The screaming from my basement kept me up at night. The women I had kidnapped and chained down there often wept or yelled until dawn, and I knew things couldn’t continue like this. They were disturbing my sleep, making my life intolerable, and that made me furious to the point where my vision turned white with rage every time they woke me up. I would go beat them any time that happened, but they still kept screaming, and I knew I would have to find a better way to immobilize them.

I had originally bought barbiturates, benzos and fentanyl off the dark web. I also bought medical supplies like plastic tubing as well as machinery to titrate IV drugs. After a few experiments gone wrong where I accidentally overdosed a couple of them and had to administer Narcan, I found I could keep them incapacitated with a very low dose of fentanyl combined with high doses of IV benzodiazepines. But then my dark web connection disappeared, likely busted by the DEA or FBI, and I knew I had to find another way.

I read about legal drugs, and one of them caught my eye. It was a red-and-white mushroom by the name of Amanita muscaria, commonly called “fly agaric”, a mushroom that appeared in pop culture references from the Smurfs to Alice in Wonderland to Super Mario Brothers, but one that almost no one realized was psychoactive and totally legal. It had incapacitating effects, often causing out-of-body experiences and catatonic states.

“This is peeeeerfect,” I said to myself, smiling and feeling elated. I immediately ordered some Siberian fly agaric, and as soon as it came in the next day, I started extracting the active ingredients and diluting them in distilled water for placement in the IV bag.

As I went out to check the mail, I saw a male about my height far away in the forest, running away in a panic from something behind him, something that appeared to drag itself forward at an amazingly fast speed on its arms, yet had no legs. But when I turned to look at it directly, they had disappeared into the thick brush. I had no neighbors, the nearest one being over a mile away in the other direction, so I wondered who would be out here.

I lit a cigarette and stayed on my porch, watching and waiting, but after no more sightings or noises came, I gave up and went back inside.

Whistling to myself, I brought the IV bags down to the basement. The three women I kept there were currently all quiet, likely either asleep or just staring blankly up at the ceiling. They were all naked, chained to the gurneys. I only unchained them when they needed to use the bathroom or eat, but then I would immediately chain them back up again. They were all beautiful with blue eyes and blonde hair parted in the middle, lithe bodies and very light, Irish skin.

I walked down the creaking cellar stairs, moving next to my nearest victim. I didn’t usually bother to learn their names, but this one was a hitchhiker and had told me when I picked her up. She said her name was Ally and that she was a college student. She was beautiful and young. She was sleeping when I started hanging the new IV solution of fly agaric up to the medical pole next to her bed.

As the fluid began to drip through the clear plastic tubing, she woke up. Her deep blue eyes regarded me with hatred for a moment, then she turned away, not saying anything. Her face had a look of hopelessness and despair on it that I had seen dozens of times before. Whenever any of my victims neared the end of their lives, that kind of vacant hopeless stare was all that was left on their faces, sometimes accompanied by tremendous pain and fear, sometimes accompanied by acceptance and peace.

Whistling to myself, I began to walk around the room, checking the other two women for infections, making sure their chains were tight and that they were still alive. I was about to grab the padlock key to unchain them one at a time, letting them use the bathroom and get some food and water quickly so I could keep them alive longer, but then something started to happen from underneath Ally’s bed.

I heard a deep growling sound. Spinning around, I saw Ally’s pupils had expanded to cover her entire iris. Her eyes were staring blankly past me with a thousand-yard stare, and the room seemed to shimmer and glow around her. Underneath her bed, I saw a face with dozens of glowing white eyes staring out at me from the shadows. I backed up slowly, reaching into my pocket for the switchblade I always carried on me. It used its front limbs to crawl out, leaving a trail of reeking blood behind it and filling the room with the smell of iron and rot.

The monstrosity looked like it was rotting from the inside. Its skin fell off in fetid bluish-purple layers, its mouth was full of blackened teeth embedded in sickly brown gums, but its dozens of eyes were what truly caught my attention. They were all blue, just like the eyes of my victims. Some were icy blue, like an Alaskan lake, while others were the deep blue of a tropical ocean. To my horror, I could even recognize some of the eyes and which of my previous victims they had belonged to.

It dragged itself forward at a tremendous speed using its arms, with exposed muscle and bone showing through the worn, decaying layers of maggot-infested skin that covered them. It had no legs, but only bleeding stumps that left two thick trails of blood behind it on the floor. It had no clothes on, but the decay and constant squirming of maggots and insects in its body gave it a unique covering all its own.

“You can flee,” it said to me with dozens of overlapping, harsh voices, “but I know you better than you know yourself. You think you are evil, but the true evil is coming that will tear you to pieces. Run!” The last word was so loud that the entire cellar shook, sending clouds of dirt falling down from the ceiling, and I turned and ran up the stairs. I heard a rapid scuttling, dragging sound as the monster behind me gave chase.

“Ah oh no oh shit oh no,” I said to myself quickly as I ran right through the cellar door, not even stopping. It slammed against the wall, shutting itself again from the impact as I passed by. I ran out into the kitchen and towards the front door, which I always kept locked with two deadbolts as well as a knob that locked. I was serious about my security, but right now it was working against me. My shaking fingers quickly undid the two deadbolts as I heard the monster break through the cellar door.

