Shrieks and Shivers From the Horror Zine
Author: Jeani Rector; Ray Garton; William F. Nolan; Lisa Morton; Joe McKinney; Tim Waggoner; Elizabeth Massie; Nathan D. Robinson; Bentley Little
Date: 2015-01-06 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: “The Horror Zine is the true home of today’s visceral, organic horror, and the stories in SHRIEKS AND SHIVERS reflect the courage and imagination with which Jeani Rector has sustained this genre for the past six years. Be prepared to encounter the grue in gruesome, not only brought to you by some very experienced butchers but by some fearless and inspired new dabblers in blood, entrails and other things too horrifying to mention.” – Graham Masterton, author of Plague of the Manitou “A potent witch’s brew of horror veterans spiced with succulent new blood.” – Scott Nicholson, author of The Red
Publisher: Post Mortem Press

Praise for Shrieks and Shivers from
The Horror Zine

“The Horror Zine is the true home of today’s visceral, organic horror, and the stories in SHRIEKS AND SHIVERS reflect the courage and imagination with which Jeani Rector has sustained this genre for the past six years. Be prepared to encounter the grue in gruesome, not only brought to you by some very experienced butchers but by some fearless and inspired new dabblers in blood, entrails and other things too horrifying to mention.”

– Graham Masterton, author of Plague of the Manitou

“A potent witch’s brew of horror veterans spiced with succulent new blood.”

– Scott Nicholson, author of The Red Church

“The stories in SHRIEKS AND SHIVERS is like a sampling from the weird, visceral darkness of the collective mind. Some of the authors are old friends, reliably creepy friends who deliver exactly what you want. What might surprise the reader is the number of new writers to devour. And there are angles on the human condition from which you never thought to look—and perhaps should not have. Endlessly creative takes on zombies, paranoia, and the monsters within. You’ll read this collection long into the night. You might want to fall asleep with the lights on.”

– Susie Moloney, author of The Thirteen

“Jeani Rector has the experience to know horror inside and out. She picks only the best of today’s writers for her anthologies. I can easily see some of her hand-picked talent carrying horror into the next decade.”

– D. W. Jones, Editor, Blood Moon Rising Magazine

“A perfect storm of a horror anthology—dread thundering through the stories, lightning flashes of terror, a hurricane of visceral thrills.”

– Simon Clark, author of The Night of the Triffids

“Jeani Rector and the Horror Zine have compiled another classic anthology of unsettling and stomach-churning tales in the tradition of Pan Books or Weird Tales (before they were both crap!), and introduced us to a motley band of new horror talent, some of whom will no doubt become household names in the genre in time. This unrepentant volume reminds us why the small press is such a force in dark literature.”

–  Djibril al-Ayad, Editor, The Future Fire Magazine

“There are some really good short stories in this collection. Some eerie. Some disturbing. Some I wish were true: I’d probably find the freak tent to see Hercules in a tank of honey.”

– Cetywa Powell, Editor/Publisher, Underground Voices Magazine

Shrieks and Shivers
from the Horror Zine

Edited by Jeani Rector

Anthology copyright © 2015 Jeani Rector & The Horror Zine

Individual stories copyright © 2015 their respective authors

Cover image © Martin de Diego Sádaba | www.martindediego.com

All rights reserved.

Post Mortem Press - Cincinnati, OH
www.postmortem-press.com

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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 permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

eBook ISBN: 978-1311176356

The Horror Zine is an ezine, spotlighting the works of talented people, and displaying their deliciously dark delights for the world to enjoy.

Visit The Horror Zine at
www.thehorrorzine.com

Staff:

Jeani Rector, Editor

Dean H. Wild, Assistant Editor

Christian A. Larsen, Media Director

Bruce Memblatt, Kindle Coordinator

Bat art created by Riaan Marais

Contents

FOREWORD   Bentley Little

A WORD ABOUT ZOMBIES    John Russo

TAPEWORM    Martin Rose

OLD HAUNTS    Nathan Robinson

I’LL BE WATCHING    William F. Nolan

NAILS IN YOUR COFFIN    Rachel Coles

PETE’S BIG BREAK    Joe McKinney

THEM    James Marlow

STASH HOUSE    Shaun Meeks

THE SAMPLE    Ray Garton

HARD RAIN    Bruce Memblatt

SQUATTERS    Elizabeth Massie

I STILL LIVE    Wayne C. Rogers

CENTER STAGE SIDESHOW    Christian A. Larsen

STALKER    Tim Jeffreys

FOR SHE IS FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE

Tim Waggoner

RAMPART    Amy Grech

SOMNIPHOBIA    P.D. Cacek

FUNERAL MEATS    Kristem Houghton

TRANSPOSITION    Jason V. Brock

THE LAST BOTTLE    Dean H. Wild

THE WOODS    Nicholas Paschall

THE HOTEL SAN DIGOT    Joseph Rubas

DADDY’S GIRL    Lisa Morton

BLURRED    Matthew Nichols

THE HOUSE    Jonathan Chapman

THE NEST    Cory Cone

REFLECTOR EYES    Garrett Rowlan

WHAT HAPPENED IN VEGAS    Rena Mason

PRIVATE FRANKS    Gary Robbe

ONE LAST TWEET    Eric J. Guignard

BECAUSE WHAT IS MINE IS MINE    Tom Piccirilli

CHICKEN    Geoff Nelder

FOREWORD

Bentley Little

I HAVEN’T READ ANY OF THE STORIES IN THIS ANTHOLOGY. I don’t even know the names of the authors contributing to this volume.

I don’t need to.

All I need to know is that Jeani Rector is the editor.

Five years ago, I had no idea who Jeani Rector was. But she wrote me a letter out of the blue, informing me that she was the editor of an online magazine called The Horror Zine and asking if I would be willing to contribute a story to an anthology she was putting together. I had no internet access (still don’t) so I’d never seen her ezine, and I wrote back and told her that I don’t contribute to electronic publications. She assured me this was going to be a real anthology, an honest-to-God book, printed on paper.

I pawned off a story on her that I hadn’t bothered to submit anywhere else, something I’d written in order to test out my new computer. The small press world is volatile, and I’m not sure I ever expected my story to see print. But, unlike many editors, Jeani kept me completely informed as to the status of the anthology, and, much more quickly than I would have thought possible, I received a copy of it in the mail.

I was immediately impressed. The cover art was terrific. And the contents were equally impressive. There were a few pieces by name authors such as Graham Masterton and Joe Lansdale, but the vast majority was by authors new to me—and they were good.

Over the next few years, The Horror Zine anthologies kept coming, all of a remarkably consistent quality for a small press publication. At a time when even longtime practitioners of horror were shying away from the label, calling themselves writers of suspense or dark fantasy or dark mysteries, The Horror Zine gave me hope. It was there in the title. And it was there in the stories. This was the real deal.

I was reminded, in a way, of David Silva’s seminal magazine The Horror Show, which in the 1980s published the early work of an entire generation of authors. These authors that Jeani was publishing, I realized, were the new generation. This was the future of horror.

And it seemed to be in very good hands.

So here we are.

Jeani has said that this could be her last anthology. I hope not. But if it is, she can look back with pride on a job well done. Luring readers in with names like Ed Gorman, Ramsey Campbell, Scott Nicholson and Elizabeth Massie, she introduced to the world a whole host of up-and-coming talent, writers who will take the torch from those veterans and use it to illuminate their conception of the darkness.

And if it really is the last anthology, you hold in your hands a collector’s item, the early works of the Stephen Kings, Peter Straubs and Clive Barkers of this century. Keep it if you want something that will increase in value; pass it on if you want to spread The Word, but know as you read that it doesn’t get any better than this.

A WORD ABOUT ZOMBIES

Slow Zombies, Fast Zombies, and Zombies that Play Trombones

John Russo

THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY GET INTO ARGUMENTS over fast zombies versus slow zombies and the artistic merits of each. Many fans come up to me at conventions or during my workshops or personal appearances and ask which kind I prefer. They want me to take sides. Since I was a co-creator of Night of the Living Dead and Return of the Living Dead, and since I have also written novels and comic books dealing with flesh-eating zombies, such as Living Things, Spawn of the Dead, and Escape of the Living Dead, they feel it would validate them if I came down on the side of one or the other. But I don’t feel compelled to do so.

I am not a purist. I believe in whatever works. In other words, if you want to have fast zombies in your novel or screenplay, come up with a concept or a methodology that makes it seem reasonable.

The zombies in Return of the Living Dead (ROLD) were, as far as I know, the first ones to crave warm human brains. They also talked, whereas the ones in Night of the Living Dead (NOLD) could not. The ROLD zombies were fast-moving when they needed to be. And they had a special appetite for cops. These were all ideas that Dan O’Bannon implemented when he re-wrote the original script, which was straight horror in the vein of NOLD. But even though many of Dan’s concepts were drastic departures from what had gone before, he made it all work. And it worked big time! ROLD is still going strong, spawning about a dozen sequels which I have not seen, but I have been told that most of them aren’t very good. I liked Part I and Part II a whole lot, but they are the only two I have seen.

To backtrack a little, when it came time for me to play the Tire-Iron Zombie in Night of the Living Dead, I reasoned that I’d have to portray a human being who was dead—but only partially dead—because my brain was still partially functioning, or else I would not have been able to go after live meat. I reasoned that such a creature would likely have some degree of rigor mortis, and so I ought to move slowly, painfully and stiffly.

Fans sometimes ask if I made my eyes flutter on purpose (after I got stabbed in the head with the tire iron). Or was that a mistake?  No, I thought it out and did it on purpose. I thought it out for a while, and remembered how I had once crushed a cockroach in a cheap, dirty hotel room, and the damn thing was still moving and wiggling its antennae even after I plastered it to a wall. So I figured my eyes might still be moving—which would be creepy and scary when Judy O’Dea was staring down at me, horrified.

Everything we did in NOLD was carefully considered and often debated. In my original script, “Johnny” does not come back and drag “Barbara” out of the farmhouse and to her doom. When George and I thought of doing that—because of the obvious shock value—we worried that our audience would not find it logical. We didn’t want to make a false step and blow their belief in our story. In other words, if Johnny came back, would people buy it? Or would they say: “Nonsense. He’s dead, he’s finished, he can’t come back; his head was smashed against that tombstone.”

In the end, we took the chance, and it paid off. Our reasoning was that the bash against the tombstone might not have completely destroyed Johnny’s brain. Obviously, the audience bought it. And Russ Streiner’s portrayal of the character has become one of the icons of American Horror.

When Night of the Living Dead Live—the first officially authorized stage play based on NOLD—had a great run in Toronto, George Romero, Russ Streiner and I did a Q&A. It was hosted at the theater by Chris Alexander, the editor of Fangoria Magazine, and one of the fans in the audience asked us what we thought about the notion of zombies eating brains. George said it made no sense to him because how would they manage to crack open a bone-hard human skull? But I pointed out that nevertheless, millions of people bought into it and the movie was a smash hit that is still producing spinoffs. I said, “I suppose that, in a way, O’Bannon’s brain-eating zombies have crossed over into a realm that is partly supernatural.”

In Land of the Dead, George Romero has a lead zombie who still partially remembers how, when he was living (and not undead), he used to play a trombone. (I think it was a trombone; I don't clearly remember. But he was a quite memorable zombie.) In many of his movies, George has been exploring the idea that ghouls might eventually be able to learn or perhaps re-learn some of their old habits and pursuits. There is nothing wrong with this notion. In fact, the concept is intriguing.

There have been quite a few very successful departures or enhancements of our original concept as to the who, what, and why of the flesh-eating breed of zombies. 28 Days Later, The Evil Dead and Shaun of the Dead all brought something new to the party. But the essential elements, the twist that turned zombies into a spectacular horror-movie sub-genre, was when we turned them into ghouls. Flesh-eaters. Undead people after live human flesh. This is how we tapped into a pervasive atavistic fear that is ingrained in us as human beings. Throughout most of our evolution, we have been weak, timid prey for vicious wild beasts. Thus, NOLD combined the fear of death and the fear of dying by being devoured, with the fear of the undead.

Before we made Night of the Living Dead, zombies weren’t as scary as werewolves or, especially, vampires. Now they are! And because of that I believe that the sub-genre will not die but will go on as long as there are live humans who want to watch movies or read books about The Hungry Dead—which is the title of my newest zombie novel.

John Russo, written for The Horror Zine

Copyright 2014

TAPEWORM

Martin Rose

SHE CLOSED HER EYES AND HELD THE GLASS between her hands. She supplied a voice to help the moment pass, to humanize the monstrous; to drive away the shameful desperation lurking behind her fear-grin.

The worm remained suspended in the glass, watching her with inscrutable and alien eyes.

What do you intend?

Rolls of fat shivered between her thighs, on the edges of her arms, and her pendulous breasts trembled, an insulting reminder of what brought her to this place in time. A long shuddering breath.

“I’m going to consume you,” she whispered.

Make it quick.

She forced herself to forget the long swallow; the twitching worm in the gush of warm water. Like a reverse birth, life flowed backward into her and she struggled not to vomit, reminding herself that she would never think or speak of this moment to anyone in her life. Not even to herself.

It was easy to forget once it was done, because nothing seemed to change.

She still woke up to her energy drink and three donuts in the morning. She still made her TV dinners in the microwave after work, and still struggled into her size 23 jeans and her triple XL shirts, with oversized scrubs layered on top in the morning.

Nothing spectacular happened; nothing magical occurred.

She began to think that this Victorian-era tapeworm weight-cure was nothing more than hocus-pocus.

*****

Will you let me in?

He framed a silhouette outlined by orange street lights through the window. Wet pavement and drizzling rain magnified the glow, and he stood in it like a back-lit angel. Soaked to his skin without a coat. Rain ran into his eyes; gleaming white, thin bands of gray separated where pupil met iris.

Her large hand held the door open, and the wind rushed in between them. She was overwhelming in her weight, at three hundred pounds well past the realms of obesity and into the morbid, death-wish range. With all the extra cushioning between them, she barely felt the cold wind nipping at her fingers; it was impossible to feel anything.

I’m waiting, he prompted. When she looked down at her hands, they were a company of writhing snakes. Fat snakes.

She jerked awake. She struggled to sit up, groping for the headboard for support.

“Please God, let me take it all back,” she whispered.

*****

Gorgeous thin people waved at her from the glossy pages, silently beckoning her into a celebrity club where she would take her place beside them, eating multi-grain crackers and serving salad portions as big as her meaty fist. She longed to belong to that thin world, where people did not shy from her and did not make fat faces when her back was turned. That world refused to find value in her as she was, and so she chased after an impossible standard designed to rob her of every shred of dignity in the pursuit. She did not stop to consider she could be loved as she was: a curvy goddess, a swollen Venus.

She found comfort in the promise of the worm.

Betsy sat on the edge of the bed and considered the foul taste of bile, the dim memory of the worm in her throat. She stood up and wobbled towards the scale.

“I’m counting on you,” she told the creature.

I know.

She stepped off the scale and then back on it again, her mouth parting in her large, doughy face. She blinked.

In the three weeks since had swallowed the worm, nothing seemed to change, but the numbers didn’t lie. She’d lost five pounds. Not a lot, but enough to suggest something was happening. She pressed one hand to her large and jutting belly, but nothing felt different. She still felt fat and gasped and heaved for breath when she went up a flight of stairs. Pushing the five pound loss out of her mind, she continued on to work.

In the succeeding weeks it became clear that this was not an isolated incident; an unknown alchemy fermented on the inside…deep in her inner workings and in her strange, gastric biles and darkest passages. Betsy often fantasized about what it would be like to be thin, to shop in the petite section, to wear cute things and eat at a buffet without being stared at. The scale was beginning to whirl numbers at her with frightening rapidity, as if it were a wheel of fortune instead of an empty dial: 300 . . . 295 . . . 293 . . . 288 . . . 281 . . .

As time passed she saw the weight loss steadily increase, and with it, a paradoxical deep heaviness overtook her. She awoke more tired than when she first fell asleep, and was eager to slumber in the evenings. Lethargy stole into her life and shrouded her passing hours in a slow dirge. Her favorite part of the day was to step on the scale as if she ascended a throne, and chart the descending numbers parading before her on the dial.

With her increased need to sleep came a flurry of night dreams that left her overwhelmed with desires and cravings.

The strange man with the white eyes would knock at her door, arriving in concert with the summer rains. With each visit he became noticeably taller than when last she met with him, bigger than before; he would sweep past her, smelling of storms and lightning, dripping puddles all around her to soak the Berber carpeting and pool across her ceramic tiles. As her own body dwindled, her strange lover appeared to grow; to increase in magnificence and size.

Her dream life was electrified with his recurring presence. Always, she would open the door for him. In that first moment of exhilaration, she forgot her fat spilling over the top of her jeans and her thighs rubbing uncomfortably together when she tried to walk. He stepped through and reached for her. At the instant of contact she looked down and saw she was mysteriously invested with a new body. His blinding eyes stared at her greedily in her new, svelte form, and he smiled with lips that never seemed to end, but extended all the way around his skull. They danced together, with the lights dimmed.

Even in a dream, she thrilled to be looked at in such a hungry way, to feel the regard of another with such urgency. His arms swept her up and carried her into the moist darkness. She began to understand how to love, how to feel passion like a knife thrust. The ferocity of her emotion terrified her; how incredible it felt to move, to breathe, to be lithe and agile, freed from the prison of her own body.

He made no notice of her size—he did not care and this revelation of love without condition was earth-shattering. In his arms she was exalted without effort and rendered precious without price.

I will never leave you now, my love.

*****

While she was fixing coffee at the local convenience store before work, she bumped into an old classmate from high school. While he apologized profusely, she smiled and curled a lock of brown hair around her finger.

“Don’t you recognize me at all, Henry?”

He narrowed his eyes, keys jingled in his hand. Then the satisfying moment of surprise that verged on the horrified, his mouth open wide.

“Bettina? God, I barely recognized you.”

She had always been Fat Betsy at school. Now, at a stunning 140 pounds, her real name tumbled from his lips almost helplessly: Bettina.

“It’s me, all right,” she said coolly, picking her coffee up from the counter. Her new, womanly form, full of curves and accentuated by her new high heels and her brand new size eight jeans, was a weapon she wielded with mastery as she sashayed from his view, barely giving him a second glance.

He even had the nerve to ask for her number.

*****

What did you do then? he whispered, excited, on the couch beside her. His white eyes burned as ghostly flames, illuminating the darkness.

“I laughed at him!” she exclaimed, clapping her thin, slender hands together as if she had just found them for the first time. “I laughed at him and he turned absolutely red! Scarlet!”

I bet he felt sorry about ever teasing you, huh?

“It was amazing!” she gushed. “Have you ever felt like that?”

I understand. People think because I am small, or unusual, or ugly, I am of no importance. That I have no power. And I think deep down, it’s because they’re afraid of me. Of us.

“But you’re not small.”

Not to you, I’m not. But we are not so unalike, you and I. Isn’t it funny how people make strange shapes of us, when they don’t know us at all? And when they come to know us at last, they see us as if for the first time. With brand new eyes. And what was hideous in one second becomes beauty the next. How what we feel changes the mechanics of our very perception. He smiled gently. Why don’t you sit with me now, and go to sleep?

“I sleep all the time now.”

It’ll be all right, Bettina.

And she nestled beside him, in the crook of his damp arm, and settled her cheek against his wet clothes, until the rhythm of their breathing became indistinguishable from the other. No matter how her senses strained in the quiet, she could not pick out the elusive beating of his heart— only the rush of his blood beneath his amphibian skin.

She did not wake up in time for work. She slept through her alarm without incident, and through the phone calls and frantic messages left by work and friends.

When she saw she had slept the clock round, she had a brand new appreciation for her transformation—it seemed she could miss work without calling out and no one suggested she be fired for it. In another world when she had been fat, no one would have hesitated to dismiss her and never mind her tears or protests. They told her to sleep well and they’d talk to her tomorrow.

Her body was laden with aches and pains, and when she stumbled into the bathroom, she saw with horror she dropped another ten pounds in weight. The bone in her shoulder was deeply pronounced, the one in her hip poking just beneath the skin. She had not been aware that she had been born with one, back in her fat years; seeing it sent an alarm bell ringing in her head.

She stared into the mirror, her eyes red-rimmed and sickly, deeply hollowed and etched in blue circles.

“It’s time to stop,” she whispered.

And deep in the canyons of her bowels, a shiver resonated, a tidal swell and ebb.

Starvation.

Bettina would starve the tapeworm out, but to do so, she had to starve herself. She threw out the contents of her refrigerator, clearing her schedule and taking a week’s vacation from work. She set up camp in her living room, with nothing more than a glass of water, a remote control and a blanket.

And she starved.

The first few hours were nothing; they were easy. After the first missed meal, she discovered it was not so terrible. She diverted her thoughts with trash television and dainty sips of water. A parade of advertising images competed for her attention between stilted day-time dialogue and she lost herself in the scenery changes until the plot was a seamless story woven between marketing and game shows; a spinning wheel and absorbent paper towels.

Her consciousness drifted and Bettina awoke once from this stupor with a panic attack, her breath coming in fast and shallow and believing herself no longer in the fabric of reality—
the real world meshing with the images until she wondered if she were not trapped like the people parading across the drama sets and reciting lines on cue. Trapped inside a box, and the box could be her room, her work place, different versions of the same box-prison until she died and would be like all those poor frozen animals she carted out to the freezer to be picked up for cremation. She closed her eyes and thought, I can go back, anytime I want I can dream and open the door for him and I don’t have to be here.

She took a drink of water and fell back to watching the spinning wheel and the exciting prizes. At dinner time, it became difficult, and she laid her head down in the hopes of sleeping through her hunger pangs.

Deep inside of her, she swore she felt a movement of distress, a feeling of deep unease, a malaise that could not be shaken.

*****

Hurt and trembling, white eyes stared into her own.

What are you doing to me, beloved?

“This has to stop.”

You are resigned?

“Yes.”

He let out a deep, shuddering sigh. In the balmy dark, he was changed, and it tore a little piece of her heart to see him so. His hair, platinum white like the rest of him, was thinning. A chunk gone missing above his forehead, and his eyes looked sunken, like melting snow banks gone dirty with car exhaust. He stared back at her, forlorn.

“What happened to you?” she whispered and moved forward to touch him. He flinched as though it hurt, but he let her feel his hair, her fingers moving through the strands and around the back of his head. He closed his eyes in pleasure to allow her touch.

A strange and fluttering bump on his skin met her fingers.

Oh, that, he said. Don’t fret, love, that’s just my other set of eyes.

She woke up screaming. Her hands planted open on the bedroom sheets but no texture could erase the sensation following her from her dream, the wet contour of eyes on her palm like open wounds.

Would the hunger kill her first, or the terror streaming through her veins in tandem with the dreadnought in her intestines, in the lining of her stomach, in the churning of bilious fluids?

Three days passed in agony, and sleep was no longer a refuge; she fell into dreams, and he no longer came to her door. In her dream-world house she moved to the window and watched him outside in the rain, hugging himself and shivering, doubled over in pain. Rain dripped from his shattered form, flattened his thinning hair to his misshapen skull. Accompanying him was a distant crying that disturbed her far more, a crying that did not come from him, but from a benthic deep buried fathoms inside herself. She awoke, believing the ghostly cries followed her from one world to the next.

On the fifth day, she was ready, and weak with the gnawing hunger inside.

She rose with effort, sluggish and depressed, her new, thin limbs moving stiffly. In the kitchen, she had only one item left: Milk. She had never been fond of milk in the past, and bought it for this reason alone.

The time had come to tease the tapeworm out.

She poured herself a glass with no intention of drinking it, and retired to the bathroom, where she sat on the toilet seat and held the glass in front of her. She was not entirely sure what to expect, or if this would even work.

She dipped a finger in the milk, and opened her mouth. Her hands shook, and the milk spilled a line onto the exposed flesh of her naked thigh.

She dabbed her lower lip.

The response was instantaneous; gut wrenching. She doubled over. The glass fell from her fingers, shattering across the ceramic tile. A tidal wave tore her inside and out in a great rushing. Her mouth opened and she gagged, face turning red and her eyes straining from their sockets with the pressure, red veins twisting and swelling.

Turning her head, she vomited.

A pattern of blood seeped into white milk and branded the shape of a red and white hurricane into the floor. Between gasps of breath came the grinding strength of the worm bound within her. She pictured a cane of thorns buried in the lining of her esophagus and her belly and up it came with driving force. Pain never ending. She thrust two fingers past her lips and into her throat to help birth it out and keeping before her the relief she would feel when it was all over, to keep her hands steady, her purpose set.

She could not hear it, but she was screaming through her fingers when she touched it at last; made a fist to crush tendrils in her hand, to yank it out and pull it through and it came, came upwelling from her deepest unknown outliers and hand over fist brought out one knuckle of flesh after another until she heard it, fall and flail to the porcelain bathroom tiles like a landed fish on the deck of a boat. Heard it flop and splash in a bath of milk and screech out the door before she could steady her horizons and open her eyes to stare at it.

Euphoria cut through the pain throbbing in her belly, her sore throat, the bile burning on her tongue. Aches and pains ravaged her inside and out, but she felt better, as if a splinter came unsheathed from the vessel of her body. She was ravenous.

She did not remember shutting the door of the bathroom. As she sat up and gathered herself, prints dotted through the milk and blood not her own. They tracked out past the shut door in a long, snaking trail through the gap. Beyond the door, a shadow moved, shifting light to give impression to not one shape, but many.

Bettina.

She reached forward and turned the lock on the door, broken glass gouging into her flesh and she did not care; her lips pulled back from her teeth in fear. Her new, thin flesh seemed insubstantial and unprepared to meet this horror, this horror she consorted with nightly, this horror she had come to love, entered the vessel of her body and made of it a home and a temple.

Open the door, Bettina. I want you to meet our children.

About Martin Rose

Martin Rose writes a range of fiction from the fantastic to the macabre and resides in New Jersey. His horror novel, Bring Me Flesh, I'll Bring Hell, was published by Skyhorse/Talos in 2014. More details are available at www.martinrose.org.

OLD HAUNTS

Nathan Robinson

HE’S A MESS. HE CAN’T GET UP. And judging from the fresh stains that mark back of his legs as he writhes about on the floor, his bowels have failed him yet again.

I want to help him, but I can’t. My subject has to do this himself.

The crowd moves on, leaving him behind. They don’t help their own kind. Why would they? They have that innate selfishness we all have at a base level; to look after oneself no matter what.

He groans and finally moves his hands up near his chest to push himself up off the litter strewn pavement. Unhooking his feet from the curb edging that caused his stumble, he draws his legs up and rolls back onto his feet. A black gash has emerged on his cheek. I stare entranced and disgusted by the structure I see beneath. To think that a skeleton is still powering this infernal machine bewilders me.

A scream bellows from around the corner where the crowd has surged. The crackling roar of gunfire thunders back in reply. The sound of bodies acting as pillows to thumping bullets is muffled by the edge of the building that hides the drama. I don’t want to see it. I’ve seen enough death. But I’m obsessed by following him.

More screams.

More bullets ripping flesh from bones.

Attracted by the noise, he looks around, oblivious to danger around the corner. His knees are scuffed through, the discolored fabric of the trousers and skin revealing a dirty brown cap beneath that clings on by few gnarled tendons. His once white shirt is a dingy yellow with a smattering of brown blood stains. Some are his. Some aren’t.

He’s missing his right shoe and the little finger on his left hand. I think it was shot off. We were fired upon and after the bullets had stopped his little pinkie finger was missing. I looked around but found nothing, giving up after realizing the ridiculousness of my quest.

The wedding ring that his wife picked out tugs at the sagging skin on his swollen finger, paring it away from the bone with each tussle he suffers. He was faithful until the end.

Amazingly, he still wears his striped blue tie; the knot is pulled down tight from where fodder has grasped the dangling lash in a last desperate purchase against their aggressor.

He clacks his sticky brown teeth with a vague form of anticipation and he stumbles onwards, wearing the skin out on his right heel. I hurry after him, intrigued by his every move. Much more so than the others.

We round the corner as the last of the bullets and screams fill the air. A few final gurgles and whimpers are soon overtaken by the crack of chomping jaws and the sick tear of hot flesh.

He lurches into the midst of the carnage. Fresh bodies lie amongst the thick spill of blood that decorates the road like a table cloth. He steps over a few before settling on a thickset man, he crouches next to Melissa. He often chooses to eat with her. Nothing physical ever happens between them, nor do they acknowledge each other in any sense or form. Either he’ll join her or she’ll join him. It might be chance, or it might be some weird deep seeded attraction that binds them both. I don’t know. Maybe I’m looking too far into it.

Melissa must have been attractive at some point during her life. She’s young with big eyes that would have looked nice if they were blue instead of that washed out grey. Her hair is a natural red, but she’d complemented it with a few blonde streaks that give her a fiery quality. For the condition she was in, I’d say the only downside would be the teeth marks on her neck and the fact half of her right breast had been chewed off, leaving a black wound that never healed, creating a healthy bosom for fly’s to lay their eggs.

We’ve suffered a few casualties from our group of ten.

Nick has suffered a shotgun blast to the forehead, he lays in the middle of the road, what’s left of his black brains are slowly spilling out quite neatly onto an old newspaper that has been plastered to the tarmac by the last rain. Nick’s cheeks are peppered with buckshot, his eyes stare upwards through me and into the sky. I wonder where he is now. A better place I hope.

A neat little bullet hole has appeared in Gerry’s forehead; Tabitha has endured the same fate. Bertha has caught a shot to the neck, severing her spinal cord. Her head hangs on as if she was a broken doll.

Doris has been cut in two. A machine gun I’m guessing. She drags her useless bottom half along on straining strings of sinew as her guts fall out like a tutu around her middle. She’s heading for the fresh meat. He steps over her and beats her to it.

Diane was part skeleton now, the skin so tight on her mostly hairless head that she looked as if she wore a mask. Her lips had either rotted or been chewed off (by others or by Diane herself I didn’t know. She looked like that when I first met her. I know she’s got an appetite, so I’ll say no more), so now her smile was pulled back into a permanent sardonic grin, complete with a wide, almost lidless stare that still chilled me to look at despite all that I’d seen.

Tommy was unscathed as usual. I don’t know how he’d gone through the change but he was in remarkable condition, and from a certain distance he looked to be normal. Even his t-shirt looked half clean.

Doris drags hers carcass into the buffet and finds a skull that has been cracked opened by friendly fire. She works her fingers inside to get at the warm pink fruit inside. From the looks of it the shell entered via the temple and bounced around, liquefying the brain to a cherry gloop.

Temple? I look at the corpse; she’s got bites on her arms. I start to think the wound was self inflicted. Maybe she was the last to go and couldn’t stand seeing her friends suffer such a fate. Suicide is such a brave way to die nowadays.

I contemplate the scene. A bus has been parked askew over the junction and judging from the ropes it looks like the group my guys tore apart was trying to shift it out of the way. Or put it in place.

The group sits in contented silence as they consume their feast. I watch as Melissa and my subject share a cavity, stuffing stinking entrails into their ever-hungry mouths. I find a brief moment of humor in this as the spaghetti sharing scene from Lady and the Tramp comes to mind, but they choose to bite and chew instead of slurping up coils of digestive tract towards one another’s rotting lips.

I don’t look at the details of the meal. I already know enough.

*****

Night falls. On the outskirts of the city, I can make out the glow of fires in the distance, a smoke blacker against the purpling sky giving food to the thought that there are other parties out there waiting to bump into ours, for better or worse.

The group picks the last remnants from the road, chasing scraps and cramming them into already full mouths before darkness takes the chunks into the shadows. They don’t fight amongst each other, nor do they snatch food from one another’s grasp. It’s remarkable that despite the gluttony they suffer unto themselves, greed doesn’t plague the group as a whole. Each takes what they need and leaves the rest. If you take away the violence, it’s quite tender to watch as any animalistic tendencies are dulled whilst they eat. Sure they gorge, but they don’t bite each other’s fingers off in the process.

A siren wails in the center of the city, like a Klaxon prayer call so loud that it wakes the dead for real. Denuded ears twitch in response and heads turn.

The group starts its migration, following the first to move.

It’s Tommy, as usual.

Diane follows him dutifully, then Melissa, then my guy.

Doris drags her broken-in-half form through the gore the group had caused, but it’s not long before she’s left behind. I hear her groan in her version of sorrow. Then we’ve crossed the park and her beseeching moans are lost to distance and the clinging veil of night.

A shape alerts them as a brave rat scuttles foolishly from a burnt out building and across the road in front of us. They all dive after it with heaving moans of dead breath as it takes shelter in the confines of a flipped pick-up truck, its load of water cooler bottles are obliterated to empty shards of hard plastic.

The rat squeals in protest as Tommy, with the sharpest of eyes grasps it and squeezes, mimics the action with his black tongue, letting it loll over his lips in unison as the innards explode from the rodent’s body. The others crowd round him as he chews fur and splintering bone, fresh blood, black in the sparse moonlight decorates his chin, giving him a grim goatee.

The ropey rat-tail drops to the ground at Tommy’s feet, Diane makes a bid for it. Being shorter, she snatches it up before the others have chance to react. It crunches like dried spaghetti.

The group looks round for spoils. Finding nothing, they continue their aimless journey into the depths of the crumbling city. Now that we’re closer I can see the fires are set inside some of the tallest buildings. Up and away from the death-heavy ground.

I wish I could warn them somehow, but I suppose they already know what is coming for them.

The siren screams constantly and I wonder if it’s an old car alarm disturbed by a stray dog or dumb deer. It’s too loud. The batteries wouldn’t have lasted this long.

Nevertheless it has the group hooked and they follow its wailing oscillations as if it’s a diner bell. Which it probably is.

Some streets have been blocked off with buses, trucks and trailers, narrowing our options of navigation. We can only go straight.

I feel no fear as we descend further and deeper into the mass of concrete boxes, the blocky shadows fading to black. I stick close to my subject as we shuffle forward. I can feel movement in the dark, behind us.

In front of us.

All around us.

Dawn breathes its glow upon my crowd, giving me evidence that our group has grown. Or our group has joined others. It depends which way you look at it. There are hundreds of them in the square, milling around without aim, but for the simple search for food. They’ll find none here. It’s just them.

More pour into the square from the North, clocking the mob in at close to a thousand. Some stand in the waterless fountain, a few more chase ignorant pigeons that dare land in their quarter. The sky rats fly too high and too fast for the rotten grasps of the hungry brave. Both sides learn that mixing with each other isn’t a bright idea and give up all involvement.

The ground is charred black with soot. A closer inspection reveals a few loose teeth and finger bones scattered as if used in some ritual to predict fortunes.

I notice a pile of dead-dead bodies filling the southwestern corner of the square, a thousand black limbs are twisted at impossible angles, empty sockets in charcoaled skulls stare at the rising sun, grinning with what sparse teeth they have left.

This group is well beyond life after death. And as useless and as irksome as they’d become, the crowd ignores this blatant, destructive pile of trophies. They were forgotten now, about as relevant as dust motes beaten by a housefly’s wing.

I look upon my group with a bizarre fondness. They are all I have left. My family is gone. I don’t drive my car anymore, and I wonder if the keys were still on the hook in the kitchen or had some adventurer pilfered the vehicle for his own survival needs.

My guy and Melissa stand beside each other, searching the horizon for movement.

Diane has melted into the crowd; even though she has to crawl, somehow she moved quickly and I know I’ll never see her again.

I see a little girl. The youngest I’ve seen in ages. She shimmers in the blaze of dawn that punches in from between two buildings. Everyone around her shimmers. It’s not the majestic light on this grim scene, but something between us, a twitching gauze or vapor.

Someone stumbles and trips, crashing to the ground and taking a few others down with them in a confused heap.

I see the pipe.

Snakeskin red and more at home dumped on a summer-yellowed lawn, it looks out of place on the concrete slabs of the city. And like a snake, it hisses. This is from where the vapor breathes, its toxic nature lost on the lungs of the breathless crowd.

Figures scurry about the broken windows around us. I see the guns poke through. It’s so quick and the feeling that I’m too late is damned horrible.

Flames erupt and bodies rain down from the sky like rubber limbed mannequins. They impact without pain; their broken bones do little to cease their movement as most of them try to get back on their feet with broken joints. They flop about, their ever hungry grins caught in spastic snaps as they chomp at the air.

Despite holding his own against the blast, Tommy is thrown to the ground. A body smashes into Melissa, pinning her down as the flames sweep over her. Her red hair sizzles in the ravenous blaze.

Everyone is burning except me. I can’t burn.

Tommy gets up and is immediately thrown back down as a bullet whistles through his skull in an explosion of black blood and bony shrapnel. His luck has run out. Hot lead hails upon other protesters of the flames, sending them back into the inferno.

I see my guy, beyond the flames. Somehow he’s heading back the way we came, having escaped the massacre as many revisit death for a second time. I follow him as he shambles back through the streets, perhaps knowing of fear, or perhaps dumbly unaware and merely wandering, blown by chance and whatever cosmic winds that have fired his synapses in that particular direction. The dead are a curious species.

His gait has changed; dipping slightly on the left hand side. The bottom of his calf is shredded through the trousers and to the flesh beneath. He starts to wobble.

I follow him and a commotion follows me.

They’re wearing black suits and armor. Some pick through the incapacitated crowd, burying bullets into burnt faces. A few follow my guy for few feet, raising rapid fire machine guns to well-rehearsed shoulders, then the rat-a-tat dance of overly efficient machinery chills me more than anything.

I’m going to lose him and that thought terrifies me as I don’t think I’m prepared for what it means.

About a dozen bullets close the distance and punch him in the back. Not one misses. He tumbles forward, crashing over himself.

I sidle up next to him, wanting to stroke his parched face, try to ease him into the next stage of life, whatever that might be. I’m but vapor to him. He can’t see my ghostly form and I’ve only followed his exploits by choice as I don’t know what else to do.

I look back; a solitary soldier is coming our way while the rest venture back into the arena of death, to finish what carnage they started. Bullets spit into skulls and concrete with flinging chimes that echo out over the derelict city.

He flips over, looks up, and looks through me. His spine has a bullet lodged in between the lower vertebrae, his arms twitch with malevolent grasps toward his approaching aggressor.

He gawps, jaws chattering, the dust in his lungs seethes.

The black suited figure stands over us, his face pale and without remorse. Then he smiles and levels the gun at us. His finger is on the trigger and I can make out the minute calculations in his eyes.

It’s what’s left of my imagination, but time slows to a treacle crawl.

If that bullet passes through us, I wonder which of us is to be the final victim. If he dies, again, do I die again? Or do I hang over his rotting remains forever more, anchored by condolence and natures I cannot begin to understand?

A deep scream punches over the finalizing gunshots. Our assassin turns and he runs back to his comrades. Someone is bitten. The life of the living is worth more than the dead.

My man blinks, unmoved by the danger he was just in. He drags himself to a burned-out car and grabs hold of the bumper. If he’d possessed the capacity for pain he would have been screaming, but since his nerve endings were shriveled by rot, the bullet in his spine was nothing more than a wiggling annoyance. His reanimation goes beyond human physiology.

The cooling lump hinders his progress, but inch by inch he pulls himself up the rusted wreck, clawing at angles for purchase until he stands on quaking legs.

He doesn’t look back. He carries his crippled form back the way we’d all come, away from the carnage, and I, the impotent guardian angel, follow. Bullets fly and screams echo across the city. I’ve seen enough to know what’s going on.

I follow him as it’s all I’m compelled to do. What else can I do?

I look at his face and contemplate all the lives he’s ended. Police officers, medics, soldiers, mothers, fathers. Brothers, sister, uncles and aunts.

Seeing the end of the world on your television is one thing, but to see it happening outside on your own street leaves you with a bizarre sense of being star struck. You tell yourself that the hole they dug in the ice is thousands of miles away. What happened to those scientists in the Arctic Circle surely couldn’t affect suburbia. But it does. Bad news travels fast. But a dormant virus that they suspect might have ruled the planet eons ago travels much, much faster.

I remember that I was a good husband and a good father to reassure myself that whatever he does now isn’t me at all. The good I did was me, the bad is all him. We have divided and gone our separate ways. But still, he’s my stead and I’m his rider. We are bound. Where he goes, I will follow.

We leave the city behind. With time, he joins others and they continue to wander like pilgrims without a home. The meals become sparse, and the weeds claw their way skyward by latching onto buildings. Blown soil forms soft curves between skyscrapers, preserving the bright packets of litter like neon fossils.

I guess he’s unaware of my existence, but still I wonder what I am.

I don’t believe in the afterlife, but here I am, musing.

I figure I’m a remnant, a bottom of the barrel scraping of memory that fires away in a slowly decaying hunk of brain matter. I’m his imagination, tagging on like a bad smell.

To not know what you are is horrible, but I’m sure you get used to it.

About Nathan Robinson

Nathan Robinson lives in Scunthorpe, England with a patient wife/editor, two adoring twin boys and a three legged cat called Dave. He’s had short stories published in numerous anthologies by Spinetinglers, Rain Storm Press, Cruentus Libri, Static Movement, Knight Watch Press, Pseudopod and many more. His debut novel Starers was published by Severed Press in October 2012 to rave reviews.

As well as writing, he reviews new and independent horror novels for www.snakebitehorror.co.uk.

Find him at www.facebook.com/NathanRobinsonWrites

I’LL BE WATCHING

William F. Nolan

I’M HERE IN THIS CALIFORNIA MOTEL IN INDIO under a false name, waiting to be arrested for murder. I’m not guilty. Swear to God I’m not. You’ve got to understand. I never killed my wife.

Total shock! Her lying there on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood (so red!), the knife in her chest with little Anna away at school and the house all silent and dark. (Betty kept the shades down against afternoon sun because she worried about the light fading our rose carpet.)

Dead. Lying on her back. Eyes open, staring. Not breathing. Not moving. I know that my prints are on that knife (from the kitchen drawer; I’ve used it often.). No forced entry. No sign of robbery. The husband is always the prime suspect in a domestic murder. The person of interest. That’s me—Chad Edward Simon.

I didn’t touch the body, her body with those terrible staring eyes. Left her there on the floor with the knife still in her chest. I just took off in our Ford Fiesta. Drove fast down the highway, driving in a kind of haze, past Palm Springs (where we’d spent our honeymoon), to Indio. Lots of desert here. The desert always comforts me. Stark and pure somehow. Serene. That’s how I think of the desert. The police will eventually catch up with me. I know it’s just a matter of time. I don’t have an alibi. No one to witness the fact that I was alone when Betty was killed. Alone at my desk in the office building. Nobody else in the building, it being a Sunday. Working on some realty contracts. (I sell houses and I’m good at it.)

Beyond my prints on the knife (dumb, not to have ditched it) there is motive. Betty and I had a really hot argument the night before her death. Over money, what else? Sales have been slow in the housing market and Bet was spending like crazy at the mall. (She collected handbags like dogs collect fleas.) I yelled at her and she yelled back at me. We were in the back yard, and I know the neighbors heard every word. I saw old man Pritchett gawking at us through his bedroom window, with his mongrel barking up a storm. (Pritchett is a sour old bastard who’ll be delighted to testify at my murder trial.)

I should have called the cops when I came home and found Betty dead. That’s what I should have done. But I was in a panic. Wasn’t thinking straight. I just wanted to get away—to the desert where things are serene. So what I did, in legal terms, was to flee the scene of a crime. Really dumb. Big mistake.

So here I sit in this cheap (cracks in the walls) desert motel, waiting for the cops. Did another dumb thing; I registered under a phony name, which will go against me in court. As if I’m trying to hide. Which I’m not. Let the cops come. They’ll find me. They always do.

I have this letter from my little Anna (she’s thirteen). Found it on the kitchen table and stuffed it into my pocket without reading it. The envelope is addressed TO CHADDO. I know it’s from Anna because only she calls me Chaddo. Never Pop or Daddy. To everyone else I’m Ed. Anyway, here’s the letter:

Dear Chaddo,

By now you’ve found Mom’s body. With the knife in her chest and with your prints on it. I know how emotional you are, so I’m sure you're all freaked out. The police will arrest you for murder and they’ll have a strong case. (Maybe you’ll even get the death penalty!) Hey, I know this sounds all cold-blooded coming from your little girl—but in a way, a part of me is not your child at all. I’ll explain everything in this letter. There’s a lot to explain.

So. . .who killed Mom? Me. I did it. Big surprise, huh? Wore gloves and was real careful not to erase your prints. Did a neat job. . . Stabbed her in the heart. Did I love Mom? Part of me did, the part that didn’t stab her. But there’s another part of me that you don’t know about. . .a dark part. And that part knew it was necessary to use the knife on Mom.

Now, being all freaked out, you are probably thinking this letter will free you. It’s a confession. You can show it in court. Hey, Chaddo, go ahead, show it in court. Won’t do you any good. No jury will believe that a sweet, loving 13-year-old daughter would suddenly kill her mother to set up her father for the murder.

I’ve thought of everything. Been planning this for months. Please note that this is typed on your old manual machine—the one you keep as an antique and that the paper’s from your desk. The cops will figure you typed it yourself to blame your poor little girl for the brutal killing. Your prints are on the paper, not mine. (Gloves again!)

Bottom line: it will do you more harm than good to show this letter in your defense. I’ll be in the courtroom looking tearful and innocent—the perfect grief-stricken daughter. Oh, why did Daddy kill Mommy? I’ll be totally convincing.

So why, you ask, did I do what I did? Guess it’s time for me to explain everything.

We’ve never talked about reincarnation, so I don’t know if you believe in it or not. We all live many lives, but most of us can’t tie one life to the next. Most people can't remember their past lives. If they did it would probably drive them batty – too much overload. But that’s not the case with me. I don’t know why, but I can remember many of my past lives without freaking. I recall each one in detail, like a movie running through my head, which is why I killed Mom. But I’m getting to that. Just keep reading!

I was alive in Old Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs, when they built the Great Pyramid. I was a male then, one of the thousands of slaves who helped put it up. The work was horrible. Pushing those huge stones up ramps, with the sun burning down like fire on my skin. My heart gave out under the strain of moving all those stones, and I died. I was still a young man.

As a dance-hall girl (loved wearing red silk bloomers), I had an affair with Wyatt Earp in Tombstone just after the O.K. Corral thing in 1881. But it didn’t last. Earp had a roving eye.

I was a combat pilot in the First World War, like the American ace Eddie Rickenbacker (never met him). I was a good pilot. Shot down six German planes, plus an observation balloon. Once fired at the Red Baron himself when he and his Flying Circus attacked our air base. But I was real nervous, shooting at him, and my bullets missed his plane (painted fire red with three wings). Somebody else shot him down later.

After the war, as a rich man, a landowner, I married a farm girl from France. She taught me to speak French, and I taught her English. But my health was lousy. Came down with pneumonia and died of it. (No antibiotics in those days.)

In the Second World War, I was a nurse in London. Killed when our hospital was bombed. And way before that, as a warrior, I fought alongside King Richard the Lionhearted in one of the Crusades (I forget which one). Got a sword thrust through my left shoulder. Survived, and lived to a ripe old age.

I could go on and on, but I want to tell you about the life I lived just before this one—and why a part of me hates you. That’s right, Chaddo, part of me hates your lousy guts. I killed Mom so you’d suffer from her death and be convicted of murder. (I might have killed her anyway just to shut up her ordering me around, who knows?)

So why do I hate you? I’ll tell you why.

In another one of my lives, you were the leader, the head honcho, of a nasty biker gang in Detroit where I lived. Called yourselves The Bad Ass Boys. You and your gang were into drug dealing, smuggling, and prostitution. Also sold illegal weapons. You liked using guns. There was a rival gang, The Black Angels, and you killed their leader, a 20-year-old named Crusher. Shot him in the head. Nasty.

So how do I figure into all this…I was a young girl. Same age as now in this life. I was thirteen when you kidnapped me as I was jogging in the local park. My father was a very hotshot lawyer, and made oodles of money, so when you demanded ten thousand dollars for my release he paid it. But you didn’t release me. Never intended to. Instead, you watched while every member of your gang had sex with me. A very painful gang rape. Then you shot me dead.

When Mom got pregnant, I entered her body (sometimes you can choose where to go) and waited until I was the same age to get my revenge for what you did to me. You probably think all of this is unfair, after all, you say, you didn't have me gang raped, it was the biker guy who did that. But hey, Chaddo, I recognized you from my past life. You were that biker. Now you have to suffer the bad karma resulting from what you did. You have to pay for your crime.

Actually, you should be grateful. Thanks to what I've done here you'll be in good shape in your next life, with all the bad karma paid off. What about me? Will I have to deal with bad karma for killing Mom to set you up? No, as I am acting in proper revenge for a prior injustice. After all, doesn’t the Bible instruct us to ‘smite the wicked?’ No bad karma for me.

Well, I don’t need to write any more. I’ve explained everything. Now you know the reason for Mom’s death. You’ve got the full story. Take this letter to court if you want to. The jury will laugh it off just like you did when I was raped. . .

I'll be watching.

She added a typed three-word P.S.:

Rot in Hell!

Anna was clever enough not to sign her name. I agree with the little bitch that her letter won’t do me any damn good, but it’s all I have by way of a defense.

I’ll try to make the jury believe it.

God knows I’ll try.

About William F. Nolan

William F. Nolan writes mostly in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. Though best known for coauthoring the acclaimed dystopian science fiction novel Logan’s Run with George Clayton Johnson, Nolan is the author of more than 2000 pieces (fiction, nonfiction, articles, and books), and has edited twenty-six anthologies in his fifty-plus year career.

Of his numerous awards, there are a few of which he is most proud: being voted a Living Legend in Dark Fantasy by the International Horror Guild in 2002; twice winning the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America; being awarded the honorary title of Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. in 2006; receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association in 2010; and as recipient of the 2013 World Fantasy Convention Award along with Brian W. Aldiss. Nolan won another Bram Stoker Award—for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction—in May 2014 for his book about Ray Bradbury, called Nolan on Bradbury: Sixty Years of Writing about the Master of Science Fiction.

A vegetarian, Nolan resides in Vancouver, Washington.

NAILS IN YOUR COFFIN

Rachel Coles

CLAIRE MATHESON INSPECTED HER PERFECT pink and white nails. The French manicure looked suitable for the meeting tomorrow, though she spotted a flaw in her pinky nail that irritated her.

“Hey,” she summoned her new nail girl. “What’s this about? Can you fix this?”

The girl looked at her handiwork and shook her head. “No, Ms. Matheson. That problem is in nail. You hit it on something?”

“No. I didn’t hit it on anything. It can’t be a problem with my nail. Are you going to fix this?”

“I can’t. It’s in nail. See, I can take polish off and show you.” The girl pulled her fingers toward her station.

But Claire pulled her hand away. “No, don’t take the polish off; I’m running late.”

“Well, how you want me to show you?”

Claire sighed, “Forget it.” She walked to the counter and paid. Money was coming off the tip for that. She walked out without another word to the nail girl. A bad review is going up on Yelp too. I can’t recommend her.

When she got outside, she frowned at a scratch on the door of her Mercedes, and glared at the car next to her, wondering if that owner had been the culprit. She got in her car and drove home, annoyed with the way the afternoon was unfolding.

After being stopped at nearly every red light possible on the way home, she tossed her Gucci bag on the couch, flipped off her shoes and padded to the refrigerator to get a gluten-free soymilk popsicle to refresh herself from the warm day. Of course, Yolanda had forgotten to restock her supply. What do I pay these people for?

She planned a big day tomorrow; pitching a new idea to the financial firm she worked at, a woman proudly clawing a place for herself among the men, or sharks, as she liked to think of them. She’d worked hard for this proposal, and she wanted to be rested and prepared. After reviewing her presentation a dozen times, she popped an Ambien and went to bed.

She was asleep almost instantly. She didn’t know how much time passed, but she became aware of an odd sensation, the kind of sensation that nags people and brings them hovering out of the heaviness of dreams and deep sleep to the edge of consciousness.

She brushed her hand down by her chilly toes and slid back into the morass of dreams, some of them typical fear images in which she showed up at the presentation naked, after not being able to find the same meeting room she’d been in a million times; others were nostalgic dreams, looking down at herself and finding that her figure was the way it had been when she was sixteen.

But there it was again, an insistent little tickle on her feet. Her dream told her that it was her cat, Sparkles, the one she had when she was a girl, a giant orange tabby the size of two cats who used climb into bed with her. Except Sparkles had died when she was eighteen.

Alarm flooded through her and she rocketed upright in bed, her heart thumping so loud it sounded like thunder trapped in her foam-plugged ears. She yanked her toes back under the down comforter that had drooped halfway off the bed in the night, and turned on the light.

Something had touched her…she was sure of it. She whipped back the comforter and searched the sheets for spiders. But she couldn’t find anything. She pulled up the fitted sheet and studied the mattress for bed bugs. She couldn’t imagine something so filthy being in her home, but she had been reading articles about invasions of the creatures even in reputable hotels. And though she always insisted on the luxury rooms when she traveled, she conceded that bed bugs were now a possibility in the aggravating world of falling standards.

Thankfully, there was no trace of bed bugs either. As relieved as she was, that was puzzling. She pulled the drape back that shrouded the bottom of the bed to look underneath. It was not as immaculate as it should have been, given how much she paid the maid, but there was nothing there that would have touched her feet as she slept. There was no breeze that could have accounted for it either.

Swallowing suddenly on a dry mouth, she took a drink of water from the glass at her bedside. Damn, I really need an undisturbed night of sleep. Now is no time for the jitters. She refused to believe that it was restless leg syndrome; she simply was not that middle-aged yet. But she didn’t have any other explanation, so she broke off another half pill of Ambien, swallowed it, and lay to wait for it to take effect.

She was almost there; almost back in the land of her perfect prom night, when something ever-so-soft and slow trailed along the arch of her foot. This time, her feet were completely under the covers. Whatever had done it had nothing to do with air currents of any kind. She yelped and scrambled back, kicking the covers off the bed. It revealed nothing but blank silky mauve sheets, and indents where her feet and rear end had been.

She brushed her hand across her feet brusquely, trying to disperse the memory of the spider-silk sensation. She looked all around the room, but nothing moved. She picked up her iPhone and as distasteful as it was, she Googled “nocturnal insects.”

It was possible that something fast in the night might be lurking. One of the entries that came up in Google, horrifyingly, was cockroaches. They were known to scatter when lights went on, rather speedily, by the descriptions. With the amount of money she paid her staff, surely that couldn’t be it. Nothing could be that fast, and surely not in this house.

But just to eliminate all ridiculous possibilities, she got the LED flashlight from the outlet in the wall and clutched it as she tentatively lay back down. There was no going to sleep this time. She waited. After about half an hour of cursing the sleep god for doing this to her, she felt something like the gentle brush of someone’s fingers all the way up her leg.

Adrenaline shot through her as she flicked on the flashlight and peered under the covers. This time, whatever it was didn’t flee or scatter.

Something that looked like a cross between pistachio shells and human nails rested on the sheet. They hadn’t been there before and she knew she hadn’t been eating nuts in bed. She leaped out of bed and threw on the lights.

They were still there after light flooded the room. They lay against the sheet, their pallor almost bleached-looking next to the rich color of the sheet. They didn’t move.

She picked up a high-heeled shoe from her shoe rack, the only thing she could find that she might use as a weapon until she could get to the knives in the kitchen. If some jerk had broken into her house and played some kind of sick joke on her, she was going to sue the pants off him, providing she didn’t stab him first with the shoe.

What if it’s a burglar? Why would a burglar leave nutshells in my bed? Nutshells, they were pistachio nutshells, not fingernails.

She crept downstairs to check the house alarm status, but it was armed so no one had entered. She grabbed a heavy chopping knife from the block and sat downstairs for a few minutes, contemplating. Maybe she could just sleep down here. But there was a morbid fascination with whatever those things were. There was a bag of trail mix on the counter, containing some pistachios. So, it had to be nuts.

Maybe she had been sleepwalking and sleep-eating. Ambien was known to give people very strange dreams, and there were a small proportion of people who did report very strange sleepwalking episodes while on the drug. She wanted to check her phone internet for the medical facts, and then she realized that she had left it upstairs by the bed. Of course. She glanced at her laptop. She got on the internet and satisfied herself that Ambien had been responsible for her current predicament. She had just taken a half dose more than was prescribed, after all.

She felt naked without her phone, so she resigned herself to going back upstairs. She took the knife with her. When she edged into her bedroom and glanced at the bed, the nutshells were where she had left them.

She sighed, almost with relief. If they had been gone, she didn’t know what she’d be left thinking and she was tired of little mysteries tonight. She grabbed the little silver and wire garbage pail and swept the shells off the bed into the pail.

As she did, she felt the tattered edge of something on the underside of a few of the shells, like the nut skin that always got stuck in her teeth, the only thing she didn’t like about pistachios. She flipped one over, just as a matter of habit. But then she froze. The rough patch had been a dried membrane, true. But it wasn’t nut skin. It looked like the cuticles that held nails to the nail beds, dried and shriveled, as if they’d been separated a very long time ago. They weren’t pistachios or any other kind of nut. There was no ignoring it now. They were human nails.

She screamed and dropped the nails and the trash pail and ran downstairs to her Mercedes. Someone had been in the house and put human nails in her bed. Why, she had no idea. What the hell’s happening to me? Why is someone doing this to me?

She squealed her tires on the way out of the garage, shaking, her hands clutching the wheel as if it could keep her from drowning in a sea of fear that threatened to choke off her windpipe. She didn’t stop until she got to a posh hotel in town. She checked in, and called the police, now that she was out of her invaded home and in a well-lit and occupied place.

“911, what is your emergency?”

“There’s an intruder in my house!”

“Where are you located? Are you in danger, ma’am?”

“I’m at 437 Elmhurst Lane, I mean my house is. I’m at a hotel now. I don’t think anyone followed me, but I don’t know for sure.”

“The police are on their way to your house. Shall I send someone to your location also?”

“Yes!”

The police arrived quickly, and Claire recounted her observations to the painfully youthful officer. God, are they taking them right out of high school now? She thought. During their conversation, the officer’s walkie-talkie on his shoulder patched in and he spoke with the officer on the other end. He frowned.

“Ma’am, we couldn’t find any evidence of a break-in. You’re alarm was still armed. We went in anyway, to make sure that someone didn’t somehow bypass it or something. But there was nothing. We scoured the place for forty minutes. Can you think of any reason someone might be in your house other than a general theft? Was there anything valuable that might be missing that we didn’t know about, that someone else you know might have been looking for? Can you think of any reason someone might want to harm you?”

“Like what? I have valuables, but…I’m telling you, this person is sick! They left fingernails in my bed! Who does that? It’s some kind of message! I told you, I put them in the trash can, can’t you take those for evidence?”

“The officers didn’t find any nails in the trash can.”

The little snake that had been wiggling around the edge of her stomach slithered right up her spine and nipped the back of her neck, so that all her tiny hairs rose.

“They were there! I touched them!”

“I believe you,” he said in a tone that indicated he didn’t believe her at all. “We’ll keep a patrol in the area tonight, just in case, okay, ma’am? We’ll let you know if something turns up. Stay in this hotel. You have a nice rest of your night.”

She wanted to cry, and scream, and grab him by the little hairs of his military-style buzz cut. But she knew assaulting the police officer wouldn’t get him to stay, or get them to keep looking at the house.

She went up to her hotel room and collapsed into bed, exhausted. There were four hours left until she had to wake up to go to work and she had to put this out of her head for now, so she could be focused later. She didn’t sleep though. She lay, ruminating over every little thing that had happened in the past couple hours, everything that had happened in the last few days, poring over anything that could give her a clue about why this was happening. But she came up with nothing.

She realized that she had chewed on one of her fingernails, ruining the French manicure. She gagged and wiped her tongue with a tissue, thinking again about the ragged nails in the trash can. She lay back down and closed her eyes, trying to call to mind the serene burbling water sounds they often played in her yoga class.

As her frayed nerves started to relax, someone rapped at the door. At least she thought it was a rap at the door until it happened again a couple of seconds later. It wasn’t coming from the door. It was a plastic-y sound coming from the room she was in.

She turned on the light and looked around the room, suddenly fearful again. She grabbed the luggage rack and folded it up to use as a bat. And that’s when she realized that the rapping was coming from the plastic trash can under the desk. It sounded like a rapid-fire tapping of nails on a surface, just like she remembered doing a thousand times every time she got impatient with something, which was often.

Rat-tat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat-tat.

Her breath caught in her throat. She knew it was utter insanity to even look, but like people who stopped to stare at a 21-car pile-up on the off-chance they might see some gore, she swallowed and peeked into the can. At the bottom were the same pale nails she had thrown in her own trash bin at home.

She screamed and knocked over the little bin with the suitcase rack and kept smashing at it. The nails scattered across the carpet. She wanted to light them on fire, just to destroy them, but she had no matches or lighter, and she didn’t want to get that near them.

She watched, mesmerized, as they began moving, slowly…one after another, crawling across the floor toward her. She sobbed, grabbing handfuls of her hair and plugging her ears. All she could think about were all the fingernails she’d bitten as a child; swallowed, and clawing their way out of her. I know they’re real, I know I’m not crazy!

She was frozen in place, either by her terror or by some power the nails held. They dragged lightly along the carpet, two pairs, one from each side. They reached her and spider-crawled up her legs, up her torso, running gently through her hair, then down her neck and rested there, softly scratching at the place where she was sure important veins lay under the skin. The scratching wasn’t hard at all. It was faint, almost like a breath of wind. But it was there.

Two more sets of nails, one of them painted in chipped pearl pink, the other crusted on the underside with dirt, crabbed their way across the carpet to her. One set climbed all the way up to her face, two fingers gently stroking her eye-lids, the other set burrowing under her satin night-shirt. There, two fingernails scraped across the skin of her midsection. They didn’t break skin, they didn’t even leave a mark, but there was no question that whatever this was, and wherever this came from, it was either a threat, or a promise.

And still, she stood frozen, tears streaming down her cheeks. Slowly, the two fingernails over her eyelids began peeling up her eyelashes.

God! Godgodgod help me!

*****

Detective Mallory took the report. Housekeeping had found her when they arrived with room service. They knocked, and when she didn’t answer, they’d gone inside. They found her leaning against the pillow with blood around her eyelids and cheeks. Her fingertips were covered in blood, and she wasn’t breathing.

Mallory sighed. There’d been a woman earlier in the night who had reported a break-in, by someone leaving nails in her bed. When Officer Mallory checked her ID, it was the same woman. He shook his head ruefully. Poor woman must have clawed her eyes out, he concluded. Sick.

But when the autopsy report came back, something twinged in the pit of his stomach. Her eyes had been burrowed into all the way back into her head and then down, all the way down. Her insides were a mess. But the only outward evidence had been blood on her fingers and cheeks, and a few contusions in her eyelids, nothing that could explain the profound internal trauma. No way could she have done that to herself. And whatever did it had left, left no trace for the pathologist. It was as though it either never existed, or dissolved by the time they got to it. The pathologist had taken blood and tissue samples, but the labs would take a while.

Officer Mallory went to see the body in the morgue, to see if he could jar some idea loose in his head of what had happened. And he noticed something that he hadn’t noticed before. He didn’t understand how both he and the pathologist had missed it.

Her nails were loose, as if they were separating from the nail bed. She had struggled against something. No, that wasn’t it. There would be more trauma to her nail beds if it had been forceful, and it would have been all of the nails, not just one or two. He sighed once more but then stopped in his tracks.

Slowly, the nail on her left hand popped off the finger and dropped to the floor.

About Rachel Coles

Rachel Coles lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband, Adam, and her young daughter, Rosa. She works in public health emergency preparedness and response, assisting with the coordination of disaster response and recovery. Rachel received a Master of Arts degree in Medical Anthropology from Arizona State University, and her love of mythology often shows up in her fiction. She is from an Ashkenazi Jewish family, and grew up with a background in Semitic and Middle Eastern folklore. Together with her husband and daughter, she enjoys martial arts, science fiction, fantasy, and horror. She and her family make and wear costumes from their favorite shows, movies, comics, and novels, to attend ComiCon, the local comic-book and fantasy convention.

Rachel is the author of urban fantasy novel Pazuzu’s Girl, and a number of short stories which have been featured in What Fears Become, Aphelion and other magazines. Pazuzu’s Girl has gained positive reviews from Fangoria, Midwest Book Reviews and other fantasy reviewers. She can be found athttp://www.rachelcoles.wordpress.com , or on her Facebook author page.

PETE’S BIG BREAK

Joe McKinney

PETE WARD WATCHED AS THE THING mutilated two of his dogs. Its motorized gears turned under a blanket of fake dog fur, simulating alien digestion. Pete looked to his right, where John Carpenter stood next to his camera crew and his assistant, staring at the carnage without expression, his eyes unblinking.

Then Carpenter raised his left hand and made a snapping motion to Pete. The signal. Pete turned back to his dogs, to Ginger, the alpha female of the group, and raised his hand at her, the palm down. Her muzzle came up, her eyes on his hand. Misted air steamed from her nostrils. Pete flicked his hand up, palm to Ginger, and made a motion like a shove. Taking the cue perfectly, Ginger began to back up and whimper. Pete had her keep doing it until Carpenter yelled, “And…cut!”

Pete dropped his hand, but held his breath. He looked over at Carpenter, waiting for a word. The director put a hand on his cameraman’s shoulder and the man stepped back to let the director have a look into the screen. A few moments passed. Then Carpenter looked up, found Pete in the crowd of men working on the set, and mouthed one word: Outstanding.

Pete let out the breath he had been holding. Then a giddy excitement came over him. The giddiness was partly the vodka and Coke he’d been nipping throughout that night’s shoot and part pure dumb joy. He was proud of his dogs, and he was proud of himself. They had done a great job together. Even Skipper, the big neutered male who was ordinarily jumpy and shy around loud mechanical props, had done a great job with the whirring thingamajig that was supposed to be a monster from beyond the stars in John Carpenter’s latest sci-fi horror film The Thing.

Pete stepped into the lights and knelt down in the snow in front of his dogs. He was a little drunker than he’d thought, and he wobbled under the weight of the six full-grown sled dogs as they gathered around him, yapping happily. Pete laughed and never wanted to stop.

“Excuse me?” It was John Carpenter.

The dogs sat, one after the other, their tails sweeping the snow in barely contained excitement. They’d taken a liking to Carpenter the first time they’d seen him, sensed that he was a natural leader.

