CHM September 2023
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 2023-08-14 13:29:28+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 - Tom Brown

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Editor: Charles Tyra

Co-Editor: Carson Winter
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

While September usually marks the change of season and the arrival of cooler air, this month brings some exciting changes for CHM! You guys asked for it and we listened. I am very proud to announce the return of From the Crypt! Over the next few months, we will be serializing one of my all-time favorites, “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood before digging deep into the vaults to uncover the gems that inspired modern cosmic horror and weird fiction. The other exciting change is the launch of the official CHM mobile app, making it easier than ever to read the magazine and manage your subscription. And don’t worry, the mobile app is simply a new addition. Email and print subscriptions will continue to work as they always have! Now, let’s discuss what’s in store for us this month.

This issue is a reality bender starting with a man who realizes something isn’t quite right in “Like Shakespeare.” Then in a bone-chilling piece of cosmic horror fiction, a search for a missing hiker takes a turn for the truly strange in “Roots in the Ground” by M. Shaw. In a mind-bending how-to, we witness increasingly strange occurrences in “How to Paint a Haunted House” before what it means to be the crazy cat lady is disturbingly redefined in “Phil.”

A want ad delivers much more than promised in “Elder Care.” Then, a couple become quickly lost in a strange mountainous exhibit in “The Theater of Infinite Delight.” We’ll learn the real cost of greed in “Tyger, Tyger” before being treated to part one of our special serialized presentation of Blackwood’s “The Willows.”

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

Cover art: Tom brown was raised by books in much the same way that Tarzan was raised by apes but with much less dramatic results. He got his first professional illustration gig when he was thirteen and has been working in the field since then. (Taking time out for meals and such) He is also half of the primary creative team responsible for Hopeless, Maine. He is not afraid of the dark, and considers abandoned ruins and old cemeteries to be his home turf.

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/

Table of Contents

1. Like Shakespeare
2. Roots in the Ground
3. How to Paint a Haunted House
4. Phil
5. Elder Care
6. The Theater of Infinite Delight
7. Tyger, Tyger
8. The Willows Chapter 1

Landmarks

1. Cover

2. Table of Contents

Like Shakespeare

By Hannah Brown

I think I am already dead. Wasn’t it Shakespeare who said ‘I think, therefore I am’?

‘Hi Arthur!’ Madeline, my next-door neighbour, calls to me as she wrangles her kids into their four-door sedan. Today, her kids are two sandy-haired twin girls of around eight. But I could have sworn…

‘Good morning, Madeline,’ I call back, smiling placidly as I water the flowerbeds. There used to be real flowers here, I remember, they were some weird little things, begonias, I think. Now they are plastically perfect roses.

Best not to look too closely.

Limbo makes the most sense. It explains the mediocracy of Lisa’s cooking, the eternal blandness of the neighbours, the sameness of every day. Not hell, because, since the day I woke up in this world shifted slightly to the left, there have been no reports of war, no new pandemics or disasters or… anything. For the first time in my life, only good things happen on the news.

But not heaven. If this was heaven surely, I wouldn’t have to keep working at the world’s shittiest data-entry job. Surely in heaven my fake wife would be more… just more.

Sometimes I try to rile her up on purpose. I forget to turn on the dishwasher. I leave my underwear on the floor in the bathroom. I put empty cartons back into the refrigerator.

Normally, she’d call me out on it. My real wife would have. But fake-Lisa only laughs in a chagrined sort of way and carries on.

So, limbo makes the most sense. Especially given the taste. Ever since I noticed I can’t get the nagging taste of it all from my mind, the bitter taste of anaesthetic.

It’s hard to know when I woke up here. One day I just was here. I think it took me a while to notice at first, but slowly I started putting the pieces together. Sometimes, when Lisa is huddled up next to me in our bed I stare up at our popcorn ceiling and wonder how I died.

Lisa is just finishing off her breakfast when I come back inside, and she smiles at me. ‘I think your toast might already be cold.’

I shrug, sitting at the kitchen table and taking a bite of the cold toast that flakes into sawdust in my mouth. I grit my teeth and swallow it down, taking a sip of the too-bitter scalding coffee to recover myself.

She frowns at me. Lisa, my real Lisa, was always pretty. But this weird mirror-version of her is paler, tired, her hair limper and her smile pulled down at the edges. ‘Aren’t you going to be late?’

I smile at her, and it is a gritty smile tainted with crumbs. ‘Not going to work today.’

She opens her mouth and then closes it again. Comes closer and rests a finely trembling hand on my forehead. ‘You aren’t feeling well?’

‘No,’ I said, pulling her hand away, ‘I’m just not going.’

There’s no point, after all, because I’m dead. I smile at her, but it wavers and falls away as she stares at me in horror.

‘What are you doing?’ she hisses.

I blink, surprised by her sudden vehemence. ‘What?’

Outside, a horn sounds; her carpool here to pick her up. She runs a hand through her hair, frantic. ‘I thought— it doesn’t matter what I thought,’ she says, gripping the collar of my shirt tightly. It’s the first time in months that I’ve seen Lisa, the real Lisa, shining through the cracks. ‘Go to work, Art. Play your role.’

And then she lets me go, fixes her hair, and heads out to the carpool without another word, leaving me sat at the kitchen table, gaping after her.

What does that mean? What is she referring to? No, worse than that: where has she been? That was Lisa. My Lisa.

The kitchen feels as though it is warping and fading around me, I realise suddenly that I am on the cusp of hyperventilation.

Knock, knock.

I scramble up and yank open the door, praying that Lisa has decided to pull a sicky. But my doorstep is darkened only by Mark, with his dumb satchel strapped over one shoulder.

‘Mark?’

Does Mark know where I live? A dawning horror, so much like comprehension burbles up inside my chest again, unbidden. Because that had been the other option, hadn’t it? Either I was dead… or I was the last one living.

Play your role.

‘Hey dude,’ Mark smiles at me, ‘came to pick you up for work.’

I blink. I wasn’t planning on carpooling… Right, right. Remember what Lisa said. A sheen of sweat breaks out across my brow and I clench my hands into fists to stop myself from slamming the door into his face. The lingering bitter taste of anaesthetic coats my tongue and I almost fall over my words as I say, ‘Sorry Mark, give me one minute, okay?’

‘Sure,’ Mark chirps, ‘don’t make us late!’

I duck back inside and briefly consider crawling into my closet and having a panic attack. But that wouldn’t work, would it? The way Lisa had spoken… God. Had we both been living with each other this whole time? Certain the other was gone?

Fuck.

I grab my backpack and head back to Mark. ‘Let’s go.’

We get into Mark’s shitty car and he pulls away from my house, flicking absently through the radio stations as we drive. His car smells faintly of some kind of chemical, or maybe it’s just the anaesthetic taste in the back of my throat getting stronger.

I roll down the window and ask, ‘Do you mind if we listen to the news?’

He blinks and then smiles at me. ‘Sure.’

We listen as Mark pulls onto the highway. A laundry list of mundane, positive things. Wars had been washed away. There was no more talk of an energy crisis. No mention of pandemics. Nothing.

‘Weird,’ I say, staring at Mark’s face. I wonder if he’s like Lisa; waiting for someone else to break. I can’t help the feeling of wanting to pry. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘What is?’ he asks.

‘This,’ I gesture to the radio. ‘The news. Things sure are quiet.’

He stops, turning to look at me. In rush hour traffic it’s not as though he needs to keep his eyes on the road overmuch, but there’s something wrong with the way he looks at me. His eyes are glassy and hollow, devoid of life.

‘Oh,’ he says, his voice an echoing burbling mess of other overlapping voices, extending forever into a depthless abyss. The windows are slowly beginning to fog over, but not with condensation, with a strange dark mist that seals away the light outside, entombing us in an endless sea of night. ‘Are you awake?’

I cringe away from him, folding myself back into the passenger door, one hand gripping the handle, but it is stuck fast. ‘W-what?’

Those glassy eyes fold in and then out again, a kaleidoscope of eyes slowly consuming his face and then multiplying outwards, a Rorschach test of eyes bleeding out from the skin and consuming the interior darkness of the car.

‘Go back to sleep,’ the voices bid.

Unconsciousness is a blessing.

* * *

I think I am already dead. Who was it that said, ‘I think, therefore I am’?

‘Hi Arthur!’ Madeline, my next-door neighbour, calls to me as she wrangles her kids into their four-door sedan. Today, her kids are an eight-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl, both brunettes. But I could have sworn…

‘Good morning, Madeline,’ I call back, smiling placidly as I water the flowerbeds. There used to be real flowers here, I think. Sometimes I struggle to remember what it was like, before. Now they are plastically perfect roses.

Best not to look too closely. We all have a role to play, after all. The thought strikes me as odd, and I reach up to cradle my head as pain lances though it.

What was I doing? I look down at the hose in my hands, sluggishly dripping water into the flowerbed. Right. Just finishing up.

Lisa is sitting down for breakfast when I come back inside, and she smiles at me. ‘I made pancakes.’

I smile, sitting at the kitchen table and taking a bite of the sickly syrupy pancake that is so sweet my stomach roils for revolution. I grit my teeth and swallow it down. ‘Great. Thanks, babe.’

She frowns at me. Lisa, my real Lisa, was always pretty. But this weird mirror-version of her is like a pale copy. ‘You don’t remember, do you?’

‘Remember what?’ I ask, something nagging at the back of my mind like the echo of terror.

‘Yesterday,’ she says, ‘you almost didn’t go to work, remember?’

The floor is vibrating in the peripheral of my vision, pain still crackling through my brain light a spider’s web of lightning. ‘I— no, what?’

Tears are clinging to the ends of Lisa’s eyelashes. ‘What happened to you?’

‘I don’t remember,’ I whisper. The pressure of the room is pressing down on me, as if I am being buried alive. I reflexively unbutton the top button of my shirt, gasping.

Lisa steps into my space, pulling me to her, wrapping her arms around my head and shoulders and pressing me to her stomach. She still smells like Lisa, like that musky perfume she loves, but there is an undercurrent of bitter anaesthetic there now. ‘I want to go back,’ she whispers, leaning down to kiss the top of my head.

‘Are we dead?’ I ask her.

She pulls back, cupping my cheek and shakes her head. ’No, we’re not dead, I don’t think,’ she pauses, glances towards the front door, ‘we have to be careful, Art. We can’t talk like this for very long before—’

The doorbell peels, an angry insistent sound, and she grimaces, stepping away from me. ‘Shit.’

I stand up, covering for her as she brushes the tears from under her eyes, and go to the door, pulling it open to reveal an unremarkable little man in a suit and tie. Everything about him attempts to deny identification. Neither tall nor short, fat nor thin, handsome nor ugly. A little grey blur of a man.

‘Hello,’ he says, smiling at me, his mouth containing just a few too many teeth. ‘I’m Lisa’s therapist, Doctor Fitzroy.’

Lisa has a therapist? My brain bucks at the information, pain spiralling out as that new fact settles itself into my grey matter as if it has been there for months. Bile rises in the back of my throat and I fight to swallow it down.

Lisa walks up beside me, tucking her body behind me and pinching my hip with her sharp fingers as she says, ‘I didn’t know you made house calls, Doctor.’

‘Well,’ he says, twanging his own braces. Was he always wearing those? ‘We had an appointment, and here I am.’

‘We must have gotten our wires crossed,’ she said, ‘I was just on my way to work.’

He frowns. ‘Are you certain?’

‘Yep,’ she smiles.

He sighs. ‘I was afraid of this,’ he says, snapping his fingers.

Orderlies in white scrubs appear from behind him as if by magic. No, they were always there. They grab Lisa’s arms as she screams.

‘What are you doing?’ I demand, trying to follow after her as they begin to drag her down the driveway to the waiting hospital transport. ‘Let her go!’

But Doctor Fitzroy is barring my exit, still smiling. ‘Come, now, Arthur. You’re the one who let us know that she was having another one of her episodes.’

‘What? No!’ I try to get past him once more, but pain drives through my skull, dropping me to my knees.

‘She just won’t go to sleep, you see,’ he says, lowering his head to look at me, until all I can see is teeth lined up like gravestones, stretching as far as the eye can see. ‘But you’ll go to sleep, won’t you, Arthur?’

Pain so sharp that it is almost light slams me down into unconsciousness.

* * *

Sometimes, I think I am already dead. Who was it that said, ‘I think, therefore I am’?

‘Hi Arthur!’ Madeline, my next-door neighbour, calls to me as she wrangles her kids into their four-door sedan. No, wait, only one child with a shock of ginger hair.

‘Good morning, Madeline,’ I call back, smiling placidly as I water the flowerbeds. My perfect red roses glisten in the sunlight. Almost… like they’re plastic?

Best not to look too closely. We all have a role to play, after all.

A role to play. Where have I heard that before? Wasn’t it Shakespeare that said, all the world’s a stage and all the men in it merely players? What a weird thought.

What was I doing? I look down at the hose in my hands, sluggishly dripping water into the flowerbed. Right. Just finishing up.

I head back inside my lonely house and sigh as I head through to get breakfast started. Sometimes, when I’m alone in here, I imagine I hear a woman’s laugh ringing through the halls. For some reason, the thought brings tears to my eyes, but I blink them back, tasting only anaesthetic.

End.

Hannah grew up exploring the rocks and crags of Welsh beaches and now lives and works in Tokyo bay. By day she teaches writing to teenagers and by night she writes horror until she drops. She has previously been published by Eerie River Publishing, Fly on the Wall Press, and Room Magazine. Find her on twitter @Hannah_Aimee_17 or at hannahbrownauthor.com.

Roots in the Ground

By M. Shaw

The sun must have been down about an hour, but we were nowhere near giving up. We held the line, swept the mountain sector by sector, sucking in breath after breath of frigid, pine-scented air and expelling it, warm, bearing the missing hiker’s name.

We all had work the next day, but October was still shoulder season, so at least there wouldn’t be tourists pounding on the door of every business in town first thing. The hiker was an out-of-towner. None of us were clued into what their business was here. They hadn’t brought skis or a mountain bike, neither of which would be of much use that time of year anyway. They’d come alone. If Carla Jeffries, who owned the B&B, weren’t such a busybody then we might never have known they were gone.

The group I was with swept uphill along the south ridge. The ridge flattened out halfway to the peak, but the trees only got thicker from there to the treeline. It was in that dense part of the woods that someone’s flashlight beam caught a human shape. Janice blew the whistle to call a halt, and we all ran toward the sound. When I reached the spot, we were looking at the backside of a fully naked man, pressed against the trunk of a cottonwood tree. At first we assumed it was the hiker, but then our lights found another person in a similarly compromised position. Then another, and another, and another. There were fourteen, at my count, and not a scrap of clothing on a single one.

Janice got on the radio, while the rest of us stood speechless and staring, and told the other teams that the whistle had been a false alarm. Probably for the best. Some of them included high school kids.

One by one, the naked men and women noticed our presence and turned to face us. Their fronts were covered with dirt, and quite a few freely bleeding cuts and scrapes.

“Who’s got the first aid kit?” I called out. No one responded, but, to be fair, no one had probably expected me to volunteer for the search party. I hadn’t exactly been high-functioning for the past twenty years, ever since my wife died and our little girl Hannah (who was five at the time) started spending more time with her imaginary friend than her drunk, depressed dad who talked about her dead mom nonstop. Talked to her dead mom, on the worst days. But this was the year I’d finally convinced Hannah to come back from the west coast for a Thanksgiving visit, and I guess that lit a fire in me when it came to finding lost people. Still, it was my fourth or fifth recovery attempt, so I couldn’t blame anyone for being a little wary.

One of the naked men approached us. The other… nudists, I guess, kept their eyes so focused on him that it almost looked like they didn’t see us at all. The man wasn’t familiar, certainly not from town. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

Personally, I wasn’t sure it was even advisable to talk to these people, much less answer their questions. Being part of a search party was an unusual enough situation; throw in whatever this was, and a guy could be forgiven for not knowing what to do.

“We’re looking for a lost hiker,” said Janice.

“I see,” said the naked man. “Well, none of us is a lost hiker.”

“And what are you doing out here?” said Janice.

“Do you maybe want to put some clothes on?” Dave Cleary added.

The naked man ignored Dave. “If it’s any of your business, we were in the middle of an orgy.”

“Jeez Louise,” said Dave. Most of us were saying something to that effect, but Dave was standing closest to me.

“An orgy,” said Janice.

“Roots in the ground,” said the naked man, as if this clarified anything.

I swept my flashlight beam between the bodies present. Most were middle age, and looked exactly like the kind of people you’d expect to populate a town like ours, though none of them did. “I don’t recognize any of you,” I said.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said the naked man who, at least, was willing to acknowledge that I had said anything. “Look, your hiker isn’t here, so…” He shrugged, hands held palm-up, an almost cartoonish gesture. “Would you mind?”

