CHM July 2023
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 2023-06-24 18:21:09+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 - “Crawling Gods - Osmia the Devourer”

by David Lopes

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Edited by Charles Tyra
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

I love the history of literature, especially as it pertains to cosmic horror. Figuring out who penned the very first story in our beloved subgenre is a fantastic (and likely endless) debate. Was it Bierce, Poe, or Blackwood? Throw in Wells and Fitz James O’Brien, a personal favorite of mine who predated many of the above, the list goes on. The month of July itself has produced many of my favorite weird tales, from “Dreams in the Witch House” in 1933 to Smith’s “The Disinterment of Venus” in 1934 and “Mother of Toads” in 1938. We hope this month to add some tales of our own to the illustrious history that readers can look back on for years. How will we fare? You’ll just have to read them and see.

We start with a mysterious space horror by CHM alum P.L. McMillan in “The Working Conditions of Shift Three” followed by a social media commentary by Jo Kaplan that will make your skin crawl in “The Feed”. In “The Tree That Casts a Shadow Like a Man” unimaginable things lurk in the woods of the upper Midwest. There is a right and wrong way to die in “Glass Clue” followed by a thoroughly disturbing tale of motherhood and entomology in “Want Like Raw Silk”.

Long time readers of CHM will know how much I enjoy corporate horror. In “Down in Minus Three” we witness how valuable interns are to large corporations… and the world. All the young men in town are connected by a weird, terrifying dream space in “Heroes” before we wrap things up this month with a ship’s crew marooned on a strange, ancient island in the era of sail in “Under the Wall”.

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

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.

The Working Conditions of Shift Three

By P.L. McMillan

“No outward signs of trauma,” Morris said, loud enough for the ceiling-mounted mic to pick his voice up. “Body temperature still reads 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.”

He gripped the corpse by one shoulder and lifted it so he could examine its back, probing the muscles, checking along the ridges of the spine. Behind him, the medbay doors hissed open. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Engineering Officer Maybelle Golde.

“Nothing’s wrong with the cryopod as far as I can tell without fully taking it apart,” she said, grasping her elbows in a position that warmly reminded Morris of a child.

“I’m not seeing anything surface level on the body either. I’ll have to cut him open,” he replied.

Golde shifted back and forth on her feet. “Shouldn’t we get permission from the next of kin?”

Morris picked up a gleaming scalpel. “We can’t risk waiting until planetfall. We need to know what happened so we can protect the other passengers. The Company can issue a settlement if the family pushes it.”

“Alright, it’s your decision.” She flashed a half smile. “Happy to throw you under the bus.”

Morris made the first cut.

“Advanced desiccation of bodily organs.” He gently pushed the organs around, this way and that.

The Citizen had been found dead in his cryopod a few hours ago. Outwardly, he appeared to have just died, but internally his organs were dry and much of his blood was gone. Where there was once blood, there were now large scarlet jelly-like orbs nestled around vital organs. Morris scooped out one of those orbs and placed it into a tray. “Unnatural coagulation of subject’s blood…”

He poked the sphere with the point of his scalpel. Nothing. Pinning the orb with his forceps, Morris sliced in. The orb popped audibly, spraying a thick, viscous ichor across the tray and the front of his medical apron. By the door, Golde gasped sharply. He glanced up at her as she staggered back, averting her eyes. With a faint moan, she vomited on the floor.

Morris shook his head and smirked. “The blood…pod, for a lack of a better word, pops with incision. Will collect a sample and run scans.”

He removed the organs one by one, scraping off samples, and bagging them to be freeze-dried in case the Company wanted to conduct their own post-mortem study. He paused before stapling the now very hollow man closed.

“Huh.” he said and made another incision at the throat. “I’m seeing signs of excessive trauma and tears in the esophagus region.”

He poked at the torn flesh and ripped muscles. “Weird.”

* * *

Morris picked at the sad lump of protein the food replicator had promised to be ‘meatloaf”. The mess hall door slid open and Navigational Officer Pavlo Holovko walked in, wiping his sweaty forehead with a cloth.

“Did you get that comms out to the Company?” Morris asked.

Holovko grunted, heading straight for the replicator. He punched through the menu, made his selection, and stood there, waiting.

“Golde didn’t find anything when she examined the cryopod, but I still think something went wrong with the hypersleep process. The Company might know more.” Morris pushed his plate away, deciding that the slice of carrot cake he’d replicated would be more than enough for a meal.

The replicator hummed as it processed Holovko’s meal. The mess hall door hissed open again and Golde entered, her face pale. She sat shakily across the table from Morris, glancing at his meal, then just as quickly looking away.

Holovko sat with a heavy thump next to her, setting his food in front of him. “Not hungry, Golde?”

She shook her head.

“She saw her first dead body today,” Morris teased and she blushed, as he hoped she would.

“You didn’t authorize the autopsy with the Company,” Holovko said around the food he’d stuffed in his mouth.

“Did you send the comms?” Morris pressed again.

“Yah.” The other man returned to eating as if it were the only thing that had ever mattered to him.

Morris frowned. Holovko wasn’t initially assigned to be the Navigational Officer for shift three. Morris had been unpleasantly surprised upon waking out of hypersleep to see a strange face. All Holovko had said was that the original Navigational Officer had asked to switch so she could spend more time with her husband on a different colony shift.

Switches like these rarely happened. It made Morris uneasy. As an officer of science, he didn’t like to think he was superstitious, but at the same time, it felt like bad luck. The exodus of Ulingark had been hectic in those last few months as the neighbouring sun had faded slowly but surely. Hundreds of colony ships, stuffed full to the brim with Citizens, seedlings, and animal DNA, launched away from the cooling condemned planet to find new homes among the stars.

* * *

“Three more bodies,” Holovko grumbled, wiping his forehead.

Morris crouched next to the cryopod and looked at the output on its monitoring screen. “An alarm should have gone off, right? When he flat-lined? Isn’t there an alarm?”

Holovko shrugged. Footsteps echoed as Golde jogged over with her toolbelt jingling. She knelt next to Morris.

“Shouldn’t there have been an alarm?” he asked.

The Engineering Officer nodded, her strawberry blond hair bobbing around her face in gentle waves. “No alarm because the pod still thinks the Citizen is alive. The monitor is glitching and showing a faint heartbeat.”

Morris shook, stretching out his aching knees. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, too old to be moving planets, still it was what it was. His sweet tooth also didn’t help, giving him a generous belly which he had to heft around. “Holovko, help me move this body to medbay.”

“Another unapproved autopsy?” the other man frowned.

“We need to identify the source of these deaths,” Morris replied. “We have to stop the spread. Yesterday, it was one, today three. Tomorrow, ten?”

Holovko shrugged.

* * *

Seven bodies lay in airlock four, side by side.

“It’s disrespectful,” Golde said, biting her lip. “Their families might want to bury them once we make planetfall!”

Morris shook his head. “We can’t risk it if it’s an infection.”

“It’s not an infection,” Holovko said, wiping his face with a grubby cloth.

Morris’s chest swelled. His face flushed. “Oh yeah? What makes you say that?”

Holovko shrugged. “We would have got it by now. Especially you, doctor. Playing with so many dead bodies.”

“P—playing?!” Morris’s bald spot prickled with rage, his vision narrowing down to Holovko’s face.

“We should just put them back into their pods!” Golde began to sob, pressing her hands to her face.

Morris hadn’t bothered to autopsy these bodies. He could only assume he’d find the same as the others: desiccated organs, strange crimson blood orbs, throat trauma.

The light above the inner airlock door lit up and a loud alarm sounded. The outer door opened and the bodies disappeared in a flash, banging against each other and the doorframe as they were ejected into the void.

Beside him, Golde wept. Holovko wiped his face with his grimey handkerchief and just stared at the now empty airlock chamber.

Morris made a note to check into Holovko’s personnel file.

* * *

The food replicator gurgled, filled the air with the rich scent of fabricated coffee. Morris and Holovko sat across from each other, glaring. Golde eventually sat next to Morris, setting a mug in front of each of them. She’d made his the way he liked it—four sugars, a heap of powdered cream. She’d remembered.

“Thanks,” he said with a soft smile.

He noted that she looked pale still, frightened. She was young, probably this was her first deployment, and what a rough first mission. Normally colonization migrations were relatively calm, boring work.

“More bodies today,” Holovko said, digging into a bowl of eggs and oatmeal.

It upset Morris how cold and callous Holovko sounded about the loss of so many Citizen lives. He made it sound like a minor inconvenience rather than death. Though his file had failed to turn up anything, Morris felt it in his gut. Holovko couldn’t be trusted.

“Golde, anything?” Morris asked.

The Engineering Officer shook her head. “I’ve run every diagnostic test I can think of. I can’t pinpoint why the monitors produce a false heart rate or what might be causing the deaths. Do you think there is some kind of cryopod corruption? Maybe in the suspension compound?”

Morris nodded. “Though why we haven’t lost everyone at this point then, I’m not sure. The deaths are happening at random locations, all over the cryopod chamber, rather than in a particular sector.”

“Have we heard from the Company yet?” Golde asked, looking at Holovko.

“Nothing,” the man replied.

“And the bodies?” She turned to Morris. “Are you planning on ejecting them too?”

Morris shook his head. “We’ll leave them sealed for now. Until we understand more or get orders from HQ.”

Golde stood and left, arms wrapped around herself. Her coffee sat untouched on the table.

* * *

Morris snapped awake with a sickening abruptness. For a moment he sat upright on his small bunk, his heart thundering, staring at the opposite wall. His mind, still half asleep, wondered if his steady diet of cakes had finally come to take its reckoning in the form of a heart attack. Then a scream broke through the quiet. Another scream, Morris realized. Golde. He stumbled out of bed, nearly wiping out as his feet tangled in the blankets. Hopping free, he dashed out of his quarters, down the hall, where the echoes of terror still reverberated.

Just outside the bridge, he found her. Holovko straddled her, his hands clutching the neck of her jumpsuit as he shook her, violently slamming her head against the plexicarb floor. The small woman struggled, raking her nails across his face but the Navigational Officer only snarled and threw her harder against the floor.

Morris didn’t hesitate, leaping, barreling into the other man and knocking him away from Golde. He scrambled to his feet and sent a kick straight to the side of Holovko’s head. The Navigational Officer went limp with a haggard sigh. Breathing heavily, Morris turned to tend to Golde. She moaned, rolling away, clutching the back of her head, blood leaking between her fingers.

“Don’t worry, Golde,” he said, kneeling. “I’m here.”

She allowed him to pull her hands from her head, so he could examine her wound. It seemed surface level, nothing a few temporary stitches wouldn’t fix, and he sighed in relief. The woman shuddered and sat up.

“What the hell happened?” Morris asked.

Tears leaked from her eyes, running down her cheeks, but Golde’s voice was remarkably steady. “I was worried. About him. I snuck into the bridge and tried to pull up a record of the comms he was supposed to send the Company.”

Morris’s guts felt like lead, weighted down with foreboding. “Holovko didn’t send any comms, did he?”

She shook her head. “He caught me, I confronted him, then he…” She made a vague gesture, her eyes distant and unfocused.

* * *

With Golde resting in her bunk, Morris went to the brig. Holovko was awake, sitting on the plain plexicarb bed. Blood had crusted around the swelling over Holovko’s right cheekbone, where Morris had kicked him. Loathing ran through Morris’s veins like icicles at the sight of the implacable Navigational Officer.

“Why did you lie?” Morris asked.

“Lie?” he replied.

“About the comms, I know you never sent it.”

“I sent it,” Holovko replied, crossing his arms.

Morris shook his head. “Why else would you attack Golde after she found out?”

“She was spying on me, snooping where she didn’t belong,” Holovko replied.

“Of course she was spying on you!” Morris snapped. “You can’t be trusted! And the deaths? Is that you too?”

Holovko sighed, laid down, and turned his back to Morris.

* * *

Morris went to the bridge and sent out a brief comms, hoping it would be relayed quickly enough to the Company that they could help him. It was obvious to the Medical Officer that Holovko could not be allowed to continue in his capacity as Navigational Officer but whether the man should be forced back into hypersleep or vented into the void of space, Morris wasn’t sure.

As he made his way down the halls towards the crew bunk area, the ship felt quieter than usual. The heating vents whispered loudly over the humming of the wiring, the rumble of the oxygen scrubbers. Distantly something clanged, thumped. He shivered, running his hands over his arms, then knocked on Golde’s door.

No response. Worried about her state after her head injury, Morris activated the door which opened with a pneumatic hiss, revealing an empty room. He stepped back into the hall and hit his comms, “Golde, where are you?”

Static answered him.

He jogged to check the mess hall, the medbay, the engineering storage room, the communal showers; empty, empty, empty, empty.

His breaths came in shallow gasps as his jogging turned to running, turned to sprinting. His next stop: the brig.

Empty.

Bracing a hand against the wall, Morris bent over gasping. His heart beat a rebellious tempo against his ribs, threatening repercussions.

Holovko was gone. His cell door open. Somehow he’d managed to escape. Or worse, he tricked Golde into letting him out. Clutching a cramp in his left side, Morris stumbled out of the brig and went back to the medbay. If Holovko was loose, he’d need a weapon, and for that, Morris grabbed his favourite scalpel.

* * *

The cryopod chamber was dark, massive, quiet save for the incessant buzzing of machinery. Morris entered the room, the motion activated light directly overhead flashed on, and immediately he felt vulnerable, standing in the huge space. He tried his comms again, horribly aware that Holovko would be able to listen in as well.

“Golde? Are you okay?”

A susurrus of static.

He took another step, another light flashed overhead. Besides these lights and the dim green glow from the pods, the room was wreathed in shadow.

“Golde?” he called.

He gripped his gold medallion. Morris never considered himself a cowardly man but, alone and surrounded by the corpse-like figures of his fellow Citizens, the Medical Officer couldn’t bring himself to go farther into the chamber.

On the third story balcony level, another light flicked on.

Morris’s palms were slick with sweat, the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

“Golde?” he called.

The light flicked off.

Morris stumbled back, his free hand reaching blindly behind him, seeking the door while he held the scalpel in front of him defensively.

The same light flicked on and he froze. He activated his comms again, his voice even softer, a whisper, “Golde?”

A high pitched scream ripped through the air, shattering the silence, and lighting his nerves on fire. The intensity of it, the sheer volume, was maddening, filling his chest with an intense pressure—a primal fear. The scream went on forever, an eternity, then cut off, dousing Morris in a silence even worse than the sound.

He turned and ran.

* * *

Morris didn’t go far. In fact, he stopped as soon as the cryopod chamber doors hissed shut. Pressing himself against the wall opposite, he forced himself to breathe. Holovko was just a man, after all. Morris had to apprehend him. He had to save Golde, if he could. Yet, he couldn’t muster the courage to go back into the chamber and, instead, waited.

A minute passed, then five, and his heart rate resumed normal rhythm, his breathing regulated. Ten minutes, then twenty, the doors hissed open and Holovko stepped into the hall.

The Navigational Officer was drenched in blood, so much of it that it dripped in long ropes, trailed behind him in a macabre path of crimson horror. In one hand, Holovko clutched a large wrench, his other was pressed to his chest in a fist. The man’s lips were torn up, his face a map of mottled bruises. Reeking of copper, Holovko looked up at Morris and took another step forward.

Morris lunged, Holovko snarled, revealing shattered teeth, and raised his wrench, but Morris was faster and slashed Holovko across the neck. The wrench clipped Morris’s elbow, he spun away but the impact was enough to make him drop his weapon. He scrabbled for it as the blade skittered away on the plexicarb floor. A low moan caused him to look up. Holovko clutched his throat, slipped on the blood pooled at his feet and fell. His legs kicked, his feet beat a faint tempo on the floor, fast then slow, then still.

Morris grabbed the scalpel, approached cautiously.

The Navigational Officer’s eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling. Slowly, Morris knelt and fumbled at Holovko’s throat, seeking a pulse while avoiding the gaping smile he’d sliced there. The man was dead.

Standing, Morris wiped his hand on the leg of his jumpsuit, and stared down at the officer’s body. He wondered at the absolute lack of remorse and dismay he felt killing a man. All he felt was distaste. Relief.

Then he remembered Golde and guilt washed over him for having forgotten her. He made his way back into the chamber and up to the third level, where he’d seen the light. It was easy to follow the trail of carnage Holovko had left, but he didn’t find Golde at the end of it. There was just a pool of blood and nothing else.

* * *

Back on the bridge, Morris stared at the new message from the Company: Received the two comms. Continue voyage, mitigate loss as much as possible. Cyrolock Holovko.

“Received the two comms?” Morris whispered to himself.

Behind him, the bridge door hissed open. He grabbed the scalpel, now covered in a fine coating of rust-coloured crust, and turned.

“Morris.” Golde stood, backlit by the hall light.

“You lied,” Morris said, his voice almost a whine.

The small woman stepped into the room. She was pale, her hair lank and greasy around her face, her lips and clothes stained burgundy with blood.

“Why? Why did you lie?” Morris shouted, brandishing the knife out in front of him.

She shrugged. “He caught me studying his star maps and flight path. He was smart—too smart. Guessed that I was learning how to fly this beast myself.”

“You—you tricked me!”

