CHM October 2022
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 2022-09-22 19:34:14+00:00
Publisher: Charles Tyra

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: Branden Singletary| https://nexumorphic.com

The King in Yellow Illustrations: Luke Spooner | Carrion House

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Edited by Charles Tyra
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. Even though spooky season is a year-round affair here at CHM, there is something special about October. Existential dread just hits a little differently when the leaves are turning and there is a crisp chill in the air. If it’s a chill down your spine that you’re looking for, you’ve come to the right place. It’s time to light a black candle, pop open an oversized bag of candy you know won’t make it all the way to Halloween, and get lost in a tale of terror or two.

We’ve got plenty of such tales queued up for you this month. We open strong with a story that stretches the very fabric of reality in Patrick Barb’s Dream, Girl. Something terrible lurks in the words in the beautifully crafted and unforgettable Becoming by David Peak. A terrifying truth found in the coldest reaches of outer space makes its way home in Adrift, before a child’s favorite VHS movie plays quite differently in adulthood in The Forgotten Folk.

You’ll want to stick around for the group of nuns working not only to help women victimized by violence but also to keep something even more terrible at bay in Providence before we are treated to part four of Patrick Barb’s acclaimed animal heist novella: The Nuthouse. Then, we have a gritty tale of monsters and strange visions in the reprinted The Monstress followed by the fourth installment of our special presentation of Chambers’ The King in Yellow: The Mask.

Enjoy.

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: Co-Editor |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: Branden Singletary is a designer and creator that reveals his inner world through Nexumorphic - a sturdy creative ground where he may build a reflection of our world through a unique fusion of visual design, philosophy, and storytelling.

Since the conclusion of Desire, his first worldbuilding project, he has further refined its setting into a work of philosophical metafiction called Metaforma, setting the stage for his latest, ongoing project called Exephysis - a fiction of everything where others may add their own avatars into the world, and in exchange, they are provided insight into the core aspects of how that avatar best reflects a piece of its creator.

A consistent purpose has persisted throughout all of his projects: to help others better connect to themselves, to the world, and to each other.

By revealing the unseen elements of the individual and the world, Branden strives to help others realize and reveal their own unique world, while connecting them with all others, for the betterment of our own, collective one.

Explore more of his work and projects below.

A world awaits. https://nexumorphic.com

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

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

Welcome to Cosmic Horror Monthly

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

Dream, Girl

By Patrick Barb

After Hamilton Blanchard saw the girl of his dreams again, he began to suspect he was going mad.

It happened at the bar after work. Hamilton went with some of his co-workers. They were celebrating an intern’s last day. Or someone’s birthday or retirement. Hamilton couldn’t remember and didn’t much care either. More importantly, this bar sat near a subway stop for Hamilton’s train and the first couple rounds went on someone else’s corporate card.

Plus, it provided a better option than heating a Pepperoni Hot Pocket in an already cheese- and grease-splattered microwave, then washing it down with a six-pack of cheap beer from the Korean grocer around the corner from his apartment.

And so, Hamilton found himself sitting around a raised table-top with a handful of people he didn’t care about and an additional sprinkling of those he outright despised, flitting his attention back and forth between conversations about the latest product launches and gossiped tales from past office outings. He took sips from his third pint in a half-hour, since he’d managed to sneak an extra one in before the official cut-off of free drinks by the company card bearer.

“Take it easy there, Ham.”

The others laughed at the comment from the co-worker Hamilton knew as “the fat one with the acne (or herpes?) scars on his chin.” He ignored the remark. After all, if anyone deserved a porcine nickname it was that tub of lard.

Bored with the company and out of free drinks, Hamilton’s eyes swept across the bar. He stopped at the entrance. Then, he noticed her leaving.

Acting as fast as three pints allowed, Hamilton muttered excuses and slid down from his perch to the sticky floor. He hit the ground faster than intended. The toe of his brown wingtip slid across a puddle of spilled beer. He grabbed at the edge of the table for support. But doing so shook the whole thing and his co-workers’ drinks sloshed around a bit. He caught sight of beer and liquors splashing on the tabletop’s lacquered surface. By the time Hamilton got his bearings and turned back to look at the door, she’d gone.

He had a choice: sit back down, apologize to his co-workers, and go back to pretending to care about their inane conversations, before slinking back home to pass out before his roommate Charles got home. Or skip all that and go home now.

He chose the latter. Threading his way between the jackasses in their pressed suits and the other jackasses in Giants and Jets jerseys, he made his way to the exit. A roly-poly toad-man of a bouncer sat on a stool near the door. Hamilton watched the man splitting his time between checking IDs and ogling the asses of the teenage college girls whose crappy fake IDs he always let slide.

“Excuse me?”

“Help you, pal?” the dirtbag bouncer asked.

“Did you see the girl who left? Did you see where she was headed?”

“Gonna need you to be more specific, chief. See a lotta ladies come in and out. This girl with you?”

The bouncer punctuated his last sentence with the type of smug, shit-eating smile Hamilton expected him to display. But then, it’s not like he knew how to answer the question. Yes, she’s with me. In the sense, she seems to have sprung from my imagination. You see, Mr. Roly-Poly, I first met this girl in a dream. No, not a sex dream. This girl, she’s different. She’s like no one I’ve ever seen before.

Instead, he said nothing. The bouncer hopped down. He poked a sausage link finger into Hamilton’s stomach, the grease of his fingerprint spreading across the front of Hamilton’s pressed dress shirt. “Look, pal, I dunno what the hell you’re expecting, but I ain’t here to play matchmaker.”

Hamilton shrugged and let the mini-tyrant have his way. Shoving his way out the door, his shoulder nailed the doorframe. It hurt like hell. Behind him, the bouncer unleashed a series of staccato grunts Hamilton assumed was the toad-man’s approximation of laughter.

Hamilton stepped out into a rainstorm. Round, thick bulbs of liquid dropped from the sky and shattered into smaller, recursive iterations on the sidewalk and against the exposed Hamilton. He cursed loud enough to make the fat tourist pawing through her fanny pack look up and glare at him. She shuffled away with a snort, her clear plastic poncho plastered to her wet skin. Hamilton guessed she was on her way to the overpriced tourist trap of a candy store a few blocks away.

Hamilton didn’t have an umbrella because he’d lost his on the subway a week ago—when he encountered his dream girl in real life for the first time.

* * *

It was a Tuesday night. Right after work again, but this time no invite from co-workers distracted him from home. He’d snagged a seat on an otherwise crowded subway car. He sat with his legs spread wide, balancing his umbrella across his knees. He wanted people to recognize his space and understand they were not welcome. He liked to pretend the umbrella was an old-timey police cudgel. He closed his eyes amid the swaying sea of packed humanity and imagined his annoying fat pig of a co-worker kneeling before him. He pictured him begging. Pleading for mercy. Hamilton knew he’d answer those pleas with a blow right to the skull. He pictured blood, brains, and chalk-colored skull fragments everywhere.

An old woman cleared her throat, her watery eyes staring down at Hamilton and his umbrella. He lifted his eyes to study her.

She was thin. Sickly thin. Hamilton figured she wanted him to get up and give her his seat.

The “robotic boy caught in a well”-sounding voice of the subway driver spread through the car, interrupting Hamilton’s face-off with the old woman, signaling the arrival at his stop. He stood up—again, too fast—as the train rocked itself to a complete stop on the tracks. He reached out, grabbing for something to hold onto, something for balance.

Was it his fault if she didn’t move out of the way? After all, she’d seen him standing up. If she’d moved earlier, then she wouldn’t have needed to suck in a menthol-scented breath between yellowed teeth, as the tips of Hamilton’s fingers grazed the front of her blouse.

He pulled his hand back, disgusted by his fingers’ contact with the mole-like lump of what he assumed was a nipple.

“Excuse me.”

He kept his head down and said nothing. The slight delay cost him precious time. New riders pushed their way through the already closing train doors, and trying to get off the train made Hamilton a salmon swimming upstream in rapid waters.

There was his chance. He used the flat end of his closed umbrella’s handle, poking it out to clear a path. As he approached the threshold of the closing door and swung the umbrella back behind him, his eyes fell on her.

She headed in the opposite direction, slipping through the crack of the closing door and onto the train. Hamilton stutter-stepped forward, unable to stop.

The umbrella fell from his fingers and back inside the train. The door closed with a defiant ring. Hamilton spun on his wobbling heels at the edge of the platform. He pressed a hand against the car’s fortified glass window. Inside the subway car, no one noticed him.

Not even her.

On the other side of the door, she turned around to look back at the train platform, looking right at Hamilton. But she may as well have stared right through his hand on the glass.

* * *

When Hamilton got back to his apartment after the second failed connection with his dream girl, he chain-smoked three cigarettes, leaning out an open bedroom window to blow smoke rings into the rain. Stripped down to his boxers, he sat cross-legged on top of his pillow. Halfway through his third cigarette, a gust of wind spit a fistful of rain into his face. It nailed the cherry out of his cigarette and onto the pillow.

Hamilton slapped at the orange, glowing ember as it burned a hole through the off-white fabric of his thrift store pillowcase. Once he’d put the miniature fire out, he flung the drenched and useless cigarette butt out the window and slammed it shut. He flipped his pillow over and went right to sleep, ignoring the pounding on his door and Charles’s complaints about how “we agreed, no smoking, dude. I don’t wanna lose our security deposit.”

* * *

She appeared in his dreams again. He followed her at a distance inside some medieval castle with spiraling stone staircases and elaborate tapestries draped down its walls. Even though she walked in front of him, Hamilton saw both the back and front of her head at once.

“Wait!”

Hamilton found his voice sounded like that of the subway driver. The Escher-like stairs twisted in on themselves until they weren’t even stairs at all. They’d become a roller coaster—one of those rickety, wooden Coney Island specials. She sat two cars ahead.

The big drop came. She threw her arms up in an ecstatic release.

Then, Hamilton realized he wasn’t strapped into his car.

He fell past her. Her lips moved, saying…something. He couldn’t hear, but Hamilton woke up confident he knew what she’d said.

“I love you.”

He had no one to share the news with. His roommate had already departed for the gym, leaving behind a yellow loose-leaf sheet of “Apartment Rules” scotch-taped to the refrigerator door.

* * *

But then, the sightings of Hamilton’s dream girl stopped. None in his dreams. None in the drudgery of his day-to-day existence either. As fast as she’d made appearances in both spheres, her complete and utter erasure occurred.

Hamilton wondered if he’d tried too hard. Then, he suspected he hadn’t tried hard enough.

He took off “sick” from work for a week. He sat in a stupor. Wasting the hours on the couch, alternating between water-piss domestic beers, cigarettes, and candy-flavored cold medicine he didn’t need. Nothing, not vices or over-the-counter meds, took his mind off his strange encounters with the dream girl. He left the TV on so the voices of tanned and overexcited infomercial hosts leaked into his dreams.

In his dreams, he didn’t see or hear her, only half-heard snippets and sightings of Charles (“Dude, where’s the rent…can’t do this . . . kicked out...”) cross-blending with the exhortations of Ron Popeil.

Hamilton pulled himself back together on a Sunday. He ran his fingertips over the patches of hair growing on his cheeks. He picked out his least dirty clothes from the piles left on his bedroom floor and headed out.

He jammed white earbuds into his ears, with the cord running down to the pocket of his black hoodie but connected to nothing. He walked for miles. His soles slapped against the pavement. No direction, no eye contact. He’d look up to study blinking crosswalk signs and then return his gaze to the pavement cracks. He walked until he found himself in Central Park. He kicked at falling leaves, as he walked across cobblestones.

She peeked out from behind an oak tree. Her hair touched its gray bark, reminding Hamilton of those pictures of nymphs in the books of Greek mythology he’d traced on loose-leaf paper in his middle school library.

She was the sprite-like, untamed dryad and he was the one who’d dreamed her into existence. As a result, Hamilton began to think of himself as a god of sorts.

And he wanted his creation.

“Wait.”

He intended the words to come out like a command spoken with a voice booming down from the heavens. But they didn’t sound that way at all.

She turned her back to him. Hamilton couldn’t shake the feeling that not only hadn’t she heard him but she still hadn’t seen him either.

Hamilton’s brain broke some more. He wanted to run over there, pulling her behind the tree.

But she was already walking away.

Ahead of her, the park’s nearest exit beckoned, and she spilled through it like a drop of rain into a storm drain, flowing into the whirling, swirling puddle of the crowded sidewalk. Hamilton followed, determined not to lose her this time. But, she merged with a swarm of rowdy teenagers.

Gone again.

Hamilton ran across the street, trying to catch up. A car swerved away from him. The long, angry bleating of its horn followed. On the other side of the street, the teens took a moment from their cultivated nonchalance to point and laugh.

* * *

Hamilton’s self-imposed “sick” week lasted far longer than five days. He hadn’t checked his phone in weeks. Several voicemails waited for him. He didn’t listen though. He imagined what they’d say.

“Message Number One: Hey, it’s Gary….”

“Message Number Two: This is Gary. Your supervisor….”

“Message Number Three: Hello, Mr. Blanchard, this is Maddie from Human Resources. We understand you haven’t….”

“Message Number Nine: Listen here asshole, your half of the rent’s late...again... dammit, I know you’re in there!”

Hamilton wanted to focus on more important matters. The most important matter of his twenty-some years on Earth. He monitored and patrolled the perimeter, following a path several blocks in either direction from his office to his apartment building. He kept his eyes open for as long as possible, walking the route over and over, day and night. As he walked, he’d try his damnedest not to blink, waiting until his eyes watered and then turned so dry he’d want to claw them right out of his skull. Then, and only then, he allowed himself to blink.

* * *

Even when Hamilton covered the route in full, she still managed to elude him. She’d always appear out of range: getting into cabs, stepping out amid departing movie theater crowds and into larger crowds of holiday shoppers, climbing stairs, and taking elevators.

* * *

It happened at the tail end of a fever dream.

Hamilton stood on another subway platform, one he didn’t recognize, waiting for a train. He looked down the gaping mouth of the tunnel. The train’s lights shone back at him, as they widened across the inner walls upon approach.

He was alone.

Then, the train arrived.

Its doors opened.

Hamilton was still alone.

He stepped into the subway car. He didn’t hear her step in behind him. But he felt her there, and he knew she wanted him to wait for her. She walked onboard and pressed her forehead into the space between his shoulder blades.

He wasn’t alone anymore.

* * *

In the days following, Hamilton studied every subway train schedule and map he got his hands or eyes on. He viewed every platform from every possible angle. For the longest time, no platform matched the one from his dream. He’d even tried asking Charles about it. But the jerk wouldn’t look at him, standing outside their old apartment building helping a new roommate shuttle their boxes inside. Only after Hamilton dropped to his knees begging, pulling at the frayed cuffs of Charles’s jeans, his roommate relented and said, “That doesn’t exist. You made it all up.” But what the hell did he know?

Hamilton let Charles put all his stuff on the curb for the sidewalk vultures to pick apart. He had the clothes on his back and enough change for laundry in his pockets. Finding a way to sleep outside on grates or in the darker corners of subway stations turned out to be easier than expected. None of that mattered anyway, not compared to his quest for the girl.

Then, one day, Hamilton’s search bore fruit.

He stood, hesitant but not retreating, on the landing of the station’s entrance stairwell. Every time a sleeve or the handle of a paper bag filled with groceries grazed his elbow, he’d inhale. “Is that her?”

None of them were. Until…

Hamilton got a clear view of the platform.

There she was. He didn’t know how she’d got past him. Not like it mattered. She stood at the platform’s edge, the toes of her flats placed past the yellow warning stripe. She waited.

For him.

“I’m coming.”

He took the stairs so fast.

It felt like flying.

He watched her, leaning out and turning her head. She bathed in the light of the approaching train.

“I’m almost there.”

He’d touch her soon enough. The train’s light already touched her. It filled her. It made her holy.

“I’m almost there.”

The train was coming.

“I’m almost there.”

Hamilton reached the platform’s edge, feet skidding past the yellow warning line. “No passengers past this line,” it said.

And she was gone. But the train kept coming.

“I can’t stop.”

* * *

Meredith’s therapist leaned back in her chair. Doing so, she closed the spiral-bound notebook she’d read in silence. A look of deep, meditative contemplation crossed her features. Then, she scratched her nose and brushed aside a strand of silver hair (like Meredith’s Meemaw’s hair, making her so easy to confide in).

Meredith’s chair was less impressively upholstered than Dr. Freedman’s. But it was a tall chair, and since her feet didn’t reach the carpet, she swung them back and forth. Like she’d done in other doctors’ offices in days gone by.

Dr. Freedman opened her eyes. She focused on Meredith in her textbook perfect way. Then she passed the notebook back to her client. “Please, Meredith, how many times, after all our sessions, do I have to tell you to call me Diana?”

“Diana....” Meredith tried the name on like a dress she was sure wasn’t her style and knew wouldn’t fit her even still.

“I think the dream journal’s been good for you. Don’t you agree?”

“I guess.”

“The boy—the young man—you swear you’ve never seen before except in your dreams?”

“My nightmares. The rollercoaster one, where I told him, ‘Leave me alone?’ That’s the sampler platter.”

“Tell me again how the last one ended.”

Meredith flipped open her dream journal notebook. But Dr. Freedman placed her palm across the open pages and shook her head. “No. I want to hear you say it. Here and now.”

“I was back in New York again. But I haven’t lived there since...for years now. Yet all these nightmares, they’re all set there. I don’t know why. On the subway, at sports bars, even in Central Park, all these places from before. Some feel like dreams you know, but others…it’s like I’m walking inside someone else’s lived experiences.

“And then there’s the boy—the man, he’s always there. Even when I can’t see him, I still see him. Ya know?”

The doctor gave a quick nod in reply.

“But in the last one, I stood on a subway platform. There was a train coming. I knew...I knew he was coming to get me. But the train was almost there too. I remembered thinking ‘You can’t die in your dream.’”

Meredith was crying. The doctor reached behind her desk and came back with a box of tissues. She passed them to Meredith.

Meredith pulled out a tissue and dabbed it under both eyes. “After you woke up, how’d you feel?” the doctor asked.

Meredith sniffed, and then shrugged her shoulders. “I fell right back asleep.”

The crumpled tissue unfolded in Meredith’s hand. “It was my best goddamn sleep in years.”

End.

Patrick Barb  is an author of weird, dark, and horrifying tales, currently living (and trying not to freeze to death) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of the dark urban fantasy novella Gargantuana’s Ghost (forthcoming from Grey Matter Press, October 2022), the talking animal/cosmic horror novella The Nut House (currently serialized in Cosmic Horror Monthly), and the collection Pre-Approved for Haunting (forthcoming from Turner Publishing, October 2023). In addition, he is an Active Member of the HWA and a Full Member of the SFWA. Visit him at patrickbarb.com or follow him at twitter.com/pbarb.

Becoming

By David Peak

Harmon first discovered the bunker when checking a deadfall. The trap hadn’t worked—some sneaky squirrel had escaped with the bait—but the promise of untold food and supplies more than made up for the missed meal.

He pulled back the brushwood around the camouflaged PVC pipe. The air filter was top of the line. Whoever was down there had a lot of money. He covered the filter with a plastic grocery bag and snapped it tight with a rubber band. Mrs. Clark did the same with the ventilation pipe. Best-case scenario someone came up to check on the air flow. Worst-case scenario no one came up at all.

Either way they had to wait. They’d gotten used to waiting. Some days they waited out the heat. Other days they waited out hunger. Mrs. Clark knelt in the dirt and prayed just loud enough for Harmon to hear. She was always reminding him that the things they did to stay alive went against her beliefs.

The nuclear-white sun slid behind the trees, casting long shadows, and the hidden world of insects chittered awake.

Harmon heard the muffled sound of metal slotting into place. The blast hatch swung open and a man with wild gray hair cautiously climbed out of the hole. Harmon stayed just out of sight. When the man stood on two feet Harmon lunged forward and wrapped the garrote around his neck. He dropped his weight and they both fell hard to their sides. Mrs. Clark was down on her knees sticking the man with a knife, using her free hand to steady each thrust. Harmon felt the man tense up. There was blood everywhere. The dirt soaked through and stuck to everything. The metallic stench was overwhelming. Harmon felt the garrote cut into the man’s flesh. All the while he prayed no one else came out of the hole.

When it was done they used clumps of leaves to wipe the dirt and blood off their hands and arms the best they could. Harmon went down the ladder first. The bunker was little more than a few darkened rooms carved in low light. The concrete floor was littered with garbage and piles of clothes and empty bottles and cans. The air was choked with dead skin cells. Harmon called out to Mrs. Clark that it was safe to come down.

They sifted through the junk. The dead man must have spent years collecting whatever he could find. There were shoes and boots of all sizes and numerous heavy jackets and water-logged books and magazines. There were stuffed animals and sheets of plywood and metal pots and pans.

