Following the address, I ended up at an abandoned construction site.
The sky thundered over my head and the air was thickening with the weight and scent of earth.
It was already getting dark.
Stepping out of the cab, I pulled out the phone message to read it again. The instructions said I was supposed to take the staircase in the back and head to the top.
Was his house being tapped or something?
Why did we have to meet all the way out here?
How was I going to climb anything with a crutch on?
I called him on the phone.
The called connected, but there was no sound coming from the other end.
"Josh, you up there? Come down here. I can't climb stairs wi—"
He'd hung up.
I took a step back to count the number of floors in the building.
Six. If I took breaks every five or six steps, I should be able to reach the top in twenty minutes.
The stairs were barely visible in the dark. A faint yellowish glow from the street lamps fifty meters opposite the building enveloped the threshold on each floor.
And so I went up one step at a time, banging the crutch against the steps and the adjacent wall whenever I got the chance with the hope that it would make him realize his own cruelty. The echoes snaked its way to the top, making the whole building vibrate.
Whenever I turned a corner, part of me expected a hand to reach out to grab my head. Bloody and mangled faces of those old women flashed in front of me—faces of her victims. To force myself forward, I squeezed the handle of the crutch more tightly and banged the surfaces even louder to scare off the haunting silence.
On each floor was empty space with rubble scattered throughout the surface.
Second floor. I was half way there.
Leaning on the crutch, I took in the view of the nearby buildings and rested for a few seconds. Most of the lights hadn't even turned on.
For some reason, I also couldn't shake the feeling that someone was watching me.
When I lifted the metal crutch and turned on the stairs, I saw a tall woman in a white gown was standing on the staircase two meters above me and immediately I jumped back, my only free hand pushing against and almost slipping on the concrete wall for support.
If it had slid any further, I could've fallen down the stairs.
I raised my head to look at the figure.
She just stood there, frozen.
Pale light reflected off her glossy skin.
Then I realized I was looking at an old mannequin. He'd probably put it there to deter any unwanted visitor in the building. If he'd also intended to give me a heart attack, I'd say he failed spectacularly.
Everything he'd ever done was to make a point—to let me know just how much he hated me.
My hand was hurting—the rugged surface of the wall had cut into the skin of my palm. Blood was coming out and mixing with the sand and dirt.
As I reached the top floor, I was greeted with a special sight. Unlike the floors below, rubble and brick fragments filled the whole area to the point where my feet could almost sink under them. In a corner crouched the skinny, shirtless man in front of a laptop. He was wearing blue jeans, and slouching in a way that a few knots on his spine protruded underneath the skin of his back. The laptop also sat on the rubble. There were no tables or chairs.
He typed away on his keyboard. His fingers moved so fast, the lines of code on the screen almost looked like they were churning out by themselves.
"Hey, Josh. How's it going?" I did my best to sound friendly.
He didn't respond.
Come on, stiff upper lip.
Without turning his head, he side-eyed me for a second, before looking at his screen again. "So it does heal," he said.
"What?"
He continued to type on his laptop.
"Hey, you're helping out here," I said. "At least let me buy you a drink or dinner or something." I limped in his direction, the rubble crunching under my feet. "And why make me go all the way here?"
He was sitting on a pair of yellowing plastic flip-flops. White light from the screen bounced off cement cubes of varying shapes and sizes filling the floor all around him.
"I live here."
"You are?" It genuinely surprised me. "Why?" I made my way towards him. Even with my shoes on, it was almost impossible to walk on the rocks.
He typed away without saying a word.
"Margaret never told me anything," I said. "Are you serious?"
"What's so bad about this place? Doesn't measure up to your fancy designs?"
"You know you didn't have to say that. Besides, anything is better than this." I looked at the cracked, unpainted walls and ceiling.
He responded, "Go outside once in a while. It will open your eyes."
"I've seen enough of what's out there."
Something caught my attention. A transparent cube four centimeters tall had been sitting on the flat surface next to the laptop, surrounded by rocks and other debris. Inside it was an object that resembled a toe. Unusual decoration. I couldn't tell for sure because the shape was blurry. If I could see anything, it was that the toenail was white.
