Midnight Paths: A Collection of Dark Horror
Date: 2011-10-16 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Short Stories
Description: Step into a world where nothing is what it seems. Where darkness never abates, and your deepest fears are just a few steps away. Travel to an old house in the country where something hungry waits just beyond the treeline. Watch as a young woman, whose life hangs in the balance, receives a visitor from the afterlife. Or, journey across an ocean on a romantic voyage that ends in the deepest kind of horror. This dark collection of the macabre is sure to chill the bones of even the most stalwart horror aficionado. "Joe Hart's debut collection, Midnight Paths, takes the reader down many dark paths.

MIDNIGHT PATHS

A COLLECTION OF DARK HORROR

JOE HART

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2011 by Joe Hart. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the author.

This collection is a work of fiction. People, places, events, dialogue, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination and are not constructed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

PCA

THE UNFAMILIAR

YOU SURE ARE CALM, COWBOY

ANGEL CHARLIE

OLD DOG

PALE MAN

THE MAN IN THE ROOM

THE EXPLODING MAN

ADRIFT

BLACKJACK

Notes

About the Author

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank, and dedicate this book to, several people who made the following stories possible. I would like to thank my mother, who instilled a love for reading and, by osmosis, a love of writing in me from an early age. To my father, who always encouraged me to pursue writing, whether he liked my subject matter or not—thanks Dad. To Rory, who always analyzed my writing and made me analyze it in turn. To Wil, who motivated me and gave me new ideas whenever we had too many drinks together. To Stephen King, who inspired me to write scary stories through his own brilliant work. To my children, Rainyn and Keegan, who were so patient through all the nights when Dad had to sit at the computer, instead of playing or watching a movie. To everyone who reads this book—thank you for spending your hard-earned dollars on entertainment that I was able to provide. I hope that you enjoy the stories as much as I enjoyed writing them. And above all, to my wife Jade, who encouraged, criticized, corrected, and believed in my work. Thank you, honey, even though you are the comma queen.

Foreword

I love horror. I love the sick feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you know something is terribly wrong. I love the excitement of a great story that turns for the worse. I love being scared.

Why else would you read the stories that are in the pages beyond? Being afraid is fun— as long as it’s safe. Sitting in your favorite chair, sipping your favorite beverage, while a cold and dangerous storm rages outside your window—all the while reading a frightening story . It doesn’t get much better than that if you ask me.

I started writing when I was ten. I wrote my first short story when I was eleven. Since then, I’ve been in love with the short story. It’s like a strong shot of alcohol: quick and to the point. A novel is wonderful. It’s engaging and mysterious, and you get to fall in love with the characters. I love novels too. But a well-written short horror story is like a ride in a Corvette with a maniac for a chauffeur: you have no idea where you’ll end up; you only know you’re going to crash.

I won’t go into a long-drawn-out foreword like the ones I sometimes find in collections. That’s not why you’re reading this book. Instead, I’ll open the door unto the dark night for you. I’ll show you an unlit path to tread on. And don’t worry about the noise you hear off in the dark woods. It’s probably something harmless. Probably.

Pick your stormy night and mix up your drink, whatever it may be. Cuddle into your chair and settle in for a ride. Give in to your fears as we pass them by, and you might be surprised how well you know the darkness that comes to meet us.

Joe Hart

October 14, 2011

PCA

Eric stepped up to the weathered wooden door of the old farmhouse and knocked a sure, confident rap against its peeling paint. He looked back and forth at his surroundings, getting his bearings.

The house sat on a slight rise at the end of a long, winding drive that branched off from the main road. Main road, Eric thought, as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. If you could call it a main road. The paved road was nothing more than a two-lane snake trail that cut a swath through the northern Minnesota wilderness. He was fifteen miles from the nearest town (one-horse was a generous description) and over thirty from the little town of Rapid Falls, where he was employed.

The yard was tidy, and it looked as though the old man who lived here cut the grass with a shears and a ruler. Eric gazed at the old garage next to the house. The windows looking like dead eyes staring out at the dingy gray sky, which threatened rain. Past the garage and through a copse of pine trees, Eric could see a chainlink fence and the stones that stood in the ground beyond. He shivered. Graveyards always gave him the chills. He shook his head slightly. With one this close, he knew he could never live here.

He turned and was about to knock on the door again when he realized there was a face staring at him through the hazy windows of the door. Eric lurched back reflexively, and he had to resist the urge to run that his mind was sending to his legs. His stomach rolled from fright, then settled back again as he realized he was looking at the old man whom he was here to see.

The door opened slightly, and Eric straightened up and tried to smile at the man who stood there. George Mathews was nearly eighty but didn’t look a day over sixty-five. He had a full head of iron-gray hair that was combed to the side, in what Eric thought was a style that had died out fifty years ago. George had wide shoulders for a man his age, which filled out the flannel shirt he was wearing. Although his posture was slightly stooped, he still held a dignity and purpose that most people Eric saw in his job lacked.

“Hello, Mr. Mathews, I’m Eric from Caring House. I’ll be filling in as your PCA while Julie’s away.”

Eric stepped forward and put out his hand. The older man smiled a warm smile and shook it with a grip uncharacteristic of a man who was much older than Eric’s own grandfather.

“Pleasure to meet you, son. Come on in before you get wet out there, storm’s comin’ in fast from the west.”

George moved out of Eric’s way, and the younger man stepped across the threshold into the house.

The farmhouse was one story and closely built, as many of its kind were fifty years ago. The entryway stemmed off into a small living room to the right and a dining room to the left, which wrapped around into the kitchen at the rear of the house. The air smelled musty. Eric was used to this aroma: the smell of used-up life and old memories.

George shuffled ahead as the two men made their way down the narrow hall that led to the kitchen. As Eric followed, he looked at each photo that hung on the yellowing wallpaper, which stood out like road signs on an interstate.

There was a faded picture of a young couple leaning against an old Ford pickup, which Eric assumed was George and his wife. Their eyes still twinkled through the black-and-white photo and the sixty years that had passed since it was taken.

The next picture was of George and a large dog standing in front of the house Eric was in now. George had an axe over one shoulder and was wearing overalls. The black dog had its head raised and was looking right at the camera, as if it knew its picture was being taken.

The last picture was of a woman Eric assumed to be George’s wife. She sat on the steps in front of the house, wearing a yellow dress. This picture was in color, and even though she must have been sixty in the photo, Eric could still see the girlish smile that was present in the first picture.

Suddenly, the old man spoke from the kitchen, bringing Eric out of his reverie.

“Like some coffee, son?”

Eric looked into the dimly lit kitchen and smiled warmly. “That would be great, Mr. Mathews.”

“Oh, call me George,” he said, as he busied himself at the counter with his back to Eric. “Mr. Mathews makes me feel old.”

Eric laughed at the spunky comment and stepped into the kitchen. The room was surprisingly warm with light colors and a golden-stained wooden table that took up most of the room.

“You have a very nice place here, Mr.—sorry, George.”

George set the glass coffeepot in the auto coffeemaker and turned to face the younger man.

“Thanks, son, been here fifty-two years. Margie and I bought the thirty acres and this old house for forty-nine hundred dollars. That was when money got you something that was worth what you paid for it.” George motioned Eric to a seat at one end of the table and sat heavily in another at the opposite end. “Times sure do change. My daddy always said, ‘Times change, Georgie, don’t let them change you.’” George smiled halfheartedly and gazed out the windows of the back door.

Eric followed his gaze and noticed that the sky was beginning to darken considerably. Eric didn’t like the thought of driving back thirty miles through a raging summer storm, although he didn’t have much choice. He had four more clients to see before his shift ended at eight this evening. He silently cursed Julie for running off with her boyfriend to wherever she’d gone this past week. Her absence had piled his workload to the breaking point because he now had to take care of his regular clients along with several of hers, such as George. He blinked back to reality as a low rumble of thunder vibrated the air above the house.

George looked at him in a way that unsettled Eric. His eyes were squinted, as if he was looking inside Eric’s head and prying apart who he was. Eric shuffled in his chair and spoke to relieve the awkwardness he felt.

“So, George, what did you do before you retired?”

The man’s eyes remained on Eric’s face for a few more seconds, then he relaxed his gaze into something that resembled a regular expression.

“Drove a tow truck for thirty-nine years, my boy. Towed vehicles out of all kinds of places. Picked up a lot of tourists’ cars over the years that broke down, but mostly I pulled trucks and cars out of the swamps around here due to too much drinking and not enough steering when they were going around a bend.”

The old man’s eyes twinkled, and Eric smiled. Thunder rumbled again, and George looked out into the backyard. It appeared he was watching for something beneath the low-hanging boughs of the white pine that marked the beginning of the thick forest at the back of the yard. After a few moments, George got up and pulled down two worn coffee mugs from a shelf near the sink. He poured the coffee, then handed one cup to Eric after he sat down in his seat.

Eric sipped eagerly at the dark liquid. He had missed his coffee that morning due to oversleeping, and he now had the beginnings of a caffeine-withdrawal headache. The hot liquid soothed the throbbing at the base of his skull and calmed his nerves, which he realized were wound tight. Why was he so uptight with this kind old guy? He was a bit strange but not near as weird as some of the clients Eric had come into contact with over the last few years of caretaking.

“So, where’s my Julie gone to?” George asked over the steaming cup.

The question surprised Eric. He wasn’t ready to field questions on the disappearance of his co-worker, mainly because he didn’t really know much. He had gone in to work as usual last week, and one day Julie didn’t show up for her shift. Their supervisor had been irritated and a little confused. Julie wasn’t the type of person not to show up for work. She was organized and punctual, especially when it came to her job. She had been working her way through college as a personal care aide (PCA) at Caring House. She’d told Eric during a staff meeting one day that she was working toward a degree in graphic design and this was just footing the bills in the meantime.

Eric had actually been attracted to her when he was hired at the agency. However, when he had asked her out, she had replied that she was dating a great guy, and had been for several years. They even had plans to get married when her boyfriend got a steady job in the area. Right now, he was working for an insurance company as a traveling adjuster and was gone for a week at a time on certain claims.

All that anyone at the agency could come up with was she and her boyfriend had eloped the week before, and she was now enjoying a short honeymoon. There was really no one to contact, since her parents had both died when she was young and she had no brothers or sisters. Eric’s supervisor had just thrown up her hands and said that if she came back, she would have a serious reprimand for leaving without scheduling and taking care of her clients prior to her disappearance.

“You know, I think she ran off to get married,” Eric said, and leaned back in his chair to take another sip of coffee. Wow, this is good coffee, he thought, not for the first time since George had handed him the cup.

George nodded thoughtfully and tilted his head at an angle. “Love is something, isn’t it? You ever been in love, son?”

Eric shrugged and smiled. “Haven’t found the right girl I guess, sir. Been looking though.”

Both men chuckled at this, but their laughter was overridden by a powerful blast of thunder that seemed to come from directly over the house. Fat drops of rain began to pelt the window like gunshots, and soon the backyard was blurred by the water that streamed down the glass.

“Yeah, love is something,” George said, as he gazed out at the storm and the large trees behind the home that began to sway. “It can change you, do strange things to you, sometimes make you do strange things too. My Margie could get me to do nearly anything just by batting an eye in my direction. Not that she abused it, that power she had over me. She just knew I would do anything for her, and I knew she’d do the same for me.” George’s face darkened, as if a cloud like the ones outside had slid across the sunshine of his mind. “She’s been missing now for over three months. We went to bed, same as usual, and in the morning her side was empty. Back door was open, and her night coat was gone. Police said she might have had beginnings of Alzheimer’s. Bullshit, I say. They looked and looked in the woods and swamps but couldn’t find hide nor hair. They even questioned me for some time, can you believe that? Me, her own husband of fifty-five years! As though I’d be capable of hurting her. Dogs might have flown with golden wings before I ever thought of hurting my Margie.”

George sat staring out at the tops of the trees that were now whipping back and forth like marionettes with strings attached to the storm. Julie had relayed this story to Eric at a company picnic over a month ago. He had deemed it strange, but he also thought the Alzheimer’s theory was a sound one. He’d dealt with several patients with the disease. The things they did without remembering or even realizing came flooding back to his mind. An old woman walking out of her house into the wilderness didn’t seem like such a far stretch to him, but he just nodded and kept his opinion to himself while he sipped his coffee.

“I’d do anything to have her back,” George said solemnly, as though he was speaking to himself in an empty house.

Lightning arced violently across the sky in the pattern of a dead tree branch, and a clap of thunder followed close behind. Eric finished the last sip of his coffee and set the cup down harder than he had intended. George snapped out of his trance and looked at Eric with what seemed like amusement.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to set it down so hard,” Eric said unsteadily. For some reason, George and the kitchen beyond had a blur to them, as if Eric were looking through a dirty glass pane. He shook his head in a quick movement, and his vision cleared somewhat.

George was still smiling benignly over his untouched cup of coffee. “Good coffee, isn’t it, my boy? The secret’s in the water. We have real good water here, our own well. Drilled it myself when we moved in. Margie was worried about it though. She was a city girl before I met her. Grew up in Minneapolis. Nothin’ but city water for her, you see. We moved here, and I drilled that well. And she worried about the things in the soil. ‘Untreated water could have bacteria microbes,’ she said. Although, I think mostly she worried about the graveyard yonder.”

“Graveyard?” Eric repeated. His vision had once again become blurry, and his stomach was beginning to tighten with nausea. The word the old man had said resounded inside Eric’s head like an echo that wouldn’t decrease in volume.

“That graveyard’s been there for over a hundred and fifty years, my boy. Two hundred fifty-three graves over there, counted them myself. Did you know that there’s one that dates back to the Civil War? That’s a long time to be in the ground. Long time to rot and seep into the earth, don’t you think? All those bodies just slowly mixing into the soil, into the water table.”

George paused, watching as Eric kept blinking like there was something in his eyes. George nodded. It was almost time.

“Margie worried. I should have listened to her. That water wasn’t pure like I thought it was. Wasn’t pure at all.”

George stood from the table and poured his coffee down the drain, then set the empty cup by the sink to be washed later.

“So, son, you want to help me with a project I have going?” George asked, as he walked quickly around the table and opened the back door to the weather raging outside.

“I … don’t know. I think I might be … sick or something,” Eric said. His eyes went in and out of focus now, and his limbs began to take on a numbness that he associated with a night of binge drinking Irish whiskey.

“Oh, come now, that’s why you’re here, ain’t it? To help me with things that need doing?” George asked enthusiastically, then stepped out into the rain and wind.

Eric got shakily to his feet and walked after the other man. His eyes squinted into slits as the rain began to hit him in the doorway. He glanced to his right, down the porch stairs in the direction his charge had disappeared. George stood next to a large overhead door at the back of the garage.

Eric lurched into the storm, not bothering to shut the door behind him. He could see George smiling in the gloom through the blowing rain. Eric stumbled halfway to the older man and nearly fell into a large mud puddle, but somehow he remained standing. With a few more shaky steps, he reached the door and stood swaying in the storm’s fury as another lightning flash lit up the yard.

George turned, and with surprising ease for a man his age, threw the overhead door up and stepped inside.

Eric followed him into the garage and heard plastic rustling under his feet as soon as he stepped onto the concrete floor of the building. Dizziness suddenly overtook him and he began to sway.

George seemed to know exactly what Eric needed. He guided him several steps inside the dark structure and sat him down against a plastic-covered wall. “Here you go, my boy, sit down. You need to rest.”

Eric nodded and was about to turn and ask the older man what he needed help with in the garage when he felt a cold snap of steel on his wrist. Eric pulled his arm close to his face and tried to make sense of what he was seeing through the fog of his mind and the darkness of the day.

A bright steel manacle was attached to his wrist as if it had grown there. The steel was highly polished, and a thick chain was connected to one end by what seemed to be amateur welding. The chain led up to his left several feet and was fastened by more welding to a heavy steel bracket that was bolted to the wall.

“Fifty-two years drinking that water. That’s a long time to have things inside you that don’t belong. Long time to have whatever came out of those bodies next door sliding down your throat,” George said, busily smoothing something out on the floor around Eric.

After a few moments, Eric realized it was a heavy-duty plastic tarp, the kind normally seen when a painter covers the floor of an area he doesn’t want paint dropping onto. The plastic was all around Eric, even up the walls, and it stretched thirty feet off into the darkness. A large shape loomed at the front of the garage, and after a few more seconds, he realized it was an old tow truck.

“Turns out we lived here long enough for it to affect us. Margie was scared at first, since she started to change faster than me. She’s smaller, so I suppose it worked on her quicker. But after a while we realized it wasn’t something to be afraid of. We got stronger and had more energy. When you get to be eighty, you shouldn’t have more energy, not the kind we both felt.” George talked as he delicately arranged the plastic, almost as if it was a ritual. Water dripped from the man’s soaked gray hair.

“I realized a few months back that regular food wasn’t going to work. Margie got sick from it, couldn’t hold it down. I tried everything. Cooking meat, not cooking it. Nothing seemed to work. It was an accident that we stumbled upon the answer. I had hired a PCA from Home Solutions to help out around the place since Margie didn’t stay in the house anymore. He came over for a few hours every week. Tom was his name. One day he was helping me clean up the yard after a storm, and all of a sudden Margie was there. She came out of the woods and took him down, and God, it scared me how she ate. She ate him down to the bones right in front of me. My wife of fifty-five years, on the ground snappin’ meat and sinew off of this poor guy in our backyard. He didn’t even have time to make a sound.”

George finally finished arranging the plastic to his liking. He looked out across the rain-swept yard.

“After that, I realized it was the only way to keep her healthy. She thrived after she fed, got stronger and more alive.” He paused and turned to face Eric where he sat on the floor with one hand hanging above shoulder level in the steel manacle. “I don’t think I could live without her. She’s the only woman I ever loved.”

“You killed Julie too, didn’t you?” Eric asked through tears that were beginning to stream down his face. Whatever had been in the coffee was wearing off, and his thoughts had begun to line up correctly.

George sighed and nodded. “Hated to do it too. She was a sweet girl. Worked out okay though. She told me two weeks ago that her boyfriend would be out of town for a bit, so last week she stopped by, and well …” George shrugged his shoulders.

“George, I don’t know what happened to your wife, but we can get you some help. There’s people I work with, people that would be willing to help you and talk to you about all this. Please, unchain me and we can help you.”

George began to unbutton his soaked flannel shirt from the bottom up. Each button he undid with deliberate, careful slowness while he spoke.

“You don’t believe me, do you? Most people wouldn’t. I don’t blame you, son. Normally have to show them, then they believe. As far as I’m concerned, we found a fountain of youth out here. That water in our well is giving both of us life, and that I can’t deny.” With a slight flourish, George opened the faded flannel shirt and turned so that the dim light of the afternoon shone on his chest.

For a moment Eric couldn’t understand what he was seeing. The rational part of his brain clashed with the signals that were sent by his eyes. Radiating out from the center of the other man’s chest was knurled, gray-looking skin that looked utterly dead. There were small folds in the flesh here and there, and the man’s ribs were beginning to stick out, as if the skin was tightening around him. The edges of the dead skin faded into more normal and healthy-looking dermis, but for all Eric could tell, it looked as though George was becoming a corpse from the inside out.

Eric screamed a short cry of revulsion and tried to scramble away, but the chain attached to his wrist held fast. He yanked and strained as hard as he could against the tether, but the bolts in the wall firmly held the base plate.

Exhausted, he slipped back down to a sitting position and stared at the gray-haired man, who was watching him intently.

“You won’t get away with this. I have a mother and father. I have friends. My supervisor knows I’m here. They’ll come looking for me,” Eric said.

“I’m sure you do, son, and they probably will, but that’s what I have my old truck over there for. There’s so many deep swamps off of old logging roads around here, a car or truck like yours can get lost pretty easily out there. And no one’s going to believe a frail, eighty-year-old man could overpower a young healthy guy like yourself.” Thunder punctuated the end of George’s sentence like an exclamation point.

Another sound rose as the thunder faded. It sounded like a man groaning, but then trailed off into a loud hissing that slowly faded in the patter of the rain beating the ground outside.

“Ah, my Margie’s coming,” George said, as he turned and watched the pine trees intently.

Eric scanned the tree line for a moment and then began looking for some way to escape. He frantically searched the immediate area for a tool or anything that would help him. There was nothing. The area around the plastic was bare and clean. He was trying to see if the old man was within striking distance of his feet when movement near the tree line caught his eye.

A dark shadow crept beneath the low boughs of the swaying pines. It flitted from tree to tree as it moved closer and closer to the yard. Eric squinted, attempting to peer through the haze of rain to see what it was, when suddenly it stalked stealthily out into the open.

And he no longer wished to see it.

Margie was still dressed in a ragged housecoat that hung below her bent and misshapen knees. Her dark hair swung in lank tendrils that dripped water in streams to the ground around her. Unnaturally long arms dangled at her sides. Her fingers had also elongated and, to Eric’s horror, ended in razor-sharp tips. Her skin was the same shade of gray as her husband’s chest, except it seemed her entire body was covered with the corpse-like tissue.

But above all, her face was the most horrifying. Her eyes were no longer human, or even remotely so. They were gray, without pupils, and wide like some sort of creature that had spent its entire life at the bottom of an ocean trench, miles from sunlight even on the brightest day. Her nose had sunk and disappeared into a small hole about the size of a dime. The hole sniffed and huffed the air as if she was trying to smell him.

And her mouth was what finally made Eric’s bladder release onto the plastic-covered garage floor. It was an open slash of ragged skin. Her teeth protruded obscenely from between the ruined lips, two rows of blunt and sharp alike. She opened her maw to let out the unearthly groan again, and began to travel more quickly toward the open garage door.

She moved with greater agility than Eric would’ve guessed, more like an animal than an eighty-year-old woman. She bent her already-crooked back lower to the ground and suddenly began running on all fours toward Eric, who scrambled back as far as his chain would allow.

“Love does funny things to you, son. You can see that now,” George said, stepping well out of the doorway and allowing his wife to lunge through.

Eric’s final scream began and ended within another blast of thunder, and the storm raged on.

THE UNFAMILIAR

David opened his eyes and stared at the slate-gray ground that his cheek and mouth were pressed into. The ground appeared to be clay, soft and dark. Rain pattered gently on his back and on the ground, splashing up and wetting his face. For a moment he thought he was dreaming. Where was he? Why was he lying in the mud and getting rained on?

He tried to sit up and realized he was very weak. His arms shook and trembled as they strained to lift his head and neck out of the wet clay. For a few harrowing seconds, he thought he would lose the battle and his face would smash back down into the mud. But after a bit of struggling, he got his arms to lock and slid his legs, which were numb and wet, underneath him so that he was in an awkward sitting position.

Instantly, pain pounded the back of his head. His eyes clenched shut from the massive waves of agony that thudded with each beat of his heart. He slowly felt around the back of his head with one hand until he found a lump rising from his scalp. He felt as if he had been hit with a hammer. After a moment of prodding the tender spot, he returned his hand to the ground to steady himself.

His dark hair hung over his forehead, nearly into his eyes, and he noticed chunks of clay clung to it in several places. He smoothed it back from his face, letting the clay act as some sort of organic hair gel. Nausea briefly swirled around his stomach like an oiled eel and then slowly dissipated. His long-sleeve button-down dress shirt was stuck to his skin, and his dark khakis were even darker now that they were soaked and covered in the dank clay.

Where the fuck am I? he thought, as he looked around. His eyes had trouble focusing on anything that was more than a few feet away, but after a moment his vision began to clear.

He was sitting on the edge of a large pond in the middle of a plain. The pond was an almost perfect circle as far as he could tell and nearly fifty yards in diameter. The water was a dark gray near the edges and faded to an inky black toward the middle. Raindrops dimpled the water’s surface as if miniature bombs were being dropped from unseen planes. David looked to his left and gazed at the surrounding area, trying to get a feel for where he was. All of the ground seemed to be made up of the dark gray clay that he was sitting on. A low hill slowly rose in the distance, and what appeared to be a cut straw field began at its base.

As he repositioned his right hand to better support himself, his fingers touched something furry and wet. David yanked his hand back quickly and looked down into the eye of a dead deer that was sprawled out directly behind him.

“Oh fuck!” he yelled, sliding away from the dead animal.

How had he not noticed that thing lying right behind him? The deer’s head was twisted at an odd angle, and one of its ears was missing at the base of its skull. A bloody hole ran straight down into its head. A blackened tongue hung out of its mouth, as if its last thought had been to get a drink from the pond that was nearby.

David’s breathing began to slow as he recovered from the shock of seeing the carcass so close to him. As his mind’s erratic revolutions calmed into manageable thoughts, images bloomed in his aching head. A dark road stretched before him. Yellow lines flashed by the sides of a car. His car. It was raining, and the windshield wipers swished back and forth, flipping the rain to either side only to have more take its place. The memories abruptly ended there. David racked his brain to pull more images into view, but no matter how hard he tried, the memories dissolved like paint under turpentine.

He decided to try to stand so he could see if his legs would hold him up. I have to get out of here, he thought, as he struggled in the slippery mud near the water’s edge. After several seconds he gained his balance and stood. A new rush of pain battered the rear of his skull like a bell being tolled deep within, but then it slowly receded into a more bearable ache. David turned in a circle, surveying his surroundings once again. There wasn’t much to see besides the pond and the dead deer.

A black protrusion caught his eye as he glanced to his right, over the animal’s corpse that lay at his feet. It looked like the top of a tree or building, poking over the rise of the nearest hill which was almost a hundred yards away. After another minute of searching, David decided that the building or tree or whatever it was seemed to be his best bet.

He began to walk toward the hill, his steps unsteady at first, but gradually his strength returned to him. It took him nearly five minutes to walk the short distance up the slight rise to gaze across the barren plains. When he reached the top of the hill, he could see the object no better. It seemed to be some distance away and tucked behind a fairly large mound in the distance. In every direction there was nothing to be seen but gray rolling hills, some speckled with the cut straw patches he had spotted in the other direction.

Well, I have no idea where I am or where I’m going, but anywhere’s better than here, he thought. David carefully made his way down the other side of the slope. The clay that had plastered his face and hair had washed away. His clothes clung to him like a second skin, and still the rain dropped lightly onto the landscape.

For a few minutes after David had vanished on the other side of the hill, everything remained still. Then suddenly the water roiled in the middle of the pond. The surface, which had been calm but for the rain battering it, became a whirlpool of motion. A large black tentacle slithered out of the depths near the shoreline. The tentacle was several inches wide at its tip and nearly a foot in diameter where it disappeared under the small waves. Suckers coated the underside of the tendril every six inches. Each sucker was as wide as a coffee saucer and flexed as though it was tasting the air. The middle of the sucker housed a sharp, bony barb that curled like a hook.

The tentacle twisted and turned in the air as it approached the shoreline. It dipped and dabbed at a few rocks near the edge of the water until it finally touched the snout of the deer carcass. The tendril pulled back a few feet and quickly flicked to and fro. It whipped forward and wrapped the deer up in a quick flipping motion. The barbs dug in, and the tentacle constricted around the deer’s frame. In one motion the tendril retracted and sucked the animal’s body into the middle of the inky pool. Waves lapped up on the shore for several minutes, and then all was calm once again. Nothing moved except the rain.

David walked for some time. The rain didn’t let up. The ground stayed the same consistency, a blend of the gray clay and mud that he had woken in. He kept the black structure in sight as he walked over the small hills. The formation seemed to be situated in a deeper valley, and only its top remained visible in the distance.

David retraced his memories again, trying to sneak up on something that would clue him in to where he was and why he was here. As he searched, an image surfaced in his mind’s eye. Corn. Rows and rows of corn lined the highway he had been traveling. The brown stalks had been twisting and turning in the wind and rain that was raging outside his car. So he was somewhere in the Midwest. He stopped for a moment and looked around. This didn’t look like any part of the Midwest he’d ever seen before.

His vision locked on to something on a nearby hill, and he blinked. For a moment it looked as if there was a figure standing there, silhouetted against the darkened sky. When David looked again, the shape was gone. He rubbed his eyes as a new wave of pain rippled through his skull.

“I gotta get to a doctor,” he said to himself. Water leaked from the legs of his soaked khakis and dripped to the sodden ground around his shoes. He began walking again, but every so often he glanced to his right or left, surveying the nearby hills. A tickling sensation of being watched needled at his brain.

After nearly an hour of walking, he was able to make out the top of the structure he had spotted earlier: it was a tree. He could see the black branches running in different directions. Each limb ended in a point, and judging from the size of the uppermost branches that he could see, the tree looked to be extremely large, possibly over a hundred feet tall if the valley on the other side of the hill was as deep as he thought it was.

David stopped and stared at the hill that ran the side of the valley in front of him. What he had initially thought were stones layered into the gray soil at the base of the hill were beginning to come into focus. Details began to fall into place and after a moment of staring at the stones, David realized what he was looking at.

Skulls lined the steep bank of the hill that ran up in front of him. Their polished bone foreheads stood out in stark contrast to the surrounding gray soil. Rain dripped down through the rows upon rows of skulls and pooled at the base of the hill. The empty eye sockets gaped and glared at David accusingly.

“Holy shit,” he said aloud. The rain dampened his words and washed them away.

There had to be a thousand skulls entrenched in the side of the rise, and just the fronts of them were visible. It was like a psycho’s mosaic. David surveyed the surrounding landscape again, almost expecting the figure to be watching him from somewhere nearby. For a few heartbeats, he just stood there in the rain, a chill running down the length of his spine. Where the hell am I? he thought for the second time since awakening. He felt the urge to run pulling at the middle of his stomach. He looked over the hill at the top of the tree and decided he needed to reach it for some reason. He had come this far, and there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go.

All right, he thought, let’s do this then. David walked through a small pool of water and began climbing the skull-encrusted hill. He positioned his feet on the top of each successive row of skulls and used the next for handholds. Three-quarters of the way to the top, his foot slipped on a forehead, and he nearly fell all the way to the bottom.

He repositioned himself as he listened to the slamming of his heart, then continued on until he had reached the top of the steep grade. His hand grasped something round and smooth, and David pulled himself up over the edge of the rise. He looked down at what he had thought was a rock and realized his stupidity as he yanked his hand off a skull that was buried in the ground. A worm squirmed sluggishly from one eye socket, and David’s stomach did a flip-flop for the second time and threatened to release what it contained onto the muddy ground next to him.

His breathing came out in ragged gasps as he looked up into the slate-gray sky. Rain battered his face for a few moments before he rolled onto his side and began to stand up. Pain buffeted his head like a series of cluster bombs going off as he stood. David pressed his fingers to his temples in an attempt to hold his head together, just in case it decided to fly apart in several directions. The world spun for a moment. He took one step forward to steady himself, but only thin air met his foot where solid ground should have been.

David fell off the edge of the small cliff with a startled cry. His hands flew out instinctively and hit the ground first, while his head and shoulder came next. His body bounced and rolled down the side of the hill into the valley for several seconds before he was able to stop his momentum and lie quietly in the fetal position.

When the adrenaline rush began to die down, he could feel pain starting to seep into several areas. He quickly did a damage assessment. He was bleeding from his elbow, his knees were bruised, and he could feel blood beginning to ooze from a cut on his forehead.

David slowly sat up and wiped the blood and rain mixture off his forehead. The clay that was stuck to his hand burned in the cut as he pulled his hand away. His vision dimmed slightly, and he feared he would pass out. But after a few beats of agony in his head, he realized he would stay conscious. He gingerly pushed himself onto his feet and wiped some of the muck from his clothes, then looked around the area where he had landed.

He was standing in a valley that reminded him of a bowl. In each direction the clay-covered ground rose up steeply into a cliff like the one he had fallen down. The valley seemed to be around a half mile long, but it could have been more since the falling rain obscured the distance. In the center of the depression grew the tree that he had spotted earlier. His first estimations had been wrong—the tree stood well over two hundred feet tall. The knurly base was at least sixty feet across and slowly narrowed and branched out as it climbed. The bark was pitch-black and fairly smooth.

David couldn’t discern a pattern in the bark that would distinguish which species it was, although he knew he had never seen anything like it in his life. The branches of the tree all reached skyward, reminding David of worshippers in a gospel church with their hands raised in supplication as they cried out to a God they hoped was listening. David took in all of these details, but one feature dominated the scene in front of him.

Spinal cords hung from the tree like macabre Christmas decorations. There were hundreds of them, each spaced several feet apart. They lined nearly every branch, and they had been tied to the tree with some sort of glinting steel wire. The bone columns were bright white, in stark contrast to the black skin of the tree. They swayed slightly in the wind, and some clinked together like horrid wind chimes.

David stood in the soft ground, awestruck. His muscles spasmed slightly, and he shook as the rain poured down on him harder than it had before. Another detail caught his eye as he gazed at the tree before him. Something was caught in its uppermost branches, above where the last scattered vertebral columns were tied.