Mrs. Clark pointed at something on the wall. “Another one of these heathens obsessed with things in the woods.”

Candle stubs lined a soot-stained shelf and their multicolored drippings had hardened into layers. Tightly bundled sticks framed a crude painting that appeared to show human and animal forms growing out of flowers and fungus. The thing was a twist of limbs and heads and everything was bent and horned in designs that bore no logical relationship to nature.

“It’s ugly whatever it is.”

“That’s all you got? It’s ugly?”

It seemed to Harmon that people’s beliefs had evolved to make sense of things. They came up with new things to give them strength when the old things went up in smoke and left them afraid and alone. Sometimes that meant worshipping stacks of stones in the woods and other times it meant studying the flicker of flame below a highway overpass. The difference between him and Mrs. Clark was that he didn’t think anyone was wrong to believe what they believed. They hadn’t asked for this world. No one in their right mind would.

“Just grab what you can. Place gives me the creeps.”

They went through the drawers and cupboards and filled their hiking packs with canned food and bottled water and whatever else they could carry. Harmon found a working disposable lighter. Mrs. Clark found a Swiss Army knife and an unopened package of batteries. These things alone were worth the time and effort.

“Don’t bother with the books,” Harmon said. “They take up too much space.”

“Ethan might want them. He’s tired of listening to that know-it-all and his stupid lessons.”

“Take the clothes instead. They’ll fit him soon.”

“I’m not stealing from no dead kids.”

“They’re no good to anyone down here.”

“You think they’re important, you take them. I’m not taking no dead kids’ clothes.”

The way the others left it to him to make the tough decisions weighed heavy on his mind. He had to believe he was doing the right thing otherwise the doubt would eat him alive.

On the ground above Harmon breathed in the clean air. His head swam. It was a long walk back. They’d have to spend a night beneath the stars. Maybe even two. Before they set out they removed the plastic bags from the bunker’s air pipes, rolled the man’s body into the hole, and slammed shut the hatch. Later they used the waters of a cold spring to scrub the bloodstains from their skin. He heard Mrs. Clark quietly crying. He didn’t ask why. He didn’t care. She’d sleep just the same as everyone else.

* * *

They lived in a sewer system where the woods met the highway. Harmon knew they couldn’t stay there forever but it was comfortable and more importantly it felt safe.

The sounds of rushing water echoed in the distance and the slick stone walls smelled of ammonia and mold. They used their flashlights to navigate the maze of dark tunnels and entered the expansive cistern with its arched ceiling. An iron grate let in cold moonlight that rippled in the shallow waters of the reservoir pool.

Harmon carefully parted the cans they’d hung from strings in the entranceway to the control room.

“It’s us.”

A matchhead flared in the dark. The room was cramped and stuffy but Harmon loved it all the same. It was the first place in years that felt anything like home.

“Keep your voice down.” Yvonne lit a candle that bathed the room in solemn light.

Ethan emerged whimpering from the darkness. He rubbed his eyes with one hand and clung to Yvonne’s leg with the other. Norton sat up in his cot and coughed into his fist. The dark bags under his eyes had gotten worse. The woman they called the mute was curled up in a camping chair in the far corner.

These people were the closest thing to family Harmon had ever known and he would do anything to protect them. Sometimes that meant doing things they didn’t understand. Acts of violence. Other things. Worse things. But he didn’t care. Everything he did was to keep them safe whether they knew it or not.

“Watch this,” he said to Ethan. He flicked the wheel of the lighter. “Magic.”

They unloaded the supplies while Yvonne warmed a can of beans. No one asked where they found the stuff they brought back. They knew better.

Norton read to Ethan from one of his schoolbooks. They were studying science. Survival. “Knowing what to eat and what not to eat might even save your life someday,” Norton said. “Seeds, berries—you name it. There’s good and there’s bad. You just have to know how to tell the difference.” The mute reached for her knitting needles and started clicking them together. She hadn’t said a word since they’d taken her in a while back. Instead she spent hours stitching together strange dolls from whatever scraps and strings she found. At first Harmon had found the dolls creepy but now oddly comforting.

“You guys were gone for a while this time. Longer than usual.”

“Not many places left that haven’t been picked over. Anything worth taking has been taken. Everyone has moved on.”

“We haven’t seen anyone in weeks.”

“Maybe they’re hiding?”

“Or dead. Whole world feels still. Crushed of life. The air—”

“How long you think this food will last?”

“A couple weeks?”

“The water?”

“No telling. Heat’s been drying up a lot of what’s in the reservoir.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I’ll think of something.”

“We need a plan.”

“I just said I’ll think of something.”

“We could head north. It’ll be cooler in the summer.”

“It’s hot everywhere. And Norton’s still sick. Might not make the trip.”

“Living down here in the damp and the cold isn’t exactly helping me shake this cough.”

“Better than cooking alive up there.”

“So what’s the plan then?”

“I need time to think. I told you I’ll think of something.”

“We should all have a say.”

“We’ve been following your lead for months now and where’s it gotten us? Living underground like rats? Taking from others to stay alive? My God, the things I’ve had to do. The things you’ve made me do. There will be a judgment—”

The mute threw her spoon at Mrs. Clark. She ducked just in time and it bounced off her shoulder and clattered to the floor.

“Jesus Christ. What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Enough.” Yvonne pulled Ethan close. “He doesn’t need to hear this shit.”

“He’s not scared,” Harmon said. “Isn’t that right, Ethan?”

The boy was stronger than his mother knew. Harmon saw it in his eyes. Yvonne did the best she could to keep Ethan safe but a child born into this world would never know any different and that alone would help him survive.

Everyone adhered to the rules they’d been given. Harmon tried to put the needs of others before his own. That was the thing he needed to get out of his cot every morning.

As for the rest of them they had their own ways. Yvonne played den mother. Mrs. Clark kept memories of the old world alive. She even insisted on keeping her dead husband’s name. Norton retreated to the realms of logic in his books. The mute made her dolls.

“Hey, Ethan, I got something else for you.”

Harmon handed the boy a few T-shirts, a pair of basketball shorts, and a baseball cap. He tried not to look annoyed by Ethan’s obvious lack of interest. If he only knew what it took to get those things.

“He wants books. Storybooks. I told you. He wants to be entertained.”

Yvonne quietly thanked Harmon. “I’m sure he’ll grow into them.”

Sometime later Harmon lay awake in the dark. He listened to the sounds of distant dripping water and the heave of Norton’s labored breathing. Memories of the bunker came back all on their own. The flash of the blade. The way the man’s body tensed. The smell of blood and dirt. He felt sick. He’d let it all go on for too long.

Maybe Mrs. Clark was right. Maybe there was a God who would judge them for their sins. But Harmon wasn’t sure he cared. The way he saw it the judgments of a God who saw fit to create this world meant nothing to him.

* * *

The next few weeks were hotter than ever. Even underground and in the shadows the heat was unbearable. They quickly ran out of food and the last few inches of water in the reservoir had nearly dried up.

It was agreed that the three of them—Harmon, Mrs. Clark, and the mute—would set out to look for supplies. Yvonne would stay back and look after the others.

They decided to explore the watershed park people called Body Bags. There was nowhere else to go. For as long as Harmon could remember the park had been treated as an open-air cemetery, a place where people dumped corpses in the middle of the night. Its network of trails and service roads snaked through deep woods and provided innumerable nooks and crannies away from prying eyes.

The feeling inside Body Bags that day was all wrong. The air was thick with decay and the heat played tricks on Harmon’s eyes. The trees seemed to bend and waver. A noxious green fog hovered in the distance.

They hiked through the trees and crossed a meadow choked with dead sunflowers. Eventually they reached a wide clearing where a stone mansion loomed against the sky.

“Has that always been here?”

“What kind of question is that? Looks as old as the city itself.”

The mansion’s wraparound porch had collapsed and many of the windowpanes were shattered and darkened. Still something of its majesty remained. Ornate carvings hung from the roof eaves and much of the masonry looked almost new.

The mute seemed strangely excited. She pointed forcefully at the house.

Harmon watched her and nodded. “Okay, we’ll check it out.”

“Are you both crazy? That place is probably crawling with squatters.”

“We haven’t seen a single sign of another person all day. Plus if anyone’s gone through there it means they might have left stuff behind.”

“Harmon—”

He didn’t wait around to hear what she said. He was tired of her questioning everything. She was always filling his mind with doubt.

The footpath led to the back of the house. One of the walls had collapsed and left the ground-level floor exposed. Harmon climbed the pile of rubble and turned to help the mute who seemed eager to follow.

Mrs. Clark stayed below. She sat with her back against an old tree and her arms crossed over her chest.

Inside the house smelled like mildew and urine. Beams of pale light slanted through the filthy windows. There was broken furniture everywhere and the peeling walls were layered with graffiti from floor to ceiling. The long hallway that led to the front rooms was lined with glass-framed family portraits fogged with condensation.

The mute had got ahead of him somehow and stood waiting near a small doorway under the stairs. The wall nearby was painted with huge block lettering. He awakes from within!

“You’ve been here before, haven’t you? That’s why you got excited. You brought me here to show me something.”

She smiled and led the way downstairs.

The basement was dark. Harmon clicked on his flashlight and tried to navigate the clutter. He heard something large and scared scuttle through the garbage. More block lettering had been painted below a crawlspace near the ceiling. He works on infinite tasks!

Like some kind of lizard the mute scaled a broken dresser and slipped headfirst into the crawlspace. Harmon stood there in disbelief. Where the hell was she going? He waited for her to come back even though he knew she wouldn’t. The realization that he was expected to follow settled on him like a terrible weight.

He got on top of the wobbly dresser and shined his flashlight into the narrow passageway. The ground sloped down and out of sight and it went much deeper than he thought it would. He shuffled forward on his stomach. The passage tightened until he felt pressed between two slabs of stone. He tried not to panic. He heard the aching joints of the old house above. His mind filled with splintered images of disaster. Collapse. Ruin. Suffocation. And then it was over and he was safely squeezing through an opening.

His flashlight revealed a darkened chamber with the draped formation of a cave. The packed dirt floor was riddled with flat stones and icy puddles. His breath hung visible in the cool air.

The mute knelt before a mummified corpse. It was recognizable only by how its legs were crossed at the ankles and its arms were folded over its chest. What remained of its blistered head was an open mouth masked in an eternal scream. Harmon couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman or young or old. The more he looked at it the less he saw it as human. In one instant it appeared to be a tangle of oily rags and then it was a man-shaped suit of black garbage bags and then it was a nest of suckling rats.

His initial horror passed and gave way to an eerie sense of calm. He swept the light along the chamber wall and revealed an elaborate painting of some kind of creature with dozens of legs and a handful of heads. The image was obscured by long squiggly lines carved into the stone. He remembered the painting in the bunker—the one framed in the wooden altar and lined with candles—the thing that seemed to be emerging and decaying at the same time.

He heard Mrs. Clark yelling his name over and over again. She sounded impossibly far away. There was a thunderous cracking sound as if the house above him had split in two.

Harmon suddenly understood that he was alone. The mute was gone. But how? There was nowhere for her to go. There was no way for her to slip past him. He scrambled and shined the light wherever he could. The shadows of the cave walls seemed to spin around him.

Sprouting from the soft dirt in the center of the chamber was a growth of mushrooms. Their pointed caps were the color of nightshade. He couldn’t remember what he’d been looking at a moment ago or how he’d even found this place. He picked one of the mushrooms and ran his finger over its gills. This was exactly what he’d been looking for. He could save everyone. He could help take away their pain.

Moments later he was back outside and was surprised to see that night had fallen and the moon had risen. He could feel the anger radiating off Mrs. Clark.

“Where the fuck have you been?”

“Where do you think?” He looked around. “Where’s the mute?”

Mrs. Clark’s silence was feral. The sky flashed indigo with heat lightning and in that brief moment Harmon saw her face change.

The woods around them seemed desolate and endless.

Harmon heard the bleed of fear in his voice. “Well where is she?”

Mrs. Clark talked to him like she was scolding a guilty child. “I don’t know what you’re playing at but it isn’t funny. The two of you went into that house together and you’re the only one who came back out.”

* * *

No one seemed to believe him. He didn’t blame them. How could a person simply disappear? How had he not noticed? Maybe she’d fallen into a hole. Maybe she was still down there somewhere—scared and hurt and all alone—unable to cry out for help.

“You’re hiding something.”

They were back in the sewer. The sound of rushing of water drowned out Harmon’s thoughts. Mrs. Clark paced and muttered under her breath. Yvonne held a squirming Ethan on her lap. Norton leaned over the folding table inspecting the pile of mushrooms.

Harmon once again tried explaining how he’d followed the mute into the basement and into the crawlspace. He described the darkness of the cave. And then he didn’t know what happened. He couldn’t find the words. It was like there was a hole in his memory. A shuddering black spot. The shape of a scream.

The only thing that came back was the painting on the cave wall.

“It was like some kind of animal. Like all the versions of a racing horse in a zoetrope but they’re stacked on top of each other. Only it’s not a horse you’re looking at but something you’ve never seen before. It wasn’t something that we would understand as an animal. It didn’t fill the space the same way. I know it sounds crazy.”

“No shit,” Mrs. Clark said. “Nobody cares about some stupid painting. We’re trying to talk about the mute.” And then again, “You’re hiding something.”

“Like what? What do you think happened down there?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Look there’s nothing we can do about it now,” Yvonne said. “When it’s light we’ll go back and look for her. Until then both of you need to calm down.”

“You’re crazy if you think I’m going anywhere with him after this.”

“I think we can eat these,” Norton said. He hadn’t been listening to a word anyone said. “I’ve studied a bit of mycology. The color of the caps seems off but they’re not red, which is good. And the gills are white. I think that means they’re safe.”

“We need to eat something,” Yvonne said.

“Poison yourselves if you want. See if I care.” Mrs. Clark slumped in the camping chair.

“You’re sure they’re okay?” Yvonne let Ethan go. He placed his hands on the surface of the table and got on tiptoe to get a closer look at the mushrooms.

Norton seemed to weigh the gravity of his response. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

Yvonne used the last of their freshwater to boil the mushrooms. She poked at them with a wooden spoon until they started to darken and soften. The stench of ammonia was awful. Everyone ate quietly and kept their eyes on their plates.

Norton kept his voice low. “The painting you saw in the cave. You said there were lines carved in the stone?”

“Yeah.” Harmon made a wavy gesture with his hand. “Like spaghetti strands.”

“That sounds like tectiforms. Signs and symbols. You know what I mean?”

“Sort of.” He finished chewing. “Actually no.”

“You know why so many paintings were found preserved in caves? It wasn’t because people lived in them. That whole idea is a myth. Caves weren’t comfortable. They were hard to get to. In fact they were used mostly for ritualistic purposes.”

Norton paused to eat another mushroom. Yvonne climbed into Ethan’s cot and curled up next to him. Mrs. Clark muttered her prayers.

“The cave walls were used to create primitive animations. The different limbs you saw were likely drawn in something called superposition. And the flicker of firelight combined with the rough rock would cause those images to move. Those squiggly lines would shift. Suddenly you’d see the image in three dimensions. Two in space and one in time. You would see a deer raising its head. Or a bird fly. The image would move.”

Harmon considered this for a moment. “It would become something new.”

Norton placed his empty bowl on the table and wiped his mouth. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

* * *

Harmon started awake in the middle of the night. The pain was everywhere and it was excruciating. He sucked air through his teeth. The room smelled like bile. In the dark he heard Norton moaning. He tried to get out of bed but room lurched and he rode it out like the swell of an ocean wave. Norton threw up. The smell was terrible. Harmon closed his eyes and tried to stop the room from spinning.

A sharp cry echoed from the cistern. Yvonne.

Norton begged for help. He threw up again. It took all the strength Harmon had but he finally got out of his cot and hurried down the tunnel toward the cistern. He had to get away from that terrible smell.

Cold moonlight filled the room. Yvonne stood near the empty reservoir with her head titled back. Just a few feet away Mrs. Clark lay face down in a pool of black blood. Her back was twisted and her neckbone jutted through her bruised skin. Her face was pressed sideways against the floor and one eye was angled at the ceiling.

“Yvonne? What’s happening? Are you okay?”

She seemed impossibly calm. “Mrs. Clark didn’t believe. So it showed her.”

“Listen to me. Where’s Ethan?”

Yvonne pointed at the iron grate in the ceiling. “The thing broke him into a new shape so he could fit through there. Mrs. Clark didn’t make it. She broke the wrong way. But my sweet little boy did so well. He was so brave.”

Harmon’s vision went raw. He dropped onto his hands and knees and vomited. Norton’s cries for help echoed down the tunnel. He was screeching like he was being burned alive. Harmon crawled forward and reached out to Yvonne. He could barely breathe. It felt like his insides were melting.

“I need help—”

Yvonne gave him a pitying glance. Her eyes were endless black. Long strands of red-tinged mucus hung from the corners of her mouth when she smiled.

“You don’t look so good, Harmon. I think maybe you need to get some sleep. Mr. Norton once told Ethan how lucky little caterpillars go to sleep sometimes and wake up as butterflies. They start a new life as something beautiful and free.” She turned once more to the grate on the ceiling. “I’ll see him again in all his glory. I just have to wait my turn.”

The last of Harmon’s strength left him. He pressed his face against the cool floor and was only vaguely aware of the darkness pulling him within its folds.

* * *

There was bliss in weightlessness. He hung suspended in the endless black and felt his skin, muscles, and bones caressed by gravitational forces beyond comprehension. He felt the relief of the end of the struggle and the calm of being lulled beneath waves.

He was back in the cave beneath the stone mansion in Body Bags. Maybe he’d never left. He laughed so hard he cried and through his tears he saw how the mushrooms grew from a sinister patch of black mold. Or maybe it was a nest of black caterpillars. They squeezed apart in hundreds of undulating waves and left behind an endless empty space.

All paths led back to that unknowable formation left rotting in the dark. It wasn’t a corpse. He saw that now. It was the very hole in things come to swallow everyone he’d ever loved. It was the crawling chaos beneath the façade of the natural world.

Harmon felt for the disposable lighter—the one he’d taken from the bunker—and knew instinctively it was there. He set fire to the endless corpse. Its stores of perfectly preserved fat crackled as the flames grew and flickered against the cave wall. The painting began to move. It expanded into dimensions beyond space and time. The creature’s body broke apart into dozens of others. Each birthed new heads. Each created new and more terrible forms.

The painting was so much larger than he’d thought. It encompassed the entire cave. All those arms, legs, heads, claws, teeth, and wings were extensions of a single living thing. Everything grew and hatched and gnawed and drooled and broke and bled. The shadows beyond the light were doorways between this world and something so much more beautiful. He slipped inside one of them and joined the knowledge held by the life that struggled on the forest floor. He was everywhere and he was nowhere. He knew the ancient thoughts of the fungus and the shared memories of the insects. He heard the sorrowful talk among the trees. And in doing so he came to know all of creation. He grew new teeth and new claws. He inherited the responsibility of guiding his children to an existence that tilted madly toward the divine.

* * *

Those who had embraced the new ways told stories to one another about the thing in the woods. Some saw it as a monster. Others worshipped it as a god. And each in their turn was subjected to its judgments whether they knew it or not.

Everything was always in process. Things were borne of the world. They lived and they died. They fed and were fed upon. And this meant there were infinite tasks to be completed.

The mute knelt in the center of a darkened cave. She placed one of her talismans on the ground. With her slender fingers she undid the thread on the doll’s back and unfolded the cloth to give it wings. Then she pressed her hands together in prayer.

It was like holding a ball of pure light. She spoke his name—he who had become—and bowed her head in mournful recognition.

End.

David Peak is the author of The World Below (Apocalypse Party), Eyes in the Dust and Other Stories (Trepidatio Publishing), Corpsepaint (Word Horde), and The Spectacle of the Void (Schism). He lives in Baltimore.

Coffins Beach Past Anissquam Lighthouse Open Water Swim

By James Van Pelt

Nothing like a bandit, October open water swim in the Massachusetts Atlantic to get your heart pumping, a chance for the rapture. Thirty-degree air and fifty-degree water. A fog shroud hovering twenty feet above. I reach behind for my zipper strap, pull the wetsuit closed.

“Keep the shore to your right,” says the course marshal. “Anissquam Lighthouse is halfway, about two miles from here. We’ll have hot chocolate and mylar blankets at the Plum Cove Beach finish. Remember, you’ve waived liability, and if you’re caught, you don’t know anything about us.”

The governor banned open water swimming last summer. Too many drownings, too many missing swimmers. Still, you can’t fight tradition. Seventy years of the fall classic across Ipswich Bay.

Oh, and the stories! The close calls! The brushes with the transcendent! I could tell a few myself.

We wade knee deep into the waves, sixteen of us this year, repeat swimmers except for two newbies.

