HOLD YOUR PEACE?
Written By: N.Z. Thorne On a curving stretch of road through the Oregon woods, the night was a chaotic playlist of heavy rain and howling winds.
HOLD YOUR PEACE?
Written By: N.Z. Thorne
On a curving stretch of road through the Oregon woods, the night was a chaotic playlist of heavy rain and howling winds. Caught in its wake, a crimson Nissan 350Z careening at a blinding speed, the rain pelted its blood-colored roof like a hail of thumbtacks.
The tires shrieked as the car drifted through a series of sharp hairpin turns. On the tenth turn, the steering wheel savagely yanked itself from the driver’s grip. The chassis groaned as it broadsided the guardrail, snapping it completely in half. The headlights shot toward the sky as the car launched into the air before hurtling far down into the dark depths below.
Rebounding against the hillside in a violent barrel-roll of destruction, the inside of the cabin became an orchestra of chaos. Shattering glass, deploying airbags, and the sound of denting metal.
The orchestra ended once the chassis collided, wrapping sideways around a massive relic of a pine. Shrill steam and oily smoke bled from the wreckage. What was once an expensive sports car was now little more than a steel coffin.
Within the cabin, the scene was a metallic heap of broken glass and jagged steel. The driver’s eyes jerked open; his world tilted into a dizzying blur, as static hissed from the ruined radio. Through the haze, he looked toward the passenger door, to see that the once stylish leather was now surrounded by split metal and blood – Strapped into the seatbelt was a mangled, unidentifiable figure—broken in ways the human body was never meant to bend.
Then, flames licked outward from beneath the crushed hood. Panic flared within him as he reached for the seatbelt latch. But his arms were anchors of dead weight. With his fingers numb, they fumbled uselessly against the jammed release.
CLANG!
The hood buckled before it ripped away from its hinges, propelling into the dark woods by the force of a small explosion. The driver slouched back, pinned against the seat and the car’s frame, unable to move.
His varsity jacket, usually a comfort, was now but a heavy shroud that had been soaked through with tacky motor oil and hot blood. His eyes throbbed with an intense pressure that beat in tandem with his own racing pulse.
He attempted to scream but lacked the strength to drag air into his lungs; his throat had locked tight. All he could do was watch as a single spark lept from the exposed engine. Before a tiny needle of light that followed turned the world a blinding white.
The heavy, oily fumes of vaporized fuel ignited instantly—a liquid wall of fire curled over the dashboard, eating through the upholstery. Shortly after an ear-splitting roar filled the cabin, a blast that knocked what little air remained out of his lungs. Searing, unbearable heat followed. He flung up his hands, the pain cutting through his paralysis. The skin of his forearms blistered instantly. Around him, the temperature skyrocketed, melting plastic and warping the frame of the sports car with a hideous, metallic shriek.
AHHHHHHH!!
***
KNOCK! KNOCK!
KNOCK!
“You okay in there, Logan? I heard a scream,” the man called through a heavy bathroom door. Adjusting his tuxedo, he looked impatient.
“Wade? Yeah, I’m fine—just needed to take a leak. Ha! It was just a scream of joy,” Logan responded from within the bathroom with a forced, unenthusiastic laugh.
“If you say so, man. Hurry up, or everyone’s going to think you bailed,” he said and then turned to walk back down the faintly illuminated hallway he came from, his dry laughter oscillating off the cold walls.
Logan leaned over a marble sink, his reflection a disheveled mess in the extravagantly spacious room. As he stared at his reflection in the mirror. In the harsh, buzzing fluorescent light, his own reflection looked like a complete stranger.
“Ugh, you look like a hot mess…” he claimed, cupping freezing water from the tap then hurling it onto his face.
The sudden cold burned, forcing an intake of breath from his lungs. He took a few strained, deep breaths to steady the heavy hammering pulse vibrating throughout his body. Grabbing a hand towel on the counter, he attempted at wiping the tired look from his eyes.
He spun away from the mirror, his gaze lowering to the bathroom floor. There his phone lay face-up on the cracked tile. Just above it near the light switch was a fresh, sizable indentation—an ugly bruise on the wall, that silently judged him.
“It can’t be… It has to be a coincidence, s-someone else with the same name…”
He violently snapped his head back up toward the mirror. Refusing to acknowledge the phone that lay on the floor, as if it were a ticking bomb.
Rising up his trembling hands to his head, he began raking his fingers through his blond hair, smoothing down any wayward strands back into place, making himself appear perfectly composed.
In the powerful bright lights of the bathroom, he cut a striking figure—swathed in a lavish, pristine white suit. It had been tailored to the inch, it was the kind of sharp, expensive threads meant for an extravagant gala or a high-stakes event. However, beneath the polished, charismatic uniform, a cold, heavy dread was written across his face.
