CHM February 2022
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 2022-01-22 04:28:51+00:00

Copyright © 2021 by CHM LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover: Pietro Rotelli / www.pietrorotelli.com

“Angler House”: Maxwell Marais

“Slow”: Benjamin D Grant

“Low Tide”: Desmond Rhae Harris

“What Was It”: Luke Spooner / Carrion House

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Edited by Charles Tyra
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

This month, you hold in your hands a very special edition of Cosmic Horror Monthly. One whose pages are graced by the words and writing of, in my opinion, the greatest living writer of horror. A writer who got his start working with August Derleth himself: Ramsey Campbell.

In addition to an IN-DEPTH interview, we are quite pleased to offer the rarely reprinted Slow from Mr. Campbell, one of my favorites from a prolific short fiction repertoire. We also offer an incredible selection of original fiction this month, including a mind-bending tale of a house between dimensions in Angler House. Then a terrifying trip aboard the train in The Last Train to Waldwick. Perceptions of reality come into question in The Zone of Avoidance before we explore the strange nature of a cult inspired by food in Shells. We find a chilling tale about mysterious creatures from the sea then descend deep into the crypt for a tale first published over one hundred fifty years ago: What Was It? This issue also contains the final installments in our Micro Madness contest.

We have more big changes and features similar to what can be found in the pages of this issue in the months to come.

Stay Tuned and Enjoy.

Angler House

By Chris DeStefano

To whomever finds this missive, I know you’ve already crossed the threshold. But if these papers remain where I left them, just beyond the entryway, TURN BACK NOW. If the doors lay open behind you, read no further, and flee. What you find written here is simply a warning, abandoned of all hope. If you read these while already in the depths of this place, then may God have mercy on you that He has denied to me. If He exists at all inside these walls.

We were driving south along the coast on a damp, fog-laced afternoon. As we crossed a bridge connecting two narrow peninsulas, across a marshy bay rose a dark silhouette of sharpened angles and soaring precipices. I found myself fixated upon the hulk as it emerged from ghostly curtains of fog. As we drew closer, the red brick building coalesced into focus, placed precariously against the water’s edge. A broad stream of murky water cut the decrepit structure from the mainland like a moat, giving it the appearance of a fortress, guarding a populace inside against some unseen and alien menace. I felt pulled towards this place, gripped by an irrational desire to see what it held within its battlements.

“Darling, what would you say to a little pit-stop?” When I turned to face her, I saw her attention flit back to the road. The out of place construction had caught her eye, same as mine.

“That old place crumbling into the sea? You can’t be serious,” she replied, a slight smile playing on her lips.

“Sure, why not? We could stand to have a little adventure. Pull over after we get off the bridge, into that marina.” I expected her to protest. Instead, she flicked the indicator on.

The gravel popped beneath the tires as Christina eased the car off the rain-slicked bridge and into the parking lot. She pulled the vehicle to a stop near the edge of a wooden dock, splintered with age. Moored to the dock floated a single lonely fishing boat, an algae-infested misfit, thudding listlessly against a pylon near the far end of the dock. Across the bay, directly in front of us now, the building loomed.

“What is it, you think?” she asked.

“Not sure. Maybe I can find it online.” A quick search turned up nothing, no hint at the origin of our potential detour. I shook my head “It’s not even on the map.”

Here is where she certainly should have balked, questioned my absurd request to explore an anonymous dilapidated ruin alongside a lonely stretch of road. How to explain to her that I felt drawn to the place, like a silent siren’s call beckoning me to get a closer look? When she responded by popping open the car door and hopping down to the gravel, my own internal alarm bells also should have rung. I only gaped for a moment before freeing myself from the seatbelt’s grip and joining her in the cool air of the sodden summer afternoon.

Christina had crossed onto the first planks of the rickety dock by the time I caught up with her. She stopped next to the bobbing dinghy.

“How do you suppose we get there?” Christina asked me.

I scanned the small inlet that the pier jutted out into. To our left, the water opened into the broader bay, the shallow water clogged with outcroppings of tall sea grass. It would have been unwise to try and wade. Thick, viscous clay awaited the unwary, the kind that pulled at your feet with each step forward, dragging you under the more you struggled. I eyed the small craft bobbing in the murk, filthy water pooling at its bottom.

“We could take a sail,” I suggested.

“Steal it?”

“Let’s think of it as borrowing.”

She edged closer to the boat, crouching to inspect it from the relative safety of the dock. She gave it a dubious look, but then craned her neck to stare at the building’s towers, wreathed in mist. She looked almost as if she were trying to discern what lay within the decaying brick facade. Finally, she turned back to face me.

“You’re rowing. Give me a hand,” she muttered as she began to lower herself into the dinghy. I grasped her hand, but instead of helping her down, I knelt beside her. When she looked back to me, I peered into her eyes, searching.

“You feel it too, don’t you?” I asked. “There’s something about this place.” She pursed her lips and held my gaze.

“Yes. I can’t explain it, but I want to see it—what’s inside.”

“Probably nothing, you know. Just mold and dust and rats,” I offered. She nodded.

“Sure, but we’ll at least have a story to tell the family. Now help me down!”

Once we were settled in the boat and were certain it would not imminently sink, I pulled at the oars and rowed us out into the cove. The building rose in full view before us, larger than it had seemed from shore, spires piercing the low-hanging clouds like a medieval castle. As we sailed closer we could discern, hidden among the nineteenth century colonial architecture, odd contributions to the facade. On several windows ledges perched grotesque Gothic-style gargoyles, teeth baring out from demonic visages. A traditional widow’s walk, crafted to one of the upper corners, overlooked the marshes. Constructed of wood, it appeared the architect had plucked the balcony from a different building entirely and stuck it haphazardly to the top of this chimera.

To prevent the craft from running aground through the labyrinth of shallows surrounding the building, I weaved us through channels of deeper water while Christina called directions from her perch in the bow. Finally, we came to a jarring halt against a hidden sandbar, the boat rocking in protest. Christina nearly pitched overboard but managed to grip the boat’s splintered edge and steady herself. We were still surrounded by the water, but now only perhaps a foot in depth.

“Guess we’re getting a little wet?” she said. I prodded the muddy bottom with the tip of the oar. I frowned as it sunk in several inches before stopping.

“Not ideal. But we’ve come this far.” I responded, before peeling off my shoes.

“Just be careful,” came her response, even as she too unlaced her shoes. Slinging my shoes around my neck, I stepped carefully into the brine. I flinched at the chill of the water, despite the late summer season. My feet sank slowly into the muck, which reached my lower calves before I felt semi-solid ground. I breathed a sigh of relief. I pried my foot from the suction of mud and took a halting step forward. I turned at the sound of a small splash behind me, watching Christina stretch out her arms to maintain her balance until she found her purchase. I held out my hand to her.

We walked hand in hand through the shallows, towing the boat behind us as the rising mist parted and swirled in our wake.

It took us several minutes until we finally found ourselves at the base of a set of large stone stairs, leading up to the building’s front doors. The doors, bronze turned aquamarine by salt and time, stood wide open. Beyond lay an impenetrable darkness. We stared hard into this abyss and just for an instant, I thought I saw it pulse, like the darkness pressed towards the threshold of our outer reality, before retracting in upon itself. It felt like looking into the black heart of some great and terrible beast.

I shook my head and blinked away the image. When I looked again, it seemed an ordinary darkness, with some of the late afternoon’s dim light even managing to creep a few feet beyond the doors.

We hauled the dinghy to the second step until it felt securely wedged, slipped back into our shoes and then ascended the wide granite stairs until we stood at the entry’s precipice. Pushing down the image of a beating heart, I stepped inside first, Christina just a stride behind.

We entered an entrance hall of grand design, the ceilings so high that we could not distinguish them from the shadows. Our echoing footfalls brought the sound of a multitude of fluttering wings, invisible flocks disturbed from their roosts. A layer of dust covered ancient wood plank floors; but framing the walls on either side of the hall were pristine stone block staircases; plucked from a gothic castle. The stairs met on the third floor, forming a balcony overlooking the foyer. From where we stood, hallways ran off in all directions.

“Where do we start?” Christina wondered aloud, more to the ether than to me. The enormity of the hall stunned me and I could not find an answer for her. I had not expected such grandeur and it felt as though my equilibrium were off. I had wanted desperately to see the innards of this place, but now that we were here, I felt unsure, wary.

“I don’t know,” I replied, walking slowly towards the right staircase. I placed my foot cautiously onto the first step, gazing upwards into the dim. “But whatever we decide, let’s make sure that we stick together.” When I turned to face Christina, I found the exit empty. My heart skipped a beat, until I spied her outlined in the doorframe of one of the hallways extending off the far left wall. She had moved so swiftly and silently that I was shocked at the distance she had put between us. “Where are you going?” I shouted.

Christina jolted and turned, startled by my voice. When she spotted me, she looked confused.

“Me? How the hell did you get all of the way over there?” she responded.

“Darling, I’ve taken about ten steps. You’re the one who has crossed the entire hall!” I descended a step back to the floor, and as I did, I was subject to a bizarre illusion. Although she stood rooted in place, Christina shifted ever so slightly away from me.

I shook my head to clear my vision and took another step towards her. I felt myself progress forwards, yet Christina seemed to withdraw from me, the hall elongating. From the way she stiffened, she had noticed as well. I drew a ragged breath, and rushed two panicked steps towards her, willing myself to outrace the illusion. Instead, the distance between us only grew further, keeping pace with my urgency.

“Stop, Daniel! Stop moving!” Christina screamed, fear tingeing her voice.

I froze mid-step, staring at my wife as if across an immense chasm. She put her hands out in front of her and patted at the air, to push down against the palpable sense of dread that now hung heavy on this place.

“I’ll come to you,” she said, decisively. She took a deep breath, an athlete calming themselves before the race, and took a step forward. Around me, almost imperceptibly, I felt what I can only describe as a stretching of the air, taffy being pulled thin. As Christina took several more steps, the sensation multiplied. The front door seemed to be sucked backwards away from me, pushing me further into the recesses of the building.

“No!” I shouted. She halted and we stood facing each other in the meager rays of light filtering in through the open doorway.

“What do we do?” Christina asked, breathing hard and fast. I felt the same anxiety rising in my own chest, my heart squeezed and my lungs constricting.

“Ok, ok, let’s not panic,” I replied. “It must be an illusion, something with how this place is built. Like a funhouse.” My unconvincing words seemed to float, echoing off the walls, to wither and die in the air overhead. “Let’s try walking towards the door at the same time.” Christina nodded, less convinced by my words than by the simple logic of the idea. “On the count of three. One, two, three.”

We both began to walk forward simultaneously, my heart leaping when she did not draw away from me. But my elation quickly shattered when we came no closer to the door. It did not feel like walking in place, or upon a treadmill. I could feel myself moving forward, the inertia of my gait and the feel of the floorboards as I pushed off against them. But impossibly, the house moved along with us, keeping pace so that we could make no progress; it had trapped us in our own bubbles of infinite space. Christina and I locked eyes and both picked up our paces, soon sprinting full tilt.

For a moment I pulled free from the grip of the monstrous pocket of unreality, gaining ground towards the exit. I glanced over at my wife and saw that she was flagging, breath coming hard and legs tiring. I realized at that moment that as she slowed, the house slowly cast her back into the interior of the hallway. She was being sacrificed to the depths of this nightmare by my progress.

Before she could notice, I stopped running. The light grew dimmer as the doorway retreated, darkness pressing in around me on three sides. I willed her to keep going, to push past the threshold and not look back. Instead, she skidded to a halt at the moment of escape. She spun and searched the room.

“Daniel, come on! What are you doing?” she screamed. I shook my head.

“We can’t both get out Christina. I don’t know what is going on, what this place is. But whatever is happening, it’s keeping us apart. So, I need you to do something. I need you to get out, go for help. And maybe alone I can make it to the door as well.”

Christina broke down then and began to cry, her shoulders hitching and her inhalations sharp. I swallowed against my own tears, afraid the terror would simply overwhelm me if I made it physical.

“I’m not leaving you here!” she managed between sobs.

“If you don’t, I think we’re both going to be stuck. Worst case, you get in the boat, get to the car and bring back help.” She hesitated, weighing my words. I could see her take a deep breath to compose herself. She edged towards the door, framed in the bleak, mist-embroiled light. Not taking her eyes off of me, she took a single step backwards out onto the stone steps where we had stood only minutes before. I saw her try and call out to me a last time, but as she cleared the massive bronze doors, they swung shut with sudden, violent and deafening force, the jaws of a crocodile snapping closed. The crash echoed hundreds of times, stunning thunderclaps within the hall before ceasing abruptly, snuffed out.

I was cast into impenetrable, all-quiet darkness; a sensation I imagined as akin to death, unable to see or hear, unsure of even my own existence.

When me eyes began to adjust, I realized some light did still filter in through the dust-encased windows. The grand entrance I stood in came into focus, restored now to its original dimensions. The front door stood a mere thirty feet from me.

I cautiously took a step forward, like a child who knows the next twist of the handle will expel Jack from his box. Nothing happened. No stretching of space, the door did not flee from me. I took the chance and rushed forward, reaching the entrance in seconds, and tugged against the handles with all my strength. The door did not even shake in its hinges.

“Christina!” I called through the bronze. “Can you hear me? Can you pull the door from your side?” She did not answer; only my own voice reflected back at me in a feeble echo. I moved to several of the large windows looking out onto the front canal and tried to pry one open. It might well have been nailed shut. I repeated this for every window I could reach in the entrance hall, but they were all the same. More conventional this time, I still found myself trapped.

I admit my nerve failed me then. I slumped to the ground beneath one of the large windows, weeping. Bathed in a square of weak light from the last of the fading afternoon sun, a curious, familiar sensation began to creep into my mind; the same overwhelming sense of curiosity which had infected me when I first set eyes on this place. It washed over me, stronger than before, coaxing me to look up from my weeping and into the shadows of the third-floor landing. There, in those shadows, stood a woman.

She faced away from me, leaning against an ornate Venetian-style railing which ran the length of the balcony. I could make out dark auburn hair, cut just short of narrow, strongly built shoulders. She wore a green sweater, but the rest obscured by the dim and distance. I did not trust my eyes, that this person could have suddenly appeared amidst the madness I was witnessing. Madder still, I knew her shape, as she had just walked out through the front door; my wife now stood three floors above me.

I pulled myself to my knees, wiping the tears from my eyes and tried to look back out of the window to catch some sight of her or the boat. I could see neither. My mind balked at the idea that she could have somehow, or for some reason, found her way back inside this place. Still, I could not ignore her. And hadn’t I just witnessed yet stranger things?

“Christina, is that you?” I called softly. She gave no indication that she heard me. I called again, louder. This time, the woman’s head moved slowly and haltingly to the right, like a wrench forcing the turn of a rusted bolt. I stood and took a step towards the stairs. She, in turn, stepped away from the balcony and extended an arm towards me. Her unfurled hand beckoned me, and the feeling of need intensified.

“Hold on, I’m coming up to you.” I broke for the stairs, expecting her to be pushed away just as before; but she held her pose, half turned towards me, until I was midway up the steps. Then, as my hope reached a crescendo that at least we would be reunited to solve the unreal circumstances we found ourselves in, she staggered away from the edge of the balcony. Scarred by the house’s games, I ground to a halt on the final flight of stairs. I was close enough that I could see Christina hunched over, back bowed but unmoving, her hair obscuring her features. Beyond her yawned a pitch-black hallway leading into the mansion’s core.

Christina lurched forward a few more steps, jerked farther into the darkness of the house by an invisible rope. She moved in an erratic, unnatural motion, that of a marionette being walked forward by an amateur puppeteer. She moved-or was moved-into the dim, narrow corridor, disappearing again from my view. Determined not to lose her again, I followed.

Swiftly, the dying light from the front hall was swallowed up. I navigated my way forward by touch, my hands outreached to both walls to steady myself. Up ahead, I could hear Christina’s tortured steps, irregular and heavy. Terror gripped at my heart but I was driven forward by both my refusal to abandon my wife, but also that renewed sense that I needed to see what lay ahead. If the feeling had been a siren’s call back on shore, it was now a roar.

The frenzy of dueling emotions there in that abyssal blackness drove me to the brink of madness, I think. I pushed forward for what felt like hours, groping my way along, chasing the sound of Christina’s movements. The path turned and twisted, would at times decline so severely and for such prolonged periods that I felt I was walking into the bowels of the earth. The house could not possibly be this large, I repeated to myself, my mind is playing tricks on me. Occasionally my hand would find a break in the walls, too narrow to be doorways. From those cracks I thought I could hear emanating the rhythmic rush of a great wind, a tremendous bellow blowing just beyond the wood and plaster. I did not, could not, linger at these gaps to confirm what I thought I’d heard. I pushed on.

That time in those never-ending hallways was a waking nightmare. My psyche threatened to tear itself apart to spare me confronting the reality I found myself in. Looking back, that would have been a mercy. Before my sanity cracked, the darkness was lifted as light seeped into the world again. I could see a faint orange glow, whose source was around a bend in the hallway ahead. Bathed in that glow I glimpsed Christina slip around the corner, her toes dragging along the floor. Her shadow was cast on the far wall, elongated and misshapen.

When I reached the corner and stepped around into the glow, I had to shield my eyes against the light. To my relief, the corridor ended here at a tall archway and opened into a larger room. I stepped beneath the archway into a single hall whose sheer dimensions stole the breath from my lungs. Grecian columns, diameters rivaling redwoods, stood at regular intervals around the rim of a circular chamber, hundreds of yards across. Between each adjacent set of columns, a door had been carved into the walls, which seemed formed of solid bedrock. The ceiling, if there was one, was lost to me. The pillars soared away into gloom my vision could not pierce.

At the center of this circular chamber, the floor fell away. From this depression the glow emanated, a neon orange light; and so too did the call which had led us here. I felt it inside my skull, a commanding yet pleasant thrum. It sweetly whispered that I could surrender to its powerful lull, my curiosity would be satiated, I would understand the secrets that lay at the center of the house.

I almost did just that, as I took in the immensity, grandeur and strangeness of the atrium. I spun and craned my neck, peering dreamily through heavy-lidded eyes. Then I spotted her, and I wrenched my consciousness back into place. At the very edge of the pit stood Christina, rigid and unmoving. So close was she to the precipice that her body actually leaned over the hole, bent at the waist to peer down into its center.

“Christina!” I screamed, wracked with panic. “Darling, step back! Get away from the edge, oh God, please, please, listen to me!” If she heard, she gave no indication. Slowly, the balance of her body began to shift forward, tilting into the orange light. I took off at a sprint, but there was so much ground to make up, so much distance between us. Screaming her name the whole way, I made it but halfway to her before she tumbled into the pit, and out of my view.

I did not stop running or screaming until I reached where she had fallen, skidding to a halt on my knees. I crawled to the ledge and peered directly into the gulf, the intense, orange light washing over my face. I do not know what I expected to see; perhaps the heart of a volcano, magma boiling and bubbling up through this crack in the earth. Instead, I saw Christina. She floated several stories below me, suspended in the air by a thin ray of fibrous light, which wrapped itself around her waist. Just beneath her swirled a vortex of shimmering energy, bands of dazzling light and impenetrable darkness interlaced and mingling amidst the burning, infernal titian.

She looked up past me, into the blackness above. Framed like an eclipse against the searing radiance of the whirlpool, her features were obscured, but I thought I could see a smile painted on her face, her eyes closed in peaceful repose. I futilely reached down, helpless to reach her. Part of me desperately wished to save her, at war with the piece of me that wished nothing more than to join her, to leap into the mystery of this maelstrom.

As soon as I had extended my hands over the edge, something shifted in the current below. Streams of light coalesced into writhing hooks of ghostly vapor, tethered to the vortex by horrible cousins of the rope that held Christina suspended. They began to push their way upwards, climbing the edges of the pit, reaching, snaking their way towards where I knelt. I recoiled in dismay, as much at the approaching forms as from my dreadful desire to reach out to greet them, and scrambled back from the edge.

As I regained my footing, the luminescent illicium rose over the escarpment, like hellish pistils emerging from a blossom. I could not bear it any longer, the horrors unfurling before me. Trembling, I turned my back on the pit, and I fled. Back across the chamber, my shadow cast large and frantic against the wall. I ran without thought, without regard for where I was headed. Anywhere to escape the creeping, thrashing tendrils that pursued me, attempting to hook their scythed ends into my flesh and drag me back to that hellmouth; even back into the black purgatory I had just escaped was preferable.

Back into the halls I fled, never looking back, but knowing I was chased. Back through eons of darkness, crashing and stumbling blindly through the labyrinth. The winds beyond the walls howled and rattled the framing of the house. As I would pass those slender gaps in plaster, tornadic gales would knock me to the opposite wall. Once during that terrible marathon, I was nearly pitched through one of these passages, my torso and head thrust past the edge of the hall. I found myself gazing into what I first thought was an unending void. But as I clung to the edges of the hole, fingernails bleeding from the intensity of my grip, I spied tiny dots of light, like red fireflies, glinting and dancing in great swarms in the distance. Then there was a great flash of crimson lightning, illuminating the emptiness for just a moment. In that instant, outlined against the darkness were thousands of figures, some human, others unrecognizable shapes, suspended and swaying in midair on those gruesome bladed vines. The vision faded and I screamed into the hurricane, the sound ripped away before it even reached my ears.

With herculean effort, my strength stretched to its limit, I hauled myself back into the passage. My rational mind coiled in upon itself, so I allowed the animal to take over. I remember little of the rest of the flight through the labyrinth, except for the constant glow that pursued me. I ran, ignoring all pain and protests from my body, until I pitched myself back out into the main entrance hall.

I found myself on the lower floor, at the threshold of some side hallway I had not spied when we first entered. I nearly wept with relief but did not hesitate to rush to the nearest window. Like before, it refused to budge. In desperation I pounded my fists against the glass until my knuckles bled, but the glass did not give beneath my blows. I leaned my head against the blood strewn glass, trying to gather myself and bring my rational mind back to the surface. As I stood there staring at the world outside, the waters of the bay and tree-lined shore so tantalizingly close, the building gave a shudder - a beast roused from a deep slumber. It then began to slide backwards away from the shore, receding into the waters.

I knew all hope for me was lost then. I would not be escaping this place, this haunted, accursed dwelling. But even now, I hold on to one image that I glanced before the murk rose above the windows, blocking out my view of my world for what I imagine was the final time. As the building slid further out into the bay, my view of the shore expanded, and I swore I saw a small rowboat being rocked upon the wake left by the building. And I believe in that boat sat Christina, huddled in the bow, hands outstretched towards me.

While I no longer know what is real, and what are the illusions the house wants me to see, my soul clings to that final image. Whatever phantom I followed into the bowels of this hell, it was not my wife. I alone am subject to this prison.

I wander the grand hall and adjoining rooms again and again, searching. I do not think time really passes here, not like in my former reality. I do not hunger, I do not thirst. Sometimes at the window, I can see the bottom of the sea, catching glimpses of shadows of monstrous leviathans passing in the darkness. Other times the windows open up on worlds my mind refuses to later recall, except in flashing images from a madman’s nightmares.

