CHM May 2022
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 2022-04-20 12:34:04+00:00

Copyright © 2022 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: Illustrator fcomin

“In the City of the Idol” & “The Slithering Silence”: Desmond Rhae Harris

The Diamond Lens: Luke Spooner / Carrion House

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Edited by Charles Tyra
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

One hundred years ago, in May 1922, H.P. Lovecraft published the short story “Celephaïs” in an issue of The Rainbow. The Rainbow was a short-lived pulp fanzine edited by none other than Sonia Greene, A woman from Ichnia, Ukraine who financed several small magazines in the 1920s before marrying Lovecraft himself. This got me thinking about the pulp magazine medium that I love so much. Some say the magazine industry is long dead, replaced by newer flashier mediums. Well, even at the so-called peak of popularity, the era of Lovecraft, Smith, and Bloch, the beast that is Weird Tales struggled to get by and was forced to change hands innumerable times.

The world certainly has changed, but the human need for narrative hasn’t gone anywhere. Small presses everywhere continue to take submissions and continue to print new volumes whether in the virtual space or on the cheapest paper they can find. It really comes down to the readers that keep us in business. I believe here at CHM that we have the greatest readers in the entire world and for each and every one of you, I am eternally grateful.

Now, let’s talk about what May 2022 has in store, shall we? We have a terrifying, gorgeously written tale by Nadia Bulkin, author of She Said Destroy (Word Horde, 2017), in “A Dream, and a Monster at the End of It.” We’ll witness the hideous give and take of an idol that hungers for flesh in “In the City of the Idol.” Then a mysterious evil lurks in the deep of the woods in “At the Mountains of Spirits.” We’ll learn just how much the human spirit can take in “Cry Baby” before witnessing a complete and utter breakdown of sanity in “The Slithering Silence.” Next up, an interesting take on the apocalypse in “Contractions” before a small boy’s shadow puppets take on a horrifying life of their own in “Silhouettes.” At last, we will return to the crypt to conclude our serialization of “The Diamond Lens” by Fitz-James O’Brien.

Enjoy.

Meet the CHM staff

Charles Tyra: Editor

Life long lover of pulp, horror, and fine cheeses. Resides in Oklahoma City.

Carson Winter: Social Media Manager

Horror fan and author with works featured in Vastarien and the No Sleep podcast. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Featured artists this month

Cover Art: Fabio Comin was born and raised in Southern California. After graduating High School he studied and majored in Traditional Illustration before transitioning fully to Digital Illustration in 2009. He currently works as a freelance illustrator and digital sculptor. His work has a strong emphasis on cyberpunk and sci-fi horror aesthetics. He has produced illustrations for several table top role playing games and in his spare time produces 3D printed miniatures for table top and wargaming. His work can be viewed at fcomin.com

Luke Spooner is a freelance illustrator from the South East of England. Since graduating from Portsmouth University with a First-Class degree in illustration Luke has gone on to work on a wide variety of projects and commissions, including; illustrations and covers for horror, science fiction and fantasy books, magazines, graphic novels, conceptual design, CD packaging and business branding. Luke has also illustrated children’s’ books for authors who aim to promote diversity and mindfulness in younger audiences.

Desmond Rhae Harris works as a freelance writer/artist alongside writing his sci-fi novel and working as Editor/Illustrator at Starward Shadows eZine. His pieces have appeared in publications like Novel Noctule and Penumbric Speculative Fiction Mag. You can find out more at www.theinksphere.com

Luis Ceriz is the proprietor of www.suspectvideo.ca which, while now only online, was a video store haven in Toronto. He is also one of the folks responsible for Toronto’s only all-horror convention: Horror-Rama.

He is horror obsessed, likes to illustrate, and is working on a horror anthology comic book.

Welcome to Cosmic Horror Monthly

A monthly tome of terrifying tales, lovecraftian, cosmic, and weird.

In the City of the Idol

By Richard Dansky

In the city there was a tower, and in the tower there was an idol, and the idol hungered for flesh.

It was the idol that protected the city, or so the High Priest said, and so the people were glad to give it what the High Priest said it desired. When times were good, its appetites were mild, and they gave unto it roasted thighbones wrapped in fat. In leaner years, they gave up the finest of their livestock, and wild game brought to the tower by the hunters who dwelt beyond the city’s walls but still felt themselves beholden to it. And in the truly darkest hours, when enemies stood before the gates and the people clustered around the base of the tower begging for salvation, the High Priest would descend from the tower and declare and declare that the great idol must be sated with something more than the meat of dumb beasts. A cry would go up from the crowd, and the words would be chanted: “A sacrifice, a sacrifice!”

Then one of their number would be chosen, with the eyes of all turning toward the honored one. They would lay hands upon the sacrifice, and any who sought to help the idol’s chosen flee would be struck down and laid low, and trampled by the feet of the crowd. But none would ever raise a hand on the chosen’s behalf, not a wife or a child or lover of many years. Such was the power of the desire of the idol, that its hunger was never questioned, and even the fairest of the city would be offered up without question or hesitation.

For once the chosen was known and seized, they would be raised up by many hands and brought into the tower. Up the Thousand Winding Steps they would proceed, the High Priest leading the mob to the very gates of the Ivory Chamber. Only those who bore the sacrifice would be permitted to bring him or her into the vaulted room, and none were permitted to speak of what they saw there on pain of death.

They would lay the sacrifice at the feet of the idol, and then they would back away. Eyes averted, heads bowed, they dared not meet the idol’s terrible gaze. Instead, they stared at the floor until they had passed beyond the chamber’s pale threshold, and then they closed and barred the door. Within the chamber, only the idol, and the high priest, and the sacrifice remained.

illustration by Desmond Rhae Harris

Sometimes, the women and men who had borne the idol’s chosen to the chamber were able to descend the Thousand Winding Steps and exit the tower before the screaming started. Sometimes, they were not.

Later, the High Priest would emerge from the chamber, and go immediately unto the top of the tower. There he would look out across the city and proclaim that he had spoken to the idol, and that, its hunger sated, it had agreed to keep them safe once again.

And then the lookouts at the city gates would cry out, and the earth would shake or darkness would descend or foul creatures would rise up in front of the city and slay any advancing army that threatened its walls. In the morning there would be naught but bones, and the citizens would offer up hymns of thanksgiving and praise.

So the city was, and it was content.

There came a day when a traveler arrived in the city. He was a young man of noble countenance but little name and less purse, or so he seemed. In truth, he was a prince of a far-flung empire, sent forth by his mother the Empress to learn the ways of the world so that when he did ascend to rule, he would do so with wisdom and understanding.

And this prince had heard tales of the city of the idol and he thought them an abomination. He would see this city for himself, he decided, and he would put an end to the idol’s reign of terror. The stories of the idol’s wrath he dismissed as having grown in the telling, or coincidence, and so he sojourned to the city brave of intent and full of purpose.

He dwelt in the city, did the prince, and he worked as first a common laborer and then a merchant. He sought out those who had been inside the tower and heard from them what they had seen. He cultivated friendships among the priesthood and learned many secrets from the tower; how the idol’s power was negated within the walls of its chamber, and how the high priest assisted in feeding the still-living sacrifices to the idol’s insatiable maw. He learned the shape and form of the idol: its leering face of mottled jasper; its cruel, clawed hands; its eyes of crushed rubies and its teeth of sharpest obsidian.

After six months, it could be said of the prince that he knew more of the idol than any woman or man alive, save the High Priest. He weighed that knowledge against the threat of discovery and the fear that he would be recalled home, and so he decided that the hour had come for him to act. In secret, he sent messengers from the city back to his home, summoning an army vast in numbers so that the residents of the city might call for the idol to defend them.

Then the prince took himself to the plaza at the base of the tower, so that when the cry went up for a sacrifice he would be the one chosen.

And when the rumor of war arose, he stood resolute among the milling crowd, and let the fear-maddened mob lay hands on him so that he might be conveyed to the idol for the feast. Up the Thousand Spiral Steps they bore him, never finding the blade he had secreted on his person, and to the doors of the Ivory Chamber itself. They held him up as the High Priest opened the doors to the chamber, and with reverence they lowered him to the ground and took their leave.

“It is a great thing you do,” the High Priest said, “For the good of all the city.” And he advanced on the stranger, who was a prince, who was now a sacrifice, with drawn blade and gentle smile. Behind him stood the idol, twice the height of the tallest man and shining a lurid red in the flames from the hearth.

“I am not here to die,” said the prince. “Nor am I a willing victim.”

“But you are here before the idol, in the place of honor. There is not one in the city below who would not trade places with you, for the honor and the glory of the city and its guardian, and the miracle that they will soon see unfold.” And having defined the sacrament thus, the priest sprang forward and brought his knife down in a glittering arc.

The prince, though, was too fast for him, or perhaps the High Priest was simply used to victims who stood meekly and patiently as they waited for the blade to cut them down. In either case, the blade cut only air, while the prince brought forth the blade which he had hidden, and stabbed at the off-balance priest. Too late the High Priest turned, and the prince’s dagger pierced his side. He cried out and fell, begging the idol’s forgiveness even as his life’s blood stained the spotless, shimmering marble floor. His own knife fell from his suddenly nerveless fingers, and slid across the stone to the prince’s feet.

He, for his part, knelt down and seized the knife. “Know you this,” he said to the dying priest. “Your worship is an abomination, your god a monster. To feed upon the flesh of those who look to it for protection is a blasphemy, and to assist that foul thing in its appetites is naught but vile cowardice. How many of those who worshipped did you dismember and feed to that great stone beast? No more, I swear to you. It shall happen no more!”

The priest, who knew he was dying, simply laughed, his last breaths mixed with mockery and the thick sound of his own bubbling blood. But after a moment he grew silent and the bloody froth on his lips grew still. His outstretched hand twitched once, a second time, and then was still. The High Priest was dead.

And when he was dead, the idol howled. No move did it make, no step did it take from its ancient pedestal, but from its lips a noxious wind poured, and on that wind was a cry of rage and hunger and despair. On and on it went, extinguishing the flames in the fireplace and leaving only a foul smoke behind. Outside birds fell shrieking from the sky and dogs ran mad, and the women and men of the town gazed uneasily upward, for never before in their lives had they heard such a thing.

At long last, the howl faded, and the prince stood before it. “I know your secret, foul thing,” he said. “Outside these walls, you have powers both wicked and subtle that you make use of. But here, you are powerless. Your priest is dead, your hunger unsatisfied, your thirst unslaked. I will bar up this chamber and let you starve for a thousand years. Curse me all you wish. With no blood to drink and no meat to sup on, your words will fall from the air like dead leaves. And the city, that once was your city, shall be your city no longer. I have freed it, and I shall lead your people into a new golden age where neighbor shall not give up neighbor to feed your demonic appetites.”

So speaking, he reached out and seized the idol, and cast it down from where it stood with a mighty crash. It fell to the floor, and the fingers of its right hand shattered and rolled away. It, too rolled, until it came to rest on its side, very near the prince.

He gave it a kick, but it had fallen as far as it would fall, and it would go no further.

Instead, the idol simply gazed at him, ruby eyes sparkling narrowly in the smoky chamber. Behind the prince, his would-be murderer’s blood slowly pooled on the spotless white of the floor.

The prince looked over his shoulder. “You can’t have him, either,” he said, and flung open the doors. There was a great inrushing of wind, as if in preparation for another howl, but the prince shut the doors behind him, and the idol’s cry simply faded away.

As the prince descended the stairs, the temple guards mobbed him, this strange figure in a bloody tunic, holding the High Priest’s knife so casually in his hand. “What has happened?” they asked, and “Where is the High Priest?” “What will become of us,” others wailed, but the prince held up his hand and said, in a calm, clear voice like the ringing of a bell, “All will be made clear! Trust me, my brothers, and you shall know the truth!”

And so they trusted him, and they followed, and when the prince burst forth from the tower to stand before it, they fanned out beside him. In the square, the voices hushed, the bustle stopped. All turned their heads to this strange bloody figure who stood at the gates of the tower, humble of garb yet kingly of mien, and wondered what sign or potent it was that they beheld.

“People of the city,” the prince said, and his words filled the square. Not another voice was lifted, not another word spoken while his words filled there.

“For too long, you have been slaves,” the prince continued. “Slaves to tradition. Slaves to fear. Slaves to the wicked stone beast who dwells in the tower behind me. I say to you, no more! You are freed from the idol’s shackles! No more must you give up your best and best-beloved to its angry maw! No more must you live in fear that you might be plucked from the crowd and fed to sate an old monster’s hunger! I am Prince Sul out of the kingdoms of the south, and I have cast down your false god, shutting it away where it can do no more harm! I shall rule with justice and mercy, and we shall make this city a garden they will sing of for a thousand years!”

There arose a great murmur in the crowd as they spoke to one another of awe and wonder. Could it be true, the merchant asked the fishmonger? Were they truly free, demanded the beggar of the moneylender. What happens to us now, said the small child clutching her mother’s hand, and for her none had an answer.

The prince watched this confusion and smiled. It was only to be expected, after all. The city had lived under the shadow of the idol for generations untold. None of them here, not the most wizened ancient or wrinkled crone, could recall a time before the idol and its loathsome rites. It would take time for those who dwelt here to truly understand their new situation, but when they did, there would be a flowering here the likes of which the world had never seen. He looked forward to leading a delegation from the city home to his mother, the Empress, so that she might see what he had done in her name, and declare it good.

And as the prince stood there dreaming of futures untold and honors ungiven, the people of the city came to him. They lifted him up with glad cries, and they bore him forward into the tower. His laughter at the honor turned to fear, and then anger as they carried him up the Thousand Spiral Steps. “What are you doing?” he cried out. “Unhand me!” and “You fools!”

But the people did not listen, and when they reached the door of the Ivory Chamber, the guards who had accompanied him down to the city forced their way inside. The people followed. Some raised up the idol again tenderly, murmuring apologies to the insensate stone and swearing mighty oaths that they would not see it so defiled again. Others found and tenderly brought forth those shattered stone fingers, and spoke about how they might be restored for the idol’s greater glory. And some lifted up the body of the High Priest, and bore him forth in honor and sadness to be buried in the great ossuary below the tower, where only those who were longest and most faithful in service to the idol were laid to rest. There, too, were kept the urns containing the ashes of those who had done nobly by the city, and fed the appetites of the idol so that the greater polis might be saved.

As for the prince, In three days’ time, his remains joined the High Priest’s in the ossuary. Above them, the city went on as it always had, and the rumors of war were stilled, and far away, the Empress reflected that her son had in fact at the last learned wisdom.

End.

A twenty-plus year veteran of the video game industry, Richard has written for games including The Division, Splinter Cell: Blacklist and many more. He also worked extensively on the World of Darkness setting, and was the developer for Wraith: The Oblivion 20th anniversary edition. Richard has published 8 novels, the most recent of which, Ghost of a Marriage, is now available from Crossroad Press. He lives in North Carolina with a large collection of single malt scotches and a cat named Goblin.

A Dream and a Monster at the End Of It

By Nadia Bulkin

Originally published in Ride the Star Wind, 2017

The Remina landed on Elijah with a bump and a scrape and the certain satisfaction of its arrival having been foretold. The solar ring’s best scientists had all agreed: on Elijah’s last sail through the neighborhood, it had come closest to Sarai. It was only fair that Sarai should be the first to land upon it, the first to drill it, the first and only to mine its riches. The prodigal planet; the stranger from afar.

Sarai had eagerly awaited its return for a thousand years, committed to it songs and films and cigarette brands and about a hundred of their eldest sons’ names in this year of its perihelion, and across the solar ring, so had everyone else. Three dozen refugee communities were waiting with desperate colonization requests that the ICG would never read. Tero was waiting to capture Elijah with an arsenal of illegal push-missiles, even though Elijah wasn’t theirs to claim by any standard of interstellar law. Everyone else was waiting with telescopes because Elijah was just that beautiful, coming into habitable space like a chariot not of fire but ice.

The only one not waiting a second longer was Sarai, because fortune favored the brave in the interplanetary age.

Captain Kadan brought out the bottle of wine that he’d smuggled onboard and promised that they would open it after they made first break. “We’re going to drink it all,” he told his crew, “and then we’re going to stuff the bottle with a note that says ‘Go Fuck Yourself,’ and we’re going to throw it out the airlock and hope it hits Tero. With any luck, they’ll think it’s a message from their great-great granddaddies.”

His crew laughed.

It was easy to laugh at that overgrown planet that thought everything was theirs. Easy to laugh at all the Callers perched on the cliff, yelling nonsense at the abyss—so convinced they were that somewhere out there was humanity’s true home, some great empire that had lost track of one of their outposts. But out there had become in here, and through all the cracked mud and subterranean lakes and water vapor, there was no one yelling back. They were alone. They were alone, they were alone, they were alone; praise God, they were alone.

“Xenia is a Caller too, you know,” said Ariq, slyly.

Xenia always tried to play it down. She’d say, I grew up in a religious community on the Eastern Plains, called the Good Garden. They were believers, she’d say, but they weren’t Callers. Oh, no. They were actually the opposite of Callers: they were cautious.

“But tell him why you’re cautious,” Ariq goaded.

Xenia shrugged. “Because we don’t know what’s out there,” she replied, trying to be matter-of-fact because it was matter-of-fact, wasn’t it? They couldn’t possibly know.

Captain Kadan stared at her for a second and broke out in uproarious, hearty laughter—the laughter of a man who knows he’s fulfilling a destiny that’s been foretold. “You are a damn Caller,” he told her. “You’re just a really pessimistic one.”

Captain Kadan and Ariq left to do the honors. The captain had been waiting his whole life to drive that rig into Elijah’s face in Sarai’s name; Ariq was the one who knew how to work the machine.

“Happy hunting,” Xenia said. From the safety of the Remina, she watched their rover roll along on the SAR, the size of a small insect and about twice as vulnerable. A sense of abiding cold had seeped in from Elijah’s pale ice hills and methane lakes when she wasn’t looking, and she had the wild thought that maybe Elijah caught a cold somewhere out there, at the other end of its stretched-out-rubber-band orbit? For the first time since they left Sarai—to the cheers and claps of their comrades chanting “First Break! First Break!”—she wished she hadn’t agreed to this detail. Should have listened to her parents. They alone didn’t herald Elijah with trumpets. They called Elijah “Hellstar,” mostly because it had spent the past thousand years crossing through a whole lot of nothing: not nothing because they knew for sure that it was empty but nothing because it was silent, like a held breath. Elijah had spent the past millennium in—(hell).

“Hey, Zee. What exactly do you think is out there? Is there a bug hunt I can join?”

She pressed the microphone closer to her chin. “We’d be the bugs, Captain.” Over the comms, she heard the two men laughing and tried to will herself to laugh with them.

But before they reached the pre-assigned site for first break, Xenia spotted something a mile left on the SAR: a tiny, perfect circle inside a tiny, perfect heptagon. She asked the rover to hold.

“Are you sure it’s not a mountain?” Captain Kadan asked, eager to continue this most noble quest before the Great Tero Starfleet was able to close in with their ship-sized drills and claim first break, claim that Elijah belonged to them.

She was sorry to have to give him the worst news he had perhaps ever heard. “It’s geometric,” Xenia said. “It looks manmade.”

* * *

Of course, Xenia had dreamt about Elijah. They all had. She had friends who dreamt of seeing peppermint-colored Elijah in their lover’s eyes or of dogs running up to them on the causeway with Elijah tucked between their teeth, a lovely saliva-covered marble. But in most of the dreams she’d had since childhood, Elijah was enormous instead of shrunken, swollen far larger than the minor planet ever could have been in Sarai’s sky a thousand years ago and growing larger by the minute. Her father would be pouring out oil onto a fire nearby, glumly saying, “No good, no good,” and Xenia would try to point to the rapidly approaching planet, but her father could never see.

Even as Elijah filled the half-light of the sky; even as a large rift opened along Elijah’s equator and revealed a gigantic, all-seeing eye, visibly rippling with veins and blood vessels; even as that eye fixed its ne’er blinking gaze upon Xenia and her father; even then, he didn’t see it.

* * *

No one spoke while the rover drove over to the structure. No one wanted to say what they were all thinking: that they had lost the race, even though they had had a figurative eternity to plan and deployed every resource possible—including a formidable army of spies—to ensure that they came in first on Elijah. The Remina had hid behind a long-period comet on its way out of habitable space and rode the momentum until the drop down to Elijah’s soft, slushy surface. And yet, for all this, they had lost. Someone had outsmarted them. Someone else wanted Elijah more. The fact didn’t seem possible, considering their desperation for its sweet silicates, its delicious platinum and palladium.