“I feel so cold, and I long for your embrace
I keep crying, baby, baby, please
Mm, mm, mm, mm
Mm, mm
Oh, can’t you see you belong to me?”
The heavy silence of the bathroom shattered at the sharp, jarring ring of the phone. Logan’s head snapped toward the screen on the floor. His pupils blown wide, his heart began to beat with a desperate, suffocating rhythm.
Like a moth drawn to a flame, he slowly inched forward; the bright luminosity of the screen covered the cracked bathroom tiles in a blanket of electric blue. He hovered over the device as he peered down toward the notification that had popped up across the six-inch glass in bold, unforgiving letters: Jemila Donaldsin.
A tornado tore through his mind, as the vertigo washed over him. At that moment he could not pinpoint what was more unnerving, the name that appeared within the notification bubble or the twisted, sick irony of the ringtone’s lyrics that bounced off the tiled walls.
It was a song he had never set himself. The 1983 hit by The Police, Every Breath You Take, had filled the cramped bathroom.
Something that sent waves of cold ripples throughout his body was the fact that it didn't play through; it was stuck on a stuttering, broken loop, playing the exact same few lines on repeat, over and over again. The lyrics hung in the heavy, humid air like a horrifying serenade
“NO! LEAVE ME ALONE!!”
BASH!
TING—TING!
Logan snapped. He brought down the heel of his dress shoe, with the strength of his full weight, stomping and kicking the phone into rubble. The repetitive rhythm of the music slowly died out, the vocals sounding more demonic before it severed completely mid-note. All that remained atop the broken bathroom tile was a heap of shattered glass and exposed smoking circuits that had spilled out of the cold aluminum frame.
Logan slouched over, dry heaving as he stared down at the metallic carnage. He didn’t want to be anywhere near it. He couldn't. Turning on his heel, he hastily fled from the bathroom, leaving the mangled device behind—much like a killer fleeing the scene of a fresh homicide. The silence of the hallway did little to put out the phantom echo of the lyrics that still clung to his skin like a parasite.
***
A sea of sharply dressed people populated a vibrant lakeside meadow, their faces dripping with opulence. At the center of an altar positioned in front of the seated attendees, Logan stood like a ghost, his immaculate white tuxedo, only serving to highlight how sickly he truly looked. A thin sheen of nervous sweat beaded along his brow. His hands were clasped tightly in front of him as his eyes darted toward the back of the field, dreading the moment his bride would appear.
“Bro, you look like hell. What’s up? You good?” Wade said as Logan turned to look at him, disheveled and drenched in sweat.
Logan let out a short, hollow laugh. “Yeah, Wade. Why wouldn't I be?” he responded visibly shaking and pale.
“Because you look like you’re about to storm the beach of Normandy, dog…” Wade said, giving Logan a side long glance, noticing that something was off.
“Listen, I’m fine, rea—” He was cut off by the sound of the Bridal Chorus, being played on a lavish, gleaming white Yamaha piano.
“Whatever, get it together, man. She’s about to walk,” Wade said, as he gave Logan a rather sharp shoulder check.
“I know! I know, I got this,” Logan brought his hands up to his face and slapped the sides of his cheeks as if to bring his game face on.
Then there she was like a glimpse of luminescence in a rosebud dress, her steely gray eyes sharp against her white, silky gown.
Beside her was a man who anchored her; he was a silver-haired goliath in a midnight suit that struggled to contain his broad frame. He escorted his daughter toward the altar while the music swelled around them.
“Damn, she looks amazing! You lucky bastard…” Wade said, giving Logan a playful, malicious stare.
“I know. I don’t understand how I got so lucky,” Logan said, looking at her, mesmerized by her bewitching good looks. The looming feeling of dread was all but washed away at the mere sight of her.
“Yeah, me and the boys all wonder that too!” Wade let out a controlled laugh that erupted from his diaphragm.
Logan didn’t say a word; he was utterly bedazzled. Drowning out the rest of the rabble, his world narrowed until it held only his bride to be. She approached the altar with a steady grace. Her father planted a brief peck to her cheek before stepping aside, letting his daughter go. As she turned to face Logan, the silence between them felt heavy, with everything they were about to say.
“Hey” Logan said, at a loss for words as he gazed into her eyes.
“Hey,” she repeated with a smile on her face.
“Family and friends, we are gathered here today to celebrate one of life’s greatest moments, the joining of Logan Paulburr and Mikayla Deshant in marriage. They have invited you here to this beautiful space because each of you has played a role in their journey. You are the community that has shaped them, supported them, and cheered them on. Today, you stand as witnesses to the promise they are about to make.”
