I Picked Up A Cursed Roll Of Cash On A Backroad In Appalachia And Now Something Is Mimicking My Voice Outside My Bedroom Door
PART 1
CHAPTER 1: THE TOLL
The rain in Appalachia doesn’t just fall; it tries to drown you. It was one of those black, suffocating nights where your high beams get swallowed up by the fog before they can reach the pavement. I was on Route 18, drifting through the curves, my knuckles white on the steering wheel of my 2014 Civic.
I was dead broke. That’s the context you need. I had forty-two dollars in my checking account and rent was due in three days. I had just driven forty-five minutes out into the middle of nowhere to deliver a lukewarm pizza to a house that didn’t even tip. I was angry. I was tired. I was desperate.
That’s when I saw it.
It wasn’t glowing. It wasn’t shiny. It was just a lump on the shoulder of the road, sitting right near a sharp bend where the guardrail was rusted through. But my headlights hit it just right. The unmistakable green contrast against the black asphalt.
Money.
I didn’t think. Instinct took over. I slammed on the brakes, the tires squealing and hydroplaning slightly before catching grip on the gravel shoulder. The car stalled. Silence rushed back in, heavy and oppressive, broken only by the rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum of the rain on the metal roof.
I sat there for a second, staring out the passenger window. It was there. A roll. A thick roll.
I cracked the door open. The air smelled swampy, like rotting leaves and stagnant creek water. I ran out, shoes splashing in the freezing mud, and snatched it up.
It was heavy. Heavier than paper should be. It was soaked through, a wad of twenties and fifties, rolled up tight. It was bound by a red string.
No, not string.
I realized it later, under the dome light of my car, but in that moment, in the dark, it felt like coarse thread. It was wound tight, biting into the paper.
I scrambled back into the car, locking the doors immediately. Why did I lock the doors? There wasn’t a soul for ten miles. But I felt it. A prickle on the back of my neck. The sudden, biological certainty that I was being watched.
I threw the money on the passenger seat.
“Score,” I whispered. My voice sounded thin, swallowed by the interior of the car. “Jackpot.”
I turned the key. The engine sputtered. It whined, clicked, and died.
My heart stopped.
“Come on,” I pleaded, twisting the key again. “Don’t do this to me. Not now.”
Click. Click. Click.
Then, a sound came from outside.
It wasn’t the wind. It was a wet, slapping sound. Like bare feet on wet pavement. Slap. Slap. Slap.
It was coming from behind the car.
I held my breath, staring into the rearview mirror. It was pitch black behind me. The red glow of my taillights only illuminated the rain mist.
Slap. Slap.
It was getting closer.
I slammed my hand against the steering wheel and twisted the key with everything I had. The engine roared to life. I didn’t wait to check my blind spot. I floored it, tires spinning in the mud, shooting gravel like bullets as I peeled back onto the asphalt.
I drove eighty miles an hour all the way back to the highway. I didn’t look in the mirror. I didn’t look at the money. I just drove.
But the whole way home, the car felt wrong. It felt low to the ground. It felt heavy. It felt like I was carrying a passenger in the back seat who weighed three hundred pounds.
And the smell.
The heater kicked on, and suddenly the car was filled with it. Not just wet dog or old fast food. It smelled like earth. Deep, black earth. And formaldehyde. The sharp, stinging scent of a funeral home preparation room.
I rolled the windows down, letting the freezing rain soak my arm, just to breathe.
When I finally pulled into the complex lot, under the safety of the orange sodium streetlights, I finally looked at the money.
I turned on the dome light.
It was wet, but the water squeezing out of it wasn’t clear. It was brownish-yellow.
I reached out and touched the red binding. I looked closer.
It wasn’t thread. It was hair. Long, coarse strands of hair, dyed a deep, unnatural crimson, matted and twisted together to bind the cash.
A normal person would have thrown it out the window. A smart person would have burned it.
But I was broke. I was desperate.
I shoved the roll into my jacket pocket, grabbed my keys, and ran inside.
CHAPTER 2: THE GUEST
My apartment is small—a one-bedroom on the second floor. As soon as I unlocked the door, Buster, my Golden Retriever mix, usually greets me with a tackle. He’s a good boy, dumb as a box of rocks but full of love.
