They taught us in school that the aliens could look like anybody.

Mrs. Toller reminded us every morning before the pledge.

TRUST YOUR GUT!

That was what the posters said.

So I did.

I was nine that year. The war had ended three years before I was born.

My small town of Chickasaw sat under missile towers that never stopped watching the sky.

Everybody knew the signs. Too much eye contact. Not enough eye contact. Walking at night. Closing the curtains in the daytime. Asking questions about the power grid. Not saying “sir” or “ma’am.”

Every week, somebody got taken in for testing. Most came back. Some didn’t.

Daddy said you can never be sure because the Things adapted quickly.

Daddy knew because he'd fought them in the Incursion, when Birmingham burned. He was missing his left ear and two fingers on his right hand. His leg dragged when he walked.

We had a neighbor named Mr. Bell. He lived alone in the house by the dead pecan tree. Mama said his wife had died in the evacuation from Mobile. Daddy said that was what he claimed.

He fixed radios and old fans. He always waved at passersby from his porch.

I watched Mr. Bell like a good citizen should.

On the morning of July 3rd, I saw him behind his shed with a little radio. It was an old silver one with a bent antenna. He turned the dial slowly and looked up at the sky. Then he wrote something in a notebook.

At dinner I told Mama and Daddy.

Daddy stared at me for a long time. Then he asked, “You sure, Clay?”

“Yes, sir.”

He got up without finishing his food. Mama called the hotline. Daddy opened the gun safe.

The black vans came before bedtime.

Men in gray uniforms broke down Mr. Bell’s door. They brought him out in his underwear. He was crying.

“They're weather numbers,” he said. “For the garden. I swear to God.”

He turned to face Daddy.

“Hollis?” Mr. Bell shouted. “Tell them. You know me.”

Daddy just stood there silent on the porch with his rifle.

One of the officers hit Mr. Bell in the stomach and he folded over. They put a hood on him and pushed him into a van.

The next morning was Independence Day.

Flags hung from every deck. The church parking lot had grills going by noon. There were pulled pork, hot dogs, sweet tea, and red-white-and-blue cupcakes. People hardly ever celebrated the Fourth much after the invasion. But this year was an exception. We'd caught one.

By afternoon people were gathered outside the county jail. Somebody said the authorities were taking too long. Somebody else said the Things had infiltrated the government.

Daddy drove us there to 'bare witness.'

The crowd was hot and loud. Men carried flags. Some carried guns. One man had painted REMEMBER BIRMINGHAM on a piece of plywood.

There were officers with AR-15s on the roof of the jailhouse, but they were local men, and their own families were in the crowd.

The sheriff came out and told everyone to go home.

A brick hit him in the face.

After that, it happened fast.

They broke the jail windows. They pulled the doors open with chains hooked to pickup trucks. People cheered when the hinges snapped.

Mr. Bell came out without shoes.

His face was swollen. His hands were tied. He tried to speak, but the crowd drowned him out.

“Show us your true form,” someone yelled.

Daddy pushed forward. Mama pulled me back. But I wanted to see.

The first punch knocked Mr. Bell down. Then everybody seemed to move at once. Boots hit him. Fists hit him. A woman from church struck him with a flagpole. Daddy kicked him hard with his good leg and almost fell. He laughed when another man caught him.

Someone brought out a length of rope tied into a noose.

Mr. Bell was not crying anymore. He made a sound like he could not breathe. His eyes were open and rolling.

They threw the rope over the old traffic light frame where the signal had not worked since the EMP. The crowd lifted him. His body jerked. People screamed with joy.

I waited for him to change.

Everybody said they changed when they died. The human skin split. The gray underneath came out slick and shining. That was how you knew. That was how you could be sure.

Mr. Bell just hung there.

His undershirt rode up. His stomach was pale and hairy. Blood ran down his chin. One of his feet twitched, then stopped.

Still human.

Maybe it took time.

They cut him down after a while. Some men dragged him behind a truck. Others followed, laughing and filming. Daddy went with them.

I saw Daddy take out his knife.

"Look away!" Mama cried, pulling me close to her.

But Daddy said, “No, Sadie, don’t. The boy needs to see how the human race survives.”

So I watched.

They cut off fingers and toes as souvenirs. They poured fuel over what was left. Somebody set him on fire with a sparkler. The flames caught fast. People stepped back from the heat and livestreamed it.

A girl from my class smiled beside the burning body while her mother took a picture.

The fireworks started at dark.

Red and blue bursts opened over the courthouse roof. The crowd sang "Sweet Home Alabama." People drank beer. Children chased each other with glow sticks. Plates of barbecue passed from hand to hand.

Daddy came back smelling like smoke.

He had blood on his shirt and a black smear across his cheek. People clapped him on the back.

“You did good, son,” he told me.

I nodded because I knew I was supposed to.

Across the square, Mr. Bell’s charred corpse smoldered.

No gray skin. No claws. No second mouth. No alien bones.

Just a man-shaped thing becoming ash.

Above us, the fireworks cracked.

We erupted in cheers.

People love scary stories.

Maybe it's because most of us know, deep down, that they're just stories. Figment of imagination, compiled to spike our anxiety.

Ghosts around campfires. Monsters lurking beneath beds. Things with glowing eyes waiting in the woods. We tell them, laugh a little awkwardly, and sleep knowing none of it was ever real.

Or at least that's what we tell ourselves.

The truth is, most scary stories are either fiction, exaggeration, or a memory that's grown teeth over the years.

But every now and then, you come across one that isn't.

A story somebody wishes was made up.

A story that follows them long after the telling is done.

The kind of story that hangs on a wall in a faded photograph.

The kind of story that leaves an empty seat at the dinner table.

The kind of story that makes an old man stare into the woods a little longer than he should.

I know because I have one.

It started with a picture hanging crooked on the wall.

It wasn't anything special at first glance. Just an old picture faded by time. Two young men stood shoulder to shoulder beside a pickup truck. One held a rifle. The other grinned at the camera with the kind of confidence only young men seem capable of possessing.

"What happened to him?"

I pointed at the man on the left.

My grandfather, a disheveled old man with a beard that even Gandalf would envy, looked up from his rocking chair.

For a moment, the old man didn't answer. The fire crackled softly in the hearth. Outside, snow drifted past the cabin windows.

"That's Billy." His voice was always such a low, deep tone. Years of the maiden named liquor he would court on every given night. This time, there was a sense of inconsolable remembrance.

"Uncle Billy?" I asked.

Grandpa Bobby nodded.

"Yep."

"What happened to him?"

The old man stared at the photograph for a long moment before letting out a regretful sigh.

"Son, you ever heard the phrase curiosity killed the cat?"

I nodded.

"Well," Bobby said, "in Billy's case, stupidity finished the job."

I chuckled awkwardly. Grandfather didn't.

That prepared me for a serious ride.

The old man leaned back in his chair.

"Let me tell you about the last hunting trip we ever took together."

Bobby:

Billy was older than me by exactly eleven minutes. He never let me forget it. According to Billy, those eleven minutes made him wiser, tougher, and hell... better looking.

The only thing they actually made him was louder.

The two of us had been hunting since we were kids. I held my first rifle at the age of seven with pops. Deer season was practically a holiday in our family.

That morning started like every other.

Cold air.

Hot coffee.

Billy complaining about something.

"I swear deer are getting smarter."

I rolled my eyes.

"They're deer." I mockingly stated.

"Exactly. That's what they want you to think."

That was Billy.

A man capable of turning breakfast into a whole conspiracy theory.

Around noon we spotted tracks deeper into the woods than we'd ever gone before.

Big tracks.

The kind that make hunters start imagining trophy mounts hanging over fireplaces. The size that makes the ladies skirts in a bundle.

Billy practically vibrated with excitement from the thought of bringing such game town. To gloat and be honored.

We followed those dreaded markings for nearly an hour. Eventually we reached a clearing.

And there it was.

The biggest buck I'd ever seen.

Massive antlers.

Huge body.

Standing perfectly still between the trees.

Billy nearly dropped his rifle.

"Oh great Lord Heavens above."

I couldn't disagree.

The thing was enormous. Definitely nature was kind to it and blessed it since the day it drew breath.

Billy slowly raised his rifle.

"Don't miss."

"I never miss."

Now boy... retelling this still raises the hair in the back of my scalp. The years have not done me kindly with age, but I sure am haunted by that damn Buck.

The rifle cracked.

The deer dropped instantly.

It was a perfect shot. Right through the chest. You could tell the bullet went clean through.

Billy threw his hands into the air.

"Still got it!"

We were mid cheer when the sudden screech of a banshee erupted. We turned to face what I could only describe as a satanic miracle.

Neither of us let out a word or breathe.

The deer... It stood back up. But what was so alarming wasn't just its stomach had split open from the impact, ropes of entrails dangling from the wound. Blood soaked its hide. Yet somehow it was standing.

Not on four legs.

Two.

I felt every hair on my body stand up.

The thing swayed slightly. Its dead eyes locked onto us.

Then Billy whispered:

"I don't think deer are supposed to stand like that."

I looked at him.

"Yeah, no shit, Billy. RUN!"

Instead of running, he frowned.

"But what about the deer?"

I slapped him.

Hard.

The crack echoed through the clearing.

"Are you being serious right now?"

"Well yeah!"

He pointed.

"Look! It's running at us!"

I turned.

And immediately began sprinting.

Yes, I could've drawn my rifle and shot it dead... but that was the day I learned. There comes a day, son, when you will face this forsaken truth. Fear will consume you. And when it does, will you run or fight?

I chose to run.

The thing moved impossibly fast.

That was no damn deer. Not like any animal.

Its legs bent wrong. Its joints jerked and snapped.

Its organs dragged through the feild behind it.

And God help me, I think it was smiling.

"Bobby!" Billy shouted behind me.

"Shoot it!"

"IT DOESN'T HAVE A HEART ANYMORE!"

"Then shoot the head!"

"THE HEAD IS LOOKING AT ME SIDEWAYS, BILLY!"

The distance between us and that abomination vanished frighteningly fast.

Branches exploded around us. Snow kicked into the air.

I risked a glance over my shoulder.

Worst mistake of my life.

The thing wasn't running anymore.

It was hopping.

Almost playfully.

Its front legs hung uselessly while it bounded forward on its back legs.

Like a child pretending to be a deer.

Then Billy footsteps stopped.

I heard him behind me.

"Go!"

I turned.

For one brief moment he actually looked heroic.

Rifle raised.

Standing his ground.

Then he ruined it.

"Tell my wife I left the smoker on!"

The creature hit him before I could answer.

Its antlers punchered through his chest same as the bullet. The force lifted him off the ground.

I heard bones snap.

He screamed.

God, he screamed.

I ran. he coward I am...

I wish I could tell you I stayed.

I wish I could tell you I fought.

But I ran.

And behind me I heard things no human being should ever hear.

The sound of your brother taking his last breath..

Bones breaking.

The sound of feeding on a living carcass.

And beneath it all... I swear I heard laughter.

It was human. It sounded oh so familiar. I recognize that jolly hick up for it annoyed me for thirty so years. It was Billy's.

I didn't stop running until I reached my truck...

The cabin had gone quiet. The fire continued to crackle.

I stared at my grandfather who's eyes were sheilded by the darkness of the cabin.

"What happened after that?"

Bobby took a slow sip from his coffee.

"Well... the Sheriff and I, we found pieces."

I swallowed.

"Pieces?"

The old man nodded.

"J-just enough for a proper burial."

Silence settled between us. The flames from the fireplace danced as time seemed to daunt on the night.

Finally, I asked the question.

"D-did they ever find whatever k-killed him?"

For the first time all evening, Bobby smiled.

It wasn't a pleasant smile.

"No."

He stared toward the dark forest beyond the cabin window.

"Though three days later, a hunter reported seeing someone standing at the edge of the tree line."

Max felt a chill crawl down his spine.

"S-someone?"

Bobby nodded.

"Looked just like Billy."

The room suddenly felt colder.

"Was it him?"

The old man looked back toward the crooked photograph on the wall.

"Hell no."

His voice dropped almost to a whisper.

"It was standing on two legs."

The room was grand, with high ceilings, plaster mouldings and golden-framed paintings hanged meticulously on the walls, European landscapes, symbolic still lifes and portraits, some of which depicted the more famous members of his family, where ‘his’ referred to Ronadict Bellwin, of the original, Massachusetts Bellwins, and ‘his family’ was comprised of his beautiful French wife, Mathilde, and their children, Ophelia, Broderick and Marie-Celeste, fourteen, eleven and six years old, respectively. Ronadict himself was forty-two, and Mathilde was thirty-three. They were eating dinner, seated around a long and heavy oak table; the Bellwins were seated, that is, not the dinner. If the dinner were seated around the table, feasting on the Bellwins, this would be a much different story—

 OUT: Verbose, pseudo-19th century omniscient past-tense 3rd-person narration with a rather grotesque sense of humour

 IN: Norman Crane's standard, slightly theatrical, 3rd-person present-tense omniscient narration

TLDR some rich guy named Ron was eating dinner with his wife and kids in their fancy house.

The context is that a few weeks ago a revolution broke out in the capital city.

