Cosmic Horror Monthly: Issue #46
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Issue #46

Edited by Charles Tyra

Copyright © 2024 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.

Cosmic Horror Monthly

Cover Art - Jakub Jagoda

Editor: Charles Tyra

Co-Editor: Carson Winter

Co-Editor: Jolie Toomajan

Printed locally in Oklahoma City, OK

A special thanks to our Patreon subscribers for making this issue possible:

Ronald Morton, David N, Mikołaj Grygorcewicz, Zach Sherrill

www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Created with Vellum

Contents

Introduction

Meet the CHM staff

A New World
e rathke

The Dying Chorus: An Oral History of the Carcosa Art Collective

Max D. Stanton

Automatic Doors

Lillah Lawson

Ritual Sacrifice to the Great God of Skates

Don’t Tell

Jonathan Gensler

Beauty Below

Lynn Forba

Big Top

Katarina Betterton

Brenda

Margaret St. Clair

Introduction

Greetings Dear Reader,

Welcome to the April edition of Cosmic Horror Monthly. (Is it really April already?) We have assembled a terrifying collection of stories to share with you this month, it’s a collection I am immensely proud to present. We’ll start strong with a man who makes a startling discovery in an apocalyptic landscape in “A New World.” Then a nod to one of the great works of cosmic horror of all time in “The Dying Chorus: An Oral History of the Carcosa Art Collective” by Max D. Stanton, author of A Season of Loathsome Miracles. Up next, a truly rude awakening in “Automatic Doors” followed by the gathering of a new cult at the roller rink in “Ritual Sacrifice to the Great God of Skates” by Bram Stoker award-winning writer Eric J. Guignard.

In “Don’t Tell” by CHM alum Jonathan Gensler, when a cadet is found dead, his best friend finds more than secrets has been hiding on base. We’ll discover something lurking beneath the surface of the lake in “Beauty Below” before witnessing one last wild performance at the circus in “Big Top.” Then a tale from the behemoth that inspired this very magazine you hold, we reached deep into the crypt to bring you a weird story by Margaret St. Clair called “Brenda.”

Enjoy.

Meet the CHM staff

Charles Tyra: Editor

Oenophile, logophile, aspiring writer. Completely captivated by Cosmic Horror and Weird Fiction from an early age after 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.

Jolie Toomajan: Co-Editor

Jolie Toomajan is a writer, editor, and all-around ghoul, and she has a PhD in English with a focus on speculative fictions. Despite all this, she would read out loud from a book written in backwards Latin.

Featured artists this month

Cover art: Jimmy Nijs is a freelance illustrator from The Netherlands. Born in 1994, as a child he once picked up a pencil and never put it down again. Ever since, he’s grown passionate about anything macabre and fantastical, and this is reflected in his art. His work is notable for its bizarre creatures and malformed monsters in unusual settings. His illustrations have starred on book covers, card games, TTRPGs and much more.

Joana (@sisaliks) is an illustrator from Barcelona, Spain. With a background in engineering, she didn't start taking art seriously until she entered art school in her late 20s, and has now made her long-time dream of working as a full-time artist a reality. Her love for sci-fi and fantasy started young, reading her father's books of classic authors and never stopped. Her art focuses on cool, relatable, and interesting female characters, concepts with an edgy vibe, and often features eerie or dark themes.

A New World

e rathke

The man adjusted his filtered mask and wiped soot from his goggles with the back of his gloved hand. There, ahead, the mountains rising from the infant forest on through the always blackgrey clouds. The wind whipped the frayed ends of his scarf and his coat. He trudged over the hard ashy landscape of the wasteland, the wind a constant shriek, the weight of his backpack a persistent ache on his shoulders. He shrugged the load higher, rattling its contents.

His steps came heavy as he slowed and crouched to where the first green follicles rose through the cracks in the waste. He wheezed, throat raw, and wiped at his goggles. Slowly, he touched the blade of grass with his gloved finger. A gentle stroke, like the cheek of a newborn.

Through the day, the only sound was his filtered breathing, that gentle wheeze, and his heavy steps, gradually carrying him up the mountain slope. The thousand hues of green danced in the greylight of the clouded world.

His stomach nagged and his throat burned as the humidity rose higher and the day hotter. Coated in sweat, he loosened his scarf round his neck and unfastened his coat but kept them both on. Lightheaded from exertion and dehydration, he pushed himself towards the promise of clean water, clean air. His gaze scanned the mountain for food but found nothing. The only color was green. Green in shades and hues foreign to the noxious world of blacks and greys and flowing reds the man knew. And then the mountain itself. Greying rock splashed with greens rising through the clinging clouds.

The sound of flowing water was a klaxon in his ears pulling him forward. He found the river cascading through the rocks, snaking its way from the mountain top above the clouds. Water clear and cold and fast. Rummaging in his backpack, he pulled out a glass bottle with a straw. Rinsing it quickly but carefully, he filled it and snaked the straw through the mask and drank.

Weeping tearlessly, he drank bottle after bottle until he lifted his mask from his mouth and vomited. His skin became electric with panic. He replaced the mask and stared at the bottle of water. His lip quivered and tears blurred his vision.

He muttered curses, then filled the bottle again, and drank.

* * *

The canopy of clouds rolled within arm’s reach. Only a mile above the wasteland, he pushed into the clouds. Blinded, he crouched and crawled up the mountain through the writhing grey surrounding him. Eventually he broke through to a sky of blue and a plateau of green and the sun blurred by tears.

* * *

Higher up the mountain, he came to a shallow valley of green bisected by the river. It flowed wide and strong. The valley’s grass was thick and green and soft, as if never tread on before. Treeless and hot, he ran through the field shouting for no one to hear. The mask muffled his voice, but he shouted anyway. He shouted his name and the name of the city he came from, the one he ran from. He shouted the names of his daughter and lover and where he burned their bodies, where he promised them to live.

Throwing himself into the grass by the riverbank, he rolled over and stared at the sky through the grimed lenses of his goggles. Empty and blue and bright and hot. He sat and dug through his backpack, pulling out a collapsible fishing rod. From his back he pulled a wire and a hook, which he weaved through the rod.

The man sat at the riverbank and let the hook float in the water while he stared out at the mountains circling him, at the sun shining.

The back of his neck tingled, as if spiders crawled along the skin. He swatted a gloved hand and then turned. A tree nine feet high and two wide stood ten feet away from him. His forehead knit and he coughed. He yanked his hook out of the water and stood, the rod in his right hand. His gaze darted from the tree to the mountains to the treeless valley around him and then landed hard on the tree. A face grew from its bark.

His eyes opened wide and he stepped back to the riverbank, his left hand grabbing the machete at his hip, trembling.

The face did not grow. The tree transformed before him. First the face, pale and delicate with tiny sharp teeth. The boughs of the tree folded down and became arms while the face stretched from a neck instead of bark. Then breasts formed and its body took the shape of a woman, naked and pale and nine feet tall. Hairless and without nipples or a navel, it reached a hand towards the man.

He recoiled and the hand stopped where it was. Its palm facing the man, its fingers spread wide. Its face smiled and its eyes kaleidoscoped through autumnal colors. Its middle finger unfurled and blossomed. Violet petals bloomed and green tendrils flowed from it.

“What—?” The man’s voice burst from him, distorted and muffled by the filtered mask.

He dropped the fishing rod and gripped the machete with both hands. “Get the hell back.”

Each of its fingers flowered in different colors and the face kept smiling.

The man shook his head and swung the machete at it, “Get—”

It pulled back its flowering hand while a green tendril darted at the man from his blindspot and stabbed him through his hood and goggles, into his left temple, sending him to the ground, writhing. He screamed and screamed, clutching at his head.

Something lodged behind his left eye, bubbling inside his skull. He ripped off his goggles, clenching his eyes shut from pain and fear of the ruined air. Like an icepick behind his eye and an immense pressure. He smashed his head into the ground and his gloves were wet with blood as he clawed at what could not be touched.

It writhed within his head and moved. It slithered between his eyes and stopped on his sinuses. Then hooks dug into his bones and through each sinus cavity, releasing pressure and filling it with a sickly sweet scent. Pungently fecund.

The man screamed. He screamed until a tendril landed softly on his bare forehead, like the kiss of a newborn, and then there was a hot pressure and only blackness.

* * *

He woke as if drugged. His naked body slow to respond and his vision blurred, he rolled over to a face. Almost human in appearance but for its eyes wavering between shades of green and yellow and red. The man blinked away the haze and jolted to a sitting position, kicking away from it. His chest buzzed as if full of flies and every breath was shallow but tasted of life and the liquid flux of memories of love with his lover and child while spiders ate his skin from the inside. The man shook his head and screamed for help.

And then a calm, like waves washing against him, brought with each lungful of scented air. The smell of roses on childhood summers, newly cut grass, and the cold clear air of autumns so long ago. His breathing began to even and his heart slowed, his pupils dilated. The face stared at him, smiling with closed lips, its hand extended and blooming. No longer the shape of a woman, its body was covered in vegetation that danced as if independent from its body.

“Where are my clothes? It’s not safe—the air—” The man’s voice was calm, and his body felt only relief but his head rushed with panicked thoughts, with visions of the death and decay of the world. But every smell was sweet and full of life.

A tendril landed on the man’s foot and the calming came deeper. His body dissolved as if falling into a vast chasm, as if sinking into an ocean of nothing. He breathed in through his nose and tasted growth. Tasted spring. The blossoming of the world. The man closed his eyes and floated amniotically on a slow stream of memories. Memories of flowers blooming, of sending their pollen into the world. Memories of his lover’s hand. The nights they held one another alone through the darkness, through the dying.

He opened his eyes and stared hard at the face trying to fill his voice with absent emotions, “Stop it. Please.”

Its smiling face came near to his. It parted its lips and blew into his mouth. The man sucked in the air while pulling his face away. His lips formed the word No but the sound never came.

The man saw. He saw the poison in the sky, in the waters of the world. He saw the world writhing to heal itself. He saw fungi the size of mountains, the size of oceans crowding out cities and continents. He saw a flower budding from the mountainous fungi. It grew and kept growing and it bloomed and kept blooming until it lifted its roots from the earth and wandered away, leaving a trail of newly blossomed flowers in its wake. He saw it care for the growth it birthed.

He returned to his aching body. Wracked by starvation and dehydration, he wept tearlessly, mouthing the word No over and over.

* * *

The man woke with tendrils clinging to his skin in a dozen places. The musk of sex heavy in the air. Humid and thick, the air tasted of pollen and his lover’s skin. Opening his eyes, its face was there before him, watching him always, hungrily. It brought a hand to his face and laid its palm on his cheek.

The man mouthed words through tears while his penis hardened.

It smiled still. The air thick with its scent. Fecund and sweet. It pressed its forehead against his and he exhaled, pleasure shuddering through his body. It pulled the man on top of it and opened itself for him. The man dug his fingers into its mossy flesh, and he thrust deeper and deeper. A thousand tendrils caressed his back, holding him. He gasped and pressed his cheek against its soft verdant body, emptying himself into it. Opening his eyes and raising his face, he stared into its smiling almost human face.

It wiped the tears from his eyes with its hands and its tendrils brushed tenderly against his skin in a hundred places.

The man smiled and shook his head, “Sorry.”

* * *

The man walked naked in the sunshine ahead of it. His skeletal body touched by patches of green drinking in the light, tasting photons, his hair puffing out from his head in tight curls like a black halo. One of its tendrils was in his hand while another lay gently on the back of his neck. The man turned back to it smiling, “This is all because of you.”

With every step, it left behind new bloom. Its large body shaped humanly but covered in leaves and moss that fluttered to no wind.

“I smell you,” the man said. “I get it now, what that is. What you did to me.” He tapped his temple.

It smiled back at him.

“I don’t even feel hungry anymore. Is that—is it something you did?”

Its eyes flowered red and it blew towards the man. The scents filled him with life. Green gushing life. Life like a river of vegetation. Like a cell, endlessly replicating, competing, and evolving.

The man laughed and pulled on the tendril in his hand. It came towards him with arms stretched to envelope his tiny body. The man smiled and jumped into its arms, pressing his face into its body, which folded around him. Finding his feet in the grass, he pulled it down with him, and rolled on top of it. He entered it greedily and kissed its flowering eyes, its blossoming torso. The air thick with pollen.

* * *

When it woke him in the night the only smell and taste was the moon. The man touched the face of his mate and a tendril wrapped round his hand and wove between his fingers. A dozen more tendrils caressed his back and gently brought him closer. He smiled and inched towards its pale human face. When his chest met the leaves of its body, it breathed into his lungs and it tasted like life, like the day his daughter was born. Tears filled his eyes when it plunged a root into him. He gasped but felt no pain, and then his body convulsed in pleasure and he came.

It backed away from the man and a weight pulled on his chest.

“What—” his voice soft as he looked down to see the faint green pulsating sack growing from his chest. The sack’s root wove through his chest, leeching into his lungs and arteries.

His eyes underwater and a smile stretching his cheeks, “Our child?”

Green was the only smell and a thousand tendrils covered the man, stirring him to climax once more.

* * *

For months they wandered together caring for the green above the clouds. He told it of his family, and it gave him the memories of the earth and all the dreams of the future. Every day the man tasted a new memory, inhaled a new scent, and every day his child grew from his chest, from the sunlight and the rain.

Every moment became new. Every raindrop had a voice. Every blade of grass carried a song only heard when the wind touched upon them. When he swam in the river, he tasted every ocean of the dead world and all the oceans that would be this new one. And he would be its father. He smiled as he stroked the green sack that housed his child.

The man was never without his mate’s verdant touch or scent. A tendril always on his neck and a dozen more places. It no longer remained in a human form but oscillated between a dozen different body shapes. As a giant leafy deer, the man had ridden it through the mountain ranges. As a bird, it had carried him through the skies. The man came to prefer it as a mossy and fungal beast. Standing behind it, he came into its body a thousand times, in a thousand variations, its tendrils giving him the pleasure of a thousand hands.

He found that he did not need to eat or even drink. His body lived as if from its touch alone. And he grew. His body thickened with muscle and fat, regaining all that was lost in his hard life and long journey.

After a year, it laid him down.

“Is it time?”

Its human face bloomed through the mossy mound of its body and it smiled. Several tendrils grasped him and the sack and pulled it open. Covered in a viscous green, it unfolded its translucent wings. The tendrils lifted it from the man’s chest and the sack fell wetly to the earth, leaving a flowering green at the center of his chest. In its hands was a tiny body convulsing in varying shapes. With a shriek the little beak curled back into human lips and the child’s human face formed as it blinked at the man.

The man wept and covered his mouth with his hand, “She’s beautiful.” He took the child’s volatile body in his arms and it mimicked his shape. The child’s skin was wet and sticky, and clung to him with human fingers and tendrils grasped at his face.

The man looked at his mate with a quivering smile, “Thank you.”

It smiled and pulled him close. When their chests met, it plunged another green sack into the man’s chest.

The man kissed his mate and it wrapped its arms around the man and the child, its tendrils connecting to both of them.

When the earth rolled away from the sun and the halfmoon shined bright in the sky, the child took flight while its parents made love again and again in the valley between the mountains above the clouds.

End.

e rathke writes about books and games at radicaledward.substack.com. A finalist for the Baen Fantasy Adventure Award and recipient of the Diverse Worlds Grant, he is the author of Glossolalia, Howl, and the space opera series The Shattered Stars. His short fiction appears in Queer Tales of Monumental Invention, Mysterion Magazine, Shoreline of Infinity, and elsewhere.

The Dying Chorus: An Oral History of the Carcosa Art Collective

Max D. Stanton

Paul Moreland, Carcosa Survivor

It’s kind of ironic to me that the Carcosa art collective has this reputation as a death cult, because Carcosa saved my life. It literally saved my life.

This was 12 years ago and I was a depressive, alcoholic wreck crash-landed in L.A. I was staggering on my usual circuit between the homeless encampment and the liquor store when I spotted a piece of canary-yellow paper taped up on a lamppost.

“There’s nothing for you on these streets,” the flier said. “Come to Carcosa and live forever.” The flier was unsigned, but a squiggly mark towards the bottom made me think of a bunch of questions breeding a mystery. That was my first glimpse of the Yellow Sign.

I turned around and there he was, like he’d been waiting for me in ambush. Harrison Davies. Bigger than life. Warm and golden as the sun. Welcoming me.

Kyesha Tynesdale, Homeless Activist

Oh, everyone on Skid Row knew Harrison Davies. He was a hard man to miss. White boy, damn near seven feet tall, dressed like a wizard in saffron robes and shit, long bushy beard and everything. Yeah, we all knew him. We knew he was up to no good.

I was working at a neighborhood soup kitchen, and I’d see him prowling around, sometimes alone, sometimes with a few girls. He liked to hang out over at 6th and Ceres. That was his favorite hunting ground. He’d find folks who were in distress and talk to them in that deep, buttery voice of his, and lead them away, and then nobody ever saw them again.

It was insane. You had this huge golden ogre walking around abducting people in broad daylight. And the cops didn’t do anything. The city didn’t do anything.

Carcosa wouldn’t have happened in the first place if folks had just been paying attention.

Paul Moreland, Carcosa Survivor

Harrison’s core teaching is simple. The meaning of life is beauty. When we create beautiful things, when we create art, we’re actually tapping into a higher plane. The realm of the angels. Carcosa. That was the name we used for both our community and our destination. Our aim was to make ourselves fit to exist in that pure and happy land.

To make contact with Carcosa we had to make art. We would open the doors to the realm of beauty as far as they would go, and escape this realm of tears. We needed to tell stories, to make music, to dance, to sculpt, to paint, to sew. I’d never done anything creative before. I didn’t have any artistic training. Very few of us did. It didn’t matter. Harrison trained us all. Or rather he unmade the parts of us that kept Carcosa from shining through.

Harrison taught through play. Jesus had his parables, Nietzsche had his epigrams, Harrison Davies played games. Games where he stripped all the inessentials from us, like dignity, comfort, and safety, so we’d learn how little we needed them. He assigned us new names and personalities and histories at whim, scrambling our identities like the yolks of eggs. We rarely ate, but when we did, we feasted. I spent a week in total silence re-learning how to hear, then a week in a cave of roaring static screens learning how not to hear, and then he dosed me with LSD and methamphetamine and put me into a sensory deprivation tank where I experienced a vivid hallucination of death. For a time I took up the role of a human marionette, only moving and speaking when a puppeteer took up my strings.

