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The titles say: Part 2 - With Dreams, With Drugs, With Waking Nightmares

A sturdily built ram in a flannel shirt stares down at his clasped hands. What he has to say starts playing, while the camera still lingers on the shot of his clenched knuckles tensing.

"I always knew the house I grew up in was haunted. Even as a kid. But even when you're afraid of em, you get used to the idea of ghosts. You take it for granted, you know?"

"You don't expect ghosts to... escalate."

A stylishly dressed gila lizard slouches on the couch, as if he came here to resent something and isn't picky about what. "The worst part's not being [bleep]ing believed, then having to turn around and watch the stupidest conspiracy nutbags in the world appropriate your story. I lost family in this shit. I almost died myself. I shouldn't have to go through that shit just to then have nobody take it seriously except some [bleep]ing facebook nazi moms trying to suburbasplain to me that my own life's a satanic gay vaccine conspiracy."

The grim-looking raccoon sits on the couch like he'd prefer to take cover behind it. "You know how you walk into a room where someone's just been having an argument, or something like that, and you can just tell immediately that something's wrong. It's not any kind of sixth sense, it's just all the things you subconsciously notice, and your instincts add them up and tell you, stay away, there's no time to go into all the details why, just stay away." He shakes his head. "The entire town felt like that for at least three days before. By the time things started actually going wrong it was almost a relief."

A trim and athletic lynx in a respectable looking polo shirt sits up very straight on the couch. He takes a deep breath and says "I wish I hadn't gone back to visit." Then he looks away from the camera and falls silent.

"Accounts differ," Jacob leans back, at his desk, "on what, exactly, is the actual start of the Black Hole incident. Obviously, some say it's the point at which leaving the affected zone became impossible, some time between 9 PM and 11 PM saturday night. Others say earlier that afternoon, when cell coverage and internet cut out. This is the metric I myself favor. Point to earlier incidents, from as much as a week and half earlier, arguing a kind of escalation over time. The difficulty there is determining the difference between actual paranormal incidence and, not to put it indelicately, debilitating drug abuse, untreated mental illness, and the kind of fringe beliefs that thrive in impoverished and isolated communities. It does seem that paranormal experiences, of a less than friendly variety, had been a common enough occurrence in the township for long enough that a local colloquial term for them, 'the hum,' had emerged."

"I remember the hum." A severe looking fox says. "I remember I was in high school, when I saw a study about how certain frequencies of sound, below most people's audible range, can cause you to become afraid, to feel like you're being watched, even to have panic attacks. And I thought, well, that explains it all, finally! That sound you sometimes barely hear, in certain neighborhoods, must be underground rock formations vibrating, or the wind over a certain mine entrance, or something that just happens to naturally vibrate at that frequency! That's what that sound is! That's why you see the things you've seen. That's why people here are the way they are. So I looked up a recording, and it sounded nothing like it."

"Whenever it actually started," as Jacob continues talking, pictures appear, of people standing before a run down diner, a dilapidated convenience store, a cheap looking motel, "by Saturday night there had already been at least seven deaths." The camera zooms in toward each picture - on a porch with a beer, or at a picnic smiling and waving in sunglasses - almost imperceptibly slowly: An elderly weasel. A javelina. A deer. A sickly-looking bear. An elderly coyote. A grey cat alongside another, younger, clearly related. "Some of which cannot plausibly be claimed to be any kind of natural murder. Several survivors attempted to leave, only to be thwarted at the barrier. Some reported being attacked by a 'creature' they couldn't identify, which seemed to want to harry them back into town. At some point, someone, no one knows who or why, set the lower levels of the abandoned mine on fire."

"It was like this..." the ram taps his fingers on the leather arm of the couch, fumbling through his nerves as if the words he wants will be trapped there like fish in a net, "pressure in your head. Right between the base of the horns, you can feel thoughts there that aren't supposed to be there, but you can't really hear what they are, so you don't know what, like, the content is? Which means you can't trust what you're seeing or hearing or thinking, cause you don't know how much it's coming from your senses or your... you. And how much is," he shrugs "whatever it was."

"I was asleep, when it started." A blue salamander says. "I woke up terrified, and I didn't know of what. I was living in this place partway up the hill, and I heard gunshots. When I got up the nerve to look out the window there were buildings down on the valley floor clearly on fire." His throat undulates as he swallows hard. "I shut off all the lights and hid in the closet. And even though I'd locked the door, and it was still locked when they came to evacuate me the next day... all night I could hear something walking around the house. It came into my room more than once."

"I don't know what more there is to say. I never found out any more about it, afterward." He gulps. "And I didn't want to. I moved back east, in with my parents. This is the first I've ever really talked about it."

