CHM June 2023 Book
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 2023-05-17 14:43:55+00:00

Copyright © 2023 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: Lars Strömquist

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Edited by Charles Tyra
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

The June issue tends to mean another year’s close (for CHM). It has become a time of reflection for me and I am thrilled to think that we have produced 36 issues so far. If you are holding this issue in your hand or on your phone or device, I can’t thank you enough for supporting us. If you are a writer who has submitted to us in the past, we are here because of you. We have been fortunate to feature some of the very best in the weird fiction game as well as many a rising newcomer and we feel like we are only just getting started. I am so excited about what we have planned, and I especially can’t wait to share it with you. But for now, let’s peek at what we have in store this month, shall we?

First, a hotel maid finds a new piece for her terrifying collection while cleaning a room in “Aleph Mem Tav.” Then in a new story by Christina Ladd, a new and strange decorative statue brings more than just tourists in “Organ of the Tide.” A car ride out to the summer island becomes a horrifying metaphysical journey in Livia Llewelyn’s reprinted “New Fox Smell.” An absolute spiritual void is too much for the strongest of mediums in “The Hollow House” by CHM alum Scott J. Couturier followed by a story of the dire consequences of coloring outside the lines in “Leaden Within the Lines.”

You never know what you’ll get when new neighbors move in, or what you’ll lose in “Keepers of the Garden.” Then we will start to wind things down with a chaotic stream of consciousness in “The Indomitable AMS” before closing with an utterly weird tale blending the animated antics of the classic cartoon with cold, punishing reality.

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

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

Featured artists this month

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

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

Welcome to Cosmic Horror Monthly

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

Aleph Mem Tav

By Phillip E. Dixon

Oleksandra emerged from Room 209 to sneering laughter. The other cleaning women flocked before the open, heavy door to Room 213. “We saved this one for you,” Magda said in English, her Polish accent thick. Oleksandra pushed her cart toward the gaggle, oiled wheels silent. The magpies turned away, still laughing, carts making a racket as they retreated to their nests, Polish squawks following tunelessly behind.

“She is so nasty.”

“She will still be cleaning it tomorrow.”

“She likes it.”

Oleksandra understood every word but never let on, never uttered a sentence. She spoke five languages, but the forgettable women were tiny, undeserving of knowledge. The youngest one, Magda’s nameless niece, was a decent girl. Oleksandra saw the discomfort in her eyes when callous agreements fell awkwardly from her mouth, but that would soon pass and the girl would grow ugly feathers like the rest.

The acrid scent of vomit mingled with beer wrinkled Oleksandra’s brow. Marijuana hung in the air. The crooked, stripped mattresses revealed still-wet stains. Crumpled cans, shot glasses, plastic baggies, and empty jelly tubes decorated tables and stands. Moist towels littered the carpet. An errant camera lens cover and cable tie sat behind the TV.

Perfect.

She started in the bathroom where the essence was strongest, collecting chestnut pubic hairs and black eyelashes, discarding any without a promising follicle. The toilet offered semi-dry pools of urine from middle-aged boys, but she didn’t need more and scrubbed the porcelain clean, the violent flush misting the air. The flecks of feces in the tub were similarly useless.

Her reflection glanced at her while she worked, assessing the deepening lines in her neck, the drawn jowls, the sleepless eyes, struggling to find a trace of the once-happy girl celebrating her bat mitzvah. Ignoring the woman’s unsettling glare, Oleksandra scraped acne spatter from the mirror to keep, then quickly scrubbed the sink clean.

Her watch beeped and she quickly sat on the floor. An air-raid siren cried from the convention hall, signaling the start of a new event. Oleksandra buried her head in her arms to muffle the wails, but sweat and tremors still took hold. Ten seconds were ten years, the following silence a comfort. Cursing the foolish choice of alert, she stood, dabbing her brow, slipping the damp handkerchief into her apron for safekeeping. No amount of customer complaints to management seemed to matter, and she didn’t dare speak up and risk her job.

Oleksandra parted the heavy curtains and slid the two large windows open, the early afternoon light a balm. On the ledge sat a clean molar with a tag of gums still attached. Her dentist’s eye probed. Second upper molar, left side. No filling. Grinds in sleep. Parked just inside her left nostril revealed a trace of vodka and borscht. She tongued the molar’s roots. The man’s essence still lingered. A jealous fist or prurient pursuit—she didn’t care why. The lone tooth’s power was the treasure.

More than enough. But she still searched while cleaning, never one to waste. Vomit on the carpet and flakes of dried ejaculate on the wall, essence already escaped from both. She soaked still-damp discharge from the mattresses, then called maintenance from the room phone to replace them. She wiped the receiver clean first.

The television remote glistened with grease. She brought it to her nose.

Chicken.

Disappointed, Oleksandra wiped the worn buttons and left the remote beside the television. She retrieved the comforter from the balcony, discovering a woman’s pair of panties beneath. They were hardly more than a hint of fabric, but the essence was strong. She tucked the lace inside her apron.

Room soon complete, Oleksandra went to the front desk to volunteer for a second shift. The harried manager said yes before she could speak, completing their routine. With each room, she added to her collection. A strip of sunburned boy from a bathtub’s edge. Nail clippings, both finger and toe. Various secretions. Blood mingled with heroin inside a used needle. The day was lucrative, the tooth a rare and most special find.

Past midnight, she shared the tram with a pair of inebriated youth donning University of Warsaw sweatshirts, laughing at their phones. A homeless man sat, eyes lost out a rear window. The conductor, Oskar, slaughtered Chopin with his crow’s toneless whistling.

Excited, Oleksandra tried not to fidget with the tooth, holding it tightly instead, afraid it would somehow escape from her bag. She didn’t open her fist until after inside the windowless single room afforded by her meager pay. Rusted hot plate, miniscule fridge, fold-out bed made of back pain. The only photograph her daughter, Nina, hanging above the sink. A beautiful, awkward nightingale with a soft song Magda could never sing. Flowing light-brown hair and a promising, full smile trapped in the crumbled nest of their apartment building, silent.

Stomach begging, Oleksandra answered with a small paska roll. She’d baked them for Easter, but eating a day early would not offend God. A resurrection was still being celebrated.

Opposite the bed sat a scavenged dentist’s chair, reclined and occupied. Oleksandra flicked on an overhead work lamp that recalled the harsh lights of an impromptu subway station bomb shelter. She sat on the accompanying stool, the rest fitting perfectly with the small of her back. On the tray sat a mouth mirror, scaler, forceps, and other dental tools, all cleaned and sanitized from habit despite no need. In the chair waited a human-shaped figure, hair and skin and distilled juices molded into limbs and torso and head. Oleksandra mixed the day’s haul with her own collected menses and daubed the slurry around his eyes, caulking the cracks, whispering the letters of God’s secret name to focus the collected essence. She worked for hours, adding final touches, cleaning her tools after each step. The Sefer Yetzirah lied open on the tray beside her, instructions ignored—she’d long memorized the ritual. The open mouth beckoned, inviting the molar. She kissed the lips tenderly, adding saliva, then licked the tooth and nestled it between three baby bicuspids and a cracked incisor.

She leaned back, exhausted from the day’s work and the night’s precision, and studied the finally complete figure. Lumpen face and mottled complexion interspersed with wax and mucous and pus. Strong feet for walking. Thick hands for choking. She’d set a kidney stone in his forehead like a bindi, simply pleased with the aesthetic.

He was beautiful.

Nervous, she consulted the book a final time, then drew a scalpel and scored the figure’s head with both hands.

Aleph

The air shifted, otherworldly.

Mem

A presence filled the room.

Tav

Thrice marked, the presence embraced the essence, turning it to life. Oleksandra rolled her stool backward and the figure stood, crackling but sturdy. Whole. She thought of her homeland, of her nightingale. The people who couldn’t be saved, and the people who could.

“Protect,” Oleksandra instructed, opening the door.

The figure lumbered into the night.

End.

Organ of the Tide

By Christina Ladd

The Parks Department budget, never robust, had passed beyond anemic this year into full-on starvation. There was no money for raises; they weren’t even getting cost-of-living increases. There was no money for contractors or consultants; all the planned projects were shuttered immediately and indefinitely. Hell, there was no money for site maintenance: either Debra was going to have to go down to the beachfront herself and collect garbage, or else they’d have to find a way to spin empties as “pre-sea-glass.” Right. You and what PR team, exactly?

Their Community Engagement Specialist (also IT Specialist, also Avian Expert by dint of her pandemic-induced flirtation with birding) was gone as of this morning.

She managed to endure firing Stacy—barely, and only because Stacy’s IT experience was extremely hirable in other sectors. And after Stacy was gone, she’d even managed to type the words unpaid internship on the job posting site to find a replacement. But she’d broken when she’d tried to add mentoring opportunity. Just put her face in her hands and bawled—in perfect silence, so as not to disturb Dan, her one remaining employee and the only other person in the office.

She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t wring every last drop of civic-mindedness out of some eager idealist, letting them think this was a stepping stone to greater things. How could she advocate for a career in public service when the public didn’t want their service? Everyone was suspicious of government like a reflex, assumed it was up to no good. She held community meetings every week until far too late, receiving criticism that she was underserving everyone but also somehow interfering too much. On the good days she was a public therapist; on the bad days, a scapegoat. Was the scapegoat—the literal goat, back when they did that—meant to be eaten? Sometimes she would look out at the crowd and feel like they were eating her alive.

She shut her laptop in a tearful fury. Damn them all, the citizens and the officials, the latter of whom had just emailed her demanding opioid-proof public bathrooms, so that the Mayor could walk his pedigree labradoodle without thinking of the other epidemic, the one with no vaccine.

The papers called it an “epidemic of despair.” Debra knew what they meant. Stuffing her knuckles under her teeth and biting down to keep any sound at bay, yes, she knew exactly what they meant. 2020 had given her ample time to contemplate all the textures of misery. Hopelessness, she’d found, made her lethargic. Pointlessness, though, made her grimly productive. After all, if nothing mattered, why not work?

And so, after ten minutes of pouring tears and silent screaming, her mouth working but nothing coming out—not like she was holding back, but like she could shriek at such a pitch now that human ears couldn’t register it—she wiped her face, blew her nose, and opened her laptop again.

And found an email that couldn’t be real. It couldn’t. She had given up on church long ago and had stopped bothering to pray around January 22nd, 2017. But here it was: a minor miracle, an un-looked-for grace.

Due to its geographic and environmental features, we have selected Ringfort, New Hampshire as a potential recipient for the Tâmtu Abzû Prize in Sculpture, Category: Public Art. This prize, consisting of a work by the winning artist and grant to cover shipping and installation fees, is meant to (1) enrich the environment in which it is to be placed, (2) benefit the local citizenship, (3) promote cross-cultural ties and understanding with the nation of Armenia, (4)… And on it went.

A grant. Money. And public art. She’d done her Masters of Urban Planning thesis on public art. She didn’t just love it, she had oriented her life around it.

She read the email again, hoping perversely that it was a scam. Because oh, it hurt to get her hopes even this tiniest bit up. She’d still have to apply. She’d still have to work out the logistics. She’d have to hold so many community meetings she might finally go bald from tearing out or straight-up losing her hair.

But public art.

Half-expecting (hoping for) a virus, she opened the attachment. A ten-page word document opened instead, with blank spaces for contact information and statements of purpose.

Is this what hope feels like? It had been so long. This felt like walking in the ocean and the seabed suddenly dropping, the split-second rollercoaster feeling. She was over very deep water. But this felt like buoyancy.

* * *

It was three months before she even received a reply. Three months, and she told herself she’d forgotten all about it like you were supposed to do with grants, but when she saw the email she burst into nervous tears. The subject line was “Congratulations.” Including the period. A stoic bunch, apparently.

Stoic, effusive—they could be killer clowns for all she cared. She opened the email and then had to read it three times before it sank in.

They were being given a sculpture. This remarkable work will be shipped and reassembled… Blah blah blah. What was it? She scrolled.

“Sea Organ.” What? It sounded grotesque, but a quick google revealed it was the other definition of organ, the church kind. An instrument the sea played. Some were built into the ground, but others were freestanding, tall like the prow of a great ship, or like the neck and scroll of a violin.

Free concerts, she started planning. Local musicians.

She read further. There were sea organs in only a few other places: one in Croatia, one in England, and one immanent in Harlem, pending community approval. Rare attraction—tourism opportunity!

She turned back to the email, wondering if they could start any kind of advertising. What does this even look like?

There were engineering diagrams and shipping manifests, but no picture of the sculpture. Does it matter? It didn’t.

Debra got to work.

* * *

The mayor, flattered outrageously into believing that Ringfort, NH was an international player and that this statue was a sign of European deference and respect, agreed to the installation. The councilmembers, only slightly saner, weighed the benefits of potential tourist dollars against potential public outrage and voted in favor of the profits.

Besides, one of them asked, what was there really to get mad about?

That guy was newly elected, but give him six months and he’d understand the chuckles that went around the room. It is a truth governmentally acknowledged that the public can find a way to be mad about anything.

So far, so good, though. She emphasized the word free as much as possible, and worked the same combination of flattery and promise on everyone who showed up to the community hearings. Even the staunchest libertarians subsided into grumbling acquiescence when she implied that they were putting one over on the socialists by accepting. Well, she either had to turn her idealism into pragmatism or despair. She chose pragmatism.

* * *

It was good practice, it turned out. When the team of—engineers? Workers?—showed up, she had to radically adjust her expectations. They didn’t want her help. They didn’t want her conversation. They didn’t even seem to want her welcome party, an admittedly shabby affair with treats purchased on her own dime. They each ate a perfunctory sliver of cake and then demanded to begin work.

Only the lead engineer, a woman they only ever called Dr. Ardzruni, would bother to discuss the installation with her. And only the installation. Not that Debra could manage more. One look at Dr. Ardzruni’s waist-length silver hair and the ripple of her shoulders and she could barely stammer out replies.

Well, it didn’t matter. They were working overtime and paying for everything, even their own meals, even their own hotel. The Motel 6 owner was overjoyed for about five minutes at the business, and then emailed her to complain about “the foreign diggers.” They make weird noises in their rooms, but they don’t talk to me.

Debra wondered if speaking Cantonese would also count as “weird noises.”

She wondered how much Cantonese she could speak these days, the language rusting in her head every day that she lived here. Her mother was getting older; her father was already gone. This close-knit group of—workers? Engineers?—made her terribly homesick.

Maybe it’s time for a change. Jobs were hard to come by these days, but not nonexistent. Maybe this installation could be her farewell to Ringfort, a parting gift (and, sticking up from the knuckles of shoreline, also a middle finger).

* * *

The day before the ribbon-cutting, Dr. Ardzruni invited her to the “moment of completion.” Debra didn’t quite understand, but figured it was some kind of capstone or blessing. This is actually happening.

Unable to sleep from the excitement, she’d started baking. The Armenians didn’t seem to like American cake, but maybe they’d like cookies. A still-warm batch of chocolate chip was next to her in the passenger seat as she drove as slowly as she could, knowing that she was still half an hour early. After this, I can go back to New York. After this, I can be done.

She heard it before she saw it. She had expected it to sound like a woodwind section warming up, a tidal symphony of breath. It wasn’t. It got into her ears like open wounds and stung there, like salt had a sound. Lot’s wife, screaming.

No. No, she liked it. It was beautiful. It had to be.

She took the last stretch holding her own breath, barely daring to blink. But when she saw the statue, she couldn’t pretend any longer. What even…?

The sculpture wasn’t like what she had imagined. The individual parts and half-complete sections she had seen could never have combined in such a way, surely? It was…visceral. Her first imagining had been correct after all: it was like nothing so much as a biological organ, ventricles and sphincters all over it like some instrument of flesh.

Breath wasn’t making this music, nor any deftness of fingers. The sounds of the sea going in were digestive, peristaltic. And the sea coming out was even worse, the expulsion of fluids like bringing up bile. It felt acid, that sound; it stung behind her eyes and at the back of her throat, like the sea was playing her instead of the Sea Organ.

What had they brought here? What had they made?

She drove closer purely by default, her body pulling up and parking like it had a dozen times before. But she didn’t want to be doing it. She wanted to turn around, but a strange fascination had her in its grip. She couldn’t seem to look away.

Or walk away. There she went, putting one foot after the other, getting closer to the sculpture.

Bulbous protrusions pressed out from the steel like the distended bellies of starving children, or like the leaking, too-full breasts of a mother to a stillborn child.

She shuddered. Why would I think that? Who thinks something like that?

“Debra!” It was Dr. Ardzruni, calling to her—but she was already there. Already staring up at the Sea Organ, and all the—workers? Madmen?—staring up with her.

“We complete the Organ,” Dr. Ardzruni declared, her arms wide. Her sleeves had fallen back, revealing heavily tattooed forearms. The moon waxed and waned, waxed and waned along her skin, repetition like a visual incantation. In one hand was a silver spike, in the other a black mallet.

Debra blinked, and Dr. Ardzruni was already poised over the organ, her arm raised high. The early light limned her in red fire.

No. I should stop this. I need to stop this.

She raised one hand. Stopped. She was a woman alone with foreign nationals, and she was a Parks Director with a job to do. What, exactly, was she going to accomplish here?

What are they going to accomplish here?

The mallet came down. The silver spike disappeared into the sculpture with a ringing tone.

And nothing else happened.

The workers turned to each other with handshakes and fist pumps, their congratulations muted but sincere. Dr. Ardzruni reached out to grasp Debra’s hand as well, and her fingers were ordinary fingers, her smile a handsome woman’s smile.

You’re being crazy. It was the stress. Just the stress.

Debra looked down, embarrassed by her fears. But when she really saw the ground in front of her, the churned-up soil crusted like a scab, she felt afraid again. With the sea pooling at its edges the Sea Organ looked freshly amputated, ready for transplant. Into what?

Oh, God. Why was she thinking these things?

This was a mistake.

That thought was worse. Because if she couldn’t stand behind this, there was no way the town would accept it. All her work, all her persuasion for nothing. This has to be for something.

She was walking away before she had registered it, just clomping back from the shore to her car. This has to be for something. She looked back, the Sea Organ humped on the shore not like it had been built there, but like it had been beached there. What is it for, exactly?

She drove away, but she didn’t calm down until she could no longer hear the Organ’s music.

* * *

There were websites that sold ceremonial objects: golden scissors, embossed shovels, even monogrammed red buttons for demolition projects. But even if she’d known what to buy, the department had no budget for it. Instead she got out a ribbon she’d stolen from a Christmas party and painted a pair of office scissors with the last of her gold nail polish. It was an excruciatingly slow process, but nothing felt urgent. Nothing felt, period. She was numb, just a pair of hands making scissors gold. Making art.

Just like the Sea Organ.

Human hands made that? A cloud rose up in her mind, a density of limbs and digits that lifted the Organ wholesale from darkness.

What were these thoughts? She had never been a particularly creative or visual person; she appreciated art for exactly that reason, marveled that others could make real objects from just their thoughts. Now, it seemed she had tapped into some kind of artistic unease. Maybe dis-ease.

Maybe she was sick. Stress-sick, like after finals, the culmination of too much desire and too much focus.

She would finish the scissors and go home to rest. She wouldn’t think about the Sea Organ until she saw it again tomorrow, when it would be a perfectly ordinary sort of strange. It would be all right. She had earned this.

* * *

In her dismay, Debra forgot the painted shears and so ended up handing the mayor a pair of $3.99 scissors from CVS. The mayor, normally a stickler for appearances, barely noticed. He couldn’t stop looking at the Sea Organ. No one could. It looked fecund, but in the way that cancer was fecund: unrestrained, unorganized, eager only to outstrip the life around it. Not a generative fertility; a hunger. An unrelenting, all-devouring hunger.