“It wasn’t supposed to go this way,” she said. “I figured we could finish out the shift together, then I’d stay up. Lock everyone in cryosleep, manage planetfall…”

Morris’s vision narrowed to tunnels as he watched her, every muscle tense and aching, his grip on the scalpel painfully tight.

“He just wouldn’t stop watching me, following me.” She shook her head. “It’s unfortunate, but not unmanageable.”

Golde lunged towards him, but Morris was ready, slashing left-right, right-left with his knife. The razor sharp blade caught her hand, her left shoulder, slicing through her flesh like it was nothing. Blood spouted, hot and thick, as she flinched back with a cry. Morris followed through, intending to do what he had to do to ensure his own survival, except she turned, ripped the cover off the closest vent, and slithered inside at an inhuman speed.

Alone now on the bridge, Morris listened. Thuds, rasp of cloth against metal, growing distant, then gone.

There were vents everywhere. Morris thought of the cryopod chamber, the pool of blood, the absence of the body he’d expected to find. He knew if he went back there and looked again, he’d find a vent without its cover. Too late now.

Switching the scalpel to his other hand, Morris wiped the sweat from his palm, never taking his eyes from the exposed vent. Overhead, a snap. He looked up as she fell on him from above, kicking the knife from his hand. His knees gave out at the impact and Morris crumpled.

She was far stronger than he expected, snapping his wrists, rendering him defenseless as she pinned his head between her hands. Golde smiled, then tilted her head back.

Her throat bulged, discoloured to a deep, violent purple. The muscles in her neck strained, distended, as her mouth stretched wide, and her jaw dislocated. Her tongue snaked out, longer than any human’s, muscular and prehensile. Tipped with a hollow needle point, Golde’s tongue stretched three feet from her mouth. She looked down at him, smiling around it, before she plunged it downward, piercing through his lips, shattering his clenched teeth.

His throat shredded and stretched, Golde’s tongue skewered him. The pain was unlike anything he had ever known, unbearable waves overwhelming his mind. His sanity drowned in agony, until tears ran down his cheeks, until he wanted to beg for Golde to kill him.

Tenderly, like a lover, she stroked his cheeks with her delicate fingers and closed her eyes. Morris batted at her with his broken hands, kicked at the floor but found no traction.

An intense cold settled over him, followed by a sensation of lightness, of being emptied. Of a void new within him. His head buzzed. The roaring in his ears deafened him. His limbs went limp without permission, falling to the floor.

His chest felt as though it were deflating, his lungs collapsing, his heart struggled, fluttered, desperate to keep him alive, though now, he wanted death. His mind broke, finally, relief in a way as everything grew distant, the pain became an echo.

Golde hunched over him, going still. Her body bloated with the new blood, she was almost twice her original size. Her skin no longer pale but lively and soft, her hair now thick and full. Her massive tongue convulsed, trembled as she arched. Her throat dimpled, dully glowing red orbs pressing against her skin and slithering up, up her throat, into her tongue. The tongue’s surface pimpled with the orbs, as they travelled down, down into his throat, his body. The taste of musk, copper, sour pus filled his mouth.

The sucking sensation reversed. Something new, no less terrible, a feeling of fullness, of being fit to burst. A fever-heat, balls of star-sparks in his body, infesting his lungs, his belly, his groin.

Morris prayed he would choke, die. He prayed for release. His stomach grew distended, new pain as his skin stretched to accommodate. Golde reared back and her tongue ripped from his, dripping blood as it returned inside her.

She threw him over her shoulder and took him to his cryopod.

* * *

Morris woke from the vestiges of a bad dream, of sucking mouths, of crimson eggs, of desiccated corpses, and found himself in his cryopod. He felt weak and stared at the raised lid above him. Around him people screamed, pain drenched wails of the damned.

His belly rumbled, a rib cracked. He looked down and saw his flesh boiling with movement, faint limbs pressing against the fleshy prison of his body. Another rib cracked. In front of him, a body fell from an upper floor, smashed against the floor. The screaming grew louder, all around him, everyone was screaming. Morris opened his mouth to join, instead his throat split, as the creatures inside scrambled to find their way out, find their first breath.

End.

P.L. McMillan’s short fiction has appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines such as Cosmic Horror Monthly, Strange Lands Short Stories, Negative Space, and AHH! That’s What I Call Horror, as well as adapted to audio forms for podcasts like NoSleep and Nocturnal Transmissions. In addition to her short stories, McMillan’s debut collection, What Remains When The Stars Burn Out, and debut novella, Sisters of the Crimson Vine, are available now. Besides being a fiction writer, PLM has experience as an editor (Howls from the Dark Ages and an upcoming anthology from Salt Heart Press), hosts PLM Talks on Youtube (interviewing peers and professionals in the horror industry), and is the co-host of a horror writing craft podcast, Dead Languages Podcast. Find her on her website: plmcmillan.com

The Feed

By Jo Kaplan

It happened the way it always happens: first gradually, and then all at once.

That’s the way of change. It doesn’t want to happen. You peel it off like a Band-Aid, which sticks at first, wanting to cling to flesh, until it finally rips free.

So it was with me and Aaron. Five years cohabitating in a one-bedroom apartment, each unhappier than the last, until the moment one of us said what the other was thinking: “This isn’t working.” Band-Aid ripped. Carefully protected flesh suddenly raw and wounded.

Mutually-agreed-upon, sure, but messy all the same.

First thing I did was start trolling Craigslist for rentals. Eye-wateringly expensive units in complexes with their own movie theaters. More realistic but miserable dumps with dingy walls projecting a kind of muted despair. My sorrow lived in my throat. I felt heavy, body slow and resistant to change. Lurching there anyway.

Until I found a listing for a roommate in a rundown pocket on the Eastside, not yet gentrified.

Aaron watched the search over my shoulder and the air between us turned to hot soup. I minimized the window, not wanting him to see, though of course he knew what I was doing.

“You’re moving out?”

“You said this wasn’t working.”

“Yeah.” He looked at me, mouth poised as if to say something else, and I grew ill with the worry that he was going to tell me he was wrong and that he loved me. But he only shook his head, gave a kind of breath-laugh. Turned sour, disdainful. “That is what I said.”

Almost as soon as he stepped away, I pulled my window back up and read the listing. Roommate: thirty-something nonsmoking female with no pets. One room in a two-bed, one bath. Rent: almost too good to be true.

Aaron already forgotten, I typed out a quick email. Within minutes came the reply:

Hi Jenna,

Thnx for getting in touch! My name is Merilee Abantian. I’m moving to Santa Monica so I need someone to take over my lease. This is a great place, you’re going to love it. Feel free to stop by any time this weekend for a look. If I’m not there, Bridgett will show you around.

Happy trails,

Meri

An odd signoff, I thought as I perused the photos in the listing. Only the outside of the building, which looked vaguely Victorian. Nothing of the inside. I pulled out my phone and found Merilee’s Instagram account, thinking she might have shots of the apartment. Her profile was plastered with oversaturated selfies.

Aaron would probably prefer to date someone beautiful like Merilee, I thought as I took in her skin like olive oil and hair like black silk and plum-colored smile. She lay bikini-clad on a stretch of sand. She leaned on the railing of a pier, head thrown back.

Then: Merilee and a blonde girl sipping milkshakes with cheek-sucked fish-faces. Look at the silly joy in their eyes, the easy comfort of their closeness. It used to be that way with Aaron and me. When did that stop? When did I start to cringe away from his touch? Perhaps there was something wrong with me. Perhaps I was the one who was difficult to love.

* * *

I didn’t even tell him I’d found a place. Every conversation seemed a confrontation best avoided. I slipped out when he was in the bathroom and followed my phone’s GPS down winding narrow streets which eventually deposited me at a Victorian mansion tucked into a cul-de-sac. Though I recognized it from the photos, its dilapidation gave me the fleeting impression it had been a joke listing for an abandoned building. Years of grime spored over bricks and windows. It was like something out of the past, like something that shouldn’t be here.

Having come all this way, I tried the front door. It was unlocked, so I let myself into a dingy lobby with gold mailboxes and peeling green wallpaper. I found a staircase to the second floor, still half-convinced I might find only dust and spiders. Found the number.

My fist raised, I hesitated briefly, then knocked. A wall sconce buzzed in the windowless hall like a mosquito trap. Reminded me of summer nights back home, dreaming up all the ways I would become famous.

The door clicked and creaked inward. A sliver of pale face, one bloodshot blue eye.

“Who are you?” A high rasp; voice like a disused pipe.

This was a mistake, I thought. I had made a mistake. “Jenna Harrington.” A beat, unrecognition in that icy eye. “Merilee said I could come by to check out the apartment today?” I said it like a question under the weight of that baleful scrutiny.

“She did, did she.”

My nod seemed somehow foolish. Bridgett swung the door as she stepped back, waiting for me to come in.

My first impression changed everything.

They don’t make apartments like this anymore, I thought. Not the same bland box of living room and kitchenette and dripping globs of white paint (the “landlord special,” Aaron and I used to joke). Here were high ceilings edged with crown molding, tall bay windows, rich hardwood floors; an antique green stove in a kitchenette dressed with marble countertops. There was something dark about the unit, but not the kind of dark that grows from windows facing taller buildings: the kind of lush and cozy dark of a classic, well-heeled abode, the kind of dark you want to sink into beside a blazing fire. A comfortable, sleepy dark.

“Is Merilee here?”

“She’s gone.” Bridgett stared at me with glassy eyes. “So you want the room or not?”

All at once. Just like that. Pretty soon I would delete the pictures of Aaron from my phone, I would empty my things from the apartment, and once I’d turned in my key, that would be it—he would be gone from my life.

* * *

After moving in, I explored the neighborhood and found a laundromat, convenience store, taco stand, carnicería, barber, and a man who sat on the corner selling fruit from a cart. I bought a papaya. I don’t really know why; I had no idea what to do with it.

Back when we’d first started dating, Aaron would have laughed. He would have looked up recipes and gotten into a whole papaya-themed dinner. In the latter days of our dissolution, though, he would have only shrugged and uttered, what do you want from me?

Still, I missed him—the him he used to be. The us we used to be.

I tried to strike up conversations with Bridgett, but we spoke little, on matters of no consequence. It was awkward. Why couldn’t we laugh over a papaya together? Why couldn’t we make fish-faces while sucking milkshakes through straws? Why did I always have to try so hard, when everyone else seemed to navigate life so easily?

Sometimes I saw things that reminded me of him, things that made me turn and start to say something, a line from a movie or a joke that only he would get, but found myself facing thin air, emptiness.

I decided I should get to know Bridgett better, so I found her Instagram, scrolled through bright, idealistic snapshots of beach sunbathing, Venice boardwalking, graffiti exploring, and amber shot cheersing. Her smile lit the sallow edges of her face, and her blue eyes hinted mischief. Makeup smoothed the blemishes I saw in real life. One hundred fifty, two hundred likes per photo. I barely scratched fifteen on mine.

She looked so happy.

But whenever I saw her in the apartment—and I never saw her leave, come to think—she bumbled about in sweats, hair unkempt, gaunt face untouched by sun, nose in her phone, eyes glazed with scrolling.

I’ll be honest. Her presence creeped me out a little. The way she lurked in dark corners, padding silent as a ghost; the way I would look up and find her staring, jaw unhinged, gaze vacant. She rarely showered, and I was sometimes hit with a whiff of unwashed flesh, sour and oniony.

I found it hard to reconcile Bridgett with her Instagram self: smiling Bridgett, sunshine Bridgett, Boho dress and gold sandals Bridgett.

Who was she, really?

* * *

And then it happened—I stopped at the liquor store after work and got wine drunk in the living room, choking back sobs as I scrolled through Aaron’s Instagram, all those old photos of us when we were happy and in love, all that love as withered now as dried petals divorced from their rose.

When Bridgett wandered in from her room, I sniffed and wiped my cheeks, swallowed thickly.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said.

“It’s okay.” I took a big gulp of wine. “It’s just, we were together for so long. Everything feels weird without him.”

“Same with me and…” She bit her lip and closed her eyes. I realized Merilee moving out must have hurt her. The loss of a best friend is not unlike the loss of a lover. I poured a second glass and passed it to her. The wine bound us together in our grief.

“I thought we would have been married by now,” I admitted. “And it’s funny because I don’t want to be married, at least not to him—but it just seems like… the normal thing to do, after a certain amount of time.”

Bridgett snorted. “Normalcy is the greatest lie Los Angeles has ever told. Look,” she swilled half her wine and set it down. Piercing eyes held me in place. “This city coerces you with the promise of fame, and when you realize you can’t have that, you settle for normalcy. But by then you’re trapped—normalcy has too steep a cost, so you trade your soul to play pretend in a false life. You mimic what you want your life to be like and you pretend that’s how it is, trying always to become a more refined and rarified version of yourself while you play at whatever you think normalcy entails.” She picked up her glass, took another sip. “Don’t you think?”

I didn’t understand half of what she said, and I was already drunk besides, but it did make me wonder: what had Aaron and I been doing but playing pretend while our relationship disintegrated? Sticking together because separating was harder, because we shared rent, because a body in motion stays in motion. You go along, and then you just keep going along because what else is there to do?

“Cheers to that,” I slurred, clinking my glass against hers. “Fuck normalcy.”

* * *

I had only been here a few weeks when the neighborhood began to change. A new building under construction boasted luxury apartments. The carnicería closed, replaced by a sterile coffeeshop with six dollar pour-overs, the kind of shop which has been slowly creeping across the Eastside like an alien species colonizing new worlds.

When I returned to the papaya man’s cart, I discovered not the squat fellow who had smiled as we exchanged pleasantries in Spanglish but a rigid weed of a man selling fruit cups. I asked where the other man had gone, and he looked at me uncomprehendingly. I purchased a fruit cup and went on my way.

* * *

I know what you’re thinking. This neighborhood is always changing. It doesn’t like to sit still. I think that’s part of it. Chasing the fad. We gentrify it, and it gentrifies us right back, in an endless loop.

* * *

Then one day I almost scrolled right past a photo of Bridgett at Santa Monica beach posted to Instagram the day prior. I found her on the couch and said, “You didn’t go to the beach yesterday, did you?”

Her shrug was meaningless—I knew she’d been home all day because I had been home all day. Maybe it was an older picture. A later-gram. “Did you go visit Merilee?”

This time her dull gray eyes sharpened and a look of disgust twisted her face. “I can’t visit Merilee.”

“Why not?”

“Because Merilee killed herself.”

“What?” I thought of the pretty, smiling girl in all those pictures—the girl who looked so happy, so carefree. I felt a hungry rot spreading across my sense of things, peeling back the falseness. “When?”

She stared at me like I was stupid. Then she said, “About a month before you moved in.”

* * *

Who posted the rental listing? Who emailed me?

At first I thought it must have been Bridgett. Some sick way of holding onto Merilee. It must have been. But it disturbed me, the idea I had been talking to Bridgett pretending to be her dead friend. I wondered what else she was hiding.

* * *

The neighborhood continued to change, shop by shop. Narrow storefronts crammed with antiques and books gave way to gleaming white emptiness marked by sparse racks of trendy clothing. Something crept over the buildings, swallowing what had been there before and replacing it with something new and soulless.

Have you ever heard of the Ship of Theseus? It’s this thought experiment about a ship being rebuilt piece by piece. And then the question: if each of its component parts is replaced, is it still the same ship?

If each shop and building is reconstructed, when all is said and done, is it still the same neighborhood? And as we shed and regenerate skin cells every day, if each of us is composed of entirely new cells, are we still the same people? Or something else?

Maybe, by the end of it, Aaron really was a completely different person. Or I was.

* * *

Though I avoided Bridgett in person, I fell in thrall to her Instagram feed, so out of joint with reality. At work, I scrolled through pictures of her smiling coquettishly in scenic locations. Four hundred, five hundred likes per post. An impossible, unreal life unspooling across the internet and taken as reality by hundreds of desperate, hungry believers.

On Fridays I became especially absentminded at work, unable to focus, so I spent a good chunk of the afternoon scrolling. Until I came across a picture of Bridgett and Merilee at the beach with the caption, “Hanging with my bestie! Happy Friday!” Posted thirty minutes prior.

Those dark gleaming eyes and that subtle smile chilled me. I couldn’t read suicide in her posture; it was like an invisible sickness.

How, I wondered, could Bridgett post something like this? Either it was the same twisted game she’d played by pretending to be Merilee via email, or she was delusional. Maybe she needed help.

* * *

“Hey,” I said when I got home and found her sitting on the couch. “How are you coping with… what happened to Merilee?”

Her eyes seemed gauzed with fog. “Fine.”

“Then how come you’re posting pictures of her and acting like you took them today?” I pulled up the photo and turned my phone to her. She barely glanced at it before shrugging. When she stood, her skin stuck to the leather and stretched as it came free like something gooey. She trudged to the hall and I could just about swear she left moist footprints in her wake. I had the sense that she had stopped taking care of herself.

“I’m worried about you,” I said. “I don’t want the same thing happening to you that happened to Merilee.”

Bridgett stopped in front of her bedroom door, the darkness beyond. She looked at me, then past me, then back at her bedroom. Just before she disappeared inside, I thought I heard her say, “It will.”

* * *

You probably think I should have done something when I heard that. Maybe you’re right. But in the moment I wanted so badly to believe she hadn’t said that at all, that she had actually said “It won’t” and I had misheard. I didn’t know how to help her. I barely even knew her, really.

