The old, corded desk phone rang beside me as I sat at my desk. It was weird because my desk phone never rang. I never saw anyone actually use them, only their cell phones. I hesitantly reached over and grabbed the landline, lifting it to my ear.

  “Hello, “ I asked with a little cautiousness in my voice, still very fucked up from the shit I saw the other night.

  Thankfully, it was Ben, “Hey, Seth. You busy right now?”

  His tone was odd because he seemed almost intrigued by something. I couldn't understand how he could feel anything but confusion and a sickness from seeing the bloody smears of our missing guys.

  These were people we knew…people we worked with… friends. I couldn’t stop thinking about their families and the pain, I intimately knew, they'd be feeling. No bodies to identify… just blood and bones… so many bones. I hadn’t seen those… but the cops told us.

  “I just got a call from one of the investigators… the bald one, I think,” Ben recalled the heavier of the two detectives that had thoroughly questioned the shit out of us that night, and over the next few days.

  “Horrigs,” I remembered his name.

  “Yeah,” Ben verified. “He’s asking us to meet him again… both of us. Says he has another investigator who wants to ask his own questions. Says he’s federal,” Ben added the last part with a strange mix of interest and worry.

  “We've already told them everything… what else could we possibly help with? “ I was frustrated and tired of answering the same questions on repeat. “Also… why are you calling me on this phone?”

  “Because I’m on my cell phone with him now,” Ben said. “They want us to meet them at the main office.”

  The conference room smelled like burnt coffee and stale carpet cleaner. One of those long, windowless boxes meant for quarterly meetings and safety briefings that no one ever paid attention to. The kind of room that made time feel slower.

  Ben and I sat side by side at the long table. My shoulders felt tense, not from guilt or anything, but that they might be trying to put the blame on us somehow. Like, just for finding this horrible scene, we were the prime suspects or some shit. It actually started to piss me off. I felt that way the whole time the two main investigators from the police department kept questioning us. Once they finally let us go, it faded. Now that we were back to square one with some new ass hole… it came back full force. I started to get pissed off again.

  Neither of us said much as we waited for Horrigs and the new guy. I kept thinking about the hole. That impossible dark hole just at the bottom of the excavation site. The shadows that spilled out, mixed with blood… and that boot. It was unsettling to say the least; how close it was… how easily it could’ve been us. What was the thing that had done to those guys? Where was it? Was it close? Was it just out of sight, ready to take us down into that pit of bones next?

  I could hear footsteps approaching from down the hall. They echoed down the hallway like they were on blast from a megaphone. One set was loud, slow, and heavy. The other set was a consistent thud of someone on a mission.

  The door opened without a knock, just a click and a silent swing open.

  Detective Horrigs stepped in first, filling the doorway like he had before: big bald head, heavy frame, eyes that didn’t blink enough behind his too-small glasses. He carried himself like a man who’d already retired mentally; his reality just hadn’t caught up to his mindset yet.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” he said, though it didn’t sound like one for him. It sounded more like he didn’t want to be here doing this again.

  Behind him came the other man. He didn’t look like a cop, not really. The new guy was early to mid-forties, maybe, with dirty blond hair cut short and practical. He wore a plain black suit with a white shirt and black tie; exactly what you thought of when you imagined someone from the FBI or one of those other three-letter agencies.

  There was no wasted movement as he entered the room and moved across to us. No softness anywhere in his presence. He stood straighter than Horrigs, lean and tight like someone who treated their body like a weapon, constantly honing it. The kind of guy who could still outrun men half his age and knew it.

  His seasoned blue eyes swept the room once, quick and sharp, cataloging everything: where we sat, where the exits were, what he could use if things went sideways. When his gaze passed over me, I felt it linger just a fraction too long, like he was weighing something… recognizing something, maybe.

  Horrigs closed the door behind them.

  “This is Agent Carlisle,” Horrigs said, jerking a thumb toward the man who moved like a shark. “Federal.”

  Carlisle gave a small nod. Didn’t offer a handshake. Didn’t smile. But he did stare at me for brief seconds… not in the same way he looked at Ben, I was sure of it.

  “Gentlemen,” he said. His voice was calm… completely in control.

  Ben cleared his throat, “What exactly is this about. We already talked to you guys… a lot.”

  “I know,” Carlisle replied, pulling out a chair and sitting across from us. He folded his hands on the table, relaxed but ready. “I’ve read the transcripts from your interviews with local police. I just want to hear it again. From you directly, as well as a few more… specialized questions,” Agent Carlisle explained calmly.

