CHM August 2022
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 2022-07-15 16:06:25+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 Art: Jakub Jagoda

The King in Yellow Illustrations: Luke Spooner / Carrion House

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Edited by Charles Tyra
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

Welcome to the 26th issue of CHM Magazine. I’d like to take this time to recognize some of the amazing women that had a hand, if not two, in shaping horror and weird fiction as we know it. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley who happened to be born in August 1797; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who unfortunately died by suicide in August 1935. We also can’t fail to mention names like Shirley Jackson, Greye La Spina, D.K. Broster, and Everil Worrell. The list goes on and on. Frankly, I can’t bear to imagine what the genre would be without their contributions. Now, on to this month’s helping of cosmic terror.

We’ve assembled a strong lineup for you this month beginning with a cautionary tale of youthful debauchery titled “Entrance Rites.” Then, from CHM alum Erik McHatton, a child learns to understand an alien invader in “Knocks.” In “Testimony,” a father’s warnings about what lurks in the deep of the woods become all too real. Lessons in humility, as well as theoretical mathematics, are dispensed in “The Math of the Red Desk,” before we are treated to part two of the saga of Asher Black in Patrick Barb’s Novella: The Nut House. Not everything is as it seems between cousins in the reprinted story “Beneath Her Skin.” At last, we will descend to the crypt for the continuation of our presentation of The King in Yellow, this month: part two of three of “The Repairer of Reputations.”

We’d like to invite our readers to write into the magazine. Selected letters will appear in issues of CHM. If you are interested, save yourself the paper and cost of a stamp and send an email to my personal inbox (crtyra@cosmic-horror.net) .

Without further ado, I hope you enjoy this month’s tales.

Meet the CHM staff

Charles Tyra: Editor

Oenophile, logophile, aspiring writer. Completely captivated by Cosmic Horror and Weird Fiction from an early age upon first reading the story: Dagon by HPL.

Resides in the flatland that is 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: Lars Strömquist is a illustrator and artist with a taste for the dark and fantastic. In his art you’ll often find the small hero set against some greater force. Lars lives with his awesome family in the cold and dark northern part of Sweden. When not drawing he enjoys playing the occasional boardgame or tabletop rpg. For more of his art you can visit his instagram or checkout his deviantart page: www.deviantart.com/happytodraw

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.

Maxwell Marais is an illustrator and author of all things horror currently living in Montreal, Canada. Their work is often featured in the pages of CHM, and their stories can be found in such publications as Thuggish Itch and The NoSleep podcast. Find their art at www.instagram.com/insanity_inc/

Welcome to Cosmic Horror Monthly

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

Entrance Rites

By Mir Rainbird

On any given day there were multiple drunken altercations, shoplifting attempts, lost children, and of course, trespasses. Still, head of security at an educational theme park was a lot better than beat cop. Little danger, fewer unsolved mysteries, and no being told to look the other way.

No pretending that the world was a place of order and security.

Mike sighed and pressed the push-to-talk button on his walkie-talkie. “We’ve got a carload leavin’ the tracks in the Story of Man. Prehistory. Looks like college boys. Again. Over.”

“Thanks, Mike. Masaru here. I’ll take care of it. Ask Mr. Shattuck to join me, please.”

“Roger that, Mr. Yamasato. Mike out.”

Mike would trust Yamasato to take care of the rule-breakers. He had other preparations to make.

* * *

Masaru didn’t have any difficulty locating the trespassers. The young men’s behavior was predictable: they wandered among the dioramas posing facetiously in scenes, groping the plaster breasts of female figures, and committing minor acts of vandalism.

The ringleader, a clean-cut blond jock in a UTPB tee shirt, was humping a cavewoman while his skinnier crony held a flask to her mate’s mouth when Masaru arrived and turned on his heavy-duty flashlight.

The men froze. Then the leader said, “Aw, it’s just a Chink. Don’t worry, boys.”

The dark-haired man holding a stolen spear frowned. The other two looked confused. They were all clearly intoxicated, flushed and blurry-eyed.

That would make this easier, although it wouldn’t help Masaru’s conscience.

“Bored by the ride, huh?” he asked, leaning one shoulder against the uneven wall of the artificial cave. The recorded tour said that the painted hunting scene was a copy of a cave-painting; no visitors ever seemed to notice that the hunters ran on all fours.

“Fucking grade-school bullshit, Neanderthals, who cares?” mumbled the man with the flask.

“Not me,” Masaru said, more or less truthfully. He didn’t specifically care about Neanderthals. “I can offer you something to make your visit more interesting.”

“What?”

Masaru produced a small box of carved bone from his pocket. “You fellows ever drop acid?”

He could see curiosity and the fear of losing face warring with unease. Sober, they would have made excuses, but they were too drunk to remember what their mothers had said about taking candy from strangers.

“Only if you take some first,” the leader said.

“Of course,” Masaru said easily.

Masaru handed around postage-stamp sized squares of blotter paper with complex designs hand-painted on both sides. He knew they were hand-painted because he had painted them. He held his up, then laid it on his tongue. After a few seconds, the young men did the same, except for the one with the spear, whose eyes were narrowed as he tried to make out the design on his square.

“Come on, Frenchy, don’t be a pussy,” the leader commanded.

“Stop calling me Frenchy,” the young man said. “I’m not French, Monty.” He put the blotter paper in his mouth.

“Louisiana French,” mumbled Monty.

“The Delapores are English,” the youth who wasn’t French insisted. “We lived in Virginia until the war.”

“Which war?” Monty’s voice was thick, his eyes unfocused.

Delapore didn’t answer. His head was tilted as if he were listening to a more distant sound. He turned and ambled away, spear falling from his hand.

“Where you...?” The man with the flask turned after him, eyes widening. He stumbled backward, turned and ran.

“Bowie!” cried the man who had yet to speak. He ran after his friend.

“Huh?” Monty looked around blearily. “Where’d everyone go?”

Masaru shrugged. “Guess they’re scared of monsters.”

“Monsters?” Monty peered at him. “Monsters aren’t real.”

“No monsters?” Masaru gave him a wide, unfriendly grin. “You sure about that, Monty?”

Monty stumbled back, eyes darting. Not a tough guy when he was alone. “Bubba! Bowie! Frenchy!”

Monty staggered into the darkness. He took the same general direction as Bubba and Bowie, but not close enough that he would end up finding them.

“They don’t seem like much of a loss.”

Masaru didn’t jump at the voice from the darkness. He had expected Elijah to find him by now. “They were just young and ignorant.” He rubbed his face wearily.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. Sure. It just gets to me sometimes, you know?”

“Of course I know. Do you want me to get Chuck to take over? He’s good at abstracting himself.”

“No, I can handle it.” Masaru sighed.

“All right. We’ve cancelled the last ride. Your bad boys can run around for a couple of hours until all the visitors have left, and then we’ll find them.”

“Assuming there’s anything left to find.”

“More convenient when there isn’t,” Elijah pointed out. “Now, come help me straighten the mammoth bones.”

* * *

By the time the park was pronounced clear of visitors, the dioramas had all been restored and the two men had joined a few compatriots in the Feasting Hall for a drink. Mike, his shift over, appeared to report.

Elijah nudged a chair out with his foot and pushed an absinthe glass in his direction. “Or there’s beer,” he offered.

“This is fine. No sugar for me, thanks. One of your boys, the big feller, ended up in the pit. He stopped screamin’ a bit ago, so you can probably cross him off the list. And another’s in the sand, so, well. You know. The third is just crawlin’ around freakin’ out. We can collect him whenever. The fourth, uh, we’re not sure where he got to. Sorry about that. Our people are keepin’ their eyes peeled.”

“How did that happen?” Elijah asked without recrimination.

“I don’t rightly know. We had security on all the marked exits. Either he’s well hidden, or he slipped past us somehow. We’ll find him soon enough.” Mike paused. “Unless we’re not meant to, of course.”

“Yes, of course that’s a possibility,” Elijah agreed, considering. “You gave them the sigils, correct, Masaru?”

“I did, and they accepted them.”

“Well, then.” Elijah shrugged and tossed back the last of his absinthe. “Let’s go find our lost lamb.”

Everyone but Mike, who fetched out his walkie talkie and resumed coordinating, rose and paired off, murmuring the direction in which they intended to search.

“Not likely he’d find the way out and not take it,” Elijah suggested as he and Masaru made their way toward the Entryway Pavilion.

“Depends,” Masaru countered mildly.

Elijah raised an eyebrow. “You think something led him here?”

“I don’t think a drunk boy who had just dropped acid eluded Mike’s security team with ninja stealth.”

“Right. Well, I leave communing with the powers to you. But I do recall that there was a Delapore in the last century who formed some sort of cult and was reputed to summon spirits,” Elijah offered.

“Was there? In Louisiana?”

“I don’t recall. I think it was something I read in Evelyn’s historical research. She may remember.”

They reached the enormous open waiting room that staff called the Cathedral. The soothing yet dissonant music that played during the day was silent now, and the lights were off except for those that illuminated the vast vertical mosaic. Most visitors thought it was abstract.

Delapore was standing in the middle of the room, gazing up at the image with dark, unblinking eyes. Masaru approached him, Elijah dropping behind and to the side in case the man made a run for it.

“Mr. Delapore,” Masaru said softly. When Delapore didn’t react, he asked, “Do you have a first name?

Delapore blinked once. “Kybel.”

“For Cybele, Magna Mater?” Elijah prompted quietly.

“I was named after my grandfather. He called me here. I followed his voice.” Delapore frowned and blinked again, seeming to come awake. “No, that can’t be right. He died before my second birthday. I don’t remember him. Why did I think… Is this a dream?” He turned to Masaru. “No. You were there before. With the cavemen. The guys… where are they?”

“They’re dead,” Masaru said baldly. “Or soon will be. But you don’t have to join them, Kybel.”

“I don’t want to die,” Kybel said agreeably, returning his gaze to the artwork.

“Of your own free will you ate the seal I offered you,” Masaru said. “Alive or dead, you belong with us now.”

“Yes.” Delapore still gazed at the mosaic. “I know. I see that.”

“Do you?” Elijah became urgent with curiosity. “In the—the image?”

“It’s an altarpiece,” Kybel said slowly. “Where is the altar?”

Elijah and Masaru exchanged a glance.

“All of this is the altar,” Elijah explained. “The entire park. The altar, and the doorway.”

“All right.” Kybel gave the mosaic a last stare, then turned to Masaru. “What do I do?”

“You need to make an offering. Don’t worry – you brought one.” He held out his hand and Kybel took it.

Elijah fell in at Kybel’s other side and together they escorted him to the center of the park, where the fountain of colored lights had been turned off for the night.

As they approached the empty basin, the eight stone pavers that formed it slid apart, revealing steps descending into blackness. Kybel started down them without prompting.

The stones remained open behind them, and Masaru glanced back to see two heads silhouetted against the night sky. Once they were on the stairs and the entrance closed, the built-in illumination activated.

Joining them were Mike and Audie, Elijah’s local protégé, hauling a slumped third man between them. Monty. They glanced at Kybel, but asked no questions.

“This one’s still alive,” Mike told them.

“Good. You’ve informed Dalton?”

“I spoke with Evelyn,” Audie said. “They should be arriving shortly.”

“Everyone else is already gathered below,” Mike added.

There were no hooded robes or black candles or chanting. Everyone sat on benches against the roughly hewn walls or stood talking quietly. The wooden covering over the well had already been removed.

Monty whimpered and jerked weakly against his captors’ grips. They held him easily, but the crowd fell silent out of respect for his impending death.

In the silence, Dalton and Evelyn arrived. Those familiar with the park owners’ thespian public appearances as rich socialites wouldn’t have recognized the quiet, serious couple who entered without theater and took their places in the semicircle above the oil-filled pit.

Masaru’s fellow artist Denise approached the sacrificial victim, holding a paintbrush that ended in a blade instead of bristles. Chuck and Roger stepped forward to rip Monty’s shirt off. The young man sobbed.

Masaru and Elijah led Kybel to the center of the action.

“Give me your hand,” Masaru interrupted, nodding at Denise’s knife so Kybel wouldn’t be taken by surprise.

Kybel offered his hand without hesitation.

Denise made a shallow cut across his palm. “Mark him.”

Kybel pressed his hand to Monty’s bare back.

Evelyn was at Masaru’s elbow. “You sponsor him?” she asked. When he nodded, she rubbed something slick into his palm and nodded at Denise, who made a shallow cut across it.

Evelyn pressed Masaru and Kybel’s bleeding palms together and held them between her own slim, cool hands as Denise carved an intricate design into Monty’s back. The young man screamed and struggled, but Mike and Audie were experienced at holding people still.

When the cutting was finished, Mike and Audie pulled Monty to the edge of the opening, where a few stone steps led down to a pool of crude oil. Evelyn motioned for Kybel to take Mike’s place, holding Monty’s arm.

“I can help you get him down the steps,” Audie offered.

“Thank you, but I can manage,” Kybel said.

Monty’s head jerked up at the familiar voice. “Frenchy? Oh, God, Frenchy, help me! Don’t let them.”

“Sorry, Monty,” Kybel said. “You should have stayed on the path. It’s too late now.”

“Don’t think of this as sacrificing him to save yourself,” Elijah advised. “Think of it as your first offering.”

Kybel turned his head to regard Elijah, almost disapprovingly. “I do.”

Kybel was already holding Monty’s arm with one hand. He twisted the other, the bleeding one, into his schoolmate’s matted hair and propelled him down the steps to the edge of the pool.

Beneath that black and viscous surface something moved.

Masaru, like the rest of the watchers, averted his eyes. To have seen once was enough.

There was a shriek, followed by thick, wet noises. They waited until those sounds had ended and the scrape of Kybel’s shoes on the uneven steps told them the rite had concluded.

Masaru was pleased to see Kybel moving under his own power. Not every officiant was able to, after.

Some never moved again.

Some were never seen again.

Kybel’s face was pale but calm. There was a smear of black on his forehead and another across his mouth.

Masaru shuddered. If the thing in the pool had touched him, his conscious mind had mercifully blocked it out.

Dalton and Evelyn kissed Kybel’s cheeks and handed him over to Masaru.

Kybel smiled at him, and for the first time in years Masaru found himself afraid.

End.

Mir Rainbird is composed primarily of words. Mir’s other hobbies include arguing with cats and being bad at art.

Knocks

By Erik McHatton

As the knocking on the roof persisted through the night, Evie laid on her bed and stared at the ceiling. With the tip of her finger, she twirled a filamentary tuft of cotton sticking out of her ear and wondered once again about the nature of the thing above. Did it have feelings, motivations? Could it be reasoned with? Did it dream? Why did it think it wanted in the house so badly? She wondered if it could hear her thoughts about it. She wondered if she could command it psychically. Get off the roof, she thought at it. Go away. Leave us alone! Still, it carried on drumming the tin sheeting. Sighing, Evie turned over and looked out the window.

She was sure it must, at least, be aware of her. Lately, every time she went upstairs to sleep, it followed, leaving the others and clambering up the side of the house and onto the roof, settling just above her bed. The others didn’t follow mother or father if they moved about the house. No, her parents’ two creatures (if they were indeed assigned) stayed put on the porch, pounding at the front door both day and night. For some reason, Evie was special, if only to the thing that thought it was hers.

She pulled the cotton from her ears, dropping it into the bedside wastebasket before reaching into her nightstand to replace it. For a few moments, the barrier was down and the full cacophony of the knocking was immediately overwhelming. She trembled as she pulled the new cotton ball apart and quickly rolled it into two small plugs. She clenched her eyes shut, holding back tears while stuffing them in her ears. The snow crunch sound they made caused her to wince as she pressed them hard, much harder than was probably prudent. She stopped when it was safe, when she was sure of being back within the peaceful, muted world. Pulling her thick blanket over her body and head, she wrapped herself in muffling comfort and counted the dull, measured knocks like sheep. Slowly, finally, she drifted off and dreamed of ewe-faced girl scouts and traveling salesmen with curled black horns.

After stringing together a few hours of under-nourishing sleep, Evie made her way downstairs. Her thing returned to its brethren on the porch, falling immediately back into rhythm with them. One, two, three; one, two, three. Sardonically, she waltzed into the kitchen to their cadence, breezing past her mother who sat face down at the table.

“Hello, Mother,” she said without looking, reaching into the cupboard for her daily ration of crackers. Three today. Two for tomorrow. After filling a dingy glass with sulfurous pond water from the tap she seated herself across from her mother and stared at the balding crown of her head.

“I see you’re finally away from the basement door,” Evie muttered around a saltine. ‘How’s the baby?” Her mother didn’t move. If she gave a response, Evie hadn’t heard it, she didn’t care anyway, just making conversation.

Finishing her crackers, she washed them down with the stagnant water while holding her nose. Not a single gag. “I think I might be getting used to the taste,” she said, before getting up and gathering her father’s meal. Three, no, two crackers for him. As she pulled his draught of pond filth from the sink, she stuffed his third portion into her mouth. He wouldn’t notice. He’d want her to have it. Better that than to have Mother steal it again for the baby. The baby didn’t eat, but Mother thought it did. How much food had she wasted by stuffing it under the basement door? It doesn’t even have a mouth.

Leaving her flaccid mother in the kitchen to fend for herself (and the baaaby), Evie moved into the living room where her father lay bundled against the front door. He was awake and scratching in his notebook, his ear pressed firmly to the wood. He’d even managed to sit up on his own, a promising development. Both of her parents were uncharacteristically mobile this morning. After weeks of near inactivity, lying in their usual spots, messing themselves, Evie had feared they were both near the end. Truthfully, she hoped it more than feared it, but seeing them out of these destructive routines did make her somewhat glad. She smiled at her father as she dropped his crackers into his lap and sat the stinking glass down next to him. His eyes stayed fixed on the door; his scratching unabated.

“How are you today, Papa?” said Evie, crossing her legs as she sat close to him, avoiding the puddle of urine near his thigh.

“Different today,” he mumbled as Evie brushed dried bits of chewed crackers from his beard. While studying the knocks, he said little else. Always “different” he said, yet they always sounded the same to her. Whatever he heard in the knocking was beyond Evie. Whatever differentiation he sensed, she could not, as she could make no sense of the gibberish he scribbled in his notebook.

Her mother was the first of her parents to go, but her father followed shortly after, broken as much by his powerlessness as by the incessancy of the things outside. He had drowned in hopeful madness, called to the depths by drumming sirens playing songs of mispromised salvation. Maybe he believed that he could still save them, but Evie suspected that whatever now sat before her, swaddled in the soiled trappings of her father, believed in nothing beyond the walls of its ensorcellment. To it, there was simply knocking, and listening, and scratch, scratch, scratching, broken up solely by the perfunctory interruptions of its basic survival. She was not its daughter, and it was not her Papa. It was nothing more than a living ghost, a being who answered purely to the call of otherworldly things, one who gargled on rations that could have been hers.

Wiping hot tears from her eyes, her face bunched by sudden anger, she snatched the crackers from his lap before rising and marching swiftly towards the den.

“Different today,” he muttered after her.

Slamming the double doors of the den, Evie pressed her forehead against them. She took a deep breath before turning to face her late grandfather’s library.

At some time in his life, her grandfather had acquired a taste for the fantastical and macabre. Aside from teaching, it was the only thing he had any enthusiasm for. The result of this obsession was a collection of tomes dedicated to the darkest imaginings of history’s finest speculative minds. Books he shared with his granddaughter in his final days of life—books he left to her. Mother hated the idea, but Papa insisted she be given what was rightfully hers. Shelves from floor to ceiling containing rows upon rows of wondrous journeys wrapped around the room like an inviting hug, one that never failed to soothe her. For these last four weeks especially, since the succumbing of her parents, this sanctum offered serenity from the shattering of her world.

