Creeps, true stories from Reddit (Second book)

Has anyone heard of The Purgatory Game? Final part.

***
She's my wife.
Mary.
I told you not to try and guess who I am, or how I'm involved, but a lot of you guessed anyway – and some of you were right.
Well, the guessing part is over now. It's time to come clean. For better or worse, this thing is about to end.
In my hand, I'm holding a letter. The letter was pushed beneath the door of the place I've been staying at some point last night. I only discovered it this morning, but I recognised the handwriting straight away. The letter is... long. It's disturbing. In a little while, I'm going to share some of it with you. I still don't know what to make of it, but I do know I've made my decision.
A decision to step through my own door. Whether or not I find what I'm looking for on the other side, though... that's something I still don't have the answer to.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, here. Way ahead. First, I owe you all an explanation, and an apology. Some of you probably feel tricked by my story, and I want you to know I can understand that.
But I also want you to know this: I was desperate. I was more desperate, and more terrified, than I've ever been in my entire life. Shit, I still am.
To tell you my story properly, I need to go back to the beginning. I need to go back a few weeks, to the night I arrived home late from London. The night I unlocked my back door, and walked into my house to find it empty...
*
I was already worried when I arrived home. More than just a little.
I'd spoken to Mary the night before on FaceTime, and I hadn't heard from her since. Not that strange for some couples, maybe. But unusual for us. When I'm away for work we always start the day with a text. Hey, hope you slept okay. That sort of thing. But today, I hadn't had a reply. Nothing. There was no reply when I messaged Mary at lunchtime either, and nothing when I shot her another text to say I was on the train home. I tried calling her on my walk back from the station, too, to see if she wanted anything from the shops, but there was no answer.
Was it possible she'd just been having a busy day, and hadn't got round to responding? Maybe. But as I fumbled my key into the back door, I'd be lying if I said my heart rate wasn't a little higher than usual.
I opened the door and stepped into a dark house.
"Mary?" My shout echoed away into silence. "Mary, I'm back! Where are you, sweetheart?"
I closed the door behind me and flicked on the kitchen light. Stepped forwards into the room. Listened to the silence. When the knocking on the back door began a moment later, I almost jumped out of my skin.
"Shit." A fist clenched tight in my stomach, then quickly released its grip. Sudden shock replaced with relief. Mary. That's all it was. It was only Mary, coming home. She'd been off work today. She'd obviously decided to go out – maybe to visit her parents, maybe over to a friend's house – and she was only just getting back now. It all made sense. Perhaps she'd forgotten her keys, which was why she was knocking. Shit, maybe she'd even locked herself out earlier on. Her phone could still be upstairs somewhere, lying on the bedside table with my little message notifications blinking on the home screen. Yes, that had to be it.
I reached out and grabbed the door handle, already grinning. "Well, well, I wonder who this could be. Did you forget–"
The words died on my lips. The man standing outside my backdoor was young, nervous-looking, and most definitely not my wife. He had one of those faces that makes it hard to tell a person's age. Could have been anything from 18 to 35. Slightly greasy hair hung down towards his shoulders, and faint acne scars were visible on his cheeks. His brown eyes darted between me and the kitchen. He fidgeted on the spot.
"Hello?" I said. "Can I–"
"Hey, I'm really sorry to bother you, but are you married to a woman named Mary?" The man kept fidgeting as he spoke. He couldn't meet my eyes.
"Yeah. I'm her husband. Why, what's–"
"Oh, it's nothing to worry about! I mean, I don't think it is, but I needed to find you, your neighbour said you lived here and I, well I saw you coming home, so I came and knocked right away, I–"
I felt heat rising in my face. "It's okay, just slow down a second. What's happened? Where's Mary?"
"Well, that's the thing," said the man, "I was over in the park with my friends a few hours ago, just sort of hanging out, you know, and then one of my mates saw this woman over by the playground. We thought she was drunk at first, or maybe ill or something, because she didn't look right, you know? Only she was well dressed, so we knew she wasn't one of those random homeless people you get sometimes, and we tried to talk to her but she just kept mumbling that her name was Mary, only she couldn't say much else, right, and then I started looking for help, and I– well, I..." The man trailed off for a moment. His eyes finally found mine. "Sorry, do you mind if I come in quickly? This might all be easier to explain inside."