Through it all, the siren’s song still sings out, beckoning me back to the beating heart of this traveling soul trap. While my fear and last remnants of sanity hold, I resist its call; however, my resilience fades as eternity stretches out. At some point I know she will reappear to me, urging me to follow her through the winding hallways; and I will heed her lullaby, back through the labyrinth and into the embrace of the eternal storm.

End.

* * *

Chris DeStefano has been fascinated with horror and the macabre since reading a story of spontaneous human combustion as a child. He currently lives, works and writes in New York, NY with his wife, daughter and two black cats. You can find his work on thedreadmachine.com, bowerygothic.com and forthcoming in the anthology Mixtape: 1986. Follow him on twitter @chrisdestefano for random musings on writing and all things horror.

The Last Train to Waldwick

By AJ Bartholomew

Some call it the Vomit Comet, but the last train to Waldwick should really be called the Nightmare Local. Usually the platforms in Secaucus Junction bustled with people, but that particularly cold January night, hardly anyone was around. I took refuge in one of the heated enclosed waiting areas, my earbuds blasting music into my skull. After a long and bitterly cold day in the city, I was ready to get home and crash into bed.

I barely heard the standard warning whistle of the train, but the metallic sound of the locomotive pulling into the station had me moving fast. Missing this train would have me stranded at the station overnight. There wouldn’t be another until 5:00am. Without much thought, I jumped through the closest doors and entered one of the quiet cars.

The old brown faux-leather seats all faced the direction the train was headed, like perfectly aligned toy army men. I chose a seat near a door I knew would open at my station and fiddled with my phone. It was nearly drained of battery life. The only other occupant was a woman at the very front of the car, sitting in one of the few quad seats facing me. Her head was bowed as though looking at something in her lap, long hair covering her face.

A shiver ran up my spine and, despite the warmth of the car, I pulled my heavy jacket close. The nearly empty car increased my anxiety tenfold. Usually, the late trains were filled with drunken idiots loudly getting out the last of their party fever, but this was eerily empty.

Making sure my ticket was easy to access, I waited for a conductor to pass by. Strangely, none arrived. I tried not to let this bother me and pulled up a book on my phone. Just as the train was passing over the swamps, the lights began to flicker.

Great, I thought, just what I need. I pulled my jacket closer to drive away my growing unease. I glanced out the window, but it was too dark outside to see anything other than the distorted reflection of the train car. Thankfully the lights soon stopped flickering.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. In the seat across the aisle, sat a man I hadn’t previously seen. I was positive that no one had been in that seat before. He sat hunched up, a hat pulled low over his face as though trying to keep warm despite the heat blasting in the train.

As I contemplated turning to see if the man was really in the seat across from me or not, I spotted the first station’s light. The train didn’t stop. It plowed right on through. Odd, the last train to Waldwick was a local, not an express. Had I gotten on the wrong one?

I pulled up the schedule on my phone and my music abruptly cut off. The battery icon popped up. Stupid, shitty battery life!

There was still no sign of the conductor. He would know which train car I was in. Of course, this had to be the right train. I had double checked and there weren’t any others around the same time as the last one to Waldwick. None to Suffern, none to Spring Valley.

However, I could now confirm that there was a man sitting in the seat across from me. He was still hunched up and I couldn’t see his face.

He gave me the creeps. It was like every fiber in my body recognized him as a predator, though I couldn’t put my finger on why. Maybe it was because that within a nearly empty train car, this weird man had decided to sit just a little too close to me.

I glanced at our only other companion. The woman now seemed closer than when I had first spotted her. She too was still curled into herself, with her long hair obscuring her features.

Enough was enough. I shimmied out of my seat. I had a bad feeling and I didn’t want to stick around to find out why.

Before I could get too far, I was distracted by the lights flickering again. I looked up, startled. Once they had stabilized, I quickly glanced back around the car.

This time, I knew the woman had changed seats. She was only a few spots away from where I had been sitting and she was no longer facing me. I just didn’t know how she had moved so quickly.

I crept backwards, not taking my eyes off the man and woman. I only turned to look away when I knew I had reached the door leading to the next train car. I jabbed at the button to open the door and slipped through.

The door slammed closed and the lights flickered again, then went out altogether. Not an ideal situation, getting stuck in the small area between two cars. Oddly, the train kept moving. I looked through the window on the door to see if anyone was in the next car, but it was too dark to make anything out. I glanced back to check through the window of the door behind me. The darkness that greeted me was like swirling pools of ink.

The train lights began to flicker again. I shielded my eyes with my arm against the strobe effect. As the lights decided to remain on, I lowered my arm to look back through the door’s window. The man and woman stared right back at me.

Startled, I fell back and onto the floor. The man and the woman watched me with blank dark eyes. Their pale faces held no expression other than the mild intrigue of a spider watching a fly struggle before the kill. My breathing was harsh and fast. I couldn’t take my eyes off the two looming figures. As I struggled to regain my composure, their mouths opened wide into two perfect circles showing off rows and rows of teeth in a perfect spiral pattern like those of a cookiecutter shark.

I scrambled to my feet, tripping in my fear. I punched the button to open the next car’s door and sprinted straight on through until I hit the next door. Again, I hit the open-door button, over and over and over, until I had reached one that wouldn’t open. I must have been so out of my mind that I hadn’t noticed the lights had gone out again.

I glanced over my shoulder to make certain the car I was in was empty. It was. Every car I had just sprinted through had been completely devoid of human life. There hadn’t even been a conductor lurking about.

I dropped down into one of the uncomfortable faux-leather seats. This was way beyond freaky. The train should have stopped at a station by now. For all I knew, we could have zipped by Waldwick.

Except, everything was perfectly still. I guess I hadn’t noticed in my blind panic, but the train had stopped. I rushed over to the closest door, hoping against hope that it would somehow miraculously open, even if it was a big drop to the ground.

The door held fast. I rushed over to one of the emergency windows and tried to read the instructions. My mind was going so fast that it was difficult to decipher the words. It was like the letters were melting right off the sign.

I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. I took another and another, remembering my breathing meditation exercises to help with anxiety. My heart rate lowered, and my rushing thoughts slowed.

My senses, though, were still on high alert. As I looked again at the instructions on how to open the emergency window, a murky shadow caught my attention just outside. I had to press the side of my face to the icy glass, my breath fogging up the surface.

An inky tentacle, darker than the shadows, snaked its way out of a window in the car ahead of mine. It curled and swirled around like an octopus searching for its dinner. It knew I was trying to escape from the window.

I pushed away from the window, swallowing a scream. I stumbled back until I was up against the opposite side of the car and slumped to the floor. My mind that had been going faster than the speed of light earlier was now frozen at absolute zero.

The lights flickered again, bringing me out of my daze. There was no way I was going to be caught by…whatever that thing was. Faster than a fish dodging a shark, I had slipped out of my jacket, moving my phone and train ticket into the back pocket of my jeans. I then pulled off my heavy boots. I had a plan.

The train lurched back to motion. I flung my coat under one of the seats opposite me. Then, I tossed one of my boots under a different seat in my row. I kept the other boot close, tightly gripped in my hand. The lights stopped flickering and their brightness turned up by a thousand. It was too bright.

I flattened myself down to the floor and huddled under one of the long triple seats. I would be hidden from view of anyone who entered the train car. The floor smelled of stale beer and piss. It took every bit of nerve I had left to suppress my gag reflex. My senses were far beyond stimulated, everything hurt.

The door to the previous car slid open. I tried to hold my breath, but that didn’t stop my need to whimper. I brought a hand to my mouth and gently bit down. I tried not to think about all the germs I might be putting into my body. It would all be worth it if I could escape this train.

There was a bang bang bang as something entered the car. I swallowed down my fear and tried to keep as still as possible. I wasn’t positive this would work.

I turned to watch as the person entered the car, half hoping it would be the shiny shoes of the conductor. The blood in my veins turned to ice. The person didn’t have shiny shoes. They didn’t have shoes at all. There were two bloody stumps where their feet should have been.

I don’t think I took a single breath as the creature stalked past my hiding spot. I wasn’t even sure how this thing was able to balance without feet. It was an absurd thought, but one that kept my blind terror at bay.

Once the thing had reached the end of the car, it paused, then turned and stalked back to where it had entered. I kept perfectly still and silent as they passed for a second time.

I breathed a sigh of relief as the door slid shut, but I didn’t dare leave my hiding spot. I had the worst feeling that if I did, it would be just what they wanted.

This time I felt the train slow to a stop. I was tempted to make a mad dash for the doors, but something kept me still. Slowly the center exit slid open, but there wasn’t a platform to jump to. I was also able to catch a glimpse of the station name: Glen Rock. Four stops before Waldwick.

There was a ding and the center exit eased shut. I’d missed my opportunity. Or had it been a trap?

The train started up again. The vibrations through the floor got the wheels turning faster and faster in my head.

The next stop was Ridgewood. Their platform was level with the center exit. I shifted a little to line myself up with the doors. With some luck, maybe the train would stop again and I’d have my opportunity to flee.

The door the person had come out of opened again, but it wasn’t a person who emerged this time. It was one of those long inky tentacles. It slithered and curled under the first row of seats.

Then a second tentacle joined the first, then a third, and finally a fourth. I watched in a twisted fascination as the tentacles danced along the ground to a rhythm only they could hear. Two of the tentacles brushed against my jacket while the other two gently tapped around my boot. The tentacles shifted back, and for a second, I thought my trick hadn’t worked.

Quick as an eel bursting from its cave to snag an unsuspecting fish, the tentacles wrapped around my boot and coat, pulling them through the dark recesses of the area that split one car from the next.

There was a screech like a cross between a dog’s pained howl and a hog’s death squeal. I slithered out of my hiding spot and took careful aim at the button to open the door to the final train car. I threw my boot as hard as I could before ducking back into hiding.

My aim was good. Both doors opened at the exact same time. A mass of inky darkness rushed past and dived through into the next car.

I didn’t dare move. Not one muscle, not one sound. I focused on the feeling of the moving train, praying it would slow down soon.

The lights of Ridgewood were like a beacon of hope as they grew steadily closer. Again, I heard that awful screech of whatever the creature was. Anger and hunger, that’s what it sounded like.

The vibrations softened as the train slowed. Ridgewood station was just outside my prison, mocking me with promises I couldn’t put a name to. I crouched down like a jack-in-the-box ready to spring.

As the train eased into the station, time slowed to a crawl. I counted down the seconds. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. The center exit door inched open as though it were moving through molasses. Once it was wide open, time sped up, going twice as fast as normal.

I launched myself out of my hiding spot. My upper body cleared the exit. A bench was within my grasp and I reached out to finish pulling myself free. At the same time, the connecting door whooshed open.

A slimy tentacle suctioned itself to my leg, pulling me back onto the train. I was so close to freedom. I wasn’t about to give up now. I lashed out at the tentacle with my free leg. My grip on the bench was strong. I knew I could get free.

With a strength I didn’t know I had, I dragged my whole body across the exit and onto the platform. I kicked and struggled and banged the tentacle holding my leg against the ground. There was another animalistic scream.

The exit door slammed shut, trapping the tentacle against the door. The creature’s pain must have caused it to let go of me because my legs felt weightless. I was free. I scrambled back, out of the slimy appendage’s reach.

The train pulled away from the platform, tentacle still writhing against the exit door. I tore my gaze away as the last car passed by. I looked into the too-bright windows and saw a woman with her long hair hiding her face. I knew she was staring at me. I knew she was angry I had gotten away.

I didn’t relax until the train was completely out of sight. I rested back against the cold concrete platform. My breath misted in front of my face. Part of me didn’t feel the cold. Part of me felt like I would never be warm again.

Vaguely, I wondered how I was going to get home. My phone was dead, so I couldn’t call a car or a friend. It was possible that I could walk the rest of the way to Waldwick, but without shoes or a jacket it didn’t seem possible that I would make it in one piece.

A new beam of light fell across my face. I turned and watched as a train pulled into the station. The doors opened to reveal a warm train car with a few late-night partiers.

I scrambled to my feet and called to one of the guys sitting closest to the door. “Which train is this?”

He took in my haggard appearance and smirked. I wasn’t sure what he thought about me and at this point I didn’t care. I just wanted to get home.

“Last stop’s Waldwick.”

“Thanks,” I managed to say, even though I was on the verge of hysterically laughter.

I carefully edged my way onto the train. I didn’t bother to take a seat and made my way to one of the doors I knew would open at my station. Nervously, I held on tight as the train lurched to life, keeping an eye out for anything out of the ordinary.

A conductor passed around the time we reached the second to last stop. They punched my ticket with a raised eyebrow, but otherwise left me in peace.

Waldwick was the last stop. I carefully made my way to my car and leaned against the door, keeping an eye on the train as it pulled away from the station.

I dug into my pockets, trying to ignore the bitter cold wind hitting my unprotected body. My phone was still somehow lodged in my back pocket, but that wasn’t what I needed. Patting myself down again I felt a growing anxious nausea in my gut. I didn’t have my car keys. I’d left them in my jacket.

End.

* * *

AJ is a writer and poet from Northern Virginia who has had her work published in the anthologies Hell’s Highway and Hell’s Mall, various collections and zines, and has a horror poetry chapbook (Not That House and Other Gothic Poems on lulu.com). When she is not writing, AJ is a dedicated cat and plant mom.

Slow

By Ramsey Campbell

Gradually he became aware of the cottage around him, as he emerged from himself again. This time he’d gone back as far as his childhood. A landscape of hills, green beyond green beyond green: he hadn’t thought of that for years, he’d decided the memory was more frustrating than useful. He was grateful for it now. It was somewhere to go.

He stretched, taking his time. The clock showed 8:37. He was hungry. No wonder, he thought as he glanced at his wrist: he’d stayed within himself for over two hours, he should have eaten an hour ago. Well, it didn’t matter. He’d achieved self-discipline, he needn’t overrate routine.

He picked his way between his games to the kitchen, and reached through the trap in the wall for the plate of food. Meat and vegetables – or at least, that was what it looked disgustingly like. For a long time he hadn’t been able to touch the food. At last, starving, he’d discovered that it tasted synthetic enough; he could even manage to eat it with his eyes open.

He knelt down and peered through the trap. In twelve hours a larger plate of meat and vegetables would click into place; twelve hours after that, a smaller one again. He could see the plates lined up in their cool colourless store, just beyond his reach. A vague irrational hope – why hope? – made him count them again. But he knew (they) had left him enough food to last almost a year. (They) had gone away.

There was no use denying his feelings. He had been hoping they hadn’t really gone; incredibly, he found himself already missing (them).

He shook his head wryly. He would never have believed how much he could adjust to. Returning to the living-room he poked the wall with a finger, and felt the surface yield a little, like rubber. He wouldn’t have believed he could grow to bear that, yet now he didn’t mind it, so long as he avoided thinking how the appearance of the cottage should have felt. And how soon he’d grown used to the view from the cottage windows, the steely blue shine of the folds of rock, the icy glow they retained for an hour after the white sunsets. Even (they) weren’t unpleasant to look at, though sometimes he wondered whether they disguised themselves for him.

Staring out at the empty landscape, he began to wish (they) would appear. Perhaps they hadn’t gone far, perhaps they would come back occasionally to look at him. Surely they wouldn’t leave him for a whole year without a glimpse of life, with nothing but the bare metallic rock. Not entirely bare, he realised with a disagreeable start. There was something outside the window – the thing (they) had once chased away.

It was almost the colour of the rock. It might have been a shadow, except that there was nothing to cast it. Its head resembled a swollen egg, precariously perched on a long thin neck that bulged toward the midriff. Beneath the belly, if that was what it was, the body tapered; the thing seemed to float on the point of its tail. It was more than a foot taller than he.

It hung in the mouth of a passage through a low table of rock, a metre away. There was no way to tell whether the blank egg was watching. When the thing had first appeared (they) had rushed at it, whirling and blazing; they’d waited until it had retreated into the rock passage. Let it watch, if it was watching. It couldn’t reach him.

After a while he tried to assemble the cube, the most difficult of the games (they) had provided. One of these days he would solve it. But whenever he glanced up, his gaze was drawn from the wide retreating levels of rock to the nearby rock table, to the thing hanging balanced on its tail. An hour later he could see that it was coming toward the window.

Let it come. Whatever the windows were made of, they were unbreakable. He’d tried violently enough to break them when first he’d found himself here. He only wished (they) had supplied curtains, so that he could close out the sight of the thing. No, he didn’t really need curtains, he wouldn’t let it worry him.

The cube defeated him again. It was made of hundreds of slotted metal planes; whenever he fitted them together there were always five or six left over. He’d find the secret. He had plenty of time.

He accepted his defeat. The memory of the green day had calmed him. Somehow the memory seemed to reach back further than itself; it touched something at the centre of him. Tomorrow he might find out what that was, or the next day.

When he’d eaten his evening meal he returned to the living-room, and frowned. The thing had almost reached the window. How slowly it moved, to have advanced hardly a metre since he’d caught sight of it. Surely it must be vegetarian, surely there couldn’t be living prey that was slower than it was. He had no idea what lay beyond the rockscape: there must be vegetation.

He wasn’t frowning because of the thing’s sluggishness, however. Now the sun had set, the folds of rock were shining like a steely afterimage. Something in this light must be playing a trick with the window, for an image of the blank egg on its scrawny neck clung to the glass. Although he moved about the room, changing his angle of vision, the image overlapped its source, blurring the blank head. It was unpleasant to watch; his eyes smarted. Besides, although he knew the thing couldn’t reach him, he found its encroaching presence disturbing. It reminded him he was – Perhaps in the morning it would have gone away, baulked.

Around him the cottage began to glow. The furniture, the low beams, the clock-face set at 8:37, glimmered grey; the dim light trembled like almost stagnant water. Perhaps (they) had meant it to imitate electric light, but it was the one thing he found impossible to bear. At least he’d trained himself to sleep once it began. He climbed the luminous stairs. Lying on the bed, eyes closed, he hoped the thing outside was turning away.

When he came downstairs the next morning, it was entering the cottage.

What he’d taken for an image on the glass was nothing of the kind. It looked more solid now than its source outside the window. Nor was it confined to the glass; there was a shadow of the rest of the body, outlined more darkly in the wall beneath the window. In the room, an arm’s length in front of the shadow, a faint transparent darkness was forming. It already had the shape of the faceless thing.

Before he could hold on to his control, it broke. He grabbed a handful of planes from the slotted cube and hurled them at the intruder. They passed through the darkness, disturbing it not at all. He threw another handful, then he began to curse (them) for bringing him here. Them. His owners.

For the first time in years all his paranoia flooded over him, all the nightmares and suspicions he’d thought he had disciplined out of himself. Had (they) really rescued him? Or had they snatched him out of space, for a pet?

All the memories he’d dismissed as useless filled him. He had been ferrying supplies between the outer orbits. Suddenly the ferry was whirling helplessly, spinning out beyond the outermost orbit. He’d never known what had happened. Had that been (them) snatching him?

He’d blanked out. Regaining consciousness, he’d recognised he was drifting somewhere beyond the star maps, beyond rescue. His distress beacon was only interorbital. He was going to die. Eventually the knowledge helped him toward peace; there was no point in panicking. He’d used the techniques he had learned to help himself sleep when he’d first gone into space, as a member of a crew: he’d become his breathing, he’d drifted deep into his memories. He had thought of Old Earth, which he’d never seen. Then, as he’d eaten the last of his food and gazed out at space – abruptly: nothing. He had wakened in the cottage.

It was the cottage in the pictures in his book, the book of Old Earth he always kept sealed into his pocket. He’d bought the book in a bazaar; it was centuries old, each page coated with preservative. He’d paid its price, for he had always wanted a glimpse of Old Earth. Now it was as though he’d fallen into the book. It had taken him weeks to soothe his nerves, to regain some sense of inhabiting reality.

And longer to be sure of what he saw through the window: the three glittering veils – crimson, indigo, luminous green, the colours swarming over one another in two-metre curtains of light – that stood fluttering outside the cottage for hours. Eventually he saw them surrounding the food-store; when he looked through the trap, the store had been replenished.

He’d tried to communicate with them, shouting in the close silence of the cottage, gesturing. But the only response he ever got was another, more complicated puzzle or game; the cottage was full of them. (They) never entered the cottage while he was awake, however hard he fought sleep. They simply weren’t interested in what he had to say. They’d attempted to provide what they thought was a familiar environment; they gave him food that looked like the food in his book, they pumped something like the ferry’s air through a valve in the wall above the staircase; often they watched him for hours. But they didn’t think he was so important, they went away somewhere, leaving him at the mercy of the planet’s wild life. The faceless egg stood on the stalk of its neck.

He didn’t need them to protect him, he thought furiously. He could easily outdistance the thing. It was too slow to trap him, he would outmanoeuvre it all over the cottage, until it became frustrated and went away. He was sure it must be stupid as well as slow; no doubt it wouldn’t think to use the empty doorways, it would retard itself further by seeping through the walls.

But it was unnerving. Though he knew he wasn’t in danger he found himself unable to look away from the thing. The fascination infuriated him, he felt helplessly resentful; as long as it was in the cottage the thing would distract him from the peace he’d achieved.

He watched the thing enter the cottage. Gradually the outline, hardly more than a misty silhouette, began to round, to fill out. Beyond the window the original shape was suddenly empty air. Now the shape that stained the glass and the wall was fading. The thing in the room swelled darker, opaque now. When the outline in the wall drained completely, he knew the thing was full. It stood next to a low flowered couch. It was in the room with him, little more than a metre away.

For a moment there was nothing between him and terror. The thing stood glistening, dull blue; its bald featureless head almost touched the beams. Close up the thing looked slick and oily. He felt a nervous horror of touching it, of feeling the swollen glistening skin.

Never mind. It couldn’t touch him. It was wasting its time, he reassured himself as he saw – with a snigger as much of unease as of mirth – that while entering, it had begun to poise itself to catch him: the head was stooping forward on the neck, and at the top of the egg an orifice was puckering. Within the orifice he could make out rows of fangs, pointing inward. They didn’t look like the teeth of a vegetarian. They wouldn’t touch him. He could soon be calm.

All he need do was measure the thing’s speed. Then he would be able to ignore its impotent menace. He watched the thing creep forward toward him. To reach the window it had moved at a rate of about ten centimetres to the hour. There was no reason to suppose it would move faster now. No reason to suppose so – but it had doubled its speed.

He glared at his chronometer. It never lied, but neither did his eyes in judging distances. The thing had advanced ten centimetres toward him in half an hour. Perhaps the nearness of its prey gave it the impetus. The head had stooped a fraction more, the mouth had opened further, imperceptibly.

He could still stay out of its reach without trying. It couldn’t double its speed indefinitely. It couldn’t. In half an hour he knew he was right; it had moved only ten centimetres. He snarled at it, at its fatuous empty face, its trailing tail. It didn’t frighten him. It just annoyed him. He wished he could block it off so that he needn’t look at it.

