of credit with just very delicately putting this in.

I mean, you can very clearly see how the protagonist feels about somebody based on how he's talking about it.

With Carrie, it was always like, it was never like, oh, her stomach, it was her gut, you know, this kind of thing.

Always very undermining people.

He's very judgmental.

Like, that's one thing about the character.

And you know what's so great about this story, too, is that you're bought into the protagonist because you're like, well, this is the person I'm following.

Really, really, our protagonist has never been, I would say,

a symbol of like, this is a good guy, whatever.

No, no,

it's never an altruist.

No, no, no, no.

But you offset it by having something crazy at the beginning and you say, oh, yeah, this guy killed himself and he was a stalker or he was like kind of creepy or whatever.

This was a bad guy.

It makes you immediately lose your apprehensions towards

the protagonist quickly to where you're kind of wondering.

I think more so you're kind of like

backseating this whole thing to where you're like, well, you know, where is this going?

But you're not really fully

realizing all of the stuff that he's doing in between these studies.

I mean, like, even going out there with Carrie and Fletch and stuff, super irresponsible.

The character's very selfish in that way, too.

And it's just the same kind of,

it's the same kind of like,

I don't know, selfish wants that

he keeps bringing and like hurting others with basically.

And now Carrie, I mean,

you know, forever changed.

Carrie suffered more than I mean, I mean, like, yes, Elena was put in an incredibly uncomfortable position, uh, but Carrie also, like, was a huge victim in this story.

Um, because she just liked this guy and wanted to do stuff with him, and, you know, probably saw a lot of their trips together as just for him because he wanted to be around her.

Uh, and she suffered for it the rest of her life, it sounds like.

Yeah, horrific.

Yeah, and I, uh, I don't know, it's uh

what's that line he said early on where he was like, I had been so reckless with Carrie.

Uh, Yeah, yeah, and that led to a lot of consequences.

A lot of our author's recklessness led to a lot of consequences.

And it's tragic on the one hand because he was a teenager and he didn't have the expertise to like handle these complicated situations, but at the same time, he never really cared to, never really cared to ask what he was doing or what decisions he was making.

So it is partially his fault, but I don't think the same would have happened if he was a bit more grown and a bit more mature.

So it's tragic that it happened to him, even though he is responsible for a lot of stuff that happened to Carrie and Alina.

It's just such an interesting, it's like a tragedy that could only happen when you're 16 years old.

And it's played out so well where it's like both your fault, but also like you're at the same time a victim of circumstance.

It's such a unique tragedy to push a character through.

Do we have any idea when this was written?

2013, I think, 2012, 2013.

It's pretty interesting because it feels like it's pretty early in the creepypasta trend too, you know?

Which this is like an R slash no sleep story, I'm pretty sure, from the beginning.

But you know, it's weird is we've read 2014, March 4th, 2014.

2014.

So yeah, so pretty, so pretty early on.

You know, you read so many of these stories, and I think that there was a couple times in part of this where,

I don't know,

you read so many of these stories and you think about so many tropey stuff that there were so many times in this story that we were joking or like, you know, we weren't,

you really don't, you can't look at it.

You're not looking at the story through almost like the correct lens or something, you know, when talking about like, you know, oh, they're getting it on or whatever this time.

And you're not reading it as the same way.

Granted, it's through his perspective and, you know, whatever else.

And you're not expecting it.

But it's kind of interesting.

Like a story like this kind of takes it to this realm where it circles back and instead of ending it on some big creepy thing.

it grounds it and it like makes almost like the the real fucking monster of the story as cringy as to say is our protagonist was the fucking like was the guy because if you think about it everything in the story is his fault Carrie's thing like everything Whatever and it could have just been as long if he wasn't thinking with his dick at the beginning everything would have been fine

I mean the bells certainly were the inciting incident for it But he was like he said he was reckless with a lot of the way that he went about it

And it's funny like how the only monster we really see other than you know the widower who put all this together was like in part nine We had the possibly real or apparition of Amy Lowell Putnam's automaton, like chasing him down and stuff.

No, and that was it.

That was it.

And I will say,

it's interesting, too.

I'm curious to see how the viewers and the listeners like it

because

that was the only little bit of horror in it.

Other than that, it was build up, and then we got to the tower and stuff, and we experienced it.

And really, it was short-lived.

Like, it was, we were, we were only in that for some.

It was the cook off at the end of the story, but

the story wasn't about that.

Which I think I like because it keeps that mysticism alive and it keeps that folk tale alive with it, and it makes the just the obsession and the kind of like the character develops we have the more important and enticing part of the story, which I do think is impressive.

It feels like in a different way, like kind of like Boroski, Baroska kind of thing of like all these Kimber, Kimberly.

or Kimberly and, you know, all these

the characters that embodied that story and the connections they had.

Whereas that one was like a group of like very tight-knit friends.

This one felt, in my opinion, more realistic to a high school experience of

a kid's obsession or something, you know?

