Date: 2020-04-21 23:17:26+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Paranormal
Description: Throughout her life, Angie has lost loved ones to stupid, meaningless deaths. As an adult she begins researching urban legends, hoping to find proof that something exists beyond our mundane world. Is there magic? Is there an existence beyond this life? Is there any kind of meaning to it all even if that meaning is a dark one? In the end, Angie will get her answer, and she'll learn that reality isn't just darker than she thinks: It's some kind of monster. "Tim may be one of the most consistently excellent writers from project to project in our genre. Never lets a reader down." —Gene O'Neill "Wh

Some Kind of Monster

Tim Waggoner

Apex Book Company

Copyright © 2020 by Tim Waggoner

Cover art © Vicki Leversedge

Jacket design by Mikio Murakami

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN (TPB) 978-1-937009-82-3

Published by Apex Book Company, PO Box 24323, Lexington KY 40524

Visit us at www.apexbookcompany.com.

This one's for Becky Spratford, tireless and enthusiastic champion of our genre.

I love monsters the way people worship holy images.

Guillermo del Toro

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

About the Author

Acknowledgments

1

Running, running, running ... Feet pounding, chest heaving, heart thud-thud-thudding so loud behind her ribs that she feels the vibrations throughout her body. There’s fear, of course, a great jangling of nerves, molten fire surging through her veins, a frozen knot buried beneath her breastbone. Her senses are heightened, so razor sharp that their input hurts. There’s almost no light, but still she squints her eyes. The only sounds come from her, but they are deafening, hot spikes driven into her ears. She feels lightheaded, almost dizzy, and nausea twists her gut, making her feel as if she might projectile vomit any moment.

But strangely she feels joy as well, heady exhilaration, and even though she’s more terrified than she’s ever been, maybe more terrified than anyone’s ever been, she laughs, a joyous sound, tinged with an edge of hysteria. Her laughter sounds crazy to her, and she wonders if she’s on the verge of insanity, her mind shattering into thousands of glittering shards, like a piece of fine crystal dropped from a great height. If she is going mad, she wonders if it matters. She wonders if she cares.

This place is dark, a realm fashioned entirely of shadow. Even the air she breathes feels dark—heavy in her lungs, a cold weight that she can’t seem to escape. The space is cramped and narrow—some kind of corridor, with ceiling and walls. There’s barely enough room for her to run without crouching, and she must keep her arms out to her sides, fingers brushing the glossy obsidian surface on either side to prevent colliding with them. To make matters worse, the corridor isn’t straight. It bends, twists, turns so abruptly that every time there’s a change in direction she stumbles, a hip or shoulder slamming into a wall. She loses her balance, nearly drops to her knees. And if that happens, if she stops running, even for a second, it will be over. She can’t allow that to happen. She has no illusions of escaping what’s coming for her, and she really doesn’t want to. But she does want to make the chase last as long as possible, to draw it out, make it last, squeeze every ounce of terror and excitement, take it all in, feed on it greedily until there’s nothing left. Then and only then will she allow herself to slow down and be caught. Only then will she surrender.

She feels the thing pursuing her, senses its presence like a great rush of wind moving through the dark corridors, an elemental force, implacable and inescapable. She hasn’t looked back to see if it’s visible in this gloom. Not only can’t she afford to pause and glance over her shoulder, she fears that she could see the thing that’s chasing her though this maze, and if she does, she’ll be so overwhelmed by the sight that she won’t be able to keep running, will only be able to stop and stare, awestruck and disbelieving as it falls upon her. She will look at it, yes, but only at the end. Not before. Besides, not seeing it adds immeasurably to the terror, allows her imagination to consume an endless variety of grotesque images exuding menace and dark grandeur. As long as she doesn’t look, it could be anything, but at the moment she faces it, it’ll be only one thing, and no matter how magnificent and terrible that thing might be, it will become real, and reality never lives up to one’s imagination.

She hears a sound then. It’s masked by the slap-slap of her footfalls and the huh-huh-huh of her breath. Soft and insidious, the sound slithers its way into her brain, forcing itself to the forefront of her consciousness. It reminds her of a parchment-dry autumn leaf skittering over cold concrete, or a frigid wind whistling across a desolate snow-covered field. This is not language as she knows it, and yet ... there is intent in this sound, a message of sorts. Two simple words.

HUNGRY.

MINE.

She knows this is the voice of the dark thing pursuing her, expressing its desperate, frantic need. The words are simultaneously gratifying and horrifying, a declaration of love from one who adores, a hunting cry from a ravenous predator.

Shapes begin to move within the shadowy depths of the walls, and their black surfaces grow lighter. Images coalesce, pictures of people and places, dozens of them, as if she’s being shown snippets from different movies. She recognizes them, and despite their differences, they have one aspect in common. Each image features her. Different times, different ages and circumstances but her, always her. She does not welcome this development, finds no fascination in it, no comfort. In their own way, these images are far more threatening than the dark force hunting her. She wants to look away, wants to close her eyes, shut out these images, deny them, prevent them from fully registering on her consciousness and worming into her brain. But to accomplish this, she would have to squeeze her eyes shut, and she would have to slow down considerably to keep from smacking face-first into a wall when the corridor takes a sudden turn.

So, she keeps her eyes open and allows the images into her mind. Her second birthday party, when she had strep throat and only Daddy, Mommy, and Grandpa Jim came. They bought her an ice cream cake because they thought the coolness would feel good on her throat. The high school homecoming dance when she was sixteen and she had her first kiss with Bobby Ortega on the gym floor in the middle of a slow dance. Neither of them had much practice with the art, and they knocked their teeth together with a loud, painful clack. But in the end, they managed to find each other’s lips, and while it wasn’t the best kiss she would ever have, it was definitely in her top five. Well ... top ten, maybe.

She catches another scene out of the corner of her eye, and she turns, can’t stop herself. She sees an image of herself as a little girl. She’s wearing a light-blue dress, and an adult is holding her hand. The picture isn’t large enough to show much more of the adult than a hand—old and wrinkled—and a scrawny wrist that disappears into a white shirt sleeve inside a brown suit jacket. The adult is leading her toward a casket. An open casket. She knows exactly when and where the scene took place. How could she forget it? After all, in a very real sense, it’s why she’s here now, why she runs so fast.

Why she wants so badly to die.

2

Angie is five-almost-six, and she hates the way this place smells. No amount of perfume and deodorant—and the adults here have used plenty of both—can mask the sour odor of sweat and the cloying over-sweetness of flowers already beginning to spoil. She will forever associate these mingled aromas with grief. She doesn’t recognize most of the people here. There’s her daddy, of course. He’s standing at the back of the room, holding her baby sister Erika, swaying from side to side, soothing her. Erika is far too young to understand what’s happening, but she senses the emotional atmosphere, much like an animal would, and she’s been fussy, crying, and squirming. Angie’s jealous. She’d like to be in her father’s arms, held tight and comforted. Everyone says she’s a big girl, but she’s not that big—especially not now.

Daddy’s hair is mostly black, but his mustache and goatee are white. He and Mommy met when they were older, although Angie doesn’t have a good sense of just how old they were. She asked Mommy once, and she just laughed and said, Old enough. People shook their heads and said she died too young, so Angie supposed she couldn’t have been that old. It didn’t matter now, she supposed, for Mommy would never get any older.

Aunt Betty hovers in the vicinity of the casket, a sodden tissue clutched in her hand. Her eyes are red from crying, but she smiles whenever someone approaches to offer their condolences. Betty is what Daddy calls a “drama queen,” and wherever she is, regardless of the situation, she always believes she’s the star. To her, today isn’t Natalie Marshall’s funeral. It’s the Bereavement of Natalie’s Sister Betty, and she’ll feast like a glutton on all the sympathy she can get.

Angie’s paternal grandparents are here, too. Grandpa Marshall carries a slim oxygen tank with him. A clear plastic tube extends from the bottle up to his head, a two-holed nub under his nose to continually feed him oxygen. When Angie was very little, she once asked Daddy if Grandpa Marshall needed to breathe special air. When Daddy said yes, she asked if Grandpa was from another planet. Daddy laughed, although she wasn’t sure why. A couple more aunts and uncles are present, along with a few cousins, the latter all older than her. Some friends of the family, too. Daddy told her earlier that people from Mommy’s work are here. Mommy taught art history at the local university, and she supposes some of these people are teachers there, too. Daddy said the younger ones are some of her students, but that doesn’t make sense to Angie. They’re grownups, not kids like her. Some of the people from the hospice where Mommy stayed—where she died—are here, too. Angie recognizes one nurse, the one with a sad smile who always brought her a little cup of ice cream whenever she visited Mommy. Angie tries to catch the woman’s eye, but she’s talking to two other people and doesn’t notice.

But the majority of people in attendance are unknown to her, and many of them don’t even look particularly sad. They’re just ... here. They stand in small groups, talking quietly, some crying, most dry-eyed. Almost everyone has already went up to see Mommy. They gaze down at her in silence, heads lowered, remaining only a few moments before moving on to make room for someone else. None of them seem fully real to her, not even Daddy and Erika. They’re life-sized dolls, mannequins placed around the room and arranged in stiff mourning poses, the same dull expressions on their faces.

People in cartoons always shiver when they’re scared. Teeth chattering, knees knocking. She assumes this is because fear makes you cold. But she feels hot, almost feverish. She had pneumonia last year, and her temperature rose to the point where she began to hallucinate. She remembers seeing her stuffed animals dancing around her room, remembers Mommy—tall as a giant, with a voice like thunder—coming into her room to check on her. She feels that hot now, and she wonders if she’s hallucinating again. Maybe none of this is real, maybe she’s sick again, lying in her bed, and when her fever breaks, Mommy will be there, alive, healthy, and smiling. But as much as she wishes otherwise, there is no fever dream, and there’s no waking from it.

Mommy and Daddy let her watch The Muppet Christmas Carol on TV last Christmas. She loved the movie, laughed lots, hummed along with the songs because she didn’t know the lyrics. But the last ghost, the one that took Scrooge to his future, was scary. Really scary. A tall creature garbed in a dingy grey cloak—she doesn’t know the word shroud—with blue-tinged hands and a pool of impenetrable darkness where a face should be. At her age, she doesn’t think about death much, but when she does, she imagines it looking like the shadow-faced ghost from the movie, a thing of silence and awful implacability. A dread god that comes for you when it’s your time. Did Mommy see the shadow-faced ghost when she died? Did it come for her and plunge one of its blue-fleshed hands into her chest to steal her soul and carry it away?

“You’re going to be okay,” Grandpa Jim says. His bony fingers tighten on her hand reassuringly, but the sensation of his paper-thin skin and tree-twig bones on her hand makes her shudder. It’s at this moment she realizes death isn’t a thing that comes for people. It’s something that everyone carries inside them, something that grows stronger the older you get, the ultimate disease from which no one recovers.

She doesn’t want to see Mommy. Daddy wasn’t going to make her, but Grandpa Jim approached Daddy and said it was important that she said a proper goodbye to her mother, that if she didn’t, she’d regret it for as long as she lived. He offered to escort her to the casket, promised he’d make it as easy for her as he could. It was the least he could do for the daughter of his daughter.

Daddy agreed, mostly because he was too sad to argue, she thought, and Grandpa Jim took her hand and pulled her gently forward, and—not knowing what else to do—she allowed herself to be led.

The people aren’t mannequins now. They all turn to look at her and watch as Grandpa Jim takes her to the casket, all of them waiting to see how she’ll react. Will she cry, will she wail, will she beg her mommy to sit up and hold her one last time?