Someone had hung a scarecrow upside down in the crotch of several branches. The figure’s hands and arms hung down toward the ground over its head, and its hips and legs were wedged in an odd position, making the figure look like a forgotten puppet in a deranged puppeteer’s traveling trunk. Its face was obscured by one of its arms, but for a moment David thought he recognized something about the figure. Something was beginning to surface in his mind like an enormous submarine coming up from below the waves of his subconscious. Before he could truly grasp what was forming there, movement caught his eye near the base of the tree.

A dark figure stepped out from behind the trunk. David recognized its shape as the one from the hill when he had been walking. Now it stepped boldly out in front of the tree and stopped in full view.

It was not human—David knew that much at a glance. Its skin was a deep, shiny black, almost the black of a killer whale’s skin but darker. From what he could tell, it was completely hairless. Muscles lined every inch of the creature’s solid form. David could see claws protruding from each finger, as well as from each toe. Its face hung above large shoulders and was trained directly toward him. It had the general countenance of a human visage, but it almost looked as if it had been in an intense fire. Its eyes were dark ebony and set deep in its skull, and its thin cheeks were pulled tight over angular bones. It had no lips to cover the permanent horrific grin that was fixed on its face, and its gums were fused flawlessly to its cheeks. Its teeth were also black, and they were elongated more than normal human teeth should be.

It remained as still as a statue and stared at him through the rain. David stepped back as his fight-or-flight instinct kicked in, and instantly flight elbowed past fight to take the driver’s seat.

Suddenly, the monster’s hand flew up to shoulder height in a “halt” sign. David nearly shrieked as his feet obeyed the creature’s command. RUN! his mind screamed at his frozen legs. His eyes bulged in their sockets as he watched the figure raise its muscled arm higher until it was pointing one bladed fingertip toward the sky.

“Reembla, doo tala kaam,” it said in a baritone that rumbled like crushed rocks in a bass drum. David’s eyes followed its pointing finger, and he gazed upon what he had initially thought was a scarecrow in the tree.

David stared into his own eyes. The body that hung in the uppermost branches of the godforsaken tree was his own, or was at one time anyway. It was his corpse that he was looking at now. He could tell from the vacant look in the eyes that there was no life whatsoever in them. The gaping hole in the side of the skull also gave it away.

He realized what had been surfacing in his mind a few moments earlier. He had recognized his own clothes on the figure. The other David wore the same dark slacks and dress shirt that he did. Its body was twisted in the tree at an odd angle, the spine seemingly no longer performing its duty. He could now see one leg that was badly broken, the white of bone protruding from just below the knee.

For a few long moments, he stared at the corpse, wondering how he had gone insane and why. Just as he was about to sit down on the ground and let his mind give into the madness that was battering it, the body in the tree moved. It jerked as if the muscles had been delivered a shock by some unseen source. David watched in horror as the arms—his arms—twitched and the head snapped back and forth. David’s eyes dropped from the jerking corpse in the tree to the black creature that stood on the ground. If something could smile without lips, the monster was doing it. The hideous grin somehow elongated in response to David’s horror.

More movement in the tree drew his attention back to the body. It had stopped twitching and was now reaching with both hands for the area where its legs were lodged. It pulled and shifted its gangling body back and forth. Finally, both legs slipped free and it fell.

The other David flipped and crashed through the branches. Small pieces of wood and bark flew off as the body fell downward. Spinal columns snapped and clacked against each other as they jounced from side to side with the body’s passage.

David watched, mouth agape, as his dead body flopped off of the last large branch and landed in a soft heap at the dark monster’s feet. David watched the unmoving form for a few seconds before the creature repeated its earlier incantation.

“Reembla, doo tala kaam.”

Before the words had died in the monster’s mouth, the heap of clothing and flesh jerked and planted a hand in the soft earth. After a moment the other hand and arm shot out and pushed the upper body into a rough sitting position. The corpse’s head flipped upward, and David looked at his own ruined face. The nose had been flattened in the fall, and the left eye looked up and to the left while the other stared straight ahead at David.

“Oh Jesus. Oh God,” David whispered, as the body slowly began to get to its feet.

The legs that surely had been broken in the fall somehow held under the thing’s weight, and when it raised its head again to stare in his direction, its shoulders sat at different heights. David took one step back as the horror smiled at him, noting that it had several teeth missing.

Without hesitation the corpse began to run at David. It wasn’t a smooth or graceful movement. The thing lumbered awkwardly toward him, its arms slightly upraised. The feet tripped and hopped in the clay as the body began to pick up its jerky speed.

For some reason the melody of “Mr. Bojangles” drifted into David’s head. Jerry Jeff Walker’s voice chimed in merrily, and soon his corpse had its very own theme music.

David needed to see no more. He turned and ran. He ran for his life, for he knew if the thing that looked like him caught him, he would die. He could see in its eyes that it wanted one thing: to bear down on him and bite him with what teeth it had left. It wanted to tear at his skin with its bloody fingers. He began to wonder what the sound he was hearing was. It was a high-pitched keening that came and went with his breathing, and only then did he realize he was screaming.

He ran until he reached the hill that he had climbed over and began pawing his way up the side. He risked a glance back and saw that his corpse hadn’t slowed; in fact, it had picked up the pace of its shambling and horrific run. It was now less than fifty yards from him and closing. David scrambled up the hill, each injury aching as he pulled himself up slowly—too slowly. He would gain a few feet and then slide back.

And now he could hear the thing approaching. Its ragged breathing was audible above the falling rain around him. The sound was wet, as if a rib was sticking through its lung, which was filling with blood.

Good, he thought. I hope you fucking choke on it and die! he screamed inside his head. The breathing got closer and closer, and David scurried up the steep embankment until he could reach the top. His hand found another skull, and he pulled himself up onto the plateau. When he looked back, he nearly screamed again.

The corpse was only a few feet away, awkwardly crawling crab-like up the side of the hill. Its broken fingers clawed at the clay with the desperation of a starving man hungrily seeking his dinner.

David rolled several feet away from the edge and hoisted himself into a standing position. He glanced quickly over the edge of the side that held the skulls. After getting his feet positioned on the topmost row, he began to sidestep down the skulls with his hands out to both sides for balance. Just as he neared the bottom, his corpse loomed over the top of the hill and looked down at him. It waited only a moment before it dove off the embankment and began rolling end over end.

David jumped off the last few rows with a shout and landed in the pool near the bottom. The body flipped over one last time and fell in a twisted heap several yards behind him. The figure remained motionless a moment, and then it heaved itself up onto its feet and stood.

“Jesus!” David yelled, as he turned and began to run again. His feet slapped through the mud and his arms pumped at his sides. He tried to control his breathing, but as soon as it dropped into a rhythm, he would hear the corpse behind him cough or splash though a puddle and it would become erratic again. His legs threatened to drop him at one point, and his breathing became so forced and labored that stars began to bloom at the corners of his vision. He shook his head and waited until the stars receded, and then glanced back over his shoulder.

The body was there. It was still loping after him in its broken-legged and all-too-eager shamble. But now another figure was following him. The monster from beneath the tree trailed them both. It walked at a quickened pace and somehow stayed within sight. Its muscles glistened in the rain, and David could see the black teeth flash in its lipless mouth every so often.

David tried to follow his own path back the way he had come, but in certain areas he could no longer make out the footprints he had made only an hour earlier. The race he was running was becoming a marathon, and he knew it was one he would soon lose. His legs began to hurt, even more so than they had earlier. His lungs burned with each breath, as if every molecule of oxygen was coated with razor blades. Every so often he would glance back as he crested a hill to see how far away his pursuers were, and every time he would be jolted into running as fast as he could by the sight of them because they were even closer than they had been a few moments earlier.

After what seemed like an eternity of running, David came over a hill and spotted the pond that he had woken by. Another feature stood out to him as he clumsily tripped and almost fell headlong down the rise. There was a rock sticking out of the wet clay near the edge of the pond. He didn’t recall it being there when he had woken up, but he had also been in a lot of pain then. He did note with some concern that the deer carcass was gone, but that wasn’t what he was after. David dug down to the bottom of his strength reserves and sprinted the last twenty yards to the edge of the pond.

When he reached the rock, he risked a look back to the way he had come. The corpse was trotting down the hill toward him. Its eyes still looked in different directions, and blood poured out of the broken nose onto its mouth. As David watched, he could see the lips part and the last of his fairly straight teeth glistening in blood.

“Come on!” David yelled at his doppelganger. He bent down and tried to pull up the rock that was embedded in the soil. It moved only a little. The rock was much larger than he had anticipated. He began to dig frantically with his nearly numb fingers, his breath still heaving in his chest. As he dug around the rock and uncovered more of its girth, he realized it would serve no use as a weapon. He had uncovered almost a foot of the surface, and it still ran into the ground.

David stood and watched as his body made its way across the ground that separated them. His hands slowly balled into fists, and in that moment he became comfortable with the fact that he was about to die. What chance did he have at beating this thing, his own corpse? It was dead; you can’t kill what’s already dead. David lowered his head and braced himself as the body covered the last few yards and launched itself at him, its hands and twisted fingers reaching for his face.

David threw a punch with all of his might and felt it connect with the thing’s chin. The skin on his knuckles tore, but he felt the satisfying snap of bone as he fell back under the corpse’s weight. The thing landed on top of him and was surprisingly light. It reached with outstretched hands at his face and tried to snap its jaw that was now hanging limply off to one side. David held it back at arm’s length the best he could. He shoved with all his might, only to have the corpse lean farther in and coat him with its breath that smelled of decay and rust. Black fluid began to drip out of its nose and mouth onto David’s face. He screamed out of revulsion and twisted his head from side to side and tried to throw off his attacker.

Once again, David dug into his last remaining strength and pushed with all his might. At the same time, he brought his legs up under the thing’s chest. As the body tried to fall upon him and to smother him in its embrace, David slid his feet up farther into the thing’s soft solar plexus and kicked out as hard as he could.

Two things happened nearly at the same time. The first was the corpse was launched back nearly six feet in the air, its arms flailing about as it still tried to grasp its prey. The second was two huge black tentacles that looked like something out of Jules Verne’s worst nightmare shot out of the pond and caught David’s corpse in midair. David could see that the tentacles had large bony hooks protruding from the suckers that covered their undersides. One tentacle quickly wrapped around the body’s legs while the other encased its upper torso. In one motion the tentacles tightened in an impressive display of muscular strength, then flew away from each other.

The corpse was torn neatly in two. Entrails flew like tails from kites, and blood arced out in a solid sheet. Its arms still thrashed with life, but it was no match for the appendages that held it. The tentacles began to slither back beneath the pond’s surface, and David stood and watched in awe. Slowly the huge snakelike arms disappeared, and the last thing David saw was the waving fingers of his corpse slipping beneath the ripples of the water.

For a moment all he could hear again was the pounding of his heart and the constant patter of rain around him. Then another sound poked against his thudding eardrums, and he looked to his right to find its source.

The monster was walking toward him over the soft clay. Its black eyes shone in the gray light, and its teeth parted slightly to reveal a vividly white tongue. Its large clawed feet squished in the mud as it approached.

David spun away from the creature with a cry and began to run again. His feet pounded into the soil, and he made no attempt to look back over his shoulder to see if the monster was following him because he knew it was there.

When he reached the top of the first hill he came to, he nearly stopped and stared but continued to run in spite of himself. On the other side of the rise the clay dissipated and a cornfield stretched out before him like an expansive brown sea. The rows started only a few feet from the top of the hill, and as David ran into them, he knew he would find a way out.

The rows continued in straight lines, and the long leaves of the stalks brushed his arms and bruised sides as he sprinted down them. As he ran, he could hear the creature behind him. He couldn’t hear its breath—he doubted it breathed at all—but he could hear the leaves whisper over its body as it quickly passed by them.

After running several hundred yards through the corn, a new memory suddenly materialized in David’s mind. He was still driving down the road past the corn. The rain still pounded onto the windshield. There was some movement off to the right of the road. Something was coming out of the corn. It was coming fast—too fast. He began to hit the brakes as it ran out of the ditch and onto the road.

David snapped back to reality as he saw a break in the rows ahead of him. A gap widened as he neared it, and then there was no denying what he was seeing. The corn was ending in a ditch. He could make out some grass and mud, and the best thing was he could see the wet shine of pavement above the depression. He had found a road. A real road, by God! He had never dreamed that he would be so happy to see a simple road. He quickened his pace again as he heard the sound of an approaching car, its wheels making the unmistakable hissing sound of rubber cutting through water.

David burst out of the corn and ran up the side of the ditch as the approaching car’s headlights fell on him. He couldn’t let it pass because the thing behind him would catch him, and he knew it would kill him. Deep down in his soul, he knew it would eat him. It would eat him alive on the side of this highway, without anyone around to help him or merely to hear his last screams.

As he ran up the shoulder of the highway, he began to wave his arms back and forth to stop the passing motorist. At the same time, a rock slid under his right foot, and he began to fall onto the highway. His arms came out instinctively to save his face from hitting first, and then all the sound in the world became screaming rubber on blacktop.

David Hanson drove through the rain in his rented vehicle. The cornstalks waved at him eerily in the wind along the sides of the road.

Jesus, he thought to himself, why did they have to have the biggest chiropractic conference in the nation in southern Minnesota? He shook his head slightly and looked at the dashboard. Half a tank of gas. He would have to stop at the next town. He rubbed his forehead, trying to wipe away the fatigue. If there is a next town, he thought gloomily.

All of a sudden, his vision caught movement off to the right side of the highway. Something was moving near the corn. No, now it was in the ditch. His eyes tried to discern and focus on what he was seeing. A deer? No, it was on two legs. It was a man. David’s foot came off of the gas and began applying pressure to the brake.

When he realized the man wasn’t stopping at the side of the highway, he began to press on the brake pedal with some force. The tires beneath the rental began to protest and shriek against the wet asphalt. The man waved his hands over his head in a sign of urgency, and then was falling. Falling into the lane where David’s car was. He pushed on the brake so hard he thought it would snap off under the force of his foot. Although, he knew it wasn’t enough.

“Fuck!” he yelled, as the sickening thump that he knew he would hear came. The car skidded to a stop on the highway, and David immediately threw the lever into park.

“Oh Jesus, oh God, I fucking hit someone!” David threw open his door and stepped out onto the rain-slick highway. “Oh no, oh no, oh no!” he said over and over, as he ran to the motionless figure that lay on the white line near the right edge of the road.

It was a man in dirty clothes. One shoe had come off from the impact, and David could see a sock that had once been white but was now stained a dark gray. He could also see the gaping wound in the man’s head where the car’s bumper had hit him. David knelt over the man for a few moments in the rain, watching for signs of life. A breath, a twitch of an arm or leg, any incoherent words.

There was nothing. He was dead.

David began to cry. He reached out to touch the man’s shoulder. His skin was still warm through the wet torn fabric of his shirt. After a moment of indecision, David rolled the dead man over onto his back, and stared into his own face.

Just as his optic nerves sent the image of his own lifeless features to his brain, pain exploded like a starburst in the back of his skull. His head rocked toward the corpse that lay in front of him, and then his body went slack as darkness flooded his mind. He fell to the ground.

The black creature stood over the two men, one unconscious and the other dead. It looked back and forth between the two for a few moments, and then it stepped forward and grasped each of them around the waist. It easily lifted the bodies onto its massive shoulders. It turned and walked off the highway and down the ditch, disappearing into the rows of whispering cornstalks.

YOU SURE ARE CALM, COWBOY

The late-afternoon sun blazed across the small desert town, long shadows forming in the dusty and narrow road that ran between the dilapidated buildings. The storefronts, which had so much character and promise years before, were now faded and in disrepair because the people that had built them had moved on some time ago. A tumbleweed danced over a few broken brown bottles before tearing across the street, only to get tangled in the remains of a horse trough.

When the tumbleweed stopped, nothing else moved. The wind that had carried it into the small town suddenly vanished, as if realizing where it was and quickly relocated elsewhere. All was quiet until a harsh scream filled the air, which was cut off as quickly as it had begun. There were no other sounds to fill the void that was left hanging on the dead air like a cloying spider web.

A rumble began to build in the east, as though a distant thundercloud were approaching. The rolling grumble shook small particles of dust and sand off some of the nearby porches. The rumbling slowly built until the source became clear when it rounded the deserted barbershop at the end of the street.

A group of five horses entered the street and thundered up the road, throwing dust and gravel into the air. Each horse carried a man who leaned into the saddle to avoid the dust that was kicked up in front of him. The men wore long dusters, despite the day’s heat, along with black hats pulled down tight over their foreheads. A bandanna covered each man’s nose and mouth, a skull and crossbones adorning the front of the fabric.

The men rode at full speed up the street until the leader of the group reined in his horse, abruptly pulling the steed to a stop beneath a sign that read “Black Cat Saloon.” Each successive rider did the same, and all the men hastily jumped down from their mounts, drawing long revolvers from their holsters.

Jasper Hull, who had jumped down first, looked quickly at the other four men before speaking. “’Kay, boys, ya know the drill. Shoot the first maggot that gives ya lip, the rest’ll piss themselves gettin’ the cash. Let’s go!”

The five men mounted the steps as Jasper kicked the double swinging doors in, knocking them off their hinges with a single thrust of his boot.

The inside of the saloon was dimly lit by a few kerosene lanterns hanging from various points on the rafters. The late-afternoon sun along with the dust from the street had shrunk the men’s pupils tight. Jasper immediately turned his six-shooter at the dark shape that stood behind the bar near his left, and his four companions aimed their weapons in various directions and began yelling orders and obscenities.

Jasper saw the outline of the bartender slowly raise its hands to shoulder height. “Good boy, barkeep. Those hands stay up an’ you do what I say, you’ll keep your guts where they are and not sprayed on the wall behind ya.”

The room was beginning to come into focus for the five men. They could see that the area was rectangular and nearly forty feet across, with round tables set adjacent to one another. At the far end of the room was a stairway that undoubtedly led up to the whores’ rooms for rent. There were several people sitting around some of the tables, and most were staring at them with slight interest, still holding their drinks.

Two or three of the patrons appeared to be sleeping or passed out as they leaned back in their chairs. A whore dressed in a light blue skirt was pressed up against the far wall near the stairway, her hands splayed out next to her against the wood. She seemed to be trying to fade into the fibers of the wall and disappear.

A lone man sat at the end of the bar farthest from the gang, near the back door. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that hid his features and left a dark hole where his face should be. His faded duster hung nearly to the floor around the barstool on which he sat, with cuts and tears crisscrossing the leather every foot or so. The man stared straight ahead from under his hat, seemingly looking at the wall behind the bar. Every few seconds he would raise a dark glass and drink several swallows of the contents with rough slurping sounds, then set it back down on the burnished wood.

Jasper took all of this in before he resumed looking at the bartender, who was still frozen with his hands at his shoulders.

“Mike, Lyle, you boys hustle them people over yonder at them tables. See if they have valuables that they’re willin’ to part with.”

Several of the armed men snickered at his comment, yellowed and snus-stained teeth showing through bearded mouths as they laughed.

“Dillon, Marty, you boys check the upstairs and make sure the sheriff ain’t getting his jollies off with one of the local whores. We don’t want any surprises.”

“Sir, I’d be happy to get you the cash from the till if you see fit,” the barman said in a light voice.

“Boy, you’ll shut up and do what you’re told right now, or I’ll loose a world of hurt on you,” Jasper replied quickly, as he shoved the barrel of the Colt revolver farther across the nicked and rutted bar.

At that moment Jasper noticed something strange. The barman’s eyes were wide with fear, but that was nothing new. He had seen the same look in dozens of eyes over the last year as his gang had made their rounds through the half-settled, mostly lawless state. The thing that didn’t sit right was the way the barkeep kept swinging his eyes over to the left. He would look at Jasper, his eyes bulging and bloodshot, and then quickly shift his gaze toward the end of the bar. He did this over and over, like his eyes were doing some sort of strange dance routine. Bulge, swing, slide back, bulge.

“Oh, fuck me sonofabitch goddammit!” Mike yelled.

Jasper swung his attention away from the bartender, expecting to see half a dozen armed lawmen coming through the back door. But he spied only Mike and Lyle slowly backing up toward the front entrance. Lyle’s attention was so drawn to the people at the tables that he tripped over an overturned chair and fell hard on his ass. Dillon and Marty stopped their progress up the stairway and turned back to see what the commotion was about.

“The fuck … the fuck is going on here?” Mike said between breaths, as he backed up to Jasper and almost bumped into the bigger man.

“What are you goin’ on about?” Jasper said irritably. He didn’t want to waste any more time than he had to in this shit heap of a town.

“They’re all dead, Jasper, they’re all fucking dead!” Mike said, as he turned to the other man and grasped his shirt.

“Get offa me, you loon!” Jasper said, pushing the other man away harshly. “Whaddya mean ‘they’re all dead’?”

“The people at the tables! See fer yerself!” Mike said. He pointed a shaking hand at the round tables in the center of the room.

Jasper stepped swiftly past the frightened man toward the tables, shoving Lyle out of the way as he went. Before he took two steps, he swung around and pointed at the bartender.

“No funny shit, barkeep! Dillon, keep an eye on him,” Jasper said. He turned back to inspect the tables and their occupants.

When he got within three feet of the first table, he could smell the blood, a thick coppery tang that filled his nostrils and nearly made him gag. His eyes adjusted more near the middle of the dark room, and he saw that Mike had been right.

Corpses sat at every table in the room. The people he had thought were sleeping or passed out leaned back at awkward angles. Most of them were missing much of their throats. He could see the ropy cords of muscles and tendons that were exposed in the necks of the nearest victims. Blood freely ran down some of their clothing and was soaking into their pants and skirts.

Jasper stepped around several of the tables and inspected the people who seemed to stare at the front door. Most of these people had circular holes the size of half dollars punched into the backs of their necks and skulls, as if they had been shot with a large-caliber gun at very close range. The only problem was he couldn’t make out any exit wounds. All of the patrons with these injuries were entirely whole otherwise.

When he bent down to examine one hole in what looked to be the remains of the general store owner’s head, he realized that he could look straight out through the man’s mouth and nose. The inside of his head had been hollowed out like a jack-o’-lantern.

Jasper stood up quickly and drew in a sharp breath. “What the fuck is going on here?” he mumbled.

He took a step to his right to move around the nearest table, and his boot slipped on something wet and pliable on the floor. He knelt down and came face-to-face with the town’s sheriff. The man had been torn in two. Strips of flesh and ropes of entrails descended from the man’s upper half and ran a few feet to a spot under Jasper’s boot.

“Christ!” Jasper yelled.

He backpedaled until he bumped into Mike, who uttered a short yelp that would have sounded more at home coming from a young child than a 215-pound man. Jasper spun and shoved his pistol across the bar at the bartender, who flinched but never took a step back.

“All right, the fuck is goin’ on here?” Jasper yelled at the man, spittle flinging from his lips.

The bartender again turned his eyes down the bar, and this time Jasper followed them.

The man at the end of the bar still sat where he had been sitting when they entered. He finished the last of his drink with a few wet sucking noises and set the glass down on the bar with a thump.

Jasper cocked his pistol and began stepping cautiously toward the man, who neither moved nor registered that anyone else was in the room.

“You sure are calm, cowboy,” Jasper said with a shaky voice that was very unlike his usual sure-and-twangy accent. The normally always-steady barrel of the Colt began to waver back and forth, up and down.

“You responsible for this, boy?” Jasper asked, as he took another step toward the man.

“You hear me, cowboy?” he asked, stopping ten feet short of the man on the stool. Jasper looked the man over for a moment, something sticking in his mind like a splinter.

Suddenly he realized what was wrong. The man had no legs or feet. There were no boots or legs protruding from the duster, only empty air beneath the man’s coat. Wind hissed in through Jasper’s broken, crooked teeth, and he stepped back, aimed the pistol, and squeezed the trigger.

At that moment the man on the stool turned and slipped off his perch to land on the floor with a thump, the coat and hat falling away from him like leaves from a tree.

It was not a man at all under the hat and coat. The abomination stretched to its full height of seven feet as Jasper and the rest of the men gasped and backed away in horror. The creature seemed to be a mixture of a scorpion and what once might have been a man. It stood on four many-segmented legs that ended in clawed tips, which bit into the rough wooden floorboards. Its torso was a burnt brownish orange and layered like a pill bug’s stomach. The arms that extended from the body were long and spiny and ended in three thick, hooked digits that twisted and flicked in the air as if they were tasting it. A slim tail slowly uncoiled and revealed its end, which was adorned with a bone-white spike nearly a foot long. The creature’s broad neck extended more than two feet and ended in a misshapen head that was elongated, stretching the features that once may have been human. The eyes were yellowish brown and much too large for its face. A mouth that once may have held straight white teeth now played host to two dark mandibles, which extended from between the thick lips along with a round tongue. The tongue looked to be muscle that transitioned into bone. The end of the tongue was serrated with sharp spines, and as Jasper gazed upon it, he knew what had made the holes in the unfortunate patrons’ necks and heads.

The thing’s eyes shifted from Jasper to the men behind him and back again, its horrible gaze taking in the panic and terror on the men’s faces. Then it began to laugh. It started as a chuckle, then grew into the belly laughs of a man who had seen something genuinely funny.

The laughter was what finally snapped Jasper out of his trance. He pulled the trigger of his .45 Colt revolver and sent a chunk of lead flying at the thing’s head.

The creature skittered out of the shot’s way at an amazing speed, the movements definitely insect-like. With quick, jerky motions, it moved behind one of the tables, where it stopped and hunkered low.

The rest of the men followed Jasper’s lead and began firing as fast as their six-shooters would allow. Splinters flew up from the top of the table, and several chairs snapped in half with the impacts of the shots. After a few seconds the firing slowed, then stopped as each man ran out of ammo.

“The fuck was that thing?” Mike whispered through clenched teeth. His gun hand still flexed, squeezing the handle of his pistol.

In a blaze of wood and debris, the thing hurled itself from behind the overturned table. It grabbed a lone chair that was lying off to one side, and as it hurtled through the dusty air, it flung the chair at Marty, who was the nearest to it.

The chair struck Marty full in the chest and shattered into pieces. The impact threw Marty off his feet, and when he landed and slid up to the bar, his gun skittered away from his outstretched hand. Marty tried to take in a breath but was surprised to hear loud sucking sounds below his chin. As he looked down at the jagged pieces of the chair sticking out of his chest, his vision began to dim, then slowly went black.

The scorpion-like thing landed exactly where it had been aiming: Mike’s chest. The thing’s talons tore at Mike’s soft flesh as it smashed him to the ground under its immense weight.

Jasper stared in awe at how fast the large creature was. The clicking pincers dug channels and bored holes into Mike’s muscles and internal organs. Mike opened his mouth to scream, and at that moment the thing stuck its bone tongue into his mouth. For several seconds it looked as though the two were embraced in a rough kiss, but suddenly the creature yanked its oblong head back and pulled Mike’s tongue and most of his upper spinal cord out. Mike’s head lolled back limply like a balloon that had deflated slightly, and the thing released its grisly prize in a spray of blood and spinal fluid.

Jasper’s hands tried to do something as he watched the macabre display before him. He looked down to see that his fingers had fumbled open the steel cylinder of his Colt and were dropping empty brass out as fast as they could.

“Reload!” Jasper yelled at the two men who were still standing.

Dillon and Lyle both began to shake out the still-warm brass from their guns, as the creature eyed them curiously from atop its kill.

“Rrrreeeeelooooaaddd,” the thing hissed with its misshapen jaws. The mandibles clicked and clacked on the sides of its tongue.

“Rrrrrreeeeeelooadd,” it again mimicked the three men, who had stopped fumbling with their weapons.

“Mother of God almighty,” Lyle whispered, quickly making the sign of the cross.

“Shoot that fuckin’ thing!” Jasper yelled. He slammed his now-loaded cylinder home and began firing at the creature.

The monster flattened itself on the floor, then flung Mike’s body across the room as easily as it had thrown the chair at Marty. Mike’s two-hundred-pound corpse slammed into Jasper in a tangle of broken arms and legs.

Jasper crumpled under the weight of Mike’s body and bounced on his tailbone hard when he landed. Mike’s corpse fell on top of him in a strange spread-eagle position. Something had gone wrong with Jasper’s legs when he fell, because he could no longer feel them. He tried to lift Mike’s weight off his chest, but his strength had ebbed considerably. Every attempt only weakened him more.

The only good thing was that he had managed to hold on to his Colt. He clicked the cylinder open and counted three unfired shells in their tight holes. He smiled grimly and waited.

Lyle had watched Jasper fall under Mike’s dead weight. When his vision swung back to the creature’s position, his stomach tightened even more. The thing wasn’t there. Lyle’s eyes scanned under the tables and behind the corpses that sat at them, but he couldn’t make out the thing’s dusky-orange bulk anywhere.

“You see it?” Lyle cried hoarsely to Dillon, who was still fumbling the last shell into place. He snapped the gun closed and looked with bulging eyes around the darkened room, his vision flicking from one shadowed corner to the next.

“No. Where the fuck is it?” Dillon answered, as he tried to steady the gun in his right hand.

A muffled sound behind the two men made them spin around. The frightened eyes of the bartender and the whore in the blue dress met their own frantic gazes, as they stopped just inside the open doorway that led to the afternoon street. The bartender grabbed frantically at the woman’s hand until he caught her wrist and dragged her out the door and into the hazy sunlight.

Both men began to call out to them as if they had been friends, not victims of their greed only minutes before. Their calls were cut short as they heard a click echo throughout the room. At the same moment, both men turned and looked toward the ceiling.

The creature was tucked into a space between two rafters above them. Its brownish-orange eyes gazed at them respectively, and then it dropped lightly to the floor like a gargantuan spider leaving its web. As Dillon brought his gun up to fire at the thing’s head, it ducked low and snagged his left foot in its talons.

“You fucker! Get offa me!” Dillon cried, as the monster’s digits sliced through the leather of his boot and into the meat of his foot beneath. His gun clattered to the ground and was kicked away by one of the segmented legs. Dillon reared back with his other foot and swung an enraged kick at the outstretched head and neck of the creature, but the boot was stopped short by the creature’s other arm. In that instant Dillon knew, without a doubt, his days of riding and pillaging were over.

Lyle circled to the right of his friend, trying to get a clear shot at the thing’s head. The creature moved Dillon, keeping the man between itself and the barrel of the gun. Suddenly, the thing yanked Dillon’s legs away from each other and split the man down the middle. Intestines and blood flew in several directions, like candy spilling from a child’s piñata. Dillon’s head and neck stayed on his right side, while the left half of his body was flipped away across the demolished room.

“NO, YOU FUCKER!” Lyle cried, and fired wildly at the creature. Two bullets ripped through Dillon’s ruined torso and pinged slightly as they glanced off the hard shell that covered the monster’s shoulders and back. The other four shots went in different directions since Lyle’s hand was not as steady as it had been a half hour before.

Several seconds later all that could be heard in the room were the clicking of Lyle’s gun and the dripping of blood from Dillon’s body. Lyle stood completely motionless except for his trigger finger, which seemed to be moving of its own volition.

With a roar, the thing dropped Dillon’s ruined corpse and, without pausing, whipped its right arm out and cut the top of Lyle’s head off at the bridge of his nose. A moment later Lyle’s body dropped to the floor, but it was much longer before his finger finally quit pulling the trigger of his gun.

Jasper listened as the last of his gang was killed. He then waited for what seemed like hours, and for a brief moment, he began to believe that the thing had left the saloon. He started thinking that it had crawled back to whatever hell it had come from and had left him here alive. He could wait until he had enough strength to move Mike’s body off him, then drag himself out to the horses. The next town was nearly a day’s ride south, but he could make it. He could find a doctor, he could definitely make it, he could—

His thoughts were cut off abruptly when the creature peered over Mike’s ruined body. Up close, its eyes were an even deeper shade of orange than Jasper had thought, with dark swirls in the pupils. The swirls started spinning in circles like dirty water draining down a bath. Slowly, so slowly, they twirled.

Jasper forced his eyes closed and turned his head as he whipped his gun up and tried to fire directly into the thing’s face. The creature caught his wrist as if the movement had been expected, and it twisted his hand as he pulled the trigger twice. Both bullets flashed out of the barrel and lodged harmlessly in the wooden ceiling.

Jasper began to cry. His tears fell from his eyes in small rivulets that washed trails in the blood and dirt that was caked on his cheeks. Slowly, he began to twist his hand back toward his own face. The creature strained against him, but a flood of adrenaline pulled his hand back toward him.

There was one bullet left, and by God, there was no way he was going to let this demon take him out of the world as it had his gang. The deaths they had died weren’t even good enough for dogs. The barrel of the gun slowly came into view, and to Jasper the dark hole looked like salvation. He could see the empty cylinder chambers, and the bright sights of the Colt twinkled at him. Another inch and he would flex his finger to escape the monster above him.

With a flick of its pincers, the creature cut Jasper’s hand off at the wrist. Blood poured out of the wound and onto his face in a drenching sheet. Jasper screamed loudly into the thing’s face, speckling it with spit and blood.

