Comic Horror Monthly: Issue 53
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Cosmic Horror Monthly

Contents

1. Full Page Image
2. Title Page
3. Contents
4. Copyright
5. Letter From the Editor
6. Meet the CHM staff

7. Introduction to the Collection by Anonymous

8. Lion Tamer
9. Full Page Image
10. An Ouroboros of a Sort
11. The Arca Musarithmica
12. Full Page Image
13. The Rest of the Chicken
14. Pale and Interesting
15. Full Page Image
16. God Only Knows
17. Full Page Image
18. The Mystery of Black Jean

Landmarks

1. Title Page
2. Contents
3. Copyright
4. Beginning
5. Cover

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 – Stefan Koidl

Editor: Jolie Toomajan

Co-Editor | Social Media: Carson Winter

Publisher | Layouts & Typography: Charles Tyra

Printed locally in Oklahoma City, OK

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

David Nichols II, Aaron Paris Davila, Zach Sherrill, Angelica Bell, Allan Smulling, Adam Vincent, Shane Ardley, Shawn Barma, Gary Coulbourne, Benjamin Hitmar, Erik Goodrich, Jim Major, Mario Santos, Mike Ostwald, Nicholas J. Corkigian, Samuel Russell
www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

COMIC HORROR MONTHLY

ISSUE 53

Edited by JOLIE TOOMAJAN

CONTENTS

Letter From the Editor

Meet the CHM staff

Introduction to the Collection by Anonymous

Charlie Hughes

Lion Tamer

D. Matthew Urban

An Ouroboros of a Sort

Elou Carroll

The Arca Musarithmica

Dave Hangman

The Rest of the Chicken

Devan Barlow

Pale and Interesting

David Stephen Powell

God Only Knows

Scott Edelman

The Mystery of Black Jean

Julian Kilman

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Greetings Dear Reader,

Welcome to the November 2024 issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly. For Issue 53, we’re bringing you a mix of weird and cosmic stories ranging from the terrifying to the fantastically camp, as only seems fitting for the start of the Holiday season here.

We start this issue with a bit of uncanny metafiction, “Introduction to The Collection by Anonymous” by Charlie Hughes. D. Matthew Urban’s masterful “Lion Tamer” follows, a Ligottian tale of unreality and dislocation where a circus performer suspects his counterpart is not really a lion. Elou Carroll’s “An Ouroboros of a Sort” gives us a take on loneliness, as an isolated narrator works to make sense of the woman floating outside their 13th story window. “The Arca Musarthimica” by Dave Hangman is a supernatural crime story and a nostalgic treat written in the pulp style. After that we bring you Devan Barlow’s “The Rest of the Chicken,” a fabulously weird folktale that sees a detective contracted by a large chicken to retrieve his fallen comrade’s body from Baba Yaga’s hut. David Stephen Powell’s “Pale and Interesting” is a traditional cosmic tale with a tinge of folk horror. We close with Scott Edelman’s “God Only Knows,” which is the best and most heartbreaking golem story I’ve read in a long time. For this month’s crypt, we turn to Julian Kilman’s “The Mystery of Black Jean” originally published in Weird Tales in March 1923.

We hope you enjoy this issue, and we’ll see you next time.

J

MEET THE CHM STAFF

Jolie Toomajan: Chief 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.

Charles Tyra: Publisher | Layouts/Typography

Oenophile, logophile, bibliophile. Obsessed with cosmic horror and weird fiction and especially turn of the century pulp magazines.

Carson Winter: Co-Editor | Social Media

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

Featured artists this month

Cover art: Cover art: Stefan Koidl is a full time Krampus mask carver, self-taught illustrator and concept artist living in Salzburg, Austria.

“I started drawing when I was a little kid, I was fascinated of creating characters and scenes that don’t exist in real life. Over the years I always wanted to improve my skills and techniques until I reach a level that my role models have. I’m currently specialized in digital paintings, with this medium its easier for me and faster to capture an idea.”

https://linktr.ee/stefankoidl

Trevin Wyant is an illustrator, educator, and nightmare maker from the foothills of Appalachia. His work offers a portal into the illusive landscape of dreams where shadows come to life and the unimaginable takes form.

INTRODUCTION TO THE COLLECTION BY ANONYMOUS

CHARLIE HUGHES

This is not an introduction. It is training, preparation.

Introductions are supposed to go like this: “Dear reader, you have made a wise purchase and you will enjoy what follows for reason x, y or z.”

I should drone on for a few pages, recounting some droll anecdote about the first time I met the author of this book at a horror/fantasy convention in the 1990s, how I was charmed by their engaging personality and dry humour, all the while intimating that I too am a damn fine sort. You know how it goes. The glib lack of self-awareness, the insider references, the glowing praise for all that follows.

On and on it would go, inevitably turning to the favourite subject of all established writers of horror and the uncanny: their unjust exclusion from the literary canon. How dare they, the critics, look down on us? Our horrors are as poetic and elegant as anything venerated by the snobs and coffee house bores. Blah, blah, blah.

I know what you expect me to write. But something different is required.

Let’s start with the basics. I’ve never met the author and have only a vague idea who they are. I was commissioned to write this introduction by a publisher who probably doesn’t exist, via an agent who is already dead. I will not reveal my own name, not because I wish to be mysterious, but to avoid distracting you from more pressing matters. I only agreed to write it because I did something the other old-time writers rarely do when asked to pen an introduction - I read the entire book, cover to cover before starting work. Once I was finished, it was already too late. The die was cast.

Here are some things I do know. This is the final edition of this book. There will be no more reprints and certainly no sequel. Then again, how could there be?

What else? You did not buy this book in a shop or from any online retailer, obscure or otherwise. Neither are you following these words on an electronic device.

In fact, I’ll wager, right now, you are struggling to recall how the book came into your possession in the first place. Did you borrow it from a friend? Find it on a shelf while clearing the detritus from a dead parent’s home? Or were there copies handed out at last week’s book club meeting. There are many possibilities, but none of them stick in the mind. That’s the difference with The Collection. It is slippery.

The stories you’ll find within will, at times, feel familiar. You have spent a lifetime reading books of this type: anthologies and collections filled with nightmares, monsters and ghouls. Story after story over-flowing with imagined darkness. They mix and meld, don’t they? Ideas and tropes and plot twists bleeding into each other. But The Collection uses this familiarity to draw you into an altogether more disturbing world. It will impart some uncomfortable truths about life, the universe and your own place within it.

This occurs slowly, both within each tale and cumulatively. When you set down the book between readings, go to prepare dinner or switch off the bedside light and rest your head on the pillow, you will be left with a peculiar sense of wrongness. This is the same troubling discomfort that accompanies the childhood memory you would never share, not even with your most intimate confidant. You know the one, the brow-furrowing recollection which cannot be explained without stepping beyond the bounds of rational understanding. The one you try to avoid.

In my own case, it is the time I stood at the top of the steep second floor stairs as a toddler, musing what would happen if I leapt all the way from the top to the landing below. Small children are capable of lethal bouts of curiosity. This was mine.

I jumped. What happened next constitutes, I suppose, a happy ending and yet the clear memory of it has always troubled me. I did not plunge to the floor below, breaking my limbs or cracking open my head. I floated down, entirely in control, like a ballet dancer winched into centre stage. For just a few seconds, I was in flight, then my sockless toes touched down onto the wooden floor with the gentleness of a mother’s kiss.

I have often wished that I’d been hurt, instead of having to deal with the inexplicable. It was a hint of the otherness inside me, a quality I did not wish to nurture. The early stories in The Collection nudge you towards this empty feeling, leaving gaps in the narrative which the reader is forced to fill.

What will it be for you? Ghostly visitations, miraculous occurrences, words heard which cannot be forgotten? Or the time you got lost in the supermarket and it took three full hours to be ‘reunited’ with two people who said they were your parents? No two readers experience the same book, it is true, but The Collection will make you look upon your memories of wrongness anew.

This ‘softening’ process will make you uncomfortable. By the time you reach the fourth story, you will want to stop reading entirely. But The Collection will not be cast aside with pious promises to return. Once you’ve begun, it must be finished. Several readers have attempted to destroy their copies and forget the whole sorry experience. It never ends well for them, and neither would it for you. Be good and begin reading the fourth story.

As you will see from the contents, the title of this tale is called ‘The Cleansing Soil’. Its primary themes are death, decomposition and the innate ability of human beings to commit acts of unspeakable evil without even the flimsiest of justification. It is told from the first-person point of view of a character who may or may not be the author of The Collection. You will not enjoy this story. It is a marker, a promise of what is to come in the remainder of the book.

At this point, you will start to get questions from those closest to you. Your children may ask why the evening meal has not been placed on the table. Your partner will want to know why you are eschewing physical contact, everything from sex to minor acts of physical affection. Story five (‘Anorak’) is the point at which most people stop going to work. You will hide this development from your family for a while, sitting all day in the car or on the bus, avoiding the routine which is so desperate to swallow you up. But no matter how hard you try, eventually someone notices. Your boss calls or maybe it’s the money no longer appearing in the bank account.

For you, the world is now divided into two groups. Those who have read (or are reading) The Collection and those who have not. The chasm between them is unbridgeable and it is better to accept this without struggle.

Take your time. Nod and smile when they make their pleas. Keep the book itself out of sight. Hide it in the same place you keep your other secrets. That drawer beneath your wardrobe with the old-fashioned lock or tucked behind the box of rusty garden tools you keep in the basement.

The pace of your reading will increase. Instead of consuming one story at a time, you will swallow them down in bigger chunks. The next three tales see the emergence of a recurring character. It is best not to share their name here, but let you reach it at the appropriate place. Conventional interpretation would designate this character an ‘anti-hero’, but that does not capture the full extent of it. She does things which transgress your understanding of what humans are capable of. Your world is expanding. Your received morality is collapsing inside you. Previously unquestioned judgements of right and wrong no longer apply. The character in stories six to eight can no longer be designated hero/villain/anti-hero because those labels no longer have meaning.

Reading the stories will become painful. Physically. Your head will pulse with a migraine-like ache. Your neck will prickle with a white heat reminiscent of the terrible fever you experienced as a child. It is not lack of sleep causing this, but the new ideas the book is introducing. We are not built to retain such information and it will take time to adapt.

Your loved ones and family will stage interventions, calling in medical professionals, your nearest and dearest begging you to come out of the stasis which they believe has infected you. They will ask why you are disintegrating in front of their eyes, why you appear to lack the motivation to roll out of bed in the morning. It is important that you do not tell them about The Collection. If they remove your copy you will not be able to finish the stories, and that would be catastrophic for everyone concerned. Hide it away.

The final stories in The Collection have a more experimental theme and format. One, titled ‘The Story’ could be described as meta-horror. No matter how turgid you have found this self-indulgent sub-genre in the past, you will persist with it and then move on to the next.

The final stories are less disturbing, less obviously horrific than what came before. The subtext is more subtle. The violence and gore, omnipresent in the earlier tales, is replaced by a quieter aesthetic. Each one is set in the same small rural town, a nowhere place in a nondescript county in the middle of England. The town is never named but the description and noted position of landmarks mean it is child’s play to find on a map.

The last story is set in the near future and relates the details of a prophesy, and a mission for the town’s inhabitants. The date of the final, climactic event is never mentioned, but in reading the story you will become aware of a date and a time in the not-too-distant future. You will see what will come to pass, even though this is never fully described.

At this point, your family will breathe a sigh of relief. With the book finished, you will come out of your stupor, finally washing yourself, eating, and agreeing to see the doctor. Slowly, but surely you will return to the rhythms of routine you practiced prior to reading The Collection. But this is just a distraction, an act. You are changed, transformed entirely from the person you were before, and nobody will suspect a thing.

Your mind is already a caterpillar in its chrysalis.

You know the town. And you know the date. Most importantly of all, you know what will happen in only a few years’ time.

You will say nothing. You will smile and work and play games with your children. You will fuck your partner and get fucked by your employer. Proceed with the whole meaningless charade for one reason and one reason only: to exist in the world on the date in question.

When it comes, you will exit your life and go to the town. You will be in precisely the correct place at precisely the right time.

Meanwhile, there is only one more task to complete.

You do not need to keep The Collection. Every single word, dot and comma is carved into your psyche. It will not be forgotten. You must not be selfish. It needs a new friend.

Use your imagination. Go to a library in a town hundreds of miles from your home and place it on a shelf. Post it to a random address. Leave it on the bus. Don’t worry, The Collection will not come to any harm. It cannot be destroyed.

You have your instructions. Fate has chosen you for this task.  Read on. Take care. I will see you when the time is right.

* * *

Charlie Hughes writes dark suspense and horror stories. He lives in London with his wife and two children. His work has been published by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, NoSleep Podcast and Flame Tree Press. His story 'The Collection' (a different story to the one printed here with a similar name) was recently reprinted in the Ellen Datlow edited 'Best Horror of the Year, Vol 15'. His story 'The Motley' will appear in volume 16 of the same series later this year. Outside of writing, Charlie enjoys following his beloved Liverpool Football Club and nursing an obsession with indie bands from the ’90s Britpop era.

LION TAMER

D. MATTHEW URBAN

The lion tamer stood outside the shed, a ring of keys in one hand and a looped bullwhip in the other. Both ring and loop gleamed in the rays of the bare bulb that hung above the shed’s metal door. Every morning before dawn, when the lion tamer arrived for his daily session with the beast, the bulb was illuminated, its beams reflected along the door in a waterfall of light. By noon, when he locked up the shed before heading for lunch at the commissary, the bulb would be extinguished. Some kind of automatic sensor probably switched it off once sunrise rendered its light unnecessary. The lion tamer wasn’t sure.

Even on this frigid winter morning, the air inside the shed was warm, sharp as always with the musky scent of lion. The lion tamer pocketed his ring of keys and flipped on the light. A dim glow fell from the translucent panel in the middle of the ceiling, and at the far end of the shed, behind the row of black-painted bars, the lion stirred. Its shaggy flanks heaved.

The lion tamer watched through the bars as the beast rose to its feet, the dim light dancing on its fur in golden spangles. He wondered if “lion” might be the wrong word for it. He uncoiled the whip.

* * *

The lion tamer watched from the darkness as the clowns finished their routine. With cartwheels and handsprings and somersaults, they rushed toward the middle of the ring, where a spotlight gleamed on the drab little hatchback in which they’d arrived. Instead of reentering the car’s strangely capacious interior, they swarmed over its surface, clinging to roof and hood and sides until all that could be seen was the squirming heap of their garishly costumed bodies. An engine revved within the mass, and the car-shaped blob of clowns began to move. The crowd howled with delight as it puttered out of the ring, into the shadows.

“Ain’t they funny, folks?” the ringmaster boomed into his microphone. “Let’s hear it one more time for those clever little creatures! Better get all that laughter out of your systems now, ladies and gentlemen, because our next act is no joke. Let’s have a big round of applause for the brave Signor Agnello and his savage…ferocious…razor-clawed…man-eating…lion!”

The lion tamer tightened his grip on the silver chain and gave it a tug. The beast rose from its haunches. With a strange huffing sound, as if it didn’t know whether to growl or sigh, it strode forward into the floodlit ring, the chain sparkling around its throat and the lion tamer following.

In the center of the bright space, the beast halted. The lion tamer unlooped the chain from its neck, flung the gleaming metal serpent aside. The crowd roared its approval. The lion’s eyes and fur glistened, tiny currents of light running along its tawny landscape. It was shivering, the lion tamer realized. Not shivering with fear or anticipation but vibrating as if its parts were pulling away from each other, straining to burst asunder in a storm of flesh. He thought of the clown-mass that had throbbed where the lion now sat, an agglomeration shaped like a car but not a car. “Lion” really was the wrong word.

