Troika Media Group, Inc. ($TRKA) ("TMG" or the "Company"), a consumer engagement and customer acquisition solutions group,
today announced that it will effect a 1-for-25 reverse stock split of its outstanding common stock. This will be effective for trading purposes as of the commencement of trading on June 1, 2023.
The reverse stock split was previously approved by the Board of Directors of TMG in accordance with Nevada law, under which no stockholder approval is required, and is intended to increase the per share trading price of TMG's common stock to satisfy the $1.00 minimum bid price requirement for continued listing on The NASDAQ Capital Market (Rule 5550(a)(1)). TMG's common stock will continue to trade on the NASDAQ Capital Market under the symbol "TRKA" and under a new CUSIP number, 89689F404. As a result of the reverse stock split, every 25 pre-split shares of common stock outstanding will become one share of common stock. The reverse stock split will also proportionately reduce the number of shares of authorized common stock from 800,000,000 to 32,000,000. The reverse split will also apply to common stock issuable upon the exercise of TMG's outstanding warrants, convertible securities, RSUs, and stock options.
"The Company has addressed many legacy equity, compliance, and regulatory matters over the past year.
We believe that this reverse stock split should be viewed not just as a critical step to regain compliance with NASDAQ's listing requirement, but also as a part of our strategic plan for the long term. Having delivered record revenues, profitability, and sustainably higher margins since March 2022, we believe that continuing to optimize our capital structure and balance sheet will ultimately position the Company to take advantage of the operational and financial momentum that we have developed and in turn, provide us the best possible opportunity to generate value for stockholders. We also need to take steps to broaden the audience of institutional investors and brokerage firms who have been unable to participate in a stock like Troika and we believe that this reverse stock split can play a part in this regard. It is Management's intention to continue to focus on performance and the fundamentals of the business, such as reducing our debt services and legacy balance sheet items so that we can invest in a growing business," said Sid Toama, the Company's Chief Executive Officer.
TMG's transfer agent, American Stock Transfer & Trust Company, LLC, which is also acting as the exchange agent for the reverse split, will provide instructions to stockholders regarding the process for exchanging share certificates. Any fractional shares of common stock resulting from the reverse stock split will be rounded up to the nearest whole post-split share and no stockholder will receive cash in lieu of fractional shares.
About Troika Media Group
TMG is a consumer engagement and customer acquisition consulting and solutions group based in New York. We provide professional services that architect and build enterprise value in consumer brands to generate scalable performance-driven revenue growth. The Company delivers three solutions pillars: TMG CREATES brands and experiences and CONNECTS consumers through emerging technology products and ecosystems to deliver PERFORMANCE-based measurable business outcomes.

When I play games, I sometimes try to make the strongest tools/armobuilds possible out of the cheapest materials possible. This is expecially useful early game, when you want to become very powerful very quickly and you don't have access to more expensive or rarer tools/weapons/armomaterials. This post will teach you how to do that with Tinkers Construct.
Now, there are two versions of Tinkers Construct that I've interacted with: Tinkers Construct 2 and Tinkers Construct 3. I've played lots of 1.12 modpacks, so TiCon 2 is what I'm most familiar with. In contrast, I've only just recently started playing newer modpacks (such as ones for 1.16 and 1.18) so I've only had a small exposure to TiCon 3 and am not as familiar with it. Anyway, let me start with Tinkers Construct 2:
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Tinkers Construct 2 Stone Tips
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Here are 5 powerful tips relating to Stone:
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• You can mine anything with Stone: You may be thinking, "No you can't! Stone tools can at most mine up to a Block of Iron and that's it." Well, normally that's true, but you can change that. Suppose you've made a Tinkers Pickaxe with a Stone Pickaxe Head. Currently, you only have an Iron Mining Level. But if you combine an Obsidian Sharpening Kit with a piece of Flint in a Tool Station/Tool Forge, you can upgrade your Pickaxe's Mining Level from Iron to Cobalt, which I believe is the highest one possible. This can be easily done from the start of the game.
• Easy repairs: As you can guess, a Stone-headed tool can be repaired with a Stone Sharpening Kit. "Yeah? So what?" Well, we've just made a pickaxe that can mine just about any material in the game. Plus, Tinkers tools don't disappear when broken like vanilla Minecraft tools; when they break, all you have to do it repair it and it works like new. When you combine these three facts together, you can see the whole picture: we have a pickaxe that can mine even Obsidian, that can be repaired whenever it breaks, and can be repaired with Stone or Cobblestone, which are the easiest resources to obtain in bulk in the whole game. And you can craft such a pickaxe early on in the game. Wow, now that's powerful! Anyway, to make repairing even easier, you can carry both a Part Builder and a Sharpening Kit Pattern with you in your inventory as you go mining for easy repairing on the go. I know that you can just make a stack of Stone Sharpening Kits to carry with you in your inventory, but if you're planning on going on extensive mining expeditions, even a stack of Sharpening Kits might not be enough for you (especially with a Stone Pickaxe Head), so you might need to take the whole Part Builder table with you. Anyway, speaking of long mining expeditions, one of the problems you may constantly be dealing with is darkness, because if you're mining for a long time, you may bump into lots of caves, which are usually poorly lit. Luckily, Stone can be used to shed a little light on the situation...
• Stone torches: Normally, Torches are made with a Stick and piece of Coal/Charcoal. But you can make Torches with Cobblestone instead. Firstly, put two Cobblestone pieces in a crafting table, one directly above the other. Now you have 4 Stone Rods. These Stone Rods can be used with Coal/Charcoal in order to make Stone Torches. Stone Torches are like regular Torches, except for their appearance and the recipe required to make them. But why would you want to make Stone Torches? Well, to make regular Torches, you need sticks, which require wood, which requires a tree, which requires you to surface/leave the caves. Now if you're on an extended mining expedition, you are probably too busy to want to stop and go all the way back to the surface just to make Torches. With Stone Torches, you can make Torches with both Stone and Coal - things you can both find in caves - removing the need to return to the surface. Now, having enough light sources to light your way is a must for extended journeys in Minecraft. Another is having enough food to be able to survive the journey in the first place. But how can Stone help us solve this problem?
• Pig Iron lets you eat Stone: Yes, it's true. Well, sort of. Pig Iron is a special alloy that allows you to EAT whatever Tinkers tool has it as one of its components. It's relatively easy to make in the beginning of the game, too. It's an alloy of Iron, Clay and Blood. Blood comes from smelting Rotten Flesh. If you don't have any Rotten Flesh, you can just have a creature walk into your Smeltery and take damage, thus causing it to bleed out a bit right into your Smeltery setup. It could be any creature, like a Pig, Sheep. or even...yourself (but not a Villager though; that just gets you Liquid Emerald, I think). But if you want to jump into your Smeltery and burn yourself alive for a bit, you can at least be safe about it. Firstly, you can have your health at max to be able to survive the damage. Next, you can build your Smeltery to be very shallow. To do this, you first build a 3x3 base. Then you build 4 walls surrounding the outside edge of the base. Each of the walls are 3 blocks long and only 1 block high. With one-block high walls, you can easily jump into/out of the Smeltery at will, to avoid burning yourself alive. Note that there must actually be something in the Smeltery for you to burn yourself with in the first place; you should first burn an Iron Ingot to produce Molten Iron, then jump into the molten metal to be able to be burned by something. Anyway, let me explain how Pig Iron lets you eat Stone. First, you make it so that the Head/main part of your Tinkers tool/weapon is made out of Stone and make one of the other parts out of Pig Iron. Then, whenever you're hold the tool in your main/offhand and lose some of your hunger bar, you begin to automatically start to nibble on your tool until your Hunger bar is topped off. This uses up some durability, of course. But remember, Stone tools are easy to repair. In this manner, you practically have access to infinite food. Now, granted, you only get back 0.5 Hunger per bite (thus allowing you to restore health rather slowly), and this "food" offers no Saturation, but infinite free food is infinite free food, so none of that other stuff matters much (not to me, at least). Now if you TRULY want infinite free food, you can just make a Tinkers tool with 5 Modifiers. This can easily be done by replacing at least some of the tool's parts with Paper to get extra modifiers (or another material that gives extra Modifiers, like Livingwood from the Botania mod). Then you can make the tool Unbreakable, thus allowing you to have ACTUAL free infinite food (because the tool can never be damaged again [Except with some materials like Extra Utilities 2's Magical Wood, which make your tool Magically Brittle], thus preventing it from losing durability whenever it feeds you). {Note: Not all modpacks lets you do this; in some modpacks I've played (can't remember which), once a tool/weapon is made Unbreakable, Pig Iron's Tasty trait stops working for some reason. This is probably done on purpose, because infinite free food is probably seen as too overpowered and needs to be stopped.) One of the Tinkers weapons I like to do this with is the Shuriken. Speaking of the Shuriken, that leads me to my next point.
• Stone lets you create a Meal-Shield-Weapon: "What the heck is a Meal-Shield-Weapon?" Well, it's a term that I just made up. Let me tell you what it means. First of all, the term is sort of self-explanatory; it's an item that operates as a meal, shield and weapon all at once. A Tinkers Shuriken can operate in such a manner. Here's how you build it: Firstly, a Tinkers Shuriken is basically a 4-point ninja star, with each point being a Knife Blade. To make a Shuriken into a Meal-Shield-Weapon, make three of the blades out of Pig Iron, Stone and Wood (the Stone is for easy repairs and the Wood is for auto-repair via the Ecological trait). The fourth blade can be made out of any material you wish, though there are some materials I recommend (but we'll discuss that later). Now, how do this Shuriken work as a Meal-Shield-Weapon? Well, it operates as a Meal because it auto feeds you. It is a Weapon, because, well, it is a weapon and meant primarily to do damage. It is a Shield because it can be held and operated from the offhand and lets you block damage. It doesn't block damage in the traditional way, but it does let you block damage by auto-healing you, thus allowing to restore health. In my opinion, auto-regen and blocking damage with a shield are technically the same thing because they accomplish the same task; both are designed to keep your health from dropping too low (I use the same tactic in other games, like Final Fantasy 5. I don't equip my characters with shields because I like to dual wield weapons. Instead, I equip all my guys with Protect Rings, which give auto-regen). Anyway, I said I was going to tell you what you could make the 4th blade out of, so let me do that: Restonia is a material from Actually Additions mod. This material has the Hearts trait, which lets you do 70% extra damage at full health (and staying at full health is easy due to Pig Iron's Tasty trait. By the way, Pig Iron also has Baconlicious, which makes blocks/enemies sometimes drop Bacon - another way to keep your health up). Bone is good, as it does a lot of damage for such a cheap material. Cactus is a good defensive material, as it helps you attack enemies from a distance via automatic retaliation, this lets you deal with skeletons a bit more easily. End Stone is good, because it helps you fight Enderman via the Enderference trait; this trait allows you to attack Endermen with any weapon (even a projectile weapon, which the Shuriken obviously is), and keeps them from teleporting for a short time. But if you happen to come across a lot of Gold early game (at least 10 ingots worth, or just 5 Gold Ore Blocks which can be transformed in the Smeltery into 10 ingots), then that 4th blade should be made into Paper; this usually gives you 5 Modifiers. All you need now is 5 Blank Gold Casts and 40 Obsidian to make 5 Reinforcement Modifiers and make your Shuriken Unbreakable.

A final tip: When I build early game tools for Tinkers, here's how I like to build them: for my Pick, I like to Make it out of a Stone Pickaxe Head, Wood Tool Binding and Wood Tool Rod. In most modpacks, you Pickaxe starts out with 3 modifiers. What I like to do is use the first two Modifiers to apply the Diamond and Emerald traits. This shoots my durability up from slightly over 100 to just over 1,000. Then I use an Obsidian Sharpening Kit to max out its mining level. Finally, for the last Modifer, I apply Luck and try to get it up to Luck III. For my Shuriken (which is my preferred weapon when playing modded Minecraft, by the way), I also like to apply the Diamond, Emerald and Luck III modifiers (most modpacks I know have Shuriken have 3 Modifiers, but some let it only have 1; in that case, focus mainly on Luck III; Luck III requires a whopping 360 Lapis or 40 Lapis Blocks, but it's worth the effort). The materials I choose are the ones I outlined above: the first three blade are Wood, Stone and Pig Iron. I prefer the fourth one to be either Restonia, Cactus or Bone. You can attach a Nether Star to both your tools if you want, too, to apply the Soulbound trait. This makes them stay in your inventory upon death, and doesn't require a Modifier slot. Getting Nether Stars early game is usually quite difficult, but it depends on your particular modpack and/or your level of skill/bravery.
Another final tip: Obviously this Pickaxe mines relatively slowly, being made out of Stone and all. There are ways to circumvent this, however. For one, you can use Restone to add the Haste trait to your tool (not recommended, as I prefer to use my Modifier slots to add other useful traits to my Pickaxe; slower mining speed doesn't bother me anyway). Alternatively, you can use Veinminer or OreExcavation or FTB Ultimine. These let you mine large amounts of blocks, provided that they're connected and are made from the same material. VeinMiner or its equivalent are available in most modpacks, so if I'm mining Obsidian, I can just hold down the button I assigned to OreExcavation/VeinMineetc., and when I break the Obsidan block, the other Obsdian blocks near it come up as well. this saves a lot of time and makes up for the slow mining speed. That's why when I play most modpacks, having slow mining speed usually doesn't bother me.
Those are all the tips I had for TiCon 2. Now, on to TiCon 3:
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• First of all, you can forget about the Shuriken. They don't exist anymore. Well, they do, but they've been transformed into cheap throwaway consumable items. You have Flint ones for Knockback and Quartz ones for damage. That's it. They're not regular weapons anymore, and can't be upgraded with Modifiers. This is possibly do to the fact that Shuriken can be OP, so that particular weapon had to be nerfed to the ground.
• Therefore, we need only to focus on the Pickaxe. Obviously, we still make the head out of Stone (well, it's called Rock now). But what about the Tool Handle and Tool Binding?
• Let's start with the Tool Handle. We should make it out of something durable. But what? Three good early options are Wood, Whitestone and Slimewood. Wood no longer allows for auto-heal via Ecological, but instead wood now has the trait Cultivated, which lets you restore 50% more durability whenever you repair it. Or if you have Botania installed, you can spring for Living wood instead of regular wood. Livingwood has the trait called...well, Livingwood. This trait is similar to Cultivated, but repair materials are 75% more effective instead. Whitestone is good, too. It gives your tool the Stoneshield trait: Stoneshield adds a second durability meter, and when you mine Stone, sometimes that Stone is consumed and then added to the Stoneshield meter. Then when you use the tool again, you can randomly use the Stoneshield meter's durability instead of regular durability. Whitestone is made from... well, white stone, AKA End Stone. End Stone can be easily obtained early in some modpacks. But if not, there are alternative ways to make Whitestone: you just pour molten metals onto a Rock tool part in a Casting Table - metals like Tin, Aluminum of Zinc. Slimewood lets you do the same thing with Overslime, which lends you a second slimy durability bar with, I believe, a minimum value of 50 points (or more, depending on the number of tools parts have the Overslime trait. This meter can also have more points based multiplying 50 by the tool's base durability multiplier). Slimewood is made by pouring Slime on a Wood Tool Part. Slimewood also has the Overgrowth ability, which makes your tool slowly regenerate its Overslime meter. So now your tool has THREE ways you can repair it: Rock Repair Kits, Slime Balls, and auto-repair. A good fourth material could be Pig Iron, but I'll discuss that later.
• What about the tool binding? Well, in this version of TiCon, the Tool Binding doesn't affect the stats of the tool in any way, meaning it doesn't affect the tool's durability. It just adds traits instead. So here, you can add relatively low durability materials if you want. You can use any of the materials from above, or you can use a Chain for the Reinforced I Modifier, letting your Pickaxe take 25% less damage.
• Based on the info from above, a cool idea would be to have a Stone Pickaxe Head, a Whitestone/Chain Tool Binding and a Slimewood/Pig Iron Tool Handle.
• Actually, I think I have a better idea: Keep the Rock Pickaxe Head, but make the other two parts into Pig Iron. Pig Iron is different now. Pig Iron tools don't auto-feed you anymore; you have to hold right-click in order to eat them (plus I don't think Baconlicious is a trait anymore, either). But the trade-off is that they heal more. Each level of Tasty restores 1 Hunger and 0.1 Saturation. So with two Pig Iron Tool Parts, we have Tasty II, which restores 2 Hunger per bite and 0.2 Saturation as well. This is the best early game pickaxe possible: it restores a decent amount of Hunger (at least, for an item that's normally not supposed to be edible) and can easily be repaired.
• Oh yeah! I almost forgot about mining levels! Well, the highest mining level now is not Cobalt, but Netherite. To boost out Pick to this mining level, we need to first apply either the Diamond or Emerald Modifiers. I prefer Diamond, if you have to choose; this boosts your mining level to Diamond (which seems to be one below Netherite) and gives us 500+ extra durability (in contrast, Emerald only adds 50% extra durablity and gives us an Iron mining level). Only then can we apply the Netherite Modifier. This requires 1 Netherite Ingot, which isn't really an early game material, unless your particular modpack allows you to get it early for some reason; in that case, you can just add on the Emerald Modifier anyway, instead. Of course, if you can afford it, you should add all three Modifiers to your Pickaxe; you durability will then shoot through the roof.