Of late, she found herself seized by a great wanderlust, compelled to spend her days within the room’s embrace, traipsing from respite to respite. In the den, well away from the front door, through the cotton and oak, the barrier between her and the knocking was as thick as it could be. Only this gave her the ability to navigate those adventure-filled portals to passionate forgetfulness. Here she could concentrate wholly on crucial measures of dissolution as she melted from controlled into controller, taking within the stories a liberative command.

Throwing herself onto the antique divan, she reached for her latest escape that lay open on the end table, precisely where she left it. Placing another cracker in her mouth, she picked up the book, promptly found her place, and plunged.

It was the story of a terrible creature summoned by folly (as so many of them seemed to be) and featured a gruff protagonist racing to defeat the completely alien menace. Standard stuff, but the evocative prose enraptured, allowing Evie to hear the sounds and smell the odors of the horrible beast as it closed in on the hero, to feel the dread and ticking clock in her blood. She easily fell back into the story and dashed from page to page with abandon, flying delighted through the dark and foreboding. The crushing reality beyond her head fell away and she was as zephyrous winds trailing just behind, witnessing the doom of another well-meaning man, a doom whose pace backward to meet the hero was determined by her will alone. And on this day, it hurtled.

She was gone for more than an hour before being jolted from her reverie by a faint rapping at the window of the den.

“No,” said Evie as she lifted her head to see what she already knew was there. It was her thing, suctioned against the window, tapping at the glass with one of its gory protuberances.

“No, no, no, no, NOOO!” she cried as she threw her book down and marched across the room, grabbing at her stringy hair reflexively. She moved in tight circles before the window, casting hateful, panicked glances alternatingly between the floor and the intruder. “You can’t be here. You always stay on the porch when I’m downstairs. Why should today be any different? Go back to the porch. Go back to your friends. This is my place. Only mine. You belong on the porch, so go back there. NOW! Go back, go back, go back. GO BACK!” she bellowed, smacking her sweaty palms together with each exasperation.

The thing carried on tapping, just soft enough to leave the windowpane intact, its body of mish-mashed and blended flesh undulating, its visible organs quivering with each thump. Evie turned her head and grimaced, reminded of how glad she was that they normally stayed well out of sight.

“You want me to go crazy like them, but I won’t. You think because you came here, I’ll give in. I suppose you think that soon I’ll be some drooling mess, and then you can all come in and mop us up. That’s what you want, right? That’s why you’ve stayed outside, why you won’t let me sleep. Well, I don’t think so!” she said before returning to the divan to retrieve her discarded story. “I can read just fine, even with you here,” she sneered, thumbing back to where she’d been before being interrupted. She read aloud, loudly.

“Brimley stood before the creature and watched as it coalesced into a singler globular mass. Impossibly, it floated above the floor of the crypt. He marveled at the surface of its skin; so dark, so smooth. It appeared a perfect spheroid of nothingness hovering weirdly in the sepulcher’s fetid air.

From inside this living chasm originated a humming, one that was proportionate to the sound he’d heard outside, the one carried by the wind. It circled into him, like water down a drain, emptying into his mind like waste. It bid him to come forward, to fall inside it, to adjoin with it.

Brimley reached for his ears in panic. Seizing them he—”

Her thing had stopped knocking. It merely sat there now, rippling oddly but not tapping, as if entranced. Evie crept across the room, goggling at the thing, attempting to tamp down the excitement that bubbled up inside her. Before she could get ahead of herself, however, the thing snapped out of whatever had taken hold of it and began going once again at the window, more intensely than before.

“I get it,” said Evie as much to herself as to the thing. Reopening the book, she continued.

“...snatched vainly, as if to catch the trails of the humming before it could bore too deeply into his brain. It was of no use, and soon Brimley was limp from its possession. Jaw slack and drool dripping, he shuffled towards the portalous maw.” Looking up, she saw that the thing had again stopped tapping, was again enraptured. Another promising development, one she was happy to take full advantage of.

Evie and the thing finished Brimley’s tragic tale that day, and they made their way through many more before dusk came to claim the light and drive them up to bed.

That night, she noted that the thing’s pounding on the roof lacked the fervor of previous evenings. It retained its autonomic character, but all the verve had been drained out. Listless, she decided, was the right word. Perhaps it was daydreaming about the stories as she so often did, knocking out of sheer habit rather than at the behest of any conscious goal. Maybe she’d found yet another element the thing retained from its former human form. Knocking, then listening, now daydreaming. Might not reason be next, or at least close at hand? The day’s events proved some understanding between them, and where understanding lay could not also compromise lie? She hoped this was the case.

She passed from her introspections into sleep and dreamed of the fields outside, those dead acres of farmland decaying around the house.

In her dream she hovered over the landscape like a witnessing specter and heard a great rustling coming from all sides. Louder and louder grew this rustling until one by one, droves of the things marched out of the woods with motions that had more in common with clumsy plopping than anything produced by footed creatures. They came, no doubt because they had finished with the more densely populated communities and had subsequently set their sights on places like the farm.

She saw the fields filled with thousands of the fluidic creatures pushing against and off one another, joined together in undulous dance. They bounced and wriggled, flopped and rolled, crowding closer and closer before merging into a single massive, rippling lake swirling with mottled flesh. The swirls then coalesced into moving pictures. Scenes projected from her mind’s eye played out over the surface of their liquid flesh. There was Brimley tumbling down the gullet of Ohimbra, then came the flaying of the royal court of Hyphrovai. The crumbling of ancient Balaluud, the invasions of the Yephitarin hordes, all her favorite stories were shared across the protoplasmic expanse, conically echoing out from the casement of the den, onto which her creature still held firm.

She saw herself inside, her hand touching the window as she read, feverish eyes poring over offering after offering. She felt a wanting, titanous in its strength, to push through the glass and be bodily a part of those tales told through flesh. She would be transformed by their touch, melting and reforming, just like the baby (the baaaaby), like the gallant neighbor boy, like everyone she had seen overtaken by the creatures during her family’s flight from the city. The possibility was no longer frightening, but welcoming. How could she ever have thought otherwise? Beyond the pane at her fingertips could lie the greatest adventure to which she’d ever been privy. She had only to accept their promise and it would be so. She was sure of it.

Finally, she saw the book fall from her hand, saw her white knuckles as she gripped at the base of the window. She saw it lifted and saw them flow through.

Awakening, Evie found that she had slept well and into the afternoon, carrying over from her dreams only a vague sense of how important the previous day’s revelation had been.

She buzzed through her start-of-day routine. In the kitchen, she gulped down her pond water without pinching her nose and grabbed a handful of crackers from the cupboard. She did all this while giving no more than a cursory glance to her mother, who still sat face down at the kitchen table, a putrid puddle having materialized on the floor beneath her overnight.

To her prone father she at least gave a grunt as she passed him on her way to the den, gingerly stepping around his puddle. He could get his own food today, or her mother could get it for him since she was so interested in everyone’s diets. Evie had more important things to do.

When she arrived, her thing was waiting. She smiled at its gory underparts as she plucked yesterday’s last book from the divan. She then made her way over and sat before the window. It tapped delicately, almost politely, in seeming anticipation. Pleased by its good behavior, she began.

After that, she spent nearly every waking moment reading to the beast and noted several patterns in its various reactions. Evie found that the thing enjoyed some stories more than others, and she became quite adept at picking just the right tales to tell. She fancied that a strange language formed between them, one that allowed her to glimpse into its alien mind and pull back the veil of its hidden desires. She even started to take her cotton out when reading. Her thing never let her down, never betrayed her, unlike her unresponsive parents, whom she found easy to abandon in favor of this new endeavor. Turn-about, after all, is fair play.

She began to sleep in the den, only stopping reading once the light died each day. She believed she had touched on its humanity, what remained of it at least, and in her nightly musings, when sifting through each day’s events, she felt a growing pride, and even hope. Hope that she would succeed where her father had not; pride in being the one to save herself.

She barely ate from the boxes of crackers she’d taken from the kitchen, and expedited any bathroom needs by relegating them to the far corner of the room. There was no time for such unimportant things. Only time for forging ahead, and no amount of hunger or foul smell would deter her.

By the third week’s end, she concluded that her thing was most fond of those stories in which the protagonists were overtaken and transformed in some manner, an unsurprising fact given the nature of the creatures’ recent assault on mankind. It showed particularly intense interest when the hero thought of this transformation as a good thing, when they welcomed it. Its reaction to the thrilling conclusion of W.E. Hinson’s “The Unused”, in which an intrepid lad gladly merges with an incandescent lifeform, was enlightening. It scuttled and rippled for over an hour after the tale’s completion. Evie would have called it giddy if it wasn’t for the slightly blasphemous way the thought of doing so felt.

After collecting this useful bit of information, Evie narrowed her selections even more and discovered that its favorite stories, the ones that caused it to fall from the window and roll about on the ground like an excited retriever, were the ones in which these transformations were not just welcome, but beneficial. Its response to Alphonse Dupont’s “The Oblate Sphere” was positively apoplectic, orgasmic even. Evie watched it spread itself out in the dirt and dead grass, its surface bubbling and cresting in odd patterns, and could have sworn she saw the face of Dupont’s farm boy melting into the god light in those patterns. Not long after this display, the answer came.

On the final night before the peace between them was well and truly struck, after considering every collected detail, she decided on one last yarn that would surely bridge the gap. She would read to it the tale of Usutrua, Queen Beneath the Waves, as chronicled in the inspiring work “Mother of the Fathomed’’, by the incomparable Wilhelm Schott. It was among her very favorites, and she was sure that it was the key.

The morning of her day of understanding Evie found herself overcome with an urgent, confusing sense of sentimentality and, owing to this, visited each of her family members in turn, even though by then they were all dead. She felt like her mother.

First came the baby(...but Charles, he’s our baaaaaby!). Weak from malnutrition, she leaned hard on the basement’s door frame and tried not to imagine him the way she’d last seen him, squirming and pooling at the bottom of his box before Papa sealed it up for everyone’s safety. She tried not to hear again the frantic, pleading beats from inside as Papa had taken it down into the basement. She tried to forget how sorrowful mother’s wails became when those pleas had stopped. Alas, there was no forgetting.

With her hand on the basement door she whispered quick and quiet; a promise, a prayer, and an apology. Sisters aren’t supposed to hate. She would make it up to him.

Her mother, or what remained of her, was still slumped in her kitchen chair, purple face flat, flush against the table’s dark wood. She was distended and split at the middle.

“I checked on the baby for you,” said Evie, easing into the closest seat and grabbing her mother’s limp hand. It squished a bit and she nearly dropped it. No, she had more strength than that. She knew that now. “He’s just fine.”

After offering up the same sentiments she had given to the baby (Colin, Colin!), Evie stood and prepared herself for her last stop. She hesitated only a little at the thought.

She tried not to look into her father’s eyes, staring at the ceiling—half-moons of darkened blood bowing beneath fogged irises—as she cradled his head in her lap. She stroked his brittle hair for several minutes, shaking off what caught and broke off between her fingers. She tried again and again to close his eyelids, but they eased themselves back open each time, as if to say, This failure must be dealt with.

“It will be Papa,” she muttered. “It will be.”

Later, sitting before her thing, criss-cross applesauce, book in her lap, she looked up at it with a wan smile spread across her face; eyes hazy. It had stretched itself far enough to completely envelop the large window, spread so thin that it had become almost translucent, giving the world behind it the quality of gauzy gore. Organ clouds dotted the sky.

“I think I’ve finally figured it out,” she said to it, patting the outside cover. “This story is the one, I just know it.”

Her thing tapped lightly in seeming anticipation.

As she opened the book her thing shifted and bent outward, pushing its middle away from the window, tenting itself against the side of the house. Several tendrils of its non-Newtonian flesh extended outward from its center and pressed against the glass, smooshing together into a nebulous, hand-like shape. Evie knew exactly what to do.

She rose to her knees while plucking the cotton from her ears, and placed her hand directly opposite this extension.

Her thing palpitated with delight.

Awash in this delight, emboldened and encouraged by it, Evie moved her gaze away from the window and determinedly began to read.

End.

Erik McHatton’s passion for horror literature began in grade school and can be credited to an early fascination with the “Terrific Triples” horror collections of Helen Hoke. He began writing fiction seriously in 2019 and has since been published several times in print and online publications. He hopes to follow in the footsteps of authors like Ligotti, CAS, Bloch, Jackson, Barker, and Cushing. He lives in Kentucky with his beautiful wife and kids, along with dear friends and family; surrounded on all sides.

Testimony

By Carson Ray

When I was a boy, my daddy would often tell me stories about people worshiping something deep in the woods separating Jasper and Talking Rock. I’d sit on his knee and listen, content just to be close to him but never taking much stock in his words. He seemed to be relating more gossip than facts, which is usually the way of things down here. Wayward souls turning away from the congregation in search of something easier. People kidnapped from their beds and disappeared. Men in dark hoods passing between the trees in the pale twilight, whispering to something just out of sight.

He refused to answer my questions as to the truth of these statements. He’d just look at me with watery eyes, head tilted. Before the pause became unbearable, he would tell me to always stay close to home when the light in the sky was fading and to never, ever go near the dark woods on the edge of town.

“Not everything in this world is meant to be understood, boy,” he would say. “There are old ways. Old things pretending to be God. Those things need followers to keep them alive. The numbers rise and fall, like any congregation. Whatever is in them woods must be strong these days.”

I was a good boy, then. I listened. I did as I was told. I kept to my schooling and made my folks proud. Momma always said I had a level head on my shoulders, and before long time proved her to be right. Still, there was more than one occasion when I considered taking a long walk through the woods. A curious mind will always push back against advice—no matter how well-intentioned—meant to dissuade investigation.

But I never did. Years went by and the strange stories lessened before trickling to nothing by the time I was a man myself, my daddy gone and planted in the ground. I had almost forgotten them altogether by the time I took a position at a prestigious bank down in Atlanta.

Then Black Tuesday changed everything. I was back on Momma’s doorstep before I knew what had happened. My guts were so twisted with shame and fear that I couldn’t bear to meet her kindly gaze or accept her assurances that there was nothing I could’ve done. Returning to my childhood room, I somehow felt bigger and smaller at the same time, still lost and waiting for someone to tell me what to do. Several hands had guided me throughout my life, me being the sheep to many shepherds. I had no clue how to lead myself out from that darkness.

This was how I came to prowl through the woods my daddy warned me about. Men in town knew me as the hotshot banker who actually managed to get out of town and make something of himself before the dying of the world forced him to return. Two of these men, enterprising fellows in their own way, thought I could do some good.

They found me out back of the house one evening as I was splitting wood, my face covered in a sheen of cold sweat. One second I was swinging the ax and the next there they stood, dirty overalls covering torn and frayed undershirts. I knew them on sight, for I had not been in Atlanta so long as to forget the faces of home.

William Dodger was barrel-chested and burly, his red nose a broken curiosity in the center of his round face. The bear of a man had seen the inside of a cell more than a few times for roughhousing. John Blackwood was his polar opposite. Tall and weed-thin, he was long-necked and so standoffish he’d scarcely look you in the eye.

There was no exchange of greetings nor small talk of any kind. Dodger laid out what he wanted to say, promising me steady money if I was interested in using my gift for numbers once again. I had reached a decision before he finished his sales pitch without him even saying what the job was, but I knew.

The country had been dry for ten years. Men defying the law by transporting packed crates in the black of night was no strange prospect, especially down here. Most of those visiting the Pickens County Jail the past decade had been sent there for playing some part in the manufacturing of drink deemed illegal by the Eighteenth Amendment.

Even I knew Georgia was up to its eyes in illegal liquor and the blood that spiraled out from its creation. A week before I was to leave for Atlanta, the gossip in the churchyards and Bert’s General Store had been abuzz about the two revenuers who had been gunned down over in Dawson County. Momma had expressed doubts about me moving to a city where so many of these violent men were transporting their product.

The three of us shook hands, the deal done. I knew there would be great risks but perhaps even greater rewards. One does not achieve greatness by risking nothing.

Three days later I passed between the trees of that dreaded forest for the first time. Dodger and Blackwood both held Winchester rifles against their shoulders, the barrels pointed toward the dying sun. They sauntered through without so much as a backward glance while I slowed, my breath coming in shallow bursts. But, as dusk settled, I broke my word to my daddy and followed my two new employers beneath the wide canopies.

We walked for almost an hour. The glowing lantern Dodger held aloft was a steady guide amongst the tightly-clustered trees. Forest detritus crunched underfoot as I was shown the proper steps to take and trails to follow. Once Dodger held the light low to a section of ground where I could just make out a circle of metallic teeth rising from the leaves. The rusted foothold trap had been intended for bears but Dodger joked that it would work even more admirably on a prying trespasser.

Trespassers, I knew, were slim in terms of likeliness. Despite no longer being the focus of town gossip, the woods still carried with it a black reputation that one felt more than heard. Hunters avoided the place altogether and always spoke highly of the game to be found in Hill City or Fairmount whenever asked. Decades of strange stories do not wash clean away after only a scant dusting of years.

Eventually we came to a small glade in the woods, both men fanning out once the lattice of branches opened above. Dodger sighed as he took his lantern and lit another hanging from a hook nailed into the bark of a poplar with a rash of moss reaching up its southern side. The light doubled and illuminated the site where I would be spending a good deal of my time in the coming months.

Directly in the center of the glade stood a large lean-to of bent and hammered sheet metal covering a dented copper drum placed atop a ring of stones. Metal tubes propped up by forked sticks planted into the ground ran from the still and connected to two barrels, a large bucket of water placed close at hand. Dodger slapped affectionately at a tarp covering two more barrels of what I later found out contained corn mash, puffs of pollen rising with his passing. He handed his rifle to his business partner and Blackwood leaned it and his own against a tree. Blackwood smiled shyly at me and withdrew a large wad of tobacco from the chest pocket of his overalls, packing it tight against one cheek.

Dodger beckoned me forward before launching into a longwinded explanation of their contraption and what they had accomplished so far. He spoke of a skinny creek that trickled through the woods closer on the Talking Rock side, which is where we would be getting water for the still. He rambled for a time about the technical process of making shine and the dangers that could arise after the slightest mistake. I nodded and grunted in the right spaces but his words quickly fell on deaf ears as I surveyed the rest of the glade.

I knew something was unnatural about the place, even then. It was as though a malevolent god had aimed a great rifle down at the woodland’s center and fired to burn away the trees and scrub to form a perfect circle. I realize the word “perfect” deals in absolutes and yet I in no way hesitate to use it here, for the circle of trees looming over our operation seemed to be meticulously spaced and planted in a manner that would be pleasing to a dullard whose mind could not grasp the impossibility of such perfection.

Dodger gave me a light shake to return me to my senses. He stared at me with one eyebrow cocked before he led me over to a small table, upon which sat a thin ledger bound in leather. I opened the pages to the creaking of the spine signaling the first use of a fresh book. I was given pens and ink and whatever else I needed to accomplish my part of the operation.

My task, from my perspective, was mind-numbing in its simplicity. I was to keep a close record of the jars Dodger and Blackwood produced and estimate the cost for the continued purchasing of materials they required. I was also to determine the ideal amount to charge our customers to ensure mutual benefit and steady working relationships. Dodger informed me repeatedly that I would never see any of our customers in person, which helped alleviate some of my initial concerns. Creeping through the woods at night was as far as I was willing to go to line my pockets.

I joined Dodger and Blackwood three nights a week while they worked six, Dodger often remaining behind to sleep in the day and keep close watch on the apple of his eye. Saturday night offered the only total respite from the forest, a needed period of rest before the Sunday service at Fairhill Baptist Church. Momma had been trying to get me to join her in the pews ever since I turned back up on her doorstep but I had refused her thus far. I assured her that I would return in due time, but the thought of sitting in a house of God alongside Dodger and Blackwood felt almost blasphemous.