Gazing at Mikayla Logan was no longer pale or shaking. He felt ready to start his life with his new wife, shutting the door on what had happened in the bathroom just a few hours ago. He buried the event deep down within him, refusing to let the paranoia ruin what would be the happiest day of their lives.
“Marriage is often described as a destination, but in truth, it is a continuous journey. It is a commitment to wake up every morning and choose the same person, over and over again.”
After a quick clear of the throat, he continued. “Logan and Mikayla: Love is not just a feeling; it is an action. It is found in the quiet moments, the way you listen when the other is tired, the way you laugh at jokes only the two of you understand, and the way you offer grace when things get difficult. Today, you are not just promising to love each other when it is easy; you are promising to be each other’s home, no matter where the world takes you.”
The priest then shifted his demeanor before continuing with the next part, “That being said, before we continue, should anyone have any reason why these two people should not be wed, speak now or forever hold your peace?”
The priest waited for a moment before continuing the ceremony, “Very well, let us conti—”
“I feel so cold, and I long for your embrace
I keep crying, baby, baby, please
Mm, mm, mm, mm
Mm, mm
Oh, can’t you see you belong to me?”
Logan’s stomach dropped into a cold void at the catastrophic interruption from the stuttering cycle of “Every Breath You Take” by The Police.
A unanimous gasp rippled throughout the crowd. All of those in attendance fixed their glaring gaze onto Logan as the song blared from his left blazer pocket.
“Logan, seriously!..” Mikayla looked at him with a deadly aura that could kill. “Well! Are you gonna answer that or what!?”
Logan didn’t acknowledge or respond to her. He couldn’t even process her question over the sudden, frantic pounding of his heart. His mind brought him back to the bathroom, to the shattered screen and the dead hunk of metal he’d abandoned on the floor. His pocket however told a different story. The weight was undeniably there, a six-inch rectangle of aluminum humming with an incoming call that everyone could hear. It was impossible.
“LOGAN!”
Mikayla’s sudden, sharp anger was the catalyst he desperately needed to break his paralysis.
With a trembling hand, he fished the device from the left pocket of his pristine white blazer. His mind reeled in a closed circuit; the last time he had seen the device, it was a mangled wreck of shattered glass and exposed circuitry on a cold bathroom floor. Now, it was impossibly whole, the glass smooth and pulsing with an active call from Jemila Donaldsin.
The name felt more like a sudden, violent gut punch from a pro boxer. A cold sweaty panic clawed at his throat, but he swallowed it back, terrified of what the sea of whispering guests in the crowd would see. Drawing a desperate breath into his lungs, he slid his thumb across the polished screen, severing the call.
The intrusive music died instantly, leaving the area plunged into a heavy, awkward silence. He hit the power button to kill the backlight, though the phantom name burned against his retinas as a missed call.
“Good. Now, can we continue?” Mikayla’s voice was a serrated edge.
Logan began to shove the phone back into his pocket, but a piercing chime cut through the silence. He froze. Looking down, his stomach continued to twist as a new notification lit up the lock screen.
Jemila Donaldsin 5:33 p.m.
I OBJECT!
The words felt like a death sentence. For a fleeting second, Logan wondered if he should just walk away from the alter and check himself into the nearest psychiatric ward.
“LOGAN!”
Mikayla’s scream shattered his trance. He looked up to find every eye in the meadow—the guests, the wedding party, even the priest—locked on him with growing heat. Desperate, he fumbled the phone into his blazer pocket, his hands shaking so violently he nearly missed the opening.
“I—I’m sorry,” Logan stammered, the words catching in his throat, “Please… continue, Father.”
The priest cleared his throat, and adjusted his collar. “R-right. Well then. Logan and Mikayla, love is not just a feeling; it is an action. It is found in the quiet moments—the way you listen when the other is tired…”
The words washed over Logan, meaningless and hollow. His mind was trapped in the glow of the screen, which had revealed a message from a woman who shouldn't be and a phone that he was sure no longer existed. The ceremony became a blur in the back of his mind as he drifted into a calculated autopilot; his body stood at the altar, but his thoughts remained lost on the text displayed on a screen that should have been shattered.
And so the wedding continued; Logan, however, was a wreck after what had happened. Going through the motions like a puppet on loose strings: from the hollow exchange of vows to the slide of the gold rings, even the kiss somehow felt fake and empty as he slightly pulled back from Mikayla. It all felt like a blurred, distant memory.
***
When the reception finally rolled by, he was a hollow shell of a groom. He sat with his new wife at the top table in the middle of a grand extravagant ballroom; they were the focal point of an entire wedding surrounded by everybody he had known and loved.
Yet… he had never felt more secluded. All around him, the party roared with booming music, clinking glasses, and laughter. But his mind was still trapped and shackled down by a single name and a phone that refused to die. Replaying that haunting text message over and over, the digital words burning into his psyche like a brand.