On with the show. The lion tamer opened his mouth wide, and the creature did the same. With a grin for the crowd, the lion tamer bent forward to lay his head between the massive jaws. Hot breath rushed over his face, bearing a sour, meaty smell from the lion’s insides. He heard a squelch—the huge tongue shifting. A damp tooth pressed into the hollow behind his ear.

Peering out from his warm, wet sanctuary, the lion tamer saw the faces of the spectators in the front row, dim but visible in the floodlights’ penumbra. The faces were wide-eyed, rapt with wonder, all except one. In the middle of the row, nestled between a well-dressed man and woman who must have been his parents, a child returned the lion tamer’s gaze with a calm, cold stare. The child was bundled up in a heavy coat. In his lap, mittened hands cradled a stuffed animal. Tan fur, a tufted tail, beady black eyes glaring out from a ring of pale, silky threads.

The lion tamer watched as the child raised the stuffed lion to his lips, planted a delicate kiss on its fuzzy head. The cold stare never wavered. Still grinning, the lion tamer thought, That child knows my lion is not a lion. Then he thought, That is not a child.

* * *

The commissary was crowded as usual. Clutching his tray as if someone might try to snatch away his meatloaf, the lion tamer scanned the long tables for an empty place. He didn’t see one. Would he have to eat on the floor again?

“Hey!” a hoarse voice called from behind him. “Hey, Mr. Lamb!” That wasn’t his name, but he turned anyway to see a short, thick man, one of the clowns—Giggles? Cackles?—beckoning him toward a space that had just opened up.

The lion tamer sat, scooted his chair forward, smiled across the table at the clown. “Thanks…Cackles?”

The clown smirked. “Pretty close. Chuckles.”

The lion tamer blushed. “Chuckles, right, sorry. Great show out there today. I loved the car thing at the end. How did you guys come up with that?”

“My idea, actually. I just got to thinking about clown cars. You know, ‘clown car,’ is that a car made for clowns…”

“…Or a car made of clowns?” The lion tamer nodded. “Nice.”

Chuckles scooped a hunk of meatloaf into his maw. “You did good today, too. The rubes always go nuts for the old head-in-the-mouth gimmick.” He swallowed, grimaced. “Not saying I think it’s easy or nothing. Takes guts, to say the least. What made you want to do that kind of thing?”

The lion tamer chewed in silence for a moment. The meatloaf tasted sour. He thought of the bulb above the door to the lion’s shed, how it glowed in the darkness, went dark in the light. What made it want to glow or not glow? Some kind of automatic sensor, something he didn’t understand. Swallowing, he felt the meatloaf’s sourness spread through him. “I guess it goes back to when I was a kid. You see, I had this stuffed animal…”

* * *

A frosty wind bit through the darkness, rattling the eaves of the shed and shaking the bulb. The lion tamer shivered, watched the waterfall of light ripple down the door. In his hands, the ring of keys and the whip gleamed like the circles of two dead eyes, beady and black.

Tucking the whip under his left arm, he reached up with his right and began to unscrew the bulb. It took a long time for the thing to come loose, and for an awful moment the lion tamer thought it might never happen, that he might stand there twirling the bulb in its socket until the sun rose and the sensor switched the light off. For a still more awful moment, he thought even that might not happen, that the sun might never rise, the light never turn off, that he might be stranded there forever in the pre-dawn cold as the bulb spun in an endless spiral and bathed him in its harsh, irrevocable beams. But finally the bulb went dark, came free. He put it in his coat pocket.

Inside, the creature was already awake, pacing back and forth behind the bars. Its claws clicked on the concrete floor of the shed, and the warm, sharp-scented air thrummed with a sound that the lion tamer thought at first was the metal walls vibrating in the wind, but which he quickly realized was coming from the beast. The lion was purring.

It wasn’t a lion, he knew. “Lion” was the wrong word. But he couldn’t think of anything better.

He flipped on the light. The beast kept pacing, covering the width of the shed in two or three strides before turning to go back the other way. The dim glow from the overhead panel coursed along its sides, pooling and flowing with the contours of its powerful muscles. Its rumbling purr sent vibrations throughout its body, every patch of its fur straining away from all the rest, every strand of its mane dancing its own wild and independent dance.

The lion tamer approached the bars. The keys and the whip dropped from his hands, and though he listened for their clang and thump on the floor, there was only the purr, the thrum, and inside the thrum he heard other sounds, tremors in the air trying to become words. Just as the lion’s body was a storm of flesh straining to tear itself free, its purr was a numberless roar of voices clamoring to tell him the right word.

The lion tamer knelt on the concrete, thrust his hands between the black-painted bars, seized fistfuls of rough, warm fur. The beast stopped pacing. Its face swiveled toward the lion tamer, and its eyes were not dead and beady but pools of living fire, golden and wise and terrible.

Quivering before the monster, the lion tamer pressed his ear against the bars. “Please,” he whispered. “Tell me.” But the lion fell silent.

* * *

The air above the ring was full of acrobats, their lithe forms soaring and spinning to the crowd’s gasps of amazement. Looking up from the darkness, the lion tamer followed the trapeze with his eyes as it swung back and forth like the shuttle of a loom, stitching a fabric of bodies on empty space. The lion tamer shuddered.

“Amazing!” the ringmaster crowed. ”Wasn’t that amazing, folks?” The acrobats bowed gracefully, the crowd thundering. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we plunge from the heights of elegance to the deepest depths of animalism. How about a big welcome for the man who tamed the savage beast, the fearless Signor Agnello and his barbarous…terrifying…dagger-fanged…bloodthirsty…lion!”

The beast shook its mane, made a sound that the lion tamer could have sworn was a chuckle, and stepped into the ring. The lion tamer followed, the silver chain cold in his sweaty grip.

Under the floodlights, the creature’s fur roiled and seized like a dread-sick heart. Any moment now, the lion tamer knew, the storm of flesh would break out, the roaring chorus would speak the truth, and then…what? His fingers trembled as he unlooped the chain.

“Hey, mister!” a small voice squealed from the edge of the ring.

Startled, the lion tamer spun toward the call. The chain fell from his quaking hand as he saw the child staring coldly from the front row, nestled between his well-dressed parents, the stuffed lion held tight in his mittened hands. Not a child, the lion tamer thought.

“You call that a lion, mister?” A smile as cold as his stare curled the child’s lips.

The lion tamer shook his head. “No,” he whispered. Not a child.

The not-child’s parents writhed with embarrassment and made shushing noises, but the squealing voice only grew louder. “That thing ain’t no lion! Leo here could whip your fake lion.” Raising the stuffed animal, the not-child buried his mouth in its silky mane. Leo glared at the lion tamer with dead, black eyes.

From the other side of the ring, someone shouted, “Are you going to do any lion tricks or what?” Murmurs rippled through the crowd.

The lion tamer stood motionless, transfixed by Leo’s beady glare. Somehow he knew that those dead circles were about to come alive, lit up by some sensor keyed to the rising terror of his own heart, and that when Leo’s eyes opened, they would trap him in a whirling nightmare, a never-ending spiral of fear and confusion.

Someone in the crowd began to boo. The ringmaster yelled, “Come on, folks, be patient! Signor Agnello is just, uh, pausing for dramatic effect!” More people booed. A cup of soda flew out of the darkness and splashed across the ring.

The not-child hoisted Leo overhead, waved the stuffed animal back and forth. “Fake lion!” he howled. “Fake lion!”

From the middle of the ring, a sound arose that was deeper than the crowd’s boos, fiercer than the not-child’s shrieks. It rattled though the lion tamer’s flesh, rumbled in the ground beneath his feet, the air and the empty spaces beyond the air vibrating to the rhythm of the beast’s purr. The lion tamer reached backward with a trembling hand, felt the rough fur churning like an ocean against his palm.

“Fake lion! Fake lion!” the not-child chanted. Leo’s black eyes flickered.

The lion tamer fell to his knees. “Lion, help me!” he screamed.

The beast’s jaws gaped in a monstrous roar, and the storm of flesh broke out.

* * *

A guard snuck a newspaper into the lion tamer’s cell. “Thought you had a right to see what they’re saying about you,” he said.

COMMUNITY AGHAST AT CIRCUS HORROR ran the headline, and the subhead read, “8-year-old Gerald Beranek mauled to death before parents’ eyes; observers describe tragic incident as ‘murder by lion.’” A series of eyewitnesses described the lion tamer’s odd behavior in the ring, his increasing agitation as the boy taunted him, and the final, horrible moment when he commanded his lion to attack. “Mr. Lamb has been my friend and colleague for years,” the ringmaster said. “Would I have ever thought he’d do something like this? Not in a million lifetimes. I guess it goes to show, you never really know someone.” The lion had been impounded by animal control and would soon be put down.

The lion tamer crumpled the newspaper and threw it into a corner of the cell, disgusted. Nothing about the storm of flesh. Nothing about how the lion was not a lion, the child not a child. Nothing about Leo. They hadn’t even gotten his name right.

* * *

On the witness stand, the lion tamer refused to answer any questions premised on the notion that the lion had been a lion or the child a child.

“Well, what terminology would you prefer me to use?” the prosecutor snapped.

“I don’t know the right words, only the wrong ones,” the lion tamer replied.

The trial was confusing yet infuriating. The prosecution’s expert witness argued that the lion tamer had premeditated the death of little Jerry Beranek due to his fixation on the boy’s stuffed lion, which reminded the lion tamer of a similar toy which he had possessed as a child. “One might suggest,” the expert witness said, “that the memory of that toy is what drove Mr. Lamb to enter the animal training profession in the first place. A desire to recapture the lost object.”

“Objection, your honor!” said the lion tamer’s public defender. “Speculation.”

“Sustained,” said the judge.

The lion tamer wanted to stand up and tell everyone it wasn’t true, that he’d never had a stuffed lion and his name wasn’t Mr. Lamb, but who could say what had happened so long ago? Maybe he’d had a stuffed lion once, or a stuffed version of some other creature that he’d mistaken for a lion. As for his name, he was only sure what it wasn’t. Not Lamb, not Agnello, not Beranek, none of those.

The one interesting thing about the trial was a photograph entered into evidence by the prosecution, an image of what the child’s head looked like after it was pried from the lion’s jaws. When the photograph was revealed, there were screams in the courtroom, and the bailiff vomited. No one had ever seen a child’s head look like that. It didn’t seem possible that a child’s head could look like that.

Because it wasn’t a child, the lion tamer thought. I knew it all along.

* * *

The guard leaned against the bars of the cell with a grin. “Hey, you hear about that killer lion of yours?”

By now, the lion tamer knew better than to say anything but, “No, what about it?”

“It went on the lam,” the guard said. “No pun intended. Animal control went to put it down, but the cage was empty. It’s all over the news.”

“Thank you for letting me know.” But the lion tamer wasn’t sure if he should be thankful or not.

* * *

One night, the lion tamer woke up in the shed. He thought it was the cell at first, because somehow his bed was there, along with the circus advertisement posters he’d convinced the guard to let him tape to the wall. But the light was the dim glow of the shed, not the harsh radiance of the cell, and when he rose to check the bars, he found they were not the dull gray bars of the cell, but the black-painted bars of the shed.

When he was sure where he was, the first thing he did was look for the door. It was there, but it was locked from the outside, and he didn’t have his ring of keys. He didn’t have his bullwhip, either. He dug through the pockets of the heavy coat that lay folded on the bed where his pillow usually sat, but all he found was a pair of mittens and a burned-out lightbulb. So much for escape, he thought.

Later, when he tried to remember what made him turn back toward the bars, he was fairly certain it wasn’t a sound, or a trembling in the floor, or anything like that. It was a smell, he was almost sure, a sharp, heavy smell that pervaded the air of the shed like a sudden pang of conscience pervading a guilty heart. Whatever it was, he turned toward the bars, and what he saw made him sit down on the bed as abruptly as if he’d been brained with a mallet.

It wasn’t a lion behind the bars; about that, he was positive. Not a lion, nor any other kind of animal. If he had to describe it, he would have said it was a whirling chaos, a lashing, raging maelstrom of multicolored fragments and threads interweaving in patterns so intricately beautiful he could only weep, so appallingly terrible he could only scream, and each of the fragments was a living face whose golden eyes regarded him with a serenity that froze his marrow, and each of the threads was a fleshy throat whose cracked and ragged voice made his flesh crawl and his mind reel with the all-unraveling sound of the word that had escaped him for so long, the single right word for everything he’d known, everything he’d suffered. But he didn’t have to describe it, because the chaos began to shine so brightly that he squeezed his eyes shut against it, and when he opened them again, he was back in the cell, the word had slipped from his mind, and he knew that if he tried to talk to anyone about what he’d seen, they’d only laugh and say it had obviously been a dream, so he never spoke of it.

* * *

The guard leaned against the bars. “You got a visitor, Lamb.”

The lion tamer had been napping. He opened his eyes. “Is that so?”

“Don’t you want to ask who it is? Your first visitor after all these years, ain’t you curious?”

“All right, who is it?”

“You’ll find out,” the guard sneered. “Now get up.”

The lion tamer recognized the short, thick man behind the plexiglass barrier at once, but it took him a few moments to dredge up the name. “Chuckles?”

“It’s Cackles now,” the visitor said. “Seems more appropriate these days.”

“What brings you here, Cackles?”

“It’s just that I got to thinking. You remember that clown car act, way back in the day?”

Shaped like a car but not a car. “It’s been a while, but I think I vaguely recall.”

“I just got to thinking about lion tamers. Is that a person who tames lions, or…?”

The lion tamer shook his head. “It wasn’t a lion.”

“So I heard.” The visitor leaned forward as if expecting the lion tamer to say more. He didn’t. “Well, have a nice life, Mr. Tamer.”

“You too, Mr. Clown.”

After the visitor was gone, the lion tamer waited quietly for a guard to bring him back to the cell. Once he was there, he’d lie down on his bed, close his eyes, and think of the creature he’d tamed so long ago. He was sure he’d understand, this time, what manner of beast it had been.

* * *

D. Matthew Urban hails from Texas and lives in Queens, NY, where he reads weird books, watches weird movies, and writes weird fiction. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in It Was All a Dream 2 (Hungry Shadow Press), Split Scream Volume 4 (Tenebrous Press), and Tales from Between, among other venues. A collection of his stories is coming in early 2025 from Cursed Morsels Press. Find him on Twitter @breathinghead or on the web at https://dmatthewurban.com.

AN OUROBOROS OF A SORT

ELOU CARROLL

The woman at the window is impossible.

It is not that she is a woman nor that she stares so that her brow is fixed permanently downwards; nor is it that her hair is too black, too sleek, too shiny, but rather that she cannot be at the window in the first place. Sage lives on the thirteenth floor, and the window is much too high. There are no ledges nor trees outside to speak of. The only shadow that passes across the window is the woman’s own.

In the beginning Sage ignores the woman. For the first few nights, they assume her to be an intrusive thought brought forth by several nights of not sleeping—the woman at the window only does her staring in the dark. From below, the bellows of drunk lads carry up; none of them mention the woman though they try to count each window in turn. She mustn’t be real, if they do not see her.

The first time the woman fades into Sage’s periphery, peering through the crack in the curtains, they jump, shriek and hammer the light switch so quickly that the buzzing light blinds them for a moment. They keep their eyes closed, unwilling to look, and retreat to the airing cupboard, which has no windows, to wait out the night.

Right now, the woman is still at the window.

The dim light accentuates the deep craters of her cheeks and eye sockets—her face is gaunt and a sickly sort of pale, but Sage can look away no longer. The woman appears at all times damp. A sheen seeps from her skin and lingers like a mist, but never drips. There is something in that face of hers that draws Sage closer, that makes them press their hand against the glass, and sinks their heart like a rock in the murky pond of their chest when the woman does not raise her own hand in reply.

