Life is a long, boring, and winding road—just like the narrow, sprawling, and noisy street in front of him. That was what Samuel Calloway always thought.
He left the house every day with his backpack over one shoulder, earphones in, blasting his favorite music from his phone, glasses sitting just right on his face.
Along the way, he'd grab some junk for breakfast at a little convenience store and keep walking toward the university, where nothing but a long stretch of droning voices and the fake smiles of people he'd rather not look at were waiting for him.
You could hear him sighing constantly—his boredom seemed like some kind of aura that followed him everywhere. Though if you asked him, he wouldn't describe himself as a boring person.
His social life was reasonably normal. He had a few friends who helped him out from time to time. He also did well with women—he'd dated three girls over the past few years. So he was a lucky guy with a "boring" life.
There was a time he went to a shooting range with a relative to kill that boredom, putting rounds through targets with a revolver. He was actually pretty good, if he was being honest—but eventually he quit.
That was what happened when you had too much of anything. You got tired of it over time. Samuel got tired of the shooting range, of his peaceful life, of the noise of the city—but he couldn't do anything to change it, because when it came to that sort of thing, ironically, he was just a boring guy.
Buried under all that existential exhaustion, Samuel made it to the university.
It was a fairly large and sprawling building for a public institution, but it was without a doubt the best in the city. That was something to be proud of—but once again, boredom got the better of Samuel.
He moved through the halls. Students passed him on either side, but all he saw were dull, blurry faces not worth remembering.
When he reached his classroom—a wide lecture hall with rows of seats arranged on a stepped platform that rose about six feet from the ground—he sat down right in the middle of it all.
Almost immediately, like an NPC in a video game spawning out of nowhere, someone appeared and gave him a light tap on the shoulder.
"You look as rough as always, Sam. You so bored of being chased by girls that you're trying to scare them off with that poker face?"
That easygoing voice belonged to Joshua. Not especially good-looking, but not ugly either. If Samuel had to put a description into words, he'd say the guy was just a pleasant, brown-haired dude with a slim build.
"I just got here and you're already being loud. Why don't you sew your mouth shut and leave me alone?" said Samuel without even glancing at him.
Joshua laughed at that.
"Don't be so harsh, man. We're friends—best friends."
Samuel exhaled, drained. He looked at Joshua like he wanted to strangle him, but shook his head instead.
"Just sit down. Class is about to start and I don't want the distraction."
"Yeah, yeah. Relax, Mr. Serious."
Joshua took the seat next to Samuel and both of them went quiet, staring at the front. But just when it seemed like silence was about to win the moment, someone sat down on Samuel's other side and gave him a small punch on the arm.
It was Rosie—an old friend who'd been putting up with these two knuckleheads for years.
She was very pretty: black hair, silver eyes, a nice smile.
"Morning, Sam. You look terrible," she said as she set her backpack on the desk.
"I didn't sleep well last night," Samuel answered, worn out. "Had to write my whole report by myself. Would've used AI to get through it, but that damn professor seems to have a nose for that kind of thing. Didn't want to risk it."
"You give her nice answers and me—your best friend, your ride-or-die—nothing?" Joshua muttered. "I'm pretty sure you only treat women decently. You… you virgin-slayer!"
"Okay, that insult went too far," Samuel said.
Rosie laughed at both of them.
"Oh my God, you two—you sound like my parents. Stop bickering like an old married couple and keep your voices down. Do you not see that the professor's already here?"
At the front of the room sat a gray-haired old man. His wrinkled face made no effort to hide his irritation at watching this pair of misfits going at it.
Samuel sighed. Joshua straightened in his chair.
Class began.
Every now and then, Joshua would make a ridiculous face to drag Samuel out of his boredom, and Rosie would cover her mouth so the professor wouldn't catch her laughing.
The day went by without any trouble.
It was late now, the sky painted over in countless shades of deep crimson, announcing the night creeping in across the horizon.
Joshua and Rosie were packing their things away—they'd taken their eyes off Samuel for one second, and the bastard had already vanished.
"Samuel? …This idiot left without us," Joshua said with an exaggerated mock outrage.