The mayor licked his lips. They were bloodless. He and his whole staff—the whole crowd, actually—looked washed out compared to the sculpture, which practically pulsed with life.

Everyone clapped politely when he finally sawed through the ribbon, and the two edges fluttered away into the mud. And then everyone dispersed, no time for schmoozing. Since when?

Debra, who had been waiting for some whispered censure or at least a threatening glare, thought they might be too focused on their own complicity to be mad at her right away. She spent the rest of the day in her office, braced for a chew-out that never came. And never came. And never came.

She went for a walk. Circled the building a few times, unable to decide where to go or what to do. Eventually, she found herself in her car, unable to choose a destination until she finally noticed that had forgotten to bring the cookies again. There they sat, still wrapped in tinfoil.

She ate every single one, and then drove herself home.

* * *

The next morning, she had eight texts and two missed calls, mostly from Dan but at least one from the Mayor’s office.

Installation. Urgent.

It was odd how relieving it was to be heading back toward the Sea Organ, given how she’d fled it the day before. It felt like returning her tongue to a missing tooth, trying to get comfortable with it. But that’s an absence. She didn’t understand her own metaphors. She didn’t understand where they were even coming from, these sensory analogies she’d never relied upon before.

There wasn’t time to contemplate it. When she arrived at the Sea Organ there was caution tape up all over again, but this time it was bathed in the flashing lights of the town’s only two police cars and its ambulance. She joined the growing crowd and tried to see what had happened.

Dan found her leaning over the barrier just as she’d glimpsed some other wrong colors, vivid orange spray paint like no letters she’d ever seen.

“Overdose,” he said, no preamble, but that was Dan. “Spraypainted some weird shit. No structural damage, but we’ll have to clean it up.”

Oh, God. She spared a thought for yet another opioid victim before lapsing into practicalities: a death in a public park would require a statement, would result in public anxiety and lower attendance. All that, and then she’d have to come out here and start scrubbing. That and—oh, no.

The Armenians were here. Can they take the statue back? Can they sue us? She wasn’t prepared to do this level of damage control before her first cup of coffee.

But Dr. Ardzruni was smiling. Smiling?

“Debra, it’s good this happens now.”

What?

“Politics, yes?” she said, waving her hand at the chaos. Her smile was conspiratorial. “We can manage this. Okay?”

Debra smiled back nervously. “Okay?”

“Okay!” As quickly as she had appeared she was gone, ducking under the caution tape with practiced authority. No one stopped her. In fact, one of the cops came over and began speaking to her like a colleague, both of them pointing and nodding.

“We should start drafting the community response,” Dan said.

She’s so pretty. And competent. “Uh—yeah.”

She let him lead her away, but not before she got one last look at the Sea Organ. The spray paint was extensive, following the statue’s curves around and around, like the man had been pacing. Writing and pacing, scrawling a manifesto that the Sea Organ was now repeating in its weird tones, a low and mournful chant.

* * *

She emailed the Parks statement to the press without proofreading it. A protest as much as an oversight: if there were errors, she didn’t care.

It wasn’t the first overdose this month. It wasn’t even the first overdose this week. But what could she do? She had no public health expertise, no political clout. She was the Parks Director.

She had to do something, and so she put her head in her hands. I thought I had earned this one thing being all right.

* * *

Debra didn’t read the paper anymore—after 2020 she had news PTSD—but she couldn’t help glimpsing the headline of the local Gazette when she walked past the stand in city hall the next morning.

Two Fatalities Near—

She couldn’t see the rest.

But when she got into the office, she felt a terrible suspicion sink down into her stomach. She was pretty sure that headline had finished “near Sea Organ.” Because Dan wasn’t in the office, and neither was anyone else. The whole floor was quiet.

Shit.

Even with the paper confirming her suspicions on the way out the door, she was unprepared for the scene. The Sea Organ, its circumference still inscribed with lurid graffiti, now bore signs of further violence: there were dark spatters everywhere, some of them dripping into darkish pools, some of them crusting over larger…chunks.

Oh God oh god oh god.

Dan met her at the police tape, a second strand of it up now, the wind braiding it with what was left from the last crime. “You shouldn’t look.”

She turned away, only to find the park overrun with cops and looky-loos, many of them her colleagues. “Where shouldn’t I look?”

Dan sighed heavily. “Poor bastards.”

She tried turning away, but the music of the Sea Organ was all around them, breathing in time to the ocean. She wanted to think it was a mournful sound, or a peaceful one. But the rhythmic noises were just a little too fast, like someone trying to calm their breathing after exertion. She turned again to examine the sculpture, the dark red splatters. “The paper said overdoses. Is that blood? Why is there blood?”

Dan only sighed again. “No idea. Nobody will tell me anything. Or—they will, but nobody’s telling the same story.”

Debra was saved from adding conjecture of her own by the sudden attention of the mayor’s assistant. Matt Rutherford was built like a truck, dressed like a mafia enforcer, and had nuanced opinions about photographing the golden hour. Debra liked him.

“Real shame,” he rumbled.

“Was this another overdose? It looks like—”

“Real shame,” Matt said again.

Debra peered at him. His eyes were glassy, unfocused. “Matt, are you—?”

“All that suffering. It should mean something.”

Dan nodded, clapped a hand on Matt’s shoulder. “It means something,” he said.

“Yeah,” Debra echoed lamely. We all know people affected by drugs.

Before she could find the right platitudes another person approached them, one of the Armenian workers. “Miss Debra Yu,” he said, as formal as ever. “Doctor Ardzruni tells me to tell you: okay.”

“Okay?” Debra said, dumbfounded.

The worker seemed to take this as assent rather than confusion. “Okay!” he said, giving her a thumbs-up and then hurrying past. She blinked at the space where he had been.

“Well, that was—Matt?”

Matt was also walking away. Or wandering, really, striking off across the park rather than toward the parking lot or the walking path back to town.

Dan shook his head. “Real shame,” he said.

“Oh Jesus, Dan, not you too. Can’t anyone say anything else?” she snapped. This was all too weird on top of too stressful.

Dan only shook his head and went off after Matt, leaving her feeling like an asshole. She looked toward the Organ again. The lights played off it in a steady rhythm, like blinking. Like breath.

* * *

Debra went back to the office to find absolutely no new messages. No voicemails, no emails, nothing. Not even spam. Surely there are hot girls in my area? Restlessness sent her to the vending machines in the hall, hoping to find gossip, but the only people around were marching in and out of conference rooms with no time to chat.

She settled for a Twix. They’ll march into my office soon enough. But even after she finally broke down and had the second bar, the mood hadn’t lifted. Her office should have been overrun with people demanding answers and justifications, but nobody had asked for so much as a quote.

And Dan still wasn’t back, she realized, getting up to toss the wrapper. Was he still consoling Matt? Had they gone for a beer or something?

Or maybe this had hit him harder than she’d realized. She didn’t know of anyone with a drug problem in his life, but that didn’t mean much. New Englanders could be private to the point of conspiracy even when the issue was an open secret.

I will always be an outsider here. Her stomach churned from all the sugar and coffee and nothing else, and she just sat back and felt it. All the discomfort, all the cruddiness of being constantly on edge and constantly on empty. She couldn’t keep living like this.

Haven’t I earned a change?

Alone in the office with no one to see her concede to the easy way out, she finally let her shoulders down. She finally opened the document she’d had hidden in a subfolder for several years. She’d hidden it from herself, and yet every year it got longer by a word, a sentence. Today, she added the date.

To whom it may concern: Please accept this letter as my formal resignation…

* * *

She’d dropped her letter into interoffice mail to delay the recriminations, but after two days it seemed that she had instead avoided it entirely. The mayor had only thanked her for her service. Everyone had. They had been warm, sincere almost to the point of excess. Apparently, everyone was happy enough to see her gone. Or they never cared in the first place.

Dan, by contrast, barely spoke to her. Was he giving her the silent treatment, or was he depressed?

“C’mon,” she tried. “It’s a promotion for you.”

“I can’t believe you’re leaving.”

She winced. “I know. I’m sorry. But there’s been surprisingly little outcry, and the Mayor seems like he just wants to let it go. This is a good one to start with. You can get your feet under you.”

He looked at her strangely. “But…”

She shook her head. “I know. But I can’t anymore. And you...look, it’ll be all right. You’ve earned this.”

* * *

A week before she was set to leave, Dan called her early in the morning. So early, in fact, that it barely counted as morning at all.

“Whassamatter?” she managed, catching the call right before it went to voicemail.

“You’ve got to come see this,” he said.

“What—?” was all she could manage. “It’s two-thirty...”

“It’s the Organ.”

She closed her eyes, and almost let herself just give in and go back to sleep. This is all a horrible dream.

“Debra?”

“What happened?”

“The Armenians are here. They want to see you, too.”

Her brain just couldn’t catch up. “Me?”

“They’re leaving soon. Deb, you gotta get here.”

He never called her Deb. No one did. Maybe it’s a signal. She’d seen too many cop shows not to know, even half-asleep, that someone inexplicably ordering a pizza or calling you the wrong name was a cry for help.

And suddenly she was furious. This whole endeavor—the Sea Organ, her time in Ringfort, her whole goddamn career—had just been her groping in the darkness, digging herself deeper, and now finally, the reward: this diamant anger, flawless, unassailable. This has all gone far enough. It didn’t matter that the cops should be handling this, or the mayor. No one else was doing anything, and so she would do it. She would handle it, whatever it was, and then she would leave, guiltless and triumphant.

She shoved her feet into boots and didn’t lace them, tossed a coat over her pyjamas and didn’t bother to button it. She didn’t care anymore, and it felt so good.

* * *

The hard edges of her fury lasted until she was nearly to the site before giving way to the duller, hot-sick anger she remembered from before her despair. I’ll see what happened, then I’ll call 911. It ought to be someone else’s problem, not hers.

She tromped out of the parking lot, seething plumes into the air, and crested the rise.

And stopped.

The Armenians were there. All of them. And just like when they were completing the statue, they stood in a rough circle around the Sea Organ, only this time it was Dan who was inside it, Dan who was holding a mallet and a nail.

She could see the whole tableau because they had lit the area with construction-grade LEDs. The spotlights made the landscape ghostly, colorless. The Sea Organ muttered into the half-light, a song that was not quite words.

“Deb!” Dan called. He waved, still gripping the mallet. It was too comical to be a threat. The whole scene was absurd.

She marched down to meet them all, her anger crystallizing again.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, trying to stab all of them with her glare but mostly focusing on Dan.

“It’s all right,” he replied, his eyes glassy.

“All right? Three people are dead.” She peered around him and around the rest of the group, looking for someone splayed out on the ground. And then she had a horrible thought. “Oh, God. You all killed them, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Oh God, those people...”

“Of course not,” said Dan. “They killed themselves. They knew. They knew.”

“Knew what?” She knew she should be afraid now, all these men around her, watching. But they weren’t watching her. They were watching Dan, their faces impassive.

“Ringfort’s a monster, Debra,” Dan said. “The whole state is, the whole country. It’s easier to get a gun than a new swing set in the park. It’s easier to get Oxy than it is to get penicillin, and a hell of a lot cheaper, too. Cheaper to ignore addicts, cheaper to ignore climate change. We’re out here fighting plagues, and the people who unleashed them don’t care. Monsters.

“But they’re petty monsters. They’re small. You helped me realize, Debra! You thought so much bigger. You brought the Sea Organ here!”

“Dan, it’s a sculpture,” she said.

“Our suffering means something now,” Dan went on, oblivious or indifferent. “All the years working for an ungrateful public and a hostile administration, all the time wasted filling out forms and getting signatures…all that red tape! God, I used to think that expression was so much more apt than anyone knew. The city’s veins are red tape, and you could bleed your whole life away to keep them running.”

“You’re scaring me, Dan.”

“No,” he said, whirling to face her, pointing the mallet at her face. She froze. “No,” he said again. “I’m not scaring you. You’re just scared. You were gonna leave. Well, now you can’t.”

He hefted the mallet above his head. Raised the nail, too.

I’ll fight. I’ll get out of this. Oh God, I will get out of this place and never come back. She raised her own hands to ward off the blow, maybe grab for the mallet, but before she could, Dan brought it down. Not toward her. Toward himself. The nail was poised over his eye—the mallet swung down, came up—connected.

There was no sound.

There was no spurt of blood, no scream. Not even a soft, wet squelch. Dan was up, and then, with a glint of silver, he was down.

The Sea Organ moaned with delight.

It wasn’t just the Organ. The whole crowd of workers began to groan in atonal intervals. Not even their mouths moved, and yet she could feel a terrible motion running through them, a churn like waves in a storm.

The roil went through her too, broke her frozen posture, and she rushed to Dan’s side. He was still breathing, horrible little sips of breath that whistled through his teeth. His eyes were open. Oh God don’t look. But she had to. His right eye was already staring at nothing, but his left was still twitching around the nail. It had gone right through his pupil. Fluids were already starting to seep out and trickle down his cheek, grayish-pink tears.

“—ohgodohgodohgod—” She felt a pointless urge to take his pulse, just for something to do, but she didn’t want to touch him. I don’t want to make it worse. And underneath that thought, the truth: I don’t want to catch it, what if it’s contagious.

“Dan?” Her voice sounded so small. “Dan?”

“He has ascended,” said a voice, a woman’s voice. It was Dr. Ardzruni, but her accent was gone. Somehow, Debra wasn’t surprised. You know they aren’t Armenians. You know their allegiance isn’t to anything so mundane as a country.

“Ascended,” she replied bitterly, indicating the muddy, churned-up ground. “Right.”

“Not skyward ascent,” Dr. Ardzruni said. “Benthic. He has helped to bring the Ušumgallu to the surface.” Debra looked up to see her reach for the Sea Organ, to stroke its surface. The metal gave slightly. Like it was flesh. “Do you know they used to call dragons worms?”

Debra didn’t respond, staring at Dan’s face. Trying not to look at the nail. Failing.

“Did you know if you cut a worm in half, the half with the heart will grow back?”

Debra said nothing. Thought nothing. Felt everything.

“The heart…” Dr. Ardzruni said again, fondly. Was the Organ pulsing, there under her fingers? Was it beating? “The sea flows in and out. Like a pulse. The pulse of the world. So many cultures have a World Serpent, you know. Apes scratching at the truth with sticks. The Greeks came closest: the Hydra, dragon of regrowth. But they thought the power was in its heads.” She patted the Organ, but it was Debra she looked at fondly. “We know better.”

“You brought this thing here,” Debra said dully.

Dr. Ardzruni looked at her with mild surprise. “No, Debra. You did.” She stepped away and approached Debra on the other side of Dan’s body, and slowly extended a hand. “The tide is only the blood. It needs a body. It needs...sustenance.”

Debra looked at that hand, at the peek of tattoos and the clean, calloused palms. It didn’t look like a killer’s hand. She still didn’t take it. They’ll have to reach to kill me. I won’t make it convenient for them, at least. “It didn’t eat the bodies, so did it eat—what, their souls? What do souls taste like, anyway? Chicken?”

Dr. Ardzruni ignored her sarcastic babbling, still smiling faintly. “They were willing sacrifices.”

“Well I’m not willing,” Debra spat. “You hear me? You want me dead you’re going to have to get your hands dirty.”

Dr. Ardzruni finally looked something other than self-satisfied: she looked aghast. “Of course not. The Ušumgallu loves you, Debra. Loves you like a mother. You brought it into the world! It would never harm you. It only wants to make you happy.”

“Well then it can go right back where it came from.”

Dr. Ardzruni looked hurt. “You don’t really want that, do you? In your heart of hearts?” She laughed very faintly at the joke. Debra didn’t really see the humor. “Ringfort has been failing you for years. It’s a very sick place. It’s been eating poorly and sitting sedentary, not doing one single thing that the doctor ordered. You’ve given it the transplant it needs. This is going to be a very special city, Debra. It’s going to do what’s best from now on. And mother knows best.”

Debra kept staring at that outstretched hand. I could still run. I could run all the way to Brooklyn and never look back.

But what would she do once she got there? More attempts at public service thwarted by an even bigger political machine? Another career entirely, starting over while pushing forty? She had so few friends, so few connections, so little family.

An epidemic of despair.

She looked down at Dan. It means something now, he’d told her.

Dr. Ardzruni’s hand was still outstretched, unwavering. And very slowly, Debra reached out and clasped it.

It was all right. She had earned this.

End.

Christina Ladd (she/her) is a writer, reviewer, and editor who lives in Minneapolis. She will eventually die crushed under a pile of books, but until then she survives on a worrisome amount of tea and pizza. You can find more of her fiction and reviews at christinaladd.com

by Maxwell Marais

New Fox Smell

By Livia Llewellyn

“You’re going to be fine. It’s just a month.”

Laurel’s mother speaks to her from behind the screen door. Laurel turns and gives her a tight-lipped smile. The screen metal is thick and gray, and her mother looks like she’s floating within a rectangular storm.

“All of August,” Laurel says. “I’ll come back and have to start school right away, I won’t have any time to get ready.”

“I don’t understand you, we’ve already been over this. You wanted to be invited, I remember how you begged Patricia.”

“That was years ago, mom. You know we haven’t been friends since seventh grade.”

“All the cool girls get invited to the island, you used to say. I’ll just die if I don’t go, you said. I thought you’d be happy that she invited you, that we agreed to let you go.”

“You mean make me go, and for four whole fucking weeks. And once again, I had to quit my job!”

Laurel waits for her mother to shout language! like she always does, but instead she pushes the wooden front door closer to the screen, her face growing darker as it recedes into the house. “You told us you wanted to go on vacation, so now you’re going. It’s done,” she says, every word dripping with the implication that Laurel is already gone, her absence both welcome and irreversible. She’s already looking away, to the living room, the kitchen. Laurel knows she should be used to this, but the pain and anger always surprise her as they flare up once again, flooding her body with cold prickly blood; and for a brief second, she’s overcome with the thrill and relief of leaving this house, running as far as she can from this sticky, predictable cage of a life.

A car horn blares, the second time since Mrs. Gibson steered her massive Cadillac into their small driveway. A pale hand adorned with diamonds and gold beckons from behind the fogged windshield. Rain falls down all around them, smacking through waxy rhododendron leaves and pattering against the sides of the house.

“We’ll take good care of her, Marcy,” Mrs. Gibson shouts as her makeup-perfect face emerges from the passenger side window. Little gold hoops glint from her ears. “Patty’s going to be so happy to have her there. It’s all she’s talked about this summer—honestly, if I hadn’t agreed to come back to the mainland to fetch you, I don’t know what she’d have done.”

Her mother’s voice, behind her. “Remember to say thank you. And stop worrying, Patricia’s still your best friend. Maybe you’ll have so much fun you won’t ever want to come back home again.” The front door closes quietly, but the bolt locks sound like gun shots.

“Don’t you wish,” Laurel mutters, and picks up the suitcase resting at her feet. It’s her old baby suitcase, covered in bright pop-art daisies and peeling travel stickers from all the interesting places they vacationed at every summer. That was long ago, though, and Mom and Dad didn’t see the need to get new suitcases for something they don’t want to do anymore. Well, do with her. Laurel was more fun when she was five, her father once admitted. She’s seventeen now, and hasn’t been fun for years, apparently.

“Hurry up, honey, it’s a long drive and we want to get there before dark!” Mrs. Gibson, shouting out the window of the car. Laurel grabs the handle and runs to the car. The passenger door swings open and she tips the suitcase into the back seat before sliding in.

“Seatbelt on. Don’t want you flying through the window.” Mrs. Gibson smiles as they back out of the driveway and up the street. Laurel straps herself in, then wipes at her wet face, pinching her nose slightly before wiping her hands on her jeans. The car smells like damp pleather and upholstery and chemical-soaked car fresheners, all the normal car smells. But beneath those scents, her nose picks up a sulfurous layer of rotting vegetables and moldering earth, and the sharp musk of unwashed crotch and wet animal fur.

