I grew up and currently live in a small town on the edge of Croydon in Surrey called Porvald. Porvald is realistically a bit of a shithole, wasn’t always, but it is now. It’s one of those places that used to be the host of a thriving community and tons of little shops and restaurants that has now been proliferated by chains that pushed out the small businesses in favour of the big brands. Even the park has lost its colour. Some kid tore the seat off the zipline and the council hasn’t bothered to fix it, and the skate ramp is too bogged down with bird shit for anyone to touch it let alone skate on it. Me and my friends now tend to go a little further out of town or into East Croydon for fun, or at least we did. I should probably get back on track.

 I live in a big house on a street in Porvald which stretches over a knoll near the town centre. In it was me; my parents; my cat; and my siblings, both older than me. My parents were loving but not necessarily very involved in the lives of me and my siblings other than helping us out when we needed it. My mum was always working and my dad didn’t really have time for my interests; as long as I got good grades and stayed out of trouble I was all good. My sister, Leah was a massive bully towards me until I was around 9, at which point she realised that if she’s leaving off to uni in the next couple years she should probably leave me with better memories than locking me in dark rooms and hitting each other with Wii remotes. Now that I’m 16 and she’s 23 we’re on much better terms, she was like a mentor to me, always kind but stern when I did something stupid and always guiding me towards being better. Since she lived in London, I saw her much less but each time I saw her she always kept my spirits high. Tom was different in the sense that he wasn’t as night and day in kindness and sternness as Leah. He was the funniest person I ever knew, and really helpful and considerate a lot of the time. I remember sitting on the stool in the sitting room and watching him play Battlefield on our PS3, swearing in German so I wouldn’t tell on him. Telling jokes to me and making entertaining commentary that would keep me occupied for hours. Other times he could be a massive asshole, the kind of asshole an older brother naturally fades into being now and again. He would get pissy with me and tell me to go away, especially with his friends around. Being 10 years older than me it always felt like I was trying to engage with him on his level, and he didn’t want me coming up near his level at all. This got worse in the days leading up to his death, and it wasn’t his fault.

 I remember the first time I saw a computer bleed. The first evening of the summer holiday Tom was on his PC like always after he came back from working at the hospital. I heard him howling with laughter and joy from his room. My mum shouted upstairs for him to be quiet but he just kept giggling like a maniac. My room was on the third floor so I went downstairs to see what was making him laugh so much. 

 As I approached his door I saw his face through the crack in the door lit up with a wide smile, appearing almost too big for his face, I could see colours flashing and reflecting off his face, his monitor just out of view. I opened the door to get a better look.

 “What’s so funny?” I asked with a chortle. He turned to me and his smile turned to a look of incredible anger.

 “Fuck off, Nat! I’m watching a video!” He scowled back at me. My mum yelled upstairs again telling him to not swear at me. I ignored him and turned the corner to get a better look at the video. It was utterly bizarre. It was a mixture of flashing images and colours, rapidly firing photos of all kinds wholesome and vile overlayed with slowly changing colours, like a LiveLeak disco. It was entrancing, I felt my eyes beginning to fall into a stimulated daze as Tom stood up in my peripheral vision and approached me. He pushed me backwards and slammed the door, I snapped out of the daze, and heard the giggling begin again.

 From that day on I heard Tom constantly laughing from his room, packages would arrive at our door and he’d run downstairs to bring them upstairs to his PC. They were mainly computer parts and peripherals, better headphones, a bigger monitor to go next to his primary one, more RAM, a new graphics card. He was spending like crazy, more than a doctor in an underpaid position should be reasonably doing. He stopped going back to his own apartment and would always come home, my family stopped appreciating the more frequent visits quickly as he seemed to only be there for his PC. He would knock on the door, say a quiet hello and immediately run upstairs. Me and my parents would share concerned looks as we heard the whirring noise of his PC begin, and a few minutes later that same sickening laughter. I would occasionally look through the crack in his door and he would always be watching that same video on repeat. One of my cats, a tuxedo named Moonshine, would lay down on his lap and rest, seemingly unbothered by the noise and light. He lost a good bit of weight during this time which for a person of his build would only be a bad thing, he never came down for dinner no matter how much my parents begged him to, he would just repeat the same things.

 “I’m an adult!”, “I’ll eat later!”, “I’m watching something right now!” My family and I were getting more concerned, using the time he wasn’t there to talk about what could possibly be causing this new obsession. I’d call my friends and put the microphone to the door so they could hear what was happening before rushing upstairs back to my room to consult them about it. None of them had anything to say other than they’d heard it also was happening to some kid a town over and that he had to be dragged out of his room after his mum called the police because he was getting violent when she asked him to stop watching it. I remembered Tom slamming the door, and was afraid of what would happen if I was noticed by him again. Until a couple days later, I stayed well away from his room and covered my ears when I slept so his laughter wouldn’t be there in my dreams.

 After those two days one evening he came home and when he went into his room, the laughing didn’t begin as usual. At this point the lack of laughter concerned me more than its presence so I went into his room to check on him and I saw him attaching more parts to his computer. He had laid it on its side and was fusing it together using various wires and adapters, the new parts rising out from the case like a tumor. Moonshine was sat up next to him, watching him tinker and click parts into place. He was muttering to himself, and I couldn’t make out the words. I knocked on his door and spoke quietly and carefully.

