Howard smoked his cigarette to a nub, then flicked it to the ground and started on another. He smoked a lot, even for a Brit, especially when he was nervous. Today, Howard was nervous. It was rent day. Ms. Jin-Hee the Korean landlady took no prisoners.

"Oi, bloody hell. You really blew it this time," he said in his Cockney accent, as though he were the son of the last chimney sweep in London. With what worry and cigarettes had done to him, he looked like he belonged in the prior century. The tip of his cigarette trembled on his lips. "She's gonna send us to hell for this, she is, bloody hell."

Ben rubbed his eyes. "Shut up about hell. Hell is a place where you're a midget stuck in an elevator packed with fat guys after lunch, and egg salad sandwiches were on the menu."

"You're so bloody funny," said Howard, starting a slow clap. "You want we should make that what goes on your tombstone?"

"You got any ideas?" Ben roared. "Because your self-pity isn't helping." He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar. "She's going to be here within the hour. We've got an hour to make the rent money -- that's plenty of time."

Eyes narrowed, Howard squeezed his lips around his cigarette and took a long drag. "Wishful thinking, mate."

Ben's eyes grew wide. He straightened up, and after a beat did a fist pump.

"What is it?" Howard asked.

"We'll write her a check," said Ben on a rush of inspiration.

"We don't have the money," said Howard flatly.

"What, you've never kited a check?"

"She'll know." Howard snuffed his cigarette and dug the pack out of his shirt pocket. "Damn," he said, peering into the empty box. He crumpled it in his fist and tossed it aside.

"She won't know," Ben said. "At least not for a few days. And that'll give us plenty of time to..."

A hard scratching sound snagged his attention. At his feet was a folded-over sheet of paper torn out of a yellow legal pad.

Howard's eyes fell onto the sheet like a piano from a rampart.

Ben jabbed an index finger at the paper and hunched his shoulders.

"It's her," Howard mouthed silently.

"She's here!" whispered Ben, then clasped his hands over his mouth for having said that out loud. 

Howard's eyes bobbed over to Ben and back to the paper, as though to say that he should read it. Ben stooped and picked it up.

"What's it say?" Howard mouthed.

Ben sidled up to Howard and straightened the note.

PASS THE RENT UNDER THE DOOR.

The two glanced at each other.

"Do you think she heard that part about kiting a check?" Ben whispered.

No sooner had he finished speaking than another note scraped in beneath the door. Ben snapped it up.

NO CHECKS. CASH.

"Oi, bloody bugger!" Howard said, and hid his face in his palms.

"Damn it, Howie!" Ben rasped so Jin-Hee wouldn't hear through the door. "What do we do now?" He shook him by the shoulders. "Focus!"

Another note. Ben slinked away from Howard and picked it up.

I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE.

"Maybe," said Howard, "if we just spoke to her, like normal human beings, she might cut us some slack?"

Ben wound up as if to backhand Howard. "What are you, crazy? We're lucky if she doesn't cut something out of us! This is Jin-Hee, man. Jin-Hee!"

A note slipped in with the text facing up.

I HEAR MY NAME.

Howard ran his fingers into his scalp and clenched his hands. "We're cooked, mate." He brought his knees up and curled into a tight ball.

A fifth note came in.

I'M WAITING...

Ben pressed his lips into a tight line. His eyes set hard into his face. "Maybe you are," he said, wagging his finger at Howard. "But I'm not." He went for the door.

"No, don't!" said Howard, but too late.

The door swung open onto an empty hallway. Stunned, Ben poked his head into the hall to look one way, then the other.

"She's gone," said Ben.

"Like 'up the hall' gone?" Howard asked.

"No, I mean, as in the 'vanished' type of gone."

Howard stood. "That's not possible. What do you mean..."

"I mean she's gone!" Ben got Howard by the arm and hauled him into the corridor. "There. Do you see her anywhere? No."

"But," Howard stammered, "that's not possible." He glanced both ways up the hall, then again to be sure.

"Well, it just happened," said Ben.

The two walked back to their apartment and shut the door. They hadn't gone two paces before the flutter of paper at the hall door caught their attention.

PMS
 
"How the hell?" Howard asked.

Ben unfolded the rest of the note.

PMS -- PAY ME, SUCKER!

What does it mean to say a man fell from the ceiling? That is, if what fell from the ceiling was even a man at all.

I'll warn you here: you're about to read a ghost story. Unlike most you've read or heard, this one isn't fiction. It's real. It doesn't have any plot or character development because its purpose is to relate the facts of these experiences. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. As with last week's entry, its point is not to convince you that these events happened. Rather, it is to share with you that they did.