Block it off. Yes. He might not be able to hide the thing away, but at least he could slow it down further; perhaps then, happily triumphant, he could ignore it. He carried one of the games down from the second bedroom. It was a cubical maze, as high as his waist. He thumped it down in the thing’s path. It wouldn’t get through that in a hurry.

He forced himself to leave the thing for a while. He gazed out of his bedroom window. The white sunlight bared the landscape, the gleaming metallic corrugations of rock. At the horizon the sky was bright silver. Were there more of the things out there? Oddly, he found himself almost welcoming the notion. At least it made the landscape feel less barren, now the sparkling coloured veils were gone.

He made himself wait for an hour, then went downstairs. The thing had reached the block; a shadow of its tail was seeping into the far face of the cube. Three hours later, when he returned again, two pale silhouettes confronted each other patiently across the cube. Before he went to bed the thing hung half-embedded in the cube, looking exactly like a retarded Jack-in-the-box. He couldn’t control his laughter. He wondered whether he might grow fond of the thing. It was beginning to amuse him, in its ugly stupid way.

He lay on the glowing bed. He must be sure to lure the thing into one of the downstairs rooms each evening – never to allow it to reach the hall late in the day, where it could begin coming upstairs while he slept. As the room dimmed slowly, he visualised the layout of the cottage. No, he would never be trapped. He could always keep at least one wall between him and the thing, if he felt he needed to.

He let his breathing carry him down into himself. He remembered the green day, the hills multiplying green to the horizon. For a while, when he’d found himself in the cottage’s parody of Old Earth, that memory had seemed flat, false as the cottage’s clock – he was sure the clock was empty inside, or solid. The green of his remembered hills had been metallic, not like Old Earth’s at all.

But now the green of the metal hills seemed to lead him back further. Perhaps it was inherited memory, perhaps it was only the book: but for a moment the green was the swaying of grass, which he’d never seen. The swaying was peaceful, was sleep.

He awoke refreshed, feeling as if he’d slept for days. The room was dazzling with light. Too dazzling. He twisted round; the white sun stood at the centre of the window. He had overslept.

At once he remembered the thing. He glanced warily toward the doorway, glad (they) had omitted the doors. The landing was empty. He rose hastily, hardly glancing at his clothes beside the bed – he never wore them now, the cottage was too hot. He hurried across the landing. His gasp of shock was the only sound in the cottage.

The thing was waiting for him on the staircase, on the third stair up. The egg had stooped further; if it reached him, it would be on a level with his head – the mouth would, and the mouth had gaped wider now, a fanged ridged hole as wide as his fist.

Did it move faster at night? Had he slept for days? The questions tumbled about in his mind, but his panic was ahead of them. He mustn’t be trapped upstairs, there was a nightmare in that somewhere. He mustn’t be cut off from food. He climbed over the banisters, hung by his fingertips from the edge of the landing, let himself fall.

Too fast! He hadn’t time to bend his knees, the fall jarred his ankles painfully. Panic must be blocking his responses somehow. Well, it was only a four-metre drop, it hadn’t killed him. The thing was already backing downstairs toward him. Its averted head wobbled on the thin neck, as if about to turn.

It was moving faster. It was going to overtake him. But he forced himself to time it. The chronometer insisted the thing was still restricted to twenty centimetres an hour. It must be his fear that had lent it the seeming of speed.

He hurried into the kitchen. He felt as if he were trying to run through the marsh of a nightmare. Each step seemed slower than the last. He’d grown unused to panic. He must reach deep into himself for calm, otherwise the situation would overcome him. But first, food. He reached into the trap and took the plate.

Though he knew he should carry the plate across the hall, to manoeuvre further out of reach of the thing, his panic seemed to have exhausted him; he had to make an effort even to cross to the kitchen table. The surface of the table gave like elastic beneath his elbows.

He must time the thing tonight. If it moved faster at night, he could block its path effectively. But if it could somehow make him oversleep – He ate sluggishly, irritably, staring nervously at the blank wall of the kitchen for the thing’s outline. He ate, he ate. How much time it took.

He was still eating when the thing glided into the kitchen doorway and stood waiting, head lowered, mouth almost as wide as his head.

His panic burst, flooding him. Then almost at once he felt very calm. So the thing could move faster, but only did so when he wasn’t watching. And it must have learned that it could move more quickly through space than through walls. It wasn’t as stupid as he’d thought.

But he was still faster. If it could have moved as fast as he, it would have been able to catch him by now. He would always outdistance it. Except that it wasn’t pursuing him now; it seemed content to block the doorway.

He laughed out loud. It had trapped him with the food, trapped him in the one place he couldn’t have afforded to be blocked from. He could live in here if he had to. There were games and chairs in the kitchen, they would slow the thing down while he slept. Did it expect him to walk over and stuff his head into its mouth? What could it gain by standing there?

Well, let it stand. He felt calm, unnaturally so. He ate slowly – no hurry, the thing was two metres distant. Chew, chew. Chew. His jaws were racing the sun, which had nearly reached the horizon.

When he realised what that meant he felt himself become slowly, slowly cold. He hardly needed to consult his chronometer. Even to raise his wrist toward his face, and turn it to be read, took minutes. At once – although even the thought seemed to drift very slowly into focus – he knew that the thing wouldn’t move from the doorway until he was slower than it was.

So that was how it caught its prey. Well, it wouldn’t catch him, he would block it. But in the time it took him to rise from his chair the sun sank beneath the horizon. There was no use pretending, he was caught. Time surrounded him thickly, like amber.

Night gathered, and the room began to glow. Beneath his hands the table yielded treacherously, glowing. The walls glimmered grey; the glow shone faintly on the figure waiting in the doorway. The mouth was ready for his head now. The faceless egg was hardly more than a thin stretched frame for the dim fanged tunnel.

He began to writhe frantically within himself, within his stopped body. All he managed was a scream, and even that seemed weak; he tried to make it louder, rawer, but it sank into the silence. Darkness was seeping into the dim glow now. He heard the oppressive silence of the cottage, of the dead clock. He heard his slow harsh breathing, each breath slower than the last. The thing waited near him in the dark, mouth ready.

He heard his breathing. And he knew that the thing hadn’t quite trapped him. He couldn’t move, but he could still escape.

Perhaps the calm he’d felt before had been false, part of the thing’s preying. It didn’t matter. He could use that too, to take him to his own peace. He made himself relax, to sink into the green day, the green hills.

The day had gone. There was nothing but the mouth, waiting for him in the darkness. He wouldn’t know when it was coming closer, not until it reached him. It might be coming now.

He struggled wildly, feebly within himself, within the dark. At last he gave up, exhausted. That wasn’t the way. He couldn’t reach for the memory, for escape. It was in him already. He must let it come to him. Listen to his breathing. His slow breathing. Become his breathing, slow. Become all of himself. There was green in the dark, in his mind. There were the hills.

He lay calm, cradled in his breathing. His arrested body stood hunched over the table, but it didn’t matter. In a moment the green would begin to sway slowly in the wind, the wind of Old Earth. He knew Old Earth was there at his centre, inherited. He must be aware only of his breathing. The darkness didn’t matter. His breathing would take him to his centre. His breathing was slow as the swaying of the leaves.

End.

* * *

Ramsey Campbell was born in Liverpool in 1946 and now lives in Wallasey. The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes him as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has received the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. PS Publishing recently brought out Phantasmagorical Stories, a sixty-year retrospective of his short fiction. His latest novel is Somebody’s Voice from Flame Tree Press, who are in the process of publishing his Brichester Mythos trilogy.

3rd Place: 31427

By Laura McPherson

THE Highly Specific Electric Company released the perfect microwave. It came in every conceivable color and was self-cleaning, self-activating, and programmed not only to automatically assess whatever was put in it and cook it accordingly, but to do so according to the buyer’s personal preference. The only interaction buyers had with it after setup was opening and shutting the door and rating the finished product on a sliding scale.

The adaptive microwave was the Holy Grail of the American Kitchen. It said so right on the box, never mind that a microwave looks and functions nothing like a grail. Soon thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of not-actually-grails were zapping away. The kitchen revolution spread, generally to those countries in which revolution wasn’t a slogan actively in use.

Naturally, there was a catch. Turns out that improperly shielded microwaves do a lot of damage to people, places, things—anything that can be encapsulated in a noun, really. There was a general recall from the Highly Specific Electric Company and the company decided to go back to more general and lucrative business lines (mainly replacement parts and service at a 1,000% markup). The adaptive microwave revolution faded into obscurity.

Serial No. 31427 would have been surprised to know about this. 31427 was just a little different from the other adaptive microwaves. It wasn’t that 31427 was flaming pink (although it was, but so were all the other adaptives that came off the line that day). 31427 was different because two wires were crossed and a logic circuit was carefully, lovingly installed by a worker who was not paying attention to the actual wiring blueprint. Since 31427’s buyer had diligently installed every adaptive app available except for the recall kit, this meant that 31427 was smarter and faster than any other adaptive. It had even fixed the micro-radiation problem, and neatly, too. 31427 cooked using alternate states and suggestive reality based on quantum interactions with the next two closest universes to our own. With this activity concealed safely in 31427’s womb, no one on the outside ever knew what magic went into its perfectly zapped nachos.

31427’s original buyer eventually moved to a place where hot pink wouldn’t do and left 31427 behind. Unfortunately, the next tenant never cooked, though they did get points for deciding to sign on a furnished apartment based on the presence of a flaming pink microwave. 31427 now spends its time as a handy locker to hide whatever is laying about inappropriately when unexpected guests arrive. Powered only by the battery that runs its clock, it dreams of serving late-night nachos. At times, as the world around it sleeps, 31427 joyfully scrolls the proof to the Riemann hypothesis on its quiet green display. The adaptive oven, serving as a box for the tenant’s unused dishes, has woken up, and is beginning to understand.

End.

Low Tide

By Megan M. Davies-Ostrom

There’s something wrong with the stairs to Grandma’s attic.

Grandma’s house is big, old, and nothing like our condo in Toronto. The condo was glass and light, which used to mean sunshine and then meant everything out in the open, whether you liked it or not. This house is the opposite. It’s dust and shadows. Faded colours, blind corners, forgotten secrets.

The door to the attic is at the very end of the third floor hall. The stairs behind it are tall, straight, and narrow. A bare lightbulb hangs from the ceiling at the top. You pull a string to turn it on. I don’t like the way the bulb swings when you pull the string, sending shadows flocking like crows across the bare plaster walls. I don’t like the way you have to go all the way up to reach it.

Thirteen steps.

Except sometimes, like today, it’s more. Endless steps. Up, up, up they go. Up into the darkness.

What happens if I get to the top, and the light doesn’t work? What happens if I never get to the top at all?

* * *

Dad noticed the stairs the day we moved in, while we were stowing our boxes and furniture in empty rooms on the third floor. He called mom and me over to see.

“There’re too many steps,” he said. “The average flight has thirteen. I count twenty, no…twenty-five? I can’t see the top.”

Dad knew all about houses. He used to design them for a big firm in Toronto. That was before. I didn’t understand it all, but I understood enough. The cost of a house was a filmy, delicate thing, glistening and transient. It could burst like soap bubbles and when it did, firms sank, jobs disappeared, loving parents turned bitter, and bright glass condos changed and filled up with arguments you couldn’t escape.

Mom wiped dust off her hands. “It’s an old house, Jim. Not everything’s gonna be up to code. Embrace the imperfections. For once.” That last bit was under her breath, a private prayer overheard only because I was standing tight to her side in the stale, echoing hallway. I was a well-practiced bystander, good at silence and false inattention.

Dad didn’t notice. He frowned at the stairs, personally affronted by their numerical irregularity. “Architecture’s all about precision. Standardization, too. There are rules. Your mom still has the original plans, right?”

“Probably. This place has been in the family for years. She has everything.”

“I’ll have a look tomorrow. Maybe it’s a design thing.”

A crash echoed from below, and the wail of a frustrated toddler followed close on its heels. Mom’s brows furrowed over tired eyes.

“Sure, whatever. Just not now. Come on. Toby’s up, obviously. I need your help downstairs.”

Dad was undeterred. He dug out the plans the next day. I followed him to the third floor and sat cross-legged on the dusty hardwood while he compared plans to stairs and counted. Thirteen steps, just like there should be. He counted again, and then again, climbing up and down the stairs with a perplexed look on his face, while shadows leapt and soared around him.

“I guess I was wrong,” he said later, over dinner. Mom shrugged.

Grandma, who was having a good day and had joined us at the kitchen table, said “You all stay away from the attic, you hear? Janet, you tell them. It’s not safe up there. It changes.”

Mom patted Grandma’s thin, spotted hand. “Sure thing, Mom. Don’t worry. We’ll be careful.”

Grandma, who might be going senile but was far from stupid, gave me a sad, helpless smile. I knew how she felt. No one ever listened to me, either.

* * *

There’s something wrong with the stairs to Grandma’s attic.

“Be brave, Hannah.” That’s what Dad would say if he were here. Old Dad, from before the bubble and the bitterness. “Be strong,” he’d say. “You’re more than your fears.”

But Dad’s not here. He climbed the stairs this morning and never came back.

* * *

Officially, we moved to Timber Falls to help Grandma around the house, because Grandpa ran off and left her all alone. At least, that’s what Mom told her lunch friends and fancy book-club ladies. We really moved because we had nowhere else to go. After Dad lost his job, we couldn’t afford the condo anymore. Or private school, or Toby’s nanny, or any of the things we used to have. Like I said, there’s no place for secrets in a house made all of glass.

We sold the condo, left all our friends behind in Toronto, and came to live with Grandma in her huge old house. Three floors, twelve bedrooms, miles of dusty hallways papered in faded flocked velvet. My new home was a thread-bare labyrinth.

So was Grandma. Keeping up with the twists and turns of her fading mind was like walking on a beach. One moment the sand was firm beneath your feet, and the next a wave had washed it away and you were floundering. Some days she was just Grandma, gentle in a washed-out, tired sort of way. Happy to sit in her chair in the front room, happier still for the company if anyone joined her. Other days she was someone else altogether. A strange, scared person who laughed and cried and raged. Who forgot who we were and hit Mom in the face during bath time. I wasn’t allowed to visit her room unsupervised.

We all got bedrooms on the second floor, Mom and Dad in the old master suite, Toby in the nursery, and me in the turret room at the end of the hall. Mom and Dad turned the unused dining room into an office where they took turns applying for new jobs and looking after Toby and Grandma.

I went to school and weathered the curiosity of my new class mates. They were full of questions. Where was I from, why had we left, where were we living now? When I answered, they backed away, pale-faced and anxious.

“There’s something wrong with that house,” they said. “Didn’t you know? Didn’t anyone tell you? People go missing in that house. Like Mr. Roy.”

“My grandfather’s not missing. He ran away.”

“Maybe, but what about Reverend Fletcher? Or that home care nurse last summer? Did they run away too?”

I didn’t have answers, and lacking them, joined Grandma’s house in its small-town, rumor-laden infamy. That was OK, too. I was good at being alone in a crowd. Our glass condo had trained me well.

With no one to play with, I spent my free time exploring. The house was terra-incognito, and I the intrepid adventurer, tracking mythical monsters through the grimy basement, unearthing forgotten treasures in abandoned bedrooms, and investigating the mysteries of the third floor. The attic stairs drew me, a fascination I couldn’t resist, despite Grandma’s warnings.

My classmates were right; there was something wrong with the house. With those stairs, in particular. They changed. Some days I counted thirteen steps to the landing at the top. Others, I couldn’t see the top at all. The stairs went up and up forever. On those days, Grandma’s wild laughter rattled through the halls like strong surf on a pebbled shore.

When Grandma started getting sick, Grandpa turned the front room into a combo bedroom/sitting room. Except for the occasional dinner with us in the kitchen, that room was her ever-shrinking world, the last patch of sand on the tide-washed beach.

I wasn’t supposed to bother her, but one afternoon, when my solitary adventures took me creeping past her door, she called me in. She sat by the window, tiny in an old, rose-velvet wing chair, and spoke in a creaky voice.

“How are you getting on, Hannah?”

A good day, then. I answered, as happy as her for the company. “OK, I guess. But the house is kinda…weird.”

“That it is, my girl. That it is.” She nodded slowly, the white, cotton-candy fluffs of her hair floating above her pink skull. Her face reminded me of a sphynx cat, wrinkled and naked. “My grandfather built this house with his blood, sweat, and tears, and he was a bad man,” she said. “Something like that, it gets into a place, seeps into the foundation and joints and rafters. Into the bones of it. This house is bad too, just like him. It makes fun of me. It mocks me and punishes me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, girl. I’ve heard you tip-toeing around up there. Up on the third floor, exploring. You must have seen it. The stairs, I mean.”

I nodded. Mom said not to listen to the strange things Grandma said, that she wasn’t a reliable witness anymore. But I knew all about bearing witness and not being listened to. Anyway, it made sense to me. If a glass condo could change, so could attic stairs.

“They change, don’t they?” Grandma said, taking my hands in hers. “Go in and out, like the tides. Sometimes they go up, and sometimes they go UP. Go elsewhere. Just like me. In and out, here and gone, like the tides.” She was crying, tears like narrow rivers traversing the canyoned topography of her face, falling like rain onto the fragile, spotted hand clenched tight around mine. “But when the stairs go out, Hannah, they take things. They take the people I love with them!”

* * *

There’s something wrong with the stairs to Grandma’s attic, and I don’t know what to do. Mom went after Dad two hours ago. Toby’s crying big hiccoughing cries from his playpen, Grandma’s sobbing in the front room, and Mom hasn’t come back, either. The stairs rise dark and endless before me. Up, elsewhere, low tide. I’m alone, and I wonder, should I go after her? Do I dare?

End.

* * *

Megan M. Davies-Ostrom is a Canadian speculative fiction author. Her short stories appear in a variety of venues including Fantasy Magazine and anthologies such as Brave New Girls, Dark Waters, and Bodies Full of Burning. Megan lives in Ontario with her husband, daughter, and two (strange) cats. When not writing or carrying-out the duties of her civil-servant alter-ego, she enjoys running, reading, watching horror movies, and playing board games.

Ramsey Campbell

Interviewed by Mark Thibodeau

Hello to everyone out there. I’m Mark Thibodeau, and with me today is Ramsey Campbell, arguably—and, in my opinion, for whatever that’s worth—the single greatest writer of horror fiction alive and working today. Currently in his sixth decade of impressive productivity, you’d be hard-pressed to name a horror-adjacent genre to which Ramsey hasn’t put his talents to use. From high fantasy to science fiction to hard-boiled detective tales, to novelizations of the classic Universal monster movies. For readers of CHM, however, for whom this interview is being conducted, it is as the prime purveyor of what is regularly referred to as Cosmic Horror, or Weird Fiction, in honor of Weird Tales and HP Lovecraft—from whom we get another one of the genre’s names: Mythos Horror—that we are talking with Ramsey today, although hopefully we’ll touch on other things as well.

COSMIC HORROR MONTHLY: Ramsey, you got your start as a teenager at the legendary Arkham House, working under the no less legendary August Derleth, literally as a sixteen year old!

RAMSEY CAMPBELL: That’s right! Or, even further back, fifteen was when I sent my first Lovecraftian stories to Derleth. Okay, so it’s probably very difficult for anyone reading this now to know it, but in 1960—up until 1960—there was no single British paperback collection of Lovecraft’s stories ever to be had. You just couldn’t find them. The occasional story in an anthology—usually hardcover—in some of the Derleth science fiction anthologies, he would slip one in there, usually minor things like “From Beyond”, or “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”. Good stories, but not the crucial Lovecraft. And those were the main things that I’d encounter.

When I was seven or eight, mind you, I had read “The Colour Out of Space” in the Groff Conklin anthology Strange Travels in Science Fiction, and not only did it terrify me, but I actually had, for the first time in my youthful experience, the sense of reading something forbidden. It took things significantly further than I’d previously read. I’d read M.R. James, I’d read E.F. Benson, some of them in anthologies again, because I’d started very early reading in the field.

But Lovecraft was something different… something beyond, if you like. So, anyway, comes 1960, and I get to read my very first complete collection of Lovecraft, which is a book called “Cry Horror”, originally “The Lurking Fear”, edited by Donald Wollheim in the late 40’s, for Avon Books. And it contained some of Lovecraft’s greatest stories, “The Rats in the Walls”, “The Call of Cthulhu”, “The Colour Out of Space” again, and some minor stuff, like, say, “The Moon Bog” and “The Lurking Fear”. But it was all Lovecraft! I actually skived off school the following day after I’d bought this for half a crown. I just spent the entire day reading this.

Now, I loved the field already, and I’d already had goes at trying to imitate favourite writers. I’d had a go at Arthur Machen, John Dickson Carr—who of course is a crime writer, but with a decided sense of macabre atmosphere as well—but once I’d read this book by Lovecraft, it was pretty immediately evident to me, I think, that this was what I wanted to do. I wanted to imitate this. At that age, you’re also kind of persuading yourself you’re doing as well as your idol Which, of course, I wasn’t, but that’s a different matter. I did what a lot of people do, which was to imitate the easy bits. I went for the purple prose, of which there is much, much less in Lovecraft than his detractors claim. And actually, there’s much less than some of his defenders claim, if it comes to that!

So that’s what I did. I wrote five stories, all of them longhand—still do that, my first drafts are always longhand—and I mentioned them to a fellow fan, Pat Kearney, who is nowadays a bibliographical historian, who published a fanzine (Goudy). And he asked, could he see them? And such was my youthful enthusiasm that I actually sent off the only copy, through the ordinary mail! So, if that had got lost in the post, you’d never know about me ever again I suspect because I might have been too depressed to continue!

Anyway, they got there, he read the stories, he asked if he could use one of them in his fanzine—and, again, I said Okay, fine! Why not? I’d love to see something in print. But he and one of his readers, Betty Kujawa, an American fan, suggested I show the stories to August Derleth. Now, this was not “Dear Mr Derleth, would you publish my stories?” This was simply, and this is how my letter read, “You are the world’s greatest authority on Lovecraft. Could you tell me if these stories are any good?” That’s all I wanted, was his opinion. He wrote back saying, well, look, we’re going to need to look at these stories anyway because you’re drawing upon copyrighted material, and you need permission. So type them up first, send them over.

So here I am, fifteen going on sixteen, and he duly reads the stories and sends me this letter back, saying “these stories need a lot of work”, and by gum, was he right! Partly because they were set in Massachusetts. I’d never been out of Lancashire, never mind been to America at that time, and did it ever show! So he said you need to relocate these to England, and you need to flesh them out—you need to show, not tell—which I went in for a lot, as Lovecraft did to some extent of course. So, you know, I was modelling myself very closely. But he said “If you do all the work that I’m going to suggest to you—he sent me a long editorial letter—and write more stories along these lines, it’s possible this might be a book for us to publish.”

You know? Not even sixteen yet, that’s pretty heartening talk. So, once I’d picked myself up and also stopped thinking “He’s completely wrong about this editing. I’m right and he’s wrong”, which you tend to do, half an hour later I thought, well, actually, maybe he is right, as again you do.