Once Captain Kadan and Ariq reached the heptagonal structure, Xenia didn’t have to switch to their video feeds to know that whatever it was, it meant first break. The slew of curses coming over the comms was evidence enough. Slugged by a wave of nauseating unfairness, she briefly rested her head on her arms. First break was an awful rule, but Sarai had signed onto it because it beat the alternative: to the captor go the spoils, which would have worked solely in favor of the large and heavy, like Tero. When she raised her head again, her eyes briefly lingered on the view from Remina’s perimeter camera: the distant foothills of ice and glimmering misshapen methane swamps, all dark, all the time. All dark, yet Elijah had seen it all.

“What is it? Whose is it?” she said, turning on Ariq’s video. She saw the tips of white boots she assumed to be Captain Kadan’s. The corroded hexagon lined a round tunnel burrowing into the ice, all glowing a sharp, military green. Whoever built it hadn’t gotten very far; there was nothing but black at the bottom of the well.

“They must have done it the last time Elijah was in habitable space.”

“Last time?” Captain Kadan scoffed. “You mean a thousand years ago?”

“Probably more like nine hundred and ninety years, but yeah.”

Xenia cut in. “I don’t see any Tero markings on it. But there’s something else…”

The two men stopped, and Ariq stooped, zooming in on the etchings carved into the hexagon. It just looked like knife marks to her eyes, but when the computer took a look, the cuts became words: “Property of the Free Paaten Nation. Hail Elijah, Our New Home.”

There was a lot of angry mumbling that she couldn’t quite hear because her mind had been swept away by thoughts of the long-suffering Paateni, hiding on the peripheries of Tero’s storms like beaten animals. She had read a sad statistic about them in school: no other nation-group had filed so many colonization requests and been denied every time. Nobody wanted to make Tero angry, so Tero got away with everything. And because the “Free Paaten Nation” would have still, technically, belonged to Tero, Tero was going to make off with Elijah too.

“We have to destroy it,” Captain Kadan said.

Silence. That went utterly against first break’s principles, though neither Xenia nor Ariq wanted to say that out loud. Ariq’s video tilted up toward Captain Kadan’s greenlit face, and their fearless leader looked downright skeletal: eyes bugged out, cheeks hollowed-out with terror.

“No one knows about this,” he went on with escalating desperation. “Tero clearly doesn’t know. The ICG doesn’t know. We’re the first ones here…”

“They were the first ones here,” said Ariq. He was an engineer. He believed in laws.

“And where are they now?” Captain Kadan hissed. He slid a little on the sludge, only pretending to be looking for a thousand-some-year-old astronaut, because what if something in a vaguely man-sized suit actually shambled forth? “They were stupid enough to land on Elijah while it was swinging out to aphelion. You know they’re all dead. The ICG sees that tunnel, all they’re going to think is ‘better hand it over to Tero, one of their crews made first break.’”

And then Xenia actually saw something behind Captain Kadan—a shadow, a shape, a mountain-sized presence at once there and not there, sitting up under the ice like a—(body). She clapped her hand over her mouth to stop herself from crying out because surely it was just a trick of the unfamiliar terrain? There were crags on Vanyez that looked like saber tooth fangs.

“Captain, there’s something over there,” Ariq said. She almost yelled, Don’t! but Ariq was pointing at something else: a much smaller, coffin-sized lump a few yards away. At first, it looked like tholin heaps that were starting to come uncovered, but when they chipped away the ice, the shape beneath it was too familiar. An astronaut. A Paateni from Tero. Preserved.

That time, Xenia let slip a little whisper to God.

* * *

The last time Elijah passed though habitable space, just a bit closer to Sarai than to Tero, Sarai and Tero were looking elsewhere. The Hammarskjöld asteroid was passing between them, and Tero was illegally flanking it with fighters as they sent an army of miners to the surface. They mined so aggressively that, even though they didn’t have push-missiles back then, the asteroid lost so much mass that it eventually fell into Tero’s orbit. Hammarskjöld was now just a mute little moon that the Tero had renamed Lojala, the Loyal.

It had been a blatantly illegal seizure of a new habitat. Sarai lodged vocal complaints to a sympathetic ICG, but all they could do was voice disapproval. No one wanted to anger everyone’s best trading partner. And while all this unfolded, Elijah sailed through habitable space, noticed primarily by poets and cults and only the most reckless of separatist groups.

* * *

The Paateni astronaut was mummified, her suit melted into her body as if polymers and flesh had been liquefied and re-frozen. Her helmet had collapsed inward, and her eyes, nose, and mouth were pressed outward against a crystal-coated visor that must have half-melted, making a sort of sculptor’s mold. They could feel the curve of her nose and lips and her closed, bulging eyelids but not the flesh or bone or cartilage. She was kissing the veil. She looked like a grotesque, bulbous marble statue that had been painted a sparkly, silvery gray. It had to be organic, though they couldn’t identify what had happened.

Captain Kadan had gone back out to the site of the Paateni break. He had kept his distance from the body after they hauled her in, throwing water sachets and gobbling protein bars in the mess instead. Xenia and Ariq only knew he had left the Remina because they watched him drive the rover out of the hold while they soaked the body in medical fluorescent light.

“He lived for this,” said Ariq, who had served with the captain before on the botched comet capture mission Magical Lasso. “He kept saying, if we don’t stop them from taking Elijah from us, they’re going to take everything. We’re not going to survive. He kept saying they might even take us.” He shook his head. “I told him that was crazy.”

If Xenia had learned anything from the Good Gardeners, it was that there was no such thing as crazy, not where the cosmos was concerned. But she didn’t want to think about everything that the failure of the mission might mean, so she focused on their new charge. “What do you think happened to her?”

“Time,” Ariq suggested, and he was right—time was the enemy of matter.

“But why does she look like she’s been covered in chromium? There isn’t any on Elijah.” She delicately traced the curve of the astronaut’s nose. “What is this stuff?”

And then the mouth parted. Her jaw fell open, like long-clenched masseter muscles had finally relaxed, revealing a cavernous throat clogged with the spacesuit’s cables and coated in silver. It would have been bad enough without the distinct, melancholic sigh that accompanied the event and sent Xenia and Ariq jumping back, Ariq grabbing a scalpel. For what felt like ten minutes but in truth was only one, nothing else happened. “Air escaping the body,” Xenia whispered, but then, there was the sound of inhalation, ragged and weak, but breath all the same.

“My Sarai,” said Ariq, letting the hand that held the scalpel go slightly slack, so the little knife swung back and forth between his fingers like a pendulum. “She’s alive.”

But Xenia could see this was not life. Not the way life had ever been understood anywhere in the solar ring, anyway. Maybe, it wasn’t death either. Nor was it some prehistoric attempt at cryogenic sleep. But maybe things happened differently out there. Her mind’s eye went racing past the planets and moons and asteroids and satellites of the solar ring, past all the libertine space-villages and corporate spacelabs, out of habitable space, into the cold uncharted deep. Racing, racing, racing toward something hidden with a gravitational field more powerful than the sun…

Xenia quickly pressed her palms against her eyes. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand. This was how her parents had taught her to spend exploratory science class in primary school, kicking away her nerves, insisting to the teachers, no, no, I don’t want to know. By the time she opened her eyes again, the Paateni astronaut was moving her mouth. Stretching her chrome lips. And Ariq was leaning over her as if to listen, hissing at Xenia to bring the microphone over.

Because she was speaking.

The Paateni’s eyes never opened, thank God. Perhaps, eyes did not survive the transformation into this state of being.

It was hard for the microphone to pick up her words, and it was just gibberish at first—a lot of cold and end and light—so Ariq tried to orient her. He told her the year and the place—“you’re still on Elijah”—and asked her the last thing she remembered, mostly to see if she still had memories.

“We were long-sleeping.”

“Sleep?” Xenia whispered. “They made first break and then went to cryo-sleep?”

Ariq snorted in a derision that wasn’t unearned. Even now, no one had successfully awoken from cryo-sleep past one hundred three years. The hippie space village Mauna Pica had just jettisoned the preserved body of their one-hundred-ten-years-asleep founder to save room and money, saying with a shrug, if it’s meant to be, someone will pick him up, by-and-by. “What kind of cryo-sleep would a separatist colony have had back then? More like permanent suspension hooked up to an ultra-low-power battery.” He shook his head. “This was a suicide mission.”

But Xenia thought it was rather beautiful, if very sad, the amount of trust they had placed in their brethren to not only find a way to claim them but to wake them, one thousand years later. “We’re on a suicide mission,” she noted. When Ariq silently tightened his fist around the scalpel, she wondered, and maybe, so is every human, aimlessly shuttling around the solar ring knowing that they had fought their way out of the primordial soup only to be greeted not by trumpets but silence.

“I woke. Alone. But not alone.”

“What woke you?” Ariq asked into the microphone, which robotically repeated him in archaic Paatenese.

The lips pressed together and opened like a blooming flower. “God.”

Ariq bristled. “Fucking Callers, can’t even think proper—”

But then the words started spilling fast and frantic from the microphone, from the astronaut’s wildly contorting mouth: “God is wrath is God is death is God is hunger is God is chasing me is God is eating everyone…”

Tend your own garden. Keep your head down. Xenia glanced at Ariq, and she could tell by the flicker in his eyes, like a frightened prey animal, he was trying not to process this, trying not to come to the same inevitable conclusion that she was spinning toward.

Whatever terrified rapture-dream had overtaken the Paateni faded, and she tried to orient herself again: “You are not Paateni.”

“No… we are from Sarai. The Paaten rebellion…” Xenia paused, searching for words that would cause the least hurt, “was ended two hundred years ago.”

And then the mouth stopped moving. Not even a cry.

Ariq muttered that they should have lied because they both knew there was one more question—the most important question.

Xenia quickly leaned down and asked, “Where is God, now?”

It took five heartbeats for the Paateni astronaut to answer, and when she did, it was nothing more than the softest of clicks. “Hiding.”

She was about to turn around, tell Ariq that she understood he didn’t believe in extraterrestrials, let alone space monsters, but to please trust her, just this once, trust that something inhuman had found its way onto Elijah and now they had to go go go—but she heard him loudly say into the comms, “Captain? We think you should head on home. We think Elijah may have run into some weird shit out on the aphelion…”

The cottonball haze of relief at having been believed was immediately pounded out by Captain Kadan’s unintelligible voice, thin as a nylon thread beneath the din of an enormous un-living roar. Unintelligible, except that he was screaming.

They rushed to switch his video feed onto the head-up display, bringing it up just in time to see a rush of incomprehensible movement as a distant ice-mountain slid into motion, less like an ice-sheet slipping and more like a blanket being pulled off a bed. Crystal sparks—silver? chrome?—filled the feed, glittering against the endless night as their captain’s garbled yelling turn to static.

Behind them, Xenia thought she could hear the Paateni astronaut laughing, but she was wrong: it was a manic, cable-clattering seizure, as if the gunmetal chrome that now grounded her every cell was trying to dislodge, to spit out what remained of her bones and her plastic suit and run free toward whatever it was that was dancing out there in the dark.

* * *

Calling is a sin, and Callers are tempters. Tend your own garden. Keep your head down. If you’re lucky, the vulture passes you by. Goodness doesn’t need to be invited, but evil does. Good listens, evil answers. Good abides, evil seeks.

The children in the compound instinctively understood the advantages of being small and quiet, of crouching under floorboards and holding their breath—one thousand, two thousand, three…

The adults in the compound usually only arrived after the world had shattered them somehow—perhaps, a death had left them convinced that any god was a bastard or that the government was hiding an apocalyptic truth. More rarely, they’d encountered something that had shaken everything they thought they understood. An impossible voice on a radio, a cave painting, a hieroglyph, a dimming star. A string inside had been plucked as if to sing, you are not alone, and they had reacted not in jubilation but in fear.

They forgave Xenia for leaving them but not for joining the Sarai Aeronautic Force, even though the government was grounded and their missions looked for minerals, not microbes.

You will be undone, her father said. Go and you will be undone.

Her mother died in the Garden. Xenia didn’t find out for two years.

* * *

At first, Xenia and Ariq just sat on the floor of the Remina, waiting for whatever had reached out from under Elijah’s ice blanket to find them and kill them. The sound of its roar, like a bullet train rushing through a mountain tunnel, had stilled any possibility of rushing to the flight deck and escaping. The thought, better to die, bounced between them, though they could neither speak nor meet each other’s eyes. Better to die than live in a world where this is true. Xenia saw her parents every time she pushed her palms against her eyes, digging in the dirt with their heads down like moles. Hellstar Elijah. Hellstar Elijah is coming back infected. You just wait and see…

What finally shook them back to life was the radar’s automated warning of an incoming aircraft. Even before they had visual confirmation, they knew it could only be an envoy of the Great Tero Starfleet, come to collect what they thought was their due.

No questions were asked before the Remina was jammed and crippled and rendered into a heap of trash metal. Their life support systems were put on a thirty-minute clock, to give them time to get into their suits.

“They can fucking have this fucking planet,” Ariq muttered, putting on his helmet.

Xenia briefly considered dragging along the Paateni astronaut—who had twisted in on herself like an action figure thrown by a child and who might, now, actually (hopefully) be dead—but then reasoned that such a fate wouldn’t be fair to the Paateni, to sleep for a thousand years only to be lit on fire by the very people she’d been trying to escape.

The Tero fleet had turned on Elijah’s lights, staking enormous LEDs on poles into the ice sludge. Xenia and Ariq could only see the dimmest outline of the Tero cargo plane, humming contentedly like a well-filtered air conditioner. From the nose alone, they could tell it was enormous. And in front of it, eight astronauts waited in red and white suits, holding sleek black guns with sleek black gloves. One of them barked a command that their microphones near-instantly translated in an androgynous voice as “Stop!”

They stopped, sliding a bit on the ice.

“You don’t have permission to be here. What is your business on Elijah?”

Nothing felt worth explaining, anymore. Ariq mumbled, “Obviously, trying to make first break,” and had to repeat it at gunpoint when they couldn’t quite make it out.

“What do you mean, first break? This planet belongs to Tero. We have listed it within our catalog of territories for almost a thousand years…”

Xenia’s eyes drifted toward the darkness where she knew the mountains would be. The mountains and God, hiding in the chrome. She thought of the other children in the compound hiding under the floorboards, mischievously twiddling their fingers against their knees, eyes hidden in shadow but curiously sharp teeth glowing and—(hungry). She thought she was picking up a sound. A tectonic moan. Bones grinding. And a strange, steady hum.

She suddenly realized that Ariq was yelling. “You don’t understand! We have to go, all of us! There’s something here, and it killed our captain…”

“I repeat. Please, be quiet.”

“We are all going to die unless—”

Xenia barely even saw him raise his hand. The gesture was so fast, there wasn’t near enough time to understand its intent, though she assumed he was trying to point to the mountains and the hiding god. But it was enough. Two lights zipped from two guns, just two of the briefest flashes in the dark, and converged at the very center of Ariq’s heart. He buckled and fell, the burn in the wound slowly smoking. Something that had been held very taut inside Xenia, some tiny emotional muscle she hadn’t even known was there, snapped and broke.

“Hostile gesture,” said one of the other members of the starfleet. “Judgment call.”

The starfleet officer who’d spoken the most took a long pause to stare at the trigger-happy subordinate, and then nodded toward Xenia and started turning around. No translation was needed. Power is the universal language. Even before the two officers in red-and-white reached her, she felt her arms going slack, her knees unlocking, the decision between resist and obey tipping toward acquiescence.

And then a larger power intervened as she had known that it would. She had the jump amid the screaming and the chaos, running with big, bounding, half-flying leaps across the ice toward the site of the Paateni break—but this time, Xenia could also look back over her shoulder and see.

When Captain Kadan was killed, it had all happened too quickly and over too much digital interface to register much more than movement: massive displacement of matter that seemed far too large and violent for Elijah—the little prince. But now, only a cloudy visor and the length of a standard space station separated them; now, she could see the spinning, singing, sinning faces in the chrome; now, she could see the arms like enormous silver lava tongues wrap around this most beloved prodigal planet. Now that she had seen the glory of its victory over (everything)—she could see how the Paateni astronaut could have mistaken this ravenous presence for a god.

* * *

She used to have another dream about Elijah, though this one she never told anyone. There was a hollowness to the vision that used to make her sick to her stomach, sicker even than the dream about Elijah’s eye. Elijah was passing over, nothing more than a small white cable car, and her mother was still alive and speaking to her so quietly that she could not understand the words except that her mother seemed to be speaking about the transience of the flowers at their feet. A kite string floated down from the heavens—from Elijah—and her mother smiled and grabbed hold of it and flew away, one of hundreds, no, thousands of sailing refugees.

Xenia sometimes ran after them but never, ever managed to catch a kite string. The older she got, the harder she tried, not because she wanted to go but because to be abandoned seemed unspeakably worse. Yet she would inevitably be left curled on the now-dead grass, thinking, I wish there was nothing. I wish there was nothing out there.

* * *

All but one of the Teroan officers died during the assault, some bodies sent flying and breaking on impact, some bodies taken up and eaten. The only survivor was the officer who had done most of the talking, who had followed Xenia into the well that the Paateni had dug a millennium ago. Her name turned out to be Bree Bonan, and she had been a captain before all of that became irrelevant. Now that the LED lights had been swatted down and both the Tero craft and the Remina pried apart by eager, searching arms, the two women stood on built-up sludge with their backs against the wall, injured past the point of feeling pain. Xenia saw Bonan whispering to herself—what she assumed to be a prayer to the keepers of that lost empire that Tero was always trying to foolishly call out of the dark—and was struck by a sudden savage thought.

“Did you know?” she spat at Bonan. “Did you know that”—God, God, God—“thing was out there? Did it reply to one of your little SOS calls, say, ready or not, here I come?”

Bonan looked genuinely, momentarily horrified. Of course, they had had a very specific vision of what their great ancestral birthright was going to look like when it finally stepped out of the anonymous expanse—God and mother and father, all at once—and it was nothing like this. “No. We never got any… no, we didn’t know.”

“Well then, I guess it’s a true miracle,” Xenia snorted. “How very proud you must be.”

Bonan let out a little feral growl. “Don’t you see that it doesn’t matter now?” she hissed. “We’ve already started bringing Elijah in. Everything is…” she squeezed her eyes shut.

Xenia realized that those were tears Bonan was trying to stop. And she knew, too, that their homeworlds lay so near each other that the Hidden God would be able to jump to not only Tero’s gleaming razorblade cities but to Sarai’s too, if it wanted. And by the way it tore through matter here, ripping apart Elijah’s skins of ice and nitrogen, Xenia knew, like a stone in her gut, that it wanted everything.

Something wet fell from the darkness above and landed on Xenia’s shoulder, filling the muscle there first with a frozen numbness, and then with the deepest, most perfect pain. She strained to turn the little outside light on the helmet onto it, only to watch a small puddle of viscous chrome seep through the suit as if to burrow, to hide. She could hear Bonan sobbing and the woman was holding her shaky, black-gloved hand up to her helmet. Straining to understand what had just seeped in even while more liquid oozed down the walls of the Paateni well. Only for a moment did Xenia contemplate scrambling up the smooth walls, like a rat in a toilet bowl, before the pain in her shoulder pulsed that, of course, there was no running from God. I told you, the pain was saying, sounding eerily like her father, I told you you’d be undone.

“Your radar will see it,” Xenia said, when she could no longer feel her limbs. But there were graves, and gardens, that needed protecting. “Your radars will pick it up. Even if it’s hiding. And then your missiles will blast Elijah to pieces.”

“No. They won’t.” Bonan still had her eyes closed. Now that God was hiding inside her, she probably would never open them again. How very much like the Paateni woman she looked, Xenia thought. And she, too, would be indistinguishable from them, in the end. “We would never destroy something we love so much. Do you know how long we’ve waited…?”

“A thousand years,” said Xenia. “Yes, I know.”

The chrome was falling faster now; more like a rain. But from her scalp to her toes, she understood that everything was all right because she had been chosen for something more. There would be no death, no abandon, only oneness, eternal. Purity filled her heart as elements organic and non-organic were remade for posterity—first, split open.

Then. Reconnected.

End.

Nadia Bulkin is the author of the short story collection She Said Destroy (Word Horde, 2017). She grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia with her Javanese father and American mother, before relocating to Lincoln, Nebraska. She has two political science degrees and lives in Washington, D.C.