I stared at him numbly for a moment, before opening the door wider. I stepped back to give him room. My mind was racing a mile a minute. Mary, acting weird in the park? Mary, slurring her words? It didn't sound right. It didn't make any sense at all. The man walked by me into the kitchen and I moved to shut the door behind him, a question already forming on my lips.
"Wait, are you sure this was definitely my wife you saw? You know that for certain?"
The door clicked shut. When the man spoke behind me, his voice was different.
"Oh, it's definitely your wife. And if you ever want to see her again, you'll keep fucking quiet when you turn round."
I spun on the spot. The man was standing in the middle of my kitchen, staring at me. His left hand was resting almost casually against the back of a chair. His right hand held a gun. He had it aimed in the direction of my chest, holding it completely still. His hand didn't shake. The nervous, fidgety look was gone from his face. His brown eyes were fixed on mine.
"Don't even think about trying anything. I don't think you will, but I want you to know it would be a very bad idea if you did. You wouldn't suffer – you'd be dead before you'd even taken a step – but your wife would." A half smile appeared on the man's face. "Yes. Mary would."
I gaped back at him. I had the sudden, almost appealing idea that I must be asleep. That I'd nodded off on the train back from London, and I was having a bad dream. But there was nothing dreamlike about the way the man grabbed my arm a second later. There was nothing dreamlike about the way he shoved me into a seat at the kitchen table, either, and then slapped me across the face, hard, when I failed to respond to a question I barely heard.
I stared at him, conscious that the heat in my face was almost overwhelming. My stomach felt like it had been sucked out and replaced with a hollow cavity. I thought I might throw up.
"Look I know this is a lot to take in, but I'm going to need you to listen to me carefully," said the man. "I need you to sit there and concentrate while I tell you what happens next, okay? There is a way out of this for you, but you need to follow my instructions. If you don't, Mary's gone. She'll disappear, and no one will ever find her."
*
I don't know how long we spoke for.
When I think back to that conversation now – that bizarre, horrible exchange at my kitchen table – it feels like it happened to someone else. The memory is hard to grab onto. There are holes in it. But even though I can't tell you the whole thing word for word, here's what I do remember.
The man introduced himself to me as Nathan. He said he was a contractor for an organisation. When I asked him which organisation, he told me they called themselves The Silent Chapter.
"Don't bother googling them," Nathan said. "They're an old organisation, but you won't find a trace of them on the web. They make sure of that."
Nathan said this organisation was running a game – or at least, something like a game – and that my wife was involved. He told me it would be my job to record it all. They'd send me video files every day, and I'd write down all the key developments. Then I'd send the logs on to an anonymous email address. I kept asking him why, and where my wife was, but he ignored me. Just kept telling me that if I wanted to see her again, I'd do as I was told. Told me if I contacted the police, or told anyone at all, Mary would disappear.
I asked him again: Where's my wife?
Nathan rolled his eyes and looked away from me. He stared out over the kitchen, at the little window overlooking my dark back garden. "She's in a place no one will ever find," he said after a moment. "If you need a better answer than that, think of it like this: Your wife is currently on the edge of the world. She's like a climber, holding on by her fingertips. If you do what we say, you might be able to pull her up again. If you don't, she falls into the abyss."
Nathan kept talking. He told me not to leave the house until I was told I could, or make any calls. He said if I did, they'd know. I asked him who would know? He rolled his eyes again, and said he'd already told me. The Silent Chapter. I asked who they were again, and why they were doing this to us. Nathan only shook his head.
"I can't tell you the why, I'm afraid. I'm just a contractor. They'll have their reasons for picking your wife." Nathan, who was sitting opposite me at that point, tapped his gun against the table and smiled. "If I had to guess, I'd say they're probably involving you so you're kept nice and busy while this all plays out. So you know what's at stake, and you don't go getting ideas in your head. But as for who they are?" He glanced away from me again, towards the dark window. The smile on his face grew almost dreamlike. "They're not like us. They have very specific interests. I suppose you could say they're scientists, in their own way – but that's not quite right. They're more like researchers. Or explorers. Yeah, that's it. Explorers."
Nathan looked back at me. The half-dreamy look remained on his face.
"Your wife is lucky in a lot of ways, you know," he said. "She doesn't know it, but she's in a position that I can promise you a lot of people would volunteer to be in. They're calling it a game, but it isn't, not really. It's so much bigger than that. Some people would probably pay for the chance."