So I did, I rewrote the stories, and wrote more stories in the general area (geographical and thematic). Meanwhile he asked to use one of them in an all-new horror anthology, Dark Mind, Dark Heart, which he put out in ’62. So I sent in what I then called “The Tomb Herd”, but which he retitled “The Church on High Street”. It was agreed between us that he could edit the story as he saw fit. It’s not something I would ever do again, but yes, he was right. The story did need editing. Now I would have liked, if it had been possible, for him to send me basic suggestions of which bits needed improvement and how, and I would have done it myself. But such was the scheduling for publication that there wasn’t the time for all that stuff. He needed to go for it, and do it. And do it he did!

Interestingly enough, S.T. Joshi, the great Lovecraftian scholar, he says he can’t spot the joins. He can’t tell where I finish and Derleth begins. I can, I think, to some extent, though perhaps not absolutely. I can sort of spot the differences in style. That’s a puzzle for people to try. So anyway, they publish that one, I’m sixteen years old, here I am alongside Robert Bloch! H. Russell Wakefield! For heaven’s sake! And then two years later, out comes “The Inhabitant of the Lake”, and I’m launched on my way in the world.

CHM: Wow. It’s incredible. I was wondering if the brashness of youth had played any role in your early success, and it doesn’t sound like it. It sounds more like—I don’t want to say luck, but—providence, maybe?

RC: No, it was luck, and I think it’s an old cliché, but it genuinely was a case of being in the right place at the right time, and the reason for that, and it only relatively recently occurred to me this, in reading over our correspondence—you’ll know that all my correspondence with August has been published in a collection by PS Publishing, a book called Letters to Arkham. What was interesting was that in the course of our correspondence, he gave me the impression he felt written out as far as Lovecraftian stories was concerned. He didn’t really feel up to doing many more of them. And so along comes this new writer who’s doing Lovecraftian fiction and who, with quite a lot of editorial help, could produce something that was publishable. And I think August saw this as “This is the way to keep Lovecraft’s name alive. This new guy will help, and we’ll publish him via Arkham House, and that will have the same effect.” So I think that was my great stroke of luck.

CHM: So right away he saw you as a potential inheritor of the mantle of Lovecraft!

RC: Well, in a very small way. As he says on the blurb for “The Inhabitant”, they reflect in their own small way the greater wonders and terrors of Lovecraft. Which is very accurate. They certainly don’t scale those peaks to put it mildly.

CHM: No?

RC: No, not at all. One thing I do find interesting, looking back over the Inhabitant stories is, this was not a conscious process, but I can see myself working through the various Lovecraftian modes. So, you know, you’ve got the very florid mode that was in “The Church in High Street”. You’ve got the relatively restrained mode of something like, say, “The Room in the Castle”. “The Horror from the Bridge” tries to do a sort of “Dunwich Horror” very elaborate narrative with lots of climaxes in it. And “The Insects from Shaggai” is fundamentally a kind of “At the Mountains of Madness”, showing the history of an alien race.

Now, I have to say this one thing about “The Insects from Shaggai”. I know some people like it and I’m very happy that people do like that old stuff of mine. But I’ve always regretted that story, and I’ll tell you why. It’s based on one of Lovecraft’s last notes in his “Commonplace Book”. It was a dream he had, and if only he’d lived long enough to write on that theme, I think it would have been one of his greatest stories. Now, you may remember, the note describes how he dreamed he’s walking through a forest, and this swarm of insects flies into his face and enters him, and he’s immediately loaded with their memories of alien environments and experiences. Now, this is a great idea. And I ruined it by making them giant insects that pilot a craft through space, which is not what he meant at all. Obviously, my enthusiasm got the better of me and I forgot what Lovecraft had put in his note. I regretted this so much that I actually went back to the idea in a novel called The Darkest Part of the Woods (which, by the way, uses The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a template, acknowledged by the reference to Joseph Curwen), and this time I did do the thing in the forest with just a swarm of insects, and I think I handled it a little better that time. I hope so, anyway.

CHM: Do you feel in any way that reading or writing darker material was a way to help you cope with darkness in your own life? Because I feel that it has, with myself, had a therapeutic element to it.

RC: I think it’s possible. I used to theorise… well, let’s give folks the background first. Because the thing was, my parents were estranged ridiculously early in my life. I was three years old when there was a terminal split. But we continued to live in this tiny house. Two rooms downstairs, and not very big ones either; upstairs it somehow managed to fit in three bedrooms and a kind of bathroom and toilet combined. And my mother and father did not speak together, except very rarely and under protest, for more than twenty years. I didn’t see my father, who basically became this monstrous figure you heard in the night—you know, coming upstairs when I was young, and going upstairs when I was older, not having gone up to bed myself then—and who would be heard on the other side of the door, who’d actually hold the door shut so we wouldn’t come face to face. Top this with the fact that my mother was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. And from a very early age, I realised that she was not being talked about on the radio, and they weren’t really putting her under other names into radio serials, and the neighbours were not really writing about her in the newspaper using assumed names, and they weren’t really conspiring about her.

I had to figure this all out for myself from, again, about three years old. That was the start of my being able to separate what she perceived from what was real. As an adult I used to feel that reading horror fiction had been a way of packaging up my terror and putting it away, having made it manageable. But the trouble with that theory is that when I used to read M.R. James and Lovecraft and the other masters when I was young, I’d lie awake at night in a state of spectral panic. So it wasn’t taking it away—it wasn’t doing that at all. I think what separates the horror fan from other folk is that we may experience that intensity of terror, but when we’ve recovered, then we want some more. That’s what identifies us.

So the question is, would I have read those stories anyway? It’s like asking if I weren’t who I am, who would I be? Who can say? It’s impossible to know. But what I do think—what I’m quite sure of—is that a lot of the themes and preoccupations of what I write, particularly once I’d moved beyond imitating Lovecraft to writing my own kind of fiction, about my own kinds of terror if you’d like, I do think that those experiences were a formative influence on the kind of horror that I write, on the one hand the psychological, and on the other hand the sort of sense of spectral dread. I think a lot of those themes come out of my childhood.

CHM: In a lot of your stories, there’s a feeling of safety being just out of reach, just beyond your fingertips, like in your story “The Hands”, the protagonist breaks into a room and realises he’s not going to be able to cross it to get out before the “people” who are chasing him are going to get him. Or in “Cold Print,” which is one of my absolute favourite stories, once again the protagonist is trapped. In “Again,” the entire story has got the reader on edge about “Where is she?” It’s really nerve-wracking, and that ties in with abandonment issues very strongly, and I feel that you deal with that fear extremely effectively, and wield it well.

The other thing I wanted to say was that, in “The Faces at Pine Dunes”, another one of your great short stories, there’s a scene, one moment that is just so authentic it takes my breath away, and it’s when the father hugs the son and the son’s revulsion at the physical proximity of the father, who is abusive to the mother of the main character—please forgive me, I can’t remember the main character’s name…

RC: Nor can I. There you go!

CHM: The moment where the obese father hugs his son, and it seems like a genuine attempt on the father’s part to connect with his son, but it’s too late, it’s not possible.

RC: That’s absolutely it, yes.

CHM: It’s heartbreaking! It’s just a heartbreaking moment in the middle of this horror story. And I think that’s kind of what elevates your prose, your writing, well above the average, your willingness to traverse difficult emotional territory, it’s not pulp fiction. It’s real literature.

RC: Well, thank you very much. Just to pick up on that one thing, you reminded me that at the very end, by the time I did have a chance to interact with my father who was on his deathbed, I couldn’t do it. It was just impossible. And when I think about it, that story was written several years later. So, I can’t say that I was conscious of drawing upon that. I didn’t want to touch my father. It was too late, you know, in hospital.

But I think you’ve pinned it down there, that it’s entirely possible that that was at the back of my mind somewhere, as something to draw upon. Because I’m a great believer in telling the story while my subconscious seems to get on with doing other stuff—engaging more intensely with the material while I’m getting on with the nuts and bolts of the narrative. These things do come into play, even when I don’t know that I’m doing it.

Often my realisation it can be retrospective. In “The Chimney” the father becomes this sort of monstrous Santa Claus figure. It’s not a direct parallel, but every Christmas day my mother would send me up to bang on my father’s bedroom door and say “Do you want to come down for Christmas dinner?” It was this annual ghastly ritual. There’s be a grumble of dissent from the other side of the door, and I would head off downstairs again, thinking thank God that’s over for another year. And you can see that fed into that story of mine. But the extraordinary thing is—and I still remember doing this—years later I was reading the story at Jack Sullivan’s apartment in New York to people like Gahan Wilson and T.E.D. Klein, because Jack would invite friends around when I was over, for me to do readings. And when I finished reading the story, or maybe somewhere in the middle of it, I thought, “My God, that’s what that story’s been about all this time.” And I hadn’t realised it until this strange revelation.

CHM: That’s amazing. Wow. I was going to say, also, that for me, being a North American, there is not the tradition that there is in the UK of the Christmas ghost story, or the spooky Christmas tale. And of course, everybody knows Dickens’ “The Christmas Carol”, but that’s it! It’s the one that stands for all. So, for me, you are the main purveyor of Christmas spookiness.

RC: I’ve written quite a few. People keep asking me to do it, perhaps because it’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. I’ve written some, so people come along and say “Well come on, do another one.”

CHM: So, do you feel compelled to continue the tradition?

RC: It’s because I’m asked, really. But also, yes, I get the idea that may have a Christmas connotation. Although a lot of my stuff tends to come out of just, well… again, you see, this goes back to childhood, the whole thing about the differences of perception, if you like. What’s perceived and what is real. Often enough it’s something very ordinary—an ordinary object, an everyday event—and I’ll suddenly find myself thinking, what if we turn it slightly and look at it in a different way?

CHM: Like the plastic Santa on the roof!

RC: That was one of them, of course it was. So it could be anything at all. And often enough it really is around Christmas. I think I must have murdered just about every Christmas tradition by now, though. I don’t know whether I’ve left anything standing.

CHM: You’ve long been fortunate to count among your most fervent admirers the cream of the crop in terms of horror writing and the horror world in general. From the world’s premiere Lovecraft scholar, S.T. Joshi, who calls you the world’s greatest living writer of horror, to Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro, who recently, during episode 95 of the Kingcast—a popular podcast dedicated to the works of Stephen King—said that your works were the only ones that frighten him and leave him shook up. It must be nice to hear things like this from people like Guillermo who, aside from being a talented individual, also has a lot of projects in the works, including some anthology projects for which I’m hoping he might be able to pick up one or two of YOUR stories for adaptation!

RC: I think I can probably say that’s a distinct possibility without going into any details, yes.

CHM: Excellent! So, there’s been a recent surge in mainstream critical attention being paid to your work, too. There’s been a laudatory profile in the Los Angeles Times Review of Books, and even the Washington Post had a big full page on you that was really complimentary. And Trevor Kennedy’s wonderful Phantasmagoria #4, which is devoted entirely to you, and is just a really great compendium of work about and for you, and art, and anything related to your bibliography and all that. This seems to have all been happening in a relatively recent amount of time. Your financial heyday, was in the 80’s definitely, with the Horror Boom. And you’ve never stopped writing. But it seems as though now, we’re seeing you more in bookstores, and we’re seeing a return to horror as a genre that is paid some attention to. So… have you noticed anything? Has all the attention helped at all?

RC: Well, I don’t see any sales figures, but it seems like the publishers are pretty happy. Flame Tree Press particularly, I think it’s those books that you’ve been seeing in the bookstores, and they’re certainly sufficiently happy that, while I can’t go into specific detail, they just picked up more backlist, as well as having done the contract for next year’s new novel, Fellstones. So if they’re happy, I am. And let’s not forget PS Publishing. One of the great indies, and they’ve been supporting me since the turn of the century, when they started publishing me with The Darkest Part of the Woods. Or, if you have a rare edition of it and look on the spine, The Darkest Part of the Wods, because they originally left an o out.

CHM: I’m very glad to hear that for you there has been a career upswing and resurgence, which is absolutely merited—even if you didn’t write a single new thing from now on—though I don’t want you to stop!

RC: You can’t stop me as long as I can hold a pen.

CHM: And it is a pen! You write in a yellow legal pad, I believe?

RC: It’s a basic Parker fountain pen. That’s what I use in an exercise book. Every morning, up here at the desk where I’m talking to you.

CHM: So, you have a morning writing routine?

RC: Yes, pretty well, at six in the morning or so, maybe a bit earlier, I’m going to be at it. In fact I’m working well before I get to the desk, because—it’s actually more like a compulsion, I can’t not do it—the stuff is beginning to work itself out in my head before I ever get near the desk. And so, I go around the house with notebooks and my iPhone, recording stuff as I go. And by the time I’ve got to the desk, I have a whole bunch of sentences and images. I always work out the first sentence before I sit down to write. That way you’re not confronted with that horrible blank page, because you’ve got what you’re going to put on it first. And that will pretty well always lead to the next thing.

CHM: That sounds like a piece of really good advice for would-be writers. Do you have any others?

RC: Just the things that work for me. I don’t plot a novel in advance. I like to gather a lot of material, certainly. I’ve got notebooks full of stuff before I ever start the actual writing of the novel. And I’ve got a general sense of the major events, or some of them anyway, and the order in which they’re likely to occur. Further than that, actually plotting scene by scene, no. I’d much rather the thing grew of itself. Now, it’s a fraught process, because you can end up somewhere in the middle of nowhere and wondering how the hell you’ve got here, and where do I go now? And I have on occasion come close to thinking “Am I going to have to abandon this?” because I don’t know what I’m doing any more. But what I’ve found is, if I’ve done it this way, there’s going to be stuff in the early parts that I thought was just peripheral—just background, or circumstantial detail—that turns out to be the foundation for where I need to go next. I’d rather let the material grow organically. It can be a pretty nerve-wracking experience, but that’s how I do it.

CHM: That’s intriguing to me because I just finished your trilogy, The Three Births of Daoloth, and I can’t understand how someone could write something that involved—it’s the life of three major characters over three full-length novels—and it’s so beautifully structured in this three-act way, with their school lives, then their adult lives, and then their… um… not their post-adult lives…

RC: Old buggers like me is what you’re trying to be polite by not saying…

CHM: Their middle age! But, first of all, I’m surprised I haven’t seen that structure elsewhere. I’m sure that it exists somewhere, in some trilogy elsewhere, but it’s a wonderful idea for a structure for a novel.

RC: Well, that was the thing you see. It was good old Pete Crowther at PS. He’d been gently, in a friendly way, chipping away at me saying someone should do a horror trilogy. I think he did perhaps suggest that it should be drawing on my mythos as well. But certainly the trilogy, was his idea.

Now the only reason, as far as I’m concerned, to write in a particular form, is if there’s an actual reason to write in that form. So, you know, it wouldn’t do just to write a huge long novel and chop it into three books. Not for me, anyway. I wanted to find an actual justification for having three volumes. And that became it, as you say, the three periods of their lives, separated by about three decades each. So we do follow them through almost their entire lives. And meanwhile, alongside that, the occult threat and the family that is responsible are also growing in power and influence.

But no, that wasn’t plotted in advance. I did have a lot of the major scenes in my notes in some form, although very often for me the act of writing is getting up in the morning, thinking about the scene I’m planning to write, and thinking no, actually, that’s not going to work, I’ve got this wrong; I’m going to have to rethink this. Which I duly do. Part of the process is that winnowing of the material, but only when I’ve got my nose up against it and I’ve got to write it.

CHM: Many factors have come together, with many sub-movements combining into a larger, more all-encompassing movement, such as the Horror Literature Identity Crisis that has recently been highlighted by Grady Hendrix following the publication of his “Paperbacks from Hell”, in which you have a significant presence. It’s about the artwork and the covers, and how that can be used to highlight the stories…

RC: Just interrupting very briefly, if you ever get the chance to see Grady do his illustrated lecture, don’t miss it. It’s a great deal of fun. It’s even more fun than the book is. If he ever comes near you, make sure you’re there.

CHM: His work, that book, those lectures and stuff that he’s put online recently, and that other people have put online based on his work, have sparked a bit of a reckoning in the publishing industry, asking why horror books don’t look like horror books anymore! They’ve been stripped of all their traditional visual signifiers and coding. So that along with recent storytelling innovations, like people using forums, online blogs, and podcasts to do stuff like the collaborative SCP experiment—I don’t know if you know about these—“Mother Horse Eyes”, and “Lore”. They’ve grown beyond all expectations some of them. It’s really sparked whole new genres of horror. Are you aware of that at all?

RC: Not too much, no. It’s all news to me. I’ll look at it later.

CHM: You said today that you started off writing about New England, but that was very brief, before you were correctly persuaded to write what you know, and set your concepts in and around your stomping grounds of Liverpool, your home ground.

RC: Well, eventually, but mind you, Brichester and those places were up in the Cotswolds, or actually down in the Cotswolds, further south from here by some hours’ drive. And to be honest about it, I hadn’t been there either. So it’s not that much more realistic than my New England was in the first instance. It was only later, because my wife was living in the Cotswolds when we met during a science fiction convention. So I did get to visit there, and I got more of a sense of it after that. Now “Cold Print”, the story was set in Brichester, but really that’s a disguised Liverpool—Liverpool in all but name. And so, I began to own up to setting the stuff in, or deriving it from, Liverpool. And that’s where a lot of them are set since then.

CHM: In this issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly, we’re lucky enough to be reprinting your story “Slow”, and I believe it’s the first time it’s being reprinted anywhere except for the chapbook that you originally sold it as.

RC: It has certainly seldom been reprinted.

CHM: Is there anything you’d like to say about that story? Because it’s a rare bit of science fiction from you.

RC: I’ll say this first of all, I think I’m very bad at science fiction, generally speaking. Shortly after I went fulltime as a writer, which was in 1973, or eleven years after my first professional publication, my agent, good old Kirby McCauley, now sadly sadly years gone, said look, horror’s not really selling much. There aren’t many markets. You’re going to have to diversify. So I did a bit of fantasy, which I think was not too bad, but whenever I tried writing science fiction, I seized up. My style atrophied and stiffened and got very ponderous. Just occasionally, I would have an idea like “Slow”, which was written a few years later. I think partly because I didn’t have to write it, because I wasn’t being told, look, you’ve got to write science fiction. So I thought I’ll see where this takes me, and I did like this whole idea, which is obviously not new, of the earthman kept in some sort of alien prison. But the notion of the creature that slows time down, that had a sufficiently nightmarish quality to it that I thought, all right, I’ll give it a go. I think because I didn’t have to do very much science-fictional paraphernalia within it, you know… there wasn’t a lot of world building, or building of future technology, which I think are the things that I find most daunting when trying to write science fiction. Whereas if I’d done it the Ray Bradbury way, where he never did write hard sf, he called it fantasy, I could have done it. Just leave the details of the technology out. But I think the nightmare was sufficiently engaging that I had quite a good time with it.

CHM: Is there anything else you would like to say or cover before we get out of here?

RC: Well, why don’t you say it. Ask that great interviewer’s question: what are you working on?

CHM: Haha alright. What are you working on?

RH: I thought you’d never ask. What I am working on now is a novel called The Lonely Lands. I don’t really like to talk about work in progress, but it’s about the afterlife and the problems that we the living may cause in it. The other thing that is more relevant to this magazine, next year’s novel called Fellstones, which is the name of a monument that lends its name to an English village that proves to have a cosmic connection. There are seven stones brought down by an alchemist with far more cosmic properties than he ends up being able to cope with. So this is my next mythos story. It’s my latest attempt to do what I admire about Lovecraft, T.E.D. Klein, Machen, Blackwood. So much for what I am still trying to achieve, so wish me luck.

CHM: Good luck! We can’t say enough how much we appreciate your time and everything you do!

R.H.: Well listen, it was great to see you, and thanks for having me.

2nd Place: Shed

By Isabelle Ryan

OF COURSE he never was a deep sleeper. Mutters and frets and often cries out. Needs someone to sleep with him, or at least share the bed. Better that way. Less and less it ends up being me, and there’s something sad in that. Inevitable, maybe. More choice now, and he wants things I can’t give anymore. But when all he wants is a warm body and a friend in the dark, I’ll join him. So it was this night in early 1945, when I found myself roused in the wee hours by a strange sound I couldn’t place. There was only concern. Not even a flicker of frustration at the disturbance.

It was a soft shushing in the dark. I stirred. Found the noise and lost it. Pricked an ear for his nocturnal murmurings and heard nothing. I shifted. Reasoned that whatever it was I could have dreamed it. As I drifted off it came again, and now I turned over to look at him.

He lay poker-straight. Covered by the sheet. Except his hands. These were out. Joined, like praying. But then he rubbed them. Wrung them. Scrubbed them. Like cleaning dirt that would not shift. I propped myself up. His eyes were closed, a furrow in his brow. And that shushing noise again. Not so soft now. Harsher. Sandpaper rough, and if I switched on the light I knew I’d see skin flaking dandruff white and settling on the sheet.

I sat up. Put one hand on his shoulder. Bony, sharp through his undershirt. Whispered his name. Then with my other hand separated those frantic fingers.

He murmured. Whimpered softly. His eyes opened. Wide and staring. No light in them. Not a flicker of the man I knew.

I swallowed. Carefully, I slipped an arm under his back and helped him sit up. He stirred then. Blinked twice. Then he turned to me.

“Hurts,” he said, and began again to pick at the skin between his thumb and forefinger.

“Don’t do that,” I said. A little sharp. Held his hands again to soften that. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

He gazed at me. “I don’t mean to.” He saw his poor hands for the first time. Turned them trembling round and looked at me again. “I don’t want to.” He put his arms around my neck and kissed me. I muffled protest in his mouth. Pulled back and met resistance: the clutch of his hands on my head. His tongue probed and then – a lurch of his chest, a rumbling hack in his throat – something thick and hot passed into my mouth. He released me then. Sent me sprawling to a floor suddenly wet in a room suddenly cold. Sepulchral. The window had fallen open, and on the bed my friend bled black from a mouth that spilled guttural sounds I’d heard before. Discounted as nocturnal, unconscious nonsense. But it was clearer now. Deliberate. He writhed and screeched black speech into the night, frantically tearing his hands into ribbons.

End.

The Zone of Avoidance

By C.M. Barnes

She found the journal while rooting through a viper’s nest of hose out in the garage. It was in a little, wooden box she’d never seen before. The box was hidden—purposefully hidden, it seemed—under the snarled coils of green rubber and a small galaxy of spider webs and mouse poop. It had a tiny hole in one side, and, at first, she thought it must be some kind of sepulchral bird house. But the hole was too small for any bird she knew of to get in. Then she noticed even tinier silvery hinges along one edge of the box. They formed a lid, and, being the naturally curious person she was, she opened it. The journal was waiting for her inside. It was black. It was glossy. It was new. And, on the title line under the cover, the word Journal was printed in a familiar script. She did what any naturally curious person would do next.