Once Harrison ordered me to cut open my own belly. I obeyed without hesitation. Turned out he’d given me a stage knife whose blade retracted into the hilt.

I know it sounds intense, but it worked. I began writing poems for the first time in my life. Wonderful poems. Harrison’s games took away the malignant pieces of me, and all sorts of beautiful words and images flowed through the gap.

Patrick Jensen, Former FBI Agent

After the - ah - after the so-called Unmasking, I was assigned to go through all the physical evidence and try to basically reverse-engineer what the hell happened. The cult had documented its activities extremely thoroughly, so there was a huge stockpile of video footage and audio recordings. And having to go through it all became . . . ah . . . it was really a terrible burden for me. Bearing witness to Carcosa.

Davies took elements of theater acting games, Eastern mysticism, CIA interrogation techniques, Masonic initiation rites, and his own homebrew theology, rolled them all together into a package of drug-fueled ritualistic torture, and used that to inflict ego death on people who had already been isolated and unstable before they came in the door. There were also heavy elements of sadism and sexual abuse. He was a predator through and through.

Make no mistake, Carcosa was designed to break people. Davies patiently, methodically shattered his victims’ minds. And then, just as patiently and methodically, he rebuilt them to his own twisted specifications.

But some were too far gone to even rebuild. A substantial minority of Davies’ victims suffered psychotic breaks or neurological damage during their brainwashing. Instead of getting medical help for them, Davies chained them up in dog kennels in a pitch-black room and recorded the sounds that they made. For months on end. He called them his chorus.

Paul Moreland, Carcosa Survivor

You couldn’t really get to know anybody in the collective. That was the whole point of it. We all changed our names and identities constantly, and Davies was always giving people masks to wear so you couldn’t even recognize faces. But there was amazing freedom and energy in that anonymity. Without selves to obsess over we could focus on the work.

Harrison owned a decaying old theater that he had converted into a headquarters and communal living space. Every aspect of the space was designed for artistic endeavor. Harrison set up a room that he called the Monkey House where he experimented with psychopharmaliterature by injecting writers with various stimulant cocktails and chaining them to typewriters. They banged out masterpieces by the sheaf, although occasionally Harrison misjudged the dosage and a writer would chew off their own fingers. He split up the backstage into a dozen soundproof, windowless rooms suitable for use as recording studios or torture chambers or both. The balcony was reserved for painting and sculpting. Yellow spotlights were trained on it at all hours of day and night, immersing the space in an intense golden glow. You could see such sights on the balcony.

The stage was given over to a neverending rotation of plays, concerts, dances, puppet shows, harlequinades, and punishments, every performance recorded on high-definition video. The members of the collective were superb collaborators, unhindered by ego. We even put on our own opera. Cassilda.

Oh, and a chorus rehearsed almost ceaselessly in the basement, so that even the most mundane activities were accompanied by gently muffled song.

Life was a ceaseless festival, where one drifted seamlessly between creating beauty, enjoying it, and playing games with Harrison. Sleep was sharply discouraged, and cocaine as freely available as sand at the beach.

Ah, those were the days.

Vincent Li, Store Owner

It was hard, running a business on the same street as those Carcosa nuts. So many strange people, coming and going. Strange noises and music at all hours. They looked dirty and hungry. Sometimes they’d come into my store and I had to chase them away. They stole.

I thought the neighborhood would get better after they went away. But now there are more crazies than ever before. They come to see the old theater, like it’s a holy pilgrimage. I wish the city would tear that place down. It has to be haunted.

Betty Delgado, Appraiser

I used to own an art gallery in SoHo, and Harrison Davies approached me about exhibiting some paintings, a series of surrealistic landscapes called Black Stars over the Hyades. Davies cut a remarkable figure. He was a giant, but even still, his body seemed too small to contain him. I was very happy to show his work. At that time I didn’t have any idea about how it was made.

A couple of days after the grand opening, a man came into the gallery with a rifle and killed three people before the police shot him. The only reason I’m still alive is because I’d gone out for coffee. The gallery closed down after that, and I didn’t hear anything more from Davies until it . . . you know, until it happened.

Bill Mattemore, Former Lead Singer of the Dum-Dums

I was one of the only people to ever see Carcosa play a show in person. I know this sounds like a hipster cliche, but I was into them way before they were famous. I was playing a basement punk show with my old band The Dum-Dums, and Carcosa came on after us. There were four of them, all in bright yellow hoodies, with the Yellow Sign drawn on their foreheads in magic marker. It was a cool look, I like it when bands get that sort of theatricality going. Harrison Davies was hanging out at the back of the room, although back then I didn’t know who he was. He looked like Gandalf had gotten roided-up and become a pro wrestler.

They didn’t introduce themselves or anything, they just launched head-on into the fastest, angriest, hardest punk rock I’d ever heard. It brought me right to a place of Zen rage. I was so amped-up it felt like I was on a parallel dimension. Their music burned away everything corrupt and phony in blistering, clarifying fury. The set lasted maybe ten minutes, and I knew right away that people would be talking about it for years. The last act couldn’t even go on after them, two of their members had broken bones in the mosh pit.

I left the venue in just an absolute foaming-at-the-mouth frenzy. I felt like a werewolf. I felt great. On my way home I beat some random guy half to death just because I couldn’t think of any other way to deal with my joy. Dude, I did three years in prison on account of a Carcosa show and I’d still go see them live if I could.

Paul Moreland, Carcosa Survivor

Towards the end a strange energy began building up within the collective. Harrison became agitated and took to going about armed. He never announced his intentions, any more than a storm cloud announces its intentions, but he promised that a final Unmasking was coming, when the last veils between ourselves and Carcosa would be swept away, and all things would be well, and all manner of things would be well.

I stood at the threshold of paradise, so naturally I managed to fuck it up. A misguided vestige of my past self mailed a few of my poems to my parents. They responded by having me declared insane. One night Harrison sent me out for cigarettes and a couple of guys grabbed me from behind and hustled me into a van. I was so used to having my head bagged and my hands bound behind my back that for a moment it felt like home.

When they hauled me out of the van into the mental hospital, however, I realized that this wasn’t one of Harrison’s games, this was somebody else’s. I began to scream like heaven itself had been taken away from me, and I deserved it. I had broken the rules. I had proven myself impure. My friends were about to transform into angels and I had forfeited the right to be amongst them. I knew that I would never see them again.

I didn’t speak for three weeks in the hospital.

Jeanne Loquist, Los Angeles Police Department Officer

I was one of the first officers on the scene. We’d gotten a call about a bad smell coming out of the old theater that the collective used. We’d taken nuisance calls about that location before, so the call itself wasn’t that surprising. But none of us were prepared for what we found.

They’d transformed the seating areas of the theater into a rats’ nest of plyboard shacks and subdivisions. It was absolutely filthy, the worst squalor I’d seen in eight years on the force. But even though the place was disgusting, they also had a fortune in high-end recording equipment lying around. Lots of creepy voodoo graffiti on the walls, especially the Yellow Sign. That was the first time I’d ever seen it. It’s all over the place these days.

The bodies were all on the stage, dressed in matching yellow jumpsuits with yellow plastic bags over their heads, heaped together to form the Yellow Sign. And there were a lot of them. The official count was 78 dead. The victims had taken a cocktail of fentanyl and synthetic ayahuasca that caused most of them to vomit inside their bags, which is where that smell was coming from. That, and the shit in their pants.

At center stage, Harrison Davies sat on a prop throne in a costume of yellow rags and a golden mask and crown. He was the only one of the cultists who didn’t take poison. He neatly arranged 78 dead people’s bodies into a symbol that he’d made up, and then he blew his own brains out with a .38 revolver.

Grace Montoya, TV Reporter

Carcosa was a huge story when it first came out, like Jim Jones but even weirder and flashier. You had dozens of journalists staking out the theater where it happened, daily press conferences with the police. People wondering if there were any cultists left. A real media circus. Viewers couldn’t get enough of it. Harrison Davies was this fascinating, diabolical figure, and for a while he was the biggest news in the country.

Then, you know, interest fades, and we all moved on to new stories. We thought the Carcosa story was over. But it wasn’t over. It was only getting started.

Paul Moreland, Carcosa Survivor

The hospital was awful. I couldn’t write any more poems, not with the pills they put me on. It felt like my time in Carcosa had all been a dream as I drifted off in the sensory deprivation booth.

When they let me out, I had no idea what I’d do with the rest of my life. Unmoored and drifting, I was living with my parents when I got a thick yellow manila envelope from a law firm. I found out - completely to my surprise - that Harrison had named me as the collective’s literary executor. I controlled the intellectual property rights to every piece of art that we had created.

He’d spared me so that I could share Carcosa’s beauty with the world.

Lisa Posnowieski, Author of Decoding the Yellow Sign: A Critical Guide to Carcosan Aesthetics

Maybe the most remarkable thing about the Carcosa art collective is just how broad their cultural influence has become in the ten years since the Unmasking. The works they’ve released posthumously through the Carcosa Foundation have reshaped literature, music, the visual arts, fashion, and more. They wrote songs that are played in classical orchestras, underground raves, and car commercials. They’ve written books that are discussed in university conferences and devoured by morbid high school students. And needless to say, the Yellow Sign has become a staple of graffiti artists and designers worldwide.

Of course, there’s been a huge backlash against the cultural ascendancy of a suicide cult. Stockholm erupted into riots when Carcosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature for their controversial novel The Lake of Hali. The American Psychiatric Association even issued an unprecedented warning against Carcosa’s chart-topping dance album Strange Moons Circling, claiming that its dissonant, toe-tapping beats expose listeners to risk of dissociative episodes. Abundant anecdotal evidence links Carcosan aesthetics to rapid-onset mental illness and acts of spectacular violence. Trying to assign responsibility, however, you run into the classic chicken-and-egg problem. Is Harrison Davies continuing to reproduce the brutality and domination of Carcosa from beyond the grave by encoding his abuse into the larger culture? Or does the cult’s output merely reflect the violently deranged quality of life in the early 21st century?

Because none of the collective’s works are individually signed, and collaborative effort seems to have been the rule rather than the exception, we can’t attribute any of the collective’s works to individual authors. But that does all the more to highlight Harrison Davies’ hideous accomplishment in creating such an incubator for artistic talent. I don’t mean to excuse his crimes, but there’s no denying his achievements, either.

Betty Delgado, Appraiser

A few months ago, I actually found one of the old Hyades landscapes in storage. I’d completely forgotten that I had it. An original Carcosa canvas would be worth a fortune at auction, but I’m holding onto it. It’s only going to appreciate in value. And I love to look at it over my fireplace. It’s a very inspiring piece. It gives me a lot of ideas.

I think the people in Carcosa were artistic geniuses. I even have the Yellow Sign tattooed on my ankle. They were troubled, of course, but I mean, so was Vincent van Gogh.

Jeanne Loquist, Los Angeles Police Department Officer

I don’t like that the Yellow Sign is so common these days. I really hate seeing it. It seems so disrespectful to the people who died. Human beings went through hell at Carcosa. Seventy-eight people died a miserable death at Carcosa.

At the same time, maybe I’m a hypocrite, because I read every Carcosa book that comes out. They’re that good. You lose track of time reading them.

Patrick Jensen, Former FBI Agent

I know better than anyone who Harrison Davies was, and about the profound evil and suffering he caused. But you know what? That doesn’t stop me from listening to Carcosa’s music. You know the opera they recorded? Cassilda? I can’t get enough of it. When I listen to Cassilda, I think, Maybe everything Harrison Davies did was justified, if it created this.

Everything decent inside me rebels against that thought, but I can’t get it out of my head.

Paul Moreland, Carcosa Survivor

Managing the Carcosa Foundation has been wonderful. Every year our licensing agreements bring in hundreds of millions of dollars, and every penny of that money goes into spreading Harrison Davies’ message. We’ve opened up dozens of outreach centers all around the world to bring his philosophy to the people, as well as our own publishing house and TV channel. It’s been deeply rewarding to see the way of life we pioneered at Carcosa start to catch on.

Harrison kept the promise he made to me in that flier. I really am going to live forever. Everyone in the Carcosa collective is going to live forever, through the immortal masterpieces that we all made together.

And there’s still so much more that Carcosa has to show the world. I’ve been releasing the material at a slow and measured pace. I don’t want to overwhelm the public with works they’re not ready for. Every year we’re pushing the envelope a little further, opening the door a little bit wider so all can see Carcosa’s light.

Next month I’m releasing a new play from the vaults that I think is going to get a very big reaction.

It’s called The King in Yellow.

End.

Max D. Stanton is a bookish, morbid Dungeons & Dragons nerd who lives in Philadelphia with his common-law wife, their cats, and their hound. An unexpected meeting with the Devil inspired Max to take up writing. His first short story collection, A Season of Loathsome Miracles, is available from Trepidatio Publishing.

Automatic Doors

Lillah Lawson

The first time was a fluke.

Lisa fumbled in her bag, grabbing at folded up bits of old shopping lists, keychain fob, hair-ties, dried-up pens. She located a quarter, waxy from some long-ago melted chocolate, and held it up triumphantly, speed-walking through the parking lot. She watched an elderly person back out of a space, narrowly missing an employee pushing a motorized cart. The employee cursed and kept moving, realizing the futility of admonishing a person whose blue-tinged head barely came over the steering wheel.

Lisa reached the carts and pushed her quarter into the slot, pulling the chain where it connected to the cart in front of it. A gentle tug, and the buggy should pop free. Today, it didn’t budge. Lisa pushed the quarter farther; tugged again. She yanked the cart, hard, but it gave no purchase. Lisa moved to the next one, pushing the quarter in a different slot, waiting to hear the pleasing click of the lock springing free. The new buggy wouldn’t move, either. “Jesus fucking Christ,” Lisa muttered under her breath, still tugging.

“Lemme help ya, gal.” An elderly man in Bermuda shorts pulled clear to his armpits inched around her. “Sometimes they stick.” With a quick yank, the buggy was free. He wheeled it around, presenting it like a gift. “There ya go.”

“Thanks,” Lisa said with an exasperated smile. She pushed the cart into the foyer.

As she inched closer to the automatic doors, Lisa could see patrons through the glass. One white-haired woman was checking a pack of strawberries; another pushed a finger deep into a loaf of bread to test for freshness. Aldi was a giant maze, complete with too-big shopping carts customers tried to navigate down too-small aisles. Lisa thought of what to buy – bananas, cashews, red-bag chicken, her husband’s ice cream bars – she’d forgotten her printed list at home.

After a moment, Lisa stopped her mental checklist and looked up, realizing the doors had not opened. She inched her buggy forward, but they didn’t move. She waved her hands in front of the doors, looking for a motion sensor to detect her, but nothing happened. Even more embarrassed now, Lisa yanked the buggy from side to side, stomping and waving her arms wider. Finally, she stepped directly in front of the doors, and clapped.

The doors did not open.

“Let me try.” A woman came forward with a pretty smile and a cloth tote slung over her shoulder. Her step was light, with her ballet flat-clad feet, but the doors slid open easily. “There!”

Her companion, tall and handsome, gave a crooked grin. “Weird it didn’t detect you. Maybe you’re a ghost!” The couple giggled good-naturedly as they passed Lisa into the store.

Lisa pushed the stupid, too-big buggy inside, shrugging. Little inconveniences that all piled up and made big inconveniences, but today, they were just a nuisance that she forgot the moment she hit aisle two.

A month later, it happened again.

Lisa exited her car, ignoring the man parked beside her, windows down, eating a messy sub sandwich, leering. The fact that he’d see her like this, rushing and crazed, wearing mismatched sweat shorts and a ratty Megadeth t-shirt, annoyed her. She was just grabbing a quick coffee—her husband didn’t like her spending money, but she really needed that cold brew today.

As Lisa walked through the parking lot towards Starbucks, hoping he wouldn’t be mad, she stepped into a watery, oil-slicked pothole.

She sprawled, landing on her knee, which skidded on the damp asphalt and immediately split open. She cried out, noting the deep red scratch where blood was beginning to pool. She hobbled back to her car, cursing, and blotted the scrape with a fast-food napkin from the dash. She wadded up the bloody paper and limped back through the parking lot, the driver beside her shamelessly gawking, his mouth absurdly full of sandwich. Back in the day, someone would’ve come to her rescue. Nobody had even noticed except sandwich guy.

Hobbling toward the entrance, Lisa pulled out her phone. She held it up to her face. An error message appeared, the facial recognition not working. She sighed and typed in the passcode with one hand, checking to see if her husband had called her back. She’d called twice. It wasn’t important, but she hated being ignored. Even a simple can’t talk, busy text would suffice, but so far, as usual: nothing.

It wasn’t just the missed calls. He never returned texts, either. He was never home for dinner. They might as well be sleeping in separate beds. How many times had Lisa sat uncomfortably on some friend’s front porch, oversized glass of wine in hand, listening as her friends eagerly shared stories about their amazing sex lives? General consensus was that forty was a happening time, for all of them; even the ones with shitty husbands were getting while the getting was good.

Except for Lisa. Maybe it was her fault. If she could try harder…put a little more thought into her appearance…she was only a homemaker, after all. He never failed to remind her of her lack of contributions. Her lack of money.

Lisa pushed her phone back into her pocket, determined not to check it again.

She’d reached the doors. For a moment nothing happened, and an icy trickle went down her spine. But then they whooshed apart, an older man sideswiping Lisa, holding a six-pack of Nattys. Lisa pushed past, relieved.

Something slammed against her arm, hard. “Ow!” The automatic door had closed on her shoulder while she was walking through, and was now pressing forcefully into her arm, trying to shut despite her. Lisa stood baffled and in pain as it closed, then opened, then closed again, jamming painfully against her arm, like a lover trying to shove her away.

The sudden memory of an incident from childhood—a shoelace, caught in the escalator—pulling her foot desperately as her father struggled to get her free. As he’d yanked the shoelace, she’d smelled burning. Daddy had joked that she’d almost gone under. “The escalator thought you were dinner!” Then she’d cried and he’d laughed while he hugged her.