“Yes sir, Mr. Carpenter,” Pete said, rising to his feet.

Carpenter said, “That was exactly what I wanted. It looks great.” He reached forward and scratched Mary Ann, the little female, behind the ears. Her tongue danced crazily between her teeth and her eyes rolled up into her head. She had always been the little lover in the pack, ecstatic whenever she got the slightest human affection.

“Thank you, sir.”

Carpenter was still petting Mary Ann, smiling at her. The man clearly liked dogs and to Pete, that said volumes about his character. “Mr. Carpenter, I can tell this is going to be a great picture.”

Carpenter laughed, sending waves of wrinkles up into the bald spot above his forehead. “You got good ass-kissing skills. Next time the studio wants to talk to me about the budget, I’ll be sure and have them talk to you.” He smiled to show he was only having fun, then said, “Your first name’s Pete, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you do great work, Pete. Listen, some of the cast is getting together in the Rec Room later, if you want to come by.”

Pete beamed at him. “Yes, sir. Thanks!”

Carpenter went off without another word, leaving Pete with his dogs. Pete stroked Ginger’s neck. “You hear that, guys and gals? I think he likes us.”

Ginger looked past him and barked once. Pete turned and saw Janice coming at him through one of the hallways that wound through the interior of the compound. She was a short, squat, dark-skinned woman with Inuit blood in her veins, but she moved gracefully, almost daintily, through the patches of wet ice on the ground.

“Well?” she asked. Her round, brown face was shiny with the cold. “What did he say?”

“He loved it,” Pete said.

She rose up on her toes and let out a little squeal of delight. “The dogs…they did good?”

“Real good,” he said. He picked up on the slur in his voice, but wasn’t sure if she had or not. He knew the vodka wouldn’t smell on his breath, which was why it had become his drink of choice many, many years ago, but he also knew that if anybody could tell he’d been drinking, it’d be Janice. After twenty years together, good times and bad, she’d come to know him in just about all his stripes.

He looked down at his hands in hers.

“I’m so happy for you,” she said. “Do you think this will mean more work?”

He nodded. “I think so.”

Her smile thinned slightly. She peered up at him. “Pete, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. He had always liked the way she said Okay, the little rise in pitch on the last syllable, and he smiled at her. “I’m fine. Tired.”

“Your eyes look a little red,” she said.

“I’m fine. It’s these damn wind machines. They dry out the air.” He licked the front of his teeth, trying to taste if there was any trace of the vodka still there. He said, “Carpenter invited me to the cast party tonight.”

“That’s great!” she said.

She squeezed his hands and the big Inuit grin he had fallen in love with more than two decades ago, when he was a fireman for the Alaskan pipeline and she was a sixteen year old waitress in a Juneau pool hall, came back in all its glory.

If she had started to suspect he was drinking again, she had evidently backed away from confronting him about it, and Pete was glad for that. Things were finally starting to look up for him now, and he didn’t want to have to fight with her about his drinking, which had started up in earnest about the same time he’d signed on with Carpenter’s production company. Success, he’d come to realize, had a way of making a man doubt himself. And, for him at least, self-doubt and drinking formed a sort of cyclical cure and disease relationship.

“I’m going to put the dogs up,” he said. “How about I meet you in the trailer in a little bit?”

“Okay,” she said. “Come hungry. I’m making chili.”

He waited for her to go, then put the dogs back on their leashes and led them outside to their kennel. They were filming in Kimberly, British Columbia, and through the magic of special effects, John Carpenter and his crew had managed to make their set look like it might actually be Antarctica. They had built up a compound of several small metal buildings and used snowplows to push dunes of snow halfway up the sides of those buildings. During shooting, giant fans blew loose snow through the compound to make it look like they were dealing with heavy weather.  But now, with the activity winding down for the evening, there was none of that. The night was calm. The sky was full of stars, and while it was cold, it wasn’t unpleasant.

He got the dogs into their kennel, laid out their food and bedding, and was about to step outside when Mary Ann started whimpering. “What is it, girl?”

She whimpered again and turned in a circle. “You gotta pee?” he asked her.

She walked to the gate and put a paw on the latch.

“Okay,” he said, and chuckled. “Okay, come on.”

He led her outside. She went off to a clearing next to the kennel and squatted in the snow, tongue lolling out the side of her mouth.

“Ever the lady, eh?” he said, and chuckled again. He was feeling good. Feeling mighty fine, in fact. He took a drink of his Coke and vodka and leaned his head back to take in the enormity of the Canadian sky. There was so much beauty in it, milky with starlight, and for a moment, he felt like his feet were leaving the earth and he was floating free.

He hadn’t felt this good, this confident of the future, since the early days in Juneau. Back then, when thirty seemed like something that would only happen to other men, the world had been a road that promised to roll on forever.

But thirty had long since come and gone, and even forty was a cloudy memory. He had put a lot of hard miles on the old chassis since those days back in Juneau, and he wasn’t so proud anymore.

Getting beat down every damn day of his life will do that to a man.

But there’s no shame in getting beat down unless you fail to get back up. And he had gotten back up.

Every damn time.

He felt good about that. Yeah, he was drinking again. And yeah, eventually there’d come a reckoning with that. Janice wouldn’t be happy. But he had it under control. This time, he actually believed when he looked in the mirror at his bloodshot eyes and said he had it under control. This time, he had a grip on the drinking with both hands.

His future, too.

Carpenter liked him, after all. The guys on the set liked him too. Hell, this was just the beginning. He’d do this sci-fi film, then hopefully some kind of picture based on a Jack London book, and before you knew it, he’d be back on top of the world again.

So, yeah, he felt good. He was back in the—

The thought broke off clean in his mind. Something smelled really bad.

Like rotten meat.

He blinked. His eyes were watering. What in the hell was that, a pile of ham sandwiches one of the union guys tossed out?

Whatever it was, it was nasty.

Behind him, Mary Ann started to growl. He glanced back at her and saw the fur bristling down her spine, her lips rippling against the white, jagged line of her bared fangs. She was suddenly a different dog. Her eyes held an unblinking, wolf-like intensity. She moved forward in a deliberate crouch, ears flattened, a stuttering growl rising from somewhere deep in her chest.

Pete turned and followed the track of her gaze. There was nothing out there but the dark and the starlight glittering faintly off the silvered snow.

He turned toward his little Mary Ann. “What in the hell’s wrong with—”

She lunged past him in a ferocious snarling rage.

Pete fell back, stunned more than frightened, landing on his butt in the snow. He didn’t stand up. He didn’t even have a chance to call out to Mary Ann. By the time his mind could process what was going on, his sweet little dog was tearing into an enormous, staggering figure on the edge of the darkness.

At first, Pete’s mind told him it was a man wearing a huge fur coat. Maybe one of the crew in a prop suit. But it wasn’t a man, not at that size. Even doubled over to swat Mary Ann away, the creature—for that was the only word Pete’s mind could latch on to—was taller than any man Pete had ever seen.

It let out a series of startled grunts as it fell backward, as though it couldn’t believe that something so much smaller than itself could hurt it so badly. Mary Ann was like a blender trying to tear into the thing’s legs and groin. Blood sprayed through the air, dotting the snow at Pete’s feet. The creature lurched sideways, then fell into a nest of electrical cords. It swatted at the cords as it crashed to the ground and somehow managed to bring part of the wall down with it.

The next instant Mary Ann’s snarls were cut off by a yelp and the sickening crunch of snapping bone.

Mary Ann’s back legs landed a few feet in front of Pete, a bloody mess of guts sagging out of the mangled torso and steaming in the snow. Pete crab-walked away from it, whimpering in fear and disgust. One of the dog’s legs was jutting obscenely into the night sky, and Pete couldn’t look away.

Mary Ann, Jesus. Oh Jesus.

The creature let out a booming roar full of pain and rage. Pete turned, white beads of spit flying from his lips with every gasping breath he took, and saw the creature wrapped up in a tangled mass of orange and yellow electrical cords. It was struggling to tear the cords loose but couldn’t.

“You killed my dog,” Pete said, at first in disbelief and shock, but then again with mounting rage. He scrambled to his feet. “You killed my dog!”

The next instant he was behind the creature, a knot of cords clutched tightly in his fists. He yanked hard, pulled with everything he had. The cords caught around the thing’s neck and it rose from the ground, gagging, its fingers tearing at the tightening loops under its chin.

It half turned then and flashed its yellow, rage-filled eyes at Pete. But Pete refused to let go. Instead he screamed at the thing and pulled even harder on the cords, twisting them now. A crazy, world destroying rage lived in him, always had, especially when he drank, and now that rage had dropped a red curtain over his mind and he wanted nothing more than to kill the thing that had killed his dog. His arms were shaking. He was gritting his teeth so tightly his gums were bleeding. And still he kept pulling on the cords, nearly blind with anger and the adrenaline coursing through him.

He wasn’t sure what happened next, or how long it took. All he knew was that one moment his mind was empty, nothing but red rage, and the next he felt suddenly spent and numb.

A trembling breath escaped his lips.

The thing had gone limp, its massive, hairy arms lying still in the snow. Pete’s arms were aching. His fingers too. He let go of the electrical cords and the massive creature dropped to the ground.

“What in the hell are you?” he said.

He moved around the body, staring at the matted fur, at the massive muscles in the arms and legs, all the deep, bleeding cuts and tears where Mary Ann’s teeth had ripped into its flesh. The thing was enormous. It had to be nine feet tall at least.  It looked like a gorilla, but somehow…not a gorilla. It was too big, too...human looking.

Except for the sloping forehead. And the massive lower jaw.

He looked down the bloody length of the thing to its feet, and that’s when it hit him. The name of the thing. The Tlingit Indians called it Kushtaka. The white men called it Bigfoot.

Back in Alaska, back in his younger days, he’d heard stories from the drunks in the bar.

But those were only stories, weren’t they?

Weren’t they?

*****

Standing there in the cold night air, Pete felt the booze hit him again.  The rage had swept it from him momentarily, but he was feeling pretty tight right now.  He blinked at the motionless creature face up in the nest of electrical cords, and all at once his eyes started to water.

“Oh Jesus,” he muttered, and turned and ran for his trailer.

Janice was at the stove when he got there, stirring the pot of chili she’d promised him.

“Pete?” she asked, when he burst through the door. “Pete, are you okay?”

He was standing in the doorway, chest heaving. She put the spoon down on the counter and stepped into the light to see him better.

“Is that blood on your face? Pete, are you okay?”

He reached out and grabbed her hand. The motion was so fast, so rough, she gasped.

“Pete, you’re hurting me.”

“Come on. You’ve gotta see this.”

He pulled her toward the open door.

“Pete, what? Stop. I can’t go nowhere. I got the chili on—”

“Come on, woman, come with me!” He was breathing fast, chest heaving. His eyes over-bright, crazy looking. “I gotta show you this.”

Why wasn’t she hurrying? Couldn’t she see how important this was?

She stepped back into the kitchenette and killed the burner. He grabbed her hand again and pulled her toward the door.

“My coat,” she said.

She had barely enough time to snatch it from the back of a chair as he pulled her outside.

“Pete, stop. Let go. You’re hurting my arm.”

He dropped her wrist and hurried off toward the kennels. She followed as best she could, but she was heavy and her legs short and the snow was deep. When he reached the spot where Mary Ann’s mangled corpse still lay, cooling in the snow, he stopped. Sodium vapor lights from a nearby building cast a buttery glow over the walkway behind him, but even in the indirect light, he could see blood spatter everywhere.

She stopped on the walkway behind him. “Pete?”

She had the back of her hand over her mouth, eyes wide.

“It was right here,” he said angrily. “I killed it.”

“You killed…?” She took a step forward. Mary Ann’s face was just visible through a tangle of bloody electrical cords. “Pete, what did you do?”

“The creature! I killed it.” He paused there, looked off towards the dark line of trees in the near distance. “It was right here.”

He looked at the mess of cords, at the blood, at Mary Ann.

“Oh Pete.”

“It was right here, damn it! I choked it. I killed it!”

She didn’t speak. Just stared at him in disbelief.

“Christ,” he muttered.

“Pete?” she asked. “Pete, will you come with me? Let me get you cleaned up.”

“You go,” he said. “Go on.  I’ll be there in a minute. I want to…”

He pulled at the tangled pile of electrical cords helplessly. The anger was starting to give way to exhaustion, to hopelessness, the way it always did with him. “I want to bury her first.”

*****

Carpenter wanted one of the dogs to enter the kennel, go down on its belly, and wait patiently for Richard Masur, who was playing a character named Clark, to kill the lights. The other dogs were supposed to be resting, crashed out on their sides, not much interested in getting up or even aware an alien imposter had just entered their kennel.

It wouldn’t have been a problem with Mary Ann. She wasn’t at all dominant. When she entered the pack, the others tended to let her be. Most of the time they just ignored her. She would have been perfect for what Carpenter wanted.

But Mary Ann was in a shallow grave behind one of the garages, and Pete was stuck using Ginger.

It wasn’t working out.

When Ginger entered a room she dominated it. She was the alpha. The others got excited. They couldn’t help themselves. Time and again Masur led her into the kennel, and each time Skipper and Professor and Gilligan started wagging their tails. They raised their heads. They panted. Skipper barked. They all wanted to jump up and crowd around her.

“Cut!” Carpenter yelled. He was getting upset. “Where’s Pete?”

“Here, sir,” Pete said.

Carpenter was a tall man. Somebody handed him a cigarette and Carpenter lit it, took a drag, and let out a long stream of smoke. Then he put a hand on Pete’s shoulder and led him off to one side.

“Pete, listen,” he said.

Pete listened. He listened as Carpenter quietly, calmly, explained what he wanted. The man was frustrated, angry that his time was being wasted, but he hid it well. And as he listened to Carpenter’s quiet instructions, he was reminded of the incident that had ended his time on the Alaskan pipeline.

Pete had managed a construction crew at the time. They’d just run a three mile long section of pipe fifteen degrees off course, costing British Petroleum tens of millions of dollars and months of delays. But the BP exec that showed up to survey the screwup never once raised his voice. He talked to Pete with the same sort of civility he might show for the janitors who empty their office wastebaskets at night. But later, that same executive rained hell on Pete’s boss. Even though the man had never so much as raised his voice, Pete considered those few polite minutes he’d spent with the big man from the home office to be the worst ass chewing he’d ever received.

Pete was having that same feeling right now, listening to Carpenter.

“Where’s that really friendly one?” Carpenter said. “The one I petted last night.”

Pete felt his face grow hot. “She’s, uh, not doing so good.”

“She sick?” Carpenter looked genuinely concerned.

“Hurt, sir. She was, uh, trying to, uh…on the gate. You know, she cut herself. On a nail.  She’s, uh, resting back at my trailer.”

Carpenter nodded. “How about you? You feeling okay? You seem distracted.”

“No, sir, I…I mean I’m fine, sir.”

“Okay.” Carpenter’s attention drifted back to the kennel, his gaze following the camera’s angle on the shot. “Listen, Pete, I need to get the live animal shots done today. Tomorrow at the very latest. Once I bring in the machinery for the transformation scene and all that goop starts flying everywhere it’s going to be too expensive to go back and try again. Can you make this happen for me?”

“I…I think so.” Pete felt suddenly lightheaded, like he couldn’t concentrate. Too much booze last night after seeing that fucking thing tear Mary Ann to pieces. Oh Jesus, he thought, Mary Ann.

“Pete? Hey buddy, you listening to me?”

“Huh? I…yes, sir.”

Carpenter didn’t look at all convinced. “I don’t think you’re head’s in the right place today, Pete.”

“No, sir, I—”

“No, Pete. Stop there, okay? When you work for me, I expect your head to be in the game, and right now yours isn’t. Go back to your trailer, take a walk, whatever. Be back here first thing in the morning with you and your dogs ready work, okay?”

Pete started to protest again, but Carpenter wasn’t having it. He had already turned and given the signal to change out the setup.

Just like that, Pete realized he had been dismissed.

*****

He had nobody to blame but himself. Pete understood that. The dogs keyed off of him. He was anxious, distracted, and in his own way, grief-stricken. The dogs sensed that bad energy coming off him, and they behaved in kind. They were anxious, easily confused, and, in their own way, aware that Pete was in pain.

They whined as he put them into their kennel. Mr. Howell gave him a quick, hurt look as Pete shoved him inside the gate.

“It’s okay, boy. Not your fault.” He nodded toward the food bowls. “Go on, eat up.”

He looked at the rest of the pack.

They had food, but none of them were eating. They stared back at him with their blue-gray eyes so full of questions, like children who don’t understand why they’re being punished.

“Go on,” he said. They were still staring at him, and it made him feel like a first rate bastard.  “I’ll check on you guys tonight.”

Pete closed the gate and latched it. He went outside and dug through a snow berm next to the door, where he’d buried half a bottle of vodka. Then he went over to the walkway where Mary Ann had died and took a drink and watched the dark line of trees in the distance.

He took another drink. A long one this time. The chill should have made the vodka smooth, but it hurt going down. He held the back of his hand up to his lips and closed his eyes until the pain went away.

When he opened them again they were burning. He could feel tears on his cheeks.

He stood there, watching the trees in the distance, tilting the bottle back now and then. Strange that he hadn’t thought at all about the creature. Last night, after burying Mary Ann, she’d been the only thing he could think of. The creature, well, that had been such a shock he hadn’t even been able to take in its significance yet.

Or maybe he had. Maybe the shock was so bad that his mind just skipped the part where he was supposed to ask questions, doubt himself.

Either way, he supposed it didn’t much matter.

But the funny thing was, he’d never even doubted that Janice would believe him. He had vague, hazy memories of the night before, of crashing through the door with his head on fire, convinced that he’d killed the thing. And just as convinced that Janice would believe him. Even when he dragged her back to the spot where he’d left the thing’s body, and found that it wasn’t there, it never occurred to him that she wouldn’t believe him. People who saw ghosts, he thought, probably acted the same way.

Now, though, now he could see it a different way. That woman. She’d thought he’d done that horrible thing to Mary Ann. She believed him capable of that. After all they’d been through together, all the years, all the hard times, she’d believed him capable of that.

Yeah, he could see that now.

The crazy woman.

He lifted the bottle to his lips and drained it.

*****

Pete was thoroughly lit when he staggered back into his trailer. Somewhere in the back of his head a small, sensible voice was trying to tell him what would happen if he kept going. He’d get the bottle he’d stashed behind the couch. He’d go out into the snow and drink and drink and drink until he was nearly blind and then he’d puke his guts out and go sleep it off in the kennel.

Never mind Janice. She’d be worried, she’d go looking for him, but never mind her. He was tired of skulking around. A man shouldn’t have to be that way. A man had a right to get lit up if he wanted.

Never mind her.

He let the trailer’s screen door slam behind him and went to the couch. He pulled it away from the wall and looked down into an empty space.

For a moment, he was confused. He didn’t remember drinking it. Where had it gone?

“Pete.”

He straightened up. Janice. God damn it.

He turned to face her. She was standing in the doorway to their bedroom, her cheeks shiny with tears.

“You’re drinking again,” she said. “Pete, why? Things were going so well for us. They were finally going our way.”

“Shut up,” he said. The words came out cold and flat. He could feel the anger boiling up inside him.  He had been angry before, but this was different. This was the other man talking, the resentful, rage-filled man who lived inside him. That man had been asleep for the last few years, but last night had roused him, and this, these needling accusations from Janice, they were bringing the rage man around again.

But Janice didn’t seem to realize it. She was still staring at him, and though the tears were still there, her neck had stiffened and her eyes had narrowed. She wanted to fight. She wanted that other man to come out, even though she knew the violence of which he was capable. Why was she doing this? Why was she courting disaster?

“Leave me alone,” he said under his breath, seething. “Walk away and leave me alone.”

“You bastard! What gives you the right? This was supposed to be our big break! That’s what you said. That’s what you promised. Follow me, you said. I’ll make it right. You said that, Pete.  And now all you want to do is self-destruct? You can’t do that to me. Not again.”

“Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk about this right now. Just close the door and go back to sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“It’ll be too late tomorrow. I want to—”

“Do as I tell you, woman!” he yelled. “God damn it, why is that so hard?”

The rage-man was awake now. He was in control of Pete’s mind now, and there was no turning back. Pete took two large strides toward Janice, his mind once again a blank red sheet, his face hot, no idea what he was going to do but knowing that it was going to hurt.

You bet your ass it’s gonna hurt, woman.

He didn’t even see what she threw at him. Something small and heavy. It caught him in the mouth and bounced off into the dark near the record player.

Pete put his fingers to his lips.

They came away dripping blood. His tongue found a hurt tooth, and when he wriggled it, it snapped off.

He spit the tooth and a wad of blood onto the rug. His gaze lingered on the white tooth, so bright against the blood, and then he looked at her.

“You crazy—”

“You stay away from me!” she screamed.

The trailer filled with flying objects. Clothes; books; records; bowls; their alarm clock; all of came flying at his head. Pete threw an arm up over his face and fell back, growling through his teeth.

“Get out!” she screamed, still hurling anything she could find at him.

He pushed open the screen door and staggered out into the snow. Some of the union guys were standing around, smoking cigarettes over by the commissary doors, and their conversation stopped as they turned their attention on him.

But Pete didn’t care. Never mind them. He turned back toward the trailer and yelled Janice’s name.

A second later, she erupted out of the door, a buttery light from the living room spilling over the snow, her wild hair making her look like the silhouette of a woman on fire.

The next instant, she was hurling his stuff outside.

“Stop it!” he yelled. “Cut it out!”

More debris from their lives together filled the air. He swatted at one of their kitchen glasses and it shattered. His knuckles were bleeding now, but it didn’t register. All he felt was rage.

Something heavy hit his shoulder and he lost his balance, ending up on one knee. When he stood back up, she was holding the bottle of vodka he’d been looking for behind the couch.

“Is this what you want? Is it? You want this more than us? Take it, then! I hope you choke on it!”

He saw the vodka flying at his head. He reached up and caught it one handed.

She stood there, staring at him, her chest heaving with rage, then she went back inside, slamming the door behind her. Once again, the little courtyard between the commissary and their trailer slipped into darkness.

The union guys clapped.

Pete glared at them, but that only prompted more catcalls.

“Guess you’re really in the dog house now, eh Pete?”

“Damn, Pete, she beat your ass!”

“Hey, don’t worry Pete. If she gets lonely I got it taken care of!” The last guy made a hitching noise, like he was telling a horse to speed it up.

His buddies roared with laughter.

Pete clutched the neck of the vodka bottle tighter, blood squeezing out between his fingers and dripping into the snow. Then his gaze locked on something Janice had thrown at him.

A small black duffle bag.

His gun bag.

He reached down and slid the zipper open. Inside was a blued Smith & Wesson .38 revolver with walnut grips and two speed loaders. Pete took out the revolver and right away the catcalls stopped.

They were soon replaced by uneasy muttering.

Pete slid the revolver into the waistband of his jeans. He put the speed loaders in his jacket pocket.  Then he staggered off toward the kennel.

The dogs whimpered and whined when he entered.

“Easy there,” he said, trying to sound reassuring, though even he could hear the slur in his voice.

The dogs watched him anxiously. Ginger barked a few times, and one or two of the others joined her.  Something had them really worked up.

“Shhh,” he said. “This won’t take me long.”

He grabbed the flashlight from the toolbox and went out again.

*****

He saw the footprints a few minutes later.

They were enormous, almost big enough he could have sat down on the rim, his feet dangling into the well. They led off into the dark tree line he had been watching earlier that evening, right after the embarrassing incident with Carpenter.

Why hadn’t he thought to look for these things last night? Didn’t people always say that’s all you ever saw of these creatures, their enormous footprints?

This was his chance.

Janice thought he had actually killed his own dog. How she could believe that he had no clue, but finding one of those things would silence her doubts for good. Once she saw the truth, she’d realize why he’d got good and drunk.

Hell, she’d probably join him.

He took a long drink, glanced back at the encampment, the soft, white glow of the lights bleeding up into the sky, and went off after the creature that had made the footprints.

*****

He hadn’t made it too far into the woods before the smell hit him.

Maybe I killed the thing after all, he thought. It used the last of its strength to limp off here, into the woods, to die. Or maybe it was still alive but badly wounded. That, too, would explain why it was sticking around.

He surveyed the darkness between the trees with his flashlight until he found the footprints again. Crashing through the underbrush, he could see blood and bits of fur on the branches.

Getting close, he thought.

A few minutes later, he came to a spot where the brush suddenly thinned. Ahead of him, a large black tree had fallen next to a small, ice-covered pond. Two animal paths went around the fallen tree, one low, one high. The snow on the high trail looked undisturbed, but something big had slid down the slope of the lower trail, and recently, too. He could see brown earth through the snow.

The smell, too, was strong here.

He killed the flashlight and pulled his revolver.  Then he went down the slope and inched his way toward the edge of the ice pond, so he could see under the fallen tree.

The tree had created a natural lean-to shelter with a long mound of earth forming a sort of bench inside, like a baseball dugout. On the bench, on its back, was the creature he thought he’d killed. One arm was hanging off the side of the bench, listlessly. It looked badly hurt. Even in the dark, Pete could see bloody wounds all down its massive length.

And that wasn’t all.

There was another creature very much like the first tending the wounded one. It was sitting on the snow, one arm thrown over the chest of its mate, its face nuzzled against the hurt one’s cheek. It looked like some sort of relic from the Pleistocene, an unbelievably massive gorilla, or something like it, and yet its grief was hauntingly human, as was its tenderness.

Pete let out a groan. It was barely audible but loud enough for the creature to hear. Its head shot up, and when it turned around, there was a yellow, hate-filled malevolence there that Pete didn’t need a translator to read.

It stood up, and it was enormous, easily nine feet tall. The smell of rotting meat moved with it. A growl sounded from deep within its chest, and Pete took a step back, his heel snapping a twig there.

The sound brought him back into the moment.

He flicked the flashlight up and caught the thing in the face with the beam. The creature turned its head, one enormous arm coming up to shield its eyes.

Pete didn’t let it adjust to the glare. He raised his pistol and fired, hitting the thing high up on its shoulder. The creature let out a roar of pain and fell back against the fallen tree. And before the shot could completely echo off through the trees, he brought the gun back on target and fired a second shot.

This time the creature scrambled away, still howling in rage and pain, its mighty bulk ripping through the underbrush.

And that left just the two of them, Pete and the wounded creature.

The thing turned its sick-looking eyes toward him. It tried to raise one of its arms, but couldn’t.

It was dying.

“And I’m gonna help,” Pete said.

He raised the pistol for another shot, and as he stared into the creature’s eyes over the pistol’s front sight and thumbed back the hammer, he thought how much he was going to enjoy this.

You bet I will.

*****

Pete made his way back to the encampment, holding the severed head of the creature in his arms like a kid trying to carry a giant pumpkin. Janice would take one look at this and shit her pants. Then maybe they could get down to figuring how things were going to be from here on out. No more hiding his liquor. It was his house, damn it.

His rules.

The cast and crew, he guessed, were off in the rec room letting off a little steam. He could hear a Beatles song coming from the radio over there. Pete had always hated The Beatles. Merle Haggard, that was more Pete’s speed. Maybe a little Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.

But the music didn’t concern him just now. He and Janice, they had bigger fish to fry.

He made it to his trailer and popped the head off one of the tiki torches along the walkway.  Then he dropped the creature’s head down on top of the torch’s base. He twisted the head around so that it was facing the front door of the trailer.

Satisfied with his work, Pete went inside.

The place was a wreck. Janice was in the bedroom, putting her stuff into a brown leather suitcase.

She turned around when she heard the screen door slam.

“What are you doing?” he asked her.

She straightened defiantly. “Moving out.”

“The hell you are.”

He advanced on her. Her eyes flicked down to the gun tucked into his waistband and went wide with sudden terror.

“Stay away from me.”

“Not gonna happen, Janice. You’re coming outside with me right now. I got something you need to see.”

He was in the doorway to their bedroom now, still closing on her. She had backed up to the bed and couldn’t go any further. But when he reached for her, she was ready. She had a small Mason jar full of coins in one hand, and she swung it at him, catching him in the ear. It shattered into a thousand shards of glass and a spray of pennies and nickels.

For a second, Pete’s world went black.

When he opened his eyes, he was on the carpet, not quite able to see straight.

But he could see Janice’s legs in front of him, and he lunged for them. He wrapped his arms around her knees and held on with everything he had. She staggered above him, and then fell backwards into a pile of dirty laundry.

He groaned.

He pulled himself up on top of her, brought his arm back, his hand balled into a bleeding fist.

“Get away from me! Get off me!”

Before he could throw the punch, the screen door blasted inward. The whole trailer shook with the impact, and the next instant, the dead creature’s companion was standing in the living room. It was so massive it couldn’t rise to its full height, but even hunched over, the thing was enormous.

From the floor beneath Pete, Janice whimpered.

Pete climbed off her. But even as he was getting to his feet, the thing was charging him, howling in a fury Pete had not imagined possible. It threw their dining room table against the wall, the record player, Pete’s La-Z-Boy recliner. The creature crashed through their trailer in a hail of fists and kicks, smashing everything.

It hit the bedroom doorway and its shoulders blew the frame apart, bringing down part of the wall. Somehow Janice had managed to get to her feet. She tried to lunge past it, but the creature caught her by the arm and slung her against the wall with so much force all the picture frames bounced off the walls and crashed to the floor.

But the creature didn’t let go. It held her by her elbow, thrashing her around like a dog with stuffed animal. Janice screamed, and as Pete stood frozen in fear, the creature ripped her arm from her shoulder.

Blood gushed onto the floor and onto the bed. Janice’s dark face went white as the snow outside, and still the creature wouldn’t let her go. The next instant it had hoisted her body into the air, face up to the ceiling. It grunted and pulled at her head and neck, and the next instant, Janice was ripped in two.

When it turned on Pete, it still held Janice’s head in one of its enormous hands.

“No,” he said, shaking his head.  “No.”

The creature roared at him. It threw Janice’s head to the floor and charged him. But not before Pete brought the pistol up and fired. The creature took the first shot in the chest at pointblank range. It flinched backward, the back of its head crashing into the ceiling, its arms flailing at the air.

Pete fired again, and again, and the creature staggered backward, out into the living room. It was bleeding from several places now, its chest wet with both Janice’s blood and its own. It tripped over the La-Z-Boy and howled again.

On the floor next to the bed, Pete fumbled through his pockets for the speed loader. All his gross motor skills were gone. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely work the cylinder open to reload. Somehow he managed to dump the spent shells onto the floor and drop in the speed loader. But when he finally got the gun loaded, the creature was gone.

He blinked at the empty trailer. It had all happened so fast. A voice in the back of his mind said: I did it! I drove you off again! But you’re not getting away from me.

He stumbled toward the screen door and out into the snow. He thought he saw a dim shape running toward the trees, but he couldn’t tell for sure. Regardless, it was too far away to run after it. He’d never catch it.

Pete stood there for a long time. He wasn’t sure how long, but eventually the little square between his trailer and the commissary started to fill with people.

“Watch it, he’s got a gun!”

Pete turned toward the voice. He saw a lot of frightened faces staring back at him.

He sagged down to the ground, utterly exhausted.

The men kept their distance. Pete didn’t blame them. What must they think of him, anyway? He began to laugh at how ridiculous they looked, cowering in the shadows. He wanted to tell them the worst was over. Pete wasn’t mad anymore. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to hurt anybody.

That wasn’t the kind of man he was.

As if to prove it to them, he threw the gun toward the commissary, then hung his head between his knees and waited.

More muttering.

Someone got up the nerve to go into his trailer. He heard them go inside, and then a few moments later rush back out again and vomit on the sidewalk.

“What is it? What happened?” Pete heard somebody say.

“Jesus, it’s awful,” another man answered. “Somebody go and get the cops.”

Pete made no effort to move.

What did it matter? He had his proof.

*****

Op-ed piece from the Kimberly (B.C.) Times, November 12, 1981. Written by Mrs. Doris Williamson:

…that I’d begrudge them that. They have as much right to make their little horror picture as anybody. But we are honest, hard working people here in Kimberly, and those horror movie types are probably all Satan worshippers. It is bad enough that man brutally murdered his wife, but what kind of sadistic human being kills his own dogs and mounts their heads on spikes? Any man who would hurt a dog just isn’t a man at all. That’s Satanism, if you ask me, and it’s simply horrible.

About Joe McKinney

Joe McKinney has been a patrol officer for the San Antonio Police Department, a disaster mitigation specialist, homicide detective, administrator, patrol commander and successful novelist. Winner of the Bram Stoker Award, he is the author of the four part Dead World series: Quarantined, Inheritance, Lost Girl of the Lake, and Dodging Bullets. His short fiction has been collected in The Red Empire and Other Stories and Dead World Resurrection: The Complete Zombie Short Fiction of Joe McKinney. For more information visit his website at http://joemckinney.wordpress.com

THEM

James Marlow

MONICA SLOWLY REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS. Her head was pounding; heavy, and she felt like she was running a fever. She was lying on a table in what looked like an autopsy room.

Strange sounds filtered in but she was too groggy to figure out what they were. Sickening smells assaulted her nostrils. A small part of her brain reacted to the sounds and smell and screamed for action. Something is wrong! it yelled. Move!

Her body wouldn’t obey the command, couldn’t obey. The coherent part of her brain tried to help by releasing some adrenaline. It got her eyes open.

Confusion draped over her as her brain made sense of what she was seeing. A crumbling plaster ceiling hung over her, threatening to fall at any second. She frowned at the ceiling, like a mother would an insolent child. Just like the stubborn child, the ceiling offered no answer.

She closed her eyes once more, listening to the odd sounds. Smelling the rank smells. The sound was…wet. And crunchy. She knew she’d heard that sound before.

The sound was a nightmare made real.

She turned her head to see.

On the floor, someone was being eaten.

Her heart slammed in her chest just as the fog cleared from her brain. She looked for a weapon of some kind and saw a small steel tray with a few scalpels and a wicked looking saw sitting on it. Blood covered the instruments. A cold chill crept down her body. Whose blood is that? Don’t think about it…only think about the task at hand.

She sat up, keeping the gruesome picnic in sight. That’s right, Mr. Zombie, you just keep eating. Don’t you worry about anything else. Don’t notice me.

Monica quietly picked up a scalpel and the bone saw. The zombie paused in its meal and she sent up a quick prayer that it was one of the slow, dumb ones. If it was a Stalker—as she called the fast-moving ones—she was probably going to die.

The zombie stuck its head back in the gooey insides of its dinner, once more oblivious to everything but food. She let out her breath…it was a dumb one. She had a chance.

The fact that some zombies exhibited different levels of reaction and awareness from others had only surprised the people who, before Hell had moved to Earth, had been excessively into zombies. They were surprised, but they were ready to fight, and, though they denied it, they had been overjoyed when word of the outbreak had been made public. For them it had been fantasy made into reality. A chance to live their sick dreams.

Some zombies were slow and stupid, only caring about food. Others turned into the undead slowly, and kept some of their mental faculties even after they turned. There were still others—and these were the worst—who kept all of their minds intact until a mental breakdown turned to rage. Rage at the living, for living. These didn’t hunt for food. They hunted for sport. These she called Stalkers.

The Stalkers had opened people’s eyes to reality. More often than not they opened people’s guts. too.

She swung her legs off the table and had to fight to stay conscious. Her vision swam in and out of focus. She bit down on her bottom lip, the pain helped to realign things. If she passed out now she’d never wake up. That thought and the taste of her own blood kept her aware. She felt out of it, drugged. Something tickled the back of her mind. A stray thought trying to turn into a memory. She couldn’t quite grab it. It buzzed, like a bee, just out of reach.

Never mind that now. Task at hand...remember?

She eased off the table, could not put any weight on her right foot, and fell to the ground.

The zombie turned from its meal, saw Monica looking dazed—and oh so much fresher than its current food—and came at her.

She screamed. She didn’t mean to. A scream would attract any other zombies in the area.

The zombie fell on her, teeth biting, trying to find purchase in soft living flesh. Monica threw up her arm and caught the dead man in the throat with her elbow. She still had the bone-saw and she slammed it into the monster’s head, knocking it back for a split second.

She didn’t have the angle to bear down and rip through the creature’s skull with the saw. The zombie took no notice and continued to press down on her, biting furiously. She pulled the saw out and bits of skin and bone flaked off. Thrusting it back in, she sawed faster and managed to dig the blade into the spongy gray matter of her attacker, finally putting the thing to rest.

She pushed the corpse off her and laid back. Tears rolled down her face. She gasped, unable to get enough air. Her heart felt like it would burst from her chest. She closed her eyes, trying to stave off a panic attack. She’d never been this close to dying.

It was quite amazing when she thought about it. Two years since the outbreak and she never came close to being eaten. Was it luck? A higher power? She knew it wasn’t skill. She’d seen better equipped people than herself go down. Survivalists. Ex-special forces. Law enforcement. All people who should have made it a lot longer than a legal secretary whose idea of roughing it had been a two star hotel. Yet here she was. Not only still alive but, before all this, actually thriving.

Her breathing and heart rate evened out. She opened her eyes, again sending up a prayer that no dead person had walked in while she was getting herself together. Her left arm hurt, but not bad. Her lower right leg was killing her.

She looked down and her vision swam once more. Her mind couldn’t process what she was seeing. It seemed unreal. The blood on the steel tray was her blood, splattered from the apparent amputation of her right foot.

She cried at the unfairness of it all. She cried at the cruelty. She cried in despair. Then she got angry for all those same reasons.

Her missing right foot throbbed and she scowled at the ball of gauze on her ankle. “You're not there; you can’t hurt.” she told her phantom foot. Her body still insisted the missing foot was not only there, but it was also in severe pain. Monica only glanced at it once more before deciding it could go on doing what it wanted. In a world where the dead walked, why couldn’t a missing foot cry out in pain?

“We need to take stock of our situation.” Talking to herself in the plural tense went back to childhood. “What do we remember before waking up here?” She thought back and remembered the feeling of a bee sting on the back of her neck. Then hot breath, whispering something in her ear. What had it been? Who had it been? Damn, she could almost remember. The voice echoed far away in her brain, just soft enough where she couldn’t make it out.

“All right,” she sighed. “That doesn’t help much. What do we know about now?”

She looked around and saw a door standing open. Beyond was cloaked in shadows. She pulled herself over to the door and shut it because the last thing she needed was a stray dead guy wandering in. She sat with her back against the door and looked at the guy the zombie had been eating.

“I know you,” she said, accusing. “Johnston, or Johnson. One or the other. I could never remember. You’re Sam’s friend, well, at least you were. Oh God, Sam.”

A memory surfaced. Sam Gregg, the doctor, hitting on her. Asking her out. Getting angry, violent, when she said no…the smell of beer on his breath as he pushed himself against her, pinning her against the wall. His hand groped her chest, eyes full of danger. As she fought him off, she had the craziest thought that he had poured beer on himself so if he was caught he could blame his actions on the alcohol. Monica didn’t buy it. He wasn’t some mean drunk, he was something different.

For days afterward, she tried to avoid him, but the hotel wasn’t that big. She saw him in the cafeteria, laughing with Johnston…or was it Johnson? Sam was liked by all. He was a doctor and in this new world, doctors were worth their weight in gold.

She could tell someone, and reveal the real Sam behind the kind doctor façade.

She told Frank, an older gentleman who served on the governing council of their little survivalist commune. Frank had listened in horror at her story. When she was done and he didn’t say anything she thought she may have read the situation wrong.

“Well, what do you think?” she asked Frank.

“We’ll look into this,” Frank had said, but Monica wasn’t convinced. “And we won’t tolerate this behavior. You just stay away from him, okay?”

Shaking off the memory, she stared at the zombie (Johnston? Johnson?) ruefully.

“You shot me up with something didn’t you?” she asked the half eaten corpse. “Drugged me and took me here to make it so I couldn’t get away.”

Her stomach clenched and she could taste vomit in the back of her throat. She wanted to scream, to rage, but that wouldn’t help her situation. She had to think, and fast. While she wasn’t positive Sam and the corpse had been working together, she couldn't afford to take the chance. The good doctor could come walking in the door at any moment.

Monica scanned the room more closely and noticed a door opposite the one she closed. She grabbed the scalpel and crawled toward it. Movement sent waves of pain shooting from her phantom foot. She ignored it the best she could, keeping her eye on the door. Hopefully it was a way out…one where the dead weren’t waiting to devour a one-footed woman foolish enough to show herself.

She pressed her ear to the door. Silence. The cold door felt wonderful against her head. She really was burning up. Have to have the doc give me some meds when I get back. Can’t get delirious now.

She reached up and slowly turned the knob. In her current position, she couldn’t defend herself if something waited on the other side.

“Here goes nothing.” She pushed open the door, fell to her side and raised the blade. Not a great defensive posture but it was all she could manage. When nothing came at her, she relaxed and crawled through the door.

The scene that greeted her on the other side was so confusing, so stupendously horrifying, that her mind couldn’t process it. The stench made her gag: rotten flesh, sweat, and sex, all mingled in a menagerie of odor. Supressing the urge to vomit, she crawled forward.

In the very center, dominating the room, sat a full size bed. Chains hung from the corners. Blood-stained manacles on the ends of the chains sat motionless, waiting patiently to be used. A camcorder sat on a tripod at the end of the bed, its eye dark and all seeing. She could imagine the things it saw, things so terrible that there wasn’t a word strong enough to describe it. Piled in the corner like discarded clothing were body parts. Flies circled the mound of decaying flesh, landing here and there, rubbing their insect arms in delight. From the state of the body parts, it looked like people were dead when they were shackled to the bed.

The realization made her head swim. Humanity had enough on its plate without worrying about things like this. Were not the living dead bad enough?

Did the good doctor and his buddy have these impulses before the outbreak, or did the insanity of the situation drive them to their own form of insanity? Was mankind only a tragedy away from losing its soul? Was that all it took to make us devolve into monsters? To let the demons that had plagued us, but we could never show, run free?

Maybe this was an anomaly. Their hotel sanctuary wasn’t like that, right? Except, maybe it was turning that way—infighting among leadership. Last month, four people left to search for sanctuary elsewhere. Not to mention the way Frank had acted about the doctor, almost like Sam was too important to mess with, or that maybe she had led him on. Had been a tease.

Perhaps her little survivalist community was filling with rot, not from a zombie bite but from good old-fashioned human nature. She’d heard it said once that if you put two people in a closed room they will eventually reach a consensus. Put three in the same room and someone will make an enemy. Perhaps humanity had always been doomed to fail. Maybe the zombies were nothing more than a reflection of societies’ soul made real.

Either way, she couldn’t spend time worrying about it now. She needed a plan.

Monica pulled herself to her knees at the end of the bed. Taking a deep breath, she got her left foot under her and stood, holding the bed for balance. She grabbed the tripod stand, folded the tripod up into a single long stick, and smiled at her makeshift crutch. Now maybe she had a chance.

The camcorder poked into her armpit with every step. It was an annoyance and she would be bruised by the time she got back to the hotel, but at least she was mobile. The door to her prison was still closed. Death could be right behind the door. A horde of the dead could be waiting in the street. A stalker. The doc. Her head rested on the door, and a single tear fell from her cheek as she listened for an indication of what waited for her on the other side.

“Please God,” she whispered. “Give me a break on this one.”

Monica opened the door, scalpel raised in her left hand, ready to stab the first thing that came at her. An empty street greeted her and she almost broke down. She looked around, getting her bearings. Off to the left she could make out the top of the hotel, three maybe four blocks away. Doable, she thought. Gonna be hard and I’ll have to go slow, but doable. First thing she had to do was get out of the street.

She hobbled as quickly as she could to the side of the next house. She was out of breath by the time she got there. She felt weak from the fever, but her body was ice cold. Her phantom foot throbbed, and the camcorder had gone from being an annoyance to being downright painful. It took her mind off the onset of this flu she was getting.

How are you going to do this?

“Shut up,” she told her mind.

You’ll never make it. It’s too far and there are too many dead folks between here and there.

“Shut up.”

You’re going to die.

“Maybe.”

A high-pitched whine brought her out of her thoughts. She had no cover other than the wall of the house so she pressed herself against it as tight as she could. The sound was getting closer and would soon pass right in front of her. It sounded familiar but she couldn’t place it—it was almost like a wind-up toy but bigger.

A golf cart sped past, two men inside. The doc was one, she could see his impossibly white coat, looking so out-of-place in the empty streets. The other was Victor, an ex-cop who led their little security force at the hotel. Seeing Victor with Sam hurt. Just how deep did the conspiracy go? How many degenerates were now living in the hotel? Was she the only normal one left?

Anger filled her. How dare they? How dare they pervert the sanctity of the refuge? Honest people had built something stable, something that could last and she wasn’t going to let these degenerates get away with ruining it. It didn’t matter that she only had one foot. It didn’t matter that she was unarmed. She was determined. Single minded in her purpose; she had the will.

The two men would suffer.

They would die, and when she had rid the world of them she would go back to the hotel and purge it of all its impurities.

Monica limped back to her prison, eyes searching for a weapon, mind searching for a plan. She was so angry that it was hard to think. She knew she had to think, to calm down and formulate a plan, but she couldn’t. She heard the phrase “seeing red” before and had never really understood what it meant. Now, she understood. She was seeing red. And why wouldn’t she be? Red was the color of blood.

Voices drifted to the open door and she stopped to listen.

“Where do you think she is?” Victor said. “You think she got out?”

“Well, she’s not here. It doesn’t look like Johnson got to finish with her before she killed him.”

So his name was Johnson, not Johnston. Her blood boiled, her veins raged. Finished what? Cutting enough of me off so I couldn’t possibly escape? Chaining me to the bed so I could be some freak sex slave to you and your buddies?

“Don’t worry Doc, we’ll find her. I saw the blood, so she’s been mutilated. She couldn’t have gotten far.”

Monica heard enough. Her body moved before she knew it. Bastards bastards bastards die die die! The bone saw was still lying where she’d left it and she managed to grab it without falling. Victor stood in the doorway with his back facing her. That was good. He would be hard to take in a fight. She wasn’t worried about the doc.

She brought the saw up and yelled as she slammed it into Victor’s head. Adrenaline-fueled muscles drove it deep into his skull. He dropped without a sound, dead before he knew what was happening. The doc brought up his hands. One open in a “hold on now” gesture. The other held a pistol.

“Easy Monica; I’m here to help.”

She limped forward, the scalpel in her left hand at the ready. “Help me? Help me? Your friend already helped me. Kidnapped me. Disfigured me. Because of you.”

Sam shook his head and backed up. “No, I had nothing to do with this. The council asked me and Victor to keep an eye on Johnson because there’d been some complaints, but we couldn’t have known about this.”

Monica smiled. “Oh grandma, what big eyes you have. I don’t believe you. What about when you tried to rape me, huh? Or, was that Johnson too?”

The doc was pressed against the wall, his hands still in the air. “That was a drunken mistake, one I wish I could take back. I always had a great respect for you, Monica. We all do.” he stopped talking and looked at her, his eyes welling with tears. “Oh God, I’m sorry for what he did to you.”

“Liar!” Faster than she thought possible she was on him, stabbing and slashing. He got one shot off. She felt it tear through her stomach. It only made her angrier, more focused. Somewhere along the line, she stopped stabbing and started biting. Teeth ripped through flesh and it felt wonderful.

Her foot didn’t hurt anymore. Nothing hurt anymore. Her memory was fading, yet she felt great. She stood and looked at the mangled corpse below her. She saw the big gaping hole in his head and smiled. He wouldn’t be coming back. She couldn’t remember exactly who he was but it didn’t matter. He was one of them, and she hated them. She wanted to find more of them. To kill them.

As her memory continued to fade; as what made her Monica left forever, one single picture filled her head. A big building with lots of rooms and lots of Them. What used to be Monica even remembered what it was.

She smiled. “Hotel.”

About James Marlow

James has been writing fiction in one form or another his whole life. His stories have been featured in the anthologies: What Fears Become, Shadow Masters, and Death Head Grin Anthology Vol.1. His lives in Indiana with his wife and children and is very busy not being idle. Find him on Facebook by searching James J. Marlow

STASH HOUSE

Shaun Meeks

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN EASY JOB.

All they had to do was to go into the stash house, flash their guns, take the cash and dope from the crackheads, and get out. Ninety seconds tops. They had been doing jobs like this for years and it had never been an issue. Yet, somehow David found himself hiding in a garage behind an old car, his foot pressed down in a pool of what had once been his friend’s insides, with vomit down the front of his shirt; his left arm opened and oozed blood, with a gun nearly out of bullets. Not to mention he didn’t have the money or the dope they had gone in for in the first place.

David peered around the corner of the rusted sedan and tried not to look down at the face of Bob as he did. The smell of him was bad; almost enough to make him want to puke again, but the sight would no doubt push him over the edge. When they had first run into the garage, Bob had been doing everything he could to push his guts back inside the gaping hole in his stomach, to keep the slippery ropes from sliding through his fingers. By the time they finally stopped to hide, the shock had begun to wear off and Bob started to cry and scream. David tried to keep him calm, told him to be quiet, but there was no use. He had to kill him or leave him.

He didn’t leave him.

The parking garage seemed empty. He didn’t see any signs they had been followed, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to leave his cover just yet. He did want to get away from Bob, but there weren’t many cars down there with him, the closest one was six spots over and that would mean he’d have to expose himself. And one of those things might be close. Whatever they were.

Shit! David thought, and crouched back. He leaned against the wall and tried to make sense of everything that had happened, but he wasn’t sure there was a way to do that. He had dealt with junkies and crazies before; he’d been in the game long enough to meet all kinds of weirdoes. Once, back in 2003, they had robbed a stash house where a guy inside was dressed like a baby, complete with a diaper full of crap.

But that had been a walk in the park compared to the latest stash house. They hit the place, kicked in the door, guns raised, and found a house of horrors on the other side. The place reeked of blood and death. The walls had been sprayed with the blood of people that littered the room in various states of mutilation. Money lay in pools of crimson, bags of crack and smack peppered the piles of intestines and severed limbs…but that wasn’t the worst of it. There was something more that almost made David think he had lost his mind.

Maybe I did. Maybe I snapped and what I think I saw, I didn’t see.

Then he looked down at Bob. His friend’s stomach hung open like a gaping mouth and he knew that there was no way he was nuts. He knew what he saw; those things in the apartment were real. Impossible, but real.

He shifted his weight against the garage wall, and as he did, he heard something. It sounded close to the entrance, as though something was being dragged along the concrete. He gripped his gun tight and felt his body break out in a greasy sweat. He thought that it could be one of those things, wondered if he should just break cover and open fire on it.

He took a deep breath and held it so he could hear clearly. The sound got louder and seemed closer. David leaned down. The cut on his arm throbbed anew and he accidently got a look at the pile of still-warm intestines steaming in the air. He tried to peer under the car in the direction of the sound. He hoped he would be able to see what it was; prayed that it would be someone normal; a bum, maybe a janitor. Anything would be better than one of those milky-skinned creatures he saw in the stash house.

Did you really see those things?

He couldn’t spot anything in the dimly lit parking garage.

Damn it!

David wanted to inch back towards the front of the car to peer out again, but was too afraid that he would be seen. He already knew how fast those things could attack, so he decided to stay where he was, gun in hand, to wait it out.

He thought back and tried to figure out what exactly had happened.

When they saw the gore and death before them in the stash house, he told Bob that whoever had done the killing might still be around, so it would be wise to get out before they ended up the same way. Bob agreed, but before they could leave, something came out of the kitchen area, a thing that made David feel as though reality had taken a vacation.

The monster was milky white, tall and snail-like with sagging, nearly translucent skin. Under the thin flesh, what looked like small black bugs moved and pulsated as though they were trying to get out. The creature’s bulbous body pushed forward with a trail of ooze in its wake. When it spotted them, its mouth opened wide as though it was about to scream. No words or sound came.  Instead, a nest of tentacles that looked more like pink rat tails shot from its mouth and flew toward them.

David jumped back as the tendrils whipped through the air. One smacked him in the arm and sliced the flesh open easily. He bit off his scream and grabbed for Bob, but saw that his partner wasn’t faring well. Several tentacles whipped and tore at Bob’s front. Blood sprayed out in a vermillion mist. Bob screamed in pain and David knew he couldn’t leave him behind, so he shot half his clip at the white monster and pulled his friend out of there.

The bullets hit the creature in the face and chest and the thin skin exploded outward. Globs of red liquid and black insects spewed into the air. He didn’t want to wait and see what happened next, so he ran with Bob in tow as his friend tried to stuff his insides back in. They ran into the hallway, and then saw that there were more of the milky-skinned monsters coming out into the hall, no doubt drawn by the gun shots. He pulled Bob to the stairs and they ran from the building.

The first refuge they came across was the garage and David though it would be a good place to hide.

And now, still crouched behind the old sedan, something was there with him, and it wasn’t his dead friend. A dragging sound echoed close-by and he was certain that it was going to be one of those things, whatever they were, come to finish him off. If it was, he needed to catch it off guard before it could send any of its tentacles at him. He didn’t want to end up like Bob.

So he held his gun steady and pointed toward the front of the car. He was scared, more than he had ever been in his thirty-three years alive. When he was twenty, and first decided to abandon the regular world of nine-to-five jobs, when he had first hooked up with Bob, he knew there was a chance for things to go sideways at any time. That old saying of live by the sword, die by the sword was always in the back of his mind. At first they robbed stores and people on the street that looked like they’d have cash, but then Bob came up with the idea of hitting dealers and stash houses. That was where the money was. Cash and dope.

There was always a chance that they would breach a door, burst into some crack house or meth lab and there would be violence…that someone would pull out a sawed-off and try to make them sorry. There was always adrenaline in David’s veins when they were about to do a job, but when it was over and they walked away unscathed, he had begun to feel like nothing would ever go wrong, that they were, in fact, invincible.

But as he looked down the sights of his gun, able to smell the insides of his partner and friend, and he felt the cut on his arm throb and burn, he knew that their lucky streak had come to an end. They should never have felt so at ease, yet how were they supposed to anticipate the nightmares in the stash house? Those ugly things shouldn’t exist in his world; they were a thing of madness, a spawn of Hell.

Well, I’m ready to send another one back to Hell, David thought and waited for the thing to show its monstrous face.

“Should we just grab any car, Jess?” David heard a woman say and his fear suddenly turned to joy. She was normal, at least she sounded it, and she wasn’t alone.

“No. We need something fast, Darla. I’m not going to get caught by one of those fucks because we jacked a beater.”

“Hurry!”

“I’m doing my best.”

David pushed himself off the wall and moved to the front of the car. His hand slid into a crimson puddle, but he paid no mind to it. He wanted to see who was there, to be careful not to just jump up and say hello. They might be armed and they would be on edge. The last thing he needed was to get shot by someone he caught off guard. He also wanted to make sure it wasn’t someone he knew. How good would it be for him to try and go to them only to find out that the guy was some crank head he and Bob had ripped off? Better to be safe and take his time.

He got to the edge of the car and saw the two walk over to a Buick with very new, very expensive rims. The guy, someone he didn’t know, looked into the driver’s side window while the girl with a large hockey bag looked around nervously.

Shit. She can’t be more that sixteen, David thought and then looked at the guy who was in his late thirties or early forties. I hope for his sake that he’s her dad.

As the two of them broke into the car, using a fire extinguisher on the window, David decided to show himself. If the guy had a gun on him, he would have no doubt used it to get into car instead of trying to beat the window open.

He stood up, kept the guy to his side as he did and raised his hands to call out, but the words died on his lips. Only a few cars away from where they stood was one of the milky things. David realized the thing had seen them, and it moved in a ragged, unnatural way, unnoticed by the two car thieves.

The creature’s skin glistened in the florescent lights and David saw that there were sacs dangling from the thing’s stomach. Something pink swirled in them, something alive that made him think of fish eggs.

Afraid to call out, scared that the thing would see him, David ducked back down with Bob and waited for the inevitable. He looked at his dead friend, and he felt the man’s vacant eyes on him as they accused him of his inaction.

“What do you want me to do, Bob?” he whispered. “Get killed to save a couple of drugged out car thieves? The thing will kill them no matter what I say. Then it will kill me.”

You could shoot it. His dead friend spoke clearly in his head. I know you know how to shoot things. Look at me.

“I didn’t mean to shoot you, Bob. I was confused and you got in the way. Maybe you should just shut up and mind your business.”

A man’s scream echoed through the garage.

David put his face to the ground again and looked under the car to see what was going on. His view was limited. He could see the girl’s feet as she backed away from the Buick and the man on the ground near it, blood bubbling from his head which had been split in two. The milky monster slid along the ground toward the girl, pink tentacles slapping the floor.

“Run!” David whispered, though he wanted to yell it out to her. “Get the fuck out of there!”

As if the girl could hear him, she spun around and broke into a run. He smiled, but the smile was short-lived when he realized that she was running toward him. She would bring the creature right to where he was.

I bet now you wish you had yelled at them, dead Bob said and laughed.

“Shut up!” David whispered and cursed himself. He needed to figure out what to do, how not to wind up like Bob.

David pushed himself against the wall again. He winced as his injured arm smacked against the concrete, but noticed it hurt less than before, which was good. He raised the gun with his good arm and waited for the inevitable; for the girl to run by, followed by the creature.

Seconds lasted an eternity. His pulse throbbed in his ears and his heart jack-hammered in his chest. He felt cold all over, yet his body was covered with a sheen of sweat.

She was close.

Closer.

His hand began to shake, the gun’s sights blurred in front of him.

Any second he would see her.

Then it.

His finger added pressure to the trigger, ready for it to happen, ready to kill the thing.

Before she came into view, the girl screamed. It was horrific, like the sound his cat had made when he was a kid and his dad had run over it in the driveway. While the cat lay there, nearly cut in two by the weight of the pick-up truck, it shrieked and howled the same way the girl was sounding now.

He heard a thump as her body hit the ground. It was followed by a sound that gave David shivers. A wet, mewling voice, followed by a series of hisses and he had no idea what it was, nor did he want to. He felt terrible, ashamed because he was relieved that the creature had killed the girl before she passed the car. It was not something he was proud of, but at least he might not have to worry about the thing finding him.

David relaxed a little, lowered his gun. The mewling continued, but there was something else. He wanted to duck down and look under the car, but he worried that if he did, he might make a sound that would attract the monster. So he sat there and waited, and the unknown was out there.

“Help me,” David heard the girl say. He could tell she was close to the front of the car where he hid. He knew if she was close, the thing was, too. “S-someone…please…help…help me.”

A hand appeared on the ground in front of the car. The girl must have started to drag herself away from the thing after it attacked her. Part of him wanted the girl to live, but a bigger part of him wanted to make sure he survived long enough to get out of there in one piece. David thought about shooting her, like he had Bob…to protect himself, he rationalized. But if he did, there was no way the creature wouldn’t hear him. And if she saw him hiding there with Bob, he had no doubt that she would cry out for him to help her. That would also cause the monster to take notice of him. It seemed like a no-win situation.

You could kill yourself, Bob said, deciding to take that moment to speak up in David’s head.

“You need to shut the fuck up, Bob. Maybe I can kill you again,” he whispered and watched the girl’s hand. He had no idea what to do, but hoped he would figure it out soon.

He felt bad. Part of him knew that the guy was dead and the girl was hurt because of him, that he had had an opportunity to help them and took the coward’s way out. He had always thought he would be better in a situation like this, more of a hero than he had been. When he was a kid he thought he was more of the heroic type, the guy to swoop in and save the day, but when the day needed saving, David could only hide behind a car, kill his friend and let a monster attack two people. And even though he felt bad, he still thought he might shoot the girl in order to save his own life, though he was starting to doubt that anything could save him.

Like I said, David, shoot yourself. Might as well. There’s not too much left to lose. There’s not much left of the person you were.

David wanted to tell Bob to shut up again, but his attention was pulled back to the front of the car where the girl was. It was no longer just her hand there; her head was fully visible and as he watched, she turned towards him.

It was now or never, but David found that he couldn’t shoot her, he couldn’t be that selfish. As her eyes fell on him, he set the gun down on the ground and motioned for her to be quiet. He held his finger to his lips and gestured for her not to say a word, not wanting to draw the attention of the creature. The girl didn’t seem to understand. Her eyes were wide with the shock of seeing him, and she opened her mouth, no doubt to start screaming for him to help her.

The plea never left her lips because as she looked at David, the creature that had attacked her came back. A dozen tentacles of varying thicknesses whipped at her head and tore it from her body. There was a sickening sound of tearing flesh, of bones being snapped off with immense force. David covered his mouth and held in a cry to avoid being noticed, but it was already too late.

The milky-white monster loomed above the hood over the car, its face turned to him. David looked up at it, something that looked almost human-like, but alien too. The creature cocked its head and David knew he had to kill it before it could react. He raised the gun, but found his hands empty and knew that he was doomed.

“Where the hell is the gun?” he gasped, but the words that came out of his mouth were strange, not his own. He was confused and terrified; his body shook as he waited for the thing to attack.

Why do you need a gun? a strange voice asked in his head at the same time as the monster began to mewl at him. Come help me with this girl and then I will help you with your friend. The creature pointed at Bob.

David was confused. He continued to watch as the monster moved around the girl’s body. It looked back over at him, but didn’t attack.

Are you going to help me, or just sit there?

What? David tried to say to it, but what came out of his mouth again was not his own voice, not anything close to English. It was that same sound the creature made.

David stood up, unsure of what was going on, but as he did, he looked down and saw why the creature hadn’t attacked him, and why the girl’s eyes had opened in terror when she saw him. He had changed.

He had become one of those milky things; or at least was in the process.

David looked down at Bob, still dead and still human and tried to make sense of it.

What the hell happened to me? Again; only the mewling.

Maybe when that thing struck your arm, it infected you, dead Bob said, in hopes to explain it to him, as though a dead man could explain anything. Or maybe since you are a monster yourself; a thief, a killer, someone that let two people die when you could have saved them, your true colors just started to show. Maybe you’ve always been this way, and you were only wearing a human mask before.

Fuck you, Bob, David said in his head, but knew his dead friend was right. He was a monster, only now, everyone would be able to see it.

About Shaun Meeks

Shaun Meeks lives in Toronto, Ontario with his partner, Mina LaFleur, where they own and operate their own corset company L’Atelier de LaFleur. Shaun is a member of the HWA and has published more than 50 short stories. His most recent work has appeared in Midian Unmade: Tales of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, Of Devils and Deviants, Dark Moon Digest, Shadow Masters: An Anthology from The Horror Zine, Zippered Flesh 2 and Fresh Fear. His short stories have been collected in At the Gates of Madness, Dark Reaches and Brother’s Ilk. His new novel, Shutdown, is now available. To find out more or to contact Shaun, visit www.shaunmeeks.com.

THE SAMPLE

Ray Garton

DONALD SAT ON THE TOILET, ELBOWS ON HIS KNEES, face in his hands, with both doors of the back bathroom closed and locked. He was alone and worried and not feeling so well. He took a deep breath. And another.

“It’s just a bowel movement,” he muttered to himself. Then he repeated it. Again.

Then he sat there for a while. But he kept running that sentence through is head, over and over, like a mantra. Because it kept him from thinking of that word, that single, horrifying word: Parasites.

A scraping sound came from outside the door on his right, which opened onto the laundry room. Bella complained in a series of short, low meows as she continued to drag her claws over the wood. Donald expected their other cat, Quimby, to start scratching at the other door, which opened onto what they called the cat room, a spare bedroom where they kept the litter box and cat trees. Quimby was a one-eyed grey tabby they’d rescued from a shelter, and he didn’t like closed doors any more than Bella.

Donald ignored the cat’s protests. He was done doing what he’d set out to do, but now he had to collect a sample and take it across town to a lab so his doctor could figure out what the hell was wrong with him. For the first time in as long as he could remember, the act of voiding his bowels had extra steps. And he did not want to execute any of them.

He had been sick for two months: Diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, bloating, constipation, excessive flatulence, cramps and other abdominal pain, and enough weight loss to make all of his clothes baggy. It was never bad enough for him to consider the humiliation and expense of an emergency room visit, but it was bad enough to disrupt his work. He wrote and illustrated children’s books, spooky tales about haunted trees and ghost cats and children with magical powers. He’d had a colonoscopy and upper endoscopy only four months ago and the results had been squeaky-clean. His family doctor had sent him back to that same gastroenterologist, who’d examined him and expressed puzzlement over his combination of symptoms before ordering lab work, including a stool sample to check for parasites.

It was as if his mind had been gradually shutting down ever since the doctor’s lab order had implied that he might be home to small creatures that might be harming him. He knew logically that his horror made no sense, because he knew that living organisms existed on every surface and in every part of the human body. But living organisms sounded so natural and healthy next to PARASITES.

People simply never give a thought to such things until their doctors plant the thought, the possibility, in their heads, like some kind of foul incantation, a mind curse that cannot be lifted until the test results are in and the truth is known. Ever since the doctor had said he was being tested for parasites, the creatures had haunted Donald’s dreams, his waking thoughts, and the backs of his eyelids, until it was hard to focus on anything else.

He reached into the paper bag on the floor and pulled out the instruction manual. It revealed nothing he hadn’t already figured out simply by looking at the contents of the kit. Each vial had a miniature shovel attached to the underside of the screw-on cap. He was supposed to use the little shovel to get the sample into the vial.

Each of the three vials, two of which contained a small amount of liquid, had come in its own labeled plastic bag. One was to be stored at room temperature, the second refrigerated, and the third frozen, unless the sample arrived during business hours, in which case he was to take it to the lab right away.

He finally stood and pulled up his pants. He turned and looked down at the plastic bowl included in the kit. It was hooked onto the edge of the toilet to catch the sample. “Oh, god,” he groaned.

He gingerly lifted the bowl by the wings that extended from the sides and placed it on the toilet tank without letting his eyes fall on its contents directly, as if it were the sun. But he saw it peripherally, of course, crouched in the center of the bowl, staying low, trying to hide. He smelled it then, as well. Suddenly feeling light-headed, he closed his eyes, pressed his hands flat on the cold marble countertop, and let his head drop.

But with his eyes closed, all he could see were the parasites. They oozed out of the pulsing blackness behind his eyelids and tumbled over one another, all shapes and sizes. They looked like alien monsters from old comic books, but he knew they were, of course, as real as dogs and cats. They remained mostly invisible because they were quite content living in hidden-away places like the human intestine.

Like my intestine, Donald thought.