Angie’s class put on a play last Thanksgiving. It was about how the Native Americans saved the Pilgrims from starving to death, and how they celebrated together afterward. They performed the play in the gym, and all the parents came, except Mommy. She was too sick by then, so Daddy videotaped it for her. She remembered what it felt like to be up on the stage with all those people looking at her in her pilgrim costume, waiting to see what she would do next. She feels like this now, only much more so.

She grows dizzy as they draw near the casket, and she thinks what a strange word it is: CASK-IT. You put IT (whatever IT is) in a CASK.

She’s a small, slight thing, and she can’t get a good look at Mommy. This is fine with her, and she hopes Grandpa Jim will lead her away now and everyone will stop looking at her. But instead he puts his bony hands on her tiny waist and lifts her up as easily as if she’s made of papier-mâché—strips of newspaper, dried paste, hollow inside.

She doesn’t know exactly what she was expecting to see, but whatever it was, this isn’t it. The thing lying in the casket—which she now knows is just another word for long wooden box—resembles Mommy to a certain degree, but it’s like a copy that someone didn’t get quite right. Her skin is shiny and tight, as if she’s been coated in a thin layer of clear plastic, and her black hair is shiny and sleek. Mommy lost her real hair because of the medicine the doctors gave her—medicine that didn’t work—and now she’s wearing a wig. Mommy’s eyes are closed and sunken in, the outlines of their sockets visible beneath the skin. Someone has put makeup on her, which is weird since she hardly ever wears—wore—any. Eye shadow, eye liner, rouge, lipstick ... She looks like a clown, Angie thinks. A dead clown.

“My baby,” Grandpa Jim says. “My poor sweet baby.”

Angie thinks he’s talking about her at first, but then she realizes he’s talking about Mommy. She was his little girl. His baby. The pain in his voice—the sorrow, the loss—is heart-rending, but she barely registers it.

“I want to touch her,” she says.

Grandpa Jim is still holding her up and she feels his hands stiffen on her.

“What?” He sounds more confused than shocked, but there’s some of that, too. He hesitates and she can almost hear him thinking. Then softly, tentatively, he says, “Okay.”

He leans forward, enough so that she can reach Mommy’s forehead. She brushes the tips of trembling fingers across flesh hard and cold as marble. When she withdraws her hand, it’s no longer trembling. Her body starts to shake, and Grandpa Jim holds her to his chest.

“It’s okay, hon. Let it out.”

She does. But the sound that comes from deep inside her isn’t a wail of despair or a choked sob.

It’s laughter.

This is death? This is the thing that everyone is so afraid of? There’s nothing scary about Mommy. She’s not some kind of monster that will suddenly sit up in her casket, eyes open, mouth wide, reaching for the person closest to her, hissing “Brains!” She’s just a piece of dead meat in a dress, and she looks sad and—worst of all—ridiculous.

3

Angie drives down a country back road in southern Ohio. It’s 3:08 in the morning, and thick clouds block the stars, turning the sky into a vast dome of darkness. It’ll start raining soon, but for now it’s dry. She likes the idea of rain, thinks it will add to the atmosphere. There’s a strong wind blowing from the east, and she grips the steering wheel of her Pontiac tight with both hands to keep the car steady. It’s late fall and the wind tears leaves from the trees, sends them tumbling, creating a swirl of red, yellow, and brown in the Pontiac’s headlights.

She could park closer to the bridge if she wanted. Hell, she could park on the damn thing for that matter. But she’s reluctant to do so. She doesn’t want to disrupt the environment any more than absolutely necessary, wants to slip in quietly and gently, like someone entering a pool of water without causing so much as a ripple. She pulls over, passenger-side tires on the grass, parks, turns off the engine, kills the headlights. She isn’t able to pull over any farther—not unless she wants to get stuck in a ditch—but country roads like this are rarely traveled late at night. She doubts she’ll have to worry about someone coming along and clipping the side of the Pontiac.

She releases her seat belt and then sits for several minutes, her hands in her lap. She listens to the engine ticking as it starts to cool, along with the sound of the wind hitting the side of the car. Any other time, she might’ve found the sounds soothing, and given the lateness of the hour, they might have lulled her to sleep. Not this night, though. She’s wired, and the noises of the wind and ticking engine only serve to put her further on edge. She fights to remain still, when she wants more than anything to release her nervous energy—tap her feet on the floor, pound her hands on the steering wheel. But she breathes slowly, evenly, and after a bit her heart rate begins to decrease and the nervousness—a hissing, clawing feral cat lodged in her chest—starts to calm. She feels like an idiot for being so nervous: she refuses to think of herself as afraid, although that’s precisely what she is. There’s an excellent chance that nothing will happen tonight, that her nocturnal expedition will prove to be a waste of time. But there is also a chance—however slight—that she will find what she’s come here looking for, and if she does, then this may very well be the last night of her life. And even though she wants that, wants it more than anything, the thought still makes her nervous. Isn’t that funny?

She takes another deep breath, removes the keys from the ignition, pockets them, and then gets out. The wind hits her like a cold slap, and although the temperature is in the high forties, she starts to shiver. She’s wearing a sweater beneath her jacket, but neither does much to fend off the cold, and her jeans don’t do any better. She didn’t think to bring a hat, and her long brown hair is tossed about by the wind, sometimes smacking the sides of her face like small, thin whips. She didn’t forget to bring the most important thing, though. She reaches into a jacket pocket and removes a flashlight and turns it on. She directs the beam toward the road in front of her, but it does little to illuminate the path she must take. Mostly all it does is create more shadows. She feels a drop of rain hit the back of her hand then, and it begins to sprinkle. She starts forward, heading for the bridge—and whatever may or may not await her there.

She passes trees and farmer’s fences. No driveways or mailboxes, not here. At one point she is startled by movement seen from the corner of her eye, accompanied by a rippling exhalation of air. She turns to see a horse standing at a fence, looking at her with large dark eyes. She doesn’t know anything about horses, doesn’t recognize the breed—if breed is even the right word. She has no idea if the animal is male or female. But it’s black, and large, and although she thinks she heard something once about horses being skittish, this one doesn’t seem bothered by the wind and the rain. She laughs in relief because it’s just a horse, but part of her feels a pang of disappointment, too. She’s come here for something else. Something special.

On impulse, she steps toward the animal, right hand lowering the flashlight, so the beam doesn’t strike its face, left hand reaching out. She wants to touch the horse—scratch its head, stroke its neck—before proceeding any further. Maybe she wants one final contact with something solid, something real before continuing on to the bridge. Or maybe she just wants to touch it for luck, unconscious superstition at work. But as she steps toward the horse, the animal abruptly tosses its head, turns, and gallops off, hooves pounding on hard ground. It’s soon lost to the night, merging with the darkness as if part of it. She feels surprisingly disappointed by the horse’s rejection of her, and if she believed in omens, she would think this is a bad one. But she doesn’t believe in such things, although she supposes that might change depending on what she finds at the bridge. She turns away from the fence, steps back onto the road, and continues walking.

She’s never been here before, but she’s done her research. She’s read dozens of accounts on the internet, most including photos. She knows that the road takes a dogleg turn ahead, and beyond that is Valley Way Bridge. It’s so small that it barely deserves to be called a bridge: twenty feet long (technically nineteen feet, eight inches), stretched across a stream only a few feet deep, rust-eaten metal guardrails on each side. To look at it, you’d never guess it’s one of the more infamous paranormal sites in Ohio. It’s a crybaby bridge, a type of haunting that’s common throughout the United States. Every state has at least one, and often more. Their backstories vary in detail, but they follow the same basic pattern. A baby is brought to the bridge, most often by a depressed or mentally unbalanced mother, but sometimes by kidnappers, sometimes by a group of Satanists. The baby—the stories rarely identify the child’s gender—is killed. Sometimes it’s thrown off the bridge to drown in the water below. Other times its head is bashed against a guardrail before it’s tossed over the side. Sometimes it’s stabbed to death or its throat is cut before the body is disposed of. However the poor thing meets its demise, its spirit is bound to the bridge, and sometimes late at night—when there’s no moon (or in some versions, a full moon) and the bridge is deserted—you can hear the ghostly sound of a baby crying.

An urban legend, one so common as to be cliché, its ubiquity making it even less believable than it otherwise might be. Angie understands this line of thinking, but she doesn’t share it. It’s the amount of reports spread across the length and breadth of the nation that first captured her interest and ultimately led her here. Her thinking runs like this: if this were some sort of natural phenomenon—say, the sighting of a new type of animal—the widespread reports would argue for its existence, not against it. She doesn’t believe that hundreds of babies were killed at hundreds of bridges throughout the country. That’s ridiculous. But she suspects something is happening at these bridges, and she’s determined to find out what.

She chose this particular bridge because the reports of ghostly crying are more detailed and specific than most, and this is one of the few crybaby bridge locations where people experience more than just hearing a scary sound. That’s more or less what she’s hoping to find here. By and large, the visitors to Valley Way Bridge depart unharmed, but some aren’t so fortunate. Some are left with strange scratches or rashes on their skin. And some—not many, but some—simply vanish, never to be heard from again. Valley Way Bridge isn’t simply another crybaby bridge, another place for teenagers to come and get scared. It’s the most dangerous of all the bridges, and she’s determined to discover why.

She reaches the short dogleg and takes it. The air seems colder here, and the raindrops hit her like sharp pellets of ice. She begins to shiver, and she’s unable to hold the flashlight steady. The beam jitters up and down, back and forth, causing shadows to dance ahead of her. It appears darker here, and she would chalk this up to the tree cover, except the trees here are sparse, their leaves mostly gone. The wind blows stronger, but it’s coming from behind her now, pushing her forward, as if eager, even impatient, for her to reach the bridge. When it finally comes into view, it’s hazy, indistinct, as if she’s viewing it through ripples of distortion, the kind of effect that occurs when asphalt becomes blazing hot and the air above it shimmers. But of course, it’s too cold for that to be happening here, and she wonders if the effect is a paranormal one, for the wind doesn’t disrupt the shimmer. The flashlight beam dims even further, and she suspects that whatever power dwells in this place is responsible. She’s read numerous accounts of electrical equipment—flashlights, cameras, computers, cars—dying in the presence of paranormal phenomena, and she wonders if that’s what’s happening here. Is electrical energy incompatible with paranormal energy? Or do unearthly entities feed on it? Either way, it doesn’t matter. This isn’t the kind of knowledge she’s come here seeking.

She considers the symbolism of bridges. They connect one place to another, allow passage across the otherwise impassable. And when you’re on one—as she is now—you aren’t really any place, are you? You’re simply between.

When she’s within ten feet of the bridge, the flashlight beam flickers and goes out. She shakes the device several times, more out of reflex than from any real expectation that it will start working again. As expected, the flashlight remains dead, so she slips the useless thing into a jacket pocket. Without the flashlight’s illumination, the bridge slides into darkness, and she stands there, shivering in the cold and the wet, waiting for her eyes to adjust. She feels a crawling sensation on the back of her neck as if someone—or something—is watching her, and she experiences a surge of fear. She refuses to let it overwhelm her or distract her from her purpose. She lets herself feel the fear, then allows it to dwindle away. By the time it’s gone, her vision has adjusted to the darkness, and she’s able to discern the outline of the bridge. She continues forward, the wind at her back urging her along. As she steps onto the bridge, she feels a slight resistance, almost as if she’s pushing against an invisible membrane, a barrier between one world and another. It opens to allow her entrance—the bridge wants visitors—and she steps the rest of the way onto it without any trouble.

