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jgmartin · 1 year

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JAGGED JANICE

I'm a government employee.

My name isn’t important. All you need to worry about is what I have to say.

I work at a compound known as the Facility. Within it, we perform research on things the public would find… unappetizing. Officially, we’re listed under Experimental Weapons Development, but lately, our umbrella has spread much wider.

Suffice it to say that there are things out there that go bump in the night. Things, both legendary and mundane, that exert their influence upon us and defy explanation. My job is to interview individuals who believe they’ve encountered such entities and determine if their accounts are fact or fiction. What my job is not to do, however, is share those interviews.

In this case, though, I don’t think I have a choice.

_____________________

The room is cramped, dimly lit, and smells vaguely of stale piss and black mold. A light hangs above the table between us, rocking back and forth and doing a poor job illuminating much of anything. Still, I can see the man's gaunt face and the fields on my clipboard.

It's enough. It will do.

I ask the man to tell me his story, and it begins.

“It happened at the cabin,” he says. He’s twenty-something, with a long nose and five o’clock shadow. When he reaches for his cigarette, his hand shakes like a 1950’s pickup truck. “Not my cabin,” he adds. “It belonged to Emily, but she invited us up. The three of us.”

My pen scratches across my clipboard. FOUR INDIVIDUALS. “For leisure, I’ll assume?”

He cocks an eyebrow at me. “Yeah, I guess.” A laugh escapes his lips. It’s short. Awkward. “Why else do people go to cabins? We just wanted to get drunk, stoned, forget our problems for the weekend. You know, like normal people do.”

“Of course,” I say, marking down his response. His eyes dart toward the cameras in the corner of the room, and his tongue slips across his lips. They’re chapped, cracked and bleeding. He looks worse than a mess. He looks like a disaster.

“The cameras,” he says. “What’s the deal with them? You said you weren’t a cop.”

“I’m not,” I reassure him. “The cameras are for my own records. Events— encounters with the paranormal, they’re tricky things. Sometimes we catch items in recordings we’d otherwise miss in person.”

He stares at me a while. His lip curls in, his teeth gnawing at it. It’s a look I’ve seen before, the sort of look where he’s wondering if maybe he’s being played. He’s wondering if this is a sting operation, and he’s taking the bait and I’m going to have him thrown into a psych ward, or worse.

“It’s better if you tell me everything,” I say, placing my clipboard on the desk between us. “I’m not here to have you put away, only to get some answers.”

A moment of dead air hangs between us, and it’s the sort of moment I recognize. He’s weighing the situation. Sizing me up. He’s wondering if he’s comfortable talking about something this batshit insane to a total stranger.

But then he takes a breath, followed by a deep drag, and he ashes his cigarette.

“Sure,” he says. He taps on a finger on the desk. Gathers his thoughts. “It happened late at night. The four of us had been drinking in the cabin, doing mushrooms, but we all slept outside in tents since the place was full of spiders. Hardly ever got used.”

“Why’s that?” I check a box labeled INTOXICATED.

He shrugs. “Bad memories, I think?”

I tilt my head to the side, inviting him to continue.

“The cabin belonged to Emily’s mom," he explains. "She passed away when Em was a little girl, and the place has been a mausoleum ever since. Em thinks it has bad mojo.”

“What do you think?”

“What do I think?” He tastes the question. “I think that... ” He trails off, his eyes losing focus, gazing at the splintered wooden table between us. Suddenly, he seems far away. There’s an emptiness to his expression. A disconnect. I wonder if he’s thinking of legends and nightmares.

I wonder if he’s thinking of Jagged Janice.

“Is everything alright?” I ask.

He blinks, then nods.

My pen scratches across my clipboard. SUBJECT APPEARS TRAUMATIZED. AVOIDANT.

“What’s that?” he asks. “What are you writing?” He leans forward, his thin frame eclipsing the table as he narrows his eyes on my form. I pull it away.

“It’s private.”

“How come?”

“Your knowledge of my notes could influence your account. I’d prefer it if such biases were avoided.”