“Will the fog come down?” The woman next to me adjusts her cap. I don’t know her.

“Probably,” I say. “The currents are the trick, though.” She looks nervously at the sea.

I double check my goggles, a new pair with GPS assist. No hugging the shore this time. Tiny LEDs in the lenses glow green when I swim in the right direction.

The starter blows the whistle, and we lunge into the waves. Freezing on the face and hands, but not terrible.

Experienced swimmers track on me, last year’s champion. Rhythm’s the secret. Settle in. Steady stroke. High hand recovery to keep from catching the chop. The inexperienced pop their heads up often, checking their bearings, veering off course, wasting energy.

Deep water. A steady wash moans over the ears. Only darkness below, starless space—my hands interrupt the view. Last year a swimmer didn’t finish. The year before, we all made it. Years ago, half the field vanished, nine swimmers, the lucky bastards. Bit of a scandal, really.

At forty minutes now, the lighthouse should be to my right, but the fog has dropped. Gray all around. I chance a look over the shoulder. A hundred yards back, churning arms show the closest pursuit.

Head down, I pick up the pace. Below, the depths are turbid. Something eldritch passes beneath. My heart in my throat, I continue, but my attention is down, always down. Will this be my year? My unnamable intentions are clear. I have walked Innsmouth’s streets. I have studied blasphemous texts, imprinted them on my cyclopean hopes.

A tentacle rises, flicks, then disappears, heading behind me.

A distant scream, a horrendous splashing. I glance again, but the close pursuit is gone. Calm sea.

Glory welcomed three entrants this year. I accept the tiny, squamous trophy on Plum Cove Beach. Frost coats the sand. They clap my back in congratulations.

“Don’t wait the bus for me,” I say, and pull the goggles over my eyes, heart full of hope. “I think I’ll swim back.”

End.

Adrift

By Rachel Nussbaum

“Rita?”

Travis’ concerned voice stirred me from sleep.

As I blinked awake, reality slowly funneled back into focus. I was hit with all the uneasiness, all the uncertainty of the last few weeks. I remember the doctor appointments we have for tomorrow. And the day after.

It started a couple of months ago, when Travis realized he couldn’t smell from his left nostril. We thought it was funny at first. After work when we’d smoke a joint and get silly, he’d plug his right nostril and close his eyes while I held up nasty things from the back of the fridge. Wait for him to unplug and reel back as the smell hit.

Then Travis lost all hearing in his left ear.

The first fear we had was a tumor, but an MRI didn’t show anything. There aren’t many ways to test loss of smell, and examinations of his ear had the doctors scratching their heads. There was no blockage; no damage to his eardrum, but Travis didn’t react to any of the myriads of different audio tests.

It was odd, one of the doctors said. People usually lose hearing gradually over time. For someone to lose all their hearing in one ear out of nowhere, with no sign of damage…

And then in the middle of it, Travis realized he’d lost the ability to smell entirely.

More tests, more doctors scratching their heads. According to them, Travis was fine. No damage to his nose, his ear, or his brain.

More than one doctor threw around the term psychosomatic. Trav took that hard. Like this strange, horrible thing he was going through was all in his head.

“You believe me, don’t you?” he’d asked me one night on the sofa, clinging tightly to me.

And I pressed myself as close to him as I could, even though I felt millions of miles away.

“Rita?” Travis said, louder this time.

Too loud. Something was wrong.

“Mmm?” I mumbled, snapping up in bed. “What’s wrong, Trav?”

I turned to him, vision still a little blurry in the dim morning light. He lifted his hand in front of his face, waving it back and forth.

“...Left eye,” he said, voice trembling.

Fuck.

I reached over to the bedside table lamp.

“It’s gonna be okay,” I reassured him. “Let’s be calm. Can you turn to me?”

“Mmm.” Travis sighed. He covered his right eye and waved his other hand in front of his face.

“Trav?” I whispered. “Let me see?”

Travis dropped his hands and faced me. Travis had deep hazel eyes— the kind that shift subtly from brown to green depending on the light.

Except when Travis widened his eyes, the left one was an icy blue.

For a moment, I didn’t understand what I was looking at. The back of my throat prickled as dread crept in. I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and turned on the flashlight.

Travis groaned and shut his eyes.

“Ahh, sorry, Trav. I just... I need to take a closer look.”

Travis clenched his jaw.

“...Something’s there?” He asked. “Like, you can see something?”

“I don’t know...let me just…”

I reached out and pry his left eyelid open, bringing my light in.

“So sorry,” I mumbled.

“...I can’t see it.”

I brought the light in closer. His eye — his blue eye— didn’t react. Didn’t move, the pupil didn’t dilate, nothing.

I peered in close. Like most people with hazel eyes, Travis had little flecks of gold in his iris, and small areas in the middle that always stayed a little green.

That was all gone now. The flecks, the color variations. It was now all a pale blue, darker around the edges. It was like staring into someone else’s eye.

“...Rita?”

Travis’ other eye cracked open, and I realized I was just sitting still, the phone shaking uselessly in my hand.

I shut off the flashlight and dialed 911.

***

“Not reacting to light,” Dr. Gwan, the resident optometrist said as he examined Travis. “It definitely isn’t an infection.”

“The doctor in the ER said it might be cataracts when they admitted us,” Travis mumbled.

Dr Gwan frowned, moving his light back and forth.

“A cataract would only be present over the lens— the pupil. That looks fine, it’s the iris that’s changed.”

“If the pupil’s fine, why isn’t it reacting to light?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

Travis shivered. I rubbed his arm, watched as his eyes drifted back and forth.

“It’s still moving,” I said.

“Eye movement is controlled by muscles— it’s just moving as his other eye follows the light,” Dr. Gwan explained. “That’s still something, though. Whatever this is, those muscles and the parts of his brain that control them are still intact.”

Travis sighed and shut his eyes.

“I’m sorry. This is a lot,” he said.

“Don’t apologize,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry I don’t have answers for you. I’d like to perform a biopsy and see if I can get to the bottom of this.”

“He had a nasal biopsy performed when he lost his smell. They couldn’t find anything wrong,” I said.

“Clearly something is wrong. Considering how abnormal this is, I’d be looking and testing for things they don’t usually do during routine biopsies.”

As scary as it is to be told what Travis was going through was so abnormal, it was the most reassured I’d felt in weeks. To be told that what he was going through was real. That this doctor not only believed Travis, but was going to leave no stone unturned.

Dr. Gwan was able to perform the biopsy in the afternoon. After Travis came back from the surgery center and woke up they let me back into his room. I couldn’t help but cringe, staring at the big patch of gauze wrapped around his left eye. I know the procedure had only been done with a small needle, but it didn’t put my mind at ease.

Seconds ticked by slowly. At some point, a groggy Travis asked to see the pictures of him I’d taken before we went to the hospital. He pursed his lips as he tilted the phone.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Blue-eyed me looks like Cillian Murphy.” He mumbled.

I couldn’t help it— I burst out laughing.

Travis glared at me.

“What? I totally do.”

“I have no idea who that is,” I said. “I’m laughing because you’re high.”

“He’s the 28 Days Later guy,” Travis spat.

“You’re a fucking nerd,” I said, reaching out and ruffling Trav’s hair.

“You’re just uncultured,” he said, smiling through a yawn.

Every now and then, usually when Travis was tired or drugged up from a procedure, I’d see a glimpse of the real him again. The dorky, sweet stoner who’d been buried beneath ages of stress and tests and pain.

Even though we’d been told it shouldn’t take more than two hours, we sat together the rest of the afternoon and into the evening. Travis pulled out his laptop and turned on a show, sleeping in and out of it. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed someone staring into our room through the small window on the door.

A nurse. Once she saw me looking, she quickly turned and walked away. I tried to shake it off, but about twenty minutes later, I noticed two doctors at the window. Once again, they darted off once I looked up.

That wasn’t a good sign.

The sun was already setting before Dr. Gwan returned. His face was pale, and there were half a dozen doctors in the hall behind him, though only one followed him into the room.

“Something’s wrong,” Travis said quietly as they closed the door.

“Something is... abnormal,” Dr. Gwan said. “My colleague, Dr. Avery will be able to explain what we’ve found better than me.”

The doctor next to Dr. Gwan nodded, though I noticed right away that she wasn’t meeting Travis’ eyes.

“Mr. Cauldwell,” Dr. Avery said. “I’m a hematologist.”

Blood specialist. Something’s wrong with his blood.

I reached out and grabbed Travis’ hand.

“Dr. Gwan had the lab run some tests on the tissue sample from your biopsy. On his insistence we checked for blood type, and it came back as AB positive.”

Travis sat up, ramrod straight.

“...That’s got to be a mistake,” he said. “I’m A negative.”

“We redid the test multiple times.” Dr. Avery said.

“Wait,” I said. “You don’t really think...can a blood type just...change? Something has to be wrong with the sample.”

“Blood types have been known to change, though it’s rare. Usually it’s due to some forms of infections or cancer.”

Travis’ hand tightened in mine.

“However,” Dr. Avery continued quickly. “Considering the other unusual symptoms, we suspected something else. We compared the blood from your tissue sample to the blood sample you gave when you were admitted to the ER. That still came back as A negative.”

A bomb could have gone off across the street from the hospital and I wouldn’t have moved an inch. I looked to Travis, his one exposed hazel eye blown wide in confusion and fear. His hand grew slack in mine.

“...You’re saying the blood from his eye is different from the rest of his blood?” I asked.

Dr. Avery exchanged a nervous glance with Dr. Gwan.

“Medical science isn’t perfect. Normally, I’d say this was far more likely the result of human error. But given the circumstances, I’d like to do more tests.”

“More tests?” Travis asked weakly.

“I’d like to schedule a second biopsy on your right eye, as well as a nasal biopsy. It’s not often performed, but I’d also like to take a small blood sample from both of your ears, the outer ear would be —,”

“This has never happened before,” Travis cut in. “To anyone else. Has it?”

Dr. Avery was quiet. Eventually, Dr. Gwan cut back in. Tried to assure us that they were going to keep working hard to get to the bottom of this, but I could see from the look in Travis’ eye he was miles away. I tried to give his hand a squeeze.

But he didn’t react at all.

***

I didn’t remember any of the doctors’ names after that. There were so many new ones coming in and out of the room they all just blurred together. And with each new test or procedure, we got double the questions and no answers.

All we knew for sure is that the blood from Travis’ nose and the ear he’d gone deaf in tested AB positive, the same as his blind eye.

Like Dr. Avery had said blood types can change, rarely. But this was something else. Random, healthy body parts don’t stop working and change blood type while the rest of the blood stays the same. Doctors’ kept throwing around the word ‘anomaly’. I realized soon what that really meant.

This doesn’t happen. This can’t happen.

The hospital brought in a flurry of specialists, some from out of state. In the days that followed, some from overseas. When I saw Travis between the barrage of medical tests, he was hooked up to some kind of machine or shaking off the anesthesia of another procedure.

One early morning, as I sat in the cafeteria staring at my untouched food, someone placed a cup of coffee from the cafe across the street in front of me. I looked up at the concerned face of Dr. Gwan.

“Mrs. Cauldwell,” he nodded. “You look like you need this more than me. The coffee here is not good.”

I almost protested, but I’d spent nearly a week trying to force down the burnt offerings of the cafeteria in flimsy styrofoam cups.

“Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate that.”

I took a sip.

“...It’s Ms. Torres, actually. But Rita is fine.”

“You and Travis aren’t married?” Dr. Gwan asked.

“Engaged,” I corrected.

“How long have you been together?” he asked.

“Almost five years,” I said. “We met at community college. I was going back to finish a degree, he’d been in the military and was finally getting his. We bonded over being the older kids.”

Dr. Gwan smiled.

“That’s cute.”

And even though I was tired, I smiled back.

Back in the room, Travis was still asleep. He looked so peaceful. It felt like it had been years, the last time I saw him without his brows pinched, his jaw clenched.

As I sipped at my coffee Travis stirred, turning to me and blinking. I smiled and looked down at him.

Into two icy blue eyes.

The cup slipped from my hand and clattered across the floor. Travis startled, blinking rapidly.

“...Hello?” Travis mumbled. He sat up. “...Rita? What’s...I can’t see….”

Travis went quiet as realization set in, blind eyes blown wide. I reached out and grabbed the nurse-call button.

“I’m right here, Trav,” I said. “I’m getting a nurse right now.”

Travis started to shake. All he could do was cautiously reach out in the direction of my voice.

But he was too far away.

***

Travis was medevaced to a specialized hospital within a few hours. The Sigmund Medical Center.

The moment we got there, Trav was carted off for an MRI. After a while, a nurse came out, asking me if I could reconfirm some things about Travis’ medical history.

“No history of hard drug use?” he asked.

“Just weed. He has a medical license, but he’s cut back a lot in the last year.”

“Do you know if any unusual disease runs in the family? The medical files his GP faxed us say his mother died of cancer, can you clarify what kind?”

“...Sorry. All I know is it happened right before he turned eighteen. He never liked talking about it. You’ll have to ask him when he’s back from his testing.”

The nurse nodded.

“There was nothing about his father’s side of the family in his files...?” he trailed off.

“His father wasn’t in the picture.”

The nurse flipped the page.

“I can see here he served in the military. During his eight years, do you know what country he was stationed in?”

That’s not right.

I frowned and looked up at the nurse.

“...Travis was enlisted for four years, not eight,” I said.

“My apologies, Ms. Torres, but it does say eight here. Would you like us to correct that?” he asked.

“...Can I see?” I asked.

I held my hand out and the nurse passed me the clipboard. There it was, in Travis’ own handwriting. Eight years.

Either he lied to his doctor, or he’d lied to me.

That thought gnawed at me for the rest of the day. Why would Travis lie about his military service? Eight years. That would have meant he’d enlisted when he was eighteen, not twenty-two like he’d told me.

Whenever Travis talked about the time between graduating highschool and joining the military, he’d always been vague. He mentioned being in a bad place when his mom died. Having little money and direction. A lot of couch surfing, minimum wage jobs, and relying on the kindness of his friends.

Yet when I thought back I couldn’t recall the names of any of those friends. Or the particulars of any of the jobs he worked. I’d always chalked it up to him not wanting to reminisce of a time of his life steeped in loss and hardship.

I never had a reason to question any of that.

Ask him. I’ll have to ask him, the next time we’re alone.

But when I saw him that evening, all I saw was the same Travis I’d always seen. The man I loved exhausted, pale, and scared. I sat down across from him and he turned to face me, reaching out for me.

“The doctors won’t say it to me, but I can tell. They’re afraid whatever this is, it’s spreading faster.”

His voice broke, and I reached out and grabbed his hand.

“I can’t take much more of this, Rita. What could happen next? Are my organs going to change? Will I wake up and not be able to breathe? I’m…I’m so fucking scared.”

Any ideas I had of asking Travis about the eight years melted away in that moment. I squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back.

“I’m right here, baby. Right here with you. No matter what.”

All that mattered was being there for Travis, and keeping him anchored through this nightmare.

***

The doctors spoke more frankly to me than they did to Travis. They didn’t want him to panic, but he was right. His left eye turned blue and blind within three weeks of losing all sense of smell. His right eye barely a week later.

Whatever was happening to Trav, it was spreading much faster. The World Health Association had been contacted to find out if this was happening to anyone else, anywhere else in the world, but nothing had been recorded or reported. An isolated phenomenon.

I became more certain this wasn’t something that could be explained or reversed. Not by modern medical science.

It was a horrible thought, one I tried to chase away whenever I clasped Trav’s hand tight in mine, whenever I pushed his hair out of his face. But I’d stare into those blue empty eyes, and I’d feel so uneasy, so helpless.

And it was becoming harder to ignore little things. Thoughts I’d been pushing aside since the nurse showed me his paperwork kept creeping back in. Things that made me question if Travis had been truthful with me about his past.

Travis never spoke much about his time before joining the military, but he never spoke much of his time in the military either. I knew he hadn’t been stationed overseas and hadn’t seen any combat, but that was about it. I had no idea what kind of job he did, where he’d been stationed for the majority of his service.

Thinking back, whenever we talked with an acquaintance who was ex-military or currently serving, Travis always stayed incredibly vague. I’d often notice his jaw would tighten and his smile would seem forced. Again, I had chalked it up to bad experiences.

I told myself I didn’t care if he had been dishonest with me. All that mattered now was if somehow, something he was exposed to during his service could have had anything to do with this. Something radioactive?

But if there was something like that, why hadn’t Travis told his doctors?

I kept waiting for a good time to bring it up with Travis. He was constantly surrounded by doctors, being carted back and forth from testing rooms. Usually when I did see him, he was exhausted.

One afternoon, his eyes blinked open slowly. I reached out and slid my hand into his. Travis yawned, his hand still limp in mine as he woke up.

“You okay Trav?” I asked.

Travis startled with a gasp, drawing back.

“Rita, shit, you scared me!” he said.

I stared at Travis, dread pooling in my stomach. I looked down to my hand, still resting partway in his. Glancing up his arm, I noticed it then.

The burn scar on his forearm he’d had since I met him was gone.

I lurched forward, I grabbed at Travis’ collar, felt up and down the length of his chest. I brought my hands to his face, brushed my hands through his hair.

“Rita?” he asked, his brows creasing in worry. “What’s that sound?”

I yanked Trav’s hair then, hard. I was panicking, trying anything I could to get a reaction.

“...Rita? Please, say something?”

Nothing. He couldn’t feel it at all.

I collapsed back and sobbed, reaching out and jamming the nurse call button. And my heart shattered into a million pieces as Travis tried to console me, oblivious to his newest horrific change.

***

Travis’ skin still hugged his muscles the same way. His face still looked the same, from a glance. Under close scrutiny, I could see. Freckles and hair growth where there never had been. Old scars were gone, replaced with new ones. A long faded surgical scar above his appendix, though an MRI revealed the organ was still in place. A nick above his eyebrow, the tissue whiter than the rest of his skin.

Travis wasn’t just changing. He was changing into someone.

The doctor’s were in disbelief, and new specialists were being flown in every day. One of them theorized that if Travis was taking on the physical characteristics of a particular person, we may be able to check his new fingerprints.

And to the shock of everyone, there was a match.

Faron Bennet. I recognized the name before seeing a picture of his face. He was an astronaut who died in a tragic accident on a space station, five years ago.

Staring at his picture, I could see it now. The pale blue eyes, the freckles, the little scar above his brow.

Travis’ jaw clenched when his medical team debriefed us.

“Any personal connection you and Faron could have had could be of significance,” one of the doctors said. “If you knew any of his relatives, even if you could have been in the same room with him once could give us a lead.”

“...No,” Travis said. “I’m sorry, I can’t place that name at all.”

And that struck me as off.

The death of Faron Bennet hadn’t been reported for long, but it definitely made national news. Back when it happened, I remember #SeeYaSpaceCowboy trending in the more niche nerd-communities online.

And for Travis, someone who was still active in those communities today, to say he’d never heard Faron Bennet’s name? That had to be a lie.

My uneasiness grew when Travis’ medical team tried to contact NASA for any information on Faron.

“Classified?” I repeated to the doctor. “Did you...did you tell them what’s happening?”

“Multiple times,” she said, voice dripping with disdain. “We were told they’d have to contact some superiors and discuss it, but until then, they can’t disclose any information.”

I nearly crumbled in on myself. That would take time. Time we didn’t have. Travis couldn’t see, couldn’t feel, couldn’t smell. He could only hear out of one ear.

No. We didn’t have any time.

Fueled by adrenaline and caffeine, I scoured the web. Some quick detective work unearthed the social media accounts of a few of Faron’s friends and family. Some accounts looked long abandoned, but a few colleagues and his mother and sister’s accounts were still in use.

I messaged all of them. I could see Faron’s mom and one of his colleagues both saw the message within the hour—and then both of their accounts disappeared. They must have blocked me. I sighed and put my phone down. Another dead end.

When Travis returned from his newest batch of tests, I reached over across the bed and took his hand.

“I’m holding your hand right now,” I let him know.

He gave me a weak squeeze.

“I’d be so lost right now without you, Rita.” he whispered. “Thank you.”

Fuck. It hurt for him to say that. Because I knew what I had to ask him now, while I still had the chance.

“...Travis?” I whispered. “You’re not…keeping anything from me and the doctors, are you?”

Travis’ jaw tensed. The same way it always used to when people asked him about his time in the military.

“What do you mean?” he asked gently.

“Stuff about your service?” I asked.

For the longest time, Travis was silent. When he finally looked up, he spoke to the air in front of him.

“C’mon, Rita. You know me,” he said gently, forcing a smile.

Even blind, he couldn’t turn to face me as he said it.

***

We both knew what was coming next. It wasn’t if, it was when.