It was just easier not to do anything.

So the gray hours passed.

* * *

I dreamt, I scrolled, hypnotic trance of pretty pictures both. Time slipped like water. My sharp emotions lessened, their edges smoothed, so I could think of Aaron without a stab of pain. I thought this was the ocean at the end of grief.

My endless scroll stopped abruptly on a picture of me.

I hadn’t taken a selfie in weeks—maybe months. Couldn’t remember the last time I had any desire to document my own face. But there I was, leaning against the narrow trunk of a palm tree, sunglasses balanced on wind-tossed hair. I couldn’t remember taking this picture.

It was me—but it wasn’t me.

When I looked for who had posted it, I saw my own handle, my own profile picture.

Then I thought someone must have gotten into my account.

Bridgett.

I marched into her room, demanded her attention. “Did you hack my Instagram?”

She turned slow, bloodshot eyes to me, peeling them away from her own screen. “What,” she said. Not quite a question.

“Did you hack my account and post pictures of me?”

Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. If she had hacked my account, how would she have gotten a picture I’d never taken? A picture that had never been taken in this reality?

In all this time, I realized I’d never actually seen her smile—not in real life. Not in person. I’d seen it dozens of times online, but here, her face was unapologetically blank. Now she pulled the corners of her lips into something like a leer, an expression so hideous I backed into the door. She laughed like grinding glass as she sat up, leaving patches of gummy skin stuck to the duvet. What remained of her was shiny, fishbelly-white, gelatinous.

She stumbled as she approached me, caught herself on the wall. When she pulled her hand away, long strands of flesh like taffy stretched, tethered her, snapped free. Her eyes seemed greasy, like petroleum jelly, pupils lost in a milky haze.

“As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you must be,” she said with something like malicious glee. “It’s got you now.”

* * *

I can tell by the way you’re looking at me—you don’t believe a word of this, do you?

You will.

* * *

Maybe I should have left then. But it took me years to untangle myself from Aaron. You really think I could have cast off the yolk of inertia so quickly?

I figured the best thing to do was avoid her as much as I could. Keep to my room when I heard her thumping down the hall. Sneak out to use the kitchen, run back to bed with a peanut butter sandwich, hunched over the glow of my phone while I ate and pretended not to hear the soft sucking sounds of her outside my door.

My own Instagram feed fascinated me. I kept finding posts I hadn’t made, selfies I hadn’t taken, and it was like watching someone else live my life, someone else wear my face. I was eager to see what I would do next. Where I would go. Who I would be. A curious thing, to watch your life from outside of it.

Here’s a picture of me and Bridgett. We didn’t take it—couldn’t have, not with her sticking to things wherever she went. We couldn’t have taken the one of us on the Santa Monica Pier, either, drenched in sunset hues. The one of Bridgett, me… and Merilee.

That picture garnered close to two hundred likes.

I hoped Aaron would see these pictures, would think of me like this: beautiful, happy, having fun with my new friends. Without him.

Hearing no sounds outside my room, I crept out to sit on the living room couch for a change of scenery—but found Bridgett was there. She must have leaned against the wall, gotten stuck irreversibly this time. The gooey edges of her flesh melded into drywall, turning hard and flaky where they met so that I couldn’t tell where she ended and the wall began.

Her eyes—ever more gray where they should be white, where they should be black—beseeched me, fearful.

“What’s happening?” I finally choked out, revolted by the stench of her—like damp, soiled clothes left to rot.

“She said it was okay. That it wasn’t that bad. That it could live for us,” she mumbled, her lips sticking together like wet glue.

I didn’t need to ask who. “Is this how she…”

Thick gray tears bubbled from her eyes. “She let it happen. She just sat down and let it happen. She wanted it to happen.”

While the wall digested her body, arms and legs flattened in place, I looked around with fresh horror, wondering where Merilee had sat down and allowed herself to be consumed—the armchair? The carpet? My bed?

I backed away from her, ill with the sight.

“Kill me,” she choked out.

* * *

Do you suppose I should have called a doctor?

But what could a doctor have even done with the thing on the wall—the thing Bridgett had become?

* * *

As the apartment subsumed her into itself, I felt myself grow heavier, slower, grayer by the day. I couldn’t help her. I could barely help myself.

Aaron commented on a picture of me: Glad to see you’re doing well…

What did that ellipsis mean? I agonized over it. Hated him and loved him. Wanted to get away from myself, to escape my own skin.

I started thinking strange thoughts. The uncanniness of it all. The self that is not the self.

Which self, I wondered, was I—and which self was the woman in my feed? She seemed more real to me now, through the artifice of the internet, than I was as a living being.

Have you ever thought about puppetry? How it mimics life even though it’s really just a hollow facsimile—and yet, the puppet show, like the movie or TV show or novel, in reproducing a sharpened version of life, somehow becomes more meaningful than life itself. It structures and orders things. The hollowness of pretend thus becomes more consequential than lived reality.

Bridgett was becoming something holy: her selfhood had both crystallized and dissolved. Her self was now playing the human, but a more refined and rarified version, a better human, the sort we all strive towards becoming, with flaws and troubles erased. She had almost reached the apotheosis.

* * *

When she screamed for help, I pinched the clay of her lips shut over that gaping orifice and held fast until it stuck. Her eyes bulged, begging me, but I knew what her sacrifice was worth. I could see it on her Instagram—thousands of likes per photo. Hundreds of comments: faces with hearts for eyes, an outpouring of affection. The internet adored her.

“See?” I said when I showed her, for she could no longer hold a phone. “See?”

She moaned her approval, eyes glistening with joy at what I’d helped her to understand. I stroked her hair, which came off in my hand like worms.

And then one day, Bridgett was gone.

All that remained was a foul-smelling stain on the living room wall. See, just there—you can still make it out faintly, can’t you?

Yes, her Instagram account continues to post. She is more popular than ever. I’m so happy for her.

I have a lot more followers now, too. Jenna on the internet is so charming, isn’t she? Did you follow her before you came here? Did you check all the lovely pictures on her feed after you got Bridgett’s email?

No one really moves out, I think. They all must be here, somewhere—all the past tenants. Who do you suppose the crown molding is fashioned out of? Or that old stove?

We can become our best selves here, you and I, and we don’t even have to lift a finger. Isn’t that the dream? We can be part of something—something holy, something that will never grow tired, that will never end.

End.

Jo Kaplan is the author of It Will Just Be Us and When the Night Bells Ring. Her short stories have appeared in Fireside Quarterly, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Vastarien, +HORROR LIBRARY+, Nightscript, and Bram Stoker award winning anthologies. She has also published work as Joanna Parypinski. In addition to writing, she teaches English and creative writing at Glendale Community College and plays the cello in the Symphony of the Verdugos. Currently, she is the co-chair of the Horror Writers Association’s Los Angeles chapter. Find more at Jo-Kaplan.com

by Maxwell Marais

The Tree that Casts A Shadow Like A Man

By Robert Guffey

Frank

I was hitchin’ through Kenosha County in Wisconsin, through a dark woodland full of caves and shallow streams and trees and mossy stones and not much else, when I met this old couple in a pickup truck. They offered to give me a ride. Real nice. Most people are, if you give ‘em half a chance. At one point I asked ‘em if they weren’t scared of pickin’ up strangers, and the old man said no ‘cause he could tell a son of a bitch from three miles away, and I wasn’t no son of a bitch. He could tell. Imagine that. That’s a good skill to have. I’d like to think I have it, too.

He asked where I was goin’, and I said I just needed to get to Lake Michigan. I had a job lined up with an old buddy from Cross Plains, Texas. Truckin’ job. We used to work construction together, and he told me to call ‘im when I got tired of all the bullshit in Texas. Well, I did call ‘im, so there I was hitchin’ my way east.

A lotta kind people in this country. Don’t let nobody tell you anythin’ different. Without people, kind people, I wouldn’t’ve been able to get from Cross Plains to Kenosha County with only a few bucks in my pocket.

I told ‘em all this, and the old man—he really sympathized. I liked ‘im right off the bat. He was a Texan, born and bred. He’d hitched his way around the country back when he was a young kid, about my age. The age you are now. He said he saw a trace of the Johnson in me, so that’s why he pulled over. I asked him what a Johnson was, and he said a Johnson was a fellow whose word was good, who’d always help you in a pinch, and (above all) minded his own damn business. Well, I laughed, ‘cause I could sure identify with that. The reason I was leavin’ Cross Plains was ‘cause some people just can’t mind their own damn business. I hoped it would be better in Michigan.

The old man told me it was. So did the old woman. They said I’d like it up there. I reminded them of their son, she said. They said they didn’t want anythin’ bad to happen to me. That’s why they picked me up off the side of the road. They said it wasn’t safe around these parts, particularly at sundown. I asked why, lightin’ up a cigarette as I did. And the woman said, “You ain’t never heard of the creature?”

“The what?”

“Hog Man,” said the old timer. Real matter of fact like.

“What on God’s earth is that?” I asked. I was imaginin’ some evil cop on a motorcycle who likes to get his rocks off by beatin’ the crap outta hitchhikers.

“Weren’t made by God, whatever it is,” said the old man. “Stands about six feet tall, got a head and paws like a pig, and smells like it’s been sleepin’ in sulfur for a thousand years.”

I just stared at him, then I started to laugh. I laughed so hard I started coughin’. Damn cigarettes… near choked to death.

“I wouldn’t laugh,” the old man said. “Lotta people’ve seen the thing in these parts. It walks the woods in the company of two little girls. One’s about eight years old, the other’s twelve or thereabouts.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Do the kids look like pigs too, or do they look like somethin’ else? Goat? Rattlesnake? Armadillo? What?”

They just went quiet and stared straight ahead through the windshield with pinched, stern expressions. I decided to shut up. I was grateful for the ride. I didn’t want to ruin it.

After about ten minutes, as the sun was settin’ behind us, the old woman said (and this was so many years ago, I can’t even remember her name now—Agatha? Julie? who the hell knows?), she said in a whisper, “I met one of the little girls once. The eight year old. In the woods, about forty years ago. My school friends were out pickin’ flowers and messin’ around, and I got lost. Lost for hours. Totally alone. Till I ran into the girl. Sad little skinny thing with hollow eyes. At first I was relieved. I thought she could tell me the way out of that place. But then I saw all the blood. Lotta her face weren’t there no more. And the middle finger on her right hand was half gone, just a little stump now. She came up to me where I was sittin’ on this rock by a small pond. I was whimperin’, cryin’ my little eyes out, and she told me this story. She said….

Liz

Can I sit here with you? When I came home from play, Daddy was on the floor screamin’. And I didn’t much care.

He always says to me, “Liz, you get in here with that broom and do your chores!” But I don’t like chores. I don’t like work at all.

Sometimes I disobey Daddy. Just ‘cause. One time he said I peed all over the toilet, but that’s silly. It was him. He always pees on the toilet when he’s been drinkin’ a lot. But I didn’t say nothin’. I just walked into the bathroom, picked up Mommy’s eyeliner, and wrote on the inside of the toilet bowl, just above the water line, “Hi ya, Pops!”

Then I went into my room and played.

When Daddy saw that eyeliner… oh, he got angry, yes he did. He exploded. Ran into my room, whipped off his belt, and did somethin’ bad to me. Told me to get down on all fours and pretend I was an animal.

“If you’re gonna act like one…!”

He said so many bad things to me. But I’m not supposed to curse.

I laughed through the whole thing. Better that than lettin’ him see me cry again.

That’s when I finally did it.

Rebecca had been askin’ my permission for months. So I finally gave it to her.

Rebecca hates grownups, just like me.

She hates to work, just like me.

We’ve been playin’ all day. I’m gettin’ kinda bored now. Bored with Rebecca. I think I hate her now, I really do.

I wish Mommy and Daddy would come back.

There’s nobody to play with anymore.

Frank

“Then she got up and walked away. Ain’t never seen her since.” The old woman looked out the window with a wistful glint in her eyes. The sun had almost set by now.

“I don’t get it,” I said, “how do you know that’s the little girl from the legend… the story… whatever. I mean, what’s the connection?”

“Oh, it was her,” she said.

“How do you know? I mean, did you see this… Hog Man?” I had to keep myself from laughin’ again.

The old woman didn’t say nothin’.

“She never did,” said the old man. “But my friend, Al, he did. He was my best friend in the world. Knew him since he was five. You could trust him. He was a Johnson. He wouldn’t lie.”

“What did he tell you?”

The old man sighed, almost as if he were bored with the whole subject. Perhaps he’d told the story a whole lot. I know I have since then.

“I can remember like it was yesterday,” he said. “Al told me this story back when we were still in our… oh, early twenties, I guess? Maybe we were still teenagers. I can’t remember exactly. Anyway, he was out huntin’ when he saw a man sittin’ by a stream. He approached the man. The man was naked, and he had grayish skin. Mottled. Leathery. Al got a weird feelin’, so he put his finger on the trigger of his rifle and started toward him. The man turned around. Weren’t human. No sir. This thing had the head of a pig, and it was cryin’ into its paws. Al thought the thing was lookin’ at his reflection in the stream, but he couldn’t know for sure. When Al saw those tears, though, he put the rifle down. The man, this creature, it asked him to sit down. Politely. Al said he felt safe for some reason. So he did. Only about five feet away from it. The thing asked him if he could tell him a story, just a little story. The words were hard to make out, Al said, but the thing was smart, that much was for certain. And he could remember every word the thing said… all the way to the day Al died he could remember them. I heard the story so much, I sometimes get confused and think I was there that day too, right there along with him. Al said yes to the thing. And then it began to speak….

Gerry

I shouldn’t have come here. They say it’s a haunted place. They say a young, deformed witch, abused by her father every day of her brief life, called upon the powers of Satan to freeze the Puritan’s beating fists forever. She transformed him into a thing of nature, of terrifying beauty, a massive oak tree that still bears his tortured image to this day. Soon afterwards, seeing evidence of her black magic rooted into the front lawn of her father’s property, the priests of the town snatched her from her hiding place in the basement while she was sleeping, gagged her to prevent the blasphemous incantations from escaping her mouth, and burned her at the stake atop a small hill that overlooked the property. In her final moments, the witch managed to bite through the gag. Her dying words, before her flesh melted off her bones, was to promise the priests she would return some day and warp their flesh into something less than human. The priests scoffed. Some say those old men disappeared, one by one, over the years, and that no one ever knew what happened to them. Others say they lived long and happy lives, completely untouched by the girl’s words, but I think those people were just trying to comfort themselves.

Some curses, they say, take a very long time to reach fruition. After all, if souls can be reincarnated, why not threats and promises and hatred itself? Hatred lives in this haunted place. I’ve felt it. I begged my brother to take his family and leave.

He wouldn’t listen. He’d always been stubborn, as stubborn as a….

No. Focus. Remember the past. There’s nothing else left to do now except pray that this curse will be lifted someday.

Listen: When I finally saw her, she was digging a hole near a tree shaped like a man. To be more accurate, the shadow of the tree was shaped like a man. The tree itself was just a bunch of gnarled branches. Its shadow, on the other hand, was something weird and ominous; it looked like a tall skinny man running in place, running to save his life.

I had been driving for two hours, ever since I received the phone call. My sister-in-law called around two in the afternoon and blurted out a bunch of incomprehensible statements, things that just didn’t make any sense. She sounded hysterical. But then again, she always got that way when she stopped taking her medicine. Then the line went dead. I was scheduled to drive up there on the weekend anyway, so what the hell. I decided to hop in the car and start off a day early. I’d beat the holiday traffic.

It was almost twilight on the day before Thanksgiving, and the trees around my brother’s farm in Kenosha County were cloaked in lengthening shadows. The sky was that special deep dusk-pink, punctuated by ragged black clouds. I had never seen those trees look so foreboding before. But then again, I had never been on the farm this late. My brother and his wife had inherited it only a year before, not long after Elizabeth’s eighth birthday.

I parked my car near the wooden fence that surrounded the property, swung open the creaking gate, and made my way up the path guarded by those crazy trees. The winds that blew through the branches whistled at me, as if taunting me. The whistling grew louder, more high-pitched, as I neared the small figure crouched in the unusually tall grass, right near the tree that casts a shadow like a man. I couldn’t see who it was, but I knew it had to be Elizabeth. She had a shovel in her hand. She was digging into the earth.

As I neared the figure, I wondered why the grass was so high. Why wouldn’t Richard cut it down before it got this bad?

A little girl in a frilly dress, her Sunday’s best, crouched down in the grass tossing piles of dirt in all directions. I stood behind her at a short distance, only a few feet, just watching her work. A second hole lay to the right of her. I quietly approached her and glanced over her shoulder. The first hole was about three feet long and just as deep. At the bottom of the hole lay a pig, its head crushed in by some kind of blunt object. There was still fresh blood staining its mangled gray forehead.

Elizabeth was humming a song, a childish, happy little rhyme I didn’t recognize. I put my hand on her bony shoulder.

Elizabeth turned around slowly. She didn’t seem startled to see me. “Hello, Uncle Gerry,” she said. Her cheeks were sunken in, and she had dark rings under her eyes. She hadn’t been eating much lately, that was for certain.

I removed my hand from her shoulder, backed away a bit. “What’re you doing, honey?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Making a hole.”