At the Mountains of Spirits

By Anthony Michael Murphy

For so long now I have kept these nightmares to myself. Nightmares born from memories of experiences I dared not share until now. In many ways, keeping these experiences as nightmares was more comforting than reporting them as fact. But I can do that no longer. Every night, I dread opening my window curtain for fear of seeing something peering in from outside. Every night, I worry about hearing something outside my house that resembles what I heard on those cold nights long ago. Every night, I am haunted by the images of things I witnessed during that trek, and by the thought of what could still be out there in that cold, unforgiving wilderness.

Alas, I am approaching the end of my days and I can hold on to these nightmares no longer. The truth about my dear friends must be told whether people believe my accounts or not. These nightmares keep me tethered to a reality that is not entirely honest and for that reason, I must sever their binds. I must tell this story. I must tell the truth...

* * *

It was the fourteenth of June, nineteen-seventy-four when we flew into Nain. For those of you who are unaware, Nain is a small, Inuit community in northern Labrador in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. I, myself, am from the island portion of the province. My colleague and good friend John Parsons (also from Newfoundland) and I would often spend time during the summer months traversing parts of our province on foot. Each year, the stakes were raised as our thirst for adventure grew more extravagant and more daring. Day long treks became overnight excursions. Groomed trails became rugged terrains. The more remote and untouched the land, the greater the allure. It was this sentiment that brought us to the harsh but majestic wilderness of northern Labrador.

John had mapped out this fateful adventure. We would stay in Nain for two nights while preparing for our trek. Early on the third day, we would take a chartered flight with our guide, Mr. Amka Anawak further north to the Torngat Mountains. From there, we would traverse roughly 350km South East back to Nain through a vast wilderness that is as remote as it is uncompromising. As he had planned it, the entire trip should have taken us seven to eight days at his most conservative estimates. Mr. Anawak would later confirm that our estimate would be accommodating of a pace that obliged to sight-seeing.

Our stay in Nain was pleasant save for one incident. While dining in a small establishment that was more akin to a neighbour’s kitchen than a restaurant, we were approached by an elderly Inuit gentleman. His face resembled the very rock that made the Torngat Mountains and the contours of his countenance seemed to be carved by erosion rather than age. He stood over us for a moment and after we greeted him, he spoke to us in his native tongue. While neither of us could understand what he was saying, we agreed it sounded ominous and unnerving. The gentleman waited for no response and simply left after having said his peace. We had mentioned this incident to our guide after having already started on our trek. He then admitted to us that had we told him sooner, he would not haven taken us.

At dawn the next morning, we boarded a tiny seaplane that would take us to the mountains. I remember thinking that the resistance of the wind alone would be enough to tear the plane to pieces. Our flight was a little less than an hour and it took us over the landscape that we would be crossing on the way back to Nain. There were so many hills and valleys, crests and gullies, rocks and rivers that I began to feel both concerned and excited for the trek looked to be an arduous one but also exactly the challenge to quench our thirsts. The highlands were mostly rock with little to no vegetation while the lowlands were mostly thick brush and evergreen trees.

As we approached the mountains, they gradually revealed themselves on the horizon, growing larger and reaching higher with every minute. So disturbed I am by the events of that trip that I often forget the absolute beauty and wonder of the Torngat Mountains. Had not our excursion been met with such peril, I would have gone back to them at some point in my life. But not now... not knowing what I know. Not having seen what I saw.

The mountains are located in the arctic tundra, which means that despite our journey back to Nain beginning on June sixteenth, it was snowing. However, the sun was shining brightly on that first day and we had dressed sufficiently for the cold, so our journey’s commencement was actually quite pleasant. As I write this now, I am surprised about how much detail I am able to recall of the Torngat Mountains, but to describe them here would miss the point of this memoir.

Our first night was quite enjoyable. We were able to see the Aurora Borealis, we heard the songs of numerous nocturnal creatures of the north (I was very surprised at how many different kinds of animals were living in this climate), and despite the cold, we slept well. It was around twilight of the second day when things started to turn.

This is the part of my story I dreaded most to tell. Even after all these years, it pains me to recall the events of the days that followed. But it must be done.

It was on the morning of the second day when we mentioned to Amka what had happened with the elderly gentleman back in Nain. He said very little about it at first, but John and I could tell that his demeanour had changed. Dear Amka’s duties were many: he was our guide, our entertainment, and also our protector. Among the many animals that roamed this area of Labrador were polar bears. We had actually seen at least six or seven of them by this point of our journey but none were so close as to warrant a draw of Amka’s rifle. As we walked, his vigilance was that of a protective father. He would often respond to noises that neither John nor I had heard. But until this moment, the way he responded to those noises could be called casual. After we told him of the elderly man, he appeared to us both as much more than “jumpy.”

The moment I would identify as the turning point of the entire venture came, as I said, just before twilight of the second day when John offhandedly exclaimed that he swore we were closer to a large peak than we actually were. At that moment, Amka stopped and signalled for us to do the same. In eerie silence, he looked very carefully but hurriedly all around us. Appearing to find nothing, he then looked to me and asked if I too had thought we were closer than we actually were. I honestly could not remember taking note of the peak so could not say for sure. Although he did not appear content with that response, he said nothing and continued on.

The sounds we heard on this night are one of the many phantoms from this trip that still haunt me today. It was at the base of this peak where we set up camp for the second night. It was already dark when we got there. Amka was not very talkative that night and, truth be told, that made John and I nervous. Our sleep was restless and I was easily awoken to a sound that I could not discern. I lifted my head and could just make out the shadow of Amka already sat up, awake, and listening. Without turning his head, he gently raised his hand to beckon my silence. I listened as intently as I could and I swear to you, we heard voices that night. Strange voices carrying on the cold air traveling a great distance. Faint, but definitely voices. I couldn’t tell if it was one voice or one hundred, there was something off about the way it sounded. It also did not sound like any language that I knew.

I watched Amka closely for his reaction and could see that he was whispering to himself as if in prayer. The voices eventually faded away, but neither Amka nor I slept for the rest of that night.

* * *

The following day, the weather was chilly and overcast, but there was no precipitation. We had made it far enough south that our surroundings were beginning to resemble a forest again in the lower lands, albeit a sparse one. It was close to mid-day before I worked up the courage to ask Amka about the night before. After some hesitation, he opened up to us. He told us about how his ancestors migrated to the Torngat Mountains from the Arctic regions many generations ago. He explained that it wasn’t long before they realized that something else was already here before they had arrived. Most of his people referred to them as spirits, but some elders believed—or rather, knew—that there was something more. They knew that there was something very real living in this part of the world long before any people ever set foot here. It was something very old and very unkind.

For generations, stories of the spirits in the Torngat Mountains were told by his ancestors until they finally came down to his time. But his lineage told a slightly different story to their children. They spoke of an ancient being that lived deep in the wilderness. Some tales involved spirits protecting people from the being, others told of being lured to it. He went on to explain that what we heard last night were the mutterings of the Taqriaqsuit, or the “Shadow People.” As far as he understood from the stories of his ancestors, the “Shadow People” were not believed to be connected to this being in the wilderness but they could sometimes be an omen of misfortune.

Our dear guide then proceeded to explain why John’s exclamation regarding the peak the day before was so alarming. He also told us about the Ijiraat, or Shape-shifters: creatures or spirits that could take on the form of any animal or person. Their only distinguishing characteristic is that they cannot change the form of their eyes—their eyes are always red. It is said by his people that when a Shape-shifter is near, people begin to make mistakes, see things that are not real, and lose their memories. Seeing an Ijiraat, Amka explained, is often met with misfortune.

As I explained previously, John and I were well accustomed to spending nights in the wilderness, often times in the company of large animals such as moose and black bears. At no point before this had we been the least bit superstitious even despite all the folk tales and myths of fairies and the “Old Hag” abound in our province. Fear had never been a factor for us but the awesome nature of the Labrador wilderness inspired wonder and evoked a humbling feeling of insignificance in the presence of such a vast and expansive, untouched world. It was very easy for fear to take hold here.

For the remainder of that day, John and I wrestled with the idea of increasing the speed of our travel and make it back to Nain as soon as possible. We considered dismissing the folktales of the Inuit people as simply myth and enjoying as much of our time in beautiful northern Labrador as possible. I have often wondered whether John’s indecisiveness would have been abated had he also heard the voices from the night before, but because he hadn’t, it helped to lend doubt to my own experience. The decision for our friend Amka, however, had clearly been made. From the moment we resumed our journey that morning, his pace and entire demeanour had taken on a more frenetic energy.

Up to that point, he had been a very friendly and obliging guide. However, on this day, he had said not more than four or five words. Whenever John or I stopped to take in the scenery, or to rest our weary legs, he could barely stand still, much less sit for a spell. If anything, John and I may have even convinced ourselves that Amka had simply spooked himself with the stories of his people and that we had nothing out of the ordinary to fear. Fools that we were, it was simply what we wanted to believe. Our ignorance would only persist until just before dark that evening.

Amka had insisted on passing by our planned camp for the night in favour of making better time and instead brought us to another similar site but further west. John and I were not ones to refuse a frightened man some comfort and agreed to the change in plans putting our trust in a knowledgeable and resourceful guide. Once there, Amka immediately built a fire while John and I set up the tent. Just as we finished, John noticed Amka sitting still as the stone on which he rested with his attention directed toward a brush of tress. Calling to him would not break his trance, so we followed his gaze to the trees and after some searching finally discovered an animal in the distance that looked to be an Artic fox.

These are the parts of my story that I fear no one else will believe but I cannot implore you enough to believe what I am telling you now. This fox had red eyes. Not only that, but despite their colour, the eyes still did not belong to a fox, nor to a human. This creature’s eyes were not the eyes of any creature that I had seen before or since. They did not look natural on the fox. They were eyes that bore judgement; eyes that bore arcane knowledge. Eyes that had witnessed things humans could only imagine.

So entranced we were by the spectacle before us that neither of us had moved or spoken for a period of time that might have been minutes or might have been hours. I remember fearing that if I broke my view of this creature for even a moment, it would be upon me faster than I could blink. To be honest, I am not even entirely sure who got the rifle and fired it, but it caused the fox to run off and brought each of us back to our senses.

I don’t know why I asked Amka if that was a Shape-shifter. I already knew that it was. I think I just held on to some foolish hope that he would say it was simply a run-of-the-mill arctic fox. He still hadn’t said anything, just nodded his head to confirm. It was a very slow nod with little range of motion. I noticed he was still staring quite intently at the trees. I followed his stare once more expecting to see the fox hadn’t actually run off. Instead, what I saw was something I could never sufficiently describe in my wildest nightmares. It was standing this time, peering out from behind a tree with those same red eyes fixed on the three of us all at once. It wasn’t a fox anymore, it wasn’t anything that I could recognize. It didn’t resemble anything that I had ever seen. All I can tell you for certain is that it was standing and it had some kind of a face with those two red eyes. Suddenly, it slipped back behind the tree and was gone.

I had never felt as vulnerable in my entire life as I did in that moment. I felt utterly exposed. I felt defenceless with only a hunting knife as a weapon. I felt powerless having no knowledge of what that thing was. Without speaking a word, it seemed that all three of us realized full well that the only thing we could do was stay there for the night, all together, and try to make it back to Nain as quickly as possible the next day.

Neither of us slept that night, and not just because of the terror of knowing that such a strange creature could be anywhere in the surrounding wilderness, but also because the “Shadow people” had been chatting again. Their voices were different that night. There was no rhythm to the way they spoke; no pattern. It was like playing random and off-key notes on a piano. John was awake to hear them this time and he did eventually ask Amka (as quietly as he could) what they were saying. Amka, who remained sat up the entire night with the rifle in his hands, simply said that they were mocking us... that they were amused by the prospect of our deaths.

* * *

I don’t actually remember if either of us had slept at all that night, but after a quick breakfast, we still managed to find the energy for a brisk trek through the wilderness. Despite our conditioning, John and I struggled to maintain the pace set by Amka who had grown up running through wilderness exactly like that. I could hardly tell you what we encountered that day in the way of animals, obstacles, or sites, but Amka seemed to be attentive to every sound the forest made.

The woods were getting thicker and denser now. Amka had kept us primarily along rivers and through clearings as much as possible to optimize our time. But as twilight grew nearer, his pace quickened even more to the point at which we were nearly running to keep up with him. We implored him to stop and rest and set up camp for the night but we had almost lost all daylight before he finally stopped. When he did, he dropped to his knees and began to sob. He kept asking us why we couldn’t hear them. Weak as I was from little food, little rest, and a full day’s marathon through the wilderness, I struggled to understand what he was asking. It sounded to me like the insane ramblings of a madman. When I looked to John, I noticed that he had been listening, which then cued me into what Amka was asking.

Sure enough, once I paused to listen, I could hear the Shadow People. They were all around us. Their voices came from every direction but they were nowhere to be seen. Amka explained that they had been talking all day—talking about the foolish travellers who will be taken in the night.

John and I picked Amka up from the ground and brought him to the nearest clearing we could find that would accommodate a tent. Amka was useless to us at this point so John and I assembled the tent, loaded the rifle, got some water, and got us all into the tent for the night. We had no time to build a fire or even properly prepare for the cold. It was terribly uncomfortable but was still far better than what we expected to find outside the tent. It was foolish to believe that a tent could shield us, but when you are horrified like we were that night, you will grab onto to anything for hope.

We huddled together, sat upright, in the centre of the tent with blankets over our legs. John had the rifle. I had my hunting knife. No one spoke for hours. We simply listened for anything that sounded threatening. I passed much of that time trying to figure out how long it would take to get back to Nain. I remember wracking my brain trying to recall if this was our fourth night, or fifth, or maybe just the third? I calculated each scenario and weighed all of my options. I thought about going west into Quebec. I thought about turning back to the Torngat Mountains. I thought about staying right where we were. I remembered that Amka had told us a search party would be deployed after 12 hours as opposed to the standard 24 due to the nature of our expedition, but that they would start on either leg of our journey, meaning that we would likely go the longest without being found if we stayed where we were.

I hadn’t actually noticed that Amka was rocking back and forth until he suddenly stopped. Once again, he was as still as the mountain stone and I dared not look this time for fear of seeing those horrid red eyes shining through the darkness outside our tent. Neither John nor I spoke but we were each acutely aware that Amka was focused on something. We remained that way for God-knows how long.

Suddenly, without warning, Amka bolted forward and ran out of the tent. John and I were so shocked by the action that neither of us reacted immediately. It was I who reached for the zipper to close the tent door and then we both listened. We could hear him plodding through the brush, cracking branches as he ran. We could hear him shouting something in his native language. Then we heard a horrible noise that sounded like a shriek and a growl. We heard Amka lose his breath as if he was suddenly hit by something. Then we heard his screams—that sound above all others haunts my dreams the most. Whatever got him was taking him away because the screaming continued but became distant and faint until it was just echoes on the wind.

John and I were left dumbfounded like two wide-eyed and frightened children who had just been abandoned by their parents. All I can guess is that the Shadow People had told Amka something that night. Whether they tricked him into believing that he could escape, convinced him that his only way out was suicide, or drove him completely into madness, I don’t know. Or perhaps he knew, somehow, that if it wasn’t him that night, it would have been one of us; the sacrifice of a vigilant father. I will never know but I have to believe that whatever happened to him, he is with his ancestors now. And I know that he is the reason why I am alive today.

* * *

I can say for certain that neither John nor I slept a wink that night. As soon as daylight broke over the horizon, we packed up our gear and continued South South-East. As exhausted as we were, we were equally as determined not to spend another night in this wilderness. We had considered looking for Amka—mostly because we felt guilty about leaving him—but we decided that finding help would be best for all of us. Though we didn’t want to admit it, we were both sure that he was dead.

While I can assure you that everything I have told you to this point is fact, due to an intense fatigue, an abundance of physical exertion, and an experience thus far that was so surreal it could only be described as a dream, my specific memories of this day are scant at best. However, I can report to you the memories that stand out. I remember crossing a particularly rocky terrain and feared that I would break my ankles. I remember stopping somewhere for water, but I couldn’t tell you if that was in the morning, afternoon, or evening. I remember seeing an animal watching us from afar (likely a moose, if memory serves) and swearing at it. What I don’t remember is how we got so turned around and started heading West, nor how long we had been walking in the wrong direction. It was only when twilight approached that I checked the compass and discovered our disorientation.

Realizing that we were likely much farther from Nain, and farther from any other human beings, than I’d hoped to be by the end of the day caused me to break down and cry. John, being the pillar of strength that he was, stood me up and gave me specific instructions as to how we would prepare for another night in those cursed woods. Instead of bundling up and eating a meal, we found a location that backed onto the base of a large cliff. He explained that we would be frightfully cold but protected. We also made sure to build a fire, not as much for warmth but additional protection and visibility. With all the precautions we could manage for another night like the one prior, we got into the tent before daylight was completely gone, and we waited.

And waited.

I remember quite vividly the expectation of hearing the Shadow People, or the red-eyed beast, or whatever had taken Amka the night before. That expectation, nerve-wracking as it was, remained with me, unbroken, all of that night. Eventually, our fire burned out and when the crackling of the wood ceased, an intense and unnatural silence beset our surroundings. It was very much an anticipatory silence like how a wave ebbs before crashing, or when you hold your breath before the bang of a gun. It was not an easy or calming silence; it held our anticipation to the very brink and just never gave us that relief. It kept us both on edge the entire night.

That was, without a doubt, the longest night of my life. Coincidentally, it was mid June and, in fact, one of the shortest nights of the year, but I am not exaggerating when I say to you that every minute of that night felt like an hour. No matter how uncomfortable I was, I refused to move for fear that the noises I made while rustling would alert something to our location. No matter how cold I became, I resisted the urge to chatter my teeth with all my might. It was so taxing to spend an entire night in that way that when daylight broke the next morning, John and I passed out inside the tent.

My hands are trembling at the thought of what I must write next.

As much as I wondered since about how things might have been different had we told Amka about the elderly gentleman before we left, or had John heard the Shadow People on that first night, I puzzle myself time and time again wondering what might have been had we pushed through our fatigue that day and got moving. Alas, none of us can change the events of the past, regardless of how powerfully we may wish it. It is very likely that moving on would have made no difference anyway, but at the very least, I would have known if it was during the night or while we slept when we were somehow transported.

I consider myself an educated man possessing a versatile and varied vernacular, but any inability to imagine the setting into which we emerged from the tent after we woke is due to my ignorance of and inexperience with such a place. Not even in my most feverish dreams had I seen anything like it. The terrain was mostly hard and solid, but it didn’t feel quite as solid as rock. It was cracked, broken, and jagged in places and looked to be a mix of pale grey and copper in colour. The sky was dark but there was some light coming from it. Not from a sun, or even a sphere of any kind, instead, the light that illuminated our surroundings emanated from a luminescent strip that stretched from one horizon to the other, bisecting the sky. All around us were protrusions from the ground that one might call hills or cliffs but they more resembled stubby digits or tendril-like bulges. In some of these protrusions were holes into which no light penetrated. Some holes were huge and some were not much bigger than my fist. There was something else that appeared to be long, flimsy, and spinal-shaped overhanging in bunches from the tops of the highest protrusions. Around the shortest ones, there were bulbous, pock-marked, things that looked something like enormous barnacles.

This was no place on God’s Earth.

Any familiarity with the description I laid out for you here came from practice after reliving this memory for decades. Please understand that in that moment, we could not begin to even fathom what we were witnessing. We were essentially rendered stupid in sheer disbelief. That is how the creature was able to get so close so quickly.

It grabbed John by the leg with an appendage that was like a tentacle and hoisted him into the air. The thing must have been about 3 meters high and 4 to 5 meters long. It looked like a shapeless mass with countless tentacles bursting from it, and orifices all over, some with sharp, pointed teeth and others with eyes. The sound it made was that same shrieking growl that signalled Amka’s demise. Through that horrible sound, I could hear John screaming like Amka did.

The creature dangled John upside-down, brought him close to the largest of the toothed orifices, and viciously devoured his head. It held out the decapitated corpse to let the blood pour out as a few of the tentacles, which had mouths of their own, lapped it up from the ground. The sounds it made churn my stomach even today.

Unable to look any longer, I turned my head and saw that John had dropped the rifle. I ran to it, grabbed it off the ground, and turned to fire at the unearthly abomination. The gun was a bolt-action rifle that held eight rounds and I got off all eight as quickly as I possibly could, screaming a primal, savage scream as I did. I don’t know how many hit, but I know some of them landed as the creature reacted with what I can only imagine was an expression of pain.