Nathan suddenly stood up. Keeping the gun on me, he walked across the kitchen, towards the back door. But before he opened it, he paused. Looked back at me and smiled.
"Mary's like Columbus," he said after a moment. "Like Columbus, standing on board his ship at the edge of the Atlantic. That, or an astronaut." His smile widened. "Yeah, that's it. She's an astronaut."
"Astronauts have a choice," I mumbled back.
Nathan stared at me for a moment longer. The smile disappeared from his face.
"We'll be in touch shortly with the first recordings," he said. "Until then, don't fucking try anything, okay? Choice or no choice, you need to do as we say. Otherwise Mary's gone for good."
*
You know what happened next. You've already read most of it.
The logs I've shared with you obviously weren't delivered to me on an anonymous USB stick. I wrote them. Sometimes I was crying as I did it, and other times my hands were shaking so badly I could barely type. But I wrote them all. I wrote them and I sent them off, just like Nathan told me to. I followed the rules.
Or at least, I did at first. Once I'd seen the final tape, though – once I'd watched my wife walking through that horrible red door – the communication dried up. I heard nothing. I tried emailing the address I'd been sending the logs to, but nothing came back. No more tapes, no messages. No more visits from Nathan.
And in the end, after I spent God knows how long going stir crazy on my own, I did the only thing I could think to do – I reached out for help. I reached out to all of you. And then, in a moment of panic, I packed up my laptop and fled.
I've been on the run ever since.
That part of my story – that and the missed calls, and the threatening messages I've been getting – is all true. I can only apologise for not being completely honest with you, but I really thought that if I concealed my identity, it might throw the people after me off the scent. Look, I know what you're thinking – I was stupid. I agree with you. I was stupid to think an organisation powerful enough to steal people in the night wouldn't be able to see through my bullshit. I should have been honest with you from the start, or I should have tried something else. Contacted the police, maybe, or even just stayed at home and waited it out. Waited to hear from Nathan again.
I don't know why they haven't found me yet. I can only speculate that it's because I'm not their top priority. They must have seen what I've been sharing online, but I suppose it's possible that they don't care all that much. They probably don't think anyone will believe me. Shit, I'm not sure even I'd believe me.
No – I think their main focus at the moment lies elsewhere. I think it lies on the red door, and what's beyond it.
I think it lies on what happened to my wife and Megan.
Which brings me back to the letter I mentioned earlier. The letter that was slipped beneath my door at some point last night. The letter I opened this morning, only to find myself staring down at my own wife's handwriting.
I won't share all of the letter. The first half talks about what happened to Mary in the bunker, and you already know all that.
No – the bit I want to share is what came next. The part of the letter that details what happened after Mary and Megan walked through the red door, and into the blackness beyond.
In my wife's own words, here it is...
..............................
Stepping into the darkness felt like diving under water.
Sounds were different in there. I could hear my own breathing echoing in my head, could feel my heart pounding somewhere up in my throat. My footfalls and Megan's echoed away around us, fading into what felt like an infinite space. Those footfalls were hard, at first – as though we were walking on concrete, or stone – but they softened after a while. Like the surface of the ground had changed to earth or sand.
It's difficult for me to describe how strange that dark space felt. Everything was sort of... distorted. It felt unimaginably vast. I could hear a noise in the distance, like a faint wind, and it gave me the idea that I was walking on a tightrope. Like Megan and I were on a thin, narrow path, suspended over a gulf.
Megan's hand was sweaty in mind. I could feel her trembling. As we moved further away from the red door, our one light source began to fade. The darkness closed in around us.
"Mary? Mary, I don't like it." Megan's voice was a terrified whisper. I squeezed her hand.
"I don't like it either," I whispered back. "But we have to keep going, okay?"
I don't know how long we walked through that darkness. I quickly lost track of time. In that echoing black space, the minutes felt as warped as the sounds. At some point, I heard the distant noise of the red door slamming shut behind us. The sound didn't surprise me. What did surprise me was that after the noise had echoed away, I could still see. I wasn't completely blind. I could see my own hand stretching off to one side, could see Megan's gripped in mine. I could see her wide-eyed, terrified face, shining out like a pale moon. Although it was close to pitch black in there, it wasn't completely black. There had to be another light source somewhere. That thought caused the faintest candle of hope to stir in my chest.