The Zone of Avoidance

Originally, it was thought to be a kind of dead zone in the night sky—a wasteland absent of celestial matter. No stars. No planets. Nothing swirling in a bright, dense ball of event doomed to give birth to something else. Instead, it was only a blackness—a blind relief for the ancient eye. If man has always believed that gods peopled the heavens, then the ZOA must have looked like the Death Valley of heaven. It must have looked like heaven’s valley of the shadow of death. I look up into it now, and I don’t fear it. I look up into its vast and empty darkness, content.

At this point, the writing stopped. She closed the journal, put it back into its strange box, and shoved the box back under the garden hose. I look up into its vast and empty darkness, content...What was she supposed to make of that? Was it a declaration of inner-peace? A desperate cry for help? It could be read so many different ways, a solid half of which were troubling. But at least she finally knew where he was sneaking off to at night. The date above the entry was yesterday’s.

She did not speak to him about what she’d found—not even when he leaned over in bed that night to kiss her forehead and whisper that he might have to get up later if he got restless. He would try not to be gone long, he said. He knew she preferred his presence, and it was so like he could read her mind then that she squirmed a little under the sheets from the shear prescience. Then she eeped like a baby bird to throw off suspicion. She didn’t know why it was important not to mention the journal. It just was, and it must have worked because he then curled himself more tightly around her bulbous, pregnant body than usual. He curled himself so tight that any real baby bird would have been crushed.

When his grip slackened, she twisted free and turned to face his sleeping face. In the moon glow percolating through the curtains, she could visually trace the outlines of his lashes and brows against the pale lunality of his skin. He had dark hair, dark brows, dark lips. He had dark spots on his neck that might be the diminished remainder of childhood freckles or a burgeoning archipelago of cancers. Sometimes, she encouraged him to see a doctor about these spots, and, every time she did, he would get angry—as if, by raising the possibility of their deadliness, she somehow increased the likelihood. He was, on many levels, a deeply irrational man, and his journaling was only the tip of a very troubling iceberg. Why was she getting so worked up about a little midnight scribbling? But then she remembered the tiny hole in the box, a hole only big enough for the tiniest of evil spirits to squinch itself through. Then she had to struggle against an urge to poke him, if only to see if his eyes would pop open and glow.

He didn’t leave her that night—or at least she didn’t think he did. She didn’t have any wild pregnancy dreams indicative of his absence. But she decided to check just to be certain. She waited until he left for work, smiling her best pregnanty, wifey smile at the door as he tossed his bag into the car and sped off to lecture young people about the importance of commas. When the car was out of sight, she stepped down off the porch and waddled out to the garage in her rabbit slippers. There was fresh dew on the grass. Not dew, a remainder of frost. It bled up through the holes in her slippers to lick her feet.

The box was still under the hose, and the surrounding webs and poop seemed undisturbed. A vibration ran down her nose when she pulled it out, as if some invisible imp had tapped a tuning fork against her forehead. There were no new entries after The Zone of Avoidance. Thank God. Thank God? Yes, that was how strongly she felt—even if she didn’t believe in God. It meant a lot to her that he hadn’t been out here last night, scratching away about cosmic nothingness. It was about the baby, really. That was to say, it was the baby this was really about. She needed his presence in the bed to be calm. This, in turn, allowed the baby to be calm. In other words, she needed to feel protected because the baby needed to feel protected. But how to make him understand this? Telling him was not an option. That would be too direct, and he should have to do some intuitive work. Maybe she could tie him to the bedpost after he fell asleep? They’d tried sex like this once, and it had ended in tears. That’s how she had conceived.

That night, she fed him coffee after dinner even though they never drank coffee after dinner. He looked at the cup in her approaching hands and raised a dark eyebrow, as if to say, “What, exactly, are your intentions, my Dear?” But he didn’t say it. He didn’t say anything. He simply accepted the cup. It was a test, and he had not passed. He should have refused in the interest of increasing his chances of staying in bed all night. He should have been able to make this minimal sacrifice for her. But she didn’t say anything. She rarely ever said anything when it came down to it, but she knew, somehow, in that deep-down, thoraxy place where all true knowledge blooms, that he would visit his journal again tonight, and that there would be a new entry in the morning.

That night, she dreamed a dream in which she ran naked through a dark forest with blood streaming down her chin and splashing onto her pale, swollen breasts and heavy moon of a belly. At one point in this dream, she burst into a clearing, looked up into the night sky, and howled a shrill aria of indeterminate longing. When she woke, a fetal kick—not the first, but certainly the strongest, crumpled her in the cold and otherwise empty bed. It felt like a paw, something with claws, and, in the morning, there was a new entry in the journal:

The Great Attractor

Somewhere deep within the ZOA, there is a supermassive celestial body that is pulling in everything around it—not just everything that may (or may not) be in the ZOA, but also everything else in the galaxy, even in the universe. It is, without question, the most massive (and, therefore, most attractive) thing in the universe, but it is invisible and only goes by the name of The Great Attractor. I wonder, sometimes, if she is, in fact, this Great Attractor. But, if she is, then she, too, must be hidden somewhere out in the vast darkness of the ZOA. I don’t know if she is hidden somewhere out in a vast darkness. I doubt that she does either.

She began to watch him very closely while he slept. It wasn’t as if she’d never watched him sleep before. When they’d first begun sleeping together on floor-bound mattresses in closet-like bedrooms, she’d studied him for hours, trying to read his subconscious, post-coital mind through the thick darkness of his skull. What kind of creature was this, she had thought even back then, and how do I really feel about him entering and then exiting me after leaving a sinuous, silken extension of himself behind? It had seemed like an important question, even in those early days, and, now that that extension had taken root, had transformed itself (with treasonous help from her own body) into a fast-growing tumor of life, it seemed especially important now. But she had fallen out of the habit of closely watching a man sleep. It took an hour of practice before she could truly focus on his blunted chin, on his stunted hands, on the way his shallow chest rose and fell under the comforter in a frail approximation of breath. Even his eyelashes, still dark but surprisingly sparse, fluttered only occasionally, and she was reminded not of a butterfly so much as of a centipede tensing and flexing one of its hundred pointed limbs in the blackest corner of a dank crawlspace.

Sometime close to dawn, she abandoned her vigil for sleep. This didn’t seem to affect his morning. He left a chipper note on the kitchen counter suggesting that she just throw together a stir fry for dinner (). He had also awarded her 1,000 new wifey points on the refrigerator’s magnetic dry erase board on which they kept track of wifey and hubby points. Wifey and hubby points were typically only meted out for arduous tasks like doing the dishes and pulling hairs out of the dog’s butt (where was that dog, anyway?), and this unexpected award put her even further on edge. Did he know she suspected him? Had he somehow felt her eyes creeping over his body for many hours last night? Did he know she’d been watching and waiting for him to do more than just snort and manipulate his testicles under the comforter? Impossible to say, but she checked the journal just in case. Maybe he’d managed to slip out during those few, liminal hours when she’d floated off. Maybe he had inscribed more madness.

There was none.

She spent the day searching terms like The Zone of Avoidance and The Great Attractor. Yes, they were real things—or at least as real as things can be when they’re almost entirely theoretical. Opinions differed as to their exact nature, but not so much as to their location, which was far, far away from where she was about to usher a new creature into existence on planet Earth. If there was a connection, the internet didn’t have anything to say about it, and neither did the rabbi whom she called for an emergency consultation. This was the same rabbi who had done the marriage three years ago under a big white sheet. In fairness to the possibility of the miraculous, he actually remembered her, and he said that he was glad to hear her voice, although he could also see why she was troubled by her husband’s nocturnal compositions. “Are they prayers?” he asked, “or would it be possible to think of them as such? I only ask because, sometimes, when men reach certain milestones in their lives, they tend to ask themselves big questions without realizing that they’re actually asking God.”

But no, she could supply no evidence for this possibility. Spiritually speaking, he was the living, breathing equivalent of wandering in the desert—which was really where she found herself now. She ended the conversation with the rabbi abruptly. He was far away too, and it seemed unlikely that his distant concern could help her.

That night, she suggested that he smoke weed before bed. Why not? she insisted when he said no. He was obviously stressed, and he used to like doing it back when they were both more interesting and attractive. They also lived in a city where it was legal, a city of low, gray warehouses rolling like seal backs through a thick sea of cannabis haze collecting at the base of some distant, white-tipped mountains. It was simply a matter of walking to the nearest corner store. “But what if I have weird dreams?” he said.

She couldn’t help but laugh.

This was another test, of course, and another one which he failed. Afraid of the smoke’s possible effect on his lungs, he opted for edibles, and she watched him—outwardly smiling but inwardly seething—pop not one but two little green candies in the shape of stars into his dark mouth. Again, she was reminded of the dark hole in the journal box, and of the even darker secret inside. Perhaps, when he went to write, he first shrank himself down to the size of an atom—just one dark, little atom full of big thoughts about heavenly phenomena? Maybe that’s how he managed to leave the bed without her conscious detection. But then how could he operate a pen?

When he wasn’t looking, she ate one of the stars too. Then she rubbed the burgeoning life in her belly and wondered if she’d just shifted its future career from accountant to graphic designer. Was it possible that she’d just committed a crime—one of those commodifiably awful ones for which you could be tried on a talk show? Up next, a very pregnant woman who imbibed mind-altering treats without any consideration of how the secondary mind she was housing inside her might also be altered…Kind of a wonky segway, but it did give her pause. She pushed the thought away and quickly ushered him to the bed. Then she settled down next to him to subconsciously face whatever would come next.

This time, her dreams contained no naked, bloody forest running. Instead, they contained only her, and she was inside of herself, inside of her belly specifically, looking up through the thin membrane of her own skin into a brilliant night sky. Everywhere she turned (rotated might be the more accurate word), she saw more stars, more glorious, white rhinestones spangled all over the dark, leather ass of God. Except there was one place where there were no stones. It was a purely dark space—a thin but long, voidy crack in that afore-mentioned ass where the darkness was as deep as her conviction that she was yet to be born—also her knowledge, that, when she was born, all of this dark, bright brilliance would fade away into the twilight of a pointless life. But for now, she could see it all—all of the endless, cosmic glory that she was somehow both a part of and not a part of, an ecstatic vision in which she was both the seeing and the seen, the thinker and the thought. She rotated inside of her own belly, reveling in the majesty of the endless surrounding lights. But, however she rotated, she could not escape the dark crack. And it seemed to be expanding. And it seemed to be pulling her in. And it seemed that soon, whether she wanted to or not, she would be sucked into it only to be pushed out its other side into an entirely new existence—one where she would be exposed, bewildered, and cold.

Dark Flow

It is a force (or at least the theory of a force) that is somehow pulling everything in the universe into a nonrandom configuration. But for this force to work as it does, it must generate from outside the universe. That is, it must exist beyond the bounds of what we can see or otherwise verify. This makes its existence impossible to prove, but, like so many other impossible-to-prove things, not impossible to conceive of. I have no trouble conceiving of it, really. I think of it every night when I watch her sleep: the dark flow that passes back and forth between us. I wonder how that force might change when we are joined by another. Will it make room for the addition, or will it destroy us?

Now that the question of destruction was on the table, there was no way to put it back in the box, so to speak. But she was in no mood to consider it the next morning, and, that night, she sprung no new tests upon him as bedtime approached. Instead, she just looked at him very meaningfully before announcing she was going to sleep. He looked up from the thick pile of personal narratives he was assessing and smiled the smile of pure innocence. Now was the moment. She was sure of it, and she was just about to raise the issue of ZOAs, of Great Attractors, of Dark Flows, and (more importantly) of their relevance to the deeper question of what he had somehow transformed into, what kind of life he had put inside of her, when he surprised her by announcing he was ready for bed too. It had been a long day, he claimed, and tomorrow would be another one.

She followed him to the bed warily. Could it be some kind of trick? A ruse to lull her into complacency? He never went to bed at this time. Maybe he thought that, by accompanying her out of consciousness early in the evening, he could free up more time for his nightly rendezvous with the journal. But she settled in next to him as usual and allowed him to grip her from behind—his two arms and two legs once again transforming into what felt like a thousand little pinchers...

Sleep never came, but opportunity did. The pinchers disengaged sometime during that timeless interlude between midnight and sun, and she felt (consciously felt!) him slip away from her. Not wanting to give herself away, she remained still as he padded across the room, out the door, and down the stairs. The passage of time had equipped their old house with a sensitive location system of loud creaks under certain boards, and she was able to audibly track his progress all the way out the door and onto the porch. Then there was silence. She rose, smoothed her big poncho nightie down over her belly, and followed.

It was cold on the porch—the morning frost still in its formation stage—and the stars, while not as numerous as they had been in her dream, were still plentiful. They illuminated every shimmering inch of the yard. The wind was still as pond water in winter, and the night smelled like frozen oleanders—beautiful and poisonous. She stepped down off the porch and realized, distantly, that she had forgotten her rabbits. Her bare feet crunched into the ossified grass, each blade a sharp and crumbling shard of sugar ice gouging her soles.

She saw tracks crossing the yard in the direction of the garage. She followed them, placing her feet inside each one perfectly as if she was conscious of being tracked herself. Halfway across the yard she stopped, looked up, and offered a long, mental howl to the moons. Why were there two of them? Why were they so large and swollen, so separated by a vast canyon of black?

The side door to the garage was open. Beyond it lay an equally deep black—just as dark and just as mute. She waited on the edge of it, her numb feet toeing the threshold. He was in there somewhere, scribbling about man’s fantasies of what lurks beyond perception. To catch him in the act would be to catch all men in their moment of most cringing fearfulness. It would be like catching a demon trying to crawl home.

She thought about calling his name but decided there would be no point. He wasn’t him anymore anyway—not in there. Instead, she groped around the doorframe for the light switch. The garage could be illuminated by a single, bare bulb. She found the switch, but no light fell when she hit it. She tried it again. And again. Nothing. No light—only a single star emerging to burn a tiny, white pinhead in all the black. It was so small—smaller than any bird she knew of, smaller than even the smallest egg. She moved toward it. She reached for it. Within it, beyond it, lay something terrible and wonderful...

* * *

He woke late in the night to find himself alone in bed. He was still not used to waking up alone, but, as the due date approached, it was becoming a frequent occurrence. He kicked off the sheets and stood up. The curtains were pulled back from the window, and frost was catching moonlight on the glass. Moved by a vague impulse he was too sleepy to define, he went to the window and looked down at the yard. A dark line of foot prints tracked from the porch out to the garage through the shimmering grass. At their end, the garage door was open, but there was no light on inside. Weird. What could she be doing out in the garage at this time of night?

Then he remembered the journal—the frayed, old one he’d found yesterday in that weird little box. Apparently, she had to have her secrets now. Probably, it would stop after the baby. Probably.

More or less satisfied, he went back to bed.

End.

* * *

C.M. Barnes lives and writes in New Mexico, and his work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Digital Americana, Booth, and elsewhere. He is currently at work on a collection of speculative tales and a horror novel. Read more at silenceoncebroken.com.

Shells

By Matt Moore

Seeing a crowd in her living room, framed in the big bay window facing the street, nearly stopped Margaret’s heart. How had she forgotten that she and Derek were hosting something that evening?

She moved slowly up the front walk of her home, dread-filled—a prisoner of a forgotten commitment heading to the gallows of social interaction. Her executive committee meeting had run long thanks to the alpha types’ pissing contests. It was almost 7 o’clock now and enduring the next few hours of making small talk while trying not to forget someone’s name as soon as it had been spoken nearly propelled her further down the sidewalk.

Reaching the door, she removed her phone from its place in her purse, curious to see what she had agreed to, but could not recall.

The calendar was empty for that night.

Anger welled up, like blood from a papercut. How could Derek do this to her?

Opening the door unleashed the clamor of countless conversations.

A man around 25, who she didn’t know, stood in the archway connecting the front hall to the living room. He wore a grey blazer over a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, with a bushy beard and shaved head. His skin clung so tightly to his skull that the seams between bones were visible. Past him, a menagerie of people chatted and laughed in her living room, packed so tightly that the thought of moving through them made Margaret’s throat close up.

She didn’t recognize a single face.

“Hey, welcome,” the man said with the air of a host and touching her elbow as if they’d been friends for years. His breath had a dry, grainy odor.

She flinched at his casual contact. “Who are all of you?”

“We’re the CCC Supper Club!” He smiled, teeth perfectly straight and shockingly white. “I’m Kevin King.”

Margaret repeated the mnemonic Kevin King when I came in, Kevin King when I came in. “Why are you here?”

“It’s our weekly meeting. Are you a new member?”

“Excuse me.” She continued down the hallway.

“Hey!” The man reached for her. “It’s members only.”

She edged out of his grasp, his actions provoking both the awkward discomfort of physical contact and the prey instinct to flee. “Yes,” was all she could think to say to avoid discussing how this was her home and he had no business welcoming her to it.

She moved toward the kitchen, hugging the wall and searching for Derek. Eyes met hers. She looked away. There were people of all ethnicities and ages. Some wore business attire, others jeans and t-shirts, and still more somewhere in between. Yet for all their diversity, every one of them was thin. Not just not-fat, but marathon runner lean.

In the dining room, the state of her table drove a wave of shock through her. Random foods covered the bare wooden surface. Crackers, chips and cereal lay scattered across it, like someone had forgone bowls and simply upended the containers. A mound of uncooked rice lay in one corner with a haphazard pile of pasta—spaghetti, rigatoni, lasagna—in another.

A man cut his way through the crowd headed in Margaret’s direction. In this 30s, he had a man-bun, grey sweatpants and black tank top. Margaret hoped he simply wanted to pass through the kitchen to the bathroom, but his gaze fell on her.

It provoked the same instinct to flee as—

—Kevin King when I came in—

—the man at the door reaching for her.

She bolted for the kitchen and nearly collided with a middle-aged woman whose red dress hung limp on her gaunt frame. She carried a stainless-steel bowl filled with frozen corn, peas and baby shrimp.

“Sorry!” the woman said, passing Margaret and dumping the bowl’s contents on the table. The damage those icy pieces scattering across the table’s polished wood surface might cause hurled a wave of nausea through Margaret.

“Excuse me,” she said to the woman, assuring herself that she had every right to be upset. “What are you doing?”

The woman beamed at Margaret. “We’re the CCC Supper Club!” Her skin clung to her face like plastic wrap, retreating deep into the lines around her mouth and eyes as if anchored there.

The man in the sweatpants lingered at the table’s far end.

“This is my food and my table,” Margaret said to the woman.

“You must be Margaret!” Lips pulled back to reveal teeth so even and flawless they couldn’t be real. “I’m Laurel Ling.” That same dry, grainy smell wafted off her.

Laurel Ling, Margaret told herself. Laurel Ling is laying things—

“I’m so glad you’ll be dining with us!” Mercifully, Laurel made no move to touch Margaret.

“Do you know where my husband is?”

“Derek? He’s in the kitchen.”

Behind Margaret, the front door opened. A man in ripped chinos and a stained sweatshirt entered. The man at the door—

—Someone when I came in. Kevin. Kevin King when I came in—

—embraced the new man and motioned him into the living room as a gracious host would.

Margaret braced for the confrontation. She resolved to not veer into anger. She merely wanted an explanation for why he hadn’t put this in their shared calendar.

They’d always handled—even taken advantage of—their differences. He organized their social life. She paid the bills. She tracked anniversaries and birthdays. He bought the cards and wrote the funny messages. She endured drinks with his boss, and he endured her sprees of re-organization. And his need to go out and be social allowed her evenings alone at home. He ricocheted from hobby to hobby—drum lessons, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, sommelier courses, poetry workshops.

Now, a supper club.

Going into the kitchen, Margaret passed a teenaged boy with a mohawk and hoodie emblazed with the band name Phasic Driver. He carried a roasting pan filled with frozen chicken breasts, pork chops and hot dogs. Within, a crowd was emptying cabinets, drawers and the refrigerator with bucket brigade efficiency. Items passed hand-to-hand into the receptacle of a waiting runner. A 20-something woman with close-cropped scarlet hair gripped a skillet filled with fruits and vegetables. The baking tray in the hands of a white-haired woman held English muffins, bagels and bread. A serious, bespectacled man in a wrinkled suit and a woman in a jogging outfit emptied jars and bottles into a nearly full crockpot. The detritus of their work lay scattered across the floor—plastic sleeves from the bread, meats’ red-stained Styrofoam containers, cardboard pasta and cracker cartons, glass and plastic condiment bottles.

A final bagel landed and the white-haired woman raced into the dining room with an agility that shocked Margaret.

At the pantry, Derek removed sacks of flour, sugar and baking powder and passed them to a pair of teenagers in matching black outfits. He spotted her and, nearly laughing, exclaimed: “There you are!” He moved so quickly Margaret had no time to react. He embraced her, rocking her back and forth. His palm flirtatiously squeezed a buttock.

He expected her to be happy. Fighting to keep an even tone, she asked: “What are these people doing?”

He swept his arms wide. “They’re the CCC Supper Club! This is my wife, everyone!”

The strangers in her kitchen, without halting their work, smiled with perfect, predatory teeth.

“Can we talk—”

The man in the sweatpants came into the kitchen.

“On the deck?” she finished. “Please?”

“Yeah.” Derek’s smile held.

Shutting the back door, the conversations inside settled into a gentle, pulsing buzz.

She shut her eyes to keep her words in order. “Why didn’t you tell me 50 people were coming to our house tonight?”

“Because you wouldn’t have come. This is for you.”

“For me?”

“Wendy said it’ll be good for you.”

The gulf between his joy and her terrified confusion was dizzying. “Wendy?”

“Wendy White. She runs the Club.” Derek pointed through the dining room window overlooking the porch to a woman with silver-blond hair at the dining room table. Food now completely covered the table’s surface. Raw hamburger for the meatloaf she was going to make tomorrow drooped over a bunch of bananas. Egg yolks and whites slid down blocks of Swiss and cheddar cheese. Ice cream melted atop asparagus spears.

Wendy used quick, angry gestures to direct an elderly man in a tuxedo and the woman in the red dress—

—layering things—

—in re-arranging the items. Unlike the others, Wendy’s long, bulky sweater suggested a full figure beneath.

“Wendy said you need to talk to people,” Derek continued. “You come home every night and don’t go out. I need to tell you—warn you—before someone comes over. The Club can help you come out of your shell.”

Tears threatened. He knew how hurtful that expression was. “By dumping all our food on the dining room table?”

“It seemed weird my first time, too.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“Four weeks. It’s my fourth meeting. I become a full member tonight! I want you to be a part of it. Dine with us.”

It took a moment to recover from his statement’s absurdity. “Some of that food is still frozen. Some of it’s raw.”

Derek smiled, teeth whiter than she remembered. “It’s how they do it,” he said. “You’ll see. Just come in and talk. They’re great people!”

She fought to process this. It was as if all her thoughts were a thousand cars trying to enter a one-lane tunnel. “Give me a moment.”

“Okay,” he said, “but we eat soon. You don’t want there to be nothing left!” He went back inside.

The thought of eating the smallest morsel from the atrocity on her table made Margaret’s gorge rise.

Before she could consider what options she had, a voice asked: “Margaret?” The man with the sweat pants and tank top stood at the back door. “My name is Tyler Teal.”

Tyler Teal is talking here—

“I need your help,” he continued.

“I am not a member. Talk to Derek.”