Tonight, the apartment was silent.
“Buster?” I called out, locking the deadbolt behind me.
A low growl vibrated from the living room.
I walked in. Buster was standing in the center of the room, his hackles raised, a ridge of fur standing straight up along his spine. He wasn’t looking at me. He was staring past me, at the front door I had just closed.
“Buddy, it’s just me,” I said, reaching out to pet him.
He snapped at the air, backing away, whining. He scrambled backward, his claws clicking on the linoleum, until he was pressed against the far wall under the window. He was shaking.
“What is wrong with you?”
I ignored him and went to the kitchen. I needed to count the money. I needed to know if this curse—if that’s what my gut was screaming it was—was worth it.
I pulled the roll out of my pocket and set it on the counter. It left a wet smear on the laminate.
I got a pair of scissors from the drawer. I hesitated. The red hair was wound so tight it was cutting into the outer bill, a fifty.
Snip.
The hair fell away. As soon as the tension was released, the roll seemed to exhale. It expanded slightly.
I peeled the bills apart. They were cold. Ice cold.
Fifty. One hundred. One-twenty. One-forty.
I counted. Then I counted again.
Five hundred and twenty dollars.
It wasn’t a fortune. It wasn’t life-changing money. But it was rent. It was groceries.
I separated the bills and laid them out on paper towels to dry. The water that seeped out of them continued to look dark, like tea.
I washed my hands. I scrubbed them with dish soap, then bleach. I couldn’t get the feeling of grease off my fingertips.
I decided to take a shower. I needed to wash the drive off of me.
I left the bathroom door open a crack so the steam could escape. I got in, turned the water to scalding, and stood there, letting the heat sink into my bones.
Then, the shower curtain moved.
It wasn’t a draft. The air conditioner wasn’t on.
The plastic liner rippled, pushed inward, as if someone was standing right on the other side, pressing their face against it.
“Buster?” I shouted, pulling back.
Nothing.
I ripped the curtain open.
The bathroom was empty.
But on the mirror, the fog from the steam had been disturbed. There were streaks. Not words. Just long, vertical streaks.
Like someone had dragged their fingers down the glass.
I turned the water off. The silence in the apartment was deafening.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
And then, from the kitchen—twenty feet away—I heard a sound that made my blood turn to slush.
It was the sound of paper crinkling.
Crinkle. Slide.
Someone was handling the money.
I wrapped a towel around my waist and grabbed the toilet plunger—my only weapon. I crept into the hallway.
“Who’s there?” I yelled. “I have a gun!” (I didn’t have a gun).
The kitchen was empty.
But the money…
I had laid the bills out in neat rows on the paper towels.
Now, they were stacked. Perfectly stacked. And sitting on top of the stack was the pile of red hair.
I didn’t stack them.
My breath hitched. I walked over to the counter, my hand shaking.
The red hair wasn’t just sitting there. It was moving.
Very slowly, the individual strands were twisting, writhing like dying worms, curling around each other.
I backed away. I backed all the way into the living room.
“Buster,” I whispered. “We’re leaving.”
I looked for the dog. He wasn’t under the window anymore.
I found him in the bedroom. He was hiding under my bed, curled into the tightest ball I’d ever seen. When I tried to pull him out, he peed on the floor.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, we’re going.”
I grabbed my keys. I wasn’t going to touch the money. I was going to leave it there, go to my brother’s house, and figure this out in the morning.
I reached for the doorknob of the front door.
It wouldn’t turn.
It wasn’t locked. I mean, the deadbolt was disengaged. But the knob wouldn’t rotate. It felt like someone on the other side was holding it with an iron grip.
I used both hands. I pulled. I yanked.
“Let me out!” I screamed.
Then, a voice.
It didn’t come from the hallway. It didn’t come from behind me.
It came from right next to my ear. A whisper so close I felt the cold breath tickle my earlobe.
“You took the toll.”
I spun around, swinging the plunger.
Nothing. Just the empty living room. Just the shadows stretching out from the kitchen.
But the smell was back. That overpowering scent of wet earth and formaldehyde. It was choking me.
And in the center of the room, right where the light from the streetlamp hit the carpet, a wet footprint appeared.
Then another.
Squish. Squish.