“Those are a lot of trees.” Laurel flicks at the three fresheners swinging from the front view mirror, then swivels in her seat. She counts at least seven—no, nine—more hanging throughout the car.

“It just gets harder every year to get all the smells out.”

“I’m sure.” Laurel presses her lips together, trying not to breath too deep. A fire wouldn’t get rid of those horrible scents. “But wait, isn’t this a new car? I mean, this isn’t your other car. I feel like I see Patricia in a different car every time I see her. I can’t keep track.”

“It’s really doing a number out there,” Mrs. Gibson mutters. They turn onto the avenue, heading toward the bridge. “But the weather is always better on the island.”

“I’ve noticed that Patricia always comes back to school with a tan,” Laurel says. Along with a new car, and always new friends. Nothing ever old for her.

“She does indeed.”

They both fall silent. Houses and businesses rush by on both sides of the avenue, neon signs and traffic lights twinkling in the downpour. Laurel rests her elbow against the edge of the car door, her hand a fist against her face as if she’s knocking herself out. She thinks about the small, laidback hippie grocery story she’d been working at since June, the job she had to quit for this. Last year she had to leave a highly-coveted job as a barista so her parents could send her to a two-week horse camp somewhere in the lower folds of Mount Rainier; the summer before that it was volunteer work with a group of obscenely cheerful church kids in Eastern Washington, for which she gave up shelving books at the local library. She just wanted one ordinary, stupid summer like all her friends had, like scooping ice cream into papery cones at Farrell’s or hanging limp dresses onto hangers in some gross mall store, hanging out after work in hot parking lots, smoking and bitching about the next school year. But Laurel’s not stupid. Whenever she leaves for one of these arranged adventures, her parents get the house to themselves. They get to pretend she’d never been born. Sometimes she wonders if she should be pretending the same thing.

“Patty will be so happy to see you. She gets a little lonely on the island during the summer. But the house has been in my husband’s family for generations, and it’s expected.”

“What’s expected?” Laurel asks.

“Oh, it’s just tradition, to always spend summer on the island. It’s actually very pleasant, the house is quite nice. You can have your own room, or you can share one of the larger rooms with Patricia, or you can both stay in one of the cottages. There’s a nice little library and a big kitchen, a tennis court and pool near the gardens, and plenty of beaches for walking. They’re gravel beaches, though. Driftwood and stones. The entire island, nothing but a ring of driftwood and stones and evergreens. Long trails and animal runs through the evergreens…” Mrs. Gibson’s voice fades, and the squelching of the windshield wipers fills the space. They’re now making their way onto the Narrows Bridge, the thump-thump-thump of each steel-plated section beating like a giant heart under the tires. Every now and then the car gives a sudden small swerve to the left or right as Mrs. Gibson steers it over the metal grates, and all Laurel can think about is the car continuing that swerve, sliding across the lanes and flipping over the railings, sailing through the gray air into the icy churning waters of the Straits below. She grabs the straps of her seat belt, clenching the hard fabric until her fingers hurt.

“I’m surprised Patricia gets lonely, I thought she always invites a bunch of friends over. I’m not the only one in her class who’s going to be there, right?” Laurel doesn’t really care, but anything to get her mind off the fact that they’re speeding on a narrow metal strip suspended in the middle of the air, and that Mrs. Gibson’s pupils are as wide as a cat’s.

“Oh, well, yes, she always invites a few girlfriends over every June, and my sister and two brothers all have teenagers around yours and Patty’s age, so there’s always some of their friends in the house, but most of them are gone before August. To be honest, most of them are gone by the end of June—none of them are ever quite up for surviving island life. Aside from her cousins, Patty’s always the last one in her circle still standing, so to speak. My little baby fox, all by herself, as usual.” Mrs. Gibson chuckles slightly, and pats Laurel’s knee, a friendly “just between us girls” gesture Laurel has experienced from older women more times in her life than she cares to count. She responds with her usual knowing smile.

“What’s to survive, it sounds wonderful. An island all to yourselves, a tennis court, a pool. I’m surprised Patricia would ever want to leave.”

“Well, yes, but there’s no town, of course. So we have to import all our necessities and our pleasures. And you young folks always get bored after a few days and want to go shopping or see movies or whatever it is you do. So I suppose what seems peaceful and cozy to us feels like hell to others, if you’re not used to it.”

“I think I could get used to it. I mean, it doesn’t sound like I’ll get bored. At any rate, I don’t plan on leaving until the end of the summer.”

“I do hope so. You would be the first.”

The fuzzy curve of the bridge flattens out, and the cables dwindle down to nothing on either side: they’re on solid land again, back on the planet, and Laurel’s fingers loosen their grip on the seatbelt. She quietly lets out a long breath which she hadn’t realized she’d been holding in. Once again, she relaxes, watches trees and strip malls whoosh past in a continuous blur. They’re at the outer edges of the Olympic Peninsula, the soft, civilized areas where the wealthy have settled, pouring money into electrical grids and sewer systems and any kind of expensive architecture that makes them forget that they do not really belong in this part of the world. Laurel feels herself slipping into light sleep, the sleep of traveling, where her body floats in and out of some other part of the universe, impervious to movement and the passage of time, while in the present the car and road and world whirl around her paralyzed flesh in a muted roar.

“No real foxes,” Mrs. Gibson murmurs. “Not for years.”

Laurel’s head snaps up. “I’m sorry, what,” she mumbles as she grabs at the seatbelt, which has cinched itself tighter during her short (or was it long?) nap. She stretches her legs out as far as they can go, her sneakers tapping at the curved shell of the interior. Laurel was never a patient traveler—the longer they drive, the more the car seems to cinch itself around them. The rain has slowed to a more typical drizzle, speckling the windows just enough that Mrs. Gibson has to hit the wiper button every couple of minutes to clear the glass. There’s no other cars on the highway, it’s just them, a speck of metal sailing down the empty ribbon of concrete underneath an ocean of clouds. Up ahead, the highway disappears along with the trees into the horizon. It’s like they’re sailing into space.

“I’m so sorry, dear, I thought you were awake. I was saying, there aren’t any actual foxes on the island.”

“Oh?”

“Just so there’s no expectations on your part. Everyone’s always disappointed there’s no foxes. They disappeared a long time ago. Of course, every summer we bring a few new strains over, but they never seem to survive the transplant more than a few days, a week at the most. It’s not an easy place for them to live, I guess, when will this damn rain end?” Mrs. Gibson squints and juts her face at the windshield, coated with a river of droplets despite the squealing efforts of the wipers. Outside, most of the traffic has bled away into the surrounding towns and villages hidden beyond the wide edges of the highway. A strange thought blossoms inside Laurel, her curiosity tinged with a sudden fear.

“Wait, why don’t they survive? What’s on the island that kills the foxes?”

Mrs. Gibson cocks her head and smiles, then gives a quick shrug of her shoulders, as if she couldn’t say. “I guess… I guess they spend so much time being angry that they were tricked onto a strange island that they don’t teach themselves how to adapt and survive. They just run around, screaming like children until they’re too weak to run or fight.”

“Fight what, bears? Please don’t tell me there are bears.”

“No, dear. Not bears. You’d never guess in a million years.”

“Huh.” A small huff of air shoots through Laurel’s nostrils as it dawns on her. “You hold fox hunts. Your family hunts foxes every summer. Is that it? Is that why all Patricia’s friends leave so soon? Because they won’t kill the foxes?”

“Patty said you’ve always thought of yourself as very clever. Very leader of the pack clever. A good quality to have, although now that I think about it, I’m not sure she meant it as a compliment.”

Laurel swivels her body around as much as she can in the miniscule space. “Wow. You know, Mrs. Gibson, Patricia and I haven’t really been close friends for a couple of years now. I mean, I can’t imagine what she’d have to say about me, she doesn’t really know who I am anymore. I don’t even know why she invited me. But I can tell you right now that I’m not going on any fox hunt. I mean, if she remembers anything about who I am, she’d know that.”

Mrs. Gibson places a ringed hand on Laurel’s sweaty knee and gives it a firm squeeze. “You have my word, Laurel, you won’t have to touch a single gun.”

“Thank you.”

Laurel stares out the window again. They’ve long passed the remnants of human life, and the freeway is an unbroken line, no cut-offs or exits anywhere in sight. The trees rush past in a wall so unbroken, so symmetrical, that for a dizzying second it feels as if they’re driving down the same stretch of road past the same hundred yards of forest over and over again, caught in an endless loop. She remembers when she and Patricia and the other kids used to play in the woods just outside their neighborhoods, the few remaining stretches of undeveloped land in a region where the cities grew faster and further and more destructive than clouds of volcanic ash. They ran through those woods like animals, tearing through massive ferns and soaring over fallen branches, weaving their way toward the rough rocky beaches of the Straits where they fell about, panting and staring up at the storm grey skies. As much as they’ve grown apart, Laurel still misses those days, filled with the crash of their feet against the forest floor, their hot panting in the cool, clean air, the echoing silence of the wide world pouring over and through and past them, making them small and enormous all at once. Laurel leans her head against the window again, ignoring the cramping in her legs and hips from the uncomfortably small seat. That damp, sour-sharp smell has only grown stronger, even the grove of swinging tree fresheners can’t hold it at bay. She’s drowning in the scents, in the cloying, overheated air.

“I’m just curious. If you aren’t friends any longer, why did you accept the invitation?”

“I didn’t want to go,” she finally mumbles. Her head lolls down. “My parents wanted me out of the house, they made me go. I don’t want to go.”

Oh, I don’t believe that. Mrs. Gibson’s voice sounds millions of miles, millions of years away. I don’t believe that at all. You’re just like my Patty. I’ve seen you run.

* * *

Her fingers are buzzing. That’s what draws her away from the river of fever-dream half-sleep, where her limp body was floating above a grey, tree-lined road stretching toward a bluish bump hovering far up above the edge of the earth, nestled in a secret layer of space between the stars. Laurel blinks her gummy eyes, drawing her cramped hand out of her pocket. A notification bar on her phone is flashing, but she can’t read the words, they don’t look like any language she’s ever seen before. Outside it’s still late afternoon, time has passed yet still they’re making their way down what feels like that same stretch of six-lane highway that cuts through that same solid wall of evergreens, now crowded against the flat edges of the concrete barriers as if slowly and steadily resisting the intrusion, pressing back until they can once again flow uninterrupted across their own lands.

“No phone service anymore. Not here. Go back to sleep.” Mrs. Gibson’s languid voice cuts through the fuzz: Laurel slides up in her seat, wincing as she lets her right arm, stiff and tingling from being curled up against her head for so long, drop slowly back down to her side.

“I wasn’t really sleeping.” She can barely push the words out of her phlegm-coated mouth. Is she sick? “I thought we’d be there already.”

“Everything is further out, out here. You know how it is.”

Laurel doesn’t respond. She’s struggling to shake off the drugged, cottony feeling in her head, and the smell in the car has grown. It’s angry, powerful and musky, so cloyingly strong it makes her eyes water and her heart flail in her chest. The entire car feels smaller, as if the odors are compressing everything around her. Laurel reaches to her side, fumbling for the window button in the door. It doesn’t yield to her touch.

“I think—I think this is stuck?” she asks, pressing down so hard it feels like she’s going to snap the bone. “It’s so stuffy, I don’t feel good, I need fresh air.”

“All the fresh air is on the island. Stay calm. Be still. Go back to sleep.”

“Please, I feel like I can’t breath—maybe one of the back windows?” Laurel glances over at Mrs. Gibson. A faint smile is frozen on the woman’s lipstick-pink mouth. Other than the slight movement of her chest rising and falling with each breath, she seems almost motionless, as though a picture of Mrs. Gibson sits beside her. So close to her now, as if they were about to hug. Laurel looks down. Her car seat is so small that her thighs spill over its edges, and her knees are firmly jammed against the underside of the dashboard. She raises her hand, placing a palm flat against the ceiling of the car, now only an inch above her head, if even that.

“Did we switch cars?” The words aren’t even out of her mouth before Laurel realizes how absurd they are.

Mrs. Gibson laughs as she sits back, her face and posture natural again, relaxed. “You didn’t smoke something before I picked you up, did you? It’s fine, I know how girls your age just love to experiment.”

Laurel can’t be bothered to smile anymore. Despite the numbing effects of all the scents, she feels cold panic rising inside her, and resists the urge to buck her legs out, smash her fists against the window, anything to make more room. “No, no, it’s not that. It’s—something’s wrong. Something’s wrong with the car.” She places her hand on the glove compartment, sliding her thumb over the latch that’s almost next to her stomach. “And I thought we’d be there by now.”

“As soon as we get to ferry at the end of the bridge.”

Laurel is silent. Something about that statement is terribly wrong. She shakes her head, but she can’t shake off the fuzzy confusion seeping across her eyes, across her mind. Her mouth opens and closes, then opens again. “A ferry?”

“Of course! It’s an island, how do you think we get to it?”

“Right, yeah. Still sleepy, I guess.” Laurel rubs her eyes, then tugs at a hairband around her wrist. Her fingers can barely work their way under the band, all her energy has bled into the damp, cloying air. She lets her hands drop into her lap and stares at them. They look like two dead spiders. Her phone slides onto the floor with a dull thump. She doesn’t have the strength to bother.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she mutters at her hands.

“What dear?” Mrs. Gibson asks.

“If the island is connected by a bridge, why are we taking a ferry?”

Mrs. Gibson lets out a long yawn. “There’s no bridge to the island, only to the ferry. Only the ferry can get to the island.”

“What? I don’t get it.”

“Up ahead. Look.”

Laurel forces her head up and looks out the windshield. “God.” She meant to say oh my god, but the stench in the car rips all the air out of her lungs. They’re traveling up, the highway rising at a steep slant as if they’re moving up the lengthy curve of a bridge, as if the bridge is moving away from the land and shooting up toward the purpling edges of coming night. The trees are gone, and so is everything else—no familiar mountain range jutting up from the distant peninsula or setting sun, and if there are cables and iron arches holding up the bridge, they are invisible against the cavernous bowl of the sky. Far ahead of them and moving closer, Laurel makes out an oily, shimmering movement, an oval-shaped darkness that seems to be eating away at the end of the bridge. She wants to say what the fuck is that, but all that comes out is a soft, breathy fuuuuu.

Mrs. Gibson is whispering, sleep, sleep, the words hot and wet against Laurel’s neck. Laurel contorts her body as much as she can, recoiling from the woman’s heat and touch. Maybe if there’s still enough room, she can slide over into the back seat, and then out through the side door—as she tries to twist herself around, Laurel freezes. Mrs. Gibson is sitting with her hands in her lap, ankles crossed as if she’s sitting in a church pew, waiting to drop four quarters into the collection plate. But her face is anything but calm and serene. Laurel has never seen such a look of determination, concentration, as if she’s preparing for whatever they’re rapidly approaching. Her hands rest in her lap.

“Oh my god—” Cold fear momentarily breaks through all the languid paralysis, and Laurel lurches into Mrs. Gibson, grabbing at the steering wheel. It’s rigid and unmoving beneath her weak grasp. Underneath the dashboard, her feet thrash around the pedals, trying to find the break. There’s so little room—

“Pull up your legs, if I can’t steer the car, we’re going to crash!”

“The car is being steered.” Her voice is barely a whisper. “Keep still. Less painful.”

“No, it is fucking not,” she gasps into Mrs. Gibson’s face. “What are you doing, what is happening?!”

“Rough crossing,” the older woman replies, her lips barely moving. “You’ll survive. You just need to make it through the bridge.”

“What are you talking about!” Laurel shrieks. Overhead, the car roof buckles down in a screech of metal, and spiderweb cracks instantly radiate throughout the windshield. “We’re not anywhere near the fucking water!”

“Look.”

Laurel stares out the remains of the windshield, little slivers of cold wind threading through the cracks and slicing at her face. That musky animal scent, the dank smell of unwashed skin and genitals, thick overripe secretions bursting from swollen scent glands: it’s coming from her. It’s her.

Outside, the highway is flat against the horizon, growing smaller and smaller as it disappears into the pulsing, gobbling black dot. It’s not perspective, Laurel realizes, as her body begins to violently shake. The highway, the car, the skies: they’re all growing smaller, slipping into some hole or mouth or orifice so infinitesimal that it can barely be seen.

The entire front of the car smashes inward, as if a titan’s invisible hands clapped and crushed a bug. A high-pitched scream fills the interior space: she knows it’s coming from her, but it’s not of her, the scream is its own creation, coiling out of her mouth like a frightened snake. The steering wheel has pushed forward into Mrs. Gibson’s chest, she never had a chance to let out more than a wet muffled grunt before her chest crunched inward, and the car is still racing down the highway, no longer being steered but pulled. Laurel feels and hears the roaring engine, the wheels spinning against the pavement, there are no words for this pain, no words only bright images that explode like song from every part of her body that is now a mouth, and there is—

* * *

There is the car with all of its hard and sharp metal pieces and the dark engine collapsing into itself like a dying sun and there are human bones and all the beautiful strands of nerves and bones like liquid moving around the hot strips of car and their faces split open like decaying flowers and legs and arms rip away, replaced by strips of tires, pistons, shards of polished steel smashing their way up torsos and through hearts, and everything is growing smaller again. There are strands of blue electricity that crackle and pulse as they slide through and around the grinding mass of metal and flesh—the only sentient remains of two passengers traveling a cosmic route they could never have survived in their original form. There is liquid darkness, the elastic liquidity of pulverized organic matter as it passes through the hole, the liquid of the metals as it mingles with bones pulled into strands as long as epochs, rivers of engine oil and shit and blood and the faint chemical scent of paper trees and now it is a Planck length-wide being stretching across the arc of the universe, an infinitesimal ferry sailing through currents of time and pockets of antediluvian life with its two miniscule passengers, until it slows a billion years into an undiscovered future or past, pools out and down, sloughing off its cargo on a quiet gray island shore as it once again disappears into the unknown.

Little flecks of bone spiraling up from the goo, teeth pulling themselves out of paste and chromium drops, nerves and wires and cables spiraling back into a shape they remember only vaguely as a dream. Ravens shout in alarm from the trees as two shapes emerge and float away from the cauldron of chaos at the end of the bridge, a four-lane bridge that becomes a two-lane road disappearing into the somber stillness of a quiet coastal island, surrounded only by the gentle lapping of—

* * *

Waves crash down and in and recede, the sound flowing like broken glass over Laurel’s body. With shaking fingers, she rubs her gummy eyes until they open. She stands on a beach that flows unbroken in both directions until it disappears with the curve of the land. The beach is wide and flat, a shore of smooth black and gray granite pebbles. Behind her, the edges of the beach are lined in long piles of smooth driftwood—entire tree trunks tangled with smaller branches, lengths of splintered timber, and the occasional pale ivory of broken skulls and bones. Beyond the driftwood rises an unbroken wall of evergreens.

She runs her hand over her face, arms, breasts, stomach. Under the reddish-brown layer of viscous gore, her body feels unsplit, unwounded. Laurel grabs at her hair. It hangs in wet chunks from her head, matted and sticky, but it’s all there. She slicks her hand down her arm, trying to wipe off the semi-congealed blood. It sloughs off and plops to the wet rocks at her feet, but even as she raises her hand again, her skin ripples and contracts, sending another fresh layer to the surface. Laurel raises her fingers to her nose and inhales deeply. She knows this smell intimately, recognizes her own scents and the sticky texture of the chunky blood oozing from every pore in her skin. Overhead, a thousand pale moons shine weakly in the gray skies.

The sound of rocks crunch against each other: Laurel drops to a crouch and presses into the driftwood as a shape emerges from around the bend in the beach. Slender and tall, reddish-brown skin glistening under the light of the overcast skies. The shape pauses, looks furtively around, then stumbles forward. Laurel knows that face.

