“Let’s hear it, Chief,” said Agent King. “Who lives here that you all are so scared of? And what the hell happened to your partner?”

            “Like you don’t know,” scoffed Jackson.

            “Let’s pretend that I don’t. This really isn’t the time to be a smartass, pal,” King warned.

            “Fine. You want to know who lives here? We call him the Sleepy Man. We, meaning me and my old man, since we were the only people who knew the whole truth about him until you started digging around. Anyone else who got close was shut up pretty quickly, unless they wanted to be the next to meet him.”

            “So what, you fed people to this guy? And you were going to feed us to him too because we figured you out?”

            “I wouldn’t have had to if you just would’ve stayed in town and kept your mouth shut. But you were going to go back to your bosses and tell them all about us, weren’t you? I couldn’t let that happen.”

            “I was going to get a girl who didn’t have anything to do with this to safety. And then, yeah, I was going to get some help to kill this thing, before you stopped us.”

            “It can’t be killed, moron. I’ve tried everything. Guns, explosives, nothing seems to even bother it. Lucky for us, it ain’t too hard to keep the secret hidden. Anyone starts getting a bit too curious, we send them up here. He takes care of the rest. This may be a small town, but it still ain’t hard to cover up a disappearance every now and then.”

            “So you send innocent people to die for no reason.”

            “To keep everyone else safe. If I didn’t, we’d have another massacre like in ’56.”

            “So that’s how this all got started then,” King inquired.

            “That’s right. I wasn’t alive then, of course, but my father was. He told me the whole story. It started here in this hospital, 50 years ago, almost to the day. Folks were being found dead in their beds; their eyes gouged out. No sign of a struggle and no explanation. Every night there was more of them. It didn’t take long for the hospital to get shut down and all the patients moved; at first, we thought it was the work of a serial killer or something. Then, people started going missing from their homes, one every night. People were scared; somebody had to do something. That’s when my old man found him. The Sleepy Man. He’s not human, I know that much. He’s got deathly pale skin and these hollowed out pits for eyes. I don’t know what he wants or how to get rid of him. All I know is how to do what my old man told me: make sure no one finds him. Anyone who sees him dies. Pretty convenient way to get rid of troublesome civilians, if you ask me. One person dies every now and then to make my life easier? Hell, I’ll take that deal. I didn’t question it. The initial killings were chalked up to a disease, and the townsfolk can be happy not knowing what’s really going on.”

            “Yeah, you’re a regular saint, Jackson,” said King. “So what about now? All these people going missing is a hell of a lot more than you’ve been implying.”

            “I don’t know!” he protested. “This ain’t never happened before! He’s never gone out of his way to kill people like this until now!”

            Perfect, thought King. So the “expert” doesn’t really know anything at all. At this rate, we’re just going to get picked off one by one. And with everybody who knows the truth gone, who knows what’ll happen to the town? Damn, I really screwed this one up. Well, no point trying to get any more out of Chief Dickhead. We have to figure out a way out of here.

            That was when he happened to glance over at Meg. The girl was hunched down in the corner, her head resting on her knees, eyes downcast. He put his hand on her shoulder. “C’mon, kid, we’ve gotta move,” he said, trying to sound encouraging.

            She just pushed his hand away. “I… don’t want to. What’s the point?”

            “What are you talking about?”

            “It’s hopeless, isn’t it? We can’t win. Not against something like this. It can kill us in ways we haven’t even thought of. We were all just so stupid to think we stood a chance against… any of this.”

            King felt a pang in his chest. The poor girl was in tears. She looked like she was on the verge of shutting down completely. Of course she is, King chided himself. She just saw a man commit suicide right in front of her. And here I was trying to play the tough guy against Jackson when I should have been protecting her. He had seen the look on her face before. It was the look of someone who had seen too much for them to handle, psychologically. Someone who was ready to just lie down and give up. With the kinds of murder cases his department investigated, it was a pretty common sight among his fellow agents. He was used to seeing it on grown men, though. Not on the face of a teenage girl.

            “Listen, kid – ah, Meg,” he said. “What you’re feeling right now? It’s called despair. You’re feeling it because you think there’s no hope; you just want to give up. But I’m telling you right now that that’s not true. There is still hope. We can still save your friends. I know they’re still alive because I know that you still believe they must be. There’s only one way to beat despair.”

            She looked up at him, waiting for an answer.

            “Keep your head up, and keep moving forward.” He stretched out his hand to her. “Stand up now, and keep going, even if you have to force every step. Do that, and eventually you will make it through.”

            She took his hand, wiping the tears from her face. “Thanks,” she said.

            Jackson scoffed. He was still slouched against the wall where King had been interrogating him. “Oh, congratulations,” he said sarcastically. “You stood up. That’s all very nice, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re still trapped in this room.”

            “Don’t worry,” said Meg. Her voice was still shaky, but she spoke with a newfound conviction. “We’ll find a way.” Impressive, thought King. She’s holding herself up pretty well. Hell, she’s even trying to comfort the man who kidnapped us.

            “Oh really? And do you have some grand plan that you secretly worked out while you were sitting in the corner cry –” He was cut off suddenly by a portion of the wall behind him crumbling away to make way for the hand that reached through it, wrapping around his throat.

            Fingernails encrusted with dirt dug into his neck, drawing blood as he tried desperately to breathe. He reached up to pry the hand away, but it was deceptively strong, despite being no larger than the hand of a child. It pulled him against the wall, straining his neck even more. Behind him, the wall splintered and flaked until finally he was pulled completely through it, leaving a human sized hole as he was dragged away, flailing and unable to scream. In the darkness beyond, Meg thought she heard a chortling laugh, like the laugh of a newborn.

            Meg and King exchanged incredulous looks. Had the situation not been so grim, she thought she might have laughed at the darkly comedic nature of it all. In a way, things had all worked out in the sense that the two men who kidnapped her had been killed by the very thing they were going to feed her to. Part of her thought they had gotten what they deserved, yet another part found herself feeling sorry for them as well. Jackson’s partner had only been following orders, after all, and as for Jackson himself… well, he had done his best to help them through information in the end, even if he had remained vulgar and prideful. She wondered if, had he been born and raised under better circumstances, he might have been a different man.

            In any case, there was no time to ponder hypotheticals now.

            Her friends, and the monster that had terrorized them, were waiting for her.