“Why?”

She said nothing, just gestured toward the dead pig with the metal part of the shovel, which was moist with dirt and blood.

I didn’t know what to say. Though I hadn’t seen her in a while, I knew there was something abnormal about her tone of voice. It was almost like she wasn’t Elizabeth anymore. I backed away some more. “Where’s Mommy and Daddy?” I asked.

She shrugged. “They’re not here.”

“Where are they?”

She just stared at me for a moment, without expression, then went back to digging her little hole.

I let her dig. Why not? I turned my back on Elizabeth and started toward the house, my heart beating faster and faster. It was so dark in that house, so silent.

As I put my foot on the first step leading to the porch, I heard Elizabeth say, “Rebecca’s in there.”

I turned back toward her. “What?”

“Say hello. Maybe she’ll like you.”

“Who’s Rebecca?”

She turned her back on me.

“Is she a friend of Richard’s? Does she live near here?”

Now she was digging again. As the winds blew harder, the shadow of the tree shifted. It almost seemed as if the shadow was trying to escape the tree that held it in place. The sky lost its color.

A sudden shiver coiled up my spine, but I ignored it. I walked up the remaining steps, up onto the creaking wooden slats of the front porch. I grabbed the knob on the screen door and pulled; it almost came off in my hands. One hinge seemed to be missing, and there were tears in the screen.

Richard was a neatness freak. Everything had to be in its proper place. He would never let something like this just go without rolling up his sleeves and fixing it himself.

I pushed open the door, which was already ajar, and stepped into the living room. What would normally be a Norman Rockwell nice-and-tidy abode was now a complete shambles. Puddles of mud covered the floor, pieces of broken furniture lay scattered, Lisa’s brand new sofa was now upside down, dark red streaks stained the white walls, and a human-sized figure lay sprawled on the wet carpet, half-covered by a soaking rug.

I didn’t want to look at it. I desperately wanted to look at it.

I approached the body slowly as the last rays of dusk disappeared with the shadows, leaving only night behind. I crouched down beside the figure, grabbed the end of the wet rug with my fingertips and pushed it aside. I couldn’t quite comprehend what I was looking at.

A full-sized corpse, in the latter stages of decay, about five-feet tall perhaps, balled up in the foetal position. Its skull, however, was unlike anything I had ever seen or read about. It seemed to be monstrously deformed, at least for a human; for a pig, on the other hand, a skull like that would have been perfectly normal. But that body was not that of a pig. This… thing was human, or at least had been at one time. A huge bullet hole had fractured the front of the skull. Clutched in the corpse’s fist was a revolver. I recognized Richard’s revolver, the one father had given him when he turned eighteen. The fist was very peculiar. It wasn’t a fist at all, not really. It had no fingers; or rather, the fingers had fused together into a hard black substance, and the gun was stuck inside it. Almost as if the fist and the pistol had fused together. Without removing the gun from the fist, I managed to open the chamber. Empty.

“Is he still sleeping?”

Elizabeth’s sing-song voice almost made me jump out of my skin. She stood in the doorway, the shovel still grasped in her little hands.

“Elizabeth,” I said, trying to sound as calm as possible, “who… who is this?”

She giggled and shook her head. “I know it’s not Rebecca. That thing’s waaaaay too big to be Rebecca.”

I let the rug drop down on top of the skeleton. I held out my hand and said, “Elizabeth, please give me the shovel.”

She hesitated for a moment, then walked into the living room and approached me. The second she was close enough I reached out and pulled the shovel out of her hands.

“Now listen, you have to give that back to me later,” she said. “You promise?”

“I promise, honey, don’t you worry.” I rose to my feet and approached the hallway that led into the kitchen. The back of the house was as devastated as the front. Canned goods lay scattered about the linoleum floor, bags of oats had been dragged out of cupboards and ripped open and poured out onto the floor. Once I almost slipped and fell on this mess, but I managed to keep my balance and approach the door that led out into the back yard.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Elizabeth had followed me into the kitchen. I pointed at her with the shovel and said, “Get back in the living room and stay there.”

“Rebecca’s in the basement, where she always is.”

“Elizabeth, tell me who Rebecca is.”

“A friend.”

“How old is she?”

“Mm… twelve? Eighty? I’m not sure.”

“How did you meet her?”

“She lives here. She’s always lived here.”

I was growing more and more frustrated with her. “Is she a friend of Mommy and Daddy’s?”

Elizabeth just laughed and shook her head. “They never really liked her.”

I pulled open the door and stepped out into the back yard. It had begun to sprinkle.

Elizabeth tried to follow me. I waved her away. “Go back into the living room!”

This time she just stayed where she was. At least she wasn’t following me this time.

I sighed and shut the door behind me. Raindrops hit me in the face. I followed my memory, turned toward the left, and felt my way toward the wooden double doors that led down into the basement. I grabbed hold of the metal rings and pulled. A musty scent hit me in the face, like that of wet leather. I pushed aside the second door, giving me enough room to fit through the rectangular entrance. I had to duck my head low to get inside, planted my feet on what felt like very fragile wooden steps, and began the descent with the mean end of that shovel held out before me. With my left hand, I reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a lighter. I flicked it on. The air was cool and grew cooler the deeper I went. By the time I reached the stone floor of the cellar, I could see my own breath.

I held the lighter out before me, spotted a switch. I hit it fast. A dim light flooded the cellar, but it was defective; it began flickering on and off haphazardly. In the corner of the room, one section of the stone floor was cracked and broken. I approached it slowly. Beneath was a layer of thick black loam. And in that loam, another hole. A grave. It contained the charred skeleton of what looked like a child.

It wasn’t deformed, not like the other one in the house above. Except… I leaned down near the edge of the hole and noticed that the head was far larger than what one might expect… but then again, what the hell did I know? Maybe all skeletons looked that way. I began thinking about the local legends. Maybe….

“Has she said hello yet?”

I dropped the shovel onto the stone floor. The resultant clang echoed in the room far more times than I would’ve thought possible. I spun around. Elizabeth was standing very close to me now.

“I told you to stay up there!” I shouted.

She didn’t seem at all affected by my outburst. She said, “She doesn’t say hello to just everybody.”

“Damn it, I’ve had enough of this. Where the hell is this Rebecca you keep yammering about?”

The expression on her face seemed to suggest that the answer was obvious. She pointed at the grave behind me.

I looked at the skeleton once more. This time it seemed to have moved slightly, like a sleeper switching positions in the night. I told myself to get a grip. “How long has this been here?”

“Daddy found her. I told Daddy to leave her alone. Mommy was upset and crying. She wanted Rebecca out.”

“Where’s Mommy and Daddy?” I could hear my voice trembling.

“Rebecca doesn’t like grown-ups. She’s lived in this room ever since her mommy and daddy put her down here. They didn’t like the way she looked.”

In the shadows around me, something grunted loudly and obnoxiously. Like a pig.

I rose to my feet. “What the hell was that?”

“Her mommy and daddy weren’t nice,” Elizabeth continued. “Before she got too big, they made her live out in the barn. With the pigs.”

With the rest of the animals, a voice said in my head. The voice of a child. The voice of a young girl—but not Elizabeth.

“Who said that?” I spun around. “Where are you?”

The sound of grunting increased. Echoed over and over again between those stone walls. Sickening, inhuman grunts filled the room. Filled the space between the throbbing walls of my skull.

A wave of panic surged up inside me. I wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. I turned to flee… and saw Elizabeth blocking my path. She seemed different now. Distorted somehow. She had picked up the shovel.

“Um, I guess she hasn’t really taken a liking to you,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t think it’d work out. Rebecca’s just that way. Can you really blame her?”

Everything seemed to waver and spin. The room itself had begun to stretch. How? How could a whole damn room just suddenly expand? Dizziness swept over me. I fell over onto my side. The grunting that filled my head only seconds before now seemed to be coming out of… my own mouth.

“I always liked you, Uncle Gerry,” Elizabeth said as she approached. “I’ll try to save you, okay?” She reached down, as if to pet my head.

Involuntarily, without wanting to, I found myself trying to bite her hand. I managed to take a bloody chunk out of her middle finger. I spit it out onto the ground. I felt disgusted with myself.

Elizabeth pulled her hand back and screamed. “Why can’t any of you be nice? Rebecca’s right. Rebecca’s always right!”

I tried to tell her I was sorry, but I couldn’t form words anymore. I tried to reach out towards her and saw that my hands were… disappearing. My fingers were spreading apart and fusing together into something gnarled and dark and hard.

I ripped the shovel out of her fragile grip with what was left of my hands. I was so confused in that moment… so damn scared… so angry… good Lord, I didn’t know what I was doing. It felt as of my hands were not my own. I lashed out.

I screamed and brought the shovel down on Elizabeth’s head. I yelled, “Make it stop make it stop make it stop!” I screamed this over and over again, pounding and pounding and pounding and pounding, until there was almost nothing left of her skull. Nothing but blood.

The confusion lifted. I started to cry. Just soft whispers at first.

I wanted to scream again, to black out and never wake up, but my thoughts had never been clearer. Only my body was changing, not my mind. Clear. Precise.

Enough to realize why Richard had gone for Dad’s revolver so damn soon.

Frank

“The thing was silent for a few minutes, then rose to its feet and shuffled away into the trees, all hunched over, like a crippled little man. But it wasn’t a man. At least not anymore.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. Wouldn’t you? Now the sun was totally gone, and these two were givin’ me the creeps. They were nuts. I wanted out.

“Listen, just let me out here,” I said. “I can walk the rest of the way.”

“That’s kinda far,” the old man said.

“That’s my problem.”

“Oh, we couldn’t let you do that,” the old woman said.

“A Johnson,” I said, “would mind her own damn business.”

The old man didn’t argue with that. He pulled off to the side of the road. I opened the door and jumped out.

“Be careful,” the old woman said, “don’t wander off into them woods.”

“What the hell’s your problem?” I said. “You just told me two stories about this monster and this ghost girl and they didn’t harm no one. They just told their story and left! So what? Why tell me this crap? And even if it is true, who cares?”

The old man shook his head. “Don’t worry about them,” he said. “Worry about Rebecca. Hope you know what you’re doin’.” And they drove off.

I started walkin’ again, watchin’ the pickup get swallowed up by the darkness around me. To my right… to my left… all the trees looked like impossibly tall men who had been frozen in place hundreds of years ago, their gnarled arms reachin’ out to me in desperation. It took me about an hour to get my mind off that damn fool old wives’ tale.

I started thinkin’ about the hot coffee I was gonna buy when I finally got into town and all the new women I was gonna meet in Michigan and….

And right when I got my mind off it… the cold inside my gut got colder… the thought… why, it just hit me.

I was bein’ watched.

I stopped by the side of the road and stared into the darkness and listened to the wind blowin’ through the trees—trees that looked too much like old men with broken bodies sufferin’ from arthritis and decades of self-loathin’ and regret. I listened hard. Nothin’. Just sounds. Harmless little animals I couldn’t even see. Animals that couldn’t give a crap about a poor hitchhiker like yours truly.

I kept walkin’, but I couldn’t shake that feelin’.

I was starin’ at the leaves blowin’ in the wet dirt all around me when I looked up and saw a pale white figure standin’ about ten feet away from me. A naked girl. Twelve years old or thereabouts. With long black hair that was almost invisible in all that night. She was so damn pale. The color of a full moon.

There wasn’t no moon that night, though. It was so dark… except for her bare skin. Her flesh was almost glowin’.

It looked like she didn’t have no eyes. And somethin’ was wrong with her head. It was too large for her body.

Somethin’ more cold than cold, a chill right out of the guts of winter, slithered up my back. I just stood there, waitin’ for the girl to say somethin’.

It was a girl, you know. Looked just like a girl.

And she said, “Hi.”

Rebecca

Have you seen Elizabeth? My name’s Rebecca.

All I ever wanted was someone to play with. Is that so bad? I play with people now. I can get into people’s heads and make them do things. Sometimes. When I have the time to crawl into their sleep. Or when they’re confused… or angry… scared.

I don’t know why I can do it. I can do a lot of things. Ever since I was born I could do them. Daddy always said I was….

But I don’t want to think about him. I don’t want to….

Mister, I don’t want to be alone.

Elizabeth got mad at me and walked off somewhere. I wonder where she is? Is she ever gonna come back? I didn’t want to hurt her. I just wanted a friend. I was just trying to protect her.

I thought she would be happy that way, with me, just the two of us, and all the grownups gone and forgotten, swept away like dirt under a rug. Like trash thrown into a basement. I didn’t know she liked them. I didn’t know that anybody… anyone… could ever like a grownup that much.

Where is she?

Where’s Elizabeth?

Have you seen her?

Frank

I shook my head no.

I just kept shakin’ no.

And finally she wandered off into the woods, the autumn leaves crunchin’ beneath her little feet. After a long while she was just a white speck in the distance, like that old couple’s pickup swallowed by the night.

The chill wouldn’t leave my stomach or my spine. I just stood there, frozen, watchin’, not thinkin’, not doin’ nothin’, until I heard her name, Elizabeth, shouted into the wailin’ wind by the saddest voice I’ve heard, likely ever will hear, and that’s when I started walkin’ again, fast, thinkin’ about that cup of hot coffee and those women, those smilin’ women, thinkin’ about the future and life life life life… and nothin’ past that… nothin’ that might be waitin’ for me on the other side of that final second….

Elizabeth.

That’s exactly what her voice sounded like.

I kinda wish I’d never picked you up, kid. It’s not fun rememberin’ that wail. It’s better to forget that kinda thing… things you can’t explain… forget and move on… forget and move on… just keep on drivin’ through the dark parts until the sun comes up. Once you’ve touched a little bit of the darkness, you’ll never want to get anywhere near it again.

Listen to me. The first town you hit, settle down in it, just get off the road, and don’t go messin’ around in the night no more. You’re not always goin’ to find a Johnson like me willin’ to help you out.

Hell, you probably think I’m as crazy as I thought that old timer was way back when. All right. Suits me. If you don’t believe me, there’s the night outside, and there’s the door.

You know what to do with it.

End.

Robert Guffey’s books include Operation Mindfuck (OR Books, 2022), Widow of the Amputation and Other Weird Crimes (Eraserhead Press, 2021), Bela Lugosi’s Dead (Crossroad Press, 2021), Until the Last Dog Dies (Night Shade/Skyhorse, 2017), Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security (OR Books, 2015), Spies & Saucers (PS Publishing, 2014), and Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form (TrineDay, 2012). He’s also published stories and articles in such publications as The Believer, The Evergreen Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Mailer Review, Phantom Drift, Postscripts, Rosebud, Salon, and TOR.com. His first short story collection, Cryptopolis & Other Stories, is scheduled to be published by Lethe Press in the Fall of 2023. His third novel, Dead Monkey Rum, is due out soon from Planet Bizarro Press.

Glass Clue

By Ivy Grimes

It was a glass clue, and that was all Joe knew about it. It was the size of his palm, a misshapen little ball. The glass seemed to have a slightly yellow tint, but it could have been his poor eyesight. He often saw colors wrong.

He discovered the clue underneath a coat he found lying on the forest floor. He tried moving leaves and stones that were near the coat, but he found no other clues.

When he searched the coat pockets, he found a pack of cigarettes and a bulletin for the First Baptist Church of Walson for a Sunday service that had taken place two weeks and two days prior.

Maybe it was Mr. Bright’s coat, after all. His mother would be happy to hear it, though it would also grieve her. That was how she always felt when her dire predictions came true: of two minds.

“You’ll have to find Mr. Bright in the woods and give him a talking to so he won’t do any more harm. I’d go out and do it myself if it weren’t for my bad back.” That was what she’d told him over the phone that morning.

“Who is he? What harm has he done?” Joe had said, which had annoyed his mother and caused her to make sounds that weren’t words before she collected herself.

“I’ve told you and told you. I get a sense of things sometimes, but it isn’t the kind of thing I could write a book about. If it weren’t important, you wouldn’t be hearing from me.”

It was true, his mother didn’t call every day. He went to her house once a week for Sunday dinner, and that was it. Most people in Walson saw their mothers every day.

So he told her he’d go into the woods near her house and look into the matter of Mr. Bright. She didn’t ask for very much, really. Since he owned the grocery store, he’d take a guy off bagging duty a couple times a week and send him to her house with groceries. It wasn’t clear to Joe why his mother didn’t leave her house anymore. Her friends stayed at home, but they had more serious conditions, as far as he knew. She said her doctor thought she wasn’t long for the world, but she wouldn’t say why. Everything with her always had to be a mystery.

It was easy enough for him to send her food. It was another thing to embody her curiosity.

When he showed her the coat and glass blob, she assured him he’d done right. These belonged to Mr. Bright, and Joe had to track them to their source and be ready to fight. It was creepy when she talked that way since it reminded him of how spooky she could be when he was a kid and afraid of shadows. Now he was a man and didn’t believe in spooky things. He was just humoring an old lady.

He waited until the next day to go to the evening service at the First Baptist Church of Walson. His mother was a Methodist, but now that he was grown, he always told her he was too busy for church. Neither of them had ever darkened the door of the first and only Southern Baptist church in town before.

Everyone knew him from the store, of course, and they were all very nice to him. He wasn’t a fan of small talk, but he stood around the snack table until Pastor Clark sauntered over to him.