To fully understand the weirdness you're about to experience, we'll have to get technical. A ceiling is the overhead interior surface that covers the upper bounds of a room. In contrast, a roof is the uppermost covering of a building. While it is wholly possible to fall from a roof, it is not possible to fall from a ceiling. The surface of a ceiling faces downward, toward the floor of a room, and so it is impossible to stand on ceiling without first nullifying gravity.

One night, lying in bed, I awoke. For no apparent reason, my eyes simply opened. I had been sleeping on my back, and so the first thing I should have seen was the ceiling. Our ceiling was white with a popcorn finish. A ceiling fan hung in the center of the room. None of these things could I see. Instead, there was pitch black. This was peculiar because, although it was dark and the only light that entered was from the incandescent streetlight outside my blinds, there was usually enough light to make out the edges of things inside my room. Many a time had I awoken at night to see the ceiling fan hanging above my head (I'd been against installing it from the start, and too many of my nightmares consisted of the thing coming loose and scoring a direct hit on my face). Tonight was different. Tonight, it was as though a black tarp had been hung from the ceiling.

I looked left, toward my window, wondering why it was so dark. At first I thought there might have been a block-wide power outage, but discarded this notion when I saw the streetlamp burning outside. Shifting my eyes back to center, I noticed something very wrong in the corners of the ceiling. Thick ash billowed in the corners, as though the room were on fire and were filling with black smoke, yet I sensed no heat nor the smell of burning. There was a lot of smoke in the room. The entire ceiling, end to end, was completely consumed. (See: The Cyclone In The Corner).

Just as I was trying to make any sense of all this, the cloud snapped like a taut rubber band. The smoke collapsed into itself, forming a tight sphere about the size of a basketball. In the next instant it drew up into the shape of shadow man and plunged from the ceiling.

It struck me. With its palm. Right square on the flat of my forehead.

The thing that fell on me hit me with enough force to bow the mattress and send my legs kicking into the air. Then, nothing. It was over as quickly as it had come on.

I ran to the bathroom mirror and checked for injuries. A blow like that, and I'd have black eyes in minutes, possibly a broken nose. Nothing. There were no marks. My head didn't even hurt.

The following morning I checked again, thinking that by then the bruises would have started to show. Still nothing.

I've experienced several bizarre occurrences, as I've shared with you. This one is unique in that the manifestation touched me -- hit me pretty hard. Most times, when these things meant me ill, there was a feeling of menace about them, but never did they touch me.

I've only told this story to a handful of people. Very few know, excepting you, now, of course. No one believed me when I told them. I don't mind so much if you don't, as I'm writing this more for my sake than anyone else's.

Some things you just have to get out.

Continuing with our series of real-life ghost stories, we bring you a short run-in with shadowy manifestations: The Cyclone In the Corner.

Most ghost stories are fiction. Some are written with a moral theme in mind, or perhaps tell a story of some too-good protagonists triumphing over (or falling prey to) an age-old curse. The ghost story presented here doesn't fit those norms because it isn't fiction. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point of this is not to convince you that this event happened. Rather, it is to share with you that it did.

Things come out of angles. H.P. Lovecraft was on to something when he wrote "Dreams in the Witch House," a short story about a house inhabited by a dimension-hopping witch. Within the house is a room with a bizarre design -- the corners, the angles are off in ways that make no sense and indeed, are hard on the eyes. It's done more for function than form, because the angles permit the witch (and her horrifying attendants) to travel between dimensions. Much like a knife's edge cuts through one surface of a two-dimensional sheet of paper to the other, so too does the witch traverse dimensions using higher-order mathematics that might stump even Stephen Hawking... only to perform such gruesome acts as might have been thought up by Stephen King.

Sorry. I thought the parallelism was funny.

In any event, Lovecraft's art seems to imitate life, as you'll find out now.

For some time before I married my wife we maintained a long-distance relationship. She left home to attend college upstate. I was still living with my parents. Since we couldn't see each other regularly, we made sure to call every night. Our phone calls usually started at 9:01 p.m. because that was when the free cellular talk time promotion kicked in. Often our conversations would go on well into the night, and I'd be the only person still awake in the house. As a courtesy to everyone else trying to sleep, I'd turn off the lights and TV in my bedroom at around 11:00 p.m., and shut my door.

This one night, at around 12:30 a.m., we were in the midst of a conversation too good to cut short. I noticed my cellphone battery was about to die, so I got up off the bed and plugged the phone into a wall socket under my window. The house was dark and silent, and the only light entering my room was the orange glow of the streetlamp coming through the blinds.