His face creases, jaw clenches.

“Now,” I say. “Please continue.”

He looks angry as he sits back in his chair. Pissed. He’s gnawing at his lips again, and his finger’s tapping the table like a gatling gun. There’s no doubt in my mind that this guy’s been through a lot, but I need to make sure he’s telling the truth, and in order to do that, he can’t know anything. Nothing at all.

“Fine,” he says at length. “We’ll do it your way.”

Yes, we always do.

“Like I said, we were drinking in the cabin. Swapping old war stories from high-school. Talking about stupid pranks we’d pull, or places we’d tag, or teachers we hated. We reflected. Pretty soon though, we got drunk enough that stuff went deeper. We stopped talking about all the silly surface bullshit, and we started talking about the stuff that really meant something to us— the things that set our souls on fire.”

“That’s a poetic turn of phrase. Are you a writer?”

He shrugs.

“Let me rephrase. Would you describe yourself as having an active imagination?”

The man studies me, gears turning in his head. Again, he’s wondering if I’m goading him into an admission of insanity. He’s wondering if I’m calculating what amount of antipsychotics it would take to counterbalance his paranoia, and what size straightjacket would best fit his scarecrow frame.

But I’m not doing any of that.

The truth is, I don’t care if he’s insane or perfectly lucid. I don’t give a damn about him at all. All I care about is whether or not he’s seen Jagged Janice, and that he isn’t another liar.

“My imagination isn’t anything special,” he says at length. “Now, can I tell my fucking story, or are you going to keep interrupting?”

I smile. "Sure. Go ahead."

He takes a breath, spares a half-second to glare at me. “The four of us are drinking in Em’s cabin and she starts to get… low. Like, depressed. She’s usually a pretty upbeat person so I ask her what’s up, and she says she’s just been feeling a bit haunted since coming back to the cabin.”

I lift an eyebrow.

“Her brother…” The man sighs, shakes his head as though determining how best to phrase his next words. “Her brother died at the cabin. Drowned to death in the ocean a hundred yards from the front door. Emily watched it happen.”

“She watched her brother drown?”

He nods. “She was three years old. She didn’t understand what was happening, not really. There wasn’t anything she could do.”

“I see.” It’s a sad story, but not really what I came here for. Worse still, nothing yet matches the Jagged Janice legend. “Anything else?”

The man looks up at me, and disbelief swims in his eyes. “Anything else?” he mutters. “No, asshole. That’s it. She watched her brother die and it made her feel like shit.”

“I’m not here for Emily’s story, I’m here for yours. You’ll excuse me if I forget to feign empathy for a woman I’ve never met.” I check a box labeled CONFRONTATIONAL and rest my pen on my clipboard. “Now then, you said you were drinking. Talking. What happened after that?”

His jaw is set. Clenched. He looks like he wants to slug me in the face and honestly, I wouldn’t blame him, but instead he takes a drag on his cigarette and leans back in his chair.

“We drink and talk until our eyes get droopy,” he says. “And then we go to bed. It’s like any night, I guess. Up until a point.”

There’s an implication in his words, but I’ll deal with it later. For now I need more details. I need to understand the setting of the Event as clearly as I can. “The police report,” I say, glancing down at my copy of the document, “mentions the incident occurred inside of the cabin. Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Can you describe it for me? The layout?”

He scratches the back of his head, brows furrowed. There’s a picture being painted in his mind, colored by memories. “It's a tee-shaped cabin. Capital T. There’s two bedrooms on either side of the T, and at the very top center is a bathroom. The bottom of the T is the living area and kitchen, then the front door.”

“Simple enough.” I make a quick sketch of it on my form. “According to the report, the Event occurred in the washroom. I’d like you to talk about that.”

His eyes narrow, and his mouth twitches. He sucks in on his cigarette like it’s the last drag he’ll ever have. Slow. Long. He burns it down to the filter, eyes bloodshot, and then he drops it into the ashtray. “You got any more of these?”

