Gabby & Cuervo Issue 1: Into theTerror Castle!
by Jackson Culpepper
Zine #43 — July 2025
We got the ghost idea because Nik was always watching these ghost shows: compilations of haunted house investigations, people tromping through abandoned hospitals, and oh my god the stuff from Japan. He pointed out how they faked all of it, hiding cuts in blurry motion or simply sending their friends to peek-a-boo out from the end of a creepy hallway. He could critique it, which I respected, but he loved that stuff. I thought it was all bullshit; if ghosts could come back and haunt people, how would the rich get any sleep? Anyway, I’d never seen a ghost or anything.
We put our scheme together out of the ghost-hunting model: cheap ass production plus posting across platforms plus the cutest of us screaming in the thumbnails and boom, money for REDACTED. (REDACTED is the overthrow of capitalism.)
That’s how I wound up in the woods behind the city, in the abandoned industrial district, where it was so gross that even the squatters had left.
Or had they?? (That was my line in the intro.)
Nik swung his flashlight around the warehouse’s exterior. I kept expecting a ghost form or a face or something, since that’s always what showed up in Nik’s shows. But there was nothing.
Or maybe it would show up when we reviewed the footage–something there, watching us, that we didn’t even notice.
Nik and Porkchop, one of the others from the squat, argued about whether they would add in special effects before they posted the video.
“No,” Nik said, “We want it to be legit. No fake shit.”
“Dude,” Porkchop responded, “Nobody wants to see people wandering around abandoned buildings without some kind of payoff. We can get Gabs to go hide and peek out or something.”
Gabs is me, Gabrielle/Gabby. I told Porkchop that I had no fucking desire to go hide and peek out or something.
We entered the closest warehouse. We could hear water dripping. Somehow, it was colder inside the place. Bits of glass or wet metal siding glittered and reflected my light as I looked around. The strewn junk cast angular shadows across the walls. Try as I might not to, I kept looking for peekaboo faces. If the videos were accurate, then ghosts mainly showed up to peekaboo around doorways and corners.
On a second-floor catwalk between buildings, we heard the scream.
Even Nik scoffs at the rake videos, but that shit sounded like a rake video. Halfway human, halfway monster, clearly aware of our presence and unhappy about it.
We huddled. Like, hunkered down as though the monster or ghost or whatever was going to wait for us to break our huddle before it came and possessed us or clawed us to bits.
“We need to call this off,” I said, trying to control my shaking.
“We keep sneaking. It’s probably some druggie who doesn’t even know we’re here,” Nik said.
I punched him in the arm. “‘Druggie?’ What the fuck dehumanizing bullshit is that?” I punched him in the other arm. “100% that thing knows we’re here.”
Porkchop added, “I’ve got a good zoom on this thing. We wouldn’t even have to get that close. Shit, we could try the drone!” He immediately swung off his backpack and started prepping the drone.
Once the drone was up, we huddled around Porkchop’s tablet screen. We watched as it buzzed ahead, making it to the end of the hallway. Porkchop guided the drone along the walls, finding a passage to the next area. All around it was graffiti that said WELCOME TO HELL.
I made a noise that I’m pretty sure I’ve heard my cat make at other cats outside the window.
Nik said, “It’s got a theme.”
“Huh?” Porkchop asked.
“Keep going,” Nik said.
The drone moved into the new passage, which was a narrow hallway covered in graffiti. There were more messages, including THEY CAN HEAR YOUR THOUGHTS and a few very expressive images of devils, pentagrams, witchy symbols, all that stuff.
At the end of the hell hallway, another large room opened up. It was too dark to see what was in it, and Porkchop eased the drone forward. That was when something grabbed the drone and slammed it to one side so hard that the feed cut out.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I said.
“Shiiiiiit,” Porkchop said. This was a change from, “Let’s get footage of supernatural beings, guys!” which did relieve me a little.
Nik reached out and rewound the footage. He looped it, right before the camera flew off to one side and died.
“Do you hear that?” he asked, bumping up the volume on the tablet.
Silence, dripping water, then a harsh crunch.
“We didn’t even hear it approach,” Porkchop said.
“No, listen. Here.” Nik looped it tighter. We strained to hear the tablet.