Note: Here's how I would build my ultimate early game Pickaxe. First, like I said above, I would choose a Stone (sorry, Rock) Pickaxe Head. Then I would make both the Tool Bind and Rod out of Pig Iron. Next, I would maximize my durability; like I said above, I would try to add both Diamond and Emerald Modifiers, if I can get my hands of some Nehterite early somehow. Finally, I would maximize my Luck. All TiCon 3 Tools/Weapons (except for Rose Gold, which has more) have 2-3 Modifier slots (which we just used up), and 1 Ability slot, which we haven't used yet. Luck is considered an Ability, now. Luck still has three levels, but the materials needed are more expensive/rare (you still need some Lapis, but now you need more than that). Luck (1st level) requires, on a tool/weapon (because TiCon 3 has armor too, which has a different recipe for Luck), a blue flower (a Blue Orchid or a Cornflower), 2 Copper Ingots and 2 Lapis Blocks. Luckier (level 2) requires a Golden Carrot, two Gold Ingots and two Ender Pearls. And finally, Luckiest (the third and final level) requires two Rose Gold Ingots, a Diamond, a Name Tag and a Rabbit's foot (it makes sense that a Rabbit's Foot is requires for the highest level of Luck, because you'd have to be extremely Luck to be able to even get one. Ditto for a Name Tag). It's a lot harder to max out Luck in Tinkers Construct 3 than it was in Tinkers Construct 2, but it's still worth the effort.
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Well, that's it. That's all the ways that I can think of getting really strong in TiCon focusing primarily on Stone. I hope this guide is useful to you all!

I bought the Rugged Oculus .22LR suppressor. Because everyone told me to buy a dedicated .22LR suppressor because you have to clean them pretty regularly because .22LR shoots dirtier than Centerfire. The only issue I have had with the Oculus is lining up the baffles. But I found a guy online that 3D prints this little stick kinda thing that goes up in the baffles of the Oculus to keep them aligned while putting your suppressor back together after cleaning. I think it was like 12 bucks and it makes keeping your Oculus baffles aligned a breeze. So that pretty much fixes the worst part of this suppressor. Oh, the Oculus is belt-fed rated too.
The Oculus Specifications: Diameter: 1.06" Length: Standard Configuration: 5.25", Short Configuration: 3.25" Weight: Standard Configuration: 6.9oz; Short Configuration: 4.3oz
I ordered the Rugged Alaskan360 along with the Oculus .22LR. The Alaskan360 is a multi-caliber suppressor that goes from 9mm for pistols and Sub guns to .338 Lapua for rifles. It’s full auto rated as well. So the Alaskan360 may not fit every single big rifle in the world. But it’ll fit most, for me it fits all my rifles, even my new nasty 8.6 Blackout!
Anyways, the main thing that makes the Alaskan360 so cool to me is that when you buy Rugged’s Dual Taper Locking System Muzzle Brakes and Flash Hiders to replace the muzzle brakes and flash hiders that are on your rifles already, it makes the Alaskan360 (with the Rugged Universal Mount or R.U.M.) attached, you can super easily swap the Alaskan360 between you big rifles within about 15seconds or less, if it’s not too hot. Basically the RUM is just the special mounting hardware that screws into the bottom of the Alaskan360 and it is made to work with the Rugged dual taper locking system muzzle devices. Or basically they should be called Rugged’s quick attach/detach devices, because that’s what they are. If you ever need to direct thread your Alaskan360 onto any gun, simply take out the RUM with the provided tool and direct thread the Alaskan360 to you gun. But if you want to go back to using the quick detach muzzles, then put the RUM back in. I am very impressed with the RUM and the quick attach/detach muzzles that Rugged makes. It is super easy for me to swap the Alaskan360 between my rifles. I even have terminal cancer, so my hand strength is really weak and I can still do it. Also, another thing I like is that the dual taper locking system muzzles have a “go/nogo” gauge on them, so you know if you have the suppressor on there right by if you can just see the “go”, if it’s not on right you will also be able to see the “nogo”. It’s super simple. As soon as Rugged comes out with a .338 muzzle device I will be complete! But for now I will just have to direct thread the Alaskan360 onto it.
I just wanted to make this post to anyone on the fence about buying a Rugged suppressor. Or at least the Oculus and Alaskan360. All in all if you buy both the Oculus .22 and the Alaskan360, with stamps factored in at $200.00 a piece and for 3 quick attach/detach muzzle brakes or flash hiders for big rifles then it’ll come out to about $2000.00 total. But since the swapping system on the Alskan360 works so well and the Oculus is modular. I think $2000.00 isn’t too bad for suppressing pretty much every gun most people will own. Plus you can’t beat Rugged’s customer service and warranty with a stick! Travis at Rugged has been great about answering any questions or anything I’ve thrown at him. And to anyone one on the fence because they don’t have a .338 Lapua bore size quick attach/detach muzzle device yet, I have heard it is just a few weeks out at the earliest to the end of the year by the latest. So regardless, it’s not too long before the should have the quick attach/detach muzzles out for more sizes than just 5.56 and 7.62. Take my opinion or leave it, but so far I have loved these Rugged suppressors and I suggest them to other people. Heck I even looked up what the decibel rating on the Alaskan360 was to dedicated 5.56 and 7.62 sized suppressors made by dead air, and the Alaskan360 was actually quieter by a few decibels! Which I thought was another little plus! Anyways, thanks for reading and maybe if you where looking at Rugged and where unsure, hopefully this helped.

How is it fair that Kayle is able to auto attack while ulting in PC but she can’t in Wild Rift? Hello??? This is an essential part of her kit and also the nashor tooth change made the item way worse on her and Gwen.

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“What exactly is the nothing we don’t have to worry about? Stu made it sound like a cross between blackmail and a National Enquirer feature on the Overlook. Talk to me, boy.” Stephen King
I propose the entire movie is set on December 2nd. Redrum day. Jack has already been locked in the pantry, and Wendy has been hired on as the new hotel manager. While Hallorann is mid-flight (chapter 42), Danny is sleeping in the apartment, and Jack is sleeping in the storeroom Wendy feeds everyone a whole new story using (akin to auto hypnosis) hypnosis aka shining. She sets up a snow cat for Hallorann to bring her, and keeps real good time, so she’s ready to leave Jack as soon as Hallorann gets there to The Overlook.
“By five o’clock tonight you’ll never know anybody was ever here”
I believe she’s leaving Jack for Al Shockley too. Al Shockley the tennis coach at stovington and I beater the investor with the largest block of stock in the overlook hotel.
This is from the book:
“The greatest terror of Danny’s life was DIVORCE, a word that always appeared in his mind as a sign painted in red letters which were covered with hissing, poisonous snakes. In DIVORCE, your parents no longer lived together. They had a tug of war over you in a court (tennis court? badminton court? Danny wasn’t sure which or if it was some other, but Mommy and Daddy had played both tennis and badminton at Stovington,so he assumed it could be either) and you had to go with one of them and you practically never saw the other one, and the one you were with could marry somebody you didn’t even know if the urge came on them. The most terrifying thing about DIVORCE was that he had sensed the word—or concept, or whatever it was that came to him in his understandings—floating around in his own parents’ heads, sometimes diffuse and relatively distant, sometimes as thick and obscuring and frightening as thunderheads. It had been that way after Daddy punished him for messing the papers up in his study and the doctor had to put his arm in a cast.
That memory was already faded, but the memory of the DIVORCE thoughts was clear and terrifying. It had mostly been around his mommy that time, and he had been in constant terror that she would pluck the word from her brain and drag it out of her mouth, making it real. DIVORCE. It was a constant undercurrent in their thoughts, one of the few he could always pick up, like the beat of simple music. But like a beat, the central thought formed only the spine of more complex thoughts, thoughts he could not as yet even begin to interpret. They came to him only as colors and moods. Mommy’s DIVORCE thoughts centered around what Daddy had done to his arm, and what had happened at Stovington when Daddy lost his job.”
Also, in the book when Jack is told by Al that he’s not allowed to write a book about the hotel he says this:
“How do I know it? At the worst, you’re planning to smear my hotel by digging up bodies that were decently buried years ago. At the best, you call up my temperamental but extremely competent hotel manager and work him into a frenzy as part of some … some stupid kid’s game.” “It was more than a game, Al. It’s easier for you. You don’t have to take some rich friend’s charity. You don’t need a friend in court because you are the court. The fact that you were one step from a brown-bag lush goes pretty much unmentioned, doesn’t it?” “I suppose it does,” Al said. His voice had dropped a notch and he sounded tired of the whole thing. “But Jack, Jack … I can’t help that. I can’t change that.” Stephen King
Al had been setting Jack up all along. To get to Wendy? Perhaps not at first.
Danny was 42 months old when Jack broke his arm.
21 months later, in July, he never touches another drop of alcohol. He finally quits. Forever and ever and ever.
5 months later it’s December 2nd. Five months of peace, five months on the wagon.
Al-cohol Shock-ley
Bob T Watson the original hotel owner and caretaker died by electrical shock when he “accidentally” plugged his finger in a light socket in the earlier thirties.
The hotel had been working on Jack and a Wendy for a very long time.
Now Wendy wears the gold chain
“Roll over, doggy. Play dead. Woof-woof.
Horace had put on the golden chain in 1939, and when it served his purpose he had knocked it off. That had happened tonight” Stephen King Before The Play
And
Notice the covers on the furniture at the end of the movie: They covered it all up.
And you’d never know it was Wendy. You’re supposed to overlook that piece of the puzzle.
Stanley Kubrick was a genius.