Sage has never been very good at making friends. Even the ones they imagined quickly grew bored of them, picked themselves up and shuffled off to wherever it was they came from. Sage imagined them gathering and snickering. The woman at the window will be different—she’s still here, isn’t she?

Her eyes—pale pinpricks of light, as if she has reached up and plucked two stars from the night sky and pressed them into her eye sockets, though they remain far too small and much too far away—are unblinking. And though there is wind outside, a gale that whistles through the poorly insulated brickwork, not a single hair on her pretty, putrid head moves with it.

She is a still image—a photo in a frame—but Sage is certain that she is alive. The gaze of the dead cannot hold such fire. Though, her burning is cold.

What little sleep they get, if they get any at all, is taken in the day; Sage has become a nocturnal creature in their pursuit. When they dream, they see the woman still. Only she is inside the bedroom now, her too-long limbs dragging across the floor as she drifts to Sage’s bedside. The woman opens her wide mouth and Sage sees the universe in her throat. So deep they could climb in.

If they wake before the sun sets, they feel the absence of the woman like the slow burn of alcohol in their chest. They cannot help but wonder if, somewhere nearby, the woman stares into someone else’s window—only in the daylight, she might be white-haired and the pins of her eyes might be shards of stolen sunlight instead of the frozen glow of the stars.

Not wanting to see the glass bereft of her, Sage whiles away the hours in front of the bathroom mirror. It has been days since they ran out of food and Sage is beginning to resemble the woman, themselves. Gaunt, just like her. With the blinds pulled down, their face could be the woman’s if the shadows sit right. But when Sage opens their mouth, it is not a galaxy they see, but their own gullet—pink, and without tonsils.

They do not remember smashing the mirror.

“This is it,” they tell themselves—for if Sage doesn’t remember smashing it, that means it could only have been the woman. She must have been inside. Sage can see her now, sneaking in while they slept. As the shatterings bite into their feet like teeth, they feel closer to the woman at the window than they have ever been.

* * *

There she is, the woman. Still at the window. Still staring.

Sage slides the window open. “You can come in. I’ve already turned all of the lights off for you. I know you like it in the dark.”

The woman at the window does not move and Sage dithers for a moment before they say, “It’s okay. We can move at your pace. We’re in no rush.”

The lie burns hot as it leaves their mouth, scorching their lips as it passes, but if the woman feels it, it doesn’t show. Her mouth still sits in a neat line, her hair still hangs unmoving at the sides of her face and her long limbs still dangle down the side of the building. It is a wonder Sage’s downstairs neighbours haven’t spotted her but they’re the kind of people who close their curtains as soon as the sun suggests it might set. It’s lucky, they think, having such incurious neighbours.

No, the woman doesn’t acknowledge the lie. Her eyes still stare unblinking.

Sage has stared back at those eyes for a long time, and the idiom is incorrect: the eyes are not the window to the soul. The window is the mouth. Look down someone’s throat and you’ll see where their soul is. It makes sense that it would be the mouth. Not the eyes that only ever look outwards. The mouth imbibes. The mouth gives voice. It is the mouth that kisses and keeps secrets.

The woman at the window is good at keeping secrets.

Sage is not. Sage is impatient and their mouth is too open, secrets too easily spilled, but it is not their mouth that gets them into trouble, this time.

It is their hands.

Sage is sick with waiting, sick with sitting still, and the woman, well, she is not doing much of anything. It is torture to watch her, to be watched by her and not reach out—connect.

Sage is shaking when they shove their hands into the night air. Hunger hounds their belly as they stretch their torso out of the window and hold the shoulders of the woman. Firm, impossibly thin, neither cold nor hot and not at all what Sage is expecting. They thought, like in all good fairy tales, the moment of connection would be transformative. That the woman at the window would no longer be a gaunt sweating thing but would become something more, something beautiful—in the conventional sense—the universe inside her seeping out and painting her with its radiance, with its colours. But there is nothing so magical about it.

There is a small transformation.

The woman at the window is smiling.

But the smile is not warm.

The smile tells Sage to run.

And they try, but their hands are stuck. No, not stuck. Their hands are part of her shoulders now. Their skin fused to whatever the woman is made of as if she’d grown Sage herself, like a tumour. The dark of the woman’s hair is spreading up Sage’s arms—each time they try to pull away, the darkness creeps higher.

The woman at the window is still smiling. Slowly, she opens her mouth and though they are scared, this is what Sage has been waiting for. Finally, they will cast their eyes on the nebula nestled deep inside the woman’s neck and perhaps the sleeplessness, the hunger, the all-consumingness of the thing will be worth it. And as the mouth widens, Sage stops struggling. Their own mouth opens in tandem, as if by doing it too, Sage can make the woman move faster, reveal herself sooner.

Her teeth, rows and rows of them, are like nothing Sage has ever seen. In their dreams, the woman at the window had human teeth, pristine and perfect. Sage’s stomach roils.

“No. This isn’t—you can’t—”

And Sage squirms anew. There is something wrong here, it tingles in their toes and up. They can feel it in their bones, excepting their arms, their hands, which they can no longer feel—they no longer belong to Sage. The woman has them now. She does not raise her hands to them—not yet—but still she takes, still she consumes.

Still her mouth—so wide—opens.

There is a darkness in her throat.

There are no stars. There is no wonder here.

Sage cries out, “Where are they?” as the night-black vines of the woman’s hair travel across their shoulders, coil around their neck.

“It’s not supposed to be like this,” they rasp.

The woman at the window opens her arms next.

Sage tries to pull away.

“No, I don’t want you. I don’t want this. No.” Their voice is barely more than a whisper now. Their mouth hardly moving.

The woman pulls Sage back, presses them against her chest as her own mouth widens yet further. As they meld, the woman’s eyes supernova, growing so bright that Sage cannot bear to look at them. So bright that the curtains seem to set alight—there is the scent of smoke and the crackling of flame but they cannot see them now. Cannot even turn their head to look.

“Please,” is the last word Sage can muster before their lips are affixed to the woman’s neck. They had imagined embracing her like this—and not at all like this—once, pictured their limbs entangled—but never like this. As the mouth opens its widest, the woman’s own limbs curl upwards, feet first. They enter her mouth and take Sage with them—an ouroboros of a sort. Sage can feel themselves slipping down the woman’s throat, taste the bitter, coal-like flavour of her bile. Each tooth scrapes across what remains of Sage’s skin and they shudder. Somewhere below, a voice slurs out, “Do you see that?” and Sage pretends they hear a, “Yes,” though no response ever comes.

The woman at the window is impossible, and then, she and Sage are gone.

* * *

Elou Carroll is a graphic designer and freelance photographer who writes. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Deadlands, Baffling Magazine, If There's Anyone Left (Volume 3), In Somnio: A Collection of Modern Gothic Horror (Tenebrous Press), Spirit Machine (Air and Nothingness Press), Ghostlore (Alternative Stories Podcast) and others. When she’s not whispering with ghosts, she can be found editing Crow & Cross Keys, publishing all things dark and lovely, and spending far too much time on twitter (@keychild). She keeps a catalogue of her weird little wordcreatures on www.eloucarroll.com.

THE ARCA MUSARITHMICA

DAVE HANGMAN

When I opened the door, a really strange man appeared in front of me. He had a stern face and a deep look of pain.

“I am the acroama,” he told me. At my surprised face he clarified, “The performer, who comes to tune the instrument.”

“Ah... yes!” I said, panicking as I realized who he was. “I don't know if it's wise for you to come to my house,” I whispered quietly. “I was hoping we could have met somewhere more discreet.”

“The instrument needs to be tuned and that work has to be done with care.”

“But...” I was astonished, “do you bring your... instrument with you?”

“Yes, it always goes with me everywhere,” he indicated raising with his right hand a case that seemed to house an accordion.

“Oh, my God! I didn't expect this. Come in, come in! Don't just stand there,” I had to hide that guy as soon as possible. I looked uneasily from one side of the street to the other.

“Don't worry. My musical technique is untraceable. They'll never be able to connect you with me, nor me with the music lover.”

“The music lover?”

“Yes, the music lover to whom we will lend our services.”

“Are you sure they can't connect you with him?”

“Absolutely sure, otherwise I wouldn't be here.”

“All right. Let's get this over with as soon as possible,” my nervousness did not diminish.

“You can call me Rezső or Mr. Seress, whichever you prefer.”

“No names, please,” I almost shrieked at him.

“Relax, it's not my real name, I like my clients to feel comfortable. I chose that name because I know that you are of Hungarian origin. Rezső Seress was the composer of a popular Hungarian song, Szomorú vasárnap. Do you know it?” I denied in bewilderment. “It was recorded in English as Gloomy Sunday. They call it the suicide song. Very appropriate, don't you think?”

“You seem to be amused by all this.”

“It's my job!” he said with a shrug.

I invited him to sit in my office, closed the door and latched it so no one could interrupt us.

“Okay, tell me what you need.”

“How well do you know the tastes of the music lover?”

“Yes, I think I do. He's been my partner for the last nine years.”

“All right, let's tune the instrument.”

He opened the suitcase and took out of it the strangest thing I've ever seen. It looked like a miniature organ. It had nine columns with sort of latticed slats of different sizes arranged from top to bottom with strange symbols on them.

“Let's begin. What is the thing that our music lover likes the most?”

I was puzzled by the question. I expected him to ask me about his habits or the places he frequented.

“Uhm! I think money and women, equal parts.” I found my answer too banal.

Seress set about adjusting a bunch of small rotary dials. There was one for each slat. He spent a long time making adjustments while I watched him suspiciously in silence.

“What irritates him the most?” he finally asked.

“I'd say the feeling of being made fun of. The belittling.”

Again, he began a long process of dial adjustment. As I watched him, I realized that there were twenty-four slats in each column, two hundred and sixteen different dials to manipulate. With the answer to each question, he adjusted more than twenty.

“How many questions are you going to ask me to tune the instrument?”

“The bare minimum is twenty-four, but this is a crude approximation of the music lover's character. With such a poor tuning I cannot guarantee the results. After fifty questions we can be surer. At eighty to one hundred the instrument is highly effective.”

“I am puzzled. With all those settings this instrument produces a melody with the desired results?”

“Yes, it does.”

“I find it incredible.”

“Have you ever heard of the baroque theory of affect?” I shook my head. “This instrument picks up the likes and dislikes of each music lover and thereby produces a unique melody tailored to that individual that will generate in him the desired mood.”

“And that by manipulating those slats?”

“They are not slats,” he replied offended. “They are Neper rods of perfectly calculated logarithmic lengths. Depending on the column they are in, the adjustable rods allow us to select and link chords, fit melodic motifs, define rhythm and tempo.” As he described them, he pointed to each of the columns. “Combine melodic, rhythmic and harmonic materials, and adjust the pitch, duration, intensity and timbre of each one of them.”

“And with that you'll produce a tune that will drive that guy crazy?”

“I imagine that before hiring me you will have made sure of my reputation,” he replied with absolute calm.

“I've been told that you are the best and most expensive specialist in eliminating problems without leaving the slightest trace.”

“That's right, with my instrument I can induce any mood I want in the music lover and thus make him act according to my client's demands.”

“Can you make that guy shoot himself?”

“Sure, that's the most basic of revenge. Although I like more to generate a deep pain that gnaws him inside for the rest of his existence.”

“It's enough for me if he shoots himself.”

“That's fine, but I like to reserve for myself the artistic form in which each music lover achieves his destination.”

“Okay, I don't care how you do it as long as you're successful and can't be linked to me.”

“That's for sure. Now, if you please, let's move on. I have many questions to ask you and many fine adjustments to make on the instrument.”

We were tuning the device until the wee hours of the morning.

* * *

“Do you know what may have driven your ex-partner to suicide?” the policeman asked me. He had introduced himself as Inspector Gavin Chadburn.

“I didn't even know he was that crazy,” I replied. “A few months ago, we had separated. We went our own way.”

“You, Mr. Keller, must have known him well, you worked together for many years. Do you know if he was depressed, had suffered a financial setback or had a mistress betrayed him?”

“How would I know? We hadn't seen each other for months. Our relationship didn't end very well.”

“We know that. You had a strong dispute, let's say over business matters. His suicide must have done you a lot of good.”

“What are you implying, that I had something to do with it?”

“You haven't even asked how he killed himself.”

“I'm just not interested.”

“I'll tell you. Apparently, he threw himself out of a seventh-floor window while his record player played the moaning strains of a song,” the policeman stared at me inquisitively. “Do you know what song it was?”

“No, how would I know?”

“Where were you between six and eight o'clock yesterday evening?”

“In my office, in a meeting. There are multiple people who can attest to that.”

“Yes, there certainly are.”

“You don't believe me? You think I had something to do with it? You said it was a suicide.”

“I don't believe anything Mr. Keller, but in most cases if there is a killer, which I don't know, it's usually one of the people who benefit from that death. It's simple.”

“But he jumped out the window,” I protested.

“They could have pushed him, pulled him, forced him or, better yet, induced him.”

“Induce him?”

“Yes, you see, let me tell you a story. In the last five years in the London metropolitan area, we have had a plague of bizarre suicides. One shot himself, one hanged himself, one poisoned himself, one slit his wrists, one inhaled gas, one slit his throat, and now your friend, Mr. Villin, just throws himself into the void.”

“So what? People commit suicide.”

“Do you know what all these suicides have in common?” I shook my head. “Four things. That there was no apparent motive, that someone made a profit, that the method by which the death occurred was not repeated, and that there was always a song playing. All different, but always a song.”

I gulped.

“Do you think they were not real suicides because each person chose a different method to kill himself?” With my question I wanted to divert attention to the detail that a song was playing.

“Yes, that is one reason. People when they commit suicide are often uncreative. But there is something even more interesting. I'm going to introduce you to someone. Miller, please bring in Professor Epstein,” he ordered the policeman who was accompanying him in the interrogation.

A bald, bespectacled man with a thick white beard and a resigned face entered the room.

“Tell Mr. Keller the story of that contraption,” Chadburn asked him.

Epstein seemed tired of having to repeat the same story over and over again.

“It is known by its Latin name, Arca Musarithmica. Something like numerological music box or also rhythmic whisper box. Both are valid translations.”

“Rhythmic whispers,” Chadburn repeated. “Remember that.”

“It's based on an idea of a 17th century German Jesuit named Athanasius Kircher. He was obsessed with what he called natural magic, which he believed produced prodigious effects by strictly natural causes. To produce such effects, he conceived a series of almost miraculous machines, which he called thaumaturgikai. One of them is this instrument.”

“Very interesting, but I don't understand what all this has to do with me.”

“Be patient, Mr. Keller. Go on, professor.”

“Kircher also wrote a treatise on the use of combinatorial techniques to compose music. Musurgia Mirifica is the Latin title. It is usually translated as marvelous art of forging music, but it really means miraculous music, do you understand?”

“No,” I answered without hesitation.

“Music capable of producing miracles, of influencing people and conditioning their behavior,” Chadburn explained, tired of my clumsiness. “Lethal whispers,” he whispered in turn, glued to my ear.

“Kircher sent a detailed description of the device to his friend, the mathematician Gottfried Aloys Kinner, who together with Huygens and other engineers of his day perfected the apparatus. Its current configuration is believed to have been completed by Luigi Russolo after building his intonarumori, his family of noise music instruments, based on his manifesto The Art of Noise.”

I stared at them, trying to look puzzled.

“If I understood you correctly, you think someone is making people commit suicide by using a strange musical instrument.”

“No,” Chadburn corrected me. “There is a hitman, hired by mobsters like you, who, using that contraption, composes melodies to induce suicide in his targets.”

