Does anyone else wake up with burning stomach pain and chest pain? I'm trying to figure out if I have a sleep condition or if it's just another symptom of IBS or GI issues. :/

I have noburp and recently my anxiety has been through the roof because of the Cryptosporidium outbreak (I’m in the UK and also have emetophobia unfortunately) and my noburp episodes have escalated severely, they’re affected badly by my anxiety as I swallow a lot more whilst panicking. Does anyone ever have episodes where they’re struggling so badly to break out the gurgles from their throat that they feel like they can’t breathe/catch their breath? I feel like my chest and throat are slowly closing up when I’m suffering in these episodes and I’m a nervous wreck!
I know I should get Botox and I’m waiting on my workplace to see if they can cover my procedure (I have Bupa Insurance however I haven’t heard anything back from them yet, I’ve submitted a query) so I guess this is just a rant but if anyone else experiences this let me know? So I feel less insane 💔

I havent had a big asthma attack since I was a kid, I was in the hospital 2 times with pneumonia.
Earlier today I was completely fine; I even gymmed
I drank a cold beverage (sometimes triggers cough) and my gf brushed my cat earlier today in front of me (heavily allergic) and I think I inhaled some.
Not long after I felt my airways tighten up and Ive been coughing for like 12 hours since then. I just fell asleep and woke up after like 4 hours with my chest burning on fire and coughing up light yellow mucus.
Does anyone know what this could be? Will asthma medication help me