The wind dies away then, all at once, as if somewhere a switch has been thrown. The rain continues, but without the wind, the drops land gently. There are no leaves on the bridge. It’s as if the wind decided to allow the ones on the trees—few as they are here—to fall in their own good time. Without the sound of the wind to interfere, she has no trouble hearing the stream flowing beneath the bridge, a soft burble of running water, as if the stream is in no particular hurry to get anywhere. She walks over to one of the guardrails and leans forward to peer over it. The rails are only a couple feet high, enough to make sure crossing vehicles remain on the road, but not high enough to prevent someone falling over. But the drop isn’t far—less than ten feet—so it’s not as if the county has to worry about people leaping to their deaths from here. She can’t see the water, not clearly, but she has an impression of movement below, liquid shadow snaking through darkness. Maybe here, in this place that seems only tangentially connected to what most people think of as the real world, it really is streaming shadow. If so, what would happen if she were to step off the bridge, climb down the bank, and enter the stream? Would it pull her in and carry her away to the place where everything—including darkness itself—eventually ends up? She turns away from the guard rail and begins to retrace her steps when she hears the baby cry. She stops, cocks her head, listens.

It’s soft at first, so much so that’s she’s not certain she hears it at all. After a time, the volume increases, and she’s sure she hears it now. The cries aren’t fueled by anger or frustration. They’re cries of fear, keening wails punctuated by choked sobs and shuddering inhalations of air. She has no children of her own, nor does she have any nieces or nephews. She’s never actually heard a baby cry outside of movies and TV shows. But she responds to the sound, nevertheless. It reaches her on a personal level, activating a deeply hardwired instinct for species survival. She feels an overwhelming need to go to the child and do whatever it takes to make the noise stop. She spins around, trying to determine where the sound is coming from, but she’s unable to hone in on a specific direction. The sound seems to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Or maybe it’s not coming from anywhere outside at all, maybe it’s being generated inside her mind. The crying continues increasing in volume until it becomes painful, and it feels like there’s something inside her head trying to claw its way out. She grits her teeth as tears stream from her eyes. She presses her hands to her head as if trying to keep her skull from exploding. She knows she should run, she wants to run, wants more than anything to get the hell off the bridge and away from this agonizing sound. But she forces herself to remain. This is why she’s come here; this is what she’s looking for.

The crying doesn’t lessen, but despite the pain, her thoughts remain clear, and perhaps this is why she senses movement coming toward her. Or perhaps she’s simply lucky. Either way, she dodges to the left as whatever it is streaks out of the darkness, and instead of colliding with her face, it strikes her shoulder a glancing blow. The impact spins her around, and she feels a fiery jolt of pain, as if something sharp cut her. She withdraws the inoperative flashlight from her jacket without thinking and grips it tight. This time when the thing attacks, she’s ready. She sees its dark form swoop toward her, and she swings the flashlight as hard as she can. She feels a jolt run up her arm, hears a satisfying thunk, and then the crying cuts off, replaced by a pained—and she thinks somewhat indignant—squawk.

The shape lands on one of the guardrails, and the flashlight beam suddenly comes on. Maybe hitting the thing shook up the device and made it work again. Or maybe whatever sort of dampening field that affected the bridge has been deactivated. Whichever the case, she trains the flashlight beam on the creature sitting on the guardrail. It’s some kind of large bird the size of a vulture. Its night-black wings are folded against its body, and it grips the metal rail with wicked-looking ebon talons. Something thin and black undulates in the air behind it. At first, she thinks it’s a snake, but then she realizes it’s the creature’s tail.

Then she looks at the thing’s head.

Small, round, grey-skinned, with tiny human features—eyes, ears, button nose, a thatch of unruly hair on top. A baby’s face. There’s a smudge of black on the creature’s left temple, and she realizes the thing is bleeding from where she struck it. The creature glares at her with obsidian eyes that look nothing like an infant’s, and its lips draw back from a mouthful of needle-thin teeth.

Whatever this creature is, whatever strange abilities it possesses, one thing is clear: it’s just a simple predator. Nothing more.

The creature spreads its wings wide and leaps into the air. She follows it with the flashlight as it flies away, wings beating the air heavily, a soft keening trailing behind it, a sound of pain and disappointment.

You’re not the only one disappointed, she thinks.

The thing is soon lost to the night, but she remains on the bridge a while longer, waiting to see if it will return. It doesn’t, and so, with a deep sigh, she starts back toward her car.

4

After her mother’s funeral, Angie became fascinated with death. Not with the biological processes of it—although those are interesting too—but rather its literature, legends, and myths. She knew what death was, but she wanted to learn what it could—and should—be. This fascination, bordering on obsession, followed her throughout her school years, and by the time she entered her senior year of high school, she’d decided that she’d major in folklore in college. She was in her sophomore year at Ohio State when she discovered that her sister Erika was also fixated on death, but in an entirely different way.

Thanksgiving break, and Angie is home for the first time since the end of summer. She doesn’t like being home, doesn’t feel like this place qualifies for the term. Her mother has been gone for almost twenty years, and her father long ago remarried. She doesn’t think of Jeannie as “Mom,” refuses to refer to her by that word, although Erika does. Angie isn’t angry at her sister for this. Erika was too young when Mom died to remember her. And Angie doesn’t hate Jeannie. She’s nice enough, and the logical part of her recognizes that Jeannie has been a presence in her life almost three times longer than her mother. And when she’s honest with herself, she has no clear memories of Mom except for seeing her lying dead in her casket. She remembers that perfectly. But she can’t help thinking of Jeannie as a replacement for her real mother, and a rather inferior one at that. She still resents her father for not remaining a grieving widower until the day of his own death. And while Dad and Jeannie moved to this house eight years ago, Angie still thinks of it as the new house, and she still feels uncomfortable every second she spends under its roof. That’s why, as soon as she got her driver’s license, she was hardly ever home, why she doesn’t visit now unless she feels she has to. And even then, she comes home primarily to see Erika.

Erika’s in her junior year of high school, and while she’s a math whiz—just like their dad, the engineer—and well on her way to a full-ride scholarship to the college of her choice, she’s just as caught up in meaningless school drama as any other teenager, and she mopes around the house, sullen and silent. That’s why, when Thanksgiving dinner is over, Angie suggests Dad and Jeannie go into the family room to watch TV while she and Erika clean up. She wants to get her sister alone so they can talk. Dad seems surprised by the offer, but he takes her up on it, and he escorts Jeannie—who says she’s happy to stay and help—out of the dining room. When the adults are gone, Erika gives Angie a glum look. “Thanks a lot for volunteering me.”

They carry the leftover food into the kitchen and prepare it for refrigerator storage. They don’t speak a word to each other as they work. Angie senses the time’s not right. Once the leftovers are put away, they turn their attention to rinsing dishes and silverware and putting them into the dishwasher. Angie rinses. She likes blasting away food particles with the rinse hose attached to the sink, while Erika enjoys putting dishes into the washer just so, making sure there’s enough room for them all, taking pride in getting as many dishes and utensils as possible clean in one cycle.

As they’re working on the dishes side by side, Angie decides it’s time to talk.

She speaks over the sound of jetting water. “Everything okay?”

Erika frowns, but she doesn’t look at her sister. She continues putting dishes into the machine, plates and glasses clinking softly against one another.

“What do you mean?”

Angie’s not a psych major, but she knows what it means when someone answers a question with a question: they’re stalling.

“You were quiet at dinner. More quiet than usual, I mean.”

Erika shrugs. “Didn’t have anything to say, I guess.”

You’re not going to make this easy on me, are you?

“You’re wearing long sleeves.” A blue mock turtleneck, to be precise.

Erika has dark hair and a fair complexion, just like Mom, and when she blushes, her cheeks turn a deep crimson. “So?” Belligerence in her voice now, a warning. Angie ignores it and goes on.

“You never wear long sleeves, no matter how cold it gets.”

Erika is silent for a moment.

“I thought I’d try something different for a change.”

Angie is hesitant to take this further, fears that by doing so, she’ll drive a wedge between them, but she knows she has to press on.

“Can I see?” When Erika doesn’t respond, Angie gently takes hold of her sister’s right sleeve and pulls it away from her wrist, back toward the elbow. There are four marks on the underside of her forearm, cuts, all fresh.

“I ran out of room on my legs,” Erika says, almost whispering.

The sight of the cuts—each two inches or less in length—makes Angie feel sick. But she fights to keep her expression neutral. The last thing Erika needs is to think her big sister is revolted by her secret.

Angie pulls the sleeve back into place. She wants to say something, needs to, but she has no idea what. So instead she pulls Erika to her and embraces her. Erika is rigid at first, but then her body relaxes, and she begins to cry. A second later, Angie starts crying too.

5

It was about a boy, of course. What else? She loved him, thought he loved her, turned out he just loved screwing her. And when he found someone he wanted to screw more, he moved on. This plunged Erika into a deep depression—one which Dad and Jeannie put down to typical teen angst—and the worse Erika felt, the more she cut herself. Angie understood her sister’s depression better than she could herself. Mom died when Erika was little more than a baby. It was only natural that she’d have abandonment issues.

Angie remained practically glued to her sister’s side the remainder of the break. They didn’t talk about the cutting again, talked about anything but that, and when it came time for Angie to head back to campus, she didn’t want to go, was afraid to leave her sister alone. But Erika insisted she felt a lot better now, and in the end, Angie left.

Erika killed herself six days later.

6

“Your father is almost comatose. He just sits and stares out the window. He won’t answer when I talk to him, won’t even look at me.”

This is Jeannie’s explanation for why she called to inform Angie of Erika’s death instead of Dad. Part of her wants to yell at Jeannie, to tell her this isn’t about her, to stop being a whiny, self-centered bitch. But she’s in too much shock to say anything beyond a simple mmm to acknowledge she’s heard Jeannie’s words.

“He was the one who found her. She didn’t lock the bathroom door. He didn’t even know she was in there. He went inside and found her lying in the tub. She’d drawn a bath, and she ... she ...” A choked sob. “The water was so red.”

Angie’s stomach gives a cold lurch.

“She didn’t leave a note. I’ve looked all over for one. The only thing she did was draw a heart on the wall using ... using ...” Another sob. “She drew a squiggly line down the middle of it. I have no idea what it means. Do you? Please tell me you do. I can’t stand not knowing.” Then she breaks down crying, and Angie hears her phone hit the floor. She calls Jeannie’s name several times, but she doesn’t pick up the phone, and eventually Angie ends the call. She sits down on the bed in the cramped dorm room, glad her roommate is at class right now.

She knows what the heart means, of course, and the line down the middle isn’t supposed to be squiggly. It’s supposed to be jagged. It’s a broken heart. Erika’s heart.

Angie’s taking an Intro to English Lit class this semester, and earlier in the term, the class read Romeo and Juliet. She remembers something the professor said.

The real tragedy isn’t that Romeo and Juliet kill themselves. It’s that they’re both teenagers caught up in the intensity of a first love. If they’d lived, they’d most likely have broken up in a few weeks, gotten over each other, and eventually gone on to find more mature love with someone else.

But they hadn’t lived, had they, any more than Erika had. She wonders if her sister thought she was making some last grand gesture by killing herself, striking out at the boy who’d put the jagged line through her heart, as if to say, See what you did? See what you’re responsible for?

Angie doesn’t know the boy, can’t even remember his name. But she doubts he’d get the message Erika was trying to send. More likely, when he hears of Erika’s suicide, his reaction will be—assuming he has one at all—Man, that bitch was crazy! Good thing I dumped her ass.