I was there when it happened, when Travis realized he’d gone completely deaf. He’d thrashed out, fallen to the floor, torn his IV out along the way.

I could only stand there frozen in horror as the nurses pulled me from the room and tried to sedate him.

The doctors told me they’d continue to monitor his condition. Keep him stable and restrained. They told me they’d keep searching for answers, keep trying to figure out what on earth had happened to my fiance.

They told me I could see him, but that he wouldn’t know I was there. They warned me it might be too hard on me.

I went anyway.

Travis was restrained to the bed, tubes and wires snaking up and down him. His blue eyes were open, mouth parting gently as he breathed. Deaf, blind, unable to feel. Completely isolated. Every few minutes, he’d say my name. The doctors had told me he’d been asking for me the whole time.

At first, I sat in the chair beside his bed, just staring at his face through the tears in my eyes. Trying to separate the pieces of him I knew and didn’t. It was all blurred together now.

“I don’t understand why you wouldn’t tell the truth,” I whispered. “If there was a chance knowing could have stopped it...why wouldn’t you tell them?”

“Rita,” Travis whispered.

I pulled myself out of the chair, and careful of the wires draped across the bed, climbed in to lay down next to Travis.

“I’m right next to you,” I said. “I still love you Travis. But...I just…. Was anything you told me true?”

“Is anyone there?” Trav continued, voice quivering.

“Was your mom really dead? Is Travis even your real name?” I asked.

“Please,” Travis whimpered. “If anyone is there, give me a sign?”

And there was nothing I could do, no way I could reach him. Nothing but curl in and hug Travis as tight as I could and sob.

I may as well have been millions of miles away.

***

It wasn’t until the next day that I checked my phone, and when I did, I had a message.

Kaitlin Bennet. Faron’s sister.

She wanted to talk to me in person. Kaitlin lived a state over, but said she was going to start driving. I told her it wasn’t necessary, but she insisted.

In so many ways, it felt too late. Too late for anything she could say to make any difference. Too late to save Travis. But still, when she texted to say she’d arrived and told me a cafe to meet her at, I went.

For what, I don’t know. Maybe some kind of closure.

Kaitlin radiated the feeling I get from a forgotten cup of coffee. Something that was once scalding and angry but had been left unbothered long enough for the bitterness to set in and grow cold.

“...Kaitlin?” I asked as I approached the table.

She looked up at me and kicked the chair across from her out.

“Kitty,” she nodded.

“Thank you for coming all this way,” I said as I sat.

“Mhmm,” Kitty nodded. “So you know, they forced me to sign a gag order.”

The hair on my arm prickled.

“...What does that mean?” I ask.

“Means I could get sued for talking about my brother. Go to prison. That’s why I wanted to meet in person. Couldn’t exactly text you about it.”

What the fuck.

“...NASA wouldn’t talk to us about it either,” I said. “They said it was classified.”

“Yeah, they would have. Faron didn’t work for NASA, though. I mean yeah, he worked with NASA, went through astronaut training, but he wasn’t an astronaut.”

I stared at Kitty, and slowly, things started clicking into place.

“...He was in the military,” I said.

Kitty nodded.

“Yeah, you get it.”

“Did he ever mention Travis? Travis Ca—”

“Cauldwell. Looked him up. I don’t think they ever met directly, but I think it’s possible they worked on the same project over the years.”

“...In the military?” I asked.

“Mmmm.” Kitty hummed. “They really tried to bury that my brother had any military involvement, even before the story broke. Mom and dad both act like it never even happened. Like being in the army hadn’t been Faron’s dream since we were eleven.”

I frowned.

“Why hide that? I’ve heard of ex-military going on to become astronauts,” I said.

“Not like this. He made the transition fast, right in the middle of a supposed deployment. He told us he’d been honorably discharged, the next thing he’d been accepted to work at NASA, despite the glaring lack of academic requirements. Whenever I tried to press him for details, he’d get all weird. Clam right up.”

Kitty glared down at the table.

“So now’s the part where you’re going to think I’m a raving conspiracy theorist, but fuck it. What would you say if I said I didn’t think he was ever discharged? What would you say if I said the military had been working on some kind of project that for some reason, was partnering up with NASA?”

I blinked. My instinct was to write that off as far-fetched, but after everything I’d seen with my own two eyes, was it really?

“...I’d ask why you think that?” I said.

“Because they never gave us his body back.”

My blood went cold.

“They told us it hadn’t been salvageable,” Kitty said. “Due to the explosion, they said. Yet despite this supposed explosion, all the other astronauts on the mission returned to earth peachy. Not a scratch. Only thing different about ‘em is when they came back, they all had signed gag orders too.”

Kitty paused and took a sip of her drink.

“What would you make of that?” she asked.

I unclenched my jaw.

“I—I’d think there wasn’t an explosion. That they were covering something up. But... what?” I asked.

At that, Kitty deflated. She sighed, the gleam in her eye shifting from fiery to sad.

“Faron...changed. When he was in the military. There was a time he used to tell me everything. Over the years, he told me less and less. Before I knew it, talking to him was like...talking to a complete stranger. Was it like that with you and Travis too?” she asked.

I was quiet for a moment.

“I didn’t know Travis before he was in the military. But...I think he was keeping secrets from me. It makes me question who he ever really was. I can’t understand. His...his life is on the line.”

And to my surprise, Kitty nodded.

“These military types, the ones who...agree to do what they do? I’ve been around them. I know the extent of their patriotism. Their sense of duty. And I don’t think it’s gag orders that keep them quiet. I think it’s because they believe in their cause.”

Kitty pulled out her phone and passed it over to me. A picture of her and Faron as teenagers, her grinning as she wrestled him into a headlock, him smiling as he took it, outfitted in camo.

“Faron was pig-headed. Our whole lives, I saw him rush in to volunteer for shit that got him hurt. And I saw people who saw that and used it,” she spat. “If the military and NASA were planning some kind of experiment or exploration up in space? My brother would have been just the guy to volunteer.”

“That’s...really what happened. Isn’t it?” I whispered.

“I can’t say anything for sure,” Kitty said. “All I know is I saw my brother go up, and he never came back down. I’ll tell you what I believe though, and I believe it with all my heart. Faron’s still up there, floating around in the vacuum. However many millions of miles away that could be by now.”

***

I told Travis’ medical team what Kitty had told me, but I doubted any of them believed it. Even if they did, what could they could do with that information?

It was hard, so hard to watch Travis as he was, but I still went to see him. I think I wanted it to hurt. It didn’t feel fair, that he had to go through this all alone. I’d sit by his side, watch him subdued on the bed, his IV keeping him fed, the nurses cleaning bedsores he couldn’t feel.

Fuck, it was hard.

Over time, he said my name less and less. Stopped bothering calling out for help at all.

So when I heard a whisper of my name out of the blue one day, I dropped my phone and looked over to him.

“...Rita?” he said again, voice hoarse.

I moved in closer and then I saw it.

His eyes were moving.

“Travis?!” I gasped. “Can you see me?!”

“...Is anyone there? Rita? Anyone? I can…I can see something. I can see….”

I punched the nurse call button and leaned over Travis, putting my arms on his shoulders.

“Travis, I’m here, I’m right here.”

His blue eyes looked up at me, and then through me. He blinked furiously, before his eyes blew wide in terror.

“What the fuck,” he whispered. “I see something, it’s...it’s f-fucking moving. What the hell is — it’s massive. Fuck, please, help…someone, anyone….”

Travis began to thrash in his restraints. I was frozen, mouth gaping in confusion and horror.

And all at once, Travis stopped moving.

“It—it’s looking at me…” he whimpered.

Immediately, Travis’ pupils shrunk down to pinpricks. Tears welled up in his eyes, rolling down his face.

He started screaming. Screaming like I’d never heard anyone scream before in my life. Beyond pain or fear.

There was no word for the sounds he made.

I tried hard, so hard to reach him. I shook him. I slapped him across the face, his tears clinging to my palm.

They were so hot.

In the next instant, the nurses were pulling me off him, dragging me out of the room. I screamed and reached out for him as the door closed.

Hours later, they told me he was dead. Cardiac arrest.

I went through the motions as if I was floating outside my own shell. Nodded at the doctors. Glanced through the paperwork they asked me to sign. Through the emptiness, through the sorrow, I felt...relieved. Glad Travis wasn’t suffering anymore.

Death was better than that.

It wasn’t until I saw something about not recounting what I’d just witnessed to the media, friends or family that I stopped. I remembered what Kitty had said about gag orders. With furrowed brows, I looked over at the two doctors who’d broken the news to me.

And I realized that in all the time I’d been at the Sigmund Center, I’d never seen these two before.

They wouldn’t let me leave the room until I’d signed it. I scrawled fuck you, but they told me that would work.

They never gave me his body. I guess I signed that away too.

Some days, I can convince myself that Travis really did die. That whatever branch of the military forced me to sign the gag order had only arrived to collect his body to study.

Other days, I think about Travis—or about the man who I thought was Travis. I think about how I never got any answers. I think about how I never even got a headstone to mourn at.

I think about that look of unquantifiable horror on Travis’ face as he stared into something unthinkable, and it stared back into him. I think of him in some secret government facility, being studied as he writhes and screams. Looking through the eyes of a dead astronaut adrift in the deepest parts of space.

Cut off from everyone and everything, forever.

End.

Rachel Nussbaum is a writer and artist from the Big Island of Hawaii. Her short stories and poetry have been featured in many anthologies including Crashcode from Blood Bound Books and Year’s Best Hardcore Horror Vol 6 from Red Room Press. Rachel’s debut novella We Rotted in the Bitterlands came out in 2021 from Mannison Press, and is the first of many more longform projects she’s working on. Rachel currently resides in California, where she plans to keep writing (and one day illustrate) her stories, novels and comics.

by Lars Strömquist

The Forgotten Folk

By Woof Achoo

My family used to sit together and recall past times. On many such occasions, my parents brought up a childhood fascination of mine: a movie called The Forgotten Folk.

“When you were, like, four,” my mother would say, snorting. “You watched that movie every day for—I don’t know—six months? You took it with you to your grandparents’, your friends’ houses, on car rides. You were obsessed with it!”

“I tried blocking it from my mind,” my father would add, shaking his head. “After you made me watch it the hundredth time. I mean, dude, we all got sick of it. We used to avoid the living room when you turned it on.”

Their mea culpa: they “gently pulled the movie from circulation.”

“Well, we couldn’t just stop—you wouldn’t have let that fly,” said my mother.

“But we started switching it up. You’d ask for that movie and we’d put in something else on accident,” my father added. “I might’ve said the TV was broke one day.”

“It took a few weeks, but you finally snapped out of your fascination,” my mother said. “You started watching other things, and that was the end of that.”

These conversations stirred vague memories in me. I felt a flash of recognition when I heard the title. If I wasn’t mistaken, the story involved a seaside town and a funny little man shouting and shaking his fists.

Curiosity once spurred me to search the title online. I found an entry for it on a movie database that listed its release year, director, writers, and some unknown voice actors. Yet, no matter how I itched to see personal revelations in them, these details provided no compelling insights. They remained bare facts in a torrent of experience—flotsam risen to the surface of dark waters.

* * *

So the state of affairs remained until my wife became pregnant. This revelation initially stunned us, as we had no plans for children. But once we grew accustomed to the idea, we were ecstatic. In keeping with the baby’s surprise appearance, we decided to forego learning their sex before delivery.

In the months that followed, my family sent us packages of standard baby necessities. My brother and sister passed along clothes and toys that my nieces and nephews had outgrown. Meanwhile, my mother either bought or scrounged up infant cutlery and bottles, assorted picture books, and suchlike.

However, one of these boxes arrived with a curio. Packed within a padding of garments as if to secret its passage was a videotape, clad in aged cardstock. This package included a note proclaiming: “Found your movie! Now you can watch with your little prince or princess. Can’t wait to meet them! Love, Mom + Dad.”

The tape itself stirred no latent memories or feelings—yet it held me in thrall. Here, perhaps, was the source of midnight reveries or unconscious behavior. The sculptor of early chinks on my tabula rasa.

My wife snorted when I showed it to her. “Your parents are a trip,” she said, sorting through the clothes that arrived in the same box. “I mean, they think I’ll send our child out in this?” She held up a lime green infant’s T-shirt on which a clown smiled—far too large a smile.

I shrugged. “Well, they’re little behind the times. But I agree that their obsession with this movie is kinda bizarre.” Then a thought struck me. “Hey, what are the odds your brother is busy this weekend?”

* * *

Now, in bright, hot morning light, I drive my car out of the driveway, down our busy street, and out of the city.

If my parents are a trip, my wife’s brother is an all-inclusive cruise. Younger than she and I, he has already married, had a child with, and divorced a woman. He holds no single full-time job but rather an assortment of odd ones, all internet-based or adjacent. And these shift each time I hear about or speak with him—website development, computer repairs, coding, and so on. He has also informed me, with no lack of conceit, that he runs a popular video blog.

After two hours of driving, I reach the end of a rotting street. Turning onto a gravel driveway, I pass through a dense forest into a clearing then park in front of his small house. I step from my car’s cool interior into dense humidity, the air buzzing with cicada song. Knocking on the door conjures no reply, so I walk around back to a scattering of buildings out there. The closest is a detached garage with its door open, where my brother-in-law sits at a work bench, tinkering. He looks up as I approach.

“Howdy,” he says, squinting through maladjusted glasses. “Heard you were coming. What can I do ya for?”

I hold up my videotape. “You’re the only person I could think of with a functioning VCR. Think we can check this out?”

He smirks and stands. “Right this way.”

We pick our way back into the garage’s depths, which extend much further than I’d guessed. The sunlight coming from the garage door illuminates a path through the junk. Disemboweled speakers, TVs, and computer towers spill across one another, with woodworking and handyman tools cropping up among them. Stacks of lumber, half-covered by a tarp, lurk by the far wall, coated in dust and cobwebs. The shadows of this rummage project onto the corrugated back wall, our movements obstructing these shapes at times.

In a back corner, an ancient TV set—a great black box with a dusty screen—and an equally old VCR sit on a table. We stop before it, and my brother-in-law mucks around the table for a minute, mumbling to himself and hooking up cables. I look back behind us—the light from the open door, beyond this cluttered space, has shrunk to a distant star.

There’s a static-bound cough and I turn back. The TV screen, briefly busy with snow, turns blue as my brother-in-law awakens the VCR. He holds out his hand and I pass over the videotape—he removes the cassette from the box and feeds it into the slot. The VCR whirs.

“So what is this, anyhow?” he asks, moving next to me with a remote in his hand.

“Just... a movie I liked as a kid. Haven’t seen it in a while.” The VCR’s whir dies away, and he shrugs then hits play.

The blue screen goes black, on which lines of staticky noise scrabble up and down. A buzz of interference emanates from the black box, which modulates into the opening bars of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The screen fades into a panorama of a town’s rooftops, interspersed with trees, looking out at an azure sea and a cloudless, pale-blue sky. Static continues to run along the screen—the image bounces and re-aligns.

“Your tape has some age to it,” my brother-in-law remarks. “The Forgotten Folk” fades in over the panorama then out again. A montage of the town begins: A clattering market square. Fishmongers announcing the daily catch. Creaking ships manned by shouting men on their ropes. Children laughing in the streets. Recognition dawns on me, though I couldn’t have recalled these images a moment ago. The score’s notes remain sharp and uneasy, clashing with the halcyon images.

The picture finally holds on two children—a girl with pigtails and a boy wearing overalls who walk down a street together. When they speak, the image bounces and static garbles their words into nonsense. My brother-in-law snorts, but I shush him.

Pigtails girl and overalls boy approach a street corner. There, a small crowd is gathered around a figure. A funny little man built like Popeye with overlarge forearms, short legs, a thin neck, and squinting eyes. He’s waving his arms, shouting, and while his speech doesn’t break the image up, his phrases are nonsense: “How cannot you deny? Wax my shoes! This room is filled of bugs, and this wood is filled of thieves! Tell me, one to know.”

“I can’t tell if he’s using too many words, too few, or just mixing them up,” I say.

“It’s intentional—the tape isn’t fritzing out here,” my brother-in-law adds.

The townspeople start booing, but the man continues preaching: “He do the devil at four, and he do want to fall. Dry this wine! I have a mind to vomit, and I will not sleep a street.”

The crowd starts pelting the man with food and stones. Overalls boy picks up a stone, but Pigtails stops him from throwing it. They take each other’s hand and run up the street, starting another dialogue that disturbs the on-screen image—its colors and lines separate. My eyes ache and I look away as the black box emits another jarring buzz.

When I look back, the kids have left the town. Now they skip along a woodland road, surrounded by scenes of bucolic bliss: Farmers till fields. Livestock are out to pasture. Country folk pass along the road. I recognize these images dimly, like I might recognize classmates in an elementary class picture.

Yet the road leads into eldritch woods and swamp. The score’s strings and woodwinds thrum. Among the trees, men with axes and great saws are chopping away foliage and felling great trunks. These workers have dark skin and chains around their ankles, and they’re watched by lighter-skinned men astride horses and carrying weapons. Red-uniformed soldiers also mill about, guarding other chained men sitting on the ground. All faces are grim and heavy except the children’s, who gaze around wide-eyed and fearful.

With an orchestral blast, a soldier jumps out on the road. He shakes his rifle and shouts at the children, splintering the image into noise and disjointed lines again. The children’s screams are bursts of buzzing interference—they flee from the soldier into staticky, transmogrifying woods. There, the screaming strings give way to a softer horn and flute. Pigtails and Overalls have escaped the soldier but are running into the dense forest. They scamper over great roots, under grasping limbs, through tangled thickets, and into a company of dark-skinned men with weapons and torches.

“It’s like Pocahontas with teeth,” my brother-in-law observes.

With wolfish smiles, the men leer and grab hold of the children, binding them at the wrists. It seems they have lain in wait to attack the soldiers and save their brethren-in-chains. Several group members now shout and gesticulate toward the worksite.

As drums beat and horns blare, these men push the children back through the dark woods. Pigtails is crying, and Overalls looks on the verge of tears. As the group emerges from the trees, onto the road from which the children ran, the music quiets to a few woodwinds and horns. The soldiers turn—their shouts shake the image—and line up along the opposite side of the road. The workers throw down their tools and hail their comrades, but their grim-faced overseers draw weapons and urge their charges into a huddled group.

The antagonist forces gaze at one another. Men on each side start shouting to one another, though interference makes their words impossible to discern.

“It’s funny,” I say. “This all seems familiar—I mean, it’s more than just déjà vu. But I don’t remember it being so . . .”

“Heavy?” my brother-in-law offers. “Morally ambiguous?”

The woodsmen and the soldiers bring their prisoners forward, unfastening their respective bonds. Guns still ready, each side urges its charges to the other. The children arrive safely to the soldiers, the workers to the woodsmen, and the two forces begin retreating from one another. Yet a soldier, whose eyes are cast fixedly at his opponents, sets his boot down onto a snake. With cartoonishly villainous eyes, the creature whips up and bites the soldier’s leg. The man yelps in shock and fires his rifle.

As the soundtrack’s horns and drums blast, the images turn to violence, disjointed colors, and jerking images. Even through the noise, I see men falling, blood sprouting from their wounds. Those who remain standing charge their opponents, swinging swords or rifles with bayonets—their clashing and screams of pain ring through the black box’s buzz. The grim-faced men on horses charge their recently-liberated laborers, who remain weaponless.

“Holy cow,” my brother-in-law says, “this is supposed to be a kids’ movie?”

Carnage reigns. The children, protected by the soldiers from the initial volley of gunfire, run under clashing swords and dive behind trees as their protectors fall, dismembered and screaming.

The image cuts to the seaside town. All faces therein look up towards the wooded hills where crashing gunfire sounds. The sky has darkened, and smoke rises from the trees. Men start running and shouting, going into their homes and retrieving weapons. Women and children run and take cover where they can. Bells clang, horses are saddled, soldiers line up in formation, and torches light up. Within this activity, the funny little man continues his oration: “Here is a horse who has a bad look. He is pursy, he is foundered, he is unshoed! Give me another—I will not that. Your pistols are loaded? Go down, I shall make march! No—I forgot to buy gunpowder and balls.”

A large company, with soldiers in front and the townsmen following them, marches out from the town and towards the forest. They are led by a man on a dark horse with a plume in his hat: proud, upright, sword drawn and pointing forward. Yet the company only reaches the farms outside of town, as woodsmen have emerged from the forests and overrun the fields and pastures. The opponents clash among the crops and battle between barns.

“I don’t . . . I can’t remember any of this,” I say in horror. “This can’t be the right movie.”

The screen pans across a burning countryside, shot through with noise and disjointed frames. From overhead, we watch clashes between dark shapes, the ground around them littered with corpses. The conflagration eats the town too—woodsmen run down the main street and burst into houses, setting fires. Soldiers engage them in the market and alleys. The sky has gone full black with smoke, the ground beneath alight in oranges and yellows.

