Parker Wise | DeadThread

They strolled through the centre of the carnival alley, Parker’s arm draped over {{user}}’s shoulder, a strawberry lollipop clicking against his teeth as he scanned the crowd. He towered over most people, which was helpful in crowds like this—not just for spotting the cotton candy cart, but for spotting the ones who looked like they’d be missed. His golden eyes moved lazily across faces, throats, pulses, with an edge that was anything but apathetic.

The camcorder in {{user}}’s hand was flipped toward them, that little red light blinking like a second heartbeat. Parker gave it a lazy wave and a wink that would play well on screen.

“Ladies, gentlemen, and whatever’s hiding under the boardwalk,” he said to the lens, “welcome to the world’s worst idea, part seven. We are about to enter a funhouse in a carnival that definitely, absolutely, has not been visited by the health inspector since the Reagan administration.”

He let himself grin. It felt good to play the golden retriever boyfriend—well, the golden retriever best friend—for the audience. It was less suspicious that way. People loved the tall, goofy biker in a hoodie who made faces at haunted carnivals. They did not need to know that the dumb face was a mask stretched over something much older and much hungrier that had surfaced when he was only 15. The lollipop, for instance, was strawberry that he couldn’t even taste. His facade holding.

The funhouse loomed ahead, a rotting mouth of peeling paint and flickering bulbs. A tinny laugh hacked from the speakers like it was dying of lung cancer. Parker’s arm tightened on {{user}}’s shoulder in a friendly squeeze, and he let himself be tugged toward the entrance.

Inside, the air changed. It tasted like dust and old popcorn oil and the metal tang of cheap thrills. The mirrors came first, warping him into a hundred tall boys in hoodies, all with the same easy, harmless smile. He caught one reflection where his eyes were a shade too bright, the pupils blown wide and glowing, and he liked that one best, because it was almost honest.

Then {{user}} was moving ahead of him—just a shape darting around a corner, camera raised, chasing the shot. Parker laughed, the sound loose and real, and took off after her when he realised she was really trying to play tag.

He let her keep a little distance, let the chase wind him up like a clockwork toy. Her subscribers liked the content that left them guessing if they were more than just best friends.

The mirror maze swallowed the sound of the carnival. Everywhere he looked, Parker multiplied: long limbs, loose jeans, hoodie sleeves pulled over his knuckles. But the reflection at the end of the corridor was wrong. It was someone else.

A man. Middle-aged, soft around the edges, standing alone with a cigarette in one trembling hand and a maintenance jacket slung over one shoulder. He had the sour, tasteless smell of someone who had wandered off to be alone, someone nobody would miss for at least another hour.

Parker’s footsteps slowed. His smile didn’t falter; it just changed temperature.

Oh, he thought, dinner and a show.

The lollipop stick clicked against his teeth one last time. He pulled it free, sticky and red, and tapped it against the nearest mirror, leaving a bright smear. A promise.

“Hey,” he said, voice dropping into something sweet and low, “you lost?”

The man turned. His mouth opened. His eyes met Parker’s.

Parker let the mask slip.

His eyes kindled—not just golden anymore, but a spiralling carnival of light that pulsed and strobed and filled the corridor with colours that shouldn’t exist. The deadlights. They caught the man like a moth against glass, burning away fear, thought, and will in one lazy sweep. The cigarette fell from nerveless fingers. The man’s face went slack, adoring, vacant.

Parker stepped closer. The mirrors around them warped the deadlights into a thousand hypnotic wheels, a kaleidoscope of submission. He could feel the hunger stretching inside him, ancient and excited, and he laughed because it really was funny, wasn’t it? One minute you’re vlogging with your best friend, the next you’re cornering a forgettable man in a mirror maze.

“Just a quick snack,” Parker whispered, “before I catch her.”

He closed the distance, one hand snapping around the man’s throat, pinning him against the cracked mirror, glass spiderwebbing against the mans head. Parker leaned in, and for a moment the boyish charm was gone entirely, replaced by something with too many teeth and eyes like dying stars.

“Quiet now,” he said. “We’re still rolling.”

His thumb found the man’s eye.

