Jun is dead, I think. That last sound wasn’t the kind people make when they’re gonna pull through, if you know what I mean.

Wet. And short.

The door is locked. The push-in kind on the knob. Barely enough to get your shorts up if some…thing really wants in.

The lock’s not going to keep it out.

I can hear it move—slapping the floor like meat on a butcher’s block—despite the noise coming from Jun’s phone. It’s not the Words anymore, thank god. What the fuck is it doing? Is it on autoplay?

We were just fucking around. Fuck! Jun’s phone is playing another video. Loud but muddy—like it’s under the couch. A gaming clip. Gunfire. Roars. The rapid clicks and tings of menu selections. A young woman’s voice alternately narrating and cursing, which ends abruptly as an ad for an energy drink cuts in.

I could use a drink. Between the adrenaline and the weed, my mouth is like sandpaper. I do a mental inventory of my room, not daring to rustle the beanbag chair and draw its attention. Nothing. No energy drink. No flat seltzer. Not even a beer bottle with backwash. My tongue sticks to the back of my teeth.

How long does it take to die of dehydration? Three days pops into my head. Less if it’s hot out, and I’m stuck in a windowless room. Why did I choose this one? Oh yeah. No windows. Jun called the bigger room, but I wanted my little cave anyway. Great instincts.

I remember the Mountain Dew I had before Jun came back with the salt. Even thinking about all that salt on the floor is making me even thirstier. Shit. Do I only have two-and-a-half days now. Two-and-three-quarters—does it work like that? It must, right? Shit. I can’t do fractions under these circumstances.

My phone is out there too, of course. It was by the lamp. With that thing.

I can’t hear it anymore. Just another video blaring on Jun’s phone, but it’s not like I’m fucking checking to see if it’s gone. I hear game-grunts and clangs in the sharp rhythms of puppeted violence. An NPC giving a mission. The gamer’s voice clips in shrieks of laughter. I’m not getting any closer to that door. I worked construction one summer in high school, and that’s hollow-core. I could push a spoon through it without leaning too hard.

I can still hear the phone. Deadened by whatever fell onto it.

Fuck.

It’s under his body.

The phone is under Jun’s body.

The back of my throat spasms with the realization, pulling my gut with it. I don’t vomit only because I’m afraid of the noise. What have we done? I grip the vinyl cover of the beanbag chair and clench my teeth to smother a wail. The vinyl emits its own tiny screams.

Jun is dead.

Jun is dead

Jun is dead Jun is dead Jun is dead Jun is dead Jun is dead Jun is dead

I shake violently, my eyes are open and straining. The beanbag is slick with sweat. A man’s voice crackles from the phone on the other side of the door. A man ranting. Conspiracies. Poison.  

Why the fuck did Jun listen to this shit?

The sound of heavy scraping. A great weight being dragged across the floor. That thing.

I saw enough. In the flash. In the seconds before I ran, after it grabbed Jun.

Seized. Like a predator, it seized him. Like it had been lying in wait for us. It sprang the trap.

It was waiting for the Words. That’s what Jun told me: the Words bring it. We were just fucking around.

The doorknob turns slowly, rotating almost imperceptibly until it reaches the limits permitted by the simple lock. It is absolutely silent. In fact, I notice it only because I have been staring intently at the doorknob from the moment I slammed the door behind me.

I am going to scream.

Music thunders from Jun’s phone, suddenly unmuffled, and it startles the whimper back into my throat. The vocalist growls over dropped-tuned guitar. The implications of this clarity are not lost on me; my eyes never leave the door. The knob returns to its rest position as slowly and steadily as before.

My head jerks around the room. There is nothing on my bed—the entirety of which is a garage-sale twin mattress—nor on the floor. Nothing that could be used as a weapon. Not even a bed frame that I could…I don’t know. There is nothing in here but rank laundry, a bong, and a greasy but empty pizza box. There isn’t even a light.

Forgot about the bong. My hand moves of its own volition to the front pocket of my jeans, patting, looking for my lighter.

It’s in the other room by the lamp.

The only illumination comes from the LED on a charging brick in the wall, a point of brilliant sapphire that tails rapidly to general, soggy haze, but I can see clearly. My eyes are fully dilated. My laptop is with my phone. You know where.

