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“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”
The video was shot in shaky cam, the footage hard to watch without getting a little seasick. Officer Wiley, Detective Wiley now, had seen a lot in his time on the force, but a double homicide perpetrated by this fourteen-year-old kid in front of him was something he hoped he would never see. A double homicide, and carried out against two of his best friends, at that. The two kids in question, Marshal Moody and Kai Dillon, had been friends with Jason Weeks since elementary school, and there had never been any reports of violence or any other alarming behavior, at least none reported to the police. The boys had operated a YouTube channel, JMK Occult, for the last two years, and while their content was pretty typical for kids online, they had been uploading steadily every week since their first video about a strange deer in the North Woods around Cadderly.
Hell, Wiley even watched their stuff sometimes when he was bored.
People in the community knew them, and this was out of character for any of them.
Wiley paused the video, the three boys blundering through the South Woods and chattering like a pack of squirrels, and looked at Jason.
Jason, Jay to his friends, looked like he had aged a decade. He had a gaunt look usually reserved for soldiers who come back from war. His hair had been long and blonde for as long as anyone had known him, but the kid sitting here now was as bald as an egg and his scalp looked scoured instead of shaved. The shirt he had been wearing in the video was gone. He was still wearing the ring of it around his neck, the stretched fabric like a collar, and the jeans he wore were stained and ragged in places that looked fresh. He'd been found with no shoes or socks, but he was wearing the orange flip-flops of a jail resident now.
Wiley knew his parents wanted to bail him out, but he wasn't sure if the judge was going to extend him bail or not, given the nature of his crime.
The way those kids had been ripped apart was something that would haunt him for a long time.
“So, Jason, Officer Russel tells me that someone picked you up beside the road and you told them that your friends were dead and that you had killed them. Is that true?”
Jason nodded, not speaking a word as he continued to stare at the wall.
The woman in question was Darla Hughes, a mother of three who had stopped when she saw a young teenage boy walking on the side of the road in the state he was currently in. Stories of kidnapping and kids held in basements for months while God knew what happened to them were clear in the public consciousness. Darla thought she had found some kid who had escaped his situation, and when she stopped to help him, she said the poor lamb had said eight words and then nothing else.
“He said, my friends are dead, and I killed them.”
They had found the kids in a clearing in the woods about three miles in, a site he was familiar with.
How many times had he and his friends gone looking for the Makaro House?
Everyone in Cadderly knew about Makaro House, and most people's childhoods had been spent looking for it. John Makaro, a prominent figure in Cadderly's history, had been a prominent importer and exporter in England. He had come to America before the Revolutionary War to try to set up a similar business here, and Cadderly had been a large enough port to satisfy his needs without being so big that a new face would be lost. He established a manor in the South Woods, despite being told that it was Indian Land, and the bill of sale did very little to dispatch the native tribe that was living there. He survived two raids by the natives somehow, but his wife and daughter were not so lucky the second time. As such, he rallied a mob of townspeople to go into the woods and help him flush out the natives who were living there. The raid took weeks, but by the end, they had killed or scattered every member of the tribe that lived there.
Satisfied, Mr. Makaro built his lavish estates there, but strange things surrounded it from the first. Workers went missing, people reported strange lights and sounds after dark, and a shriveled figure in skins and feathers could be seen lurking after moonrise. Animals on the property acted strangely, and sometimes people found wolves or bears on the grounds. Usually, they were in a rage, but sometimes they simply fled as if they had been drawn there and weren't sure what to do now that they were. Once the house was finished, John Makaro had a hard time keeping staff. None of the hands he had hired to keep his livestock would stay more than a week, and they all refused to stay on the property after dark. His servants would likewise disappear suddenly, and none of them would stay at night besides his butler, who had been with him for years. People said that Mr. Makaro talked about hearing chanting in the house and seeing strange shadows, and when even his butler disappeared one evening, John locked the doors and stayed in the house alone for a long time. People who came to see him said he could be seen wandering the halls like a ghost, calling out for people only he could see.
When his mansion was seen in full blaze one night, those who were first on the scene said they saw a lone man silhouetted in the flames, his feathers and skins on full display.
He disappeared when they got close, but he had been seen by many in the years to come.
“What did you see out there, Jason?”
Jason continued to stare at the wall.
“I wanna help you, kid, but you have to help yourself first.”
He couldn't help but glance down at the kid's fingers as he left them splayed on that table like sleeping spiders. The nails were dirty, the beds crusty with something like blood, and several of them were torn and ragged. There was grime around his mouth too, and Wiley would have bet his next paycheck that it wasn't a Kool-aid ring. It looked like mud or paint, but it was probably blood.
Jason remained silent as the grave.
“Jason, none of us believe that you killed your friends. You,”
“You're wrong,”
Wiley had been fiddling with the remote, trying not to look at the kid's hands, but when he spoke, he looked up. Jason was still staring at the wall, but his head was shaking as his teeth chattered together. The kid looked like he was staring into the mouth of hell instead of the creme-colored wall of the interrogation room. Wiley almost didn't want to ask him what he had seen, but he needed to know. He needed to know how this kid had killed two other kids, one of whom was bigger than him by a head and sixty pounds.
“Would you like to elaborate?” Wiley asked.
He didn't think the kid would for a minute, but finally, he just reached slowly and pushed play on the remote. He kept looking at Wiley like he thought he might slap his hand, but when he let him get all the way across the table unsmacked, he relaxed a little. The video went on as they walked through the woods, joking and laughing as the woods lived their quiet existence around them.
“We went in at eight, just after Kai's mom went to work. She wouldn't have liked us going into the South Woods, but we wanted to investigate Makaro House. We wanted to do it for our first episode, but Moody said it was something we should work up to. The Makaro House was something big, and we needed to be ready for it. Turned out we weren't.”
On the screen, the kids kept walking through the woods, checking their compass and making their way carefully through the thick brush. They were still chattering, talking about what they might find when they got there, and whether they would find the clearing or see the mysterious mansion that people talked about sometimes. Legend said that a ghostly manor appeared in the clearing sometimes, the ghost of the house and that people who went inside were never seen again. Wiley didn't believe that, but as a kid, he had to admit that the clearing where the house had sat was spooky. All the wood had long ago rotted, the stones taken away for use in other things, but the land just felt wrong. Wiley had never been there after dark, but people claimed to hear footsteps and see things after the sun went down.
Wiley pushed fast forward on the tape and watched as the kids plodded on and on.
Jason wished that he could have sped through that part of the trip.
They had set out at eight, waving to Kai's mom as she pulled out of the driveway. The packs had been pulled out of the garage after she was down the road a piece, and the three set out for the woods. They knew the rough direction of the Makaro House, but no one really came upon it in the same way. Danny Foster had said it was a three-mile walk from the forest's edge to the property, but Jamie had claimed that he and his friends had walked for what seemed like hours.
“When we found it, though,” he said, “we found the house instead of an empty lot. We kept daring each other to go in, but we left when someone lit a fire on the grounds.”
Jason and his friends were hoping to find the house instead of the lot, and as their walk turned into a hike, Kai stopped and looked at the compass.
“We should have gotten there by now.”
Moody chuckled, “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.”
“Can't be,” Kai protested, “The directions are to go south into the south woods for three miles. Then you'll come to the clearing where Makaro House once sat.”
Jason didn't want to jinx it, but at the time he thought that boded well for them finding the house.
They kept walking, Kai good for an endless stream of conversation, and as the sun began to set, Jason found he was out of breath. His tongue felt like leather as it stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the lunch they had brought had been eaten hours ago. Moody had argued that they should turn around and head back, but Jason had finally vocalized that this could mean they were going to find the house instead of an empty lot.
He was hopeful right until they got what they wanted
When the sun began to go down, Wiley knit his brows together.
“I thought you and your friends were only in the woods for a few hours?”
Jason shook his head slowly, “We were, and we weren't. The time on the camera says we walked for eight hours before I turned it off, but when I got picked up by the side of the road, it was barely noon.”
Wiley pursed his lips, “How is that possible?”
The video cut out, the battery in the camera having been exhausted, and Jason nodded at the screen.
“Those batteries have a max life of three hours. Dad said it was the best battery they had when he ordered it for me, and it was pretty expensive. There's no way one of those batteries could have recorded for eight hours, but it did.”
The recording came back on, and Wiley was shocked to see that they were standing on the lawn of an old Gothic mansion. The sun setting behind the house made a perfect backdrop for the shot, and the boys were oooing and ahhing appreciatively. None of them seemed to believe what they were seeing, the whole thing a little otherworldly, and there seemed to be some argument about who was going to approach the house first.
“Is that,” Wiley stopped to wet his lips,” it can't be. The Makaro House burned down hundreds of years ago.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the wall, “in all its glory.”
And oh, what glory there had been in it.
Moody had gawped at the house as he had never seen one before.
“No way, there is no way.”
“That's impossible,” Kai breathed, “that house burned to the ground before our father's fathers were even thought of.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, mirroring his later statement, though he could not know it, “in all its glory.”
As the sun set behind it, Jason thought it looked even spookier than it would at night. The mansion rose like an obelisk towards the sky, its towered roofs looking naked without flags or pinions. The boys stood at the edge, trying to shame or bluster one of the others into going there first, but in the end, Jason took the first step. The others looked surprised at his boldness, but they followed closely after, not wanting to be thought less of.
Jason expected the house to disintegrate as he approached, an illusion or a trick of the light, but as his foot came to rest on the boards of the old house, he felt their solidity and continued to climb.
When the doors opened for them, the broad double doors swinging jauntily on their hinges, the three boys pulled back as they prepared to run.
The camera captured their indecision, the portal yawning wide as it waited to receive them, and Jason seemed to surprise even himself as he came forward to investigate it.
“Jason, What if it's a trap?”
“This whole place shouldn't exist, and if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to explore it, you're wrong."
Jason went in, pausing just inside the doors as if waiting for them to crash shut.
When they didn't, Moody followed him and Kai brought up the rear.
Makaro House lived up to its Gothic exterior, the inside full of soft dark velvet and antique furniture. There was a fire burning in the hearth inside the sitting room, tables spread with books in the library, and as they came up the long hall that led towards what was undoubtedly a dining room, Jason began to smell something. It was something like a stew or maybe a roast, and the smell of meat brought them to the dining room. A long table sat in the middle, eight chairs on each side of it, and at the end sat a wrinkled old man eating soup from a bowl.
It was hard to tell before they had gotten close, but the old man looked like he might be Native American. He was dressed in hides, feathers adorning his head and necklace, and he wore a beaded necklace with bones and claws on it. He looked up as they approached, glowering at them evenly, before returning to his meal. He ignored the boys, all three standing back apprehensively before Jason found the courage to speak.
“Excuse me, sir. Is this your house?”
The spoon froze on the way to his mouth, and the old man looked like he'd been slapped.
“My house?” he asked, his voice sounding thin and whispery, “No, child, but it was paid for by my people. We paid with our blood, we paid with our lives, and in the end, the cost was high. I took some of that cost from the previous owner of this home, and now it's only me who lives here.”
Kai made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, like a dog trying to tell its owner that something wasn't safe, and Jason understood the feeling.
“Well, we'll leave you to it then. We didn't mean to,”
“Leave?” the old man said, sounding amused, “oh no. No one leaves Makaro House until they've played the game. It was always a way for our warriors to test their metal, and I have so longed to see it played again. Will you join me? If not, I'm afraid you might find it quite hard to leave.”
Moody took a step back, and Jason heard his heavy footsteps on the carpet as he tried to retreat.
“What's the game?” Jason asked, figuring they could outrun this old coyote if it came down to it.
Jason would wonder why he had thought of him that way, but he didn't have time to ponder it then.
“Choose your piece from my necklace,” the old man said, slipping it off and laying it on the table, “Claw, Talon, or Fang.”
“Then what?” Moody asked, Kai moving behind him as if afraid to come too close.
“Then we start the game.” the old man said, smiling toothily.
For an old man, he certainly had a lot of sharp teeth.
“Okay,” Moody said, walking forward as Kai followed in his wake, “I choose claw.”
“Talon,” said Kai, reaching out to touch it.
“Fang,” said Jason, and as he put his hand out, he felt a sudden, violent shifting in his guts.
He was shrinking, the world moving rapidly all around him. He was smaller, but also more than he was, and he was trapped. His legs scrabbled at the thing that held him, and he tore it to pieces as he freed himself. He heard a loud roar and something big rose up before him. The bear was massive, ragged bits of something hanging from him, and Jason was afraid that he would kill him before he could get fully free of his snare. Something screeched then, flying at the bear's face and attacking him. Jason saw blood run down the snout of the bear, and as it tried to get the bird, a large hawk, off its face, Jason circled and looked for an opening. He was low, on all fours, and he could smell the hot blood as it coursed down the bear's muzzle. Blood and meat and fear and desire mingled in him, and as something laughed, he turned and saw a large coyote sitting at the table. Its grin was huge, its snout longer than any snout had a right to be, and he was laughing in a strange half-animal/half-man way.
The hawk suddenly fell before Jason, twitching and gasping as it died, and he knew the time to strike was now.
Jason leaped on the bear, its arms trying to crush him but not able to find purchase. He sank his teeth into the bear's throat, and for a moment he was afraid he wouldn't make it through all that thick fur. The bear tried to bring its claws to bear, but as the wolf worried at it with its fangs, he was rewarded with a mouth full of hot blood. The bear kept trying to rake him with its claws, but its movements were becoming less coordinated. When it fell, the whole room shook with the sound of its thunder, and Jason rolled off it as it lay still.
“Bravo, bravo,” cried the coyote, clapping its paws together in celebration, “Well fought, young wolf, well fought.”
Jason took a step towards him, but suddenly he was falling. It was as if a whirlpool had opened up beneath him and he was being sucked into it. Jason thrashed and snarled, trying to get his balance, but he was powerless against the pull as it flung him down and into the depths of some strange and terrible abyss.
He came to in the empty clearing where the house had been, and that was where he found his friends.
Wiley rewound the tape, not quite sure what to make of this.
“So this strange man offered to play a game, and then he changed you three into animals?”
Jason nodded, looking like one of those birds that dip into a glass of water, “I picked Fang, so I was the wolf. The game wasn't fair, we didn't know what we were doing, but I still killed Moody. I killed both of them because I had been the one to approach the house first. I killed them when I agreed to play the game. It's my fault, I'm a murderer.”
Wiley wasn't so sure, but it was hard to argue with the evidence. The video showed Jason dropping the camera and then suddenly there was a lot of snarling and screeching. Wiley heard the animals fighting, but he heard something else too. Something was laughing, really having a good belly chuckle, and it sounded like a hyena. He couldn't see it, it was all lost amongst the carpet, but suddenly that carpet had turned into grass, and the camera was lying outside in the midday sun. Someone got up, someone sobbed and moaned out in negation, and then they walked away.
That was where the video ended.
In the end, Jason was sent for psychiatric evaluation and the whole thing was chalked up to a drug-induced episode. Jason and his friends were drugged by an old man in the woods and while under the influence of an unknown substance, a substance that didn't show up on any toxicology screening, they killed each other. Blood was found on Jason, blood belonging to Marshall Moody, but blood from the fingernails of Moody was determined to belong to Kai Dillon, which really helped push the narrative that Detective Wiley was working with. He told the press to report an old man in the woods who was drugging people and pushed the stranger danger talks a little harder than usual that year on school visits.
After that day, the tape he took from Jason Weeks was never seen again, but Wiley believed that the boys had run up against something they weren't prepared for. When John Makaro had led the extermination of the Native People that dwelt on his land, he had angered something he wasn't prepared for either. Wiley's grandmother had liked to tell stories about Coyote, the trickster god, and how he could be as fierce as he was cunning when he needed to be. Wiley didn't think they would ever find an old man out there in the woods, but he didn't doubt others would find him.
Coyote liked his games, especially when the players were people he saw as interlopers.
Makaro House remained a town legend, and Wiley had little doubt that those foolish enough to enter would be presented with the same game these three boys had been given.
Wiley shuddered to think how the next challenge might go when Coyote needed more amusement.

“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”
The video was shot in shaky cam, the footage hard to watch without getting a little seasick. Officer Wiley, Detective Wiley now, had seen a lot in his time on the force, but a double homicide perpetrated by this fourteen-year-old kid in front of him was something he hoped he would never see. A double homicide, and carried out against two of his best friends, at that. The two kids in question, Marshal Moody and Kai Dillon, had been friends with Jason Weeks since elementary school, and there had never been any reports of violence or any other alarming behavior, at least none reported to the police. The boys had operated a YouTube channel, JMK Occult, for the last two years, and while their content was pretty typical for kids online, they had been uploading steadily every week since their first video about a strange deer in the North Woods around Cadderly.
Hell, Wiley even watched their stuff sometimes when he was bored.
People in the community knew them, and this was out of character for any of them.
Wiley paused the video, the three boys blundering through the South Woods and chattering like a pack of squirrels, and looked at Jason.
Jason, Jay to his friends, looked like he had aged a decade. He had a gaunt look usually reserved for soldiers who come back from war. His hair had been long and blonde for as long as anyone had known him, but the kid sitting here now was as bald as an egg and his scalp looked scoured instead of shaved. The shirt he had been wearing in the video was gone. He was still wearing the ring of it around his neck, the stretched fabric like a collar, and the jeans he wore were stained and ragged in places that looked fresh. He'd been found with no shoes or socks, but he was wearing the orange flip-flops of a jail resident now.
Wiley knew his parents wanted to bail him out, but he wasn't sure if the judge was going to extend him bail or not, given the nature of his crime.
The way those kids had been ripped apart was something that would haunt him for a long time.
“So, Jason, Officer Russel tells me that someone picked you up beside the road and you told them that your friends were dead and that you had killed them. Is that true?”
Jason nodded, not speaking a word as he continued to stare at the wall.
The woman in question was Darla Hughes, a mother of three who had stopped when she saw a young teenage boy walking on the side of the road in the state he was currently in. Stories of kidnapping and kids held in basements for months while God knew what happened to them were clear in the public consciousness. Darla thought she had found some kid who had escaped his situation, and when she stopped to help him, she said the poor lamb had said eight words and then nothing else.
“He said, my friends are dead, and I killed them.”
They had found the kids in a clearing in the woods about three miles in, a site he was familiar with.
How many times had he and his friends gone looking for the Makaro House?
Everyone in Cadderly knew about Makaro House, and most people's childhoods had been spent looking for it. John Makaro, a prominent figure in Cadderly's history, had been a prominent importer and exporter in England. He had come to America before the Revolutionary War to try to set up a similar business here, and Cadderly had been a large enough port to satisfy his needs without being so big that a new face would be lost. He established a manor in the South Woods, despite being told that it was Indian Land, and the bill of sale did very little to dispatch the native tribe that was living there. He survived two raids by the natives somehow, but his wife and daughter were not so lucky the second time. As such, he rallied a mob of townspeople to go into the woods and help him flush out the natives who were living there. The raid took weeks, but by the end, they had killed or scattered every member of the tribe that lived there.
Satisfied, Mr. Makaro built his lavish estates there, but strange things surrounded it from the first. Workers went missing, people reported strange lights and sounds after dark, and a shriveled figure in skins and feathers could be seen lurking after moonrise. Animals on the property acted strangely, and sometimes people found wolves or bears on the grounds. Usually, they were in a rage, but sometimes they simply fled as if they had been drawn there and weren't sure what to do now that they were. Once the house was finished, John Makaro had a hard time keeping staff. None of the hands he had hired to keep his livestock would stay more than a week, and they all refused to stay on the property after dark. His servants would likewise disappear suddenly, and none of them would stay at night besides his butler, who had been with him for years. People said that Mr. Makaro talked about hearing chanting in the house and seeing strange shadows, and when even his butler disappeared one evening, John locked the doors and stayed in the house alone for a long time. People who came to see him said he could be seen wandering the halls like a ghost, calling out for people only he could see.
When his mansion was seen in full blaze one night, those who were first on the scene said they saw a lone man silhouetted in the flames, his feathers and skins on full display.
He disappeared when they got close, but he had been seen by many in the years to come.
“What did you see out there, Jason?”
Jason continued to stare at the wall.
“I wanna help you, kid, but you have to help yourself first.”
He couldn't help but glance down at the kid's fingers as he left them splayed on that table like sleeping spiders. The nails were dirty, the beds crusty with something like blood, and several of them were torn and ragged. There was grime around his mouth too, and Wiley would have bet his next paycheck that it wasn't a Kool-aid ring. It looked like mud or paint, but it was probably blood.
Jason remained silent as the grave.
“Jason, none of us believe that you killed your friends. You,”
“You're wrong,”
Wiley had been fiddling with the remote, trying not to look at the kid's hands, but when he spoke, he looked up. Jason was still staring at the wall, but his head was shaking as his teeth chattered together. The kid looked like he was staring into the mouth of hell instead of the creme-colored wall of the interrogation room. Wiley almost didn't want to ask him what he had seen, but he needed to know. He needed to know how this kid had killed two other kids, one of whom was bigger than him by a head and sixty pounds.
“Would you like to elaborate?” Wiley asked.
He didn't think the kid would for a minute, but finally, he just reached slowly and pushed play on the remote. He kept looking at Wiley like he thought he might slap his hand, but when he let him get all the way across the table unsmacked, he relaxed a little. The video went on as they walked through the woods, joking and laughing as the woods lived their quiet existence around them.
“We went in at eight, just after Kai's mom went to work. She wouldn't have liked us going into the South Woods, but we wanted to investigate Makaro House. We wanted to do it for our first episode, but Moody said it was something we should work up to. The Makaro House was something big, and we needed to be ready for it. Turned out we weren't.”
On the screen, the kids kept walking through the woods, checking their compass and making their way carefully through the thick brush. They were still chattering, talking about what they might find when they got there, and whether they would find the clearing or see the mysterious mansion that people talked about sometimes. Legend said that a ghostly manor appeared in the clearing sometimes, the ghost of the house and that people who went inside were never seen again. Wiley didn't believe that, but as a kid, he had to admit that the clearing where the house had sat was spooky. All the wood had long ago rotted, the stones taken away for use in other things, but the land just felt wrong. Wiley had never been there after dark, but people claimed to hear footsteps and see things after the sun went down.
Wiley pushed fast forward on the tape and watched as the kids plodded on and on.
Jason wished that he could have sped through that part of the trip.
They had set out at eight, waving to Kai's mom as she pulled out of the driveway. The packs had been pulled out of the garage after she was down the road a piece, and the three set out for the woods. They knew the rough direction of the Makaro House, but no one really came upon it in the same way. Danny Foster had said it was a three-mile walk from the forest's edge to the property, but Jamie had claimed that he and his friends had walked for what seemed like hours.
“When we found it, though,” he said, “we found the house instead of an empty lot. We kept daring each other to go in, but we left when someone lit a fire on the grounds.”
Jason and his friends were hoping to find the house instead of the lot, and as their walk turned into a hike, Kai stopped and looked at the compass.
“We should have gotten there by now.”
Moody chuckled, “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.”
“Can't be,” Kai protested, “The directions are to go south into the south woods for three miles. Then you'll come to the clearing where Makaro House once sat.”
Jason didn't want to jinx it, but at the time he thought that boded well for them finding the house.
They kept walking, Kai good for an endless stream of conversation, and as the sun began to set, Jason found he was out of breath. His tongue felt like leather as it stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the lunch they had brought had been eaten hours ago. Moody had argued that they should turn around and head back, but Jason had finally vocalized that this could mean they were going to find the house instead of an empty lot.
He was hopeful right until they got what they wanted
When the sun began to go down, Wiley knit his brows together.
“I thought you and your friends were only in the woods for a few hours?”
Jason shook his head slowly, “We were, and we weren't. The time on the camera says we walked for eight hours before I turned it off, but when I got picked up by the side of the road, it was barely noon.”
Wiley pursed his lips, “How is that possible?”
The video cut out, the battery in the camera having been exhausted, and Jason nodded at the screen.
“Those batteries have a max life of three hours. Dad said it was the best battery they had when he ordered it for me, and it was pretty expensive. There's no way one of those batteries could have recorded for eight hours, but it did.”
The recording came back on, and Wiley was shocked to see that they were standing on the lawn of an old Gothic mansion. The sun setting behind the house made a perfect backdrop for the shot, and the boys were oooing and ahhing appreciatively. None of them seemed to believe what they were seeing, the whole thing a little otherworldly, and there seemed to be some argument about who was going to approach the house first.
“Is that,” Wiley stopped to wet his lips,” it can't be. The Makaro House burned down hundreds of years ago.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the wall, “in all its glory.”
And oh, what glory there had been in it.
Moody had gawped at the house as he had never seen one before.
“No way, there is no way.”
“That's impossible,” Kai breathed, “that house burned to the ground before our father's fathers were even thought of.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, mirroring his later statement, though he could not know it, “in all its glory.”
As the sun set behind it, Jason thought it looked even spookier than it would at night. The mansion rose like an obelisk towards the sky, its towered roofs looking naked without flags or pinions. The boys stood at the edge, trying to shame or bluster one of the others into going there first, but in the end, Jason took the first step. The others looked surprised at his boldness, but they followed closely after, not wanting to be thought less of.
Jason expected the house to disintegrate as he approached, an illusion or a trick of the light, but as his foot came to rest on the boards of the old house, he felt their solidity and continued to climb.
When the doors opened for them, the broad double doors swinging jauntily on their hinges, the three boys pulled back as they prepared to run.
The camera captured their indecision, the portal yawning wide as it waited to receive them, and Jason seemed to surprise even himself as he came forward to investigate it.
“Jason, What if it's a trap?”
“This whole place shouldn't exist, and if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to explore it, you're wrong."
Jason went in, pausing just inside the doors as if waiting for them to crash shut.
When they didn't, Moody followed him and Kai brought up the rear.
Makaro House lived up to its Gothic exterior, the inside full of soft dark velvet and antique furniture. There was a fire burning in the hearth inside the sitting room, tables spread with books in the library, and as they came up the long hall that led towards what was undoubtedly a dining room, Jason began to smell something. It was something like a stew or maybe a roast, and the smell of meat brought them to the dining room. A long table sat in the middle, eight chairs on each side of it, and at the end sat a wrinkled old man eating soup from a bowl.
It was hard to tell before they had gotten close, but the old man looked like he might be Native American. He was dressed in hides, feathers adorning his head and necklace, and he wore a beaded necklace with bones and claws on it. He looked up as they approached, glowering at them evenly, before returning to his meal. He ignored the boys, all three standing back apprehensively before Jason found the courage to speak.
“Excuse me, sir. Is this your house?”
The spoon froze on the way to his mouth, and the old man looked like he'd been slapped.
“My house?” he asked, his voice sounding thin and whispery, “No, child, but it was paid for by my people. We paid with our blood, we paid with our lives, and in the end, the cost was high. I took some of that cost from the previous owner of this home, and now it's only me who lives here.”
Kai made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, like a dog trying to tell its owner that something wasn't safe, and Jason understood the feeling.
“Well, we'll leave you to it then. We didn't mean to,”
“Leave?” the old man said, sounding amused, “oh no. No one leaves Makaro House until they've played the game. It was always a way for our warriors to test their metal, and I have so longed to see it played again. Will you join me? If not, I'm afraid you might find it quite hard to leave.”
Moody took a step back, and Jason heard his heavy footsteps on the carpet as he tried to retreat.
“What's the game?” Jason asked, figuring they could outrun this old coyote if it came down to it.
Jason would wonder why he had thought of him that way, but he didn't have time to ponder it then.
“Choose your piece from my necklace,” the old man said, slipping it off and laying it on the table, “Claw, Talon, or Fang.”
“Then what?” Moody asked, Kai moving behind him as if afraid to come too close.
“Then we start the game.” the old man said, smiling toothily.
For an old man, he certainly had a lot of sharp teeth.
“Okay,” Moody said, walking forward as Kai followed in his wake, “I choose claw.”
“Talon,” said Kai, reaching out to touch it.
“Fang,” said Jason, and as he put his hand out, he felt a sudden, violent shifting in his guts.
He was shrinking, the world moving rapidly all around him. He was smaller, but also more than he was, and he was trapped. His legs scrabbled at the thing that held him, and he tore it to pieces as he freed himself. He heard a loud roar and something big rose up before him. The bear was massive, ragged bits of something hanging from him, and Jason was afraid that he would kill him before he could get fully free of his snare. Something screeched then, flying at the bear's face and attacking him. Jason saw blood run down the snout of the bear, and as it tried to get the bird, a large hawk, off its face, Jason circled and looked for an opening. He was low, on all fours, and he could smell the hot blood as it coursed down the bear's muzzle. Blood and meat and fear and desire mingled in him, and as something laughed, he turned and saw a large coyote sitting at the table. Its grin was huge, its snout longer than any snout had a right to be, and he was laughing in a strange half-animal/half-man way.
The hawk suddenly fell before Jason, twitching and gasping as it died, and he knew the time to strike was now.
Jason leaped on the bear, its arms trying to crush him but not able to find purchase. He sank his teeth into the bear's throat, and for a moment he was afraid he wouldn't make it through all that thick fur. The bear tried to bring its claws to bear, but as the wolf worried at it with its fangs, he was rewarded with a mouth full of hot blood. The bear kept trying to rake him with its claws, but its movements were becoming less coordinated. When it fell, the whole room shook with the sound of its thunder, and Jason rolled off it as it lay still.
“Bravo, bravo,” cried the coyote, clapping its paws together in celebration, “Well fought, young wolf, well fought.”
Jason took a step towards him, but suddenly he was falling. It was as if a whirlpool had opened up beneath him and he was being sucked into it. Jason thrashed and snarled, trying to get his balance, but he was powerless against the pull as it flung him down and into the depths of some strange and terrible abyss.
He came to in the empty clearing where the house had been, and that was where he found his friends.
Wiley rewound the tape, not quite sure what to make of this.
“So this strange man offered to play a game, and then he changed you three into animals?”
Jason nodded, looking like one of those birds that dip into a glass of water, “I picked Fang, so I was the wolf. The game wasn't fair, we didn't know what we were doing, but I still killed Moody. I killed both of them because I had been the one to approach the house first. I killed them when I agreed to play the game. It's my fault, I'm a murderer.”
Wiley wasn't so sure, but it was hard to argue with the evidence. The video showed Jason dropping the camera and then suddenly there was a lot of snarling and screeching. Wiley heard the animals fighting, but he heard something else too. Something was laughing, really having a good belly chuckle, and it sounded like a hyena. He couldn't see it, it was all lost amongst the carpet, but suddenly that carpet had turned into grass, and the camera was lying outside in the midday sun. Someone got up, someone sobbed and moaned out in negation, and then they walked away.
That was where the video ended.
In the end, Jason was sent for psychiatric evaluation and the whole thing was chalked up to a drug-induced episode. Jason and his friends were drugged by an old man in the woods and while under the influence of an unknown substance, a substance that didn't show up on any toxicology screening, they killed each other. Blood was found on Jason, blood belonging to Marshall Moody, but blood from the fingernails of Moody was determined to belong to Kai Dillon, which really helped push the narrative that Detective Wiley was working with. He told the press to report an old man in the woods who was drugging people and pushed the stranger danger talks a little harder than usual that year on school visits.
After that day, the tape he took from Jason Weeks was never seen again, but Wiley believed that the boys had run up against something they weren't prepared for. When John Makaro had led the extermination of the Native People that dwelt on his land, he had angered something he wasn't prepared for either. Wiley's grandmother had liked to tell stories about Coyote, the trickster god, and how he could be as fierce as he was cunning when he needed to be. Wiley didn't think they would ever find an old man out there in the woods, but he didn't doubt others would find him.
Coyote liked his games, especially when the players were people he saw as interlopers.
Makaro House remained a town legend, and Wiley had little doubt that those foolish enough to enter would be presented with the same game these three boys had been given.
Wiley shuddered to think how the next challenge might go when Coyote needed more amusement.