He was right; there was a weird buzzing sound right before something grabbed the camera. “What is that?” I asked.
“Maybe it’s an old robot,” Porkchop offered. “It lives here and tries to scare everybody off.”
That made sense, except I really didn’t think AI had developed to the point of “wanting to be a hermit.”
“We didn’t see anything physically grab the drone,” Nik said. We watched again, and he was right: no hands, claws, articulated pincers. Just buzzing noise, then dead drone.
I sat back to hypothesize–yes I felt scared, but I felt something else too: I wanted to know what the hell all this stuff was. The clearest answer, of course, was that we needed to get the fuck out. Even in the weirdest of Nik’s ghost videos, there wasn’t this much . . . stuff. Usually the location was creepy and then maybe they saw a peek-a-boo shadow and that was it. But this place was like a house of horrors. Like an attraction . . .
“Someone made this,” I said.
“Because they want to scare people away,” Nik finished.
“I was going to say that,” I said. Nik didn’t respond. He was thinking. Porkchop was eating some hot chips from his backpack. I grabbed some.
“They’re willing to destroy a drone,” Nik said, “Which suggests they don’t want people filming here. Or, probably, being here at all.”
“So we should leave,” I said, crunching chips.
“We could get footage of the old warehouse hermit,” Porkchop said.
My stomach fell when he said it, because I really didn’t want to do that, but I knew it would make great fucking content. Money content.
Nik continued, “We don’t know how deadly this could get. If the hermit’s willing to hurt a drone, they might hurt a person too.”
Porkchop looked at us, thinking. Sometimes Porkchop makes me nervous when he thinks. “We need this,” he said. “Like, not for the notoriety, but for food. For enough gas to get through the winter. Unless one of you has a creative idea to feed the house, this is our best shot.”
He was right. We’d debated for like five nights about how to keep the house going, and gods help us, this was our best idea. We pressed on.
“Huh,” Porkchop said. Nik and I entered the hallway, edging past the scary graffiti. Our cameraman stood looking at his drone, fallen to the ground. One side of it was crushed. We shined our flashlight beams around. If there was anyone there, we couldn’t see nor hear them.
The next room, which the drone hadn’t been able to see into, was a cavernous warehouse, a big empty quasi-liminal space that made me feel a hollow kind of scared. I felt like I imagine a hamster would if you put them on a stage in an auditorium. Tiny, lost, overwhelmed–and watched.
Nik squatted and looked at the ground. A coating of dust lay on the floor. Beneath the drone was a disturbance, probably from its own fall, but there weren’t any other signs of movement to either side. Nik raised his light to the ceiling. There wasn’t anything up there either.
We studied the scene. Nik thought out loud: “Nothing grabbed it from the ground. Nothing grabbed it or hit it from the ceiling. But something moved it.” I made a process of elimination and looked at the wall next to where the drone had gotten hit. There, on the very edge of the doorway, were some scratches in the paint. The paint itself was a close shade to the yellow-beige base coat of the corridor’s walls, but not quite as gross-looking; it was newer paint. Beneath it, a bright metal surface, raised from the rest of the wall, running from floor to ceiling. I turned the corner and found a few small wires that ran out from behind the metal surface and up into the tangle of wires and pipes on the ceiling.
“It’s a boobytrap,” I said.
“An electromagnet,” Nik said. “Those wires could lead to a control where our host can activate it. Depending on how powerful it is, that setup could grab a person if they had enough metal on them.”
“It could stop bots too,” Porkchop added.
“Is this the kind of person that bots come after?” I mused. They only sent bots out after a higher-level type of criminal. None of this added up.
We chose a path going up to the catwalks. Through faded opaque windows, the lights of the city gleamed like candles in a far-off room.
Ahead, into the next room, our flashlights caught eyes. Many, many eyes.
We froze. My heart beat against the back of my ribs. Maybe two dozen sets of reflective eyes peered back at us. A few on the bottom moved. Porkchop uttered a sound that would have been hilarious if we weren’t currently terrified. We kept our lights ahead, watching three sets of eyes leave the others and move toward us. Even our high-lumen lights couldn’t make sense of that darkness or whatever creatures watched us from within.
There was no sound as the eyes moved closer: across the room, then into the catwalk. Ten yards, five.
