The World of Myth Magazine

"Glad the bitch died. One less useless mouth to feed"

The article had jumped out at Billy that evening as he scanned the local paper. A tragic tale, all too familiar - a young girl, out with her friends, just looking to have fun. After ten days of increasingly desperate searching, a dog walker had stumbling over the corpse during an early morning outing. He had shaken his head at the triteness of the cliché; it made the whole story read like the synopsis of some tired BBC drama. It was the photo of the mother that had grabbed his attention, staring out of the page at him, grief still raw and clear in the brightness of her eyes, the slope of her shoulders. Familiar, somehow.

He had found the memorial site in minutes. Hollow sympathies filled the page; one bland, cookie-cutter condolence after the other, like a collage of cheap Hallmark cards. The hypocrisy sickened him. Most of these narcissists probably didn't even know the girl; they just wanted to give their own social media profile a bump by piggy-backing on the grief wagon. Occasionally genuine commiserations would appear, messages born of concern rather than a need to trumpet how well the sender knew the dead girl. Good. He needed someone to hurt, otherwise what was the point.

The bedroom was cold enough to shock his breath into white tendrils that curled between his thin lips, but even the chill couldn't banish the sheen of perspiration on his brow as he focused on his task. He closed his eyes, and a shiver of anticipation went through his body as he jabbed the Enter key and sent his message into the world.

As he waited for the first angry response to ping, he found himself in idle contemplation. Why was he like this? He wondered whether, had he been born a century ago, he would have sent poison pen letters with such glee. He doubted it - it was the immediate feedback that thrilled him, the dopamine rush of seeing strangers respond to his words while he stayed safe behind the anonymity of a fake profile. He sat waiting for his trophy - a reply from the mother herself. He knew she would be monitoring the page, anything to keep close to the memory of her little girl. Sometimes it would take a day or two for the big payoff, sometimes a site would remove his comments before he could strike gold, but tonight he was sure he wouldn't have to wait long. Replies began to flood in, each more indignant than the last.

Julie189: You monster. What's wrong with you?!!?

MickConlon: Sick bastard. Reported.

StormzysLoveChild: Don't feed the troll people.

Thurse_1: Hello William Grimmsdell, 6 Cavendish Avenue. I'm watching you.

As the last message pinged up on the screen, he felt the chill in the room for the first time. Goosebumps pimpled up on his bare arms, fine hairs standing on end like rows of soldiers. He reread the text over and over, sure his mind was playing tricks on him. But the words stayed the same, terrible in their simplicity.

His first reaction was pure fear. Even knowing how foolish it was, he was unable to suppress an urge to look over his shoulder. The shock of seeing his anonymity torn away prompted a vestigial reaction; now the darkness held monsters. Once he was able to wrestle back control, he deleted his original message, getting rid of all the indented replies at the same time. Seconds ticked by, then minutes, with no further messages. His silent vigil stretched deep into the night, many hours passing before he felt safe enough to abandon his watch. He collapsed into bed and fell into a troubled sleep.

For the next few days, the incident preyed on Billy's mind. The message flashed up every time he closed his eyes. At work, his colleagues started to look at him out the corner of their eyes, then keep their distance, finding his constant muttering disturbing. Over time, fear turned to curiosity, then to anger. Some social justice warrior thought they could dox him, thought they could shut him up? He'd show them.

By Wednesday night, he had found himself a new target – some local Black footballer who had just raised thousands for charity. Billy had always found that racism made for good engagement. Outside his bedroom window, streetlamps were winking out of existence one by one. The blanket of warm light that had touched the room ebbed away and once again the only illumination came from the laptop screen, an icy sun in the void of space.

He took a deep breath and posted.

The response was instant – exactly the same words as before, outing his identity to all readers. This time he was less panicked. Before deleting the comment, he checked the account of his nemesis. It was almost empty: a stock profile picture, the name, Thurse_1, and nothing else. He wasn't surprised - the account was almost certainly automated; there was no other way it could have found and replied to his message so quickly. But there were ways of tracing even automatic profiles back to their owners.

If the taxi driver was surprised to see a man carrying a cricket bat at this hour of the night, he wisely kept his own counsel. Billy watched dark houses pass in silence as the cab wound its way through a rat race of abandoned London streets.

After a while, the architecture began to change. Symmetrical lines of new-builds gave way to older cottages, irregularly spaced along narrow roads. The deep rumble of the taxi's tires switched to a staccato rattle as tarmac became cobblestones. Finally, they drew up at their destination and Billy stepped out into the fog.

He stood alone under a railway arch. The only source of light was a single sodium lamp pimpled on the ceiling above him, illuminating the vaulted walls as they swept down either side of him. Everything beyond and behind was darkness. It felt like the rest of the world had vanished, as if he stood beneath the sole piece of scenery on a vast unlit stage. To his left, a single red door punctuated the brickwork. Since moving to the capital, he had noticed shops built into railway arches, but never a residence. He took a printout from his back pocket, double-checked the address. This was the place alright.

Feeling a good deal more nervous, he produced a set of complicated tools. He had spent hours in his flat in front of YouTube videos practicing this procedure, but as he pushed the first pick into the keyhole, the door swung open without a sound. With one last nervous glance around him, Billy hefted his bat and entered.

As he crossed the threshold, the last dregs of his anger drained away. His previous resolve was replaced with a sparkling grey fog, as if his mind had stood up too quickly. He was stood in an unlit tunnel, narrow and impossibly long. In a daze, he ran a hand over one of the walls, felt the wattle and daub rough and cool under his fingers. The door swung closed behind him, darkness devouring the wedge of light from the outside world. The only illumination now was a blue glow emanating from the end of the tunnel, an infinite distance ahead of him.

The air was stale, faintly earthy. The smell triggered an old memory - a childhood trip to the Yorvik Viking Centre with his mother and sister. It had been long years since he'd thought of them, but as he continued into the shadows towards the blue light, the orderly thread of Time began to tangle. Images assaulted him; long buried memories reawakened, appearing now as real when they had first occurred.

His mother's anguish as they had entered the bedroom, blood draining from her face until it was almost as pale as his sister's.

The sea of black mourners at the funeral, many of them the very school "friends" who had driven her to her fate.

The curl of disgust on his mother's lip as he had buried himself deeper and deeper into a virtual world to escape the pain.

The empty hallway of the house he had grown up in, disappearing forever as he crept away to start a new life, unloved and unwanted.

His legs crumbled beneath him, and he fell to the floor on his hands and knees. Yet the glow kept coming closer – inexorable, inevitable. The blue light resolved itself into two burning orbs, staring out from a terrible face. The last thing he saw as the creature's teeth closed on his head was an image of his sister, smiling at him. "Welcome home."

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