“Please tell me you’re not Googling parasites,” Louise had said yesterday, shortly after they’d returned from his doctor appointment and from picking up the stool sample kit at the lab.

“No, I’m Googling human parasites.”

“Oh, good. Can you hold off the panic attack until after dinner? Because I was hoping to order a pizza and I don’t want you frightening the kid who delivers it.”

“I’m not going to have a panic attack,” he said as he clicked on “Images.” When he saw them, the words, “Oh, shit,” rushed out of him as if he were deflating.

“See? See? You always do this to yourself. Turn off the computer, Donald.”

“I thought people got parasites like this only in Third World countries.”

“Why do you do this? You won’t be able to sleep tonight. I’m not staying up with you. I’m going antiquing in the morning.”

After twenty-four years of marriage, Donald found it hard to believe that she still put up with his neuroses, his quirks, his hypochondriacal tendencies. He knew they irritated her at times, he could tell, but she always laughed it off.

She finally coaxed him away from the computer. As they walked down the hall side by side, with her arm around him, she said, “Let me take care of the stool sample for you.”

“No!” He cringed at the thought of Louise doing it for him. Even though he knew she loved him, he often felt ashamed of himself for being such a mess.

“Look, it’s nothing I haven’t seen before after raising two kids, and with you throwing up so much—your gag reflex was already sensitive enough, but, now—well, I just think it would be best if you let me do it, or you’re just going to make yourself sick.”

“I’m only fifty-one, for crying out loud, I’m not so feeble that my wife has to—”

She laughed. “You’re not old and feeble, but you’ve been so sick that I—”

“Don’t worry, I’ll be fine,” he’d said. “I’ll do it, and I’ll be fine.”

Now, he wasn’t so sure.

He took a book of matches from a drawer and lit one to smother the odor, then dropped it into the toilet, where it died with a quick hiss. Then he moved the bowl to the corner of the counter and unscrewed the cap of the first vial. Holding the cap between the thumb and fingers of his right hand, he turned to the bowl and its contents.

Bella scratched at the door again, and her abrupt meows were more forceful. Donald leaned over and opened the door, saying, “Okay, come on in, but you’ll just want me to let you out again in a few seconds.” He closed the door.

Bella was a chubby orange-and-black calico who ate too much dry cat food. She was shaped like a pear. She hopped onto the edge of the bathtub, settled her fat ass down, and stared at him, meowing quietly.

Still holding the vial cap in his right hand, Donald turned to the bowl and anchored it by placing his other hand on the wing. He could not stifle a low groan as he dipped the tiny shovel into the soft pile.

Bella responded with a long, loud meow that made clear her displeasure.

When he pulled the scoop out, he found the substance of the stool to be more viscous than he’d expected. He saw something in there, squinted slightly and, in spite of his disgust, leaned closer to the bowl for a better view. Donald filled with panic for a moment—

Worms! Oh Jesus Christ worms I have worms there are worms living inside me I have—

—but that faded quickly when he understood that, although he did not know precisely what he was looking at, it wasn’t worms. It was just something stringy and dangly that looked like worms.

He put the little shovel into the vial and rattled it back and forth until the glob dropped off, then placed the vial on the counter. He was supposed to fill it to the red line, about two-thirds of the way to the top.

“That’s more shit than I thought, Bella,” he said.

The cat expressed at length her distaste for the entire undertaking.

Donald went in for another scoop, but snatched his hand away, yelped with surprise, and stumbled backward a couple of steps.

Startled, Bella fell into the bathtub with a thump.

He fixed his eyes on the contents of the bowl as he slowly stepped back up to the sink. It had looked, for a split second, as if something small but very much alive were pushing its way upward and out of the stool. Now he could see nothing but the stool and the small pit he’d gouged out of it with the tiny shovel. He closed his eyes a moment and tried to calm his pounding heart.

Louise had been right, of course. As usual. By Googling parasites, looking at pictures of parasites, and reading articles about parasites, he’d worked himself into such a state of dread that now he was seeing things.

When he opened his eyes, a rush of blurred movement to his left made him yelp again. It was only Bella hopping onto the back of the toilet.

“Jeez, Bella, you scared the crap out of me.” He laughed at his own words. “I need to learn to meditate, or something.” He’d been saying that to himself for years.

Still holding the cap in his right hand, he scooped it into the brown goo, and something crawled out of it and skittered up his hand, leaving behind a tiny trail of shit. He let go of the cap and left the shovel where it was as he reflexively flailed his arm to throw the creature off of him. He cried out in pain when he felt it pierce the flesh of his wrist and slammed the back of his hand down on the countertop, knocking the thing into the sink.

He stared in slack-jawed horror at the tiny thing as it struggled to climb the side of the basin. He quickly turned on the water. It splashed over the shit-stained bug and washed it down the drain.

“Son of a bitch!” he shouted as he clutched his forearm with his left hand and lifted the back of his wrist to examine it. There was a tiny red pinprick just below the crease that cut across his wrist.

The cat wanted nothing to do with any of it, but having managed to haul her fat ass up onto the toilet tank, she was nervous about jumping down. She meowed her irritation.

Donald held his wrist under hot water, lathered up with a bar of soap and scrubbed, then rinsed off and grabbed a hand towel. As he dried his hands, he saw movement in his peripheral vision, low and to his left, but he did not want to look down because it had to be some kind of stress-induced optical illusion, because if it wasn’t…if it wasn’t…

He looked down.

More of them pushed their way out of the shit, their tiny legs climbing and pumping. Their oval-shaped bodies were flat and pill-like and vaguely resembled a spider or crab, with delicate, hair-like legs, and they were smaller than ladybugs. He could not remember seeing anything like them while he was driving himself insane by Googling parasites.

They crawled out of his shit like ants out of an anthill, four of them going in four different directions, all of them on their way up the sides of the bowl. But they hadn’t come out of his shit alone—they had come out of him. And more were coming. He spotted one crawling across the counter directly toward him.

Donald shocked himself by screaming “Jesus Christ!” in a voice that was disturbingly reminiscent of his mother’s (which did nothing to help the situation) as he threw himself backward away from the sink. The back of his legs hit the side of the tub and he fell backward into the shower curtain, which was gathered at that end. The polyester curtain helped break his fall a bit as it ripped from the metal rings on the bar and his ass landed painfully in the tub. He found himself staring at the ceiling, knees up, and wrapped in the shower curtain when Quimby scratched at the cat room door and Bella shrieked in pain.

As he struggled to get out of the curtain and the tub, Bella’s shrieking grew louder and more panicky. Something thumped loudly in the room. Against the door. It happened again. And again.

He got out of the tub to find Bella wailing at the top of her voice as she ran frantically back and forth kicking her hind legs erratically like a drunken bronco at a rodeo, slamming into one door, then turning to dash across the floor and slam into the other.

“Shitbugs,” he whispered tremulously as he saw two more of them crawling out of the bowl. He opened the laundry room door with a trembling hand and Bella ran out of the bathroom, then he quickly closed it again. He was breathing too fast and would hyperventilate soon. He leaned back against the door and tried to calm himself, but he caught a glimpse of two of the shitbugs on the floor—two moving specks—just an instant before they disappeared under the cat room door.

Bella continued to shriek outside the door behind him and Quimby scratched again at the other door. Donald looked at the bite on his wrist. It had become red and swollen and was beginning to ache.

He forced himself to act, pushed himself away from the door, grabbed one of the two blue bath towels on the rack, rolled it up and placed it along the bottom of the cat room door. He grabbed the other towel to do the same at the bottom of the laundry room door, but he froze when Quimby began to scream in the cat room.

Clutching the towel in both hands, he looked around for the bugs but saw none. He knew they weren’t gone, he simply could not see them.

Quimby slammed against the door as his shrieking grew louder.

Bella continued to make horrible sounds of pain.

And for a long moment, Donald felt paralyzed, unable to move or speak or form a coherent thought because the cats were screaming and there were tiny biting spider-like creatures living inside his guts and some of them were now loose and running free in the house.

Maybe I’m dreaming, he thought desperately as he dropped the towel, opened the cat room door and stepped out of the bathroom just in time to see Quimby’s tail disappear into the hall. Even through the wailing of the cats, he heard Quimby’s claws chitter and scrape on the hardwood floor on the way to the living room.

Bella fell silent.

Donald went back into the bathroom, through the other door, and into the laundry room, which was little more than a cluttered passageway in which the washer and dryer stood next to the water heater. There were spatters of a clear fluid on the floor, and beyond that, some scattered cat droppings. It looked like Bella had had a little accident.

Quimby’s yowling continued in another part of the house, but Donald could hear no other sounds. He moved on into the kitchen.

“Hey, Bella,” he said. He made quick kissing sounds with his lips, which usually brought Bella trotting into the room for pets or, even better, some food. “Bella-Bella-Bella!” he called a little louder, but stopped and closed his eyes when a cramp tightened like a fist in his lower abdomen.

The shitbugs are restless, he thought and regretted it immediately as hideous parasites rushed out of the blackness behind his eyelids. He opened his eyes and tried to ignore the cramp as he crossed the kitchen and entered the dining room.

Quimby’s yowling abruptly stopped and the house was silent except for Donald’s footsteps and the occasional creak of the floor beneath his feet. He went on into the living room and down the hall to his office. Still cramping, he dropped into the chair at his desk and bent forward with hands on his abdomen.

What the hell just happened? Did those things…did they really come out of…did that really happen? I’m neurotic, sure, I know that, but I don’t hallucinate. Do I?

The cramp intensified and he tried to stifle a groan as he wheeled his chair back and pressed his forehead to the cold desktop.

Is this caused by the shitbugs? What do they want? Are they hungry?

A laugh slipped out of him and he whispered, “Maybe they’re eating me.” And then: Oh, boy, that sounded crazy. Peter Lorre crazy. I’ve gotta pull myself together. What time is it? When is Louise getting home?

He couldn’t even remember where she’d gone. He took the phone from its console and hit a couple of buttons.

Louise answered by saying, “I hope you haven’t been Googling parasites again.”

He chuckled, but it sounded forced to him. “I was just wondering when you’ll be home.”

“Home? I’ve only been gone a little more than an hour. We just got here.”

“Where?”

“A little antique shop up in Round Mountain. What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

“I…well, I’m not feeling so good, but—”

“Did you do the stool sample?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Oh, Donald, why didn’t you let me do that for you?”

Another cramp doubled him over and he said, “Hang on a sec,” and placed the phone on the desk. It became nauseatingly intense and he quickly grabbed the small waste can beneath his desk just in time to vomit into it. He waited a moment to catch his breath, then sat up straight and picked up the phone.

“Sorry about that.”

“Do you want me to come home? I will if you want. It’ll take a while, but we’ll start back now.”

“I’m worried about the cats.”

“The cats? Why?”

“Well, they’re…they’re, um…” He hesitated. If he was going to tell her what had just happened, it might be better to wait until they were face to face. Hearing about it over the phone might make it easier to dismiss. Louise had been a saint when it came to tolerating his quirks, but even a saint has limits, and a story like this might reach hers. “It’s nothing. I’ll tell you about it when you get home.”

“Do you want me to come now?”

“No, have fun at the antique shop. I’ll be sick whether you’re here or not.”

After they said goodbye, Donald sat in his office and listened. He hadn’t heard a sound from Bella and Quimby since they’d stopped wailing. He wondered where Bella had gone. He stood slowly, made sure he wasn’t dizzy, and left the office. He shuffled along the hall, looking for Quimby.

He saw the cat—or what appeared to be the cat—through the open door of the master bedroom at the end of the hall. It looked grossly swollen and seemed to be moving convulsively in a strange humping motion. Donald picked up his pace a little and said, “Quimby. Hey, fella.”

The movement stopped, and as he drew closer, Donald realized he was not looking at Quimby. He was looking at something on Quimby. Something puffy and pale but smeared with dark streaks. Something with a lot of legs.

The creature, streaked with blood, had been feeding on Quimby’s remains and now turned to face Donald, who stood frozen in the hall. As it turned, it revealed a second creature behind it. They were nearly the size of the cat.

“Shitbugs,” he said in a thin, whimpering voice.

The thin legs moved rapidly, sending the creatures over the creamy carpet toward the open bedroom door, one slightly ahead of the other.

Donald launched into an awkward run down the hall, arms outstretched as he tried to cover the remaining distance faster than the shitbugs could get out of the bedroom.

The creatures moved with speed, but they were clumsy, as if they had not yet grown accustomed to their bulk.

His left hand slammed onto the doorjamb when he reached the bedroom, and he leaned in and grabbed the doorknob with his right hand. Pain exploded in his stiff, swollen wrist as he pull the door closed with a sharp bang.

One of the creatures thumped against the other side of the door once, then the other. Then they were silent.

Donald backed away from the door several steps, then turned and hurried down the hall to look for Bella. His guts twisted in another cramp, making him bend at the waist slightly, but he kept going. He called her name a few times, but his voice was so hoarse, it came out as an incoherent croak.

He searched the living room but found no sign of her, then went back into the dining room. He heard the sounds before he knew their source—quiet, wet sounds. He pulled one of the chairs away from the table and bent down to look underneath.

He startled the two creatures feeding on Bella, one at each end of her body, and they turned to him. It was a bright, sunny morning, and in the light from two windows, Donald did not understand what he was seeing, but part of it looked like a rose.

The shitbugs were the color of maggots, but they appeared to be sturdier. They were the same size as the two in the bedroom. Their pill-like bodies were no longer flat. Now that they’d eaten, they had thickened in the middle, especially on top, bulging above and below the ridge that went all the way around their bodies. Their many slender legs, lined up on each side of their bodies, looked like bent needles. Their eyes, if his guess was correct, were two pale stalks that grew up from that ridge with small, shiny, black orbs at the ends. The thing that looked like a rose was between them.

It was blood-red and made up of beautiful layers, elegant curves. Until it opened.

Then Donald saw that it was red only because it was dripping with Bella’s blood and what had resembled a rose became a maw of fangs and blades and barbs.

The creatures—the tiny shitbugs that had come out of his stool sample—were now the size of dinner plates. They didn’t seem to be finished eating yet, but they were finished with Bella. Their needle legs propelled them with a fluid grace and created a rapid-fire thumping sound against the floor.

Donald made a strangled sound and, as he stood up straight, he spun away from the table too fast, threw himself off balance, and fell to the floor.

The thumping sound rolled closer.

He crawled over the floor frantically, his knees working to find traction on the polished wood, and as he entered the living room, he clambered to his feet. He ran down the hall, listening to the sound the creatures made as they pursued him—it sounded like some kind of engine.

Donald threw himself into his office, then against the door as he slammed it shut and turned the lock. Movement sent blades of pain through his tightly swollen wrist. He held it to his chest as he went to his desk and plopped into the chair. He sat there shaking for a while, as if he were in a meat locker. Finally, he picked up the phone and hit a couple of buttons. When Louise answered, he blurted, “I changed my mind come home.”

“Whuh-what?”

He’d spoken too fast. It had sounded like a single word. “You need…to come…home,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s…it’s…um…the cats.”

“What’s wrong with the cats?”

“They’re…well, I don’t know, they’re, um…”

Donald’s eyes slowly rolled toward the door when he heard a sound coming from there. Something like…scratching. He first thought it was one of the cats, but then he remembered where the cats were and knew it had to be something else. The scratching thickened and became a crunching sound.

“What are you talking about?” she said. “Is something wrong with the cats or not?”

He continued to listen and did not respond. Yes…yes, that was it…crunching.

“Donald? Are you still there?”

“Yes, wait just a—”

He saw the wood splinter at the bottom of the door; saw the paint chip and crumble.

“Oh, Jesus, they’re chewing through the door!”

“What? What’re you—honey, are you having a panic attack?”

“You have to come home, now, please, right now; they’re chewing through the door!”

“What’s chewing through what door?”

“The shitbugs. The shitbugs!”

“Don…Donald, are…are you taking any drugs you haven’t told me about?”

“They came out of me, out of the stool sample, out of my shit, and they killed the cats and got bigger and now they’re—”

After that, his words gave way to a long, shrill scream that ended abruptly when the connection was severed.

*****

“Oh, god, he’s hung up.”

“What’s wrong?” Judith said.  Of all of Louise’s friends, Judith was the most impatient with Donald.

“I think Donald is having a panic attack. A bad one.”

Judith clicked her tongue and rolled her eyes. “Look, it’s going to take us more than an hour to get home even if we leave this second. Why don’t we at least make our way through the shop once? And Liz isn’t here yet. Let’s just wait a little while longer. Please?”

Louise thought of Donald home alone in his current state. He wouldn’t hurt himself—not intentionally, anyway. He wasn’t self destructive during a panic attack. He was more likely to hide under the bed until it passed. He knew where to find his meds. He was a grown man; he knew what was happening to him, it wasn’t new. She couldn’t be with him every second of every day.

“Yes, let’s do that,” she said after a long sigh. “I could use the break.”

About Ray Garton

Ray Garton has been writing novels, novellas, and short stories for thirty years. His work spans the genres of horror, crime, and suspense. His latest thriller, Frankenstorm, is available now from Pinnacle Books. His short fiction has recently appeared in such anthologies as Nightscapes, Volume 1, Dark Visions: A Collection of Modern Horror, Volume 1, and Horror Library 5. You can see his bibliography and keep up with new releases at his website, RayGartonOnline.com. He lives in northern California with his wife Dawn and is currently at work on his next novel.

HARD RAIN

Bruce Memblatt

DAMN THE RAIN THAT SEEMED LIKE IT NEVER WOULD STOP. Damn all the rain that ever was; rain running, changing, pouring down drains, emptying, nurturing, flooding over green grass, and sand and mud and shifting grounds.

Jacob never shifted or changed. Jacob Fisher stood firm on the earth, always solid and square, and don’t you dare mess with him, or his world or his life.  Forever walking the straight and narrow path, today Jacob walked in the rain just a few feet from where Unreliable (his old car) broke down.

In many ways they were alike, Jacob and the place he was about to enter, though he’d never see it that way. Everything looked familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time; a patch of woods near the side of a highway he’d traveled down nearly every day of his adult life, but something seemed different today.

He felt suddenly and hopelessly lost.

Quickly, he turned around to check on Unreliable. If his car was there then he was just at the side of a familiar road and everything was fine, but if he couldn’t see his car, if Unreliable was gone…

Unreliable was gone.

The wind shifted like it made a U-turn.

The rain stopped.

The surrounding trees had changed; where tall oak trees once stood, now were lazy willow trees. The grass beneath them was greener and seemed to extend forever into a far-away mist. It was as if a dream was unfolding around him. Jacob began to experience an extraordinary calm, which was suddenly and violently broken by a tall lean figure of a man wearing a hat, holding a shotgun at his side.

The first thought that ran through his head was this happened before. Yet, he had no explanation for the idea—no memory of such an insane turn of events. It was too real to be déjà vu, and too crazy to be real.

The man turned and whispered, “If you ever want to see your wife again, Mister, you’d better come with me.”

Suddenly nothing mattered; not the day, the trees, the car, the wind, or the rain. Jacob’s body lurched. He rushed closer to the man, pulling on his arm, and he cried, “Anne! Leave her alone; what did you do with my Anne?”

The man pulled away his arm, tugged on his shotgun and said, “No, mister, not Anne, I’m talking about Jaqlin.” He spoke in an elegant Southern accent as if he’d just stepped out of a Tennessee Williams play, yet this Brick Pollitt seemed rough around the edges, and mean.

At once Jacob’s belly felt like someone kicked it in with a sledgehammer, and then it began to sink under the weight of a long-forgotten pain. Jaqlin was his first wife who died just a week after their honeymoon—a heart attack, the doctor said as he scratched his head, not understanding himself how someone young and healthy as Jaqlin could have a heart that suddenly stopped one night as if it just gave out from boredom.

It took Jacob ten years to get over her memory and another two to meet Anne, with her bushy black hair, her larger than life rosy cheeks and breasts to almost make him forget about the past.

“Jaqlin is dead!” he hollered at the man. “What kind of sick fuck are you?”

“Nothing dies,” the man said, and then a sadistic laugh filled Jacob’s ears and he felt raindrops pound on his head like bullets.

His eyes jumped. The trees were oak once again. The man was gone. The dream had vanished quickly as it came. He turned his head and there was Unreliable, his old Buick, on the side of the highway waiting for him as if it was an ordinary afternoon.

Jacob scratched his head and he wondered why he’d gotten out of the car of in the first place.

He rushed back to Unreliable, popped in the key, and heard the thunder of the engine turning over. Then he hit the gas and sped down the wet highway with only one thing on his mind: Jaqlin.

******

He kept calling her name. His head thrashed against the pillow, which by the third time he called Jaqlin was drenched in sweat. I dream of her day and night—different dreams. Her fingers; now pale bone, reached for him out of a deep empty grave trying to pull him from life into the deepness, into the empty darkness—the hollow slide to oblivion—the quick drop.

He pulled away from her as hard as he could, feeling the cold jabs of her fingers pressing against his legs; ready at the slightest slip to pull him down…down…down…

She grew stronger. Her reach grew farther. Jacob started to swerve. The earth beneath his feet crumbled, sifting into air, and fell like dust to the grave below.

His head thrashed harder against the bed. “Jaqlin! Jaqlin! Jaqlin!”

He felt another hand; this one soft and alive as it reached around his shoulders, and he heard another voice calling his name, muffled at first, then clearer, “Jacob, wake up!”

The scene changed in an instant.  He saw her eyes, her warm eyes, and he was out of the dream, and in her arms, in Anne’s arms, back into the warm world.

And now he’d have to tell her.

She tugged on her mountainous black hair, and ran her lips, still red even after she wiped the day’s lipstick out of them, across his forehead. “Honey, what’s wrong? Try and relax, baby.”

Jacob wanted to tell Anne, It’s okay darlin’. It’s nothing, just things that go bump in the night. But this wasn’t like that—this was a man with a shotgun, this was a man who knew Jaqlin’s name. This was not something he misheard. This was clear as day and real as death.

So he told her the truth. “I think she is calling me.”

“Who is calling you?”

“Jaqlin is calling me.”

The light dimmed in Anne’s eyes. Her smile reversed and her hands started to tremble slightly. She reached into the drawer of the night table beside their bed and pulled the last Camel cigarette out of the soft pack, tossing the cellophane wrapping to the floor, and lighting the butt with a torn matchbook that she’d left in the side pocket of her nightgown.

She drew the tobacco into her lungs, glanced at Jacob, then she hacked out a cough and said, “Jacob.” She hardly ever called him Jacob, it was always baby, or honey or darling, or a combination thereof.  Jacob was reserved for only the most serious of discussions and only for   the most pivotal points in those discussions.

She continued, “Jacob, listen to yourself! This is a serious thing you are putting on the table. This is the kind of thing that can break up marriages. If you are thinking about a wife other than the one you have, then it’s like a time bomb ticking away at our marriage: tic-tic-tic. Look at me, please,” Anne said. “Look at me. She has been dead for over ten years. She is not calling you! What happened tonight was simply stress and nerves and not real. For God’s sakes, it was just a dream.”

“But, Anne…”

“It was not real, okay, Jacob?”

“Okay.” Jacob sighed, knowing fully well that it was real and this thing was not ending tonight with an okay.

She pulled the small travel clock from the night table, stared at the dial, pointed it at Jacob and said, “Look it’s nearly 4 AM. Why don’t you take the day off tomorrow, Honey, and rest your nerves.”

So he was off the hook. She called him Honey. And he was always looking for any excuse he could find not to go into Sid’s, the automobile repair shop he had been working in for the past several years while taking classes at night hoping to become something else. “Okay,” he instantly agreed.

He made it a long weekend. He used the time to drink away any thoughts of Jaqlin.

When he left for work on Monday morning, a slight hangover still lingering over his head, the memory of the weekend just behind him weighed on his mind. He drank and fucked Anne all weekend.

They fucked in the bed. They fucked in the living room. They fucked in the basement; they even fucked in the god damned laundry room. They fucked and fucked and fucked, trying to fuck Jaqlin out of their minds, and their lives, hoping with each pant, with each hump, with each climax she would be gone—dismissed— dead again because when that thing happened to him on Wednesday morning, it drove Jaqlin back to life just as much as if she were alive again. She had become a palpable presence in their marriage; a thing to deal with—a real thing, and that weekend Jacob was determined to fuck Jaqlin out of his mind.

He jumped into Unreliable and hit the gas but didn’t point the car towards Sid’s. Monday mornings were the worst. How would he even tell Anne that he just decided to take another day off?

It was raining again. He hated the rain. He pulled over at the side of the road, took a gander at the long stretch of highway ahead of him, and watched the water pelt against the asphalt; the windshield wipers crisscrossing the scene as if they were jittery school guards.

He could turn around; he could turn around right now and go to Sid’s, but he wouldn’t. The straight and narrow path he’d always traveled had swerved.

No, he swerved.

Something swerved, and now all bets were off. Now he had to find that place again; he had to find Jaqlin.

He took a swig from the bottle of whiskey he kept hidden under the seat, and hit the gas pedal hard. He was drinking and driving on a slick wet highway, lying to Anne and cutting another day of work. Sid would probably fire him today if he didn’t kill himself first.

Or Anne would divorce him.

Like she said, he mockingly echoed in his head, This is the kind of thing that can break up marriages. Yada yada yada.

Fuck it. Fuck everything; he had to get back there.

The trees on the side of the road flew by. So many trees on the side of this old highway; old oak trees far as the eye could see.

Why did they live by the side of a fucking highway? What was wrong with them? No, what was wrong with him?

More trees, more rain, more gas—he hit the gas pedal harder. Old Unreliable began to screech around the edge of a curve.

He took another swig. The place should be coming up soon if he could only remember where it was. Damn the mother fucking rain. Damn it.

Suddenly, something changed. He could feel it. He tried to pump the gas. He tried to turn the wheel, but no luck. Old Unreliable was moving down the road slowly—slow and determined as if it knew the way. It was too freakish to contemplate. He took another swig and enjoyed the ride.

Moments later, Unreliable pulled over to the edge of the highway, and then it turned down a side patch; a break in the trees, and came to a stop in a small clearing.

Jacob wiped the sweat off his brow, and he pushed the car door open.

Sun was everywhere; blue sky, and sun and lazy willow trees. He was back. Back in the calm, back on the edge of nowhere.

And as he stepped away from the car, in the small of his spine he felt the brunt edge of something poke him—something like a shotgun.

A chill within Jacob whispered, It’s him.

He heard the man’s voice, the crisp drawl crooning, “Came back for more, Mister? Guess you like this place. It is a beautiful cemetery, so peaceful and serene and green.”

Cemetery? Jacob’s eyes spanned out across the green field that lay ahead of him, the one that ran into the faraway mist—so peaceful, so serene.

The smell of freshly cut grass pinched his nostrils.

The now-familiar drawl returned. “Look closer, Mister."

They were everywhere: tombstones. Rows and rows of brilliant white tombstones, sharpened by a blazing sun, unfolded into the hazy green mist.

He knew he should run. He should high-tail it out of there—back to Anne’s warm arms. If he ever got out of this mess, he’d take her out for the most expensive dinner she’d ever had. He knew this, yet he stayed.

He turned around to look into the barrel of the shotgun; the man’s eyes squeezing like his finger on the trigger. There were willow trees along with the oaks behind the man. Oak trees, willow trees, green grass, and miles of tombstones—but no Unreliable.

Alone. I’ve slipped through a crack and I’ll never escape.

He had a need to find Jaqlin. “Where is Jaqlin?”

“Don’t you see where you are, Mister?”

Of course. It was a cemetery. It made perfect sense. Jaqlin was dead so naturally he’d find her in a cemetery.

But her body was in a cemetery already for the past twelve years! Just two counties down, that’s where she was buried, near her parent’s home, two counties down. So, why this cemetery? Wherever this was.

The man spoke. “Cemeteries are for funerals ain’t they?”

“But Jaqlin already had her funeral somewhere else somewhere in the real world, in a real cemetery. She’s been dead and buried for twelve years. What could she want with me now? What do you want with me now?”

“Make no mistake about it; this is a real cemetery.”

The place so peaceful and serene with its green grass, lazy willow trees, and its polite Southern accents, yet Jacob knew it was hiding something wrong. There was something nasty and mean here. Something awful. He could feel his belly flip like it was going to jump through his skin. He could feel the earth beneath his feet ready to betray him.

The man turned around and aimed his shotgun at the faraway mist, but still didn’t fire. “It’s a crazy world, Mister, much crazier then it seems. Sometimes mistakes are made. Sometimes things get screwed up. Sometimes you just get screwed over and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

Jacob’s eyes followed the barrel of the shotgun out into the mist.

There she was.

There was Jaqlin, as radiant as if she were alive, beautiful as ever running through the mist. Her long black hair flowed behind her like she was an angel running towards him—

—running through the mist…naked… towards him.

Jacob knew the strange man in the cemetery was wrong. He wasn’t getting screwed over at all. Soon he’d feel her. Soon he’d feel Jaqlin’s touch. Like he should have for the past twelve years before the world cheated him…cheated both of them for taking her away. That was the mistake.

“That’s right, Mister, you keep your eyes on her; you keep your eyes on her while I tell you the rest.”

“I will,” Jacob softly responded, “I will. I can’t take my eyes off of her.”

“When mistakes are made, they have to be corrected.”

“I agree,” Jacob said half listening to the man, nearly hypnotized by Jaqlin’s image.

“You see, Jaqlin wasn’t supposed to die, Mister, you were. That’s why you’re here today. Like I said before, cemeteries are for funerals. I’m awful sorry, but you’ll be attending yours today.”

What?

Before Jacob could catch another breath, the man turned around and now the barrel of the gun eclipsed his view of beautiful Jaqlin. It blocked out everything because it was square in his eyes.

Then the man pointed the gun toward something Jacob didn’t spot before, something right on the ground in front of him—a new headstone.

The man waved the gun. His gentle accent turned forceful and crude. “Read the name, Mister, read that name! What does that tombstone say? I’ll read it for you: Here lies Jacob Fisher…beloved husband…”

No, this wasn’t possible; the world couldn’t operate like this—digits…numbers…one gone, one replaced—the books neatly balanced.

He cried, “Are you insane?”

But before he could think, he felt the shotgun plunge into his stomach. He saw the man manipulating it fast. He tried to shout. He tried to run.

The sun beat down hard. The barrel of the gun also beat down hard on his back and he fell.

He fell backwards into a freshly dug hole, the freshly dug grave behind him. He fell long and deep—deep into the ground. He fell trying to scream, but he couldn’t catch his breath, and suddenly he felt severe pain as the earth became hard beneath him. The earth betrayed him, broke his fall and cracked his spine.

He could still see, but he couldn’t move his arms. He couldn’t move his feet. He couldn’t speak, but he could still see. He could still think.

Paralyzed, at the bottom of a wide elevator shaft of a hole, all around him was dark, but far above he could see light; the light edging through the top of the cavity, and the sky above; the blue sky (his last sky) and the shovel dropping dirt, the dirt falling on him—soon to cover him completely—

Jaqlin.

******

Anne washed another dish and put it in the drainer. Through the kitchen window she could see the rain soaking the porch. Jacob would be home late for dinner, because she knew he hated driving in the rain. It would be okay though; once she saw him pulling into the driveway she could stop worrying like she always did when the weather was bad.

The crazy thoughts she had. They were just embarrassing.

Of course he would be okay. It was just rain; just water falling from the sky.

She stepped away from the sink and flipped the switch by the door. Now the porch light was on, bright and shining through the pouring rain.

Any moment Unreliable would be pulling up.

Her heart warmed because almost as soon as she had the thought she saw the headlights; Unreliable’s old headlights pulling into the driveway. The car came to a halt, at last the driver’s door opened, and then a woman stepped out of the car.

About Bruce Memblatt

Bruce Memblatt is a native New Yorker, and a member of the Horror Writers Association.

He is on the staff of The Horror Zine as Kindle Coordinator.

His story “Dikon’s Light” is a recipient of the Bewildering Stories 2012 Mariner Awards.

His works have been published several times in anthology books, magazines, and zines such as Aphelion, Nameless Magazine (Cycatrix Press), Suspense Magazine, Post Mortem Press, Dark Moon Books, Sam’s Dot Publishing, Strange Weird and Wonderful Magazine, The Horror Zine, Midwest Literary Magazine, Danse Macabre, Parsec Ink, The Feathertale Review, Yellow Mama and many more.

SQUATTERS

Elizabeth Massie

THERE WAS NO WAY HE WAS GOING TO TELL HIS MOTHER about losing his latest job. She would have said, “Jack, with that attitude you’ll never keep a job. You have to be willing to follow directions, do what they ask of you.” Damn, but how her voice scraped his nerves raw. She’d never believed in him, never understood him. Her nagging and lack of confidence was the reason he’d not been able to reach the pinnacle he knew he was supposed to reach.

So screw it all. He had bigger fish to fry than a minimum wage job bagging groceries for old people, snotty teenagers, and welfare mothers.

He left a scathing note on his pillow, gave up the bedroom in his mother’s house, took his old Chevy, and drove to Washington DC with determination, a plan, his cell phone which was paid up through the end of the month, and $273 he had from auctioning on eBay the Vietnam War crap he’d inherited from his father when his father had died. The United States government was going to Hell in a hand-basket; shit, it was already in Hell and had climbed out of that hand-basket and was having a big-ass party with Satan.

Jack was going to fix all that. As a Senate candidate, he’d rally folks who were as sick of things as he was; he’d make noise, get media attention and plenty of petition signatures, then get on the ballet, win the election, and take his place in Congress. And he’d shake up Congress, oh! You bet. The citizenry would realize his brilliance and value his insights into the nation and the world at large. Might even run for president after that. Jack’s slogan, already designed and e-mailed from his mom’s computer to Staples on H Street NW (found on Google maps; one good thing about the internet) to be printed out on their big format printer, was “Arguing with Idiots is a Waste of Time! I Won’t Argue! I’ll Make it Right! Vote Jack Pritchett, Independent Candidate for Senate for Washington DC.” Granted, the slogan was a little long, but it said what needed to be said. He couldn’t wait to pick the banner up.

Oh, yeah.

DC was a huge, sweltering city, one Jack had only visited many years ago on an eighth-grade field trip, and it was confusing in its layout, noisy, and crowded, with occasional green stretches to break up the concrete and tarmac. After discovering that motels were beyond expensive and then circling around and around, Jack found a free place to sleep—a shelter just a half-mile from the Capital Building.

The shelter was a one-story, nondescript, 1940’s-era brick structure that looked like it had once been an elementary school. Barberry bushes pressed like angry tumbleweeds against the exterior walls. Poorly painted wooden benches lined the shelter’s narrow, grass-bare yard, and seated on the benches were bags of human refuse, smoking and muttering to each other or themselves. The idea of crashing in the shelter set his teeth on edge and his stomach acid to roiling, but he was afraid to sleep outdoors or in his car, and no way in hell would he go back home to yet more derision from his mother.

Through the shelter’s front door the receptionist had seen Jack parking his Chevy, and she asked how, if he was destitute, he could afford to own and maintain a car. He said, “I borrowed it from my cousin.” She said he couldn’t park it in front. He’d have to give it back to his cousin or move it to a public parking lot. So he drove it around the corner and left it in the 7-11 lot. He’d move it later.

Back in the shelter, Jack filled out the required paperwork by lying on the forms and then slipping the receptionist $30 to just go ahead and approve it. Next, the shelter’s security guard, a fat man in a sweaty white shirt, gave Jack a clip-on badge and a printout of the rules of the place:

1. Leave facility at 10 a.m.; do not return until 4 p.m.

2. Adhere to curfew – 10 p.m.
3. No smoking
4. No drinking
5. No fighting
6. No drugs

7. Dorm room doors are to remain open at all times

Control freaks.

Jack dragged his suitcase into the north wing where men were housed. The hallway smelled of sweat, urine, and vomit, and most of the overhead lights were burned out. Jack thought he saw a rat scurrying along the wall then disappear into a narrow crack at the floor. These squatters don’t give a fuck how they live. Well, I can handle it. Couple days until I get my followers, then, hell yeah, I’ll be out of here, you can bet. And I’ll have some stories to tell during my political rallies about these bums.

There were six rooms in this wing. He’d been assigned to Room 2. The room had two long windows, latched and secured with padlocks and chains. It was furnished with eight cots, two stuffed chairs that looked as if they were encrusted with feces, four plastic lawn chairs, a folding table, and faded, framed prints of the ocean hanging at tilts on the walls. Cockroaches scuttled across the cracked floor and walls and dusty brown spiders nested in ceiling corners. Air-conditioning rattled up through the floor vents, offering air not much cooler than the 80 degrees outside.

One man—an old guy with a matted white beard—was in the room, prone on a cot with a thin blanket pulled to his chest. He had a thick, rattling cough. He stared at Jack with muddy eyes.

“Who you?” the man asked.

“None of your business,” Jack replied.

“I’m Donald.”

“Whatever.”

“You know Brady?” asked Donald. He reached down beneath the blanket to scratch.

There better not be fleas in these cots.

“I don’t know Brady.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Lose your job?”

“What?”

“Can’t get no work? That why you here?”

“Leave me alone.”

Jack glanced around, uncertain as to which cot to claim. Maybe it didn’t matter. Hell, it shouldn’t matter. The men who lived here certainly didn’t pay anything and so had no genuine claim on anything. He stepped toward one of the cots, reaching out to lift and shake the mattress.

“Can’t have that one, that’s Boot’s bed.”

“Did he buy this bed? Does he rent this bed?”

The old man just stared.

“If he doesn’t then it’s not his, now, is it?”

Donald sighed, coughed, scratched.

Jack examined the mattress. No fleas or bedbugs that he could detect. He put his suitcase on the cot but left it locked in case the old man decided to rummage for something he could sell.

“You leave my stuff alone, now,” Jack told the Donald. “Anybody else come in here, you tell them the same.”
“Don’t want your stuff,” said Donald. “Get out of here and let me sleep.”

Jack left the shelter and found that his car had been towed from the 7-11. With no extra money to retrieve it, he cussed the state of the world then began the long hike to Staples.

Traveling by sidewalk, he was even more aware of the people he passed. Businessmen in suits. Women in heels and sunglasses. He smiled at these people. They were successful; they were productive and worthy. And then there were the tramps slumped against walls with crumpled paper bags in their hands. Hoodlums screaming at each other, jabbing fingers, waving arms, likely with stolen pistols in their pockets at the ready. Old women in bandanas and sagging socks, pushing carts filled with nonsensical mishmash. It set his teeth on edge, this seething, soul-sucking humanity. Leeches, draining America dry.

At last he reached Staples, only to discover they had screwed up his large scrim vinyl slogan banner, spelling “argue” as “agrue.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Jack yelled at the young woman behind the counter. “You’ve got to do this over! This is going to be put up at the Capital building. I can’t have a misspelling!”

The woman handed Jack the order form she’d printed out, showing Jack’s misspelling of the word.

“We’d be happy to do it over,” said the woman.

“For free?”

“No, sir. That would be an additional $49.99 plus tax.”

“Couldn’t you have seen that it was spelled wrong? What, are you an idiot? Did you fall asleep in English class? Or are you an illegal?”

“We print what we’re given, sir.”

“I can’t afford to print it over!”

Jack thought he heard the woman mutter, “Then get a job so you can pay for it,” so he shot back, “You just wait! You just wait and see!” He grabbed the banner, rolled it up into a lumpy bundle, and stormed out.

He hiked back to the shelter, the banner slipping and sliding beneath his arm. Damned scrim vinyl. He dialed his mother on the way to ask her to wire him $100 so he could reclaim his car, but she didn’t answer. Fine. When he was elected he wouldn’t even acknowledge her.

Arriving back on the block where the shelter stood, Jack noted that the people on the bench were different now, but still much the same. Crumpled, dirty, muttering. A large man with dark skin, sunglasses, and a shaved head stood on the sidewalk in front of the main door, a cigarette stuck to his lower lip. Next to him was a skinny, pale dude whom Jack instantly pegged as someone in the employ of a drug dealer. They took up the full space of the sidewalk, so Jack would have to walk around them to get to the front door. A power play, to be sure. That’s how a lot of these people worked; strutting and posturing to prove something they didn’t really have.

“Hey, chief,” said the big man as Jack came close. “Whatcha got there under your arm?”

“Let me by,” said Jack, “I need to go in.”

The smaller man chuckled. “We ain’t stoppin’ you.”

Jack narrowed his eyes. “Sidewalk,” he said.
“Not ‘til we talk,” said the big man. He eased smoke out through his lips; the cigarette bobbed slightly on his lip.

Jack stopped short. Damn these ne’er-do-wells. One of the first things Jack would do when he was elected was get rid of the welfare system, entitlements, and everything else that propped up these good-for-nothings. Let them learn to contribute something like everybody else. Contribute or die. Like the old Revolutionary War slogan, “Join or Die.” That could make a great new banner. Fuck Staples, though, this time he’d get it printed elsewhere.

“I have nothing to say to you,” Jack said. “Let me by.”

The tall man leaned close. Jack saw himself twinned in the sunglass lenses. “Oh, but we got somethin’ to say to you.”

“Move. I have things to do.”

The tall man shook his head. “Things to do? Well, first of all, you can’t go back inside ‘til after four.”

“I’m only going to put this banner in my room.”

“Your room? You pay for it?” asked the big man. “You rent it? If not, ain’t yours, now it is?”

Jack flinched. Hadn’t Jack said that earlier? “Move. Move or I’ll call the security guard and get you to move. You can’t be threatening me.”

The big man grinned, wide. His teeth were odd; large, stained, and crooked, reminding Jack of the pictures he’d seen of George Washington’s hippopotamus ivory dentures. Only they seemed a bit sharper than Washington’s dentures, as if too many of them were canines. “You ain’t gonna call for nothin’ ‘til we have our talk. Now, my name’s Brady. This here is Boot. What’s your name?”

Jack opened his mouth to demand they let him by, but suddenly, in a single move, Brady and Boot spun about to stare up the street. From between the row of parked cars, a band of four loud, scraggly young men were approaching. They snarled, cursed loudly, and bumped into one another. Jack saw flashes of metal among them.

Oh, shit.

Then Brady held up his hand and said, “Leave.”

All four stopped instantly. They shivered as if they’d been dashed with a bucket of cold water or hit with a powerful charge. One waggled his shoulders, clearly angered, and took one staggering step forward. Brady clacked his odd teeth and said, again, “Leave.”

And all four, as if by remote control, turned in unison and shuffled back up the street. Snarling, cursing, but seemingly unable to do anything about their redirection.

Brady looked again at Jack. “Now where were we? Oh, yes. We are going to talk. What’s your name, boy?”

Jack’s stomach tightened. He did not want to be afraid of this big man, but he was, and royally pissed off that he was. “Not boy,” he managed. “It’s Jack.”

“See, that weren’t too bad, was it?” said the big man. “Now, I stop in here at the shelter to see how things are going. Help out as I can. Do this and that. So tell me, Jack. What you doin’ at this shelter?”

“None of your business.”

“But it is.”

“I’m just staying until I get my own place,” Jack managed.

“That’s what they all say,” said Boot.

“Yep, that’s what they all say,” said Brady. “Now, try again. What you doin’ here? Fella like you looks like you would have somewhere else to go.”

“None of your…”

Brady shook his head, held up a finger. It was odd, that finger, like a thin, boneless creature waving in the air. It seemed that for the barest second, blue mites of electricity danced on its tip. “None of that again. Tell me true.”

Fuck it, I’ll tell him. Jack’s heart hammered but, happily, his voice didn’t crack. “I’m going to run for office, since you are so damned interested. Run for Senate. Represent the people of Washington DC and get this country back on track. It’s one fucking mess, in case you hadn’t been paying attention.” He swept his arm out and about, indicating the neighborhood, the shelter, the people on the benches.

Brady looked at Boot and Boot looked at Brady. They burst into heavy, smoke-scented laughter.

“Listen to you!” said Brady. “Washington DC ain’t got no Senators!”

“It…it does so.”

“No, it don’t, Jack. Didn’t you go to school? Didn’t you study history or government? What, are you an idiot? Or are you an illegal?”

Jack’s fists clenched. How the fuck did Brady know what Jack had said to that Staples woman?

“Lemme see what you got there, Jack.” Brady held out his hand. Jack didn’t offer the banner but Brady took it all the same.

“Look-a this,” Brady said, unrolling and holding it out. “Let’s see. It says you won’t…what? Is that supposed to be ‘argue’?”

“Shut the hell up!” Jack pushed through Brady and Boot and into the shelter as the two men continued to chuckle. The security guard stopped him in the foyer and shooed him back out.

What a mistake! I can’t stay here. Jack thought as he plopped down on one empty bench. He sneered at the tattered women on the other bench. “What the fuck are you looking at?”

One of the women, face scarred and hair matted, stuck her tongue out at him. The other, who was ninety if she was a day, began to cry. Jack frowned at them, then stared at his shoes. He heard Brady, in a surprisingly soft voice, say, “Julia?” and the crying lady became quiet.

Okay, Jack thought as he considered his shoestrings. Okay. One or two nights here, tops, just until I can make a new plan and find some money for a motel. I’ll get donations from people who agree with me. If I can’t run for the Senate, then I’ll just start my own independent political movement! Plenty of people felt the way he did. They would protest and rally with Jack. No more free lunches. No more moochers or squatters or immigrants taking advantage of and intimidating decent Americans!

Jack looked over at the sidewalk to give Brady and Boot his glare of disdain and decidedness.

But they were gone.

Not in front of the shelter. Not across the street. Not down the sidewalk heading south. Not up the sidewalk heading north.

Vanished. In a matter of seconds.

I need to get out of this damned sun.

There was a Starbucks around the corner. Jack sat there, sipping a cup of free iced water and getting the hairy eyeball from the employees. At last his cell phone read 3:58. Fuck his mother for not letting him have her laptop. He could have been researching and Facebooking, drumming up support. She had a desktop in her home office; she didn’t need another. All she did with the laptop was play Scrabble. Selfish bitch.

Reluctantly Jack returned to the shelter, finding his suitcase unmolested and six other men up in the room including sick old Donald. They were scattered around on cots and chairs, talking, flipping through old skin magazines, talking about people Jack couldn’t know and wouldn’t want to know.

“Hey, newbie,” said a middle-aged man with an eye patch and a pair of too-large workpants. “Where you from, anyway?”

Jack wiped sweat from his nose and pawed though his suitcase, searching for his notebook. He would walk to the National Mall and write up his plans for his first rally. Stay on the Mall until he had needed to get some sleep. Hell, maybe he could get some funding while was there. Tell people what he was up to and ask for donations. Then he wouldn’t have to actually sleep here.

“Man,” said Eye-Patch. “I asked you where you from?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Why you here?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What you up to?”

“Leave me alone.”

Jack glanced up from his suitcase, notebook in hand. All six men were staring at him, with a most bizarre expression of sympathy, anger, and resignation. It stung his neck like a hornet.

“I think Brady got you pegged,” said the old man lying on his cot.

“He knows what you up to,” said Eye-Patch.

“Fuck Brady and what he thinks he knows,” said Jack.

“Why do you hate us?” asked the old man.

“I…” Jack took an exasperated breath. “You really have no idea, do you?”

The men looked at Jack, then at each other. Same expression. Sympathy. Anger. Resignation. Jack slammed shut his suitcase and grabbed the handle.

“I’m out of here. Don’t piss on my cot.”

As he stormed out the door, he thought he heard one of them whisper, “Your cot? You rent it? You pay for it?” but then again, it might have just been that rat, scrabbling in the wall.

Seated against a shady tree on the grass of the Mall, Jack created flyers on notebook paper, printed boldly with a wide-tipped black Sharpie: “Revolution is past due! Take back our government from the parasites! Bring America up out of the gutter! End welfare! Survival of the fittest! Let’s meet and make our voices heard! National Mall, west of the Washington Monument, August 4, 9 a.m. Jack Pritchett, President of Our Nation Now, Inc.” Adding “Inc.” gave his new organization the extra promotional umph it needed. At the last moment, he decided to add his phone number for those wanting more information. Then he stapled the flyers on as many trees as he could, using four staples each so they wouldn’t curl over in the humidity. He asked some tourists for donations, explaining his cause, but they only grimaced and walked off.

Fuck them.

He bought a hotdog, pretzel, and watered-down soft drink for his dinner, and when it grew dark he returned to the shelter. The light was on over the door; moths batted at it as if they wanted to kill the globe.

Inside, a new receptionist was at the desk. He pulled his badge from his pocket and was admitted. In Room 2, two men were stretched out on their cots, staring at the ceiling and the others were at the table playing cards. Cockroaches scuttled across the floor. Spiders dangled from the ceiling. Jack clenched his jaws, went to his cot, and shoved his suitcase underneath.

“Play poker?” asked a middle-aged guy in a crusted work shirt.

“Me?” said Jack. “No.”

“Wanna learn?”

“I don’t gamble.”

“We just play for nickels.”

“And where do you get your nickels?”

“Why you care?”

“Did you know that when you panhandle, you’re playing off sympathy of others for your own lazy-ass gain.” As soon as Jack said that he tensed, ready for someone to lunge at him. But they watched him, eyes steady. That strange mixture of expressions again. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw the cockroaches scramble away and vanish into the wall cracks. The spiders drew up tight in their corners. The sweat-inducing temperature in the room dropped suddenly to a surprising, immediate cool. Jack felt himself gasp and draw in the refreshing air.

“How you doin’, guys?”

All faces turned toward the door. There stood Brady and Boot, smiling, hands in pockets. Brady, still in dark glasses, looked even taller in the doorway, the top of his shaved head reaching the doorframe. Boot looked shorter, but no less cheerful.

All the men grinned.

“Hey Brady!” said Eye-Patch. “Doin’ okay,” The other men nodded in agreement.

“How’s the new roommate?” asked Brady as he pulled a stash of beef sticks from a paper bag and tossed them around.

The men caught the food, looked at Jack, and said nothing.

Brady shook his head and made a tisking sound. “Jack,” he said quiet patiently. “Jack, Jack, Jack.”

“What?”

“You givin’ my boys trouble?”

“Of course not.”

Boot came into the room and dropped down onto a cot. He didn’t mention that Jack had claimed the one said to have been Boot’s. Jack looked at Boot, then Brady.

“Jackie,” said Brady. “C’mon out here in the hall a minute. Let’s have a talk. A real talk.”

“I have nothing to say to you.”

Brady hooked his boneless finger in the air, beckoning, and Jack felt a charge surge through his legs, his hips. Against his will, he rose and walked to the door. Damn it, what is with this guy?

The hall was brighter than it was when Jack had returned from the Mall. It was as if Brady had brought in new bulbs for all the fixtures. Couldn’t have, though. Jack would have heard the banging around.

“Jack,” said Brady, moving so Jack was pinned against the wall, with one of Brady’s arms to each side. “I don’t think you’re an all out bad fellow. But you fightin’ the wrong battle, buddy.”

Jack looked at the lens-shaded eyes; saw his reflection again. He looked terrified. “You have no idea.”

“Then tell me. Tell me, Jack. What you up to?”

“I’m just sick of moochers, that’s what. I’m tired of frauds and lazy-ass people, tired of squatters trying to take what they don’t deserve.”

“Like the men here?”

Jack’s mouth opened, snapped shut, and then opened again. “Yeah, like them.”

Brady shook his head, looked away, and removed his glasses. When he looked back, Jack saw his eyes. Huge as silver dollars and pure white with blood red pin-pricks in the center. Jack gasped. His legs gave out beneath him and he slid to the floor.

Brady leaned over, his hideous eyes wide and unblinking. “You don’t know what a squatter is, do you?”

“Of course I do.”

“A squatter is someone or something that moves into an empty place and stays there. A place it doesn’t really belong, but where it finds room. It snuggles down and hides, with all the space, all that room.”

“I know that.”

“No. You don’t know that. You don’t see, Jack. Open your eyes. See what’s real, what’s good and what’s not. I look out for these men. Always have. Always will. Not a one is a moocher. Not a one is a squatter. Talk to them. Learn something about them.”

“Who…who are you?”

“Brady.”

“No. I mean who are you?”

Brady chuckled, stepped back, and put his sunglasses on. He leaned into Room 2 and said, “Sleep well, guys. I’ll stop by tomorrow with some desserts.”

“Oh, God, make it pie,” said One-Eye.

“Chocolate bars,” said Donald.

Brady left. The hall lights flickered and went dim again. Jack thought he saw cockroaches scramble back out from the cracks to resume probing the walls.

Jack stumbled into Room 2 and dropped onto his cot. The men shook their heads and looked back at the cards in their hands.

With trembling fingers, Jack fluffed the pillow on the cot, sniffed it, inspected it. Now, if he could just sleep and if these men would just leave him alone, tomorrow he could start over. He’d get back on track. Get some money somehow and find a motel. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, but no one had called. He bet some druggie had pulled his flyers off the trees at the Mall.

Fuck it. I’ll put up more in the morning. And fuck Brady and his creepy white-eye costume shop contact lenses. He can’t bully me out of what I need to do.

Sleeping was impossible. The night wore on; the men played cards, laughed, grunted, farted, coughed talked about tedious shit that forced its way in one of Jack’s ears and bled out the other. Jack lay with his pillow over his head but it didn’t help.

At last, the security guard tapped on the open door (doors were to remain open at all times, so said #7) and told the men to calm it down, they were too loud, it was well after midnight, and the women in the other wing were complaining.

The men cussed the guard good-naturedly and the man left. They quieted but continued playing.

Jack drifted, fell asleep.

And then awoke to a hand scrabbling around his mattress, underneath, the around to Jack’s arm, tapping up to his chest. Jack cried out and slapped the hand away. He sat upright, panting. In the faint light from the hall, he saw a silhouette by his cot.

“Who is that?” he demanded.

There was no answer. The figure leaned over again, coughing, coming close to Jack, fumbling under the mattress again. Jack reached under the cot, pulled out his suitcase, and swung it hard, knocking the figure away and down.

“There you go!” Jack shouted. “You can’t rob me! You can’t steal my stuff!”

Someone got up, raced to the door, turned on the overhead.

Donald lay flat on the floor, gurgling.

“Fuck it!” One-Eye was up, went to Donald, dropped down on one knee. “You broke his fucking neck!”

“He was trying to rob me!”

“Look at his hand! He was pulling a rat out from your cot so it wouldn’t bite you! He hates rats. Always believed it was his job to keep them out of our room.”

Donald grunted, twitched, then went still. One-Eye pulled the old man’s hand out from under him; in it was a dazed rat.

“I…I think he was putting it there to scare me,” said Jack. “He deserved what he got. You don’t sneak up on people and try to scare them!”

“Damn you, you fucker! Donald’s dead! Did you listen to Brady? You ain’t cared enough to learn anything about us, you just want to hate us.”

“Killer!” said all the men. In unison, they chanted. “Killer, killer, killer!”

The security guard was at the door, then, blinking as if he’d been asleep.

“Donald’s dead!” One-Eye said.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” the security guard growled. “And on my watch! I’ll call for the…”

But then Brady was there, moving the security guard back and out of the way. “I got it,” he said. He stepped into the room. The men stared at Donald. Jack stood over him, still holding the suitcase.

“Jack, Jack, Jack,” said Brady. This time there was no patience in his voice. “You done it now.”

“Self defense!” Jack said.

“You men go to sleep,” said Brady, his sunglassed face trained on Jack. The moment he spoke those words, the men returned to their cots, closed their eyes, and began to snore softly.

Jack swallowed hard. Shit. This wasn’t going to be good.

“Sit,” said Brady.

Jack sat. “Now, listen to me,” he began, “you’ve got to understand…”

“That’s the problem right there,” said Brady sadly with a shake of his head. “You don’t take time to understand. You got some fucked up idea in your head and it’s so crowded in there, ain’t no room for nothing else.”

“You…”

Brady held up his hand. His fingertip danced with blue sparks. “But there’s part of you what’s got lots of room ‘cause there ain’t much in there at all. Empty space. Where squatters like to move in.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Shh, now, lie down.”

Jack licked his dry lips. His mind raced. “No.”

“Now,” said Brady.

Jack felt himself lie back on the cot.

“There now.”

“Don’t hurt me!”

“I said shh, now.” Brady knelt on the floor beside Jack’s cot. He snapped his fingers, sending sparks flying like fireflies. And with that beckoning, the cockroaches came. Out of the floor cracks, the walls, the ceiling, hurrying to Brady. The spiders overhead scrambled down to join the roaches. They pooled around Brady’s knees like a living, squirming puddle.

“Up,” said Brady. The roaches and spiders crawled up onto the cot and onto Jack’s chest. They stared at him with cold, tiny insect eyes.

“Now this might hurt a bit,” said Brady. He touched Jack’s chest with his boneless finger, and a scorching current split open the flesh of his chest—a narrow, long slice. The pain was horrific, white hot, but Jack couldn’t scream.

“Just one more move here,” said Brady. He dug his finger through Jack’s ribs to his heart. Then, he burned open a small gap in the beating organ.

“Go,” Brady said.

Roaches and spiders clambered up, down through the raw chest wound and squeezed into the heart. Jack could feel them writhe inside.

“That’s enough. That’ll do.” Brady sealed the heart wound with his finger, and then the chest wound. With a nod of his head, the remaining spiders and roaches scattered, back into the shadows from where they came.

“Now you know what squatters are,” said Brady. “Things that move in where there is plenty of room, but where they don’t belong.”

Jack’s heart began to clench, sputter, and strain. The roaches and spiders inside continued to crawl about. Again, he tried to scream, but he had no voice.

“Might take a few minutes,” said Brady. “Sorry it worked out this way. But you gave my boys trouble.”

Jack bucked on the cot, clawing at his chest. Sweat drops as big as bullets flew from his pores. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think over the pain.

“You gave my boys trouble,” repeated Brady, and then he touched Jack’s head and sent him into a deep sleep, so at least when his heart exploded, he would be spared that agony.

About Elizabeth Massie

Elizabeth Massie is a Bram Stoker Award- and Scribe Award-winning author of horror novels, short horror fiction, licensed media tie-ins (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Shadows, The Tudors, and more), mainstream fiction, poetry, and educational fiction and nonfiction. Recent works include stories in the anthologies/magazines Tales from Crystal Lake, Dark Discoveries #25, and Shadow Masters, the zombie novel Desper Hollow, and the historical horror novel, Hell Gate. Massie is the creator of the Skeeryvilletown slew of cartoon zombies, monsters, and other bizarre misfits. In her spare time she manages Hand to Hand Vision, a Facebook-based fundraising project she founded to help others during these tough economic times. Massie lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and shares life and abode with her husband, the talented illustrator/artist Cortney Skinner. She can be reached through her website: www.elizabethmassie.com or through Facebook.

I STILL LIVE

Wayne C. Rogers

HITTING THE CHAIN-LINKED FENCE WITH ARUNNING START, Ricky Peterson climbed to the top like a monkey in a zoo and dropped to the other side. When he landed, he eyed the immediate vicinity for trouble. His best friend, Bobby Webb, had already warned him about Mitchell being in the red-clay pit. If Mitchell and his gang caught him, it would mean a serious beating.

Glancing upward, he saw the thick, black clouds rolling in from the Gulf of Mexico and felt a slight chill in the air. Ricky knew the streets of Mobile would soon be flooded. He needed to be home before the downpour started. If not, his mom would have a conniption and that wouldn’t be pleasant. He took off down the sloping embankment to the dirt road. When he reached it, he turned right and headed toward a large culvert about twenty yards away. He was almost to the entrance when a loud voice erupted from behind.

“Hey, slow down, piss-ant!”

Stopping in his tracks, Ricky spun around, and saw Billy Mitchell and two other guys standing thirty feet back. It was like they’d magically appeared from out of nowhere. He knew Mitchell’s reputation as did every boy in junior high school. There would no mercy shown. Looking at the culvert, Ricky measured the distance in his mind and started running. The underground pipes were his second home. He and Bobby had been exploring them for over a year, and he knew them backward and forward.

“We won’t hurt you,” Mitchell shouted. “Come back, you little chicken shit!”

The three guys laughed.

Ricky made it to the concrete cavity ahead of them. He stopped for a second to glance back and saw the boys bearing down upon the culvert like pit bulls after a piece of steak. He recognized one of guys as Charlie Wade, a seventh grader who was in his social studies class. Not wanting to hang around for a knuckle sandwich, Ricky ran deeper into the blackness of the pipe and encountered a foul odor that made his face wrinkle up. He forced himself to stop breathing through his nose so he wouldn’t be sick. Then, gulping down a mouthful of air, he continued on through the darkness, putting as much distance as possible between him and the bullies.

Ricky’s eyes quickly adjusted to the dark, and he saw the branch-off several feet ahead. The pipe that led to the fort was big enough to walk upright, if you didn’t mind ducking your head. He swung to the right and headed into the second tunnel. He slowed to a fast walk, and could already hear the three boys as they entered the larger culvert, talking non-stop to each other.

“Where is he?” the third boy asked.

“How the fuck should I know?” Mitchell replied.

“Hey, what’s that?” Wade asked the other two.

“What’s what?” Mitchell said. “I don’t see anything.”

“I see it,” the voice of the third guy said. “It looks like two red eyes staring at us from the back of the pipe.”

“We found you, Peterson!” Mitchell yelled.

Stopping in his tracks, Ricky listened to them talking, wondering what it was they saw. A few moments later he heard the first scream. It was primal, high-pitched, and filled with unmistakable fear.  Ricky knew it was one of the guys, but he didn’t think a boy could sound like that. It caused goose bumps to pop out on his bare arms.

A second bloodcurdling scream followed.

Ricky looked back the way he’d come, not knowing what to do. That was when he heard Billy Mitchell’s voice.

“Noooo!” Mitchell cried.

Another horrible, gut-wrenching scream ripped through the drainage pipes. It was far worse than the other two. In fact, it was more terrible than anything Ricky had ever heard in his life, even on Creature Feature.

Something had Billy and his buddies…something bad.

Ricky felt sweat on his forehead as he struggled to get his emotions under control. He swallowed deeply, realizing how dry his mouth was. Then, making a quick decision, he continued down the drainage pipe, keeping as quiet as a mouse making its way through a kitchen. He knew there was a shaft further up with an iron ladder that led down to the next level.

As he made his way through the long pipe, ignoring the odor, Ricky kept glancing back, expecting to see two red eyes chasing after him.

Thankfully, there was nothing.

When Ricky finally got to the end, he grabbed the metal rungs on the inside wall of the shaft and worked his way down to the bottom. Once he was standing on the concrete floor, he felt safe enough to remove the flashlight from his Khaki shorts. Switching it on, he shined the beam around and saw the two pipes that led out in different directions.

He clicked off the light and took the passage heading south.

After a dozen minutes had passed, he used the flashlight again and saw the next shaft further up.

He ran to it.

As Ricky stepped into the manhole, his eyes zeroed in on the ladder that led up to the iron-plated cover. There was an opened grate near it. El Camino Drive, where he lived, was just outside. Unfortunately, he knew the plate wouldn’t budge because he and Bobby had tried to lift it before. What had his attention, however, was the pipe midway up. It was right next to the ladder.

The smaller culvert offered a straight shot to the fort.

Ricky switched off the light and started up the ladder at a brisk pace. He was nearly to the opening when the flashlight slipped out of his hand. It fell to the floor, bursting into several pieces, making a loud metallic sound. He couldn’t stop himself from grimacing as the noise echoed through the surrounding pipes, calling forth who knew what.

He bit down on his lip and started climbing faster.

Once he was at the pipe’s opening, Ricky took hold of its edge and pulled himself into the narrow space. When he was safely inside, he rose to his hands and knees, trying not to hit his head on the low ceiling. He then began to crawl through the darkness, moving along like a rat searching for a way off a sinking ship. The nasty odor was still with him as he tried not to think about the screams he’d heard earlier. His gut instinct told him the other boys were dead. Whatever had attacked them would soon be after him.

Coming to the end of the conduit, he eased himself out and into a large square room that had been turned into a make-shift fort by him and Bobby. He felt his way over to the left wall where a bookcase, made of two-by-fours and cinder blocks, was located. It was filled with dog-eared paperbacks and men’s magazines that Bobby’s older brother had given to them. Ricky walked his fingers along the top, searching for the spare flashlight. They passed over a sleek Playboy magazine and then touched metal. He grabbed the flashlight, clicked the light on, and aimed it at the old Army blanket spread out in the far corner.

The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs was lying right there next to his grandfather’s World War II bayonet and a candle with its melted bottom stuck to the inside of a pie tin.

I still live, he thought with a smile.

As Ricky snatched up the thin paperback, he heard a faint scuttling sound coming from inside the pipe he’d just left. He stepped hesitantly back to the opening and directed the light slowly into it.

Less than twenty-five feet away, two red eyes were coming straight at him.

Lifting up his T-shirt, Ricky crammed the paperback down his shorts. Then, tossing the flashlight over onto the green blanket, he rushed to the bookshelf and grabbed one of the cinder blocks that held up the top piece of lumber. He jerked it out from its solid perch, causing the board, the magazine, and some of the paperbacks to tumble haphazardly to the floor.

Hurrying back to the pipe, he stood to one side of the opening with the block raised high in the air. He was going to bash the living daylights out of whatever emerged.

He waited, sucking air into lungs.

Nothing happened.

As Ricky’s arms grew tired and his hands began to tremble, he lowered the block to the floor and debated whether or not to peek into the pipe. But he was scared, so frightened that he’d peed in his shorts without even realizing it. When he noticed the wetness below, Ricky felt humiliated and embarrassed. Most of all, he was glad Bobby wasn’t there to see his shame.

Wiping his face with the back of his forearm, he used his foot to move the cinder block over to the opening. He wanted an obstacle in front of the pipe to slow the creature down. Ricky returned to the wall, got a second block and placed it on top of the first. He then retrieved two more and dropped them in front of the others, praying they would be enough.

Once that was done, he rushed over to the blanket and picked up the bayonet and flashlight.  Ricky slipped the sheathed blade down the back of his shorts, and then dropped to his knees in front of a second pipe that offered an escape route. He crawled into it, wincing at the pain to his exposed knees.

The culvert ran for fifteen yards and opened up ten feet above the floor of a new manhole. It was a tight, confining space that reeked of the same scent as the other drainage pipes. The odor still made him sick to his stomach whenever he breathed it in through his nose. He couldn’t stop wondering if the creature had been this way, marking its territory with urine and why he hadn’t smelled anything in the fort.