  When he said it, I didn’t feel that same sense of incoming blame like before. He truly seemed like he was on the hunt for something.

  My jaw tightened, scenarios running through my mind. Old thoughts and hunches rising from five years ago, especially after the same ominous mystery surrounding the disappearance of our excavation crew.

  “Why?” I asked with a growing sense of grim intrigue.

  Carlisle’s eyes flicked to me, sharp as a blade turning in light. It almost seemed like he knew that I knew something. But he responded calmly.

  “Because sometimes people don’t lie,” he said. “They just leave things out. And sometimes they don’t even know they’re doing it.”

  Horrigs leaned against the wall, arms crossed, watching us like he was waiting for this all to be over. Like all he was daydreaming about was lunch: swallowing a fucking hoagie or something.

  Ben shifted beside me. I could feel the tension rolling off him now, the earlier curiosity finally drowned out by unease. “We saw what we saw,” he said. “There wasn’t anything else.”

  Carlisle tilted his head slightly. “You’re sure about that? The things I need to know about are things you wouldn’t have even thought to vocalize.”

  The room felt smaller all of a sudden. The hum of the lights grew louder. My chest tightened, breath coming shallow for some reason. I couldn’t figure out why I felt like this in the moment.

  I thought about the hole again. About how it didn’t make sense. About how my mind kept sliding away from parts of it, like touching a hot stove and pulling back before the pain registered. It was almost like… I was subconsciously not trying to think about it… like my mind was trying to protect itself from the truth and horror of it all.

  Carlisle leaned forward again, elbows on the table this time, like we were just a couple of guys swapping stories instead of witnesses to something that shouldn’t exist.

  “Let’s rewind,” he said. “When you first arrived at the site, before you really saw anything, what did you smell?”

  Ben frowned. “Smell?”

  “Yes.”

  He glanced at me, then back to Carlisle. “I mean… blood, I guess. Like a slaughterhouse. Irony smell… rusty. It was so bad we had to go back to the truck to get something to cover our mouths and noses.”

  “Iron,” Carlisle repeated softly, filing it away. His eyes slid to me. “You?”

  I swallowed. My mouth felt dry all over again.

  “Same,” I said. “Blood… and dirt… or like a mixture of the two. Mud but not from water… but blood.”

  Carlisle nodded like that confirmed something he already suspected. “Did it remind you of anything else? Anything familiar?”

  I shook my head. “Just… wrong. Like it was too much. Too thick.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Ben scratched at his jaw. “Yeah… like it hung in the air so much I felt like it was invading my body.”

  Carlisle didn’t smile, but there was a flicker of something behind his eyes… interest, maybe… or some dots being connected.

  “Did you see anything else there?” he asked. “Anything you couldn’t explain? Shadows where they shouldn’t be, movements, sounds… a presence…”

  Ben snorted softly, more nerves than humor. “If you’re asking if we saw a monster or a ghost or something… then no. Just a bunch of fucked up shit around where all our guys were supposed to be. They were just… fucking gone.”

  Carlisle didn’t react.

  I hesitated. My chest tightened. “No,” I said finally. “Just the hole and… what was left.”

  Carlisle held my gaze a moment longer than necessary, like he was waiting to see if I’d say anything else. Almost like he knew I had seen something. But my own problems were separate from this shit. He didn’t need to know about how my brother haunted my mind ever since he disappeared five years ago.

  “Alright,” he said. “In the days leading up to the incident, or since, have either of you noticed anything strange? Headaches, vivid dreams, smells that aren’t there. Feeling watched?”

  Ben shook his head quickly. “No.”

  I followed suit. “No.” It was a lie… but it was unrelated to all this. Wasn’t it?

  Another pause. The hum of the lights felt louder again, like the longer the silence hung between us, the louder the fluorescent lights would get.

  Carlisle sat back and reached into his jacket, pulling out two forms clipped to a slim folder. He slid them across the table toward us.

  “Routine acknowledgment,” he said. “Confirms you’ve given statements voluntarily and understand the ongoing nature of the investigation.”

  Horrigs finally pushed off the wall and stepped closer, looming again. Lunch was approaching, and he was ready to make a beeline toward the buffet downtown.

  Carlisle set two pens on the table. They were heavier than normal, sleek, and made of a shiny metal that had tiny, intricate symbols carved into their lengths. They looked old… tarnished maybe… Were they silver?