Bodies materialized: three black cats stared at us. One of them sat down. The other two crept toward us with their tails bobbing.
We breathed out all at once. Of course. Goddamn cats. One of them rubbed against my leg. I squatted to pet it. The scary black cat purred.
The next room had a wall a few feet behind the doorway, like the back of an elevator shaft. That wall was painted black, with a bunch of sets of eyes painted over the black in glow-in-the-dark, reflective paint. Another booby trap.
“We’re getting closer,” Nik said.
I agreed. “The more traps, the more Mr. Corporate Spy/Serial Killer/Supreme Hermit Weirdo doesn’t want us to get closer.” But we were in it now, to the end of the mystery. The Tube show must go on.
The next room was smaller than the others, but pretty tall, with ceilings about 20 feet tall. Metal beams, liminal-space ambiance. My flashlight beam fell on a huddled figure atop a ten-foot metal column.
Black cloth fell over the beam, and long black hair. Human, I supposed. First spotting it sent a chill through me, but I figured it was a dummy or mannequin with a wig or something.
“Get out,” the figure said, and my blood turned into that sparkly goop they put in freezer packs. It wasn’t a dummy with a speaker. It was a flesh and blood person. OR WAS IT?
“They want us to leave,” Porkchop said, raising his camera.
At that moment I experienced a split in my existence: the self-preservation half of me decided that this person was definitely Mx. Serial Killer and became determined to exit the area by the most direct route possible. Another, Porkchop-influenced half of me reasoned that this person had set traps for us that were spooky, but not really dangerous. They hadn’t even used the electromagnet on us, and with my piercings, that trap would have been devastating. Most of all, the person had nice cats, and I had a hard time imagining a bad person with nice cats.
“Get out and leave me alone,” the figure said, raising their head this time. Their face was, of course, pale as a vampire’s, with eyes darker and deeper than the shadows in the room. Maybe Latine, hard to tell, but their cheekbones did remind me of Antonio Banderas in Interview with the Vampire, for whatever that could explain. Their gender seemed firmly androgynous. Pronouns might have been bat/ghoul.
“Can you tell us why you’re here first?” asked Porkchop from behind his camera.
“No,” the figure said, with a growl.
“How about your name then?” Porkchop continued.
“I liked the cat-eye wall. That one was clever.” Nik said/asked.
The figure looked from one to the other of us. They settled on Nik. “There is an old woman behind you. She has a scar by her ear. She thinks you are being very foolish right now.” Their voice was deep and liquid, like a vat of black oil that sucks people in to drown them.
I looked at Nik. He had turned pale in the castoff light of our flashlights. The figure, I noticed, wasn’t looking at Nik, but toward something a few feet behind him. Something I couldn’t see. “Nik,” I said, in a checking-in tone.
“It’s my abuela,” he said. “She hated all the ghost videos and stuff. She said it attracted the devil.”
“All the abuelas say that,” I reassured him.
“She had a scar from a dog attack,” Nik continued, “From when she was a girl. It nearly took off her right ear.”
Again, cold goop blood.
“Leave,” said the person who lived in an abandoned, boobytrapped warehouse and who could also see ghosts.
“Wait,” responded Porkchop. “Look, we need money. Not just us, but everybody at our house. I get that you want to be left alone, but all this–” he gestured in a vague circle, taking in the warehouse, the storm outside, the black cats, the ghost furniture, etc.–”this is all too good to not record.”
The crow-like person perched and watched us. One of my ex’s was a big chess player, and she’d make me watch grandmaster games on the tubes. Those guys stared intensely at the board, with this anger mixed with fear and concentration into a muddled sludge of emotion oozing out of a poker face. It wasn’t a normal way for a person to look. That’s how the person who lived in the warehouse looked at us.
“I don’t want you to post that footage,” the person said. “If you post it, others will show up wanting their own footage, and I won’t have solitude, which is why I am here.”
“I mean, we’re probably going to post the footage,” Porkchop said, still recording. “We need the money.”
Silence stretched the seconds into minutes. I ran my fingers along one of the chains at my waist. Nik peered into the darkness behind him, probably trying to see his abuela.
Finally, they said, “I will help you if you agree to delete the footage and say nothing about me or this place to anyone else.”