“Jaaacckk…” it said to me, dragging my name out as it slid on its belly behind me. I had just gotten to the last lock, the turnkey on the doorknob, when I felt it grab my leg. I kicked back as hard as I could, smashing the bottom of my steel-toe boot directly into its face through pure luck, and felt the knob turn suddenly. I flung the door open, but just as I was running through it, I felt myself pulled back by the grasping arms of the eldritch monstrosity behind me. It spun me around to stare into its rotting face. I felt like I could do nothing for a moment but look into those countless eyes. Then, with a superhuman speed beyond my vision, it rapidly bit my right thumb off with its blackened teeth.

For a moment, there was no pain, just shock. I stared down at my spurting hand, the blood soaking into my white shirt, then a fiery burning sensation shot up my arm. Screaming and thrashing, I fell back through the door, kicking with all my might at the thing’s eyes and face. But though I made contact over and over, it just started laughing, a demonic and deep sound that rattled the windows and doors of the house.

Laying flat out on my back on the porch, I began to scoot backwards as fast as I could while it came towards me. Fumbling in my pocket, I found the key for the deadbolt I kept on the basement door, pulled it out, and unthinkingly shoved the piece of metal into the center of its eyes. It made a direct hit into one of them, sending warm vitreous fluid covered with squirming maggots shooting out onto my left hand. The smell was so pungent and the sensation of the insects so horrifying that I started to gag. But it bought me enough time to push myself up and begin sprinting into the woods. I held my mutilated hand with my good one, wrapping the cloth of my shirt around it to try to slow the bleeding. I knew if it kept spurting like it was, I would begin to lose consciousness from the blood loss, then that thing would have me.

The daylight was growing soft and weak as the sun set, but it was enough to see the brushes and brambles as I ran blindly ahead. After a couple minutes, I came into a clearing, where I saw myself standing in the center of the field. I stopped suddenly, looking behind me for the creature, but there was no sign of it. Then I turned back to me and started moving forwards. I saw he only had one shoe on.

“What the fuck is this?” I asked loudly. My doppelganger only smiled at me.

“We’ve made a huge mistake, Jack,” he said.

“Who are you?” I said.

“I’m you, obviously. Look!” He raised his bandaged right hand, the strips of a white shirt wrapped tightly around the dismembered thumb.

“How is this happening?” I felt like I was about to wake up at any moment, as if I were trapped in a nightmare.

“You didn’t do enough research into that drug you gave the young woman,” he said to me. “Not only did you accidentally kidnap and torture a psychic who has supernatural powers, but then you gave her a drug that causes time-loops and out-of-body experiences. Her mind is so powerful that it is disrupting the flow of space and time all around us. You are caught in the same loop now that she is subjected to inside of her nightmare state.” I shook my head.

“That sounds totally impossible,” I said. “There’s no such thing as psychics.”

“Before today,” he said, “we also thought there was no such thing as monsters. Yet didn’t you see the one who bit off our thumb? It had the eyes of every girl we’ve killed. She has recruited their spirits and pieces of their decomposing bodies to reform into a vessel for justice. You’re being hunted, and you don’t have much time. You have to listen to me and stop asking questions.” I nodded at him, and he went on.

“Your only chance now is to run out the clock. That drug, the fly agaric mushroom, only has enough active chemicals in that one bag to keep Ally in a time-loop for twenty or twenty-five hours, depending on how fast the drug begins to wear off when the IV bag is depleted. If you can survive the entire time, you might be able to make it out of this alive. Her powers should start to fade back to normal once the drug has dissipated…” He turned, looking. “Did you hear that?”

I was about to respond, saying that I didn’t hear anything, but then I realized I did hear something. It sounded almost subaudible, like the tremors of an earthquake deep underground just out of the reach of human hearing, but as I listened, it grew louder and the ground started to shake. Thousands of black, decomposing hands began to reach out of the ground, sprouting from the forest clearing like rows and rows of corn stalks, and I screamed in terror.

I was much closer to the forest than my doppelganger, so I began to back away rapidly. Some of the hands grabbed at my jeans and shoes, and I lost one shoe in the process of escaping, but within a few seconds I was back under the cover of the trees. My doppelganger wasn’t so lucky.

He tried fighting, kicking at the nearest hands and pulling a switchblade from his pocket, which he used to begin stabbing and slicing at the dozens of hands that now grabbed his legs, feet and torso. I saw black liquid dripping from the slices he made, but the hands were totally unaffected. They began to return to the earth, dragging him down with them. He shot me one final, terrified glance before he disappeared beneath the ground.

“Found you!” a monstrous gurgling said from behind me. I turned around and saw the monster there, one of its eyes deflated and still dripping, its mouth opened in a grin that stretched across its face like a Glasgow smile, its cheeks ripping open from one corner of its face to the other as its grin kept widening.

“Please, leave me alone!” I said, using my good hand to pull my switchblade out of my pocket. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. I have no fight with you.” The thing laughed, a deep and disturbing sound that echoed through the rapidly darkening forest.

“You killed me, over and over,” it said, “and now I come to repay the favor. A life for a life, the ancients said, but your debt is overdue. You have only one life to trade, so I’m going to make this fun for us. You can have a sixty-second head start.”

I turned around and sprinted blindly across the forest, until I eventually found an abandoned shack. I took out my phone and tried calling for help. I called 911, but the only voice that came through was the voice of the monster, gurgling and laughing.

The internet worked, so I began to write up my story. I know I can’t survive for twenty hours. I’ve seen myself die already. These things are just toying with me before they finish me off for good.

I just wanted the world to know what happened to me, though. Maybe I do deserve to die, but at least I can give others a warning.

Stay away from the fly agaric mushroom.