By the time he got to the next manhole, Ricky’s knees were raw and bleeding. The only thing he could do was try and forget the pain as he stuck his head out like a shy turtle. He placed the flashlight in his pocket and wrapped his fingers tightly around the ladder on the inside wall. Dragging himself into the faded light that was filtering in through the grate, he saw a massive amount of water descending to the floor and knew the storm had begun. He looked downward and saw the deepening pool that was emptying itself into another drainage pipe…a pipe that was the only way out of his predicament if the manhole cover wouldn’t budge.

A crack of thunder exploded in the outside sky.

The scent of ozone filled the dank air as Ricky ascended the ladder and then stared out through the rusted grate into the lonely street. It was flooded and empty of traffic. His eyes shifted upward and viewed the angry-looking clouds releasing their deluge upon the city. The coldness in the air was now bitter and bespoke of terrible things to come.

That was when he heard the echoing sound of crashing cinder blocks and knew the creature hadn’t given up.

Ricky shivered, but it wasn’t from the chill.

Shifting his feet on the rungs, he positioned his shoulders against the plate and heaved upward with what little strength he had. For a brief moment it appeared as if the cover was going to move. He could feel it shift, which prompted him to push even harder.

But, in the end, it was no-go.

The heavy plate was there to stay.

Rather than wasting any more time, Ricky made his way down to the floor and stood in two feet of freezing water. The culvert leading out of the manhole was bigger than the others, and he’d be able to walk upright in it without bumping his head. As he entered the large pipe, he heard a slightly different scuttling noise coming from behind. This time it seemed to have a strange clicking resonance that caused him to think the creature might be excited about its impending kill.

Ricky twisted his head and glanced up. Shining the flashlight at the pipe, he removed the bayonet from its sheath and held it by his side. Ricky didn’t even know if he had a half-ass chance against the thing as he stared at the opening for the longest minute of his life. He held his breath, waiting to see if anything would appear. When nothing did, he blinked his eyes and took off running through the water. He knew the culvert would lead to the manhole on Bobby’s street and perhaps safety.

By the time he had covered fifty yards and was within spitting distance of the next shaft, he found himself out of breath and bone tired. The flowing water had turned into a raging river that reached to his waist. He couldn’t stop his body from shaking or prevent his teeth from chattering. Making his way to the manhole, he could vaguely hear a howling wind coming from the street above. He eased his head into the shaft and saw a waterfall gushing wildly from the grate, filing the bottom.

Ricky eyed the ladder bolted to the wall and then stared up at the round plate. Placing the bayonet back into its sheath and the flashlight into a side pocket, he took hold of a steel rung and began to climb up. He nearly fell when his left tennis shoe slipped off a wet rung, and he dangled helplessly for a nerve-racking second. He somehow managed to find his footing and continued on with the journey.

Once he was directly underneath the manhole cover, he began to press his shoulders against the bottom like he had with the other. That was when he gazed out through the grate and saw his mother on the other side of the street as she hurried home. She wore her London Fog raincoat and held a black umbrella over her head. The force of the wind was pushing her along the sidewalk, and the hard rain was unmercifully pelting the top of the umbrella. Ricky figured she’d just been to Bobby’s house looking for him and was probably worried, if not mad as the devil.

“Mom!” he shouted.

She didn’t hear him.

He yelled at the top of his lungs and hit pay dirt.

When Mrs. Peterson heard her son’s voice over the wind, she twisted around and nearly slipped on the sidewalk. Once she’d regained her balance, she glanced around and called out, “Ricky?”

“I’m over here, mom!”

Ricky shoved his hand through the grate and waved at her above the running water like a metronome’s pendulum swinging from side to side.

His mother saw the movement, dropped the umbrella and ran across the street with an expression of horror on her thin face.

“Get Bobby!” Ricky called to her. “Tell him to bring his father’s crowbar.”

“Do what?” Mrs. Peterson said, stopping in front of the gutter and staring down at her son in obvious bewilderment. “What in God’s name are you doing in there?”

“Mom, listen to me!” Ricky yelled. “Get Bobby and tell him to bring a crowbar to lift up the manhole cover. Something’s trying to kill me down here.”

“Trying to kill you?”

“Hurry, mom!”

She ran off in the direction of Bobby’s house without asking any more questions. Ricky didn’t know how long he waited. The level of water in the lower part of the shaft was growing steadily higher with each passing minute.

After what seemed like forever, Bobby Webb scared him half to death by sticking his face upside down in front of the grate and giving him a big, goofy grin. “What the hell are you doing down there, Rick-O-Rama?”

“Did you bring the crowbar?” Ricky asked.

“I have it in my hand.”

“Get the manhole cover up, Hurry! The water’s rising!”

Bobby didn’t ask any more questions.  He jammed the flat edge of the crowbar into the groove of the metal cover, and began to push down on it with all of his strength.

Ricky let out a loud shout as Bobby brought the plate up and over to the side. The piece of metal dropped to the cement with a clang.

“I still live,” Ricky said, quoting a line from the John Carter novels, then held up his hand.

As Bobby bent over to grab it, he saw something below that changed the excited gleam in his eyes. It happened so fast that Bobby wasn’t even sure of what he saw.

A leathery-looking hand with long, pointed claws popped up out of the churning water and clinched its wicked-looking fingers around Ricky’s ankle, just above the top of his tennis shoe.

“Holy shit!” Bobby screamed.

Ricky’s disbelieving eyes met Bobby’s for a split second before he fell, splashing into the water and disappeared beneath the rough surface.

The only thing Ricky could think of as he sunk like a rock was to grab the bayonet and lash out. With his eyes open, he jerked the blade from its sheath and jabbed the point of it into the thing’s arm. Blood seeped into the water.

He slashed at the hideous face, cutting a deep gash into the pockmarked cheek. The creature’s red eyes glared as it reached eagerly for him. Before his air gave out and Ricky found himself a prisoner within the thing’s grasp, he managed one last defiant act and drove the bayonet into its neck, pushing the blade into the brown, knotty flesh as far as he could.

The creature unexpectedly drew back as more of its blood emptied into the water.  It seemed to understand a losing battle was taking place, and that it held the shorter end of the stick.  Giving Ricky an ugly grin that revealed its fang-filled mouth, the creature vanished back into the culvert.

Ricky didn’t have time to celebrate.

Feeling the current tugging him toward the pipe on the opposite side, he knew death was only moments away. His lungs burned with pain. He shot his hand up to the surface, hoping someone would see his urgent plea for help.

I still live, he thought.

*****

Bobby jumped into the culvert and swam down as fast as he could, using broad strokes, seeing the distant shape of his best friend being sucked into the opening on the left side of the manhole. Kicking his feet hard, he propelled himself forward and caught Ricky’s wrist before the unconscious boy disappeared into the culvert. Bobby drew his friend to him and held on tightly.  Then, setting his feet on the floor of the concrete shaft, he used the strong muscles in his legs to drive himself upward like a ballistic missile, taking Ricky with him. When their heads burst out of the water, he immediately saw a crowd of people staring at them through the manhole opening with their mouths opened in stunned silence.

He shoved Ricky toward the ladder.

“Take him!” Bobby yelled.

Hands reached down and took hold of Ricky’s arms, lifting the boy’s body carefully up through the round hole.

Bobby treaded water as he gripped the ladder’s rungs, catching his breath, thinking he’d been too late to save Ricky. Tears ran down his cheeks. He could hear an ambulance’s siren coming closer.

Suddenly he heard a familiar voice from above.

“Are you crying?”

Bobby leaned his head back and looked up. Ricky’s face was peering down at him from the street. His friend was alive.

Bobby found himself laughing and crying at the same time as he made his way up the ladder. A dozen men and women were huddled there in the pouring rain, cheering him on when he reached the sidewalk, not knowing what to say or how to act.

When Bobby reached the street, Ricky said in a near whisper, “I lost the paperback.”

“I’ll buy you another one.”

“Thanks,” Ricky said, smiling. Then—“I still live.”

About Wayne C. Rogers

Wayne C. Rogers sold his first horror story, “The Hitchhiker,” to Cavalier Magazine in March of 1986 (Stephen King’s old stomping ground). It was twenty-five years later before he sold another.

Dividing his time between short fiction, book reviews, and screenplays, Rogers has seen some of his fiction published in anthologies and ezines during the past two years. His story, “A Step in the Shadows,” can be found in the paperback anthology I’ll Never Go Away. Another short story, “Shanghai Ed,” is in the anthology, Grindhouse, while “The House of Pain” can found in Paul Fry’s Peep Show: Volume 2.

For the past year, Rogers has been focusing on writing two feature-length screenplays and ten short scripts. Now, all he has to do is sell them.

CENTER STAGE SIDESHOW

Christian A. Larsen

THE SMELL OF COTTON CANDY AND PRIZE PIG DROPPINGS met in the air, forging a new and not altogether unpleasant smell that seemed to go perfectly with the calliope music that came from nowhere and everywhere all at once. Harrison loved that smell as much as he loved that sound, which he loved as much as he loved sucking the salt off the fresh roasted peanuts. It was like Christmas and Halloween rolled into one, with perfect summer weather to boot, and not a schoolbook to be seen for weeks in either direction.

Dust and dirt were high in the air, thick enough to drive away Okies, but Harrison didn’t mind, because today was the day he was going to finally kiss Emily Preminger. Right on her rosy cheek. He was floating higher than the balloon he bought for her.

“How do you know she’s going to be there?” asked his best friend, Arnie, who was watching the balloon bob like a fishing float.

“She’ll be there,” answered Harrison confidently. He could feel the blood throbbing in his fingertip where he wound the string of the balloon. “The freak tent is the blue ribbon event. You don’t get to see it but once a year, and most people can’t even stomach that much.”

“Yeah, but invite agirl there?”

“It’s the perfect set up, Arn,” explained Harrison, kicking a clump of dirt that might as well have been a stone. “Ferris wheel, she’s been on. Besides, it’s not all that high or scary. Even if I could get her on with me it would probably bore her to death. But the freak tent, Arn, they don’t let ladies go in there alone. You gotta have a ticket and you gotta have a man.” He puffed out his chest until it almost popped the buttons on his overalls.

“I’d rather check out the goochie tent.”

“You’re hopeless! Once your nickel’s gone, what are you gonna do? Me, she’s gonna press right up against me for protection, and I’m gonna slip my arm around her waist real slick like so.” He snaked his hand around Emily Preminger’s imaginary waist. “I’ve been practicing on my pillow. Got to be on my game. Same bit got my brother going steady with Wendy going on two years ago.”

“Well, just so long as my ma doesn’t find out. She’d tan my hide so bad I wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week. Says the stuff in that tent is unnatural. Shouldn’t be allowed to exist ‘cause it goes against God or something. So swear not to tell.”

“I swear.”

“So, do you still want to buy the teddy bear?” asked Arnie, holding up the toy Harrison had asked him to win.

Harrison could have taken it from Arnie. He was stronger and faster, but he was a bad shot with a baseball and could never win a carnival prize, not on his best day. “How much?”

“It cost me three cents to win it.”

Harrison started digging in his pocket for three pennies, but Arnie stopped him.

“So make it a nickel and it’s yours.”

Harrison found the nickel, put it in Arnie’s palm and took the bear. “It’s not fair, you up-charging me two cents like that.”

“Why not?”

“You know Emily told me she wanted a carnival bear, and it only cost you three cents. You making a profit off me like this is playing dirty.”

“You calling business dirty? You're starting to sound like a socialist.”

“Climb off it, Arn. We're pals, you and me, but if you call me a socialist again, I'll bloody your goddamn nose.”

Arnie smiled. “So when are we meeting her?”

“She has to babysit her little sister. Said she couldn't make it out until after lunch, so that gives us time enough for a corn dog, whattaya say?”

The splatter of kernel-filled vomit a few paces from the corn dog cart did nothing to ruin their appetite. The two boys split a bottle of Coke and a corn dog, leaving just a few sweet, precious crumbs for the sparrows to spirit away. They didn't say much. Boys their age, on the cusp of adolescence with food in their mouths, did most of their communication by sight, and there was so much to see: the garish signs and banners with grotesque smiles and gilded letters, the spinning steel framework of the Ferris wheel, the blinking lights and swirling dust creating a soft, dusky glow even in broad daylight. But the one thing that kept drawing their gaze was the freak show tent, flapping in a way that was even more inviting than the dark recesses of Miss McDermott's skirt when she took the class outside on a windy day.

“There she is,” said Harrison in a half stupor. He could feel a big, stupid smile on his face, bigger even than the clowns on the signs above him, but he couldn't help it, and besides, even at a mere dozen years, he could tell that she was nervous, too. Whether about him, or what was inside the tent, he didn't know. He grabbed Arnie's arm and dragged him across the midway. “Hiya, Emily.” He waved, started to reach for her, and then shoved his hands in his pockets to keep them out of trouble.

Emily dug her toe into the dirt, swinging her skinned knee around her other leg like it was a light pole. “Hello, Harrison. Hi, Arnold.”

“I gotcha this teddy bear,” Harrison said, catching Arnie running his knuckle under his nose like he wanted someone to see him just then. “And this balloon.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Harrison said. “You ready to go inside?”

“I think so. Will I be able to stand it?”

“It’s pretty gross,” said Harrison. “Ain’t it, Arnie?”

Arnie nodded, even though he’d never been inside. Harrison’s older brother had taken Harrison last year, though, and it was enough to make him believe in magic again, the things he saw in there. His mouth was dry, not from the horrors inside, but at the thought of having to keep up conversation with Emily all afternoon. What if he ran out of things to say? Arnie was there to make sure things weren’t too quiet, and Harrison’s mom always called Arnie the self-appointed gab-about-town, but he was pretty mum today, too.

The freak tent looked like a canvas cave rumpling in the wind.  A man with the pencil thin mustache and silk top hat tore their tickets and ushered them in with a greasy smile plastered on his face. The inside felt like a cave, too—cool and a little damp, like a cold sweat. Harrison felt Emily’s hand slip quietly into his and he gave it a confident squeeze. The stuff in the tent was going to be weird, no doubt, but it was harmless, from what Harrison remembered.

At least it started that way.

Harrison sat between Arnie and Emily and waited for the show to start. They were lucky to get front row seats, because it wouldn’t be easy to see over all the fedoras and bald spots. The electric lights strung up on the tent poles almost made him forget it was broad daylight outside. For them, the whole audience, and the freaks, it was going to be near midnight for quite a while, and if he played his cards right, that would drive Emily right into him.

Hercules Farnsworth, the midget who ran Farnsworth’s Freak Tent, trotted out the talent like a Vaudeville show. Pinnie the Pinhead came first, just like last year. He was no taller than the midget, maybe a little shorter, and he wore something that looked like a dress, but it wasn’t what he was wearing that drew the eye. He had a cone-shaped head with a tuft of hair on its point. The rest of the head was covered by an absurdly large face that prattled the most ridiculous rendition of Cab Calloway’s ‘Minnie the Moocher’ that Harrison had ever heard, complete with mentions of dope, smoke and jellyroll shaking, all in a tiny, simple voice.

Pinnie was still bowing and smiling as Farnsworth chased him off the stage with his cane and the men laughed at the blue lyrics sung by an idiot. Harrison was red-faced, bringing Emily to hear a song like that, but before he could apologize, she smiled and shimmied her shoulders. It would have shook her jellyroll, too, if she had one. Harrison’s ears were hot with embarrassment, and he was glad when the bearded lady came out. But she was no big-boned matron with nothing but her dress and fat breasts to distinguish her from the men in the room.

“Goll-ee,” said Arnie. “Is that awoman?”

“What do you think, Arn? With a figure like that?”

“I bet she’s a dancer,” added Emily. “Or was. She’s beautiful.”

Arnie wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, her and her beard.”

Harrison thought it sounded more than a little rude, but it saved him from dredging up some ham-fisted compliment for Emily, and for that he was glad. Even if he had a good one all lined up, maybe she wasn’t fishing for one and then the moment passed.

A few animals followed, some with two heads, or four horns, or one eye, and there was even a chicken with no head that made the farmers murmur. Those small, mundane atrocities had a way of cleansing the palate, setting the stage for the real freaks to come.

“Most carnivals have a half man,” said Harrison in Emily’s ear. “You’ve heard of ‘em?”

“Half man?”

“Nothing below the waist, walking on their hands, that sort of thing.”

“Oh.”

“Farnsworth’s has a man that’s nothing more than shoulders, arms and a head.”

“That’s impossible,” Arnie groused, crossing his arms. “How’s he even alive?”

But there he was, and hewas impossible, dragging himself on stage like a coat hangerwith arms and a head instead of a hook. He was Armstrong, and hewas, doing single handstands, smashing walnuts, and climbing a ladder when Farnsworth gave him the right commands.

“How does he breathe?” asked Emily. “Where is his heart?”

“I don’t know, Em. I don’t. Honest.”

“Is it an automaton?” asked Arnie.

“You mean is it a machine?” asked Harrison. “Does it look like one?”

“Is it a machine?” Arnie asked Hercules.

“Does itlooklike a machine?” asked Hercules in return without missing a beat. “Does itact like a machine?”

Harrison thought the flesh looked pliable enough, but that Armstrong did move something like a windup clock. The eyes had a blank look to them, one of those mannequins at Marshall Field’s, where the customer was always right, thank you, except this one was moving, so-help-me-God moving, and it was just a pair of shoulders, arms, and a blank-staring face that came together in an impossible fraction of humanity, or something trying its damnedest to mimic humanity. It gave Harrison rills of gooseflesh, but he felt all gooey when Emily nestled her shoulder into him and he felt his arm going around her just like he’d practiced.

It was almost enough to distract him from Armstrong’s teeth. He looked like he’d eaten a bag of licorice and it turned them into smoked glass. The black even seemed to be seeping into the cracks in his lips and at the corners of his mouth, like tributaries to an ocean of horrific breath that Harrison could smell all the way from the audience. Some of the people around him seemed to notice it, too, and cupped their hands or hats over their noses. The smile faded on Hercules’ face, and he hurried Armstrong through the end of his routine, almost knocking the bodiless man into Emily’s lap before he scuttled behind the curtain like a crab.

“Let’s hear it for Armstrong!” cried Hercules, raising his arms to the applause. “Now, folks, you’ve heard of sword swallowing? Perhaps you’ve even seen the trick. A performer holds open his mouth and throat, and slips a sword right on down. Quite a sight, but pretty simple in theory, even if it takes a little practice. Well, our next star of the stage goes by the sobriquet: The Human Pincushion, and folks, no amount of practice will ever get you ready for the run through you’re going to see today. Before he knocks theoohsandaaahs right outta ya’, make some noise for The Human Pincushion!”

A man wrapped in nothing but a loincloth walked dreamily onto the stage followed by a woman dressed as an Arabian princess, complete with veil, halter top and baggy pantaloons. She pushed a cart covered in an array of blades.

“Is he mesmerized?” asked Arnie, feeling more confident.

“Young man,” answered Hercules from the side of the stage. “You see The Human Pincushion in his natural state. He is not under the influence of hypnosis or narcotics. You will all now witness the lovely Sahrazad run him through with a dozen deadly blades.”

The Human Pincushion’s skin was the color of moldy cheese, and somehow baggy, even though he didn’t look that old. His flesh yielded to each of the blades, which Sahrazad thrust into his abdomen and chest at different angles. Harrison was convinced it was an illusion—it had to be—when he saw a knife go into his chest exactly where the heart would be, and then pop out the back without the slightest trace of blood. He glanced over at Emily to see if she could handle the gag, but she was far from horrified. Her pink lips parted slightly and her eyes were fixed in a universal posture of entrancement. She wasn’t leaning into him anymore. It was like Harrison was gone, and he started feeling jealous of the freak on the stage. Jealous and helpless.

“That’s not real,” he said, trying to reel Emily back to him.

“How do you know?”

“He’d be dead,” explained Arnie.

Harrison pointed to the exiting act with his hand. “And where’s the blood? A pretty cheap trick, if you ask me.”

“No, that was real,” insisted Emily without looking at either of them. Her eyes were fixed on the gash in the curtain where Sahrazad, in her shimmering and almost translucent outfit, and the Human Pincushion exited. “I’ve seen magic acts before. Those swords weren’t folding up or whatever. They were really going through him. You must have seen that from this close. Sure there wasn’t any blood—that’s what makes it so real. They would have added blood to a fake, but The Human Pincushion doesn’t need blood. It’s part of what makes him a freak.”

Harrison stared at Emily, disbelieving her belief. Just before Hercules started his oratory for the main event, Harrison looked at the little man, who was looking at Emily with a sly smile, a knowing smile—a smile that said more than it should have.

“And now, friends and neighbors, you will see the most amazing human rarity on display in Farnsworth’s Freak Tent or anywhere else civilized man has drawn breath. Witness the death defiance of the Amazing Alexander, who will awaken before your very eyes submerged in a tank of honey and remain there, without breathing, for the remainder of the show.”

The curtain at the back of the stage parted and there stood an amber tank filled to the brim, and inside stood a man with his eyes shut. The unmistakable sweetness of honey trickled into the air.

“Is he dead?” asked an onlooker from the back of the room.

“Dead people don’t move by themselves,” answered Hercules.

“He ain’t moving,” said someone else.

“No, sir, heain’t moving. Ain’t yet,” said Hercules, and then his eyes settled again on Emily. “Miss, if I could borrow you from your paramour for a moment, would you mind stepping up on stage?”

Emily slipped away from Harrison like a sniff of air and walked up on stage, with that same look of entrancement he’d seen on her before, the work of a sawed-off Svengali, or maybe someone—something?—even more sinister that he hadn’t yet fathomed.

“Miss, is there any trickery with this tank, say, a tank within a tank? Anything like that?”

“No, it’s just a big jar of honey with a man inside.”

Harrison could see the bubbles clinging to Alexander’s skin, and the wild muff of hair that could never quite settle. He did look for all the world like he was dead. Dead and well-preserved. He looked like he’d fallen into the tank and couldn’t swim or climb out, a sort of sweet quicksand, and a terrible frightening way to go, Harrison imagined.

Hercules continued. “Well then, tap on the glass, would you?”

Emily raised her finger and tapped on the glass lightly with her nail.

Nothing happened, and murmurs broke out in several pockets of the audience.

“Miss, tap just a mite harder.”

She used two fingers the second time, and tapped loud enough for Harrison to hear it from his seat. He looked at Arnie to see if he could read where things were going, but Arnie wore a look of astonishment so genuine, it forced Harrison’s face back toward the stage.

Alexander’s eyes were open and he was moving toward Emily, wading through the viscous goop in the tank at about a quarter mile an hour. Harrison remembered learning to swim in the lake by his aunt’s house, and finding out no matter how hard you pushed, the water would only let you move so fast. Alexander didn’t seem to understand that. He was pushing hard against the honey—like a madman—and he didn’t seem to see anything else in the room but one thing, and that one thing was Emily.

She flinched when Alexander raked his fingers across the inside of the glass, but if he meant her harm, he was powerless to effect it. If he was getting out, it would have to be with a ladder, or rope, or net. Alexander was trapped, and it had been at least a couple of minutes since the curtain parted.

“How is he breathing?” asked Emily with a flutter in her voice.

“A common dolphin can hold its breath for fifteen minutes or more,” answered Hercules. “How long can Alexander? I suppose I don’t rightly know. Everybody who’s ever tried to time him has gotten tired of waiting. And while I wish you could stay to try and outlast him, more people are waiting outside, so we’ll have to make room for them. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for witnessing Farnsworth’s Freak Tent. I sincerely hope to see you all next year when we come around these parts again. And be sure to tell your friends!”

Harrison climbed up on stage and took Emily’s hand while everybody else started filing out, muttering, laughing, and explaining it all away. But there was no explaining it away for Harrison, especially after he got up close to the tank and saw those flat, remorseless eyes staring through gallons and gallons of honey, right at the lovely little girl Harrison had brought in on his arm. He felt clammy all over again just thinking about Alexander.

They caught up with Arnie outside, by which point Emily had regained at least a portion of her senses. With the smell of cotton candy replacing the smell of bad breath, sweat, and honey from the freak tent, Harrison suggested they have some, his treat.

“Sounds good,” said Arnie, smacking his lips. And then he added idly: “Say, I heard someone on the way out say that Alexander used to be the carnival strong man. Did you ever see the strongman act?”

“Hey, I think you’re right. Alexanderwas the strongman last year. You s’pose this is some kind of promotion for him?”

“Promoted to a fish tank full of honey? Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know,” said Emily. “But I want to see it all again.”

“Gee, Em, I don’t have enough money for another go,” said Harrison, exchanging his last few cents for a cloud of pink spun sugar. “Maybe we can do the Ferris wheel.”

“Or maybe,” said Arnie. “We can sneak in tonight and see what he looks like out of that tank. I bet he has to soak in the tub for hours and hours after they pull him out of there.”

“Or maybe they don’t take him out at all,” said Emily.

The afternoon stretched ponderously for the three children, especially since they almost immediately ran out of money. But they were saved by the grace of their age, when the newness of the world was still something worth experiencing, the way clouds danced, sparrows flitted, and sound rolled over the otherworldly landscape of the carnival, bringing with it a skyline of towers and mountains more immense than a tall tale could contain. All the while Harrison waited for the chance to just peck Emily on the cheek, but he sensed the opportunity was long gone, if it was ever there in the first place.

Night fell late, as it is wont to do that time of year, and the children had almost all day to come up with a plan to sneak into the tent after close. In the end, it was as simple as staying close to the shadows, keeping quiet, and slipping under the edge of the tent. Harrison went first, then Emily, and finally Arnie, who volunteered to guard the rear and act as lookout. Harrison allowed him that dignity, especially since it made him look even braver.

Harrison’s guess was on the mark. They walked right backstage, where the tank still stood, reflecting a dim glare from the watch lamp set there by Hercules Farnsworth or one of his many minions.

“There’s the tank,” said Emily. “Let’s go.”

Harrison crept across the stage with Emily’s hand in his. Her other hand linked with Arnie’s so that if one of them was dragged into oblivion, the others could drag him back—or be sucked in along with him. They were painfully aware of the creak of the worn planks under their feet, but not knowing the floor made it hard to guess where to step. After what seemed like an eternity, they reached the tank, and Harrison pressed his eye to the glass.

“Holy smokes!” he gasped, tapping on the glass. Alexander swung his head around slowly, almost sleepily. “He’s still in there! Come on, Em, Arn. Check it out!”

Arnie sidled up next to his best buddy and Alexander almost yawned, but when Emily pressed against the glass to see, the man in the tank started the same strenuous stroll he’d exhibited that afternoon, like he wanted Emily for something--and that something was not nice.

Hercules Farnsworth emerged from the shadows wrapped in a robe, holding a nightcap in his little hand, the knuckles of which were white. “What are you kids doing in here?”

“Sorry, mister,” said Emily. “I just had to see Alexander again. We didn’t mean anything by it, honest.”

Harrison cleared his throat. “She’s right.”

“Don’t matter what you meant by it.”

“How can he still be in there?” asked Arnie.

“Get away from that glass,” said Hercules. “T’other side of the curtain.”

Arnie did as he was told and Harrison started to follow him, but Emily lingered by the glass, where Alexander was raising his fists like he was planning to punch his way out of the tank.

“Miss, if you don’t step away from the glass, I’m going to drag you away,” Hercules said in frustration. “Alexander don’t give a wet fart for your friends. It’s you he’s after.”

Emily took a couple of steps backward. “After?”

“What do you mean?” asked Harrison as Hercules led them into the empty auditorium.

“I don’t surmise it would harm me to tell you, seeing as you’re not supposed to be here anyway, and you’re kids to boot. Alexander used to be our strongman. If you’ve been to the carnival before you might remember him. Used to have a great big mustache and wear a leopard skin. Well, he got himself caught having his way with a girl about your age, miss. I’ve never been one for the police, so I had him put in there.”

“That would have killed him,” said Harrison.

“Of course it would,” admitted Hercules. “You think he deserved better? But here’s the part no one would believe if you told ‘em. I brought him back to life using voodoo, same as I did Armstrong and the Human Pincushion. They’re all zombies. Mindless, undead slaves. They do like I tell them, only sometimes Alexander needs some extra motivation, which is why I called you up out of the audience, little lady.”

“That’s awful,” said Emily. “So he’ll be in there forever?”

“Well, not forever,” Hercules answered. “They wear out after a while, and we bring in a new one. ‘Course most die by natural causes—some even ask for the honor. Now, I do hope that you’ll keep this a secret, and scuttle on home to your parents before they set to worrying.”

Hercules put a hand on Emily’s shoulder as he showed them out, and let it slip down to her right buttock before giving it a little squeeze. She didn’t tell anyone, not even Harrison after he kissed her goodnight on her front porch. But a couple of years later, when she was older and wiser, and Harrison was as broad in the chest as a young man has a right to be, the steady couple went back to Farnsworth’s Freak Tent, and the grand finale was a midget named Hercules who lived in a tank of honey.

About Christian A. Larsen

Christian A. Larsen grew up in Park Ridge, Illinois and graduated from Maine South High School in 1993. He has worked as an English teacher, radio personality, newspaper reporter, and a printer’s devil.

His short stories have appeared in such anthologies as Chiral Mad (Written Backwards), A Feast of Frights (The Horror Zine), Zippered Flesh 2 (Smart Rhino), and Bleed (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing).

In Losing Touch, Larsen’s debut novel from Post Mortem Press, Morgan Dunsmore is near bankruptcy and desperate to keep his marriage from dying a quiet death. Morgan discovers that he can walk through walls. When he tries to use his newfound power to repair his life, he endangers himself and his family in ways he didn’t imagine. Losing Touch features a foreword by NY Times bestselling author Piers Anthony.

Larsen lives with his wife and two sons in the fictional town of Northport, Illinois. Follow him on Twitter @exlibrislarsen or visit www.exlibrislarsen.com.

STALKER

Tim Jeffreys

THE DRIZZLE THAT HAD BEEN FALLING when they left the hospital had turned to heavy rain by the time they reached Kate’s neighborhood. Ben leaned forward in the driving seat, trying his best to see out through the water sluicing down the car’s windscreen. The wipers were only able to throw it from side to side.

Kate was talking about the last patient she’d seen before leaving work, eighty-nine year old Mrs. Chard, whose continual weight loss Kate was having difficulty diagnosing. She’d hoped Ben—or Doctor Silverman, as she knew him at work—might be able to give her some advice, but clearly he was having too hard a time seeing the road before him to concentrate on what she was saying so she stopped talking.

Ben brought the car to a halt.

“What’s this?” he said.

Kate leaned forward, peering out through the rain-washed windshield. In front of the car, at the entrance to the next street, a police roadblock had been erected. It was manned by two policemen in black waterproof jackets. One of them waved a hand, indicating to Ben that he should reverse.

“This is weird,” Kate said. “I always come home this way, and there’s never any problem.”

One of the policemen started to walk towards the driver’s side of the car. Ben lowered the window, letting in the sound of the driving rain.

“What’s happening, officer?”

The policeman bowed to the level of the window, water streaming off the hood of his jacket. “Road’s closed. There’s been an accident.”

“No one hurt, I hope,” Ben said. “Perhaps we can help.  We’re doctors.”

The policeman looked from Ben to Kate, frowning. “It’s too late for that, I’m afraid.”

“Oh no,” Kate said. “What happened?”

“Looks like a suicide. A gentleman appears to have jumped from the fifth floor window of this apartment building here.”

“How awful. Can we do anything to help?”

“It’s all under control, miss.”

Ben appeared unmoved. “We’re trying to get to…” He looked at Kate. “Where is it you live?”

“Rosehip Avenue.”

The policeman shook his head. “You can’t go this way, sir. You’ll have to find another route.”

“What route do you suggest?”

The policeman shrugged and moved back to his post by the barricade.

“Thanks for nothing,” Ben said. He raised the window and swiveled in his seat as he reversed the car. “Don’t these people who kill themselves realize how much they’re inconveniencing others? Totally selfish if you ask me.”

Kate looked at Ben for a long moment to see if he was joking but he had a straight face.

“You know what, Ben? I think I’ll walk from here. I’m just a few streets away and I know a short cut through the park. Otherwise, you’ll have to get on the turnpike, and that can be a nightmare at this time of day. Pull over and I’ll jump out here.”

“I can’t drop you off here. It’s pouring!”

“I’ll be fine. I’ve got my umbrella.”

“Fat lot of use that’ll be. You sure?”

“Yes. It was good of you to give me a lift, so thanks.”

Ben brought the car to a halt beside the curb. “It’s no problem. When’re you getting your car back from the garage?

“Tomorrow.”

“Want me to walk with you? You live alone, don’t you?”

“Yes. But it’s fine. There’s no point in both of us getting soaked.”

“All right. Listen, when’re you back at work?”

“Friday.”

“Wasn’t there something you wanted to talk about? A patient?”

“Mrs. Chard.”

“Well, seeing as you’re not at work ‘til Friday, why don’t you give me a call later? My wife Vanessa does a Pilates class on Tuesday nights. Or I could come over to your place and discuss it if you prefer. Maybe we could have a drink, you and me.”

“Er…now is not a good time. I’m just getting settled in my new home; too early for visitors.”

“Right. Where was it you moved from again?”

“Aberdeen.”

“That’s a long way away. Got any friends or family here in London?”

“No.”

“You must get lonely.”

“Not really. And I’ll meet people eventually. But listen, Doctor Silverman…”

“I told you, it’s Ben when we’re not at work.”

“Yes, Ben. I’m going home. But maybe I’ll give you a call later. Thanks.”

Kate gathered up her belongings, sprung the door, climbed out of the car, and got her umbrella open as fast as she could. With a quick wave to Ben, she dashed along the street toward the entrance to the park. The car moved slowly as it passed her.

Keep going, Kate thought to the car. Keep going. She liked Ben as a friend and a colleague, and it had been kind of him to offer her a lift, but that—for her—was where it ended. She didn’t like the way he’d said: My wife Vanessa does a Pilates class on Tuesday nights, as if there was some reason his wife needed to be out of the way if she called him at home to discuss a patient.  In the end, the roadblock had been a blessing. She suspected that if Ben had driven her to her door, he’d have expected her to invite him in.

She waved again as the car moved ahead of her and turned a corner.

As she walked across the park, picking her way around puddles and a mush of dead leaves, there was a roll of thunder overhead. The rain came down with renewed force. Her umbrella was proving to be of little use, just as Ben had said. She could feel the squelch of water in her shoes.

She hurried on.

Before she reached the exit on the other side of the park, she stopped—a little alarmed—and glanced behind herself, thinking she heard footsteps following close at her back. For a second she’d thought that it might be Ben, having decided to park up somewhere and chase after her, but there was no one following. In fact, as far as she could see, there was no one else in the park.

“That’s weird. Must’ve imagined it.” She didn’t realize that she had spoken out loud.

She hurried on, but as soon as she began walking she heard the footsteps behind her again. She spun around, but again saw no one. Now she really was alarmed, and she could feel her heart pounding in her chest.

Maybe I’m losing it, she thought. I must be over-tired. I just did two twelve-hour shifts in a row. I need a rest.

She decided she needed to get out of the park immediately. She started to run, and though she again heard the footsteps dashing along behind her, she didn’t stop to look. By the time she got to her own front door, her heart was pounding and she was glancing all around and behind herself in fright. There was no mistaking that she was hearing footsteps, pursuing her the whole way.

Except she couldn’t see anybody following. It was pouring with rain. There wasn’t anyone around.

Her hands shook as she attempted to get the key into the lock on the door. Entering, she closed the door behind herself as soon as she’d gotten through, as if there was somebody behind she wanted to prevent from following her in.

Standing in the hallway, she realized that not only was she shaking, but she was close to tears.

I must be tired. I really must be tired.

Closing her umbrella and shedding her coat, she moved along the hall towards the kitchen–thinking to make a cup of tea to calm her nerves—but after a few paces she stopped and stood still.

Turning her head to the side and listening closely, she lifted one foot and placed it in front of her. From behind there was the sound of a single footstep. Ice flashed through her veins as she lifted her other foot and brought that in line with the first. Behind her, another footstep fell. She felt the skin on the back of her neck tingling, as if a cold breath had touched her there.

Call Ben, she thought. He can’t be far away. Get him back here. See if he can explain what the hell’s going on with me.

Not wanting to move or even turn around, she reached out, grabbed her handbag, then routed inside for her mobile phone. Quickly, she flicked through the saved numbers and found Ben’s mobile.  He’d given it to her a few days ago, insisting she save it into her phone. In case you need to get hold of me in an emergency, he’d said. She dialed, but there was no answer. It just rang and rang, then went to voice mail.

Call me, you said. Yeah, I call you and you don’t answer!

She put down the phone and took a deep breath, deciding that there had to be some rational explanation for what was she was hearing. She went into the kitchen and moved about preparing the tea, with footsteps following behind her all the time. Though the sound chilled her, she decided to try and ignore it. She sat at the counter and drank her tea, looking anxiously about herself.

Then, much to her own surprise, she said aloud: “Is someone there?”

She waited, holding her breath and listening, but there was no response, not even a footfall. She let out her breath. She felt suddenly exhausted. A busy day at the hospital had taken its toll on her, and now this. She wondered if there was a way she could get to the bedroom without walking. In the end she decided just to run there, not listen for any footsteps, close the door and fall down on the bed.

Setting down her cup, she got up from the stool and looked about the room. Then she made a dash for the bedroom. Rapid footsteps followed.

I won’t sleep, she thought. How the hell am I going to sleep?

But as soon as she lay down on the bed, she did sleep.

*****

She woke late the next morning with an immediate sense of dread. She didn’t want to get up from the bed. If she heard footsteps following her again, what then? What did it mean? That she was losing her mind?

Eventually, the urge to use the bathroom became so strong that she had no choice but to get up. Peeling back the duvet, she swung her legs over the side of the bed, not allowing her feet to touch the floor but slipping them into the slippers that were lying there. Then she eased herself into a standing position.

She looked about herself. There were no sounds. She tentatively placed one foot forward.

Immediately, there was another footstep, like an echo of her own, except harder. Her heart sank. She ran to the bathroom, ignoring the flurry of footsteps pursing her. She did what she needed to do then ran back to the bedroom and dived under the duvet. She lay still with the duvet covering her face, feeling her heart’s rapid pulse in her throat.

She cast her mind back to when she had first heard the footsteps. It had been yesterday in the park, when she was walking home in the rain. That was when it had all started. Before that, what? Ben had driven her home. The heavy rain. The roadblock. The suicide.

She sat up, feeling a cold wave pass through her body. She was suddenly sure that what was happening to her had something to do with that suicide. Maybe someone, something, had attached itself to her. But no, that was crazy. She was certain, though, that there was a link.

She had been the only person in the park at that time. She encountered no one on the street after getting out of Ben’s car. If there had been someone—something—around wanting a person with whom to attach itself, there’d been no one in the vicinity—except herself.

Yes, these are crazy thoughts, she thought to herself, but what if it’s true?

She would have to go back to the park. She got up. The sound of the footsteps following her as she moved about the room getting dressed sent chills through her body.

At one point she half turned her head and said aloud, “Why are you following me? What is it you want?”

She paused, waiting for an answer. No answer came; though the silence and the knowledge that those dogged footsteps would be right behind her when she moved was somehow more frightening.

She put on her coat and left the house. She thought she would feel more at ease once she was outside, but the footsteps pursued her along the street. Once or twice she spun her head around, exasperated, expecting to see someone behind her, as if she could catch them out if she looked around fast enough, but there was no one there.

She hurried across the park and continued until she came to the place where the police barricade had been in place the day before. There was no barricade or policemen standing around now.

She moved along the street, looking up at the houses narrow and tall, with little slit windows that she imagined let in very little light. She wondered from which window the suicide had taken place. Then she saw that flowers had been laid on the pavement in front of one of the houses. Stopping by the flowers, she looked up at the house. There were three rows of windows and another window in the slope of the roof. She tried to remember if the policeman had said what exactly had happened.

Out of the corner of her vision then she noticed someone crossing the street. Surprised, she turned nervously and saw a middle-aged woman walking towards her with a bouquet of flowers in her hands. The woman gave Kate an odd look before crouching to lay her bouquet with the others on the pavement. She stood then and stared at Kate for a moment or two, before speaking.

“Did you know Simon?”

“Simon?”

“My nephew. The one who died here yesterday.”

“Oh. Was he your nephew?”

“Yes. Were you friends? Did you know him well?”

“I…not very well.”

“It’s a terrible thing for a young man his age to do. Take his own life. So hard on the family.”

“Yes, of course. It’s very sad.”

The middle-aged woman continued, “Of course, he hadn’t been right for a while. Those drugs the doctor gave him didn’t help at all.”

“Drugs?”

“Didn’t you know, dear?”

“No. I mean…was he taking medication?”

“Yes. He had…delusions, the doctor called them. Paranoia. The doctor thought he might be schizophrenic. They thought…”

“What kind of delusions?” Kate interrupted so bluntly that the woman stared into her face.  “I’m sorry, I mean, what happened? What was wrong?”

“Well, ever since that accident…”

“Accident?”

“Yes. That terrible accident with his car.”

“I…I don’t know what you mean.”

“He hit someone. Ran a kid over. Some teenage boy just ran right out in front of his car.  Killed instantly. Poor Simon never got over the shock. An experience like that can do strange things to the mind. I believe it was quite soon after that the delusions started.”

“The footsteps?” Kate said. “Footsteps following him everywhere he went?”

“Yes, that’s correct…” The woman paused and stared into her face again. “Are you all right, dear? You’ve gone quite pale.”

“Yes,” Kate said in a robotic voice. “Well, no. Not really.” She turned and began to walk away, then stopped. She looked back at the woman. “Can you hear that? Can you hear those footsteps following me?”

The woman blanched. She didn’t answer. She only looked at Kate in apparent outrage.

“I’m not making a sick joke,” Kate said. “I really am being followed.”

The woman stared at her a while longer, then turned and walked away.

*****

Three days later, when Ben saw Kate crossing the hospital staff parking lot towards him, he turned to greet her but then he stopped and the smile fell from his face.

He was stunned for a moment by how different she looked. She seemed to have aged. She was pale, her eyes were shadowed and her dark hair flat and greasy. Her shoulders were hunched. She was not dressed as smartly as usual.

He thought she was behaving oddly. As she closed the gap between them, she darted her head about from side to side, turning to look behind herself and mumbling. She didn’t seem to notice Ben until she was almost upon him. Then she hurried to his side.

“Ben! Ben!”

“Something…something wrong?” he said, though it was clear that something was indeed wrong. Perhaps she’d been on a three-day bender. Or perhaps she was addicted to something, stealing drugs from the pharmacy. That had happened before, with other doctors.

Her dress and appearance were slack and unacceptable for work. He hoped he wasn’t going to have to discipline her. He hated disciplining the female junior doctors, especially the attractive ones. At least in regard to work. He would have been happy to discipline her in other ways. That had happened before too, with other female doctors.

She interrupted his thoughts. “Ben,” she said, “something strange is going on! I don’t understand it.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“Footsteps. I keep hearing footsteps…everywhere I go, everywhere I walk, there are footsteps following me. It’s been like that since Tuesday when you dropped me off.”

Ben stared at her a moment. “Ah…okay, sure.”

“It’s true,” she said. “Listen.” She began walking to and fro in front of Ben. “Hear that?”

“I heard your footsteps.”

“And the others. The ones following me. It’s like I’ve got an invisible stalker, Ben. It’s driving me insane.” She turned, looked over her shoulder and to Ben’s utter amazement shouted:  “Go away! Please, just leave me alone!”

“Um…Kate, there’s no one there, invisible or otherwise.”

She looked at him with pleading eyes. “You have to help me, Ben, I think I’m going mad.”

“Okay,” Ben said, putting an arm around her back. “Let’s get you inside and sit you down with Doctor Cuddon a moment. You do seem a tad stressed. You’re probably over-tired.  Let’s see what Cuddon says. He’s a psychiatrist, so he’ll help if you think you’re going mad.”

As he led her into the hospital, she flinched and looked behind herself a number of times.

Every single year, Ben thought, one of the new intakes cracks under the strain. Shame, I was really hoping to get to know this one better.

The receptionist seated at the main desk looked at them both as they entered and raised one eyebrow. “Doctor Silverman,” she said. “Your wife called.”

“Not now.”

Leaving Kate in the corridor, Ben was relieved to find Doctor Cuddon in his office.

“What do you want, Silverman?” Cuddon flapped the newspaper he’d been reading.

“I met one of the junior doctors on the way in today. Kate Benson. She…”

“Who?”

“Kate Benson. Slim. Dark hair. Attractive.”

“Oh yes?”

“Yes, she doesn’t seem quite herself today. Seems very stressed and anxious. I think you should have a talk with her. She says she can…well, she says she can hear footsteps. She says they follow her everywhere she goes. Says she’s been hearing them for three days.”

Cuddon set down his newspaper and scowled at Ben. “Is this some sort of joke?”

“No, sir.”

“Bring her in. What is she on, what medication?”

“No, sir. Well, I don’t actually know.”

At that moment Ben’s beeper sounded. He took it from his pocket and glanced at it.

“I have to go. Kate’s just out here. I’ll bring her in.”

“You’re going to leave me with her? I need to know who to bill for my time.”

“I’m wanted on ward nine.” Before Cuddon could say anything more, Ben opened the door and turned to Kate who was standing against the corridor wall. He told her, “Speak to Doctor Cuddon. He’ll help you.”

*****

An hour later, Ben was doing his rounds in ward eleven when he noticed a commotion in the street outside. The ward nurses drifted to the window to see what was going on. Ben joined them.

“Looks like someone’s been run over,” one of the nurses said. “Someone must’ve run out in front of an ambulance as it turned into the hospital.”

When the nurse said this, Ben felt a wrench in his stomach. He knew; he just knew. “Oh, Christ,” he said, setting down his clipboard. “Kate.”

He ran out into the corridor. There were people waiting outside the elevators: a group of old people and a porter with a patient in a wheelchair. He went instead to the stairwell and rushed down. By the time he exited the hospital a small crowd was gathered in the ambulance bay. Two paramedics were crouching over a body on the ground.

It was Kate.

She lay unmoving on the ground in front of a parked ambulance. Her head was turned at an unnatural angle. One of the paramedics was holding her arm, feeling for a pulse. Ben caught the man’s eye when he glanced up.

“Well?”

“Nothing,” the paramedic said.

Ben felt a jolt of shock that made him feel sick. “What the hell happened?”

“She was running, not looking where she was going. She was looking back. We were coming in fast. We had a young boy in the back. Head injury.  Losing a lot of blood. We thought she saw us, but then she just ran out in front of us. She looked like she was trying to get away from someone. Like someone was chasing her. There was nothing we could do.”

“Jesus Christ.” Ben closed his eyes tight. He should have listened to her.

As he turned to walk back to the hospital, he heard footsteps behind him.

About Tim Jeffreys

Tim Jeffreys is the author of six collections of short stories, the most recent being From Elsewhere, as well of the first two books of his Thief saga. His short fiction has appeared in various international anthologies and magazines. In his work, he incorporates elements of horror, fantasy, absurdist humor, science-fiction and anything else he wants to toss into the pot to create his own brand of weird fiction.

Originally from Manchester, UK, Tim now lives in the southwest of England where he can be found either working at his day job, taking care of his daughters, haunting libraries, or sitting at his desk writing. Visit him online at www.timjeffreyswriter.webs.com.

FOR SHE IS FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE

Tim Waggoner

I’M DRIVING THROUGH A SUBURBAN NEIGHBORHOOD, windows down, cool air streaming over my face. It’s supposed to get into the eighties today, but it doesn’t feel like it right now. It’s still early yet, though. Plenty of time for it to warm up. I’m heading home after dropping off my daughter for her last day of middle school. I can hardly believe it. It seemed like only yesterday I was walking Lindsey into her kindergarten classroom. Now in a few months she’ll be starting high school. God, I feel so old.

I’m driving faster than I should through the neighborhood. I overslept and didn’t have time to hit the shower before I had to take Lindsey to school, and I need to get home and finish getting ready for work. I’m already going to be late as it is, and I don’t want to waste any more time than I have to. It’s because I’m going so fast and thinking about what excuse I can tell my boss when I get in that I only barely register the girl walking on the sidewalk. It’s not like it’s any great surprise to see someone out this early on a Friday morning. I normally see dog walkers, people jogging or walking, mothers pushing little ones in strollers…

So at first the girl doesn’t register with my conscious mind. But my subconscious must be on the ball, because without thinking about it, I glance at the rearview mirror. The girl is in her early teens, tall for her age, with long strawberry-blond hair. She’s lean-bodied—a good athletic build—and is dressed in a blue-and-red soccer jersey, black shorts, and lime-green flop-flops. The number on the jersey doesn’t register at first, but before I can make it out in the mirror, the road curves, and the girl’s image slides off the glass.

Lindsey.

It’s a ridiculous thought. I just dropped her off, and the school is several miles from here. There’s no way she could’ve gotten here before I did, not even if someone had given her a ride. But the girl looked so much like my daughter. Her height, her clothes, and most of all, that hair. I didn’t get a good look at her face, though, which is weird, considering she’s walking the same direction I’m driving. She was facing me in the mirror. I saw so many other details. How could I miss her face? Feeling more than little stupid, and knowing I don’t really have the time, I pull into a driveway, back out, and start driving back the way I came. I want to see the girl one more time, without a mirror between us. I want to reassure myself that she isn’t Lindsey, somehow transported from her school to the sidewalk.

I drive more slowly now, and I feel like some kind of stalking pedophile. I wonder if anyone is looking out their window right now, taking down my license number in preparation for calling 911.

Yes, there’s a strange man driving slowly up and down the neighborhood. He’s watching a young girl who’s walking on the sidewalk. A pretty thing, wearing shorts that are a little too short, if you know what I mean. I think you should send someone out here right away.

For this reason, I don’t drive too slowly, and when I come around the curve and see the girl again, I only have a few seconds to get a good look at her. But I’m not the only one doing the looking this time. She stares back at me. Then I’m past her and she once again becomes just an image in glass. I saw her face this time, I know I did, but I don’t have a solid impression of it. Sure, she had eyes, nose, ears, mouth, but I don’t have a mental picture of their proportions or arrangement. It’s almost like her face had been blurred, like they do on reality shows when someone in the background of a particular shot won’t sign off on having their image displayed on-screen.

The cool air coming through the window feels clammy now, sticky with light humidity, but it’s not the reason I shiver.

Get ahold of yourself, Greg. It’s just time to see the eye doctor again, that’s all.

During my last exam, the doctor said that I should wear sunglasses as often as possible when I’m outside to protect against macular degeneration. When I got home, I researched the condition on the Internet and discovered that one of the effects is a blurry spot in the middle of your vision, which can result in people’s faces seeming obscured and indistinct. It sounded like a horrible thing, and I’ve heeded the doctor’s advice ever since. In fact, I’m wearing sunglasses now. I can’t decide whether to hope I’m experiencing a symptom of macular degeneration or not. Because if I’m not, then I don’t have any explanation why the girl’s face was unclear. And I don’t know which prospect is more frightening – losing my vision or losing my mind.

I keep driving for several moments as I try to decide what to do next. Okay, for whatever reason, I hadn’t been able to make out her features. But this time I did manage to catch the number emblazoned on her jersey. Thirty-six: Lindsey’s number. Still heading in the opposite direction from the girl—back toward the school, in fact—I pull my phone out of my pants pocket, find the school’s number on my contact list, and make the call. It rings for a while, and I’m about to disconnect and try again when someone finally answers.

“Montrose Middle School,” a woman’s voice says.

I hesitate, unsure how to word what I want to say.

“This is Greg Adams. My daughter Lindsey is a student at your school. I dropped her off not long ago, and I was wondering if you could tell me . . .” I trail off, unable to think of a way to ask the question without coming across as paranoid.

“Yes?”

“Tell me if she’s inside the building.”

As I say this, I realize that I’m sweating, despite the coolness of the morning air. I can feel the first stirrings of panic in my gut, but I try to fight it down by telling myself there’s no way the girl on the sidewalk is Lindsey, no way. I’m just calling to double-check because that’s what any good parent would do in my situation. Right?

“Lind-sey A-dams,” the woman on the other end of the phone says, drawing out the syllables as if the language is foreign to her.

I don’t hear any noise, but I imagine her holding the receiver in the crook of her shoulder as she types on a computer keyboard. After a moment, she says, “Yes, she’s in her advisory right now. Do you want me to have her come down to the office and call you?”

On the surface, the woman seems sympathetic, but there’s an underlying mockery in her tone.

“No, that’s not necessary.” I can’t stop myself from asking the next question. “Are you sure she’s there?”

“Of course,” the woman says, her mocking tone stronger now. “Where else would she be?”

She disconnects before I can say anything else.

So there it is. Lindsey’s safe at school and the girl I saw, blurry face or not, is someone else. Nothing for me to do now but turn around, head home, and get ready for work as fast as I can. Although maybe I’ll take a different route so I won’t have to pass that girl again.

And yet…the girl is dressed like Lindsey, even has the same goddamned number on her jersey. What if the woman at the school made a mistake? Or what if she was too busy—or lazy—to check and just told me Lindsey was there? And aren’t schools supposed to be super security-conscious these days? The school has an intercom outside and you have to call the office on it, state your name and business—all while being checked out on a hidden camera—before they’ll buzz you in. So why would one of the staff give out information over the phone to someone, even if that someone was a parent? Or at least claiming to be a parent. What if it was some kind of trick, a standard reply designed to lure any such caller to the school where a security guard would be waiting to ask some very pointed questions?

And then there was the mocking way the woman spoke, as if she was making fun of me for calling, as if she knew something I didn’t. Bottom line: Just because the woman said Lindsey was in advisory doesn’t necessarily make it so.

I pull into another driveway, back out, and reverse direction once more.

*****

“Whatsit, Daddy?”

Lindsey, squatting on her haunches, points at a ladybug crawling on the kitchen floor. She’s three and “Whatsit” is currently her favorite game. Whenever she sees something she doesn’t know the name for—or sometimes even if she does know the name—she points to it and calls out “Whatsit” in a loud, giggly voice. My part in the game is to make up a silly name for whatever it is that she points out.

I’m standing at the sink rinsing a head of lettuce in a plastic colander, and I turn back to finish the job as I answer.

“It’s a kadoodlebob.”

She shrieks with laughter.

“A kapoodlepop!”

Close enough, I think, and grin.

She’s silent for several moments, and I assume she’s watching the kapoodlepop with fascination. I finish rinsing the lettuce, give it a couple good shakes over the sink, then turn off the faucet and place the colander on a folded-over paper towel on the counter to absorb the water.

“Daddy, can I mush the kapoodlepop?”

Her voice is so sweet, so innocent, that for a moment the question doesn’t fully register with me. When it does, I turn from the sink to see my little girl squatting there, her thumb poised a fraction of an inch above the trundling insect. She presses her thumb down and there’s a moist cracking noise.

“KapoodlePOP!” she says, and giggles.

My stomach turns, and as I try to come up with an appropriate response, Lindsey swivels her thumb back and forth, back and forth, reducing the ladybug’s remains to paste. For an instant—just an instant—her face blurs. But then there she is, my little girl, smiling up at me, still grinding her thumb on the tile.

*****

Lindsey is staying overnight at her cousin’s. I have a whole Friday evening to myself and no idea what to do with it. I should’ve set up a date, but I haven’t been out with a woman for months. Shelia’s been gone for close to eight years now. Even so, I can’t seem to muster any enthusiasm for the dating scene. It’s past eight, and without anything better to do—and to try to distract my mind from thoughts of Sheila and my non-existent love life—I decide to catch up on some household chores I’ve neglected for too long.

I vacuum, I dust, I do a few loads of laundry, and then—because I’m still thinking of Shelia—I decide to wash all the sheets for good measure. I do mine first, and then Lindsey’s. I go into her room, her collection of stuffed animals staring at me with their unblinking eyes from the shelves where they sit, and I pull her SpongeBob sheets off the bed. As I do so, my foot bumps into something under her bed. I’m not surprised. Lindsey’s eleven. She keeps all kinds of stuff under there.

SpongeBob sheets wadded up and stuck under one arm, I bend down and reach out to push whatever-it-is farther under the bed so Lindsey won’t bump into it later. As I touch it, I realize it’s a book. A large one. Curious, I slide it out and into the light. The cover is a plain forest green, and the title is spelled out in gold-foil letters. Deformations. That’s all. No author’s name. Just the title. The book looks old, too. The corners of the cover are dented and the spine’s loose. I’ve never seen this book before, and I have no idea where Lindsey got it. And that title…

I put the sheets down, sit on the floor, and open the book. There is no text, no publication information. Just page after page of photos, some of people, some of animals, some that could be either or a combination of both. All of these photos fulfill the title’s promise in the most grotesque and nauseating manner possible. Malformed features, extra limbs, distorted orifices, mutated genitals…

Each page is more disturbing than the last, and what’s worse, the most shocking pages have been dog-eared for future reference.

I barely make it to the bathroom in time to vomit. When I’ve had some time to collect myself, I return to Lindsey’s room, grab the book without looking at any more photos, and—after grabbing my wallet and keys—I go outside, get in my car, and head for the nearest grocery. I drive behind the building and I throw Deformations into one of their dumpsters. Then I drive around front, park, and go inside to get some beer. A twenty-four pack. I’m going to need it.

There are pictures of Lindsey hanging in the foyer of our house, images from a few hours after she was born up to her current school photo. I call it the Wall of Fame. I leave the foyer light off as I walk through, and all of Lindsey’s faces are nothing but shadowy smudges.

I’m hung over the next day when Aunt Josie brings Lindsey home. I don’t say anything about the book, and Lindsey never asks me about it. From time to time, I catch her looking at me, her gaze dispassionate and calculating, her face…

Her face.

*****

“You’re too young to date.”

“How do you know?”

I’ve got the windows down to let the cool breeze in. I overslept and I’m still not fully awake yet. Her question—like so many of them these days—takes me aback. I’d expect her to come back at me with I am not or Things have changed since you were a teenager. But this? I have no idea how to respond. If she were a boy, would I think differently about the issue? Maybe. I don’t like admitting this, but it’s true.

“Besides,” she continues, saving me from having to answer her question, “it’s not a date-date. Some friends and I want to walk to Savors after school. And it is the last day. It’s special.”

“One of those friends is Blake, isn’t it? The same Blake you text back and forth with all the time?” The boy who told her how much he liked kissing her—and touching her. I know this because I snuck a look at her phone when she was in the shower last night. Touching has so many meanings, none of them good to a father of a fourteen-year-old girl. One text in particular haunts me, a four-word message from Lindsey to Blake.

You make me scream.

She gives me a sideways glance, and I wonder if she suspects that I spied on her. Of course she does, I think. She’s a teenager.

“And they sell alcohol at Savors. I’m not really comfortable with you going there.”

Savors is a small convenience store within walking distance from Lindsey’s school. It has a few tables and chairs that serve as a makeshift café area. Local kids—high school kids, mostly—hang out there after school, drinking soda, eating junk food, and gossiping. Harmless enough, I suppose, but I don’t think my girl is ready for that just yet. I know I’m not.

“Nobody drinks alcohol there, Dad. They buy it to carry out.” Her tone is withering, as if she’s wondering how someone so stupid as I am has managed to live so long.

A thought occurs to me then. I’ve never met this boy.

“How old is Blake?”

Silence.

“Is he in high school?”

More silence, then, “So what if he is? I’ll be in high school in a few months.”

I try to keep my feelings hidden, but my voice shakes a little as I reply. “But you’re not in high school yet. I’m sorry, honey, but I’m going to have to say no on this. Maybe when you’re a little older.”

She crosses her arms over her soccer jersey, covering her number thirty-six. She turns her head and looks out the passenger window. I can see a faint image of her reflection in the glass, but I can’t make out her expression. It’s like there’s a smudge on the glass where her face should be. She mutters something, and although I can’t quite make it out, it sounds like, “You don’t know me.”

*****

It doesn’t take me long to catch up to the girl. She’s still making her way down the sidewalk, although now there’s a swing in her hips. Why isn’t she in school? Did she decide to skip the last day?

I slow down so I don’t pass her, not caring what it might look like to anyone watching from their house. Let them call the damn police if they want. I have to know.

Except for the hip sway, the girl’s body language is similar to Lindsey’s. She walks with the same stride, moves her arms the same way. My parental instincts tell me that she is my daughter, but I’m not sure how to verify it. If she is Lindsey, wouldn’t she have recognized my car, wouldn’t she have noticed me going past her twice already? It’s not as if any other cars have gone by recently. But she’s shown no sign of recognition. Maybe she’s trying to play it cool, hoping that I’ll decide to drive on by. Maybe she’s too wrapped up in her thoughts to pay attention to what’s going on around her. Thoughts of Blake.

You make me scream.

Should I drive up next to her and call her name out the window? It might startle her, but when she turns to look at me, I’ll know. If I can make out her face, that is. Maybe if I could hear her voice? Yeah, a creepy middle-aged man trying to get a teenage girl to talk to him through the open window of his car? Not such a good idea.

If she’s Lindsey, she’s sure to have her phone with her. I could call her, and even if she won’t answer, she’ll at least check to see who it is. I take out my phone to place the call. It rings on the other end, but the girl on the sidewalk doesn’t react. The ringing continues until the call goes to voicemail.

“Hi, this is Lindsey. I’m doing something especially awesome right now or I’d pick up. Leave a message, and I’ll call you back ASAP. Unless you’re my dad, in which case you can fuck right off.”

I’m too stunned to leave a message. I disconnect and drop the phone onto the passenger seat.

This has to end.

I push down on the accelerator and my car jumps forward. I roar past the girl, who turns to watch me go. I still can’t see her face clearly, but I have a plan to fix that. I drive down the street several hundred feet, past the point where it curves, and I park. I turn off the engine, but I leave the keys in the ignition. This shouldn’t take long.

I get out of the car and shut the door behind me with too much force, the metallic ka-chunk loud as a gunshot. The sound makes me wince, but only because of its volume, not because I’m nervous. I step onto the sidewalk and start walking in the girl’s direction. When she comes around the curve and into view, I should be almost on top of her. If she’s Lindsey, I’ll stop and confront her. If she’s not, I’ll walk on past and—to avoid looking any more suspicious than I already do—I’ll keep going for a while before turning around and heading back to my car.

I read somewhere once that when we look at people we spend a lot of time around—family, friends, coworkers—we don’t see them as they are but as we remember them to be. When, for whatever reason, we become fully present in the moment and truly see them, we’re startled. How could they be so different from what we expected? Gray at the temples, wrinkles at the corners of their eyes…

A thousand little details we hadn’t taken notice of before but which now assault us with their alienness. Do I dare truly see my child? Or more to the point, what my child has become?

My blood thrums in my ears, and I feel light-headed and off-balance. I stop and wait, unsure. Moments pass, but the girl doesn’t come around the curve. She’s gone inside one of the houses, I tell myself. Gone home. Unless it was Lindsey, and the house she’s entered is Blake’s. What can I do, though? Knock on every door in the neighborhood to see if Lindsey’s there? And what do I do when no one answers? Walk around the house peering into windows? Break in and search the place? Some questions have no answers. Not ones we’d like, anyway.

I turn around and head back toward my car. In a way, I’m relieved that the matter has been taken out of my hands. Now I can let rationalization go to work. I remind myself that no matter how much that girl resembled Lindsey, even down to the clothes she was wearing, there is no way she could’ve gotten from the school to this street ahead of me. No. Fucking. Way. I grab hold of that thought and clutch it tight, planning to use it as a talisman to ward off the doubts that are sure to come creeping back. Maybe when I get home, I’ll call in sick and then make an appointment with the eye doctor. Maybe I’ll make one with a therapist, too. Just to be on the safe side.

I reach the car, open the door, climb inside and take hold of the key.

“Hello, Daddy.”

I freeze, my hand on the ignition. I force myself to keep looking forward.

“I know you,” I say, the words coming out as little more than exhaled breath.

“No, you don’t.” A pause, and I can hear the smile in her voice. “But you will.”

I can’t help it. I turn to look at her then, and I see. And she makes me scream.

About Tim Waggoner

Tim Waggoner has published over thirty novels, three story collections, and his articles on writing have appeared in many publications. He teaches creative writing at Sinclair Community College and in Seton Hill University’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program. Visit him on the web at www.timwaggoner.com.

RAMPART

Amy Grech

WHEN CHARLES RAMPART LOOKED UP from his book and squinted through glasses as thick as slices of bread, he swore the vase in the far corner of his study had moved suddenly. It had been knocked askewnot tipped or broken but had definitely shifted slightly at the exact moment he felt a sudden jolt as the walls crept forward.

His noble castle creaked and moaned.

A fire flickered lazily in the fireplace to his right, creating strange shadows that seemed to sway. Charles cowered in the wavering light, startled and dreading the inevitable. He shut his book and set it down quickly on the end table by his side. Reluctantly, he rose from his comfortable, red leather chair and shuffled over to the delicate vase resting on the middle of the polished cherry table near the entranceway. After considerable effort, he managed to lift it for a closer look. Nothing out of the ordinary explained the shift. He returned the vase to its proper place and cried.

He became aware of these subtle shifts gradually, obvious only to a keen observer. He watched and waited hoping his overactive imagination simply played tricks on him. As days turned into weeks, the bizarre phenomenon became impossible to deny. He wanted to tell his beloved wife, but dreaded doing so because he knew she would reason her way out of what she considered his delusional paranoia.

Susan tiptoed into his study and stopped short at the sight of him weeping openly. “Charles, what's got you so upset?”

He shook his head vigorously. “Do you see that vase over there?”

“Of course I do.” She laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “What about it?”

He balled his unsteady hands into fists. “It just moved. I watched it happen!”

Susan rolled her eyes. “Don’t be foolish. It’s impossible to see anything in this dim light, let alone the vase on the other side of the room.” She extinguished the fire. “You look exhausted. Your eyes must be playing tricks. That happens sometimes when you’re tired.”

“I know what I saw!” He looked around, desperately searching for an explanation.

He seemed dazed, and Susan went on, “Come to bed. Everything will look better in the morning. I promise,” she said to coax him upstairs. He followed her, but stared at the floor, unable to bear the dreadful sight of the walls closing in.

Susan frowned. “What’s wrong now?” She took his hand and held it tight.

Charles worked up the nerve to take a quick look around. His voice matched his shaky movements. “I do believe my castle is trying to destroy me, little by little...”