Porkchop lowered the camera just enough to look over it at the person. “What kind of help?”
“Turn it off and I’ll show you.”
That sounded ominous. Mx. Serial Killer, I thought. We hadn’t ruled out that possibility. Maybe this is how serial killers got people in the first place: you want to find out what a weirdo does. It’s a perverse human drive.
Porkchop pressed a few buttons on the camera. He paused and said, “If you explain, and then let us go safely, I’ll delete it before we get back to the house. Deal?” Smart, I thought.
“For now,” the person said, and then they dropped from their platform and stood. They were tall, over six feet, their black clothes draped around them in layers. They moved to a door at the end of the room. It led to a series of gangways and staircases, all leading up. We followed, glancing at one another with glances that communicated the same thought: we’re really raising the stakes on whether this person is a serial killer, huh?
We came to a final door, and when the person pushed through, our eyes adjusted to the light. The room glowed with yellow LEDs like candles. It was clean, warmer, not as damp; it felt habitable. There was furniture: desks piled with books, a small makerspace with printers and a few mounted milling machines, a kitchen with sink and burners, and an area with some kind of wooden dummy and bullseye targets. That last made me stop in my tracks– knives jutted from the targets, all within the smallest two rings. Okay, a knife person. I wasn’t sure how to feel about a knife person.
The hermit led us to a floor-to-ceiling window, with the city’s grungy lights taking up the whole view.
“You’re from a punk house,” they said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah,” replied Porkchop.
“Are you political?”
“Are you?” I blurted. I was still new to the antifash/anticap politics, and questions like “Are you political?” had escalated me into several fights over the last few months. Maybe seeing where this hermit lived put me at a little ease–there had been ramen packets on the kitchen counter. Black pullovers lay over the chairs. Some of the black pullovers had sleepy yellow eyes–more black cats lounging around. It wasn’t an intimidating space, aside from the knife gallery.
“No,” the hermit said. “But I have rendered my services to political groups in the past.”
“Which ones?” asked Porkchop. Now we had to figure out if the hermit was fash.
“Not the fascists or anyone close to them,” they said. Okay. If they were telling the truth.
“What kind of services have you rendered?” Nik asked, still gawking around the space.
The hermit faced us squarely, their long hair falling along the sides of their face. “I am a medium, psychic, and witch. I speak to the dead. I know what the living intend. I can make certain things happen. Some groups have found these skills useful.”
A psychic? I thought. This person can read my thoughts? The hermit turned to me and said, “It doesn’t work like that.” I flushed and panicked. While Nik asked some clarifying questions, I clamped down on my thoughts–don’t think about whether those are Latino cheekbones–no! They said it didn’t work like that, though. Think, think–maybe the hermit can read thoughts, or do something like that. Or maybe my complete lack of a poker face showed my disbelief and fear, and the psychic hermit saw that, and decided to fuck with me. Nik told me all about mediums and cold readings. There’s a whole set of tricks where hucksters can pick up on subtle cues, or make good guesses, to give the appearance of psychic ability.
But the person did see Nik’s abuela, and that was harder to disprove.
Maybe they were the real deal, or maybe they were good at tricks.
When I pulled myself back together, the boys and the hermit were dancing around the politics of our punk house. Porkchop said, “We do some subversive shit. Are you cool with that?”
“Yes.”
“So wait,” Nik said, his brow furrowed behind his glasses. “You said you’re a witch too, right?”
“Yes.”
“So you curse people, or what?”
“I can, and I have. Only in dire circumstances. There is a cost to that kind of work, and risks involved.”
“Can you kill someone with magic?”
“If you want to kill someone, use a weapon.” The hermit had a tone of annoyance, like they’d answered all these questions many times before.
I asked, “How do we know you’re legit?”
The hermit turned their full gaze on me. It made me want to roll my shoulders in, to become small. I resisted the urge.
They said to me, “You aren’t a true believer. Not yet. You washed up at the house, desperate.” They stepped across the room toward me. “You hope they don’t see your desperation, but they do. No, you don’t have ideology–” they were feet away, lowering their head to my 5’2” level–their breath smelled like bitter herbs–”You have fear and rage. Those old jobs, those old families, they made you–small. Now you’ve gotten a taste of rebellion, of insurrection, and you want to never be small again. Isn’t that right?”