“I'm not a mobster. I am a respectable businessman,” I protested energetically.

“Yes, who is dedicated to importing antiques and works of art but who, along with them, also brings in… other things.”

“What are you insinuating?”

“Drugs, weapons, black money, counterfeits, anything that is profitable. I imagine your partner, Mr. Villin, wanted a bigger slice of the pie.”

“That's infamy. You have no proof whatsoever.”

“You talk like a posh guy, but you're just a damn crook. Don't worry, it's not you we want, as long as you lead us to that fucking murderer. We want the acroama.”

“Who?” I asked in my best quizzical tone.

“That's what they call that fucking hitman.”

“Acroama in Latin refers to a performer,” Professor Epstein explained. “Like an actor or, in this case, a musician. It can also refer to a musical piece or a play. In English it has come to have the connotation of an esoteric knowledge that should not be written down.”

“That knowledge, out of the reach of anyone else, is the one this individual has in his mind and is what allows him to tune his instrument so lethally. Hence his name.”

“I don't know any acroama or whatever.”

“Very well, we just have to spread the word that you have given us his description and that you have told us all these details about his instrument. Miller, remind us of this man's description,” Chadburn asked the other policeman.

“Broad forehead, hair greased back,” he said, looking at the notes in his notebook. “Old-fashioned mustache and goatee, stern face, bulging eyes and a firm but grieving look. Well dressed, always in jacket and tie.”

They had hit the nail on the head with his description.

“Remember that musician can also play his instrument for you if he feels threatened.”

I could either go down and then they had me trapped or keep my poker face on and play that hand tight. All that had also given me an idea.

“Do as you see fit, inspector. I don't know that guy.”

* * *

I sent a message to the secret post office box I had for contact. It said: “A music lover obsessed with your last recital has located six of your scores and asks me very insistently to meet you. Perhaps you should tune your instrument for him.”

I hoped Seress, or whatever his real name was, would understand. Who could be obsessed with his last recital and have identified his six previous scores? To me it was obvious, only someone who was investigating such cases.

It took me three days to receive a reply. “As you suggest, I am tuning the instrument for the music lover you indicate. If it doesn't work, I will tune it again, but this time for you.”

I got goose bumps reading it. That guy could know me much better than I had imagined. He knew about my Hungarian origin; he could know my tastes and my habits. He spent more than four long hours with me in my home studying me. If he had been able to make Villin commit suicide, he could surely do the same with me.

But I knew how he acted. I just had to avoid listening to music, any kind of music. I wouldn't go near a record player, or a radio set, or any nightclub where they played live, or even a sad street performer.

It came to my mind that the last guy who had shaped the device was an expert in the art of noises. Could he use any set of sounds, even noises, to condition people? Could he have already conditioned me without me even realizing it and just needed a trigger to finish me off? I was going crazy thinking about it.

Ten days later a front-page story appeared in the press: “Police inspector killed by a subordinate.”

The article explained that Sergeant Jack Miller had shot his boss, Inspector Gavin Chadburn, at point-blank range, who had died a few minutes later in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Miller had then blown his brains out. Most shockingly, the two men had been working together for nearly six years and had never had any known problems.

The article went on to describe the terrible stress the members of the homicide department were under because of the backlog of unsolved cases and emphasized the need for the department to invest in providing them with specialized psychological support.

Seress' plan A had succeeded. His plan B, in which he had included me, would not need to be activated. I could finally sleep soundly.

* * *

When I opened the door, I didn't recognize the guy standing in front of me. His hair was disheveled, and he was dressed in old, frayed clothes.

“I have a package for Mr. Keller,” he said, “I must hand deliver it to him.”

“I am Joseph Keller.”

“It's for you, from the acroama,” he said as he handed me the package.

I blanched at the word. I looked uneasily from one side of the street to the other, convinced that this mysterious man was watching us.

“I'm a musician too, you know?” the messenger commented, not caring that I was looking everywhere. “For a few days, together with my two colleagues, I played a tune composed by Mr. Seress. I think you already know it. It was beautiful, but very strange.”

Now it had caught my full attention.

The guy stared at me as if he was waiting for something. Then he brazenly reached out his hand.

“A tip wouldn't be bad,” he said.

I mechanically put my hand in my pocket and handed him a few shillings.

“What tune was that?” I asked intrigued.

“It was like a prolonged moaning that tore you up inside. We played it for several days near the house of that cop who later killed his boss.”

My hair stood on end listening to that.

“Did he ever hear it?” I wanted to know.

“I guess he did. He could hear it every time he went to and from work. Seress paid us to play at that particular place.”

I swallowed hard. Now it seemed to me that the busker knew more than he was telling me.

“Mr. Seress told me that you also hire musicians from time to time. He told me to tell you where to find us in case you needed us. We play around Coven Garden. If you want to hire us, just look for us there.”

“All right,” I agreed stupidly. “I'll do that.”

The guy gave a little bow, turned around and walked away happily at a brisk pace. It was obvious that he had been paid twice for his messenger work.

Alone in my office I fearfully unwrapped the package. It had a handwritten note. It read: “I received your message and understood it perfectly. As a thank you, I want to give you a small gift. Inside this box is your best life insurance.”

I smiled in relief. I had feared the worst. I opened the box. To my surprise it contained a revolver. I stood petrified, staring at it. It was a life insurance, of course, but not the one I would have imagined.

Before I knew it, there was music, strange and compact, rising from the infrasound. The gun was inside a damned music box! My paralysis was total. What if that music was the prelude to my suicide?

I closed my eyes trying with all my might to get my hand to close the box lid, but the chords of that melody were embedding themselves one after another in my brain. I couldn't open my eyes until the song ended. Then I saw that I had indeed managed to close the lid, but the music had continued to play until the dark melody was complete.

I was terrified. I didn't know what effect that strange song could have had on me. My hands were shaking. I felt a shiver run through my body. After a few minutes, I felt no desire to shoot myself. Perhaps that music was actually a vaccine that immunized me against the lethal instrument's effects. That could be the gift the acroama was talking about in his note. I breathed a sigh of relief.

That night I ate dinner as if it were the last of my life. Then I felt the urge to hear that melody again. I went to my office and cautiously lifted the box lid, but the music didn't play. I closed and opened the lid several times to no avail. I inspected the box from one side and the other for any switches, but there was nothing. I shook the box in desperation, as if that compulsive and chaotic movement could fix the mess.

Inside me a growing anxiety developed. I needed to hear that song again. The silence coming out of the box distressed me. It was turning into an almost physical pain that was tormenting me inside. The pain grew until it became a real ordeal that was impossible to bear.

I took the box, threw it under my arm, grabbed my coat and hurried off to... I didn't know my destination.

I walked and walked without knowing where my steps were leading me. I stopped in front of a group of street musicians, I was eager to hear my melody. Then I heard a girl sing and then a man play the violin. Nothing satiated my longing or alleviated the anguish that afflicted my soul.

A distant melody lured me until I found myself in Coven Garden listening to three musicians playing the song I so desperately needed. For a moment, peace returned to my mind. I was able to close my eyes again.

When they finished playing there was some timid applause. Someone threw them a couple of coins and left. I stood alone watching them pick up their precarious instruments.

“Give me back my song,” I asked them angrily.

The three needy men looked at me indifferently, not taking me seriously at all.

“Give me back my song,” I repeated even more forcefully. I myself was amazed at my own anger.

“What are you talking about?” one of them said to me.

“The song was in my box before,” I explained, holding it in front of him. “I need it.”

“You're out of your mind!” said the other one.

“Mr. Keller?” I heard the third one say. “It's me. I was at your house this morning. I was at your house this morning. Don't you remember me?”

At that moment I felt completely helpless. This man knew me and could wipe out my life insurance. I had to stop him.

I opened the music box, took the gun, pointed it at his head and fired. Three shots. The first one in the forehead to the man who came to my house, and then to the other two, who stood still after the first shot looking at me stupefied.

When the three bodies were already on the ground, I approached and fired again a bullet on each of them, finishing them off. Six shots in total, all the bullets in the cylinder. Someone had it all very well calculated.

* * *

“So, according to your confession, you believe that there is a hitman who has a strange gadget that composes melodies that make people commit suicide,” summarized the policeman.

“Yes, I'm afraid so.”

“You also claim that, at your request, it was he who caused the death of your partner, Mr. Villin. Are you aware that you are incriminating yourself in a possible crime?

“Yes, I am.”

“Also, according to you, it was he who induced Sergeant Miller to kill Inspector Chadburn and then to commit suicide, because he believed he had been found out. Finally, it was also that individual who supplied you with the gun and induced you, by means of that alleged music box, to kill the three buskers,” his skeptical face said it all. “A rather convoluted story, don't you think, Mr. Keller?”

“I swear it's the truth.”

“I might even admit that you think it is the truth, what I doubt is that it really is.”

“I've told you all the details,” I insisted. “You can verify them. Call Professor Epstein.”

“There was a Professor Epstein, a member of the music department of the faculty of arts and humanities at King's College London, whom Inspector Chadburn consulted on a couple of occasions, but he is missing.”

“Dead, too?”

“No, he has simply abandoned his research post. Apparently, he had lost interest in baroque music, which was his specialty, and wanted to devote himself to the field study of the ethnic origins of Oriental musics. We believe he has left the country.”

“He has fled in fear or has been induced to do so.”

“There is also no transcript of his interviews with Chadburn. We deduce that they must not have been of police interest. Chadburn was very meticulous.”

“There must be something you can check to make sure I'm telling the truth.”

“I'm afraid things are almost always what they appear to be,” said the weary policeman. “Villin committed suicide. Miller in a fit of stress and insanity killed Chadburn. And you shot those three buskers because one of them had been in your house that morning and had had the gall to copy your damn song.”

“But what about the music box? It was that guy who sent it to me.”

“We have found an invoice at your home from a store near Oxford Street where you must have bought it almost a decade ago. You may no longer remember it. When the musical mechanism broke down you must have adapted it as a gun case.”

“I have done no such thing.”

“Our experts have verified the box was repaired and modified to contain the weapon.”

“I've never seen that case before.”

“Then why do you have its purchase invoice?”

“I don't know anything about that invoice.”

“But you do know where you got the gun.”

“I already told you, that gun is not mine, it came with the box.”

“We found two other guns in your house, all of them unlicensed. Of course, these other guns must not be yours either,” said the policeman sarcastically. “The facts are stubborn and do not support your version.”

Downcast, I had to bow my head. I had killed three guys for no apparent reason. At that instant I realized that this was my best defense.

“What's the motive?” I asked with renewed impetus. “Why would I want to kill those buskers?”

“Because you're just a self-important mobster who, in a fit of uncontrolled rage, killed those three poor men. You are a psychopath incapable of controlling yourself.”

“I'm not crazy,” I shouted.

“You know, I think you've made up this whole crazy story to appear before the judge as a madman who has been the victim of a plot, when in reality you're a cold murderer who kills for nothing.”

“Why would I want to implicate myself in my partner's murder, which you dismiss as a suicide, if I wasn't telling you the truth?”

“Because then you can support your story of being induced to commit these heinous crimes. Do you think you'll get away with it, that you'll get off with a stiff sentence and be sent to a mental health institution? Not if I can help it.”

“I swear you're wrong about me,” I shrieked in despair.

“The interrogation is over. Officer!” he shouted to someone waiting outside the room. “Take this bastard away.”

A uniformed policeman with a stern face and bulging eyes came in. He handcuffed me with my hands behind my back and led me through the police station corridors to the cells in the basement. He was humming a song.

The melody sounded familiar, but I couldn't remember what from. Suddenly something triggered in my mind. I panicked.

The policeman opened a cell and pushed me inside. I looked at his face. His forehead was wide and his hair was slicked back. The mustache and goatee were gone. His features weren't what I remembered, but what hadn't changed was his look. It was laden with pain and now also reflected an enormous desire to inflict it on others. He smiled mischievously at me.

“I think, Mr. Keller, this will be the last time we see each other,” he said.

He closed the door and gave me a long look through the peephole. I sensed he was still smiling. Then I heard him humming that damn song for a long time. I think that was the moment I went crazy.

Six months later the court sentenced me to death by hanging. A year later, Mr. Wilson's Labour government succeeded in getting Parliament to abolish capital punishment, by two hundred votes to ninety-eight. I have the result well etched in my memory.

My sentence was then changed to life imprisonment. The judge decided that I should spend at least thirty years in prison, ten for each murder, before being eligible for parole.

Three months ago, my lawyer got me declared mentally deranged and transferred to this psychiatric institution. Now my doctor has asked me to write down my story in detail and that is what I am doing right now.

Yesterday, after my doctor's consultation, I heard that horrifying melody again. It was hummed by the burly male nurse who accompanied me to my cell. My heart skipped a beat. I knew the acroama had come back for me. He doesn't like to leave loose ends and I am one that, by pure chance, has escaped him.

This morning a different nurse was humming the song, right in front of my cell.

I don't know how he did it, but hearing that wicked song again I feel an irrepressible urge to end my life. Perhaps he has activated a trigger in me. I don't even know if I really hear the song or if I just hear it inside my mind.

I know that my hours are numbered, as I will be unable to contain myself for long. Therefore, I have decided to make my story my suicide note as well.

Beware of the acroama! In the end, he always achieves his goal.

* * *

Dave Hangman is Spanish writer David Verdugo's pseudonym. He has published stories in the anthologies "Superstition" by Redwood Press, and "Cryptids from the Rock" by Engen Books and in After Dinner Conversation, The Lorelei Signal, East of the Web, Space and Time Magazine, Twenty-two Twenty-eight, Hyphen Punk, Havok, The Sprawl Mag, History Through Fiction, Tales from the Moonlit Path, and Bright Flash Literary Review. His story "Eternal Fall" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2022. He has received four honorable mentions in L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future contests for 4Q2021, 1Q2022, 3Q2022, and 1Q2023.

THE REST OF THE CHICKEN

DEVAN BARLOW

I should have known better the moment the chicken lumbered into my office.

The bird, who had to crouch to fit underneath the ceiling, didn't bother disguising her distaste for the state of my office. Is it my fault people refuse to pay me when they don't like the answers I find for them?

The chicken's awkward pose somehow only made her seem bigger, more menacing, like her cream-and-brown feathers might puff out until they smothered me and burst through the broken window she sneered at.

"I have a job for you." The chicken said. "You know the witch?"

"Who doesn't?" At least by reputation. Every so often someone strikes out into the forest to slay her. They never come back.

"The witch killed one of us," the chicken continued, "and took their legs to support her home. We want the rest of the chicken back."

"You want the rest of the chicken." I repeated, then peered closer. "Is that you in there, Anton? Miriam?" This must be several people in a chicken costume, hoaxing me, though admittedly the costume was worlds better than the one used every year in the village's spring festival.

In our village, you only ask after "the rest of the chicken" when you're trying not to outright tell someone they're on your last nerve.

"And where's the rest of the chicken?" asks the shopkeeper when I complain about the quality of the potatoes he sold me, before he shoos me away in favor of the next customer.

"Where's the rest of the chicken?" asks my sister when I remind her that I can't eat the soup she's made, and ask if there’s anything else.

It's the response to the sort of question whose very asking should tell you you've already got bigger problems.

The chicken drew back, affronted, then lowered her head. But instead of the head detaching to reveal other villagers inside, the chicken's beak rose, this time holding a sack.

The sack clanged as she dropped it on my desk, but she pulled it away before I could grab for it.

This was not Anton and Miriam. This was a real chicken, as large as the stories said, and this chicken had coin. Enough coin, I hoped, that I could afford to move to a different village, where no one mockingly offers me soup.

"The rest of the chicken, you said?"

