Three legs, no welcome, wrong shape. No thank you.
They called me the Enfield Horror.
Hell of a nickname.
Sounds like a punk band that never sold a single record but still haunts the jukebox in a bar that burned down before you were born.
I don’t correct them.
Names are for people who fit into systems—phones, payrolls, gravestones. I’m not in your system. I’m the burn in your tape. The blur in the corner of your Polaroid that shouldn’t be there—but always is.
You don’t see me. You remember me.
I move like a whisper with a limp. Like a jazz note in the wrong key that still makes the whole thing sound right. I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to remind you that you never really understood what was lurking behind all that asphalt and indoor lighting.
I pass through your town—not out of hunger, not even out of curiosity.
Call it instinct. Call it a rhythm I’m wired to.
I don’t knock. I don’t howl.
I just am.
And when I move, birds pause. Not out of fear. Out of respect.
They remember what you’ve forgotten.
I’ve seen your kind build towers and forget why they were afraid of the woods.
I watched you pave over the bones of things older than your gods.
And then cry out when something with no name steps out of the brush and doesn’t blink.
But me?
I don’t judge. I’m not here to preach.
I’m the pause between your thoughts.
The stutter in your story.
The proof that some patterns don’t want to be completed.
It begins as a whisper in the dark, a presence felt rather than seen. The air carries a strange stillness, a chill that settles deep in the bones, a pressure just beyond perception. It is the kind of cold that doesn’t sting or bite but lingers, seeping inward, pressing against the ribs with invisible weight. At first, there is no reason to question it. The world is full of silences, full of moments where the mind wanders and the body tightens without explanation.
Then comes the hesitation. A pause where there was once certainty. A second thought where there should have been action. A feeling, quiet and nagging, that something isn’t quite right. The cold deepens, not in temperature, but in its presence—it is not simply felt but known. The pulse slows. The air thickens. The moment stretches.
A small pressure builds in the chest. A shallow breath that wasn’t there before. The thought takes root: something is wrong. The mind circles it, first as a passing worry, then as an undeniable fixation. The body reacts before the mind can rationalize it—shoulders tense, the hands grow clammy, the throat tightens just slightly.
It is a slow creep, a trick of sensation, a delicate pull on unseen strings. The pulse flutters, then accelerates, like a drumbeat just slightly out of rhythm. There is no clear danger, no tangible force at play, but the world itself begins to shift. Shadows stretch a little too long. Sounds linger a moment past their source. The ordinary loses its shape.
Then the grip tightens.
The moment that was once hesitation becomes something else—a rush of heat, a prickle along the spine, a pounding in the ears. The body prepares for something it cannot name, for something it does not understand. What was a whisper is now a murmur, a sound beneath the threshold of hearing that somehow speaks in meaning rather than words.
It sees you.
That thought arrives unbidden. The world shudders at the edge of awareness. The pulse is no longer uncertain—it is hammering now, each beat slamming against the ribs, demanding movement, demanding release. The breath catches, the muscles coil, the skin tingles with static. There is nowhere to run, and yet the urge is there, primal, insistent.
Then, the break.
The heart surges. The body ignites. The hesitation is gone, replaced by something sharper, something faster. The air no longer carries weight—it crackles, charged with urgency. The cold is obliterated in a rush of heat, of movement, of sheer velocity. The mind doesn’t think anymore—it reacts.
What was once a whisper has become a roar.
The fire spreads, consuming hesitation, devouring every weakness in its path. The world bends to it, twists under its force. Fear is no longer a whispering force in the dark—it is a tidal wave, an inferno, a storm tearing through the void. And just when it feels as if the mind cannot take another second, just when it reaches the precipice of losing itself entirely—
It stops.
The silence returns, but it is no longer the stillness of hesitation. It is something else entirely.
The world is bright. The body, still tense from the surge, now holds something different—something solid, something unshakable. There is no fear anymore, no lingering cold, no whispering doubts. The fire has burned away everything but what is real. What is left is not something hunted, not something chased.
Rise in the hour where shadows grow thin, Where the light stumbles drunken, unsteady with sin, And the breath of the house, thick with its ghosts, Swirls in the lungs of the living, its hosts.
The doors groan awake, their hinges alive, Each creak a confession, each whisper contrived. The floors swell and buckle, drunk on despair, Carrying feet that move nowhere, nowhere.
At the long gray table, a carnival of dread, Where laughter shivers, where hunger is fed. Plates hold their secrets, mute and profound, Forks strike their rhythm, but never a sound.
The gardens outside—if gardens they are—Are fenced with the ribcage of some dying star. The trees are frozen in screams of green, While the wind gnaws the air, rabid and keen.
In the midmorning haze, they march us to prayer, Kneeling in pews that don’t take our weight, And the hymn of the broken, with voices undone, Rises to rafters that swallow the sun.
Afternoon sways in its lunatic tide, With a shuffle of hands and dreams misapplied. Paintbrushes falter on canvases torn, Where visions are birthed, but stillborn, stillborn.
Then comes the night, the hallowed despair, Where pills are handed like sacrament there. One for the silence, one for the screams, One to deny the betrayal of dreams.
The walls hum their madness, their cobwebbed tune, While the moon hangs limp like a punctured balloon. And the voices—oh, the voices—they rise, they fall, A choir of sorrow echoing all.
Sleep is a rumor, a gambler’s deceit, A shadowy promise that falters, retreats. The bed becomes prison, the pillow a stone, And you lie there unburied, yet utterly alone.
And so, the wheel turns, the cycle restarts, A parade of the damned with clockwork hearts. But the house breathes on, devouring the years, Feeding its belly with whispers and tears.
Oh, to tear through the dawn like a thief in the sun, To break this mad orbit, to end what’s begun, But the house is a labyrinth, a trap sprung deep, And its strange routine is the price of sleep.