Susan raised her eyebrows.

He pointed to the vase. “Look, that vase isn’t even with the door. It was this afternoon. Explain that!”

“There’s nothing to explain. That vase hasn’t moved in years. You probably kicked the table by mistake, and that’s why it doesn’t look right. Accidents happen.”

She kissed him, tucked him in, and got into her side of the bed.

*****

The next morning, Charles woke early and felt well enough to venture downstairs alone to the kitchen. Not wanting to wake Geoff, the butler, he prepared a feast for Susan and himself of scrambled eggs, bacon, French toast, orange juice, and coffee. Charles placed everything on an enormous tray and set it down gently on the dining room table, trying hard not to look at the walls along the way.

Much to his dismay, they had shifted a bit. He noticed a slight difference; early in the morning, the picture of Susan at the far end of the room was even with the china cabinet, but now it seemed much closer to the dining room table. Too close. He shook his head and shut his eyes. A minute later he opened them, alarmed to find the picture closer still.

Terrified, he rushed upstairs to get his wife. She had just finished dressing and met him in the hallway.

“What’s wrong now?” Susan took him by the hand and led him downstairs afraid he might trip and tumble down headfirst in such an agitated state.

“The walls moved right in front of me!” Like a frightened child, Charles cringed, wide-eyed. “Come see for yourself.”

She sighed, tired of these episodes. “Show me where.”

“In the dining room.” He led her to the scene. “Your picture doesn’t line up with the china cabinet anymore.”

Susan examined the china cabinet. “Well, this is odd. Are you sure Geoff didn’t move it?”

“Let’s ask him.” Charles yanked the golden rope and waited.

Moments later, Geoff appeared, distinguished as ever in his morning suit. “Can I help you, sir?”

“Geoff, did you clean the dining room yesterday?” Charles cocked his head, anxious for tangible evidence.

“Yes, as I do every day. Did I do an unsatisfactory job?”

Susan smiled and spoke before her husband could answer. “Not at all. But I do have one question: did you forget to put the china cabinet back where it belonged?”

“No, I didn’t move the cabinet. It’s much too heavy for one man to move single-handedly. I call in part-time movers every six weeks to help me clean behind such furniture.” Geoff scratched his head, quite puzzled. “If you ask me, it looks perfectly fine where it is.”

Charles straightened up, his face going red. “I’m telling you that cabinet moved. I watched it happen!”

“Calm down, Charles,” Susan said. “There’s no need to panic. There must be a logical explanation.” She went over to the offending wall and leaned, willing it to move; nothing happened. “See, this wall is as solid as the stones it was built with.”

Charles scanned the room frantically in desperation. He shuffled over to the troublesome wall and caressed the cold stone with rough fingers. Then he looked at his wife with a heavy face. “I’ll have you know that something awful went into the building of this castle.”

His wife peered at him. “Charles, I think you should sit down before you fall down.”

Geoff helped him over to the table. Susan sat next to her distraught husband and held his hand.

Charles took a long drink of orange juice. “I want you to understand what I’ve done, to help put things into perspective. I want you to know why my castle wants to kill me.”

She gave his hand a little squeeze. “Go on, tell me. I’d give anything to know what’s going on here.”

“Well, you know that I had this castle built, stone by stone.”

His wife nodded. “Yes, dear, that was thirty years ago. What’s your point?"

Geoff shook his head, “Perhaps I should take my leave.”

“No, stay,” Charles said and then cleared his throat. “I took great pains to create an authentic atmosphere worthy of royalty. I had these stones imported from England, back where our ancestors came from. Little did I know that most of them, especially the ones on the second floor, were actually headstones filched from local graveyards, stolen from their rightful owners, the dead. I was not there to oversee the unearthing. I only found out after the fact. By then, this castle was already built.”

Silence filled the room.

Charles continued, “I now believe that the walls are being moved by the headstones’ former owners.”

Susan scoffed. “Ghosts? That’s ridiculous! Even if, oh, even if!  Why would they wait so long to seek revenge?”

Geoff shrugged. “Everyone’s patience has its limits, even the dearly departed.”

Susan glared at the butler. “Don’t encourage his delusions!” She helped Charles to his feet.

He made his way over to the other end of the room and pointed to a stone that had been hidden behind the china cabinet. “And the dead know who I am. I didn’t notice this until much later. Come over here and I’ll show you what I mean.”

Susan and Geoff followed close behind.

He paused in front of a flat stone with these words etched upon it, scarcely legible but unmistakably there: HERE LIES RICHARD RAMPART 1856 – 1916.

“Your grandfather?” Susan gasped.

“They’re coming for me!” Charles clutched his chest and collapsed.

Susan screamed.

The butler dialed 911.

An ambulance arrived minutes later. The paramedics let her ride in the back with her husband. When they arrived at the hospital, the prognosis was encouraging. Dr. Fox told Susan that Charles had suffered a mild heart attack and would have to be kept overnight for observation. Sedated, he slept soundly. She stayed by his side until the doctor discharged him the following morning.

*****

“Are you feeling better, sir?” Geoff greeted them at the front door when the silver Rolls Royce pulled up.

“Quite.” Charles said.

Susan pulled Geoff aside to whisper in his ear. “Dr. Fox said he needs plenty of bed rest and no more nasty surprises.”

The butler nodded. “Understood.”

She tried to take her husband’s hand while Geoff prepared lunch. But Charles shook her off, and wandered the hallway, checking the stones for inscriptions. Finding one that was illegible but slightly visible, he flinched. “The walls have moved again! I just saw it happen with my own eyes!”

Susan and the butler hurried to his voice.

Charles looked at them. “I felt the tremors.” He touched the stone, observing its roughness and permanence of the letters carved upon it.

Geoff cleared his throat. “Mr. Rampart, frightening though they are, I’m sure we’ve experienced an earthquake, and nothing more. This is California, after all. Just a mild quake, at that. Nothing to worry over.”

Susan tightened her grip on her husband’s arm. “You’re still delirious, Charles. Come with me; you need your rest.”

She led him into the bedroom, took off his shoes, and helped him into bed.

He struggled to sit up. “Susan, I’m hungry. Where’s my lunch?”

“I’ll ring Geoff and have him bring it to you right away.”

Moments later, the butler appeared with a tray of cucumber sandwiches and two glasses of lemonade. “Lunch is served.”

Geoff bowed and left the room.

Charles devoured half of the sandwiches in record time.

“You must be feeling better.” Susan helped herself to a sandwich before Charles polished them off. “I see your appetite is back. That’s a good sign.”

He shook his head. “I won’t rest until I’m certain the walls have stopped moving.”

She frowned. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

He pulled the covers up to his chin. “Don’t be too sure.”

*****

Charles lay in his bedroom, alone. He felt the walls advancing on him, he’d seen them advancing all along, but he had no idea how to make them stop.

He took his glasses off and set them down carefully on the nightstand. Then he shut his eyes and drifted off into a troubled sleep. He dreamed he was reading in his study again when the walls suddenly rushed at him from all sides. It happened so fast that he couldn’t get out of his chair before being sandwiched between them with no hope of escape.

He awoke with a start and squinted, until he realized he wasn’t wearing his glasses. When Charles put them on, he realized that all four walls in the bedroom actually had closed in silently while he slept. Frantic, he struggled to get up, but stopped after a few seconds. With the bed crushed between the walls, he couldn’t budge.

He strained to yank the golden rope dangling next to the bed until he heard Geoff and Susan rush upstairs to his aid. He clutched the bedcovers in trembling hands.

When Susan jiggled the doorknob; the door didn’t budge. “Honey, open the door.”

He screamed, “I’m trapped!”

“What? Open the door!”

“Help me before I’m crushed!”

They threw their weight against the door in a futile attempt to break it down. The wood didn’t even splinter.

Charles could hear Geoff’s voice. “I’ll fetch a crowbar!”

It seemed Geoff was gone for an eternity. Charles lay helplessly, pinned by the walls, desperately hoping nothing would move. He felt hope when the butler returned and he could hear the man prying at the door.

Suddenly there was a loud rumble overhead that sounded like thunder. Charles could hear the butler dropping the crowbar; it clattered and slipped between the cracks of a rapidly growing fissure in the cold, flagstone floor beneath him.

Charles heard Susan’s voice from the other side of the door. “Are you still there, honey?”

He shrieked in reply.

*****

The rumbling ceased, the lights flickered, but thankfully stayed on, offering some comfort. Outside the bedroom door, Geoff frowned and turned to Susan. “It sounds like Charles was right after all.”

Susan opened her mouth to answer, but was cut short by a headstone that landed smack-dab on top of her.

Geoff staggered backward as the castle crumbled around him like row after row of flagstone dominoes; far too many to count. A hailstorm of headstones landed this way and that. The final blow knocked Geoff to the floor. His death was delivered swiftly by a headstone which read: HERE LIES RICHARD RAMPART 1856 – 1916.

About Amy Grech

Amy Grech has sold over one hundred stories and three poems to various anthologies and magazines including: Apex Magazine, Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled, Fear on Demand, eFiction Magazine, Funeral Party 2, Inhuman Magazine, Needle Magazine, Space & Time, The Uninvited Magazine, Under the Bed, and many others. Damnation Books published her second collection, Blanket of White.

She has a story forthcoming in Expiration Date. Amy is an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association who lives in Brooklyn. Visit her website: www.crimsonscreams.com or follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/amy_grech.

SOMNIPHOBIA

P.D. Cacek

IT’D BEEN TESS’ SUNDAY TO PICK THE DAY’S ACTIVITY and although it wasn’t something he probably wouldn’t have even thought of, Jim Ferguson had to admit it’d been a good day.

Of course, antique shopping wasn’t anything like sitting through a triple feature Zombie movie marathon or smacking balls in a batting cage, but he had to admit he sort of, kind of, maybe enjoyed himself.

A little.

The Designated Sundays Rule had begun halfway through their third year as husband and wife. He’d just started his first real post-doc job at a top-rated pharmaceutical company while she plugged away at a call center by day and studied for her real estate license by night.

During the week, they saw each other at dinner, in bed, and, after a quick kiss in the morning, parted company to shower (separately), dress, and grab whatever breakfast protein bar was handy before heading out for another stress-filled day.

On weekends, instead of resting, relaxing and reconnecting, Jim found things to keep him occupied while Tess studied.  It’d become habit, being together but apart, until one unseasonably hot Sunday morning when Tess walked into the downstairs powder room where Jim was trying masterfully to replace a faucet washer, and claimed the day.

“This is my Sunday,” she’d said, “and we’re going to the lake.”

“Lake? What lake?”

“It’s only an hour away,” she’d said, handing him a printout with a map and directions. “I’ll go pack a picnic lunch.”

The lake was actually a man-made reservoir, but it was tree lined and quiet and offered all the amenities—snack bar, picnic area, boat rentals and hiking trails. Splurging on a two-hour kayak rental, they had paddled to a small semi-secluded beach near the southern-most tip and, beneath the creaking limbs of a centuries old sycamore tree, ate lunch.

That night they’d made love for the first time in weeks.

The next Sunday, Tess said, was his.  A tradition was born.

Eight years and still going strong—one Sunday at a time.

Tess muttered from the passenger seat and Jim took his eyes off the winding, autumn-bright road just long enough to mentally blow her a kiss. She was stretched out with the seat all the way back, asleep, done in from a day spent going from one “Ye Olde Antique Shoppe” to another in the old hard rock mining town turned antique mecca.

And all she had to show for it was a set of wind chimes made from tarnished spoons and crib blanket she planned to turn into a bed pillow (after she’d had it sterilized).

Jim smiled and returned most of his attention to the road, but kept a tiny part in reserve to go over the list he’d been working on for his Sunday. There was an RV show, a Rod and Custom Car show, another movie marathon at their local “Art House” theater, this one classic 1950’s SF  and a—

Suddenly he heard her scream, “NO!”

Jim swerved the car into the empty oncoming lane when Tess screamed and tried to sit up—the seatbelt catching halfway up and jerking her to an abrupt stop. Trembling from the rush of adrenaline, Jim pulled the car back into his lane at the same time that he tapped the brakes and reached for his wife.

“What’s wrong?”

She took a deep breath and giggled. “Sorry.”

Sorry? Jim took his own deep breath and felt his pulse slow back to normal. “What happened?”

Jim kept his eyes on the road ahead but saw her shrug in his peripheral vision as she readjusted her seat to its fully upright position.

“I dunno. I guess I had a nightmare or daymare or something.” She shrugged again. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay.” Except that you scared the hell out of me, and if there’d been a car coming the other way we’d be dead right now. “Want to talk about it?”

“It…” He heard her shift in her seat. “It was just sort of…Nope, it’s gone.”

“Well, good.” Jim reached over and gave her leg a little squeeze. “We’re still about thirty-five minutes from home. Why don’t you lie back down?”

“No!” She said it too quickly but then laughed. “Thanks, I think I’ve had enough sleep. You want me to take over and drive the rest of the way?”

He was thinking about it and she knew that. That was one of the many things he loved and hated about her…after eleven years together, she consistently knew what he was thinking and how he felt when he never had the smallest clue.

It just didn’t seem fair.

“Come on.” She patted the hand still on her knee. “Really, I’m wide awake and I’m restless. Driving will do me good. And besides, this is my Sunday, remember? My choice, my rules. Pull over when you can, and I’ll drive us home.”

Jim hunched his shoulders up toward his ears and thrust his head forward. “Yes ma’am! Whatever you say, ma’am! Will do, ma’am!”

But it still took another quarter of a mile before he was able to turn into scenic turnout and cut the engine. The late afternoon view from the ridge was spectacular. The autumn colors flamed above the lengthening shadows as the mist was just beginning to rise and move among the trees like displaced ghosts.

“Don’t you want to stretch your legs?” he asked when she slid into the driver’s seat and slammed the door. The engine rumbled to life a moment later.

“I just want to get home, okay? It’s getting dark and I…Come on, hop in. Chop, chop.”

“Choppin’, boss,” Jim said and hopped in. He’d decided not to mention there was still a good hour of daylight left, because there had been something in her voice, a tightness that hadn’t been there earlier.

And shouldn’t have been there now.

*****

They were out on the open ocean in a small sailboat while a storm raged around them. Jim fought the wheel to keep them facing into the wind. If he gave up, if the wheel broke free from his grip, the boat would founder.

A giant wave crashed over the bow, and he fell to the deck, the wheel slipping from his grip. As the water covered him, something struck his leg hard enough to

…wake him up when Tess screamed.

Their bedroom was tinted blue in the faint predawn light—5:14 on the digital bedside clock—and Tess was having a nightmare.

Flat on her back, eyes squeezed shut, she mumbled words that never quite made it past her lips, kicking and flailing at the empty air above her.

She was having one hell of a nightmare.

Careful not to get within striking distance, Jim reached out and gently shook her shoulder.

“Tess? Wake up, hon. You’re having a nightmare. Tess?”

“Na-na-na…”

He shook her a little harder. “Come on, Tess. Wake up.”

“Na-no!” She sat up, eyes wide, arms outstretched, fingers spread as if she were pushing something large and heavy off her. “Jim!”

Jim sat up and pulled her into a hug. “Right here, babe…I’m right here.”

She struggled, still fighting until she blinked and took a long, ragged breath. “J-Jim?”

“You were having a nightmare, kiddo.”

“Another one.”

“A real doozy by the look of it.”

She nodded and took another deep breath. Her heart was pounding so hard Jim could feel it through his own skin. He pulled the blankets up around them and felt her tremble.

“Sorry I woke you up.”

“No harm done,” he said, “except maybe to my shin. You kick like a mule, sweetie.”

“Oh my God, I kicked you?”

“Hey, you were asleep and…”

“Oh God, I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

There was a frantic tone to her voice that Jim had never heard before. “Hey, you were asleep. Okay?”

She nodded.

“Want to talk about it?” he asked. The light had brightened and he could see her more clearly: short hair a tangle, dark eyes too wide, face too pale. “Tess?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know…I can’t remember.”

“Well, that’s probably just as well, right?” He glanced at the clock again—5:16 (yawn)—then leaned back to reach around behind her and turn off the alarm. They still had almost twenty-five minutes before they had to get up, but he was wide awake and knew he was going to stay that way. “Look, why don’t you try and grab a little more shut-eye? I’ll start the coffee and wake you up after I take a shower.  How’s that?”

“Really?” she asked but was already settling back against the mattress. “I mean, I woke you up…”

“Yes you did. Just don’t make it a habit.”

Kissing her forehead, Jim vaulted over her—to the sound of her giggles—instead of getting out on his side of the bed and tucked her in. Her eyes were closed by the time he pulled on his robe and reached the bedroom door.

She looked so peaceful.

But it didn’t last.

“Tess?”

She was in the office/guest room, wrapped in an afghan and curled into the corner of the sofa bed that was illuminated by the reading lamp. A book sat on the cushion next to her.

She rubbed her eyes as he stepped into the room, and his own eyes stung in sympathy.

“Hi,” she said, whispering because that’s what you did at 3:17  in the morning when you lived in the middle of a condo complex. “What are you doing up?”

“What am I…?”

He hadn’t been worried when he woke up to use the bathroom and found her gone. They’d had wine with dinner, and that usually meant at least one trip to use the facilities sometime during the night for both of them. He also didn’t wonder why she hadn’t used the master bath in their room. Less than fully conscious, Jim had emptied his bladder, returned to their bed and waited for her to crawl back in beside him.

And waited.

And fell asleep.

And woke up two hours later to discover she still wasn’t there.

“What are you doing down here?”

Worming her arm out of the afghan, Tess tapped the book. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

That made enough sense. Jim nodded and held out his hand. “Okay, let’s go back to bed.”

She shook her head. “You go on. I’m not sleepy.”

His hand dropped. “You feel okay?”

“Yeah…just not sleepy yet. Go on, really. I’ll…be up in a little while.”

“Sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. Go to bed.” Tess curled up and opened the book, holding it out like a barrier between them.

It was too late…or too early to start any in-depth discussion, so Jim let it go.

But she never came to bed. He found her prowling the downstairs when he got up for work.

He stood at the bottom of the staircase and watched her move slowly through the early morning shadows. A hunched figure trailing the afghan behind her, Tess dragged her feet against the carpet as if she didn’t have the strength to pick them up…and maybe she didn’t.

She looked like hell.

“Okay, what’s going on?”

Gasping, Tess took a step back and stumbled over the afghan.

“What?”

“What do you mean ‘what’? Close your eyes, I’m going to turn on the light.”

“No, don’t…I’m—it’s okay, it’s…the sun’s coming up.” Letting the afghan fall from her shoulders, she gave him a big fake smile and headed for the kitchen. “I’ll go make coffee, okay? You go take your shower. You want toast, too? I’ll make some toast. With some of that jelly we bought.”

She was filling the coffee pot when he stepped up behind her and touched her shoulder—telling himself that the shudder he’d felt beneath his hand was because it was chilly in the kitchen and she was only wearing a nightgown.

“Tess? What’s going on?”

The shoulder shrugged against his palm. “Nothing.”

“Come on, tell me,” he pleaded and felt the breath catch in his throat when she turned and revealed the tears cascading down her cheeks. She began sobbing as soon as he pulled her into his arms. “Oh baby, what is it? What’s the matter?”

“I—I can’t sleep!”

Relief made him sag against the counter. Was that all? God, he thought it was something serious.

“It’s okay,” he said, patting her back, “everyone has trouble sleeping sometimes, you know that. Maybe you’re just coming down with a bug.”

“M-maybe.” Her voice still sounded thick, but at least she stopped crying.

“Look, why don’t you call in sick today and just stay home and try to re—?”

The air whooshed out of Jim when she pushed him away. “Rest? Weren’t you listening?  Didn’t you hear me? I can’t rest! If I rest, I’ll fall asleep, and I can’t sleep!”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Tess shook her head, “I have nightmares.”

“Okay. Think you should call the doctor and—”

“No! I mean, that’s silly, right? Maybe it was the wine or…Look, just go take your shower so I can take mine. I just need to get the day started, I’ll be okay.”

Jim kissed her forehead and nodded. “Got’cha. Okay, I promise to leave you some hot water.”

He hoped the sound she’d made when he left the kitchen had been a chuckle.

*****

The morning meeting had gone longer than planned and when Jim got back to his office, the message was waiting for him on his cell.

“This is Jefferson Memorial Hospital calling with a message for James Ferguson. Your wife, Tess, was brought to Jefferson this morning in a highly agitated state complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath. She was immediately admitted to the E.R. and placed under my care. Would you please contact the hospital at your earliest convenience? The number is—”

The only call Jim made was to his supervisor telling her was taking the rest of the day off.

*****

“Mr. Ferguson?”

The vending machine cup slipped from his hand as he stood up, spattering a dark brown Rorschach test onto the “Family Waiting Area’s” beige carpet. Both Jim and the middle-aged man in a white lab coat looked down at the stain—Jim thought it looked like fireworks—before meeting each other’s eyes.

“Don’t worry about it,” the man said. “Everything here is stain resistant. I’m Dr. Nelson.”

“How is she? The message said she was having chest pains. Oh, God, when she said she wasn’t sleeping, I said she might be coming down with something but...not this. Jesus, was it her heart?”

“Her heart is fine. But you said she hasn’t been sleeping? How long has this been going on?”

Jim stopped listening after the doctor said Tess’ heart was fine and crumpled back onto the chair a second before his legs gave out.

“Thank God. What? Oh, only last night, but she had a nightmare the night before…” He allowed himself one more deep breath. “What happened?”

The doctor took the chair next to him. “Your wife had a panic attack, Mr. Ferguson, a pretty bad one.”

“A panic attack? Was that all?”

The doctor cleared his throat. “Panic attacks can be devastating to the person going through it.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m sorry. Can I go see her now?” Jim started to get up when the doctor motioned him back.

“In a moment. You say your wife’s been having nightmares?”

“Yeah, just the last couple of days.”

Dr. Nelson stared at him. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Did your wife suffer a fall? Experience some sort of emotional trauma right before she began experiencing these nightmares?”

“No.”

“Nothing out of the ordinary happened? You two didn’t have some sort of argument that might have gotten out of hand, did you?”

Jim didn’t like the implications of that last question.

“No, nothing happened. Why are you asking me this? Tess just had a couple of nightmares, that’s all. People do. Was that why she had the panic attack?”

“Possibly. From the information the EMTs got from her coworkers, your wife had apparently fallen asleep at her desk and woke up experiencing what she thought was a heart attack.”

The air around Jim, already cool, seemed to go frigid. “But it wasn’t her heart. You said it was only a panic attack.”

“Yes, but I’m afraid it’s more than just that, Mr. Ferguson. You wife is exhausted, emotionally and physically, and is presenting evidence that would indicate she’s been suffering from chronic insomnia for much longer than a couple of days.”

Jim shook his head because that was the only part of his body he could still feel.

“But she was okay this morning…well, not okay like she usually is, but that was just because she didn’t sleep last night and—” His mouth kept moving, but he’d run of out words.

“Mr. Ferguson, the attending ER physician called me to give a psychological evaluation of your wife.”

“Psychologic—she’s not crazy.”

“I didn’t say she was, but for some reason, Mr. Ferguson, your wife is experiencing a sudden and acute case of somniphobia…fear of sleep.”

Jim couldn’t help himself. It sounded so stupid he laughed. “Fear of sleep? No, not Tess. No one loves sleep more than Tess. I mean she’s a bit of a night owl sometimes, but I usually have to drag her out of bed in the mornings.”

The doctor reached out and touched Jim’s arm, and the laughter stopped.

“I know this is a difficult thing to accept. What you have to understand is that somniphobia is a symptom of an anxiety disorder, not a mental disorder.  Obviously something triggered this, and what we have to do right now is reduce your wife’s anxiety. I’ll give you the names of some local trauma therapists and psychiatrists before you leave.”

The air temperature dropped again.

“I don’t understand. What happened? She was okay a few days ago…I mean, really, she was.”

“I know. She told me exactly the same thing when I talked to her; but as I mentioned earlier, her present physical and emotional condition seems more appropriate for someone who hasn’t slept in weeks. Your wife seems on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I suggested she might consider taking a non-prescription sleep aid, but…” The doctor exhaled slowly. “The thought of being forced to go to sleep produced another panic attack.”

Jesus Christ. “Is there anything I can do to help her?”

“Take her home, stay with her and try to make her feel safe. Tell her you’ll stay awake and watch over her all night. People suffering from somniphobia feel they lose control when they’re asleep and anything can happen to them. If she feels safe she might be able to sleep, and while I’m not saying it will cure her, it would certainly help.”

“That’s all I have to do? Just get her to sleep?”

A chime sounded from the doctor’s pocket.

“Sorry.” Standing, he retrieved his cell phone and read the text message. “I have to go, but I’ll make sure you get that list of therapists before you leave.”

He offered Jim his hand and Jim stood to take it. “Good luck, but try to force her to sleep, just let her know you’re there to protect her. I’ll have a nurse escort you to your wife’s room.”

“But she’ll be okay, right?”

“In time,” the doctor said. “Don’t worry. Most people don’t die from lack of sleep.”

*****

Jim watched her get more and more nervous as the afternoon shadows grew longer. By the time it was dark, Tess was wandering the house as she had that morning; but now she’d turned every light on as if that would somehow hold back the night.

It tore him apart to watch her.

At six, Jim ordered in Chinese Take Out and Tess picked at it as she made her rounds.

At eight, he turned on her favorite program, and she watched standing up, shifting from foot to foot.

At nine, she started to cry, sobbing, “I’m sorry…I don’t know what happening to me. I’m so sorry…” as he held her.

At midnight, he fell asleep on the couch.

At two am, he woke to the sound of shattering glass.

Tess was standing directly opposite him, the front of her jeans soaked, shards of a water glass littering the coffee table between them.

“I fell asleep!” she shrieked. “I got some water and came back and…I fell asleep standing up! Oh God, Jim, don’t let me go to sleep!”

Glass crunching under the heels of his shoes, Jim pulled her to him and, carefully, began walking her toward the stairs.

“Where are you taking me? I don’t want to go to bed! Jim—don’t make me go to bed…I’ll fall asleep!”

“Shh, it’s okay,” he lied because it wasn’t. “I’m just helping you upstairs so you can change. Maybe if you just lay your head down…”

“No! I don’t want to sleep, I told you I don’t want to sleep, I don’t—”

She sounded like a frightened little girl.

“I didn’t mean that!” he lied. “You don’t have to go to sleep. I promise—and I’ll stay awake and make sure you don’t fall asleep, okay? But I think we should just lie down, okay? Just lie down.”

She pulled in a wet, ragged breath. “Okay. And you’ll stay awake? You won’t let me fall asleep?”

Jim crossed his heart. You’ll forgive me, I know you will. “Now, you go change. I’ll get you some water. You must be thirsty.”

He knew, considering how tired she was that half a Sominex would have been more than enough, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. Crushing the small pill, Jim scooped the powder into the plastic mouthwash tumbler and filled it halfway with water.  He’d get her more if she wanted it, but he had to make sure she swallowed the dissolved pill first.

Tess was in her sweats, sitting on the edge of the bed swaying slightly as she pulled on a pair of socks.  She could barely keep her eyes open.

Good.

“Here ya go,” he said and handed her the tumbler. Her hand was shaking, but she downed it in one continuous swallow…and wrinkled her nose.

“Ugh…didn’t you rinse it out first?”

Jim made a “oops” face and took back the glass. “Sorry. Would you like some more? I’ll rinse it this time.”

Tess nodded and yawned—without panic, without fear or pleading for him to keep her awake…there was just peace and stillness.

She was already asleep when he came back into the room, crumpled across the foot of their bed like a forgotten doll.

Jim set the tumbler down on the end table, then moved her to her side of the bed. Kissing her forehead, he pulled the blanket over her and turned off the lights. She muttered softly when he climbed in next to her, but she didn’t wake up and that’s all that mattered.

“You’ll feel better in the morning,” he whispered and felt himself drift….

And they came at him from the darkness behind his eyes…

…you took her away…

…she was fun…

…so much fun…

…but we have you now…

Shadows… shapes without form…a teeming, slithering cloud of teeth and eyes and claws that tore at him…laughing…tearing …whispering…we’re here…come play…fear…filling him…

“No.”

…go to sleep…

…sleep…

…go to sleep and let us in…

“NO!”

Jim woke up panting, his heart racing. Next to him, Tess mumbled sleepily and rolled over, away from him.

…only a nightmare…it was only a nightmare… only a….

About P.D. Cacek

The winner of both a Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Award, P.D. Cacek has written over a hundred short stories, six plays, and five published novels. Her most recent novel, Visitation Rites, is available from Amazon.

Her work has appeared in Cemetery Dance Magazine, 999, Joe Lansdale’s Lords of the Razor, Night Visions 12, Inferno, Women of the Night, Masques V, Shelf-Life, Full Moon City, Postsctipst 10 and the inaugural YA anthology of horror fiction from Scholastic Books, 666:The Sign of the Beast.

Cacek holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English/Creative Writing Option from the University of California at Long Beach and has been a guest lecturer at the Odyssey Writing Camp.

A native Westerner, Cacek now lives Phoenixville, Pennsylvania…home of Blobfest, and only a short walk away from The Colonial Theater where the famous “Run Screaming from Theater” scene was filmed for The Blob.

When not writing, she can often been found either with a group of costumed storytellers called The Patient Creatures (www.creatureseast.com), or haunting local cemeteries looking for inspiration.

FUNERAL MEATS

Kristen Houghton

I HAVE ALWAYS FELT VERY COMFORTABLE AT FUNERALS. That statement may seem strange to some people; God knows the people at the newspaper where I work thought it strange. But then they didn’t spend their childhood in Castle Bluff. I grew up where death is celebrated in a strange way. People in this part of the country have strongly-held traditions concerning death.

One of these traditions is the way the wakes were conducted in the country town where I had grown up. There were no funeral homes; people adhered to the old practice of what they called a “house wake.” If anyone in the town died, their un-embalmed body was placed on bags of ice in a casket in the very house where they had once lived. The room where they were on display was quaintly called the parlor. The “house wakes” were well attended. For a child who was brought up this way, having a dead body in the house was as normal as apple pie.

For three days the deceased lay in the house with visitors coming to pay their respects. Mourners sat on old chairs in the darkened parlor staring at the corpse and talking in whispers as if the dead should not be disturbed. Death was revered.

But there was more to the wakes than just a dead body lying on ice in the parlor; the wakes were a time for good eating. Everyday meals were meager. The food at wakes made for times of feasting.

Those sitting in the parlor could smell the strong aroma of stews and roasts simmering in huge pots in the kitchen and they would start to squirm in their seats and actually begin to salivate. That aroma of good food and death became forever linked in my young mind.

A woman who was known as a cum coquit super mortuo would be called to cook for the bereaved who came to pay their last respects.

My mama was one of these women and was always in great demand at these wakes. She was the best cook in the whole county and people came any time, day or night, to tell her she was needed to prepare the feasts for the wakes.

Mama traveled from one wake to another with her large cooking pots and special herbs and spices. Her delicious rich meat stews served during the wakes were legendary. Everyone, including me, loved my Mama’s cooking.

The tradition was that the daughter of a cum coquit super mortuo would be given all her mother’s recipes when she turned eighteen. During a special ceremony, the daughter was taught how to properly prepare the food for the feasts.

The wakes followed a set pattern. After sitting in near silence and hushed whispers for hours in the parlor, visitors were invited to share with the family members what were traditionally called the “funeral meats” in the dining room. Since nothing separated the dining room from the parlor but an open doorway, those in attendance, dined heartily on the funeral meats in full view of the corpse. Somewhere in the middle of the meal, men and women would turn, as if on cue, towards the casket with raised glasses and murmur, “Delicious meats, delicious meats.”

Mama said that they were honoring the dead person whose death had made the meal possible.

*****

I stopped my car and looked at the front wrap-around porch on the large clapboard affair of my family home. It was cozy and comfortable with a huge yard and herb garden perched on the very edge of the town of Castle Bluff. Our home was far away from the larger towns and from people my mother called “outsiders.”  It had been in my family since before the Civil War and was truly from another time.

I sighed as I got out of the car. I had come home for the wake of my grandmother, my beloved NeeNee. The funeral meats would be in her honor this time.

I hadn’t wanted to come home at all that autumn. I was finally feeling comfortable in my position at the newspaper in New York City where I had gone to work. Going home would be going backwards and I wanted to keep going forward with my life.

I hadn’t always felt this way. There was a time when Castle Bluff was all I knew or wanted. We lived way out in the boondocks and the townspeople, my family and I included, were the kind of characters you see in movies that make fun of dopey country bumpkins.

I was “the odd girl out” in my town; a dreamer, writer, and a voracious reader. People told Mama that I was strange. “She’s a loner, Lucille,” they’d say, “not a true Castle Blufftonian. Watch her.”

Still, I thought that Castle Bluff was all there was to the world and imagined myself ending up just like Mama and my grandmother NeeNee. Strange as it may have been, it was home and it was safe. I would spend my whole life in the Bluff, get married, have babies, and learn to cook funeral meats.

NeeNee had encouraged me to leave my home. In fact, she made me promise that I would leave as soon as I was eighteen.

“Go, Maryanne. Go away and seek your future. You have talent, you’re a good writer and you’re too smart to stay in this old town. I want to see you working for a newspaper, a regular Lois Lane type. Now I don’t say this lightly, baby, but this is not the place for you; there’s nothing here for you. Get out of this backwater town and become someone.”

When I hesitated to answer, she took a ring with a large red stone off her gnarled finger and gave it to me. “Here, honey, take this. My mama gave me this when I turned eighteen and I want to give it to you. I never left here; I was fearful of the outside world but I want things to be different for you. Whenever you’re afraid, look at this ring and know that it means that I have faith in you. Promise me you’ll leave. You won’t miss anything here, honey.”

“But I’ll miss you, NeeNee!”

She laughed and jokingly asked what else I’d miss. I thought for a second and said, “I’ll miss Mama’s funeral meats. I was going to get her wake recipes when I turned eighteen.”

NeeNee’s face looked briefly angry and she turned away. Then she stared long and hard at me for a few minutes before she spoke again.

“You’ll learn a different style of cooking. Maryanne, you have got to leave here. This is not the town for you. Go to New York.”

I promised her that I’d leave. A little grandiosely, I said that once I got set up nicely with a job and an apartment maybe NeeNee could come live with me. She smiled a little sadly, shaking her head. “It’s too late for me. I will die here.”

“No! NeeNee! I don’t want you to die.”

“Why, baby, we all have to go sometime. This is Castle Bluff.”

*****

Mama and Daddy weren’t happy about my leaving and they fought with NeeNee about her encouraging me to go. The arguments ended when NeeNee said firmly,

“The old ways, well, they don’t seem to matter all that much anymore. Things are changing; yes, they have to change.”

Mama looked at me and said, “If you really want to go to New York, so be it.”

And so I left. Once on my own, I called home once a week; NeeNee and I would talk first, with me doing most of the talking. Then Mama, Daddy, or my brother would get on the phone and tell me who got married, who was having a baby, and always, who had died and then of course, all about the funeral.

Most shocking of all, my brother Freddie told me during one of my weekly calls, was the fact that two brothers from the large town of Pell Ridge had opened a funeral home at the edge of our small town. They had delivered flyers to every family in Castle Bluff offering their services. Maybe things were changing, as NeeNee said.

*****

As usually happens with young people who leave home, I became overwhelmingly busy and three years went by quickly. The phone calls home dwindled from once a week to once a month or even longer. In my hectic workaholic state, I pretended, when I did call, that NeeNee’s voice wasn’t beginning to sound faint and querulous. I absolved twinges of guilt about not seeing NeeNee by reminding myself that she was the one who wanted me to leave.

But one morning my brother Freddie called to tell me that my beloved NeeNee had died.

“The funeral’s in three days, Maryanne,” he said a bit anxiously. “You have to come home now. The family has to be together.”

And so I had to drive home to see NeeNee one more time, one final time.

Daddy and my brother came out to greet me and Freddie grabbed my luggage from the back seat of my car. Daddy embraced me.

“Come in, Maryanne. It’s good to have you home. Come in and freshen up before you pay your respects to NeeNee.”

“Where’s Mama?” I asked although I already knew where she would be.

“She’s in the kitchen, honey. She’s been cooking since it happened. This is the first night.”

Of course. The first night. I could smell the delicious aromas as soon as we ascended the old wooden stairs to the front porch. Mama was making her famous funeral meats and I suddenly felt hungry. And guilty; how could I be hungry when NeeNee was never going to enjoy the taste of food again? I sighed and felt my eyes fill with tears.

I deliberately kept my eyes averted from the parlor on my right where my grandmother lay on bags of ice.

I walked into the house and went straight to the kitchen. Mama was there, laboring over two big pots that were simmering on the stove. A pitcher of homemade lemonade was sitting on the table and I saw flowering herbs in a glass canning jar near the sink. Nothing had changed. Home; I was back home.

“Mama.”

My mother turned around and smiled when she saw me. She wiped her hands on the old, stained apron she was wearing and came over to hug me. “Oh baby, you’re here. Go wash up and when you come back I’ll have some stew ready for you. It’s been simmering for hours.”

I went upstairs and my old room looked the same. Freddie had put my luggage on my bed. In the old bathroom down the hall, I washed my face and hands and looked at myself in the yellowing glass above the sink. I was exhausted from the four hour drive. Three days of mourning; could I do it? Three days of feasting. I had to do it to honor my NeeNee.

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath before going out into the hall again and then down the stairs. The smells from Mama’s cooking pots were strong as I descended the stairs; the delicious stew was waiting for me and I was ravenous.

After I ate, I went to the parlor to pay my respects to NeeNee. Mourners had already arrived and the room was full. It seemed both familiar and strange. It wasn’t part of my life now. My ideas had changed. When my New York editor’s mother died, he had used the services of a professional mortician. He had been shocked when I told him about the house wake tradition of my hometown of Castle Bluff.

“Sounds like something out of the Dark Ages,” he had said. “A little macabre, if you ask me.”

You didn’t grow up in Castle Bluff, I wanted to tell him, but instead I said nothing. He was right after all; a house wake was a tradition from over a hundred-and-fifty years ago and really had no place in today’s world.

I sat in silence and avoided staring at her body the way I had seen so many folks stare at the deceased. When I finally allowed myself to look at NeeNee, what I saw struck me as odd. Something didn’t look right about my grandmother lying in the casket.

I nudged my brother Freddie who had come to sit near me. Motioning to the casket I whispered, “Freddie, she doesn’t look, well, right…does she?”

Freddie stared at me as if I was crazy. “Jesus, Maryanne, of course she doesn’t look right. NeeNee’s lying there dead, how could she look right?”

I cringed at his anger, and looked at my grandmother again. The body looked wrong but I couldn’t put my finger on why it did. I stared hard at NeeNee and tried to understand what didn’t look right.

“No, something is wrong, Freddie. Look at her arms. Why aren’t they crossed over her chest? Why are they straight out by her sides?”

“Because we’re not religious nutcases, that’s why,” sneered Freddie. “And, anyway, nobody sleeps with their arms crossed over their chests. She’s supposed to look like she’s asleep.”

Asleep. She didn’t look as if she was asleep. She looked misshapen and shriveled. I shook my head. I must be more exhausted from the drive than I thought. My eyes and imagination were playing tricks on me. Some of the mourners were looking at me and I decided not to say any more. I rose to go into the kitchen. It would be a long night.

The first night’s feast was brought to the table by Mama and me, huge pots of thick meat stew and bread for dipping. Wine glasses were already filled. Glancing around the table I watched the guests. Their wide, hungry eyes were staring at Mama as she began heaping stew into bowls. Tongues were licking lips as the bowls were passed around the table. The assembled mourners looked more than a little like hungry dogs with saliva in the corners of their mouths.

Midway through the feast, everyone turned as one towards the parlor and raised a glass to NeeNee, murmuring, “Delicious meats, delicious meats.”

The feasting lasted until almost midnight and I was beyond tired. After the last guest left I stumbled upstairs to bed. Mama had insisted I go upstairs and told me not to worry about helping her clean up.

“Just get some sleep, honey. I know you’re exhausted.”

Just as I was falling into a deep sleep, I heard Mama still moving around downstairs hustling back and forth between the parlor and the kitchen. I guessed she was still tidying up.

In the morning I awoke to the familiar aroma of meat stew. It was the second day, and Mama was cooking again.

*****

On the third night of the wake, Mrs. Arbor who had to be almost one hundred years old, came and sat next to me in the parlor. Nodding her head at NeeNee she said, “Your Grandma is so good.”

“Yes, she was,” I corrected her. “She was a good woman.”

“Why I just hope that I am that good, is all I wanted to say.”

A young woman walked up and took Mrs. Arbor’s hand, leading her away. Turning back to me, she mouthed the words, “Dementia.”

Now alone in the parlor, I looked long and hard at NeeNee. She seemed to shrink each night. She looked like an old cloth doll I’d had as a child.

When I was seven, Mama had made me a cloth doll that she stuffed with sawdust. I played with that doll constantly. Eventually the stitching came loose and the sawdust slowly spilled out until the doll’s body was flat and empty. That’s the way NeeNee looked. Flat.

Freddie tapped me on the shoulder; the feast was about to begin. I went into the dining room for the last night of feasting. Then I went to bed, once again exhausted.

Sometime around two in the morning I awoke and I couldn’t seem to get back to sleep. We were going to bury NeeNee today. I got up and walked into the parlor and looked at NeeNee lying there. Taking off the ruby ring she had given me, I nervously twisted it in my fingers.

“Oh Nee,” I whispered. “Why did you make me leave? I would have had more time with you if I’d stayed.”

I bent over to kiss my grandmother’s forehead. My hands were shaking so badly I dropped the ring on my grandmother’s chest…and heard a swooshing sound. It should have been a thumping sound; something solid had dropped on the cold body. But no, it was a rustling sound like tissue paper. I reached to pick up the ring.

When my hand touched NeeNee’s chest, it felt soft and crinkly. I pressed on it and there was that sound of tissue paper rustling again. There was nothing solid at all. I pressed down on her dress and all I felt was more tissue paper; no ribs, no bones, no flesh, nothing. All was flat, just like my old rag doll.

Cautiously and squeamishly I slide my hand up the hem of her dress. There was nothing there but crumpled paper. Ripping the dress open I saw that there was no body at all!

The slippers sticking out of the hem of her dress were stuffed with tissues. No feet! I looked at the hands coming out of long sleeves, hands that were not crossed over the body, but lying by the sides of the dress. I grabbed her right hand and it came away from the sleeve. It had been neatly severed. Horrified, I touched her face and it moved towards me. Her head was attached to nothing, just lying in the neck of the cheap dress.

Oh my God! I dropped the hand and began to scream.

Lights went on in the upstairs hall and Mama, Daddy, and Freddie came hurrying down the stairs.

“Sugar, sugar, now stop screamin’ so! NeeNee wouldn’t want you to carry on like this. She’s gone, yes, but she had a long life, no need to scream so. What’s the matter child?”

I pointed to NeeNee’s hand which had fallen into the casket next to her dress. “Mama! Oh, Mama, what happened to NeeNee? I can’t feel her body! There’s no body! There’s only tissue paper! And her head and hand! Oh my God! They’ve been cut off!”

I stared wild-eyed at them all. Finally my father spoke. “Tell her, Lucille,” he said solemnly as he led me to a chair. “It’s time she knew.”

I couldn’t believe what Mama was saying. I was in a nightmare, I had to be. What she said sounded like something out of a horror novel.

“You cooked the flesh from NeeNee? Are you crazy?” Turning to my brother I said, “Freddie? They cook people! Help me!”

But Freddie just shook his head and looked at me as if I were crazy. “This is Castle Bluff, Maryanne,” he said calmly. “It’s a way of life from centuries ago. Mama explained it to me last year. It is part of who we are.”

“I have to call the police! This is sick!”

“Why, honey,” smiled Mama, “who you gonna call that hasn’t had me cook their own departed? Sheriff Coley knows all about tradition. He ate his mama and papa when they went two years ago. And Mayor Hope? Why he said that the funeral meats from his wife Agatha were the best meat he ever ate.”

I sat in a chair near what was left of NeeNee. I couldn’t look at her. My God! My family was crazy!

“Now baby, listen to your Mama. You don’t know ‘cause you left before the ceremony that would have taught you how to cook the meats. This is how it’s always been done.  The first night we take the legs and feet, the next night the arms, and the chest. We cook them slowly and oh, does it taste good! Now on the day of the burying, right before we close the coffin, we take the head.”

“Stop! I don’t want to hear this! That’s NeeNee you’re talking about!” I screamed but Mama continued.

“We simmer that real slow until the meat just drops off, then we mix it with what’s left of the funeral meats. That’s the food we serve for the repast when everybody comes over after the funeral. That is the best! You know, Maryanne,” said Mama, her eyes shining, “it’s just lovely when a young one goes. Your favorite cousin Agnes? The one who tried to run away from home and then met with that…accident? She was only fifteen, poor child, when she died, and she was so delicious to eat. Remember?” She closed her eyes and sighed with contentment.

“You’re saying that we ate Agnes? No! I don’t believe that!”

“Oh yes, honey, you did eat her meats, we all did. Oh you loved the taste! Why, you asked for seconds and thirds. You especially loved her cheeks.”

I turned and vomited onto the floor. No. No! This is not happening.

Mama continued. “Honey, I know this is upsetting. You should have been here for your training; we would have explained it slowly. Freddie, clean up that mess on the floor.”

Freddie headed for the kitchen, and Mama said, “Now NeeNee, well, she was old and all, but I put a lot of flavoring in the pot. Didn’t you love the stew the first night of the wake? You said you did. Those were her legs, cooked slow and with lots of gravy to soften the meat. So-o-o good!”

I felt faint. “I have to leave here.” I tried to stand but Daddy gently pushed me down again. “Stay put Maryanne.”

“Well now, sugar, we can’t let you leave. Can’t have you tell the world outside about our traditions like your cousin tried to do. Can’t have that.”

“You’re all crazy!” I said, suddenly very afraid of Mama, Daddy, and even Freddie.

“You’re so young, so sweet,” crooned Mama. We just can’t let you go. You’ll be so good here.”

*****

The smell of meat stew on the first night of the wake filled the house with a delicious aroma.

“Mama, you make the best funeral meats.”

“Well, it’s a lot easier when they go young. Meat’s more tender. Now go see to the mourners. Got to simmer her legs for an hour or so more. Your sister will be so delicious, Freddie!”

About Kristen Houghton

Kristen Houghton writes “nice little horror stories guaranteed to make you check your locks and look under the bed before going to sleep.” She is the author of the best-selling horror novella, Welcome to Hell. Her short story, “The Shuttle Bus Man” was published in the print version of The Horror Zine Magazine in 2012.

Her new novel For I Have Sinned: A Cate Harlow Private Investigation, where her detective encounters plenty of horrors of her own, will be published in Fall of 2014. This book is the first in the Cate Harlow Private Investigation series.

Houghton is the former head writer and fiction editor of Mused Literary Magazine. Her portfolio includes writing for The Huffington Post, TwoDayMag.com, More Magazine, the San Francisco Examiner, and various other in-print and online magazines. She also writes under the name CK Houghton and lives happily with her husband Alan in New York City which is a great place to write horror stories.

Books by Kristen Houghton: No Woman Diets Alone-There’s Always a Man Behind Her Eating a Doughnut; And Then I’ll Be Happy!; Welcome to Hell; Remember, Hetty? (YA ghost story).

TRANSPOSITION

Jason V. Brock

“CUT TO THE CHASE. HOW MUCH?”

The speakerphone went silent.

“We need two thousand to make it happen,” the man on the other end of the line finally replied. “Each.”

Dr. Aiden Burns thought for a moment, rubbing a day’s growth of stubble along his narrow jawline. He squinted unconsciously, then said: “I’ll give you eight hundred…each; no more. Take it or leave it. I’ve got other contacts.”

Silence again. The line crackled: “Hold on a minute, boss.” The phone clattered down. Burns leaned back in his chair, the glow from his computer monitor the only illumination in the dark office. He pulled at his tie then took a swig of Scotch. He could hear voices in the background arguing but could not make out the words. He swished the amber liquid in his tumbler, amusing himself with the subtle tinkling sound of ice cubes on glass.

“Okay, doc. Eight hundred each. You really drive a hard bargain.”

Aiden’s features creased into an icy smile in the bluish gloom. “Thanks. I prefer to think of it as smart business…I need the parts by Wednesday at the latest. I won’t deliver the ’scripts to my brother if he screws this one up. The window to harvest is short here. Be sure to tell him.”

“Got it.”

“And remember,” Aiden added, “cut ’em clean this time, above the joints. None of those ragged stumps like the last ones. I’ll use my credentials to grant access to your cutters at the morgue starting tomorrow morning. You can pick up the cash at my university office on Friday in the afternoon. I need those parts by Wednesday, though. No parts, no cash.”

“Right, boss. University. Friday afternoon.”

Aiden typed something into his computer. “One more thing—I’m going to need a set of kidneys and a few eyes. You got a lead on any cadavers?”

The line went quiet again.

“Hmmm… Well doc, I’m going to need another week on that. Market’s tight right now. Been some Feds—FDA types—snooping around, too. Audits, inspections, that type of thing.”

Aiden’s jaw tightened. “The sooner the better, Angelo.”

“No sweat, doc. I’m on it. A shame…we got an older guy that just came through the funeral home, but he’s no good. Jaundice—”

“So what? What’s a little jaundice?”

“Well, I mean you don’t want to put that in somebody, doc. I mean, he might have had liver cancer, AIDS, or Hep C, or—”

“He’s fine. I bet his kidneys are fine. I mean, a body broker took some of Alistair Cooke’s bones out and repurposed them at a tissue bank. They were just going to cremate the guy, so why not use the stuff? Cooke died of metastatic bone cancer; I never heard of any complications from the eventual recipients.”

“Yeah, boss. I hear you. But those guys didn’t have permission.”

“Well, they got greedy, I admit. Weren’t careful like we are. Sometimes it’s better to seek forgiveness than ask permission, understand what I mean? You know what we’re doing here, right? There’s a lot of money to be had, Angelo. Donors are in short supply. We’re saving lives. So what if we make a little coin with it? That’s no crime, not in America. I mean, think of it—heart valves, veins, skin for burn grafts, organs, femurs, tendons, cartilage. There’s a fortune out there just waiting to be had. I can clear over a hundred grand on a single body that’s just going to rot in the ground or be incinerated. And all those titanium screws, pins, plates. We can reuse that stuff. I mean, why not?”

Aiden took another swallow of Scotch and set the glass on his desk, letting his words sink in. He massaged his eyes in the dark room, relaxing. “We aren’t harming anyone; they’re dead. In fact, we’re doing a service, Angelo. Never forget that.”

After a long silence: “Yeah, boss. I get it. I get it.”

“Your cadaver with the yellowing…See if you can score those kidneys. I’ll pay good money for that. Ask my brother.”

Aiden sat forward again, typing into his computer. “Another thing. I’ve just been approved for more tissue work. In addition, I think the university is about to grant me permission to move ahead on the full-face transplant. A male, white, average build, in his forties or fifties. We have applicants going through psychological and physical screenings in the next few weeks. Eight so far, narrowing it to the final contender. It’ll be the first one in our region, and it will make me a star; I’ve even picked my team.”

He studied the images of the final nominees on his monitor: Gunshot victims missing noses or lower jaws; a car accident that had melted the fat and skin on a man’s head into a pink, waxen likeness of a grinning skull; industrial injuries where the entire front of the cranium had been sheared off down to the sinus cavities, leaving just staring eyes and an opening for the throat. He continued, removed, distant in thought: “I’m an honorable man, Angelo; I don’t forget those that have helped me out. You. My brother. Even though they busted him on the drug test and stripped his nursing credentials, I’m about family ties… I can help wean him off the morphine and get him back on the right path.”

“I understand, doc. Family’s important,” Angelo replied. “And Mike’s been doing good. He’s done great here. Couple of slip-ups, but holding things down. And he’s a real good cutter, doc. Real good.”

Aiden snorted. “Oh, I know. He always had good hands. Identical twins carry a lot of those traits in common, Angelo. I have no doubt that Mike can get those kidneys, for example. Just help me keep him on the straight and narrow. Still need some eyes, though. Jaundiced eyes are no good, unfortunately.”

Angelo chuckled over the line. “I have no doubt about that. I hate doing eyes, boss, I admit. They’re hard to keep intact for one thing. Delicate. And they’re really in there. The ‘pop’ they make coming out…Not my favorite, doc.”

“Yeah. I understand. We all have our thing, even doctors and nurses. Mike hates anything to do with impalements. Me, I don’t like dealing with blunt force. Everybody’s got a weak spot.”

“I catch you, boss.”

Aiden glanced at his watch. It was late. “Before we go, keep in mind that your new side venture here with Allied Mortuary and Tissue Services could start to see some really good business. Might be able to get you out of the funeral home, even. Just be on the hunt for what I need, and deliver those kidneys. And don’t forget, if you find a good face candidate, I’ll start spreading the word about your… quality services. I think we can do business for a long, long time, Angelo.”

“That sounds real good, doc. Real good.”

*****

I should never have trusted that bitch.

The scotch whiskey was hitting him hard. Three down in a few hours had been plenty on an empty stomach. This was the time his self-loathing usually crept forward.

Six years down the tube. All I have are the fucking debts. She got the house, the car, everything. All over one lousy mistake. One stupid malpractice lawsuit…they didn’t even convict me on all counts!

He staggered to the bathroom, switched on the light. The room was hazy, shifting, too bright. He relieved his bladder, flushed, then swayed over the sink, staring into the mirror. He turned on the water, splashed some on his face, pulling his hands slowly down his features as the stream gurgled into the basin.

Another hoppin’ Saturday night for Dr. Aiden-fucking-Burns.

The past several years had been a nightmare of professional mistakes and trauma. After the lawsuit filing, his life had been thrown into complete chaos. That was when Barbi had begun to snap; it was like watching super high speed footage of a bullet tearing through a water balloon. In exquisite slow motion, the instant the bullet penetrates the form, the rubber of the balloon shreds and vanishes, leaving a tremulous, watery globe it in its place as the bullet spins to the other side. Everyone watching knows that it cannot stay that way for any length of time; that ultimately the water will collapse, without any boundaries, of its own weight. The final judgment had been that critical dissolution. The only way to fix the water balloon is to watch the film in reverse.

Life never goes in reverse, however, except in dreams or memories.

“I can’t take this, Aiden! I-I don’t know who you are anymore…Where did we go? This is what we have to look forward to?”

He had tried to soothe her, but she twisted away from his hand and collapsed into their living room loveseat, reduced to inconsolable sobbing.

He sat on the couch across from the chair.

“I know this seems bad…I know it’s been a rough time, Barb. But we have to…We have to just hang in there. It’ll be reversed on appeal. It’ll—”

“You don’t know that, Aiden!”

His mouth worked quietly, as he struggled to find the words. The sadness of her crying filled the space around them like the loss of a heartbeat, like the absence of hope. She reached for a box of tissues next to the chair and slowly regained her composure. Today, the final penalty phase decision, had been the worst day since the emotionally-devastating revelations were disclosed at trial.

It had all come out: Burns’s “professional arrogance” and his unusual methodologies, which conflicted with the hospital’s stated “core values.” His “independent” and controversial research techniques on discarded fetal tissue and other, more macabre, experimentations on “beating heart” organ donors. Previously things that the hospital had perhaps not “officially” condoned, but certainly been aware of, and had no issue with their ultimate outcomes bringing in millions in grant and research funds. As he explained it to the court, everything was done for the sake of the advancement of science and medicine. . . out of a desire to save the lives of others. An overwhelming need inspired by the deep hurt and profound respect centered around his late mother’s memory.

That event—her death from an iatrogenically introduced infection after cancer surgery—had been a catalyst for him, and for his brother Mike. His sibling had missed out on medical school due to less than stellar grades, but Aiden had excelled. Both went to the same college, and Mike eventually made his career as a nurse. That was when his problems began: With access to the meds. Once Aiden had discovered his brother’s drug abuse, his misguided attempts to cover it up had brought forth more scrutiny. That could have been the extent of it had it not affected his work. The disastrous moment when everyone realized Dr. Burns—a superstar of regenerative medicine at the largest hospital in the area—had accidentally injured a patient and ultimately caused their death all due to an error made by his brother was like a death knell. After the malpractice suit was brought against him, his future prospects slowly evaporated.

As the lawsuit dragged on for one year, then another, then a third, he was gradually seen as a pariah within the hospital’s conservative organizational structure. He was not called to meetings as often. He was no longer consulted on complex cases in spite of his brilliance and experience. Journals rejected his papers. He was suspended from practicing at the hospital due to negative publicity. Soon he and Barbi were struggling financially. He was dismissed outright just ahead of the verdict. Not fired, just “no longer needed.” Best of luck and all of that.

Then came the jury’s decision: the final monetary penalties, and the stripping of his medical license for two years; he narrowly avoided prison time, though his brother was sentenced to one year in jail and fined. Today’s nadir was the only time in Aiden’s life that he was glad their mother was dead, and that their father had killed himself.

Perhaps they had been fooling themselves? Living beyond their means for too many years. What was that saying? Republicans are one health crisis away from being Democrats? Similar here. One crisis away from a deathbed conversion, he ruminated.

Aiden suddenly realized he was staring at the end of his marriage. Granted, it had been a long, hard four years: Financial adversities, legal disappointments, the miscarriage. Barbi was cracking with stress. He did not have it in his heart to blame her. Realistically, it was probably another few years before he could recover, if ever. He knew they could move so he could get a new license to practice in another state. Then he could start earning, and dig out of the hole of debts and penalties. But it would not be easy. Not at all. And Mike was still in jail— his only living family except for Barbi.

He could never just leave his brother.

As he thought of everything and gazed into the mirror, Aiden was overcome with a mix of emotions: revulsion, rage, sadness.

With the water gently pouring from the faucet, he studied his face in the harsh fluorescent light. It had been three years since Barbi had divorced him; they had not spoken since. He still loved her he supposed; or perhaps he just loved the idea of her, what she represented—love, passion, life. His brother Mike had gotten out early for good behavior, and Aiden had helped him move to the same little college town. By then, Aiden had been able to re-secure his medical license, and complete a stint as part of a successful family practice. No one ever knew of his previous situation.

A new career in a new town. A new part of the country, even.

He had done exceptionally well there; it was such simple work for him, unlike the rigors of his previous tenure, he felt as though he could have done it in his sleep. In a way, he had: He was emotionally numb for nearly the first two years after Barbi and he had split. That opportunity led to his current position at the university where he had been able to regroup. To gain some perspective. Unfortunately, Mike had put his hand back in the medicinal cookie jar at the clinic where he had been hired as a nursing assistant. They fired him after a few months. That’s when Aiden had helped him get another job at a local funeral parlor. After a few months, Mike brought Angelo to Aiden’s attention, and a new partnership was formed. Now, even more opportunity was opening up, and not just with Angelo.

Nevertheless, the crushing debts—over two million dollars—had aged him. He looked at his bleary, red eyes, puffy with drink, darkened by a lack of sleep, his disheveled button down shirt, and stained tie. He had not shaved in a week, his face was sallow, his hair greasy. New lines had taken hold near his eyes, on his forehead, around his mouth. He was still having the panic attacks, and much trouble sleeping; the continual haranguing of creditors only added to his frustration. That was why he often preferred sleeping in his office at the college over going to his shadowed and sad apartment.

He let Mike stay there, as his brother had little in the way of funds and credit at this point. They rarely saw one another, however; since Mike usually worked nights, and the little two-bedroom unit was too empty, too bleak for Aiden at times. At least here at the university he knew people would be around at some point; there was always someone on campus. It was comforting somehow.

“Mirrors,” he said to his reflection at last, “always lie. We can’t see our true selves, only a semblance of it.” He huffed in amusement at his philosophical insight. The novelty of his cleverness was brief; he shut the water off, breathing in deeply.

Desperate times called for desperate measures…

The debts are what had plunged him into his new side activities with Angelo and his brother. And it was working. With the connections Angelo had made, and a few others from Mike, they were starting to make serious money with the body parts. There was, in fact, too much demand. They were always looking for more bodies and more types of tissue. It was not his preferred way of conducting his life, but it was better than drowning in debt and suffocating from despair.

“We only need to keep at it one more year,” he mumbled. His head was starting to clear. He walked unsteadily from the bathroom over to the couch in his office, checking that the door was locked along the way.

3:01 a.m. Need to rest.

He stripped to his underwear, putting his clothes into the overnight bag he carried with him. He needed to go to the apartment tomorrow; he had not been home for nearly a week. The onset of summer might improve his outlook.

Time for fresh clothes and to check on things.

*****

Mike was not at the apartment. Not an uncommon event, but it still made Aiden uneasy; he was leery of his brother’s drug issues, and liked to be in touch every few days.

After a shower and a nice meal of intensely spicy Thai curry, Aiden washed his clothes while watching some television. He kept his cell phone close by, anxious to hear what had happened with the latest harvest Angelo had been dispatched to carry out for the legs and arms.

And did they get the fucking kidneys?

His phone woke him up from a fitful nap as the TV droned in the background; no caller information. Aiden noted the smell of rain was wafting through a cracked window, and that the day had slipped away into evening. He had told Mike repeatedly about leaving the apartment window open. The last thing they needed was someone snooping around, especially with all the parts they kept in the freezer chest.

“Hello?”

“Yeah, Aiden, it’s Mike.”

“Mike! Where are you? I’m at the apartment. Hey, remember what I said about the window?” His voice was edged; they had been over this dozens of times.

“Yeah, yeah. Sorry, man. Been distracted. I got good news and bad, thought you’d like to hear. Which one first?”

“Good news first; I’m feeling charitable.”

“Cool, right, well, like I got the kidneys—”

“Yes!”

Mike laughed over the line. “Yeah. Got ’em. Look pretty decent to me, too.”

“Excellent; that is good news.”

“Right. And I think that another cutter and I can get to the other harvest at the morgue tonight. Looks like we’ll have that locked up. Angelo says he’s got two good face candidates coming in tomorrow.”

Aiden tightened his lips at this news. That meant he would have to pay them both and get the morphine prescription for Mike by Friday. He was conflicted about contributing to his brother’s habit, but had to keep the long view in mind.

“Okay. Let’s hope so.”

There was a pause.

“That it?” Aiden offered at last.

“One thing,” Mike replied. He lowered his voice: “I think Angelo might be getting wise that you’re giving me a little extra.”

“Really? Well, it’s none of his business. Just don’t let it slip—”

“I think he saw the note you left when we were dropping off some of the skin and bone samples.”

“You let that fucking guy in the apartment? I thought we discussed that! I said not to even let him know the address!”

Silence.

Aiden: “So did he see that I’ve been cutting him out? How bad is it? Does he know we’re working with the other mortician at the place outside of town?”

“I think he might. I think he suspects we’re sort of phasing him out and giving him the harder jobs for less pay.”

“Fuck. Well, okay, so what? Look, we’ve got just a few more gigs with Angelo to pull off; then I say we drop him. His hands are redder than ours. He won’t talk. He just wants cash. We’ll settle up and part ways; the out of town connection is better anyway ’cause he gets people from all over the state, not just in town. More traffic, y’know?”

“Yeah. I hear you, man. I think we just need to be careful. Angelo’s got a real bad temper, I’ve noticed. Bit of a sadist. Holds grudges. I’ve seen him… do things. Things that I think we’d not want near our little Burke and Hare operation, if you take my meaning. This is bad enough. Some of the things, well…get sort of necro.”

Aiden was surprised to hear this. He was also taken aback at the direct reference by his brother to the nineteenth-century body snatchers from Ireland. It was one thing to skirt the edge of being modern day “resurrectionists,” but they were not murdering anyone, nor were they causing any harm to the living.

“I understand,” he replied to Mike. “Well, let’s get through this. I still need him for the week at least.”

*****

The last few harvests had gone exceptionally well. Aiden was relieved, as they brought a windfall in profit for the kidneys. In addition, the joints, skin patches, ligaments, and a few heart valves had netted a gross of nearly $28,000 dollars. His world was starting to look up.

True to form, as soon as he got his prescription, Mike vanished. Sometimes he would be MIA for nearly a month, just working and dropping the occasional note at the apartment. At least until he began running out of stuff.

Angelo’s prospects for the face transplant fell through; both were living donors, but they died suddenly. After that, they all parted company, and Mike switched to the other mortuary for employment, which also increased their side business exponentially. No more Angelo seemed to suit everyone involved better. The debt was becoming manageable at long last.

Aiden decided to concentrate on pushing his last proposal through for the transplant candidates: It was the car accident burn victim. The university board approved, and candidate passed all preliminary tests. In addition, the patient had a minimal loss of facial bones, so that would make the operation less complex.

Now, it was a waiting game.

*****

Fall was beginning to settle in. There was a swirl of color and a crisp smoky scent to the air complemented by long shadows of late afternoon. In the past few months, Aiden’s fortunes had dramatically improved. They had been able to gain more funding, and keep Angelo at bay just long enough to switch away from working with him. Even Mike had decreased his need for morphine after meeting a young woman in a drug-counseling program. It appeared that the deepest part of the last few years’ horrors was finally receding.

“Dr. Burns.” It was his secretary. Aiden looked from his computer to the intercom on his desk.

“Yes?”

“There is a face available for the transplant. They have prepped the candidate and need you in Surgery Theater II in thirty minutes.”

Aiden was surprised, but excited: “Perfect, Brenda. Tell everyone to muster there. Going to be a long night.”

Once in Surgical Theater II, there was a conference. They had rehearsed this moment and practiced on animatronic models and cadavers for months, but the real thing was always different. The plan was gone over carefully for about an hour, with the roles and positions reiterated. After everyone and their alternates were assigned and instructed, they all changed clothes and scrubbed.

Inside the room, the anesthesiologist was already working; the candidate’s body was screened off except for the head and neck, which had been swabbed with brown-yellow betadine solution, the surgical area marked with a series of black lines. Dr. Burns stood for a moment, regarding the historic scene, which had an atmosphere not unlike a sort of surreal party with all the participants in costume, the thump of the aerator and the blip of the heart monitor creating a kind of soundtrack.

I’m back. This is my return and it has all been worth it.

Aiden gripped the cauterizing scalpel in his hand and leaned over the unconscious man’s figure, whispering: “We are about to change your life, Mr. Atkins.” Burns then glanced up at his lead assistant and nodded; above the facial cover, her dark brown eyes were shining in the focused light of the operating room.