“Sure.” I reach inside my jacket and pull out a pack, tossing it to him. The man catches it and flips it open. His hands are shaking. They’re shaking so hard that he can hardly light the smoke after he slips it into his mouth.

“Let me,” I offer.

“No,” he says. “I’ve got it.” The lighter strikes, and a flame dances to life. He hovers it below his dart until an ember glows. Then the man leans back, takes a deep drag, and blows out a storm cloud. “You’re the real deal, huh?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The real deal. You actually believe me, don’t you?”

“Maybe,” I say. Truthfully I’m still making up my mind. “You said the four of you quit drinking to go to sleep. Back in your tents, I presume. What happened after that?”

He ashes the cigarette. “Nature calls. I gotta take a shit, so I get up and head to the cabin. When I unzip the tent though, I can’t see the dirt in front of me. It’s that dark outside. Pitch black.”

“No moon?”

He shrugs. “Wasn’t looking for one. All I know is I’ve got to take a shit, and I’m not about to use the outhouse— it smells worse than death. So I make my way to the cabin. Once I get inside though, this weird feeling comes over me.”

“Weird feeling?”

“Like I’m being watched.”

Promising.

“The place feels empty. Lonely. It’s just me, the bugs, and the light from my phone. The light’s making shadows out of everything— the dusty fridge, the cluttered shelves, and the messy counters. There’s a thousand shapes all around me, shifting with every step I take and this feeling of, I don’t know.... Dread? comes over me. Like I’m not safe.”

The man pauses. Sweat beads down his forehead. “Sorry,” he says. “I just haven’t thought about it in this much detail since the night it happened.”

“Don’t worry,” I tell him. “Events are messy things, and more often than not, they leave scars.”

“Okay.”

“Take your time.”

He gives himself a minute. Catches his breath. “Like I said, I don’t feel safe in there, but I’m drunk enough that it doesn’t faze me. I’ve still got a buzz going from earlier in the night, you know? I think to myself, I came to take a shit and some spooky shadows aren’t gonna stop me.” He chuckles to himself, shakes his head. “But a few seconds later, I’m in the bathroom and locking the door behind me. I figure, why take the chance?”

He’s nervous. Jittery. His leg’s bouncing up and down and shaking the table. It’s beginning to affect my ability to write. “Would you like a glass of water?” I ask.

“I’m fine.”

“Humor me.” I grab the jug and pour him a cup, sliding it across the table. He eyes it for a moment, and then grips the glass, bringing it to his lips and downing it in one swig. I pour him another.

“So,” he says, wiping his lips. “I’m about to unbuckle and do my business when I see movement. It’s in the top corner of the bathroom— in one of those little toilet windows, like the type that’s clouded on the bottom for privacy, or whatever, but clear on the top to let in light.”

“I’ve seen those. Is that where you witnessed the Event?”

“That’s where I saw the smile.”

Jagged Janice. “Describe it.”

“Honestly I…” He sounds suddenly hesitant. Worried. “I’d rather not describe the smile, if we could. Wouldn’t it be better to just talk about the Event instead?”

“The smile is part of the Event,” I remind him. “It’s important that we get as many details as possible, no matter how uncomfortable your memories may be.”

He looks down, and his eyes drift out of focus. “The smile is just a row of teeth. But the teeth are too big and too sharp to belong to a human, and there are just… so many of them.”

I check my notes, consulting descriptions of Jagged Janice listed in old email chains from the early 2000’s. “I’d like to hear more about these teeth.”

“Why?”

“The teeth are important. Describe them, please.”

The man is uncomfortable. He’s shifting in his seat like quicksand, and when he talks his voice cracks but he gives me what I want. “The teeth are jagged,” he says. “Serrated, almost. Their length is all over the place. Some barely break her gums, others stretch down, cutting through her lips.” His fingers move again. They’re tapping on the metal table. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“When I see the smile, my heart starts pounding. I’m frozen there, standing in the dark bathroom with just the light from my phone. My mind’s reeling, but I know that whoever that smile belongs to, I don’t want them seeing me, so I hold my phone up against my chest. Tight as I can. I smother the light.”

