We summoned something called “The Visitor.” It was the biggest mistake of our lives. FINALE

PART ONE

“Follow the leader,” it said.

Then it turned yet again and disappeared down the hall.

“Shit,” said Trevor, grabbing Liz’s hand before quickly moving up the steps. Mikey and I ascended just behind, keeping pace. 

“I’m assuming when it says leader, it means itself right?”

“Yes, Mikey, obviously,” I responded.

By the time we reached the top, the visitor was already near the far end of the hall, the last of the overhead lights flickering from black to white as it passed.

We gave chase, doing our best to close the distance as it slowed and turned into the master bedroom.

Right behind now. Trevor and Liz reached the doorway first and—

Abruptly stopped.

“Woah,” he said.

“What? Why aren’t you going?” 

Trevor stepped aside, pulling Liz with him.

I shot them both a confused look, then peered into the room.

Complete darkness. No floors, no ceiling, no walls. The room felt like the opening to a void—or a black hole. It was connected to our hallway, sure. Where we were was still concrete, three-dimensional, fully here. But as I looked on, I was only a foot away from what I could best describe as a locational aberration.

The single, solitary deviation from complete darkness was the sight of the robed entity, trudging along through the expanse, like a gravekeeper holding a lantern.

“Yep. Fuck that shit,” said Mikey.

I inhaled. A tough inhale. “But what happens if we lose him? And we can’t find him again?”

“Isn’t that… maybe what we want to happen?” asked Trevor.

“Right after it said ‘follow the leader’? I’m not sure about that.”

Trevor paused. Glanced over all of us. “Do we all really want to cross this threshold?” 

I thought about it. I had no clue, honestly. But I was certainly afraid that the pain would start again—and not stop, this time.

“We go,” said Liz, cutting through the quiet. “It said follow the leader so… we go.” She then, very carefully, leaned her foot forward as if dipping her toe into the deep end. “Hold onto me,” she said to Trevor, who wrapped his arms around her as her leg crossed the doorframe and entered into the spatial nothing that the visitor was seemingly walking on.

And her foot settled on it. And she sighed a breath of relief. Trevor held on as she brought her other leg forward.

“Follow the leader,” she said, more confidently, detaching and striding forward now.

Mikey took in the miracle. “Fuck,” he said—then, as if psyching himself up before second-guessing could intrude, he forced himself across the barrier next.

Against every instinct in my body, I stepped into the strangeness as well. I looked back—Trevor was still stalled in the hallway.

“Trev,” I said.

“What… is this?” he asked.

“We’ll figure that out later, but we need to go.” I extended my hand, which after a bit of hesitation, he took.

And then we all, not quite in a line, not quite as a pair of duos, but rather a squeezed collective, shuffled along in the void.

For all of the strangeness and horrors of the late evening, there came with it the slightest, smallest feeling of awe. Wonder. Something in me I’d long wanted to satiate finally being addressed, albeit in the most horrible of circumstances. 

The idea that there might be something more to all this. Something we might not completely understand.

That perhaps everything isn’t as linear—as closed—as life presents it to be.

We kept moving, eyes fixed on the creature—a healthy, but not impossible, distance ahead.
We mirrored its pace.

“Do you think it’s gonna take us to hell?” asked Mikey.

“I’m not sure if that’s this thing’s M.O.,” answered Trevor.

“Fucking… insane,” said Liz, under her breath.

On we went.

One footfall after another, after another, after another…

It took me a few seconds to realize Mikey had suddenly stopped walking with us. The remaining cohort—Liz and Trevor—continued on. I stalled for just a second. Looked back.

He was just standing there. Distracted by… something?

“Mikey,” I shouted. It didn’t seem to catch his attention.

I walked back towards him. As I reached him, I heard Trevor’s voice call from ahead:

“What are you guys doing?!”

“It’s Mikey,” I responded, “I don’t know what he—”

And suddenly, he started walking off the beaten path. In a new direction.

“Mikey!” I called again, tailing him, turning my head back to see Liz and Trevor, looking absolutely thrown.

“I don’t know what he’s fucking doing!” I called back to them—“but hold the path!” 
And as Mikey broke off into a full-on run, I charged behind, praying I wasn’t signing my death warrant. 