Porkchop and Nik were staring at us. The hermit stood close enough that they could grab me. The hermit was right, more or less, but everything they said could have been from a cold read. I knew Nik knew that too. Porkchop was cool; I didn’t worry about Porkchop. If the hermit had meant to drive a wedge between us, it wouldn’t work.
Most importantly, they didn’t understand that all of us carried around fear and rage, and none of us really knew what to do with them. Because of that, I understood that the hermit, the wizard, whatever they were–they were at least partially full of shit.
Porkchop and Nik got that same feeling. Something had shifted in the room, like when Shosanna back at the house made one of her aggressive moves in Root: the hermit had pushed too far, and everybody knew it.
They straightened up. Their face was impassive, partly hidden by the waves of their long hair. They looked through me.
“What should we call you?” Porkchop asked, “Since you’re going to be working with us.”
“Crow,” said the hermit.
We groaned and protested. “You can’t just be Crow!” I said. “Dude,” Porkchop said, even though we’ve told him over and over that not everybody considers it a gender-neutral term. “You might as well be Batman,” said Nik.
“Fine. Ilsé Cuervo.”
“That’s still Crow,” Nik protested.
The hermit Ilsé did not respond. Ilsé Crow it was going to be. Porkchop muttered something about fixing it before we posted.
“You said you were going to delete the footage,” the Crow said with an edge to their voice.
“That was if you work with us,” Nik said. “And so far we still don’t know what kind of work you’re offering.”
A black cat rubbed up against my leg.
Ilsé asked, “What is your current campaign?”
“To destroy Capitalism,” I said, “but first to scam this one single-staffed corner store for as much as we can take.”
“Where is it?” they asked. I told them. The turned with a disproportionately dramatic swish of their clothes, taking a seat in an antique-looking armchair. An Eastlake chair, I later learned. Ilsé was particular (/vain) about their furniture.
They sat and were silent for a minute which stretched into a while. Our attention wandered; I petted the nearby cats and Porkchop snuck in some B-roll.
Finally Ilsé Crow said, “Back in the 20’s a Pakistani immigrant owned that store. He had a thing for the young pop stars of that era that wasn’t entirely healthy. Now it’s one of thousands in a corporate portfolio. No one watches it. Spoof the footage aggregate so an algorithm won’t spot anything and you can take them for all they’re worth.”
We looked at Crow Criminal in disbelief. “You’re sure?” Porkchop asked.
The question there was whether the store had a dedicated manager somewhere or not; some were monitored by type-A jackboots and others were left to a cut-rate algorithm and prepared for like 70% shrink. If Ilsé could tell which was which . . .
They explained, “People leave an imprint on the places they care about. If no one’s watching a place, it becomes quiet. It smells like ozone. The store you described is one of these places. Maybe their algorithm is strong, but no human cares about that place.”
Nik, Porkchop, and I looked at each other. The hermit was a royal flush if they could tell which stores were watched and which ones were write-offs. If . . . then again, I was skeptical of psychics for the same reason everyone else tended to be: because they were mostly grifters. And what do grifters do but hand you a big payday and then tell you more are coming?
We needed to test this person. How do you test a psychic?
I said, “Here’s our deal: we won’t post the footage. Instead, we’ll finish the job on the store. If your advice works, then we’ll delete the footage, and maybe talk about working together. If it doesn’t work, we’re posting the footage, but keeping the location secret. Deal?”
Mx. Crow responded, “If you post that footage, every bored dilettante with a camera will run to every abandoned warehouse in the city, eventually finding their way here.”
“That’s why your tip needs to be good. Good tip, no post, no visitors,” Porkchop said with an expression on his face as easy as if he’d just polished off a plate of ribs. “So how sure are you of the tip?”
Ilsé grimaced. They might have growled. “What I told you is true: no one watches that store. That doesn’t preclude some expensive algorithm capable of watching it along with hundreds of others. Some of the conglomerates have that. I can’t read a machine.”
“Then you’re taking a chance along with us,” Nik said.