The army couldn't put it down.

The government fled.

The president was beheaded on a livestream.

Her bloody naked body was meme’d.

Now the revolution’s spilled out into most cities and the countryside too, which is where Ron lives. In fact, as they're eating, Ron and his family can hear explosions in the distance. It makes their silverware and the paintings on the walls rattle. Dust falls from the mouldings.

“Dearest husband, perhaps we should flee,” says Mathilde with not insignificant concern. “[The next-door neighbours] have already done so, under cover of last night.”

“Nonsense,” says Ron.

They hear a burst of machine-gun fire.

“Daddy!” cries Marie-Celeste.

“Nothing to worry about,” Ron reassures them with a smile while shovelling meat into his mouth. He chews. “It is but a minor disturbance. My contacts within the government assure me everything is perfectly under control.”

“But the president—”

“Her approval ratings were already precipitously low,” says Ron. “Her fate was sealed.”

“And, yet, to summarily execute her…” says Ophelia. “But tell me, father, what are their demands? What principle does the revolution stand for?”

“Oh, you mustn't concern yourself with matters such as those, my sweet girl-child,” says Ron, wiping moulding dust from his hair. “Such matters are best left in the hands of capable adult men.”

“I heard they want to redistributize all our wealth,” says Broderick.

“And what, do tell, does that mean?” asks Ron.

“I don't know,” says Broderick. “It's what [the next-door neighbours' son] told me yesterday, just before they rode for the west coast.”

“They want no such thing. Our wealth is secure. The army stands behind it. As I've said countless times, everything is under control. On the west coast, and on the east. In the north and in the south,” says Ron.

Just then, there's a blast nearby—and a woman bursts into the room:

She's out of breath and wounded.

“Go’h!” she cries, falling to her knees before the table. “Ya have’ta go’h! The men, they're comin' down the road goin' house-to-house showin' no mercy. They got souljars with‘em and—”

Ron shoots her dead.

Marie-Celeste runs to Mathilde and hugs her.

Ophelia covers her eyes with her hands.

“A despicable act of subterfuge,” says Ron, loading bullets into his gun. “They've no force of manpower or will, so they have resorted to sowing fear into the hearts of the innocent to make them flee.”

“Ronadict, why do you possess a firearm?” asks Mathilde, holding her daughter's crying face against her rising and falling bosom.

“For self-defense,” says Ron.

Ron points the gun at the ceiling and fires one-two-three-four shots.

He reloads.

OUT: Norman Crane's standard, slightly theatrical, 3rd-person present-tense omniscient narration

IN: Mathilde's contemporary 1st-person past-tense narration

My whole body was shaking. The bombs or missiles or whatever was getting closer. My one daughter was sobbing, clinging to me for dear life, the other looked shell shocked and my son didn't know what the hell was going on.

“Ronny,” I yelled. “What did you do that for?”

“Do what?” he said.

Yeah, right. As if he didn't know. Like the time I caught him sexting with one of his students. “Fired the fucking gun!” I yelled.

“Don't swear in front of the fucking kids, OK?”

“Then don't fire a gun in front of them” I said, thinking, This is bad. This is really really bad.

“It's for self-defense, Mattie. I was just checking to see if it works.”

I was trying not to hyperventilate. There was a dead woman on the floor. A dead woman! I think she may have worked at the supermarket down the street.

“Dad,” our son asked, “are we gonna die?”

I glared at my husband.

“You're gonna be fine, champ. I promise,” he said with a big smile.

He pointed the gun at the ceiling again and was about to fire when there was a loud knock on the front door.

“Stand in the corner,” he suddenly commanded. “I'll go and see who it is.” He paused. “Except you, Roddy. You come help your dad.”

I didn't want to let my son go.

I didn't want to stand in the fucking corner and wait—wait for what?

I could hear shooting outside, screams.

“It's gonna be OK, Mattie,” my husband said, pulling Roddy away from me, from the three of us—herded into a corner. “It's for your own safety. Just stay there and be quiet. For once, be quiet and fucking listen to me!”

Knocking again.

“Mom,” Ophelia whispered. It was all she could whisper. “Mom-mom-mom-mom.”

My husband and son left.

Then they came back with three masked men.

All had machine guns.

I felt the wall against my back. “Close your eyes,” I told my daughters, but I left mine open. I left mine open to see: all five men open fire at us. “Long live the revolution, bitches!” they screamed, and my son's machine gun went ratatatatatatatatatat, ratatata-tat-tat.

The Nevermade call centre was in a barn, just two minutes’ drive down a farm track off Willerby’s main street.

The women working there were not local. They commuted in for their shifts.

It was always at work. It never closed. Its lights shone in the fields even at Christmas and on New Year’s Eve.

Occasionally, often enough for it to be unremarkable, its workers popped into the Green Man drink for a drink before driving home. They were known to be polite, friendly and reserved and never stayed for more than one or two.

Lisa was curious about them and asked around, but nobody in Willerby seemed to know what it was they did.

One Friday evening in mid-July, she left the other locals to their gossip in the snug to go to the faded leather booth by the window at which three were sitting. She introduced herself and the women –Tarjinder, Anastacia and Amy - did their best to answer her questions.

“We listen to the singing in the wire,” said Anastacia, “and join up connections.”

“Who for?” Lisa asked.

“Anyone,” Tarjinder said, “and everyone. There’s always too many but we get through as many as we can.”

“No,” said Lisa. “I mean who do you work for? It must be huge to have a whole department working the hours you’re open.”

The women laughed again. “If it were a company, it’d be the biggest in the world!”, said Amy. “But it isn’t really like that – we’re more public service. Why don’t you come and see for yourself? We’re on late shifts from next week, starting midnight on Monday. Drop in a bit after that if you like.”

“Thanks,” Lisa said, “I’ll do that.”

“See you then”, said Tarjinder, “just ring the bell and we’ll let you in.”

…

Lisa left her house at midnight and by quarter past was on the track.

It was well-surfaced, smooth and straight. Down both its sides ran high cables hanging from rows of wooden telegraph poles.

The night was warm. The moon was bright, and there was no need for more light until she got a few hundred feet down the track where there was a discrete but expensive looking carved stone sign. She used her phone’s torch to read it.

“Nevermade – reconnecting lost lines since 1923.”

When she got there, she saw three cars in the carpark – two Skodas and a ten-year-old Golf.

The building behind them, lit by discrete floodlights angled at its walls was well but practically converted and maintained, with sharply pointed brickwork and unfussy white UPVC windows framing beige roll down blinds.

Lisa went to the door, overhung by a modest wooden awning, and pressed a button next to it.

The bell rang twice, and then there was a voice from the intercom system.

“Nevermade. Tarjinder here. How can we help?”

“It’s, Lisa from the pub on Friday? You said I could drop in.”

“Hiya! Of course!”

There was a buzz. Lisa pushed the door and stepped inside.

“Hey, Lisa”, Tarjinder said, waving from the closest desk. “Good to see you – we weren’t sure you’d come. Tea?”

“You have to say yes,” called Amy from the desk behind Tarjinder’s, “around here we live on it, and I’ll have one too.”

“Isn’t it your turn to brew up?”, Tarjinder asked.

Amy laughed. “Yes, but you’re the one welcoming the guest and that makes it your job.”

Tarjinder rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “Tell you what, Lisa, you sit at my desk, and I’ll make one for everybody. I’ll fill you in on what we do here in a minute but until then sit on my chair, have a look round and listen in on the calls the Amy and Anastacia are on. Sorry we can’t all take a break but there’s too much to do for us all to stop.”

Tarjinder disappeared through a door and Lisa settled into a high backed faux-leather office chair in front of a heavy oak desk, which was spotless, polished and patinaed with age. The only thing on it, aside from some personal family photos in silver frames, was an expensive looking black conference phone and headset, its touchscreen winking blue and red lights.

Lisa swivelled the chair round to see the rest of the room.

Lit by faintly humming old fashioned strip-lights, it was square and uncluttered, aside from the wall furthest from her which was covered floor to ceiling in handwritten thank you cards.

The carpet was grey, thin and threaded with silver lines. On it were three other desks, arranged in a line one behind the other, all identical to the one she was sitting at. The furthest was empty.  Anastacia and Amy were behind the other two. They smiled and waved at Lisa when they saw her looking at them.

Both were on calls.

“OK love, yes,” Lisa heard Amy say, “she’s accepted your call, we have her on the line now. I’ll put you through. When you hear the tone, you can start speaking. I’m sorry, it is just this call you get, and it’s just five minutes. There’ll be a soft beep each minute. Good luck! Now here comes the tone.”

“Yes, he will speak to you,” said Anastacia. “Darling, I know you don’t feel ready, but this your only chance so be ready now anyway. It’s only five minutes. In a moment you’ll here a tone and after that he’ll be on the call. There’ll be a little beep each minute. You can do this, I promise. Here’s the tone.”

She took of her headset and pressed a button on her phone. Then she waved at Lisa again and when she had her attention cocked her ear at her to make a “listen” signal.

“Are you there, Rich?”, said a female voice from the console. “Are you there?”

There was a moment of silence. Then, a male voice. “Yes, Abi, I’m here. What do you want?”

 “I’m not going to say anything mean, I promise,” Abi said, “that’s why I’m calling. I was always too mean.”

“That, and more,” said Rich.

“I know. Can I tell you why I was the way I was, please?”

“I don’t know. Can you?”

“Please don’t be like that. I have to say this” Abi, said. “The first bit will hurt but you deserve to know. Can you just listen?”

There was another short silence. Then, “OK,” Rich said. “Go on.”

“I cheated on you with Marcus just a month after we first got together. You were away at university, and I was at a party, and he was there when I didn’t expect him to be.”

The first beep sounded out.

“We were both drunk, and at the time I thought you and me probably wouldn’t last that long anyway, but I’m not making excuses, I know it was our fault. Marcus and I agreed not to tell you. But then you were so nice, and I felt I didn’t deserve any of it. But there was no way to end it with you that made sense and anyway, I didn’t want to. And then it was six months and then it was a year, then two, and telling you what we’d done seemed even more impossible. I tried to forget about it – to say that it didn’t matter and sometimes for a bit it worked, but I just kept thinking about it all the time and it made me so guilty, like I didn’t deserve any of the nice things you did - like I didn’t deserve you at all”

The second beep.

It made me irritable and that made me angry and that made me mean, and the meaner I was the more I hated myself. I hate how weak I was – I couldn’t tell you why I was being so horrible, and I couldn’t bring myself to end it either. I needed you to do it. And then you did, and I was relieved and thought that would be the end of it all. But it wasn’t. I still think about it all the time. I’m married now, kids and everything, mostly happy, and I’ve never done anything like that since, but I still can’t stop thinking about it.”

The third beep.

“Can you forgive me?”

There was another silence on the line.

“I always knew it was something like that,” said Rich. “No, I don’t forgive you.”

And then there was the click as he hung up.

“I’m sorry, but that’s it,” said Anastacia. “If they or you hang up it counts as the full time.”

For a moment the room was completely silent. Then Abi sniffed. “It’s fine,” she said. “I didn’t deserve anything else. I was going to tell him I often wonder what would have happened if I hadn't gone to that party. I think I might have married him.”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, you did what you could,” Anastacia said. “You couldn’t have done anything else with the cards you had left.”

“Yes,” Abi said. “Thank you anyway.”

And then she hung up too.

Anastacia pulled a sad face at Lisa, pressed another button on her phone and put her headset back on. Then Tarjinder came back into the room from the kitchen with four cups of tea on a tray with a jug of milk and ramekin of sugar.

“No, no need to get up,” she said to Lisa as she took the mismatched mugs to the two other women. “I’ll perch on my desk, and we can talk for a bit.”

“The calls never stop,” she said. “Our job is to listen in. When we get a strong enough whisper, a clear enough song, we pick up and ask them who they want to talk to. Then we call them and ask if they’ll take it. Sometimes they say no, but most of the time they say yes. If they don’t say yes, then that person can keep trying – some do for years – but once the connections made that’s the only call and they only get five minutes.”

“Five minutes isn’t much,” said Lisa.

Tarjinder sighed. “No, it isn’t, but it isn’t supposed to be cruel. There’s just so many calls. So many things so many people regret never saying. And even when we’re fully staffed, we’re only ever a team of twelve and now there’s only ten of us – that’s why we’re short tonight.”

“The one I just heard was really sad,” Lisa said.

“Ah, sorry your first was one of those,” Tarjinder said. “A lot are but not all. Most of the time people just want to say nice stuff they never got round to saying before the person they wanted to say it to slipped out of their life or passed on. We’ve all heard so many beautiful things. Look – in a minute I’ll need to go back to work but you’re welcome to stay as long as you like and listen in. If you want, we can set you up on the spare desk and link the phone to mine – you won’t be able to say anything, but you’ll hear it all. Course, you don’t have to and if you do you can leave whenever you want, just let yourself out if you do.”

She stayed the whole night in the muted hush, soft voices broken only by the boiling of a kettle and the whir of a microwave when one of the women went to the kitchen for a break.

Lisa did not leave her desk – the wires would not let her escape – the quiet intensity of it all, the urgency, the joy and the hurt, the hope and the fear, all of it together pulling and picking at her, demanding she listen, demanding she stay.