“The light,” I say. “Did the woman showcase an adverse reaction to it?” Janice, according to her legend, loathes light.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “Or, I don’t know? I can’t remember small details.” He pauses, and reaches for his glass of water before taking another gulp.”At that point my body’s mostly just adrenaline. There’s a storm of it coursing through me and screaming at me to run or scream or fight this bitch or just do something. Anything. But I can’t. I just stand there, staring at her inhuman teeth, at her horrible, twisted smile with my phone clutched to my chest like a crucifix.

“Then the smile begins to fall away, lowering itself until it’s just a blur behind the foggy part of the window. In its place are two eyes.” The man takes a breath, shuddering, trembling. “They’re wide, angled all wrong and they’re leaking this… black fluid. They dart around the washroom as if looking for something.

“I stay still. Still as I can, like I’m fucking paralyzed. There’s no light in the room, none except the bits of moon framing the monster in the window, so I let myself meld into the darkness. I don’t move an inch, and I pray to god the creature can’t see me there.”

He shivers, reaches for his cigarette and takes a drag.

“Then I hear the tapping on the window. Tap. Tap. Tap. It’s followed by this chattering sound, and it takes me a second but I realize it’s her teeth gnashing together, open and shut, open and shut, over and over again. I don’t want to look at her. I don’t. But part of me can’t stop myself, and I glance up and see her eyes staring back at me. Two tiny black dots in a sea of white. My breathing stops. My pulse races. Dribbles of piss run down my leg. It’s just the two of us now, watching one another.”

I lean forward, my interest piqued. Much of his description could have been pulled from the Jagged Janice legend itself. The small black pupils. The rows of inhuman teeth. I check off the features on my clipboard as he goes. “What does she do?” I ask. “When you lock eyes with her?”

He swallows. “She speaks.”

“What does she say?”

“She says,” he stammers. “I see you.”

I write the words down and circle them three times. They’re not familiar to me. “Describe her voice to me. Did she sound old? Young?”

“Her voice was quiet. Hard to hear. The words sounded like they’d been pulled out of a woodchipper. Their pronunciation was broken and unnatural, like they’d been cut up by those… teeth.”

“Curious,” I mutter.

“Her fingers reach up, and she taps the glass again. Tap. Tap. Tap. I chance another look, and all I can see is her terrible, serrated smile in the window. It’s making me feel nauseous. I’ve never been that scared, you know? I close my eyes, wanting the feeling to go away for just a second, but when I open them again the smile’s gone. It’s just me, alone in the bathroom.”

He puts his face in his hands and lets the armor fall away. His shoulders quake with silent sobs. I give him a minute, then another.

“Is that all?” I ask.

No response. It becomes apparent that his account has reached its conclusion.

Disappointing to say the least.

“A harrowing experience,” I say, giving my form a final swipe with my pen. With a sigh, I stand up from my chair, reaching out to shake his hand. “On behalf of the Facility, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to share it with me.”

The man’s sobs taper off. He blinks up at me, with red, puffy eyes and when he speaks his voice is barely there at all. “It’s not over,” he says. “There’s more.”

My heart thrums as I pull back my handshake. A smile slips across my face as I sit back down in my chair, centering my clipboard in front of me. “Something else occurred?”

“Yeah,” he says, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “The next few hours turned into a nightmare.”

I click my pen, skin prickling with goosebumps. “You don’t say?” Now it’s my turn to take a breath, to center myself and calm my nerves. “How very unfortunate.”

“Yeah, you could say that,” he says, sarcasm thick in his voice.

“Please continue, then.”

“It… It takes me ten minutes before I can muster the courage to crack the bathroom door. When I do, I do it gently. Quietly. You can hardly even hear the shitty hinges creak, that’s how careful I am. I peek out of the crack, looking for the smiling woman, terrified that I’m going to see her standing in the living area waiting for me, but I don’t.