The last thing Jasper saw before the foot-long spike protruding from the monster’s tail penetrated his skull and drove into the floor was one translucent eyelid dipping down in a lazy wink.

ANGEL CHARLIE

Carolyn opened her eyes and quickly closed them. She realized two things. The first was that she was upside down. The second was that she was in an enormous amount of pain. It seemed as though the pain was an entire ocean made of roiling currents of fire that for some reason had been poured inside of her stomach.

She tried to cry out. She opened her bloodied mouth and attempted a shout for help, but the yell rushed out of her in an inaudible hiss. She licked her lips and tried to capture and lock the pain away inside a part of her so she could think clearly. Waves of it rolled upon her as if she was caught in a tide that flowed without ebbing, and she lost control of it.

A cry escaped her lips, and in a strange way, it brought her comfort. If she could cry out, she was still alive. If she was still alive, she could be rescued. If she could be rescued, she might continue to live.

Carolyn tried opening her eyes again. Blurriness greeted her, and it wasn’t due to consuming several tall vodka martinis. In fact, she felt completely sober, which wasn’t a particularly comfortable feeling at this point in time.

After blinking rapidly a few times, her vision began to clear. She was inside her car. The car was upside down, and she was hanging from the seat, her arms dangling like the appendages of a marionette. She looked down—or was it up? Did it matter now? She could see the dashboard, which was still lit with an iridescent green glow. As her vision traveled down, she identified what was causing the excruciating pain in her midsection.

The steering wheel had somehow jutted back like a broken jaw and was pinning her to the seat. The rest of the driver’s area was also pushed in much too close. The steel frame and exposed metal of the Mercedes were bent and twisted like a child’s Erector set. She could see her cell phone, which had flown free of her purse in the crash, lying well out of reach above the passenger seat.

She began to do an assessment of her body. She could feel her toes and feet, which she deemed as a good sign, and wiggled them to be sure. She tried moving her arms and succeeded in lowering them to her midsection, where she found her seat-belt latch and unbuckled it. To her dismay, this did nothing to release the pressure that kept her upside down in the seat.

After a few more moments of fumbling and struggling against the steering wheel, she let her arms hang above her head once more. The large ring on her left hand glinted in the dash lights, and even in her current state of pain, a part of her still admired the enormous diamond that was secured with platinum settings.

She could smell gasoline and motor oil now, the acrid odors assaulting her nose from the direction of the engine compartment. Other than the light from the dashboard, the darkness was complete. She began to cry then. The tears burned at first as they slipped over her eyelids, but after a few seconds, they soothed the reddened blood vessels around her pupils. Soon her sobs filled the close air of the car. The pain in her stomach began to lessen, and the helplessness of her situation took over her normal composure and self-control.

“Oh God, help me. Help me, help me, help me.” She repeated the words as though, if she said them enough, they would gain power and release her from this trap of highly polished precision machinery. Her sobs reverberated in the confines of the car, and a short time later she reluctantly spoke again. “Charlie, oh Charlie, help me! If you can hear me now, help me!”

She hadn’t spoken his name in over six months, and it felt strange to now. The guilt that welled up inside her at his name was immediately forced back down into the depths of her conscience by the militant thoughts that she had placed there as safeguards against such feelings. It wasn’t her fault he had been a coward, not a real man, not like Jake. It wasn’t her fault that he hadn’t had any aspirations beyond fixing cars in the greasy mechanic shop that he called a business.

Sure, he had loved her, she was positive of that. He had made it clear every time he had come home from work, sometimes well past ten o’clock, apologizing for how late it was and saying he loved her so much, how he wished he could be home more. He would crawl into bed, sometimes without even showering, and try to cuddle up next to her.

In the first years of their marriage, it had been sweet. He had worked long hours in the shop so they could afford her tuition for college courses at the state university. She would spend the day at college, and he at the garage. They would meet at home at the end of the day, both exhausted and triumphant in their youth, sure that their hard work would pay off and they would live the life of their dreams. They would eat a meager supper and make love in their small double bed, which barely fit in the cramped bedroom they shared.

The years went by. She graduated with a major in business administration and a minor in accounting, and was hired at a large insurance firm in a busy part of downtown. She swiftly moved up in the company, quickly gaining titles and promotions through long hours and a fair amount of flirting with the higher-ups. Her salary increased exponentially year after year, and soon they were living in their dream home and she was driving a seventy-thousand-dollar sedan.

But Charlie remained the same. He didn’t have the same drive as she did, or the same taste for life. He was content to work his fifty-hour work weeks and to tinker on the old muscle car he kept on his side of the garage.

Carolyn, however, fell out of love with Charlie and in love with the corporate world and all that it offered. Over the years she became enamored with the flow of the executive life, the business meetings, the company expense accounts, the lavish trips that many of the vice presidents went on. She spoke of these things to Charlie, and he smiled and nodded. She knew he didn’t have the faintest clue as to how good it felt to close a multi-million-dollar deal. But Jake did.

Jake Miltrone walked into the firm and into her life in her fifteenth year of marriage to Charlie. Jake was her senior by several years, but he could have passed for twenty-five. He was aggressive, bold, smart, and sexy. Basically everything that Charlie wasn’t. It was a matter of weeks before they were sleeping together. She would leave work early sometimes to meet Jake at a ritzy hotel near their building. Sometimes she would bring him to her home and they would do it on the kitchen counter. She would blush when Charlie would cook a dinner for her and hours before another man had ravished her there.

But it was only a matter of time before Charlie caught on. Carolyn realized that even a fool like Charlie could sense the difference in her: the way she wore her hair, her perfume, and her lack of interest in lovemaking.

He had caught them at their home, in their bed. She still remembered the look on his face when he opened the door. It seemed as if his soul had drained out of him. He just stood there as she and Jake gathered their clothes from around the bed.

Her initial reaction had been not guilt or fear but anger. She had screamed at him about how he had never evolved with her. How he had stayed in the past with his cars and poker nights with his friends. Charlie hadn’t said a word while she had berated him, and that had angered her more. She left him to wallow in his silence at their home and went to stay with Jake at his penthouse suite across the city.

The phone call the next morning had woken them both. Jake answered, and then with a puzzled look on his face, handed her the phone. It was a sergeant from the local police department. He informed her that after she had left the night before, Charlie went to his gun cabinet, loaded one shell into his twelve-gauge, and redecorated their modern-style bedroom with his own organic shades of red and gray.

The funeral had been small, and she had shed the necessary tears. The rumors floated about for several months afterward, but Carolyn didn’t care. Truth be told, the first emotion she felt when the phone call had come through was relief. Relief that there was no messy divorce to go through and nothing to hold her back from her future in her business.

Jake proposed three months after Charlie’s death, and tonight she was driving home after an engagement party at the country club where she and Jake were to be married. Apparently the drinks had been too much for her on the winding road that led to the city, and she had missed a turn.

The pain in her midsection was beginning to lessen. Perhaps she was only pinned and there wasn’t internal damage. She hoped so. She didn’t want to postpone the wedding if possible. Even with a catastrophe like a car crash, she didn’t want to keep Jake waiting.

Had she actually called out Charlie’s name? Why had she done that? She supposed that it was because she believed in the afterlife. She believed in God. She also believed somewhere beneath her consciousness that if Charlie could hear her, he would help her because he had worshipped her on earth. Why would he not in the great beyond?

She shook her head to clear it of the crazy thoughts. If anyone came to rescue her, it would be Jake—the man who took charge and knew what to do in situations like these. He was a natural leader, one of the many attributes that she so admired about his personality. Although he had been sloppy drunk at the party and had been hauled off to the private bar in the clubhouse by several of his giggling friends, she was sure he would sober up and come looking for her when she didn’t call after several hours.

These thoughts were suddenly washed from her mind as a pale glow began to light up the ditch that the car had landed in.

A car! she thought, and her heart leapt with hope. Surely they would see the broken guardrails and the trail of debris where the Mercedes had cascaded sideways over the shoulder, coming to rest on its top.

The light became brighter and brighter, yet she could hear no sound of an engine. The light also seemed off somehow. It was bluish, not the pale gold or bright white of normal headlights. It also shimmered, as if the light were shone through depths of water and filtered to its base color.

The light continued to brighten until it lit up the entire area inside the car. It grew and grew in brilliance, and Carolyn shaded her eyes with her bloodied hand to block it.

There was a flash so bright that it lit up afterimages of the car’s interior, even through her closed eyes and shielding hand. Carolyn opened her eyes when her name was spoken from several feet away.

“Carrie.”

It was simple. It was quiet. And it was Charlie’s voice that had said it. Carolyn blinked away the night blindness that had invaded her vision after the flash of light. A soft glow now emanated from a form several feet away. She blinked again and her sight became clear enough to see what was before her, and she gasped.

It was Charlie. He was lying on his back, almost casually, on the roof of the car. He seemingly had squeezed through the shattered windshield. He was young again, maybe in his early twenties, when she had first met him. His dark hair hung low near his ears, and the easy smile she knew so well was on his lips. He was the source of the blue light. It seeped from his skin and enveloped him like he was soaking in some sort of shimmering glow. He was looking at her with his soft eyes, and there was love there. Even after death, he still held her on a pedestal.

“Carrie.” He breathed the word, and it seemed to flow easily through the air and penetrated her consciousness without passing through her ears. It was as if he was speaking directly to her mind.

“Oh God, Charlie! It’s a miracle! Help me, Charlie! I’m stuck. I need you!” She strained against the steering wheel to no avail, and then reached out to where Charlie lay on his back.

Charlie smiled benevolently at her and nodded. “You need me?” The words again were soft and seemed to pass through her skull and into her brain without effort.

“Yes, oh God, Charlie! I’ve missed you! Please help me, honey!” She strained her arms again as she reached around the twisted metal of the car toward the apparition of her dead husband.

He shimmered brightly again and reached toward her. Their hands stretched, and just as they were about to touch, Charlie dropped his hand back to his side.

Surprise bloomed across Carolyn’s face as she watched Charlie’s soft and easy smile turn to a slight frown that creased his face, as though he had been slashed with a blade and scarred.

“Where’s your lover when you need him?” Charlie asked.

Carolyn blinked at the words. What was happening? He had stopped reaching out for her, and now he was bringing up Jake?

“I loved you and you tore out my heart, you worthless, money-grubbing, cheating whore.” The words were smooth and without emotion. They flew into the deepest part of her mind and rang like a struck brass bell. “I built my life around you. I worked for you, and only you. Do you know I actually hated being a mechanic? I couldn’t stand it, but it was the only job I knew how to do. I wanted to go back to school, but I put your ambitions first. Look where it got me.”

The words had startled her at first by how they had entered her mind seemingly through osmosis, but now a rage began to build within her. Angel or not, no one spoke to Carolyn Michaels that way.

“You pathetic excuse for a man! My only regret in our marriage is that I didn’t cheat on you sooner! Maybe you would’ve blown your head off a long time ago, and I could have had years of happiness instead of only months!” Her anger seemed to break against his calm like the swell of a storm dissipating against a wall of granite. The smell of gasoline was now cloying, almost unbearable as it thrust itself up her nose. She shook her head to clear it, hoping that her dead husband would disappear, but he remained where he was.

Charlie smiled again at her, yet now there was malevolence in his grin as he leaned in close to her. “You pitiful waste of a woman. You don’t even know it, but your Jake’s already got a little number on the side. He’s with her right now; he called her the moment you left the clubhouse. Oh, what a catch you have there, but hey, I think you’re perfect for each other.”

Carolyn’s rage frothed inside her and then boiled over. She lashed out with her left fist to strike the apparition, to wipe the lying words from its mouth, to send it away from her, rescue or not.

Her engagement ring struck a piece of steel that was jutting into the driver’s-side area. Sparks flickered in the dimly lit car from the platinum ring on steel and ignited the gasoline that had been slowly creeping into the car. The flames erupted with a thump, and Charlie’s aura seemed to dim slightly in the fire as it began to make its way toward him.

Panic filled Carolyn’s pinned stomach, and she started to struggle vainly against the carbon-fiber steering wheel, which would not move. Through the haze of smoke that began to fill the car, she could see Charlie was starting to fade.

“Charlie! You can’t leave me here! Help me! You can’t leave me! You’re an angel, for God’s sake!” she screamed.

Charlie suddenly intensified to a brighter brilliance of blue and slid near her through the flames, which were beginning to lick closer and closer like eager tongues. His hand reached out to cup her face, and she was surprised to feel extreme heat in his touch, almost as if there was an ethereal fire burning within him. A look of gentleness slid across his face as he stared deeply into her now-panicked, pleading eyes.

“Darling, who said I went to heaven?”

OLD DOG

The old dog sat at the end of its thin rusty chain and stared balefully from under its drooping eyelids at the red-haired teenager who stood before it. Its head hung near the middle of its body, and its tail was curled in close around its back legs in a protective gesture.

“Fuckin’ stupid dog,” the teenager muttered as he bent at his heavy waist and picked up another egg-sized stone that lay near his feet. The boy straightened and hefted the smooth rock in his right hand. His gaze swung from the rock to the yellow lab that sat at the very end of its chain in the desolate, weed-choked yard.

In one motion the boy pulled his right hand up close to his chest and cupped it tenderly with his left, while unsteadily bringing his left leg up in a classic pitcher’s stance. His right hand arced back and over his head, then he dropped his left leg to the ground and flung the stone through the air as hard as he could. It sailed through the cool evening air and smacked solidly against the ribs of the old yellow lab.

The dog immediately yelped in the way only dogs can, with heartfelt pain at the betrayal by its best friend. It stood and began to pace back and forth at the length of its chain, trying to get away from the ache that was forming in its side. It looked mournfully through watery eyes at the redheaded teenager, as its cries of pain echoed off of the nearby abandoned houses.

“Ha, ha, ha, you stupid fucking dog!” yelled the teenager.

The dog continued to pace back and forth at the end of its chain. Eventually it settled down on its side and looked with its sad eyes at the boy standing on the sidewalk.

The boy’s laughter slowly trailed off and stopped. He glanced nervously down the deserted street to his right, and then to his left. There were no cars moving down the quiet lanes of the dead-end road. There was no one in the front yards of the houses that stood like abandoned landmarks of a long-dead past. There was no life on this street, save this old dog.

He had waited for this moment for quite some time. His hands had started tingling in the way that was becoming familiar to him, as if he was holding a large electrical wire. He had come here often after school, riding his bike several blocks out of the way to this house so he could throw stones at the dog. His mother and father thought he was tutoring a younger kid in algebra at an afterschool program. They were so gullible. And stupid. He hated watching them in the morning, holding each other’s hands and drinking coffee together. He couldn’t stand their company.

At least it was better since Shelly. That had put a dent in their wagon, as his friend Dean would say. He especially couldn’t stand the way his father ruffled his hair and called him “sport” as he left for work. Sometimes he imagined his father having a horrible accident on his way to work. Maybe he would get T-boned on one of the suburban back roads. Or maybe a tire would fly off a semi and he would swerve off the interstate and into an overpass. He’d wonder if he’d be able to keep from smiling when a solemn-faced teacher or policeman took him aside and told him his father wouldn’t be coming home. Would he be able to hold back the questions that would want to come flooding out? Will it be a closed coffin? Did he burn to death?

The redhead snickered under his breath as he looked at the dog that was staring back at him. An idea suddenly sprang to his mind. He would pretend the dog was his mother or father—their expressions were about the same sometimes. He examined the dog again and was repulsed by the condition of the animal. Its hair seemed to be coming off in clumps, and he could count four humps of vertebrae poking at the skin of its back. Each rib was clearly defined like sickle blades, and the tail was missing three or four inches from its end.

I’ll be doing it a favor, he thought gleefully as he took a step across the brown lawn. The dead grass crackled under his feet like small bones breaking, and his red-freckled hand crept into his pants pocket and grasped the short folding knife that was hidden there. His parents didn’t know he had this either. He took it to school every day. He expected a teacher or another student to find it on him. He didn’t know what would happen if someone saw him with it, but he had ideas about what he would do to them.

As he walked, he unfolded the blade to its full two-inch length and grinned at the old dog. “Hey, pup, how ya doin’, old boy? Had a tough time lately? Let Andy fix it for you, huh, buddy?”

The dog glanced quickly from side to side, as if hoping to spot someone who would come to its rescue. It began to back up with the boy’s approach, and then it slowly sat on its haunches, resigned to its fate.

The teenager smiled again, but there was no warmth there. This wasn’t the county fair or the movies. This was so much better. His hand wavered menacingly back and forth, the short blade protruding from his wrinkled fist.

All at once, the dog began to heave in silent spasms, its eyes never leaving the face of the boy, who stopped several feet away. Its sides kept heaving, and soon the boy saw its throat convulsing. The dog’s mouth opened, and it hacked the way only dogs can do. Instead of a pool of milky white foam mixed with chewed grass, it issued forth a small black pebble, which fell to the ground between its feet.

The boy’s mouth hung slightly open, and he huffed a short laugh before stepping forward again. As he leaned toward the sallow-eyed dog, he heard something. It was a faint buzzing like a faraway power line on a humid day. He stopped and glanced over his shoulder as he tried to discern where the sound was coming from. After a moment of searching, he looked to the ground directly below him and squatted down.

The black pebble that the dog had hacked up wasn’t a pebble at all. It was a fly. A big gleaming black fly, the kind that sometimes looked green at the right angle or distance. The kind of fly you’d find on a windowsill or trapped between a screen and glass. It had only one wing, and several of its legs were missing. The boy looked closer, leaning nearer to the dog, which also was staring down at the fly. It was crawling across a dead leaf, two of its remaining front legs pulling it and the wing batting back and forth as if it kept expecting to rise into the air.

The boy straightened up quickly, and his body shuddered involuntarily. He looked down at the dog, his eyes squinted with red eyebrows pulled down in a scowl. The dog stared at the fly for another moment, and then it began to heave again. The dog hacked and several more maimed flies flew from its mouth. They hit the ground and began to crawl in the same direction as the first, toward the boy’s sneakered feet.

He took a step back, and his mind rebelled at the spectacle and against the thoughts slowly surfacing like bodies in a swamp. He stared at the flies. They were all missing either one or both wings. As he squinted further, he realized some were even missing heads.

The dog was heaving again, and the boy could see something dark in its throat, something dark and furry.

A kitten fell free of the dog’s mouth and uncurled from the tight ball it had tucked itself into. Its fur was black and speckled with two white spots on its chest. Its face slowly turned toward the boy, and that’s when he made the first utterance since he had spoken to the dog. It was a small choked sound, as if a whimper had tried to escape his throat but failed.

The kitten’s eyes and lips were gone. They had been crudely cut away, leaving two gaping red holes and a crimson grin that highlighted just how white its small needle-like teeth were. It began to limp in the boy’s direction. It was limping, he realized, because it was missing its front right foot, the one he had cut it off when he was eleven.

The boy started backing away from the scene before him, but the dog’s hacking made him pause again. In horror, he watched to see what the beast produced next. Two more mangled kittens fell from the dog’s mouth. One had a broken back and dragged its useless legs behind it as it crawled. The other was almost fully skinned, its small pink muscles and tendons exposed to the cool fall air.

In the background of the macabre display, the dog was hacking almost constantly now. Several puppies issued forth, their intestines trailing after them like forgotten leashes. A dozen white rats scurried out of the dog’s convulsing jaws and began to make their way in the boy’s direction, even without the aid of their heads.

The teenager took another step back, his heel hooking in a branch that he was stepping on with his other foot, and he fell heavily onto his ample bottom. His breath whooshed out of him, and he quickly scrambled onto his stomach as he tried to crawl away. Pairs of small, sharp fangs and claws sunk into the tender skin of his left calf, and he shrieked with pain as he glanced down to his leg with bulging eyes.

The skinned kitten had caught up with him and was perched on his lower leg, its black eyes glaring accusingly at him. He had killed it when he was twelve. He had fed it milk behind their garage, until one day he had taken it into the woods behind their house and returned two hours later, his knees covered in dirt stains and hands bloodied to the wrists.

Now, that kitten was gnawing hungrily on his calf, drawing his blood. The boy kicked out with his opposite foot and felt the kitten’s body tear loose from his pants leg with a rip.

Two more half-moons of pain blossomed on his right hamstring, and he realized the puppies had caught up with him. They were biting over and over into the soft flesh there, and he screamed as he felt a chunk of muscle tear and separate from his leg.

He flipped onto his back and scooted away from the dozens of slaughtered animals, a thick line of blood now running from the bottom of both pant legs. If he could just get up and get to his bike, but his muscles were now betraying him. They held no strength to stand, and it was all he could do to slide backward on his rump. He risked a glance over his shoulder, and cursed loudly through thick tears when he saw that he was still half a dozen yards from where his bike was parked on the sidewalk.

A loud snapping sound drew his blurred vision back to where the dog still sat. Its lower jaw had broken loose from its skull and was beginning to unhinge like an anaconda. The boy squeezed his eyes shut. If he willed this away, it would be gone when he opened his eyes. If he truly believed that this wasn’t real, it wouldn’t be. This was the real world. Dogs did not cough up dead animals that started moving. Dead kittens didn’t bite, and headless rats had no navigational sense. It just couldn’t be.

When he opened his eyes, the scene hadn’t changed much. However, for some reason the animals had all stopped to watch him, both those with eyes and those without. They stood in small semicircular rows in front of him like some ghoulish theatre where he was the star on stage. Oh yes, they had come to see him and no one else—no one else would do.

The dog was hacking again, and though he didn’t want to look, there was no stopping his eyes from flashing to where the old mutt sat. This time the dog was heaving with its elongated jaws pointing toward the deepening dark of the evening sky, and when the boy saw what was emerging from the dog’s mouth, his heart stuttered and a scream began and quickly died in his chest.

Small pale fingers gripped the edges of the dog’s jaws as though its mouth was the lip of a well or some sort of portal. On some level the teenager believed it was just that: a portal. All other conscious thoughts were swept away by the sight before him. The hands attached to the fingers gripped and pulled, and a small wet crown of dark hair began to emerge from the dog’s throat. The hair gave way to thin white shoulders and a stunningly colorful yellow-and-pink bathing suit. Small, gray-tinged legs finally slid from the mouth of the dog, and the form of a little girl lay twitching on the ground amid the dead branches and curled leaves.

“Sh-Sh-Sh-Shelly?” The name escaped from his lips before he could stop himself.

The shaking form on the ground suddenly stiffened at the sound of his voice. Her head tilted up from the earth, and he could feel eyes locked on his own through the tangle of the dark hair. The small arms reached out, and the white wrinkled hands pushed the form into a kneeling position.

Raisin fingers, his mother had called them, he remembered—the way the skin looked after being in water for too long. How many times had she said that when taking him out of the bath? The little girl’s raisin fingers were now reaching for him as she gained her feet.

His dead little sister began to walk across the brown yard toward where he was lying helplessly, half surrounded by the animals he had tortured and killed.

“Shelly, I didn’t see you fall in!” his voice shrieked from between clenched teeth. He tried to get one of his feet beneath him, but both of the eviscerated puppies issued growls much too deep to have come from their vocal cords. He dropped back onto his backside quickly.

“Mom was on the phone inside! It was her fault! I didn’t mean it! Please!” He began to slide on the rough ground, but his strength faded again, and he gave up trying to move. Tears streamed down his freckled beet-red face as the pale corpse of his sister moved closer and closer, one unsteady step after another.

“Please, I’m sorry, Shell. I wish you were still here with us!” As the lie left his lips, images began to flood his head with sharp colors and angles as if they were being forced into his mind from the outside. His mother walking into the house to get the phone and saying over her shoulder to watch Shelly by the pool. His sister splashing her feet in the deep end. His knee nudging her in the back of her pink-and-yellow swimsuit. The water spraying up from her flailing arms in bright silver arcs. Her brown eyes searching for help. Her mouth opening beneath the surface of the chlorinated water as she slowly begins to sink to the bottom of the pool.

Now, her fingers were reaching around his throat, and he was being pushed back onto the ground. He couldn’t stop her, even though he knew her four-year-old body couldn’t possibly be as strong as his. She gripped with her raisin fingers, and he felt them sink deep into the soft skin of his throat. His eyes pleaded with her, and a choking squeak slipped from his mouth like air from a pinched balloon. He could see Shelly’s eyes behind the curtain of hair. They were no longer brown, but were now a deep black. So black, like midnight miles deep in an ocean. That’s where he was: underwater. And he couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t breathe.

The dog’s mouth slipped easily over and around the paralyzed form of the redheaded teenager. Its pink lips slid over his face and then stretched obscenely wide over his shoulders. Its front incisors clicked against his belt buckle as it squirmed and dug its back feet into the cold earth to gain leverage. The teenager’s legs slid together, and the heels of his sneakers snapped against each other quietly as the lab’s jaws cinched tighter.

Soon the sneakers disappeared into the dark mouth of the old dog, and its lower jaw snapped audibly back into place. A small white hand reached beneath the dog’s neck and unhooked the rusty chain from its collar. The dog chuffed with what could have been a thanks and turned from the now-empty yard to the street. It paused for a moment to relieve itself on the bike that stood on the sidewalk, then trotted off into the coming night.

PALE MAN

The three SUVs ripped down the winding valley road with purpose, like a line of beetles intent on feeding within a newly fallen corpse. The northern Idaho sun glinted off the hot windshields and reflected on the valley’s floor in blazing arcs of light. Plumes of dust from the dirt road rose up around the vehicles, and one by one they slowed to a stop on the crest of a small hill on the valley’s floor.

The passenger door of one of the SUVs opened, and a man of medium height stepped out onto the rough brown grass that covered the valley. The grass slowly gave way to the rock of the mountain ridges that ran on either side of the valley like twin spinal cords jutting from a malnourished back. The man wore dark sunglasses that gave no hint of the deep brown eyes behind them. His build was that of a man who saw the importance of exercise, but it was expensive muscle beneath the cool gray dress shirt he wore. There was no splitting wood for him, only the cool tiled floors of three-hundred-dollar-a-month sports clubs and shining weights with cushioned handles. The black tailored dress pants he wore hung smoothly over the mirrored shine of his dark wingtips.

He gazed over the grassland that stretched the length of the valley between the white-tipped mountain ranges on either side. Money, he thought. It was here. Silent, but here. In stacks of hundreds, too many to count, just waiting to be deposited in his bank account, the zeros lining up so orderly. Thinking of all the money buried just a few hundred feet beneath his feet nearly aroused him physically.

Another man in pressed khakis and a loose T-shirt rounded the SUV and looked at the man in sunglasses expectantly. After a few moments, the man in the dark glasses turned and surveyed the crew that was assembling behind him. Men in work shirts and boots and a few in suits. He smiled thinly and breathed the smell of money deep into his lungs.

“All right, this is the site. I want a full twenty-four-hour drilling team set up here by the end of the week, and I want drilling to commence no later than noon on Monday. Jones, you’ll help me oversee site production and condition.”

The man in the khakis nodded and smiled.

“Allenson, your team will be setting up the drill site a quarter mile down in the valley. You can start hauling in the equipment immediately, and Jones will get you the exact coordinates for the boring hole.”

Elliot Rydon strode past the work-clothed men, who began pointing and nodding to one another as they made plans for the site that would be built later that day. When he reached the two men in suits, he stopped and gave another thin smile.

“So, what do you gentlemen think? Does this or does this not look like the newest multibillion-dollar drill site for Emerson Industries?”

The two suited men looked at the surrounding ranges, then past Rydon at the valley, then at each other, before the taller of the two spoke.

“Listen, Rydon, you’ve come through before, and that’s why we followed you out here today. But we passed a sign on the way in saying this was the Nez Perce Reservation. That little fact wasn’t mentioned in the memo you sent out last week. There’s no way that we’ll be cleared to drill here. This is a sovereign nation, for Christ’s sake. We’ll be locked up in court faster than you can say Indian.”

Elliot smiled at this, and his sunglasses glinted in the bright sunlight that shone down on the valley.

“Don’t you gentlemen worry about the local tribe. I have a meeting with the chief this afternoon in Glaston. I have a feeling things will go our way.”

Elliot left the two men standing beside their dark SUV and walked quickly to his own. Jones was already waiting in the driver’s seat when Elliot slammed the door and settled into the cooled leather of his own seat.

“Where to now, boss?” Jones asked, pulling the shift lever down into drive.

“Back into town, we have the meeting of a lifetime.”

The meeting room was extremely chilly, almost to the point of being uncomfortably so. Rydon and Jones sat on one side of a highly polished oak table in the narrow boardroom of Elkson and Associates. The building looked out of place in the rural town of Glaston, which sat nearly a hundred miles to the north of Lewiston. It rose above the other structures like a proud king among his kneeling subjects.

For a few moments, Rydon had felt nervous outside the looming structure. Maybe he was out of his league here. He had never dealt one-on-one with the Nez Perce before, only through mediators during negotiations. They always came back with the same result: the tribe had held strong, and no amount of money had been able to sway them to let the white men drill on their land.

Well, this time is different, Elliot thought, and felt a small smile beginning to creep across his cleanly shaven face.

The mahogany door on the opposite side of the room opened suddenly, revealing a dark-skinned Nez Perce man in a black suit. He was young, not out of his twenties if Elliot’s guess was right, and his eyes were dark and calculating. Elliot felt them quickly scan over him with slight disdain, before they hardened again and became emotionless. The man’s hair was tied back in a tight ponytail, and a small gold earring hung from his left earlobe. The man took two steps and then set the small briefcase on the table before extending his hand to the two white men.

“Gentlemen, my name is Jason Elkson, and let me introduce Chief Timothy Silent Fox.”

An older man stepped out from behind the young lawyer and surveyed them with deep-set gray eyes. His hair was long, nearly down to his waist, and it had once been pure black but was now striped with the gray and white of time. His skin was leathery and deep brown like the desert floor. He wore a loose-fitting white shirt and some sort of large necklace made from straps of tanned leather and feathers, which looked as though they had fallen from some sort of predatory bird’s tail.

Rydon and Jones stood, both smiling politely at the older man. Elliot extended his hand as a greeting.

“Hello, Chief Timothy, very glad to meet you,” Elliot said as he waited for the old Nez Perce to take his hand.

Silent Fox stood true to his name. He stared at the two men on the other side of the table as if they were no more than rocks to be studied on a hike. His hand did not extend, and after several seconds of uncomfortable silence, Elliot dropped his own and raised his eyebrows in exasperation.

“Let’s just get started, shall we?” Elkson said as he seated himself at the table.

Elliot and Jones both sat, and after a moment Silent Fox settled into a chair to Elkson’s left. The dark-skinned lawyer opened his small briefcase and pulled out a folder of legal documents and quickly slid it across the table toward the two men on the opposite side.

“Well, gentlemen, I think you’ll be appeased with these. These are the rulings by Judge Reinhart marked from the laws passed statewide fifteen years ago regarding drilling for oil or any other similar refining processes on Nez Perce lands. I’m sure you’ll see that the land you’re inquiring about, although at the farthest edge of the reservation, is still on the reservation,” Elkson said.

Elliot opened the folder and thumbed through the pages with distaste. After a few moments, he folded the back cover of the folder over the front and smiled at the young lawyer.

Elkson stared back with no emotion. Then he said, “So, if that answers your questions, I do have other pressing business to attend to, and Chief Timothy is also needed elsewhere, so if you’ll excuse—”

Elkson was cut off as Elliot reached down and brought out his own folder with a gold drill head emblazoned on the front, with the words Emerson Industries below it. He casually slid the folder over to the young lawyer and smiled.

“What’s this?” Elkson asked, opening the folder’s cover. He started reading the documents inside.

“Oh, it’s just the deed and title to the land in question, which has been recently acquired by Emerson Industries.” Elliot let the words hang over the room like an oppressive fog for a few moments before continuing. “You see, Mr. Elkson, there was actually a misrepresentation of land boundaries when the reservation documents were originally drawn up. The valley in question was thought to belong within the Nez Perce Reservation, but upon closer inspection it was discovered that there was a misreading of longitude and latitude. You see, this valley is actually perpendicular to the flats just outside of the long plains, I think they’re called, not inside as the original documents stated.”

“That doesn’t matter, Mr. Rydon. This valley is still within the borders of the Nez Perce Reservation. You cannot legally drill on that location,” Elkson replied.

“Well actually, Judge Reinhart himself signed the deed document last week when the contract was drawn up. Emerson Industries made an offer to the state of Idaho when these insights came to light, and the state took it.”

Elliot’s eyes glinted in the harsh glare of the overhead fluorescents, and his smile widened to fill up his whole face. Money, he thought. Enough money and anything was possible. A few bribes to the document holders in the state archive department, one extremely skilled forgery artist that Elliot had used before, a large lump sum deposited into Judge Reinhart’s account, and the transaction had been completed. What was half a million dollars when there was over a billion flowing beneath the valley’s floor?