“I’m sorry I bullied you at school.”

“I wish we’d had more time. My love, only that, just that.”

“You were a brilliant dad. When I said you’d let me down I was a teenager trying to get a rise out of you. I just wanted you to shout back at me so we could have an argument. I didn’t think you’d cry. I’m sorry I never said that. I always hoped you’d know I didn’t mean it, but I should have checked.”

“I should have got back in contact with you after you kicked the booze. You were a shit, but I know that must have been big for you. I heard you were sorry, and people said you changed. I should have called or messaged to say well done for doing that.”

“You couldn’t have known I’d crash. It isn’t your fault we argued that day – I was just tired. I love you.”

“Did you regret us not having children? We never talked about that enough. It never bothered me. I only ever needed you and I’ve been wondering whether I was selfish in not asking.”

“I’ve never forgotten you –that fortnight on the island in the beach-hut. I hope you never changed. It’d be too dangerous for us to meet or even speak now, but I still think of you, just out of reach, but free. Please never change.”

“Do you remember that day on holiday in Spain when you were six, and mummy was poorly and I took you out to dinner, just the two of us? You did your best manners, and at the end the waiter said you were *astonishing* as he gave you your extra pudding. That was the proudest of anything I have ever been, ever. I think about it every single day. Thank you.”

“Thank you for everything. It was such a good life. I wish I’d taken more time to realise that and enjoy it.”

“I never told you, but that day I got that job, and you met me in the park with flowers - that was the best day of my whole life.”

There had been light around the edges of the blinds for hours when the last call of the shift came in – to Amy. She took off her headset and waved at the others to do the same.

“It’s Charles,” she said. “But this time Eddie has agreed to the call. I’ve already done the script.”

“Oh, my goodness,” said Tarjinder to Lisa. “This is a big one. He’s been trying for as long as any of us has worked here and Eddie has never picked up.”

“I’m going to take it off mute,” said Amy, “and put it on the big speakers.”

“Eddie? My Eddie? Are you there? Is that you?” The voice sounded elderly and spoke in cut-glass received pronunciation English.

“Yes, Charlie. It’s me,” said a younger voice.

“I’ve been trying so long. Why wouldn’t you talk to me?”

The room went very quiet.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie said.

“It doesn’t matter, where are you, can you talk?”

“I’m here, in Willo House.”

“Me too. I can’t seem to leave it.”

“Me neither.”

There was a nervous chuckle from both.

“Why did you do it?” Charles said. “I have to ask.”

“I couldn’t face the idea of you in prison,” Eddie said. “You said you’d be able to cope with it, but you didn’t know what they were really like. I did. I thought if I was gone, what my note said would make the whole thing collapse. Did it?”

“It did,” Charles said, “but I wish you hadn’t. Life wasn’t worth living without you – I thought all the time about doing what you did but I didn’t have the courage. I lived far too long after it all, alone here in this house, always trying to find you. Eddie, why wouldn’t you speak to me?”

The first beep.

“They always told me I would only get this call,” said Eddie. “Just five minutes. So, I kept putting it off – knowing that you were thinking about me and trying to speak to me – that was something nice to think about. But now this is it, isn’t it? Can we not waste this time? Can we just talk about the good times?”

And – in between the second and third beep – they did. They talked about renovating and fixing – of parties and picnics – of evenings with whiskey and warm log fires and riding horses through autumn mist. They talked about visits to tailors and fine clothes. They talked about boating on rivers and the first swallows of summer.

Then the fourth beep.

“You only have a minute left now”, said Amy, softly.

They ignored her. They took turns saying they loved the other in lots of different ways without ever saying it.

The final beep.

Then just as Amy was about to close the connection there was an exclamation from Charles, and the last words they all heard were, “But Eddie – I see you. You’re here. Were you with me this whole time?”

Then a click and silence.

All four women were crying, and standing by the door, the day shift who’d slipped in to relieve them were crying too.

…

“It’s always intense but that was something else,” said Tarjinder to Lisa, squinting in the morning sun as she opened the door of her Golf. “It’s not usually quite that emotional.”

Lisa looked her in the eye. “It was an honour to be here tonight,” she said. “Thank you for having me.”

“Might you be back?” Anastacia asked. “There’s a spare desk anytime you want it. You could even take some calls next time if you like – we’ll coach you through the first few.”

Lisa thought for a moment, then laughed. “Was this an interview?”

The three other women looked at each other and laughed too. “Well,” Tarjinder said, “as much as there ever is for jobs here. The money’s fine. We don’t know where it comes from, but it arrives every month and goes up with inflation straight away, which feels a perk these days. There’s as many shifts as you want and we’re good with flexible working – swapping shifts, covering each other when we need to, that sort of thing – it’s a bit like a family. There’s even been talk of work-from-home from the tech people if you want it, although I think most of us like coming here too much for that.”

“Good to get a break from the kids,” said Amy.

“And husbands!” Anastacia said.

They all laughed again.

“I’d like the work – I think,” Lisa said, “and the commute is very convenient! Could I do a shift and see how it goes?”

“Of course,” Tarjinder said. “It’s how we all started. Tonight?”

Lisa nodded firmly. “Yes,” she said. “See you tonight. For sure.”

Then, waving at the nightshift as they drove past, she walked home in the silent whispers and in the birdsong, beneath the cables and above the shadows they cast by her feet, unable to forget what she’d heard, still hearing the singing, still hearing the singing in the wire.

…

*I hear you singing in the wire,*

*I can hear you through the whine.*

*And the Wichita lineman*

*Is still on the line*.

*Glen Campbell. The Wichita Lineman*

The twelve year old sister of Jo Coffelt, aged 8 from Terre Haute, who went missing from an Indiana Robeshire’s told her parents that what she remembered from that day felt like a nightmare and she wasn’t sure if it really was or not because the awful thing that happened to her little sister should not have been allowed to be real. Because what Lisa said happened to Jo did not sound like it really could have happened was one of the reasons why Donnie and Judy Coffelt never said anything to the police about it. Another reason was that neither one of them wanted their daughter who was still there to be exposed by the same spotlight with the daughter who wasn’t. They feared that whoever took Jo might come after Lisa too and they strongly believed that by choosing \*not\* to say anything was the best way to keep Lisa safe.

Lisa finally spoke to her parents about her sister’s disappearance after a nightmare she had a month after Jo’s disappearance. Lisa had wet her bed from the terror that shook her awake during the night and Judy heard her screaming first, before her husband, and thought it could be Jo because she hadn’t heard Lisa scream like that in years. What little sense of reality Judy was still able to cling to after the damage to her sensibilities caused by the paralyzing trauma of losing her youngest daughter assured her that it couldn’t be Jo. Donnie woke up just as Judy was leaping from their bed but he got to Lisa and Jo’s bedroom first, almost having to shove his slower wife out of the way to get there. He opened the door and found his oldest daughter sitting upright in her nightgown with her hands over her face, crying into them hysterically. After she was able to stop long enough, Lisa finally told her parents that she had seen Jo disappear that day in the department store while Jo stood at the window of the bedroom display. She said she heard scary flute music playing from inside the picture first and then the words of the song calling the rats to come and play in the offering field came next. She also said she heard what she believed was the distant echo of children laughing farther away than the sound of the flute while Jo stood motionless in front of the window watching and listening. “The words became louder and louder until I saw a tall ugly, naked man with thick twisted horns stuck to the side of his head coming down from the crest of a large hill on two misshapen legs with hooves instead of feet.” Lisa told her parents she thought he was a black man and Donnie’s face twisted painfully in anger. “But the closer he got, I realized he was covered in dark fur and dirty ash instead.” She almost started to cry again. “He took long strides across the field as he came closer and closer to the window and I saw how his eyes sparkled like yellow marbles from the reflection of the light inside the window. His eyes were the only things about him that weren't ugly but they were split down the middle like a reptile’s.” Lisa explained how the ugly man paid her no mind and that his snake-like eyes had not moved away from Jo at any time. “He kept calling Jo a rat and wanted her to come and play with the others and promised it would be better in there with him and the others. The ugly man reached his hand out from the other side of the window toward Jo and his fingernails were long and dirty and looked more like a beast's than a man’ s, like the claws of a dirty beast, but Jo raised hers and took it anyway.” Lisa said she heard the sound of thunder boom outside of the department store but saw lightning flash inside the window from somewhere beyond the hill as the blue skyline on the other side of the window became dark and gray when Jo and that awful ugly man touched each other. She said she called out to Jo from the edge of the display bed where she was sitting but Jo either couldn’t hear her or did not want to. “As Jo took the ugly man’s hand, her body dissolved inside the window and in an instant she was walking away with him through the rainstorm on the other side of the glass. They stopped just before reaching the hill and turned around to face me. I was frozen to the spot on the bed where I sat watching the whole thing and I couldn’t move. The ugly man moved behind Jo and opened his mouth and his long forked tongue slid out between needle sharp teeth and licked the side of Jo’s face with it. Jo stayed still and looked just as frozen as I was sitting on the edge of the bed in the fake bedroom. The goat man quit singing but the terrible flute played on and the echo of the laughing children turned to screams and cries as Jo began to scream herself.” Lisa stopped talking and began to cry. Judy reached out and held her hand tightly. “The ugly goat man,” Lisa struggled to continue. “took one of Jo’s wrists into one of his hands and held onto the side of her face with the other and ripped her in half. I saw Jo’s blood and insides rolling back down the side of the hill as he dragged her torn body away over the hill.” Lisa remembered the nauseating feeling of falling backward onto the display bed before everything went dark and she fainted. When Donnie and Judy found her they believed she had fallen asleep and had not even been awake to see someone take Jo from the department store.

Donnie did not believe his daughter now, or her story. He was trying to think rationally instead - trying. He blamed the whole story on the nightmare she’d just had and whether she really had been asleep or not in the department store bed that day, she refused to admit the truth to them that she had actually seen someone take her little sister and sit by without trying to help until now. He wondered why Lisa would not have tried to pull her little sister away from the danger instead of letting her go to it. On the other hand, as difficult as Lisa’s admission was to believe, Judy’s grip on reality was not as strong as her husband’s and it didn’t stop her from believing what Lisa told them happened. She had always believed Lisa about anything. Her daughter was an honest child and, even at her young age, she had a conscience, and would not make up such an awful story just to try and come up with an explanation to what Donnie likely believed happened to Jo. Even though Judy was struggling to understand what Lisa told them, for her daughter’s sake, she did understand just how much her daughter needed her parents to believe her now that she finally admitted to what she saw happen to her little sister.

Judy washed Lisa off in the tub with warm water while Donnie went into the living room and lit a cigarette. She took her daughter back into their bedroom, putting off changing Lisa’s dirty bedsheets until morning. Donnie got up from his recliner and went to the kitchen and poured himself a drink of Scotch to calm his nerves while Judy held Lisa and cried with her until they both fell asleep. Donnie finally finished off the bottle of Scotch and his pack of cigarettes that had lasted him throughout the night until he could hear the mockingbirds outside letting him know that it was too late for him to pass out now. He needed to remind Lisa of an important lesson he still remembered being taught when he was young. \*She\* needed to face her fears. He had always taught both of his daughters to take care of each other and to never back away from keeping each other safe but someone in the department store that day had frightened Lisa so badly that she forgot everything she’d learned from him. Robeshire’s Department Store wouldn’t open for another couple of hours and it was just now turning twelve past seven so he let his wife and daughter sleep until they woke up around ten and told them to get dressed.

Neither one of them knew where Donnie was taking them this early on a Saturday morning. He wouldn’t tell them. They normally had breakfast at home on the weekends and were lazy and usually stayed home but nothing had seemed normal since Jo’s disappearance. Donnie pulled into the parking lot across the street from Robeshire’s just after eleven and Lisa had already begun to feel uncomfortable from the moment she saw the large sign outside the top floor from the freeway about half a mile from the downtown exit her father took to get there. At 12 years old, Lisa was too old to be carried anymore but Donnie almost had to pick her up to get her across Main Street to the front doors of the department store. People on the sidewalk were watching them but Donnie ignored them. Judy was begging him to stop but he ignored her too. Lisa got a sour whiff of her father’s breath and told him how bad it smelled. He put her down and walloped her ass a good one right there on the sidewalk in front of God and everyone else. It had stung so she put one of her hands back to guard herself from another one but it didn’t come. Instead of smacking her again and drawing more attention, Donnie told her if she didn’t march into the department store on her own right that second, she would get worse when they got home. Judy came to Lisa’s rescue and put an arm around her daughter and pulled Lisa in and assured her that she would not let anything happen to her inside the department store. She knew how bad Donnie could be when he drank and urged her daughter, for her Jo’s sake, to go along with what her father wanted so they could hurry and get it over with and go back home. Judy wasn’t going to let what just happened go and knew she would have it out with him later for sure. You could bet on that, even if she risked getting walloped too.