Context

While on an evening stroll, you somehow wound up in the middle of nowhere. You try to retrace your steps back home, but you give up when an unforecasted, sudden downpour soaks your jacket. You pace towards the only building in sight– a cartoonishly foreboding castle– and knock on the door. The stoic soul inside calmly invites you to a cup of tea, ignoring your frantic request for directions to the nearest phone booth or motel. You shrug and enter.
Addtl info:
Monetization is A-OK and editing the script is allowed, especially if you just want to swap a few words around (e.g. replacing 'sugar spouse' with 'sugar father' or 'glucose guardian').
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START
“Are you enjoying the tea, old sport? I’d like to think it’s ‘a special herbal mix’ I came up with, but at the end of the day, it’s just black tea mixed with green tea and a tinge of lemon juice [forced chuckle]”
“Now then, let’s get to business. I know you’re not here just to sip on a hot drink… You’re here because you’re lost, aren’t you? And I don’t mean that in a figurative or a poetic sort of way… You went off the path and found yourself in a place you’re unfamiliar with.”
“Oh yes, I’m quite the astute one, you see. I’m a doctor at the top of my field and as such, I have a talent for shedding light on the ambiguous.”
“Of course, my dear, I have a doctorate in Art History, so yes, I am a doctor despite all those times my parents have called me solely to tell me how I irrevocably f*cked up my life. You really learn to trace patterns from the characteristic formal qualities of pieces from each artistic movement when you’re as experienced as I am. The rebellious but actually kind of boring quality of Impressionism, the exaggerated curvatures of female sculptures from the Neolithic period, ect., ect. So, you see, the common fool couldn’t have discerned one’s backstory during a limited frame of time as I have time and time again on a daily basis.”
“Hm? You said multiple times that you needed directions? Well, I apologize, but as they say– ask not what they can do, but what you can do. Perhaps take this misunderstanding as a sign to speak less softly next time. A lovely voice like yours shouldn’t be lost in the cacophony of nonsense we call normal conversation.”
“...My ‘passive-aggressiveness’ is besides the subject of interest at hand. What we should really be discussing is the fact that you’re all lost and cold–and not to mention, completely drenched from the rain, now that I think about it… Tsk, tsk, tsk… what a massive blunder on my part! This calls for a change of clothes! Wouldn’t want you to catch a cold, now would we? Here, take this neatly folded, matching outfit that looks really good on you and is conveniently in your size. I always make sure to keep a spare set of luxurious robes around for extremely specific and situational occasions such as these.”
“You think that’s odd behavior, now do you? …You think it’s almost as if I expected you to come? …Well, you see, old sport, it’s customary in my culture to address a guest’s exact needs before you even meet your guest.”
“Indeed. It’s a tradition from, uh… New Jersey. I highly doubt such a tradition would raise an eyebrow when weighed against literally everything else from New Jersey, so you should probably stop asking about something that’s most likely trivial in the grand scheme of things. Let’s change our discussion topic to something, I don’t know, practical. Let’s start thinking about our next move, or perhaps even our future togeth— I mean your future. You’re the guest after all, haha. What sort of host would I be if I were more concerned with my own, non-romantic-in nature goals?”
“Now then, allow me a moment to retrieve my reading glasses and a sufficiently large piece of parchment for writing so we can put a few items on the docket… . How do you like your eggs? Shaped like hearts or decorated with XOXO’s written with ketchup? Do you like eggs? It’s alright if you don’t. Tell me all about your dietary restrictions; I promise I’ll find a way to work around them. What’s your stance on keeping a pet around? Are you open to pre-marital… Oh? You have something to say about the robes? Ah, I just knew you loved them! You don’t have to ask me twice— or at all. I can read your thoughts like a book. Yes, you can keep them! I had a hunch that you were just too shy to admit your gratitude towards my gift, and by extension, me.
“Oh… um. I-It seems my guilty conscience has won this time… I can’t bear to withhold the truth from you any longer… The robes I gave you does indeed have ‘My Beloved' lovingly embroidered on it in cursive. And yes, stitching conveniently sized clothing for attractive strangers is not a tradition from New Jersey, as fitting as that phrase would be in the headline of a magazine from New Jersey. Personally, I thought it was a good excuse considering the whole U.S. is a mess from top-to-bottom… I just…
“...I really didn’t expect you to arrive at this very moment. I never expected… anyone to come along besides the occasional mailman. Have you tried living somewhere with no neighbors around? It’s like being stranded on an island except I have access to water, a dope manor, electricity, food rations, and actually– this is a dumb analogy now that I think about it, so I’m just going to get straight to the point now–I’m touch starved.”
“For months I’ve played the part of the damsel in distress, waiting for someone to come rescue me from this figurative ivory tower. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve started to fantasize about being the sugar spouse of one whom I could have exclusively – a reciprocal relationship where we could build each other up on a foundation of affection. From the moment I saw you from the fish-eye lens on my front door, I knew you had potential. If I had you in my good graces and proved my own potential… I’d be able to convince you to stay with me. Our little sapling, our heuristic bond – it could have blossomed into actual love.”
“Hphm. I see how you’d be able to find love if *you\* didn’t live in ‘Dracula’s childhood home,’ as you put it. I presume a personality like yours is endearing enough to pull anyone in, but a creepy loner like me? I’d end up… hurting someone. I’m not exactly the most sensible emotionally, and I’m not as modest or patient as you are… For a second there, I was happy. I thought I had a chance to prove myself wrong and form a sincere human connection with you. But I blew it, unsurprisingly… The only real thing I gained from this experience is regret and affirmation that seclusion really is the best route for me…”
“But, still, I am your host nonetheless and you have nowhere else to go. Take this hammer and set of nails so you can board yourself up in my bedroom for the night, lest I be tempted to cuddle you in your sleep. Also, take this shovel so you can dig yourself an escape route. I’m sorry you had to put up with me”
“...You think I don’t need to apologize? But why? I’m a socially isolated stranger with morally questionable intentions. Can’t I make a good decision in my life just this once? …You want me to actually cuddle you in your sleep? You know that’s just a hypothetical possibility, right? A possibility I specifically mentioned because it was weird and something you should want to avoid? What sort of malevolent force is possessing you to say that? “
“You think it’s the least I could do to make up for ‘wasting your time?’ W-well, when you put it that way… It’s only proper. Some might say it’s even… my duty to cuddle you – a good host should always oblige requests within reason… But only for a few seconds, ok? I don’t want to overstep another boundary; I’ve already broken like a hundred during your stay.”
END
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I'm in the first draft stage and am having some difficulty getting some beta readers so I'm hoping for some input on just the first chapter. I know there's a lot of editing I'm gonna have to do so be as brutal as you can/ want, just as long as it's helpful criticism towards developing my writing style.
Alice Eye
Chapter One- Alone In The Rain
"Don't get in the way of humanity's future!"
A clash of swords race across a barren wasteland–
"Please! Let me save you!"
–Where two women face each other one last time.
"I can't be saved anymore! This is the only way! I won't let you stop me!"
One who has suffered and wants to belong.
"And I won't let you destroy yourself!"
And the other, who wished to heal a friend in need.
"I'm already lost!"
Unable to move forward as the darkness grows–
"As long as I'm still me, I won't stop trying to save you!"
–Yet a brilliant light burned, ready to stand beside it. It all began–
Two Years Ago….
BOOM! Thunder roared across the land as the light casts its shadow over one city; a city where the word impossible doesn't exist.
"It's been eight years since that day. The day the world became trapped in this endless rain and the day where a chain of unexplained deaths took place in our once, beautiful city. The police have no leads, scientific groups haven't discovered the cause behind the storm, and now, conspiracy theories and myths are rising."
September 1992, the eighth year where the sun's rays no longer reached off the coast of England; the Royal Quartet City.
"While the citizens have gotten used to the downpour, stranger things have been happening lately within the Dream District. A woman in a black cloak has been seen in children's rooms at midnight. Teen girls have been murdered with no signs of struggles. And recently, more sightings of odd, unexplainable creatures have been seen randomly throughout the area. Lastly, several witnesses have claimed to have seen the sun near a high-rise building. This is Wild Heart News, reporting in…"
CLICK.
"That's enough of that. I better get going. Second period is almost over."
Highschool student, Iris Blackheart, is getting herself ready for another rainy day as she finishes her breakfast and daily news. She looked in her dresser for some clothing and grabbed whatever was left; she smelled the clothes she grabbed "Wow these smell bad. I need to get some more clothes."
As she got dressed, she looked around her room, piled up dirty dishes, worn clothing all over the floor, and garbage bags along a wall.
"..... I'll get to it eventually." She sarcastically claimed as she walked towards the front door. She grabbed a purple zipper hoodie, an umbrella, and a small, silver bracelet with a heart shaped diamond embedded in the center. As she placed it on her wrist, her eyes became entranced as she thought of the day she first acquired it.
I can't believe it's been eight years since I got this thing! It's funny. It was also the last day the sun was out.
Iris looked at the clock as its arms moved and questioned what she was even leaving for. She knew she had school, but no one was there to make her go or tell her why she should go; she just felt she had to go. Looking around her room once more, Iris saw all the things that needed to be done, and wasn't up for doing it. She slapped her cheeks, rolled her head and shoulders as she loosened up, and left her apartment to go to school. She opened her umbrella as she took in the sight; the Dream district, one of the city's four major boroughs.
"Hurry up or we'll be in even more trouble!"
Iris quickly turned her head over to the hasty voice; her heart raced with excitement as the voice called to her.
Is someone really calling me?
Her gaze shot over to two adults. One was in a car telling the other to get in as he struggled to close his umbrella. The two drove off once he closed it as Iris stood there watching.
I should have known better. She let out a long sigh as she shut her front door. Iris looked at her umbrella and just threw it away, choosing to let the rain wash away the emotions she felt as she dragged herself towards her school.
Why is it always like this…
She passed by other adults running late to work, traffic workers trying their best to work in the rain, police constantly on the move to give the city a sense of security, even elders sitting by watching the sky; not one person paid her any mind as she walked. She tilted her head towards the cloudy sky as the downpour continued and muttered–
"I really wish this rain– would just wash me away already."
This city, which has long been waiting for release from the storm, lies two girls bound by fate.
SLAM!
"What was that? Who's there!"
"It's probably the rumored ghost again!"
"I thought it was only in the bathrooms!"
"Wasn't it supposed to be shaking the hallways?!"
"Forget this! I'm getting out of here!"
Several students were on their way to their next class but ran the moment Iris opened the front door of the school building.
Sigh… There they go again.
A teacher tried to calm the students down as they ran, however Iris stood in front of him.
"How about you help the student in front of you asshole?" She demanded, staring into his eyes, hoping he would scold her.
Please…
"Seriously kids, knock it off, stop running, and head right to class before you all get detention!"
The teacher chased after the other students leaving Iris behind in a now empty hallway. She dropped her bag, took a deep breath and screamed–
"STOP TREATING ME LIKE I DON'T EXIST!"
She waited for a moment to see if anyone, be it a teacher, a student, or even an animal would approach her to say or do anything to her; anything to be noticed.
RING!
The late bell went off and no one approached her.
"Whatever." She took off her sweater and started squeezing the water out onto the floor. She looked at the clock on the wall, "It's only the fourth period. Think I'll use their showers and dry off."
Why did I show up again? It's not like I'm learning anything here. Iris entered one of the school's shower rooms and changed out of her wet clothes when something caught her attention from the window.
"Is… is that– light?"
Across from Iris's school on a tall building, a golden light emanated.
"Is the sun really shining again?"
As she reached her hand out towards the light, it vanished. Did I imagine that just now?
She took one more glance around the area, but found no such light again. Unable to assert whether or not what she saw was real or not, Iris continued getting undressed, entered the shower and leaned against the wall as each droplet of hot water loosened the stress on her body.
I should enjoy this for a bit before the other girls arrive.
After thirty minutes passed, the doors opened and other girls started walking in to change as the current class ended.
"Why is the shower water on?" And here we go again.
"Don't tell me the ghost is in here now too."
"Maybe it was just a fluke! Let's just quickly shower and get out."
"I agree."
Iris walked out as the girls walked in. She dried herself off and went towards the lockers and saw a black and gold v neck shirt, short black ripped pants, and mix matched socks.
"Can I switch clothes with one of you? Mine smells a bit and they're wet." The girls continued to shower without saying anything to her. "I'll take that as a yes."
A little tight around my chest, but it'll do. She got dressed in the other girl's clothing, placed her wet clothes in the locker, leaned on a wall, waiting for them to get out and see if they noticed her. Now let's see if anyone cares.
The shower water turned off and the girls hastily walked over to the lockers.
"Huh… where are my clothes? Whose are these for? Ugh, they reek!"
"That stupid ghost steals clothing now!"
"Nowhere is safe in the school!"
Ugh, drama queens. Iris rolled her eyes, grabbed her bag, and walked out of the shower room causing them further confusion.
How much longer do they plan to keep this bullying up? Iris thought as she picked up her bag and walked the hallways of her school. For as long as she could recall, everyone in the city has treated her like she doesn't exist; no one acknowledged her presence. She couldn't grasp why anyone would treat her like she wasn't there and continued to ponder this as she arrived at her class. Before she walked inside, she took a deep breath, slapped her cheeks, and prepared herself for the bullies of her classroom. She opened the door so fast that a gust of air passed through the classroom.
"Not again!"
"Why is our classroom haunted?!"
"Is this going to happen for the rest of the year?!"
Yeah, yeah, shut up. Iris ignored their panic, quietly walking over to her desk and sat there waiting patiently to leave. The students were alarmed and panicked as the teacher made an attempt to settle them down. It was difficult to calm any of the students down as there were reports of teenagers being murdered by some invisible force; superstitions were rising as the victims increased. The teacher advised everyone to speak to each other for the remainder of the class and help calm one another down as tensions rose. Iris watched the class comfort one another and felt her chest tightened as her frustration over being ignored grew.
"Would anyone even care if I stopped coming? Even the teachers don't seem to care about me." Iris muttered to herself as her only form of communication.
"Sigh… you know what. I don't even know why I show up?!" Iris got up, threw her chair on the floor spooking the class even further and walked out. "Stupid classmates! Stupid teachers! Stupid school!" She kicked lockers, and yelled outside the classes, but nothing.
"Ugh… What do I have to do to get some attention around here?!"
"Shut up you whiny bitch!"
Iris heard a voice and immediately looked around to see who it was. Everyone was in a classroom, so who was it? Who acknowledged her?
"Where did that voice come from? Did someone hear me just now?" She searched the school looking everywhere she could think of; the gym, the lunchroom, the teacher's lounge, anywhere she could think of.
"Where? Where? Where?! Where?! WHERE?!" Soon her curiosity turned into desperation as she ran throughout every corner of the school. She wasn't sure if she was just hearing things or not, but all she knew was that she was tired of being alone for so long.
Whoever that was they have to be here somewhere. I—
RING!
Unfortunately, the final bell for school rang and just about everyone was leaving to go home. Tired from running around the school, she stopped and sat down against the wall of the hallways to catch her breath before trying again.
"So what should we try at the Cafe this time?" Iris looked up to other students chatting thinking it was directed at her.
"There's a new item on the menu that I want to try that is apparently to die for!"
"Oh, what's it called I want to try……."
Iris faced the ground as she held herself, sitting in her isolation. No one to hang out with. No one to comfort her. No one to ask her if she's okay. She tried her hardest to keep tears from flowing out of her eyes as she struggled to keep herself from breaking down.
Why? Why won't anyone see me? Why won't– anyone acknowledge me?
BANG! One of the students suddenly fell onto the ground as she struggled for air causing the students to panic; however…
Are you serious?! Iris trembled as she wiped the tears from her eyes to see if she was seeing things; she wasn't. What is that?!
Over the student was a skinny humanoid creature that wore a tattered cloak and seemed to have multiple hands wrapped around parts of its body. It had one of its hands inside the girl's mouth as it attempted to pull something out of her.
What the hell is it doing?! And why is no one reacting to it? Her heart began to beat faster than her trembling as she looked on in horror. The class started screaming in fear as the student began to cough up blood.
I need to get out of here!
Iris felt her whole body become as light as a feather as she immediately stood up in an attempt to run; the creature instantly turned to her. Iris completely froze in both mind and body. She was so afraid that she even stopped breathing as if anything would set it off. The creature walked towards her pulling something out of the student causing her death. As the class yelled in fear and agony, Iris stood there unable to move as her skin froze up in the presence of the creature slowly approaching her. Something finally acknowledged her existence, and she was far too afraid to even think of why it was happening now.
"Found you!"
Iris and the creature turned towards the voice and saw an oddly dressed rabbit. The creature immediately fled from the rabbit giving Iris a chance to reclaim herself. She fell to the ground struggling to breathe as if someone was strangling her.
(HUFF, HUFF, HUFF!) What the hell was that?! And why is no one reacting to this?! As she's gasping for air, Iris sees the rabbit leave after the creature and tries to follow it. She got up and attempted to follow, however she caught a glimpse of the student dead on the floor with her eyes pointed at her as if she could see her.
Don't, don't look at me as if you could finally see me. A tear ran down Iris's face for her fallen classmate. Whether it was because she was sad that she was possibly acknowledged after someone died or if she wished it was her that died to escape her isolation, she didn't know. All she knew was that something was out there that only she could see and that meant there could be a way to make people see her again is what she thought no matter how unreasonable a thought it may be. She ran looking for the two creatures and heard a loud sound coming from the nearby restroom.
Okay. I'm close. Need to calm myself before I see, whatever that thing was.
Iris stopped moving, closed her eyes for a moment, placed her hand on her bracelet, and headed over to investigate. She stopped again.
This is stupid. No matter how I look at it, this is stupid. What am I hoping to find?
Iris stood for a moment, listening to nearby sirens approaching the school.
After what I saw, stopping now would be crazy right?
She carried on and reached the area where the sound was loudest; the boy's bathroom. Iris stood there for a moment, embarrassed by the idea of entering a room for the opposite gender.
Okay, so I might be curious, but not that curious. It's the boy's bathroom, what if one of them is peeing or…
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Multiple loud sounds came from the room again and again. Do I go in? Or do I turn around and pretend I saw nothing? Iris paced back and forth contemplating what choice to make.
"Screw it! If it were a boy in the same situation he'd go into the girl's bathroom without second guessing it! I'm doing this for gender equality!" She yelled, hardening her resolve as she nervously walked in and saw something unbelievable; a black hole lodged into the ground.
I… I must be dreaming. This can't be real. Can it?
Iris was unable to determine the thing in front of her. And yet, she felt drawn to it as if something called to her. Before she could even attempt to comprehend what was happening, she was already through the hole. She felt her body was changing, becoming, something… free. Free of all her worries. Free of isolation. Free of reality. Her vision went dark and then, like magic, she was standing somewhere far away from her school. In front of her were several abandoned, run-down apartment complexes ranging from roughly six to twelve stories tall floating on rocks and connected by train tracks.
This place looks like it's been abandoned for decades. Even the ground looks like it's been through an earthquake or two….. Somehow, this place seems familiar…
She looked at her hand and saw the rain water slip right through her as if she were a ghost.
So— this really doesn't help with my "I don't exist" anxiety. Where am I? Iris started walking towards the nearest apartment building when she suddenly heard a voice.
"How the fuck did this slut get here?!"
Iris was completely thrown off by the random words thrown in her direction and immediately sought the voice.
Where is that voice? I've heard that voice before. Iris looked and saw the oddly dressed rabbit from before. Iris grabbed the rabbit who didn't even bother to try to escape and immediately inspected it from head to toe.
"Is there like a radio or voice box attached to this thing?" She said curiously. Iris looked it in the eyes, "No way was this cute little thing the source of the voice! It's a bunny!"
SLAM!
Iris was flipped onto the ground with zero time to react. She was completely dumbfounded and tried to get the words to comprehend what happened until the rabbit got on top of her.
"Touch me like that again with your slutty hands and I will bury you like my liquor on a Saturday morning." The rabbit commanded.
Iris couldn't process or find logic in what was happening. Where was she? Why is there a talking rabbit? Why is it a bitch? Iris had too many questions on her mind.
CRACK!
Iris heard a building crack and quickly looked to see an abandoned apartment complex breaking down in front of her. She saw the cracks intensify and saw the creature from earlier get blown out of the building. She quickly moved away to avoid the creature.
"What is that thing?!" Iris asked, but the rabbit quickly ran towards the building as a person began to walk out of it. Golden light emanated from the building and only grew brighter.
What's happening?
Iris tried to look as best as she could until someone came into clear view. A petite, teen girl in a dark blue jacket with glowing golden long hair had Iris in awe of her unique appearance. She pulled out a red curved sword with a rose shaped handle on it and a clock embedded in the center of the rose.
"Abby– Clock in."
The rabbit was drawn into the clock as the needle turned and a strong golden light glowed from the sword. She took a stance, readying her blade, and prepared to battle the creature. It removed its cloak, unleashed its other four arms that were surrounding its body, and lounged at the girl. The girl is pushed back into the building as their battle carries through the floors. Iris could hear the sounds of their attacks rise slowly getting quieter as she thought of whether she should follow them or not.
"I don't know what's happening, but I can't sit here and wait to see what happens. I walked through the weird hole, I'm going to see this through to the end!"
Iris ran into the building, ran up the stairs, and looked for the girl and the creature. As she got closer to the top, she stopped hearing any sort of loud sounds.
Is it, is it over? Iris felt concerned now that she was at the door to the rooftop. Who won? The girl or the creature? If the creature won, Iris would be her next target. But if the girl won, what happens next?
I– I can't stand here and wait for something to happen.
She grabbed the door handle with hands drenched in sweat and uncontrollable shaking of fear from the unknown; whatever happens next, nothing would be the same for her.

