Comic Horror Monthly: Issue 55
Author: CHM LLC
Date: 0101-01-01 00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Cosmic Horror Monthly

COMIC HORROR MONTHLY

ISSUE 55

Edited by JOLIE TOOMAJAN

CONTENTS

Letter from the Editor

Meet the CHM Staff

The Wind Beneath

Alex Ebenstein

Those Perfect Materials

Addison Smith

Evil in My Sight

Daniel Bart Hutchins

Buddha in Your Head

Anne Liberton

The Stars Have Teeth

C.R. Langille

Devil Is Fine

Michael Bettendorf

Disposal of a Leg

Scott McNee

Soothsayer

Ian Kappos

The Three Marked Pennies

Mary Elizabeth Counselman

Copyright © 2025 by Randolph Literary Press 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 – Valentine Kulakov / DegeneArt

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:

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, Joseph Morris, Mike J Clarkewww.cosmichorrormonthly.com

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Greetings Dear Reader,

Happy New Year and welcome to another year of CHM. The more things change, the more things stay the same, and I’m delighted to say that we’re planning on yet another year of the best in cosmic and weird horror, starting right now.

We kick this issue off with Alex Ebenstein’s “The Wind Beneath” an elevated (pun unintended) apocalypse tale. We then bring you Addison Smith’s “Those Perfect Materials,” which gives us body horror on a cosmic scale and turns the fetishization of youth on its head. Daniel Bart Hutchins “Evil in My Sight” is the smartly crafted story of a city beset upon by a turkey processing plant that seems to infest everything it touches, followed by an anxiety-inducing tale of emotions made physical, Anne Liberton’s “Buddha in Your Head.” C.R. Langille’s eerie grief tale, “The Stars Have Teeth,” shows us a mother’s single-minded desperation backgrounded by a world thrust into chaos. “Devil Is Fine,” Michael Bettendorf’s very weird Western, introduces aging gunslinger Grant (no mister), tasked with escorting a younger gunslinger, an oil heir, and a box containing a harmonica to safety. Scott McNee gives us a darkly funny workplace horror with “Disposal of a Leg.” We close the issue with Ian Kappos’ “Soothsayer,” which introduces us to Devin—obsessed with his discovery of an unidentifiable animal carcass, he ends up entangled in his friend Sammy’s deteriorating mental state and his more sinister pastimes.

Our crypt story this month is “The Three Marked Pennies,” by Mary Elizabeth Counselman, which finds an entire city drawn into a lottery with life-altering consequences. Part of a trilogy, we’ll be bringing another of the stories to you next month. It was originally published in Weird Tales.

Until next time!

J

MEET THE CHM STAFF

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: Valentine Kulakov was born November 12, 1997. He graduated from the faculty of Traumarology and Orthopedics in 2022 and now works as a hand surgeon. He started painting from YouTube tutorials just for fun and later found a second life for himself as an artist working in a remoulded marinistic manner

Alex Reed is a 31-year-old self-taught artist with a passion for creating visually captivating pieces. Originally from Battle Creek, Michigan, he has honed his skills with a commitment to excellence and a drive for continuous improvement and can always find a certain peace in art that has been irreplaceable in life.

THE WIND BENEATH

ALEX EBENSTEIN

There’s a gale when dawn illuminates our world. The morning light arrives as though leached from my son’s eyes, his gaze cast skyward, forever in search of hope, his dreams. He’s gone.

The wind is nothing new, of course; there’s little to mark the passage of time now, everything’s wind and survival…and heartbreak. When the world turned, we had no choice but to reckon with loss. To breathe it. To choke on it with every gust. We made it damn near ten years after, him and I, and that’s that. I don’t know what time I have left, but I do know it feels like too much now.

The thing is, it’s not all bad, this incessant wind that yanks at my clothes as I sit on the beach in grief, uncertain my legs have the strength to carry me. An old neighbor, distant a mile or so as we are nowadays, was an engineer. Before. A good one, apparently, because he was able to retrofit leftover technology, made harnessing wind for energy a breeze. So we’ve got that, an efficient windmill and perpetual electricity—a sufficient, if unremarkable, new way of life in the post-apocalypse. Well, I have that. The neighbor hanged himself not long after lending his help, and today my boy is dead.

No, the wind isn’t so much an issue. The problem is everything else.

* * *

My son was only five when the earth spoiled and the heat arrived with the wind. Both came with death. What we didn’t know at the time was that Earth’s revolt had begun years earlier, the death wobble imperceptible—or ignored. There was not one single incident but a culmination of undercurrents finally boiling over at once. I never fully understood what happened, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

It’s funny what all’s remained threaded through the folds of my brain from that time. My boy’s, too. Our personal connection to that End of Days, which became the routine topic of discussion in the After, a storybook read enough to know by heart.

We were due to fly out west for vacation, the first real one he’d have gone on—but the morning of our departure saw all flights canceled. Globally. He didn’t understand, not really. I understood his devastation quite clearly. Can picture it just the same, even now. It was the first time I felt the visceral stab of his despair. It cut a part of me I wasn’t aware existed.

The next devastation came less than a month later, when his mother, carrying a once-dormant disease, died alongside five billion of our Earthly neighbors.

My son and I found refuge along the shores of Lake Michigan, when the urban areas became more dangerous than useful. There was little competition for land in the wake of the mass death, not to mention our spoiled earth had run the great freshwater lake rancid. I didn’t mind, and neither did my boy; the big lake looked and sounded the way it always had, at least from shore. Fresh or poisoned, it was a comfort.

I get no comfort now as I stare out into the lake, scanning the horizon as though searching for my son. Has he gone somewhere? Anywhere? I don’t know. What remains of him is still by my side, right where he asked to be when he knew it was time. I almost refused to cart him down to the water, unwilling to accept that he was right—but how could I deny my boy a final view of his favorite place?

Hadn’t I known this day was coming? Since discovering the near-extinction level disease had first rooted in humans just when my wife carried him in her womb? Even if I couldn’t guess when, there had been no doubt in my mind, I will admit now, that he would meet an early grave.

The sun has already finished rising and now begins to fall. It’s time to get moving again. There is work to be done, as is the case every day, but particularly now, in order to properly say goodbye.

Thanks to the boom in business when more than half the population died, funeral services are still attainable in this age, a decade after. Though I doubt it gets much use these days thanks to the ubiquitous lack of wealth and transportation options. Maybe it’s a free service now, I don’t know. I could find out, I suppose, but that would mean a multi-day trek into town, and we made that trip not a month ago. It’s a place I never liked, a place of false hope and gossip. A torturous place for my boy who wanted to believe a new, different life was attainable. The only real source of conflict between us over the years, but he knew. I much prefer my windmill to the rumor mill.

And I much prefer to say goodbye alone, my way, than whatever way they might suggest in town.

* * *

It’s summer and the sun, forever shrouded in haze, still sets late here. So, late it is when the darkness blots out the horizon. The fire is strong and crackling as intended, and I’m planted in the sand upwind so as not to catch any flames. Same place I always sit on bonfire nights. The difference now is that my son is not beside me, sat cross-legged, but rather up shore, prone and bundled in a blanket. Though it’s not so much a bonfire tonight, but a pyre. He’ll burn soon, when I can muster the courage to put him to rest.

To avoid fixating on that bundle of my grief, I gaze into the cloudless night sky. I could get lost in the sea of stars, and I’d like to. Though I couldn’t fathom such a journey without my boy. The thought brings me back to Earth, and I wonder if I might be better off getting lost in the sea-like lake before me. I could walk and not stop. Eventually I’d find the end. Perhaps I’d find him.

My sorrow blurs my vision, and it takes me a second to notice. There’s a blinking light, high up in the atmosphere. A drifting satellite tethered by gravity. I know it as well as anything, yet after all these years of telling my son as much, to protect him from false hope, I wonder… Is this one a plane, after all?

I rise ungracefully to my feet, the weathered skin on my cheeks feeling drier than normal, leeched of moisture by way of the wind wicking tears I didn’t know I had been crying. There will be more, to be sure—the night is far too young, much like my son.

What if it is a plane? What message would the universe be sending me, on this, the day of his death? I picture the products of his often-singular focus over the years, every paper airplane, every cardboard rocket, every kite…

With as gentle a hand as I can manage, I draw the blanket away from his face. My fingertips trace a familiar route down the soft skin from eye to lips. I kneel beside him with shaky knees, and lay a kiss on his forehead.

The wind across the water and sand, rustling the loose folds of the blanket, it speaks to me. It repeats my boy’s final words, as if they haven’t been looping through my head since he spoke them. They lay heavy and aggressive, clawing at the chambers of my heart, and I suspect they always will.

Maybe, wherever I go from here, they’ll let me fly. I’ll never stop until I find Mom.

Yet, this time, I understand. He’s not going on the fire as I had planned.

* * *

The work is delicate and agonizing, each movement wrought with anguish—but if these past ten years have done anything, it’s make me skilled in such endeavors. Countless, the number of animals I’ve skinned, and though I would never reduce my son to such a comparison, I can’t deny the similarity. Different types of necessity, but both high in levels of importance. I handle the blade with care, always, and give an extra ounce now. Once enough skin is gathered, the appropriate bones selected, and my well of tears momentarily emptied, I’m ready to begin construction.

Oddly enough, I don’t know how, exactly, to construct such an object. I helped my son once long ago, but it soon became his own challenge to tackle. Though, much like if I were handed a piece of paper and told to fold it into a plane, I find that when I employ logic and creativity and craftiness, the work becomes obvious and steady. Almost joyful.

It helps that I’m doing this for—and with—my boy.

* * *

It should be easy, flying a kite in this wind, but I can’t remember the last time I tried. Regret is acute, thinking of all the times I could have done so with him and chose not to, the mountains of excuses employed. But, I suppose, I’m doing it now.

My hand clutches the bone frame, testing the feel and positioning of my fingers. I angle the kite just so; the wind catches the taut skin-fabric and I feel the pull. There’s nothing else I need to do but jog and let the wind take hold. We’re ready.

I never liked running in sand, but I don’t need to go far, or move all that quickly. After only ten or so steps, the kite takes off. Yards of string fly through the loosely closed fist of my trailing hand. Memories from childhood roost in my mind. Up, up, and away!

A quick glance to the sand, not wanting to take my eyes off my creation above, but needing to know how much is left below. I squeeze, trapping the final few feet of string. We’re tethered, and I’m his anchor. He tugs and swoops and soars, and I struggle to hold tight. I don’t like fighting it and the familiar panic finds its home in the hollow of my throat.

Not again. Let me be the anchor.

My forward motion comes to a halt and my feet dig pits into the sand and I strain against the upward force, yanking my arms left and right, mercilessly.

I can’t let go I can’t let go I can’t—

Let go.

My grip loosens and the string slips through my hand. The loss pulls at my knees, wanting me to sink into the sand, but it’s counteracted, overcome by a swell of pride. My handiwork is good, it’s holding up to the wind.

My boy finally gets to fly.

* * *

Alex Ebenstein is a maker of maps by day, writer of horror fiction by night. He lives with his family in Michigan. His published novellas include Curse Corvus (2023), Melon Head Mayhem (Shortwave Publishing, 2023), and Reanimated Rex (2024). He is also the editor of the SPLIT SCREAM series, published by Tenebrous Press. Find him on social media @AlexEbenstein.

THOSE PERFECT MATERIALS

ADDISON SMITH

The girl's skin split in long zipper lines—epidermis, muscle, and fat curling away from her glistening rib cage as if to say, "Behold my soul; am I not beautiful?" And she was. Under the lesions and cracks that split in sweeping floral curls across her body, she had been beautiful once. Even now she lay marked with the signs of recent inhabitation, a swath of rainbow face paint across her cheek and glitter in her hair.

The Vastness was beautiful too, in its own way, even if I dared not speak the words. With a canvas of youthful flesh, it made a thing terrifying and appealing in fractal scores and Fibonacci spirals that sliced before my eyes with no impetus beyond the virus itself. It rebuilt her, a toddler experimenting with its first imperfect strokes, ascending to mastery as it learned of this body and these cells and the twisted things it could become.

There was nothing I could do at this point, so I watched with morbid fascination as the Vastness took her body for its own purposes in its needful machinations that collected the bodies of the young and vital and turned them into something new and fearful and filled with unknown purpose. The girl's body shifted on the sterile stainless morgue table, not alive as a person but as an entity nonetheless. I pictured her eyes opening, not with the flutter of viral control, but with recognition. I saw her staring into my eyes over her destroyed and beautiful form, at peace with herself. Before long the tendrils would come forth from within and carry her to the others who filled the streets. The rainbow swath across her cheek would become a part of something greater that did not remember its parts but was marked with the graffiti of well-lived and too-short lives.

I wondered if I would join them soon. But no. I was too old, too used, too impure for this creation. I opened the door to ease her escape. Her parents would not come for her. Nobody did anymore. I stepped out of my meat locker employment and left her behind, but she would follow soon. The Vastness would not take me, but I could go to it. I could see it for myself.

Outside the morgue, the sterile fluorescent hallways, and the lobby once filled with grief and paperwork, I stepped over the threshold into the parking lot and the street beyond. There were no bodies upon the ground, as the Vastness cleaned up after itself. Instead, there was only the tower in the distance, a thing built of bodies, but no longer recognizable as such. Meat and muscle formed its great stalk reaching heavenward, and skin grew over its exterior. It wasn't just patched and assembled from the bodies of the lost but grew with true cellular duplication, forming an unbroken tube that undulated from its earthen roots, waving a hundred meters in the sky.

Miles down the road I saw another tower, reaching and undulating and waving to the sky. And beyond that there would be thousands more, covering the land like great cilia pulling the world into something new and terrible.

The office door creaked behind me, joined by the squelch of mechanical meat. The girl emerged on bent and broken limbs, doubled backward in a crabwalk to eternity to join the reaching stalks. As she passed, I looked again at the swath of rainbow paint. Above her cheeks, her head bent backward, her eyelids fluttered. There was nothing inside them.

There was only purpose.

* * *

They called us the Axmen, once the world decided what it was going to do about the towers. We didn't all use axes, but the imagery was potent. Hundreds of thousands of us, the middle-aged and elderly, gathering at the stalks of writhing flesh like lumberjacks in a forest marked for harvest. Some of us cried, but most of us had little of that left in us. A lot of words spread after the towers rose. Eldritch was one of them, but I had trouble with it. For all that the Vastness took our young, I couldn't think of it as sinister. When a parasite nestled among the flesh of its host, it was not with malice. The parasite wanted to live and had found a way to survive and procreate. There was no malice. Only life.

I stood at the base of my designated stalk, an axman in truth with a sharpened red wedge on a long wooden handle. A woman stood beside me, and more in a circle around the fleshy timber, seven to round its circumference. They were all the same diameter to an unnatural tolerance. They said the diameter was some mathematical anomaly, representing some fractal perfection. I didn't know much about it, but it felt right. I believed it to the moment I swung my ax into its bulk. The flesh gave way beneath my ax, chopping a four-inch gash that would have beheaded a body, were it not a neck so thick it took all of us to make a dent. The tower screamed from within, as if those thousands of young mouths rested at its core, unchanged and still connected to a string orchestra of vocal cords.

The woman beside me wept, but did not drop her ax. Blood sprayed and soaked and our hands slipped across the wetness of our ax handles. We didn't stop. The future was taken from them, and it was taken from us. We couldn't take it back, but we could make it hurt and squirm and fail in whatever its purpose.

What started as meat became cord wood in our minds, chopped and sheared and tossed aside in heaps until we reached the core of the thing, somehow still upright even as its base thinned to mere feet. At its center stood a column of bone in great linking vertebrae. All around the city and around the world that bone lay exposed. We stopped and stared at what we had done, and our purpose wavered. I felt it as a silence passing over our group of seven who stood in blood and tacky swaths of gore. The bone was a column of pristine white, and upon it the marks of something we couldn't understand. Words marked deep in the bone, not carved but grown into its being, and though we couldn't recognize any human language, we knew what they were. The names of the fallen marked the bone in a tongue that I had to admit had the feeling of the eldritch. We all understood, even if we couldn't know how. These were our children, their names and souls given remembrance in bone. It was a holy thing. A terrible thing. All around the world the axmen stopped and stared. Above us, the towers swayed and split as they grew ever upward to eternity.

They stopped just short.

* * *

When the hands emerged at the tops of stolen-flesh towers, we watched them with fascination and horror. I imagined great long-armed gods reaching down to the earth to pluck away the sinners and clean the body of the world. To pick away the parasites that grew and infested and usurped. We were the aged, after all. If any were without sin, it was those who became the stalks and marked the bones with their souls. We festered, outlived, deprived the world of the resources that should have gone to them, to the future of our species.

Fingers thick as trees groped at the sky as towers of flesh swayed to their own motion. When they found each other, the hands clasped a hundred meters above the earth, shading us beneath them. I made love to a woman whose name I didn't know, but whose tears I had seen and whose stories I had listened to in mutual despair. Her life was an unending series of loss as her children gave way to the Vastness that built the great waving arms. She had a husband, but he was gone now, given way to grief and an easy bullet-wound exit. There was no ire when she spoke of him. She was happy for his escape, even if she wouldn't join him. Her skin prickled beneath my axman's hands, calloused from the work we had both done and giving way to the arthritic.