A few minutes later, clutching the coffee she no longer wanted, condensation running over her fingers, Lisa went to customer service and told the manager about the automatic doors. “I think they’re broken,” she explained. “They shut on me as I was walking through.”

His expression was disbelieving. “You must have a super light step,” he’d said with a professional smile. “Or maybe you’re a ghost!”

Lisa left, her mouth pursed. They all thought they were so funny, didn’t they? But she didn’t want to be a Karen about it.

The third time it happened, Lisa was almost ready.

Her husband would be home tonight. “Make something good for dinner,” he’d said. “Nothing from the microwave.”

Wary, Lisa expected the doors wouldn’t open, but they slid open easily, as if to say I won’t kick you when you’re down. She walked through without incident, sighing in relief. Ten minutes later, she took her receipt and walked to the exit, proud of herself for only splurging on a single foil-wrapped chocolate-covered cherry, an impulse buy tucked next to the self-checkout. She didn’t even mind that she had to swipe her card four times before the machine would read it.

Lisa thought about the cherry as she walked; the thick, sweet chocolate dome, enrobing sugary cordial and juicy red cherry. Perhaps she’d share it with her husband, tonight, in bed. She could almost taste it. Her mouth watered.

Smack. Lisa’s head whipped up in surprise, fresh pain blooming in her mouth. The glass doors inches away from her face. An oily print of her own nose stared back; smeared, accusing. She had walked right into the doors. Right smack into them.

“You okay? Might oughta watch yourself!”

Lisa whirled to see a bagboy behind her, holding an old woman’s groceries. The woman, small and shriveled, in a red fleece jacket despite the heat, stared at her curiously.

Lisa’s voice came out meaner than she intended. “Watch myself? How was I supposed to know that would happen?”

“Are you hurt?” The lady asked.

“Not really. It’s not bleeding. They’ve got to fix this, though.” Lisa said to her. “What if the automatic doors shut on you like this? You could be seriously hurt!”

The woman’s gray eyebrows scrunched together, and her mouth scrunched up too. “Well, it’s never happened to me.” She said, her blue eyes staring hard at Lisa, her small shoulders, shrunken in the red fleece.

The bagboy stepped around Lisa, as though she were a car crash he wished to avoid. The doors whooshed wide and he ushered the lady outside. He turned around. “Try to have a nice day, ma’am.” His voice held a note of pity.

Lisa watched as he led the woman to her car, loaded up her groceries, and waved goodbye. Then he strode across the parking lot and stepped into the foyer—the doors opened quickly—and stopped, surprised to see her still standing there. “Can I help you with something else, ma’am?”

“You didn’t have to be so rude.” Lisa said finally. “Before.”

“I was?” he asked, his own eyebrows scrunching. He stared at her for a moment, then shrugged and went inside.

Lisa’s face throbbed. She stood dumbly, waiting for another customer. As the doors opened, she sprinted through and ran, shopping bag dangling wildly from her trembling hand. As she reached the car, the toe of her Converse caught the pavement and sent her flying. Lisa caught herself just in time, scrambled into the car and sat there, panting.

Suddenly, a whispered voice was in her ear, warm and sensual. “Come here.” Lisa jumped, banging her head on the driver’s side window.

She turned and stared into the back of the car. Empty.

* * *

That night Lisa dreamed.

She was driving. She was tired. A trip she’d made a thousand times before. The light; green, then yellow, and after a moment, red. Lisa pressed her foot on the pedal and frowned. She pressed harder, her eyes widening with alarm as the car gained speed—

—Lisa sat straight up in bed, and then, suddenly, she was in a house—a big house, full of warm, soft light and the smell of delicious things—citrusy air freshener, savory cooking smells, laundry detergent, and she was running into the kitchen, the biggest smile on her face.

Her husband Thomas was there, a wooden spoon held aloft over a pot where red sauce bubbled. When he saw her, his face broke into a beautiful grin, the same grin that had hooked her the first day of 6th grade gym, where they’d met. His almond-shaped brown eyes were full of love, his arms outstretched as she let herself be enveloped.

He was so close his dark, inky black lashes tickled her face. Lisa leaned up, her heart in her throat, and their lips met—

Lisa woke with a start, her head pounding. Her mouth tasted awful; the headache trailing from her temples through her skull, down to her nose and mouth, still throbbing from the day before. The dream swirled there, among the pain, like something alive, its tendrils poking at the backs of her eyes, out her ears, plugging up her sinuses.

Her husband—not Thomas—lay beside her, snoring. Lisa reached a hand over, gave him a poke. He didn’t stir. Soundlessly, she got up and went to make the coffee.

* * *

Later, she leaned over her cup, watching her husband rinse his mug and put it into the dishwasher. “I had a weird dream,” she said, clearing her throat.

“Oh?” He asked absently, fingering through the bills on the counter, discarding a piece of junk mail.

“…there was an accident. And I came home, but my house wasn’t this house.” She swallowed. “And my husband—he um, wasn’t you.”

Her husband looked up, a hint of a smile in the corner of his mouth. “Oh, yeah? And just who were you married to?”

A gnat had made its way into her coffee cup, bobbing around in the hot liquid in a futile effort to save its own life. Lisa reached a finger in and fished it out. “It was Thomas. Isn’t that weird?”

“Thomas?”

Lisa frowned. “I’ve told you about him. The boy I was in love with all through school, remember?”

“The Chinese guy you dated?”

“He was Japanese, and we only went on like, two dates.” Lisa said, staring down at her finger. The drowned gnat was not moving, laying immobile in the puddle of cold coffee on her fingertip. “All those years in love with him and we finally started going out and just…it didn’t work out. Then I met you and just…” she trailed off.

“More’s the pity for him.” Her husband said. But he was rifling through envelopes again, and his voice was flat. Lisa wondered how she ended up marrying a guy who said things like More’s the Pity.

“He died, remember?”

“Mmm.” He stared down at the bills. Lisa, stung, continued.

“The dream…it was happy, I think. It was really like…warm, and tender. But inside I felt…” Lisa struggled for the word. The gnat, still on her finger, began to move. “…upside down.” She added the last part silently. “It was like—"

“—hey, can you run by Aldi? They’ve got those ice cream bars back in stock.”

Lisa got up, grabbing a paper towel, and gently wiped the gnat on it. She folded it, careful not to wad it up, and placed it gingerly in the trash. “That’s clear across town,” she said, leaning over to give him a kiss on the temple, ignoring her quickening heartbeat. “Can I get you something similar at Kroger?”

He frowned. “I’ll go, if it’s that much trouble. But it’s not as if you do anything all day—”

“—it’s no trouble.” Lisa said quickly. “I’ll go.”

“What was that about upside down?” He asked. “Like in that TV show?”

“No. Nothing.” Lisa watched him wad up the remainder of the mail, tossing the heavy ball of paper into the trash can where it landed on top of the folded napkin, sinking it deep into the bag. The gnat. She winced. “It was just weird, that’s all.”

“Okay, then. I’m off to work.”

“Bye.” Lisa said, but he’d already shut the door.

A loving, feathery voice in her ear.

“Come here.”

“No.” Lisa said.

* * *

Lisa poured herself another cup of coffee and walked over to the desk, powering up the computer. She dreaded going to that damned store. The doors will open and it will be fine.

Lisa opened Facebook and typed Thomas Sato into the search engine. She clicked on his memorial page, smiling as she scrolled through old photos. The most recent photo was from five years before; of a hardened, changed-looking Thomas holding a baby on his knee. The baby was chubby and smiling, a slick of drool hanging from its toothless, happy gums. Thomas’ face was drawn and thin, his cheekbones in stark contrast against the whiteness of his face. In school Thomas had always been tanned, his skin smooth and glowing in direct counter to his classmates with their zits and oily foreheads. How many nights had she lay in her canopy bed with its lavender-colored unicorn sheets, clutching her pillow and dreaming of touching Thomas Sato’s smooth, high cheek?

Lisa could still remember how his brown eyes seemed to dance, even when he was getting sent to detention or getting in fights with some random jock—incidents that happened often. Thomas never stopped finding things funny, those eyes never stopped twinkling.

Lisa had caught a glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror after her husband had gone to work. Her pale skin, under-eye bags and stringy hair seemed to accuse. The teal of her robe made her sallow. She’d come downstairs looking so haggard. No wonder her husband was more excited by vegan ice cream bars than her. He went to the gym every day, lived on protein shakes, and looked amazing. Like most men, the salt-and-pepper creeping into his beard only made him more dashing; sophisticated.

Women hit on him all the time. At grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants. They did it in front of her. He always laughed with fake humility, as if to say, “Who, me?”

Lisa scrolled.

The computer screen froze. She clicked, and the computer beeped; a long, low whine of warning.

Fuck, Lisa thought, shutting her laptop. It was time to get dressed and head to the store.

“Come here.”

“I said no.” Lisa pulled on her jacket.

* * *

This time, it was no surprise.

Lisa, stood in front of the automatic doors, where they remained shut, staring eyelessly back at her.

“Seriously, fuck you.” Lisa said and pitched herself forward suddenly.

She caught herself just in time, on clumsy feet just before her forehead collided with the glass. She could see shoppers perusing the produce section, oblivious to the seemingly invisible woman on the other side. Her arms propelled forward, her hands landing flat against the glass, palms out prayer-style, legs trembling. She leaned there, breathless, waiting for the whoosh. They had to open now.

Except they didn’t.

“Lisa.” The voice was so faint, so light, yet she could hear it clear as a bell over the sounds of people and cars. The voice was achingly tender. “Come here.”

Lisa screamed. Finally, people in the store began to look. “Please; help me!” She screeched. “The doors won’t open. They’re stuck. Somebody help!”

A woman near the checkout held a single bottle of soda aloft, as though she’d just been picking it up when Lisa’s scream had frozen her in place.

“Come here, Lisa. Come to me.”

Lisa screamed again. She could see an employee against the far wall, picking up a telephone.

“No need to scream lady, jeez.”

Lisa turned; hysterical, grateful. A teenager wearing a black t-shirt with a pot leaf on it held a skateboard beneath his arm and a cell phone in his other hand. He’d been recording her, probably still was. Lisa didn’t care. The only thing that mattered to her anymore was getting those damned doors to open.

“Just help.” She gestured at the glass. “Please.”

“Okay, but I mean…it’s not hard.” The kid propped his skateboard against the wall. As he stood flush with Lisa, the automatic doors whipped open quickly, and he stepped inside.

He turned to her with an easy smile. “See? Nothing to it, you just—”

Lisa had begun to step through after him. As she did, the doors pushed shut, slamming in Lisa’s face and catching her wrist. She yanked it back just in time.

For a moment she could only stand there stupidly, wrist throbbing where the door had almost crushed it. The boy on the other side of the glass stared at her wide-eyed. Probably also wondering if she was a ghost.

“Stupid. Fucking. Doors.” Lisa whispered, a sudden humming in her ears. Her throat burned. In the distance, she could hear sirens. They’d called the police. She could read the headline now, the one they’d all be sharing on Facebook tomorrow. Local woman has meltdown at Aldi. Claims automatic doors wouldn’t open. Police suspect drugs or mental illness may be a factor.

The buzzing in her ears was so loud. The teen was still staring from the other side of the glass. Mocking. Lisa walked over and grabbed his skateboard, hoisting it high above her head.

“Come here, Lisa. Come here come here come here—”

“Hey, wait!” The teen mouthed, though Lisa could barely hear beyond the roaring in her ears. “Don’t! Hey, that old lady’s stealing my skateboard—”

Lisa threw the board with all her might, then, as the sound of splintering, shattering doors replaced the roaring, she threw herself forward with all her weight and went tumbling through the broken glass headfirst.

When she stood up, the room was quiet, with a warm, dim glow. She made her way down the hall, following the sweet golden light of the chandelier, beckoning from the kitchen.

Thomas was there, holding his wooden spoon, smiling. The chandelier refracted a million bits of light, like a shattering come back together.

Lisa came round the kitchen island, enveloping herself in his embrace, her tears wetting his shirt. “Thomas.” She was surprised at the choking in her own voice. “I missed you.”

His arms held her tight and fast.

Outside the glass double doors to the patio, it was dusk; the sky darkening to a beautiful, lush shade of purplish-blue. The trees swayed in the wind like dark fingers, and she longed to feel that breeze on her skin. “Do those doors open?” She asked, pushing herself closer into Thomas’ warm, inviting body.

He didn’t answer.

* * *

As Lisa lay cocooned in her hospital bed, wrapped in white linen sheets, head propped on a starchy pillow, the night nurse could’ve sworn she saw her smile. She wondered if she should tell the husband—Mike, his name was—but decided it would be more cruelty than kindness. There was no hope that his wife would wake. Not after that horrific accident.

They’d discussed it over coffee in the hospital cafeteria. “I should’ve gotten the car serviced; light had been on for ages,” he’d confessed, blue eyes crinkling at the corners. “She was on the way to Aldi when it happened, to get my ice cream bars. The brakes just…failed. How do I live with the guilt?”

“It’s not your fault,” the nurse had said, putting a hand on his, to comfort him.

His other hand closed over hers. “Thank you.” He squeezed.

It was only that afternoon that he’d sighed, shoulders drooping, and agreed to pull the plug. Lisa died, uneventfully, later that night. The nurse had washed and dressed Lisa’s body with respect as the orderlies waited outside with the gurney.

The automatic doors opened soundlessly as the attendants wheeled Lisa’s body through. Later, the nurse was surprised to see Mike lingering in the corridor. Red-eyed, he asked if she’d like to get another coffee after work. She said yes.

When her shift was over she threw her bag over her shoulder and walked down the hospital hallway to clock out for the night. As she headed to the cafeteria, she could have sworn she heard a woman’s voice, low and pained in her ear.

“Watch for the doors.”

End.

Lillah Lawson is the author of novels Monarchs Under the Sassafras Tree (2019; nominated for Georgia Author of the Year 2020); So Long, Bobby (February 2023); The Dead Rockstar Trilogy (’20-’24); and upcoming Tomorrow & Tomorrow with Lauren Emily Whalen (October 2023).

Lillah was a recipient of the UGA Willson Center/Flagpole Magazine’s Micro-Fellowship for her short story Shoofly (2020). Her horror short The Lady and the Tall Man was published in the Shiver Anthology (Nico Bell) in 2021. Her essay A Last Blood Benediction: Anne Rice, Type O Negative and Religious Imagery in Vampire Lore appeared in Pop Culture & Theology Magazine in January 2022, and was chosen as one of their five best pieces of the year. Her story Burn the Witch appeared in the Stoker-nominated anthology Chromophobia, in 2022. Another story, Oblong Objects in the Mirror (Are Closer than they Appear) appeared in the Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic Anthology by Cosmic Horror Monthly in May 2023. Her true crime piece A Close Shave with Death: the Framing of Henry Drake appeared in Scalawag Magazine in August 2023. Lillah enjoys writing across genres, specializing in historical fiction, southern gothic, and horror. She also writes a monthly column for her local newspaper.

In addition to writing, Lillah is a genealogist pursuing her BA in History and English Literature, and proudly serves as secretary on her local library’s Board of Trustees. An avid music lover, she’s happiest at metal shows. She lives just outside of Athens, Georgia.

Ritual Sacrifice to the Great God of Skates

Eric J. Guignard

It’s hot, sticky, ugly outside. Distant haze shrouds the valley, if one can see that far, past the festering shopping malls, teeming with languid, plotting patrons. They come, they go, belching exhaust-pipe fumes from their Pintos and Plymouth Champs at every turn. Imagine them there, sweating, broiling. Clambering in and out of stores like the morbid funereal procession of some sun-sickened cult. 90°, 100°, 110°—the temperature doesn’t matter when Sears or J.C. Penney has a five-percent discount off yesteryear’s jeans. The streets are always packed there, crawling with cheap-suited workers, and insurance clerks, and bored housewives in their curlers and shapeless gowns. They step in unison, clumping and pacing, and mindless and dull. Screaming kids, befuddled elderly, dentists and actuaries and other broken-hearted, mobs of the clinging, clawing bourgeois, all circling each other like minor sharks turned toothless and terrified, watching, just watching for what will happen next. Such is the view in this downtown suburbia.

Rita San Glory knows this. It’s why she drives the other way. Out on Route 63, where a few ancient trees still remind mankind of their place in this strange world. Past that to Cherry Blossom Trail, where an antique barn guards the crossroads like a timbered paladin. Past there and down the old fire road to a remote lot that’s resplendent. Here, the air isn’t brown with smog, but gold with dreams.

She parks and gets out, pulls from her backseat a velvet-lined box and carries it to the only building around, a single-story structure like a warehouse, long and deep, and maybe you can’t see one end to the other, no matter how hard you try.

So just imagine it there where it doesn’t belong, like the mirage in the middle of the desert, the rainbow sheen of an oil slick that if you touch sends ripples into radiance…

But the building, it is there, for real, for her, and four giant letters cascade down its front wall: RINK.

Behind her, in the parking lot, other cars snake in. Those who wish to skate too, the initiates.

Rita enters, and they follow.

Rita San Glory in Her Element

She sits on one of those long wooden benches that’s wrapped in carpet, mauve and maroon from another age. It’s threadbare, to be sure, and that’s from love. She sits there, and she takes off her flat pumps. She opens the box she carried in from her car, the one that’s velvet-lined, and she lifts out a pair of roller skates that shares her name, and the others watch, those who have come before, and those who have yet to arrive.

When Rita San Glory puts on those skates, she feels her feet fitting into them—not the other way around. Not the oiled leather, dyed cross-stitched red and white, wrapping each foot to squeeze tight as she runs those double-knit laces up over her ankles helix-style, but rather her feet seem to shift inside the skates like something pliable, potter’s clay molding between the hard shelled toe stop, flattening out over the steel plate, and then rising up in the boot, filling perfectly every indentation and slope.

Rita’s used to it. It makes her fast, lets her saiiil. She stands, feeling the lift of those half-foot wheels, and it’s on.