  I picked mine up; it was cold and heavy. Felt expensive.

  Ben signed first, quickly and sloppily. I hesitated a half-second, then signed too. My name looked strange on the page, like I’d written it with someone else’s hand. Must’ve been the stress of not answering completely truthfully. Like this signature might come back and bite me in the ass.

  Carlisle gathered the forms, slid the pens back into his pocket, and patting the two pens with an affirmative nod to himself. Then he stood, “That’s all for now,” he said.

  He shook Ben’s hand briefly. Then he turned to me. When he took my hand, his grip lingered just a little too long. His thumb pressed lightly against my knuckles, like he was grounding himself… or me. I almost saw something in his eyes I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was the look people used to give me when they didn’t know if I was Sam or me. When they were unsure of which twin they were looking at. But it was probably just the moment… this guy had never met me before… and Sam had been gone for a long time. Plus, the weird questions severely stressed me out, and signing the paperwork, and just the images of that grizzly sight… the dark hole of blood and bones. I knew not to create something where there was nothing.

  Up close, Agent Carlisle’s eyes were unsettlingly sharp. The blue was almost a cool silver in parts of them.

  “Thank you, Seth,” he said quietly. There was something in his voice that I couldn’t comprehend. “If anything else comes up, I’ll be in touch.”

  He lifted up a card with his info on it and handed it to me with his free hand as we shook. I grabbed it, and then he let go. He and Horrigs left without another word, the door closing softly behind them.

  The room felt emptier after that, colder… his card weighed heavily in my palm. I felt like a kid again… like I had just lied to the principal or something.

  Ben let out a long breath. “That was… weird, right?”

  I stared at my hand, flexing my fingers around the rectangular card like the federal agent could hear me through it. “Yeah,” I said, cautiously.

  But I couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever Carlisle had come looking for… he’d already found it. This meeting just felt so… pointless… like he just wanted to look us in the eyes or something. Or maybe… just me.

  I didn’t say anything else to Ben. There wasn’t anything left that wouldn’t sound stupid or paranoid, and I was already riding the edge of both. We walked out of the conference room together, down the too-bright hallway, past bulletin boards still advertising last month’s safety milestones like any of that meant a fucking thing to me right now.

  At the doors, Ben peeled off toward the other building where his personal office was.

  “Catch you later,” he said, trying for normal and missing by a mile. Even he was a little weirded out by the Agent’s strange questions.

  “Yeah,” I muttered.

  The sun outside hit me harder than it should have. Midday, clear, normal… offensively normal compared to the strange interaction I just had. The main building sat quietly behind me, windows reflecting the sky like nothing inside had just twisted my stomach into knots. I stood there for a second, keys in my hand, listening to my own heartbeat thud in my ears.

  I couldn’t go back to work… not yet… maybe not for the rest of the day.

  The smell came back out of nowhere… iron and rot, sharp and wet. I actually checked my clothes and my hands, like I might still be carrying it with me. But it was just the memory… my mind recreating the scent.

  “Fuck this,” I whispered.

  I got in my truck and drove without really thinking about it, just following muscle memory until the company lot disappeared in the mirror. The bar up the road wasn’t far, and the truck just kind of naturally ended up there.

  It wasn’t much, just a low brick building, faded sign, the kind of place that opened early because people like me needed it to.

  The door stuck for a moment when I pulled it open. It was good… familiar. The first sign of the beer that was coming my way. I just needed something to calm me down… bring me back from this weird paranoia that started gripping me.

  The inside was dim and calm, covered in wood paneling and lingering cigarette smoke. No blood… no mud… no iron. Just booze, greasy food, and the smoke-soaked walls that reminded me of Grandma and Grandpa’s house. A couple of guys sat hunched over the bar already, nursing beers like it was their job.

  I took a stool near the end and leaned forward, elbows on the bar, head hanging for a second.

  “What’ll it be?” the bartender asked.

  “Corona,” I said simply.

  The bottle hit the counter a moment later. I wrapped my hand around it and paused, then knocked about half of it back in one go. The sensation was sharp and grounding, dragging me back into my body. It was so fucking good…

  I exhaled slowly, releasing some of the stress I had been carrying. My shoulders dropped a fraction. For the first time since the excavation site, the noise in my head dulled. But the images didn’t leave. That darkness, that gory depth still lingered like whatever had been waiting inside to take our crew was waiting in my mind for me to go back.