 “Tom?” He looked up at me, and he smiled. Something I hadn’t seen since the day he first watched the video.

 “Come sit next to me, I’m working on my PC.” I did as I was told and lowered myself next to him and crossed my legs.

 “I can see that.. anything you’re doing in particular?” From a closer view the structure of the machinery seemed impossible, wires flowed from corner to corner, some spiraled seemingly infinitely into different areas of the computer. The parts themselves seemed to intersect with one another like objects clipping in a video game. He had a knife in his hand and was tightening various screws. I heard a deep growling coming from within the computer, it would change tone, and as it did he would begin working on a different part of the build. I felt myself grow nauseous, I grimaced to keep the feeling in and clutched my stomach.

 “I’m just doing what I was told.” I saw that smile on his face again, but it was different. Something was dark in his eyes and there was an odd stillness to his features. Nothing twitched, he was completely still aside from his hands, working away at the computer.

 “Told, by who?-“ I uncrossed my legs to ready myself to get up, as I extended one of them I accidentally pushed away the PC with my foot, causing Tom to falter and slice one of the wires with his knife. The wire reared up and spattered blood from its fresh opening like crimson sparks. A growling whine emitted from the speakers, the computer was screaming. Tom’s expression twisted into one of disdain and sheer dread, he covered the PC with his body while manically apologising to it before turning to me.

 “You piece of shit! Get out of my room now!” I scrambled backwards and rose to my feet before backing up towards the door. I had started crying out of fear and confusion and this seemed to make him even angrier. “You hurt it! You did this on purpose!” His hands were now covered in blood as it poured out from the severed wire. I held my breath and left the room, closing the door behind me.

 That was the last time I saw my brother alive.

 That night, all I could see in my head was the blood on Tom’s hands. For a couple hours after I left his room he was sobbing and growling to himself like he was struck with grief and stress. It was the kind of reaction you’d see in those hospital shows on TV when a mother is told their child has passed away, or the panicked call to 999 that they play the recording of after they find their body themselves. The noises set my head on fire, I couldn’t bare hearing my brother that distressed but I knew it would get worse if I went back in, so I shut my bedroom door and put my headphones on. Laying down in bed I did my best to get to sleep but soon the sobbing stopped and was replaced by that laughter again.

 “He must’ve fixed it then.” I thought to myself, and then I fell asleep.

 During breakfast the next morning I told my family what had happened, they didn’t believe all of what I had said but they did at least agree that my brother had reached a point of no return in his behaviour and an intervention had to be made. However, amidst this conversation we had failed to realise one thing. My brother had stopped laughing.

 “Should I go check on him?” Mum asked, her voice was a tiny bit shaky, the unnatural silence was throwing her off too. Dad interjected with his own idea.

 “No just let him be, the next time he comes down to go to work we’ll catch him on the way out.”

 “That’s if he leaves. I told you about the calls we’ve been getting! If there wasn’t a strike happening right now he would’ve been fired a week ago.”

 “I’ll go check on him.” I piped up to cut the tension, leaving my chair and moving towards the staircase outside the kitchen door. I looked back to my parents’ worried faces and gave them my best approximation of a comforting smile. “I’ll call down if I need you to back me up or do anything.”

 “Okay NitNat, tell us how he’s doing when you’re done.” My parents had stupid nicknames for all of us, but that was my favourite. I smiled properly this time, and went upstairs.

 I knocked on Tom’s door to no response. Rather than immediately enter I put my ear to the door. Through it I heard the loud whirring of his computer as well as a deep guttural throbbing noise, different to anything I’d heard before. Looking down I could see the changing colours fading in and out through the crack at the bottom of the door. The video was on, but he wasn’t laughing. Something was terribly wrong.

 I opened the door and the scene before me was one that hasn't left my mind since. He was laying face down on the carpet of his room next to the monstrous machine his PC had become, piles of metal and thick wires bound together reaching out and sprawling across the room in all directions. His arms were stuck to his sides with his hands turned up, his right one was bloodied and in his palm was a chunk of skin and flesh that upon looking further had been torn from the back of his neck right below his skull. From that cavity in his neck his veins were hanging loosely and were fused with a group of wires that flowed out from the PC. The wires were throbbing visibly and I could hear the rush of blood moving through them. The video was playing on every single one of his monitors, the rapidly changing photos and colours reflecting off his pale body and the shine of the metal obelisk that he was now melded with. Moonshine was next to his body, lapping the pool of blood that had formed around his head. Through my panic and horrified sobbing I yelled down to my parents and I heard them immediately stand from their seats and begin rushing up the stairs. The last thing I remember of that day was looking back at the video on my brother’s screen and seeing his face appear amongst the photos, joyous, mouth agape in exaggerated glee, unmoving and unchanging, before flashing back into the slideshow of gore.

The funeral came a week later.

 After I found Tom my dad called the paramedics who pronounced his body dead on the spot. I say Tom’s body and not Tom for a reason which I’ll get to. But for now I want to tell you about the rest of my family, and how we all dealt with Tom’s death. 

