Night Hag

The box arrived bruised and battered, bound in twine. Ethan found it propped against his apartment door like a little orphan, his name and address in jagged script. His brother’s handwriting. Of course... he kicked the door shut behind him, the package tucked under his arm. Six months since Brian had vanished into Morocco’s sun-bleached alleys. Six months of radio silence, broken eventually by a deranged fucking set of emails and WhatsApp messages about desert d-ja-jinn, stolen artifacts, and arguments with 'bribed officials'. Like, what the actual fuck was he doing out there? Ethan had stopped reading after the third one. He ripped the twine with his teeth. Inside, nestled in a worn Arabic newspaper, was a stone. He was hit by a painfully thick smell that nearly made him toss the thing in the sink. It took a moment to process, it absorbed the light rather than reflect it. It was pocked with tiny, fractal grooves. Smaller than his palm, heavier than it should’ve been. At the b...