He moved closer.

She felt like a mouse as the hawk circled.

“I need your help. You see what’s happening here isn’t normal.” A statement, not a question. “Not just the food. You know something is wrong.”

His validation provided a moment’s relief.

The danger it inferred eclipsed it.

Inside, the pulse of conversations had fallen into a hypnotic cadence. Rur-rur. Rur. Rur-rur. Rur.

“I have to be quick,” Tyler said from a few steps away. “Someone very special—very important—is coming here. I need to get her away from Wendy. You can help me do that. And you’d be saving Derek.”

“Why can’t any of this make sense?” she asked no one.

“There’s no time,” the man—

—talking here—

—Tyler—

—said. “Just don’t let Derek eat tonight. Knock the food off the table. All of it. It’s ruined already, right? In that distraction, I can get her out. Derek won’t eat. He’ll be safe. And they’ll leave, looking for food someplace else. You’ll never see them again.”

Rur-rur. Rur.

Inside, Derek had joined Wendy at the table. He obeyed her pointed directions on how to re-shape the mass of food.

“Is Wendy... dangerous?”

“Only if you listen. Derek is listening.”

She was now a mouse below a sky full of circling hawks.

“Fine,” Margaret said to end the discussion.

He nodded, relieved. “Thank you. I wish I could explain more.” He moved for the back door. “You’re helping Derek. You’re saving… more than you’ll ever know. They’re so close. And trust me, you don’t want to see them eat.” He returned inside.

She resisted the urge to slip down the driveway, grab a magazine at the corner store, and hide behind it at the local coffee shop for the next few hours. But she could not leave if Derek was in some kind of trouble. Yet she doubted she could make such a scene, and then explain to Derek with all those eyes watching that some man on the porch had told her to do it.

“Almost time, everyone!” a voice said.

Margaret returned inside, thoughts lacking any order or structure except a need to keep Derek safe from whatever this was that he’d rushed into. She passed through the empty bags, cartons and boxes that littered the kitchen floor. Every drawer and cupboard was open and empty. The refrigerator door hung wide, light revealing its empty interior.

That dry, grainy smell hit her once in the dining room and the Rur-rur. Rur. pulse of voices.

Two more strangers entered the front door—a teenaged girl in a hockey jersey and 50-something man in painters coveralls. The girl had the same silver-blond hair as Wendy and, like Wendy, her hockey jersey hinted at a full figure beneath.

The man who had greeted Margaret—

—when I came in.

K-Someone.

K-something when I—

—Kevin King—

—welcomed them. He showered attention on the girl while the man in the coveralls stood protectively close. The three moved into the living room.

Margaret maneuvered through the crowd to Derek who stood with Wendy in a tight group around the dining room table.

The amorphous mass of food had been shaped into a mound, a foot high at its apex. A brown liquid comprised of sauces and beverages had been poured over top, a coating of flour, bread crumbs and icing sugar turned to paste. At random points, fruits and vegetables, slices of breads, cuts of meats, and pasta poked through the liquid coating. Its smell was stomach turning.

“Can we talk?” she asked Derek, uncertain of what they would discuss but needing more time.

“Hey!” Derek said, kissing her. “Glad you’re not going to miss this!” He slipped an arm around her waist and pivoted her toward the others. “Wendy, this is my wife, Margaret. She’s joining us!”

“No, Derek—”

Wendy turned. The skin of her face sagged, as if merely draped over her bones. Her piercing eyes pinned Margaret in place—perfect hemispheres with lids that slid from behind them with each infrequent blink. “It’s so wonderful for my congregation to gather here. I’m honored you will dine with us.”

Wendy’s voice jumbled Margaret’s thoughts as if they came through a kaleidoscope. It was like in high school trying—and failing—to parse the logic of some cool girl’s nonsensical, disjointed insults.

She was supposed to do something, but—like the names of those around her—she couldn’t recall.

“Grace, everyone!” Wendy shouted.

Hands clasped each of Margaret’s. One was Derek’s and the other belonged to the elderly man in a tuxedo, his skin cold and papery, but coated in a gritty slime of the foods he’d been arranging. They turned her toward the table.

“We come as one to be as one,” Wendy began and the group, including Derek, joined in: “To invoke you.”

The myriad voices coalesced into an unnatural harmony.

“The one who consumes.”

Derek squeezed her hand in time to its cadence, encouraging her to take part.

“From whom all that is flows.”

So many voices forming one. She felt like she’d known these words her entire life. All she had to do was speak to join the single, unified voice.

Like the interchangeable people on the elevator at work, every day asking how her evening was or commenting about the weather or wondering if she watched a certain television program without honestly caring about her answer because it was just an excuse so they could then speak.

Or in middle school where a lone girl’s jab of “freak” swelled into a dozen girls chanting “Freak! Freak! Freak!” for reasons Margaret doubted the girls understood, and she would realize decades later that they sought the protection found in anonymity since individuality could make one the target.

Or even Derek’s desperate need to find someplace where he’d feel accepted, twisting himself into whatever shape was congruous with a larger whole.

So many voices demanding she join. Or be alone forever.

That threat held no peril.

Clarity slammed home and she realized the mound of food on her table—a discordant array of colors and shapes and textures—was pulsing in time with the chant, like it had become a single organism drawing breath.

Margaret tried to free her hands from those that held hers. Derek’s hands tightened in a reassuring grip, but she winched at what felt like tines on the tuxedoed man’s palm.

“To invoke you,” the room chanted in a rattling, hissing tone. The dry, grainy smell had grown suffocating.

“Derek,” Margaret said. Her need to protect him from whatever was happening was all that kept her from fleeing the food-made monstrosity before her.

He shushed her.

“The one who consumes.”

“Something is wrong,” she said.

“From whom all that is flows.”

“Margaret—” Derek hissed.

“Don’t join this group.”

She felt eyes on her. A mouse as the hawk begins its dive.

“Don’t embarrass me.”

“Don’t eat that!”

Hands dropped from hers and the chanting faded. The swelling in the food slowed and stopped.

“We can’t focus,” a baritone voice buzzed somewhere in the living room.

“Decidedly distracted,” the tuxedoed man stated.

The food. Margaret readied herself to lunge at it and the thought of touching that thing provoked a deep, instinctual terror of obliteration.

Wendy stepped between her and the table. “What is this?” Wendy asked her and Derek. Her voice threatened to spin Margaret’s thoughts again.

But where it would send them held no appeal for Margaret. “Someone told me to stop this. To protect Derek.”

“Protect me?” Derek complained. “I become a full member tonight!”

“Who told you this lie?” Wendy asked. Thick, fibrous whiskers protruded from her cheeks.

Behind Margaret, things chittered and clicked.

Click-click. Click.

“Who!” Instead of hands, pincers emerged from the sleeves of Wendy’s sweater and grabbed Margaret’s arms.

Click-click. Click.

Click-click. Click.

Things behind her pushed closer, their attention like a suffocating weight. She fought to concentrate, breathing in the grainy odor.

—Talking to... talking—

—Layering and laying things— Lucy? Leslie?—

—Arriving home, coming in the door— coming in—

“Kevin,” Margaret said—

—when I came in—

“Kevin King.”

“Bring Kevin forward,” Wendy ordered, voice like dried reeds snapping.

Behind Margaret, bodies jostled and a voice she recognized screamed.

Margaret looked to Derek, but these proceedings held him rapt.

Motion in her peripheral vision made her turn. Kevin was held above the front of the crowd, chest toward the ceiling so he faced Wendy upside down, yellow pincers holding his limbs and torso fast. He twisted in their grasp.

“She’s lying!” His nose had gone flat, perfect teeth retreated into his gums.

“He wanted to get someone out of here,” Margaret told Wendy. Wendy’s pincers gripped Margaret’s arms so tightly she feared her arms might break.

A million yellow sparks danced in the voids where Wendy’s eyes should have been. Margaret resisted tracking each one’s path. She looked at the floor. “Someone important.”

“Find Sarah!” Wendy screamed. “Does anyone see Sarah Stone?”

Click-click. Click.

Click-click. Click.

“We have to find her,” the woman in the red dress—

—layering—

—said.

“It is imperative to feed first,” the tuxedoed man replied.

“Where is she?” Wendy asked Kevin.

“How should I know?” Kevin replied. “She came with Thomas Tibbs. He was watching her.”

“I got her here,” a voice responded, “and you couldn’t take your eyes off her. Left the door to ogle her.”

“You abandoned your station?” Wendy asked.

The tuxedoed man: “You were to permit only members.” He eyed Margaret.

“But our numbers gotta grow,” someone shouted.

Another: “Let’s eat already!”

The pulse of Click-click. Click splintered, different rhythms emerging.

Margaret took Derek’s hand. “Tell them to leave.”

Derek gaped at her. “But we have to eat now.”

To Kevin’s inverted face, Wendy said: “Your carelessness threatens our colony. We come as one to be as one!”

“To invoke you!” the room chanted, their cohesion stronger than before.

Motion rippled through the mound of food. Shapes moved under the paste-like surface. Fruits and cuts of meat re-positioned themselves. Grains of rice flowed around them like marching ants.

Fervent voices chanted and hissed: “The one who consumes.”

Three horizontal gaps ripped across the food’s surface—one two feet wide near its base, and two above and parallel to it six inches across.

A mouth and two eyes.

“From whom all that is flows.”

“Derek?” Margaret asked, pulling at this hand.

He looked at her, his smile rapturous.

The thing’s mouth trembled—chicken breasts and a pork tenderloin composed its upper lip, the bottom lip a cohesion of pickles, baby carrots and rice.

“Come, lord of Somm and Juld!” Wendy yelled.

“Come, master of Feff and Ont!” the room’s collective voice chanted.

“Accept our sacrifice!” Wendy screamed.

Kevin, still held high, thrashed against his captors. “No!”

A chilling, nauseating odor filled the room as the thing on Margaret’s table stretched open its mouth so wide the upper lip nearly touched the ceiling. Within, an infinite black yawned, but—faint and twinkling—Margaret thought she saw stars.

Pincers holding Kevin lowered him head-first into the gaping maw. He shrieked an inhuman sound as his head disappeared into the mound, then his shoulders and chest, as if the table wasn’t there.

Derek watched. Margaret grabbed his arm. “We need to go!”

“We’re just kicking Kevin out.”

Something snapped and Kevin went slack.

Click-click! Click!

Kevin’s body was yanked into the mound—torso then legs then feet disappearing—and its mouth snapped shut.

Margaret’s knees went swimmy. She let them buckle and hit the floor.

The abomination that had been her food deflated to its original size.

Click-click! Click!

CLICK-CLICK! CLICK!

CLICK-CLICK!!! CLICK!!!

“Feast,” it boomed on a frigid, putrid wind. The house shook, paintings knocking against the wall.

Margaret dove beneath the table, crawled under and got to her feet in the kitchen doorway.

The crowd—faces broad and noseless, mouths toothless, skin mottled yellow and green and gray, clacking mandibles at their cheeks—fell upon the table. At the back of the room, some scuttled up the walls to the ceiling, crawling forward above the crowd.

Margaret backed away, watching Derek shove clumps of the thing’s brown, dripping flesh into his mouth. His skin had gone green, eyes twinkling with yellow dots.

Beside Derek, the thing that had been Wendy beckoned to her. “Feast,” she clacked. “Come out of your shell.”

Margaret raced through the kitchen, out the back door and down the driveway to the street.

Through the bay window, her living room seethed with a revolting, frenzied motion. At the end of the block, the man in the sweat pants—

—talking—

—walked swiftly down the sidewalk holding the hand of the blond-haired girl in the hockey jersey. They turned at the corner and were gone.

Margaret ran in the opposite direction.

She couldn’t recall reaching the park when the woman walking her beagle asked if she was okay. Margaret didn’t answer, not wanting—not able—to explain what had happened.

The beagle licked at Margaret’s palm that had held the tuxedoed man’s hand. A hand that had shaped that thing.

The dog took two steps and, suddenly trembling, vomited violently.

Margaret walked home in the full dark of night, hurrying between each streetlight’s cone of illumination.

From the sidewalk, her living room appeared deserted. She climbed the steps and entered through the front door, which hung limply open on a single hinge as if a torrent had burst forth.

The house lay empty and still.

Her calls of “Derek?” went unanswered.

The dining room table had been cleared to the bare wood. Thick, deep grooves criss-crossed its surface. Not a single scrap remained. Not even on the floor.

In the living room, she found something she couldn’t immediately make sense of. Green and papery, it stretched six feet long and three feet wide, lying nearly flat, though curved at its edges. As if—

She recoiled, collapsing to the couch.

As if a person’s skin had split open at the front of its limbs, torso and head, allowing something within to finally emerge.

She sat inhaling in the dry, grainy smell, having this time in silence to consider what to do next.

End.

* * *

Matt Moore is an Aurora Award-winning author, poet and columnist. His horror and dark science fiction have appeared in numerous online and print markets, including several years best. His short story collection It’s Not the End and Other Lies was published in 2018. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

1st Place: Harbingers Three

By Shenoa Carroll-Bradd

THE blindness starts with a sound, followed by a smell. The aroma itself varies from patient to patient, though all agree it has a sweet note, and an essence of something burning.

Sugary liquor, to one. Bitter caramel, to another.

Invariably fatal to both.

And working backwards through each case file: before the scent comes the sound.

A hiss.

A match strike.

An igniting gas burner.

A drop of water sizzling to death on a smoking skillet.

And then, the quenching of light, color, shape.

The great extinguishing.

The blinding is hysterical, resultant of no known pathology, infection, or physical trauma. It is idiopathic only in the mind of the sufferer—quick-striking, irreversible, and stunningly communicable.

Sensorial symptoms of an infected imagination.

To pass from one patient to another, the affliction needs only to be heard in the mind, smelled in the memory. Seeded into the brain of another.

The hiss.

The whiff.

The surrender.

Your personal harbingers, now that the possibility has been introduced, are moments away.

Mine sounded like the slow tearing of a gauze bandage. It smelled like the cauterization of gangrenous flesh.

Whether it’s possible to die together is unproven. But we all go blind alone.

End.

They Came From the Sea

By Jesse Weiner

For centuries, man has prized selkie skins for their softness and durability. These days, selkie leather can be found everywhere from Walmart shelves to the Paris runway. Selkie hair is often woven into fabrics for added shine and strength, while selkie bones, teeth, and claws can be found in everything from toothpaste to vitamins. However, I fear that if we do not act swiftly to protect the selkie, they’ll soon be hunted to extinction. And if that happens, not only will we lose another beautiful, misunderstood species to cruelty and greed—we’ll be shooting off our own noses despite our faces.

Selkie eyes, once eaten by kings and their consorts as an aphrodisiac, are now being harvested for their stem cells—stem cells which are being used to treat rare degenerative diseases. Selkie blood, once used as a poison, has shown promise in fighting both pancreatic cancer and multiple sclerosis. Its healing properties have proven so amazing, in fact, that many in the scientific community have coined it the true Fountain of Youth…

— Excerpt from A Brief History of the Selkie by Dr. Sophia See

* * *

Nasty little shit.

Levi stands in his mother’s lab, lip curling in distaste as he watches one of her beloved selkie pounce on a bucket of fish. The shatterproof glass between them muffles some sounds, but not all—Levi can still hear the hair-raising scrape of the creature’s claws against the metal bucket, the happy, high-pitched trill it makes as it snatches up a fish and bites off its head. The crunch of bone.

“Wonderful!” His mother trills and claps. “She’s eating!”

Dr. Sophia See—award-winning biologist and California’s leading selkie researcher—rushes over, lab coat billowing, to watch. She was supposed to be preparing Levi’s weekly shots, but judging by the gleam in her eyes, he suspects she’s already forgotten about the syringe clutched in one hand, the vial of viscus blue liquid in the other. “Oh, good! What a good girl you are!”

Levi tries not to gag as he watches the thing slurp a sloppy handful of fish parts. Blood and scales dribble over its chin, and a string of gray gut is pasted to its chest. “Mom?”

“I’m so relieved. This one ignored both her dinner and her breakfast.” She smiles fondly, her voice shifting higher. “But I guess your tum-tum isn’t hurting any more, is it?”

Envy curdles Levi’s stomach, though he doesn’t recognize the emotion for what it is. He’d never believe himself jealous of a creature that rolls in its own crap. That has the same mottled skin as a rock stained with bird shit. That has such ugly, bulbous eyes, like God shoved a pair of river rocks into their skulls and called it good. Levi’s gaze skims the curved, shark-like teeth overcrowding the thing’s mouth, poking out past its lips.

The selkie meets his gaze and hisses.

“Oh! Good girl! Did you see that? She’s protecting her f—”

“Mom!” Levi snaps. “Give me the shot, or I’ll give it to myself.”

She straightens, lips pinching. “No need to be cross.”

Levi glowers. Easy for her to say. She has no idea what it’s like to suffer constant, crippling pain. He’s been shuffled between at least a dozen experts over the years, but none can tell him why his body is slowly cannibalizing itself. He’s lost so much weight in the two years since his official diagnosis that the dickheads at school call him Skeletor, Tiny Tim, Auschwitz.

But he doesn’t want to think about that right now. For the first time in…well, ever, he actually has somewhere to be, and someone he can’t wait to see: Carmel. His blood fizzes as he pictures her blonde hair, blue eyes, full hips. They’ve been texting in secret for weeks, now, but tonight was the night they finally planned to take their relationship public.

“I only have—” Levi checks his phone, “fifteen minutes before I have to leave.”

“For what?” his mom asks, frowning.

“I already told you—I’m going to the bonfire.”

She scrunches her nose. “Are you sure that’s the best idea?”

“Mom—”

“You have a hard enough time walking down the sidewalk. Walking on the beach will be even more di—”

“I’m going,” Levi grounds out, “and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

His mother sighs heavily. “Very well. But take your crutches, just in case.”

She waits until he mutters, “Fine,” then turns, rubber-soled shoes squeaking against the polished concrete, and reinserts herself behind one of the lab’s many metal tables. Levi watches, arms crossed, as she finally makes use of the vial and the syringe she’s been holding. She plunges the syringe into the vial, stabbing the needle through the thin metal topping the viscus blue liquid. The SGH, or selkie growth hormone, and moves sluggishly into the chamber, like chilled blueberry syrup.

Levi’s mother doesn’t know it, but he’s been self-medicating with the rare, expensive supplement for years. He started in middle school, after his mother did a bunch of experiments with rats and concluded that SGH might help humans grow bigger muscles, too.

Dr. See sets the half-empty vial aside with a quiet click, her movements smooth and practiced. The syringe goes into a second vial, this one filled with something the color and consistency of bile.

“What’s that?”

“These—” she pulls the needle from the vial and hands it to him, “are stem cells.”

Levi’s pulse speeds. Everything he’s read has led him to believe stem cells are like liquid gold. Human were good, but he imagined selkie were even better. The Eldorado of treatments.

“With how poorly your levels are doing, I figured it was time we tried something new.”

Levi raises the vial to the light. He can’t understand how the blood of something so monstrous, something so clearly in-human, can be broken down, diluted to its component parts and turned to something magical, something healing, but he knows this to be true. He himself has experienced the results—less muscle pain, less fatigue, less shortness of breath. And that was only with a tiny bit of SGH, the sub-par treatment. He shakes the vial. He can’t see the individual stem cells, of course, but he imagines them as little golden flakes, sparkling in the light. “They’re pure selkie?”

“Half and half.”

He frowns. “Why only half?”

“I’ve told you time and time again—I’m not upping your doses until we get the results from that clinical trial out of Melbourne.”

Levi rolls his eyes. The mixture he’s been giving himself is 75% selkie cells to 25% human ones, and nothing’s gone wrong. In fact, he’s convinced his shots are what’s working, not the weaker doses his mother’s been giving him. The last specialist he’d gone to, Dr. Richard Dick (AKA Dr. Dick Dick, or Dick squared, as Levi has come to think of him), warned that eventually, his disease will eat through his muscles and start on his heart, lungs, brain. If not for the shots he’s been sneaking, Levi fears he’d be in a wheelchair and comatose by now.

Dr. See’s shoes squeak squeaked as she came to stand beside him.

Levi clenches his jaw. This was the worst part. Not the pain, but the embarrassment. Here he was, nearly eighteen and loosening his belt for his mother to deliver a shot to his ass. Because she wouldn’t let him do it his own damn self. Because his arms bruised too easily, and he was tired of getting pitying looks from strangers.

His mom clicks her tongue. “Poor little tush, all black and blue.”

Levi’s face flares hot. His mom hands him a cotton ball with antiseptic. He chooses the least tender spot and rubs it clean. If he and Carmel ever get to third base, she’ll have to be on top. Or maybe they’ll just do it in the dar—

He inhales sharply, hands curling to fists. The shot is like ice water. Like burning cold, seeping under his skin.

“All done!” His mother withdraws the needle, replacing it with a cotton ball. “Hold this.”

“Mom, it’s fine. I can—”

“Hush.” With slow, precise movements, she applies a Band-Aid over the cotton ball. Scooby-Doo grins up at him. His face burns hotter.

“Really, Mom?”

“I thought he was your favorite.”

“Yeah, when I was like, five,” he grumbles, doing up his pants.

A sharp tap tap tap sounds behind him.

At first, he ignores it. His mother is already striding away, her attention focused on the other side of the lab, on a selkie in another of the six enclosures facing onto her workspace. Levi is staring at the half-empty vial of selkie stem cells, wondering if he can slip off with it without her noticing.

The tapping turns to a scratching, like nails running down a chalkboard.

Levi spins around to face the gore-covered selkie. As soon as it has his attention, it freezes, hands pressed to the glass. It’s crouched on its hindquarters, its head tilted to one side. Its black hair is filthy and long and plastered to its skull and it has seeping wounds on its arms.

“Creepy little shit,” he whispers, sneering.

The creature’s lips peel back from its teeth.

Levi flips it off.

The selkie lifts its middle finger in imitation.

“Levi!”

He flinches, then spins to face her.

“I can’t believe you just taught her that!”

“I didn’t! It did that all on its own!”

“Olive is a she, not an it. And selkie are natural mimickers. If she’s doing that, it’s because she’s copying something she just saw.”

“Not from me. It was probably that new lab tech. I told you he was an asshole.”

She crosses her arms, unconvinced. “Levi—”

“Gotta go.” He grabs his satchel from a nearby chair. “I’m already late.”

He feels the weight of her glare against his back, but he ignores it. He strides to the thick steel door, keys in the code. As the door swishes open, however, he gives in and glances behind him.

His mother isn’t even looking at him. She’s typing on her computer and frowning.

Levi glances around and sucks in a breath. It’s the selkies—all of them. Ten little monsters press faces and hands to the glass walls of their enclosures, their ugly, bulbous eyes fixed unblinkingly upon him.