A month passed without incident. Dodger made two shipments in his Ford pick-up, crates packed with full Ball jars hidden within a false compartment burrowed in the center of a load of stacked lumber. I could not help but admire the man’s ingenuity once I saw the hidden door in the lumber swing open with my own eyes. He would drive the pick-up into the woods from Talking Rock when his paid lookout on the other side deemed it safe. The route through the forest from that direction was less winding and treacherous but Dodger wisely did not want to make a habit of driving through tiny Talking Rock.

The money was good despite my smaller percentage, which I accepted gladly. I was simply a numbers man one step removed from the dangers of transportation and face-to-face dealings. I had no notions of riding with Dodger down trails unknown to any map, the threat of pursuit a constant companion.

But one night, while I was bent over the ledger and patiently explaining the week’s numbers to Blackwood across from me, I felt a hiss of hot breath warm the back of my neck.

I shuddered and spun around. Nothing. Only the trees and the deeper dark of the woods beyond. Blackwood eyed me curiously.

“Someone walk across your grave, Ryan?” he said.

Dodger laughed at that from his place next to the crates. He lifted a jar of the clear shine to his lips and sampled it, as he always did after a fresh batch.

Both men knew of my feelings concerning the woods. Though I never voiced the words my daddy had spoken to me as a youngster, Dodger and Blackwood had been living two decades before I came kicking and screaming into existence. They had heard the same tales as I, though they too never made mention of them. There could be no benefit from speaking such things aloud while all light had bled from the world.

My employers again set about their chosen tasks, Blackwood sauntering away from the table to inspect fresh bags of corn he had propped against an oak. I tried to regain my concentration but it proved a futile prospect, my skin breaking into gooseflesh as I recalled the feeling of mysterious warmth.

A week rolled by. Dodger and Blackwood made their runs while I stayed home listening to the radio with Momma, my mind drifting back to those old stories. My daddy had never given names to the things he had accused of playing God. He would never verbalize having physically seen one of the cloaked men roaming the woods because—I am certain—he was just repeating stories he had heard. Everything was whispers and hearsay. Distantly, I began to harbor resentment against my daddy for filling a child’s ears with such nonsense when a good whipping would have been incentive enough in keeping his only son away from the woods.

But, even more distantly, a suspicion was growing within me that he might have been right after all.

The moon was full above the glade when next I felt my rational mind slip. Dodger had extinguished his lantern when the canopy opened above us, our operation bathed in regal light. Indeed, I needed no further illumination as I opened the ledger to the most recent page.

I froze, my pen hovering over the paper like an ax before the fall. Again my skin rippled with gooseflesh as I took in the impossibility before me. There, beneath the tallies and figures from the previous week, was written a single word:

VENERATION

I did not leap to my feet and accuse my employers of tampering with the ledger. There were no angry shouts or hurled objects. In fact, no words were spoken at all.

How could I accuse Dodger or Blackwood of scribbling the word when it was plainly written in my own hand?

The trees seemed to sigh as my mind filtered through the possibilities. Had I forgotten I had written this, perhaps in the throes of a daydream? Had I been sleepwalking? Had I risen from a nightmare and written on whatever was close at hand in an effort to make sense of what tormented me?

The forest creaked and popped as a sudden wind swept through, the force of it so strong that Dodger had to clutch at his hat lest it twirl away. The big man laughed after the gust died away and sampled the latest batch, his lips glistening and curling with satisfaction.

I chose to keep the sudden appearance of the word to myself. We were moving to a new week and there was no possibility that Dodger would ask to see pages dedicated to the past. The quality of my work spoke for itself as more money rolled in, the profits and potential for expansion on a constant upswing. Dodger had recently been carrying on about the possibility of running two stills, a fantasy I did my best to discourage. Another still suggested the need for more men, and the more people involved would bring us closer to ruin. Perhaps we could have achieved such lofty ambitions in a larger town, but Jasper was small and its tight-knit community was held together by a chain of gossip and fingers ready to be pointed.

Some nights, in the darkness of my childhood bedroom, I would hold the ledger to the window and read the word by what the moon could provide.

Veneration.

Respect. Reverence. Awe inspired by the dignity or aura of someone or something. These were merely definitions incapable of providing me with any clues as to why I wrote out the ten letters and strung them together. The mystery nagged at me night and day, everything made worse by the fact that I knew no one with whom I could discuss the matter in an intelligent manner. I was trapped in my own head, the word burrowing deep into my brain.

I slept less and less. Fatigue would weigh me down while I was awake but sleep would be a fleeting thing when it came time to draw the covers up past my chin. I’d stare up at the ceiling, whispering the word under my breath until it matched the rhythm of the grandfather clock ticking down the hall.

Exhaustion was what I initially attributed to my shouting episode in the woods.

The three of us had just entered the glade to begin the night’s work when terror seized me by the throat. Dodger and Blackwood kept on as I stood rooted to the spot, my mouth opening and closing like a banked fish.

The glade was smaller.

There could be no doubt. It was as though the trees encircling us had all crept forward three paces since our last visit, the circle more compact than it had been just days prior. How could Dodger and Blackwood not see it? Just how dense were these men?

Finally, I forced one foot in front of the other and shuffled to my table. I had been known to pace between my workspace and the woods while I pondered figures and the future, so one glance at the worn patch of grass confirmed what I already knew. Days ago, I could have outstretched my arms and spun around without touching anything. Now I scarcely had to lean out of my chair before my fingertips would brush against bark.

I am not sure when I started to shout but shout I did. I ranted about the trees, the tall, dark trees, creeping closer to ensnare us in a labyrinth of timber and undergrowth.

“Veneration!” I shouted as I pointed all around us, carrying on like this for some time. “Veneration! A word I’ve inscribed without knowledge! Veneration!”

It was Dodger who slapped me across the face. The force of it threw me down onto my backside, my head lolling.

“Get a grip on yourself, man!” he barked. “What’s come over you?”

I stammered up at him, tears filling my eyes. I pointed over past my workspace, where Dodger would surely see the truth of my words. His eyes followed and he lifted his lantern to investigate.

“Ain’t nothing looks out of the ordinary to me,” he growled.

It was true. The space between my table and the woods looked as it had the first time I paced it. I stared about the glade with mounting bewilderment. The circle of trees had returned to their proper places, the glade enlarged back to its usual circumference. It felt as though I could hear the trees chuckling from high above, branches seconds away from pointing down at me in mocking ridicule.

How long had it been since I slept?

Slowly I composed myself, a wave of embarrassment threatening to strangle my voice. “I apologize,” I said. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

Dodger nodded and lumbered over to his precious drum of copper, my explanation apparently settling the matter in his mind. Blackwood considered me suspiciously while I climbed to my feet, sweat beading his brow.

The night passed without me making matters worse. Dodger’s slap had banished away most of my fatigue and my mind whirled through the numbers as I recorded them into the ledger. More than once I leaned back and considered the stars above as they twinkled bright like beads of shine scattered across a black canvas.

Dawn was but an hour away when Dodger lifted a jar to his lips and scowled. He sniffed the liquid, his countenance suddenly one of caution.

“What is it?” Blackwood asked.

Dodger shook his head before taking a small sip of the alcohol. A look of revulsion distorted his face and then he was spitting and retching.

“Rotten!” he shouted, hurling the jar to shatter against a tree. “Rotten!”

He then grabbed Blackwood by the scruff of his neck and hauled him over to the sacks of corn stacked high as a man. Dodger withdrew a knife from his pocket and the blade flashed beneath the stars. I stood abruptly, fearing for Blackwood’s life.

But the knife only sliced through the top sack. Perfect little orbs of corn poured out from the tear and spilled down to the ground with a sound that was almost pleasing. Dodger released Blackwood and grabbed a handful, holding the corn just beneath his nose.

“Must be something else,” Dodger grumbled, stomping over to the barrels of mash.

“I know what spoiled corn looks like, Will,” Blackwood cried, rubbing at his neck. “Lord knows I’ve smashed enough of it. That mash I gave you was right as rain.”

Dodger stared at the still with hard eyes. “Well, we’ll be back here tonight. You too, Ryan. This batch ain’t fit to drink. Pure rot gut. I’ll get to the bottom of what went wrong, that you best believe.”

He then took his lantern and stormed off, leaving Blackwood and I to run after the bobbing light. We kept the big man within eyeshot and did our best to avoid tripping over fallen branches and gnarled roots. Eventually we slowed to a companionable walk when the sun rose and beams of yellows and oranges flitted down from the trees, Dodger long gone.

“You say you wrote something without meaning to?” Blackwood asked, the suddenness of the question catching me by surprise.

“What?”

“Back there, you said you wrote that word. Whatever it was.”

“Oh.” I forced a chuckle. “I’m just tired. I feel like I could sleep for three days straight.”

Blackwood rubbed at his hands. “Thing is, I don’t think you was just tired.”

“Oh?”

“Nope. I believe you.”

I stopped walking. Blackwood took another few steps before he bent down and began fiddling with the right leg of his pants.

“I ain’t got no reason as to why this is here,” he said.

Dimly I noticed my mouth had gone dry. “Why what is here?”

Blackwood carefully rolled up the denim and tilted the back of his calf into a shaft of sunlight. I forgot to breathe as I read the word carved into his puckered flesh.

SUPPLICATION

“What joke is this?” I babbled, feigning anger to combat the terror threatening to overtake me. “You’d take a knife to your leg just to make me feel a fool?”

Blackwood shook his head vehemently. “Nossir! No knife did this. Look at it.” He turned his calf under the light. “Far from a clean cut. Took me forever to dig the crud out.”

“Crud? What crud?”

Blackwood looked up at me, his eyes haunted.

“Bark.”

* * *

Dodger pushed us hard the next week in an effort to get back on track. He tended to tower over Blackwood as the scrawny man nervously crushed corn into a fine paste for the future batches. He oversaw everything, from the initial opening of the corn sacks to the introduction of yeast and more besides into the mixture as it simmered in the still. I watched from my station, the smell of potential violence thick in the air. Dodger even kept close eye on me and whatever I wrote in the ledger. He made no comment on my handwriting, which had devolved into a shameful chicken scratch far removed from the crisp clarity of my usual work. Lack of sleep and food had transformed me into a man I no longer recognized.

Finally, after a few setbacks caused by Blackwood’s nervousness, Dodger lifted a jar of clear shine and held it up to his eye as if inspecting an exquisite jewel. There was a swagger to the big man, his attention to detail during the making of this batch guaranteeing its success in his mind.

I held my breath as he took a sip of the concoction, Blackwood’s rigidity suggesting that this time he was coiled to flee from any outburst. The liquid swished in Dodger’s mouth and then he swallowed.

“Now that’s true white lightning,” he said, beaming. He downed the rest of the glass and went back for more. “I reckon I’ll need to keep an eye on you more often, John.”

“Weren’t me,” Blackwood grumbled, though clearly relieved. “Coulda been any number of things.”

Sighing, I closed the ledger and was readying myself for the walk home when all hell broke loose.

Dodger doubled over and gave a strangled shout before a jet of black blood vomited forth from his mouth and sprayed all down his front. He grabbed at his stomach with one hand and reached for Blackwood with the other, his suddenly-bloodshot eyes burning with hatred. He took a step forward and another geyser of the foul blood spewed from his lips.

“It weren’t me!” Blackwood screamed, falling on his rear and scuttling backward. “Something ain’t right about this place!”

Dodger gagged and something more than blood splattered to the ground, but still the big man kept coming.

“You stay back!” Blackwood cried. He grabbed one of the rifles propped nearby and took aim. “Don’t make me do this, Will.”

Dodger reached down, blood peppering Blackwood’s boots.

A shot rang out in the night and Dodger’s head snapped back. The mass of bloody bulk collapsed to the ground and twitched once before falling still.

Blackwood made a mewling sound in his throat as he scrambled to his feet. He turned about and stared desperately at me, his cheeks streaked with tears.

“You saw it, Andrew,” he said. “You saw. I had no choice.”

I nodded dumbly, words of any sort beyond my ability to muster.

“God help me,” Blackwood whispered. “I had no choice. I had no—”

A massive boom shuddered through the forest and drove us both to the ground. Branches shook and creaked overhead, a deluge of leaves and twigs fluttering down to rain upon us. Trees groaned and moved as if they were clay things being molded by unseen hands. A fierce wind swept through the glade and sent everything scattering, the copper still crashing from its place atop the rocks.

The terrible creaking grew even more deafening. I looked up to see branches coiling overhead like a mass of writhing copperheads, the wood moving with impossible fluidity. I stared, uncomprehending, until I felt my blood chill as realization dawned.

The branches slowed and formed letters, spelling a single word.

WORSHIP

Without knowing why, I did as I was bidden and rose to my hands and knees. I spared a glance for Blackwood and the man had done the same, his backside high in the air in a showing of supplication. He shook with wracking sobs and he babbled words I could not hear. We remained like that for a span of heartbeats and then Blackwood was up and running, his nerve lost or found, depending on your perspective.

My shouting did not save him.

The man screamed as soon as he passed out from the guttering light of the lanterns. The sound rose to a high pitch until it was cut off to nothingness. From far away I heard something crash into the trunk of a tree with a hideous squelching sound.

I trembled violently but I continued to kneel. Thoughts of my parents ran through my mind, particularly my daddy sitting in his chair telling me to never venture into these woods. I thought about how strange it was that I had obeyed him without question as a child only to fail him as a man.

The noises of the angry forest slowly died away. Leaves spun about in lazy circular motions before resting soundlessly atop the grass. Several minutes passed before I summoned up the courage to lift my head.

Our operation was destroyed, everything tossed about and broken beyond repair. My teeth started chattering when my eyes fell on the jar Dodger had dropped, liquid thick and black as tar oozing from the rim to saturate the earth. My neck craned and I squinted at open sacks of corn and overturned barrels of mash ridden with black and green mold. Shuddering, I lowered my head and remained where I was, never planning on moving again. I’d stay there until time itself ceased to have meaning.

But then I felt hot breath on the back of my neck as something bent down to whisper into my ear.

* * *

My name is Andrew Ryan, and this is my testimony. There is more to this world than what we can see. We walk with veils over our eyes, worrying over trivial matters and never accepting our insignificance. How easy it is to forget that we are merely dust crusting the eye of something much greater.

I wonder what my daddy would think if he saw me now. What would he say when I told him that he had been wrong all along? The things in the woods don’t need followers to keep them alive.

They merely wait until someone comes along to spread the good word.

End.

Carson Ray was born in 1991 in Jasper, Georgia and remains there to this day. His writing has appeared on The NoSleep Podcast and in the pages of Weirdbook and the third volume of the Swords & Sorceries:

Tales of Heroic Fantasy anthology series. When Carson isn’t working on something, you can almost always find him watching a baseball game or a movie made before he was born.

Art by Maxwell Marais

The Math of the Red Desk

By William R.D. Wood

“And just what are you going to do with a mathematics degree?” Liam’s father sawed at his pork chop as their server filled his glass of water. Her eyes sparkled and she looked as though she were about to comment on the leather-bound edition of The Limitless Poe on the table between them. A gaudy gold leaf circle dominated its cover. Liam’s father carried the book the way fanatics carried Bibles and iPhones.

He couldn’t blame the old man. The book had been the last gift Liam’s mother had given him before she disappeared.

His father glared up at the server and shut her down.

Liam’s conversation was going just about as well.

“You’re kidding, right?” Liam had changed his major five times in as many months. His father was a genius in his own right, but a college drop-out. Microbiology, pre-med and botany had all been the subject of previous discussions. “I can do anything. Literally, anything.”

“Literally? Is that a jab?” His father glanced at his book. The circle, an intricate sort of ouroboros, twitched in the light from the low fixture.

“Dad, no, of course not.”

An artery in his father’s neck pulsed. “If your mother were here, bless her soul, she’d feel the same. Mathematics.” He spat the word.

“Theoretical mathematics. Cutting edge stuff. Professor Downham is brilliant. Just last year she—”

“That’s supposed to make it better? Theoretical is how the lazy support themselves at the expense of the hard-working.”

“Dad, it’s not like that.”

“Name one practical application.”

Some things never changed. “Well, it’s not exactly like that either. Math is the science of everything. It underlies the very essence of existence.” His father stared him directly in the eye, but he wasn’t listening. “Worst case scenario—absolutely worst case—I could teach.”

His father stopped mid-cut and placed his knife and fork across his plate. “Propagation of uselessness is less than useless. How’s that for theoretical? You want to take what little money we have to become a social virus?”

“You mean like studying dead poets?” He regretted the words as soon as he spoke them.

His father placed his napkin on top of the half-eaten meal and stood. “Get used to washing dishes.” He tucked the book under one arm and shouldered by their server. She wished him a good day, but he didn’t hear her either.

* * *

Liam locked the wheels on the cart and fumbled in his coverall pocket. The jangle of the keys echoed down the long, dark hallway. Sixteen offices hunkered on the second floor of Brightmeer Hall, the gloom broken between every fourth door by a safety light. The other night crew employees preferred the overhead lights on as they worked but Liam was more comfortable in the dark. And it saved energy too. It was the least he could do toward saving the planet. The dark seemed more respectful of the great minds who wandered these halls by day, too. Those like Professor Downham.

Liam would have preferred an equally respectful silence, but one level up Marjorie was cranking her classic band of the day. Blue Oyster Cult. Who thought up the names for groups back then?

Liam tried a key, then another. Everyone on the crew hated pulling math hall duty. Math doody, Marjorie called it. Liam loved the old place from the moss-stained columns to the crumbling façade on the southwest corner. The hall was the oldest on campus. Sure, it lacked magnetic keycards, air conditioning and wi-fi, but it had character.

One more semester of extra shifts and pinching pennies and he’d have enough to re-enroll. If he could show that level of commitment, maybe his dad would be able to see beyond his own baggage and help.

Liam stepped into the cone of light cast down by a safety fixture to see the engravings on the keys. The old incandescent bulbs threw off a hell of a lot of heat. The hall was years away from an LED upgrade, he was sure. He wiped sweat from his forehead. Hell, given the age of the place, he was lucky the safety lights weren’t gas lamps or pitch-fueled braziers.

Ah, there was the key. Room 271. And the offices weren’t just numbered, they were prime numbered. How cool was that? Liam loved math people. Dad didn’t get it, but he would. Perseverance.

Muffled music crept in from above. Something about lost gods and long walks, or was it long gods and lost walks?

The latch released and Liam turned the knob, stumbling forward as it was sucked from his hand by a negative pressure in the room. The keys, still in the lock, clattered as they swung. The office was always the coolest on the floor. Could be the west facing windows, or the shade from the ancient elms outside, or maybe the arcane magics of Marjorie’s Blue Oyster Cult.

Liam snickered.

For a second everything was cold and dark. The light from the hallway spilled into the room but stopped a few feet inside along sharply defined lines. The angles seemed odd, wrong for the room. Liam groped for the old knob-style light switch, found it and twisted.

Wan yellow light popped on from shade-less lamps, each positioned low beside a couch or easy chair. The office of Cassilda Chancelle Downham, Professor of Mathematics. Liam wedged his cart in the doorway. It was the exact width of the opening and even slightly askew, it would prevent anyone from barging in unannounced. He took a small supply caddy from the top. The angle of the lamps cast multiple shadows of Liam’s lanky form up the walls and across the ceiling as he made his way to the professor’s desk. The polished cherry surface looked like dried blood in the yellow light. A stack of papers sat in a corner beside a legal pad, but otherwise the desk was clear. The other offices were brimming with laptops, printers, Keurigs and digital projectors, but not this one. Professor Downham was old school.

Chalkboards were mounted to the three inner walls. A few scribblings here and there but mostly clear except for the one behind the desk which contained a complex Venn diagram. Formulae filled the various overlapping cells and tick marks defined random arcs along their edges. Above the board a banner read, YOU ARE WHAT YOU DERIVE.

Liam eased down into the chair behind the desk. Ancient springs and old wood joints creaked under his weight, the sound bouncing about, trapped in the cozy little room. Liam took a couple of pages from the stack and leaned back, breathing in the chilled rational air of brilliance.