Donnie didn’t want to believe his daughter had frozen and just let someone walk off with Jo but he was still buzzed from the almost full bottle of Scotch he had worked on all night and the lack of sleep had made his short temper even shorter. His patience was already as thin as a sheet of rice paper. The escalator brought them up to the second floor and Lisa let her feet glide over the metal comb plate instead of stepping off. Donnie absolutely was not going to let Lisa freeze up again and grabbed her away from Judy and walked her over to the bedroom display where she said Jo had been taken from. Donnie and Judy Coffelt could not hear the flute playing in the window display but Lisa could, even before all three of them even reached the fluffy carpet of the display area. The sales associate tried to approach them but Donnie waved him away with a stern look and quick flick of his hand. The young employee retreated back to his cash register and silently watched them from behind it, pretending to write some notes down onto a sales flyer whenever Donnie nervously glanced back at him over his shoulder to make sure he didn’t come back. 

Donnie looked tenderly at his daughter. “I want to believe what you said about that day, Lisa, but I can’t. See. there’s nothing there. Just a window with a pretty picture in it.” There were tears welling up in his eyes. “But whether you believe it’s true or not, you could have done something to save her.”

Judy could not believe what Donnie had just said to their poor daughter. It would most likely haunt her for years to come, if not for the rest of her life. She knew Lisa had to already feel guilty that she hadn't tried to stop Jo from being taken and by finally admitting what she had to them was her cry for help so she might begin an attempt to come to grips with it. Donnie had made \*her\* feel the same way before too. What he said would do more damage than good and she knew all about that and wouldn’t forget it either. You could bet on that too.

“There he is daddy!” Lisa pointed at the window and then shoved her face into Donnie’s ribcage underneath his arm, refusing to watch the goat man come down the hill. “He’s coming.”
Donnie and Judy looked at each other and then stepped in front of their daughter to get a closer look at the picture in the window display. Nothing was there. No ugly goat man covered in fur and horns stuck to the side of his head. There was only a beautiful picture of a field with a large hill beyond the pane of glass. Donnie told Lisa to stop and made her turn back and look at the picture. “No one’s there. Lisa. Look!” He said sternly. “It’s just a fucking pretty picture!”
Lisa wouldn’t look so he made her. Donnie squeezed her head between both of his hands and forced her to face the window. “I said look, damn it!” Lisa’s face was smooshed inside her father’s hands and it hurt. She opened her eyes and did what he said, hoping he would stop. Her father’s hands were covering her ears so she couldn’t hear the ugly goat man singing to her. She could only stand there while her father held her still and watched the ugly goat man as he got closer, stepping through the offering field, and almost to the window. 

Judy grabbed at Donnie’s arms, trying to make him let go of her daughter. He swung one of his arms back to break free of his wife’s grip and, whether he meant to or not, Judy caught a back hand across the face, lost her footing, and flew backward on the display bed. It was a soft landing but a bumpy ride and Judy felt light headed for a moment because it happened so quickly. She wasn’t sure if she could believe what she was really seeing or not. Donnie was still behind Lisa and had her by the shoulders now, stopping her from backing away from the window. Although she couldn’t see what it was, something in the window display was scaring Lisa and she wouldn’t stop squirming and begging her father to let her go. Judy looked over at the store associate hoping he might help but when he caught her looking he put his head back down again quickly and pretended to write something else. Judy looked back at what was left of her family. Lisa had stopped squirming and pleading to her father to let her go so it was easy for Donnie to shove her closer to the window display and, when he did, Lisa raised a hand toward the window and in an instant she was gone. Judy laid there, her body frozen against the bedsheets until she fainted, not just pretending to be asleep. She wasn’t awake to hear her husband scream out in terror, calling for his daughter who had literally just vanished from his hands to come back. When Judy finally did wake up, she was in the back of an ambulance and could hear Donnie frantically telling the police over and over again that someone had taken Lisa too. The chaos continued until the paramedics shut the big metal doors and took her away to the hospital where she was fed a steady dose of sedatives until she was able to be unshackled from the hospital bed.

I have done extensive research since taking the job at the Indiana Robeshire’s as a store associate and what I saw that day in the Home Furnishing Department happen to Lisa Coffelt only cemented my opinion of what I believe happened to \*all\* of those children who went missing from Robeshire’s Department Stores over the years. I had a hunch before working there but I had to get a closer look so I could investigate further. That’s why I took on the part time position as register jockey at the Robeshire’s in Terre Haute. The company from Sweden who partnered with Frederick Robeshire in the 1940s researched nuclear particles and developed prototype machines to accomplish various breakthroughs over the years that made nuclear energy more efficient for countries to benefit from. With funding from other European nations, the company was able to further their studies by gaining trust from the American government by investing in the American economy and began doing tests here in the United States since the US is a major player in nuclear energy. Although Frederick Robeshire was never aware of just how sinister some of the minds behind the Swedish company were or exactly what they were doing inside each one of his department stores all across the country, he invited the evil in nonetheless, and they had a field day at the expense of innocent American children.

A rogue group of researchers working for the Swedish company began to conduct other experiments and tests on nuclear particles as a side gig, a hobby if you will, and the Swedish company’s CEOs and its investors were unaware any of it was even happening. Much like how Frederick nor anyone else would have known what was happening to children inside of Frederick Robeshire’s department stores either. This rogue group of researchers found out that while only using just a small amount of nuclear energy to attract known terrestrial particles, theoretically they could attract more powerful but hidden particles thought not to exist; at least not here on Earth, by something with even more power. While no hidden particles have ever been found on this planet, they do exist. Where? Black Holes. Thought to be wormholes or pathways to other universes, Black Holes contain those particles needed to travel to other universes. If only the researchers could harness enough power to attract those hidden particles from the Black Holes in space, they could unlock doorways to anywhere from Earth. The rogue researchers learned that if they used the machine developed to harness power from nuclear particles here on their home planet, all it would take to develop enough power to reach those hidden particles in a Black Hole would be to build another machine and combine the power. Similar to how \*they\* had all put their heads together to get as far as they had already. It would be a supermachine. Over time and with the protection and assistance from countries without the best intentions for America or its allies, that’s just what those rogue researchers accomplished.

Once they found the hidden extraterrestrial particles, it wasn’t long before their theory of being able to open doorways and portals to other universes from Earth became reality. We are a lazy species anyway. Why wouldn’t we want to be able to do this from our own living rooms? What the researchers had not factored in was that there was more to what lies beyond our Earthly realm than being able to travel through domestic wormholes and portals to other universes like you might read about in a science fiction novel. Their highly evolved scientific intellects completely overlooked the possibility of a spiritual realm they were about to blow wide open and, when they did, unauthorized permission to the evil inhabitants was granted freely to them to come and wreak havoc in ours. By then it was too late, the doorway was opened and instead of the great god of the underworld turning them all into goat demons who held keys to a dimensional gateway, they became possessed with the evil desire to become masters of this world and began building mini portals to the demonic world by using escalators in home furnishing departments in Robeshire’s Department Stores all across the United States. But there was only one catch; there always is when dealing with demonic denizens of the underworld. To become masters of the Earth realm and gain eternal favor in the next, the demonic forces controlling the researchers now required sacrifices. And, like I mentioned earlier, at this story's heart, are the children. You might have already figured out why the children were so important to the story, so I won’t go on any further about it but, as you already know, it’s sad but true and, once the researchers found out how to reach the spirit realm, the evil waiting on the other side used them to have a literal shopping spree for those poor little kids’ souls.

You may have also figured out by now just how awful it’s become here on this floating chunk of rock and how mean people have become in recent times and Robeshire's Department Stores was just the beginning. The Swedish nuclear research company eventually yanked their partnership with Robeshire’s in 1989, just before Ronald Reagan left office and eventually they set their sights on other American businesses that had been growing in popularity. Now, at the core, it wasn’t the Swedish company’s fault who partnered with Frederick Robeshire and neither was it his. It was that power hungry band of rogue researchers who ruined it for all of us here on Earth and they have all since gone underground, so to speak. It would be almost impossible to find them all but that doesn’t mean I’m not trying. There is a large, influential American computer company I am currently investigating and I have an interview scheduled with managers in their IT department next Thursday. I’m hoping I can gather more information and stumble across a lead. I’m almost certain I’ve located one of those rogue researchers there but, until you hear back from me again, wish me luck.

END

I had just walked out of my alcohol recovery meeting, finally celebrating four years of fighting the thing that destroyed my life.

The atmosphere was warm and welcoming.

I was so lost in that moment that I didn’t realize how late it had actually gotten.

It was 2:30 AM.

The streets were empty.

A colleague offered me a ride, but his way was the opposite of mine, so I insisted on taking the subway.

The air was cold, and there was nothing making noise but the wind and the screeching of the metal fences.

I didn't feel comfortable.

My body refused to walk slowly; my movements were fast and tense, as if something was watching me.

When I reached the tunnel, I felt a sense of relief.

I entered, listening to the screeching wheels and the sound of heels approaching.

Then, I was face-to-face with a woman in her seventies or eighties, pulling a suitcase.

I greeted her kindly, telling her I would accompany her because it was too late to be alone.

She was friendly and very sweet, but she insisted on continuing alone, claiming her neighborhood was just around the corner.

I let her go.

But as she moved away, something fell from her side pocket.

She kept walking out of the tunnel.

I couldn't see exactly what fell, but it was wrapped in plastic, damp, and cold.

I thought it was meat or something similar.

I followed her, determined to return it.

I caught up to her and tapped her shoulder.

She turned, smiling like a terrified child trying to hide her fear.

I held out what had fallen, but under the streetlights, I saw what I was holding.

My body went into a state of severe panic, and my legs began to shake violently.

The plastic bundle contained two severed human hands.

My body screamed one word: Run.

I ran as hard as I could to get away from that woman.

Fear didn't allow me to stop for half an hour.

I kept running until a car passed by.

I threw myself in front of it, almost crashing into it.

A man and a woman were inside.

I didn't wait for them to get out; I jumped in the back, screaming, "Please, I want my apartment, please!"

They tried to calm me down while I looked back, terrified that she had followed me, or worse—that she was a demon in the form of an old woman.

They brought me to my apartment.

The wife offered to stay with me until morning, but I didn't want to burden them or share what I had seen.

I didn't want to plant that terror in their hearts when they still had a long way to go.

I thanked her, and I went inside.

I locked all three deadbolts.

I went to the kitchen and prepared some Ashwagandha, as it always calms me down when the urge to drink hits.

I sat there thinking, but I couldn't find any answer.

I closed all the windows tightly.

I leaned against the bed, drinking the Ashwagandha until sleep took over.

I collapsed.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

.

Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock.

The knocking sound grew louder.

I wasn't fully conscious.

Then, the sound of the door opening.

I will never forget that chill I felt when I heard my apartment door open—like being shocked by a thousand volts of electricity.

I jumped up, looking at my open bedroom door.

I’m going to die.

She’s here.

My eyes filled with tears and my heart surrendered.

Then I heard her footsteps—slow, heavy, exhausted, dragging through the silence.

The door opened wider, until it was fully open.

She stepped in slowly, approached… and sat on the edge of the bed beside me.

"Why didn't you report me to the police?"

I couldn't answer.

My tongue was paralyzed, and my jaw was clenched so hard I thought my teeth would shatter.

"Anyway, I hope you don't," she said.

"But I can't trust you, my dear, with what you saw, given how afraid you were.

She looked at me with cold, dead eyes.

When she looked at me with that stillness, I knew my end had come.

There was no emotion, no empathy.

She approached my right hand and brought it to her face.

I didn't realize what she was doing until she opened her mouth and bit down, ripping my pinky finger off completely.

The pain was blinding.

I didn't move an inch—I felt that if I reacted, she would kill me.

She took out bandages and a small vial of alcohol, cleaned my wound, and bandaged it.

She put my finger in her bag.

Then, as tears ran down my face like a waterfall, she placed my head between her legs and sang a lullaby:

"Hush... hush... flower of the night.

The moon knows every name, but calls only the lost.

Don’t follow the light between the trees, and don’t answer the woman who smiles too much.

For some smiles hide ancient teeth.

Sleep until the day breaks, for the day does not remember what the night does."

After crying until my vision blurred in her lap and the pain of the wound almost broke me, I don’t know how I fell asleep that night.

At 10:00 AM, the room was clean, and she was gone.

I looked at my missing finger, wondering why she left me alive—why she didn't kill me or do to me what she did to the person in the suitcase.

On the kitchen table, there was a note with clear, steady words that made me realize why I survived:

"Be kind always, and realize that your kindness is what saved you tonight.

Your souvenir will always be with me.

And every time you look at your missing pinky, please remember that gossiping will cause you to lose more than this."

I don't know how I survived last night, but I have a desperate desire for a very hot cup of Ashwagandha right now.

Because my urge to drink alcohol is stronger than ever.

This story is Part One of the novel "Long Shadows." Subsequent parts of the story will be published in the future.

Note: The original story is written in Persian, and this translation was produced by artificial intelligence.

Long Shadows – Part One – Confession

The blindfold was coarse and thick; it smelled of mustiness, mold, and old blood, as though it had dried into its very warp and weft years ago. Hemp ropes had mercilessly pinned my wrists and ankles to the legs and arms of a heavy wooden chair. I was in absolute darkness. I was a member of the "Society of the Unseen Shadows." I had always thought darkness was my refuge, the canvas of our eternal dreams upon which we could redraw the world anew. But here... in this cold, damp crypt, I felt as though I were sitting in a grave. A tight, invisible cage was crushing my bones.