Hi everyone! Just came back from my first trip to Japan. It has always been my biggest dream to visit Japan since I was a kid and I'm so glad I finally got the chance to go! The trip was actually planned by my boyfriend who booked everything for us in May, which is my birthday month.
Tips:
Make Reservations Months in Advance! We made reservations for cafes, activities, restaurants, and even trains months in advance to make sure we would be able to do everything we wanted; we were not taking any risks and we were so thankful for our reservations. Make sure to do your research about when to make reservations months in advance.
Pack and Travel Light. Japan isn't really suited for traveling with big luggage to haul around. The trains can get incredibly crowded, you’ll probably be walking around and using stairs frequently, and hotel rooms can be very small at times. I recommend bringing a small rolling luggage and a large backpack and only pack what you need. Leave some room in your luggage for souvenirs or snacks to bring back.
Get Yen immediately at the airport or at the nearest convenience store! You will definitely need yen for a good amount of places in Japan. My boyfriend and I tried to load money in our Suica but the machine we used only accepted yen. Luckily we found a nearby conbini that accepted our debit card but we couldn't use our credit cards for some reason because the atm required a pin number. I might have accepted Mastercard but we both didn't have one.
Bringing comfortable shoes is a must in Japan! I brought comfortable shoes and my feet still hurt by the third day because we were walking and standing most of the days. I also recommend buying Lion’s Foot Patch if you find it at a conbini (I think we bought them at Lawsons) as the gel patch felt so good after a long day of walking!
Plan more days to relax. Although I have no regrets doing all the fun things we planned for our trip, I do wish we had more rest days in Japan, especially when our feet were so sore and we were so sleep deprived from waking up early. I wish we would have stayed a full 2 weeks in Japan and planned relaxing things to do in between our activities like visiting an Onsen and staying in a Ryokan.
Get to popular places early! My boyfriend and I would wake up at 5am to get ready and beat the morning rush hour and to get to popular places before the crowds showed up, it definitely worked out well for us.
Use hotel luggage transport or lockers when necessary. The luggage transport was especially useful when traveling long distances and carrying luggage through the trains would just be a hassle. All we had to do was just talk to our hotel clerk and give him the information for our next hotel we would be sending it to, and the clerk did the rest of the work. The luggage would usually arrive 2 days after we sent it. For the rest of the time, we just used lockers at train stations to store our luggage as we went sightseeing.
Trip Report:
Sunday May 14: Arrival and TokyoDisney
Arrival at Narita Airport
Arrival was simple, fast, and easy. For immigration and customs, we just had to scan our QR codes and passport and also take a picture.
Yen situation
As we arrived at Disney by bus, we wanted to use the coin lockers to store our luggage. The lockers only took suica (maybe yen too) so we tried to buy a suica but the machines only took yen (it didn't look like it took foreign cards). We tried walking to 7/11but it was closed so we ended up just walking to our hotel to drop off luggage. We ended up spending more than an hour walking everywhere and only had 2 hours for Disney.)
Tokyo Disney
The only ride we had time for was the beauty and the beast ride and it was amazing! We loved our experience inside the castle and we were amazed how fluid the animatronics were. If I could recommend one ride in Disney it would be this one. We did have time to go on one more ride so we went on the Monsters Inc ride which was just a shooter game and was just okay.
Monday May 15: Tokyo- DisneySea
Before we went to disneysea, we wanted to try some convenience store food so we went to Lawsons and Family Mart. The convenience store food was delicious! The onigiri tastes better than the ones in the US, the chicken in the hot food section was so juicy and delicious! Definitely recommend eating the hot foods and drinks. We tried getting money out of the ATM with our Visa credit cards but it didnt work so we used our debit card because the atm required a pin number.
Tokyo Disneysea
We arrived at Disneysea almost an hour early and we still had to wait in line. After the gates opened, we went straight to Journey to the Center of the Earth, but it broke down before we were able to ride it. The staff did offer us a fast pass to use for the ride later when it would be fixed. When the ride was working again, we headed back, used the fast pass and immediately got on the ride. It was a fun. fast, and short ride. All the rides at disneysea are pretty short and are moderately thrilling. Afterwards, we went to the submarine ride, 20,000 leagues under the sea, which was a unique experience and a very chill ride. Next was the Indiana jones ride; it was fun and a much better ride than the one in california. Then we went to Tower of terror which wasn't too scary. We also went to Soaring which actually has really long lines and wait time but it was a cool experience. The ride with the longest line was probably toy story mania; we decided not to go on the ride because of the long lines and we've been to the one in california. Kings triton castle was the most beautiful area to look at and explore, our favorite part of the area was exploring ariel's trinket room. Lots of rides were closed the day we went so we didnt get to ride on the spirits roller coaster, autopia, and explorers. My favorite food i tried there was the Ukiwa bun.
We also got to eat at Magellan which is one of the more expensive dining options. We didn't make a reservation until that very same day but we luckily able to reserve a spot in the morning. The food was tasty and it was my first time going to a fancier kind of restaurant that offered 3 course meal that were all tiny portions. I got the cheaper option (around $40 or $60, i cant remember) and it was very delicious. My boyfriend got the most expensive option (around $100) and it tasted terrible! I wouldnt recommend getting the most expensive option there.
Tuesday May 16: Tokyo-Harajuku
Harajuku
We took the trains to get to Harajuku and it was a little overwhelming trying to figure out how to find our train the first few times but, after a while, it became a very easy process. We used google maps to find the trains we needed to take. Then at the train stations, we looked for signs with the name of the train line we needed and followed the arrows and asked for directions when we needed extra help. Then we used our suica card to tap into the specific station we needed to be at to find our train. Next we looked for the PLATFORM NUMBER our train would be arriving at and followed the signs for that number. Once at the platform, we confirmed if we were at the right place by making sure the ARRIVAL TIME, PLATFORM NUMBER, and TRAIN LINE on the digital signs matched the one from our google maps. Make sure to follow train etiquette by stepping to the side to let people out of the train and putting your backpack in front of you if the train is really crowded.
At Harajuku station, we put our luggage in coin lockers for the day so we could explore. We went to a conbini, grabbed some food for breakfast and went to Yoyogi park to eat since nothing was open at 7am. After eating, we went to Meiji shrine for a bit, which is also near yoyogi park, and then headed back to harajuku so we wouldn't be late for our mipig reservations.
Mipig cafe was our favorite cafe and one of our favorite experiences in japan! The pigs were so loving and friendly, they came right up to us and laid on our laps after the staff put some blankets on us. They were adorable and as many as 2-3 pigs would come up to us and sit on our laps. Some pigs would even get aggressive with other piggies if you gave one too much attention. Some pigs started chewing on my dress so I had to get another blanket to hide my dress from being eaten.
After Mipig, we wanted to get some food. We tried Marian crepes, candied strawberries, and some small cafes. We visited Anakuma cafe and it was definitely an interesting experience. A bear hand would come out of hole in the wall and give us candy and a coin to put in a gacha machine and it would also play rock paper scissor with us.
Next stop was Hedgehog cafe which i wouldnt recommend only because I learned later that hedgehogs are nocturnal and they were sleeping most of the time we were there. We ended up leaving early because there was not much to do as we felt bad disturbing the little guys.
Afterwards we visited the Kiddyland store and I enjoyed the studio ghibli section but they also had kirby, pokemon, and sanrio merchandise.
Teamlabs
Next we took a train to team labs, we got there early but we had to wait until it was closer to our reservation time before we could line up. After getting inside we had to put our shoes and backpacks in lockers so we could go through the water exhibition first. They offer shorts if you are wearing dresses as some of the exhibitions have mirror floors. I wasnt too into the water exhibition but I did like the lights exhibition and flower exhibition the best. Overall it was a cool experience and I got some amazing photos out of it.
Shibuya sky
Lastly we went to shibuya sky. We also couldn't get inside until our reservation time started. The elevator ride up was pretty cool as they played a video on the ceiling. They have some restaurants and cafes near the top, I wish I came earlier to try them but we were so tired I didnt want to stay too long. The top of shibuya sky was outside and it was cold (i wish i brought a sweater) but it was incredibly beautiful, especially at night. It's a nice place to relax and look at views. This was probably my favorite sky building out of the three i went (shibuya sky, umeda sky, and tokyo skytree).
Wednesday May 17: Nagoya-Ghibli Park
Ghibli park
We left early morning to get on the train and avoid morning rush hour. We ended up taking the Nozomi train to Nagoya. We bought our shinkansen tickets at the JR ticket booth. We recommend reserving seats as its only a couple yen more and gives you peace of mind knowing you get to choose your seats. We also grabbed some ekibens which were delicious, my favorite was the blue one with mt. fuji on it. Next we had to take a bus to ghibli park which was actually very hard to find. We had to ask for help to find it. To pay for the bus, you can use a suica card or yen to pay as you board the bus.
We arrived super early, and put some of our bags in the lockers. We went to lawsons nearby and bought a ghibli park book which features the exhibitions inside. We walked around the park a bit before we were allowed to start lining up for our reservation times. There are also no trash cans at ghibli park so make sure you bring a trash bag with you to take all your trash back with you.
Around 12pm we went inside and went straight to the first exhibition (Becoming characters in Memorable Ghibli scenes) and there was already a line to get in. Once we got in we took pictures with Noface from spirited away, ponyo, princess mononoke scene, and many more movie scenes.
The next exhibition we went to was the food exhibition (Delicious! Animating Memorable Meals). You can't take pictures in that area but it was cool to be able to interact in the kitchen spaces from your favorite movie scenes. Also, in the end of this exhibition, you can take pictures with totoro and the cat bus!
We visited the ghibli store next because I heard the lines can get rather long at the end of the day and I bought some merchandise from there.
Afterwards, we took pictures at the central staircase, the castle in the sky scene, and the scene with Yubaba.
Next, we took the elevator down to the bottom floor and took pictures in the arietty scenes, it was cool feeling so tiny while everything was supersized!
Lastly we went to the bakery to get some sandwiches. Unfortunately, the food does sell out and there were not a lot of choices left by the time we got there. The food we got was okay but nothing special.
Osaka: Ichiran ramen
After Ghibli park we took the train to Osaka. In Osaka, we lined up to get into Ichiran ramen. We ordered our ramen through a vending machine and it gave us our ticket to give to our server. We were seated in these small cubicle areas but we were also able to close the partition in between us so my boyfriend and I could share our table space together. I thought it was a unique dining experience; it was cool not having to say a single word to our server, and the food was also delicious too.
Thursday May 18: Osaka-Universal Studios Japan
Got to USJ an hour before it opened and there were still super long lines! As the gates opened up, we ran to nintendoland to make sure we got in. We went to toadstool cafe to get ticket reservations but they didn't open until 9am so we decided to take the single rider line for the mario kart ride, it was a bad idea. For some reason the single rider line still took us 30 minutes to complete and it felt like it was going slower than the regular lines. The mario kart ride was cool, it used like a VR headset and you were able to shoot shells at others but I really didn't understand what was going on.
Toadstool cafe
We went back to toadstool but all the tickets were gone, I tried talking to one of the workers if they would offer tickets later but I don't think he understood what i was saying. He actually just let me in the line after I asked a few times if they had anymore tickets for the afternoon. After waiting in line and ordering, we grabbed our drinks and table number and sat down at our table. The drinks were delicious! Definitely recommend. We also ordered some kind of mushroom pesto soup and it was bomb! We recommend that too since they don't offer it in the California Universal. We also got peaches cake for like $30 which is supposed to be for 4 people but just the 2 of us ate it. It was light and fluffy and we recommend getting it as they also dont offer it in the California Universal. The staff also came by and offered to take pics of us which was so nice.
Next we bought the limited edition wrist bands and started playing some of the mini games. We played about 3 games before we decided to leave nintendo land and check out the other areas because we also bought a reserved time to get back into nintendoland to use our fastpass for the yoshi ride.
We had a fastpass for the Jurassic park ride so we went on that next. Make sure you are prepared to get wet cause you will get soaked at the end. Then we went to Hogwarts and watched some of the shows they offered and grabbed a meatpie. We didn't stay long here as we have already been to Hogwarts in california. Next we got in line for the mario strawberry shortcake pancake and it was delicious light and fluffy! I think we also had a fastpass ride for jaws and that ride was actually really cooler than I expected . The next fastpass ride was for despicable me ride so we did that one too and it was actually better than the california version. And lastly we went back to nintendoland to use our reservation time and our fastpass for the yoshi ride. It was a cute slow ride but it had nice views of the park. I enjoyed it even though it was a kiddy ride. Lastly, we had the yakisoba shells and melon lassi and both were delicious
By this time our feet were so sore from walking for days so we left early to go rest at our hotel. I ended up being so sore and tired I just knocked out early. My boyfriend bought Lions Foot Patches from Lawson and put them on my feet while i slept. They felt so nice and cool on my feet. I recommed getting those foot patches while you're in japan.
We woke up for a late dinner and got some nearby mcdonalds. I'm not a fan of mcdonalds in the US but i wanted to try japan's mcdonalds to see if its better. I honestly didn't like the Japan Mcdonalds either even though it does taste different, I'm not sure what the hype is about with the japanese mcdonalds. I found that japan's convenience store chicken was much juicer and tasted better than the mcdonalds chicken.
Friday May 19: Kyoto-Fushimi Inari Taisha, Nishiki market, Ninenzaka
Fushimi inari taisha shrine
We got to the shrine early, maybe around 7am,and it was not very crowded but there were still people there. It was raining a bit so luckily i brought my umbrella, unfortunately my boyfriend did not, this would haunt him later. We took a picture of a map to see which way to go to reach the top as there are different routes you can take. It was a gradual climb up but my boyfriend really struggled as his feet still hurt from the days before. The gates were beautiful and there were so many areas to look at and explore as we climbed. Unfortunately my boyfriend was tired and we were in a time crunch so we didn't explore every area but I wish I could have because this was the most beautiful place I had visited in Japan. As we neared the top it started to rain more heavily and my boyfriend ended up getting soaked. The top of the shrine was anticlimactic, but we took our picture and headed back down. On our way we stopped by the little stores and bought an umbrella for my boyfriend which we were thankful they had some. As we went down the steps in the rain, my boyfriend accidentally slipped and fell on his back pretty badly. He ended up with a deep gash on his finger as the blood gushed all over the floor. Luckily I had some tissues to wrap up his finger. We headed back down the mountain and bought some bandaids at a conbini store. We also bought some strawberry daifuku at a small little shop and it was the best daifuku I ate in Japan. The mochi was a great consistency and the strawberry was the juiciest strawberry i ever had. I wish i had bought more from there.
Nishiki market
We went to Nishiki market around 11am and it was super crowded while the path was so small and narrow. We literally had to push through the crowds at times because there were so many people, it was not a fun time for me. I also ended up losing my suica card somewhere around there. I'm also not the biggest fan of seafood but my boyfriend is so he ended up eating most of the food. We ended up not staying long for all those reasons and ended up going to a nearby store that sold all kinds of different food which I liked a lot better because there weren't crowds of people there.
Ninenzaka
Next we walked to Ninenzaka which was like a 30 minute walk. It was still raining so we were just looking for a place to stop and eat for a bit. We went to Kudamono cafe and got the cloud dessert. It was pretty good and fluffy and the dessert looked so pretty. Afterwards, we had room for more dessert so we tried Meccha cafe. We ordered the matcha tiramisu and the parfait. The matcha tiramisu was probably the best dessert i had in Japan, I definitely recommend getting it! We also visited Donguri and bought more totoro merchandise. At this point, my boyfriend was so tired and soaked from the rain we decided to go back to the hotel. We took the bus this time and it was packed! We had to push people just to get out.
Saturday May 20: Kyoto, Nara, Osaka
Kyoto:
Arashiyama bamboo forest
We got to the bamboo forest early at 7am, there were a few people there but not too many like later in the day. I recommend going super early to beat the crowds. The bamboo forest was super short but it was still a cool area to check out and plus there are many things to do around the area. We walked to a nearby park next to a big river and the views were absolutely gorgeous! Kyoto is really breathtaking. After walking a while and checking out the scenery we headed back to the bamboo forest to board the Sagano Romantic Train.
Sagano Romantic Train
We had reserved seats for the Sagano Romantic Train and the views from the train were amazing! Get there early because you might have to do some minor paperwork stuff to print out your ticket if you reserved in advance. The reserved seating we had was in a train with no glass windows so you can just feel the air rushing through your hair as the train moves. Truly it was a memorable and fun experience with a lot of breathtaking nature views. After coming back to our initial departure spot on the train, we left for Monkey Park.
Monkey Park
We rushed over to Monkey park and by this time the streets of kyoto became much crowded as we had to dodge pedestrians left and right. We paid a fee to get into the monkey park and hiked our way up to the park, there were a couple benches to take rest if needed. At the top, you can see monkeys running around and playing with one another. We went inside a little building where you can buy food for the monkeys and feed them through windows covered with a mesh net. We didnt stay long as we had a full schedule planned for the day so we left to go catch a train to Nara but we did eat some amazing street food on the way. I don't know why but the street food in Kyoto was so delicious, the best I had in Japan probably.
Nara:
Nakatanidou
We arrived at Nara from the trains and went straight to Nakatanidou for some mochi and it was packed with people! It was even hard trying to get a space to watch them make the mochis. It was cool to experience the mochi making and to taste the mochi but I probably wouldn't go back there again because of the crowds.
Nara Park
After the mochis, we walked to Nara park and it was amazing! There were so many deers and they were so friendly and polite! This was my favorite part of nara for sure. For a few yen, we bought some crackers and found some deers that would bow everytime they wanted a cracker, it was too cute. The deers were literally everywhere, on the streets and even at temples.
Shrines
There were lots of shrines around the area but we came pretty late so most of them were closing up but the ones we did see were pretty neat to look at. We also ate some udon at a little restaurant next to a small lake, the views of the lake were amazing from inside the restaurant.
Osaka:
After Nara, we came back to Osaka and the streets were so crowded at night. I tried shopping at don quixote but there were just to many people to weave through that I just decide to give up and try a 10 yen cheese bread near the store. The line was kind of long but I decided to try it out, it was actually really big, not that good, and made my stomach hurt. I would not be getting that again haha
Matsusakagyu Yakiniku Restaurant
My boyfriend had reserved this place for Thursday but we were so tired that day that we decided to cancel our reservation. We decided to try to go in person on this day to see if we could get in. We were lucky that they had a spot available and we ordered a platter of A5 wagyu beef for more than $100 US dollar. Im not really a meat person but the beef was very tender and delicious and the service was very good. They took pictures of me and my boyfriend and gave me free ice cream for my birthday.
Sunday May 21: Tokyo-Joypolis, Akihabara, skytree
Joypolis
The next morning we took the Nozumi back to Tokyo and headed straight to joypolis. We got tickets that allowed us to go on pretty much any ride there. Joypolis was small but had some interesting and unique rides and attractions. My favorite was the rhythm rollercoaster where you play rhythm games on a small roller coaster. We also played a VR Laser tag which was actually pretty fun even though I dont really play VR. There was an Attack on Titan walkthrough attraction that was completely in Japanese so I didnt understand any of it but it had some very cool props inside. The other interesting attraction was a scary house, where you have to get into these lockers and a girl comes and bangs on them and then the lockers flip you back horizontally. It wasnt that scary but it was pretty unique.
Akihabara
Next we went to Akihabara just to check out but we were actually super tired so we didnt stay long. We went to a couple stores but to be honest it was actually kind of boring as I am no longer as into anime as I was when I was a kid so we ended leaving akihabara fairly quickly.
Tokyo Skytree
Instead of going to akihabara I kind of wish I just went to the tokyo skytree shopping area because there was so much cool things to do there! They have a pokemon center, a kirby cafe, studio ghibli shop, and so many stores to shop or restaurants to eat at! We also went to the top of skytree but it honestly wasnt worth the money as the very top didnt have that much stuff and we just had to wait in these super long lines to get both up and down the skytree. After the skytree, we found a yakitori spot and ate some beef skewers which were delicious. We wished we went restaurant hopping more as there were just so many places to eat in this area.
Monday May 22: Ueno Park and Departure
Ueno park
Before we left to the airport, we visited Ueno park which was only a few blocks away from our hotel. It had a beautiful lake which was covered with some sort of lily pads. The park was pretty big and it was nice just walking around the area.
Life Mart
We decided to stop at Life Mart to get some food before we left to the airport. The Meat was so delicious and was so cheap, and it had different options from conbinis. We took train back to Narita Airport, this train I think you have to reserve in advance.
Narita airport
Going back through immigrations and customs and tsa was super easy and fast. We recommended getting lunch or snack early because there were pretty long lines as our departure time approached.
We also bought Tokyo Banana for souvenir snacks to bring back to our families, its very delicious!
In the end, visiting Japan was better than I could ever imagine and I just cant wait to go back! Please let me know what your favorite parts of Japan are and what other areas in Japan I must check out!