The chicken nodded solemnly. "Our treaty with the witch prohibits us from entering the woods. But we need you to find the remains so we may lay them to rest."

"And if the witch has, uh, already disposed of them?" I wasn't sure how delicate to be when speaking to a chicken taller than I was.

A gust of wind hurled itself through the window, slamming the shutters against the walls and blowing everything off the top of my desk.

"Just a minute." I knelt to gather the papers now strewn on the floor.

"Let me help!" the chicken stomped one clawed foot on the flame of the toppled candlestick before it could ignite anything else, which quenched the room's only light.

As I struggled to find the matches I barked my hand on something sharp and hissed in pain.

"Find them, and the coin is yours."

I relit the candle in time to see the chicken turn away. Her beak gleamed slightly red, but by the time I saw the matching line of red on my hand, she was already out the door.

* * *

I took the long way toward the forest, to avoid the scents of village dinners simmering. There was always someone making soup.

I love soup, but I haven't had any since I was a child.

I'd snuck into the kitchen, lured by the aroma of the meal being prepared for the family gathering taking place later that night. Finding the kitchen curiously empty, I'd dipped a spoon into a bubbling pot and savored the tastes of pepper and tarragon, like all of my relatives’ embraces condensed into hot broth.

Until the spoon was batted out of my hand. "It's not ready yet!" A woman I’d never seen before, about the age of my great-aunts, scolded me. "May all soups be too hot for you, until you've learned some patience!"

Covering the soup pot again, she marched out of the kitchen. She was not among all the far-flung family members I met for the first time that night. Yet from then on, I could eat no soup.

* * *

Everyone knew the path through the forest eventually led to the witch's hut. What everyone seemed not to know, I realized as the trees shrouded the village from my sight, was how to get back once you'd found her.

I paused, hearing a rustling in the distance. Perhaps the witch had spotted me.

Soon thereafter, a new smell layered itself atop the fragrances of pine and rot. I stilled, reveling in a combination of ingredients I couldn't place, but that indubitably combined into a fragrant soup.

So transfixed was I, I didn't notice the dead body until my foot collided with it.

I didn't know his name, but I remembered days ago when he'd declared to the whole village that he'd be the one to storm the woods and end the witch. Now here he was, his blood having fled his body from a number of deep wounds.

* * *

The skulls were certainly a distinctive decorating choice.

Now, if I had most of the corpse of the enormous chicken who had once rested atop those legs, where would I keep it? Surely it would smell, though, and the wonderful soup scent had only gotten stronger as I'd reached the hut.

I didn't relish telling the chicken the remains hadn't been here to find. Maybe I should give up. I'd eventually make enough to move, if people finally started paying me for solving their little mysteries even when they didn't like the answers...

I went into the hut, and nearly swooned at the smell coming from the enormous cauldron in the center of the room. My mouth watered.

A furious clucking sound issued from outside. I cracked the door open again, and was startled to see the chicken who'd hired me.

Her plumage looked starker here, as if the feathers refused to be dimmed by the murky forest light. The reddish brown feathers were distinctly redder, and even the cream-colored feathers were scattered with red droplets. Her beak dripped red fluid, and I thought of the body I'd found earlier.

Between the chicken and the cottage stood a woman, who cackled as the chicken scraped a taloned foot along the ground.

The witch's next cackle came with a gesture that bent the very wind to her will. The skulls rose into the air and launched furiously at the chicken. Clucking and the sound of rending flesh accompanied the flurry of feathers that billowed upward like steam from a boiling pot.

Terrified, I stumbled backward, only stalled by the lip of the cauldron. It rocked violently enough that several hot droplets shot upward toward my face, and my tongue instinctively lapped at the moisture on my lips.

I swallowed the liquid, staring at the cauldron in amazement as I forgot my earlier fear.

I could eat this soup!

I grabbed up the ladle and swallowed mouthfulls of the stuff, sweet and savory and salty all at once, the ideal of soup condensed into a form my merely human mouth could process.

Suddenly, I understood where the rest of the chicken was.

A shadow filled the doorway, matching neither combatant, before it resolved into the witch. Her hands brushed against one another resolutely.

I swallowed my latest mouthful of soup, then asked, "The treaty?"

She scoffed, "There's no treaty. My magic keeps the chickens from finding this place," her expression was somewhere between amusement and disdain, "unless they follow the blood of a human."

I recalled pain on my hand, as I scrabbled in my darkened office, and a red sheen on the chicken's beak...

"Not that I get any thanks from your village for slaying the creatures."

"I knew you'd be able to take care of that chicken," I licked my lips, "while I'm here, is there anything else I can do for you?"

She smiled.

Then, with ladle in hand and soup shining on my lips, I recognized the woman from the kitchen of my family's home, who'd batted a spoon from my hand.

I said, "This, truly, is the most marvelous of soups!"

She took the ladle from my unresisting hand and stirred the cauldron. Suddenly the utensil seemed to be both ladle and sword, sharper than a chicken’s talons…

Beyond the cottage, the skulls' teeth clacked together in anticipation.

* * *

So you see, newcomer who's just sauntered up like you're the best thing since schmaltz, think before you go into that cottage.

Or don't, and join me. The witch never runs out of soup, and she can always make room for more skulls.

What's that you ask me?

And where's the rest of the chicken?

* * *

Devan Barlow is the author of the Curses & Curtains series of fairy tales-meet-musicals fantasy novels. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in several anthologies and magazines. She can be found at her website devanbarlow.com or on Bluesky @devanbarlow.bsky.social. She reads voraciously, and can often be found hanging out with her dog, drinking tea, and thinking about sea monsters.

PALE AND INTERESTING

DAVID STEPHEN POWELL

The hotel looked flaky, both figuratively and physically, but the rest of the town made up for it. The honey-coloured stones almost crackled in the September afternoon heat. Professor Mary Fowler stood in the small central square with her valise on wheels, out of breath and sweating. The walk across the causeway from the “mainland” of the surrounding plateau had been exhausting for a woman not used to physical exertion. The place was silent save for the chuntering of pigeons perched in the shadowy eaves.

“This is for you, if you come back after ten o’clock,” the girl in reception said and handed Mary a small brass key. “There is no one here after that time.”

Mary could understand why. There was absolutely nothing to do. A thousand years of weathering had almost cut off the town from its surroundings. When the government had built the ugly causeway, it had become a tourist attraction—almost empty of residents.

“What if I have a medical emergency?” Mary asked. At her age, it was the sort of thing she had to keep in mind. “And more to the point, where does one find a proper drink at that time of night?”

The receptionist pointed out that the doctor’s number was printed on the welcome booklet, and that the minibar in her room was always stocked, should she have need of it.

I’m certain I’m going to have need of it, Mary thought. And so would you, if you’d just been what I’ve been through.

The Dean had suggested a sabbatical. “Six months away doing research for your book,” he’d suggested.

She’d given him a list of reasons why that wouldn’t be a good idea. However, he had made it clear that a sabbatical was the best she could hope for.

“Come back in six months, Mary. It’ll have all blown over by then, you’ll see.” It seemed some of the students had got it into their heads that Mary was “unsafe” to be around. Utter tosh, of course, but it didn’t take much these days. “The world is changing, Professor Fowler,” the Dean had continued. “We must be sure we change along with it—for the sake of our students.”

Mary recalled that someone had once said ‘life is about sailing, not rowing,’ so she had sailed away (metaphorically) and taken a flight from Manchester to Perugia.

Her hotel room was pure chintz, but pleasant enough. The large window had a tiny balcony that overlooked the central square (should she feel in the mood to address a crowd). She lay on the bed for half an hour and decided to go for a stroll around town. It was too early to eat dinner, and there was nothing else to do.

Many of the buildings showed evidence of being constructed from robbed stone. Latin inscriptions and early Christian crosses formed parts of door frames and lintels. There were vague hints of pre-Christian figures set into walls, now weathered to practically nothing—the faceless gods of an earlier epoch, their names lost to history—known only to those who were three thousand years dead.

Most of the town was deserted—dry dust rooms lurking behind blank-eyed windows. Those dwellings that were still tenanted reminded her of rotten fruit, hollowed out by a bloated grub. Behind shuttered windows she caught glimpses of silent figures hunched over tables, the only source of light the phosphorescent glow of idiot TV. The day faded quickly in the ravine-like alleys. Soon the shadows gathered in every doorway and stairwell, and shooed Mary back to the hotel.

She wasn’t surprised to find she was dining alone that evening. The waitress was a sullen girl who, when she wasn’t serving Mary incompetently, was arguing loudly with the cook behind the swing doors of the kitchen. It appeared they were mother and daughter. After a reverberant metallic crash, Mary heard, “Mannaggia la miseria, brutta stronza. Che pale, pero.”

The dish of potatoes that arrived soon after, looked suspiciously as though they had been rescued from the floor. Later, Mary watched them from her bedroom window, still arguing and hurrying back across the causeway. It was as though they couldn’t wait to get out of there.

For the first time in a month, she slept well, waking only once in the small hours to some imagined noise from underneath the floor.

At breakfast, Mary had been hoping for something along the lines of bacon and egg, but it wasn’t to be. She ate two croissants and put another three in her bag for later. She was soon out of the town and on the path that led down into the trees at the base of the plateau.

It was hot under the canopy of the trees, and the mosquitoes were almost unbearable, continually flying into her ears and up her nose. It was a relief when the greenery died back, and a cliff rose out of the undergrowth before her. She sat on the sloping base, ate another croissant, and pulled out her copy of Italy before the Etruscans by Sir Mandeville Clifford-Brown.

She compared the line illustration with the cliff above her. Some of the rock-cut features depicted in the drawing were now worn away, but it was definitely the place. There was a sketchy path running up and across the cliff face. She could see the outline of an opening, some ten metres above. She read Clifford-Brown’s sensationalist account once more.

At the southern end of the town, I came upon the entrance to what I originally thought was a rock tomb of the Etruscan period, but upon ascending, I realised that I was mistaken, and that this was a holy site connected to a chthonic cult that I had not observed anywhere else in Etruria. An antechamber was cut into the rock, much like that used by the later period Etruscans. Here I observed carvings of a serpentine creature above a doorway that led into the cliff itself.

Upon seeing this, my guide became anxious and refused to go any farther, saying that it would offend the god of this place. Unlike other Italians, he was incorruptible, and no amount of bribery or cajoling would induce him to continue. It was with some frustration that I relieved him of the torch and pressed on into the dark alone.

Mary always smiled when she imagined the stuffy Englishman losing his patience with a superstitious local, grabbing the torch in a huff, and forging onward, an expression of grim determination on his bewhiskered face.

He went on:

In the first chamber, I beheld the most marvellous wall-paintings proceeding around the architrave. All depicted the same creature in great detail. Its skin was pink, and the body segmented like a common annelid. The head was surrounded by pedipalps. Before the creature, human figures crouched in an attitude of adoration and supplication. Some of these figures I assumed were priests. They carried long staffs with a crook at one end, and wore a hat of singular design: tall and pointed, like a fool’s cap. The floor of the chamber was strewn with broken pottery, which had once contained some liquid, the residue of which stained the stones.

In the farthest wall, another opening surrounded by a carved door frame beckoned to me. I passed through the portal and continued onward. The floor sloped down, and I arrived in a second chamber where the light of the torch revealed the pale bony domes of many human skulls piled into the corners. I saw no artefacts here, and the walls were stained with a dark mould. A noisome smell emanated from yet another black opening in the wall.

My scientific mind was enticed by what might lie beyond, but as I stood there in that charnel house, I had the most terrible sense of impending danger rushing towards me from the dark. It took a great effort of will to stop myself from running outside in a panic. I had the cold hand of fear upon my shoulder until I walked into the bright sunlight.

My guide had already cleared off, and I was left standing in the entrance on my own, my heart racing but with my dignity intact.

Later that evening, I tried to rationalise my sudden fear of the dark, but could not. It seems to me that these ancient places still have the ability to overawe and deceive modern man. Thus, it becomes easier to understand how the suggestive power of place and superstition dictated almost every aspect of our forebears’ lives.

Whatever had frightened Sir Mandeville it was enough for him to never enter the place again, or record what lay beyond in the darkness.

“You silly old thing,” Mary said. He was an unashamed sensationalist, but his many books on ancient superstitions and customs were best-sellers in their time because of his style. Nevertheless, she looked up at the dark opening and wished she’d brought a stiffener from the minibar.

Along the worn path were the vestigial remains of carved stone steps, almost eroded away to nothing. In one place, her boots dislodged a clitter of small stones which tumbled down into the trees. The shade within the opening was welcome after the climb. The entrance looked much as Clifford-Brown had described it, except that it was now very overgrown. An acacia tree had forced its way into the door frame and split the carving, a large piece of which now lay in the entrance. The smell of damp wafted out of the dark, like the dying breath of a water-nymph.

Mary turned on her torch and squeezed past the prickly acacia branch into the cliff.

Even from the filtering daylight, she could see that the floor was covered in pottery both broken and intact. Mary hadn’t expected the pottery to still be there, but perhaps Clifford-Brown had been the last person to visit the site. However, he hadn’t mentioned intact pots, and archaeological ethics of the time would not have prevented him from helping himself to any whole samples. And yet, here they were—plain pottery vessels, small and brown among the broken sherds. She stooped and lifted one from the floor. It was a simple thing but looked almost unblemished by time.

“Amazing,” she said. She took off the lid. Inside, it was half-filled with black ashes that still gave off a vague smell of oregano. Of course, it was an olfactory hallucination. No odour could survive that long in a container like this.

Mary played the torch over the architrave. The wall-paintings, too, were still vibrant and colourful. How was that possible? The atmosphere was tinged with damp that wafted through from the inner rooms, and one would have expected some heavy mould at the very least, but the figures looked as if they had been painted only recently, not three thousand years ago.

Here were the scenes described by Clifford-Brown: the pink worm-like creature and the supplicants bowing down before it. But there were several other details that the explorer had either not seen or had failed to mention. The creature rose from a structure that looked like a well with a low wall surrounding it. Only the upper portion of the worm was shown, with the rest of its body being buried in the ground. The “supplicants” hands were shown tied behind them with either ropes or chains. These were not worshippers at all, but sacrifices. The priests were officiating from a place farther back from where they were directing the ritual.

In other parts of the painted scene, the creature was shown in full, writhing among the stars and moon, its body overlapping itself many times in a complicated knot. The gaudy depiction of the ritual introduced a note of unease, like the almost imperceptible onset of a tinnitus episode, steadily growing. She pulled the camera from her bag and took pictures.

“Alright, onward,” she said. Her voice slapped back at her in the confined space and sounded strained and odd. She widened the beam of the torch and went through the second arched opening, farther into the cliff.

The white domes of many skulls piled into the corners greeted her, and she almost wished the torch wasn’t quite so bright. Not only because the sight was unnerving, but because there was no hiding the fact that, in the clinical light of modern electronics, ancient bones were never this colour. There were not only skulls but also rib cages, pelvises, and long bones.

“Oh dear, this isn’t right,” she said. “This isn’t right at all.” It looked like a butcher’s midden. The walls were stained as though a tide of blood had washed over them.

Without wanting to, but feeling compelled, if only to face down the growing unease, Mary shone her torch into the passage that yawned in front of her. A short, arched corridor led to another, deeper chamber, where the beam lit a low circular wall enclosing a dark space.

A hissing release of air came from between her teeth. A smell reached her: the high smell of tainted meat but with another buried underneath—the wild, hot odour of an animal's nest.

A breeze caressed her face, and the odour intensified. At the same time a vibration reached up through the soles of her feet—a real physical sensation. In reaction, one of the skulls dislodged itself from a pile and rolled a short way toward her.