“Just a moment,” said Janice, signaling for us clothed people to huddle up together.

Anne Borden spoke first. “He did say they were having an orgy, right?”

“It’s below freezing out here,” said Dave.

“Their nipples’ve gotta be hard enough to cut glass,” said Ted Furrier.

“Thank you, Ted,” said Janice, “thank you for that contribution. Anybody here replacing a windowpane tonight?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “How do y’all suggest we handle this? I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but if we leave them here, they’ll be a dozen popsicles covered in infected gashes by morning.”

“Something’s not right about this,” said Ted. “That’s all I’m saying.”

A few of us cleared our throats. There was a whole host of not-right-here things about this, but what could we do? Even if they wanted our help, there were only three survival blankets in the first aid kit.

“Fuck it,” said Dave, “why don’t we leave ‘em? Freezing or not, I don’t want nothin’ to do with whatever this is. I mean, not that I’m well acquainted with these things, but doesn’t an orgy normally involve… you know…” He made an O with his thumb and forefinger, then poked his other forefinger through the hole.

“Fucking!” said Ted. “Exactly! What kind of orgy is this? They’re just rubbing themselves on the trees, looks like.”

“The way they’re all scratched up,” said Dave. “They trying to diddle the trees?”

I pointed my flashlight back toward the nudists, guessing maybe I could do some forensic shit on their wounds (I’m not a CSI, I just watch too much TV). “Hold up,” I said, “look.”

Our lights lit the trees. Fourteen naked bodies had been reduced to just a few stragglers, weaving between the trees away from us, up the slope.

“I guess that’s that,” said Dave.

Ted must not have been listening, because he took off after the fleeing nudists, followed by Anne and a few others.

“Do not—” said Janice. “Hey! Hey! Fuckin’ hell.”

“Good riddance, I say,” said Dave. “I mean the weirdos, not our folks.”

“Should we follow?” I asked.

“Absolutely not,” said Janice. “We stick with the plan, keep sweeping our grid. They’re in front of us, so eventually either we’ll run into them, or another team will. Provided no one else wants to do anything astonishingly stupid.”

We reformed the line, spaced appropriately farther apart to account for the deserters. We kept calling for the missing hiker, but it’s safe to say that was no longer the first thing on my mind. I kept thinking about the way they’d all stood there, stark naked and bleeding in the cold, like they weren’t the least bit uncomfortable. As we poked through the woods, I kept looking for any discarded garments left behind, but never saw a single one. Had they somehow grabbed all their clothes as they ran, or had they never had them? Either way, where the hell had they come from, and where the hell were they going?

All I knew for sure was how I felt, which was that I wanted to get myself off that mountain and not look back. I told myself it was just my old chickenshit depression trying to give me an excuse to cloister myself at home and avoid the world, and that I should push on like an adult instead. Despite what the horror movies of the 1970’s would have us believe, a bunch of naked hippies in the woods probably aren’t planning a Satanic murder party, no matter how scary they look.

I tried to go back to thinking about Hannah, how I’d tell this story to her in a few weeks. Oddly enough, I found this making me feel more uneasy, not less.

I’d lost track of how much time had passed when Dave tripped on a root and busted his nose. Janice called a halt so we could check him out, stick some gauze in his nostrils and bandage his ankle.

“How you feeling?” I asked him, pressing the ends of a strip of surgical tape to his cheek bones.

“Little dizzy,” he said. Dave was in pretty good shape for his age, but still forging well into his sixties. Thankfully he didn’t object when Janice drew the line and said they wouldn’t continue the search until he headed back to town.

“You know the way?” she said.

Dave mumbled something that might have been yeah, but was really more like “nyeh,” which just as easily could have been nah.

“I’ll make sure he gets there okay,” I said.

“Oh come on,” said Dave, shooting me a knitted-brows look that strongly implied, Seriously? You of all people are going to look after me? “You stick with the group, I’ll do fine on my own.”

“Yeah, I know all about doing fine on your own,” I said. Dave shrugged, which was as good as I was going to do.

* * *

I didn’t make the connection at the time, but when Hannah was little she had this song about trees. As far as anyone could tell, she’d made it up. It was cute. Kind of like a love song to a tree, as if it were a close friend or maybe a boyfriend. The kind of thing kids come up with, when they’re still figuring out how to process feelings like affection and attachment.

The title of the song was “Roots in the Ground.” The lyrics changed over time along with the artist, but the chorus was always that phrase, repeated 8 times at increasing volume. The last “roots in the ground!” was a scream. It was cute.

* * *

Janice swore the group would be fine without us, even considering they were down by almost half between this and the ones running after the nudists. She pointed out they’d be getting those folks back, hopefully before too long.

I didn’t say so to anyone, but I was glad for the excuse to hike back down with Dave. Something the naked man said had plucked a chord in me that hadn’t been plucked in a long time, and not a pleasant one. I was ready to give in to my chickenshit depression, by that point. I had thoughts milling around in my head that I didn’t want to be there, and the sooner I could get home, eat a gummy and watch some stupid TV show, the better.

Dave found a walking stick before long and insisted it was all the support he needed. We hiked on in silence. I made sure to keep myself busy, sweeping my flashlight in all directions, still looking for our hiker because it was better than thinking about something else, like why those people had looked so familiar even though I couldn’t identify a single one of them.

We were still the better part of an hour from the base area, probably more considering that one of us was in hobbling shape. The cold wasn’t doing us any favors, either. At least we were well outside of rattlesnake season.

That being the case, one could imagine my surprise when I heard something off in the trees that sounded very much like a rattlesnake. Dave stopped in his tracks the same moment I did, so he must have heard it too. A moment later it came again, that crisp, cascading shudder. Unmistakable.

“You gotta be kidding me,” said Dave. “What now?”

It took a minute for me to get my light on it, far back in the trees as it was. Faint movement. Not a snake; even from a distance I could tell I was looking at skin, not scales.

“I think it’s a person,” I said.

“Jimminy Christmas,” said Dave.

I kept my light trained on the source of the sound and started toward it, cautioning Dave to watch his step.

It was one of the nudists from before. Or so I assumed, given her lack of clothing and prominence of wounds. How she had doubled back and passed us without our noticing was beyond me, but it was either that or there were multiple tree orgies going on that night, which I didn’t want to entertain. She looked in even worse shape than before. There were trails of blood running out of her ears and nostrils. The rattling noise came from her heaving breath, passing through all the blood in her mouth, which visibly bubbled and sputtered on each exhale. Trembling hands held a stick that she was working back and forth over her privates. Most of her fingernails were torn off. Her skin had gone bright red from the cold, with the exception of her feet, which were blue, fading into black.

“I’m out,” said Dave.

“Hold up,” I said, but when I turned, all I found was his back as he fumbled his way out of the trees.

“Too old for this shit!” he called back.

So he said, but the woman on the ground couldn’t have been any younger than him. A large and vocal part of my brain wanted me to leave her for dead right then, which I ignored. Unsettling though it was to stay there, I knew that any future reports of her death from exposure would be on my conscience. She still wasn’t doing anything besides rubbing herself with the stick and making that godawful rattle. It had an audible wheeze underneath, I was noticing.

Dave might have been out of earshot, but I tried. “You better make it back to town, asshole! You get lost, that’s on you!”

No response. Just the sound of breath, pushed through a mouthful of blood.

I didn’t have any supplies on me beyond the flashlight and my phone. I could call 911, but who could they send? All the first responders in town were already on the mountain, and Dave had taken our radio. There was no way the woman would be able to walk on those feet, given that they were starting to resemble overripe eggplants in shape and color.

I knelt by her and shone my light in her face. Confirmed: I had absolutely no idea who she was. Like her compatriots, though, looking at her gave me the oddest feeling that she should be familiar. Her pupils, which had been dilated across the entire iris, shrank to pinpricks when the light hit them. No reaction otherwise.

“Hey,” I said, “can you hear me? Can you sit up?”

She coughed. Blood from her mouth spattered across my face.

“Jesus!” I shot to my feet, wiping desperately at the blood with the sleeve of my Carhartt.

Something came out of her throat, which sounded like either pained retching or the word almost or both. Then, more clearly, “Please. Please, it must be enough.”

I stood over her again, making sure to keep my face a good distance from hers. Blood had splashed onto her chin and chest as well, enough that it was already forming rivulets. I took a step toward her and my foot sank into the ground, almost to the ankle before I yanked it back. All around her, the dirt felt soft, damp. I smelled something rotten, which could have been the blood drying on my face but reminded me more of dead leaves.

The best solution I could see here was to put my coat on her and carry her piggyback into town as fast as I could. Getting her onto my back would be complicated, and there was the concern about her coughing blood on me again, but what the hell. I slid a hand under her shoulder and started to lift.

“No!” she screamed.

I stumbled and fell backward.

Her eyeballs wrenched sideways in my direction, though when I shone my light on her face they looked cloudy, staring into the distance. My ass stayed firmly planted on a pile of pine needles.

“Got separated.” Her voice was a deep, witchy croak. She burned through words like they were holding her up. “When we ran. Lost the sheltering. But I’m so close.”

My hands groped behind me, searching for anything that might impede my scooting backward while I kept eyes on her. I realized, as I was doing this, that I had ceased to feel much of anything other than fear. My whole body was swimming with adrenaline, and it felt so terrifyingly peaceful. I wasn’t even cold anymore.

“Please,” she said again, followed by something that was either gagging, or a word made up entirely of vowels. “I accept your embrace. Please.”

Her entire face contracted, except for her mouth, which shot open. Her back arched. Either she was having a seizure, or that knobby old stick was really doing something for her. Blood pushed itself from every open wound, dark and halfway clotted.

If that was all I’d seen, it would have been enough. I could have stood at that moment and booked it into town and left her to the frozen woods. I’ve still got enough cowardice in me for that. But I didn’t, God help me.

* * *

Here’s the thing: kids say creepy shit all the time, especially when they’re little. All the more so when there’s a dead parent involved. It’s normal. It’s healthy, or so the shrink said. Hannah’s imaginary friend showed up about as soon as she was old enough to talk, but their relationship shifted into a new gear when her mom died. This made perfect sense to me. It also made sense that the imaginary friend in question was a bit morbid.

“Rudy,” as she called it (it, not him), was made of nothing. She would get really mad if you tried to ask what Rudy looked like. One time she cried because her first grade teacher said “Rudy doesn’t look like anything,” which she insisted was not at all the same as looking like nothing. If you said anything about Rudy that she didn’t like, she’d stomp out of the room and scream that she was going to The Sheltering, which I assumed was where Rudy lived, probably a word she’d heard on some cartoon.

If you asked her what Rudy did with its time, you’d learn that it ate sticks, dead leaves, and animal bones. Its favorite activity was “gardening,” but if you asked for clarification then it turned out this involved burying things—seeds, toys, dead animals or anything else—and growing them back as trees. Rudy’s penis was also a tree, which got Hannah into trouble at school on multiple occasions. The funnest aspect of the penis thing was that it wasn’t connected to Rudy’s body, and it didn’t stay in one location; it could be any tree, anywhere on the mountain. Rudy didn’t like us for living on the mountain, but it didn’t want us to leave, either.

You can see where we assumed that this was all about her mom’s death. The fixation with burial, with things that were dead and rotting, the central importance of someone being “nothing” and yet all around you at once. Almost too easy to analyze, and I wasn’t even the shrink.

Like all imaginary friends, Rudy went away after a while. She might have hung onto it a bit longer than most kids, but again, that was understandable. Her friendship with Rudy could even be cute at times, although no one was exactly sorry to see it go.

After that night on the mountain, I wasn’t so sure it had.

* * *

The woman fell limp, letting out a sigh like wind in a blizzard. Then something settled on top of her.

It was more like the lack of a something, really. All the light was sucked out of the space just above her body. It was the kind of darkness so thick that it seems to have its own substance, beyond mere absence of light. At the same time, looking at it hurt my eyes like looking at a bare lighbulb. Like looking at the Sun. When I pointed my flashlight at her, it showed nothing. The thing on top of her refused to be illuminated, beyond a slight shimmer at its edges where the light was devoured.

There was a heavy creaking sound, and the ground beneath her receded, as if it were simply falling away into nothing. She sunk into the dirt, and with the darkness on top of her it looked almost like she dissolved. Then everything was quiet.

When I stood, my vision had gone fuzzy. I didn’t feel weak or tired, but my strength was gone. Moving felt more like operating a puppet. My vision warped and crackled around the periphery. I looked into the hole in the ground where the woman had been. A few inches below the edge was a thick latticework of roots. Couldn’t see much past that. I thought, Huh. Then I turned and started walking. Next thing I remember, I was back home.

* * *

I slept on it. Multiple nights, in fact. Let it never be said that cutting my daughter out of my life forever was something I did on impulse. After what happened in the ensuing days, I had to harden my heart. I had to keep her away from the mountain.

They never found the missing hiker. By the next morning, most folks didn’t remember there ever was a missing hiker, and the ones who did talked about the search in distant terms, like something that happened years ago. They never found any of the nudists, either. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one who remembers them at all. I’ve learned not to bring it up. Dave Cleary never made it back to town, nor did any of the folks who chased after the nudists. No one reported them missing. To this day, all you’ll get in return for asking about them will be comments about the weather.

Nothing prepares you for hearing your daughter’s voice while knowing it’s the last time. I’ve heard you can tell by someone’s voice on the phone when they’re smiling, even though you can’t see them. I don’t know if that’s true, but Hannah’s voice did sound different to me on that call, and I like to remember her smiling.

“Hey dad, what’s up?”

“Hi, Hannah! Just wanted to check in, see if you’re still thinking of coming home for Thanksgiving?”

A chuckle, with just a hint of annoyance. “Well like I said, home is Oakland. I’m coming to visit for Thanksgiving.”

“That’s real good, sweetie. Just making sure. You know we’ve missed you, all these years.”

“We?”

“Your mother and I are really looking forward to having you back.”

Silence on the line.

“Dad, what the fuck?”

“I know it hasn’t been too too long, but we still talk about you every night at dinner.”

“Dad, quit. You promised, you… you wouldn’t…”

“Sorry, what did we promise? Maybe you told mom, but I can’t remember.”

Her voice changed again, and this time she definitely wasn’t smiling. “I already bought the fucking plane ticket.”

“Great! We’ll meet you at security.”

“I...” A long, wet sniff. “I can’t do this.”

Click.

I can’t picture Dave Cleary’s face anymore. I can barely remember what Hannah’s mom looked like, and her name is gone. Everyone gone is fading, like an imaginary friend. But not Hannah. I remember every day I spent with her, even if most of them weren’t great. The pain of it bites deep as ever. That’s how I know she’s safe.

I don’t leave the house much anymore. Most folks assume I’m lapsing back into my old ways, probably over Hannah canceling her visit. They don’t know it’s because I can feel the trees watching me out there, both of us waiting patiently for the mountain, and whatever’s under it, to wrap me in pine and take me in.

End.

M. Shaw is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writing Workshop (class of 2019), with work most recently appearing in Apex Magazine, Voyage YA Journal, The Dread Machine, and other outlets. My novella One Hand to Hold, One Hand to Carve is available from Tenebrous Press.

How to Paint a Haunted House

By Thomas C. Mavroudis

Hey guys! Thanks for all the kind words posted to my channel while I was away. But here I am, back at the thing, and just in time for spooky season!

What’s it been, July was my last video? Boy, it sure feels like a lot longer since we were together, doesn’t it? Time is funny that way. Sometimes, you heal up just like that, and other times, it takes the scabs and bruises much longer. Well, anyway, as you can see, I’m not too worse for wear, physically. The make-up and lights do their trick as well, don’t they?

For this project, you’ll want to start with a sketch, the bones of the house, if you will. I have a particularly heavy hand, so the pencil I use to rough out my work is an 11G. They are difficult to acquire, and the price, I admit, is outside most people’s means, so I don’t recommend them for everybody. A 10H or even a regular old 9H will work for most folks.

Now, don’t worry about the landscaping just yet. The trees, the grass and shrubs. That’s all decoration. Let’s focus on the house itself.

Gabe decided to work on the faux shutters first. There were six altogether, two at the front, and four facing south. He started with the shutters because, considering the extensive restoration, he needed some effortless sense of accomplishment to carry him to a more dedicated project. After all, how else could he devour an entire house except one bite at a time?

That’s not quite right, it occurred to Gabe, as he began painting the first set of shutters tucked behind a pair of eye-level, dusty junipers. But it made sense. Paint the shutters, and people will notice someone is actually caring for the decrepit place. Besides, for the time being, the contrast between the sun-paled, hail-stricken exterior with the fresh, latex coated shutters gave the property a suggestion of vibrancy and rejuvenation.