The math wasn’t particularly difficult. Not the theoretical sort he been exposed to in Professor Downham’s preview class before he dropped out last semester. More diagrams dominated the pages, each with slight variations in the placement of the tick marks.

“Liam.”

Liam pitched forward in the chair almost spilling out onto the floor.

Marjorie stood in the doorway, peering over his cart. “Going out for a smoke. Come with me.”

“What? We just got here?’

She looked at her watch. “Been an hour, Einstein. Let’s go.”

An hour? “Thanks, no. I don’t smoke.”

“And I don’t care.” She looked down the dark hall, then back at him. “Place is all creepy and shit. More than usual. Come on.”

Her expression softened and he felt the tug in his chest once he was on his feet.

The hallway was warm. Outside Brightmeer Hall was even warmer.

* * *

The professor had been busy since Liam’s last visit. Two wheeled dry erase boards had been brought in and stood to either side of the chalkboard behind the desk.

Liam wedged the cart in the doorway as usual, not that it had helped him notice Marjorie’s arrival last week. That was unusual though. And she’d actually been pretty embarrassed by getting spooked. She wasn’t likely to show up again.

Tonight, the office was positively icy and reeked of ozone. He’d heard the maintenance department’s plans to install window units. They must have started the project already. He couldn’t see his breath, but that had to be by a matter of only a few degrees. He shivered.

“Welcome to the twenty-first century, professor.” Now they just needed to get the woman an automatic air freshener. That ozone smell reminded Liam of the packages of freezer-burned meat he and his dad had disposed of a year after Liam’s mom disappeared. His dad had never been the cook in the family and Liam had been too young to care when a microwave Salisbury steak would hit the spot.

The chalkboard was filled with equations, intermingled with a dozen new drawings, bigger and more involved than before. The top of the desk was littered with legal pads and post-its. An old ruler and protractor arm from a drafting table had been clamped to the desk’s edge to aid in drawing the various figures. Papers hung over the edges in places, partially exposed lines and arcs seeming to flow directly into the woodgrain swirls of the desk.

The deep red wood was intricately carved, suggesting an artisan with a flair for the gothic. The interconnected shapes and curves could almost be faces in some spots, but then everyone tended to see eyes and mouths in inanimate objects. The desk was more than that though. Entire scenes played out along the panels and down the totem-like legs, larger images breaking into smaller versions of themselves, fractal-like. He’d never noticed this aspect of the desk before, always far more interested in what the professor had on the top.

Liam took a seat and leaned over the scattered pads, careful not to disturb their positions. The last thing he needed was complaints about the cleaning crew. He was not about to lose his job when he was so close and he did not want to go begging back to his dad. They’d only recently opened a dialogue again. Mostly text messages but last week they’d actually talked on the phone for over thirty minutes, about Liam’s mom.

Despite the disarray on the desk, the drawings seemed on the verge of, well, lining up. Fibonacci sequences and hyperboles, geometric shapes with distorted grids drawn painstakingly across their surfaces causing them to shift downward, then upward, then down again. Geometry based on the work of Escher instead of Euclid. His father would probably say it was like visualizing the poetry of E.E. Cummings. Liam tilted his head taking in a new Venn diagram, his gaze tracing around it, pausing involuntarily at the ticks like a worshipper at the Stations of the Cross.

Leaning down until his back protested the radius being asked of it, Liam gazed along the surface of the desk from the edge. About two inches above the desktop, the script defining the circle snapped into unexpected focus. The thick edge of the circle wasn’t a line at all but a string of script interspersed with equations, a shape that started off narrow and grew wider until it came around and consumed itself. Like the ouroboros on the cover of his father’s book.

“Numb nuts.”

Liam looked up from the desktop unable to stifle a yawn. The cold air burned in his nostrils and throat as if he’d exhaled long ago and forgot to breathe back in.

“Ain’t got all night,” said Marjorie from the doorway, unlit cigarette bobbing in her lips. Her voice was an imperfect echo, too far away for such a small room. “This your last room? I’m ready to go.”

“What?” Liam rubbed his forehead. “No, of course not. We just got here.”

Marjorie laughed. “Six in the god-fearing a.m., Kemosabe.”

The sky outside was the pale purple of dawn and the clock on the wall confirmed the time she claimed. Liam checked his watch, tapping the crystal.

“You shitting me?” Marjorie sighed, took the cigarette from her lips and tucked it behind an ear. “An hour left to get the whole floor before the geeks start pouring in. I’ll help you, but you owe me a fuck-off night too, or a date or something, ‘‘kay?”

Liam stood, joints stiff. His head hurt, too. Right behind the eyes. He rubbed them hard enough to leave bruise-colored after-images that reminded him of his dad. “Yeah, sure. Thanks.”

Had she said date?

* * *

“Dad, one last thing before I go.” Their phone call had been a good one. Over an hour. Liam had talked about Marjorie and the night crew. Dad had talked about pulling extra shifts at the mill. They’d even planned a trip home for Liam across the Christmas holidays. When Liam brought up his plan to re-enroll in the spring, his father had been understandably quiet, but that was better than hanging up on him.

“Yeah?” His father’s affable tone was gone.

“The book Mom gave you.”

“Yeah?” Now he just sounded confused. Liam knew his dad had expected a request for money and, as much as he enjoyed the recent improvements in their relationship, a part of him was deeply satisfied he’d sent a jolt through the old man. “What about it?”

“On the cover, the circle, does it have little tick marks at all?”

“As a matter of fact, it does. A lot of them. Why do you ask?”

“I’m just interested in reading it. Where did she get it, anyway?”

“Something she picked up back when she was at Mandelbrot.”

She’d been a math major too, which might even explain why Liam’s announcement had hit his father so hard.

“It was always her favorite,” said Dad. “Hand-made, I think. There’s no ISBN or publisher listed. Only fiction or poetry I ever knew her to read.”

Liam hadn’t known that. He smiled.

“‘Course, how many books of prose have a math insert?” His father chuckled for the first time Liam had heard him do so in years.

“What do you mean?”

“Craziest thing. Dead center of the book is a double-page spread of geometry. Bunch of equations written in the shape of overlapping circles. What do you call them?”

“Venn diagrams?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

Christmas was two months away and his dad was working sixty-hour weeks these days. “Any chance you could mail it to me? Insured, of course. I’ll pay, and I promise I won’t let anything happen to it.”

* * *

Marjorie had said date. In the weeks since, they’d been out a half dozen times, most recently culminating in a night at her place.

Marjorie swatted his ass as he pushed his cart from the Brightmeer elevator. He turned to give her a peck on the cheek, but she grabbed the collar of his uniform and pulled him in. He preferred less tongue, especially considering how much she smoked. The rubber bumpers on the elevator doors clamped onto him as they tried to close, rebounded, then clamped again as if they were giant toothless gums gnawing on him, the keys in his pocket digging into his leg.

Shoving him out, she winked and pressed the door close button. “Go clean something, you fucking pillow ninja.”

“Uh, you too.” He gave her a little wave as the elevator doors closed. He sighed and mumbled to himself, “Well-played, moron.”

He’d hoped he was good at math because he wasn’t going to make a killing with his rapier wit.

He pulled the keys from his pocket, but the door to Professor Downham’s office was already ajar a fraction of an inch. The cart’s wheels squeaked as he pulled it along. Cold air gushed through the crack like an industrial air knife and Liam wished he’d brought a jacket. The new A/C unit must be working overtime.

Liam touched the knob and snatched his hand back, palm stinging from the cold. He took a rag from his cart and pushed the door in, pausing at the threshold. Last time he’d lost an entire night inside that hallowed space. Marjorie would be back in a few hours and he didn’t want to chance needing her help to clean the whole floor again. One-sided relationships never last. He wasn’t sure he wanted it to, but he didn’t want to screw it up either.

Leaning into his own frosted breath, he reached around the corner and switched on the lights.

Multiple dry erase boards lined the walls, every single one covered in looping equations and drawings that would shame every Hawking and Einstein history could produce. Professor Downham was a genius. She must be.

Behind the wheeled boards, the mounted chalkboards were covered too, and the legal pads on the cherry desk had been replaced with overlapping easel-sized presentation boards.

Leaving the cart in the hallway, Liam took his cleaning supply caddy and walked slowly down the gauntlet of dry erase boards. The edges of the huge pads of paper on the desk fluttered as he approached, disturbed by the air conditioners. He didn’t see window units, though, only a row of stark, featureless institution windows.

Behind the desk, Liam placed the caddy on the floor and removed the book from its Priority Shipping box. When it had arrived this morning, he’d known he couldn’t wait until they were scheduled to return to Brightmeer Hall. Liam’s phone buzzed in his pocket. Marjorie had taken to calling him when she was ready for a smoke, or something more interesting. He gave it a firm shake without pulling it free to silence it. He wouldn’t be long. He just wanted to compare the math.

The gold leaf ouroboros glinted in the light. The drawings on the desk were the most complex yet. Lined shapes written as flowing equations that interlaced and writhed with even the tiniest change in perspective.

The book flopped open in his hands. A single set of interlocked circles dominated the pages. Tiny equations spun off from their edges extending outward until they ran off the pages, their angles shifting as he looked on the way you might expect in candlelight.

Papers with the same Gordian scrawl of symbols covered every inch of the desktop except the very center. Lines of code stabbed inward at the blank area like a circle of teeth.

The void was roughly the size—no, it was exactly the same size. Liam placed the book in the void.

Brightness flared around him as a spoke of light flooded in through the doorway. A shadow moved outside. Marjorie had found him after all. Where else would she expect him to go?

“Explain yourself.”

Liam stepped away from the desk. In the doorway stood Professor Cassilda Chancelle Downham.

* * *

“P—professor.” The word stumbled through Liam’s lips, his mouth dry. His legs trembled, as did his ribcage as he forced himself to breathe. Everything was fine. He was the cleaning crew. He had every right to be in the office. “Just cleaning up, ma’am.”

She strode into the room, ropes of long white hair bouncing around her head. Her face could have been sixty years old, or eighty, or a thousand. Her expression, though, was unforgiving. That he knew. She pulled a phone from a pocket. “Is that right? Looks to me as though you were shoving your nose where it doesn’t belong. Do you know the number for security?”

“Ma’am, please accept my apology.” Liam grabbed the caddy from the floor and rushed from behind the desk. “I’ll come back when you’re finished.”

The professor stepped in the line of his retreat, stopping him cold. She was a head taller and her wiry frame transmitted grace and power rather than frailty. She grabbed his chin in cold fingers and examined both sides of his face with ice-blue eyes streaked by bloodshot veins. Liam half expected her to separate his lips and look at his teeth. “You’re familiar.”

“I was in your Integral Calculus for Philosophers last term. Liam—”

She shook her head slowly from side to side, but said, “Yes, yes. I remember you. You weren’t significantly stupid.” She released his chin and pushed him away a few inches, her scrutiny shifting to the twisting equations on the dry erase board to her right. “You didn’t care for it then? The class?”

“No, ma’am. It was amazing.”

“Then me. You didn’t care for me?” She picked up a marker and placed several new tick marks along an arc at the bottom left of the board. “Closer.”

“No, ma’am. I mean, yes, ma’am.” Liam wanted to run but he was as trapped by propriety as a rabbit in a snare. “I’m saving my money to return in the fall. I’m taking your Intro to Theoretics.”

“Are you?” Her head jerked in his direction, but her gaze stopped on her desktop. His keys sat atop a sheaf of papers. Air currents in the room curled the corners up around them like a Venus flytrap trying to engulf a juicy fly.

Liam snatched them from the papers, only then noticing the painfully obvious intruder on the desk. His father’s book.

“What’s this?” asked the professor.

Liam reached for the book. The professor smacked his hand away and leaned over the desk, taking in the book and the array of papers around it. The corners of her mouth tugged back slowly, her stark white teeth creeping through. He wanted to recognize the expression as a smile but couldn’t.

“This is yours?” she asked, squatting down until the desktop was at eye level the way he had.

“My father’s. My mother gave it to him.”

Professor Downham moved too swiftly for him to follow. She had his chin in her hand again, the smile wider than before as she nodded. “Now I see it. Of course. And you brought it to me, yes?”

He pulled away. For god’s sake, she had him so flustered he was hallucinating. He tugged the wrinkles from his uniform shirt. “Yes, ma’am. Well, no, ma’am. I’ve been looking at your work while cleaning these last few weeks and these diagrams reminded me of the cover on my dad’s book.”

“Your mother’s,” she corrected.

“My father told me about the insert.” Liam pointed to the double page spread. The way the script extended to the edge of the pages, they looked as though they could almost line up with the equations on the papers around them, but he could tell, even if he rotated the book, they wouldn’t. “And I just wanted to compare them.”

“Integrate them?” The professor moved in on the desk, reaching out and letting her hand hover inches above the book. She flexed her fingers. “Almost twenty years.”

“I don’t—”

“Oh, I’ve worked out the math,” she said. “I found the doorway, didn’t I?”

“Professor?”

“She stole it from me.” Vapor condensed at her lips as she spat the words.

“I have no idea what you’re—”

Her hand slammed down on the book, the impact pulsed through the room. Liam lunged for the book but her free hand came around stopping him cold clamping onto his shoulder. Liam pulled against her, swung at her face, his blows connected cracking bone, but she did not stop. “The sights she saw. The words she spoke. Mine.”

She lifted the book, flipped it over and lowered it onto the desktop. The room was ice cold, the air still. White noise throbbed to life in Liam’s skull. Eyes too large gazed up at him, irises too blue, held in placed by broken blood vessels like jagged claws.

“No,” was all he could say.

Too many teeth smiled up at him and the professor rotated the book ninety degrees.

Sledgehammers struck Liam’s temples as blinding red light filled the room. He staggered toward the door, making three steps before thunder boomed like a calving ice shelf dropping into the sea. A gust of freezing air blew him from his feet and he landed face down an arm’s reach from the threshold.

He rolled onto his back. Iridescent red erupted from the desk, striking the ceiling and splashing around the walls, taking on substance. Writhing tentacles throbbed suggesting the mathematical convolutions that had been, only a moment before, confined solely to paper and ink, chalkboard and chalk. Their tips gouged chunks from plaster walls, shredded the dry erase boards and pulled the scattered chairs and couches into tufts of padding and splintered wood.

Liam pushed himself toward the doorway as rubbery tendrils whipped from the desk and wrapped around his ankle. A larger tendril swept within an inch of his face, a spray of bloody ice crystals in its wake. Liam gasped for air.

From behind, a hard, ungiving grip clamped onto one of his shoulders, then the other, lifting him from the floor and hauling him into the corridor. Pain tore through his ankle and foot as his shoe pulled free, snatched away by the tendrils.

“You okay?” Liam’s dad was backlit by the overheads as scarlet light flickered across his face from the office.

“Dad!”

His father scowled, looking into the office. Huge patches of red frost formed along the walls and ceiling before their eyes. Tiny tentacles sprung up like cilia, clawing at the air. “Some things never change.”

“You knew?”

His father shrugged. “You should answer your phone. Nothing against you, I swear. I just didn’t think you’d put it together. Minds like your mother’s are one in a million.”

Liam got to his feet and pushed away.

“Correction. Two in a million,” said his father placing a hand on Liam’s shoulder. “Sorry, son.”

“Dr. Phil moment later, boys,” said Marjorie. She thrust a fire axe into Dad’s hand and planted a kiss on his cheek. Hefting her own axe, she looked passed them into the office and winced. “Think it’ll be enough?”

She and Dad stepped to the doorway. A ropy tendril whipped through and Marjorie swatted it aside with the flat of her axe head.

Liam stepped to her side, placing a hand on the axe. He tried to take it from her. “It should be me.”

“Fuck you,” she said. “Grab a mop.”

He opened his mouth to protest as a tentacle wrapped around his neck and snatched him into hell.

* * *

Thick fibers held him to the side of the desk, pinning his arms and clamping around his head. He struggled against them but couldn’t gain leverage. The ceiling shimmered, clouds of red vapor coiled and uncoiled, too far away to be inside the room. A gateway into some other place. Great masses beyond the clouds expanded, oily and dark.

The pain in his head was a terrified, tangible beast fighting to escape, beating itself against the inner wall of his forehead. Was this real? Could it be?

He worked his fingertips into gaps but the more he pulled, the tighter the fleshy ropes became.

The cilia encrusting the room were growing, stretching, thickening. Pincers formed in places. Others secreted spines, razor tipped and twitching in his direction.

Two figures in the distance swung axes, yelling his name but the icy bands clamped across his chest would not let him take in enough air to respond.

Overhead, arcs and angles shifted. Professor Downham slid into view, like infinite reflections in a hall of mirrors lining up behind a single image, that stood and floated at the same time, all frames of reference lost.

“All mine!” she screamed as tentacles flashed in from every direction, simultaneously exploding from within her in a spray of blood and viscera. A lump of meat thunked to the floor just beyond his feet, half-covering a shard of dry erase board, covered with a mixture of red ice and the professor’s equations. A blue eye dangled by its optic nerve from a smaller lump at one end attached by a few strands of muscle to a jawbone. The chunk of professor Downham squirmed, pulling itself across the floor, a grotesque inchworm of blood and gristle. Shadows and light shifted above highlighting the scarlet frost that formed along the line of cracked teeth like tartar.

Like calculus. Liam suppressed a laugh.

He looked at the masses in the not-ceiling above. Whatever they might be, they were in his head and he was in theirs. Redness permeated everything as far as he could see, growing deeper and darker, spilling and consuming. An emptiness as all-encompassing and all-inclusive as the first infinitesimal spark of the unborn universe, without space and without time. Beginning at the desk and pouring out in a wave. Only, as surely as a universe could be born, it could be unborn, aborted. Humanity’s mathematics, the greatest and highest thoughts ever conceived on this tiny planet, swept away like so much grime and grit from the teeth of gods.

Liam tried not to laugh again and failed.

An axe slammed into the desk beside his face, peppering him with shards of ice and wood. Liam was on his feet, his arms across the shoulders of his father and Marjorie.

The world was a twisted mess of ice and light with a rectangular opening to the world of sanity a few strides away. Marjorie’s face was bloody. So was Dad’s. When they reached the door, his dad shoved the two of them through and turned back.

Liam grabbed his shoulder, stopping him.

Marjorie held him too. “It’ll never work.”

“Damned book,” he shouted..

Liam looked back. The desk had become a twisted mound, unrecognizable, but the book still sat on top, face down, holding down the halo of papers. They fluttered madly in the onslaught of energies erupting from the gilded symbol.

Liam shook his head violently, clearing the fugue. “Help me.”

He stumbled toward the cleaning cart, each step stronger, each more certain, until he was behind it. At the doorway, he wrenched the cart back and forth, Dad and Marjorie joining in to force it through the opening. The office was a maelstrom. Tentacles whipped about, ignoring the three of them, no longer seeing them as a threat. A larger one, thick as his arm and long enough to reach the outer wall smacked against a window, raining glass into the night outside.

Forcing his gaze ahead, ignoring every stray thought, Liam charged forward. Marjorie screamed at his side. His father’s bulk was a wall behind him pushing him unwaveringly forward. Two steps from the desk, the tentacles froze in the air, flexed, and came for them.

The cleaning cart slammed into the desk. Liam vaulted over the cart, tearing the book from the desktop. Ice crystals sprayed like electric sparks as he twisted and flung the book toward the open ceiling. The floating masses above convulsed and roared as the gateway slammed shut.

Liam struck the floor, the blow replacing the air in his lungs with fresh pain.

Red snow dripped and drifted from the ceiling as blue strobes grew brighter outside.

Nearby Marjorie groaned as Dad lifted the back of a couch off her legs.

* * *

Staggering from Brightmeer Hall, Liam welcomed the blinding lightbars of a dozen police cruisers. After glimpsing the endless, uncaring void, he was grateful for anything that wasn’t red.