The hope didn't last.
Megan was first to spot the shape in the distance. The shadow. She didn't say anything – just squeezed my hand so hard I almost yelped, and pointed somewhere off to our left. I looked in the direction, but I didn't feel any fear at first. That came a few moments later. To start with, I only felt confusion.
What I was staring at was like a blackness on another blackness. A denser blackness. Like the shape of a storm cloud in the night sky. It was hard to judge distance beyond the door, but I had the sense this shadow was a long way off – maybe miles, or even hundreds of miles. A gigantic, black shape, towering in the darkness above us like the silhouette of a ruined building.
Only that wasn't quite right, because buildings didn't move.
My stomach felt like it'd dropped out. My heart rammed against my windpipe like a fist. The giant shape in the distance was moving. It was drifting through the far-off blackness, roaming the dark like a colossal jellyfish drifting through the deep sea. Megan and I watched its distant progress for a while, frozen in place. Too terrified to make a sound. And then its shadow gradually faded in with the rest of the darkness, and we lost track of it.
"Was that..." Megan's voice was almost too quiet to hear, but I could hear the panic in it. "What was that?"
I squeezed her hand, tight. "I don't know. But we need to keep moving."
"What is this place, Mary? Is this purgatory? Are we in purgatory?"
Megan's voice was starting to creep up in volume. I squeezed her hand and pulled her forwards, whispering to try and distract her.
"I don't know where we are, sweetheart. But I know purgatory is meant to be a kind of... well, an in between space. Like being caught in the middle. I don't think where we are now has anything to do with heaven or hell, but I think whoever discovered this place – whoever trapped us in that bunker – came up with the purgatory theme for a reason." Megan was listening to me now, her pale face turned towards mine. I kept pulling her gently forwards as I spoke, wanting to keep her attention on me. "If I had to guess, I'd say this place is a sort of... gap. Like the space you get between walls."
"You mean a void? Like in space?"
"Not quite, but something like that," I whispered back, not voicing the thought that had just flown through my head: It can't be a void, because voids are empty.
A short while later, we heard the first footsteps.
*
I didn't hear them at all at first. I was distracted. For the previous few minutes, I'd been conscious that I could see more of my own body in the dark. That I could see more of Megan. As if the darkness might be thinning slightly, or there was some as yet unseen light up ahead.
Once again, that faint candle of hope was flickering in my chest.
But then Megan stopped dead and squeezed my hand.
Our footsteps echoed... and echoed... and then they kept echoing. The sound didn't stop. The footsteps weren't ours. Fear swirled through my stomach like poison. The footsteps sounded as though they were echoing all around us now and suddenly I wanted to run, I wanted to drag Megan with me through the darkness and just run, but the sounds were distorted and I no longer knew which direction was the right one to run in.
"Mary? Mary?"
Megan's voice was close to panic. I turned and pulled her in one direction, hurrying through the darkness – and then I came to a terrified stop.
There was a shape, up ahead of me. A shadow. Much smaller this time. Coming towards me through the murk. The darkness swirled and eddied like mist in front of my face – and then a human figure materialised out of the gloom.
I stumbled back a pace. Gripped Megan's hand even tighter in mine. Terror flooded my chest. When the figure spoke a moment later, I felt myself grow cold.
"It's dark in here, Mary. It's so, fucking, dark."
Simon grinned at me through the shadows. His voice sounded all wrong. His face was wrong, too. As he emerged from the gloom I could see wrinkles in it that hadn't been there before. They snaked across his skin like cracks. His eyes looked like they were set further back in his head, too, like insects watching me from twin burrows. As he reached up and ran a hand across his grinning face, a section of his skin peeled away. Somewhere behind me, Megan screamed.
"Have your eyes adjusted yet, Mary? Have they? It took me a while, but now I can see pretty well." Simon lurched towards me, the muscles beneath his peeled skin twitching as he spoke. "We're not alone, Mary. That's what I found out. We're not even close to alone, because there are things in here with us."
Behind me, I heard more footsteps. Megan let out a yelp. A split second later, I heard her call Luke's name. I wanted to turn around but Simon was too close to me now, he was close enough for me to see the dark cracks splintering his skin like fissures, and as I stared at him in horror his grin suddenly disappeared and his expression changed in an instant. Simon's eyes widened into a look of terror. He reached up with both hands and grabbed his own hair, gripping it hard enough to turn his knuckles white.