Stupid. Futile. Wasteful. Erika’s death is all these things, and what’s worse, she chose it. At least their mother had been sick. If Erika had to die, she should’ve chosen better.

Angie tries to cry, wants desperately to do so, but no tears come.

7

Angie makes her way through a maze of oaks and elms, a layer of ice-coated snow crunching beneath her booted feet. This kind of weather is uncommon in southern Ohio during the second week of March, but not unheard of. Sometimes winter is reluctant to release its hold on the world any sooner than absolutely necessary, and it seems this is one of those years. The air is brittle cold, more suitable to January, and her breath leaves her nostrils as streams of white fog. She’s dressed for the weather—heavy coat, snow pants, Under Armour, gloves, hat, scarf. She’s pulled the latter up to warm the lower half of her face, but it doesn’t help much. It’s so fucking cold that her exposed skin stings, and her eyes feel like frozen marbles in their sockets.

She’s carrying a flashlight in her right hand, and there’s a backup in one of her coat pockets. Just in case. Not that she really needs her own light. It’s close to midnight, and there’s a full moon in the clear night sky above her. The trees here are bereft of leaves, and there’s nothing to prevent the moonlight from reaching the forest floor. Snow and ice coat trunks and branches, and the moonlight glitters on the trees, making them seem like spun glass. There’s a peaceful hush, as if the world has been wrapped in an invisible blanket that softens sound. Even the crunch-crunch of her footfalls seems muted and nonintrusive, as if she’s barely making any noise at all. So much the better. She prefers not to announce her presence if she can avoid it.

After her failure at Valley Way Bridge, she took her time selecting the target for her next investigation. She considered and ultimately rejected a dozen different possibilities before settling on the Yorklyn Wolfman. Sightings of a hairy wolf-like humanoid in this area dated back more than a century, and the eyewitness accounts are more detailed than usual for urban legends. Unlike many encounters with the paranormal, people are often in close proximity to the Wolfman when they spot him, resulting in detailed drawings of the creature, as well as a number of blurry—but intriguing—photos. None of this is proof the Wolfman is real, of course, but it’s good enough to make the stories worth checking out as far as Angie is concerned.

The details varied from sighting to sighting, but the creature is supposed to be most active around midnight during a full moon, so that’s why she’s here now. She’d have preferred to come in spring, or better yet, summer, but while sightings occur throughout the year, they’re most common in March. Just her luck that this year, March turned out to be unseasonably cold.

She could’ve waited until next month’s full moon, or the one after that. But once she settled on her second investigation, the idea of postponing her trip to Yorklyn County was out of the question. She’d waited a long time—since the moment Grandpa Jim carried her to the side of Mom’s casket—and she doesn’t want to wait a single second longer than necessary. She’s confident she’s in the right general location for encountering the Wolfman. She plotted the sightings on a map, calculated frequency and proximity of each sighting, and identified a square mile of forest where the Wolfman is seen most often. Of course, a square mile means she has 640 acres to cover—an impossible task—but at least it gives her somewhere to start.

She’s hopeful that, should she find the Wolfman—or he finds her—that the encounter will go differently than what happened at Valley Way Bridge. The Wolfman is reputed to be aggressive, chasing people, even injuring them sometimes. There are no reports of the Wolfman causing serious wounds, but there are stories of people vanishing in these woods. There are any number of reasons why someone might go missing in a forest that have nothing to do with a furry urban legend. But she considers the disappearances to be a good sign. With any luck, the Wolfman will prove harder to deter than the winged creature at Crybaby Bridge.

She reaches a small clearing and stops at the edge to examine it. The snow here has been disturbed by deer, and dozens of tracks crisscross the clearing. She’s no hunter—not of deer, anyway—and she can’t estimate how many of the animals have been through here. Maybe a couple, maybe more. But what catches her attention and gets her heart racing are the other, larger tracks interspersed among the hoofprints. Tracks that look as if they were made by a human foot, and a bare one at that.

Excited, she steps into the clearing and walks toward the closest footprints. She’s adding hers to the mix, of course, but she’s careful where she steps. She doesn’t want to disturb the scene any more than she has to. She crouches next to a footprint to get a better look. She can make it out well enough in the moonlight, but she shines the flashlight beam on it to bring the details into sharper relief. It is a human—or at least human-like—print: five distinct toes, ball, heel. Space where the arch would be. It’s weird that someone would be walking barefoot through the snow, but there’s nothing about the print to suggest it was made by anything other than a human. A man, she guesses, given the size of the print. There’s certainly nothing about it that screams “Wolfman.” No indentations made by claws, no indication of thick, paw-like pads. There’s nothing remotely canine about the print. She’s not certain how fresh it is. The edges are clear and distinct, and as far as she can tell, there’s no sign of melting, so she doubts it was made before sundown. Then again, the ice coating the snow might’ve preserved the print, protecting it against the sun’s rays. A couple hours ago or a couple days. There’s really no way to tell when it was made.

There are different theories about what the Yorklyn Wolfman might be. A variant of Bigfoot is the most popular, but this print was made by a normal-sized human foot. The aggressive nature of the Wolfman is at odds with most Bigfoot reports, which describe the creature as shy and nonthreatening. Some people posit that the Yorklyn Wolfman is, in fact, a lycanthrope—a human that transforms into a wolf-like beast under the influence of the full moon. The big problem with that theory is most of the lore surrounding the werewolf legend was invented by Hollywood screenwriters. Full moon, silver bullets ... all bullshit. But there’s no denying the Wolfman’s connection to the full moon, whatever the reason for it. So, while the footprints aren’t impressive in and of themselves, they are a sign that someone walked through this forest in bare feet—in the snow—and while doing that doesn’t make the owner of these feet a monster ...

She has the sudden feeling that she’s being watched freezes, still crouched before the footprint, and she listens. There’s no wind tonight, and the forest is as silent as a long-abandoned graveyard. She holds her breath, tries to ignore the pounding of her pulse in her ears. At first, she hears nothing, but feels eyes upon her, and is sure she’s not imagining it. Then she hears a voice, so soft it’s nearly inaudible. A man’s, she thinks, murmuring to himself beneath his breath. She can’t make out individual words, isn’t certain the man is speaking English. She thinks the voice is coming from the trees to her left, but sound is deceptive in the night forest, and it could be coming from any direction. This thought gives her a shiver of fear, and while it makes her stomach lurch, she can’t say the sensation isn’t pleasurable in its own way.

Her legs are beginning to ache, and she stands up slowly, keeping her hands away from her body to avoid giving the impression that she might reach for a weapon. She continues listening the entire time she performs this maneuver, but the murmuring remains at the same volume and intensity. She does, however, feel the scrutiny on her intensify, settling on her like a weight. Once fully upright, she stands there, waiting for whatever’s in the trees to make a move—to come rushing at her, hands raised, and teeth bared. Or maybe it will approach slowly, slinking forth from its concealment, stalking her, drawing her out ... But neither of these things happen. The murmurer remains where he is, speaking softly to himself, content—it seems—to merely observe.

She grows angry then. She came here for a confrontation with a Great Mystery, and she damn well intends to have one. She turns to the left and trains her flashlight beam on the dark spaces between the trees. The first thing that registers on her consciousness is a pair of glowing eyes that make her think of a cat. Further details become clear. A riot of brown hair, tangled and matted, rises from the head, and an equally wild beard covers the lower half of a grimy, narrow face. The beard trails down the middle of a scrawny chest so covered by hair that she can’t tell where beard hair ends, and chests hair begins. Maybe they’re not separate at all, just one large mass of hair connected to the body in two different places. The man doesn’t have much hair on his slender arms and legs, but there is a thatch of pubic hair above a thin dangling member that looks more like a large flaccid worm than a cock. Last to come into focus are the details of the face. The eyebrows are thick and bushy, and the eyes themselves continue to gleam in the flashlight’s glare. There’s an intelligence within them, coldly appraising her. The mouth is almost lost among all the hair, but she can see a slash of white so startlingly bright in contrast to the hair that it’s almost as if the teeth are glowing too.

Part of her is thrilled to see the Yorklyn Wolfman. This meeting is, after all, why she’s come here. But she’s also more than a little disappointed. Assuming this is the being all those eyewitnesses encountered over the years, she can see why they thought of it as a wolfman. But he’s clearly human. Crazy, sure, but supernatural? Doubtful.

The reports go back a century, she reminds herself. Longer than any one human could be responsible for. She can’t determine the wild man’s age, but she guesses it at forty, at least, and likely older, but not over a hundred.

He doesn’t have to be responsible for all the sightings, she thinks. He’s probably just a crazy old man who’s been inspired to act out the legend.

And yet ... those eyes.

She lowers the flashlight and shadows rush in to cloak the wild man. But the light shining from his eyes doesn’t dim. If anything, it becomes more pronounced, silvery and fluid, like mercury, and it appears to quiver slightly, as if the wild man is trembling. Not from fear, she thinks, but rather anticipation, and now she’s not so sure what he is.

That’s when he takes a step into the clearing.

She wants to stand her ground, wants to play her role in whatever is to come. But survival instinct kicks in, and she turns and runs in the opposite direction—feet crunching in the snow—and plunges back into the forest, weaving in and around trees. She still grips the flashlight, but doesn’t use it to guide her. Its beam darts this way and that, creating a disorienting strobe effect that makes it harder to see where she’s going. She hears the wild man crashing through the underbrush after her. He’s clumsy, without a bit of animal grace. Another quality that argues for his humanity.

But if he is merely human, why is she running from him? He’s so skinny he’s practically emaciated, and she’s confident she could take him down without working up a single bead of sweat. But she can no more stop running than she can will her heart to stop beating. It’s an action that’s happening independently of her conscious mind, and all she can do is go along for the ride.

She jumps over the remains of fallen trees, raises her arms to shield her face and eyes from low-hanging branches. Cold air sears her lungs and numbs the unprotected skin on her face. Her sinuses throb, and an icicle of pain lodges between her eyes. Her adrenaline burst is already starting to fade, probably because her system is working so hard to keep itself warm. Her legs suddenly feel like heavy iron weights, and her energy ebbs, leaving her tired, almost sleepy. She pictures herself passing out, collapsing to the snow, the wild man catching up, regarding her still form curiously for a moment before kneeling down and taking the first bite of her flesh. She discovers an extra reserve of energy and picks up speed once more. It’s one thing to die on your feet while facing a thing from the unseen world. It’s quite another to lie unconscious in snow while an insane senior citizen snacks on you. She’s not running from death. She’s running from the wrong death.

Her second wind doesn’t last long, and a wave of weariness twice as strong as the first crashes into her. She forces herself to keep going, but her legs feel numb, like they’re no longer part of her body and controlling them is no longer possible. Eventually her left boot snags on a fallen branch, and she goes down. She lands hard on her right side, the impact knocking the breath out of her, and she feels a sharp pain in her ankle. It’s twisted, maybe even broken. She lost her grip on the flashlight when she fell, and it went flying, landing a dozen feet away, beam pointing toward her as if she has her own miniature spotlight. As she lays there panting, cold snot running over her lips, she hears crunching snow as the wild man catches up to her. Part of her wants to turn her head and squeeze her eyes shut, but a bigger part wants to face whatever’s coming and look it in the eye.

The wild man gazes down at her. He’s not breathing hard and there’s no sweat on his body. Naked as he is, he should be shivering in this frigid air. Hell, he should be suffering from frostbite. But he seems perfectly comfortable, as if he’s standing on a warm tropical beach instead of in a snow-covered Ohio forest. White cuts through his beard as he bares his teeth, but whether he’s smiling or sneering, she can’t tell. Maybe a little of both.