“I OBJECT!”
It was taking such a toll on him that his toast had been a catastrophic disaster. Standing before a sea of eagerly waiting faces in the crowd, he had stumbled through a series of half-remembered platitudes and awkward, disjointed improvisations, his voice choking under the weight of his own panic.
He hadn’t spoken to Mikayla in over two hours. He didn’t need to look at her to feel the heat of her resentment. She was done playing the part of the happy bride to a man who was clearly somewhere else.
“Logan! Did you hear me?” He looked at her, confused by what she meant.
“Hear you?” he repeated.
“Your phone!”
His mind was a playlist of worst-case scenarios, each more vividly horrifying than the last. Does she think I’m cheating? The irony was maddening; she suspected another woman, yet he was being courted by something far less than human.
Under the crushing weight of her unyielding stare, he hesitated. And after what seemed like an inordinate amount of time, he finally answered with a poorly rehearsed excuse, one even more of a disaster than the toast he’d given earlier.
“My phone, did…did you need me to call someone?”
“UGH!! NO! Take a picture of me and Alexis, dork,” she said, growing more and more impatient by the second.
Logan froze. Staring at her uncomfortably, he didn’t want to touch it. He didn’t even want to be in the same room as it. That was why earlier he had made the excuse to slip out to the parking lot. There he stripped off his blazer, and locked the garment—along with the haunted device—inside the backseat of his car. He remembered the heavy thud of the door closing shut. It was now as far away from him as possible, or so he thought.
“Sorry, hun,” he mumbled, trying to coat his voice in a layer of sheepish embarrassment. He forced a weak smile, desperate to sell the lie. “I left my blazer in the car. My phone was in the pocket… S-Sorry”
Mikayla’s expression transitioned from irritation to a mask of pure bewilderment. “What are you talking about? Logan, your phone is right there.” She pointed at the table. “Right next to your hand.”
He looked down. His breath hitched. Laying over the white linen of the table, inches from his fingers, was the phone. A cold chill slowly slithered up his spine from the sight. His hands began to tremble against the pristine, holy white of the cloth; the dark glass of the screen looked like an oil slick—waiting to drown him.
“Oh… Yes…Yes… Didn’t see it there…” he gripped the phone and shakily brought it up, peering at the screen in camera mode, aligning the shot as best he could with his shuddering body.
Snip!
“Let’s see!” Mikayla said excitedly. Logan hesitantly handed her the phone, the screen open to the image.
“Aw, we look amazing!” she said to her friend beside her, beaming with excitement. Then, suddenly, the chime of Logan’s text message notification sounded off—once, twice, more.
“WHAT! LOGAN!”
Mikayla’s voice was a petrifying crack of a whip. He looked at her, his limbs locked, his throat dry. He didn’t know what she saw on the screen, but the absolute rage discharging from her told him his world was ending. The ballroom around them seemed to nauseatingly warp, the happy faces of those in attendance blurring into a wall of judging eyes.
“Yes...Yes… hun…?” the words escaped him as a pathetic whimper.
Mikayla didn’t answer. She only turned the phone, pressing the screen inches from his face. Her maid of honor, standing beside her, recoiled, a hand pressed over her mouth in genuine stomach-turning horror.
“Don’t you ‘Yes, hun’ me! What the hell is this shit!?”
The screen pulsed with a gallery of nightmares. It was a sequence of photos—a girl in her early twenties was posing provocatively; many of them were absent of clothing. Logan’s heart seized as if a cold hand had reached into his chest and squeezed, stilling the rhythm of his pulse. The face was familiar—horrendously so.
He hadn’t seen those eyes in decades, yet they stared back at him with a predatory glassiness. It was impossible. She was gone. She couldn’t be sending photos from beyond the grave.
“Listen, it’s not what it looks like, baby!” Panic surged through him, his voice cracked with a desperate, doomed honesty, as if he were crawling through the trenches for his life.
“I’ve been getting these… Weird calls and texts all day. Someone is trying to mess with me!”
“Right. Because a stranger has a catalog of your amateur porn?” Mikayla’s lip curled in disgust. “And on our wedding night, too!”
TING!
In an abrupt, blinding motion, Mikayla violently swept her arm across the table. Champagne flutes exploded against the floor, spraying shards of glass and slicks of gold across the solid oak floor. Logan bolted upright, dripping with champagne and dumbfounded silence. The music died mid-note. The air turned arctic as over a hundred eyes fixed on the wreckage; the celebration was over.
“I can’t believe this!” Mikayla screamed, backing away as she threw her fists into the air and cried, “I should have known! I should have known you were a lie!”
THUD!
“UGH!!”