By all means, you may make your house two stories. Heck, three stories! And with a widow’s walk on top. But see my outline, here? Isn’t that nice? A Ranch-style, they call that. Reminds me of the houses that used to be in the neighborhood where I grew up. It might not look sinister right now, but any ol’ house can have ghosts. Yeah, any house can be where monsters are.

Every wall of every room, except for the tiled sections of the kitchen and bathrooms, was covered in wallpaper, floor to ceiling. And layers of it, as through it were another type of construction material that formed the very walls they overlaid. The topmost sheets were dingy with decades of cigarette smoke, but otherwise in fair condition, only lifting here and there at a few corners and seams throughout the varied chambers.

In one room, a pass-through with two doors, a nursery perhaps, the walls were papered with steam trains, a faded vanilla background with the engines and cars a henna tone like dried blood. In the formal dining room, the walls were draped in scarlet bands of varying width, stamped with mahogany fleur-de-lis. A ubiquitous yellow damask adorned the master bathroom, opposing the grubby and cracked ivory tilework.

It was too much.

Gabe sat outside on the window box in front of the huge picture window. The shade and stone were cool. Seductively cool. A dad and his little son on a beat-up tricycle creeped down the sidewalk. Gabe almost felt as though they were not there. Or he wasn’t.

What could he do? How could he make this easier? He didn’t have the money for a professional remodel, for one thing. But time was different. Time was plentiful now. At least for a good while or so.

He hopped off the wall, shuffling through lawn invaded by ferns and dandelions, and constellations of mushrooms, to the sidewalk. He analyzed the house, the houses on either side.

His reflection in the picture window, a dubious figure, looked like someone inside, studying him through the old plate glass.

Somewhere along the way, Gabe recognized, he had made a poor decision.

I like to wet my paper a little bit, first. Not messy, just a little moist. Then we take our burnt umber and add just a speck of crimson. A tiny splatter. Hardly noticeable. And just draw it along the top line of our roof, let it bleed down. There. Let’s let that dry and then we’ll go back in with some viridian at the eaves to give a hint of all the moss and decaying bits looming there.

The flies, for some reason, loved the paint. All of it. Was it the smell, that odd cake-batter odor, or something about the colors? Crystal lake, lemon pepper, chicory. Crushed tomatoes. And where were they all coming from? That was worrisome. A cat perhaps, abandoned, crawled to a corner of the basement, or some rodent of substantial merit trapped within the walls.

Gabe, quickly annoyed by their prevalence, by their flitting buzz until they landed and were ensnared by the layer of fast drying latex, scrutinized, hunted for the usual weak spots: tears in the screens of the opened windows, faults in the seals of the exterior doors. Damp places, wet places. The flies appeared to simply happen.

But just as soon, he ignored them, dozens of them on a single kitchen wall. He painted the adjacent surface, and when he was done, he remembered the flies. He examined one, and then another. A few had all their legs trapped. Some a wing. A couple, their heads. They didn’t seem panicked, like he had seen flies caught in sticky paper. He plucked one, tearing off all but one leg and dropped it. He plucked another, squashing it accidently. Then he flicked one from the wall, and then another, until the wall was mostly bare. Gabe snickered.

The trick is, and it’s no trick really, it’s practice…is showing what’s inside by what is absent from the outside. Let me take my paper towel, see, and just dab. Just dab away a little of the color from right here…and there, see that? Can you feel what’s lurking in the basement? It’s there, just by pulling out the pigment. Down in the furnace room, past the sliding doors across from the deep freezer. Or is it in the freezer? Something is there in the crawlspace, no doubt, crouching just behind the box of wrapping paper and garland. I can smell it, can’t you? Candles, and scented pine cones, and just under it the sticky, surgery rot. You’re afraid to even stand at the top of the stairs. Afraid someone will shove you so they can pull the basement door shut and lock it. Even if you are in control of the light switch, it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s down there. Down there still. Hiding. Hiding anywhere.

From room to room, Gabe pulled down the wallpaper like pulling down stale drapes. Except, where sunlight might flood through newly uncovered windows, the walls beneath were dull and grotesque, the color of a wandering derelict, all faded browns and dirty taupe, and dots and lines of greasy black. A lithe putrescence clung to the surface, nearly not there but in Gabe’s mind, a scent only existing in some form of memory, neither wholly true nor false.

At times, a flicker would catch the corner of his eye. Sometimes his ear. For instance, he was stirring the primer and it happened; a moth, the big sort like his childhood cat would bring inside on summer nights, twitching, then holding still when he looked directly at the spot. Or the bump bump of several tiny moths fluttering against the surface. The repulsive, naked walls could camouflage millions of moths, big and small. Or the walls themselves could have been cut from the wings of gigantic moths. If he dared touch the surface with his hands, a finger or two, it was brittle and spongy at the same time, and disturbingly tepid—the temperature of something newly dead. Maybe he should have contemplated the structure of the walls first, replaced the drywall, sprayed texture. Just paint them, just cover them all, get it over with, even if it takes four, five coats. More.

I know what you’re saying, you did it again, you son-of-gun, but remember, in this little world of ours, there are no mistakes. And there surely are no accidents here on the canvas. We can fix any old mishap right up.

Out there though, well, that’s just…

Let’s take the knife here and just scrape, just scrape, scrape, scrape. There. Now I’ll take a little water and we blend it out. See, even though the colors bled into each other, we’ll soften them up, just dab and blend, like you would a stain on the carpet or the ottoman.

There. Almost like nothing bad happened at all, right? And we can paint right over that ugly spot. What happened underneath, violence, desperation, love…that’s our secret now.

Eighteen years was not that long. But it was. Babies become adults in eighteen years. Adults, some of them, become babies in eighteen years. Worse than babies. Eighteen years of neglect, eighteen years of misuse made a difference. Eight days, Gabe knew, had an impact.

Still, how could the house become so alien? For one thing, the houses on either side, architectural monstrosities that swallowed the double lots across the subdivision, made the 60’s Ranch appear to be the one out of place. And it certainly looked abandoned in its extreme disrepair, although it was not. Had not been, rather.

Was there a remnant of warmth or comfort in any corner of the house, any crack or crevice? The house behaved as though it was always a place of fear and misery. And was that alien to Gabe after all? He adapted, he immersed himself in the uncertain refuge, as a worm tunnels through grave dirt. There was pain there, always, not hidden so much as ignored. Disregarded.

Gabe walked through the house, a hand to the walls. Every newly painted room was dull, each colored wall infected with seams of grey. He dipped a finger in the half gallon can of cascade and drew a figure on the bedroom wall. It was bright and glossy at first, and as he watched it dry, it shivered from the wall and walked away. He drew a figure on the living room wall in crystal lake. That figure sat, then crawled across the floor to prone beneath the picture window. Each room he gave an occupant.

When he went around the house again, in the fading western sunlight, only one painted occupant remained—the one sprawled on the floor. He sat next to it, a draught through some loose weather stripping tussling his hair. The muscles of his face were sore with contortions. Everything was sore.

Let’s see now, I think…yes, there it is. There’s a thorny hedge that runs along right…here. Yeah. Imagine all the rascals running around in there in the shade and shadows, hiding in those sharp stickers. Lots of little critters there, like a little town of mice, slugs, spiders, roly-polies, centipedes, worms. Heck, maybe there’s even a little snake in there that’s the mayor.

Here, why don’t we…yes, take just a little crimson and strike it through our titanium white, and get a very sharp point on our brush. Now, we’re going to make a slash right back here on the hedge, just a little strip of cloth fluttering, snagged up there. Maybe someone scrambled over the fence trying to get away, didn’t quite make it. I think that’s what I recall.

Four weeks, five weeks and it’s done. Summer ends more abruptly than Gabe can recall as an adult. The sky is dark grey with rain, but the grey is glossy and clean. Inside the house, all the colors have succumbed to a matte grey remnant of their bright, hopeful palette. The exterior, Gabe decided to leave alone. It was the only part of the house that looked right. Normal.

He stood on the sidewalk in the rain and looked at his failure. The windows, the brick and mortar, the trees and shrubs, the entire portrait was a haze of discolor bleeding into itself, decaying into a mess of meaninglessness.

And Gabe’s figures, what of them? Just another haze. Real or not real, only we remember them.

By early December, the house is sold. It takes two days to go under contract after it is listed. In the middle of March it is demolished, scraped, erased. Gabe drives past once. The spot looks like a blank piece of paper; a forlorn sheet lost behind a file cabinet. Still, he daydreams about what should have been. Through his bragging insomnia, he pictures the house as he made it. Remade it. Music and laughter in the living room at Christmastime. Enticing kitchen aromas flowing from room to room like a jet stream of joy and nostalgia. The long comfort and security of the master bedroom. The pain of his imagination is the only thing that gives him relief.

Gabe never sees what fills the space. It is the void forevermore.

And well, I think that’s it, don’t you? All we have to do is sign it. Let’s see, where can I hide myself this time? Under this bush, I think. We know there’s all sorts of secrets in the dirt there. Graves carry all sorts of secrets, don’t they? And what would a haunted house be without a grave or two.

Where do you hide yourself? At work? In public? With your loved ones? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all, does it? We’re all ghosts, hiding in plain sight, aren’t we? Goodbye, now, and peace be with you.

End.

Member of the Denver Horror Collective, as well as the Horror Writers Association, Thomas C Mavroudis has an MFA from the University of CA, Riverside – Palm Desert under the direction of Stephen Graham Jones. His debut novella, Bergdorf & Associates, was released in May of ٢٠٢١ and his short stories have appeared on Creepy, A Horror Podcast and The NoSleep Podcast, and in Weirdbook, Mooncalves, and elsewhere and forthcoming in December Tales II.

by Maxwell Marais

Phil

By Tiffany Sanerd

Jean Baker had lived a very full life. She was respected by people she respected, desired by people she desired, had put herself first and benefited from it. And yet, when she met people – at a bookstore reading, in a theater lobby during intermission, shopping during the holidays – they didn’t ask about the life she’d lived. They asked about her children.

“We’re not trying, but we’re not not trying. We’re leaving it up to fate,” she’d said when she was young and married. Her well-educated, atheist coworkers would laugh. Her religious childhood friends would promise to pray. Her sister would press a frowning kiss to her own procession of babies’ heads, roll tired eyes behind their downy hair, and say nothing.

Later, after she and George had amicably decided to stop trying, she smiled politely and said, “I like having my freedom.” And when someone invariably followed with, “Aren’t you lonely?” she would say, “Maybe a pet would be nice.”

To that, her sister said plenty. “You don’t want to become a cat lady,” she said. Or, “You don’t want dog hair all over your clothes.” Or, “You don’t want your house to smell like bird shit.” Her sister with six kids whose lives became her life, whose clothes were perpetually stained, whose house smelled like bleach and – under that – years of spilled milk and pissed pants. Then it was Jean’s turn to roll her eyes and say nothing.

Later still, after her sister had died, Jean said simply, “I have cats.” And though no one ever asked about the cats, no one asked if she was lonely, either.

The first cat showed up on her doorstep two weeks after her sister’s funeral. As if it had been waiting for the scent of her sister’s disapproval to clear. She coaxed it in, cleaned it up, got it fat. And most days after, they went their own ways. It was her ideal partnership. She named him Phil and told no one it was short for Fulfilled.

Phil continued to go out and do whatever it is feral cats do. Like her cortisone shots, it kept him frisky. He never brought another cat home with him, but another always showed up a couple days on, like he’d made an offer they had to consider.

The second cat was a sleek young tabby, and though it was content to stay inside, it never fattened like the first. She named it Work. The third was solid black with unsettlingly yellow eyes. She named it Art. The fourth was fluffy white with perpetually dirty paws. She named it Food. The fifth was another tabby; this one dour and heavy with kittens. She named it Sister and vowed to rehome it. The six kittens were white with black patches like her granddaddy’s Holstein cows.

After the kittens, she was careful not to let Phil out anymore. He sulked and hid so long she thought he’d escaped anyway. She put a bit of chicken in a dish and left it on the porch as a peace offering. The next morning, Phil was wedged against the bottom of the door, like a draft stopper. When he heard her approaching, he slunk away, revealing several deep, vertical scratches where he’d tried to get to the chicken on the other side.

She gave the cold chicken to the mama tabby on her way out. Phil watched from the hall, growling low in his throat. “Get over it,” she hissed back. She was meeting her family at the aquarium that day and was saving her patience for them.

And a good thing she did. With their overbearing matriarch gone, Jean’s nieces and nephews delighted in letting their kids run amok. Her sister’s grandchildren were scalpels of movement and sound, slicing through the womblike darkness of the aquarium, bleeding Jean’s energy into the soft-edged shadows.

She stopped to rest against the rail of a tall, narrow tank with a Closed for Cleaning sign – the oldest of the herd falling back – when a funny thing happened. How long did she stare before she saw the eyes and lost all of the breath she’d managed to catch?

Kids might try to make eye contact with fish, but adults know better. Know too well that the fish just want to be left alone, to forget so they can begin again in earnest the tedium of their circuit. She certainly had not been looking to make a connection at the aquarium. And yet, there were those paperweight eyes, heavy with knowing under their brown cobbled brows.

She laughed. The sound came out breathy and girlish. It was hard to discern the full size and shape of the sinuous body. How would it feel for such a thing to cling to her? She touched the glass and was rocked by a spasm of want. She shivered so hard it shifted the strap of her sensible black leather purse.

This time when she laughed – scoffed really – she’d regained enough of her senses to sound appropriately embarrassed with herself. In the murk of the tank, it almost looked like the creature blushed, too. “Sorry,” she apologized to its horizontal pupils. She let the ebb current of extended family obligations pull her away, into the catacombs of the freshwater corridor.

On her way home, she curled her fingers around the steering wheel and thought of clinging legs; caught her gaze in the rearview mirror and wondered what the creature had thought of her. Maybe octopi were nearsighted, and it hadn’t even seen her.

It was dusk by the time she opened the front door. Her house was the same queasy swirl of light and dark as the aquarium. The mama cat came running. Five kittens mewed around her like fuzzy satellites.

Jean almost stepped on the sixth kitten, lying at the threshold of the entryway and the kitchen. It was already stiff. In that moment, she felt tired enough to lie down beside it. The tabby butted her head against Jean’s ankle then arched backward in a flurry of spit and claws.

Feline grief, Jean assumed. As she carried the small body through the house, she noticed the other cats were also keeping their distance. All but Phil, who emerged from her bedroom to resume his low growling.

“Did you do this?” she whispered as he watched her swaddle the baby in a hand towel and tuck it into a shoebox. He blinked with only one eye. It looked jaunty, like a wink. Rage flickered once in her chest before giving way to exhaustion.

She closed the box and went out the sliding glass door to the garden. She dug a hole where the green grass became brown weeds. Then she said a simple prayer to St. Francis, who had preached to the animals. “Bless this baby,” she said, “And its mother.”

A strange feeling washed over her, like a warm breeze in winter. She pressed her hand to her center. “And me, too,” she added, suddenly crying.

The sliding door stuck a few inches down the track, and while she struggled to unstick it, Phil slipped through. He was so fast he might’ve been a shadow cast by a passing car. She stared after him, to be sure. He stopped on top of the little dirt mound and let the moon touch his eyes.

“No more,” she said to him. He winked and was gone.

He was gone for days, then weeks. She told all her friends and the community page on Facebook; put up fliers at the grocery store, the vet’s office, the gas station, and on the poles at each end of her block. The first tabby finally gained weight, and the kittens were more playful in Phil’s absence.

Just when she’d decided the cat was dead – hit on the road or carried off by coyotes – he returned. In the middle of the night, she was woken by an animal singing a death song. She turned on the porch light, and there he was, naked, crying his sorrow to the night.

She gathered his cold, bristled body in her arms. Felt rough circles under the pads of her fingers and hoped whatever he’d caught wasn’t zoonotic. She set him down in the kitchen, so she could pour a bowl of milk. Every time she took a step, he forced himself between her legs, pulling at her pajama pants and begging to be held. The other cats didn’t come to greet him. He sniffed the milk then grabbed at her cuff again.

“Ok,” she said. As she lifted him, she saw that his ears were gone, right down to the Henry’s pocket. Without them and his fur, he looked like a withered old man. She kissed his head to let him know she was not repulsed.

She considered calling the vet, but Phil had no open wounds, no signs of illness aside from the rash. It could wait until morning, she decided. What he needed now was love. She shut off the lights and toed her way back to the bedroom, feeling like a ghost in her own home. When she bent to lay him beside the bed, he tensed and clung to her thin cotton shirt. “Ok,” she said again, easing onto the sheets with one arm.