"It's in my head, Mary." His voice gurgled like water through a sewer. "One of those things is in my FUCKING HEAD."
What happened next will haunt me for the rest of my life.
It will haunt me more than the chamber, and the red door. It will haunt me more than seeing Ron with his eyes clawed out. It will haunt me more than the vision of Simon, his burrowed eyes twitching behind his cracked paper skin in the endless dark beyond the red door.
In that moment, as Simon screamed, he took a lurching step towards me. With my right hand, I held the shard of wood out towards him. And with my left hand, I let go of Megan.
I let go of her. I've thought about that moment probably a hundred times since it happened, and I still can't work out why I did it. I still don't know why I let her go.
The new few moments were chaos. A mad nightmare. I heard Megan's voice behind me screaming and I heard two other voices, voices that sounded like Luke's and Laura's, but I couldn't turn around and help because Simon was lurching closer to me and suddenly I was thrusting the shard of wood forwards again into his face. The splintered end pierced his cracked skin like a knife through a pie crust, and he let out a scream that wasn't even close to human. Black liquid ran from his face like tar. I stumbled away from him, my left hand groping backwards in the dark for Megan.
But I couldn't find her.
I could still hear her screams, but suddenly they sounded distant. Like they were coming to me from a long way away.
I floundered through the dark like a drowning woman, trying to locate her. Trying to pick out her shape in the gloom. And when I couldn't do that – when all I could see was Simon, writhing and gurgling in agony on the ground – I ran. I ran through that darkness as fast as I possibly could.
I never saw Megan again.
*
The rest of my story can be told quickly. I can tell it to you in person, in fact, when we see each other.
Because we will see each other, sweetheart. I have to believe that.
When I was running through that darkness after I'd lost Megan, that thought was the only thing that kept me going.
I think those minutes, or hours after I lost her were the closest I've ever come to losing my mind completely. To something just snapping. I was terrified, scared out of my wits, and the darkness around me was so dense and disorientating that I didn't know where I was going. I lost all sense of space, time and direction. I just ran, and ran, and ran.
Sometimes I was aware of noises, or shapes, around me. Distant shadows in the murk. Echoing sounds. Once, as a stitch ripped through my side and I felt close to collapse, I heard a faint chittering noise somewhere over to my left. Like the distant hum of a wasps' nest. Fresh terror surged through me at the sound, and I forced myself to keep going.
And finally, after an unknowable amount of time had passed, I saw it.
I saw the faintest of lights. A greyish tint, turning the swirling blackness into mist. I stumbled towards it, struggling to keep my feet.
And eventually, just when I thought the pain and the desperation and the terror might actually kill me, I saw the outline of a door up ahead.
*
I came back to consciousness on a concrete floor. Dust stuck to my sweaty face. For a second I had no idea how much time had passed, or where I was. But when I forced my eyes open, I found myself in a large indoor space. Something that looked like an abandoned factory. Rusting machinery gathered dust beside gloomy stone walls. Cobwebs littered the dark corners. There was no-one anywhere in sight.
I spat dust out of my mouth, twisted myself onto my back, and screamed. The red door loomed above me. The red door was right behind me, it was cracked open a jar, and as I continued screaming the darkness beyond it swirled and eddied, a thick blackness that was almost alive somehow, a thick blackness that was reaching out towards me, that was–
But no. No.
The terror that had lodged itself in my throat like a knot slowly loosened. The door in front of me wasn't the red door. It was just a door. A faded door that led to another room in whatever rundown shithole I was lying in. There were shadows beyond that door, yes – but nothing else.
I was someplace different.
It took me five minutes to stand up in the end. I felt impossibly weak, and every part of my body hurt.
It took me another five minutes to shuffle my way across the floor of the factory. A couple of times I had to stop and rest against the machinery, struggling to get my breath back.
And finally, around 20 minutes after I'd regained consciousness, I found it. I found another door. A better kind of door. A door that, when I opened it, led to sunlight on the other side.
As I hobbled across the tarmac outside that rundown factory, feeling the light touch the skin of my face, I began to cry.
*
You know the rest. Or if you don't know, you can guess it.
Since I left that rundown building – since I made my way through the darkness, and came out on the other side – I've been on the run.
Just like you.