Mikayla slung the device with a scream of pure betrayal. It caught Logan squarely above his right eye, the impact tearing open his brow with a sickening, dull thud. For a second, the world went white. Then, a hot, steady stream of crimson began to trickle over his eyebrow.
“I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING! I SWEAR!”
In her white hot fury she couldn’t hear his plea. Collapsing in her chair, she sobbed into her hands. Then the phone beside Logan’s feet yet again sounded with a supernatural, ear-piercing volume. The sound was wrong—too loud, too sharp. He looked down, and his stomach plummeted. The images weren’t provocative anymore. They were forensic in nature. He bent over picking the phone off the floor.
“What the hell? How did they get these?”
The images were horrific and hyper-vivid across the six-inch screen. Showcasing the totaled, skeletal remains of a incinerated Nissan 350Z. Its twisted chassis was like a discarded soda can as it stayed wrapped around a massive, unyielding tree.
The orange and crimson hues of fire looked alive, as if the flames were still dancing across the wreckage in a frantic, celebratory hunger. Then, the gallery scrolled.
Its display was full of grisly high-resolution close-ups: the scorched, unrecognizable remains of the person in the passenger seat sat slumped forward in a grotesque, broken posture. Their carcass loomed over the melted-away dashboard like a shadow cast in soot and bone. Every crisped detail was sharp enough to touch—the peeling, carbonized leather of the interior fused forever to their body.
“See!”
In one frantic motion, Logan threw himself forward, slamming the phone down onto the white linen right in front of her. He held it there with a quivering hand, desperate for her to witness his reality. He was no longer the kind-hearted groom; he was now a desperate man drowning, clawing at anyone nearby to stay afloat. The blood from his brow smeared across the pristine glass, a red streak that nearly obscured the haunting images beneath.
“There’s no way she could be sending these! Look! That’s her in the car! Dead people don’t send texts, Mikayla! Someone is playing a sick joke on me!”
The ugly crying of a betrayed woman on her wedding day stopped. What followed was a heavy, suffocating silence one that felt fundamentally wrong. Logan blinked. Then suddenly the floor seemed to liquefy; the world shifted beneath his feet. And the faces of the guests, once razor sharp with judgment, smudged like wet ink within the shadows of the ballroom.
“Baby? Mikayla?”
He paused, feeling as if all the air had left from his lungs when he noticed something. Mikayla wasn’t wearing her wedding dress anymore. The white laced rosebud gown had evaporated, in its place was a simple, knee-length crimson dress. Her hair was different too, pinned back with practical indifference.
Even the makeup he’d watched her apply that morning had vanished, leaving her skin pale and scrubbed clean. She looked at him not with the rage of a betrayed bride, but with the weary, distanced concern of a stranger watching a madman unravel in public.
“Dude, what’s your problem?” she asked, her voice flat, “I don’t care about your weird blackmail issues or whatever.”
Logan’s heart hammered violently within his chest. “Mikayla! What are you talking about? Hun…” He reached out, his juddering hand touching her arm.
SLAP!
“Don’t touch me, asshole! Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you!?” She recoiled slapping his hand away, as if his touch were toxic.
“What’s up with you?” Logan’s voice rose to a panicked shout. “Why are you acting like you don’t know me?”
“Well, umm, maybe because I don’t,” she said, rolling her eyes, as she stepped back.
“Stop it! Stop messing with me!” Logan gestured wildly at the room—the white flowers, the catered cake, the sea of guests, “We’ve been together for years! This is our wedding!”
She stared at him, a pitying smirk tugging at her lips, as a mocking laugh escaped from her mouth. “Are you on drugs? Me, married to you?” she continued to laugh—a short, cruel sound.
“This is Wade and Alexis’s wedding, dumbass. Seriously, how much have you had to drink? I think you need to call an Uber and go home, guy.”
Without another word, she coldly turned her back on him. The movement was entirely devoid of the heat she’d shown moments before. Mikayla quietly walked away from him sliding her arm through another man’s—a man Logan did not recognize—and they walked away together, settling at a table at the far edge of the room. He was left alone standing at the center of the ballroom, surrounded by a sea of people who had already forgotten he existed.
“Mikayla…” her name escaped his lips as a dying whimper.
He reached out his hand as if she would walk up and grab it. But she only looked past him, her eyes as cold as the oak floors he stood on.
His stomach churned as a heavy dizziness twisted the ballroom on its axis. Then, a string of rapid-fire digital alerts sliced through the music of the reception. Logan’s gaze was yanked back down to the screen. A new series of photos burst onto the glass in a frantic, stuttering sequence.