I cut off mid-sentence when I noticed something odd at the opposite end of the room. In the corner near my hall door was a billowing cloud of inky black churning up at the ceiling. At the floor directly beneath it was another cloud. Now, mind you, it was dark in the room, but the clouds were darker still, like the exhaust from coal-fired factories of the late 1800's.

"Oh God," I remember saying.

My wife (fianceé at the time) panicked. "What? What is it?" she yelled into the phone.

I could not respond. She kept demanding to know what was wrong.
"Honey," I said, eyes fixed on the thing in the corner. "Quiet."

The clouds churned and rolled in their respective corners. In their darkness there was an almost granular aspect, like they were dust devils or whirlwinds that kick up the dust when a breeze sweeps past tall buildings.

The clouds grew larger. Each let out a tendril as they spun in place. The fingers met in the middle and swirled in a tight spiral.

"Oh my God," I said. A funnel cloud had formed in the corner of my room.

"What's wrong?" my fianceé yelled.

Before I could tell her, the whirlwind spun itself out. The black clouds dissipated. Where once the clouds had been, I could now see into the corner, even with the dim light of the streetlamp outside my window. The corner was empty.

"I..." I stammered. "I'll call you tomorrow."

To this day, I'm not certain what it was I saw. I mean, I am certain what I saw is in fact what transpired, but whatever it was that I saw manifest in the corner is anyone's guess. It's not like an actual cyclone could have formed in my room. The room's only window was shut, and the air conditioning alone could not have caused so strong a breeze. Or the clouds, for that matter. Moreover, if a whirlwind had actually formed, there would be no dust or dirt to sweep up into itself, yet the thing was pitch black.

Another interesting point is this: my dresser sat near to where the cyclone formed. The dresser was covered in loose papers (mostly letters and other opened mail). When the cyclone touched down, it had formed a tight vortex, which would indicate that the "winds" were strong, yet it disturbed none of the nearby papers.

It's never happened before, or (thankfully) since.

Last week, we commenced our exploration of the creepier side of Miami-Dade County. This week, we delve deeper into the abandoned facility on the western fringe known colloquially as the "insane asylum".

Our last few entries have been ghost stories. Admittedly, this entry is not one. Even so, the experiences shared here are creepy in their own right.

Two things to point out before we proceed. First, these photographs were taken several years ago, in March of 2005. The facility may or may not have changed since then, it may since have been developed or brought back into operation. Regardless, the property was in no condition for anyone to be venturing in it. The place is dangerous, especially at night, and that says nothing of what creatures (wild hogs, venomous snakes, spiders, scorpions) one might stumble upon inside. In short: do not go there!

Secondly, and on a related note, "No Trespassing" signs have been stenciled in at the facility entrance (see the photo immediately below, courtesy of Google Maps). The land is purportedly owned by the U.S. government, as the signs indicate. When we ventured out here in 2005, there were no such warnings or "Keep Out" signs. We've heard from those in the know that people found on the land have been escorted off the premises by armed government agents. Thus, we reiterate: do not go there!

That said, read on.

We approached from the north along Krome Avenue (not shown, to the right-hand side of the photo below). It was the dead of night.

Upon pushing through the dilapidated chain-link gate, we found ourselves standing on a broad asphalt access road that ran the length of the property. We turned left, putting us in a parking lot at the front of the building. Once there, the gaping black maw of the facility entrance awaited us.

From this end, the building looked like a long strand of shotgun houses stacked end to end. It was a long, continuous hallway. The corridor was tight -- wide enough for foot traffic walking two abreast. There were small concrete rooms at regular intervals, built with their corridor entrances facing each other. None was much larger than an office cubicle.

Even if you knew nothing of the place, you'd definitely get the impression from this corridor alone, that the facility likely was built to restrain its occupants.

At one time, the building had had a dropped ceiling. The framework for the ceiling tiles was extant but rusted, falling from the ceiling, and warped out of shape. Strands of electrical wires hung from the roof like cybernetic ivy. Piles of pressboard ceiling tiles moldered on the ground, having succumbed to vandalism and the elements.

All the interior doors had been yanked from their hinges and removed; the windows were nothing but concrete encasements where once the panes had been. Errant bullet holes pitted the ceiling and concrete walls. The building showed evidence of fire damage. Everything that wasn't made of concrete was rotting away.

The corridor hit a dead stop at a wall. A perpendicular hallway bisected the hallway.