As paramedics escorted them toward the nearest vehicle, an officer knelt, poking at a writhing snakelike shape, tipped on one side in bright blue. Liam swatted the thing to the ground, bringing his boot down on it repeatedly, his keys jangling in his pocket, louder with each blow.

The officer scowled but Liam walked on, Marjorie to one side, his father to the other.

Doors were unlocked now.

And there was no promise of how long they would remain closed.

End.

William R.D. Wood traces his love of science fiction and horror back to a childhood filled with Space: 1999 reruns, frequent visits to the Night Gallery, and a worn-out copy of Dune. A good writing day finds him at any of several overlooks on the Blue Ridge Parkway deeply immersed in new works of cosmic horror. Will lives with his wife, children and assorted ghosts in an old farmhouse turned backwards to the road.

On the Beach

By Beth Morris Tanner

Ellie was picking up shells from the hot sand. “Look mommy, that wave is eating the beach!”

“Yes, honey.” Martha was trying unsuccessfully to rub sunscreen on the squirming baby. “They’re called barrier islands. Every year the waves will take away some of the sand. It does sort of look like it’s eating, doesn’t it?”

She glanced over at the next dune. Hadn’t there been sunbathers there a few minutes ago? She looked down at the angry ocean, then scooped up her children and ran for the parking area as fast as she could. She was sure she’d seen teeth.

End.

Fathoms by Luis Ceriz

The Nut House

A Novella By Patrick Barb

Chapter 2: The Cache

Asher’s black fur bristles when his front paws touch glass shattered to dewdrop-sized pieces along the outer ledge of the Nut House’s second-story window. It’s the same ledge where Flippy crouched moments before, talking about something Asher and the others in their ragtag heist crew “had to see.”

Now Asher faces two pressing issues: finding where his flying squirrel friend went when he either fell (or was pulled?) off the ledge into the house and assessing the potential dangers he might face when following his friend inside.

He cups his forepaws around his mouth and calls through the jagged entrance in the busted window. “Flip? Flippy?”

“This is your B&E expert?” The sneer on DW’s face is obvious without the black squirrel needing to turn around.

Knowing that ignoring the asshole serves as a more cutting blow than any quip he’d toss over his shoulder, Asher stays focused on the task at paw. His tail brushes some of the glass off the ledge, tossing the shards back at the others. As the glass droplets land like melting icicles crashing from the eaves of houses onto damp sidewalks below, DW, the grays, and Chee-Chee the chipmunk perform a group soft-shoe to avoid the debris.

Some of the slivers of glass remain in the black squirrel’s coarse tail fur however.

Good. Might come in handy later.

Leaning closer, poking his head through the crooked entrance, Asher repeats Flippy’s name, whispering it into the unnatural darkness of the house. Something thick, a wall of darkness, like smoke, blocks Asher from picking out much of anything ahead or down below.

He’s not sure how long he stays there contemplating the darkness and listening for his friend’s response. However long, it’s too long for the other lowlifes making up their misfit band.

Someone presses against him, too close for Asher’s comfort. Figuring it’s the fox squirrel, he’s ready to retaliate in response to the unwelcome touch.

Except his glare’s met by Chee-Chee, blinking her eyes fast, crouching. Giving her all in a poor widdle woodland creature performance. “Oh please don’t hurt me. Please, please, please. Oh please.”

Sensing the act isn’t getting her desired response of discomfort and confusion, Chee-Chee rolls her eyes and nudges Asher aside. “Ah, you’re no fun anymore, Asher Black.”

He dips his head back from the glass, returning to the outside world.

“When was I ever—”

But before his question’s out, Chee-Chee pushes a paw through the opening. Asher falls silent. The tips of the chipmunk’s claws touch the darkness. When she does, it becomes clear to her and Asher, what’s blocking the illumination from outside is nothing more than the set of thick maroon-dyed curtains hanging across the top of the window frame. The thick, velvety cloth, like blood-soaked moss, displays rippled impressions across its surface, showcasing Flippy’s downward path.

“Kinda hard to find your buddy with this here, huh?” Chee-Chee asks.

“Yeah, I—”

This time, Asher gets two words out before Chee-Chee’s interrupting. And not with her teasing, unhinged sing-song nonsense either. Wiggling the nub of her tail, chattering in harsh tones, the chipmunk hops, skips, then jumps through the opening before Asher, DW, or the two gray squirrels can stop her.

“Goddamn crazy chipmunk.”

DW’s worked up enough courage to approach the busted window. Maple and Birch aren’t far behind him.

“Told you there was something in the house,” one of the grays says to the other.

DW, impatient with the current line of conversation, offers a firm rebuttal. “Knock it off, you two. There ain’t nobody in there, ‘cept for the lame ‘flying’ squirrel and the chipmunk bitch.”

“You’re all talk when she can’t hear you,” Asher says to the dark curtains.

Before DW fires off a “What’d you say to me, pal?” Chee-Chee’s laughter rises from beyond the blood-colored curtains.

“That’s what scared you? That?”

It unnerves Asher, the way the chipmunk’s high-pitched laughter sounds so much like screaming. Closing his eyes to center himself, Asher finds the burning tree of memory waiting. With no sanctuary available, he opts to face reality head-on. He opens his eyes, prepared to jump.

This time, DW does place a paw on the black squirrel’s shoulder, pinching enough so it’s clear what he’s saying isn’t up for discussion or debate. “Uh uh, Ashy. Maple and Birch go next. Then, you. Then, me.”

Asher says nothing in response to the news he’s set as the meat in the goon squad’s sandwich. He steps aside and extends his arm in a sweeping, theatrical gesture.

Maple and Birch aren’t too eager to take the plunge. But when the lengthy nails on DW’s back paws tap between the remaining glass shards, they hop to it. Their claws pierce the fabric of the curtain, before they turn themselves upside down, back paws pointing up and front paws to the floor. Once they’re past the sill, Asher prepares for his leap of faith.

As he jumps, he turns for one last glance at the world outside. He’s falling, but he swears he catches DW moving behind him, lifting the broken branch they’d climbed past the creamy yellow paint on the siding and onto the ledge. In this vision, the fox squirrel gives the branch a hard shove, eliminating the crew’s expected way home.

Asher’s too far gone in the darkness to witness that last part. But the sound the deadwood of the branch separating from the even deader wood of the window sill makes is unmistakable.

Hearing the absence, it’s what connects him to the trees, their leaves, their branches, and their seeds.

How am I so good at finding acorns? It’s simple. They talk to me, they tell me where to find them.

The confession isn’t something he’s willing to share with others. Not even with Flippy.

When Asher touches down on the floor, it slides underneath him. He scrambles to find purchase. It’s like stepping across wet leaves. The slick glossy magazine pages, coating the floor under the curtains, prove a tricky surface on which to gain traction. But Asher sinks his claws in deep, cutting through layers until he’s steadied himself.

He leans to the side when DW tumbles after him, cursing all the way. Studying the curtain again, Asher picks out gouges in the fabric from one too many sets of claws scratching at it.

Turning from the window, Asher’s eyes adjust to the dim lighting inside the Nut House. Going into the heist, he knew to expect the unexpected. But this strange scene’s far beyond unexpected.

Flippy’s on the floor, forepaws over his face, terrified of the thing casting a shadow across his body. Chee-Chee’s beside him, laughing in a way that substitutes for the terrified screams the flying squirrel would make if capable of finding his voice.

In silent contemplation before both animals, a naked Human-Child, with black eyes like the squirrels’, gazes down at the woodland creatures who’ve violated the sanctity of Their home. Unblinking. The child’s head is a soft pink with cherry red lips pursed, arms and legs the same color. But the body’s unshaded, a blank, nondescript white. More an absence of color than anything from the world of the living.

“Flip? You okay?” Asher asks.

Still holding his paws over his face, Flippy shakes his head back and forth.

Asher steps forward, putting on his bravest face to show his friend there’s nothing to fear.

He stops in front of the strange Human-Child. Her eyes remain open, her lips bowed. Nothing’s changing about her from one moment to the next. Asher stretches up, paw cracked and chapped, until a claw hooks onto the Human-Child’s forehead. The hard plastic surface gives like the skin of an acorn splitting from attention. Asher pulls, claws scraping across the hard black orbs playing at eyes. Of course, they’re not eyes. The Human-Child’s not alive. Not a Human-Child either. It’s a fake, an imposter, something made by Them to resemble Them.

DW moves in front of Asher again, using his tail to knock the facsimile Human-Child over. His claws tear through the imposter’s stomach, extracting whirling wispy streamers of cotton stuffing. “Doesn’t even bleed,” he mutters.

Flippy scurries back from the false Human-Child’s head. Lashes, long like claws, slide against those scratched glass orbs.

Rushing to Asher’s side, he sinks his claws into his friend. But the black squirrel doesn’t mind. He knows it’s nothing more than a fear response. More than anything, he’s happy his friend’s okay enough to hurt him. He’s pleased to see the flying squirrel moving again, no longer fear-struck.

Flippy’s mouth touches Asher’s ear and he whispers, “My Buddy, my Buddy, my Buddy and me…”

“Hey Dubs, check this out.” One of the gray squirrels, calls out to their de facto leader for the heist. Asher notes the way the fox squirrel grimaces, reacting to the nickname their real boss—their real gray squirrel boss—uses. He also notes how DW comes on their command. Chee-Chee’s stopped laughing, but she meets Asher’s gaze. Grinning.

She might not be all there, but she’s more aware than she lets on.

The whimpering at his side reminds Asher Chee-Chee’s not the sole member of the crew with unconventional insights. Only Flippy’s in no condition to provide his unique perspective in words indecipherable or otherwise. Asher brushes his front claws through Flippy’s fur. He whispers, gentle, like how he remembers his mother used to when he was a kit. “C’mon, Flip, we gotta keep moving.”

The layer of magazines under the window isn’t an anomaly, but the beginning of an unfolding pattern. Past the naked doll—yes, doll, that’s the word. Flippy’s Human-Child plays with them, the stapled stacks of peeled-off tree skin sit, piled one on top of the other. They fan out wide from the bottom and narrow at the top, producing an informal staircase for the crew to climb. Placing one paw in front of the other, they scurry to the top. Everyone makes sure to keep their movements controlled and precise, so the magazine pages don’t give way beneath them.

Asher’s sure they’ll get a better view of the floor’s layout once they crest the top of the pile of yellow-bordered magazines with strange creatures pictured inside the front cover frames.

Except when they reach the top, they discover it’s a mere hill compared to the mountains ahead. Glossy, unstable, stapled and stitched, magazine mountains. Some teetering on the edge of collapse, towering structures lurching to the ceiling. And not just magazines either, paper and plastic bags, bunched like wrinkled palms, hang between more solid objects.

It’s a hundred lives compressed, compacted into a tiny space. The impossible landscape stretches across the not-so-open floor, reminding Asher of a magpie nest his father showed him once, made from stolen pieces.

One time and never again.

Memories of his father lead Asher back to the tree on fire, his father screaming for him to help and…

He shakes his head, pushing the memories away.

Pressed to Asher’s side, Flippy whimpers another jumble-worded warning. “Red Bull gives you wings.”

“What the hell’s his problem?” Maple asks, getting a chuckle from Birch. Before Asher says anything, it’s DW whose claws slice across the chuckling squirrel’s nose. Tears well up in Birch’s eyes and when the fox squirrel hits him a second time, blood splashes in tiny dots across the magazines under their paws.

“You’re welcome,” DW says, but it’s uncertain who the comment’s meant for.

DW points from their lookout spot, gesturing at all the trash, the piles of books and magazines, the mounds of loose shopping bags and water-logged shipping boxes. Every creature assembled on the hill wrinkles their noses, confronted with a heady scent of urine and scat.

“Where the hell do we go from here?” DW asks.

Asher waits for the acorns to tell him where they’ll be found. He closes his eyes. Ignoring the nauseating odors of defecation and decay, ignoring the crisp scent of sun-baked paper crinkling like autumn leaves, he reaches out in search of a tree. Or to at least the possibility of one.

Before DW and others question how Asher’s meant to find acorns with his eyes closed, he opens them wide once again. There’s one direction he knows when checking for a tree—up.

Extending an arm, the claws of his front paw unfurled, Asher squints as he nails down the target for the others.

Across the space, hanging above the highest stack of detritus, a white string with a pearl sphere dangles, leading to an indentation in the ceiling. The rough outline of a rectangular door’s visible once they know what to check for.

“They’re in there,” Asher says, letting confidence in his abilities and instincts carry the day.

“Grand,” DW says. “How the fuck’re we supposed to get up there?”

Asher tests the stability on the other side of the junk heap they’ve set as their temporary base. One paw in front of the other, he brings Flippy along with him. “We climb down and then up. It’s what we do.”

* * *

Climbing’s not the only skill required to reach the Nut House’s attic and recover the building’s alleged treasure trove of acorns. Asher chastises himself for believing it’d be that easy.

Moving down the yellow-bordered hilltop, leaving behind the collection of slick, stapled pages, Asher leads the crew into a valley waiting for them between the garbage mountains. Here, there’s another thin layer of abandoned life, serving as padding above the floor, but nothing requiring any climbing. As they pick their way across frozen smiling faces and old Styrofoam packaging, they catch glimpses of rotting carpet, infested with mold in spots or pulled loose into wild strands in others, like an expansive rabid beast hides beneath the waste, waiting for an opportunity to rise and sink its teeth into one or more members of the crew.

Asher’s in the lead, but DW’s not far behind. The fox squirrel stays on him like a mid-day shadow. However, Asher’s got more pressing matters on his mind: finding the acorns and keeping Flippy safe. His forepaw slides through the top bun of an abandoned hamburger. What he expects to be rock solid proves a slimy illusion. The mirage of the burger crumbles on contact and Asher’s paw sinks through sodden layers. Pushing, until he touches the carpet below.

With quickness, he withdraws his paw and uses his other forelimb to hold the others back.

“Flooded,” DW says, stating the obvious so he sounds like he’s got some control over the situation.

Asher moves along the border, testing stability. Maple, Birch, and Chee-Chee join him, pressing their paws against the edge and finding too much give every time. Asher reaches one side of the hall and spies a gurgling, overflowing toilet, with dark water spilling across tile and flowing out into the garbage landscape. Like the stone fountain in the park, but tainted.

He calls for the others, pointing out the best way forward based on his assessment. He delivers the news in as clipped and concise a fashion as he can, aiming to avoid arguments.

“We’ve gotta go through the water,” he says. Pointing to the tallest peak of piled-up trash still standing ahead of them, Asher means to prove the leak stops short of the mound.

“It’s gotta be dry there. Otherwise, it’d crumble right in front of us.”

He’s surprised when no one argues or pushes back against his plan.

Asher takes Flippy on his back, letting his friend dig claws into his shoulders for the journey. The tiny flying squirrel’s heart thuds through his chest and sends vibrations up and down Asher’s spine. Chee-Chee rides on DW and the two gray squirrels bring up the rear.

The water here’s no summer shower puddle. There’s no heat radiating up from a concrete sidewalk. It’s cold and thick with a viscous quality to the liquid. Strands of tissue cling to wet fur. Flippy’s extra weight presses Asher into the soupy mix. The black squirrel keeps his mouth closed. Even still, the foul pollution touching his lips makes him nauseous. His nostrils stay above the wastewater, sucking in barely breathable air wafting off the surface.

“Swim faster, swim faster!” Chee-Chee’s got one of her forepaws dug deep through the fur on the back of DW’s neck. She waves her other front paw wildly.

When Flippy whispers, “Where there is man, there is Marlboro,” Asher checks behind him and finds they’ve completed their slog across the muck pond. He lowers his shoulders giving his friend a chance to disembark. DW and Chee-Chee reach dry land next. The fox squirrel brushes the chipmunk off and she nips at his tail. When he spins around, brow furrowed, she’s waiting. Licking her lips.

DW lowers his head and shakes himself dry with unchecked abandon. His tolerance heading toward an all-time low. But Asher’s focus falls on the gray squirrel duo still mid-way through the muck. The blood from Birch’s busted nose appears as thin streams of pale red, streaked across the mottled surface of the liquid. He’s swimming in circles, blood trails forming spirals. At the rate he’s moving, Birch is working himself into a frenzy. Finally, he stops and cries for help.

It’s the other gray, Maple, who requires the requested aid. From the distance Asher and the others are at, it’s hard to pick out the second gray squirrel. His head alone appears above the waterline. But the echo of his teeth chattering, bouncing against the vast canyons of refuse surrounding them, is unmistakable.

“He’s stuck!” Birch calls to the others.

“What do you mean?” DW fires back.

“Something’s got him! Come on, Maple, give it one more try.”

Asher studies the face of the trapped gray squirrel. In doing so, he blinks. Once. There’s the tree on fire, a majestic eruption of flames in the night sky. He blinks again. He’s falling after leaping through the disorienting clouds of noxious smoke, his body breaking on impact, and his eyelids closing, but not fast enough. Not fast enough to stop him from noting all the gray squirrels watching from the edge of the green space.

Watching, just watching.

Now when Asher watches, he observes Maple’s eyes widening and his mouth opening to scream in pain before polluted sluice rushes into his mouth. He chokes, vomits, and then chokes again.

Finally, his head goes under. Birch dives and comes back with his friend’s face between his forepaws. But it’s clear panic’s worn both squirrels out and the rescue effort’s coming up short unless someone else intervenes.

Asher flinches at the touch of a paw on his face.

The paw belongs to Flippy. “Go help him,” his friend says. “Just do it.”

There’s new life in the tiny squirrel’s eyes. His friend’s fierce altruism moves Asher like he’s caught an infection or had some curse placed on him. An obligation’s strapped like a heavy stone to his limbs.

Before he can resist, Asher returns to the muck and makes his rendezvous with the gray squirrels. Now, his heart’s thumping inside his chest, keeping him warm in the frigid temperatures. “What’s wrong?” he asks Birch, helping him hold Maple above the lapping water.

Maple manages to speak first. “T-t-t-tail!”

Birch finds his words as well. “Har-hard to get a clear look down there. Bu-but th-think there’s a tra-trap.”

Asher bristles at the word. Traps are more of a threat for indoor rodents to worry about. They pose a problem for mice and rats most frequently. Squirrels encounter the baited death traps every once in a while. During late evening break-ins at the convenience store or during trips into the custodial closet and bathrooms at the park. As a result, the encounters are much rarer for squirrels.

Asher knows enough about a little to grasp the seriousness of Maple’s situation.

Besides, we’re the ones inside now. Makes sense we’re dealing with inside problems.

It’s as much introspection as Asher allows. He doesn’t take another breath to consider the moral weight of his next decision. He gulps another big breath of semi-fresh, semi-corrupted air and dives.

His front paws and back paws work in tandem, slapping aside candy wrappers and dead flies, traveling through the sludge settled at the bottom of the flooded floor. He spots the wire-sprung trap, with its metal edge biting into Maple’s tail. Not sharp enough to slice through fur and flesh, but enough to bruise, or break bones even.

More than enough to hold the gray squirrel fast.

Asher can’t stay down any longer. He pushes up through the mire, hoping the direction he thinks is “up” proves accurate. When he breaches the surface, he finds less of Maple’s head above water than before. “Can-can y-y-you…?”

Birch can’t even finish his question.

And Asher can’t nod his head or shake it no. He draws another breath and slips under again. His paws slash through sludge. He tries his best to avoid having his claws slice Birch or Maple’s stomachs or pinch their limp limbs. But as his cheeks and eyes widen, as he feels the muck sucked into his nostrils and splashing against his exposed eyes, desperation becomes the color of the day for the black squirrel’s rescue efforts.

His paws close around something heavy and flat. With strength sapped and air nearly depleted, he finds a silvered disc held in his forepaws.

Thick enough so if I wedge this piece between the trap and the gray’s tail, I can…

A pounding headache sends Asher shooting back to the surface. Maple and Birch are both gone. Disorientation means it takes a moment before the black squirrel understands they’ve both gone under.