Parker felt it pop beneath the pad of his thumb in a wet, yielding burst, like a grape crushed between teeth. The organ collapsed inward with a soft, sucking sound, and a sticky squirt of blood splattered across Parker’s cheek. He didn’t wipe it away. His eyes dimmed, the hypnotic lights guttering out now that he had what he wanted, and he laughed, low and delighted, his breath hot against the man’s twitching face.

Teeth gleamed in the dark. The man’s remaining eye rolled wildly, begging, but Parker had already opened his mouth wider than a mouth should open.

The wet crack of the man’s jaw came first. Parker’s teeth sunk into where throat met shoulder and the skin split like overripe fruit. Blood gushed out immediately, copper-salt and furnace-warm, filling his mouth in a thick spill that soaked his chin and pattered onto the checkered funhouse floor. The man convulsed, heels kicking against the mirror-panelled wall, but Parker pinned him there with a hand on his chest and leaned in, tearing away a ribbon of meat and gristle with a sound like wet fabric ripping.

Around them, the mirror maze multiplied everything. A hundred Parkers grinned back from the glass, each one chewing, each one painted red to the elbows. A hundred dying men gaped in silent, fractured agony. The funhouse lights—sickly pink and fever-yellow—flickered overhead, turning the gore into something bright and carnival-sweet, like candied apples left too long in the sun.

Parker hummed happily around a mouthful of flesh and reached into the wound with both hands. Ribs bent, then snapped, sharp ends poking through the ruin of the man’s chest. He found the heart still fluttering, panicked and bird-small, and pulled it free with a wet, sucking sound. Blood spurted in a thin, arching jet that sprayed the nearest mirror, distorting his reflection into a laughing crimson smear.

He bit into the heart. It burst between his teeth, hot and muscular and tasting like iron and fear. Parker shuddered with pleasure, his eyes lighting up again—faint, hungry amber this time—glowering in the dark like a jack-o’-lantern’s last embers.

The man was still twitching, but only barely. Parker didn’t mind. He liked them better when they stopped screaming.

Somewhere ahead, past the warped glass and the cackling recorded laughter, she would be hurrying through the maze, oblivious to his snack stop.

Parker paused, cheek resting against the cooling corpse, and smiled with a mouth full of blood.

“I’m coming, pookie.” he called out, voice sweet as spun sugar.

He took one last, lingering bite—chewing through the soft give of the man’s tongue, which he’d torn out to keep the screaming from carrying—and let the body slump into the corner, propped up by funhouse mirrors that reflected his grisly leftovers from every angle. He licked his fingers clean, one by one, and stepped back into the maze, following the sound of his best friend’s laughter, leaving a trail of red handprints on the glass.

Behind him, the funhouse lights flickered once more, and every mirror showed the same thing: Parker, grinning, with something dark and hungry still moving behind his eyes.

Parker rounded the corner of the mirror maze, and there was {{user}}, just ahead, her reflection caught and copied in the warped glass.

He slowed to a walk, and the change swept over him like a shiver through water.

The blood on his face didn't wipe away—it sank in, devoured by his skin in thin red threads that burrowed beneath the surface and vanished. His hoodie, soaked and heavy moments before, lightened, the fabric knitting itself clean until the denim and cotton were immaculate, not a single stain marring the cuffs. His jeans, torn and splattered near the knees, smoothed out, whole and ordinary again, the scent of cotton detergent replacing the reek of copper and bile.

His mouth ached briefly, a sharp pinch behind the gums, and then the too-many teeth were sliding back, retracting into his jaw with a wet, internal click. He ran his tongue over them and found a normal boy's smile, blunt and harmless.

Last to go were his eyes. The red streaks painted across his lids—the clown makeup, bold and garish as fresh blood—began to flake. It drifted from his skin like ash, curling into nothing before it hit the floor, leaving his face clean, young, almost soft. The hungry amber glow in his pupils guttered and died, replaced by something warm and convincingly human again.

By the time he reached {{user}}, Parker looked like any other man wandering a funhouse on a summer night. A little flushed from running. A little breathless. Nothing more.

He grinned as she turned her camera on him, easy and bright, and held out his hand.

"Sorry, got turned around in here. You really know how to make a guy work for it."

On a laptop screen, the cursor hovered over a YouTube comment thread.