“Big Joe! What brings you to our humble church?” the pastor said. He had a gold chain around his neck, just visible through the collar of his white starched shirt, and his teeth were dazzling.

Joe wondered, Mr. Bright? Pastor Bright?

“Thank you for having me, Pastor. See, my mother’s taken one of her notions.”

“Uh oh!” the pastor’s eyes went wide in comic fear.

“She sent me here to ask about something.”

Joe showed the pastor the coat he’d found in the woods and asked if he’d seen anyone wearing a coat like that at a Sunday service two weeks prior.

Pastor Clark pretended to think, screwing up one eye and muttering to himself, but there would be no disguising a newcomer. Everyone in town, and especially at the Baptist church, all knew each other.

“It’s not a very unusual coat, Joe. Anyone might have been wearing it,” the pastor said slowly. “But it was a packed house that night. We had a singing group down from Nashville. Probably all our members were there.”

“Was there anyone there you didn’t recognize? Who wasn’t a member of the church?”

“I doubt it, but I can’t recall,” the pastor said. “Wish I could help you more. Want me to put it in the lost and found for you?”

The pastor gave him another glimpse of his snow-white teeth.

“Oh, no. I mean, eventually. But my mother would want me to keep checking.”

Joe didn’t ask the pastor about the glass blob. That was too strange to ask about, and the pastor might think there was something wrong with Joe and start coming to his house to see if he needed pastoring.

Later that night, Joe had a nightmare. He was decorating a Christmas tree, and he put a glass angel on top of the tree, and the angel glowed, and it was smiling. It was an ordinary tree topper, and Joe felt sort of bored in the dream. That is, until the angel’s eyes opened, revealing a pair of empty eye sockets. Joe backed away from the Christmas tree, but the angel made the tree lean towards him.

He yelped in real life, and it woke him. He lay in the darkness for a while and told himself to calm down. He was getting jumpy like a little kid.

The angel had stared at him like he was hungry for him. What had he done to offend the angel? Maybe it was because he didn’t go to church. He had nothing in particular against church, but his job at the grocery store wasn’t exactly a Monday to Friday gig. He had to be in or nearby the store as much as possible to make sure everything about the place was clean and appealing.

He opened the drawer of his bedside table to check the glass blob to make sure it hadn’t turned into an angel while he was sleeping. But no. It was still a fuzzy, undetermined shape. It reflected the little bit of moonlight pouring in from between the blinds, and it looked sort of pretty. It wasn’t just a random piece of glass like you’d find in a knick-knack shop or shattered by a dumpster. It had that yellowish tint, like it was a gem or something. Maybe it was more than glass. Maybe it was more like a diamond.

No, not a diamond. A citrine. They were the yellow gems, the birthstones for November. He’d thought they would be cheap, but they were very expensive. It was easy to find cheap lookalikes, though. He didn’t lie to his wife. She knew how much he’d taken from the bank account to buy it. It wasn’t the most expensive thing in the world. It had looked so pretty, though, so old and sort of like amber. The glass clue was only a little yellow, whereas the stone he’d given his wife had looked like a glob of honey sweet enough to eat. The stone was still on her finger, whatever state her finger was in. Maybe it was mostly bone. It had been years and years.

It hurt him to think of her body in that state. He put the glass blob away and went back to sleep.

In the morning, the sky was full of thick clouds, and there was a hardness in the air. Autumn was threatening to turn to winter. He didn’t have a good winter coat. He had a ratty old puffy coat he hadn’t had time to replace. Might as well borrow Mr. Bright’s coat.

It was a black peacoat, double-breasted. A nice-looking garment. He wore it and put the glass blob in the expansive pocket.

At the store, Gene the butcher ran up to Joe as he made his way to his office.

“That’s my friend’s coat!” Gene said.

“How do you know?” Joe said, feeling a little defensive about the coat, though he didn’t know why. It wasn’t really his, after all. It wasn’t even his style, too preppy.

“He fixed it himself, see.” Gene pointed to the hem of Joe’s coat, which was sewed up with white thread. “This was the only thread he had. He kept complaining about it, but he never fixed it. He kept saying he wasn’t long for this world anyway, so it didn’t matter”

“Well, who was your friend?” At long last, the mystery would be solved, and then Joe could get back to work in earnest.

“My friend Paul. See, he…” Gene’s voice got thick. “He died last week. Heart attack. His wife tried to wake him up, and he…well, he wouldn’t. For months, he kept saying he was going to die. He got his affairs in order and even started getting religion. Wouldn’t stop smoking or drinking, but God wouldn’t ask a dying man to give up all his fun, right? I didn’t even believe him when he said he was going to die. Thought he was being dramatic. Anyway, that’s definitely his coat.”

Joe felt cold in spite of the heavy coat and the store’s well-functioning heater. He was wearing the coat of a dead man. He took it off right away.

He got the address from Gene and set out to talk to the man’s wife. Maybe she’d appreciate having the coat (and the glass thing) returned. Maybe it would provide some kind of sentimental value. And his mother wasn’t going to let the matter drop until he looked into it.

When Paul’s wife answered the door, she seemed to have been waiting for him. She was wearing bright red lipstick and had a tray of coffee things arranged on the coffee table in the living room.

“Gene called me and told me about the coat,” she said, seeming awfully happy and hospitable for a grieving widow. After Joe’s wife died, he’d stayed in bed pretty much the whole time he wasn’t at the grocery store.

“You ought to have it,” Joe said, though he kept holding onto it.

She gestured for him to sit down, and she poured him a cup of coffee.

“I have a little Irish cream, too,” she confessed with a giggle, gesturing to a small silver pitcher on the tray. Joe helped himself. The situation was making him a little nervous.

“I’m so sorry about your husband,” he finally said after taking his first sip.

She looked down at her lap, and he could see a mixture of grief and guilt and excitement on her face. Was her husband Mr. Bright? Had he been cruel to her? Maybe she was happy to be free.

“He always told me he had special powers, but I never believed him. I wish I had listened.”

“Powers?” He choked a little on his sweet coffee.

“I’ll be honest with you. My husband was buried in that coat you’re holding so tightly to. He always told everyone that nothing could keep him down for long. Well, he didn’t stay down, did he?”

Joe hadn’t noticed he was still clutching the coat with his free hand, keeping the thing on his lap. Once he heard it was the coat a man was buried in, he tossed it on the floor as fast as he could. Paul’s wife scooped it off of the floor and held it to her chest like it had a heart and soul.

“Sorry. Sorry,” Joe said. He put down his coffee cup and stood up. “I guess I’d better be going!”

He felt like he was going to throw up. It was too hot in Paul’s old house.

“I’m so sorry,” his wife said. “This must be a shock to you.”

“I lost my wife, too. I know the mind plays strange tricks. You think of strange things.”

Sometimes, Joe imagined his wife’s citrine ring glowing inside the casket, lighting up her sleeping face. He hadn’t wanted to think that all the life had been drained from that face. What was the point of having a face if it went away?

“It isn’t all in my mind, though. You have his coat. How do you explain that?”

Joe kept his head down and kept talking. He needed to get out of that house. “I kept all my wife’s things. I haven’t thrown a thing away. I’m not judging you, ma’am. I understand. I wish…I wish I’d kept the things I buried her with. To remember. You keep that coat. And there’s something in the pocket, too.”

Paul’s wife reached into the right pocket and pulled out the glass blob. Each time Joe looked at it, it seemed to glow a little brighter.

“This must be his soul,” his wife said, touching the glass to her cheek. It wasn’t a cold blob of glass. Joe knew that. It always felt like someone had just been touching it and left a little of their blood’s warmth on it. It was kept warm like an egg in a nest. For a little while, Joe had been the bird sitting on top of the nest. Now it would be the job of Paul’s wife. It was her task now.

“Anyway, I hope you can find some comfort in all this. I should be getting back to work now.”

Paul’s wife had her ear to the glass blob. “Wait, Joe. Paul wants to thank you. He says he tried to get home to me, but he got tired along the way. If you hadn’t come for him, he might have fallen asleep there forever in the woods.”

“I’d better be getting back to work. No need to thank me.”

“Just drop by the cemetery! His soul is here with me now, but since his body had to be buried there, that’s where some part of him remains. He has something to show you. It’ll just take a moment.”

He hadn’t felt so perplexed since the morning of his wife’s death. Nothing about death made sense to him. On the way to the cemetery, he stopped by his mother’s house to give her an update on the case. She didn’t seem surprised by anything he told her.

“I knew that Mr. Bright was up to no good,” she said.

“He came back for his wife, though.”

There had been a crumpled feeling in Joe’s heart since meeting Paul’s wife, and he realized he was feeling jealous of her. Her husband had gone to all the trouble of making himself into a glass blob and donning his old coat to try to get back to her.

“People who mess with death are dangerously arrogant. Mark my words.”

“Jesus messed with death,” Joe said.

“He did it to show us the right way to go about it. You have to go through the proper channels. Don’t you think I’ve thought about all this? I’m on the threshold of death myself, and I have more insight than the average person, to say the least.”

“So Mr. Bright is a bad guy for not going through the proper channels?”

“He’s a bad guy, and that’s why he didn’t go through the proper channels. And you need to give him a talking to, or he might bring down a curse on the whole town. He might give the dead ideas.”

His mother did look worse for wear, especially that morning. He’d knocked on her door before she’d gotten ready for the day, and with her face so gaunt and her eyes bulging, she reminded him of a wet cat. How would he feel when he got the news that she died? It would be a shock no matter what. Even when death walked right up to someone in broad daylight, like it was with his mother, it was always a shock to hear the news. Something about death just wasn’t right. It didn’t seem natural.

“Well, I guess I’ve got to see this thing through,” Joe said, and his mother agreed. So after using her phone to call the grocery store to tell them he’d be in a little later, he drove to the cemetery. He hated going there, though he made himself leave a new bunch of fake flowers at his wife’s grave once a month. Real ones died too soon, and even the fake ones soon got sun-faded and wind-blown.

He wasn’t sure where he’d find Paul, or Mr. Bright, so he parked at the perimeter and looked around. The day was still gray and chilly, and he didn’t have a coat anymore, so he wrapped his arms around himself. There weren’t any other mourners around that day. He felt quite alone.

“Paul?” he said aloud.

He thought he heard something, a sound like a coin falling to the floor. When he looked up, he saw a small yellow dot in the sky, like it was coming from a laser pointer. He tried to follow the source of the light, which led him over the tallest hill in the cemetery, the one with the three stone crosses that loomed above his head. Finally, he saw where the light was coming from.

On a bench near his own wife’s grave, there sat two vague outlines of people. One was his wife, and he presumed the other was Paul. From the angle he was looking at, their hands seemed to touch. The yellow light was a reflection from the stone on his wife’s hand.

He ran over to the pair, fierce blood pumping through his system. Yes, he would give that Mr. Bright a piece of his mind. How dare that man mess with something so sacred?

When he got closer, he saw their hands were not touching. His wife looked up and smiled at him. The coatless Paul gave him a wink.

Joe tried to punch Paul in the jaw, but of course his fist went right through that translucent face.

“Goddamn you, Mr. Bright,” Joe said, or maybe shouted. He was crying by then. “Why did you have to go and do that? You’re supposed to go through the proper channels.”

Paul looked right at him and said (with a voice no higher than a whisper), “Who’s to say I didn’t?”

“You aren’t supposed to violate things!” Joe shouted, wishing his mother were there. She’d know what to say. Joe still barely understood what had happened. He had a hard time looking at his wife’s face.

Finally, he switched his attention and stared at her.

“I missed you,” he said, sniveling like a child. He was embarrassed to look so weak in front of Mr. Bright.

“I missed you,” she whispered. She smiled.

It didn’t help. It didn’t help one bit. Because then she was gone. It happened so fast. What was the point of it? Joe blinked, and his wife and Paul were both gone. Paul must have delivered his message, finished making his point.

On the bench where the ghost pair had sat, Joe looked down and found a sparkling object. It took his breath away. It was real, it was real! Solid as anything. It was his wife’s citrine ring.

He held it in his hands. He whispered into it. He held it to its ear to see if it spoke back.

It was not as talkative as the glass blob left by Mr. Bright. But it was something. It had some piece of his wife. Some piece of her soul.

“But it isn’t right!” he shouted at the empty spot where Mr. Bright had been.

He got no answer.

When he stared at the ring, he noticed it didn’t glow as brightly as it had on her living finger. He tried to clean it with his shirt, but it was still dull. It didn’t seem to catch the sunlight that burst every now and then from behind the clouds. When the light had shone from it before, it must have been lit by some invisible moon.

Joe put the ring in his pocket and went back to work. He prayed that his wife’s soul would not be divided. He prayed he would die and find her whole in that other world.

The ring and the gemstone were so warm. He would ask his mother about it after work. Before she died, his mother would have to tell him the proper way to die. Otherwise, he was afraid that he might fall under the spell of Mr. Bright.

End.

Ivy Grimes lives in Virginia, and her stories have appeared in The Baffler, Vastarien, Seize the Press, ergot., Tales From Between, Dark Matter Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find her assorted thoughts and stories @IvyGri on Twitter, www.ivyivyivyivy.com, and ivygrimes.substack.com

Want Like Raw Silk

By Erin Keating

Way up on the mountaintop, just before the spruce firs finally surrender to craggy rock and sky, stands a grove of mulberry trees so dense the trunks knot around each other. And in that thicket, tangled among the branches and the sweet fruit, are panes of glass, buckled wood, a rusted bed frame. No one can recall how long it’s been since that lonely house fell—on the account that no one was there to witness it—but there are stories. Oh, there are stories.

* * *

Ira lived alone on the mountaintop, with no man to love and no woman neither. Most mornings she woke above the clouds—the spruce-dotted peak breaking through the fog that blanketed the mountainside and valley below. Her parents had died years ago, though how many exactly had been lost to the cycle of snow and fog and trepid spring.

All Ira had for company were the creatures of the woods—cottontail rabbit, flying squirrel, and bugling elk, that she hunted more often than she befriended—and the crawling critters in her garden.

The ladybugs flitted between the fennel and yarrow and dandelion. The earthworms crawled among the parsnip and wild carrot and beetroot. The silk moths laid their eggs on the leaves of the mulberry tree. Ira would speak to them as she tended the garden, if only to keep her voice from shriveling and dying from disuse. She complimented the ladybug’s fashionable red-spotted coat; she thanked the earthworm for its diligent work; she wished the moths blessings for their newly hatched young.

That was how Ira lived, from the thaw to the frost to the thaw again—utterly and irreparably alone.

* * *

One day in late summer, when the daylight had begun to dwindle and the treetops on the mountainside below were turning the faintest shades of amber, Ira noticed the silk worms spinning their cocoons in the branches of the mulberry tree.

The white, bulbous bodies crawled back and forth between the branches, weaving a sling to cradle themselves through the winter. In the spring, these same worms would emerge as silk moths with brown hairy bodies and wings patterned with blinking hazel eyes. How did they know, Ira wondered, that it was time to become something new?

Ira gathered up her skirts and sat in the dewy grass beneath the mulberry tree, intending to rest only a few minutes in the sweet shade. Her eyes followed the slow, methodical movements of the silk worms—back and forth, back and forth.

As she watched them, time seemed to unspool around her, the memories of her parents flung farther away, and the lonely future on the mountaintop stretching on endlessly. She ignored the work that she had done unquestioningly for years. What did it matter to her that weeds sprouted in the vegetable patch, or that crows soiled the laundry line, or that rabbits burrowed under the fence, when each day was like the next and the next and the next, with no promise of change? So, Ira sank deeper into the dewy grass. The silk worms wound their thread tighter, until their fleshy forms disappeared beneath the spun strings.

Ira had only intended to sit a spell, but for three days as the silk worms wove, she watched, hardly thinking of food or water or sleep or the damp seeping into her skin.

When the silk worms had finished spinning their cocoons and the steady rustling inside them stilled, a want, sticky as raw silk clung to Ira’s skin. She squirmed beneath it, this strange desire to be wrapped up in a cocoon herself. Winter would be here again, that long, unbearable season of darkness and silence. How she envied that the silk worms would sleep through it, would wake in the spring as a fearsome creature, and would fly away before the sticky summer heat clung to the mountaintop. The silk worms would become something new, but Ira would be ever the same, tending to this lonely house on the mountaintop, winter after summer after winter.

She wanted to be something new, like the silk worms and the silk moths. She wanted to leave here on wings with hazel eyes. Ira rose, head spinning, knees wobbling, and plucked one of the cocoons from the branches. The silk stuck to her fingers, soft as the blurry edges of a dream.

The wad of silk twitched as the silk worm inside stirred. When it became a silk moth, it would fly away, and Ira would stay. Ira would stay and stay and stay. But not alone—not this time. She would hold this changing thing close—hold it inside herself—until the day she could find wings of her own.

Ira swallowed the cocoon.

The wad of silk stuck in her parched throat. Her face turned to flame as she gasped for air, disgusted and mortified by what she had done. She coughed and coughed, and it would not budge. Only after drinking handfuls of clear spring water did the cocoon slide down, down, down the whole length of her throat.

That choking fit brought her back to herself, into her body that needed food and water and sleep. She drank until her thirst was quenched, then stumbled into her bed where she slept dreamlessly.