Elkson’s brow furrowed with concentration at first, then with anger after several minutes of reading. He shook his head in disbelief as he shut the folder. His dark eyes stared at Elliot, trying to read him or break him.

But Elliot had dealt with many hardened businessmen, and he now realized this young Nez Perce was no match for him. His smile remained on his face.

“I don’t know how you did this, but I’ll find out,” Elkson said. “And when I do, I’m going to shut Emerson Industries down, do you understand me? You won’t get away with this, not on our land.”

Elliot merely continued smiling, nodding before he stood. “Well, if there isn’t anything further, my associate and I will be going.”

As Jones and Elliot began to round the table, there was a small sound. Both men stopped. The sound repeated itself, and Elliot realized it was the chief clearing his throat. If the old man hadn’t done so, Elliot would have forgotten that he was still in the room. Before Elliot could regain momentum and walk to the closed mahogany door, Silent Fox started speaking.

“There was once a creature that lived many years ago in these lands. It was pale and it walked on two legs. It was strong. Too strong to fear any other animal that walked the land. It did not fear the call of the Wolf. It did not fear the Grizzly’s teeth. It did not fear the Cougar’s claws. It devoured anything that crossed its path, and its hunger was insatiable. For many years it roamed these lands, killing and eating whatever it pleased.

“One day, when nearly all the animals of the earth were gone, clever Coyote decided that this menace must be destroyed, so he intentionally crossed paths with the creature. When the Pale Man opened its jaws to eat Coyote, Coyote dove down its throat with a sharp flint rock in his mouth and pierced the creature’s heart. It bled out on the valley floor, and Coyote divided its remains into the different peoples of the earth. The heart he saved for last, with which he created the Nez Perce.

“The spirit of the Pale Man still roams these lands and needs only be awakened, for its hunger lingers here, waiting for fresh blood and the soft flesh of those who would cross its path.”

The room fell silent. Elkson’s head was lowered and his eyes were closed in what seemed to be some sort of reverie. The old man stared at Elliot with dead eyes that bored into him like two drill bits.

Elliot blinked and smiled again. “Well, what a nice story. Thanks very much, Chief Tim Tim?. I’ll be sure to tell that one to my children when I have them.” Without another glace back, Elliot walked out with Jones close behind him.

When the elevator dinged its arrival in the lobby, Jones turned to Elliot as they stepped out onto the highly polished floors that led to the street.

“So, you afraid of the bogeyman, boss?” Jones smiled and raised his eyebrows expectantly.

“What a fucking old crock of shit. I’m guessing that was an actual attempt to scare us with that mumbo-jumbo bullshit of legends and whatnot. It’s almost pathetic—yeah, I actually feel bad for him.” Elliot fell silent as they stepped into the heat of the afternoon. His eyes narrowed before he started speaking again. “But I do want you to keep a close watch on this operation. I don’t want any fuckups on this one.”

“Boss, all the jobs I run go smooth, you know that.”

“Just do me a favor and get a few of the guys you use from time to time to be around the drill site when it’s up and running. Two or three should do. No legend is going to mess up this operation, but a few young braves with delusions of honor could. That ground is private property of Emerson now, and as such we have the right to protect it. Don’t you agree?”

Jones smiled in a way that gave even Elliot goose bumps.

“Don’t worry, boss, no one’s going to crash your party.”

Joshua crouched on the overhanging cliff face on the south side of the Valley of Sun, as his people called it. His dark eyes squinted at the shapes some six hundred feet below his perch. The machinery was clearly visible, enormous earthmovers and backhoes along with several containers that looked like boxcars. There were also dozens of long rods bundled up like the expensive firewood Joshua had seen for sale outside of the gas station on the edge of the reservation. The men, working the machines and walking in the hot sun on the valley floor, were harder to make out. Their arms swung at their sides, and each wore a white helmet and gloves. Joshua could almost imagine that they were wind-up tin soldiers invading his homeland not with guns and tanks but with dump trucks and drills.

The young man’s upper lip drew back in a snarl, and he spit off the side of the cliff, hoping that the wind would magically carry his saliva down onto the head of a worker. After a few more moments of watching the movements below, Joshua stood to his full height and bolted back over the top of the range the way he had come. His Yamaha dirt bike lay where he had left it, and without looking back over his shoulder, he kicked the machine into life and noisily sped away down the side of the mountain.

Silent Fox opened the door to his home with his free hand and breathed in the smells that he knew so well. There was the smell of the blueberries, which he and Joshua had picked yesterday, that were drying in the kitchen. There was the smell of dried leather from the saddle he was molding in his basement. And there were the mingling scents of too many herbs and spices to count.

His home was just that: a home. It wasn’t something one would expect a chief of an entire sovereign nation to live in. It was a squat structure built over a full basement, where he did his crafts. The arid wind had dried and flaked some of the paint on the outside walls. He made a mental note to set a workday with Joshua to scrape the outside of the house so he could paint it when he got some free time.

At the thought of the boy, Silent Fox paused and listened to the quiet of the house. He couldn’t hear the telltale sounds that told him his grandson was home, such as the squeak of a floorboard in the kitchen in front of the fridge or the swearing rap songs he sometimes had playing in his room. The old man nodded silently as he remembered not seeing Joshua’s bike parked in its usual spot beneath the large maple.

He shuffled into the shadowy kitchen and set the groceries down on the counter. The beef roast he had laid out in the sink earlier that day had thawed enough to cut, and after a few minutes of arranging bowls and knives, he set to carving it. As he worked, his mind began to wander back to the meeting with the white men who had been troubling him for almost a week.

His hands worked deftly as he cut up the vegetables for the stew, and he snorted when he saw in his mind’s eye the sneering look on the face of the man who had stolen the rights to his people’s land. Silent Fox knew he had been lying. He knew it the moment the man slid the folder across the table to Laughing Elk’s son. It was in the way his hands didn’t move in time with his eyes or speech. Silent Fox could see these things clearly; he had been able to read people this way all his life. He supposed that was one of the reasons he had become chief of his people.

He sighed and remembered how angry Jason had been after the two white men left. He had sworn and cursed their existence, while at the same time vowing to right this wrong against their people. Silent Fox had smiled and assured him that all would work out for the best. In one way or another, it always did. He had seen seventy-five summers come and go, and that was one truth that had yet to fail.

As he lit the burner of his small stove and placed the stew pot over the flame, he could hear the high whine of his grandson’s motorbike. In a few minutes, the whine became a low rumble and then stopped abruptly.

Joshua banged into the house without preamble and began yelling for the old man before the door was shut.

“I’m in the kitchen, Joshua,” Silent Fox said, just loud enough to be heard. The old man hoped that each example he set for his grandson would eventually sink into the young man’s thick skull. Joshua had his father’s will and his mother’s looks. It was a dangerous combination as far as Silent Fox was concerned, but he smiled nonetheless when the young man stomped into the room like a whirlwind.

“They’re almost ready to drill!” Joshua half yelled as he sat heavily in one of the two wooden chairs near the small kitchen table. The young man nearly vibrated with energy, and his dark eyes roamed over objects he had seen thousands of times, taking in each one as if it were an alien artifact.

“There must be thirty trucks and seventy men down in the valley! You should see the way they’re raping our land, Grandpa! It’s horrible! The white pigs. If this was earlier times, it would get dealt with exactly how it should!”

The old man let the younger rant without comment. He had a slightly bemused look on his face when he turned and leaned against the sink to watch his grandson angrily flail his hands about his head.

“They have no right! You said yourself that they were lying!”

“Yes, I did, and they are. But no matter, the old days when our people fought bravely and died for the land we stand on are gone. Everything is determined with paperwork these days, paperwork and talk. What will be, will be. We cannot change the will of the world. The warrior spirit lives on, but only in the hearts of lawyers and judges. These are the only warriors that hold weight anymore,” the old man said, turning back to the stove to stir the stew.

“What about the Pale Man?”

The words stopped Silent Fox, his hand with the spoon frozen over the stew pot. It was as if the words had mortared him in place and only his eyes were free to move. His own warning to the white men came rushing back, and a heavy feeling weighed on his shoulders. After a few moments, he licked his dry lips and turned to face the young man before him, who was so much like his own son that it was unnerving at times to look upon his proud features.

Joshua knew he had hit a nerve. His grandfather’s eyes had gone cold. Normally there was a flicker of humor or happiness behind the gray eyes, but with the mention of the legend, the fire had disappeared.

“The Pale Man is just a legend, Joshua, and I will not speak of it under this roof.”

“I know there’s truth to the stories. I’ve heard you tell the people during celebration. I’ve seen fear in your face when you say its name. The Pale Man could right the wrongs that have been done to us, it could save our people from the rape and humiliation that the whites are committing in the valley, I know—”

“You know nothing of what you speak!” Silent Fox roared, startling the younger man. The fire was burning behind his eyes again, but it was a cold flame without reason or confinement. Joshua could see that the old man was angry and afraid.

“It is legend, nothing more! Foolish tales told around fires to embolden ideals that have long since died. Ghost, smoke, and shadow are all you seek. I will have no more of this talk in my house! You can choose to abide or you can leave.”

Joshua sat motionless for a few moments before he pulled his feet under him, and then he stood from the chair. He towered over his grandfather by nearly four inches, though Silent Fox was not a small man. His dark eyes reflected his grandfather’s anger, and Silent Fox could see that he was no longer looking at a child. Joshua was a man.

“I’ll just grab a few things and go. I’d rather spend the night outside than within the house of a coward,” Joshua said through clenched teeth. The young man turned and left the kitchen quietly.

Silent Fox heard him rummaging in his room for a few minutes. Then Joshua strode past the doorway with a large backpack slung over one shoulder. A few minutes after the front door slammed shut, the old man heard the Yamaha come to life and scream away from the house. Silent Fox listened to the receding whine of the bike until it blended into the quiet of the house and was gone. He shook his head and blinked slowly before turning and stirring the stew, which was beginning to bubble.

The small fire crackled within the ring of low stones that contained it, jumping as though it longed to escape its confines and tear across the dry land alighting everything it came across.

The fire danced in Joshua’s eyes, which were like two miniature mirrors. He sat cross-legged, his hands cupping his knees. The small camp he had made looked like a crash site. There was a one-man tent and a bundle of firewood to his left, and his dirt bike stood like a sentry off to his right.

He could hear the occasional bang of pipes or the starting of an engine at the drilling site over the small rise near his camp. He had stood for an hour before dark watching the progress down below. With each erection of equipment on the valley’s floor, his anger grew until he couldn’t stand to watch any longer, and he had returned to his makeshift home for the night.

A pan of canned beans and bacon sat bubbling on a flat rock a few inches outside the fire ring, but Joshua made no move to eat his dinner. He was lost in the thoughts that cascaded through his mind like rain on the fields. Why did his grandfather seem so reluctant to stand up for himself and the members of their nation? Was he becoming infirm in his old age? Where had the spirit of the warrior that had once been so prevalent within his people gone?

Joshua knew he was somewhat of an oddity. There weren’t many youths still keen on the old ways. After high school most of his friends had moved off the reservation in search of colleges and jobs that didn’t hold with the ways of Nez Perce in the traditional sense. Joshua had always been enamored with the ceremonies, the stories, and the spiritualism that accompanied his heritage. He often felt utter disdain when he saw an old classmate return for a traditional celebration. He watched their polite smiles as they walked among the earlier generations, as if they were in a history museum and not surrounded by their family.

Joshua did realize one thing from the confrontation with his grandfather: there was some truth to the Pale Man legend. The fear in Silent Fox’s eyes had affirmed at least that much, and deep inside he knew that if he was to learn more, he would have to do so without his grandfather’s help.

Joshua’s reverie was broken when he heard several rocks slide against one another just outside the fire’s ring of light. He squinted in the direction of the sound and wondered absentmindedly if a bear had wandered close, tempted by the smell of his food cooking.

Soon the sound repeated, and then he heard more movement to his right. Joshua stood and searched the dancing darkness with his eyes, trying to spot movement or a shape that didn’t belong within the rough outcrops of rock and sage. His hand went to the sheathed knife that hung from his belt, and he drew the short blade that glittered in the firelight.

All at once several men stepped into the camp from different directions. Joshua counted four of them, all dressed in dark green fatigue pants and loose button-up shirts. Each man carried a short menacing-looking rifle that hung from a sling around his shoulder. They moved quietly and with purpose, and as they neared he could see that they all had smiles on their faces. A solidly built man wearing a white shirt stepped closer than the others, gazing at Joshua with a slight sneer as he surveyed the knife in the youth’s hand and the defiant look on his face.

“Nice camp you have here, my friend,” the man said silkily as he began to circle Joshua in a wide swath. The man looked at Joshua’s bike and the small tent, then at the beans, which were beginning to turn black near the fire. “Burnin’ your dinner, though,” the man drawled.

“You don’t have any business here. Leave,” Joshua said in what he hoped was a confident tone.

Laughter rippled through the men as they glanced around at one another. The man in the white shirt dipped his head, and when he raised it, he was smiling again.

“Actually, you don’t have any business here, little buddy. You’re on the private property of Emerson Industries. So get your shit packed up on your cute little bike over there, and get your brown ass down that mountainside.”

Joshua looked from one man to another. Their hard features seemed more angular in the dancing light, and his anger was suddenly upon him like a rogue wave.

“You fucking bastards! You’re on Nez Perce land, this isn’t your home! Fuck you!” Joshua punctuated the last two words by spitting across the fire on the man in the white shirt.

The reaction was immediate, like two volatile liquids being mixed in a beaker. The man in the white shirt leapt the fire and kicked out at Joshua’s hand that held his short knife. Joshua tried to pull the knife up in defense, but the man’s hard-soled boot caught his wrist in a vicious upward soccer kick that sent the small blade spinning off into the darkness. Just as Joshua tried to throw a punch at the man’s square jaw, the man whipped the butt of his rifle around and connected solidly with Joshua’s temple.

The young Nez Perce fell to the hard soil as though his feet had been cut from under him. He moaned into the dirt, and a wide cut had opened on the right side of his head.

“Fucking Indians never learn. We took your land once, and we’ll do it again,” Jones said, eliciting uproarious laughter from the other three men. “Go ahead, boys, show him why it’s not a good idea to mess around on other people’s property.”

Joshua tried to raise his head off the ground, but the first man wound up and landed a solid kick to his rib cage. Joshua heard several ribs snap and screamed in pain. Another kick came from the left and caught him in the hip. Joshua rolled onto his side and tried to cover his head, but the last thing he saw was the way the firelight reflected off the design on the bottom of the combat boot swinging toward his face.

Elliot Rydon sat at a small steel table that had been set up at the back of a large canvas tent. Halogen lights powered by a nearby generator shone down and illuminated the interior like spotlights on a stage. An air conditioner hummed in the corner, and a water cooler bubbled. Many reports and complex graphs were scattered across the desk in front of Elliot, who sat staring past his steepled hands deep in thought.

He felt like a general on the front lines of a battlefield, surrounded by men who were willing to give up their lives for him. The victory he sought was not peace but money, and the war was being waged with drills and pipes rather than mortars and missiles.

The tent flap was suddenly thrown aside and Jones ducked in, his eyes flashing in the bright lights.

“And where have you been? I needed the latest core samples an hour ago,” Elliot said.

Jones walked briskly across the tent and stopped before the table. The light fell and died on the black machine gun that hung heavily across his chest. Elliot eyed the other man and the gun with equal scrutiny before raising his eyebrows, awaiting the response.

“Just like you said, boss, had to go rough up a young brave a little while ago,” Jones answered.

Elliot sat up straighter, and his attention sharpened to a needle point. He narrowed his eyes at Jones. “What happened? Where?”

“Lyle saw some sort of light reflecting off a bluff on the west ridge, so we went up to investigate. Young native kid was camped out up there, just over the rise. Got lippy when we told him to leave, so we showed him the door. Don’t worry, boss, he won’t be an issue.”

Elliot studied the man on the other side of the desk, and for a moment wondered if at some point in the future he would have to have Jones handled. The man was dangerous, like a wily pit bull on a short leash. Elliot nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Good, maybe send a little message to his friends too. Anything else?”

“No, the rest of the perimeter is clear, and the guys are stationed at their posts. What’s the schedule looking like?”

Elliot sighed deeply and settled back into the uncomfortable chair. “We’re actually on time for drilling, should cut the surface layer no later than seven a.m., so that’s good. I still have the execs breathing down my neck over the land takeover. That Indian lawyer’s been making a fucking stink at the corporate office every day for a week. He’s trying to prove the documents are forged. Don’t they ever know when to quit?”

Jones smiled and recalled his own words not a half hour before.

“Anyway, once I get the latest core samples, I’m out of here. I’ll be back in the morning, and I’ll most likely stay tomorrow night to oversee production if these readouts are right.”

“Just out of curiosity, boss, how much oil is down there?”

Elliot smiled and his eyes narrowed once again. The mention of oil always brought a smile to his face. Oil—yes, there was oil here, a substantial amount. Enough to add another zero onto the quarterly report for Emerson Industries, but he didn’t give two solid-gold shits about the oil. Little did Jones—or for that matter, anyone at Emerson—know why he really had such an interest in this land.

The brine water in the natural underground spring that lay beneath their feet was really what he was after. The dirty water that would be pumped out of the hole that would be drilled tomorrow was what gave him shivers every time he thought about it—or more importantly, what was in the water. Lithium, millions and millions of pounds of lithium were floating in the water. He had discovered the deposit in the spring months ago, when the oil field had been under research by Emerson. There were a select few who knew what was in that water, and now they were all on his private payroll.

The water would be pumped away from the drill site and into large holding tanks that were now waiting in the dark nearly five hundred yards away. Once these tanks were full, they would be transported to a warehouse where an exchange would be made with a buyer. Emerson was paying him $1.6 million for the completion of the drilling project. He would make forty times that amount from the lithium.

“Lots of oil, my friend, lots and lots.”

Jones nodded and said good night as he stepped out of the tent and into the darkness. Elliot leaned back in his chair and smiled as he laced his hands behind his head. He saw hazy zeros lining up before his half-closed eyes.

Joshua’s eyes fluttered open, and he was surprised to find himself face-down on the hot soil. He coughed suddenly, and the taste of blood filled his mouth. He gagged and curled up as pain began to flow throughout his body. It radiated from his broken ribs and into his bruised extremities. Tears began flowing from his eyes as he attempted to sit upright. After a moment of straining, he sat up, leaning heavily on his right arm, which was planted away from his body like a lone tent peg. Nausea flooded his stomach, and his head spun with vertigo. He threw up onto the ground in front of him. The vomit was reddish brown, and he choked from the pain in his ribs. After steadying himself from being sick, he looked around.

His bike still was where he had left it, but his tent had been knocked down. From the looks of it, it had been cut to shreds by several blades. His small cooking pan was bent and lay in the dirt just outside the ring of stones, which were now cold.

Joshua slowly got to his feet and stood. Neither of his legs felt broken, only bruised, and he nearly fell backward as another wave of dizziness hit him full force like a small tsunami. He assumed he had a concussion, and after nearly a full minute of steadying himself, he began to take a few shaky steps toward the dirt bike, which now looked like it was a mile away.

“Get some more fucking pipes over here!” Elliot yelled, as four men ran full tilt toward a pile of the steel tubes that lay several yards away. His voice was mostly lost in the din of equipment that was chugging and humming as the large drill rig bored through its sixtieth foot of soil.

Elliot stood watching the massive steel arm rotate in the hole that had been blasted earlier that morning. A three-inch hose ran from the top of the pivoting arm above the drill shaft down onto the ground near Elliot’s feet. Every so often he stepped lightly on the black hose and felt the pulse of the water coursing through the inside. Each time goose bumps would break out on his body. He smiled into the bright sunlight of the Idaho midday, his teeth flashing white in contrast to the dark sunglasses he wore.

Elliot stepped away from the drill site and began making his way back to his command tent, as he now thought of it. One of the foremen for the drilling crew was passing the other direction. Elliot stopped the man by raising his hand.

“How long till we hit the oil?” Elliot asked loud enough for the other man to hear.

“Not sure, sir, but I’d guess another six hours. We should be at nearly three hundred feet by then, so we’ll be close.”

Elliot nodded at this and dismissed the other man, and then continued on in the direction of his tent.

Jones was waiting for him when he stepped into the coolness of the canopy that blocked most of the sunlight. He let his eyes adjust for a moment, and then he carried on to sit behind the metal table where he had sat the night before.

“What can I do for you, my friend?” Elliot asked as he settled himself into the chair. He started going over reports that chronicled the drill team’s progress so far that morning.

“I just wanted to update you on the brave we jumped last night. He’s gone,” Jones said.

Elliot looked up at the man and said nothing for a few moments. When Jones just looked back blankly, Elliot replied. “Gone? You mean packed up and gone?”

“Well, he left most everything there and took his bike. We figured he would get going in the morning when he woke up, so we didn’t do anything to the motorcycle.”

Elliot nodded and pursed his lips together.

“Well, that’s fine, I guess. If he goes to the authorities, we’ll tie it up in court until we’re done here, and then we’ll beat it anyway. I have a feeling he’s tucked his tail between his legs and headed for home, after what you and your men did to him. I’m guessing his warrior pride didn’t expect to get its shit kicked in in the middle of the night.”

Jones smiled his rare smile, and it sent a slight shiver down Elliot’s spine. Yes, he decided, there would be a time when he could no longer trust Anthony Jones to be so close to him and his operations. He made a mental note to start looking into other options when this job was wrapped.

“Anything else?” Elliot asked lightheartedly, but with an air of impatience that he hoped would signal the other man to leave him be.

“Yeah, just one last thing, boss. What are you doing with all that water in those tanks back there?”

Elliot stopped shuffling the papers in front of him and listened as the question hung in the air like a grenade with its pin pulled. His eyes flashed up—too quickly, he realized—to Jones’s and held there, waiting for some change in the mask that made up the other man’s face.

“Just keeping it out of the drilling area, that’s all. The ground needs to stay dry and stable for the crew to work. I didn’t want it fouling up the project.”

The lie was like a cloying perfume that both men could smell. Jones’s smile returned, although it now was at half power and only curled up one side of the man’s leathery face. Suddenly, he stood and turned his back to Elliot but spoke quietly over his shoulder.

“Just checkin’, boss. Wouldn’t want there to be something that I should know about. Might endanger the security of the project we have going here.”

Jones reached the tent door and pulled it back, revealing a blazing white triangle of the outside. He smiled one last time and ducked out of the tent, leaving only dust motes and unease dancing in the air within.

Joshua stumbled across the threshold of his grandfather’s small house. He stood swaying in the entry to the kitchen, waiting for sounds of movement or his name to be called. When none came, he continued down the hallway, past his own bedroom, until he reached the closed door at the end.

His vision was slightly blurry in his right eye, and he couldn’t see at all out of his left. He had caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror that hung in the entry hall. His face was a mass of blood and bruises, and he could see several scratches on his lower chin where he had rested it in the dirt overnight. The ride down the valley’s ridge had been almost as painful as when he had woken and sat upright. After over an hour’s ride—which normally took fifteen minutes—he had stood his bike outside the house and prayed that his grandfather wasn’t home.

Joshua reached out and felt the doorknob to his grandfather’s room. It was cold to the touch, and he hesitated for a moment. He hadn’t stepped foot in the room in over two years; it was his grandfather’s private place, and he respected it. His grandfather had done the same for him, although from time to time he would grumble loudly about Joshua’s choice of music. After a deep breath, Joshua turned the knob and hobbled into the dark room.

The room hadn’t changed in the past two years. His grandfather’s bed still sat in the middle of the room with the headboard shoved close to the far wall. Several family pictures hung sporadically throughout the room. In one, Joshua saw his mother smiling prettily into the camera while she sat near a stream. In another, his mother and father were gathered around a table that he remembered from his early years. His mother had her hands clasped before her and her head back, and in such a state of laughter he could almost hear it. His father was leaning forward, arms outstretched across the table and dark eyebrows raised, with half a shout and half a smile on his lips. His father was reaching toward a baby boy with dark hair who had leaned forward and pushed his entire face into a small birthday cake before him.

Joshua blinked his still-functioning right eye and shook his head slightly. He wasn’t here to walk down memory lane. Revenge coursed through his blood now. Hot and angry, it raced within him like a poison out of control. He could see the white men’s faces in the glow of his campfire, their smiles exposing their teeth and their boots kicking him over and over.

Joshua scoured the room for what he knew must be there. His good eye searched out the obvious places on his grandfather’s nightstand, beneath the bed, and on the dresser. It wasn’t there. Joshua sighed and shuffled clumsily around the other side of the bed to the ceremonial stand, where his grandfather kept his large headdress and totem staff that he used at the sacred celebrations.

Joshua inspected the stand carefully in the dim light. On the top there was only one other object besides the headdress and totem. A flint arrowhead sat in the very middle of the stand in a small holder of its own. Its pointed tip looked like a broken and jagged tooth in the low light of the room, its edges sharpened to razors. Joshua’s eyes rested on the arrowhead for a moment. His grandfather had never told him where the flint arrowhead had come from or what significance it had, but he knew it held much importance if it rested here on the stand that supported all the other things his grandfather held sacred.

Joshua bent down lower and gazed into the shadows below the stand. There was a small shelf that hung under the stand’s top. It housed several seashells and two leather pouches that Joshua knew held sweet-smelling wood shavings and spices that were burnt in offerings to different animal spirits. He stared past these small objects, and his eyes rested on the leather spine of a large book. It was dark at the back of the shelf and hard to see, but he could just make out its outline. Joshua’s heart leapt in his chest like a frightened mouse. Carefully, he moved the other items out of the way, grasped the edges of the book, and slid it out into the light.

The book’s cover was a dark brown and made from antelope hide. There was no title on the cover, and it smelled of smoke. His mind went back to each time his grandfather prayed over the ceremonies using the book. Not that Silent Fox needed to read from it; he had memorized each prayer and song many years ago. No, the book was a symbol. It was a history. Songs, legends, prayers, they were all held here in this book, and it was one of a kind.

Joshua paged through several stained and faded songs. The entire book was in Nez Perce, and it was a good thing he had paid attention and stayed close with the old ways, unlike others his age. Although he wondered, if he had split from the tribe like so many did, would he be here right now at this moment? Would he be bleeding and bruised by the boots of white men who were raping their land? Would he even know that they were drilling here or care if someone told him? Joshua stood shakily to his feet. It was a good thing life wasn’t made up of what-ifs.

Joshua moved back across the room and quietly shut the door behind him. He turned and limped down the hallway and out of the front door. After a few minutes, the roar of the dirt bike faded away, and the house was silent once again.

“We hit oil about fifteen minutes ago, boss. Little behind schedule, but we’re actually ahead on the overall timeline.”

Jake Allenson stood in the doorway of Elliot’s tent, half in and half out, shuffling excitedly from one foot to the other. Elliot had been looking on his laptop at an island for sale near Bermuda. The asking price was twenty million, not bad for a private beach and all the water you could look at. His head had snapped up when the drill crew’s chief had thrown the flap to his tent back and called out to him.

“Good. It’s about time. How many barrels filled?”

Allenson wiped the back of his dirty neck with a soiled handkerchief before answering. “Fifteen barrels so far, and the flow’s increasing. All the charts say we’re at optimum drilling depth for this well.”

Elliot nodded and looked back at the images of white sand and blazing sunsets on his computer. It was time for him to check on his own investment.

“Good job, Allenson. I’ll put in a word with corporate for you and your team.”

The other man nodded and smiled gratefully before ducking out of the tent.

Fucking oaf, Elliot thought as he stood and stretched. Hang one little carrot in front of their noses, and they’ll plow all day. He smiled and was grateful he had finished college and would never fall into the same category as the men outside with dirt on their faces and hands.

He walked across the tent and stepped out into the late-afternoon sun that lay like a golden blanket across the valley. His eyes searched the immediate area for signs of Jones. He didn’t want the other man following him to the water tanks or overhearing anything he shouldn’t. That’s the last thing he needed: a greedy mercenary who didn’t mind cutting a throat to get what he wanted.

Elliot glanced one last time down the makeshift alley of pipes and machinery that lay next to his tent and started off in the opposite direction. After a few minutes of walking, he reached six enormous steel tanks that glowed dully in the sunlight. A three-inch black hose ran from the drill site, across the rough ground, and up into the first tank in the row. Each tank was daisy-chained to the others by interconnecting hoses across their top lips. When the first tank was full, it would spill over into the next one, and so on and so forth, until all six tanks were brimming full with the lithium-rich water.

Elliot glanced quickly to his right as a man rounded the closest tank, a small clipboard and walkie-talkie in his hands.

“Larry, talk to me, baby. Where’s the level currently at?” Elliot said quietly to the other man.

“First tank’s full, boss, and the second is three-quarters. We should hit max volume at around midnight if the flow stays constant.”

Elliot frowned. He had hoped that the tanks would be full within the next few hours so that he could accompany them to the drop-off point at regular quitting time, so as not to draw attention. Some might wonder why he was still milling around near midnight at the drill site, and he didn’t want any unneeded attention.

“Fuck. Okay, no one’s been around today, have they? Asking questions?”

Larry shook his head. “No sir, no one. Just me and John overseeing the flow.”

Elliot nodded and sent the other man on his way. A low rumbling pervaded the air over the din of the drilling machinery. Elliot turned and gazed at the setting sun, which hung low over the plains that stretched past the end of the valley. Dark storm clouds were gathering on the horizon. They seemed to boil directly out of the ground, as though an erupting volcano was spewing them skyward. Every so often, a bolt of lightning would streak across the face of the storm, and thunder would obediently make its deep voice heard shortly after.

Great, thought Elliot, like I needed a fucking storm right now too. He tried to shake off his dismay at seeing the clouds. There weren’t clouds like those on his computer screen in his tent. He made his way in that direction, carefully stepping over mud and puddles, while the front of the storm expanded and rumbled angrily like a hungry man’s stomach before a meal.

Silent Fox unlocked his front door and stepped into the small house. His left hand loosely held a paper bag containing a bottle of leather sealant. His right hand dangled at his side, clutching the car and house keys. He stood for a moment in the entryway listening, his gray eyes locked on the floor, unmoving. After several seconds he moved into the kitchen and set the bag down on a nearby chair. He opened the fridge and gazed at the food inside. He had learned long ago that the best way to tell if Joshua had been home was to check the fridge to see if the interior was considerably less crowded.

After seeing that everything lay untouched, the old man shuffled out of the kitchen and down the hall to his bedroom door. He reached out to touch the doorknob and stopped. He stared at the handle and listened to the silence of the house. He waited for a noise in one of the rooms, a shifting of weight, an exhaled breath. None came. He stared at the small smudge of blood that lay on the gold surface of the doorknob. Then he grasped the handle and stepped quickly into the room.

His room was empty, but he could smell something. Sweat and blood. Someone had stood here not long before. He began to methodically search the room. The bedside table still held the handgun he kept there. The false bottom to the drawer still hid the envelope containing almost twenty thousand dollars he had stashed away, just in case Joshua ever decided to go off to college. He went to the other side of his bed and looked at his ceremonial stand. Immediately he noticed that the leather pouches had been moved, and his stomach clenched almost painfully, like a snake biting its own tail. He bent lower and confirmed his fears as his eyes scanned the empty space at the rear of the shelf.

“No,” he said to the empty room. It was a declaration, not a plea. He couldn’t let it happen. Not to Joshua. He was the only family he had left. He was presumably next in line to be chief, and he needed to grow older and wiser and have a family. He wasn’t supposed to do what he was doing now.

Silent Fox turned and hurried across the room and down the hallway. His hand had reached the front door when he paused and turned back the way he had come. He rushed into his room, pulled a long, narrow case from beneath his bed, and set it on the mattress. The dark wood was dusty, and his fingers left trails in the gray fuzz that covered it. He flipped two small latches on one side and pulled the top upward.

The recurve bow lay in the box on its side as if it was sleeping. For some reason he almost expected it not to be there. He turned quickly and pulled the flint arrowhead from its small stand and threw it into the case next to several long wooden arrow shafts. The case snapped solidly together, and he latched the sides closed before pulling it off the bed.

As he half jogged, half walked down the hallway, a rumbling filled his ears, and he had the irrational fear that he was already too late, that the ground was shaking beneath his feet and Joshua was already gone. The sound abated and then came again, and he realized it was thunder in the distance.

Silent Fox slammed the door behind him and ran to his car, hoping to beat the coming storm, to turn the winds back the way they had come, and to save his grandson from himself.

Joshua stared at the pile of stones that sat before him. They were stacked in a haphazard way that one would overlook if passing by, not bothering to notice the geometry that linked the stones together, that held them together. They were all sizes and shapes, yet they were piled on top of one another and latched together by the crevices and cracks that had naturally formed with the millennia. Water and pressure had made these rocks into what they were, and somehow they had come together and had been fitted into a jigsaw that rose nearly ten feet above the surrounding landscape.