A dark room, filled with clothes and objects thrown around, held a girl, crying on the floor. Her silky silver hair splattered on the ground, with dirty pinky pajamas. Her tears would fall beneath her eyes, wetting the place with her constant and long cries.
V was afraid, unsure. She didn't know what her love thought of her, but his actions hurt her more than any words. Her sunshine was avoiding her, depraving her of it's vitamins that she so much needed. The memories of his looks at her pierced her chest, they weren't hateful, but terrified. He was afraid of her presence, of her. She, who loved him so much, was being neglected of what should be only hers, by the one himself. This was all that bitch's fault. If that twintailed whore hadn't talked with him, he would never be like this. She corrupted him with her two haired fangs, covincing him to bite that damned misinformation, losing the paradise that was their future. Worst of all, she had hope she'd be able to fix everything after his sister's death. She tried to get close to him, but it didn't work. He never listened to her, prefering to stay silent and never repond or react to anything she did.
V punched the floor in frustation. She couldn't believe she made that mistake, allowing such evil to approach her beloved. She could never let it happen again. She had to protect him from everything, all that could do harm to such perfection, but first, she had to gain his grace again. For that, it's best to just talk with him tomorrow.
The next day, V was standing at the school's entrance, waiting for him. She looked more presentable than her home self, wanting to look good for her sun. In the distance, she could see him walking, although, unlike his old self, he was much more gloomy, wearing a hoodie, hiding his face and sheltering his chest with his body. A sight that hurt V and, unfortunaly, was becoming more common to see. He was getting closer to her, but with no signs of even noticing her presence, so she decided to act.
"Hey N, how's your day?" She cheerfully asked him, waving at the boy, but his steps got quicker and he walked right by her side, not answering her question or even glancing at her. This surprised V, leaving a hole in her chest. She tried to follow him, but her body was frozen, pierced by sadness to the ground.
Wandering eyes watched as she suffered, finding amusement in her reaction.
Time passed, she tried to find him in any place, but it seemed that he had disappeared from school. However, she was sure she would see him on class, he never missed one, no matter what.
When she sat on her place, she smiled, seeing that he really was here, but before she could say anything with him, the teacher entered and V recognized this one, he hated talking in his class, so she decided to wait for the bell to ring once again and this pest to be gone.
The bell was heard by the entire school, meaning this class was finally over. It was a bore, as usual, but now, that the poor excuse of a drone was out of the room, she could finally speak with N. V got up and walked to his chair. He was even more gloomy than in the entrance, he hadn't even spoken to the teacher. His lack of happyness was affecting everyone around him, seeing that everyone seemed less joyful.
"Hey N, can we talk-" Before she could finish, N abruptly got up and walked away from her, going out of the room. Everyone looked at the scene, wondering if the two had a fight, since they used to be so close to each other.
From a chair, the same eyes looked with a faint laughter. It would be easier than it thought.
V didn't try to speak with him in class again. Judging by his mood, he would just repeat the same thing. V could feel a hand grasping her core with force, nearly exploding it. Why did this have to happen to her? She just wants his love, nothing more. She could feel tears wanting to leave her eyes, but she couldn't allow them to ruin her reputation. She had to keep it in. Her home was waiting for her when this ended. There, alone, she could do whatever she wanted.
The bell rings one more time, now, annoucing recess. Everyone got up, including N, and so did V. They all walked to the cafeteria, waiting to get their lunch, with others picking their tables. V followed her love, wanting to sit by his side and have a conversation about everything that is happening. She approached him when he walked out of the food line with his plate.
"So N, how about we-"
"Sorry, can I sit with you guys?" She was once again interrupted, although this time, he talked. His voice sounded horrible, as if any sound produced by his vocal cords hurt his flesh, but this wasn't what worried V the most. He had asked a table full of students she was sure he never even talked to. They looked at him and accepeted. He then sat on their side, leaving no room for her. She could only walk away, tears forming on her eyes, looking for any empty table where she wouldn't be bothered by anyone.
Why was he doing this? She just wanted to talk, clear things out, explain to him that she wasn't a monster he had to fear. Why couldn't he accpet this? She leaned on the table, covering her face from everything else. No, she couldn't blame him. What fault did he have on this? He only fell for lies told by the true monster. She couldn't blame him for being himself, she wanted that, more than anything at the moment.
Hours passed and V didn't try to talk with him again, fearing the worst. She only observed him from afar, watching how his old self was being washed away by the more depressing view of himself. Only if she wasn't so naive. The bell rang one last time. They now had to go back to their houses. If she had any chance to talk with him, it was now.
At the entrance of the main building, everyone was alredy gone. V made sure to pick a time where no one would be around. Maybe he was just shy to talk in front of everyone, she had to think about his side too. He was getting ready to leave, when she decided to confront him.
"N, we need to talk" The boy, who was ready to leave, stopped, however, he didn't look at her "I-I just want to talk about things N, to explain what's happening, so, please, let's talk about everything" She pleaded. His fist clenched, but he gave no response, although, he didn't move either. He was just standing there, listening. He wanted to say something, his body was shaking.
Slowly, he turned to her, his eyes meeting hers, expressing a mic of terror with aggressivness. This made V's look soften. He didn't seem happy to talk with her, but it couldn't be that, he was probably just surprised. He opened his mouth, but no words came out. Although, only this action filled V's core with hope. He's finally going to talk wity her, address her directly once again. She couldn't wait to hear her name on his voice once again.
"I've been following you the whole day" A female voice with a heavy russian accent was heard from behind V. She turned around, seeing a girl, about the same size as Lizzy used to be, with red hair and eyes, wearing the normal school outfit of a white shirt, stamped with the school's name, and dark blue shorts, paired with black boots, carrying an abnormally large dark red backpack. V could faintly remember this girl being one of Lizzy's friends, but she only wondered where she came from? V was sure she had checked every place, making sure there was no one in school other than them "But I finally caught you murder queen"
"Who are you?" V asked with a lifted eyebrown. N closed his mouth and only observed the situation in front of him.
"I'm Doll, one of Lizzy's friends. You know, the one you killed" She said with an angry tone. V narrowed her eyes. How did she know? No, this had to an asumption, there was no way she really knew.
"Oh, please. I didn't kill anyone, so just fuck off will you?" The silver haired girl showed the middle finger to the red haired, just wanting to be over with this pointless discussion and continue her talk with her beloved.
"Oh, I will" Doll said with a smile, putting her backpack on the ground and pulling out an AK-47. V and N's eyes widened at the sight of the gun, however, the boy didn't have enough reflex to escape, different from the girl, who quickly grabbed his wrist and ran to a corner where they wouldn't be hit, just as the russian girl started shooting.
The two silver haired were able to escape any fatal injury, but V noticed that N was clenching his shoulder with force, making small whimpers. She feared the worst, only for her to notice a black liquid squirming through the gap in between his fingers. He had been hit by a bullet.
How dare that bitch! First she attacks her for a fucking assumption, now that whore hurts her beloved!? No, things couldn't be this way. That stupid, demented little slav would feel what was like living in the USSR.
As much as V wanted to lunge on the red haired girl and rip out her organs, she was still firing her gun, but what worried the silver haired the most was that she could guess that Doll was approaching the corner with each second that passed. This was bad, if she reached their location, she doesn't know what to do. She doesn't know how to fight someone with an alredy firing gun, but she had to run out of bullets at some point. That's it, she would strike at that moment.
As if magic, the loud sound of gunshots stopped, but V didn't jump out of her cover yet. She didn't knew if the russian had only stopped or ran out of ammunition, the former being the worst scenario for her and N. So she waited, until, the sound of something falling to the ground echoed to her ears. That's what she wanted to hear, confirmation Doll was reloading, so it was safe to attack.
In one quick movement, V got out of cover and lunged at the russian girl with everything she had, but, after jumping towards her, V noticed that Doll was looking at her with a big smile on her face, as if she wanted that to happen. Before the silver haired pinned her down, she ripped her shirt, revealing mutiple active bombs strapped to her body. N got out of cover, leaning on the wall, looking at the fight scene unfold, unaware of what's going to happen. V brought Doll to the ground, as the russian took a detonator from her pocket.
"Это для Лиззи, сука" She spoke, pressing the button before the femme on top of her could escape.
All the bombs on Doll's body exploded, creating a huge ball of fire that engulfed her body, burning to nothing but a black powder, the only pieces of her remaining being the ones from the corner of her body that were exploded away. The center of the explosion hit half of V's body, burning it completely, but not desmebering her.
Her body was sent flying across the area, hitting a wall close to the corner she was before. The impect against the concrete nearly sent her unconscious, but something inside of her kept her mind running. She fell to the ground, but her vision darted around the place looking for something, no, someone.
N was laying on the gorund, clearly unconscious with a part of his head blown off, oil oozing out of it like a fountain. She started to cry and weakly crawl towards him. When close enough, she hugged his body, giving him a kiss on the forehead, right on the side of the wound.
"Please... Don't die" Was all she said in between cries, before closing her eyes.