We parted ways when the great hands fanned outward, thick skin webbing between the fingers and then from the stalks themselves, reaching to join with one another in great fleshy domes across the earth. There was no knowing how many of those domes existed. There was only our own mile of earth separate from the rest of the world. Light penetrated the thick webbing of skin and cast the world in red, the skies punctuated by long and flowing veins, and I remembered my own birth.

The womb surrounded me in darkness and flesh, and I reached with hands beyond my control. Hands which grasped and clung to anything they could find, any semblance that there was more than just myself. Heat gave way to pressure and light and the bite of air upon my own wet skin.

The young had left us and we were reborn into a world of strange meat and eldritch ritual and the rising of gods from the wombs of the dead. I found the woman I had lain with. Her name was Martha and she was a being built of strength and loss and a willingness to persevere beyond any pain. We all were now, those who were left.

"We don't know what will happen," Martha said as I lay beside her, my lungs aching from the exhaustion of our love. I laid my hand upon her stomach, begging for life to begin anew and rise from the ashes of the old and decrepit. Martha smiled, and I felt young in her eyes, and burdened with all the uncertainty of the future.

"What happens if they take her?" she said, her own wrinkled hand joining mine upon her belly. "What happens if they take them all?"

I had no words to impart, but hope entered her eyes when she looked upon me, an old man who had purpose again and the willingness to continue on into eternity.

"Then they will build something fantastic," I said, memories of rainbow swath paint in my heart.

"They have the finest materials."

* * *

Addison Smith (he/him) is an amorphous being constructed of suspended cold brew and kombucha. His mind is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast formed around a brainstem of Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus. He's doing his best, though. His fiction has appeared in dozens of publications including Cosmic Horror Monthly, Fantasy Magazine, and Escape Pod, Addison is a member of the Codex Writers Group and you can find him on Bluesky @addisoncs.bsky.social.

EVIL IN MY SIGHT

DANIEL BART HUTCHINS

Daniel was in Willmar for two months on paid leave. He spent each day cleaning, throwing away, and picking through the remnants of his father’s life: a box of fishing lures, a hand-carved duck decoy, and, more importantly, boxes of papers that showed exactly how little he had left behind. Taxes unpaid, second and third mortgages, all amounting to a big pile of, “Here, this is your problem now.”

Daniel picked up a Louis L’Amour book from the shelf, remembering how his father talked to him like an uncle who got stuck babysitting. The closest they had ever come to sharing anything important was a quiet conversation in the parking lot of Taco Bell with eight beef burritos sitting between them on the bench seat of his truck. They tried to decide how they’d respond if one day they stumbled upon a ranch run only by a widow in need of protection. Daniel’s father was a good man, but only just good enough.

It was 8 a.m. before Daniel realized it was Friday. On Fridays he had to get out of town, at least for the day. The smell was bad on Thursday, and on Friday, it made you want to die.

The town of Willmar sat in a valley like lint stuck in your belly button. Everyone was mean, and no one seemed to think it had anything to do with THS Foods. THS Foods processed 3,000 dead turkeys a day, separating their heads, pulling their guts out through their anus, and grinding their kidneys into paste. On Thursdays, they rendered the turkey fat, and on Fridays, they boiled down the blood.

The smell covered the town like a sleeping sow, warm and suffocating. Daniel hated the stench, he hated the Louis L’Amour book in his hands, and he hated this piece of shit house on Averie Avenue. So on Fridays, he left town, drove north two hours to the one decent bookstore in a 300-mile radius. He read, drank coffee, and counted the days until he could return to the city.

That morning, as he drove, he noticed a blue Chevy Silverado following close. “Stupid hick,” he muttered to himself, nearly choking on the bloody air that invaded the cab through the air vents. He sped up, passed a red Subaru, and moved into the right-hand lane. As he did, the truck followed. He sped up some more, and the truck somehow got even closer.

In the rearview mirror, Daniel saw the man's Germanic Minnesotan face—wide, swollen, sparse, his eyes somehow blank and full of rage, both hands gripping the steering wheel as if he intended to rip it off. The man was screaming. Daniel tried to read his lips. The best he could make out was “Here, piggy piggy, here piggy piggy,” over and over again. What the fuck?

The exit to I-23 approached quickly, and Daniel sped up. There’s no way this guy will follow me all the way to Spicer, right? As he took the exit, his bumper collapsed. The other man’s truck crushed it like a soda can. Daniel tasted fear in his mouth, and he screamed, first a terrified squeak, then, self-correcting, an angry roar. He yelled to the truck, to God, to the ceiling of his Ford Focus, “Are you fucking kidding me, man?”

* * *

Doug Billings Boils the Blood

Doug kept his knives sharp. Before and after every shift, he ran them along a whetstone. First, a coarse stone to even out the edges, then three finer stones until the knife could easily slide through paper. After fifteen years at THS, he knew what having dull knives could do to a turkey cutter.

Once or twice a quarter, some guy showed up to work with dull knives, attempted to slide one through a turkey carcass on the belt, only for it to kick out sideways, resulting in a lost finger and occasionally an entire hand. Doug’s hands were good. His knives were better. They were proof that he showed up every day, focused and prepared.

When he first joined THS foods, he thought that was all he would need, to be focused and prepared. He banked his house, his family, his entire future on it. Sometime around his tenth year on the line, Doug realized he was wrong. No matter how many days he showed up, met his quotas, and never caused a slowdown, he would be on this line until the day he quit or died. He would never move up the chain. He would never leave the factory floor.

He continued to show up focused and prepared, but after his epiphany, something else as well. Doug was tired. He spent a year stalking the floor with his knives, holding them less like tools and more like weapons each day. He counted the hours until the end of his shift, and the hours until a new shift began. They moved slower and slower until after a year, they blended together, and he forgot to count them at all.

Then, after a year in timeless turkey purgatory, Doug showed up one day to find he loved his work again. But this time, not for its potential. He had fallen in love with the process. He enjoyed carving through each carcass. He enjoyed rendering the fat on Thursdays. And he looked forward to Friday when they gathered the full week's worth of blood and filled a giant vat, setting a gas fire beneath it and boiling 500 gallons down to a single five-gallon bucket.

All week he stared at the vat, anticipating its powerful performance. Did it feel excited too, as excited as him? Did it hunger for blood by Wednesday and Thursday? Doug hungered for it. He needed to watch it destroy. When he woke, when he slept, he wanted to watch it eat.

He started to ache for the vat. How cruel it seemed to leave it hungry all week, how cruel to waste any of its food in the process through carelessness and mess. Why did he let so many turkeys bleed on the floor without a bucket underneath? That blood was for the cauldron. The cauldron begged him to take care, to be kind, to feed it in full.

Doug listened. He became more diligent, more conscious of the cauldron’s needs. He lined the floor with buckets, carefully collecting every drop until not a single one went to waste. The Friday boil slowly grew, from 500 gallons to 501 to 502. But like a real man, a real monster, with each new gallon of blood the vat boiled, its appetite grew.

One Friday morning, Doug woke from sleep, damp and oily. His face was worn and haggard, violence had drawn a shadow across it. A half-emptied bottle of vodka had tipped over on his nightstand and dripped quietly onto the work shirt he had wrestled off in his stupor the night before. He looked at his radio alarm clock. It was 3:30 a.m., thirty minutes before his alarm.

Then, Doug heard it again, the noise that had woken him. It was a voice, a hiss. He knew it was the cauldron, reaching to him through the dark, rousing itself for boiling day. It was anxious, and urgent. It simply said, “More.”

Doug got out of bed and into his truck.

* * *

Daniel Dials 9-1-1

Daniel’s body held a gallon and a half of blood, and each ounce was chilled to near freezing. He sped up, maxing out his Ford Focus at 120 miles an hour. His bumper hung in the wind. The truck was inches behind him. He focused on keeping the car straight.

One hand on the wheel, he dug his cellphone out of his pocket and dialed 911. The dispatcher picked up immediately and said, “What’s your emergency?”

“There’s a crazy person following me.”

“Following you?”

“Yes, I’m on I-23, and there is a man in a blue Silverado chasing me.”

“How do you mean, chasing you, sir?”

“I mean I left Willmar and headed towards Spicer, and he's been on my tail for six miles now, maybe seven. We’re going over 100 mph, and he’s still chasing me.”

The truck latched to his bumper, pushing more than following. The cars clung together like a strange train headed to absolutely nowhere. The Silverado turned ever so slightly, sending Daniel’s Focus swerving, first off the road, then onto its top, and finally landing in the ditch.

* * *

Stanley is Concerned with Property Value

Stanley Albright owned a small diner down by the lake in Spicer, Minnesota. Every Friday at 7 a.m., he ordered a patty melt with extra mustard and sat down to run payroll, cutting checks for each cook and waitress under his employ. Over the last three years, those checks started to shrink. Fewer and fewer guests came by, the boating season dwindled, and his friends started to move away.

Stanley was three months behind on the mortgage for the building and stared at a payroll he could not make when a cook reminded him it was Friday.

Usually when the diner was slow, every cook, waiter, and busboy took stabs at what might be causing it.

“Oh, it’s the weather.”

“Oh, it’s the football game today, everyone left town.”

“Last day of school, folks are all down at the ball field.”

On Fridays, no one guessed. Friday meant no one would come to town. The diner would remain empty. The stink of Willmar would creep down I-23 and claim Spicer as its own.

A few years before, Stanley decided to do something about the stench. He made T-shirts that said on the front “Spicer is Nicer” and on the back “Let’s keep it that way.” Everyone in town bought a shirt, and the catchphrase took off. Homemade signs with the slogan were strewn across lawns and in medians.

Every penny of the proceeds went to Stanley's political action committee whose single issue was this: shutting down the THS plant. He lobbied the town councils, then the state legislature, and finally the mayor to try and shut down THS.

None of this worked. The Mayor took money from THS, the town council took money from THS, and the state legislature was practically built on a pile of their dead turkeys. His petitions fell on deaf ears, even in his small town the world had become too big to hear him. Each plea echoed off the walls of bureaucracy that did not notice him.

Stanley grew bitter. As each season got a little slower, he started deciding between bills. This month he could be late on the water bill so he could make the power bill. But then next month, he would trade them. He kept playing hopscotch with utilities, mortgages, and suppliers until the whole thing froze to a halt and he started carrying a gun.

* * *

Daniel Dreams He’s Dying

Daniel woke up on his back. He was lying on the ceiling of the cab of his car. He cursed God, Willmar, and his father for not having the common decency to die without being a burden. His ears were ringing, and his vision was out of focus. Everything seemed to be seen through Vaseline.

He missed the city badly. He missed his apartment where the floors didn’t creak. He missed riding his bike to work. He missed his local bookshop that didn’t require a two-hour drive. He missed getting the paper at the newsstand and having conversations about anything other than the weather or what the crops were doing this year.

Doug Billings reached through Daniel’s nostalgia and homesickness like a blade, grabbing at him with his oversized paws. Doug had one of his big fists wrapped around Daniel’s ankle and was trying to pull him out of the wreckage. Daniel kicked and screamed, and his vision cleared up.

Doug’s face was red, not like a sunburn or a tomato, but dark and rusted. His face was the color of blood, and his eyes were black. He said “here, piggy piggy” over and over again. His eyes were black, and nothing stood behind them. Daniel wiggled and writhed and tried everything he could to get back and away from this creature.

Without missing a beat of his chant, Doug began swiping at Daniel with a carving knife. It had a plastic blue handle and was curved from being sharpened every day for years on end. First, the blade cut through Daniel’s New Balance sneakers.

Daniel’s eyes filled with tears, and he screamed, “Stop, stop, what are you doing? Stop.” The words felt like slime in his mouth and meant nothing. He had just enough time to be embarrassed by his tears before the knife ripped through his shoe and lodged itself in the side of his foot.

Daniel kicked harder, taking the knife from Doug with his foot. He found his way out of the side passenger window of the Focus and began running, the knife as an insole and a beast on his heels.

* * *

Stanley Didn’t Pay the Light Bill

It was 11 a.m., and Stanley could already smell the blood drifting over from Willmar. He hated that there was nowhere to escape. He hated the way the smell would climb in through your air ducts, under your doors, and find you no matter where you were.

Outside the diner window, a truck pulled up with “Kandiyohi County Utilities” on the side. A fat man climbed out, his shirt hanging out over his belt like mud rolling downhill.

Stanley’s stomach turned when he realized why the man was there. He ran out the front door. The man was unloading a T-bar from the back of his truck as Stanley yelled, “Hey man, not today!” The man blinked at him as if he didn’t speak the same language. Stanley continued, “Hey, I’ll pay them today, you cannot cut off our water today.” He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and took out three wrinkled twenty-dollar bills.

The man spoke in a monotone, “Sir, I am not the payment department. I cannot take payment. Please call the office to handle any and all billing issues.”

Stanley’s fear, his shame, his embarrassment drained from his body. He felt the anger come in first in his feet, climbing his carcass like monkey bars until his face was red. “Hey motherfucker, did you not hear me? I will pay them today. Don’t touch that fucking water.”

Again, in a monotone, “Sir, I am not a member of the billing department. I cannot take payment. Please call the office to handle any and all billing issues.” He took a knee next to the water shut-off valve.

The air was thick. The smell claimed the atmosphere as its own. It smelled like copper to some; it smelled like garbage to others. To Stanley, it smelled like death. He pulled his handgun out of the holster under his jacket and stuck it to the back of the utility man’s head.

“I am telling you right now, you are not shutting off the water. Get back in your truck and leave, or or or or I’m blowing your fucking brains out.”

* * *

Cops Get Confused

“Dispatch, this is K9 Alpha Sigma. Come in.”

“Go ahead, K9 Alpha Sigma.”

“Yeah, has anyone reported this car in the ditch on 23? Over.”

“Copy, Sigma. Yeah, a man called not too long ago and said he was being chased. Over.”

“Another one? What’s that, three this morning? Over.”

“That’s right, I think three. Maybe four. Over.”

* * *

Daniel Runs

Doug wasn’t far behind him. Still on repeat, he yelled, “Here piggy piggy piggy.” The words echoed off trees until it sounded like the entire forest was hunting Daniel.

Daniel saw a street open up and recognized the waterfront. He had made it to Spicer. He found in himself more motivation and ran faster.

As he broke out onto the main street, he saw a man holding what must be a gun to the back of another man’s head. He was either in hell or hallucinating. He screamed, “Help! Help! Help!”

Doug wanted his knife back. Doug wanted his blood. He had no thoughts beyond this. His insides became a deep well of need, his desires echoing off the walls of the well and repeating themselves over and over and over again until every thought only registered as “Blood knife blood knife blood knife blood knife BLOOD KNIFE.”

He yelled, “Here piggy piggy piggy,” and was interrupted.

* * *

Stanley Summons The Devil

Stanley held the gun to the back of the man’s head with a shaky hand and an unsteady voice. Unsure of where the tough-guy act went from here, he confessed to the man his sins.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His confidence was crumbling, he wanted to tell the man of his sorrow. This town, this diner, was all he had.

“Boo hoo. What are you going to do, tough guy? You gonna fucking shoot me?”

Stanley’s trembling voice righted itself, his fear becoming rage. He pushed the gun a little deeper into the back of the man’s hair.

“I’ll do it, I swear to God I’ll blow your brains out.”

“You fucking pansy, you won’t do shit.”

“Shut up! Shut up. Shut the fuck up! I swear I’ll do it. I swear I’ll…”

“Go ahead then. Go for it, buddy. Do it! Stanley Albright, Mr. Fucking Tough Guy, go for it.”

The men were interrupted by a scream. The forest opened up and out spilled a beast. Emerging from the roadside brush, it had four legs, four arms, and two wet and screaming mouths. Stanley stared at the creature barreling towards him. He felt as if the gates of hell themselves opened up into Spicer.

As they drew closer, Daniel’s pleas and Doug’s screaming combined to make one awful noise, that was itself the sound of terror and the sound of reckoning and the sound of this particular land rebelling against its settlers.

Stanley turned his gun towards them. He yelled, “Stop!” Screech. “Stop!” Scrreech. “STOP!” Screech.

Then he fired. The first bullet exploded into Daniel’s chest, dropping him to the ground, and the second lodged itself in Doug’s skull, ricocheting off each wall and making a pink sludge of his brains.

Their blood flowed and became one and found its way into the soil.

* * *

Car Killer’s Victims’ Bodies Found

WILLMAR, MN — Police recovered the bodies of Doug “Car Killer” Billings’ victims earlier this week. The Willmar K-9 unit discovered the deceased, two men and one woman, at Billing’s home. Officials believe Billings murdered the three Friday morning, before he was shot and killed along with an intended fourth victim. Billings was a fifteen-year employee of THS foods. Authorities have not yet identified a motive.