 The paramedics didn’t know how to classify the death, and neither did we. They decided to list it as a suicide, wounds all seemed self inflicted and there was no evidence for an accident because the positioning of his body was too intentional. They ignored his PC, there was so much blood I don’t think they even realised some of it was coming from the computer itself. The day after we threw his computer away and sold his monitors, keyboard, mouse, headphones, all of it. None of us could bear to think about it anymore. I could hear my mum sobbing as she cleaned the blood from Tom’s bedroom and my dad struggled to wipe Moonshine’s face clean without breaking down himself. They were just as clueless as me as to what had happened, and couldn’t handle thinking about it for more than a couple minutes at a time. Dinner had been silent since that day, even when Leah came over it didn’t brighten any moods, it only added a fourth member to the silent suffering that engraved itself in the walls of my home. I leant on my friends a lot during that period, I would cry in voice calls with them and they would do their best to comfort me, often ending up in us playing Quiplash to settle me down and get me in a better mood. They may not have been the most openly sentimental people, but they knew how to make me laugh, and that’s all I needed.

 As my family were planning the funeral I thought about that word, suicide. I didn’t disagree with it, but I couldn’t in my right mind admit it to be the truth either. My brother had done something to himself, but it wasn’t of his own volition. I was upset at my family’s reluctance to get the police involved, it felt like the obvious thing to do in the wake of a death like that of my brother’s. But I think they just wanted the feeling to pass by as quickly as possible, and to not dwell on it any more than was needed. Especially my mum, she drowned herself in her work as a distraction, if she kept her nose to the grindstone she’d never need to look up. I tried reporting it to the police but I didn’t have much evidence on hand aside from the fact that there was that kid that watched the same video that got dragged out of his home, but the police’s reasoning was correlation doesn’t imply causation and that if I had more substantial evidence they would do something about it. I was pissed, my brother was dead and no one would do anything, let alone willingly acknowledge it. Leah shared my sentiments, we went on long walks together and cried on park benches, we would put on music we both liked and vent all our anger out, because god knows we would have torn that house to the ground if we vented it there.

 The chapel was cold and echoey. Tom’s coffin laid behind the altar in a closed thatch casket, ready to be burnt. There was a framed photo of Tom on an easel, a photo I took myself when I was with him in our sitting room, he was slightly hunched over a table doing a jigsaw puzzle, he was facing the camera, and giving a soft smile, his short black hair swept to the side slightly. It was nice to see him that way after the weeks that had come before, it was the side of him we all missed the most. And the side we chose to represent him that day. I didn’t listen to much of the eulogies. I was only thinking about what had happened to him, and what I could do to get someone to listen to me.

 While Tom was being cremated I had my idea. We had dumped the PC off at the city scrapyard, my dad wore gloves as he dragged it out of the backseat and onto the dry dirt below, coagulated blood dropped off different parts in chunks and a thin layer of red powder coated the tips of his shoes. We left it there and drove home. I thought that if it was still there, I could take a few photos of it and give them to the police as my evidence. I’d need to bring a couple friends, and we’d all need to sneak out at night, but if we managed to pull it off it would give me exactly what I needed, it would put my head to rest. As my careful thoughts closed and my mind came back to the immediacy of my surroundings, I stared at the clouds. Wires of smoke were spiralling upwards from the funeral crematorium.

 Within a couple days I was on the train to the scrapyard, by my side was Ashley, Sofia, and Lucas. It didn’t take much convincing for them to come along when I explained the whole situation. If they weren’t coming for my sake they were coming to see what I was talking about. All four of us stepped off the train at Mitcham Junction and began walking to our destination. It was pitch black for the most part, the occasional flicker of a faulty street light would shimmer lightly against the wet pavement, broken glass lined the curb and there was a thick scent of cigarette smoke that stained the air.

 Upon arriving at the scrapyard we stared out through the gate at the metal hills and valleys that the PC was somewhere between. We sent Ashley out to check the attention of the security guards. Shortly after he ran back to us, panting and smiling.

 “He’s distracted. The monitors seemed out of whack and he looked like he was fixing them so I think we’re good.” There was a slight shake in his voice, there were tinges of adrenaline running through all of us.

 “Alright, cool.” I whispered back to him, a great big smile across my face. Despite the reason we were all here, stepping out of line never stopped being fun. The moment we took a step forward a clatter and the sound of small trinkets clicking down one of the mounds stopped us in our tracks. A small orange tabby ran out from the pile, looking disheveled, skin and fur covering the place where one of its eyes should’ve been. It looked at us tentatively before running off in the direction of the security office. Sofia and I let out an ‘aww’ in unison when we saw it. Lucas shifted in place slightly, he never admitted it but he was always a bit scared around cats. I remembered him lifting his legs up onto my sofa whenever Moonshine was in the room at my house. I’d pick her up and tell him she was just looking for attention and in response he would always begrudgingly accept her affection.