“P—Patricia?”

Two rows of glaringly white teeth emerge from the dry, brown-blooded sea of its face.

“It hurts the worst the first time.”

Laurel whips her head up. Mrs. Gibson stands at the top of a small path winding through a break in the driftwood, her skin stained as dark as crushed blackberries, the pink lipstick obliterated from her mouth.

“No way to avoid that, I’m sorry to say. Because you girls never obey me. You never listen to what I say.”

Laurel rises up from her crouch, fingers curling into fists. “Where are we? What happened to me?”

“We crossed the bridge, then took the ferry to Fox Island.”

“This isn’t—” Laurel turns and looks out across the gently lapping waters. Strange shapes move within the gray fog that coats the coastline, shapes as massive as buildings. Larger. A soft, thunderous rumble emanates from them, or some other unseen colossus, sending little quakes through the beach and up Laurel’s body until she trembles in time with the vibrations. Further to the left, a shaft of dark light slashes through the fog and clouds like a sword, the low bass of a horn accompanying each rotation. There aren’t any lighthouses along the Straits. There never have been.

“This isn’t—where did you take me, where are we?”

Mrs. Gibson smiles. She wipes the blood away from her face: it stays off, the skin underneath remains pale and white. “I’d think the more pressing question would be, what have I become, or maybe, where did I park the car, but you can be forgiven for not quite understanding the situation.”

A calm, cold numbness washes through Laurel, that she gradually realizes is a combination of white-hot rage and uncontrollable fear.

“What have I become?”

“You haven’t become anything. You’re simply in a place where you’re more you than you could ever be. More girl than you were back home.” Mrs. Gibson pulls a blood-soaked pack of cigarettes out of her jacket pocket and slides one out with her broken nails. “More animal. More alive.”

“Take me back to the car, now.”

“You better worry about your own engine, sweetheart,” she says, turning away as she heads into the woods. “In fact, you and Patty had both better start running—they’re headed right toward you!” she shouts back, coils of acrid smoke following her words. “They can smell you from a million miles away, and you no longer have that new car smell!” Laurel stares at the shadowed space between the trees where Mrs. Gibson used to be, then turns back to the beach.

“What! The Fuck! Is going on!!” Her ragged screams bounce back and forth across the waters. Immediately from within the looming gray bank of clouds, a roar claps back across the water, so unimaginably loud that all the driftwood along the shore clatters from the force of the sound. Wet warmth floods her crotch, trickles down her legs.

Patricia lopes past her in a quick animal gait. She’s wiped her face clean, just like her mother. “You’ll be the one, I know it. I told mom, this time I wanted someone who’d last the whole summer with me. Not a friend. Someone who’d hate me enough to survive.”

“Survive what!?”

“Duh, the fox hunt, you dork!” she says with that familiar bright grin as she breaks into a run. Laurel watches as she grows smaller and smaller, disappearing around the curve of the island. She looks out at—the ocean? the Sound? Columns and mounds of dark flesh are beginning to take shape, slowly emerging from the storm and fog. Her feet are stepping back already, legs stumbling backwards up that little path, even though part of her wants so badly to see, to see. But the thought is fleeting and alien, that part of her brain is shutting down, and now Laurel’s running, legs pumping like pistons through forest choked with green ferns and bramble, running until she’s nothing more than a streak of fresh red on the ancient land, a pine and cunt-scented arrow pointing the way for the hounds and hunters to meet her at the end.

End.

Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica, whose fiction has appeared in over 80 anthologies and magazines, including The Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Her short fiction collections Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors (Lethe Press) and Furnace (Word Horde Press) were both nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, and her short story “One of These Nights” won the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Short Story. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com and on Twitter and Instagram.

Livia Llewellyn is a writer of dark fantasy, horror, and erotica, whose fiction has appeared in over 80 anthologies and magazines, including The Best Horror of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica. Her short fiction collections Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors (Lethe Press) and Furnace (Word Horde Press) were both nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, and her short story “One of These Nights” won the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Short Story. You can find her online at liviallewellyn.com and on Twitter and Instagram.

The Hollow House

By Scott J. Couturier

Some may think it strange to remark on an unremarkable house. However, as with all things, obscurity is a thing of degree. Consider sightseers on modern ghost tours. Isn’t it more titillating when the obscene crime occurred in a regular neighborhood, in a regular house, with stained vinyl siding and smudged windows, a backyard pitted by gopher-holes? Horror lurks most profoundly in the everyday, I’ve always found.

But this house…truly, frankly unremarkable. An old box frame, with warped gray siding and windows that seem both too narrow and close-set. Built on one of those convenient quarter-acres, with drooping maples in front and a mess of pricker bushes out back, blocking off the street. Two stories, with a basement of unfinished cement, never used for anything but storage and laundry. A cold, unassuming house, beige front door fixed with a simple brass knocker. A feeling of perpetual vacancy hovers about it, even when occupied; I know because I went there to visit an old, dear friend who was dying. If her spirit couldn’t fill up that house, no one’s could.

Her name was Daisie Rosencrantz, and she was a medium. We’d worked together frequently in the past, intercessing on behalf of families tormented by spirits or elemental forces, sometimes going together to cemeteries simply to comfort the restless dead. She possessed an extraordinary gentleness of nature, which drew disembodied souls her way; she would often joke, with a grin, “The first thing you see after dying will be me.” About five-foot-four, with restless olive-green eyes and a complexion, towards the end of her life, wizened by experience and not a little hardship, she was nonetheless always a formidable presence, even after the cancer began its slow advance.

When I got the message to come visit her we hadn’t seen each other for a few years. The pandemic forced everyone inside, both indoors and into their own heads. Daisie had always wanted to retire someplace nice “Up North;” lockdown, and the sibilant mental voices of those in isolation, made her finally pull the trigger. She bought the unremarkable house over the phone after taking a guided virtual tour, never once having visited the town of Oak Falls, Michigan, where she hastily relocated in autumn of 2020. I kept up with her on social media, though she was never an enthusiastic adapter. “I already hear them in my head,” she’d say. “Why would I want them chattering away on my computer, too?”

Well, 2021 came and went, whatever that’s worth. I was dealing with my own demons. Alcohol, a divorce, a kid who wouldn’t talk to me—really, summaries suffice. A few times I even toyed with the notion of going out to the shed and blowing my brains out, but then I’d remember all the traumatized spirits encountered alongside Daisie, most lingering out of remorse for killing themselves. Of course, they usually realize there’s no need for regret and pass on almost effortlessly after a few minutes’ urging. Even ghosts need someone to talk to; more than once I’d teased that Daisie should apply for a therapist’s license.

So here I was, 2022, Happy New Year, and I started getting messages from Daisie. “I hate the house,” she’d say, “it’s empty, it’s just too empty.”

“Well, order some furniture online,” I texted back the first time. “Get some bookshelves. Spruce the place up.”

“That’s not what I MEAN,” she texted back, and that was it for a little while. But soon she was imploring me to come visit her, practically begging me, saying she couldn’t explain but had to demonstrate what she meant. “It’s too empty,” she wrote, sounding frantic. “Empirically. I’m afraid to die here.”

She was, she admitted, pretty sick by this point, cancer of the bone radiating outward through every cell. I saw pictures of her looking lean as a scarecrow, with dark bags under her eyes, her teeth and hair falling out from the relentless chemotherapy. She believed in science—not like so many crackpot psychics and mystics. She was a dear one, Daisie, a true and noble soul.

What could I do with that entreaty? Still, I bought my plane ticket with a grimace of reluctance. Arriving in Grand Rapids, I rented a car and drove ever-further north, through endless forest, until a more unenlightened version of myself might’ve worried about tipping over the world’s edge. But, I just followed the road signs, infrequent as they were, pointing the way to Oak Falls. “There aren’t any waterfalls around here,” she’d told me. “I figure they named the town after how often folks slip on the ice.”

Arriving, I saw the house as I’ve described it, unremarkable in every way, blanketed in thick layers of snow. Icicles hung from the slumping porch, the too-narrow windows glowered, the few maple trees curled sideways as if deformed by an unseen weight. I’d thought the place looked unpleasant in pictures she’d sent me, but seeing it in February, in the depths of winter’s deadness, unleashed a torrent of dismay and exhaustion I couldn’t entirely attribute to jet lag. Going to the beige door, I knocked three times, then let myself in when Daisie’s weak voice trembled out to me, “It’s open.”

I found her in the narrow living room, hunched up beside a gas fireplace and covered by some dozen-odd quilts. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said, with a surprising level of vehemence, though her face looked ashen-gray, and she made no move to rise and embrace me. “How was the trip? Tell me, tell me everything. This house needs voices to fill it up, if nothing else.”

Leaving that cryptic comment aside, I made us tea, and we were soon engaged in a lively discourse, recounting our days exploring the paranormal together. At length the conversation turned to a promise I’d made, long ago, when Daisie had been ill and thought she might not recover. “Remember,” she said now, with a gap-toothed grin. “You swore to contact me after death. A séance, with all my loved ones attending—the whole nine yards. You swore, you know you did.”

“Of course I remember,” I said, smiling back at her even as a shiver trickled down my spine. Something about the house felt—off. Not in the way haunted places normally feel off, a lurking-but-intangible awareness, the restlessness of immaterial presences. This place seemed, instead, empty of all energy and intention, almost unlived-in, with no past memories or history attached to it. I described the feeling to Daisie, adding, “This would be a lousy place to convoke spirits. It’s so quiet! Like the house is dead, us inside its corpse.”

Daisie’s eyes went wide, and she lurched forward violently from her chair, one claw-like hand reaching to clutch at my lapel. “You can feel it,” she said, breathlessly. “The emptiness. I told you this house was too empty, and you pretended not to understand.”

Reaching up, I held her hand tenderly in my own, answering, “But I didn’t understand. That’s why you called me here, isn’t it? To experience this feeling, this sense of… nullity.” No other word seemed appropriate.

Releasing me, she leaned back in her chair, fixing me with a look like a thrown spear.

“This house is over a century old,” she told me. “And yet, nothing that’s happened here has left an imprint. These walls, these rooms—it’s all like a blank sheet, as if the lives that once existed here were negated by the house itself.” She shivered and released me, though a fire continued to flicker restlessly in her dark eyes. “I bought the place because I figured it had to be at least a little haunted. Just from the looks, the age, the vibe. Now I realize it was drawing me in, because that’s what it does. Like a black hole, devouring, giving nothing back but x-rays. That’s what this house is, a kind of radiation.”

I gaped at her for a moment before looking down at the dark-stained floorboards. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far. The atmosphere does feel sterile, but then that’s not really a bad thing if you want someplace to retire.” I felt like a fool even as I said it.

She smiled at me, pityingly; I could hear the voice of her younger self in my head, A medium never gets to retire. “Of course, not every house becomes haunted in the same way,” she said instead, “but here, it’s a feeling of entropy. Of the soul’s decay. If I die here—dear God, if I die here, there won’t be anything left of me afterward.” She said it so frankly, eyes popping wide, that for a moment I could only accept her statement as fact. As a result, I felt the dread she must be feeling. A house that destroyed memories instead of collecting them, where even ghosts couldn’t survive; a place antithetical to the past, to the survival of anything beyond the momentary. Again that shiver shook me, and I rose to my feet, making a big show of turning up the gas jets.

“I could just barely afford this place,” she said to me, looking away from the flames. “I sunk every penny I had saved into it—this ugly old box, a house empty even of what life tries to call it home. It’s a hateful situation, and I just know I can’t die here.”

I made a promise, then and there, to help her, no matter what it took. Chemo does strange things to people, but regardless of what was truth and what was delusion, her present living conditions were affecting her negatively. Over the next few days I worked the phones, finding a care facility Daisie could transfer to, someplace where she’d be close to other patients going through the same thing, a place doctors could always be on hand, all helped along by donations from a few of her grateful old-time clients. “Stupid of me,” she admitted more than once. “To invest in this place, like I need to make any plans for the future. I won’t be here much longer. I know that now, no matter what the oncologist says. But at least I won’t die in there. Thank you, thank you for helping me escape from that emptiness.”

She set up all her arcane possessions in that tiny room, her seeing-crystal and her Tarot cards, starting up friendships with some other women in the ward. I stuck around for over a week, just to make sure she was settled; to save money, I stayed in the empty house. Of my time there I have nothing to report. No nightmares, no moments of relaxation or perturbation, nothing but a faceless impression of time implacably proceeding. I felt numbed by the place. Not a menacing sensation, more impassive and impersonal, like a poison spring or vale where toxic vapors gather. Of course, I do a disservice by these comparisons. It was all I could manage to go back there each night, to lock myself in and feel the enclosure of oblivion, the walls and ceilings receding to infinite abysses, emptiness manifest in the air like a musk. But nothing else. Nothing.

Finally it seemed Daisie was well and truly settled. “I can’t sell the house,” she said to me then, shaking her head with such vehemence it seemed her withered neck might snap. “Who knows how many souls it’s eaten? Or not eaten, nothing so active as that. It’s not hungry, just too empty for life to exist inside, though it draws life in by its nature. You understand, I’m sure, and anyways I can leave all the rest of my junk there. No matter if it gets consigned to nothingness.” It was a pun befitting her earlier, sprightlier self.

Imagine my appalled surprise when I awoke that last intended day in the house, rising from dreamless sleep, stretched and went downstairs to make coffee, only to find Daisie’s wasted body sprawled face-down in the foyer, her arms crooked and rigid at her sides, fingers gripping the shag carpet with the tenacity of rigor mortis. No one could figure out how she left the facility; the cameras showed nothing, no one on the floor saw her leave. And how, for that matter, did she get across town? She’d become sicker ever since my arrival, seeming to shrivel inwards, a decay she blamed on the house. “But at least,” she’d repeated, over and over like a mantra, “I won’t die in there.” Yet, here she was, lying dead in the one place she abhorred above all others. The doors and windows were all locked, I should point out, from the inside. She didn’t have a key.

Legal matters needed wrangling, so I stayed around as February bled into March. Doing some research, I discovered the property had been home to a rotating cast of nobodies, mundane families with made-up-sounding names like Haussbend and Fentilwick, most owners dying inside or around the house in sudden, but everyday, ways. Given this knowledge, that the place was so energetically barren made even less sense. It proved impossible to discover who had built the house, or when, as if this data had already vanished beyond some event horizon.

In the midst of everything I never forgot my pledge to conduct a séance, formally proving the survival of Daisie’s soul beyond death. Ever since college she’d nursed a grudge against the classical philosopher Epicurus, who declared there was no afterlife, the soul dissolving with the body back to its constituent particles, “like spilled water from a broken vessel.”

Her diatribe still echoed in my ears: “So our souls are just atoms, destined for dissolution, bouncing about in a big deathless void? But what about quantum entanglement, spooky action at a distance? Epicurus never heard of those things, nor had Lucretius.” Her voice rose in reprimand as she declared, “Well I’ll show him. Just because the old fool’s third eye was puckered up tighter than a crow’s cloaca.”

At first I thought of phoning up some of our old acquaintances, or at least setting up a Zoom meeting so everyone could participate as planned. However, it ended up just being me, a nurse from the care facility named Grace, and old Mrs. Petersen from next door, who overheard us plotting through the skeletal garden hedge and demanded she be allowed to participate. “She seemed a nice sort,” she said of Daisie, trying to conceal the prurience of her curiosity behind concern. “Would only be proper for me to say goodbye. Or is it hello?”

The house, as ever, gave no hint of conscious intention. The air inside – stifled, heavy, motionless, drear. I walked from one room to another like someone in a dream, my life slipping away in trickles, as if I bled from a thousand tiny wounds. The thought of conducting the séance here unnerved me, though there was no other choice. This is where Daisie had come to die; this is where her spirit would linger the strongest.

We got together on a dark, icy night, all the blinds drawn and the lamps turned down low. Grace, still dressed in her orderly outfit, sat across from me, the seeing-crystal positioned between us. “She told my future in that,” she said. “Or at least pretended she did. Said I had a lot to live for, a lot more joy and happiness in store. She was a kind old woman. Funny, I keep forgetting her name.”

I smiled in sympathy, tears stinging in my eyes. Mrs. Petersen looked from me to Grace, as if realizing just how little reason she had to be there, then crossed her arms and said, “She told my Harold he had a green thumb. She was looking forward to seeing the begonias come up this spring. Really, she seemed very nice.”

I nodded, then reached beneath the table and drew out a Ouija talking-board. “Keeping it simple,” I said as I opened the toy-like box containing the very real instrument within. “Still can’t believe they stock these in stores for kids.” Pulling everything out, I positioned the planchette neutrally and invited Grace and Mrs. Petersen to put their hands on it. I laid my fingers on the cheap-feeling plastic, closed my eyes, cleared my head, and called out in a sonorous voice, “We are here to speak to the departed. Is there anyone in this room who would like to make their presence known?”

Nothing happened. No small gust of air or drop in temperature, not the slightest hint of anything stirring in the whole house. Just that heavy, stagnant, ugly feeling, hanging off the air like peeling wallpaper, an adumbration of static doom. We all felt it, to varying degrees of being able to understand exactly what we felt, and I trembled and cleared my throat before calling out a second time, holding a picture of Daisie firm in my mind, “Is there anyone present? Anything at all that would like to speak with us?”

Now the planchette trembled beneath our collective touch, eliciting a gasp from Grace and a startled “Oh my!” from Mrs. Petersen, whose eyes flew wide as widow shades. We all stared down with a mounting sense of horror as the planchette dragged itself, agonizingly, toward the bold-face NO on the talking-board. It came to rest with the magnifier blowing up the word, NO, trembled a moment, then refused to budge from that spot. I called out again, asking for Daisie by name, and the three of us struggled to move the planchette, but it was as if the plastic had fused to the board. NO, there was no one there, nothing there at all.

At last we tore up the board and burned it in the fire pit out back, watching as the planchette melted into a fiery ooze, never once moving from that definitive answer, NO. After a round of purification chants and a thorough smudging with white sage, we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways.

I know, now, how right Daisie was in her apprehensions about that house. Approximately a year after our séance, Mrs. Petersen was found inside, dead of a heart attack, no reason at all to be there. Except, “She starting acting real weird about the place,” her husband said. But that was all, end of story. I decided to check up on Grace, gratefully discovering she’d moved out to California within the last year.

All the more disconcerting, then, when her body was discovered in the house scarcely two months later. She’d disappeared from Los Angeles a week before, apparently hitch-hiking across the continental US, though the authorities could never comprehensively account for her movements. Her body was frail-looking, malnourished and bluish-pale, as if she had suffered long exposure to the elements.

The autopsy revealed no hint of foul play. It seems Grace stumbled on the edge of a rug, fell and hit her head on an endtable. Nothing extraordinary, except she shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Friends back in California reported her acting distant and out-of-sorts, though most had an odd difficulty remembering her name. “She’d stay quiet, except when she talked about this house,” one girl told me, a nurse she’d worked with at St. Michael’s Hospital of the Bleeding Heart. “Ugly, beige coloring, narrow windows. It was like she couldn’t get it off her mind.”

Funny thing is, I can’t stop thinking about the house myself. It haunts me with its intimations of emptiness, its lack of ability to register what happens within it. No house should be like that—devoid of any care for its inhabitants, a black well with walls and a roof, a place people fall into, vanishing forever. I’ve tried to talk with Daisie by board, even reaching out to Grace and Mrs. Petersen, but the ether is clear of their faintest wisps. No atoms, even, remain of their essences, no aggregate to go on and reincarnate, or ascend, or descend. Just a blankness, a place where memory itself is unmade. I keep their names written down, ink retaining the information even as it vanishes repeatedly from the mind.

