 In October of last year, my best friend Dan was hunting for a job. He'd arrive at my second-story flat each morning to borrow a suit. I'd open the door to see his lopsided grin, his shock of unkempt hair, and put on some toast while he got ready. We'd sit at my skinny, laid kitchen table that he accompanied me on the Ikea trip to buy and chat about his options. The thing about Dan was that he didn't know what he wanted to be. A fairly normal problem that made for a fairly hectic job search. Sometimes we'd do mock-up interviews over a coffee in the morning. He'd look at me, trying his best to seem professional, with his tie undone and collar unbuttoned, chewing on some buttered toast. His responses were quick and sharp, but always seemed to lack some sort of enthusiasm. I'm sure that's why he struggled for so long, being unemployed. Who'd hire someone who clearly didn't want the job they were interviewing for? Nevertheless, he showed up day after day, week after week. His resolve never wavered. He might not have wanted to work, but he knew he needed to. I think his landlord was starting to breathe down his neck a bit with late rent, but he never spoke properly to me about that. It was always too serious for us, or too off-topic when he was trying to get into an interview mindset. Dan was human. It took a toll whether he liked it or not. I can see in my mind's eye how tired he was in those last few months, how he was losing hope, losing hope, but never his resolve. He kept trying, on and on. He told me when I asked how he could keep going after nothing but rejection, that something his father once told him played in his head every time he didn't hear back. It had been when his father had been going through a similar period of unemployment and had gone to the job center day after day, as doggedly as his son was now. Dan had asked a similar question to the one I'd asked him. How can you go on trying, dad? Well, son, the way I see it, if I've put in all this time and then choose to give up, how will I ever know if I was one try away from getting it? I can't put my efforts to waste like that in a good conscience. When Dan told me that, I'd nearly laughed, I could see so much of the man he described sitting right across from me. He'd stood up as he'd done a hundred times before, thanking me for the suit, promising to come back for a drink tonight. He'd put his plate in the sink and walk out. Little did I know that would be the last time I ever saw my friend. A few hours later, he'd call me, excited as I'd ever heard him. You'll never guess what. I got hired. What for? I'd replied, barely able to keep the surprise from my voice. It's a dream job. He replied happily. I'll send you the details. I gotta go. I'm getting on the train. I'll see you soon. A job listing appeared in my email inbox moments after he'd hung up. And that was it. I never got so much as another message from him. When he didn't show up for a couple of days, I was upset. Maybe I thought it was stupid to be like that, so I told myself it was about the suit. That lousy bastard's taken his time, I told myself. After about a week, I started to worry. I called him daily, more often as time went on. I called his family, who said they hadn't heard from him either, but hadn't begun to worry yet. After that phone call, I'd taken the train down to his flat. It was a journey I hadn't done in a while. He'd been coming to me for so long that I guess it just hadn't happened that way for a while. When I arrived, I grabbed a coffee from the little shop in the station. The girl behind the counter was cute, long blonde hair, big eyes. I smiled at her, my mind emerging from the worries that had been drowning in for weeks. In a moment of clarity, I asked her if she recognized a photo of Dan that had been my phone wallpaper for years. A picture of us with our arms around each other beside the lake that ran alongside our hometown. She'd said yes, but unsurprisingly she hadn't seen him for weeks either. As I made my way towards his building, my body started to ignore me as if it didn't want to know the truth about whether Dan was okay. It felt like my blood started to freeze. I wanted nothing more than to stop moving, to sit here, tell myself I'd done everything I could and just turn around. I plowed on. A neighbor let me into his flat. It wasn't hard to convince her. She remembered me from a visit long ago and she herself had begun to worry about him having not seen him for so long. She led me in and I heard her gasp before I saw the scene before us myself. The rooms, not too large but not tiny considering how much rent cost those days, were completely empty. There was nothing. We walked through each of them, praying to see at least a remnant of the man we both knew. But there was nothing. Or almost nothing, I should say. It was her that saw it. In what was his bedroom, there were built-in wardrobes across one wall. Each of them were thrown wide open and were empty, but one. In the last one, closest to the wall, hung up neatly on two separate hangers, was my suit. I walked back to the station in a haze. The neighbor had asked me to come in for a drink, but I had hurriedly excused myself and practically ran for the train. I even forgot to see if the girl in the coffee shop was there. I'd meant to update her. She'd been interested after hearing my questions. Oh well, too late now. On the train, my phone buzzed. It wasn't a new message, but an old one that I hadn't thought necessary to open. It was the job listing that Dan had got. I clicked on it. Under the big green box that read, post-filled, it said, looking for a young person with good communication skills willing to work long hours, was the tagline. The skills it asked for were all fairly standard, confidence, teamwork, things that had been on thousands of applications across time. I kept scrolling, hoping for some clue as to where he was, who he was with. Not there at the bottom was a line that made my blood run cold. Must not have any close friends, family, or other acquaintances who might bother you in times of low communication. Neighbors or similar will be questioned. What an odd line. I couldn't imagine why having those things could be a bad thing, but I was damn certain it was bad that they didn't want you to have them. That was enough for me to make my first call to the police. Of course they found nothing, and no reason for concern. A man's allowed to up and leave if the fancy takes him without an intentional manhunt, one detective told me after an interview. But I knew something was wrong. A few nights ago, after another frustrating police interaction, I went back to the listing. I was laying in bed on my phone, desperate to find another lead to check to find him. What I did see surprised me. At the top of the page where it had read post-filled, it now read vacancy in a big red box. I suppose the sensible thing to do would have been to ignore it. But I was desperate to know anything. I just wanted an answer. I clicked the button, and I applied. The moment I did, my lamp flicked off. So did my phone. My room was completely black, even the moon seemed to be blotted out. It was the most intense darkness I'd ever felt. I didn't have time to concentrate on that though, because I could hear something, sense something in the room with me. I could hear it move around. Once I felt it touch me through the duvet I've been hiding under, it's been days now. At least I know what happened to Dan.