Joshua held the leather-bound book at his side. His eyes stared at the pile of rocks, and he marveled at the fact that he had never noticed it before. He had ridden through this area a hundred times before on his bike looking for new terrain or a quiet place to drink a beer and watch the light dance across the valley.

It was a cairn. Joshua knew this without being told. The book had led him this far and described the shape of the pile of rocks that sat before him. He had spent nearly a half hour reading the book, looking for the right legend and prayer. Finally he had found it. The legend of the Pale Man. The creature that had borne all the races of his people across the nation, not through nature but through death and dismemberment. His people lay at its heart, closest to the truth.

Secretly he had doubted the directions that had been laid out in the legend. He hadn’t thought the cairn would exist, yet here he was. As he had crested the hill to the south and seen the pile, his stomach had dropped a little, and a feeling he didn’t at first understand had taken up residence there: fear. After a moment the fear turned to a molten anger as his wounds stung and his head ached. Seeing the cairn solidified what was going to happen, what he believed with his heart, and he knew now there was no turning back.

Joshua opened the book, and for the first time he heard the thunder that was reverberating across the open sky. He turned and looked back the way he had come—the storm was building. He nodded and flipped to the correct page. He drew a deep breath and then began to sing.

The prayer flowed out of his mouth like a river of misery, and his people’s language, soulful and hearty in celebration, now rang with undertones of anger and poignancy. The notes of his breath hung hauntingly on the chilling air that was running before the storm behind him. His voice wavered and swayed with emotion. Joshua poured his anger and anguish into the prayer with a fervor that he had never felt before. The song took on a life of its own, and Joshua could feel the air around him heating up, but still he sang on.

A light bloomed within the rock pile before him. Joshua noticed it immediately, because the sky had darkened considerably since his arrival. The light was a pale yellow, and as Joshua sang, it continued to brighten. He had almost halted when the light appeared, but he inexplicably wanted to continue singing. It was as if the light had confirmed what he had known all along: his beliefs were true. He hadn’t been misguided in staying with the old ways and shunning the new. He would have revenge and redemption and they would pay for what they had done—the scales would be leveled.

As his prayer hit a crescendo, the light brightened between the stones and was thrown across the nearby plain like bright sunlight through a prism. The fading notes of Joshua’s prayer echoed and were carried away with the quickening wind, but still the light continued to brighten. The beams seemed like golden lasers, and Joshua imagined that if he passed his hand through one it would lop the appendage off neatly, cauterizing the wound as it went.

The rock pile started trembling, as if it had been built on a miniature fault line and an earthquake had suddenly begun. Rocks shook loose from their positions, unlocking like pieces of a geometric puzzle. A sound also had begun within the pile. It started as a low humming, like a sewing machine in another room, and slowly rose to a deep, hollow sound. It reminded Joshua of the wind blowing through the large bamboo wind chimes that hung outside his grandfather’s house. Joshua stepped back, an uncertainty rising within him like a meal of bad fish. A question blossomed in his mind: what have I done?

The light dimmed, the beams withdrawing into the widening gaps like snakes receding into burrows, and there was an abrupt silence. Joshua counted two quick beats of his heart, and then the rock pile flew apart. Joshua cried out at the sudden explosion of rock and fell onto his back in surprise.

The light rose out of the ruined cairn. It was golden white, and its brilliance made Joshua shield his eyes. He could see that the light didn’t have a definite form; instead, it seemed to wobble like an enormous bubble that was nearly three feet across. It hovered there, and Joshua had the distinct feeling that he was being inspected. He could feel eyes on his skin, and he knew the sounds of his heart and breathing were being absorbed. Slowly he began to scoot away from the light, his butt sliding on the rough dirt and rock with a soft scraping sound.

The light zipped across the space between it and Joshua, fluid like water. It hit him square in the chest and knocked him flat to the ground. Agony that he had never known existed began to course through his body. It flowed like acid through his veins and tore his muscles apart fiber by fiber. He also felt violated.

There was something there with him in the pain, something old, so old. It watched him writhe and kick with knowing eyes. It knew pain, it drank it from him like water from a cup. As soon as the pain came to the point where Joshua knew he would die—hoped he would die—it was drained off, and the cycle started over.

Suddenly the pain was gone, and so was the light. It was as if it all had never happened. Joshua lay on his back staring at the darkening sky and listening to the sound of thunder, which had faded with the pain but now was back, deafening, like the crunching of giant bones. The light had healed him as it guided him through the pain. He could see clearly out of both eyes, and when he rubbed his palm across his face, he felt smooth, undamaged flesh.

He was about to sit up when images and thoughts that were not entirely his own began to course through his mind like a river of information that was poured into him. He revolted at first, trying to close his mind to what was happening. But it was as if a gate had been opened, and his consciousness began to meld with something else that waited patiently in the darkness of his mind. Then the pain returned.

Silent Fox pulled his old aching frame up the last few feet of hill and peered over the rise. His long gray hair had been blown free of its leather tie by the wind from the storm, and it tickled his face, but he didn’t notice. His gaze was transfixed on the spectacle several hundred feet before him.

Joshua lay in a twisting heap on the ground before the crumbled ruins of the ancient cairn, Silent Fox’s prayer book splayed open with the pages down in the dirt next to him. The old man nearly broke into a run, but stopped himself as light began to surround his grandson’s body. Joshua screamed out in pain, a horrible agonizing scream that brought tears to the chief’s eyes. Seeing his grandson like this hit him like a punch to the stomach and nearly took his feet out from under him.

He noticed that Joshua’s right leg was propped up, his knee jutting toward the low, rumbling sky, but something was wrong. His leg was much too long. The leg stood nearly three feet above the ground, and Joshua’s pants leg was slowly being pulled up his calf. No, not pulled up. The leg was still growing, elongating grotesquely.

Silent Fox watched in horror and wonder, his mouth hanging agape as he noticed Joshua’s left arm flailing above the young man’s head. It was growing beyond any resemblance of a natural arm.

Joshua got his right arm under him and began pushing himself into a sitting position, his right leg struggling to break free of the denim that surrounded it. His left arm was now at least five feet long, and the hand attached to the end was the size of a pumpkin. The long, thin fingers flexed and scrabbled in the dirt while Joshua continued to scream and tried to regain his feet. It was like watching someone with only one stilt trying to stand. Joshua rolled onto his left side and supported himself with his freakishly long limb, while his leg bent beneath him and gained an unsteady footing.

Silent Fox dropped the long wooden box he was holding, his fingers forgetting their purchase as his mind forgot they were gripping it. The noise startled him out of his reverie, and he crouched to open the case. His fingers worked frantically, flinging open the case and pulling the already-strung bow out into the deepening night. He glanced up and immediately wished he hadn’t.

Joshua was now standing; his left leg hadn’t caught up yet but wasn’t far behind. As it was, the young man stood at an awkward angle, as though he had sprained an ankle. His back had also lengthened, causing the T-shirt he had been wearing to pull tight across a hairless midsection with too many ribs jutting from beneath the pale skin. His neck was longer and barely supported a head that had grown to the size of the big television at their home. Joshua’s features were distorted: his nose had drooped low like a melting candlestick, and his eyes had begun to slide to either side of his enormous head. Folds of thick skin hung down on either side of his mouth, which gaped like the dark maw of a shark. His shrieks had slowly become deep bellows, and now they were coming less often, as though Joshua was beginning to tire inside the distorted form.

Tears leaked freely from the old man’s eyes, and he realized he was wailing in his people’s tongue, asking the spirits above to spare his grandson. He prayed as he grabbed the flint arrowhead and set it into a blunt arrow shaft. He began to tightly wrap the base of the arrowhead and the notch in the wooden shaft with fine elk gut that he had dried himself. He risked another glance up and recoiled because of how Joshua now looked.

Joshua’s other leg had caught up, and he stood over twelve feet tall. His arms hung down below his knees and ended in great palms of white skin and long spindly fingers, which flexed and relaxed spasmodically. His face was no longer recognizable as the boy who had ridden here on the motorcycle that sat several yards to his right. The eyes had finished their journey and now sat on either side of the head, devoid of their natural color. There was only blackness beneath the heavy white lids, and Silent Fox was again reminded of a shark. There seemed to be no real nose, but Joshua’s skull had elongated into an enormous guitar shape, the actual head being the body of the instrument and the mouth being the neck. The skin folds the old man had noticed moments earlier had deepened and hung lower from each side of the long maw.

As Silent Fox watched, the mouth opened and thick mucus-covered teeth shone in a flash of lightning. Then Joshua let out another painful bellow. His cry reminded Silent Fox of the horns that Vikings blew in movies before they went to their bloody deaths in battle. It was deep and shook the old man’s lungs.

All at once both smoothly muscled legs snapped at the knees and folded backward with audible cracks like small-arms fire. Joshua let out a deep cry of pain and looked down at his broken legs with surprise. Both legs folded back to almost forty-five degrees, and Silent Fox saw the joints in both ankles elongating, the heels sliding upward into new positions several feet above the ground. Joshua’s legs resembled those of an elk or deer, with thick tendons spanning between muscles.

The beast reared, throwing its impressive wingspan behind it and thrusting its chest toward the black clouds that were now directly overhead, and roared. Silent Fox unconsciously covered his ears with his hands and dropped the arrow to the earth between his feet. The beast’s call—because that’s what it was, he realized—penetrated his old eardrums easily. He stared at not his grandson but the monster of legend, of nightmare, the horrible creature that had scared him since he was a child.

Thunder boomed overhead again as the storm climbed to its climax, and the Pale Man turned its horribly elongated head to the west and sniffed deeply, its breath huffing through pinhole nostrils just above its upper lip. It bared its teeth once again, and a growl rumbled deep inside its chest like a jackhammer in a padded room.

The Pale Mane took off at an awkward gait, its long arms swinging at its sides as it gained speed. Soon its arms and hands had joined the strange jog, and it began to lope. For a few moments, it looked so strange that Silent Fox thought it would trip and fall, but soon the motion became fluid. As it ran, it resembled a large white ape with the movement of a spider. It didn’t run, it scuttled.

Silent Fox watched, awestruck and numb with horror, as what used to be his grandson loped over the nearest hill and continued on through the rain toward the valley just outside the long plains.

“Grab me another beer, will ya?” the man with a short black goatee yelled, laughing.

The bearded man who was stooped over the small refrigerator to grab a sandwich frowned and shut the fridge door without pulling out one of the many chilled cans. He waited and stared at the man with the goatee until his laughter had died down. Then he replied, “You’re on in two hours, Floyd, you should sober up. You can’t run that machine of yours worth a shit when you’re sober. How the hell are you gonna run it when you’re fucked-up?”

The long tent grew quiet. The men playing cards and smoking stopped talking and glanced over shoulders and reading glasses at the confrontation brewing before them.

Floyd blinked blearily a few times before replying. “The fuck did you just say to me?”

The bearded man moved to the center of the tent before he spoke again. “I said, get your shit together, Floyd, or you’ll get kicked off this job like you did the last one.”

Thunder rolled overhead, and the lights dimmed and then flared as the generators revved outside in the pounding rain. Floyd stood and lost his balance and had to sit down again. He put his hands on the table, scattering the cards that were sitting face-down before him along with several twenty-dollar bills, and stood shakily while doing a great impression of the leaning tower of Pisa.

“You’d do well to watch your tongue, Johnny boy!” Floyd half spoke, half yelled at the bearded man. He pointed a wavering finger at the figures before him and willed the two images into one.

“Go to bed, you shithead, I’ll cover your shift,” Johnny said, turning away and putting his half-eaten sandwich back into the fridge.

Floyd bellowed a meaningless string of words and rushed at Johnny in a drunken stumble across the uneven dirt floor. Johnny spun and caught the other man in a bear hug that forced Floyd’s air out in a whoosh. Floyd responded by throwing a loose hook at Johnny, which barely connected with his ear. Johnny tightened his grip and began to dig into the other man’s short ribs with his forearm. There were a few yells of exultation from the spectators as the two combatants danced and twirled in a ballet of violence.

Another sound soon became audible over the cries of the men seated at the poker tables, over the grunts and forced breaths of the two men locked in the fight, and even over the concussion of the overhead thunder. It was a quick vibration that shook the bones of each man. It felt as if a giant were sitting just outside the tent, drumming its fingers on the ground in boredom. The men stopped their yelling in the anticipation of blood, and the two grapplers ceased their twisting to listen as the sound grew louder and louder.

A giant gray shoulder and head ripped through the side of the tent, followed shortly by the rest of the enormous gangling body as the monster flowed into the men’s eyes and made the synapses in their brains do stutter steps. It shrugged off the torn canvas that clung to its shoulders as it heaved breaths in and out and stared at the men before it with its cold black eyes. The beast then opened its four-foot jaws and screamed while it grabbed with one giant splayed hand the nearest man from his chair. The man screamed but was cut off as the enormous hand clenched, and his intestines squirted out of his mouth and anus like a juice box held too tight.

The men erupted in a flood of movement. Chairs were overturned and cards flew in the air like pieces of confetti shot from cannons. The Pale Man dropped the ruined body and made a large sweeping motion with its hand, raking a dozen men from the tent and out into the rainstorm as easily as a man knocking over the pieces on a chessboard. The men flew in different directions, many of them with broken bones, while some tumbled into the unforgiving form of an earthmover sitting several yards away from the tent, their flesh tearing and skulls cracking on the hardened steel.

The remaining men in the tent ran screaming in the opposite direction, not realizing that they had passed the only exit in the middle of the structure. The framework itself shook and threatened to fold as the beast plunged farther into the tent, gnashing its long jaws together and reaching out to grasp the nearest man.

Its fingers found Floyd, who had tripped and fell in the rush to exit the tent. Floyd screamed with all his might and realized that he was stone sober while both of the enormous hands grasped him like a loaf of bread and pulled in opposite directions. Floyd’s scream rose an octave and was abruptly cut off as long white fingers dug into his midsection and ripped him apart at the waist. Blood flew in a wide swath and sloshed across the dark ground below the creature.

The remaining men had reached the side of the tent, and they realized their folly as they scrambled at the base of the structure, trying to find the seam between ground and canvas. The monster let out another earsplitting roar and ambled toward them on too-long legs while it balanced itself with even longer arms.

Two men made a run for the opening just a few yards in front of the creature’s path. The first man ducked and dove for the darkened doorway, landing in the muddy earth that lay beyond. The second man tried to follow but was caught in midair by a hand as wide as a coffin. He was thrown, screaming, through the opposite side of the tent, leaving a gaping hole behind.

The Pale Man launched itself toward the small exit and shrugged its large shoulders through. It looked as though the tent was giving birth to the white abomination.

The man who had dived through the door began crawling through the mud, the rain pelting down and soaking the red button-up shirt across his back. He scurried as fast as he could, stumbling and falling along the way, until he reached a tall steel structure, which he crawled beneath and huddled himself into a small shivering ball of muscle and bone.

The Pale Man stood to its full height and swung an enormous clawed hand at a fuel tank that stood on stilted legs. A thousand gallons of eighty-seven octane tipped and fell heavily to the wet earth, the steel of the tank breaking and spewing forth its contents. Gas fumes welled up like heat rising from the desert floor, and the Pale Man shook its great head to rid itself of the smell. One of its huge feet crushed the stand of a sodium-vapor lamp that had been sitting next to the fueling station. The light fell like a comet toward the earth, and upon impact it sputtered out in an impressive shower of sparks. The sparks lit the gas with a concussive thump, and the northern valley was bathed in a sudden yellow light.

The tanks better be fucking full. The thought rolled back and forth through Elliot’s mind like driftwood in a high tide. He was tired of waiting in the tent with water beginning to leak under the sides. He didn’t care anymore; he was going to haul the tanks out now. His impatience rose to new heights, and he was through being delayed. He stalked through the mud, his three-hundred-dollar shoes becoming sodden and ruined. He didn’t care, he would buy new shoes. He could buy anything he wanted after this. For Christ’s sake, he was going to buy an island. He had contacted a real estate agent in Bermuda that afternoon and made an offer on a plot of land floating in the great blue-green that was the Atlantic.

He wished he was there now, not in this wet stinking hole of the Southwest. He could see the tanks looming in the slanted rain of the storm, standing like giant monoliths amid shimmering silver curtains. Almost there. Almost there.

“Larry!” Elliot yelled the man’s name in irritation and slight desperation. The rain pelted him endlessly, his coat and shirt beneath seeming like separate skins that were becoming one. “Larry!” His cry died as quickly as it had emerged from his throat.

In the gloom of the storm, he spied a dark shape moving in his direction around one side of the huge canisters. He let out a small sigh of relief as it began to make its way toward him, one step after another, very deliberate.

It was the way that the figure walked that began to disturb him. It approached with calmness and surety that, Elliot realized too late, Larry did not possess.

Jones strode the last few steps like a man on a Sunday walk in the park, the rain hammering down upon him and the lightning flashing behind him. He stopped and stared at Elliot through the pouring drops of water.

“Clever guy you are, boss,” Jones said. A burst of lightning and clap of thunder flowed together while light and sound became one. Jones’s face became a skull in the strobe of the weather, his teeth gaping obscenely through a torn maw that grinned, flickering away into darkness.

“What’re you talking about?” Elliot asked, as lightly as he could while yelling against the wind that raged around them.

“Lithium, boss! Where the real money is! It’s like beef! It’s what’s for dinner! I didn’t think old Larry was going to talk for a while, but he turned out to be an all-right guy.”

Elliot stood like a stone in the sinking mud, the rain pouring down endlessly. He realized his right-hand man, his bodyguard, his enforcer, was insane. Elliot had suspected it at certain points in their relationship. The idea had been like a moth dancing in the darkness just outside a porch light’s glow. Now there was no denying it. The gleam in the man’s eyes that stood before him couldn’t be denied anymore.

“You got me! How much do you want? A million? Two? Whatever you say, big guy,” Elliot yelled above the wind, which whipped his words away like autumn leaves.

“Half,” Jones said barely above a whisper.

Elliot didn’t actually hear the word, but he saw Jones’s mouth form it and knew what he had said. He swallowed and blinked at the other man.

“What did you do to Larry?” Elliot asked.

The answer came back so quickly that Elliot realized Jones must have been waiting for the question. “Exactly what I’ll do to you unless we split this fifty-fifty.”

Elliot grimaced but slowly nodded. He didn’t want to split the money, but felt his neck weakening and his head bobbing up and down like one of those stupid toy dogs in the back window of an old woman’s Cadillac.

“Good. Now, where are the trucks taking these—”

Jones’s words were cut short when his radio squawked to life. “Jones, come in, come in. We have a breach on the east end of the valley. Alex is gone. There’s a fucking smear on the ground where he was positioned! Jesus Christ!”

Jones quickly reached for the radio, his eyes growing darker as his lids closed until he was almost squinting. “Say again? A breach on the east side?”

“Yes! Fuck me! It’s something big! I just caught a few flashes of it in the lightning. Must be a fucking bear or something! It’s all white! I think it’s heading down into the site.”

Jones frowned and his eyebrows nearly touched as they drew together. A fucking polar bear is attacking the site? he thought.

“Okay, Jimmy, move in on the threat, but do not engage until I say so. Mark, you read me too?”

There was moment of silence and the punctuation of thunder, and then the guard’s reply came. “Yeah, boss.”

“Good, come in from the south side of camp. Converge on the threat and wait for my orders, now.”

A sound abruptly carried through the soaking air and penetrated their chests with a bass thrum. It was some sort of machine, Elliot concluded, an earthmover grinding gears or a drill shaft shearing off in mid-turn. Both men stared back across the dark abyss that separated them from the lit work area around the drill site and the men’s mess tent. Over the cacophony of thunder and wind, they heard something else.

Peals of high-pitched sounds weaved their way through the air. Both men stood still in the downpour, heads cocked at strange angles, as if trying to identify a song playing in another room.

Jones looked back at Elliot, who now stood nearby with his shoulders slumped.

“You get these loaded up, and so help me, if you drive off without me, I will hunt you down myself.”

Without waiting for a reply, the mercenary ran into the darkness, unslinging his short machine gun as he went. A moment later his outline faded into the darkness, and Elliot was alone.

Elliot turned and trudged through the thick mud toward the containers. There was no way he was letting that fucking ape screw him out of twenty million dollars. No way. Elliot reached gingerly inside his wet coat and fingered the small pistol concealed there near his left armpit. When the time came, he’d deal with Jones and be gone before anyone had time to figure out what had happened.

With a new resolve, he strode through the pounding rain toward the lit cab of the flatbed truck, where he knew his last employee would be fast asleep.

Jones rounded the side of a small storage shed and paused. He gazed through the wet darkness as he knelt near the structure. He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but the sounds coming from within the mess tent were another story. Screams that he didn’t think men could issue were rolling over one another, along with another noise he assumed was the bear. It was a deep, guttural sound that reverberated in his bones.

What kind of fucking bear makes a sound like that? he wondered, and he began to let his instincts take over. His intuition had led him through many tight situations over the past years. From burning jungles that smelled of decay and burnt hair to dark streets in the Middle East where he could still feel the wet slickness of men’s blood running hotly over his hands. He was a killer, plain and simple. There were two kinds of people as far as he was concerned: the ones who died and the ones who made the others dead. He had learned early in his life which group he wanted to be a part of.

So a fucking bear wasn’t going to impede on his fair share of this job. He and his men would put it down, and he would go back to the loaded truck, shoot Elliot in the head, and have the driver of the truck haul the lithium water and himself to the drop-off point, where he would collect the money from Elliot’s contact. Then maybe a chartered jet out of the country to retire. He had heard Spain was nice this time of year. Hell, he’d even send a little check to Alex’s widow.

All other thought was wiped away as a man came diving out of the tent as though it was on fire and he was doused in gasoline. He landed heavily in the mud and started crawling away from the tent.

Showtime, Jones thought, and he brought his short weapon up to his shoulder and gazed down the barrel at the doorway, where he knew the bear would appear.

What came out of the tent defied logic, reason, and even imagination. The pale-white skin, the grossly elongated head, and the overly long legs and arms wouldn’t compute in Jones’s mind. He had never seen anything like it. It was huge. And it was angry. Jones watched, stunned, as the man crawled under the refueling tower and huddled into the fetal position. The thing followed with long, powerful steps, its legs hinging the wrong way but propelling it forward smoothly nonetheless.

With a swipe of an enormous hand, the beast knocked the fuel tower over. When it hit the ground, it split like a large egg dropped on concrete. Hundreds of gallons of fuel poured out. Jones watched as the creature took a step back and knocked one of the powerful floodlights to the ground. In an instant, heat and light flooded the entire work area in a brilliant yellow.

Jones fell back behind the shed and felt the whoosh of air from the explosion rush by. After a moment he returned to the edge of the shed and peered into the inferno. The man who had crawled under the tank was on fire, yet the pain must have been too much to vocalize. He was running in a straight line without making a sound, the rain hissing off of his burning flesh. He ran nearly twenty yards that way, until he met the unyielding ends of a large bundle of steel pipes. There was a dull thud that echoed hollowly from the other end of the pipes, and the man fell in a burning heap that didn’t move again.

The mess tent was also aflame. He could hear coughing and screaming coming from inside, as the men beneath the canvas slowly roasted in the extreme heat that was creeping farther and farther across the ground. That sucks, Jones thought as he looked for a flash of pale flesh in the light of the flames.

Jones instantly scanned the area. The beast was nowhere to be seen. He grabbed his radio from his breast pocket and jammed the speaker close to his grizzled face.

“Jimmy, Mark, do you have visual on that fucking thing?”

There was a horrible second of silence and Jones thought he was alone, and then the radio crackled to life.

“Can’t see it, boss. What the fuck is that thing?” Jimmy responded.

“Mark, do you have it?” Jones asked.

“No, I lost it during the blast. Wait. I see something on the slope below me,” Mark said.

Silence stretched out, and Jones was about to call out to Mark again when his voice came through low over the static.

“Nothing, I don’t have it boss. How should we pro—”

It was as though Mark had suddenly shut his mouth. Jones waited for several seconds and then broke the quiet.

“Mark? Mark? Jimmy, can you see Mark from your position?”

“No, he was higher up on the side hill to the south, and now I don’t see him,” Jimmy said.

“Come in from your side, and I’ll swing right. If that fucker’s over there, we’ll flush him out,” Jones said.

Jones didn’t bother to listen for a reply. He was already moving, his body tense and low as he ran quietly across the small alley between the shed and a row of pickup trucks. Lightning flashed as he moved, and he used the flicker of light to take in his surroundings. Nothing moved in his direct path or to either side. His footsteps quickened, and he ducked and slid to a stop under a large flatbed trailer. He waited. The heavens flashed, and he surveyed his immediate area. Again nothing moved, and he set out once more.

After nearly a minute of running and stopping, Jones crept up behind the rectangular shape of a porta-potty and glanced around the side. The southern slope near the work site was barren. The sage that grew on the side of the hill wasn’t high enough to hide a deer, let alone a twelve-foot-tall pale-white monster.

His eyes snagged a strange shape farther down the hill, closer to one of the large drilling units. It was an oblong shadow among the deeper darkness. Jones squinted and waited for the shape to move. It didn’t. He waited for the lightning, and when none came, he cursed quietly under his breath and slid around the side of the toilet.

He made his way down the side of the hill. Movement caught his attention as he neared the shape on the far side of the drilling unit. He could make out a hunched figure carrying a short rifle tight to its shoulder hurrying through the rain to the shape that he was moving toward. He watched Jimmy stop and slowly straighten. The rifle dropped from Jimmy’s hands and he took a step back.

Jones stopped several yards away and pulled his machine gun tighter to his shoulder, sighting at the giant lollipop shape before him. The lightning flashed, and in the few seconds of flickering light, he saw much more than he wanted to.

Mark had been shish-kebabbed on a six-inch drill pipe that was jammed into the ground. The pipe ran up between his legs, into his ass, and through his torso, where it did a magic trick and sprouted obscenely out of what was left of his face and mouth. The pipe gleamed dully in the lightning, and Jones could see entrails hanging in thick red ropes from the top like streamers from a party favor. His mind suddenly went to the image of minnows he used to skewer on steel hooks when fishing as a child. In the jaw and out the mouth, cast and cast and it won’t go south. His father’s rhyme replayed crazily in his mind as he stared at the ruined body before him.

The lightning abated, and that was when Jimmy began to scream. It welled up from a low groan to a high-pitched shriek that Jones didn’t think any grown man could emit. Jimmy began to stagger backward, then turned and ran full tilt away from the gruesome display before them.

He was rounding the side of the drill structure when an enormous white hand swooped out of the darkness and grasped him around the chest and stomach. The hand was followed by the rest of the creature as it stalked out from behind the structure and into full view. It stood for a moment holding the kicking and screaming man in its grip, staring into Jimmy’s convulsing face with its black eyes.

For a second Jones thought he saw a hint of a smile pulling back the hanging jowls around the massive mouth, but then it was moving in a blur of speed. It took two large steps and slammed Jimmy into the side of the muddy hill. In one motion, the monster smashed and smeared the man’s body into a gooey mass on the side of the hill, sliding its hand up and away. An image of a man squashing a mosquito on his leg and wiping the remains off his hand sprang into Jones’s mind. He finally brought his gun up and pulled the trigger.

The muzzle flash from the weapon lit up the night like a miniature lightning strike, and bullets flew from the muzzle like angry wasps. Wounds opened up in dark punches of blood across the side of the creature. Jones heard it grunt with pain and watched it turn in his direction. He quickly readjusted his aim and squeezed off another burst of rounds that flew at the chest of the abomination, right where its heart should be.

The lead opened up a meaty hole in the center of the thing’s chest, and it fell backward, tipping on its strange legs. It hit the ground on its back and lay still, both arms out in a spread-eagle pose. Lightning flashed again, and Jones’s muzzle didn’t waver an inch. It stayed trained on the target lying on its back in the pouring rain. It didn’t move. He watched. He waited.

An arm flew up in the air, and it began to roll onto its side as it tried to regain its feet. Jones ran.

The last tank settled heavily into place on the flatbed truck. Elliot sighed his relief at the cargo finally being in place. It had taken a few minutes and a few extra thousand dollars to coax his sleepy-eyed driver out of the warm, dry cab of the truck and into the bucket operator’s chair, but he had done it. The massive truck and trailer now held the six tanks of lithium water, and they were ready to be hauled away.

Elliot looked around the immediate vicinity, his eyes squinting against the rain that refused to stop falling. Where was that fucker Jones? He hadn’t seen him since he had run off into the rain-drenched night holding that black machine gun. He had seen the flare of light that could have only come from lit gasoline and had wondered how well his security team was handling the renegade bear. He had snickered to himself in the rain. He hoped the bear would finish Jones off for him so he wouldn’t have to shoot the bastard himself.

At one point while he and John had been loading the tanks—well, he had stood by yelling profanities and needless instructions while John loaded the tanks—he thought he had heard gunfire. Chew him up bear, Elliot thought. He was done with this project, and he didn’t care if the whole work site burned to the ground and he didn’t get paid. The execs at Emerson would be pretty pissed when they realized that he’d hauled away and sold the lithium deposits from their land, but by then he’d be sipping drinks on the shore of his own island.

Elliot reached inside his soaked coat and fingered the cold steel of the semiautomatic again. He was starting to question himself. Could he do it? Could he calmly pull the pistol out and shoot Jones in the back of the head? Could he ride away and leave the country tonight? Never look back and never feel remorse for leaving a dead man in the cold Idaho mud? Elliot sniffed and turned back to the truck. Of course he could. Where would he go tonight? He couldn’t go to his island yet. He thought Spain was nice this time of year, so maybe there.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of someone approaching from the direction of the work site. He could hear the steady slurping sounds of boots slamming down and being pulled up from the mud. He swung his head toward the sounds and could see the dark outline of a man approaching at a run. After a few moments, he could make out the solid shape of Jones holding his gun close to his chest as he ran. And he was yelling something, but Elliot was already reaching toward his holster on the inside of his coat. All right, as soon as he gets close enough. Just pull and fire, don’t hesitate.

“Get in the fucking truck! It’s coming! Get in the truck!” Jones yelled again.

But Elliot’s mind was on a one-way track now, like a freight train rolling down a steep hill. He pulled his gun out into the dim glow from the truck’s running lights and aimed it at the approaching figure. His heart was slamming in his chest. His grip was firm on the pistol, but his arm shook like a flagpole in a gale. His finger tightened on the trigger. Squeeze, breath. Just like he had been taught by the high-priced firearms instructor whom he had purchased the Beretta through. If only his instructor could see him now, pointing a loaded gun at another man. Big no-no.

At the last second, Jones looked right at him and realized what was in his hand, but it was too late.

Two things happened in the same time. The first was the gun kicked up in an arc and a bullet sped directly toward Jones’s surprised face. The second was something huge and white came hurtling out of the darkness to Jones’s right. The shape didn’t slow down or change course as it slammed into Jones like a truck, lifting him from his feet before the bullet could tear its way through the skin, bone, and brain of Elliot’s top security guard. Instead, the bullet smacked wetly into the side of the thing as it passed, throwing a spray of fine blood up into the wet air around it.

Elliot blinked and shook his head as he turned and tried to focus on what was now happening to his former hired killer. The bear was standing over top of Jones, who lay on the sopping soil of the valley with his back and shoulders pushed painfully deep in the mud. Elliot stared at the white bear—that had to be what it was, didn’t it?

Although, now as it rose to its full height, he began to wonder, and when it reached down with giant hand and plucked the fallen man from the sodden earth with a squelching sound, all semblance of a bear faded away at once. That thing was no bear. Looking at it now, Elliot couldn’t begin to fathom how his mind had thought the word bear to describe what stood before him. It was tall, much too tall. And the stilted limbs were too long.

Elliot heard John yell something incoherent in the background. He jumped from his post atop the truck’s crane and started running as soon as he hit the ground. But Elliot didn’t turn to look; his attention was wholly focused on the spectacle in front of him.

The thing stood to its full height and pulled Jones up so he was in line with its oblong face and head. Jones had been knocked unconscious by the impact, but being lifted through the air seemed to have the same effect as smelling salts. His eyes opened, and he stared into the face of the creature. He looked into the blackened depths of its eyes, and when lightning flashed with the brightness of noon, he realized the presence behind those eyes was not just old but ancient and knowing. He felt naked within its grasp, and he could feel all the suffering and death he had ever caused being brought to bear and scrutinized under its stare. This more than anything made him scream, because he knew he was being held not by an animal but by something with reason and intellect. And there was no pity for him in its eyes, only judgment.

The Pale Man’s lips and jowls pulled back in a sharp grimace of anger and hatred, and it reached up and wrapped two long fingers and a thumb around Jones’s neck. With its other hand, it hooked two fingers over his shoulders and pulled.

Jones’s entire spine pulled free of his body and slid into the rain like a blade being unsheathed. The vocal cords in his disembodied head and throat emitted a choked whine that faded away quickly without air from his lungs to fuel the scream. The Pale Man stared into the head’s blank eyes for a moment, then tossed it aside like a piece of trash.