She rolls down a thirty-foot hall, past the endcap of lockers, past a video arcade, past a snack bar that sells a little more than what’s shown on the menu. There’s a gate up ahead, the kind where bulls might chute through before charging out into a rodeo field. She takes hold of the metal frame—it’s cold, but warming up. She rolls her shoulders back, does a calf raise, cracks her knuckles and pulls a squat. Then she signals to the DJ; it’s only a look, and that’s all he needs.

The rink lights drop for one second, just enough overture for her to frame that gate, gold bangled arms held high for the explosion of light—it flashes three times, laser swaths of red, of blue, of green, and her face is a phoenix rising from the gloom. She hits the concrete track among the cheers, and all around it’s flipped-up feathers, ducktails, locks, and now she’s another bird blazin’ past in blue spandex and a rainbow tee sportin’ “Bounce Rock.”

Charge and go, racin’ in the front, racin’ down the track, cross those wheels, kickin’ from the back—

“Rita! Rita! Rita!” she hears the crowds cheer, all the prismatic eyeballs of the whacked-out world.

The lights, they’re bright, and the sounds sizzle, but the smells are here too; yeah, the scents, they’re effluvious. Bearing grease, slick lube, sweat, the sweet kind, perfumed from secreted dreams, and hair spray, ’cause those locks won’t stay in place on their own. Snack bar smells, popcorn and pie; Coca Cola with fizz like fireworks; body lotion, cologne, and lipstick—cherry flavored, of course.

Rita swivels and swirls, double arm swings; she does “The Bus Stop,” she does “The Get Down,” “The Latin Hustle,” “The Back Catch.” She taps and drags her left foot, turns to the right, closes her feet together for a four-count, poses with her elbows pointed down, and shakes her goddamn beautiful ass.

Then she charges, races, speeds, and if her skates had throttles, they’d be opened wide, raising sparks on those inside turns, around a track with no end, looping and looping, and the faster the better, hurtling down the straightaways, cutting through the leads, leaning in, leaping out, for a back-spin and a flamingo, double-clutching those curves with a smile for a mile.

This is Lucky’s 24-Hour Roller Daze, and in here it’s strobe lights flashing, neon bright, 30,000-watt system speakers pounding out ABBA so loud you’ll dream of that concussion in your sleep, but you won’t be sleepin’ for a long time, cause this club won’t allow it.

So just groove on, baby, groove on, ’cause Rita sure will…

Craig Glibbsen in His Element

Eastland Shopping Mall. Clothing-Mart. Craig Glibbsen skims through pull-overs. Twenty or thirty of them. Hung on racks, folded on shelves. Worn on life-sized busts of ivory-skinned mannequins. There’s crew neck and fisherman’s. Cashmere, merino. Ecru, Khaki, Desert Puce. Cardigans, button or no. Dusters, the cardigan’s longer cousin. Buy one, get half off the other. Emboldened stickers inform that tweed has a traditional honeycomb Aran cable stitch. He sniffles, moves on. Once he was a size medium, but now he’s a large, and that has to do with his gut, the softness, the flab that has somehow spread with insidious, yet inexorable, lethargy. His arms are too skinny, too runty for the larger size pull-over, which just accentuates such unflattering proportion, but he must make do, since the medium would give him a look like he’s gestating a spare tire. It’s not fair. More pull-overs. Here are alpaca fibers, natural fleece, unless synthesized. Basket-stitch or cable-pattern. Both beige as dust motes, and just as common. He nods appreciatively. Did you know sweaters originate from the 15th century, knitted by fisherman’s wives to keep their beloved warm in those frigid realms off the Atlantic’s Channel Isles? Craig didn’t. Now such clothing is sold by design, by texture, by name. Talvikki or Neige, assembly-line precision from the child labor of fashion supply camps. Craig thumbs through more. Polyamide, acrylic, elastin. There’s a nice raglan. Saddle shoulders with a proper arc. Muzak hums from distant ports, “The Great Pretender” done on a xylophone. He sniffles again, gazes abstractedly at a Bouclé Knit sweater: Is yarn actually a better heat insulator than cotton? It’s inelegant, what with the loopy patterns, but it’s definitely a cozy touch.

MaryAnne touches his back, and Craig startles. “Anything?” she asks.

“No.” Craig looks to his wristwatch.

They say no more, but in unison turn, and exit Clothing-Mart, into the walkway levels of other stores. Wall to wall, the stores connect, doors spaced twenty feet apart—optimal space for crowd control, for meandering before display windows, yet without impeding enthralled foot traffic. Here’s Hallmark greeting cards and holiday ornaments. Here’s Payless ShoeSource, the cheapest footwear in the hometown capital. Hickory Farms, food gifts of processed meat and saran-wrapped gouda cheese. Kay Bee Toys, VideoConcepts, and Zales Jewelry. A thousand more.

MaryAnne carries three bags. Craig stuffs his hands into trouser pockets. Her pull-over is tight, fitting a nice form. It’s admirable. A sniffle comes. He stopped wearing pull-overs two years ago, opting now for flannel button-downs. He can’t remember how she and him met.

It’s crowded here, in Eastland Mall. Escalators hum. Children shout. Registers ring, clang, clatter. A girl in a paper hat and carnival-striped apron offers them corn dog samples.

“Yum,” MaryAnne and Craig both say.

Wherein a pair of strollers bump together, and two mothers realize they haven’t seen each other in a month. An old man heroically chooses to walk the stairs. A fly has somehow gotten inside the mall, buzzing and whirling, searching for food slop in which to lay its eggs.

“Wilson Leather is moving. Did you know that?” MaryAnne asks.

“No.” Craig scratches at his ear.

A girl is handing out flyers. MaryAnne and Craig each take one. They’re advertisements for Lucky’s 24-Hour Roller Daze. Come Visit! Fun for all ages!

Craig sniffles. Sees MaryAnne give a quick wink to the girl.

He folds the flyer in half, then again. When they’re out of earshot from the girl, he asks, “What was that?”

“What?”

“That wink.”

“Just that.”

He makes a face. “You wink at strangers?”

“I’ve seen her around.”

“Where?”

“Lucky’s.”

“This place?” He holds up the folded flyer.

She shrugs. “It’s fun.”

“Never heard of it before.”

“Of course you haven’t.”

“What does that mean?”

“Because I told you it’s fun.” MaryAnne gives a playful nudge into Craig’s ribs. He pouts.

“Isn’t skating for kids?”

“Like the flyer says, Craig. It’s ‘fun for all ages.’”

They walk on, past a Harrison Draperies and a Foot Locker sports attire. Employees in mock black-and-white ref shirts motion for them to come inside. Big sales! Big deals!

“I didn’t know you went there.”

“It’s not really your thing, Craig.”

“I can skate.”

She shrugs, lifting up her shopping bags in a sort of placation. “You have a pair?”

“Of skates? No...”

MaryAnne gives it a moment. Her voice is a singsong when she says, “They rent.”

“Hm.”

“If you want,” she says very indifferently.

He glances back. The girl with the flyers has gone. He says, “Yeah. Sure, I mean, take me with you next time. I’ll see what it’s about.”

MaryAnne conceals her smile.

A Moment of Vast Consequence

Craig pulls into the remote lot, off an old fire road, from Cherry Blossom Trail and Route 63. He parks the Datsun. Gazes there at a long building that seems like a horizon, way it stretches back and back until growing smaller and vanishing. Or maybe that’s just the sinking sun, turning into dusk with a certain refraction through trees that surround it all like a great leafy palisade.

He rubs his eyes. “Never knew this place was out here.”

MaryAnne nods. “Sometimes your surrounds can surprise you.”

They exit the car, walk to the endless building. When Craig passes under the letters that spell RINK, he feels a quiet unease. An unsettledness he hasn’t felt since childhood, lost and alone at night. There’s a jolt like a small electric shock, and then it’s done. They go inside. She already has the tickets, some sort of pre-sale, maybe. The place seems copacetic.

Until they reach the window for rentals and the unease hits again. MaryAnne walks off. He’s taken aback. These skates, the ones to choose from, they’re not… not normal. At least the way he remembers roller skates from his youth, teetering down the cracked sidewalk in front of his family home.

He leans in to look closer until a woman cuts in front, the woman who runs the rental counter. This woman, she dazzles. Snakeskin sheen on a rouge face, lips like a lush heart, beating with each breath. She’s slender with muscles lithe as a wildcat. Eyes green as emeralds. Contacts? A trick of light? Those eyes, whatever they are, they search Craig, and they read deeeep.

“Here,” she says. “Size nine. Wide.”

She gives him a pair of roller skates that shares his name.

He stares at them. “How—”

MaryAnne returns, she’s already on wheels, brought her own maybe. “Need help lacing up?”

“No,” Craig whispers. The moment passes, he can’t think of anything else to say. When he puts the skates on, there’s a pressure that builds around each foot, not unpleasant, but unusual. It’s warm, almost throbbing. Wanting.

“Ready?” MaryAnne takes his hand, pulls him down the hall, and then he’s at the track.

He’s never seen anything like it—swaths of light like shooting stars rocket down the lanes, flash-pops of brilliance pass and bend in waves that snap back behind. MaryAnne nudges him nearer.

He stutters, “Are those actual… flames inside the track?”

“Yes, Craig. Yes they are.”

And she shoves him forward.

Intermission

There are new gods as there are old, gods that are born, that are designed, gods that reincarnate or appear through collective vicissitude. Major, minor, providence or numen, the deities who are us, of our image yet magnified to titanic size and consequence. Is existence quantifiable? Or is it senseless as the filament of cosmic hair that retches out time and space? There, behold Ninazu, Mesopotamian god of serpents. From Enegi to Eshnunna, He doth go, as warrior and infinite son. There, witness Scáthach, Celtic goddess of combat. Temptress, trickster, heroine, She yet keeps the Fortress of Shadows in thrall. There, consider Xipe Totec, Aztec god of metallurgy. He cloaks himself in flayed human skin to depict the act of germination and of His nature in the sunken valles of Puebla, Mexico.

Here, regard Rink, Flemmish god of roller skating. See Him, if yon worth prevails. He proffers great bliss, both transcendent and of mortal felicity. At a cost. At a measure of worth. There are times—moments of astronomical significance—when Rink makes Himself known, when followers come to worship, times when distant moons and worlds align like the four spinning wheels of a boss-spring ride.

It is said by theologians that worshippers love their Gods for either external riches or internal consolation. Yet Rink towers above them all, undefinable. Venerable though haughty, volatile and so badass. Mosaic tiles depict him, skin of neon red, head thrown back with just enough smile to see fangs. There’s a head of hair like a Texas tornado—bouffant up and duck tail in back. Lithe arms outstretch, one waving a goedendag sword, and the other holding a human soul like an hourglass; is it compassion he holds up this soul? Or perdition? The debate is as enduring as its legacy… and now look again at that skin, red as it is… You tell me: Is it blood? Flames? Cherry lipstick smears from Rita San Glory?

Maybe never mind that, but catch a long glimpse of those legs, all six of them, fifty feet high, and each colossal cloven foot sheathed in the bombest slick rigs you’d ever dream: golden skates jeweled with skulls, set on lifters and drag packs, with astronomical ratios that spring each bearing to the tightest of powerband.

Rink roars, he skates through the cosmos, cutting swathes through lesser gods with a pivot and a swirl, a split-squat-and-go. And sometimes he makes his way to Earth, where a coven of one hundred initiates emulate his ways and, once a year, grant onto him yearly sacrifice.

A Singular Moment of Realization

Craig’s been pushed from the skating rink gate by MaryAnne, and he lurches onto the concrete track. It’s smooth here, glassy as ice, and promptly the wheels roll out from under one foot. He clumsily falls to a knee, says “Ow,” is about to turn and yell at her for having pushed him—I mean, why would she do that?

Then the gate closes and it latches, and the moment strikes him as he rises, as he tries to steady himself: there’s a vibration coming through here, like placing your ear on the steel rail of an oncoming train, thundering, pulsing, growing nearer. And this vibration isn’t just from the track, but in the air too, a carnivorous beast breathing, and Craig has to turn, even with growing recognizance, MaryAnne all-but-forgot, looking there! where concentric blossoms of smoke whirl across the outside lanes…

A figure appears from the gloom, insubstantial as a wraith, until backlight catches the sparkling turn, and then it’s sequins and spangles, blue spandex and iridescent sheen. The figure slides in like a rocket queen, coming upon him all at once in a blur, seizes his hand perfectly into her own, and yanks him along to skate at her majestic side.

A Singular Moment of Realization From a Different Perspective

Rita San Glory skates here whenever she feels the need. Whenever age has caught up, threatens to overwhelm. Whenever the world is slowing, and she needs to speed up. Whenever the sun reshapes seasons, when the calling is great, when the one hundred initiates gather.

Every year, one among them provides offering, sacrifice from the flock of the mundane—a mortal, assessed and found lacking, found inconsequential and unsaved.

And so here it is, the truth of the matter: Fuck confessional. You come here, you skate away your sins. You dance and you glide, and this is the purest vision of Xanadu you’ll ever know on this side of existence.

Rita sees the sacrifice fall onto the track. He’s unsure, dazed. Lost. Pale and pouting in his rumpled button-down flannel. He looks around, looks back. His fingers are limp, his posture strained. Those eyes blink like a sad toad’s.

Rita leads the pack, the eternal hunt, and swoops upon him. “Baby,” she says, her voice husky, smoky as the gloom. “You’re about to lose your mind.”

A Journey of Transcendent Flight

The woman takes him and at touch, he knows her name. The union is immediate, euphoric, entwining. They change lanes, and they fly, and the one hundred initiates follow, jostling at their heels.

And Craig can’t help but scream, though he’s not in pain. It’s shock, facing the unfamiliar, which to this woman, this Rita San Glory, must be the familiar; fear, confusion, disbelief, it is the same for all whom she takes hold.

When he finds his voice, it’s: “Wh—what’s happening?”

She laughs. To ask Rita San Glory, High Priestess of the Sacred Circle of Rink, what is happening is to ask the stalking lion why it is hungry, or the ocean why it should storm.

And at which point Craig Glibbsen is transported. Another time, another place, another him. He looks upon himself, skating ten billion miles an hour. Ten trillion. More. There are no shapes around any longer, at least nothing discernible, but that existence has become a running blur, colors mashed and whirled together like passing through a great blender. He feels his particles trying to pull apart and understands that what’s keeping him together, keeping him going, is the woman who holds his hand, and if she should let go now he will be lost in the cosmic spiral of annihilation.

Craig Glibbsen was once a child, and before him lay the interminable entanglement of choices. Choices to turn right or to turn left, to speak a kind word or one cruel. Choices of books, of flavors, of friends; to act honestly or to lie, to walk or run or dance, to pet a dog, to watch a cloud, to kiss, to kill, to ignore. To choose the duster, the cardigan, the Bouclé Knit sweater. And with each choice made, how so does the future change, does it evolve or reset, or does it shrink by one, the decision made, the alternative foregone, and onto the next choice, and the shrinkage by one yet again, and the next and the next and the next, until the end of existence is but one final choice away…

And Craig sees the choices then, he lives them as he circles round and round in the lemniscate-loop of infinity. The adrenaline, the twists, turns, sparks showering all around, fireworks of celerity, and Rita San Glory who shifts and shows with spandex-clad limbs that grow and multiply and face him with the eyes of star-spangled vastitude.

Craig is an ant, infinitesimal, insignificant. Craig is a mote, a whit of dung from the bowel of a moon-slug. Craig is a fireman, a father, a hero. Craig is a primate on an island risen by catastrophe. Craig is a mayor, a mother, a lover. He is a spore. He is a wraith. He is a leaf of lettuce in the salad of a troll.

And so are his travels toward Rink, the learning, the yearning, each choice made, each choice not made, flying, flying through the laser swaths and fog screens, flying through the DJ pulse, the scree of wheels, the gold dust sparkle where he lives all the choices of that interminable entanglement of existence.

And he knows he’s dead. He’s been dead, hasn’t he, just living in the purgatory of Eastland Shopping Mall, for years and years and years, all his venial sins collected and gauged, and charged back in due to a longing and deprivation from which there is no awareness, a yearning for more, of something indefinable, something out of grasp, a torment of banality and discount days in the dishware department.

But for MaryAnne, he’d been saved, pulled forth from the distraught. MaryAnne, one of those hundred initiates, tasked and trusted to deliver him, to sacrifice him, to save him, and that he is free, he is flying in this moment, and he has learned the absolute singular perfect path of choices for his own existence, and thus is he spent, and Rita San Glory delivers him to Rink…

And why else would you skate but to live another life, of freedom, of exuberance?

Then the lights dim.

End.

Eric J. Guignard is a writer and anthologist of dark and speculative fiction, operating from the shadowy outskirts of Los Angeles, where he also runs the small press Dark Moon Books. He’s twice won the Bram Stoker Award, won the Shirley Jackson Award, and been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and International Thriller Writers Award. His latest books are his novella Last Case at a Baggage Auction (Harper Day), novel Doorways to the Deadeye (JournalStone), and short story collection That Which Grows Wild (Cemetery Dance). His second short story collection, A Graveside Gallery: Tales of Ghosts and Dark Matters, will be out through Cemetery Dance in 2025. Visit Eric at: www.ericjguignard.com or Twitter: @ericjguignard.

Don’t Tell

Jonathan Gensler

A thousand cadets in gray, where there should have been a thousand and one.

A cadence of drums spilled through the darkness. A bagpipe wailed, and the instruments wound around one another, echoing off Gothic towers and across a grassy plain. A mass of uniformed youths came to attention in a singular movement. A second bagpipe joined the first, and the requiem crawled towards and enveloped the horde.

“Cadet Johnson, Timothy!” a voice shouted, cutting off the pipes and drums.

“Present, sir!” came a reply from deep within the ranks.

“Cadet James, Sarah!”

“Present, sssi...sir!” The response shaking, quavering.

“Cadet Jones, Victor!”

Emptiness.

Then again, “Cadet Jones, Victor!” The mass of youth in gray stirred not.

After a moment of tranquility, a final command, drawn down to just above a whisper, “Cadet Jones, Victor...” followed by absolute silence.