They were walking toward me. Invisible feet, soaking wet, heavy, marching across my carpet.
I scrambled back, tripping over the coffee table, falling hard on my back.
The footsteps stopped right in front of my face.
I looked up. There was nothing there. But the air above me was freezing. I could see my own breath.
“You have my passage,” the voice whispered again, sounding like gravel grinding together. “Now you must carry me.”
My phone buzzed in my pocket. The screen lit up the room.
It was a notification from my banking app.
Deposit Received: $520.00.
I hadn’t deposited the cash. It was still sitting on the counter in the kitchen.
I scrambled to my feet and ran to the kitchen.
The counter was empty.
The money was gone. The red hair was gone. The water stains were gone.
It was as if it had never been there.
But my pocket… my jacket pocket felt heavy again.
I reached in.
The roll was there. Wet. Cold. Bound in red hair.
I threw it across the room. It hit the wall with a wet thud.
I blinked.
It was back in my pocket.
I screamed. I reached in and threw it again. I watched it fly through the air, hit the sink, and slide down the drain.
I blinked.
The weight was back in my pocket.
I fell to my knees, sobbing. I pulled the roll out and stared at it. The face on the twenty-dollar bill… it wasn’t Andrew Jackson anymore.
It was a face I recognized.
It was my face. But my eyes were closed. And there were coins over my eyelids.
PART 2
CHAPTER 3: THE PASSENGER IN THE GLASS
I didn’t stay to stare at my own dead face on the twenty-dollar bill. Panic is a funny thing—it overrides logic, but it also sharpens your motor functions. I grabbed Buster by his collar, practically dragging the poor dog across the linoleum, and threw myself at the front door again.
This time, the knob turned. It turned easily, like it had been greased.
I tumbled out into the hallway, the cool air of the apartment building hitting my sweaty face. I didn’t lock the door. I didn’t care. I ran down the stairs, Buster scrambling to keep up, his nails clicking frantically on the concrete steps.
We got into the Civic. I threw Buster in the passenger seat this time. I wasn’t letting him sit in the back. Not where It had been sitting.
I peeled out of the parking lot, my tires screeching. I didn’t have a destination. I just needed lights. I needed people. I needed the noise of civilization to drown out the whispering that was still echoing in my ear canals. You took the toll.
I drove toward the highway, heading for the 24-hour Walmart Supercenter off the interstate. It was 2:30 AM. In America, Walmart is the only sanctuary for the insane and the insomniacs.
As I merged onto the highway, I checked the rearview mirror.
Clear. Just the empty back seat, illuminated by the passing streetlights.
I breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe it was stuck in the apartment. Maybe the haunting was localized to the location, not the object.
I reached into my pocket to check.
Empty.
My heart soared. I checked my other pocket. Empty. I patted my jeans, my jacket, the center console. The roll of cash was gone.
I started laughing. A manic, hysterical laugh that scared the dog. “I dropped it,” I yelled at the windshield. “I dropped the damn thing in the hallway!”
I felt lighter. The car felt lighter. The smell of formaldehyde faded, replaced by the smell of wet dog and stale french fries.
I pulled into the Walmart parking lot. The fluorescent lights were blindingly bright, buzzing with a comforting electric hum. I parked far away from the other cars, just in case.
“Stay here, buddy,” I told Buster. I cracked the window. “I’ll be right back. Daddy needs a Red Bull and a moment of sanity.”
I walked into the store. The greeter, an elderly woman who looked half-asleep, didn’t even look up. I walked the aisles, letting the sheer normalcy of consumerism wash over me. Rows of cereal. Walls of televisions. It was safe here.
I went to the bathroom at the back of the store. I needed to splash cold water on my face.
The restroom was empty. White tiles, harsh lights, the smell of industrial cleaner. I went to the sink, turned on the faucet, and bent down. The water was freezing. It felt good. I scrubbed my face, trying to wash away the feeling of those invisible fingers on my ear.
I grabbed a paper towel and dried my eyes. Then, I looked up at the mirror.
My reflection was looking down.
I froze. The towel dropped from my hands.
In the mirror, I was still bent over the sink, washing my face.
I stood perfectly still, my breath caught in my throat. My reflection didn’t move. It was on a delay. A terrifying, impossible delay.