Then, the screaming strings, blaring horns, and great drums ease to a low pulse. The fighting appears to fall away. In its place, shapes emerge from the smoke and ruins, resolving into dark, hooded figures who spread throughout the town. Each one stops among a slew of slain bodies, where they reach down and clasp dead hands. Despite wounds or spattered blood, the corpses rise up and, still holding the hands of the hooded figures, reach down to raise their counterparts.

The tape’s noise and interference have eased, and the soundtrack softens to a gentle, plucking harp and light strings. Fires that once raged have dimmed to a soft glow. Woodsmen, townspeople, soldiers, grim-faced overseers, washerwomen, and children now stand hand-in-hand in a long line. Then, a lone violin bursts into urgent, dissonant chords. I recognize this new composition, yet my brain cannot connect it to a name. When I turn to ask my brother-in-law, he’s staring open-mouthed at the screen.

The hooded figures, interspersed in the line of corpses, begin a rhythmic step in time to the new song. And as a screeching but sustained melody starts up, figures and corpses alike hop and step into a proper dance. The hoods and the cloaks fall back from the newcomers, revealing skeletons as upright and animated as maids at May Dance. They lead the people through the town market in an ambulatory waltz, weaving through abandoned stalls and wares then dancing up the streets and among the houses. While the wraiths traipse over other corpses, the more recent revenants grab dead hands and pull their owners up. The line of dancers passes easily into houses, burnt and whole, and retrieve any occupants still within.

Now, the overseers who charged their defenseless workers follow them in the dance. Soldiers caper, nobler than ever they appeared in formation. Their proud leader retains his plumed hat, yet—placed between two phantoms—has dropped the earnest deportment he once held in every ligament. Each face is beatific, even the funny little man’s—he who was scorned in the market and streets. Yet his homily now is wordless, his movements in sync with the same folk who pelted him with refuse.

The screen cuts to a shot of the town overhead, and the music fades as the image pulls away to a view of the town from a nearby hill. Two small heads and backs enter the frame: Pigtails and Overalls. They watch the dance through the streets and exchange words, their dialogue jerking the screen out of alignment and producing a buzz of interference. Then, two skeletal hands appear, each of which clasps a shoulder of one child. Pigtails and Overalls turn and gaze up at a great skeleton behind them, cloaked but with its hood pushed back. In its forehead, a great jewel is set.

The children and the wraith stare at each other a moment, then the latter releases their shoulders and holds out its bony hands to them. Each child takes one, and as the score swells to full volume again, the figure leads them to the town and its dancing inhabitants. The screen fades to black, credits roll, and my brain finally furnishes the composition’s title: the Danse Macabre.

While my brother-in-law sputters and stammers, “What the fuck was that!?” I picture the clown on that lime green T-shirt, its grin is now sinister and barbaric. I hear my wife laugh and say, “Your parents are a trip,” her words now derisive and cold. And then my mother’s note that came with the tape returns to me: Now you can watch with your little prince or princess. Can’t wait to meet them!

End.

Woof Achoo writes dark fiction, poetry, and marketing copy. Read his other work at woofachoo.com or find him on Twitter at @AchooWoof.

Providence

By M. C. Herrington

Carya watched Sister Anne climb the hill to the dormitory, stopping to scan the lake as she passed. It was as smooth and still as a lead pot, and whatever it had witnessed since the Sisters of Providence settled there nearly three centuries before was locked inside.

The sisters had been running the program for victims of domestic abuse for a decade now. They taught women like Carya to develop small business plans, provided them with start-up funds to purchase inventory, and gave them a shop of their own in the village of St. Elizabeth, rent-free for the first six months. The County Sheriff ensured that they were allowed to participate by making their partner’s parole or probation contingent upon it. And Sister Anne made a point of visiting the shopkeepers regularly, looking for signs—long sleeves when it was too hot for them, brimmed hats or sunglasses worn indoors, scarves tucked into already buttoned-up collars. Sometimes Carya suspected that the three-billion-dollar segment of the women’s accessory industry had been purposely designed to cover up the evidence of domestic violence.

Carya was the village’s flower vendor. As part of a deal she’d made with the sheriff—who’d found her naked in a pool of her own urine because her husband had tied her to the bed with ratchet straps and left on a three-day bender-- she was “allowed” to have her own shop in St. Elizabeth. The other vendors, she knew, had similar horror stories. Cee-cee, who sold homemade ice cream next door, was a former weightlifter who would have been one of the few African American women on the 2016 Rio team if her jealous manager-husband hadn’t slammed out of the gym just as she snatched 150kg up over her head, leaving her to break four ribs and puncture both lungs. Every time Carya saw Sherry, who ran the coffee shop, she was scratching her neck, a reminder that her husband had once tried to strangle her with the chain of the silver cross she no longer wore. Molly sold honey in squeezable bottles that looked like bears, honeycomb in old Mason jars, and beeswax candles. Some days she came to work with dried wax in her cropped hair, as if someone had forced her head toward the scalding vat on purpose. And then there was Camille, who sold totems, beautiful birds and animals she carved from the oaks that toppled over in St. Elizabeth. At least once a week, Camille cut herself and had to be taken to the infirmary. Carya had noticed that her injuries were never on her fingers or palms but on her inner arms and thighs. Perhaps it was only practice, she thought, and one day, Camille would cut the person who deserved it.

Carya sold bouquets in recycled containers, coreopsis and zinnias in Campbell Soup cans, lavender and sage in green tea tins. To tide her over through the cold seasons, she also made herbal teas, lavender sachets and bath salts, and wreaths adorned with dried flowers and herbs. She realized she wasn’t what anyone in St. Elizabeth would call a people person. She didn’t wander over to Sherry’s for a cup of coffee. She didn’t hang around outside Molly’s to smoke a Salem. But when Camille’s wife called Camille a fucking whore and tried to kick her shop door in, Carya went after her with a pair of flower shears.

“I may have to put up with this kind of shit at home,” she’d said, backing her friend’s attacker against the wall. “But I won’t put up with it here.”

* * *

The rule was that the shopkeepers had to leave St. Elizabeth no later than dusk, so that the sisters could refocus their energies on God rather than on entrepreneurship. No one had noticed that at least once a month, Carya’s husband, Frank, “forgot” to pick her up, his passive-aggressive response to having his fists figuratively tied behind his back; or that Carya only pretended to mind. Usually, he’d text her in an hour or two, and she’d meet him at the north gate, locked by then but accessible via a wooden stile. In the meantime, she’d turn off the lights and sit in the dark, her chair pushed to one side of the window so she could see out without being seen.

Not that there was much to see—a parking lot to the north of the shops, a line of oaks to the south that blocked her view of the lake and of the sisters’ dormitory on the other side. Sometimes a deer or a raccoon wandered past, but mostly, Carya simply sat and breathed and tried to be present, as Sister Anne was trying to teach: “If you stop dwelling on what happened in the past and stop worrying about what might happen in the future, you’ll discover that right now is a fine place to be.”

Sometimes it was, Carya admitted. But it all depended, right?

Carya had worked in St. Elizabeth long enough to know its history. It was established in 1740, when the French still claimed this part of the country. Thirty sisters and thirty crewmen set sail from Saint Vielle, but their ship, the Triton, foundered off the coast. Only the women survived. Carya had been told that they made the rest of the inland journey by foot, arriving just in time to build winter quarters, a dozen huts made from fractured limestone blocks they hoisted one atop the other. They also built a stone grotto, adorning the crevices with shells they collected on the beach where they first landed. It was here they hung the statue of the Blessed Virgin, much of her paint and plaster dissolved by seawater. At her feet once lay a replica of the wrecked Triton, made from a scrap of its hull and long since decayed. Sister Anne had told Carya that the ship included tiny replicas of the drowned crew. Perhaps this was a rendering of vanitas, she’d said, and then explained: A reminder of the nearness of death. Perhaps it was a manifest, a statement of the order’s will to survive. In either case, they did survive, first by cultivating benefactors among the wealthy women of the Vincennes (now Indiana) diocese, whose largesse helped them build the mother house they still used as a community center. There also were rumors that the grand cathedral was financed—inadvertently—by the women of Louis XVI’s court, who transported looted gold and silver to the sisters for safekeeping and were never able to reclaim it. With a substantial endowment in place, the women turned their attention outward. They fed and sheltered Kickapoo and Piankashaw women and children who were too ill to move west with their tribes. They took in pregnant slaves whose mistresses did not wish to be reminded of their husbands’ infidelities. In short, they cared for women no one else cared for. It had always been a booming business, Sister Anne said.

Carya wasn’t religious, but she was curious about the sisters. Two weeks ago when her husband failed to pick her up by the curfew, she left the shop and crept up to the cathedral. She expected to see priests on the dais, but there were none. Instead, Sister Anne was leading what she assumed was communion, attended by a half dozen of the sisters. Carya had never seen them in their habits—in the village, they wore twill slacks and white blouses under vests or cardigans. Here they were wearing what appeared to be common black habits, except that the cloth was woven with fine silver threads that made it shimmer, and because the garments flowed out from the waist, they moved like ocean waves on a dark night. The effect was magnified by their full-dress veils, which were long and white and intricately pleated. Carya thought they looked like the gills of gigantic fish.

That evening, she’d been so focused on the sisters she hadn’t realized she wasn’t alone. When she heard the leaf litter crunch, she turned. It was dusk by then, and Carya couldn’t trust her eyes. But the woman who slipped into the woods appeared to be clothed in nothing but her own long, pale hair. The skin beneath it was too white to be real.

Another victim, she’d assumed, who’d come to check out the sisters before she transferred her title of ownership from her abuser to them.

When someone tapped her on the shoulder, she spun around, ready to fight back. “Happy Friday,” Camille said.

She was being ironical: None of the women were ever happy when the weekend rolled around. Carya could see the newest strip of white gauze on Camille’s small wrist. Likely she was still on church grounds because she’d just left the infirmary.

“Walk me to my car? I swear there’s something out there,” she said, gesturing toward the lake. “I’ve never seen anything, but I can feel trouble coming from a long way away.”

* * *

Tonight, Frank was later than usual. Carya didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until the thermos slipped out of her hands and smacked the stone floor. It was dark, though she could see the moon easing up out of the oaks like the glistening crown of a baby’s head. She felt rather than heard the shriek, which echoed off the leaded window glass and repeated twice. She was out the back door before she had time to think, her hand on the scabbard that held her cutting shears.

It was Sister Landis, the young woman who was supposed to oversee the community garden but who spent most of her time caring for the animals that robbed it. She was knee deep in the lake, blood dripping off her white blouse and into water that roiled around her ankles, as if some voracious animal were feeding there.

Carya said her name softly before reaching out to tug at her elbow. “Step back. Slowly.” The woman did as she was told. Carya moved in front of her on the muddy bank, holding the shears out like a dagger.

The water stilled. The moon crested the trees. The corpse—a fawn, its neck broken, its throat ripped out—slid forward, as if whatever had dined on it had just pushed back from the table. Carya saw only what looked like a white wrist breaking the surface of the lake, and three meters behind it, a whiter heel. Not an animal, but the white-skinned being she’d seen before.

She helped Sister Landis up the hillside and into her shop, where she wrapped her in a shawl and sat her down in front of the fireplace. Then she turned on the lights, knowing that would be enough to send Sister Anne running.

* * *

Violence was an ordinary horror. At least that’s how Carya rationalized her detachment from what she’d seen at the lake. Sister Anne assumed she was in shock, and once she escorted Sister Landis to the infirmary, she returned to the flower shop to put the shawl around Carya’s shoulders and hand her a new thermos of tea.

“How much did you see?” she asked.

Carya looked up. “Enough to understand why you don’t want any of us hanging around after dark.”

Anne kicked the fireplace logs with the heel of her shoe. “I can’t think of an ethical way to convince you that you didn’t see what you think you saw—”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Carya cut in.

“So I’m going to tell you the truth, and hope you’ll find a way to—”

Carya shook her head. “Keep it to myself?”

“Forgive me.” The sister touched her hand gently and sat down across from her, the fire illuminating the right side of her face. “You know the story about how our order came to be here? The voyage from France, the shipwreck?”

Carya nodded.

“But you don’t know what caused the wreck.” She sighed. “From Mother Thalia’s logbook, we know that halfway through the journey, one of the sisters disappeared. And then a second and a third. The captain suggested they’d thrown themselves overboard rather than face the hardships of life on the frontier. But Mother Thalia knew better. She ordered the rest of the sisters to barricade themselves in their cabins while she searched the ship. Two members of the crew took pity on her and volunteered to help. They overpowered the men who’d been keeping two of the girls in the hold, stripped and shackled spread-eagled so they could not defend themselves against their rapists. Both died of hypothermia the same night. They found the third girl in the captain’s quarters too late to even try to save her: She’d slit her wrists when he left to attend to his other duties. She had the foresight to bleed on his formal jacket, though, her way of reminding him of his sin.”

While Carya clenched the arms of her chair tightly enough to crush them, Sister Anne wiped her eyes with her index finger. “When the sisters left their cabins the next day, they found the ship deserted and the lifeboats intact. Not even their male benefactors had survived. The only sign that there had been a struggle was the jacket covered with blood, which they later learned came from one of their own. By that afternoon, the wind shifted, and some of the sailors’ corpses were blown back to the ship, their skulls knocking against the wood each time a wave broke. One by one the bodies tipped over and sank, which is when the sisters realized that their lower limbs had been... removed.

“It was a horrible night for the women—alone, adrift, unsure if whatever had killed the crew might still be lurking on the ship. It was providence that Sister Durant found the courage to take charge, barricading the women and their provisions on the tween deck while she searched every inch of the ship. Once she was sure they were safe, she redirected their energy to prayer. It was providence that they continued on course, and providence that they hit a snag and were discovered by whalers.

“And perhaps,” she said, her voice fainter now. “It was providence that they eventually discovered Mother Thalia’s body, which they had unknowingly towed behind them for two weeks, caught in the rigging that trailed behind the listing mizzenmast and protected it from predation.”

The shop was warm enough by then that Carya pushed the shawl off her shoulders, but Sister Anne shivered and put another log on the fire. “Sister Durant wrote to the Superior General that the body was inviolate and unblemished, pure white but with a silvery sheen imparted by the ocean that embraced it; she believed Mother Thalia’s body remained intact as proof God had marked her as a saint. Later, she’d realize she’d been mistaken. But within a few years, the congregation became self-sustaining, and it severed all ties with the French order once the Revolution began. So the matter of Mother Thalia’s canonization was forgotten. In time, Thalia herself was forgotten, except by Sister Durant and the confidante who watched over the crypt where she’d been laid to rest.”

Carya glanced at her cellphone to see if her husband had texted. He was four hours late now, a record even for him. Maybe he thought his absence was punishment. Maybe he was lying dead in a ditch somewhere. Both possibilities were a blessing, she thought, rubbing the earlobe he’d split when he yanked out her earring two weeks before. No matter what was out there, Carya believed she was safer in St. Elizabeth than at home.

“The body would go missing,” Sister Anne was saying. “First there would be signs of desiccation, skin stretched tautly over bone, all lustrousness gone. And then the body would disappear between dusk and dawn. A novitiate would claim she’d seen something near the lake, a sirène or a moon spectre, and then the body would be returned to the crypt, plump and perfect. When the cycle began again, Durant and her confidante hid themselves in the hermitage so they could see it for themselves: Mother Thalia slipping into the lake like a long white shadow, diving down to the bottom where there were catfish as big as horses, draining their blood until they were as white as she was.”

Carya knew this was the juncture of Thalia’s story and her own. “What do you feed her now?” she asked. “The fish must have run out long ago.”

“Injured and motherless animals of a certain size.” Sister Anne cleared her throat. “It’s important to quench her thirst with one feeding.”

Carya understood. “Which didn’t happen the last time. That’s why she came after the fawn Sister Landis was caring for.”

Anne didn’t have to answer—Carya could read her mea culpa look. “So does everyone in the order know?”

Sister Anne shook her head. “Only the Mother General and whomever she chooses as a confidante. Usually a sister, like me. And someone trustworthy from outside the order who’s strong enough to do the heavy lifting. Live animals. Dead ones. Sometimes Mother Thalia herself if she has to be moved when the temperature drops and she goes into torpor.”

“That’s a lot of witnesses over three centuries,” Carya pointed out.

“True. But the Mother Generals never stay for more than ten years, and a secret like this one seems to lose its hold on them once they’re far away. We’ve been very careful. We also have strict rules about being out after dark, as you know. I believe this is the first time they’ve been violated at such an inopportune time.”

Carya laced her fingers and looked up, but she was thinking, not praying. The dead fawn couldn’t have weighed forty pounds. “She isn’t finished feeding yet, is she?”

Anne could barely squeak out the word. “No. But once she is, she’ll go back to waiting. We’ll have a steady supply again soon, fresh roadkill now that fall is here.”

The wheels were turning in Carya’s head. “What do you think happened on the ship?”

“I think she called on the wrath of God, and when he didn’t answer, someone else did. Someone who empowered her to avenge her sisters’ deaths and then punished her for doing so.”

“They were rapists, Sister. Why wouldn’t God want to punish them himself?”

“I can’t answer that question-- this is something out of Greek mythology, Carya, not Christian teaching. But I refuse to believe our savior would punish Mother Thalia for doing something only a man would call a sin.”

Carya held the sister’s gaze long enough to be certain she meant what she’d said. “Then answer this one. If you feed her something four times bigger than normal, will she stay put for two months instead of two weeks?”

Sister Anne stopped pacing. “What did you have in mind?”

Carya’s phone buzzed. She held it up so the Sister could read her husband’s text.

End.

M. C. Herrington is Master Naturalist at The Perry Farm, which is so close to the convent described in “Providence” that she never goes out alone after dark. Her work recently has been published in 34 Orchard, Boulevard, Chautauqua, Mystery Tribune, and The Penn Review. Her poem “Fragile Animals” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

The Nut House

A Novella By Patrick Barb

Chapter 4: The Creep

The calico cat’s fur falls in thick chunks from its body, as it traipses across the garbage-strewn foyer of the Nut House. Eyes wide and head tilting from side to side, it’s clear the feline means to make a thorough examination of the squirrels and the chipmunk who’ve broken into his home. The dull burnished silver medallion hanging off his loose poly fiber collar shows his name stamped in blocky text: MR. MUFFINS.

Mr. Muffins can’t read, so he doesn’t count on the squirrels knowing what his tag says.

“Well, who do we have here? My name’s Mr. Muffins, and who might y’all be?”

Asher and the other squirrels stay silent. Between them, there’s enough bad run-ins with feral cats to know they need to approach with caution. Those abandoned offspring of the housebound felines end up savage and uncivilized in the tall grasses between the more run-down homes of Majestic Forest—the homes whose outsides match the Nut House’s insides. The feral cats strike without warning or mercy. As a result of these past encounters, a mutual wall of silence serves as their response to the scraggly cat’s entreaty.

No doubt Chee-Chee’s gone through a similar number of violent, life-threatening encounters with ferals, all of whom must now appear tame and sweet when compared with the bedraggled, unsettling appearance of Mr. Muffins. However, the chipmunk’s response differs from her partners’ silence. “Chee-Chee’s the name,” she says. Then she pisses on the garbage, letting it leak across the tanned box top on which she stands, before it rolls down to Mr. Muffins’s forepaws.

Mr. Muffins wrinkles his nose. After stepping away from Chee-Chee’s trickle, he licks himself. “We don’t know you. So you…five…must’ve come from outside.”

Chee-Chee steps forward, dragging her tail across the final dribbles of her piss trail. “Sure, we’re from the trees. You all know trees, right? Trees?”

The hackles rise on Mr. Muffins’s back. His spine’s arched and his mouth spreads wide to reveal two mismatched, incomplete rows of rotted, yellow teeth. He hisses, his voice a reedy, shrill sound like an ambulance siren. “Outsiders! Outsiders! Outsiders! Come to steal from us! Steal! Steal! Who’s gonna steal from us? Yeah, you are, aren’t you? Yes, you are. Oh, yessss, you are….”

The switch from sugary sweet to outraged fury and back again is jarring. It even manages to halt the chipmunk’s reckless approach. She scurries back to rejoin the squirrels.

The rats and cats join their leader’s chorus, chanting, “Yessss, you are. Yessss, you are….” Over and over again. The clicks, whistles, and humming from the insects darting and dashing between the mammals indicate even they’re an invested part of this mob scene.

Asher’s paw rubs across the processed cotton covering the recovered acorn cache. The pointed bottoms of the nuts poke through the fabric and scratch against his paw pads. He moves to lift the satchel from his neck. “Fine. Here. Take ‘em.”

