Kate looks at him half surprised, “Wait, what do you mean there was a hole there?”

“I MEAN there was a hole here,” he knocks on the wall causing a dull, hollow sound to echo on the other side. “It’s gone now. Yep, someone must’ve patched it right up.”

“Well, that’s impossible!” Kate exclaims, half chuckling and half trying to tell if he’s pulling her leg, “I mean, I keep hearing freaky shit coming out of this wall. Like, I don’t know. Voices, or something. I don’t think the building next door is like, being used by anybody or anything like that.”

“Just ‘cause the hole is gone in the wall don’t mean it’s gone on the other side of it! I figure your landlord just put the wall up and wanted to deal with this little problem himself. Prolly got some animals making noises, or druggies or some shit.” He lets out a raspy belly laugh, before coughing hard into his fist.

Kate rubs her temples. Of COURSE it was her landlord’s fault. Half the stuff when she got this place barely worked. This is the fifth time she’s had to call her landlord in the past month because her landlord isn’t returning her plumbing, heat, electrical, and now mysterious un-filled hole-related problems. “Okay, okay. Can you at least fill it in or something? I don’t want any raccoons tearing into my wall while I’m in the shower.”

“Erm, sure.” He sighs and scratches his head. “I mean, we need ta’ get a permit from the city which will take a few days. I know a few people in the city ‘cause of my drywall business, so they should be able ta’ give us ‘special permission,’” he says with air quotes. “I also own the building next door, been meaning ta’ make it into a rental. I’ll swing by with some tools and start filling it in maybe… in a week or so?”

Kate starts to complain, groaning and smacking her forehead with the palm of her hand, “Well, thanks Ed. I wish it could be done sooner but the fact you’re doing this for free is really helping me out so… yeah.”

Ed shrugs, “Hey, what’re friends for, huh? See ya next week, and try not to have that ‘hole’ thing stress you out too much, okay? ‘S the middle of the summer, so it’s not like any of those pests over there are tryin’ ta’ get warm. It’ll be fixed in no time.”

Kate wishes she could believe him, and as the days go by she’s able to ignore the gnawing anxiety in the back of her mind that something is going to go wrong with that damn hole in her bathroom. Her one saving grace is that it’s being covered by the wall.

That is, until she woke up one Saturday morning. She partied after work the night before, so she was hungover and exhausted as she groggily stumbles into her bathroom. She washes her face with cold water trying to shake the night away, and was halfway through brushing her teeth when she notices it: There’s a large hole— large enough for a person to easily crawl through— in her wall where the landlord knocked.

Kate peers into the hole with her brow furrowed and toothbrush still in her mouth. Toothpaste starts to drip from her mouth and onto her outdated bathroom tiles, but she’s so taken aback by the sudden appearance that doesn’t even notice. The hole in the wall seems to go on for a while, and it’s dark. Too dark for Kate to see the end of it, even when she shines her phone flashlight into it. She spits her toothpaste out and calls her landlord as she cleans her toothpaste mess up.

He doesn’t pick up the first couple of calls, but on the third try Kate finally gets through to him. He sounds groggy, and angry that she’s calling him.

“Geez o’ petes Kate! Y’know it’s my day off, right? What the hell’s going on?”

Kate’s voice wavers, still shaken from the hole that seemingly apprared in her wall, “L-listen, do you remember that hole in my wall that was ‘gone?’ I-it’s back.”

The landlord sighs, “Shit, uh, whaddya mean it’s back? Like, sum animal tore its way in ta’ your bathroom?”

Kate shakes her head and looks at the hole, “No, it’s like… I don’t know. It’s almost grafted into the wall. Like it’s always been there, or maybe like the wall itself just opened up.” The landlord chuckles, causing Kate’s nostrils to flare and her brows to furrow.

“Listen hun, I know yer stressed about this whole thing-“

“Don’t fucking call me ‘hun,’ Ed. I know what I’m looking at.” She runs her finger along the edge of the hole as she says this, trying to see there were any gaps indicating it had been added to the wall in some way. Instead it seemlessly blends from white drywall to a strange brownish-gray cement with ridges every inch or so. “Just get your ass over here, PLEASE. I CANNOT go the rest of the weekend thinking I’ll be jumped by some raccoons.”

Ed starts to say something just as a sound emanates from the hole, causing Kate to jump. It’s a strange, strained noise coming from deep in the hole. It starts out low, and Kate tells Ed to stop talking so she could hear it better. After a second, she realizes it’s a voice. It’s strained and weak, like someone is standing on their chest.

“Kkkkhhhhhh- khhhaaaaa….aaaatttttttteeeee,” says the voice. “Khhh-Kaaaaattttteeee, hhhhheelp me… help me, please!” The voice sounds feminine—slightly deep and distorted as well. Maybe she’s saying it through the hole on the other side of the wall, or maybe she’s stuck in there, either way Kate goes through a paroxysm of shock. The last thing she expects from noises coming out of a hole is a woman pleading for help.