For Immediate Release -

Spicer, Minnesota

THS Food is excited to announce its expansion. Having grown the THS Willmar factory from a small family business to over 500 employees, THS is excited to announce its second location in Spicer, Minnesota.

“THS is an incredible economic force in the region, and I’m so excited they’ve chosen Spicer as their new home,” says Mayor Torgerson.

Plans include a new factory for processing pork products, and this new factory will stretch six city blocks.

“This represents a new chapter for THS and is just the beginning,” stated CEO Tyler H. Shaw.

* * *

Daniel Bart Hutchins is a writer, chef, and restaurateur based in Washington, D.C. He once ate 136 oysters in one sitting. He lives with his wife and son, whose laughter guards him from the brutality of life in our time.

BUDDHA IN YOUR HEAD

ANNE LIBERTON

Pop!

The first one was her mother and, Paloma being a baby at the time, it barely made an impression. Chances are she licked a little blood and brain matter, and life followed as it should. The rest of the family would tell completely different stories.

Sacks of potpourri and therapy became part of her routine since she could remember, despite there being no baby victims in the Machado family history to account for that early precaution. She hadn’t heard of any other relatives who shared her “innate apathy”—as her father called—either. It described Paloma’s lack of screaming when one of her sisters pinched her or why she didn’t flinch while beholding dead mothers in their beds. A vital asset against popping before she reached puberty.

Dangerous hormones aside, that impassivity had endowed her the biggest room in the house, so Paloma would serve as a buffer between Pacífica, the oldest, who dreaded loud noises more than life itself, and Serena, the second child, who usually emitted said noises. Serena dreaded loneliness, something encouraged on those grounds to prevent accidents like their mother’s. She and Paloma spent most of their time together.

“Are you still not talking?” she would ask at times. “Can’t you learn? You’re four already! Say ‘four.’”

Paloma stared at her, who then pouted.

“Sit. Let’s do this.”

And they played with their dolls. The Internet was not an option until sixteen: one argument on social media or a day with no connection might be fatal. For now, ignorance protected them as a loving father. The real one was busy avoiding the house as best as he could, for raising children was a one-way ticket to death by popping. Not that it would make much of a difference.

Pop!

Pacífica and dread parted during ballet class, which had been a terrible idea from the start, if anyone asked Paloma—which would be pointless, since she would not answer (verbally, anyway). She had just turned seven and no words thus far.

Sports and art often offered great opportunities for the Machados to let out some steam, however, one had to cater them personally to each family member if they hoped to ever see the effort baring some fruit that was not soft, crimson, and oozing all over. Far too competitive for her own good, Pacífica lasted two seasons before losing the role of Sleeping Beauty to a fellow ballerina, and the toll of defeat went straight to her head and then out into the world.

No one allowed Serena to attend the funeral, which was a shame. She would have cried on top of her lungs in homage to her. She was doing it right there and then at their house, the adults at the cemetery and only Paloma keeping her company.

“Do you think they’ll take her to mom?” Serena asked, nose running until it dripped down her blouse. They were lying in front of each other on her bed. “What if she doesn’t know the way?”

Paloma stared at her. Growth aside, the most distinct change on her features during those years had to be the skin: her complexion had gone from a bright brown to an ashen surrogate.

“I wish we could see her…Maybe we could help.” Her eyes welled again and disappeared behind a pillow.

A soft, muffled wailing sound filled the room.

You don’t feel anything, Paloma recalled their father saying prior to the burial. Serena’s sniffs already echoed in the corridors. Help her feel a little less, or we’ll be doing this again soon.

She placed her hand on her sister’s shoulder. Half a red face appeared. Paloma bent over, eyes dead.

“Say ‘four.’”

Pop!

The house reeked of marijuana and chamomile by then, which disguised the distinct odor of iron in the air that would have tattled to any occupant what had happened.

Their father never cared to learn how not to feel, seemed uncapable of doing so, unlike his remaining daughters. Serena, now taller and much paler, urged him to at least try. She also insisted she would not have been able to master blocking any emotions had she not experienced them first, which meant Paloma did, too.

Look at her, their father would say. What does that face say to you? It’s empty. She never even cried when she was born. Paloma agreed with his statements, nodding in silence.

Back to the reeking house, aside from loving tea and self-medication, their father was a huge fan of soccer. He could be found almost every Wednesday and Sunday night before his TV screen watching Cruzeiro play, or even some random team if they weren’t on. Soccer time was riskier than any other moment of the day, as the game only truly ended once the referee blew their whistle, so he kept a vast arsenal of chamomile and drugs at his disposal. Paloma and Serena in turn went to the garden to wait it out; they hated the smell. This, along with the odorific properties of his arsenal, meant the maid was the one who found him, several hours after the fact.

He sat in his armchair, proud and elegant, a man no one would accuse of shrieking like a wild animal because the goalkeeper’s gross negligence had granted Atlético Mineiro—Cruzeiro’s greatest rival—the ball, two minutes before the game ended. They scored. It ended.

Midmorning, when the maid entered the room, she was greeted by a bloodstained television screen. A cooking show taught the steps to a chicken stew sprinkled with red, served with sanguine rice. Most of the liquid did not concentrate there; it had slid from the armchair, pooling behind the girls’ father, on his body or on the floor. The maid handled it quite well for a novice popper, until she stepped on something mushy and a piece of it caught on her foot.

This is what awoke the children, her reaction. Game or no game, their father never kissed them goodnight, which had spared them the walk past the living room after they got sick of the garden. Fourteen and thirteen were too old for kisses—not that there had been any before that. On the bright side, this time he wouldn’t be able to forbid anyone from attending (or crying at) the funeral.

[No Pops… for now.]

A hapless event, their father’s passing, the entire family agreed by his grave. There was no crying.

“Who the hell pops to a soccer match? Of course, he wasn’t actually from our side of the family,” one of the aunts said, crimson marring her cheeks.

“She chose poorly,” Paloma heard another say, referring to her mother. “And that might reflect in the children. Those who are left.”

“Oh, have you seen them? They look so wrinkled, pale…no, gray. How old are they again?”

Serena and Paloma, fourteen and thirteen, but with indeed wrinkled and gray faces that placed them well into the forties, glanced at each other. They had a clear vision of how their popping was supposed to go. Serena wanted it to be epic, either fighting over a lover, walking into a burning building to rescue people, or falling on her face after saving a cat from the top of a tree. To Paloma, well, she preferred to live until old age and pop right before she died. Death must hurt, even as you slipped into it in your sleep, and pain was a powerful catalyst. Just as babies, however, there were no records in the family of old people popping in their sleep.

It would take them a while to crown (or bury) a winner: they were separated shortly after the service. Serena would go to Canada, to live with the chose poorly aunt, her husband and kid. The woman firmly believed a touch of frost was the answer to a belated popping. Chill people got to keep their blood cold and their heads on their necks. (Nonetheless, no scientific evidence supported this claim.) Paloma got the side of the family aunt, who loved her apathy and attributed longevity to three steps: 1) meditation; 2) love; 3) a little help from modern medicine. This aunt lived with her wife in a small house in the city.

“Do you really need to separate us?” Serena asked the aunts, still holding her sister’s hands. Neither was willing to part ways. There were at least three other relatives that could take them in and that hadn’t spoken ill of their father (to their face).

“Two teenagers is a lot. Puberty, hormones, you don’t know how nasty that can get. Well, you will soon enough.” The woman laughed. She was the only one. “Your aunt and I agreed that it would be best for everyone—especially you!—to deal with one at a time, even if Paloma isn’t capable of feeling. Once you get to college, we’ll leave it up to you two.” She sighed. “Three kids… Oh, I have no idea how your mother planned on doing this.”

“She didn’t have to,” said Paloma. “She was with us only for a few seconds. I popped out and she…just popped.”

Silence washed over them.

Pop?

Farewells were terrible, all three Serena and Paloma endured before the first finally boarded a plane to Canada. They hugged and kissed, something Paloma refused to do to anyone else—her aunt discovered with utter embarrassment—while promising to call at least once a week.

“I hate calls,” Paloma said with a crease in her forehead. It was so deep an onlooker might wonder whether she was sad or a fifty-year-old woman who hated sunscreen, despite the small body of a preteen.

“I can’t see you through texts, besta,” Serena replied, squeezing her tighter. “And hey…Don’t listen to them, okay? You have feelings. You feel everything, it’s just in a different way.”

“No, I have innate apathy. Father said this is why mother died and it—”

“Father was an asshole,” said Serena, looking right into her eyes.

Paloma looked back.

He was.

“I’ll call. You better pick up.”

“I will…” Paloma said.

And she did, though the first time it rang for a while before Paloma gathered enough strength to slide the button. They spoke amenities and how each was adapting to their new home (not quite well). Serena missed the sun, did not miss the constant smell of pot and chamomile around the corridors, and had yet to decide whether her new non-poppable friends were worth the trouble of risking her head. Paloma wanted the rain, her sister, and did not care for meditation—you just closed your eyes and froze in place. It was makeshift sleep without slumber, makeshift death without blood and brains.

The months ignored their opinions and kept on coming one after the other. They shared little moments in each call, tricking distance with technology. Soon Serena settled at school, improved her English, and made friends (they were indeed worth it). Fifteen years of youth had been restored by her fifteenth birthday, her face not smooth as those of her peers, but less brittle than an autumn leaf. On her side, Paloma looked like she had somehow transferred that freshness to Serena, head shrunk to a third its size and freckled with age spots. She spoke to no one at school and her flat affect had granted her a colorful range of soubriquets deriving from robot.

“…iron corpse, android, cyborg, hasta la Paloma…”

“Stop, stop! I got it…” Serena pursed her lips on the screen. “No need to repeat all of them.”

“I’m not. I was just reading the list.”

“You wrote them down?”

“Of course,” said Paloma, lifting the notepad so she would see it. It shook a little as the car jolted. She and her aunts were on their way home. “Some of them I had never heard before. How else would I remember them?”

Serena frowned. “You should tell tia.”

“You look upset.”

“Obviously!”

“But you can control yourself. She can’t. It would be annoying if she popped.”

“At least we’d know she cares…”

Their aunt and her wife were busy in the front seats, singing obscure MPB loud enough to ignore whatever Paloma said on her earbuds, which both proved the point and was convenient for secret conversations.

“It’s not her fault. I did some research on her meds and, apparently, they are very strong.”

“What is she taking again?” Serena asked.

“Benzodiazepines, or benzos, which are sedatives that work on your GABA neurotransmitters,” she read from her notepad. “It makes her like us through artificial means. Like me.” Regardless of skill, she and Serena no longer resembled each other. Paloma narrowed her eyes. “Have you been taking these? Or meditating?”

“Have I what?”

Pop!

Paloma would later look back on this moment and wonder if she too was under the influence of something, since she would ebb in and out of focus while it all happened. The car jerked to the sides, then to a stop in the breakdown lane. Her aunts slammed their doors, arguing as they took out the tools to replace a flat tire. Serena screamed in the earbuds (she was still loud, to that very day), for Paloma spared her no attention anymore.

“… ignoring me?” Serena insisted from the screen.

“I’m not ignoring you,” Although Paloma’s gaze was distant. “We lost a tire. I need to help them.” She finished the call.

Earbuds off, phone in her pocket, Paloma didn’t move.

She thought it was her aunt. The noise, the sinking feeling she had before seeing what had just been a person, both swallowed her the past few minutes and wouldn’t let go. Tia heard our conversation, Paloma already devised an entire explanation in her head. This is my fault.

And, in the end, it was nothing. She only bore the blame of entertaining such a wild imagination that she gave herself an anxiety fit.

As Paloma rested her head against the window, there it was again, picturing Serena taking the pills and meditating, to create the answer she never received. Her sister must be doing something different, since she was clearly not gray and wrinkled anymore. Not a robot. She never had been, just became similar to Paloma at some point. Had the pot and the chamomile worked on her? The years of pot-pourri? Or perhaps it was not a matter of what worked on her, but what didn’t on Paloma. Innate apathy.

Father was an asshole.

And she was a robot.

A knock on her window sent her brain spiraling down her throat. Her face, however, remained unmoved.

“See! I told you she was fine,” the woman said to her wife. “We chose right, amor. This whole thing happening, and she didn’t even flinch. She’s so placid!”

The couple engaged in a giddy chat about Paloma as they returned to the car. She was not included.

Placid.

For some reason, she didn’t like that word any better.

Pop!

She grew into it as the months went by. Her hairline had receded from the forehead and from the sides, and given that she was only fourteen, her aunt did make comments about adoption and cheating when she thought Paloma couldn’t hear her. She paid her no mind, as her father had also been close to bald near his death, and they shared that snub nose. (Unless, of course, he was the cheater in question, which would beg several other… questions. At this point it was hard to remember what her mother looked like. Paloma simply pictured abstract concepts such as pretty and red and brains all over the place.)

Due to her solar lentigo and the occasional mole, the other kids now used colorful euphemisms of old to refer to her wrinkles, including flaccid. Each of her attempts to redirect them to placid or the robot rhetoric had failed. It wasn’t flattering in the slightest, but she had grown accustomed to it. Repeating the process with old would be an unnecessary annoyance.

“He called you what?” her aunt asked, completely appalled. At least she hadn’t popped until now, like Paloma predicted.

“Decrepit? Joana do Caixão?” She had to Google that one.

“Before that.”

“Flaccid,” she mumbled, all embarrassment and regret.

Serena was dead wrong. This was not helping. She herself wasn’t helping, considering Paloma had been calling her for the past hour to inform her of their aunt’s non-popping status, to no avail.

“Oh, I thought it was placid. In that case, I would have agreed…” Her aunt pursed her lips. “This is just some silly school bickering… Don’t pay any attention to that kind of thing, Paloma. You’re better than this. Placid, I’d say.” She winked.

“That’s it?”

“Pardon?”

“Serena thought you would have some amazing idea on how to deal with them or just solve this whole situation. Maybe because you’re an adult.”

“You spoke to her today?”

“No. She refuses to pick up.”

“Oh. Maybe she’s busy…”

“She’s not. It’s break time at her school right now. She always picks up.”

“Oh.”

“Oh.” Paloma mimicked her voice. Her aunt frowned. “You keep saying that.”

She laughed. “You notice everything, don’t you? Must be hunger. I always babble when I’m hungry… Why don’t you call your aunt and tell her to wait at the lobby? We should make it to the bank in about ten minutes.”

“We’re having lunch together today? All three of us?” A nod, and Paloma asked, “Is it someone’s birthday? Is that why you picked me up?” Every single one of them was scheduled in her phone, and no alarms had sounded.

“No, no! I just wanted to do something different. Aren’t you sick of eating at the same place with me every day?”

“No.”

“Well, I am, so today we’ll meet with your aunt and have something different.”

It was Paloma’s turn to frown as she dialed her sister again. No response. “Can I stay home?”

“I’ll take you to that Mexican place you like, Paloma. How about that?”

“I want to go home. Please?” She might be luckier with a computer. Or both at the same time. In any case, with two devices, there would be more options.

Her aunt twisted her lips. “Of course. I can take you there first.”

While they changed course to the house, Paloma did try her aunt, who didn’t pick up either. It only further convinced her that she should lay low and wait.

“Oh, looks like she’s here too,” said her aunt after they turned the last corner. The car that once terrorized Paloma with its flat tire was in the driveaway.

Paloma barely waited for her to park, circling the cars and walking toward the front door. The place was dark and silent, which she didn’t even register until her aunt turned on the lights and screamed.

“Who the fuck is this?” Her voice was so loud Paloma had to check if her head was still on the shoulders (victims of beheading retained consciousness for at least ten seconds. You never know).

Two other voices replied in horror, including one she did not recognize. She stopped dead by her room and stared. Her other aunt sat on top of some blond woman, both half-naked, flushed, and looking like they wished to be anywhere else.

“This…this is what you think it is, but…”

(How silly of her, Paloma thought. You needed a head to remain conscious after a beheading. Popping didn’t fit the pattern.)

“How dare you…”

“Don’t do it,” said Paloma, fully back in the room, looming closer. She knew where this was going, and it wasn’t the ten seconds. They had to know it, too. “Stop talking right now.”

“I’m a little sick of going to funerals, and after the kid came…”

“So you’re going to pin this on the kid?”

“Girls, please…” the blond said.

“You shut the fuck up!”

“Don’t touch her!”

“Tias, please,” Paloma tried, transfixed with anxiety. Tension rose like a scorching wave. She didn’t want to jump in the middle of it. Their voices boomed, overlapped, carried insults back and forth, and all she could do was watch. No faces reddened, no veins popped, but what if she ran to grab some of her aunt’s pills and it happened? What if she called the police and that triggered them? What if she screamed to catch their attention and caught their heads instead?

Concern didn’t spare her anything, as that dreadful noise caught her mid-thought. It swallowed the cacophony, plastered crimson on the remaining three, on the furniture. Paloma contemplated her cheating aunt, what was left of her, when the body slid down the sofa and landed on the ground. A half-naked sack of bones. That reignited the rage.

“This is all your fault!” barked the widow, grabbing the other woman, a trespasser in such a private moment, by the shoulder.

“Tia,” this was Paloma.