A nursing assistant wheeled the chilling cart holding the new face to be used for the transplantation to the operating table.

“Dr. Burns, I was given a message by the harvest team,” another woman, the lead nurse, said.

“Oh yes? What would that be?” Burns gestured for the nursing assistant to take the lid off the container.

“I don’t understand it, but the guy said ‘Please inform Dr. Burns that I have located some eyes, too.’”

The room started to spin for the doctor. It felt as though everyone in the chamber was watching him now, as if the space were unexpectedly shrinking to a point of cosmic singularity.

The nurse pulled the lid off, the stark lights adding a nightmarish dimension to her flourish of movement. Gingerly, almost in slow motion, she lifted up the translucent, yellowy combination of skin, fat, muscle, and veins to show the surgeon, like some horrid, quivering mask: It was a blank-eyed mirror image of himself.

Mike!

Aiden Burns screamed as the room died away.

About Jason V. Brock

Jason V Brock is an award-winning writer, editor, filmmaker, composer, and artist, and has been widely-published online, in comic books, magazines, and anthologies, such as Butcher Knives & Body Counts, Disorders of Magnitude (nonfiction collection), Simulacrum and Other Possible Realities (fiction/poetry collection), Fungi, Weird Fiction Review, Fangoria, S. T. Joshi's Black Wings series, and many others.

He was Art Director/Managing Editor for Dark Discoveries magazine for more than four years, and has a biannual pro digest called [NameL3ss], which can be found on Twitter: @NamelessMag, and on the Interwebs at www.NamelessMag.com. He and his wife, Sunni, also run Cycatrix Press, and have a technology consulting business.

As a filmmaker, his work includes the critically-acclaimed documentaries Charles Beaumont: The Life of Twilight Zone’s Magic Man, The AckerMonster Chronicles! (winner of the 2014 Rondo Hatton Award for Best Documentary), and Image, Reflection, Shadow: Artists of the Fantastic. He is the primary composer and instrumentalist/singer for his band, ChiaroscurO. Brock loves his wife, their family of reptiles/amphibians, travel, and vegan/vegetarianism.

He is active on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter (@JaSunni_JasonVB), and their personal website/blog, www.JaSunni.com.

THE LAST BOTTLE

Dean H. Wild

SULLY LEANED UP REAL CLOSE,as if to share the scent of his breath across the bar. “Thing is, you can catch it all sorts of ways.”

Bellings didn’t back away, mostly because he could tell that was exactly what Sully was hoping for. He stirred his scotch with his finger instead. “It’s got to be physical contact, simple as that,” he said. “Only long term physical contact.”

“That’s what we’re told.” Sully stumped a thick finger on the bar top to make his point. His jowls shook and his eyes glinted under his shaggy brows. “They give it to us like that, something easy, so we can feel like there’s something we can do. Or not do. I’ve seen it before. Bird flu, the damn SARS. Keeps the tension out of the public pressure cooker when shit like this comes down.”

Sully made a broad gesture toward the flat screen above the bar where statistics and death tolls crawled across the bottom of the frame while a talk show host capered around a table full of anti-Mold products that could be found at any of your local pharmacies while supplies lasted. Then he jerked his thumb, quick and covert, and his gaze grew imperative. It made Bellings check the other end of the bar where the only other patron sat, head bent so his wide brimmed hat covered his face and cloaked his drink in shadow.

Yeah, the guy had The Mold, the patches of scaly white on the backs of his hands were apparent. The deep purple bruising around those patches made it unmistakable. But there was nothing to get worked up about unless you wanted to grip one of those hands and crush the flakes into stale-smelling, highly infectious powder. Then, through the skin it went, and raged like a brushfire. Prolonged body-to-body contact was the only way, unless you listened to Sully.

“I wanna do my bit.” Sully leaned even closer and added another glass to the clutch of nearly a dozen in front of Bellings. He poured scotch into it, and his voice dropped to the mere essence of a whisper. “Help stop the spread. I want to kill him.”

Bellings pulled the fresh drink over with a slow hand. He gave no voice to the thoughts that leapt into his head. Instead he downed the scotch in one fiery mouthful and climbed off the stool so he could get at his pockets. “What do I owe you?”

“Stay.” Sully’s thick arm slammed on the bar and his hand clamped on Bellings’ wrist. “I’ll pour you another drink. On the house. It’s my last bottle, but what the hell.”

The voice from the other end of the bar was thin, more wheeze than speech. It traveled through the gloom like a wayward spirit. It made them both look around. “Can I get another rum down here?”

Sully stared, wide-eyed, like a kid whose name has just been called by the principal. Then he walked over with his amiable, bowlegged bartender’s walk. “Sure thing. And would you look at that? My last bottle of rum, too. Supplies are so thin these days.” He uncapped a fresh liter from under the bar. “There’s a lot of that going around.”

Sully looked back at Bellings with a neutral smile.

“Men’s room?” the man asked and then coughed. A cloud of dry white, like chalkboard dust, billowed out from under the brim of his hat.

“Back hall,” Sully said and fanned the air. “Left side.”

The man got up. He swayed a little in his dark boots, plucked a twenty from the pocket of his black duster coat and tossed it on the bar. Then he ambled to the back hall.

Bellings’ hands curled into fists at his sides.

“Makes me sick,” Sully said, short-poured the rum and then stashed the bottle with a clang, “him pissing in my toilet back there. Spreading his Mold crap all over. I suppose I’ll bleach the place down when I’m done with him.”

“Bleach doesn’t help,” Bellings said and sat down again. He suddenly and very badly wanted that on the house knock he was promised.

“You see where I’m coming from, don’t you?” Sully said and poured a neat one as if reading his mind. “I’m not nuts. Not really. I’m just trying to shut The Mold down any way I can. I thought you’d understand more than some.”

He stopped with the glass halfway to his mouth. Caroline’s face whorled at him, a cheap automated scare in a funhouse, an iceberg out of the fog. Reminders were everywhere and there was no one hundred percent guaranteed barrier against them. Not on the brightest beach or in the dimmest bar. “You don’t know half of what I understand,” he said.

“You don’t have to do anything. I’ll drag him in back and take care of all the clean-up  The most you’ll have to do is mix a drink or two while—”

The men’s room door thumped and boot heels sounded in the hall, came closer.

Sully’s voice rose in pitch. “—while I’ve got a business to run. Know what I mean?”

“Your business,” Bellings said and tossed back his drink, “is your business.”

He got off the stool again, probably for the last time. There wasn’t anything at Sullivan’s Bar and Grill that suited him any longer.

“See you, then,” Sully said after him. “Say hello to your wife for me.”

Bellings cursed the fact that his feet lost all desire to move, that his body was making a slow turn back to the bar. He maintained control of his voice, however, which he kept low. “Caroline’s dead, asshole.”

“She is, isn’t she?”

Sully’s gaze flicked to the patron at the end of the bar, his expression reflective. Bellings focused on Sully’s swollen purple bartender’s nose because that was where he wanted to hit him. In two seconds he would lunge across the bar and that miserable nose is where everything would land. Ground zero.

The front door opened and enough light came in to throw him off the track, remind him that outside was where he wanted to be. The woman who entered was dressed in loose clothing but still struck a shapely, attractive silhouette. She passed by close enough for Bellings to see the blotch of dry scales on her cheek. The eye on that side was a milky glob under a purple bruised lid. She smiled, a weary stretch of her crusted lips, as she took the stool next to the man in the duster.

“Jesus, another one,” Sully muttered and snatched dirty glasses from the bar to scrub at them. “Are you sure you can’t stay? At least until the air clears in here? I’ll pour you another one on the house.”

He smiled and he made sure it was reflective. “I think you’re in good company.”

The voice from under the broad hat held a sudden reedy alarm that made them both look toward the end of the bar. “Jess?”

The woman was standing once again, hands clasped at her bosom like a swooning actress in an old silent movie. She drew in a great whooping gasp and the exhale that followed produced a whorl of white dust from deep in her lungs. Duster Man got to his feet and then froze, locked up with indecision.

This was how it ended for most Mold victims, Bellings had seen it on television a few times, read about it often, even witnessed it in the streets on occasion. Sometimes he could bear to watch the whole sequence, sometimes he had to look away. His gaze settled on her hands, which wrung together white-knuckled with pain and panic—delicate hands, the skin clear, the nails painted.  A solitaire diamond glinted on her left ring finger. He cursed his feet again as they took him over to the couple at the end of the bar.

“Help her down to the floor. Make her comfortable. Do it.”

Duster Man considered him with a baffled wrinkle on his brow.

“We can make this easier for her. A little,” Bellings added.

“Listen to him,” Sully said and backed away as if he had other, urgent business. “He knows. His wife died of that shit.”

Bellings shot him a fiery glance but he was gone, tucked back in the storage room behind the bar like a denned weasel. Goddamned Sully.

Duster Man eased the woman down to the worn linoleum in front of the bar stools. Bellings knelt next to her, his hands held up like a surgeon’s, not meaning to touch or invite contamination.

“Get some liquor over here,” he said.

The woman’s face knotted with pain and pleading. It was a lovely face, Bellings thought, despite the agony that came at the end of The Mold. A rattle knocked around inside of her full of dark promise. “Am I?” she asked. She reached toward him. “Am I going to—”

“Don’t touch him, honey,” Duster Man said as he came back with the rum bottle from behind the bar. Sully’s last one. He handed it to Bellings. “He’s clean.”

“Hold her head,” Bellings said. The bottle cap spun out of his fingers and skittered away into the gloom as if making an escape. It made him think of Sully. “This should help clear your airway for a few minutes. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway.”

He poured a little into her mouth, and did well considering the trembling in his hands. He wanted to clasp the sides of her face, restrain the essence of her, somehow keep her from slipping away because maybe this time it would help. She coughed, a wretched barking sound, that produced no puff of dust. Instead, a gout of foam spilled over her crusted lips, trailed down her chin. End Foam. It squirmed with nearly microscopic yellow organisms which fed on the digestive and respiratory systems of those with Mold. They only evacuated when the body was shutting down and they excreted a white froth to ease their escape. Goddamned End Foam.

“Oh no,” Duster Man said and locked a hopeless gaze on her. “Oh, Jess. Oh no.”

“I’m sorry,” Bellings sat back on his heels. “I’m sorry, Caroline.”

“Jess,” Duster Man said, his voice like a whine of displeasure. He bent low to kiss her, unmindful of the secretive creaks muttering inside her skin and the wisps of foul yellow vapor that leaked from her pores. Her breath escaped her all at once. Evacuation without replenishment. A last blot of foam slid down her cheek, slowed, stopped.

Bellings got to his feet. “Jess,” he said at last.

The rum bottle felt like a lead weight in his hand. It made a mocking slosh. Maybe he’d smash it when he got outside. Smash it hard and fast.

“Hey you. Mold scum.”

Sully stood behind the bar, a rifle in his hand. He tipped his head as he drew a bead. Duster Man looked up at him, wet tracks wending through the scale on his cheeks and twinkling in the gloom. His expression was almost welcoming.

The gunshot jarred the world back into cold clarity. Bellings jumped. Duster Man raised his hands as if to inspect the sudden, gushing hole in his throat and then fell to the floor. His mouth worked. A glut of red broke over his lips and flowed down his chin.

Whiskey churned in Bellings’ gut. The air was too thin. Sully lowered his rifle with a grin. A familiar grin, really, now that he looked at it. Reminders were everywhere.

At first it appeared Caroline never saw the pickup truck when she stepped off the curb, but it was more likely she did. She just never dreamed the driver would speed up when he spotted the loose white scales on her neck and shoulders or turn his wheels with such exacting malice. It was startling how quickly the truck’s bumper snatched her away from where they stood on the sidewalk, waiting to cross the street. When he closed his eyes, he still saw what looked like a huge skein of knotted rags flung into the gutter, only a moment before, it had been Caroline on her way to buy a purse and some shoes. And he saw the driver’s grin of mad accomplishment. It was a symptom of something with the capability of spreading. And so it had.

Bellings leaped forward and rapped the rum bottle on a table as he passed. The bottom shattered and rum splattered everywhere stinking like vile medicine. Sully watched him come, still wearing his grin, and it was only in the last seconds that his mouth turned down and his eyes bugged. Only as Bellings pushed the ring of jagged glass into his face, punched it deep into the flesh around his miserable purple nose. Ground zero.

Sully dropped his rifle and squealed, a porcine sound—appropriate since the bottle end that protruded from his face gave him a strange, snout-like profile. The rifle fouled between his feet and he fell forward, hard. Hard enough so that when his left temple whalloped the corner of the stainless tub where bar glasses were dunked and rinsed, it made a moist crunch. So much blood, Bellings thought as he stepped up to the bar.

Clean-up was slow but easy. Everything fit nicely in the large walk-in cooler behind the storage room of Sullivan’s Bar and Grill. He took a seat behind the bar afterwards, and sipped some scotch, waiting for its blessed numbing effect to take over. The rifle sat across his lap. He stroked it with tentative fingers, and briefly pondered if it was somehow better that Caroline never got as far as End Foam, but he didn’t agree or disagree.

He drained his glass and poured another one—it really was Sully’s last bottle of scotch, of that the bartender had been well informed and honest—and he wondered what type of person would come through the door next, what their symptoms would be and what, exactly, he would do about it.

About Dean H. Wild

Dean H. Wild has been fascinated with horror and has been creating tales of terror from a very young age. His first paid sale was to Famous Monsters of Filmland in the Forrest J. Ackerman days. A Wisconsin native, he resides in the small town of Brownsville and works behind a closed study door, mainly for the safety of his wife, Julie, and his cat Sigfreid. His publishing credits span over thirty years, but most recently, his work has appeared in Shadow Masters from The Horror Zine and Night Terrors III.

THE WOODS

Nicholas Paschall

THE TWO MEN SANG OFF-KEY as they stumbled through the woods, laughing all the while. “The lord bless Charlie Mops!”

The man on the left, a taller man with graying streaks at his temples, took a long swig from a brown bottle clutched in his free hand, the other hand slung over his friends shoulder for support as they walked.

“You are a stinking drunk, Brandon,” slurred the man he was leaning on, groping after the bottle for a swig of his own. This man, shorter and more barrel-chested than the other, was bald. Great tanned forearms and thick wrists showed he worked outside.

Brandon laughed, passing the bottle to his squat drinking buddy and stumbling toward a sturdy oak. “Like you’re one to talk, Ashton!” He fumbled with the front of his pants in an effort to free himself before his bladder finally gave up the fight of holding back a night’s worth of binge drinking.

Ashton drained the last of the bottle before throwing it far into the woods, the shattering of glass against a tree making him laugh. “That’s more like it! Damned woods are nothing but trouble…”

“Says the woodsmen,” Brandon sighed in relief, having finally freed himself from the confines of his trousers and released the pressure that had been building all night.

“I tell you, mate,” Ashton said after a long burp, rubbing one hand over his head slowly, “I really feel for James, you know?”

“I know, I know…nobody thought his little girl would get caught out under a full moon.” Brandon tilted his head to the side as he stared up at the cloudy sky. “Thought she had more sense, truth be told.”

“We all did!” Ashton peered over at his friend. “My god, how much did you drink, buddy?”

“Shut it!” Brandon laughed as he strained to push out the last few drops, shaking himself a few times before stuffing his member back into his trousers. “But seriously, have you or the other men seen any sign of anything?”

“This again?” Ashton slurred, rolling his eyes. “Like I’ve told everyone else, there’s nothing in these woods to be afraid of. Just a few wolves that like to hunt when the moon is full.”

“But the way they found her…”

“She probably got hurt by the wolves and crawled up a tree, got tangled in the branches and bled out.” Ashton said, waving off his friend’s concerns. “Could happen to anyone.”

A sharp crack in the distance caused both men to spin round. Brandon cursed as he quickly tied off his belt. “What was that?” he drunkenly asked.

“Probably the wind knocked a branch down,” Ashton said, his eyes still gazing off into the darkened woods. Another crack caused him to narrow his eyes as he watched a shadowy figure some twenty yards away duck into the brush. Leaning his head to the side, he watched the bushes shake and rattle as the figure moved through the underbrush with animalistic speed. “Brandon, uh, maybe we should just head back to the bar?”

“But I thought you said you had some whiskey stashed out near your worksite?”

“Yeah, but whiskey’s on me at the bar. Let’s just go, all right?”

Brandon didn’t seem to understand. “It’s a little muggy out, but a fine night to drink under the moon, assuming the clouds move away. Let’s just go to your worksite.”

Ashton bit his lip and looked back into the woods where he threw the bottle. From underneath the penumbral darkness, he could see a pair of golden eyes watching him. “There’s some kind of animal out here. Let’s go.”

Suddenly it was upon them, howling madly as it tackled the two men to the forest floor, tearing into Brandon with sadistic abandon, silvery blood glimmering under the moonlight that peeked out from behind the clouds. Brandon screamed with terror and pain, but after a quick crack of his neck, his cries fell silent.

“Goddamn it, Nichole, you need to control yourself!” Ashton said as he rolled to his feet, dusting off his sleeveless shirt as he watched the half-wolf, half-woman drag the corpse slowly into the underbrush, her muzzle firmly latched over Brandon’s shoulder. “I told you this morning, I can’t keep covering for you!”

Sitting back on its haunches, the strange creature whined like a pitiful dog, even as it tore a chunk of flesh away from Brandon’s still-living form. Ashton did his best not to look into his friend’s pleading eyes as his sister tore into him like a steak.

Ashton folded his hands behind his head and blew out a puff of air. “Well, what are we going to do with him now?” he asked the feasting beast, who merely growled in response. “Hey, don’t take that tone with me!”

Nichole raised her bloodied muzzle up and brandished her claws, growling deep in her throat as she gazed at her brother. Is this it? Ashton thought as he reached into his back pocket. Is this the night she decides to eat me?

As she crept over Brandon’s bleeding form, walking on curled talon and wicked claw, Ashton drew out a butterfly knife, spinning it open with a resolute clacking noise of steel on silver. Holding it as if he were about to drive it down into a freshly caught rabbit, the burly lumberjack stood and waited for his sister to make a move. “I dare you.”

A warm summer wind blew across the meadow, rustling the leaves in the trees and bushes all around them, but both of them stood as still as statues, waiting for the other to make the first move. The only sound in the clearing was the final rasping breath of Brandon as the cold vice of death closed around him with harsh finality.

Growling, Nichole turned and tucked her long tail between her legs as she slumped into the bushes, whimpering like the bitch that she was.

“That’s right,” Ashton called out, flipping the blade closed, “slink off into the darkness like you always do. I just wish you would show this kind of cowardice every full moon instead of hunting down and slaughtering our neighbors’ cattle, or worse, our actual neighbors!”

But she didn’t disappear into the woods. Nichole sat on her haunches and continued to whimper as she licked at her forelegs, cleaning the blood from her sickle-sized talons.

“Whine all you want! But tomorrow I have to go with the other men and try and hunt down the ‘wolves’ that killed that little girl you mauled. And now Brandon, too. Do you know how hard it’s going to be for me to hide you for the next three days?”

Nichole’s golden eyes stared as he lectured, her tongue lacing out from behind her teeth to lick and clean her muzzle.

“Why can’t you just hunt deer, hmmm?” he asked, walking up to Brandon as he slipped his folded blade back into his back pocket. Squatting next to his dead friend, Ashton realized three things.

The first was that he shouldn’t have put his weapon away, as that was the only thing that kept his sister at bay.

The second was that she proved just how crafty a hunter a wolf truly is as she sprang out and rolled with him to the forest floor, her hind legs raking across his stomach, painfully rending his hard muscles into bloody ribbons.

The third was how badly it hurt to have one of your own family members to attack you when you were only trying to help her.

Throwing her over him with a well-placed foot to her stomach, Ashton rolled over and pulled out his knife once more, flipping it into a locked position as he stood on shaking legs. The slashes across his lower belly were deep, and he could feel the blood gushing from the wound.

“Nichole! Don’t make me do this!” he begged, brandishing his knife in a hammer-fist.

But the wolf-girl seemed no longer capable of reasoning. She spun from her prone position onto all fours, growling and circling her brother, looking for an opening. Her hands were dexterous, nearly like those of a human, each finger ending in a hooked claw that allowed her a good deal of traction. In the blink of an eye she went from being a few feet in front of him to on top of him again, her teeth sinking into his shoulder as she sought a tender vein.

Ashton grabbed her wrist with his free hand and bent it back, causing her to yelp and let go of him. He drove the blade between her ribs two times in rapid succession. Black blood spurted from the small punctures, and she howled in agony as the silver blade burned her flesh. Slapping a one paw over the wounds, she lashed out at her brother with the other, slashing his face with her wicked claws.

Ashton rammed her with his shoulder while still gripping her left wrist, throwing her off balance, and dropping her onto her back.

He dropped to his knees between her legs and rammed the blade home into her neck, pulling it up to sever her esophagus and jugular in one fatal twist of the knife. As she lay bleeding, she produced a low keening sound, feebly moving her limbs as if she might savage her brother once more.

Heaving a sigh and running a bloody hand over his face, Ashton turned and looked over at his dead drinking buddy. Looking back to his sister, he clutched a tuft of her fur near her right ear and brought her golden orbs to stare right into his own brown eyes.

“You made me do this. You made me do this, and for that I will never forgive you,” he told her, tears streaming down his bloody face. “But know that I love you, and I wish you the peace of the grave. I’ll make sure you’re buried with mom and dad.”

She whimpered on final time as a last breath escaped her throat. Ashton knelt over her as he watched her change, slowly reverting to her human form, laying nude in a pool of shimmering silver blood, glinting in the moonlight.

*****

The news spread like wildfire the following morning; though for Ashton he could hardly care. He had his fair share of well-wishers come by and offer their condolences for his sister’s apparent death at the hands of the drunkard Brandon, and the other men of the village offered to let him sit out on the hunt for the wolves that had claimed James’s daughter and Brandon.

Ashton thanked them for their kindness and kept to his cottage for the day, nursing the rapidly closing wounds he’d received from his sister the night before.

“Have to come up with a reason to leave soon,” he grumbled to himself as he pulled a new shirt on over his broad chest, the slashes on his stomach mere scabs now. His shoulder was still tender from the bite that had passed along the curse, but he could deal with such a minor inconvenience. “Don’t want to hurt anyone here that I know and love. Maybe it would just be best to move out into the wilderness, build a home there.”

Gazing out his window into his back yard where two headstones stood, he saw the new grave being dug next to his parents.

He leaned heavily against the window as he watched the gravediggers work, resting his head on his forearm. “No…I can’t leave my family.”

About Nicholas Paschall

Nicholas Paschall has been publishing horror for nearly two years now, with over eight anthologies to date containing his torrid tales. From his sunken sepulcher in San Antonio, he writes out stories for his website, the “Nickronomicon,” and acts as a recurring columnist for the horror magazine Dark Eclipse.

Nicholas graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio with a degree in History, hence his penchant for writing historical fiction. He hopes to see you in his dark corner of the net from time to time, where he publishes running series as he writes them.

THE HOTEL SAN DIGOT

Joseph Rubas

MIKE O’CONNER YAWNED AND LOOKED at the green dashboard clock: 10:58.

Fabulous, Mike thought, just marvelous. It was nearly eleven, and San Diego (hell, the border) was still six hours off, on the other side of a whole lotta nighttime. Driving through Mexico didn’t help the scenery any.

He should have known he’d never make it down and back in one sitting; twelve hours either way. Sure, Frankie, I can do it, you can count on me.

God, he was so tired. If it weren’t for the lively Spanish station he’d found on the radio (American airwaves didn’t penetrate quite this far, not even at night), he’d be asleep, probably lying in a ditch somewhere while the car burned on the blacktop, the smell of gas, oil, and coke thick on the warm Mexican air.

Mike shivered. The cocaine in the trunk wasn’t his; it belonged to Frankie “The Fish” Marazano, the boss of the Los Angeles Crime Family, and Frankie was a nasty hombre when something happened to his product. Hell, Mike was surprised Frankie didn’t have him killed for getting busted with some of his brown back in ’08.

But if he messed up this time…

He didn’t even want to think about it; it had been on his mind since the moment he left Frankie’s club early that morning, eating at him little by little. By the time he actually met up with the guys from the cartel, he was a nervous wreck. He didn’t trust them, was sure they’d dupe him, take the coke and the money, and send him back north to be fitted for a pair of concrete sneakers.

But no, thank God, he got away. Now all he had to worry about was getting the cargo across the border, and that was nothing; border crossings were a joke.

The only problem was: Mike was exhausted. He’d been on the road since five this morning, and hardly slept a wink the night before. Now, the highway lines in the headlights were hypnotic, lulling him. The hum of the tires on the pavement was worse, hence the Spanish music.

He couldn’t stop. But he couldn’t keep going. If he fell asleep and wrecked…

He shuddered. He turned up the air conditioning and let the car fill with icy vapor. Instead of waking him up, it just made him cold.

If he found a motel, away from lights and people and towns, he’d stop. That was a big if. The last signs of habitation he’d seen were fifty miles back. There was the occasional gas station, but not much else. He briefly considered pulling onto the shoulder and sleeping in the car, but if any Federales came cruising by in the night, they wouldn’t hesitate to stop and investigate. Mike couldn’t decide which was worse in that scenario: Losing the coke and incurring Frankie’s wrath, or winding up in a Mexican prison.

So he’d have to stop…if he happened across a motel. No pressure. Mike sighed. His eyes throbbed dully.

As the miles rolled on and the highway rose and fell, rose and fell over the low desert hills, he found himself actively wishing for a motel; a gaudy neon sign, a kidney-shaped pool, something, anything, but the night remained unbroken.

Whatever, he told himself, he was fine, he could make it. He was famous for going days without sleep. One time, he waited in front of an apartment building for a rat for three days straight. The guy was in Vegas the whole time, gambling away money he’d skimmed off the family. When he came back…

Of course, he wasn’t doing meth anymore, but that didn’t matter. Even clean and sober, he didn’t need sleep. He was fine. Totally fine. Right?

Yet within fifteen miles, he began to drowse, his eyes falling closed and his chin falling against his chest. He’d snap awake just as the car began veering into the other lane, but each time he was slower and slower to respond.

He wasn’t fine. If he kept going on like this, he’d wind up in a ditch, and if he wound up in a ditch…

Admitting defeat, Mike pulled onto the dusty shoulder and put the car in park. He fished his cell from his pocket and searched for motels in the area, hoping against hope something would pop up.

The service was spotty and the page took an agonizingly long time to load, but, lo and behold, there was a hotel (swanky!) not ten miles down the road, a place called the San Digot. There were about a dozen five star reviews, but to be fair, they looked like they were all written by the same person (caps lock, bad spelling, piss poor grammar, hell, even different variations of the same username): THE HOTELL SANDIGOT IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL HOTELL IN THE WORLD; I WISH I COLD LIVE THERE (SandraH); IVE NEVER SEEN SCUH A MAGNIFIGASENT HOTELL IN MY LIFE. IT WAS PERFICT (Sandy123).

Dishonest on the part of the management maybe, but Mike didn’t care; as long as there was a bed or a spot on the floor to curl up, he was fine.

It was settled, then. He’d stop, grab a few hours of sleep, and then hit the road.

Five miles later, Mike crested a hill, hit an open stretch of road, and there, beyond a reflective green road sign, black against the Baja stars, was the San Digot. Not much to look at, really, just a dark shape. The only light he could see was the soft glow of candles, and even then, only every few windows.

Old school, huh?

Looking both ways, he pulled into the dusty parking lot and slid in next to a rusted Fleetwood. After killing the engine, he sat behind the wheel for a long moment. What was he going to do with the coke? He couldn’t just leave it in the trunk.

He’d have to bring it in.

Mike sighed, leaned over and opened the glove box. Under napkins and receipts was his snub-nose revolver.

Getting out, Mike tucked the gun into his waistband. Around back, he popped the trunk and stood for a moment looking at the two black duffle bags. So much money, so little product. Mike grabbed the bags, wincing and muttering at their weight, and closed the trunk.

He walked around the Fleetwood and to a covered porch he’d seen from the road. As he reached the bottom step, he became aware of a presence. Looking up, he saw two abstract forms near the door, one denoted by the warm glow of a cigarette cherry. Guests enjoying the night, perhaps.

“Hey,” Mike said in his best halting Spanish, “I need a room.”

“You’ve come to the right place then,” a woman replied in clear, perfect English. “Is it just you?”

“Yeah.”

“Pity,” said a low male voice, “the more the merrier.”

Ooookay.

“I am Sonia,” the woman said, sounding very formal. She stood up. “I am the manager. If you can follow me I will lead you to your room.”

“All right,” Mike said, starting up the stairs.

“Will you need help with your bags?” Sonia asked.

“Uh, no,” Mike replied quickly, and he clutched them protectively.

“Whatever you feel is best,” she said. “Please follow me.”

Arms straining, Mike followed Sonia and thought how funny it was that the shadows clung to her like a witch’s cowl. They went through the vaulted doorway and into the antechamber, a subtle but distinct change of atmosphere settling over him as he passed the threshold. The night became heavier, more burdensome. The air inside was cold, too cold, and heavy with an almost overpowering odor suggestive of death and abandonment.

She led him down a brief set of stairs and into a grand, cathedral-like lobby pooled with candle-licked shadows. Phantoms danced upon the walls, across dusty portraits, through cobwebbed corners and brisk, marrow-chilling drafts that whistled in the arched eves. Could the shadows have come from outside, where the night was warm and calm and smelled of flowers?

He shuddered. Suddenly, the darkness seemed to press just a little too closely.

As they passed a large wooden check-in desk, Sonia said, “I apologize for the state of things. The Hotel San Digot is very old.”

Old? The place looked like one of those abandoned buildings on Skid Row where bums and winos slept with needles hanging out of their arms. He was beginning to think that this place wasn’t entirely legit. But that was fine, since he wasn’t legit either.

They were now ascending a great staircase directly across from the check-in desk. To their right was what seemed to be a lounge of some kind, only instead of armchairs and end tables, it was populated only with the shattered, skeletal remains of furniture. A fireplace sat disused and cold, and another painting hung askew on the wall.

“At least it’s free,” she said.

Free?

Seeming to hear his thoughts, she said, “The Hotel San Digot has been closed for years. We came later.”

“Who’s we?”

“All of us. The Hotel San Digot needs life and we give it.”

What?

Now they were at the top of the stairs. In either direction, long, windowed corridors were bathed silver by the light of the moon.

“What are you? Some sort of cult?” he joked, the words flat on his lips.

Sonia turned and faced him. God, she was beautiful, her skin luminescent and her eyes dark and sparkling in the moonlight. “No. Simply outcasts.  Now come on. We must hurry. It is almost midnight.”

With that, she was off, and Mike had to run to keep up with her. From the stairs, she led him down a series of passageways past wide, open rooms strewn with wreckage and refuse, piles of moldering wood, dust, and other, less namable things.

“The Hotel San Digot was built in the year 1881 by an American industrialist,” Sonia said. By now, they were climbing a winding set of service stairs. High above them, cold moonlight filtered down through the shattered roof. Mike noticed that neither their voices nor their footfalls made the slightest echo. If was as if the walls around them were greedily absorbing their
life
noises.

“On the day it opened, he fell from the bell tower, down these very stairs.”

“That’s too bad,” was all Mike could think to say. They reached a narrow landing, and Sonia led him through a wide opening. Before them, aglow with moonlight, stood another hall, doors hanging open. As they passed, Mike swore he heard whispered voices, babbling like blood over bleached skulls. From somewhere, insane laughter rose, hitching and shaking before it fell. He closed his eyes, trying to steady his suddenly pounding heart.

“Over the years, many others have died here,” Sonia was saying, “but the hotel cannot be blamed for human folly. How could something so beautiful, so magnificent, be to blame?”

Mike didn’t speak.

“This beautiful hotel cannot be blamed,” she said, her voice rising. “It simply can’t. The hotel has done nothing wrong. It is people who have wronged it. People who hurt people here. People who hurt themselves. People abuse and disfigure everything they touch. The Hotel San Digot is too good for people.” She paused, and then continued, “But it needs life. All places need life, or else they wither and die. Buildings, neighborhoods, nations…”

The hall ended in another staircase. Mike was starting to get dizzy in the endless twists and turns of the hotel.

Sonia’s crazy talking wasn’t helping. “In 1928, a fire broke out in the kitchen and spread. Thirty-eight people were killed. Afterwards, the owners left it to rot.”

He wished she would shut up. They came to another landing, another doorway, and another gray, listless hall. Just how large was this hotel, anyway? They were so deep inside that the only sounds were the thumping of rats in the rotting walls. Images of Stephen King’s The Shining flashed into his mind.

“In the sixties, the hotel became a refuge for hippies and outlaws, murderers, thieves, and pirates of the desert.”

As if on cue, signs of what must have surely been of that lawless period began to appear on the emaciated walls. Drawings. Words. Symbols. Black power fists. Penises. Peace signs. And, to top it all off, the macabre centerpiece, etched into door hanging open: CHARLES MANSON FAMILY 6-18-69.

“Jesus,” Mike muttered softly.

“We have been here for almost twenty years now, living in the rooms, taking in weary travelers, feeding them, housing them.”

“Look, how about if we don’t talk about the past?”

Finally she was quiet, and she paused in front of a closed door. Then she spoke again, but not about the past. “This is your room. We don’t have running water, but there’s a bed and warm blankets. It’s not much.”

“It’s fine,” Mike said.

She smiled and opened the door.

Mike was surprised (and perhaps disturbed) to find a candle already burning, as if it had
always
been awaiting his arrival. It jutted from the neck of a wine bottle on a small writing desk and its flame threw frenetic shadows over the peeling walls. There was a bed shoved against the farthest wall, the desk in front of a narrow window, a chair, and a closet. Nothing else.

“No TV?” he asked.

“Remember, there’s no electricity. Well…here you go. You are the only one in this wing, so it should be quiet for you.”

“Thank you,” Mike said, and forced a smile.

“Goodnight.” She smiled sweetly, and seemed to dematerialize like a moonbeam in the morning.

When Mike was certain he was alone, he dropped the bags and closed the door, locking it. His hands were trembling. Swallowing, he turned around and sagged against the door, letting go a long, shuddery breath. What the hell was going on here? Who were these people?

A cult. A cult that worshipped the ruins of a Gilded Age hotel in the Mexican badlands.

Perfect. Should he have expected anything less? Really, this was just his luck. Right up his alley. Here he was with coke belonging to the mob, trapped with a bunch of psychos (how many were there?) who probably wanted to sacrifice him on the altar of San Digot and stick him in the wall like an Energizer battery. Sandy needs life, after all.

He wondered if he should get out of here. But he couldn’t. First of all, he needed sleep, and second, it was dark, and he’d get lost in the maze of corridors the moment he even tried. They had all the advantages. This was their home turf. They’d find him in a second, and he’d be done.

He had to wait until morning.

He counted to three, beating back the wild grip of panic. All right. He’d wait until morning. When the sun was up and the halls of the San Digot were bathed in light, he’d leave. If anyone tried to stop him…he touched his gun.

Resolved, Mike went back to the door, grabbed the bags, and brought them over to the bed. Setting them down disturbed dust, which kicked into the air like a cloud of noxious gas and sent the candle flame dancing madly. He sat in the chair.

He was in for a long night.

Tap. Tap.

Mike opened one bleary eye, the world a smudge of gray, and realized he’d been falling asleep in the chair.

Blinking, he sat up straighter. Grotesque shadows writhed across the walls, congregating in corners like witches at black mass. God, it was cold, so cold he could see his breath.

Something woke him, he knew, but he didn’t know exactly what. The rats in the walls?

Sure. Whatever. He didn’t care. All that mattered was he was falling asleep, and doing that would get him—

Tap. Tap.

Mike’s blood froze. The sound was like that of a single ghostly finger on a closed door, his closed door.

Something was out there, asking to be let in.

Not something. This wasn’t a Stephen King movie. Someone. A cultist, come for his pound of flesh. Sandy’s boy.

Tap. Tap. Tap. More insistent.

Mike got up and crept to the door, wincing as floorboards creaked beneath him. Just as he reached it, the doorknob rattled.

His gun raised and ready, Mike unlocked the door and ripped it open.

The hall was empty.

Breathing more heavily than he should have been, he stepped out and looked both ways, up and down the passage. “Hello?”

His voice echoed. Somewhere, sounds like shuffling footstep moved in the darkness.

“Who is it?” Mike asked, his voice faltering. He stepped into the hall, the gun in front of him like a talisman.

Scrape. He barely heard it over the pounding of his heart. Someone was there, in the deep black, moving ever so slowly down the hall, perhaps hoping to lead him into a trap.

He glanced over his shoulder and was stunned to see his door almost forty feet behind him, the ghostly candlelight soft on the decaying wall. He’d taken only one step. How the hell did he get all the way out here?

Gun or no gun, Mike’s courage flagged, and he half-ran back to the room, the back of his neck tingling. When he reached the room, he slammed and locked the door, throwing himself against it.

Once he’d caught his breath, he moved reluctantly back to the chair and sat down. He was wide awake, wired, alert, and afraid.

Tap. From the closet.

He looked up. The closet door was closed tight.

Someone was in there. That was why they lured him into the hall, so that they could send someone into the closet.

Mike got up. Whoever it was would be sorry. They’d all be sorry.

He pulled the door open and thrust the gun before him in one fluid motion. He was expecting trouble, a person, a zombie, anything except a slime-slathered stone staircase lit by feeble burning torches, but that’s what he found.

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. As if in response, a stale, chilly breeze rushed over him, bringing with it the smell of decomposition and he thought he heard the rattling sound of his own name hissed over dead lips.

“Miiiiichaelllll...”

Mike jumped back, nearly tripping over his own feet, and the door slammed so hard the walls shook. Unthinking, he sprang back and ripped the door open again…

…and saw a closet, dirty and shadow-filled. The staircase was gone, the torches were gone, the breeze was gone. It was almost like one of those old episodes of Scooby-Doo, where a switch in the wall revealed a gaping chasm that appeared only long enough to swallow someone before closing up again.

He went back to the chair and sat down. He felt like a man on the brink of a breakdown. What the hell was going on here?

That stairway didn’t happen, he decided. He was keyed up, scared, on edge. He’d hallucinated the whole thing. Going out into the hall was real but certainly the staircase and the whispering were the result of being over-tired. In fact, it had the quality of a dream. Yeah. That’s all it was.

Mike felt sleepy once again. He pulled the covers back from the bed and lay down. Soon, he slept, and dreamed.

*****

Empty passages through rot and ruins, slanted, canted, and tilted; the shadows teeming with unseen life, ghostly whispering, babbling, stifled laughter were all around him. He struggled toward the stairwell they’d ascended, but became lost in the maze-like corridors, stumbling into forsaken rooms littered with human skeletons. The way was dark but lit intermittently by inexplicable lightning flashes.

And in those flashes, Mike saw things, half-formed figures darting across his path, disappearing into ancient doorways and deep corners, waiting to strike as he passed.

He wanted to leave, to escape into the realm of the real, but his resolve crumbled, and he turned back toward his room, his feet like two great cinderblocks. He had to hurry. It was almost midnight.

Instead of returning to his room, however, he came to a large tomb-like door, and threw it y open.

The closet stairway!

It glowed a ghastly white in the light of the moon that streamed through the blasted ceiling stories above.

He felt horror. Below, a door clanged open, and a somber procession of footfalls began ascending the stairs, accompanied by eerie, echoed chanting. Revenants in a monastery of the dead.

Mike turned, had to find another exit, and came face-to-face with the pale, skeletal face of Charles Manson, his eyes shining madly from under a faded swastika etched into his forehead.

“Welcome to Hotel 666,” Manson raved, “we’ll leave the candle on for ya!”

*****

Mike sat bolt upright, a scream building in his throat. The candle had burned most of the way down, and the room was lost in darkness.

Screw this. Charles Manson is still alive, tucked safely away in an American prison.

He got out of bed and grabbed the gun. He wanted out of here; fuck sleep.

Before he could get to the door, however, it blew open in blast of cold air, blowing out the candle and plunging the room into darkness, and there, shining in all her luminescence was Sonia, naked, her flesh cold and white, the color of cemetery clay.

“Mike,” she gasped, “Mike, I want you.”

“Get the fuck out of my way,” Mike shouted.

Sonia came forward, her arms outstretched beseechingly. “Mike, please, take me. I burn for you!”

“I said move! Or I’ll shoot!”

She came forward still. In the pale light of the moon, he saw that she had grown inexplicably older in the few hours since he’d last seen her: Lines around her mouth and eyes, wrinkles, liverspots, silver streaks in her hair. She looked old and rundown like the hotel; needing life.

Mike raised the gun and fired three times, sending the spectral Sonia spinning into a corner. The doorway was free. He ran.

“You can’t leave!” Sonia cried from the floor as he passed, her voice cracking, changing, deepening. “I need your life!”

How could she not be dead? He couldn’t have missed with all three shots. He’d seen her fall to the floor.

In the hall, Mike staggered and nearly fell. In the half-light of the moon, hands made of wood and rusted copper reached through the floor, their fingers jagged and splintered. One seized his pant leg, and he kicked at it furiously, shattering it into a million pieces.

“Stay! Stay! Stay!” chanted the walls as the Hotel Digot began to tremble. “Stay! Stay! Stay!”

Teetering on the brink of madness, Mike threw himself through the swaying field of hands, dodging the whip-like wires snaking through the bleeding walls, and screamed as bits of living plaster fell from the quaking ceiling. The doors opened and slammed, opened and slammed, cheerleading the grotesqueries.

At the end of the hall, Mike veered left, but came to a screeching halt; the floor was gone, and in its place a yawning maw composed of beam boards and supports, waterlines and sewage pipes spewing bile. By now, the shaking was so bad he could hardly stand. He was trapped.

The window!

Mike turned. The dawn streamed in from the window.

“No!” the hotel screamed. Window shutters slammed closed, but Mike was already running, already smashing through, already airborne.

He hadn’t realized how far he would fall to the cement courtyard below.

About Joseph Rubas

Joseph Rubas is the author of over 200 short stories, many of them in the horror genre. His works have appeared in Eschatology Journal, The Storyteller, and countless others. He currently resides in Florida with his fiancée, Brenda, who is also a writer, and his son, Jeremy, who enjoys screeching, his binky, and his mommy and daddy.

DADDY’S GIRL

Lisa Morton

IT WAS ALREADY DARK WHEN JANNYFINALLY LEFT THE OFFICE, weary and weighed down with her yearly Christmas depression. She slid behind the wheel of her twelve-year-old Toyota, turned the key, and winced as a bubbly carol erupted from the radio.

Holly jolly Christmas. Yeah, right, she thought as she negotiated her way out of the parking structure.

She hit the street, surprised at the lack of rush-hour traffic until she remembered it was Christmas Eve. Most folks were already home with their families, released hours ago by bosses who still had a shred of compassion. Most wives were probably already setting out lovely dinners before smiling faces, not wondering if they’d find their husbands already drunk (again) when they got home. Janny hoped that Tris had at least stayed sober enough to take care of the baby. Yesterday when she’d arrived home, she’d found her five-year-old daughter Nessa trying to open a jar of baby food for the bawling little Marcus because Daddy had already passed out on the living room couch.

All I want for Christmas is peace and quiet.

For Janny, Christmas brought its own burden of bad memories: Daddy showing up late and drunk from parties with the other guys at the factory, presenting her with gifts that he told her she didn’t deserve. Now her present life had caught up with the past. Tris unemployed for two years…thirty days away from losing their two-bedroom house, nowhere else to go…Janny’s own failed dreams and the degree in PoliSci that she’d once thought would bring her an exciting career in the State Department, not a dead-end secretarial position in a law office…

And her father never missed an opportunity to remind her that she was a failure and a disappointment. No wonder Mother had died years ago; she’d simply been worn down by the man.

Janny pulled onto her own avenue, trying to feel cheered by the twinkling lights and glittery yard decorations. At the end of the block, the Bryants had really gone all out this year: Their yard included a giant animatronic Snoopy in Santa costume, and an eight-foot inflatable snowball, featuring a perpetual fall of white flakes.

At least I got our nativity scene out, Janny thought, already slowing as she approached her home.

Janny frowned as she realized hers was the only dark house on the block; it was, in fact, completely dark, without even interior lights gleaming through the windows.

“Damn it, Tris,” she cursed under her breath, feeling her adrenaline start to match her growing anger.

She parked the Camry in the driveway, took her purse and got out, slamming the door. The house was completely unlit, silent—

Where’s Toto? That dog always barks up a storm when I get home.

Had Tris left the house, taken the dog and kids somewhere? She couldn’t imagine where he would have gone—his family lived on the other side of the country, and hers wouldn’t have him. They hated Tris; even when he’d been working, Janny’s father had called him a loser and blamed him for holding her back.

Janny picked her way up the front walk by instinct, listening for any noise, but all she heard was the distant remnants of Christmas music and the creak of the wooden manger, set on a bale of hay she’d bought at the crafts store, surrounded by cheap plastic statues of Joseph and Mary and various animals. Nessa loved the lamb, and Janny had let her place it carefully nestled up against the hay bale. The manger creaked again, even though there was no breeze.

Something was wrong.

Intuition prickled the back of Janny’s neck as she juggled her keys, fingers suddenly jittery with nerves. She reached the front door, tried the knob, found it unlocked.

“Tris?” she called as she pushed the door open and stepped inside.

Still no Toto. No blare of the television, no baby’s squall.

Janny shut the door, then reached for the entryway light. She wondered if their power might be out (maybe that’s why Tris left with the kids), but was both relieved and unnerved when light flooded the entry.

She moved cautiously, trying to ignore the knot growing in her stomach. From somewhere down the block she heard the echo of “Silent Night” played over speakers, and she tried to tune it out as she reached for the living room lights.

She flipped both switches, and the living room was abruptly bathed in the multicolored hue of the Christmas tree lights, as well as the usual overhead fixture.

Janny saw instantly that something had changed.

The tree caught her attention first: There were the decorations she and Nessa had put up last week (while Marcus had played with a little stuffed reindeer), the angel on top and the silver tinsel garland looped around…

The packages at the base of the tree. She’d placed most of them there just two nights ago, but now they’d been rearranged carelessly, some overturned, and there was a large one that she’d never seen. It was the size of a banker’s box and had cheap paper taped around it, a red-and-green tree print that was crinkled and even torn in places.

Janny’s eyes moved from the tree to the rest of the room. Something had been spilled on the beige carpet near the faux gas fireplace. Janny felt her temper flare again.

Goddamnit, Tris, we can’t afford to have that cleaned.

Then her eyes moved up, past the imitation log in the imitation hearth, to the mantelpiece…and her breath caught.

There was something placed there, hanging from the mantel where she usually put the Christmas stockings, sneaking carefully down the stairs after everyone was asleep to leave gaudy knit decorations stuffed with candy and toys.

This wasn’t a stocking. It was black, skinny, fur-covered and bleeding.

It was one of Toto’s legs. It had been severed near the hip and then nailed to the mantelpiece. The stain on the carpet was the dog’s blood.

Janny gasped for air, stared in shock, didn’t even know that she’d taken a step to the side until her foot hit something slippery and she nearly went down. She saw that it was more blood, pooled thickly; her foot had slipped in it and impressed a crimson print in the pale living room carpet.

“Nessa!” she shrieked, without thinking.

She heard a closet door crash open and a shout from the kitchen. “Mommy!”

Janny ran through the dark until her daughter was in her arms, sobbing and clutching at her. “Baby, are you alright?”

The little girl could barely get words out between choked sobs. “Mommy, he chased me, and—Toto, and I—hid—”

Janny tried to stroke her daughter’s hair and shush her while she felt fear for her other child, the one-year-old. “Where is Marcus?”

“Don’t know, Mommy.”

She had to find Marcus, get them out of here, but her need to protect her children collided with anger that had spiraled into fury.

Tris.

She realized: Two years of unemployment, her father’s derision, a man’s pride, holiday stress, and alcohol had combined into a vicious brew.

“Toto…” Nessa said between softer sobs.

“Shh, baby, we can’t save Toto now. We gotta grab your brother and get us out of here.”

Janny was shaking and could smell blood and couldn’t remember where she’d dropped her purse with the cell phone. But she knew she couldn’t stay in the house long enough to make a call; she needed to get Nessa and Marcus out. They could go next door to Mrs. Windell; she was elderly and alone, but she liked the kids and she’d keep them safe until the police could come.

Then Janny heard a rustling in the hallway. Someone was coming toward the kitchen.

With her escape cut off, she thought frantically: Can’t run, can’t get to Marcus, must protect Nessa. She wrenched a drawer open, the one where she kept her cooking utensils, and her fingers closed around the hilt of a butcher knife.

She’d kill Tris if he threatened their daughter.

“Get behind me, Nessa.”

The little girl bit off her cries and did as instructed.

A dark form appeared in the kitchen entry, silhouetted by the light from the living room.

“Tris, get out of my way.”

Even as she said it, Janny knew something was wrong; it wasn’t Tris. It was too tall, too slim, slightly bent with age…

The figure laughed, a deep rumble. “You need to open your eyes, girl.”

Daddy.

It was her own father. Janny’s fingers closed tighter on the knife handle, even as she tried to keep her hands from trembling. “Daddy…what’s…?”

He reached in and turned on the lights, and Janny saw that he carried a hatchet in one hand; she recognized it from childhood, from all the times Daddy had dragged her out into the December woods to chop down that year’s Christmas tree. Except now the hatchet—and Daddy’s arms, chest, and face—were splattered crimson.

He held Marcus in his other arm, the baby cradled against his chest. Daddy grinned; even his teeth were bloodied.

Janny took a step forward before she reminded herself that Daddy was good with that hatchet. “Marcus! What did you do to him?”

He jostled the baby, who uttered a tiny giggle. “The baby’s got my blood in him, Janny. You don’t think I’d hurt my own kin, do you?”

“Then let me take him.”

“Oh, not this time, no. I’m going to raise this boy right. Just look at how happy he is, Janny. I even think he looks like me, don’t you?”

Janny couldn’t answer. It was the first time she’d ever wanted Marcus to cry, to shriek, to squirm and fight. Instead, the baby betrayed her, chewing a chubby knuckle as he kicked a foot in delight.

Daddy smiled at his grandson, then looked up at Janny. “But Christmas shouldn’t be just for the little ones, should it? I decided to give you the best Christmas present of all this year, Janny. Come see.”

He stepped aside, motioning her out of the kitchen. Janny didn’t move, just held the knife before her.

Daddy mock-frowned, and Janny saw a vicious gleam behind the milky cataracts starting to cover his eyes. “Now, now, it’s Christmas—aren’t you going to let me play Santa Claus? It’s all for you.”

Janny weighed the options: His hatchet and his size against her knife and her weakness…all with her son in his arms, her daughter behind her. She made her choice instantly. “Stay here, sweetie,” she whispered back over her shoulder, and felt her girl squeeze her hand in acquiescence.

She prayed Nessa would run if she got the chance. If Janny could give her the chance.

Lowering the knife, Janny stepped forward. “All right, daddy.”

“Good girl.”

He waited, never turning his back, as she walked past him. “The living room,” he directed her.

The big box under the tree.

She walked on leaden feet, dread nearly causing her to drop the knife. At one point she had a chance to make a run, out the front door, screaming—but that would leave Nessa and Marcus behind. She couldn’t do that.

So she walked, numb, into the living room. To the tree, and the merrily wrapped gifts that surrounded it.

Daddy followed behind her. “Never did like that yappy little mutt of yours. Figured he worked better hung over the chimney with care.”

Janny didn’t look. She felt hot tears on her cheeks. They’d gotten Toto for Nessa’s third birthday, and that dog had been her daughter’s best friend.

“Now, that box right there—you open that. It’s from your Daddy.”

She couldn’t move. She stared at the box, and saw now that what she’d thought was just a badly-rendered holiday design was partly red handprints and crimson splotches.

“Open it, Janny.”

The tone was demanding, and Janny couldn’t disobey. She’d never been able to. She dropped to her knees and tore at the paper, tossing it aside. Underneath was a cardboard box, the top flaps sealed with Scotch tape.

“C’mon, now, don’t keep Daddy waiting.”

There was a terrible smell wafting up from the box, and Janny knew what was inside. She sagged, openly crying, drained by the knowledge. “Why…” was all her lips could form; even as she said it, she hated the obviousness of it.

“He took my little girl’s life away. Nothin’ but a loser. He didn’t deserve you, and you’re better off without him. My Christmas gift to you.”

Janny’s mind flashed back: Daddy slaps mommy, daddy kills a neighbor’s cat, daddy gets arrested for beating on a kid who jaywalked, a kid he didn’t even know…the look in Daddy’s eyes sometimes…and she saw the madness that had always hidden in Daddy—that she’d let be hidden, because to acknowledge it would be to accept that this man was part of her. His blood was hers.

In that second, she accepted it. She’d be mad, then, just for as long as it took to protect Nessa and Marcus. She’d save them as she’d never been saved, and they’d have the life she hadn’t had.

She lunged up, the knife held before her, coming in low from where she’d knelt by the box, coming below the arm that held the baby, and Daddy hadn’t expected it. He made a chuff sound as the knife was buried up to the hilt in his chest. The arm holding Marcus fell, but Janny was there, ready. Marcus dropped into her arms and began to howl. Janny stepped back, clutching her son protectively as Daddy stared in disbelief at the knife, at the blood—his blood now—and at Janny.

“Baby…” he said once, before he toppled. One arm tangled in the foil garland and the tree went down with him, the sound of his final breath lost in the bruised tinkling of shattering glass ornaments. The tree’s lights were extinguished, leaving the room lit only by the normal yellowish glow of the overhead fixture.

“Mommy…?”

Janny looked up to see Nessa in the doorway, her eyes wide and fearful.

She meant to say, “It’s okay, baby, we’re safe now. We’re safe.” She wanted to believe that Daddy’s madness had been his alone, that she had inherited no more than his sandy hair and long nose.

Instead, when she opened her mouth what came out was a wild, ferocious howl, a terrible sound that was hoarse around the edges but rose and rose, gaining power and pitch.

The silent night was shattered.

About Lisa Morton

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author of non-fiction books, award-winning prose writer, and Halloween expert whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening”.  Her most recent releases include the novella By Insanity of Reason (co-authored with John R. Little) and the novel Zombie Apocalypse: Washington Deceased. She lives in North Hollywood, and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com.

BLURRED

Matthew Nichols

I CAN’T FIND MY GLASSES. THEY WERE RIGHT THERE on the sink. I’m patting my hand around the smooth porcelain of its edge, and I don’t feel them. I probably knocked them off and they’re on the floor next to the toilet. I’ve done that before, although I hope they’re not broken. I need them if I’m going to continue my work with the stone tonight.

I shut off the water and push the shower curtain aside. Without my glasses, the bathroom is a hazy mirage of patchwork shapes that don’t fit together. I step out, dripping hot water, and I shiver a little in the house’s coolness. I slide the towel off its rack and make sure everything’s dry before binding it around my waist. I kneel down and look into the space between the toilet and the sink’s cabinet. They’re not there. I check if they’re behind the toilet. I search with my hand between the jutting handles of the toilet brush and plunger. I can’t feel them there. I squint, hoping maybe I’ll detect their outline. I don’t.

I’m wondering if I put my glasses somewhere else and forgot. I don’t think I did. I distinctly remember folding down the earpieces and placing them on the sink. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t done that. Maybe I took them off in the bedroom. I move towards the bathroom door and pause. The door is open a crack. I’m sure I closed it.

I sigh and shake my head. Randall Donovan, I think. Dr. Randall Donovan, please return to Earth. It’s something Rhonda would say if she saw me right now. She left for my in-laws’ house this morning and was planning on returning tomorrow night. Did she come back early and stick her head into the bathroom? If she did, why didn’t she say anything? And why didn’t she call earlier to let me know that all was well with her dad?

“Rhonda?” I call, my voice amplified by the bathroom’s smallness. I don’t hear a reply. It probably wasn’t her. When I’m busy with a project, I get absent-minded, so I must not have noticed leaving the door open slightly.

I open the bathroom door and turn off the fan before padding in the direction of the master bedroom. Something dark shifts in the corner of my eye. I turn towards the movement and see something oval and black exit the laundry room and turn down the central hallway, towards the living room. It’s probably the cat. I walk unconcerned into the bedroom and shut the door. I let the towel drop to the floor and start patting down the surfaces of the furniture like I’m frisking someone for contraband. I check my dresser and my nightstand. I pat my hands across the bed as though I’m slowly playing “Chopsticks” with open palms. I even kneel down and squint and reach around with sweeping arcs under the bed. Nothing.

Rhonda’s dresser and vanity table yield no results either. I’m starting to become frustrated. I wouldn’t have taken my glasses off and tossed them just anywhere. They’re the only way I can see properly and they’re damned expensive, too. I don’t want to search the rest of the house in my birthday suit, so I head over to the dresser and feel my way down to the second drawer in the center and pull it open. I take out boxers, pajama bottoms, and an old college T-shirt I use as sleepwear and pull everything on.

My alternate pair of glasses is downstairs in my office. I won’t have the crystal clarity of my newer glasses, but at least I’ll be able to see. I exit the bedroom and, with a firm grip on the railing, slowly make my way down the steps. The house is silent save for the hum of the air conditioning. I reach the first floor and turn so I’m looking down the central hallway toward the living room. Everything around me is an amorphous blob and I’m starting to get a headache from all the squinting. I’m also pausing because the cat, Horace, usually comes up the hallway in a bid to get me to sit down and scratch between his ears. The cat is nowhere to be seen, but because of my poor eyesight, what can be seen at the moment is subjective.

I look towards the laundry room, which leads into the garage. I’m pretty sure Rhonda isn’t home. The last I heard, her dad was in a bad way, and I can’t see her leaving only a few hours after she got there. Nevertheless, I decide to check the garage anyway. I walk with care through the laundry room and open the garage door. I nod. Rhonda’s car isn’t in the garage. The only other vehicle in the garage is my truck.

I close the garage door and move back into the hallway, feeling my way along until my fingers caress the door jamb to my office. I turn and enter, and my nose involuntarily wrinkles. Something smells in here. It has the acrid, metallic odor of a stovetop burner that’s been left on for too long and it’s burning the cookware. I walk towards my desk, which sits perpendicular to the far wall. Bookshelves line the entirety of the office’s rear, most of which contain academic volumes on geology that I reference for papers and classes. I move closer to the desk. I stop for a moment and look at the stone object that’s been sitting on my desk for the past couple of days.

It’s a strange octagonal stone, sent to me by Ajay Chandrasekhar, a friend at the University of Chicago. He’s an archaeologist. There was no notification ahead of time via e-mail or even a phone call. There was only a package that showed up on my doorstep with the stone and an apologetic letter from Ajay, who said in it that he needed a second opinion. According to the letter, he’d been the chief archaeologist at a discovery made close to Yellowknife in northern Canada. The ruins of a small village had been uncovered by the opening of a sinkhole close to one of the old mines up there. Initial investigations revealed the ruins of the village, which was initially thought to belong to one of the indigenous tribes before European colonization. Apparently, it was much more than that.

Ajay also stated in the letter that he didn’t trust the “crackerjack” (his words, not mine) geologists that had been brought in to examine the objects up there. He wanted a clear, unbiased opinion on the object, and so there it was, on my desk, with lamps and a magnifying glass arranged over it. I hadn’t gotten around to fully examining it because Rhonda had been a mess upon receiving the news about her father.

I feel a pang of regret swell in my gut when I think about her. I should be with her at her parents’ right now, not gearing up to examine some weird stone. Besides, it’s not like there’s a whole lot that can be done at my house. I can take the stone into the geology labs at the university after my office hours tomorrow. I decide to call her up and tell her I’m on my way after I get my alternate pair of glasses.

They’re in the second drawer down on the right-hand side of the desk. I move around the chair and place my hand on that side of my desk. I find the right drawer and pull it open. I start pawing around inside. My relief at being able to see slips into confusion, then deeper into disbelief. My other pair of glasses is not in the drawer. The case holding them is missing. I shake my head, drawing my hand from the drawer. I must have missed it. There’s a bunch of office supplies in there. Perhaps something shifted and is now covering the glasses case.

I plunge my hand back into the drawer. Pens. Loose-leaf paper for notes. Thumbtacks, paper clips, more pens and some pencils. But no glasses case. This isn’t right. This isn’t a case of misplacing something. I know my other pair was in this drawer. I’ve seen them in here a thousand times whenever I’ve opened up the drawer to get a new pen. I check the other drawers. No glasses in those drawers, either.

I move around the desk and start towards the office door, moving to check the kitchen, when something shifts past it. Whatever it is, it’s large and dark and I’m fairly certain it’s walking on all fours. I shrink back until I’m up against my bookshelves, a cold sweat jumping out all over my body.

Just the cat, I think, but no. It seemed too large to be Horace.

I step forward tentatively towards the hall and then freeze at the sound of the stairs creaking. It would be a normal sound if Rhonda or one of my colleagues was here, but there’s only me. The steps squeal under the weight of something heavy, something that takes its time before reaching the upstairs landing. My head snaps upward as whatever it is moves into the guest bedroom. It is in there that the movements stop.

I stay still for a while. Time slips by like water in a creek bed that’s almost gone dry. Two things dislodge me, and one of them is the need to breathe. I’ve been holding my breath, and it releases in a gust that provides a welcome relief. The second becomes apparent to me when I breathe in. That burned odor I smelled earlier is stronger. It’s sharpened into something resembling cordite from spent ammunition. I look over at the stone on my desk and it seems…darker somehow, as if it really has been set alight and burned. I don’t know if it’s just me, but the room seems hotter, too.

Get out, a part of my mind says sternly. Get out now! You don’t know what’s upstairs, you don’t know what’s going on with that stone. Now’s not the time to be macho.

I dismiss it as nonsense. There’s a reasonable, rational explanation for whatever’s going on here. I decide to go over to the stairs, even though every fiber of my being would like nothing more than to hurtle through my front door and away from whatever I think is standing in my guest bedroom.

I slowly round the corner and proceed cautiously into the hall. I round the banister and stand at the foot of the stairs. I look up and feel icy and rooted in place again. The lights have gone off upstairs. I left the lights on in the bathroom and bedroom, and now both lights have been extinguished. The stairs look directly up at the guest bedroom, its darkness impenetrable, especially with my eyes. I don’t need proper eyesight to know that something is up there. There is a feeling of weight and pressure from that direction, as if whatever’s hiding in the dark up there is staring intently at me.

There’s nothing up there, I keep saying to myself, but my fear is overriding the voice of reason that I’m desperately trying to adhere to. What about the missing pairs of glasses? What about the bathroom door being open when no one else was home? What about the stone and that weird burnt smell and how hot it was in the office? It’s connected somehow, and…but no, there has to be a reasonable explanation, something rooted here, in the real world, and—

A noise comes out of the guest bedroom. It’s low and guttural, like a growl choked by phlegm, except it sounds more like…like a giggle, or some version of one that wouldn’t be applicable to anything human.

I back away from the stairs, my widening eyes locked on that area of the dark that opens into the guest bedroom. I slowly move towards the hall closet. There’s a baseball bat in there. Rhonda and I keep it in there in case of intruders. My heart pulses so heavily I feel it in my throat. A part of my mind is still trying to convince me that I didn’t hear anything, that it was nothing but a figment of an overcharged imagination. Just get the bat and go upstairs and put an end to this nonsense once and for all, it says.

I open the closet door and reach inside for the bat. I don’t feel it. I search with my hand along the closet’s right side, pushing aside the coats. I still don’t feel it.

“What the hell?” I breathe.

I yank on the light cord and tear the hanging jackets to either side. I don’t see the bat, but that’s not saying much. I start peeling aside the vertical layers of jackets, trying to see if maybe the bat might have gotten caught up between two of them.

I become increasingly frantic, ripping the jackets off their hangers and tossing them to the floor. I dig through the shoes on the shoe rack, throwing them over both shoulders until I finally pitch the rack itself into the hallway.

Nothing. The baseball bat is not in the closet.

“No,” I say softly. I stand up on legs that have begun to tremble. This is not happening. This is impossible. It knows my house, I think as I stare down at the blurry floor. I’m inches away from losing any semblance of calm I’ve managed to hold onto so far. It knows where everything is right down to the fucking baseball bat in the closet I would’ve used to defend myself.

Defense. The knives in the kitchen spring to mind. There’s a butcher’s block on the counter next to the toaster. I stumble toward the kitchen, keeping my hands on the walls to guide me around the corner into the kitchen. I see the lit space of the kitchen, the counter ringing it, and everything on it. I know from memory where the butcher’s block is supposed to be, and I hurtle across the linoleum towards it. The closer I get to it, the more things come into focus, and my stomach drops.

The knives are all gone.

There were eight knives, all of them arranged by size and purpose, and they’re not there. “No,” I whine in my throat like a dog that’s been kicked into submission. I run my hands over the butcher’s block as though my touch will cause the knives to magically reappear. I yank open the drawers and jam my hands inside, only to find them devoid of utensils. I can’t breathe. A low moan gathers in my throat and I clap a hand over my mouth lest it become a scream.

Get out, I think again. It knows your house, it knows where everything is, it’s rendered you defenseless, now GET THE HELL OUT!

Walt and Janice, next door. They’ll still be up at this time of night. They’ll know what to do. They’ll help.

I run through the hallway back to the front door, tripping over the shoe rack and almost falling in my haste. I recover by gripping the railing at the last second before bolting for the door. I misjudge the distance and slam full-bodied into it. I cry out in surprise before gripping the knob and twisting. It doesn’t open. I remember it’s locked. I twist the lock to the left and pull. It still doesn’t open.

“Oh, God, no,” I sob. I twist and pull, twist and pull, I do this three more times, and the door still doesn’t open. I hit the door twice with my fist and utter a brief yell of frustration before turning and running back down the hallway. I make it to the back door. I unlock it and try to pull it open. It won’t budge. I tug the knob, I twist at it, I even put one foot against the wall and pull as hard as I can. It’s no use.

The window. We have a large set of bay windows in the living room. The middle one’s big enough to toss something through. I grab one of the chairs lining the table and hurry into the living room, tripping over several things. A thought (What’s it waiting for?) occurs to me, but I don’t pause long enough to consider it. I’m trying to get out. I stand in front of the window, about five feet away from it, and I aim as best I can and toss the chair. It bounces off the glass. I stand there agape for a moment. I must not have tossed it hard enough.