 Regardless, we walked on into the scrapyard, treading carefully so as to not disturb the stray pieces of metal plating and pieces of torn machinery beneath our feet. All we had was our phone torches and to them, a vague idea of what we were actually looking for. We all were fumbling around through the maze around us, too scared to climb to the top of any of the piles for fear of being spotted and getting into trouble. Eventually we threw caution to the wind and began pulling piles of scrap from one another, lifting sheets and kicking away chunks of metal to search for some indication of the computer. Through our searching Sofia found the PC and called out to us to come and see it. The second she did, my smile faded and I felt sick. It was in the middle of the dry dirt between 4 massive piles of metal parts, like the centre piece of a colosseum. All four of us walked over to it and saw it laid on its side surrounded by dried blood not dissimilar in smell to that of the copper parts that surrounded it. We put our heads above it to look down inside the open case. Thick wires were tangled with each other and were writhing like restless snakes or worms atop a flower bed, searching, cloying for something to eat.

 “Holy shit.” Lucas said what the rest of them were thinking. Between their wonder I felt a pit in my stomach, seeing them so enraptured with the machine that killed my brother made me feel resentful, but even as tears pricked my eyes I couldn’t bring myself to reject their curiosity entirely. Sofia grimaced at the sight, she always would try to put on a brave face, even when it made her seem stubborn and often that brave face would fall away too quickly to count.

 “Let’s just get a couple photos and leave, seeing it again is making me feel disgusting.” Simultaneously I saw all their faces fall into embarrassed realisation. We all pulled our phones out and snapped a few photos of it and sent them to a group chat between us.

 Just as I was breathing a sigh of relief that our mission was over, I heard Ashley yelp.

 “Lucas, what the fuck are you doing?!” I looked up from my phone to see Lucas reaching into the computer, and pulling up one of the wires with his fist clenched around it. I screamed for him to stop  immediately but he looked at me like I was going crazy. He told me he just wanted to see what was underneath it all, but the moment he finished his sentence he was pulled in by the wires. They coiled around his whole arm and before we could even react we heard a series of thick wet snaps followed by an agonising scream. His arm now contorted into a variety of unnatural angles, blood drooled between the wires onto the floor. Sofia threw herself forward to help but I pushed her out of the way, seeing the wires lift themselves up to try and meet her.

 “Back up from it!” I yelled, tears now flowing from my eyes. I had to come up with a solution quickly. “Guys, get something long and sharp, try and cut up the wires from afar or at least just break the PC, and call the police. I’m going to run and get the guard!” All of us were sick to our stomachs, a thick mask of nausea and dissociation preventing us from considering what was happening right in front of us. Lucas’ screams filled the air as his leg was claimed and swiftly twisted into segments by the wires. I turned and I ran, hearing Ashley and Sofia’s panicked beckons for Lucas to hold on as they noisily threw scrap to the side searching for an appropriate weapon.

 I sprinted back to the entrance and from there found my way to the security office. As I approached I saw the officer slumped over on his desk, the walls of the doorway obscuring his head. Around him, slowly pulsing light was fading into different colours and shining over his body. I yelled out to him to no response, my voice choked by tears.

 As I stepped inside the office I saw the guard’s body. His head was laying on his desk, slack jawed. Wires were running through his skin, one piercing his eye and emerging out the back of his skull before leading into the various monitors, pulsing and leaking blood. The one-eyed orange tabby was curled up next to the officer’s head, sleeping soundly. In the corner of the room I noticed a small feeding bowl full of uneaten cat food. The guard’s skin was pale, the video playing on all of the monitors painting his face in all of their colours. I felt sick to my stomach and as I looked up at the monitors amongst the slideshow this time was something that took me off guard and deepened the churning tension that was brewing in my chest. I saw myself, sitting on the stool in the living room, holding up a camera to my eye. Before I could fully register what it meant it flashed onto the next image. I broke my gaze from the screen and sprinted out of the door, going through the piles once more to find my way back to the computer. As I ran back I could hear Ashley and Sofia screaming at the top of their lungs, their sobs piercing through the noises of flesh being rended and bones being snapped and crushed. However, through the noise I had failed to notice that Lucas’ screams had now ceased.

 As I stumbled into the space between the piles I saw Ashley and Sofia clinging to one another, looking away from the computer and hiding in one another’s shoulders, inconsolable and hyperventilating through clenched teeth, vaguely attempting to comfort one another in the wake of what had just taken place before their eyes. Ashley’s phone was on the ground face up, 999 was on the screen, vibrating and ringing to no response until the call failed. There was a long piece of rebar that was splattered with blood and laid bent a couple meters from Sofia’s feet. The PC was now standing upright, soaked in blood that formed a thick sanguine pool below it. Its case was completely closed, the only thing attached to it was a thick yellow ethernet cable that ran directly down into the dirt. A wet pulsating squish noise emanated from it. I looked at my friends, tears pouring down my cheeks. 

 “What the fuck happened?! Where’s Lucas?” I choked out the words, hoping somehow they’d have an answer that was different, hoping to god that it was fucking anything other than what it was. They remained sobbing in one another's arms, cloying to one another, the only response was that of a grief stricken cry from Sofia as she pushed her face further into Ashley’s shoulder. The world began to get muffled around me, my vision and hearing a haze of sobs and dissociation. I cloyed at my hair and looked down at my bloody shoes, I gagged and cried and gripped my hair tighter, my fingers shaking around it tightly, plucking small strands from my scalp, the pain distracting me, taking me away from everything, the mistake I had made taking him here, the friend I had just seen mutilated, I gripped tighter and tighter and then.