Hi, I just received my first electric guitar, a Squier Bullet Stratocaster HSS Hardtail Limited-Edition from Musician's Friend and have some beginner questions:

1. For future reference, should ALL of the plastic film all around the guitar be peeled off? On the back is a rectangular metal plate with a screw in each corner. It has plastic film on top of it but while trying to peel that off, the oval "CE" marking/sticker also comes off. It appears to be stuck to the plastic film rather than the metal plate. Was I supposed to remove that film, too?
2. Under the dials on the front of the guitar, there may be small bits of plastic that are underneath still that I couldn't fully pull out while I was pulling off the plastic film. There might also be a little under the pick guard that didn't fully pull out. Should I be unscrewing the pick guard and removing the dials to get that last bit of plastic out?
3. Nearest to the bridge, there are 2 pickups right next to each other. Unlike the other ones, these appear to move when you touch them, almost like they're on a suspension. While I was pulling plastic film off of that area, I noticed that those 2 pickups have what appear to be some sort of rubber band or something that goes all the way around the sides of each pickup. Are those to be left on and just the plastic film is to be removed?
4. After removing the plastic film, is the next step to tune the guitar, or are there also additional steps that should be taken, like stretching out the strings a bit by carefully pulling on them to create some tension and then releasing?
5. Anything else I need to do as part of initial unboxing and setup?

Thanks in advance!

I have a wharf and I have factories very near it that produce ship building components (hull parts etc.)
Why is it that whenever I place an order to build a ship, my wharf doesn’t get the parts from these factories? And instead opts to buy it from other stations that I don’t own?
More details:
The factories are absolutely chalk full of these components.
Wharf has 2 traders assigned to it, factories also have 2 traders assigned to it
All traders are set to auto-trade for their respective stations
Station storage and habitat are both very spacious and at peak efficiency
Could it be that I’m lacking trader ships? If so, if I want the goods from my factories to go into the wharf, should I assign more trader ships to the wharf? Or to the factory stations.