She was silent for a while, ears almost ringing as she stares at the hole in a horrified silence. After a second, she realizes that she still has her phone in her hand. Ed is still talking, asking Kate where she is. She puts the phone to her ear.

“Ed… _Ed!” _She says, interrupting him with a wavering tone. “I think there’s someone inside the fucking hole.” Ed is silent for a second, which seems like an eternity for Kate with the continuous pleading from the woman in the hole. Finally, Ed just laughs.

“Kate, what- what’re ya talking about?” There is a sense of nervousness in his voice.

“Listen!” Kate places her phone up to the hole, allowing Ed to hear the pained wails. After a second, she puts her phone back to her ear. “Do you believe me now?” She says, half smug and half impatient. “_Please, _you gotta swing by. I’m gonna call 911 and crawl in there, or something.”

Kate could hear a quiet “Fuck,” come from Ed. Then, he said in a surprisingly stern voice, “Kate listen to me. Do NOT go into that hole and do NOT call the cops. I’ll be over there in an hour. If anythin’, lock yer bathroom door. Better yet, leave yer apartment. I’ll be there soon.”

Before she had a chance to protest, Ed hangs up. It was her turn to cuss, since the idea of just hanging back while this woman was in possible pain wasn’t one that she wanted to entertain. Especially since the cries from the woman seem to be growing louder and louder. Kate wonders if anyone else in the building can hear it.

_Screw Ed, _she thinks. This hole is more than big enough to crawl through. If Ed’s going to take that long to lug his ass over here, I might as well just crawl in myself.

Kate rumages through her kitchen drawers until she finds her flashlight, not wanting to take her phone into a cramped place. She shines the flashlight down the hole and it hits the darkness as though it ran into a wall fifteen feet away. She sighs, and shakes her hands to amp herself up before putting her flashlight into her mouth and crawling head first into the hole in her wall.

She crawls into the darkness. The ridges every inch give good fingerholds as she crawls on her hands and knees into the darkness, and are also strangely warm to the touch. She realizes that she’s been crawling for a while— much longer than what should’ve been the space between buildings. She tries to turn around to see how far from her bathroom she had crawled so far, but is unable to from the size of the hole. In fact, she’s just realized that the hole itself seemed to have shrunk since she went in, now closing around her shoulders and hips. She tries to back up, but it’s almost as though something is forcing her to continue into the hole. Whether it’s controlling her or the hole is physically pressing her deeper and deeper into it, she can’t tell. Eventually, after what feels like half an hour of crawling she ends up on her stomach, dragging herself— or maybe, being dragged, even— along the warm concrete ridges of the hole. It’s getting tighter, it’s constricting her and making it harder to breathe. The air is stale, and her lungs are being crushed by the walls of the hole. Even if she wanted to turn around, or push herself backwards, she couldn’t. Her arms are to her side, and her head barely has enough space to look forward. Eventually, her flashlight goes out, and she’s left in the darkness.

---

Ed unlocks Kate’s door with his skeleton key for the building. He’s pissed at her, and rightfully so, he feels. The bitch who’s been ringing his phone nonstop since she moved in can’t seem to answer hers the one time Ed needs her to. Of course she had to keep him locked out, too! Ungrateful fucking tennants.

“Kate! I’m ‘ere ta’ fix that dammed hole ya keep yammering about!” He stands in the doorway of her apartment. The lights are all still off except for the bathroom. The light seeps out of the doorway, slightly brighter than the glow of the afternoon sun. Ed shifts uneasily when Kate doesn’t respond. “Aight, well… I’m comin’ in! Don’t call the cops on me, or nothin’.”

He mutters under his breath as he walks into the bathroom, complaining about how much of a bitch Kate is. He stops in his tracks, though, when he sees the hole in the wall— and no sign of Kate. It’s not until he peers into the hole that he hears her. She’s sobbing, calling out to him.

“Eeeeehhhh…. Eeeeeeeeehhhhhddddd,” Her voice calls between choked sobs. “Eeeeehhhhhddwaarrddd… Heeellp me… Help me PLEASE!”

Ed swears under his breath. Then, he says to the hole, “Fuckin’… this is the fourth one this year you piece of shit!” He kicks the wall underneath the hole out of frustration, putting another hole into the wall from his steel toe boot. “Great, now I need ta’ find another tennant and fill another fuckin’ hole!”

Ed starts to plaster over his foothole, quickly patching the hole in the drywall. He looks into the hole, the uneasy darkness seems to reach out to him. Kate continues to scream his name between rhaspy sobs, but he shrugs it off. He knows that isn’t Kate.