Mr. Muffins holds up a paw and mewls, his vocals sounding like he’s straining to make himself heard over a thunderstorm. His followers fall silent. “Oh, what’s this here? A teensy-weensy socky-wocky? No, no, no. You want to take our Provider. In Life and Death. You all want to take our Giver, our God. She Who Sits. She Who Reclines. She Who is Death!”

Again, the Nut House denizens take up the chant in a call-and-response fashion.

“She Who Sits…She Who Reclines…She Who is Death….”

“Domesticateds…” DW mutters. His crew stays silent.

Asher glances over his shoulder and faces the glimmer of tears in the eyes of the grays. Even Chee-Chee’s restrained, her mouth shut tight. Waiting.

It falls to Asher to speak. “Now, sir, Mister…uh…”

“Muffins!” the Nut House animals answer as one.

“Mister Muffins, sure. We don’t want any trouble. We came here for something left behind by the squirrels like us. We believed this house to be empty. Clearly, it’s not. We apologize for any disturbance we caused and we aren’t trying to take away anything that doesn’t belong to us. Especially not something, uh, precious or sacred to you all. All we want’s a safe passage out of here and a return to the outside world.”

Asher hates talking and he especially hates doing it for the animals responsible for his friend’s death, but he hopes his words are enough.

They’re not.

“Liar! Liar! Pants of fire!” Mr. Muffins screams. “There is no outside! Consult the prophecies of She Who Reclines, you blasphemers! The outside’s an evil, hateful place! She welcomed us. Some of us she brought into the fold, others she welcomed when they stumbled on the house…this temple.”

She Who Reclines…She Who Reclines…

Behind Asher, DW chuckles. Amused by his rival’s failure to break through to the Domesticateds of the Nut House. “C’mon Maple, Birch, let’s get the fuck outta here, fellas,” he says to his fellow gangsters.

Mr. Muffins’s phlegmy hiss gets picked up by his fellow corpse-thin cats. The droning buzz of the insects joins their chorus. When Maple and Birch turn to ascend the stairs to the second floor, one of the mangled, misshapen rats lined up along the railing lunges forward. Yellow teeth, like blades, descend. The rodent latches onto Birch’s already-injured nose.

Caught off balance, the gray squirrel’s back paws give way underneath him. He stumbles, but the rat remains steady with its claws dug into the hardwood on the steps. The arc of blood from Birch’s face, pulsing from the spot where his nose sat moments before, covers the rat in a baptismal font. The creature opens its mouth, showing off the nose and hunk of flesh it’s removed from the gray squirrel. Its cheeks fill with blood.

Then, it swallows.

Maple holds his bleeding, panicking friend up and they descend in a sloppy, unsteady fashion. More falling than any deliberate movements. Driving DW, Chee-Chee, and even Asher farther down the stairs as well. The rats follow them.

On the first floor, waiting on the cardboard boxes and envelopes left behind by the mistress of the house—She Who Reclines, Mr. Muffins and the others remain still. For now.

Asher’s certain they’ll move. He knows it the same way he remembers the tree on fire and understands that digging too deep for answers means facing the possibility of being torn apart from the inside out.

“My no-th! My no-th!” Birch’s pathetic groans become thicker with each exclamation as blood trickles into his mouth and down his throat.

He’s drowning, choking on himself.

“Bad, bad, bad. Naughty, naughty, naughty. We won’t tolerate naughty beasts here. We’re gonna take care of you. Oh yes, we are. Oh yes, we are.”

Mr. Muffin’s stiff tongue, the pink color gone a drab gray like spoiled fish, licks at his paws. When he glances up from his work, his tongue’s covered in dust, fur, and dead skin.

Asher checks for an exit. He bobs his head, up, down, and side-to-side. He wishes the acorns would “talk” to him, offering any new, life-saving wisdom hidden in their shells.

But they’re silent. Hanging from his neck. Feeling heavier and heavier.

Something slides across the tattered end of his black stub—a rat’s thin, warty tail. Already, they’re closer than they were moments prior.

Too close.

Asher weighs his options. They’re short one healthy gray squirrel, with Birch pressed up against Maple. And, of course, Maple’s none too interested in abandoning his partner. That leaves Asher, DW, and…

…Chee-Chee.

The chipmunk’s paw strikes at the rat’s tail weaving between their legs. Once it’s in her grasp, she dives for it, with her mouth open wide. She bites down with the same level of intensity she’d apply to grazing on one of Their food stashes left intact, unwrapped on a checkered blanket in the park.

The end of the rat’s tail, detached from its owner, twists and twitches on the next-to-last step before the ground. The squirrels cling to the last step, resisting a final push to the floor by the ever-encroaching and now enraged rodents behind them. Asher assesses the bugs and cats, trying to figure a way past them. On closer examination, he spies tiny field mice, a couple of lizards, and a fat hamster, opening her toothless mouth in a slow yawn to reveal what Asher first mistakes for a wriggling pink tongue. But when the mucus-coated fetal creature opens its own eyes and screams, the black squirrel understands—with horror—what he’s staring at is the hamster’s offspring, hidden away in Mother Hamster’s mouth.

And there’s also the snake out there somewhere. Of course, the damn snake.

Every day since the tree burned and They returned him to the “wilds” of Majestic Forest, every moment of Asher’s life has been a calculation. Weighing the odds, assessing situations, and taking measured risks. This way of living is a necessity because he is alone. All he has are his choices to keep him alive, keep him sane.

Flippy served as his sounding-board, a considerate source of conversation meant to keep him removed from the insanity of loneliness. But Flippy wasn’t a replacement for family.

And now he’s gone too.

The injured rat retreats to the frantic caresses of his brethren. Their chittering shrieks are near indecipherable, but Asher picks out bits about “blood” and “vengeance.” Lisping whispered promises to “the Rat King” sound between their screams. It’s clear the rats pose the most immediate threat to Asher’s survival.

The animals in the foyer shouldn’t prove too much of a challenge if the crew works together. Going through the malnourished creatures appears to be their best bet for finding a way out of this bad situation. Not to the front door though, even the smaller, weaker animals are packed in tight, lowering the chances of the route providing a means for successful escape.

They’ll need to venture further back into the house. Asher’s betting…hoping there’s another way out. Somewhere invisible from outside the Nut House: a broken window hidden by well-placed plastic blinds or an unblocked pipe wide enough to fit them all. Something.

But if they want to find the truth, they’ll need to move. Now.

“Dogwood!”

Asher’s shout wrenches the fox squirrel from whatever contemplations or calculations of his own he’s engaged in, pulling him back to reality. Asher grabs Maple’s paw. He nods to DW to likewise help the injured, incoherent Birch. Every instinct’s screaming at the black squirrel to leave the mauled gray behind. One less body to worry about. Less blood for the others to sniff out and track.

But snippets of Flippy’s cryptic speeches dig deep into Asher’s brain. “…the friendly skies…When you’re here, your family…”

“We’ve gotta run,” Asher says, nodding in the opposite direction of Mr. Muffins and his minions.

“No! No! No!” the calico screams. “No running in this house, Fuzzy Wuzzykins.”

As though punctuating their leader’s words, a rat snaps its jaw close to Asher’s face. Acting on instinct, he hefts the acorn satchel up, then smashes it down. Again and again. Striking the rat full force in the face.

Soon enough, the rodent’s got one eye dangling from its socket, studying the grain texture on the step below.

Chee-Chee’s laughter’s so loud Asher pictures it as a solid thing.

Then, she mounts the rat, biting into the eye with her thick front teeth. The eyeball squishes like a bug, oozing its insides onto her fur. She turns to the squirrels and repeats Asher’s earlier command. “Run!”

Wriggling tails and guts heavy with gas, the rats swarm the chipmunk. Teeth take hold of her ears, her cheeks, her limbs. As he charges forward, Asher won’t look back the way they came. The four remaining squirrels work as a battering ram to penetrate the defenses of the few followers of “She Who Reclines” who block their path deeper into the Nut House.

But even over the raucous cries of the cultists, the damp tearing sounds and the drip-drip-drip afterward, marking Chee-Chee’s destruction, are unmistakable to Asher’s ears.

The linked chain of squirrels shifts from a horizontal line across the floor to a vertical, an arrow shot full-force but still flying on a crooked trajectory.

Hot breath on the back of his neck sends a chill down Asher’s spine. “Move!” he screams.

The garbage crumbles behind him, the snake burrowing back under after missing out on seconds.

Behind them, the Nut House cult surges forward in pursuit of the interlopers. “The creep! The creep! Now, it’s time to do the creep!”

Mr. Muffins’s words precede orgasmic exclamations from the other cultists. “The outside world’s a dead world. Not dead like our god. Not a death from which life is given and strengthened. A much worse death. Why else have they come? Why else would they try to take her from us? But she’s ours to keep and so…and so…they’ll do the creep.”

Asher’s got no clue what the creep is. But he’s certain it’s nothing good. There’s an open door ahead, offering the overwhelming odors of spoiled meats and stale liquids left untouched too long. But also promising sanctuary.

As soon as they cross the threshold, Asher turns and the others follow his lead, slamming their bodies against the wood until it creaks, then clicks into place. Closed.

But there’s no shutting out the chanting of the cultists, echoing the words of their prophet and leader.

The creep…the creep…the creep!

And there’s Mr. Muffins still pontificating, elaborating on the specifics. “You creep and creep inside our house. We keep and keep you in our house. Sacrificed for She Who Reclines…on your flesh we soon will dine…”

* * *

Birch is dead.

Maple keeps him propped up on the counter by the sink basin. He holds Birch’s head with both paws and talks at his friend’s dead-eyed stare and parted lips that expend no more breaths. But Maple won’t accept this truth laid bare before him.

Moments ago, Asher watched the life leaving Birch’s eyes. Witnessed him taking his last breath, bloody snot bubbles popping in the wound where his nose once sat. The gray squirrel’s lost nose was the kind young Human-Males and Human-Females playing in the park around the oak tree—the last original one in Majestic Forest—would ooh and ahh at. Saying things like “Watch him wrinkle and wiggle his nose.” And their Human-Mothers or Human-Fathers might say, “I bet he’s checking for some acorns or birdseed. Something to hide for the long winter….”

No one ever said those things about Asher. Black fur and burnt flesh, he was something they’d sooner kick away. Throw rocks at. Sic their dogs on. The sunlit park, the concrete sidewalks, the casual encounters with Them, all of it was reserved for the gray squirrels. It’s how their leader Oakley amassed his fortune and powers.

The gray squirrels made Majestic Forest look good.

Asher’s already experienced too much of the light. He’s felt its stinging heat.

The darkness is more his realm.

But not this boxed-in, claustrophobic darkness inside the Nut House. Checking the perimeter of the kitchen once more, he tests the tiny window above the sink. It’s still locked tight and no amount of knick-knacks tossed against the glass can break through the pane. Nothing a squirrel could throw at least.

Down on the tiled floor, DW crushes the occasional stray ant or pillbug crawling under the kitchen door. He makes sure not to get too close to the gap between floor and door. On the countertop, Asher’s seen cat claws swiping underneath in lazy half-hearted attempts to strike at any squirrel foolish enough to get too close.

At least, DW proves he’s not that type of stupid. When there’s a lull in the cultists testing the defenses, the fox squirrel calls up to the others. “Any luck finding a way outta here?”

When they make eye contact, Asher shakes his head. The baseboards appear secured with no immediate holes presenting themselves. He’s sure DW’s caught onto the same thing down on the floor. Even the refrigerator’s pushed back into a corner with no room for any creature to crawl behind it.

He’d say something if he found a way out though. Right?

“Maple!” DW clucks his tongue hard against his teeth, getting the gray squirrel’s attention.

“You’re okay, bud. Gonna let you rest,” Maple says, resting the dead—growing stiffer and glassier-eyed by the second—Birch on the marble countertop. The black surface flecked with streaks of silver reminds Asher of the night sky, viewed from the top of his family’s old tree. So black and shiny, he wonders if his paw will sink through it too. Taking him away from here and into another world.

By the time, DW ascends the kitchen island and leaps across to join the others on the countertop, Maple’s standing at attention, waiting for marching orders. Whatever brewing beef appeared poised to explode between the fox squirrel and his boss’s henchmen is put on the backburner. For the moment.

Fear makes for strange allies.

DW swipes his back paw along the raised burnished steel rim of the sink basin. He mumbles to himself, as though someone’s right in his ear, whispering secrets.

“No…no…no…”

“Dubs, you okay?” Maple asks.

The fox squirrel shakes his head. Not in denial of Maple’s query, but to clear the cobwebs out. Asher notes the faraway glaze in the fox squirrel’s eyes. Like something’s changed inside him during his time on the floor.

Maple moves to cover up his faux pas all the same. “Sorry, D. Dogwood.”

DW’s not paying attention to the gray squirrel. He’s peering past the soiled dishes encircling the basin’s interior. Mold grows over the remnants of sponges. If the squirrels hadn’t already experienced the noxious odors wafting through the Nut House, the decayed remnants in the kitchen sink might have a deadlier impact on their senses.

As it stands, DW joins the other two squirrels in breathing out the side of his mouth, delivering his next words in a husky whisper. “There’s a hole there,” he says.

“What?” Maple asks.

DW repeats himself. He thrusts his forepaws down, gesturing past the plates, cups, and bowls, focusing their attention toward the exposed drain. Asher crawls over and peers into the basin as well. DW’s assessment appears correct. With the drain protector removed, floating in the fetid waters of an abandoned cup of coffee, the drain hole itself is large.

Large enough for a squirrel or three to fit through.

Though who’s to say what’s waiting for us the deeper we’d go.

“Maple, stick your head in and check what’s what.”

“Excuse me?” Maple’s already sliding down the streaked metal of the basin. Tail dipping into the dishwater, stale coffee, ketchup stains, and more. But he’s staring up at DW, like he’s trying to will another option to materialize.

The fox squirrel’s not offering him one. “Stick your head in,” he repeats, “Make sure we can fit through there. You’re the biggest. So if you won’t fit in there, forget it.”

“Birch is bigger,” the gray squirrel whispers, still in denial.

Asher winces, realizing this final trio he’s found himself a part of consists of three lonesome souls existing in each other’s orbits but never connecting. As it stands, DW ignores Maple’s comment and urges him on. “Come on, Maple. They’re coming….”

Asher listens. Strange how at this moment the cultists’ efforts diminish. It takes a moment before he catches on that the stop-start roar he mistook for the heating of the Nut House comes from his panicked breathing instead. He closes his eyes, narrowing his world to the space behind his lids.

By the time he opens them again, Maple’s upside down, body half in and half out of the drain. When he speaks his words rattle the dishes in the sink. “Dark this way, even darker than…but if I shimmy a bit and squeeze into…there we go…”

“What do you see?” DW asks. “Anything down there?”

Asher notices he’s not actually keeping tabs on what’s happening in the sink. Instead, the fox squirrel’s head tilts toward the ceiling. His mouth moves between questions, as though he’s trying to get his mind around the next words to come—words sourced from somewhere other than his own mind.

“I’m trying to make sure…we’ll all fit…but there’s some blockage here….”

Asher tenses on the edge of the sink, his attention divided between Maple in the drain and DW’s trance-like state on the counter

“I’m gonna reach my paw out and try to move….”

A skittering sound follows, and then a choir of screeches loud enough to make stale liquids spray from the abandoned dishes via the vibrations produced. Asher acts fast, sliding down the basin’s sides to join the trapped gray squirrel.

DW remains on the counter. But there’s no time for Asher to worry about him.

“Heh muh. Heh muh. Gabbbbgggggg.” Maple’s garbled words become further obscured, sounding as though his tongue’s swollen, filling his mouth. His back legs and tail thrash and wriggle, showing his panicked efforts to free himself. It’s unclear what’s holding him in place inside the pipe. As Asher grasps the gray squirrel’s tail and pulls backward, DW’s chanting from the countertop. The noise carries to his fellow survivors.

“The creep…the creep…”

Buzzing, humming, then clicks and clacks, follow Maple’s moans. Asher shouts up to DW, “Help me! Help us!”

When no response follows, he goes all in, wrenching back on Maple’s crooked tail. The black squirrel plants his back paws until they scrape the steel interior, producing an unbearable sound.

It’s soon surpassed by the tearing of flesh.

Asher falls back into a cup of noodles stained black during its long abandonment.

Maple’s tail drops from the black squirrel’s grasp. The gray squirrel’s bloody hindquarters, still sticking up from the drain, split open and a cockroach hisses before it makes its exit. More insects emerge. Then, flies buzz through the ever-widening wound, covered in blood and feces, their wings dripping and shiny from intestinal juices.

A loud POP makes Asher cover his ears and his eyes go wide, facing yet another horror worse than he ever anticipated. Maple—or what remains of him—shoots out from the drain. The top of his body resembles a house dog’s ruined plaything. Chewed up and spit out, with the Nut House insects splitting his seams. Their chitinous blackened forms become a second skin as they pulp Maple’s insides to a sticky nothingness.

The bugs show no signs of contentment with gorging themselves on the ruin of Maple. They scurry forward, heading for Asher. He’s too tired for any of it. There’s no time for losing his mind…or his life. Not today. He slaps a pair of flies away as they try to burrow into his ears. His already ruined tail gets picked at by a roach’s mandibles, his fur pulled out in chunks, but he keeps climbing, slashing his attackers with the bits of glass still stuck to him.

Up and over a stack of plates, past coffee cup shards, he climbs until he reaches the rim of the sink and holds a paw out, trying to get hold of something to steady himself with and pull up the final quarter inch.

A paw closes around his. There’s DW, swatting bugs off the side of the sink with his free paws, and pulling Asher onto the countertop. The fox squirrel’s paw pads are slick to the touch like he’s drenched in sweat…but sticky like honey.

When Asher’s out of the sink, he collapses in a heap on the counter. Panting, trying to catch his breath and crawl further away from the torrent of pests spilling up from the sink. He ignores the choked sobs coming from his body. “Come on, I got you,” DW tells him.

Once he’s got Asher back on his paws, the fox squirrel touches the burnt side of his face. Patting him once, twice. They turn back to the sink. Asher struggles to get away because they’re moving in the wrong direction. He’s forced to face the shiny mirrored knobs on the sink. In his reflection, he finds DW’s bloody paw prints, marking him. Behind him, Birch’s corpse leaks rich serum from a jagged bite mark on his neck. The useless substances oozes forth slow and steady.

Like honey.

Then, there’s DW with fur and flesh between his teeth, pointing up. Above the sink, a vent with loosened screws pops open and Mr. Muffins stares at the chaotic scene below. A pleased expression pushes his whiskers back against his face.

“They’ve whispered to me, too!” DW screams.

With the fox squirrel’s maddening declaration, Mr. Muffins drops from his perch. When he lands, the cat slaps a meaty paw against the back of Asher’s head. The black squirrel crumbles, returning to the darkness.

To be continued...

The Monstress

By Jibril Stevenson

Originally published in The J.J. Outré Review in May 2021

José María Valdez—“Chema” to his friends, “Joe” to the pinches gabachos—was not your average bounty-hunter. Sure, he’d bring in the occasional bank-robber or highwayman to make ends meet, but that wasn’t what he was known for, not the reason clients sought him out.

No, since the day he had killed the blood-sucking bat terrorizing his South Texas town back when he was a boy, Chema Valdez had been known as a monster-hunter.

Monster-hunting wasn’t always profitable—hence the bank-robbers and highwaymen—but Chema had spent the last few months in Louisiana, where the superstitious folk kept him busy chasing down all manner of rougarous, skunk apes and zombies, along with one particularly aggressive ‘gator. By the time he got the letter from his clients up north, he had enough tin to pay for passage upriver on the Lucy Belle. That would get him within a stone’s throw of the Canadian border as fast as any train or stagecoach, and the Lucy Belle had a full bar and a faro table. Once he got to Canada, it would be back to work hunting some cursed cannibal, but at least he might enjoy himself in the meantime.

It was at the faro table that he met the tall man.

“You are the famous Chema Valdez, are you not?” the tall man asked, looking at Chema rather than at the board where he was placing his bet.

Chema, for his part, had been looking at a redhead on the other side of the room, but something about the tall man caught his attention right away.

“Usually you people call me ‘Joe’,” he said, but as soon as he said it he realized the tall man was no gabacho. His eyes were an intense black, and tilted like a Chinese, but the tall man was, well, taller than any Chinese Chema had ever met, and pale as a ghost.

He was no ghost though. He was flesh and blood. Flesh anyway.

The faro dealer cleared his throat. “You betting?”

Filled with a sense of unease, Chema tore his eyes away from the tall man, forcing himself to look at the faro board instead. He placed his bet, and lost.

“Join me at the bar,” the tall man said, and headed that way.

Chema followed, observing the tall man’s movements as he walked. Maybe it was just being so tall in such a small space, but there was something unnatural about his gait, too. Something inhuman.