So, whereas one is an incest rape machine.

This is just about a kid who is like, I think I like this girl.

And he goes way too far.

And then now it's like a.

That dictates way too much in him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I don't know.

And sure, and sure, the bells did make him lose his inhibition, but that inhibition was already there.

You know, like that underlined emotion.

Yeah.

Yep.

It's true.

So

overall, this was great.

This is one of the better stories we've read for sure.

You know, and I think it's going to relate to a lot of people.

I think that, like, at least for me, I know being a cringy kid who had the girl that you liked, you know, and all that kind of stuff.

And my

relatable place.

Me, me, and you, the whole time, were just like, Jesus Christ, this is too real.

And I bet you anything.

Yeah.

From a male perspective, from that, and the female perspective, there's probably tons of instances or guys like this that you had to reject as well.

So I don't know.

It's almost like, especially for a guy, it's almost like being like, remember all of those weird emotions you had around women when you were a teenager?

Okay, now imagine that you didn't control any of those inclinations and like everything, like you kept telling yourself it was okay.

That's why it creates a horror story.

To me, the most horrifying parts was like the instances with Alina.

That like made me way more uncomfortable and freaked out than anything to to do with the clock woman's body.

My anxiety, my anxiety was through the roof.

Anytime you would talk about like hooking up with her and she'd be crying, I was, oh, oh,

oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, you pep, you pepper it in there, and it's like, you, you really do.

You like think about this thing.

It's like, oh, we kissed.

And in a way, you're like, oh, there you go.

Romantic.

And it's like,

and then immediately the next thing is, yeah, like I was so happy, my cheek against hers.

And then we parted, and I could tell she was crying.

And you're like, what?

It's like, okay all right all right

it's like I wanted to get through all those segments quickly once again though Tony does a great job by like

once once again putting it through the perspective of the

of the protagonist but then also this

starting it off with this guy's suicide and then now it's all from the perspective of how all these events and these people are connected to this one thing which is traumatic and horrifying and it's so loud and bombastic i mean a kid sitting in his car burning to death is insane.

So, you know, it's just these things where it's like, who, who is fucking mentally right?

You know, who, who, who is in a good spot right now?

And I don't think anybody is.

And that's just, but that, that's what lowers your guard down.

You don't even think about it, you know, and I,

I know we were joking about it, but until the end, when it's just kind of like very blunt and serious, then that, then it's, uh, it really fucking wraps it around and you get a, uh, a more realistic take of everything.

So I don't know, man.

Like, all in all, how, how did you like the story, though?

Were you stoked on it?

Or, you know,

I loved it.

This was a ton of fun.

I really enjoyed it.

I really enjoyed a lot of the developments.

I like the tone it went.

I like how Tony was so smart to write the story in such a way where just the grammar and like adjectives he would use to describe different people kind of gave hints to the fact that our author was biased.

Until eventually, then he's turned, he's full-blown unreliable.

And I think that he's peppered in details really well.

The way information was divulged to us was really good, where we would get little hints of the next thing to come along.

Like, yeah, it was very well written.

A very cool story.

Very unique.

Like, it started as a coming of age thing, then took a very different direction, and I think it did it well.

Very haunting.

Overall, great story.

I really enjoyed this a lot.

Well, I hope that it stays up.

I don't know.

Listen.

Yeah, no one may see any of this.

It took us three days to record this.

It's just a long story with other work stuff we had going.

And, you know, yesterday I didn't really think much about it.

And today we'll be recording anything much about it until right now where I'm like, I think people are going to love this story.

And then I'm like, well,

it might, it might get smited down.

So if you're one of the lucky few to have made it across the finish line or if it's been up for a while, thank God.

But just know we appreciate you sticking it out.

I know this is, I think, our longest episode today.

We may have to cut a lot of deals with Steven Spielberg here.

Yeah, I know.

Steven Spielberg, we're going to have to cut it.

We're going to have to bribe him with some of that Jaws money, dude.

We're going to have to see.

But all in all, guys, we appreciate you.

Thank you so much if you've been listening along and following through this long episode.

And thank you to our audio listeners as well over at Apple Podcast and Spotify and for giving us a solid rating there.

And then also, once again, be sure to check out creepcast.store.

We have some new merch up right now.

If you want to snack merch, wearing it right here.

Eat me like a bug.

Let's go.

After this incredibly traumatizing story about childhood, you know,

eat me like a bug.

Ha ha.

Remember the good times.

We need to get back to juggling boxes of knives and jumping out of the window onto a trampoline.

All right.

That's that's we need to get back into that.

There we go.

That's the spirit.

That's the spirit.

All right.

But until next time, guys, we will catch you in the next one.

Bye-bye.

We will catch you in the next one.

And also,

man, this is so depressing.

I don't even have a quip this time.

If you hated this, it was Hunter's fault.

But if you liked it, the story was actually my idea.

Yeah, that works.

Bye.