He crouches before her, his limp worm-cock dangling too close to her face—and is it writhing as if possessed of a life of its own? Maybe.

She can smell him now. His body odor surrounds her in a thick miasma, but he doesn’t smell of old, sour sweat. He smells like wet leaves and pine sap, and his breath reeks of the cloyingly sweet stink of rotting fruit. He extends one long-fingered hand then, and she sees that the nails are jagged and yellow. He curls three fingers and a thumb inward, leaving only the index finger outstretched. The hand stops for a moment, then it darts toward her face. She winces, expecting the finger to strike one of her eyes, shove inward creating a gout of blood, and plunge into her brain. Instead it gently touches her nose, and the wild man says, “Boop.”

He withdraws his hand but remains crouching. The white slash behind his beard is wider now, and she’s sure he’s grinning.

“Good chase,” he says in a voice like wet gravel. “Fun.”

He returns to murmuring after this, the words unclear, little more than whispers.

Angie stares at him incredulously. Of all the ways she might have imagined this encounter would go, this is not one of them. Now that the wild man—the so-called Yorklyn Wolfman—is so close to her, she is finally able to get a good look at his eyes, and she instantly revises her opinion of the man’s humanity. Although the flashlight beam shines on his eyes, it’s too far away and its light is weak, diffuse. The glow emanating from the wild man’s eyes isn’t created by any external force. It’s generated by something within. The silvery luminescence is solid, unbroken. There are no pupils, no irises. Just that liquid silver glow.

Moonlight, she thinks. That’s what’s shining in his eyes. The moon. Is this why he appears during the full moon? Because something inside him is connected to the moon? Or maybe whatever it is only exists when the moon is full and high. Hell, maybe that’s the only time he exists.

But the longer she looks into his eyes, the more she realizes that there’s something within the silver, or maybe beyond it. Tiny shapes, hundreds of them. Many are animals: deer, rabbits, groundhogs, birds, cats, dogs, even some horses and cows. But a number of the shapes—far more than she would’ve thought likely—are human. Men and women, boys and girls. Babies. All of these faces are looking at her, eyes boring into hers. She feels their awareness reaching out to her, trying to connect, trying to send her a message. The pressure of so many minds trying to make contact is overpowering, and she feels as if she’s in danger of being subsumed. Then, just when she thinks she’ll never understand, a simple word breaks through.

Lost.

“Join them?” the wild man asks. “Still room.” More white splits his beard. “Lots and lots.”

He frowns then and leans his head closer to Angie and sniffs the air around her, inhaling deeply. He then holds the finger he touched her with under his nose and inhales again. He opens his mouth and extends a tongue too long and black to be human. He dabs his finger onto his tongue. He closes his mouth, swirls his tongue around several times, and then frowns again, as if he isn’t quite sure what he’s tasting. But then his expression becomes more certain, as if he’s reached a decision.

“Sorry,” he says in his gravel voice. “I do not have what you seek.”

He stands then, turns, and walks off, in no particular hurry. He doesn’t look back at her.

“Fuck you,” Angie spits, hot tears running down the cold, tight skin of her cheeks. Then again, softer. “Fuck you.”

8

Angie sits at a table for two in a crowded chain coffee shop. She can see the window from where she’s at and gazes at the pedestrians and vehicles passing on the street outside. There’s a goofy smile on her face. She’s well aware of it, and she doesn’t care. It’s a warm sunny day in April, and there’s an energy to the people’s movements, a “pep in their step,” as her father used to say. She knows exactly how they feel.

Generic folk music is playing over the shop’s sound system, soft guitars and softer voices. Usually, she would find the music bland, but today it seems to complement her mood perfectly. But then, as happy as she is right now, polka music could be playing at a deafening volume, and she would probably feel the same way.

A middle-aged woman sits at the counter, a small plastic cup of water in front of her. She seems normal enough at first glance, but a second look reveals that something’s not right. Her rust-colored hair is cut short, but the edges are ragged, as if she’s done the job herself. Her makeup is heavy and sloppily applied, as if she didn’t have complete control of her hands when she put it on. There’s something off about her clothes, too. She’s wearing a heavy cardigan sweater despite how warm it is outside, and the T-shirt underneath is inside out. Angie can tell because there’s a picture on the chest—a cartoon character of some sort—but she can’t make out which one. The sweater’s sleeves are ragged and torn, as if the woman’s been chewing on them, and the inside-out shirt has reddish-brown stains on it that remind Angie too much of dried blood.

The woman’s not doing anything especially weird. She’s not talking to herself, and she doesn’t have any facial tics. She’s not looking at anyone or anything in particular—at least not that Angie can tell—but there’s something about her presence in the coffee shop that seems wrong, like she’s a piece from a different puzzle that’s been jammed in so that it kinda-sorta fits, but really doesn’t. Others feel it, too. Angie sees them glance at the woman, frown slightly, then turn away, only to glance at her again a few moments later, frowns deepening.

Greg makes his way through the crowd to their table, a drink in each hand, and Angie puts the odd woman out of her mind. He places the cups on the table before sitting down. Angie lifts hers to her face and inhales the rich, slightly acidic aroma of black coffee.

Greg shakes his head. “I have no idea how you can stomach that stuff without cream and sugar.”

“Why would I want to ruin a good cup of coffee by putting a bunch of useless shit in it?”

He grins, one side of his mouth lifting higher than another. It’s a quirky smile, but she finds it adorable. Their argument over the best way to drink coffee is a familiar one between them. Not even an argument, really, more like something to tease each other about. A sign of shared intimacy. She lets out a small laugh. Look at you, getting sentimental over coffee preferences.

Her thoughts must show on her face because Greg raises a questioning eyebrow.

“Nothing,” she says and takes a sip of her coffee. It’s hot, almost to the point of burning her tongue, but that’s the way she likes it. Greg takes a long sip of his drink. He adds creamer and flavor shots to his coffee, and it’s barely warm by the time he starts to drink it.

There’s a reason for their near-giddy moods. After dating for a year-and-a-half—and moving in together three months ago—she and Greg just purchased a marriage license. They met during their first year of grad school. He was a psych major, and she was continuing her folklore studies. They were both teaching assistants and taught in neighboring classrooms on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11:00 to 12:15. They started talking before and after class, then they started eating lunch together, then they added dinner, and without any formal declaration of affection, they found they were dating. Eventually they moved in together on the pretext that as poor grad students, it only made sense for them to share a place and save on rent. And now here they were, both in their last semester, preparing to marry.

She never thought she’d fall in love with someone, let alone become a wife. She had friends before she met Greg, of course, and she dated from time to time, but never seriously or for very long. After Erika’s death, she became reluctant to get too attached to anyone. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It was something that just happened. When she thought about it, she supposed it was only natural. Losing Mom so young and then losing her sister on top of it drove home just how fragile life was, how temporary. If you loved people too deeply, let them become a part of you, when they died, something inside you died, too, and it left a bleeding, aching wound, a hole that could never be filled. Get hurt like that enough times, and there would be nothing of you left. The way to protect yourself? Simple. Don’t get attached in the first place.

When she and Greg began talking, she wasn’t worried. Talking is just talking. And when they started eating lunch after class, it was no big deal. People have to eat, right? Same for dinner. Step by step, bit by bit, acquaintanceship became friendship became an actual, honest-to-god relationship, all without her realizing it was happening until it was too goddamned late.

Not that she’s complaining. It feels good to love someone again, but she can’t deny it’s scary, too. She does her best to control her anxiety, but she can’t stop worrying when Greg’s late coming home—even if he’s only a little late—and doesn’t call or text her. She imagines any number of awful scenarios in which Greg is killed. She almost cries with relief when he finally walks through the door. He snores when sleeping, not too loudly, and she actually finds the sound rather soothing. When he stops snoring, she wakes up in a panic and turns toward him, listening closely to make sure he’s still breathing. Sometimes she’ll touch trembling fingers to his neck and check his pulse. She finds it strong every time, but it takes her hours to return to sleep, if she sleeps at all.

But when she looks at Greg—his brown eyes, black hair and beard (both of which are usually in need of a trim)—she thinks the anxiety is worth it. He knows about Mom and Erika, of course, but she hasn’t told him about her fear that he’ll die and abandon her, too. She’s knows she can, though. One of the things she loves about him—one of the many—is that despite making psychology his profession, he never tries to psychoanalyze her, never judges her thoughts and feelings. His support is unwavering. Early in their relationship, Dad and Jeannie both died in a car crash. Her father started drinking after Erika’s suicide, and while no toxicology tests were done on his body, Angie is fairly certain he was drinking when he slammed his car into the path of an oncoming semi. She’d rather believe he was drunk than think he became suicidal himself and chose to let the semi take him out, causing Jeannie’s death in the process. Greg was there for her during those first awful weeks after the accident, and it was during this time that she realized how much she loved him, and that love is what makes her willing to be vulnerable again.

The woman at the counter lets out a harsh noise that’s part hack, part cough, and part laugh. It’s a strange sound—almost inhuman somehow. The coffee shop falls instantly silent. No conversation, no hiss of steam or grinding coffee as the baristas work. Everyone looks at the woman, but she gives no sign she’s aware of their scrutiny. She continues to sit and stare at nothing, water untouched on the counter before her. When she makes no further outburst, the shop’s patrons and employees return to what they were doing, but the atmosphere in the shop is hushed now, as if everyone is keeping part of their attention on the woman, waiting to see what, if anything, she’ll do next.

Angie and Greg exchange nervous glances followed by uncomfortable smiles. Greg shrugs, as if to say, Takes all kinds.

“So ... how do you want to do it?” Greg asks. Angie’s still thinking about the woman, though, and the question doesn’t fully register.

“Um ...” she says, stalling, hoping she’ll remember what he said, but he saves her the trouble.

“Getting married? You know, the thing we just got a license for?” He smiles to show he’s teasing.

She thinks of the paper, stowed safely in the glovebox of Greg’s certified, pre-owned Prius, and she smiles too.

“We’ve both got a lot of work to finish before graduation,” she says. “Would it bother you if we kept the wedding simple, maybe even just do it at the courthouse?”

Greg might be a psychologist-in-training, but he isn’t an emotionally restrained intellectual. He’s the most sensitive—and sentimental—person she’s ever met. One more thing she loves about him.

He lets out a theatrical sigh. “I suppose we have no choice but to bow to practicality.” He brightens, as if an idea has just occurred to him. “Maybe we can do a more formal ceremony down the road when we’re both more settled into our careers. We can renew our vows! How does that sound?”

Once they’re married, she doesn’t see much point in redoing the ceremony as a sort of dress-up game for grown-ups. But if that’s what Greg wants, it’s fine with her.

“Sounds good.”

They sip their coffee for a few moments before Greg speaks again.

“Speaking of careers ...”

Fuck. Not this again.

Greg’s planning on starting a doctorate in psychology this fall, and he’s been accepted by two excellent schools—Yale and the University of Georgia—and he hopes to find a position at a top-tier research university eventually. He has his career path all planned out. She, however, does not. Since falling in love with him, her obsession with death has waned. The deaths of Dad and Jeannie still affected her, of course, but in a more normal way. She felt their loss—still feels it—but she’s not compelled to explore the darker legends of the world seeking some sort of understanding, some kind of peace. Without that motivation to spur her onward, continuing to study folklore doesn’t make much sense to her. How can she explain this to Greg, though, when she’s not sure she fully understands it herself?

“We’ve talked about this before. I’m not sure what I want to do after I graduate.”