Asher clenches his forepaws into fists and there’s a moment of relief when he discovers the heavy silver disc still in his grasp. Drenched black fur—sticky with waste—pulling him down once again, Asher takes another breath and dives.

So many things need to go right for what follows. He’s got to swim to the trap through opaque wastewater. He’s got to hold onto the disc. This means he has to rely on his back paws and the twitching remnants of his tail to propel him down.

When the trap appears in front of him, with Maple hanging loose and defeated above it, Asher works fast. He’s dealt with plenty of acorn caches out there with dried leaves or burrs used to either alert squirrels to intruders or to mark guilty culprits. There’s always a degree of precision required when pulling off a heist from those more security-focused stores.

But there’s something to smashing through dirt and ripping out rocks, sticks, and clumps of overturned earth to get the job done.

It’s this brute force Asher calls on now, pressing the disc between the metal clip and Maple’s tail. Pushing up, up, up, until he feels like his limbs will explode. Until he feels like there’s no more of himself to give and a moment of regret takes hold. Synapses fire. The burning tree’s etched across his eyes.

Then, he hears whispering voices amplified beneath the water. “You’ll burn too. You’ll burn too. You’ll burn…”

And then, Asher’s momentum sends him rocketing to the surface. The trap’s flung open. Before he travels too far, he reaches down, grabbing Maple by his scruff and holding tight. They breach the surface and Asher kicks for the comparative safety of the far shore. Over his shoulder, he catches sight of Chee-Chee and DW working in tandem to carry Birch back as well.

When the others reach dry land, Flippy brings over coffee-stained napkins, pressing them against the damp fur of the gray squirrels. Helping to rub them down. Both Maple and Birch vomit up the filth they’ve consumed. Maple’s tail’s bent to the side. He moves it gingerly, testing out its now-limited range of motion.

“Hurts,” he says.

Asher’s ragged, incomplete appendage twitches in sympathy.

“C’mon, let’s go.” DW takes the lead this time, heading up the tallest pile of debris.

The acorns promised are waiting at the top, through the door in the ceiling. Asher and Flippy bring up the rear this time. Continuing their explorations, Asher listens to the gray squirrels, consoling each other over their shared brush with death.

“Did you hear the voices down there too?” Maple asks Birch.

Birch nods.

Asher holds his tongue, trying to put the pieces together.

* * *

Progress comes slow on account of injury and exhaustion. But bit by bit, paw by paw, the crew ascends the waste pile like it’s some crumbling remnant of a dead tree rotting from the inside out.

Caught in the drudgery of the climb, when Flippy speaks, the others all stop short. The flying squirrel leans close to Asher and asks, “What would you do-oo-oooo for a Klondike Bar?”

Asher waits for more. It’s different this time because the others wait as well. Impatient, DW groans, following with “The fuck’s that freak on about?”

Before Asher answers for his friend, Flippy finds his voice once again. “I always wondered how one gray squirrel got all those acorns into the house. I’m not sure one of them’s capable of carrying so many…”

On his them, Flippy nods toward the gray squirrels.

DW laughs. Then, resumes climbing.

“Mr. Grey’s relative was a resourceful individual. Not unlike Mr. Grey himself. When Majestic Forest wasn’t even Majestic Forest yet, when They were new, building their homes and destroying ours, he saw the writing on the bark. Back then, we had the grays, we had my fox squirrels, and we even had some black squirrels like ol’ Ashy there.

“Except the previous Mr. Grey understood the trend of things with houses springing up every day and more and more of our trees cut down and the ground made so nothin’ grew where they once stood. Grays and foxes fought tooth and claw and tail for the territory remainin’. Cuz territory meant resources and resources meant survival.

“The way Mr. Grey tells it, his relative got lost, turned around in a thunderstorm, found this cache of acorns…”

“And then? Do the Dew.”

Again, DW bristles at Flippy’s interruption.

“Then, well he fashioned some system for carryin’ ‘em all. Figuring them as unclaimed. Never mind he’d crossed over into fox squirrel territory.

“He headed home and fox squirrels gave chase. So, this Mr. Grey made a mad dash for the nearest raised structure. Which I suppose happened to be this house right here. He lost the foxes and hid the acorns.

“Eventually, They demolished the remaining trees where the fox squirrels lived, and Mr. Grey let them all leave to find new homes outside of what’d become Majestic Forest. On one condition: they leave someone behind. That someone was me. End of story.”

Except, when the story’s told in those rushed, clipped sentences, Asher finds doubt creeping in.

Haven’t I always wondered how the grays kept so much territory and every other group of squirrels got squeezed out? Hasn’t it never made sense…the tree on fire? Wonder if DW feels the same about his story too?

He keeps those questions somewhere safe. To himself.

Within the silence following, the animals reach the top. Asher and the others find themselves crowded together, sharing space on the slick, rectangular cobweb-coated magazine cover featuring a Human-Female, dressed in white, smiling. Lips red and inviting. DW—stretching to reach the pearl globe attached to the string in the ceiling door—scratches the Human-Female’s face off as he fights for stability with his back claws.

In reaching for the pearl, he tilts forward. Asher and Chee-Chee grab and pull him back. If not for their intervention, it’s a near-certainty he would’ve tumbled off into the myriad dangers waiting in the junk below. Once more, DW shoves them off and Asher’s grateful for his years spent learning to balance with a damaged tail.

If Maple got hit, he might not’ve stuck around to complain about it.

“You, flipping squirrel or whatever,” DW says, crooking a paw around Flippy and pulling him from his spot next to Asher. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and flap up there. Take a running leap and grab on to the shiny thingamajig, okay?”

Flippy hangs his head, not meeting DW’s gaze. The fox squirrel hooks a claw under the smaller animal’s chin and moves his head so they’re eye-to-eye. There’s no escaping. “C’mon. Tell me, what’s your name?”

Thrown by the question, Flippy answers. “Flippy. Mikey likes it.”

“Flippy? Mikey? Ain’t no squirrel I know going by a name like that. Right, fellas?”

The gray squirrels, no doubt shook from their twin brushes with death, take a moment before nodding in agreement. DW presses on.

“Take me, for example. They call me DW, but it’s short for Dogwood. On account of it’s what kinda tree I got myself born in. You can guess what tree your friend was born in and Maple and Birch over there too. No big mystery, right? So, unless your Mama squeezed you out in a Flip tree, I’m betting you got yourself another name. A real name.”

Flippy nods.

DW tilts his head as if to say I’m waiting.

“Wi-wi-willow.”

Asher tenses. Ready to pounce. But then he feels someone’s claws pushing into his forelimb. A slow headshake from Chee-Chee follows.

“Willow, huh? Like one of them droopy, mopey trees, huh? All sad like, right?”

Flippy’s non-response is answer enough for DW.

“Yeah, that’s the one. The one where the branches all hang like this.”

Moving too fast, the fox squirrel grabs Flippy by his back legs and flips the flying squirrel over. He dangles the tinier, underdeveloped creature off the edge of the mountain they’ve scaled. Flippy squirms, forepaws battling invisible foes in the open air.

“They’re like this, right? Right? Right?” DW’s frothing at the mouth. Yelling his questions down at Flippy.

Asher pulls against Chee-Chee’s grasp, trying to break free and save his friend. But she squeezes all the harder for his resistance. Drawing blood. She leans in close and whispers, “You move now, he’ll drop the little one and it’s the end of his story. Find another way.”

“I’m sorry,” Flippy says. “I don’t remember how to fly or glide or anything.”

“Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!” DW’s become a nightmarish motivational speaker, though what he’s encouraging isn’t clear. “You didn’t forget how to fly. You’re afraid to fly. You’re scared of the truth. Right? Right?”

“Dammit, Dogwood, leave him alone.” Asher’s seething, enraged by what’s happening and upset by the truth in Chee-Chee’s warning.

His protests make DW shake the trembling Flippy harder and harder, until the flying squirrel manages to squeak out an answer. “Yes,” he says, “I’m afraid. Afraid to fly. First in flight. Come fly the friendly skies.”

“Well, now’s as good a time as any to conquer your fear, Willow. Time to embrace who you are. I’m gonna let you go in three, two—”

“Wait!”

Asher’s call makes every head turn in his direction. “We’ll do it another way. We’ll balance, one on top of the other. Grays at the base. You and me. Then Flippy, then Chee-Chee.”

DW’s head tilts, as he considers the plan as presented. “Mmmmm. I dunno. Seems complicated. Maybe I let your pal go n—”

Sometime in there, Chee-Chee’s released her grasp on Asher’s forelimb, so he drops, his belly pressed against the shredded magazine cover. Eyes wide against his black fur on one side of his face and the pink flesh on the other. He waves his paws, showing his submission to the other’s dominance. “Please, I’m begging you. Please, let’s try this other way.”

DW doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t smile or gloat. He reacts like someone who expected no less. He pulls Flippy back onto the garbage mountain and gestures for the two grays to get into place. They follow his lead, moving in silence, planting their back paws.

When Asher scrambles up Maple’s back and DW up Birch’s, they come face-to-face. The fox squirrel sneers. Then under his breath, he whispers, “With a face like yours, you probably always beg, Ashy.”

Before Asher retorts, Flippy and Chee-Chee follow, coming to complete the makeshift furry pyramid. Asher holds his tongue. When Flippy crawls onto his shoulders, he asks, “You okay, Flip? We’ll take a break. We don’t have to do this now…”

But Flippy shakes his head. “Built Ford tough,” he says. Then, before Chee-Chee climbs on his shoulders and grabs for the dangling pearl sphere, he adds, “I wanna be on top.”

“I sure love a squirrel who knows what he wants,” Chee-Chee says with a throaty chuckle followed by her more typical high-pitched chipmunk chittering.

“Flip, you don’t have to…”

Again, Asher’s protests receive a definitive silence in return.

The tower of animals complete, Flippy’s back paws digging into the place where Chee-Chee’s black and white-striped head meets the more common amber coloring on her shoulders, they all work together, aiming for a one-in-a-million trick.

All Asher has is hope, since he’s not a praying type of squirrel. He hopes the grays at the bottom hold their own, supporting so much weight. He hopes the bastard DW and Chee-Chee, wildcard as ever, do their parts. He hopes his efforts are enough and he hopes Flippy finds the strength to pull hard enough to open the door above them.

C’mon Flip, all ya gotta do is get the panel open when ya pull on the string.

“Almost got it…”

Just grab for it, pal. Reach up, reach up, and…

“Got it. I got it! I…”

Now pull!

Realizing they can all help, Asher calls to the grays. “Maple, Birch! Step back. We’ll hold onto you two. Chee-Chee, you hold onto me and Dogwood. One-two-three. Pull!”

The old door creaks open. A little. Then, a little more. With a loud pop of stale air—Whoomp!—released, it’s opening all the way. Chee-Chee leaps up and joins Flippy on the dangling cord, crawling up and then over onto the interior side of the hatch panel. From his temporary perch on the grays, Asher jumps, stretching his forelimbs, biting the air. Until he’s digging one paw into the plywood and reaching for Flippy with the other. He pulls his friend close, howling with relieved laughter. “You sunuvabitch! You did it, Flip! You really did it!

Asher drags them both up into the shadowed confines of the attic. With the panel dangling, it’s easy enough for DW and the grays to scramble after them. Flippy lays on his back, arms spread wide revealing his membranous pseudo-wings. He sucks in deep breaths of stale air. Asher, black fur against black shadows, rests his forelimbs on his haunches.

He searches for light. The bulb above their heads is long burnt-out. And whatever sunlight they’d get from a tiny oval-shaped dormer window across the attic is diminished by more tight-packed piles of old picture albums, video cassettes, dress boxes, and more. A lifetime of memories for the Human-Female reduced to mere obstruction for the invaders.

Wrinkling his nose, figuring sight’s out of the question, Asher tries to sniff out the acorns.

He moves slow, deliberate. The others trail behind, but he makes sure Flippy’s close. There’s less of the rot inside the house here compared to what’s settled across the second floor. But there’s still a sense of abandonment, a forsaken-land quality for the Nut House in the middle of bright and sunny Majestic Forest. It doesn’t add up. Puzzling out another mystery allowing his subconscious a chance to work on the more pressing concern, Asher can’t help but wonder, What happened to the old Human-Female? Did she leave like DW claims?

“Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” says Flippy.

Before Asher follows up on the cryptic musings of his friend, the black squirrel’s nose presses against the squishy, soft embrace of something not unlike wild cotton or dandelion fuzz. He pulls back, the tiniest sliver of light shining through to show the pink and lumpy insulation, set up in the attic, covering the exterior walls of the building. Just as the darkness resembles Asher’s fur, this raw pink insulation represents his own scarred, burned flesh.

He touches a paw to his ancient wound. Then, he touches the insulation. It gives way to his touch. When he pulls his paw back, a hunk of pink fuzz comes with it.

There’s no more searching. Asher knows. The same way he always does.

“It’s in here,” he says. “Start digging.”

Teeth, claws, paws; the squirrels and the chipmunk put their whole bodies into the work. Asher digs up the insulation with a single-minded purpose. Not so much to find the acorns, but to get rid of them. To let his debt be repaid in full to Oakley Grey. When he breaches the cache and the acorns cascade around him and the others, Asher won’t even allow himself a moment to celebrate.

But Chee-Chee’s gleeful, indecipherable chirps and DW’s muttered “It’s real. It’s fuckin’ real,” serve as their victory celebration. Asher’s seeking something to gather the nuts in, eyeing a lone sock made for a Human-Newborn, the article left alone in the attic without its mate in sight. It’s something to work with, Asher decides. But when he grabs it, he notices the two grays.

Funny, how they’re not celebratin’.

Of course, they’d worked apart from Asher, Flippy, Chee-Chee, and DW. When Asher moves closer, he picks up their whispering.

“Put ‘em back, Maple.”

One thing about the brutish heavies of the Grey Gang? They’re not subtle. DW soon picks up on their conversation and heads over to the place in the wall where the two squirrels push the insulation back into place.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

They don’t answer.

The fox squirrel grabs chunks loosened by the grays’ previous efforts. He pulls them away. One, two, three.

Creating a hole he peers into.

The choked cry DW emits while gazing into the pink-encircled abyss stops Asher cold.

When the fox squirrel pulls away, there’s no chance Asher can resist peering inside as well.

Laid across the beams, he counts four skeletons. Elongated compared to what he remembers of the fleeting glimpses of his black squirrel brethren already consumed in the lower limbs of the burning ash tree. Black squirrel’s being close to grays except for coloration means the grays can’t be counted as the source of the skeletons either. Which leaves…

“Four fox squirrels,” DW says. When no one responds, he keeps talking.

“You know, I remember another story about the Nut House. Not the one they tell the gray squirrels like you and you…”

He slices his claws close to Maple and Birch. Driving them back against the insulation.

“They told it to us fox squirrels. All about the gray squirrel betrayal. Went in on a massive score of acorns, promised ‘em they’d split Majestic Forest 50/50, but then turned on ‘em. Killed ‘em all. Except he couldn’t take the nuts with him…. so, he settled for the story, the legend.”

Maple and Birch raise their paws. “Dubs, you got us wrong.”

DW moves closer, nostrils flaring, fur standing straight up on his back. “My name’s not Dubs.”

Touching his scabbed-over nose, a memory bolt of lightning shooting through him, Birch takes the first step to meet the fox squirrel. Asher steps back. DW’s foot slips on top of a lone acorn, rolled out from the assembled pile. It sails through a hole in the insulation, and they all turn to watch.

Pinging like hailstones against the cobbles of the park walkways, the nut bounces off the wooden beams and then hits a pocket of open space. Before it falls down, down, down.

Plink-plink-plink!

It’s hard to tell for certain, but by the sounds coming up to them and the length of time they hear the acorn falling, Asher guesses the nut’s gone past the second floor and slipped to the first floor. Where they haven’t gone.

Where we don’t need to go.

Flippy pulls Asher close, so their noses touch. He points to the hole in the insulation—with the dead fox squirrel skeletons and the falling acorn.

“The best part of waking up…is Folger’s in your cup.”

To be continued.

Patrick Barb is an author of weird, dark, and horrifying tales, currently living (and trying not to freeze to death) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His debut dark urban fantasy novella Gargantuana’s Ghost is coming from Grey Matter Press’s Emergent Expressions line in Fall 2022. His debut dark fiction collection Pre-Approved for Haunting is coming from Keylight Books in 2023. In addition, he is an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association and a Full Member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. For more of his work, visit patrickbarb.com or follow him on twitter.com/pbarb.

Beneath Her Skin

By KT Wagner

Originally published in The Twisted Book of Shadows, 2019

Beneath the bathroom’s flickering light, Tamsin attempted to tell Mother about the bird lady at her bedroom window. About how the wind whipped the lady’s silver hair and she wept tears of moonlight. About the angry words the lady whispered through the rain and the mullioned glass. About how the fury slithered past Tamsin’s ears, slipped under her skin and down her spine.

“It’s the middle of the night. You were dreaming.” Mother motioned for her to stand on the rickety beige stool she’d pulled out from under the sink. “Besides, birds don’t fly at night, only bats.”

“Owls do. She had grey feathers, but she wasn’t an owl.”

Mother snorted; the corners of her mouth turned down as usual. “Be quiet, child.”

Tamsin scrunched her toes and tried to ignore the curls of paint scratching the soles of her feet. She wished she were taller.

Just two weeks earlier, Auntie held a super-secret birthday party for her and her cousin Kaya. Their birthdays are only one day apart, and they’d both turned seven. For the first time, Tamsin had lied to Mother about where she was going after school. Lying hurt her tummy, but Auntie said it was okay. She told Tamsin what to say and claimed it was just a little white lie to protect Tamsin’s mother. Tamsin hadn’t really understood, but she’d nodded along.

A bunch of kids from the apartment building were there and they could all reach high enough to whack the piñata. Auntie brought out a stool for Tamsin—a nice smooth plastic one—but she didn’t need it because a bigger boy broke the piñata before she or Kaya got a turn.

Mother wouldn’t talk about Auntie. Auntie shook her head and cried when Tamsin asked her why. Auntie explained about being fraternal twins. They were alike, but different, and Mother didn’t like some parts of Auntie. If Tamsin didn’t think about it too hard, it made sense. She didn’t like some parts of Mother, either.

She wished she and Kaya were sisters, not just cousins. Kaya said she felt the same way.

“I like being older than you,” Kaya said, then giggled. “Even if I’m only one day older. We’re best friends forever.”

Each night before Tamsin fell asleep, she would wish to grow tall enough to decide for herself where she lived. She hated the dark, narrow townhouse. Kaya and Auntie lived in a sunny apartment high up in the sky.

Mother refused to consider a move but complained about the gloomy townhouse all the time—the narrow rooms, the sketchy neighbours, the crappy location.

Tamsin wanted all four of them to live together. A three-bedroom apartment would be big enough. Mother and Auntie could each have their own room. Tamsin liked having her own room, even if she wasn’t allowed to have anyone over to play, but she’d love to share a room with Kaya. They’d have matching superhero duvet covers and share their favourite books and read by flashlight under the covers each night while eating giant bowls of strawberry ice-cream with chocolate sauce.

Mother rapped her knuckles on the bathroom counter and interrupted Tamsin’s thoughts. “Hold up your hair and hunch over. I need to see.” She didn’t touch her daughter. She only touched her when angry. “It’s a bite! Damned house. Now spiders are invading through the hole in the bathroom ceiling and attacking us while we sleep.”

“A spider didn’t bite me. The grey bird lady did.” Storm winds whistled in the distance. The windowpanes in her room rattled. The little girl clenched her fists and told herself it didn’t matter what Mother thought, but it did.

Mother pinched her arm. “What have I told you about making up stories?”

Tamsin expelled a breath. Crying or complaining invited Mother to do worse. Instead, Tamsin stopped listening and studied the pale-blue porcelain sink. The colour of a robin’s egg, except for the brown stains no amount of scrubbing had removed. Glistening black sludge coated the inside of the drain. How far down could she see? She leaned closer. All the way to the basement?