 “Help” Silence fell over us.

 “Lucas?” Ashley choked out, pulling away from Sofia. All of our eyes locked onto the PC.

 “Help” An achingly slow and bitcrushed voice arose from the speakers, it was Lucas.

 “Oh god.” I approached the case slowly, I was on the verge of throwing up, liquid boiling up to my throat before I swallowed it down and placed one foot in front of another. “Lucas? Can you hear me?”

 “Heeeeeelllllllllllllllllp meeee” His words extended grotesquely, each syllable crackling and glitching in tone as the speakers let out his pleas. I picked up the piece of rebar off the floor and extended it out towards the PC, I lifted it slightly and smacked the lip of the case. The case fell open and with it piles of organs and chunks of brain spilled out onto the dirt, a small flood of blood fell out and spread across the ground. I choked and threw up onto the floor, stomach acid flowing up through my throat and out of my mouth, splattering on my shoes. I spat and wiped my eyes of tears. Spitting out the remaining bile I looked back up at the scene in front of me and noticed that each piece of viscera was wired up to the PC, blood vessels transitioning into wires that pulsed restlessly. His heart buzzed as it throbbed violently on the ground and his lungs were filling and compressing slowly, attached to a fan that was blowing moist warm air on the rest of the parts. A stuttering groan emerged from the speakers. We stared in horrified silence and backed away slowly. As we did, the wires inside the PC slowly coiled, dragging the viscera across the floor and pulling it back inside of the case. Sinew and muscle stretched from the computer and latched to the case before picking it up and fixing it back onto the rest of the computer, sealing it shut once more.

 “Oh fuck, what do we do?” Ashley muttered.

 “I-I don’t know what to do. I’m gonna call my mum.” I just wanted this all to be over with, I wanted to go home and see my parents. I wanted my brother back. I wanted to forget about all of this.

 “There’s no connection here, that's why I couldn’t call the police.” Ashley’s voice was monotonous, detached. Sofia shook her head.

 “Let’s take a photo of that wire, and the blood around the PC. Tomorrow we can hand it in to the police and report everything we’ve seen. They’ll have to do something about it.” Her voice had become stern, each word flew from her mouth as if she took too long to speak each sentence she would begin crying again.

 “And what do we tell Lucas’ parents?! They’re going to find out one way or another!” My head was roaring with unbearable stress. I saw Lucas’ parents in my head, walking to their son’s room, going to wake him up and seeing his bed completely empty. I imagined standing in front of their horrified faces, explaining that their child was now mangled and stuffed inside a computer, and that he could feel all of it.

 “We cross that bridge when we get to it!” She snapped at me before stepping forward and taking a few photos of the ethernet cable and blood. She sent them to the group chat and began walking back to the entrance. “Come on. Let’s just go home.” Her shoulders were shaking and there was a quake in her voice.

 “And let him suffer in there?” I yelled back at Sofia. Just then, Ashley tapped my back and handed me the piece of rebar again.

 “He doesn’t have to.” His face was a twisted mess of grief, tears stained the collar of his shirt and his eyes were red and glassy, he was biting his lip to stop it from shaking.

 “What? No! We’re not killing our friend!”

 “Then how do you plan to stop him from suffering?”

 “We need him alive, Ashley. If the police come here to investigate and they find it looking different to the pictures, what do you think they’re gonna say?!”

 “I don’t know! I don’t fucking know! But this is our only option if we want to end his suffering.” He forced the rebar into my hands. I looked at it, considering the option, I looked at the PC. There was nothing more I wanted to do than to destroy it, to end all of the suffering it had caused. It had taken my brother, it had taken my friend, and at that moment I knew that it would continue to hurt more people. But I just couldn’t, I couldn’t kill my friend, and even if we did destroy it, it wouldn’t end anything. I threw the rebar to the floor, it clattered loudly and reverberated around the scrapyard. We stood silently in the dark, streams of blood crept through the dirt towards us. I shook my head slowly at Ashley, and began walking towards the entrance.

 The next day I sat on my bed for an hour flicking through the photos we took of the PC and the guard. I winced back tears, got dressed, and walked outside. I was going to hand everything to the police, that was the plan, and quitting at that point would’ve been a disservice to everyone that had suffered for the evidence I now had. One of the photos had caught my eye now I had a slightly clearer mind. The one of that bright yellow cable leading into the dirt. It had to have been connected to something, I just didn’t know what, or where, or who. The air was bitterly cold, the streets were grey and the sky had dulled into an unsatisfying shade of baby blue. The tips of my shoes were freckled with tiny spots of red that slowly smeared as I dragged my feet across the damp concrete. As I walked I noticed a small crowd in the distance. I took off my headphones and immediately heard the loud commotion coming from them. As I got closer I noticed they were looking up at the telephone wires stretched out from pole to pole. The sun blocked me from being able to properly see what they were looking at, I began to jog closer, as I did the wires slowly rose in my vision and witnessed four silhouettes emerge from the sun. Bodies, hanging in the wires overhead.