The midnight moon bared its blade of light; the granite-faced barracks shimmered. Three notes rang out from a hidden bugle and the mournful melody of “Taps” floated across the assembly, slipped into muted echoes, and then stillness. The Corps melted back into the safety of the barracks.

A single young man remained, staring across the field. Tears streamed down his stony cheeks. He dropped his long-held salute as drops hit the pavement at his feet.

His stoic facade crumbled and his knees buckled. The cadet jerked with a cough before a splash of watery vomit hit the pavement. The smell of PBR and fried food laced with stomach acid overran his senses and the young man hacked until his chest was ragged with dry heaves.

His eyes, inches from the ground, found a reflection in the beer-tinged bilge.

A face, and not his own.

Its features were blurred, a pallid inverse of himself, a nightmare. He felt the breath of someone standing over him, with the damp foulness of the grave replacing the acrid stench of stale lager.

He scrambled backwards, his eyes glued to the stain on the otherwise pristine ground.

He felt eyes upon him and looked up and around, wary. Had he seen movement out there?

No. He was alone. Totally alone.

With a snap of his heels, he made an about-face and marched back through the arched sally port to rejoin the living.

* * *

A few hours later, through the short tunnel and around the corner, two cadets remained awake.

“Thanks for covering for me here, Sam,” said Tim, the young man from earlier, dark brown hair cropped close.

“Of course. I don’t know how you managed it, man. Those things give me the... I don’t know. I remember the last one, and they are just too damn hard.”

“Anyway, I appreciate it. I was supposed to be here with you.”

While he was still looking at Sam with wet eyes, an old phone rang on the desk between them.

“Bat-phone, your turn, Tim,” said Sam, nodding over to it.

Tim hopped up from his seat. “Central Guard Room, Cadet Tim Johnson speaking. How can I help you?”

An earful of jabbering came through the handset. Tim responded, “Slow down, ma'am. Please tell me that again.” He rolled his eyes at Sam, circling his finger around his ear, mouthing “Crazy.”

“Yes ma’am, I heard that. Down at the First Class Club? Are you sure?” Another pause. Tim’s eyes winced. “Yes of course you are. We will head right down and investigate. Thank you, yes ma’am. Goodnight.”

He looked up at Sam. “You will never fucking believe this. That was the Supe’s wife.”

“What did she want at oh-two-thirty? Can’t be anything fucking good.”

“It’s weird. Thought she heard someone prowling around over the hill by the Firstie Club.”

“Probably another fucking raccoon.”

“Yeah, likely. Log that she called and reported some strange noises down at the Club. It’s probably nothing, but I need some air after that vigil, so I’ll head down to check it out.”

“Don’t forget comms. Go ahead and make the full round, too. Might as well knock it out now instead of waiting another thirty minutes.”

Tim picked up the brick and clipped it to his belt. “I have Number Nine. I’ll give a radio check when I get over to the Monument before I head down the hill to the Club. See you in a bit. And seriously, thanks.”

* * *

Tim walked out of the guard room into the concrete- and granite-bound quad of the cadet area and turned to walk through the sally-port tunnel and onto the parade ground, where a few hours earlier the Corps gave their final respects to Tim’s late roommate, Victor Jones.

Tim emerged from the tunnel and glanced left at the pale stone form of George Washington on his horse, looming over the plain ahead, the commander of an army long dead.

The moon painted a pall on concrete, granite, and glass alike. Shadows cast in the window wells above him turned the long rows of barracks rooms into an array of eye sockets peering down.

Washington glared as well, the statue’s soulless eyes seeming to follow Tim as he strode past the monument’s base. Tim shivered in the growing cold, felt as if everything was watching him, judging him, bringing his mind back to that moment of weakness earlier. Washington’s stony countenance seemed to accuse the cadet of failure at every turn.

Dark swirls floated in the haze above the parade ground.

Tim froze, captivated by the whorls of shadow taking shape in the void. As if the darkness itself was reaching out, to grab him and size him up, to find him lacking.

Tim closed his eyes and shook his head. “Get on with it, Tim. There’s nothing there.”

The residual taste of mud and vomit in his mouth told him otherwise.

He stole a moment to pause, to repeat in a whisper one of the old pieces of knowledge, “But an officer on duty knows no one…”

He skirted the apron at the base of the barracks and passed by Quarters One Hundred, where the Supe’s wife had called.

Walking absentmindedly, Tim thought only of Victor, and how his roommate had up and disappeared the week prior. For everyone else, this was out of the blue: gone from the barracks, no note, not a clue of why he left or where he had gone. He had left only secrets, puzzle pieces shared with Tim over a few weeks of shocked emotion.

Yeah, we all knew it was a hard road, boundless stress coming from all directions, but we were thriving, thought Tim. Victor was thriving. He’d been selected as captain of the team handball club next spring; he was near the top of his major, if not the whole class, academically. Everything seemed to be going right for him. Why would he leave?

Of course, that was before the body washed up on the banks of the Hudson halfway to New York City. The autopsy would say he’d broken more than half the bones in his body, his lungs full of water when he died.

Witness reports started coming in. A young couple had seen him walking down Route 9W from West Point at oh-two-hundred. They stopped to offer help, and he seemed fine, they reported. Said he was out for a walk and wanted to go watch the river.

Another man reported seeing him at Bear Mountain Bridge, hiking across the walkway closer to sunrise. He’d noticed Vic was stopped and looking downriver. He thought it must be just another hiker. This didn’t look out of place, he wasn’t staring down at the water, but looking downstream, as the sunlight crept up over the mountains and began streaming down into the river valley itself.

“But yes, that was definitely him. He was wearing that uniform. Not sure why I thought he was a hiker... I was in a hurry. You know how it is,” he told the police.

Everyone soon found out he was wearing his full-dress uniform, even his saber still attached to his belt as he tumbled through twenty miles of the Hudson’s plodding current before getting caught on the rocks just north of Tarrytown and the Tappan Zee Bridge, at Sleepy Hollow.

* * *

A week earlier Tim had been called to the brigade commander’s office to discuss the missing cadet, and if he could provide anything that might help them understand what happened. Everyone remained convinced he had simply gone AWOL, maybe on a drinking binge, now laid up somewhere hungover for a day or two.  It certainly wasn’t unheard-of for a cadet to drop off the face of the earth and show up sleeping it off down in the City at the Soldiers and Sailors Club, where a shared bunk room cost a scant twenty-five dollars with a military ID.

That hopeful outlook didn't last long. While Tim was walking through the prior weeks and months of recollections of his roommate, trying to eke out any pertinent details (while maintaining his neutrality on Victor’s sexual orientation, per official Army policy), they got The Call.

The Garrison Military Police had received word that a body had been found down river, wearing cadet full dress, and it was waiting at the morgue in Sleepy Hollow. As there were no other cadets unaccounted for, the MPs assumed it must be Victor, and had worked the academy chain of command until they got the Brigade Commander.

As the cadet commander took the call, Tim sat not quite still, feeling a rush of blood to his hands as he balled them up into fists and then released his fingers, over and over.

“I understand sir, yes. He is here with me now. Yes, we can do that. Right away, sir. Thank you for calling us so quickly.” The look in the cadet commander’s eyes went blank as he listened and responded with quiet professionalism.

“Tim, we need to go see the Colonel... I am... I’m so sorry. They’ve found a body.” As the knowledge of the death firmed up in his mind, the commander’s poise slipped. This wasn’t supposed to happen. The ranking cadet stood and walked to the door, automatically motioning for Victor to follow, and suddenly sat back down. Glassy eyed, he looked at Tim and said, “He’s dead.”

Tim’s life blurred into a whirlwind of dread, sadness, and sleepless nights. Of answering endless questions from the chaplain, some random psychologist, his other friends. He had been willing himself through it, living in a daze, making it through each twenty-four-hour period by drawing on the reserve of strength that wells up in all soldiers, hell, in all people, when faced with the choice of living in sadness or finding a way to drive on and charley-mike.

* * *

The evening before the funeral, Tim dashed into a building with a run-down Victorian facade, slashing in through sheets of rain. In the alcove, a man in a midnight blue suit greeted him with a nod, motioning for him to head down the hallway to the left.

“Thank you, sir.”

“We are sorry for your loss, mister…?”

Not responding, Tim lowered his eyes and removed his gray cap. The dress gray uniform and its rain-soaked wool constrained his movement as he tried to hurry past the sparse flower arrangements to the double doors at the end of the hallway. A young woman had her hands pressed to the doors, her head bowed down.

“Michelle,” Tim said.

She turned with a forced smile, tears streaking down her cheeks.

“Tim. Mom and Dad wouldn’t come. God, they never even wanted him to go to that blasted place to begin with, and now they won’t come to see him like this?”

Tim placed a hand on Michelle’s shoulder. “I’m glad you are here. I know it wasn’t far, but Victor would be happy to know you made it.”

“If Vic could be smiling at anything, we wouldn’t be here like this.” She choked on a tear- and snot-filled cough and clutched Tim’s shoulders. “I can’t go in to see him yet. Please, you go first. Tell me it’s gonna be ok.”

“Sure, but first, what is this place, Michelle? Why here? It seems an odd choice.”

“This is where Vic would want it. We buried our grandpa here just a few years ago, before Vic started training. Though the place seems to have let itself go a bit.”

Tim held Michelle close. “You’re his big sister; you sure you want me to go in first?”

“I just can’t. If our parents wouldn’t do it, then how am I supposed to… you go in first. I’ll follow in a few minutes.”

Tim nodded, steeled himself, and pushed through the swinging doors.

The room on the other side was too large to be so empty. A dozen or more empty rows of pews led up to the casket. Tim hesitated, and felt a shiver run up his feet through his back.

He took a step towards his friend’s body. Rain lashed against the windows, driven by an unholy wind. “Go. See him,” Tim told himself.

He took step after dreadful step. Driving rain battered the stained glass, distracting Tim as he tried to remain calm and focused on his task.

“No one else is here. You can do this. Don’t be a chickenshit.” He walked. Closer and closer, as the coffin took up more of his vision and focus. It loomed impossibly large in front of him, dark cherry, minimal adornment.

“Oh Vic, I am sorry,” he whispered. “I knew what you were going through, and I never said anything. I...”

With his eyes closed and his hands holding the edge of the casket, he could see Victor sitting there in front of him, smiling, reading to him the latest letter from his friend stationed outside Kabul, Afghanistan, the two roommates wondering if the war was still going to be there when they got to their Army assignments in a year or so.

Tim knew that Victor was in love with that same lieutenant fighting in Afghanistan, and that his love was forbidden to talk about. Tim bowed his head, and ran his hands down the lines of the closed encasement when he heard a soft tapping emerge underneath the sound of rain on glass.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

“What the?”

Tap.

Drip.

Drip.

Then his hand felt a splash of water coming from the coffin, and he saw a heavy drop of water roll down the wood. He glanced up just as the large watermark in the ceiling let loose another series of droplets directly above the coffin.

“Fucking hell. This place is a dump, buddy.” He tried to put on a joking face as the drips of water kept coming, splashing his face.

He closed his eyes and lowered his head towards his dead friend.

Then the tapping got louder.

Not just water dripping from the ceiling. TAP. TAP. TAP.

Louder. He felt the lid of the coffin vibrate, then tremble.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!

Tim opened his mouth to scream, but found it to be full of dirty, muddy water.

The upper half of the coffin flew open; inside a raging torrent flowed from nowhere to nowhere. Tim couldn’t breathe, his mouth and lungs full of the same.

He gripped the side of the coffin, his hands sliding along the wet silk lining. Out of the unbelievable depths within, a clammy hand emerged and grasped Tim’s forearm. This time he managed to howl in both pain and terror. The grip held fast, while the current pulled it down and under the head of the coffin with such strength that Tim couldn’t fight it.

He managed to hack up enough water to steal a final breath before being yanked into the current. He tumbled into the dark watery depths.

Tim kept his eyes closed as he felt his body bashed and smashed into rocks, large and jagged. The water was cold, frigid, arctic. Time lost its meaning, and the bruising and breaking of his body numbed his senses to everything but the singular wish for it all to end. To be released from this torment at last.

And as quickly as the drowning had begun, he felt the current slow and stop, and his body rise toward a light. He opened his eyes, and rising with him, the broken and twisted body of his friend.

Victor clutched a book in his stiff hands. A journal: his journal, Tim knew. The missing journal he’d been asked about. The one he’d seen Vic scribbling in for several weeks. On the cover in large angular black letters, it read DON’T TELL.

Vic’s eyes opened, his normally gray irises now an electric blue. His mouth opened wide to shout, but lungs full of water made no sound. Reaching out, he grabbed Tim, struggling to pull him back into the depths. His lips gurgled the same words over and over in a last fading gasp of life: Don’t Tell. Don’t Tell. Don’t Tell. Don’t T—.

And then light. Fresh air. Gasping and floating in the river’s waves towards a rocky shore.

Tim tried to rub his eyes, but his arms didn’t respond to the effort. Victor’s dead grip held fast to his right arm as Tim’s own body was beaten, battered, and broken. The pain in his arm consumed everything. He screamed.

* * *

Tim awoke in a strange room. His head throbbed and he had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there.

An unfamiliar woman walked through the door. “Hey there. Glad to see you up. How are you feeling?”

She called out to the hallway, “Deb? Room nineteen is awake. Let the on-duty know?” and turned back to the bed. Tim’s eyes adjusted to the light, and he noticed her light blue scrubs.

He was in a hospital bed. His whole body shook as he spotted his uniform hanging in an open closet, still a shade too dark from being soaked.

“What’s going on? Wha…what…what happened?” Tim continued to shiver.

Reviewing her clipboard, she said, “Well, sir, you likely suffered from an anxiety or panic attack. Collapsed and knocked your head pretty hard.” She glanced up at Tim with soft eyes. “We can get you a counselor, or someone else to talk to.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. What about the water? The…”

“You were muttering about the water in your sleep. Kept saying his name, the boy who died… I am so sorry for your loss. You poor thing.”

Tim ran his hands over his body and arms, feeling the freezing burn on his right forearm. “What’s this on my arm? Where’s my watch? What time is it?”

“Your limbs are all fine, though you have a nasty bruise on your head.” She glanced at her own wrist. “And it’s noon. You’ve been out for about eighteen hours.”

His eyes opened wide. Did she just ignore the burn mark?

“Noon? I have to get out of here. Did anyone call the Academy?”

“Don’t worry, cadet. We got in touch with them. In fact, someone from the Army is outside waiting to hear how you’re doing.”

“The funeral. Victor’s funeral was at oh-nine-hundred today.”

“Oh, I am so sorry, dear. You must have missed that. The shock of it all. Let me go get the officer.”

Tim’s legs were a bit wobbly after such a long sleep, but he was up and out of bed, throwing on his uniform by the time the major came through the doorway. As he zipped up the front of the damp dress gray top, he felt a slight bulge in the inner chest pocket. Reaching in, he could feel the soggy wet pages of a small book, just the size of Vic’s missing journal.

“How are you feeling, cadet?” Major Harmeson peeked his head in through the cracked doorway just as Tim pulled his hand out from the pocket.

“Sir? What the… what happened? I was at the funeral home, went in to see Vic’s casket, and woke up here.”

“The doc says you likely just collapsed from all the stress. After Afghanistan and then a death like this, all in just a couple of weeks. Term end exams coming up. Sometimes pressure can make a man crack.”

“That doesn’t seem right, sir.” Tim could taste the remains of muddy water in the back of his throat, his teeth covered with a film of dirt and debris. He choked down a spurt of stomach acid.

“Look cadet, are you squared away? The doctor has given us leave to get you back to the academy. It took a minute for them to find your ID and let us know what happened. But we can set everything straight when we get back home.”

“Home, huh?”

“What’s that, cadet?”

“Nothing, sir. I’m ok. A bit… I missed Victor—Cadet Jones’s—funeral this morning.”

“I know. I was there. With his sister, not his parents. Some folks can’t handle a suicide.”

“It isn’t that sir. I saw Michelle last night, too. I wish I could have been there for her.”

The major stopped and faced Tim.

“Let me know right now if you need more time. But this is an opportunity to show what you’re made of, cadet.”

“Yes, sir. I am good to go.” No hesitation.

“You need to remember—you need to know it—in here,” the major said, tapping his own chest. “Death isn't merely a small part of what we do, cadet. It is who we are. We deal death to others, and we get our share in return. Might as well get used to that now. The war waiting for you on the outside isn't going anywhere, anytime soon. Trust me. These Taliban and Al Queda fucks aren’t just going to up and surrender.”

The Major didn’t hold anything back, but he didn’t seem to be wrong, at least about this.

The academy had a special relationship with Death.

* * *

Tim couldn’t sleep. His barracks room remained full of Victor's belongings: uniforms neatly hung, bed taut as ever, shoes dressed squarely under Vic’s bed. His desk had been searched and Vic’s computer taken to the IT department to be searched for hints of what happened, but Vic’s books and pictures were still up on the shelves.

Well past midnight, Tim found himself sitting at his roommate’s desk, staring at a picture of Vic and Dan Simpson, the cadet who had graduated two years earlier: camouflaged faces, arms around one another's necks, and holding their rifles up in a celebratory pose. Both cadets were now gone, dead, buried.

“This hurts so much,” he said in a broken voice, clutching the frame to his chest. In front of him lay the combat journal he’d discovered in his breast pocket—Army green with nominally waterproof pages, yet still wet and bulging. He reached for the journal, and his eyes caught the handprint-shaped burn wound on his right forearm.

Gently prodding his arm as the cold seeped from the burn, Tim breathed in, breathed out, and accepted it with poise. What else could he do? Don’t tell.

Yet, how did he square that with the Honor Code that dictated no cadet lie, cheat, or steal (nor tolerate those who do)?

He moved back to the journal, shaking off drops from the frigid waters of the Hudson, and opened it with trepidation, but soon found he couldn't put it down if he’d wanted to.

Death had stalked Victor. What started off as amateur philosophical musings and bad poetry soon descended into a deep fear, an obsession, a battle with himself and his place in the Long Gray Line.

He had become mired in questions of his own morality, his sense of belonging, with the pain he felt spreading from his heart to every extremity of his body and soul. Scrawled in sections that rambled backwards and forwards, upside down and in spirals, Vic wrote about ghosts, spirits, and the West Point cemetery calling out to him.