Still screaming and clicking the unresponsive trigger, I was blind-sided and knocked senseless by one of the creature’s tentacles. The force threw me through the air and right into one of the large holes I described earlier. I only remember darkness after that and I couldn’t tell you if it was from the lack of light in the hole or the dark of unconsciousness. I can tell you that when I opened my eyes, I saw the light of the sun—our sun—and felt the cold breeze of the arctic air.

* * *

No one knows how long I was lying on the ground before I was found. I do remember being awake when the man who discovered me came to me, but I could neither move nor speak. I remember when the helicopter came and some men loaded me onto a stretcher and boarded me onto it. I fell asleep on the helicopter ride and woke up days later in a hospital back in St. John’s. I remember the first interview with the RCMP and telling them fragments of my story. I distinctly remember how the officer who was writing down my testimony simply stopped part way through, obviously believing me to be unfit to testify. They did come back a second time a few days later but my story had not changed and they continued to believe that I was delirious or delusional, despite my improving condition and lucidity. By the time they came back a third time, I was recovering well and could not tell them the same story I had twice before. It was too hard to repeatedly tell a story that you knew to be true only to have people dismiss it and look at you like you are some kind of pitiful creature.

From that point forward, I decided to lie. That’s when the nightmares began. I told them everything up to the third night pretty well the way it happened except for seeing the Shape-shifter (I had to keep with my story about hearing the Shadow People because I needed a reason as to why we quickened our pace on the third day). As for what happened after that, I simply told them I could not remember.

Over the course of the following year, they would periodically try questioning me for more information and probed me about the stories I had told them after I woke up in the hospital. I felt foolish for not understanding it sooner but I was technically a suspect in the disappearances of John and Amka. Their “investigation” of me didn’t last long; it seemed my innocence proved easier to resolve than my culpability. I learned that nothing of my two friends was found. I had done my best to recall the route we traversed on a map and the different places we had set up camp but even after sending in some trackers and other guides, they recovered nothing.

I still miss John so much...

The most curious fact of all for me was one I learned the first time I had tried to outline our journey on a map. While doing my best to recall the directions we travelled, I had suggested that we were three to four days south of the Torngat Mountains from where we started. Puzzled, the officer I first showed this to insisted that I had been found still among the mountains about twelve kilometres from where we began. The belief that I could be so mistaken about where we were, or that those mountains and their inhabitants possessed such power as to transport a living being against its will so quickly disturbed me more than I could possibly put to words.

Those mountains obviously harbour more secrets than are known even to the aboriginal people who lived there. But if creatures like the Shadow People, the Shape Shifter, or that horrible tentacled beast exists in such a place, who’s to say they are bound only to those mountains?

End.

Refrigerated Nightmares

By Maxwell I. Gold

Packed deep inside the high freezers of yesterday were falsehoods, rumors, and twisted thoughts which melted under the hot stars of tomorrow. My wild dreams, perspiring with tears of someday, dripped along the hinges of that frozen gateway where the warmth of something familiar gnawed away at my mind like some nasty little monster. Inside this cold desert, I saw the unending creation and destruction of iced cities, nameless beasts, and skies without a starless crown swallowed by the birth and death from my own sleepless nights; chopped at the head from the scorching horizons like a bloody stump; filled with pus and death.

Over and over, I relived these nights of cold, emotionless confinement within the oblivion of my thoughts, my body falling towards the perilous, molten tomorrow as the ice deserts turned to boiling oceans, pathetic gods atomized by the pressures of heat and entropy.

Something familiar, cold and hot at the same time dried my flesh where soon, I felt the sharpness of a someday so dreadful as it clutched my throat heavily, happily, and I accepted its embrace with a cracked smile.

* * *

Maxwell I. Gold is a multiple award nominated author who writes prose poetry and short stories in weird and cosmic fiction. He is a regular contributor to Spectral Realms, and his work has also appeared in Weirdbook Magazine, Space and Time Magazine, Startling Stories, Strange Horizons and many anthologies and magazines. Maxwell is also the author of Oblivion in Flux: A Collection of Cyber Prose from Crystal Lake Publishing.

He’s a proud Columbus, Ohio native and currently serves on the Board of Trustees for the Horror Writers Association as the Treasurer for the organization.

Academics by Luis Ceriz

Cry Baby

By Mike Murphy

Once more, the child started crying. To Lt. George Maltin of the United States Space Corps, the noise seemed more shrill each time. “Not again!” he bellowed, tossing and turning on his uncomfortable cot. After a couple of minutes, he leapt up, pressing his hands over his ears in a worthless attempt to gain quiet. “I’m gonna go nuts!” he screamed. He took a few steps to the wall—the room wasn’t very big—and pounded on it. “Hey, warden! Warden!” he yelled.

With some metallic clangs, the wall slowly slid back to reveal Crun, his jailer. Crun was a Mingari, and, as such, had a high-domed forehead, three stubby legs, and one tentacle-like arm projecting from the center of his torso. “Is something wrong, Lieutenant?” he asked calmly.

Maltin was incredulous. “Is... Is something...” he stammered. “Can’t you hear the crying?”

“Of course,” he responded.

“Can you do something about it?”

“If I wished to,” Crun replied with something resembling a chuckle.

“You son of a—”

“My advice,” his jailer interrupted him, “would be to calm down.” “How?” Lt. Maltin asked, his nerves frayed. “All day, every day, for hours on end, all I can hear in this cell you’ve locked me in is that crying.”

“Can’t you muffle the sound?” Crun inquired, slightly amused.

“You’ve taken away anything I could muffle it with!” the prisoner protested. “I can only press my hands against my ears for so long.”

“I do not feel sorry for you. You are here to serve your punishment for the heinous crime you committed.”

“It was an accident.”

“Of course, it was,” Crun replied sarcastically.

“It was!” Maltin pleaded. “The dust storm kicked up when Captain Kittredge and I were landing our ship. Our scanners were inoperative. We couldn’t see the boy.”

“His name was Frad.” “I know that!” Maltin said. “God, how I know that!”

“So,” Crun went on, “because of your incompetence in landing your craft on my world during a minor dust storm, you crushed a child under one of your landing struts.”

“I told the judge—” “I was at your trial. I heard everything that was said,” Crun interjected. “You were found guilty. This is your sentence.”

“To listen to a recording of the boy crying for hours on end? It’s... It’s inhuman.”

“We are not human,” the Mingari told the Earthman.

The Lieutenant paced his small cell some more. “I... I can’t take this,” he told Crun.

“You have the option of choosing death, as your captain did.”

“Oh,” Maltin continued. “You’d like that. Wouldn’t you?” “How I might feel makes no difference.”

“The captain didn’t know how you’d execute him,” Maltin went on, growing livid at the memory. Was it really only a few weeks ago?

“Turning him over to Frad’s parents seemed the only reasonable thing to do,” Crun said.

“You’re savages.”

“We did not kill a child.” “I’ll go nuts if I have to put up with more of this!” the Earthman screamed.

“You will not,” Crun replied.

“What do you mean?” Maltin asked hopefully, looking up at his jailer.

“The computer will not allow it.” “Computer?” he continued, confused. “I thought you were the boss.” Crun explained, “Oh no. I merely tend to the computer. It will not allow you to, as you said, ‘go nuts.’” He paused briefly to swat an airborne buzzing something resembling a fly with his tentacle and insert the carcass into his fanged mouth. “You see,” he continued after chewing, swallowing, and licking his lips, “through a network of sensors in these walls, the computer constantly monitors your condition. It knows how much you can physically tolerate.” “It has a pretty high opinion of me.” “Every day, it will mete out your sentence until you think you can’t possibly take any more,” the alien continued. “It will push you to the limit – to the very brink of your sanity! – and then it will back off and allow you to recuperate just enough to resume your sentence.”

“The judge has to reconsider,” Maltin said emphatically.

“She will not.”

“I can’t take 50 more years of this!”

“Where did you get that figure?” Crun asked, confused. “I’m... I’m thirty,” the Earthman explained. “Eighty years is the average human lifespan.”

“Not on Mingar.”

“What... What do you mean?” the Lieutenant inquired nervously. “We live for two hundred years.”

“Bully for you,” Maltin added sarcastically.

“Now that you are breathing our atmosphere, you will likewise live for two centuries.”

“You’re joking?” he said, shocked. “Our doctors confirmed the changes happening to your body during your pre- incarceration physical.” “Two hundred years!” Maltin bellowed. “I can’t... I’ll... I’ll never survive for that long!” “The computer will see that you do complete your life sentence.” “I can’t stay in this room—with that noise—until I’m two hundred years old!” Maltin screamed, pacing nervously.

“You will,” Crun responded matter-of-factly.

At that moment, the wall began noisily sliding home. Maltin grabbed at it futilely. “No, no! Wait!” he pleaded.

It clicked back into place, and the recording of Frad’s crying grew even louder. Maltin’s body shook uncontrollably, and he let out a scream that, ever so briefly, drowned out the crying.

End.

Mike’s prose work has appeared in several magazines and anthologies. He is the writer of two short films, Dark Chocolate and Hotline.

In 2020, his screenplay Die Laughing was a semi-finalist in the Unique Voices Screenplay Competition from Creative Screenwriting magazine. The following year, his TV pilot script “The Bullying Squad” was a quarter-finalist in the Emerging Writers Genre Screenplay Competition.

In 2013, he won the inaugural Marion Thauer Brown Audio Drama Scriptwriting Competition. In 2020, he came in second. For several of the in-between years, he served as a judge.

Mike keeps a blog at audioauthor.blogspot.com.

The Slithering Silence

By Lamont A. Turner

I can’t say when it started. Maybe it had always been there, lurking in the dark corners of the room, waiting for the moment when it could expand outward, dragging the darkness with it. I first became aware of it about two weeks ago when I noticed something moving out of the corner of my eye. We all experience that occasionally, letting a stray shadow or a bit of light reflected off a shiny surface trick us into thinking there is something creeping up on us. On this particular day, however, I was bombarded by the sensation. Every time I bent my head to read, I felt as though I were being stalked.

Eventually, I abandoned my novel and retreated to the kitchen where I discovered Mrs. Christian discussing the mental health of the Prime Minister with Professor Morrison, a fellow boarder. Professor Morrison, being from the States, seemed only marginally interested in the topic, but submitted enough comments to maintain polite discourse.

“He just hasn’t been the same since he went into the hospital,” Mrs. Christian was saying, just as she noticed me lingering in the doorway. “What do you think, Doctor Philips?”

“I can’t say I’ve been following it enough to have an opinion,” I said, walking in to take a seat across from Morrison. “I’ve been much too busy with my book to bother with politics.”

“I’ve read some of your articles on molecular biology,” Morrison said. “I’d be very interested to read a more in-depth treatment.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” I said with a chuckle. “The book is about some of the more obscure bands that popped up in the wake of the Beatles. I don’t expect to get a Nobel Prize for it, but the advance funded my stay in this delightful domicile.” Mrs. Christian was pleased enough by my flattery to fetch me a plate of bread pudding. “I have to confess; I haven’t spent a moment working on it since I arrived here.”

“I haven’t accomplished much either,” Morrison said, staring at my breakfast with undisguised disgust.

“What are you working on, if you don’t think me rude for asking?”

“It’s a hunting expedition,” Morrison replied.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t take offense, “but you don’t strike me as the sportsman type. What are you hunting?”

illustration by Desmond Rhae Harris

“Cracks,” Morrison said. “Cracks in the dam holding back a torrent of hideous nullibiety.”

“If it were earlier in the day, I might have mustered the effort to feign comprehension,” I said. “I’d have an easier time sorting out Mrs. Christian’s political musings.”

“We dwell on an island in a vast sea of emptiness,” Morrison explained. “Beyond the barriers of our perception, the void presses against us, always threatening to wear down our defenses. The void, of course, has no sinister intent, there is no intelligence to guide it, however, there are certain entities here who desire to let it in.”

“Certain entities?” I asked. “If what you say is true, letting this—substance in would erase all life. Who would desire that?”

“This is the part where I’ll most likely lose you,” Morrison said. “You’ve been polite enough to indulge me up to this point, but I doubt if you’ll stick with me once I bring up the monsters.”

“Monsters?” I asked, glancing around for Mrs. Christian to look for signs she was in on the joke. At some point she’d abandoned us. I was alone in the room with a man I was beginning to suspect was a little mad.

“There are creatures older than time that flit about on the periphery of reality, unable to fully acclimate to our carbon based world. They rage against their impotence, and seek to wipe…”

Morrison’s mouth continued to form words, but those words never reached my ears. For a moment, I was completely deaf. It lasted less than a minute, not even long enough for Morrison to notice my distress, but it left me unnerved. I made my excuses and returned to my room, leaving half of my bread pudding uneaten.

Mrs. Christian didn’t allow smoking in the rooms, so, that night, shortly after dinner, I braved the cold to smoke my pipe on the small balcony, glad I’d decided to pay the extra ten pounds a week for the privilege. It was a windless night, and my pipe would have lit easily but for the shaking of my hands. I broke the first match, dropped the second before I could put it to the bowl, and finally succeeded on the third try by setting my pipe on the railing to steady it while dropping in the flame.

My father had died of a brain tumor when he was thirty, eleven years younger than my present age. One of the first symptoms had been a sudden loss of hearing in his right ear. The visions came later, haunting him right up till the end. By then, he was completely deaf. He died heedless of the volume or intensity of his screams. I’d already decided to return to the city, when I thought I saw something moving in the copse of moor birch standing in the moonlight before the distant thicket. At first I thought it was a large black mastiff, as it seemed to be sniffing the ground around one of the trees and had the general contours of a dog, but as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I noticed long tendril-like fingers extending from the fore paws, raking at the grass. Two yellowish symmetrical markings on the part of its head that should have been between the ears suddenly vanished, then reappeared, giving me the impression of blinking eyes. The thing was staring at me!

My pipe fell from my mouth, but made no sound as it landed at my feet, scattering tobacco across the balcony. Kicking off my slipper as an ember burned into the fabric, I let slip a curse that never made it past my lips. Shocked at my inability to hear my own speech, I repeated the oath, this time pushing it out as a scream.

“Damn!” echoed across the empty field before me. The thing was gone.

The next morning, I was embarrassed when Mrs. Christian inquired into the state of my toes, assuming I had stubbed one of them the previous evening. I assured her my digits were all in working order, and apologized for my outburst. Morrison grunted from behind the morning paper.

“Clumsiness is a sign of genius, as is a colorful vocabulary,” he said, putting the paper down. “I don’t suppose you’ll be shouting from your balcony today though, not with the storm heading our way.”

“It’s supposed to rain today?” I asked, getting a nod. “I was planning on making a trip to the city to run some errands.”

“You might want to put that off,” Mrs. Christian said, filling my tea cup from a somewhat battered pot. “The roads leading into town will be impassable a half an hour after it starts coming down. It’s really a disgrace the way our infrastructure is neglected.”

“Better keep that clumsiness in check,” Morrison said. “It sounds like we won’t be able to send for an ambulance if you bang more than your toe on the furniture.”

I smiled politely, but the implication of being beyond aid in the event of a health crisis troubled me. I recalled my father had suffered seizures. Seeking distraction, I returned to our conversation of the previous evening.

“You neglected to tell me why you think you’ll find your cracks out here in such an innocuous locale,” I said, just as Morrison was returning to his paper.

“Folklore,” he said. “The stories parents use to frighten their children into behaving have certain characteristics in this region that are unique to areas where the creatures I’m seeking have displayed an unusual level of activity.”

“What kind of creatures?” I asked. “I assume you aren’t talking about fairies and goblins.”

“Ghosts would be a better fit,” Morrison said, “at least as far as the way an average person would describe them. They often act as temporary portals for the void. The average person sees them as a blur, or what they interpret as a flash of light, often in the rough shape of a human being. It’s not uncommon for people, unable to process a glimpse at utter emptiness, to mentally fill the space in with an image of a person, often a deceased loved one. These mental reconstructions, often imperfect, sometimes are described as being transparent, or devoid of color.”

“So, you’re saying everyone who claims to have seen a ghost has actually seen one of these things?” I asked.

“Not at all,” Morrison said. “These particular sightings are always accompanied by either a ringing in the ears, or near total deafness, lasting as long as the entity is in the vicinity and channeling the void. People are reacting to the void itself, rather than the creatures.”

This, of course, troubled me. For a moment, I suspected Morrison of toying with me before realizing he had no way of knowing of my recent bouts with deafness. I began to take him a little more seriously.

“Has anyone seen these things when they weren’t doing whatever it was to let this void seep in?” I asked.

“That is difficult to answer,” he said. “There have been reports from people suffering certain brain injuries, but we can’t be sure of how much credence to give to the statements of people who are possibly impaired. The only real clue they might have actually seen them is the number of concurring descriptions. They always describe them as shadowy amorphous things, usually roughly humanoid, but capable of extending their limbs to freakish lengths and possessing bodies that seem to be jointless, their arms, legs, and even torsos being capable of twisting about like a snake, or a tentacle.”

“I suppose they have glowing red eyes and long fangs,” I said, my flippancy an attempt to disguise my unease.

“Actually, their eyes are usually described as having a yellow tint,” he said. “As for the fangs, I don’t recall hearing of any. In the one case I can think of where a mouth was mentioned at all, it was described as a large gaping hole that stretched to grotesque proportions as the head expanded to accommodate it.”

Was it possible I was so disturbed I had allowed our discourse to shape my memory of the previous evening? How was it possible the monsters he’d described conformed to my hallucination? I didn’t want to hear anymore. I excused myself and returned to my room just as the rain began to fall.

I laid curled up on the bed, listening to the patter on the roof steadily increase in volume and tempo, depressed, but grateful for the respite from the headaches. They’d started about a week before, coming on suddenly and lasting for hours. I thought of my father, a towel wrapped around his head to shield him from the light, moaning while he rubbed his temples. He would never speak when the head aches were upon him, not even to answer a question.

Reaching for the book on my nightstand, I happened to glance out the window. There was something out there, a gray shape against the white sheets of rain. I sat up, trying to make it out as it came near enough to almost press its face against the glass. It was a man, staring plaintively in at me, mouthing a warning I couldn’t hear. I got up and took a few steps toward him, ready to defend myself with the lamp I wielded like a club. Suddenly, I recognized the mournful visage of my father, while simultaneously realizing I could no longer hear the rain beating on the roof. I could see it was still coming down, assailing my visitor as he peered in at me, but I could not hear it!

I pounded on my ears, and the vision of my father dissolved as the rain washed over him in a roar. As I fell onto the bed, my heart trying to explode out of my chest, I tried to catch my breath and cursed myself for allowing Morrison to fill my head with phantoms. I vowed to avoid the man as much as possible. A man who can’t trust his own thoughts shouldn’t subject his imagination to the ravings of other men of unsound mind.

It was still raining the following morning, so I put The Dave Clark Five on my MP3 player and tried to work on the next chapter of my book. An hour later, I had completed about half a paragraph when the music stopped abruptly. This time it was because I’d neglected to charge my device, but the fright it gave me was enough to end my literary aspirations. All I could think of was getting into see the doctor. It had been nearly thirty years since my father had succumbed to his tumor. Since then, medical science had progressed considerably. If I wasn’t too far gone already, there was a chance I might not share my father’s fate. There were also drugs to alleviate the symptoms, if I could get them administered before my hallucinations impelled me to acts of fatal madness.

I took my meals in my room, and spent most of the day brooding over a bottle of sherry and chain smoking cigarettes to conserve my limited supply of pipe tobacco. The rain finally having let up around dusk, I stood on the balcony, daring the ghosts and monsters to appear. I wanted to face them down, to shout at them that I knew they weren’t real. Seeing nothing, I leaned over the railing to see if any were clinging to the wall. Instead of monsters, I saw Morrison, standing over a dark shape sprawled out on the pavement. It was a black, shapeless thing resembling nothing so much as a pool of melted wax. Sticking out of it was a human arm. I gasped, and Morrison looked up at me like a lover caught in the arms of another woman. I wasn’t supposed to be seeing whatever was happening down there.

The hand twitched, and the ooze bulged at one end as though something were trying to rise up out of it, before it collapsed in on itself and was still. I ran back into my room and jumped into the bed, pulling the blanket up over my head like a child trying to hide from the shadows in the corner. It’s not real, I thought, repeating it over and over in my head until I fell asleep.

Morrison was in the kitchen the next morning, burning something in a frying pan.