I don't know if they've been looking for me, but I've been careful. Very careful. I've stuck to the shadows, and I've kept my head down.
I know you have, too.
It took me a while to find you. I should have guessed where you'd go to hide – no one knows me better than you, after all – but I didn't know whether or not they'd have got to you. So I went to our house first, and when I couldn't find you there, I kept searching.
And now, finally, I've found my way back to you.
I don't know if they're watching, but we have to assume they are. We have to assume they're already on to you. We have to be careful.
On the day you find this letter, I'll be by the lake. You know the one. I'll be waiting there for you, sitting on the bench closest to the spot where you got down on one knee.
I'll be waiting there all day. I'll be waiting for you. And I only pray that the next time I hear footsteps approaching, it's your face I see when I turn around.
All my love, forever,
Mary
..............................
So here we are.
In many ways, this story is going to end the same way it began: with a door.
Only this time, it's not a red door leading to some dark and unknowable in-between world. This time it's my car door.
I'm currently sitting in a car park, not far from the lake where I proposed to my wife. Close enough to see down to it, in fact. Close enough to see the sunlight sparkling and bouncing across its surface.
Close enough to see the figure on the bench.
I can see the figure, but I can't make out the details. They're too far away. Their back is to me, and in the shade of the trees ringing the lake's edge they're really nothing more than a shadow. A question mark.
See the thing is, after I read Mary's letter, I was thrilled. Elated. I threw on some clothes and a coat, and after making sure the coast was clear outside I jumped straight into my car.
But as I was driving to the lake, the doubts began to creep in. The fear. In the end I pulled over to check I wasn't being followed, and to gather my thoughts. To write all this down. Eventually, after the worst of the paranoia had faded away, I started driving again.
And now I'm sitting in the car park. I'm sitting in the car park and looking down at a figure by the lake.
And the doubts in my mind are back.
There was a big part of me that wanted to throw the door open the second I pulled up. To just throw it open and run down to the lakeside, to greet the figure on the bench. But at the same time, there was this little nagging voice at the back of my head.
A voice asking me if I was absolutely sure I was doing the right thing. A voice asking me if I was certain this wasn't a trap. A voice asking me if that figure really was my wife, after all. Sitting in the car, stomach churning, I could suddenly see Nathan in my mind's eye. Nathan, telling me to follow his instructions. Nathan telling me it'd be bad if I didn't.
Don't fucking try anything, okay? he'd said. Choice or no choice, you need to do as we say. Otherwise Mary's gone for good.
Suddenly, I had a clear image in my head of walking down to the lakeside. Of realising too late that the figure on the bench wasn't Mary. Instead of my wife turning at the sound of my footsteps I imagined Nathan, a wide smile on his acne-scarred face as he levelled the gun at my chest.
You didn't listen, did you? he'd say before he pulled the trigger. You didn't do as you were told.
You see the thing is, I'm not as brave as my wife. I'm not as brave as Mary. So instead of leaving my car the minute I pulled in by the lake, I've just stayed sitting in it. Sitting and writing. Sitting and thinking. And finally, after God knows how long, I've made my decision.
The handwriting on that letter is my wife's. I know it is. I recognised it. And no matter how often the voice in my head tells me that means nothing – there are forgeries, after all, or even ways of forcing someone to write something they don't want to – I refuse to listen to it. I refuse to listen to the doubts and the fears any more.
What other choice do I have?
All my life, during my time as an investigative journalist, I've been focussed on opening doors. Focussed on finding out what lies on the other side of them. What secrets might be hiding in the darkness.
Now, I need to be brave enough to do it one more time. I need to be brave like Mary was.
After this post, you won't hear from me again. One way or another, I need to go silent. I need to disappear. But before I do, I wanted to take a moment to thank you. I wanted to thank you for your help, and for your understanding. I wanted to thank you for reading this. I wanted to thank you, because even though you couldn't lead me to the door my wife walked through, you've helped lead me up to this point. You've helped get me this far.
I need to go the rest of the way alone.
In a few more moments, I'm going to shut my laptop. I'm going to pull in a deep breath. I'm going to open the door, get out of my car, and walk down to the lake. I'm going to meet the person sitting on the bench.
There is no in between. There is no purgatory. This story either has a happy ending, or it doesn't.
Now all I have to do is open up the door, step out into the morning air, and find out which it is.

Posted by u/samhaysom