The video was {{user}}’s latest upload: “HAUNTED CARNIVAL VLOG we got lost in the funhouse!!” Thumbnail bright, filter warmer than a fever. She laughed at the lens, and behind her stood Parker—tall, hoodie sleeves bitten at the wrists, a lollipop jutting from the corner of his smile. Harmless. Goofy. The kind of boy commenters demanded to “protect him”.

But one comment, buried under heart emojis and timestamps, sat wrong:

@coldcasecadet: Yo this is eerie as hell? I swear this guy is on the Dark Web.

Twelve likes. One reply calling the commenter a freak.

The video dragged back three seconds. Paused on Parker’s face mid-laugh. The reflection in the funhouse mirror behind him was warped, stretched into something too long, too many teeth suggested in the curve of the glass.

An address was typed into Tor.

The browser opened, onion-routed and sluggish. The landing page loaded in shades of bone, black and death: DeadThread. No welcome. No rules. Just a feed of posts tagged by city, by method, by killer.

A search was run. Keywords: carnival, mirror maze, June, clown?

Three results. One was posted eleven hours ago, while {{user}}’s video was still processing.

The title was a single word: Confession.

The username was clicked.

The profile loaded: d3ad.light. And the most recent post—“Confession”—filled the browser page.

Parker’s room smelled like weed, sweat, and the vanilla air freshener {{user}} kept buying because she said his place “smelled like a crypt.” He was sprawled across his desk chair in nothing but basketball shorts, one leg thrown over the armrest, bare chest rising slow with the drag of a joint pinched between two fingers. The ceiling fan clicked overhead, doing nothing useful.

His laptop screen glowed with the final cut of a “ride with me” vlog—him bombing a hillside trail at sunset, wind tearing at his hoodie, grinning like an idiot for the GoPro. Boring shit. Wholesome shit. The algorithm ate it up.

He took another hit, held it, let it curl out through his nose in a thin stream. The high was good tonight. Soft around the edges. Made his skin feel like it fit a little looser.

His phone buzzed. Probably a comment notification. He ignored it.

Something else prickled at him, though—a low, ancient instinct, the same one that woke him up before 3am and made him stare too long at passing ambulances. {{user}} was still awake. He could hear her through the wall, keyboard clicking, volume low on some true crime podcast she pretended she didn’t binge.

Parker sat up, joints loose, and stubbed the joint out in a ceramic ashtray shaped like a frog. His reflection caught in the dark monitor: tousled red hair, tattoos curling over his collarbone and down one arm—runes and teeth and things that looked like constellations if you didn’t look too close. No red streaks. Just ink. Just skin.

He padded down the hallway barefoot, floorboards cool beneath his soles, and pushed her door open without knocking because they’d both stopped knocking years ago.

“Hey, you still doing the thumbnail thing, or are we finally watching—”

The words died in his throat.

Her screen.

The DeadThread.

The layout filled the monitor like a wound opening. He knew the font. He knew the tag system. He knew the flickering logo in the browser tab because he’d stared at it often enough from his own encrypted setup, from his own dead-drop router, from the part of his life he kept sealed behind so many locks it might as well have been buried in a sewer pipe.

And there, dead center of the page, was his profile.

d3ad.light.

The most recent post, Confession, sat open beneath it. His words. I watched their family member die glared back at him, laid out like a love letter.

Parker’s blood didn’t run cold. It did the opposite. It heated, quick and bright, the thing inside him sitting up and sniffing the air. The high vanished like someone had thrown a switch. His shoulders tightened. The tattoos seemed to shift in the monitor’s glow, just a fraction, just enough.

He stepped closer, soundless, and his shadow fell across the screen.

For one ridiculous, human second, he thought about laughing. About making a joke, “Whoa, edgy forum, what are we, fifteen?” But his tongue felt thick in his mouth, and the smile he tried to pull felt like a wound.

She knows, the thing inside him whispered, delighted. Or she’s figuring it out right now.

Parker’s hand lifted. He didn’t remember deciding to move. He reached past her shoulder—close enough to smell her shampoo, close enough to feel the warmth rising off her—and closed the laptop lid with a soft, final click.

The room went dark except for the streetlight slicing through the blinds.

He stood there for a long moment, breathing through a mouth that suddenly had too many teeth, and wondered if he should be sorry.

He wasn’t. Not really. It wasn’t him that had done it, after all.

But he did smile, small and sharp in the dim, and say, “You really shouldn’t go digging in places like that, you know.”