They didn’t tell us the name of the next kid that disappeared. They didn’t tell us another kid had disappeared at all. We could all tell by the silence what had happened. It spoke volumes. I’m sure they talked about it in great detail amongst themselves. In PTA meetings and City Councils. My parents made sure to turn off the TV at 5 o’clock before the news came on, at least in my home. They’d turn it back on for the 11 o’clock news, when were were in bed and couldn’t hear the details.
The strange thing is, they never told us to just stop going outside. They told us to go in groups, sure, but they never decided, or as far as I could tell even though, to keep us all indoors. I guess that sort of freedom wasn’t something they were willing to give up. Instead, they did the neighborhood watch thing. For those few months, I remember my folks meeting more of our neighbors than in all the time previously, or since. Retirees would spend their days out in their front lawns, watching kids and everybody else coming and going. They’d even set up lawn furniture, with umbrellas, even all through the rains of spring. Cops stopped sitting in ambushes on the highways waiting for speeders and instead started patrolling the streets, chatting with us as we’d pass by. Weekends would see all the adults out in their yards, working on cars in the driveways, fixing the gutters, and so on. They had this weird way of looking at you as you’d ride by. Not hostile stares, but it was like they were cataloging your presence. Boy, eight years old, red raincoat silver bike, about 11:30 in the morning, heading south on Sorensen. Seemed fine.
The next time we saw it, it wasn’t in our neighborhood, and I was the one who saw it first. We were visiting Russ, a sort of 5th semi-friend from school. We rarely hung out, mostly owing to geography. His house wasn’t far as the crow flies, but it was up a steep hill. We spent a Saturday afternoon returning a cache of comic books we’d borrowed. The distance we covered was substantial, as we had decided to take lots of extra streets as switchbacks, rather than slowly push our bikes up the too-steep hills.
The descent was going to be the highlight of the trip, up until I saw the Hidebehind. We were on a curving road, a steep forested bluff on one side. The uphill slope was mostly ivy-covered raised foundations for the neighborhood’s houses. That side of the road was lined with parked cars, and the residents of the homes had to ascend steep staircases to get to their front doors.
I was ayt the back of the pack when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Movement, something brown squatting between two closely parked cars. My head snapped as I zoomed past, and despite not getting a good look, I knew it was that terrible thing. “It’s behind us!” I shouted and started pedaling hard. The others looked for themselves as I quickly rushed past them, but they soon joined my pace.
Ralph’s earlier idea of directly confronting the thing was set aside. We were moving too fast, and down too narrow a street to turn around. Then we saw it again it was to our left, off-road, between the trees. Suddenly it leaped from behind one tree trunk to the next and disappeared again. That hardly made sense, the base of the trees must have been thirty feet below the deck of the street we rode down. One of us, I think it was India, let out one of those strangled screams.
There it was again, back on the right, disappearing behind a mailbox as we approached. That couldn’t have been, it must have outpaced us and crossed in front of us. Logic would suggest there was more than one, but somehow the four of us knew it was the same thing. More impossible still, the pole holding up the mailbox was too thin, maybe two inches in diameter, yet that thing had disappeared behind it, like a Warner Bros. cartoon character. It was just enough to catch a better glimpse of it though. All brown. A head seemingly too bulbous and large for its body. Its limbs were thin but far longer, like a gibbon’s. Only a gibbon had normal elbows and knees. This thing bent its joints all wrong like it wasn’t part of the natural order. We were all terrified to wit’s end.
“The trail!” Ralph shouted, and the other three of us knew exactly what he meant. The top of it was only just around the curve. It was a dirt footpath for pedestrians ascending and descending South Hill, cutting through the woods on our left. It was too steep for cars, and to be honest, too steep for bikes. We’d played on it before, challenging each other to see how high up they could go, then descend back down without using our brakes. A short paved cul-de-sac at the bottom was enough space to stop before running into a cross street.
Ralph had held the previous group record, having climbed three-quarters of the way before starting his mad drop. India’s best was just short of that, I had only dared about halfway up, Ben only a third. This time, with certain death on our heels, the trail seemed the only way out. Nothing could have outrun a kid on a bike flying down that hill.
We followed Ralph’s lead, swinging to the right gutter of the street, then hanging a fast wide left up onto the curb, over a patch of gravel, between two boulders set up as bollards, lest a car driver mistake the entrance for a driveway, and then, like a roller coaster cresting the first hill, the bottom fell out.
It was the most overwhelming sensation of motion I’ve ever had, before or since. I suppose the danger behind us was the big reason, and being absolutely certain that only our speed was keeping us alive. I remember thinking it was like the speeder bike scene from Return of the Jedi, also a recent movie from the time. Only this was real. I didn’t just see the trees flashing past it, I could hear the motion as well. Cold air attacked my eyes and long streamers of tears rushed over my cheeks and the drops flew past my ears, I didn’t dare blink. Each little stone my tires struck threatened to up-end me and end it all. Yet, and perhaps worse, half the time it felt like I wasn’t in contact with the ground at all. I was going so fast that those same small stones were sending me an inch or two into the air, and the arc of the flights so closely matched the slope that by the time I contacted the trail again, I was significantly further down the hill.
At the same time, I had never felt more relief, as the thing behind us had no way of catching us now. Somehow, maybe the seriousness of the escape gave us both the motive and the seriousness to keep ourselves under control. Looking back, I marvel that at least one of us didn’t lose control and end up splitting our skulls open.
We hit the pavement of the cul-de-sac below, and didn’t bother to slow down. We raced through the cross-street, one angry driver screeching to a halt and laying on his horn. This brought out the neighborhood watch. Just a few of them at first. Still, we didn’t slow down, our momentum carried us back up the much shallower slope of our neighborhood. Witnesses saw us depart at high speed, and this only brought out more of the watch. We heard whistles behind us, just like our P.E. teacher’s whistle. We figured that was the watch’s alarm siren. Regardless of what happened to that thing, it was behind us. We returned to our homes, shaken, but safe and sound, our inertia taking us almost all of the way there.
Another kid disappeared that Sunday, up on South Hill. We’d suspected it because we could see the lights of the police cars on a high road, surrounding the spot where it would turn out later, one of the kid’s shoes had been found. Russ confirmed it at school on Monday. It was a kid he’d known, lived down the road from his place, went to private school which is why we didn’t recognize his name.
I remember seeing Ralph’s face the next day when he arrived at school. He looked angry. Strong. Like he’d been crying really hard, and now it was over and he was resolved. He said he’d felt guilty because the thing we’d escaped from had gotten the other kid instead. He tried to tell his old man about it, then his mom, then any adult he could. He’d tell them about the monster who hides behind things. They needed to focus on finding and stopping that instead of looking for some sort of creeper or serial killer. Of course, nobody had listened to him. They hadn’t listened to the rest of us either when we’d tried to tell.
So he’d devised a plan. He was calling it the “Fight Patrol,” which we didn’t argue with. If the adults wouldn’t do something, we would. We’d patrol our neighborhood on our bikes, the four of us, maybe a couple more if we could talk others into it. We’d chase it off like that first time, maybe for good, or maybe corner it. Clearly, it could not handle being caught.
Naturally, we brought up the scare on South Hill. He argued that was a bad place. Too isolated, couldn’t turn around easily. We needed to stay on our home turf, lots of visibility, and plenty of the Neighborhood Watch within earshot. Maybe we and the adults working together was the key, even if the adults didn’t understand the problem.
Well, that convinced us. Our first patrol was that afternoon, after school. We watched everybody’s back like hawks. Nothing had a chance to sneak up on us. Nothing could step out from behind a bush without getting spotted. By Friday afternoon there were eight of us. The next week we split up to extend our territory to the next neighborhoods over.
Nothing happened. We never saw anything. Ben thought it was because we were scaring it away. Ralph just thought we were failing, and took it personally. I myself thought the thing had just moved to different parts of town, where the new disappearances were taking place. I told him we should keep it up until the thing was caught.
It was all for naught.
One day, India didn’t show up for school. I asked everybody, the teachers, the office staff, the custodian, my parents. All of them said they didn’t know, and it was so easy to tell that they were lying. That would mark the end of the Fight Patrol.
Ben didn’t show up a couple of days after that. When I got home and collapsed into bed, my mother came in to tell me that Ben’s mother had called. She’d taken him out of school and they were moving elsewhere. I called up Ralph to let him know the news, and he was relieved too.
My last day was Friday, and then I was taken out. Again, I called Ralph so he wouldn’t worry. I guess when there were only two weeks left of school, and it was just grade school, a couple missed weeks don’t amount to much. So I ended up spending the bulk of the summer out in the country, with my grandparents, which was why I brought up my grandpa in the first place.
I suppose I did fine out on their farmhouse. I was safe. There was certainly no shortage of things for a kid to do. I think my mom felt a strong sense of relief too. Things slipped through the cracks.
My grandparents didn’t have cable, too far out of town. They just had an old-school antenna and got a couple of TV stations transmitting out of Canada, Vancouver specifically. I remember one July day, sitting in their living room. My grandmother had just fixed lunch for me and my grandfather and had gone out to do some gardening as we watched the news at noon.
My grandfather was already being ravaged by his illnesses. He was able to get around, but couldn’t do any real labor anymore. He’d lounge in front of the TV in a special lounge chair. He hardly talked, and when he did he’d just mumble some discomfort or complaint to my grandma.
The lead story on the news was the current situation in Farmingham, despite being in the neighboring country, it was still big news in Vancouver, and the whole rest of the region. It seemed the disappearances were declining, but the police were still frantically searching for a supposed serial killer. I didn’t pick up much about what they were talking about, I was a kid after all, but my grandfather was watching intently, despite his infirmity.
He mumbled something, I didn’t catch. I asked him was he said, and as I approached I heard him say “fearsome critters.”
He turned his eyes to me and said again, distinct and in a normal tone of voice, “fearsome critters,” then returned his attention to the screen. “I don’t know why they call them that. Fearsome, sure. But ‘critters?” Makes it sound silly. Like it's some sort of fairy tale that it ain’t. Guess it’s like whistling past the graveyard. Well, they don’t have to worry about them no more, guess they can call them what they like.”
Then he turned to me. “Do you know what it is?” he asked. “Squonk? Hodag? Gouger? Hidebehind?”
“Hidebehind,” I whispered, and he turned back to the TV with a sneer. I had no idea what on earth he was talking about. Remember, this would be years before I learned he spent his youth as a lumberjack. And yet, somehow, I knew exactly what we were talking about.
“Hidebehind,” he repeated. “That will do it. They give them such stupid names. The folk back East, that is. Wisconsin. Minnesota. Ohio. Way back in the old days, before my grandfather would have been your age. Back when those places were covered by forests. They didn’t give them silly names back then, no. Back then they were something to worry about. Then they moved on, though. They all went out West, to here, followed the loggers. So as once they didn’t have to worry about them anymore, they started making up silly stories, silly names. “Fearsome critters,” they’d call them. Just tall tales to tell the greenhorns and scare them out of their britches. Then they’d make them even sillier, and tell the stories to little kids to spook them.”
“Not out here they didn’t tell no stories nor make up any names. It was bad enough they followed us out. I had no clue they even existed until I saw one for myself. Bout your age, I suppose. Maybe a little older. Nobody ever talks about them. Not even when they take apart a work crew, one by one. They just pull the crews back. Wait till mid-summer when the land is dry but not too dry. Then they move the crews in, a lot of them. Do some burning, make a lot of smoke. Drives them deeper into the woods, you know. Then you can cut the whole damn place down. But nobody asks why, nobody tells why. The people who know just take care of it.”
“I guess that’s why they’re coming to us now. All the old woods are almost gone. So they’ve got to. Like mountain lions. I supposed it’s going to happen sooner or later.”
We heard my grandma come into the back door to the utility room, and stomp the dirt off her boots. My grandfather turned to me one last time and said, “Whichever way you look at it, somebody’s just got to take care of it.” Then my grandmother came in from the utility room and asked us how our lunch had been.
Now that I look back at it, that might have been the last time my grandfather and I really had a meaningful talk.
We moved back home in late August. I had been having a fantastic summer. Though looking back, I suppose it could be rough for a still-young woman to be living in her aging parents' house when she’s got a perfectly good husband and house of her own in town.
First thing I did was visit Ralph. He’d been busy. He’d fortified his treehouse into a proper, well, tree fort. He’d nailed a lot of reinforcing plywood over everything. He hadn’t gone out on patrols by himself, of course, but the height of the tree fort afforded him a view of the nearest streets. He’d also made some makeshift weapons out of old baseball bats, a hockey stick, and a garden rake. The sharp rocks he’d attached to them with masking tape didn’t look very secure, but it’d only take one or two good blows with that kind of firepower. He also explained he’d been teaching himself kung fu, by copying all the movies he saw on kung fu movies late at night on the unpopular cable channels. That was classic Ralph.
As for the monster, it seemed to be going away. Its last victim had disappeared weeks previously, part of the reason my mom felt it was time to go back. This had been at night too. What’s more, the victim had been a college student, a very petite lady, barely five feet tall, under a hundred pounds. The news had speculated that their presumptive serial killer had assumed she was a child. I remember thinking the Hidebehind didn’t care. Maybe it just thought she couldn’t run fast enough to get away or put up a fight when he caught her. Like a predator.
At any rate, the college students were incensed. Of course, they’d been hyper-alert and concerned when it was just local kids going missing. Now that it was one of their own the camel’s back had broken. They really went hard on the protests, blaming the local police for not doing enough.
They started setting up their own patrols, and at night too. Marches with sometimes dozens of students at a time. They called it “Take Back the Night.” They’d walk the streets, making sure they’d be heard. Some cared drums or tambourines. They’d help escort people home, and sometimes they’d unintentionally stop random crimes they’d happen across. I felt like this was what the Fight Patrol could have been, if we’d just been old enough, or had been listened to. This would be the endgame for the Hidebehind, one way or another.
I stayed indoors the rest of the summer, and really there wasn’t much left. It doesn’t get too hot in the Pacific Northwest, nobody has air conditioners, or at least we didn’t back then. It will get stuffy though, in August, and I liked to sleep with my window open. I could hear the chants and challenges from the student patrols on their various routes. Sometimes I could hear them coming from far away, and every now and then they’d pass down my street. It felt like a wonderful security blanket.
I also liked the honeysuckle my mother had planted around the perimeter of the house. Late at night, if I was struggling to fall asleep, the air in my bedroom would start to circulate. Cold air would start pouring in over my windowsill, bringing the sweet scent of that creepervine with it, and I’d the sensation before finally passing out.
This one night, and I have no knowledge if I was awake, asleep, or drifting off, but the air in the room changed, and cooler air poured over the windowsill and swept over my bed, but it didn’t carry the sweet smell of honeysuckle. Regardless of my initial state, I was alert pretty quickly. It was a singularly unpleasant smell. A bit like death, which at that age I was mostly unfamiliar with, except a time some animal had died underneath the crawlspace of our house. There was more to it, though. The forest, the deep forest. I don’t know and still don’t know, what that meant. Most smells I associate with the forest are pleasant. Cedar, pine needles, thick loam of the forest floor, campfires, even the creosote and turpentine of those old timey-logging camps. This was none of those smells. Maybe… rotting granite, and the spores of slime molds. Mummified hemlocks and beds of needles compressed into something different than soil. It disturbed me.
So I sat up in bed. I hadn’t noticed before, but I’d been sweating, just lightly in the stuffy summer night heat. Now it was turning cold. Before me was my bedroom window. A lit rectangle in a pitch-dark room. To either side were my white, opened curtains, the one on the right, by the open half of the window, stirred just slightly in the barely perceptible breeze.
Most of the rectangle was the black form of the protective cypress tree. Only the slight conical nature of the tree distinguished it from a perfectly vertical column. To either side was a dim soft orange glow coming from the sodium lamps of the street passing by our house. It was perhaps a bit diffuse from the screen set in my window to keep out mosquitos. In the distance was the sound of an approaching troupe of the Take Back the Night patrol. They were neither drumming nor chanting, but still making plenty of noise. They were, perhaps, three or four blocks away, and heading my way.
For some reason that I didn’t understand, I got up, off of the foot of the bed. The window, being closer, appeared bigger. I took a silent step further. The patrol approached closer. Another step. I leaned to my right, just a bit, getting a slightly wider view to the left of the cypress tree. That was the direction the patrol was coming from.
That was when it resolved. The deeper black silhouette within the black silhouette of the cypress tree. A small lithe frame with a too-bulbous head. It too leaned, in its case, to the left, to see around the cypress tree as the patrol approached. They reached our block,on the other side of the street. A dozen rowdy college students, not trying to be quiet. None of them fearing the night. Each feeling safe and determined, and absorbed in their own night out rather than being overtly sensitive to their surroundings. They were distracted, unfocused If they had been peering into the shadows, if just one of them had looked towards my house, behind the cypress tree, they might have seen the Hidebehind, poking its face out and watching them transit past. But they didn’t notice.
It hid behind the cypress tree, and I hid behind it, hoping that the blackness of my bedroom would protect me. I stood absolutely still, as I had done once when a hornet had once landed on the back of my neck. Totally assure that if I made the slightest movement or made the slightest sound that I’d be stung. I hardly even breathed.
The patrol passed, from my perspective, behind the cypress tree and temporarily out of view. The Hidebehind straightened, ready to lean to the right and watch the patrol pass, only it didn’t lean. Even as I watched the patrol pass on to the right, it stood there, stock still, just as I was doing.
It was then I became aware that my room had become stuffy again. The scent was gone. The air had shifted and was now flowing out through the screen again, carrying my own scent with it. I knew what this meant, and yet I was too paralyzed to react. The thing started to turn, very slowly. It was a predator understanding that it might have become victim to its own game. It turned as if it was thinking the same thing I had been thinking, that the slightest movement might give it away.
It turned, and I saw its face. Like some kind of rotting desiccated, shriveling fruit, it was covered in wrinkles. Circles within concentric circles surrounded its two great eyes, eyes which took up so much of its face. I couldn’t, and still struggle, to think of words to describe it. Instead, I still think in terms of analogies. At the time I thought of the creature from the film E.T., only twisted and distorted into a thing of nightmares. Almost all eyelids, and a little drooping sucker mouth. Now that I’m more worldly, it reminds of creatures of ancient artworks. The key defining feature were the long horizontal slits it had for eyes. You see that in old masks carved in West Africa, or by the Inuit long ago. You see it in what’s called the “slit-eyed dogu” of ancient Japan.
As I watched the wrinkles on the face seemed to multiply. Then I realized this was the result of its eyes slowly widening. It’s mouth, too, slowly dilated, revealing innumerable small razor-sharp teeth. A person, standing in its location, shouldn’t have been able to see in. Light from the sodium streetlamps lit the window’s screen, obscuring the interior. It was no person. It could see me, and it was reacting to my presence. Its eyes grew huge, black.
My own eyes would have been just as wide if not for my own anatomical limitations. I was still watching when it disappeared. It didn’t see it move to the right. I didn’t see it move to the left, nor did I see it drop down out of view. It simply disappeared. One fraction of a second it was there, and then it decided to leave, and so it did. It was not a thing of this world.
There were no more disappearances after that poor woman from the university. I don’t think it had anything to do with me. The media and police all speculated their “serial killer” had gone into a “dormant phase”. There was no shortage of people who tried to take credit. Maybe they deserve it. The thing’s hunting had been on the decline. All the neighborhood watches and student patrols, I think that maybe all that commotion was making it too hard for the Hidebehind to go about its business. Maybe it had gone back to the woods.
Then again, maybe Ralph had been right the whole time. Maybe it really, really, really didn’t like to be seen.
So.
Now I’ve got some decisions to make. I think the first thing I should do is look at social media and dig up Ralph. It’s been a good thirty years since I last talked to him. He ought to know the Hidebehind is back. He’s probably made plans.
Then, there’s the issue of my son. He’s up in his bedroom now, probably still mad at me. Probably confused about why I’d be so strict. Maybe he’s inventing explanations as to why.
I’m not sure, but I’m leaning toward telling him everything. He deserves to know. It’d probably be safer if he knows. I think people have this instinct where, when they see or know something that they’re not supposed to know, they just bottle it up. I think that was the problem with grown-ups when I was a kid. It was the issue with my grandfather, telling me so little when it was almost too late. I think people do it because we’re social animals, and we’re afraid of being ostracized. Go along to get along.
Hell, my son is probably going to think I’m crazy. It might even make him more mad at me. And even more confused. He knows about the disappearances. “The Farmingham Fiend” the media would end up dubbing the serial killer that didn’t really exist. It’s become local “true crime” history. Kids tell rumors about it. It was almost forty years ago, so it probably feels safe to wonder about.
So yeah, I suppose when I say I know who the real killer was, a magical monster from the woods that stalks its prey by hiding behind objects, then impossibly disappears- that I’m going to look like a total nut. I’d think that if I were in his shoes.
Except… people are going to start disappearing again, it’s only a matter of time. The media will say that the Farmingham Fiend is back in the game. Will my son buy that? He’ll start thinking about what I told him, and how I predicted it. Then he’ll remember that he saw the thing himself, he and his friends, even if it was just out of the corner of his eye.
I hope, sooner or later, he’ll believe me. I could use his help. Maybe Ralph is way ahead of me, but I’m thinking we should get the Fight Patrol back together. Father and son, this time. Multigenerational, get the retirees involved too.
Old farts of my generation, for reasons I don’t understand, like to wax nostalgic over their own false sense of superiority. We rode our bikes without helmets and had distant if not irresponsible parents. Yeah, yeah, what a load. I think every new generation is better than the last, because every generation is a progression from the last, Kids these days? They’ve got cell phones, with cameras. And helmet cams. GoPros you can attach to bikes. Doorbell cameras.
It seems the Hidebehind loathes being seen. This time around, with my grandfather’s spirit, my own memories, and my boy’s energy? I think this time we’re finally going to beat it.