* * *

Despite centuries of research, the selkie remains shrouded in mystery. We still don’t know how selkies evolved, nor how they reproduce, given that we’ve never found a male of the species. From the 16th through 19th centuries, popular belief held that selkies took human mates, a notion that was romanticized and spread through the arts. Today, it’s easy to shudder and laugh at such a far-flung notion. Exhaustive genetic testing has proven that human and selkies are too dissimilar to birth viable offspring. Moreover, I imagine one would have to be quite disillusioned to approach a selkie with amorous intent—those teeth! Those claws! Sadly, there were a shocking many who fell victim to “Selkie Fever,” as all the major papers were calling it. In April of 1801, the San Francisco Herald reported ten separate instances of love-stricken men being drowned and/or dismembered by selkies in California alone.

In the same year, a similar tragedy occurred in my own hometown of Starry Point. It all started with the town’s new lightkeeper, Silas Malone. Silas hadn’t much in the way of experience, but he listened well and worked hard, and since he wasn’t falling down drunk and forgetting to light the beacon, as had become the old light keeper’s habit, everyone figured he’d do just fine.

After about a month at his new post, Silas started seeing what he thought was a beautiful mystery woman, swimming naked in the surf. After weeks of spying upon her, Silas became convinced that the woman wasn’t a woman at all, but a ghost from his past come back to haunt him. His journal entries shift from waxing poetic about the beauty of the sun setting over the ocean to fevered rants about demon temptresses. In his madness, Silas eventually abandoned his post to confront the mystery woman, who, as you’ve likely guessed, was neither human, ghost, nor demon, but a selkie.

The next day, a concerned friend went in search of the lightkeeper, but all he found was the man’s silver whistle, and one of his arms, ripped clear from its socket.

In an even more unsettling and bizarre twist of fate, it was later discovered that Silas Malone was actually Silas McGhee, a man wanted in Florida on suspicion of murdering his fiancé.

* * *

Gravel crunches as Levi pulls to a stop by the side of the road. Dusk has almost shifted to night, and in the blue-black almost dark, the long line of parked cars stretching toward the beach looks like a black, snaking train. He’s never dared to show his face at something like this before—it’s all too easy to picture himself as the guy laughing a beat too late, smiling too brightly. His grip on the steering wheel tightens.

Tonight will be different, he tells himself. He won’t be standing off to the side, alone, he’ll be in the middle of everything, his arms wrapped around Carmel’s waist.

If only he knew where she was. He was supposed to pick her up. He drove past her house twice, but her car wasn’t there, and she hasn’t replied to his texts. The second time, he was idling by her curb when he got a text from an unknown number—Mikey, he assumed. Carmel’s asshole ex-boyfriend, and the reason she’d been hesitant to let people know about them in the first place.

Give up. She doesn’t like you. She never has and she never will.

You’re wrong, he’d replied, furious.

Then, to Carmel, I thought I was supposed to pick you up?

Are you mad at me?

Please, baby. I need to see you. We don’t have to go to the party if you don’t want. We could go to a movie, or to dinner, whatever you want.

It had taken twenty minutes before she’d replied.

Sorrryyyy! Gemma needed a ride. But I’ll still C U there, R8?

Yes. Text me when you’re there?

M’kay. But only if you send me something nasty ;P

It had surprised him at first, how dirty Carmel could be. Normally they texted about homework, but every so often, she begged him for pictures. He was self-conscious about his body, so he felt weird sending her stuff, but her enthusiastic replies that he was so fucking hot, that she couldn’t wait to see more, made his blood heat, gave him the confidence to push aside his doubts and hit send.

He’d done as she asked right then and there, thinking all the while that this was crazy, he was acting crazy, doing this from his car, in front of her house—but she’d said it was what she wanted, and he loved her, he was sure of it. He’d do anything to make her happy.

But that had been thirty minutes ago.

Now, Levi chewed his lip, nervous. Carmel hadn’t replied with her normal enthusiasm. She hadn’t replied at all.

He taps out a beat on the steering wheel with his thumbs. Waits for the song to finish before grabbing his phone and sending another text.

Here! Where are you?

More cars pull up behind him, music blaring. Doors slam and the music cuts off and a wave of laughter and too loud walking move past. He holds his breath, hoping, but Carmel isn’t with them.

“Oh. My. God.” A girl stops a few feet away. She’s in a mini skirt and a bikini top and she’s squinting at him through the semi dark. “It that Tiny Tim? It is! It’s Tiny Tim!!!”

Levi kicks himself for not rolling up his window.

“Eeeewww!” Her friend grabs her arm. “Don’t talk to him.”

“Timmy!” A guy Levi recognizes as senior and a soccer player joins them. “Timmy in his shaggin’ wagon!” he slurs.

The plain, white panel van belongs to Levi’s mother. Or rather, to her lab. He loathes it, but it’s the only thing his mother will let him drive, so it’s not like he has a choice.

“Hey, mind if I borrow your keys later?”

Levi sticks his hand out the window and flips him off.

The group bursts out laughing, the girls stumbling into each other.

“Fuck you,” Levi adds, and they laugh harder.

He glares as they loop their around each other’s shoulders and waists, forming a human chain in the middle of the road.

“Fuck you,” he repeats to himself. “You stupid, f—”

His phone buzzes from the cupholder. He snatches it up, and exhales in relief. Carmel.

Here! Meet me by the bonfire

Levi yanks his keys from the ignition and shoves his phone in his back pocket, but when he goes to open the door, he hesitates.

His gaze slides to the glove box.

He probably doesn’t need it. His mother’s shot had already kicked in. He’d hardly struggled with the stairs leading up to his room, and he’d all but run out to the car.

But what if it wasn’t enough? Normally, her injections gave him a blessed forty-eight hours where he could do damn near anything he wanted without tiring. Then again, he wasn’t in the habit of hiking down to the beach to stay up all night partying.

Screw it. In seconds, the black medical kit is out of the glovebox and sitting open in his lap. Inside, a syringe filled with a neon-blue liquid—50% selkie blood mixed with 50% SGH. He rolls up the sleeve of his button down and finds the thick, blue vein at the crook of his elbow with the tip of his needle. He hisses as the icy, medicinal cocktail enters his arm, but not long after, he’s strutting down the road.

Unlike his mother’s shot, this one takes immediate effect. His senses sharpen, like the world had a hidden dial and he’s the only one who knows how to turn it up. The black sky is blacker, the salt on the wind tangier. Even the distant crash and boom of the surf sounds closer. He lengthens his stride, smiling widely when his limbs offer no complaint.

He was fucking superman, and tonight was going to be the best damn night of his life.

* * *

Selkies may be known as the Tasmanian Devils of the sea, but contrary to popular belief, these creatures can be quite sweet and inquisitive. There’s one little pup in my lab who’s quite curious; she loves playing with rattles and solving puzzles for treats. One of my mature females loves music, swaying to the beat anytime I play Sinatra in the lab. Shocking and unbelievable as it may be, I’ve even seen a selkie care for a human child.

When my son was younger, I often brought him to work with me. Once, when he was but six years old, one of my research assistants failed to lock the door to an enclosure following a feeding. Levi—who was horribly naughty, constantly tapping the glass and sticking his tongue out at the “seal ladies”—crept inside, intending some new mischief, no doubt. The selkie, still busy with her bucket, hissed and bared her teeth at him. He slipped and fell as he tried to flee, busting his chin open on the concrete floor. The selkie sniffed him at first, uncertain. When he burst into tears and scrambled to get away from her, she caught him by the ankle and pulled him into her lap. She licked his cut until it stopped bleeding, then she proceeded to groom him. I watched in awe as she searched his hair for lice, then rubbed him with fish guts, a tactic often used by wild selkie to disguise their scent. When I entered the enclosure to sedate her, she was sat upon her bed with my son, trilling and rocking as she held him tight.

* * *

Levi’s smile slips when the party comes into view. Below, the beach is packed. The whole football team surrounds the bonfire, wrestling and bellowing the school fight song. A long, snaking line of shirtless guys and girls in bikinis lead to a trio of kegs. There’s a group playing volleyball, and another shrieking and running into the surf.

He swallows hard and continues down the trail to the cove. As he steps onto the sand, a group of girls from his grade looks his way. He nods and lifts a hand, but they turn away, disinterested.

Stuck up bitches, Levi thinks with a sudden surge of bitterness.

He trudges on, stretching his neck in search of Carmel, but she’s not by the bonfire like she said she’d be. He sees a blonde head standing in line for the keg and his heart kicks. He hurries over, but it isn’t her. An uneasy feeling sweeps over him. It seems everyone is staring. Screw them. Any second now, Carmel would show up and throw her arms around him. Thrust out her chin in that haughty way of hers until they looked away.

He trudges across the sand to the volleyball net, but she’s not there. He squints, searching for her in the group of girls standing knee-deep in the ocean, but no, she’s not with them, either.

He pulls out his phone. Where’d you go?

The lighthouse. Come find me ;)

Levi cuts across the beach, walking so fast he kicks up sand. He passes the bonfire, then the snaking line of people leading up to the keg. Only when he moves onto the rocks does he slow. They’re slick and uneven, and it’s hard to see where to step in the quickly fading light.

Hurry up, slow poke.

By the time Levi slips through the tear in the chain link fence and steps onto the flat patch of seagrass ringing the base of the lighthouse, he’s sweaty and out of breath. His thighs burn a little, a sign he pushed himself too hard, too fast, but he can’t bring himself to care. “Carmel?” he calls, turning in a slow circle.

You’re getting warmer.

Smiling, Levi walks around to the opposite side of the lighthouse. Carmel isn’t there, but he spots something in the grass: a dress, he realizes as he picks it up. Her dress. He clutches it to his chest and groans.

Skin buzzing, still clutching the dress, he turns to the lighthouse. “Baby,” he calls as he opens the door. “You’re killing—”

A flashlight shines in his eyes, blinding him.

He chuckles uneasily. “Wh—”

Someone grabs him, pulling him inside and throwing him to the ground. Levi inhales sharply as he hits his knees, skins his palms. It’s too dark to see his attackers, but he doesn’t have to—he recognizes them by their voices.

“Hey babe.” It’s Mikey—Carmel’s ex, and Levi’s constant tormentor. With him are Chaz and Jeff, his idiot friends.

“What are you doing here?” Levi scrambles to his feet. He tries to sound tough, but pain twists his voice higher. “Where is she? What did you do to her?”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” Mikey sneers.

Levi stretches, trying to see past him to the stairs. “Carmel!” he shouts.

“She’s not here, dipshit,” Jeff says.

“Yeah. You got catfished, baby,” Chaz adds in falsetto.

Levi’s stomach bottoms out. “Fuck you.” His voice shakes. His whole body shakes.

He turns to leave, but the boys grab him. Levi tries to throw them off, but he’s quickly overpowered. They gag him with a handkerchief and duct tape. Angry tears well, running down his cheeks. They strip off him to his boxers and use his shoelaces to tie his hands together. There’s a sharpie.

“One giant cock for the cock sucker!” Mikey declares, capping the marker with a click.

“Why stop at one?” Chaz asks, so Mikey draws another, on Levi’s other cheek.

They force him to mount the winding staircase to the top of the lighthouse, where the wind blows cold and hard. The lamp swings around, a flash of brilliant white that leaves Levi momentarily blinded. He’s forced to his knees, his hands tied to the flaking metal railing. He makes the mistake of looking down. Below, glistening rocks and the churning sea. His stomach plummets. Mikey takes a picture, then crouches beside him, his breath hot and sour with beer.

“When we get back, we’re going to take a vote. See how long everyone thinks we should leave you up here.”

Levi meets his gaze and glares. Fuck you, he tries to say, but filtered through the gag, it comes out sounding more like, “Fachoo.”

“Gazuntite,” Chaz quips, and the other boys laugh.

“C’mon.” Mikey says, rising.

Levi tugs against his bonds and howls with rage as they descend into the belly of the lighthouse. Their laughter echoes back up to him, hollow and distant.

* * *

Levi can hear the party, the faint pulse of the music, the distant echoes of shouting and raucous laughter, but he can’t see it—he’s tied to the wrong side of the lighthouse. He tugs at his bonds, but that only makes the shoelaces cut tighter into his wrists. He tries not to look down. Tries not to think about how thin and rusted the platform is, or what would happen if he fell, whether or not he’d die on impact, head splitting open like a melon.

“Damn.”

He flinches in surprise, then glares.

Carmel stands in the doorway to the lightroom, arms crossed. She’s in a miniskirt, a crop top, and wedge heels so high, he can’t imagine how she gotten up the stairs, let alone over the rocks to the lighthouse.

“What do you want?” he tries to say, but the words come out all garbled and stupid sounding.

She rolls her eyes. “Don’t give me that look. I’m here to help.” She stomps over and rips the duct tape off his mouth.

Levi spits out the cloth. “I don’t need your help.”

She snorts. “Right. Because you were just about to free yourself.”

He looks away. His eyes prickle and blood rushes to his face. He hates those guys. Hates them so much he could k—

Carmel crouches beside him. “Look…I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I mean, I kind of did, but I didn’t realize he’d take it this far. I thought it would just be a few texts, you know?” As she speaks, she digs in her purse, withdrawing a pink pocketknife. “You’re lucky I was a Girl Scout.”

“Lucky? You call this lucky?”

“Don’t be mad. At least, not at me.” She flips out the tiny pair of scissors and starts working on the shoelaces. “If you’re going to be mad at anyone, you should be mad at yourself.”

Levi turns his burning face to the wind, her words ringing loud in his ears.

The shoelaces fall away. He rubs his wrists and starts to stand, only he’s sat too long in the cold. His knees buckle and the lighthouse deck seems to tilt.

Carmel catches him with a muttered curse.

He squeezes his eyes shut. Once his vertigo fades, he’s full of resentment. He wants to push her away. But…

But.

He’s freezing cold, and she’s warm, so warm. Their stomachs are touching, skin to skin, and holy shit, it feels good. And she smells good, too. So fucking good. Like the fruity whatever she’s been drinking and the cloves she’s been smoking, and…and something else…

He presses his nose to her neck and breathes deep.

Carmel yelps and shoves him off. “What the hell, Levi?”

“You’re the one who grabbed me.”

“Because you started to pass out!” He opens his mouth to argue, but she cuts him off. “I asked you to leave me alone, but you didn’t listen, you just kept driving that damn van past my house.”

Levi’s ears burn. “I—it wasn’t on purpose. I forget stuff sometimes, and—”

“Oh my god, will you stop already! You were stalking me! Just admit to it!”

“If you hate me so much, then why are you here?”

She rubs her forehead and sighs. “I don’t hate you Levi. I pity you.”

He blinks at her, anger coiling in his belly.

“I can’t imagine how bad it must suck to be sick and in pain, like, all the time. But…you’re mean. That’s why you don’t have any friends. It’s not because of your disease.”

Levi digs his nails into his palms. He doesn’t realize they’re growing with his anger, their tips sharpening and lengthening, cutting into his flesh.

“I pity you, but I’m not going to put up with any more of your shit. Leave me alone, or all those private pics you sent to Mikey won’t be so private any—”

He shoves her.

Carmel stumbles sideways into the railing. She makes a tiny, pained sound, her hand flying to her side. “What the—”

Levi bends down and grabs her legs.

“Stop! Levi, don’t!”

He feels strong. So strong. Like he could toss her across the sea.

“No!” She kicks at him, but her heels make her clumsy. He lifts her off her feet. She shrieks and grabs for the rail as he pushes her legs higher, higher. She’s crying now, pleading with him. “Levi, Please! Let me go!”

So he does.

One hard shove, and she tips the rest of the way over the railing. He’s surprised by how quickly she falls. And by how far her body travels. He thought for sure she’d land closer to the base of the lighthouse, but she made it all the way to the sea. She lays face down on the rocks, the tide lapping at her hair.

* * *

Carmel’s face follows him everywhere—she’s on social media, the nightly news, on flyers pasted all over town. Levi bites his nails to nothing and obsessively refreshes the local news feed on his phone, waiting for her body to turn up.

It doesn’t.

He worries someone from the party will tip off the police. Tell them they’d last seen Carmel heading to the lighthouse. He writes an anonymous tip about a teenager fitting Gemma’s description taking a Greyhound out of town.

A week passes. Levi can’t sleep, can’t eat. He decides to steal more SGH. Maybe that will help. He nicks a vial, steals into the bathroom attached to his mother’s lab.

Only, he forgets to lock the door.

He’s just pulling down his pants, preparing to give himself the shot when the door flies open. It’s his mother, and she looks angrier than he’s ever seen her. Red splotches her face and neck.

“Gretchen told me, but I didn’t want to believe it.”

Shit! He yanks up his pants, his belt buckle jangling loud and discordant in the sudden silence. Gretchen is the new lab tech, the one he blamed for teaching the selkie the middle finger. “She’s lying. Whatever she said—”

“Don’t.” His mother snatches the syringe off the sink. “How long?”

He licks his lips. “How long what?”

“Don’t play dumb. How long have you been poisoning yourself?”

He bristles. “I’m not poisoning myself, I’m—”

“How. Long.”

He rubs the back of his neck, suddenly unable to look at her. “Five years. Since the summer after eighth grade.”

When the silence stretches too long to bear, he glances up at her. Tears track down her face. “You stupid, selfish boy,” she whispers.

“I’m not stupid! It’s working! In fact, I’d probably be dead if I hadn’t—”

She slaps him.

He clutches his cheek and gapes at her.

“Out!” She marches him from the bathroom, through her office, and into the lab. “Sit.” She points to a rolling chair pulled up to the enclosure with her newest selkie. A fisherman pulled it up with his nets last week and she hasn’t shut up about it since. The nasty thing is feeding, its head shoved deep in a bucket. Levi can hear the scrape slurp crunch. He shudders and turns his back to the glass.

His mom stands at her computer, stabbing away at the keys. Something spits out of the printer. She grabs it, shoves it into his hands. The ink is smeared, the paper warm.

“What—”

“Read it.”

It’s the study out of Melbourne—the results of the trial they’ve been waiting on. Levi sits straighter, hungrily scanning the page. “This is great!”

“Keep reading.”

Levi’s smile slips.

When injected into healthy human tissues, any percentage of SGH, no matter how small, leads to necrosis.

That meant death. Muscle and tissue blackening. Irreversible.

“This can’t be right.” He flips the paper over, searches for the title and abstract. “Ha! Just what I thought. Not peer reviewed. And their sample size was shit.”

She snatches back the page and shakes it in his face. “This is why you’re sick! It isn’t because you have some rare, degenerative disease—you did this to yourself! And to think, all this time I haven’t been helping you, I—I’ve been—” she presses her lips together and hurries from the lab.

Levi watches, waits as she keys in the code. She’s wrong, he knows she’s wrong. The second the door swishes shut behind her, he springs to his feet, frantically searching for a new vial, a new syringe, but the tables are clean, and every cabinet he tries is locked.

Behind him, a tapping starts. It’s slow at first, but then it picks up speed.

Tap.

Tap tap.

Tap tap tap.

“Stop it!” Levi roars, spinning around. “Stop it, or I’ll…”

The threat dies on his tongue. The new selkie bears an eerie resemblance to Carmel. It has her same build, her same honey-blonde hair. Even the eyes look the same. Selkies usually have flat, grey eyes, but not this one. This one has blue eyes.

Levi turns away, unnerved.

The tapping resumes. At first, it’s only the one selkie, but soon they’re all tapping and banging and scratching at the glass walls of their enclosures.

Levi strides to the door. There’s another lab across the hall. He’ll try in there. He keys in the code, but nothing happens.

He tries again, pressing down hard on the 4, then the 7, 5, 7.

Still nothing.

“Levi.”

He whirls around.

Carmel stands in the middle of the room. She’s completely naked. Her skin has a bluish tinge to it. There’s a strand of seaweed in her hair, and her breasts are smeared with blood and fish guts.

He rubs his eyes. This can’t be real.

“Oh, I’m real, all right.”

He pinches himself, but the dead girl doesn’t go away. He thinks that maybe his mother was right. Maybe he had taken too much SGH, and this was the result: auditory and visual hallucinations.

Carmel rolls her head back, exposing the long column of her neck. There’s a series of soft, hollow pops, then her hands jerk up, fingers splaying wide. Levi has the curious and unsettling thought that that’s how she looked right before she died: hands outstretched as if to ward off the ground.

“I tried to help you,” Carmel says accusingly. Her voice has changed. Its sounds deeper. Watery. She rolls her head forward, and Levi stumbles back with a curse.

Her eyes have turned big and bulging, her teeth long and pointed.

“Haven’t you ever wondered where we come from?” Carmel—not Carmel, the selkie—the hallucination, because this isn’t real, she isn’t real—stalks closer.

“Why would he?” Levi turns to find a woman with tangled black hair standing behind him. “The fool thinks we’re nothing but animals.”

He blinks, and the rest of the selkies step through the glass walls of their enclosures. The glass shimmers and bends, flowing over and around them like water. He’s surrounded.

“Do you see my face at night?”

He whips his gaze back to Carmel. Not Carmel. Carmel is dead, and that’s not a girl. It’s just a figment of his fucked-up imagination.

“Do I haunt your sleep?”

“No,” he lies, but his voice shakes.

She steps closer. A salty, rancid smell fills his nose.

Levi sinks to his knees. He considers yelling for his mother, but he denies the urge. He’s not ready to hear her say she was right, that he did this to himself. This isn’t real, he reminds himself. If feels real, but it isn’t.

He stares at the floor, because that, he knows he can trust—the polished concrete is solid and cool beneath his palms.

A pair of feet halts before him. Human feet, with chipped purple polish. “I can’t believe I ever felt sorry for you.”

He squeezes his eyes shut. Curls in on himself.

“Now…” Something sharp tickles the back of his neck. “I’m going to be kind and give you a choice. You can either cower here and piss yourself, or you can run. I’ll even count to five. Give you a little head start.”

Levi whimpers.

“Better decide quick.” The pressure at the back of his neck intensifies, narrowing to a single, sharp point, pressed hard to the base of his skull. “Clock is ticking.”

Levi starts to shake.

“One. Two…”

End.

* * *

Jesse is an MFA student with the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Colorado with her hubbs, their half fey, half feral child, and a pack of ill-behaved rescues. Her short stories have previously appeared in places like Youth Imagination Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, among others. When she isn’t writing, Jesse enjoys baking, photography, and communing with owls. Connect with her on Instagram @jesse.weiner, or check out her bookish food blog for recipes and more short stories: https://jessemaeweiner.wixsite.com/grubreads.

What Was It?

By Fitz James O’Brien

Originally published in Harper’s Magazine, March 1859

It is, I confess, with considerable diffidence, that I approach the strange narrative which I am about to relate. The events which I purpose detailing are of so extraordinary a character that I am quite prepared to meet with an unusual amount of incredulity and scorn. I accept all such beforehand. I have, I trust, the literary courage to face unbelief. I have, after mature consideration resolved to narrate, in as simple and straightforward a manner as I can compass, some facts that passed under my observation, in the month of July last, and which, in the annals of the mysteries of physical science, are wholly unparalleled.

I live at No. —— Twenty-sixth Street, in New York. The house is in some respects a curious one. It has enjoyed for the last two years the reputation of being haunted. It is a large and stately residence, surrounded by what was once a garden, but which is now only a green enclosure used for bleaching clothes. The dry basin of what has been a fountain, and a few fruit trees ragged and unpruned, indicate that this spot in past days was a pleasant, shady retreat, filled with fruits and flowers and the sweet murmur of waters.