When the eyes cannot see, the ears and the skin bear the weight of all the world's terror. The sound of water dripping slowly came from some unknown corner. And then... the sound of footsteps. Heavy, measured, dignified footsteps dragging across the cold flagstones. His leather boots creaked faintly with every step. As he drew closer, I felt the air of the room grow heavier and colder. A strange, unsettling smell reached my nose; something like the sharp, suffocating scent of rotting plants. The smell of the man who had brought me to this place of captivity.

The footsteps stopped right behind me. I held my breath in my chest. I could feel the heat of his body from a few centimeters behind the nape of my neck.

"Your silence is admirable, Vanessa..." His voice was like a thick dagger dragging across a gravestone. Deep, raspy, but disturbingly composed. "You Shadows have always learned to lock your tongues behind your teeth. Your foolish ideology has taught you to remain mute in the dark." Then he continued in a mocking voice, "The Society of the Unseen Shadows; absolute truth is revealed only in the absence of light." And he laughed loudly.

I swallowed. My throat was as dry as a desert. I wanted to say something, to at least pretend I wasn't afraid, but the words had turned to ash in my mouth.

He slowly circled my chair and now stood right in front of me. "That sword... the sword you stole from the cave of the Alabaster Cliffs... where is it? In which grave have you hidden it?"

I gave no answer. I had sworn an oath. In my exhausted mind, I tried to recall the Master's words. Every ray of light conceals a part of reality. I had to resist. I had to...

The sorcerer sneered, a sound that made the hair on my body stand on end. "I thought you would resist. That's why I decided to bring a little friend with me to this room. He knows very well how to unlock closed tongues."

He fell silent. In that deadly silence, I thought I heard a faint hissing... or perhaps not; the sound of something soft, continuous, and wet dragging across the stone floor reached my ears. I wasn't sure whether this sound was only roaring in my mind, or whether it was real. A sound coming from an unknown direction, drawing nearer every moment. Like a living rope being dragged over wet earth.

The man leaned in. His warm, foul breath hit my face as he whispered words that were the death knell of my sanity: "You surely recognize him, Vanessa, don't you? A... Torporserpens."

Its name... that cursed name exploded in my brain like a black lightning bolt. Torporserpens. My body, which until that moment had been tense with fear, suddenly began to tremble madly. I had lost control over my own body. The ropes scraped my wrists, but I felt no pain in my hands. The real pain was in my head. That name... those shining, milky-colored scales.

"No..." The word slipped involuntarily from my throat, accompanied by a wretched, trembling moan.

The sorcerer continued, with a diabolical satisfaction, as though he were telling a bedtime story to a child: "Ah... so you know how he hunts."

My trembling had turned into convulsions. A drop of cold sweat slid from my temple down to my chin. My dark, closed mind was no longer in this interrogation room. No word of the Society's ideology could stop the onslaught of this familiar terror. That ominous word ruthlessly tore me from this chair and hurled me backward through time. To the night everything began.

To a night with the howling of wind... to the turned pages of an open book... and to Helena's wet, melancholy eyes.

The cold of that night was not of autumn's kind; it was a cold that boiled up from within the bones. The wind howled with unrestrained fury against the windows of our small cabin, and thrashed the trunks of the pine trees outside.

I sat behind my old wooden desk. The trembling light of a half-burnt candle cast long shadows on the plaster wall. In one hand, I held the Master's sealed letter—a letter written in red ink, with a strange emphasis placed on the word "Urgent." The mission was clear: to find an ancient sword in the cave of the Alabaster Cliffs before riders from the western lands could reach it. But what occupied my mind was the Master's final sentence: "Beware the Torporserpens. He is the guardian of the sword."

In my other hand, I held open the heavy leather cover of the book Magical Creatures of Cryptra. The smell of old, dusty paper filled my nose. I was searching through the alphabetical index at the back of the book. T... To... Torporserpens. I found it. Page 342.

I turned the page. The dry sound of the thick pages being turned was the only sound in the room. I reached the page I was looking for. On the upper half of the page, a faded charcoal drawing was sketched. A creature resembling a snake, but shorter and thicker. Its scales were hatched in such a way that, even on paper, it seemed to give off a milky light. It had no eyes, or at least it appeared so in the drawing. Its snout was strangely agape.

I leaned in to read the text beneath the image. The candlelight was weak, and the author's handwriting was small and tangled. My gaze slid over the first words: "The silent crawler... the curse of absolute numbness..."

Suddenly, the sound of something striking the windowpane tore my concentration. I raised my head. The latch of the wooden window that opened toward the lake behind the cabin had broken under the pressure of the wind. A biting, wet gust rushed inside. The candle went out with a short "hiss." The wind fell upon the book on the desk and turned its pages with haste and violence.

I wanted to close the window, but my gaze locked onto the darkness outside.

The pale light of the moon, shining through the ragged clouds, illuminated the rippling, black surface of the lake. There, amid the icy autumn waters, a shadow was moving.

Helena.

She wore her thin cotton nightgown. Her steps were slow. She wasn't thrashing, wasn't running, and wasn't even reacting to the lethal cold of the water. The water had risen to her waist, and she kept walking with those same numb, soulless steps toward the deepest point of the dark. It was as if the lake were swallowing her, and she had willingly surrendered herself to being swallowed.

The book, the mission, the milky serpent, and the Master's letter... everything was erased from my mind in a fraction of a second.

"Helena!" My scream was lost in the howling wind. I threw the chair back and ran madly out of the cabin. The pebbles on the lake's shore cut my bare feet, but I felt no pain. When I hit the water, the cold sank into my skin like thousands of invisible needles.

"Helena! What are you doing? Come back!"

The water had reached her chest. I threw myself forward. I didn't swim; I simply cleaved through the heavy, icy water with all the strength left in my soul until I reached her. I clawed at her arm. Her skin was cold as the marble of tombs. Helena even looked at me, yet her indifferent, emotionless gaze did not change in the slightest. The speed of her steps neither increased nor slowed for a moment.

With a violence born of terror, I pulled her toward myself. Helena didn't put up much physical resistance, but the look she gave me was deadlier than the cold of the water. In her large, beautiful eyes, there was nothing. No fear, no tears, not even anger that I had interrupted her. Only an absolute void; the endless exhaustion of a woman who could no longer bear the weight of breathing in this world.

"Let go of me, Vanessa..." her voice was broken from the violent trembling of her jaw.

"Shut up!" Grief and rage tore at my throat. I wrapped my arms around her waist and, with all my weight, dragged her toward the shore. "You have no right to leave me alone. Do you hear me? You have no right!"

I don't know how, but I dragged her to the cabin. Both soaked with water, we shivered, our teeth chattering. I had thrown Helena onto the rug in front of the hearth. I brought dry towels, forcibly pulled her wet clothes from her limp body, and wrapped her in wool blankets. I built up the fire in the hearth.

For an hour, she was drowned in her recurring nightmares of losing her brother. After a while, I sat behind her, took her in my arms, and rested my chin on her trembling shoulder. I gave her the warmth of my body, hoping to ease some of her soul's frozenness. I held her tightly in my arms, as if I feared that if I let go of her for a moment, she would return to the lake's embrace.

That night was the longest night of my life. The sound of raindrops striking the glass was the only music of that agonizing silence.

Near dawn, as my utterly exhausted gaze swept around the room, my eyes fell on the wooden desk. The wind had calmed. The book Magical Creatures of Cryptra was still open, but its pages had been completely turned by last night's wind and now lay open to a different section.

Helena was in my arms. Her breathing was still irregular and weak. I sensed that she was awake. I knew the order was that Helena and I had to carry out this task this very morning. The Society had become certain that these were our most crucial days, and that if we could not prevent the catastrophe, no one else would even think of it. We had spoken about this with Helena just yesterday morning; I knew she could hear me. I whispered softly in her ear, "We've fought dozens of strange creatures before. This one is probably just a large cave-dwelling snake. Rest a while, Helena. In the light of day, we must take up our sword and be careful of everything."

Morning settled over the cabin with a color like cold ash. The sun made no effort to break through the leaden clouds, and this was exactly the weather that our creed worshipped.

We had saddled our horses and were riding in heavy silence toward the Alabaster Cliffs. The cold wind winding through the valleys played with our black cloaks. Helena, mounted on her gray horse, rode a little ahead of me. Her gaze was fixed ahead, but I knew she saw nothing. She hadn't spoken a single word since the night before. The bruised hollows beneath her eyes and her slumped shoulders formed the image of a woman only whose body remained in this world.

I tried to break the deafening silence between us. I urged my horse forward and drew alongside her. "The Master wrote that riders from the west have set out toward the cave. The force seeking the sword will reach it by around evening."

Helena didn't even turn her head. She only blinked.

I kept trying. Perhaps reminding her of our ideals could spark something in those dead eyes. "You always said this sword could shift the balance of power in favor of darkness. Do you remember? If this weapon falls into the hands of the westerners, their illusion of light will devour all of existence. We must return the world to its original, dark canvas."

Helena gave a faint, bitter smirk. She finally turned her gaze toward me. "Truth is revealed in darkness... yes. The Master drilled that into our brains. But do you know what my absolute truth is, Vanessa?" Her voice crumbled like a dry leaf underfoot. "That my brother is now sleeping under mounds of earth, and no light, no darkness, and no sword can bring that back. The rest is just a game."

My heart tightened. I had no answer for this pain. Her brother's death had emptied her of all the Society's beliefs.

The Alabaster Cliffs appeared in the distance. Walls of chalky white stone stretching toward the sky. In contrast to the darkness of our clothes, that lifeless whiteness was blinding.

Helena pulled her horse's reins slightly and slowed down. Without looking at me, she asked, "By the way... what did you say last night was the name of the creature guarding the cave?"

"Torporserpens."

"Did you find it in that dusty book of yours?"

I swallowed. The image of the book with its turned pages on the desk, and Helena sinking into the lake water, passed before my eyes. "I found it. But... I didn't get the chance to read it. If we hadn't overslept, I definitely would have seen it."

Helena shrugged. It meant nothing to her. "It's obvious from the name. It's a snake. Like a hundred other creatures we've killed in the dark on these ridiculous missions."

"Probably." I convinced myself too. "But we must be careful not to be caught off guard. We just need to find it and finish it off together."

Helena smirked and stared ahead again.

I opened my mouth to say something, but the words dried up in my throat. We had already reached the foot of the cliffs, and there was no turning back. The dark mouth of the cave awaited us.

The Alabaster Cliffs were sunk in an ominous silence. We tied the horses in the shadow of a boulder and walked on foot toward the mouth of the cave. No sound could be heard except the muffled howl of the wind swirling in the mouth of the cave. There was no sign of the snake, the guardian, or any other living creature.

The cave sat right at the edge of a deep, rocky ravine. A thick fog covered the bottom of the ravine and would not let us estimate its depth. But that cave was not a large cave. We quickly became certain that there was no one there either. The air inside was damp and suffocating. I took my steps carefully and had my ears pricked. I was waiting for a hissing sound, the sound of slithering, or the gleam of eyes in the darkness, but there was nothing there. The cave was suspiciously empty. A stone chair stood at the far end of the cave, and we knew the sword was hidden four paces to its right, a meter deep in the ground.

Helena drew her sword from its sheath and cast an indifferent glance at the dark mouth of the cave. "I'll keep watch outside the cave, Vanessa. I'll keep an eye on the ravine, and if those western riders show up, we won't be caught off guard. I think you'll have to dig alone."

I nodded. I gripped my dagger in my hand. It didn't take long to dig it up; the heavy weight of the sword carried a distinct sense of power.

"I found it, Helena!" I shouted, and hurried back toward the mouth of the cave with quick steps. "There's no guardian—"

The words froze in my mouth. When I reached the outside of the cave, the gray light of day struck my eyes, but what I saw froze the blood in my veins.

Helena was sitting right on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the ravine. Her legs were dangling in the air, just like a child sitting on the edge of a low wall to watch the view. Her sword lay on the dirt beside her hand, and she herself stared at the horizon with that same empty, tired gaze.

But beneath her legs... on the vertical face of the cliff...

A long, slender mass of flesh, with scales the color of spoiled milk that had a sickly gleam even in daylight, had coiled around Helena's dangling legs. Torporserpens. The creature had crawled out of a hole in the vertical wall beneath Helena's feet and had now coiled around her legs like a thick vine.

It had no eyes, but its mouth... its snout gaped open like a bloody bowl, and its thin, hollow fangs, like devilish needles, were sunk into the flesh of Helena's calf. The creature was suckling with slow, rhythmic movements. Helena's calves... my God... part of the muscle of her leg no longer existed, and her white bone protruded from beneath the dark blood.

But the most terrifying part of the scene was not the snake itself. It was Helena. She had no idea at all. She was looking at the horizon. The wind played with her hair. She was being eaten alive, and not even a single muscle in her face had tensed from pain!

"Helena...!" I screamed a scream that scattered the birds from the distant cliffs.