  I finished the beer in the second go, and then I signaled for another. I wasn’t trying to forget. I just needed something, anything, to quiet the feeling… that whatever happened out there was not over. Something had taken those men… something had taken Sam… and it was still out there.

  I moved over to a small table away from the bar to just get some peace and solitude from the other day drinkers at the bar. I sat there, slowly sipping the Corona. The bottle was cold, sweating against my palm. I drank it slower now, small pulls, long pauses. Let the quiet do its work. The bar settled around me, the low murmur of voices, the clink of glass, the old jukebox humming something quietly, not overpoweringly loud, or too low to not hear that it was actual music and not just an electric hum. My breathing evened out, and my shoulders loosened. For a few minutes, I almost felt normal.

  The front door creaked open. The sound cut clean through the room as two people stepped inside, and the temperature seemed to drop with them.

  The first was a mountain of a man; wide shoulders, thick chest, arms like they’d been carved instead of grown. Red hair hung down the back of his head in a strange, outdated mullet, tangled and heavy. A thick beard framed his jaw, shot through with darker red, his expression slightly amused at something. He moved like a strongman, all controlled weight and balance, every step deliberate. People looked at him but quickly looked away, so as not to piss him off.

  Beside him was something even more intimidating. It was a woman… just as imposing, but in a strange and different way. She was tall, muscular, and had skin with the deep bronze tone of Native American heritage. She walked languidly behind the man, like some kind of predator. She had on a black tank top and skinny jeans that looked just like something any other woman could wear… but she did not look like any other woman. Her skin was tight over defined arms and shoulders. Her hair was pitch black, cut to her shoulders, blunt and severe. I could see the muscles of her legs through the jeans fabric. Her eyes were dark brown and steady, and when they swept the room, they didn’t linger… but everyone felt them pass.

  Conversation died down to a low, uneasy buzz. Every head in the bar turned. Mine included, though I wished it hadn’t. Something about them set my nerves jangling, the same instinct that had flared at the edge of that hole. Not fear exactly… recognition without understanding.

  They didn’t look at me. I don’t think they actually saw me when they first walked in and took stock of everyone else on their way to a table on the other side of me. I was out of their line of sight for now.

  The big man moved up to the side of the bar and ordered drinks as if this were just another stop in the middle of the day. The large, dark-haired woman leaned back in her chair like she was trying to spread out and relax after being cooped up or something. She looked like I did after a long car ride… only with much more controlled aggression in her demeanor.

  Shelly always said I had an RBF, but this woman had something even greater than that. Maybe she had an RKF… Resting-Killer-Face.

  The bartender hesitated, then poured the big, red-headed man two drinks. No one said a word until the glasses hit the counter and the man returned to the dangerous-looking woman.

  I took another slow drink, eyes fixed on the bottle now. I tried not to stare and get them to notice me. I was big enough in my own right. I felt strong and confident enough in my own abilities… I always had. But there was just something about these two that I didn’t feel the need to interact with them.

  The door opened again. This time, the footsteps sounded just a touch lighter, almost familiar in the cadence of footfalls. It was like someone on a mission, walking with purpose. I turned to look, half expecting to see someone I knew…

  Agent Carlisle was walking inside the entryway, making his way through the bar just like the previous two. At first, he looked the same, with dirty blond hair just as neat as earlier in the conference room. But now… he was wearing different clothes: dark jeans, tough-looking coat, a dark green shirt beneath, and some weathered-looking leather boots. It was nothing like the dark suit he had in our meeting.

  He was almost past the point where I would fade from sight behind a small column that held a portion of the structural weight of this place… but then his eyes met mine. He stopped in his tracks.

  His steely blue eyes were already locked onto me. He looked surprised, like he didn’t expect to see me sitting in this dark, shadowy corner of some rundown bar. He didn’t pause. Didn’t scan the room. Didn’t acknowledge the stares or the tension or the two walking threats on the other side of the bar. He walked straight toward me after shaking off the initial surprise of seeing me again.

  I felt a little at ease after realizing that he didn’t expect to see me again, so that meant he wasn’t coming here looking for me. But still… the tension was rising in my gut again.

  Agent Carlisle stopped at my table as I remained sitting and smiled at me cautiously. It was not the same demeanor he held in that room with Horrigs.

  “Hello, Seth,” he said.

  The bar went quiet, but I knew it was just me. I felt like I was getting tunnel vision and everything else was being blocked out. I knew without knowing how that this drink, this moment, this fragile calm I’d carved out for myself amidst all this chaotic bullshit… was over.