And the start date of these entries lined up with the date of an attack on American forces in Afghanistan where twelve soldiers were injured, and three lost their lives, including the late First Lieutenant Dan Simpson.

Tim knew Victor had loved Dan, and the feeling was mutual. He also knew they were all walking a tightrope. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was the law of the day, and he never did ask, but he knew all the same. Victor would get letters, and Dan would share his exploits as an infantry platoon leader, the manliest and most desired role in the Army, its heroes held on high, the glory emblazoned via the Combat Infantryman Badge and blue cord.

And now Tim knew the whole truth, and still, he couldn't tell. If it came out why Victor ended his own life, the damn government would strip away anything left of his honor. A man loving another man in the Army was somehow more dishonorable than taking his own life. The loss of a loved one, and not being able to mourn that loss, to share in the absolute sadness of it, proved too much for Victor.

“He couldn't even tell me,” Tim whispered, tears rolling down his face.

* * *

Crackling noise brought Tim back to the present and his patrol. He had walked past the Supe’s house, down the hill, and found himself standing in front of the First Class Club.

“Damn this place...”

“CGR to—read me?” came a broken voice over the radio. How was he out of range for these pieces of shit?

“CGR this is Papa One, I am at the Firstie Club, you read me, over?”

“Not loud and clear, but good enough. What happened, over?”

“Papa One was lost in his own head for a few minutes, CGR. That’s all. I’ll report back with a SITREP in five. Out.”

Tim brought his mind back into focus on his patrol, with both Major Harmeson’s and Victor’s words still echoing in his head.

“CGR, this is Papa One, there isn't anything down here. I see some knocked-over trashcans, but nothing else suspicious. The Supe’s wife probably freaked out because they live in that old house all alone.”

“Roger, Papa One. I hear you. Head back and finish the round. See you in half an hour or so. Central Guard Room out.”

Tim began the trek up the hill, remembering the last time he walked up with Victor, Vic telling him about the dream he’d had the night before.

“I saw him. Dan, I mean. He was... over there. They were pinned down after a helicopter assault. Like with the 101st, you know? I saw him, talking on his radio, pointing to his map and giving orders to a few of his sergeants. It was dark, though it must have been almost sunrise or so in reality. So, it couldn’t have been for real, could it?”

“I don’t know Vic; I think you’re just worried about him.”

Everything Tim knew remained an unspoken thing between the two friends.

Vic’s relationship with Dan sprouted before Vic met Tim. By Dan’s senior year, Tim and Vic had harbored a close kinship during summer training. Some things you can hide from a roommate; the intensity of youthful romance in full bloom is not one of them. Tim watched it grow in secret, and he kept it secret. Don’t ask, don’t tell, ever. Don’t even think about it. Victor was a good cadet, and Dan, well, he was at the top of his class, branching Infantry, choosing to go to the 101st, the envy of most, if not all.

Dan Simpson was, simply put, a true stud.

“Something happened to him, Tim.”

“Don’t worry about it. There isn’t anything that anyone here can do. When did you get that last letter from him?”

“Too long ago. Why can’t they have email, so I could just know for sure? The dream was awful. I watched him... watched him die. I could see him, and I know he could see me too. No one was helping to stop the bleeding... to do anything. He tried to tie his own—”

"Stop, Vic. It’s okay. He is okay. It was just a dream.” Tim hugged his half-drunk friend, and they walked back to the barracks, arms around one another’s shoulders. They would check for updates in the morning.

Of course, everything wasn’t okay. Everything wasn't fine.

The next day the Corps got news that two recent grads had been killed in combat. Dan’s unit had been hit hard during an assault into a Taliban stronghold, and another helicopter pilot had his Apache gunship taken out in the same fight. Four KIA, several more wounded, and it was a grievous loss for the Army and West Point community.

The hardest blow fell on Victor, who had nowhere he could otherwise turn.

The midnight vigil for the two dead lieutenants was the first the Corps had offered up since the smoke plumes had drifted over the southern horizon on 9/11. Dan’s class of 2001 was fighting a war they hadn’t planned on, and Victor's class of 2003 was readying to follow them into the meat grinder everyone knew was waiting. The midnight moment of silence was the Corps’ way of gripping hands with the fallen, those who had gone before them in joining the Long Gray Line.

Victor couldn’t bring himself to attend. He stayed in the room, lights out, and watched it from above. When Tim made it back, Victor was still staring out the window over the plain. “Do you feel them? Out there waiting for us?”

“I wish you would’ve come, Vic. It’d do you some good to let the Corps mourn with you.”

“They aren’t mourning, Tim. Some of them worship this. They want this war. They want the glory and honor and bloodshed and their seat at the right hand of Mars. I watched him die. I felt him die. Dammit all, Tim. They are out there, waiting for us. I can feel them. I can feel... him, I think.”

“I still think you should’ve come. You aren’t alone. Some of us, we know what he meant to you.”

Victor glared back. “Don’t. I... well. I know you know, but just don’t. I couldn’t tonight. I watched the Corps from our window. It was better to be here, above you all. Down there I don’t know if I could’ve taken it.”

“I understand, Vic. Anyway, I’m glad I was down there for you. For Dan too. He was... well, everyone loved him. And I know you did too.”

Tim hugged Victor one last time before falling onto his stiff mattress, pulling up the puffy Green Girl blanket, and saying goodnight to his friend for the last time.

* * *

His investigation complete, Tim walked back through a tunnel under the road that circled the parade ground, recalling that last embrace, and felt the unhealing burn mark on his right forearm. Did he do that to himself? The shrink implied he might be at risk himself for self-harm. He could still see the dark emptiness of Vic’s eyes under water, could feel the awful, unknowable strength of death, enough to break his arm if he had tried to fight it, and could hear the underwater gurgle warning him.

Walking up to the level of the parade ground, now dowsed in the darkest hours of night, he felt welcomed back by the barracks above.

Below the stone facade, the impossible loomed.

The light of the low-slung moon pushed its way through the fog, a shroud swirling over the ancient grassy plain. Through it marched the translucent shapes of an army long dead, a field of rifles, bayonets fixed, moving in concert through the dissipating top of the mists, dead metal glinting in the darkness.

They first took the form of a traditional cadet parade— black shakos, feathers flying, the sparkle of moonlight on sabers and bayonets. The faces of individuals were a blur, but the sense of deep history pulled Tim toward the parade, sucked in by some strange gravity.

Then the eddies and whorls caught him. The parade echoed the thunder of far-off drums, as a doorway opened in his mind. They didn't notice him, this river of ghostly cadets in their dimly lit full dress gray, moonlight still somehow sparkling off immaterial brass buckles and chest plates, the faded memory of sunlight reflected in the night’s gloom.

Time slowed to a murmuring creek. He caught one of the marcher’s eyes, and the hollow face focused in on him, with a quick and full stop, while the others parted and kept marching around it.

He sensed the scream before he heard it, and the thunder of marching exploded into cannon fire. Tim was on the ground, holding a broken, dying soldier, a captain by the rank on his Stetson, fallen under his horse. Artillery blared in the near distance; the hot zephyr of grapeshot passed through him, shredding the flanks of the fallen horse, and ripping through the face of the young man in his arms. His blue uniform in tatters, terrified eyes staring up at him, not yet gone, but fading fast.

The moment of death was quickly followed by a rabid squeal over the ridge line. Tim cradled the head and shoulders of the Union captain, and glanced up as a crazed rebel yell erupted, his position overrun by a shoeless mob of men in rags, armed with an assortment of muskets, rifles, pistols, and swords. They passed him by, shots fired point-blank into the face and chest of the captain's body, and Tim was ripped back to the Plain, staring into the eye sockets of the otherwise faceless spirit, now moving on with the rest of the ghostly assemblage.

As he looked back, trying to stand amid the swirling mists, Tim felt an icy grip on his right hand, yanking him around to face another member of the dead army.

Again, he was pulled into its eyes and found himself stuck in barbs of concertina wire. The bank of fog twisted and turned into a yellowish-green gas, immediately burning his lungs, his eyes, his exposed skin. The body writhed attempting to escape the wire, followed by the rapidly firing nightmare of a large caliber machine gun.

His body jerked around helter skelter, shredded by the spray of bullets. Gasps for air met only with poison, his mask a worthless and broken tool in his left hand, taken itself by the next round of gunfire. The searing pain was impossible to bear as time slowed to a crawl, and he saw the corpses of the surrounding dead, caught in the wire, their skin melting and bubbling.

His breath was dragon's fire, dissolving the lungs in his chest. His head drooped and slumped toward the ground; his eyesight dimmed; the screams grew louder.

Tim fell face down into damp grass of the parade ground. He gathered his fortitude to face whatever was next and pushed himself up gently into a crouch, and felt a hand grip his shoulder from behind.

Breathing slowly, he turned and glanced up at a familiar face, puffy and swollen, skin shimmering and translucent in the moonlight. Victor didn’t look down at him, scanning ahead.

“They came for me, Tim.” His voice came from the depths of the earth and from the stars themselves, filling Tim's head with disallowed knowledge. “You shouldn’t be here. It isn’t your time.”

“It wasn’t your time, either!” Tim shouted, recovering from the shock of combat, tears welling up in his eyes. He gripped his right arm, where the icy burn marks refused to be ignored, reminding him that Victor was truly dead and gone, that this was.... he didn't know what this was. Couldn’t ever explain it. He was on the parade ground, but also somewhere else, everywhere else. A place of death. Perhaps THE place of death, the junction of hell and earth, of heaven and oblivion. It felt so very wrong, as the iciness on his forearm crept up to his elbow.

“You need to go.” Victor’s voice was a death rattle.

“I—”

Victor interjected with a simple “Don’t.”

“I... I can’t...”

“They’re here for me. It’s alright.” The faintest trace of a smile crept into the corners of Victor’s blackened lips. “There he is... my Dan.”

In the direction of the ghastly parade, one shade was standing still, its jaw unhinged in a battle cry.

A shock wave knocked Tim down, then sucked him in. The sudden popping explosion of a Soviet-era rocket-propelled grenade crowded out the chaos of machine gunfire and mortar impacts all around. Black diesel smoke burned his nostrils. He pushed himself off a rocky slope, inches away from what was left of a leg. Bone shards flashed white amid black mud and gristle, red spurting through the shreds of a soldier’s woodland camouflage.

SHHHHOOOOOOOF!

A rocket flew overhead, sparking through the pre-dawn shadows into the mountainside behind him, detonating into a rainbow of fire and ash.

“GODDAMMIT!” the owner of the wounded leg screamed.

Then Tim was beside him, staring into a pair of eyes losing their internal light, and unable to help. The soldier grabbed his rifle and fired wildly in the direction of the rocket fire. Through the haze, more shouting arrived somehow too late, in this liminal space, an echo of the confusion of the battlefield.

“Thompson! Grady! Anyone!” More gunfire into the void, no target other than the pain and the loss and the looming specter surely on its way.

“Not today, not today, not today,” the wounded man whispered.

In the glow of encroaching flames, the soldier’s mien finally took form. Tim’s face paled at the short cropped black curls, deep brown, almost black eyes, and stunning high cheekbones. Dan Simpson lay prone, fighting through his final moments.

Dan stopped firing, and brought the rifle close to his chest, fiddling to undo the shoulder strap.

Tim could do nothing. His hands passed right through Dan’s arms as he tried desperately to change the inevitable.

Dan had the strap undone; blood pooled on the ground below his leg; he looped it around his thigh above the wound, cinching it down.

twwweeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEE!

A blast of hellfire and hurricane winds, the scent of cordite and blood, shit and mud erasing everything else.

Tim’s thoughts faded into nothingness.

* * *

The void swirled and drifted in timelessness. Tim sensed the empty space of the parade ground, the vortex of whatever constitutes life, death, memory, pasts forgotten, futures never dreamed. Hours, days, or perhaps only milliseconds later, everything collapsed into a singularity, its limitless gravity pulling on his essence.

“This is not for you.” Victor’s voice floated to him across the infinity of the grounds.

Tim was staring dead-eyed into the shadow of Dan’s face, the spirit’s eyes alternating between orbs of pooling darkness and the living brown eyes he’d left behind.

With the echo of Victor’s voice crawling through his skull and the dead weight of Victor's hands still pinning Tim to the ground, they both perked up as a clear voice rang out ahead.

“Jones, Victor....”

The drums of war shifted to a somber, steady beat, with a memory of bagpipes across the river, or across time, a sliver of sound carried by the shroud enveloping them both.

Again, the voice. “Jones, Victor...” and Vic’s weight eased from Tim’s shoulders.

The body snapped to attention behind Tim, and a raspy voice cracked out a simple, “Present, sir.”

Once more, now just a few yards away, “Jones, Victor!”

A tall shape emerged from the mist, initially distorted, a body writhing behind a dark veil of velvet, parting through the very fabric of reality. It called out one final time, “Jones, Victor,” Dan’s familiar face hovered over shredded combat fatigues and a missing leg.

“Present and accounted for, sir. Present and accounted for,” Victor said, his voice a whisper as Dan's injuries blinked in and out of existence.

“Fall in, Vic. It really is going to be okay now,” Tim said, his fragile mind wrapping around the situation. “Go on. Go with them.”

Victor stepped forward without a backward glance and faded into the dissipating mists.

A crackle of noise erupted, “Papa One, radio check. Where are you?”

The clear signal yanked Tim back to the present with a vicious ferocity. “Tim, what the hell is going on?”

The marks on Tim’s arm were fading. He looked up at the retreating fog, fading and drifting back to wherever it had come from. Where his friend had been, where Victor’s fortune lay, perhaps where all cadets’ destinies lay.

“All clear, now. Papa One returning to Central Guard Room.” He paused. “You wouldn’t believe me if I tried to tell you. So please, don’t ask.”

End.

Jonathan Gensler (he/him) is a Pushcart Prize nominated author who grew up in a haunted house in West Virginia. A recovering combat veteran and former entrepreneur, you'll find his stories in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Creepy Pod, Crystal Lake Publishing's Shallow Waters, and other venues. He is an Affiliate Member of the Horror Writers Association and lives in the Rocky Mountains with his wife and three children. You can connect with him online at jonathangensler.com.

Beauty Below

Lynn Forba

Ashley hated the summer worst of all. Not because of the oppressive heat, or the plague of bugs, but because of the sun. In the summer, the sun rose at the ungodly hour of 6 in the morning. Since the sun rose so early, Coach insisted they could begin training at the lake at 5:15 in the morning.

The lake was a full hour outside of town proper, so Ashley had to wake up at four in order to get there on time. Every single day.

She pulled to a haphazard stop in a parking space, just barely ending up inside the lines. She quickly finished off her granola bar and tossed the empty mylar wrapper at the trashcan. Of course she missed, the wrapper fluttering to the ground at the base of the bin.

Then, adding insult to injury, she got hit by someone’s coffee cup as she was picking up her litter. “Really?” she turned around and asked.

It was Hailey, who somehow managed to smile and wave at 5 AM. At the same time, she was a madman who drank a tall cup of black coffee before working out—a feat which Ashley thought would give anyone an upset stomach.

“Sorry, bad aim,” Hailey laughed, “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” Ashley said, rubbing the back of her head. “Did not expect that though,”

“Right, sorry.” Hailey shrugged it off, “I didn’t expect to miss my throw.”

“Hey you two!” A third teammate, Ryan, called as he jogged past holding an energy drink–another feat which Ashey thought should kill someone. “Workout starts in two minutes!”

Ashley and Hailey made eye contact. Then Hailey shouted, “Race ya!” and started running.

Ashley ran too, not because she was racing, but because Coach would make her do pull ups if she was late.

At least in the summer they got to do their dry land exercises inside the lake house, instead of on the rocky shore. During the day the room was rented out for art classes and birthday parties, but this early in the morning it was empty save for a stack of folding chairs in the corner. One wall was made entirely of windows, showing the pier and the gibbous moon reflecting off the still water.

Coach raised his eyebrow as they jogged the last few steps into the room, glancing at his watch as they spread their mats on the floor, “Cutting it close, ladies.”

“Sorry, Coach!” Hailey bubbled, placing her water bottle beside her mat. Ashley just grunted, pulling her hair back into a ponytail.

They started off with stretches, getting their muscles ready. Coach clapped, drawing them all back to attention. “How are your arms feeling today?”

The room of fifteen swimmers groaned, a few of them crossing their arms across their chests. Ryan called out, “I think you killed us yesterday, Coach.” They had spent the entire forty-five minutes yesterday doing upper body exercises, and Ashley could certainly still feel it.

“Nonsense.” Coach said, “I think we can do another day of upper bodies, what do you think?”

The room turned into aggrieved moans. “Do we have to?” Hailey stretched her arms above her head. “I’d really rather not.”

Coach cackled, “Alright, alright. You win. Let’s run three miles, the full circle.”

The full circle referred to a hiking trail that ringed the lake, with the entrance at the other end of the parking lot. Some parts of it were paved, others were gravel, and all of it was surrounded by tall trees and full underbrush. Frogs chirped in the early morning, the sky just barely turning gray.

Coach started off leading the pack, setting a moderate pace. He made it clear that he didn’t want anyone to slow down, and he especially didn’t want anyone to stop.

Hailey sidled up alongside Ashley, “It’s a bit creepy today, don’t you think?”

“What?” Ashley said, “No? Why?”

“It’s—” Hailey paused a moment to think. She was wearing a bright pink exercise jacket, with matching leggings. Ashley wore space cat pajamas and old tennis shoes that had been dipped in the lake a few times. “It’s quieter than normal. I don’t know, I can’t really describe it.”

Ashley took a quiet moment to listen. The lake path was wooded, and all that she could hear was panting breaths, and footsteps on gravel. Once in a while, a branch snapped or Coach shouted out some sort of encouragement.

The frogs had fallen silent.

Probably, they were startled by the runners.

“Sounds pretty loud to me.” She declared at last.

Hailey looked her up and down and pursed her lips. “Hm.” She jogged ahead of Ashley and stopped next to Ryan to talk more. She glanced back at Ashley over her shoulder, but quickly turned away when she was caught looking.