Elliot’s jaw hung open like a forgotten window, and any attempt at making a sound was abandoned. He still held the pistol out in front of him like a chrome talisman in the pounding rain. The creature swiveled smoothly, as if on bearings, toward where Elliot stood like a shivering statue. It snarled again and stalked quickly across the open ground between them.

Elliot finally snapped from his reverie of horror and began pulling the trigger of the small pistol. He didn’t squeeze and breath like his instructor had taught him; he pulled the trigger as fast as he could. One shot out of seven hit its mark, striking the Pale Man high on its long forehead. The bullet tore the white skin open in a puff of water and blood. The wound drizzled what looked like strawberry syrup on a sundae until the skin suddenly weaved back together, thin strands of white flesh interconnecting and meshing. Eventually there was no mark where the bullet had landed.

The gun clicked empty, and the slide locked back without another shell to breach. Elliot continued to squeeze the unmoving trigger until he finally realized the gun was empty. The Pale Man didn’t falter as it strode toward him, and Elliot felt warmth near his crotch as his bladder released. Without any more hesitation, Elliot spun and dove under the large trailer as a huge white hand swept across the spot he had just been standing in.

He hit his knees and scrambled under the large support rails of the trailer’s undercarriage. His mind slipped back to playing hide-and-seek as a child in a Las Vegas suburb, sliding beneath his father’s truck, the dusty ground puffing up in a cloud around his face.

Elliot pulled his feet in tight as he rolled onto the other side of the trailer and stayed low, waiting for a giant hand attached to a grotesquely long arm to come slithering after him through the darkness. He listened and could only hear the patter of the rain on the soaked ground around him.

Thunder rolled overhead, and he glanced to his right. His eyes found the passenger-side door of the large truck. Although it was only thirty feet from him, it seemed a football field away. He could see it playing out in his mind already: he would run toward the door, glancing behind him as he went; the door would loom before him, salvation glinting off its deep satin blue in the lightning; and just as he was reaching for the gleaming door handle, a hand would reach from the front of the truck and crush him. He could feel its cold fingers gouging into his sides, breaking his ribs like chicken bones.

For a moment he wondered what the creature was—because it was no bear—and where it had come from. Hell, he supposed. Where else could something like that be born? Nowhere in the real world, that was for sure. There wasn’t any room for something like that in his reality.

Elliot glanced quickly under the long trailer and then toward the side of the truck. Still no movement. If he was going to go, it had to be now. He nodded unconsciously and stood up. He realized as he squeezed his hands into tight fists that he had dropped his gun somewhere under the trailer while scrambling away from the monster. It didn’t matter, that thing didn’t mind bullets any more than it minded the rain.

Elliot stepped cautiously and tried to listen over the storm for a telltale sign of the creature. When nothing reached out to grab him, he began to walk quicker. Five steps, eight steps, ten. The door was only a few feet away now. He could drive this fucking thing, he knew it deep in his bones. He would be able to drive it, or he’d learn real fast. His hand touched the door handle, and a small warm pouch of relief bloomed in his stomach.

A squeal filled his ears, and he wondered who could be killing a pig nearby in a rainstorm like this. When he turned, his eyes bulged at what he saw. The trailer was being tipped slowly onto its side. The huge steel tanks filled with lithium water were sliding to the side as though they weren’t on a solid trailer but on the deck of a ship in a gale miles out at sea. They listed dangerously as the trailer kept moving upward onto its side.

That’s too much weight, Elliot thought as his hand tightened on the door handle. He was just about to pull the door open and attempt his getaway, regardless of what was happening to the trailer, when the second tank from the front tipped dangerously on its bottom edge, balanced there for a moment, and then flipped off the trailer onto its round side. It hit a rock the size of a man’s head when it landed on the rough ground and began revolving toward the front of the truck like a giant rolling pin.

Elliot let a small shriek escape his mouth as he tried to dive out of the path of the oncoming tank. His expensive shoes slid in the soft mud, and he fell a few feet from where he had jumped, his hands digging into the soil as he landed on his stomach.

The tank rolled over both his legs just above the knees. He heard the sound of his kneecaps snapping and sliding to the sides of his legs, the noise like popping walnut shells. Both feet tried folding down to the ground, but they snapped loose of their ankle joints and were crushed into bloody pulps of bone and skin.

Elliot let loose a scream as this happened that was like no shriek before. It was wholehearted, and he had found his octave and made it his own. The air wailed out of his lungs as the agony built and built to the point where he began to think, to hope, to dream, that he would pass out.

Then he felt them: fingers. Sliding around his stomach in the mud. He prayed one of them would pierce his side and gouge his heart and make the awful pain from his legs stop.

But none did. They lifted him gently. They turned him upright, his crushed and useless legs dangling like those of a ventriloquist’s dummy below him. Elliot blinked the rain and mud from his eyes and gazed into the face of the beast. It regarded him with its shark stare, its eyes unwavering. Water dripped from its enormous muzzle, and hot, reeking breath blazed from the two nostrils above its upper lip. Elliot strained his arms against the iron grip the creature had around his midsection, but there was no use, no escape this time. The end of the line had come, and it was time to get off.

“Do it!” he screamed at the white impassive face that scrutinized him from a few inches away. “What are you waiting for?”

The Pale Man slowly nodded, and suddenly there was warmth in the cold fingers surrounding his torso. The heat spread up through Elliot’s body until it reached his head. Images and sounds bloomed in his mind. The time he had kicked his new puppy that his mother had bought him for his tenth birthday. The time he had stolen five hundred dollars from his father’s wallet and gotten their maid fired in turn. The time he had raped a college girl in a small bathroom stall. The time he had paid Jones ten thousand dollars to kill a man who had told him that he would expose Elliot’s affair with the wife of Emerson’s CEO. All of the worst moments in his life were brought under close scrutiny, magnified somehow before being ripped away into the rain drenched night.

“Fuck you,” Elliot said through bloodstained teeth.

The Pale Man opened his mouth in huge yawn and shoved Elliot in headfirst. Its jaws came down in a final snap that severed Elliot’s arms and legs in clean cuts, which fell away unheeded to the ground. The Pale Man chewed in short crunches as Elliot’s scream filtered out between bites and then abruptly stopped. One white hand scooped up the severed arms and legs off the ground like hors d’oeuvres and popped them into the gaping maw. It chewed for some time as it stood in the rain near the abandoned truck. Finally, it swallowed and gazed around at its surroundings. It could hear something in the distance, below the rumble of thunder. A high, shrill whining. It turned on its muscular legs, took one step, and stopped when it saw the figure standing in the rain at the rear of the trailer.

Silent Fox’s long hair, so neatly braided and combed hours before, was soaked, a full sheet of gray that stretched nearly to his lower back. His colorless eyes stared unblinking at the creature that stood on the blood-soaked ground at the opposite end of the trailer.

The Pale Man took half a step and paused, studying the old man. There was no fear in the air. The age-old smell that hung about all of its prey was absent.

“I will not fear my own blood, but instead give it back to the earth whence it came. My fathers before me hold us close.” Silent Fox’s words carried across the air that separated the man and beast.

The Pale Man’s lips pulled back, and it roared its bass call and lumbered at the old man, rain pelting off its white flesh as it ran.

Silent Fox stood still, rooted to the ground as if he had grown there and seen decades pass. The long white arms began to reach for its prey, and its mouth hinged open … wide … wider still, until Silent Fox thought it could go no farther. A sudden lightning strike illuminated the beast’s face, and the old man sprang into action.

The ancient recurve bow swung up and around from behind Silent Fox’s back, the long arrow already nocked on the string. The old man’s eyes fought to sight down the arrow’s shaft as he drew back the taut string with all his might. He could see the flint arrowhead, razor-sharp edges glinting and bound tightly by the elk gut on the end. The beast roared once more as it overtook the old man, and the string sprang from his fingers.

“Love you, Joshua,” Silent Fox said.

The arrow flew from the bow and whistled down the open throat of the Pale Man. The flint buried itself deep into the thick muscle of the creature’s heart. The organ nearly exploded with the impact, but the Pale Man’s momentum took it forward and it collided with the old man. It fell heavily on top of Silent Fox, and the two lay motionless in the rain.

After several moments light began to emanate from the pale-white body, and the skin began to dissolve as though it was being burned from the inside. Golden hues mixed with brilliant blues illuminated the side of the long trailer. The light filtered upward like embers from a forgotten fire. They continued to rise, not extinguished by the rain. Higher and higher into the sky the flashes of light rose, until there was nothing left of the monster’s corpse. Instead, the body of a young man lay where it had been. The old man’s body lay next to it, his eyes held tightly shut to the rain that continued to fall. Joshua’s hand was stretched out above his head as if he was reaching for something. The old man’s hand was extended down, and the very ends of their fingers were just barely touching.

In the distance the sirens of rescue vehicles echoed off the valley’s walls as they drew nearer to the drill site. After a short while, the rain began to let up. As the sun climbed from its bed in the east to warm the horizon with the red light of morning, the rain tapered off more, and then stopped.

THE MAN IN THE ROOM

There was a man in the room. He stood at the foot of the large bed, white patches of moonlight shining through the curtainless window and dappling his legs. He looks so out of place there, Henry thought, and he blinked again. The contrast of the shadow figure in the tidy, almost-empty bedroom scared him even more than realizing there was a man standing at the foot of his bed in the dead of night.

Henry’s breath hissed involuntarily, and his question became a jumble of vowels that tripped off his sleep-encased tongue.

“What’s that?” the man whispered from the darkness.

Henry couldn’t see his face, but he could see the shadows move around the area where his mouth was. “What do you want?” Henry repeated, this time more clearly.

The man stepped slightly closer to the bed in an easy, almost-lazy way. Henry reached out automatically to his right side and felt for Diane, but his fingers met only smooth cotton and her pillow. He pulled his hand back as if he had touched a hot burner and remembered that she’d been gone over two years now.

“What do I want?” the shadow said, standing near the foot of Henry’s bed like a man at dinner buffet. “I want the true shape of things. I want to know. To know is power. I want that.”

The voice rasped out of a dry throat, and Henry resisted the urge to clear his own. The voice was like sandpaper to his ears.

“What do you want with me?” Henry asked, his voice gaining a little strength with the indignation of his home being invaded.

“Oh, you’re my truth. Don’t you know me? I’m the one you dream about.”

Henry’s mind spun as the sleep and confusion slowly cleared from his head like morning fog burned off by the sun. He knew the voice coming from the man’s mouth, but something was wrong. Something was so wrong that he couldn’t grasp it.

“I … I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Henry said, trying to think if there was a weapon somewhere near his bed that he could grab. The nearest object was a large bedside lamp that sat on a table to his left. It couldn’t be swung easily, but at the very least he could shed some light on the man so he could see who he was.

“Sure you do, my friend. I’ve come all this way to say hello. I know you need me, so I’m never far away. I’m the truth.”

“The truth of what?” Henry asked, as he made ready to dive toward the light switch.

“The truth of you,” the voice croaked.

Henry lunged, and as his fingers grazed the depressible light switch, another connection was made deep in his mind. He knew the face he would see when the light flared within the hundred-watt bulb, even though it was impossible. Even as he turned the light on and the optic signals were sent to his mind and interpreted into conceivable thought, his brain rebelled against it. A scream left Henry’s mouth like bats escaping a cave at twilight.

Daniel Ash stood at the foot of his bed, naked, all six foot three of him, his dark eyes partially hidden by the slash of black hair hanging lankly over his broad forehead. His thick lips wore a small knowing smile, and Henry could see the three scars on his flush cheek where Diane had clawed him while he strangled her.

“You’re dead!” Henry screamed after drawing a heaving breath back into his shaking lungs. “You can’t be here, I saw them kill you!”

Ash did not move. He only stared at the shivering middle-aged man sitting in the bed before him. When Henry’s breathing slowed after a few moments, Ash spoke.

“She was the first, but not the last. I watched the light fade from her eyes. I know her; there was truth there.”

“Shut up! Shut up, you fuck! You killed my wife! You’re dead! They killed you in the gas chamber! They killed you!” Henry rose from the bed. His feet touched the room’s cold wood floor and seemed to sink into it.

“They set me free, my friend. Free to come here and be with you, whenever I want. To learn the truth and to teach it to you.”

“I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you this time,” Henry growled, and was surprised by the venom in his voice. He had always been a gentle person, and the hatred that dripped from his words—unclothed as the man before him—did not seem his own. Henry took another step on the soft, springy wood floor, but stopped as something moved in the darkness between Ash’s parted lips.

A black multi-jointed leg jutted from the other man’s mouth like a thin cigarette. It held the illusion of a cigarette until it twitched and pulled against Ash’s upper lip. The spider emerged slowly from its burrow, expanding its other legs as it gained freedom and began crawling across the man’s face. Henry staggered back, a cry of revulsion choking off the words of rage that had earlier poured forth so easily. Another spider joined the first and crawled up to the dark nest of hair. Soon Ash’s face was covered by the creatures, and his mouth hung open to accommodate their departure from the depths of his body.

Henry backed away and fell onto the top of his nightstand. His hands grasped the lamp on the table as he steadied himself, and without thinking, he stood and hurled the large light across the room at the naked infestation.

The light connected solidly with Ash’s head, and it was as if a grenade had gone off inside the man’s body. His skin flew apart and his mouth opened as his body dropped away like a coat from a hanger.

Thousands of spiders of all sizes and colors flowed to the floor in a living pool of undulating legs and fat bodies. They spread out like a drop of honey on a plate and began to flow toward Henry’s exposed feet. As the bedside lamp finally landed on the floor, the light winked out and the spiders became dark scurrying shapes on the hardwood before him. Henry tilted his head back and screamed when the many legs started making their way over his feet, climbing toward his open mouth.

The scream echoed hollowly down the bright corridor, bouncing off the white and pale-green squares of linoleum. The nurse dressed in white scrubs sitting at the small table tucked into an alcove near the far end of the hall looked up from the book he was reading.

Nineteen, he thought. Had to be. Always was. There hadn’t been a single night when he had been on shift here that nineteen hadn’t woken screaming. It was almost like clockwork.

With a sigh he stood and stretched his back and felt the solid cracks of his spine adjusting. Without pausing he drew a ring from his belt and selected a small silver key from the multitude hanging there. The key slid into a lock on the steel cabinet near the desk, and his hand darted inside. It withdrew, clutching a plastic-wrapped syringe and a small bottle of clear liquid.

Nineteen was a Statie. Staties get a shot if they get out of hand, especially at night with only one nurse on each floor to care for them. Staties didn’t have family or friends that looked after them and made sure they were all right.

After the syringe was full of the clear liquid, the nurse made his way down the long hallway, listening to the squeak of his shoes on the clean floor punctuated every few seconds by a hoarse scream that filtered out of the end room.

When he reached the steel door marked “19,” the nurse pulled his keys out and fit the largest of the group into the lock. As the door swung into the padded room, the screams from the man strapped to the large bed amplified a hundred times. The nurse quickly stepped inside and shut the door behind him. He couldn’t have this crazy waking the others, or else he’d have a hell of a night ahead of him.

He talked to the man in a quiet voice as he approached, hoping to soothe him into silence. “Hello, sir, how are we tonight?”

“Spiders! Full of spiders! They’re on me! They’re on me! Get them off! Get them off!”

The nurse sidled up to the bed, where the dark-haired man lay straining against the padded leather straps that held his ankles and wrists down tight at his sides.

“It was a dream, sir. Just a bad dream.”

The nurse repeated the words several times, just loud enough for the restrained man to hear him. Soon the nurse’s calm voice began to have an effect on the screaming man. His breathing still came in ragged heaves, and his bulging eyes still strained against their sockets, but they seemed to actually see his surroundings for the first time.

In a smooth movement that he had done hundreds of times, the nurse slid the small needle into the man’s shoulder and depressed the plunger. The clear liquid slid into the man’s body, and within seconds his eyes had begun to glaze. In a minute, his muscles had relaxed and his head, which earlier had been held upright to gaze around the room, slumped back onto the white hospital-issued pillow. As the nurse watched, the man’s breathing slowed and became a steady metronomic rhythm.

The nurse nodded and turned from the restrained man. He snapped off the powerful overhead light, and the room was bathed in pale moonlight that shone through a reinforced window ten feet above the floor. The light illuminated the three achromic scars, raked in furrows on the sleeping man’s cheek. Before shutting and locking the door, the nurse paused for a moment to consider the man who lay on the bed.

“Good night, Mr. Ash. Sleep tight.”

With a soft click, the door locked behind the nurse, and the room was silent once again.

THE EXPLODING MAN

Larry’s brain was hurting again. He knew that his brain wasn’t actually hurting because there weren’t any pain nerve receptors in the brain. He’d heard it in a couple of movies, and a doctor had mentioned it once at a conference he had attended in Seattle. So his brain wasn’t hurting, but it sure felt like it.

It had started that morning when his wife—well, soon-to-be ex-wife—had called using the cell phone he was paying for while driving the car he had bought, probably giving the dentist he had recommended a hand job while on her way to said dentist’s condo that he had paid for with all the dental work that had been done for his family.

She had tried to sound upbeat—for his benefit, he knew. She was worried about him. She had been since she broke the news to him two weeks ago. She was sleeping with the family dentist.

Okay. How did one go about starting an affair with a dentist anyway? Esscuss me, dochh? Woushld choo lichh to go chu tinner lacher? Machbe shtop at a hochel on tha way bachhh?

Really? The word had been bouncing around inside his head for the last two weeks like a mental patient in a padded room. This was really happening? His wife of fourteen years was leaving him? His wife who, up until two weeks ago, had seemed perfectly happy with their suburban, albeit mundane, life?

He thought that was the real kicker. He hadn’t seen it coming. It had been like stepping out into a deserted and silent street only to get smacked by a Mack truck the moment your feet hit the pavement. The next blow was when she had taken Mattie.

It was one thing to sleep with the dentist and tell him that she wasn’t in love with him anymore. Those things he could absorb. He could take them in and slowly digest them like a sour piece of meat. Eventually, he’d get back on his feet and continue the slow, plodding steps that would lead him to the end of his life.

But taking his little girl away from him had been something completely different. The heaviness of it had hit him like a well-placed punch to the stomach. It left a hollow ache in his mind whenever he walked by her empty room and when he didn’t see her small blonde head poking over the top of the sofa as she watched cartoons.

He had made two trips to the courthouse to fill out the necessary paperwork to gain custody, or at least to get visitation rights. But the bitch wasn’t even giving him that. That’s what he had taken to calling her over the last two weeks. Not out loud, of course. He didn’t know if he could actually bring himself to do that. It just wasn’t in his nature to say nasty things about other people. He thought things, all right, but he never said a word.

That was actually one of the things that had attracted Jill to him: he was a nice guy. She had said that it was so hard to find a truly nice guy in a world full of takers. That compliment had stayed with him for years, strengthening his ideals of always doing the right thing and turning the other cheek. Then two weeks ago she had said that he needed to stand up for himself more. He was a pushover, and no one respected someone who didn’t respect themselves.

After he had gotten off the phone with the bitch this morning, Larry realized he had completely burnt his toast because he hadn’t checked the setting on the toaster. His daughter had pushed the dial all the way to the dark-colored toast on the display. It was her little joke. She had laughed so hard the first time she had done it that she had fallen on the floor in a fit. He and Jill had laughed too, the smell of burnt bread hanging thick in the air.

Now, seeing the knob twisted to the dark setting, Larry’s eyes began to fill with tears. Before a single drop could escape from his red eyelids, the pain began to build in his head again. It started with a low buzzing sound and slowly built into a solid feeling of pain that resided right behind both of his ears. The pain beat in a slow rhythm with his pulse, until he began to hear a dull whining that sounded like a large jet idling just above his house.

He stood and started pacing in the spacious kitchen. Back and forth. Back and forth across the spotless white tile. He had taken to doing this in the last two weeks. He had always thought pacing was something the minor character in a horror movie did when the hero went out into the storm where they knew a killer was waiting. But as he walked across the hard floor, seven paces this way, seven paces back, he felt the pressure and pain in his head abating.

After several minutes of movement without stopping, Larry slowed, then ceased his pacing and released a large breath of air he didn’t remember holding. He looked up at the clock, not really to check the time but just to look somewhere to let his thoughts refocus, and realized he should have left the house ten minutes ago.

“Fuck!” The curse rang out against the cabinets of the kitchen, and Larry half ran toward the front door of his house. The pain that had released its hold on him began to beat threateningly behind his ears and, not for the first time, he wondered if he had a tumor growing up there. He pushed the thought away quickly, but not before he registered that a feeling of relief had surfaced along with the idea.

After slipping on his shoes, he stumbled out the side entrance and into the two-stall garage. The garage was half empty now, of course, because Jill’s minivan was gone, never to return again it seemed. The only occupant now was his BMW X6, which gleamed dully in the darkened garage.

After throwing open the door to his car, he realized he had left his briefcase sitting on the table near the entry door. He exhaled, trying to keep the pain that was slowly working its way back into his head at a minimum. Larry raced back up the two stairs and into the house and tripped by stepping on one of the dangling shoelaces of his wingtips. His hands flew out instinctively, and his left shin connected with the entry flashing, tearing the skin through the thin material of his slacks.

He landed face-down in the entryway, his top half in the house and his legs sticking out into the garage. The air in his lungs had whooshed out of him, stopping him from releasing the string of curses that immediately came to mind as fire bloomed across the front of his left shin. He lay there for a few seconds, wondering if he had broken his leg. Even through the pain, he shook his head and couldn’t believe his luck. This might be the absolute worst morning he had ever had.

Larry sat up and pulled the leg of his slacks up to inspect the wound. A little blood seeped from the abrasion, and there was a small red splotch already soaked through on his pants. The pain in his head pounded, and the jet engine in his ears started to rev up. Ignoring the pain in both his head and leg, he grabbed the handle of his briefcase and went back into the garage, this time being careful while going down the stairs.

The engine of the BMW purred to life, and he hit the garage-door button mounted on his sun visor. The door didn’t move. He hit it again, and still there was no movement from the door behind him.

“Are you kidding me?” he said to the quiet interior of the car. He had a sudden urge to take this as an omen. Not to go raise the door by hand. To just sit there with the car running and roll down the windows, enjoy the blue breeze that would build in the garage after a few minutes. Mattie’s face suddenly sprang into his mind through the thumping pain behind his ears.

Immediately he opened the car door and reached up to release the garage door from the automatic motor that normally ran it up and down. The door sprung up several inches. After a few moments, he had opened it, backed his car out, and pulled it closed once again.

He jumped in the car and risked a glance at the luminous blue numbers on his dash. He was now fifteen minutes late, and he was going to miss the board meeting that he needed to be at. The Larson/Weis project was being given out this morning, and he was the prime candidate to head it up. He couldn’t let that fucking Bob Apple get it, that was for sure. That guy couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a flashlight, much less supervise and oversee the architectural design and production of a fifteen-story executive building in downtown LA.

Larry quickly backed out of his driveway and accelerated down the small street that his family had lived on for the last fifteen years. All of the houses and trees seemed to look different in some way, as if a special-effects crew had come and built a set in his neighborhood that was almost exactly like the original but slightly different in the details.

He tried to shake the strange thoughts, along with the pain that was beginning to spread from behind his ears and over the back of his skull like hot acid, as he merged onto the freeway that would bring him directly to the architectural firm he had worked at for the last seven years.

Traffic was fairly light, which was unusual for a Tuesday morning only a little after the beginning of rush hour. Larry rubbed his right temple unconsciously as he stared ahead at the four-lane. His thoughts began to wander back to Jill and their dentist. Well, he was her dentist now in nearly every way, he supposed. That was something else—now he would have to look for a new dentist.

Larry felt his gorge rise as he imagined them together, sneaking around behind his back for who knows how long. They probably had laughed at him, and were still laughing at him. Larry, the nice guy, never said a bad word or hurt anyone. He just turned the other cheek. How many times had he made polite conversation with that fucking prick of a mouth cleaner, only to have the guy screw his wife and probably take his daughter out for ice cream on the weekend?

Well, he would be damned if that asshole was going to take over his life. He wasn’t even that good of a dentist, Larry thought angrily. He still had to be careful of hot liquids on his right side where the incompetent shit had supposedly filled a cavity.

A semi that had been creeping up slowly next to his driver’s-side window swiftly changed lanes while the last ten feet of the enormous trailer was still even with Larry’s BMW.

“Shit!” he yelled as he simultaneously hit the brakes and swerved his car sharply to the right. The tread of the tires screamed like a cat being skinned, and the car swung lazily on its expensive suspension system. The two right tires rose into the air and then slammed back down when Larry compensated by turning the wheel back to the left. Smoke curled from the molten tires as the car came sliding to a stop in the center of the right lane.

Larry checked his rearview mirror, making sure there wouldn’t be a sudden and fatal impact from behind. The lane was clear for a quarter mile behind him. His breathing came in sharp gasps that stabbed his lungs and made his head feel as if it were filled with helium. The semi continued on several hundred yards down the road in his lane, seemingly oblivious as it trundled stupidly on its way somewhere to displace its cargo and completely unaware that Larry had nearly been killed in its wake.

The pain blossomed like a fiery hand across the back of his skull. The lengthening tendrils of agony crept just under his scalp, and he felt as if his skull was beginning to crack under the pressure. A breathless whimper escaped Larry’s lips, and he pressed his palms flat to the sides of his head, nearly expecting to feel the sludgy drippings of brain matter running out of his twitching ears. Forcing himself to breath and trying to focus his watering eyes, Larry slowly gripped the steering wheel and pulled over to the side of the lane just across the white line and rumble strip lining the edge of the highway.

After throwing the car into park, Larry sat motionless, staring out of the windshield and releasing himself to the pain. There was nothing else to do. If he was going to die here on the side of the road in his car, then so be it. But just make it stop. Please, God, make the pain go away.

“I love you, Mattie,” he whispered with a forced breath between clenched teeth. If he was dying here, then he wanted the last words from his mouth to be uttered to his little girl. She wouldn’t know, but God would.

His breathing began to slow, and suddenly he realized the pain was receding like a beaten army retreating toward their reinforced lines. He knew the pain hadn’t given up, hadn’t left him, but was drawing back for some reason.

Jesus, he was regarding the pain as though it had a mind of its own. As if it could reason and bide its time until it was ready to finally kill him.

Larry blinked his eyes and rubbed his dripping nose on the shoulder of his suit jacket. He considered going home and calling in sick. He could lie on the couch and watch reruns of Seinfeld or catch Gladiator on TV. Maybe he’d get stinking drunk and pass out, forget everything. Forget Jill, forget the dentist, forget his job, and forget his responsibilities for a day. He deserved it, damn it! He’d been a good guy his whole life. He could take a day for himself if he needed it. Maybe the pain would leave for good if he took a sick day.

Larry was just beginning to look for the nearest exit that would take him back in the direction of his home when Bob Apple’s thin smiling face floated up into the auditorium of his mind. He just couldn’t let that wretched sniveling suck-up get the Larson/Weis project. He’d butcher it for sure.

Without thinking any further about the comfort of his quiet home and the softness of his couch that was calling from the opposite direction, Larry put the car into gear and accelerated back into traffic of the southbound four-lane.

His parking spot was taken when he arrived at his office building. Of course it was. This was literally the day from hell, why wouldn’t his parking spot be taken? Larry pulled past his reserved spot and the gray Hummer that was nestled there. He searched for an open spot without luck. Rows upon rows of gaudy SUVs and fairly unimpressive sports cars lined the lot from one end to the other.

Finally, giving up on finding a spot within the building’s lot and fighting the pain that was beginning to rise again in the back of his head, Larry guided his BMW onto the nearby side street and parked haphazardly between a beat-up rusty Ford pickup and a dumpster that had, for reasons unknown, been moved out onto the street.

Larry risked a glance at his wristwatch as he hurried across the packed parking lot. He was nearly thirty-five minutes late now. He half ran, half walked until he reached the entrance doors and slipped quietly inside the empty lobby. His steps echoed hollowly off the marbled walls, and he nodded and smiled as best he could with his sweat-drenched face at the security guard. The guard just stared impassively as though he was made of stone and chewed the gum he always chewed. Larry was reminded of the blank look of a cow chewing its cud and actually had to stifle a burst of laughter that welled up from within. How could I laugh after the type of morning that I had just endured? he wondered as he punched the backlit number fourteen in the deserted elevator.

He was still contemplating the problems and irritations he had dealt with so far when the doors dinged open and he stepped out onto his floor. The wide oak door at the end of the hall opened after he had taken two steps. When he saw the grin on Bob Apple’s weaselly face, he knew he was too late.

Larry’s stomach dropped when he saw the owner of the firm smile and shake Bob’s hand. The Larson/Weis project was gone. It would be doomed to poor decisions and incompetent design work. Larry had been hoping for this job for months, and now it was in the hands of the idiot striding down the hallway like a guided missile.

“Larry! How ya doing, pal? You look like hell.” Bob punctuated the sentence by throwing his head back in loud, braying laughter and slapping Larry roughly on the lower back.

The pain began to beat out a tempo in time with Larry’s heart on the back of his skull, but he managed to pull his fallen face up for a moment with a tight smile and nod of his aching head.

“Just wanted to tell you, I got the Larson/Weis project this morning. They said it was down to you and me, and well, with the issues you’ve been dealing with at home … Well, anyway, no big deal, really, in the grand scheme of things. Still on the same team, right? So what do you say I bring you on board as my senior advisor? A seven-month project is gonna get pretty long, and I could use the help.”

Larry’s mouth worked soundlessly, and he realized that if he let the words spew out that were itching to come forth, he would soon be wrestling this other man on the floor of the hallway, their four-hundred-dollar suits and polished shoes flying wildly in all directions.

Larry could hear the jet returning over the muted clack of shoes on the polished floors and the secretary answering a softly beeping call on the phone at the end of the hall. The whistling whine built until he could see Bob’s lips moving with no sound reaching his ears.

Larry mumbled something about needing to call his daughter and stumbled past the other man in a shambling jog. He made it down the hallway to another row of offices that branched off from the main walkway to the left. His office was set off to the far right corner of the large design room, and it had a great view of the city stretching to the north. His secretary, a woman in her early fifties with dark hair that was gradually turning gray at the temples, was standing at the door of his office with a bundle of folders and several envelopes clutched to her chest.

“Morning, Larry, you’re late. You’re never late.”

Larry could just hear her over the whining in his ears. He smiled another tight smile and wiped the tears that were forming in the corners of his eyes away with the heel of his hand.

“Sorry, Joan. Had a rough morning.” He stepped past her and motioned for her to shut the door of the office as she entered behind him.

“Jesus, Larry, you look terrible. Is that blood on your pants?” Joan said, pointing with one outstretched hand at the spot where he had banged his shin that morning.

Larry set his briefcase on the large desk that sat in the middle of the room and fell heavily into the swiveling chair behind it.

“Yeah, hit my shin this morning.” Larry leaned forward and carefully put his face into his hands. He breathed in and out and willed the pain that was beating wings of agony in the back of his head to go away.

“Well, we lost the Larson project, but I’m guessing you heard that already from big-mouth Bob. He sent out e-mails to half the building already. That should’ve been yours.”

“I know!” Larry yelled suddenly, causing Joan to take a surprised step toward the glass door behind her. He saw a few people look up from their desks and peek from their cubicles in the main work area. He breathed deeply and drew another stiff smile across his sweating face.

“I’m sorry. I know I lost it, because I was late and with what’s going on at home right now. How the hell did that spread so fast anyway?” Larry asked.

Joan only shrugged and pursed her lips with heartfelt sympathy in her eyes.

“I’m sorry about all this. Jill called this morning and …” He stopped and shook his head.

Joan’s eyes softened further in her lined face, and she nodded in understanding. He had let the older woman in on the news of his home life in the last two weeks. She hadn’t been a shoulder to cry on, really, but she listened and she was the closest friend he had here at work.

“You know what? You don’t want that project anyway. It’s going to be a pain in the ass, and not to mention a ton of paperwork on my end.”

Larry glanced up and had to smile for real at the look of levity on Joan’s face. He snorted and shook his head again, this time in amusement.

“You’re right, let Apple deal with the ins and outs of building an exec in the city. He’s never done one.” The pain receded suddenly as though he had thrown ice water on a fire. Maybe it was just stress, he thought. He needed a break. Maybe he would take Mattie to the beach for a week when this whole thing settled down. No, not settled down—when he had custody. He smiled for real at this thought, and Joan smiled back.

“Thanks, Joan, I needed that.”

“Anytime, boss. I’ll be out front if you need to talk.” Joan shut the door quietly behind her, and he watched her sit down at her desk and begin filing papers.

He breathed deeply a few times and took a moment to enjoy the lack of pain in his head and the clear sound of silence that filled his ears. Things would be okay. He’d get Mattie this weekend, and they would do something fun. He would explain to her about what was happening, because she was probably afraid and felt very alone. He would make it okay somehow.