Advice on Allergic Reaction from the Ordinary Beta Glucan Moisturiser
Beta Glucan the Ordinary allergic reaction
Hi there,
I recently decided a few days ago to try a new moisturiser, I was using Kiehl’s ultra facial cream but wanted to use something cheaper because the price tag is a bit much for me. I have used the HA natural moisturising factors from the ordinary before and had no problems. However, I really wanted to try something new and seen that they had a new gel moisturiser with Beta Glucan in it.
I ordered this and when I received it I done a patch test on my skin. However later on I started to feel my throat close up but I could still breathe it felt like a burning sensation. I am quite allergic to dust mites and I wasn’t sure what caused this reaction but I searched up Beta Glucan to see if it is an allergen and the first thing that came up was a study on dust mites.
I just kinda wanted advice on this to see if any of you folks know about Beta Glucan and to see if it does have any association to dust mites.
Thanks Friends! 🫶

20 yr old man. My throat hurts a lot when I swallow, especially when I swallow food. I can feel the food going down and it hurts all the way going down my throat and chest Does anyone know what it could be?

The second worst part of POTS aside from the feeling faint when trying to do anything is acid reflux. I NEVER had digestive issues like this until I developed POTS. I can’t eat anything I like anymore like pasta with tomato sauce, garlic, chocolate, peanut butter, potato’s, all of these give me acid reflux. I’ve tried multiple antiacids from my gastro and nothing has helped.Ive had an endoscopy and colonoscopy done and nothing was wrong there aside from high stomach acid and a tiny hiatal hernia which apparently “isn’t causing my issues” my stomach is quite literally pushed up into my chest cavity💀it’s 5:30am and I just wanna sleep and I have a gross glob in the back of my throat and a twinge of nausea. I’ve taken two tums already and it’s not helping. I tried saltine crackers and it only made it worse. I’ve been drinking water which is making me feel like I’ll throw up the water. I just want to sleep. I try not eating at all before bed but then my blood sugar drops and I feel crappy (I have reactive hypoglycemia). All I eat for my night snack is a nutrigrain bar, nothing fancy, nothing big. It should not be making me feel like this 😭😭 To top it all off I have insomnia so even if I did start to feel better I probably wouldn’t sleep anyways. IM SO TIRED YALL HELPPPP.