* * *

For weeks afterward, Ira went out of her way to avoid the mulberry tree, the sole witness to her shame. Instead, she watched the tree’s leaves turn golden from a safe distance as she busied herself harvesting the root vegetables.

Winter settled all at once on the mountaintop, sharp and sudden as a gasp. Ira woke to find the spruces encased in ice, and she knew it would be months before she felt warm again. She prepared herself for long dark hours, where sleeping and waking were distinguished only by the light of a tallow candle.

But this winter was different.

As the days grew shorter, a flutter began in her stomach. She would have thought nothing of it except that her monthlies, which had been as predictable as the moon since her girlhood, had stopped altogether. Ira spent days wrapped in her blanket, crawling out only to be sick in a bucket she kept by the bedside.

Sprawled on her bed, Ira demanded of the cracked ceiling, how had this happened? How had her body—which had never known the touch of man or woman, only her own steady hand—become with child?

Still the fluttering persisted. It beat within her, faint as a phantom pulse or—Ira clutched her stomach, finally understanding—a moth’s wing.

* * *

Ira slept for days as snow piled up beyond her frosted windows, dreaming of the abomination she carried, of her stomach cracking down the middle like the husk of a cocoon, of her child’s unfurled wings.

When Ira roused herself from bed, it was only to ease the hunger gnawing on her ribs like a stray dog. She cooked over the wood stove filling the house with the scent of broth and salt. Stirring slow circles, her face tilted into the steam, a strange calm swept over her. Outside, the world was blanketed in the hush of snowfall. But, inside the house—insider her—where, for so long there had only been silence and stillness, there was the promise of something new.

“Hello,” Ira whispered. She pressed her palm to the slight swell of her belly.

Her child fluttered in response.

Ira’s heart leapt into her throat, and the spoon clattered to the floor. “Hello,” she whispered again. One hand rubbed small circles on her belly, the other dried her eyes which spilled over with tears.

For the first time in a very long while, Ira was not utterly and irreparably alone.

* * *

It was the shortest winter Ira remembered. The dim days sped by as she spoke to her growing belly and felt her child listening. She sang the lullabies and told the monstrous stories her mother would whisper in the dark. By the time Ira heard the robin’s heralding, her stomach had swollen ripe and round.

The cramping began the day the silk moths returned to lay their eggs, as though the child inside her recognized its own. The pain shot through Ira, a white-hot bolt of lightning. She doubled over in the garden among the violet-headed crocuses. She thought she’d be able to do this on her own, like her family’s farm animals back in those golden-hued days before she was the only soul on the mountain.

But that first wave of pain disillusioned her of such an idea. When it ebbed, she began to trek down the mountainside, following the path of the bubbling spring as it spilled over the rocks into a wide creek bed. Surely, the water would lead her to a town, and the people there could help her find a midwife. Once—twice—three times, the pain crested so strong in her belly she had to catch herself on a tree to breathe through it. At last, she spied smoke tendrils above the treetops, then shingled roofs, then a packed dirt road lined with houses and slack-jawed people.

A young woman, her own child swaddled to her chest, took Ira by the arm. Ira imagined how she must look, a sweat-drenched stranger in labor walking right out of the woods. Still, this young mother let Ira lean on her all the way to the midwife’s house. Her hand was the first touch Ira had experienced in years. She did not have the language for her gratitude.

The midwife’s eyes drooped so that Ira couldn’t see the color of them, but as she explained her half-day journey down the mountain, those eyes opened wide and brown. The midwife didn’t ask about the man, and Ira guessed she wasn’t the first woman to come through here, unable or unwilling to name her child’s daddy. Instead, the midwife began boiling her tools and set to work.

* * *

Ira’s daughter was born near midnight under a new moon, but the sky was so bright with fireflies that the midwife didn’t even need to light a candle. The lightning bugs had emerged so unseasonably early that, through the windows, Ira could see the townsfolk marveling in the street.

“Mighty strange,” the midwife muttered.

And Ira’s child rushed out of her.

The midwife made a soft gasp as she caught the baby and remained completely silent as she cleaned it, even though Ira begged to know if the child was well. The baby did not cry—the whole room was thick with the scent of blood and the heavy quiet. When the midwife placed the swaddled child in Ira’s arms, she turned her head so her droopy eyes could not meet Ira’s own.

“I don’t know what you’ve done, but you’d best leave first thing in the morning.”

Then the midwife went to join the folks in the street, blessing herself on her way out.

Ira’s daughter looked up at her with all-black, bulbous eyes. Downy brown hair covered the girl’s entire body, except her moon-white hands. In the center of her palms, two birthmarks like hazel eyes seemed to blink as she balled and stretched her tiny fists.

And Ira loved her.

She curled around her daughter. The two bumps on her daughter’s head, like antenna stumps, pressed into Ira’s cheek. Ira’s fingers roved the downy skin of her daughter’s back, searching for any sign of wings and, when she found only the curve of shoulder blades, warmth spread through Ira’s chest like a summer sunrise. Without wings, her daughter couldn’t fly away.

While her daughter breathed contently against her chest, Ira watched the shimmer of fireflies blink in and out, in and out, and Ira decided she would name her daughter Lucy, after the lights.

* * *

The next morning, Ira and Lucy were climbing back up the steep creek path in the pink dawn light. Lucy, swaddled against Ira’s swollen breasts, never cried, but instead hummed soft and low, sending a buzzing through Ira’s chest.

“That’s right, my love,” Ira murmured in response. “We’re going home.”

As they hiked the long way up, the insects of the creek followed them. A flight of dragonflies winged in their wake; caddisflies skated across the surface of the shallows, heading upstream; earthworms crawled out of Ira’s hollow footsteps in the soft ground. Lucy hummed, and the world around them seemed to hum in answer, the air filling with the buzzing voice of every fly and beetle, mosquito and worm.

The mountain felt more like home than it had in a long while.

* * *

Lucy grew like knotweed. That first night home, Ira admired the impossibly tiny spiral of her daughter’s ears, the perfect pearls of her fingernails. The next morning, she’d risen to find Lucy doubled in size—a day-old child now the size of a weeks-old child. And again the next day, and the next. Soon Lucy was crawling, then walking, then running through the gardens with Ira racing after her. Lucy’s delighted buzzing filled the air as Ira grazed the downy hair on her daughter’s shoulders before the girl ducked behind a row of bean sprouts.

One day, when Lucy was both two weeks and two years old, the silk moths gathered on the mulberry tree. Ira found her daughter staring up at them with her all-black eyes. Lucy, that child of constant motion, stood impossibly still.

Until she raised her arms.

The silk moths landed, blanketing her in wings like hazel eyes. They beat those many wings in unison, and, inch by inch, Lucy rose off the ground.

Ira watched, stunned, as the silk moths frantically swarmed around her daughter. They had always seemed gentle, fluttering around the mulberry tree for only a couple of weeks in the late spring, those miraculous days between the biting winter cold and the suffocating summer heat. Ira had always wondered where they went and had longed for her own wings to fly alongside them.

But there was something desperate in their spasmic flapping. Lucy hummed to them, a quiet drone of acceptance. Understanding washed over Ira, icy and clear as creek water.

The silk moths flew off to die. And they were trying to take Lucy with them.

“No!” Ira screeched, lunging at Lucy. The silk moths scattered, powder from their wings puffing up in a cloud of dust. Lucy landed with a thud, stumbling backward and falling onto her bottom. Sprawled on the ground, her eyes tracked the moths as they flew over the treetops and vanished from view. When Ira brushed Lucy off and gathered her against her chest, her daughter hummed a low drone that was the closest to weeping Ira had ever heard from her. She rubbed her hand over Lucy’s back, feeling only soft fur and shoulder blades. “It’s alright,” Ira cooed. “I’m here. You’re here.” She repeated until she was no longer sure who she was trying to soothe.

They didn’t see another silk moth that season.

* * *

Time had always moved too slowly on the mountain, days tracked merely by the dirt under Ira’s nails or the sun blisters on her shoulders. Now, time hurtled forward, and Ira didn’t know how to stop it.

At night, Lucy slept curled against her mother. Ira folded herself around her daughter until they nested together like the young lettuce leaves out in their garden. While Lucy breathed evenly, growing so quickly her joints groaned and popped, Ira lay awake telling her stories. The crickets had amassed on the one window of the house, blotting out the moonlight and deafening Ira with raucous song. Still, Ira spoke the story of a mountain woman so lonely that she swallowed a cocoon, if only to know change; she spoke of the baby that grew from the cocoon and the fireflies that presided over her birth; she spoke of a girl growing up too fast.

The crickets reached a fever pitch as Ira pressed a kiss to Lucy’s fuzzy forehead and traced her bony shoulder blades. How strange, that she had once longed for wings and now dreaded to find them on her daughter.

“You’ll stay, won’t you? Please, stay,” Ira whispered her prayer into Lucy’s skin. In her sleep, Lucy hummed as though she understood.

* * *

That summer, Lucy grew to a girl of six, then nine, then twelve. The days stretched longer, then shorter, and the mulberries ripened from white to black. Ira never took her eyes from Lucy, afraid that, if she looked away from the girl for a moment, she would miss days of her life.

All at once Lucy was fifteen and tall as Ira, her body lean as a willow branch. Her fur shone a richer brown, the eyes on her palms a brighter green. At night, Ira held her daughter close and sobbed silently into Lucy’s long hair, wishing time would stop.

* * *

When the treetops on the mountainside below showed the first hints of amber, the silk worms began their weaving. By the time Ira noticed, Lucy was already sitting beneath the mulberry tree, her skirts gathered up, her eyes tracking the hypnotic motion of the worms.

“Lucy!” Ira snapped. Her daughter didn’t even blink. Dread lodged itself in Ira’s throat—thick and sticky as the cocoon she had swallowed a year ago. “Lucy, come here,” her broken voice insisted.

And still, Lucy watched the silk worms.

Ira grabbed Lucy by the wrist. If only she could get her daughter inside, where she could bolt the door against the silk worms, against the crickets and caddisflies and lightning bugs, against anything that tried to tell Lucy she was more than Ira’s flesh and blood, more than a human girl, but a creature of silk and wings and sky.

It was already too late.

Lucy struggled against Ira’s grip—the girl had grown as strong as she had grown tall—until she pulled Ira down to the dewy grass. Ira thrashed like a snared rabbit, eyes wide and chest heaving, as she wrestled her daughter.

“Stay,” Ira commanded through gritted teeth.

Lucy buzzed in response, high and sharp and angry.

The world flipped. Ira sprawled on her back, and Lucy climbed on top of her—brown hair tangled with leaves, dress grass-stained. Those all-black eyes brimmed with tears as she looked down at Ira, a sad hum passing from Lucy’s chest to her mother’s.

Lucy reached under her tongue and pulled out a strand of raw silk.

Her daughter tied the thread around Ira’s littlest finger, a silk ring glistening against her sweaty skin.

Lucy kept weaving. Ira’s little finger, then her ring finger, then her whole right hand were bound before Ira formed the words to protest.

“Please—please—what are you doing?” Ira whispered.

But Lucy narrowed her all-black eyes in concentration, pulling strand after strand of silk from under her tongue. Ira struggled against the string, trying to pry her fingers apart. It would not give.

“No!” Ira’s voice tore from her throat. She tried to buck Lucy off, but her daughter stumbled forward, pinning Ira by her shoulders. Lucy buzzed again, a tinny whine of frustration.

That’s when Ira noticed the strange sensation on her legs—a soft itch, a tingling, a crawling across her skin.

The silk worms had wriggled down from the mulberry tree, away from their cocoons, and crept over Ira’s shins. She tried to kick, but her ankles had already been bound fast.

“Why?” Ira pleaded.

Lucy, in response, looked up at the sky, over the treetops where the silk moths had vanished before the summer heat.

Ira howled with a mother’s fury. “No—you need to stay—you must stay—please—please—you cannot leave me—”

Lucy and the silk worms only kept weaving.

Lucy would abandon her here beneath the mulberry tree, bound by silk while she slept through the winter in a cocoon. Ira would perish under the snow, frozen and blue, and Lucy would leave. Lucy would leave.

“I’m sorry,” Ira begged the silk worms, as though they could understand. “I only wanted wings—I only wanted wings.” And when that did not work, she wept, “She is mine—you cannot have her—I will not let you.”

She pleaded and swore and begged until the silk worms stuffed up her mouth. Ira gagged, the sticky strands on her tongue terrifyingly familiar. She should have never swallowed that cocoon—no.

Even now—even betrayed—she would not give up Lucy.

She longed to reach up to stroke her daughter’s downy cheeks, but the worm’s work was almost done. Ira’s legs had been pinned together; her arms trapped at her sides. Her mouth—now her nostrils—stopped up. All that was left were her eyes. Ira met her daughter’s all-black gaze, which reflected the evening light. The hair on Lucy’s cheeks were damp with tears. Lucy wiped them quickly with the back of her wing-patterned hands, like she did when she was a little girl.

Ira fought the exhaustion that settled in her bones, the warmth of the silk stealing the little fight she had left. She could no longer speak, but she hummed low and soft—a question, a comfort.

Lucy answered in kind—gentle and firm, a promise that would not be broken.

Ira understood. Lucy was not leaving Ira behind; she was taking Ira with her. Ira would fly at last.

Lucy’s lips pressed to Ira’s brow, her breath hot against the night’s chill. Ira closed her eyes, and let the silk worms finish their work.

A cocoon for Ira. A cocoon for Lucy. A warm winter. A crack to let in the light. An unfurling of wings with blinking hazel eyes.

* * *

Way up on the mountaintop stands a dense grove of mulberry trees. And in that thicket, thousands of silk moths hatch every spring, rising up above the treetops like a brown storm cloud; and thousands of silk worms spin every fall, cocooning the trees and corpse of some long-forsaken home in a blanket of raw silk. No one can much agree on when that lonely house fell, all tangled now in the roots and branches, but we can agree on one thing.

That house fell all at once, like it was blown over by the beating of two great wings.

End.

Erin Keating earned her B.A. in creative writing and literature at Roanoke College and her M.A. in history at Drew University, mostly so she could continue to surround herself with old books. She currently works as a grant writer at an arts education nonprofit. When she isn’t reading or writing, she is rock climbing, playing video games, or learning bass guitar. Her fiction has appeared in Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic: Anthology of Hysteria Fiction, It Was All a Dream: An Anthology of Bad Horror Tropes Done Right, and Tales to Terrify, among others. Find her online at erinkeatingwrites.com or on Twitter @KeatingNotKeats.

Down in Minus Three

By Dermott Fairfield

Horace stood there trying to convince the clear automatic doors that he was, in fact, a person. After receiving sufficient evidence, the doors opened in invitation. The indistinct, though pleasing, scent of the air freshener threatened to expose his soaked underarms by aromatic contrast. The hallway’s narrow journey led to a closed door and two black chairs that he would shortly learn were exactly as uncomfortable as they looked, the padding beneath the flaky leather having eroded long before he crossed paths with them. He was wearing the only suit he owned, hopeful that the jacket would disguise the poor job he did of ironing his shirt. With no one around to inform of his arrival, he sat down. As he waited, the wet patch of his underarms spread, and he could swear the ticking of the clock sped up to maintain rhythm with his heartbeat, though whether that was a sign of a faulty clock or a terrifying alteration to the nature of time, he was not entirely sure.

Suddenly the door opened, and out walked one man and one shell of a man. The man was jovial and approachable, while the shell was a vision of death, white as a fully cooked yolkless egg. They were at the end of an exchange, the man thanked him for his service with the company, but it seemed he just wasn’t the right fit, but certainly if he needed a reference he could expect a glowing recommendation. Receiving none of this, the shell muttered a number of individual words. Horace didn’t quite catch all of them, but the gist was something along the lines of,

‘Monstrous…’

‘Inhuman…’

‘Underpaid…’

The mutterings trailed off down the hall, faint monosyllabic echoes still bouncing their way to Horace’s ears. The man introduced himself as Mr. Edgar, and welcomed Horace into a spacious, though not egotistical, office. Mr. Edgar stepped in front of his desk and used it as a seat. The guest’s chair was positioned close enough to create a sense of intimacy, but not so close that there might be an awkward near brush when someone seated themselves.

Mr. Edgar began the interview, the sleeves of his nice, pit-stainless dress shirt rolled up in a laid back guy sort of look. Though closer inspection of the upsettingly neat folds suggested he was the type of person that put his socks on before his pants.

‘I was quite impressed with your resume,’ he said.

Horace found this strange, as he knew for a fact he had a decidedly unimpressive resume, and being hired based on said resume would certainly be a mark against Mr. Edgar’s judgement.

‘Oh, great,’ replied Horace.

‘Very well formatted.’

‘Oh.’

‘We like that sort of thing here.’

‘I see.’

‘Did you use a template?’

‘No, it was all me.’

‘Outstanding work.’

‘Thank you.’

Horace could feel the sweat of his underarms connecting with the sweat on his back. He wondered if he was emitting an odour.

After some discussion about Horace being a great fit, Mr. Edgar refusing to be pinned down regarding specifics of pay, careful to acknowledge the many opportunities for growth, and the importance of supporting their people etc., it seemed Horace had the job.

‘To start with you’ll mostly be doing data entry, answering calls, ordering office supplies, feeding K’Shuug’Th the Great Cosmic Warlord, creating templates—’

‘I’m sorry what was that last one?’