They weren’t static anymore. They depicted the impossible: the singed, disfigured remains of the passenger were no longer slouched in the seat. The figure was moving, its skeletal, roasted limbs jerked in a sporadic, mechanical twitch. The final, high-resolution shot, the body was halfway out of the flaming wreckage, its melted fingers clawing at the scorched earth as it dragged its overcooked weight toward the camera.
“LEAVE ME ALONE!” He demanded, the words tearing from his throat in a panic-induced frenzy.
As if pulled by a single string, the guests turned in unison. Dozens of void-filled eyes fixed on him, cold and unblinking. His nonsensical screaming punctured the quiet of the room, leaving him exposed. As they all watched.
He wasn’t a grieving groom or a haunted man; he was a spectacle—a man by all accounts spiralling through a drug-fueled hallucination, his face slick with sweat, the blood from his brow continuing to stream down his face as he fought enemies that didn’t exist.
The images materialized at a nauseating cadence, a digital heartbeat of horror. With every flash of the screen, the burnt carcass dragged itself closer, its roasted limbs gaining definition and malice with every misaligned pixel. Logan’s mind began to fracture, his grip on reality fraying like a snapped cable as the background of the photos transitioned in a fluid, flipbook motion.
The backdrop was no longer the rustic treeline of the dark wood or the scorched earth of the crash site. A cold, hollow dread settled in his bones as he recognized the distinct, swirling pattern of the carpet. The mahogany hallway. The ornate, gold-leaf trim of the very ballroom doors he was standing behind. The camera wasn’t documenting a memory anymore; it was tracking a predator. The thing was in the building. It was navigating the venue. It was seeking him.
Then, a single, pale text bubble bloomed on the display, its chime sounding like a gunshot in the crowded room.
Jemila Donaldson 9:33 p.m.
“I’m here.”
A plume of frost escaped his lips, as if it were the dead of winter. Shivering, Logan peered up from the horrors of the screen. And standing exactly twenty-three feet away was Jemila—or at least the barbecued corpse that remained of her. The smell of scorched upholstery and old copper began to drown out the scent of the wedding lilies.
The figure in the doorway wore the same clothes he remembered from that night—or what was left of them. The vibrant fabric was gone, replaced by melted synthetic fibers that had fused into a tattered, plastic crust against her charred skin.
Logan’s mind broke all he could do is stare. The sporadic flicker of ballroom lights caught the oily sheen of her chard remains, casting long, shadows across the gold-leaf trim of the doors. She was a physical, indictment of everything he had tried to leave behind in the dark.
She was no longer a memory; she was a harbinger of death and vengeance. Her skin was a landscape of raw tissue and blackened carbon. Her lips had been seared away completely, leaving her teeth locked in a permanent, horrific grin that mocked the joy of the evening. One eye was a milky, sightless bead buried in a crater of scar tissue; the other, wet and dark, pinning him where he stood. Where her left cheek should have been, a hollow window that revealed the pulse of her jaw, the bone slick and yellowed by the heat of the past.
What was worse was that no one seemed to notice her but him. The guests continued their low murmurs, Mikayla leaned into her new companion. Meanwhile, Jemila stood anchored at the entrance to the venue, as a sentinel guarding the only way out.
“No! This is all wrong! YOU’RE DEAD!” he shouted louder than before. Everyone just watched as what they believed to be a man on a downward spiral continuing to digress.
“What’s wrong with you people? Can’t you see her? She’s standing right there!?” he bellowed to the guests but, all they saw was nothing but an open doorway leading to the outside of the ballroom.
Slowly and staggeringly, she began to advance toward him; it was a inhuman kind of movement. Every step was a mechanical failure; her broken and worn out ligaments seemed to snap with each lurch, making her nearly unable to maintain her balance. She didn’t walk so much as she glitch-stepped through the air, her frame tilting at impossible angles as she dragged the weight of her torrefied history across the pristine floor.
“GET AWAY FROM ME!”
THUD—TING!
He shrieked, hurling the phone with every ounce of his adrenaline fueled strength. Striking her square in that hollow window of a jaw, or at least it should have. Instead, it phased right through her as if she were nothing more than a trick of the light. The device collided into the heavy oak frame of the doors behind her, exploding in a spray of metallic bits. Shards of glass and steel rained down onto the ballroom floor.
He sprinted for the exit, stumbling in a blind, frantic panic. Shouldering through the specter advancing toward him, he phased through her as his phone had. He ran out into the biting night air.
Inside the ballroom, the silence was absolute. Alexis stood frozen, as she looked at her new husband, Wade. Her eyes were wide with a raw, gut-wrenching astonishment at the broken man who had just shattered the peace of their wedding.
“Wasn’t that your friend Logan?” she asked confused as why he would be friends with someone such as that.
“Yeah… He’s never been the same since the accident… I guess it finally broke him,” he said with a heavy look of pity on his face.