 Joining the crowd I looked up and tried to make out who it was, it was no one I knew personally but I had recognised them as being from my neighbourhood. Their bodies were hanging from the wires like puppets. The wires passing through their limbs and linking to their heads, causing their bodies to rest in contorted positions, like people in freefall. Their faces were restful and unaware of the crowd below them, like a peaceful sleep. Circles of blood emerged from the wounds that the wires ran through and slowly dripped down onto the pavement.

 After seemingly endless minutes of taking in the sight, hearing the distraught and confused reactions of the people around me. I felt the soft push of three cats on my legs, nuzzling into me softly, smearing blood from their mouths onto my jeans. I looked up from them, and with that, the police finally arrived.

I remember the lighting of the police station before anything else. Bright white and artificial, like a dentist’s office when they’re inspecting your teeth. I had come in the police car voluntarily and I was guided into the station by a police officer in his mid-thirties. He was tall and wide, more from muscle than fat. He was ungroomed and tired looking, his beard had a texture that just by looking at it you could tell it was itchy. He spoke with a strong scouse accent that he did best to soften so he wouldn’t spit as he was speaking. Another officer walked by him and they paused to speak momentarily.

 “Hey, from all the reports we’ve got they all seem to be linked to a video online. I’m going to check through it to see if we can find anything.” He spoke with a warm Scottish accent that was pleasant on the ears, but not enough to ward away my alarm at his words. 

 “Thank god you’re on evidence today, I can’t bear to look at anything more after this morning.” The scouse officer tapped me on the back. “Already got this kid to deal with.” I looked up at the evidence officer.

 “Don’t watch the video, please.” Dread rose through me and I felt sick.

 “That’s my job, lass. Sorry.”

 “No, you don’t understand. You don’t know what it does to people.” I saw his face drop slightly into concern, more for me than himself.

 “I’ll let you deal with this one, see you later.” He turned around and walked out of the room. I began to panic, breathing heavily and grabbing my stomach. My vision was going blurry and my head burned hot.

 “Oh god, oh god, no more. Please.” The police officer touched my shoulder and attempted to guide me towards the reception desk, I shook him off. “Don’t fucking touch me! He’s going to die!”

 “Okay, listen!” His voice rattled through me, freezing me in place. “I’ll have someone check on him every now and again. In the meantime you can tell me what’s going on, alright?” His words calmed me slightly, but not nearly enough to take away the dread I was feeling. I resigned myself to it, knowing I couldn’t stop them if I tried, and trying probably wasn’t a good idea anyway.

 “Okay. I’m sorry.”

Within an hour I was in an interrogation room. I knew in the meantime they’d contact my parents so I quickly sent them a text telling them not to come to the station. I finally had evidence, and I didn’t want them to put themselves in danger. We went back and forth, but they agreed eventually.

 The interrogation room looked how you’d imagine. A box of concrete and brick, a single door, and a one way mirror separating me from whoever could’ve been on the other side.

 “There’s no one on the other side, don’t worry. You’re not technically a suspect yet.” I sat across from the scouse officer who told me his name was Joseph. The first thing I did was tell him about Tom, the report I made, the ignorance I was met with, my search for evidence, and Lucas’ death. I pulled out my phone and opened the group chat. I let him flick through the photos while I averted my eyes to my ground and counted the imperfections in the concrete. I listened to Joseph’s heavy breathing twitch into sighs and muted gasps as each horrifying image was scanned over and examined. Once he was done he slid the phone back over to me.

 “So you’re saying this kid is stuck in there?”

 “Yes.”

 “And he’s alive?” I could sense the disbelief in his voice.

 “Listen, we heard him. And the organs in the PC were moving, like it had just shed his skin and kept his insides.”

 “And why did it do this to Lucas but not your brother, or that guard you mentioned? To me this just looks like you went out in the night with 3 friends and only 2 came back, and the only member of authority nearby wound up dead too. How do I know you’re not lying to me?”

 “I told you, my brother’s death was self-inflicted. And it was a week before Lucas.” I leaned forward. “It’s evolved from making people do it to themselves. Now it has more power, it can take what it wants as long as you give it the ability to.”

 “Is that why you’re so scared of the video?”

 “It is. With my brother it was slow, it took a while before he died. But now, I think watching it is opening the door to something that won’t waste any time.”

 A knock on the door startled us both, in came an officer. He was pale, sweat dripping down his forehead.

 “What is it?” Joseph stood up, shaken by the visible stress from his colleague. 

 “It’s Wilson. In evidence.” Joseph looked at me, I shot him a terrified variation of ‘I told you so’. “He’s acting really fucking weird, he’s locked the door and won’t come out. I could hear him giggling, snapping things, clanging metal around.”

 “I’ll come check it out.” He told me to stay where I was.

 “No! I come too, you don’t know what you’re dealing with.” They shared a concerned look before begrudgingly allowing me to come along.

 Outside the evidence room, I stood alongside Joseph and the pale officer. A thin multicoloured glow coming from the edges of the door. Joseph produced a key from his pocket and opened the door. 