16f (5'5 or 5'6) Last year I was outside and my finger started twitching, it kind of stung but I thought nothing of it, but when I went inside my arm began to hurt so bad to move, it felt so tender even the touch of a feather hurt. Anyway went to the doctor they said I had tennis elbow, so I got a arm rest and went home, finally felt better after a week or so. Then my other arm began to hurt but the pain was different I could move my arm without pain but the pain was still worse, it felt like lightning, burning, and aching. The original arm that started hurting began to hurt again too, went to the doctor again and got blood work that was sort of abnormal but I was on my cycle. My fingers began to hurt on the left arm specifically pointer finger and pinky. Then my left thigh began to hurt, then the calf. Then my right calf. It's all the same type of pains, burning, lighting, and aching, and for the first time in awhile I'm feeling tender again. I was actually feeling better for a few weeks but then a week or so ago, I felt me getting worse again, but still not as bad as before mostly pain in my left arm and hand, like a burn. Now 2 days ago, I woke up with a hard bump on my leg it was itchy and hurt, right below it my bone is so sore and it feels bumpy. My arm began to burn, and hurt really bad all of a sudden and it feels bumpy too, and it's tender, when I realize that I decide to check my other arm and leg, my other arm isn't bumpy but slightly hurts, amd my other leg is bumpy and hurts like heck. I've also been having chest pain accompanied with left arm pain. Before all this I was having problems with my jaw popping, hurting, and being stiff, then that stopped and now this is my problem, literally back to back.

I am 7 days post op. L5 S1 microdiscectomy with symptoms on my right side/leg. I was doing really well. I was still taking Celebrex and Tylenol around the clock but my pain was manageable and I was getting out for some short walks.
Day 5 I started to get bad chest pain and my post op notes said that was something to look for. I called my surgeon Day 6 and they said for me to go into emergency to get it looked at (Canadian here) I went in and it was crazy busy. There was barely anyplace to sit down let alone lay down. But the nurses there told me I should wait to make sure it wasn’t a clot or something. I waited 6 hours. I tried to change my position from sit to stand every 30 mins but man I was in pain and exhausted. All tests came back clear for my chest. The doctor said it was probably a side effect from either the Celebrex or anesthesia.
Today (day7) I woke up feeling alright and went for a short walk and had a shower. But the pain in my back and leg started to build. So I thought it best to rest most of the day only walking to the washroom. Tonight, I am having pains like when I first herniated my back intense burning down my leg and back pain on my right side. Could this just be inflammation from over doing it yesterday? Or did I mess up my microdiscectomy?

Hi all!
Im sure this question has been asked before.
Short story: i was put on 40mg of ppi to “see if it helps”. I have been weening off for a few months now. (I didn’t have heartburn previously either, and didn’t find any reasons for acid reflux)
Question: I have got down to 20mg and am now doing every second day. Is the rebound supposed to be this bad while doing every second day? I have constant sharp stomach pains, globus sensation, bloating galore, and some burning in the throat.. Its much worse than the other weens i was doing..
Anyone else had this? I was under the impression that doing every second day shouldn’t be too bad.. Or is it worse going down to nothing
Also should add: Gaviscon etc doesn’t seem to help, if anything its actually making my stomach pain worse..
Thanks!

Every year in summer when we start the AC, a wall unit, it’s extremely uncomfortable for our eyes, nose and throat. Right now it’s very humid outside so I wouldn’t think it’s the dryness especially since it still feels humid. Outside we have no issues so not allergies from outside. Later in the summer the unit doesn’t seem to bother us as much. When we had a window unit we never had this issue. Any ideas what’s going on? We clean the filter regularly but maybe need to clean the machine?

“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.

ive been working on a youtube series i wanna film with my friends over summer. writing how i want it to plan out it is all i really have motivation for anymore right now but at the same time i want to quit everything. it is absolutely utterly exhausting having to somehow find a way to balence not eating, having depression, juggling school, friendships, music, writing this film shit, i get moments where my heart pounds in my chest and all i can do is focus on my breathing because i never eat and i am sick and genuinely so tired of never eating. im sick of having mental illness and im sick of pretending like im not barely present in my own body because im dissociated and too tired half the time. i genuinely feel exhausted and burned into the dirt

“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.

“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.”

“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.”