“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”
The video was shot in shaky cam, the footage hard to watch without getting a little seasick. Officer Wiley, Detective Wiley now, had seen a lot in his time on the force, but a double homicide perpetrated by this fourteen-year-old kid in front of him was something he hoped he would never see. A double homicide, and carried out against two of his best friends, at that. The two kids in question, Marshal Moody and Kai Dillon, had been friends with Jason Weeks since elementary school, and there had never been any reports of violence or any other alarming behavior, at least none reported to the police. The boys had operated a YouTube channel, JMK Occult, for the last two years, and while their content was pretty typical for kids online, they had been uploading steadily every week since their first video about a strange deer in the North Woods around Cadderly.
Hell, Wiley even watched their stuff sometimes when he was bored.
People in the community knew them, and this was out of character for any of them.
Wiley paused the video, the three boys blundering through the South Woods and chattering like a pack of squirrels, and looked at Jason.
Jason, Jay to his friends, looked like he had aged a decade. He had a gaunt look usually reserved for soldiers who come back from war. His hair had been long and blonde for as long as anyone had known him, but the kid sitting here now was as bald as an egg and his scalp looked scoured instead of shaved. The shirt he had been wearing in the video was gone. He was still wearing the ring of it around his neck, the stretched fabric like a collar, and the jeans he wore were stained and ragged in places that looked fresh. He'd been found with no shoes or socks, but he was wearing the orange flip-flops of a jail resident now.
Wiley knew his parents wanted to bail him out, but he wasn't sure if the judge was going to extend him bail or not, given the nature of his crime.
The way those kids had been ripped apart was something that would haunt him for a long time.
“So, Jason, Officer Russel tells me that someone picked you up beside the road and you told them that your friends were dead and that you had killed them. Is that true?”
Jason nodded, not speaking a word as he continued to stare at the wall.
The woman in question was Darla Hughes, a mother of three who had stopped when she saw a young teenage boy walking on the side of the road in the state he was currently in. Stories of kidnapping and kids held in basements for months while God knew what happened to them were clear in the public consciousness. Darla thought she had found some kid who had escaped his situation, and when she stopped to help him, she said the poor lamb had said eight words and then nothing else.
“He said, my friends are dead, and I killed them.”
They had found the kids in a clearing in the woods about three miles in, a site he was familiar with.
How many times had he and his friends gone looking for the Makaro House?
Everyone in Cadderly knew about Makaro House, and most people's childhoods had been spent looking for it. John Makaro, a prominent figure in Cadderly's history, had been a prominent importer and exporter in England. He had come to America before the Revolutionary War to try to set up a similar business here, and Cadderly had been a large enough port to satisfy his needs without being so big that a new face would be lost. He established a manor in the South Woods, despite being told that it was Indian Land, and the bill of sale did very little to dispatch the native tribe that was living there. He survived two raids by the natives somehow, but his wife and daughter were not so lucky the second time. As such, he rallied a mob of townspeople to go into the woods and help him flush out the natives who were living there. The raid took weeks, but by the end, they had killed or scattered every member of the tribe that lived there.
Satisfied, Mr. Makaro built his lavish estates there, but strange things surrounded it from the first. Workers went missing, people reported strange lights and sounds after dark, and a shriveled figure in skins and feathers could be seen lurking after moonrise. Animals on the property acted strangely, and sometimes people found wolves or bears on the grounds. Usually, they were in a rage, but sometimes they simply fled as if they had been drawn there and weren't sure what to do now that they were. Once the house was finished, John Makaro had a hard time keeping staff. None of the hands he had hired to keep his livestock would stay more than a week, and they all refused to stay on the property after dark. His servants would likewise disappear suddenly, and none of them would stay at night besides his butler, who had been with him for years. People said that Mr. Makaro talked about hearing chanting in the house and seeing strange shadows, and when even his butler disappeared one evening, John locked the doors and stayed in the house alone for a long time. People who came to see him said he could be seen wandering the halls like a ghost, calling out for people only he could see.
When his mansion was seen in full blaze one night, those who were first on the scene said they saw a lone man silhouetted in the flames, his feathers and skins on full display.
He disappeared when they got close, but he had been seen by many in the years to come.
“What did you see out there, Jason?”
Jason continued to stare at the wall.
“I wanna help you, kid, but you have to help yourself first.”
He couldn't help but glance down at the kid's fingers as he left them splayed on that table like sleeping spiders. The nails were dirty, the beds crusty with something like blood, and several of them were torn and ragged. There was grime around his mouth too, and Wiley would have bet his next paycheck that it wasn't a Kool-aid ring. It looked like mud or paint, but it was probably blood.
Jason remained silent as the grave.
“Jason, none of us believe that you killed your friends. You,”
“You're wrong,”
Wiley had been fiddling with the remote, trying not to look at the kid's hands, but when he spoke, he looked up. Jason was still staring at the wall, but his head was shaking as his teeth chattered together. The kid looked like he was staring into the mouth of hell instead of the creme-colored wall of the interrogation room. Wiley almost didn't want to ask him what he had seen, but he needed to know. He needed to know how this kid had killed two other kids, one of whom was bigger than him by a head and sixty pounds.
“Would you like to elaborate?” Wiley asked.
He didn't think the kid would for a minute, but finally, he just reached slowly and pushed play on the remote. He kept looking at Wiley like he thought he might slap his hand, but when he let him get all the way across the table unsmacked, he relaxed a little. The video went on as they walked through the woods, joking and laughing as the woods lived their quiet existence around them.
“We went in at eight, just after Kai's mom went to work. She wouldn't have liked us going into the South Woods, but we wanted to investigate Makaro House. We wanted to do it for our first episode, but Moody said it was something we should work up to. The Makaro House was something big, and we needed to be ready for it. Turned out we weren't.”
On the screen, the kids kept walking through the woods, checking their compass and making their way carefully through the thick brush. They were still chattering, talking about what they might find when they got there, and whether they would find the clearing or see the mysterious mansion that people talked about sometimes. Legend said that a ghostly manor appeared in the clearing sometimes, the ghost of the house and that people who went inside were never seen again. Wiley didn't believe that, but as a kid, he had to admit that the clearing where the house had sat was spooky. All the wood had long ago rotted, the stones taken away for use in other things, but the land just felt wrong. Wiley had never been there after dark, but people claimed to hear footsteps and see things after the sun went down.
Wiley pushed fast forward on the tape and watched as the kids plodded on and on.
Jason wished that he could have sped through that part of the trip.
They had set out at eight, waving to Kai's mom as she pulled out of the driveway. The packs had been pulled out of the garage after she was down the road a piece, and the three set out for the woods. They knew the rough direction of the Makaro House, but no one really came upon it in the same way. Danny Foster had said it was a three-mile walk from the forest's edge to the property, but Jamie had claimed that he and his friends had walked for what seemed like hours.
“When we found it, though,” he said, “we found the house instead of an empty lot. We kept daring each other to go in, but we left when someone lit a fire on the grounds.”
Jason and his friends were hoping to find the house instead of the lot, and as their walk turned into a hike, Kai stopped and looked at the compass.
“We should have gotten there by now.”
Moody chuckled, “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.”
“Can't be,” Kai protested, “The directions are to go south into the south woods for three miles. Then you'll come to the clearing where Makaro House once sat.”
Jason didn't want to jinx it, but at the time he thought that boded well for them finding the house.
They kept walking, Kai good for an endless stream of conversation, and as the sun began to set, Jason found he was out of breath. His tongue felt like leather as it stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the lunch they had brought had been eaten hours ago. Moody had argued that they should turn around and head back, but Jason had finally vocalized that this could mean they were going to find the house instead of an empty lot.
He was hopeful right until they got what they wanted
When the sun began to go down, Wiley knit his brows together.
“I thought you and your friends were only in the woods for a few hours?”
Jason shook his head slowly, “We were, and we weren't. The time on the camera says we walked for eight hours before I turned it off, but when I got picked up by the side of the road, it was barely noon.”
Wiley pursed his lips, “How is that possible?”
The video cut out, the battery in the camera having been exhausted, and Jason nodded at the screen.
“Those batteries have a max life of three hours. Dad said it was the best battery they had when he ordered it for me, and it was pretty expensive. There's no way one of those batteries could have recorded for eight hours, but it did.”
The recording came back on, and Wiley was shocked to see that they were standing on the lawn of an old Gothic mansion. The sun setting behind the house made a perfect backdrop for the shot, and the boys were oooing and ahhing appreciatively. None of them seemed to believe what they were seeing, the whole thing a little otherworldly, and there seemed to be some argument about who was going to approach the house first.
“Is that,” Wiley stopped to wet his lips,” it can't be. The Makaro House burned down hundreds of years ago.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the wall, “in all its glory.”
And oh, what glory there had been in it.
Moody had gawped at the house as he had never seen one before.
“No way, there is no way.”
“That's impossible,” Kai breathed, “that house burned to the ground before our father's fathers were even thought of.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, mirroring his later statement, though he could not know it, “in all its glory.”
As the sun set behind it, Jason thought it looked even spookier than it would at night. The mansion rose like an obelisk towards the sky, its towered roofs looking naked without flags or pinions. The boys stood at the edge, trying to shame or bluster one of the others into going there first, but in the end, Jason took the first step. The others looked surprised at his boldness, but they followed closely after, not wanting to be thought less of.
Jason expected the house to disintegrate as he approached, an illusion or a trick of the light, but as his foot came to rest on the boards of the old house, he felt their solidity and continued to climb.
When the doors opened for them, the broad double doors swinging jauntily on their hinges, the three boys pulled back as they prepared to run.
The camera captured their indecision, the portal yawning wide as it waited to receive them, and Jason seemed to surprise even himself as he came forward to investigate it.
“Jason, What if it's a trap?”
“This whole place shouldn't exist, and if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to explore it, you're wrong."
Jason went in, pausing just inside the doors as if waiting for them to crash shut.
When they didn't, Moody followed him and Kai brought up the rear.
Makaro House lived up to its Gothic exterior, the inside full of soft dark velvet and antique furniture. There was a fire burning in the hearth inside the sitting room, tables spread with books in the library, and as they came up the long hall that led towards what was undoubtedly a dining room, Jason began to smell something. It was something like a stew or maybe a roast, and the smell of meat brought them to the dining room. A long table sat in the middle, eight chairs on each side of it, and at the end sat a wrinkled old man eating soup from a bowl.
It was hard to tell before they had gotten close, but the old man looked like he might be Native American. He was dressed in hides, feathers adorning his head and necklace, and he wore a beaded necklace with bones and claws on it. He looked up as they approached, glowering at them evenly, before returning to his meal. He ignored the boys, all three standing back apprehensively before Jason found the courage to speak.
“Excuse me, sir. Is this your house?”
The spoon froze on the way to his mouth, and the old man looked like he'd been slapped.
“My house?” he asked, his voice sounding thin and whispery, “No, child, but it was paid for by my people. We paid with our blood, we paid with our lives, and in the end, the cost was high. I took some of that cost from the previous owner of this home, and now it's only me who lives here.”
Kai made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, like a dog trying to tell its owner that something wasn't safe, and Jason understood the feeling.
“Well, we'll leave you to it then. We didn't mean to,”
“Leave?” the old man said, sounding amused, “oh no. No one leaves Makaro House until they've played the game. It was always a way for our warriors to test their metal, and I have so longed to see it played again. Will you join me? If not, I'm afraid you might find it quite hard to leave.”
Moody took a step back, and Jason heard his heavy footsteps on the carpet as he tried to retreat.
“What's the game?” Jason asked, figuring they could outrun this old coyote if it came down to it.
Jason would wonder why he had thought of him that way, but he didn't have time to ponder it then.
“Choose your piece from my necklace,” the old man said, slipping it off and laying it on the table, “Claw, Talon, or Fang.”
“Then what?” Moody asked, Kai moving behind him as if afraid to come too close.
“Then we start the game.” the old man said, smiling toothily.
For an old man, he certainly had a lot of sharp teeth.
“Okay,” Moody said, walking forward as Kai followed in his wake, “I choose claw.”
“Talon,” said Kai, reaching out to touch it.
“Fang,” said Jason, and as he put his hand out, he felt a sudden, violent shifting in his guts.
He was shrinking, the world moving rapidly all around him. He was smaller, but also more than he was, and he was trapped. His legs scrabbled at the thing that held him, and he tore it to pieces as he freed himself. He heard a loud roar and something big rose up before him. The bear was massive, ragged bits of something hanging from him, and Jason was afraid that he would kill him before he could get fully free of his snare. Something screeched then, flying at the bear's face and attacking him. Jason saw blood run down the snout of the bear, and as it tried to get the bird, a large hawk, off its face, Jason circled and looked for an opening. He was low, on all fours, and he could smell the hot blood as it coursed down the bear's muzzle. Blood and meat and fear and desire mingled in him, and as something laughed, he turned and saw a large coyote sitting at the table. Its grin was huge, its snout longer than any snout had a right to be, and he was laughing in a strange half-animal/half-man way.
The hawk suddenly fell before Jason, twitching and gasping as it died, and he knew the time to strike was now.
Jason leaped on the bear, its arms trying to crush him but not able to find purchase. He sank his teeth into the bear's throat, and for a moment he was afraid he wouldn't make it through all that thick fur. The bear tried to bring its claws to bear, but as the wolf worried at it with its fangs, he was rewarded with a mouth full of hot blood. The bear kept trying to rake him with its claws, but its movements were becoming less coordinated. When it fell, the whole room shook with the sound of its thunder, and Jason rolled off it as it lay still.
“Bravo, bravo,” cried the coyote, clapping its paws together in celebration, “Well fought, young wolf, well fought.”
Jason took a step towards him, but suddenly he was falling. It was as if a whirlpool had opened up beneath him and he was being sucked into it. Jason thrashed and snarled, trying to get his balance, but he was powerless against the pull as it flung him down and into the depths of some strange and terrible abyss.
He came to in the empty clearing where the house had been, and that was where he found his friends.
Wiley rewound the tape, not quite sure what to make of this.
“So this strange man offered to play a game, and then he changed you three into animals?”
Jason nodded, looking like one of those birds that dip into a glass of water, “I picked Fang, so I was the wolf. The game wasn't fair, we didn't know what we were doing, but I still killed Moody. I killed both of them because I had been the one to approach the house first. I killed them when I agreed to play the game. It's my fault, I'm a murderer.”
Wiley wasn't so sure, but it was hard to argue with the evidence. The video showed Jason dropping the camera and then suddenly there was a lot of snarling and screeching. Wiley heard the animals fighting, but he heard something else too. Something was laughing, really having a good belly chuckle, and it sounded like a hyena. He couldn't see it, it was all lost amongst the carpet, but suddenly that carpet had turned into grass, and the camera was lying outside in the midday sun. Someone got up, someone sobbed and moaned out in negation, and then they walked away.
That was where the video ended.
In the end, Jason was sent for psychiatric evaluation and the whole thing was chalked up to a drug-induced episode. Jason and his friends were drugged by an old man in the woods and while under the influence of an unknown substance, a substance that didn't show up on any toxicology screening, they killed each other. Blood was found on Jason, blood belonging to Marshall Moody, but blood from the fingernails of Moody was determined to belong to Kai Dillon, which really helped push the narrative that Detective Wiley was working with. He told the press to report an old man in the woods who was drugging people and pushed the stranger danger talks a little harder than usual that year on school visits.
After that day, the tape he took from Jason Weeks was never seen again, but Wiley believed that the boys had run up against something they weren't prepared for. When John Makaro had led the extermination of the Native People that dwelt on his land, he had angered something he wasn't prepared for either. Wiley's grandmother had liked to tell stories about Coyote, the trickster god, and how he could be as fierce as he was cunning when he needed to be. Wiley didn't think they would ever find an old man out there in the woods, but he didn't doubt others would find him.
Coyote liked his games, especially when the players were people he saw as interlopers.
Makaro House remained a town legend, and Wiley had little doubt that those foolish enough to enter would be presented with the same game these three boys had been given.
Wiley shuddered to think how the next challenge might go when Coyote needed more amusement.
Makaro House
“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”

I am 30F, and I have a long complicated relationship with my husband 31M. Before and even after marriage (2016) we had a significant number of problems because I never felt like I was enough for him. He was always looking at porn of women who didn’t look like me, he would save pictures of girls he liked and even some of my relatives for his spankbank, and in general he was non romantic and always has been (i didn’t even get properly proposed to). He was unclean and went up to two wild without showering or brushing his teeth (he denies this to this day but it’s 100% true). At one point i even tried to make a deal with him for him to shower in return for sexual favors but got frustrated at his shit eating grin and feeling like i was being taken advantage of.
In 2020, i had 2 kids under 2, and he started interviewing for promotions. He ended up accepting a job offer 3 hours away, mid-COVID, with no permanent housing offer. I cried and begged for him to rescind this job offer, but he didn’t. About 6 months later I got a job closer to his and the kids and I moved in with him for 6 months. During this time, the same habits were happening, i felt overwhelmed by the household chores, and shortly after my uncle died (which i have still never grieved properly) i ended up playing an online game and meeting a person, and after four days of talking to him, i told myself i was polyamorous, in love, and that’s it had to tell my husband because he’d be happy and let me have this boyfriend.
I realize more it likely had a lot to do with my uncle dying and me not processing the grief appropriately, but regardless, i told my husband. This dude and i had exchanged a lot of sexual messages, and i had sent two photos of myself in lingerie, all of which i showed my husband. And for days i was forced to do the most depraved sexual things he could think of, things I’d hated, all while telling myself i deserved it for being a whore. He also made me beg for hours for him not to leave me, just to leave for work and tell me he was probably going to leave me anyways, then leaving me at home with my thoughts for nine hours while he was working.
Fast-forward, husband’s housing options fell through, and I was forced to move to my support network that was roughly 3 hours away again. I was at my lowest point physically, mentally, and I met someone else (Bill), also online, and we started a pretty good friendship. He’s older than me, and he knew a lot about things that I was interested in like BDSM, history, travel, and over a period of time, I began to ask him questions about BDSM because I thought it was a way that I could heal myself sexually from the things that had happened to me.
Our friendship grew, as did our relationship, and for three years he has become my best friend, My dominant, and a person I love and trust. We’ve spoken daily since meeting, we’ve met, and i feel very comfortable around him. However, the whole “i-have-a-husband-even-though-we-live-apart” thing was wheats something i felt guilty for. We both worked, i did 90% of the mental load, and for a long time I was in a dark place, like i didn’t deserve happiness, that husband didn’t deserve to be treated like this, that i was a piece of shit. But as Bill and I’s friendship grew i learned how to pick myself up, know my worth, I’ve got tasks so I’m up to date on all my meds, i never miss a dose. I started taking care of myself and even loving myself. Sexually i was more open than I’d been since the “hate fucking” and i felt justified in doing all of this because i was abandoned, i was never enough, i was never romanced, etc. plus it was online so (in my own earlier opinion) who was i really hurting?
Things got really intense when husband was home because he always wanted sex, i hated scheduled sex, & eventually it came to a head when he knew i was on pain medication’s for a herniated disc and’s he knew i was asleep and he tried to have sex with me anyways. I am silly recognize that this was not healthy, and immediately classified it to him for what it was. I then had a giant mental breakdown at work and he ended up getting arrested because I mentioned this to my coworkers who reported it out of concern. He is facing 3 felonies, but has been out since day 1.
I continued having a relationship with him until about a month ago, when he found out that I had been cheating for three years emotionally, and sexually (albeit, long distance). I told him that we needed to take some time apart to work on ourselves and see if we could overcome these things. I’ve been really touchy since August when he tried to harm me, so I have been trying to put myself back together and I’ve been seeing a therapist about healing my sexual trauma as well as my abandonment issues.
All of this to say that for a very long time, for all of the reasons above, I justified what I did and cheating on him because he wasn’t a good husband (he said he was for “providing” when i witness 40 hweek too), and I allowed myself to continue to hurt him over and over again because I felt like it was a sense of justice, but also because I felt so many immeasurable feelings for Bill.
No, I realize that what I did was wrong, but does anybody have practice with reminding themselves to not justify actions? I still have a really bad habit of being like “well yes cheating is wrong, but sexually assaulting me was worse “. I’m trying really hard for the sake of our kids to repair what I’ve broken but need help with holding myself accountable, and just advice in general.