Here again is where the facility's design seems to point to its apparent use. Our corridor met a dead end at the intersection, but upon entering the intersection and taking a few paces to one side, we saw that the corridor continued on to the rear of the property. This bend in the main corridor prevents one from running the entire length of the facility to the doors leading outside. Were you to run full sprint down the hall, you would have to stop and change direction to continue down the passageway, or else charge face-first into concrete. This pause would buy your pursuers a few moments to circle up from the other side (further ahead in the direction you're headed) and cut you off.

It didn't come as much of a surprise that there was graffiti in the bathroom. Granted, there was graffiti everywhere else in the structure, but no bathroom is a proper bathroom without graffiti, even in an abandoned asylum.

Beyond the living quarters was what looked like a loading bay with an adjoining utility room. The utility room had been stripped of most of its electrical wiring. What remained of the room showed signs of fire damage.

Some time after our visit, we conducted independent research which indicates that the facility in fact operated as a mental hospital. While in operation, it was colloquially named "the annex" and it served as an overflow facility when the other local mental hospitals were at or over capacity.

This place definitely gives off bad vibes. It came as no surprise, then, when we found out the worst of the worst were sent to the annex. According to what we've heard, these walls housed people accused of heinous crimes who were too mentally ill to stand trial.

Is the place haunted? We think so. Even if it isn't, it's still not a place we'd like to return to.

Few know of an abandoned facility known colloquially as the "Insane Asylum". Located on on Krome Avenue's west side, south of Southwest 8 Street, it would be the best setting for a ghost story if it didn't seem so trite. The location is not open to the public, as is made clear by the concrete barriers erected in front of its entrance. Even so, the very barriers set up to keep people out announce the presence of something beyond them, where otherwise no one would think to look.

It seems like Krome Avenue gives off all sorts of bad vibes. Also known as Florida State Road 997 and West 177 Avenue, Krome is a 36 mile stretch of two-lane highway running along Miami-Dade County's western fringe. The highway is a traffic bypass through a sparsely populated region of the county. Straddled on one side by the sprawling Everglades swamp and on the other by a whole lot of nothing, no matter where you are on Krome or which direction you travel, you are in the middle of nowhere.

I'll warn you here: you're about to read a ghost story. Unlike most you've read or heard, this one isn't fiction. It's real. It doesn't have any plot or character development because its purpose is to relate the facts of these experiences. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. As with last week's entry, its point is not to convince you that these events happened. Rather, it is to share with you that they did.

Backed by a small army of friends in three cars, I set out for the asylum on a clear Miami night. We left our homes and ventured west, leaving civilization behind as we pressed into the swamp. We turned south when we hit Krome. Short of our headlights and those of the tractor-trailers roaring by, the roadway was pitch black. For the most part, Krome Avenue is devoid of streetlamps. Geddy Lee of Rush fame sang of those places beyond the bright lights that lie in the far unlit unknown -- I knew then what Geddy meant, as I was in one of those places.

We pulled off the road when we saw the concrete barriers. The tall brush that flanked the roadway had all but consumed the facility entrance. Scaling the barriers and pushing through the brush put us at a chain-link gate that had been punched through. Beyond that, to the left, was a concrete hut, where once a guard might have stood watch.

Once past the entry checkpoint, we found ourselves on a tarmac path that cut a swathe down the length of the facility. There was no way to tell how far the path went. It was too dark, and although we shined our flashlights  down the path, the road far outran the flashlight beams. To the right was a length of hedge, or a shoulder-tall string of trees (the exact details escape me, but I recall there was a line of foliage). Up ahead and to the left was a fork in the road that led to the facility's main entrance.

As I was one of the three in our group with the foresight to bring a lantern, I took up the rear position. Our flashlights were interspersed -- with our group marching in single file, we had one flashlight at the lead, one in the middle of the line, and me at the end. We were a group of about fifteen, which meant there around five bodies between flashlights. There was just enough light to see by, but not enough to feel comfortable.

As the group marched ahead and to the left, toward the structure's entrance, I spied a pair of shadows out of the corner of my eye. They were humanoid, but I could not make out their finer details. The shadows stood against the line of trees to our right, opposite the group's bearing. Interestingly, there was no ambient light in the facility. Remember, we were in the swamp by a rural road, and it was the middle of the night. Light from passing trucks' headlights could not get in to where we were because of the thick overgrowth at the facility's perimeter. What's more, the only lights in the facility were our flashlights. The only other two flashlights were already well along the path, meaning that whatever light made that pair of shadows visible had to be coming from my flashlight.

Then it hit me -- my flashlight was pointed away from where I'd seen the shadows.

I turned in place to look straight on at the shadows. As if sensing they had been spotted, the two shadows ran -- as in, they seemed to pivot in place and pump their arms and legs and flee -- away from the hedge and out into the open air. They vanished. Once in the open air, there was no surface against which they might be seen.