“I know, I know,” he says, his tone placating. “But I’m worried that you’re not looking into doctoral programs for yourself because you don’t want us to go to different schools.”

She gives him a wry smile. “We are getting married. I think it’s a good idea that we keep living together after that, don’t you?”

He smiles back. “Of course, I do. But I’m afraid you’re not looking because you don’t want to go to a different school than whichever one I end up at. You probably won’t even tell me if you found a program because you’ll worry I might go to that school to be with you.”

“Yale and Georgia have two of the best psychology programs in the country. You have to go to one of them.”

“I have to love you. Everything else comes second.”

The woman releases another bark-cough-laugh, this one louder and more explosive than the first. It sets off an actual coughing fit, one so violent that it sounds like her throat is tearing to shreds. Then the woman lunges forward and spits a large wad of phlegm onto the counter. It lands a few inches away from her water cup, a diseased yellow-brown with threads of blood running through it.

The coffee shop falls into a shocked silence, and then a man at a table closet to the woman mutters an audible, “Jesus Christ,” in disgust. In the quiet, the words sound loud as a shotgun blast and just as startling.

The woman finally becomes aware of her surroundings, and she turns and fixes the man who spoke with a hateful glare.

“Did he send you?”

Her voice sounds like barbed wire being dragged across a wet rock.

The man—fortyish, balding, wearing a suit and tie, and sitting across from another man who looks so much like him they’re practically clones—gapes at the woman, confused and more than a little alarmed.

The woman rises from her chair and takes a step toward the man, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“Well? Did he?”

Angie hears chair legs scrape against the floor, but like everyone else in the place, her gaze is fixed on the woman. It’s not until Greg moves into her field of vision that she realizes it was his chair she heard, and she knows then what he intends to do. Not only does he teach introductory psych classes at the university, he works in the counseling center. He has experience helping people in crisis, and he intends to put that experience to use now. She’s at once proud of him and frightened for him. She lifts a hand, as if intending to grab hold of his arm and stop him from going over to confront the woman, but she doesn’t, and then he’s beyond her reach, and all she can do is watch, like everyone else.

He holds his hands palms up as he approaches.

“I’m a doctor,” he says, smiling. A lie, but a necessary one given the situation.

The woman turns to look at him, spinning around so fast she almost loses her balance. She squints at Greg, as if she’s having trouble seeing him and is trying to bring him into focus.

Greg reaches the woman and stops. Angie wants to tell him he’s standing too close, but she says nothing, doesn’t want to do anything that might make things worse.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” Greg asks.

The woman’s eyes widen, as if in sudden recognition.

“You! I knew you sent him!”

Greg’s bafflement is clear on his face. He is only a student, after all, and it would take a highly trained and experienced professional to deal with someone this disturbed. Angie sees him struggling to think of what to say next, and while he does this, the woman reaches into her sweater pocket and pulls out a pair of scissors. Big ones, the kind used to cut cloth. Fabric shears, that’s what they’re called.

The woman doesn’t hesitate. She steps forward, raises the shears, and plunges them into Greg’s throat. People scream, and they scream louder when the woman yanks the shears free and blood gushes from the wound she’s just made. Angie screams loudest of all.

Greg doesn’t stagger backward, doesn’t clap a hand to his throat to stop the bleeding. He simply stands there, a look of surprise on his face as blood pours from the hole in his neck.

The woman screams then—an ear-splitting shriek that doesn’t sound remotely human—and then she steps toward Greg and begins stabbing him over and over, each strike rapid, targeting his neck and face. More blood gushes—so much of it—and now Greg does stagger backwards, but the woman keeps stabbing.

The people in the shop react differently. Some continue sitting where they are, stunned. Others rise to their feet but do nothing more than stand there and watch. A few run toward the door, as if afraid the woman with the shears will come after them next—or maybe they simply can’t stand being in the presence of such violence. Angie is one of the people still sitting. She watches as Greg stumbles and falls to the floor. The woman leaps onto him, straddles his chest, and continues stabbing him.

Someone should call 9-1-1, Angie thinks, feeling numb and distant, as if this is a movie and she’s just another member of the audience. Several men rush toward the woman and pull her off Greg, but it’s too late. He lies on the floor, blood all over and around him. He doesn’t move, doesn’t turn his head to look at Angie one final time. He dies without making a sound.

9

It’s a bit after two in the afternoon when Angie reaches the house. She’s spent the last twenty minutes navigating a dirt path barely wide enough for her Pontiac to pass through. The path is uneven, and has more than a few large rocks on it, and she wouldn’t be surprised if the shocks in her car are shot. One thing’s certain: after all that bouncing around, she’ll need to visit a chiropractor for a spine adjustment. But then again, if all goes well today—if she finally finds what she’s looking for—she won’t have to worry about her back, or anything else, ever again.

The path ends a few hundred feet before the house, and she’s forced to stop. She parks and gets out of her car, but doesn’t immediately start toward the house. Instead, she takes a look around. There are no other houses in the vicinity. No sheds, no barns, no structures of any kind. This is farm country, but if this place ever was a farm, there’s no sign of it now. All she can see are trees and overgrown fields stretching outward from the house in all directions, almost as if the house is in the center of it all.

Like a spider in the middle of a web, she thinks.

It’s late June but feels more like August. The air is not only hot, it’s heavy and sticky. She’s wearing a T-shirt, but wishes she’d put on shorts instead of jeans. She can feel the denim already growing warmer in the sun’s rays, and a bead of sweat rolls down the back of her neck. She could’ve come here at night, when it would be cooler, but the reports she found online said the paranormal encounters in this place occur primarily during the day. Despite how uncomfortable it is, she’s glad she came here during daylight hours. She had a hard enough time finding this place as it was. She wasn’t confident she could’ve done so in the dark.

After her expedition to Yorklyn County, the next couple urban legends she investigated turned out to be busts. She encountered nothing even remotely paranormal at those sites, didn’t have so much as a single chill down her back or an ominous feeling that she wasn’t alone. Complete wastes of time. She decided the regular internet had let her down, so she turned to the Darknet, the sordid underbelly of the online world where you can find information, goods, or services not readily available elsewhere, and all too often criminal in nature. It was here that she first ran across references to the Devil House. The stories she read about the house were remarkably similar. No one knows who lived in the house originally or how long it has been empty. There are no records of the house being built, although the precise spot where the Devil House rests is a matter of some dispute. People have tried to determine the exact coordinates using an app on their phones, but they never get the same result twice. Some theorize that the house—or perhaps the land surrounding it—generates an energy field that interferes with electronic devices. Others suggest the house moves somehow or perhaps exists in a different dimension entirely. There’s no history of violence associated with the house. No abuse, no torture, no murders—at least, none that anyone knows of. Whatever the true nature of the Devil House is, its phenomena doesn’t appear to be associated with a haunting.

There are no pictures of the house posted online because it’s not possible to take any. Due to the strange energy field, or whatever it is, no cameras or video recorders will function. There are simple sketches posted, though, as well as more artistically rendered images. There are no depictions of the interior, though, nor are there any written accounts of what the house looks like on the inside. Not because no one has ever gone inside. According to the stories, those who enter the house don’t always come back out again. And those who do return can’t clearly articulate what they experienced inside. Their memories are jumbled, incomplete, and they have no idea how long they’ve been inside. Moments, hours, days, weeks ... Some of them speak of a great darkness that dwells inside the house and some of them capitalize it: the Great Darkness, as if it’s some sort of living entity. In addition to having their brains scrambled, those who return from exploring the house are weak and lightheaded, sometimes dehydrated and malnourished. One trip, it seems, is more than enough. None of the survivors have any desire to make further expeditions into the house’s depths, and some say they’d rather die than set foot within a mile of the Devil House ever again.

She’s brought no special equipment with her beyond a flashlight tucked into a pocket—which according to the stories probably won’t work here anyway—a metal water bottle clipped to her belt, and some energy bars stowed in a fanny pack. If she does experience any time distortion inside the house, she wants to make sure she’s prepared.

She walks toward the house, forging a path through the tall grass and weeds. Good thing I didn’t wear shorts. This high grass is probably full of fucking ticks.

From what she can see, there’s nothing special about the Devil House—at least from the outside. It looks like a simple two-story farmhouse. The windows are boarded up, but otherwise it doesn’t look especially rundown. The front door remains intact. The porch hasn’t subsided ... even the goddamned shingles are still in place. The house couldn’t look less scary if it tried.

As she draws closer, she waits to see if she feels a sudden onset of anxiety, as others have reported experiencing upon first approaching the house. But other than a tightening in her stomach and a dryness in her mouth, she feels normal. At one point she stops, removes her phone from her pants pocket, and holds it up so she can see the screen. The device is on, but the screen remains dark. She supposes it’s possible that the battery has run out of power, but she made sure it was fully charged before setting out this morning. She returns the phone to her pocket and continues trudging forward. She feels little enthusiasm for this expedition. Since her experiences at Valley Way Bridge and Yorkyln County, she’s all but lost hope that what she’s been searching for since Greg’s murder will be found inside this nondescript country house. She has no family left and no friends. Only a lousy minimum wage job at a packaging and shipping store. She might as well go inside, even if the place turns out be a bust. It’s not like she has anything better to do.

She reaches the porch steps, walks onto the porch itself, and up to the front door. She feels an absurd impulse to knock, to announce her arrival to whatever inhabits this house—if anything. She reaches for the doorknob, hesitates, then figures what the hell. She knocks three times.

“Anyone home?” she says brightly.

There’s no answer, of course.

She opens the door—which doesn’t have the decency to give forth a spooky creak—and steps inside. In movies, whenever someone enters a potentially dangerous place, they always close the door behind them when they should leave it open in case they have to make a fast exit. Angie doesn’t expect to find any trouble in the house—she doesn’t expect to find anything—but she figures it can’t hurt to leave the door open, so she does, then enters.

Although the windows are boarded up, enough light filters in for her to see. The front room is completely empty. No furniture, not even any dust. No signs that any other living thing—human or animal—has been here recently. Good. She’s not especially afraid of animals, but she’d rather not have to deal with a nest of rats or raccoons or possums. The floor is wooden, and as she walks across it, the boards give slightly beneath her weight, producing soft creaks.

That’s more like it, she thinks.

The air smells musty, as if it’s been trapped inside for a long time, but there’s no odor of mold or mildew. It’s that detail, that lack, that make the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Old house that’s still in great shape. No dust. No sign of animals having been inside. No damage from water leaks. No mold or mildew. The Devil House stories go back thirty years or more. An abandoned house, out in the middle of nowhere, would not be in this kind of condition after three decades of neglect. What’s creepy about this house is that there’s nothing creepy about it.

She smiles, and for the first time since coming here, she feels a stir of hope. She’s ready to explore deeper into the house and see what strange wonders it might have to offer her. She pulls the flashlight from her pocket, but before she can turn it on, the room dims and shadows gather in the corners. They grow larger, darker, and when they reach a critical mass, they explode outward and race toward her.

10

She has no sense of how long she’s been running through this nightmare mirror maze. Could be hours, could be days. She’s so tired, but she can’t stop, can’t allow her pace to slacken. It’s right behind her, so close it can almost reach out and grab her. She feels the coldness emanating from its dark substance, feels it on the back of her neck, and she pictures a large ebon hand protruding from the Great Darkness, long segmented digits terminating in midnight-black claws mere inches from her flesh, eager to sink into her skin, to begin rending and tearing ... It’s a wonderful shivery image, and it spurs her to run faster, to draw this out, to make it last as long as possible.