There are instincts that you develop when you’re a parent. If you don’t have any children it might be a little hard to understand. If you have a toddler, for example, and they’re in the other room and silent for more than a few seconds, there’s a good chance they’re up to no good. I take that back, most of the time they’re doing nothing, but you still have to check. You feel a compulsion to check. I don’t think it’s a learned skill, I think it’s an actual instinct.
Paleolithic parents who didn’t check on their toddlers every few minutes, just to double check that they weren’t being stalked by smilodons were unlikely to have grandchildren and pass on their genes. You just feel you need to check, like getting goosebumps, a compulsion. I suppose it’s the same reason little kids are always demanding you look at them and what they’re doing.
I think that instinct starts to atrophy as your kids grow. They start learning to do things for themselves, and before you know it, they’re after their own privacy, not your attention. I don’t think it ever goes away though. I expect, decades from now, my own grown kids will visit and bring my grandkids with them. And the second I hear a baby crying in the earliest morning hours, I’ll be alert and ready for anything, sure as any old soldier who hears his name whispered in the dark of night.
I felt that alarm just the other day. First time in years. My boy came home from riding bikes with a couple of his friends. I’m pretty sure they worked out a scam where they asked each of their parents for a different new console for Christmas, and now they spend their weekends traveling between the three houses so they can play on all of them.
We all live in a nice neighborhood. A newer development than the one I grew up in, same town though. It’s the kind of place where kids are always playing in the streets, and the cars all routinely do under 20. My wife and I make sure the kids have helmets and pads, and we’re fine with the boy going out biking with his friends, as long as they stay in the neighborhood.
You know, a lot of people in my generation take some weird sort of pride in how irresponsible we used to be when we were young. I never wore a helmet. Rode to places, without telling any adults, that we never should have ridden to. Me and my friends would make impromptu jumps off of makeshift ramps and try to do stupid tricks, based loosely on stunts we’d seen on TV. Other people my age seem to wax nostalgic for that stuff and pretend it makes them somehow better people. I don’t get it. Sometimes I look back and shudder. We were lucky we escaped with only occasional bruises and road burns. It could have gone so much worse.
My son and his buddies came bustling in the front door at about 2 PM on a Saturday. They did the usual thing of raiding the kitchen for juice and his mother’s brownies, and I took that as my cue to abandon the television in the living room for my office. I was hardly noticing the chaos, by this point, it was becoming a regular weekend occurrence. But as I was just leaving, I caught something in the chatter. My boy said something about, “... that guy who was following us.”
He hadn’t said it any louder or more clearly than anything else they’d been talking about, all that stuff I’d been filtering out. Yet some deeper core process in my brain stem heard it, interpreted it, then hit the red alert button. My blood ran cold and every hair on my skin stood at attention.
I turned around and asked “Somebody followed you? What are you talking about?” I wasn’t consciously aware of how strict and stern my voice came out, yet when the jovial smiles dropped off of their faces it was apparent that it had been so.
“Huh?” my son said, his voice high-pitched and talking fast, like when he thinks he’s in trouble and needs to explain. “We thought we saw somebody following us. There wasn’t though. We didn’t really see anybody and we’d just spooked ourselves.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Nothing? We really didn’t see anybody! Honest! I just saw something out of the corner of my eye! But there wasn’t really nobody there!”
“Yeah!,” said one of his buds. “Peripheral! Peripheral vision! I thought maybe I saw something too, but when I looked I didn’t see anything. I don’t have my glasses with me, but when I really looked I got a good look and there was nothing.”
The three boys had that semi-smiling but still concerned look that this was only a bizarre misunderstanding, but they were still being very sincere. “Were they in a car?”
“No, Dad, you don’t get it,” my boy continued, “They were small. We thought it was a kid.”
“Yeah,” said the third boy. “We thought maybe it was Tony Taylor’s stupid kid sister shadowing us. Getting close to throwing water balloons. Just cause she did that before.”
“If you didn’t get a good look how did you know it was a kid?”
“Because it was small!” my kid explained, though that wasn’t helping much. “What I mean is, at first I thought it was behind a little bush. It was way too small a bush to hide a grown-up. That’s why we thought it was probably Tony’s sister.”
“But you didn’t actually see Tony’s sister?” I asked.
“Nah,” said one of his buds. “And now that I think about it, that bush was probably too small for his sister too. It would have been silly. Like when a cartoon character hides behind a tiny object.”
“That’s why we think it was just in our heads,” explained the other boy, “That and the pole.”
“Yeah,” my son said. “The park on 14th and Taylor?” That was just a little community park, a single city block. Had a playground, lawn, a few trees, and some benches. “Anyway, we were riding past that, took a right on Taylor. And we were talking about how weird it would be if somebody really were following us. That’s when Brian thought he saw something. Behind a telephone pole.”
“I didn’t get a good look at it either,” the friend, Brian, “explained. Just thought I did. Know how you get up late at night to use the bathroom or whatever and you look down the hallway and you see a jacket or an office chair or something and because your eyes haven’t adjusted you think you see a ghost or burglar or something? Anyway, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned there wasn’t anything there.”
“Yeah, it was just like sometimes that happens, except this time it happened twice on the same bike ride, is all,” the other friend explained.
“And you’re sure there was nothing there?”
“Sure we’re sure,” my boy said. “We know because that time we checked. We each rode our bikes around the pole and there was nothing. Honest!”
“Hmmm,” I said. The whole thing seemed reasonable and nothing to be concerned about, you’d think.. The boys seemed to relax at my supposed acceptance. “Alright, sounds good. Hey, just let me know before you leave the house again, alright?” They all rushed to seem agreeable as I left the room, then quickly resumed their snacking and preceded to play their games.
I kept my ear out, just in case. My boy, at least this time, dutifully told me his friends were about to leave. He wasn’t very happy with me when I said they wouldn’t be riding home on their bikes, I was going to drive them home. The other boys didn’t complain, but I suppose it wasn’t their place, so my boy did the advocating for them, which I promptly ignored. I hate doing that, ignoring my kid’s talkback. My dad was the same way. It didn’t help that I struggled to get both of their bikes in the trunk, and it was a pain to get them back out again. My boy sulked in the front seat on the short ride back home. Arms folded on chest, eyes staring straight ahead, that lip thing they do. He seemed embarrassed for having what he thought was an over-protective parent. I suppose he was angry at me as well for acting, as far as he knew, irrationally. Maybe he thought he was being punished for some infraction he didn’t understand.
Well, it only got worse when we got home. I told him he wasn’t allowed to go out alone on his bike anymore. I’d only had to do that once before, when he was grounded, and back then he’d known exactly what he’d done wrong and he had it coming. Now? Well, he was confused, furious, maybe betrayed, probably a little brokenhearted? I can’t blame him. He tramped upstairs to his room to await the return of his mother, who was certain to give a sympathetic ear. I can’t imagine how upset he’ll be if he checks the garage tomorrow and finds I’ve removed his tires, just in case.
I wish I could explain it to him. I don’t even know how.
Where should I even begin? The town?
When I was about my son’s age I had just seen that movie, The Goonies. It had just come out in theaters. I really liked that movie, felt a strong connection. A lot of people do, can’t blame them, sort of a timeless classic. Except I wasn’t really into pirate’s treasure or the Fratellis, what really made me connect was a simple single shot, still in the first act. It’s right after they cross the threshold, and leave the house on their adventure. It was a shot of the boys, from above, maybe a crane shot or a helicopter shot, as they’re riding their bikes down a narrow forested lane, great big evergreen trees densely growing on the side of the road, they’re all wearing raincoats and the road is still wet from recent rain.
That was my childhood. I’ve spent my whole life in the Pacific Northwest. People talk to outsiders about the rain, and they might picture a lot of rainfall, but it’s not the volume, it’s the duration. We don’t get so much rain, it just drizzles slowly, on and on, for maybe eight or nine months out of the year. It doesn’t matter where I am, inside a house, traveling far abroad, anywhere I am I can close my eyes and still smell the air on a chilly afternoon, playing outdoors with my friends.
It’s not petrichor, that sudden intense smell you get when it first starts to rain after a long dry spell. No, this was almost the opposite, a clean smell, almost the opposite of a scent, since the rain seemed to scrub the air clean. The strongest scent and I mean that in the loosest sense possible, must have been the evergreen needles. Not pine needles, those were too strong, and there weren’t that many pines anyway. Douglas fir and red cedar predominated, again the root ‘domination’ seems hyperbole. Yet those scents were there, ephemeral as it is. Also, there was a sort of pleasant dirtiness to the smell, at least when you rode bikes. It wasn’t dirt, or mud, or dust. Dust couldn’t have existed except perhaps for a few fleeting weeks in August. I think, looking back, it was the mud puddles. All the potholes in all the asphalt suburban roads would fill up after rain with water the color of chocolate milk. We’d swerve our BMX bikes, or the knock-off brands, all the way across the street just to splash through those puddles and test our “suspensions.,” meaning our ankles and knees. The smell was always stronger after that. It had an earthiness to it. Perhaps it was petrichor’s lesser-known watery cousin.
There were other sensations too, permanently seared into my brain like grill marks. A constant chilliness that was easy to ignore, until you started working up a good heart rate on your bike, then you noticed your lungs were so cold it felt like burning. The sound of your tires on the wet pavement, particularly when careening downhill at high speed. For some reason, people in the mid-80s used to like to decorate their front porches with cheap, polyester windsocks. They were often vividly colored, usually rainbow, like prototype pride flags. When an occasional wind stirred up enough to gust, the windsocks would flap, and owning to the water-soaked polyester, make a wet slapping sound. It was loud, it was distinct, but you learned to ignore it as part of the background, along with the cawing of crows and distant passing cars.
That was my perception of Farmingham as a kid. The town itself? Just a typical Pacific Northwest town. That might not mean much for younger people or modern visitors, but there was a time when such towns were all the same. They were logging towns. It was the greatest resource of the area from the late 19th century, right up until about the 80s, when the whole thing collapsed. Portland, Seattle, they had a few things going on beyond just the timber industry, but all the hundreds of little towns and small cities revolved around logging, and my town was no exception.
I remember going to the museum. It had free admission, and it was a popular field trip destination for the local school system. It used to be the City Hall, a weird Queen Anne-style construction. Imagine a big Victorian house, but blown up to absurd proportions, and with all sorts of superfluous decorations. Made out of local timber, of course. They had a hall for art, I can’t even remember why, now. Maybe they were local artists. I only remember paintings of sailboats and topless women, which was a rare sight for a kid at the time. There was a hall filled with 19th-century household artifacts. Chamber pots and weird children's toys.
Then there was the logging section, which was the bulk of the museum. It’s strange how different things seemed to be in the early days of the logging industry, despite being only about a hundred years old, from my perspective in the 1980s. If you look back a hundred years from today, in the 1920s, you had automobiles, airplanes, electrical appliances, jazz music, radio programs, flappers, it doesn’t feel that far removed, does it? No TV, no internet, but it wouldn’t be that strange. 1880s? Different world.