My flashlight swept into the spot in the hedge where I'd seen the shadows only a moment ago. There was nothing there. Tentatively, I took a step toward the hedge, wanting to know more but knowing it would risk separating me from the group. Nothing. There were enough gaps in the hedge to clearly see through it. Nothing hid within it, or behind it.

Check back soon for this story's continuation (click here for part 2), for photographs and a description of the derelict facility's interior.

How do you chase something whose footfalls make no sound? What nets do you use to snare something incorporeal? And, assuming you can catch it, who in their right mind would dare hunt something no one knows anything about?

Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point is not to convince you that these events happened. Rather, it is to share with you that they did.

The home where I grew up was built in the 1950’s, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Its living space was distributed in such a way that the master bedroom was at the extreme front corner of the structure, with a window looking out into the front yard. The other bedrooms were connected along the same side of the house via a corridor.

When my sister was born, we built a second master bedroom for my grandparents to live in, and the rest of the family played musical chairs with the living arrangements. My sister took my old bedroom in the middle of the hall, I moved into my parents’ former bedroom at the front of the house, and my parents took my grandparents’ old bedroom at the opposite end of the hall.

By the time my brother was born, there wasn’t any more room to make additions to the home, and so he moved in with me. My bed was arranged parallel to the wall closest to the street. Were you to enter the room from the hallway, you would see my bed in the far left corner, with my brother’s along the opposite wall.

One night, when the house was quiet and everyone was asleep, I awoke. I found it strange that I should be awake because there hadn’t been any loud noises or anything that would have roused me. Lying on my back in bed, I actually considered this, when I noticed a faint light in the hall. It was pale green, like the face of a glow-in-the-dark watch. The light slowly grew in strength, as though its source were drawing nearer.

I was terrified. I had no plausible explanation for what I was seeing. At the time, we did not have any motion-activated lights in the hallway, and when my mother did eventually buy those, they were incandescent orange. Worse - whatever approached was coming from the hallway, which was the only way out of the room.

The glow entered and lit up the doorframe with a sickly green haze. The light was pale, and transparent - even as it drew closer I could see through it to the desk and television hutch behind it. The glow moved toward me. Once it had wafted halfway across the room, it changed. The light shifted to its extremities and became a ring. It did not become brighter - it was as if the light compressed itself and had become opaque in the tight area of the ring it formed. Within the ring it was as dark as the rest of the room, but not so dark that I was blind. My bedroom walls were painted stark white, and I had white furniture and so with the scarce light of the streetlamp beyond my window I could still see.

The space within the approaching green disk darkened, as if it had become a sheer film of black silk. The figure within the disk was human. It had a clearly discernible head, trunk, and limbs. I could not see details. I could not see its face, or digits, nor could I tell if it had either. The legs and arms were positioned away from the trunk in a posture that might have been uncomfortable for a person to maintain for too long, but this made it abundantly clear to me the figure was human-like. The air space that the figure occupied was perfectly dark, opaque. The area it did not occupy I could see past.

It floated toward me in a slow, even pace, as though it were on a conveyor belt. It did not swing its arms or move its legs as it approached. It did not have feet, but the pointed ends of its legs appeared not to touch the ground.

Just as it brushed against my bedside, numbers lit up in the glowing green circle. Twelve at the top, three to the right, six at its feet, nine at the left. In the center of the figure’s torso appeared a tiny disk of green light from which shot three bars - an hour hand, a minute hand, and a second hand. The seconds ticked with rigid precision.

I watched, wide-eyed, as the figure drew within arm’s reach. Meanwhile, my brother slept, unaware of any of this. Had it gone for him instead of me, I don’t know what I would have done, if anything at all. It was all I could do to keep from screaming.

The figure brushed against my bedside, then, as abruptly as it had appeared, it vanished. The shadow in the clock was gone. Without its green glow, the bedroom was darker than before.

I did not sleep the rest of that night.

Most ghost stories are fiction. Some are written with a moral theme in mind, or perhaps tell a story of some too-good protagonists triumphing over (or falling prey to) an age-old curse. The ghost story presented here doesn’t fit those norms because it isn’t fiction. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point of this is not to convince you that this event happened. Rather, it is to share with you that it did.

Krome Avenue runs north-south for the length of Miami-Dade County, approximately 36 miles. It is a two-lane highway located on the county’s western fringe, bordered on the east in some areas by nothing for miles, and on the west by the sprawling swampland known as the Everglades. No matter where you are on Krome or which direction you travel, you are in the middle of nowhere.