“There’s nobody else in the cabin. It’s just me. So I step out, moving across the hardwood floor. It creaks and groans with every step I take and each time that it does, my heart skips a beat and I expect to see her jump out of the darkness. I’m seeing that smile everywhere now. In every shadow. In every window. I want to shout and scream— I want to call out to my friends in the tent and beg them to pull me out of this horror, but they’re beyond the cabin door. Out there at the far end of the yard. They’re a world away.”

“And your phone,” I ask. “You never thought to use that to call for help?”

“Yeah, sure,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I’m on a backwater island off the coast of rural BC. I’ve got great cell service out there.” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t get a cell signal if I climbed to the top of the tallest tree. My phone was a glorified flashlight.”

A fair point.

“Since I can’t call for help, I psyche myself up. I’ve got my hand on the front doorknob, and I’m ready to fling the door open and scream bloody murder, run to my friends and tell them we need to start the truck now because there’s a fucking monster on the island and.... And that’s when I hear it.”

His fingers thrum the metal desk. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“In the window next to the front door, I see a long arm in a frayed sleeve, with crooked fingers playing against the glass. They’re drumming a rhythm. Something… awful. It’s noise masquerading as song.”

“Then I hear her again. I see you, she says in a gravely, guttural voice. The tapping gets faster. Heavier. I pull away from the window, from the door, and fall back into the shadows of the cabin. She must be twelve feet tall because her head cranes down into the window frame, all the way from the top of it. Her eyes are gleaming in the moonlight, darting around and swiveling again in ways they shouldn’t be able to. She’s searching again. For something— me maybe. I don’t know.”

The man finishes his cigarette and slips a fresh one out of the pack. He lights it, trembling, and sucks in on the nicotine. His expression softens. “Then she’s gone,” he says.

“Gone?” I ask, disappointed. “Again?” There’s nothing in the Jagged Janice mythology that indicates her vanishing and reappearing at regular intervals.

“Gone,” he confirms. “I’m alone. Time passes. Minutes, maybe hours. I don’t know. I just sit there in the living room, my ears and eyes straining for any sound, any movement, anything at all. I’m shaking and breathing in short bursts, terrified if I breathe too heavily she’ll hear me. I wonder to myself how long it's been. How long there’s still to go until the sun rises, and somebody wakes up and comes to check on me or use the washroom. I think about using my phone to check the time, but the idea of its blacklight giving me away terrifies me, so I don’t. I just sit there and wait.”

“How long do you wait? Until morning?”

He laughs. Takes another drag. “Fuck no,” he says. “It takes a while, but eventually I get calmer, or maybe too scared to keep sitting there doing nothing. Maybe I just need to reassure myself that this nightmare has an ending. I don’t know.” He gnaws at his fingernail. “I’m fucking quivering as I pull my phone outta my pocket. Shaking like a leaf. I turn it on, and my home screen lights up my face like I’m about to tell a campfire story.”

“What time is it?”

“3:34 a.m. Two hours from sunrise, at that time of year.” The man sighs, running a hand along his jaw. “It’s too long for me. I can’t do it, you know? I decide I need to do something now before that woman comes back because I have this horrible feeling that the next time she shows up she’s going to be inside the cabin. She’s going to find me. So I tell myself to make a run for it. Wake up my friends. It’s easy, I think. I’ll open my mouth and fucking scream my lungs out, and that way even if she gets in my way then at least everybody on the island will wake up, and maybe I’ll get out of there in one piece. So I do it, I open my mouth and I scream.

“But nothing happens,” he says quietly. His expression darkens. Tears slip from the corners of his eyes, and his lip trembles all over again. “No sound comes out. Instead, a hand that’s long and crooked wraps itself around my mouth. It pulls my head back, and I smell rot and decay and seaweed, and a voice whispers in my ear like a lawn mower. I see you.”

Janice. I lean forward, gazing at him expectantly. “How did you get away?”

He wipes at his eyes, choking back the last of his sobs. “No idea. I blacked out. When I woke up I wasn’t in the cabin anymore, I was in a hospital bed surrounded by my friends.”

“Same ones from the cabin?”

“That’s right.”

I check a box on my form labeled SURVIVOR. Then I chew on the back of my pen for a second before checking a second box: POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS AFFECTED.