“I…I didn’t mean to…” The blond quivered on the sofa, covered in blood and brains.

“To what? Fuck my wife? Kill her?”

“Tia, stop. Maybe it’s time for some meditation,” Paloma insisted, recalling the entire list of protocols. Love (2) was off the table and the pills (3, modern medicine) were too far away. She touched her arm and was nearly elbowed in response.

“My wife is dead. Who cares about fucking meditating?”

“Breathe. One, two…”

“She’s dead, Paloma. Dead! I’m not heartless like you. I can’t just stand here and stare while this bitch—”

Tussled hair, lips trembling, erratic movements… There were the human bits and pieces dripping from her, who had been the closest to her wife before the popping. Paloma understood why she was so disturbed, why she would take it out on the “kid.” She also understood it perfectly when this aunt followed her wife’s footsteps and…popped. Part of her wondered if it had been on purpose. The rest of her assured it had not. Emotion would render the smartest person in the world stupid for a second. Well, if they had a heart.

“I am so, so sorry,” said the blond woman. Paloma had almost forgotten she was there, so red she blended with the ambiance.

After straightening her clothes, the stranger tiptoed around the bodies, glanced over one shoulder, and fled the house without another word.

Paloma blinked, something dripping from an eyelash. Time froze and rushed past her as she hoisted her phone from a pocket, dawdling away from her aunts to dial. Red footsteps followed her. Serena didn’t pick up. She tried again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

“Oi.”

She must have circled the living room six times when a soft child voice greeted her on the other side. She held her breath, the folds in her face shrinking further to swallow her eyes. Droplets of blood snaked down her neck, squished from the cheeks like a wrung-out towel.

“Oi,” she said. “Pedro, is that you? Where is Serena?”

Her little cousin ran off, phone in hand, calling his mother.

“Yes?”

“Tia?” Paloma said. Her Canada aunt had replied. “Where is Serena? I’ve been calling all day.”

“Paloma? Is that you?”

“Who else?”

She fell silent for a moment. “Did you talk to your aunt?”

“About what?”

“Can I talk to her?”

“No.” Paloma was getting impatient, both with that pointless dialogue and because the folds were not unfolding. She could barely see anything. “She and her wife popped a few minutes ago.”

More silence.

“Can I talk to my sister? Where is Serena?” Maybe there was truth to her classmates’ words after all. She was feeling like a robot. It didn’t help that her aunt wouldn’t answer.

“I hate to do this over the phone, but… I don’t think there’ll be time for you to come. Not for the funeral.” Her aunt cleared her throat. “Serena went out camping last night. With friends. They were attacked by a bear. She, uh…I’m so sorry, Paloma. She didn’t make it.”

Silence came from her end this time. Paloma heard her aunt breathing, the blood dripping from her own chin, her heart beating in her chest (the physical organ, the only one she had).

“I’m really sorry,” her aunt resumed. “For what happened over there too…Thank God you can’t feel anything. At least your father gave you that. I’ll arrange all the burials and the papers so you can come visit Serena’s grave. Then I guess you can decide whether you want to live here or stay with another—”

Despite Paloma turning off the call, that sound echoed in her ears. Breath (now hers), drops, heart. She put the phone back in her pocket, slimy and unpleasant to the touch, and pried the folds in her face open to find the front door. She leaned her back on the wall outside, breathing slowly in and out. Her pants lit up from time to time, Canada aunt calling, but she ignored it. In and out. Her aunt was right. She had been lucky. And Serena too. The sole member of her family that hadn’t popped (or had she? Unclear). She wouldn’t either. In and out. Folds in, folds out. Each time she wheezed, her head crumpled, flattening like paper. A dead leaf in autumn wind.

She had no heart to miss anyone. No emotions to burden herself with the losses. All there was to do was wait until Canada aunt handled everything. In and out. Unfortunately, waiting was boring. And took so long. And required her spending time in the house with two popped aunts and flashing images of Serena being eaten by bears. Ripped apart by sharp claws. Had she popped during the panic that had surely installed throughout the attack? In and out. Paloma should have asked. Serena might have died after saving a friend, exactly as she wanted. The idea soothed Paloma’s chest, tightened for whatever reason. Yes, this would be it. Good thing she had always had an active imagination. Great lungs too, if all that breathing was any indication. She gulped air as if standing against the entrance was running a marathon. In and out. Mouth gone, eyes non-existing. She thought of her dad, the asshole. He would be so proud of her. Perhaps he was watching over from somewhere.

No one watched when her head detached from the neck, light as a petal, and flew away.

* * *

Anne Liberton is an autistic Brazilian author fascinated by all things weird, from fiction and poetry to people. In her spare time, she sings, studies languages, and plays with her pets. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Diabolical Plots, Strange Horizons, Small Wonders, Heartlines Spec and more. She took part in the 2021 Clarion West Novella Bootcamp workshop and is an editor at Eita! Magazine. You can find her everywhere @anneliberton or at anneliberton.carrd.co.

THE STARS HAVE TEETH

C.R. LANGILLE

Heather killed the engine to the old Tacoma and sat in silence. Only the click of the cooling motor and the rhythmic breathing of her daughter in the passenger seat gave off any noise. Just outside the car, tall pines loomed up into the evening sky, towering fingers of wood and bone that stood sentinel to any who would dare step foot into their domain. Most were wise enough to stay away these days. However, Heather was desperate.

Snow gently fell, kissing the windshield. Some flakes melted, but many stuck. It gave the promise of a chilly night. One Heather didn’t look forward to, but perhaps an end to the hell she and her daughter called life. That was enough to spur her forward.

Heather placed a hand on Gretchen’s forehead. It was hot. Doubts crawled into her mind, whispering worries, and urging her to turn back. Perhaps Gretchen wouldn’t have the energy to make it. Heather willed those intrusive ideas away. If Gretchen couldn’t walk, that was what the sled was for.

“Hey there Gret, we’re here,” Heather said. Her voice cracked, and she almost started crying again. Almost.

Gretchen opened her eyes. Once, they were a brilliant blue, like the ocean. Now they were dull, worn from a year’s worth of pain. Gretchen sat up straight and wiped the drool from the corner of her mouth.

“This is the place?”

“It’s where we start,” Heather said.

Gretchen stared out the window, her breath forming small splotches of fog that would disappear only to come back a moment later. Just as Heather once again reconsidered, Gretchen opened the door and got out of the truck.

“Here we go,” Heather said.

She pulled a small oak figurine out of her pocket. It looked like a raven’s head, but instead of eyes, there were just spiral pits. Heather kissed the figurine and closed her eyes. “Corvid Queen, please protect us.”

After squeezing it so hard the beak nearly broke skin, Heather put it back in her pocket and joined Gretchen outside.

The cold October air cut across Heather’s face and stole her breath. She zipped her coat up, wishing she had brought another layer. But they would have to make do. Besides, she would have probably given the extra layer to Gretchen, anyway.

“How are you doing? Too cold? We don’t have to do this you know. We can come back in the spring or something.”

Gretchen looked away from the skyline and locked eyes with Heather.

“I’m okay, Mom. We have to do this now, or we won’t get another chance. At least I won’t get another chance.”

Tears threatened to break through the levees again, but Heather fought them back. Why did this happen to her little girl? Perhaps if the world hadn’t fallen to hell years ago, a doctor could have done something. But now, when your next meal wasn’t even guaranteed, medical care was a luxury very few had.

“Okay. Let’s get going. Now remember, once we start down the trail, keep moving, don’t stray from the path, and don’t—”

“Don’t listen to the voices. I know, Mom. We’ve been through this a billion times already. You know, I’m not a little kid anymore. I can take care of myself.”

Heather nodded. It was tough. Even though Gertrude was nearly 20, she would always be her baby girl. Years of keeping her safe from those things and the people… oh by the Corvid Queen, sometimes the people were worse than the others, but years of protecting her, caring for her, and now keeping her as healthy as possible, it was hard to let go. But Gertrude was right. She could take care of herself. Mostly.

“I know. I just… never mind. Let’s go.”

As they approached the trailhead, marked by a wooden post covered with keychains, pictures of loved ones, scarves, and other mementos, Heather removed a worn silver ring from her finger. It was simple, with only a tiny turquoise stone attached to it.

“That’s Grandma’s ring.”

Heather smiled at Gretchen. “Yes, it was.”

She placed the ring on a bent iron nail someone had haphazardly driven into the post. It was their tribute to proceed into the woods. Heather hoped it was enough. The old lady had told her the offering had to be special. Something precious.

They stepped past the post and into the trees, and a pair of ravens took flight, cawing as they left.

Heather hoped it was a good omen.

With the overcast skies and the falling snow, there wasn’t much light. Heather had brought their only working flashlight, but batteries being as scarce as they were, she had no idea how long it would last. The clouds above spun lazy circles, spirals. Was a tornado forming? She couldn’t remember when the last tornado occurred. They rarely happened in October. After making a mental note to keep an eye on it, she pressed forward.

The trail was difficult to follow. A long time ago, someone had carved blazes into the trees to help mark the path. But these woods were tricky. Sometimes, the trees didn’t stay put.

After what could have been hours, Heather stopped to get her bearings. They should be nearing their destination. That was, of course, assuming they went the right direction and that the information she bought from the old woman back in town was correct as well.

Lady May was known to lead some astray sometimes just for fun. Yet Heather had made an accord, sealed with blood and paid for with bone, so a deal was a deal.

“Mom!”

It was Gretchen. Though from further away than she should have been. Heather spun around and found her daughter was nowhere to be seen.

Her heart rate increased as her blood ran cold. How could she be so stupid to let her get out of her sight?

“Gret! Where are you? Mama’s here!”

Only silence responded. Not even the forest made a noise, as if it held its breath in anticipation.

“Gret!?”

“Mom? Help me!”

This time, her voice came from further away in a thick patch of trees. Heather turned her flashlight on, shining the beam towards the thick grouping of birch. She was about to run over to find Gretchen but stopped at the tree line.

The hairs on the back of Heather’s neck danced a nervous waltz. Beyond those trees was unknown. Don’t stray from the path… one of the rules. But Heather wasn’t about to let Gretchen fall to any danger in these woods.

Just as she was about to step off the path, someone grabbed her shoulder from behind.

Heather screamed and whirled around. She nearly hit her assailant with her flashlight, but tripped on a root and fell backward.

Standing in front of her was Gretchen, wide-eyed, with her hands up, showing she meant no harm.

“Sorry,” Gretchen said with a sheepish grin.

Heather scrambled to her feet and backed away from her daughter. She shined the light at her, then the trees.

“Gret, I… I could have sworn… where were you!?”

Gretchen was about to answer when her voice came from the woods again.

“Mom?”

The smile disappeared from her daughter’s face. She took a tentative step back from the trees.

“That’s not me,” Gretchen whispered.

Heather rushed over to her, wrapping her up in a big hug. “I know. Come on, don’t listen to it.”

The other Gretchen continued to call out a few more times before finally falling silent. The pair didn’t say anything for some time after that, afraid it might attract whatever was out there.

* * *

“Mom, I need to rest. Just for a minute.”

Heather turned to find Gretchen sweating, face red, and eyes dull. Her daughter took another step but stumbled forward. She would have fallen face first into the snow-covered dirt and rocks if Heather hadn’t jumped forward to catch her.

“Whoa, okay. Yeah, let’s take a breather then.”

Heather led Gretchen over to a fallen tree and sat her down. She placed a hand on her daughter’s forehead. It was even hotter than before.

“Hold out your hands,” Heather said.

Gretchen did so. They were steady.

“Let me see your eyes. Try and keep them open for me.”

Heather flashed the light onto Gretchen’s face. At first, Gretchen squinted, but then fought through it to open her eyes fully. The pupils were dilating. Not quite all the way, but enough to show it had begun.

Heather sucked in her breath and turned away. If it came down to it, Heather didn’t think she had the courage to do what needed to be done.

“Mom?”

Wiping fresh tears away, Heather pulled Gretchen into a hug. “It’s going to be okay. We’re almost there, we have to be. Lady May said if we started at night, we’d be there before morning. And look. Just look,” Heather said, pulling her coat sleeve up to expose her wristwatch. It was almost six in the morning.

“I don’t think I can.”

“Of course you can! I know you can. Just come on. Not much further.”

Gretchen took a few steps before she leaned against a tree and shook her head.

“I can’t. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”

“Then I’ll pull you,” Heather said, and pointed to the sled. She hoped and prayed to any god listening that the trail would be clear enough to use the sled with Gretchen’s weight, even though she was lighter now than even a couple of weeks ago. If not, she’d carry her.

The sled itself was old, but sturdy. Heather’s father had used it when he ran trap lines out in the woods before everything went south and they were no longer safe. She still remembered when he put it away in the shed while nursing a bleeding arm, mumbling about the voices and the teeth. He never slept well after that night. It wasn’t too long after he went to get something from the shed and never came back.

Gretchen got in and sat down. Her face was pale, almost as white as the snow that fell around them.

“Mom?”

“What is it, Hon?”

“What’s going to happen when I die? Am I going to become one of them?”

Heather buried Gretchen’s face into her coat when she pulled her in for a big hug. Partly to comfort her daughter, and partly because if she saw Gretchen’s face, she’d break down again.

“You’re not going to die. Not tonight.”

Gretchen started crying then, hugging Heather tight. Her daughter’s body trembled in her arms. So frail. Not the happy kid from years past, but now weak, sick, and…

No.

They would make it.

“Come on.”

Heather got up and dragged the sled behind her. It wasn’t as hard as she thought it would be, which was bittersweet. Happy to be able to pull her daughter faster, but sad that she was so light.

The trail cooperated with her and the sled for the most part. There were times Gretchen had to get out so they could get over a fallen tree, or around large rocks, but overall, smooth sailing.

“Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“I know we’re not supposed to listen to the voices, but what do we do if we can see them?”

Heather stopped and turned to look at Gretchen. She sat, wide-eyed, on the sled looking at the trees. Heather flicked the flashlight on and tried to spy what Gretchen was looking at, but it was just forest.

“What do you see?” Heather whispered.

“You.”

She couldn’t see what Gretchen was talking about. It was just trees and-

-wait-

-something moved.

Heather shifted the flashlight’s beam and tried to get a different angle. There was a shape amongst the branches. Somewhat human, but…off somehow. For what felt like minutes, minutes that were too long, minutes that ballooned into eternity, Heather stared.

Then it moved, a pair of eyes catching the flashlight and reflecting back at her.

Heather screamed, dropping her flashlight as she grabbed onto the rope tighter. She pulled with all her strength, rushing down the trail to get away from whatever it was.

The voices came from all around her. Yelling, screaming, laughing, crying, moaning…

Voices she recognized. Her mother, crying for help, saying she’d fallen down and broke her hip. Her father, saying he was just going to get something from the shed followed by the gunshot that still echoes in her dreams. Her elementary school teacher slamming his fist onto her desk to tell her to keep quiet. Gretchen laughing as Heather chased her around the kitchen and living room when she was only five.

Nothing she did quelled the cacophony of noise invading her head. In the distance, Gretchen cried, or maybe screamed. She couldn’t tell. Nor could she discern if it was really Gretchen or whatever was in the woods with them. Part of her wanted to turn and look, make sure that her daughter was still in the sled. Another part of her feared what she would see.

The clouds broke above her, exposing the moon. Its pallid light fell upon the forest, and the illumination revealed an unkindness of ravens circling above her in a spiral. They spun a few times, before breaking away and veering down towards the tops of the trees to the right.

It was a sign. The Corvid Queen had sent it.

To the right was nothing but trees. Don’t stray from the path. That was one of the rules, and probably one of the most important ones. However, she couldn’t ignore a sign like that.

Fighting through the screams, Heather stopped and turned toward Gretchen. What she saw made her heart drop into her stomach.

Gretchen was unconscious, her arms dragging along the dirt and snow. Blood poured from her nostrils and ears, caking in her hair.

“Gret!”

Heather dropped to her knees.

“I screamed for help, but you ignored me.”

It was Gretchen’s voice, right behind her. Heather tried to ignore it and scooped her daughter into her arms. Her legs and lungs were already burning with the exertion of sprinting through the forest dragging a sled, but she couldn’t stop. Not now.

“Just a little further.”

Whether she was talking to herself or Gretchen, it didn’t matter. Peeling away from the trail, Heather ducked into the trees.

Immediately the woods fell silent. Branches scratched her as she barreled through the trees. It wouldn’t have been an issue if she could take her time, but a cold feeling crept into her stomach that told her if she didn’t hurry, sign or not, the woods would take her and her daughter and that would be that.

“Just keep breathing, baby girl. We’re almost there.”

It was a lie. Just like every time she had to tell Gretchen that it would be okay, that she would be fine, that everything would be fine. Things had not been fine for a long time. Not since they tore through the fabric of reality and spilled into the world like a flood.

Things had not been fine since the crops wilted and died. Things had not been fine since it was no longer safe to be out in the woods at night. They weren’t fine and they would never be fine again.

“Just keep breathing.”