There is a gas station on Krome Avenue at a four-way intersection. At the extreme corner of the gas station lot, facing the roadway, there is a triangular-shaped section with a ground-level backlit sign advertising the station’s brand and prices. Separating this section from the station is a chest-high hedge.

 The three other parcels along the roadway are plots of dirt and tall grass on which nothing is built. These plots run for acres in every direction.

The only light comes from the gas station, which, at night, is lit up like daytime with harsh florescent lighting. Otherwise, the roadway is devoid of streetlamps. Nor are there any sources of light on the undeveloped plots. Geddy Lee of Rush fame sang of those places beyond the bright lights that lie in the far unlit unknown - I knew then what Geddy meant, as I was in one of those places.

Very late one night, some friends of mine and I were in my car at this particular intersection. We were coming home from a day at the beach. We had had a good time and were all talking. I sat in the driver’s seat with my date to my right, a guy friend of mine (Chris) in the seat behind her, and his date sitting behind me. We approached Krome Avenue from an orthogonal street, about to make a left turn to head south. The gas station loomed ahead and to the left. It was pitch black in every other direction.

I stopped at the intersection to check for oncoming traffic. I looked both ways, and as my eyes shifted forward and I started to make my turn, I spotted a man standing beside the gas station’s backlit sign.

I hadn’t seen him when I first approached the intersection, but after I’d noticed him, I realized how hard it would be to miss him. The man was easily six feet tall and was wearing a stained tanktop shirt that glowed white in the harsh glare from the filling station. His paunchy gut stuck out from beneath his shirt and over the waistband of his denim pants. He was of heavy build, his shoulders drooping at his sides from the weight of his meaty arms.

His head was lowered. I could see his chin was pressed up against his chest. His full pink lips were drawn slightly, as though he were breathing through his mouth. He had greasy black hair that hung in curling strands before his face, forking like a river at the bulb of his nose. I could not see his eyes. Inky blue-black ringed the spots beneath where his eyes would have been. These rings stretched down well into his cheeks. While I couldn’t see his eyes, a strange feeling in my gut told me he was watching us.

Just seeing the man made me feel uncomfortable. I locked my eyes on him as I drove into the intersection, and then looked away to see where I was going. After the moment it took to complete my turn, I glanced at him in my side-view mirror. The man had shifted impossibly fast. He had turned 180-degrees to face me and stood now not on the grass by the backlit sign but on the gravel approach to the gas station. His arm was raised, hand balled up in a fist pointed at us.

“Did you see that?” I asked, cutting short the conversation.

“No,” said my date, sitting shotgun.

“No,” said my friend’s date, sitting behind me.

“Yes,” said Chris, after a moment’s hesitation.

Silence.

“Chris,” I began. “What did you see?”

Again, he paused. “I saw a guy.”

None of us spoke the rest of the way. Later, after I’d dropped the girls off at their homes, I gave Chris a ride to his house. Along the way we talked about what we’d seen. Interestingly, Chris related that he had continuous visual contact on the strange man, while I had to look away and then look back, since I was driving. According to Chris, the man never shifted position or raised his hand, which was bizarre because I was certain he had.

Admittedly, there are other explanations for what we experienced that night, but I maintain that we saw something supernatural. Everything about the man we saw, from his appearance to the sentiment he evoked in us, exuded menace.

Then, also, there is the fact that he came out of nowhere. The only plausible place he could have come from was the gas station, as there was nothing but open land around. Even so, he would have had no business standing by the backlit sign at the roadway. There isn’t even a bus stop there. And for him to have appeared there so suddenly would have required him to jump the hedge. The hedge was chest-high and thick, and it wouldn’t have been possible for a man his size to get across it so quickly.

The alarm clock went off but it didn’t wake me, as I wasn’t asleep. I’d been up for hours lying in bed. Just thinking of the sleep I wasn’t getting was keeping me up, to say nothing of all the other tasks on the day’s punch list. I turned over to face the alarm clock. It blinked 5:05 a.m. in incandescent red. 5:05. SOS. In hindsight, I should have known better than to go to work that day.

This is the story of how I went insane.

The office was a long way off but the commute was short. At 5:20 a.m., expressway traffic was light. If I really stood on the gas, I could get to work in half an hour. All the better for me that there was no one on the road, as I was at the office in what seemed to me a blink. Piecing events together after the fact, I figured I’d dozed off at the wheel for a few miles. I was exhausted.

I pulled into the car park and took the elevator up to the eleventh floor. As usual, I was the first to arrive. The time-activated lights in the office wouldn’t come on for another ten minutes, at 6:00, but by then I’d already had a cup of coffee and gotten started on my second.