“And what do these friends say? Anything useful?”

“They tell me it’s all their fault,” he says. “Em mumbles about how we should never have come out to the cabin in the first place. Steve and Haily are blaming themselves for letting me get exceptionally drunk.” He cracks a bittersweet smile. “Everybody wants a share of the guilt.”

My eyes drift down to the man’s file. “You said the island was remote. I’ll assume the hospital wasn’t local to it?”

“No,” he says. “It was off the island. An hour or so inland. I must have been out for a day at least though, because I don’t remember ever travelling there.”

“Interesting.” A recurring aspect of the Janice mythology is a sense of mild amnesia and the presence of minor to severe bite wounds. “What did the hospital treat you for?”

He clears his throat. “A mild concussion. And water in my lungs.”

“Water in your lungs?” I shake my head, dropping my pencil. Perhaps I should be happy the young man survived whatever terror visited him that night, but so many pieces of his story don’t match the mythology at all. “You’re certain? Water in your lungs?”

“That’s right,” he says. “The doctors didn’t understand it either. I never even got a chance to take a dip in the ocean, let alone drown in it.”

“Okay, let me get this straight. So your friends pop by, leave you some get-well cards and you get discharged a couple of days later.” I lean back in my chair, folding my arms. “Does that about sum things up?”

The man looks away, rubbing his arm. “Not exactly,” he says darkly. “Before they leave, I tell them about the smiling woman. I ask them if they’ve seen a tall woman with razor sharp teeth lurking around the island. Steve and Hailey look at eachother like I must have hit my head harder than anybody thought. The look in their eyes… It's like they’re terrified I’ve given myself brain damage. Steve squeezes my arm and apologizes over and over for doing shots with me. Says he should’ve gone easy for the first night. Hailey agrees. Says I drove them all the way out there, so they should have let me get some sleep.”

“And your other friend?” I ask. “Emily?”

“She’s standing back. Staring at me, and her eyes are filled with… I don’t know. Regret? But it’s different from Steve and Hailey. She doesn’t look like she feels sorry for me. She looks like she really blames herself for all of this. I say her name, Emily. Ask her if she’s seen the woman because I get the sense that she has.”

I slide my pen down my clipboard and circle a word that says WITNESS before annotating it with a small question mark. “How does she respond?”

“She leaves,” he says with a sigh. “I don’t think she wants to talk about the woman— at least, not in front of Hailey and Steve. Pretty soon everybody leaves. It’s just me again, in some tiny hospital on the outskirts of nowhere. The only company I’ve got is the apple tree outside my window and the shitty TV. I sleep pretty uneasily that night. Tossing and turning. I wake up at one point to the sound of tapping, and I stare out my window horrified, expecting to see that woman again, but it’s just the apple tree. It’s branches are brushing against the glass.

“I wonder to myself if this is just my life from now on. If everytime I hear the faintest sound at night, I’m going to wake up in cold sweats thinking that woman’s come back for me. Then the door creaks open. My body goes into full-blown panic, my breath hitches in my chest, my muscles tighten, and it’s like that night all over again, with the smiling woman where I can’t move an inch for fear.

“But it’s just Emily,” he says, chuckling in disbelief. “She pauses in the doorway and asks me if she can come in. I tell her that of course she can, and she does, not bothering to turn on the lights. When she gets to my bedside, I can see her face more clearly by the light of the window. She looks rough. Her eyes have these heavy bags, and her cheeks are all red and splotchy from crying. She’s wiping snot on her sleeve and telling me sorry, over and over.”

“Sorry for what? Inviting you out to the cabin?” I say, doing my best not to roll my eyes. I’ve never seen a group of friends with such a guilty conscience.

“No,” the man says. “She says she’s sorry for not warning me about the woman. She says she thought the woman was gone, otherwise she’d never have come back to that place.”

“What?” I snap forward, eyes latching onto his. “She told you she knew about the woman?”