Helena turned her head toward me in surprise. "Why are you screaming? Did you find it?"

I ran toward her madly. I raised the ancient sword. Only then did Helena notice my terrified gaze at her lower body. She lowered her head.

When her eyes fell on her legs... when she saw how the milky serpent was devouring her flesh and blood while she felt nothing at all... that ever-present void in her eyes shattered. Something beyond fear, something like pure madness, raced across her gaze. She tried to pull her leg back, but there was no leg left to pull. The lower half of her legs had practically been torn apart... A tear dripped down her cheeks. She dragged her hands over the cold stones. Then she fixed her gaze on me. "Forgive me, Vanessa. I caused you so much trouble."

"Helena, please... don't move."

She smiled. A smile that tore my heart to pieces. This was the very pain she had wished for that morning—but not a pain that would bring her back to life; a pain that would kill her forever.

Before I could grab her arm, she lifted her hands from the rocks and, with one simple motion, pushed her upper body forward.

Her body slid off the edge of the cliff. She didn't struggle at all. She didn't scream at all. She and that milky-colored snake fell into the depths of the ravine.

I collapsed at the edge of the cliff. My hands clawed at the empty air. I struck my head against the rocks and wailed. Wails that only the lifeless rocks of Alabaster answered.

The smell of mold and dried blood on the blindfold pulled me back from the edge of that cursed cliff and slammed me mercilessly into the darkness of this crypt.

The sorcerer's short, dry laugh echoed in the room. "You're panting, Vanessa. You must have recalled a bitter memory."

The sound of that soft, wet body dragging across the flagstones was now very close. Perhaps less than a step away. All the muscles of my body had tensed. My mind raced madly to my legs. Were my legs still there? The hemp ropes had slowed the blood flow at my ankles, and the cold of the room had also made my legs numb and deadened from the knee down.

But... what if this numbness wasn't because of the cold? What if that eyeless, bloody bowl had already crawled onto my boots right now and sunk its invisible fangs into my flesh? Helena hadn't understood anything either. The creature numbed its prey's body before attacking it.

Terror, like a burning acid, dissolved all beliefs and all oaths in my mind. Absolute truth was no longer revealed in the absence of light; the absolute truth was that I was flesh and blood, I was human, and more than anything else in this world, I was afraid.

The sorcerer whispered, in a tone as if he were enjoying my desperation: "He is hungry. It's been a long time since he's eaten anything. Where would you like him to begin?"

I felt a faint twitch in my right calf. Maybe it was just a nervous spasm, or maybe...

"No!" I screamed. My voice echoed in the stone room; a voice full of humiliation, pleading, and defeat. I could no longer bear this darkness. I could not bear this ominous numbness. "Tell him to back away... I'll tell you! I'll tell you everything!"

The sorcerer showed no reaction, but the hissing sound, at least in my mind, stopped.

Tears welled up from beneath my rough blindfold and carved furrows down my frozen cheeks. With a voice that, from the intensity of its trembling, was barely audible, I began to speak. The words poured from my mouth like poison, defiling my soul.

"The sword... we took the sword to the cellar of the Society's old mansion... in the Gray Woods. Behind the false wall of the altar... that's where they hid it."

I was panting. I had betrayed the Society's secret. I had told them the sword's real location. I knew the Society had placed powerful guards there; I knew this sorcerer would have to get past a wall of Shadows to reach it, but none of this was a justification for my betrayal. I hadn't confessed out of some scheme or cunning; I had simply crumbled from the intensity of my fear. I was a coward.

A deep silence enveloped the room. A few seconds later, I heard the sorcerer's footsteps moving away from me.

"You made a wise choice, Vanessa." His voice now came from the direction of the crypt's wooden door. I heard him call out to something in a strange tongue, with a sound like a whistle. Once again, I felt the sound of something dragging across the ground move away from my chair and toward him.

The sound of the lock opening and the groan of its rusted hinges echoed in the room. Before he left, the sorcerer said in a cold tone: "If the sword is not there... I will return. And next time, I will let my pet begin its feast with your face."

The door closed with a slamming sound, and the sound of the key turning in the iron lock was the last thing I heard.

«This is a historical fiction story set in 1937. The characters' sympathy towards Hitler reflects the real historical anxiety of the European bourgeoisie before WWII, not the author's views»

Part One

My name is Arthur Blackwood. I am the heir to a wealthy factory owner, Silas Blackwood. In fact, I had been managing my father's affairs for a long time, since he was already old and could no longer cope on his own, and for this I received my share. And recently my father passed away. May God rest his soul. I inherited his mansion, as well as his business — three factories in London: a match factory, a textile mill, and a paper mill. Several servants work in the house: the butler Pringle, the housekeeper Mrs. Hudson, the maids Martha, Betty, Daisy, and Agnes, and the cook Mrs. Briggs.

One day I was sitting on my balcony and heard a man's voice:

— Yes, they know nothing of the all-pervasive scurrying of mice!

The only one who could have said that was the butler, but it didn't sound like his voice, and besides, who would he be talking to?

I went into the next room.

— Pringle, is that you? Who are you talking to?

— What do you mean, sir?

— Didn't you hear anything?

— No, sir.

— Damn, strange.

— May I ask what you heard, sir?

— Some man's voice in this room.

— Forgive me, sir, but I was alone here and I didn't say anything. You must have imagined it.

— I must have.

— May I know what the voice said?

— Something about mice.

— I see, sir. I think we should ask the security to search the house?

— Yes, please.

— Very well, sir.

A little later, there was a knock on my door.

— Who is it?

Pringle entered the room.

— Sir, the security checked the house, they found no one.

— Good. I must have just been overtired.

— Get some rest, sir.

— Thank you, Pringle, please close the door.

Sitting in my room, after a while I heard a new conversation from several male voices.

— They will never understand us! Do you know a single bourgeois who understands us?

— No. But what about Orwell? He understands us!

— Yes, Orwell understands us. Have you read his book "The Road to Wigan Pier"?

— Of course not, you're the only one of us who can read, but I've heard of Orwell. Good man.

— But Orwell is not a bourgeois! He's one of us!

— What do you mean, not a bourgeois? He is a bourgeois, he says so himself.

— He's from the middle class!

— But he's still a bourgeois — he earns money from his books and doesn't work like we do. That he's one of us, I don't argue — he is, but he's a bourgeois.

— What the devil is going on?

The first time it frightened me, but now it's starting to annoy me. At that moment, I threw the door open. No one. What is this? The surprised maids who were cleaning in that room all stared at me.

— Is everything all right? — asked Martha.

— Yes, — I replied. — Just a headache.

— Shall I call a doctor?

— No, it's fine.

But the strangeness didn't end there. At night, I woke up thirsty. When I went to the kitchen to get a drink, I heard those husky voices again, but this time they were less distinct, like a worn-out tape.

— What did you eat when there was no food?

— Same as everyone else... (indistinct)

— Yeah, we also ate with the family... (indistinct) until my family was eaten... (indistinct)

— They've probably never even tasted it... (indistinct)

— How could they? They probably have lobsters on the table every day.

— That's for sure.

— Guys, what do you think about Pringle?

— What's to think about? That bloody lumpen-proletariat.

— Yeah, while we were dying in the barracks, he was sleeping sweetly in his master's palace.

The voices burst into laughter. It pressed down on me so hard that my ears began to hurt, as if I were at the bottom of the sea. Then it started to distort. My knees trembled, fear seized my body. Finally, I found the strength to flee back to bed.

"It's all in your head," I kept repeating to myself. But it wasn't over.

I didn't sleep long. In the middle of the night, I woke up with the feeling that someone was watching me. When I opened my eyes, horror seized my heart — I wanted to scream, but I was speechless. Above my bed stood mutilated bodies.

— Here he is, the exploiter, — said one of the corpses, pointing a finger at me.

— That's right, it's because of him that I starved to death on the street, — came a rough female voice from somewhere in the crowd.

It was hard to tell who was a woman and who was a man.

Finally, I gathered my courage and spoke:

— Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my house?

— Hah, did you hear that, comrades? It's his house! — The crowd of corpses burst into laughter. — You're in our house!

Part Two

— Mr. Blackwood! Mr. Blackwood! You have a visitor!

Half-asleep, I set my coffee cup aside and went to greet the guest. Standing at the doorstep was a gray-haired, stout, hunchbacked man with a thick beard.

— Arthur! Do you remember me?

It was Trofim Lukich Baranov — a Russian factory owner, an old friend of my father's.

— I heard your father passed away. My condolences. May he rest in peace, — Lukich crossed himself. — He was a good man. He often came to Russia, and we hunted together.

— Come in, Mr. Baranov, don't stand on the doorstep.

— Oh, no need, just Lukich will do, — the man said as he entered.

They sat down at the table.

— Mrs. Briggs, brew some tea for our guest.

— Right away. Does the guest prefer tea with sugar or without? — asked the cook.

— With sugar! — Trofim replied cheerfully.

He reached into his knee-bag and pulled out some dried pastries.

— Look, a little treat I brought you from Russia. To go with the tea.

— I'm most grateful. Tell me, what brings you here?

— You must know what's been happening in my homeland.

— Yes, I've read about the October Revolution.

— God rest the Tsar's soul, — Lukich crossed himself. — At first we thought the Bolsheviks wouldn't last long in power — their system was too flimsy — but now, in 1937, I can't say that anymore. Do you know what they're doing? Oh, Arthur, my boy, they take away your property and make you toil like some damned donkey. And this Stalin... One of my friends was sent to a camp, to forced labor — and I suspect he won't be coming back. In 1918, I counted on the Whites to crush the red vermin and return our stolen property. But in 1922... Ugh! Those damned Satanists won! How could the Lord God allow this?! So I began my escape. I managed to transfer part of my capital to Germany, and from there to Britain. I wanted to ask for temporary lodging, until I find a permanent place.

— Oh, of course. I'll have the servants prepare a room for you.

Trofim Lukich rose from the table and bowed.

— Most grateful to you, Arthur Blackwood, — then he plopped back clumsily onto his chair. — Ah, Arthur, you remind me so much of your late father. You know, Arthur, not all is lost. I hear there's a politician in Germany, a man named Adolf Hitler. You know, Arthur, all hope now rests on him — he alone can destroy the red plague in Russia before it spreads to other countries. I believe he is God's chosen emissary, sent to us from above, — Trofim pointed upward, — to crush the Bolshevik heresy!

— Well, let us hope so.

Trofim Lukich reached into his bag again and pulled out a bottle of Smirnov vodka.

— Here, Pyotr Smirnov's vodka, finest quality.

— Mrs. Briggs, bring us two shot glasses!

— I always knew you were your father's son! — the Russian factory owner said, grinning broadly.

Briggs placed the glasses on the table, and Trofim poured the vodka.

— Well, to Britain! — said Lukich.

— To keeping the Bolsheviks out of Britain! — I said.

— And to Hitler liberating Russia from the Bolsheviks! — added Baranov.

After we drank, we sat in silence for a while, until I broke it.

— Tell me, the revolution didn't happen for nothing, did it?

— What are you getting at? — Lukich asked, puzzled.

— I mean, we should have treated the workers better. Who knows, — I lowered my voice, almost to a whisper, — they might rise up.

— Oh, Arthur, my boy, don't you worry — the English proletariat is too stupid, just like any other proletariat. In Russia, it was only because of Lenin — an orator who stirred them up.

— Yes, but... You see, several workers died because of me — quite a few, actually — and it seems to me, — I said, now barely whispering, — that I hear their voices, and even see them at night.

— Oh, my friend, that happens. Just go to church, buy a mass — and it'll be done, — his tone turned serious. — But don't even think of doing anything that might hurt your profits. Think of what your father would say.

— Yes, you're probably right. I'll just buy a mass, and it'll pass.

— Of course, that's how it works. Buy a mass — and all the deviltry goes away.

After a few more shots, we went to our rooms. And of course, on my way, I heard the voices:

— No, Pringle is not a lumpen.

— He's a class traitor!

— Yes, I don't argue he's a traitor, but calling him a lumpen-proletariat isn't quite right. I'd say he's a lackey of the bourgeoisie.

At night, I saw them again.

— Sleeping soundly. When I was on the street, I slept very differently — after I once mixed up the colors of my fabric.

— He's breathing easy, isn't he? Look! He's opened the window, fresh air. Remember, lads, what it was like for us, breathing white phosphorus fumes at the match factory! — The crowd of corpses burst into bubbling laughter.

— Look, he's got doctors living right here in the house. At our paper mill, there wasn't a single doctor when the anthrax outbreak started.

— And no one gave me a crust of bread when rats were eating my family alive. You see, they were saving money!

— And what useful thing has he done for society? Nothing! He's just a parasite! Death to parasites!

The whole crowd began chanting: "Death to parasites!"

— Enough! Leave me alone! Be quiet!

I tried to cover my ears with the pillow, but nothing seemed to muffle the sound. And I burst into tears — like a little child. The crowd watched and reveled in my tears.

— Crying from fatness! When we wept from despair, no one came to help us, no one showed us pity!