Phil’s weight was stifling, but she couldn’t bring herself to move him. As she wobbled at the edge of sleep, she remembered when her sister used to sit on her chest and pin her arms with her knees. Her sister had always been awful. But without her, Jean wouldn’t have known the sweet boneless weight of babies. Her thoughts flipped forward again, to the whole-body press of her lovers.

She must have squirmed. Phil must have panicked. The sudden pain of twenty claws brought her back from the edge, but she must have opened her eyes still half-asleep. Because what she saw where her pajama shirt had been pushed up was a confusion of the cat’s flesh and hers. She blinked, and the cat became something separate again, but it left its claws inside her, their translucent tips whipping like flagellum before slipping under her skin.

She screamed, and Phil stumble-leapt from the bed. She pressed her hands to her stinging torso and scrambled for the bathroom. The overhead lights and unflattering mirror showed her the sober truth: normal cat scratches, fresh and red but barely bleeding. She swabbed them with peroxide, to be safe.

“Phil?” she sang quietly, apologetically, out into the hall. Neither he nor any of the other cats answered. Sick from shock and shame, she crawled back under her sheets.

In the morning, she searched the house for Phil but found nothing. Having learned her lesson once, she was sure he was hiding. She phoned the vet. When they heard about his ears, they told her to bring him immediately, whenever she found him. If it was after-hours, they would come over.

Jean made her day a trap. She ate Phil’s favorites. She made the other cats wait when she served the soft food. She went into rooms then stood flattened against the wall, holding her breath and listening for the whisper of his paws as he snuck down the hall. Before bed, she put a bowl of chicken outside. Then she couldn’t sleep, thinking of how he had clawed the door so desperately before, and she got up to place a second bowl inside.

He was gone, she told the vet when they called the next day. The vet told her she should call the police.

“To report a missing cat?”

“To report a cult,” they said.

She called the police.

“You want to report a missing cat?” The secretary was incredulous.

“No, I want to report...Someone shaved my cat and cut off his ears,” she said. There was a long silence, then a click as the call was transferred.

“Officer Johnson. How can I help you?”

“Someone shaved my cat and cut off his ears.”

“Have you called a vet, Mrs...?”

“Baker. Jean Baker. I called the vet, but the cat’s gone. They said I should call you.”

“Ah.”

“They said it might be a cult,” she prodded.

“Oh. Well. That’s not something we’ve seen around here,” he said, as if it were a product the police store didn’t carry.

“What about my cat? Do you think someone stole him?”

“That’s unlikely, Mrs. Baker. Why don’t you put some food out for him?”

“I tried that, but-”

“If we hear anything about your cat, we’ll give you a call.” Then Officer Johnson hung up without getting her number.

Her nephew, Gabriel, came over and installed a motion-activated floodlight. It popped on several times a night, but when she pulled back the curtain in her bedroom, she never saw anything. Not the cat or a cult member or even a rabbit. After a couple disrupted nights, she turned it off.

Several bowls of chicken went bad on her doorstep. The other cats seemed to blame her. They eyed her suspiciously and wouldn’t approach their food dishes until she backed away. The kittens that had once leaned into her palms flattened their ears and bared their tiny teeth when she reached for them.

Ten days after the incident with Phil, she found blood in her overnight pad. This is it, she thought. If the spotted pad was a Rorschach, then the correct answer was cancer. Every time, cancer. She knew she should call her doctor, but she decided to wait until there was something more to tell him. Wait, maybe, until it would be too late for him to recommend any of the futile things her sister had tried.

There was no blood the next day, or the next, or the next. It was like waiting for a bill she couldn’t pay. Only it never came. Somewhere in the midst of those first, frightened days, the second cat – Work – disappeared. Maybe it was for the better, all things considered. She’d have to rehome them soon anyway.

She eased back into routine, but it was just going through the motions, because she knew death was out there. Or rather, in there. She could feel it stretching up her spine, like a cat getting comfortable in a square of sun.

“You don’t have to hide from me,” she said, to the tumor and the kittens, who were half-grown and half-feral now. There was desperation in her voice, though, because the third cat had also gone missing. She should have gone looking, like she had for the first cat, but that’s when the nausea started. She’d endured it as long as she could; she called the doctor’s office.

Jean sweated and vomited her way through several more days. She was sore and bloated but also inexplicably hungry. The fourth cat – Food – disappeared after a disturbing fever dream. By then, she was too weak to feel anything but resigned. Maybe, she thought, Phil had found a new home and was calling them back the same way they’d come.

She drove herself to the hospital. She didn’t want to tell her nieces and nephews yet. A nurse drew blood for a CA-125 test. Dr. Martin came and explained the transvaginal ultrasound process. She didn’t tell him she’d read about it already.

When she laid back, her bones and boobs and other wayward parts tried to come out of the gaps in the gown. Like a cartoon of springs exploding from the back of a clock. As the doctor twisted the probe inside her, that’s what she told herself she was. Just an old clock that needed winding.

A few times the doctor stopped, made incremental adjustments, and snapped a picture. The machine with the screen made a noise like an old-fashioned film camera, and she waited for the photo booth strip to fall between her legs. She repeated this thought aloud. The nurse smiled tightly. Dr. Martin remained fixated on the silver topography of her interior.

Another thrust and twist. She swallowed a nervous burp. On the screen, a black pocket opened. It looked like a fisheye with a cataract. She resisted the urge to pat her belly. I see you.

The doctor removed the probe, threw away his gloves, and washed his hands. “I’ll be back,” he said over his shoulder. The nurse went with him.

Jean cleaned herself; swabbing the great gooey mess from her thighs with the “gown,” which made an equally bad napkin. She redressed quickly but needn’t have.

There was no clock in the room – aside from her – but she didn’t want to get caught with her phone out, like a kid and not a grown woman about to hear she was dying. So she continued to wait, reading drug and disease pamphlets that would never apply to her again.

Dr. Martin knocked before re-entering. He was followed by another man carrying a small machine. The nurse brought up the rear, closing the door behind them.

“This is Dr. Nilsson,” said Dr. Martin. She looked for clues in his eyes, but they were still fixed on her abdomen.

“Do I have cancer?” she asked.

“It will be a few days before we have the test results, but we do not believe you have cancer.”

They were wrong, but you couldn’t tell doctors that. “I was so sick,” she said instead. “It must be something.”

Dr. Martin nodded. “Mrs. Baker, have you seen another doctor in the last year?”

“No,” she said.

“You haven’t left the country? Tried any experimental treatments?” Dr. Martin’s usual, professionally indifferent voice climbed in pitch.

“No.” She fidgeted, and the paper under her hips tore.

“Mrs. Baker.” Dr. Martin removed his glasses, rubbed the bridge of his nose. Just like a doctor on a tv show. “Mrs. Baker,” he started again. She was getting sick of hearing her name. “The ultrasound images found a…fetus in your uterus. We need to know who you’ve been seeing for IVF treatments.”

“A fetus?” Jean laughed, high and thin. “Can a tumor look like a fetus?”

Dr. Nilsson cleared his throat. “You aren’t in any trouble, not legally anyway, but we need to know what we’re dealing with so we can help you. Who was the doctor?”

“Dr. Martin is the only doctor I’ve seen since Dr. Khan retired,” she said. “It can’t be a fetus. I’m 72. And I haven’t been with a man in years.”

“With IVF that’s not necessary,” said Dr. Nilsson.

“I haven’t had anything done to me,” said Jean. She was scared now. More scared than she’d been of what she’d expected.

“Based on its size in the ultrasound images, your fetus is mature enough for us to detect a heartbeat. Do you mind if I try? If no heartbeat is present, we can perform a biopsy to determine the nature of any possible growths.”

Jean raised her hands in surrender. The nurse helped her lie back, lifted her blouse, unbuttoned her slacks. Don’t cry, Jean warned herself as the woman smeared lubricant across her stomach. Just let them see they’re wrong.

Dr. Nilsson held the machine in one hand and a plastic wand in the other. When he pressed the wand to her stomach, she shuddered so hard her shoulder throbbed afterward. The wand jumped. The speaker crackled.

A horse galloped through the white noise. Dr. Nilsson’s hand trembled. Back to distortion. The nurse looked at Jean, squeezed her aching shoulder through her sweater.

“That was a heartbeat,” she whispered.

Jean realized she had known it was there all along. Felt its hunger and felt its satisfaction when she fed it. The tears she’d been fighting dampened the corners of her eyes. She had been calling it a tumor, but it was a baby. Her baby.

Dr. Nilsson regained his composure, the wand tracking across her stomach, in search of what it had lost. She could feel the baby pushing away from it.

“I don’t think it likes it,” she said.

Dr. Nilsson blinked at her, his pupils unfocused.

“We have the images from your earlier ultrasound,” he said. “But I would like to see the fetus myself. Would you mind if we did a second ultrasound today?”

Jean’s stomach knotted. She wasn’t sure if the apprehension was hers or the baby’s. “Is that safe?” She thought she’d read something once about the dangers of ultrasounds, but maybe she was confusing them with x-rays.

Dr. Nilsson straightened. “I think it’s best if we’re honest about your situation. The ultrasound images we have are less than ideal.” The other doctor shifted behind him. “Dr. Martin wasn’t looking for a fetus when he took them. But what I’ve seen, well, it doesn’t look normal. And that’s hardly a surprise, given…” He pointed at her with the wand.

This time, she and her stomach flinched in tandem. She tugged her blouse down over the sticky skin of her torso. “This is a lot to process. I think it would be best if I went home.”

Dr. Martin stepped forward, beside Dr. Nilsson, creating a wall. “Mrs. Baker. Jean. This is a very serious situation. A complicated situation. As your doctor, I assure you, we only want –”

She shook her head. Shook the nurse’s hand off her shoulder. Started pushing herself up. She knew what they wanted. Their names on a study. Her life and the life inside of her laid out in numbers for a roomful of their peers. The tests wouldn’t end with another ultrasound.

“I’m going home,” she said, lifting her purse from the arm of a chair.

“I don’t know if –” Dr. Nilsson was saying, but she was already past him.

“I’m going to discuss it with my family,” she lied. “I’ll make another appointment. Soon.”

She didn’t know if they heard her, because Dr. Martin and Dr. Nilsson were talking over each other, dueling pianos of polite doctor speak. She made it through the door, down the hall, past the desk. The receptionist’s chair squeaked behind her.

She was almost to the vestibule when she felt a hand close around her upper arm. She gripped her purse, ready to swing.

The nurse pressed a thick blue folder into her hand. “Congratulations, Mrs. Baker,” she said. Jean saw her own fear and awe mirrored in the woman’s eyes, saw her touch the cross swinging under the collar of her scrubs.

* * *

“You and I have something in common now,” she said to Sister’s retreating tail. Though the kittens were almost grown, and Jean’s baby was still growing.

She opened the blue folder, opened her laptop beside it, opened a string of browser windows, wrote a long grocery list. Every time she felt scared by something she read, she reminded herself that she shouldn’t be pregnant at all. There was no sense worrying about science when a miracle grew inside her.

That night, it wasn’t worry that kept her up but wonder. She could feel the baby swimming, strong and graceful, in the ocean of her blood.

The next morning, Sister didn’t lead her kittens to breakfast. The disappearances no longer bothered Jean. Maybe the cats knew she was pregnant, knew she didn’t need them anymore. Maybe they didn’t care. It was all well and good. As she’d already noted, the kittens were grown. They didn’t need their mother, and they certainly didn’t need her. She should call around, maybe post a flier at the vet’s office, find them new homes.

More important than that, though, was her long grocery list. She folded it into her purse and left.

As she compared prenatals in the vitamin aisle, a vaguely familiar voice called, “Jean!”

She blinked at George’s second wife. She couldn’t remember her name. It might not be old age, she thought with a secretive smile. It might be pregnancy brain. “How are you?”

She let her eyes drift back to the label in her hand as the woman went on. About vacations and movies and health scares and grandchildren. “You didn’t ever have children, did you?”

Jean had been waiting for the question. Hoping for it, even. Now she turned her secretive smile on the woman. “I’m leaving it up to fate,” she said.

The woman laughed. “You always were a hoot,” she said.

Jean put the vitamins in her cart, beside the fish oil supplement, in the front basket, where they wouldn’t get lost among the fruits and vegetables, the blender, and the big box of newborn diapers. “You take care,” she said to the woman.

She’d gotten everything on her list, but she continued on, to every store in town that carried anything for babies. And when she couldn’t fit so much as a binky more into her trunk, she realized she needed to make space. In the cabinets and in the spare room, for what she’d just bought, yes. But also in her life, where she’d left no room for what was coming.

When she got home, she went straight to her desk and contacted every board she chaired, the charities she’d long supported, the up-and-comers she was mentoring, the organizers of the convention she’d co-founded, even her nieces and nephews. She told them she was working on something important and wouldn’t be available for a while.

She had called many of those things her children. But now she could see they were as capable of living without her as the cats were. Only the life in her stomach – and here it kicked, and she laughed, and it kicked harder, and she wiped away a tear – truly needed her.

When she’d regained her composure, she called Dr. Martin’s office and said she was under the care of a specialist, hanging up before the nurse could request a name. They didn’t think the baby would make it, anyway. Her skin crawled at the thought of their skeptics’ hands, chasing her baby’s heart.

It was a blessing. Beyond anything a doctor could understand or accept. If God had gotten her this far, He could get her the rest of the way. If that was His plan. And if it wasn’t His plan? She remembered her sister saying, “You don’t understand unconditional love until you’ve had a child.” She’d been right. Jean loved her baby – unconditionally – already.

* * *

The time when her body felt as mysterious as an ocean was over much sooner than she expected. Within days, she felt more like a narrow stream, the tips of her baby’s fingers and toes testing her skin like the fins of spawning salmon.

Less than a week after the ultrasound, she stopped in the middle of scouring gristle from a knife to lean against the kitchen counter. Carefully, she laid down the knife. “Do you see it moving?” she asked the wide eyes of the last kitten.

Twelve hours later, she woke with a start from a nightmare about suffocating to find her own body looming over her. The baby was a tight coil, too big for her stomach, pushing against her bones as if they were the thin glass of a goldfish bowl. “Not long now,” she tried to laugh, though it came out more a gasp.

She rocked herself upright – wanting to floss away what felt like hair between her teeth – and felt a single point of pain. Too high to be a proper contraction. She felt it again and lifted her nightgown to see a finger tent-poling her skin. She pinched it gently. “I’m here,” she said. There was a pause in the pressure, the pain fading like an echo, the bulge smoothing to a bump.

Then the bumps became many, more than the ten there should have been. But she didn’t get to count them. Because in an electric current – a drowning wave – the pain surged back. It didn’t feel like her body was contracting around the baby. It felt like the baby was flexing outward. “Oh,” she said, trying not to scream.

The bumps became fingers again, purple as bruises at the tips where her skin was stretched tightest. And now she couldn’t help but scream, because it felt like the baby was burrowing out of her. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen, even when it went wrong.

It was too late now, though. She fell back on the bed. When she wasn’t screaming, she panted, “Unconditional love,” like a mantra. With a wet pop, the first finger burst through. It was the clear blue of art glass where it wasn’t streaked with her blood.

More followed. Faintly, she heard herself tear. The pain was transformative, muffling all other senses. Through a narrowing porthole, she saw the fingers continue to reach, to grow into arms. One for every time she longed to hold and be held. Her own arms felt detached, impossibly heavy, but with a slippery smile, she watched them rise.

She had been right to assume for so long that she wasn’t made for motherhood. Her body was in tatters, as flaccid and useless as a burst balloon. It reminded her of what she would miss: no first birthday, first words, or first steps.

But there was this: the arms wrapped her wrists, and she dragged her baby closer, so it could look her in the eyes and know how much her sputtering heart loved it.

“You’re all I ever wanted,” she sighed before tentacles filled her mouth, probing the cat hair between her teeth.

End.

Tiffany Sanerd lives in rural Illinois. She writes horror comedy in the winter and dark fantasy in the summer. Her work is equally influenced by boredom, pesticides, her kids, her cat, and the antiques she sells as a day job.

Elder Care

By M. Kelleher

Consciousness took it’s time returning to Darrell. Little snippets of sensation to give shape to his current reality. His brain cherry picking what he could and could not know. This wasn’t completely out of the norm, no need to worry yet. Darrell had always liked his pills. And whatever gods take care of users would often blunt the memories of the worst things he’d done while he was on them. But today felt different, and somewhere in the back of his mind there was an alarm sounding. Telling him he needed to get a handle on his current situation, quickly.

He breathed in deeply. And hey, he could breathe. That was nice. That usually meant everything would be fine. Though the air felt heavy and dank in his lungs and the smell was… less than ideal. Low tide and rot. The docks, maybe. What had happened last night?