Epicurus claims our component atoms go on through eternity, even though we do not. But that house – somehow it absorbs the atomic imprint of its inhabitants, not erases but effaces them, subsuming them into its blankness. Almost a kind of Nirvana: we’re not all happy to learn for-absolute-certain that there is an afterlife. Some of us live in terrible expectation of punishment, of reckoning. I once did, though that’s not really a part of this story. Suffice to say I’ve wondered, often, if I should go ahead and get it over with, give myself to the house willingly. The only other option is to wait for its placid wave of gravity to wash over me, to draw me back to that beige door with the plain brass knocker, that hollow house of no identity, of vanished lives and silenced voices, where nothing is remembered, every moment only existing in the now, scoured from eternity’s record like a blemish.

Over and over I think I should go, but then I realize it’s not time. If it were time I’d be there already; no reason to rush things. The Universe, like that house, moves at its own pace. At any rate, I’ve bought the place and kept it off the market, and it’s not notorious. Nothing to see here, just blank windows and silent rooms, dust-covers stirred by no supernal presence. Truly an unremarkable house.

End.

Scott J. Couturier is a Rhysling-nominated poet and prose writer of the weird, liminal, and darkly fantastic. His work has appeared in numerous venues, including The Audient Void, Spectral Realms, Tales from the Magician’s Skull, Space and Time Magazine, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and Weirdbook; his collection of Weird fiction, The Box, is available from Hybrid Sequence Media, while his collection of autumnal & folk horror verse, I Awaken In October, is available from Jackanapes Press.

Currently he works as a copy and content editor for Mission Point Press, living an obscure reverie in the wilds of northern Michigan with his partner/live-in editor and two cats.

Leaden Within the Lines

By Jennifer L. Collins

Fenton shrugged his blue crayon along the outline of the giant’s shoulder. Maybe ninety percent of the blue stayed within the giant’s form, just that extra ten percent jittering outside the thick black line.

Was that about what she saw? Ten percent?

A slick of warm sweat thickened along her spine, tacky in the humid classroom. Fenton was always cold, always complaining that the classroom was as freezing as Frosty the Snowman even when the thermostat read eighty and the other children complained, and so she’d opened up the windows that day while he practiced. Opened up the windows and sweated full beads of adrenalin-ridden awareness while the boy smiled over his crayons and they waited for Fenton’s father.

“Can I...”

Get it together, Gaylie. Your voice is cracking. He’s five, for fuck’s sake. You want your nerves to bleed off you and into him? Defeat the purpose here?

“Fenton, can I get you some water? A snack? I’m sure your father will be here soon, but while we wait...”

The boy hummed to himself and exchanged his sky blue tool for a forest green one. He didn’t look at her to answer, remaining focused on his coloring. The giant’s fingerless glove went green beneath his fingers.

Ten percent. No more than ten percent outside the lines.

“No, Miss Gaylie. I’m fine. Thank you very much.”

Her phone buzzed, the senior Fenton’s number—long since memorized in blood—blazing at her from her screen. She took a breath before she picked it up. “Hello?”

“Ah, Miss Gaylie, there you are! Remind me, do I head left or right to reach you and Fenton?”

She swallowed bile, toxic in her throat. “Left, Mr. Knox.”

“Oh, call me Fenton, Gaylie! Be there in a jiff.”

The phone clicked silent, and she fumbled it back to her desktop.

Fenton looked up from his coloring, eyes squinted with focus. The image of the man whose voice echoed in her brain, too calm to be believed. “That Dad? He comin’?”

Her tongue ran against her teeth, once and then twice and then three times, hard as she could bear the pressure. “He’s coming. Be a good boy and keep practicing, alright? For me, Fenton?”

For the love of god, for me, please.

As agreeable as ever, the boy grinned and turned back to his giant.

The green crayon in his hand jittered, taking a long foray outside the line of the giant’s arm. God, but he was painting the giant’s glove and forearm both green, as if he’d not noticed the line of the glove along the giant’s wrist.

Damn, damn, damn, damn. Not today, Fenton. Please.

“Fenton—” She choked on her words, jarring the crayon further. “Fenton, why don’t you start on a new picture? Fresh for your daddy to see your best work?”

He glanced back down to his giant, frowning.

“You can finish the giant tomorrow,” she promised. “First thing.”

His little cupid lips pursed, but his hand shifted toward the crayon box as if with new ideas. “You won’t let anyone else have this book? Till I’m done with him?”

Footsteps echoed along the hallway outside the classroom, loud in the emptying school. “Promise.”

That decided him. Fenton flipped pages forward to some picture he must have already had his heart set on. She stood, smoothing the pencil skirt she’d bought just for this afternoon, and saw he’d landed on a picture of the harp that Jack stole from the Giant. Elegant strings slung between graceful limbs of the frame, a damsel’s face and arms outstretched in greeting of her new white knight.

Fine lines, thinner than those of the giant. And with more detail to the expressions and shapes, god help her.

“Fenton!” The boy glanced up, a maroon crayon clenched in his fist. “Focus on your lines, remember? Gentle on the page. Just like we’ve been practicing.”

The boy sat up straighter, and grinned and nodded as if she’d just set him up on a military mission.

“Miss Gaylie, how are you?” Fenton Knox’s narrow frame all but filled the frame of her door, one gloved hand solid on the doorknob. “And, Fenton! Boy, did you grow since this morning?”

She forced a smile, watching Fenton drop his crayon and bounce up to his feet and toward his father. The high neck of her sleeveless blouse felt like a constrictor around her throat, but she stood still and waited as the father hugged his boy, as loving a parent as might have been glimpsed in a Hallmark movie.

Except that one of his hands shut her classroom door behind him, and twitched shut the deadbolt, before finishing the embrace of his son.

Her eyes darted to the harp in the coloring book. Fenton had barely started. From where she stood, no color shifted beyond the careful lines of the illustration. None at all.

Smile growing more honest, she focused back on the father and son. The father was whispering in the boy’s ear, honest love all over his face and in his gentle hands. He patted Fenton on his lower back and sent the boy back to his desk before standing, his eyes landing on the teacher. He gestured toward the little meeting area by the window, set up just for these parent-teacher conferences. As he well knew. “Shall we?”

“Of course.” She smoothed her skirt and followed him back past her desk, allowing herself to breathe in the fresh autumn air of the outside, so much cooler than her classroom, before taking a seat across from the father. The chair was cozy, cushiony and built so that she could pull it sideways and sit in comfort for storytime. Today, she sat with her back straight and her legs and knees and ankles all pressed together. Ready.

Well...theoretically ready.

“Fenton tells me there’s been more coloring in class this last week.” The man’s blue eyes twinkled, in on the joke, and her cheeks warmed in response.

“Well, just a little bit. Given your concern...”

A perfectly formed shoulder twitched. “I didn’t mean for you to change your lesson plans, Miss Gaylie. That was...not the point of my last visit.”

She forced a smile, holding her gaze against his.

Do not look at the harp. Do not look at the harp.

Don’t you fucking dare look at that fucking harp.

“Mr. Knox, I assure you the children are learning what they need to learn. Lesson plans sometimes shift...for many reasons. And given your concern, I wanted to make sure we were covering all bases. Any good teacher would do the same, particularly when...well, when only one concern is being communicated by parents.” She forced a laugh that sounded too high by full decibels. “If I had different parents complaining about different things, you wouldn’t get such service.”

The man’s eyes squinted in the same way his son’s did when examining a particularly difficult line. “And you’ve had cases where different parents were communicating different concerns?”

Her fingers clenched her skirt. “No, Mr. Knox, but—”

“Let’s look at his coloring, shall we?”

The man rose as if he’d been unfolded from a box of building materials, brought to full form in one terrifying instant of expectation. Before she could breathe again, he’d moved over to Fenton and leaned in to loom over him. As supportive of his son as he was a terror to the teacher. “What’s this, Fenton? You started a new one for me?”

Fenton shifted his purple crayon around the edges of the harp. No more than three percent’s out, I’m sure of it. He positively glowed as he nodded agreement. Just for his dad.

“And what were you working on before?”

“Mr. Knox—”

The man raised his hand fast, cutting her off in a single gesture as words constricted in her throat, knotting themselves in a braid along her windpipe.

“I was working on a giant, Dad. Miss Gaylie said I can finish tomorrow.”

“Show me?”

The pages flipped, one by one. She tried to speak, but choked on the sounds before they matured into meaning. Her legs glued themselves together, one fingernail tugging and tearing into the chair’s armrest as the elder Knox let out a little huff of air upon seeing the long, errant line of green that marred the giant.

Encouragement came from his lips, and then he patted his boy’s shoulder and came back to the teacher.

Fenton picked up his purple crayon and went back to his giant. Gaylie did what she could to breathe.

“Miss Gaylie, that giant doesn’t show us much progress as I would have hoped, especially considering your change in plans. Shouldn’t such a course correction have had an effect?”

The man smiled, dimples showing, and Gaylie thought she might be sick. If he’d let her.

She tried for words again, but they caught in bubbles of air constricting her throat.

“Let me finish.” He took his seat again, crossing one leg over his other and tugging at the knee like a man three times his age. Focus never leaving her, lips never unsmiling. “You do understand how important lines are to my son, don’t you? This is about his heritage. About my legacy.”

Her mouth opened, but the air she inhaled drained into a hard line of leaden pressure that entered her throat and headed downward, into her esophagus and lower. Eyes going wider, she gasped for what molecules of air she could find along the line that now searched downward, aiming for a straight path downward until it dead-ended and resumed course through other organs. Forced to her feet by the weighty line of air running down her body, she shivered straight, wobbling on her little heels.

Before her, Mr. Knox grinned and stood, coming a touch closer. He raised one hand and traced it in front of her, six inches from her arm, down the line of what she knew to be veins and arteries, but now felt like lead. Molten lead drying in her body, melding her into a gasping statue before him.

At the back of the classroom, Fenton colored on, humming to himself. His father stepped between Gaylie and the boy.

Her fingers extended from their fists, flexed and straightened with the leaden air still forcing itself down her throat and throughout her body, until her muscles strained to hold the natural curvature they’d become used to over three decades of life.

“Miss Gaylie, you know my business. Know I create and destroy. Know I form and de-form. Know that I use lines and need them in all their uses, and my son will, as well. What if I were less familiar?

His eyes sqinted at her, the smile twitching, and then he reached up one long-fingered hand and placed it over her mouth. He pressed, hard, but the leaden line of her body anchoring her to the floor no longer had any give in it, and so she didn’t move. Desperate little bits of air made it around the concrete line of air running into her nostrils, and her eyes leaked with awareness.

“Can’t have the boy hearing.” He leaned closer, the smile becoming a thin-lined threat. “Because what if I were to color outside the lines? When engaged in such detailed work?”

He glanced over his shoulder and huffed a sigh.

“I appreciate creativity, truly. But with colors. Not lines. What were we at last week, fifteen percent outside? I’d say we’re at twenty now.” He turned back to her, and his mouth twitched. “That’s not progress.”

His hand pressed deeper into her skin, pressing on the line of air running into her and straightening her past human limits, and then his free hand came to her shoulder. Three inches away, then one, he held it straight...and then balled it.

The line of lead that had run from her neck and throat and spread downward and out, into her shoulder and further, vibrated in her shoulder, the line of lead filling her growing unstable, bumpy and shivering within her, until it pressed against her bone and she felt her skin shifting around it, working to accommodate it.

No scream could have communicated the agony, and any rare air had to get around the lead in her lungs, feeding her as Knox held her still and shuddering straight.

“If I couldn’t color within the lines, Miss Gaylie...” His hand balled again, this time near her stomach, and the line of lead which traced her organs and held her stiff as a bar of steel vibrated. She heard a rib break, and her shoulder finally gave up on containing the pressure to its side, and cracked. “What a mess I would have.”

“Dad, can we have cheeseburgers tonight?”

Knox stood still before her, hand still pressed to her mouth, and then he stepped back, and the lines of lead slowly, inch by inch, drew up from her feet and her veins and her arteries. She gripped her stomach with her good arm, fighting down a scream, but moisture dripped from her face. The back of her blouse was soaked with sweat. Her rib shifted as she leaned on the chair behind her, and her shoulder screamed, but the voice she knew remained balled in her throat like a coiled snake held down by a heavy net. Pressed backward into her throat at the pleasure of the father before her.

“Yes, son, I think we can.” The man twitched his hand, and a band of air caught her shoulders and pressed her back into her storytime chair, hard enough to bruise.

Her brain had gone numb with pain, but she met Knox’s eyes, and closed her own when she saw the intention there. The line holding her shoulders straight down, her body to the chair, grew needled fangs and punctured her skin.

“If I don’t color within the lines, things don’t go well.”

Her scream coiled, but wouldn’t release more than a hiss of dribbled air through her barred teeth.

“Ten percent in two weeks, Miss Gaylie. Ten percent. We can’t have my boy coloring outside the lines, after all.”

A line of leaden air leaked into her nostrils and spread, straightening her throat once more, and then bending her head once, then twice, in a jarring nod that vibrated her spine below it.

When the man released her, she clutched her arm below her ruined shoulder. From experience, she knew it would reset itself overnight. Be fine tomorrow, back together within its lines. Her rib would be healed, straight and true. She’d be able to breathe, and speak, and scream if she had to.

The man nodded at her, formal once more. “Fenton must be able to color within the lines when he needs to as he grows older. Just like I can. You see that, don’t you?” And then he grinned the loving expression he saved for his boy, and turned away from her toward the door.

The boy pulled on his coat and waved. “Thanks, Miss Gaylie! See you tomorrow! Don’t forget to save this book for me!”

She found a way to nod, making sure her shoulder remained still. At the door, the father turned back to her and twitched a wave that sent a line of air weaving into her nostrils, gentle and ticklish and true to its lines.

His reminder gentled its way through her body as he disappeared out the door with his son, relaxing her back into her chair as it drained down to her feet and anchored her there like lead, heavy and still until they left. It tickled at the inside of her soles, a bare vibration of false metal, and she breathed out.

Ten percent.

The line vibrated its reminders, as insistent as the father’s tilted smile. Anchored still, she could only close her eyes against the lead remaining within her own lines. The lead teaching its own lesson.

End.

Jennifer is a tattooed poet and animal lover who grew up in Virginia and has recently relocated to Cape Coral, FL., where she and her husband have five rescues. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart by Puerto Del Sol, as well as Silver Blade and Abyss & Apex, and her first poetry chapbook, Oil Slick Dreams, is available for sale from Finishing Line Press. Her short stories are appearing for the first time as of this summer, in Cosmic Horror Monthly and the HOWLS anthology Howls from the Wreckage, and her first novel is currently under submission to publishers through Sarah N. Fisk at Tobias Literary.

Keepers of the Garden

By James Pate

In the dark, in the soil, he felt his skin slowly loosen, his bones turn to cool stone. His mouth had been filled with rich earth, and white living beads of rot flowered on his tongue. He forgot his name, his station in life, the image any mirror ever reflected back to him. Here underground, his rebirth came both slow and fast, mind turning to root, entrails sprouting towards the surface, flowering in moonlit air.

The collapse of one story budding into many others.

* * *

Monday

One spring morning, Hans noticed a moving truck in front of the Malone House as he jogged along the street. The property had stood empty ever since the death of the previous owner, the renowned local gardener Mr. Malone. As Hans approached, he saw a woman carrying boxes from the truck and placing them on the sidewalk. And a man lifting those boxes and taking them to the mountain of boxes piled in a pyramid-shape in the front yard. They both had whitish hair but youthful faces, making it difficult to guess their age. She wore muddied overalls and the man a battered corduroy jacket. Neither wore shoes, and their feet were grimy. Hans nodded to them as he ran past and they nodded solemnly in return.

That night during dinner, Hans told his wife, Agatha, and his two sons, Dennis and Peacock, about the new people in town. Agatha poured herself more wine. She said she wondered if they knew about the garden, and how famous it had been when Mr. Malone was alive. Peacock glanced over at his dad. “Didn’t he die there too? In the garden? Didn’t you find him there?”

Hans wiped his mouth with a napkin. He said yes, he had found Malone one morning while jogging. Actually, he explained, it had been more than one morning. He’d been jogging at daybreak along the back wall of the Malone property. As usual, he said, he casually looked over the wall at the garden when passing by. And he saw Mr. Malone there, sitting on a bench in front of his rose bushes in a robe and with his head titled at a slightly awkward angle, as if he were watching some odd creature at the root of the bushes. Then he had run on, not thinking much about it. The following morning, he had jogged by again. He’d seen Mr. Malone sitting on the bench in the exact same place, his head turned in the same awkwardly-askew way. That was when he suspected something was not right with the man. “But how come nobody else noticed him?” asked Dennis.

“It’s because your dad’s so tall,” Agatha answered. “And that wall around the garden at the Malone House is so high.”

Hans agreed. “If I were one inch shorter, or the wall one inch higher, Mr. Malone might still be sitting there.”

* * *

Tuesday

In the late evening light Hans and Agatha walked along the Potomac River, following a pitted, gravel path. Eventually they turned north and climbed the stone steps leading back up to the town’s streets. The April air had a chilly autumnal tinge to it, especially when the breeze blew hard through the trees. As they passed the Malone estate, Agatha paused, grabbing Hans by the arm. “There they are,” she said, and Hans followed her gaze to the front porch. The couple who now inhabited the Malone House stood beneath the glow of the crimson fanlight of their front door almost as if they had been waiting for Agatha and Hans to pass. They waved from the porch and started going down the concrete walk towards the entrance gate. Because the house stood far back from the road, the couple approached from quite a distance. The new neighbors greeted them, unlocking and opening the low metal gate. “I’m Corinne,” the woman told them, offering her hand.

“And I am Roland,” said the man beside her, his voice so round and full Hans wondered if he was a stage actor.

Agatha and Hans introduced themselves too. They told the couple they lived only a few houses down. Roland gestured toward to the Malone House, inviting them in for a drink on the back porch. Agatha and Hans glanced at each other and back at their new neighbors and agreed.

Inside the house, the air smelled of mud and fresh paint. The new neighbors led them down the hallway linking the front door to the back of the house. On the hallway walls hung several paintings in thick gilt frames. Each image had been conjured with bright, pastel Pop Art colors. One showed a lumpy scarecrow in a graveyard with pink lasers projecting from its eyes and on to a red orb in the sky that could either have been the sun or moon. The heavenly body bled what looked like rose petals onto the tombstones beneath it. Another painting showed two humanoid figures in bright violet furs rolling around lustily in a tangle of vines through which tiny eyes peered. Roland and Corinne walked briskly, not pausing at the paintings nor commenting on them. Agatha and Hans treaded more slowly, eyeing the framed pictures. Agatha stopped in front of the one with the two figures frolicking provocatively in the greenery. “Which one of you is the painter?” she asked.

Corine answered they both were. She did the figures and Roland created the landscape and weather.

“They’re bright and light,” Hans said, his hands clasped behind his back, “and the frames aren’t. The frames say church and the paintings say punk café.”

“We like contrasts,” Roland told him.

The four of them stepped on to the long back porch. Little white lights, like the type people hung at Christmas, had been nailed up along the edges of the porch, and the bulbs shined hazily in the dark-blue dusk. A marble table with an already-opened bottle of wine set near the back steps. Because a full moon was out, Hans could see the garden from the back porch, a long stretch of tangled shrubs and plants hemmed in by a rectangle of embedded fieldstones.

There were no chairs. The four drank standing.

Hans asked if they knew about the garden. How famous it had been.

Corinne said she had been the grand-niece of the former owner, Mr. Malone. When she was four or five, she and her parents had even visited this house. Only a few fragmented memories were left, she told Hans and Agatha, but those memories were related to the garden. The incredible taste of the tomatoes, with flesh that seemed to pop in your mouth. The roses so crimson they looked like painted tin. The muscular eggplants with their pretty purple skins. “The secret, he used to say,” Corinne told them, “was believing in the soil. And hoping that the soil believed in you back.”