She sees someone running toward her then, a woman—face red from exertion, sweat-soaked hair plastered to her head. She’s grateful to see another person, although it means that someone else is trapped in this awful place with her—someone who isn’t here because she wants to be. Who hasn’t come searching for answers, hoping for an end to her life that has some kind of meaning to it, even if she’s the only one who will ever know what that meaning is.

But this woman is running the wrong way. She’s running toward the darkness, not away from it, and unless she wants to give herself over to whatever horrors lie within the Great Darkness, she needs to turn her ass around ASA-fucking-P.

Angie’s not sure what to do. If she slows to help the woman, there’s an excellent chance the darkness will engulf them both. But if she dodges past the woman and keeps running without doing anything to warn her, then she would be consigning the woman to her death—or worse. It’s one thing to seek a spectacular death for one’s self, quite another to run unknowingly into it.

“Turn around!” she shouts. “Go back!”

The woman shouts something. Angie can see her open her mouth and form words, but she can’t hear them. She wonders if the woman heard her. Does sound even travel in this strange maze of mirrors?

Mirrors.

And then she understands who the woman is.

She’s within inches of colliding with the other woman—who in reality is simply a reflection of her in glass—and although she tries to stop, tries ridiculously to dodge to the side and avoid striking her other self, she runs into the glass. She has a split second to raise her arms in front of her face to protect it before the sound of shattering glass fills the universe. Pain blossoms bright and hot in her arms, and her cheeks and forehead, and she stumbles, trips, falls.

She lands on a cold smooth floor that she realizes is just more glass. She pushes herself onto her hands and knees, but she resists looking downward. She doesn’t want to see how badly she’s hurt. Blood falls from her wounds, patters onto the glass floor like thick warm rain.

“That looked like it hurt like hell. You okay, sweetie?” A man’s voice.

“She’s fine.” A woman’s voice. “She’s a lot tougher than you think. Always has been.”

Angie recognizes these voices. They’re as familiar to her as her own. She doesn’t want to look at their owners, doesn’t want to acknowledge their presence in any way because that would make them real. She doesn’t think she can stand that, but in the end she looks. It is, after all, why she came here.

Dad and Jeannie stand in front of her. At least, she thinks it’s them. They’re human in shape, but their bodies are formed from a soft grey substance which she doesn’t recognize at first, but she quickly realizes what it is, more because of the smoky smell that comes to her nostrils than anything else. It’s ash.

After burying his first wife and their daughter, Dad decided to be cremated, as did Jeannie. What Angie is looking at are their cremains, shaped into crude approximations of the bodies they used to be.

She wants to look away from these horrible apparitions, but she cannot. Her gaze fixes on their eyes, blazing orange things like hot coals set into otherwise featureless faces. When they open their mouths, she sees the same orange fires dancing within them, and she feels heat waft outward, carried by their voices.

We hate to see you like this, Dad says, voice sad and sympathetic. So worn out.

So used up, Jeannie adds.

You fought hard. Harder than most would’ve in your situation.

It’s time for you to rest. You must be so tired.

So very tired.

Lie down.

Close your eyes.

They move closer as they speak, smoke curling from their mouths with every word. They don’t lift their ashen feet from the glass floor as they come. Instead of walking, they glide toward her, trails of dusky grey left in their wake. The closer they get, the hotter it becomes, until sweat drips from Angie’s body like salty rain, and the sulfurous stink of their breath nauseates her.

Rest.

Resssssssssssssst ...

Their words are like weights pressing her down, and each time they speak, more weight is added. They’re right. She is tired. And not just her body; her soul is weary beyond measure.

Her head is bowed so she doesn’t see Dad and Jeannie—who now stand next to her—bend over and lean down close. But she can feel the heat from their mouths, their eyes, blasting her skin, burning it, making her hair smolder. She knows she’s going to die in the next few moments, and part of her is ready to surrender. Isn’t this why she came, to meet death on her own terms, to find an ending to her life that wasn’t as mundane, absurd, and insulting as cancer, depression, a car accident, or a scissors-wielding lunatic? But she doesn’t want to die like this, on her knees, bleeding, held down by the psychic force of a couple goddamned ghosts—even if they are her dad and stepmom.

She lifts her right hand from the floor, teeth gritting with the effort this simple motion requires. The ash ghosts continue exhorting her to resssssssssssssst, but she does her best to shut them out. She reaches toward her belt, fingers scrabbling until they come in contact with her water bottle. She manages to take hold of it, unclip it from her belt, and thumb it open. Then she flicks her hand forward. Water flies from the bottle and splatters the ghosts’ ashen legs. The drops sizzle when they hit and steam rises. She didn’t get a lot of water out—she can barely make her arm move and couldn’t apply much force—but the ghosts react as if they’ve been hit by acid. They give forth ear-splitting shrieks and slide backward, arms flailing wildly, their abrupt movements dislodging bits of themselves and sending up clouds of grey ash.

Now that the ghosts are no longer speaking to her, the pressure on her body lets up, and she’s able to rise to her feet. She feels weak and unsteady, but remains standing. She walks toward the featureless grey figures and begins flinging water at them. With each swing of her arm, her motions become faster, stronger, and each time more water flies from the bottle to strike the ghosts. More water, she thinks, than the bottle should contain—much more—but she doesn’t have time to consider this now. She continues attacking the ghosts, and they continue shrieking and writhing, bodies sizzling, hissing, and smoking. They attempt further retreat, but their legs no longer operate properly, and they only manage to move a few inches. Angie advances, flinging water, her arm a blur of motion now, and the ghosts begin losing large chucks of their bodies. Portions evaporate, revealing the orange flames within, and the water reaches that fire and begins dousing it. The ghosts’ cries are reduced to pained moans, and then—all at once—they collapse in upon themselves with a soft whumpf. A grey cloud billows upward from the mingled pile of ash they’ve become, but there is no sign of the fire that burned within them.

Angie isn’t finished yet. She steps up to the mound of ash and upends her water bottle, letting the last few drops fall onto the mingled cremains of Dad and Jeannie. When the bottle’s empty, she tosses it aside. It hits the glass floor, bounces once, then skitters to a stop. She looks down at the wet ash, breathes in part of the grey cloud still lingering in the air. She should feel something, shouldn’t she? Maybe these things weren’t really Dad and Jeannie but instead manifestations of the Great Darkness. But maybe, somehow, they were her father and stepmother as well—at least parts of them. And she destroyed them. She mostly feels tired, just as the ghosts told her she did. But she’s not ready to stop. Not until she gets what she’s came for.

She looks around to get a sense of where she’s at. She’s still in the maze if the glass floor is any indication, but she can’t see any walls. She appears to be in a large open space, and while that comes as a relief after running through narrow corridors for so long, it also means that an attack could come from any direction, not just directly behind or in front of her like before. And she has nothing to guide her, to help steer her one direction or another. So, without anything to help her choose a way to go, she picks a direction at random and starts walking.

11

Once more, she loses track of time spent and distance traveled, but after walking for what feels like quite a while in this open, empty expanse, her foot comes down on something slick and shoots out from under her. She goes down hard, and the impact cracks the glass beneath her. She ends up lying on her side in something wet, warm, and coppery-smelling. She knows what it is before she sits up. It’s blood, and her hands and clothes are covered with it. At first, she fears she’s been wounded further by her fall, but she feels no new pain—aside from soreness from her fall. The blood isn’t hers, but she has a sickening idea who it belongs to.

More blood wells forth from the cracks in the floor, and she scuttles away from it in a backward crab walk. She quickly rises to her feet and watches as blood continues to flow outward, faster and faster, until it forms a large pool. She keeps retreating to prevent the blood from touching her shoes, a foolish effort since her clothes are already soaked in the stuff, but she can’t help it. The animal part of her brain wants to avoid further contact with the blood at all costs. This blood is not natural. What if it’s diseased? Stay back, stay back!

She realizes there was already some blood here. That’s what she slipped on. Maybe the glass was already cracked—just a little—and she damaged it further when she fell, causing the cracks to widen, allowing the blood to flow more freely and in greater quantities. That makes sense, at least as much sense as anything else in this damn place.

A form rises from the center of the pool, a human shape so covered by blood that it seems to be formed from the thick, crimson liquid, just as the ghosts of Dad and Jeannie were formed from ash. But the blood begins to trickle downward, revealing that there is an actual body beneath, that of a teenage girl with alabaster skin.

“Hey, Angie. What’s up?”

Erika.

Rivulets of blood streak her naked flesh, and her hair is a heavy, sodden mass. There are long, ugly gashes on the underside of both forearms. The wounds are dry, but they open and close, open and close, like the mouths of fishes. The sight makes Angie’s stomach do a flip. She didn’t see Erika lying dead and naked in the bath—Dad had that horrible honor—but this is exactly how she’s always imagined her sister looked.

She doesn’t know what to say, isn’t sure she’ll be able to speak at all, and then she feels a hand fall on her shoulder. Someone is behind her, and her own blood—which currently still flows within her veins—goes ice water cold.

“Hello, Angie dear. It’s so good to see you again. It’s been so long ...”

This second voice is a raspy croak, the sound of two scabs rubbing together, and the breath stinks like raw sewage. The smell of it makes her stomach lurch, and she’s afraid she’s going to vomit. She pulls away from the hand, spins around, and finds herself looking at her mother—or rather, the thing that was once her mother. She’s naked, too, but she’s little more than a skeleton with bits of diseased meat clinging to the bones. Cancerous meat. Most of her hair is gone—only a few wisps remain—and her leprous hands resemble a pair of bird claws. The most awful aspect of her appearance, the thing that horrifies Angie the most, isn’t a malformation caused by the rot of disease. It’s her eyes. Perfectly normal, healthy, human eyes set into a hideous ruin of a face. Eyes that gaze at her with loving sorrow.

“You’re so alone,” Mom says in her raspy scab-voice. “I can feel your sadness. It fills every corner of you—heart, mind, and soul.”

She steps toward Angie as she speaks, her skeletal body moving with jerky motions, like she’s a poorly made puppet. Angie backs up, not taking her gaze from Mom. She hears the wet sounds her shoes make as she retreats into the pool of Erika’s blood, but she doesn’t care about stepping in it anymore. She has something far worse to concern herself with right now.

Erika speaks then.

“You don’t have to be alone anymore if you don’t want to. You have us.”

Angie looks over her shoulder to see Erika walking toward her. When her bare chalk-white feet step through the blood pool, they make no splashes, not even tiny splatters. She raises her arms at the same time their mother does, and it looks like Mom and Erika intend to enfold her in a group hug—one which she most likely will never escape.

“Let us hold you, Angie,” Mom says. “Let us show you you’re not alone.”

Erika smiles, showing teeth stained crimson. “Let us hold you forever.”

Angie imagines spending eternity trapped between a pair of corpses and is surprised to discover it doesn’t sound all that bad. She would be—if not exactly warm given the state of Erika and Mom’s bodies—loved. She would be guarded, too. Safe, for all time. But she still can’t bring herself to surrender, not yet, and not to them.

She makes her way carefully across the blood pool, being extra cautious to avoid slipping again. She doesn’t want to give Mom and Erika a chance to dart forward and snag hold of her. She keeps going, flicking her gaze back and forth between Erika and Mom, making sure to keep both in her field of vision at all times. When she feels the floor give a little beneath her feet, when she hears the cracking of broken glass, she stops, and when she judges Mom and Erika are close enough, she raises a foot and brings it down hard. She then throws herself into the air as the floor begins to break, the tinkling sound of glass shards striking one another. Angie lands with a thud on solid glass outside of the blood pool’s range, but this glass remains intact. The same can’t be said for where Erika and Mom stand. The floor beneath them falls away in glittering fragments, and they fall with it. Her mother and sister both cry out as they disappear from sight. Angie isn’t sure, but she thinks they both shout her name.