Ashley rolled her eyes.

Then, the jogging party rounded a curve in the path, and the trees parted enough for her to see the lake. The sun was starting to rise, turning the sky a pale gray with a hint of pink at the horizon, but the lake seemed to glow in its own blue light.

Mist reached off the top of the lake, in tendrils, like fingers. The longer Ashley looked, they reached out to her, and she could feel them grabbing her, engulfing her, pulling her—

“Montgomery,” Coach was next to her suddenly, when did Coach get next to her?

“Sorry?” Ashley shook her head. Then her eyes went back to the lake. It had lost its bioluminescent glow. She mourned for it.

“Montgomery!”

“Ah, yes Coach?”

“Are you okay? You stopped.”

“I,” Ashley looked at the lake. She blinked slowly, lethargically. “Sorry, got caught up in my head. It’s early, y’know.”

Coach frowned. After a moment, he patted her shoulder. “Alright. Now, we gotta catch up with everyone, come on!” he took off running.

With one last glance at the lake, she followed.

* * *

“Alright!” Coach clapped at the end of their run. It was brighter out now, the sun making its appearance over the horizon. “You have ten minutes to suit up, then meet me on the docks. Heard?”

“Heard.” Everyone responded in unison, then dispersed.

Ashley, for her part, went back to her car to pull out her suit, cap, and goggles. Then she swore as she noticed she only had two out of the three.

“Great,” she muttered to herself as she shifted through the backseat clutter, as if searching through the detritus once more would reveal her goggles. “Just great.”

“What’s wrong?” Hailey, as always, appeared right over Ashley’s shoulder at the worst moment.

“Forgot my goggles.” Ashley admitted it and stopped searching. She dropped her head on the backseat, deeply inhaling the fast-food smell.

“Oh, I have an extra pair you can use,” Hailey started going through her bag.

“No,” Ashley shook her head, but took the offered pair of blue goggles. She turned them over in her hands. They would be better than nothing. “My goggles are prescription. I’ll basically be blind out there.”

“Oh, that sucks.” Hailey summed it up pretty well.

“Yep.” Ashley agreed. “Thanks anyways.” She held up the goggles.

“Yeah, no problem. Keep them, lake water is icky, and you definitely don’t want to get that in your eyes. You’d probably grow a third one.” Hailey said, pointing right at the center of her forehead. “And I guess I’ll just have to keep an extra eye on you during practice.” She winked and pranced into the bathroom to change.

Ashley watched her go. “I don’t need a damn babysitter.”

“Today we will be doing a timed swim.” Coach said to the mass of colorful blobs in front of him. Logically, Ashley knew these were her fellow swimmers in high-vis, open-water swim wear, but in reality, they just looked like jellybeans.

The jellybeans groaned.

“Hey, none of that, it’s good for you.” Coach chastised. “We’ll be using the one-kilometer buoy. I encourage you all to be working on your corkscrew turns at this time. Start at your leisure.”

That, of course, was coach speak for ‘get in the water as fast as possible.’

“You’ll be good?” Hailey asked, bumping her shoulder against Ashley’s. She wore all yellow, like a lemon-flavored jellybean.

“I can manage a time swim.” Ashley rolled her eyes, then dove into the water.

The cold water momentarily shocked the breath out of her, but once she started kicking, it faded. By the time she broke the surface and started to stroke, it felt pleasant.

A time swim. Truly, one of the worst things in the world. No objectives, no intervals to make, just a time limit. Nothing to think about. Nothing to distract from the exhaustion and injustice of having to wake up at four in the morning. Ashley devoted herself to count how many strokes it took for her to reach the buoy.

And really, as Ashley soon learned, it wasn’t all that different to be swimming without her prescription. The water beneath her was still murky brown, her fellow jellybeans still surrounded her, and she still aimed for a giant, floating jellybean.

She kept a reasonable pace — after all, it wasn’t a race, and she’d be in the water swimming for at least two hours. This was purely to build endurance.

And then something moved beneath her.

She came up for air, coughing and choking and sputtering. She treaded water as she did her best to breathe normally again. The sun shone brighter than it had before, forcing Ashley to squeeze her eyes shut.

“Hey,” Hailey popped up next to her, because of course she did, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ashley waved her off. She coughed into her fist on last time. “Just got startled by a fish.” Because it was definitely a fish, there was nothing else down there.

“Really?” Hailey looked down, “I haven’t seen any.”

“Yeah, well, I did.” Ashley snapped, “It just startled me, I’m fine.” Without giving Hailey time to respond, she put her head back in the water and started swimming again.

This time, as she kept swimming, she kept an eye out, though for what she wasn’t sure. She couldn’t see anything beyond the swirling dirt and grit of the lake. Even if there was anything, she wouldn’t be able to identify it without her glasses.

So, when she saw movement next, she didn’t react. It was a fish, or maybe a particularly dark patch of dirt caught in an eddy. Nothing worth freaking out over, so she kept her head down and she kept swimming.

Until she saw a hand reaching for her.

She spun onto her back and kept swimming. She closed her eyes against the sun as she felt the warmth on her cheeks. No need to get Hailey’s attention again, it had to be nothing. She only needed a moment to catch her breath and relax. It was a normal day, and she was freaking out over nothing.

When she flipped back onto her stomach, there was nothing there, nothing to panic over. She was just paranoid because she didn’t have her glasses. She made it to the other buoy, but didn’t bother going for the corkscrew turn.

When she saw the hand again, she didn’t react. She clenched her teeth, closed her eyes and kept swimming. She knew she had a while before she needed to sight the other buoy; all she had to do in the meantime was swim in a straight line without panicking. Her paranoia was playing tricks on her.

A blue light penetrated her eyelids, so bright it hurt.

She opened them.

The entire lake had turned electric blue, the brown silt had turned into swirling masses of greens and violets and yellows. And it was bright, so bright it hurt and her eyes watered and yet she couldn’t look away.

It was beautiful.

The hand returned, except now it was many hands, reaching up to her, inviting her in. They waved at her, beckoned her to come join them in the beauty. They shimmered in the light, they created the light. It was as if all the silt and dirt at the bottom of the lake had been given life, had been turned into fairy dust.

One of them held its palm up to her, an open invitation. Without her noticing, her feet slowed and she reached back, taking the hand in hers.

It didn’t feel like a human hand; it wasn’t warm, and she couldn’t feel any bone or muscle beneath the glowing skin. At the same time, it wasn’t wet or slimy like the one time she had accidentally gotten a handful of seaweed.

It was smooth and hard, like stone. The whole thing vibrated, popping like carbonation bubbles beneath her fingers.

Ashley giggled, and bubbles flowed out of her mouth. Instead of rising, like she expected, they swirled around her, ticking her cheeks and finding their way under her cap to run through her hair.

The hand in hers shook, and she knew it was laughing too.

Other hands came up around her, making fists and grabby-hands, beckoning her to the bottom of the lake, to come join them.

The water was beautiful, shimmering in all shades of blue and green and purple. The hands wanted to share that beauty with her.

Ashley wanted that beauty, she wanted it with all her heart.

Her chest ached for air, so she breached the surface. She took one last breath and dove down. She kicked someone, she didn’t care. Someone tried to grab her foot, to pull her away from the beauty, and she struggled until they were forced to let go.

She needed to get to the bottom, her heart hurt from how much she needed it. More than anything in the world, she needed to reach the bottom, she needed to touch the beautiful deep blue below.

But no matter how hard she swam, no matter how hard she kicked, or how deep she went, the bottom stayed tauntingly far from her. The hand in hers tugged, dragging her along, but the other hands retreated faster than she could descend. Soon they were nothing more than specs of light.

The hand in hers squeezed one last time before it, too, slipped from her grasp. With a final wave, it disappeared, becoming just another star at the bottom of the lake. She kicked and clawed and struggled, but the beautiful lights stayed just out of reach.

The lights around her, the blues, the greens, the violets all started to fade, disappearing further into the depths, leaving her behind. They abandoned her.

Heavier, heavier, she needed to be heavier, to sink faster. She blew out all the air in her lungs, pushing out bubbles until her lungs hurt and shadows danced before her eyes. The lights stopped for a moment, and swirled in circles, teasing her. Then they faded faster.

Heavier, heavier, she still wasn’t heavy enough.

She took in a deep lungful of water and,
finally,
she was heavy enough.

The lights welcomed her with open arms.

And it was beautiful.

* * *

Rocks dug into her thighs, and someone was pounding on her back, forcing her to spit and cough and vomit water all over herself. She hurt, all of her hurt, her throat burned, and her chest felt heavy. Something brackish sloshed inside her lungs.

People were talking, frantic voices, Coach, Hailey, Ryan, paramedics. They wrapped a towel around her shoulders, a blanket over her lap, and placed her on a stretcher in an ambulance. They said words like ‘dry drowning’ and ‘pneumonia.’

And Ashley cried.

And Ashley hated them.

Because they had stolen the beauty away from her.

End.

Lynn Forba is a full-time graduate student from Austin, Texas. She can usually be found under a large pile of yarn, working on a project that she swears she'll finish this time. She can also be found as @LynnForbaWrites on Twitter.

Big Top

Katarina Betterton

I’ve done this for a long time.

Why, I can barely remember a day in my life I did something else.

For decades, the performers of Martel’s Traveling Circus found a sense of belonging with me. Though Mr. Martel does most of the scouting, I pride myself in giving these people a home, a stage, and a family.

Martel’s circus always has been—and always will be—a family. He inherited it from his father, who took over for his father before him. Mr. Martel’s grandfather hired me, and his son, Mr. Martel’s father, almost ran the family legacy into the ground with his penny-pinching and abhorrent upkeep. Fifteen years after the third generation took control, Mr. Martel has breathed new life into this place.

From my perch above the muck and mud (last night’s storm really did a number on our spit of land), I watch the circus’ only seamstress—Mr. Martel’s spinster sister—stomp from wagon to tent to stall waking the troupe for breakfast. She took it upon herself years ago to mother the lost souls who find a home with us since she has no family of her own. Most of the troupe begrudgingly allows it, too proud to thank her for her kindness. If they did, they’d have to admit the shortcomings of their own mothers.

I have a unique and indispensable position at the circus, which allows me to observe performers and patrons interacting every day. I’ve never watched the circus’ acts—that’s not my job—but hear the music and feel the thunderous applause; my body seems to reverberate with each cannon blast and standing ovation. At least, it used to. Nowadays, the music is softer and applause less raucous. I keep forgetting, though—tonight’s our last show before the off season. Next spring will be better.

An ear-splitting cowbell rouses the rest of the sleepy performers as smoke begins to rise from the mess tent. More bodies spill out from tents in pursuit of what I’m sure is another disappointing breakfast. I search their faces for my favorites among them (Martel’s feature contortionist Lea and her acrobatic brother Leo) but they’re nowhere to be found. Instead, I see Arthur limp toward the smell of food, his clown paint only half-on. Florence and Mary, the conjoined twins, whisper to each other as they pass the Strongman’s empty tent. Strongman left a few days ago without much pomp or circumstance—I never did get his name. As the orange sun crests the horizon, our world of wonted wonder wakes up.

Movement from the far end of the fairground catches my gaze and I see Lea exiting Mr. Martel’s tent with an armful of papers. I try to wave at her, but the wind picks up and she doesn’t notice—she’s too focused on catching the stray posters the gust carries from her grasp. As she draws closer to me, I see the sun catch her cheeks and realize they’re covered in tears.

Tears? Why would she be crying?

Lea and Leo came to us seven years ago after escaping from a rival troupe. What I’ve overheard, coupled with the bruises they wore their first weeks here, suggests the siblings’ previous ringmaster was nothing like Mr. Martel.

Leo catches up with Lea as they pass me. I avert my gaze while straining to listen to any of their words the wind blows my way.

“...are… crying… much?” Leo’s disjointed voice floats to me.

“Leave… alone!” I hear Lea exclaim. “...not… time… Can’t do it. I just… more.”

She must be upset about the newest trick Mr. Martel pushed her and Leo to perform. Arthur says she’s fine with the actual contortions, it’s attempting them underwater that petrifies her.

Lea’s the best performer we have and the kindest person in the troupe. I hate to see her sad, but I have to take Mr. Martel’s side. None of the other circuses are doing submerged tricks and it’d be a show-stopping number to close our season. And, if she continues to practice, next season’s sales will be through the roof.

I’ve heard Mr. Martel grumble to himself late at night, after the guests are gone and all that remains of their patronage are discarded pieces of popcorn and peanut shells on the midway. As he stoops down to clean the dirt avenue he shakes his head, pulls at his hair and even sinks to the ground. We all know the circus struggles; his father did irreparable damage. Still, it’s not in Mr. Martel to quit. No—it’s more than that. It’s not in Mr. Martel to abandon this family.

When Leo and Lea tramp away from me, my gaze catches the barkers jogging beyond the entrance of our show, embarking to nearby towns to bring new customers. As the day drags on, vendor carts I’ve never seen before roll onto the midway and an odd energy buzzes between performers and other staff. It’s akin to anticipation, hanging over us all almost as heavy as the brewing clouds to the west. The sensation heightens in even my heart as the haphazardly-strung electric string lights flicker on, sweet scents begin to fill the air, and the band begins to play.

Mr. Martel strolls through an hour before the gates open to the public, tipping his hat to performers and adjusting his blindingly red tailcoat at the waist. Sometimes I wonder if his sister soaks it in the blood of the circus’ enemies to get it that vibrant a shade of crimson. I notice, as he reaches the back corner of the circus, he pulls several suited men to the side. Taking folded paper out of his jacket, he hesitates a few moments before entrusting it into the outstretched hand of one of the strangers. They shake hands and Mr. Martel watches them walk away before heaving a great sigh and turning his face to the falling twilight.

Calliope music begins to play and I realize I’ve wasted the entire day watching others instead of preparing myself for the final night. Truth be told, there’s not much to do; I’m never center-stage. I stand in the background, ensuring every guest has an enjoyable evening and every act has a safe, spectacular stage on which to perform. Nevertheless, I stand a bit straighter and await the coming crowd.

When the barkers return with throngs of people, I’m not surprised at the enormous flock following them. I don’t know what they tell the guests to get them here, but every closing night is the biggest of the season. This one, by far, is our best.

From my vantage point, the entire night goes off without a hitch. Every act dazzles, every firework explodes; even the looming rainclouds hold off their deluge. The last guest fades out of view over the grassy knoll, taking the warmth in my belly with them as another season closes.

A familiar sensation, the one I loathe but bear without complaint, comes over me. I watch as dozens of strangers approach, their hands outstretched to help me down. My feet are pulled from their deep roots and the wind is knocked out of me. Several hands fumble with my form as I prepare myself for months of hibernation in my usual trailer. As thunder booms in the distance and a crack of lightning electrifies the sky, I realize something is wrong. Very wrong. They’re not taking me to my trailer; instead, they’ve left me on the ground and stare at my face with odd expressions.

A deep and profound silence falls over the troupe. Each pair of eyes bores into my skin and more than anything, I want to melt into the mud they’ve laid me on. What brought on this sudden spotlight? I’m always in the background. It’s what I like; it’s where I’m comfortable. But for some reason, no one looks away.

Why are they so sad?

Before I realize what’s happening, the people I’ve come to know as family begin throwing lit matches at me. I screech in agony as I feel my flesh burn. I scream for respite; I want to reach out my hands for help but they’re already melted. Matches, cigarettes, flaming rolls of posters pile onto my face. Thick paper unfurls in the flames and I barely catch its message before the fire chars them.

DON’T MISS THE FINAL NIGHT!

EXPERIENCE MARTEL’S TRAVELING CIRCUS ONE MORE TIME BEFORE THE BIG TOP BURNS.

Mr. Martel approaches, Lea at his side clutching the arm of his jacket. She’s crying—no, sobbing. He cries too. Mr. Martel throws a match first, then her. Lea’s the last of the company to add to the flames.

“Goodbye, Big Top,” she whimpers against the back of her hand to stifle sobs. “Thank you for everything.”

End.

Katarina Betterton is an aspiring adult fiction author. During the day, Katarina is a full-time freelancer specializing in copywriting, content strategy, and SEO optimization. Katarina also works as a marketing consultant for an independent publishing house and an editorial lead for Scribbler, a writer subscription box. When not reading or writing, her hobbies include cooking, learning new languages, and painting with her husband, Lucas. They currently live in Ohio with their three dogs, who are all way too cute for their own good.

Brenda

Margaret St. Clair

Originally published in Weird Tales, March 1954

BRENDA ALDEN was a product of that aseptic, faintly sadistic, school of child-rearing that is already a little old-fashioned. The vacationing parents on Moss Island liked her and held up her politeness and good manners as examples to their offspring; the children themselves stayed away from her, sensing in her something waspish and irritable. She was tall for her age, and lanky, with limp blonde hair. She always wore slacks.

Monday began like all her days. She had breakfast, was told to keep her elbows off the table, helped with the dishes. Then she was told to go out and play. She sauntered slowly into the woods.

The woods on Moss Island were scattered clumps of birch and denser stands of conifers. There were places where Brenda, if she tried hard, could have the illusion of a forest, and she liked that. In the western part of the island there was a wide, deep excavation which people said had been a quarry. Nobody ever said what had been quarried out of it.

It was a little before noon when Brenda smelled the rotten smell. It was an intense, bitter, rottenness, almost strangling, and when it first met her nose Brenda’s face wrinkled up with distaste. But after a moment her face relaxed. She inhaled, not without eagerness. She decided to try to find the source of the smell. Sometimes she liked to smell and look at rotten things.

Sniffing, she wandered. The smell would be strong and then weak and then strong again. She was just about to give up and turn back—it was hot in the airless, piney pockets, under the sun—when she saw the man.

He was not a tramp, he was not one of the summer people. Brenda knew at once that he was not like any other man she had ever seen. His skin was not black, or brown, but of an inky grayness; his body was blobbish and irregular, as if it had been shaped out of the clots of soap and grease that stop up kitchen sinks. He held a dead bird in one crude hand. The rotten smell was welling out from him.

Brenda stared at him, her heart pounding. For a moment she was almost too frightened to move. She stood gasping and licking her lips. Then he extended an arm toward her. She turned and ran.