The basement had never held much interest, but now she wanted to explore it.

The hole pulsed. A whiff of rot. She jerked back and grabbed the rubber stopper. Its chain wound around the corroded faucet.

“Tamsin Louise! Stop messing around.”

“But—” It was no use arguing. With trembling fingers, Tamsin freed the chain and plunged the stopper into the drain.

Mother used the handle of Tamsin’s pink toothbrush to poke at the spot on her back just below her neck. Something under her skin scurried out of the way. She tried to reach back and feel it herself.

Mother smacked her hand. “You’ll infect the bite with your dirty hands.”

Tamsin held her hands out and examined them. She’d scrubbed them before bedtime, and Mother had laundered the sheets from both their beds on the weekend.

Mother squinted at her from the middle of the tarnished spot on the mirror. On either side of her eyes and mouth, deep brackets scored her face. Her short spiky hair lay flat and misshapen, and her turquoise-framed glasses were nowhere in sight.

Tamsin loved those glasses, especially the rhinestones on the arms. She’d begged her mother for a pair of her own, but Mother had laughed at her. “Be thankful you have perfect vision.”

Tamsin hadn’t laughed. She didn’t have perfect vision, or she wouldn’t see creepy things out of the corners of her eyes. Mother claimed glasses helped people see better. She’d hoped wearing glasses would help her, but she’d tried her mother’s on when Mother was sleeping, and they hadn’t helped. They must only work for adults, she’d decided.

The mark on her upper back burned. Her own reflection appeared to have a slight double image, like the television on a stormy day.

A word fought to escape Tamsin’s mouth. She bit down hard and tasted feathers. The word escaped anyway. “Bitch.”

“Tamsin!” Mother’s eyes widened, then narrowed.

Tamsin cringed. She’d never say that word out loud and on purpose, especially not in front of Mother. In the mirror, sweat beaded on her forehead.

Her tummy cramped. “Sorry. It hurt when you poked.”

She studied her bare feet and wished she hadn’t cried out when the grey lady had burrowed into her back. She hadn’t meant to wake her mother. If only she were stronger and bigger and more able to control what she said.

A rancid taste coated her mouth. She reached for her toothbrush, then decided to wait; Mother would accuse her of stalling a return to bed.

Mother yawned. “You’d better mind your tongue at school. I don’t need any more trouble.”

“There really was a lady at the window.” Tamsin’s words echoed in the tiny bathroom. She held her breath. Maybe Mother would believe her for once?

“Give it up, child. You’re on the third floor.”

“Can I go back to bed now?”

Mother nodded. Tamsin scampered back to bed and pulled the covers to her nose.

Mother tapped the bedroom window. “No one is getting in this way. It’s painted closed, but you know that.” She pulled the tattered brocade drapes. They dampened the wind noise but didn’t block all the light from the streetlamps.

One hand on the door, Mother paused, silhouetted by hall light, while behind her a smoky shape loomed. Tamsin half waved. The shape rippled.

The lock on the door clicked, and long shadows shrouded the room.

* * *

The stairs creaked. Tamsin counted the thump and thud of descending footsteps. Thirteen stairs down to Mother’s second floor bedroom. Tamsin counted sixteen footsteps.

While her eyes adjusted to the dark, she continued to count, all the way up to five hundred. The new skill surprised her; she hadn’t been studying or practicing her numbers lately. She stared up at the ceiling and scanned it for spiders and faces hiding in the popcorn stucco.

She pictured living somewhere else, like an apartment in the green-glass high rise where Kaya and her aunt lived. Their ceilings were a smooth, soft white. A month earlier, before the school year began, Tamsin had carefully cut out a newspaper ad for two-bedroom apartments in the same building and taped it to the fridge.

When Mother noticed the ad, she’d turned ghost pale. “My sister’s no good, Tamsin. You make sure you tell me if she shows up at the school again, and we’re certainly not moving anywhere near that woman.” She’d ripped the paper down and torn it into tiny pieces that fluttered onto the kitchen floor like confetti.

The memory made Tamsin restless. She retrieved the flashlight from the drawer of her bedside table.

Wrinkling her nose against the faint mildew smell, she pulled back the drapes. Far below, rain churned the surface of black puddles. The windows of the townhomes across the road reflected the rippling dark. Often, if she stood still for long enough, the wispy shapes of children would float into the empty street, but their presence never tugged at her the way she felt drawn to the bird lady who wailed without sound, and always appeared to be searching.

Tamsin waited at the window. Her feet grew cold. The children arrived, but not the bird lady. The hole in her back throbbed. Why had the lady hurt her?

Unaffected by the wind, the pale children milled, their faces twisted with expressions of longing and regret.

Tamsin replayed Mother’s words in her head. Maybe Mother was right, and she’d dreamed everything. She needed to know.

She dragged the chair from her desk into the bathroom. Mother had rescued the chair from an old dining room set a neighbour had placed out on garbage day. Only one spindle was broken, and unlike the other chairs, the crossbars were intact. The feet scraped against the wood floor with a low moan.

The spider hole lurked in the ceiling behind the bathroom door and next to the shower cubicle. Tamsin pushed the chair into the corner and climbed onto the seat but couldn’t quite reach. She stacked the stool on top, clutched the plastic shower curtain for support, and clambered up.

The spider hole wasn’t big, and the perimeter appeared moldy and soft.

Wings rustled.

“Look,” the bird lady whispered. The stench of rot worsened.

Tamsin glanced around but didn’t see her. She hooked her fingers over the edge and peeled away chunks of spongy plaster. The beam of her flashlight illuminated a web. At its centre loomed a black spider with thick, hairy legs.

Her hand darted up, and she closed a fist around the creature. Careful not to crush it, she shook her hand a bit. The panic of the creature radiated into her flesh, but it didn’t defend itself.

The spiders in her room didn’t bite. Mother lied.

She grasped the spider by one leg and lifted its writhing body. A soft voice wondered how it would feel against her tongue.

“Gross!” Tamsin squeaked, and tossed it into the sink.

It tried to scramble up the porcelain walls. She reached past it, unplugged the drain, and turned on the faucet, before running back to bed.

* * *

At breakfast, Mother growled, “Good morning.” Bony elbows on the kitchen table, eyes stained by yesterday’s mascara, she slurped from a chipped mug.

She’d been like this for the two weeks since Tamsin’s birthday, which she’d ignored. It was the same the year before. Tamsin couldn’t remember it ever being different.

A sour, burnt odour filled the room. Blackened toast lay in the sink.

Tamsin warmed a packaged pastry in the toaster and munched on it while packing food for school. “Is it okay if I take the last yoghurt? It’s expired.”

Mother didn’t respond. She didn’t ask about the spider bite.

Tamsin rubbed at the numbness at the base of her neck. She’d ask Kaya to look at it when she got to school.

Words not her own tumbled, musty and hard-edged, out of her mouth. “I’ve always wanted a sister.”

The chipped mug smashed against the tile floor. Dark liquid spread around the shards.

Tamsin backed against the stove.

Mother lunged and shook her by the shoulders, hard. “What game are you playing?”

“I’m going to live with Kaya and Auntie.” She hadn’t planned to say anything until Auntie had talked to Mother. She wanted to add “and you too” but Mother’s expression had darkened and twisted.

Tamsin ducked under Mother’s arm and ran all the way to school.

* * *

Tamsin’s teacher stopped her at the door to the classroom. He held out a hand. “Homework.”

She’d forgotten. Behind him, Kaya bounced on the balls of her feet, and motioned for Tamsin to hurry up. Tamsin hunched her shoulders and moved to pass her teacher.

“Not so fast, Missy. Your homework?” He shook the stack of papers in his other hand.

A voice in her head whispered. Tamsin’s heart sped up. A dank scent crowded her nostrils. She tried clamping her teeth together, but the words had already flown out of her mouth. “Bugger off. I didn’t do it, but I did see you kick a homeless guy Saturday night, and there are dirty magazines behind your hot water heater.”

Her teacher stepped back, eyes wide. “What the—?” His expression hardened.

She felt the blood drain from her face. Maybe if she explained her mother said she’d been bitten by a spider? No, no-one ever believed what she said. She turned to run but found herself yanked back by the collar.

“If I catch you snooping…” he ground out.

She trembled and shook her head.

“Principal’s office. Now.”

* * *

Tamsin swung her dangling legs and wondered why the chairs outside the principal’s office weren’t kid sized. Never had she seen an adult sitting on one of the hard, wooden seats.

The bird lady was teaching her many things, like the ability to spot a lie and how to walk softly, but she was most pleased to be able to count to five hundred. Sitting on the chair, she’d already counted to five-hundred four times, but mostly in her head because the school secretary shushed her the first time.

She hadn’t paid much attention to the principal’s words. Instead, she studied the severe lines of her hair style and her ruby-red glasses. She wondered what powers the glasses held, and whether the principal was lucky enough to live in a new apartment building with no basement.

“Tamsin, I’m very disappointed to have to call your mother. You’re normally a better-behaved young lady.”

She’d heard that part.

The round, black and white clock over the school secretary’s desk clicked past each second. One hour, twenty minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Her mother would come when she could, the secretary had told her.

The recess bell rang.

Kaya stood outside the office on the other side of the glass wall. Her hand low next to her knees so only Kaya could see, Tamsin waved.

The secretary gathered up papers and went into the principal’s office.

Kaya slipped through the office door and stood at the counter. “Mom wants you to move in with us, but she’s scared of your mother.”

Tamsin’s chest hurt. Everything was messed up and it was her fault. She kept saying things she shouldn’t. She stared at her feet and blinked against the prickling behind her eyes.

“I’m tired of being all by myself,” Kaya’s voice cracked.

“Me too.” Tamsin reached out and grabbed Kaya’s hand. “We’ll share a room. We’ll make good sisters.”

Kaya smiled. “Best friends forever.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

The secretary bustled out of the principal’s office. When Tamsin turned back, Kaya was gone.

* * *

A light, windless rain fell. Mother turned the key in the lock of the faded-black front door. “Go to your room and stay there. I have three more cleans before I can call it a day.”

Tamsin slipped past her mother, ran up the stairs and slammed the bedroom door behind her. Mother wouldn’t be back for hours.

Maybe she could go over to Auntie’s. Tamsin dialled the wall phone in the hallway, but no answer.

She prowled around her room, restless and unhappy until her stomach began to growl. She tip-toed downstairs in search of food.

In the kitchen, a towel lay across the mess from breakfast. The stains formed odd shapes that were not quite recognizable. She stood at the other side of the table eating stale crackers from the box. Her back itched.

Thump. Thud. Thump. Thud.

Soft footfalls on the basement stairs.

Tamsin stopped chewing and listened. The sound ceased and after a minute she decided she’d been mistaken.

Mother didn’t like the basement. She kept the door locked and the key hidden, but Tamsin knew where to find it. Her curiosity had been growing since the night before.

In the narrow living room, she climbed onto the back of the threadbare chair next to the fake fireplace. She teetered there, and the frame of the chair creaked and popped. She carefully moved aside the large red vase and several guttered candles, then worked one hand behind the heavy, garage-sale mirror. It crushed her knuckles. She ran her other hand along the back of the frame until she felt the taped key.

Moving the red vase back, its smooth surface warmed to her touch. Sadness wormed its way up her arm. She hugged the vase, felt silly and stopped. Maybe Mother kept something interesting inside it? Setting the vase back on the circle it left in the dust, she slipped a hand inside. A jolt like electricity burned through her, and she yanked her hand out with a shout.

A whisper that sounded like her name drifted up through the floorboards. Like a magnet it drew her down, below ground.

* * *

The cold and damp basement wasn’t interesting at all. One large room, about the size of the first floor, dusty and empty, except for two items—an unplugged freezer with the lid propped open and nothing inside, and an open-slat wooden crate bristling with rusting tools. A couple looked like the ones the caretaker at school used on the flower beds. Odd. The tiny back patio of their townhouse consisted of a cracked concrete slab and a few half-dead dandelions.

Three walls were cinder block, the far wall rough concrete. She looked around for spiders. One high, filthy window interrupted the concrete monotony. Tamsin headed for the stairs, then paused to scratch the base of her neck. The crate might be more interesting than it looked. She pulled it away from the far wall.

The concrete behind it crumbled slightly. She ran a finger over the surface. Dust billowed and formed two wispy shapes: the grey bird lady and a much smaller person. For a second Tamsin thought it was her shadow, but when she moved, it didn’t.

The wall whispered, the murmurs soft and welcoming, begging her to explore and discover. She extracted a long-handled weeder from the crate, fell to her knees, and wielded it like a chisel.

Dust surrounded her, settled on her, and crept into her ears, eyes, and mouth.

“Dig,” the bird lady whispered, and even though it felt like something she might get in trouble for, Tamsin dug with the talons of metal. A hint of sulphur wafted past.

The coarse tone of the scraping weeder changed. A bright note rang out.

She sat back on her heels and wiped at her eyes. Visible at the back of the hole, a patch of familiar red.

She chipped around it; hands guided by the grey lady. The stench of rotten eggs increased.

She’d been wondering, so she asked, “Who are you?”

The response formed within a series of sighs and chirps, “I punish.”

Tamsin frowned. The answer didn’t tell her much. She thought about asking another question, but before she could put one together, a palm-sized shard of warm red pottery dropped into her hand. Tamsin recognized it as part of a jar; its twin sat on the fireplace mantel in the living room.

Her stomach lurched and for a moment, nausea swept through her. She straightened, cradling the shard with cupped hands. “I’m not doing this anymore,” she spoke to the empty room, knowing the bird lady could hear her.

Tamsin climbed the stairs.

Back in the kitchen, she cleaned the piece of pottery with a tissue. She cut a lone piece of butcher’s twine from the roll in the utility drawer and wrapped it around the shard, creating a necklace. Against her chest, it pulsed warmth.

Tamsin sat at the kitchen table, rested her palms on the Formica, set icepacks on her knuckles, and waited for her mother to return.

* * *

The kitchen light snapped on.

“What have you done this time?” Mother filled the kitchen doorway and glared at Tamsin. “You’re filthy.”

“I found something in the basement.” Tamsin’s voice emerged small and insignificant. She pictured herself as a bird unfurling her wings. She lifted her chin.

Mother’s face turned chalk white; her gaze fixed on Tamsin’s chest.

“Tell me the one on the mantel fell.”

“I dug it out of the basement wall.” Tamsin placed her hand over the shard. It pulsed, warm and slippery.

“Give me that.” Mother grabbed at the cord.

Tamsin dodged her and raced up the stairs.

Boom, boom, boom. She tried to count, but the pounding footsteps behind her were too fast. She couldn’t make it to her room. She hid in the second-floor linen closet.

Mother was on the landing. “Have you been talking to my sister?” her voice cracked. “You have, haven’t you? She kept calling, wanting to see you. Then she stopped…I should have known.”

“They’re our family,” Tamsin whispered. She wasn’t sure Mother could hear.

“I hoped you’d never find out.”

Tamsin blinked. Mother wasn’t making any sense. Carefully she pushed open the closet door. Mother stood there, her face blotchy, her turquoise glasses pushed to the top of her head. She didn’t look angry. She looked sad.

Tamsin crept onto the landing. She felt the bird lady stir and tense, like this was important. “Mother?” she asked.

“You’re only seven. I hoped you’d be older…if it had to come out at all.” She stared the necklace. “We’ll go see my sister but stay close to me.”

Tamsin felt the grey lady’s beak curve into a smile. It wasn’t a nice smile.

* * *

Mother held Tamsin’s hand on the city bus. She also made her wear a sweater and buttoned it up to her chin, despite the sunny warm day. Tamsin stared out the window and hoped Mother would consider moving once she talked to Auntie.

Sunlight glinted off the green glass apartment building. Beautiful. Tamsin gazed up and wondered if Kaya would notice her get off the bus. She’d kept her promise and hadn’t tattled about being here before. She hoped neither her aunt nor her cousin would think she had.

* * *

Auntie answered the apartment door. At first Tamsin thought Kaya wasn’t home, but then she saw her standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She didn’t appear happy to see Tamsin.

Kaya smiled a sad smile and waved.

“You brought her.” Auntie reached for Tamsin. “Thank you.”

Mother yanked Tamsin behind her, her grip a vise. “She found a piece of the red vase in the basement. I can’t…won’t protect you anymore. From her. From anyone. I’m telling Tamsin the truth. You may have been the one who birthed her, but I’ve looked after her all these years. You need to move away from here. I don’t want to know where.”

“No,” Tamsin struggled to get away from her mother. “I want us to be with them.”

“Them?” Tamsin wasn’t sure which grown-up sister said it. The bite on her back pulsed.

Kaya cried out and ran to Auntie. “Mom!”

A black rage crashed through Tamsin, as the grey lady took control. She squeezed Mother’s hand, hard, curling her fingers and pinching the skin.

Mother yelped and let go.

Kaya stared at Tamsin, her eyes dark and haunted. She shook her head. “I don’t want to move away.”

Neither Mother nor Auntie looked at Kaya. It was like they didn’t see her.

Auntie reached for Tamsin. “She’s mine.”

“She’s only alive because I felt something was wrong. God, if only I’d paid attention quicker…arrived a few minutes earlier. I’ll never forgive myself.”

Tamsin stared up at her mother. The grey bird lady quieted, like she waited for something.

“I made a mistake,” Auntie wailed, and held her arms out toward Mother.

The bird lady unfurled her wings. Tamsin darted into the apartment, into the kitchen. The bird lady directed her to where the knives were kept.

Auntie followed close behind; Kaya pulling at her blouse and yelling, “No mom, no!”

Auntie grabbed for Tamsin, but the bird lady materialized between them, her wings a blur of black fury. The back of Tamsin’s neck throbbed. She whimpered and clutched at it with one hand. The other hand closed around a knife.

Auntie’s eyes rounded, her mouth worked, and her throat opened up, red and smiling. She crumpled to the ground. A dark stain spread across the floor.

Mother screamed.

“Kaya?” Tamsin looked for her cousin.

Wind whipped through the apartment. Kaya trembled in the doorway.

Eyes flashing silver, the bird lady folded a dark wing around Kaya. Together, they dissolved into a wispy mist, blew into the corner of Tamsin’s eye, and disappeared.

Tamsin tasted feathers and dust.

Mother picked up the phone and turned to Tamsin. “Did she hurt you?”

From deep within Tamsin, the bird lady snarled and tried to push words into her throat, but Kaya stirred, and warm strength flowed through Tamsin.

Kaya spoke to the bird lady, “No. My sister and I are together now, and we don’t need you anymore.”

Tamsin swallowed hard and spoke to Mother. “We’d like to go home, Mom.”

End.

KT Wagner writes speculative fiction in the garden of her home on the west coast of Canada. She enjoys daydreaming and is a collector of strange plants, weird trivia and obscure tomes. KT graduated from Simon Fraser University’s Writers Studio in 2015 (Southbank 2013). A number of her short stories are published or podcast. She’s currently working on a scifi-horror novel. KT can be found online at www.northernlightsgothic.com and @KT_Wagner

The King in Yellow

The Repairer of Reputations:II

By Robert W. Chambers

Originally published in 1895

II

I climbed the three dilapidated flights of stairs which I had so often climbed before, and knocked at a small door at the end of the corridor. Mr. Wilde opened the door and I walked in.

When he had double-locked the door and pushed a heavy chest against it, he came and sat down beside me, peering up into my face with his little, light-colored eyes. Half a dozen new scratches covered his nose and cheeks, and the silver wires which supported his artificial ears had become displaced. I thought I had never seen him so hideously fascinating. He had no ears. The artificial ones, which now stood out at an angle from the fine wire, were his one weakness. They were made of wax and painted a shell pink; but the rest of his face was yellow. He might better have revelled in the luxury of some artificial fingers for his left hand, which was absolutely fingerless, but it seemed to cause him no inconvenience, and he was satisfied with his wax ears. He was very small, scarcely higher than a child of ten, but his arms were magnificently developed, and his thighs as thick as any athlete’s. Still, the most remarkable thing about Mr. Wilde was that a man of his marvellous intelligence and knowledge should have such a head. It was flat and pointed, like the heads of many of those unfortunates whom people imprison in asylums for the weak-minded. Many called him insane, but I knew him to be as sane as I was.