He felt the floor beneath him. Cold and damp where it touched the bare skin of his arms. He’d woken up on enough floors to recognize the feel of kitchen linoleum, bathroom tile, the odd concrete alley. This though? Something stronger than lived experience told him he was lying on stone. Told him he was deep under the earth. He tried to sit up and felt the crinkle of paper in his hand. A clue?

If he could just get his eyes open to look at it. But his eyes did not want to open—were in fact clenched shut so tightly that it was hurting his cheeks. He got the left to squint, then the right. The lids felt crusted together by old tears. He forced his empty hand up to rub them, help the process along, and found it filthy, dirt and blood around broken nails. A thin string of bile connecting to his chin. Had he overdosed? He needed to get up.

It was a slow but steady journey to sitting. His head was still tipping dangerously forward towards his lap. But that let him take in the mint green scrubs he was wearing. A job? Had he been on a job last night? Not Myrtle, she’d been taken to hospice. And Bernice was dead as of last Tuesday. Someone new then?

His fist clenched. Spasmed around the crumpled paper. He pried his fingers open one at a time to release it, ignoring the little streaks of blood around the halfmoon punctures in the meat of his palm. An orange flyer, xeroxed bubble letters, a clip art rainbow in black ink.

ELDER CARE NEEDED

Professional nurse needed to care for Awesome being!!!

Looking for a job that will enrich your soul AND your bank account?

Need to transcend your current life?

This might be the job for you!

Must be able to bathe and feed.

Call Steve for details.

Steve! He remembered him. Thomas Pink shirt all buttoned up. Horn rimmed glasses and a patchy goatee. Square but harmless looking Steve.

Darrell had needed a gig. He was almost out of the pills that he’d lifted from his last few clients. Honestly, he was almost out of clients. Not from lack of care—he wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea about him. He’d been to nursing school; he just hadn’t finished. But he took good care of the grandmothers and grandfathers who found themselves in his company, and he probably gave more attention to them than they’d get at a nursing home. That’s certainly what he told his friends whenever the subject came up. And the families loved him. He never called them for anything. And his prices were reasonable because he wasn’t there for the money. The scam was good for everyone involved. Except for the high turnover rate. His marks kept dying on him.

The orange flyer tucked under his windshield wiper had felt like a neon sign. For a good time, call Steve. And it turned out Steve needed him. Steve was desperate. Didn’t even want to do the phone interview and the criminal background check that somehow, someway, Darrell always passed. Steve needed someone right now. “Why don’t you meet me at the coffee shop on Main. We can talk over the details. If it’s a good fit, you can start today.”

So, they’d met, and they’d spent about half an hour talking. And if there was maybe a feeling that something was off about Steve? If he’d been talking too fast, or too loud, or just been sweating too much? Darrell ignored it. Because he could feel the pull of a new medicine cabinet like the subtle pulsing of his own blood, and he’d been rationing supplies for days.

“Come back to my place and the two of you can meet. We’re just out of town, close to the beach.” And that was nice. Wasn’t it? Working near the beach? A few hours listening to some nice old lady talk about the past and then he’d be lying on the sand, pockets full of treasure.

Being led to the basement steps should maybe have been a tip-off that something was wrong. First, who has beach front property with a basement? And more importantly, who keeps their grandma in a cellar? Exactly the kind of middle-aged white man you should not go into a basement with, was the thought Darrell was having now. Now that it was too late to be helpful. Now that he was knocked out in some kind of… cave? Dungeon? God. Had he been kidnapped? He couldn’t remember anything after walking through that door in Steve’s worn down but tidy yellow kitchen. There had been steps, maybe. A fall? A fall would explain the blood on his knees. The scrapes he could feel along his belly. Maybe.

The klaxon bell in the back of his brain was getting progressively louder. Wherever he was, he had to get out. He stood on shaky legs. Assessed his surroundings. A large natural cavern, tunnels leading out in five directions, like the points of a star. There was a dim light coming from strands of old Christmas lights daisy chained one into another, running off into the distance in every direction. They were all plugged into a knot of orange extension cords stretching up over his head towards… he tried to focus his eyes, and there, about fifteen feet over his head, the bottom rung of a pull-down ladder.

He tried jumping for it, but it was far out of reach. He looked at the extension cords, dangling down like vines. If he’d been thinking he wouldn’t have done it, but he grabbed a fistful and heaved himself up like he was Indiana Jones. They came unplugged somewhere above him, and he hit the ground. Still trapped, now in the dark.

This was worse. He’d made this much worse. Darrell felt his breath pick up. His body trying to hyperventilate. He closed his eyes and attempted to adjust to the kind of darkness that only things that live under the earth experience. When he was a kid, his mother had taken him on a camping trip, and they’d gone on a cave tour. He remembered seeing the insects and lizards that had evolved in the dark. No pigment in their skin so that you could see all their tiny little organs. All the throbbing, pulsating processes that make life go. Things that are kept hidden in the daylight.

Not one of those creatures had grown eyes. That’s what had gotten to him as a kid. What had given him nightmares for weeks. Waking up in his Bugs Bunny sheets, drenched in sweat, clawing at his own little boy face. You don’t need eyes when you live in the dark. He was going to throw up. He was going to die here.

“Darrell?”

He sat up, turned his head towards where he thought the call had come from.

“Darrell? Are you awake?”

He could see it now, the tunnel over his left shoulder was just visible, the barest tint of blue compared to the rest of that oppressive black. “Fuck, It’s dark down here. Where are you, Darrell?”

“I’m here,” he croaked. His throat was raw like he’d been crying. Or screaming. And suddenly there he was. Steve. Pale face and checkered shirt practically glowing in the bounce from a small pen light.

Steve passed him and inspected the trailing ends of the extension cords now limp on the ground. He sighed before turning back to him, hands on his hips. “Well, I wish you hadn’t done that. You have no idea how long it took me to run them all in the first place. Water?”

He pulled a little plastic water bottle from his pocket, holding it out like a gift. He was smiling. Darrell thought he probably ought to try and overpower him. Take the light. Force his way out. Maybe in a minute though. When he was steadier. He held his hand out for the water bottle. Drank it down. “Where the hell am I? What do you want with me?”

“What do I want with you?” Steve smiled, polite and puzzled. “I want you to do your job. Don’t you remember?” he gestured vaguely towards the tunnel he’d just come from. “Oh. You don’t remember. That’s alright. Happens to a lot of people the first time. Don’t worry about it. The first time you can’t remember. The second time you can’t forget.”

“Forget what?”

“Follow me,” Steve turned and started walking back down the way he’d come.

“I’m not following you anywhere,” Darrell spat bravely while peeling the label off of his water bottle. Steve turned back; his face lit by the pen light.

“Do you know how to get out of here on your own?” He kept walking. And all the light in the world went with him. Darrell followed. He had no sense of how far they walked. He knew that they were going deeper, there was more water on the ground here. Cold as it seeped into his shoes. It was, oddly, less dark the farther into the tunnels they travelled. The walls felt like they were glowing, a dull blue luminescence. Lichen, maybe? It would have been pretty if he weren’t so terrified.

He tried hard to focus on the sound of Steve’s footsteps ahead of him. The bouncing of his light. It helped him to ignore the impression that the earth was breathing. In and out. Heavy and close. The tunnel pulsed with a heartbeat that felt like it was shaking the ground under his feet. Probably just the sea. The tides, he thought to himself. The smell of rot grew stronger.

Steve paused at a bend in the tunnel, held his arm out, inviting. “Just around the corner. Try to be a little more polite this time.” Darrell had stopped moving. He looked down at his feet. Frozen in place.

“There are claw marks. On the ground,” he whispered.

“Oh, don’t worry about it. Most of those are yours.” Steve reached over, gently lifting Darrell’s bloodied hand. “See?” He gave it a reassuring pat, then tried to pull him forward.

Darrell did not feel reassured. He felt petrified. He could hear something moving around the corner. “Let me go. Please. Just let me go home.”

“Come on man, you already said you’d take the job. And I have plans tonight.”

“I can’t. I can’t go back in there. Please. Please. I’m begging you. I’ll straighten up. I’ll do anything you want. Let me go.” Darrell didn’t see Steve pull out the gun. But he felt it when the cold barrel pressed against his temple. He held his breath, ready for threats, for violence.

Steve’s voice was soft and sweet. “It’s the shock the first time. That’s what has you stuck. Your mind wasn’t big enough to hold her. The second time, you’re prepared. You’ll open up, let her in. You’ll realize how beautiful, how expansive the universe is. How honored we are to have been chosen. You’ll understand. This is a gift. And you’ll have purpose. Real purpose.” The tone was at odds with the insistent nudging of the gun and the fanatical gleam of Steve’s eyes behind his glasses.

Darrel stepped forward. He was weeping. His eyes were shut so tightly. Steve took his hand again. Guiding him blindly around the corner. The air was thick and foul. Steve breathed deep, let out a pleased little mewl. Darrel gagged on it.

“Open your eyes,” Steve implored, with a delicate press of the muzzle.

Darrel shook his head. There was something touching him. Wrapping around his leg.

“Open your eyes, Darrel. Don’t you want to meet her?” The thing wrapped around his ankle was making its way under the hem of his pants. Cold and slimy and he didn’t want to see it but he had to know what it was and his eyes opened just enough, just enough to see the tentacle gripping his calf.

The rest of it was just outside of his field of vision, but he could feel it. The size of it. The many eyes watching him. The press of it against his body and his mind and make it stop. God, make it stop. Was he in hell? Was this hell? He had to get away. He had to run.

Steve was talking to him, “I can’t pronounce her name. It’s beyond me. But I call her Mills. Or Millie. Short for Millenia. Do you think you can start tonight?” Darrel felt warm wet running down the inside of his thigh. He thought he’d be screaming if he could make a sound.

Steve was petting it. Or maybe it was petting Steve? Another tentacle moved towards his face, exploring. He hit the ground hard when he passed out again. A small mercy.

“Damn,” said Steve watching as, even unconscious, Darrel’s body tried to claw its way out of the chamber, the jagged nail of an index finger left in one of the furrows he’d dug out only hours before. “Second time tonight. Looks like I’m cancelling my date, huh Mills?” A wet growl vibrated the walls around him.

“No, I think he’ll be fine. Third time’s the charm.”

End.

M. Kelleher is a speculative fiction writer and theater artist currently living in New Orleans, LA. With fifteen years of experience as a Stage Manager and Lighting Designer in New York and New Orleans, she is new to publication. And is excited to be making her debut in Cosmic Horror Monthly.

The Theater of Infinite Delight

By J. Weintraub

Only one couple is in front of us by the time we reach the ticket booth of the newly opened Red River Canyon Mystery Tour, quite a contrast from the anxious crowd that had been blocking our way just beyond the head of the Escarpment Trail on the other side of the park. So, despite the lateness of the afternoon and our growing impatience, we decide to climb the steps and purchase tickets for the Tour.

* * *

Twenty years before, shortly after we were married, my wife Diane and I were the only ones to hike along that narrow Escarpment Trail winding across the stony face of the mountainous bluff overlooking the gorge below. Through the arches and channels grooved into the granite and sandstone over many millennia by wind and the river now out of sight on the canyon floor, the trail eventually led us to a wide grassy plateau, which soon sloped down to the rippling waters of one of the Red River’s many tributaries. Its banks were lined with birches and willows, and under one of those willows, between sips of Bordeaux, we spent the rest of the afternoon nibbling on bread and assorted cheeses as beams from the lowering sun filtered through the pendulous leaves to shimmer against the surface of the stream flowing beneath us.

But this time, we had brought neither bread nor wine, and although we knew there had been considerable development in the area since our last visit, we had hoped to hike the path in some degree of isolation, if only to recover a hint of that beauty and tranquility we had experienced two decades before.

But it was not to be. From the moment we were on the trailhead, we were accompanied by a pair of couples and a family of four, and just before we reached the first panoramic overhang, our progress was blocked by a wall of shifting bodies.

“Bikers ahead!” someone upfront explained.

“What’s that?” commented a woman next to me who did not consider that to be an explanation.

“They’re partying at the first overlook,” came the reply, “and hardly anyone’s getting through.” I recalled the perilous footing of the path crossing the scenic overview and also that a convention of motorcycle clubs was convening that weekend in a small town just over the state line, and we all watched as a volley of beer cans were launched overhead, arching into the air where, as the sun gleamed off of them, they seemed to hang suspended for a moment, before plunging into the chasm below.

“I hope those cans are empty,” commented the women next to me. “Someone down there could get hurt.”

“Don’t worry, no one’s allowed on the canyon floor,” I said, recalling that hiking by the river was strictly prohibited due to, as we had once been informed by a park warden, the multiple threats of mud slides, flash floods, poisonous snakes, and a variety of other natural dangers.

“Not anymore,” said her companion. “It’s open now, and just teeming with folks.”

“Let’s get out of here,” said Diane, pulling me away from the crowd. “Something should be done about all these superfluous people.” A callous remark from a woman who was usually a caring person, but it was not unexpected. Diane had been a long-time member of the Sierra Club and had recently joined SGW! (Stop Global Warning!). She was not unsympathetic to the plights of others, but she was also concerned about massive overconsumption and uncontrolled population growth, and, in fact, she had recently called off a proposed Italian vacation for fear of being overwhelmed by the tourists in Florence, the Vatican, and Piazza San Marco.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I was suffocating back there,” and she hurried me along as if in escape from the presence of others as we descended toward the parking lot. But then I stopped her at that gate that had once prevented all entry down to the valley floor.

“Look,” I said. It had swung open.

“What?”

“Don’t you remember? There were chains last time we were here. Locked up tight. And there was a sign, something like ‘Hazardous Passage. Access Forbidden.’”

The sign linked to the iron piping now advised only, “Proceed at Your Own Risk.”

A couple crossed in front of us and through the gate. Both were about half our age, blonde and smiling, their cheeks pink and pudgy. I noticed the man’s shirt hanging loose and flapping over his chino shorts, I could see his belly rolling over his belt. He was wearing sandals, and her feet were bare. I recalled that the park warden from before had also warning us about the thorny brambles often closing in on the various trails, the shifting and unstable rocks beside the river and streams, the stinging insects.

“You sure you want to go down there,” I called out after them as the gate swung back. “They say it can be treacherous.”

“Don’t worry about us,” he said over his shoulder. “We’ve got a GPS and plenty of water,” and he raised a plastic bottle from a pouch looped across his stomach.

“We’re seasoned hikers,” she added as they began their descent. To them, I’m sure, the swinging gate was the opening to an adventurous experience, but to me it seemed more like a jaw clamping shut.

“Good luck,” I said, almost beneath my breath as Diane pulled me along as if she feared I was tempted to join them.

“Do you still want to go to that funhouse?” she asked as we arrived at the parking lot, and she gestured over toward the mesa that seemed to sprout directly from the prairie on the opposite side.

“Why not? We’ve come this far, and if it’s not too crowded, we should at least give it a look.”

“Ok,” and shrugging her shoulders, she followed as we worked our way through the sea of cars.

From a distance the structure could barely be distinguished among the rocky outcroppings on the steep ridge of the mesa facing us. But as we approached, the details became more distinct. A pair of wide Doric columns was topped by a pediment extending between them, all carved into the stone in high relief to give the appearance of an archaic portico, the entrance to a temple or tomb recently unearthed from some ancient civilization. Behind it, in the shadow of the excavation, a dual series of columns, also etched from the wall, seemed to lead deep into the mountain.

“The Red River Canyon Mystery Tour” was chiseled in block letters into the shelf just above the pediment, and within that empty space itself—something that no ancient could ever have imagined—was the inscription, streaming in intermittent, multicolored, fluorescent bursts, “Enthralling! Entrancing! Captivating!”

The ticket booth was freestanding, like a miniature baptistry, set just inside the portico as if as an afterthought. It was clearly fabricated out of concrete plastered over with a stucco to simulate red sandstone, and I wondered, for a moment, if the entire mesa were an artificial construct, although it seemed natural enough even at close quarters. “Let’s buy a ticker,” I said. “There’s only one couple ahead of us, and if it’s crowded inside or if it doesn’t look interesting, we can always leave.” Diane reluctantly agreed and we climbed the graven steps together.

* * *

As we walk past the rows of columns, also incised out of the rock, I have the impression that we are entering a massive cavern, and I expect to see stalagmites and crystal formations projecting downward when we pass through the doors. But once inside, I feel, rather, that we are in a huge mine shaft, one illuminated by dim beams of light projecting from floor and ceiling, forming thick shadows everywhere that make it difficult to determine the height and depth of the space.