“Good morning,” he said cheerily. “I’ve been trying to fry some eggs, but I keep getting distracted and burning the damned things. I think I may have to settle for some toast and jam.”

“Where’s Mrs. Christian?” I asked, taking a seat at the table.

“She had to go into town,” he said. “Now that the roads are passable, she wanted to stock up on necessities. You’ll have to fend for yourself this morning. Hopefully you’ll have better luck than I have.”

“I think I’ll just have some tea,” I said. “I can get a bite to eat in town.”

“Oh, you’re planning on leaving?”

“I’ll be back this afternoon if everything goes right,” I said. “I have some business matters to take care of.”

Morrison looked at me as though he were puzzled. He had the look of a man trying to decide how to handle a difficult situation.

“You might want to wait a bit to make sure the roads are clear,” he said. “Mrs. Christian had the benefit of an experienced driver.”

I told him I was sure I’d be fine, but he was insistent on the point. It was clear he wanted to keep me there.

“You act as though you are afraid to be alone here,” I said, determined to force an explanation from him.

“I don’t want the authorities mucking about until I’ve finished my work,” he said. “I know last night must have been a shock, but it’s nothing the authorities need to be bothered about.”

“Last night?”

“I wasn’t sure you saw me, you disappeared so quickly, but as soon as you said you were heading into town I knew. I can’t blame you for being alarmed.”

“But that wasn’t real,” I said. “It couldn’t have been. I thought I’d imagined it.”

“It was real,” Morrison said. “Mrs. Christian is dead.”

“I’m not hearing this!” I shouted. “This is all a dream, an illusion created by a lump of cancerous flesh pressed up against my brain. You’re not even here!”

“The cancer isn’t in your brain,” Morrison said. “It’s everywhere, corrupting the very ground we stand on. You have to accept that. There’s nothing wrong with you. Everything I’ve been telling you is true.”

“You’re making this worse!” I shouted. “You expect me to believe this nonsense? You expect…” My mouth was still moving, but the sound was gone. Seeing Morrison was staring past me, his face contorted into a grimace of utter revulsion. I turned and saw Mrs. Christian standing in the doorway. She stood there long enough to nod at us, and then scurried away, leaving me alone with the madman standing by the stove. I wanted to follow her, to warn her of the lunatic she harbored under her roof, but there was no point. I couldn’t even hear my own words.

“What did you see?” Morrison asked.

“Mrs. Christian, of course,” I replied, surprised my hearing had returned so quickly.

“I saw a blank space in the doorway, a blur of white.” Morrison said. “I told you, Mrs. Christian is dead.”

I didn’t bother to reply. I was through listening to his ravings. I rushed from the kitchen, hoping to catch up to Mrs. Christian, but she wasn’t in the parlor. Nor was she anywhere else. I searched the halls and the grounds outside, and even ventured into her room after my knocking had received no response. I could only conclude she’d gone into town, and had stopped to give us a nod on her way out. I resolved to follow her. I finished dressing, found the keys to my Volkswagen, and pushed past Morrison, who was in the parlor, peering through the window by the door.

I got as far as the top porch step and froze. The drive was full of elongated black monstrosities, lounging about like leeches attached to the back of some unfortunate beast, sucking the life from the Earth itself. One slithered like a serpent from under my car, while another crouched on the hood, glaring at me, daring me to reclaim my vehicle. I stumbled back into the house and stood with my back against the door, panting.

“What is it?” Morrison asked. “What did you see out there?”

“My death,” I responded. “I’m going to die just like my father. It’s too late. I doubt if anything can save me now.”

“Tell me,” Morrison demanded. “What did you see?”

“The monsters you put into my head,” I told him. “They were just as you described them, horrible shapeless things with yellow eyes. I hope your pleased with yourself. You’ve made this all the harder for me.”

“You can see them as they really are!” Morrison exclaimed. “You are the solution I’ve been searching for!”

“What are you babbling about?” I asked, sliding down the door to sit on the floor, my head in my hands.

“Poor Mrs. Christian must have stumbled on the crack,” Morrison said. “That’s why she was attacked, and being in such close proximity to the void, the creatures had the power to overcome her. I came upon her as she stumbled out of the door and onto the lawn under your window, and watched as she died. I assume the thing that killed her also expired from its exertions once it was divorced from its source of power.”

“Stop it.” I muttered. “Please just leave me alone. I don’t want to hear anymore of your insane rambling.”

“I can make them all go away,” he said crouching down so we were eye to eye. “Help me seal up the rift in reality and we’ll both head into town together.”

“Why wouldn’t I call an ambulance?” I asked.

“Because then I’d be forced to tell them you murdered Mrs. Christian. You’re hardly in a state to put up a believable defense, and, as far as you know, you may actually be guilty. Let me help you work it out. Just humor me for a bit. Please.”

“What do you want?” I asked. He was right. I couldn’t be sure of anything. Maybe helping him act out his fantasy would pacify him long enough to allow me to call for help.

“First, you have to tell me where they congregate,” he said, standing. “Then, I’ll need you to keep them at bay while I set up the equipment needed to close the gap. We won’t be able to hear each other once we’re in the thick of it, so I’ll be counting on you to follow my directions to the letter.”

“How do you expect me to hold them back,” I said. “I couldn’t fight my way past an angry toddler.”

“It won’t involve anything as physically stressful as fighting toddlers,” he said, extending a hand to help me to my feet. “The circle of salt will protect us. I just need you to make sure it stays intact, and to point out where they are congregating for an assault.”

He led me to his room, where I watched him load several canisters, a battery pack, and a metal box about the size of a toaster into a backpack. He explained the box would project a stream of ions, stitching up the rip in the fabric of reality. The canisters contained salt. The pain in my head made it difficult to concentrate, and I paid little attention as he babbled on about something in the chemical composition of salt being abhorrent to the creatures. I was a blind man being led by a lunatic, not wanting to follow, but unable to make my way on my own.

Morrison suggested we begin our search in the parts of the house neither of us would have had occasion to frequent. The wisdom of this decision, at least in context of the narrative Morrison had constructed, was evident as soon as we reached the stairs leading to the basement where Mrs. Christian did the laundry. Three steps down, Morrison was cut off mid-sentence. Our ears were useless. We continued down, guided by the beam of Morrison’s flashlight, until we reached the string suspended from the ceiling lamp in the center of the room. Morrison tugged the light on, revealing walls covered by an undulating black mass. I tried to make Morrison aware of the horrors surrounding us by gripping his shoulder, but he was fixated on something on the far wall. As the squirming mass separated, peeling off into individual creatures, I saw a jagged crack in the wall, extending from the ceiling nearly to the floor. Morrison was already encircling us in a ring of salt as the things loped toward us, reaching for us with tentacle-like fingers that stretched out ahead of them as they rushed forward.

Seeing more of them peel themselves off the walls to the sides and behind us, I panicked. Unable to believe such a ghastly scene could have originated in my imagination, I ran. I leapt over Morrison as he crouched with his canister of salt, and dashed up the steps and toward the parlor. Flinging open the door, I saw more of the creatures. They encircled the house, swaying in unison, transfixed on the walls behind me. Seeing a gap, I raced through, unheeded. My car key slipped from my trembling grasp, but I retrieved them and got the door open. Once behind the wheel, I twisted the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. I turned the key again, and put my hand on the dash. There was no vibration.

I sat there, tapping on the wheel with quivering fingers. I had to get out of there, but the nearest house I knew of was miles away, and my head was pounding. The dashboard blurred, as did the scene through the windshield. The house, the creatures, the surrounding woods, all appeared as though submerged in murky waters. I was down there with them, sinking, my body weightless. Everything faded, the color washing out of my surroundings until all that remained was a seeming infinitude of white. I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“It’s over,” said a voice. I turned toward it and saw my father, seated next to me. We were in the old Ford Falcon He’d owned when I was a boy and we’d briefly tried to make a go of it in the States. The Ford, being an American car, my father was behind the wheel, just as he would have been back then.

“Am I dead?” I asked.

“You’re as alive as I am,” he responded with a reassuring smile. “You’re sick, but it’s not too late. It was the house, or rather the crack in the foundation, that made it seem as though your illness was more advanced. We’ll get you help now. You’ll be alright.”

A little boy again, I buried my face in my hands and wept. When I raised my head again, the creatures were gone, and everything was as it should be. Morrison was in the passenger seat, his hand on my shoulder.

“How?”

“After you ran off, I reversed the ion flow, temporarily widening the crack,” he said. “It was risky, but I knew it would lure the remainder of the creatures into the basement. They flung themselves into the void, unable to resist its pull as I opened it wider, and I could see them. It was a brief enough glimpse, but I can understand now why you ran.”

“You closed it up?” I asked, realizing my head no longer ached. “They’re gone?”

“That batch is gone,” he said. “I’m sure there are more out there, but you needn’t concern yourself with that.”

An hour later we were driving away from the house, early 1960s R and B blaring from the car speakers. It was a poor recording, but I relished every pop and hiss.

End.

Lamont Turner is a New Orleans area writer whose work has appeared in numerous print and online venues. His short story collection, Souls In A Blender was released by St.Rooster Books in 2021.

Contractions

By Kevin David Anderson

The day Aaron realized he wanted to eat his children, he knew it was time to leave. The urges were first revealed in nightmares with gruesome cinematic clarity, a horror show starring him in a reel of blood and pain. But now, the scenes of him feasting on his own offspring ran in high definition in the wake of day. Like the other men before him, it was time to say goodbye before he did something no man should have to live with. Something no sane man could live with.

“Stay another night?” his wife said. “Just one?”

Aaron held her boneless hands and pulled her aquatic looking limbs around him. Tears streaked her pale cheeks. “Heather, you know I can’t.” He brushed a wisp of hair from her face and felt the strength of her new limbs encircling him.

Like other women in town, Heather’s arms had transformed. Seemingly overnight, human skin and fingers had given way to tentacles that could stretch far beyond their length. Just how far no one knew, but yesterday she had closed the front gate outlining their property without leaving the porch.

“I would stop you,” she said. “If you tried to hurt the children.”

“Don’t make this harder than it is,” Aaron whispered. “I got the urges, and I can’t stay.”

Heather’s arms held him like pythons, constricting, suffocating. Her cheek nuzzled the silver memento around Aaron’s neck, a modest cross. She pulled back slightly. “Can’t understand why you wear this. You don’t even believe.”

“You gave it to me,” Aaron said. “That’s reason enough.”

She looked up into Aaron’s eyes. “I don’t want you to be alone when it happens. No one should be alone.”

Aaron touched the cross with his fingertips. “I won’t be,” he said. “Iggy Patel is going with me.”

Heather almost laughed. “Iggy Pat—you don’t even like him.”

Aaron chuckled, and rested his forehead against hers. “Hate his guts.” They both laughed. “Take care of our girls,” he whispered. He said this knowing she would slay anyone that came near. “And if you see me again, you know what must be done.”

She nodded, closed her eyes, and released her husband of fifteen years. Aaron picked up his pack and shotgun, stepped off the porch his grandfather had built and began walking, never looking back.

As he passed through the front gate, he held an image of his family framed in his mind. His four girls, all sandy blonde peppered with cinnamon freckles, standing around their mother. He preferred to picture Heather the day he first met her, stepping off a bus from Baltimore, lost, broke, and the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. But her new, end-of-the-world self kept creeping in.

When Aaron first saw that her arms were transforming, he knew what it meant. It had been happening all over town, mothers went through the change just a few days before fathers began to get the insatiable hunger, the uncontrollable desire to eat children. Best Aaron could figure was that it was nature’s way of trying to strike some sort of insane balance in a chaotically shifting world.

Thankful at least, that enough was now known that he could avoid the fate of so many other families in the county—mothers clashing with fathers in an unholy custody battle. When a mother won, a father lay on the ground, often without a head. But if the father won, and the kids were not able to get away, then everybody died. And not quickly.

It should have seemed horrific, Aaron knew, the idea of eating children. His own children. But it wasn’t and it terrified him. So much had changed in the last two months since the universe had stopped growing. No, that wasn’t what the word they’d used. Expanding, he remembered.

At first, it was believed that the global changes were the result of an industrial accident in space. But no amount of orbiting toxins could account for the fact that rocks now sometimes exploded, rabbits gathered in ferocious, carnivorous packs, and the color yellow was now painful to the touch. The last scientific expert Aaron saw on CNN, just before all broadcasts stopped, claimed the universe was now snapping back, contracting, and the laws of physics—laws that once made the world a place of reason and understanding—were now mere suggestions that nature could ignore as it saw fit.

It was as good an explanation as any other, Aaron had thought while watching the scientist illustrate his theory with an elaborate equation that he didn’t have the remotest chance of understanding. But deep down he knew nobody really had a clue as to why it was all coming to such a strange end. To his mind, a physics equation couldn’t explain why the trees all lived underground now, or why the clouds had decided to hunt and feed on airplanes.

Iggy signaled Aaron with a gentle wave as they met up on the edge of town, neither saying more than two words to one another before heading out. Aaron stayed a good ten paces behind Iggy, hoping that the distance would discourage any notion Iggy might be entertaining of starting a conversation. He had nothing to say to Iggy and he hoped to God Iggy didn’t have anything to say to him.

By mid-afternoon, Aaron could smell Iggy’s physical efforts wafting back to him on the trail. It curled his nostrils and he lingered farther back. There wasn’t much else to compete with the odor. Flowers no longer bloomed and the fresh air didn’t seem fresh anymore. Staleness rode the breeze, bringing with it the gentle reminder that it was all winding down.

Aaron was thinking about tying a bandana around his face to mask Iggy’s stench when he felt the contraction coming. Just a trembling in his bowels at first but within a few seconds, the entire planet vibrated. When a contraction came there were two choices, hold onto something solid and try to remain standing or lie down flat on your back, eyes toward the heavens, and pray that God still gave a shit.

Letting his pack fall to the ground, Aaron dropped fast. He pressed his hands flat, palms down into the dirt, and held his breath. His guts ached, gas expanded inside him, and he felt like his head would pop. He fought against his fear to keep his eyes open. If this was it, the last and final one, Aaron wanted to see it. To face it. To gaze down its gullet and maybe catch a glimpse of what will come next.

The afternoon sky folded in on itself to the relentless pounding of thunder. Clouds appeared then vanished in the span of a moment and just when Aaron thought it was over, then came the pressure. Like weights pressing down on his body, a jolting acceleration, the entire planet becoming a roller coaster, plunging downward, banking hard to the right, then snapping back hard to the left.

Stomach acid burned the back of Aaron’s throat. His eyeballs grew heavy, the vibrations in his skull seemed to be trying to shake away the memory of all he held dear; who he was, the girls, Heather. Then as quickly as the contraction came, it vanished with a suddenness that almost lifted him into a seated position. He exhaled fast, vomiting a little, then rolled over on his side. After wiping his mouth, he looked over for Iggy. The grass and weeds were about two feet high and if Iggy had hit the dirt, he was obscured. “Hey, Ig,” Aaron called out. “You still with me?”

A quiet second passed before Aaron saw Iggy’s hand rise up over the crest of the grass, delivering a very unenthusiastic thumbs-up.

“Am I crazy or are those getting worse?” Iggy said, voice somewhat muffled by the grass.

Aaron pushed himself up and wrapped his arms around his knees. “No, I don’t think that was any worse than this morning.” But Aaron didn’t believe that. Dealing with four young girls, he had become accustomed to downplaying almost anything put in front of him as a means of comfort. It had worked for a while, but then the contractions came.

At least that’s what a physicist at some university Aaron had never heard of had decided to call them. Some other scientists had tried calling them celestial gravity subsonic inversions, but the name just didn’t stick. But whatever they called them, they were getting worse. No contraction had ever produced vomit from him before, and although the pressure was always there, that last one felt like an elephant squatting on his chest.

“No, I disagree,” Iggy said, beginning to stand. “I think they are getting worse.” He picked up his pack. “Just wish I knew why.”

Iggy was like that. Aaron remembered him from high school, always asking questions, always wanting to understand. But trying to understand the physics at the end of the world was like trying to understand why left socks always disappeared from the dryer. No one was ever going to be able to understand why cars now drove themselves, or why mountains disappeared in the night. The end of the world had its own understanding.

Iggy was nearly to his feet when he suddenly froze, eyes forward. Aaron tried to find what Iggy was locked onto but saw nothing. A few still beats passed as Aaron held his breath. Then Iggy craned his head back, making several quick hand gestures. They hadn’t worked any signals out beforehand, but it didn’t take a code breaker to surmise what Iggy was saying.

Aaron got the message. They had company.

With the ears of an experienced hunter, Aaron tuned in to the sounds. There were at least two different approach patterns; one to the right, the other dead ahead. Iggy gestured, identifying what kind of creatures were about to strike. He wiggled his fingers and forearm, mimicking the motion of a snake.

The Ones that Slither, Aaron thought. He gripped his gun, scanned, and tried not to breathe. The former mammals that had lost most of their bones usually hunted in pairs, attacking so fast victims rarely had the opportunity to scream before being swallowed alive.

Aaron motioned back for Iggy to draw a bead on the one in front while he targeted the one on the right. He had just gotten his gun up, checked the sites when the tall grass moved. Flecks of auburn hair weaved in the fading sunlight, then dove like a sea serpent moving across the ocean’s surface.

Aaron followed the bending grass, trying to find an opening. He soon realized that if he waited for a clear shot it would be on him before he got a chance to fire. Narrowing his gaze, he anticipated the thing’s route, took aim, and held his breath. But before he pulled the trigger it slithered into an opening. He saw its face, mouth open, teeth bent outward, hair flapping around its scalp like alien tendrils. Glimpsing a white patch of skin on the nape of its neck, he fired.

He rocked back from the recoil, placing a hand behind him for balance. The beast’s forward progress had been halted, but it would not lie still. Blood sprayed up like a broken sprinkler, as its deformed mass thrashed in the grass.

Aaron heard Iggy’s rifle fire, then the fast sound of the bolt being pulled back and slamming back again. Aaron got to his feet and saw Iggy fire once again. The thing was hit but still charged.

“Iggy, pull back,” Aaron screamed, running forward, raising his gun. The thing and Iggy were so close Aaron didn’t have a clear shot. “Iggy get down,” Aaron ordered, heart pounding.

But Iggy held his ground, slammed the bolt forward again and fired. The shell casing almost hit Aaron as he arrived at Iggy’s side, shotgun poised to fire. Both men held still waiting for the result of Iggy’s last shot.

A hissing moan rose up from the grass, then something large and furry flopped over, tail twitching, lungs gasping, then it lay still.

Aaron let out a long hot breath as he knelt, his weight coming down much harder than he’d intended.

He looked over at Iggy, whose eyes were huge white spheres against the backdrop of his dark olive skin. “You…” Aaron started then decided to take a few more breaths before attempting speech again.

“You all right?”

“I think…” Iggy looked down. “I think I need to change my shorts.”

“Well, damn, that sure as hell ain’t gonna make you smell any better.”

Iggy, smiled, then laughed.

Aaron reached for Iggy’s rifle. “Let me see that relic.” Aaron sized up Iggy’s old firearm. “Jeez, Ig, if I’d known you were gonna cover my ass with a BB gun, I’d have grabbed you my kid’s slingshot.”

“It’s a family heirloom.”

“Well, your heirloom just about ended you. Next time just hurl insults at the things.”

Iggy snatched his weapon feigning an insulted look. “Okay, great white hunter, how’d you do?”

“I took its head nearly off,” Aaron said but remembered the thing still thrashing in the grass. He put a hand on Iggy’s shoulder, pushing himself up. “I’d best go check.”

With his muzzle trained ahead, he returned to his firing position, then stepped over to where the blood had redecorated the grassy landscape. The thrashing had stopped and only the breeze brought movement. Auburn hair fluttered under the weight of blood and pieces of scalp liberated from the young woman’s head by a shotgun blast.

Aaron pushed the head over with his muzzle, allowing its dead eyes to stare skyward. Scarcely discernible as human, the eyes had been pulled around to the side of the head, like a bird, reptile. Dropping to a knee Aaron tried to guess how young she must have been when it happened. Fifteen and not a day more he decided. The common wisdom about this phenomenon was that it happened not only across species but seemed to occur in adolescent offspring. Teenagers. The first one Aaron had killed still had the headphones from some device wrapped around its bloody and boneless neck.

“Oh, hell,” Iggy said. “I think that’s Gail Michener’s kid.”

Aaron didn’t answer and Iggy must have thought he didn’t remember her.