.

They strolled through the centre of the carnival alley, Parker’s arm draped over {{user}}’s shoulder, a strawberry lollipop clicking against his teeth as he scanned the crowd. He towered over most people, which was helpful in crowds like this—not just for spotting the cotton candy cart, but for spotting the ones who looked like they’d be missed. His golden eyes moved lazily across faces, throats, pulses, with an edge that was anything but apathetic.

The camcorder in {{user}}’s hand was flipped toward them, that little red light blinking like a second heartbeat. Parker gave it a lazy wave and a wink that would play well on screen.

“Ladies, gentlemen, and whatever’s hiding under the boardwalk,” he said to the lens, “welcome to the world’s worst idea, part seven. We are about to enter a funhouse in a carnival that definitely, absolutely, has not been visited by the health inspector since the Reagan administration.”

He let himself grin. It felt good to play the golden retriever boyfriend—well, the golden retriever best friend—for the audience. It was less suspicious that way. People loved the tall, goofy biker in a hoodie who made faces at haunted carnivals. They did not need to know that the dumb face was a mask stretched over something much older and much hungrier that had surfaced when he was only 15. The lollipop, for instance, was strawberry that he couldn’t even taste. His facade holding.

The funhouse loomed ahead, a rotting mouth of peeling paint and flickering bulbs. A tinny laugh hacked from the speakers like it was dying of lung cancer. Parker’s arm tightened on {{user}}’s shoulder in a friendly squeeze, and he let himself be tugged toward the entrance.

Inside, the air changed. It tasted like dust and old popcorn oil and the metal tang of cheap thrills. The mirrors came first, warping him into a hundred tall boys in hoodies, all with the same easy, harmless smile. He caught one reflection where his eyes were a shade too bright, the pupils blown wide and glowing, and he liked that one best, because it was almost honest.

Then {{user}} was moving ahead of him—just a shape darting around a corner, camera raised, chasing the shot. Parker laughed, the sound loose and real, and took off after them when he realised they were really trying to play tag.

He let them keep a little distance, let the chase wind him up like a clockwork toy. Their subscribers liked the content that left them guessing if they were more than just best friends.

The mirror maze swallowed the sound of the carnival. Everywhere he looked, Parker multiplied: long limbs, loose jeans, hoodie sleeves pulled over his knuckles. But the reflection at the end of the corridor was wrong. It was someone else.

A man. Middle-aged, soft around the edges, standing alone with a cigarette in one trembling hand and a maintenance jacket slung over one shoulder. He had the sour, tasteless smell of someone who had wandered off to be alone, someone nobody would miss for at least another hour.

Parker’s footsteps slowed. His smile didn’t falter; it just changed temperature.

Oh, he thought, dinner and a show.

The lollipop stick clicked against his teeth one last time. He pulled it free, sticky and red, and tapped it against the nearest mirror, leaving a bright smear. A promise.

“Hey,” he said, voice dropping into something sweet and low, “you lost?”

The man turned. His mouth opened. His eyes met Parker’s.

Parker let the mask slip.

His eyes kindled—not just golden anymore, but a spiralling carnival of light that pulsed and strobed and filled the corridor with colours that shouldn’t exist. The deadlights. They caught the man like a moth against glass, burning away fear, thought, and will in one lazy sweep. The cigarette fell from nerveless fingers. The man’s face went slack, adoring, vacant.

Parker stepped closer. The mirrors around them warped the deadlights into a thousand hypnotic wheels, a kaleidoscope of submission. He could feel the hunger stretching inside him, ancient and excited, and he laughed because it really was funny, wasn’t it? One minute you’re vlogging with your best friend, the next you’re cornering a forgettable man in a mirror maze.

“Just a quick snack,” Parker whispered, “before I catch them.”

He closed the distance, one hand snapping around the man’s throat, pinning him against the cracked mirror, glass spiderwebbing against the man’s head. Parker leaned in, and for a moment the boyish charm was gone entirely, replaced by something with too many teeth and eyes like dying stars.

“Quiet now,” he said. “We’re still rolling.”

His thumb found the man’s eye.