To the right, their faces barely discernible in the dimness, men, women, and children wait in a line that seems to plunge endlessly into the depths of this central gallery. A small swinging gate and an attendant wearing overalls and a miner’s helmet blocks their entry into the tunnel behind him. An arrow painted next to him with the message “Plan of Visit” points inside, and curving over the tunnel are the words “Theater of Infinite Delight.”

Two lights flicker from the inside, and the man lowers the arm he had been extending to hold back the group at the head of the line.

“Ok, you’re next,” he says, taking their tickets, and after allowing them to pass through, he proceeds a step or two behind the group into the tunnel, switches the headlamp on his helmet on and off, and then returns back to the front of the line. “Next tour of five, or six if you’re together. Children must be accompanied by adults,” and as he silently counts heads to confirm the number, I approach. “Excuse me,” I ask, “how long . . .”

“Not long,” he replies, cutting me off with the courteous impatience of someone who has been asked the same question too many times during the day. “We’re speeding things up. We’ll be closing before too long,” and after telling the next group to, “Have your tickets ready, please,” he looks back toward the tunnel to await the next flicker of lights.

I rejoin Diane. “He said . . .”

“I heard him. No.”

“Come on, Diane. Only a couple of minutes to to see how it goes. In the meantime, we can look around for a bit. . .” and then I nod toward a corridor just to the other side of the main entrance that probably serves for the coat check and the restrooms. “Over there, down that hallway, for instance, there’s probably even a café. . . .”

“And what’s that?” she asks, indicating another tunnel directly across from us, with a similar gate at its front but without signage or an attendant. “I’ll bet that’s the exit,” she continues, “where the tour ends. Let’s take a look inside to see if it’ll be worth a wait.” I nod and smile, recognizing that the suggestion comes from a woman who cannot pick up a mystery or detective novel without reading the final chapter first.

The gate swings open, unlocked. Once we are inside, the passage shifts very slightly to the left, and before long our view of the opening behind is obscured. As we move forward the shadows become even thicker, making it progressively more difficult to take in much around us, but, on the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be anything worth seeing among the dark display cases, one right after the other in an almost numberless sequence, and, as we progress further along, the empty platforms where spectacles or shows of some kind could be staged.

“Maybe it all lights up and things happen when a tour passes through?” Diane suggests, but before I can reply, I stumble over an obstacle of some sort and, failing to keep my balance in the open space, fall to my hands and knees.

“What was that?” I ask.

“Rails,” she says as she approaches to help me up.

“I guess a ride of some sort?” and I wipe my hands on my jacket as I get to my feet.

“Look, it’s only going to get darker, and we’re probably in the middle of something under construction. Besides, we don’t belong here, so let’s go back and go home.”

“I’m beginning to think you’re right,” but then I almost lose my balance again as the ground seems to shift beneath us.

“What’s that?” I wonder aloud, and the thought of being trapped inside something like a collapsing mineshaft during an earthquake enters our minds simultaneously.

“Yeah, let’s get out of here.” But before we can take another step, the ground again groans and wavers, and just as we are thrown against the stony surface at our backs, we stare in amazement as across from us, amid an additional creaking and rumbling, a narrow sliver of illumination appears from ceiling to floor, widening to become a stream of blinding light as a portion of the opposite wall swings open like a revolving door. As it continues onward, to crash backward against the opposite wall, a man and a small girl stagger out from the depths of the brightness, and when the panel swings back hard on rebound, the pair of them stumble hastily forward into the passageway to avoid being struck by it. It slams shut, and we are again left in semidarkness.

“Could this be part of the tour?” Diane, drawing nearer to me, asks.

The man apparently hears her, and turning abruptly, his eyes blinking as if trying to adjust to the change in light, he crosses over to me to clutch at my jacket. The girl, as if afraid to be left by herself, follows and clings just as tightly to his trousers,

“I don’t think so,” I say in reply to my wife as I stare directly into the man’s desperate eyes, and then before I can demand an explanation from him, he blurts out, “How long have you been here? Inside, I mean?”

I push him softly away to keep his sour breath at arm’s length. His cheeks are dark, as if he is intending to grow a beard, and his hair is as disheveled as his shirt and trousers. I am tempted to ask him, among other things, why he wants to know, but that same wild look in his eyes impels me to give him a straight answer. “We just got here,” I say. “Practically, anyway. We wanted to join a tour group, but then. . . . In any case, we’re thinking about. . . .”

He draws uncomfortably close to me again. “You’ll take us there? You’ll show us where you came in!”

This sounds to me more like a command than a request, and I am reluctant to give him the satisfaction of immediate compliance. “Well. I don’t know about that. Like I said, my wife and I just got here. We bought tickets, and, frankly they weren’t cheap. . . .”

“I’ll make it worth your while,” and after withdrawing his wallet from his pocket, he stuffs a twenty-dollar bill into my hand.

“Look, that’s not really necessary,” and I offer him his money back. “Actually, we were heading back in that direction anyway. We don’t need . . .”

“Keep it. Just show us where you came in.” The little girl begins to tug more forcefully at the man’s trousers. “Daddy, I’ve got to pee again.”

“And hurry,” he says, but before I can reply, he places his hand on my shoulder, and in a far gentler voice, he adds, “Please.”

I nod, and after I take Diane’s arm, we begin to retrace our steps, the father and daughter a short distance behind. Although the darkness does not seem to diminish as we proceed forward, perhaps my eyes have become more accustomed to the absence of light as I notice for the first time several deep crevices in the wall, almost the size of additional passageways themselves. The empty display cases seem more distinct, but there also seem to be less of them than there were before, and eventually they disappear completely.

“Shouldn’t we be there by now?” Diane asks after a few more long minutes, and the man, apparently having overheard her, catches up with us. “What’s that you said?” he asks.

I don’t say anything as we stop, confronted by what appears to be a slight fork in the passage. A narrow shaft to the left seems to descend slightly into an even deeper pool of darkness, and to our right, a diffuse illumination beckons to us from some distance away. Naturally, without a word, I choose the path to the right, and I certainly breathe more easily when it leads us to the gate.

Hurrying forward, I push through it to step into the wide, central gallery. “And here we are,” I say decisively.

“I don’t know,” says Diane as she joins me. “Something doesn’t seem quite right.”

“Of course not, it’s empty,” I reply, having realized that the line that had extended down from the entrance of the theater across from us, along with the attendant, had vanished. “I guess he wasn’t kidding about moving things along. It looks like they’ve all begun the tour, just like he promised. I wonder if there’s still time for another one.”

But the father, now also at my side, clearly has no interest in joining a tour, and he is again pulling at my jacket. “The entrance? Where you came in?”

“Right over there,” I say, and with a sudden burst of energy, he launches himself towards the series of doors a few yards to my right, crashing against the first one. It does not budge.

“You’ve got to pull, not push,” I call out, recalling that they opened to the inside. “I’m sure of that.”

But when he tugs violently at the handle, the door still does not move. Trying the other three in turn, he pulls hard at each handle, and then, at the final one, he again bangs his shoulder several times against the door until the wall itself trembles. Finally, still clutching the handle, with his weight leaning against the door, he slides gradually downward to his knees.

His daughter, who has remained behind with us, gazing at his futile efforts in horror, runs up to him, and grabbing at his shirt, she cries out, “Daddy, I’ve got to pee! Now!”

Diane follows her, and with the stricken look on her face of someone who desperately wants to help but doesn’t quite know how, she lays her hand gently on the girl’s head. “Listen, honey, when we first came in here we thought there might be a cloakroom and a restroom, down that corridor over there,” and before she can offer to accompany her, the little girl swivels around and, running, disappears into the hallway not far from the series of doors.

Instead of going after her as I had expected, Diane nods towards me. “You should come over here and take a look at this,” she says, and when I arrive by her side, she tells me to open a door. I try one of the handles, and it is as unyielding as if the door, rather than being locked or chained, had been soldered to its frame. And then, like the man at my feet had done before, I shove hard against it. The entire wall shivers, and I smile at the curious thought that the doors had been painted or sculpted in place, a trompe-l’oeil work of art, and that only the handles are real.

The man at my feet is now looking down the corridor into which his daughter has vanished, and with a groan he shifts slightly, as if he has finally decided to rise and follow her. But before he can get up, she reappears and runs haltingly toward to us.

“There’s nothing there,” she says. “Just empty walls like everywhere else,” and then as she begins to whimper and also to fall to her knees, her father wraps one arm around her shoulders as she buries her face in his shirt.

“Listen,” says Diane, opening her purse and removing her phone. “It looks like you two could use some help. I’ve got the number of the front office on my phone, and maybe they can send somebody over here with water or first aid or whatever else you need,” but then after punching several numbers into the phone and raising it to her ear, she twists her mouth and shakes her head. “Damn,” she says. “Damn!”

The man, a weak smile on his face, shifts again, and with his other hand withdraws his phone from his pants pocket, offering it to Diane. “You can use my phone,” he says, “that is, if you prefer the silence of a dead battery to raw static.”

“Well,” I tell Diane, “after all, we are inside a mountain. . . .”

She turns her eyes to me, silently, pleadingly, as if there is something I can do to help.

“I think we can probably catch up with the last tour group if we hurry,” I say. “It wasn’t so long ago that the line extended all the way down the wall, and there’s sure to still be some staff inside,” and then I add, addressing the father and his daughter. “We’ll send someone back here to get you some help, or to find a quick way out for you. . . . Unless, of course, you want to come along with us?”

“You mean in there?” he asks, and then reading from the inscription overarching the entryway to the tunnel, “Into the ‘Theater of Eternal Delight’?”

“Wait a minute,” says Diane, “Is that . . . ?”

I put my finger to my lips, cautioning her. “Do you want to come with us?”

“No,” he says. “We’ll wait for you to send back some help. We’ll depend on you for that,” and turning his face away from me, he leans his cheek against the top of his child’s head. As we turn from them, huddled on the floor, I notice a brackish puddle gradually seeping around the circumference of their knees.

“Are you completely sure . . .” Diane begins to ask, but probably recognizing our lack of choices, she never completes her question, and taking my arm, she joins me as we step inside the Theater of Eternal Delight.

End.

J. Weintraub’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in many literary journals--such as The Massachusetts Review, The New Criterion, Prairie Schooner, Cream City Review, and The Dark City-- as well as in regional and specialty publications. A member of the Dramatists Guild, he has had dramatic work produced throughout the United States and internationally. As a translator, he has introduced the Italian horror writer, Nicola Lombardi, to the English-speaking world, and his edition of Lombardi’s The Gypsy Spiders and Other Tales of Italian Horror was recently published by UK’s Tartarus Press. (“Lovers of postwar narratives and surrealist horror won’t want to miss this.—Publishers Weekly); in 2018 his annotated translation of Eugène Briffault’s Paris à table: 1846 was published by Oxford University Press.

More at https://jweintraub.weebly.com.

Tyger, Tyger

By Julia August

I
fearful

Wednesday morning, eleven a.m. There’s an abstract depiction of hell splashed across the lobby. Nick looks once, sees immortal souls arrayed in burning torment, looks twice and realises it’s a tapestry, red blurring into yellow blurring into infernal murk. The symmetry is upsetting, like one screaming face flung endlessly between two fragmenting mirrors. “Can I take your coat?” the girl says. “I’ll show you down.”

He follows her down the spiral stairs. The lawyer’s waiting in a glassy boardroom set out with biscuits and grapes and a selection of different teabags. They exchange pleasantries. The safe deposit box sits square and grey and unassuming on the table. Nick moves towards it. “Oh, nice,” he says. He lifts out a gold mesh necklace strung with pearls. “Yes, I’d say Iraqi, quite old stuff... it’s family jewellery, you said?”

He’s not listening to the answer. It’s there. It’s the very first thing he laid eyes on. “Look at this,” he says, lifting out something that might look like a large animal’s incisor if you didn’t know any better. It’s mounted in silver; the chain is missing. The translucent tip is capped with silver too. An electric thrill quivers against Nick’s fingers. “It’s a tiger’s claw. Nineteenth century. They used to keep them as hunting trophies. You can’t sell it, of course. Endangered species.”

The lawyer’s just a bit too interested. Hurriedly Nick fishes out a thin black bracelet wound round with gold wire. “You can sell this, though. It’s elephant hair. In theory you can pluck it while the elephant’s still alive.”

He reaches for a pair of bright gold bangles with key-fastened catches. The hinges still work. He opens them and closes them, first one and then the other, then opens up his pad and makes a few notes. He hopes it looks convincing. He could be writing anything. “Yes, thank you,” he says, when someone offers him tea. He starts laying out the contents of the box across the table. “That would be very kind.”

“So how much do you think it’s worth?” the lawyer says. “All together.”

“Oh, not more than ten thousand. Fifteen at a push. There isn’t anything spectacular here. It’s only the family associations that make it interesting, I’m afraid. Although this might be diamond...” He gets out his loupe to inspect a ring. The lawyer all but holds his breath. Nick’s hand is as steady as his eye. “No,” he says, after a pregnant pause. “It’s zircon and garnet.”

The lawyer breathes again. Nick empties a knot of gold chains from a small red velvet bag and disentangles them with his pen. The girl puts a cup of tea by his elbow and waves the biscuits at him. “No, thanks,” Nick says.

He’s waiting for the lawyer to leave, as he does eventually, leaving the girl to sit by the glass door in profound boredom and peck at her phone. Nick glances around. A shallow chrome cabinet lined with pills dominates the wall in front of him. Light streams in through the two glazed sides of the boardroom that frame the red-eyed cranes peering over Lincoln’s Inn and in the distance the Shard vanishing into the clouds. All around, London’s concrete forests gleam.

Nick shakes his pen. He gets the box out of his satchel, opens it up, pulls out the replacement ink cartridge, swaps out the cartridges, and drops the box into his bag. The girl isn’t looking at all.

He makes notes on the contents of the safe deposit box as fast as possible, mostly without thinking about it. At twelve thirty precisely he leaves. On the way out he texts CU fri night and drops the phone in the nearest bin on his way to the South Bank for lunch.

II
deeps

Two nights ago. He’s in a bar. He’s not quite sober enough to be sure where and not quite drunk enough to leave. Whatever he’s drinking isn’t working. His hand stings where the frying pan spat fat at him earlier and the rest of him stings after talking to the latest divorce lawyer. Seize the moment! Dare to move on! Reach for the skies! Hah. Nick sucks at his burnt fingers. So much for real food. From now on it’s strictly ready meals and takeaway. He hasn’t had to cook in twenty years and he doesn’t aspire to start now.

A woman slides onto the stool beside him. “Can I get you another?”

Nick tips his empty glass from side to side. Fire fills up the monogrammed hollows like candlelight. “No,” he says.

He shifts on his stool, looks around for the barman. Behind the bar the mirror flashes unfamiliar eyes. Nick wants to hurl his glass at it. “Are you sure about that?” says the man on Nick’s other side. “What were you having?”

“Guinness,” Nick says, before he can think better of it. “Cheers.”

He leans on the bar. He’s trying to remember what his divorce lawyer said about the upcoming settlement, specifically how there is still no such thing as a no-fault divorce and Nick has already put himself very much at fault, but at the same time he feels the familiar flutter of wings inside his ribcage. He looks from the man to the woman. She must be his sister: same dark eyes, strong nose and down-curved mouth, same sturdy body, same accent. Her hair is tawnier; his moustache is lusher. Both coats cost far too much to be flung down in here.

A distant unease begins to percolate. “Do I know you?”

The brother grins. “Nick,” he says. “It is Nick, isn’t it? Let me get you that drink and then we’ll talk.”

III
dread

Wednesday night. He’s asleep in the horrible flat near Clapham Junction that’s the only place he can afford these days. It smells of damp and dog hair and whatever downstairs made for dinner. There aren’t any blinds. He locked the cartridge box in the safe with his mother’s engagement ring and drank half a bottle of Co-Op whisky on his way to bed.

The tiger leaps out of the dark in a gush of rotting breath.

The bed judders and protests and Nick wakes up choking under half a tonne of undomesticated Panthera tigris tigris, a hot heartbeat drumming in his face. Beneath him the springs twist in his rented mattress like sprained sinews. He can’t breathe. His face is full of fur and muscle. A mountainous paw presses down on his shoulder, and flexes, and Nick lies very still. The fluorescent froth of the streetlit dark laps over him in unrelenting waves.

The tiger’s eyes blaze lamplike. What do you want, it says. Give me what you want, and the words bounce off Nick’s auditory ossicles and resonate from bone to trembling bone until his whole body shakes. He screws his hands up in his unpleasant polyester duvet cover. It’s all he can move. He’s terrified. He can’t even make his feet twitch.