“You know,” Iggy continued, “Gail Anderson in high school.”

But Aaron did remember. He’d been seeing her off and on about the same time he started dating his future wife. Not a proud moment.

“She married that drifter, remember?”

Aaron nodded hoping that would be enough for Iggy to drop it. His chest tightened and acid burned his throat as the history he’d denied himself flooded back. He had broken it off with Gail after falling for Heather. A few weeks later, Gail was showing early signs of motherhood under her waitress uniform. Then almost overnight she was married and picking out baby names. Gail never said Aaron was the father, but she never said he wasn’t. Mostly because he hadn’t asked.

Aaron closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see how much the auburn hair clinging to frayed pieces of scalp lying in the blood-splattered grass was the same shade as the locks on his four girls. Iggy shouldered his gun. “Didn’t you go out with Gail, way back when?” Aaron took a deep breath and tried to ignore Iggy.

“Lots of people said that Michener guy wasn’t the father—”

“Jesus Christ, Iggy,” Aaron snapped. “You in a goddamn sewing circle?”

Iggy fell quiet and bent back a little like grass in the breeze.

Aaron turned away. “Come on. I want a few miles between us and this mess before dark. I’ll take point.”

They walked in silence until Aaron’s feet hurt. The sun started to set in the north this evening and there was just enough twilight left to gather wood for a fire. Making camp at the top of a hill deep in the woods, the only sign of civilization was a fairly large farmhouse, nestled a good half-mile away.

Spying it through his binoculars, Aaron could see it was occupied, at least two adults, and there was a child’s swing set in the backyard. Knowing that Iggy’s cannibalistic urges had started a few nights before his own, Aaron decided to keep the detail about the swing set to himself.

Both men sat down on opposite sides of the fire, pulled out the sandwiches their respective wives had prepared and started to eat in silence. After a few bites, Aaron started to feel bad about snapping at Iggy, and since they were going to be each other’s only company for the next two days, he thought he’d try to smooth things out. Lake Placid, the place where the men in the county had collectively decided to gather when the urges struck them, was a long hard hike. And even though he didn’t care for Iggy much, they needed to work together to make the journey.

“So, Ig, have you heard anything from your part of the world?”

Iggy swallowed, then frowned. “This is my part of the world. We were born in the same town, jackass.”

Aaron sighed and forced himself not to reply with an insult. “You know what I mean. Anything from a relative back in India or something?”

“We haven’t heard anything in a week,” Iggy said. “Before Skype went down, my mom’s sister said that the birds were turning back into dinosaurs.” Iggy shook his head. “Most of Asia went quiet after that.”

Aaron had no idea what birds had to do with dinosaurs, but wasn’t interested enough to ask. He took another bite and spoke from the corner of his mouth. “You believe what they say?”

“Who?”

“Scientists. The ones that say the universe is done expanding and whatnot. That these bizarre earthquakes are really interstellar contractions, as the universe collapses into itself.”

Iggy shook his head. “There will always be those that must find a logical and rational explanation for everything. I don’t think anyone will ever know. How about you? You buy into the scientific explanation of the end of everything?”

Aaron scoffed. “Doesn’t sound all that Christian to me.”

“So, what do you think?” Iggy said lowering his sandwich.

“Hell, I don’t know, Ig. Maybe God’s just tired. Tired of sorting it all out. Tired of keeping the Devil at bay. Tired of separating Heaven and Hell.” Aaron sighed deeply. “Maybe he’s just gonna let the bastard have it all.”

They sat quietly for a few minutes, both men chewing slowly and staring into the fire. Images from the last few weeks ran through Aaron’s mind; a jetliner that had turned to liquid over Main Street, the shrieks of a teenager as her body transformed into a slithering nightmare, and the screams of children watching their desperate parents duel. Aaron shook his head. “Sorry to bring the party down, Ig. Whatever happens, however it ends, I’m sure we will all be in Heaven soon, reunited with loved ones—

“Last night I ate my son,” Iggy said sharply, tears welling in his eyes. “Do you think there is a place for me in your Heaven?”

“Jesus, Iggy. I…”

“When my wife heard our son’s screams she stopped me before I killed him, but the boy will never walk again.”

Aaron didn’t know what to say. He just sat still trying not to imagine the scene.

“Not sure why she didn’t kill me. I wish she had.”

Neither spoke for several minutes, both listening to the crackling fire. Finally, Aaron broke the silence.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Iggy smiled, wiped the tears that had not yet fallen. “In any case, my friend, there is no Heaven for me. Even if I am forgiven, I can never forgive myself.”

Aaron was desperate to change the subject or at least lighten the mood. Anything to chase the image of Iggy feasting on his boy’s legs from his mind. He picked up some wood and fed the fire which didn’t need feeding. “So what does Allah have to say ’bout all this?”

Iggy smirked and shook his head. “You’re such a redneck. I’m not Muslim.”

Aaron chuckled. “Okay, Buddha then.”

Iggy rolled his eyes. “I’m Hindi.”

Aaron shrugged. “That doesn’t clear much up for me.”

“No kidding.” Iggy put down the balance of his sandwich in order to use both hands as he continued. “My religion has many stories of the end of days via Kali and Shiva, but I think they are just stories, as this world is just a dream. Bit of a nightmare at the moment.”

“The world’s a dream?” Aaron said.

Iggy looked across the fire intently. “Vishnu is dreaming this world and when he wakes it will all be gone.”

“That’s a wonderful thought, Ig. You and your wife tell your kids that story before they go to bed?”

“My kids prefer Harry Potter. But I do think there is some truth to the story of Vishnu.”

“Oh, do tell.”

“I think what our world is experiencing is merely a changing of dreams. As one dream dies, Vishnu will give birth to another.”

Aaron was quiet for a moment, wondering how seriously Iggy believed that. He looked across the fire and saw Iggy trying to hide a smirk. Then the two men both broke out laughing. Aaron chucked his stick into the fire. “Did a nifty snake-charming voodoo whistle come with that religion of yours?”

“No,” Iggy said. “Glow-in-the-dark decoder ring shaped like Gandhi’s head.”

“Nice.”

A gunshot echoed in the trees. Aaron jumped to his feet, instinctively grabbing his gun. Iggy got up a bit slower and they stared at one another across the fire. A second, then a third shot rang out.

“Where’s it coming from?” Iggy said.

But Aaron was already moving in the direction of the shots, now accompanied by distant screams. Iggy was on his heels and nearly collided with him as Aaron stopped to look down at the farmhouse.

Every light in the house was on. There was movement on the porch and billows of smoke drifting over the yard from the shotgun blasts.

Aaron took a step down the hill but felt Iggy’s hand on his shoulder. “You can’t go down there. You know what’s happening.”

Aaron took his binoculars off his hip and brought them up. He did know what was happening, but still felt a perverse desire to check. Through the magnifying lens, he saw the front door fly open so hard the screen was knocked off its frame. A heavyset woman stumbled through the opening, her appendage transformation clearly visible. One tentacle dragged on the ground behind her like a tail, tattered and torn, while the other snaked across the porch.

A blast from inside rang out and she fell forward, down the steps and into the yard. She scurried in the grass, trying to regain her feet.

Aaron lowered the binoculars just as something caught his attention. Two kids, a boy of ten years and a little girl not yet half that, ran into the night, toward the swing set in the backyard.

“Shit,” Aaron said. “Stay here, Ig.”

“Why? If you’re going, I could help.”

Without thinking, Aaron swung around, instinctively leveling his gun at Iggy’s chest. “You know why.”

Iggy took a step back and narrowed his gaze. In an instant, Aaron knew that any trust or comradery they had built had been destroyed in the span of a gesture.

Iggy held up his hands. “Fine. Go.”

Aaron didn’t hesitate. He spun around and charged down the hill. A former high-school running back, he still had the speed of an eighteen-year-old, but not the endurance. By the time he neared the farmhouse, his lungs were burning and he gasped for air.

As he entered the yard, a man limped on the porch, using a rifle as a crutch to support a grotesquely broken leg. He shambled to the wooden steps. Aaron locked eyes with the man for a moment, but the man had no interest in him. He limped down the steps and moved toward the spot his wife had fallen, gun raised.

Something slithered in the grass, and moonlight glinted off a long tentacle as it emerged from the darkness and coiled around the man’s broken leg. He screamed, then aimed at some unseen target and fired. The shot found its mark, and the woman rose from the grass then dropped back to the ground. She twisted like dying roadkill, her spine blown out.

Staggering, the man hobbled over to the woman, reloading his weapon as he moved. Aaron didn’t have time to call out and try to reason with the man. He got as close as he dared, steadied his aim, and fired. Hit straight through the chest, the man fell back, crimson spraying the porch.

Aaron moved forward, cautiously, then stood over the man. Aaron’s aim had put one near his heart, but to his amazement, the dying man started to rise. Aaron swung the butt of the gun at the man’s face, connecting just below the jaw. He hadn’t meant to swing that hard, but the adrenaline had consumed him. He heard the jawbone break and teeth flew out, disappearing into the grass. The man slumped into a motionless pile of ragged clothes, blood, and broken bones.

A gurgling rose up behind him. “Gah, gah, gah.”

Aaron knelt down next to the woman, her only functioning tentacle flopping in the grass like a fresh catch suffocating on the deck of a fishing boat. The light was fading in her weary eyes and Aaron gazed deep, looking for any sign of humanity. But all he saw was the raw instinct that fired a mother to protect her offspring. Animal instinct.

My God, he thought, is this what Heather is now? For a moment he was glad he wasn’t with her. He couldn’t bear to see her become this.

“Gah, gah,” she continued, tears of red outlining her cheeks.

Aaron got to his feet, preparing to use his next shot to put this animal down. He had just leveled the muzzle at her forehead when a scream came from the backyard. A child’s scream.

Aaron bolted around the house. He still hadn’t caught his breath from his sprint but managed to reach the backyard in a few seconds. He followed the screams, now high-pitched shrieks of terror.

The children had taken refuge in a homemade fort of plywood. But their wooden haven was under attack. Iggy had hold of the older boy’s leg and was pulling him free of the fort. The little girl screamed as Iggy brought his teeth down on the boy’s foot.

“Iggy!” Aaron shouted bringing the rifle up.

Stopping for a moment, Iggy met Aaron’s eyes. “I can’t wait. You need to try this. It’s the way it’s supposed to be.” Like the woman in the front yard, there was nothing human in his eyes anymore. Just instinct. Just animal.

Aaron fired.

Iggy fell back into darkness, blown off his feet and into the shadows. The boy recoiled as crimson spray colored his foot.

Stepping fast Aaron checked to make sure Iggy wasn’t getting up again. He wouldn’t. The shot was straight through the heart and Aaron was relieved he wouldn’t have to look him in the face and finish him. He knelt down and closed the dead man’s eyes.

Aaron turned and saw the boy getting to his feet. “It’s all right now, son.”

“Get away from me!” the boy shouted, fear visibly rippling in his body.

“I ain’t gonna hurt you, boy,” Aaron said.

“Daddy,” the little girl said, as she bolted out of the fort and into Aaron’s arms.

Aaron let his gun fall in order to embrace the girl.

“Carrie, that’s not Dad,” the boy shouted. “Get away from him.”

Aaron could feel the child trembling, and he rubbed her back softly. “Is your name Carrie?” She looked up at him with tear-streaked eyes and nodded.

“Well, I have a little girl named Carrie.” Aaron smiled. “She is a little older, but…” Aaron inhaled deeply. “She smells just like you.”

The images of his girls flooded his mind, the way they talked, the way they moved. The sound of their laughter echoed in his memory. “Just like you,” he said.

He brushed her hair with his hand, which seemed to calm her the way it did a chicken right before lopping its head off.

“There, there. No more tears.” Aaron was surprised at how soothing his voice had become. And then he had an outlandish thought. An alien idea at first, but it also made a strange kind of sense. He wondered how much pressure it took to bite through a child’s skull. Could he do it in one try, or would he have to gnaw on it like a dog chewing a bone? If he could get the angle right—

“Get away from her,” came a voice far outside his thoughts. He felt something strike the side of his head, and as he fell back he saw the silhouette of the boy, swinging his gun.

With his back flat on the ground, Aaron felt it first. The earth was beginning to shake. Another contraction was coming. Looking up at the stars, now tracers of dotted light, he shouted, “Kids, get down!”

He couldn’t see if they obeyed as the bone-breaking pressure came much faster this time, heavy, violent. He tried to turn his head but the blow to his skull sent pain down his neck. With his gaze locked straight up, he had a spectacular panoramic view of a once-in-a-trillion millennium event, blossoming directly overhead.

The blurry lines of stars winked out like dying lightbulbs in a distant and unreadable marquee. Then, thin at first, a glowing line bisected the night sky, dilating as it stretched across and beyond Aaron’s vision.

The Milky Way-sized fissure began to open, ripping the heavens in half.

Aaron peered into the chasm, unable to move, unable to blink, and saw all the way back to the beginning of everything, gestating in a passageway that was impossible to know. But deep down, in every cell, every atom that comprised his insignificance, he did know it. Aaron had stood by and watched hundreds of domesticated animals come into this world, held his wife’s hand as she delivered their four girls. Aaron knew a birth canal when he saw one.

The Earth pressing his back became less violent as if the part of the planet he was on had detached from the rest. The air was thin. He gasped for each breath and his lungs began to ache. Still unable to blink and not wanting to, he watched as the remaining stars fell into the enormous opening above, like marbles rolling off an uneven table.

Summoning up the last vestige of control he had over his body, he brought a hand up to his chest, dug under his shirt and grasped the cross Heather had given him. It didn’t offer comfort or understanding, just the memory of her and his girls. He clutched so tight the silver edges cut into his skin. Then from above, something began to emerge.

Forcing its way through, it pushed, tore at the boundaries of the canal, destroying the passage as it came into being. It was fire and ice, the beginning and the end, everything and nothing, and it exploded into existence with a shriek of pain and cosmic awareness. It was the end of one dream and the beginning of another.

Aaron laughed. Not because he found anything funny, but because he had a glint of understanding. Not much, but it was enough. “Congratulations,” Aaron whispered, squeezing the cross with all he had left. “It’s a Universe.”

End.

Kevin David Anderson’s debut novel is the cult zombie romp, Night of the Living Trekkies from Quirk Books. His latest is the horror-comedy Midnight Men: The Supernatural Adventures of Earl and Dale, from Grinning Skull Press. Anderson’s stories have appeared in more than a hundred publications from anthologies, magazines, and podcasts. His stories can be heard on podcasts like Pseudopod, Drabblecast, NoSleep, Horror Hill, and The Chilling Tales Network.

Silhouettes

By Jeffrey B. Burton

Originally published in Millenium Science Fiction & Fantasy, May 1998

The guards poured into the cell as Webber’s scream abruptly ceased. I knew they were expecting to break up yet another one of Webber’s altercations. The prison guards were startled to discover me lying motionless on the top bunk watching Webber—his eyes bulging, feet kicking frantically, blankets corkscrewed about the bottom of his bed, performing a bizarre and ever-slowing, horizontal dance atop his bed, pulling ineffectually at his throat, as though choking silently on a chicken bone.

Oh, but I’m getting ahead of myself…

* * *

Once there was a little boy. An only child. Friendless. Neglected by his parents, he would entertain himself for hours in his closet. With the help of a table lamp, minus its shade, the little boy would make endless shapes on any of the three narrow walls. Sitting cross-legged, alone, he’d pattern and mold his agile little fingers into the shapes of hawks and tarantulas, horses and sharks, spaceships—you name it and the little boy could craft it, flexing his fingers to near impossible angles in order to view new images on the whiteness of his closet wall.

The last time the little boy created these shapes in his private theater, he was ironing out the arched eyebrows of a barn owl with the curves between his thumb and forefinger when he noticed something odd about the wall. The shadow of the owl ceased to be flat. It now appeared as tiny and textured ripples, strangely three dimensional. The little boy blinked his eyes, repeatedly. It didn’t go away.

In fact the shape of the owl appeared to be moving, almost imperceptibly, as though it were breathing.

Shocked, the little boy dropped one arm to the floor. The shadow on the wall immediately turned into the figure of the small boy’s remaining hand. Well, almost the figure. It can’t be, a voice inside told him, it simply cannot be. The thumb on the wall shadow was on the opposite side from the one the little boy held in front of the light bulb. Though frightened the boy remained glued to the spot. Eyes wide, he was transfixed by this new image. He slowly extended his palm. The wall shadow seemed to bubble outward in order to meet his touch. The boy now wanted to scream, to run away, but couldn’t.

The darkness, an inch off the wall, beckoned. As though he had no control, the little boy reached forward. They touched. The shadow was cold, almost metallic. It circled his hand in a vice-like grip. He felt its curiosity, its strength . . . its something elseness not quite as pleasant.

The little boy pulled back, knocking over the lamp with his flailing free hand. The bulb smashed on impact, shards skittering across the hard wood floor. The shadow grip disappeared and the little boy ran from the closet to the security of daylight, of the known world.

The little boy told no one. Who would have believed him anyway? In time he came to believe it was a dream...

I was that little boy.

* * *

Most of Junior High was spent trying to blend into the woodwork. I did my fashion best to wear things that wouldn’t call attention to myself. I’d sit strategically toward the teacher in order to be safe from the guys in the back row, but not too close as to be targeted as the teacher’s pet. In gym class, although picked last for team sports, I worked hard so as not to call attention to my complete lack of sports prowess.

But it was bound to happen. Whenever a cow strays from the herd, they become easy prey for coyotes and wolves. And the stragglers on the fringe, in my school, would eventually come face to face with one particularly mean coyote named Dave McCarthy.

McCarthy wasn’t so much big as he was intense in his sadism. One year older, he was the bane of all seventh and eighth graders. His gang of bully-creeps would egg him on into messing with someone for no apparent reason. I once saw him haul off and punch a kid in the back of the head only because the poor sap was carrying his trombone to band class. McCarthy’s assaults, if ever caught, would merit him a day’s suspension, which he seemed to relish.

Even teachers were afraid of Dave McCarthy.

I’d made it through most of seventh grade without McCarthy taking notice of me. But on the day I straggled from the herd, I never saw it coming. Lunch had just ended and I headed to the restroom. After my business, I washed my hands, turned to leave and . . . there stood Dave McCarthy, surrounded by three of his bully-creep friends.

“Okay now Piss Face,” McCarthy grinned ear to ear, pointed a tube of something at the floor by me and squirted a gob of transparent liquid near my feet, “here’s the deal. You’re either gonna step in that gunk or I’ll SuperGlue your lips to the shitter.”

That met with a chorus of glee from the cohorts. This must be virgin territory for McCarthy. He’d probably recently lifted the SuperGlue from an art supplies closet. At a complete loss for how to deal with this situation, I grinned back. I thought I might be able to ingratiate myself to the sociopath by pretending it was all so very funny. By pretending I was of his ilk. By being in on the joke.

It didn’t sell.

“Don’t give me teeth, you little faggot. I’ll punch your goddamn head off.”

McCarthy’s smile had disappeared. He reached over and pushed the tube hard against the top of my shirt, starting at my shoulder blade and laying a tight bead diagonally down across my bony chest and stomach, ending above my belt. McCarthy had pressed so hard against me that I could feel the moisture of the glue begin to stick to my skin. It was not going to be pretty when the time came to peel the shirt off. But I had a far more urgent issue to attend to. McCarthy emptied the rest of the gunk over my shoes. Snags of adhesive landed on them as well as the floor about me. He flicked the crushed and empty tube, cigarette-like, into the nearest urinal.

“Step in it right now, Piss Face, or I’ll make you lick it up.”

My heart was beating so fast, I thought it’d beat through my chest. There was no way I could cut and run. The bully-creeps blocked the only exit door.

Just live through it, I thought. He’ll be on to someone else tomorrow. The SuperGlue won’t hurt your shoes. But if you do anything other than exactly what McCarthy says, you’re going to be eating his fist.

So just live through it. It’s yet another toll you get to pay along the road. I stepped onto the fresh SuperGlue and felt the glob squish beneath the sole of my right tennis shoe.

McCarthy cocked his head in the direction of the bully-creeps, “I told you momma-puss-boy would do it.”