Here come the contents of Methods Q&A on Guangzhou Indie Game Only 2024!
Including news about #MTDC and #MTCF , the latest goods and character anecdotes. Scroll to have a look!
***
Q1: Motives when?
A1: Probably after canada files.
Q2: Does MTCF plan to go on switch (or the next generation model of switch)?
A2: I would love to, but Ren'Py does not have the capability built-in, so it would be up to Erabit to devote the resources to make it happen
Q3: Do you have plans to tell short stories from other character's perspective (especially characters that have been narrators in mtdc)
A3: Great question, yes I have thought about it, and it is a good way to see more of the many many characters. So it is something I'm interested in doing, yes!
Q4: What did Joane do for a living before she went to jail?
A4: Hmm, maybe she worked as a food critic. She does have a discerning taste.
Q5: I really like the last stage of mtdc! Just love the fight between the two very bests...aaaaaaaaa!
A5: Thank you!!
Q6: Do you have plans for easter eggs featuring the post-competition lives of the American detectives and masterminds in Motives?
A6: Not at the moment — I'm sure there are many characters fans would like to know more about, so I will try to find ways to do more with them someday, even if its not in Motives.
Q7: I wish there're Vignettes from other characters' perspectives! btw happy 4th bday Methods!
A7: Thank you! Me too, I'm sure I will do more Vignettes at some point.
Q8: Joane merch when QAQ
A8: We will make sure to include many fan favorite characters in the merch, so don't worry!
Q9: File 03 suggests that Mellie is still in the competition right? Will she show up in future chapters?
A9: Hmmmm👀 Keep an eye out and maybe you'll spot her!
Q10: After the American competition, will Catscratcher show up again? Will he participate in future competitions?
A10: It depends on how he feels after losing😂
Q11: 我爱你, I/we love you. (From your many fans)!
A11: Thank you !!🥺 I hope you look forward to future works!

“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”
The video was shot in shaky cam, the footage hard to watch without getting a little seasick. Officer Wiley, Detective Wiley now, had seen a lot in his time on the force, but a double homicide perpetrated by this fourteen-year-old kid in front of him was something he hoped he would never see. A double homicide, and carried out against two of his best friends, at that. The two kids in question, Marshal Moody and Kai Dillon, had been friends with Jason Weeks since elementary school, and there had never been any reports of violence or any other alarming behavior, at least none reported to the police. The boys had operated a YouTube channel, JMK Occult, for the last two years, and while their content was pretty typical for kids online, they had been uploading steadily every week since their first video about a strange deer in the North Woods around Cadderly.
Hell, Wiley even watched their stuff sometimes when he was bored.
People in the community knew them, and this was out of character for any of them.
Wiley paused the video, the three boys blundering through the South Woods and chattering like a pack of squirrels, and looked at Jason.
Jason, Jay to his friends, looked like he had aged a decade. He had a gaunt look usually reserved for soldiers who come back from war. His hair had been long and blonde for as long as anyone had known him, but the kid sitting here now was as bald as an egg and his scalp looked scoured instead of shaved. The shirt he had been wearing in the video was gone. He was still wearing the ring of it around his neck, the stretched fabric like a collar, and the jeans he wore were stained and ragged in places that looked fresh. He'd been found with no shoes or socks, but he was wearing the orange flip-flops of a jail resident now.
Wiley knew his parents wanted to bail him out, but he wasn't sure if the judge was going to extend him bail or not, given the nature of his crime.
The way those kids had been ripped apart was something that would haunt him for a long time.
“So, Jason, Officer Russel tells me that someone picked you up beside the road and you told them that your friends were dead and that you had killed them. Is that true?”
Jason nodded, not speaking a word as he continued to stare at the wall.
The woman in question was Darla Hughes, a mother of three who had stopped when she saw a young teenage boy walking on the side of the road in the state he was currently in. Stories of kidnapping and kids held in basements for months while God knew what happened to them were clear in the public consciousness. Darla thought she had found some kid who had escaped his situation, and when she stopped to help him, she said the poor lamb had said eight words and then nothing else.
“He said, my friends are dead, and I killed them.”
They had found the kids in a clearing in the woods about three miles in, a site he was familiar with.
How many times had he and his friends gone looking for the Makaro House?
Everyone in Cadderly knew about Makaro House, and most people's childhoods had been spent looking for it. John Makaro, a prominent figure in Cadderly's history, had been a prominent importer and exporter in England. He had come to America before the Revolutionary War to try to set up a similar business here, and Cadderly had been a large enough port to satisfy his needs without being so big that a new face would be lost. He established a manor in the South Woods, despite being told that it was Indian Land, and the bill of sale did very little to dispatch the native tribe that was living there. He survived two raids by the natives somehow, but his wife and daughter were not so lucky the second time. As such, he rallied a mob of townspeople to go into the woods and help him flush out the natives who were living there. The raid took weeks, but by the end, they had killed or scattered every member of the tribe that lived there.
Satisfied, Mr. Makaro built his lavish estates there, but strange things surrounded it from the first. Workers went missing, people reported strange lights and sounds after dark, and a shriveled figure in skins and feathers could be seen lurking after moonrise. Animals on the property acted strangely, and sometimes people found wolves or bears on the grounds. Usually, they were in a rage, but sometimes they simply fled as if they had been drawn there and weren't sure what to do now that they were. Once the house was finished, John Makaro had a hard time keeping staff. None of the hands he had hired to keep his livestock would stay more than a week, and they all refused to stay on the property after dark. His servants would likewise disappear suddenly, and none of them would stay at night besides his butler, who had been with him for years. People said that Mr. Makaro talked about hearing chanting in the house and seeing strange shadows, and when even his butler disappeared one evening, John locked the doors and stayed in the house alone for a long time. People who came to see him said he could be seen wandering the halls like a ghost, calling out for people only he could see.
When his mansion was seen in full blaze one night, those who were first on the scene said they saw a lone man silhouetted in the flames, his feathers and skins on full display.
He disappeared when they got close, but he had been seen by many in the years to come.
“What did you see out there, Jason?”
Jason continued to stare at the wall.
“I wanna help you, kid, but you have to help yourself first.”
He couldn't help but glance down at the kid's fingers as he left them splayed on that table like sleeping spiders. The nails were dirty, the beds crusty with something like blood, and several of them were torn and ragged. There was grime around his mouth too, and Wiley would have bet his next paycheck that it wasn't a Kool-aid ring. It looked like mud or paint, but it was probably blood.
Jason remained silent as the grave.
“Jason, none of us believe that you killed your friends. You,”
“You're wrong,”
Wiley had been fiddling with the remote, trying not to look at the kid's hands, but when he spoke, he looked up. Jason was still staring at the wall, but his head was shaking as his teeth chattered together. The kid looked like he was staring into the mouth of hell instead of the creme-colored wall of the interrogation room. Wiley almost didn't want to ask him what he had seen, but he needed to know. He needed to know how this kid had killed two other kids, one of whom was bigger than him by a head and sixty pounds.
“Would you like to elaborate?” Wiley asked.
He didn't think the kid would for a minute, but finally, he just reached slowly and pushed play on the remote. He kept looking at Wiley like he thought he might slap his hand, but when he let him get all the way across the table unsmacked, he relaxed a little. The video went on as they walked through the woods, joking and laughing as the woods lived their quiet existence around them.
“We went in at eight, just after Kai's mom went to work. She wouldn't have liked us going into the South Woods, but we wanted to investigate Makaro House. We wanted to do it for our first episode, but Moody said it was something we should work up to. The Makaro House was something big, and we needed to be ready for it. Turned out we weren't.”
On the screen, the kids kept walking through the woods, checking their compass and making their way carefully through the thick brush. They were still chattering, talking about what they might find when they got there, and whether they would find the clearing or see the mysterious mansion that people talked about sometimes. Legend said that a ghostly manor appeared in the clearing sometimes, the ghost of the house and that people who went inside were never seen again. Wiley didn't believe that, but as a kid, he had to admit that the clearing where the house had sat was spooky. All the wood had long ago rotted, the stones taken away for use in other things, but the land just felt wrong. Wiley had never been there after dark, but people claimed to hear footsteps and see things after the sun went down.
Wiley pushed fast forward on the tape and watched as the kids plodded on and on.
Jason wished that he could have sped through that part of the trip.
They had set out at eight, waving to Kai's mom as she pulled out of the driveway. The packs had been pulled out of the garage after she was down the road a piece, and the three set out for the woods. They knew the rough direction of the Makaro House, but no one really came upon it in the same way. Danny Foster had said it was a three-mile walk from the forest's edge to the property, but Jamie had claimed that he and his friends had walked for what seemed like hours.
“When we found it, though,” he said, “we found the house instead of an empty lot. We kept daring each other to go in, but we left when someone lit a fire on the grounds.”
Jason and his friends were hoping to find the house instead of the lot, and as their walk turned into a hike, Kai stopped and looked at the compass.
“We should have gotten there by now.”
Moody chuckled, “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.”
“Can't be,” Kai protested, “The directions are to go south into the south woods for three miles. Then you'll come to the clearing where Makaro House once sat.”
Jason didn't want to jinx it, but at the time he thought that boded well for them finding the house.
They kept walking, Kai good for an endless stream of conversation, and as the sun began to set, Jason found he was out of breath. His tongue felt like leather as it stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the lunch they had brought had been eaten hours ago. Moody had argued that they should turn around and head back, but Jason had finally vocalized that this could mean they were going to find the house instead of an empty lot.
He was hopeful right until they got what they wanted
When the sun began to go down, Wiley knit his brows together.
“I thought you and your friends were only in the woods for a few hours?”
Jason shook his head slowly, “We were, and we weren't. The time on the camera says we walked for eight hours before I turned it off, but when I got picked up by the side of the road, it was barely noon.”
Wiley pursed his lips, “How is that possible?”
The video cut out, the battery in the camera having been exhausted, and Jason nodded at the screen.
“Those batteries have a max life of three hours. Dad said it was the best battery they had when he ordered it for me, and it was pretty expensive. There's no way one of those batteries could have recorded for eight hours, but it did.”
The recording came back on, and Wiley was shocked to see that they were standing on the lawn of an old Gothic mansion. The sun setting behind the house made a perfect backdrop for the shot, and the boys were oooing and ahhing appreciatively. None of them seemed to believe what they were seeing, the whole thing a little otherworldly, and there seemed to be some argument about who was going to approach the house first.
“Is that,” Wiley stopped to wet his lips,” it can't be. The Makaro House burned down hundreds of years ago.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the wall, “in all its glory.”
And oh, what glory there had been in it.
Moody had gawped at the house as he had never seen one before.
“No way, there is no way.”
“That's impossible,” Kai breathed, “that house burned to the ground before our father's fathers were even thought of.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, mirroring his later statement, though he could not know it, “in all its glory.”
As the sun set behind it, Jason thought it looked even spookier than it would at night. The mansion rose like an obelisk towards the sky, its towered roofs looking naked without flags or pinions. The boys stood at the edge, trying to shame or bluster one of the others into going there first, but in the end, Jason took the first step. The others looked surprised at his boldness, but they followed closely after, not wanting to be thought less of.
Jason expected the house to disintegrate as he approached, an illusion or a trick of the light, but as his foot came to rest on the boards of the old house, he felt their solidity and continued to climb.
When the doors opened for them, the broad double doors swinging jauntily on their hinges, the three boys pulled back as they prepared to run.
The camera captured their indecision, the portal yawning wide as it waited to receive them, and Jason seemed to surprise even himself as he came forward to investigate it.
“Jason, What if it's a trap?”
“This whole place shouldn't exist, and if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to explore it, you're wrong."
Jason went in, pausing just inside the doors as if waiting for them to crash shut.
When they didn't, Moody followed him and Kai brought up the rear.
Makaro House lived up to its Gothic exterior, the inside full of soft dark velvet and antique furniture. There was a fire burning in the hearth inside the sitting room, tables spread with books in the library, and as they came up the long hall that led towards what was undoubtedly a dining room, Jason began to smell something. It was something like a stew or maybe a roast, and the smell of meat brought them to the dining room. A long table sat in the middle, eight chairs on each side of it, and at the end sat a wrinkled old man eating soup from a bowl.
It was hard to tell before they had gotten close, but the old man looked like he might be Native American. He was dressed in hides, feathers adorning his head and necklace, and he wore a beaded necklace with bones and claws on it. He looked up as they approached, glowering at them evenly, before returning to his meal. He ignored the boys, all three standing back apprehensively before Jason found the courage to speak.
“Excuse me, sir. Is this your house?”
The spoon froze on the way to his mouth, and the old man looked like he'd been slapped.
“My house?” he asked, his voice sounding thin and whispery, “No, child, but it was paid for by my people. We paid with our blood, we paid with our lives, and in the end, the cost was high. I took some of that cost from the previous owner of this home, and now it's only me who lives here.”
Kai made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, like a dog trying to tell its owner that something wasn't safe, and Jason understood the feeling.
“Well, we'll leave you to it then. We didn't mean to,”
“Leave?” the old man said, sounding amused, “oh no. No one leaves Makaro House until they've played the game. It was always a way for our warriors to test their metal, and I have so longed to see it played again. Will you join me? If not, I'm afraid you might find it quite hard to leave.”
Moody took a step back, and Jason heard his heavy footsteps on the carpet as he tried to retreat.
“What's the game?” Jason asked, figuring they could outrun this old coyote if it came down to it.
Jason would wonder why he had thought of him that way, but he didn't have time to ponder it then.
“Choose your piece from my necklace,” the old man said, slipping it off and laying it on the table, “Claw, Talon, or Fang.”
“Then what?” Moody asked, Kai moving behind him as if afraid to come too close.
“Then we start the game.” the old man said, smiling toothily.
For an old man, he certainly had a lot of sharp teeth.
“Okay,” Moody said, walking forward as Kai followed in his wake, “I choose claw.”
“Talon,” said Kai, reaching out to touch it.
“Fang,” said Jason, and as he put his hand out, he felt a sudden, violent shifting in his guts.
He was shrinking, the world moving rapidly all around him. He was smaller, but also more than he was, and he was trapped. His legs scrabbled at the thing that held him, and he tore it to pieces as he freed himself. He heard a loud roar and something big rose up before him. The bear was massive, ragged bits of something hanging from him, and Jason was afraid that he would kill him before he could get fully free of his snare. Something screeched then, flying at the bear's face and attacking him. Jason saw blood run down the snout of the bear, and as it tried to get the bird, a large hawk, off its face, Jason circled and looked for an opening. He was low, on all fours, and he could smell the hot blood as it coursed down the bear's muzzle. Blood and meat and fear and desire mingled in him, and as something laughed, he turned and saw a large coyote sitting at the table. Its grin was huge, its snout longer than any snout had a right to be, and he was laughing in a strange half-animal/half-man way.
The hawk suddenly fell before Jason, twitching and gasping as it died, and he knew the time to strike was now.
Jason leaped on the bear, its arms trying to crush him but not able to find purchase. He sank his teeth into the bear's throat, and for a moment he was afraid he wouldn't make it through all that thick fur. The bear tried to bring its claws to bear, but as the wolf worried at it with its fangs, he was rewarded with a mouth full of hot blood. The bear kept trying to rake him with its claws, but its movements were becoming less coordinated. When it fell, the whole room shook with the sound of its thunder, and Jason rolled off it as it lay still.
“Bravo, bravo,” cried the coyote, clapping its paws together in celebration, “Well fought, young wolf, well fought.”
Jason took a step towards him, but suddenly he was falling. It was as if a whirlpool had opened up beneath him and he was being sucked into it. Jason thrashed and snarled, trying to get his balance, but he was powerless against the pull as it flung him down and into the depths of some strange and terrible abyss.
He came to in the empty clearing where the house had been, and that was where he found his friends.
Wiley rewound the tape, not quite sure what to make of this.
“So this strange man offered to play a game, and then he changed you three into animals?”
Jason nodded, looking like one of those birds that dip into a glass of water, “I picked Fang, so I was the wolf. The game wasn't fair, we didn't know what we were doing, but I still killed Moody. I killed both of them because I had been the one to approach the house first. I killed them when I agreed to play the game. It's my fault, I'm a murderer.”
Wiley wasn't so sure, but it was hard to argue with the evidence. The video showed Jason dropping the camera and then suddenly there was a lot of snarling and screeching. Wiley heard the animals fighting, but he heard something else too. Something was laughing, really having a good belly chuckle, and it sounded like a hyena. He couldn't see it, it was all lost amongst the carpet, but suddenly that carpet had turned into grass, and the camera was lying outside in the midday sun. Someone got up, someone sobbed and moaned out in negation, and then they walked away.
That was where the video ended.
In the end, Jason was sent for psychiatric evaluation and the whole thing was chalked up to a drug-induced episode. Jason and his friends were drugged by an old man in the woods and while under the influence of an unknown substance, a substance that didn't show up on any toxicology screening, they killed each other. Blood was found on Jason, blood belonging to Marshall Moody, but blood from the fingernails of Moody was determined to belong to Kai Dillon, which really helped push the narrative that Detective Wiley was working with. He told the press to report an old man in the woods who was drugging people and pushed the stranger danger talks a little harder than usual that year on school visits.
After that day, the tape he took from Jason Weeks was never seen again, but Wiley believed that the boys had run up against something they weren't prepared for. When John Makaro had led the extermination of the Native People that dwelt on his land, he had angered something he wasn't prepared for either. Wiley's grandmother had liked to tell stories about Coyote, the trickster god, and how he could be as fierce as he was cunning when he needed to be. Wiley didn't think they would ever find an old man out there in the woods, but he didn't doubt others would find him.
Coyote liked his games, especially when the players were people he saw as interlopers.
Makaro House remained a town legend, and Wiley had little doubt that those foolish enough to enter would be presented with the same game these three boys had been given.
Wiley shuddered to think how the next challenge might go when Coyote needed more amusement.
Makaro House
“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”