Well before the sunrise, I was already at work.

My desk was covered in file boxes, looking like an overstuffed filing cabinet had gone on a bender the night before and puked all over my desktop. Not a square inch of faux wood saw sunlight.

That last thought made me take pause. For nearly a year that I had been working for the firm of Banco Banque and Banquiao, I hadn’t seen any sunlight either. Every day I woke up before sunup, bedded down at midnight, and spent the hours in between at the office. Even at eleven stories up, the office never felt more like a subterranean cavern. My pasty white complexion was proof of this.

The boss checked in at 7:05. I met him in the break room and had a coffee with him. At 9:00 I was due for another, as the effects of the first were starting to wind down. The rest of the office staff filed in at 9:00, and so I thought it best to get a fresh mug before the support staff emptied the pot.

By 10:00 a.m. my caffeine-addled heartbeat felt like a flock of hummingbirds trapped in my chest, yet I was still nodding off at my desk. It annoyed me to no end that I was falling asleep where I least wanted to sleep, and just hours ago I could not sleep where most I wanted to.

There was no time to sleep. There was no time even to live. The billable hour is a thing of the devil, and it had me in its grip.

The office required me to account for every minute of my work time, and expected each minute to be devoted to making my boss money. This I did to an admirable extent: of the fourteen hours spent at work daily, on average I captured twelve billable hours. Two of those hours were spent doing those ancillary, non-billable things I needed to do to support the billable time, such as book-keeping, drinking coffee, and using the bathroom, though I knew of co-workers who had discovered ways to bill the client even while on the toilet.

Of those twelve billable hours, every day my boss skimmed another three off the top, nicking fractions off of each of the billable activities I’d completed. Every week, before writing big checks to the firm, the client would review my time report and knock off another hour or two each day. The firm where I worked would grudgingly acquiesce, thankful to accept some payment over none. By month end, half of my billable hours would be gone, and the boss would drag me into his office by the scruff of my neck. Our discussions were always the same: “Get your hours up, or you’ll get canned.”

It had gone on this way for ten months. As long as I’d been working there, the firm had had it in mind to fire me.

Things really started to get strange at 11:00 a.m. It was Monday, but I had to keep reminding myself because I’d worked fourteen days straight. To me, it felt like the middle of the week.

The days were running together, as though days past and days ahead had melted into a pudding and were blobbing up together. I kept reminding myself to do things I’d already done days ago, because I’d forgotten I’d done them, and because they were super important and needed to be done. I doubted whether I’d actually driven in this morning or just spent the night at the office. My dreams - when I could sleep - were of things I had done at the office or things I needed to do on arriving there. That I was sitting at my desk seemed surreal, like some bizarre yet mundane deja vu.

Lunchtime rolled around. At the bottom of my desk drawer was a bag of apples. I ate one whenever I got hungry. For several days straight I’d eaten nothing but apples, going through a half-dozen daily. At the time - and this is the scary part - it made perfect sense. Eating apples was a boon to efficiency. They were healthy, they needed only one hand to eat and left my other hand free to do work, and since they came in a bunch, I could eat these all day without ever having to leave my desk.

Hungry as I was, I tried to keep the drawer shut as much as I could. The bag of apples was see-through, and underneath it was the resignation letter I had written three months before. I hadn’t signed it, but I’d come very close. It wasn’t dated, but that was intentional, as I could just as easily write in the date when I felt it was time.

I called my wife to let her know I wouldn’t be joining her for dinner at home. Although I told her that I’d be home at 7:00 p.m., I’d already devised a plan for the day. I didn’t tell her this while on the call, but at 7:00 I’d call her and tell her that I needed to stay a while longer. Then, at 9:00, I’d send a text saying that I’d be at work ‘til midnight. Everyone would have gone home by then and the office would be quiet, making it an optimal environment to net a ton more billable hours. Then, when I needed to, I’d sleep at my desk and wake up at 5:00 a.m. the following day (still at my desk) to start the day off. Thankfully, I’d stashed extra clothes in my office, so I could change into them and none of my co-workers would be the wiser that I’d spent the night at the office.

I revised my plan after I’d had another coffee. I didn’t need to sleep. Sleep was beneath me. I shuddered with giddy laughter. I was thinking so fast I was almost prescient. It felt great. My hands shook and my typing speed took a tumble, but these losses could be recouped tonight since I had no need to sleep. And the feeling in my chest that my blood had turned to glass shards as it coursed through my heart could be ignored as a passing inconvenience.