I’m going to have to drink bong water.

I live like an animal. It’s a strange time for me to fully internalize this understanding of my existence. I am twenty-seven years old. The idea of dying young, before I’ve reached my…potential or whatever…has occurred to me. I drink too much. Drugs. I do stupid shit a lot. I don’t think I’m going to have the opportunity to pull myself together.

This specific situation is a surprise, I admit.

What the fuck is that smell? Holy fucking christ. I choke on…fumes…coming from beneath the door.I can see smoky tendrils rising from the carpet like steam from fresh dog shit. Like someone uncovered a weeks-dead deer. Fetid and astringent and sticking like hot tar in my sinuses and lungs. For a moment, the stench smothers the fear, and I drop my guard. A cough escapes my lips.

The sound barely fills the room before the thing starts at the doorknob again, but there is no stealth. It attacks. Shakes it like a dog tearing into a rat.

This time, I do scream.

Even as I scramble backwards to huddle in the corner, pathetic animal that I am, I wonder why the thing doesn’t simply wrench the door from its hinges. I saw what it…did…to Jun. It’s unimaginably strong.

I don’t know what it is. A horror. A demon.

A sloughing pile of—

I don’t know.

Jun’s phone is playing. A sound.

The music is gone, replaced by a vibration. Slow. But I feel it in my palms, and my eyes throb with it. The Words.

It purrs. Multiplies. Voices. Droning, piercing. Words, yes, but somehow just beyond the threshold for comprehension. It is deafening. It is sickening.

For weeks now. From Jun’s room. Not like this. But secretly. At night. Oozing through Jun’s earbuds. Creeping under his door like the stench leaching through my carpet. Now, again, I can feel the Words in my skin. I feel them

in my eyes

I see

I see it.

On the other side of the door, still closed and locked, but I see it. Not understanding, I am in the other room with it, and I cower. It is huge, and it does not react to me, focused as it is on the door. A part of it…an extension…squirms around the edges of the frame. I do not know how to tell you what it is to see this thing, all limbs and writhing.

Because I am not in there. I am in here with these Words in my muscles

My vision stutters and rolls, moving chaotically as if a camera is being thrown about the room. Objects move in and out of focus. My eyes are not…obedient.

It sees me.

SEES me.

Reaches. Snaking.

The spell is shattered. I am thrust back into my body, back into this room, by an ad for Toyota Camry. The words are gone. The absurdity doesn’t stop my howling.

There is no one to hit skip, so the ad plays for its thirty-second entirety. I recognize the airy tune to which I am shrieking along. I can picture the car speeding into a country sunset. It is the soundtrack for the longest thirty seconds of my life, and I have been rescued, only momentarily I am certain, by the comprehensive monetization of media. Necromancy, like all things, is subordinate to the algorithm.

I am still screaming. I do not think that I can stop.

Jun.

Listening to that. Foulness.

I understand him now. Where he learned it. What we did.

What is it waiting for? Still Jun’s phone plays. And plays. And plays. Words, some monstrous, others mundane. It is so loud. My teeth vibrate in time to them.

Can’t they hear it? Are they too terrified to help me?

Another ad. Inhuman gibbering woven through a clash of metal and bone, urging me to buy. Hissing. Cajoling. Beckoning me to participate in the consumer market with the sound of entrails hitting the floor.

the ad ends the Words begin again

the door opens at last with a click

Mirror image. It is a feedback loop

of myself through the open door, past an unfurling pseudopod red and black like glowing embers in the dark, myself against the wall in my room huddling in shadow, Jun’s crushed body held loosely in another appendage, his eyes

my eyes

through each

meeting

Jun’s phone glowing on the floor like an opening to the abyss.

The Words are in us all now. Me.

Jun.

It.

I see through Jun’s dead eyes and mine how it is. Jun’s body is meat upon which the thing is feeding as I gape. Jun is somewhere else. Some pit.

Such a dark hole. And such pain. I weep as I howl.

The thing has a Name, which cannot be said or written, but I know it.

It touches me and Jun and me and Jun and me and Jun and me and Jun and forever in the loop and I understand.

You die when your body dies.

Unless you don’t.

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Copyright © Derek T. Leuenberger, 2025