 “What the..” The officer was sitting in his swivel chair, a wire ran from the computer next to him into the back of his neck. He was sitting completely still, looking at us. His face was twitching, each individual part of his expression shifting into entirely different emotions from each other, over and over and over like a slot machine never matching up. A soft buzzing noise emanated from his closed mouth. The pale officer stepped forward.

 “Wilson?” The now plugged-in Wilson snapped his eyes over to the pale officer, his eyes flickered from scared, to frustrated, to happy, to disgusted, repeat. He rose from his chair and snagged the pale officer by the collar. Joseph yelled out, telling Wilson to put the officer down, but he was met with no response. He rushed forward and attempted to push away Wilson and get him to release the guard but with one quick motion Wilson grabbed Joseph and threw him backwards to the floor. I grabbed the door and pushed it shut.

 “Joseph! Give me the key, now!” He weakly slid the key across the floor to my feet, I picked it up quickly and locked the door before jamming a nearby chair over the handle, locking it in place. I stepped back slowly and listened to the muffled screaming coming from the evidence room. The pale officers' cries became choked and wet as the sounds of flesh being rended and the whirring of machinery filled the air. Falling silent momentarily, before a series of loud bangs came from the door, the chair rattling in place.

 I picked Joseph up and onto his feet.

 “We need to make sure no one opens this door. Go warn everybody not to get near the evidence room. I’ll meet you back in the interrogation room.”

 On the way back to the interrogation room I called my friends and told them to meet me at the police station in an hour. I felt terrified and didn’t want to face it alone, or at least with people familiar to me. I thought over what to do, how to do it. A plan formed in my head, I flicked through the photos and looked intently at the wire running into the dirt of the scrapyard.

 Within a couple minutes I was back in the interrogation room with Joseph. We had our phones out on the table and were looking through the evidence again.

 “We need to find the source of this, quickly.” I pushed my phone forward, showing the image of the ethernet cable leading into the bloodied dirt. “It needs a connection to function, so we need to find a way to trace it. And I had an idea how to. Put your walkie on the table and turn it on.”

 “Okay, what are you going to do with it?.” Joseph placed his radio on the table and turned the dial, with a soft click it whirred into the low rush of white noise. As he did, I opened the maps app on my phone and placed pins on my house, the location of the telephone wires, and the house of the boy that Sofia told me about.

 “You get communications about stuff happening across the city though this, right?” I pointed at the radio and he nodded back.

 “Good. I was thinking that if we pin all the locations where incidents are happening then we can see where the most common areas are and see if that’s a lead. Do you have any idea about similar incidents that have happened before today?”

 “Yeah, hand me the phone.” I leaned over the table and gave him my phone, I sat back and let my mind wander momentarily, attempting to make sense of the past few weeks and stifling the rising panic at the threat inside the station. I listened to the soft chatter that whispered in compressed bursts through the walkie, skimming over the words in my head about sights and sounds that had become all too familiar. Joseph’s fingers softly tapped at my phone screen as each report came through. I should’ve probably been more helpful, but in that moment I let my mind rest, or at least let it disassociate, I needed to be detached for a little bit.

 I was pulled back to the moment by Joseph.

 “Hey!” I sat up and looked at him, he held out my phone and passed it back into my hands. “I think I’ve done enough.” I flicked my eyes over the screen and saw all of the pins Joseph had put, dotted and grouped in a cluster in Chislehurst before spattering out across Croydon like disjointed tendrils, I zoomed in on the cluster and made a mental note of the formation of pins that circled Chislehurst Caves.

 “It’s in the caves?” he gave me a nod and a proud-of-himself smile “you think we can get there in your car?”

 “Should be able to.” He jingled his car keys in his finger before putting them back in his pocket.

 “Good, I contacted my friends about three quarters of an hour ago, they should be here in fifteen minutes.”

 “Why?”

 “I thought more company would be good. Safety in numbers and all that, they were there at the scrapyard too.” He let out a disgruntled sigh.

 “Alright. “

 I pushed my chair backwards. Just as I stood up and signalled Joseph to do the same, a muffled crash came from the corridor, followed by panicked screams that shot chills down my spine. My eyes pricked with tears and looked at Joseph, who was facing down the door with an unbreakable stare.

 “We need to get out of here, now.” He slid his baton from his belt and walked to the door, opening it slowly. He looked around the corner and quickly recoiled back. “Jesus!” Suddenly an officer shoved the door open and shut it quickly behind him, locking it. “Scott?” The door handle rattled violently as the officer stepped back and lifted up a pistol, facing the door until the ratting stopped. He was covered in blood, he was shaking uncontrollably, like his body had been dragged through freezing water.

 “Sir. What are those things?” Joseph stepped over to Scott and softly pushed down on his hands, lowering his gun.

 “I don’t know, but I’m glad you’re safe. What happened?” He pulled a chair over to Scott and let him sit down. He clung his hands to his head and began weeping, droplets of tears tainted red steadily dripping down his face.

 He looked up at Joseph with a look of absolute desperation. “Do not go out there.”