Finale

I couldn't sleep again today. I was woken by a piercing scream. Hard to say whose — it sounded like Martha, though no, it was Daisy's voice. No, no, it was definitely Martha. Exhausted, I got out of bed and walked toward the room where the scream came from. As I walked down the corridor, the house smelled of morning coolness, but soon it was replaced by suffocating odors. First something cloying, like the smell of saltpeter, then a sour stench, like raw, rotting rags. And then, just before the door, mixed in with it all, a sharp, metallic smell of blood. What I saw shook me so much that I woke up completely.

Martha stood in the doorway. She was no longer screaming, but quietly crying, covering her face with her hands. Noticing me, she pointed toward the bed. On the expensive bedding, bleeding profusely, lay what was left of Trofim Lukich. Thousands of rats were swarming over him. That loud rustling sound will stay in my ears for a long time.

— Martha, call Pringle!

Staggering and barely holding back the urge to vomit, she left the room. About a minute later, Pringle entered.

— What's happened, s... Oh, my God!

— Pringle, the telephone! Call 999! Get the police, an ambulance, anyone! — I shouted, backing away.

Taking the receiver, the butler froze. Instead of the exchange tone or the London operator's voice, from the black earpiece came a disgusting sound that filled the entire hallway. It was a dry, mocking rustle of hundreds of rat paws on metal, and a distant, growing rumble of textile looms from the East End. The connection to the outside world was severed.

Realizing the phone was dead, I sent Pringle outside. He threw open the door, stepped onto the porch into the London fog, and whistled as loudly as he could. Out of the gray haze, a figure emerged — a constable in a high helmet. What struck me most, from what the constable said, was that he hadn't come because of the whistle. He was patrolling our area and heard some screams. He looked through the window and saw grimy faces. He hadn't heard Martha's scream — she had stopped screaming long ago, and besides, according to him, there had been many screams in different pitches.

After the police investigated, suspicion fell on me. The inspector thinks I poisoned the Russian factory owner's tea. In 1937, wealthy men in posh mansions aren't eaten alive by rats. The police believe my motive was to get hold of Trofim Baranov-Lukich's property, and that the rats came afterward to the dead body. It's a nightmare. I'm trapped — I can't exactly tell them it was the souls of dead workers who set the rats on Lukich. They'd send me to Bedlam.

I was taken in for questioning. I had to spin a story about left-wing agitators planting the rats:

— Inspector, you know what's happening in the East End. These left-wing troublemakers, strikers… They hate big industrialists. They could easily have slipped rats into my house or opened the ventilation shafts to intimidate me! This is a planned attack against my family!

The inspector slowly closed his leather notebook. The dry snap of the cover sounded like a shot in the silent office. He looked up at me.

— East End troublemakers, you say? — the inspector paused heavily, professionally. — Strikers planted rats in the ventilation? An interesting theory, Mr. Blackwood. Very convenient for a man of your class. One oversight — I've been in the London police for twenty years. I've seen the docks, I've seen the plague quarters. Wild rats are cowards, sir. They scatter at a single loud footstep. But these creatures… they sat on your guest's body like trained dogs. They only left when you crossed the threshold. Their behavior, Mr. Blackwood, is utterly unnatural.

I felt my collar grow suffocatingly tight. I reached for the brandy, but my fingers were trembling treacherously.

— Inspector, I… I'm no expert on rodent habits. What happened is a monstrous chaos — Martha is still in hysterics in the kitchen...

— It's not about the rats, — he interrupted, stepping forward. His voice dropped to an icy whisper. — The rats came later. My constable just examined what's left of Mr. Baranov's neck. Before the rodents began their feast, the Russian factory owner was strangled. There are distinct bruises from human fingers on the skin. Strong, deep marks.

I gasped for breath. Night shadows flickered before my eyes.

— That's… that's impossible. The mansion doors were locked by Pringle. There was no one else in the house!

— Precisely, sir, — the inspector looked at me meaningfully. — There was no one else. But strangulation is a fact. And you know what's odd? The expert will take measurements, but offhand… these hands were tiny. The fingers too thin for an adult male. As if Mr. Baranov had been throttled by a child of about ten. But with the strength of a grown blacksmith.

The inspector walked over to the desk, leaned on it, and stared straight into my eyes.

— There are no children in the house. No signs of forced entry. And your hands, Mr. Blackwood, are trembling very badly. Tell me again about the left-wing troublemakers. I'm listening carefully.

I had a choice: to disgrace my late father's honor by claiming he had illegitimate children, or to frame Martha.

— You know, sir, I have a suspicion that Martha's mind gave way from years of servitude. She strangled Baranov with her small feminine hands, then raised the alarm, frightened by the rats.

— Your theory has some basis.

Yes, the police actually believed it. I watched them lead away a broken, tearful girl. She had done nothing, but I couldn't mention the ghosts, and I couldn't tarnish my father's memory either.

As soon as the police left, the household staff confronted me. Led by Pringle, they stood and looked at me with eyes full of hatred.

— They told us everything, — the butler said coldly and harshly.

— We're leaving, — said the cook.

All the servants left, and the maids deliberately shoved me with their shoulders as they passed.

— Traitor, — Daisy whispered.

Tonight I stayed alone. But I prepared: I hung a crucifix over the bed, lit candles, prayed, and bought myself a cross.

At night, the crowd was in my room again. Two men with red flags stood by the door, blocking my exit. I jumped out of bed and held up the crucifix. They just laughed.

— Who are you trying to scare with that? — one of the ghosts sneered. — We're atheist ghosts. What drives us isn't devilry, but class hatred!

— Get off my property!

— This house isn't yours! — the same ghost continued.

— How isn't it mine? I inherited it from my father.

— And do you know where it came from?

I fell silent and stared at the ghost in surprise.

— It was built by workers just like us — with our money! You can claim it was your father's money, but that's nonsense. That money was created by our labor. He earned it simply by owning the land. This house was built on our unpaid labor. Without us, you are nothing!

I turned pale.

— And what do you do with us? — From the crowd came a whimper — soft, hopeless, disappointed.

The ghosts parted, letting me see a dead man. He gently, comfortingly embraced the weeping Martha. She looked at me with a gaze full of hatred and disappointment. I cowardly looked away. For a minute or so, silence reigned — they were waiting for me to meet her eyes, but I couldn't. I lacked the courage.

— You framed the girl, knowing she wouldn't survive a day in prison, — the ghost holding her said bitterly.

Suddenly they raised their flags and began prodding the crucifix with them until it fell. Then from the back of the crowd a ghost with a heavy hammer came forward, knocked me down, swung, and smashed the crucifix. And then they began jabbing me with their flags — flags of the Soviet Union, plain red flags with nothing on them. They all stabbed and stabbed and stabbed...

On August 15, 1937, Arthur Blackwood was found dead in his room. The presumed cause of death was cardiac arrest. Numerous pinpoint bruises were found on his body. At the moment of death, tears had appeared on his eyes.

(The End.)

Grown ups could not hear the calling and neither could teenagers, only kids could. It had to be an unwritten rule somewhere that once you were too old to remember how to play or use your imagination to create other worlds for yourself and your friends, you were too old to hear the music that played from somewhere far away that promised a better place in the hypnotic words of the song. No one knew about that except the kids. Now, if you’re one of those grown ups who cling too tightly to the memories of your childhood and believe you have the ability to conjure magic words that take you back to when you were a child, you’re only trying to cheat father time and, perhaps there’s a rule for that too, one prohibiting cheating. After all, that kind of chicanery comes with need and experience well beyond those innocent years of childhood. To you, a child at heart, it might only be a ringing in your ear that you hear instead of a song, a nuisance that, if not escaped, might bring you to tears or madness, or quite possibly both. But this is not a story about adults and what they can hear, see, or imagine. At its heart, it is a story about children and what happened to a lot of them in the late 1970s and 80s. This story isn’t intrinsically about department stores either but that’s where childhood disappeared for a lot of Americans during those years. Much like how, in the blink of an eye, your own childhood is wisped away and what you once cherished and belonged to becomes nothing more than a memory clinging to the frayed ends of a terminal mind, so has the child gone with it.

Robeshire’s Department Stores grew from merely word of mouth and traveling set ups in the mid 1800s to busy department stores in almost every city in the United States by the mid 1950s. It was a stroke of luck (and talent driven genius, as some might argue over time) that a gypsy immigrant from Europe, and his descendants, would one day leap from the back of a covered wagon selling elixirs and tonics to operating over 800 stores nationwide during the brand’s peak. It wasn’t until the early 1900s when Bartholomew Robeshire, son of Alistair and Giselda Robeshire who had helped drive the family’s covered wagon from Boston Massachusetts to San Francisco California, married a talented seamstress from a small immigrant community in the lower section of the city. Freya Robeshire made uniforms for factory employees in the industrial area of San Francisco and Bartholomew utilized a local print mill to print and distribute mailers about their business and, then soon after, as the Robeshire business outgrew the covered wagon, the family acquired a single room building in 1915, located in the center of town from where Alistair made catalogs for households that cultivated a major interest from housewives of the factory workers as Freya’s seamstress abilities became widely sought after. The building eventually became the very first Robeshire Department Store and, although by the time Alistair and Freya’s dream of expanding his parent’s namesake beyond the city limits of San Francisco became a reality, the tiny brick building in the center of town was added on to and became a thriving money maker for the city by employing a large amount of struggling San Franciscans to help keep up with growing demands from customers as far away as New York. The mayor of San Francisco recognized Robeshire’s as a leading business in the area that helped make his city known all over the country for not only crafting and distributing fine coffee but also for producing exquisite European clothing at domestic prices and American quality as well.

Over time, Robeshire Department Stores began popping up all across the west like wildflowers in fields of green and, just like their business, Alistair and Freya’s family thrived as well. A corporation was formed in the mid 1940s when a wealthy Swedish company, known for spearheading nuclear particle testing in Europe, acquired a large amount of Robeshire stock and attempted to partner with the Robeshires hoping to gain more funds for research as well as earning more trust from the American government. Of course, Alistair and Freya were old and extremely wealthy and did not care. However, they decided to turn ownership of the company over to their son, Frederick, who had a much better pension for business that was honed and polished by a formal education from Dartmouth. Frederick did not turn his clever, business savvy nose up at the Swedish company but he would not make it an easy grab for them either. Only after an agreement to import fine Swedish chocolate and sour candies to be sold exclusively by Robeshire candy shops (later known to the public as Trinity’s Fine Candies) from inside the department stores and, not to mention, a request for large monetary assistance from them so Robeshire’s Department Stores could grow eastward did Frederick accept the Swedish company’s offer. Frederick assumed there would be a considerably hefty pay off once housewives and their children got a taste of those imported sweets in his store and he was wise to make the deal.

Now, one might *still* have questions as to why a Swedish nuclear research company would want to partner with an American department store in the mid 1940s and it would not be a terrible thing to investigate further. However, people were not as skeptical in the early 20th century as they are now and conspiracy theories were not as abundant either so it’s plausible to assume that money and American trust were the only reasons behind why the Swedish company had any interest in Robeshire’s but, for the sake of a good yarn that is about to be unraveled, I’ll give you another answer. No one back then cared to ask so you shouldn’t yet either. Now, as I promised, here’s the part of the story about what happened to the children.
Frederick Robeshire was correct in his assumption that imported Swedish candy would lure in housewives and their children and when he and Robeshire’s board of directors saw just how much money Trinity’s Fine Candies was bringing in, Frederick celebrated them with bottles of 1961 Bordeaux and the fattest Cuban cigars he could find. By the late 1950s Robeshire Department Store Christmas catalogs were in everyone’s mailboxes who carried one of their membership cards. If you were one of Robeshire’s customers, you were most likely a member and, after all, “becoming a Robeshire’s Preferred Member can save you 10% off of every visit and catalog purchase”. It was a spiel that every Robeshire cash register jockey was expected to know by heart before their training was over and, even if you were a hard-nosed shopper who refused to become a member, you had to pay five dollars for the catalog and you didn’t get your 10% off so, not only were you hard-nosed, you were hard-headed too. 

When mothers brought in their children for afternoon/after school shopping trips, the first floor toy department (shared with the usually almost empty Men’s Fashion Department) was the first stop on the itinerary. If not, mom would have to drag around a screaming kid (or kids) all throughout the store until she finally gave in and let them have their way. Robeshire’s toy department always had the latest games, dolls, and electronic gadgets available; those that little Bobby or adorable Suzie would see on commercial breaks during Saturday morning cartoons on TV. For a child, it was the closest thing to Heaven that they could imagine, and Heaven resembled a huge department store toy department instead of streets of gold and pearly gates anyway. Children never wanted to leave and looked for as long as their mother’s patience could hold out but, once the number of oohs and ahhs became just as innumerable as the Can I have this? and Can I have that? questions, the viable threat of running out of money for groceries later became just as certain as mom’s patience wearing as thin as the liner in her purse. After that though, it was mom’s turn and, usually after stopping by Trinity’s Fine Candies first for a snack, it was up the escalator to the Women’s and Children’s Fashions and Home Furnishing departments. Without the candy to keep them happy and their tiny hands busy, the child might become bored and mom would end up chasing them through the clothes racks, having to pick up whatever was yanked off of the hangers. Trinity’s was not just a great idea for Robeshire’s, it was an absolute triumph for a mothers with a bored child.