I grab the chair by its legs and stand closer to the window. I suck in one long, gasping breath before I power the chair forward with my right arm. It hits the window with a loud crack and falls to the floor. The glass is unbroken, and when I kneel down to the floor to collect the chair, I find that one of the legs has actually splintered off. I move toward the window and press my face against the glass, trying to determine if anyone is out there. I don’t see anyone, but that doesn’t stop me from slamming my fists against the glass and screaming until I’m hoarse. No one comes.

This is a nightmare. It has to be. I’ve fallen asleep standing up in the shower and I’m having the most horrifying dream I’ve ever had, in which something has invaded my house and stolen my means of sight, of defending myself, and escape; a dream in which it fills my house with the stench of its passage—

The smell.

The burned metal smell is now filling the house where it had once been limited to my office. There’s something else underneath it. Something rotten, like egg that’s been left on an unwashed plate in a dirty sink. It makes me gag. I can hear something, too, from my office: a low hum like an electric current. I stand up, dropping the chair leg, and shuffle towards my office.

I walk into my office and stop. The room is swelteringly hot, and the stone is glowing. It’s a deep reddish-pink, and hostile, angry colors swirl and collide over its surface, like lovers in the middle of angry sex. A haze surrounds it, a distortion of the air.

I’m shaking my head, muttering, “No, no,” but the impossible is possible and what I have assumed to be imagined is horribly real. And yet there’s something about the stone that’s vaguely…alluring. Comforting, even.

The colors it displays are attractive, perhaps beautiful. A strange tingling sensation develops at the base of my skull. It’s warm, and God help me, it makes me feel good. The fear that threatened to crack open my mind like an egg is dissipating, melding into a dreamy fugue in which I feel like I no longer should be afraid. The stone’s here. It will protect me, keep me safe. And why am I dressed like this? It’s so hot in here.

I peel my sweat-sodden pajamas off piece by piece until they lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. I walk towards my desk, a painless pins-and-needles sensation swarming all over the surface of my body. It’s like when Rhonda touches me except…better. More imaginative, more risky. More sexual.

The closer I get to the stone, the more my vision sharpens until everything solidifies. I can see! I can actually see! I didn’t need those stupid old glasses after all! And why was I thinking about leaving? Why was I trying to escape from the wonderment that was sitting right in front of me, just waiting to be experienced?

I utter a low moan of pleasure as I slide my fingers around the edges of the stone and pick it up. I hug it tightly to my chest, feeling its warmth penetrate me and heat my guts. I don’t want to leave after all. I’m not afraid anymore. If the thing upstairs has something to do with this, this incredible piece of ancient stone, then it can’t be all bad, can it? I’m starting to not think so, although there’s an increasingly distant part of my mind that is positively screaming its head off for me to put down the stone, it’s dangerous; it’s trying to control you, but how? Why? Who cares how it works?

When I bring it out of my office, the lights in the house flicker and die. I’m plunged into darkness that is broken only by the deep, pulsating, bloody red of the stone. I move down the hallway, easily stepping over the shoes and the rack. I smile at the hall closet, where the baseball bat used to be. I didn’t need it after all.

I come back around the corner and stand in front of the stairs. On the lowest step is Horace the cat who sits there on his haunches, staring at me. His ears are completely pricked up, and he’s looking at me wide-eyed.

“Horace,” I blurt. “What—?”

But the cat turns and shoots up the stairs. He disappears into the guest bedroom, where it’s waiting for me. That distant part of my mind grows closer for a moment, whispering, It’s taken everything else. Why not the cat, too?

The thought makes a chuckle rise in my throat. It turns into a laugh when I open my mouth, a halting, braying laugh that the other part of me wants to stop. I hold the stone with my right hand as I put my left over my mouth. The laughter doesn’t stop, and it takes me a moment to realize that I’m not the one that’s laughing. It’s coming from the guest bedroom, and even though it’s registering as completely and utterly mirthless, it makes pinkly red things rise in my mind that stroke all the right places in my brain, things which wrap around whatever’s left of my conscious thought and bend me unavoidably toward it.

I take one step up the stairs. Then another. And another. My eyes are wide. A grin stretches across my face from ear to ear. If I saw myself in the mirror, I’d probably scream like that other me is doing right now, but the farther up the stairs I go, the more it seems like a strange annoyance. A fly to be shooed away.

I stop when I reach the upstairs landing. The darkness in the bedroom moves, and I feel that I should kneel. It seems appropriate. As I kneel and hold the glowing stone before me, it reveals something black and curved and armored, something that shouldn’t exist in this world but does, and it feels old yet young, young even when the universe itself was young. It is a god, some kind of unfathomable god, and it is here, in my house! It has chosen me!

“Raaaaannnndallll,” it coos from the bedroom, and I feel I should rise and go to it. I stand up and slowly move forward. A grain of me recoils. I ignore it. I walk into the darkness. It embraces me. I am its destiny, and it is mine, and between us and the stone, we are one.

About Matthew Nichols

Matthew Nichols has a Master’s degree in history from Southern Illinois University. In addition to his scholarly work, he writes horror, science-fiction, and dark fantasy. His short stories and poetry have thus far seen publication in Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine, Under the Bed Magazine, and Aphelion. He also hosts a blog titled The Eclectic Post-Dispatch, where he reviews and discusses literature, films, video games, and non-fiction works at www.transeclectic.wordpress.com. Follow him on Twitter at MatthewANichols.

THE HOUSE

Jonathan Chapman

STARING HARD, HEART THUNDERING, breath coming in short gasps, Andrew watched the window of the master bedroom with all the attention he could find within himself. It was black outside, the dark of three in the morning, deep in the forest of the Sierra Nevada foothills. The window was the old kind that slid upwards, with the big metal latch on the cross-bar. He had thumbed it closed earlier, and double checked it soon after that.

He had seen something out there. Hadn’t he? Yes—something black and moving outside—seeming to hover.

Andrew blinked to clear his vision. The old house was silent except for the slight sound of the wind outside. He peered at the window frame, through the old glass—and that must be it, after all, the old glass was distorted and that was all—

No! There! There was something outside. The outline was unmistakable.

He sat upright in the big four-poster bed. His stomach turned as the excitement triggered the usual nausea and weakness from his illness. Terrified and now in pain, Andrew grabbed his stomach and rolled over to face the window, unable to look away.

He peered through the darkness. Something was obviously and clearly outside, right beyond the thin layer of glass. He stared all the harder, knowing the bedroom was on the second floor.

Slowly, as he watched, the window latch turned. It was moving by itself, by some invisible force…by the thing outside the window. He heard the latch make a small popping noise as it snapped open. Then, with a rattle, the window began to lift.

Andrew tried to sit up but only managed to roll over; he was too far along in his illness. Whatever was coming in to claim his soul would be there soon, and there was nothing he could do about it.

It flashed in his mind then—all of it—how he had come to be there, the why and what and all the sadness and pain of the whole thing. He crunched his eyes shut and rolled into a ball and let it all come back to him.

*****

The rental car crunched and popped over the gravel as Andrew drove down the old, overgrown driveway. The house was a mile off the main road, which was itself a single lane blacktop affair, far in the forgotten hills of Calaveras County. It was much scarier than Andrew had thought it would be, and he was sicker than he had thought; he was almost doubled over the wheel in pain. Only the rattle of the two bottles in his pocket comforted him. One was pain medication, the other something his good friend the MD had said would “speed it along.” A suicide in a bottle, if and when things got too bad.

The house was shocking in its disarray; a two-story Colonial, stately but old. After the glitter of Manhattan, the peeling paint, dirty and torn curtains hanging within, the overgrown yard; all seemed so dismal and old. Andrew wondered if he had made the right choice.

It had seemed like the thing to do; the only family connection he had, as thin as that was.

All Andrew knew of his father was that he had died at the “old family estate” in a little town called “Sheep Ranch” in the old Gold Rush country of Northern California. His dad had been diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer when Andrew was a baby and had flown home to die alone in what Andrew understood to be an aging mansion that was more relic than luxury.

He had never been there until now, though wondering about his dad had made him want to go on more than one occasion. His mother told him nothing about his father; it was almost as if she barely knew him, or knew him not at all.

But she had inherited his money.

Andrew had been brought up in the best private schools Tribeca, Manhattan and the East Coast had to offer. Then it was Yale and—

And a recurring stomach ache that would not cease and a trip to the doctor that led to tests and then his own diagnosis with a rare cancer—terminal within two months.

He had no siblings, his mother disappeared when he turned eighteen, and his fiancée was killed in a car accident the month before. Andrew found himself with nothing left.

And so he went “home,” where his father had died. This was his heritage, and his last chance to visit something real in his otherwise empty life.

Steeling himself, Andrew parked and got out. The place was silent; the little town was two miles further up the road, and there was nothing but California oak forests around him.

Inside, the house was dust covered and clearly unused for years, but functional. Andrew located the big master bedroom upstairs and cleared the bed, put on (reasonably) fresh sheets and dusted the room before his usual nausea returned. He took a pain pill and fell into bed and a deep sleep…

The knocking on the door woke him.

Andrew rose, head swimming, and staggered downstairs to the door. Who could that be? No one knew he was there.

The woman on the porch was a “colorful local” in a Western shirt, boots and straw hat Her long hair was blonde mixed with grey, her face weathered from country life. She smiled warmly.

“Are you Andrew? The new owner?”

“Yes,” he said. “How did you know my name?

“Wayne, my husband, said someone was moving in. He works at PG&E; he turned the power on for you when you called to have the utilities checked. I’m Melissa Thomas, the mayor of Sheep Ranch.”

“Nice to meet you, Melissa. I can’t invite you inside yet; this place is a mess.”

They made small talk for a while, and she told him where the (one) local grocery store was, the flea market days, and the closest hospital. The woman seemed pleasant but pre-occupied about something. She kept ending a sentence and then stammering, then starting on some new topic.

“I wanted to stop by and—oh, hell. I just need to say it.” She looked down nervously.

“Say what, Melissa?” Andrew asked. He smiled engagingly; he had always been charming with women; he happened to be handsome to an almost shocking degree; at least, he was before he got sick.

“I know you’ll think I’m crazy,” she said. “But I have to warn you. There’s a witch in the woods, out there.” She pointed to the north of the property, where the cleared area was overtaken by the brambles, low shrubs and dense oak.

Andrew blinked. “A witch?”

“Yes, I know how that sounds,” Melissa said. “Look, we all know about her, and this place. No one comes here. When they do, very bad things happen to them. Sometimes they get away, sometimes they don’t, but she never lets it go unpunished. Why do you think this house has never been vandalized in all these years?”

Andrew laughed, maybe a little high from the medications. “Let me assure you,” he said, “I’m already in bad shape. There’s nothing more that can be done to me. Trust me on that.”

Melissa told him about stories of locals who had been “hexed;” who had fallen ill suddenly, had their hair fall out, their favorite pets go missing, their own house burn down; they were punished for any insult to the place. But left alone, the “old woman” would leave them alone.

“She doesn’t want anyone here,” she said.

Andrew suddenly felt tired. Tired of being sick, tired of Melissa, tired of hearing crazy talk. “I have to go,” he said, and closed the door.

He headed to the old bookshelves his father— or grandfather? —had placed in the drawing room. The big built-ins were lined with old books, some leather bound, some more recent.

Witches, the title of one read. An Exhaustive Index.

Andrew took the big book down, blowing twenty two years of dust from the top. Somehow he knew that this book would be there.

He lugged the book back to the bed. His stomach was aching again; he was dizzy. Dizzy and…lonely. God, he had always been so lonely. His mother had run his life like a job, he realized. Like she was paid to raise him, but didn’t really care. She’d checked in on his tutors; patted him on the head; bought violin classes, cello, French language arts, cooking classes, all of it training for…what? There was never any emotional connection.

Then, when he’d turned eighteen, she was gone. Gone with half the bank account, leaving him the other half, but the other half that was his was still thirty million dollars once you added in the international holdings.

*****

And now, Andrew lay in bed, afraid. He peered through the darkness at the window, which remained half-open yet motionless. Whatever had unlatched it must have gone away. Right?

He wondered how long he should wait until he found out.

Somehow, despite his illness, he pulled himself up from the bed and went to the window. He pulled it closed and re-latched it. The stars should be brilliant out there…What was that?

Something had moved in the yard. A figure…a shadow flitted in and out of his peripheral vision.

Maybe a shadow from the trees waving in the moonlight? A cloud sailing in the sky? There, under the oaks…there seemed to be a black area, like robes moving in the breeze…Andrew stared, terrified; there was something there.

A young woman walked out from under the trees. She was wearing a white dress, or maybe a nightgown. It fluttered loosely in the breeze. She was clearly visible in the full moonlight, almost floating across the big open space in front of the house. She was blonde, with a good figure from what he could see; maybe beautiful. She walked directly to the house and then out of sight below the window.

There was a knock on the door downstairs.

Andrew stood, too terrified to move. Why he was scared of a beautiful blonde girl he couldn’t have said, but she had been there, in the dark, and now at the door. And what if she was the witch?

So what? He was dying anyway. Maybe she was a human girl who was lost? Maybe she had wandered from the road? Who knew, but he had nothing to lose.

Andrew made his way down to the front door (moving slowly now; the illness was progressing). He took a breath and opened the door.

She was beautiful, barefoot and in a simple shift, the satin sliding against her otherwise bare body. She was something like twenty (he was twenty-two), and smiled sweetly. Andrew tried to not look down at the peaks of her breasts under the fabric and succeeded, barely.

“Can I help you?” he said, at last.

“Of course, Andrew,” she said.

She reached out and caressed his cheek, stepped into him, and kissed him.

He could not ask her what was she doing and who she was or anything at all; he could only kiss her and feel her arms around him. She tasted strange, as if she had been bearing some strange potion in her mouth that she spit into his as she forced his mouth open. Then came a spreading warmth through his body and a jolt of power and energy and the sick feeling he’d come to know as his constant companion was gone. He felt young and strong again and more; he felt alive. He gripped her, intoxicated and loving it; he swept her off her feet (physically impossible moments before) and bounded up the stairs with her. Soon they were in that big bed, making love; his head spun. She was soft and warm and wonderful, and the night spun on…

*****

In the morning Andrew woke, staring at the ceiling in agony. The exertion had drained him; he had been in a delicate state to begin with but whatever it was that had happened had left him much nearer the end.

Today would be the day he would die. Yet, his night had been worth it.

But had it been real? The woman was gone…but there was the place where she had made an imprint in the bed…there, a long blonde hair…there, the smear of lipstick of some sort…his head pounded…she had given him something, clearly…

He spent the morning lying in bed, weak, thinking it all through. The house was silent, scary. He was not sure if he’d dreamed the event or not. Some farm girl, excited by the new prospect? He yet retained his good looks, thin as he was; a bored and lonely country girl might easily seek him out. But why drug him? And how did she know he was there? Had Melissa told her?

Perhaps it wasn’t a great idea to be there. If he stayed, dying in bed, who would find his body? And when?

He mustered his strength to get out of bed. He was dizzy; his stomach threatened to upload onto the floor. He swallowed the bile down, and then was able to reach onto the nightstand to grab his car keys.

He needed to drive, maybe into town; maybe just leave; despite his rational mind, and the strange comfort of the woman, it scared him.

He slowly made his way, hunched and shuffling, outside to the car…which sat on four flat tires.

He swayed on his feet. The road was a mile away. There was no way he could walk that far, sick as he was.

There was a flash in the woods. Andrew turned, staring, but seeing nothing except the fleeting motion; a branch still shaking from being brushed against, a group of leaves scattering through the air. Something had moved, fast, through the trees. Branches broke in the woods to the north, clearly audible, then behind him, then somewhere ahead.

He had the terrifying realization that he wasn’t alone, that he was in the deep forest with something… something not human, or at least not like anything he knew or understood.

He took one step forward in the bright sunlight and there was a cracking, booming sound in the forest. The crashing went on, and as he sought the answer, he looked up; a huge broken branch fell out of the tree overhead. He moved, but too slowly; the limb bounced off his back and leg, pulverizing the muscles and scratching him in long gashes. He fell to the ground, rolling away from the branch, breathless and gasping.

Nothing was broken; he would be able to walk again soon, but barely. And not far.

Andrew got up and almost blacked out. He couldn’t stop turning his head this way and that, seeking to find out what it was, and where. He wanted to think it was chance, some bizarre circumstance, but he knew with equal certainty that someone had prevented him from leaving. Would not allow him to leave. He had felt it; there was a witch.

He made his way back to the house, locking the door behind him and standing terrified against it for a long time.

*****

The signs began early, as the sun lowered.

A bird crashed into the window, falling to the porch below, neck broken. The water for his tea would not boil; there was a light laugh, barely heard, coming from the woods to the north. Andrew sat in a chair next to the window, head cocked, listening. He heard it several times before fleeing from the blackness outside and lying in the big bed.

He was surprised that he was still alive.

He read the book about witches; this he did with grave intensity, mostly it was a mass of He read the book about witches with grave intensity. Mostly it was a mass of arcane imagery and texts that were Victorian and wordy. But some things stood out:

The witch will occupy an area it finds comfortable. It prefers those places that were once the scene of heartbreak, of loss, of abandoned buildings and vacant lots…the broken places of the world. The witch will punish any infraction, however slight. This may come as a small curse, or the ultimate destruction of the person. A victim may find himself trapped in the witches’ web, unable to escape.

There was a motion outside the window, as if a black thing was going by in the night.

And then came a knock on the door.

The house was silent, except for his heart which was thundering again. He did not move. The seconds ticked by, slowly, so very slowly. Below, a light scratching of nails on the wood frame.

“Andrew…”

Light, scratchy, the voice of an old woman; not his blonde from the night before. Haunting, unearthly. Strange how he’d heard that word before but never really understood it; Unearthly.

He took out his suicide bottle. By his own feel for the situation, he had only one or two days left anyway; better to escape now before this—whatever it was—arrived. God, he was so scared.

The blackness appeared before the window again. This time, though, it did not move. Andrew began watching the glass…praying that the latch would not open.

He popped the top of the bottle and poured the rattling contents into his hand. He bent to put them in his mouth but caught sight of the true contents just as he leaned over—sticks and pebbles. He stopped and stared; the pills were gone, replaced with pebbles and little oak fragments.

“When? How?” he blurted, and threw the mess onto the floor, then looked back up.

The window was wide open.

“Andrew…” the dry, thin voice carried in from outside.

“What are you?” Andrew said. His voice rose to a near scream midway through the sentence. “What do you want? Leave me alone! I’m sorry I intruded! Just let me die in peace!”

“I can help you, Andrew,” the voice called up into his bedroom, calmly, seemingly oblivious to his terror.

“But I’m dying,” he called back weakly.

“Heh.” The laugh was knowing; frank, evil. “I know you are dying. Listen, Andrew. I can help you. I can cure you.”

He could see a black form hovering outside the window. He felt strangely calm. “Thought you were here to kill me? How do you know my name?”

“I’m powerful, Andrew…so, so powerful. And I’ve known you a long time. I’m not here to hurt you, but to help you.”

Andrew stared at the blackness outside the open window. “At what price?”

“Heh.” The laugh again. “You’ll be with me…twenty-two years.”

It was insane. Insane. But death…was just around the corner. Certain. So close. He had been so terrified, he was willing to kill himself a moment before, when things had been hopeless. But now, what if there was hope? Wasn’t any life better than none?

“Cure me, then,” he said.

There was a jolt. In his stomach, his chest. Andrew coughed out a gasp of air and choked a moment and then felt…fine. Weak, tired, scared…but no longer sick.

“Go downstairs, Andrew,” the voice said. “There’s someone you need to meet.”

Andrew stood easily and without pain. He dressed and went downstairs. Taking a breath, he opened the front door. A man stood there, thin, wearing an old suit that was moth-eaten, filthy, falling apart; he was balding, with a dirty face and the creases of time, worry and fear etched into it. He had suffered; that was clear.

The man’s left eye watered, his left cheek hung empty and hollow, the teeth behind it long gone; his jaw quivered and moved spasmodically. He knew, without doubt, that this was his father.

“Dear Lord,” Andrew said, his voice full of wonder. “You didn’t die.”

The man nodded his head but looked only at the ground. He backed away as Andrew reached out for him. He seemed like a whipped dog.

“You’re free, Justin,” a voice called from the black of the woods to the north. “Go.”

The man, Andrew’s father, turned and loped away in a pathetic shamble, in the dark, towards the road. He made no effort to say anything at all. Andrew stood staring, watching his broken father leave his life for a second time.

“Oh, the questions,” the voice called. It was coming closer, stepping out of the forest and towards the house. The outline solidified into the vague shape of a woman.

“You see, I enjoy my men,” the woman’s shadow said. “I like them young, and strong, and vibrant and artistic…to play the violin for me, the cello, to cook…you see, I use your house once in a while. You don’t mind? Of course not…”

The witch moved around to his side, pacing around him, taking him in.

“It’s so hard to find a man like that; who is as beautiful as you’d like, as schooled and educated, as refined. No, you can’t find them like that anywhere. And so you have to find a way. You find one you like, you keep them. Over and over.”

“Twenty-two…” Andrew said. “My dad came here at twenty-two…and disappeared.”

“He didn’t disappear. He made you. With a woman who appeared one night as he lay dying. And then she slipped away.”

“My mother.”

“Yes.”

“That woman last night…” Andrew began, then recoiled at the horrible knowledge.

“That woman will bear your son. Who will grow to adulthood. My friend there will raise him, making sure he learns the finest manners, the best skills, the most useful traits. He will hear how his father died young and spent his final days at the family estate. And when he is twenty-two and at the height of his beauty, he will be stricken be a deadly illness. His emotionally removed mother will have long since gone, and in an attempt to connect to something, he will come here.”

“And I will be—”

“You will be too old for me by then, Andrew. All the bloom will be off the bud! You will need replacing. Not just in body, but in spirit…they tend to break, after a while. The things I show them…they only last so long. Your father stopped talking years ago. Very tiresome. I don’t have you instructed in French for nothing…”

“You…you did it,” Andrew said. “Everything.”

“I did. The illness…I gave it to you. Your little girlfriend’s car wreck…I couldn’t have anyone touching my property…oh, no.”

“Alone all this time, because of you.”

“Well, you won’t be alone any longer, boy. Now come here.”

Andrew went to her, stepping into the darkness.

About Jonathan Chapman

Jonathan Chapman works in his day job as an Investigator for Contra Costa County in California. He worked twenty-two years in the Sierra foothills before recently retiring to live in the Bay Area. He is a fan of and three-time contributor to The Horror Zine.

THE NEST

Cory Cone

NICHOLAS, THIS IS FOR YOU.

Mia stands before the mirror and presses the razor to her stomach. She imagines her empty womb tumbling out, cloaked within a steaming wave of viscera. Was a child of my own too much to ask? she thinks, and her fingers do not tremble.

She is ready, but hesitates at the sound of something landing on the deck’s wooden slats outside her bedroom. She realizes she’s heard something out there for half a minute at least; a rhythmic pulse, beats, like thick sheets whipped taut.

She places the razor on the edge of the sink and walks from the bathroom, through the hall, and to her room. It’s late, the clock on the nightstand reading 3:13 AM. A rectangle of misty moonlight shines through the curtains, illuminating the edge of the bed. Seeing the light, forgetting why she came back to her room at all, she clenches her fists and realizes that tonight, if she doesn’t open her stomach—like cutting through a trash bag—it will be the first time she’s ever slept in that bed alone.

A shadow darkens the window…the shape of a person passing by. She sees the outline of someone’s head and when he’s gone, something else sweeps by like a cape.

It cannot be Nicholas, not her husband returning after all that was said—because she would accept that, she would forget it all and he could come back if only he wanted to—and she feels suddenly vulnerable and ashamed of her nakedness in her own house, her own bedroom, and rushes to the closet to get her robe. She pulls it on to hide her body from the stranger, the intruder here to rob or rape her.

He stalks around the deck. His footsteps are timid and light and unsure, as if he’s searching or lost. Mia imagines him there, drooling, shivering with a lust for violence, some animal need that she, a victim, can never comprehend.

She tiptoes to the phone resting on a small table and lifts the receiver to dial 911. She peers behind the curtain, searching for any detail to give to the dispatcher that may differentiate the intruder from Nicholas in the event that swat cars and police officers storm the house. She doesn’t want them to mistake Nicholas (having returned to her when he hears of her terror) for this man and shoot him dead in the driveway.

She sees a figure standing at the edge of the deck, one leg on the stairs, one in the grass, afraid, it seems, to take the steps fully onto the lawn. And in seeing it, she is no longer certain that it’s a man or even a woman. She sees now that what may have been a cape passing by her window was in fact a pair of enormous, leathery wings dangling from long, finger-like bones that sprout from the creature’s back. Torn in places, as if it’s been on the losing end of a fight.

It’s turned away from her. She can see its body only from an angle: half of its back, the wings, an arm ending at a hand with taloned fingers hooked into the wood of the railing. She can't see its face, only hints of hair, ink-black, dripping past its shoulders.

It turns and Mia sees its glowing eyes, yellow in the moonlight. The creature sees her watching from the safety of her house and she drops the phone but doesn’t back away, her fear holding her still. It sees her. It knows she is home.

In meeting its eyes, Mia is filled with a great, immeasurable sense of calm. She ees now that what she thought was here to hurt her is far more frightened than she. It is waiting to see if she will hurt it. The talons quiver, the eyes shimmer in the light, hints of tears beading along its cheeks. It seeks not violence or hate, Mia realizes. Only sanctuary.

The creature moves away, and the breath Mia hadn’t realized she’d been holding exhales from her lungs and fogs against the window. She wipes it away and the creature is already off the deck and halfway down the incline of the yard, vanishing then from her line of sight.

A female voice speaks from the phone on the floor. “Hello? Is there an emergency?”

Is there an emergency?

Mia picks the receiver up from the floor. “I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “I must have dialed by accident,” and hangs up. She tightens the robe around her body and walks quickly out onto the deck from the door in her room. Late October wind pricks her flesh. The pads of her feet protest from the cold hard surface of the deck. She briskly walks to the stairs and to the lawn, her mind overwhelmed now with an urge to help, to protect.

To mother.

She follows the sloped earth down, gazing into the shadows beneath the deck for any sign of where it has gone. Her feet move fast, though now they’ve grown numb from the frigid evening moisture on the ground. All is quiet but for her frantic breathing and the low hiss of the river across the street. Pale moonlight casts a dreamy aura on the lawn, though fails to reach far beneath the deck.

The shingled siding becomes cement foundation halfway down the yard, and it’s there, in the darkness, that she finds the creature, huddled. Sparse slivers of light rake across its flesh, but it’s enough to reveal the sweating bulge of its stomach, the trembling swell of impending life.

Mia places a hand to her own stomach, where not much earlier she had pressed a razor blade. Had the creature not arrived, she wonders now if anything would have spewed forth from her at all, or if it would have simply wilted away with a depressed puff of air, like popping a nearly deflated balloon.

And the creature, curled like a frightened child, inches through those blades of light and further into the shadows.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she says. “Do you need help?”

It is silent.

“You can stay here, if you’d like. You’re safe here.” She steps closer but the thing tenses up, curls a wing around itself like a shield. “Are you hungry?” she says. “You must be hungry.”

When it doesn’t answer, Mia leaves it and returns to the house. Uncertain what it might eat, she puts together a plate of leftovers containing a variety of food: cereal, steak, salad, chicken and broccoli. She fills a glass with milk and brings everything outside and places it beneath the deck.

The creature makes no move to take the offered food. Only stares at her. Its shoulders rise and fall with the quick pace of its breath.

“For you,” Mia says, pointing to the food. When she still receives no answer, she timidly steps away and goes back inside.

But she feels good now, and remarkably exhausted. She’s so tired that she crawls straight into bed, pulls the covers over her head and curls into a ball of rising warmth. She’s proud of herself, happy that she didn’t overreact and send the police to capture or hurt such a beautiful, frightened creature in its time of need. She’s done well. It will know that it has chosen a safe place for the night and that Mia is here to take care of it and its unborn child.

Sleep takes her, and the bed, without Nicholas, doesn’t feel so lonely after all.

*****

She wakes to the rattle of raindrops on her window. For reasons she can’t quite place, she wants to scream, and strikes out an arm to wake Nicholas. When it whiffs through empty space she remembers that he is gone.

The previous night comes rushing back to her in a series of brief images: a razor, a shadow passing by her window, wings, a pregnant stomach. From her bed she sees that she’d left the bathroom light on during the night. Sees the glint of the razor blade where it rests on the sink.

She climbs from the bed and rushes out into the rain, not concerned that she is only wearing her robe. The chill of morning doesn’t bother her. The cold against her feet serves to wake her further, more fully, and she descends the deck stairs and back yard to where she had left the creature.

The plate is still there, empty of the food but full now with rainwater and bits of grass. The creature is gone. In its place lies a bulging mound of sticks, pebbles, trash, and mud.

Entwined within the mesh are four eggs as large as her head, gray as stone, and wet now from where rain dripped between the deck’s boards. Their surfaces glisten.

Mia tightens her robe.

She bends over and places a finger onto the nearest one. It’s warm to the touch, soothing against her skin. Before long she has opened her palm and placed it against the egg, feels the soft thrum of a pulse. Waves of warmth pass through her body. The rain has made her robe soggy, but she is so soothed by the pulsing sensation that she pays it no mind.

She peers over her shoulder, scans the perimeter of her yard, the fogged tree line of the wooded next door lot, and the misty rippling surface of the river across the street. She sees no sign that the creature is close by. It has left the eggs here to go off and do whatever it is that it does during the day, wherever it is that it does it.

Mia smiles. Tears fill her eyes. It trusts her, and because it trusts her she will only hold one for a moment, a miniature slice of time that will have no bearing or impact on the growth and wellbeing of the little thing gestating within. She wants to cradle it, to love it, to care for it. And it’ll all be fine.

She’ll put it right back.

Maneuvering between bits of nest that sit on top of the egg she’s just touched, Mia cups her hands beneath its smooth bulk and gently lifts it out. Its texture and weight is not unlike that of a robin's egg. It's fragile, like papier mache; too strong a squeeze might break it open. She parts the front of her robe and holds the egg between her breasts. She lets the pulsing warm her chest and dance with the beat of her heart; lifts it higher so that her wet hair dangles down and sticks to the sides of the egg. She presses her face gently against the surface, smiling and rubbing it along her cheek.

Why has its mother chosen her home to lay the eggs? Why is Mia the lucky surrogate whose space beneath her deck will shelter these young beings until they hatch and fly off on their own, strong and young and ready to live, to sail among the clouds and do whatever it is that…things like those creatures do?

And with the egg held to her face, she knows that creature and thing are not accurate. They do little justice to the majestic feeling welling inside of her. They are much more than that; they are angels.

If only Nicholas could see me here, pretending to be a mother in the rain.

But what a risk she is taking, invading now that ultimate trust. Each moment that she is in possession of the egg she is souring that special bond between them. She must secure permission for this sort of thing, and resolves to pursue it when the mother returns. Seeing how well she has cared for the eggs in its absence, surely the angel will grant her such permission.

It is a disciplined act to take the egg away from her flesh, but it is right and it is good, so she holds out her hands and prepares to return it to the nest, and it slips, just like that.

The egg moves so fast that it is gone and out of reach with no chance to quickly grab it…falling, falling. It lands on her foot and explodes.

A thick stream of gelatinous membrane flows along the slope of the earth. The faint hint of an embryo twists horribly within, a pink breath of life pulled away in the ooze. Mia falls to her knees and hopelessly scoops the ruins back toward her with a bowl shaped chunk of shell. Maybe if she is fast enough she can fuse it back together somehow and it can go back into the nest and heal and grow and it might look a little funny when it hatched but it would hatch and it would live. She scoops, strains, screams, and in her mind she sees it all again—on her knees beside the toilet, Nicholas sitting on the edge of the bathtub, and she’s crying out ‘What do we do what do we do,’ and the blood on her fingers drips to the floor and there is nothing she can do. Four of her children gone, now. Four that never were—and pushes it away, cannot stand to remember, and she’s losing the egg now, like trying to grip a jellyfish, the fluid slipping and sliding through her fingers.

Gone.

Dead.

Long strings of egg dangle from her fingertips, tinged red.

Her heart stops beating, a feeling like that first big drop on a roller coaster when only gravity has you and nothing else, and she thinks, Don’t let my heart come back. Let me die, but it does come back and she weeps into her slimy, murderous hands.

*****

Nicholas, I’m a killer. A murderer. Evil.

A child-being snuffed of life at her hands, hands that were given a silent duty by way of a mysterious creature's choice of her home. Now, Mia lies in her bed staring at the shadowed patterns of raindrops on her ceiling, drowning, awaiting the angel’s inevitable discovery of what she’s done.

Nicholas would tell her to calm down, that she’s overreacting. He always thought she was overreacting.

I dropped the egg! I killed a baby!

What would he say to that? Would her comfort her? Would he hate her even more than he already did? Is that possible?

“You’ll never be a mother,” he’d told her. “Why won’t you do what’s best and seek help? I can’t sugar-coat it any longer. You’re ruining your life. Can’t you see you’ve practically ruined mine as well?”

Ruined his life? She’s the one hurting. She, not he! She’s the broken one, the sour half of their rotting home.

The angel is staring at her through the window, its shape dark and silhouetted by gray afternoon clouds.

Mia ducks under her blankets. She hides within the cocoon of fabric and listens for the window to break, for the flap of its wings to lift it into the room so that it can pierce her veil with its talons, to open her throat. To seek its horrible retribution.

When it doesn’t happen, Mia slides the covers from her body and sees that it’s gone from the window. Through the din of softly falling rain comes a low, undulating call, like a ship at sea, signaling desperately for help.

*****

In the night the rain stops.

The door to the deck is open. Cold air whips inside, howling. The bedroom is dark, but from the bed Mia sees that the darkness within the doorway that leads to the hall is in some way deeper, angrier. A shape there sways gently, and from it comes wet, grief-stricken sobs.

Pathetic whimpers in the dark.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I only wanted to love them. I’m a mother, too, and I know that you’re sad, but I understand. It’s a pain that never dies, only grows and grows until everything and everyone you know can no longer help you. They become afraid of you, afraid of your hurt. I didn’t mean to bring this onto you. I admire you! You are so strong and brave, to escape from whatever danger you were in. But look, look, can’t you see? It’s okay! It was only one. Yes, only one! There are three others! Three healthy angels just for you, and I’ll help you! I will. I’ll help and they’ll live and grow, and I can be Auntie Mia.”

She’s sitting now. Her blanket is wet with tears. “Answer me, please! Say something! It was an accident, damn you!”

And Mia’s guilt then gives way to something else, so sudden that it sends a not-unpleasant chill through her bones. She rises from the bed, letting the blanket fall from her naked body. And now, in this moment, feels not the vulnerability she had felt the night before, but a strength and a rising anger of her own. “Will you only stand there and cower? And cry?” She seethes at the shape in the doorway. “How dare you cry?” she says, stepping toward it. “In my house.”

She stares into its face, its eyes glowing a pitiful yellow, and shoves it back. The angel’s wings unfurl, caught off guard by the sudden thrust, and knock empty picture frames from the end tables in the hallway.

Mia comes at it again, shoves against its chest and this time it falls. There is the snap of cartilage or bone. It has fallen on a wing.

“You have more babies!” she screams. “Blessed with so many yet I have none? None!”

She lifts her leg and brings in down onto the creature’s chest. And then again, and again, screaming, riding the wave of her boiling fury. Faster, harder, deeper into its chest. Black, blurred, furious motions. Thoughts of the egg tumbling so effortlessly from her hands, as if knocked away by some unseen force, watching it fall through space, and her foot comes down, down, down, and she craves now nothing more than to smash all of the others. To take them away from this ungrateful and miserable excuse for a mother. This creature.

It is not struggling, if indeed it ever was. Mia leaves it there in the hall, wraps herself in the discarded blanket, and goes outside.

Gray light washes over her. Her legs appear as if they are covered in oil rather than blood. She rushes to the space beneath the deck and reaches into the brambly nest and clutches an egg so fiercely that her fingers penetrate the fragile surface. The insides ooze out along the perimeter. She lifts it high above her head and she is filled with a wild surge of pleasure, then she swings her arms down in a wide arc. The egg bursts, embryonic fluid flowing down the incline. She puts her foot through the second egg and squishes her toes playfully within the juices. She reaches for the third and—

Her breath catches in her throat. She blinks once, twice, stands back and screams. The third egg, cradled there in the nest, helpless, sobers her outright. She remembers the pulse she had felt when she'd placed her palm against that first doomed child and vertigo takes her. Her hand finds a support beam and she leans her weight against it, gasping.

What have I done?

This isn’t her. She is a protector, a lover. These children need love and tenderness and a safe home, not such wild, reckless violence.

“You,” she says, regaining her composure and kneeling before the remaining egg. “You'll be just fine.” She takes the survivor into her arms, rocks it gently back and forth, cherishes the emanating warmth from its shell, and then brings it safely into her home.

*****

The tub is filled with pink water.

The razor glistens in a pool of blood on the white tile floor.

The angel is dead. It lay half within the bathroom, half out, its eyes open but now faded to a dull gray. A clawed hand is extended, the final effort of its tortured crawl through the hallway, talons still now in death.

Mia’s voice reverberates off the walls. “Nicholas,” she says, calmly, to no one. “Come home.” Would he hear the change that was in her if he were here? The happiness?

No, of course he wouldn’t.

“Everything is better now,” she says. “I’m going to be okay.”

You’ve said that before, he’d say. I don't feel safe with you anymore. Oh, how often he’d said things like that. How can you reasonably expect me to come home? Answer me that.

But this time would be different, she knows. This time she has an answer.

Mia rubs the bruised bulge in her stomach, gently, with only enough pressure that the wound will not reopen. The water ripples from the pulse, a warm and precious hint of life.

“Nicholas, sweetheart,” she says. “We’re going to have a baby.”

About Cory Cone

Cory Cone studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he met and married his wife. He now works in the college’s Admission and Financial Aid department and writes strange fiction in the evenings. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in several publications, including Niteblade, The Colored Lens, T. Gene Davis’s Speculative Blog, and the anthology A is for Apocalypse. Cory blogs now and again at www.corycone.com, and you can follow him on twitter, @corycone.

REFLECTOR EYES

Garrett Rowlan

DOROTHY REMEMBERED THE MOMENT when she saw her maker. He had shaped her skull using bent and welded California license plates, adding indentations to form a toothless, tongue-less mouth, a nose, and eyes he filled with reflector shields from shattered taillights. They were glued into the eye sockets.

Dorothy was the name of the girl that had been on the movie playing on the DVD at the moment of her birth. Dorothy is what she named herself.

Her maker had given her a heart, too, a pulsating light that he had inserted through the rear trunk of a Ford fender that had become her back. “I ordered that off the Internet,” he had said, on the afternoon he had presented the sculpture to the desert community. “A light attached to a wire driven by two double-A batteries,” he had said. “It’s like I gave her a heart.”

He had turned off the pulsating light but now, days later, the flash of lightning that had hit the shed’s rooftop had somehow turned it on. A shudder of electricity had surged through her. Moving her head, she saw how the light blinked inside her metal chest. She twitched. The rain pounded outside, and another lightning bolt fell in the distance.

Dorothy creaked as she moved. Around her, in boxes and jars, were the discarded elements of her construction, and in the corner the welding element that had formed her and would soon fuse her to the plinth. She had to act now, or be trapped with the voices in her head. They were sounds of inorganic agony, tires squealing, brakes jamming, horns bellowing, followed by the sound of metal hitting metal at high velocities, a crash and burn, followed by the sound of human screams and moans. Those were the worse. She tried to cover her ears, an ashtray he had sheared in two and soldered, but the sound was within her. She had to get rid of it.

Limb by limb, twitch by twitch, she moved across the shed, the concrete floor mottled by drips from the leaky roof. Dorothy pressed the door open with fingers formed of cut and welded windshield-wipers blades and stepped into the night.

She was in a small California town, a shack on its outskirts. Its few lights were tinted by the reflector shields in her eye sockets. She stumbled and she limped, for one leg was slightly longer than the other, but she remained upright. The rain fell against the iron and metal of her construction.

Dragging herself, she reached the road and heard the thunder rumble. She wasn’t afraid, for that crackle was nothing like the wallop of sounds inside her, the squeals and the screams, blended into a symphony of catastrophe and horror. Only movement seemed to lessen the grip of the sounds inside her.

She forced herself to move into the dark, to leave this island of light and head into the darkness, her limbs stiff and her limp pronounced. She moved slowly.

A bolt came from the sky and hit her, knocking her to the ground.

*****

“I call it Running Woman,” Rob Tilling, the sculptor, said.

Kendall, the lawyer who collected art, nodded. “I’m thinking Duchamp’s Woman Descending the Stairs.” He tilted the photograph Rob had given him. “It’s what I think of, looking at the photograph, definitely a dynamic aspect…a sculpture depicting a woman running in mid-step.”

“The real thing is even more dynamic,” Rob said.

Kendall raised the photo of the just-completed sculpture to the light. “I believe you.”

“I’m very proud of it,” Rob said. “I feel a connection to it…running from accidents.”

“But why traffic accidents?”

“It’s was just one accident,” Robert said. “A car had skidded at the bottom of Halloran Summit and jumped the median strip to cause a head-on collision and a huge pileup on I-15 south of Las Vegas, just over the California border. It happened just in front of me. I was in my pickup and I managed to steer away in time. It was horrible, but it was beautiful, too.”

“Beautiful,” Kendall repeated.

“That’s not the right word, perhaps. Impressive is better, I guess. I went up the road and saw all this material, fenders and bumpers and lights and tires and all manner of detritus. Some parts I managed to sneak into my pickup, others I got at the junkyard later because I followed the tow trucks. I had pictures of the cars on my phone so I knew which pieces to look for. A half-dozen cars were totaled. Three people died, one of them a baby, only a few weeks old. I was impressed.”

“Impressed,” Kendall said.

Rob heard the dubious note. “Okay, maybe that’s not the right word. The point is, I saw and I heard the crash in front of me. I wondered if something began to live in the moment of that collision. If the pain and destruction wasn’t a kind of creation, too: the violence of birth, that kind of idea. It was something I wanted to incorporate. And I want to make a statement. You know, the environment, reusing material…decontextualizing.”

“The face,” Kendall said, looking closely at the photo. “You took a lot of effort with the face.”

The head had been made from license plate numbers and letters molded to the shape of a face whose lipless grin said LUVU2.

“Remind you of anyone?” Rob asked.

“I don’t know,” Kendall said. “Who?”

“Judy Garland.”

Kendall looked at the picture again: the vanity-plate head and the hair consisting of seat covers, stripped, sliced, braided, and glued onto the skull. “I confess I don’t see the resemblance.”

“A young Judy Garland, around the time of The Wizard of Oz.”

Kendall twisted the photo slightly. “Well, maybe, if those eyes weren’t red.”

“I needed a face to model,” Rob said. “I had a DVD of The Wizard of Oz, and while I worked I kept playing the movie.”

Rob saw Kendall glance through the large sliding glass door at the patio, maybe visualizing how the sculpture would fit like the other pieces in his backyard, knockoffs of Brancusi and Henry Moore. They shone slightly. The rain in Los Angeles had ended an hour ago, the storm was moving east.

“I had the strangest feeling at times,” Rob said, “while I was I working on this. It was a feeling I’ve never had before, that I was really creating something alive.” He struggled to find the words. “Like the material has a certain DNA established just by the force of the accidents that constitute its various parts.”

“DNA,” Kendall said. A lawyer, he had started off in a prosecutor’s office before he went corporate, and he repeated the term with a dubious generosity, though allowing the artist a latitude of interpretation. “DNA, like a living thing?”

“Well, it’s just an impression, aided by the heart, the pulsating light, I had inserted into the chest. That was just my addition, incidentally. You can remove that gadget if you think it’s tacky.”

Kendall moved the photo. “It almost looks like the eyes are moving,” he said, adjusting the picture to the track lights above.

“Yes, sometimes I had the eerie feeling that it was alive, watching me.”

Kendall crooked an eyebrow, the sort of gesture by which he might have looked at a jury to cast doubt on a defendant’s testimony.

Rob said, defensively, “She gives me feelings I’ve never had before.”

“I wouldn’t say that to your wife.”

“Artistic feelings, I mean.”

Kendall cleared his throat. “There is a theory that consciousness is a byproduct of biology. It comes along for the ride, like froth on the wave. It’s called…I forget what it’s called.”

“So this statue has consciousness.” It was Rob’s turn to sound skeptical.

Kendall’s hands made a juggling motion. “You’ve built this body from scratch. I can understand how you’d feel a certain connection.”

Rob thought he looked like he was going to say more and decided against it, or was that a repressed yawn? “Well,” Rob said, in a dismissive note of departure.

But Kendall continued. “There is one thing I have to ask you. Don’t you feel kind of, I don’t know, that you’re using someone else’s grief? I mean, I understand how you want to recycle material, and how impressed you were at the moment you experienced the accident. I respect your artistic impulse. But what about the ethical aspect?”

“Art for art’s sake,” Rob said. His hands, the palms up, moved up and down as if balancing two things.

Kendall let out a breath. “We’ll be in touch,” he said, and he and his wife, who was younger and whose tattooed arms resembled twin coral snakes, smiled in ambiguity.

Rob walked out to his rental car. As he drove, he passed a fender bender, a car pulled to the roadside. It reminded him of his own artistic evolution. He’d always been interested in roadside discards, from blowouts that expelled scraps of rubber and accidents that left fenders and wheel wells and shattered glass. He even noted household throwaways like fans, televisions, computers, Styrofoam cups, plastic bottles, wrappers. They were used things; discarded, passed over, forgotten.

He altered them, resurrected them, the chairs and fans and stands into thin, etiolated figures, Giacometti-like skeletons. Cabinets for computers and televisions became stages for small domestic dioramas: tiny figures, formed of wrappers and wire, walking, fighting, drinking in bars, men and women groping on couches.

It was all part of Rob’s credo, the artist’s moral imperative to rescue things from oblivion, the convergence of art and ecology. Any rebirth must come from material already there; the passed-over must be formed into a Unity.

And as for Kendall’s ethical objections, he considered that and let it pass, like the accident fading in his rear view mirror.

*****

When she rose from the effect of the lightning bolt, Dorothy felt her legs and arms loosen. She felt stronger, agile. She walked and gradually went into a trot, a jog. Adjusting her stride to account for the uneven legs, she picked up speed. Ahead, the storm had moved on, leaving behind a moon that shed light like sifted flour.

The voices in her head—the screams and moans—were stronger, too.

Running, Dorothy remembered her first moment of consciousness. It was a pinprick of blinding pain, the blowtorch’s stab pulled from a metallic black. Her agony was a scream that bloomed in blue.

Later, when the shattered glass had been glued into her eye sockets, she was able to see Rob as he worked. It made the pain greater, somehow, seeing him administer it.

The bits of gray in his hair looked like sparks from a satanic furnace. In the visor of the mask he wore, she saw her reflection, the license plates (she knew what they were, instinctively) wrapped around a shell. Beyond him, she saw a room full of boxes of spare parts and shards of metal and a tool cabinet with files and pliers and screwdrivers.

In the other corner was the television where she saw Dorothy and the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow. (There would be other movies, but that was the one she remembered.) The torch bit, not only hurting but waking the memory of pain, the screams and screeches and moans and the shudder of metal on metal that she heard in her head. They had been welded into her consciousness.

She ran and she remembered. Above, the gibbous moon looked machine-made. She swung her arms like synchronized pistons. She was picking up speed, which was probably why she didn’t see the car coming until it was too late. She pulled (almost literally, for she had had a steering wheel installed as a buttress in her chest) to the side of the road.

It was not the first car that had passed her, but that car had kept going as she had slipped to the roadside. This one slowed, stopped, and turned around. Panicked, she headed for the shelter of a relay tower and an attached, small shack a few yards away. She hid behind the shack. Please go, she said to herself, but the car door wheezed open and shut.

The interior lights illuminated his rumpled jacket and hair. “I seen you, you tall skinny bitch.” He had a bottle that he lifted to his lips, swallowed, and let out a whoop. “Come have a drink with me. You’ll feel no pain. I know what you want. You want love.”

She wanted what he had, she realized: Courage like the Lion (it was in his bellow), brains like the Scarecrow (he knew what she wanted), and a loving heart like the one the Tin Man got. It would take away the voices in her head. He seemed happy. She wanted to be happy, with no sound inside her.

Stepping around the edge of the shack, she saw him swing the bottle around, place it to his lips. He drank. “Didn’t get lucky in Vegas but I’m feeling lucky now,” he said.

He waved the bottle. She stepped into the open. She wanted to embrace him.

“I seen you,” he said. “You got nice tits.”

(They were actually cut and torch-shaped hubcaps.)

She stepped in front of him. He dropped the knife he carried.

He gasped, turned to run but she was on him. He had what she wanted. She put her hand of soldered wiper blades to his mouth. She wanted to press him to her, to have his body join hers. She squeezed. Things cracked inside him.

*****

The rain had passed through Los Angeles and was headed into the desert and toward Las Vegas. Rob hated to fly and he hated to fly through turbulence, which was why he stopped at the bar in LAX.

He was having a drink when a very pregnant woman came up and sat beside him.

“Hey there,” she said. “Care to buy a lady a drink.”

“I don’t talk to strange women in bars.”

“Come on, Sailor. I bet you can guess what I’m drinking.”

“Seven-Up,” he said.

His wife leaned close to him. “I love a man who knows what a lady wants.”

Later, as they heard the boarding call and headed for their gate, she said, “How did the pitches go?”

“Well, if I were fishing I’d say I felt the line tug a couple of times.”

She touched her baby bump. “I know the feeling.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

“How about your mother? How did the visit go?”

“Fine,” she said. “She drove me to the airport.”

“Is she still mad about you marrying an artist?”

She touched his arm. “A grandchild carries a lot of forgiveness.”

As the plane took off, she held his hand.

*****

Dorothy ran up the darkened highway. Its slope rose gradually. All the time, she held the man to her, clutching him for comfort though the warmth had gone out of him.

Then she heard the dogs.

They barked in the distance. This wasn’t like Toto barking, she knew that at once. She heard their paws tearing through the brush and she began to run herself, holding the man’s body to her hip. Ahead, where the road rose, she saw a single light pole and its mushroom of illumination carving a sphere from the darkness. She ran toward it. When she reached the lit space she turned. Three dogs bounded into the light. They were large, their teeth were bared and their throats hummed with vehement growls.

She stepped forward. The growls stopped, the fangs vanished, and they ran even before she threw the man’s body at them.

They had what Dorothy wanted. Those vicious barks had a ferocity she needed. She pursued. Two dogs peeled away from the third; one she chased. The terrain slanted upward. She heard one of the dogs in front of her, laboring. The ground was dark and uneven and twice she fell and got up again.

As the slope reached its apex, she caught the dog. She lifted it by the nape of its neck. It struggled. It whined. As she drew it closer to her and began to squeeze she saw a line of lights in the distance, headlights streaming in two opposing directions. She had not seen them until now. She recognized them.

She dropped the dog, and it ran away, whimpering.

Dorothy knew those lights. They were highway lights, but they were something else to her. They were the lights of Oz, her own Oz, where she would get what she wanted. She wanted the voices in her head to stop. She wanted the screams and the shouts and the moans and the skidding sounds and the breaking sounds to go away. They had gotten louder, insistent. The man’s bellow and the dogs barking hadn’t diminished them.

There’s no place like home, Dorothy thought. She remembered that from the movie, and it seemed right. She was going home. Home was where it wouldn’t hurt anymore.

*****

At McClellan, their car was parked at the place where they had left it that morning.

“I will be so glad to leave the desert,” Jamie said. She looked over at Rob.

“Me too,” he assured her.

“Really?”

“My work here is done,” he said, in a voice of fake portentousness. “We don’t need to be isolated at this point in our lives. I know how important this child is for you.”

“After my son died,” she said.

Driving a half-hour out of Las Vegas, she swore, which was something she didn’t do often.

“What is it?”

“Rob?”

“What is it?”

“I think my water is breaking.”

“What?”

“You need to turn around. Call in the hospital in Las Vegas.”

“Are you…?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure.”

Ahead was the turnoff for the town of Noah, near the place where Rob had seen the massive accident that became Running Woman’s raw material, the scattering of automobile parts. He recognized an old skid mark.

“You need to pull over,” Jamie said. “I need to lie down.”

“Here?”

“Yes!” she insisted, almost shouted.

He pulled to the roadside and she stepped out of the car and opened the back door and he helped her crawl into the seat. He pulled into traffic—almost hitting a car—and in a mile used the looping turnoff that took him across the Interstate and ultimately north to Las Vegas. In the instant he had cleared the bridge he stopped, stunned by what he saw in his headlights.

It was Running Woman, standing in the glare.

“My God,” he said.

“Why are we stopping?” Jamie cried from the back seat.

Rob couldn’t answer. He needed to confront his creation; his obsession. He couldn’t run her over no matter how badly they needed to get to the hospital.

A baby was part Jamie’s, but Running Woman was his in a way that nothing else had ever been. He’d made her from the ground up, each discard piece cut, hammered, and blowtorched into shape. He knew each axle, fender, rocker panel, hubcap, steering wheel, seat cover, license plate, fender, hood, ashtray, and roof that formed her body.

Her red eyes picked up the glow from his headlights and brought more back than a reflection. They brought intelligence.

“I need you to listen to me,” Rob said, getting out of the car. He approached Running Woman, all eight feet of her. She stood at a slant, a result of having one leg shorter than the other, which had been necessary to portray her in the act of running.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asked her. “Can you hear me?”

Running Woman made no response.

He stepped closer to her. She remained still, except for the head that tracked his movements toward her.

“I want to understand you,” he said, stepping closer.

In a rapid motion, Running Woman reached out and struck him, knocking him to the ground. She walked through his headlights and put her foot, made of rear-tire rubber nailed into brake pads, against his throat and pressed down.

He was so stunned by the blow that he couldn’t react until he felt his trachea closing. He couldn’t breathe and felt his neck breaking.

That’s when Jamie moaned from the car.

Running Woman’s foot lifted. She limped toward the car.

“No!” Rob shouted hoarsely, coming to his senses about the birth of his baby.

He struggled to his feet. He thought his jaw might be broken. He lurched toward the car as Running Woman opened the back door. He heard the newborn baby’s wail from the back seat.

Running Woman stepped back and put her hands to her ears, as if to shut out some painful memory. The baby screamed louder. Running Woman backed up against the guardrail. She pressed her hands to her head as if to crush it.

The baby wailed, screamed its way into life as if to shatter the time that lay ahead of it.

Running Woman turned. A large truck was headed toward the space under the bridge beneath the parapet. It must have been doing ninety.

Running Woman looked at Rob. He knew his statue. He had made her.

She did not want to be second-place in his life. She wanted to be his only creation.

“No!” he yelled.

It was too late. Running Woman leaned back against the parapet and fell over it.

Rob ran to the railing and saw his creation land on her feet a second before the impact. The sound of the truck striking the sculpture was followed by the sound of braking and metal being crumpled and battered and sent flying and rolling down the road.

The baby wailed.

Rob lurched to the car and looked in at Jamie and the slick, new life bundled in her arms.

“Okay?” he asked, gasping for breath.

Jamie nodded, tearfully. Gratefully.

“I’ll get you to the hospital,” he assured her as he hopped into the driver’s seat. He accelerated down the onramp, going north, heading to where the big rig had hit his creation.

As Rob drove, he saw Running Woman’s head on the side of the road just at the moment that the eye’s red reflector lights went out.

*****

There’s no place like home. It was Dorothy’s thought as she lay on the concrete and saw the cars passing and avoiding the scattered debris that had once been part of her.

The truck that had hit her pulled to the side. Dorothy wanted to thank the driver. He had cured her.

Home is where you return to, she thought. Home is where you belong.

Home was where they broke you into pieces. Home was the place without voices, and she had none. Her head was clear. Here there was nothing, no jealousy, no voices screaming, no cars crashing—only the soothing sound of wheels passing, a sound growing fainter.

About Garrett Rowlan

Garrett Rowlan is a retired substitute teacher in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Bacopa Literary Review, bioStories, and the ten-year anthology of the Cafe Irreal. His website is garrettrowlan.com.

WHAT HAPPENED IN VEGAS…

Rena Mason

ROUNDING ENDLESS CORNERS OF FOREVER HALLS in a Las Vegas hotel, Kelli ran and bounded through closing elevator doors setting off an alarm. Her oversized beach bag swung around and she stumbled, grabbed the rail for balance. The ring on her finger clinked against the metal. She pushed the button for the third floor, and an electric jolt shot out and stung her finger. Kelli’s arm recoiled and while examining the puffy redness, the lights flickered.

“I’m out,” she said and attempted to exit. The doors swooshed shut in her face, puffing her hair up. Kelli laughed it off and backed into something—someone else in the elevator. She jumped to the left, turned around, and shuddered at a frisson of unease.

“Sorry, I didn’t see you when I got on,” she said. She repositioned the Hollywood starlet sunglasses on her face.

A short Hispanic man in his thirties wearing jeans, a black western shirt, matching cowboy boots and hat smiled up at her. His dark eyes wide with excitement, he clapped his hands and rubbed them together briskly. “You here for the fight?” he said with a thick accent.

“No. I’m getting married.”

His enthusiasm deflated.

She showed him her beach bag. “I came early to get everything ready and get some sun.”

The man reanimated. “You should go to the fight if you can. It’s going to be one of the best. I can get you tickets, maybe, if you want.”

Kelli wasn’t sure he understood, so she spoke louder and slowly. “I can’t. Getting married, remember?” She raised her hand and wiggled her ring finger. Diamond light glinted in his eyes. It appeared to hypnotize him momentarily.

“Just ask for Ricky Lopez. They all know me here,” he said, still staring at her ring.

After that he shut down, backed into a corner, then turned and faced it. His head jerked around and he mumbled in Spanish.

The elevator dinged, Kelli squeezed through the doors before they finished separating. She didn’t care what floor it had stopped at, it was time to get out. Pleased to see the strange man didn’t follow, Kelli turned around and read the placard for directions. The third floor—Kelli smiled and sighed with relief. She’d actually gotten off at the right place. “Thank God.” An arrow pointed to the left for the pool and she followed it.

Kelli fast-walked through a labyrinth of narrow halls carpeted with bright orange and pink circles that seemed to bubble up and pop before her eyes. Frigid air blew down from the ceiling vents and gave her consecutive waves of chills and goose bumps. She pulled the swimsuit cover up over her shoulders and moved with haste. Every other turn, she’d go down a hall that had rooms on one side and the hotel’s open atrium on the other. Looking out, Kelli saw linear rows of balconies that climbed all the way to the top of the pyramid’s interior. She had a room in one of these upgraded hallways, but a fear of heights kept her walking closer to the side with the hotel rooms, and she never looked down.

Left turn after left turn heightened her disorientation. More than once Kelli stumbled and twisted her flip-flops, or bumped into a door or a wall. Upon entering each new corridor, she looked back, unable to shake the feeling the elevator man had followed her. His dark, wild eyes still gazing at her ring.

Glass double doors with the pool in sight appeared at the end of a hall, and Kelli ran. The automatic entryway opened as she neared, and hot air rushed past, warming her chilled bones. She took in a deep breath scented with coconut oil, sunscreen, and chlorine. A tall attractive blonde in a barely-there red string bikini walked by carrying a full tray of drinks.

“Excuse me, Miss,” Kelli said.

The waitress ignored her and kept going.

Someone called out, “There you are!”

Kelli turned at the familiar Alabama twang of her best friend, Tina. A welcome sight in an enormous sunhat, Tina held a Mai Tai in each hand and balanced them perfectly as she walked over.

“Tina! Oh my God, I’ve never been so happy to see you.”

“Where’ve you been? I’ve been waitin’ over an hour.” Tina handed her a drink.

Kelli took the paper umbrella out and guzzled down the cocktail.

“Slow down, girl,” Tina said.

When she finished, Kelli stepped over to set the glass down on a planter box and glanced at her watch. An hour and fifteen minutes had passed since she left her room. How could that be?

“Where’d you set your things? This stuff’s getting heavy, and I need another drink.” Kelli eyed the other Mai Tai in Tina’s hand.

“No way. This one’s mine.” Tina stretched her arm out and motioned the glass to the left. “We’re over there.”

A row of green and white striped tents lined a back wall. “Ooh, a cabana,” Kelli said.

“Nice, huh? Part of your wedding present.”

“Aww, bless your heart.”

The two headed toward the reserved lounge chairs.

Kelli let the beach bag fall from her shoulder onto a side table. “Ugh, why’d I put so much crap in there?”

Tina went over and stood next to Kelli then raised her phone. “Say cheese.” The girls both smiled until the camera clicked.

The blonde bikini waitress that had passed Kelli before, walked up. “Hi ladies, I’m Lauren. I’ll be your server today.”

“Oh, so you’re taking drink orders now, eh?” Kelli said.

“Do you know what you’d like?”

“Well, I tried to order earlier, but you just walked on by and ignored me.”

“Uh, two Mai Tais, please.” Tina spoke up.

The waitress stamped off, her heels tapping against the concrete.

“What’s wrong with you? She’s going to spit in our drinks now,” Tina said.

“No she won’t. They don’t do that here. They’ve got cameras everywhere.”

“Oh.” Tina pulled one of the lounge chairs out from under the shade and lay down. “But still, what’s got you so riled up? Did Blake call or something? You guys fight?”

“No. And stop thinking that. It’s getting on my nerves.”

Tina’s phone chimed. “Speak of the devil.”

“Why’s he texting you?” Kelli said.

“I sent him that picture of us.”

“What’d he say?”

“Nice!”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah.” Tina closed the conversation on her phone and looked back at Kelli. “So, what’s buggin’ you then?”

“It’s nothing. Just this creepy guy on the elevator, and then I got lost.” Kelli pulled her lounger out and put it alongside Tina’s.

“What’d the guy do?” Tina said.

“Talk about some fight going on this weekend.”

“Oh God, I bet the hotel’s gonna be packed.”

“I’ll pretend they all came for my wedding.”

Tina laughed. The waitress came back with their drinks. Kelli downed hers and ordered another two.

“Seriously Kelli, you need to slow down. You’re not used to Vegas. You might get drunk faster.”

“Everyone knows that’s not true.”

“Fine, then. Cheers to your wedding.”

*****

After drinking four Mai Tais while sunbathing, Kelli felt warm inside and out. She turned over and began to doze off when the image of the elevator man appeared behind her eyes. His desperate expression haunted her and she wondered if that’s what people mean when they say someone’s got gambler’s eyes. So desperate and lifeless. The image raised hairs all over her body. A chill raced up and down her spine, and she shivered. Kelli felt frozen and on fire at the same time.

“What is it?” Tina said.

“I’m not feeling so good.”

“I told you not to drink so much.”

“Will you come up with me?”

“Are you kidding? There’s at least five hours of sun left. Don’t you want me to look nice and tan in that hideous, hot pink bridesmaid gown you’re makin’ me wear?”

Kelli laughed. She’d picked the ugliest dresses on purpose.

“Seriously, finish your drink and walk me upstairs, please.”

“Why can’t you go by yourself? You’re a big girl.”

“What if I see that creepy elevator guy again?”

“Take a look around. There’re creeps all over the place.”

They both sat up, scanned the pool area, and giggled. Kelli gathered her things, and gave Tina one last puppy dog look.

“You’ll be fine,” Tina said.

*****

As soon as she’d stepped back into the hotel, the air conditioning blasted Kelli’s heated skin and gave rise to extreme gooseflesh—the painful kind that brought an onslaught of trembling and teeth chattering.

A set of six elevators she hadn’t noticed before were right around the corner. One dinged open, and a few people in swim gear stepped out. She stuck her head inside to be sure everyone had gone, then entered, and pressed the button for the 26th floor. Kelli leaned back against the wall and braced herself as the elevator shot straight up and sideways. Butterflies swam in the mai tai ocean of her stomach. Woozy, she exited, then checked the wall placard twice for the direction of her room.

The corridor tottered, threatened to spin, she shook her head and tried to make it stop. A shadow loomed at the far end of the hall. Sconces flickered along the walls, and the darkness appeared to jump forward each time the lights dimmed. Her eyes couldn’t focus, but something approached. She blinked a few times and tried again. Its movement changed to a slow glide.

Kelli lowered her head and gasped at the bare feet she saw floating just inches above the floor. The right foot snapped ninety degrees to the left, and the sound of breaking bones reverberated down the hall. She looked up and Ricky Lopez launched toward her. His right arm went up over his head, then bent back at the elbow with a loud crack. Jagged, white bone protruded from the middle of his arm, blood dripped from the end and pitter-pattered off the carpet. Ricky’s head caved in with a sickening crunch. His right eye filled with crimson and bulged as if it might pop out. Blood sprayed from his nose, droplets misted the carpet near her flip-flops. Only a foot away, he opened his mouth and screamed.

She opened hers and vomited.

Ricky disappeared. The elevator behind her dinged, and she jumped. Two security guards came out, their eyes unfazed at the sight of her.

“Are you okay, Miss?”

Kelli shook and cried, wiped her mouth using her sleeve.

One of the guards gently took hold of her by the arm. “What’s your name?”

“Kelli.”

“And your last name?”

“Ralston.”

“Are you a guest in the hotel, Kelli?”

She nodded.

“My name’s Haiden, and this is Kyle,” said the guard that held Kelli’s arm. “Looks like you might’ve had a little too much to drink.”

Kelli nodded. “I, I think I saw a ghost.”

“Yeah, okay. Let’s go,” Haiden said.

Kyle shook his head, and pushed the elevator button.

“Am I in trouble?” Kelli said. She’d sobered up enough to feel silly.

“No,” Haiden said. “The doc’ll just make sure you don’t need to go to the hospital.”

Kelli nodded, thought for a moment. “There’s this man I keep seeing around. He creeps me out. He says everyone here knows him. His name’s Ricky Lopez.

“Miss, I think you should pace your drinking,” Kyle said.

“He told me he was here for the fight,” Kelli said.

Kyle opened his mouth to comment, but Haiden looked at him and shook his head. The two men eyed one another but said nothing else.