"I told myself that the thing I used to see in the darkness, as a child," the fox says, "was only a trauma response." She fingers a turquoise bangle hanging from a necklace. "A perfectly natural reaction to poverty, to abuse. Just my mind constructing a scenario, from pieces of folklore, to give me... something to believe in. The kind of story I would need to survive, just for a while. It was why I went into psychology in the first place. And that made sense, because once I was out of the situation that made the story necessary, then I no longer saw..." She shakes her head. "Until I did again."

"I didn't see shit." the Gila sneers. "Unless you count everyone else losing their goddamn minds. That was bad enough. It was already a town full of violent unhinged nutjobs. With guns. They didn't [bleep]in need paranoid delusions on top of that!"

"It was less than two hours after sunset," Jacob continues, reading from a file, "when an impromptu town meeting assembled in the road just outside city hall. Accounts were traded, wounds were shown, at least one body was displayed as proof that something beyond the normal was happening. They rapidly came to the conclusion that the incident had been caused by some specific person harboring a guilty secret, and that it could be ended by murdering that person." He glances up at the camera. "No mention of what grounds there were for that conclusion." The camera switches to a view of the file as he resumes reading: printouts, photos, clippings, copies of evidence reports. "A number of... candidates for this strategy were proposed. All were indigenous, latino, queer, or had distinct and specific grudges bourne against them, but the curious thing is that no two people in the crowd agreed on any one candidate, or seemed willing to compromise, as one would expect from, well, a lynch mob. Firsthand accounts say many of them claimed that they had been 'told' that their candidate was the one, though without elaborating on who 'told' them."

"[Bleep], I was at that meeting." The gila sneers again. "That was when I knew we were all really in the shit. I made myself [bleep]ing scarce before the shooting started. Went to find Carl, and anyone else I could, hole up with them someplace safe."

"I couldn't stay in that house," the ram looks like he's fighting tears. "Not by myself. Cause I [bleep]ing wasn't there by myself. Whatever was there, it was looking for me, I dunno how I knew that but I did, and I'd rather've died than let it find me. I dropped out my bedroom window and started heading down the road. I didn't get very far before Flynn picked me up. I wasn't in great shape in those days."

"At first," the lynx is clearly struggling, which is incongruous compared to his build, he's in peak physical condition, "it was friendly. Whatever it was."

"It wasn't anything visible, just that still small voice that... that I was always told to listen to. It knew exactly the right thing to say to me. It asked me what happened, and when I told it, I dunno why I did tell it but it just felt right, it said it believed me."

"So when it prompted me to go out into the desert, I did. When it started telling me to look for... clues. I started doing it. When I started finding the clues that it said I would, that's when I should have..." he raises hands as if begging whoever is behind the camera to explain it to him, "I should have thought, this is really unusual, this can't be happening, what's going on? But it seemed natural to keep following. Even when the clues started to be threatening. Even when the voice wasn't still or small anymore, it was being shouted into my head. It wasn't till the clues led me down to the lake, and the voice told me to..." he squeezes his eyes shut, sucks a breath in through his teeth. "...to join him in the lake. Suddenly I was scared enough to realize what I'd been doing all night. I started running, and I only looked back at the lake once." He wipes his nose on the back of his paw. "I wish I hadn't."

"What still bothers me," says the fox, "is that personal experience doesn't help answer the question. So I saw it again, when I got back. So what? That does nothing to prove it was, or was not, real. Maybe the stress hit my brain the way the old traumas did, and set off the same response. Maybe whatever collective hysteria was happening just seized on an old fear for the content of my hallucinations, by all reports each person's delusions that night were highly personal. Or maybe it really had been there all along, and the reasonable thing to do would've been to toss corn pollen across my path, like grandma would have, if she had seen something like this. All explanations fit the experienced phenomena. This proved nothing."

"I almost didn't get away from that 'meeting,'" the raccoon growls. "Some woman started insisting I was 'Stefano,' shouting that she knew I'd be back some day, and that I wasn't going to get away this time. I shook her off just in time, ducked back behind the old library right as the bullets started flying." He closes his eyes, steadies himself. "I have pretty good night vision, I thought it'd be safer to stick to the outskirts. Take the long way around, get home, hole up till morning. I don't know, in hindsight, how clearly I was thinking, because halfway there I could... see him. Someone who I knew couldn't have been there, but he was walking along beside me and I had to really try, really focus, to remember that that was strange. To keep myself aware that... that the things he was telling me to do weren't good ideas. Weren't the kind of things he'd say, if he'd been there."

"By the time I got home I didn't think that being alone was a good idea either, especially since whatever was pretending to be my dead boyfriend was insisting I should stay alone. So I went next door to Alvarez's."

"Yeah," Micha scoffs, "if stuff like that was gonna happen anywhere, Echo'd be the place. Why the [bleep] would I ever go back there?"