He nods. “She said the circumstances of her brother’s death were different than she’d originally told us. He didn’t drown— not accidentally. He was murdered. A woman attacked them on the beach, a woman with a terrible smile and this tangle of black, messy hair that covered her face. She dragged Em’s brother backward through the sand, muffling his screams with her hand, and then held him under the surf. She kept him there until he stopped moving. Then, she let the tide take him away.”

“Disturbing,” I say. “And she never brought this up to her parents?”

"She did. Her father told her it was just her imagination. He said that her brother had fallen into the ocean and gotten swept away, and it was already hard enough to deal with without Emily adding to it. So Emily just buried the memory. Moved on."

The man looks up at me, his expression despondent. “That’s when we hear it,” he says. "In the hospital room. A tapping. Tap. Tap. Tap. It comes from the window to my right, the one with the old apple tree.”

“The woman?”

“I don’t look. I tell Emily not to look either. I tell her to focus on me, to ignore the sound. I don’t know what she saw as a little girl, down by the ocean, but I know I don’t want her to see what I saw in that cabin." He shudders. "I don’t want her to see that smile."

“Does she listen to you?”

He grips a fistful of his hair, closes his eyes. “No,” he says quietly. “She looks, and when she does, she screams. She screams so loudly that the lights come on down the hall, and Inurse bursts in and pulls Emily away, calls a patrol car the night nurse call out and start running. Emily rushes toward the window, I catch sight of it from the corner of my eye because I still refuse to look at that pane of glass, but I hear Emily beating against it with her fists. Clawing at it with her nails. Then the her to drive her home.”

The man takes a breath. He puts his face in his hands and rubs his eyes. “I text her an hour later. Just to make sure that she’s okay and—”

“—Yes,” I say, cutting him off. I glance at the folder on my desk labeled CORRESPONDENCE, then down at the watch on my wrist. It’s three in the morning, and I’m jet-lagged. The meat of the man’s story appears to have run its course. “If the texts are everything that’s left then I can read them on my own.” I rise from the desk and offer my hand to shake. He gives it a weak, reluctant squeeze, avoiding my eyes. Then he leaves the room without another word.

I sigh, sitting back down in the steel chair. Another long day. Another dead end. I adjust my glasses and pull out the text logs. There’s only a handful of message receipts. The chance is slim, but the possibility that there’s something in there about Jagged Janice entices me too much to set them aside for tomorrow.

I begin to read.

As I do, I make note of the timestamps. Words do a good job of painting a picture, but time and location lend context to everything.

01:34 Dorian: are you okay?

02:12 Emily: Not really

02:12 Dorian: did you see her?

02:45 Dorian: em, im sorry. that was a stupid text

02:45 Emily: It's fine.

02:46 Dorian: im guessing you dont feel like talking

02:46 Emily: Actually, it might be good for me

02:47 Dorian: yeah? okay. me too

02:47 Dorian: i never got a chance to tell you earlier, but i cant imagine how horrible it must have felt to see what happened to your brother and have your dad not believe you?? thats fucked

02:55 Emily: It's fine. We were never close anyway.

02:55 Dorian: sorry to hear. did you ever tell your mom? I mean, before she passed?

02:56 Emily: No. Mom was already dying by then and dad would've killed me

02:56 Dorian: fuck. im an asshole. how could I forget something like that? sorry agajn

02:57 Emily: You're not an asshole. You're right that I would have told her about Jonas if I could have

02:59 Emily: By then she was so hopped up on painkillers though that I hardly even recognized her

03:00 Dorian: the meds must have been pretty heavy. thats a lot to deal with for a four year old kid.

03:01 Emily: Yeah, her esophageal cancer was bad. She was in a lot of pain near the end and rarely in a good mood. Pretty sure dad was having an affair at the time too. Fuckin prick

03:01 Dorian: im sorry. thats a shitty memory to bring up

03:03 Emily: Dont be. I think I repressed a lot of old memories of her which probably isnt healthy

03:05 Emily: Honesrly, if it wasn't for you, I'd probably think I was going crazy right now

03:05 Dorian: why?

03:06 Emily: I saw her too.