Slowly, the version of me in the mirror stopped washing its face. It stood up.
It looked at me.
But it wasn’t me.
The eyes were wrong. They were flat. Dead. Like a shark’s eyes. And the mouth… the mouth was curving up into a smile that was too wide for a human face. It stretched, skin tearing at the corners, revealing teeth that looked like they had been filed to points.
The reflection raised its hand. It pointed at my chest.
I looked down at my chest.
There was a bulge in my jacket pocket. A heavy, cylindrical bulge.
I looked back at the mirror. My reflection slammed its hand against the glass from the inside. BANG.
The glass didn’t break, but the sound echoed like a gunshot in the tiled room.
The reflection mouthed three words. I could read the lips perfectly.
PAY THE FERRYMAN.
Then, the lights in the bathroom flickered and died.
I was in total darkness.
And from the stall behind me, the handicap stall that I was sure was empty, the toilet flushed.
Whoosh.
Then the stall door creaked open.
I didn’t wait to see what walked out. I ran. I ran blindly through the dark, smashing my shoulder into the doorframe, bursting out into the store.
The lights in the store were on. Shoppers were meandering around like nothing had happened.
I stood there, panting, clutching my chest. I reached into my pocket.
My fingers brushed against wet, cold paper.
It was back. The roll.
And it was vibrating.
CHAPTER 4: THE CURRENCY OF THE DEAD
I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t stay here.
I sat in my car in the Walmart parking lot, the engine idling. Buster was asleep, blissful in his ignorance. I held the roll of cash in my hand.
I had to get rid of it. But throwing it away didn’t work. It had boomerang mechanics—it was bound to me.
“Think, Mike, think,” I muttered, rubbing my temples.
In every horror movie, every urban legend, there’s a rule. You can’t just discard a cursed object. You have to pass it on. Or you have to use it for its intended purpose.
Pay the Ferryman. That’s what the thing in the mirror said.
Ferryman. Charon. The river Styx. You pay the toll to cross over.
But I wasn’t dead. I didn’t want to cross over.
Maybe… maybe I just had to spend it? If I exchanged it for goods or services, it would become someone else’s property. Someone else’s problem.
It was a terrible, selfish thought. But survival is selfish.
I looked at the gas gauge. I was running on fumes anyway.
I drove to a gas station across the street. A Sheetz. It was well-lit, busy.
I pulled up to a pump. I got out, clutching the roll. I peeled off a twenty.
The face on the bill had changed again. It wasn’t me anymore. It was an old man I didn’t recognize. He looked terrified, his mouth open in a silent scream.
I tried to feed the bill into the slot on the pump.
The machine wouldn’t take it. It kept spitting it back out. Zip-zip. Zip-zip.
“Come on,” I hissed.
“Machine’s broken, hon,” a voice called out.
I jumped. A woman at the next pump was watching me. “You gotta go inside to prepay.”
“Right. Thanks,” I stammered.
I walked inside. The cashier was a young guy, maybe twenty, with gauges in his ears and a bored expression.
“Twenty on pump five,” I said, placing the bill on the counter.
I didn’t hand it to him. I was afraid to touch him.
He reached for the bill.
As soon as his fingers brushed the paper, he flinched. He pulled his hand back like he’d been burned.
“Whoa,” he said, frowning. “Why is it… wet?”
“Rain,” I lied. “It’s raining.”
He looked at me, then at the window. It had stopped raining an hour ago.
He picked up the bill gingerly. He held it up to the light to check the watermark.
His face went pale. All the color drained out of him in a second.
“Dude,” he whispered.
“What?” I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs.
He turned the bill around to face me.
“Where did you get this?”
I looked at the bill. In the light, the texture of the paper looked wrong. It had pores. Tiny, microscopic pores. And hair follicles.
It wasn’t paper. It was skin. Dried, cured skin.
And the “ink”… the green ink shifted. It was moving, swirling like oil on water.
“I found it,” I said. “Just take it. Please.”
He dropped the bill. He backed away from the counter, knocking over a display of lighters.
“Get out,” he said. His voice wasn’t bored anymore. It was trembling.
“Just take the money!” I shouted, pushing the bill toward him. “I just want gas!”