“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”
The video was shot in shaky cam, the footage hard to watch without getting a little seasick. Officer Wiley, Detective Wiley now, had seen a lot in his time on the force, but a double homicide perpetrated by this fourteen-year-old kid in front of him was something he hoped he would never see. A double homicide, and carried out against two of his best friends, at that. The two kids in question, Marshal Moody and Kai Dillon, had been friends with Jason Weeks since elementary school, and there had never been any reports of violence or any other alarming behavior, at least none reported to the police. The boys had operated a YouTube channel, JMK Occult, for the last two years, and while their content was pretty typical for kids online, they had been uploading steadily every week since their first video about a strange deer in the North Woods around Cadderly.
Hell, Wiley even watched their stuff sometimes when he was bored.
People in the community knew them, and this was out of character for any of them.
Wiley paused the video, the three boys blundering through the South Woods and chattering like a pack of squirrels, and looked at Jason.
Jason, Jay to his friends, looked like he had aged a decade. He had a gaunt look usually reserved for soldiers who come back from war. His hair had been long and blonde for as long as anyone had known him, but the kid sitting here now was as bald as an egg and his scalp looked scoured instead of shaved. The shirt he had been wearing in the video was gone. He was still wearing the ring of it around his neck, the stretched fabric like a collar, and the jeans he wore were stained and ragged in places that looked fresh. He'd been found with no shoes or socks, but he was wearing the orange flip-flops of a jail resident now.
Wiley knew his parents wanted to bail him out, but he wasn't sure if the judge was going to extend him bail or not, given the nature of his crime.
The way those kids had been ripped apart was something that would haunt him for a long time.
“So, Jason, Officer Russel tells me that someone picked you up beside the road and you told them that your friends were dead and that you had killed them. Is that true?”
Jason nodded, not speaking a word as he continued to stare at the wall.
The woman in question was Darla Hughes, a mother of three who had stopped when she saw a young teenage boy walking on the side of the road in the state he was currently in. Stories of kidnapping and kids held in basements for months while God knew what happened to them were clear in the public consciousness. Darla thought she had found some kid who had escaped his situation, and when she stopped to help him, she said the poor lamb had said eight words and then nothing else.
“He said, my friends are dead, and I killed them.”
They had found the kids in a clearing in the woods about three miles in, a site he was familiar with.
How many times had he and his friends gone looking for the Makaro House?
Everyone in Cadderly knew about Makaro House, and most people's childhoods had been spent looking for it. John Makaro, a prominent figure in Cadderly's history, had been a prominent importer and exporter in England. He had come to America before the Revolutionary War to try to set up a similar business here, and Cadderly had been a large enough port to satisfy his needs without being so big that a new face would be lost. He established a manor in the South Woods, despite being told that it was Indian Land, and the bill of sale did very little to dispatch the native tribe that was living there. He survived two raids by the natives somehow, but his wife and daughter were not so lucky the second time. As such, he rallied a mob of townspeople to go into the woods and help him flush out the natives who were living there. The raid took weeks, but by the end, they had killed or scattered every member of the tribe that lived there.
Satisfied, Mr. Makaro built his lavish estates there, but strange things surrounded it from the first. Workers went missing, people reported strange lights and sounds after dark, and a shriveled figure in skins and feathers could be seen lurking after moonrise. Animals on the property acted strangely, and sometimes people found wolves or bears on the grounds. Usually, they were in a rage, but sometimes they simply fled as if they had been drawn there and weren't sure what to do now that they were. Once the house was finished, John Makaro had a hard time keeping staff. None of the hands he had hired to keep his livestock would stay more than a week, and they all refused to stay on the property after dark. His servants would likewise disappear suddenly, and none of them would stay at night besides his butler, who had been with him for years. People said that Mr. Makaro talked about hearing chanting in the house and seeing strange shadows, and when even his butler disappeared one evening, John locked the doors and stayed in the house alone for a long time. People who came to see him said he could be seen wandering the halls like a ghost, calling out for people only he could see.
When his mansion was seen in full blaze one night, those who were first on the scene said they saw a lone man silhouetted in the flames, his feathers and skins on full display.
He disappeared when they got close, but he had been seen by many in the years to come.
“What did you see out there, Jason?”
Jason continued to stare at the wall.
“I wanna help you, kid, but you have to help yourself first.”
He couldn't help but glance down at the kid's fingers as he left them splayed on that table like sleeping spiders. The nails were dirty, the beds crusty with something like blood, and several of them were torn and ragged. There was grime around his mouth too, and Wiley would have bet his next paycheck that it wasn't a Kool-aid ring. It looked like mud or paint, but it was probably blood.
Jason remained silent as the grave.
“Jason, none of us believe that you killed your friends. You,”
“You're wrong,”
Wiley had been fiddling with the remote, trying not to look at the kid's hands, but when he spoke, he looked up. Jason was still staring at the wall, but his head was shaking as his teeth chattered together. The kid looked like he was staring into the mouth of hell instead of the creme-colored wall of the interrogation room. Wiley almost didn't want to ask him what he had seen, but he needed to know. He needed to know how this kid had killed two other kids, one of whom was bigger than him by a head and sixty pounds.
“Would you like to elaborate?” Wiley asked.
He didn't think the kid would for a minute, but finally, he just reached slowly and pushed play on the remote. He kept looking at Wiley like he thought he might slap his hand, but when he let him get all the way across the table unsmacked, he relaxed a little. The video went on as they walked through the woods, joking and laughing as the woods lived their quiet existence around them.
“We went in at eight, just after Kai's mom went to work. She wouldn't have liked us going into the South Woods, but we wanted to investigate Makaro House. We wanted to do it for our first episode, but Moody said it was something we should work up to. The Makaro House was something big, and we needed to be ready for it. Turned out we weren't.”
On the screen, the kids kept walking through the woods, checking their compass and making their way carefully through the thick brush. They were still chattering, talking about what they might find when they got there, and whether they would find the clearing or see the mysterious mansion that people talked about sometimes. Legend said that a ghostly manor appeared in the clearing sometimes, the ghost of the house and that people who went inside were never seen again. Wiley didn't believe that, but as a kid, he had to admit that the clearing where the house had sat was spooky. All the wood had long ago rotted, the stones taken away for use in other things, but the land just felt wrong. Wiley had never been there after dark, but people claimed to hear footsteps and see things after the sun went down.
Wiley pushed fast forward on the tape and watched as the kids plodded on and on.
Jason wished that he could have sped through that part of the trip.
They had set out at eight, waving to Kai's mom as she pulled out of the driveway. The packs had been pulled out of the garage after she was down the road a piece, and the three set out for the woods. They knew the rough direction of the Makaro House, but no one really came upon it in the same way. Danny Foster had said it was a three-mile walk from the forest's edge to the property, but Jamie had claimed that he and his friends had walked for what seemed like hours.
“When we found it, though,” he said, “we found the house instead of an empty lot. We kept daring each other to go in, but we left when someone lit a fire on the grounds.”
Jason and his friends were hoping to find the house instead of the lot, and as their walk turned into a hike, Kai stopped and looked at the compass.
“We should have gotten there by now.”
Moody chuckled, “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.”
“Can't be,” Kai protested, “The directions are to go south into the south woods for three miles. Then you'll come to the clearing where Makaro House once sat.”
Jason didn't want to jinx it, but at the time he thought that boded well for them finding the house.
They kept walking, Kai good for an endless stream of conversation, and as the sun began to set, Jason found he was out of breath. His tongue felt like leather as it stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the lunch they had brought had been eaten hours ago. Moody had argued that they should turn around and head back, but Jason had finally vocalized that this could mean they were going to find the house instead of an empty lot.
He was hopeful right until they got what they wanted
When the sun began to go down, Wiley knit his brows together.
“I thought you and your friends were only in the woods for a few hours?”
Jason shook his head slowly, “We were, and we weren't. The time on the camera says we walked for eight hours before I turned it off, but when I got picked up by the side of the road, it was barely noon.”
Wiley pursed his lips, “How is that possible?”
The video cut out, the battery in the camera having been exhausted, and Jason nodded at the screen.
“Those batteries have a max life of three hours. Dad said it was the best battery they had when he ordered it for me, and it was pretty expensive. There's no way one of those batteries could have recorded for eight hours, but it did.”
The recording came back on, and Wiley was shocked to see that they were standing on the lawn of an old Gothic mansion. The sun setting behind the house made a perfect backdrop for the shot, and the boys were oooing and ahhing appreciatively. None of them seemed to believe what they were seeing, the whole thing a little otherworldly, and there seemed to be some argument about who was going to approach the house first.
“Is that,” Wiley stopped to wet his lips,” it can't be. The Makaro House burned down hundreds of years ago.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the wall, “in all its glory.”
And oh, what glory there had been in it.
Moody had gawped at the house as he had never seen one before.
“No way, there is no way.”
“That's impossible,” Kai breathed, “that house burned to the ground before our father's fathers were even thought of.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, mirroring his later statement, though he could not know it, “in all its glory.”
As the sun set behind it, Jason thought it looked even spookier than it would at night. The mansion rose like an obelisk towards the sky, its towered roofs looking naked without flags or pinions. The boys stood at the edge, trying to shame or bluster one of the others into going there first, but in the end, Jason took the first step. The others looked surprised at his boldness, but they followed closely after, not wanting to be thought less of.
Jason expected the house to disintegrate as he approached, an illusion or a trick of the light, but as his foot came to rest on the boards of the old house, he felt their solidity and continued to climb.
When the doors opened for them, the broad double doors swinging jauntily on their hinges, the three boys pulled back as they prepared to run.
The camera captured their indecision, the portal yawning wide as it waited to receive them, and Jason seemed to surprise even himself as he came forward to investigate it.
“Jason, What if it's a trap?”
“This whole place shouldn't exist, and if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to explore it, you're wrong."
Jason went in, pausing just inside the doors as if waiting for them to crash shut.
When they didn't, Moody followed him and Kai brought up the rear.
Makaro House lived up to its Gothic exterior, the inside full of soft dark velvet and antique furniture. There was a fire burning in the hearth inside the sitting room, tables spread with books in the library, and as they came up the long hall that led towards what was undoubtedly a dining room, Jason began to smell something. It was something like a stew or maybe a roast, and the smell of meat brought them to the dining room. A long table sat in the middle, eight chairs on each side of it, and at the end sat a wrinkled old man eating soup from a bowl.
It was hard to tell before they had gotten close, but the old man looked like he might be Native American. He was dressed in hides, feathers adorning his head and necklace, and he wore a beaded necklace with bones and claws on it. He looked up as they approached, glowering at them evenly, before returning to his meal. He ignored the boys, all three standing back apprehensively before Jason found the courage to speak.
“Excuse me, sir. Is this your house?”
The spoon froze on the way to his mouth, and the old man looked like he'd been slapped.
“My house?” he asked, his voice sounding thin and whispery, “No, child, but it was paid for by my people. We paid with our blood, we paid with our lives, and in the end, the cost was high. I took some of that cost from the previous owner of this home, and now it's only me who lives here.”
Kai made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, like a dog trying to tell its owner that something wasn't safe, and Jason understood the feeling.
“Well, we'll leave you to it then. We didn't mean to,”
“Leave?” the old man said, sounding amused, “oh no. No one leaves Makaro House until they've played the game. It was always a way for our warriors to test their metal, and I have so longed to see it played again. Will you join me? If not, I'm afraid you might find it quite hard to leave.”
Moody took a step back, and Jason heard his heavy footsteps on the carpet as he tried to retreat.
“What's the game?” Jason asked, figuring they could outrun this old coyote if it came down to it.
Jason would wonder why he had thought of him that way, but he didn't have time to ponder it then.
“Choose your piece from my necklace,” the old man said, slipping it off and laying it on the table, “Claw, Talon, or Fang.”
“Then what?” Moody asked, Kai moving behind him as if afraid to come too close.
“Then we start the game.” the old man said, smiling toothily.
For an old man, he certainly had a lot of sharp teeth.
“Okay,” Moody said, walking forward as Kai followed in his wake, “I choose claw.”
“Talon,” said Kai, reaching out to touch it.
“Fang,” said Jason, and as he put his hand out, he felt a sudden, violent shifting in his guts.
He was shrinking, the world moving rapidly all around him. He was smaller, but also more than he was, and he was trapped. His legs scrabbled at the thing that held him, and he tore it to pieces as he freed himself. He heard a loud roar and something big rose up before him. The bear was massive, ragged bits of something hanging from him, and Jason was afraid that he would kill him before he could get fully free of his snare. Something screeched then, flying at the bear's face and attacking him. Jason saw blood run down the snout of the bear, and as it tried to get the bird, a large hawk, off its face, Jason circled and looked for an opening. He was low, on all fours, and he could smell the hot blood as it coursed down the bear's muzzle. Blood and meat and fear and desire mingled in him, and as something laughed, he turned and saw a large coyote sitting at the table. Its grin was huge, its snout longer than any snout had a right to be, and he was laughing in a strange half-animal/half-man way.
The hawk suddenly fell before Jason, twitching and gasping as it died, and he knew the time to strike was now.
Jason leaped on the bear, its arms trying to crush him but not able to find purchase. He sank his teeth into the bear's throat, and for a moment he was afraid he wouldn't make it through all that thick fur. The bear tried to bring its claws to bear, but as the wolf worried at it with its fangs, he was rewarded with a mouth full of hot blood. The bear kept trying to rake him with its claws, but its movements were becoming less coordinated. When it fell, the whole room shook with the sound of its thunder, and Jason rolled off it as it lay still.
“Bravo, bravo,” cried the coyote, clapping its paws together in celebration, “Well fought, young wolf, well fought.”
Jason took a step towards him, but suddenly he was falling. It was as if a whirlpool had opened up beneath him and he was being sucked into it. Jason thrashed and snarled, trying to get his balance, but he was powerless against the pull as it flung him down and into the depths of some strange and terrible abyss.
He came to in the empty clearing where the house had been, and that was where he found his friends.
Wiley rewound the tape, not quite sure what to make of this.
“So this strange man offered to play a game, and then he changed you three into animals?”
Jason nodded, looking like one of those birds that dip into a glass of water, “I picked Fang, so I was the wolf. The game wasn't fair, we didn't know what we were doing, but I still killed Moody. I killed both of them because I had been the one to approach the house first. I killed them when I agreed to play the game. It's my fault, I'm a murderer.”
Wiley wasn't so sure, but it was hard to argue with the evidence. The video showed Jason dropping the camera and then suddenly there was a lot of snarling and screeching. Wiley heard the animals fighting, but he heard something else too. Something was laughing, really having a good belly chuckle, and it sounded like a hyena. He couldn't see it, it was all lost amongst the carpet, but suddenly that carpet had turned into grass, and the camera was lying outside in the midday sun. Someone got up, someone sobbed and moaned out in negation, and then they walked away.
That was where the video ended.
In the end, Jason was sent for psychiatric evaluation and the whole thing was chalked up to a drug-induced episode. Jason and his friends were drugged by an old man in the woods and while under the influence of an unknown substance, a substance that didn't show up on any toxicology screening, they killed each other. Blood was found on Jason, blood belonging to Marshall Moody, but blood from the fingernails of Moody was determined to belong to Kai Dillon, which really helped push the narrative that Detective Wiley was working with. He told the press to report an old man in the woods who was drugging people and pushed the stranger danger talks a little harder than usual that year on school visits.
After that day, the tape he took from Jason Weeks was never seen again, but Wiley believed that the boys had run up against something they weren't prepared for. When John Makaro had led the extermination of the Native People that dwelt on his land, he had angered something he wasn't prepared for either. Wiley's grandmother had liked to tell stories about Coyote, the trickster god, and how he could be as fierce as he was cunning when he needed to be. Wiley didn't think they would ever find an old man out there in the woods, but he didn't doubt others would find him.
Coyote liked his games, especially when the players were people he saw as interlopers.
Makaro House remained a town legend, and Wiley had little doubt that those foolish enough to enter would be presented with the same game these three boys had been given.
Wiley shuddered to think how the next challenge might go when Coyote needed more amusement.
Makaro House
“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”

“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”
The video was shot in shaky cam, the footage hard to watch without getting a little seasick. Officer Wiley, Detective Wiley now, had seen a lot in his time on the force, but a double homicide perpetrated by this fourteen-year-old kid in front of him was something he hoped he would never see. A double homicide, and carried out against two of his best friends, at that. The two kids in question, Marshal Moody and Kai Dillon, had been friends with Jason Weeks since elementary school, and there had never been any reports of violence or any other alarming behavior, at least none reported to the police. The boys had operated a YouTube channel, JMK Occult, for the last two years, and while their content was pretty typical for kids online, they had been uploading steadily every week since their first video about a strange deer in the North Woods around Cadderly.
Hell, Wiley even watched their stuff sometimes when he was bored.
People in the community knew them, and this was out of character for any of them.
Wiley paused the video, the three boys blundering through the South Woods and chattering like a pack of squirrels, and looked at Jason.
Jason, Jay to his friends, looked like he had aged a decade. He had a gaunt look usually reserved for soldiers who come back from war. His hair had been long and blonde for as long as anyone had known him, but the kid sitting here now was as bald as an egg and his scalp looked scoured instead of shaved. The shirt he had been wearing in the video was gone. He was still wearing the ring of it around his neck, the stretched fabric like a collar, and the jeans he wore were stained and ragged in places that looked fresh. He'd been found with no shoes or socks, but he was wearing the orange flip-flops of a jail resident now.
Wiley knew his parents wanted to bail him out, but he wasn't sure if the judge was going to extend him bail or not, given the nature of his crime.
The way those kids had been ripped apart was something that would haunt him for a long time.
“So, Jason, Officer Russel tells me that someone picked you up beside the road and you told them that your friends were dead and that you had killed them. Is that true?”
Jason nodded, not speaking a word as he continued to stare at the wall.
The woman in question was Darla Hughes, a mother of three who had stopped when she saw a young teenage boy walking on the side of the road in the state he was currently in. Stories of kidnapping and kids held in basements for months while God knew what happened to them were clear in the public consciousness. Darla thought she had found some kid who had escaped his situation, and when she stopped to help him, she said the poor lamb had said eight words and then nothing else.
“He said, my friends are dead, and I killed them.”
They had found the kids in a clearing in the woods about three miles in, a site he was familiar with.
How many times had he and his friends gone looking for the Makaro House?
Everyone in Cadderly knew about Makaro House, and most people's childhoods had been spent looking for it. John Makaro, a prominent figure in Cadderly's history, had been a prominent importer and exporter in England. He had come to America before the Revolutionary War to try to set up a similar business here, and Cadderly had been a large enough port to satisfy his needs without being so big that a new face would be lost. He established a manor in the South Woods, despite being told that it was Indian Land, and the bill of sale did very little to dispatch the native tribe that was living there. He survived two raids by the natives somehow, but his wife and daughter were not so lucky the second time. As such, he rallied a mob of townspeople to go into the woods and help him flush out the natives who were living there. The raid took weeks, but by the end, they had killed or scattered every member of the tribe that lived there.
Satisfied, Mr. Makaro built his lavish estates there, but strange things surrounded it from the first. Workers went missing, people reported strange lights and sounds after dark, and a shriveled figure in skins and feathers could be seen lurking after moonrise. Animals on the property acted strangely, and sometimes people found wolves or bears on the grounds. Usually, they were in a rage, but sometimes they simply fled as if they had been drawn there and weren't sure what to do now that they were. Once the house was finished, John Makaro had a hard time keeping staff. None of the hands he had hired to keep his livestock would stay more than a week, and they all refused to stay on the property after dark. His servants would likewise disappear suddenly, and none of them would stay at night besides his butler, who had been with him for years. People said that Mr. Makaro talked about hearing chanting in the house and seeing strange shadows, and when even his butler disappeared one evening, John locked the doors and stayed in the house alone for a long time. People who came to see him said he could be seen wandering the halls like a ghost, calling out for people only he could see.
When his mansion was seen in full blaze one night, those who were first on the scene said they saw a lone man silhouetted in the flames, his feathers and skins on full display.
He disappeared when they got close, but he had been seen by many in the years to come.
“What did you see out there, Jason?”
Jason continued to stare at the wall.
“I wanna help you, kid, but you have to help yourself first.”
He couldn't help but glance down at the kid's fingers as he left them splayed on that table like sleeping spiders. The nails were dirty, the beds crusty with something like blood, and several of them were torn and ragged. There was grime around his mouth too, and Wiley would have bet his next paycheck that it wasn't a Kool-aid ring. It looked like mud or paint, but it was probably blood.
Jason remained silent as the grave.
“Jason, none of us believe that you killed your friends. You,”
“You're wrong,”
Wiley had been fiddling with the remote, trying not to look at the kid's hands, but when he spoke, he looked up. Jason was still staring at the wall, but his head was shaking as his teeth chattered together. The kid looked like he was staring into the mouth of hell instead of the creme-colored wall of the interrogation room. Wiley almost didn't want to ask him what he had seen, but he needed to know. He needed to know how this kid had killed two other kids, one of whom was bigger than him by a head and sixty pounds.
“Would you like to elaborate?” Wiley asked.
He didn't think the kid would for a minute, but finally, he just reached slowly and pushed play on the remote. He kept looking at Wiley like he thought he might slap his hand, but when he let him get all the way across the table unsmacked, he relaxed a little. The video went on as they walked through the woods, joking and laughing as the woods lived their quiet existence around them.
“We went in at eight, just after Kai's mom went to work. She wouldn't have liked us going into the South Woods, but we wanted to investigate Makaro House. We wanted to do it for our first episode, but Moody said it was something we should work up to. The Makaro House was something big, and we needed to be ready for it. Turned out we weren't.”
On the screen, the kids kept walking through the woods, checking their compass and making their way carefully through the thick brush. They were still chattering, talking about what they might find when they got there, and whether they would find the clearing or see the mysterious mansion that people talked about sometimes. Legend said that a ghostly manor appeared in the clearing sometimes, the ghost of the house and that people who went inside were never seen again. Wiley didn't believe that, but as a kid, he had to admit that the clearing where the house had sat was spooky. All the wood had long ago rotted, the stones taken away for use in other things, but the land just felt wrong. Wiley had never been there after dark, but people claimed to hear footsteps and see things after the sun went down.
Wiley pushed fast forward on the tape and watched as the kids plodded on and on.
Jason wished that he could have sped through that part of the trip.
They had set out at eight, waving to Kai's mom as she pulled out of the driveway. The packs had been pulled out of the garage after she was down the road a piece, and the three set out for the woods. They knew the rough direction of the Makaro House, but no one really came upon it in the same way. Danny Foster had said it was a three-mile walk from the forest's edge to the property, but Jamie had claimed that he and his friends had walked for what seemed like hours.
“When we found it, though,” he said, “we found the house instead of an empty lot. We kept daring each other to go in, but we left when someone lit a fire on the grounds.”
Jason and his friends were hoping to find the house instead of the lot, and as their walk turned into a hike, Kai stopped and looked at the compass.
“We should have gotten there by now.”
Moody chuckled, “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.”
“Can't be,” Kai protested, “The directions are to go south into the south woods for three miles. Then you'll come to the clearing where Makaro House once sat.”
Jason didn't want to jinx it, but at the time he thought that boded well for them finding the house.
They kept walking, Kai good for an endless stream of conversation, and as the sun began to set, Jason found he was out of breath. His tongue felt like leather as it stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the lunch they had brought had been eaten hours ago. Moody had argued that they should turn around and head back, but Jason had finally vocalized that this could mean they were going to find the house instead of an empty lot.
He was hopeful right until they got what they wanted
When the sun began to go down, Wiley knit his brows together.
“I thought you and your friends were only in the woods for a few hours?”
Jason shook his head slowly, “We were, and we weren't. The time on the camera says we walked for eight hours before I turned it off, but when I got picked up by the side of the road, it was barely noon.”
Wiley pursed his lips, “How is that possible?”
The video cut out, the battery in the camera having been exhausted, and Jason nodded at the screen.
“Those batteries have a max life of three hours. Dad said it was the best battery they had when he ordered it for me, and it was pretty expensive. There's no way one of those batteries could have recorded for eight hours, but it did.”
The recording came back on, and Wiley was shocked to see that they were standing on the lawn of an old Gothic mansion. The sun setting behind the house made a perfect backdrop for the shot, and the boys were oooing and ahhing appreciatively. None of them seemed to believe what they were seeing, the whole thing a little otherworldly, and there seemed to be some argument about who was going to approach the house first.
“Is that,” Wiley stopped to wet his lips,” it can't be. The Makaro House burned down hundreds of years ago.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the wall, “in all its glory.”
And oh, what glory there had been in it.
Moody had gawped at the house as he had never seen one before.
“No way, there is no way.”
“That's impossible,” Kai breathed, “that house burned to the ground before our father's fathers were even thought of.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, mirroring his later statement, though he could not know it, “in all its glory.”
As the sun set behind it, Jason thought it looked even spookier than it would at night. The mansion rose like an obelisk towards the sky, its towered roofs looking naked without flags or pinions. The boys stood at the edge, trying to shame or bluster one of the others into going there first, but in the end, Jason took the first step. The others looked surprised at his boldness, but they followed closely after, not wanting to be thought less of.
Jason expected the house to disintegrate as he approached, an illusion or a trick of the light, but as his foot came to rest on the boards of the old house, he felt their solidity and continued to climb.
When the doors opened for them, the broad double doors swinging jauntily on their hinges, the three boys pulled back as they prepared to run.
The camera captured their indecision, the portal yawning wide as it waited to receive them, and Jason seemed to surprise even himself as he came forward to investigate it.
“Jason, What if it's a trap?”
“This whole place shouldn't exist, and if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to explore it, you're wrong."
Jason went in, pausing just inside the doors as if waiting for them to crash shut.
When they didn't, Moody followed him and Kai brought up the rear.
Makaro House lived up to its Gothic exterior, the inside full of soft dark velvet and antique furniture. There was a fire burning in the hearth inside the sitting room, tables spread with books in the library, and as they came up the long hall that led towards what was undoubtedly a dining room, Jason began to smell something. It was something like a stew or maybe a roast, and the smell of meat brought them to the dining room. A long table sat in the middle, eight chairs on each side of it, and at the end sat a wrinkled old man eating soup from a bowl.
It was hard to tell before they had gotten close, but the old man looked like he might be Native American. He was dressed in hides, feathers adorning his head and necklace, and he wore a beaded necklace with bones and claws on it. He looked up as they approached, glowering at them evenly, before returning to his meal. He ignored the boys, all three standing back apprehensively before Jason found the courage to speak.
“Excuse me, sir. Is this your house?”
The spoon froze on the way to his mouth, and the old man looked like he'd been slapped.
“My house?” he asked, his voice sounding thin and whispery, “No, child, but it was paid for by my people. We paid with our blood, we paid with our lives, and in the end, the cost was high. I took some of that cost from the previous owner of this home, and now it's only me who lives here.”
Kai made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, like a dog trying to tell its owner that something wasn't safe, and Jason understood the feeling.
“Well, we'll leave you to it then. We didn't mean to,”
“Leave?” the old man said, sounding amused, “oh no. No one leaves Makaro House until they've played the game. It was always a way for our warriors to test their metal, and I have so longed to see it played again. Will you join me? If not, I'm afraid you might find it quite hard to leave.”
Moody took a step back, and Jason heard his heavy footsteps on the carpet as he tried to retreat.
“What's the game?” Jason asked, figuring they could outrun this old coyote if it came down to it.
Jason would wonder why he had thought of him that way, but he didn't have time to ponder it then.
“Choose your piece from my necklace,” the old man said, slipping it off and laying it on the table, “Claw, Talon, or Fang.”
“Then what?” Moody asked, Kai moving behind him as if afraid to come too close.
“Then we start the game.” the old man said, smiling toothily.
For an old man, he certainly had a lot of sharp teeth.
“Okay,” Moody said, walking forward as Kai followed in his wake, “I choose claw.”
“Talon,” said Kai, reaching out to touch it.
“Fang,” said Jason, and as he put his hand out, he felt a sudden, violent shifting in his guts.
He was shrinking, the world moving rapidly all around him. He was smaller, but also more than he was, and he was trapped. His legs scrabbled at the thing that held him, and he tore it to pieces as he freed himself. He heard a loud roar and something big rose up before him. The bear was massive, ragged bits of something hanging from him, and Jason was afraid that he would kill him before he could get fully free of his snare. Something screeched then, flying at the bear's face and attacking him. Jason saw blood run down the snout of the bear, and as it tried to get the bird, a large hawk, off its face, Jason circled and looked for an opening. He was low, on all fours, and he could smell the hot blood as it coursed down the bear's muzzle. Blood and meat and fear and desire mingled in him, and as something laughed, he turned and saw a large coyote sitting at the table. Its grin was huge, its snout longer than any snout had a right to be, and he was laughing in a strange half-animal/half-man way.
The hawk suddenly fell before Jason, twitching and gasping as it died, and he knew the time to strike was now.
Jason leaped on the bear, its arms trying to crush him but not able to find purchase. He sank his teeth into the bear's throat, and for a moment he was afraid he wouldn't make it through all that thick fur. The bear tried to bring its claws to bear, but as the wolf worried at it with its fangs, he was rewarded with a mouth full of hot blood. The bear kept trying to rake him with its claws, but its movements were becoming less coordinated. When it fell, the whole room shook with the sound of its thunder, and Jason rolled off it as it lay still.
“Bravo, bravo,” cried the coyote, clapping its paws together in celebration, “Well fought, young wolf, well fought.”
Jason took a step towards him, but suddenly he was falling. It was as if a whirlpool had opened up beneath him and he was being sucked into it. Jason thrashed and snarled, trying to get his balance, but he was powerless against the pull as it flung him down and into the depths of some strange and terrible abyss.
He came to in the empty clearing where the house had been, and that was where he found his friends.
Wiley rewound the tape, not quite sure what to make of this.
“So this strange man offered to play a game, and then he changed you three into animals?”
Jason nodded, looking like one of those birds that dip into a glass of water, “I picked Fang, so I was the wolf. The game wasn't fair, we didn't know what we were doing, but I still killed Moody. I killed both of them because I had been the one to approach the house first. I killed them when I agreed to play the game. It's my fault, I'm a murderer.”
Wiley wasn't so sure, but it was hard to argue with the evidence. The video showed Jason dropping the camera and then suddenly there was a lot of snarling and screeching. Wiley heard the animals fighting, but he heard something else too. Something was laughing, really having a good belly chuckle, and it sounded like a hyena. He couldn't see it, it was all lost amongst the carpet, but suddenly that carpet had turned into grass, and the camera was lying outside in the midday sun. Someone got up, someone sobbed and moaned out in negation, and then they walked away.
That was where the video ended.
In the end, Jason was sent for psychiatric evaluation and the whole thing was chalked up to a drug-induced episode. Jason and his friends were drugged by an old man in the woods and while under the influence of an unknown substance, a substance that didn't show up on any toxicology screening, they killed each other. Blood was found on Jason, blood belonging to Marshall Moody, but blood from the fingernails of Moody was determined to belong to Kai Dillon, which really helped push the narrative that Detective Wiley was working with. He told the press to report an old man in the woods who was drugging people and pushed the stranger danger talks a little harder than usual that year on school visits.
After that day, the tape he took from Jason Weeks was never seen again, but Wiley believed that the boys had run up against something they weren't prepared for. When John Makaro had led the extermination of the Native People that dwelt on his land, he had angered something he wasn't prepared for either. Wiley's grandmother had liked to tell stories about Coyote, the trickster god, and how he could be as fierce as he was cunning when he needed to be. Wiley didn't think they would ever find an old man out there in the woods, but he didn't doubt others would find him.
Coyote liked his games, especially when the players were people he saw as interlopers.
Makaro House remained a town legend, and Wiley had little doubt that those foolish enough to enter would be presented with the same game these three boys had been given.
Wiley shuddered to think how the next challenge might go when Coyote needed more amusement.
Makaro House
“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”