‘Creating templates, for use in different departments of the office. I assume you’re proficient with the Microsoft Office suite? That resume was some damn fine work, I expect you’ll excel in that area.’

Horace was pretty sure that’s not what he’d said, but he also understood that he’s in a state of high anxiety, he hadn’t eaten, and he’d made a mental note that he must google what an unsafe level of bodily fluid loss is. In an impression of sanity, he assured himself that he was in fact asking for clarification about the templates, and that the answer was satisfactory.

‘Great, yeah. That sounds good.’

‘We’ll start you Monday. Thanks so much for coming in.’

Mr. Edgar put his hand out to shake at a height that forced Horace to stand in order to comfortably reach it.

Mr. Edgar walked Horace to the door.

‘Oh one more thing.’

‘Y-yes?’

‘They’ll explain it in the orientation, but we do casual Fridays here. And we take it quite seriously.’

Horace searched for a smirk that never appeared.

For his first week, Horace was assigned to an eight year veteran of the company, named Patricia. He was assured that she would be the perfect person to shadow while he learned the ropes, Patricia being a ‘top notch lady,’ with whom he would no doubt ‘get along famously.’ He found little truth in either of those statements, and a week of close proximity, suffering under the annoyed whir of fluorescent lights operating day and night to make its victims forget that human beings needed vitamin d, it appeared neither did she. The bright Hawaiian shirt he wore on Friday drew the occasional discreet scowl from her, who seemed to have a very different definition of the word ‘casual.’

The sheer whirlwind of tasks refused to form the necessary synapses to create memories for Horace, and he was getting the sneaking suspicion that after this first week he would not only be expected to recall these tasks, but also be able to accomplish them without guidance. Patricia, when she bothered to explain what she was doing, went through it like an instruction manual, and Horace had never, ever managed to process any kind of information as written in an instruction manual.

‘Did you get that?’ she said, with a tone of exasperation just small enough to ignore, but big enough to make sure Horace definitely received the barbed edge of the question.

‘Uh, sure. Something about interns?’

Her nostrils flared ever so slightly.

‘I need you to grab three interns, and meet me down in level minus three.’

‘Minus three?’

‘It’s a quirk of the building. In the elevator, just press the blank button next to three.’

Horace was in the elevator with the three interns he’d collected, certain he’d snagged the best of the bunch. He was attempting to convey the impression that certainly he’d been down to level minus three many times, what a mundane experience this was for him, just put in the work and you fellows will be in my position before you know it. This went well enough pretty much up until he had to press the blank button next to three, there being a blank button on either side of three. There was a maelstrom of theories circling Horace’s frontal cortex. Were both buttons the same? Did one button result in some terrible consequences? Could Patricia, humourless as she is, possibly be playing a joke on him? The moment he took to consider these possibilities was long enough for the interns to start making some very annoying confused noises that came across as very performative, and Horace’s esteem for each of them dropped. He pressed the button to the left of three, secretly hoping for the terrible consequences option that would give the interns their due punishment.

The elevator doors opened to a menacing darkness, the cool draught wafting forward in mockery. There were only two visible light sources: a wooden torch that was aflame and gripped into a holder on the wall, and the more distant guiding light of Patricia’s cigarette. Horace removed the torch, noticing the barely lit snapshots of an inexplicable medieval surrounding. He advanced towards the cigarette, the brightness briefly escalating with each puff.

Patricia inspected what remained of her cigarette, then stamped it out with her shoe. She took the torch from Horace and slowly waved it toward the interns, looking at them like cigarettes with very few remaining drags.

‘What is this?’ Horace asked.

‘Level minus three. Come with me.’

This last part was directed at the interns, who nervously watched Patricia open a large metal door with a key from an ancient looking rusty ring. Fearing their replaceability in the company, they followed her in. Horace peered after them, refusing to cross the boundary of the doorway. The room was pitch black, besides the torch light, which was getting smaller and smaller. A sound he hoped wasn’t breathing, because what on earth breathes like that, swelled into grumbling and the flame was suddenly gone, the rapid sound of clopping on stone grew closer until Patricia appeared, and slammed the door behind her with a resounding thud, never once bothering to look at Horace, whose hope that the sound wasn’t breathing had evaporated as the grumbling took on a vicious, indefinable quality mixed in with the much more familiar screams that one might expect from human vocal cords.

Patricia lit up another cigarette, while Horace was fairly certain his heart was about to explode. He was trying to formulate the right collection of words to enquire about what in the holy hell just happened when she interrupted his progress.

‘How are you with Excel?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Microsoft Excel? They said you were good with that sort of thing.’

‘Sure… I know Excel’

‘I need you to update our inventory management spreadsheet. We’re adding some new supplies.’

Horace spent the next week hoping for the complete mental breakdown that would prove conclusively that he’d lost his mind. Unfortunately, it never came. Patricia had given him the obligatory ‘let me know if you need anything’ talk with a look in her eyes that said you better not ever need anything. He was managing just fine enough to avoid scrutiny for any negligible mistakes he was making. He made it to Friday with increased confidence in his ability peppered with some comfort found in the mindless routine of the job. With all his work done just over 5 minutes before the end of the day, he sat back in his cubicle reflecting on his good, not great, job performance. Certain that if he could keep it up, he might even find himself in middle management someday. Just gotta keep his head down, do the work, and—

‘What are you doing?’ asked Patrcia, but it was more accusation than question.

‘Just updating some spreadsheets,’ he said, trying and failing to look busy pushing papers around his desk.

‘Why hasn’t the intern log been updated today?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The interns. I was just looking over it and there were none removed. Did you forget to update the spreadsheet?’

‘Update it for what?’

‘For the feeding, for god’s sake’

‘Feeding?’

Patricia’s face betrayed a momentary haunted expression, which she managed to keep at bay before it entered the realm of alarming.

‘Please tell me you didn’t forget to feed K’Shuug’Th.’

Horace felt his heart trying to bash through his sternum.

‘That… that was real?’

‘Real? You are—we all are, but you especially, are in deep shit if you don’t get down there with some interns right now.’

Then the clock hit five o’clock, and every trace of impending… something in her face vanished.

‘You better catch the interns before they go home. See you Monday.’

In no hurry at all, she and everyone else walked out of the office, ignoring the spasms of flickering lights and the thunderous wailing that shook the ground beneath them.

Horace only managed to wrangle two interns, all stuck together in the elevator down to minus three making an awkward lack of small talk. The doors opened, but while the flickering lights upbuilding were no longer an issue, the dreadful moans only got worse. For the interns, who knew nothing, it was scary. For Horace, who knew slightly more, it was terrifying. Nevertheless, he valiantly led them down the hall, brandishing the lit torch and feeling like an old gaoler with his rusty ring of keys. He opened the door, and one intern dared to boldly show some trepidation.

‘What is this? What exactly are we doing?’

‘I just need a couple of extra sets of hands. We’ll be in and out, and I’ll put in a good word for you,’ Horace attempted a wink. It did not go well both because it was too dark to really notice that kind of thing, and because he’d never once in his life winked and even in a very well lit room it would have looked bizarre and a little confronting.

The depths of the room welcomed all three with its best impression of an oven, choking them with the thick, rancid air. Horace put on a brave face, despite the fact none could see it. He marched the doomed parties forward, almost slipping on the strange mucousy substance that coated the floors, before a terrible glimpse of the tenant halted him, the torchlight revealing very little and far too much. Horace began a scream that he never managed to finish.

End.

Dermott Fairfield is an Australian writer, animator, and filmmaker. He is currently finishing his last year of a Bachelor of Animation degree at university. His short animated film ‘Pit Stop’ appeared in the Sydney Science Fiction and AniMate film festivals. He is passionate about stories, and finding the right medium in which to tell them.

Heroes

By Nathaniel Beardsley

August 8th

So Brian is dead now, the Cohens’ son. I didn’t know him well. I guess now I never will.

A small crowd was assembling near his house when I went outside this morning. Apparently, his parents heard screams a little after 3:00. Rushed upstairs, pounded on his door. The screaming had stopped by then. Too late. Half of Brian’s body – the lower half – was just gone, blasted to pieces. His once-white sheets were soaked with blood, the adjacent walls painted red with a kind of pointillist precision. I heard that his face was frozen in terror. That was the worst detail, for me. The way I see it, everyone deserves a peaceful death: because if we don’t have that to look forward to, what the hell is the point? What the hell are we even doing?

“Like he stepped on a mine,” was the surgeon’s diagnosis. He left it at that. A couple of months ago, nobody would have let him leave it at that, but here we are. A lot can change in two months. Hell, a lot can change in two minutes. Two seconds. A man can die in less than two seconds, or a child can be born. A lot of notions about the world can be shattered into a million pieces.

Anyway, I mainly mention Brian because I’m shocked how little the news of his death is affecting me. At the very least, it should scare me. It hasn’t. I remember reading this book in sixth grade about a boy who gets all the nerves in his arm burned off during an accident at smith’s shop; after that, he can’t feel any pain with that arm anymore, only a horrible, stupid numbness. I always hated that book as a kid, but now I guess I have something in common with that boy.

Mom and Dad didn’t say a word about Brian at first, even though they must have heard the news. I don’t think they know the Cohens well, but I might be wrong. I remember seeing them talking together at barbeques a few times. I don’t know. Either way, a few weeks ago, they would have said something. Their silence today was deafening.

So an hour ago, I decided to bring the subject up and test whether they were feeling the same way I was feeling – which is to say, not at all. I made a show of being worked up. And I said something I probably shouldn’t have said: I said, “I’m so tired of this bullshit,” or something like that. It was the first time I’d cussed in front of them. It was the first time I’d cussed at all. I was as surprised to hear the words come out of my mouth as my parents were.

Dad gave me a significant look, and I think I heard Mom gasp, but they both seemed to understand. Two months ago, they wouldn’t have understood. But a lot can change in two months. A lot of shit.

August 11th

Sometimes, it’s worse when they don’t die.

Every once in a while, one of us will wake up with just a burn or a cut, easily treated. Other times, a missing limb. A young man named Darrell woke up a week ago with all his hair burned off, eyebrows and everything. They’re the lucky ones.

For others, the dreams extract a heavier toll. They wake up with that famous thousand-yard stare, and don’t recognize their families, don’t remember their names. They just sit there trembling, or muttering nonsense-words. I heard that one guy a few streets from here won’t stop laughing – as if he thinks it will help. Sometimes they get better, and sometimes they don’t, and there’s no pattern to who does and who doesn’t.

We treat them like freak shows, those boys; we hang out with them not to make their lives easier, but to satisfy our grotesque imaginations, revel in our fear of the unknown. Step right up, step right up, see the man who lost his very wits—in his sleep! Watch him mutter, watch him laugh. This could happen to your son—any day!

I don’t know why it only affects young men. Seems kind of sexist to me. It’s not like women didn’t also live through some shit back in the day when wars came through. Rape, pillaging, grief. More than a few times, they were right there on the front lines. And then there were those nurses who had to decide who lived and who died: you don’t get out of that without a few mental scars. But if any women are having the dreams, I haven’t heard about it.

Then again, I’m going through enough as it is. Maybe there’s a reason I haven’t heard.

August 13th

Professor Freeman was on edge today. He doesn’t have a son – only two daughters – but he has a tender heart, and other people’s sorrows and fears tend to weigh on him. His voice trembled during his lecture this morning, reaching a crescendo near the end of the hour. I knew what he was thinking, and I’m sure some of my classmates did, too. Professor Freeman often talks about how literature is one of the only beacons of light in this dark world. “Maybe,” I remember him saying once, “if the world were sane, we would just read books all the time. There would be no busy-work, no wars, no greed—only reading. In a world like that, we would all be smarter, more sympathetic.” Then he sighed, and added, “Of course, the world isn’t sane, so most people don’t read books at all.” Being an English professor, it was obviously an indulgent thing for him to say, but his sincerity and innocence swayed me, and I often find myself thinking about that other world.

I approached him after class today, thinking he might appreciate the company, but also hoping that he might assuage my numbness with his simple wisdom. He’s old enough that he doesn’t have the dreams, but as I already said, he has an almost chronically sympathetic personality, and I knew he cares deeply about me and all his students.

I started by asking about his health, telling him he seemed a little odd during the lecture. He fell back against his chair with a sigh, and there was palpable relief in his voice when he said: “I’m fine. I know I was distracted today, but really, I’m fine. Thank you for your concern, though. I appreciate it.”

He then asked me how I was feeling, and I told him that I was also fine, although my real response was nonverbal.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Professor Freeman. “About trauma. How it lingers not only in the minds of individuals, but in the collective mind of a society.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Nowadays,” he said, “we can’t avoid hearing bad news. And even though by our very natures we can’t know about every injustice in every corner of the world, we know about enough of them to give us an idea of what we’re missing. Aside from that, we know that our fragile modern world is built on a pedestal of blood, pain, and tears. We know that many, many people lived terrible lives before we could live our decent ones. Over time, those ghosts of the present and the past take their toll. We become paralyzed. Guilt-ridden.”

“I guess so.”

“I think that’s what’s happening in this city,” he went on. “Trauma. Collective trauma is being given shape by some occult force we don’t understand.”

“Occult?” I asked. “You believe in that stuff?”

“Of course I do. Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, but I do. How could I not? Everything about these deaths is too evil, too precise. In the past, people understood that the universe was governed by forces we can’t control or understand. That fact never changed; we did.”

I was a little disappointed in him at first; it seemed crass, suggesting that the dreams and the deaths had come to Saint Plerys at the behest of a veritable Yog Sothoth—a fathomless god who moved through the world, bringing us misery for its amusement. But the more I think about it, the more I realize his is as good an explanation as any I’ve heard. You should hear the “experts” on the news, the theories they come up with, the way they step around occult explanations for the dreams as if admitting the existence of magic will land a hex on them right then and there.

Hell, maybe I do believe in magic. Maybe magic is the only way men could have ended up being so wicked to each other in the first place.

August 14th

I had a really bad dream last night, probably my worst. Usually, I don’t remember details, but this one is as fresh in my head as if it really happened. I was running through a hollowed-out shell of a city, separated from my squad, the sound of gunfire ricocheting off the crumbling walls around me. I was cradling a gun, but it was old and I was low on ammunition.

Then, in the middle of all the madness, I came across Arthur. I haven’t seen him in years in the waking world, and when I saw him last night, I had this inane thought; I thought What if they’re all here, all the young men? What if we’re all scrambled around every night, placed on different sides, forced to kill each other as pawns in a diabolical scheme? I was so consumed by these thoughts that I didn’t notice that the color of Arthur’s uniform did not match my own; I didn’t see him raising his gun, his trigger-finger stayed momentarily only by the recognition in his own eyes.

When I saw what was about to happen, I panicked, shot him. First in the foot, then in the head. I stood staring over his body after that, thinking about how it’s every young person’s dream to be a hero, about how saving even a single human life is the most noble achievement to which any of us can hope to aspire – about how so many boys dream of growing up to be firefighters, rescue operations personnel – and about how in the heat of war, we become no better than forces of nature, taking lives to protect our own with the inevitability and nonchalance of a hurricane, driven not by any noble ideals, but by the carnal desperation in our genes.

I woke up crying, thinking that I had killed Arthur for real. First thing this morning, I called him. He was fine. He’d moved away from Saint Plerys years before all this started, so I guess that meant he would be fine. I tried to explain the situation to him over the phone; he waited patiently for words to emerge out of my tears.

Sometimes I wonder if my sleep-deprivation is causing the dreams to be more vivid, more brutal. I’ve been staying up as late as I can every night, because that’s what most of the other boys are doing, and that’s what feels right. But is all the caffeine just making it worse? I don’t know.

I’m not even old enough to buy alcohol. Why the hell should I be having to navigate this maze where one misstep might bring all the potential of my later years crumbling to a premature close?

August 16th

I heard something today that makes Professor Freeman’s theory seem even more plausible. This morning on the news, a doctor was saying that unlike normal dreams, the Saint Plerys Nightmares— as they’re now calling them—don’t take place during REM sleep; they take place during deep sleep, when your body is paralyzed and your heartbeat is at its slowest. And they say that shouldn’t be possible, that your brain shouldn’t be active during deep sleep. The story became even more complicated when a study on a seventeen-year-old from Saint Plerys showed that, indeed, his brain wasn’t active; the only way the doctors knew he was dreaming during deep sleep was because they were able to achieve one-way communication with him throughout REM sleep by tapping on his finger, and he later confirmed that the dream during which he had felt the tactile communication had come after he’d emerged out of the Nightmare. His EEG, however, showed no signs of heightened brain activity during deep sleep. One of the doctors, distraught, said it was like the boy’s mind had been transported out of his head during the Nightmare.

So…Yog Sothoth? Eldritch abominations messing with our heads? Yeah. It really is as good an explanation as any. I would have found all this stuff interesting if I had read about it in a book, but it’s hard to stay interested in the supernatural if your life depends on learning as much as possible.

Honestly, I don’t even care what causes the dreams at this point. I just want them to be over.

August 17th

I just had a fight with Mom and Dad. They’ve been close to snapping for days, and I guess what I just told them was the last straw. I told them that I didn’t think my chances were very good.

