Seamus Coffey

I have no idea how I survived.

It happened in the blink of an eye, but for a brief moment I could have sworn that I saw a black tendril tear itself out of the fabric of existence and push the kid in front of a passing metro bus. The tendril and the ripple in space-time was gone in an instant. It couldn’t have been there for more than a hundred milliseconds but I saw it.

It’s easy to sit in my office and look down on the people I am tasked with protecting. I quite literally look down at the security monitors for eight hours a day. It is this perspective that allows me to find these things disturbing. It allows me to see the synergy and synchronicity. In short, the workers operate less as independent units and more like a hive.

I don’t normally watch the news. Between my Facebook feed and Twitter, I usually knew enough about current events not to care. For whatever reason, I found myself sitting in front of the television at five-in-the-afternoon and decided to watch the news. I kinda wish I hadn’t. The television switched from a commercial to showing the anchor sitting in front of the camera with a somber face.

My name is Melvin. I am a good son. Mother has done her best to raise me up over the past 40 years. I’m not very smart. Mother tells me that the world is not kind to boys like me.

If you hear of the Schlessinger Farm, don’t try to find it.

My daughter Emily is three. She spends her days playing with an app on her tablet learning her letters or watching Zig & Sharko on Netflix. Shortly after we moved into the house, she started talking to what we assumed was an imaginary friend. One day while I was sitting on the sofa in the living room, I mentioned going into her room to grab her tablet. It was then that Emily said something that I can’t forget.

Frank Lamb was an intellectually disabled man from New Concord, Kentucky. At 52 years old, he’d never seen the inside of classroom. He couldn’t read or write, but had above-average communication skills. He had been placed in the care of the state when a welfare check at his parent’s farm revealed that the elder Lambs had been dead for some time. Frank’s parents had seemingly been mauled by an animal and left on the front porch.

I was in high school back then all of this started, I guess I was about 16 years old. Karen was 12. My dad ended up getting a second phone line so she could talk to her friends and the rest of us could use the phone. It wasn’t uncommon for Karen to be up at night talking to her friends on the phone, so I don’t know when these things started happening, but I’ll tell you when I first noticed something was wrong.

“The Rathen are known to infect our loved ones and turn them against us. They tell us that we imagined things as we remember them. Once someone has been lost to them, there is no hope. Cut all contact. After the infection has taken root, it is only a matter of time until the host his taken over and they are ready to strike.”

“I’ll never be as loved as I was when I was pregnant, but I don’t want to bear the thought of losing another life from inside me. I’m done.”

That night, I had a nightmare I can’t forget to this day.