What are my dominant and inferior functions exactly ?
What I’m sure about me is that I got big problems with sensation so I’m sure that I got my sensing function being low in my stack but I want to know if it’s Se or Si. Oftentimes I can forget my stuff at home and at times forgetting to give money to the cashier or then forgetting to take the change, and not taking care of my stuff in general, even breaking things sometimes and struggling with my physical surroundings, for example I’m pretty rigid with my moves, I’m being a trash dancer, struggling to be attentive of the environment around me and zoning out is something not rare with me, slow time reaction, slow in my moves and because of that I already received bad feedbacks at some jobs where you gotta be dynamic, but it’s funny cause as a kid I used to be a lot energetic and chaotic, I think it started to change when I went to a psychologist when I was a really young kid. Let’s say that if I’m going to the beach, it will mostly be just for chilling on a towel and listening the waves noise instead of doing physical activities that I don’t specially enjoy except for some special stuff(but I’m still in a good shape), my friends saying that I’m slow cause of that lol, people be calling me intelligent but
Also I’m really not punctual or organized usually, I’m only planning some goals on the long term but I’m never planning exactly what I’m going to do the day following the other one, even at the gym I’m going over there with no programs and all. I don’t really care about deadlines, schedules. Of course there is moments when I’ll be in time and when I will organize some things but this is not what I’m going to do on the regular.
And I can have some insecurities about my looks also, I want to look the best in front of others and absolutely not looking bad, I actually want to take care a lot about my physics so I can spend a lot for hairs, clothes, etc and I will feel miserable if I’m failing to look good. In general, my biggest insecurities tend to give bad experiences to people like giving a bad sex and also not being practical, it’s really something that I fear but I keep all of that to myself, I don’t wanna show any weaknesses to others. I would also like to be more organized, more disciplined and all but it’s not where my biggest insecurities will come from, even if it would help me a lot.
Now let’s focus on Ti-Fe axis or Te-Fi axis
I don’t really like useless conflicts or dramas even if I love to joking around and being sarcastic a lot for the fun of it but at the end I want to treat people fairly and equally, and not being personal. I can say some truths if I think it’s something needed depending the situation even if I know that it can hurt and if things are going too far but other than that I prefer harmony. I give nonchalant behavior that makes people think that I don’t care about anything (which is not 100% wrong, most of time I just mind my own business and I’m a laidback man) but I’m emotionally expressive (not that I share what I feel but I’m smiling when talking to people) so it balance the thing. Also I tend to prefer working by myself, not having a boss always behind telling me what to do because he might not share the same vision that me on a project, but instead I prefer working with others if it’s for something less professional and more fun like preparing a party, where there is no leaders and where we are all equal. I don’t care that much about being validated for my emotions by the way, I tend to keep things for myself when I might not be good and not saying to everyone that I feel sad or some, I’m somehow secretive about me in general and I’m not telling other people about my life, what I like, my opinions on things, etc until they ask me for it (and I won’t even tell about everything). I got some values and principles of course but it’s more like a mark of respect for other persons, so they seeing me as a trustable person and they telling me about their secrets because they know that I won’t talk bad on them. I can be seen as a wise or intelligent person when I share to others my vision of things and the world, I’m just being cautious to balance logic and feelings with my ideologies and thoughts.
For concluding, I’m just trying to reach the truth and knowing what inferior and dominant functions I got, I been struggling finding my own type.

“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”
The video was shot in shaky cam, the footage hard to watch without getting a little seasick. Officer Wiley, Detective Wiley now, had seen a lot in his time on the force, but a double homicide perpetrated by this fourteen-year-old kid in front of him was something he hoped he would never see. A double homicide, and carried out against two of his best friends, at that. The two kids in question, Marshal Moody and Kai Dillon, had been friends with Jason Weeks since elementary school, and there had never been any reports of violence or any other alarming behavior, at least none reported to the police. The boys had operated a YouTube channel, JMK Occult, for the last two years, and while their content was pretty typical for kids online, they had been uploading steadily every week since their first video about a strange deer in the North Woods around Cadderly.
Hell, Wiley even watched their stuff sometimes when he was bored.
People in the community knew them, and this was out of character for any of them.
Wiley paused the video, the three boys blundering through the South Woods and chattering like a pack of squirrels, and looked at Jason.
Jason, Jay to his friends, looked like he had aged a decade. He had a gaunt look usually reserved for soldiers who come back from war. His hair had been long and blonde for as long as anyone had known him, but the kid sitting here now was as bald as an egg and his scalp looked scoured instead of shaved. The shirt he had been wearing in the video was gone. He was still wearing the ring of it around his neck, the stretched fabric like a collar, and the jeans he wore were stained and ragged in places that looked fresh. He'd been found with no shoes or socks, but he was wearing the orange flip-flops of a jail resident now.
Wiley knew his parents wanted to bail him out, but he wasn't sure if the judge was going to extend him bail or not, given the nature of his crime.
The way those kids had been ripped apart was something that would haunt him for a long time.
“So, Jason, Officer Russel tells me that someone picked you up beside the road and you told them that your friends were dead and that you had killed them. Is that true?”
Jason nodded, not speaking a word as he continued to stare at the wall.
The woman in question was Darla Hughes, a mother of three who had stopped when she saw a young teenage boy walking on the side of the road in the state he was currently in. Stories of kidnapping and kids held in basements for months while God knew what happened to them were clear in the public consciousness. Darla thought she had found some kid who had escaped his situation, and when she stopped to help him, she said the poor lamb had said eight words and then nothing else.
“He said, my friends are dead, and I killed them.”
They had found the kids in a clearing in the woods about three miles in, a site he was familiar with.
How many times had he and his friends gone looking for the Makaro House?
Everyone in Cadderly knew about Makaro House, and most people's childhoods had been spent looking for it. John Makaro, a prominent figure in Cadderly's history, had been a prominent importer and exporter in England. He had come to America before the Revolutionary War to try to set up a similar business here, and Cadderly had been a large enough port to satisfy his needs without being so big that a new face would be lost. He established a manor in the South Woods, despite being told that it was Indian Land, and the bill of sale did very little to dispatch the native tribe that was living there. He survived two raids by the natives somehow, but his wife and daughter were not so lucky the second time. As such, he rallied a mob of townspeople to go into the woods and help him flush out the natives who were living there. The raid took weeks, but by the end, they had killed or scattered every member of the tribe that lived there.
Satisfied, Mr. Makaro built his lavish estates there, but strange things surrounded it from the first. Workers went missing, people reported strange lights and sounds after dark, and a shriveled figure in skins and feathers could be seen lurking after moonrise. Animals on the property acted strangely, and sometimes people found wolves or bears on the grounds. Usually, they were in a rage, but sometimes they simply fled as if they had been drawn there and weren't sure what to do now that they were. Once the house was finished, John Makaro had a hard time keeping staff. None of the hands he had hired to keep his livestock would stay more than a week, and they all refused to stay on the property after dark. His servants would likewise disappear suddenly, and none of them would stay at night besides his butler, who had been with him for years. People said that Mr. Makaro talked about hearing chanting in the house and seeing strange shadows, and when even his butler disappeared one evening, John locked the doors and stayed in the house alone for a long time. People who came to see him said he could be seen wandering the halls like a ghost, calling out for people only he could see.
When his mansion was seen in full blaze one night, those who were first on the scene said they saw a lone man silhouetted in the flames, his feathers and skins on full display.
He disappeared when they got close, but he had been seen by many in the years to come.
“What did you see out there, Jason?”
Jason continued to stare at the wall.
“I wanna help you, kid, but you have to help yourself first.”
He couldn't help but glance down at the kid's fingers as he left them splayed on that table like sleeping spiders. The nails were dirty, the beds crusty with something like blood, and several of them were torn and ragged. There was grime around his mouth too, and Wiley would have bet his next paycheck that it wasn't a Kool-aid ring. It looked like mud or paint, but it was probably blood.
Jason remained silent as the grave.
“Jason, none of us believe that you killed your friends. You,”
“You're wrong,”
Wiley had been fiddling with the remote, trying not to look at the kid's hands, but when he spoke, he looked up. Jason was still staring at the wall, but his head was shaking as his teeth chattered together. The kid looked like he was staring into the mouth of hell instead of the creme-colored wall of the interrogation room. Wiley almost didn't want to ask him what he had seen, but he needed to know. He needed to know how this kid had killed two other kids, one of whom was bigger than him by a head and sixty pounds.
“Would you like to elaborate?” Wiley asked.
He didn't think the kid would for a minute, but finally, he just reached slowly and pushed play on the remote. He kept looking at Wiley like he thought he might slap his hand, but when he let him get all the way across the table unsmacked, he relaxed a little. The video went on as they walked through the woods, joking and laughing as the woods lived their quiet existence around them.
“We went in at eight, just after Kai's mom went to work. She wouldn't have liked us going into the South Woods, but we wanted to investigate Makaro House. We wanted to do it for our first episode, but Moody said it was something we should work up to. The Makaro House was something big, and we needed to be ready for it. Turned out we weren't.”
On the screen, the kids kept walking through the woods, checking their compass and making their way carefully through the thick brush. They were still chattering, talking about what they might find when they got there, and whether they would find the clearing or see the mysterious mansion that people talked about sometimes. Legend said that a ghostly manor appeared in the clearing sometimes, the ghost of the house and that people who went inside were never seen again. Wiley didn't believe that, but as a kid, he had to admit that the clearing where the house had sat was spooky. All the wood had long ago rotted, the stones taken away for use in other things, but the land just felt wrong. Wiley had never been there after dark, but people claimed to hear footsteps and see things after the sun went down.
Wiley pushed fast forward on the tape and watched as the kids plodded on and on.
Jason wished that he could have sped through that part of the trip.
They had set out at eight, waving to Kai's mom as she pulled out of the driveway. The packs had been pulled out of the garage after she was down the road a piece, and the three set out for the woods. They knew the rough direction of the Makaro House, but no one really came upon it in the same way. Danny Foster had said it was a three-mile walk from the forest's edge to the property, but Jamie had claimed that he and his friends had walked for what seemed like hours.
“When we found it, though,” he said, “we found the house instead of an empty lot. We kept daring each other to go in, but we left when someone lit a fire on the grounds.”
Jason and his friends were hoping to find the house instead of the lot, and as their walk turned into a hike, Kai stopped and looked at the compass.
“We should have gotten there by now.”
Moody chuckled, “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.”
“Can't be,” Kai protested, “The directions are to go south into the south woods for three miles. Then you'll come to the clearing where Makaro House once sat.”
Jason didn't want to jinx it, but at the time he thought that boded well for them finding the house.
They kept walking, Kai good for an endless stream of conversation, and as the sun began to set, Jason found he was out of breath. His tongue felt like leather as it stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the lunch they had brought had been eaten hours ago. Moody had argued that they should turn around and head back, but Jason had finally vocalized that this could mean they were going to find the house instead of an empty lot.
He was hopeful right until they got what they wanted
When the sun began to go down, Wiley knit his brows together.
“I thought you and your friends were only in the woods for a few hours?”
Jason shook his head slowly, “We were, and we weren't. The time on the camera says we walked for eight hours before I turned it off, but when I got picked up by the side of the road, it was barely noon.”
Wiley pursed his lips, “How is that possible?”
The video cut out, the battery in the camera having been exhausted, and Jason nodded at the screen.
“Those batteries have a max life of three hours. Dad said it was the best battery they had when he ordered it for me, and it was pretty expensive. There's no way one of those batteries could have recorded for eight hours, but it did.”
The recording came back on, and Wiley was shocked to see that they were standing on the lawn of an old Gothic mansion. The sun setting behind the house made a perfect backdrop for the shot, and the boys were oooing and ahhing appreciatively. None of them seemed to believe what they were seeing, the whole thing a little otherworldly, and there seemed to be some argument about who was going to approach the house first.
“Is that,” Wiley stopped to wet his lips,” it can't be. The Makaro House burned down hundreds of years ago.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the wall, “in all its glory.”
And oh, what glory there had been in it.
Moody had gawped at the house as he had never seen one before.
“No way, there is no way.”
“That's impossible,” Kai breathed, “that house burned to the ground before our father's fathers were even thought of.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, mirroring his later statement, though he could not know it, “in all its glory.”
As the sun set behind it, Jason thought it looked even spookier than it would at night. The mansion rose like an obelisk towards the sky, its towered roofs looking naked without flags or pinions. The boys stood at the edge, trying to shame or bluster one of the others into going there first, but in the end, Jason took the first step. The others looked surprised at his boldness, but they followed closely after, not wanting to be thought less of.
Jason expected the house to disintegrate as he approached, an illusion or a trick of the light, but as his foot came to rest on the boards of the old house, he felt their solidity and continued to climb.
When the doors opened for them, the broad double doors swinging jauntily on their hinges, the three boys pulled back as they prepared to run.
The camera captured their indecision, the portal yawning wide as it waited to receive them, and Jason seemed to surprise even himself as he came forward to investigate it.
“Jason, What if it's a trap?”
“This whole place shouldn't exist, and if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to explore it, you're wrong."
Jason went in, pausing just inside the doors as if waiting for them to crash shut.
When they didn't, Moody followed him and Kai brought up the rear.
Makaro House lived up to its Gothic exterior, the inside full of soft dark velvet and antique furniture. There was a fire burning in the hearth inside the sitting room, tables spread with books in the library, and as they came up the long hall that led towards what was undoubtedly a dining room, Jason began to smell something. It was something like a stew or maybe a roast, and the smell of meat brought them to the dining room. A long table sat in the middle, eight chairs on each side of it, and at the end sat a wrinkled old man eating soup from a bowl.
It was hard to tell before they had gotten close, but the old man looked like he might be Native American. He was dressed in hides, feathers adorning his head and necklace, and he wore a beaded necklace with bones and claws on it. He looked up as they approached, glowering at them evenly, before returning to his meal. He ignored the boys, all three standing back apprehensively before Jason found the courage to speak.
“Excuse me, sir. Is this your house?”
The spoon froze on the way to his mouth, and the old man looked like he'd been slapped.
“My house?” he asked, his voice sounding thin and whispery, “No, child, but it was paid for by my people. We paid with our blood, we paid with our lives, and in the end, the cost was high. I took some of that cost from the previous owner of this home, and now it's only me who lives here.”
Kai made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, like a dog trying to tell its owner that something wasn't safe, and Jason understood the feeling.
“Well, we'll leave you to it then. We didn't mean to,”
“Leave?” the old man said, sounding amused, “oh no. No one leaves Makaro House until they've played the game. It was always a way for our warriors to test their metal, and I have so longed to see it played again. Will you join me? If not, I'm afraid you might find it quite hard to leave.”
Moody took a step back, and Jason heard his heavy footsteps on the carpet as he tried to retreat.
“What's the game?” Jason asked, figuring they could outrun this old coyote if it came down to it.
Jason would wonder why he had thought of him that way, but he didn't have time to ponder it then.
“Choose your piece from my necklace,” the old man said, slipping it off and laying it on the table, “Claw, Talon, or Fang.”
“Then what?” Moody asked, Kai moving behind him as if afraid to come too close.
“Then we start the game.” the old man said, smiling toothily.
For an old man, he certainly had a lot of sharp teeth.
“Okay,” Moody said, walking forward as Kai followed in his wake, “I choose claw.”
“Talon,” said Kai, reaching out to touch it.
“Fang,” said Jason, and as he put his hand out, he felt a sudden, violent shifting in his guts.
He was shrinking, the world moving rapidly all around him. He was smaller, but also more than he was, and he was trapped. His legs scrabbled at the thing that held him, and he tore it to pieces as he freed himself. He heard a loud roar and something big rose up before him. The bear was massive, ragged bits of something hanging from him, and Jason was afraid that he would kill him before he could get fully free of his snare. Something screeched then, flying at the bear's face and attacking him. Jason saw blood run down the snout of the bear, and as it tried to get the bird, a large hawk, off its face, Jason circled and looked for an opening. He was low, on all fours, and he could smell the hot blood as it coursed down the bear's muzzle. Blood and meat and fear and desire mingled in him, and as something laughed, he turned and saw a large coyote sitting at the table. Its grin was huge, its snout longer than any snout had a right to be, and he was laughing in a strange half-animal/half-man way.
The hawk suddenly fell before Jason, twitching and gasping as it died, and he knew the time to strike was now.
Jason leaped on the bear, its arms trying to crush him but not able to find purchase. He sank his teeth into the bear's throat, and for a moment he was afraid he wouldn't make it through all that thick fur. The bear tried to bring its claws to bear, but as the wolf worried at it with its fangs, he was rewarded with a mouth full of hot blood. The bear kept trying to rake him with its claws, but its movements were becoming less coordinated. When it fell, the whole room shook with the sound of its thunder, and Jason rolled off it as it lay still.
“Bravo, bravo,” cried the coyote, clapping its paws together in celebration, “Well fought, young wolf, well fought.”
Jason took a step towards him, but suddenly he was falling. It was as if a whirlpool had opened up beneath him and he was being sucked into it. Jason thrashed and snarled, trying to get his balance, but he was powerless against the pull as it flung him down and into the depths of some strange and terrible abyss.
He came to in the empty clearing where the house had been, and that was where he found his friends.
Wiley rewound the tape, not quite sure what to make of this.
“So this strange man offered to play a game, and then he changed you three into animals?”
Jason nodded, looking like one of those birds that dip into a glass of water, “I picked Fang, so I was the wolf. The game wasn't fair, we didn't know what we were doing, but I still killed Moody. I killed both of them because I had been the one to approach the house first. I killed them when I agreed to play the game. It's my fault, I'm a murderer.”
Wiley wasn't so sure, but it was hard to argue with the evidence. The video showed Jason dropping the camera and then suddenly there was a lot of snarling and screeching. Wiley heard the animals fighting, but he heard something else too. Something was laughing, really having a good belly chuckle, and it sounded like a hyena. He couldn't see it, it was all lost amongst the carpet, but suddenly that carpet had turned into grass, and the camera was lying outside in the midday sun. Someone got up, someone sobbed and moaned out in negation, and then they walked away.
That was where the video ended.
In the end, Jason was sent for psychiatric evaluation and the whole thing was chalked up to a drug-induced episode. Jason and his friends were drugged by an old man in the woods and while under the influence of an unknown substance, a substance that didn't show up on any toxicology screening, they killed each other. Blood was found on Jason, blood belonging to Marshall Moody, but blood from the fingernails of Moody was determined to belong to Kai Dillon, which really helped push the narrative that Detective Wiley was working with. He told the press to report an old man in the woods who was drugging people and pushed the stranger danger talks a little harder than usual that year on school visits.
After that day, the tape he took from Jason Weeks was never seen again, but Wiley believed that the boys had run up against something they weren't prepared for. When John Makaro had led the extermination of the Native People that dwelt on his land, he had angered something he wasn't prepared for either. Wiley's grandmother had liked to tell stories about Coyote, the trickster god, and how he could be as fierce as he was cunning when he needed to be. Wiley didn't think they would ever find an old man out there in the woods, but he didn't doubt others would find him.
Coyote liked his games, especially when the players were people he saw as interlopers.
Makaro House remained a town legend, and Wiley had little doubt that those foolish enough to enter would be presented with the same game these three boys had been given.
Wiley shuddered to think how the next challenge might go when Coyote needed more amusement.
Makaro House
“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”