Larry blinked several times and decided he needed some coffee. The coffee machine was at the other end of the hallway. The execs hadn’t spared any expense when they had put it in a year ago. The machine made cappuccinos, lattes, and some of the best black coffee he had ever had.

He had just risen from his chair when his phone beeped, and Joan’s voice filtered in from the other room.

“I just wanted to make sure you saw you had a message waiting.”

The phone clicked off, and his eyes landed on the blinking light next to line one. He sat back down, lifted the receiver to his ear, and punched the button.

“Hello, Mr. Daniels, my name is Sheri Davis with Los Angeles County Court Services. I am getting in touch with you about the paperwork you filed last week regarding custody of your daughter during your divorce proceedings. Your wife, Jill Daniels, has filed an injunction against you gaining custody or having visitations with your daughter on the grounds that she has voiced concern about your mental well-being. At this time she has also filed a restraining order, which I can go over with you if you would call me back when you get this message. For the time being, you’ll need to come to the courthouse and set a date with the court-appointed psychologist. The findings of the appointment will be examined by the judge assigned to the divorce proceedings. Once again, my name is Sheri Davis, and you can reach me—”

The phone dropped from Larry’s hand and hit the floor with a resounding crack. He didn’t notice the dropped phone because his head suddenly felt as though a railroad spike was being driven into the back of it. The pain didn’t stop at its mid-skull boundary line as it had before. It continued and began to fold the front of his forehead into its fiery grip.

Larry stood and took a shaky step toward the door. What did I stand up to do? he wondered. Coffee. That was it, he needed coffee. The whining sound of the jet had returned, and had increased tenfold. His eardrums thrummed with it, and he feared that they would simply perforate from the sound. Coffee. Yep, coffee would do the trick. Had he been talking on the phone to someone? He felt as though he had gotten some bad news, but he couldn’t remember what it had been.

He staggered to the door and pulled it open roughly. Joan’s head swiveled around, and her eyes widened at the sight of her boss. Larry’s face was pulled into a fixed grimace of pain, and his eyes had gone wild. She had seen those eyes before. They were the eyes of a gazelle on the nature channel she watched sometimes, as a lion closed in and made to tear out its throat. They were the eyes of an animal in panic.

“Larry, are you okay?”

Larry stumbled past her, stiff-legged and gritting his teeth so hard that she could actually hear pieces of them snapping off in his mouth. She could hear something else too. A dull static whining, like a TV on a fuzzy station in another room. It seemed to be coming from the man who was making his way across the front of her desk toward the hallway.

“Just need a coffee!” Larry screeched through his clenched jaw.

Joan stood and watched as the young man staggered out into the hall and turned left toward the lounge area.

Larry made his way down the hall, bouncing off of a wall every so often and returning to his course like a bowling ball on a lane with bumpers. He passed drunkenly by Bob Apple’s office, and the other man spotted him and immediately jumped from behind his desk and followed, holding a half-empty cup of coffee.

Larry arrived at the coffee machine, grasped the stack of foam cups, and after several attempts, managed to pull one off. He put his shaking hand that held the cup under the silver spout at the top of the whirring machine and tried to hold it steady as another wave of misery washed over the coast of his brain. His knees buckled slightly and he nearly went straight to the floor, but he managed to hold himself up by putting his other hand out onto the table that the machine sat on.

Bob stepped up behind Larry and immediately began spewing words out like water from a sprinkler. “Hey, buddy, didn’t get to finish what I was saying back in the hall there. I was hoping you could head up my team. We could start organizing this afternoon. I have to hit the links with a couple of the investors this afternoon, but I’ll send you a memo on who I want on the team.”

Larry could barely hear the other man rambling behind him. He concentrated on pushing the button that said “Coffee” in the center of the machine before him. He punched the button with a shaking finger and held it as the directions at the top of the silver contraption said. No dark liquid came out. Not a drop. He released the button and punched it again. Nothing. He pushed it again, harder this time. Nothing.

“Oh, hey, buddy, I actually just got the last cup. Someone needs to come down and refill it, I think. Anyway, when you get the memo, just use your own discretion …”

The sound in Larry’s ears rose until he could feel the fillings in his teeth begin to tingle and shake. He turned on rubbery legs, eyes bulging and mouth gaping at the man standing behind him.

Bob took one look at Larry and stopped talking. Larry’s head was completely aflame with agony now, and the pain was spreading down into his chest. There was nothing other than the pain. It was all he knew. It flowed inside his stomach like molten lava and washed lower into his legs. His head was shaking now with the sound, the muscles and tendons in his neck straining against the skin that held them back. His eyes stared at the ceiling. His knees finally gave way and he fell to them.

The high whining that had started coming from his mouth began to deepen, and blood vessels in his eyes and face started to rupture. Larry’s white fingers scrambled at his throat as if to quiet the noise, but it continued to drop in pitch.

Bob started to back away from the kneeling man but failed to notice the leather footstool behind him. He tumbled backward over it, only to land in the matching overstuffed leather chair behind it. He watched in horror as Larry’s head tilted back farther and farther, until his mouth was open and his tongue stuck out like a child catching the first snowflakes of winter.

The whistling whine coming from Larry’s mouth continued to deepen as his hands dropped from his throat and he leaned farther back like some sort of human loudspeaker.

Bob sat motionless on the expensive leather chair, and his mind subconsciously connected the dots that the auditory signals were sending to his brain. It was a bomb. The whistling that was coming from his co-worker’s mouth, emanating from his skin, was the sound of a large bomb slowly dropping to the earth, inexorably and surely. Bob curled into the fetal position on the large chair and tried to cover his head. Several people stepped out into the long hallway to see what was causing the noise.

Blood began to pour from Larry’s ears, and a thin stream dripped down his chin and onto his neck. The sound dropped even lower, and abruptly the hair on Larry’s head erupted into flames that danced across his blistering scalp in a small inferno. His vocal cords ruptured, and a white light bloomed from every pore in his body.

“We interrupt this program to bring you breaking news. At a little after nine Pacific Standard Time this morning a nuclear weapon of some sort was detonated on the western edge of Los Angeles. Initial reports are saying that the blast has reduced an area of the city five miles in diameter to rubble. Casualties are still being estimated at this time, but all early calculations put this disaster in the realm of three million dead, with more in the surrounding area soon to die from the inevitable nuclear fallout. Theories are still being brought to light as to whether this is an attack or an accident. Either way, this is, bar none, the most horrific catastrophe the world has ever witnessed …”

ADRIFT

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Case File: 00017451

Designate Code: Zebra

10/15/11

Authorized Personnel Only:

The following journal entries were recovered from the southwestern Pacific Ocean, approximately three hundred nautical miles off the coast of Japan, by the Jill Alverez, a United States oil tanker en route to Kobe. The entries are believed to have been made by Nathan Vannek, an independent investment banker from San Diego, California, who was lost at sea over six months prior to the discovery of the journal. A crewman on the Alverez spotted the buoy that was attached to the journal and hauled it aboard. The crewman read it and, after landing in Kobe, sent the journal to Agent Schael, who is, in fact, the crewman’s brother. After analyzing the journal and verifying its authenticity, a large search was launched in the area described early in the journal. No wreckage or body was recovered.

2/6/11

I wasn’t going to have a journal on this trip. It’s kind of cliché to keep a sea log. “Sea log” sounds like a wet turd. Well, with nothing else to do but wait for a rescue to come, I might as well write down what I’m seeing, thinking, feeling. Maybe I’ll get a book deal out of this. I can see the headlines now: “Man Rescued at Sea after Two Days.” Not really dramatic stuff, but you never know, I am an opportunist. That’s what Gale always says. It’s true; I do look for the best in a situation and try to use it to my advantage. It’s made me rich, so I can’t complain or question how it works, and that’s that, as they say. That’s actually why I’m here right now in this drifting boat in the middle of the North Pacific Sea. I saw an opportunity and took it. An opportunity to make a grand proposal to the woman I love. I’ll read this to you, Gale, when I get to the mainland, so I have to make it romantic! Ha, ha.

I got the idea when Gale’s company called and she announced she’d be leaving to work in Japan for three months. She works as a product manager for a company that distributes promotional pieces. Basically it’s her job to make sure the seams don’t leak on batches of travel mugs from China or the printing stays straight on golf balls from Indonesia.

When she got the call that she was needed in Japan, I already had a ring stored away in an old shoebox tucked in the back of our closet. (Yep, honey, it was right there in front of you the whole time! I’m glad you didn’t spring clean and throw everything out though!) I couldn’t bring myself to propose before she left, it just didn’t feel right.  So then I considered going with her and asking her there in Japan. It would be romantic, under the lights of the Orient. She begged me to come too. But this idea was already blooming in my mind. It would be grand and wonderful and something she’d never forget. I love her very much and that is the God’s honest truth. I wouldn’t settle for anything less.

So, the day I saw her off at the airport, I took a three-week crash course in open-sea sailing. I did some sailing when I was younger, just around some islands off the coast of Maine where I grew up. Sailing’s fairly simple once you get the hang of it. I’ve always been able to pick things up quickly, and this was no different. A few days after I completed my class, I rented the boat that I’m sitting in now (writing this survivor journal) the Wind Clipper. Cool name, right? I thought so. There’s even a mural of a huge pair of scissors running down both sides of the thirty-six-foot boat. I packed the necessary gear and provisions, made arrangements with my business (I told my secretary that if Gale called while I was making my journey, tell her I had an urgent business trip that was taking me off the map for a while and it might be some time before I could reach her), and set off from San Diego Harbor. I was going to sail into Tokyo harbor and call her as I was arriving and ask her to go the docks. I would sail up, tie off the boat, and bend on one knee, as she stood there holding her hand on her throat as she does sometimes when she’s excited. I couldn’t wait. It would literally be the best moment of my life. That was, if she didn’t crack me for not calling her for two months.

Now I bet most people would say that the idea was reckless. Stupid. Insane. Well, I wouldn’t disagree with them, but I also have more money than the average person. I had the best distress-signal transmitter and lifeboat installed before I left. It was going to be an adventure, my last real-life adventure before I settled down and married the woman I love. There’d be no traipsing across the ocean for me once there were little feet pattering around our house, that’s for sure. I also brought Will. Will’s a two-year-old beagle and one of my best friends. Gale bought him for me as a Christmas gift, and he’s almost never left my side. I even bring him to work most days. There was no way I was leaving him behind for two months.

So, like I said, we set off. The waters were calm on the Pacific as we made our way farther and farther across the deep blue. Every day was a new beginning. I would rise with the dawn and eat a light breakfast while watching the sun climb out of the water like an ancient god of fire, and I’d fall asleep looking up at the stars as the gentle rocking of the boat lulled me into dreamland. Everything was fine until the storm hit two days ago.

I was still about four hundred miles from seeing land, but for a moment I thought I’d sailed into an unknown black-and-gray Island that blocked out the whole horizon. I could even see it before the radar on the computer picked it up. The huge mass of dark rolling clouds was like an ocean unto itself. It loomed above the water, turning it a dirty dishwater color that unnerved me to say the least. My heart had started beating harder as I tried to remember what to do when encountering a storm on the open water. I knew if at all possible that I should go around it, but there was no way, it was too large. I also knew I had to keep the boat headed right into the waves; otherwise, I’d be flipped and torn apart like a papier-mâché toy.

It came faster than I’d expected, and the waves crested at nearly twenty feet. My boat was only thirty-six. Thirty-six feet. It had sounded impressive and seaworthy when I left the mainland. Now, in the face of Mother Nature’s fury, it seemed insignificant, and I did too. My confidence that had always gotten me so far had ebbed away like blood from a deep wound and left me feeling weak.

The waves pounded the boat through the night and sometime around three a.m. I turned on the emergency beacon. I held Will tight to my chest as I steered the vessel as best I could. Just when I thought we were coming to the end of the storm, a giant gust of wind caught the mainsail from the front, and I heard the mast cracking like a walnut’s shell. The beam of wood snapped off about two feet above the deck and fell back toward the helm, where I was standing with Will. I jumped down into the cabin area below deck just as the mast hit the spot where we’d been. Luckily, that was nearly the last push of the storm, and within an hour the sea had calmed and the sun began to rise.

As soon as there was enough light, Will and I surveyed the damage. The mainmast had broken off, like I said, and swung down like a missile. I could see the splinters around the inboard engine housing, and when I looked closer my fears were confirmed. The mast had smashed several components on the top of the engine to pieces. I tried starting the motor anyway and received nothing but a harsh grinding growl for my efforts.

I inspected the rest of the ship for other damage. I couldn’t find any other structural problems, except for in the sleeping area below deck. There was something sticking out of the floor near the bed that I slept on at night when the sea was calm. It was a spear of pearly gray material about two and a half feet long that ended in a sharp black tip. I touched the object, and it felt smooth and actually somewhat soft in a strange way. It was lodged solidly in the hull, and no matter how hard I pulled, it would not move. I think it’s some sort of strange coral formation that must have broken off in the storm. Somehow it got blasted through our floor. Could we have been near a reef that was unmapped and hit this thing? For now it’s not leaking around the edges, but I’ll keep a close eye on it just to be sure. One strange thing: Will doesn’t like it one bit. He stopped at the door to the cabin area and wouldn’t take another step inside. He even growled at it. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him growl before.

For now I’ve reset the beacon and tried the emergency radio to call for help. There’s nothing but static, but I’m sure I’ll get something soon. The day is pretty clear and we’re just adrift on the unending blue waves. I’m guessing we’ll hear the sound of airplanes and helicopters shortly, and this will be my last real adventure. I guess getting off of a rescue chopper and proposing is almost as cool as stepping off a ship after sailing across a sea. Almost, but not quite.

2/7/11

Still here. I’m actually a little surprised. I slept lightly through the night, thinking that any minute I’d wake to the sound of steel blades cutting the air and the sight of a friendly dude in a wetsuit rappelling down a line onto the deck of the boat. Neither happened. Instead I woke to the sound of Will growling again. He was standing at the threshold of the bedroom, staring at the coral thing poking out of the floor. His ears were actually lying back against his brown skull, and I could see some little white teeth below his upper lip. I had to laugh. He’s just not an intimidating dog. I guess he doesn’t like the smell the thing’s giving off—kind of a musky fish odor that reminds me of some sushi restaurants I‘ve been to, and not the good ones! It’s not really potent but just enough that you notice it above all the other scents of the sea.

I cooked a simple breakfast of oatmeal and ham for us over a butane grill on the deck. Will especially enjoyed the ham. I’m guessing the rescue planes are maybe having a little trouble narrowing down our location. It is a big-ass sea after all. I went to check our GPS this morning, but the power is completely out. The batteries drained somehow since yesterday, and there’s not enough juice to even turn on the computer console. I’m guessing something short-circuited during the storm, but I can’t be sure. My handheld GPS is a little funky too. It’s showing us ten or eleven miles from where the storm hit us two nights ago, and normally I’d think we had gotten pushed that far with the wind and drifting—except we’re ten miles in the opposite direction that the storm went. It’s almost as if we traveled against the wind and currents.

Will and I spent the afternoon fishing. We had tried it a few other times during the past month but not with real enthusiasm. Now I’m starting to think it would be wise to limit our non-perishable food consumption if we can. We have enough provisions for the foreseeable future (forty-five days), so I’m not really worried, but it would be nice to save as much as we can.

I’m not panicking yet. The beacon is still running (it actually has its own lithium battery built in), but I’m starting to wonder why we haven’t even heard a plane yet. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but I can feel a little unease beginning to creep into my stomach like cold oil. Will seems to have noticed. He’s staying right by my side no matter what. Seeing the soft love in his brown eyes comforts me.

I caught a decent-sized grouper just as we were going to pull the line in and have some peanut butter for supper. The fish barely fought, which was strange. It came up from the water like it was stunned. I wonder if I caught him while he was half asleep! Regardless, he’ll make a nice supper over the grill, and I think I’ll pop open a bottle of the Merlot I brought to celebrate with. Hopefully by nightfall we’ll see some sign of a rescue mission in the dark sky.

2/8/11

I woke up to thumping under the hull last night. I had drank a little too much wine, but I figured what the hell, it’s not like there’s a sail to watch or any way to avoid a collision if we run across something out here. It must have been a few hours after I fell asleep/passed out. I woke to a deep thumping and a vibration. I tipped off my bed and landed solidly on the floor, not really knowing where I was or what century I was in for that matter. After a moment of getting my bearings and realizing what had happened, I felt and heard it again. It was a deep thrumming sound, like a diesel engine in a well-insulated building. It reverberated in my chest and actually made my palms, which were pressed to the floor, numb. In the almost nonexistent light, I could see Will’s eyes staring at me from the doorway. He didn’t seem impressed with the recent performance of his master, and I couldn’t say I blamed him. I shook my head to clear it and then was instantly scared. What if the vibrations and noise was a tsunami? What if I was right over the top of a major aquatic earthquake?  The boat would be snapped in half, and I’d be sent reeling in the aftershock of a hundred-foot wave. Then reason began to poke its head into my little room of crazy and I calmed down. Even if it was a tsunami, there wouldn’t be much effect this far out at sea. The wave that would reach epic proportions when it hit shore wouldn’t be more than another swell on the surface to me out here.

I was still calming my racing mind when my vision landed on the coral thing on the other side of the room. For a few seconds I stared at the long graceful shape and tried to blink the sleep from my eyes. For a moment it seemed that the straight line of the coral had bent into a half-moon shape and was nearly touching the floor of my room. I watched for another couple of seconds, and I could’ve sworn the thing twisted slightly toward me. Right about then I realized there was an emergency flashlight hanging a foot from my right hand. I reached out and grasped the knurled handle of the heavy plastic barrel and pulled it from the wall. I fumbled for a moment in the dark and finally found the button to turn the thing on. I shined the light over to where the coral was poking/prodding the floor and just stared for a few moments. The coral was standing straight up like it had always been. I kept the light on it for over a minute, and when there was no movement from it, I grabbed my pillow and blanket from the bed and went up to the deck to sleep.

I’m sure, now in the daylight, that I was drunker than I thought and I was seeing things in the dark. I’m sure that’s what it was, but I’ll be damned if I can get myself to go back into the same room with that thing.

I threw my handheld GPS overboard. The thing was thoroughly screwed up. It was saying we were about thirty miles to the south from where we had been the last time I checked. There’s no way we could’ve traveled that far in twelve hours.

I started building a sail this afternoon too. I rigged it up out of the jib sail (the main somehow came loose from the mast when it broke and floated away in the night) and the boom. It’s makeshift at best and only about six and a half feet high, but it is catching wind, so that’s good. I still have my compass, and I’ve locked it on dead west. I’ll run into some sort of land sooner or later. I’m not giving up on a rescue, but I have to do something. Our food won’t last forever, that’s for sure, and neither will my patience.

There were a few more stunned fish today too. They surfaced around the boat as twilight was coming on. There were groupers and several tuna, along with some exotic-looking fish with long snouts I’ve never seen before. They all just kind of half swam, half flopped on the surface of the ocean. I’ve never heard of fish acting like that before. I’m guessing it’s some sort of spawning ritual. What the hell do I know about fish anyway?

2/9/11

I think I’ve just had a run-in with some sort of deep-sea animal. It was literally the weirdest experience of my life. Will and I were sitting on the deck this morning after having some leftover grouper and crackers when I heard something thunking on the side of the hull. Immediately, the spear thing in the downstairs cabin came to mind and I chided myself for being silly. I walked over to the edge of the boat, and there was this blackish-gray ball floating in the water. It was about the size of a softball with little greenish nubs poking out from its surface every few inches. I watched it floating there in the water and wondered what the hell it could be. I thought maybe it was some sort of turtle since it sounded really hard, but it didn’t seem to be moving. I went and got a net from down below and scooped it from the water. It was heavy; I hadn’t expected it to weigh so much. I’m guessing it weighed a good ten pounds, if not more.

I flipped the thing out onto the deck, and it rolled around a little bit, making a weird hollow clunking sound as it went back and forth. Will backed all the way across the deck as far as he could go from the thing. He must’ve been able to smell what was inside. I sometimes wish I had the senses that he has; they would keep me out of some shit, that’s for sure.

Well, I figured I’d see what was inside of it. Isn’t that human nature at its most basic? Pandora syndrome, I always called it. Anyway, I went below deck again and grabbed a hammer from the toolbox down there and came back up. The ball was still clunking on the deck, and I had to hold it steady with one hand while I raised the other with the hammer. I whipped the hammer down as hard as I could, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

As soon as the hammer connected with the sphere, the fucking thing opened like a jack-in-the-box. The shell didn’t shatter like I expected it to when I hit it with the hammer—it unlocked. It was like a 3D puzzle coming apart. Jagged edges opened up and the whole ball suddenly unfolded out into some sort of animal. It had a long tail that stretched out behind it and four fins with hooked claws attached to their ends. The head was hidden under the outer edge of shell, but I could see two white eyes under there looking at me and a lower jaw that jutted thickly down from the face. It kinda resembled an armadillo, but the tail was flat instead of round and shaped like a double-bitted axe.

The freakiest thing about it was how it moved. As soon as it unrolled from the ball, it skittered a few feet away on the deck and sat looking at me as if it was waiting for me to hit it with the hammer. I could hear a high-pitched squeak every few seconds and realized it was the thing’s breath whistling in and out of whatever godforsaken mouth or nose it had. I was pretty much awestruck as I sat there with the hammer still clutched in one hand and the other braced on the decking. Meanwhile, Will was raising hell a few yards behind the thing. He was barking and snarling like I’d never seen a dog of his size do before. Foam frothed at his lips as his teeth snapped together, and if I hadn’t gotten him his booster of rabies shots a few months ago, I would have sworn he was in the final stages of the disease.

I watched the little critter for a few seconds before I started to move cautiously to a standing position, talking to the thing the whole time—“Hey, buddy, where’d you come from? You’re okay.”—shit like that. I realize now it was waiting. Waiting for me to make a move.

As soon as I took a step closer, the little fucker scuttled forward and whipped its nasty tail around and buried it in my calf. I didn’t have time to move or cry out. It immediately pulled its tail free from my gushing leg and swiveled around for another strike. At that moment I did the only thing I could think of: I threw the hammer at it. The stainless-steel tool bounced off the thing’s shell like a pellet off a car. I don’t even know if it noticed. It pulled itself forward on its clawed flippers and finally its head came into view.

Now, I’ve never seen an actual snapping turtle strike at something before, but I’m guessing it would look something like what this thing did. The head and neck stretched out from under the shell in a coiling motion. The head was oval-shaped with lots of shiny black bumps on the crown. It reminded me of a crab’s shell, only dark instead of the red you normally see in a restaurant. The neck slimmed down to about two inches across, but it came out nearly a foot. I just barely got my foot jerked back before I heard the sharp snap of teeth coming down together as it bit the air where my flesh had just been.

Well, needless to say, I’d had enough of these shenanigans, and I grabbed the next thing that was closest at hand, which was a ten-foot-long aluminum oar for the rowboat. In one motion I spun the oar off the rack it was sitting in on the toe rail and swung it in a sweeping motion. Apparently the thing didn’t have the best peripheral vision, because I caught it broadside and sent it sailing through the air off the side of the boat. Just before it hit the water, it curled back in on itself and locked tight, back into the original ball shape. When it hit the water, I limped over to the rail and searched for the little bastard, but there was no sign it had ever even been there, not even a solitary bubble rising up toward the surface.

So, here I sit now writing this. My calf has been disinfected and bandaged, and I have my flashlight and flare gun handy to my right. There’s a slight wind that’s picked up during the afternoon, and I hope it pushes us out of these waters. I’m anxious to leave our little friend far behind. I hope he sunk to the bottom and fucking cracked under the pressure of the ocean. Although it looked like that’s exactly where it had come from, down deep. I have a feeling I may not get a lot of sleep tonight.

2/10/11

There’s no rescue coming. The beacon went dead today. It’s been running steady for four days, and I think the battery just finally gave out. I don’t blame it. I’m guessing it figured if no one has shown up yet to rescue my rich dumb ass, then no one is going to.

Last night I heard the thumping and felt the vibrations again. There’s something wrong and I don’t know what it is. I could hear something down in the cabin earlier today, but when I went down there to listen, the sound stopped. It was a scraping sound, like something rubbing on the floor. The thing in the bedroom is still there. I don’t know what to make of that anymore either. Anyway, the ocean’s calm except for a breeze out of the northeast. But from all I can tell, we’re moving in a southern direction. I’ve quit trying to figure this out.

My leg’s infected too. The little bastard of a sea creature must’ve injected me with something. The wound opened up last night and bled a little. When I changed the bandage this morning, the cut was puckered like it had been soaked all night in water and the area around it was black for about three inches. I’m not sure what to do. I poked through the first-aid kit again and found some antibiotics, but I’m not sure what dose to give myself, so I just injected a small amount right around the wound.

There’s something else too. There’s a whole lot more fish coming to the surface around the boat now, and they aren’t stunned, they’re dead. I’m starting to get scared. I’m beginning to think that I may not get through this alive. What a fucking stupid thing to do. I should’ve just gone with Gale to Japan. Fucking storm.

Will and I are sitting on the bow of the boat, just kind of wondering what the next move is. I’ve still got my flare gun ready, so I guess there’s that. I haven’t totally given up yet; there’s always hope and faith. What was the quote by that famous spiritualist/philosopher? You can have faith without hope, but there is no hope without faith. Yeah, that’s well put, but I feel like I’m having a shortage of both.

2/10/11? 2/11/11?

This will be my last entry. I’m writing this not for me but for everyone else on earth. For Gale and for the children she’ll have someday with another man. This is a warning.

Will and I must have fallen asleep in the late-afternoon today, because I woke up and it was full dark. Another storm blew up from the west with lots of lightning and thunder. I was soaking wet by the time I realized it was raining and I grabbed Will and tried to make my way to the other end of the boat to get below deck. My leg had gotten worse from when I had fallen asleep, and I was limping hard down the length of the boat—the pain was shooting all the way up my thigh by then. Just before I had gotten to the entrance to below deck, lightning flashed out like a strobe and lit up the surrounding sea like a stage under a spotlight.

For hundreds of yards around the boat I could see nothing but the tops of bobbing black circles in the water illuminated by the light. There must have been a hundred thousand of the creatures floating in the water surrounding the boat, and they seemed to be all sizes. In that instant I saw some that were close to the same size of my visitor from the day before and many that must have been four feet across. Beyond the floating creatures there were thousands of dead fish of all shapes and sizes lying in ring after ring, expanding out beyond where my eyes could see. I did spot a killer whale’s unmistakable black-and-white belly floating amongst the smaller bodies, along with what looked like a giant squid, although I couldn’t be sure.

At that point lightning flashed again and a particularly high wave washed over the Wind Clipper that made me put most of my weight on my bad leg. It didn’t hold me and I tipped overboard. I managed to drop Will on the deck as I fell, and the last thing that I heard before I smacked onto the hard bodies of the creatures was Will’s yelp of pain as he hit the deck.

I slipped easily between the rounded bodies of the things in the water and sunk a few feet below the surface of the waves. I looked around and tried to get my bearings in the utterly alien place as the lightning flashed once more above water, bathing the surrounding ocean in a vivid white.

I pushed and kicked myself back to the surface and pushed between the hard spiny creatures and gasped for air. The nubs on the round animals dug painfully into my back and sides, and I absently wondered if I was getting poisoned at every touch from the things in the water. Luckily, I came up only a few feet from the boat and could see Will’s small brown head poked over the side watching my progress as I pushed the hard spheres out of my way. Eventually I was able to grab the gunwale and pull myself back on board and down below deck to sit and write these words.

To my sweet Gale: I love you more than anything I’ve ever known on this earth. I hope you find every happiness the world has to offer, and if God is kind at all, I’ll be waiting for you somewhere beyond this place. Please savor life and take your time getting to wherever I‘ll be waiting.

As I said earlier, this entry is a warning. After writing this I will attach this journal to a buoy, and I hope with all my soul that someone will find it. I know now what is happening to us out here on the lonely sea, for I saw what was under the water when the lightning flashed.

An enormous spiny tentacle trailed up from the depths below our boat, and there is no doubt in my mind that the very end of the hideous thing stops in a sharp gray point with a black tip. It’s been towing us around for the past five days or so. It must have impaled us during the storm, thinking our boat was some sort of food for its offspring. Because that’s what it’s doing, that thing that’s sitting below us in the darkness of the deep ocean, it’s giving birth to the spheres all around us. It’s been killing the fish in the area with its sounds, making sure when the time comes and its babies hatch that they have plenty to feed upon.

Well, I’m not going to be something that those fuckers are going to bite into, that’s for sure. I won’t wait until they come scraping across the deck with their taloned fins to find me cowering down here in the darkness. When I’m done writing this, I’m going to fill a syringe full of the morphine that was in the first-aid kit (hey, I said I paid for the very best) and put Will to sleep. I can’t bring myself to think about him suffering in the snapping jaws of the things floating around the boat. Then I’m going to slice my wrists with the razor blade that’s sitting next to me on the floor and hope I fade away quickly, and that, as they say, will be that. I can hear them now out in the water. They’re hatching or opening or whatever. They’ll be down here soon, I can’t wait much longer.

I only ask whoever finds this to take my words seriously and launch a search for the thing that’s hooked to the bottom of our boat and kill it when they find it, because I think each one of those little creatures out there could eventually become the size of the monstrosity that attached itself to us. And if that’s the truth, then it’s only a matter of time before human beings become their food source. There’s only so many fish in the sea.

I love you, Gale, and I set out on this trip to marry you. I’ll see you again someday, I can feel it.

Nathan Vannek

BLACKJACK

The hazy smoke-filled room, air full of the sounds of clanging coins in metal trays and calls for liquor or luck, filled Sam’s senses. Behind the cacophony of money being put down, he could hear the lulling background music (better suited for the elevators) at either end of the large casino pouring through the overhead speakers that were concealed well in the high ceiling.

Sam gazed at the cards that were laid out like two dead men side by side before him on the green-felted table. A jack and a two stared back at him. The jack’s one visible eye seemed focused on Sam, instead of traditionally gazing at the staff held up ceremoniously in a white-gloved hand before him. Sam’s eyes flicked up to the ten exposed in front of the dealer, which partially covered the other face-down card beneath it.

“Hit me,” Sam said, and he expelled the smoke he had held burning in his lungs for nearly twenty seconds.

The dealer slipped a card expertly from the bottom of the card holder and snapped it quickly down next to the jack. Now the jack had a companion: a queen that looked off to the right over Sam’s shoulder, as if embarrassed for what she had just caused.

“Bust,” the dealer called out in the flat tone that had grated on Sam’s ears all evening.

Immediately, more cards were flicked down at the request of the other two people at Sam’s table. The old man with white eyebrows and dark-rimmed glasses smiled through what must have been dentures as he was dealt nineteen, and the woman with too much eyeliner and lipstick blew air out of her overdone lips as she watched a king fall on her ten and three that sat before her.

The dealer flipped his face-down card, revealing a two, and proceeded to snap down two more cards in rapid succession, one being a four and the next being a six.

“House busts, winner on the corner,” the dealer said in monotone as he slid a hundred dollars in chips to the elderly man, who smiled through the acrylic resin that resembled teeth.

“Fuck this,” the woman with too much makeup said, and she stood and grabbed the remaining fifty-dollar chip that lay near her seat.

As she slung her jacket around her shoulders, she winked suggestively at Sam. He politely smiled, not knowing what else to do when rebuffing the advances of someone he found unattractive. To avoid further eye contact, he pulled a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and shook the red-and-white package, confirming that there were only two white sticks remaining within the folds of plastic and foil.

Sam pulled one of the remaining cigarettes from the pack and lit it from the dying embers of the last coffin nail. He pulled long and deep, and as he exhaled he stared through the white smoke that billowed up before him at the dealer, who was looking back at him without expression. That bastard had taken another forty dollars from him. That was part of the rent sliding away from him on the green felt. What would Ellen say if she saw him sitting here in this oh-so-familiar spot? Would she slap him? Here, in front of hundreds of strangers? His Ellen, who was normally so reserved until it came to his addiction?

He knew exactly what she’d say: I’m taking Josh away.

Sam licked his lips and pushed his hand through his thinning blonde hair, trying to shove the images of his wife’s and son’s disappointed faces from the forefront of his mind. The dealer looked to him again for his bet. Sam slid another forty dollars into the circle made by the decorative wheat designs emblazoned on the table every foot or so. Dentures plopped down three hundred, emboldened by his last hand.

Did anyone really think they could beat the house? Sam wondered. The randomness of how the cards fell, the fate that they carried no matter if you busted or hit twenty-one—it seemed exactly how it should be. Of course, the house could be beat, but not consistently. Not enough to make this a paying job. Not enough to pay off the debts owed to men who talked of the weather and of breaking bones in the same sentence. Not enough to dig yourself out from under the pressure of the addiction that lay over the people of this place like an old stinking blanket. Just enough to keep you coming back.