Mom looked aghast and Dad went ballistic, telling me I was letting fear mess with my head. I don’t think he had bad intentions, I don’t think he ever does, but he couldn’t control himself; he was just yelling and carrying on. I told him he was the one letting fear mess with his head. Of course, that only made things worse.

When I finally got around to explaining my logic, my voice was trembling. I said that the deaths were stacking up, that they didn’t seem to be slowing down. There are now about three-thousand boys in town who are having the dreams, and every night – on average – ten of them wake up dead, another twenty with ghastly wounds. Since it’s been a month since the deaths started, that means I probably have less than a year left to live: about nine months, if I’m lucky. I told them we have no reason to believe the Dreams will stop anytime soon, and that it would therefore make sense for me to prepare to die.

Mom told me I shouldn’t think about such things, and Dad said I couldn’t believe all those numbers. Looking back at it now, I think he was mad about something else. Maybe the way I’m cussing so much now? Maybe the way my grades have fallen into shambles? I don’t know why any of that would matter; I think that deep inside, he’s still living in another world, one where none of this ever happened.

I hear them arguing downstairs now. They’re arguing a lot these days. I wonder if they’ll stay married after I’m dead.

August 18th

The President visited my college today, and most of Saint Plerys attended his speech. I hadn’t planned on being there, but I felt I owed it to my parents after last night, so I rode with them to the college in silence, not meeting their eyes.

There were seats set up for us at the front of the auditorium: all the young men. I didn’t want to display myself before the whole town like that, but I made my way to those rows nonetheless, by rote, and took my place among the rest of the boys. Some of them were classmates. Most of them I didn’t know.

The President’s speech was long and emotional, and I wanted to take comfort in it—really, I did—but all it did was allow my anger and frustration to further fester. I didn’t care that the President of the United States had come to our small town on our behalf; the President, after all, was just a man, a man who didn’t have any better idea how to save our lives than anyone else. His emotion was genuine, but somehow that made it worse; knowing that my woes were shared by the rest of the world just seemed like another weight on my back, another way in which I was burdening this country.

Throughout his speech, the President emphasized one word: Heroes. “You’re heroes,” he said to us. “For weeks, you’ve stared death in its cold, merciless face, and not once have you flinched, not once have you allowed terror or madness to get the better of you. To the best of our knowledge, nobody in the history of the human race has faced the challenge you are now facing, and you therefore represent the noblest and best of humanity. You’re heroes, every one of you, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

Heroes. If we’re heroes, what does it even mean to be a hero? How many of those young men who have already died would have gone on to become great doctors, researchers, or philanthropists? Who among them might have been the next Kafka, Einstein, or Borlaug? We aren’t heroes for being thrust into a nightmare we can’t control; we’re having our potential for future herodom stripped away.

The President meant well, of course, and maybe if I had been in a better mood, I would have listened to what he had to say. But my parents have always told me I’m a cynical person.

After the speech, I found them again, and it was like last night never happened. At least the speech got through to somebody. They apologized for everything they had said, and I said I had already forgotten about it, that it’s stupid to worry about such things at a time like this, that what we needed now was unity. I sucked up my pride and told them I forgave them.

There are still a few things I want to do before I die. I want to finish writing some of my stories. I want to experience a first kiss. I want to tell Professor Freeman how much I appreciate him.

At least, unlike the martyrs of previous generations, I’ll get to live out the remainder of my days in a peaceful college town on the East Coast—and not huddling in a trench all wet and sick, waiting for the artillery to stop so I can take up my gun and dash across a blackened, corpse-ridden field, while I pray to the laws of chance to spare me for one more day.

Editorial Note: Mark Mason was found dead in his bed on the morning of August 19th, 20XX. His body had been ripped open in nine places by close-range machine gun fire, mainly on the chest and face. Three 5.56mm bullets were found embedded in the wounds.

By June of the following year, all men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-eight who had been living in Saint Plerys when the Nightmares began were dead. The cause of the Saint Plerys Nightmares remains a subject of considerable debate today.

End.

Nathaniel Beardsley studied English literature and film at the College of William and Mary. For some reason, he has been compulsively making up stories since the time he was a kid, and he has no intention of stopping anytime soon. Follow him on Twitter at @NathBeardsley.

Under the Wall

By Darci Meadows

The first thing that struck the crew about the island was the silence. It was almost a welcome aspect at first, after the thunderclaps and crashing waves of the typhoon that had deposited them there. But over the ensuing hours, as the crew of The Endeavor slowly pulled their battered and broken forms from the shattered hulk of their vessel, the eerie silence began to gnaw at them. The ship that had once been their livelihood along with all 7 of its crew had been marooned in the midst of a vast jungle, somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and yet there were no sounds. No birds cried or sang, no insects buzzed or crawled, no animal cried out from the endless greenery—there were simply the waves of the sea that seemed to echo between the trees.

It wasn’t till the silence was broken that its eeriness truly dawned on the men, as Randal Danning, their cabin boy, rushed through the undergrowth crying out for the crew to follow him quickly. There, not 20 yards from the shipwreck, was the first time they saw the wall. The silence returned as the men looked upon it, the ancient moss covered stone stretching nearly 70 feet into the sky. It extended seemingly infinitely in both directions, an impassable and impossible gash slit into the very flesh of the island. There were no sign of blocks or bricks to it, almost as if the entire wall was one single massive slab of stone laid across the landscape.

As the crew stared at the megalith, the silence enveloped them once more, the distant sound of crashing waves the only thing to muffle the whispering fear of their own thoughts. Captain Mercer spoke first, in a tone that strained for determination but came up just short. “A mystery for better minds,” he said, attempting to turn and leave only to find the remaining crew still in place. A hushed murmur had begun to spread between them, each man speaking allowed the questions of the wall as their voices blurred together into a babel. Only the Captain seemed entirely unchanged, though his fear shown through the tremble in his voice and the shake of his hand. He grabbed the first mate, Harold Fielding, by the shoulder, shaking him as if from a stupor. The man simply stared straight ahead, his neck craning upwards towards the top of the wall that lingered nearly out of sight.

As the Captain continued his impotent pleas, he failed to notice Randal, the boy who’d brought the crew to the wall, had begun to approach it, slowly at first with his arm outstretched but growing nearer and nearer. It wasn’t till the boy began screaming that the crew woke from their trance, suddenly aware of the young man with his arm shoved against the ancient stone of the impossible edifice. In a moment they rushed towards him, catching him as he collapsed. In quick succession they dragged the unconscious cabin boy back towards the ship, leaving the wall alone and silent.

By the time night fell the crew longed for the silence of the morning. Randal had recovered physically but changed; a boy had gone to the wall and something else had come back from it. His eyes were wild, and his lips seemed unable to cover his teeth anymore. In truth, he no longer had teeth, but fangs curling within his mouth. His body hair had grown course and rough, creeping over more and more of his skin, and his fingernails had become sunken and gray. He no longer spoke English, instead he raved and muttered in some guttural language no one could understand, like the cry of a dumb animal mixed with the disturbed ramblings of a madman. The crew had been forced to restrain him, eventually chaining him to a nearby tree, though he broke seaman Wilmore’s arm before the struggle was ended. As night fell and the crew lit a small campfire, the thing that used to be Randall still paced and babbled under its breath, wide eyes glinting menacingly in the dim firelight.

The First sounds of the island came only after the last light of the sun had faded and the absolute black of the open sea had enveloped them. The fire was dwindling, and the men had just established a night watch schedule when they heard the cries. A thundering sound, echoing tonal and mighty across the vast jungle foliage of the island, a sound from the other side of the wall. It sounded like thunder mixed with the roar of a train car, like the crashing of the waves and the roar of lion, like something neither man nor beast. The thing that used to be Randal howled back its own answer as the crew hunkered down for a fitful and uneasy night.

In the morning a new horrible silence greeted them. The Randal creature had finally given in to exhaustion and was huddled in a ball under the shelter of its tree, but David Tibbs, the cook and last watchmen for the night, was gone. No sign of the man could be found anywhere in the small crater that marked their makeshift camp, nor could he be found at the hulk of The Endeavor. After an hour of searching, seaman Wilmore called out after coming upon the only hint of his final fate. It was a pair of shoes, the only pair that David Tibbs had ever owned, left lying on the ground near the edge of the camp. Above them, the canopy had been torn away; specks of blood and viscera still lingering on the jungle foliage. It was as if some force had ripped him from the Earth, with only what it could not hold left behind to mark his passing.

The day past quickly after that discovery, the men setting about repairs as best they could hope to affect them. The work was slow and fruitless, even as the sun seemed to race across the horizon. It was nearly 2 hours before any of them spoke. Seaman Wilmore and the Captain had been attempting to hammer whatever wood could be salvage from the limited cargo into the shape of the mast. The glare of the sun was strangely strong and hot even through the dense canopy. It was then Wilmore stopped and turned to the captain asking, “Have you ever heard of Tanga?” For a moment the two men simply breathed in the silence between them, the question hanging heavy in the sticky humid air.

“It’s a superstition,” replied the captain, “a myth they mutter along island chains from Madagascar to Sumatra—some kind of local god or spirit.” The captain’s words were stern, but his gaze was averted, he didn’t see Wilmore turn away and face towards the wall—you could just make out the gray of its stone through the denseness of the trees.

“Yeah...” replied the sailor. “Something monstrous and all-powerful, something alive, holding these islands in its fist.” The captain finally turned to spot the man’s gaze. “Something ancient, almost as ancient as whoever built that wall out there, something so ancient and powerful it came ages before there were any men—before there was even the idea of men or the idea of Gods, something...”

“WILMORE!” In a moment the captain snapped him out of his trance, and Wilmore realized he’d begun walking toward the wall.

There wasn’t much talk after that, even as the fruitlessness of the task became more and more clear to the men. The captain did his best to keep everyone moving, setting up a base camp at the small crater they’d found where wood could be chopped, and Randal guarded while the rest of the crew tried their best to patch the ship. The men all knew their situation was hopeless, even if they could somehow repair the catastrophic damage done to The Endeavor, they had no way to get it back to the sea. Still, they toiled on, till the sun hung low and deck hand Carl Johnson pulled the captain aside.

“What do you mean, listening?” asked the captain, rubbing his brow in frustration and exhaustion.

“Just that, Captain. They were listening to him, Bishop and Fielding both.”

“How could they be listening to Randal—the man’s a gibbering lunatic.”

“All the same sir, last time I was at the base camp...it was like they didn’t even see me? Just standing there, listening to Randal spew out that weird language like—like he was preaching.”

“Did they do anything else?”

“Not to me sir, like I said they didn’t even acknowledge me, but when I left, they’d drawn in closer to him, sitting cross-legged on the jungle floor, hanging on his every word.” The captain frowned deeply and considered the large knife he’d been using to try and shape the remaining wood.

“We should head back there, make sure they’re alright, if anything’s wrong...it’ll be just you and me, Wilmore can’t do anything with that arm. Still, that’s two against two.”

“Unless they let Randal loose.” replied Johnson gravely.

“Not much chance of that son, I’m the only one with a key to his chain.

When the three men returned to the camp site it was completely empty. No first mate, no boatswain, no thing called Randal chained to a tree, only the scattered salvaged remains they’d chosen to set-up as a makeshift haven in the crater. Randal’s chain still hung from the deep-rooted tree it’d been latched too. The only sign the crazed cabin boy had ever even been there was his severed left hand lying limp on the dirt with the chain still padlocked around its wrist. The silence came for the three remaining men yet again in that moment, oppressive and overpowering, the silence of eyes watching and teeth being bared.

Finally, they decided to retreat to the relative safety of The Endeavor. It may not have been much, but it at least had walls and doors they could cower behind. Working together, the three carried whatever supplies they felt necessary back to the hulk of the ship as quickly as possible. The captain was last to leave the abandoned camp, hurrying to avoid being alone too long in the place, but stopping long enough to mark the shape of the strange crater they’d been staying in, the shape of 5 fingers and a palm, as if some giant hand had reached down from above and pressed itself into the Earth.

As night fell across the island, the three men huddled in the presumed safety of what remained of the Endeavor. The blanket of silence returned to eat away at their courage with every passing moment. Like an oppressive blanket of empty space they could fill with all the terror in their hearts. Even as they closed their eyes and pretended to sleep, they strained their ears through the dead quiet listening for any hint of danger. It was in this state that the screams began. They were howls no longer human, barely recognizable as the missing crew, reverberating off the ancient trees and the even older stone of the wall.

They seem to drift down from some place high above and every so often would be answered by the deep wail that had come the night before. The cries burned long into the night, chanting and shouting that somehow seemed worse than the silence, till it mingled with the screams of the men themselves. No one saw what happened, their eyes tightly clenched attempting to shut out all sensory input, but when they opened them seaman Wilmore lay dead on the floor of the endeavor, a great dark shape skittering away into the blackness of the wild. The Captain and Johnson resolved not to sleep again after that, to sit awake, back-to-back, till the night passed and they might make for the shore, even as the howling men taunted them, and their eyelids felt heavier.

When Captain Mercer awoke, he was bound. His arms and legs were held tightly in place, jungle vines pressed so deeply into his skin they cut off the circulation to his hands. He could feel a hard, flat, wooden board against his back like a stretcher. Barely able to turn his head he could make out the hunched skulking figures of his former crew,their clothes tattered, faces slathered in red liquid, hands and arms stretched and extended in unnatural ways as their open mouths showed sharp teeth. They muttered and grunted in an unrecognizable tongue, looking back and forth till one of them dragged the makeshift stretcher that held the captain out of the hull.

From his vantage point on the jungle floor, he could still see the shape of figures within the ship, the remaining creatures standing over Johnson who appeared unmoving. In an instant the two figures set upon the sleeping man wildly, their fists crashing down on his head and chest again and again, blood splattering across their bodies and the walls of the broken ship. Even from outside the captain could make out the gurgled screams of fear and terror before they slowly gave way to a dying wail of pain as the man’s throat and mouth were mashed into bloody pulp against the deck boards.

Their gristly work completed; the things that used to be the crew of the Endeavor reconvened. Together they hoisted the captain’s stretcher and began to drag him away from the wreck, toward the wall. As they went and the captain struggled hopelessly against the bonds of his stretcher, he could see the green foliage of the jungle creeping across the ship. In an instant, vines grasped the wheelhouse, crushing the wood and steel of the structure to pieces. Roots jutted out of the ground to ensnare the body of the ship, splintering it as they went. It was as if the jungle itself had formed a fist around the Endeavor and in one smooth motion destroyed it.

By the time they reached the wall the captain had given up struggling against his bonds. He could barely feel his fingers anymore and even if he could escape, he had nowhere to hide from the trio who’d just savagely beaten his last alley to death. In a quick, jarring motion he found himself once more on the ground, staring upwards as the figures began to climb the wall. Each man was quick and agile, even Danning with his single hand, seemed to be able to scale the sheer rock face of the edifice with alarming speed. As they reached the top, Captain Mercer could feel a rope affixed to the top of his stretcher begin to tighten dragging him up after them. For a moment the entire jungle seemed to rush past as he was pulled higher and higher before he was suddenly above the tree line and staring out at the ocean beyond. Finally, he was perched atop the wall, his stretcher fit easily into a set of grooves built into the ancient stone structure.

He could see the wall ran from one side of the island to the other, and beyond it was sheer cliff face and mountain. On the other side of the wall stretched out untold miles of dense jungle, imposing mountains, and God only knew what else. Together, the three creatures began to howl once more, their deep throaty call echoing across the vast island. It was as if a frenzy took them, howling and pounding each other’s chests, stamping along the wall, till a single word emerged from their revelry, a phrase uttered over and over again amid the indecipherable language they now all spoke: Tanga.

They screamed the name from somewhere deep in the pit of their stomach, blood spitting from their mouths their throats had been screamed so raw. They shouted and chanted till finally, the reply came in the form of the deep rumbling howl, this time far closer than it had ever been before. The figures rejoiced at the sound, a mawkish dancing atop the wall and the low animalist approximation of laughter as the roar came again, nearer still.

Finally, content their task had been completed, the three turned back towards the captain, their mouths peeled back in menacing, mirthless smiles. And then they were gone, flinging themselves one-by-one over the wall towards the sound, their bodies splattering on the rocky ground below. The silence returned to the island once more, like a thick blanket smothering everything it covered. The captain, still strapped to his makeshift stretcher and affixed to the top of the wall, went blank for a moment, the panic of his situation washing over him. Suddenly, he remembered the knife he’d kept tucked into the back of his belt.

Slowly but desperately, he began to try and work his arms around towards its handle. He was almost there when the roar came again, and the trees began to split. It was just as his fingertips touched the hilt of the knife that the shape emerged. A huge dark figure, bursting forth from the jungle tree line, a silhouette in the blazing sun but unmistakably the shape of massive shoulders and head, bigger even than the wall itself. And set in its face, the same wild eyes as the transformed crew. They burned with terrible hatred and sinister intelligence, glinting in the light, as the figure drew closer, and the knife slipped from the captain’s grasp.

End.

Darci Meadows is a trans horror author looking to do great things in the genre. After years in a strictly reviewer capacity she’s made the jump to successful jump to professional short fiction. She’s been published previously in Decoded Pride Issue #3 and will be featured in the upcoming eco-sci-fi anthology book To Root Somewhere Beautiful

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