It was a mantra now. Not only for Gretchen, but for herself. The coppery taste of blood tinged her taste buds as each breath became harder and harsher than the last. Spots and tiny bursts of light danced in her eyes. Each step was harder than the last.

Finally, she burst into a meadow.

A scene from a fairy tale splayed out before her as a babbling brook cut through the middle. Just past the brook was a circle of stones, each bigger than her Tacoma and worn from eons of weather.

Lichen and spiral petroglyphs covered the rocks. There were other shapes as well, shapes that hurt her eyes if she stared too long. Heather limped over to the stones and stood just outside of the circle. Being this close, she found they weren’t a circle at all but arranged in the same spiral pattern she had seen all throughout the forest.

More signs. Whether they were good, bad, or something between, she didn’t know.

At the very center was a stone altar with dark-colored mushrooms fruiting all around it even though it was so cold.

“We’re here, Gret. We made it.”

Her daughter’s breathing was labored. A long, wet wheeze accompanied each exhale.

“Hang in there.”

After readjusting Gretchen’s weight, Heather took a step into the stone spiral. As she did, the brook stopped flowing. It’s sound cutting off as if someone flipped a switch. The snow stopped falling, freezing in place mid-air all around them.

Finally getting to the center, Heather laid Gretchen down on the altar as gently as possible. She brushed some stray hair away from her face before kissing her on the forehead.

“Okay. We’re here.”

Not sure what to do now, Heather stood. Lady May never mentioned this part, and Heather hadn’t thought to ask. Was she supposed to say something? Offer something?

“Look. I don’t know who or what, or if anything is listening. But if you are, please… please help my Gretchen get better. Bring her back to me. She is all I have left.”

Gretchen’s eyes fluttered open. “Mom?”

A surge of adrenaline flushed through her body, making her tingle. Was it happening? Heather kneeled to be at eye-level with her daughter.

“I can see them.”

“See what, baby girl?”

“The stars. They are beautiful.”

Heather looked up to find the stars swirling in a vortex. They were beautiful.

When Heather looked back to Gretchen, she found the light had faded from her daughter’s eyes. She had a smile on her face as a single tear rolled its way down her cheek and onto the stone altar.

The rattle in Gretchen’s chest slowed and then stopped.

“Gret?”

Heather stood, checking Gretchen for a pulse. Nothing.

“Gret! No, no, no…come on baby girl. You can’t die. You can’t!”

No. They’d come all this way. Braved the drive, the hike, the woods. Did everything the Lady May told them to do. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

It wasn’t going to be like this.

Heather started chest compressions.

“Come on! You come back to me. You hear me! Gretchen Theresa Chambers, you come back to me right now!”

Press. Press. Press. Press.

Crack.

Gretchen’s rib cracked.

Heather stopped, hands shaking as her mind raced over what just happened. Over what she just did to her child.

“Oh my god! I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”

Keep going. That’s what they told her during training. Keep going.

But… what about…? There wasn’t time. Every second counted and she was losing them.

Press. Press. Press. Press.

Gretchen stared up at the stars, lifelessly. Heather wailed, her anguish washing across the forest and filling the woods with her anger and frustration.

“No… come back. You come back…”

The brook started flowing again. The snow began to fall in earnest, coating both Gretchen’s corpse and Heather as she continued to will life back into her daughter.

Heather collapsed in a heap.

Sometime later, Heather woke lying next to the stone altar, but Gretchen’s body was gone.

Heather knew deep down in her marrow that Gretchen was gone-gone. Taken by the forest or whatever it was that this altar was for.

It had all been a lie.

After another couple of hours, Heather left.

She made the trek back to the truck in silence. There were no voices. At this point, she would have followed Gretchen’s voice if she heard it. Only the occasional lazy caw from a raven, or irritated scream of a squirrel filled the woods.

The truck fired right up, and she navigated home in a daze. As she got closer to civilization, the occasional pop-pop-pop of gunfire echoed in the distance. Plumes of black smoke rose into the sky like damned pillars. Eventually, she found herself back at the cabin.

Heather went through the same ritual. Lock the doors. Shut the windows. Put up the blackout curtains.

Then she found herself sitting at the kitchen table. Alone.

A handgun—her father’s handgun, sat on the table in front of her.

Just going to get something from the shed.

What was left for her? Nothing.

Heather stared at the gun for a long time before she picked it up. It felt heavy in her hands.

Just one squeeze of the trigger and that’s it. No more pain.

“Momma will be there soon, Gret.”

Heather pointed the barrel at her temple. There were no more tears, as she was fresh out. Only focus filled her mind.

Just as she was about to pull the trigger, the back door opened. Heather recognized the shuffle of feet, as Gretchen’s gait was forever ingrained in her mind.

“Mom?”

Heather put the gun back down, surprised that she still had some tears left.

“Yeah, baby girl?”

Heather didn’t turn and look. She wasn’t ready. Not yet.

“I saw the stars, and they have teeth. Let me show you.”

A shiver ran down Heather’s spine as Gretchen’s icy hands touched her shoulders. Then they wrapped around her throat.

Gretchen told the truth. The stars have teeth. So many teeth.

* * *

C.R. Langille spent many a Saturday afternoon watching monster movies with her mom. It wasn't long before she started crafting nightmares to share with her readers. She is a retired, disabled veteran with a deep love for weird and creepy tales. This prompted her to form Timber Ghost Press in January of 2021. She is an award-winning author, affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association, the DEI Chair for the League of Utah Writers, earned her MFA: Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in 2014, and was named Editor of the Year by the League of Utah Writers in 2024.

DEVIL IS FINE

MICHAEL BETTENDORF

I ain’t a good man, but that don’t mean I like doing bad things. Not everyone is afforded the choice. Not truly, anyhow, but I’ve accepted that one day I’ll be judged for what I’ve done. What I do. My lot in life didn’t leave me with a good family or much in ways of inheritance, but I was gifted with a decent mind and an eye for opportunity.

It’s how I’ve found myself huddled on the ground near some boy named Mitchell who’s convinced he’s a man just because he don’t live at home no more. But the boy’s so embarrassed by his lack of whiskers, he covers his face with a bandana all the time, like he’s playing bandit. Well if anyone is going to be suspected a bandit, I suppose it’s better Mitchell than me.

“It’s colder out here than I thought,” Mitchell says, poking the fire.

“The plains tend to trick you. Hardly any cover out in these parts. Makes any breeze feel ten times colder.”

Mitchell rubs his arms, hugging himself.

“It true you took that stagecoach yourself?” the boy asks. “That how you get that beautiful horse of yours?”

“Don’t know what you mean.”

“No need to be coy,” he says. “I heard you took a guarded stagecoach and everything in it all by yourself. Not a single breath of air left in anyone’s lungs. That true, mister Grant?”

“Just Grant,” I say. “And I ain’t interested in tall tales.”

“That’s not all I heard. I heard you make short work of tall tales. That you’re a hell of a gunslinger. Ruthless. No goddamn heart in ya.”

“Watch your mouth, son,” I say.

“Didn’t put you for a religious man, mister Grant, given the killin’ n all.”

“Just Grant,” I say. “And I ain’t. I’m just tired of hearing you talk.”

It’s all half-truth, of course. My opinions of my father and his god couldn’t touch the clouds, but he instilled into me not saying the Lord’s name in vain. Always felt like I was welcoming a curse by doing so. And all them stories are just stories of a man getting by. Ain’t nothing to be proud of.

Some men are born lucky—ain’t concerned much about getting by. It’s one of them things you can hear in the way a man speaks. My employer, David McNally, for instance. Boy how I hate this man’s voice. How I hate taking commands from this man’s voice, all stiff and lifeless like one of them wind-up clocks.

The man’s pockets are so deep you could pump water from his boots. Though it may be truer to say you’d strike oil, seeing as he inherited so much of it. It’s why he thinks I’m here. To protect him and his wagon full of oil money from folks the likes of me.

McNally steps from his wagon, grinding my thoughts of robbery into dust. “All right fellas. It’s getting late,” he says. “One of you rest. The other take watch. Then switch when you’re tired. We’ve got a long day tomorrow, and I don’t want no problems.”

Mitchell is eager to take the first watch, which is fine by me. The boy waits till McNally returns to his wagon before he opens his mouth, nothing but bad breath and worse proclamations pouring from it.

“I know what you’re here for,” he says. His eyes shrink when I don’t respond.

“Don’t you try nothing,” I say.

“It’s too late for that, mister Grant,” he says. “And it don’t matter anyhow.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I mean that it don’t matter, mister Grant. That case is empty as these skies.”

“Emptier than that head of yours, more like,” I say. “And it’s Grant. No mister.”

I rub my chin in contemplation, figuring the boy could be telling lies to take the haul for himself while I’m asleep. Maybe he just looked in the wrong case. “What do you mean empty? No bank notes? No clothes—”

“No nothing, mister Grant,” he says. “Well, nothing anymore. I peeked in there our first night out, figuring we was still so close to town, I could make a break in the night and catch a train out east. Thought I saw a lone bar of gold in there, but it was nothing but an old harmonica.”

“Well it ought to be worth something to someone.”

“Don’t see how. It don’t make no noise. I blew a note that first night. Made no more noise than a man sleeping in peace. The next night I peeked in the case, just to make sure, and there was nothing. I think McNally caught wind though. Been giving me weird looks ever since. I’m waiting for the right time to make a break for it.”

“Oil your gun and count the stars,” I say. “I’m tired of listening to your bad ideas.”

* * *

I wake and stretch and pat my horse, Sadie. Given the way the stars seem to ripple across the glassy sky and the way my gut rumbles, I’d say it’s nearing three in the morning. I walk a quick oblong pass around the wagon, ensuring he didn’t do nothing stupid while I was asleep.

I walk to where he’s sitting—snoring—disappointed by his lack of responsibility, but glad to see he hasn’t run off nonetheless. I nudge his boots once, then kick him when he doesn’t stir. I get in close and tug the bandana from his face.

I knuckle the sleep from my eyes, unsure if what I’m seeing is real. The thought hits me I may still be asleep, as I’ve been known to control my dreams from time to time, but this ain’t like that. Black drips from the boy’s nose and mouth. His jaw’s set at an unusual angle, almost like it’s two sizes too small, appearing like the mouth of a cave. And there’s this unusual glow about the hole, which ignites the boy’s fury and sends him into a rage I ain’t ever seen in a man’s character before. Not even my father’s righteous wrath.

Mitchell covers his face, pulling the bandana tight. I can’t help but notice how clean it is, unsoiled by the substance oozing from his flesh. How curious of a wound that is, and I consider it’s not a wound at all.

“I’m just sick, okay? Don’t mean nothing else.”

I hold up my hands to show I don’t mean no harm, but he starts swearing at me and God himself in a language I can’t place.

“Keep your voice down, boy,” I tell him, but it don’t matter. McNally stumbles from his wagon, pistol drawn. The boy’s gaze shifts from me to McNally.

“Mitchell, don’t!” I shout and my hand is at my hip, gun drawn. The boy turns to me and shoots. My vision turns strange. An intense pain throttles my head. I fall to the ground. Sadie, though she’s a good and loyal horse, is not the bravest, and I watch her grow restless.

Then the boy shoots our employer and his horse. I crawl over to McNally on my hands and knees, watching as Mitchell mounts Sadie, and rides away into the empty night.

I’m stubborn, but I can accept when things have gone to shit. McNally lies dead beside me. His wounds appear like two crimson eyes on his chest, and maybe it’s my vision playing tricks on me, but I swear they open and close as if trying to blink away tears of blood. When I muster the strength to do so, I stand and touch my face. I feel around shredded skin and broken bone and blood already turning sticky, and find myself in an intense confusion. A chaotic double vision. One where I see midnight blue stretched across the horizon until infinity—and one staring at my boots, covered in bloody muck.

The shot has removed my eye from its bony home, the socket shattered by gunpowder and lead where it hangs, unraveled, still somehow granting me one of life’s great senses.

I bend over and heave, carrying on like this for what I feel is an appropriate amount of time, the stinging pain subsiding due to shock, stress, or perhaps the universe’s gift to me. I cook my knife in our fire’s dwindling coals until the steel glows, and do what needs to be done to my right eye. My best eye. My hazel eye, the other being blue. My shooting eye.

I’m not sure why I do it, but I place my severed eye into McNally’s open mouth. Then I walk away, same direction as the boy.

* * *

Moonlight bathes the prairie in a pale glow, creating a ghost-like landscape that is nearly treeless and seems to call out to the sky’s enormity, almost maddeningly so.

Thoughts poke at me while I walk across the plains. Did the boy’s sickness cause him to crave violence? Did I cause this by revealing his face n all? Was McNally sick too? And will I succumb to the strange illness, just the same? Maybe I already have, for what’s more contagious than the desire for retribution—for violence? I consider I’ve been sick for a long, long time. An illness passed down to me by a cruel, violent father who serves a cruel, violent god.

“Go ahead,” I call out. “Strike me dead for all I care, goddammit...you’ve taken everything else.”

There is no lightning, no thunder. The earth does not crack open to swallow me whole. But I do hear the faint sound of music in the distance.

I hobble toward the noise. A few dozen yards out, a figure sits atop a trunk the color of wine in the middle of the road, playing the harmonica. The notes are somber and drawn out and seem to convey a particular kind of sadness.

“Mister,” I call out, trudging through the water towards him, drawn to the tune. “Hey, mister.” As I get closer, I see he has no clothes on and he is built like a skeleton, with skin pulled so tight and paper thin across his bones you can see all his veins and all the blood coursing through them. A roadmap of black underneath pale flesh.

“Mister,” I say, but he keeps on playing. “Have you caught the sickness, mister?”

He pauses and smiles. I wish I could say it were an empty one, but it ain’t. His smile bears the stars and seems to contain the vastness of the universe.

“No. I am the sickness, but I am also the cure.”

The figure grips my head in bone-white hands, brittle and smooth as driftwood, and kisses my eye, his tongue dancing inside my broken socket. Could be weak nerves, but I can’t move. His tongue is rough against my tender cauterized flesh. There is a cool numbness as he pulls away from our embrace. He licks his lips and begins to play a tune, and my world turns unholy black.

* * *

There’s a moment where I believe the pale man is holding me in his arms, for I feel weightless as if the earth no longer cares to pull me close, but there’s no way he could hold me so. Something in my mind whispers believe. His hand, cold to the touch and heavier than it ought to be, rests on my shoulder. The way I imagined my father always doing, but never did with such kindness or grace. And as if he can read my thoughts, the pale man says, “He never loved you, Grant, but I do. I’m giving you all of this,” and he stretches his arm wide with an open palm as if he’s serving me the world. “No price, but your love in return.”

I gaze at these ethereal plains, seeing the DNA of all that makes up this world overwhelming my senses, tears in my eyes at the beauty—the truth of nature. After a while, the pale man speaks. “So what do you say, son?”

Were I not so broken, I may have questioned this stranger’s intentions, but instead, I lean into his embrace, his flesh soft as a snake’s belly. His sunken eyes tell me he’s proud of me. The pale man snaps his fingers and dissipates to gun smoke, turning the air around me oily and unsavory.

* * *

When I open my eyes, it’s as if I’m looking at two different worlds simultaneously: the one as we perceive it, beautiful in its own right, but awfully fallacious in its presentation; and the one as it truly is, neither gorgeous nor hideous, but composed of the dust motes of veracity.

I stare at my hands, one eye seeing dirty flesh, the other—the geometry within by skin and gristle and all the molecules of man that I am made from. Bursts of light in the shape of a doe run in the distance. Ribbons of life and death spiral through the air. I’m inclined to gaze at heavens to see if my father was right, but there all I see is swirls of particles. I set my eyes forward, toward this intuition in my mind I cannot ignore, nudging me toward the boy, and my horse.

I walk for days without tiring, guided by the voice in my mind. Storm clouds form before my eyes days before the rains fall. Winds shift. Buffaloes migrate across this frontier, though they don’t know it, they’re among the last of their kind, and this saddens me. These are among the truths I see, and yet, I know I’m not the only one looking through these eyes no more. Nor my thoughts, my own. But the promise of recovering my sweet Sadie pushes me onward, fighting through bloody blisters and my aching heart.

Whether it is the result or the cause of my new vision, I cannot be certain, but it leads me to a place where my mind finds no respite, only gloomy death. Only truth. For I am confronted with a scene not even my eyes have witnessed in all my gunslinging days.

A camp, painted red. A man flayed and dumped, crackling in a weak fire. A child of no more than eight years, huddled in the slumped, dead arms of her mother, whose decapitated head stares at her from below through milky eyes.

I vomit into grass.

Though the child lives, I only see death when I look at her. It’s in her heart and it’s in her mind and it’s in her thoughts. The once innocent story of her life has been rewritten by someone else’s hand—the boy’s. She wants to be left alone. I see that, and oblige, following the trail I know will lead me to Mitchell.

No more than half a mile northeast, I catch sight of the boy kneeling in the middle of a river. I could shoot him dead here and now, without so much as a blink, but the voice in my mind tells me otherwise.