“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”
The video was shot in shaky cam, the footage hard to watch without getting a little seasick. Officer Wiley, Detective Wiley now, had seen a lot in his time on the force, but a double homicide perpetrated by this fourteen-year-old kid in front of him was something he hoped he would never see. A double homicide, and carried out against two of his best friends, at that. The two kids in question, Marshal Moody and Kai Dillon, had been friends with Jason Weeks since elementary school, and there had never been any reports of violence or any other alarming behavior, at least none reported to the police. The boys had operated a YouTube channel, JMK Occult, for the last two years, and while their content was pretty typical for kids online, they had been uploading steadily every week since their first video about a strange deer in the North Woods around Cadderly.
Hell, Wiley even watched their stuff sometimes when he was bored.
People in the community knew them, and this was out of character for any of them.
Wiley paused the video, the three boys blundering through the South Woods and chattering like a pack of squirrels, and looked at Jason.
Jason, Jay to his friends, looked like he had aged a decade. He had a gaunt look usually reserved for soldiers who come back from war. His hair had been long and blonde for as long as anyone had known him, but the kid sitting here now was as bald as an egg and his scalp looked scoured instead of shaved. The shirt he had been wearing in the video was gone. He was still wearing the ring of it around his neck, the stretched fabric like a collar, and the jeans he wore were stained and ragged in places that looked fresh. He'd been found with no shoes or socks, but he was wearing the orange flip-flops of a jail resident now.
Wiley knew his parents wanted to bail him out, but he wasn't sure if the judge was going to extend him bail or not, given the nature of his crime.
The way those kids had been ripped apart was something that would haunt him for a long time.
“So, Jason, Officer Russel tells me that someone picked you up beside the road and you told them that your friends were dead and that you had killed them. Is that true?”
Jason nodded, not speaking a word as he continued to stare at the wall.
The woman in question was Darla Hughes, a mother of three who had stopped when she saw a young teenage boy walking on the side of the road in the state he was currently in. Stories of kidnapping and kids held in basements for months while God knew what happened to them were clear in the public consciousness. Darla thought she had found some kid who had escaped his situation, and when she stopped to help him, she said the poor lamb had said eight words and then nothing else.
“He said, my friends are dead, and I killed them.”
They had found the kids in a clearing in the woods about three miles in, a site he was familiar with.
How many times had he and his friends gone looking for the Makaro House?
Everyone in Cadderly knew about Makaro House, and most people's childhoods had been spent looking for it. John Makaro, a prominent figure in Cadderly's history, had been a prominent importer and exporter in England. He had come to America before the Revolutionary War to try to set up a similar business here, and Cadderly had been a large enough port to satisfy his needs without being so big that a new face would be lost. He established a manor in the South Woods, despite being told that it was Indian Land, and the bill of sale did very little to dispatch the native tribe that was living there. He survived two raids by the natives somehow, but his wife and daughter were not so lucky the second time. As such, he rallied a mob of townspeople to go into the woods and help him flush out the natives who were living there. The raid took weeks, but by the end, they had killed or scattered every member of the tribe that lived there.
Satisfied, Mr. Makaro built his lavish estates there, but strange things surrounded it from the first. Workers went missing, people reported strange lights and sounds after dark, and a shriveled figure in skins and feathers could be seen lurking after moonrise. Animals on the property acted strangely, and sometimes people found wolves or bears on the grounds. Usually, they were in a rage, but sometimes they simply fled as if they had been drawn there and weren't sure what to do now that they were. Once the house was finished, John Makaro had a hard time keeping staff. None of the hands he had hired to keep his livestock would stay more than a week, and they all refused to stay on the property after dark. His servants would likewise disappear suddenly, and none of them would stay at night besides his butler, who had been with him for years. People said that Mr. Makaro talked about hearing chanting in the house and seeing strange shadows, and when even his butler disappeared one evening, John locked the doors and stayed in the house alone for a long time. People who came to see him said he could be seen wandering the halls like a ghost, calling out for people only he could see.
When his mansion was seen in full blaze one night, those who were first on the scene said they saw a lone man silhouetted in the flames, his feathers and skins on full display.
He disappeared when they got close, but he had been seen by many in the years to come.
“What did you see out there, Jason?”
Jason continued to stare at the wall.
“I wanna help you, kid, but you have to help yourself first.”
He couldn't help but glance down at the kid's fingers as he left them splayed on that table like sleeping spiders. The nails were dirty, the beds crusty with something like blood, and several of them were torn and ragged. There was grime around his mouth too, and Wiley would have bet his next paycheck that it wasn't a Kool-aid ring. It looked like mud or paint, but it was probably blood.
Jason remained silent as the grave.
“Jason, none of us believe that you killed your friends. You,”
“You're wrong,”
Wiley had been fiddling with the remote, trying not to look at the kid's hands, but when he spoke, he looked up. Jason was still staring at the wall, but his head was shaking as his teeth chattered together. The kid looked like he was staring into the mouth of hell instead of the creme-colored wall of the interrogation room. Wiley almost didn't want to ask him what he had seen, but he needed to know. He needed to know how this kid had killed two other kids, one of whom was bigger than him by a head and sixty pounds.
“Would you like to elaborate?” Wiley asked.
He didn't think the kid would for a minute, but finally, he just reached slowly and pushed play on the remote. He kept looking at Wiley like he thought he might slap his hand, but when he let him get all the way across the table unsmacked, he relaxed a little. The video went on as they walked through the woods, joking and laughing as the woods lived their quiet existence around them.
“We went in at eight, just after Kai's mom went to work. She wouldn't have liked us going into the South Woods, but we wanted to investigate Makaro House. We wanted to do it for our first episode, but Moody said it was something we should work up to. The Makaro House was something big, and we needed to be ready for it. Turned out we weren't.”
On the screen, the kids kept walking through the woods, checking their compass and making their way carefully through the thick brush. They were still chattering, talking about what they might find when they got there, and whether they would find the clearing or see the mysterious mansion that people talked about sometimes. Legend said that a ghostly manor appeared in the clearing sometimes, the ghost of the house and that people who went inside were never seen again. Wiley didn't believe that, but as a kid, he had to admit that the clearing where the house had sat was spooky. All the wood had long ago rotted, the stones taken away for use in other things, but the land just felt wrong. Wiley had never been there after dark, but people claimed to hear footsteps and see things after the sun went down.
Wiley pushed fast forward on the tape and watched as the kids plodded on and on.
Jason wished that he could have sped through that part of the trip.
They had set out at eight, waving to Kai's mom as she pulled out of the driveway. The packs had been pulled out of the garage after she was down the road a piece, and the three set out for the woods. They knew the rough direction of the Makaro House, but no one really came upon it in the same way. Danny Foster had said it was a three-mile walk from the forest's edge to the property, but Jamie had claimed that he and his friends had walked for what seemed like hours.
“When we found it, though,” he said, “we found the house instead of an empty lot. We kept daring each other to go in, but we left when someone lit a fire on the grounds.”
Jason and his friends were hoping to find the house instead of the lot, and as their walk turned into a hike, Kai stopped and looked at the compass.
“We should have gotten there by now.”
Moody chuckled, “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.”
“Can't be,” Kai protested, “The directions are to go south into the south woods for three miles. Then you'll come to the clearing where Makaro House once sat.”
Jason didn't want to jinx it, but at the time he thought that boded well for them finding the house.
They kept walking, Kai good for an endless stream of conversation, and as the sun began to set, Jason found he was out of breath. His tongue felt like leather as it stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the lunch they had brought had been eaten hours ago. Moody had argued that they should turn around and head back, but Jason had finally vocalized that this could mean they were going to find the house instead of an empty lot.
He was hopeful right until they got what they wanted
When the sun began to go down, Wiley knit his brows together.
“I thought you and your friends were only in the woods for a few hours?”
Jason shook his head slowly, “We were, and we weren't. The time on the camera says we walked for eight hours before I turned it off, but when I got picked up by the side of the road, it was barely noon.”
Wiley pursed his lips, “How is that possible?”
The video cut out, the battery in the camera having been exhausted, and Jason nodded at the screen.
“Those batteries have a max life of three hours. Dad said it was the best battery they had when he ordered it for me, and it was pretty expensive. There's no way one of those batteries could have recorded for eight hours, but it did.”
The recording came back on, and Wiley was shocked to see that they were standing on the lawn of an old Gothic mansion. The sun setting behind the house made a perfect backdrop for the shot, and the boys were oooing and ahhing appreciatively. None of them seemed to believe what they were seeing, the whole thing a little otherworldly, and there seemed to be some argument about who was going to approach the house first.
“Is that,” Wiley stopped to wet his lips,” it can't be. The Makaro House burned down hundreds of years ago.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the wall, “in all its glory.”
And oh, what glory there had been in it.
Moody had gawped at the house as he had never seen one before.
“No way, there is no way.”
“That's impossible,” Kai breathed, “that house burned to the ground before our father's fathers were even thought of.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, mirroring his later statement, though he could not know it, “in all its glory.”
As the sun set behind it, Jason thought it looked even spookier than it would at night. The mansion rose like an obelisk towards the sky, its towered roofs looking naked without flags or pinions. The boys stood at the edge, trying to shame or bluster one of the others into going there first, but in the end, Jason took the first step. The others looked surprised at his boldness, but they followed closely after, not wanting to be thought less of.
Jason expected the house to disintegrate as he approached, an illusion or a trick of the light, but as his foot came to rest on the boards of the old house, he felt their solidity and continued to climb.
When the doors opened for them, the broad double doors swinging jauntily on their hinges, the three boys pulled back as they prepared to run.
The camera captured their indecision, the portal yawning wide as it waited to receive them, and Jason seemed to surprise even himself as he came forward to investigate it.
“Jason, What if it's a trap?”
“This whole place shouldn't exist, and if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to explore it, you're wrong."
Jason went in, pausing just inside the doors as if waiting for them to crash shut.
When they didn't, Moody followed him and Kai brought up the rear.
Makaro House lived up to its Gothic exterior, the inside full of soft dark velvet and antique furniture. There was a fire burning in the hearth inside the sitting room, tables spread with books in the library, and as they came up the long hall that led towards what was undoubtedly a dining room, Jason began to smell something. It was something like a stew or maybe a roast, and the smell of meat brought them to the dining room. A long table sat in the middle, eight chairs on each side of it, and at the end sat a wrinkled old man eating soup from a bowl.
It was hard to tell before they had gotten close, but the old man looked like he might be Native American. He was dressed in hides, feathers adorning his head and necklace, and he wore a beaded necklace with bones and claws on it. He looked up as they approached, glowering at them evenly, before returning to his meal. He ignored the boys, all three standing back apprehensively before Jason found the courage to speak.
“Excuse me, sir. Is this your house?”
The spoon froze on the way to his mouth, and the old man looked like he'd been slapped.
“My house?” he asked, his voice sounding thin and whispery, “No, child, but it was paid for by my people. We paid with our blood, we paid with our lives, and in the end, the cost was high. I took some of that cost from the previous owner of this home, and now it's only me who lives here.”
Kai made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, like a dog trying to tell its owner that something wasn't safe, and Jason understood the feeling.
“Well, we'll leave you to it then. We didn't mean to,”
“Leave?” the old man said, sounding amused, “oh no. No one leaves Makaro House until they've played the game. It was always a way for our warriors to test their metal, and I have so longed to see it played again. Will you join me? If not, I'm afraid you might find it quite hard to leave.”
Moody took a step back, and Jason heard his heavy footsteps on the carpet as he tried to retreat.
“What's the game?” Jason asked, figuring they could outrun this old coyote if it came down to it.
Jason would wonder why he had thought of him that way, but he didn't have time to ponder it then.
“Choose your piece from my necklace,” the old man said, slipping it off and laying it on the table, “Claw, Talon, or Fang.”
“Then what?” Moody asked, Kai moving behind him as if afraid to come too close.
“Then we start the game.” the old man said, smiling toothily.
For an old man, he certainly had a lot of sharp teeth.
“Okay,” Moody said, walking forward as Kai followed in his wake, “I choose claw.”
“Talon,” said Kai, reaching out to touch it.
“Fang,” said Jason, and as he put his hand out, he felt a sudden, violent shifting in his guts.
He was shrinking, the world moving rapidly all around him. He was smaller, but also more than he was, and he was trapped. His legs scrabbled at the thing that held him, and he tore it to pieces as he freed himself. He heard a loud roar and something big rose up before him. The bear was massive, ragged bits of something hanging from him, and Jason was afraid that he would kill him before he could get fully free of his snare. Something screeched then, flying at the bear's face and attacking him. Jason saw blood run down the snout of the bear, and as it tried to get the bird, a large hawk, off its face, Jason circled and looked for an opening. He was low, on all fours, and he could smell the hot blood as it coursed down the bear's muzzle. Blood and meat and fear and desire mingled in him, and as something laughed, he turned and saw a large coyote sitting at the table. Its grin was huge, its snout longer than any snout had a right to be, and he was laughing in a strange half-animal/half-man way.
The hawk suddenly fell before Jason, twitching and gasping as it died, and he knew the time to strike was now.
Jason leaped on the bear, its arms trying to crush him but not able to find purchase. He sank his teeth into the bear's throat, and for a moment he was afraid he wouldn't make it through all that thick fur. The bear tried to bring its claws to bear, but as the wolf worried at it with its fangs, he was rewarded with a mouth full of hot blood. The bear kept trying to rake him with its claws, but its movements were becoming less coordinated. When it fell, the whole room shook with the sound of its thunder, and Jason rolled off it as it lay still.
“Bravo, bravo,” cried the coyote, clapping its paws together in celebration, “Well fought, young wolf, well fought.”
Jason took a step towards him, but suddenly he was falling. It was as if a whirlpool had opened up beneath him and he was being sucked into it. Jason thrashed and snarled, trying to get his balance, but he was powerless against the pull as it flung him down and into the depths of some strange and terrible abyss.
He came to in the empty clearing where the house had been, and that was where he found his friends.
Wiley rewound the tape, not quite sure what to make of this.
“So this strange man offered to play a game, and then he changed you three into animals?”
Jason nodded, looking like one of those birds that dip into a glass of water, “I picked Fang, so I was the wolf. The game wasn't fair, we didn't know what we were doing, but I still killed Moody. I killed both of them because I had been the one to approach the house first. I killed them when I agreed to play the game. It's my fault, I'm a murderer.”
Wiley wasn't so sure, but it was hard to argue with the evidence. The video showed Jason dropping the camera and then suddenly there was a lot of snarling and screeching. Wiley heard the animals fighting, but he heard something else too. Something was laughing, really having a good belly chuckle, and it sounded like a hyena. He couldn't see it, it was all lost amongst the carpet, but suddenly that carpet had turned into grass, and the camera was lying outside in the midday sun. Someone got up, someone sobbed and moaned out in negation, and then they walked away.
That was where the video ended.
In the end, Jason was sent for psychiatric evaluation and the whole thing was chalked up to a drug-induced episode. Jason and his friends were drugged by an old man in the woods and while under the influence of an unknown substance, a substance that didn't show up on any toxicology screening, they killed each other. Blood was found on Jason, blood belonging to Marshall Moody, but blood from the fingernails of Moody was determined to belong to Kai Dillon, which really helped push the narrative that Detective Wiley was working with. He told the press to report an old man in the woods who was drugging people and pushed the stranger danger talks a little harder than usual that year on school visits.
After that day, the tape he took from Jason Weeks was never seen again, but Wiley believed that the boys had run up against something they weren't prepared for. When John Makaro had led the extermination of the Native People that dwelt on his land, he had angered something he wasn't prepared for either. Wiley's grandmother had liked to tell stories about Coyote, the trickster god, and how he could be as fierce as he was cunning when he needed to be. Wiley didn't think they would ever find an old man out there in the woods, but he didn't doubt others would find him.
Coyote liked his games, especially when the players were people he saw as interlopers.
Makaro House remained a town legend, and Wiley had little doubt that those foolish enough to enter would be presented with the same game these three boys had been given.
Wiley shuddered to think how the next challenge might go when Coyote needed more amusement.
Makaro House
“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”

“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”
The video was shot in shaky cam, the footage hard to watch without getting a little seasick. Officer Wiley, Detective Wiley now, had seen a lot in his time on the force, but a double homicide perpetrated by this fourteen-year-old kid in front of him was something he hoped he would never see. A double homicide, and carried out against two of his best friends, at that. The two kids in question, Marshal Moody and Kai Dillon, had been friends with Jason Weeks since elementary school, and there had never been any reports of violence or any other alarming behavior, at least none reported to the police. The boys had operated a YouTube channel, JMK Occult, for the last two years, and while their content was pretty typical for kids online, they had been uploading steadily every week since their first video about a strange deer in the North Woods around Cadderly.
Hell, Wiley even watched their stuff sometimes when he was bored.
People in the community knew them, and this was out of character for any of them.
Wiley paused the video, the three boys blundering through the South Woods and chattering like a pack of squirrels, and looked at Jason.
Jason, Jay to his friends, looked like he had aged a decade. He had a gaunt look usually reserved for soldiers who come back from war. His hair had been long and blonde for as long as anyone had known him, but the kid sitting here now was as bald as an egg and his scalp looked scoured instead of shaved. The shirt he had been wearing in the video was gone. He was still wearing the ring of it around his neck, the stretched fabric like a collar, and the jeans he wore were stained and ragged in places that looked fresh. He'd been found with no shoes or socks, but he was wearing the orange flip-flops of a jail resident now.
Wiley knew his parents wanted to bail him out, but he wasn't sure if the judge was going to extend him bail or not, given the nature of his crime.
The way those kids had been ripped apart was something that would haunt him for a long time.
“So, Jason, Officer Russel tells me that someone picked you up beside the road and you told them that your friends were dead and that you had killed them. Is that true?”
Jason nodded, not speaking a word as he continued to stare at the wall.
The woman in question was Darla Hughes, a mother of three who had stopped when she saw a young teenage boy walking on the side of the road in the state he was currently in. Stories of kidnapping and kids held in basements for months while God knew what happened to them were clear in the public consciousness. Darla thought she had found some kid who had escaped his situation, and when she stopped to help him, she said the poor lamb had said eight words and then nothing else.
“He said, my friends are dead, and I killed them.”
They had found the kids in a clearing in the woods about three miles in, a site he was familiar with.
How many times had he and his friends gone looking for the Makaro House?
Everyone in Cadderly knew about Makaro House, and most people's childhoods had been spent looking for it. John Makaro, a prominent figure in Cadderly's history, had been a prominent importer and exporter in England. He had come to America before the Revolutionary War to try to set up a similar business here, and Cadderly had been a large enough port to satisfy his needs without being so big that a new face would be lost. He established a manor in the South Woods, despite being told that it was Indian Land, and the bill of sale did very little to dispatch the native tribe that was living there. He survived two raids by the natives somehow, but his wife and daughter were not so lucky the second time. As such, he rallied a mob of townspeople to go into the woods and help him flush out the natives who were living there. The raid took weeks, but by the end, they had killed or scattered every member of the tribe that lived there.
Satisfied, Mr. Makaro built his lavish estates there, but strange things surrounded it from the first. Workers went missing, people reported strange lights and sounds after dark, and a shriveled figure in skins and feathers could be seen lurking after moonrise. Animals on the property acted strangely, and sometimes people found wolves or bears on the grounds. Usually, they were in a rage, but sometimes they simply fled as if they had been drawn there and weren't sure what to do now that they were. Once the house was finished, John Makaro had a hard time keeping staff. None of the hands he had hired to keep his livestock would stay more than a week, and they all refused to stay on the property after dark. His servants would likewise disappear suddenly, and none of them would stay at night besides his butler, who had been with him for years. People said that Mr. Makaro talked about hearing chanting in the house and seeing strange shadows, and when even his butler disappeared one evening, John locked the doors and stayed in the house alone for a long time. People who came to see him said he could be seen wandering the halls like a ghost, calling out for people only he could see.
When his mansion was seen in full blaze one night, those who were first on the scene said they saw a lone man silhouetted in the flames, his feathers and skins on full display.
He disappeared when they got close, but he had been seen by many in the years to come.
“What did you see out there, Jason?”
Jason continued to stare at the wall.
“I wanna help you, kid, but you have to help yourself first.”
He couldn't help but glance down at the kid's fingers as he left them splayed on that table like sleeping spiders. The nails were dirty, the beds crusty with something like blood, and several of them were torn and ragged. There was grime around his mouth too, and Wiley would have bet his next paycheck that it wasn't a Kool-aid ring. It looked like mud or paint, but it was probably blood.
Jason remained silent as the grave.
“Jason, none of us believe that you killed your friends. You,”
“You're wrong,”
Wiley had been fiddling with the remote, trying not to look at the kid's hands, but when he spoke, he looked up. Jason was still staring at the wall, but his head was shaking as his teeth chattered together. The kid looked like he was staring into the mouth of hell instead of the creme-colored wall of the interrogation room. Wiley almost didn't want to ask him what he had seen, but he needed to know. He needed to know how this kid had killed two other kids, one of whom was bigger than him by a head and sixty pounds.
“Would you like to elaborate?” Wiley asked.
He didn't think the kid would for a minute, but finally, he just reached slowly and pushed play on the remote. He kept looking at Wiley like he thought he might slap his hand, but when he let him get all the way across the table unsmacked, he relaxed a little. The video went on as they walked through the woods, joking and laughing as the woods lived their quiet existence around them.
“We went in at eight, just after Kai's mom went to work. She wouldn't have liked us going into the South Woods, but we wanted to investigate Makaro House. We wanted to do it for our first episode, but Moody said it was something we should work up to. The Makaro House was something big, and we needed to be ready for it. Turned out we weren't.”
On the screen, the kids kept walking through the woods, checking their compass and making their way carefully through the thick brush. They were still chattering, talking about what they might find when they got there, and whether they would find the clearing or see the mysterious mansion that people talked about sometimes. Legend said that a ghostly manor appeared in the clearing sometimes, the ghost of the house and that people who went inside were never seen again. Wiley didn't believe that, but as a kid, he had to admit that the clearing where the house had sat was spooky. All the wood had long ago rotted, the stones taken away for use in other things, but the land just felt wrong. Wiley had never been there after dark, but people claimed to hear footsteps and see things after the sun went down.
Wiley pushed fast forward on the tape and watched as the kids plodded on and on.
Jason wished that he could have sped through that part of the trip.
They had set out at eight, waving to Kai's mom as she pulled out of the driveway. The packs had been pulled out of the garage after she was down the road a piece, and the three set out for the woods. They knew the rough direction of the Makaro House, but no one really came upon it in the same way. Danny Foster had said it was a three-mile walk from the forest's edge to the property, but Jamie had claimed that he and his friends had walked for what seemed like hours.
“When we found it, though,” he said, “we found the house instead of an empty lot. We kept daring each other to go in, but we left when someone lit a fire on the grounds.”
Jason and his friends were hoping to find the house instead of the lot, and as their walk turned into a hike, Kai stopped and looked at the compass.
“We should have gotten there by now.”
Moody chuckled, “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.”
“Can't be,” Kai protested, “The directions are to go south into the south woods for three miles. Then you'll come to the clearing where Makaro House once sat.”
Jason didn't want to jinx it, but at the time he thought that boded well for them finding the house.
They kept walking, Kai good for an endless stream of conversation, and as the sun began to set, Jason found he was out of breath. His tongue felt like leather as it stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the lunch they had brought had been eaten hours ago. Moody had argued that they should turn around and head back, but Jason had finally vocalized that this could mean they were going to find the house instead of an empty lot.
He was hopeful right until they got what they wanted
When the sun began to go down, Wiley knit his brows together.
“I thought you and your friends were only in the woods for a few hours?”
Jason shook his head slowly, “We were, and we weren't. The time on the camera says we walked for eight hours before I turned it off, but when I got picked up by the side of the road, it was barely noon.”
Wiley pursed his lips, “How is that possible?”
The video cut out, the battery in the camera having been exhausted, and Jason nodded at the screen.
“Those batteries have a max life of three hours. Dad said it was the best battery they had when he ordered it for me, and it was pretty expensive. There's no way one of those batteries could have recorded for eight hours, but it did.”
The recording came back on, and Wiley was shocked to see that they were standing on the lawn of an old Gothic mansion. The sun setting behind the house made a perfect backdrop for the shot, and the boys were oooing and ahhing appreciatively. None of them seemed to believe what they were seeing, the whole thing a little otherworldly, and there seemed to be some argument about who was going to approach the house first.
“Is that,” Wiley stopped to wet his lips,” it can't be. The Makaro House burned down hundreds of years ago.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the wall, “in all its glory.”
And oh, what glory there had been in it.
Moody had gawped at the house as he had never seen one before.
“No way, there is no way.”
“That's impossible,” Kai breathed, “that house burned to the ground before our father's fathers were even thought of.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, mirroring his later statement, though he could not know it, “in all its glory.”
As the sun set behind it, Jason thought it looked even spookier than it would at night. The mansion rose like an obelisk towards the sky, its towered roofs looking naked without flags or pinions. The boys stood at the edge, trying to shame or bluster one of the others into going there first, but in the end, Jason took the first step. The others looked surprised at his boldness, but they followed closely after, not wanting to be thought less of.
Jason expected the house to disintegrate as he approached, an illusion or a trick of the light, but as his foot came to rest on the boards of the old house, he felt their solidity and continued to climb.
When the doors opened for them, the broad double doors swinging jauntily on their hinges, the three boys pulled back as they prepared to run.
The camera captured their indecision, the portal yawning wide as it waited to receive them, and Jason seemed to surprise even himself as he came forward to investigate it.
“Jason, What if it's a trap?”
“This whole place shouldn't exist, and if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to explore it, you're wrong."
Jason went in, pausing just inside the doors as if waiting for them to crash shut.
When they didn't, Moody followed him and Kai brought up the rear.
Makaro House lived up to its Gothic exterior, the inside full of soft dark velvet and antique furniture. There was a fire burning in the hearth inside the sitting room, tables spread with books in the library, and as they came up the long hall that led towards what was undoubtedly a dining room, Jason began to smell something. It was something like a stew or maybe a roast, and the smell of meat brought them to the dining room. A long table sat in the middle, eight chairs on each side of it, and at the end sat a wrinkled old man eating soup from a bowl.
It was hard to tell before they had gotten close, but the old man looked like he might be Native American. He was dressed in hides, feathers adorning his head and necklace, and he wore a beaded necklace with bones and claws on it. He looked up as they approached, glowering at them evenly, before returning to his meal. He ignored the boys, all three standing back apprehensively before Jason found the courage to speak.
“Excuse me, sir. Is this your house?”
The spoon froze on the way to his mouth, and the old man looked like he'd been slapped.
“My house?” he asked, his voice sounding thin and whispery, “No, child, but it was paid for by my people. We paid with our blood, we paid with our lives, and in the end, the cost was high. I took some of that cost from the previous owner of this home, and now it's only me who lives here.”
Kai made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, like a dog trying to tell its owner that something wasn't safe, and Jason understood the feeling.
“Well, we'll leave you to it then. We didn't mean to,”
“Leave?” the old man said, sounding amused, “oh no. No one leaves Makaro House until they've played the game. It was always a way for our warriors to test their metal, and I have so longed to see it played again. Will you join me? If not, I'm afraid you might find it quite hard to leave.”
Moody took a step back, and Jason heard his heavy footsteps on the carpet as he tried to retreat.
“What's the game?” Jason asked, figuring they could outrun this old coyote if it came down to it.
Jason would wonder why he had thought of him that way, but he didn't have time to ponder it then.
“Choose your piece from my necklace,” the old man said, slipping it off and laying it on the table, “Claw, Talon, or Fang.”
“Then what?” Moody asked, Kai moving behind him as if afraid to come too close.
“Then we start the game.” the old man said, smiling toothily.
For an old man, he certainly had a lot of sharp teeth.
“Okay,” Moody said, walking forward as Kai followed in his wake, “I choose claw.”
“Talon,” said Kai, reaching out to touch it.
“Fang,” said Jason, and as he put his hand out, he felt a sudden, violent shifting in his guts.
He was shrinking, the world moving rapidly all around him. He was smaller, but also more than he was, and he was trapped. His legs scrabbled at the thing that held him, and he tore it to pieces as he freed himself. He heard a loud roar and something big rose up before him. The bear was massive, ragged bits of something hanging from him, and Jason was afraid that he would kill him before he could get fully free of his snare. Something screeched then, flying at the bear's face and attacking him. Jason saw blood run down the snout of the bear, and as it tried to get the bird, a large hawk, off its face, Jason circled and looked for an opening. He was low, on all fours, and he could smell the hot blood as it coursed down the bear's muzzle. Blood and meat and fear and desire mingled in him, and as something laughed, he turned and saw a large coyote sitting at the table. Its grin was huge, its snout longer than any snout had a right to be, and he was laughing in a strange half-animal/half-man way.
The hawk suddenly fell before Jason, twitching and gasping as it died, and he knew the time to strike was now.
Jason leaped on the bear, its arms trying to crush him but not able to find purchase. He sank his teeth into the bear's throat, and for a moment he was afraid he wouldn't make it through all that thick fur. The bear tried to bring its claws to bear, but as the wolf worried at it with its fangs, he was rewarded with a mouth full of hot blood. The bear kept trying to rake him with its claws, but its movements were becoming less coordinated. When it fell, the whole room shook with the sound of its thunder, and Jason rolled off it as it lay still.
“Bravo, bravo,” cried the coyote, clapping its paws together in celebration, “Well fought, young wolf, well fought.”
Jason took a step towards him, but suddenly he was falling. It was as if a whirlpool had opened up beneath him and he was being sucked into it. Jason thrashed and snarled, trying to get his balance, but he was powerless against the pull as it flung him down and into the depths of some strange and terrible abyss.
He came to in the empty clearing where the house had been, and that was where he found his friends.
Wiley rewound the tape, not quite sure what to make of this.
“So this strange man offered to play a game, and then he changed you three into animals?”
Jason nodded, looking like one of those birds that dip into a glass of water, “I picked Fang, so I was the wolf. The game wasn't fair, we didn't know what we were doing, but I still killed Moody. I killed both of them because I had been the one to approach the house first. I killed them when I agreed to play the game. It's my fault, I'm a murderer.”
Wiley wasn't so sure, but it was hard to argue with the evidence. The video showed Jason dropping the camera and then suddenly there was a lot of snarling and screeching. Wiley heard the animals fighting, but he heard something else too. Something was laughing, really having a good belly chuckle, and it sounded like a hyena. He couldn't see it, it was all lost amongst the carpet, but suddenly that carpet had turned into grass, and the camera was lying outside in the midday sun. Someone got up, someone sobbed and moaned out in negation, and then they walked away.
That was where the video ended.
In the end, Jason was sent for psychiatric evaluation and the whole thing was chalked up to a drug-induced episode. Jason and his friends were drugged by an old man in the woods and while under the influence of an unknown substance, a substance that didn't show up on any toxicology screening, they killed each other. Blood was found on Jason, blood belonging to Marshall Moody, but blood from the fingernails of Moody was determined to belong to Kai Dillon, which really helped push the narrative that Detective Wiley was working with. He told the press to report an old man in the woods who was drugging people and pushed the stranger danger talks a little harder than usual that year on school visits.
After that day, the tape he took from Jason Weeks was never seen again, but Wiley believed that the boys had run up against something they weren't prepared for. When John Makaro had led the extermination of the Native People that dwelt on his land, he had angered something he wasn't prepared for either. Wiley's grandmother had liked to tell stories about Coyote, the trickster god, and how he could be as fierce as he was cunning when he needed to be. Wiley didn't think they would ever find an old man out there in the woods, but he didn't doubt others would find him.
Coyote liked his games, especially when the players were people he saw as interlopers.
Makaro House remained a town legend, and Wiley had little doubt that those foolish enough to enter would be presented with the same game these three boys had been given.
Wiley shuddered to think how the next challenge might go when Coyote needed more amusement.
Makaro House
“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”