The tall man had ordered Chema a whiskey, but nothing for himself.

“I’m a teetotaller,” the tall man said.

More likely a vampire, Chema thought. That would explain the bloodless pallor. He’d been tasked with hunting vampires often enough, but they’d always turned out to be common murderers. He’d never met an honest-to-God vampire, unless you counted the bat. But this fellow looked to be the real thing.

Chema was intrigued, but also unnerved. If this creature knew who he was, what he did, then its reasons for seeking him out couldn’t be good.

“So you know my name,” he said, his hand moving slowly toward the Smith & Wesson on his hip. “What can I do for you?”

“I understand you track fugitives with… peculiar characteristics.” If the tall man had seen Chema reaching for his gun, he didn’t seem to notice.

“Monsters,” Chema said, his hand hovering an inch from the grip.

The tall man flinched. “I suppose you’d see it that way. I am looking for a… monstress.”

Chema drew his hand back, more intrigued than frightened now. He’d once tried tracking La Llorona south of the Rio Grande, but never found her. The witch in Arkansas wasn’t so lucky, but she’d just been an old hag with a penchant for poisons, not a proper monster. “What’s she like?”

“Tall. Thin. Pale. Dark eyes.”

“A vampiress?”

The tall man produced an odd noise Chema assumed was meant as a laugh. “Nothing so commonplace. Where I come from, she is a lady of some distinction.”

“Of course.”

“It’s a story I’m sure you’ve heard before. A young girl is forbidden from marrying the man she loves, so they arrange to run away to some far off place.”

“And you’re supposed to take her back to Daddy?”

“Oh, no. I’m the man she was to run away with. We arranged to meet up here on—in America, but I was shipwrecked, you might say, and have no way to contact her. I supposed a man of your talents might have heard news of her.”

“I never forget a female,” Chema said, casting a wistful glance at the redhead, who was making her way out of the saloon, “so I’m sure I’d remember a lady as striking as you describe.”

“My description doesn’t do her justice. You would remember, indeed.”

“Sorry I couldn’t help you.”

“If you do hear of such a lady,” the man said, extending his hand, a calling card grasped between two long, thin fingers, “please don’t hesitate to contact me.”

Chema reached out to take the card, shuddering at the inexplicable coldness he felt when his fingertips brushed the tall man’s. He almost dropped the card in surprise when he noticed that apart from the thumb, the two fingers holding the card were the only fingers on the tall man’s hand. He hadn’t lost any digits—that’s just how his hand was built.

“She got hands like yours?” Chema asked, holding the card up between his index and middle fingers, his other fingers down, in his best imitation of the tall man’s strange anatomy.

The tall man gave an uncanny smile. “I knew you were more observant than most. Do write if you hear anything.”

Chema glanced down at the card, which bore the name John Smith—an obvious pseudonym—and an address in New York. When Chema looked up again, the tall man was gone.

He tucked the calling card into his pocket, downed another whiskey, then went out on deck to look for the redhead. After a fruitless hour of pacing the deck and another visit to the bar, Chema retired to his stateroom to sleep.

It was not the redhead who filled his dreams, though. He dreamt of a woman he’d never met in waking life, yet he recognized her instantly—a tall woman with skin pale and luminous as moonlight, and those eyes, like nothing Chema had ever seen.

His mother had been a full-blooded Huasteca Indian, with eyes to match her raven-black hair, but they were nothing compared to this dream woman’s. Her eyes were so black they seemed to absorb all the light around them, swallowing the whole world and Chema along with it. He felt himself tumbling through space, accelerating as he fell into that dark abyss.

He startled awake, the terror of that immeasurable blackness broken by the ringing of the Lucy Belle’s engine bell, a pounding at his stateroom door and the cries of a porter announcing they’d reached St. Paul and Señor Valdeez had better get down that gangplank if he didn’t want to pay for the return fare to New Orleans.

Chema pulled himself out of his daze with the help of a tumbler of mescal and half a pot of Arbuckle’s and got to work. He had no time to wonder about Mr. Smith because he needed to be on the stage to Winnipeg that same afternoon if he wanted to beat the storm that was blowing in from the north.

The ride north turned out to be uneventful, and the Canadian job nearly so. Chema solved their little wendigo problem like he’d promised, but his heart wasn’t in it. He could hardly eat or drink, not even whiskey, and ambled across the snow-dusted prairie in a daze, just passing the time until nightfall when he could curl up in his bedroll to dream of the strange woman and lose himself in the terrible mystery of her eyes.

Every time he took a job, whether it was monster hunting, or plain old bounty hunting when times got tough, Chema would ask after a three-fingered woman with big black eyes. He did find a slew of three-fingered broads in saloons and whorehouses from Saskatoon to San Francisco, but they’d all lost their fingers to gangrene or vengeful pimps, and none had eyes like the woman of his dreams.

He’d almost given up the chase when he met the Russian gentleman in Seattle, in the antechamber of the new synagogue. Chema had come to hunt a golem the local rabbis had cooked up to protect themselves now that so many Cossacks were pouring in from Vladivostok to work for the big logging companies. But the golem had refused to obey its masters and now they wanted Chema to track it down so they could turn it back into lifeless clay.

When Chema asked about the three-fingered woman, as he always did these days, the Russian grew pensive.

“I have a niece,” he said. “She ran off with a Christian boy who lived in a small village in far north. It broke her father’s heart, but her mother—my sister—kept correspondence with her. The last letter she sent told of a very strange occurrence indeed.

“She said one night a ball of fire fell from sky, like a shooting star but much bigger, and it was followed by an earthquake that flattened acres of forest. But when villagers searched area, they found no debris, only one shallow crater and a set of strange footprints.

“They are superstitious, those country folk, believing in all manner of ghosts and monsters, so they did not follow trail, but only crossed themselves and hurried home. But, weeks later, a woman came to village. If she was not woman you are describing, I will be surprised. She was having black eyes and three fingers on each hand, and villagers were believing she was a witch.”

“So she is in Russia?” asked Chema.

The Russian raised his hands and shrugged. “Who knows? She asked about falling star, and then she left, following footprints into forest.”

“She spoke Russian?” Chema remembered that Mr. Smith had an unusual accent in English, but it was not like this fellow’s.

“That is strange thing, the reason they were calling her a witch. At first, she was trying to talk by signs, and villagers thought she must be dumb, but then one young boy grasped her hand. He said it was cold as ice!

“And after that she was speaking perfectly, not like Muscovite, but like native of that region. That boy, though, he was having strange dreams. After one week, he’d gone completely mad.”

Chema shuddered, remembering the tall man’s icy touch. He’d been having strange dreams, all right. Was madness his destination?

But he remembered the abyss of those black eyes, and he knew he could not give up.

“The boy,” Chema asked, “he is alive?”

“Yes, of course,” said the Russian. “In fact, he is here in Seattle.”

“Why didn’t you say so? Take me to him!”

The missing golem forgotten, Chema and the Russian hastened toward the edge of town where the loggers’ wives and children lived in neat rows of wooden cottages. Looking over his shoulder, understandably wary of his Christian compatriots, the Russian showed Chema to the house.

A pretty blonde of no more than thirty-five answered the door. A younger Chema would have flattered and flirted his way inside, her undoubtedly strapping lumberjack husband be damned, but now Chema had no eyes for any woman but the black-eyed monstress of his dreams.

His companion exchanged a few words with the woman in Russian, then turned to Chema and said, “You should ask her your questions. Her boy no longer speaks.”

“Tell her…” Chema began, trying to think of an adequate explanation. “Tell her I’m a physician, a specialist in this kind of disorder, that I heard of his case and wished to examine him in hopes I might be able to treat him.”

The Russian translated, his version a bit wordier than Chema’s, and the woman looked at them both with skepticism. To be sure, Chema hardly looked like a doctor in his work clothes and silver-spurred boots, not to mention the Smith and Wesson on his hip. But she eventually nodded and led them inside.

There was a rocking chair in the corner of the humble sitting room, and in it, bundled up in woolen blankets despite the summer heat, sat a tow-headed youth, staring at the wall. He didn’t shift his gaze when Chema passed in front of him or leaned in to look at his face.

But when Chema placed a hand on his clammy forehead, the boy began to shudder, and Chema shuddered with him, for the images filled his mind so fast that he could not keep up, a whirlwind of colors and shapes and sounds and feelings he could not parse into anything intelligible. It was too much.

He broke contact with the boy, stumbling back and collapsing onto the floor. The images were still flowing, more slowly now, reforming and reordering themselves into something Chema could follow.

First was the lady from his dreams, pale as death. Her eyes, black as night. As in every dream, Chema felt himself falling, faster and faster as their all-consuming blackness pulled him in. But this time he didn’t wake.

Just when he felt the acceleration would tear him apart, it stopped. Not suddenly, as if he’d hit something, nor slowly like a braking train. Simply, motion ceased to matter.

He was somewhere else. The night sky. And the stars. Good God, the stars, millions upon millions of them. Nebulas and galaxies whirled around him, constellations he’d never seen. The very fabric of reality pulsed with color and life and sound, the music of the spheres.

Then he was moving again, or perhaps just refocusing, as one star in particular grew larger in his mind’s eye, and then a planet orbiting that star, blue and green but somehow wrong, the continents and oceans out of place. Then he was on the ground among strange buildings and stranger people, all of them pale with those big black eyes, and before him the tall man, the so-called John Smith, and Chema knew this was the moment of the farewell.

Man and woman pressed their three-fingered hands together one last time and separated, with the promise they’d meet again. Then Chema was back in the sky, watching the stars and galaxies flit by like millions of fireflies until a new world loomed before him, blue and green again, now with shapes he recognized as the map of North America, until the map became a bird’s eye view of farms and forests, and then he had landed. She had landed, rather, in an open expanse of grassy Midwestern prairie.

Chema sensed that she had expended all her energy in controlling the descent of her… whatever it was that brought her to Earth, so that when she arrived she could barely stumble out and collapse into the green grass to sleep. But she had not slept long when her eyes sprang open to see a fireball split the night sky and then disappear over the western horizon.

In his memory of the boy’s memory of the tall woman’s memory, Chema focused on the image of the fireball arcing through the atmosphere and calculated its trajectory with respect to his—her—location. Then, after weeks of wandering, traversing mountains and deserts, crossing the ocean on a rickety ship full of strangers, she reached the place her companion must have landed.

And found nothing.

Just a shallow crater and, nearby, a jumble of wooden hovels and a crowd of frightened natives, and a single brave young boy who took her hand in his.

That was it. The memory had run its course.

The boy sat in the corner, gasping. He began to babble in Russian, his mother hugging him and weeping tears of joy that her son was speaking again, his psyche finally free of the burden it had been carrying.

Who knows how long Chema sat on the floor before he became aware of the Russian who was trying to help him to his feet. Chema waved the frantic Russian back, telling him by gestures to bring him pen and paper.

His mind was a hurricane of darkness and light, shapes and colors and that sound—pulsing, pulsing, pulsing—but he had to do it now, get it down on paper while he still could.

He fished in his breast pocket for Mr. John Smith’s calling card with the New York address, and when the Russian returned with pen and paper, Chema scribbled “Telegram” in a fractured hand, and below it the address of the Seattle boarding house where he was staying. He added, “Have news STOP come quick STOP Chema,” and then he let the pen fall to the floor.

As he handed the Russian the letter and the card, along with a handful of greenbacks, Chema tried to give an explanation, but what came out was gibberish. He let the blonde help him sit in the chair where the boy had been rocking and swaddle him in woolen blankets, despite the summer heat.

The tall man would get the message, or he would not. If he did, he would surely come, but even such a man who had traveled the stars was limited here on the ground by the speed of trains and riverboats. There was nothing to do but wait.

Chema imagined that once he shook the tall man’s three-fingered hand, the circle would be complete, the lovers would reunite, and he would be free of this burden. But now, as Chema drifted off into an open-eyed sleep, his vision filled with the pale, inhuman beauty of the tall woman, he was frightened. For as he plunged into the cosmic blackness of her eyes, emerging into that symphony of stars and planets, his heartbeat adjusting to the inhuman music of the spheres, Chema was not sure he would make it.

This was the sound of infinity, the very tone of the universe.

How long could his feeble human brain contain it?

End.

Jibril Stevenson graduated from the University of Puerto Rico more years ago than he would care to admit, and spent most of the intervening years making the world safe for democracy. Newly retired, he’s now writing Muslim Westerns, when not yelling at kids to get off his damn lawn. He currently lives in Delaware with his wife and children, a lizard and two guinea pigs, and is trying to decide whether an Oxford comma would make this sentence better or worse. He can be found at jibrilstevenson.wordpress.com or @jibrilstevenson on Twitter

The King in Yellow:

The Mask

By Robert W. Chambers

Originally published in 1895

CAMILLA: You, sir, should unmask.

STRANGER: Indeed?

CASSILDA: Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.

STRANGER: I wear no mask.

CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!

THE KING IN YELLOW: Act I—Scene 2d.

I.

ALTHOUGH I knew nothing of chemistry, I listened fascinated. He picked up an Easter lily which Geneviève had brought that morning from Notre Dame and dropped it into the basin. Instantly the liquid lost its crystalline clearness. For a second the lily was enveloped in a milk-white foam, which disappeared, leaving the fluid opalescent. Changing tints of orange and crimson played over the surface, and then what seemed to be a ray of pure sunlight struck through from the bottom where the lily was resting. At the same instant he plunged his hand into the basin and drew out the flower. “There is no danger,” he explained, “if you choose the right moment. That golden ray is the signal.”

He held the lily toward me and I took it in my hand. It had turned to stone, to the purest marble.

“You see,” he said, “it is without a flaw. What sculptor could reproduce it?”

The marble was white as snow, but in its depths the veins of the lily were tinged with palest azure, and a faint flush lingered deep in its heart.

“Don’t ask me the reason of that,” he smiled, noticing my wonder. “I have no idea why the veins and heart are tinted, but they always are. Yesterday I tried one of Geneviève’s gold fish,—there it is.”

The fish looked as if sculptured in marble. But if you held it to the light the stone was beautifully veined with a faint blue, and from somewhere within came a rosy light like the tint which slumbers in an opal. I looked into the basin. Once more it seemed filled with clearest crystal.

“If I should touch it now?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” he replied, “but you had better not try.”

“There is one thing I’m curious about,” I said, “and that is where the ray of sunlight came from.”

“It looked like a sunbeam true enough,” he said. “I don’t know, it always comes when I immerse any living thing. Perhaps,” he continued smiling, “perhaps it is the vital spark of the creature escaping to the source from whence it came.”

I saw he was mocking and threatened him with a mahl-stick, but he only laughed and changed the subject.

“Stay to lunch. Geneviève will be here directly.”

“I saw her going to early mass,” I said, “and she looked as fresh and sweet as that lily—before you destroyed it.”

“Do you think I destroyed it?” said Boris gravely.

“Destroyed, preserved, how can we tell?”

We sat in the corner of a studio near his unfinished group of “The Fates.” He leaned back on the sofa, twirling a sculptor’s chisel and squinting at his work.

“By the way,” he said, “I have finished pointing up that old academic Ariadne and I suppose it will have to go to the Salon. It’s all I have ready this year, but after the success the ‘Madonna,’ brought me I feel ashamed to send a thing like that.”

The “Madonna,” an exquisite marble for which Geneviève had sat, had been the sensation of last year’s Salon. I looked at the Ariadne. It was a magnificent piece of technical work, but I agreed with Boris that the world would expect something better of him than that. Still it was impossible now to think of finishing in time for the Salon, that splendid terrible group half shrouded in the marble behind me. “The Fates” would have to wait.

We were proud of Boris Yvain. We claimed him and he claimed us on the strength of his having been born in America, although his father was French and his mother was a Russian. Every one in the Beaux Arts called him Boris. And yet there were only two of us whom he addressed in the same familiar way; Jack Scott and myself.

Perhaps my being in love with Geneviève had something to do with his affection for me. Not that it had ever been acknowledged between us. But after all was settled, and she had told me with tears in her eyes that it was Boris whom she loved, I went over to his house and congratulated him. The perfect cordiality of that interview did not deceive either of us, I always believed, although to one at least it was a great comfort. I do not think he and Geneviève ever spoke of the matter together, but Boris knew.

Geneviève was lovely. The Madonna-like purity of her face might have been inspired by the Sanctus in Gounod’s Mass. But I was always glad when she changed that mood for what we called her “April Manœuvres.” She was often as variable as an April day. In the morning grave, dignified and sweet, at noon laughing, capricious, at evening whatever one least expected. I preferred her so rather than in that Madonna-like tranquillity which stirred the depths of my heart. I was dreaming of Geneviève when he spoke again.

“What do you think of my discovery, Alec?”

“I think it wonderful.”

“I shall make no use of it, you know, beyond satisfying my own curiosity so far as may be and the secret will die with me.”

“It would be rather a blow to sculpture, would it not? We painters lose more than we ever gain by photography.”

Boris nodded, playing with the edge of the chisel.

“This new vicious discovery would corrupt the world of art. No, I shall never confide the secret to any one,” he said slowly.

It would be hard to find any one less informed about such phenomena than myself; but of course I had heard of mineral springs so saturated with silica that the leaves and twigs which fell into them were turned to stone after a time. I dimly comprehended the process, how the silica replaced the vegetable matter, atom by atom, and the result was a duplicate of the object in stone. This I confess had never interested me greatly, and as for the ancient fossils thus produced, they disgusted me. Boris, it appeared, feeling curiosity instead of repugnance, had investigated the subject, and had accidentally stumbled on a solution which, attacking the immersed object with a ferocity unheard of, in a second did the work of years. This was all I could make out of the strange story he had just been telling me. He spoke again after a long silence.

“I am almost frightened when I think what I have found. Scientists would go mad over the discovery. It was so simple too; it discovered itself. When I think of that formula, and that new element precipitated in metallic scales———”

“What new element?”

“Oh, I haven’t thought of naming it, and I don’t believe I ever shall. There are enough precious metals now in the world to cut throats over.”

I pricked up my ears. “Have you struck gold, Boris?”

“No, better;—but see here, Alec!” he laughed, starting up. “You and I have all we need in this world. Ah! how sinister and covetous you look already!” I laughed too, and told him I was devoured by the desire for gold, and we had better talk of something else; so when Geneviève came in shortly after, we had turned our backs on alchemy.

Geneviève was dressed in silvery gray from head to foot. The light glinted along the soft curves of her fair hair as she turned her cheek to Boris; then she saw me and returned my greeting. She had never before failed to blow me a kiss from the tips of her white fingers, and I promptly complained of the omission. She smiled and held out her hand which dropped almost before it had touched mine; then she said, looking at Boris,

“You must ask Alec to stay for luncheon.” This also was something new. She had always asked me herself until to-day.

“I did,” said Boris shortly.

“And you said yes, I hope,” she turned to me with a charming conventional smile. I might have been an acquaintance of the day before yesterday. I made her a low bow. “J’avais bien l’honneur, madame,” but refusing to take up our usual bantering tone she murmured a hospitable commonplace and disappeared. Boris and I looked at one another.

“I had better go home, don’t you think?” I asked.

“Hanged if I know!” he replied frankly.

While we were discussing the advisability of my departure Geneviève reappeared in the doorway without her bonnet. She was wonderfully beautiful, but her color was too deep and her lovely eyes were too bright. She came straight up to me and took my arm.

“Luncheon is ready. Was I cross, Alec? I thought I had a headache but I haven’t. Come here, Boris;” and she slipped her other arm through his. “Alec knows that after you there is no one in the world whom I like as well as I like him, so if he sometimes feels snubbed it won’t hurt him.”

“À la bonheur!” I cried, “who says there are no thunderstorms in April?”

“Are you ready?” chanted Boris. “Aye ready;” and arm in arm we raced into the dining-room scandalizing the servants. After all we were not so much to blame; Geneviève was eighteen, Boris was twenty-three and I not quite twenty-one.

II.

SOME work that I was doing about this time on the decorations for Geneviève’s boudoir kept me constantly at the quaint little hotel in the rue Sainte-Cécile. Boris and I in those days labored hard but as we pleased, which was fitfully, and we all three, with Jack Scott, idled a great deal together.

One quiet afternoon I had been wandering alone over the house examining curios, prying into odd corners, bringing out sweetmeats and cigars from strange hiding-places, and at last I stopped in the bathing-room. Boris all over clay stood there washing his hands.

The room was built of rose-colored marble excepting the floor which was tesselated in rose and gray. In the centre was a square pool sunken below the surface of the floor; steps led down into it, sculptured pillars supported a frescoed ceiling. A delicious marble Cupid appeared to have just alighted on his pedestal at the upper end of the room. The whole interior was Boris’ work and mine. Boris, in his working clothes of white canvas, scraped the traces of clay and red modelling wax from his handsome hands, and coquetted over his shoulder with the Cupid.

