Marched into the dead of night, Pullman Grier’s life was a relentless curse, wrapped tight with enemies both tangible and unseen.
Elevators always a gamble, as were buses—all of them claustrophobic metal beasts that rattled his nerves into frayed threads.
Tonight, the elevator was a desperate risk he'd taken, racing against time that slipped like ice beneath his feet. His muscles tensed, coiling to snap, while the insidious black bile of panic crept up the back of his throat.
The greasy sheen on his skin caught the flickering hallway lights, each step forward a battle. The lift’s steel door groaned, inching open just enough for him to wedge through, barely keeping the retching down.
Elevators. Buses. His own body betraying him with constant revolts.
At the end of the foul, damp carpet—almost breathing beneath his boots—his apartment door loomed like a fragile salvation. With trembling fingers, he fumbled for his keys in the pocket of his grimy, stained work pants. One caught the fabric just right, splitting the seam with a sharp rip.
“Fuck,” he spat under cracked lips, tossing aside the irrelevant keys: the so-called security lockbox, the ancient bike lock, all useless relics in a life unraveling.
Elevators, buses, his own rotting guts, and now locks—another enemy to overthrow.
He thought bitterly about his past, a toxic stew of foes that had stalked him from childhood to this moment. Perhaps it was time to warn these new enemies that the ghosts of his youth were anything but dead.
The deadbolt clicked open under his practiced touch. With a sharp shove of his bony shoulder, the door protested and gave way. Red bulbs flickered overhead, feeble sentinels in the stale air. His belt unclasped under strain. A low rumble of dread echoed in his bowels.
His pants and underwear hit the floor in a damp heap over his worn shoes. The door slammed behind him, a noise too loud for one in a building full of sleepers, but he didn’t give a damn about their complaints tonight.
With his pants still around his ankles, Pullman limped toward the bathroom—the one sanctuary in this rust-stained hellhole—and collapsed onto the cold porcelain seat, shivering beneath his ragged winter coat.
Suddenly, an explosive convulsion shook the small bachelor pad, rattling the cracked windowpanes and peeling wallpaper like the aftershocks of some ancient curse.
Several agonizing flushes later, Pullman half-stood, half-stumbled out, clutching his bruised abdomen. He wavered, tempted to retreat back into that cramped cell, but instead sank into the rickety office chair snagged from an alleyway dumpster, his elbows resting on the cluttered desk as his head dropped into his hands.
A fresh gurgle emerged from his belly, wringing a grimace of pain from his worn face.
“It’s stress,” he muttered to himself, imagining the ghosts of doctors past—long gone from this forsaken town—mocking his despair. “Still young. Thirty-five, right? Twenty-two? Christ.”
He pictured them, pulling him apart with clinical indifference. “Maybe diet,” echoed faintly in his head. “What happened?” They’d call out for the nurse, mocking his suffering.
Imaginary laughter filled the stale room, cruel and hollow.
“Isn’t that the most fucked-up thing you’ve ever heard?” Pullman scoffed to the silence. “Well, I’m out of here. This dump doesn’t pay enough for this shit. Get out, kid. Relax a little. Your asshole will thank you.”
He chuckled bitterly. “Yeah. Herman’s comatose, but his asshole’s spectacular.”
“Relax,” he whispered, stripping off his grease-streaked 'Winnipeg’s #1 Fat Boy' shirt to reveal ribs stark beneath skin stretched tight, lined with three pale scars—a map of old wounds and survival.
His gaze roamed the dingy walls, where peeling wallpaper curled like dead leaves and water stains whispered of long-forgotten leaks.
“Relax,” he muttered again, bitter and hollow.
Find a girlfriend.
The thought hit like a slap. His stomach churned, erupting loudly with a fresh spasm that shook the apartment.
Girlfriend. Right.
Find a hobby. At least there was one box he could tick off, simple and cheap—a brief escape to steal a moment’s peace from the chaos.
He slid the battered laptop across the desk, the machine more relic than tool. He called it the Headless Mule. No fancy screen or battery—just a thrift-store TV repurposed as a monitor and a mouse so grimy it was a wonder it worked at all. All for seventy bucks and the mercy of a stranger who dropped it off without a second thought.
The Mule groaned awake, waking slowly, the Linux Lite desktop blinking into life with a digital yawn. Tonight, it was especially sluggish.
“Good boy,” Pullman murmured to the machine. “Sometimes we pitiful humans need graphics.”