I carry on, stepping into the shallows of the river which carries blood downstream. A pink froth laps at my boots. The boys still crouched on a sandbar a few yards upstream, tending to what appears to be a snakebit horse. And no matter how much I want to lie to myself, I simply cannot, for I know the truth which lies before me.

My sweet Sadie, a Dutch warmblood the color of buckskin, lies bleeding into the river. Tendrils of shallow breath emanate from her nostrils, a weak whinnying sings somber in the air.

“Boy!” I yell.

He turns, hand and face covered in Sadie’s blood. Meat stuck between his rotten, jagged teeth. I ain’t ever drawn my gun so fast, but despite the voice in my head telling me to pull the trigger, I hesitate, waiting for the boy to speak.

“I didn’t want to,” he says. The words form in the air, written in the breeze. “I’m sick, and now so is you. You don’t have to do this. You’re a good man. He fooled us both, mister Grant.”

The boy’s tongue is twisted. The words pouring forth simultaneously from two different worlds. They collide with one another in the air, truth and deceit battling for ownership.

I’m not a good man, but that don’t mean I like doing bad things, but seeing Sadie suffer puts a fury into me I’ve only ever seen once in my life, and I fire my pistol—watching the cylinder spin in slow motion—as I empty it into the boy. He writhes amidst the oily black seeping from his body and I am not convinced he will ever die, though I know he can feel pain.

“Just Grant,” I say. “No mister.”

Moved by burning thoughts, I stumble to Sadie, falling to my knees at her side. I stroke her neck and tell her I’m sorry, convinced she was judged for what I’d done. “You were my only friend,” I say. Weep for her, son.

Black tears pour from my eye and seep into her wounds, an unholy tincture which brings life back into her pale eyes. She snorts, spraying blood across my hands, but stutters to a stand nonetheless. Dark, ropey sinew knits her muscle together. Soon, comes the flesh. And a pale patch of hide dots her buckskin-colored coat.

I mount, and ride across the plains, guided by the voice in my head to deliver retribution, an obedient son.

* * *

Michael Bettendorf (he/him) is a writer from the Midwest. His short fiction has appeared/forthcoming at Sley House Press, the Drabblecast, and elsewhere. His debut experimental horror novel/gamebook "Trve Cvlt" was released by Tenebrous Press (Sept. 2024). Michael works in a high school library in Lincoln, NE - a place he believes is too strange to be a flyover state. Find him on Bluesky @BeardedBetts and www.michaelbettendorfwrites.com.

DISPOSAL OF A LEG

SCOTT MCNEE

We were in the loading bay fitting a crate of sifaka lemur cadavers into one of the truck trailers when Team Leader’s order came through on the walkie.

There is a leg in the freezer. Dispose of it before nightshift.

Team Leader communicated almost exclusively through walkie. On the rare occasions we saw her, she would stand on the grate flooring above us in storage, still talking through the walkie and twisting the heels of her work boots to emphasise her words.

In the freezer, the leg emerged from the far wall, stretching out and over the crates of milk bottles, yoghurt pots and vacuum-packed horse meat. It was segmented, multiple joints crooking and straightening as we watched, letting out a gentle sound akin to twigs snapping underfoot. It ended on a sort of rudimentary wrist (or ankle, we never quite agreed) from which a small nub of a toeless foot the size of a human head rotated aimlessly, as if in search of the floor it had not quite reached.

“It’s like a spider’s leg,” said Hilliker, the new hire.

I thought this was useless speculation—to narrow in on the similarities to a spider’s leg, you would have to ignore the similarities to a devil’s coach horse beetle, to mannequins, to people.

Among ourselves, we debated the best way to proceed, not wishing to ask guidance from Team Leader, who had previously been unreceptive to such familiarities. Our discussions were frequently interrupted by the intrusions of those tasked with stocking the freezer, who wheeled in more product without interest in the leg that had shattered their workspace. Every so often I would become aware of one of the janitors peering into the freezer as well, his leering wooden mask presenting a significant risk to morale. Each time I chased him off he would flee a shorter distance.

Hilliker was the first to examine the leg and inadvertently demonstrated that, even through gloves, with the lightest touch, the chitinous hairs penetrated flesh and bone. We were all immensely grateful to her.

Fenwick the key holder drew his box-cutter across the carapace, which created a rattling sound like a leaf-blower failing its ignition sequence. The blade was useless thereafter, coated with a thick brown resin that could not be removed.

It was my idea to chip at the tiles from which the leg protruded. This initially showed progress, the cracked tile swiftly dropping at the repeated careful tapping of a hammer, though each volunteer was forced to ascend the ladder with head bowed, as even hardhats proved useless against the hairs drooping down and wavering as if in a soft breeze. After several precarious hours, we discovered that the leg was coming from beyond the tiles, the brickwork beneath and possibly from the exterior of the warehouse itself.

Fenwick was so disturbed by this that he misspoke, suggesting that a volunteer should leave the building and determine the leg’s source. “There,” he said, “it might connect to a body.”

He eventually registered our expressions and realised the terrible weight of his unprecedented suggestion. I radioed Team Leader and had him removed. She added a condition, likely as startled by Fenwick’s outburst as us: No one in your team is to approach the loading bay. Being the warehouse’s only exit, she must have feared the idea might catch hold and lead some astray.

I risked a question to Team Leader; was there a possibility that the leg connected to a torso of some kind?

She replied. The relationship between the leg and the body is irrelevant. We are concerned with the relationship between the leg and the freezer, which is not a body according to our extensive documentation. Dispose of it before nightshift.

I discerned from this that the leg was growing from the freezer itself, which was neither helpful nor comforting.

Our dilemma continued. The freezer, once vacated by its roll containers and their held products, was spacious enough to admit a forklift, but on contact with the leg the forklift proved as useful as the boxcutter. The aftermath was even more detrimental, as the leg’s resin rendered the vehicle stuck so completely to the floor that to remove it would require an industrial crane and the absence of the warehouse’s ceiling.

Hilliker began to sprout hairs like that of the leg, first from the maimed section of her arm but eventually all over. When they began to sprout from her face, and eye-sockets in particular, her speech became nothing more than an irritable whimper. She sat in the opposite corner of the freezer from the leg and did little work. After a while, we observed that the hairs had tangled and hardened over her shrivelled form, and she did even less work after that.

The impending deadline of the nightshift worried me. I took to wandering the warehouse’s more desolate corners, clambering between pallet racks, over the scree, shaligrams, and shopping trolleys in search of some forgotten tool that might have been designed with the purpose of the leg’s disposal. In aisle 160-Q, sheltering from a bitter northerly-southerly, I encountered a produce manager who suggested dismantling the leg by levering equipment into the joints and prying it apart like a lobster. This was attempted and the debris from our shattered tools rendered several of us unfit for hours more. At some point during this farce, the janitors arrived to inform us that Hilliker had been made redundant—they carried her off on their shoulders, and we did our best not to look.

Fenwick returned, freshly chastised. He became more reliable as a worker, though on breaks he withdrew from the group, embarrassed by the alterations to his diet and digestive tract. I have often tried to parse the logic behind the chastisements doled out by our employers, but I have been unable to figure out the correlation between the transgression and its associated punishment. For instance, I recall that when Null fell asleep on shift, she returned from her employee review with cropped ears like a Dobermann, which has yet to have any impact on her narcolepsy as far as I am informed. Despite Fenwick’s return, our order to stay far from the loading bay was not rescinded—our replacements in those duties continued to glare at us with a great deal of malice whenever they passed the freezer.

In any case, his presence allowed me to delegate duties. The leg’s implacability was unlikely to serve as a satisfactory explanation to our employers or even Team Leader. It seemed to me that the issue had galvanised a change in our work—in my moments of pause, I began to perceive a sickly yellow light from beyond the loading bay, where workers with pockmarked faces like sun-bleached driftwood leapt from trailer to trailer and called to one another in burbling, drowned voices. I sat down on a pile of discarded, upturned pots and tried to organise my life back to its former coherence.

A change in duties should be an inconvenience at worst. Never before had I felt myself confronted with an impossible task—I would have thought that reflected my competence or the trust placed in me. I wanted to believe that this was change—that all of my tasks before served a singular purpose, chiefly because money alone is not compensation enough for abstraction.

Such interiority cost me much of the time I had left. To seriously consider your work is like remembering the tongue in your mouth and becoming aware of its wriggling grotesqueness. Marriages work in much the same way.

I went to storage, where I felt my way through the aisles, following Team Leader’s shambling progress from below until I stood beneath her. The fluorescent lights that haloed her crackled with an unsettling intensity, as if the glass was moments from shattering.

“I don’t understand,” I said, calling up. “We don’t have the equipment for the task at hand. The leg won’t move.” Were I braver and capable of facing life beyond the loading bays, I might have threatened to quit.

She ground her heels into the grating, flaking rust down into my beard and dress suit. I heard her make a singular communication through her walkie, which did not come through on my channel. She was answered by a distinct scraping sound that seemed to satisfy her. After a while, I realised that she had quite forgotten me, so I returned to my group.

Fenwick stood by the cocooned forklift, gazing up at the leg. He gestured at the empty space once occupied by crates and trolleys. “This room exists to contain a leg now. If it were growing outwards rather than inwards, we would have no issue.”

I might have thanked him for this were I not unnerved by his now external digestion process. I gave my orders, and we began our new work in earnest.

The janitors gathered to watch us, huddled together in their cloaks and chattering excitement from behind their wooden masks. They were, we knew, hoping for a straggler to befall an accident. It would have been convenient for Hilliker’s redundancy to come later in the day. We continued our heavy lifting and openly fantasised that the janitors would slip into the leg’s bristles. Hatred is the most effective form of camaraderie.

We took everything—tiles, A/C units, petroleum generators—to a desolate corner of the warehouse, taking the debris found there and stuffing them in the gaps in the walls created by tearing out the industrial air conditioners. In the new space we arranged things in our best imitation of the original freezer, though, lacking certain materials, the tiles were simply distributed across the floor and the generators openly fastened to the A/C units in a frankly less aesthetic manner.

You all move too quickly, Team Leader radioed to me. The movement risks nausea and completion far ahead of nightshift. Work with persistent clarity of purpose.

I was put at ease. That her main complaint was speed of execution reassured me that my decision was the correct one. Perhaps the whole scenario had been an assessment. I called for the roll cages, which were returned by our coworkers from the loading bay with their now expected hostility. Though open to the warehouse’s elements, the products within the cages quickly approached the expected temperature—I wiped away a layer of frost and displayed my dampened glove to my exhausted group, but they did not smile.

I radioed news of our success. The new freezer was lesser, but it served its purpose.

Nightshift will be informed.

I waited for elaboration, further instruction or my deserved recognition. Nothing else came from Team Leader but a rough burst of static. At this and the sight of my coworkers removing their coats for the shift change, I suffered a momentary loss of equilibrium and, with the intension that none should see me fall, I set off into a staggered run through the aisles. My knees finally dropped and scraped across the threshold of the leg’s room, and I leant forward on the bare, thawed concrete to rest.

Nightshift did not disturb me—they now had no reason to step into the leg’s room. It is possible that others passed by me in that time, but I took notice of nothing but the twitching nub at the end of the leg, watching it makes its irregular and silent circuits. It did not appear to have noticed the change in temperature.

There would be some comfort, I thought, in a version of events where the leg grew or was allowed to grow purely in service of my decline. But that scenario would have me more important than the freezer, itself now diminished and decayed.

I became aware of the cloth billowing by my shoulder. One of the janitors was standing over me, the mask’s pointed chin level with my soft, vulnerable eyes.

“I don’t understand my use here,” I confided. “I don’t understand what we are accomplishing.”

Here, both leg and janitor deserted me.

* * *

Scott McNee tutors in English and Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. His short fiction and poetry have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, New Writing Scotland, Vastarien, Tether's End, Kalopsia, Gutter, Quotidian and The Grind.

SOOTHSAYER

IAN KAPPOS

His first night up in the foothills, Devin sat cross-legged opposite Sammy.

Trough planters and square openings in the floor lined them on both sides. The trough planters contained a species of tuber, or so Sammy claimed. In the darkness below the floorboards, he said he was cultivating mushrooms.

“How long was your hold?”

“Five days,” Devin said. He sipped his soup. “The first seventy-two hours were involuntary. They can keep you that long if you say you want to kill yourself.”

“Cops,” Sammy said.

“Cops,” Devin agreed. “Doing their job.”

“Doing their job.”

Bit by bit, the tincture Sammy had mixed into the soup was beginning to help Devin sink more comfortably into his body. He did feel a little nauseous, but this was probably due to imbibing it on an empty stomach.

“Got the on-site doctor to increase the Ativan, so I stayed a little longer.”

Sammy nodded. He had this sage-like nod now. They’d done only surface-level catching up since Devin’s aunt dropped him off that afternoon at the bottom of the driveway. Sammy hardly seemed fazed by the sudden arrival of his old friend.

“Emma broke the lease?”

“Me, too.”

“You, too. You left all your shit?”

“Left all my shit.” It hurt, hearing Emma’s name. “All I have is what I brought.”

Sammy produced a wide smile that reached his eyes. He hadn’t smiled like that even when Devin showed up unannounced. He was a big-boned guy, but he’d grown thin.

“That’s the way to go, man.” He slapped his thigh and got to his feet, making the gaslamp flutter. The barn was far from properly insulated for the coming winter months. Devin hadn’t removed any of his layers.

“I should get you something more substantial,” Sammy said.

“Thanks.”

Sammy retreated into the darkness. Devin listened to the noises he made there and thought about why he’d come. He wasn’t sure how to cast light onto the right words.

When his friend reemerged with a plate of mushrooms, Devin asked, “Do you know of an opposite to divination?”

Sammy chewed, in thought. “You mean not seeing the past?”

“No.” Devin popped a mushroom into his mouth and tried not to taste it. He wanted a path, or at least affirmation that one lay ahead. One without Emma. One he could suffer treading.

They ate in silence. When it became apparent that Sammy had no advice to offer, Devin grew frustrated. Sammy was supposed to have answers. Devin downed the rest of his soup, wincing past the bitterness.

“You can stay here as long as you want,” Sammy said finally. “I don’t have a lot, but if you want to borrow the truck, you can. Go down the road, get what you need. I don’t use it much anymore.”

Devin nodded. “Thanks, man.” At last, the tincture’s effects were hitting him full force.

“If you’re hard up for money,” Sammy continued, “there’s a thing I did when I first moved up here. Kind of a morbid little hustle. The guy and his people are really weird, but…” Sammy chuckled.

“But then—so am I, right?” He let out a cackle.

The laugh rebounded off the murky contours of the barn. A jangling echo, as though Sammy and Devin were trapped inside a tin can.

Not the laugh Devin was used to.

* * *

Devin kept one body in the truck with him, even though the windows had to be up to stave off the cold and the smell would hit him soon. He’d decided against putting it in the truck bed like the others; it was so small and light he feared the wind would take it once they got going. He kept the heat off. It was morning but still dark out.

He drove past the fence and into the fog. The dead animals had begun to just accumulate in the yard; he didn’t need to go out as much to find them. Which was good for gas. Sammy had loaned him the truck but no money. The money came from Parkman.

The fog closed back up behind him in a swirl like flushed toilet water. In the gloom, the cargo resembled any other cargo. Devin readjusted his mask. The smell was hitting him now.

* * *

A Parkman met him at the edge of their property. He didn’t know how many Parkmans there were or if there existed any blood relation. When he came by, he was used to dealing with just the old man himself.

“Whutchu got?” she asked.

Devin pulled a pair of disposable gloves on. He reached over the side of the truck bed and began unloading his delivery, extracting in multiple trips its contents until they were in a pile in front of her.

“Wait,” he said. It hurt to breathe in the chill. “One more.”

He yanked a glove off to open the passenger’s side door. With his gloved hand, he brought out the last of his cargo. He set it to the side of the pile.

The Parkman regarded the final body, eyebrow arched. Unlike the rest, it was swaddled in plastic wrap.

“Three possums,” she tallied, “three cats—small, same litter, I’m guessing—five-ish squirrels, two…and a half raccoons. A deer, mostly eaten. Most of these look better than last time, at least.” The Parkman again studied the carcass beside the heap. She knelt for a closer look.

“Beaver? None this high up,” she muttered to herself. “Fox? Bobcat? Small guy…” She plucked a stick off the ground and prodded it to turn it over.

Devin waited, holding his breath. Not just, he realized, because the breathing pained him.

After a moment, she shook her head and arose, knees cracking.

“Whatever it is,” she said, “don’t think the old man will have use for it.”

Devin let a slow exhale escape through the open edges of his mask, tried to make it soundless. Why had he suddenly not wanted to part with this body?

He cleared his throat. “Okay. How much, then?”

The Parkman gave him a number and he agreed without haggling. She counted out the bills. He received them with his ungloved hand. With the other, he picked up the plastic-wrapped animal and brought it with him back to the truck cab.

Two more Parkmans were already coming down the hill from the depository, each with a dolly. The Parkman he’d spoken with kicked the carcasses into a tighter pile.

Devin started the ignition. No goodbyes.

