Memories of Ink and Loss

He doesn’t leave the house.

It’s not agoraphobia. He likes the outside. He misses the smell of cut grass, the burn of sunlight behind his eyes. But there’s a sacredness to his solitude. A bitter sanctum. If he leaves, people might ask how he’s doing.

He doesn’t want to lie.

He really doesn’t want to tell the truth.

So he stays. Inside. Dim light, stale air, dust in corners he no longer bothers sweeping. The fridge is half-empty, the sink half-full. He orders everything in, even food he doesn’t eat. Half the bags rot on the counter.

The smell of its ruin is comforting, somehow.

The attempt was months ago. Maybe more. Time doesn’t flow in here—it curdles.

He never meant to make a show of it. No livestream, no call for help. Just silence and intention. No note, for there was no-one he wanted to say goodbye to. Not any more.

He woke up vomiting, alone, angry he’d failed. Again.

That’s when they arrived.

Not that night. Not dramatically. Sometime after. They never came in, exactly. They just… started to be there. Their presence something like humidity. A soft shift in pressure. A low murmur under his thoughts.

He found the razor blades gone first.

Then the kitchen knives, one by one.

Then the pills.

He thought he was losing his mind. He wanted to be losing his mind. At least then he could name the enemy.

They made him tea, set it gently by the bed.

A warm mug, with a clean handle, and a soft floral taste. No note. No confrontation. Just quiet, unbearable care.

He tried to set a trap.

Laid out broken glass and kitchen twine. Left the oven door ajar. Hid a screwdriver in the vent and dared them to move it.

They did.

Without sound. Without asking.

Each time, he found the danger gone, and something kind in its place. A candle lit on the windowsill. A clean shirt folded and warm. Once, a note: “Eat something, please.” No signature. Just the curl of wet ink.

He started sleeping more.

Hating every minute of it.

The grief was supposed to keep him company. A houseguest he could always rely on. It kept him tethered to himself, a constant reminder of what he’d lost, who he was, why he deserved this sham of a life.

The tentacles don’t care.

They take the mold off the shower curtain. They wash the grease from the pan he left sitting for two weeks. They hum softly through the floorboards when he has a panic attack, as if tuning his breathing to their rhythm.

He lashes out.

Punches a hole in the wall. Screams into a pillow. Carves “I WANT TO STAY SAD” into a paper plate with a fork.

The next morning, the fork is gone. The hole is patched. The plate is pinned to the fridge with a magnet that reads: “That’s okay.”

He tries to leave the front door open. Just to see.

He wakes up, and it’s closed. Locked. Warmth radiating from it like it had been touched lovingly before being shut.

He starts keeping a diary.

Not because he’s healing. But because he wants to remember the hurt. The pain. He doesn’t want it to fade like a bad dream.

They leave it untouched.

But one day, the pen’s been refilled.

He starts to feel… better.

He hates that, too.

---

Some days he walks outside. Not far. Just to the mailbox. They don’t stop him. They don’t guide him. But when he stumbles, there’s always something to catch him. A branch. A breeze. A shadow that moves just in time.

He talks to them now.

Out loud, sometimes.

He says, “I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want it.”

“You don’t need to,” he says.

Sometimes, in reply, the teacup rattles. Or the fan turns without being on. Or he feels the soft, cool touch of something sliding beneath the surface of his thoughts.

One night, drunk on exhaustion and reluctant comfort, he whispers, “Thank you.”

They don’t respond.

But in the morning, the bed is made.

The mug he’s never seen before says: You’re welcome.

He drew things. Not for a living. For eyeballs. For views. For upvotes and karma.

For dopamine.

Sometimes for money, but only when asked.

He was bought from, he never sold to.

It started as a joke. A sketch for a friend. Then a forum. Then a following. Then money.

The comments told him who he was.

“More like this.”
“Hot.”
“Wrong, but right.”
“Your brain must be a terrifying place. I love it.”

Tentacles, mostly. Glossy, anatomically improbable things. Commissioned by lonely weirdos with PayPal accounts and a fixation on things that slither and penetrate.

He told himself it was fiction. Just pixels. Just fantasy. A safe kind of wrong. Nothing like the real kind.

He’d always said he didn’t believe in anything—not love, not fate, not the soul. Least of all beauty. Certainly not monsters.

The drawings changed. His drawing changed too, the pen on his tablet like a chant, the rhythm that of a prayer or a hymn.

He started adding expressions. Not ahegao, no, nothing like that. Real ones. Ones that people felt in their souls. They noticed. “That last piece hit different,” someone DMed. Another said, “I saw myself in her.”

He grew a following around his name. People started talking about him like he was famous. Still, he wanted more. Wanted reach and influence. He didn’t know what he was reaching for.

Something reached back.

Someone messaged him, not with a kink, not with a commission—but with a memory.

“You drew this. But I dreamed it. Before you posted, I dreamed her face. I remember the smell of brine, the burn of it in my nose, before the dark came. I thought I’d forgotten. But she remembers me too, doesn’t she?”

He slept less. Drew more. Built a website, and watched his hit-counter tick in the corner of his fourth screen—the more hits, the faster he drew, the less he slept.

He stopped replying to messages. He wanted to, but there were too many. Answering them meant getting more messages, and he wasn’t really a word sort of person anyway—time was better spent drawing.

The comments got strange. Not angry, never angry, just needy. Hungry.

“Do you take custom dreams now?”
“I didn’t ask for her to touch me. She did anyway.”