Notifications flickered in, one by one: a cryptid website he kept forgetting to leave, his shifting work schedule, and a merciless email from his bank demanding more money.
“To relax, just add money,” Pullman snorted, a dark joke that tasted like ash.
And then, the one he waited for.
“We got the wanker. Get on.”
Anticipation prickled along his spine as he spotted the handle sygard_the_mighty tagged with 'Mentor' flair lighting up his screen.
He switched over to the message boards. The case was titled “Last image of my daughter with her father.” Photos lined the thread: a thin young woman with dark hair and skin, smiling softly. Amid familiar faces was a new photo—a sunlit café terrace, a happy couple, and in the background, a man with ruddy skin, graying beard, and sunglasses.
A father who had taken his own daughter and vanished.
A dull ache in Pullman’s gut eased, replaced by a rising spark of grim excitement.
“Our boy picked him up three hours ago,” he typed, fingers hesitant but eager.
He glanced at the terminal output from the script Sygard had coached him through—the social media image, no geotags, posted two hours earlier. A ship passing a lighthouse, an ordinary asshole move cloaked in mystery.
“Geo-locators estimate Khyber. Afghanistan, maybe,” a new message confirmed. “Sun position matches. The restaurant menu’s Pashto. They’ll confirm soon.”
A faded photo of the girl hung on the Victory Wall above the Mule, alongside two others—the girls they’d rescued from Algeria months ago.
“What can I do now?” he typed, cautious and precise.
Moments later, a reply blooped in: “Lads are checking title deeds in the area. Got the new OCR script ready?”
“List of aliases and associates?”
“Yeah. Have at it. Some docs are prehistoric. Might take a while. Give the lads time to pin down the location.”
Pullman fed the PDFs into the script. The laptop gasped, slow and labored as lines of text crawled across the terminal window. Algorithms wrestled words from scanned pages, translating and hunting names.
The cursor staggered, sluggish as syrup. Pull grumbled, tweaking memory use. It’d take at least thirty more minutes but would free him to do other things while waiting.
“Chug, chug, chug,” he joked quietly.
The silence stretched, no reply coming.
He sank back onto the single bed in his underwear, mind drifting into the emptiness.
People vanished. In an age of constant surveillance and GPS, it seemed impossible—but it happened. Sometimes, authorities responded; other times, cases fell to the bottom of forgotten piles.
Some might say it was convenient when fathers slipped into wild backwoods with their daughters, marrying them off to strangers to escape their pasts.
“Don’t make assumptions,” Pullman warned his own cynical mind.
Maybe the father was simply mad. Maybe lost. But from the mother’s story, no.
She had nowhere else to turn but to the strange, the dorks and nuts scattered across the internet. The weirdos and assholes that made up Deep Eyes.
“You can always depend on the kindness of strangers,” Pullman muttered at the cold screen before dragging himself up and shuffling to the tiny kitchenette.
Inside his bulbless fridge, bagels and apples sat next to bottles of chewable vitamins, loperamide, and psyllium husks. He grabbed an apple and a bagel, and the Flintstones vitamins—expensive but necessary despite the chalky taste.
Midway turning back, a small, black-and-dun blur scuttled under the counter. Whiskers brushed crumbs from the cracked moulding.
A mouse.
Pullman’s skin prickled, cold dread crawling up his spine, dragging memories from the darkest pits of his gut.
Fetch me the yums.
The sickly thought slithered through his mind, suffocating and fast, forcing him to steady himself against the counter. The apple slipped from his shaking hand, rolling against the worn wood.
Sweat pearled at his brow. Knees quivering, he gasped desperately for breath.
“Fuckfuckfuck,” he hissed, fighting to keep the last strands of strength in his legs.
The bagel slid across the floor as he surrendered, sinking to his hands and knees, crawling toward the bathroom sanctuary.
Fetch me my yums, fobbly boy. Fetch them now!
That word, fobbly, a leftover from the pidgin that had invaded his childhood language, clung to him—ghosts of a past he’d tried to bury but that refused to stay silent.
“You’re dead,” he whispered fiercely, eyes wild with pain.
Never dead iffin’ you find thoughts for me, boy.
He sank his elbows onto his knees, hand pressed to his forehead as a spasm ripped through his stomach—a wave of agony sharp enough to bring tears.
“Ugggghhh. Fuuuuuck.”
The pidgin curses crashed against English ones in his mind, a desperate duel born from years of torment.