An animal sound came from her throat, midway between a grunt and a cry of disgust. The top of her head had become cold, and her breath came in gasps. “You’re having a panic attack,” she said. “You’ve had them before, you’re not dying—it will pass. Control your breathing...” They had been her constant companions throughout her childhood before she’d found drink. But this one was as terrifying as any she’d had before. It didn’t pass; it became worse. The smell also became worse, and the trembling became louder until it filled all the cavities of her skull. She turned the flashlight beam back down the corridor ahead as a last defiant act before she ran.

Under the too-bright beam of the torch, a pale pink tendril emerged from the hole—an obscene groping thing, feeling its way over the low wall. Rough, course hairs grew out of the puckered skin. It was followed by others, slung up like grappling hooks with the hint of something else, much larger, just coming into view.

“No,” she said emphatically. “Absolutely not. No.” She turned and stumbled out into the daylight. She almost fell several times in her hurry to reach the bottom of the crumbling cliff path. All the time she reiterated her mantra: “No. Absolutely not. Didn’t happen.”

* * *

Once at the “mainland” end of the causeway, Mary found a bar, where she ordered a large vodka and sat at a table outside. It was empty at this time of the morning. She looked across the valley expecting a monstrous pale pink creature to emerge from the woods at any moment.

Had the world slipped out of kilter back there in the rock-cut chamber? “The mind is a powerful thing,” she said and knocked back the vodka. She’d read that, in extreme cases of auto-suggestion, people could conjure up, from the whole cloth of their overwrought minds, the stuff of nightmares.

Who are you kidding? she thought. You know what you saw, what you felt...and the smell? It was real—you might be on the last train to Looneyville, but you know what you saw.

She ordered another vodka and could tell that the waitress didn’t approve.

“Don’t judge me, missy,” she mumbled at the retreating waitress. “You haven’t just seen what I’ve seen.” She laughed at her own melodramatic turn of phrase.

Despite her interest in the esoteric and the arcane, she had never been superstitious—not a bit. If the creature was a physical entity (as she was sure it must be), it was a cryptid, a previously unknown species. It was either incredibly long-lived, or the nth generation of the creature shown on the walls.

She imagined how all her former colleagues (the ones that had stabbed her in the back) would now be kissing her arse if she could obtain proof. She got out her phone and made a call.

Dr Primo Moscattini in Rome didn’t shoot her down in flames, but listened attentively, only interrupting to clarify certain points in the narrative.

“Well?” she said, when she’d finished. “What do you think?”

“Mary, stay where you are. I’m driving down today with my equipment. Can you book me a room at your hotel?”

* * *

Mary was sitting on the hotel terrace when Moscattini appeared in the square carrying an overnight bag with him. He took a swig from a plastic bottle of mineral water. Mary jumped up and went to meet him.

“My god, this place," he said.

“You won’t believe it, Primo. What I’ve seen this morning is the discovery of the decade, maybe the century. Come on, let’s get you registered and then we can go down there.”

“Mary, my dear, calm yourself. I’ll buy you lunch, and you can tell me all about it. Then tonight, when the air is cooler, we will go exploring. One afternoon is not going to make any difference.”

The restaurant was busier than the last time. Several other tables were occupied, quiet groups of older people, come for a daytrip to the town. The waitress and the cook still argued loudly from the kitchen, the more numerous clientele no restraint to their disagreeableness.

When they’d ordered, Primo said, “Come on then. Tell me again, but in granular detail: what happened and what did you see?”

Throughout, he made notes on a small pad at his elbow. He was most interested in the shuddering Mary had felt beneath her feet.

“The creature moves quickly, in tunnels already hollowed out, or does it create new ones as it goes?” he reflected.

“I would say already hollowed out,” Mary said. “If it’s been here all this time, the plateau must be honeycombed with passages. In fact, I’m surprised the town is still standing.”

“There are parallels, of course,” Primo said. “The oboi-khorkhoi of Mongolia, various Lindworms of Northern Europe, and our own Biscione, which is depicted giving birth to a human form. This could be the progenitor of them all.”

“To be honest, Primo,” Mary said. “I’m so glad you didn’t poo-poo me straight away. I knew you wouldn’t, that’s why I called you. Those idiots back home would use it as an excuse to get rid of me for good. ‘Silly old moo,’ they’d say. ‘She’s finally cracked.’”

Primo found her hand with his own. “Of course I believe you, Mary. Why wouldn’t I?”

“I know, I know. I’m grateful, that’s all.”

After lunch, Primo excused himself; said he’d promised to look up an old friend who lived in a nearby town.

Mary went up to her room and lay down on the bed. The wine they’d drunk at lunch had made her sleepy even though her mind was racing. In the liminal space between dreaming and waking, she imagined the floor was vibrating again—jangling the small change on her bedside table, and making the bottles vibrate in the minibar.

At seven o’clock, the phone on the table rang.

“Signor Moscattini is waiting in reception for you, Ms Fowler,” the girl said.

Mary had a headache and felt tired and weak. I must have drunk more than I realised, she thought. There was a chill in the evening air, and she changed her clothes quickly, took a painkiller, and went downstairs.

“You’re ready. Good,” Primo said when he saw her. He carried a coil of rope over his shoulder.

“What’s that for?” Mary asked. “Are you seriously considering climbing down into that pit?”

“Of course,” he said. “Don’t worry, I have taken precautions.” He produced a taser from his pocket and triggered it twice. Fat sparks leapt from between the contacts.

“I’m not sure that will be enough,” Mary said. “This thing is huge.”

“It will be enough,” he said. “If it’s an annelid, it will be mostly water, and the skin is very thin.”

He seemed confident in the ability of the weapon, and who was she to doubt him?

It was already sunset when they left, icy clouds were smeared across the stratosphere.

“Looks like the weather is changing at last,” Primo said.

They turned left, into the warren of streets of the darkling town.

“Isn’t this the wrong way?” Mary asked.

“There’s a path down at the southern end. It’s easier and less dangerous than trying to walk through the woods at night. Less likely to twist an ankle.”

At the end of a seemingly blind alley, Primo led the way to a hidden stair under the old town wall, and out onto a small terrace beneath. An iron gate in a rusted fence gave onto a path that looped down into the ravine.

Primo adjusted the rope on his shoulder and switched on his torch. He turned to Mary, “Are you ready?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” It was becoming increasingly clear to her that this wasn’t the best time to go back to the site. Also, whilst they had been walking through the twisted lanes of the town, she had sensed that someone was following them, quietly and without wishing to be seen, always out of sight, but just around the corner they had just turned.

“I don’t know, Primo,” she said. “Surely it would be better to come back in the daylight. What do you think?”

“But we’re almost there now,” he said. “It’s just down this path a hundred metres or so. Let’s have a quick look, and then decide whether to proceed. I’d really like to have a look at those paintings you told me about.”

He tried to cover it, but she recognised from the tone of his voice that he was a little exasperated with her. After all, he had come especially from Rome as soon as she had called him.

“Yes, you’re right. I’ve got a touch of the jitters, that’s all. I’m a silly old woman.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “Hold my hand; I’ll help you down.”

He took her hand in his own, and she could feel the power in his grip. He wouldn’t let her fall.

The path was worn with age but looked as though it had been repaired recently. Wooden boards banked up the loose earth on either side, and steps were reinforced with pegs and a latticework of branches.

Mary was aware of noises behind them again, the crunch of stones underfoot, and even whispering. “I’m sure there’s somebody following us,” she said. “I heard them before, whilst we were still in the town.”

“Really? You think so?” He stopped and shone the torch back up the way they had come. “Who’s there?” he called in Italian. After a beat of silence he said, “Might be kids from the town. More likely animals. I expect wild boar use this path down into the woods.”

“Oh God, as if we didn’t have enough to worry about.”

“Come on, don’t worry. We’re nearly there.”

How does he know how close we are? she thought. He sounded as though he was already familiar with the route. Typical Italian male over-confidence. And as for kids following them; the town didn’t have any kids as far as she could tell. It barely had any adults. She had visions of them being charged down by an enraged wild boar, toppling them off the path into the trees below.

The path traversed the slope to reduce the steepness as it descended. A lone cricket chirped somewhere in the trees but remained unanswered.

Mary soon recognised how they would approach the temple, as she now thought of it: high, and from the opposite direction she had approached from in the morning.

The final stretch consisted of stone steps that brought them to the space in front of the entrance. The sun was a red afterglow on the western horizon, and lights had come on in the villages on the other side of the ravine. The noises she had been hearing since they left the town were still there. The was no doubting it, approaching footsteps were on the stairs behind them. Mary turned to look. “Primo? There is somebody there. Can’t you hear them now?”

“Yes, Mary. I can hear them. They’re here for you.”

She turned back to him. His voice sounded different. “What are you talking about?” For one moment, she thought it was some sort of surprise party—her old colleagues come to say sorry for not supporting her, come to praise her for her remarkable discovery. Silly me, she thought.

Primo thrust the taser into her side and pulled the trigger.

* * *

It was damp and dark and she was lying face down on the stones. She tried to move, but couldn’t. Her hands and feet were tied to each other, and her arms were fixed at her sides. The only part of her she could move was her head. She laid her cheek on the cold stones. To the sides and behind her, torchlight bobbed on the walls and floor, and a murmur of conversation echoed around the chamber when they saw her move.

“Mary, you’re awake,” Primo said. “Thank goodness. I thought I might have been a bit heavy-handed with the taser.”

She felt his strong arms lifting her up into a kneeling position. He turned her to face a small crowd of onlookers in the doorway of the second chamber. She saw the cook and her daughter, the receptionist, and several of the diners from the hotel. They’d all come to see her.

“Careful, Mary,” Primo said. “If you over balance you won’t be able to put your hands out to save yourself.”

“Primo, what are you doing?” she said. She sounded ridiculous in the circumstances, as though he’d just made an ill-advised pass at her.

“Doing what has to be done, Mary. What has been done for thousands of years. I know it might not feel like it now, but we’re all very grateful to you. Siamo tutti molto grati,” he repeated. There were appreciative murmurs from the crowd. “You came along at just the right moment. Normally, they draw lots. You probably noticed everyone was a bit on edge.”

“You’re going to look like a lot of fools in the morning when I come down for breakfast,” she said. If it was a joke, she’d try to take it in good humour. If you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?

How could she have believed what she’d seen was real? She had been overwrought from all the problems at work. It was her imagination getting the better of her. Her mother had always told her she’d had and over-active imagination.

“That’s right, Mary. Keep your pecker up—that’s what you say in English, isn’t it? ‘Keep your pecker up, old chap.”

The crowd moved away into the first chamber. Some of them carried pottery vases from which tendrils of smoke rose. They placed these on the floor and stepped back. Primo took a long staff with a crook from one of the onlookers and struck the chamber floor three times. The concussions echoed and reverberated deep beneath them as though the whole plateau was one big drum.

Mary tried to crane her neck over her shoulder to look behind.

“Don’t, Mary,” Primo said. “Don’t look. It’ll be better that way.”

The floor started to shake beneath her, and with it came the stench of the beast, fetid and wild, wafting up from somewhere below. She thought about screaming, but what was the point? She had never been the type for histrionics.

The crowd gasped collectively. Something had arrived. And now it was rushing, rushing up behind her.

* * *

David Stephen Powell was born in London and worked as a professional musician. He now lives and works in Italy. His stories are published in Litro Magazine, Idle Ink, Dreams or Shadows, Parabnormal Magazine, Black Hare Press, ‘The Other Stories’ podcast, and Cloaked Press.

GOD ONLY KNOWS

SCOTT EDELMAN

If Benjamin had been doing this by the letter, he supposed he should have begun by heading back to the old country -- and not his own old country, either, as that would have only gotten him as far from his current home as New Jersey -- but one of the old countries of his grandfathers -- or maybe even the birthplaces of the great-grandfathers he’d never met.

But he also supposed -- and if there’s one thing this quixotic project required, it was supposing -- he had no interest in conversing with any God who insisted on doing things by the letter, who would care whether the clay Benjamin gathered had come from Poland or Czechoslovakia or some other spot in his family’s history he’d never been curious enough to visit.

And if there’s one thing Benjamin’s seventy-three years had taught him, it was that a God who demanded things be done by the letter would have no interest in speaking with him either.

More than seven decades of silence -- with neither God nor man budging, neither willing to be the one to utter the first word and break the ice -- had taught him that much.

So the raw material with which he intended to sculpt what his despair demanded hadn’t been excavated from lands thousands of miles away, as the ancient stories would also seem to demand. He’d carried his shovel first to the park where he and Ruth had met, that hallowed patch of ground remembered as if the moment had been yesterday, rather than a lifetime ago, molded that treasured earth to the soil which he’d dug from around the footings of the synagogue where they’d married, merged them both with what he’d knelt to scoop from beside her grave, and decided ...

This would have to do.

If God were truly all about forgiveness, let him forgive that.

It hadn’t been easy gathering the amount of mud and clay as he thought he’d needed, at least not based on the plan as originally conceived, but the art classes he’d taken at the adult education center, his first concrete step toward this final moment, gave him a different idea. As well as the sculpting skills he’d need to bring that revised plan to fruition.

He’d at first assumed, based on his studies, his golem would need to be a solid creation through and through. But as Rachel, their weekly instructor, led them through other methods, he realized he could get by with wrapping a thin shell about a supporting armature. That his humanoid artifact would be hollow mattered little. Strength wasn’t a requirement for the vessel he was dreaming into being. Besides, unless there was a hollow within, how could there possibly be a space to fill with what his own hollowness deemed necessary?

To begin, he stripped his suits and collared shirts from their hangers -- he was retired, anyway, with no need any longer to dress for others. And besides, what was the point of more formal clothing at all without Ruth there to smile when she saw him, to pat his lapel before he headed to the shop? She was the only one whose judgement mattered.

So he bent the wire and nailed together the wood into an approximation of human form, then began slapping clay against the ragged skeleton he’d constructed upon a chair in the living room of his echoing apartment.

Those first attempts at shaping the repository for the needed void were a disaster, looking nothing like what he needed, and barely even human. Even once he progressed, and his sculpture began to approximate a true human form, the arms kept ending up inhumanly spindly and the chest impossibly concave -- and neither at all in the way the years had carved Benjamin himself. As for the face, the eyes, as he began, were sometimes so close together he felt as if he’d almost accidentally crafted a Cyclops, or else so far apart, he could have believed he was staring at a fish. He’d had to repeatedly dampen the drying clay so he could peel it away and start over, eventually losing track of the number of his attempts.

Time wasn’t the only thing of which he’d lost track. During the birthing process, he rarely answered the phone, and no longer allowed Leonard into his apartment whenever the silence would cause him to drop by and check all was well. Some of that was due to the intensity of Benjamin’s purpose, but also, he knew he couldn’t let his son see what was coming to life -- well, a sort of life -- on a chair he’d dragged from around the kitchen table. He knew the wall he’d built between them recently -- strengthened recently, actually -- worried Lennie, but better to let the boy -- Benjamin still thought of him as a boy, even though he’d almost caught up with his father to become an old man himself -- think it was because he was ashamed of a mess which came from mourning rather than that he’d been hiding a chaos made of madness. He didn’t want to have to explain.

He knew he couldn’t explain.

Finally, after many long nights spent looking from clay to mirror, from mirror to clay, Benjamin decided what sat in the chair across from him had at long last come to resemble what his soul insisted was required.

He leaned back with slick hands, and nodded, for what was before Benjamin was indeed ... Benjamin.

There was his broken nose, there the ever-expanding forehead, there the jawline which jutted out crookedly when he smiled. It hadn’t a reason to jut out for a long while, not since he’d lost Ruth, the only one who’d ever found that crookedness endearing. But his success that night caused it to jut out once more, so as he studied both it and himself, that aspect this day matched the vessel he’d made.