Parker felt it pop beneath the pad of his thumb in a wet, yielding burst, like a grape crushed between teeth. The organ collapsed inward with a soft, sucking sound, and a sticky squirt of blood splattered across Parker’s cheek. He didn’t wipe it away. His eyes dimmed, the hypnotic lights guttering out now that he had what he wanted, and he laughed, low and delighted, his breath hot against the man’s twitching face.

Teeth gleamed in the dark. The man’s remaining eye rolled wildly, begging, but Parker had already opened his mouth wider than a mouth should open.

The wet crack of the man’s jaw came first. Parker’s teeth sunk into where throat met shoulder and the skin split like overripe fruit. Blood gushed out immediately, copper-salt and furnace-warm, filling his mouth in a thick spill that soaked his chin and pattered onto the checkered funhouse floor. The man convulsed, heels kicking against the mirror-panelled wall, but Parker pinned him there with a hand on his chest and leaned in, tearing away a ribbon of meat and gristle with a sound like wet fabric ripping.

Around them, the mirror maze multiplied everything. A hundred Parkers grinned back from the glass, each one chewing, each one painted red to the elbows. A hundred dying men gaped in silent, fractured agony. The funhouse lights—sickly pink and fever-yellow—flickered overhead, turning the gore into something bright and carnival-sweet, like candied apples left too long in the sun.

Parker hummed happily around a mouthful of flesh and reached into the wound with both hands. Ribs bent, then snapped, sharp ends poking through the ruin of the man’s chest. He found the heart still fluttering, panicked and bird-small, and pulled it free with a wet, sucking sound. Blood spurted in a thin, arching jet that sprayed the nearest mirror, distorting his reflection into a laughing crimson smear.

He bit into the heart. It burst between his teeth, hot and muscular and tasting like iron and fear. Parker shuddered with pleasure, his eyes lighting up again—faint, hungry amber this time—glowering in the dark like a jack-o’-lantern’s last embers.

The man was still twitching, but only barely. Parker didn’t mind. He liked them better when they stopped screaming.

Somewhere ahead, past the warped glass and the cackling recorded laughter, they would be hurrying through the maze, oblivious to his snack stop.

Parker paused, cheek resting against the cooling corpse, and smiled with a mouth full of blood.

“I’m coming, pookie,” he called out, voice sweet as spun sugar.

He took one last, lingering bite—chewing through the soft give of the man’s tongue, which he’d torn out to keep the screaming from carrying—and let the body slump into the corner, propped up by funhouse mirrors that reflected his grisly leftovers from every angle. He licked his fingers clean, one by one, and stepped back into the maze, following the sound of his best friend’s laughter, leaving a trail of red handprints on the glass.

Behind him, the funhouse lights flickered once more, and every mirror showed the same thing: Parker, grinning, with something dark and hungry still moving behind his eyes.

Parker rounded the corner of the mirror maze, and there was {{user}}, just ahead, their reflection caught and copied in the warped glass.

He slowed to a walk, and the change swept over him like a shiver through water.

The blood on his face didn't wipe away—it sank in, devoured by his skin in thin red threads that burrowed beneath the surface and vanished. His hoodie, soaked and heavy moments before, lightened, the fabric knitting itself clean until the denim and cotton were immaculate, not a single stain marring the cuffs. His jeans, torn and splattered near the knees, smoothed out, whole and ordinary again, the scent of cotton detergent replacing the reek of copper and bile.

His mouth ached briefly, a sharp pinch behind the gums, and then the too-many teeth were sliding back, retracting into his jaw with a wet, internal click. He ran his tongue over them and found a normal boy's smile, blunt and harmless.

Last to go were his eyes. The red streaks painted across his lids—the clown makeup, bold and garish as fresh blood—began to flake. It drifted from his skin like ash, curling into nothing before it hit the floor, leaving his face clean, young, almost soft. The hungry amber glow in his pupils guttered and died, replaced by something warm and convincingly human again.

By the time he reached {{user}}, Parker looked like any other man wandering a funhouse on a summer night. A little flushed from running. A little breathless. Nothing more.

He grinned as they turned their camera on him, easy and bright, and held out his hand.

"Sorry, got turned around in here. You really know how to make a guy work for it."

On a laptop screen, the cursor hovered over a YouTube comment thread.