“That’s not money!” he screamed. He grabbed a baseball bat from under the counter. “Get that thing out of here! That’s a Death Note! That’s a shroud piece!”
He was hysterical. People in the store were staring.
I grabbed the bill. “Fine! Fine!”
I ran out. As I crossed the threshold of the automatic doors, the sensors didn’t pick me up. The doors didn’t open. I slammed face-first into the glass.
I fell backward.
The cashier was pointing at me through the glass. No, not at me. Above me.
I rolled over and looked up.
Reflected in the glass of the automatic doors, hovering directly over my shoulder, was a figure.
It was tall. Impossibly tall. Draped in rags that looked like rotting fishing nets. It had no face, just a hood filled with absolute darkness. And from that darkness, two coins glinted where eyes should be.
It reached a skeletal hand down toward me.
The doors suddenly swooshed open.
I scrambled on all fours, scraping my knees on the concrete, and bolted for the car.
I threw myself into the driver’s seat and locked the doors.
“Go, go, go,” I screamed, keying the ignition.
As I sped away, I looked back at the gas station.
The lights of the Sheetz flickered and went out. All of them. The pumps, the sign, the store. The entire block was plunged into darkness.
And in my pocket, the roll of money was getting hotter.
It was burning my leg.
I pulled it out and threw it on the passenger seat.
The red hair binding the bills was gone.
Now, the bills were bound by something else.
I turned on the dome light, risking a look while doing sixty down the service road.
The bills were tied together with a finger.
A human finger. Severed at the knuckle. It was bent into a circle, the bone fused together to form a ring holding the cash.
And on the nail of the finger, someone had scratched a message with a knife.
INTEREST IS DUE.
I almost drove off the road.
I needed help. I needed someone who knew about this stuff. I couldn’t go to the police. They’d lock me up or shoot me.
I thought about the cashier. He called it a “Shroud Piece.” He knew what it was.
But I couldn’t go back there.
I pulled over on the side of a dirt road, shaking uncontrollably. I took out my phone. I had 12% battery left.
I opened Google. I typed in: “Finding money wrapped in red hair folklore.”
Nothing.
I typed: “Money wrapped in human hair curse.”
A forum result popped up. An old Reddit thread from r/Appalachia, dated seven years ago.
The title: “The Sin Eater’s Toll – Has anyone seen this on Route 18?”
I clicked it. The post was short.
“My grandfather used to tell us about the Toll Roads. Not the turnpike. The old roads. He said sometimes, when a bad man dies—a murderer, a rapist, a traitor—the ground won’t take him. The Devil won’t take him either, not until the debt is paid. So the family has to pay the Ferryman. But they can’t pay with their own money. They have to wrap the ‘blood money’ in the hair of the deceased and leave it on a crossroads. If a stranger picks it up, they accept the debt. They become the vessel. The soul of the dead man hitches a ride in the stranger’s body to cross the river. But if the stranger doesn’t die within three days… the dead man takes over the body permanently.”
My blood ran cold.
I checked the timestamp on the post.
The user who posted it… their username was Mike_P_1990.
My name is Mike P. I was born in 1990.
But I didn’t write that post.
I scrolled down to the comments. There was only one comment. It was posted one minute ago.
User: TheFerryman666 Comment: “Two days left, Mike. Drive faster.”
I looked out the window.
We were parked on a dirt road surrounded by cornfields.
Standing in the corn, perfectly still, row after row… were people.
Hundreds of them.
They were all facing my car. They were all pale. They all had coins over their eyes.
And they were all pointing down the road.
Toward the river.
PART 3
CHAPTER 5: THE WIDOW ON BLACKWOOD MOUNTAIN
I slammed on the gas. The tires spun in the mud before catching the asphalt, launching the Civic away from the cornfield and the silent, pointing legion of the dead.
I didn’t look back. I knew if I looked in the rearview mirror, I wouldn’t see the road. I would see Him. The man in the mirror. The passenger.
“We need a witch, Buster,” I muttered. My voice sounded raspy, like I’d been screaming for hours. “We need a priest. We need… someone.”
Buster was pressed into the floorboard of the passenger side, shivering so violently his teeth were chattering.