“Mikey, pull your fucking shit together—”

I reached him, just barely, catching him on the shoulder with my hand. But when I felt him, something was off. He felt cold. Vacant. Lifeless.

Stopped in place now, I pulled ahead to catch his expression:

Empty eyes, with a tranquil smile on his face.

The words, which he was only whispering now, still characteristically him:

“That’s crazy,” he said, “you guys are gonna give me all this for free?”

I looked around us. There was nothing except for abyss.

“I mean, of course,” he continued, as if I was only privy to his half of the conversation, “How could I say no to that?”

“Mikey, I don’t know who the fuck you’re talking to, but it’s a mirage, you need to—”

I tried to pull him away—he held his ground. I tried again, and this time he reacted—almost instinctively—with a full-on shove that knocked me back.

I lifted myself up from the invisible floor, and watched as he disappeared even further off into the veil. Into a never-ending direction.

“Mikey, what the fuck…” 

I settled on my feet. I was all alone. 

A part of me wanted to retrace the whole evening—every step I’d ever taken to get to this point. This stupid impulse I’d shared with my friends, and their going along with it—likely more for my benefit than their own. They were being supportive, after all. They were trying to help.

I wanted to wallow in all of it—the cost of these decisions—but the truth was, my own disappearance into nothingness was now looming, and so I turned my head, searched all around me, and tried to spot the faintest distant dot of what might’ve been the visitor.

I couldn’t see anything.

“No, no, fuck—” I started, but hearing my own desperation wasn’t helping to self-soothe. I tried to remember which way I’d come from.

Nothingness in every direction. Gloom in every direction. And self-doubt now flooding me.

In an instant—I closed my eyes. I tried to access something. An internal compass. A thought. An idea. Anything.

I heard—far off—

People talking. Calling. Shouting.

Was it for me?

Keeping lids glued shut, I Marco-Polo’d myself towards the noise, taking steps both hot and cold.

The conversation grew ever-so-slightly louder. I drew myself towards it, chasing the invisible line of audio.

Two voices. Murmurs I couldn’t quite make—

Turning into, as clarity came to the entities, with eyes open again—

Someone trying to pull someone else.

“Trev, I don’t know what’s coming over you, but we have to go—”

“Just… just wait.”

“What are you talking about? We can’t wait anymore!”

And suddenly, they were in front of me, loud and visible, and much as I wanted to hug them—even Liz, at the promise of escape—the situation didn’t seem like one where they were calling for me. Nor one that was going well by any definition of the word.

I glanced further ahead to see the visitor, far off, slipping further and further away—
And now Trevor, trying to step off on his own path. 

“Trev,” I called. He looked over for a second, then started on his new route. Liz tried to pull him away again, successfully halting him for another moment.

I moved closer. “Listen, I don’t know what’s happening in your body right now, but Mikey just lost his fucking mind back there, and I can’t lose you too,” I said. 

“You lost Mikey,” Liz said, not as a question but almost as a reconciliation. I saw her expression fade to something dark. 

Trev tried to make off again. Liz held on with all of her strength. “Trev, come on–” I started.

“Girls,” he turned emphatically. “I appreciate it, I honestly really do, but—” he let out a laugh—it felt relaxed, almost bewildered, “there’s a whole stadium of people waiting for me to perform. You know I’ve been working so hard at this. So many years. You can’t honestly expect me to turn down my big break, can you?” He shifted again, this time with determined movement.

Liz lunged, secured him again. “Trevor, respectfully, you need to get your fucking shit in your order—”

He grabbed her, threw her hard to the ground. “I don’t even… know who you are,” he said, his voice collapsing into a scattering of whispers. He turned and headed off into the blur without another look. 

I lowered my gaze to Liz, in her stupor, eyes welling up. “What… what the fuck even is tonight, what is—”

I bent down and interrupted. “Keep your eyes on him.” I pointed to the anomaly far off in the distance. “Know the direction, and don’t lose sight of it—I’ll get Trevor and come back to you. Even if I have to give him a concussion first.” 

I got up and headed for my oldest friend.

And felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Liz, just trust me—”

I glanced back. 

It wasn’t her. Of course it wasn’t. I knew it before I even spoke. There was a weight to the hand. A heaviness. A familiarity.

I turned fully. Though he was somewhat obscured by the dark, I knew it was him. The gruff man I’d been waiting so long to see again. 

He was wearing my locket. I knew he’d bring it back for me. 

“Tay, dear,” he said, “First time seeing you in forever and you’re all riled up!”

Warmth flooded me. “Dad.”

I rushed to him. Hugged him tight.

Felt his soul. His light. 

All this bullshit. All this bullshit I’d been doing all these years, just for the chance to see him again. Or even, just the chance to know he might still be out there somewhere.

I heard a distant yell interrupt the moment. I ignored it. It didn’t matter now. 

The moment with him started brimming. Burgundy tones, warm wood, the faint outline of a house forming where the dark had been.

“I have so much I need to tell you about,” I said. “I’ve been—such a fucking mess.” I laughed. “And, such a fuck-up.” 

I heard that distant, annoying shout again. I pushed it away. It was something stupid. A distraction. A non-necessity. 

It didn’t matter.

I had what I’d come for.

Dad outstretched his hand. It felt like he held the universe in it. 

“I’d love to hear about it, bear. Should we get going?”

I extended mine to meet his.

“Yeah Dad. Let’s go home.”

And just as I was about to reach him, just as I was about to feel like it was all gonna be okay, I saw my finger snap back at an unnatural angle.

Crack.

I immediately grabbed my hand, recoiling—

“Gah, what?! What the fuck—”

He was gone. The moment was gone.

“Dad?!” I screamed, and I was back in the darkness, and now Liz was standing in front of me—

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but nothing else was working. I had to do something insane.”

I staggered through the space, raw from a kind of pain I’d never quite felt before, desperate to bring the light back

“What were you thinking?! You made him disappear!”

“It’s not real, Taylor. None of it. But we are microseconds from being stuck here forever if you don’t snap out of it—” she grabbed my arm and started dragging me away. 

I resisted—but only partially—slowly caving to the direction of her steps as she took off with rising urgency, in pursuit of something. I kept scanning as she pulled.

“Dad, where’d you go—” Tears flowed. A horrible pain clung to my hand. My steps stayed cautious, just in case he’d come back.

“Trev, Mikey, they’re both gone,” she said. “They saw something. You must’ve seen it too. I know it’s not… what you want to hear, but whatever you think you saw, it wasn’t…”

I swallowed. She didn’t need to say anything more. Like the heartbreak of a perfect dream collapsing the moment your eyes open—when reality railroads you—the mirage fades quickly, you come to terms quickly, and suddenly I was running beside her, her hand still latched to my arm.

“Are you with me now?” she asked.

We headed forward, the distant visitor still in our eyeline, and soon, there was light at the end of the bleak tunnel. Just some final steps to go. 

“I’m with you now,” I answered. 

And we broke through, and all of a sudden, we were in the master bedroom.

I looked behind me. The second floor hallway.

I looked down—my snapped finger.

“I think you broke it,” I said. 

“Sorry,” she said.

And then the rest of the situation hit me. “Wait, Trev, Mikey, can we—” I rushed into the hallway. Then, I stepped back through the doorframe into the room. I searched all around, looking for a hint—a way—into the dark chasm again. At the very least, an opening to at least shout through. Some way to reach them.

“By the time I broke through to you,” she said, “I couldn’t see them anywhere. They were gone.”

“Fuck,” I said, the word barely taking form.

“You were doing all of this to see your Dad?” she asked me.

I said nothing. I was empty.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Liquid in my eyes again. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, for your pain,” she reiterated, “but I think it’s high time for you to swallow a bitter pill. You brought this on, you caused this with your fucking—denial. And your devotion to the most insane approach to grieving I’ve ever seen in my entire life. And now it’s cost real lives—”

“I’m aware of my mistakes. I’m aware that my fuck-ups might have just cost me my closest friends. Not yours—mine.”

“I lost my boyfriend.”