They all laughed. McCarthy was chuckling out loud now. Another one taken care of. Another kid tossed onto the heap. People like Dave McCarthy steal all your dignity. I was a puny ninety pounds soaking wet. My hair didn’t part right, I wore thick glasses, and all I wanted to do was make it through the day. Just make it through another day without anyone noticing. No tall order there. But the Dave McCarthys of the world won’t allow you that. They’ll scar you. They’ll burn it deep into your soul, until, on your death bed, instead of thinking about loved ones and better times, you’ll find yourself gasping your last breath while fixating on how the Dave McCarthys superglued your K-Mart dress shirt to your hairless chest, then superglued your foot to the restroom floor.

And all the while it happened, you didn’t say boo and you didn’t say peep.

At that moment in time I did a very impulsive, very stupid thing. I leaned forward and gave Dave McCarthy a shove. Off guard, and off balance, McCarthy fell backwards, landing on his rear end. All bully-creep laughter came to an abrupt halt. McCarthy glared up at me, eyes burning with hate.

I accepted the inevitable. I was going to, most likely, land in a hospital. I didn’t know how to fight, much less how to hold my fists. I wasn’t even going to try. Perhaps the beating would then go quicker.

“You’re dead now, Piss Face. You’re fucking dead.” And with my immediate fortune told in a non-too-subtle manner, Dave McCarthy began to rise.

Here it gets a little bit like the retelling of a car accident, where you can remember everything in slow motion. McCarthy’s mouth suddenly popped open in a perfect O, like that famous Edvard Munch painting, and he sank slowly back to the floor. The bathroom echoed with an extended, piercing exhale. McCarthy began to writhe in pain, on the dirty tile floor, as though having an epileptic seizure of some kind. We all stood over him in shock, as though waiting on some kind of warped punchline.

“Get help,” yelled what must have been the lieutenant bully-creep as the other two jettisoned out the door, seeking an authority figure for what must be the first time in their lives.

Dave’s eyes rolled back in his head, exposing the whites. The lieutenant bully-creep bent to help as Dave began to regurgitate his recently eaten lunch over his black T-shirt. I looked away, down at the bathroom tiles.

Something was happening here, but what? Then it caught my eye.

The shadow, emanating from my feet, was moving on its own. I watched frozen in fear and fascination. The shadow curved at a grotesque angle. A boomerang of darkness moving sideways, impossibly toward the light as it stretched forward to snare McCarthy’s leg. The tendon-like shadow that now gripped McCarthy’s ankle with an unforgiving power tethered outward from me. It was my natural silhouette up to my thighs, then played tricks with its dark reflection as it taffied across the bathroom tile and connected with Dave McCarthy’s lower leg. I saw the dark shade as it wrapped itself tighter and tighter about McCarthy’s ankle. A deadly Boy Scout knot forever closing. McCarthy’s blue jeans, skin and bone were being squeezed inward like a child clawing at putty. The memory from my childhood returned, and with it the assurance that it had certainly not been a dream. I stood there, riveted to the floor, right up to the stomach turning crunch before I tore my tennis shoe up from the floor and fled the rest room.

Dave McCarthy was gone for a month. When McCarthy returned he wore a cast up to his kneecap for the rest of the school year. He limped along with the aid of crutches. You could almost hear the seventh and eighth grade breathe a collective sigh of relief. McCarthy looked as though he’d lost thirty pounds, his face gaunt, white, and much older. The story was that he had fractured his ankle by twisting and falling down on it.

But he and I knew differently.

We both knew that something else, something definitely not an accident, had occurred that afternoon in the school restroom. I thought McCarthy might come looking for me, but neither he, nor any of his bully-creeps, ever crossed my path again.

* * *

There have been a handful of other occurrences throughout the years, mostly in times of danger. I remember a sailing course from a decade back. Thought it might be a good way to meet people, to force a hobby. When the instructor took us out that first day, I felt a wave of nausea wash over me. Lightheadedness. I stared into the water, at the lapping, frothing greenness and hoped not to lose my breakfast. The boat hit a hard wave and I toppled, headfirst, into the lake.

...Only I never made it. An arm, quick and strong, wrapped about my middle and pulled me back on deck. I turned around to thank whoever had miraculously saved me from a cold, mid-afternoon dunking. No one was there. No one even remotely by my side. Just a twisting shadow at my feet, blending back into what would be a logical reflection. The instructor, across the stern, blinked his eyes as though he’d just seen a ghost.

I never returned for further courses.

Most recently was last spring when Mike Cusack, the new Department Manager, had me stay late in order to reconcile the month-end HoustOil spreadsheet, a project for which I was not responsible. Just a little clean-up on the HoustOil account, Cusack had explained earlier that day, just a little clean-up. Cusack’s little clean-up found me remaining there late into the evening. It made me miss Jonathan Pritchard, the firm’s founding father, all that much more. The business had taken some drastic turns for the worse ever since Jonathan had lost his bout with cancer.

I called Brook periodically, in order to tell her I’d be home late, but kept getting the answering machine. Another girl’s night out, I figured. I walked the desolate skyways till I came to the elevator above the parking garage. Footsteps fell in line behind me. I heard the talk, the profanities, obviously turned up a notch or two for my benefit. Street punks. I didn’t dare look. I’ve spent a lifetime avoiding eye-contact; an innocent look could prompt certain undesirable actions. I pressed the down button repeatedly until the elevator doors slid open. They followed me inside.

I stood with my back against the wall, head down, and listened to their obnoxious banter. Best to completely ignore them; appear absorbed in one’s own thoughts, until something concrete occurs. Then, after the appropriate protocol has been established, hand over wallet and car keys. Whether they were trying to have some fun with me or were simply getting up the moxie for a real shakedown, the one with the serpent tattoos plastered over his thick forearms cracked wise about hitting the stop button “so then we could all become well acquainted.”

I continued staring at my feet. The light in the overhead bulb should have plastered any shadows against the wall at my back. But the ropes of darkness falling below my trench coat and starting at my feet weaved impossibly forward, wrapping and slithering lightly about their legs, like tentacles about prey. These shadows emanating off of me bore no resemblance toward any earthy posture I could imagine. And I knew, with utmost certainty, that if these unwashed punks stopped the elevator or if they had pushed their intimidation game one inch further, that they would receive the biggest and, perhaps, last surprise of their lives as we all became very well acquainted, indeed.

After a breathless eternity, the elevator doors opened and they stepped off onto their level.

* * *

Mike Cusack’s unexpected e-mail informed me that I needed to cut the Atlanta trip short in order to meet with him at nine sharp tomorrow morning. There were some important changes coming down the pike that he needed to communicate. Something was up. With the loss of the CompCo account, the rumor mill had been steadily grinding for weeks. I switched to a much earlier flight, got back home in the afternoon... and there was stubble in the bathroom sink. Brook’s bathroom. The one connected to the master bedroom. The one I never use as all my shaving supplies are kept in the downstairs bathroom.

Brook and I have been married almost two years. I met her at the diner where she worked. She was twenty, I in my early thirties. I fell in love with her. Or, perhaps, I fell in love with the absence of loneliness. Is there a difference? I’d offered her a chance to leave a job she detested, to drive a better car, to go back to school, and to make a home with all the trimmings. I knew that tilted things in my favor. Perhaps I’m greedy, but I wanted people to see that this quiet, gawky outsider might possibly be human after all, and, for the first time, the very first time, think that he might just fit in.

This last year Brook has been out with her girlfriends several nights a week. Girl’s night out she calls them, and they’d become more and more frequent. I went out on a couple of these at first, but felt silly, felt my age. I didn’t want to smother her. I thought she could get the night life out of her system. Brook would return home around midnight. Smelling of rum and coke, she’d slip into the sheets next to me and fall quickly asleep. Brook always thought I was sleeping. But I never was.

Not even once.

Barely comfortable with myself, it’s much harder with others. I don’t know how to behave in a relationship. I’ve not had any experience before Brook. I know how it must appear from the outside looking in, but from inside, I’d found a certain mode of contentment. And now, home early from a business trip, I discover stubble in her vanity sink.

“Hey, Grandpa,” Brook looped around the corner. “You’re home early.”

Sometime lately Brook had taken to calling me ‘Grandpa.’ She’d say it in a jocular, teasing manner. I pretended not to take it in the manner in which she likely meant. Just another way of avoiding eye contact, I guess.

“How was the trip?” Brook asked.

“I’m tired.” I stared at her. I sensed her level of anxiety.

“Why don’t you lie down for a bit?”

It was then I noticed something on the wall behind her, saw the darkness begin to blend, to move silently as it curved downward and swirled about her legs, a hush of black slithering up her jeans, across her stomach, her breast, angling toward her exposed neck.

“God no!” I squeezed between her and the bathroom door, took the steps two at a time. “Oh God, no!”

“What the hell has gotten into you?” Brook said, following after me.

“Stay there.” I hurried toward the garage. “I left my briefcase in the car. I need to finish the actuaries.”

“Jeez, Grandpa. You almost ran me over.”

Hours later, when I came back upstairs, the sink had been rinsed sparkling clean. You could even smell the cleanser.

* * *

“You’re firing me?” I shook my head in disbelief.

“Roark,” Mike Cusack sailed onward, a Cusack decision had been rendered, now it needed to be implemented, then off to the club for a round of golf, tell his rich pals how he’d made the executive decision to fire the company nerd. “It’s called downsizing. With the loss of CompCo, we’ve been forced to reevaluate our staffing needs in a manner best suited for our existing client base.”

“But I’ve got seniority. And Mr. Pritchard always gave me excellent evaluations.” Jonathan Pritchard, he of the Father-Christmas eyes, he who had founded this firm, and had built it into what his idiot son, with the help of his idiot son’s fraternity pal, Mike Cusack, were rapidly pissing away. CompCo had quickly pulled anchor after outside auditors had given their account a less than flattering evaluation. We were lucky we didn’t get fined.

“There were a lot of factors involved in this decision, Roark.” Cusack scooped together the superficiality that was his essence and looked me in the eye, “Quite frankly, it was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make because of the tremendous staff we’ve got onboard.”

“I never touched the CompCo account. If I’d still been doing the cross-reviews, like Mr. Pritchard had me doing—”

“Times change, Roark. Old man Pritchard’s been dead over a year now.”

Old man Pritchard? Where did this jargon-filled, let’s-do-lunch son of a bitch get off referring to Jonathan Pritchard as “Old man Pritchard?” “Old man Pritchard” had built this company up from scratch while you were busy filling your diaper with your mission statement. “Old man Pritchard” had set up controls and safeguards in order to stop the lazy slop that passes for what happened with the CompCo account. “Old man Pritchard” had also, a dozen years ago, taken a chance with a young Icabod Crane lookalike who’d bumbled his way through the job interview with nothing but a pocket calculator bouncing about in his otherwise empty briefcase.

“My work has been spotless. This is a business and the work product has got to count for something.”

“Roark,” Cusack patronized and peeked at his gold Rolex, “don’t beat yourself up.”

“If my work is excellent, and I’ve got seniority... then what is it?”

“Roark—”

“No,” I interrupted, mustering my remaining courage. “What is it? I need to know what you based your decision on.”

“We’ll, um, Roark, it comes down to customer satisfaction,” Cusack had thought this would be a painless ten minute meeting. He was visibly flustered in that it wasn’t heading down that road.

“Which customer has not been completely satisfied with my work?”

“It’s the look, the feel of the company. That’s the vision, you see. We need more sales oriented cost accountants, Roark, more people-oriented.”

“What are you saying? You want salesmen for accountants?”

“No, but, um, some of our customers get turned off by—”

“What customers? Who have I possibly turned off?”

“Well,” Cusack stumbled awkwardly for an answer, “Steve Barrett said—”

“I’ve never worked for Steve Barrett. I’ve never worked his account. I met him once at the Christmas party. Why on earth would you ever talk to Barrett about me?”

Cusack was silent. I knew Steve Barrett to be another of Cusack’s college pals. Nice to know I’m mocked by management and client chums alike. So that’s what this all boiled down to, some silly popularity contest. I started to laugh. At least I’d managed to, momentarily, wipe that smirk off Cusack’s face. I’d even surprised myself. In fact, this was probably the most I’d ever said to Cusack in my life, certainly since Pritchard Jr. had decided to give the man the keys to the company after Jonathan’s funeral. That had been a very dark day. And right now it felt damned good to put Cusack on edge. It was a grand screwing all right, but, as the comedy routine goes, I knew it, and he knew it, and he knew I knew it, and so on and so on...

Cusack is a joke, all sizzle without the steak, all frosting without the cake. Smooth talker, no problem there. The paradigm, the new paradigm of schmoozers. No trouble whatsoever with people. Not him. I may have the quality, but I lack the sizzle. And, in the grand scheme of things, sizzle is everything.

“What a convergence,” I mumbled half-heartedly.

“What?” Cusack broke his silence.

“There was some black stubble in my wife’s bathroom sink when I came home from Atlanta yesterday.”

“Huh?” Cusack now looked completely lost.

“You see I never shave there. And now I’m getting fired by a guy who thinks quality is a song, a dance, and a wink, all paper clipped to a billing statement. The cult of the blowhard. I know it’s all crunching numbers, Cusack, but done right, it’s an art form. Doing it right can be goddamned poetry in motion.”

My eyes watered up and I wiped them on my sleeve. That’s when I noticed the blotch of a shadow spider scampering across his desk. I watched it slowly hover over Cusack’s golf-tee paperweight, his stapler and coffee mug, then sail over his keyboard.

It didn’t matter. I didn’t care. A convergence. To come together, to unite. The events of the last couple days, years, life, were converging. And it just didn’t matter. What was that childhood game I enjoyed so much? The one where you kept adding straws until they eventually broke the camel’s back.

“So you want me out because I don’t fit in with your vision, whatever the hell that vision is?” The shadow inched up Cusack’s shirt, button by button, passing over his initials, MKC, which he had monogrammed over the pocket of all his tailored dress shirts. “And meanwhile my wife has someone else shaving in her bathroom.”

“Jesus, Roark,” Cusack frowned and peeked down at his watch again. This meeting was getting much too strange, running much too late. “Get ahold of yourself, there’s certainly nothing that—”

“Why don’t you shut-up?!”

The shadow hand clawed inward. Startled, Cusack grabbed at his tie, his collar, his throat. The cold, iron hand began its powerful crush, full of the hate I’d always known was there, and had somehow now unleashed. Cusack began to rise, pulled upward by his neck, as though a hydraulic lift were beneath his chair. Gasping for air, he began to kicking outward. A terrified foot hit at his monitor, knocked it to the floor with a crashing thud, startling me out of my catatonia.

I ran to Cusack, struggled with the darkness laced around his throat, the ice-black choking collar wrapping ever tighter, strangling him, turning his face blue, bulging his eyes near the point of popping. I pulled Cusack down, tried to break the dark grip about his throat. Suddenly several hands grabbed me from behind and forced me to the floor.

But, by that time, Mike Cusack was very dead.

* * *

My trial was mercifully brief. Choking your employer to death will get you second-degree in most states. I never said a word about the shadow. Or about its remarkable power. I didn’t want that type of attention. I already had my hands full of the loner-goes-berserk garden variety. I think that The Drudge Report can do quite well without having a segment spotlighting me, thank you very much.

As for my cellmate Webber, he’d been making some rather graphic remarks regarding certain things he had in store for me. The type of things that make it awful hard for a fellow to get much sleep at night. But that’s behind me now. The guards all swore I strangled him, then, evidently, leapt back onto the top bunk while he continued to die for another minute or two while they made their futile attempts at first aid.

I’m kept in solitary confinement much of the time now. I don’t mind. It’s a place where there are no eyes for me to avoid. It’s dark here most of the time. Not much light for silly things like shadows.

Detached. It’s a funny word, isn’t it? I remember how we would detach the files off e-mail, then import them onto an Excel spreadsheet. I like the word detach. Much better than perforate or tear off.

Or even unleash, don’t you think?

For you see, as Webber lay there, drowning in his own larynx, and as the guards made their meaningless attempts to help, I felt it. A small tug. A wave of emptiness that passed quickly through me. Probably wouldn’t have noticed, or put it together, had I not also seen it sliding weightlessly over the backs of the prison guards. My shadow lingered at the edge of the cell for an instant. A final look back at its only friend, a dark nod, before it slipped around the corner and was gone from view.

Its great escape complete.

I wonder how it’s doing, what it’s doing? But I guess I know. I’m all its known these past lonely years. I’m the only one. Its best friend. An only love in its sea of cold, dark hate.

We’ve shared a strange umbilicus, now broken...

And I can only wonder when they’ll bring me the news. The news of what has occurred to a wayward, cheating wife, to a man who shaves where he ought not, to the spoiled cronies busily destroying Jonathan Pritchard’s firm, to the other people who’ve inflicted the thousands of humiliations that a bonefully timid fellow like myself has been forced to endure, to endlessly choke down…

But I have a feeling it won’t be long in coming.

End.

Novels in Jeffrey B. Burton’s Mace Reid K-9 mystery series include The Finders and The Keepers. Jeff’s short stories have appeared in dozens of magazines. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with his wife, an irate Pomeranian named Lucy, and a happy galoot of a Beagle named Milo. For more information, check out his website at www.JeffreyBBurton.com

The Diamond Lens: Part II

By Fitz-James O’Brien

Originally published in The Atlantic Monthly: 1858

(Part I of The Diamond Lens can be found in CHM #22: April 2022)

IV

There was a light in Simon’s room as I entered my house. A vague impulse urged me to visit him. As I opened the door of his sitting-room unannounced, he was bending, with his back toward me, over a Carcel lamp, apparently engaged in minutely examining some object which he held in his hands. As I entered, he started suddenly, thrust his hand into his breast pocket, and turned to me with a face crimson with confusion.

“What!” I cried, “poring over the miniature of some fair lady? Well, don’t blush so much; I won’t ask to see it.”

Simon laughed awkwardly enough, but made none of the negative protestations usual on such occasions. He asked me to take a seat.

“Simon,” said I, “I have just come from Madame Vulpes.”

This time Simon turned as white as a sheet, and seemed stupefied, as if a sudden electric shock had smitten him. He babbled some incoherent words, and went hastily to a small closet where he usually kept his liquors. Although astonished at his emotion, I was too preoccupied with my own idea to pay much attention to anything else.

“You say truly when you call Madame Vulpes a devil of a woman,” I continued. “Simon, she told me wonderful things to-night, or rather was the means of telling me wonderful things. Ah! if I could only get a diamond that weighed one hundred and forty carats!”

Scarcely had the sigh with which I uttered this desire died upon my lips when Simon, with the aspect of a wild beast, glared at me savagely, and, rushing to the mantelpiece, where some foreign weapons hung on the wall, caught up a Malay creese, and brandished it furiously before him.

“No!” he cried in French, into which he always broke when excited. “No! you shall not have it! You are perfidious! You have consulted with that demon, and desire my treasure! But I will die first! Me, I am brave! You can not make me fear!”

All this, uttered in a loud voice, trembling with excitement, astounded me. I saw at a glance that I had accidentally trodden upon the edges of Simon’s secret, whatever it was. It was necessary to reassure him.

“My dear Simon,” I said, “I am entirely at a loss to know what you mean. I went to Madame Vulpes to consult with her on a scientific problem, to the solution of which I discovered that a diamond of the size I just mentioned was necessary. You were never alluded to during the evening, nor, so far as I was concerned, even thought of. What can be the meaning of this outburst? If you happen to have a set of valuable diamonds in your possession, you need fear nothing from me. The diamond which I require you could not possess; or, if you did possess it, you would not be living here.”

Something in my tone must have completely reassured him, for his expression immediately changed to a sort of constrained merriment, combined however, with a certain suspicious attention to my movements. He laughed, and said that I must bear with him; that he was at certain moments subject to a species of vertigo, which betrayed itself in incoherent speeches, and that the attacks passed off as rapidly as they came.

He put his weapon aside while making this explanation, and endeavored, with some success, to assume a more cheerful air.

All this did not impose on me in the least. I was too much accustomed to analytical labors to be baffled by so flimsy a veil. I determined to probe the mystery to the bottom.

“Simon,” I said gayly, “let us forget all this over a bottle of Burgundy. I have a case of Lausseure’s Clos Vougeot downstairs, fragrant with the odors and ruddy with the sunlight of the Côte d’Or. Let us have up a couple of bottles. What say you?”

“With all my heart,” answered Simon smilingly.

I produced the wine and we seated ourselves to drink. It was of a famous vintage, that of 1848, a year when war and wine throve together, and its pure but powerful juice seemed to impart renewed vitality to the system. By the time we had half finished the second bottle, Simon’s head, which I knew was a weak one, had begun to yield, while I remained calm as ever, only that every draught seemed to send a flush of vigor through my limbs. Simon’s utterance became more and more indistinct. He took to singing French chansons of a not very moral tendency. I rose suddenly from the table just at the conclusion of one of those incoherent verses, and, fixing my eyes on him with a quiet smile, said, “Simon, I have deceived you. I learned your secret this evening. You may as well be frank with me. Mrs. Vulpes—or rather, one of her spirits—told me all.”