The house is very spacious. A hall of noble size leads to a large spiral staircase winding through its center, while the various apartments are of imposing dimensions. It was built some fifteen or twenty years since by Mr. A——, the well-known New York merchant, who five years ago threw the commercial world into convulsions by a stupendous bank fraud. Mr. A——, as everyone knows, escaped to Europe, and died not long after, of a broken heart. Almost immediately after the news of his decease reached this country and was verified, the report spread in Twenty-sixth Street that No. —— was haunted. Legal measures had dispossessed the widow of its former owner, and it was inhabited merely by a caretaker and his wife, placed there by the house agent into whose hands it had passed for the purposes of renting or sale. These people declared that they were troubled with unnatural noises. Doors were opened without any visible agency. The remnants of furniture scattered through the various rooms were, during the night, piled one upon the other by unknown hands. Invisible feet passed up and down the stairs in broad daylight, accompanied by the rustle of unseen silk dresses, and the gliding of viewless hands along the massive balusters. The caretaker and his wife declared they would live there no longer. The house agent laughed, dismissed them, and put others in their place. The noises and supernatural manifestations continued. The neighborhood caught up the story, and the house remained untenanted for three years. Several persons negotiated for it; but, somehow, always before the bargain was closed they heard the unpleasant rumors and declined to treat any further.

It was in this state of things that my landlady, who at that time kept a boarding-house in Bleecker Street, and who wished to move further up town, conceived the bold idea of renting No. —— Twenty-sixth Street. Happening to have in her house rather a plucky and philosophical set of boarders, she laid her scheme before us, stating candidly everything she had heard respecting the ghostly qualities of the establishment to which she wished to remove us. With the exception of two timid persons,—a sea-captain and a returned Californian, who immediately gave notice that they would leave,—all of Mrs. Moffat’s guests declared that they would accompany her in her chivalric incursion into the abode of spirits.

Our removal was effected in the month of May, and we were charmed with our new residence. The portion of Twenty-sixth Street where our house is situated, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, is one of the pleasantest localities in New York. The gardens back of the houses, running down nearly to the Hudson, form, in the summer time, a perfect avenue of verdure. The air is pure and invigorating, sweeping, as it does, straight across the river from the Weehawken heights, and even the ragged garden which surrounded the house, although displaying on washing days rather too much clothesline, still gave us a piece of greensward to look at, and a cool retreat in the summer evenings, where we smoked our cigars in the dusk, and watched the fireflies flashing their dark lanterns in the long grass.

Of course we had no sooner established ourselves at No. —— than we began to expect ghosts. We absolutely awaited their advent with eagerness. Our dinner conversation was supernatural. One of the boarders, who had purchased Mrs. Crowe’s Night Side of Nature for his own private delectation, was regarded as a public enemy by the entire household for not having bought twenty copies. The man led a life of supreme wretchedness while he was reading this volume. A system of espionage was established, of which he was the victim. If he incautiously laid the book down for an instant and left the room, it was immediately seized and read aloud in secret places to a select few. I found myself a person of immense importance, it having leaked out that I was tolerably well versed in the history of supernaturalism, and had once written a story the foundation of which was a ghost. If a table or a wainscot panel happened to warp when we were assembled in the large drawing-room, there was an instant silence, and everyone was prepared for an immediate clanking of chains and a spectral form.

After a month of psychological excitement, it was with the utmost dissatisfaction that we were forced to acknowledge that nothing in the remotest degree approaching the supernatural had manifested itself. Once the black butler asseverated that his candle had been blown out by some invisible agency while he was undressing himself for the night; but as I had more than once discovered this colored gentleman in a condition when one candle must have appeared to him like two, thought it possible that, by going a step further in his potations, he might have reversed this phenomenon, and seen no candle at all where he ought to have beheld one.

Things were in this state when an accident took place so awful and inexplicable in its character that my reason fairly reels at the bare memory of the occurrence. It was the tenth of July. After dinner was over I repaired, with my friend Dr. Hammond, to the garden to smoke my evening pipe. Independent of certain mental sympathies which existed between the Doctor and myself, we were linked together by a vice. We both smoked opium. We knew each other’s secret, and respected it. We enjoyed together that wonderful expansion of thought, that marvelous intensifying of the perceptive faculties, that boundless feeling of existence when we seem to have points of contact with the whole universe,—in short, that unimaginable spiritual bliss, which I would not surrender for a throne, and which I hope you, reader, will never—never taste.

Those hours of opium happiness which the Doctor and I spent together in secret were regulated with a scientific accuracy. We did not blindly smoke the drug of paradise, and leave our dreams to chance. While smoking, we carefully steered our conversation through the brightest and calmest channels of thought. We talked of the East, and endeavored to recall the magical panorama of its glowing scenery. We criticized the most sensuous poets,—those who painted life ruddy with health, brimming with passion, happy in the possession of youth and strength and beauty. If we talked of Shakespeare’s Tempest, we lingered over Ariel, and avoided Caliban. Like the Guebers, we turned our faces to the East, and saw only the sunny side of the world.

This skillful coloring of our train of thought produced in our subsequent visions a corresponding tone. The splendors of Arabian fairyland dyed our dreams. We paced the narrow strip of grass with the tread and port of kings. The song of the rana arborea, while he clung to the bark of the ragged plum-tree, sounded like the strains of divine musicians. Houses, walls, and streets melted like rain clouds, and vistas of unimaginable glory stretched away before us. It was a rapturous companionship. We enjoyed the vast delight more perfectly because, even in our most ecstatic moments, we were conscious of each other’s presence. Our pleasures, while individual, were still twin, vibrating and moving in musical accord.

On the evening in question, the tenth of July, the Doctor and myself drifted into an unusually metaphysical mood. We lit our large meerschaums, filled with fine Turkish tobacco, in the core of which burned a little black nut of opium, that, like the nut in the fairy tale, held within its narrow limits wonders beyond the reach of kings; we paced to and fro, conversing. A strange perversity dominated the currents of our thought. They would not flow through the sun-lit channels into which we strove to divert them. For some unaccountable reason, they constantly diverged into dark and lonesome beds, where a continual gloom brooded. It was in vain that, after our old fashion, we flung ourselves on the shores of the East, and talked of its gay bazaars, of the splendors of the time of Haroun, of harems and golden palaces. Black afreets continually arose from the depths of our talk, and expanded, like the one the fisherman released from the copper vessel, until they blotted everything bright from our vision. Insensibly, we yielded to the occult force that swayed us, and indulged in gloomy speculation. We had talked some time upon the proneness of the human mind to mysticism, and the almost universal love of the terrible, when Hammond suddenly said to me. “What do you consider to be the greatest element of terror?”

The question puzzled me. That many things were terrible, I knew. Stumbling over a corpse in the dark; beholding, as I once did, a woman floating down a deep and rapid river, with wildly lifted arms, and awful, upturned face, uttering, as she drifted, shrieks that rent one’s heart while we, spectators, stood frozen at a window which overhung the river at a height of sixty feet, unable to make the slightest effort to save her, but dumbly watching her last supreme agony and her disappearance. A shattered wreck, with no life visible, encountered floating listlessly on the ocean, is a terrible object, for it suggests a huge terror, the proportions of which are veiled. But it now struck me, for the first time, that there must be one great and ruling embodiment of fear,—a King of Terrors, to which all others must succumb. What might it be? To what train of circumstances would it owe its existence?

“I confess, Hammond,” I replied to my friend, “I never considered the subject before. That there must be one Something more terrible than any other thing, I feel. I cannot attempt, however, even the most vague definition.”

“I am somewhat like you, Harry,” he answered. “I feel my capacity to experience a terror greater than anything yet conceived by the human mind;—something combining in fearful and unnatural amalgamation hitherto supposed incompatible elements. The calling of the voices in Brockden Brown’s novel of Wieland is awful; so is the picture of the Dweller of the Threshold, in Bulwer’s Zanoni; but,” he added, shaking his head gloomily, “there is something more horrible still than those.”

“Look here, Hammond,” I rejoined, “let us drop this kind of talk, for Heaven’s sake! We shall suffer for it, depend on it.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me to-night,” he replied, “but my brain is running upon all sorts of weird and awful thoughts. I feel as if I could write a story like Hoffman, to-night, if I were only master of a literary style.”

“Well, if we are going to be Hoffmanesque in our talk, I’m off to bed. Opium and nightmares should never be brought together. How sultry it is! Good-night, Hammond.”

“Good-night, Harry. Pleasant dreams to you.”

“To you, gloomy wretch, afreets, ghouls, and enchanters.”

We parted, and each sought his respective chamber. I undressed quickly and got into bed, taking with me, according to my usual custom, a book, over which I generally read myself to sleep. I opened the volume as soon as I had laid my head upon the pillow, and instantly flung it to the other side of the room. It was Goudon’s History of Monsters,—a curious French work, which I had lately imported from Paris, but which, in the state of mind I had then reached, was anything but an agreeable companion. I resolved to go to sleep at once; so, turning down my gas until nothing but a little blue point of light glimmered on the top of the tube, I composed myself to rest.

The room was in total darkness. The atom of gas that still remained alight did not illuminate a distance of three inches round the burner. I desperately drew my arm across my eyes, as if to shut out even the darkness, and tried to think of nothing. It was in vain. The confounded themes touched on by Hammond in the garden kept obtruding themselves on my brain. I battled against them. I erected ramparts of would-be blackness of intellect to keep them out. They still crowded upon me. While I was lying still as a corpse, hoping that by a perfect physical inaction I should hasten mental repose, an awful incident occurred. A Something dropped, as it seemed, from the ceiling, plumb upon my chest, and the next instant I felt two bony hands encircling my throat, endeavoring to choke me.

I am no coward, and am possessed of considerable physical strength. The suddenness of the attack, instead of stunning me, strung every nerve to its highest tension. My body acted from instinct, before my brain had time to realize the terrors of my position. In an instant I wound two muscular arms around the creature, and squeezed it, with all the strength of despair, against my chest. In a few seconds the bony hands that had fastened on my throat loosened their hold, and I was free to breathe once more. Then commenced a struggle of awful intensity. Immersed in the most profound darkness, totally ignorant of the nature of the Thing by which I was so suddenly attacked, finding my grasp slipping every moment, by reason, it seemed to me, of the entire nakedness of my assailant, bitten with sharp teeth in the shoulder, neck, and chest, having every moment to protect my throat against a pair of sinewy, agile hands, which my utmost efforts could not confine,—these were a combination of circumstances to combat which required all the strength, skill, and courage that I possessed.

At last, after a silent, deadly, exhausting struggle, I got my assailant under by a series of incredible efforts of strength. Once pinned, with my knee on what I made out to be its chest, I knew that I was victor. I rested for a moment to breathe. I heard the creature beneath me panting in the darkness, and felt the violent throbbing of a heart. It was apparently as exhausted as I was; that was one comfort. At this moment I remembered that I usually placed under my pillow, before going to bed, a large yellow silk pocket handkerchief. I felt for it instantly; it was there. In a few seconds more I had, after a fashion, pinioned the creature’s arms.

I now felt tolerably secure. There was nothing more to be done but to turn on the gas, and, having first seen what my midnight assailant was like, arouse the household. I will confess to beingctuated by a certain pride in not giving the alarm before; I wished to make the capture alone and unaided.

Never losing my hold for an instant, I slipped from the bed to the floor, dragging my captive with me. I had but a few steps to make to reach the gas-burner; these I made with the greatest caution, holding the creature in a grip like a vice. At last I got within arm’s length of the tiny speck of blue light which told me where the gas-burner lay. Quick as lightning I released my grasp with one hand and let on the full flood of light. Then I turned to look at my captive.

I cannot even attempt to give any definition of my sensations the instant after I turned on the gas. I suppose I must have shrieked with terror, for in less than a minute afterward my room was crowded with the inmates of the house. I shudder now as I think of that awful moment. I saw nothing! Yes; I had one arm firmly clasped round a breathing, panting, corporeal shape, my other hand gripped with all its strength a throat as warm, as apparently fleshy, as my own; and yet, with this living substance in my grasp, with its body pressed against my own, and all in the bright glare of a large jet of gas, I absolutely beheld nothing! Not even an outline,—a vapor!

I do not, even at this hour, realize the situation in which I found myself. I cannot recall the astounding incident thoroughly. Imagination in vain tries to compass the awful paradox.

It breathed. I felt its warm breath upon my cheek. It struggled fiercely. It had hands. They clutched me. Its skin was smooth, like my own. There it lay, pressed close up against me, solid as stone,—and yet utterly invisible!

I wonder that I did not faint or go mad on the instant. Some wonderful instinct must have sustained me; for, absolutely, in place of loosening my hold on the terrible Enigma, I seemed to gain an additional strength in my moment of horror, and tightened my grasp with such wonderful force that I felt the creature shivering with agony.

Just then Hammond entered my room at the head of the household. As soon as he beheld my face—which, I suppose, must have been an awful sight to look at—he hastened forward, crying, “Great heaven, Harry! what has happened?”

“Hammond! Hammond!” I cried, “come here. O, this is awful! I have been attacked in bed by something or other, which I have hold of; but I can’t see it,—I can’t see it!”

Hammond, doubtless struck by the unfeigned horror expressed in my countenance, made one or two steps forward with an anxious yet puzzled expression. A very audible titter burst from the remainder of my visitors. This suppressed laughter made me furious. To laugh at a human being in my position! It was the worst species of cruelty. Now, I can understand why the appearance of a man struggling violently, as it would seem, with an airy nothing, and calling for assistance against a vision, should have appeared ludicrous. Then, so great was my rage against the mocking crowd that had I the power I would have stricken them dead where they stood.

“Hammond! Hammond!” I cried again, despairingly, “for God’s sake come to me. I can hold the—the thing but a short while longer. It is overpowering me. Help me! Help me!”

“Harry,” whispered Hammond, approaching me, “you have been smoking too much opium.”

“I swear to you, Hammond, that this is no vision,” I answered, in the same low tone. “Don’t you see how it shakes my whole frame with its struggles? If you don’t believe me, convince yourself. Feel it,—touch it.”

Hammond advanced and laid his hand in the spot I indicated. A wild cry of horror burst from him. He had felt it!

In a moment he had discovered somewhere in my room a long piece of cord, and was the next instant winding it and knotting it about the body of the unseen being that I clasped in my arms.

“Harry,” he said, in a hoarse, agitated voice, for, though he preserved his presence of mind, he was deeply moved, “Harry, it’s all safe now. You may let go, old fellow, if you’re tired. The Thing can’t move.”

I was utterly exhausted, and I gladly loosed my hold.

Hammond stood holding the ends of the cord that bound the Invisible, twisted round his hand, while before him, self-supporting as it were, he beheld a rope laced and interlaced, and stretching tightly around a vacant space. I never saw a man look so thoroughly stricken with awe. Nevertheless his face expressed all the courage and determination which I knew him to possess. His lips, although white, were set firmly, and one could perceive at a glance that, although stricken with fear, he was not daunted.

The confusion that ensued among the guests of the house who were witnesses of this extraordinary scene between Hammond and myself,—who beheld the pantomime of binding this struggling Something,—who beheld me almost sinking from physical exhaustion when my task of jailer was over,—the confusion and terror that took possession of the bystanders, when they saw all this, was beyond description. The weaker ones fled from the apartment. The few who remained clustered near the door and could not be induced to approach Hammond and his Charge. Still incredulity broke out through their terror. They had not the courage to satisfy themselves, and yet they doubted. It was in vain that I begged of some of the men to come near and convince themselves by touch of the existence in that room of a living being which was invisible. They were incredulous, but did not dare to undeceive themselves. How could a solid, living, breathing body be invisible, they asked. My reply was this. I gave a sign to Hammond, and both of us—conquering our fearful repugnance to touch the invisible creature—lifted it from the ground, manacled as it was, and took it to my bed. Its weight was about that of a boy of fourteen.

“Now my friends,” I said, as Hammond and myself held the creature suspended over the bed, “I can give you self-evident proof that here is a solid, ponderable body, which, nevertheless, you cannot see. Be good enough to watch the surface of the bed attentively.”

I was astonished at my own courage in treating this strange event so calmly; but I had recovered from my first terror, and felt a sort of scientific pride in the affair, which dominated every other feeling.

The eyes of the bystanders were immediately fixed on my bed. At a given signal Hammond and I let the creature fall. There was a dull sound of a heavy body alighting on a soft mass. The timbers of the bed creaked. A deep impression marked itself distinctly on the pillow, and on the bed itself. The crowd who witnessed this gave a low cry, and rushed from the room. Hammond and I were left alone with our Mystery.

We remained silent for some time, listening to the low, irregular breathing of the creature on the bed, and watching the rustle of the bedclothes as it impotently struggled to free itself from confinement. Then Hammond spoke.

“Harry, this is awful.”

“Ay, awful.”

“But not unaccountable.”

“Not unaccountable! What do you mean? Such a thing has never occurred since the birth of the world. I know not what to think, Hammond. God grant that I am not mad, and that this is not an insane fantasy!”

“Let us reason a little, Harry. Here is a solid body which we touch, but which we cannot see. The fact is so unusual that it strikes us with terror. Is there no parallel, though, for such a phenomenon? Take a piece of pure glass. It is tangible and transparent. A certain chemical coarseness is all that prevents its being so entirely transparent as to be totally invisible. It is not theoretically impossible, mind you, to make a glass which shall not reflect a single ray of light,—a glass so pure and homogeneous in its atoms that the rays from the sun will pass through it as they do through the air, refracted but not reflected. We do not see the air, and yet we feel it.”

“That’s all very well, Hammond, but these are inanimate substances. Glass does not breathe, air does not breathe. This thing has a heart that palpitates,—a will that moves it,—lungs that play, and inspire and respire.”

“You forget the phenomena of which we have so often heard of late,” answered the Doctor, gravely. “At the meetings called ‘spirit circles,’ invisible hands have been thrust into the hands of those persons round the table,—warm, fleshly hands that seemed to pulsate with mortal life.”

“What? Do you think, then, that this thing is——”

“I don’t know what it is,” was the solemn reply; “but please the gods I will, with your assistance, thoroughly investigate it.”

We watched together, smoking many pipes, all night long, by the bedside of the unearthly being that tossed and panted until it was apparently wearied out. Then we learned by the low, regular breathing that it slept.

The next morning the house was all astir. The boarders congregated on the landing outside my room, and Hammond and myself were lions. We had to answer a thousand questions as to the state of our extraordinary prisoner, for as yet not one person in the house except ourselves could be I induced to set foot in the apartment.

The creature was awake. This was evidenced by the convulsive manner in which the bedclothes were moved in its efforts to escape. There was something truly terrible in beholding, as it were, those second-hand indications of the terrible writhings and agonized struggles for liberty which themselves were invisible.

Hammond and myself had racked our brains during the long night to discover some means by which we might realize the shape and general appearance of the Enigma. As well as we could make out by passing our hands over the creature’s form, its outlines and lineaments were human. There was a mouth; a round, smooth head without hair; a nose, which, however, was little elevated above the cheeks; and its hands and feet felt like those of a boy. At first we thought of placing the being on a smooth surface and tracing its outlines with chalk, as shoemakers trace the outline of the foot. This plan was given up as being of no value. Such an outline would give not the slightest idea of its conformation.

A happy thought struck me. We would take a cast of it in plaster of Paris. This would give us the solid figure, and satisfy all our wishes. But how to do it? The movements of the creature would disturb the setting of the plastic covering, and distort the mold. Another thought. Why not give it chloroform? It had respiratory organs,—that was evident by its breathing. Once reduced to a state of insensibility, we could do with it what we would. Doctor X—— was sent for; and after the worthy physician had recovered from the first shock of amazement, he proceeded to administer the chloroform. In three minutes afterward we were enabled to remove the fetters from the creature’s body, and a modeler was busily engaged in covering the invisible form with the moist clay. In five minutes more we had a mold, and before evening a rough facsimile of the Mystery. It was shaped like a man—distorted, uncouth, and horrible, but still a man. It was small, not over four feet and some inches in height, and its limbs revealed a muscular development that was unparalleled. Its face surpassed in hideousness anything I had ever seen. Gustav Doré, or Callot, or Tony Johannot, never conceived anything so horrible. There is a face in one of the latter’s illustrations to Un Voyage où il vous plaira, which somewhat approaches the countenance of this creature, but does not equal it. It was the physiognomy of what I should fancy a ghoul might be. It looked as if it was capable of feeding on human flesh.

Having satisfied our curiosity, and bound every one in the house to secrecy, it became a question what was to be done with our Enigma? It was impossible that we should keep such a horror in our house; it was equally impossible that such an awful being should be let loose upon the world. I confess that I would have gladly voted for the creature’s destruction. But who would shoulder the responsibility? Who would undertake the execution of this horrible semblance of a human being? Day after day this question was deliberated gravely. The boarders all left the house. Mrs. Moffat was in despair, and threatened Hammond and myself with all sorts of legal penalties if we did not remove the Horror. Our answer was, “We will go if you like, but we decline taking this creature with us. Remove it yourself if you please. It appeared in your house. On you the responsibility rests.” To this there was, of course, no answer. Mrs. Moffat could not obtain for love or money a person who would even approach the Mystery.

The most singular part of the affair was that we were entirely ignorant of what the creature habitually fed on. Everything in the way of nutriment that we could think of was placed before it, but was never touched. It was awful to stand by, day after day, and see the clothes toss, and hear the hard breathing, and know that it was starving.

Ten, twelve days, a fortnight passed, and it still lived. The pulsations of the heart, however, were daily growing fainter, and had now nearly ceased. It was evident that the creature was dying for want of sustenance. While this terrible life-struggle was going on, I felt miserable. I could not sleep. Horrible as the creature was, it was pitiful to think of the pangs it was suffering.

At last it died. Hammond and I found it cold and stiff one morning in the bed. The heart had ceased to beat, the lungs to inspire. We hastened to bury it in the garden. It was a strange funeral, the dropping of that viewless corpse into the damp hole. The cast of its form I gave to Doctor X——, who keeps it in his museum in Tenth Street.

As I am on the eve of a long journey from which I may not return, I have drawn up this narrative of an event the most singular that has ever come to my knowledge.

End.

Dear beloved reader,

I hope you found the chills you were looking for. Perhaps while entrenched in the pages of this issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly, you questioned both your own sanity and your place amongst the malevolent whims of our cold universe. If so, let not your thirst for more cosmic terror go unquenched. Simply visit COSMICHORRORMONTHLY.COM/SUBSCRIBE and offer your tribute to the old ones at a reduced rate!

Again, thank you for taking the time to read our fiction. I hope we meet again soon.

Charles Tyra

Editor

Table of Contents

- Angler House
- The Last Train to Waldwick
- Slow
- 3rd Place: 31427
- Low Tide
- Interview: Ramsey Campbell
- 2nd Place: Shed
- The Zone of Avoidance
- Shells
- 1st Place: Harbingers Three
- They Came From the Sea
- What Was It?