"Let him go. That's just how he is. He spends most of his time alone. Probably why he's always so bored," said Rosie, glancing toward the door like she'd been waiting for her own excuse to go catch up with him anyway.
As for Samuel, he was already heading home along the sidewalk. Hands in his pockets, earphones in, volume maxed out. The heavy metal was loud enough to hear from a few feet away.
His eyes drifted across the tall buildings, their surfaces catching the last of the evening light—making the whole thing feel almost peaceful, just for a moment.
He walked past a mirror being carried down the street by two men crossing the sidewalk.
For a second, he caught his own reflection: pale skin, black hair, black eyes, a face that never bothered with strong expressions, wearing the most generic clothes anyone could buy at a discount store.
That was him. A boring person.
He sighed at his very NPC-looking reflection—but before he could cross the street, a white van pulled up right in front of him.
The door swung open, and Samuel was suddenly yanked inside while someone pressed a rag over his mouth to keep him from screaming.
Whatever was on that rag must have been something strong, because Samuel passed out almost immediately.
His entire field of vision went dark.
It felt like floating in the middle of outer space.
He could hear voices whispering in the distance and the muffled bumps of the van rolling over the road.
He felt sudden jolts—and then everything stopped.
Samuel opened his eyes. The glow of candles surrounding a large circular stone altar—stained with blood—lit up the inside of a vast, dark hall draped in red cloth.
A dead goat, its abdomen split open, lay in front of the altar.
'Where am I? What is this?' Samuel wondered as he realized his wrists and ankles were bound to the stone, leaving him spread out like a turkey ready for the oven.
Standing before him were four people in red robes, the hems embroidered with a row of sharp teeth that ran from the hood all the way down to the waist—making each of them look like some kind of creature with a mouth that opened along the entire length of their body.
They were praying in a strange language, and they were crying.
The candle flames trembled with each word, and thousands of ethereal whispers began to fill the room.
Panicked by the sheer strangeness of it all, Samuel tried to scream—but every part of his body was numb and he could barely move.
He pushed with everything he had, and what came out of his throat sounded like the moan of someone who'd lost their voice entirely.
Then, all at once, the candles went out. Silence swallowed the scene.
The robed figures waited, tense—and then a spectral whisper tore through the room from every direction at once, as if the sound were drilling straight through Samuel's skull with a thundering reverb.
A pair of mysterious eyes opened in the darkness: white, with slit pupils like a cat's.
The voices of the cultists—if that's even what they were—turned surprised, almost excited at the presence of that shadowy entity. But every single voice cut off at once when an invisible force crushed them, leaving nothing but a pool of blood on the floor.
Samuel heard all of it, and the fear that hit him was unlike anything he'd ever felt. He thrashed against the altar with everything he had—but he couldn't break free in time. When he looked at that thing in the darkness, his mind shut off alongside the grotesque sound of blood hitting the stone—not his blood, but the blood of those people, raining down over him.
Those eyes vanished the moment the blood made contact with his body. He floated in the darkness as everything went still.
Silence…
None of what was happening made any sense. Like—was he dead? Or worse, was he at a Muse concert?
There was no real answer for that.
But then a voice spoke to him. Almost certainly the voice of that demonic entity.
"This is how it has to be…" it whispered.
Its voice was a blend of hundreds of voices layered into one.
"This is how it has to be, isn't it?" it said, followed by a short laugh.
A soft breeze moved through the edges of Samuel's formless, ethereal body.
"This is how it is… Samuel Calloway… Bonnie Jones…"
That breeze became a tornado, hurling Samuel through the blackness.
Then came a hard impact against an invisible wall—and it slammed him back into reality.
He opened his eyes. A stone ceiling stared back at him.
Aching, confused, and terrified, he sat up and pressed a hand to his head—but noticed that his hand was smaller than it should be. In fact, it was a delicate, feminine hand.
Unnerved, he looked down… two soft, small hills hidden beneath a yellow dress soaked in blood.
Samuel touched his face.
It wasn't his face.
Desperate, he climbed off the altar. A few candles still burned, but there was blood everywhere—spread across the floor in every direction. And there, reflected in that blood, was the figure of a beautiful girl from the Old West.
Her name was Bonnie Jones…