Next, there was a stand-off of glares. Ilsé glared at each of us in turn, and we glared back, and Porkchop nonchalantly looked at us, which was his way of glaring at us to be sure we held up. It wasn’t easy to get glared at by Crow Hermit. The person was intense.
“Fine,” they said eventually. “Run the con. When it works, bring me the memory cards so I can see it deleted. If you post it, or save a copy, I’ll curse your whole house.”
“Curse us?” Nik asked, half in surprise. He’d been threatened with ass-beatings, but never with a curse.
“Yes. A curse. That is within my power. Now go back the way you came.” With that, they turned to the window and watched the rain outside like a movie villain might.
Porkchop shrugged and we walked out. I petted another cat before we left.
The Crow wasn’t wrong. We got Nik hired to the store on nothing more than an employment check from a spoofed profile and a 50-page NDA/Non-compete/Waiver agreement, which he signed with a little picture of a bat. We worried about biometrics, but with some contouring makeup and a few degrees’ shift of gender expression, the cameras caught only a much more ditzy, femme Nik. It was close to drag, honestly. We spoofed the cameras and cleaned the place out: enough food and supplies for a few months, plus medications and electronics to barter. Our dinnertime conversations very quickly centered on how we could scale the operation, hitting all the neglected stores in the city. Exciting possibilities for a bunch of anarchists starry-eyed with successful theft.
Once the job was done, and a week or two went by to make sure the coast was clear, we returned to Dracula’s castle. We traipsed back up to the Crow sanctum and the hermit watched us right click and delete all the video files. Porkchop wasn’t too upset about it–he’d gotten a new camera and a 3-drone hive out of the job.
“Good,” the hermit said as the last file disappeared. “What is next for you?”
We looked at each other. “More stealing?” I offered.
Ilsé watched me. When they looked at you, it felt like they were drilling into whatever parts of your brain you left unguarded. “You could do more. You are political, yes?”
In theory we are, I thought, but of course you couldn’t say something that noncommittal to the Crow.
“You could do more. We could do more. The oppressors are complacent and unprepared for attack. They think they’ve won.”
We raised our eyebrows. The hermit wanted to storm the Bastille?
They grimaced, as though the next words were physically painful for them to say. “I have been alone for a long time, watching the world sink. I let you go before because I thought you might not be entirely stupid, and because you might be willing to actually do something.”
“‘Let us go?’” Does that mean the hermit had considered not letting us go? And how did they plan to stop us, exactly?
“Thanks?” Nik said. We waited. The air had changed; a visit of relief and conclusion shifted into danger once again–we didn’t know what this hermit wanted, or what they were capable of. The more the world had crumbled in our young lives, the more dangerous people had become. In a lot of ways, it became harder to tell who was dangerous and who was okay. It wasn’t that Nik, Porkchop, and I and the other people at the house weren’t committed–we read Kropotkin and Serafinski and spent whole nights debating what the hell we could do about it. The question was whether this Crow was okay or not.
Maybe they read our minds, or finally remembered how human beings like to be treated, because they offered, “I have some good coffee. I’ll make some, and we can discuss the possibilities of our mutual endeavors.”
“Sure,” I said, before thinking about it. Maybe I thought someone who lived in a warehouse/boobytrapped vampire castle would definitely, definitely, have great coffee. Maybe I felt some hope that with a legitimate wizard, we could really change things. Maybe I was stupid. Either way, we soon sat with steaming cups of truly magnificent coffee, plotting how to overthrow the capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal state, now that we were an anarchist collective plus a psychic witch.
Jackson Culpepper(he/they) is a teacher, writer, and zine artist. His debut short story collection, Songs on the Water, won the Landmark prize in fiction and was published by Homebound publications in 2022. The stories in that book are all about growing up in the Southern culture of Georgia, with both the beautiful parts and the heartbreaking parts. His ongoing zine series, Gabby & Cuervo, follows the adventures of a punk collective and a psychic witch in a cyberpunk future. When he's not writing, Jackson is usually hiking, playing tabletop games, and going out to goth night.
Etsy zine page: https://www.etsy.com/shop/ZinesbyJackson?ref=shop_profile&listing_id=4310945895
Songs on the Water: https://www.wayfarerbookstore.com/product/songs-on-the-water/182?cs=true&cst=custom
Instagram: @jcculpepper