Agatha drank from her glass. The wine left her lips red. “That sounds like something George Malone would say. I met him only a few times but he’d talk about his garden the way some people would talk about their kids.”

“In Corinne’s family gardening is the one true religion,” Roland said. His chesty voice seemed to fill the entire backyard. “I learned that soon after marrying into the Malones.”

Corinne didn’t glance over at Roland. She kept her gaze on Agatha and Hans. “I think my great-uncle meant every garden knows you, is aware of you, senses you. It’s not a dead thing under your feet. You’re its keeper, and it, in turn, keeps you.”

Agatha turned to Hans. “Do they know?”

“Know what?”

“About you and George Malone.”

Hans sipped his wine, took a deep breath. “I found him,” Hans admitted. “Mr. Malone. I was the one who noticed him sitting in his garden day after day.”

Corinne looked confused.

“He means,” Agatha elaborated, “that he was the one who realized Mr. Malone had passed. Hans saw him in the garden a couple of days in a row. In the garden and not moving.”

Corinne looked over at Roland. They smiled. She turned to Hans. “That means you have a special connection to this place then.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“I would.” Roland took a cigar from the pocket of his denim shirt and lit it. In his stentorian voice, he said, “If it wasn’t for you, Great-Uncle George might still be out there in his garden, wasting away. You saved him from that.”

Agatha laughed. “Someone else would have discovered him eventually. Don’t give Hans too much credit.”

She took Hans’ hand, squeezed his pinkie finger.

Corine asked if they wanted more wine and Hans and Agatha said they did.

They returned home drunk. Agatha headed upstairs to take a bath. Hans wandered towards the greenhouse where he kept the old radios he had collected over the years, hoping to repair them over time. As he walked through the backyard, he heard a wet, weeping noise. Behind some shrubs, he found Peacock crouching, his face dirty and a half-moon scratch on his cheek. Hans asked him if his brother had done something to him, and Peacock, standing in his pajamas, nodded yes. “He’s evil sometimes, dad.”

“No, he’s not. He just gets carried away.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Not exactly. Evil is when you plan to commit harm. Carried away is when you lose yourself in what you’re doing and you wind up doing harm.”

“I don’t see a lot of difference. The harm is still done, isn’t it?”

“How did he do it?”

“A pillow fight.”

“I’ve told you two pillow fights are too dangerous.”

“He promised he wouldn’t use the pillow with the zipper again. But he did.” Peacock looked up. “Which means he is evil. He chose that pillow on purpose. He wasn’t being careless.”

“Let’s say it was a bit of both and call it even.”

Later that night, as he stared at the ceiling, the bed under him feeling like a raft on choppy waters due to the many glasses of wine he had consumed, Hans thought about what type of person Peacock would be when he grew up. He imagined Peacock as a young man with blood gushing from his lips because a supervisor decided to punish him for being late by hitting him with a pillow covered in rusty zippers. Agatha turned, resting a hand on his collar bone. She asked, in a drowsy voice, what he thought of the new neighbors. Hans said he wasn’t sure yet. He couldn’t figure out how old they were, and that unsettled him. In certain lights they looked to be in their thirties. In other lights, they might be in their late fifties.

“Maybe they’re as old as you want them to be,” Agatha replied.

* * *

Wednesday Morning

Hans stepped into the dining room doorway, a cup of coffee steaming in his hand. Peacock and Dennis ate their French toasts and bacon at opposite ends of the dining room table. Bright sunlit mist undulated outside the long windows of the room and a single bird cawed over and over again as if it had lost its way and hoped to call upon another bird for assistance.

“Dennis, why did you hurt your brother last night?” Hans asked.

Dennis glared. “I didn’t mean to.”

“But you did hurt him regardless if you meant to or not.”

Peacock said, “He knew he chose the one with the zipper.”

“Liar. I forgot about the zipper. I can’t think of everything all the time.”

Hans sipped from his coffee, staring at one son and then the other. “You need to apologize. You made Peacock upset, which made me and your mother upset.”

Almost as if she has heard herself mentioned, Agatha appeared the doorway. She was dressed for work in her black blouse and grey cardigan. She carried a plate of eggs and sat at the table. She looked at Dennis and told him she had heard what he had done the night before. “You’re older than your brother,” she said. “Older siblings shoulder extra responsibilities.”

“I never asked to be older,” Dennis replied.

“Apologize,” Hans told him.

Dennis turned to Peacock. “I’m sorry I’m you’re older brother. I never asked to be.”

Agatha slapped the tabletop. “Dennis. Do it right.”

“Sorry,” he mumbled. He stared at his plate.

* * *

Wednesday Night/ Thursday Morning

Hans looked up at the ceiling with its glowing bars of orange from the streetlight not far from the bedroom window and then glanced at the clock. For hours he had tried to sleep and for hours sleep had not arrived. Quietly he rose from the bed, listening to Agatha gently snore. He gathered a shirt and jeans from the closet and made his way along the unlit staircase to the downstairs study. Without turning on the study lamps, he dressed. At the front door he grabbed his wool jacket and stepped outside into the night air. Off to the east a fine pink thread of cloud shone in the sky. All else was dark.

He made his way to the river. The water was a wide black road between the overhanging boughs. Next, he walked back up the steep trail leading to his own street, and paused along the back of the Malone house. He felt called there, as he often had since discovering the body of George Malone in Malone’s garden. He peered over the garden’s stone wall into the backyard. He stopped and he focused.

Among the thick twists of shrubs and ivy, all of them curled into one another like a head of hair that had not been combed out in years, he glimpsed two forms shifting, barely decipherable inside the dense growth. They looked like deer in the act of rutting. But then their deer-like qualities faded and they seemed to be huge vines intermingling in the wind. But this too fell away to reveal ghostly figures with legs where their arms should be and faces where their bellies should be and in a quicksilver instant those faces turned, eyed him as he stood there, mostly hidden by the height of the wall. The faces were those of the new owners. The new keepers of this garden. Their mouths were open, panting. Their eyes glistened in the moonlight.

He could not tell from their expressions if they saw him or not.

He crouched down. He ran forth in a crouching position. When he was past the wall he stood up again and hurried home.

* * *

Friday

All day and night on Thursday Hans dreaded getting a text or call from the new neighbors, accusing him of spying on them.

All day and night he kept replaying the image he had seen. How what seemed to be deer turned into vine and then into humans but humans with their pieces reconfigured. During dinner on Thursday night, he almost told Agatha. He almost said what he had seen. But when she had looked at him as he gathered the dirty plates to take into the kitchen he did not tell her. The words remained locked on the tip of his tongue.

Friday evening, Agatha stepped into the greenhouse where Hans sat at the table, screwing in the back of a forties-era radio. She said she’d received a text from Corrine. They had been invited over for a drink. Hans placed his screwdriver down. He sighed. “Guess we’ll have to go over some time.”

“You don’t sound excited.”

“I’m fine. A drink sounds good.” If nothing else, he would be able to tell if they had seen him peering over the garden wall.

Corinne met them at the front gate in a yellow summer dress, her whitish hair in a makeshift beehive hairstyle. She welcomed them. She led them through the house to the backyard patio.

Roland was already there, a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarillo in the other. Four wicker chairs set around a raging fire pit. They drank and they talked. Agatha spoke about their recent problems with Dennis and Peacock, saying that Dennis was too reckless and Peacock too careful. She wished she could blend them together, balance out their two sides. Roland told them he and Corinne had never had children, had never even considered it, because whatever parental instincts they had went into their gardens, their plants, their soil.

Hans leaned forward in his chair. “May I ask what brought you here?”

“We’re both microbiologists,” Corinne told him. “We have a year-long grant to study this very special garden.”

“You’re only here a year?” Agatha asked. She had picked up a stick, was poking it into the curling flames.

“Technically,” Roland replied. “But if we like the area enough we might relocate.”

During their first hour with Corinne and Roland, Hans studied the couple closely. He tried to catch some hint, some look from either one of them, that they had seen him peering above their wall. None appeared. As the night passed on, he relaxed. Maybe what he had seen that night had been caused by his tiredness, and the deer rutting and vines swaying had been his weary brain processing a simpler fact: his neighbors had been making love in their garden. A bit unusual, but it was their garden, their property.

He started his third glass of wine. The night rippled, the voices danced around him.

Roland offered Agatha one if his cigarillos and she took it and he lit it for her. Then he rose and scratched at his slight paunch and wandered from the patio into the dark of the garden. The red bud of his cigarillo glowed in that darkness. Hans turned toward Agatha. Her chair was empty. Corinne touched his wrist, leaned forward. A strand of hair from her beehive had shaken loose and formed a hook along the side of her angular features. In her husky voice she said, “My mother used to tell me she lived with many voices. She said that when you grew older, at least for some people, you heard these voices more and more. She meant the voices of the dead. She meant the voices of ghosts who try to sound like your own voice in your head but who aren’t quite able to pull it off. I’m different from my mother in that way. She spent her life looking up. I prefer to look down. I believe in earth and petals and worms and thorns, like George Malone did. I think ghosts are the faces we put on things that are deeper and less human. The snake crawling out from a hole in a tree and staring out with its snake-eyes. The mole sniffing the night air. The weeds that grow through the bones of some run-over carcass.” She laughed. “Sorry. Wine makes me ramble.”

Hans asked, “If you don’t mind me inquiring, how old are you two? I can’t tell.”

“We get that a lot. We have an unusual diet. It blends us up. Makes the old and young swirl around. Twist about.” She looked at the two empty chairs across from them. “We’re as old or as young as you’d like us to be.”

* * *

Saturday

Hans spent the afternoon in the greenhouse, placing small bits of wire into various old radios. Around noon, he went through the back kitchen door and scrambled a few eggs and made a gin-and-tonic. He heard a creak behind his back. Peacock’s light step. “I saw them outside my window last night,” his son said.

Hans turned, grabbing a fork from the drawer. “You saw someone?”

Peacock took another step on to the kitchen’s black-and-white tiles and said yes, the new neighbors. He was not sure it was real. There was a chance it had been a dream, he said. But it had seemed real as he stood looking out his bedroom window a little after midnight. They had been in the front yard and their faces had been covered in mud, as if they’d rubbed it on their cheeks and foreheads deliberately. They had been looking at the house. The front door, the windows. They seemed to be looking for a way in. They stood side by side and they didn’t say anything to one another. Then they took each other’s hands and walked way.

“But it could have been a dream?” Hans asked.

“I can’t say it wasn’t. I’ll put it that way.”

Upstairs, Hans found Agatha in her office, editing one of the history textbooks she been hired to revise. Hans stood in the doorway, told her what Peacock had related. She removed her glasses and placed them on the desk, saying she had seen them too the night before. Around midnight, she’d gotten up to take an aspirin. As she’d swallowed the tablets down she had stared out the front kitchen window, and had seen the couple walking along the sidewalk as if it were in the middle of the day and not the middle of the night. Yes, they did have some soil on their cheeks, and yes, they’d paused at their house, glancing up at it. But not in a sinister manner. Peacock had let his imagination run off, casting the moment in a much more menacing light than it was worth. “He sometimes sees things in an unusual way,” she told Hans. She placed her glasses back on.

Hans said maybe, sure.

Agatha added, “You walk around at night sometimes too. Are you really so different from them?”

* * *

Sunday Night

Around nine, Hans and Agatha went over to the Malone House. A huge moon floated high on the horizon as if it were peering down on the two of them as they made their way along the narrow, elm-flanked street. The scent of plants in rich bloom hovered in the air. Corinne waited for them on the porch under the glowing fanlight. She wore a paint-splattered corduroy jacket. As they approached, she told them she loved nights like this. Nights that brought a new season in with it. Fall nights and spring nights were the best nights in the world.

Corinne led them inside to a study. Roland was in the room already, his longish hair in a topknot. He stood by a large painting that set on an easel. “A little project we’ve been working on,” he said, turning to Hans and Agatha. “Tell us what you think.”

Like the ones in the hallway, this painting shined with vivid, psychedelic tones. In it a scarecrow in a top hat had been crucified. The figure’s eyes shot laser beams up to a wide yellow moon much like the one Hans had glimpsed outside. A rainfall of roses drifted from the underside of the moon and fell across a garden of lilacs and hydrangeas and what looked like human feet. Hans stepped closer. The feet stuck up from the ground in a manner suggesting the rest of the body had been planted head-first into the soil.

Agatha neared the painting too and removed her glasses from her sweater pocket and placed them on. “We’re in here, Hans. Look.”

Taking another step closer, he saw them. The two figures near the back of this painted garden. One had on the grey sweater Agatha often wore and the other was garbed in his wool pea coat. Their faces were a mixture of glossy leaves and spiraling vines and teeth. They wore no shoes. Their feet had turned into roots.

Hans stepped back, turning towards Roland and Corinne. “What the hell is this?”

“A little present from George Malone,” Corine answered.

The air in the room shivered, twisted. The walls thinned and faded.

They were outside, all four of them stationed around the hot fire pit. Hans did not remember coming here. He looked up at the moon directly above them and felt watched. He did not know if the gaze was menacing or kind. Cruel or gentle. Or both, each cocooned in each. His feet were cold and he glanced down and saw he wore no shoes nor socks. His looked over at Agatha and saw her feet were also bare beneath the hem of her black skirt. “I want to go home,” he told her. “We need to get back home.” She took his hand. Squeezed his pinkie. Lifted his hand to her lips and kissed the thick part of his palm.

Agatha turned to Corinne and Roland. She said she was flattered they had included her and Hans in the picture but that she didn’t like the faces. “If you’re going to paint us, make us look like we really are. Not as you wish us to be.”

Corrine and Roland laughed. Hans noticed the flash of sharp green leaves that glinted out between their mirthful lips, over their teeth. Hans opened his mouth to ask them what was happening. Earth came out from under his tongue like bits of dried cake. He looked at Agatha. There were vines between them and long wagging tongues of fronds surrounded them and thorns bit into his shoulder. Through the wide fronds he could see her cheeks were blistered with fungus. “Gardening is an ancient art,” Agatha said through the greenery, “and one none of us will ever master.”

“All we can do is play in the mud,” said Roland.

“And taste whatever odd forms we can convince the earth to grow for us.”

Han felt cold hands on him. Hands that smelled of soil and sweetish rot. They patted him, tried to soothe him. So many hands and countless fingers. They were deep in the garden now. In its hair and entrails. They had not gone there: the garden, instead, had risen around them. And the scarecrow in the top hat in the painting hung on a cross high above the shuddering vines and night-damp foliage, its form solitary against the empty sky. Through the eyeholes of its burlap head-cloth Hans could make out the eyeholes of a skull. George Malone’s skull. How he knew this he wasn’t sure, but he sensed it, and was certain. Mr. Malone had been brought back up from the earth. He had returned to his garden. Hans tried to scream but no muscles moved in his throat or mouth. The scream burst out from his jaw like shoots from an overripe vegetable.

* * *

A Night in Early Autumn

Peacock dreamt about his missing parents again. They stood on the front lawn, their faces made of mud and tiny twigs, grey smoke rising from their scalps. He woke and turned on his lamp. He read a story from his House of Mystery comic and placed the comic back on the nightstand and dressed. When he wandered through town at night he always wore the same clothes. An oversized black shirt that had been his dad’s and a pair of black jeans too small now for his brother. His aunt, who had moved into the house to take care of him and Dennis, slept in his parents’ old room. Carefully he crept past her door. He did not put his sneakers on until he stood on the porch.

People vanished. Peacock knew this. He had listened to podcasts about the hikers and campers and hunters in parks who had vanished over the years. The last people who had seen his parents were the couple who lived in the Malone House, and they had told investigators that his mother and father had left the house around ten p.m. They had planned to take a late night stroll along the Potomac. As they frequently did.

They never returned.

And Peacock suspected they never would, despite what Dennis said.

“They’ll come back,” his brother would argue. “Stop telling me they won’t. I don’t want to hear that shit from you.”

Peacock would stare at Dennis. Dennis with his wet eyes, his weak lips. Until his parents disappeared, Peacock had never seen his brother cry.

What a peculiar summer it had been.

Tonight, he walked off his porch and down the silent street. To the Malone House he went. Over the wall he climbed. He’d visited these grounds many times these past months.

Once he was planted on the always-spongy ground, he studied the back of the Malone House. The windows were dark, as they always were this time of night. In the corner of the garden that was especially tangled and uncut, eccentric fruits and vegetables had grown in July and August. Now, in September, they’d fallen into the weeds. Red orbs that seemed like a hybrid between a beet and a plum. Muscular pink growths the size of a hand, with five protruding appendages. Soft gourds which revealed a frail bony spine in the center when you ate into them.

Peacock liked the taste of these weird garden offerings. They were bitter and he liked the taste of bitter things.

Tonight, he picked up a crimson globular vegetable that had ventricle-like sprouts from its sides. He bit into it. The outer later was tough, leathery. But once his teeth broke through, the flesh was mealy, and a pit roughly the size of the ones in avocados waited inside.

Peacock held this pit in his palm, studied it. The dark marks on it appeared to stare at him, recognize him. And the grief in that pit-eye was harrowing, as if tears would start to drip from it if tears could form from such an object. Peacock realized his own eyes were damp. He stroked them dry with a muddied thumb.

Slowly the grievous pupil faded. He simply held a hard inedible pit. The breeze tumbled through the branches overhead. Leaves cascaded around him, fluttering like hands.

“Goodbye, sweet pit,” he murmured. He placed the pit into the weeds and continued alone through these wild, hushed grounds.

End.

James Pate has had work published in Oculus Sinister: An Anthology of Ocular Horror, Dark Lane Anthology, Black Warrior Review, 3:AM Magazine, Berkeley Fiction Review, Ligeia, Heavy Feather Review, Coffin Bell, and Occulum, among other places. His books include the poetry collections The Fassbinder Diaries (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and Mineral Planet (Schism), the essay collection Flowers Among the Carrion: Essays on the Gothic in Contemporary Poetry (Action Books Salvo Series), and the occult noir novel Speed of Life (Fahrenheit Press).

The Indomitable AMS

By J.L. Royce

I: Home

“Hello! I didn’t see you there. Welcome—it’s not much, but I call it home.”

Ben sits at the kitchen table, spoon poised over a cereal bowl. He looks healthier than his photographs.

The colorful tablets and pills float in a viscous liquid that may be writhing blood, or plasma. He jabs his spoon into the mess.

“Mi casa es su casa.”

Ben shovels a spoonful of the dripping mess into his mouth and chews loudly. He swallows with some difficulty. He spits up into his napkin.

“It’s the cancer,” he apologizes. “You’re welcome to join me, though…”

He waits for an answer, then shrugs and stands.

Ben wears pastel pajamas decorated with cartoon characters, their poses reminiscent of a Japanese pillow book.

“So,” he says. “You’re here to evaluate my mental status, I suppose.” He glances around. “All things considered, I’m doing alright. I mean, for someone whose brain is being kept below ninety Fahrenheit. And I’ve given myself structure—you’ll see—from my life before. Similar.”

Ben straightens, and his pajamas become a business suit. He shoots his cuffs.

“Have you met the family? Here, I mean, not those people waiting for...”

He trails off, peers into the next room, and bellows, “Kids!”

The sounds of their clawed feet scampering and scratching on the parquet floor herald their arrival: a boy and a girl, furred and running on all fours, long naked tails whipping behind them. Their narrow, rat-wise faces sense the visitor’s distress, and they chitter in a semblance of amused laughter.

“Kids, this is…Sorry, I don’t recognize you.” Ben laughs. “I doubt you’d recognize yourself.”

Ben catches a reflection in the toaster, a beautiful chrome-plated relic of a past century.

“No! Don’t look down. I recommend you don’t look in any mirrors.”