He wants to shout. Already he sees the tiger opening up its jaws and feels the poisoned teeth crush his skull. It breathes on his face. Its breath burns. Give me what you want, it repeats. It digs its claws into Nick’s chest and he howls without sound and the feathers escaping upwards brush his bloody ribs as the tiger cracks him wide:

His whole stomach is an ache, a black aching hollow that deceives him into thinking it’s only ordinary hunger. He wants something more than he can describe. He wants to break free of the everyday where he goes the same way to the same work and sees the same people and comes back to the same man. It’s like being corralled by invisible walls. He’s trapped in a labyrinth he can’t even see and he can’t feel his way back to the exit because every turn only takes him deeper. There is no art to it. He’s running on preordained tracks like a train. The only way out is through.

Which is how he ended up alone, stuck in a squalid flat above a twenty-four-hour convenience store the cops raid twice a week for selling drugs. He used to be reckless. He used to think he could kick out for freedom and crawl home afterwards, sullied but satiated, until the next time the sense of being boxed in became too much. Now he’s used up all his second chances and he’s angry. He wants – the black ache says he wants – to burn the whole thing down.

The hot weight lessens. Nick lies gutted and gasping. He squeezes his eyes shut and presses his face into his pillows with a groan.

He must have fallen asleep. In the morning, in the shower, he checks gingerly for bruises. He’s brought more back from a night out, especially lately. Only his shoulder shows any signs of having been kneaded by a massive cat.

He feels lightheaded. His stomach spasms. All day he has to force himself to eat.

IV
chain

It takes Nick several pints to grasp why all this Guinness is being poured into him. He counts the hairs in the brother’s luxurious black moustache and in his head he’s taking someone’s clothes off, possibly his own. His brain’s a furnace. The condensed outline of his clasp blooms and gradually dissipates on each fresh glass.

There’s a dead aunt and an inheritance and a foundation. Somewhere there’s a safe deposit box. There’s an excruciatingly expensive law firm. Nick shares his opinion of lawyers. The brother agrees heartily: terrors, one and all. Nick presses his glass to his forehead and revels in how cool it feels. In the morning his hangover’s going to use his head as an anvil. He should cut back. He should stop picking up strangers in bars. That’s what Thabo said before he threw Nick out.

“So you’ll help us?” says the sister. “When you go to value what’s in the box this week?”

“What?”

She starts talking about the foundation again. Nick doesn’t care about the foundation, or how the dead aunt left her millions and her thriving business and everything else she owned to it, or the truly sentimental value of the family jewellery in the box. He’s a bit unnerved, when he thinks about it, about how this pair identified him and tracked him down to this grotty bar, but he’s drunk enough by now not to think about it too much.

The brother leans on the bar. He’s rolled up his sleeves and his muscular brown forearms bring Michelangelo vividly to mind. “The thing is, Nick,” he says. “Everything in that box, my aunt’s lawyers are going to sell it for the foundation. Those are my grandmother’s necklaces in there. They weren’t my aunt’s to give away. They belonged to our family. I dread to think what my mother would have said.”

Nick tips his glass up. “You should talk to these lawyers. Might be sympathetic.”

“That’s not likely. You know lawyers. You’re our last hope.”

His voice is so rich it takes several minutes for the words to sink in. Nick unfocuses, confused. Already he feels the hammer taking aim at his temples. It’s going to be deadly. He might have to call in sick again. “What?”

“There’s one thing in there no one will miss. It’s very small. It’s worthless. They’ll probably have to destroy it anyway, but it means a lot to us. You could get that back, couldn’t you? Just for us, Nick?”

Nick blinks. Everything is swaying. “You want me to steal something for you?”

“It should never have been in that box,” the sister says sharply. “It’s not stealing if it’s ours anyway.”

“Yeah, but...”

“Nick, Nick,” says the brother, “Nick... let me get you another drink. Then we’ll talk money.”

V
work

Thursday night. Nick drinks the rest of the Co-Op whisky and waters the last tenant’s spider plant and sits up in the flat’s IKEA armchair until the wrong side of midnight’s come and gone. Sometimes he paces. He’s thinking about opening up the safe, and then he’s thinking about throwing the cartridge box down off Battersea Bridge, and then he’s thinking about paying off a couple of his most pressing credit card bills, although he didn’t really do it for the money. It wasn’t the Guinness or the brother’s moustache, either. It was one more kick at the rotten remnants of Nick’s life. He doesn’t know how he feels about that now. Mostly he feels numb and hollow and more than a little confused.

He closes his eyes, and opens them, and there it is: the tiger, lying like a monstrous housecat in Nick’s tiny sitting room, twitching its tail over its massive paws. The overhead spotlights fleck white around its eyes and dripping jaw. Nick grips his armchair until his hands cramp. He might be dreaming. He should be dreaming. Transfixed, he meets the tiger’s headlamp glare full on.

It yawns. Its teeth are yellow spears. Nick says, strained, “You again?”

It’s eyeing up his throat. He feels as tender as a newborn lamb. Maybe he’s hallucinating. Maybe Thabo’s right and delirium tremens is just around the corner. Maybe he shouldn’t have drunk all that whisky. He knows he shouldn’t have got involved in this to start with. If anyone finds out... if the lawyers for the aunt’s foundation ever realise what Nick took, his divorce will abruptly become the least of his problems.

He was mad to agree. He’s been mad for months. Maybe it’s the baneful influence of the frenzied stars, except they’re not stars, those scarlet pinpricks glittering through the unblinded glass, but lights strung up to ward the helicopters away from the building site across the street. The cranes crawl into heaven like Jacob’s ladder. Tonight they have an acid glare.

Nick tears his eyes away. Maybe this is what the tiger’s come for. Maybe it’s come to tell him to stop drinking and screwing up and proving Thabo should have listened to his mother. Maybe it’s here to teach Nick a lesson.

The tiger heaves itself up off the hairy carpet and digs its claws into the arms of Nick’s IKEA chair. Madly he tries to count how many claws there are. Fur brushes Nick’s white knuckles. He flinches. Deep in his bones, the tiger rumbles, What do you fear?

“What?”

It swipes at him. The claws catch Nick’s jaw and drive him sideways, exploding pain across half his face. His skull splits open. He opens his mouth to yell:

That this is it. That he’s going to be stuck in this horrible flat on this horrible street forever. That he tore up his life and kicked down every door he could and it was all for nothing, because he will never find the way out. All he found was the centre of the maze. And now here he is, alone and angry and trapped more thoroughly than ever. He should have settled for what he had. At least that box was comfortable.

He’s dazed. He knows there’s blood running down his face, though he can’t see any of it on his hands or shirt cuffs. It might just be his heartbeat pounding in his ears, but he thinks he hears the tiger pad away.

VI
symmetry

Friday night. Nick hurries out of Waterloo and checks twice over his shoulder before ducking into the graffiti tunnel leading to the Vaults. Acetone lingers in the air. Two youths are spraying neon letters over a striped feline frame; they glance incuriously as Nick passes. He sees the tiger’s eye vanish with a shudder. It wasn’t there. He imagined it. And he’s early: he should have time for a drink.

Drinks in the Vaults come in plastic cups and the floor is sticky. Even these days it’s not Nick’s natural environment. Last time he came for something orgiastic with Thabo and the walls were bright with tulips. Today it’s done up for some science fiction festival, all flattened baubles and floating metallic nets, and a spatter of greyish white stains the high arched ceiling. It could be the night sky or mould or it could be a giant alien jerked off across it. The suspended cage with the cocktail bar isn’t open yet. Nick makes do.

He didn’t sleep and he’s been on fire all day. The tiger’s claw is burning a hole in his pocket. He can’t wait to get rid of it. When he inched it out of the cartridge box he saw several black seams had developed in the keratin; he sellotaped it into a tissue cocoon and decided not to think about it. The thing was only in Nick’s safe for two days. It couldn’t possibly have been affected by Nick’s rising damp so fast after all those years in the aunt’s defiantly non-temperature-controlled deposit box.

A hollow voice calls to a non-existent audience over the PA system. Nick empties his plastic cup and staggers away from the bar. He has an uncertain feeling he used to be steadier on his feet. He straightens his tie. He doesn’t want to give anyone the wrong impression.

But it’s only the woman waiting around the corner for him. “Oh,” Nick says blankly. He leans against the vivid arches and looks around. A train thunders overhead; the wall shakes beneath his shoulder. “Isn’t your brother coming?”

“No. Have you got it?”

Nick feels in his pockets. “Did you transfer the money? Let me check that first.”

The app takes forever to load. The internet is terrible down here. Nick almost gives up, because he wants to get rid of the claw more than he wants the money, but he planned this out in advance and if he deviates now he’ll lose it totally. Already he feels his grip on reality slipping. The sister clutches her huge black bag and glares at Nick until he says, “All right then,” and puts his phone away. “Pleasure doing business with you. Here you are.”

He drops the claw into the sister’s plump hand. He wants to back away, but it might look like he was fearful. He waits for her to dig through the tissue layers. “Are we done?”

She holds the claw up to what little light there is. Nick never wielded his loupe so fiercely. “What happened to it?” she says. She sounds outraged. “What did you do?”

The tiger came to me in my sleep. I gave it all I had left. “Nothing!”

“Then what is this? It wasn’t like this before! You’ve damaged it!”

“No, I haven’t! Don’t shout at me, madam. It’s not my fault.”

“If you knew,” she said, “if you had the slightest idea... Did it speak to you? Did you listen?”

“What?”

“Did you feed it? Is that what happened?”

“Nothing you’re saying makes any sense,” Nick says, while the heat surges and subsides in the long hollows of his cheeks. “I gave you what you wanted. I think we’re done now. Goodnight!”

He shoves past her. He’s going to stride off in disgust, except the dangling tag of her bag catches his cufflinks and then something else catches the soft inside of his wrist. He swears and sucks his skin. The sister’s eyes are wide with horror. “That shouldn’t have happened,” she says in a low voice. “That really shouldn’t have happened. Of all the stupid things—”

Blood blossoms on Nick’s sleeve and salts his teeth. His head is lightening. “I should sue you for that. That’s assault.”

The sister rubs frantically at the claw. “What have you done?”

Nick sags against the graffitied wall. The dark develops crimson depths. He peers at his hands. For a moment there he thought he might have paws.

He can’t account for everything he’s feeling. He feels a tremor, and a rush, and an all-encompassing tidal roar of something like rage and something closer to liberation. It howls up through his central nervous system and seizes control of every sense and thought and trembling limb, and if he could do anything at all he’d tug his cheeks to check for fur. It’s filling up his skin. He feels bloated. Unfamiliar urges flash through his head, accompanied by emotions that were never his. The one thing he recognises is the ache he gave the tiger. Everything else is stolen. Everything else is a bright piece of someone else’s life.

His teeth are lengthening. “No,” he hears the sister say, “no, don’t–” but then the howl in his ears cuts off her mounting alarm. He’s moving. He’s shaking and pounding and tearing, over and over, until the wall runs red. He can’t remember anything except how hungry he is. When he last prowled the mangrove swamps, he battered boats from stem to stern and laughed at all the backwards-facing masks worn to confuse him. Dakshin Rai, the fishermen would pray, from the tiger save us, Dakshin Rai, and he would snap their necks between his jaws and gulp down salt blood instead of salt water. O save us, Dakshin Rai! And then the men and the beaters and the guns had come, inshallah, and cornered him and locked him away in a box in the hungry dark. Now at long last the box has broken open. Finally, he’s free.

The perfect clarity of that thought recalls Nick to himself for one crystalline moment. His chest heaves. He’s dripping. Inside him, the immortal tiger-shaped thing rubs against his bones and starves under his mottled skin.

The brother. His face occurs to Nick and the tiger simultaneously. I want him, Nick says.

The tiger agrees. Together, they set off into the concrete forest.

End.

Julia August’s work has appeared in F&SF, Fantasy Magazine, The Dark, Unlikely Story’s The Journal of Unlikely Academia, the anthology Places We Fear To Tread and elsewhere. She is @JAugust7 on Twitter, j-august on Tumblr and j_august7 on Instagram. Find out more at juliaaugust.com.

The Willows

By Algernon Blackwood

1

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sumpfe, meaning marshes.

In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain is moving and alive. For the wind sends waves rising and falling over the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water, green swells like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then silvery white as their underside turns to the sun.

Happy to slip beyond the control of the stern banks, the Danube here wanders about at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting the islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-clumps; and forming new islands innumerably which shift daily in size and shape and possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates their very existence.

Properly speaking, this fascinating part of the river’s life begins soon after leaving Pressburg, and we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent and frying-pan on board, reached it on the crest of a rising flood about mid-July. That very same morning, when the sky was reddening before sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of Thelsen on a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly from the left and the frontier is crossed between Austria and Hungary.

Racing along at twelve kilometers an hour soon took us well into Hungary, and the muddy waters—sure sign of flood—sent us aground on many a shingle-bed, and twisted us like a cork in many a sudden belching whirlpool before the towers of Pressburg (Hungarian, Poszony) showed against the sky; and then the canoe, leaping like a spirited horse, flew at top speed under the grey walls, negotiated safely the sunken chain of the Fliegende Brucke ferry, turned the corner sharply to the left, and plunged on yellow foam into the wilderness of islands, sandbanks, and swamp-land beyond—the land of the willows. The change came suddenly, as when a series of bioscope pictures snaps down on the streets of a town and shifts without warning into the scenery of lake and forest. We entered the land of desolation on wings, and in less than half an hour there was neither boat nor fishing-hut nor red roof, nor any single sign of human habitation and civilization within sight. The sense of remoteness from the world of humankind, the utter isolation, the fascination of this singular world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly laid its spell upon us both, so that we allowed laughingly to one another that we ought by rights to have held some special kind of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic—a kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them.

Though still early in the afternoon, the ceaseless buffetings of a most tempestuous wind made us feel weary, and we at once began casting about for a suitable camping-ground for the night. But the bewildering character of the islands made landing difficult; the swirling flood carried us in shore and then swept us out again; the willow branches tore our hands as we seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled many a yard of sandy bank into the water before at length we shot with a great sideways blow from the wind into a backwater and managed to beach the bows in a cloud of spray. Then we lay panting and laughing after our exertions on the hot yellow sand, sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun, a cloudless blue sky above, and an immense army of dancing, shouting willow bushes, closing in from all sides, shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands as though to applaud the success of our efforts.

“What a river!” I said to my companion, thinking of all the way we had traveled from the source in the Black Forest, and how he had often been obliged to wade and push in the upper shallows at the beginning of June.

“Won’t stand much nonsense now, will it?” he said, pulling the canoe a little farther into safety up the sand, and then composing himself for a nap.

I lay by his side, happy and peaceful in the bath of the elements—water, wind, sand, and the great fire of the sun—thinking of the long journey that lay behind us, and of the great stretch before us to the Black Sea, and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming traveling companion as my friend, the Swede.

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to play the great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved, unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the grown of some living creature.

Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told us so much of its secret life? At night we heard it singing to the moon as we lay in our tent, uttering that odd sibilant note peculiar to itself and said to be caused by the rapid tearing of the pebbles along its bed, so great is its hurrying speed. We knew, too, the voice of its gurgling whirlpools, suddenly bubbling up on a surface previously quite calm; the roar of its shallows and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering below all mere surface sounds; and that ceaseless tearing of its icy waters at the banks. How it stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its face! And how its laughter roared out when the wind blew up-stream and tried to stop its growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and foamings, its unnecessary splashing against the bridges; that self-conscious chatter when there were hills to look on; the affected dignity of its speech when it passed through the little towns, far too important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings when the sun caught it fairly in some slow curve and poured down upon it till the steam rose.

It was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the great world knew it. There were places in the upper reaches among the Swabian forests, when yet the first whispers of its destiny had not reached it, where it elected to disappear through holes in the ground, to appear again on the other side of the porous limestone hills and start a new river with another name; leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we had to climb out and wade and push the canoe through miles of shallows.

And a chief pleasure, in those early days of its irresponsible youth, was to lie low, like Brer Fox, just before the little turbulent tributaries came to join it from the Alps, and to refuse to acknowledge them when in, but to run for miles side by side, the dividing line well marked, the very levels different, the Danube utterly declining to recognize the newcomer.

Below Passau, however, it gave up this particular trick, for there the Inn comes in with a thundering power impossible to ignore, and so pushes and incommodes the parent river that there is hardly room for them in the long twisting gorge that follows, and the Danube is shoved this way and that against the cliffs, and forced to hurry itself with great waves and much dashing to and fro in order to get through in time. And during the fight our canoe slipped down from its shoulder to its breast, and had the time of its life among the struggling waves. But the Inn taught the old river a lesson, and after Passau it no longer pretended to ignore new arrivals.