Logan had run so fast that it appeared as if he flew across the parking lot, his shoes skidding over the rain-slicked asphalt. He fumbled with the fob as his thumbs were useless under the crushing surge of adrenaline coursing through his body.
A soft chirp sounded from the BMW i8 as the locks disengaged. The chime felt grotesquely normal in the wake of the horror. He swung the wing door open; then sank down into the seat, forcing his hands to steady from the shaking. It was so much that he could barely thumb the ignition.
The engine hummed to life with a low, electric whine before he floored it. The tires screeched against the pavement, leaving behind a pair of black streaks. Thundering down the venue’s tree-dotted winding driveway, the i8’s stiff suspension fought the uneven gravel as it flew past iron gates.
The dirt road was a downpour-filled mess before him, hazy with darkness and blinded by walls of torrential rain. Headlights cut frantic arcs through the night and densely packed trees, illuminating nothing but the void he was trying so desperately to outrun.
***
His mind was a hurricane. He replayed the day’s descent into madness with a clinical, relentless precision: the first cryptic calls, the impossible gallery of images, and then the horrific apparition of Jemila in the hall.
It defied every law of nature, every boundary of the sane world. A lover, dead and buried, returning to claim a debt; a bride who looked at him with the vacant, glassy eyes of a complete stranger. It wasn’t just a haunting. It was a cruel, coordinated erasure of the last four years of his life—as if the universe itself were hitting undo on his existence.
“The phone is back there, she’s back there…” he whispered to the empty cabin, a mantra meant to anchor his fraying sanity.
He gripped the steering wheel as if his life depended on it. Speeding down the road at over one hundred twenty miles per hour; a desperate attempt at outrunning the reach of the dead. He just needed to believe that the distance between his taillights and that venue was a barrier she couldn’t cross.
His leg began to seize, a sharp cramp blooming in his calf, before he finally eased off the pedal. The aggressive roar of the wind died down to a thin, mournful whistle against the window seal.
He took a long, strained breath, the air of the cabin stinging his lungs like a cold blade. His life was in ruins his marriage revoked before the cake was even cut but the physical distance felt like a hard-won victory. He was miles away from the ballroom, in the dark, and for now, he was safe.
In the sudden stillness of the cabin, the steady, heavy, broken thump of his own heart was louder than the tick of the cooling engine.
“I feel so cold, and I long for your embrace
I keep crying, baby, baby, please
Mm, mm, mm, mm
Mm, mm
Oh, can’t you see you belong to me?”
His felt his soul leave his body as the hunting lyrics called out to him at an ear-piercing level, the song filling the metal box, violating his ears. From a phone he was sure had been destroyed for the second time. Yet here it was again, appearing out of nowhere.
Then, he saw framed in the white glare of the LED headlights a silhouette that was one with the darkness. Jemila stood in the middle of the road. The ringing surged, vibrating the very glass of the windshield, as a text notification chimed in perfect, unison—a dual-tone funeral march that signaled his time was up.
Jemila Donaldson 10:33 p.m.
“I’ve come for you. Don’t fight it.”
A combination of the unbroken repeating lyrics and her staring him down—made him feel more as if he were losing his mind. It felt as if he were falling out of his seat and into a cold, weightless void.
Then, something snapped in his mind. For the first time since the phone had shown him her number into the night, the terror evaporated. His expression hardened, shifting from the wide-eyed plea of a victim to the ravenous snarl of a cornered animal. In that moment he slammed his foot down, and the engine let out a guttural, earth-shaking roar that drowned out the loud hunting serenade.
“DIE, YOU BITCH!” he cried out as he raced toward her.
BANG!
The i8 shot at her, like a lion pouncing on its prey. Driving right through her—hitting only cold air and shadow—before a gut-wrenching realization struck.
Blinded by a white-hot rage, he hadn’t seen the guardrail or the deadly hairpin turn that cut back into the mountain. The metal cried as the car tore through it. The headlights swept across the empty, indifferent sky, then the BMW careened into the dark, suffocating woods below.
The i8 plummeted, nose-diving into the hillside with a catastrophic impact. The force caused it to flip, sending the car into a deadly barrel roll that demolished the carbon fiber and glass until a massive pine brought the chaos to a dead stop.
The chassis wrapped itself around the trunk, the mangled cage of high-tech scrap smoldered in the night. Inside the cabin, the only sound was the hiss of the radiator and the ticking of cooling metal. Heavy plumes of smoke billowed from the wreckage, then flickers of orange light escaped from beneath the caved-in hood.
Logan’s body was leaned over the steering wheel. He was a broken mass of sinew and bone. His right arm was twisted and contorted at an impossible, backward angle, and his legs were shattered far beyond any hope of repair. Most of his teeth had been knocked loose by the impact, they lay scattered across his lap like ivory dice.