She heard the noise, she smelled the smell, as he came stumbling after her. Her lungs hurt. There was a stitch in her side. She tripped over a root, fell to her knees, and was up again. She ran on. Only when she was almost too exhausted to go further did she look back.

* * *

He was more distant then she had hoped, though he was still coming. For a second she stood panting, her narrow sides going in and out. He was still separated from her by some fifty feet. She blinked. Then her lips curved in what was almost a smile. She turned to the right, in the direction of the quarry, and began running again, though more leisurely.

There was a thicket of poison oak; she skirted it. She stooped for a pine cone, and then another one, thrust them into the waistband of her trousers, and went on with her steady trotting. He was still following. The light seemed to hurt his eyes; his head hung forward almost on his chest. Then they were on the edge of the quarry, and Brenda must try her plan.

She was no longer afraid — or, at any rate, only a little so. Exertion had washed her sallow cheeks with an unaccustomed red. Carefully she tossed one of the pine cones over the steep quarry side so that it landed halfway toward the bottom and then rolled on down. With more force she threw the second cone; it hit well beyond the first and slid toward the bottom in a rattle of loose stones and dirt. Then, very quickly and lightly, Brenda ran to the left and crouched behind a tree.

The noise of the pine cones had been not unlike that of a runner plunging over the quarry edge and down into the depths. Brenda’s pursuer halted, turning his head from side to side blindly, and seeming to sniff the air. She felt a moment of intense anxiety. She was almost sure he couldn’t catch her, even if he started after her again. But—oh—he was so—

One of the pine cones slid a few feet further. He seemed to listen. Then he went over the edge after the sound of it.

* * *

Brenda’s heart was shaking the flat bosom of her shirt. While the rotten-smelling man stumbled back and forth among the dusty rocks in the quarry bottom hunting her, she waited and listened. It took him a long time to abandon the search. But at last the moment for which Brenda had been waiting came. He left his hunting and began to struggle up the quarry side.

He slid back. Brenda leaned forward, tense and expectant. Her eyes were bright. He started up again. Once more he slid back.

It was clear to the watching child much sooner than it was to the man in the depths of the quarry that he was imprisoned. He kept starting up the sides clumsily, clawing at the loose handholds, and sliding back. But his blobbish limbs were extraordinarily inept and awkward. He always slid back.

At last, he gave up and stood quiet. His head dropped. He made no sound. But the penetrating rottenness was welling out from him.

Brenda got to her feet and walked toward him. Her pale lips were curving in a grin. “Hi!” she called over the edge of the quarry. “Hi! You can't get out, can you?”

The mockery in her tone seemed to cut through to his dull senses. He raised his grayish head. There was a flash of teeth* very white against their inky background. But he couldn’t get out. After a moment, Brenda laughed.

Brenda hugged her secret to herself all the rest of the day. She was reprimanded for being late to lunch, her father said she needed discipline. She was not bothered. That night she slept soundly and well.

Early next morning she went to see Charles. Charles was a year older than she, and tolerated her better than anyone else on Moss Island. Once he had given her a cast-off snake skin. She had kept it in the drawer with her handkerchiefs.

Today he was making a cloud chamber with rubbing alcohol, a jar, and a piece of dry ice. Brenda squatted down beside him and watched. After five minutes or so she said, “I know what’s more fun than that.”

“What?” Charles asked, without looking up from his manipulations.

“Something I found. Something funny. Scary. Queer.”

The exchange continued. Brenda hinted. Charles was mildly curious. At last she said, “Come and see it, Chet. It’s not like anything you ever saw before. Come on.” She laid her hand on his arm.

* * *

Until that moment, Charles might have accompanied her. The cloud chamber was not going well, and he did not actively dislike the girl. But the dryness and tensity of her touch on his arm—the touch of a person who has never received or given a pleasant physical contact—repelled him. He drew away from her hand. “I don’t want to see it. It isn’t anything anyway. Just some sort of junk. I'm not interested,” he said.

“But you’d like it! Please come and see.”

“I told you, I’m not interested. I’m not going to go. Can’t you take a hint? Go away.”

When he used that tone, Brenda knew there was no use in arguing with him. She got up and walked off.

After lunch her father had her help him with the barbecue pit he was building. While she shoveled dirt and mixed concrete her thoughts were busy with the man in the quarry. Was he still standing motionless at the bottom, or was he once more stumbling back and forth hunting her? Or was he trying to clamber up the sides again? He’d never make it, no matter how much he tried. But if he stayed there long enough, some of the other children might find him. Would they be more frightened than she had? She didn’t know. She couldn’t form any mental picture of what might happen then.

When her father knocked off work for the day, she lay down in the hammock. Her hands were sore and her back ached, but she couldn’t relax. Finally, though it was almost supper time, she got up and walked off quickly toward the quarry.

He was still there. Brenda let out a deep breath of relief. The bitter, rotten smell hung strong
in the air. She must have made a noise, for he raised his head and then let it drop forward again on his chest. Other than that, he was motionless.

Charles wouldn’t come to see him. So . . . Brenda looked around her. Farther along the edge of the quarry, twenty feet or so from where she was standing, were two long boards. She measured their length with her eyes.

It was thirty feet or more to the bottom of the quarry. The boards were not quite long enough. But the zone of loose, sliding stuff did not extend all the way up; once the man in the excavation was past it, he ought to be able to get up easily enough. Charles had said that what she had found wasn’t anything. Just some junk. Brenda began to move the boards.

Her hands were sore, but the boards themselves were not heavy. In fifteen minutes or so she had laid a narrow path from the bottom of the quarry to within a few feet of the top. He—the man—had done nothing while she worked, not even watched her. But underneath her shirt, Brenda’s narrow body was trembling and wet with sweat. She’d had to get closer to him than she’d liked while she was putting down the second board.

She stood back. The man in the quarry did not move. Brenda felt a moment of anxious exasperation. Wasn't he going to do anything, after all her trouble? “Come on!’’ she said under her breath and then, more loudly, “Come on!”

The sun was beginning to decline toward the west. The shadows lengthened. The man below turned his head from side to side as if the waning light had brought him a keener perception. One blobby gray hand went up. Then he started toward the boards.

Brenda waited until his uncertain feet were set upon the second of the lengths of wood. She could stand it no longer. She whirled about and ran as hard as she could toward home. She did not know whether or not he followed her.

* * *

Brenda did not go to the woods next morning. She hung around the house until her mother sent her out to help her father, who sent her back, saying that he had got to a place in his construction where she could be only in the way. Brenda went to the kitchen and got herself a sandwich and a glass of milk. When she came back with them her mother, pale and disturbed, was on the terrace outside the house talking to her father. Brenda went to the door and leaned her head against it.

“I don’t see how it could be a tramp,” her mother was saying. “Elizabeth said nothing had been taken. She was quite emphatic. Only the roast chicken. And even it hadn’t been eaten, only torn into pieces.” She hesitated. “She said there were spots of grayish slime all over it.”

“Elizabeth exaggerates,” Brenda’s father answered. He gave the mortar he was smoothing an impatient pat. “What’s her idea anyway, if it wasn’t a tramp? Who else would break in her kitchen? There are only the six families on Moss Island.”

“I don’t think she has any definite idea. Oh, Rick, I wish you could have heard her talking. She mentioned the dreadful smell over and over. She said she was phoning the other families to warn them. She sounded afraid.”

“Probably hysterical,” he answered contemptuously. His eye fell on Brenda, standing in the shadow of the door. “Go up to your room, Brenda,” he said sharply. “Stay there. I won’t have you listening behind doors.”

“Yes, father.”

Brenda did not resent the order. She was afraid. Would Charles remember her hints of yesterday, connect them with the raid on Mrs. Emsden’s kitchen (the man from the quarry must be hungry—but he hadn’t eaten the chicken), and tell on her? Or would something worse happen, she didn’t know what?

She moved about her room restlessly. The bed was made, there was nothing for her to do. She could hear the rumble of her parents’ voices indistinctly, a word now and then rising into prominence. For the first time she felt a sharp curiosity about the man who had been in the quarry, about the man himself.

She got out her diary and opened it. But it wouldn’t do; the volume had no lock, and she knew her mother read it. She never wrote anything important in it.

She looked at the scribbled pages with dislike. It would be nice to be able to tear them out and crumple them up in the wastepaper basket. But her mother would notice and ask her why she had destroyed her pretty book. No. . . .

She hunted about the room until she found a box of notepaper. Using the lid of the box as a desk, she printed carefully across the top of one of the narrow gray sheets: THE MAN.

She hesitated. Then she wrote: “1. Where did he come from?”

She licked her pencil. The idea was hard to put into words. But she wanted to see it written out on the paper. She began, erased, began again. Finally she wrote, “I think he came to Moss Island from the mainland. I think he came over one night last month when the tide was so low. I think he came here by acci—” She erased. “By mistake.”

Brenda was ready for the second question. “Why does he stay on the island?” she scribbled. She was writing faster now. “I think because he can not swim. The water would—” she paused, conscious that the exact word she wanted was not in her vocabulary. At last she wrote, “Would wash him away.”

She got out another sheet of note paper. At the top she printed, “THE MAN Page 2.” She bit into the pencil shank judiciously. Then she wrote, “What kind of a man is he? I think he is not like other people. Not like us. He is a different kind of a man.”

She had written the last words slowly. Now inspiration came. She scribbled, “He is not like us because he likes dead things to eat. Things that have been dead for much—” an erasure— “for a long time. I think that is why he came to M.I. in the first place. Hunting. He is old. Has been the way he is for a long time.”

She put the pencil down. She seemed to have finished. Her mother must have gone out: the noise of her parents* voices had ceased, and the house was perfectly quiet. Outside, she could hear the faint slap slap of her father’s trowel as he worked on the concrete.

There was a long pause. Brenda sat motionless. Then she picked up the pencil again and wrote at the bottom of the page, very quickly, “I think he would help me to be born.”

She picked up what she had written and looked at it. Then she took the two pages and went with them into the bathroom. She tore them into small pieces and flushed them down the drain.

* * *

Supper that night was quiet. Once Brenda’s mother started to say something about Elizabeth Emsden and was stopped by her father’s warning frown. Brenda helped with the dishes. Just before she went upstairs to bed, she slipped into her parents’ bedroom, which was on the ground floor, and unlatched the window screens.

She had trouble getting to sleep, but slept soundly. She was roused, when the night was well along, by the sound of voices. She stole out on the stair landing and listened, her heart beginning to thud.

The rotten smell was coming up in burning, bitter waves. The cottage seemed to rock under it. Brenda clung to the banister. He’d come then, the man—her man—from the quarry. She was glad.

Brenda’s father was speaking. “That smell is really incredible,” he said in an abstracted voice. And then, to Brenda’s mother, “Flora, call Elizabeth and tell her to have Jim come over. Hurry. I don’t know how much longer I can keep him back with this thing. Have Jim bring his gun.”

“Yes.” Flora Alden giggled. “You said Elizabeth was hysterical, didn’t you? For God’s sake keep your voice down, Rick. I don’t want Brenda to waken and see this. She’d be—I don’t think she’d ever get over it.” She moved toward the telephone.

Brenda’s eyes widened. Were her parents really solicitous for her? Were they afraid she’d be afraid? She moved down two or three steps, very softly, and sat down on one of the treads. If they noticed her now, she could say their voices had wakened her. She peered out between the banisters.

Her father was standing in the hall, holding the man from the quarry impaled in the stabbing beam of an electric torch. He—oh, he was brave—he kept moving about and trying to rub the light out of his eyes. He made little rushes. But her father shifted the torch mercilessly, playing him in it, even though his hand shook.

Brenda’s mother came back from the phone. “He’s coming,” she reported. “He didn’t think the gun would do much good. He had another plan.”

It took Jim Emsden long enough to get to the cottage for Brenda to have time enough to shiver and wish she had put on her bathrobe. She yawned nervously and curled herself up more tightly against the banister. But she never took her eyes from the tableau in the hall below.

* * *

Emsden came in by the side door. He was wearing an overcoat over his pajamas. He took a deep breath when he saw the gray, blobby shape in the light of the torch.

“Yes, it’s the same man,” he said in his rumbling voice. “Of course. Nobody could mistake that smell. I brought the gun, Rick, but I have a hunch it won’t help. Not against a thing like that. Elizabeth got a glimpse of him, you know. I’ll show you what I mean. Keep him in the torch.”

He raised the .22 to his shoulder, clicked the bolt, and fired. Brenda’s little scream went unheeded in the whoosh of the shot. But the man from the quarry made no sign of having received the impact. He did not even rock. The bullet might as well have spent its force in mud.

“You see?” Emsden demanded. “It wasn’t any good.”

Flora Alden was giggling gently. The beam of the torch moved in bobbing circles against the darkness. “What’ll we do, Jim?” Rick asked. “I didn’t know things like this could happen. What are we going to do?—I'm afraid I’m going to be sick.”

“Steady, Rick. Why, there’s one thing he’ll be afraid of. Whatever he is. Fire.”

He produced rags and a bottle of kerosene. With the improvised torch they drove him out of the cottage and into the night outside. Whenever he slowed and tried to face them, his head lowered, his teeth gleaming, they thrust the bundle of burning rags in his face.

He had to give ground. Brenda was chewing her wrist in her excitement. She heard her father’s higher voice saying, “But what will we do with him, Jim? We can’t just leave him outside the house,” and Emsden’s deeper, less distinct answering rumble, “... kill him. But we can shut him up.” And then a confused roll of voices ending in the word “quarry.” She could hear nothing more.

Next day an atmosphere of exhaustion and cold defeat hung over the house. Brenda’s mother moved about her household tasks mechanically, hardly speaking to her daughter, her face white. Her father had not come back to the cottage until nearly daybreak and had left again after a few hours. It was not until nearly dusk that Brenda was able to slip out and try to find what had become of the man.

She made straight for the quarry. When she reached it, she looked about, bewildered. The sides were still sharp and square, but a great mound of rock had been piled up in the center. The men of Moss Island must have worked hard all day to pile up so much rock.

She slid down the sides and clambered up the heap in the center. What had become of him? Was he under the mound? She listened. She could hear nothing. After a moment she sat down and pressed her ear to the rock. It still felt warm from the heat of the sun.

She listened. She could hear only the beating of her heart. And then, far down, a long way off, a rustle within the heap like that made by a mole’s soft paws.

* * *

After that, things changed. Brenda’s father put the cottage up for sale, but there were no purchasers. He and Jim Emsden spent a couple of days piling up more rock in the quarry. Then he had to go back to the office, since his vacation was over. He could visit the island only on weekends. Everyone, even Brenda, seemed to want to forget what was under the rock heap. Brenda’s mother began to complain that the girl was getting hard to handle, no longer obeyed.

The children who had rejected her now sought her out. They came to the cottage as soon as breakfast was over, asking for Brenda, and she went off with them at once, deaf to all that her mother could say. She would return only at dusk, pale with exhaustion, but still blazing with frantic energy.

Her new energy seemed inexhaustible. The physical feats that had once repelled her drew her irresistibly. She tumbled, climbed, dove, chinned herself, did splits and cartwheels. The other children watched her admiringly and applauded. For the first time in her life she tasted the pleasures of leadership.

If that had been all, only Brenda's parents would have complained. But she drew her new followers after her into piece upon piece of mischief. They were destructive, wanton, irrepressible. By the end of the summer, everyone on Moss Island was saying that Brenda Alden needed disciplining. Her parents complained bitterly that she was impossible to control. They sent her off ahead of time to school.

There the events of the late summer were repeated. Brenda's schoolmates accepted her lead blindly. The teachers punished and threatened. Her grades—for the first time in her life—were bad. She was within an inch of being expelled.

* * *

The year passed. Spring came, and summer. The Aldens, fearing more trouble, left Brenda at school after the school year was over. She did not get back to Moss Island until late July.

The last few months had changed Brenda physically. Her narrow body had rounded and grown more womanly. Under her shirt—she still wore slacks and shirt—her breasts had begun to swell and lift. She seemed to have outgrown her tomboy ways. Her parents began to congratulate themselves.

She did not go at once to the cairn in the quarry. She often thought of it. But she felt a sweet reluctance, an almost tender disinclination, toward going. It could wait. August was well advanced before she visited the mound.

The day was warm. She was winded after the walk through the woods. She let herself down the side of the quarry delicately, paused for breath, and went up the mound with long, slipping steps. When she got to the top she sat down.

Was there, in the hot air, the faintest hint of rottenness? She inhaled doubtfully. Then, as she had done last year, she pressed her ear to the mound.

There was silence. Was he—but of course he couldn’t be dead. “Hi,” she called softly, her lips against the rock, “Hi. I’ve come back. It’s me.”

The scrabble began far down and seemed to come nearer. But there was too much rock in the
way. Brenda sighed. “Poor old thing,” she said. Her tone was rueful. “You want to be born, too, don’t you? And you can’t get out. It’s too bad.”

The scrabbling continued. Brenda, after a moment, stretched herself out against the rock. The sun was warm, the heat from the stones beat up lullingly against the body. She lay in drowsy contentment for a long time, listening to the noises within the mound.

The sun began to wester. The cool of evening roused her. She sat up.

The air was utterly silent. There were no bird calls anywhere. The only sounds came from within the mound.

Brenda leaned forward quickly, so that her long hair fell over her face. “I love you,” she said softly to the rock. “I’ll always love you. You’re not afraid of anyone, not even father. You’re the only one I could ever love.”

She halted. The scrabbling within had risen to a crescendo.

She laughed. Then she drew a long, wavering sigh. “Be patient,” she said. “Someday I’ll let you out. There’s a lot of rock, but I'll move it. I promise. Then you can make me a woman. I’ll be alive for the first time. I’ll love you. We’ll be born together, you and I.”

End.

Margaret St. Clair (February 17, 1911 Huchinson, Kansas - November 22, 1995 Santa Rosa, CA) was an American science fiction writer, who also wrote under the pseudonyms Idris Seabright and Wilton Hazzard. Apart from more than 100 short stories, St. Clair also wrote nine novels. Of interest beyond science fiction is her 1963 novel Sign of the Labrys, for its early use of Wicca elements in fiction.