Stepping in front of it, he straightens his tie with a vicious tug. His fleshy neck bulges over his shirt collar. Then he pushes the appliance off the countertop. It lands with a clatter out of sight behind the kitchen counter.

“Best not to know.”

The children are nosing shoes and eating spilled food from the floor.

“My mental status. About that… Why don’t I introduce you to the Missus? She can help, being rather mental herself, ha ha!”

He leads the way through the foyer, the children scuttering along at his heels. They pause, tittering, at the sight of the family dog. It sprawls atop Ben’s elegant leather briefcase, pelvis thrusting spastically.

“Bad dog!” Ben shouts. “My father’s satchel!” He aims a kick at the hound. It dismounts and shambles away with a sullen expression. The briefcase shudders and lets out a disconsolate sigh.

“Ben?”

His wife stands in the living room archway. Her long evening dress, in lemon chiffon, stretches over a swollen abdomen. One carefully manicured hand rests on the bulge, a crimson nail tapping idly. The mass within moves up and down rhythmically, and her lips part.

She takes a deep drag from her cigarette, and exhales in their faces, considering them.

Ben clears his throat. “Hi, honey! This is—”

“Charmed.”

The smoke is vaguely pink, emerging from her flared nostrils. Her mouth is a caricature of glowing red gloss. The children resemble their mother, her black eyes, narrow face, high cheekbones.

“Ben, I need to talk to you. It’s almost due; are you going to be around, or miss it like—”

“No time—we’ve got to get to work.”

Ben whispers, “Do you see what I have to deal with? This woman...”

He confronts her. “I’m doing this for you—” He stops short. “Was doing this…”

She draws the last puff and drops the cigarette on the burnt umber rug, grinds it out with the toe of one high-heeled pump.

“Never mind,” she replies, “Too late now.”

The movement of her belly becomes violent, and she squats indelicately, steadying herself on the door frame. “It’s time…”

Her groans are passionate and prolonged, punctuated by obscenities and pleas to ‘not stop’. The performance sends the children scampering and squeaking.

“Ah…yes!” she cries. A rush of liquid pools around her feet, reeking of fish and sweat. Her abdomen flattens and she stands, steps away, revealing a huddled, gelatinous mass on the floor.

The mess stretches, grows, the pale gray ichor sloughing off to reveal arms, then hands that wipe off the face. A small, bald fellow struggles to sit up, then gets to his knees.

“Oh, babe…” he says. “Got a ciggie?”

At the sound of her lover’s voice, her breasts dampen the dress strained taut over their breadth.

“Sure, babe,” says Ben’s wife. She takes two cigarettes out of a silvered case and lights them, together, sucking hard before handing him one, stained lipstick red.

She glances up. “Triste est omne animal post coitum…”

“Herb?” Ben stares open-mouthed at the pair. “Herb from next door?”

“I tried to tell you,” she complains. “I tried just a few minutes ago; but no, too busy. You ignored me—what did you expect?”

She crosses her legs, leans in the doorway. “I’m young, attractive—” she tosses back brick-red hair “—I want to live! Live!”

Her declaration shocks Ben out of his inaction. He rushes the slimy fellow.

“Come here, you little git!” Ben roars. “I’ll teach you to sniff around my bitch!”

“Oh, no…” Herb scrambles toward the woman, slipping in the slime. He tries to crawl beneath her dress, climb her long legs and retreat to safety, but she kicks him away with a patent leather point.

“Why can’t you be more of a man, Herbie? Fight for me!”

Herb struggles to his feet, encumbered by the massive schlong swinging to his knees. The children rush up to nip playfully at his burden. Herb turns and flees, moaning, into the ill-defined darkness of the house, the chittering little ones close behind.

“You think you know someone.” Ben shakes his head. “Putz.”

He stares at his wife. “I don’t know what you see in him. I’d…” Ben loses his train of thought and turns away.

His wife sneers. “Maybe you can ask when you get home.”

At the sturdy front door, Ben pauses and regards the gleaming bronze skull doorknob. Through the barred window the lawn is visible: sere. A large car is waiting. Beyond, all down the block, the houses are afire.

“Controlled burn,” Ben says. “Have to do it every few years, eradicate the invasive species, if you get my meaning.”

He reaches for the knob but jerks his hand back, shrugs his coat sleeve over his palm, and grips it. “Mind your step.”

The door swings wide, opening into the Cadillac’s spacious interior: bright red vinyl.

“Bye, dear,” Ben calls over his shoulder and slides across the broad bench seat to the driver’s side.

He grips the wheel and grins. “Well, we’re off.”

II: Commute

“They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.”

The front seat is wide enough for a half-dozen people. The air conditioner, the car itself, is already running, the interior as chill as a hospital room. The traffic is cracking along, four lanes in either direction. Ben grabs the column shifter and jerks it into gear, speeding into the oncoming traffic with a squeal of the tires.

“What a life,” Ben nods to himself. “So, you’re here to check out my mental status and report back. And then…what? Pull the plug?”

The traffic slows. Congestion thickens like clotting blood.

“Never mind; not your decision. You wouldn’t be here if it was good news.” Ben looks away, out the window.

The car is barely creeping along now, the needle of its temperature gauge rising.

“Look at that; collateral damage, they call it.”

The breakdown lanes on both sides of the expressway are littered with corpses: mice, chipmunks, ground squirrels; raccoons, woodchucks, otters; deer, moose, elk. Ambulances and Fire Rescue vehicles are parked at intervals, their staff lounging about, smoking and talking.

The traffic crawls. The car comes alongside a twelve-point buck lying on a stretcher. Its chestnut eye stares into the car.

Ben turns back to the traffic. “Uh-oh—here comes trouble.”

The Peace Officer walks the center breakdown lane. She is beautiful and terrible to behold: helmeted and shielded, in gleaming black body armor and leather motorcycle pants, holsters on her hips rolling as she saunters along. She administers the Last Rites with a chrome-plated automatic, executing each EMT, but ignores the suffering of the animals.

“Best let me do the talking,” Ben says.

The Peace Officer reaches the Cadillac and stops at Ben’s window. She holds the gun at her side and taps the window with a gloved knuckle.

Ben cranks it down with a groan.

“Morning, Officer!” His hand remains on the column shifter.

She is crying: the tears flung from her yellow eyes strike the face shield like the cat’s-paw raindrops of a summer storm.

She looks past Ben at his passenger. “Memento mori,” she sobs.

The Peace Officer’s wings unfurl, feathers gleaming blue-black as a raven’s, each inscribed with a regret written in blood.

The wings enshadow the car. “Gotta go!” Ben cries. He slams the Cadillac into Reverse. The big car hits the sedan behind it with a sickening crunch. Its driver honks furiously.

The pistol comes up.

“Hang on!” Ben slams into Drive and leans back, straight-armed, his face smeared as if by a rocket’s acceleration. The Cadillac heads straight towards the car in front of it but rises, climbing, up the hatchback and over, ascending.

“Close one,” Ben says. “You can get used to it, though. The grind.”

He looks back to see if she will give pursuit. Her lifted gun tracks the car for a time; then she lowers it, slowly, tucks the barrel beneath her face shield, and fires.

The wings shatter, feathers scattering regrets into the air, raining down on the commuters creeping through their lives.

The Cadillac flies west above the grid-locked highway. Ben glances up and asks, “Looking for your exit? Up there, huh? I’ll bet it’s that patch of blue, isn’t it? No worries, we’ll find it, when the time comes.”

The city’s towers stand like upraised swords, bathed in the bloody sun of a new day.

III: Work

Ben leads the way through the dank underground garage. Torches flickering in sconces light the way.

Around a corner, a shining door awaits. Ben steps forward and punches the Up button. The mirrored surface momentarily reveals a wasted figure in a hospital gown, trailing tubes, a leaking ostomy bag at his side.

The door slides open soundlessly. Inside, the carriage is five-sided and featureless. The door closes, plunging the car into darkness. The elevator shudders and rises into the harsh fluorescent light of the next floor.

The car is completely transparent. The headquarters is an open floor plan: aisles radiate away in five directions, lined with cubicles, occupants bent over displays. Wires at their wrists and jaws lead up to the ceiling and through it.

The lift continues to ascend, floor after floor of workers, each tied to the workers below, bound by wires leading to the floors above. Ben waggles his hands next to his ears and sticks out his tongue.

“Mirrored. They can’t see us—they don’t even know if we’re here. Doesn’t matter; they know someone might be watching, so they behave.”

The floors grow smaller as the lift ascends, the bindings heavier and heavier with the weight of their direct reports.

Ben sighs. “God, I miss this place. So glad I could bring you here, to see it all.”

The elevator stops.

“You know, if there’s an afterlife, heaven or hell, I hope it’s a corporation.”

He steps out. “We’ll stop at HR first, get you a guest badge.”

Past dull-eyed admins Ben steps to a glass-walled office with drawn blinds. He knocks.

“What?” comes a voice from within. A low moan ends with the wet sound of a slap.

“Visitor pass,” Ben announces, with a wink.

“Come…”

Ben swings the heavy glass door aside and leads the way. The office is spacious. At the center is a low couch in Moroccan leather, burgundy, with a man tied spread-eagle across it. The Director stands before the couch, resplendent in her matching crimson corset. Her eyes gleam eagerly behind her mask.

“You’re supposed to be on medical leave.” She steps around the table, stiletto heels clicking on the marble floor.

“I’m just visiting, and—”

“Not malingering, are you?” She slaps her riding crop into a gloved palm. “Do I have to arrange for an intervention?”

The employee on the bed squeals as the crop hits his thigh.

“Just a visitor pass for my…visitor.”

The Director smiles sweetly. “Why didn’t you say so? I was just finishing a performance review.” She nods at the supine man.

Her arms jerk up, tugged by the chrome wires ascending into the ceiling. Her hands come together, and she bows. “Pleased to meet you.”

The Director tears the paper label from her victim’s hairy chest. He squeaks. “This will do.”

It reads Hello! My name is _________ but the employee’s sweat has rendered the scrawled name illegible. She scribbles something with a marker on the tag, and presses it in place, hand lingering. Her eyes are sparkling blue marbles framed by her mask.

She runs her fingers back and forth across the tag. “All better.”

Ben clears his throat. “Must be going.” He retreats towards the elevator.

The interviewee cries, “I’ll be good!”

Ben waits for the door to open. For a moment, the tag is visible in its mirrored surface. The Director’s illegible scrawl, reversed, reads Nemo dat quod non habet.

Inside the car, the door closes, and the moans recede.

Ben shudders. “I don’t miss the performance reviews,” he says. “You alright? You look—”

The elevator opens.

The Executive suite at the apex of the tower is made of glass, revealing the cityscape beyond. Towers sway in a catastrophic breeze. The sky is full of tumbling shapes: human shapes.

“Are you going to just stand there staring out the window?”

The CEO sits naked in his Executive Chair. He is so obese as to appear genderless, or equi-gendered. He is entangled in a web of wires, wound around fingers, toes, and private parts, piercing his cheeks, lips, tongue, eyelids, ears. Every movement of his body is reflected in the corporate body below.

The CEO’s voice is dry, a tape hiss. “Report.”

Ben stammers and launches into his speech. “It’s like this—I’m dying, sir; this is just delaying the end.”

“Dying?” The CEO’s laughter is dry leaves over broken pavement. “Macht nicht. We all die. Only the Corporation lives on.”

He gathers a handful of loose wires. “You need to stay connected if you’re going to be effective.” The wires are seeping blood, for they are tubes. “Here.”

“I can’t work.”

“Explain yourself.” The deep-sunk eyes hunger for information.

“I just came to say, I have cancer. It’s incurable.”

The CEO heaves himself erect and gestures with a bloated gray hand. “You don’t look so sick to me. Slacker.”

“This is just an altered mental status; partly the drugs, partly the cryostasis.”

“Drugs will do that, young man—alter your mind. No harm, blowing off steam, but you pay the price.”

Ben shakes his head. “The cancer treatment, I mean.”

“I think you’re malingering. Underachieving. Slacking off.”

“No, really—I miss this place, but I’m not here to work.”

“Go, then! I cast you out!” With an outflung arm, the CEO sends Ben skidding towards the translucent wall. Ben’s flailing hand catches the walland holds.

The wall dissolves, and he is flung into the maelstrom beyond the shelter of the corporate headquarters.

“I was afraid of this!” Ben shouts over the roar of the wind. “Afraid of it all my life! Termination!”

Ben tumbles in the currents then rights himself with outstretched arms.

“Like this,” he says. “Follow me.”

The winds carry Ben out of the city and onward, past the coast and out to sea. With the human center far behind, the winds calm.

“This isn’t so bad,” Ben says. “No more fear.”

The swirling edge of a vast whirlpool looms ahead, an abyss whose far edge is beyond the horizon. Ben leans over to fly the margin. “Ah, except for this.”

A stream of bodies, spinning randomly, head down into the darkness and disappear.

“The Big C. This is it—the end.” Darkness looms at its heart.

“Don’t look down there—don’t stare. It doesn’t like it when you stare!”

The ocean around the vortex is an angry white. Countless people disappear into the quiet emptiness of the storm’s eye, their voices joined in an endless chorus.

We’ll meet again…

The soft blackness is touched with an infinity of tiny lights: atoms, stars, galaxies, or souls.

“Look at me!” Ben sends them skidding into the whirlpool of darkness. But then his hands fly open and he drifts away.

“It’s nothing personal!”

Ben swims upward, into the aperture of roiling sky. Above him appears a disturbance: a pair of eyes, the irises a variegated blue, the pupils an empty black—

IV: Death

The woman on the table groans.

“She’s coming around.”

“Hey…” someone else says. “That’s right—you’re back.”

She stares into the blue eyes. “You’re…you’re…”

“You know me.” The neuro-oncologist frowns. “Stanitz.”

“Of course.” She clears her throat, blinks, shakes her head. “Sorry. I…How long?”

He consults his tablet. “Seventy-three seconds.”

“Amazing. It seemed like hours…in there.”

“We were prepared to let you stay longer, but…”

“What happened?” She tries to sit up but flails comically. “I feel…different. And my voice—do I sound…never mind. What happened?”

Stanitz’s glance at the others in the hospital room tells it all. The wife sobs extravagantly, consoled by the balding friend of the family; the children, teens, tap on handsets, oblivious.

She twists around to the adjacent bed, where an inert shape lies, covered in a sheet. A technician removes the hypothermic inducer from the corpse, humming absently to himself.

… don’t know where, don’t know when…

“No. I mean…” To me?

“Ben is dead,” Stanitz says. “It was so sudden—we were worried about you—being in there while it happened—so we pulled you out—emergency withdrawal. Just in the nick of time, I suppose.”

Coitus interruptus. She tears her gaze from the body to look at the wife, and sighs.

“Of course.” She swings her legs off the edge of the instrumented bed and peels the transducers from her shaved head, the electrodes from her chest. Blonde hair drifts in front of her eyes as she pauses to stare beneath her gown.

The doctor taps a note on his tablet. “Obviously, no urgency to your report, now; it’s moot. Don’t think it’s a waste; we’ll use your analysis in our research.”

Stanitz reaches over, solicitous, eager to touch her.

“It was so sudden,” he repeats. “Ben seemed like such a fighter; I thought his spirit was…indomitable.”

A sound escapes her throat: a laugh struggling with a sob, emerging as a cough.

“I just want to go home; get a shower and some sleep.”

“Of course.” Stanitz nods. “It must have been frightening. Just know…I’m here if you need someone—you know, to talk it over.”

She sees the family friend staring with hungry curiosity and pulls her hospital gown close.

“Sorry for your loss,” she says to no one in particular.

End.

J. L. Royce is an author of science fiction, the macabre, and whatever else strikes him. He lives in the northern reaches of the American Midwest, exploring the wilderness without and within. His work appears in Allegory, Fifth Di, Fireside, Ghostlight, Love Letters to Poe, Lovecraftiana, Mysterion, parABnormal, Sci Phi, Strange Aeon, Utopia, Wyldblood, etc. He is a member of HWA and GLAHW. Some of his anthologized stories may be found at: www.jlroyce.com.

He Will Not Fall Until...

By RSL

She will learn
that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall
until he notices his mistake.

From Nick Flynn, ‘Cartoon Physics, part 1’

In the perfect little town of Dureem, a tired, emotionally spent Thomas Mupp is opening the door to his detached house with calming cream walls and cool oak flooring. Prying off his boots, he slams the door with his free hand. Today had been long. He’d told his father this morning that he needed to leave Dureem, and he did not take it well. And now, coming into his home, he genuinely struggles to remember a life outside of today. So like a hatchling in the darkness of a shell, his every cell screams only one thing: that he needs to get out of Dureem.

“David,” Thomas calls from within the hallway. “Where are you?”

David does not reply as instantly as he usually might. His silence (and apparent absence) from the house prickles his neck. It’s not like David to be out at this time, and if he is, he’d have left some kind of message. Thomas goes to their open plan kitchen where David is typically writing on a laptop in the corner, but he isn’t there either, and the laptop lies closed on the couch.

Just as he’s about to call David’s phone, there is a bang above Thomas’s head, like something falling. “David?” Thomas runs to the stairs, afraid for him.

Finally: “Yes!” David replies, his voice muffled by plasterboards and flooring. Thomas hasn’t even mounted the first step when David practically falls down the stairs he comes down so fast. Framed by the stairwell, hair disheveled and shirt untucked, he looks delightfully stupid. “What’s wrong?” David asks, as if reading in between the lines of Thomas’s thoughts.

“Nothing,” Thomas replies, bracketing a cry. He embraces David, and David holds him so tight that this feeling of looseness within Thomas, this feeling that he is not quite all together real, leaves, and they meld as one.

“Wine time?” David asks in a gentle voice.

Thomas sniffs and unlatches. “I just want to leave.”

“Come on,” he says, holding his arms. “Just talk to me. Tell me what’s up.”

His turgid eyes blink back the breaking of a dam. “Please,” he says.

“We’ll go,” David replies. “I promise. I just want you to relax and calm down now. You’re safe here.”

Reluctantly, Thomas agrees. “Maybe one or two will settle me. But I’d like to go as soon as possible.”

“Of course,” David says. “Anything. Do you want a red or white?”

Thomas shrugs.

“Well, red it is,” David says. “It’s what I have these great big fangs for, ain’t it?” He turns and heads to the kitchen. While over there, he puts on music. “Alexa, play, ‘Soothin Tunes’,” pronouncing tunes like toons.

“Sorry. Slip of the tongue.”

“It’s okay,” Thomas replies. “It’s not your dad who’s a cartoon character.”

“Well…”

“By blood, I mean,” he says, taking from David a glass of wine. “Unless you’re hiding some whiskers?”

“All family is blood. And Ronnie the Rat is part of me as much as he is you.”

“Yeah?” Thomas drinks his wine in seconds, goes to the kitchen worktop and refills, then returns to the couches with the bottle and his glass. “I wish you could take half the burden, then.”

“So today didn’t go well?” he replies.

“You mean me having to put up with the little-boy-isms he patronizes me with… Or the constant Manifesting he does, tirelessly conjuring clowns out of his ‘grey goo’ or whatever the fuck he calls it, while I’m trying to speak to him like an adult? You mean all that?”

David gulps dramatically. “So he didn’t like us bailing.”

“Bailing is doing a lot of legwork in the wrong fucking direction. We’re not bailing, David. We’re just moving away. He can pop up anywhere and everywhere, so it’s not like some difficult trip.” He sighs. “He owns everything around here. I want independence.”

A song changes from some soft-sung ballad to a washed-out rendition of something by Chopin. Rain Prelude maybe? Thomas briefly wonders who these artists are, who with all their skill cover songs stylelessly, only to be reduced to a nameless entity filling up the room. Sonic wallpaper. Thomas is reminded of his dad’s films, the ones Harry put on to keep Thomas quiet. The ones David now works on. Thomas shivers at the sudden chill wrapping around his neck.