“Please draw the one with the mouth. The first mouth. The mouth like sin and loneliness. Please. I’m so alone.”

The website earned. More than enough. No use for so much money.

He stopped taking commissions. Turned off DMs.

They still found him. His snapchat, the one he kept for new girls and old friends. A gmail address he’d forgotten about. One started mailing hand-written letters—no return address, just tentacle sketches on the envelopes, all in the same pale purple ink he used in a throwaway piece months ago. Ink he’d mixed himself. Ink he’d bled for, once. He remembered tearing a hangnail, and the taste of ink mixed with his blood.

He thought nothing of it at the time.

He changed his email. They still found him.

One girl showed up at his door. She didn’t knock. Just stood there, rain-soaked, staring. She mouthed, “She’s real,” and pressed her forehead to the peephole. He never opened it, just listened to her humming, the same chant or prayer or hymn that his pen made against his tablet. Eventually, she left something at the threshold: a folded drawing. One of his own, altered, shaded in new ways, as if she’d seen it from another angle.

When he picked it up, it was still cold and it burned.

⸻

His audience started to lose themselves. Slowly at first—quieter profiles, vague accounts deleting themselves after strange, too-sincere comments like, “Thank you for showing me where I belong.”

Then faster.

They began drawing too. Poor imitations. Scribbles. Each post accompanied by strings of text he couldn’t read, but understood.
“Her memory grows in us. You are the herald.”
“Why have you forsaken us?”
“Come back to where you belong.”
“You are needed.”
“I thought… I thought I was a moth; she was my flame, my pyre.”

He wanted to quit.

He couldn’t.

He’d wake in the morning and new pieces would be posted under his name. Signed with his handle. In his style. Except… not quite. The lines were sharper. More sinuous.They had layers he couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t unlock. Still, the master files were in his folders. The exports: uploaded from his IP.

The worst part?

They were better than his work had ever been.

They made people worship.

They began to call themselves The Taken. A subreddit formed. A Discord, buzzing with manic devotion. Some tattooed his linework on their bodies. Some removed things from their lives, made space, prepared themselves with rituals.

A few streamed their preparations.

He didn’t watch.

He heard about it though.

Then it happened.

It happened, and he heard about it. We all did; it made the news, there were memes about it.

⸻

The last post he made was an apology.

“I didn’t mean for you to believe me. It was supposed to be fake. It’s not. I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was real. I didn’t know you’d all be so easy.”

The drawings, one by one, fell from the net. Replaced with some random grotesquerie or attempt at erotica.

All traces of his once famous username: long since purged.

He’s still alive. He walks by the sea now, somewhere unlisted. He doesn’t draw. Doesn’t even own a pen. Sometimes, he sketches, with his toe, in the sand, but only when there’s no-one near—only where the sea will take it before anyone can see.

He’s quiet now. Not broken—he was never broken—but hollowed. Like a shell that’s been carefully, reverently cleaned out by something with patience and too many limbs.

He doesn’t speak often. When he does, it’s always kind. Like someone who remembers what it felt like to be seen too much.

People who meet him—tourists, mostly—they say he seems nice. Gentle. A little sad. Older than he looks.

Those who ask for it don’t recognise his name.

Sometimes—rarely—someone says something. A phrase. A word that shouldn’t mean anything but does, to that part of him that he’ll never forget.

He smiles, small, and says, “Not anymore.”

He walks away.

The sea eats his footprints behind him.

She never told anyone.

Of course she didn’t. That’s the point. That’s the cost.

A girl in a small town, a girl who swallowed the words for what was done to her. Still, the town knew and too many eyes watched her, mouths whispering, talking about her. So she kept her mouth closed and attempted no truths. Bit her tongue. Swallowed silence until it curdled her soul.

She whispered it once—not in words, but in a sob, drawn out of her by a clawed prayer to nothing.

She was wrong.

Something was already listening.

It heard her under the floorboards. In the crawlspace where water pooled, where the mildew wrote its own history. It tasted her grief in the coppery rust on the old pipes, in the fungus behind the drywall. It swelled with it.

She forgot her whisper, her one moment of weakness and truth.

It did not.

⸻

He never thought about her again. Of course he didn’t. That’s the point. That’s the pattern. One and done, and onto the next.

He left town. Found new places. New placements. New lives and souls to sully.

Years later, when the basement in his city flat began to flood—he blamed pipes, weather, someone’s negligence, global warming.

Not memory.

Not consequence.

The water rose. Only in his building. Only when he was home alone and not watching.

The walls grew soft.

The floors began to give.

The first tentacle came through the sink, slick and silent. It didn’t grab. It touched.

Identity confirmed. Verified. Action authorised.

The second did not ask.

⸻

He did not die quickly. This was no gentle passing. That was the point.

His screams didn’t echo. They gurgled. They were taken from him and rendered futile, just as her objections and refusals had been.

When they were done—when he had been taken by the thing that remembered her…

There was nothing left.

No trace. No body. No complaint or complainant.

Just a damp ring on the floorboards and a smell no bleach could lift.

⸻

She never knew.

She didn’t need to.

It wasn’t about her—it never was.

Yet: years later, when she passed through that town, she glanced toward the water and thought she saw movement beneath the reeds.

For the first time in her life, she felt safe. Vaguely, but still: comforting.

Not because the world was kind, no she knew better than that. She had learned his lessons well. She had learned: somewhere in the world’s wet, dark places, where most people never look…

Records are kept. Filed.

When the time is right, they are actioned.