I drove blindly for twenty minutes, my phone dead, my GPS screen black. The only light came from my high beams cutting through the oppressive Appalachian darkness. The trees on either side of the road leaned in, their branches looking like skeletal fingers trying to scratch the roof of the car.
Then, the radio turned on.
I hadn’t touched it.
Static. Then a voice. Not a broadcast. It was a guttural, wet sound, like someone speaking with a throat full of blood.
“Turn… right…”
I looked ahead. There was no road to the right. Just a dense wall of pine trees.
“Turn… right…” the radio screamed, the volume spiking to max.
I saw it at the last second. A hidden gravel track, barely wide enough for a car, overgrown with weeds.
I didn’t want to turn. My brain screamed NO. But my hands… my hands yanked the wheel.
The car lurched onto the gravel path. We bounced and scraped bottom, driving deeper into the woods. The air grew colder. Frost began to spiderweb across the windshield, even though it was July.
The path ended at a clearing. In the center sat a single-wide trailer, rusted and sagging, surrounded by wind chimes made of animal bones.
The porch light flickered on. A yellow, sickly bug light.
The front door opened. An old woman stepped out. She was tiny, withered, wearing a flannel nightgown and holding a double-barreled shotgun.
She didn’t aim at me. She aimed above the car.
BOOM.
She fired a shot into the air.
“Kill the engine!” she shrieked. Her voice was surprisingly strong, echoing off the mountains. “Don’t you bring that engine noise up here! And don’t you bring Him any closer!”
I killed the ignition. I threw my hands up. “I need help!”
“You need a grave, is what you need!” she spat. She marched down the steps, keeping the gun leveled at the car. She stopped ten feet away. She sniffed the air. “Formaldehyde. Grave dirt. And…” She squinted at me. “Greed.”
“I found money,” I choked out. “On Route 18. Wrapped in hair.”
The old woman’s face hardened. She lowered the gun slightly. “You picked up the Sin Eater’s Roll? Boy, you didn’t just pick up money. You picked up a contract.”
She walked around the car, sprinkling something from a pouch onto the ground—salt? “You ain’t coming inside. The dead don’t enter my house. Talk from there.”
I rolled down the window. “What is happening to me? My reflection… it’s not moving.”
“Of course it ain’t,” she said, lighting a cigarette. The cherry glowed in the dark. “Your soul is being pushed out. Think of your body like a house. You opened the front door when you took that cash. Now you got a squatter. And he’s changing the locks.”
“How do I get him out?”
“You can’t kick him out,” she said matter-of-factly. “He paid. You accepted payment. The transaction is valid in the eyes of the Below.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “So I’m dead?”
“Not yet. The transaction ain’t complete until the coin crosses the river. You got… maybe 24 hours. The rot is already setting in.”
She pointed the shotgun at my hand resting on the doorframe.
I looked down. My fingernails were turning blue. The veins in my hand were black, standing out against my pale skin like a road map of death.
“Who is he?” I whispered.
“Doesn’t matter who he was,” she said. “A killer. A thief. Someone the Earth refused to swallow. His family tried to buy his way across the Styx by leaving his sins on the road for a fool to find. You’re the fool.”
“How do I fix it?” I begged. “Please. I’ll do anything.”
The old woman took a long drag of her cigarette, then flicked the butt at my car.
“You can’t spend it. You can’t burn it. You have to return it.”
“I tried!” I yelled. “I threw it away! It comes back!”
“Not to the road, you idiot,” she hissed. “To the source. You have to put that money back in the hand that earned it. You have to find his corpse.”
“His corpse? Where?”
She pointed a crooked finger toward the passenger seat.
I looked. The roll of money was there. The finger-ring binding it was twitching. The severed finger was pointing.
“Follow the finger,” she said. “And boy? If you don’t make it by sunrise… don’t worry. I’ll find you. And I’ll put you down before He walks around in your skin.”
She cocked the shotgun.
“Now get off my mountain.”
CHAPTER 6: THE DEAD MAN’S DRIVE
I reversed out of that clearing so fast I took out a row of her bone chimes.
The drive down the mountain was a blur of terror. The “finger-compass” on the passenger seat was my only guide. Every time I reached a fork in the road, the severed finger would swivel, the knuckle grinding against the leather seat, pointing the way.
It was leading me north. Toward the old coal mines.