I do not deny that he was eccentric; the mania he had for keeping that cat and teasing her until she flew at his face like a demon was certainly eccentric. I never could understand why he kept the creature, nor what pleasure he found in shutting himself up in his room with the surly, vicious beast. I remember once glancing up from the manuscript I was studying by the light of some tallow dips and seeing Mr. Wilde squatting motionless on his high chair, his eyes fairly blazing with excitement, while the cat, which had risen from her place before the stove, came creeping across the floor right at him. Before I could move she flattened her belly to the ground, crouched, trembled, and sprang onto his face. Howling and foaming, they rolled over and over on the floor, scratching and clawing, until the cat screamed and fled under the cabinet, and Mr. Wilde turned over on his back, his limbs contracting and curling up like the legs of a dying spider. He was eccentric.

Mr. Wilde had climbed into his high chair, and, after studying my face, picked up a dog’s-eared ledger and opened it.

“Henry B. Matthews,” he read, “book-keeper with Whysot Whysot & Company, dealers in church ornaments. Called April 3rd. Reputation damaged on the racetrack. Known as a welcher. Reputation to be repaired by August 1st. Retainer, Five Dollars.” He turned the page and ran his fingerless knuckles down the closely written columns.

“P. Greene Dusenberry, Minister of the Gospel, Fairbeach, New Jersey. Reputation damaged in the Bowery. To be repaired as soon as possible. Retainer, $100.”

He coughed and added, “Called, April 6th.”

“Then you are not in need of money, Mr. Wilde,” I inquired.

“Listen” -- he coughed again.

“Mrs. C. Hamilton Chester, of Chester Park, New York City, called April 7th. Reputation damaged at Dieppe, France. To be repaired by October 1st. Retainer, $500.”

“Note -- C. Hamilton Chester, Captain U.S.S. Avalanche, ordered home from South Sea Squadron October 1st.”

“Well,” I said, “the profession of a Repairer of Reputations is lucrative.”

His colorless eyes sought mine. “I only wanted to demonstrate that I was correct. You said it was impossible to succeed as a Repairer of Reputations; that even if I did succeed in certain cases, it would cost me more than I would gain by it. To-day I have five hundred men in my employ, who are poorly paid, but who pursue the work with an enthusiasm which possibly may be born of fear. These men enter every shade and grade of society; some even are pillars of the most exclusive social temples; other are the prop and pride of the financial world; still others hold undisputed sway among the ‘Fancy and the Talent.’ I choose them at my leisure from those who reply to my advertisements. It is easy enough -- they are all cowards. I could treble the number in twenty days if I wished. So, you see, those who have in their keeping the reputations of their fellow citizens, I have in my pay.”

“They may turn on you,” I suggested.

He rubbed his thumb over his cropped ears and adjusted the wax substitutes. “I think not,” he murmured, thoughtfully, “I seldom have to apply the whip, and then only once. Besides, they like their wages.”

“How do you apply the whip?” I demanded.

His face for a moment was awful to look upon. His eyes dwindled to a pair of green sparks.

“I invite them to come and have a little chat with me,” he said, in a soft voice.

A knock at the door interrupted him, and his face resumed its amiable expression.

“Who is it?” he inquired.

“Mr. Steylette,” was the answer.

“Come to-morrow,” replied Mr. Wilde.

“Impossible,” began the other; but was silenced by sort of bark from Mr. Wilde.

“Come to-morrow,” he repeated.

We heard somebody move away from the door and turn the corner by the stair-way.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Arnold Steylette, owner and editor-in-chief of the great New York daily.”

He drummed on the ledger with his fingerless hand, adding, “I pay him very badly, but he thinks it is a good bargain.”

“Arnold Steylette!” I repeated, amazed.

“Yes,” said Mr. Wilde, with a self-satisfied cough.

The cat, which had entered the room as he spoke, hesitated, looked up at him, and snarled. He climbed down from the chair, and, squatting on the floor, took the creature into his arms and caressed her. The cat ceased snarling and presently began a loud purring, which seemed to increase in timbre as he stroked her.

“Where are the notes?” I asked. He pointed to the table, and for the hundredth time I picked up the bundle of manuscript entitled:

“THE IMPERIAL DYNASTY OF AMERICA.”

One by one I studied the well-worn pages, worn only by my own handling, and, although I knew all by heart, from the beginning, “when from Carcosa, the Hyades, Hastur, and Aldebaran,” to “Castaigne, Louis de Calvados, born December 19, 1887,” I read it with an eager, rapt attention, pausing to repeat parts of it aloud, and dwelling especially on “Hildred de Calvados, only son of Hildred Castaigne and Edythe Landes Castaigne, first in succession,” etc., etc..

When I finished, Mr. Wilde nodded and coughed. “Speaking of your legitimate ambition,” he said, how do Constance and Louis get along?”

“She loves him,” I replied, simply.

The cat on his knee suddenly turned and struck at his eyes, and he flung her off and climbed onto the chair opposite me.

“And Dr. Archer? But that’s a matter you can settle any time you wish,” he added.

“Yes,” I replied, “Dr. Archer can wait, but it is time I saw my cousin Louis.”

“It is time,” he repeated. Then he took another ledger from the table and ran over the leaves rapidly.

“We are now in communication with ten thousand men,” he muttered. “We can count on one hundred thousand within the first twenty-eight hours, and in forty-eight hours the State will rise en masse. The country follows the State, and the portion that will not, I mean California and the Northwest, might better never have been inhabited. I shall not send them the Yellow Sign.”

The blood rushed to my head, but I only answered, “A new broom sweeps clean.”

“The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts,” said Mr. Wilde.

“You are speaking of the King in Yellow,” I groaned, with a shudder.

“He is a king whom emperors have served.”

“I am content to serve him,” I replied.

Mr. Wilde sat rubbing his ears with his crippled hand. “Perhaps Constance does not love him,” he suggested.

I started to reply, but a sudden burst of military music from the street below drowned my voice. The Twentieth Dragoon Regiment, formerly in garrison at Mount St. Vincent, was returning from the manoeuvres in Westchester County to its new barracks on East Washington Square. It was my cousin’s regiment. They were a fine lot of fellows, in their pale-blue, tight-fitting jackets, jaunty busbies, and with riding-breeches, with the double yellow stripe, into which their limbs seemed to have been moulded. Every other squadron was armed with lances, from the metal points of which fluttered yellow-and-white pennons. The band passed, playing the regimental march, then came the colonel and staff, the horses crowding and trampling, while their heads bobbed in unison, and the pennons fluttered from their lance points. The troopers, who rode with the beautiful English seat, looked brown as berries from their bloodless campaign among the farms of Westchester, and the music of their sabres against the stirrups, and the jingle of spurs and carbines was delightful to me. I saw Louis riding with his squadron. He was as handsome an officer as I have ever seen. Mr. Wilde, who had mounted a chair by the window, saw him, too, but said nothing. Louis turned and looked straight at Hawberk’s shop as he passed, and I could see the flush on his brown cheeks. I think Constance must have been at the window. When the last troopers had clattered by, and the last pennons vanished into South Fifth Avenue, Mr. Wilde clambered out of his chair and dragged the chest away from the door.

“Yes,” he said, “it is time that you saw your cousin Louis.”

He unlocked the door and I picked up my hat and stick and stepped into the corridor. The stairs were dark. Groping about, I set my foot on something soft, which snarled and spit, and I aimed a murderous blow at the cat, but my cane shivered to splinters against the balustrade, and the beast scurried back into Mr. Wilde’s room.

Passing Hawberk’s door again, I saw him still at work on the armor, but I did not stop, and, stepping out into Bleecker Street, I followed it to Wooster, skirted the grounds of the Lethal Chamber, and, crossing Washington Park, went straight to my rooms in the Benedick. Here I lunched comfortably, read the Herald and the Meteor, and finally went to the steel safe in my bedroom and set the time combination. The three and three-quarter minutes which it is necessary to wait, while the time lock is opening, are to me golden moments. From the instant I set the combination to the moment when I grasp the knobs and swing back the solid steel doors, I live in an ecstasy of expectation. Those moments must be like moments passed in paradise. I know what I am to find at the end of the time limit. I know what the massive safe holds secure for me, for me alone, and the exquisite pleasure of waiting is hardly enhanced when the safe opens and I lift, from its velvet crown, a diadem of purest gold, blazing with diamonds. I do this every day, and yet the joy of waiting and at last touching again the diadem only seems to increase as the days pass. It is a diadem fit for a king among kings, an emperor among emperors. The King in Yellow might scorn it, but it shall be worn by his royal servant.

I held it in my arms until the alarm on the safe rang harshly, and then tenderly, proudly I replaced it and shut the steel doors. I walked slowly back into my study, which faces Washington Square, and leaned on the window-sill. The afternoon sun poured into my windows, and a gentle breeze stirred the branches of the elms and maples in the park, not covered with buds and tender foliage. A flock of pigeons circled about the tower of the memorial Church, sometimes alighting on the purple-tiled roof, sometimes wheeling downward to the lotos fountain in front of the marble arch. The gardeners were busy with the flowerbeds around the fountain, and the freshly turned earth smelled sweet and spicy. A lawn-mower, drawn by a fat, white horse, clinked across the greensward, and watering-carts poured showers of spray over the asphalt drives. Around the statue of Peter Stuyvesant, which in 1906 had replaced the monstrosity supposed to represent Garibaldi, children played in the spring sunshine, and nurse girls wheeled elaborate baby-carriages with reckless disregard for the pasty-face occupants, which could probably be explained by the presence of half a dozen trim dragoon troopers languidly lolling on the benches. Through the trees the Washington Memorial Arch glistened like silver in the sunshine, and beyond, on the eastern extremity of the square, the gray-stone barracks of the dragoons and the white-granite artillery stables were alive with color and motion.

I looked at the Lethal Chamber on the corner of the square opposite. A few curious people still lingered about the gilded iron railing, but inside the grounds the paths were deserted. I watched the fountains ripple and sparkle; the sparrows had already found this new bathing nook, and the basins were crowded with the dusty-feathered little things. Two or three white peacocks picked their way across the lawns, and a drab-colored pigeon sat so motionless on the arm of one of the Fates that it seemed to be a part of the sculptured stone.

As I was turning carelessly away, a slight commotion in the group of curious loiterers around the gates attracted my attention. A young man had entered, and was advancing with nervous strides along the gravel path which leads to the bronze doors of the Lethal Chamber. He paused a moment before the Fates, and as he raised his head to those three mysterious faces, the pigeon rose from its sculptured perch, circled about for a moment, and wheeled to the east. The young man pressed his hands to his face, and then, with an undefinable gesture, sprang up the marble steps, the bronze doors closed behind him, and half an hour later the loiterers slouched away and the frightened pigeon returned to its perch in the arms of Fate.

I put on my hat and went out into the park for a little walk before dinner. As I crossed the central drive-way a group of officers passed, and one of them called out, “Hello, Hildred!” and came back to shake hands with me. It was my cousin Louis, who stood smiling and tapping his spurred heels with his riding-whip.

“Just back from Westchester,” he said; “been doing the bucolic; milk and curds, you know; dairy-maids in sun-bonnets, who say ‘haeow’ and ‘I don’t think’ when you tell them they are pretty. I’m nearly dead for a square meal at Delmonico’s. What’s the news?”

“There is none,” I replied, pleasantly. “I saw your regiment coming in this morning.”

“Did you? I didn’t see you. Where were you?”

“In Mr. Wilde’s window.”

“Oh, hell!” he began, impatiently, “that man is stark mad! I don’t understand why you --”

He saw how annoyed I felt by this outburst, and begged my pardon.

“Really, old chap,” he said, “I don’t mean to run down a man you like, but for the life of me I can’t see what the deuce you find in common with Mr. Wilde. He’s not well bred, to put it generously; he’s hideously deformed; his head is the head of a criminally insane person. You know yourself he’s been in an asylum --”

“So have I,” I interrupted, calmly.

Louis looked startled and confused for a moment, but recovered and slapped me heartily on the shoulder.

“You were completely cured,” he began; but I stopped him again.

“I suppose you mean that I was simply acknowledged never to have been insane.”

“Of course that -- that’s what I meant,” he laughed.

I disliked his laugh, because I knew it was forced; but I nodded gayly and asked him where he was going. Louis looked after his brother officers, who had now almost reached Broadway.

“We had intended to sample a Brunswick cocktail, but, to tell you the truth, I was anxious for an excuse to go and see Hawberk instead. Come along; I’ll make you my excuse.”

We found Hawberk, neatly attired in a fresh spring suit, standing at the door of his shop and sniffing the air.

“I had just decided to take Constance for a little stroll before dinner,” he replied to the impetuous volley of questions from Louis. “We thought of walking on the park terrace along the North River.”

At that moment Constance appeared and grew pale and rosy by turns as Louis bent over her small, gloved fingers. I tried to excuse myself, alleging an engagement up-town, but Louis and Constance would not listen, and I saw I was expected to remain and engage old Hawberk’s attention. After all, it would be just as well if I kept my eye on Louis, I thought, and, when they hailed a Spring Street electric-car, I got in after them and took my seat beside the armorer.

The beautiful line of parks and granite terraces overlooking the wharves along the North River, which were built in 1910 and finished in the autumn of 1917, had become one of the most popular promenades in the metropolis. They extended from the Battery to One Hundred and Ninetieth street, overlooking the noble river, and affording a fine view of the Jersey shore and the Highlands opposite. Cafes and restaurants were scattered here and there among the trees, and twice a week military bands from the garrison played in the kiosques on the parapets.

We sat down in the sunshine on the bench at the foot of the equestrian status of General Sheridan. Constance tipped her sunshade to shield her eyes, and she and Louis began a murmuring conversation which was impossible to catch. Old Hawberk, leaning on his ivory-headed cane, lighted an excellent cigar, the mate to which I politely refused, and smiled at vacancy. The sun hung low above the Staten Island woods, and the bay was dyed with golden hues reflected from the sun-warmed sails of the shipping in the harbor.

Brigs, schooners, yachts, clumsy ferry-boats, their decks swarming with people, railroad transports carrying lines of brown, blue, and white freight-cars, stately Sound steamers, declasse tramp steamers, coasters, dredgers, scows, and everywhere pervading the entire bay impudent little tugs puffing and whistling officiously -- these were the craft which churned the sunlit waters as far as the eye could reach. In calm contrast to the hurry of sailing vessel and steamer, a silent fleet of white war-ships lay motionless in mid-stream.

Constance’s merry laugh aroused me from my reverie.

“What are you staring at?” she inquired.

“Nothing -- the fleet.” I smiled.

Then Louis told us what the vessels were, pointing out each by its relative position to the old red fort on Governor’s Island.

“That little cigar-shaped thing is a torpedo-boat,” he explained; “there are four more lying close together. They are the Tarpon, the Falcon, the Sea Fox, and the Octopus. The gunboats just above are the Princeton, the Champlain, the Still Water, and the Erie. Next to them lie the cruisers Farragut and Los Angeles, and above them the battle-ships California and Dakota, and the Washington, which is the flagship. Those two squatty-looking chunks of metal which are anchored there off Castle William are the double-turreted monitors Terrible and Magnificent; behind them lies the ram Osceola.”

Constance looked at him with deep approval in her beautiful eyes. “What loads of things you know for a soldier,” she said, and we all joined in the laugh which followed.

Presently Louis rose with a nod to us and offered his arm to Constance, and they strolled away along the river-wall. Hawberk watched them for a moment, and then turned to me.

Mr. Wilde was right,” he said. “I have found the missing tassets and left cuissard of the ‘Prince’s Emblazoned,’ in a vile old junk garret in Pell Street.”

“998?” I inquired, with a smile.

“Yes.”

“Mr. Wilde is a very intelligent man,” I observed.

“I want to give him the credit of this most important discovery,” continued Hawberk. “And I intend it shall be known that he is entitled to the fame of it.”

“He won’t thank you for that,” I answered, sharply; “please say nothing about it.”

“Do you know what it is worth?” said Hawberk.

“No -- fifty dollars, perhaps.”

“It is valued at five hundred, but the owner of the ‘Prince’s Emblazoned’ will give two thousand dollars to the person who completes his suit; that reward also belongs to Mr. Wilde.”

“He doesn’t want it! He refuses it!” I answered, angrily. “What do you know about Mr. Wilde? He doesn’t need the money. He is rich -- or will be -- richer than any living man except myself. What will we care for money then -- what will we care, he and I, when -- when -- “

“When what?” demanded Hawberk, astonished.

“You will see,” I replied, on my guard again.

He looked at me narrowly, much as Dr. Archer used to, and I knew he thought I was mentally unsound. Perhaps it was fortunate for him that he did not use the word lunatic just then.

“No,” I replied to his unspoken thought, “I am not mentally weak; my mind is as healthy as Mr. Wilde’s. I do not care to explain just yet what I have on hand, but it is an investment which will pay more than mere gold, silver, and precious stones. It will secure the happiness and prosperity of a continent -- yes, a hemisphere!”

“Oh,” said Hawberk.

“And eventually,” I continued, more quietly, “it will secure the happiness of the whole world.”

“And incidentally your own happiness and prosperity as well as Mr. Wilde’s?”

“Exactly,” I smiled, but I could have throttled him for taking that tone.

He looked at me in silence for a while, and then said, very gently: “Why don’t you give up your books and studies, Mr. Castaigne, and take a tramp among the mountains somewhere or other? You used to be fond of fishing. Take a cast or two at the trout in the Rangelys.”

“I don’t care for fishing any more,” I answered, without a shade of annoyance in my voice.

“You used to be fond of everything,” he continued -- “athletics, yachting, shooting, riding -- “

“I have never cared to ride since my fall,” I said, quietly.

“Ah, yes, your fall,” he repeated, looking away from me.

I thought this nonsense had gone far enough, so I turned the conversation back to Mr. Wilde; but he was scanning my face again in a manner highly offensive to me.

“Mr. Wilde,” he repeated; “do you know what he did this afternoon? He came down-stairs and nailed a sign over the hall door next to mine; it read:

MR. WILDE

REPAIRER OF REPUTATIONS

3rd Bell.

“Do you know what a Repairer of Reputations can be?”

“I do,” I replied, suppressing rage within.

“Oh,” he said again.

Louis and Constance came strolling by and stopped to ask if we would join them. Hawberk looked at his watch. At the same moment a puff of smoke shot from the casemates of Castle William, and the boom of the sunset gun rolled across the water and was re-echoed from the Highlands opposite. The flag came running down from the flagpole, and bugles sounded on the white decks of the warships, and the first electric light sparkled out from the Jersey shore.

As I turned into the city with Hawberk I heard Constance murmur something to Louis which I did not understand; but Louis whispered “My darling!” in reply; and again, walking ahead with Hawberk through the square, I heard a murmur of “sweetheart!” and “my own Constance!” and I knew the time had nearly arrived when I should speak of important matters with my cousin Louis.

To be continued...

Robert William Chambers was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories titled The King in Yellow, published in 1895. He got his start selling illustrations to major magazines before dipping his toe in the gothic and supernatural fiction genres. Following 1924, he wrote exclusively historical fiction. He died in 1933 after undergoing intestinal surgery.

Dear beloved reader,

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

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

Charles Tyra

Editor

Table of Contents

- Entrance Rites
- Knocks
- Testimony
- The Math of the Red Desk
- On the Beach
- The Nut House
- Beneath Her Skin

- The King in Yellow: The Repairer of Reputations part I