The metallic aroma of blood filled the cabin, but through the haze of pain, a familiar scent took over: the smell of burning rubber and seared flesh.
He strained to turn his head toward the passenger seat. There Jemila sat in the wreckage with him, her disfigured, blackened face inches from his own. The hollow window into her jaw pulsed with a wet, unyielding twitch as she stared at him. Her one eye that still had life fixed a gaze, finally closed a distance. One that Logan had spent decades trying to build.
“You tried to forget me Logan, but I didn’t forget you.” She gargled, her voice a wet, mess of bubbling fluid and burnt vocal cords.
She reached out and placed her badly crisped hand over his. Her fingers mangled and snapping in the opposite direction, hanging precariously off exposed white bone.
The heat from the engine had begun to melt the dashboard; the smell of gasoline and broiling flesh filled the cabin. Logan couldn’t move or cry out through his shattered jaw; he could only feel the agonizing, fiery pressure of her grip locking them together in the rising flames.
“I never forgot you, this whole time. Now, you’re mine again.”
BOOM—TING!
The hood of the car erupted in a explosive blaze, that hurled it into the treetops with a violent, metallic roar. It sheared through the pine branches before vanishing into the dark canopy above. With it’s metal cover gone, the fire beneath the engine found its breath. The low hiss transformed into a ravenous, thrum, the flames grew louder and brighter.
“Till death brings us together.”
“N..n…N—NO!”
With his one arm that was still moveable, he reached his fingers scraping uselessly against the warped, melting interior of the door. But he was pinned, his legs fused into the crushed footwell. Jemila’s charred, broken hand weighed him down like a lead anchor. Then, he saw it.
A single, brilliant spark leapt from the exposed wiring of the damaged engine. It danced through the air, reflected within the wide, dilated pupils of his eyes. Time seemed to slow as the spark arched toward the pooling gasoline beneath the seat.
BOOOOoooooommm!
The chaotic discharge was a deafening roar that set the BMW into a blazing pyre. A shockwave launched throughout the dark woods, decimating pine branches as chunks of flaming metal and carbon fiber rained down like scorching stars.
In the sudden, flickering quiet that followed, standing just inches from the roaring inferno, were two figures. Logan and Jemila stood side by side.
“Now we can be together for all eternity.” An unsettling demonic cackle came from within her.
Logan attempted to scream, but no sound broke. The air stayed trapped, stagnant in his lungs. He brought his toasted hands to his face, his fingers searching for the familiar line of his lips.
He felt nothing but a blistered, seamless expanse of smooth, melted flesh. His mouth was gone, fused shut by the flames. Panic spiked to a cardiac level, a violent drumming in his chest that should have killed him—but he was already dead.
He was dead, yet every seared nerve remained raw. He was tethered to the wreckage, gifted with a capacity for fear that would never fade and a voice that would never again be heard.
Logan looked down at a shard of the windshield that had survived the blast. In the reflection, he saw the most horrifying thing he had ever encountered—himself.
His hair was gone, burned away; all that remained were smoldering patches of singed strands that clung to a scalp of raw, weeping tissue. His face was a tapestry of ruffined obsidian and rising blisters, a mask of permanent agony.
His wedding suit—once symbolizing the start of a new point of his life—was now a tattered, soot-darkened shroud, the fine fabric fused to his skin. His right arm hung uselessly, swinging from the broken, snagged fractures of his elbow bone.
Tears tracked through the soot and raw blisters of his face as he stared at the monster in the glass. Jemila put out her hand, the ebony crisp skin of her fingers looming demandingly. Logan looked at her hand and felt his own crackling fingers close around hers.
Jemila’s burned, disfigured face was split by a crooked, devious permanent ivory smile—a smug mask of total victory that would be the last thing he ever saw in the living world.
Together, the groom and his new bride turned from the inferno. They stepped into the lightless depths of the Oregon woods, their silhouettes bleeding into the long shadows of the pines. As the first distant wail of a siren broke through the night, the space where they stood was empty. Logan was gone, never to be seen or heard from again.
The flaming pile of metal and glass continued to roar against the embered bark of the pine tree, a flaming beacon in the deep Oregon woods. But just a few feet away, isolated from the heat and the wreckage, a pristine rectangular slab of glass and aluminum lay in the dirt. It caught the flickering orange light, a perfect, mocking circle of a life that no longer existed. It was the only remnant left behind of the man once known as Logan Paulburr.
THE END
N.Z. Thorne is an aspiring horror and science fiction writer. He is currently working on his debut novel, Beast in Bone, as well as writing and illustrating an original webcomic. Previews of Beast in Bone can be found on Wattpad under the username NZThorne.