Imagine red cedars, so big you could have a full logging crew, arms stretched out, just barely manage to encircle one for a photographer. Felling a single tree was the work of days. Men could rest and eat their lunches in the shelter of a cut made into a trunk, and not worry for safety or room. They had to cut their own little platforms into the trees many feet off the ground, just so the trunk was a little bit thinner, and thus hours of labor saved. They used those long, flexible two-man saws. And double-bit axes. They worked in the gloom of the shade with old gas lanterns. Once cut down from massive logs thirty feet in diameter, they’d float the logs downhill in sluices, like primitive wooden make-shift water slides. Or they’d haul them down to the nearest river, the logs pulled by donkeys on corduroy roads. They’d lay large amounts of grease on the roads, so the logs would slide easily. You could still smell the grease on the old tools on display in the museum. The bigger towns had streets where the loggers would slide the logs down greased skids all the way down to the sea, where they’d float in big logjams until the mills were ready for processing. They’d call such roads “skid-rows.” Because of all the activity, they’d end up being the worst parts of town. Local citizens wouldn’t want to live there, due to all the stink and noise. They’d be on the other side of the brothels and the opium dens. It would be the sort of place where the destitute and the insane would find themselves when they’d finally lost anything. To this day, “skidrow” remains a euphemism for the part of a city where the homeless encamp.
That was the lore I’d learned as a child. That was my “ancestry” I was supposed to respect and admire, which I did, wholeheartedly. There were things they left out, though. Things that you might have suspected, from a naive perspective, would be perfect for kids, all the folklore that came with the logging industry. The ghost stories, and the tall tales. I would have eaten that up. They do talk about that kind of thing in places far removed from the Pacific Northwest. But I had never heard about any of it. Things like the Hidebehind. No, that I’d have to discover for myself.
There were four of us on those bike adventures. Myself. Ralph, my best friend. A tough guy, the bad boy, the most worldly of us, which is a strange thing to say about an eight-year-old kid. India, an archetypal ‘80s tomboy. She was the coolest person I knew at the time. Looking back, I wonder what her home life was like. I think I remember problematic warning signs that I couldn’t have recognized when I was so young, but now raise flags. Then there was Ben. A goofy kid, a wild mop of hair, coke bottle glasses, type 1 diabetic which seemed to make him both a bit pampered by his mother, who was in charge of all his insulin, diet, and schedule, and conversely a real risk taker when she wasn’t around.
When we first saw it…
No, wait. This was the problem with starting the story. Where does it all begin? I’ll need to talk about my Grandfather as well. I’ve had two different perspectives on my Grandfather, on the man that he was. The first was the healthy able-bodied grandparent I’d known as a young child. Then there was the man, as I learned about him after he had passed.
There was a middle period, from when I was 6 to when I was 16, when I hardly understood him at all, as he was hit with a double whammy of both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's. His decline into an invalid was both steep and long drawn out. That part didn’t reflect who he was as a person.
What did I know of him when I was little? Well I knew he and my grandmother had a nice big house and some farmland, out in the broad flat valley north of Farmingham. Dairy country. It had been settled by Dutch immigrants back in the homesteading days. His family had been among the first pioneers in the county too. It didn’t register to me then that his surname was Norwegian, not Dutch. I knew he had served in the Navy in World War II, which I was immensely proud of for reasons I didn’t know why. I knew he had a job as a butcher in a nearby rural supermarket. He was a bit of a farmer too, more as a hobby and a side gig. He had a few cattle, but mostly grew and harvested hay to sell to the local dairies. I knew he had turned his garage into a machine shop, and could fix damn near anything. From the flat tires on my bicycle to the old flat-bed truck he’d haul hay with, to an old 1950s riding lawnmower he somehow managed to keep in working order. I knew he could draw a really cool cartoon cowboy, I knew he loved to watch football, and I knew the whiskers on his chin were very pokey, and they’d tickle you when he kissed you on the cheek, and that when you tried to rub the sensation away he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.
Then there were the parts of his life that I’d learn much later. Mostly from odd passing comments from relatives, or things I’d find in the public records. Like how he’d been a better grandfather than a father. Or how his life as I knew it had been a second, better life. He’d been born among the Norwegian settler community, way up in the deep, dark, forest-shrouded hills that rimmed the valley. He’d been a logger in his youth. Technologically he was only a generation or two from the ones I’d learned about in the museum. They’d replaced donkeys with diesel engines and corduroy roads with narrow gauge rail. It was still the same job, though. Dirty, dangerous, dark. Way back into those woods, living in little logging camps, civilization was always a several-day hike out. It became a vulgar sort of profession, filled with violent men, reprobates, and thieves. When my grandfather’s father was murdered on his front porch by a lunatic claiming he’d been wronged somehow, my grandfather hiked out of there, got into town, and joined the Navy. He vowed never to go back. The things he’d seen out in those woods were no good. He’d kept that existence away from me. Anyways…
Tommy Barker was the first of us to go missing. I say ‘us’ as if I knew him personally. I didn’t. He went to Farmingham Middle School, other side of town, and several grades above us. From our perspective, he may as well have been an adult living overseas.
Yet it felt like we got to know him. His face was everywhere, on TV, all over telephone poles. Everybody was talking about him. After he didn’t return from a friend’s house, everybody just sort of assumed, or maybe hoped, that he’d just gotten lost, or was trapped somewhere. They searched all the parks. Backyards, junkyards, refrigerators, trunks. Old-fashioned refrigerators, back before suction seals, had a simple handle with a latch that opened when you pulled on it. It wasn’t a problem when the fridges were in use and filled with food. But by the 80s old broke-down refrigerators started filling up backyards and junkyards, and they became deathtraps for kids playing hide-and-seek. The only opened from the outside. I remember thinking Tommy Barker was a little old to have likely been playing hide-and-seek, but people checked everywhere anyway. They never found him.
That was about the first time we saw the Hidebehind. Ben said he thought he saw somebody following us, looked like, maybe, a kid. We’d just slowly huffed our way up a moderately steep hill, Farmingham is full of them, and when we paused for a breather at the top, Ben said he saw it down the hill, closer to the base. Yet when we turned to look there was nothing there. Ben said he’d just seen it duck behind a car. That wasn’t the sort of behavior of a random kid minding his own business. Yet the slope afforded us a view under the car’s carriage, and except for the four tires, there were no signs of any feet hiding behind the body. At first, we thought he was pulling our leg. When he insisted he wasn’t, we started to tease him a little. He must have been seeing things, on account of his poor vision and thick glasses. The fact that those glasses afforded him vision as good as or better than any of us wasn’t something we considered.
The next person to disappear was Amy Brooks. Fifth-grader. Next elementary school over. I remember it feeling like when you’re traveling down the freeway, and there’s a big thunderstorm way down the road, but it keeps getting closer, and closer. I don’t remember what she looked like. Her face wasn’t plastered everywhere like Tommy’s had been. She was mentioned on the regional news, out of Seattle, her and Tommy together. Two missing kids from the same town in a short amount of time. The implication was as obvious as it was depraved. They didn’t think the kids were getting lost anymore. They didn’t do very much searching of backyards. The narratives changed too. Teachers started talking a lot about stranger danger. Local TV channels started recycling old After School Specials and public service announcements about the subject.
I’m not sure who saw it next. I think it was Ben again. We took him seriously this time though. I think. The one I’m sure I remember was soon after, and that time it was India who first saw it. It’s still crystal clear in my memory, almost forty years later, because that was the time I first saw it too. We were riding through a four-way stop, an Idaho Stop before they called it that, when India slammed to a stop, locking up her coaster brakes and leaving a long black streak of rubber on a dry patch of pavement. We stopped quickly after and asked what the problem was. We could tell by her face she’d seen it. She was still looking at it.
“I see it,” she whispered, unnecessarily. We all followed her gaze. We were looking, I don’t know, ten seconds? Twenty? We believed everything she said, we just couldn’t see it.
“Where?” Ralph asked.
“Four blocks down,” she whispered. “On the left. See the red car? Kinda rusty?” There was indeed a big old Lincoln Continental, looking pretty ratty and worn. I focused on that, still seeing nothing. “Past that, just to its right. See the street light pole? It’s just behind that.”
We also saw the pole she was talking about. Metal. Aluminum, I’d have guessed. It had different color patches, like metallic flakeboard. Like it’d had been melted together out of scrap.
I could see that clearly even from that distance. I saw nothing behind it. I could see plenty of other things in the background, cars, houses, bushes, front lawns, beauty bark landscape.. There was no indication of anything behind that pole.
And then it moved. It had been right there where she said it had been, yet it had somehow perfectly blended into the landscape, a trick of perspective. We didn’t see it at all until it moved, and almost as fast it had disappeared behind that light pole. We only got a hint. Brown in color, about our height in size.
We screamed. Short little startled screams, the involuntary sort that just burst out of you. Then we turned and started to pedal like mad, thoroughly spooked. We made it to the intersection of the next block when it was Ralph who screeched to a halt and shouted, “Wait!”
We slowed down and stopped, perhaps not as eagerly as we’d done when India yelled. Ralph was looking back over his shoulder, looking at that metal pole. “Did anybody see it move again?’ he asked. We all shook our heads in the negative. Ralph didn’t notice, but of course, he didn’t really need an answer, of course we hadn’t been watching.
“If it didn’t move, then it’s still there!” Ralph explained the obvious. It took a second to sink in, despite the obvious. “C’mon!” he shouted, and to our surprise, before we could react, he turned and took off, straight down the road, straight to where that thing had been lurking.
We were incredulous, but something about his order made us all follow hot on his heels. He was a sort of natural leader. I thought it was total foolishness, but I wasn’t going to let him go alone. I think I got out, “Are you crazy?!”
The wind was blowing hard past our faces as we raced as fast as we could, it made it hard to hear. Ralph shouted his response. “If it’s hiding that means its afraid!” That seemed reasonable, if not totally accurate. Lions hide from their prey before they attack. Then again, they don’t wait around when the whole herd charges. Really, the pole was coming up so fast there wasn’t a whole lot of time to argue. “Just blast past and look!” Ralph added. “We’re too fast! It won’t catch us.”
Sure, I thought to myself. Except maybe Ben, who always lagged behind the rest of us in a race. The lion would get Ben if any of us.
We rushed past that pole and all turned our heads to look. “See!” Ralph shouted in triumph. There was simply nothing there. A metal streetlight pole and nothing more. We stopped pedaling yet still sped on. “Hang on,” Ralph said, and at the next intersection he took a fast looping curve that threatened to crash us all, but we managed and curved behind him. We all came to the pole again where we stopped to see up close that there was nothing there, despite what we had seen moments before.
“Maybe it bilocated,” Ben offered. We groaned. We were all thinking it, but I think we were dismissive because it wasn’t as cool a word as ‘teleport.”
“Maybe it just moved when we weren’t looking,” I offered. That hadn’t been long, but that didn’t mean anything if it moved fast. The four of us slowly looked up from the base of the pole to our immediate surroundings. There were bushes. A car in a carport covered by a tarpaulin. The carport itself. Garbage cans. Stumps. Of course the ever-present trees. Whatever it was it could have been hiding behind anything. Maybe it was. We looked. Maybe it would make itself seen. None of us wanted that. “OK, let’s get going,” Ralph said, and we did so.
I got home feeling pretty shaken that afternoon. I felt safe at home. Except for the front room, which had a big bay window looking out onto the street, and the people who lived across it. There were plenty of garbage cans and telephone poles and stumps that a small, fast thing might hide behind. No, I felt more comfortable in my bedroom. There was a window, but a great thick conical cypress tree grew right in front of it, reaching way up over the roof of the house. If anything, it offered ME a place to hide, and peer out onto the street to either side of the tree. It was protective, as good as any heavy blanket.

AAP had a bad day today. Puts on AAP? With debt ceiling deal in the house what are your thoughts on this. I mean who the fuck is buying their car parts from Advanced Auto Parts anyway? lol isn't amazon selling transmissions yet?