 Suddenly, a thump came from the one-way mirror. One, two, three-four. Each thump was louder than the last. I walked backwards until I was behind the table with my back against the wall. Joseph slid the gun from Scott’s holster slowly and held it out towards the mirror, urging him to stand next to me. Joseph backed away as the mirror shattered and through the crumbling glass and twinkling and clattering noises came what was now no longer human, a thick extension cord hung limply from the back of its neck. Its hands were dripping with blood, shards of glass sticking from torn skin with little care or reaction. Just the low buzz of electricity and the flickering facial expressions that adorned its head. 

 It fell to the floor as it tumbled over the broken glass and laid there momentarily before lifting itself up without using his arms, like it had just levitated to its feet. Joseph fired a shot into its head, the loud bang made my head spin with dizziness as a chunk of flesh and bone separated from the rest of its head as it snapped to the side before returning back to its original position, staring straight past the barrel at Joseph. He fired another shot, this time at its knee. It collapsed to the floor, its leg twisting at the point where Joseph had shot it. Quickly he placed the heel of his shoe on its head and grabbed a piece of glass off the floor. He grabbed the cable connected to the officer and swiftly severed it. Instantly the wire reared back and spewed blood across the floor before collapsing in a puddle of steady blood flow. The officer now dead on the floor. Joseph wiped the sweat from his forehead, huffing with adrenaline.

 “We need to leave, now.” Joseph pointed at both of us with his eyes and then down at the body. “Pick up the glass, we need to arm ourselves.” In an instant I followed his order and scrambled to the floor, fumbling through the shards to find one long and big enough to function as a knife. I slipped the sleeve of my hoodie up to my palm as I held the shard so I didn’t let it slice into me. I handed another shard to Scott before standing up and nodding to Joseph to open the door.

 As we moved out into the corridor we were met with nothing but the distant purring of plugged in officers coming from the main room ahead. We moved as quietly as we could, taking each step slowly and purposefully. The main office room was a mess. A waist height labyrinth of cubicles and disarray, blood pooled in various areas of the floor, a scarf of wires knitted into a great mass that moved across the floor like roots that pulsed and twisted up into each computer in the room. Every officer was plugged in, wires and cords winding and spiralling into their veins and arteries. Some stood still, others wandered slowly and aimlessly. The buzz from each of them fused into a soft purr that reverberated around the room.

 Joseph fired a shot at the legs of two of them, before Scott and I ran over to sever the wires. The noise alerted all of the officers in the room. They turned to us in unison and moved slowly in our direction. All of us did our best to kill as many as we could. Blood poured across the floor as wire after wire was severed, my grip on the glass sliding and cutting the fabric of my sleeve slowly. I could hear Joseph swearing with each missed shot as we cleared a path to the exit. Once I saw the doors to get outside I yelled back.

 “Just leg it!” Scott and I began sprinting towards the door before we heard a yelp followed by the sound of something heavy hitting the floor. I turned around to see Joseph laying on his stomach, his leg extended outwards, a smear of blood extending out from where he had slipped. I felt myself begin to cry as I saw an officer moving towards him. “Joseph!” I yelled out, he twisted around on the floor and extended his arms, aiming the pistol up at the officer.

 Click. Click. Click.

“No no no no NO!” Scott grabbed me and turned my head towards him, guiding me to the exit as Joseph’s screams echoed through the corridor. I tried to scramble from his arms, weakly attempting to turn back and save Joseph as his cries became gargled and I heard the snap and spark of a wire being implanted in his flesh.

 We stumbled out of the door and turned back, looking at the small crowd of officers moving in our direction, being tugged back by the wires in their necks as if they were in a state of perpetual motion. Walking but never travelling. Among the crowd was Joseph. His once friendly face now twisting unnaturally into wax emotions, like he was a facsimile of himself. My eyes flicked up away from him and to above the doorway. In the cool darkness of the early evening, through the haze of tears I saw the glowing eyes of dozens of cats. Waving their tails and nuzzling against one another around the entrance to the station.

 As we stumbled tiredly onto the pavement, I saw Ashley and Sofia running towards us. I moved towards them slowly, they scooped me up into a hug as we collided. I cried into their shoulders and apologised over and over, begging them to forgive me for ever bringing them into this, for getting Lucas killed. They comforted me in return and made their stance clear. I was their friend, and I needed help, and I couldn’t have known what would happen. Finally, they helped wipe the blood from my hand and bandage it up. I hadn’t noticed but in my shock, I had gripped the shard with such intensity that a thick gash was now open on my palm. I seethed in intense pain as Sofia emptied her water bottle from her bag over it and Scott offered a spool of bandage from one of his vest pockets that Ashley wound around my hand. The more I was aware of the injury the more it burned and ached, each flex of a finger or movement of my wrist sent waves of pain through my entire arm and so I did my best to keep it still.

 Soon after, I explained the situation to all of them. What Joseph had discovered, and where we needed to go. Scott guided us all into his car and as he pulled out onto the road, I looked back at the entrance and saw Joseph. Standing still with his head turned down, the pistol still firmly held in his hand.

 I turned away and to the GPS on the centre console of the car.

 Chislehurst Caves - 23 minutes away.