Urgent advice needed!!
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“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”
The video was shot in shaky cam, the footage hard to watch without getting a little seasick. Officer Wiley, Detective Wiley now, had seen a lot in his time on the force, but a double homicide perpetrated by this fourteen-year-old kid in front of him was something he hoped he would never see. A double homicide, and carried out against two of his best friends, at that. The two kids in question, Marshal Moody and Kai Dillon, had been friends with Jason Weeks since elementary school, and there had never been any reports of violence or any other alarming behavior, at least none reported to the police. The boys had operated a YouTube channel, JMK Occult, for the last two years, and while their content was pretty typical for kids online, they had been uploading steadily every week since their first video about a strange deer in the North Woods around Cadderly.
Hell, Wiley even watched their stuff sometimes when he was bored.
People in the community knew them, and this was out of character for any of them.
Wiley paused the video, the three boys blundering through the South Woods and chattering like a pack of squirrels, and looked at Jason.
Jason, Jay to his friends, looked like he had aged a decade. He had a gaunt look usually reserved for soldiers who come back from war. His hair had been long and blonde for as long as anyone had known him, but the kid sitting here now was as bald as an egg and his scalp looked scoured instead of shaved. The shirt he had been wearing in the video was gone. He was still wearing the ring of it around his neck, the stretched fabric like a collar, and the jeans he wore were stained and ragged in places that looked fresh. He'd been found with no shoes or socks, but he was wearing the orange flip-flops of a jail resident now.
Wiley knew his parents wanted to bail him out, but he wasn't sure if the judge was going to extend him bail or not, given the nature of his crime.
The way those kids had been ripped apart was something that would haunt him for a long time.
“So, Jason, Officer Russel tells me that someone picked you up beside the road and you told them that your friends were dead and that you had killed them. Is that true?”
Jason nodded, not speaking a word as he continued to stare at the wall.
The woman in question was Darla Hughes, a mother of three who had stopped when she saw a young teenage boy walking on the side of the road in the state he was currently in. Stories of kidnapping and kids held in basements for months while God knew what happened to them were clear in the public consciousness. Darla thought she had found some kid who had escaped his situation, and when she stopped to help him, she said the poor lamb had said eight words and then nothing else.
“He said, my friends are dead, and I killed them.”
They had found the kids in a clearing in the woods about three miles in, a site he was familiar with.
How many times had he and his friends gone looking for the Makaro House?
Everyone in Cadderly knew about Makaro House, and most people's childhoods had been spent looking for it. John Makaro, a prominent figure in Cadderly's history, had been a prominent importer and exporter in England. He had come to America before the Revolutionary War to try to set up a similar business here, and Cadderly had been a large enough port to satisfy his needs without being so big that a new face would be lost. He established a manor in the South Woods, despite being told that it was Indian Land, and the bill of sale did very little to dispatch the native tribe that was living there. He survived two raids by the natives somehow, but his wife and daughter were not so lucky the second time. As such, he rallied a mob of townspeople to go into the woods and help him flush out the natives who were living there. The raid took weeks, but by the end, they had killed or scattered every member of the tribe that lived there.
Satisfied, Mr. Makaro built his lavish estates there, but strange things surrounded it from the first. Workers went missing, people reported strange lights and sounds after dark, and a shriveled figure in skins and feathers could be seen lurking after moonrise. Animals on the property acted strangely, and sometimes people found wolves or bears on the grounds. Usually, they were in a rage, but sometimes they simply fled as if they had been drawn there and weren't sure what to do now that they were. Once the house was finished, John Makaro had a hard time keeping staff. None of the hands he had hired to keep his livestock would stay more than a week, and they all refused to stay on the property after dark. His servants would likewise disappear suddenly, and none of them would stay at night besides his butler, who had been with him for years. People said that Mr. Makaro talked about hearing chanting in the house and seeing strange shadows, and when even his butler disappeared one evening, John locked the doors and stayed in the house alone for a long time. People who came to see him said he could be seen wandering the halls like a ghost, calling out for people only he could see.
When his mansion was seen in full blaze one night, those who were first on the scene said they saw a lone man silhouetted in the flames, his feathers and skins on full display.
He disappeared when they got close, but he had been seen by many in the years to come.
“What did you see out there, Jason?”
Jason continued to stare at the wall.
“I wanna help you, kid, but you have to help yourself first.”
He couldn't help but glance down at the kid's fingers as he left them splayed on that table like sleeping spiders. The nails were dirty, the beds crusty with something like blood, and several of them were torn and ragged. There was grime around his mouth too, and Wiley would have bet his next paycheck that it wasn't a Kool-aid ring. It looked like mud or paint, but it was probably blood.
Jason remained silent as the grave.
“Jason, none of us believe that you killed your friends. You,”
“You're wrong,”
Wiley had been fiddling with the remote, trying not to look at the kid's hands, but when he spoke, he looked up. Jason was still staring at the wall, but his head was shaking as his teeth chattered together. The kid looked like he was staring into the mouth of hell instead of the creme-colored wall of the interrogation room. Wiley almost didn't want to ask him what he had seen, but he needed to know. He needed to know how this kid had killed two other kids, one of whom was bigger than him by a head and sixty pounds.
“Would you like to elaborate?” Wiley asked.
He didn't think the kid would for a minute, but finally, he just reached slowly and pushed play on the remote. He kept looking at Wiley like he thought he might slap his hand, but when he let him get all the way across the table unsmacked, he relaxed a little. The video went on as they walked through the woods, joking and laughing as the woods lived their quiet existence around them.
“We went in at eight, just after Kai's mom went to work. She wouldn't have liked us going into the South Woods, but we wanted to investigate Makaro House. We wanted to do it for our first episode, but Moody said it was something we should work up to. The Makaro House was something big, and we needed to be ready for it. Turned out we weren't.”
On the screen, the kids kept walking through the woods, checking their compass and making their way carefully through the thick brush. They were still chattering, talking about what they might find when they got there, and whether they would find the clearing or see the mysterious mansion that people talked about sometimes. Legend said that a ghostly manor appeared in the clearing sometimes, the ghost of the house and that people who went inside were never seen again. Wiley didn't believe that, but as a kid, he had to admit that the clearing where the house had sat was spooky. All the wood had long ago rotted, the stones taken away for use in other things, but the land just felt wrong. Wiley had never been there after dark, but people claimed to hear footsteps and see things after the sun went down.
Wiley pushed fast forward on the tape and watched as the kids plodded on and on.
Jason wished that he could have sped through that part of the trip.
They had set out at eight, waving to Kai's mom as she pulled out of the driveway. The packs had been pulled out of the garage after she was down the road a piece, and the three set out for the woods. They knew the rough direction of the Makaro House, but no one really came upon it in the same way. Danny Foster had said it was a three-mile walk from the forest's edge to the property, but Jamie had claimed that he and his friends had walked for what seemed like hours.
“When we found it, though,” he said, “we found the house instead of an empty lot. We kept daring each other to go in, but we left when someone lit a fire on the grounds.”
Jason and his friends were hoping to find the house instead of the lot, and as their walk turned into a hike, Kai stopped and looked at the compass.
“We should have gotten there by now.”
Moody chuckled, “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.”
“Can't be,” Kai protested, “The directions are to go south into the south woods for three miles. Then you'll come to the clearing where Makaro House once sat.”
Jason didn't want to jinx it, but at the time he thought that boded well for them finding the house.
They kept walking, Kai good for an endless stream of conversation, and as the sun began to set, Jason found he was out of breath. His tongue felt like leather as it stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the lunch they had brought had been eaten hours ago. Moody had argued that they should turn around and head back, but Jason had finally vocalized that this could mean they were going to find the house instead of an empty lot.
He was hopeful right until they got what they wanted
When the sun began to go down, Wiley knit his brows together.
“I thought you and your friends were only in the woods for a few hours?”
Jason shook his head slowly, “We were, and we weren't. The time on the camera says we walked for eight hours before I turned it off, but when I got picked up by the side of the road, it was barely noon.”
Wiley pursed his lips, “How is that possible?”
The video cut out, the battery in the camera having been exhausted, and Jason nodded at the screen.
“Those batteries have a max life of three hours. Dad said it was the best battery they had when he ordered it for me, and it was pretty expensive. There's no way one of those batteries could have recorded for eight hours, but it did.”
The recording came back on, and Wiley was shocked to see that they were standing on the lawn of an old Gothic mansion. The sun setting behind the house made a perfect backdrop for the shot, and the boys were oooing and ahhing appreciatively. None of them seemed to believe what they were seeing, the whole thing a little otherworldly, and there seemed to be some argument about who was going to approach the house first.
“Is that,” Wiley stopped to wet his lips,” it can't be. The Makaro House burned down hundreds of years ago.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the wall, “in all its glory.”
And oh, what glory there had been in it.
Moody had gawped at the house as he had never seen one before.
“No way, there is no way.”
“That's impossible,” Kai breathed, “that house burned to the ground before our father's fathers were even thought of.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, mirroring his later statement, though he could not know it, “in all its glory.”
As the sun set behind it, Jason thought it looked even spookier than it would at night. The mansion rose like an obelisk towards the sky, its towered roofs looking naked without flags or pinions. The boys stood at the edge, trying to shame or bluster one of the others into going there first, but in the end, Jason took the first step. The others looked surprised at his boldness, but they followed closely after, not wanting to be thought less of.
Jason expected the house to disintegrate as he approached, an illusion or a trick of the light, but as his foot came to rest on the boards of the old house, he felt their solidity and continued to climb.
When the doors opened for them, the broad double doors swinging jauntily on their hinges, the three boys pulled back as they prepared to run.
The camera captured their indecision, the portal yawning wide as it waited to receive them, and Jason seemed to surprise even himself as he came forward to investigate it.
“Jason, What if it's a trap?”
“This whole place shouldn't exist, and if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to explore it, you're wrong."
Jason went in, pausing just inside the doors as if waiting for them to crash shut.
When they didn't, Moody followed him and Kai brought up the rear.
Makaro House lived up to its Gothic exterior, the inside full of soft dark velvet and antique furniture. There was a fire burning in the hearth inside the sitting room, tables spread with books in the library, and as they came up the long hall that led towards what was undoubtedly a dining room, Jason began to smell something. It was something like a stew or maybe a roast, and the smell of meat brought them to the dining room. A long table sat in the middle, eight chairs on each side of it, and at the end sat a wrinkled old man eating soup from a bowl.
It was hard to tell before they had gotten close, but the old man looked like he might be Native American. He was dressed in hides, feathers adorning his head and necklace, and he wore a beaded necklace with bones and claws on it. He looked up as they approached, glowering at them evenly, before returning to his meal. He ignored the boys, all three standing back apprehensively before Jason found the courage to speak.
“Excuse me, sir. Is this your house?”
The spoon froze on the way to his mouth, and the old man looked like he'd been slapped.
“My house?” he asked, his voice sounding thin and whispery, “No, child, but it was paid for by my people. We paid with our blood, we paid with our lives, and in the end, the cost was high. I took some of that cost from the previous owner of this home, and now it's only me who lives here.”
Kai made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, like a dog trying to tell its owner that something wasn't safe, and Jason understood the feeling.
“Well, we'll leave you to it then. We didn't mean to,”
“Leave?” the old man said, sounding amused, “oh no. No one leaves Makaro House until they've played the game. It was always a way for our warriors to test their metal, and I have so longed to see it played again. Will you join me? If not, I'm afraid you might find it quite hard to leave.”
Moody took a step back, and Jason heard his heavy footsteps on the carpet as he tried to retreat.
“What's the game?” Jason asked, figuring they could outrun this old coyote if it came down to it.
Jason would wonder why he had thought of him that way, but he didn't have time to ponder it then.
“Choose your piece from my necklace,” the old man said, slipping it off and laying it on the table, “Claw, Talon, or Fang.”
“Then what?” Moody asked, Kai moving behind him as if afraid to come too close.
“Then we start the game.” the old man said, smiling toothily.
For an old man, he certainly had a lot of sharp teeth.
“Okay,” Moody said, walking forward as Kai followed in his wake, “I choose claw.”
“Talon,” said Kai, reaching out to touch it.
“Fang,” said Jason, and as he put his hand out, he felt a sudden, violent shifting in his guts.
He was shrinking, the world moving rapidly all around him. He was smaller, but also more than he was, and he was trapped. His legs scrabbled at the thing that held him, and he tore it to pieces as he freed himself. He heard a loud roar and something big rose up before him. The bear was massive, ragged bits of something hanging from him, and Jason was afraid that he would kill him before he could get fully free of his snare. Something screeched then, flying at the bear's face and attacking him. Jason saw blood run down the snout of the bear, and as it tried to get the bird, a large hawk, off its face, Jason circled and looked for an opening. He was low, on all fours, and he could smell the hot blood as it coursed down the bear's muzzle. Blood and meat and fear and desire mingled in him, and as something laughed, he turned and saw a large coyote sitting at the table. Its grin was huge, its snout longer than any snout had a right to be, and he was laughing in a strange half-animal/half-man way.
The hawk suddenly fell before Jason, twitching and gasping as it died, and he knew the time to strike was now.
Jason leaped on the bear, its arms trying to crush him but not able to find purchase. He sank his teeth into the bear's throat, and for a moment he was afraid he wouldn't make it through all that thick fur. The bear tried to bring its claws to bear, but as the wolf worried at it with its fangs, he was rewarded with a mouth full of hot blood. The bear kept trying to rake him with its claws, but its movements were becoming less coordinated. When it fell, the whole room shook with the sound of its thunder, and Jason rolled off it as it lay still.
“Bravo, bravo,” cried the coyote, clapping its paws together in celebration, “Well fought, young wolf, well fought.”
Jason took a step towards him, but suddenly he was falling. It was as if a whirlpool had opened up beneath him and he was being sucked into it. Jason thrashed and snarled, trying to get his balance, but he was powerless against the pull as it flung him down and into the depths of some strange and terrible abyss.
He came to in the empty clearing where the house had been, and that was where he found his friends.
Wiley rewound the tape, not quite sure what to make of this.
“So this strange man offered to play a game, and then he changed you three into animals?”
Jason nodded, looking like one of those birds that dip into a glass of water, “I picked Fang, so I was the wolf. The game wasn't fair, we didn't know what we were doing, but I still killed Moody. I killed both of them because I had been the one to approach the house first. I killed them when I agreed to play the game. It's my fault, I'm a murderer.”
Wiley wasn't so sure, but it was hard to argue with the evidence. The video showed Jason dropping the camera and then suddenly there was a lot of snarling and screeching. Wiley heard the animals fighting, but he heard something else too. Something was laughing, really having a good belly chuckle, and it sounded like a hyena. He couldn't see it, it was all lost amongst the carpet, but suddenly that carpet had turned into grass, and the camera was lying outside in the midday sun. Someone got up, someone sobbed and moaned out in negation, and then they walked away.
That was where the video ended.
In the end, Jason was sent for psychiatric evaluation and the whole thing was chalked up to a drug-induced episode. Jason and his friends were drugged by an old man in the woods and while under the influence of an unknown substance, a substance that didn't show up on any toxicology screening, they killed each other. Blood was found on Jason, blood belonging to Marshall Moody, but blood from the fingernails of Moody was determined to belong to Kai Dillon, which really helped push the narrative that Detective Wiley was working with. He told the press to report an old man in the woods who was drugging people and pushed the stranger danger talks a little harder than usual that year on school visits.
After that day, the tape he took from Jason Weeks was never seen again, but Wiley believed that the boys had run up against something they weren't prepared for. When John Makaro had led the extermination of the Native People that dwelt on his land, he had angered something he wasn't prepared for either. Wiley's grandmother had liked to tell stories about Coyote, the trickster god, and how he could be as fierce as he was cunning when he needed to be. Wiley didn't think they would ever find an old man out there in the woods, but he didn't doubt others would find him.
Coyote liked his games, especially when the players were people he saw as interlopers.
Makaro House remained a town legend, and Wiley had little doubt that those foolish enough to enter would be presented with the same game these three boys had been given.
Wiley shuddered to think how the next challenge might go when Coyote needed more amusement.
Makaro House
“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”

Hey everyone,
Apologies in advance if this post seems uninformed or naive.
I'm interested in pursuing a PhD but lack a clear understanding of what a typical day looks like for a PhD student in an unstructured program. Do I need to be on campus (or even on the same continent) all the time? How frequently do meetings with supervisors occur—are they scheduled regularly, or are they more flexible and based on when I seek guidance? Are these meetings typically in person or via Zoom?
The reason for my questions is that I’d love to study abroad but will still need to work in my home country occasionally to finance my studies. Is this a common or feasible arrangement?
Thanks a lot for any insights, and best of luck with your research! :)

Hello, I just received today na I didn’t passed the final interview sa Makati Med tho I really tried my best. Gusto ko na mag work. Ang dami ko na na-applyan pero until now wala pa din. :(((( all of my friends hired na, im really happy for them. Sana ako din mag kawork na. Baka po may alam kayong hiring ng medtech full time. Willing to start anytime and to relocate around Metro Manila or Makati po. I recently passed my licensure examination in March 2024 with 1-year clinical internship experience.