He started with horror. His intoxication seemed for the moment to fade away, and he made a movement toward the weapon that he had a short time before laid down, I stopped him with my hand.

“Monster!” he cried passionately, “I am ruined! What shall I do? You shall never have it! I swear by my mother!”

“I don’t want it,” I said; “rest secure, but be frank with me. Tell me all about it.”

The drunkenness began to return. He protested with maudlin earnestness that I was entirely mistaken—that I was intoxicated; then asked me to swear eternal secrecy, and promised to disclose the mystery to me. I pledged myself, of course, to all. With an uneasy look in his eyes, and hands unsteady with drink and nervousness, he drew a small case from his breast and opened it. Heavens! How the mild lamplight was shivered into a thousand prismatic arrows as it fell upon a vast rose-diamond that glittered in the case! I was no judge of diamonds, but I saw at a glance that this was a gem of rare size and purity. I looked at Simon with wonder and—must I confess it?—with envy. How could he have obtained this treasure? In reply to my questions, I could just gather from his drunken statements (of which, I fancy, half the incoherence was affected) that he had been superintending a gang of slaves engaged in diamond-washing in Brazil; that he had seen one of them secrete a diamond, but, instead of informing his employers, had quietly watched the negro until he saw him bury his treasure; that he had dug it up and fled with it, but that as yet he was afraid to attempt to dispose of it publicly—so valuable a gem being almost certain to attract too much attention to its owner’s antecedents—and he had not been able to discover any of those obscure channels by which such matters are conveyed away safely. He added that, in accordance with oriental practice, he had named his diamond with the fanciful title of “The Eye of Morning.”

While Simon was relating this to me, I regarded the great diamond attentively. Never had I beheld anything so beautiful. All the glories of light ever imagined or described seemed to pulsate in its crystalline chambers. Its weight, as I learned from Simon, was exactly one hundred and forty carats. Here was an amazing coincidence. The hand of destiny seemed in it. On the very evening when the spirit of Leeuwenhoek communicates to me the great secret of the microscope, the priceless means which he directs me to employ start up within my easy reach! I determined, with the most perfect deliberation, to possess myself of Simon’s diamond.

I sat opposite to him while he nodded over his glass, and calmly revolved the whole affair. I did not for an instant contemplate so foolish an act as a common theft, which would of course be discovered, or at least necessitate flight and concealment, all of which must interfere with my scientific plans. There was but one step to be taken—to kill Simon. After all, what was the life of a little peddling Jew in comparison with the interests of science? Human beings are taken every day from the condemned prisons to be experimented on by surgeons. This man, Simon, was by his own confession a criminal, a robber, and I believed on my soul a murderer. He deserved death quite as much as any felon condemned by the laws: why should I not, like government, contrive that his punishment should contribute to the progress of human knowledge?

The means for accomplishing everything I desired lay within my reach. There stood upon the mantelpiece a bottle half full of French laudanum. Simon was so occupied with his diamond, which I had just restored to him, that it was an affair of no difficulty to drug his glass. In a quarter of an hour he was in a profound sleep.

I now opened his waistcoat, took the diamond from the inner pocket in which he had placed it, and removed him to the bed, on which I laid him so that his feet hung down over the edge. I had possessed myself of the Malay creese, which I held in my right hand, while with the other I discovered as accurately as I could by pulsation the exact locality of the heart. It was essential that all the aspects of his death should lead to the surmise of self-murder. I calculated the exact angle at which it was probable that the weapon, if leveled by Simon’s own hand, would enter his breast; then with one powerful blow I thrust it up to the hilt in the very spot which I desired to penetrate. A convulsive thrill ran through Simon’s limbs. I heard a smothered sound issue from his throat, precisely like the bursting of a large air-bubble sent up by a diver when it reaches the surface of the water; he turned half round on his side, and, as if to assist my plans more effectually, his right hand, moved by some mere spasmodic impulse, clasped the handle of the creese, which it remained holding with extraordinary muscular tenacity. Beyond this there was no apparent struggle. The laudanum, I presume, paralyzed the usual nervous action. He must have died instantly.

There was yet something to be done. To make it certain that all suspicion of the act should be diverted from any inhabitant of the house to Simon himself, it was necessary that the door should be found in the morning locked on the in-side. How to do this, and afterward escape myself? Not by the window; that was a physical impossibility. Besides, I was determined that the windows also should be found bolted. The solution was simple enough. I descended softly to my own room for a peculiar instrument which I had used for holding small slippery substances, such as minute spheres of glass, etc. This instrument was nothing more than a long, slender hand-vise, with a very powerful grip and a considerable leverage, which last was accidentally owing to the shape of the handle. Nothing was simpler than, when the key was in the lock, to seize the end of its stem in this vise, through the keyhole, from the outside, and so lock the door. Previously, however, to doing this, I burned a number of papers on Simon’s hearth. Suicides almost always burn papers before they destroy themselves. I also emptied some more laudanum into Simon’s glass—having first removed from it all traces of wine—cleaned the other wine-glass, and brought the bottles away with me. If traces of two persons drinking had been found in the room, the question naturally would have arisen, Who was the second? Besides, the wine-bottles might have been identified as belonging to me. The laudanum I poured out to account for its presence in his stomach, in case of a post-mortem examination. The theory naturally would be that he first intended to poison himself, but, after swallowing a little of the drug, was either disgusted with its taste, or changed his mind from other motives, and chose the dagger. These arrangements made, I walked out, leaving the gas burning, locked the door with my vise, and went to bed.

Simon’s death was not discovered until nearly three in the afternoon. The servant, astonished at seeing the gas burning—the light streaming on the dark landing from under the door—peeped through the keyhole and saw Simon on the bed.

She gave the alarm. The door was burst open, and the neighborhood was in a fever of excitement.

Every one in the house was arrested, myself included. There was an inquest; but no clew to his death beyond that of suicide could be obtained. Curiously enough, he had made several speeches to his friends the preceding week that seemed to point to self-destruction. One gentleman swore that Simon had said in his presence that “he was tired of life.” His landlord affirmed that Simon, when paying him his last month’s rent, remarked that “he should not pay him rent much longer.” All the other evidence corresponded—the door locked inside, the position of the corpse, the burned papers. As I anticipated, no one knew of the possession of the diamond by Simon, so that no motive was suggested for his murder. The jury, after a prolonged examination, brought in the usual verdict, and the neighborhood once more settled down to its accustomed quiet.

V

The three months succeeding Simon’s catastrophe I devoted night and day to my diamond lens. I had constructed a vast galvanic battery, composed of nearly two thousand pairs of plates: a higher power I dared not use, lest the diamond should be calcined. By means of this enormous engine I was enabled to send a powerful current of electricity continually through my great diamond, which it seemed to me gained in lustre every day. At the expiration of a month I commenced the grinding and polishing of the lens, a work of intense toil and exquisite delicacy. The great density of the stone, and the care required to be taken with the curvatures of the surfaces of the lens, rendered the labor the severest and most harassing that I had yet undergone.

At last the eventful moment came; the lens was completed. I stood trembling on the threshold of new worlds. I had the realization of Alexander’s famous wish before me. The lens lay on the table, ready to be placed upon its platform. My hand fairly shook as I enveloped a drop of water with a thin coating of oil of turpentine, preparatory to its examination, a process necessary in order to prevent the rapid evaporation of the water. I now placed the drop on a thin slip of glass under the lens, and throwing upon it, by the combined aid of a prism and a mirror, a powerful stream of light, I approached my eye to the minute hole drilled through the axis of the lens. For an instant I saw nothing save what seemed to be an illuminated chaos, a vast, luminous abyss. A pure white light, cloudless and serene, and seemingly limitless as space itself, was my first impression. Gently, and with the greatest care, I depressed the lens a few hairbreadths. The wondrous illumination still continued, but as the lens approached the object a scene of indescribable beauty was unfolded to my view.

I seemed to gaze upon a vast space, the limits of which extended far beyond my vision. An atmosphere of magical luminousness permeated the entire field of view. I was amazed to see no trace of animalculous life. Not a living thing, apparently, inhabited that dazzling expanse. I comprehended instantly that, by the wondrous power of my lens, I had penetrated beyond the grosser particles of aqueous matter, beyond the realms of infusoria and protozoa, down to the original gaseous globule, into whose luminous interior I was gazing as into an almost boundless dome filled with a supernatural radiance.

It was, however, no brilliant void into which I looked. On every side I beheld beautiful inorganic forms, of unknown texture, and colored with the most enchanting hues. These forms presented the appearance of what might be called, for want of a more specific definition, foliated clouds of the highest rarity—that is, they undulated and broke into vegetable formations, and were tinged with splendors compared with which the gilding of our autumn woodlands is as dross compared with gold. Far away into the illimitable distance stretched long avenues of these gaseous forests, dimly transparent, and painted with prismatic hues of unimaginable brilliancy. The pendent branches waved along the fluid glades until every vista seemed to break through half-lucent ranks of many-colored drooping silken pennons. What seemed to be either fruits or flowers, pied with a thousand hues, lustrous and ever-varying, bubbled from the crowns of this fairy foliage. No hills, no lakes, no rivers, no forms animate or inanimate, were to be seen, save those vast auroral copses that floated serenely in the luminous stillness, with leaves and fruits and flowers gleaming with unknown fires, unrealizable by mere imagination.

How strange, I thought, that this sphere should be thus condemned to solitude! I had hoped, at least, to discover some new form of animal life, perhaps of a lower class than any with which we are at present acquainted, but still some living organism. I found my newly discovered world, if I may so speak, a beautiful chromatic desert.

While I was speculating on the singular arrangements of the internal economy of Nature, with which she so frequently splinters into atoms our most compact theories, I thought I beheld a form moving slowly through the glades of one of the prismatic forests. I looked more attentively, and found that I was not mistaken. Words can not depict the anxiety with which I awaited the nearer approach of this mysterious object. Was it merely some inanimate substance, held in suspense in the attenuated atmosphere of the globule, or was it an animal endowed with vitality and motion? It approached, flitting behind the gauzy, colored veils of cloud-foliage, for seconds dimly revealed, then vanishing. At last the violet pennons that trailed nearest to me vibrated; they were gently pushed aside, and the form floated out into the broad light.

It was a female human shape. When I say human, I mean it possessed the outlines of humanity; but there the analogy ends. Its adorable beauty lifted it illimitable heights beyond the loveliest daughter of Adam.

I can not, I dare not, attempt to inventory the charms of this divine revelation of perfect beauty. Those eyes of mystic violet, dewy and serene, evade my words. Her long, lustrous hair following her glorious head in a golden wake, like the track sown in heaven by a falling star, seems to quench my most burning phrases with its splendors. If all the bees of Hybla nestled upon my lips, they would still sing but hoarsely the wondrous harmonies of outline that inclosed her form.

She swept out from between the rainbow-curtains of the cloud-trees into the broad sea of light that lay beyond. Her motions were those of some graceful naiad, cleaving, by a mere effort of her will, the clear, unruffled waters that fill the chambers of the sea. She floated forth with the serene grace of a frail bubble ascending through the still atmosphere of a June day. The perfect roundness of her limbs formed suave and enchanting curves. It was like listening to the most spiritual symphony of Beethoven the divine, to watch the harmonious flow of lines. This, indeed was a pleasure cheaply purchased at any price. What cared I if I had waded to the portal of this wonder through another’s blood. I would have given my own to enjoy one such moment of intoxication and delight.

Breathless with gazing on this lovely wonder, and forgetful for an instant of everything save her presence, I withdrew my eye from the microscope eagerly. Alas! as my gaze fell on the thin slide that lay beneath my instrument, the bright light from mirror and from prism sparkled on a colorless drop of water! There, in that tiny bead of dew, this beautiful being was forever imprisoned. The planet Neptune was not more distant from me than she. I hastened once more to apply my eye to the microscope.

Animula (let me now call her by that dear name which I subsequently bestowed on her) had changed her position. She had again approached the wondrous forest, and was gazing earnestly upward. Presently one of the trees—as I must call them—unfolded a long ciliary process, with which it seized one of the gleaming fruits that glittered on its summit, and, sweeping slowly down, held it within reach of Animula. The sylph took it in her delicate hand and began to eat. My attention was so entirely absorbed by her that I could not apply myself to the task of determining whether this singular plant was or was not instinct with volition.

I watched her, as she made her repast, with the most profound attention. The suppleness of her motions sent a thrill of delight through my frame; my heart beat madly as she turned her beautiful eyes in the direction of the spot in which I stood. What would I not have given to have had the power to precipitate myself into that luminous ocean and float with her through those grooves of purple and gold! While I was thus breathlessly following her every movement, she suddenly started, seemed to listen for a moment, and then cleaving the brilliant ether in which she was floating, like a flash of light, pierced through the opaline forest and disappeared.

Instantly a series of the most singular sensations attacked me. It seemed as if I had suddenly gone blind. The luminous sphere was still before me, but my daylight had vanished. What caused this sudden disappearance? Had she a lover or a husband? Yes, that was the solution! Some signal from a happy fellow-being had vibrated through the avenues of the forest, and she had obeyed the summons.

The agony of my sensations, as I arrived at this conclusion, startled me. I tried to reject the conviction that my reason forced upon me. I battled against the fatal conclusion—but in vain. It was so. I had no escape from it. I loved an animalcule.

It is true that, thanks to the marvelous power of my microscope, she appeared of human proportions. Instead of presenting the revolting aspect of the coarser creatures, that live and struggle and die, in the more easily resolvable portions of the water-drop, she was fair and delicate and of surpassing beauty. But of what account was all that? Every time that my eye was withdrawn from the instrument it fell on a miserable drop of water, within which, I must be content to know, dwelt all that could make my life lovely.

Could she but see me once! Could I for one moment pierce the mystical walls that so inexorably rose to separate us, and whisper all that filled my soul, I might consent to be satisfied for the rest of my life with the knowledge of her remote sympathy.

It would be something to have established even the faintest personal link to bind us together—to know that at times, when roaming through these enchanted glades, she might think of the wonderful stranger who had broken the monotony of her life with his presence and left a gentle memory in her heart!

But it could not be. No invention of which human intellect was capable could break down the barriers that nature had erected. I might feast my soul upon her wondrous beauty, yet she must always remain ignorant of the adoring eyes that day and night gazed upon her, and, even when closed, beheld her in dreams. With a bitter cry of anguish I fled from the room, and flinging myself on my bed, sobbed myself to sleep like a child.

VI

I arose the next morning almost at daybreak, and rushed to my microscope, I trembled as I sought the luminous world in miniature that contained my all. Animula was there. I had left the gas-lamp, surrounded by its moderators, burning when I went to bed the night before. I found the sylph bathing, as it were, with an expression of pleasure animating her features, in the brilliant light which surrounded her. She tossed her lustrous golden hair over her shoulders with innocent coquetry. She lay at full length in the transparent medium, in which she supported herself with ease, and gamboled with the enchanting grace that the nymph Salmacis might have exhibited when she sought to conquer the modest Hermaphroditus. I tried an experiment to satisfy myself if her powers of reflection were developed. I lessened the lamplight considerably. By the dim light that remained, I could see an expression of pain flit across her face. She looked upward suddenly, and her brows contracted. I flooded the stage of the microscope again with a full stream of light, and her whole expression changed. She sprang forward like some some substance deprived of all weight. Her eyes sparkled and her lips moved. Ah! if science had only the means of conducting and reduplicating sounds, as it does rays of light, what carols of happiness would then have entranced my ears! what jubilant hymns to Adonais would have thrilled the illumined air!

I now comprehended how it was that the Count de Cabalis peopled his mystic world with sylphs-beautiful beings whose breath of life was lambent fire, and who sported forever in regions of purest ether and purest light. The Rosicrucian had anticipated the wonder that I had practically realized.

How long this worship of my strange divinity went on thus I scarcely know. I lost all note of time. All day from early dawn, and far into the night, I was to be found peering through that wonderful lens. I saw no one, went nowhere, and scarce allowed myself sufficient time for my meals. My whole life was absorbed in contemplation as rapt as that of any of the Romish saints. Every hour that I gazed upon the divine form strengthened my passion—a passion that was always overshadowed by the maddening conviction that, although I could gaze on her at will, she never, never could behold me!

At length I grew so pale and emaciated, from want of rest and continual brooding over my insane love and its cruel conditions, that I determined to make some effort to wean myself from it. “Come,” I said, “this is at best but a fantasy. Your imagination has bestowed on Animula charms which in reality she does not possess. Seclusion from female society has produced this morbid condition of mind. Compare her with the beautiful women of your own world, and this false enchantment will vanish.”

I looked over the newspapers by chance. There I beheld the advertisement of a celebrated danseuse who appeared nightly at Niblo’s. The Signorina Caradolce had the reputation of being the most beautiful as well as the most graceful woman in the world. I instantly dressed and went to the theatre.

The curtain drew up. The usual semicircle of fairies in white muslin were standing on the right toe around the enameled flower-bank of green canvas, on which the belated prince was sleeping. Suddenly a flute is heard. The fairies start. The trees open, the fairies all stand on the left toe, and the queen enters. It was the Signorina. She bounded forward amid thunders of applause, and, lighting on one foot, remained poised in the air. Heavens! was this the great enchantress that had drawn monarchs at her chariot-wheels? Those heavy, muscular limbs, those thick ankles, those cavernous eyes, that stereotyped smile, those crudely painted cheeks! Where were the vermeil blooms, the liquid, expressive eyes, the harmonious limbs of Animula?

The Signorina danced. What gross, discordant movements! The play of her limbs was all false and artificial. Her bounds were painful athletic efforts; her poses were angular and distressed the eye. I could bear it no longer; with an exclamation of disgust that drew every eye upon me, I rose from my seat in the very middle of the Signorina’s pas-de-fascination and abruptly quitted the house.

I hastened home to feast my eyes once more on the lovely form of my sylph. I felt that henceforth to combat this passion would be impossible. I applied my eyes to the lens. Animula was there—but what could have happened? Some terrible change seemed to have taken place during my absence. Some secret grief seemed to cloud the lovely features of her I gazed upon. Her face had grown thin and haggard; her limbs trailed heavily; the wondrous lustre of her golden hair had faded. She was ill—ill, and I could not assist her! I believe at that moment I would have forfeited all claims to my human birthright if I could only have been dwarfed to the size of an animalcule, and permitted to console her from whom fate had forever divided me.

I racked my brain for the solution of this mystery. What was it that afflicted the sylph? She seemed to suffer intense pain. Her features contracted, and she even writhed, as if with some internal agony. The wondrous forests appeared also to have lost half their beauty. Their hues were dim and in some places faded away altogether. I watched Animula for hours with a breaking heart, and she seemed absolutely to wither away under my very eye. Suddenly I remembered that I had not looked at the water-drop for several days. In fact, I hated to see it; for it reminded me of the natural barrier between Animula and myself. I hurriedly looked down on the stage of the microscope. The slide was still there—but, great heavens, the water drop had vanished! The awful truth burst upon me; it had evaporated, until it had become so minute as to be invisible to the naked eye; I had been gazing on its last atom, the one that contained Animula—and she was dying!

I rushed again to the front of the lens and looked through. Alas! the last agony had seized her. The rainbow-hued forests had all melted away, and Animula lay struggling feebly in what seemed to be a spot of dim light. Ah! the sight was horrible: the limbs once so round and lovely shriveling up into nothings; the eyes—those eyes that shone like heaven—being quenched into black dust; the lustrous golden hair now lank and discolored. The last throe came. I beheld that final struggle of the blackening form—and I fainted.

When I awoke out of a trance of many hours, I found myself lying amid the wreck of my instrument, myself as shattered in mind and body as it. I crawled feebly to my bed, from which I did not rise for many months.

They say now that I am mad; but they are mistaken. I am poor, for I have neither the heart nor the will to work; all my money is spent, and I live on charity. Young men’s associations that love a joke invite me to lecture on optics before them, for which they pay me, and laugh at me while I lecture. “Linley, the mad microscopist,” is the name I go by. I suppose that I talk incoherently while I lecture. Who could talk sense when his brain is haunted by such ghastly memories, while ever and anon among the shapes of death I behold the radiant form of my lost Animula!

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