He plugs up the hole after an hour of work, goes home, and puts up a new ad for the apartment:

“Wonderful one-bedroom apartment in downtown Lansing. Rent is $2,500 a month. Fully furnished and rececntly retouched after sudden departure of previous tennant. There was a hole in the bathroom wall, it’s gone now.”

As the moans rise into echoing shrieks, pounding in my head like the marching of a thousand soildiers, I shriek with them— for I finally knew what it is I’ve done.

I’ve spent the last years of my life invested heavily in my reaserch— that of a strange book that has come up time and time again in different cultures I’ve studied as an anthropologist. It has different names across all cultures, but I and others in my team of scientists and historians have referred to it simply as “Disha Di Kitaba,” which is punjabi for “The Wishing Book.” It’s said to contain rituals that allow one to do simply that— wish. Of course, it comes with some sort of sacrafice— but the idea of a lost book of wishes was one too difficult to pass up. Especially when we got a lead to its location.

We found the book in the Nanda Devi in India, hence the punjabi name for the book. This was a joyous day for our years of studying and resesrch, as the book has not been seen for centuries— only appearing in ancient manuscripts from around the time of Christ. References has to this book has even been found in texts as old as the Great Pyramids of Egypt thenselves. Imagine our surprise when we found the tome in an abandoned monastery, not only intact, but in decent condition at that. The book’s cover was that of some kind of dark leather— someone in the team mentioned its similarity to crocidile skin, but the scales were much smaller than that of a crocodile and much more rigid to the touch. The pages were a rough and yellow-green parchment, likely damaged through years of sitting in the monastery temple. The pages are filled with an ancient script— similar enough to some sort of Sumerian dialect to where we could get a sense of its contents. Every other page has illustrations of men who have wielded the book. Kings and generals, Egyptian pharohs, Mongolian rulers, even medieval kings have held the book. Despite this, the reoccuring mention of the “sacrafice” these men had to make were vague. There are also empty pages in the back, which we eventually found to be how we made the wishes.

We had been warned by the nearby villiagers that the monastery was dangerous, full of curses and other paranormal happenings. As a person of science, I heeded their warnings as we flipped through the book— carefully looking over my shoulder at my companions standing watch in the dilapedated temple. I worry that they’ll be of more harm to me than any sort of spirit could be. Power drives all who wield it mad, and the ability to have your wishes granted is a great power to have.

After an hour of studying the book and no strange happenings occuring, we decide to conduct one of the rituals in the book. Having researched the supposed items needed for the rituals, and confirming it by roughly translating the ancient texts, we begin the ritual. A fight ensued between us between who should “get the wish,” as though it would actually grant us its power. I thought of them as fools. Did they really think they deserved it, when it was I who brought them here? When it was I who even whispered the ideas of the Disha Di Kitaba in their ears? I reminded them of such, and I was given the opportunity to lead the ritual. I saw their sullen looks of disappointment, and I knew that if given the chance these men would betray me. They’re jealous, I know they are.

We conduct the ritual. I read the script, we place the ingredients and mix it with the blood oozing out of my freshly cut hand. Bloodied knife in one hand, bandage in the other, I chant with the men in my team with the book open in front of us. Finally, I drop the knife, turn the book to an empty page and smear the blood mixture on the page. I wish by thinking with all my might on the thought of having the book with me for all eternity, to only be used by me and me only, so I could have its awesome power.

A light appears from the page, and the wind blows in from all openings of the temple. The chanting of the men around me turned to moans— that of pain as the skin shrinks tight to their bones. It was as though the book was draining them of all their life. Their moans turned to shrieks as they learned of their fate. They turn to ash as they wither away and flow into the book. A dull yellow-green light emits from the pages, and I shriek with them as I see the granter of wishes, the true owner of the Disha Di Kitaba, and the fate that awaits me. I shriek even as the others disappear entirely, their sunken and skeletal faces burned in my memories forever.

Finally, I shriek in joy— knowing that the power if the Disha Di Kitaba is finally mine to wield.

Walking alone along the road, the mist surrounds me. It reaches out with a cool touch, as though it tells me to slow down and look around. I brush it off, though— I know what it’s trying to coerce me into doing and I won’t let it.

The path curves, yet nevertheless heads straight ahead. For better or for worse, I’m on this path careening dead ahead into the unknown misty forest. The overgrown pavement causes the occasional skip in my step as I trip on it. Occasionally, it’s bad enough that I’ll fall and completely stop walking. It’s never for long, though— I scramble back onto my feet and look behind me, thanking God that it hasn’t caught up to me yet.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been walking this overgrown and misty path, but I know that if I stop something bad will happen. My hands and knees are bloodied and bruised from my tripping, and it happens more often the longer I walk. Every time I fall, I should be getting better at catching myself, yet it feels like that never happens. At some point, I’m going to fall over and never get back up again.

I’m just so, so tired.