Furtive whispers accompanied shuffling up the hall. “Someone’s fallen.” A man in the building across the street had hurled himself from the top of the car park. What a mess he’d made. He’d ruined his suit, which didn’t matter much anymore, because it didn’t fit him as well as it must have before he took the dive, as the man was spread out for yards across the asphalt.

A question struck me then, as suddenly as an open-palm blow to the forehead: what could drive a man to leap from an otherwise structurally sound office tower? This question may as well have been rhetorical, judging by how quickly the answer came.

I rubbed my eyes, elbowed past the crowd thronged at the glass to get a better look at the dead man lying in the street. In a blink he had gone from wearing pinstripes to brown trousers just like mine and back to pinstripes.

That was the wake-up call, more so than the alarm clock buzzer at 5:05 - SOS - a.m. I went back to my desk and wrote a two-sentence resignation email, completely forgetting about the carefully drafted letter that had sat in my desk drawer for months. I threw the bag of apples into the wastebasket. I didn’t know it just then, but I would develop a taste aversion to apples that would last months.

I powered down my PC and sat, elbows propped on the desk, with my face in my hands. A partner at the firm shoved through my office door without so much as knocking.

“Get your stuff and get out,” he said, which was polite enough, considering he refrained from punting me in the ass when he said that.

That same day my name was removed from the associate roster, and my profile and all signs that I had worked at the firm for nearly a year were obliterated. The Egyptians did no less a job with Hatshepsut.

I went home and slept for two days straight, not rousing even to eat. When I awoke, a shooting pain between my eyes rippled my vision and threw off my sense of balance. As I hadn’t had any coffee during those two days, my body was furious. You don’t come down easy from a ten-month caffeine binge.

I rolled out of bed. My first piss in two days looked like infield clay and collected into silt at the bottom of the toilet bowl. I felt like I was ninety-nine years old. Even shuffling around the apartment in sandals got me winded. It would be a month before I was in any shape to do anything more physically demanding than shopping for groceries.

Without any sense at all of the time, I went outside and stood in my apartment’s parking lot. The sun was out, shining in the center of a cloudless blue sky. A single tear rolled down my cheek. More followed. Many, many more.

It seemed such a trivial thing to forget over so short a time as a year, but I remembered then, that the sky is blue.

My mom says I’m meticulous. I say I’m thorough. My doctors say I’m paranoid. All the better for me if any of us are right; these are tense times we live in.

The news man is calling it a cold war, like that’s supposed to sound reassuring. It’s still a war. The White House and the Kremlin are primed to bomb each other flat if one side so much as sneezes. If - hell, when - that happens, everyone will go up in smoke.

That is, except me.

I’m ready. It’s taken a year and a half, but the concrete bunker under my house is stocked: food, communications, even foil caps. Rumor has it the reds are working on mind control. They can’t get their x-rays into your head if you chrome up your lid.

Now that I’m ready, what’s left is to stay vigilant. Playing defense is a loser’s strategy, and holing myself up in that concrete cave is a last resort. I listen to the ham radio every night. The airwaves are filled with commies chattering in code. They’ll let something slip eventually.

The radio is a real piece of work. It’s not powerful enough to listen in on the commies at home in the C.C.C.P. but I don’t need it to. They commies are here, in the States. My rig picks up restricted channels, so I’ll be listening when the Kremlin calls. When that happens, I’m taking a road trip. My van out front doesn’t look like much, but it’s a surveillance vehicle that the Federal Communications Commission retired last year. Uncle Sam used it to pinpoint people who beamed up unauthorized broadcasts on restricted channels. The government stripped it of all the equipment, but left the electrical hookups in place. It wasn’t too hard a job to wire it up with goodies from the electronics store where I work. All I need to do is dial in a suspicious frequency, and I’ll be pointed right to its source.

August 28, 1962

I fell asleep at the radio again. The clock says 3:42. Down here in the bunker, I can’t tell if it’s a.m. or p.m. The radio’s silent. I rub the sleep out of my eyes and reach for my glasses, when suddenly a boy’s voice comes on.

“Three times three is nine.”

Pause.

“Twenty-one. Forty-eight. Negative thirty-six.”

The boy speaks slowly and with long pauses between numbers. I snatch a notepad off the desk and jot down the numbers. Before I know it, a half hour has passed. The broadcast cuts off. Silence.

The numbers make no sense. I tear the page out and rewrite the numbers down the left margin of a new sheet. Holding both sheets up to the ceiling light, I can see the number’s I’ve written through the page. No matter how I hold the sheets to make the two lines of numbers intersect, nothing leaps out at me.