“And I’m sure he was the light of your life for the three months you knew him, but he was my best friend and so was Mikey, and now I have emphatically lost pretty much everyone I have ever cared about—”

“Oh, I’m sure it’ll be fine. Maybe just find some new strangers to loop into your supernatural madness? Pray they don’t disappear too?”

“Fuck you,” I said. “I’ll take my dressing down, but not from you. Not from someone whose only pain has been feeling unpopular.”

“It’s funny, actually. You know, when you’re insulated from something—when you get the free ride to, I dunno, avoid being bullied, being alone, being relegated—with your bullshit popularity—you pretend like it isn’t a big deal! Like it isn’t existential! Like I didn’t just lose the one person who didn’t make me feel like fucking furniture!”

“Oh God no, that sounds so awful, I’m sure it’s exactly the same as losing a parent young—”

“Very different actually. Also different—how we coped with the pain. I took my misery and tried to be a better person with it. What did you do?”

“What I did was the best I fucking could given the circumstances and what I had in front of me. Speaking of which: you didn’t have a vision back there! Why is that? Why do you get to comment on my shitty situations, pretending like you’d handle them any better than I did?”

I heard a needle settle on a record player. My eyes shot to the turntable in the room.

Supernatural.

The bright electric keys chimed in. And then the drums. 

“Ooh, you’re making me live.”

It was Queen. Why was Queen playing? 

The visitor, who I’d assumed had all but gone at this point—perhaps another luxury I was taking for granted—suddenly appeared between us.

“It’s you, you’re all I see.” 

Static flooded my ears again. Deep, stabbing heart jolts. And weakness. And misery—

I watched Liz fall to her knees too. 

“Oh, you’re the best friend that I ever had.”

And with the sugary pop backdrop, the entity spoke, with more of a unified voice than I’d heard from it before:

“That’s the thing… ‘Follow the leader’ wasn’t just about me—it was about the first person willing to broach that void. No beautiful visions waiting for them.”

“Ahh… fuck… please…” I struggled. 

“For the leader, the leader always gets a choice. Do they want to be a permanent visitor, to their own perfect world, or do they want to stay here?”

The pain was destroying me. I couldn’t handle it. 

“I’d have to imagine the choice would be obvious, for anyone. Embody your perfect world—and all you have to do is stay in my kingdom.”

“Just… tell us what you want us… to fucking do.” said Liz.  

The visitor looked down on us.

“Rain or shine, you stood by me girl, I’m happy at home. You’re my best friend.”

“Hug,” it said. “It sounds like there’s a lot unresolved between you two.”

With no delay, we crawled towards each other. 

“Whenever this world is cruel to me, I got you to help me forgive.”

“Get over here… you prick.” I inched forward, in all my suffering glory.

“I’m trying… asshole.” She did her part to try to close the distance.

Slowly, we met halfway, and then, from the floor, knee-to-knee, we shared an awkward embrace. 

“Express what you’re feeling,” the visitor said next. The pain hadn’t extinguished—it was only growing. 

I felt something get placed in my hand. Cold.

I gripped the handle. A knife. Presumably, the one I’d cut myself open with earlier. 

I watched as the visitor stepped around and pressed something into Liz’s hand behind me. I felt the shape of it flat against my back.

A knife hug.

“What the fuck is going on?!” said Liz, her voice cracking.

And like most aspirations for something grand—in my case, the pursuit of supernatural salvation to somehow find concrete proof that my dad’s soul was out there somewhere—ideally, somewhere comfortable—just waiting for me to find him again—

Where you actually land in said pursuit is something at best thoroughly underwhelming and at worst a complete, additional, deconstruction of your life with your friends now banished to some strange abyss where they’re deep-fed a matrix fantasy of their deepest desires, and an entity with the powers of a God forces you to slow dance, knife in hand, with a girl you only properly met eight hours ago who you desperately want to hate but this whole diatribe has forced you to realize that you’re actually more similar than you might’ve thought. 

But all of this was thinking. What the visitor asked for was expression.

“I do mean it,” I said to Liz. “I’m sorry.”

And with that, I spun, and stabbed my knife directly into the visitor’s chest. One foul swoop.