“Where were you before?” he asks, changing the subject. “I thought you were working on one of his scripts.”

“Yeah,” David says. “I still am. He’s just trying to figure something out with a character. ‘The key is trauma’, he keeps saying. But I’ve had no chance to work on it all that much.” He drinks some wine. “Busy day.”

“What kept you busy?” Thomas asks.

“You, silly,” he replies. “I’ve been worrying all day.” He reaches out his hand. He takes it. Their fingers lattice.

“I know, I should have messaged. Let you know how it’d been. But it was hard even going there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was at his… Play Palace, or whatever he calls it. Outside it. Going over what I needed to say and how to say it. And I was looking at his, you know, balloon towers he has. Great tall things in the ‘Crimson Courtyard’, you know where he has those fountains that splurge that blood-like stuff? And I just kept thinking about what could happen to me.”

“What do you mean what could happen? He’s never done anything wrong?”

“No. Not officially.”

David pauses to drink more wine. “What about that courtyard? I thought you liked them. And I Doubt he’d make you swim through blood.”

“I did, when I was four. And no, it’s not blood, but, you know. Hard to untangle that association. But this is his whole thing. He is, and always will be, Ronnie the Rat. He could never be like this, like us. A human. Everything is painted holes in walls and dust clouds whenever he runs anywhere.

“I’ve seen him fly off into space and return without a scratch. Seen him swallow hot suns and burp out aluminum. He has lava for breakfast, can take a hit from a collapsing mountain, and can drink black holes like milkshake.

“So I was looking at those balloon towers wobbling in the air and the red oozing from them, and I was thinking, ‘He’s not frail; he’s not like a balloon; he doesn’t bleed.’ And yeah, I was thinking, like, what’s he gonna do to me? He can do anything to me. Do anything to anyone. We’re nothing. But him, Ronnie the Rat. He’s not frail.”

“Why would he be frail or human?” David says. “He’s a cartoon.”

“You’re struggling to read the room tonight. I know. I’m not disputing that. I just—he was a dad. He played the game Human Race. And he should never have adopted us if he didn’t plan on living up to those expectations. So, no, he doesn’t get to make films or whatever he’s working on right now, not if he thinks, what, ‘trauma is the key’? Not after what he did to Harry.”

A noise from outside prompts Thomas’s attention: his neighbour, Ms Tick, lit by her porchlight, taking out the rubbish. She notices Thomas and waves through the patio doors. Thomas nods back.

“What time is it?” Thomas asks.

“6pm,” he says.

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Thomas eyes his wine and downs it in one. The gulp hurts his throat.

“Woah there cowpoke,” David says.

Thomas flinches when he says this, retracts and repours another wine.

“What’s up?”

“Sorry,” Thomas says, holding his hand again. “It’s not your fault. I’m just on edge. Today was rough and brought up a lot.”

“I’m sorry,” David says, stiffening. “Do you wanna maybe talk more about it? Like, am I meant to be packing?”

Thomas sighs. “Yes, and no.”

“Yes and no?”

“Well… We had it out, as you can imagine. But it’s tiring with him. One minute he’s Ronnie the Rat playing the violin on his whiskers, modulating his voice in strange notes, whispering, ‘Oh, Tommy-boy, Oh Tommy-boy,” and the next he’s a wheel of cheese rolling around the room. Then when I really got angry, he broke out into song, flashed us through a desert, then to I think a moon of Jupiter, and then some shadowy pillow world that smelt of raw oil. And the whole time I’m just crying, you know, trying to tell him that I’m suffocating here.”

“Maybe he just wanted to make you laugh? You know, to bond?” David says.

“And that’s the problem. I’m there asking him to let me go.”

“‘Let me go’. He’s not forcing us to live here.” David’s back straightens, alert like a guard dog. “He wouldn’t hurt us, would he?”

“He doesn’t say we’re locked in here, but when was the last time you left Dureem? I know I can’t remember. Feels like this is my whole life: Coming home and complaining about dad.”

“And watching Ms Tick like a hawk.”

Thomas smiles. “Fuck all else to do.”

Thomas looks out the patio doors again, into the darkness. The deep purple hues of the bruising sky are blackening.

“I’ve left,” David says. “Not sure when or for what. Work, I think. Editing.”

“Was it for dad?”

“No, no. My work with him is only for now. We’ve been real close lately. Maybe that’s what he’s so angry about. This story that’s eating him up. People are tricky, he says.”

Thomas isn’t listening. He’s watching the bin where Ms Tick was moments ago. He stands and moves to the patio doors. “You know, every day for the past… I don’t even know how long. But for as long as I can remember, every day at 6pm, Ms Tick takes her rubbish out.”

David is silent but for the slurping of his wine. Thomas cringes.

“Don’t people have routine?” David asks.

“The bin is every two weeks, David. I suppose it is always me doing it. While you, what, whittle away the hours at that manuscript for dad. Getting real close with him.”

“I don’t understand your point,” David says. He is meek, shriveled into himself, a tortoise retreating to its hell.

Thomas downs the rest of his wine and goes to the cupboard to get more, sighing as he opens the wooden door. There’s only white. He mixes the remains of his red with the white and necks it.

“I shouldn’t lash out at you.”

“It’s okay,” David says.

Thomas lets the bad air of argument filter, then speaks. “What’s he like with you, honestly?”

“Ronnie?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah. He’s—honestly, he’s okay.”

Thomas drinks more wine.

“No, seriously. He does a lot for us. Talks about you all the time. ‘What a rootin tootin lad he is that starshine o’ mine’, he says, in that lovely foxtrot of an accent he does. And, yeah, he looks after me. When we’re at his Play Palace, it’s rough sometimes. He’s surrounded by this press team and all these rotten eggs who don’t care none for what he does. Not at all, no sir. They don’t know what he’s making here. This Story. It’s his magnum opus, he says. What’ll make people take him seriously. He won’t just be a cartoon. He’ll be a creator. And it must be tough, musn’t it? He must be lonely. No one like him.”

Thomas is down half a bottle, eyes fogging with drunkenness like the mist on a car cold car window.

“Look, I know this is a bit left field—but think about it: he made everything for you. And this place, he built it for you, he says. He spoke for a long time with me. He loves you. And I guess, yeah, maybe I feel like we’re bailing on him.”

Thomas returns drunkenly to his seat, head wobbly, lolling lazily, the wine leaving him light and loose. “He was a terrible father, David. Awful. You weren’t there. You didn’t see what he did to us. To Harry. He can tell you whatever the fuck he likes, but I am removing him from my life.

“Do you know what it’s like to watch your dad morph his hand into a mallet and smash a waiter’s knees off? Or to hear your little brother crying because there was another ‘accident on set’ that we had to pay off, and it turned out he’d just vaporized one of the grips with his ‘Peepee laser gun’? The hurt he’s caused so many people over the years. It’s too much to deal with, to remember. That past, festering.”

“Where’s this come from?” David asks, his words molten with a sudden fury. “Why are you like this?”

Thomas eyes the bottle of white he grabbed, except now it’s red. “I swear this was a white,” he says.

“Thomas, you’re drunk. I asked you a question. Why are you like this?”

“You,” he replies. “We met. And, I dunno. You. You were very nice, but you didn’t take shit. Like Harry.” Thomas looks off into the night, where the porchlight still shines from Ms Tick’s house. “I miss him.”

“I don’t want to leave,” David says then. “I’m sorry, but I don’t. Ronnie has—”

“Stop saying his name.”

“That’s his rootin tootin name, Tommy-boy. What else am I to call him?”

“His what?”

“His—fuckin name.”

Thomas pulls back in his chair. His eyes flick upward.

“What’s wrong? Thoma—”

“Shut the fuck up.” Thomas’s hand, accusatory, points at David. “You’re not him. You’re not David.”

David laughs. “Hon—”

Thomas shouts, loud. “Stop it. Bring him back”

“This is ridiculous,” David says, standing. “You’re drunk. I’m going upstairs.”

A smash of a glass. David turns. Wine pooling on the floor. In Thomas’s hand: a smashed shard of glass to his throat.

“You fucking move and I do it. I do it right now.”

David’s hands are up—playfully. “Look, calm down, okay, this is not the way to go about this. I’m sorry. I was—disrespectful. I wasn’t listening to you, Melon.”

“Dad, what have you done with David.”

Another laugh. “I am David.”

She starts walking around the perimeter of the room.

“Where are you going?” He moves closer. he yells, presses the glass to his throat. Blood leaks.

“Any closer and I fucking rip my throat open. I’m going upstairs. Move back.”

“Christ on a croissant, just look at your neck—”

“Move!”

David sighs, bored. “Fine, okay. Exeunt.”

Thomas makes his way to the stairway, then slowly steps up each stair with his eyes on this not-David. At the top of the stairs, he spins, runs to where he had heard the bang earlier. He is crying and calling for David, for the man his father has clearly done something to. Ronnie can be anyone, do anything—and he’s hurt David. He’s hurt him and took his place to convince him to stay, to—

But bursting through their bedroom door, there’s nothing. No signs of a struggle, no smashed furniture. All that is out of place is the open window and blinds flowing like the tail-end tendrils of a ghost.

“Oops.”

Thomas spins to David at the door.

“What have you done with him?” Thomas demands, his back finding safety in the bedroom wall, near the window.

“I’m David,” he replies. “Come on. Let’s reconvene our tête-à-tête.”

Thomas’s hand is on the window now, and in his back left pocket, the shard of glass.

“You’re him,” he says. “David?”

“Yeah,” he replies, coming closer, his hand rising to his face. “I’ve always—”

Thomas doesn’t give him a chance. Stabs him right in the side of his face, the shard ripping through his jaw, then throat.

But red runs. Blood. A foul and bright near neon red in the twilight-light dusk of the bedroom. And Ronnie doesn’t bleed red.

Thomas lets go of the glass—still lodged in David’s pulsing pulp of a neck—and returns to the wall.

Then he begins to tremble, scratching at his airless throat.

Because David’s body is bubbling, and that blood burns to a foul ashen grey. Then comes the sound of what can only be imagined as a black hole’s screech. Some mad, hungry roar that somehow sucks in the air, the room whirling now in a vortex. The bubbling body bloats like a balloon and then bursts, flies around the room comically, grey goo splattering across Thomas’s face and the walls. The sack of flesh that was once not-David whacks the wardrobe with a wet slap.

Thomas is out the window now, sliding along the tiles. Fuck this. But when he gets to his car, it’s gone, replaced with a Ronnie the Rat See ya soon, folks, sign.

He runs around the house to the cover of night, toward Ms Tick’s house, the only other car he knows, and the little perfect town of Dureem shakes. A voice.

“Son o’ Mine, O beautiful sunning shine – where is it do you go?”

Ronnie is singing, with all the bravado of a children’s film finale, and Ms Tick isn’t answering her door. Thomas charges at it. He falls through with ease, and is in the house, covered in a stinky, chunky liquid. The door behind him bears a Thomas-shaped hole, crumbling apart. It’s cottage cheese.

“Ms Tick?” he shouts, crawling, dragging himself up. “I need your keys, I need—”

Thomas bumps into a wall, a wall that perfectly represents what he assumed to be Ms Tick’s living room. He isn’t sure how moments ago it looked real, but he pushes over the flimsy cardboard anyway.

A bad mistake.

The cardboard cut-out of the living room gives way to a bottomless pit, and stars are swelling and bursting in bright flashes of cosmic puss throughout that endless space. The sound, the vortex of a black hole scream, fills his skull like a mad swarm of hornets eating away a nest of bone. Far off into the pocket universe that has bloomed in the living room, cold constellations and corpse stars congress, and soon those alien asterisms form the face of Ms Tick. Her monstrous mouth widens and unrolling from the black nebula is a tongue-like red carpet, travelling faster than light from what must be billions of light years away. It only takes a couple of seconds for a shape to emerge on the end of that tongue, a foul, terrible, awful blot on the skin of the universe. Who could it be? Why, it’s only Ronnie the Rat doing a jig in his showman outfit, booming in a high falsetto, “Oh Sweet, Sunning, Beautiful Shine, O’ Handsome Son o’ mine! Why do you leave me to die?”

Thomas is out the house again now and running on the road when his legs stick to the floor. He wrestles his leg out of whatever is holding him, only to see molasses-like strands grabbing like fingers his calf. He is in a toffee swamp that is slowly simmering, evolving from the muddy, brackish brown to a deep, merlot red made black in the tangoing moonlight. And just as he reaches the pavement, the blood-toffee river drops away, revealing only that same cosmic wound that is festering in Ms Tick’s house.

Thomas jumps the fence into another estate where the houses he runs to all burst into confetti. And his dad is still singing…

“O Son o’ mine, the prince and pyre, you’re burning a hole in my home! And don’t you see, my jewel, my bean, that I will not let you roast?”

Thomas is running through a now houseless field, avoiding the meatless whack-a-moles that burst like geysers out the ground, when his phone rings. He checks to see if it’s David. It is. Answering, he tries his best to abate ragged breaths and talk. The other end emits only a whimpering, snotty cry that boils to a full-on scream, Ronnie’s voice in the background, deep and chthonic: you were gonna take my rootin tootin lad weren’t ya hotstuff, oh yes, you were—

Thomas stops running.

Oh he’s listening now when loverboy turns up. Are you listening Tommy-boy?

Thomas nods, terrified for David.

Good.

The click of Ronnie’s fingers down the phone: and with a blink, the world is bright again. A blank unyielding voidspace.

“Behind ya, Zoos, my boy.”

Thomas rotates slowly on command like a broken Lazy Susan.

Ronnie’s showman suit is now a mess of royal regalia and ragamuffin robes that boast the mangled, agonized Os of screaming faces. Beside him is the messy pulp of David. His face, welted and bruised, is a gaunt mask with the horn of a coat hanger hooked through his eyeless socket, while what should be his body hangs limply like a stretched morphsuit.

“Here you are my sweet! My munty-mire. My glassy-eyed twitchy thoughtless fire.”

“Dad,” he says, sniffing. “Just let him go. I won’t leave.”

“Oh, but son, my peach and plumb! I thought you sincerely wanted to run?”

“I did. I do.” He looks around. “But where could I go.”

Ronnie smiles, his mouth rippling into the open air, wider than his face allows. The grin conjoins and comes full circle above his head, and in this new little fleshy halo a grey, foamy ball manifests. Lips red with blisters rupture its surface. It speaks in a low, grumbling, toneless tone. “You have come around, Son? Thine rebellion have ended? Harrison’s lesson hath returned?”

Thomas keeps looking at David whose mouth opens and shuts every now and then, his eyes white like milk. Thomas nods, remembering Harry suffering the exact same way.

“Is he hurting?”

Ronnie’s eyes furrow, then a big blue hand stretches out of his ear and slaps Ronnie’s cheeks, popping his eyes out. They float toward David. Ronnie’s original now eyeless form and little ball of grey goo burst into flames. From the floating eyes, Ronnie’s form grows back. “Yes,” he says. “Pun-ish-ment.”

“Why?” Thomas asks.

Ronnie bursts like a blister and floats over to Thomas like a mist. He is holding his breath when he begins condensing his form around him. He manifests again with his arm around his neck, holding him like an old friend. “You know how much I love you. And Schmavid-David, and Hawwy-son, was gonna take you away from me.” Ronnie clicks his fingers and a lazy-eyed, malnourished, smaller version of himself appears before David’s hanging skinsuit. It slaps the flaccid skinsuit’s bottom. “Talk,” it says in a scratchy chipmunk-tuned kitten-voice.

David tries to speak and fails a couple times. His mouth opens and static comes out, a high pitch tune undercutting it all. When he finally voices syllables, it is a far off, distant vocalization, like the voice mail left on a voice mail left on a voice mail.

“I went to Ronnie and asked if we could take a break, see the world,” David says in that awful voice. “And he brought me to his Party Room, the pocket in which we are now in, and he showed me the truth of our mask—”

Ronnie’s little minion zips David’s mouth shut, torquing his moans.

“The truth of our what?” Thomas asks.

“He’s been in the Party Room for far too long—he doesn’t know—”

Thomas stumbles backward, into white expanse, Ronnie following lightly. “Too long? How long have you been him?” Nausea burns in his stomach.

“I wanted you back at your daddy’s side,” Ronnie is saying now, but the white noise of David’s voice is searing Thomas’s mind. So long ago. Where had all his hours been? All his life felt like this one day, today, like he was born just this evening. He tries remembering David—but can’t. Not him, at least. Tries remembering outside of the perfect world of Dureem, or even his brother, Harry. Their adoption, their life before Ronnie… But nothing arrives to the shores of his mind. Just blank whiteness.

Thomas very suddenly wants to die. And just like that, his hand wields that glass shard from before. Ronnie’s eyes widen, window wipers clearing them of the rain of disbelief.

“Son o’ mine!” he shouts in a thunderous voice, flying toward him like lightning.

Too late. Thomas slits his throat.

There is a pulsing, a wet heat beating out of him. Whiteness, whiteness… The black of his eyelids.

Silence.

“Ya still here dumby.”

Ronnie in front of him; Skin-suit David a little further away; Minion-Ronnie now a pile of grey goo. And it’s this colour that draws his eye closer to himself, to his hand, the one that did it all, ended his life, the final sentence. Where there should be bright, vivid red, coagulating in the fresh void-air, there is only and utterly the abysmal, foul, evil greyness of Ronnie’s magic goo coating his glass shard and hand.

His hand finds his throat. Cut, open, but sealing. In his left hand: a bottle of white wine suddenly manifested shimmers to red. And to his right, that shard of glass reforms into a full wine glass. He lets these two items go and they float, the wine pouring into the glass.

Except all of that is wrong. It’s not him that looks to his left hand, not him that looks to his right. And he certainly didn’t reform those items himself.

Ronnie is smiling at him.

“No,” he says, and his belly widens, splits apart, intestines folding into themselves in a symphony of squelches, packing neatly away in folds of furry fat. “You didn’t. But oh, you were so very close.” Great megladonic blades for teeth rupture the sides of his flesh, and at the centre of his belly is a black foundry among maggoty stars that wriggle and wrestle against the dirty night. At the centre of this heaving mass is a gaping, hungry maw, the pupil of an unblinking eye.

Thomas doesn’t know what Ronnie means, or what is happening. First, the mess that is David pools into a grey mush, his moans melting to barely noticeable bubbles on the goo’s surface. And Ronnie slurps him up. What could Ronnie have meant? To be so close? He thinks about the glass shard he had in his hand, and—look!

The shard reappears. He—he has control. How does he have his his father’s—

“That’s enough of that,” Ronnie says, slashing Thomas’s hand clean off. And just as Thomas tries to manifest something else, his body begins to quake.

“Oh Tommy-boy, the strings, the strings… They’re falling….” And as Ronnie sings, Thomas’s legs wobble, his arms weaken, but Thomas still fights, fights till his eyes pop with a sad poof of air, only to reform again weakly. His fingers bloat and pop like overfilled sausages. His nose, cheeks, mouth—they swirl away, floating into the grey mass of goo he is now becoming. And as the sick truth of his Making uncoils Thomas’s thoughts, he falls, blank-faced, like a stringless puppet to the floor.

“Tricky stuff, humans,” Ronnie says, drinking what remains of the goo called Thomas, “but we can always start again.”

End.

RSL is a writer from Liverpool making use of his nightmares. His work tends toward the weird and the absurd. He also has work forthcoming in Vastarien. You can find him on Twitter complaining about money as @RSLjnr

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 WWW.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

- Cover-Copyright
- LFTE
- Meet the Staff
- Aleph Mem Tav
- Organ of the Sea
- art 1
- New Fox Smell
- Hollow House
- art 2
- Leaden Within the Lines
- Keepers of the Garden
- art 3
- indomitable
- He will not fall until