My body was failing. My left arm went numb first. Then my legs started to feel heavy, like they were filled with concrete. It was becoming harder to breathe, as if a weight was pressing on my chest.
I am the weight, a voice whispered in my head.
It wasn’t through the radio this time. It was inside my brain.
I am the weight, and I am the toll.
“Shut up!” I screamed, slapping the side of my head.
Suddenly, the steering wheel locked.
We were doing fifty on a winding mountain road. The wheel jerked hard to the left—toward the cliff edge.
I gritted my teeth and fought it. My muscles screamed. The veins in my arms bulged, black and throbbing. It felt like an invisible pair of hands was gripping the wheel, trying to kill us both.
“You can’t kill me!” I yelled at the empty car. “If I die in a crash, my body is useless to you!”
The wheel jerked again.
Not useless, the voice laughed. It sounded like grinding stones. Broken, yes. But mine. I don’t need pretty. I need flesh.
The car swerved, tires screaming. We drifted toward the guardrail. Beyond it was a three-hundred-foot drop into the black canopy of the forest.
I slammed the brakes. The pedal went to the floor.
No brakes.
“Oh god,” I whimpered.
I grabbed the emergency brake lever. I yanked it up with both hands.
The rear tires locked. The Civic went into a spin. The world became a nauseating blur of headlights and trees.
SCREECH-CRUNCH.
The car slammed backward into the rocky mountainside. The impact threw me against the steering wheel. The airbag didn’t deploy.
Silence.
Dust and steam hissed from the engine.
I coughed, tasting copper. Blood. My nose was bleeding.
“Buster?” I croaked.
A whimper from the floorboard. He was okay. Shaken, but okay.
I tried to open the door. It was jammed. I kicked it. Once. Twice. It groaned and popped open.
I stumbled out into the night. My legs were numb, but adrenaline was forcing them to work.
I looked at the car. It was totaled. Steam was pouring from the hood.
But on the passenger seat, illuminated by the dying dome light, the roll of cash sat perfectly still.
The finger was pointing straight ahead. Into the woods.
There was no road here. Just dense, untamed forest.
I grabbed the roll. It was freezing cold, burning my skin like dry ice. The finger felt slimy.
“Come on, Buster,” I said.
We walked.
We walked for what felt like hours. The woods were silent. No crickets. No owls. Just the sound of my ragged breathing and the crunch of dead leaves under my feet.
My vision was getting blurry. The edges of my sight were darkening. I looked at my hands. The black veins had spread up my arms, disappearing under my sleeves. I could smell myself. I smelled like the money. I smelled like rot.
The finger in my hand twitched. It pointed down.
We had reached a ravine. At the bottom, half-buried in vines and kudzu, was a wrought-iron fence.
An old family cemetery.
I slid down the muddy embankment, tearing my jeans, scratching my hands on thorns.
I landed in the graveyard. It was ancient. Most of the headstones were toppled or worn smooth by time.
But one grave was fresh.
The dirt was mounded high. There was no headstone, just a wooden cross that had been snapped in half.
And sitting on top of the grave, waiting for me, was a shovel.
Dig, the voice commanded.
I didn’t want to. But my body moved on its own. My hands grabbed the shovel.
I started to dig.
The dirt was soft, wet clay. I dug rhythmically, like a machine. I wasn’t tired anymore. I felt powerful. But it wasn’t my power.
As I got deeper, the smell became unbearable.
Thunk.
The shovel hit wood.
I cleared the dirt away. A plain pine box. No varnish. No lock.
I threw the shovel aside. My hands—my black, rotting hands—reached down and gripped the lid of the coffin.
“This ends now,” I whispered.
I ripped the lid open.
The coffin wasn’t empty. And it didn’t contain a skeleton.
It contained a body.
It was a man in a black suit. He looked perfectly preserved. His skin was pale, waxy. His hair was red—dyed red.
I looked at his face.
I screamed. The sound tore out of my throat and echoed through the ravine.
The man in the coffin didn’t have a face.
He had my face.
It was me lying in the box.
And his eyes… my eyes… snapped open.
They were silver coins.
The corpse in the coffin smiled. It reached up and grabbed my wrist with a grip like steel.
“Receipt accepted,” the corpse said with my voice.