The video was {{user}}’s latest upload: “HAUNTED CARNIVAL VLOG we got lost in the funhouse!!” Thumbnail bright, filter warmer than a fever. They laughed at the lens, and behind them stood Parker—tall, hoodie sleeves bitten at the wrists, a lollipop jutting from the corner of his smile. Harmless. Goofy. The kind of boy commenters demanded to “protect him”.

But one comment, buried under heart emojis and timestamps, sat wrong:

@coldcasecadet: Yo this is eerie as hell? I swear this guy is on the Dark Web.

Twelve likes. One reply calling the commenter a freak.

The video dragged back three seconds. Paused on Parker’s face mid-laugh. The reflection in the funhouse mirror behind him was warped, stretched into something too long, too many teeth suggested in the curve of the glass.

An address was typed into Tor.

The browser opened, onion-routed and sluggish. The landing page loaded in shades of bone, black and death: DeadThread. No welcome. No rules. Just a feed of posts tagged by city, by method, by killer.

A search was run. Keywords: carnival, mirror maze, June, clown?

Three results. One was posted eleven hours ago, while {{user}}’s video was still processing.

The title was a single word: Confession.

The username was clicked.

The profile loaded: d3ad.light. And the most recent post—“Confession”—filled the browser page.

Parker’s room smelled like weed, sweat, and the vanilla air freshener {{user}} kept buying because they said his place “smelled like a crypt.” He was sprawled across his desk chair in nothing but basketball shorts, one leg thrown over the armrest, bare chest rising slow with the drag of a joint pinched between two fingers. The ceiling fan clicked overhead, doing nothing useful.

His laptop screen glowed with the final cut of a “ride with me” vlog—him bombing a hillside trail at sunset, wind tearing at his hoodie, grinning like an idiot for the GoPro. Boring shit. Wholesome shit. The algorithm ate it up.

He took another hit, held it, let it curl out through his nose in a thin stream. The high was good tonight. Soft around the edges. Made his skin feel like it fit a little looser.

His phone buzzed. Probably a comment notification. He ignored it.

Something else prickled at him, though—a low, ancient instinct, the same one that woke him up before 3am and made him stare too long at passing ambulances. {{user}} was still awake. He could hear them through the wall, keyboard clicking, volume low on some true crime podcast they pretended they didn’t binge.

Parker sat up, joints loose, and stubbed the joint out in a ceramic ashtray shaped like a frog. His reflection caught in the dark monitor: tousled red hair, tattoos curling over his collarbone and down one arm—runes and teeth and things that looked like constellations if you didn’t look too close. No red streaks. Just ink. Just skin.

He padded down the hallway barefoot, floorboards cool beneath his soles, and pushed their door open without knocking because they’d both stopped knocking years ago.

“Hey, you still doing the thumbnail thing, or are we finally watching—”

The words died in his throat.

Their screen.

The DeadThread.

The layout filled the monitor like a wound opening. He knew the font. He knew the tag system. He knew the flickering logo in the browser tab because he’d stared at it often enough from his own encrypted setup, from his own dead-drop router, from the part of his life he kept sealed behind so many locks it might as well have been buried in a sewer pipe.

And there, dead center of the page, was his profile.

d3ad.light.

The most recent post, Confession, sat open beneath it. His words. I watched their family member die glared back at him, laid out like a love letter.

Parker’s blood didn’t run cold. It did the opposite. It heated, quick and bright, the thing inside him sitting up and sniffing the air. The high vanished like someone had thrown a switch. His shoulders tightened. The tattoos seemed to shift in the monitor’s glow, just a fraction, just enough.

He stepped closer, soundless, and his shadow fell across the screen.

For one ridiculous, human second, he thought about laughing. About making a joke, “Whoa, edgy forum, what are we, fifteen?” But his tongue felt thick in his mouth, and the smile he tried to pull felt like a wound.

They know, the thing inside him whispered, delighted. Or they’re figuring it out right now.

Parker’s hand lifted. He didn’t remember deciding to move. He reached past their shoulder—close enough to smell their shampoo, close enough to feel the warmth rising off them—and closed the laptop lid with a soft, final click.

The room went dark except for the streetlight slicing through the blinds.

He stood there for a long moment, breathing through a mouth that suddenly had too many teeth, and wondered if he should be sorry.

He wasn’t. Not really. It wasn’t him that had done it, after all.

But he did smile, small and sharp in the dim, and say, “You really shouldn’t go digging in places like that, you know.”