* * *

He returned to Sammy’s after a long detour to the nearest gas station. As he pulled in, the truck dipped into the embankment bordering the property and struggled to climb out. Soon, snow would replace the sluice. The tread on the tires was all but stripped. All the time Sammy had lived up here by himself, he’d never bought chains.

Along the road back up and around the barn, blue oaks, ponderosas, and Jeffrey pine kept most of the emerging daylight at bay. Emma would have been able to tell him the other trees.

Sammy’s barn stood in the center of the property, solemn and soggy from rain. The small tool shed, once blue but now peeling and off-color like a waterlogged cadaver, sat twenty yards behind it on a hillock. Sammy said he’d “converted” the barn, but Devin didn’t know all the changes made.

No additional lifeless animals had amassed in the time Devin was away.

He stood in the open doorway of the barn, letting his eyes adjust. Gray daylight streaked across the unvarnished floor and rows of doorless trapdoors.

Somewhere in the darkness beyond, Sammy toiled away.

* * *

Stairs along the eastern wall led to the loft where Devin slept. Up there, the barn’s second window, angled to conform to the A-frame, bled wan light across the banister.

Devin hadn’t had the heart to inform his friend that tubers, while capable of sprouting in the dark, needed direct sunlight to actually grow. Emma had taught him that. The single ground-floor window here wouldn’t suffice. Sammy would need, at the very least, some artificial lights. The barn lacked electricity, though.

“I got food,” Devin called into the pitch.

A clatter of clay pots told him Sammy was awake. But he was always awake, it seemed.

His friend emerged, stepping over a trough planter.

“Cool,” Sammy said.

Devin laid the bag of gas station snacks next to the pile of books he kept downstairs to read when there was still daylight. Nearby, a framed picture on a wall—the barn’s single adornment—caught the light. A photograph of a grizzly bear, mouth open in mid-roar, its lower legs engulfed in a blanket of autumn leaves.

He returned his attention to the plastic-wrapped body, turning it over in his hands. It stank despite no visible signs of decay.

“What you have there?” Sammy zigzagged over, minding the gaps in the floor. Teetered up to Devin as if in a dream. Then he bent forward and peered so close at the specimen that his beard grazed it.

From this angle, its short legs and outsized paws, with their indeterminate number of digits, gave the appearance of reaching out for Sammy.

“Hunh,” he said. One of his more overt displays of interest. Still different from the Sammy Devin used to know.

“This was out in the yard like the rest?”

“Yep.”

“They just keep dropping dead?”

“Yep.”

Devin had wrapped it so tight that one of the creature’s eyeballs was flattened against the cling wrap.

Sammy crossed his arms. Seemed to regard Devin’s find with pride.

“Proof,” he said. “Fruits of your labor.”

“This is supposed to happen?” Devin asked. “Animals falling down dead around the barn?”

But Sammy was shaking his head before Devin finished his question. “We’re not supposed to know some things, that’s just how it is. Check out the condition…”

Sammy gripped a corner of the body, startling Devin. He wagged it around as Devin clung on. “Look,” he said. “It’s alive!” He laughed.

It took everything Devin had not to yank it back.

Sammy released the body and clapped the same hand onto Devin’s shoulder. It made Devin want to lay him out. Punch the living shit out of him.

“Soon,” Sammy said, squeezing. “I can tell you feel it coming.”

“Feel what coming?”

Sammy shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “But you’re feeling better, aren’t you?”

The question stumped Devin like a Zen koan.

“Relative to how you felt when you first got here?”

He didn’t want to give Sammy the satisfaction of a gesture of acquiescence. But Sammy seemed to recognize the admission in his eyes. He shook Devin’s shoulder one last time, then removed his hand.

“I poked through some of your texts down here,” he said. “Haruspicy, huh?” Sammy laughed and tilted his head ponderously. “Admit I hadn’t thought of that one. I’m sure you’re onto something.”

He slinked back across the barn to his workspace, which Devin still hadn’t seen up close even though his loft hung directly above it.

“That thing’s got big plans for you!” he called over his shoulder. He followed it up with another one of those unfamiliar, absurd guffaws.

“What are you doing?” Devin called back.

“Back to the project,” Sammy answered, already no longer visible through the shadows.

Everyone had a fucking project around here.

The lantern went out. It became just Devin and his headache from the carbon monoxide, suspended in the dark.

The passage he’d been reading remained superimposed over the inside of his skull: Following from the liver, the first and most telling step in the process, transition to heart and lungs. Sometimes different anatomies will require their own respective…

“Sammy?” he hollered into the void.

Heavy, percussive sounds from below. Devin never asked what his friend was working on. It was an unspoken challenge to himself: wait until Sammy cared enough to volunteer the information.

“Yeah?”

“My shit went out.”

“Okay.”

How the hell was he working? No light bled up through the floorboards.

“Where’s the propane?” Devin asked. “Is there any propane?” His remaining flashlight had gone out the week prior, and he’d forgotten to snag batteries from the gas station. His phone only had so much juice. Same for the portable charger.

“Um.”

Devin waited.

“Toolshed. Toolshed out back,” Sammy said. “You know it?”

“Yeah,” Devin said.

He sighed and got to his feet. Felt his way to the banister.

* * *

Outside, the nearly full moon and the stars helped only slightly. The trees got in the way. He’d have to use the phone.

He tried getting as far across the yard as he could before conditions forced him to turn on flashlight mode. It wasn’t very far. Six paces out and he tripped over a furred body.

The light bleached the toolshed, transforming it into a crooked tooth. Devin tugged the knob and the door fell open, cracking. It dangled only from the bottom hinge now. Mildew filled his nose.

Shelves lined the walls. Devin glided his phone over them, but movement out of the corner of his eye at the far end of the toolshed caused him to jerk the light in its direction.

Between a cubby hole and a sagging box lay a family of possums. Eight or nine tiny bodies squirmed at the mother, fastened to her torso, feeding. Her eyes were locked onto him.

Emma had once told him it takes several weeks before baby possums can open their eyes.

Alive, Devin thought dully.

“You’re alive,” he said in a low voice.

Without breaking the mother’s gaze, he ran a hand across a shelf until it met a wide cylinder he felt confident was the propane tank.

“Don’t go outside,” he said. “Stay here. Stay away from the barn.”

The mother hissed. Devin retreated.

He tried closing the door to the extent that it could be closed with its remaining hinge. The family would freeze if he wasn’t able to get it back the way he’d found it. The knowledge that he may have put them in mortal danger planted itself in the back of his mind.

He surveyed the door, hanging slightly open still. He might be able to fix it, but the tools would be inside the shed, and Devin felt as though he had intruded upon something sacred. He would have to wait till morning.

Snow began to fall.

* * *

Another trip down the road. Devin didn’t know if he needed the money. He wasn’t particularly hungry. The tank was full enough to last him a little longer. It was perhaps even stupid to be on the road now; snow was coming on heavier, and still the truck had no chains. He found himself hoping something would happen.

Slip, he thought. Careen and bash into the hillside.

Brain yourself.

The corpses were almost all unmarred and young. No evidence of violence, injury, pestilence. As fresh for the world as a body could be without life. He didn’t bother wearing a mask anymore. Or gloves. He imagined Emma chiding him while also goading him on, finding entertainment in his adventurous spirit. But he wasn’t adventurous. He’d never been adventurous. By the time she learned that, though, it was too late and she already cared.

The Parkman driveway was freshly shoveled. The bodies, hardened by death and cold, clattered in the truck bed as Devin pulled up onto the property. Little skulls and little frozen brains. Devin realized he was crying. A valve had been turned on in him, though not all the way.

He wiped his face and stepped out.

A new structure, twelve or fifteen feet tall and at least six wide, had been erected between the depository and the house. At first he thought it was a silo, for grain or wood chips maybe. But as he squinted, the patchwork of fur across its facade sharpened into focus. So that’s what they’d been up to. A statue, or something like it. The beginning of one. Was this part supposed to be a leg?

A Parkman approached as he was hauling the last carcass onto the pile he’d created. A young man this time. Not the old man.

Devin asked, “Where’s the old man?”

“Laid up in bed. The fumes, they…” He seemed to catch himself. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “You still have that… one body?”

Instinctively, Devin shook his head.

“Shame,” the Parkman said. “We were talking about it. Who you talked to had it wrong. Old man was interested.”

“Don’t have it,” Devin said, meaning to put a lid on the topic.

The Parkman proceeded to brush off the bodies. He scrutinized each in turn and after a few minutes concluded his appraisal.

“Poison?” he asked.

The question caught Devin off-guard. “No,” he said. His body tensed up.

“What’s your method?”

“No method. I find them.”

“We’re used to knitting the roadkill back to—”

“Not roadkill,” Devin said. “They’re not roadkill.”

He was fuming.

The Parkman regarded him, amused. This only further incensed Devin.

“Fuck you,” he decided to say. “All of you. Tell the old man I said that. Tell him I said he’s a fucking sicko.”

It brought him back, raising his voice. An intoxicant that didn’t inebriate. Just poison. He inhaled hard and fast on his way back to the truck, drinking in the pain of the cold air.

The engine stalled half a dozen times before it finally turned. He threw the vehicle into reverse and peeled recklessly back out onto the road.

“Fuck you,” he said one last time. He realized, driving away faster than he should, that he hadn’t stuck around to collect payment. Fuck it.

When he got home—could he call it that now?—Sammy appeared straightaway. He seemed animated by a genuine, unadulterated glee.

“Wanna see?” he asked. He was practically bouncing off either foot.

“See what?”

Sammy ushered him along.

Devin cast a glance over his shoulder: the last portion of daylight was spilling through the ground-floor window, moderately bolstered by a rising full moon. He’d spent some time alone in the truck, parked on the side of the road. Mentally reviewing what he’d been putting off. Which would have to wait a little longer now.

He had glimpsed only the crude dimensions, suggested by the occasional lit candle, of Sammy’s living space. A portable stove was kept there; he knew that. Sometimes the smells of Sammy’s elixirs reached him as he lay awake in bed or sat bent over the carpenter desk studying his specimen. He suspected, at times, the smells influenced his dreams.

“Have you ever just wanted to sleep forever?” Sammy asked.

He drew out a lantern, switched it on.

“It’s fine, don’t answer.” Sammy’s voice trembled with excitement. Devin felt a sudden, deep unease. “Question’s unfair. Doesn’t begin to scratch the surface. My bad. I’m just excited.”

Holding the lantern at waist-level, Sammy entered his makeshift quarters. Devin realized part of what had aided the cover all this time was a stable door, apparently spared during Sammy’s renovations.

His friend laid the lantern on a small, unlacquered table. He went to a corner and struck a match. He proceeded along the edges of the space, candle aflame. Gradually, the features of his private area flickered into Devin’s field of vision. Shelves, stacks of books, overturned milk crates, various tools.

Two more sawed-out openings in the floor were notably different from those in the barn’s central area. From them protruded strange vegetation: wood-like bulbs, tall and wide enough that they broke the perimeter of the trapdoors, straining the planks to the point that they’d snapped to allow them through. The bulbs were rough where something had carved into them, making it hard to estimate their original size.

“See?”

But Sammy wasn’t indicating the plants, or vegetables, or whatever the bulbs were. He gestured beyond them, at the wall. Devin peered, but the most he could make out was a bulky shape against the wall, low to the ground.

His friend directed the candle over what he wanted Devin to look at. A piece of furniture, something like a divan but not upholstered, wobbled under the light. It was composed of three or four sanded chunks of the wood-like material, and large enough to accommodate a person of Sammy’s physical proportions.

“A bed?” Devin asked. “This is what you’ve been working on?”

“You don’t think I’ve earned it?” Sammy laughed. The dark circles under his eyes shone like bruises. “When inspiration strikes, you don’t let up till you cross the finish line.”

Devin studied the gentle curves of the bed. It gave a vaguely alien impression. He had to admit it was beautiful.

“That’s not all.” Sammy set the candle atop one of the pruned bulbs, where the dancing light lent it the illusion of animation. He then pulled a long swathe of fabric from a basket and brought it over to Devin.

At first it appeared nondescript: a plain, monochrome length of cloth. Upon closer inspection, however, Devin distinguished the unmistakable pattern of lamella and a gill-like texture unlike any material he had ever come across. Had Emma never been so obsessed with fungi, it might have escaped his notice.

Sammy’s face strained to its fullest capacity in a grin.

“This is made from mushroom?” Devin asked.

Sammy nodded rapidly. “Innovative, right? I’d like to see someone out in the modern world try and reverse-engineer this. There’s no having the right brain for it, though. It’s in the guts. You could tell ’em a thing or two about guts.”

It dawned on Devin that it was likely Sammy hadn’t slept in quite some time. Tucked away in his little workspace, he labored far into the night, every night. Never sparing a moment for rest.

“Feel it,” Sammy implored him.

Devin pinched the blanket. The material was strong, durable. It made him conscious of the empty yet sated feeling in his stomach. So that’s why he had no appetite. Over the course of his stay, he had sustained himself on a fungus that kept his metabolism occupied.

Sammy wrapped the blanket around himself. It enveloped his body, trailing with a flourish to the floor.

“Have you ever wanted to sleep forever?” he asked again. “Or even just for a season?”

“Hibernate? Have I ever wanted to hibernate?”

Sammy tilted his head. “Sure,” he allowed. “Why not.”

Devin’s answer was, of course, yes. But he didn’t share it. Sammy was already as giddy as could be; he hardly needed Devin’s affirmation to feel fulfilled.

A moment passed. Despite his lack of an appetite, Devin felt a strong, urgent impulse to put something in his body.

“Do you have any more of that soup?”

“Let me put the burner on.”

* * *

The liver is the only organ known across the animal kingdom to regenerate itself.

The lightheadedness he got from the carbon monoxide, paired with the effects of Sammy’s concoction, made for a peculiar but potent high that Devin had acquired a taste for during his weeks spent at the barn. He could no longer check his phone to confirm the time; it had died, joining the mass grave of other electronic carcasses. But he estimated about an hour had elapsed since he drank down the soup.

He had two lanterns going on both sides of the carpenter desk. In the center of the desk rested the body of the creature no one had been able to identify. It still stank after all this time, and still showed no sign of rot.

Sure, Sammy. I know a little about guts. It’s not like you’d given me any suggestions. So, haruspicy it was.

The conical head was scaled yet sprouted whiskers above the lips—lips which peeled back not from fangs but from unstained, blocky teeth. The furred midsection boasted a number of conflicting patterns, all tufting outward where they clashed. Six digits, plus maybe a pair of dewclaws, in the front. The hindquarters, long like a rabbit’s, ended, from what he could discern, in stubs more akin to flippers than paws.

So small, the whole thing so small. So tiny and delicate. The most exquisite specimen. Sammy had been right about something.

Devin would be able to tell, if not from the liver then later from the kidneys, how to expunge the memories. Replace them with blankness. How to wipe his slate clean.

Given the creature’s unmapped anatomy, though, would he even know where—how—to start? And why wasn’t he peaking yet? Even the second helping of Sammy’s elixir hadn’t stopped the arguments from ringing in his head.

Her dismayed voice. How he’d yelled.

How he’d fucking yelled.

All the things he had thrown, breaking the plaster. The neighbors on the other side of the wall.

The creature’s eyes gleamed. Did it reach out for him, just now?

He plunged his knife into its abdomen.

Out wafted a green miasma and Devin rocked back in his chair, unconscious before he hit the floor.

* * *

He dreamt of a giant, furry man, shackled to the earth yet standing upright and laughing. In good humor despite the situation. As though he knew something his captors didn’t.

The laugh boomed and boomed.

* * *

A tremendous crash broke his slumber. It came from below. Another great sound followed it, filling the barn, but Devin was too befogged to identify it. Smaller noises came later, wet noises, but by then the sensation had returned, enveloping him.

Warmth.

Gas, fumes, potions.

* * *

His scalpel lay slick on the floor beside the mattress, catching the dim morning light. Snowflakes were on his face. He climbed to his feet, feeling a suspicious sense of rejuvenation despite the cold.

His gaze fell on the carpenter desk. He yelped.

The creature was no longer there.

He shot down the staircase so quickly it was only at the bottom that he noticed the vast level of destruction: the trough planters cloven, spilling dirt onto the planking, the planking itself broken in a vague pattern suggestive of a heavy force having trod across it.

A circle—too broad and too perfectly perforated to have been circumstantial—gaped in the center of the barn floor. But Devin wouldn’t be able to divine its significance just now.

Something else caught his attention.

Most of Sammy’s wall had vanished—had been pulverized—and now lay scattered in splintered chunks across the ground and near Sammy’s half-devoured body. Beyond, snow cascaded onto a yard already layered in it.

Numb, Devin walked over. He leaned against the stable wall and stared, glassy-eyed, at the kaleidoscope of gore his friend’s body had been reduced to. Hunks of flesh scooped out. Insides glittering with frost. Bones camouflaged in frost. A giant claw had mauled his face but left enough intact that Devin could recognize the expression. Ecstatic joy. Orgasm. Somewhere in there.

Is this what he wanted? Devin found himself wondering dreamily. Sammy had gone off-grid. Then gone off the deep end. For Devin, it had just been the other way around.