Yet, here I am. Continuing to walk down this dilapidated path because I’m too scared to see what lies outside the boundaries of the pavement. I’m scared of what lies inside the mist and everything beyond it. The path forward is what I’ve been set on, yet its clear it’s just not meant for me.

By: Georgia Bennet, Editor in Chief of The Greymont Gazette

Wednesday, July 24, 20–

The Greymont County Sheriff’s Office urges everyone to stay home, a step up from the 7 p.m. curfew already in place. This comes after a string of twelve disappearances and an unidentified corpse that has rocked the small town over the past month.

“Please, stay home and stay safe,” said Sheriff Greene in a press conference. “Only leave for work, groceries, and in emergency events. We at the Greymont County Sheriff’s Office are doing everything we can to find your missing loved ones, and we won’t rest until they’re accounted for.”

This comes after the most recent disappearance— a 13 year old Greymont local named Sam Whitehead, who went missing three days ago while walking home from school. A bad omen for many in the town, as this occurred just a day after the unidentified body in Mallebeigh Park.

Police have not released information on the body outside of a possible animal attack. However, 53 year old Sharon Barley, the Greymont resident who reported the body while on a walk with her dog, believes the body is connected to the disappearances.

“I mean, it just makes sense, doesn’t it?” Barley said in an interview. “With all of these people going missing so quickly, I think we all figured a body would turn up eventually. I just wish I knew who that poor, poor person was— just to give them some justice, you know? Their face was just too damaged, mangled like the rest of him. I don’t even know what could’ve done that to a man, but I just hope we find whoever— or whatever did this.”

Greymont Police is looking for any information regarding the disappearances of Sam Whitehead, or any of the other twelve missing persons. If you’ve seen them, or know where they are, please contact them at (906) xxx-xxxx or come into the station on Rosewood Avenue.

The lights are low at Half-a-Dime, and the noise emitting from the bar can be heard from halfway down the block. It’s a busy night, and Dot is sitting by herself with a pint of their lager in her hand. The glass still has frost on it that burns her hand as she holds it, and it’s half empty.

She’s sitting by herself. Well, that’s a lie— Dot may as well be sitting by herself, though. She decided to take a chance and go out, something she doesn’t do very often to do her lack of funds and agoraphobic tendencies. Why spend all of that time, money and energy going out when you can drink in the peace of your own home, after all? That being said, Dot had a couple of friends who wanted her to hang out with some of their mutuals and invited her along to go bar hopping. Dot was unsure, but after some convincing from her friends she gave in— she wanted an excuse to get dolled up, anyway.

So, here she is. This is actually the second stop of the night, a dive bar just down the block from a brewery Dot had met her friends at. She had prepared for a nice night with friends, a time prowling the town in search of good times and good drinks. Her hair is just starting to get long— it’s starting to fall on her broad shoulders and drape on her black sweater dress. She had done her makeup too, a purple eyeshadow with thick black eyeliner. Yet, despite her best efforts to be more confident-seeming and to be “part of the girls,” it just wasn’t enough. At least, Dot didn’t think so.

Why was she sitting all by herself when her friends were at the bar with her? Perhaps Dot was just too shy to meet new people, as she had never met any of their mutual friends before. But, that’s not a big deal for her— she had a great conversation with one of them about a tv show they both like watching. Perhaps she said something wrong? But if that’s the case, she feels as though she could tell if people were mad at her— this doesn’t seem to be from a place of anger.

Yet, why is nobody involving her in the conversation? Nobody can see that she’s on the outlier either, apparently. They all have their backs turned to her and appear to be engrossed in a conversation about something Dot couldn’t hear and didn’t understand. She takes a drink of her beer and sighs. It was like this in the previous bar, too. The loud music and social eviction from the group had been discouraging, but Dot had had her hopes high going into Half-a-Dime just to have them dashed the second she came back with her drink.

The mutuals just might not know her, but they could at least involve her. She had to force her way into conversations so she wouldn’t be left alone, which gave way to weird looks being shot in her direction. Dot was just tired of being be only one that tried, and is upset that her friends sat on the opposite side of the table as well; it’s impossible to yell loud enough to talk to them.

She doesn’t know why she even tried with this. Dot knows that she’ll never be like one of them— she’s just an in between of the friend groups, an “other” that lurks in the background that is, at best, ignored. Maybe it’s just because she’s trans, and people are just being weird about it. Dot feels guilty about thinking of her friends like that— she knows they’re good people. But, why did they leave her alone?

Dot finishes her drink and looks at the time. It’s 10:30 pm, they’ve been there for thirty minutes and nobody has said a word to Dot. She wonders if she could leave without anybody noticing her, and looks at door with her legs crossed and fingers drumming on the table. She’d have to walk past the whole group of people on her way to it.

Dot gets up, pushes her chair in, and walks home before anyone notices she’s gone.