Rachel, a good teacher, had taught him well how to capture his own image, first on paper, and then with all three dimensions. And his own image, he’d decided, was what was called for here.

For had not God revealed in sacred texts He had made Man in His own image?

If that were truly so, why shouldn’t Benjamin return the favor, and make God -- or that which would summon God, would contain God, would amplify God’s voice so it could at last be heard -- in his?

Benjamin wiped his hands dry on a rag and prepared himself for what would come next, what would come last -- the placing of the word.

His word.

It wasn’t the world’s word, not any of the words which according to myth and legend had come before to animate creatures such as these (but never, not ever, a creature such as this), but instead one purely his own, called into being by his desire and desperation, yet another way he refused to follow the traditions of his faith by the letter.

For what good were traditions anyway, if after having survived this far into a life, he was alone?

He grasped a scraper and scratched the word across his own newly born forehead -- a word he had been mumbling to himself often in recent weeks, ever since this mission began. And then he prayed -- a prayer deeper and more honest even than the ones he’d prayed since Ruth’s death -- for the form to be imbued with the breath of God.

It was long past time they talked. And since Benjamin had received no answers to any of his other attempts at conversation with a Higher Power, he saw this as the only way.

The instant Benjamin’s final stroke etched the word to completion, God tilted his head and opened his mouth. A puff of dust exited those lips before He uttered a single word, dust made from all the places which had mattered most in Benjamin’s life.

Benjamin inhaled that dust.

And remembered those places.

And waited for the words he hoped would follow.

“Hello, Benjamin,” said God, not with the booming voice he’d expected from He who’d formed the universe, but with Benjamin’s own.

Benjamin had never liked the sound of his own voice, and hearing it used as a tool by the Supreme Being washed all of his carefully rehearsed questions from his head. They were stripped from him, and it was suddenly as if he’d never prepared for this encounter at all. He sought words, different words, any words.

“You came,” he finally said. Stating the obvious was all that remained to him.

“Of course I came,” said God. “You called, didn’t you? So I could not help but come, even though this is not the way these things are usually done. You called, and whatever you might think, no, I do not insist on doing things by the letter. You called, and because you shouldn’t always believe what you hear from the lips of those who claim to speak in My name, yes, I came.”

God smiled, and Benjamin was greatly discomforted to see his smile issue through His lips.

“You say that,” answered Benjamin. “But surely you have better things to do than come when I call. That’s what your actions, your inactions, have proven, again, and again, and again. I cried out for you before, yet you never came. Where were you then?”

“I was beside you, Benjamin. I came, and you refused to recognize I’d come. And as for the other things you believe I should be doing rather than speaking with you ... I am doing them. I am here ... but I am there as well. I am everywhere. But then, you know that.”

Benjamin had no idea how to respond, as all of the words he’d rehearsed suddenly seemed false, became pointless, which meant even after all of his efforts to get to this moment in time, he could do no more than sit in silence.

A silence God was the first to break.

“You had questions, Benjamin?”

Benjamin did.

Benjamin had.

Many questions.

Questions which were, for all their verbosity, really but one question.

A question which ultimately was truly only a single word.

And since it was a word God had surely heard a hundred, a thousand, a billion times before, uttered by every organism since the first had dared crawl out of the oceans, and likely even those which had come before as well --

Why even utter it?

Benjamin had felt despair before in his life, but that which consumed him then -- because he’d invested so much hope in what would happen on the day he finally faced his Maker -- overwhelmed all he’d ever felt before.

He realized, even in the face of such a miracle as what sat across from him, that this entire exercise had been pointless.

He decided he should end what he should never have begun. But as he was about to stretch out his thumb and smear away the word he’d written, the Lord Himself leaned forward and erased the invisible word on Benjamin’s forehead, the one the man had never known was there, the one which none of us ever knows is there.

Benjamin froze.

Then God rose.

And went walking to and fro upon the Earth.

* * *

God left Benjamin in his apartment, knowing that because he had become as still as if he’d never known His breath of life, the man could come to no harm, would in fact have no awareness of the passage of time, nor even a sense of his slumbering state. He walked to the rec center where Benjamin had spent many months learning to mold the vessel He now inhabited.

He arrived as that night’s art class was breaking up. As the other students slipped from the room, they nodded while He made His way by them in the hall, knowing them as Benjamin never had, never could. Not merely because He was God, but because the man had been too grief-stricken from his loss to even try to come out of his shell, bereft of anything but the energy to learn how to force the conversation he then rejected.

Rachel’s back was to the door as He entered her classroom. She was folding up easels and wiping down turntables as He entered, but she looked back over one shoulder as she heard His approach.

“Benjamin!” she said with a laugh and a smile. “It’s good to see you.”

“It is good to see you, too, Rachel.”

Rachel paused in her puttering, but continued to smile in a manner God fully understood, but to which Benjamin had chosen to remain blind.

“I’m glad you decided to return. It’s been ... what? A month?”

“I have been busy,” said the Lord.

“Who isn’t?” said Rachel. “But after you told me you felt you’d learned all you needed to learn here, I wasn’t sure whether I’d ever see you again.”

“I thought better of that,” said God. “One could always stand to learn a little more.”

“True,” said Rachel. “‘I am still learning,’ right?”

The Lord nodded. He had heard those words when they were first spoken, long before anyone had ever thought to quote them.

“Is everything OK, Benjamin? How are you feeling? You seem ... different. You look ... ”

Rachel turned to her desk and grabbed a sketchpad, the one in which she’d drawn portraits of each of her students as part of her lessons. She flipped to the page with Benjamin’s face on it, the real Benjamin’s face, ran her fingers across her loving lines, then held the book up beside His face.

“Yes, there’s definitely something different. The smile perhaps ... “

“Yes,” said the Lord. “The smile.”

But it wasn’t the smile.

Because for all Benjamin had remembered, all the knowledge he’d picked up from Rachel, he’d forgotten one thing.

When his fingers sculpted a vessel for what he thought he needed, the result perfectly matched what he saw in the mirror he’d consulted for reference -- which meant that though Benjamin had been satisfied, he shouldn’t have been, for the face he’d beheld was not his own. What he’d created ... was reversed. Benjamin had made a beginners mistake, not having paid as much attention to Rachel’s art lessons as he thought he had.

And as to another lesson Rachel was attempting to teach, he’d been paying no attention at all.

“So what brings you back, Benjamin?”

“I thought you should see the result of all your hard work.”

Rachel looked puzzled for a moment, but then --

“Oh, you mean your smile today? Well, if you’re happier now than when you first started coming to my class, I’m glad. Creating art can bring that out in a person, and you’re ... you’re very talented. Does this mean you’re ready for more lessons?”

“I am. I realized there’s much more I have to learn. But what I also realized is ... I believe I was being held back being taught in a group. Have you considered giving private lessons?”

Rachel laughed a musical laugh, one she’d been careful to keep suppressed in the classroom until now.

“I haven’t, not before, no. But in your case, I’d be willing to make an exception.”

God smiled.

“You don’t seem as troubled as usual, Benjamin. May I ask what happened? What’s changed?”

God’s only answer was to continue to smile.

He told Rachel he looked forward to seeing her the following day.

* * *

Leonard was shocked when the receptionist told him his father was waiting on a couch in the lobby of his law firm. The old man had never visited him at work before, had always claimed running the shop kept him too busy. Even after he’d let the business go, though, he’d just never shown an interest.

And showing up unexpectedly like that, what with Leonard’s father no longer answering most of his calls ... he had no idea what to think.

“I decided I’d come by and surprise you,” said God, as He rose to greet Benjamin’s son.

“You did surprise me. Of course you did.”

He looked at his father, and it seemed to him he saw an odd tilt of the head there he’d never seen before. Something seemed off, but surely not ...

“Have you been drinking, Dad?”

God shook his head.

“No ... merely thinking.”

“About ... ?“

“Maybe you could drop by tomorrow. I’ll tell you then. I’ll make dinner. And we’ll talk.”

“Are you sure you haven’t been drinking?” said Leonard, but then quickly added, “I’d like that.”

God gave Leonard a hug, and then, as he was about to leave, turned.

“I’m sorry your mother and I loved each other so much there wasn’t enough room for you.”

And then He was gone.

Stunned, Leonard almost dropped to the couch in the lobby, but managed to hold himself together until he could get back to his office and weep behind a closed door.

* * *

God sat down across from Benjamin and extended His finger to restore the word He had previously smudged out with a thumb. Benjamin shivered, then looked at the Lord, confused, knowing nothing of what had transpired between God reaching out His hand and God pulling His hand back.

“What just happened?” Benjamin asked.

God did not answer. He let the voices which came from the other side of the door to Benjamin’s apartment, subdued at first, but rising as the speakers approached, be his only response. Benjamin was horrified to hear Rachel’s and his son’s voices.

“Is that Rachel?” said Benjamin, with a wail that was almost a whisper. “Is that my son?”

The doorbell rang, and Benjamin glared at the Lord with a great anger. He had not asked for this. He had not wanted this. All he’d hoped for were ears to hear as he unburdened himself of his rage, and for eyes which would acknowledge that rage was deserved.

But not this.

“What have you done?” whispered Benjamin. “My grief ... my grief is all I have.”

Benjamin flung out his arms and erased the word on the forehead of the vessel he’d carefully crafted, and his creation once again became nothing more than mere sculpture, emptied of the breath of the divine.

There was a knock at the door, followed quickly by another. Benjamin answered those with a knock of his own, grabbing up a hammer, and with one great swipe, smashing the Lord to shards.

* * *

Leonard arrived at what he still thought of as his parents’ apartment building to find an unfamiliar woman in the lobby, her thumb on the button above his father’s name. As far as Leonard knew, though, there was no woman in his father’s life other than his late mother, and the customers he knew from his shop. And this one, with her over-stuffed backpack and paint-stained jeans, didn’t seem like someone who had much use for dry cleaning in her life.

“May I help you?” he asked.

She turned to him, and was about to speak, but as she took in his face, she paused -- then nodded as if she recognized him.

“Oh, you must be Benjamin’s son,” she said. “I’m Rachel, your Dad’s art teacher.”

“Ah, yes, he mentioned something about signing up for lessons. Which was a surprise. He’d never expressed interest in anything like that before ... before ... “

“I understand,” she said, putting her hand over his. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

He allowed her hand to rest there as long as deemed polite, but no longer, then pulled his hand away.

“So what brings you here?”

“When your father came to see me yesterday, he told me he felt could make a great leap forward with a few one-on-one lessons. So here I am! Only -- he hasn’t been answering.”

Looking back and forth between Rachel and the buzzer, Leonard sighed.

“Well, you might as well come on up,” he said.

He used his key to open the lobby door, then took the elevator up to his father’s floor, wondering, as they rose in that confined space, whether it was wise to bring a stranger along. His father had always been a private person. But it was soon late to back out now.

He rang the the bell at his father’s front door, but there was no answer to that buzzing either, nor to his repeated knocking.

He shouted for his father, then pressed his ear to the door, worried about what he might hear, but even more worried he might hear nothing. He looked at Rachel, hesitating for a moment, then realized he had no other option than to unlock the door.

“Wait here,” he said. He’d only just met this woman, he had no idea what he might find. “Please.”

Leonard had his fears. His father had been depressed lately -- which was understandable -- and had taken to acting strangely. How he’d acted during the previous day’s visit to the law firm was the strangest of all. But best not to think about going down that road until he had to.

He entered the living room, which when his mother was alive, had been kept pristine. But now there seemed to be mud everywhere: some scattered in clumps, some smeared across the carpeting, some in shards, some hanging loosely among twisted metal and shattered wood. It was almost as if something had exploded. He could find no clear spot of floor, but carefully picked his way through the mess anyway to stand in the center of the room.

“Dad?” he called out. There was no answer. He shouted again, and when still no answer came, pushed through the debris to search the bathroom and bedroom, hoping he might find his father there, dreading he might finding his father there ... but he was gone.

“Dad,” he said again, low and weak, in a voice which could have been a child’s.

“What’s going on in there, Leonard?” Rachel called from the hallway. “Is everything OK? I’m coming in now.”

Leonard did not want a stranger to see this, see how his father had obviously lost it, but before he could bring himself to answer, Rachel entered the apartment.

“Well, well,” she said, surveying the mess. “Your father has been busy.”

“Do you know anything about this?” he asked, his voice trembling. “Is this why you’re here?”

“I know nothing about this,” she said, as she scanned the wood and wire and earth which surrounded them. “I’m only here because your father asked me to meet him here. I’m here because -- “

Rachel spotted something amid the rubble, something which froze her words. She knelt, reaching for a curve of clay which had been sculpted to form part of a mouth. It looked like Benjamin’s mouth. And it almost was Benjamin’s mouth.

Almost. But not quite.

“What was going on here?” asked Leonard. “What did my father think he was doing?”

Rachel pulled her sketchpad from her backpack and swiped an arm across the floor to create a bare patch of carpeting. She laid the sketchpad down and flipped to the page where she’d months before drawn Benjamin, the page she’d examined carefully, but not carefully enough, the night before. She placed the shard of clay beside her pencil drawing, seeing then what she’d failed to see before. And then hurriedly began rummaging through the wreckage.

“What are you looking for?” asked Leonard.

“I don’t know,” she said, even though ... she knew. But it sounded too ridiculous even in her head to ever say aloud.

She soon found other fragments which bore the impressions of a face -- a fractured ear, a dented cheek, a nose she thought she’d come to know in life -- and carefully set them by the lips she’d found as if assembling a puzzle. She also saw, across three pieces she could tell had once been a forehead, a smudge, as if something had been written there, then erased. She could only just make out it had been there, but not what it had been.

Her fingers attempted to trace the exact markings which had been, but those marks were lost. She could make no sense of them.

“Help me,” she asked Leonard, her fingers shaking as she pointing at what she’d already assembled. “See if you can find anything which looks as if it might have been part of a face.”

She continued poring through the pieces to see what else could be recovered, but most of the slivers were too small to hold meaning. She kept searching until she found, hidden beneath chunks of familiar knuckles, a hammer, and then -- a second set of lips.

She held them against the first she’d found, and realized to her horror -- they were mirror images.

“What does it mean?” asked Leonard, looking down over her shoulder, but not seeing.

“God only knows,” said Rachel, ripping from her sketchbook the portrait of the Benjamin which once had been. With shaking fingers, she offered it to Leonard, knowing without knowing how she knew, or why she knew -- neither of them would ever see either of those smiles again.

* * *

Scott Edelman has published 125+ short stories in magazines such as Lightspeed, Analog, Apex, and The Twilight Zone, and in anthologies such as Why New Yorkers Smoke, Crossroads: Southern Tales of the Fantastic, and MetaHorror. He has been a Stoker Award finalist eight times, both in the category of Short Story and Long Fiction. He was the founding editor of Science Fiction Age, which he edited during its entire eight-year run and has been a four-time Hugo Award finalist for Best Editor.

THE MYSTERY OF BLACK JEAN

JULIAN KILMAN

Aye sir, since you have asked, there has been many a guess about where Black Jean finally disappeared to.

He was a French-Canadian and a weed of a man—six-feet-five in his socks; his eyes were little and close together and black; he wore a long thin mustache that drooped; and he was as hairy as his two bears.

He just drifted up here to the North, I guess, picking up what scanty living he could by wrestling with the bears and making them wrestle each other. ‘Twas in the King William hotel that many’s the time I’ve seen Black Jean drink whisky by the cupful and feed it to the bears. Yes, he was interesting, especially to us boys.

Along the time the French-Canadian and his trick animals were getting to be an old story, there comes—begging your pardon—a Yankee, who said he would put up a windmill at Morgan’s Cove if he could get the quicklime to make the mortar with.