*****

Tina finally showed after Kelli spent two hours in the doctor’s office. Kelli overheard Tina talking with Haiden, who’d stayed the entire time, just outside the exam room where they’d made her lie down and wait. The door opened, both of them stood in the entryway and stared at her.

“Oh, Kelli, I’m so sorry I let you go upstairs alone. I didn’t realize how drunk you were.”

“I wasn’t, though.”

“Yeah, okay, honey, let’s get you out of here.” Tina walked over and helped Kelli sit up.

Haiden stayed in the doorway. “You sure you’re all right?”

Kelli nodded. “Thanks for everything.”

He smiled at her and left.

“Ooh, what’s that all about?” Tina said.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Looks to me like somebody’s flirtin’.”

“I’m covered in barf, he thinks I’m a nutcase, and I’m getting married in two days.”

“Well, what happened?”

“What did Haiden say?”

“Said they got a call from whoever watches all those cameras, and they saw you puking.”

“Did they see anyone else?”

“Not that he said, why? Was someone there?”

“I thought I might’ve seen—”

“Don’t even say the creepy elevator guy.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Something wasn’t right.”

“What do you mean? Did you see him or not? I’ll get that cute security guard back here if you did. I’m sure he’d be happy to kick the guy out of the hotel for you.”

“No. It was nothing. Really. I must’ve had too much to drink. Let’s go.”

Kelli hopped down from the exam table.

*****

Tina stayed and watched TV while Kelli showered, and then both of them dozed off.

“Close your eyes and go back to sleep.” Blake’s voice sounded distant. She struggled to wake up, wanting nothing more than to see him. Her eyelids finally responded, except when they opened, all she saw was Tina in a chair, texting.

“Is Blake here?” Kelli said

Tina turned off her phone. “Oh good, you’re awake. I’m hungry. You want to go downstairs and eat or order some room service?”

Kelli groaned. “I thought I heard Blake.”

“Nope. You must’ve been dreaming. He won’t be here till Friday, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Well, are you hungry or not?”

“Just give me a minute. My head’s killing me.”

“I’m not surprised. Don’t think you’ll be making it out to the club tonight.”

“Probably not.”

“Well, I am. I didn’t come to Vegas just to babysit you, and be a bridesmaid.”

“Let me get dressed. I’ll meet you at that café downstairs by the lobby in an hour.”

After Tina left, Kelli got up and stretched. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, dry and gritty as if she’d eaten sand. She took a bottle of water from the small refrigerator and drank half of it in one continuous swallow.

Kelli dressed in a rush, and on the way out, grabbed another bottled water from the fridge. In the hall, she pulled the door closed then jiggled the handle to be sure it locked. The wall sconces flickered then went out, but the hotel’s open atrium lit the corridor. Kelli headed straight for the elevators and froze when she saw a short figure with familiar dark features several feet from where she stood—Ricky Lopez.

He stared down at the interior of the hotel, his hands atop the balcony wall. Kelli’s heart hammered, she hoped he didn’t see which room she exited. Ricky turned his head and looked at her.

“Did you see the fight?

“No.” She backed up two steps. “Please, just leave me alone.”

Kelli started to cry, then noticed the way Ricky gripped the ledge. She looked into his dark, gambler’s eyes and tried to be sympathetic.

“Please, don’t,” Kelli said.

Ricky’s body lifted into the air and went over the balcony ledge. Kelli ran and tried to grab him. The water bottle fell from her hand, and his arm went through her fingers. She screamed.

Shouting came from down below. Kelli looked over the rail and saw Ricky Lopez’s smashed body sprawled out on the hotel floor. His right arm had bent above his head at an unnatural angle, white bone protruded from his skin. The man’s right foot had twisted ninety degrees, and blood seeped into a widening pool from the crushed side of his head. Kelli screamed again.

More people gathered on the main floor, looked up, and pointed at her. When she glanced back to the mangled body it had vanished. Kelli became suddenly aware of the height and that she’d been peering down over the ledge. The atrium seemed to fall away, vertigo reeled her back from the balcony. Darkness circled her peripheral vision and closed in.

Kelli woke with damp carpet against her cheek, the smell of vomit wafted up her nose. Her wrists had been bound behind her.

“Don’t move,” a voice said.

She ignored it, kicked and screamed. “Why am I in handcuffs? He jumped, I swear!”

Kelli saw Tina running down the hall. She came at her sideways.

“Oh my God, what happened? This is my friend,” Tina said.

“She threw a bottle over the rail,” one of the guards said in a familiar voice. Kelli looked up. It was Kyle. “You could’ve seriously injured or killed someone.”

“Help me, Tina. Tell them it was Ricky, the elevator guy. I saw him jump. I swear.”

Tina’s eyes widened and she shook her head as the guards pulled Kelli off the floor and stood her up.

“Where’re you taking her?” Tina said.

“Hotel security office.”

Tina removed her sweatshirt and put it around Kelli’s shoulders. “I’ll call your folks, then come as soon as I can.”

Kelli nodded, and the security guards took her away.

*****

Tourists and hotel employees stared as four guards escorted Kelli through the casino. Hotel security walked her through long, beige corridors with locked doors on both sides. The walls, floors, and ceiling emanated a cold, sterile feel. The hairs on Kelli’s arms tingled.

“What’s happening? Where are you taking me?” she said.

They continued walking and went down two flights of steps. “I’m going to take you to a desk and they’ll ask you for some information. Then you’ll be brought to a holding room where someone will be in to talk to you about what happened tonight,” Kyle said.

Kelli looked at the clock on the wall behind the registration area. She couldn’t believe it was nearly midnight. The other guards that had followed them turned around and went back.

“Thanks guys, I got this,” Kyle said. He brought her up to the desk, then handed a woman seated behind it her driver’s license. After filling out a short form, Kyle led Kelli down another hall. Four open doors lined the right side of the next corridor. Kyle went to the second room, led her in, and uncuffed her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Go ahead and have a seat. It’ll be a few minutes until someone comes to talk with you.” Kyle shut the door after stepping out.

Kelli pulled a few tissues from a box on the table, blew her nose, and wiped her eyes. Large pipes crisscrossed the ceiling. Kelli felt certain she’d been brought to the hotel basement.

After twenty minutes of shivering in the air conditioning, Kelli remembered she had Tina’s sweatshirt over her shoulders. She put it on and shoved her hands in the pockets. Something hard rubbed against her knuckles. It was Tina’s phone. How will she call my parents?

Kelli thumbed over Contacts and accidentally opened up the phone’s Photo Gallery. She immediately recognized a picture of Blake and touched it. The image of him standing under the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign filled the phone’s screen. He must have texted it to Tina when he came out a month earlier for his bachelor party. But why did he send it to Tina? Kelli never got any snapshots from Blake while he’d been in Vegas.

Kelli swiped the picture and her stomach knotted when she saw the next one. Tina and Blake sitting close together with their arms around each other. A dim candle sat on a dinner table in the foreground. Big happy smiles crossed their faces. Tina wore a low-cut dress that Kelli recognized as one of hers Tina had borrowed.

The next picture made Kelli’s heart muscles wrench. A smiling Tina had her head against Blake’s bare chest while his rested on a pillow. A post-sex selfie. Kelli shoved the phone back into the pocket, then shook and cried.

A bald man, wearing a black suit and tie opened the door and walked into the room. “Miss Ralston, my name’s Mr. Black, I’m in charge of hotel security.” He reached across the table, shook her hand, then sat down.

“I need to ask you a few questions about what happened tonight. I spoke to your parents, and they’ve worked things out with the hotel. They’ll be coming in tomorrow instead of Thursday to help straighten this out before your wedding. And the hotel’s not going to press any charges.”

“Does this mean I’m not under arrest?”

“You never were.” He flipped through pages on a clipboard. “Hotel records show that security brought you to the infirmary earlier in the day. Is this right?”

“Yeah. I had a little too much to drink.”

“Did you have anything to drink after that incident?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. My best friend Tina was with me the whole time. We fell asleep in my room after we left the doctor’s office.”

“She told the guards you were supposed to meet her for dinner and that she waited downstairs for more than thirty minutes then came up to see if something had happened. Said she’d been worried about your behavior lately. I believe she’s on her way down to see you now.”

“Yeah, look, weird things have been happening to me since I got here. There’s this man I met on the elevator. His name’s Ricky Lopez. He asked me if I was going to the fight. He’s crazed about it. Then he’d pop up in the halls. I think he might be stalking me.”

“What’s his name again?”

“Ricky Lopez. He told me he’s well-known at this hotel, but whenever I mention his name, nobody knows who the hell I’m talking about.”

“Give me a minute. That name sounds familiar.”

Kelli sighed. “Finally.”

Mr. Black stepped out and left the door cracked open. Kelli overheard him talking with the secretary.

“Lucinda, you remember the incident with Ricky Lopez?”

“The bookie who jumped when he lost three mil after the Pacquiao fight?”

“Yeah, well, this girl says he’s been bothering her.”

“Can’t be. He died on impact, and that happened ten years ago. She probably read about it somewhere. Drank too much. You know how it is.”

“I most certainly do. Look, why don’t you go ahead and take your dinner break. I’ll handle the paperwork when I’m done here. Take your time. I know you like to eat with Terry. How is he by the way?”

“Thanks, Mr. Black. Terry’s fine, and thanks again for putting in a good word to get him on the night shift.”

“No problem, and really, don’t worry about rushing back. It’s slow tonight.”

The door closed and cut off the rest of their conversation. Frigid air filled the room. Kelli rubbed her arms and took in a deep breath. When she exhaled, it came out as a billow of white. A slow creak sounded just above her head and she froze. Something swayed to the left. She could see it in her periphery but refused to turn and look. She wondered if Ricky had followed her.

Strained gasps sounded overhead, and Kelli couldn’t stop her eyes from slowly drifting to the left. A pair of silver-tipped, black cowboy boots floated next to her face. Kelli’s heart pounded so hard, she grabbed her chest in pain and looked up.

Ricky Lopez hung from one of the pipes in the ceiling by the strap of a belt. The leather creaked again and the body turned toward Kelli, his face swollen and purple. Open gashes above his eyes trickled blood. He had a puffy, split lip, and what appeared to be a broken nose. Ricky’s eyes opened wide and his glare pierced Kelli. “I won, girl!” His body shook and swayed as he struggled. “That Mr. Black was fucking my wife. Then they brought me here and fixed things. You know what I mean? They took everything.”

Kelli gasped and quickly covered her mouth with her hands and nodded frenetically.

“Don’t stay here alone,” he whispered.

Icy chills moved in waves over her skin. The door clicked open. Kelli looked up at Ricky and he pointed with his head toward the door. “Vamanos.”

Kelli got up and tiptoed to the door. She pushed it open then looked back at Ricky.

“Run!” he said.

She jumped, bolted through the door, and took off to the right. Heartbeats jackhammered her sternum, but she continued until the hallway ended in a T that went left or right. Fluorescent lights flickered and buzzed to her left, so she followed them through a labyrinth of beige hallways to an elevator, then got on. The lights inside remained steady. She pushed the button to her floor, leaned back against the wall, and caught her breath.

*****

Tina rushed onto the elevator hoping Kelli hadn’t found her phone. The doors closed and the lights flickered overhead. The elevator stopped after only going down a few floors. They opened, and a balding, tall man in a black suit smiled at her and stepped on.

“Hello, you must be Tina. I’m Mr. Black.”

He held out his hand for her to shake, but she gave him a strange look.

“Forgive me, Miss Ralston asked me to come and get you.” Mr. Black put a key into the control panel and pushed the button for a sublevel. The doors closed.

“But how—”

The lights above buzzed and flashed intermittently. In the corner next to Mr. Black, a shadow blinked in time to the rhythmic pulses of illumination and took the form of a man. Tina gasped and backed into the opposite corner.

The man slowly turned around and looked up at both of them, the brim of his black cowboy hat exposing intense eyes, dark and vacant.

“You here for the fight?”

The lights shone brilliant then went out, and Tina screamed.

About Rena Mason

Rena Mason is the Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of The Evolutionist, and East End Girls. She’s a Sin City writer and longtime fan of horror, sci-fi, historical fiction, mysteries, and thrillers who began writing to mash up those genres in stories revolving around everyday life. To find out more about Rena and her upcoming projects visit her website:  http://www.renamasonwrites.com/

PRIVATE FRANKS

Gary Robbe

“LOOK,” GODFREY SAID.

I stood up in my stirrups and gazed straight ahead east toward the ridge at what appeared to be white boulders shining in the morning sun.

“Boulders,” I said.

“No,” Godfrey said, almost dropping his field glasses. “Those are bodies.”

I wiped my mouth, then pulled my hat brim closer to my eyes. My tongue felt along the dryness that crusted my lips. We rode our mounts slowly past the remains of several of our comrades as we ascended the ridge. Now more shapes, naked and bloated, were scattered along the ridge, leading to a cluster of bodies at the highest point within a half circle of rotting horse carcasses.

The stench was horrific. We covered our mouths and noses as best we could with bandanas and ripped pieces of clothing. Several men bolted to the river to vomit. A sickening buzz drowned out the wind rustling the high grass. Our crow scouts, Half-Yellow Face and Hairy Moccasin turned back and rode off as fast as they could, as if they had seen hordes of ghosts.

Godfrey and I dismounted. Benteen rode further to the cluster of bodies and dismounted there.

“Jesus,” I mumbled. The body closest to me, if it could still be called that, was missing its head, hands and feet. Something had fed on its abdomen leaving blotches of entrails trailing away into the grass. I bent over, retching, but there was nothing in me to come up. Godfrey cried.

All of the bodies were naked except for an occasional sock on an unattached foot or leg.  Some of the bodies were blackened from the sun or from the swarms of blue green flies covering the wounds.

Someone mumbled, “Animals had at ‘em. All of ‘em.”

Just beyond where I stood, all that remained of the soldiers were cracked and splintered bones with a few ribbons of tendon and flesh, the bones tossed about as if caught in a whirlwind of starving wolves and coyotes. There were no paw prints although there was plenty evidence of moccasins and bare feet and boots and hoof prints, everywhere in the blood-dusty battleground.

We were silent. Some of the men sobbed. Others rode up, dismounted and joined us without a word, staying motionless for an eternity to take in the massacre around us. Benteen motioned for Godfrey and me.

The rest of the men stayed back as we walked toward him, leaving our horses with Private Jenks who shook so hard we had to press the reins in his hands to make him understand what we wanted. Benteen pointed to his right.

There, on the flat crest at the far end of the ridge, rested Custer, naked. He was leaning in a half-sitting position against two other dead soldiers. He hadn’t been torn apart like the others. A gunshot wound to the left chest. A gunshot wound to the left temple. He had not been scalped.

“They’re all gone,” Benteen said. “But General Custer was left untouched. Don’t know why.”

Benteen kicked a spent cartridge out of his way and came over to me. He hadn’t covered his face like the rest of us. He pulled a dusty and blood-spotted bandanna from his back pocket and did so now. “Lieutenant Windolph, have the men spread out. See if there are any…” His voice faded.

I knew what he meant and nodded. Benteen turned to Lieutenant Godfrey, and instructed, “Take two men and go back and get shovels or whatever you can.” He kicked at the dust again, sending another cartridge into a dead horse.

Benteen walked a few yards from the General to another body, this one torn completely apart, as if some great beast had ravaged him. His head was flattened. And again it appeared he had been fed upon. On what remained of an arm nearby was a tattoo with the initials TWC.

“That would be Tom,” Benteen whispered. The General’s brother.

The wind picked up. It rolled over the high grass and carried with it the stench of rotting flesh and sated flies. We spread out, being careful where we stepped; body parts everywhere. Scattered tufts of reddish brown grass on the almost ashy white soil made it a scene of loneliness and despair.

Every man was tired, thirsty, and numb. For two days, we had choked on dust and smoke with little water, withstanding one attack after another from the same bands that wiped out our commander. The scouts were in awe of the Indians attacking us, saying that they had never before felt or seen such big medicine. When Terry and Gibbon’s columns arrived they found Custer and his men first, then found us hunkered on a hill expecting to die any moment. After a brief rest, Benteen and a handful of us were ordered to this hellish place to see for ourselves what happened to our comrades and friends.

We were quiet. Heads down, searching, trying to find anyone we could recognize. My arm ached from the grazing I received two nights back. I was lucky. Matthews was not. The bullet that skinned me hit him full in the forehead. I thought of him as I checked the corpses, hoping to find someone intact and not half eaten. Everything of value was gone, taken away—
arms, ammunition, equipment, clothing. Occasionally a partial body with a bloody undershirt or trousers or socks was found, but any names stitched on the items were always cut out.

“Over here!” Private Bennings was on his knees, vomit erupting from his mouth as he tried to call out again. He was about thirty feet from the top of the ridge.

I got to him first, seeing right away what he saw—bloody flies buzzed around a trouser leg that protruded from the belly of a bloated sorrel horse.

The leg moved.

“My God!” I cried.

We both grabbed the leg and pulled and the dead horse seemed to give birth to a blubbering, brown-red mess of a man. The man, covered in blood and rotting horse entrails flailed at us and emitted a high-pitched attempt at a scream.

“Take it easy soldier,” I said, “We’re your friends.”

Several other soldiers from my unit came over immediately and held him down while we checked for injuries. There was a festering wound on his right arm; a good chunk of flesh missing with what appeared to be tooth marks surrounding the wound.

I did not recognize the wounded man, but Bennings said he thought it was Franks, a scrawny recruit from out east. Somehow Franks had avoided slaughter by hiding inside a dead horse. For two days.

We poured water on his face while he was being held down. He took deep breaths and took the canteen with trembling hands and gulped the water, threw it back up, then drank some more. This calmed him, but I could tell by his eyes he was quite mad. He looked at each of us, muttered something about the end of everything, being hungry, and then closed his eyes.

I leaned over him. Behind me I heard one of the troopers say, “Damn coward.”

I turned around and said, “What would you do?”

Before I could turn back, Franks was on me, springing up from the ground like an explosive charge, fixing his teeth on my arm at the very spot I had been wounded. I screamed and thrust my other arm against his head, hard, knocking him out.

“Take him back to camp,” I said, regaining my calm. Fresh blood oozed down my left arm. I stumbled backward into Godfrey and the others.

Bennings and a few others threw him across a pony and rushed away through the grass, toward the Bighorn, then disappeared behind a bend. After more men from Gibbon’s outfit arrived, we spent the rest of the day burying the remains of five companies in shallow graves, using picks, axes, knives, cups and raw blistered hands.

*****

“The man who was pulled out of that horse wants to see you,” Porter, the company surgeon, said. He had finished dressing my arm, leaned back and was smoking a thick cigar. “There was a bite on his arm, so now the arm is gangrenous. It’s going to have to come off.”

“That’s the least of his problems.”

The doctor stared at me. “Oh no, Windolph. He is quite lucid now.” He smiled, displaying blackened teeth. “He wants to see you.”

“Franks spent two days inside a rotting horse. Everyone around him massacred; mutilated beyond recognition. How is it he survived?”

“Luck, I suppose. Go see him. Lieutenant Godfrey will go with you. He won’t talk to anyone else. Let’s see what he says happened down there. See if it resembles what he told me.”

*****

Private Franks was tied to his cot. He looked barely human; pale, emaciated, his bad arm wrapped and oozing green pus, smelling bad. Half-Yellow Face, a Crow scout, and Corporal Lansing, an interpreter, joined us. A number of men wanted to come along, curious to see the lone survivor of Custer’s engagement, but the doctor thought it best to keep it to a few men.

Franks was awake. He eyes were black shadows in the dim light inside the tent. The skin of his face was dried and shrunken like gauze. He wiggled against his ropes and smiled as we came in.

“You remember me,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “I remember all of it.”

“Well?” I asked. He kept his eyes on me, fixed, those black holes spearing into me as easily as the hundreds of arrows protruding from the dead we buried that day. “Tell me what happened.”

“You won’t believe me.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“I was with C Company. We rode into the river to the village but the General stopped.” He looked at Half-Yellow Face. “I guess he thought there were too many of you and changed his mind.”

Franks stared at Half-Yellow Face who kept backing up to the tent flap. I could tell he didn’t want to be here. The Indian’s eyes trembled as much as his hands and lips did.

Franks said, “They were like bees knocked outta their hive, swarming up at us, shooting and picking us off as we sat dumb on our horses waiting to move. Finally the General hauled up toward the ridge. We scrambled after, holding up on a hill with Keogh and most of C Company, waiting for reinforcements to come…but none did. The redskins came at us but we set them back, giving the General time to make it further up the ridge.”

He hesitated, then continued.

They came again. So many! Stormed over our skirmish lines. A roar filled the air. Horses screaming, hooves pounding, Indians, soldiers yelling. You could even hear the sound of bones and skulls breaking, and over all this the deafening blasts of close quarter rifles and pistols firing. I shot one bastard in the face. And then the funny thing: the Indians pulled back.”

There were fewer shots. Keogh choked orders to regroup; those of us who could move started backing up the hill toward where the rest of the Seventh was. I can see the General plain as day standing up there with his brother trying to figure out what the Indians were up to, their horses already down and dead to give some protection and maybe they thought it was over. Some troopers fired shots but there was nothing to aim for, except an occasional head popping up out of the grass. I knew there had to be thousands of them, and they had us good. They were waiting for something. It got real quiet. Eerie quiet.

A wind picked up. A cold wind like blows in the plains in winter. Icy cold, lieutenant. It numbed our faces and worse, our fingers. My rifle dropped outta my hands like it was a wisp of smoke. Terror gripped me. It welled up from the inside, this feeling we were all going to die in some horrible way. I think we all thought that, because every one of us had that hopeless fear look that froze us to the bloody ground like statues. Those seconds lasted years until…

Screams out of the sky. A cloud of death blew across us, thick of decay and rancid meat, burning our nostrils and throats. And following that cloud, hundreds of warriors, giant ones with skeleton faces and rotting flesh dripping off them like wax in the sun, sweeping in on us like they were flying.”

He turned to me, one eye closed and covered in mucus. “They were flying at us, lieutenant. We barely let off any shots, they was so quick. We were panicking. Most of us dropped our rifles and started to run, tried to make it up the ridge. Men were putting pistols to their heads to end it right there. Hawkes screamed next to me but I didn’t see him ‘cept for his boots lifting up in the air, his blood raining down on me. They were demons, lieutenant.”

Drool flowed from the side of his mouth. Godfrey and I looked at each other. My heart was racing and I, too, was feeling the panic I had felt the past two days, holding back attack after attack, knowing I was going to die.

Franks was a madman. But I knew the fear he was talking about.

“Go on,” Godfrey said. His voice brittle, tentative.

I kept running, stumbling. Looking back I saw they were on the ground , loping towards all of us who were trying to get away. They were like wolves the way they moved, but …once they were upon us they were more like men, dead men with long stringy  hair and black pits for eyes. They ripped  men apart with claws and tore into them with jagged teeth. A group of men made it to a ravine only to be overtaken by a swarm of those things— they were all dead in an instant, but their screams dogged me like a shadow as I ran up the ridge toward the gray red smoke where the guidon was planted.  I saw Tom shoot the General in the head, then try to shoot himself, but one of the demons leaped on him, pinning him to the ground as it buried its fangs into his gut.”

I got knocked to the ground. I expected to die. I wanted to die. It was all over. I saw the things, so thin now that they were wisps of smoke, ravenous, scraping the meat off the bones with their teeth, feeding on us.

“Not you,” I said. “They didn’t feed on you. You hid like a coward.”

“My arm,” Franks said. “The bite.”

I had enough. I was tired, hungry, terribly afraid, and I wanted to kill this worthless lying coward more than anything in the world. Half-Yellow Face was going to beat me to it. He lunged toward Franks with his knife, just missing the man’s throat. Godfrey had knocked him to the side giving the rest of us time to grab him. Half-Yellow Face screamed something at Franks, who was crying and laughing at the same time. I looked at Lansing.

Lansing, the interpreter, said, “I’m not sure I understand. Iya, Chiya-tanka. Bakaak. Those are Lakota words about evil spirits or creatures. I think he is trying to come up with a name for the images Franks was talking about.”

Half-Yellow Face struggled. He was shaking; his face childlike as though he had just awoken from a nightmare and barely knew where he was. He started singing and I knew it was the Crow death chant. That told me Half-Yellow Face expected to die.

Lansing spoke, directing his words to me. “Wetigo. Plains Cree for Windigo It’s an Indian evil spirit, very powerful. There are Windigo legends in almost every tribe. They are like walking corpses with canine fangs—they feed on people and the more they eat, the hungrier and more powerful they become.”

Half-Yellow Face stopped chanting and said, “The Wihtikowan. They were called up by the big medicine in the village. There were many of them. If one is bitten by a Windigo…they will go Windigo.” He backed out of the tent and ran off.

“Fool,” I said. I turned my attention back to Private Franks. I held Half-Yellow Face’s knife. The urge was still there to plunge it into this madman, but I wanted to know what happened out there. “Franks,” I said, “Finish.”

“I want to eat,” he croaked, thrashing so hard against the ropes ribbons of blood splashed at us.

“He’s going to die,” Godfrey said. “Leave the man in peace.”

I leaned over Franks. Spasms of pain bolted up and down my arm. I knew it was infected. Damn him. “We’ll get you food. Talk!”

I played dead but but it didn’t work. One of the fiends came to me and bit into my arm. Shook me until I blacked out. Next thing I remember was the searing heat, and the godawful smell. There were voices all around me. When I opened my eyes I saw Indians—squaws mostly, old men, children, poking at the body parts, picking up anything they could use. Hats, clothes, weapons, they were taking everything. They shot arrows into bodies, slashed every piece of white man they could find. I waited for someone to notice me but they stayed clear. I tried to crawl but couldn’t. I was a dead man. You know what they do to captives. I expected the worst.

A squaw with a flat wizened face and a toothless grin came to me and kicked my leg, then moved on to other spoils. I closed my eyes. Heard them all around me, but they left me alone. I buried my head into my good arm and bit my sleeve to not cry out. I wanted to die.

Private Franks looked at us with his one good eye. His drawn tight skin almost translucent, displaying his veins. We all knew what a dying man looked like. The doctor might get his arm off but it was already too late. Franks wasn’t going to make the steamer once it crawled to the mouth of the Little Bighorn to pick up the dead.

I moved closer to him. “Every man with Custer was butchered, mutilated beyond recognition. You say you saw the squaws and the old men plundering the battlefield, yet they left you alone, the only survivor? I know what the Sioux do with captives. You crawled in that horse and hid there during the heat of the battle while your comrades, your friends, fought and died. You’re nothing!”

“No,” Franks said. “I didn’t crawl into that dead horse.” He coughed weakly and turned away. “They put me there. They put me into that damned horse!”

He arched his body in the cot, struggling against the ropes that held him, sobbing and shaking. He tried to bite the ropes, snapping his jaws, then collapsed in on himself like a wrinkled gray blanket.

He was done for the night.

*****

Those of us left under Reno and Benteen’s command kept to ourselves that night. We didn’t talk. We avoided Terry’s men and they avoided us, somehow regarding us with disdain for having survived while Custer did not. I didn’t think I could ever sleep, the absence of stars in the night sky and the horrors of that battlefield were too bright a light, like the whiteness you see through your eyelids when you look at the sun with closed eyes. I was hungry. And the slightest touch on my arm sent spasms of pain throughout my body. I could hear men whimpering and crying, and then there was silence.

I was alone, walking the ridge where Custer lay. The dead were above the ground, bloated and blackened from the sun but they were whole, unmutilated. The sun was cold and distant. I heard cries coming from the tall grass. The wet smell of death flowed into my nostrils.

I stood over one of the slain troopers, his naked body glistening in the weak sun. I felt sick. Then a hunger I had never before experienced took hold. I tried to step back, watching my shadow retreat across the body like a swarm of flies into my mouth. I gagged, threw myself upon the trooper and tore at him with my teeth, ripping soft rancid strips of flesh to satisfy the incredible hunger overtaking me. The trooper’s eyes, black spoiled pits, stared at me. I howled in hunger and lust.

Shouts. I sprang from my bed. There were screams coming from the hospital tent. Fear paralyzed me, and the taste of death was still in my mouth. I shook my head to wrench it from the hideous dream. We were under attack. The massive force of Indians that had laid siege to us for two days had returned to finish us off.

I grabbed my Colt and stumbled into Lansing and Benteen. We charged through the hospital tent flaps, expecting to see hostiles clubbing and hacking at our wounded. It was worse.

Franks had somehow broken free of his ropes. He was standing over Cooper, the man’s throat torn apart, holding Cooper’s arm to his face. He was gnawing on the man’s fingers. His blood smeared face was a portrait of ecstasy.

More men poured into the tent. As one we charged him, grabbing his arms, keeping clear of his skull-like face, and the lipless mouth baring yellow fangs. He threw us about as if we were little children. Benteen cracked him across the jaw with his Colt, and someone hit him from behind with a rifle. We dragged him outside, in disbelief that such an emaciated a form could be so strong.

We knew what we had to do. I didn’t wait for an order.

I put a bullet in Private Frank’s brain. Benteen placed his hand on my shoulder and walked away.

In the morning, Godfrey and I took Franks to the battlefield, where he should have died, and left him there in the open for the wolves and coyotes to eat.

We knew that no man in the Seventh would ever speak of this; no man would ever let it be known that someone survived down there. The idea would be as crazy as his story of fantastic creatures called forth to annihilate the finest fighting force in the country.

*****

We will be moving out soon. Porter put me in the field hospital, which had been moved to Gibbon’s camp; it was a slightly cooler area near a creek bed. He says he will have to take my arm, but I will be able to board the steamboat when it arrives in a few days. Some of the soldiers with me in this stinking tent will not be so lucky.

A blanket of flies eat at my arm which oozes pus. I am so hungry, I lick at the flies.

About Gary Robbe

Gary Robbe currently lives and works in Cincinnati where he teaches students on the autism spectrum. He has been a lifelong fan of dark fiction, having grown up with Rod Serling, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ray Bradbury as babysitters.  He has been writing for many years and has always wanted to write a western horror story. Working on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation years ago fueled some of the ideas in the story “Private Franks.”

ONE LAST TWEET

Eric J. Guignard

THE ALARM GOES OFF.

It’s late, but not too late that you can’t snooze a bit more. You consider it as muddled dreams fade away, voices and visuals that linger like the cloying scent of perfume in an empty elevator. So easy to slip back into a fantasy, a world of whims, a realm of freedom... but it’s not really free is it? You can do what you want in dreams, yet the dreams still have a way of controlling you; the promise is there, but it misleads you, it takes you where it wants.

The alarm goes off again.

You’ve been dozing. Time to get up. There’s work to be done, plans to make, responsibilities, chores, life to live!

The coffee maker was set last night, and you’re grateful you had the foresight to program it in advance. The heady smell of Arabica already fills the kitchen. Like Pavlov’s dogs, you salivate at its scent once the machine’s chime rings and its green light blinks. Time to drink. The pot is full, and you’re a reactionary person after all. Given a stimuli, you respond. But don’t we all? Who among us lives in a void, absent of exterior catalysts? The alarm went off, and you woke. The coffee maker brewed, and you prepare to consume. True, you would have done these things anyway, but your routine—your sense of time—is moderated by these contrivances around you. If not for them, you would have woken at a different time, would have drank your java some other instant. The dreams might have lasted a bit longer... life would happen differently. The machines compel and you move to their rhythm. Remember, you’re a reactionary person. You’re conditioned to this, though, again, aren’t we all?

You stroll to the den. In it, your computer is set to sleep mode. You shake the mouse, prodding the computer to rouse. Ironic, eh? One machine wakes you, and you, in turn, wake another machine.

Microsoft’s Outlook program opens first, automatically. There’s one new email.

Only one? you wonder. Did the universe end last night? The thought is flippant, but you look through the window in the side of the room to make sure it hasn’t. Outside, the world turns as it should, heralding lovely spring.

Okay, only one email is a good thing. Because you know how you are, how the computer can ‘take over.’ If there were more emails, you’d want to sit at your desk and read them all. Links would be clicked, sites opened, news browsed, updates followed, tweets shared, feeds scrolled, pictures liked, and then the day would be over.

You’ve got work to do. You need to get into the office before nine. At least it’s Friday, and the workload should be easy today. Plus you have a first date tonight with Channa, the girl you met online. Can’t wait!

The timestamp on the email is 12:55 AM. You went to sleep at 12:50 last night, so had just missed it. The message is from your buddy, John Cattrall:

Dude, let’s go camping for a couple days, just get away. The eGolems are on the rise.

eGolems?

Open Google’s search engine and submit the term. A quarter million results arrive, each pleading to be selected like desperate children of some Dickensian orphanage. You choose one at random.

Urban Dictionary states: An eGolem is a physical creature born or animated from the sum experience of your social persona.

Haha, that’s pretty funny. And fitting! Others would appreciate it, they’d see that you’re witty and relevant. Friday’s always a good day for Facebook posts, too; statistically, people comment most on social media at the end of the work week when job duties give way to apathy or early weekend revelry.

You write a post on your page: Watch out for eGolems—they’re taking over.

Immediately two people ‘Like’ it. Someone comments, OMG! I gave into my eGolem long ago. Haha.

Then you Tweet your remark, for those Twitter followers who don’t see it on Facebook. Facebook limits you to five thousand friends. You have many more than that on Twitter, tens of thousands.

Cool, that was fun, you think. Time to get ready for work, be productive today!

Outlook’s inbox alert starts flashing and forty-eight new messages appear…the ‘Send/Receive Folders’ function was just asleep earlier! It had taken a few minutes for your multiple email providers to synch with the software information manager.

Okay, maybe you can skim just a few more messages before you leave for work. You certainly don’t want to miss out on anything important.

A recruiter in software and development has asked to connect with you via LinkedIn.com. You work in the information technology industry and would love to transition to development during the next few years. You know the languages of HTML and Java and C++, but employers are now looking for C#, SQL, Python, and PHP. Who can keep up with it all? Still, it’s good to build relationships in advance of career moves. You accept the recruiter’s request which then triggers a list of additional suggested connections. You request to connect with several. More suggestions take the place of those you had requested, and then you realize the page’s notifications flag is lit. How’d you miss that before? Better open it now to review your endorsements.

Wait, time is slipping by…you’re going to be late to work again…

But that was only one email! There are forty-seven more unread messages in Outlook still waiting. No, make that fifty-three; you just received six more. Of course, most of those are probably just subscription updates, marketing notices, or newsletters.

You should really check them all to be sure.

A Meetup notice invites you to Art Walk this weekend in the downtown district. That sounds like fun. If your first date tonight with Channa goes well, perhaps you can take her to Art Walk for a second date on Sunday. You’re very excited to meet her since eHarmony matched the two of you with twenty-three dimensions of compatibility. You log into the dating site to assess her profile again, wondering briefly if eHarmony matched her with others simultaneously, men with more than twenty-three dimensions of compatibility. You read again that she likes Italian food, country music, and spy movies.

That reminds you there’s a new spy movie which just came out…what was the name of it again? Easy enough to check Yahoo! Movie Trailers and watch it—

It’s time to go to work!

But John Cattrall just replied to your Tweet: Damn eGolems are no joke. Get offline for awhile!

You wonder if there’s still time to reply before rushing out the door…wait, you haven’t even brushed your teeth, combed your hair, or yet dressed!

But this’ll only take a moment, just one more Tweet. You write: Oh, eGolem’s so scary. Running away in terror this very moment!

A calendar reminder pops up, and you react. Open it. Read it. Remember to schedule your biannual appointment with the dentist. Connect to your provider’s website and fill out their online appointment form. Success! Your dentist’s page has sidebar banners suggesting other local businesses based on browsing history or maybe paid sponsorship. A local Thai restaurant is recommended, and it sounds really good. Just thinking about Thai food incites a craving for yellow curry in peanut sauce. That would be a great place to bring Channa tonight. No, hold on, she likes Italian food…or was it sushi?

John Cattrall replies to your Tweet: Haha, J/K. Check out this YouTube link. Topless woman eats a chicken.

Weird, but you click the link to watch. The woman is indeed topless, though her face looks like it could haunt a house. And she doesn’t eat a chicken per se, but she does bite its head off…which is pretty horrific. How can that occur in light of PETA and other animal activist groups? Apparently, she’s a ‘Geek,’ and her performance is the opening for a circus sideshow. But who would pay to see something like that? True, you watched it, but you didn’t shell out any money to do so.

Oh no, speaking of money, your credit card payment is due! Quick, log into online banking. What’s your balance? Lower than you thought it should be, so you scroll through purchases and withdrawals, looking for anything out of the ordinary. You were victim of identity theft once and don’t want it to happen again. Nothing suspicious is found…money just has a way of slipping through your fingers. Sigh.

Log onto the credit card website…what’s your password? So many web sites and all of them have different alphanumeric requirements. You work in the technology field and still can’t keep up with them all! You click, ‘Forgot Password,’ fill out the security questions, and wait for it to be emailed to you.

Email is already up to eighty-six more unread messages. You need to just skim them quick and do a batch-delete. Don’t forget to check the Spam folder once in a while though; it happens that messages you want to read are relegated as Spam by whatever random criteria the email provider dictates for that day.

You notice the time: It’s three o’clock in the afternoon!

Oh God! You’re still in your pajamas! How does time slip away like this? Your temporal sense seems to fluctuate, warped, compressed between character limits and acronyms. Why is it, when you rely on the machines, life is so much easier, but so less controllable? Like your dreams, you are misled. The online dreamscape empowers you as a divine being, boosting you with euphoric vigor, and you believe you can do it all! Yet then the hours fall away like seconds, as if the machine is charging you for its services, not in monetary compensation, but in biological cost, extracting payment from your dwindling life span.

Ironically, the faster you move with the machines, the faster life speeds away. If you sat outside in the grass, doing nothing, the seconds would drag by agonizingly slow. But ‘plugged in?’ The world rushes past as if you were broken down on the edge of the information highway, thumb stuck out for help and a dumb smile on your face. No one stops, no one looks back.

But can you still get in just one more tweet before rushing to work, stammering lies to your boss about a traffic jam somewhere?

Wait, what was that? Something about major freeway construction just scrolled by on your RSS ticker feed. That’d be perfect to tell your boss! Better check the details. You have four different news sites you like to follow for local updates, but the best is www.BeatTheTraffic.com.

Oh, the construction is for next week, Tuesday through Thursday. Why is freeway construction always planned during workdays and not on weekends? That’s a question for the ages. Anyway, it’d be wise to prepare alternate routes now, in advance of next week’s commute. For that, MapQuest can help.

Back to email.

Your favorite men’s clothing is having a sale this weekend.

There’s another LinkedIn request.

A distant cousin wrote a nice letter about what his family is doing.

Your eGolem post on Facebook is up to fifty-four ‘Likes.’ You scroll through Facebook’s home page and ‘Like’ a few dozen updates of other people, most of whom you don’t even know. Pay if forward.

Someone’s cat is posed in photographs wearing a Groucho Marx mustache, monocle, and top hat. The cat looks miserable and that makes the pictures even funnier! It’s part of a collection on Pinterest. You just have to see the others. OMG! There’s over three hundred pictures, but they’re each well-posed and cute, so it makes it worthwhile to peruse. You scroll them all, even voting on a numeric scale which ones are your favorites.

Weren’t you trying to read through your emails? Unread messages are now over two hundred. You have got to get caught up!

Wait, something’s wrong…it’s dark outside the den window. Are the clocks broken? Is there an eclipse? It’s a little after three…only a few minutes since last you checked.

Double-check, and the time is in the AM.

No, no, no…how does it happen so fast? The day, your date with Channa! You missed it!

But you’re dressed…weren’t you in your pajamas? You’re wearing nice slacks and a dress shirt. That’s strange…and you smell the fragrance of a cigar and…is that perfume?

No time to worry, you owe Channa an apology. Need to send a message: Sorry that something came up, or maybe the traffic story again? Maybe a family member was ill?

You think back to your cousin’s email; was there anything in it you could use to validate your excuse? But you can’t remember what he wrote…his message flowed through your mind as transient as a drop of water in a rainstorm. Just how much online information can you retain? If your brain were a bucket to collect advice and memes and trivia, it would have overflowed long ago, so much excess sifting away into nebulous oblivion.

But no time to think about that!

Facebook is open. There are new pictures posted that you’re tagged in. It’s you and Channa having dinner, drinks, watching a jazz band in a small lounge. Although, doesn’t she like country music? Of course we can’t know people based only on their online persona, but still…you feel slightly deceived. That seems to bother you more than the pictures themselves, because the pictures feel normal, that they are real, that all they depict occurred while you sat here in your den.

Did you black out? Were you sleepwalking? Drugged? Did you contract amnesia?

You look again at the pictures. Channa looks so beautiful, radiant even, her smile a burst of incandescence lighting a pert face with auburn hair and almond eyes.

You remember the eGolem. The concept doesn’t sound so funny anymore.

Hurry, before you’re distracted, search Dogpile: ‘eGolem’ and ‘How to stop.’

Results display by order of relevance. Ask.fm, LibraryOfSupernatural.com, Snopes.com, Britannica.com, and ten million others. You open up the first several pages in separate browser windows.

The golem is formed of inanimate matter such as clay, iron, or even energy...called upon to serve its human master. The latest reincarnation, the eGolem…born from aggregate online persona…cognitive duality... observational theory for that which fills a void...hoax...truth...joke... help...unknown to those unaffected...

Suddenly there’s a flurry of online activity! Newsfeeds all post simultaneously a TMZ exclusive: Gary Busey just punched a dwarf in a wheelchair. No way! You used to love Gary Busey…still do, truth be told. Point Break was one of your favorite movies, guilty pleasure as it is. Busey’s had some crazy mental illness attacks, but that’s no excuse for such an assault. Really, why would he do such a thing?

You just have to find out, and this’ll only take a second to skim. TMZ’s opening paragraph includes a hyperlink to Gary Busey’s new movie release. What? He’s still making movies? You haven’t seen anything he’s been in for a decade. You click the link and it redirects to his IMDB page. Look at that: six works in the past two years. One of them doesn’t sound half-bad, either. It’s the semi-factual account of an ex-biker who becomes a gun-toting preacher.

You search the pirated movie torrents for Busey’s film and begin its download. Of course, if you’re downloading something you really should offer something else to upload in exchange, as the ethics of media pirating mandates. You search through your music folder for files to share and see a band you haven’t listened to in twenty years, Stone Roses. You used to love that song back in high school, I Wanna Be Adored.

Click on it, and your media player opens. But the format can’t be read because it’s missing a codec for the file extension. You Google-search the codec and also Tweet about how annoying it is that music files aren’t more cross-compatible between your eight media platforms.

Followers Tweet back a dozen variances of agreement.

Skype’s Instant Messenger pops up. It’s a text sent from Channa’s cell phone. “Be home in five minutes.”

Home? you think. Her home? Why is she telling you that?

Then another IM: “Bringing lunch!” A smiling emoticon follows.

You look outside the den window. It’s bright outside, mid-afternoon…appropriate lunch time. But the trees look all wrong for the season. The branches are mostly bare of leaves, and what remains is crinkled brown, red, or gold, not the soft greens and pinks of spring like when you last gazed out…though when was the last time you gazed out a window?

You rub at your eyes and feel an unfamiliar sensation: glasses. You wear glasses now, though you’ve never had problems with your eyesight before. When did this happen?

It feels as if something’s taken over, masquerading under your guise…

eGolem.

Life is moving faster, past you, and you’ve got to catch up! But how? How to take it all back, regain control? How do you stop being reactive?

Should you do an online search for the answer?

A Google Connect request appears, and you forget what you were trying to do, and you wonder only momentarily how convenient that is.

The request comes from a friend of someone names John Cattrall, who is in your Circle, and is a second-connection from MySpace. John Cattrall... that name sounds so familiar, but you can’t quite remember who he is. You certainly have no memory of ever having met him. But you accept the friend request anyway. Can’t have enough friends, right? The requestor’s bio highlights a photograph of a snake with an alligator’s tail hanging from its mouth. You click on the image and it links to an anecdote sourced from a chemistry student’s blog in Bangkok. You read the anecdote, then notice Outlook’s Inbox icon is flashing in the bottom right corner of the monitor.

You’ve got mail! Outlook doesn’t say that, but remember when AOL Mail used to, back in the days of dial-up? How’d you ever live on dial-up internet service? Couldn’t make a phone call and be on the computer at the same time, and downloads larger than one megabyte took half an hour to open. You click on the ‘New Message’ icon.

There are over eighty thousand unread emails. Jeez! How do they add up so fast?

The first message is clearly Spam, advertising vacation packages at unbeatable prices. You’re about to delete it, but the email preview shows an amazing view of blue-green ocean as flat as glass. In bold letters a headline reads that rates start under $39. Huh, wonder how they could be so cheap?

You open the site and there are two women on the beach in bikinis so skimpy a loud word might blow them off. One of them has a tattoo of a dragon’s head in the small of her back. It’s very striking with vibrant colors and bold lines. You always wanted a tattoo like that on your shoulder. Wouldn’t it be cool?

You should check out websites of tattoo art for inspiration—

You hear the front door open and gasp. Who’s coming into my house? But the door opens as she would open it, a gentle click, and her soft steps on the inside mat. Somehow it’s a sound you are used to.

“Channa?” you ask.

There’s a movement outside the frame of the den door, a passing shadow and a footfall that approaches closer.

Outside the window are Easter decorations.

The Facebook notifications window has been flashing for a long time. You click on it. Two hundred thousand new notifications. What! Facebook has been wonky lately…must be a glitch.

You look at recent photos you’re tagged in. You’re with Channa in front of the Grand Canyon. You’re with her in front of Niagara Falls, then a kitsch cowboy hotel, a lush jungle, a church. There’s a wedding picture. Channa’s dress is pale turquoise with an ivory gown, and you wear a black tuxedo with turquoise highlights. There are people in the wedding party, some of whom you recognize, some you do not. Your parents are there, but it’s as if someone has Photoshopped them, adding laugh lines and crow’s tracks on their faces and graying the hair on their head.

There’s a ring on your finger, in the picture, and on your hand now. It’s simple, thin and gold, with a hammered platinum center. It’s elegant. It’s not new; light scratches appear across its face. How long have you been wearing this?

eGolem.

You need to take control of your life, you want it back! Yet even as you wish it, some part of you dissents. You have friend requests pending, posts to share, updates to read, messages to reply, profiles to amend. You’re a busy person, you can’t fall behind or you’ll never catch up. And a part of you whispers that, in some way, it’s the eGolem who is bettering your life... where else would you be if not for here in your den?

By the way, did you see the latest fractal images on DeviantART? You’re invited to view them now, stunning images of rainbow spirals and helixes. It’s really amazing what users can create these days.

Oh, and there’s a new site called Orkut that everyone’s talking about. Hopefully if you set up a profile, you’ll be able to connect with preexisting friends from other sites and not look like a newbie.

What’re people doing on LiveJournal lately? That’d be interesting to look into. Maybe it’s a dying site. Remember Friendster?

There’s a new Tweet about cutting carbs from breakfast. An update from opposing political views. That cat wearing a Groucho Marx mustache is trending again.

There’s a blog of your life. It’s really interesting. You ‘Like’ the pictures of you and Channa and share them to Tumblr. Your posts are really clever. And you have so many followers—Wow!—people are interested in you. Someone comments on an image, writing about what a lovely family you have. You then notice the three children standing between you and her.

Your eGolem has done well.

Have you ever Google-searched yourself before? It’s interesting. What are people saying about you? What is your name connected to? It could be enough to drive people crazy, always checking, if they didn’t have better things to do with themselves. Of course, you’re not one of the crazies. It’s just a curiosity, so you search.

One of the top results is your post about eGolems taking over. That was such a long time ago, but it’s still relevant isn’t it? You wonder how many other eGolems are out there, because nothing on the internet ever goes away…

…though sometimes you wish there was an alarm to wake you from all this, the way it wakes you from your dreams.

But there’s so much to do, and people are waiting for your replies, your comments, your approvals! RSS tickers scroll past, and your name is tagged with every feed. TMZ wants you to read their page. CNN wants you to read their page. FourSquare wants you to read their page. Yahoo! wants you to read their page. Forbes wants you to read their page. Mashable wants you to read their page.

Blog comments post faster than your internet browser window can refresh. Notification reminders outlive friends. Everyone wants to connect via LinkedIn. Via Twitter. Via Facebook. Via Google Plus+. Via YouTube. New messages in Outlook amass to over a billion. Read faster!

But there’s something wrong with your breath…it’s short. You can’t inhale all the way as if someone is pushing down on your ribcage. A savage pain rips across your chest and you cry out. Impossibly, the pain grows even worse. White flashes erupt across your vision and you buckle over, falling from the chair, shrieking as your heart feels like it’s tearing in half.

A little boy passing by the doorway looks in and gasps. He has auburn hair and almond eyes, but he still looks as you once did when you were his age.

“Grandpa!” the boy shouts.

Your vision darkens, and you wonder who he’s talking about.

And you wonder when the Groucho Marx cat will update.

And you wonder what will become of your eGolem.

And you wonder if you still have time for one more Tweet before work starts today.

About Eric J. Guignard

Eric J. Guignard writes dark and speculative fiction from the outskirts of Los Angeles. His stories and articles may be found in the disreputable magazines, journals, and anthologies stocked in back alley bazaars. As an editor, Eric’s published the anthologies, Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations and After Death…, the latter of which won the 2013 Bram Stoker Award®. Read his novella, Baggage of Eternal Night (a finalist for the 2014 International Thriller Writers Award), and watch for many more forthcoming books, including Chestnut ’Bo. Visit Eric at: www.ericjguignard.com, his blog: www.ericjguignard.blogspot.com, or Twitter: @ericjguignard.

BECAUSE WHAT IS MINE IS MINE

Tom Piccirilli

FOR THE THIRD TIME THAT WEEK, Harry Jones had taken my parking spot. So I decided to hide a key of uncut Columbian ya ya in a dead baby and stick it in his trunk under his spare tire.

I pay Johann, the head of our janitorial staff, a thousand dollars to make an anonymous call to the police.

But there is so little that any of us can each call our own that I would, and do, argue his hijacking my parking slot to being tantamount to kidnapping my children, absconding with my wife, or burglarizing my home.

Harry argued in private with me, and later in a public court, that we at the company do not have assigned parking spots, and so “my spot” was not, in fact, mine. This may be true in a legal sense and perhaps even in a technical one, but as I said then, and still say now, everyone knows whose spot is whose, and in some regards my spot was even more well-regarded as “mine” as those of others were “theirs.”  This becomes especially obvious when all the facts are made known, including, first and foremost, that I am president of the company and should only park in the spot that says “reserved for the president of the company.”

I found the baby at a local daycare facility, which was just a woman with four or five kids of her own who babysat a few more in her home to make a few extra bucks. Its name seemed to be “Stanley,” as chanted by several other children in between drinks from their juice boxes and sippy cups.

“Smile, Stanley! Stanley! Baby! Baby! Smile!”

I at least put it to good service, something that might never have happened otherwise, especially if its mother was dropping it off with a care provider that left unsupervised children in a backyard full of cars on cinder blocks.

Harry Jones discovered the hard way that child-killers were still considered the prison “low men on the totem pole” when he was shivved twenty-eight times during his third week on Sing Sing’s C-Block. The fact that he lived through the attack only serves to prove that some have a genuine gift for life and cannot, under any “normal means” be stopped. This again shows that I did not, in any way, over-react in my decision. Harry Jones had to be stopped.

I began visiting Harry at around that time; I felt it was my Christian duty despite not being Christian and feeling no real sense of duty to anyone or anything except what’s mine. He was in a great deal of pain and slept a lot during my visits. I didn’t take it personally, although he was wasting “my time” and I could feel the old resentments beginning to rise within me again.

Johann has decided he wants more than a thousand dollars to keep silent about what he knows. He’s leaving messages on my voice mail. He braces me outside of the “y” office and in the men’s room.

He should know better than to try to blackmail me.

He is, after all, my janitor.

About Tom Piccirilli

Tom Piccirilli is an American novelist and short story writer. He has sold over 150 stories in the mystery, thriller, horror, erotica, and science fiction fields. Piccirilli is a two-time winner of the International Thriller Writers Award for “Best Paperback Original” (2008 and 2010). He is a four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. He was also a finalist for the 2009 Edgar Allan Poe Award given by the Mystery Writers of America, a final nominee for the Fantasy Award, and he won the first Bram Stoker Award given in the category of “Best Poetry Collection.”

CHICKEN

Geoff Nelder

KARL TOLD ME, “We both need a way out, Giff, and I’ve the perfect plan.”

Two weeks later I’m strapped to a nutter heading downwards for Shropshire at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. I can’t decide which is worse: the tandem harness hugging me too tightly to my suicidal friend, or how to yell above the wind that I’ve changed my mind.

“Noooooo. Pull the coooorrrd!” I yell, but behind me there’s no response. Probably can’t hear me. My ears pop. Then I recall from the twenty-minute instruction session that no release of the main chute would happen until after freefall. I wouldn’t be surprised if Karl has disabled the chute anyway, even though when I strain my neck, I see the little drogue chute has deployed.

As I watch the patchwork quilted greens, browns and yellows of England getting closer, I rue how I let Karl dominate me so much. He began as an elementary school bully and I’ve been in his shadow ever since. Something snapped in him a couple of months back.

Arggh, we lurch backwards. The main chute? I look up. No. Must be turbulence.

Surely it’s past thirty seconds.

“Karl! I want to live!”

Nothing.

I look down. Bile comes up.

I see individual trees.

The other instructor taught me how to reach behind and pull the chord but I’m sure Karl would stop me.

Suppose he’s passed out?

Left or right? Can’t remember. Logic says right—stronger arm for most. I fling my arm behind me and twist around as much as I can. Can’t feel the toggle. A fist bangs my hand away. Need a plan.

I’m gasping, more from stress than the rushing air.

By now the automatic activation device would have kicked the chute open but I knew Karl was going to disable it—my agreement. My fail.

I bluff with a grab round to my left.

I grope in harnesses, clothes and Karl’s thick fingers, then I jab backwards with my right.

A triangular handle. Tug!

Whoa, I’m pulled backwards—the harness digging into my ribs. I’m safe.

I brace myself not just for a hard landing now, but for Karl’s fists battering my face. Perhaps that’s why we wear helmets: protection from pissed off suicide instructors. We swing like a drunken pendulum. No! He’s trying to undo the harness.

I swing my legs this way, that way, backwards, forwards; exaggerating the pendulum-motion to make life difficult for him. He has all the control of this jump but the harness release button is between us. I feel his knuckles between my shoulder blades. I hurl myself backwards trying to get in the way of his muscular arms.

He grunts.

We lurch down to the left so fast my stomach travels up into my throat. I swallow, then yell, “Not the knife!”

Again I throw myself back, battering him with my head and swinging my legs.

I grab a look down and we’re spiraling towards the roof of a very large house, a mix of flat slabs and steep blue slate. Looks like a stately home. For survival we should head for the expansive, overgrown lawns. Nope, he’s cut another cord and we stagger to the right. I don’t think we can survive a crash land from this height so I’m heaving around like a crazed ape. Yes! I see his hook knife in free fall.

I follow its fall and see it bounce off jagged red-brick chimneys. And we’re following it.

Seconds to go…I can’t do anything to head for a soft landing, so I close my eyes and hug my knees goodbye.

*****

Perhaps Karl had released the harness at the last second, or the crash-land jarred half-undone catches, but I am on my back on the sloping slates, thinking there is no time to admire the blueness of that sky.

A snapping sound is followed by me sliding and gathering speed, again. I fling out my arms and shriek as hot pain shoots up my right arm, which flops even though my fingers clutch at the warm roofing. I lift a leg and crash it down hoping to smash a tile, gain purchase to stop me sliding off this tall mansion. No use, but then I gasp as I collide with a parapet. Death is foiled yet again.

But I can’t let Karl know that I’m alive in case he is still alive as well.

Anxious that I’ve alerted Karl to my survival, I risk kneeling—at least no broken leg bones. though I ache everywhere. I stretch my neck up, looking along the hundred yards or so of low red stone wall and up the slate hill to the chimneys. I see the green and white striped chute tangled with cords around the stacks.

I look around. No sign of Karl.

I need to examine my useless arm but I should get as far from the crash point as possible. On the other hand, wouldn’t Karl guess I’d do that? Perhaps I should risk crouch-shuffling past the chimney to the other side of the roof, but he’s cunning and would guess such a bluff. I’ll stay here and look at my arm. I’m wearing a yellow jumpsuit over jeans and pullover. No point in taking the top layer off even if I’ve broken my arm bone. It dangles when I stand and the pain accelerates until I support it with my left. I button the jumpsuit sleeve at the wrist to a buttonhole at my neck.

My fingers are playing pins and needles now. My hand will need setting, binding, and I’ll need major pain relief soon. All this excitement has made my eyes sting with perspiration. My helmet: cooler without, but safer with. It stays on.

A jabbing pain is speaking to me in my left side. Cracked rib—I know because of the bruised memory of cracking one falling off a horse as a teen.

Just as I start mulling over how I’m going to get off this roof, a sharp jab pokes me in the back. “Gifford, you treacherous scumbag! We made an agreement, so you’re going to die.”

He’s astride the crumbling apex pulling up another slate. If he slips, like I did, he might cannon into me and we’d both crash into the cracked palisade and add to the detritus scree slope at the bottom. He throws his helmet at me. Misses.

I scurry along a narrow path between the sloping roof and parapet. Past the red-brick chimneys towering above me like gnarled fingers making an up-yours gesture, the roof flattens like a courtyard. I keep to the edge, but thieves must have broken the palisade so it’s dangerous everywhere. A crash to my left as another tile splinters, kicking up a small cloud. My stomach tightens as I’m obliged to scamper along a roof beam. My nose wrinkles at the sour odor of rotting wood and guano. I hear Karl grunt…he must have slipped.

Karl will realize he’ll catch me faster if he gives up trying to target me with slate. I wonder, is he’s injured and can’t run? I look behind.

Damn, he’s running. What I thought was anger might be blood from a big rip in his left trouser leg. He’s reached this flat bit. As I turn to run, I shout to slow him down.

“Watch out for soft bits!”

Laughably, he’ll slow even though it’s not logical for me to warn him. Nothing’s funny now though. He’s fitter than me, and my broken arm is jabbing pain into my nervous system, instructing my brain to have a lie down.

I look for a weapon and see a loose metal rod twice my height, an inch square. No use with only one hand. If only I had time to rig it up as a booby trap…a piece of wood with a vicious nail, or television aerial strut as a stiletto dagger—please! Maybe I can tire him to death if I keep in front of him.

I run-stagger from the second stack of chimneys to a brick hut, the top of a staircase perhaps, or an elevator housing. It’s an elevator.

It’s locked! Not difficult to force entry but time challenging for a one-armed fugitive. Beyond, the roof is angled again but badly damaged. I head for the far side hoping for a hiding place.

After a few seconds I reach the far parapet. I crouch behind a low stone wall, one of several parallel, going up to the apex. I look back. Karl takes so long to arrive at the lift housing that I’m thinking he’s fallen through the roof. He must be more injured than me, or he’s made a weapon.

But then he appears. He picks up an iron bar and hits the lock a couple of times then has a go at levering with the end that’s flattened. I stifle a laugh. Go for it, Karl. Surely it’s in his interest to keep me trapped up here. Ah, he must be telepathic.

“Gifford, you snake. You’re going headfirst over the side. You betrayed me.”

I risk communication but stay hidden. “Why do you want to die?”

A growling laugh lurched across. “We’re all going to die. Sooner than everyone thinks.”

I see him looking up at the sky. Pink clouds gather on the west horizon. Sunset limbering up already? I need to keep him philosophizing so he can stray away from homicidal tendencies.

“You know something, Karl? A government secret perhaps.”

“Better you don’t know. That’s why…”

I try standing up. “Now you’re freaking me out. Are aliens coming to suck out our brains?”

He looks at me. I should have stayed low. Blood flows down his forehead. It must be in his eyes. Much more and he won’t be able to see me.

He points, as if memorizing where I am. “Something like that, Gifford. Worse. It’s why we’re better off ending it. And you agreed! We were supposed to commit suicide together.”

Damn it, he’s coming for me again and he’s using that metal rod as a lance. I turn and stumble-jog away from him along the edge of the sloping roof. I hear his grunts and oaths but daren’t stop to look behind.

At the end of the building I look for stairs. Come on, even a rusty falling-apart fire escape will do…but there’s nothing. I stagger as fast as I can across the end, which is about fifty yards to the next corner. I glance back and see he’s limping but keeping up with me. His face is twisted.

“You’ll stop before I do, Gifford, you turncoat.”

No chance. I turn the corner and head back towards the lift housing, desperately searching for another piece of metal to lever that padlock. Nothing. I am loping past the door again. Perhaps there’s a breaking-and-entering utensil at the other end of the roof.

My arm is killing me with shooting pains although logic says the bone ends can’t be rubbing or I’d be happy to hurl myself off this damn roof just to end the agony. Getting tired, though.

At the other end I find a scattering of old beer cans. It reminds me that my tongue is a piece of wood in a sawdust pot. Hey, it means there’s a way up, and more crucially, down. I can’t see it. The party-goers might’ve been a mountaineering club and abseiled down. Even so, I take a bit of time to scan for some stairs. No good knowing that a person blessed with four working limbs can use drainpipes. Another corner later, plus a few minutes and we’ve both done a full circuit.

God, how many laps before he gives up?

I look back, ready to quiz him more on his inside knowledge of humanity’s apocalypse, but I see his lance sailing towards me. Good throw from ten yards. I dodge to my right, hurting my arm more against the parapet, but the iron clatters on the roof. It’s sliding towards a jagged hole in the slates so I put my foot on it. Karl must be tired carrying it. I pick it up with my left and jab it towards him.

He backs off, then crumples to the floor. Could be a bluff. He’s bigger, stronger than me and with two functional arms. I turn, and with rejuvenated vigor, run down the side of the roof so I’m out of sight. Then I round the end again to the elevator housing.

I lift the rod and smash the flattened end between the hasp and door. It waves around like a flag pole. My left arm has cramp so I dangle it, giving it encouraging vibes for a swift recovery. Moments later I use it like a battering ram and charge it at the lock. “Have at ye!”

I had no idea it can be so satisfying to hear and see a lock being torn from a door. No wonder there are so many burglaries. The iron bar makes a worrying, clanging music on the flagstones before I pull at the handle and the door creaks open.

Before I can step into the lift, I hear hooves clumping, and the snorts of a bull charging. Once I again I fling myself to the right. Had to, my left was blocked by the opened door. I don’t clear Karl’s path enough and he crashes into the left of my back. We both fall. I scream as my broken arm breaks my fall, and I’m blacking out.

*****

Someone is pouring water on my face. I have the worst hangover ever, and I can’t see anything. Another cup of water.

“Cut it out, Megan, I’m awake, okay?”

There’s a hard lump between my shoulder blades—one of her anti-snoring tricks? I shuffle around but it digs in more. I try to move my right arm to lever up off the bed—

I am woken by something scratching my left hand.

My eyes creak open to a chrome-dawn sky. Turning my head, I see departing heavy clouds. I’m shivering. It might be August but I’m soaked through, lying in a large puddle on a roof. It comes rushing back. Noooooo.

I try to use my good arm to lever myself up but the muscles are too cold, or traumatized to play. No feeling now in my right hand fingers. At least my legs twitch. Maybe my left arm will liven up soon. I look at the lift door and see emptiness. No lift. Is Karl now downstairs? Probably head first on top of the lift on the ground floor. So the man had his wish, though he’s taken what delusional secrets he’d discovered with him.

A fluttering attracts attention to my feet. Can crows be that big? A raven, then. I agitate my legs and it spreads nightmare black wings, hops back a little then returns to my right side.

“Fuck off, now! Or else!” It doesn’t. Maybe it’s deaf or treats my threats with contempt.

No, its black beak jabs at my right hand. I can’t feel it—a mixed blessing— as it tears meat from my palm. I thought birds went for the eyes first. At least then I wouldn’t see what it was doing. This bird must be a sadist.

I shout, “Help!” until my voice gives up. Not loud enough to reach the ground anyway with my dry throat creating a pathetic rasping sound.

Hopefully, the pilot will have noted our lack of chute opening and a rescue team is on its way. Not likely though. It must be fifteen hours since we took off. No doubt Karl’s arranged for no follow up. Damn, he’s got his double death after all.

As the raven hops towards my face, its shiny eyes looking forward to a feast, I know I should never have touched that parachute toggle.

About Geoff Nelder

Geoff Nelder has a wife, two grown-up kids, an increasing number of grandkids, and lives in rural England within an easy cycle ride of the Welsh mountains. He taught Geography and Information Technology for years until writing took over his life. Geoff is a competition short-fiction judge, and a freelance editor.

Publications include several non-fiction books on climate reflecting his other persona as a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society; over 50 published short stories in various magazines and anthologies; thriller, humor, science fiction, and fantasy novels, including ARIA: Left Luggage and ARIA: Abandoned Luggage.

About Jeani Rector

While most people go to Disneyland while in Southern California, Jeani Rector went to the Fangoria Weekend of Horror there instead. She grew up watching the Bob Wilkins Creature Feature on television and lived in a house that had the walls covered with framed Universal Monsters posters. It is all in good fun and actually, most people who know Jeani personally are of the opinion that she is a very normal person. She just writes abnormal stories.

Jeani Rector is the founder and editor of The Horror Zine and has had her stories featured in magazines such as Aphelion, Midnight Street, Strange Weird and Wonderful, Dark River Press, Macabre Cadaver, Blood Moon Rising, Hellfire Crossroads, Ax Wound, Horrormasters, Morbid Outlook, Horror in Words, Black Petals, 63Channels, Death Head Grin, Hackwriters, Bewildering Stories, Ultraverse, and others. Her historical fiction full-length novel about the 1348 pandemic of bubonic plague titled PESTILENCE: A MEDIEVAL TALE OF PLAGUE is published by The Horror Zine Books.

About Post Mortem Press

Since its inception in 2010, Post Mortem Press has published over 100 titles in the genres of dark fiction, suspense/mystery, horror, and dark fantasy. The goal is to provide a showcase for talented authors, affording exposure and opportunity to “get noticed” by the mainstream publishing community. Post Mortem Press has quickly become a powerful voice in the small genre press community. The result has been five years of steady growth and successful endeavors that have garnered attention from all across the publishing sphere.