For just a second, the pain dissipated, clarity was back, but then—

It grabbed me by the neck, and I saw—

The strangest labyrinth. A maze of black, stretching forever, broken only by scattered slabs of floor, each occupied by a different person staring blankly at a different wall, everyone there in a trance—

And the vision was gone within a blink. I looked down. Liz had thrust her knife into the visitor’s arm. It had detached from me.

“Ooh, you’re making me live. Ooh, you’re my best friend.”

“Run,” said Liz.

And it took only a second to re-establish object permanence after being pulled in and out of a void for the second time today. I traced Liz’s frantic sprint out of the room, looked back for just a second to see the visitor, though reeling, already starting to remove the additional bladed appendages we’d added to it. 

And we bolted down the flickering hallway—

Down the grand staircase—

To the front door we’d left open since we first let the visitor in—

And out into the front yard, the road, then the field—

No static, no heart throbs, no misery, just—far off in the distance now off my last glance over my shoulder—the visitor standing in the doorway of the Trask residence, entrance still ajar.

“How long should we run for?” Liz asked.

“Good question,” I said. “How does forever sound?”

—-

It was a few years later. We were at a college party.

We meaning, Liz and I.

It’s strange but nothing quite brings people together like a fucked up, supernatural happening. The kind of happening where if you were to share about it, honestly, even to the people who really love and care about you, their first recommendation would be to pump you full of Lithium and tie you to a hospital bed until they were absolutely sure the psychosis was gone.

Liz and I only had each other to speak to about, well, the incident. My life had a new dividing line separating it now—everything pre and post Visitor. Post-visitor, Liz was my confidante, co-survivor, and therapist.

She came over and handed me a drink.

Liquid therapist. I guess Trevor was right about her.

Right—I should probably circle back on that one. He’d invited her on that, well, incident night, in the hopes of making us friends. He had correctly diagnosed that I wasn’t speaking to anyone—not even him or Mikey, bless their souls—about my parental trauma. Liz, in his mind, was an open, compassionate person with a great EQ and a penchant for listening. He thought maybe she could be the one to finally break through.

I never got a chance to thank him for that. 

“Quick question,” she said, off the backdrop of pointless party conversations, “why aren’t you drunk yet?”

I took a sip. “My exam is at 9AM tomorrow—”

“Fuck exams.”

“I don’t disagree but unfortunately, saying fuck exams doesn’t make them go away.”

She downed the rest of her drink. Stared out into nowhere for a second. 

“How long are you staying for?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Don’t know. This one’s kind of lame. Maybe leave at midnight?”

“I mean, they’re all lame—”

“Yeah, but this one is like, freshmen playing with a ouija board in the bedroom lame.”

“Kids gotta have hobbies, right?” I thought back to how insecure I used to be about my supernatural pursuits—perhaps, all of those years, I was just overthinking. Then, realizing—“also, it’s like five minutes past midnight. Fix your internal timer, girl.”

She smiled. I smiled.

KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

I grimaced, as did she. Knock PTSD we’ll call it.

I overheard some frat boys shouting in the living room. 

“Alright, that’s gotta be Thomas—”

“Thomas with the refill!!”

She rolled her eyes. “God. I’m sure what all these gentlemen need is more alcohol.”

We stepped out of the kitchen to the fanfare.

One of the jocks pulled the apartment door open, and standing outside in the hallway certainly wasn’t anyone who would’ve had the name Thomas.

A towering figure, cloaked in robes.

A visitor.

“Yo, what the fuck?” said the musclehead in front of the door. “You dressed up man?”

“Will you let me enter—”

“Don’t—” Liz and I both started.

“Get the fuck in here, man!” said the door-keep.

And just like that, the visitor stepped into the crowded living room, looking absolutely out of this world, now strolling through an even more ill-fitting environment than its previous appearance.

And slowly, everyone turned away from their creature comforts and mindless nonsense to the failed God that had graced them with its presence.

A group of dudes rushed out of the bedroom—they stared slack-jawed at the creature before them.

“Holy shit,” one of them said. “It fucking worked.”

Liz and I turned to each other. 

“Do you think it remembers us?” asked Liz. 

And thus spoke the visitor:

“Bleed.”