Sam glanced at the dwindling pile of chips sitting to his right and fought the urge to cash out and leave, to walk out the doors into the warm afternoon sun and drive the ten miles home to his family. Tell Ellen everything. Beg her forgiveness. Swear to counseling. Tell her his job was gone. How the last project wasn’t done on schedule, and there was nowhere to point the finger this time. Tell her he owed their next three months of rent to two different loan sharks. Tell her that everything was gone: all the savings, his severance check, even Josh’s college money. Gone.

Instead, he stared down at the cards that had fallen before him from the deft hand of the dealer. Two fives. Dentures had a four and a six. The dealer had a king showing.

“Split,” Sam intoned, and motioned to the cards.

The dealer leaned over and slid the cards slightly apart and snapped a seven next to the five on the right.

“Hit me.”

Another seven landed beside the first. Sam waved his hand over the cards as if flicking water from his fingers. The dealer flipped a ten next to the five on the left.

“Hit me.”

A four silently landed on the felt. Again Sam waved his hand, feeling this could be the beginning of a streak. If that card face-down in front of him wasn’t an ace, he might be okay.

While he was contemplating the odds within his head, Sam heard Dentures swear loudly as he busted after trying to run up his cards. The dealer wasted no time and flipped the face-down card over with a scooping motion of his king.

The ace of spades, bold and black under the overhead lighting, sat beside the king. The tip of the spade pointed toward Sam, and he nearly nodded to himself. This was how it was, of course. He was kidding himself to think differently.

“Blackjack,” the dealer said in his flat tone.

Sam felt like jumping across the table and throttling the other man just for how he said it.

“Bullshit,” Dentures said just loud enough to be heard, and he scooped his remaining chips off the table and walked away in the humped-over manner only the elderly can accomplish.

Sam looked at his pile of chips. There were four left. A ten and three twenties. Seventy dollars. For some reason the sight of the last of his family’s money lying there on the green felt, which he had seen several times before, evoked a sadness he hadn’t known existed. That was his family’s future lying there. His future. Although, it seemed the two wouldn’t coexist for much longer. Ellen had sworn if he stepped foot in a place like this again she would leave, and he believed her.

With a quick thrust of his hand, Sam shoved the seventy dollars into the chip circle and looked up at the dealer. This was the first time he had really looked at the man’s face; he had been preoccupied with what the man’s hands had been doing.

The dealer was young, really young. He seemed no older than some of the interns who worked at the advertising firm he used to be employed by. His hair was dark and lank and was combed off to one side as was the style these days. It hung down close to the top of the man’s right eye, which was a solid blue. The blue of ice chips from an aquifer in the arctic. His mouth was pulled straight across his face. He blinked once and then looked down at Sam’s chips on the table.

“That’s all you’ve got,” the dealer said as he began dealing the next hand.

“What?” Sam asked, surprised at the deviation of conversation.

“That’s all the money you’ve got. I can see it in the way you look at it. Like it owes you something, and it had better pay.”

A four and a ten lay before Sam. The dealer had a seven visible on the table.

“You’re very astute, my young friend,” Sam said, looking into the cold blue of the man’s eyes. “Hit me.”

The dealer flipped a card from the deck next to him and laid it carefully on the table. A seven. Twenty-one.

The dealer flipped his card, a queen, and stacked chips in front of Sam’s seventy. Now he had one-forty. He had come here with twelve hundred. He wouldn’t leave with less than that. Sam caught a passing waitress and ordered a whiskey sour and waited until it arrived before continuing.

The next hand brought him a win at eighteen when the dealer busted. The hand after that won at twenty. The one after that he doubled down and won when the dealer stayed on seventeen.

Sam glanced at the growing pile of chips next to him. A rough estimate totaled at six hundred dollars. He let himself smile for a moment in the murky light. Fumbling for his drink, he realized it was empty. He motioned to another waitress, and after a minute a new whiskey was set before him.

As the waitress leaned close to him and then away he caught a whiff of something. It wasn’t the sweet smell of lavender or jasmine like several of the other girls seemed to wear. It wasn’t even the musky scent of tobacco that one would expect in this environment. It was decay. Plain and simple rot. The girl had smelled like a deer he had found on the side of the road after it had been hit by a semi when he was a kid. The carcass had been out in the sun for days. Bloated and open to the air, its insides had started to ferment, and the smell of death had wafted for several yards around.

Sam shook his head and looked after the waitress. She was limping away from him toward the other side of the room. Her strange gait was almost unnoticeable, but when Sam looked down at her left heel, he saw that instead of a stiletto jutting down there was a black claw that sprouted directly from her foot and stabbed into the soft carpet each time she took a step.

Sam blinked, and when he looked again, the waitress had disappeared behind a row of slot machines.

“Sir, place your bet,” the dealer said. The monotone was becoming quieter, almost a whisper.

Sam glanced at him, and the blue eyes flashed downward at Sam’s pile of chips. Sam slid two hundred in front of him and watched the cards fall. He took a sip of his whiskey and surveyed the two and the jack that lay before him. His eyes went up and found the nine sitting before the dealer.

He also noticed that the dealer’s heavy leather belt was moving. It was slithering around the young man’s waist, and suddenly two amber eyes glowed at Sam from beneath the dealer’s tucked-in shirt. A forked tongue flicked into sight and tasted the air before the living belt slid quickly off the dealer’s waist and fell to the floor with a soft thump.

Sam leaned back quickly and looked in all directions under the table, searching for the slithering belt, but he could see nothing in the strange light that was beginning to envelope the room. Sam looked around at the other tables nearby and noticed everything was bathed in a reddish hue.

Maybe there was something in the drinks, Sam thought, straining his eyes open and looking down into his glass. Even the liquid in the glass looked red. Sam blinked several more times before the dealer’s voice interrupted his analysis of the state of the casino.

“Sir,” the dealer said, still a whisper, as if he was slowly becoming overtaken by laryngitis.

Sam glanced down at his cards. “Hit me.”

A nine flashed out and landed on his side of the table. The dealer smiled and slid two hundred in chips across the felt.

“Twenty-one, sir.”

Sam nodded and pulled a hundred off the pile of chips before him and let the remaining three hundred ride. Something was moving in the dealer’s hair. He could see the small furrows as it crawled back and forth just out of sight beneath the dark strands.

Sam looked to his left and saw there were two people sitting at a row of slot machines. The row stretched on and on into the distance until Sam lost sight of it in the red gloom that coated the room. The two people had their backs to him. Then suddenly he realized they were both naked and starving. That was the only explanation for the way the bones pressed against their skins like a set of operating tools beneath a sheet. Sam looked closer and could actually see nubs of their spines poking out, white against the pale skin that stretched over their bodies. Both people—he couldn’t discern what sex either one was—had stringy gray hair that hung limply down to their necks. Corpse hair. Didn’t the hair continue to grow after a person died? Didn’t it grow down in the coffins, down in the dark as the worms bided their time and inexorably closed in on the prize within the wood boxes?

The two corpses pulled the handles on the machines like robots on an assembly line. The harsh clicking as the handles were pulled and the loud dings as they were let go echoed across to Sam. One of the dead people swiveled its head toward Sam, as though it could feel his eyes upon its back. Sam turned his head quickly to the right when he saw a gaping hole where the face should have been.

There was only one table occupied off to the right, and Sam’s breath caught in his throat as he saw what was playing blackjack a few yards away. A man was leaning over his cards, a drink of some dark liquid clutched in his hand. His eyes were gone, and the top of his head was missing. Jagged chunks of skull etched the opening where his brain had been housed, and Sam could see the remnants of his gray matter plastered to the inside of his skull like some sort of ghastly plaster of Paris.

The dealer, who stood at the table waiting patiently for his player to decide what to do, was a twin of the man opposite Sam. The dark hair, the blue eyes—right down to the way he stood with his hands curled into fists on the green table top.

Sam was filled with the urge to run from the casino. To just get up from the table and sprint toward the door. Even though he knew he must be hallucinating, he still felt the desire to flee pulling at him. He even turned and glanced back over his shoulder toward the main entrance.

The front entryway now consisted of a single door instead of the four sets he had walked through on his way in. The light that shone through the glass of the door was a pure bright white, and Sam couldn’t make out the street beyond that he knew was there.

Instead of giving in to the urge to run, he turned and pushed all of his chips into the betting circle.

“All in,” Sam said, and swallowed the last of his whiskey in a quick toss of his head.

The dealer nodded and flipped an eight onto the table with a hand that had several more fingers than it should have had. Sam watched an ace of hearts appear before the dealer, and then a seven fell in next to Sam’s first card.

“You can still leave, you know,” the dealer whispered.

Sam looked up and saw that the other man’s face was now gone. There were no eyes or nose, just smooth skin with a small tear where the mouth should have been. A black pointed tongue darted out of the small tear and then receded like a water snake returning to its lair. Sam only stared at the face and wondered why he hadn’t fled when he had the chance.

Because the table was hot. That’s why. It was always why he stayed when he should’ve gone. It was why he had lost his job. It was why he was losing his family. It was why he was seemingly losing his sanity. But the pull of the cards was too great. The promise of the win, the exhilaration of seeing the right card turn up at the right time. It was fate, meant to be, the heaviness that the cards carried.

“Leave your chips here and go. You know where you are, don’t you? You surely should by now,” the dealer said, and he gestured a hand with fingers that were nearly two feet long and multi-jointed.

Sam happened to look up and noticed for the first time that the ceiling had disappeared. There were now great flying buttresses that stemmed down from a main white beam that ran the entire length of the room. Sam squinted and realized that the gleaming beam above him was segmented and shifted every few seconds. The walls were also moving, heaving in and out rhythmically as the buttresses curved with them. It dawned on him that the beam overhead was a spine, and the supports around the room were enormous ribs. The elevator music had faded, and he could now hear the chug of a giant heart somewhere nearby as it pumped blood throughout the room he sat in. Sam nearly screamed when the rasping voice of the dealer spoke again from across the table.

“You have a choice, which is more than the other souls who reside here now have. Leave the money and walk away unharmed. Sit here and gamble …” His voice trailed off in a hiss.

Sam licked his dry lips and felt that his shoes were soaked, and the blood that coated the floor was creeping slowly up his pant legs. He glanced down at the pile of chips before him and saw they had changed too. There were stacks of one-hundred- and five-hundred-dollar chips in neat towers before him. More money than Sam had ever seen in his life sat a few inches from his fingertips. He reached out and touched the towering piles. They were solid and did not fade before his eyes. Sam licked his lips again, and then he brought his eyes back up to the shapeless face and spoke.

“What if I win?”

A grin surfaced from deep within the face, playing across the small tear of a mouth before disappearing again.

“Then you win.”

Sam shakily lit his last cigarette before he turned and looked back over his shoulder at the entrance again. The doorway was still extremely bright but had shrunk in size, as if it were now much farther away. That light, it was so calming, so smooth and perfect. He could walk into it and get lost, and that would be okay. He knew he would find Ellen and Josh there. He took a deep pull from the cigarette, and as he dropped his hand from his face, a glint of light caught his attention. The light from the door reflected off his gold wedding band. It was as if a small gleaming door had opened on the surface of his ring. He nodded and turned back to the table.

“Hit me.”

Excerpt from Lineage

Available Sept. 18th 2012

Lance checked and then rechecked the fire number on the driveway against the one written on the listing printout. They matched—he was here.

The gravel driveway led from the pavement at a ninety-degree angle. The drive crossed over a set of intersecting railroad tracks and then dropped down into a large turnaround. The circular drive sat on a rough upheaval of ground made decorative by the growth of three small pine trees. The berm hadn’t had a good going-over in years and looked shabby with weeds beginning to grow over the timid grass layering the bottommost area. The drive led away from the road and turned sharply into a thick copse of woods. Oak, birch, and pine all intermingled, making an impenetrable wall that dominated the right side of the highway.

Lance had lost sight of Superior several miles back as the road curved away from the water. Although the real-estate agent had told him over the phone the house was only five miles north of Stony Bay, the turn had still snuck up on Lance as he rounded a hard left.

As he pulled into the drive, he took in the surroundings. The sun filtered in less and less through the crowded trees as he drove farther into the property, bathing the interior of the car in dingy light. Gray squirrels ran and jumped from branch to branch on all sides. The gravel crunched under his tires, and when he rounded yet another corner in the driveway,he finally got his first look at the house.

It loomed solemnly in the middle of a clearing, just as he had seen on the realty website. The grass in the yard looked longer than in the photo and there was an air of disuse about the grounds. The stone of the lower level had darkened with time, and moss of some sort grew in patches here and there in the cool shadows. The logs of the upper floor were beginning to lighten and needed to be stained. Two darkened windows stared him down from the upper floors as he approached, and he could see a few sticks lying like sunbathing snakes on the roof. Another circular turnaround was positioned before the front entry and a twin of the berm at the driveway’s mouth rose neatly in its center. Lake Superior stretched out beyond the house like a dreary drop cloth, its waves rolling over one another in a race to reach the rocky shore first. In its day, Lance thought, it would have been a sight to behold; perhaps a place of envy by neighbors who lived in much less striking abodes nearby.

A shining Chevy Tahoe and a Ford Ranger so rust-coated its original color was indiscernible were parked near the front door. As Lance approached and stopped the Land Rover a few paces behind the Ranger, he caught sight of a man sitting on a stone bench just outside the entryway. Lance could only make out white hair protruding in every direction from beneath a dark baseball hat that had been jammed on, it seemed, as an afterthought. The man also wore a black T-shirt and baggy gray painter’s pants. The bill of the hat obscured his features, but if he had to guess, Lance would have placed him near seventy-five, if not more.

When Lance cut his engine, the man seated on the bench looked up and stared from beneath the brim of his hat, his hands resting flat by his sides. He looked like someone on the edge of a deep pool contemplating a dunk into waters that he no longer trusted. Lance opened his door and shut it, making his way between the vehicles to the front porch. The man did not move as he approached, and it was only when Lance was a few feet away that the man betrayed the illusion of a statue.

“Afternoon,” the elderly man said, his dark eyes running uneasily up and down Lance.

“Hi, I’m Lance. I’m here to see the house,” Lance said as he stepped forward and extended his hand. The man hesitated only a moment before reaching out and shaking Lance’s outstretched palm. The man’s hand felt like iron wrapped in paper.

“John Hanrahan. I’m the caretaker here, although I haven’t been able to fulfill my duties as of late, and for that I apologize.”

“I think the place is beautiful, just needs someone to live here, I’m guessing.” John pursed his grizzled lips and nodded in agreement. A moment later the front door opened and a tall blond woman dressed in a white business suit and black high heels stepped out onto the concrete apron before the entry.

“Lance?” she said as she strode over to him, her hand held out before her.

“Yes, and you must be Carrie?”

“The one and only,” she said, beaming at him through what must have been an inch of makeup. “Well, what did you think of the drive? Very scenic up here, but just wait until fall. You said you live near Minneapolis, right?” Without giving pause to let Lance answer, she hurtled on through what must have been a customary greeting and sales pitch combined. “I lived there in college, couldn’t really get the hang of city life though. I grew up just a few miles south of Duluth, so this has always been my home, so to speak. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Come inside and I’ll give you the grand tour.”

Lance followed Carrie as she spun on one polished black heel and disappeared back into the house. As he mounted the steps, Lance looked over his shoulder at the old man, who still sat on the bench, not looking in his direction but staring at something across the yard, seemingly in deep thought. Lance was about to ask him if he was coming with them when Carrie’s high voice called out from inside.

“Coming, Lance?”

He turned away from the motionless figure on the bench and stepped into the coolness of the house.

The foyer that met him was wide with tall ceilings. Smooth oak planking made up the floor he stood on, and the walls were covered in surprisingly light, neutral colors. Beyond the foyer, the home opened up with vertical support beams made of stained logs that ran from the floor to the ceiling nearly fifteen feet overhead. A large bathroom was positioned to the right with bright track lighting already glowing within. Lance assumed Carrie had gone throughout the house before he arrived, throwing on lights and perhaps tidying up a bit to further entice her potential buyer.

“The last owners really wanted to modernize the old place. They sheetrocked over all of the stone walls, which to me wasn’t the best idea, but it turned out really well nonetheless. The house was built in the late forties just as Stony Bay was being fully established. Actually, the bay out front is the town’s namesake and I’m guessing you’ll be able to see why.”

Lance followed the realtor farther into the house, glancing up every so often at the large chandeliers hanging from ornate chains. Suddenly he imagined he could see the blond man sitting in an overstuffed chair covered by a white sheet. Lance stopped and stared. The man blinked and Lance could see a tear running down the right side of his face. Absently, the man wiped it away and kept looking forward blankly, then dissolved to leave only an empty dust-covered chair behind. He’s here, Lance thought. Why’s he here? What is he waiting for? Lance’s mind was so consumed with the story dancing at the edges of his imagination that he barely heard Carrie speak to him.

“Lance, are you okay?” He nodded and licked his lips as he looked at the Realtor vacantly.

“Sorry, I’m fine. Long drive,” Lance replied, finally gathering his wits. The Realtor gave him a sidelong glance and turned to walk farther into the house.

Carrie led him into a wide kitchen set into the right side of the home. Lance admired the black marble the prior owners had chosen for countertops and the contrasting light wood of the cabinets beneath. A hanging pot rack hovered over a large cutting block in the middle of the room, and Lance even spied a fairly new-model dishwasher tucked beneath one end of the counter.

“As you can see, they spared no expense in the kitchen. If I remember right, the owner used to be a chef at a culinary school in Boston.” Lance nodded and was about to follow Carrie out of the kitchen when he imagined the blond man seated at the counter, staring forlornly out of the window. There was a scrap of paper and a dulled pencil lying on the marble top. His left hand kept rolling the pencil back and forth, over and over.

Excitement buzzed in Lance’s stomach as he followed Carrie out into the wide expanse of the dining/living room. Details were starting to appear. It was always the first sign of a story taking shape. He would see something in his mind or imagine it happening in the world around him, and it was only when he noticed a detail within the imaginations that he realized there was something worth writing there.

“To me, this is the best part of the house. The atrium was added just before the previous owners bought it. It’s the best view of Lake Superior I’ve ever seen.” Lance stepped out into the glass room and couldn’t help but agree. The panoramic view floated before them, unobstructed by walls or doors. The contractor who had built the vestibule was talented and had the foresight not to install wide supports that would have cut up the observatory like a tic-tac-toe board.

“I could write here, I think,” Lance murmured, mostly to himself, but the Realtor perked up instantly.

“You’re a writer?” she said with what seemed to be polite interest, but after a moment Lance could almost see the gears turning and lights flipping on in the control rooms behind her eyes. “Oh my God! You’re Lance Metzger! Wow! I’ve read some of your books! I didn’t put two and two together until now. God I’m so dumb!” Carrie issued a high, annoying titter that made Lance’s teeth grate against one another, but he smiled nonetheless and nodded as Carrie’s face flushed in the light thrown by the afternoon sun. “So, you’re coming here to write a novel?” For the first time the Realtor seemed genuinely interested in Lance and what he had to say.

“Possibly, if everything works out. I do really like the place so far, but I’d love to see the rest of it.” He hoped that the gentle redirection wouldn’t hurt the woman’s feelings, and he was grateful when she smiled and continued walking through the living room.

“This is such a nice room—the bay windows looking out over the lake and the high ceilings. Just a really great room to mingle or have a little get-together in.” Carrie nodded while pulling her overly red lips into a grin that any clown would have envied. She turned and began to make her way across the living room, to the stairway that undoubtedly led up to the bedrooms on the second floor. Lance trailed after her, his eyes looking for another piece of the story to jump out at him when they landed on a darkly stained door set off to the north side of the room. The door looked odd to Lance, set in a recessed frame, uncharacteristic of the other remodeling the house had undergone. So flat and smooth. He strained to see a gap at any of the sides of the entrance. An oblong cast-iron door handle protruded from a steel plate, seamlessly fastened in the wood.

“What’s in there?” Lance asked, and Carrie paused, two stairs up from the main floor.

“Oh, that? That’s storage. I think the prior owner may have had some of his cooking equipment in there before moving. It’s locked. I have the key somewhere in my office, I believe.” Without hesitating, she turned and made her way farther up the wooden stairway to the second floor.

Instead of following, Lance walked toward the door and examined it further. It was even darker than he had initially thought and coated with an enormous amount of lacquer. The depth of the grain pattern in the wood was intricately layered and almost mesmerizing. His hand reached out to the doorknob. Could he feel cold coming off the iron, or was it his imagination? His fingers stretched out, a few inches from the black of the handle. Closer. There was definitely a chill coming off the knob. His hand circled to grasp it.

Lance.

The whisper came from the door. His hand froze over the knob and he looked back and forth to see if perhaps John had entered behind them without him noticing. The house remained silent around him, and he could no longer see Carrie at the top of the stairs.

Lance.

It came again, and this time there was no denying it. The sound had issued from behind the door. Lance knelt before the handle and peered into the small black keyhole below the knob. There was only darkness there; no windows seemed to grace the room inside. He leaned farther in. A soft stream of cold air filtered out of the hole, making his eye begin to water. He peered closer, straining to make out any features of the room beyond.

The darkness on the other side of the keyhole moved.

“Lance?”

He flew back from the door, scrambling to remain on his feet. A wood pillar rammed firmly into his shoulder blades, pain blooming there and halting his backward motion. He could feel his eyes bulging in their sockets and it seemed that his scalp had been drawn into a thousand tight points. Carrie stood at the top of the stairs, a fist held tightly to her chest, as if she were grabbing at her heart. Even from where he stood leaning against the support, Lance could see the furrows of worry on her brow.

He stretched his jaw and it clicked loudly, echoing off the flat surfaces of the nearly empty house. His mouth was full of syrupy spit and his heart felt as if it had somehow learned to double-beat within the last minute or so. Something had moved behind the door, he was sure of it. It wasn’t the twisting of nothingness the eye sometimes saw in the complete lack of light. The darkness itself had shifted. Had he really heard his name, or was it just the apprehension he had felt at the sight of the door? Trying to regain his composure, he stood without the help of the log behind him and aimed a tight smile up the stairs.

“Sorry, just stumbled. Knocked the wind out of me, I think.” Lance saw the Realtor’s face relax, but unease remained just below the surface. Lance breathed in and out several times as he began to climb the stairs. “Let’s see the bedrooms,” he said as he neared the woman on the landing, and kept the smile frozen in place like the mask that it was.

“So, what do you think?” Carrie asked as she shut the front door behind them, and walked down to where Lance stood by the now-vacant bench. Her enthusiasm, which had been dampened by Lance’s odd behavior, returned as she led him through the two spare rooms along with the enormous master bedroom, complete with a full attached bath.

Lance stood looking out across the open grounds toward the shoreline beyond the house. He could see the outline of the old caretaker there, now seated in a lawn-chair beside the large three-season gazebo.

“It’s great, really spacious, which I like. Would it be okay if I took a turn around the outside and get a feel for it?”

“By all means. I’ll just be in my car if you have any questions.” Carrie began to turn away when Lance stopped her.

“Why didn’t John come inside with us?”

Carrie smiled as she stepped closer to him and lowered her voice conspiratorially, as if to keep the breeze that blew between them from carrying her words across the yard like fallen leaves.

“John’s been the caretaker here for close to fifty years. He’s seen owners come and go. I think he feels quite an attachment to the place and he might be a bit upset seeing it change hands again.”

“How many times has the house been sold?” The Realtor’s makeup-caked face took on an almost cartoonish thoughtful expression.

“The same owners have been trying to sell it since I became a Realtor two years ago. Beyond that, I’m not really sure. John would be able to tell you, though; he’s been knocking around this part of the world for a long time. He might’ve even known the person who built the place.” Carrie laughed while Lance nodded and thanked her before turning to walk through the ankle-length grass.

Lance noticed the wind had picked up, and the waves on the lake reflected it. Whitecaps were beginning to form every so often in the distance, like the backs of whales surfacing for air. He counted at least a dozen submerged boulders poking their heads out of the water within the bay directly in front of the house. He wondered absently how many boats had been damaged or sunk just a few hundred yards from shore and if their skeletons were still there like bones of ancient aquatic creatures, waiting in the shallows.

Lance stopped and stood still as he came abreast of the caretaker, who sat motionless in the plastic chair. John’s eyes were narrowed, studying the bay. He didn’t acknowledge Lance’s presence, so instead of breaking the silence first, Lance sat on the lawn nearby, his arms resting on the tops of his knees. Waves continued to crash on the shore, marking off the seconds and minutes that passed by, their insatiable thirst for erosion unquenchable.

“You’re pretty good at being quiet,” John said. Lance turned his head and studied the old man’s profile. It was worn and tired, like a statue made of materials unintended for rain and wind. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

John lifted his chin in acknowledgement. “You gonna buy the old place?”

“The thought crossed my mind.” John nodded again. A lone seagull coasted overhead, the wind fueling its flight without the beat of its wings. It looked down on them for a moment, its black beady eyes there and gone as it glided away in search of food.

“You’re a writer.” The words were a statement, not a question.

“Yeah, have you read my books?”

“No, knew your name, though. You’re alongside Patterson sometimes when I buy his latest. I like Patterson.” Lance smiled and looked back out across the expanse of water. “What’s a writer want with a place like this?”

Lance pulled a strand of grass from the ground beside him and began to tie it in knots. “It seems like a good place to think. Calm, quiet.”

John finally turned his head and examined Lance. He could feel the caretaker’s eyes running over the surface of his face like the fingers of a blind person. Eventually, John turned back to the lake and sighed. If Lance hadn’t been listening closely it could have been misconstrued as the breath of the wind.

“Don’t buy this place. There’s nothing for you here.”

Without another word, John rose and retreated to the driveway, where he climbed into the rusted Ranger, gunned the engine to life, and left dual plumes of dust behind in the wake of the truck.

Lance watched as the vehicle disappeared behind the thick row of trees lining the driveway before turning back to the choppy lake. Instead of trying to interpret the old man’s cryptic words, Lance brushed them off as sentimental remnants from a time before him. No matter how promising or bright the future sometimes seemed to be, the past had its own way of holding onto people, at times letting out some slack for them to run, but always making sure they knew that they were tethered.

Lance gazed at the horizon and tried to make out the distant shore he knew was there but couldn’t see. Words began to form in his mind and a corner of the veil was lifted slightly. A shape beneath tried to show itself. It was as if the story wanted him to find it but was limited, chained just beyond the reach of his imagination. Nonetheless, he seized the moment and formed the words into a sentence.

His eyes searched for them, but his heart knew better. The waking hours were the worst, the moments when he would drift up from sleep and reach for her or listen for the sounds of laughter. Instead, there was silence, a vacuum, and then the crashing slam of reality settling down on him.

“They’re dead, but he’s still there,” Lance said to the water. It lapped at the shore but said nothing back. Lance stood, his back cracking as he turned and walked across the yard to where Carrie waited near the rear end of her Tahoe. Lance noticed that she was smiling her too-large smile again, but in spite of himself, he felt his own face reflect her expression as he stopped a few feet away.

“I’ll take it.”

Notes

I always want to know where authors’ ideas come from, and whenever there’s an explanation at the end of a book, I’m eager to see what insight lies there. An idea is just such an interesting concept that I can’t resist finding out where it came from. I’m thoroughly convinced that some people are just meant to be writers, and ideas are interpreted through them differently than they are through other people. Almost like they’re mediums for thoughts. And maybe I’m just cracked, but I’m okay with that as long as people want to read what I write. Anyway, I wanted to write a short explanation for each of the stories so anyone who was interested would have a little better understanding about the crazy process I call writing.

PCA

This story was a decade in the making. The idea came when my brother and I were driving on a lonely road to a great fishing lake we know. It’s way off in the wilderness, and as we were driving along in my brother’s truck, he pointed off to the right side of the road and said, “I always wondered about living in a place that close to a graveyard. I don’t think I’d want to drink the water.” When I looked, there was a little house sitting just a few hundred yards away from a large fenced-in cemetery. The idea stayed in my brain for about ten years, and then about three months ago I drove past the same place with my mom. The story came together on the drive home, and the rest, as they say, is history. This is probably my favorite story in the collection, because of the humanness of the characters and how easily it flowed.

The Unfamiliar

This is another old story. I started writing it when I was still in high school. I got a few pages in and then lost interest. But it stayed with me all these years, in the back of my mind like an old painting locked away in a trunk in an attic. When I started writing this collection, I just knew I had to finish this one. It’s my story of purgatory. A vicious, never-ending cycle of fear and horror. I really love the setting: a gray unfriendly ocean of land that never ends, filled with some monsters that you know, and some you don’t.

You Sure Are Calm, Cowboy

This one just surfaced in my mind without warning. The idea of an Old West setting mixed with some really weird shit just seemed to click. It’s just a really fun story of knowing something is very wrong but not being able to put your finger on it. I really like this concept, and I used it several times in the collection. Also, the idea of having the tables turned on the aggressor was something else I did a lot of. Anyway, this story’s a fun little ride.

Angel Charlie

This one came to me after my dad passed away. I hadn’t “talked” to him very much since he had died, and one day an idea came to me about a son trapped in a car wreck who had lost his dad some time ago. His father, in the meantime, is sitting in heaven and is kind of disappointed by how few “phone calls” or prayers he gets compared to the other souls in the afterlife. Suddenly, his son begins to talk to him because he thinks he’s going to die in the car wreck that he’s trapped in. His father is allowed to go and visit him, and they talk while he’s trapped there. The dad keeps the son company, conscious, and alive until help finally arrives. Meanwhile, they resolve some of the issues that they had while the dad was alive. It’s a great story, and one I still hope to write, but it didn’t fit in this collection. “Angel Charlie” is the evil twin of the original idea.

Old Dog

This story jumped into the forefront of my brain while I was trying to finish one of the other stories here. I could see the image of an old golden lab that was sick and chained to an abandoned house in a desolate neighborhood. There was an evil young man there too, tormenting the dog. I disliked that young man so much I thought that he should get his just deserts, and he did.

Pale Man

This one was my big bad monster story. I have always had a fascination with undiscovered monsters or legends. I caught wind of the Pale Man legend on the Internet, but when I did more research, I really couldn’t find any more information about it. This was my opportunity to create my own creature, which I really enjoyed. I hope that I portrayed the Nez Perce in a good light. Everything I’ve read about them has echoed of honor and pride. This is also the longest story in the collection (novella length). I just couldn’t seem to trim it down and finally decided to let it buck. I think it turned out pretty well.

The Man in the Room

I really wanted to write a short, short story for the collection. I love really short, shocking stories and wanted to create my own here. The darkness inside regular people always interests me too. From the temper that flares suddenly in an average guy to an everyday person just snapping and going on a rampage, I’m always amazed at what lies within people.

The Exploding Man

This one came from one of my best friends. He’s probably the nicest guy I’ve ever met. He never wrongs anyone else and actually will harm himself in the process of trying to be nice or accommodating to others. So, needless to say, he’s become very unhappy, and on top of everything else, he’s somehow picked up a terrible case of bad luck. Call it what you will—karma, fate, coincidence—he almost always gets the short end of the stick. I kept envisioning him finally snapping, and this story is what came out.

Adrift

This is another one of my favorites. The ocean really scares me. I mean really, really scares me. The thoughts of what could be down there in the depths, maybe watching people pass over it, has given me many chills over the years. I thought this one up near the end of completing the book. I wanted to capture that feeling of unease throughout the story, along with the stark and horrifying realization at the end.

Blackjack

This is my story of addiction. I think the central idea encompasses all the different addictions across the board. The feeling of not being able to control yourself when faced with your weakness, even though it could mean the difference between damnation and salvation. Choices, that’s really the scariest part of most horror stories. It’s not the monster in the dark or the killer that just won’t stop. It’s the choices that regular people make. That’s what actually terrifies me.

If you’ve enjoyed this collection, I would greatly appreciate a review on Amazon. Being a self-published author, I believe the readers like you are the most important part of the success of the creation. I give you many thanks for buying this collection, and I hope to meet you again on this dark path sometime in the future.

Joe Hart

October 14, 2011

About The Author

Joe Hart was born and raised in northern Minnesota and has no desire to ever leave. He’s been in love with the horror genre since the first time he picked up The Shining. He is currently at work on a novel. He’s happily married to his wonderful wife, Jade, and has two extraordinary children, Rainyn and Keegan.

Other Books By Joe Hart

Lineage: A Supernatural Thriller

Singularity

Outpost: A Short Horror Story

The Edge of Life: A Short Horror Story

Table of Contents

- Acknowledgements
- PCA
- THE UNFAMILIAR
- YOU SURE ARE CALM, COWBOY
- ANGEL CHARLIE
- OLD DOG
- PALE MAN
- THE MAN IN THE ROOM
- THE EXPLODING MAN
- ADRIFT
- BLACKJACK
- Notes
- About the Author