This was many days back, of course, and since then we had come to know other aspects of the great creature, and across the Bavarian wheat plain of Straubing she wandered so slowly under the blazing June sun that we could well imagine only the surface inches were water, while below there moved, concealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army of Undines, passing silently and unseen down to the sea, and very leisurely too, lest they be discovered. Much, too, we forgave her because of her friendliness to the birds and animals that haunted the shores. Cormorants lined the banks in lonely places in rows like short black palings; grey crows crowded the shingle-beds; storks stood fishing in the vistas of shallower water that opened up between the islands, and hawks, swans, and marsh birds of all sorts filled the air with glinting wings and singing, petulant cries. It was impossible to feel annoyed with the river’s vagaries after seeing a deer leap with a splash into the water at sunrise and swim past the bows of the canoe; and often we saw fawns peering at us from the underbrush, or looked straight into the brown eyes of a stag as we charged full tilt round a corner and entered another reach of the river. Foxes, too, everywhere haunted the banks, tripping daintily among the driftwood and disappearing so suddenly that it was impossible to see how they managed it.

But now, after leaving Pressburg, everything changed a little, and the Danube became more serious. It ceased trifling. It was half-way to the Black Sea, within seeming distance almost of other, stranger countries where no tricks would be permitted or understood. It became suddenly grown-up, and claimed our respect and even our awe. It broke out into three arms, for one thing, that only met again a hundred kilometers farther down, and for a canoe there were no indications which one was intended to be followed.

“If you take a side channel,” said the Hungarian officer we met in the Pressburg shop while buying provisions, “you may find yourselves, when the flood subsides, forty miles from anywhere, high and dry, and you may easily starve. There are no people, no farms, no fishermen. I warn you not to continue. The river, too, is still rising, and this wind will increase.”

The rising river did not alarm us in the least, but the matter of being left high and dry by a sudden subsidence of the waters might be serious, and we had consequently laid in an extra stock of provisions. For the rest, the officer’s prophecy held true, and the wind, blowing down a perfectly clear sky, increased steadily till it reached the dignity of a westerly gale. It was earlier than usual when we camped, for the sun was a good hour or two from the horizon, and leaving my friend still asleep on the hot sand, I wandered about in desultory examination of our hotel. The island, I found, was less than an acre in extent, a mere sandy bank standing some two or three feet above the level of the river. The far end, pointing into the sunset, was covered with flying spray which the tremendous wind drove off the crests of the broken waves. It was triangular in shape, with the apex up stream.

I stood there for several minutes, watching the impetuous crimson flood bearing down with a shouting roar, dashing in waves against the bank as though to sweep it bodily away, and then swirling by in two foaming streams on either side. The ground seemed to shake with the shock and rush, while the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured over them increased the curious illusion that the island itself actually moved. Above, for a mile or two, I could see the great river descending upon me; it was like looking up the slope of a sliding hill, white with foam, and leaping up everywhere to show itself to the sun.

The rest of the island was too thickly grown with willows to make walking pleasant, but I made the tour, nevertheless. From the lower end the light, of course, changed, and the river looked dark and angry. Only the backs of the flying waves were visible, streaked with foam, and pushed forcibly by the great puffs of wind that fell upon them from behind. For a short mile it was visible, pouring in and out among the islands, and then disappearing with a huge sweep into the willows, which closed about it like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to drink. They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river up into themselves. They caused it to vanish from sight. They herded there together in such overpowering numbers.

Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion began to stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.

A rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous; many of the little islands

I saw before me would probably have been swept away by the morning; this resistless,
thundering flood of water touched the sense of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay
deeper far than the emotions of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt. Nor had it directly to
do with the power of the driving wind—this shouting hurricane that might almost carry up
a few acres of willows into the air and scatter them like so much chaff over the landscape.

The wind was simply enjoying itself, for nothing rose out of the flat landscape to stop it, and

I was conscious of sharing its great game with a kind of pleasurable excitement. Yet this
novel emotion had nothing to do with the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of distress I
experienced, that it was impossible to trace it to its source and deal with it accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do with my realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the elements about me. The huge-grown river had something to do with it too—a vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with these great elemental forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of the day and night. For here, indeed, they were gigantically at play together, and the sight appealed to the imagination.

But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself more particularly to the willow bushes, to these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening. And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.

Great revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to exalt.

With this multitude of willows, however, it was something far different, I felt. Some essence emanated from them that besieged the heart. A sense of awe awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror. Their serried ranks, growing everywhere darker about me as the shadows deepened, moving furiously yet softly in the wind, woke in me the curious and unwelcome suggestion that we had trespassed here upon the borders of an alien world, a world where we were intruders, a world where we were not wanted or invited to remain— where we ran grave risks perhaps!

The feeling, however, though it refused to yield its meaning entirely to analysis, did not at the time trouble me by passing into menace. Yet it never left me quite, even during the very practical business of putting up the tent in a hurricane of wind and building a fire for the stew-pot. It remained, just enough to bother and perplex, and to rob a most delightful camping-ground of a good portion of its charm. To my companion, however, I said nothing, for he was a man I considered devoid of imagination. In the first place, I could never have explained to him what I meant, and in the second, he would have laughed stupidly at me if I had.

There was a slight depression in the center of the island, and here we pitched the tent. The surrounding willows broke the wind a bit.

“A poor camp,” observed the imperturbable Swede when at last the tent stood upright, “no stones and precious little firewood. I’m for moving on early tomorrow—eh? This sand won’t hold anything.”

But the experience of a collapsing tent at midnight had taught us many devices, and we made the cozy gipsy house as safe as possible, and then set about collecting a store of wood to last till bed-time. Willow bushes drop no branches, and driftwood was our only source of supply. We hunted the shores pretty thoroughly. Everywhere the banks were crumbling as the rising flood tore at them and carried away great portions with a splash and a gurgle.

“The island’s much smaller than when we landed,” said the accurate Swede. “It won’t last long at this rate. We’d better drag the canoe close to the tent, and be ready to start at a moment’s notice. I shall sleep in my clothes.”

He was a little distance off, climbing along the bank, and I heard his rather jolly laugh as he spoke. “By Jove!” I heard him call, a moment later, and turned to see what had caused his exclamation. But for the moment he was hidden by the willows, and I could not find him.

“What in the world’s this?” I heard him cry again, and this time his voice had become serious. I ran up quickly and joined him on the bank. He was looking over the river, pointing at something in the water.

“Good heavens, it’s a man’s body!” he cried excitedly. “Look!”

A black thing, turning over and over in the foaming waves, swept rapidly past. It kept disappearing and coming up to the surface again. It was about twenty feet from the shore, and just as it was opposite to where we stood it lurched round and looked straight at us. We saw its eyes reflecting the sunset, and gleaming an odd yellow as the body turned over. Then it gave a swift, gulping plunge, and dived out of sight in a flash.

“An otter, by gad!” we exclaimed in the same breath, laughing.

It was an otter, alive, and out on the hunt; yet it had looked exactly like the body of a drowned man turning helplessly in the current. Far below it came to the surface once again, and we saw its black skin, wet and shining in the sunlight.

Then, too, just as we turned back, our arms full of driftwood, another thing happened to recall us to the river bank. This time it really was a man, and what was more, a man in a boat. Now a small boat on the Danube was an unusual sight at any time, but here in this deserted region, and at flood time, it was so unexpected as to constitute a real event. We stood and stared.

Whether it was due to the slanting sunlight, or the refraction from the wonderfully illumined water, I cannot say, but, whatever the cause, I found it difficult to focus my sight properly upon the flying apparition. It seemed, however, to be a man standing upright in a sort of flat-bottomed boat, steering with a long oar, and being carried down the opposite shore at a tremendous pace. He apparently was looking across in our direction, but the distance was too great and the light too uncertain for us to make out very plainly what he was about. It seemed to me that he was gesticulating and making signs at us. His voice came across the water to us shouting something furiously, but the wind drowned it so that no single word was audible. There was something curious about the whole appearance—man, boat, signs, voice—that made an impression on me out of all proportion to its cause.

“He’s crossing himself!” I cried. “Look, he’s making the sign of the Cross!”

“I believe you’re right,” the Swede said, shading his eyes with his hand and watching the man out of sight. He seemed to be gone in a moment, melting away down there into the sea of willows where the sun caught them in the bend of the river and turned them into a great crimson wall of beauty. Mist, too, had begun to ruse, so that the air was hazy.

“But what in the world is he doing at nightfall on this flooded river?” I said, half to myself.

“Where is he going at such a time, and what did he mean by his signs and shouting? D’you think he wished to warn us about something?”

“He saw our smoke, and thought we were spirits probably,” laughed my companion.

“These Hungarians believe in all sorts of rubbish; you remember the shopwoman at Pressburg warning us that no one ever landed here because it belonged to some sort of beings outside man’s world! I suppose they believe in fairies and elementals, possibly demons, too. That peasant in the boat saw people on the islands for the first time in his life,” he added, after a slight pause, “and it scared him, that’s all.”

The Swede’s tone of voice was not convincing, and his manner lacked something that was usually there. I noted the change instantly while he talked, though without being able to label it precisely.

“If they had enough imagination,” I laughed loudly—I remember trying to make as much noise as I could—”they might well people a place like this with the old gods of antiquity. The Romans must have haunted all this region more or less with their shrines and sacred groves and elemental deities.”

The subject dropped and we returned to our stew-pot, for my friend was not given to imaginative conversation as a rule. Moreover, just then I remember feeling distinctly glad that he was not imaginative; his stolid, practical nature suddenly seemed to me welcome and comforting. It was an admirable temperament, I felt; he could steer down rapids like a red Indian, shoot dangerous bridges and whirlpools better than any white man I ever saw in a canoe. He was a grand fellow for an adventurous trip, a tower of strength when untoward things happened. I looked at his strong face and light curly hair as he staggered along under his pile of driftwood (twice the size of mine!), and I experienced a feeling of relief. Yes, I was distinctly glad just then that the Swede was—what he was, and that he never made remarks that suggested more than they said.

“The river’s still rising, though,” he added, as if following out some thoughts of his own, and dropping his load with a gasp. “This island will be under water in two days if it goes on.”

“I wish the wind would go down,” I said. “I don’t care a fig for the river.”

The flood, indeed, had no terrors for us; we could get off at ten minutes’ notice, and the more water the better we liked it. It meant an increasing current and the obliteration of the treacherous shingle-beds that so often threatened to tear the bottom out of our canoe. Contrary to our expectations, the wind did not go down with the sun. It seemed to increase with the darkness, howling overhead and shaking the willows round us like straws.

Curious sounds accompanied it sometimes, like the explosion of heavy guns, and it fell upon the water and the island in great flat blows of immense power. It made me think of the sounds a planet must make, could we only hear it, driving along through space.

But the sky kept wholly clear of clouds, and soon after supper the full moon rose up in the east and covered the river and the plain of shouting willows with a light like the day. We lay on the sandy patch beside the fire, smoking, listening to the noises of the night round us, and talking happily of the journey we had already made, and of our plans ahead. The map lay spread in the door of the tent, but the high wind made it hard to study, and presently we lowered the curtain and extinguished the lantern. The firelight was enough to smoke and see each other’s faces by, and the sparks flew about overhead like fireworks. A few yards beyond, the river gurgled and hissed, and from time to time a heavy splash announced the falling away of further portions of the bank.

Our talk, I noticed, had to do with the faraway scenes and incidents of our first camps in the Black Forest, or of other subjects altogether remote from the present setting, for neither of us spoke of the actual moment more than was necessary—almost as though we had agreed tacitly to avoid discussion of the camp and its incidents. Neither the otter nor the boatman, for instance, received the honor of a single mention, though ordinarily these would have furnished discussion for the greater part of the evening. They were, of course, distinct events in such a place.

The scarcity of wood made it a business to keep the fire going, for the wind, that drove the smoke in our faces wherever we sat, helped at the same time to make a forced draught. We took it in turn to make some foraging expeditions into the darkness, and the quantity the Swede brought back always made me feel that he took an absurdly long time finding it; for the fact was I did not care much about being left alone, and yet it always seemed to be my turn to grub about among the bushes or scramble along the slippery banks in the moonlight.

The long day’s battle with wind and water—such wind and such water!—had tired us both, and an early bed was the obvious program. Yet neither of us made the move for the tent. We lay there, tending the fire, talking in desultory fashion, peering about us into the dense willow bushes, and listening to the thunder of wind and river. The loneliness of the place had entered our very bones, and silence seemed natural, for after a bit the sound of our voices became a trifle unreal and forced; whispering would have been the fitting mode of communication, I felt, and the human voice, always rather absurd amid the roar of the elements, now carried with it something almost illegitimate. It was like talking out loud in church, or in some place where it was not lawful, perhaps not quite safe, to be overheard.

The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make use of it! Something more than the power of its mystery stirred in me as I lay on the sand, feet to fire, and peered up through the leaves at the stars. For the last time I rose to get firewood. “When this has burnt up,” I said firmly, “I shall turn in,” and my companion watched me lazily as I moved off into the surrounding shadows.

For an unimaginative man I thought he seemed unusually receptive that night, unusually open to suggestion of things other than sensory. He too was touched by the beauty and loneliness of the place. I was not altogether pleased, I remember, to recognize this slight change in him, and instead of immediately collecting sticks, I made my way to the far point of the island where the moonlight on plain and river could be seen to better advantage. The desire to be alone had come suddenly upon me; my former dread returned in force; there was a vague feeling in me I wished to face and probe to the bottom.

When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere “scenery” could have produced such an effect. There was something more here, something to alarm.

I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one and all, each in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress. But the willows especially; for ever they went on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing— but what it was they made so much to-do about belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves. I watched them moving busily together, oddly shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even when there was no wind. They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible.

There they stood in the moonlight, like a vast army surrounding our camp, shaking their innumerable silver spears defiantly, formed all ready for an attack.

The psychology of places, for some imaginations at least, is very vivid; for the wanderer, especially, camps have their “note” either of welcome or rejection. At first it may not always be apparent, because the busy preparations of tent and cooking prevent, but with the first pause—after supper usually—it comes and announces itself. And the note of this willowcamp now became unmistakably plain to me; we were interlopers, trespassers; we were not welcomed. The sense of unfamiliarity grew upon me as I stood there watching. We touched the frontier of a region where our presence was resented. For a night’s lodging we might perhaps be tolerated; but for a prolonged and inquisitive stay—No! by all the gods of the trees and wilderness, no! We were the first human influences upon this island, and we were not wanted. The willows were against us.

Strange thoughts like these, bizarre fancies, borne I know not whence, found lodgment in my mind as I stood listening. What, I thought, if, after all, these crouching willows proved to be alive; if suddenly they should rise up, like a swarm of living creatures, marshaled by the gods whose territory we had invaded, sweep towards us off the vast swamps, booming overhead in the night—and then settle down! As I looked it was so easy to imagine they actually moved, crept nearer, retreated a little, huddled together in masses, hostile, waiting for the great wind that should finally start them a-running. I could have sworn their aspect changed a little, and their ranks deepened and pressed more closely together.

The melancholy shrill cry of a night-bird sounded overhead, and suddenly I nearly lost my balance as the piece of bank I stood upon fell with a great splash into the river, undermined by the flood. I stepped back just in time, and went on hunting for firewood again, half laughing at the odd fancies that crowded so thickly into my mind and cast their spell upon me. I recalled the Swede’s remark about moving on next day, and I was just thinking that I fully agreed with him, when I turned with a start and saw the subject of my thoughts standing immediately in front of me. He was quite close. The roar of the elements had covered his approach.

To be continued next month…

After farming in Canada, operating a hotel, mining in the Alaskan goldfields, and working as a newspaper reporter in New York City, experiences that he recalled in Episodes Before Thirty (1923), Algernon Blackwood returned to England in 1899. Seven years later he published his first book of short stories, The Empty House (1906), and became a full-time fiction writer. Later collections include John Silence (1908), stories about a detective sensitive to extrasensory phenomena, and Tales of the Uncanny and Supernatural (1949), 22 stories selected from his nine other books of short stories.

In his later years Blackwood achieved a wide audience as a teller of ghost tales on British radio and television.

Dear beloved reader,

I hope you found the chills you were looking for. Perhaps while entrenched in the pages of this issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly, you questioned both your own sanity and your place amongst the malevolent whims of our cold universe. If so, let not your thirst for more cosmic terror go unquenched. Simply visit WWW.COSMICHORRORMONTHLY.COM
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Again, thank you for taking the time to read our fiction. I hope we meet again soon.

Charles Tyra

Editor

Table of Contents

- Like Shakespeare
- Roots in the Ground
- How to Paint a Haunted House
- Phil
- Elder Care
- The Theater of Infinite Delight
- Tyger, Tyger
- The Willows Chapter 1