"What about food and water? How do you take care of yourself? Margaret has a few spare rooms, maybe you can move in with her for a while."
Not a word from him.
"This is just awful..." I tried my best to fill the silence. "You'll get sick if you keep going like this."
"I don't know what she saw in you."
"What?"
He still refused to look at me. "She was desperate."
"You mean Marge? What are you talking about, Josh?"
His fingers stopped moving. He turned to me.
"Do you want to hear the truth?" His eyes bore deeply into my skull. "She doesn't love you." Then he faced the laptop and started to type again. "No one loves you."
"Okay, I get it. I know you have some kind of problem with me. But come on, Josh. I always think of you as family! Why are you acting this way? What have I ever done to you?"
"Nothing. I just hate the way you look, that's all."
"There's gotta be more than that. If you don't tell me, how can I ever make it up to you?"
Was it envy?
Did he hate me because I'd seen some modest degree of success in life and he had not?
Me? A worthless piece of human trash who got a little lucky?
That couldn't be it.
"How's she doing?" he asked.
"Who?"
"The—girl." There was that pause again.
"Liz? She's doing all right. I'll have to get back soon to check up on her."
"Anything unusual happened lately?"
"No. Did Marge tell you all about it?"
"Anything unusual about her?"
I stopped to think for a moment.
"Lately she's been irritable. But considering our circumstance, I think it only makes sense that she's a little upset about everything that's been going on."
"Has she been avoiding looking at you?"
His question surprised me.
"How did you know?"
"Most of the passage was impossible to translate." He abruptly changed the subject again. "Except for a small section. This section was written in Elamite, an offspring of the Sumerian cuneiform."
"Sumerian?"
"The language was used by a small tribe in Southern Iran around 2600 BC. It was logographic in nature."
"Yeah, I've heard that somewhere before," I said. "Is it like the Chinese language?"
He kept talking like he didn't hear my question, "The rest of the writing I assume should be other languages, but I couldn't identify any of them."
I had fed the image to countless AI chatbots and open-source LLMs, but none of them recognized any part of the writing. Liz had told me the people from online forums couldn't find anything, either. Where was he getting this information from?
Then I asked him, "So none of it was code? I was hoping you'd find something that could point to the vowels and consonants."
"These are not codes," he corrected. "They're languages. I couldn't recognize any of it, but what I do know is that the language changes over seventy times—at least seventy-three times—based on the sample you gave me, after every three words. The Elamite section consists of three symbols representing different concepts. The first two are 'present', as in time, and 'it' or 'they'."
While he explained, lines continued to gush forth on his screen. His typing never slowed down, but stayed at a constant, blistering pace. Since the code seemed highly complex, I assumed he couldn't be typing them out with pure muscle memory. It was impressive how he was able to think about two different things at the same time.
He continued, "The third one is tricky. It could be due to how the girl wrote it or how it was originally written in the book in the first place."
Josh then said, "It might be symbol for the word 'consume', or the word 'combine', as in to become one singular unit. But if we went with the latter interpretation, the syntax would be wrong."
I muttered the words, "Present, it, consume. Present, it, combine..."
"The language changes after every three words," he said. "We are confident about this because the stylistic presentations of the shapes alter dramatically after every three symbols and the change rate is highly consistent. That means there's a high chance that these languages all share the same three concepts."
He finally took a break from typing when he held out a small piece of paper.
"You mean the words repeat..." I said as I took the paper from him.
"It took a while to figure out the Elamite section since there are so few writings of it available to do any comparisons. But this is just my interpretation. There are a few cases where some symbols when paired together would form a completely different meaning. Again, we lack the resources but it's possible."
Judging from what he said, I guessed this translation was a team endeavor. And considering these cuneiform languages, there must have been at least dozens of them, and these were obviously dead languages.
But how was he able to recognize any of them at all? How much time did he spend learning these languages? Why would he want to learn these dead writing systems in the first place?