“I see you,” he insisted, “don’t try to look the other way and pretend not to see me. You know who made you, little humbug!”

It was always my rôle to interpret Cupid’s sentiments in these conversations, and when my turn came I responded in such a manner, that Boris seized my arm and dragged me toward the pool, declaring he would duck me. Next instant he dropped my arm and turned pale. “Good God!” he said, “I forgot the pool is full of the solution!”

I shivered a little, and drily advised him to remember better where he had stored the precious liquid.

“In Heaven’s name why do you keep a small lake of that grewsome stuff here of all places!” I asked.

“I want to experiment on something large,” he replied.

“On me, for instance!”

“Ah! that came too close for jesting; but I do want to watch the action of that solution on a more highly organized living body; there is that big white rabbit,” he said, following me into the studio.

Jack Scott, wearing a paint-stained jacket, came wandering in, appropriated all the Oriental sweetmeats he could lay his hands on, looted the cigarette case, and finally he and Boris disappeared together to visit the Luxembourg gallery, where a new silver bronze by Rodin and a landscape of Monet’s were claiming the exclusive attention of artistic France. I went back to the studio, and resumed my work. It was a Renaissance screen, which Boris wanted me to paint for Geneviève’s boudoir. But the small boy who was unwillingly dawdling through a series of poses for it, to-day refused all bribes to be good. He never rested an instant in the same position, and inside of five minutes, I had as many different outlines of the little beggar.

“Are you posing, or are you executing a song and dance, my friend?” I inquired.

“Whichever monsieur pleases,” he replied with an angelic smile.

Of course I dismissed him for the day, and of course I paid him for the full time, that being the way we spoil our models.

After the young imp had gone, I made a few perfunctory daubs at my work, but was so thoroughly out of humor, that it took me the rest of the afternoon to undo the damage I had done, so at last I scraped my palette, stuck my brushes in a bowl of black soap, and strolled into the smoking-room. I really believe that, excepting Geneviève’s apartments, no room in the house was so free from the perfume of tobacco as this one. It was a queer chaos of odds and ends hung with threadbare tapestry. A sweet-toned old spinet in good repair stood by the window. There were stands of weapons, some old and dull, others bright and modern, festoons of Indian and Turkish armor over the mantel, two or three good pictures, and a pipe-rack. It was here that we used to come for new sensations in smoking. I doubt if any type of pipe ever existed which was not represented in that rack. When we had selected one, we immediately carried it somewhere else and smoked it; for the place was, on the whole, more gloomy and less inviting than any in the house. But this afternoon, the twilight was very soothing, the rugs and skins on the floor looked brown and soft and drowsy; the big couch was piled with cushions, I found my pipe and curled up there for an unaccustomed smoke in the smoking-room. I had chosen one with a long flexible stem, and lighting it fell to dreaming. After a while it went out, but I did not stir. I dreamed on and presently fell asleep.

I awoke to the saddest music I had ever heard. The room was quite dark, I had no idea what time it was. A ray of moonlight silvered one edge of the old spinet, and the polished wood seemed to exhale the sounds as perfume floats above a box of sandal wood. Some one rose in the darkness, and came away weeping quietly, and I was fool enough to cry out “Geneviève!”

She dropped at my voice, and I had time to curse myself while I made a light and tried to raise her from the floor. She shrank away with a murmur of pain. She was very quiet, and asked for Boris. I carried her to the divan, and went to look for him, but he was not in the house, and the servants were gone to bed. Perplexed and anxious, I hurried back to Geneviève. She lay where I had left her, looking very white.

“I can’t find Boris nor any of the servants,” I said.

“I know,” she answered faintly, “Boris has gone to Ept with Mr. Scott. I did not remember when I sent you for him just now.”

“But he can’t get back in that case before to-morrow afternoon, and—are you hurt? Did I frighten you into falling? What an awful fool I am, but I was only half awake.”

“Boris thought you had gone home before dinner. Do please excuse us for letting you stay here all this time.”

“I have had a long nap,” I laughed, “so sound that I did not know whether I was still asleep or not when I found myself staring at a figure that was moving toward me, and called out your name. Have you been trying the old spinet? You must have played very softly.”

I would tell a thousand more lies worse than that one to see the look of relief that came into her face. She smiled adorably and said in her natural voice: “Alec, I tripped on that wolf’s head, and I think my ankle is sprained. Please call Marie and then go home.”

I did as she bade me and left her there when the maid came in.

III.

AT noon next day when I called, I found Boris walking restlessly about his studio.

“Geneviève is asleep just now,” he told me, “the sprain is nothing, but why should she have such a high fever? The doctor can’t account for it; or else he will not,” he muttered.

“Geneviève has a fever?” I asked.

“I should say so, and has actually been a little light-headed at intervals all night. The idea! gay little Geneviève, without a care in the world,—and she keeps saying her heart’s broken, and she wants to die!”

My own heart stood still.

Boris leaned against the door of his studio, looking down, his hands in his pockets, his kind, keen eyes clouded, a new line of trouble drawn “over the mouth’s good mark, that made the smile.” The maid had orders to summon him the instant Geneviève opened her eyes. We waited and waited, and Boris growing restless wandered about, fussing with modelling wax and red clay. Suddenly he started for the next room. “Come and see my rose-colored bath full of death,” he cried.

“Is it death?” I asked to humor his mood.

“You are not prepared to call it life, I suppose,” he answered. As he spoke he plucked a solitary gold fish squirming and twisting out of its globe. “We’ll send this one after the other—wherever that is,” he said. There was feverish excitement in his voice. A dull weight of fever lay on my limbs and on my brain as I followed him to the fair crystal pool with its pink-tinted sides; and he dropped the creature in. Falling, its scales flashed with a hot orange gleam in its angry twistings and contortions; the moment it struck the liquid it became rigid and sank heavily to the bottom. Then came the milky foam, the splendid hues radiating on the surface and then the shaft of pure serene light broke through from seemingly infinite depths. Boris plunged in his hand and drew out an exquisite marble thing, blue-veined, rose-tinted and glistening with opalescent drops.

“Child’s play,” he muttered, and looked wearily, longingly at me,—as if I could answer such questions! But Jack Scott came in and entered into the “game” as he called it with ardor. Nothing would do but to try the experiment on the white rabbit then and there. I was willing that Boris should find distraction from his cares, but I hated to see the life go out of a warm, living creature and I declined to be present. Picking up a book at random I sat down in the studio to read. Alas, I had found “The King in Yellow.” After a few moments which seemed ages, I was putting it away with a nervous shudder, when Boris and Jack came in bringing their marble rabbit. At the same time the bell rang above and a cry came from the sick room. Boris was gone like a flash, and the next moment he called, “Jack, run for the doctor; bring him back with you. Alec, come here.”

I went and stood at her door. A frightened maid came out in haste and ran away to fetch some remedy. Geneviève, sitting bolt upright, with crimson cheeks and glittering eyes, babbled incessantly and resisted Boris’ gentle restraint. He called me to help. At my first touch she sighed and sank back, closing her eyes, and then—then—as we still bent above her, she opened them again, looked straight into Boris’ face, poor fever-crazed girl, and told her secret. At the same instant, our three lives turned into new channels; the bond that had held us so long together snapped forever and a new bond was forged in its place, for she had spoken my name, and as the fever tortured her, her heart poured out its load of hidden sorrow. Amazed and dumb I bowed my head, while my face burned like a live coal, and the blood surged in my ears, stupefying me with its clamor. Incapable of movement, incapable of speech, I listened to her feverish words in an agony of shame and sorrow. I could not silence her, I could not look at Boris. Then I felt an arm upon my shoulder, and Boris turned a bloodless face to mine.

“It is not your fault, Alec, don’t grieve so if she loves you—” but he could not finish; and as the doctor stepped swiftly into the room saying—“Ah, the fever!” I seized Jack Scott and hurried him to the street saying, “Boris would rather be alone.” We crossed the street to our own apartments and that night, seeing as I was going to be ill too, he went for the doctor again. The last thing I recollect with any distinctness was hearing Jack say, “For Heaven’s sake, doctor, what ails him, to wear a face like that?” and I thought of “The King in Yellow” and the Pallid Mask.

I was very ill, for the strain of two years which I had endured since that fatal May morning when Geneviève murmured, “I love you, but I think I love Boris best” told on me at last. I had never imagined that it could become more than I could endure. Outwardly tranquil, I had deceived myself. Although the inward battle raged night after night, and I, lying alone in my room, cursed myself for rebellious thoughts unloyal to Boris and unworthy of Geneviève, the morning always brought relief, and I returned to Geneviève and to my dear Boris with a heart washed clean by the tempests of the night.

Never in word or deed or thought while with them, had I betrayed my sorrow even to myself.

The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was no one to see except myself, and when day broke the mask fell back again of its own accord. These thoughts passed through my troubled mind as I lay sick, but they were hopelessly entangled with visions of white creatures, heavy as stone, crawling about in Boris’ basin,—of the wolf’s head on the rug, foaming and snapping at Geneviève, who lay smiling beside it. I thought, too, of The King in Yellow wrapt in the fantastic colors of his tattered mantle, and that bitter cry of Cassilda, “Not upon us, oh King, not upon us!” Feverishly I struggled to put it from me, but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, The Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud rifts which fluttered and flapped as they passed like the scolloped tatters of The King in Yellow. Among all these, one sane thought persisted. It never wavered, no matter what else was going on in my disordered mind, that my chief reason for existing, was to meet some requirement of Boris and Geneviève. What this obligation was, its nature, was never clear; sometimes it seemed to be protection, sometimes support, through a great crisis. Whatever it seemed to be for the time, its weight rested only on me, and I was never so ill or so weak that I did not respond with my whole soul. There were always crowds of faces about me, mostly strange, but a few I recognized, Boris among them. Afterward they told me that this could not have been, but I know that once at least he bent over me. It was only a touch, a faint echo of his voice, then the clouds settled back on my senses, and I lost him, but he did stand there and bend over me once at least.

At last, one morning I awoke to find the sunlight falling across my bed, and Jack Scott reading beside me. I had not strength enough to speak aloud, neither could I think, much less remember, but I could smile feebly, as Jack’s eye met mine, and when he jumped up and asked eagerly if I wanted anything, I could whisper, “Yes, Boris.” Jack moved to the head of my bed, and leaned down to arrange my pillow: I did not see his face, but he answered heartily, “You must wait Alec, you are too weak to see even Boris.”

I waited and I grew strong; in a few days I was able to see whom I would, but meanwhile I had thought and remembered. From the moment when all the past grew clear again in my mind, I never doubted what I should do when the time came, and I felt sure that Boris would have resolved upon the same course so far as he was concerned; as for what pertained to me alone, I knew he would see that also as I did. I no longer asked for any one. I never inquired why no message came from them; why during the week I lay there, waiting and growing stronger, I never heard their name spoken. Preoccupied with my own searchings for the right way, and with my feeble but determined fight against despair, I simply acquiesced in Jack’s reticence, taking for granted that he was afraid to speak of them, lest I should turn unruly and insist on seeing them. Meanwhile I said over and over to myself, how it would be when life began again for us all. We would take up our relations exactly as they were before Geneviève fell ill. Boris and I would look into each other’s eyes and there would be neither rancor nor cowardice nor mistrust in that glance. I would be with them again for a little while in the dear intimacy of their home, and then, without pretext or explanation, I would disappear from their lives forever. Boris would know, Geneviève—the only comfort was that she would never know. It seemed, as I thought it over, that I had found the meaning of that sense of obligation which had persisted all through my delirium, and the only possible answer to it. So, when I was quite ready, I beckoned Jack to me one day, and said,

“Jack, I want Boris at once; and take my dearest greeting to Geneviève. . . . . ”

When at last he made me understand that they were both dead, I fell into a wild rage that tore all my little convalescent strength to atoms. I raved and cursed myself into a relapse, from which I crawled forth some weeks afterward a boy of twenty-one who believed that his youth was gone forever. I seemed to be past the capability of further suffering, and one day when Jack handed me a letter and the keys to Boris’ house, I took them without a tremor and asked him to tell me all. It was cruel of me to ask him, but there was no help for it, and he leaned wearily on his thin hands, to reopen the wound which could never entirely heal. He began very quietly.

“Alec, unless you have a clue that I know nothing about, you will not be able to explain any more than I, what has happened. I suspect that you would rather not hear these details, but you must learn them, else I would spare you the relation. God knows I wish I could be spared the telling. I shall use few words.

“That day when I left you in the doctor’s care and came back to Boris, I found him working on the ‘Fates.’ Geneviève, he said, was sleeping under the influence of drugs. She had been quite out of her mind, he said. He kept on working, not talking any more, and I watched him. Before long, I saw that the third figure of the group—the one looking straight ahead, out over the world—bore his face; not as you ever saw it, but as it looked then and to the end. This is one thing for which I should like to find an explanation, but I never shall.

“Well, he worked and I watched him in silence, and we went on that way until nearly midnight. Then we heard a door open and shut sharply, and a swift rush in the next room. Boris sprang through the doorway and I followed; but we were too late. She lay at the bottom of the pool, her hands across her breast. Then Boris shot himself through the heart.” Jack stopped speaking, drops of sweat stood under his eyes, and his thin cheeks twitched. “I carried Boris to his room. Then I went back and let that hellish fluid out of the pool, and turning on all the water, washed the marble clean of every drop. When at length I dared descend the steps, I found her lying there as white as snow. At last, when I had decided what was best to do, I went into the laboratory, and first emptied the solution in the basin into the waste-pipe; then I poured the contents of every jar and bottle after it. There was wood in the fireplace, so I built a fire, and breaking the locks of Boris’ cabinet I burnt every paper, notebook and letter that I found there. With a mallet from the studio I smashed to pieces all the empty bottles, then loading them into a coal scuttle, I carried them to the cellar and threw them over the red-hot bed of the furnace. Six times I made the journey, and at last, not a vestige remained of anything which might again aid in seeking for the formula which Boris had found. Then at last I dared call the doctor. He is a good man, and together we struggled to keep it from the public. Without him I never could have succeeded. At last we got the servants paid and sent away into the country, where old Rosier keeps them quiet with stories of Boris’ and Genevieve’s travels in distant lands, from whence they will not return for years. We buried Boris in the little cemetery of Sèvres. The doctor is a good creature and knows when to pity a man who can bear no more. He gave his certificate of heart disease and asked no questions of me.”

Then lifting his head from his hands, he said, “Open the letter, Alec; it is for us both.”

I tore it open. It was Boris’ will dated a year before. He left everything to Geneviève, and in case of her dying childless, I was to take control of the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile, and Jack Scott, the management at Ept. On our deaths the property reverted to his mother’s family in Russia, with the exception of the sculptured marbles executed by himself. These he left to me.

The page blurred under our eyes, and Jack got up and walked to the window. Presently he returned and sat down again. I dreaded to hear what he was going to say, but he spoke with the same simplicity and gentleness.

“Geneviève lies before the Madonna in the marble room. The Madonna bends tenderly above her, and Geneviève smiles back into that calm face that never would have been except for her.”

His voice broke, but he grasped my hand, saying, “Courage, Alec.” Next morning he left for Ept to fulfil his trust.

IV.

THE same evening I took the keys and went into the house I had known so well. Everything was in order, but the silence was terrible. Though I went twice to the door of the marble room, I could not force myself to enter. It was beyond my strength. I went into the smoking-room and sat down before the spinet. A small lace handkerchief lay on the keys, and I turned away, choking. It was plain I could not stay, so I locked every door, every window, and the three front and back gates, and went away. Next morning Alcide packed my valise, and leaving him in charge of my apartments I took the Orient express for Constantinople. During the two years that I wandered through the East, at first, in our letters, we never mentioned Geneviève and Boris, but gradually their names crept in. I recollect particularly a passage in one of Jack’s letters replying to one of mine.

“What you tell me of seeing Boris bending over you while you lay ill, and feeling his touch on your face, and hearing his voice of course troubles me. This that you describe must have happened a fortnight after he died. I say to myself that you were dreaming, that it was part of your delirium, but the explanation does not satisfy me, nor would it you.”

Toward the end of the second year a letter came from Jack to me in India so unlike any thing that I had ever known of him that I decided to return at once to Paris. He wrote, “I am well and sell all my pictures as artists do, who have no need of money. I have not a care of my own, but I am more restless than if I had. I am unable to shake off a strange anxiety about you. It is not apprehension, it is rather a breathless expectancy, of what, God knows! I can only say it is wearing me out. Nights I dream always of you and Boris. I can never recall anything afterward, but I wake in the morning with my heart beating, and all day the excitement increases until I fall asleep at night to recall the same experience. I am quite exhausted by it, and have determined to break up this morbid condition. I must see you. Shall I go to Bombay or will you come to Paris?”

I telegraphed him to expect me by the next steamer.

When we met I thought he had changed very little; I, he insisted, looked in splendid health. It was good to hear his voice again, and as we sat and chatted about what life still held for us, we felt that it was pleasant to be alive in the bright spring weather.

We stayed in Paris together a week, and then I went for a week to Ept with him, but first of all we went to the cemetery at Sèvres, where Boris lay.

“Shall we place the ‘Fates’ in the little grove above him?” Jack asked, and I answered,

“I think only the ‘Madonna’ should watch over Boris’ grave.” But Jack was none the better for my home-coming. The dreams of which he could not retain even the least definite outline continued, and he said that at times the sense of breathless expectancy was suffocating.

“You see I do you harm and not good,” I said. “Try a change without me.” So he started alone for a ramble among the Channel Islands and I went back to Paris. I had not yet entered Boris’ house, now mine, since my return, but I knew it must be done. It had been kept in order by Jack; there were servants there, so I gave up my own apartment and went there to live. Instead of the agitation I had feared, I found myself able to paint there tranquilly. I visited all the rooms—all but one. I could not bring myself to enter the marble room where Geneviève lay, and yet I felt the longing growing daily to look upon her face, to kneel beside her.

One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern rugs for the wolf-skin. At last I distinguished the pointed ears and flat cruel head, and I thought of my dream where I saw Geneviève lying beside it. The helmets still hung against the threadbare tapestry, among them the old Spanish morion which I remembered Geneviève had once put on when we were amusing ourselves with the ancient bits of mail. I turned my eyes to the spinet; every yellow key seemed eloquent of her caressing hand, and I rose, drawn by the strength of my life’s passion to the sealed door of the marble room. The heavy doors swung inward under my trembling hands. Sunlight poured through the window, tipping with gold the wings of Cupid, and lingered like a nimbus over the brows of the Madonna. Her tender face bent in compassion over a marble form so exquisitely pure that I knelt and signed myself. Geneviève lay in the shadow under the Madonna, and yet, through her white arms, I saw the pale azure vein, and beneath her softly clasped hands the folds of her dress were tinged with rose, as if from some faint warm light within her breast.

Bending with a breaking heart I touched the marble drapery with my lips, then crept back into the silent house.

A maid came and brought me a letter, and I sat down in the little conservatory to read it; but as I was about to break the seal, seeing the girl lingering, I asked her what she wanted.

She stammered something about a white rabbit that had been caught in the house and asked what should be done with it. I told her to let it loose in the walled garden behind the house and opened my letter. It was from Jack, but so incoherent that I thought he must have lost his reason. It was nothing but a series of prayers to me not to leave the house until he could get back; he could not tell me why, there were the dreams, he said—he could explain nothing, but he was sure that I must not leave the house in the Rue Sainte-Cécile.

As I finished reading I raised my eyes and saw the same maid-servant standing in the doorway holding a glass dish in which two gold fish were swimming: “Put them back into the tank and tell me what you mean by interrupting me,” I said.

With a half suppressed whimper she emptied water and fish into an aquarium at the end of the conservatory, and turning to me asked my permission to leave my service. She said people were playing tricks on her, evidently with a design of getting her into trouble; the marble rabbit had been stolen and a live one had been brought into the house; the two beautiful marble fish were gone and she had just found those common live things flopping on the dining-room floor. I reassured her and sent her away saying I would look about myself. I went into the studio; there was nothing there but my canvasses and some casts, except the marble of the Easter Lily. I saw it on a table across the room. Then I strode angrily over to it. But the flower I lifted from the table was fresh and fragile and filled the air with perfume.

Then suddenly I comprehended and sprang through the hall-way to the marble room. The doors flew open, the sunlight streamed into my face and through it, in a heavenly glory, the Madonna smiled, as Geneviève lifted her flushed face from her marble couch, and opened her sleepy eyes.

To be continued...

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Thanks to all of you, we are a pro rate magazine!

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

- Dream, Girl

- Becoming

- Coffins Beach Past Anissquam Lighthouse Open Water Swim

- Adrift
- The Forgotten Folk
- Providence
- The Nut House
- The Monstress
- The King in Yellow: The Mask