03:06 Dorian: the smiling woman?

03:07 Dorian: em?

03:34 Emily: My mother

03:34 Emily: I see my mother

I stare at the last word in stunned silence. Her mother? Could she actually have been the origin of the legend? I rub a hand along my jaw, considering what I've heard of Emily's history. She had only been four years old at the time of her brother's death when she had witnessed a crazed woman drag him into the sea, a woman who she couldn’t identify because black hair obscured her face.

Could that woman have been her own mother? It doesn’t seem terribly likely. But it doesn’t seem impossible either. Children often reframe moments of terror in a bid to understand the incomprehensible.

I reach for my briefcase, unclasping the latches on the front and pulling out my laptop. I take a breath and then open up the database software. Emily’s easy enough to find. Her last name is plastered everywhere across her social media, so I plug that in. The search function isn't the fastest, but it does the trick. It takes thirty seconds for the tiny, rotating hourglass to stop spinning, and when it does I see her.

SUBJECT: EMILY KALDWELL

FATHER: HARLOD KALDWELL

MOTHER: JANICE KALDWELL [DECEASED]

I swallow, my hands shaking on the keyboard.

Had I finally found Jagged Janice? I pour myself a glass of water, finishing it in two giant swigs. It does little to calm my nerves. Still, it's one piece of the puzzle solved, but really it just creates more questions. It doesn’t explain several aspects of the man’s story. The water in the lungs, for instance. Or the vanishing. Certain pieces of his encounter don’t add up, at least not compared against the original legend.

There’s a knock on the door.

Three sharp raps with a knuckle. I get up to answer it, thinking maybe the man’s forgotten his phone or wants to give me back my pack of smokes. When I open the door though, there’s nobody.

I raise an eyebrow and head back to my laptop. I need to discover the source for these changes, these departures from the Jagged Janice mythology. This time I bring up my web browser, navigating to one of my preferred resources on urban legends. The website's a bit corny, but it's proven accurate, and its community aspect has been invaluable in my research.

After some scrolling, I bring up the Jagged Janice article. People can leave anecdotal encounters beneath the main text, and sometimes they do. Usually, they’re all bullshit.

One of them catches my eye, however. It mentions seeing the serrated smile, the tapping fingers, and… that they found their infant child dead with water in its lungs. I shake my head. A coincidence, that’s all. I keep scrolling. More keywords jump out at me.

“... there and then gone.”

“... voice like a meat grinder.”

“... to the sea with you.”

I pause. Those were the words Emily said, words she remembered when she witnessed her brother being pulled into the ocean. To the sea with you. My mind spins, but a picture is forming. The guttural, difficult to understand voice. The drowned brother. The words.

“I see you.”

No. She was never saying those words, not really. She was saying to the sea with you. The man misheard, or perhaps he couldn’t properly understand because of Janice’s damaged voice. In his panic he likely defaulted to the simplest sounding phrase.

My heart races, I reach for my phone to make a call, to tell my boss what I’ve found. It wasn’t long ago the Facility had an incident with a Man with a Red Notepad, one in which we learned the core principle of all legends and one which cost many people their lives: that legends evolve.

If the Jagged Janice legend has evolved, we need to allocate additional resources to locating it and neutralizing it. I continue to scroll, noticing many of the anecdotes have been posted in the last week. Several, in the last few days. If even half of them are true, it'd imply highly increased activity on Janice's part.

I hear another knock at the door—three soft raps. I curse, kicking off from my desk and storming to the door, phone still pressed to my face waiting for my boss to pick up. Once more, I swing it open, and once more, I look down a cold, empty hallway.

I slam the door shut and stalk back to the table. My phone continues to ring, and my boss continues to ignore my call. It's really not like her, but I tell myself to relax. She's probably sleeping. According to my watch, it’s late as hell— 3:34 in the morning to be precise. That makes me an asshole, maybe, but this discovery is too big, too dangerous to ignore. Janice is out there, and she’s on the move.

Three more knocks ring out. These are softer than before. More gentle.

Almost taps.

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