No, that couldn't be right. It would be much easier to compare the shapes of the "letters", but even that would require going through every single one of these potential languages. And not all of them were readily available on the Internet. There were no proper lessons or dictionaries, since nobody spoke these languages today.
It must have taken him days to do this. He'd been dead set against helping me just a while ago, and now he was going all out with this.
Even though he was probably doing this for Margaret, I couldn't help but be moved by his efforts.
I looked at the paper in my hand.
A heavy feeling shot through my chest.
Cold sweat rolled down my temple.
Only three words were written on it.
Eat it now.
Before I could do anything, he snatched the piece of paper from me and folded it in his hands.
"I can't believe I'm saying this," he said. "Don't come home tonight."
The small piece of paper continued to fold five times.
"What do you mean?"
"You want to die or something? No, that's actually not bad at all." He put the folded paper in his back pocket.
"You think Liz is after me?"
He shook his head and sighed in what appeared to be utter disappointment. "Not a bad idea at all."
"Why would someone write encrypted letters just to tell her to eat me, a cripple?"
He pursed his lips and shook his head nonchalantly.
"This can't be right," I said. "I used to think she might be after me, but why would she want to suddenly eat me now? She couldn't even eat regular meat."
"She's not like us."
"Trust me, the last thing she wants is to eat anything."
"Then go." He turned to his screen again. "I frankly don't care one bit if you jump off this building right now. I'm only telling you what she wanted me to tell you." He exhaled loudly, his shoulders shaking. "The lengths she'd go to for this piece of garbage."
"Margaret? What'd she do?"
"Go jump off that ledge. Nobody wants you."
"What'd she do?" My voice was louder this time.
In that instant, when he faced me, what I saw in his eyes was the desire for murder. If, for some reason, I'd had a knife on me and I handed it to him, I knew for certain he'd stab me without a second thought.
"It's too late now," he said.
There was no point in saying anything else. He'd decided that I was an enemy and nothing would change that.
It was time to leave. If I stayed any longer, the spiders would come for me.
"Where do you think you're going?" he called out to me.
"I'm heading home."
"Stay a little longer," he said bitterly. "She should be here, soon."
"What are you talking about? I'm leaving."
I turned around only to find a girl was standing near the flight of stairs.
"You?" I said to her. It was the girl who worked the front desk at his company. In her hand dangled a pink and wrinkly single-use plastic bag carrying two paper boxes. Two pairs of throwaway chopsticks pressed against the bag.
"Mister Robert."
She remembered my name.
So that's how it was. Besides probably relying on public restrooms to keep himself clean, he was able to get by in this building because someone else had been taking care of him.
"Tell him to find a better place to live, will you?" I said to her. "You're more than welcome to stay with my wife." Although I raised my voice enough so he knew I was talking to him, I wasn't looking back when I said this.
Unsure of how to respond, she darted a nervous glance at Josh.
"Take care, you two." I held the crutch tightly to my torso and slowly climbed down the stairs.
"No, mister Robert," the girl called out to me. "All preparations are made. I suggest that you stay so we can arrange for a way to deal with these monsters."
I turned my head to look at him. "You told her about it, too?"
Josh shrugged.
"I've no idea what you're talking about," I said. "No preparation will be enough when it comes to these things. She's the only one who can deal with them."
I turned around and climbed the stairs.
"What? Nothing I can do about it," he murmured faintly from above.
It was almost time—I had to get far away from them fast. The trip to the city took so long that when I got here it was far into the evening.
If I stayed, all Hell would break loose, and I'd be dragging them along with me. Then what would I say to Marge?
My leg was killing me. Every step was like somebody was hammering a nail into my foot.
Eat it now, huh?
Maybe he was right, I was heading straight for death.
It was suddenly hard to breathe. As I was nearing the bottom of the staircase, my vision began to spin. I leaned against the wall, trying my hardest not to fall over.
In my foot, I could feel the liquid leaking out of the orifices.
A bite mark in the waking state? This was new.
I chuckled to myself.
Time had run out. I had to leave this place.
But my body refused to move.
My arms and legs. They got heavier and heavier, like being chained to an anchor.
Everything went black.