Black Jean said he knew how to make lime and if they would give him time, he would put up a kiln. So the French-Canadian went to work and built that limekiln you see standing there.

I was a youngster then, and I know how Black Jean, a little later, built his cabin. I used to hide and watch him and his bears. They worked like men together, with an ugly-looking woman that had joined them. They put up the cabin, the bears doing most of the heavy lifting work.

The place he picked for the cabin—over there where that clump of trees.… No, not that way—more to the right, half a mile about—that place is called “Split Hill,” because there is a deep crack in the rock made by some earthquake. The French-Canadian built his cabin across the crack, and as the woman quarreled with him about the bears sleeping in the cabin, he made a trapdoor in the floor of the building and stuck a small log down it, so the bears could climb up and down from their den below.

The kiln, you can see for yourself, is a pit-kiln, so-called because it is in the side of a hill and the limestone is fed from the top and the fuel from the bottom. Like a big chimney it works, and when Black Jean got the fire started and going good it would roar up through the stone and cook it. You could see the blaze for a mile.

One day Black Jean came to the King William looking for that Yankee. Seems that individual hadn’t paid for his lime. When Black Jean didn’t find him at the tavern he started for the Cove.

I have never known who struck first; but they say the Yankee called Black Jean a damn frog-eater and there was a fight; and that afternoon the French-Canadian came to the tavern with his bears and all three of them got drunk. Black Jean used to keep a muzzle on the larger of the bears but by tilting the brute’s head he could pour whisky down its throat. They got pretty drunk, and then someone dared Black Jean to wrestle the muzzled bear.

There was a big tree standing in front of the tavern, and close by was a worn-out pump having a big iron handle. Black Jean and the bear went at it under the tree, the two of them clinching and hugging and swearing until they both gasped for air. This day the big bear was rougher than usual, and Black Jean lost his temper. It was his custom when he got in too tight a place to kick the bear in the stomach; and this time he began using his feet.

Suddenly we heard a rip of clothing. The bear had unsheathed his claws; they were sharp as razors and tore Black Jean’s clothing into shreds and brought blood. Black Jean broke loose, his eyes flashing, his teeth gritting. Like lightning, he grabbed his dirk and leaped at the brute and jabbed the knife into its eye and gave a quick twist. The eyeball popped out and hung down by shreds alongside the bear’s jaw.

Never can I forget the human-sounding shriek that bear gave, and how my father caught me up and scrambled behind the tree as the bear started for Black Jean. But the animal was near blinded, and Black Jean had time to jerk the iron handle out of the pump; and then, using it as if it didn’t weigh any more than a spider’s thought, he beat the bear over the head. He knocked it cold.

Then my father said, “That bear will kill you some day, Jean.”

Black Jean stuck the iron pump handle back into its place.

“Bagosh! you t’ink dat tru?” he sneered. “Mebbe I keel her, eh?”

Our place was next to the piece where Black Jean lived, and it was only next morning we heard a loud yelling over at Split Hill. I was a little fellow but spry, and when I reached Black Jean’s cabin I was ahead of my father. I saw the French-Canadian leaning against a stump all alone, the blood streaming from his face.

“By God. M’sieu!” he blurted, when my father came up, “She scrat’ my eye out.”

My father thought he meant the woman.

“Who did?” he asked.

“Dat dam’ bear,” said Black Jean. “She just walk up an’ steeck her foots in my eye.”

Father caught hold of Black Jean and helped him to the cabin.

“Which bear was it?” he asked.

Black Jean slumped forward without answering. He had fainted.

I helped father get him into the house—he was more than one man could carry—and just as we went inside there was a growling and snarling, and the big, muzzled bear went sliding down that pole to her nest.

Well, we looked all around for the woman, expecting to get her help: but we couldn’t find her, which was the first we knew that she had left Black Jean.

It took the French-Canadian’s eye two or three months to heal, and then he came to our place to get something to wear over the empty socket. So father hammered out a circular piece of copper about twice the size of a silver dollar and bored a hole in opposite sides for a leather thong to hold it in place. Black Jean always wore it after that. He seemed vain of that piece of copper, for he used to keep it polished and shined until it glowed on a bright day like a bit of fire.

That fall the settlers opened up the first school in the district and imported a woman teacher from “The States.”

I must tell you about that teacher. She was a thin, little mite of a thing that you would think the wind would blow away. Some said she was pretty and some that she wasn’t. I could have called her pretty if her eyes hadn’t been so black—hereabouts you don’t see many eyes that are black-brown, maybe, and blue and gray, but not black. Fact is, there were just two people in these parts having those black eyes: Black Jean and the little mite of a schoolteacher.

Well she came. And she hadn’t been here a month before it was noticed that Black Jean was coming to town more regular. And, what is more, he was coming down by the school and waiting around there with his bears.

This went on. They say that at first, she didn’t pay any attention to him, but I can’t speak for that as I was too young. But in time there was talk and it came to me: then I watched. And I remember one afternoon after the teacher let us out, we all went over to where the bears were. The teacher followed.

Black Jean was grinning and showing his white teeth.

“Beautiful ladee, “says he, “Sooch eyes, mooch black like the back of a water-bug.”

Teacher smiled and said something I couldn’t understand. It must have been French. I had never seen a Frenchman around women before, and Black Jean’s manners were new to me. Here was a big weed of a man bowing and scraping and standing with his cap in his hand. We boys laughed at that—holding his cap in his hand.

The long and short of it was the French-Canadian was sparking the schoolteacher. And everybody talked about it, of course; they said it was a shame; they said if she didn’t have sense enough to see what kind of man he was, someone should tell her.

I have often wondered since what would have happened if anybody had gone to that woman with stories of Black Jean. I know I’d never dared to, because, without knowing why, I was afraid of her. I guess maybe that is why the others didn’t either.

There was no mistaking she was encouraging to Black Jean. She didn’t seem to object in the slightest to his attentions and I can see them yet: her, little and pretty and in a white dress, and Black Jean lingering there with his bears, dirty, and towering head and shoulders above her.

Black Jean kept coming and people went on talking, and finally somebody said she had been to Split Hill.

And one day I began to understand it too. It was the time she was punishing some pupils. Three of them were lined up before her, and she started along whacking the outstretched hands with a stout ruler. Right in front of where I was sitting stood Ben Anger. He was the smallest of the lot and was trembling like a leaf.

Her first clip at him must have raised a welt on his hands, because he whimpered. She hit him again, and he closed his fingers. At that she caught up the jackknife he’d been whittling at his desk with and pried at his fingers until the blood came.

Sitting where I was, I saw her face while she was at it. It had the expression of a female devil. I didn’t say anything to my folks about that: but I wasn’t surprised when word came next week that we were to have a new teacher—the little one had gone to live with Black Jean.

Well, there was more talk—talk of rail-riding the pair of them out of the district. But nothing was done, and one evening, a month later, there was a rap at our door and the French-Canadian staggered in. He was carrying the schoolteacher in his arms.

“What has happened?” my father demanded.

“Dat dam’ leetle bear,” snarled Black Jean—”She try to keel Madam.”

He laid the woman on the bed. She looked pretty badly cut up, and we sent for the doctor. Mother would only let her stay in the house that night, being shocked at the way she was living with the French-Canadian.

It turned out she wasn’t much hurt, and father kept trying to find out just what had happened. But he couldn’t. I knew, however. Most of my time, when I wasn’t in school or running errands for the folks, I was spending watching that couple, and only that afternoon I had seen her stick a hot poker into the side of the smaller bear and wind it up into his fur until he screamed. And the bear must have bided his time and gone for her—those brutes were just like folks.

Next morning Black Jean came and got his woman, and I stole out and followed. I knew there would be more to it. I was right. The two of them went into the cabin, and pretty soon I hear a rampus and out comes Black Jean with the smaller bear and behind them the woman. She was carrying a cowhide whip.

The French-Canadian had a chain heaped about each forepaw of the animal, and, pulling it under a tree, he tossed the free end of the chain over a short branch and yanked the bear off his feet. Then he wound the end of the chain about the trunk of the tree and sat down. So the bear hung, his feet crossed, and squirming and helpless.

And there in that clear day and warm sunshine, the woman started at the bear with the whip. She lashed it until it cried like a child. Black Jean watched the proceedings and grinned.

“Bah!” he shouted, after the woman had begun to tire. “She t’ink you foolin’. Heet harder. Heet the eyes!”

Again the woman went at it and kept it up until the bear quit moaning, and its head drooped and its body got limp. I was feeling sick at the sight, and I stole away.

But next morning, when I crawled back, there was the bear still hanging. It was dead.

That woman was a fair mate for Black Jean.

She kept him working steady over here to this kiln—most any night you could see the reflection of the blaze—and it was something to watch Black Jean when he was feeding his fire with the light playing on that copper piece and making it look like a big red eye flashing in the night. I saw it many times.

And it was noticed that Black Jean wasn’t getting drunk any more, and he wasn’t wrestling the one-eyed bear anymore. He had good reason for that. I began to believe Black Jean was afraid of that brute.

But he made it work for him in the kiln, using the whip, and it was a curious animal, growling and snarling most of the time, as it pulled and lifted big sticks of wood and lugged them to the kiln.

When Black Jean wasn’t working, he was over at the cabin where he would follow the woman around like a dog. She could make him do anything. she was getting thinner and crosser, and I was more afraid of her than ever I was of Black Jean.

Once she caught me watching her from my spying-place in a tree. She had been petting the one-eyed bear, rubbing his snout and feeding him sugar. She ran to the house and got a rifle and, my friends, I came down out of that tree lickety-split.

When I reached the ground, she didn’t say a word—just let her eyes rest on mine. After that I was more careful.

Then something happened.

I was hoeing corn one afternoon in a field next the road when I spied a woman coming along from the village. She was big and blowsy and was wearing a shawl. I knew she was headed for Black Jean’s, because she climbed through the fence on his side of the road.

Keeping her in sight, I followed along my side and crossed over when I came to a place where she couldn’t see me. I followed her because I knew she was the woman who had come to Black Jean when he first landed in the district. She walked up to the cabin, and I was wondering who she would find home, when out comes Black Jean.

“Snere!” he exclaimed, putting one hand to his eye. “Spik queeck! Ees it Marie?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “I have come back.”

Black Jean looked around fearfully.

“Wat you want?” he demanded.

“I’d like to know who knocked your eye out,” she laughed.

Black Jean did not laugh.

“You steal hunder’ dollar from me an’ run ‘way,” he snarled. “Bagosh! You give me dat moenee.”

“You fool!” said the woman. “You think I don’t know where you got that money? You killed—”

A sound of rustling leaves in the wood nearby interrupted.

“Ssh!” hissed Black Jean, his face blanching. “For de love o’ God, nod so loud.”

He listened a moment; then his expression grew crafty. His teeth showed, and he went close to the woman and said something and started into the cabin.

The next instant I knew someone else had seen them. It was no other than the little ex-schoolteacher—and she was running away! I lay still a moment, scared out of my wits. Then I went home.

“Did you see Black Jean’s wife?” my mother asked.

“You mean the schoolteacher woman?” I said.

“Yes,” my mother said. “Who else?”

“I did,” I said, “a while ago.”

“I mean just now,” said my mother, breathing quick. “She rushed in here, right into the house, and before I could stop her, she snatched your father’s rifle from the wall and ran out.”

I didn’t wait to hear more.

I set off through the fields for Black Jean’s. Before I had run half the distance, I heard shooting, and it was father’s rifle—I knew the sound of her only too well.

When I got to my spying-place it was all quiet at Black Jean’s. I could not see a thing stirring about the cabin.

Then I thought of mother and started home. Father had gone over to the Cove that morning, with a load of wheat for the Yankee’s mill, and wasn’t to get back until late. So mother and I waited.

It was nearly one o’clock in the morning when we heard father’s wagon, and I rushed outside.

“Hello, son,” he exclaimed. “You’re up late. And here’s mother, too.”

Father listened to what we told him, without saying a word.

“Well,” he said, when we had finished. “I don’t really see anything to worry about. Black Jean can take care of himself. Look there!”

He was pointing over here to this limekiln.

“Jean’s had her loaded for a week,” said father, “waiting for better weather.”

Later, in the house, my father said: “It is none of our business, anyway.”

And in a little he added, as if worried some: “But I am going over there after my rifle.”

The following Sunday—three days later—father and I went to Black Jean’s to get the rifle.

The door of the cabin opened, and the little woman came out. She was carrying the rifle. Somehow, she looked thin and old, and her hands were like claws. But her eyes were bright and as sharp as the teeth of a weasel trap.

“I suppose,” she said, as cool as a cucumber and as sweet as honey, “you have come after the rifle.”

“That is what,” said my father, sternly.

She handed it over.

“Please apologize to your wife for me,” she said, “for the sudden way I took it. I was in a hurry. I saw a deer down by the marsh.”

“Did you get the deer?” I piped in.

“No,” she said. “I missed it.”

Father and I started away. But he stopped and called: “Where is Black Jean this morning?”

“Black Jean!” she laughed. “Oh, he’s got another sweetheart. He has gone away with her.”

“Good-day,” said father.

“Good-day,” said she.

And that was the end of that.

Neither Black Jean nor the big blowsy woman was ever seen again, nor hide nor hair of them. But there was lots of talk. You see, there hadn’t been any deer in these parts for many years; and besides it just was not possible for so well-known a character as Black Jean to vanish so completely, without leaving a single trace.

Well, finally someone laid information in the county seat and over comes a smart young chap. He questioned father and mother and made me tell him all I knew and took it all down in writing; then he gets a constable and goes over and they arrest the little black-eyed woman.

There was no trouble about it. They say she just smiled and asked what she was being arrested for—and they told her for the murder of Black Jean. She didn’t say anything to that; only asked that someone feed the big one-eyed bear during the time she was locked up.

Then the people started coming. They came on horseback, they came afoot, they came in canoes, they came in lumber wagons—no matter how far away they lived—and brought their own food along. I calculate near every soul in the district turned out and made it a sort of general holiday and lay-off, for certain it is that no one cared anything about Black Jean himself.

Every inch of the land hereabouts was searched; they poked along the entire length of that earthquake crack, and in the clearings, and in the bush, looking for fresh-turned earth. But they could not find a thing—not a thing!

Now you gentlemen know that you can’t convict a person for murder unless you have got positive proof that murder’s been done—the dead body itself. Which was the case here, and that smart youth from the county seat had to let the little woman go free. So she came back to the cabin, living there as quiet as you please and minding her own precise business.

Here is a pocket-piece I have had for some time. You can see for yourself that it is copper.

It is the thing my father made for Black Jean to wear over his bad eye. I found that piece of copper two years after the little woman died—near twelve year after Black Jean disappeared. And I found it in the ashes and stone at the bottom of the limekiln standing there, half-tumbled down.

A lot of people hereabouts say it doesn’t follow that Black Jean’s body was burned in the kiln—cremated, I guess you city chaps would call it. They can’t figure out how the mischief a little ninety-pound woman could have lugged those two bodies after she shot them with my father’s rifle, the distance from the cabin to the kiln—a good half mile and more.

They point out that the body of Black Jean must have weighted over two hundred pounds, not to mention that the other woman was big and fat. But they make me weary.

It is as simple as the nose on your face: The big one-eyed bear did the job for her!

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Contents
- Copyright
- Letter From the Editor
- Meet the CHM staff
- Introduction to the Collection by Anonymous
- Lion Tamer
- Full Page Image
- An Ouroboros of a Sort
- The Arca Musarithmica
- Full Page Image
- The Rest of the Chicken
- Pale and Interesting
- Full Page Image
- God Only Knows
- Full Page Image
- The Mystery of Black Jean