She lies still for several moments, half expecting the glass beneath her to break, but the floor holds, and she soon moves into a standing position. She’s tempted to walk to the edge of the jagged hole and look down to see what’s inside. But she thinks better of it. She doesn’t want to risk going too close because the floor will likely be too unstable there, and she’d find herself falling after Mom and Erika—which is something she most definitely does not want to do. Besides, while the pit seems to be filled with nothing but darkness—at least, that’s what it looks like from where she’s standing—it could be filled with other things, too. Things that use the darkness for cover, things she’d prefer not to see.

She turns away from the pit where, for all intents and purposes, she’s reburied her mother and sister, and resumes walking. But she’s really tired now, almost exhausted to the point of passing out, and the best pace she can manage is a weary shuffle. Seeing Mom and Erika die for a second time has torn her heart into a million pieces. She wants to sob like a baby, wants to howl in pain at losing them again, for being the cause of losing them. But she’s too tired to cry. All she can do is mourn silently and keep shuffling onward.

12

Again, she’s unclear on how long she walks, but she doesn’t care. She just keeps moving one foot after the other, trying not to think about what she’s seen since entering the Devil House, and especially about what she’s done. When the wind comes—a wind she suspects heralds the approach of the Great Darkness—it’s a relief. It comes from all directions, which makes sense since there’s no corridor to channel it. She doesn’t attempt to run, doesn’t have the strength or the will. Besides, the time for playing chase is over. Now it’s time to face the thing she’s come here to meet.

The wind increases, becoming a vortex whirling around her, so strong she fears it might lift her off her feet and send her flying. She tries to keep her eyes open so she can see what’s coming, but the wind is too intense, and she has no choice but to squeeze them shut. She tries to listen for what’s approaching, but the wind roars like a freight train in her ears, drowning out all other sound. And then, just when she thinks she can’t stand it any longer, the wind suddenly cuts off, and she stands with her feet firmly on the floor, dazed, ears ringing.

A shadowy form emerges from the surrounding gloom and comes striding toward her. This, at last, is the Great Darkness. The answer to the mystery she’s been trying to solve since first laying eyes on her mother’s dead body. Is death nothing but a meaningless joke? Or is it—as legends tell—a force of dark power and sinister grandeur? She doesn’t care that learning the answer will cost her life. She’s looking forward to dying, as long as she gets to know before she’s gone.

The black shape glides toward her, and a thrill of anticipation surges in her. But as the form draws closer, its features become clearer, and she realizes that what she’s looking at isn’t a monster or some amorphous spirit. It’s a man. More precisely, it’s Greg.

No, she thinks. Please, not this.

He looks the same as he did on the day he died. He’s wearing the same clothes, his hair and beard still need trimming, and he is whole and intact, without a single wound or drop of blood on him. He gives her the smile she knows so well, the left curve of his mouth lifting a little higher than the right.

“Hello, Angie.”

She’s afraid he’s going to come to her and wrap his arms around her. If he does, she doesn’t think she’ll be able to take it. She’ll start sobbing and never stop. But he comes to a halt a few feet away from her, not so close as to make her uncomfortable, but not so far away as to seem standoffish. She doesn’t reply, doesn’t trust herself to speak.

“It’s almost over. Why keep fighting? You’re only making it harder for yourself.”

His voice is the same mellow tenor she loved to listen to, but there’s a stiffness to his manner, a formality that’s not like him.

“I must admit, I’m at a loss to understand why you created all this.” He makes a sweeping gesture to indicate the shadow-shrouded world around them. “Most people create a pleasant experience for themselves. A fond memory to inhabit, a dream they always hoped to make come true one day, an exotic and perhaps forbidden fantasy to live out. But this—being pursued by a formless force, encountering and being tormented by deceased loved ones?” He shrugs. “I’m honestly at a loss. I suppose that’s why I wanted to speak to you before the end. I want to understand.”

His last words hit her with almost physical force, and she starts laughing.

“You want to understand me?”

She laughs louder, harder, doubles over, her stomach muscles aching. Greg—or the thing wearing his shape—looks at her quizzically, the understanding he seeks retreating farther away from him with each of her laughs. When she finally manages to get control of herself, she wipes tears from her eyes and looks at him.

“This place isn’t real,” she says. “None of it. Not my family and not you. At least, Greg’s not real. As for whatever else you might be, we’ll see about that.”

She was holding her flashlight when she was taken from the house and brought to this place by the Great Darkness—who hardly seems so great now. She thought she dropped it somewhere along the line. But if none of this is real, then maybe she didn’t drop it. Maybe she’s still holding onto it and just doesn’t know it. She closes her eyes, imagines the flashlight in her hand, imagines the feel of its smooth hard plastic against her flesh. And just like that, it’s there.

“No,” the Not-Greg says, raising his hands as if to fend off an anticipated blow.

“Yes.”

She raises the flashlight, aims it at him, and turns it on. The stories say that technology doesn’t work in the Devil House, but if this place is a lie, maybe the stories are lies too.

A beam of light blasts outward from the device, brighter and more powerful than anything a flashlight has ever put out. The energy strikes the Not-Greg square in the chest, and he screams as it obliterates him. Angie isn’t surprised by this result. He was a creature of darkness, after all. Not an evil darkness, but a concealing darkness, a lying darkness. That sort of darkness can’t exist when confronted with the light of truth.

Once the Not-Greg is no more, she begins sweeping the flashlight bean around in wide, swinging arcs, shining its cleansing light on this world of shadows, mirrors, and untruths. Shadows flee the light, trying to escape its burning touch, but there’s nowhere to go, and like the Not-Greg, once the light touches them, they cease to exist. Angie then aims the beam downward, targeting the glass floor. The glass reflects the powerful beam, casting its light in all directions. The glass cannot withstand the beam’s power for long, and cracks begin to spiderweb across its surface. Angie does not raise the flashlight, nor does she turn away from its blazing glory. This is not the kind of light that blinds. This is the kind of light that helps you see.

Glass shatters, the sound deafening, tolling the death knell of an entire world. With nothing left to support her, she falls, although it feels more like floating, gentle and serene. Lights fills the air around her, floods her senses, and then she opens her eyes—for real.

13

She’s sitting cross-legged in the middle of an empty field, sweat beading on her skin thanks to the summer heat, her Pontiac parked a few hundred feet away. There is no house. She doubts there ever was one. She still feels bone weary, as if most of the life has been drained out of her, and in another few seconds, she understands why. She feels a weight on her left shoulder. Not too heavy, but noticeable. She also feels something touching the front and back of her head, as well as something fastened onto her left temple. This something is pulsing in a regular rhythm. No, it’s sucking. A wave of revulsion strikes her, and she finds the strength to reach up with both hands and pull the thing off her. She feels sharp tearing sensations on her shoulder and head. That part of the thing that’s fastened to her temple doesn’t want to detach, but she yanks harder and it finally comes loose with a sickening squlerch.

She holds the thing in front of her so she can examine it, gripping it tight so it can’t escape. It’s nine, maybe ten inches tall, and humanlike—head, neck, chest, trunk, two arms, two legs—but its skin is green, the same color as the grass that surrounds them, and instead of a normal human mouth, it has a coiled proboscis, like a butterfly’s. Its eyes are tiny green beads several shades darker than its skin. It’s naked and there’s no sign of any genitals, male or female. No breasts, either. Its fingers and toes terminate in tiny curved hooks, and she understands the source of the tearing sensation she felt. The creature—the it—jumped on her as she walked toward the illusory Devil House. It climbed onto her, dug its feet into her shoulder and its claws into her head to steady itself. It then unfurled its proboscis and inserted it into her temple, somehow making a connection with her mind. It created an illusory world to distract her while it fed, draining the life energy from her bit by bit: a world shaped by her own grief and obsession. If she hadn’t come to her senses when she did—thanks to the creature intruding on her illusion—she would have died. Her death wouldn’t have been at the hands of the Great Darkness. Instead, she would’ve died as a meal for something that was basically a supernatural parasite.

Fury ignites in the core of her being and without making a conscious choice to do so, her hands tighten on the creature, and she squeezes with all the strength remaining to her. The thing makes a high-pitched squealing sound, equal parts alarm and pain. It thrashes wildly, hand and foot claws raking her flesh, but she ignores the pain, doesn’t care about the blood dripping from the slice marks into the grass. She squeezes harder, teeth gritted, tears streaming from her eyes. Her vision begins to grey around the edges, and she sees tiny white spots. She’s on the verge of passing out, but she fights to hold on. And then with a sound like a handful of popsicle sticks snapping, the creature’s spine breaks, and it goes limp.

Her hands—which ache like hell—spring open, and the creature’s body falls to the ground. Sweat pours off her, soaking her clothes, and she draws in great gulps of air as she waits for her vision to clear. It takes longer than she expects. When she feels better, if not exactly okay, she gazes down at the creature. Its head is cocked at an unnatural angle, and black goo—which she guesses is its blood—leaks from the holes that serve as its nostrils. Whatever the thing was, it’s dead now.

As she sits sweating in the heat, feeling weak and lightheaded, she thinks about the journey she’s been on since the day Greg was killed in the coffee shop. She was seeking to confront Death, to understand it, yes, but she was also searching for—to put it simply—the presence of some kind of magic in the world. For proof that there’s more to existence than eating, pissing, shitting, fucking, and dying. And what better combination of the concepts of death and magic than the idea of monsters? Monsters are death writ large, made flesh, terrifying and wonderful in equal measure. But the creatures she’s encountered on her quest—all supernatural to some extent—were small, almost pedestrian wonders. There is magic in the world, she’s proved this to herself. But like everything else that’s real, that magic turned out to be a disappointment. It didn’t measure up to the legends. How could it? She understands now that she will never find what she’s searching for because it doesn’t exist, and it never has.

She’s tempted to lie down next to the broken body of the parasite, close her eyes, and let the last feeble shreds of life that remain to her fade away until she dies, a pathetic failure at the end. She almost does it, too, but a thought comes to her. Just because something doesn’t exist doesn’t mean it can’t. Maybe she can’t find what she wants, but maybe she can make it.

She can become the monster that she’s searched for. All she needs is a proper start.

She gazes down at the dead imp for several moments, contemplating its broken body. Then she picks it up with trembling, weak hands, brings it to her mouth and—slowly at first, but with greater speed and enthusiasm as her strength returns—she begins to eat.

14

She wipes a smudge of black goo from the corner of her mouth as she walks back to her car. She’s regained the life energy the parasite took from her, and more. Its dark power now dwells within her. She’ll return to Yorklyn County and Valley Way Bridge, and she’ll feed and increase her power further. She’ll continue searching for other small dark magics of the world, discover their hidey holes, draw them out, and make their strength her own. She will become the greatest darkness the world has ever seen, and then ...

Then the fun will really begin.

About the Author

Critically-acclaimed author Tim Waggoner has published over fifty novels and seven collections of short stories. He writes original dark fantasy and horror, as well as media tie-ins, and he’s recently released a book on writing horror fiction called Writing in the Dark. He’s won the Bram Stoker Award and been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award, the Scribe Award, and the Splatterpunk Award. He’s also a full-time tenured professor who teaches creative writing and composition at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jason Sizemore for being crazy enough to publish this thing, to Lesley Conner for all her hard work on the book, and to my agent Cherry Weiner, who has boundless faith in all my weird ideas.

Table of Contents

- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- About the Author
- Acknowledgments
- Full Page Image