“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”
The video was shot in shaky cam, the footage hard to watch without getting a little seasick. Officer Wiley, Detective Wiley now, had seen a lot in his time on the force, but a double homicide perpetrated by this fourteen-year-old kid in front of him was something he hoped he would never see. A double homicide, and carried out against two of his best friends, at that. The two kids in question, Marshal Moody and Kai Dillon, had been friends with Jason Weeks since elementary school, and there had never been any reports of violence or any other alarming behavior, at least none reported to the police. The boys had operated a YouTube channel, JMK Occult, for the last two years, and while their content was pretty typical for kids online, they had been uploading steadily every week since their first video about a strange deer in the North Woods around Cadderly.
Hell, Wiley even watched their stuff sometimes when he was bored.
People in the community knew them, and this was out of character for any of them.
Wiley paused the video, the three boys blundering through the South Woods and chattering like a pack of squirrels, and looked at Jason.
Jason, Jay to his friends, looked like he had aged a decade. He had a gaunt look usually reserved for soldiers who come back from war. His hair had been long and blonde for as long as anyone had known him, but the kid sitting here now was as bald as an egg and his scalp looked scoured instead of shaved. The shirt he had been wearing in the video was gone. He was still wearing the ring of it around his neck, the stretched fabric like a collar, and the jeans he wore were stained and ragged in places that looked fresh. He'd been found with no shoes or socks, but he was wearing the orange flip-flops of a jail resident now.
Wiley knew his parents wanted to bail him out, but he wasn't sure if the judge was going to extend him bail or not, given the nature of his crime.
The way those kids had been ripped apart was something that would haunt him for a long time.
“So, Jason, Officer Russel tells me that someone picked you up beside the road and you told them that your friends were dead and that you had killed them. Is that true?”
Jason nodded, not speaking a word as he continued to stare at the wall.
The woman in question was Darla Hughes, a mother of three who had stopped when she saw a young teenage boy walking on the side of the road in the state he was currently in. Stories of kidnapping and kids held in basements for months while God knew what happened to them were clear in the public consciousness. Darla thought she had found some kid who had escaped his situation, and when she stopped to help him, she said the poor lamb had said eight words and then nothing else.
“He said, my friends are dead, and I killed them.”
They had found the kids in a clearing in the woods about three miles in, a site he was familiar with.
How many times had he and his friends gone looking for the Makaro House?
Everyone in Cadderly knew about Makaro House, and most people's childhoods had been spent looking for it. John Makaro, a prominent figure in Cadderly's history, had been a prominent importer and exporter in England. He had come to America before the Revolutionary War to try to set up a similar business here, and Cadderly had been a large enough port to satisfy his needs without being so big that a new face would be lost. He established a manor in the South Woods, despite being told that it was Indian Land, and the bill of sale did very little to dispatch the native tribe that was living there. He survived two raids by the natives somehow, but his wife and daughter were not so lucky the second time. As such, he rallied a mob of townspeople to go into the woods and help him flush out the natives who were living there. The raid took weeks, but by the end, they had killed or scattered every member of the tribe that lived there.
Satisfied, Mr. Makaro built his lavish estates there, but strange things surrounded it from the first. Workers went missing, people reported strange lights and sounds after dark, and a shriveled figure in skins and feathers could be seen lurking after moonrise. Animals on the property acted strangely, and sometimes people found wolves or bears on the grounds. Usually, they were in a rage, but sometimes they simply fled as if they had been drawn there and weren't sure what to do now that they were. Once the house was finished, John Makaro had a hard time keeping staff. None of the hands he had hired to keep his livestock would stay more than a week, and they all refused to stay on the property after dark. His servants would likewise disappear suddenly, and none of them would stay at night besides his butler, who had been with him for years. People said that Mr. Makaro talked about hearing chanting in the house and seeing strange shadows, and when even his butler disappeared one evening, John locked the doors and stayed in the house alone for a long time. People who came to see him said he could be seen wandering the halls like a ghost, calling out for people only he could see.
When his mansion was seen in full blaze one night, those who were first on the scene said they saw a lone man silhouetted in the flames, his feathers and skins on full display.
He disappeared when they got close, but he had been seen by many in the years to come.
“What did you see out there, Jason?”
Jason continued to stare at the wall.
“I wanna help you, kid, but you have to help yourself first.”
He couldn't help but glance down at the kid's fingers as he left them splayed on that table like sleeping spiders. The nails were dirty, the beds crusty with something like blood, and several of them were torn and ragged. There was grime around his mouth too, and Wiley would have bet his next paycheck that it wasn't a Kool-aid ring. It looked like mud or paint, but it was probably blood.
Jason remained silent as the grave.
“Jason, none of us believe that you killed your friends. You,”
“You're wrong,”
Wiley had been fiddling with the remote, trying not to look at the kid's hands, but when he spoke, he looked up. Jason was still staring at the wall, but his head was shaking as his teeth chattered together. The kid looked like he was staring into the mouth of hell instead of the creme-colored wall of the interrogation room. Wiley almost didn't want to ask him what he had seen, but he needed to know. He needed to know how this kid had killed two other kids, one of whom was bigger than him by a head and sixty pounds.
“Would you like to elaborate?” Wiley asked.
He didn't think the kid would for a minute, but finally, he just reached slowly and pushed play on the remote. He kept looking at Wiley like he thought he might slap his hand, but when he let him get all the way across the table unsmacked, he relaxed a little. The video went on as they walked through the woods, joking and laughing as the woods lived their quiet existence around them.
“We went in at eight, just after Kai's mom went to work. She wouldn't have liked us going into the South Woods, but we wanted to investigate Makaro House. We wanted to do it for our first episode, but Moody said it was something we should work up to. The Makaro House was something big, and we needed to be ready for it. Turned out we weren't.”
On the screen, the kids kept walking through the woods, checking their compass and making their way carefully through the thick brush. They were still chattering, talking about what they might find when they got there, and whether they would find the clearing or see the mysterious mansion that people talked about sometimes. Legend said that a ghostly manor appeared in the clearing sometimes, the ghost of the house and that people who went inside were never seen again. Wiley didn't believe that, but as a kid, he had to admit that the clearing where the house had sat was spooky. All the wood had long ago rotted, the stones taken away for use in other things, but the land just felt wrong. Wiley had never been there after dark, but people claimed to hear footsteps and see things after the sun went down.
Wiley pushed fast forward on the tape and watched as the kids plodded on and on.
Jason wished that he could have sped through that part of the trip.
They had set out at eight, waving to Kai's mom as she pulled out of the driveway. The packs had been pulled out of the garage after she was down the road a piece, and the three set out for the woods. They knew the rough direction of the Makaro House, but no one really came upon it in the same way. Danny Foster had said it was a three-mile walk from the forest's edge to the property, but Jamie had claimed that he and his friends had walked for what seemed like hours.
“When we found it, though,” he said, “we found the house instead of an empty lot. We kept daring each other to go in, but we left when someone lit a fire on the grounds.”
Jason and his friends were hoping to find the house instead of the lot, and as their walk turned into a hike, Kai stopped and looked at the compass.
“We should have gotten there by now.”
Moody chuckled, “Maybe we're going in the wrong direction.”
“Can't be,” Kai protested, “The directions are to go south into the south woods for three miles. Then you'll come to the clearing where Makaro House once sat.”
Jason didn't want to jinx it, but at the time he thought that boded well for them finding the house.
They kept walking, Kai good for an endless stream of conversation, and as the sun began to set, Jason found he was out of breath. His tongue felt like leather as it stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the lunch they had brought had been eaten hours ago. Moody had argued that they should turn around and head back, but Jason had finally vocalized that this could mean they were going to find the house instead of an empty lot.
He was hopeful right until they got what they wanted
When the sun began to go down, Wiley knit his brows together.
“I thought you and your friends were only in the woods for a few hours?”
Jason shook his head slowly, “We were, and we weren't. The time on the camera says we walked for eight hours before I turned it off, but when I got picked up by the side of the road, it was barely noon.”
Wiley pursed his lips, “How is that possible?”
The video cut out, the battery in the camera having been exhausted, and Jason nodded at the screen.
“Those batteries have a max life of three hours. Dad said it was the best battery they had when he ordered it for me, and it was pretty expensive. There's no way one of those batteries could have recorded for eight hours, but it did.”
The recording came back on, and Wiley was shocked to see that they were standing on the lawn of an old Gothic mansion. The sun setting behind the house made a perfect backdrop for the shot, and the boys were oooing and ahhing appreciatively. None of them seemed to believe what they were seeing, the whole thing a little otherworldly, and there seemed to be some argument about who was going to approach the house first.
“Is that,” Wiley stopped to wet his lips,” it can't be. The Makaro House burned down hundreds of years ago.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, his eyes still fixed on the wall, “in all its glory.”
And oh, what glory there had been in it.
Moody had gawped at the house as he had never seen one before.
“No way, there is no way.”
“That's impossible,” Kai breathed, “that house burned to the ground before our father's fathers were even thought of.”
“But there it is,” Jason said, mirroring his later statement, though he could not know it, “in all its glory.”
As the sun set behind it, Jason thought it looked even spookier than it would at night. The mansion rose like an obelisk towards the sky, its towered roofs looking naked without flags or pinions. The boys stood at the edge, trying to shame or bluster one of the others into going there first, but in the end, Jason took the first step. The others looked surprised at his boldness, but they followed closely after, not wanting to be thought less of.
Jason expected the house to disintegrate as he approached, an illusion or a trick of the light, but as his foot came to rest on the boards of the old house, he felt their solidity and continued to climb.
When the doors opened for them, the broad double doors swinging jauntily on their hinges, the three boys pulled back as they prepared to run.
The camera captured their indecision, the portal yawning wide as it waited to receive them, and Jason seemed to surprise even himself as he came forward to investigate it.
“Jason, What if it's a trap?”
“This whole place shouldn't exist, and if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to explore it, you're wrong."
Jason went in, pausing just inside the doors as if waiting for them to crash shut.
When they didn't, Moody followed him and Kai brought up the rear.
Makaro House lived up to its Gothic exterior, the inside full of soft dark velvet and antique furniture. There was a fire burning in the hearth inside the sitting room, tables spread with books in the library, and as they came up the long hall that led towards what was undoubtedly a dining room, Jason began to smell something. It was something like a stew or maybe a roast, and the smell of meat brought them to the dining room. A long table sat in the middle, eight chairs on each side of it, and at the end sat a wrinkled old man eating soup from a bowl.
It was hard to tell before they had gotten close, but the old man looked like he might be Native American. He was dressed in hides, feathers adorning his head and necklace, and he wore a beaded necklace with bones and claws on it. He looked up as they approached, glowering at them evenly, before returning to his meal. He ignored the boys, all three standing back apprehensively before Jason found the courage to speak.
“Excuse me, sir. Is this your house?”
The spoon froze on the way to his mouth, and the old man looked like he'd been slapped.
“My house?” he asked, his voice sounding thin and whispery, “No, child, but it was paid for by my people. We paid with our blood, we paid with our lives, and in the end, the cost was high. I took some of that cost from the previous owner of this home, and now it's only me who lives here.”
Kai made an uncomfortable noise in his throat, like a dog trying to tell its owner that something wasn't safe, and Jason understood the feeling.
“Well, we'll leave you to it then. We didn't mean to,”
“Leave?” the old man said, sounding amused, “oh no. No one leaves Makaro House until they've played the game. It was always a way for our warriors to test their metal, and I have so longed to see it played again. Will you join me? If not, I'm afraid you might find it quite hard to leave.”
Moody took a step back, and Jason heard his heavy footsteps on the carpet as he tried to retreat.
“What's the game?” Jason asked, figuring they could outrun this old coyote if it came down to it.
Jason would wonder why he had thought of him that way, but he didn't have time to ponder it then.
“Choose your piece from my necklace,” the old man said, slipping it off and laying it on the table, “Claw, Talon, or Fang.”
“Then what?” Moody asked, Kai moving behind him as if afraid to come too close.
“Then we start the game.” the old man said, smiling toothily.
For an old man, he certainly had a lot of sharp teeth.
“Okay,” Moody said, walking forward as Kai followed in his wake, “I choose claw.”
“Talon,” said Kai, reaching out to touch it.
“Fang,” said Jason, and as he put his hand out, he felt a sudden, violent shifting in his guts.
He was shrinking, the world moving rapidly all around him. He was smaller, but also more than he was, and he was trapped. His legs scrabbled at the thing that held him, and he tore it to pieces as he freed himself. He heard a loud roar and something big rose up before him. The bear was massive, ragged bits of something hanging from him, and Jason was afraid that he would kill him before he could get fully free of his snare. Something screeched then, flying at the bear's face and attacking him. Jason saw blood run down the snout of the bear, and as it tried to get the bird, a large hawk, off its face, Jason circled and looked for an opening. He was low, on all fours, and he could smell the hot blood as it coursed down the bear's muzzle. Blood and meat and fear and desire mingled in him, and as something laughed, he turned and saw a large coyote sitting at the table. Its grin was huge, its snout longer than any snout had a right to be, and he was laughing in a strange half-animal/half-man way.
The hawk suddenly fell before Jason, twitching and gasping as it died, and he knew the time to strike was now.
Jason leaped on the bear, its arms trying to crush him but not able to find purchase. He sank his teeth into the bear's throat, and for a moment he was afraid he wouldn't make it through all that thick fur. The bear tried to bring its claws to bear, but as the wolf worried at it with its fangs, he was rewarded with a mouth full of hot blood. The bear kept trying to rake him with its claws, but its movements were becoming less coordinated. When it fell, the whole room shook with the sound of its thunder, and Jason rolled off it as it lay still.
“Bravo, bravo,” cried the coyote, clapping its paws together in celebration, “Well fought, young wolf, well fought.”
Jason took a step towards him, but suddenly he was falling. It was as if a whirlpool had opened up beneath him and he was being sucked into it. Jason thrashed and snarled, trying to get his balance, but he was powerless against the pull as it flung him down and into the depths of some strange and terrible abyss.
He came to in the empty clearing where the house had been, and that was where he found his friends.
Wiley rewound the tape, not quite sure what to make of this.
“So this strange man offered to play a game, and then he changed you three into animals?”
Jason nodded, looking like one of those birds that dip into a glass of water, “I picked Fang, so I was the wolf. The game wasn't fair, we didn't know what we were doing, but I still killed Moody. I killed both of them because I had been the one to approach the house first. I killed them when I agreed to play the game. It's my fault, I'm a murderer.”
Wiley wasn't so sure, but it was hard to argue with the evidence. The video showed Jason dropping the camera and then suddenly there was a lot of snarling and screeching. Wiley heard the animals fighting, but he heard something else too. Something was laughing, really having a good belly chuckle, and it sounded like a hyena. He couldn't see it, it was all lost amongst the carpet, but suddenly that carpet had turned into grass, and the camera was lying outside in the midday sun. Someone got up, someone sobbed and moaned out in negation, and then they walked away.
That was where the video ended.
In the end, Jason was sent for psychiatric evaluation and the whole thing was chalked up to a drug-induced episode. Jason and his friends were drugged by an old man in the woods and while under the influence of an unknown substance, a substance that didn't show up on any toxicology screening, they killed each other. Blood was found on Jason, blood belonging to Marshall Moody, but blood from the fingernails of Moody was determined to belong to Kai Dillon, which really helped push the narrative that Detective Wiley was working with. He told the press to report an old man in the woods who was drugging people and pushed the stranger danger talks a little harder than usual that year on school visits.
After that day, the tape he took from Jason Weeks was never seen again, but Wiley believed that the boys had run up against something they weren't prepared for. When John Makaro had led the extermination of the Native People that dwelt on his land, he had angered something he wasn't prepared for either. Wiley's grandmother had liked to tell stories about Coyote, the trickster god, and how he could be as fierce as he was cunning when he needed to be. Wiley didn't think they would ever find an old man out there in the woods, but he didn't doubt others would find him.
Coyote liked his games, especially when the players were people he saw as interlopers.
Makaro House remained a town legend, and Wiley had little doubt that those foolish enough to enter would be presented with the same game these three boys had been given.
Wiley shuddered to think how the next challenge might go when Coyote needed more amusement.
Makaro House
“This is Jay, Moody, and Kai, and today we are searching for Makaro House.”

Hi, I am from india and passed out of class 12th in 2023 took a gap year for trying one more time to enter med school but didn’t get in.Currently I’m going through that phase where I have made peace with the fact that I won’t be able to become a doctor but unfortunately my parents aren’t able to digest that. Irrespective of that I have been applying to various engineering colleges to pursue a degree in btech biotechnology and got accepted in a few. But looking at the number of people complaining about layoffs and the salaries not being enough. To all those who are interning or working in this industry what would you advise me? Am I doing the right thing? An estimate as to how much can a person earn after getting a PhD or masters. Which is the best country in the world to settle in terms of the (growth and scope of biotechnology) I belong to a middle class family and if I will be taking a loan for my studies it’s very important for me to land a good paying job because i can’t be a burden on my parents. So experienced advice on as to much can an individual earn considering that I’ll be applying for jobs 7-8 yrs down the line. I know it’s a little difficult to predict the future market but any advice e would help me rn. Anything you would to advise me before I enter this field would help me A little advice from you’ll would actually be of great help to me because none of my family members are in this industry. Thank you 🙏

23F, 160cm, 54Kg, no substances. No known allergies. I am lactose intolerant and have eliminated lactose from my diet. I have been feeling generally 'off' for around a year now, and have been having semi-regular blood tests. I have always had iron levels on the lower side of healthy. I have always eaten a diet high in red meat and other iron-rich foods, and yet I still have low iron.
It began about a year and a half ago, when I suddenly had an episode of feeling very off. I was fatigued, had pain in my arms, a strange rash that didn't go away when pressing (the best way to describe it is unconnected small red and purple blotches, confined to a small area usually appearing on my torso or legs), and experienced an overwhelming feeling of doom. I do have anxiety, however I have never before (or since) experienced that feeling, and there was nothing in my life happening at the time to trigger it.
I had my blood taken and it showed extremely high iron levels all of a sudden (more than 2.5x my previous levels). The only other results of note were low Urea and cholesterol, and high bilirubin. I have never had anything wrong with my liver before. My white blood cell count was normal at this time. The doctor recommended to monitor and have a follow-up test in three month's time.
Three months passes and I remain fatigued, and the joint pain is on and off. The rash mostly just appears after showering. I'm not sure if it's related, but I started coughing up a large volume of tonsil stones. My follow-up blood test showed that my iron had returned to its normal borderline low levels! everything else had returned to normal, except my white blood cell count. The total count had decreased but was still within healthy levels. My neutrophil levels had decreased by 50%. Everything looked pretty normal, so despite still feeling bad I didn't test again for another 8 months. I felt embarassed to talk to doctors as I felt like I was wasting their time.
Over those 8 months my energy levels took a nosedive. I could only last until around 3pm before feeling incredibly tired. I am not a big caffeine drinker, and drinking tea didn't help my energy levels. I get around 8 hours of sleep per night. I started taking iron supplements with vitamin c, but there was no improvement. The strange rash continued after showering, however the joint pain decreased (but still occured). I saw a doctor who confirmed the rash wasn't due to scarlet fever. He told me not to be concerned as it may be due to a skin allergy. I was feeling nauseous every morning, and my abdomen was constantly bloated. I often experienced severe pain just under the ribs. I also got recurring pain in my lower left abdomen and my doctor suggested a possible hernia. At nights I would again feel nauseous. I was still eating like normal. I always felt like there was something caught in the back of my throat, and I had a lot of excess mucus. I was constantly clearing my throat.
I mainly noticed that wounds were bleeding for longer and I had a lot of mouth ulcers. My gums would bleed overnight and are always an inflamed red colour despite regular burshing, flossing, and dental checkups. Also strangely I have had new brown moles appearing even in places not exposed to the sun. Around 5-6 new moles appear per month. I had a skin check by a dermatologist, and he confirmed no skin cancer. He biopsied two moles which came back healthy. I have been getting itchy red sores on my hands and feet which come and go. This is different to the other rash, and happens mainly when exposed to moisture for too long.
Still feeling very off, I went back for the next blood test. My cholestorol had reverted to the previous low levels, and my glucose was very low (borderline hypoglycemic). I have no family history of diabetes. My total white blood cell levels had once again dropped and were now bordeline low. My Neutrophils in particular were clinically low and the report noted mild neutropenia. I had not recenty been sick or had an infection. My iron levels were still borderline low despite taking supplements. The doctor once again said to just do follow-up testing when possible. That was a month ago, and I have since moved somewhere remote with very limited access to healthcare facilities to volunteer.
Since then, my appetite has been steadily decreasing. I have been eating around 1.5 meals a day as I feel very full very quickly. I don't weigh myself regularly, however it looks like I have been losing some weight. My throat is now constantly mildly irritated. A doctor noted that the lymph nodes on the right side of my neck were enlarged, however we chalked this off to me moving to the tropics. Two lymph nodes have remained swollen most of the time, one feels firm and doesn't hurt. The other feels soft and moveable, and is a little sore when pressed. The doctor checked for both ear and throat infections but nothing was found. The doctor recommended an ultrasound of my neck, however there are no ultrasound facilities in the place i'm living.
I had to go to a hospital in a neighbouring location for unrelated reasons after an injury, and they did x-rays of my entire spine. Nothing was noted in the neck area, and no blood tests were taken. I brought up the other symptoms I had been experiencing, but after treating the injury I was discharged.
I am just not entirely sure what to do. I am tired of feeling sick all the time. No changes in diet or supplements have worked, and doctors seem to have no answer for me. I keep being dismissed for a variety of circumstantial reasons like moving to the tropics, being stressed, indigestion, period symptoms. Everyone keeps saying it's because of the tropical climate, but these symptoms have been ongoing since months before, and the blood tests were all taken prior to moving.
At one doctor's appointment he asked if there was a possibility of blood born diseases. I noted that I used to work as a medical sterilisation technician, however I had never had a needlestick injury or other contamination that I knew of. It has been three years since I worked that job.
At this stage I am scared to go back to the doctor as I feel like I am wasting everyone's time. It would take a lot of effort for me to access medical facilities due to my location, and I don't see the point in going in for a follow-up test when I will probably be brushed off again. I would appreciate any advice at all, noting that it is very difficult for me to access medical facilities at the moment.

So I travel constantly and had to speak with Lufthansa about a matter that a chatbot couldn't deal with. I tried every phone number listed on the internet and one on their site and literally nothing worked.
Maybe I made an error? Missed something? I'm in the US.
I understand massive corporations want to replace human customer agents with robots to generate more profits, which to me signals the downfall of society for a litany of reasons I won't go into, but Lufthansa doing this surprises me.
I would have thought an American airline would beat them to the punch.
I thought they were one of the best and I've flown with them 10 years ago and enjoyed the experience.
Customer service does actually matter as far as repeat business - I literally never have to fly Lufthansa again if I want to personally ban it because there are bazillion airlines that travel where they travel.
So far I've been pleased with KLM across the board and Qatar Airways even during the pandemic and post-pandemic eras.
Sorry for the rant.

Hi Everyone,
Just wanted to provide an update on my post from last week:
https://www.reddit.com/Feral_Cats/comments/1csag2t/borrow_a_drop_trap_san_diego/
I was able to borrow a drop trap from a local TNR organization and managed to trap the little guy late Thursday night. The earliest I was able to get a vet appointment for the next day was with my local shelter so I took him there for treatment and neutering. Fortunately, they were able to help him but had to remove his right eye in the process.
Saturday morning, I took him to my vet for a blood panel and SNAP triple test but they let me know it was risky to put him under anesthesia again so soon. My vet reviewed the medical report provided by the shelter and noted the FVCRP and rabies vaccines had been administered as part of his treatment, so they suggested scheduling the blood panel and triple test for three weeks from then as they could also administer the boosters in the same visit. I set the appointment and then got to work building the 6'x10' catio (pics 1 - 3) I ordered from Amazon (please forgive the messy state of my backyard as we're moving things around to prepare for some repairs to the house). I'm going to do my best to gain his trust so I can bring him indoors but wanted him to have his own space to adjust to everything that's happened in the meantime.
On Monday night I noticed his sutures were bleeding a little so I called my vet and scheduled a visit for the next morning. They were going to put him back under anesthesia to get a cone on him as one wasn't placed on him at the shelter and also suggested we do the blood panel and SNAP triple test that day instead of waiting the three weeks like we had originally planned. I haven't gotten the results from the blood panel yet, but the SNAP triple test showed he was negative for both FeLV and heartworm but positive for FIV. Since then, I've been reading up on FIV so I can better provide the care he needs and hope to give him a long and happy life.
In pics 4 and 5 you can see dry blood below his right eye but that's because the tough little guy woke up from the anesthesia early so the vet didn't have the chance to clean it from his fur. I'd clean it myself but he gets a bit stressed when I get too close right now.
I also wanted to thank everyone for the advice and encouragement I received in my original post as I wouldn't have caught him without everyone's help.

Writing this here because I won`t ever text her again, i told her that she can be 100% sure that I`ll think of her, but I won`t reach out.
A part of me hates how you treated me often, the things you said, how you didn`t even apologize for your shit part of our relationship, how you rarely took accountability for your own (re)actions, how you were more in your head than in the reality or in our relationship in the last months of us, you acted after our breakup. If you will be like this in your future & don`t change for the better and work on yourself, I don`t want to hear from you ever again, or see you again. A part of me wishes you`d be able to see the reality & open your damn eyes, but that isn`t on me anymore, you`ll have to do it yourself and idk if you`ll ever be able to do that, even if you feel the same pain and get in a similar situation, I always wanted you to grow.
The other side of me just wishes you the best, a great birthday, a great life, we`re exes not our worst enemies. I love(d) you for sooo many reasons and you did the same, I have a shitty day today and knew that already weeks ago, I`m happy the bad times, moments & your bad sides of our relationship are over, but I miss you/us, we were special in many ways, I miss all the good sides, we were able to give each other so much love, power, stability,... and it`s sad that you didn`t want to fight for it, because I`m 100% sure it would`ve been worth putting in the effort, your commitment was missing but mine was absolutely there. I`m disappointed in you, I`m angry & sad because you left & because of the situation. I`m doing okay in general, but damn this week is hitting me hard, especially today. I`d have loved to think of which present I`ll get you today, we always gave us the best presents we ever had, now it`s gone. Goodbye.