The bear tracks were still fresh in the snow beyond the sundered wall.

He stood there awhile. Then he scooped up Sammy’s blanket and pulled it around himself.

* * *

Where had the creature gone? The other creature. The one he knew yet didn’t know. The one that nobody knew.

Devin turned his back to Sammy and slogged toward the yawning circle in the middle of the barn. Immaculate. A flawless hole-punch.

He got to his knees. Then he made himself prone to poke his head inside.

He found a tunnel: smaller than the opening in the floor, and dug at an angle. Peering closely, he spotted little lines. Claw marks. Tiny claw marks. While only so much was visible, the tunnel seemed to go deep.

Devin could go down, follow the tunnel to its terminus. Or he could climb beneath the floorboards, just lie there in the dirt, shield himself from the cold while he guarded the tunnel’s entrance. Maybe he could do one thing and then the other. Either option meant descent. He had time to decide. He was still warm.

* * *

Ian Kappos grew up in Northern California but currently lives in LA. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Seize the Press, Cosmic Horror Monthly, Witch Craft Mag, Maximumrocknroll, and other venues. His debut chapbook of fiction Crossfaded in Narnia is available from Eibonvale Press. He’s played in the bands Cross Class and Fluppies and is a co-creator of Los Suelos, CA, an interactive multimedia fiction anthology benefiting California's migrant workers. He earned his MFA in creative writing from CalArts. On Instagram, he's @jung_carl. On Twitter, he's @kapposyan.

THE THREE MARKED PENNIES

MARY ELIZABETH COUNSELMAN

Originally published in Weird Tales, August 1934

E very one agreed, after it was over, that the whole thing was the conception of a twisted brain, a game of chess played by a madman—in which the pieces, instead of carved bits of ivory or ebony, were human beings.

It was odd that no one doubted the authenticity of the “contest.” The public seems never for a moment to have considered it the prank of a practical joker, or even a publicity stunt. Jeff Haverty, editor of the News, advanced a theory that the affair was meant to be a clever, if rather elaborate, psychological experiment—which would end in the revealing of the originator’s identity and a big laugh for everyone.

Perhaps it was the glamorous manner of announcement that gave the thing such wide-spread interest Blankville (as I shall call the Southern town of about 30,000 people in which the affair occurred) awoke one April morning to find all its trees, telephone poles, house-sides and storefronts plastered with a strange sign. There were scores of them, written on yellow copy-paper on an ordinary typewriter. The sign read:

During this day of April 13, three pennies will find their way into the pockets of this city. On each penny there will be a well-defined mark. One is a square; one is a circle; and one is a cross. These three pennies will change hands often, as do all coins, and on the seventh day after this announcement (April 21) the possessor of each marked penny will receive a gift.

To the first: $100,000 in cash.

To the second: A trip around the world.

To the third: Death.

The answer to this riddle lies in the marks on the three coins: circle, square, and cross. Which of these symbolizes wealth? Which, travel? Which, death? The answer is not an obvious one.

To him who finds it and obtains the first penny, $100,000 will be sent without delay. To him who has the second penny, a first-class ticket for the earliest world-touring steamer to sail will be presented. But to the possessor of the third marked coin will be given—death. If you are afraid your penny is the third, give it away—but it may be the first or the second!

Show your marked penny to the editor of the 'News' on April 21, giving your name and address. He will know nothing of this contest until he reads one of these signs. He is requested to publish the names of the three possessors of the coins April 21, with the mark on the penny each holds.

It will do no good to mark a coin of your own, as the dates of the true coins will be sent to Editor Haverty.

By noon everyone had read the notice, and the city was buzzing with excitement. Clerks began to examine the contents of cash register drawers. Hands rummaged in pockets and purses. Stores and banks were flooded with customers wanting silver changed to coppers.

Jeff Haverty was the target for a barrage of queries, and his evening edition came out with a lengthy editorial embodying all he knew about the mystery, which was exactly nothing. A note had come that morning with the rest of his mail—a note unsigned and typewritten on the same yellow paper in a plain stamped envelope with the postmark of that city. It said merely: Circle—1920. Square—1909. Cross—1928. Please do not reveal these dates until after April 21.

Haverty complied with the request…and played up the story for all it was worth.

The first penny was found in the street by a small boy, who promptly took it to his father. His father, in turn, palmed it off hurriedly on his barber, who gave it in change to a patron before he noted the deep cross cut in the coin’s surface.

The patron took it to his wife, who immediately paid it to the grocer. “It’s too long a chance, honey!’’ she silenced her mate’s protests. “I don’t like the idea of that death-threat in the notice…and this certainly must be the third penny. What else could that little cross stand for? Crosses over graves—don’t you see the significance?’’

And when that explanation was wafted abroad, the cross-marked penny began to change hands with increasing rapidity.

The other two pennies bobbed up before dusk—one marked with a small perfect square, the other with a neat circle.

The square-marked penny was discovered in a slot-machine by the proprietor of the Busy Bee Cafe. “There was no way it could have got there,” he reported, mystified and a little frightened. Only four people, all of them old patrons, had been in the cafe that day. And not one of them had been near the slot-machine—located at the back of the place as it was and filled with stale chewing-gum which, at a glance, was worth nobody’s penny. Furthermore, the proprietor had examined the thing for a chance coin the night before and had left it empty when he locked up; yet there was the square-marked penny nestling alone in the slot machine at closing time April 15.

He had stared at the coin a long time before passing it in change to an elderly spinster.

“It ain’t worth it,’’ he muttered to himself. “I got a restaurant that’s makin’ me a thin livin’, and I ain’t in no hurry to get myself bumped off, on the long chance I might get that hundred thousand or that trip instead. No-sirree!’’

The spinster took one look at the marked penny, gave a short mouse-like squeak, and flung it into the gutter as though it were a tarantula.

“My land!” she quavered. “I don’t want that thing in my pocketbook!’’

But she dreamed that night of foreign ports, barracuda fins cutting the surface of deep blue water, and the ruins of ancient cities.

A black workman picked up the penny next morning and dung to it all day, dreaming of Harlem, before he succumbed at last to gnawing fear. And the square-marked penny changed hands once more.

The circle-marked penny was first noted in a stack of coins by a teller of the Farmer’s Trust.

“We get marked coins every now and then,” he said. “I didn’t notice this one especially—it may have been here for days.”

He pocketed it gleefully but discovered with a twinge of dismay next morning that he had passed it out to someone without noticing it.

“I wanted to keep it!” he sighed. “For better or for worse!” He glowered at the stacks of someone else’s money before him, and wondered furtively how many tellers ever really escaped with stolen goods.

A fruit-seller had received the penny. He eyed it dubiously. “Maybe you bring me the moeny?” He showed it to his wife, who made the sign of horns against the “evil eye.”

“Throw away!” she commanded shrilly. “She is bad luck!”

Her spouse shrugged and sailed the circle-marked coin across the street. A ragged child pounced on it and scuttered away to buy a twist of licorice. And the circle-marked penny changed hands once more—clutched at by avaricious fingers, stared at by eyes grown sick of familiar scenes, relinquished again by the power of fear.

Those who came into brief possession of the three coins were fretted by the drag and shove of conflicting advice.

“Keep it!” some urged. “Think! It may mean a trip around the world! Paris! Qiina! London! Oh, why couldn’t I have got the thing.”

“Give it away!” others admonished. “Maybe it’s the third penny—you can’t tell. Maybe the symbols don’t mean what they seem to, and the square one is the death-penny! I’d throw it away, if I were you.”

“No! No!” still others cried. “Hang on to it! It may bring you $100,000. A hundred thousand dollars! In these times! Why, fellow, you’d be the same as a millionaire!”

The meaning of the three symbols was on every one’s tongue, and no one agreed with his neighbor’s solution to the riddle.

“It’s as plain as the nose on my face,” one man would declare. '“The circle represents the globe—the travel-penny, square”

“No, no. The cross means that. 'Cross’ the seas, don’t you get it? Sort of a pun effect. 'The circle means money—shape of a coin, understand?”

“And the square one?”

“A grave. A square hole for a coffin, see? Death. It’s quite simple. I wish I could get hold of that circle one!”

“You’re crazy! The cross one is for death—everybody says so. And believe me, everybody’s getting rid of it as soon as they get it! It may be a joke of some kind…no danger at all…but I wouldn’t like to be the holder of that cross-marked penny when April 21 rolls around!”

“I’d keep it and wait till the other two had got what was due them. Then, if mine turned out to be the wrong one. I’d throw it away!” one man said importantly.

“But he won’t pay up till all three pennies are accounted for, I shouldn’t think,” another answered him. “And maybe the offer doesn’t hold good after April 21—and you’d be losing $100,000 or a world tour just because you’re scared to find out!”

“That’s a big stake, man,” another murmured. “But frankly, I wouldn’t like to take the chance. He might give me his third gift!”

“He” was how everyone designated the unknown originator of the contest; though, of course, there was no more clue to his sex than to his identity.

“He must be rich,” some said, “to offer such expensive prizes.”

“And crazy!” others exploded, “threatening to kill the third one. He’ll never get away with it!”

“But clever,” still others admitted, “to think up the whole business. He knows human nature, whoever he is. I’m inclined to agree with Haverty—it’s all a sort of psychological experiment. He’s trying to see whether desire for travel or greed for money is stronger than fear of death.”

“Does he mean to pay up, do you think?”

“That remains to be seen!”

On the sixth day, Blankville had reached a pitch of excitement amounting almost to hysteria. No one could work for wondering about the outcome of the bizarre test on the morrow.

It was known that a grocer’s delivery boy held the square-marked coin, for he had been boasting of his indifference as to whether the square did represent a yawning grave. He exhibited the penny freely, making jokes about what he intended to do with his hundred thousand dollars—but on the morning of the last day he lost his nerve. Seeing a blind beggar woman huddled in her favorite corner between two shops, he passed close to her and surreptitiously dropped the cent piece into her box of pencils.

“I had it!” he wailed to a friend after he had reached his grocery. “I had it right here in my pocket last night, and now it’s gone! See, I’ve got a hole in the darn’ thing—the penny must have dropped out!”

It was also known who held the circle-marked penny. A young soda clerk, with the sort of ready smile that customers like to see across a marble counter, had discovered the coin and fished it from the cash drawer, exulting over his good fortune.

“Bud Skinner’s got the circle penny,” people told one another, wavering between anxiety and gladness. “I hope the kid does get that world tour—it’d tickle him so! He seems to get such a kick out of life; it’s a sin he has to be stuck in this slow burg!”

Finally, it was found who held the cross-marked cent piece. “Carlton…poor devil!” people murmured in subdued tones. “Death would be a godsend to him. Wonder he hasn’t shot himself before this. Guess he just hasn’t the nerve.”

The man with the cross-marked penny smiled bitterly. “I hope this blasted little symbol means what they all think it means!” he confided to a friend.

At last, the eagerly awaited day came. A crowd formed in the street outside the newspaper office to see the three possessors of the three marked coins show Haverty their pennies and give him their names to publish. For their benefit the editor met the trio on the sidewalk outside the building, so that all might see them.

The evening edition ran the three people’s photographs, with the name, address, and the mark on each one’s penny under each picture. Blankville read…and held its breath.

On the morning of April 22, the old blind beggar woman sat in her accustomed place, musing on the excitement of the previous day, when several people had led her—she knew by the odor of fish from the market across the street—to the newspaper office. There someone had asked her name and many other puzzling things which had bewildered her until she had almost burst into tears.

“Let me alone!” she had whimpered. “I ask only enough food to keep from starving, and a place to sleep. Why are you pushing me around like this and yelling at me.? Let me go back to my corner! I don’t like all this confusion and strangeness that I can’t see—it frightens me!”

Then they had told her something about a marked penny they had found in her alms-box, and other things about a large sum of money and some impending anger that threatened her. She was glad when they led her back to her cranny between the shops.

Now as she sat in her accustomed spot, nodding comfortably and humming a little under her breath, a paper fluttered down into her lap. Slie felt the stiff oblong, knew it was an envelope, and called a bystander to her side.

“Open this for me, will you?” she requested. “Is it a letter? Read it to me.”

The bystander tore open the envelope and frowned. “It’s a note,” he told her. “Typewritten, and it’s not signed. It just says—what the devil?—just says: 'The four corners of the earth are exactly the same’ And…hey! look at this! …oh. I’m sorry; I forgot you’re…it’s a steamship ticket for a world tour! Look, didn’t you have one of the marked pennies?”

The blind woman nodded drowsily. “Yes, the one with the square, they said.” She sighed faintly. “I had hoped I would get the money, or…the other, so I would never have to beg again.”

“Well, here’s your ticket.” The bystander held it out to her uncertainly. “Don’t you want it?” as the beggar made no move to take it.

“No,” snapped the blind woman. “What good would it be to me?” She seized the ticket in sudden rage and tore it into bits.

At nearly the same hour, Kenneth Girlton was receiving a fat manila envelope from the postman. He frowned as he squinted at the local postmark over the stamp. His friend Evans stood beside him, paler than Carlton.

“Open it, open it!” he urged. “Read it—no, don’t open it, Ken. I’m scared! After all…it’s a terrible way to go. Not knowing where the blow’s coming from, and “

Carlton emitted a macabre chuckle, ripping open the heavy envelope. “It’s the best break I’ve had in years, Jim. I’m glad! Glad, Jim, do you hear? It will be quick, I hope… and painless. What’s this, I wonder. A treatise on how to blow off the top of your head?” He shook the contents of the letter onto a table, and then, after a moment, he began to laugh…mirthlessly…hideously.

His friend stared at the little heap of crisp bills, all of a larger denomination than he had ever seen before. “The money! You get the hundred thousand, Ken! I can’t believe …” He broke off to snatch up a slip of yellow paper among the bills. “Wealth is the greatest cross a man can bear,” he read aloud the typewritten words. “It doesn’t make sense…wealth? Then…the cross-mark stood for wealth? I don’t understand.”

Carlton’s laughter cracked. “He has depth, that bird—whoever he is! Nice irony there, Jim—wealth being a burden instead of the blessing most people consider it. I suppose he’s right, at that. But I wonder if he knows the really ironic part of this act of his little play? A hundred thousand dollars to a man with—cancer. Well, Jim, I have a month or less to spend it in, one more damnable month to suffer through before it’s all over!”

His terrible laughter rose again until his friend had to clap hands to ears, shutting out the sound.

But the strangest part of the whole affair was Bud Skinner’s death. Just after the rush hour at noon, he had found a small package, addressed to him, on a back counter in the drug store. Eagerly he tore off the brown paper wrappings, a dozen or so friends crowding about him.

A curiously wrought silver box was what he found. He pressed the catch with trembling fingers and snapped back the lid. An instant later his face took on a queer expression—and he slid noiselessly to the tile floor of the drug store.

The ensuing police investigation unearthed nothing at all, except that young Skinner had been poisoned with crotalin—snake venom—administered through a pin-prick on his thumb when he pressed the trick catch of the little silver box.

This, and the typewritten note in the otherwise empty box: “Life ends where it began—nowhere,” were all they found as an explanation of the clerk’s death. Nor was anything else ever brought to light about the mysterious contest of the three marked pennies—which are probably still in circulation somewhere in the United States.

Table of Contents

1. COMIC HORROR MONTHLY

1. ISSUE 55

3. Edited by JOLIE TOOMAJAN

2. CONTENTS
3. LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
4. MEET THE CHM STAFF

5. THE WIND BENEATH

1. ALEX EBENSTEIN

6. THOSE PERFECT MATERIALS

1. ADDISON SMITH

7. EVIL IN MY SIGHT

1. DANIEL BART HUTCHINS

8. BUDDHA IN YOUR HEAD

1. ANNE LIBERTON

9. THE STARS HAVE TEETH

1. C.R. LANGILLE

10. DEVIL IS FINE

1. MICHAEL BETTENDORF

11. DISPOSAL OF A LEG

1. SCOTT MCNEE

12. SOOTHSAYER

1. IAN KAPPOS

13. THE THREE MARKED PENNIES

1. MARY ELIZABETH COUNSELMAN

Landmarks

1. Title Page
2. Contents
3. Copyright
4. Beginning
5. Meet the CHM Staff
6. Cover

Table of Contents

- COMIC HORROR MONTHLY

- ISSUE 55

- Edited by JOLIE TOOMAJAN

- CONTENTS
- LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
- MEET THE CHM STAFF

- THE WIND BENEATH

- ALEX EBENSTEIN

- THOSE PERFECT MATERIALS

- ADDISON SMITH

- EVIL IN MY SIGHT

- DANIEL BART HUTCHINS

- BUDDHA IN YOUR HEAD

- ANNE LIBERTON

- THE STARS HAVE TEETH

- C.R. LANGILLE

- DEVIL IS FINE

- MICHAEL BETTENDORF

- DISPOSAL OF A LEG

- SCOTT MCNEE

- SOOTHSAYER

- IAN KAPPOS

- THE THREE MARKED PENNIES

- MARY ELIZABETH COUNSELMAN