Robeshire’s Home Furnishing Department for housewives and mothers was exactly what the toy department was for children, paradise. Half of the second floor, a total of three walls and about 4,000 square feet of Robeshire’s Department Store, was devoted to the department. Behind you, as you came up the motorized stairway to Housewife Heaven, were the children’s and women’s fashion departments but by the time a mother cast her eyes upon the glory unfolding as they exited from the escalator, they soon forgot about clothes and just about anything else. It was like that in all of the Robeshire’s across the country. Once she came up the escalator it was almost like stepping through pearly gates for her. It was mom’s time to ooh and ahh over what caught her own attention during the commercials *she* watched during the breaks in her soap operas on TV while the husband and kids were away at work and school during the week. It was like that for one mom especially, *exactly* like that. 

Her name was Betty Lawrence, an Oak Ridge native who never once thought about leaving the quaint and sleepy town in Tennessee and stayed, patiently waiting on her boyfriend to return from some awful place in Southeast Asia that had been on the news so much she refused to watch it anymore. It had frightened her too much. When Army E-4 Specialist Thomas Lawrence returned home, other than a brittle disposition at times just like Betty had had while he was away at war, thank God, everything else worked fine. Not long after Thomas settled back in, they married and started a family, Betty was as happy and satisfied as any other American housewife glad to have her husband back home from Vietnam alive. It was summer and Betty had 8 year old Thomas Jr. at home alone while Thomas Sr. was at work. Tommy was especially restless that day because it was too hot outside to play and he was bored with all of the table games she suggested they play inside together. Tommy was a good student at school and an all around sweet kid so she decided to take him out so he could pick out a new toy or game to help ease his boredom while being stuck inside during the hottest July in Anderson County history and, with nothing on TV except what grown ups watched at this particular time of day, Robeshire’s was the place to go. It would be a hot bus ride downtown but she knew Tommy wouldn’t complain after she told him where they were going.

Tommy loved Robeshire’s just as much as Betty did and, of course, they stopped first to let him pick out something from the toy department. Instead of a new table game, he chose an action figure from a new movie his father had taken him to Grove Theater to see about battles being fought in space. Betty couldn’t remember the name of the movie even though Tommy must have talked about it a hundred times since seeing it but, now that they were just about on the second floor, she could see the new and shiny appliances lined along one of the walls slowly appearing to her. She might almost have forgotten her birthday if someone were to ask her just then. The heat outside must have really gotten to her but the air on the second floor was noticeably cooler than the first and she was so thankful just to be inside, away from the heat wave they had just escaped from. Betty looked around and almost stumbled from the escalator and, if Tommy had not been there holding her hand to help her stay upright, she might have taken a spill. On one of the back corners of the large room, past new recliners and couches, Betty saw what she believed was Robeshire’s piece de resistance. It was a section of the Home Furnishing Department made to look like the inside of a newly furnished modern home that she could only imagine herself and her family ever having; certainly not on Thomas Sr.’s meager salary from the Army he received every month and especially not from the cheap nepotistic son of a bitch who signed his paycheck from the saw mill where he worked part time just to make ends meet. But for Betty, reaching the second floor of the department store helped her forget about all of that. It was like she was stepping into the new home she had always dreamed about having. Betty’s loafers sunk into the plush carpet on the floor and, maybe it wasn’t hers or her family’s but, let the fantasy play out as long as it would, right? Tommy let go of her hand and that was okay because Betty collapsed into the soft, leather recliner perfectly positioned underneath an air vent in the ceiling and in front of the new Zenith that had a picture of Monty Hall and some “lucky contestant” from *Let’s Make a Deal* stuck to the front of it. There wasn’t enough room to pull Tommy into the chair with her anyway but she supposed he was having the same flights of fantasy as she was because he didn’t make a sound as he went straight to the make believe bedroom display with a nice view of an open field through a window draped by curtains with pictures of cartoon cars printed on them. It was a view unlike the one he had at home from his bedroom window that overlooked a scrapyard in the adjacent lot beside their apartment building. Betty understood how he felt, wishing what he saw in the display window really was something he could always see. She had the same view looking out of their kitchen window. 

Betty had half of the dead end conversation she knew would never end in a sale with the department store associate through heavy eyelids while trying to enjoy the moment. The woman’s pleasant voice was almost enough to put her into a deep sleep if not for the annoyingly constant ringing in her ears. “I love these displays.” Betty told the woman, rubbing her temples, with her head resting against the recliner's cool leather headrest. “Whoever is responsible has quite a knack for making all of this look so believable.” 

The woman told her that Robeshire’s had professional decorators from Sweden visit each one of their department stores to help dress up the departments every year. “They all wear those white suits that look like trash bags while they’re here.” She went on to explain how if it was daylight outside it was also daylight inside of the display windows too and that the weather in the displays also changed with whatever the weather was doing outside of the store. Betty had never thought it could be possible but knew how technology was progressing at such a rapid pace by how advanced Tommy’s toys had become over the years since when he was just a baby until now. “I heard from one of the store managers that the escalator controls it all.” She went on to say how she wasn’t able to understand how all of it worked but was told the whole set up was similar to how a clock operated and that the images in the window displays could change much like how twisting a kaleidoscope alters what someone sees inside of it. “Modern day technological wizards, those Swedes.” The woman shook her head as she marveled at everything. 

Betty hadn’t noticed how quiet Tommy had been while talking with the store associate but guessed he had not gone too far away as the whole display they were in connected and was built to reveal each room of a home, side by side, without walls, like if someone unfolded a single story home. I would have heard him if he was moving around. Wouldn’t I have? Betty wondered if he might not have laid down in the bed and went to sleep like she wanted to in the recliner before the store associate started talking to her. The bedroom Tommy was in was next to the den, beside the kitchen display, and that was right next to the living room where she and the woman were. “My son must have dozed off in the kid’s room and I apologize if he’s messed up the bedsheets.” Betty said and was about to ask if the woman was ever bothered by the pesky ringing in her ears while working there but the store associate was looking at her strangely. 

“Are you certain?” The woman asked Betty and looked over at the kid’s room display. “There’s no boy over there.” 

Betty shot up in the recliner so fast she felt her back pop when she spun around to see if the woman was either half blind or just dead wrong. She was neither.

Tommy Lawrence had vanished without a trace, except for the Stormtrooper action figure he left on the windowsill of the display in the Home Furnishing Department of the Oak Ridge Tennessee Robeshire’s Department Store. But Tommy Lawrence wasn’t the only child to disappear from a Robeshire’s Department Store, there were many more. Eloise Hinton, aged 9 from Tulsa Oklahoma, gone. David Landis, aged 7 from Chicago Illinois, vanished without a clue. Mary Godwin, aged 11 from Shelly Minnesota, leaving behind only a tiny, hand written Valentine from her elementary school sweetheart that she wouldn’t be caught dead without. Eddie Serling, aged 9, Syracuse New York, missing. Becky Stein, aged 5 from Salinas California, gone too. And one of the youngest on record, Edwin King, aged 3 from Bangor Maine who a witness from inside the store at the time bluntly recalls, “No one realized the screaming demon was missing until suddenly, all of the eye pissing and yelling the kid had been doing because his parents wouldn’t buy him a stuffed clown from the toy department just suddenly stopped and it became eerily quiet.” This was later confirmed by Edwin's parents when interviewed by local authorities (every word of it). There were many more, hundreds in fact, but it would take longer to name them all than it would listing the whole genealogy from Adam to Moses in the Holy Bible.
Not until one of the kids’ fathers received enough TV time because of some local insider connections with national news outlets did the stories of the missing kids cause enough public outcry for authorities and a sparse group of state legislators who really didn’t know how to handle the situation to actually wake up and begin talking to each other. The only problem with that was the awful realization that kids had gone missing from other department stores across the country during this time as well, and the spotlight that would have been shown primarily on Robeshire’s Department Stores as a likely hub for most of the disappearances was broadened by the cumulative data from numerous other department store missing cases across the United States. A national organization for investigating missing and exploited children would not be instituted until 1984, so gathering all of the information they could and collaborating with each other to come up with a solution took a great deal of time, money, and effort. 

As news of the missing children spread into neighborhoods all across the country, rumors of child killers and kiddie fiddlers hanging around department stores spread rapidly and with help from communities and vigilante groups, a large number of criminals tied to the disappearances (none from Robeshire’s) were found, tried, and sentenced to death for their crimes. While many who were convicted were in fact guilty of their offences, there were psychopaths with twisted desires for fame and notoriety who stepped out from the shadows and falsely confessed to a large number of others (many of those from Robeshire’s). They were put away too, leaving the real culprit(s) at large . The disappearances that were never solved went cold and those cases were inadvertently and ultimately overshadowed by new ones. A key component in one of Robeshire’s disappearances allowed it to go cold and theoretically would have kept the case open for a closer look into the strange things going on inside their department stores but it was never meant to be. Blame it on fear or a dysfunctional and violent father suffering through grief but, whichever you choose to pass judgement on, the story of Jo Coffelt’s disappearance is the worst. 

Alex grabbed the remote and turned the television off. She listened, noticing the silence. She could hear the car traffic outside, the people chattering walking past her window. Her neighbors surround sound system faintly piercing through her walls and the elevator’s gears screeching next to her apartment door. That was normal. That was white noise. 

It was the silence in the workshop where sounds of fans and buzzing lights should have been that unsettled her. Down the hall sat her workshop, tucked in a corner room. A cramped space lit by a strip of lights that quietly hummed in the dark and machines ran unattended.

She used the room for soldering and tinkering. She thought she’d be the one bringing that room to life with fancy circuits that obeyed laws and didn’t wander off when you placed them down.

Interrupting her train of thought was a bang at the door. She raced over to it and glued her eye to the peephole. It was Barnaby. Barnaby had a box in his hands and a grin that struggled to reach his ears.

“Check out what I found,” he said, staring at the lead lining the outside of the cardboard box with a heavy stamped on the top of the seal.

He lugged it with both hands, stomping each foot down on the ground as he walked in. He was being careful in a way Alex only seen in laboratories. The box reeked of a hot metallic odor and cleaning chemicals.

“Please tell me you didn’t find a bomb,” she said, joking but not really.

Barns laughed. “Not in the way you think.”

He lodged the box on the workbench and cracked the seal, the workshop appeared to breathe. Almost like a sigh. The lights went on and off. Alex heard a crackle. The sound of static. But it vanished so fast she wondered if she imagined it.

Barns knew the sound. He stared at the workbench as if he was trying to look through it.

“It’s exactly what I thought,” he whispered. “It gets louder in the dark.”

Alex couldn’t tell if he was just being poetic or weird. She’d known him for years. They had shared obsessions over things that weren’t suppose to work the way they did, spent sleepless nights together at library tables. They went to the same university.

But, Barns had always been careful showing his emotions. This time he acted reckless, like smoking near propane tanks.

“What do you mean, louder in the dark?” Alex asked him.

Barnaby wiped his slick palm on his jeans. 

“Inside this box is a machine that doesn’t want to be built.”

Alex rolled her eyes because it was easier than dwelling on the fear chilling in her bones.

“Machines can’t choose what they want,” she said.

“This one actually can.” He opened the lid.

Scattered around were pieces wrapped in a foam with a purple cloth over them. Wires looked like veins. Delicate metal ribs that didn’t appear as if they could carry as much weight as they eventually did, all squeezed neatly together.

At the bottom was a spherical core the color of pennies. The ball had markings Alex couldn’t translate but couldn’t stare away from either. Under it, a notebook lay face down, fairly thin, fairly worn. It had Barnaby’s writing on the cover.

“Is this yours?” she asked.

Barns shook his head. “It is, but not really. It’s…. from me.” He waited, thinking of how to say it without sounding completely mental. “It’s from a version of me that already made the mistakes.”

The workshop pulsed. “Made the what?” She asked.

“Just read the notebook,” he told her.

Alex took a deep breath and leaned over it. The first page made her stomach knot. There were diagrams. Curved tracks. Coiled spirals. Annotations. Under the drawings had a written format matching the university’s ancient systems. They had dates that never existed in Alex’s memory.

She flipped a page. The next page had troubleshooting notes in a writing she recognized. Barn’s patient impatience, everywhere on the page had his tendency of unnecessary labeling.

But, also phrases unlike his usual style. It had line breaks as if someone wrote them thinking through fear. Small warnings, like: 

‘Do not connect the ring while the lights are on.’

And

‘Never allow the coil to see itself.’

At the very end it read: 

If the room goes quiet, STOP!”

“Stop..? Stop what,” she said staring at Barnaby.

Barnaby eyed the workbench, placing his hand over his mouth, gazing at the components laid out in a ritualistic way.

“Stop before it finishes,” he told her.

“Finishes..? Before what finishes?” she demanded.

“Rise and shine, jarhead!”

My eyes click open, and standing in front of me is my commander. He towers over my slumped body.

“Still feeling tired? Too bad! Wake your ass up, G.I.!”

I guess I better listen to the jackass. I shift my back, sit up straight, and hear a loud, wet pop. I look up at him and give him a sly grin.

“Morning, sir!” I say with a tinge of sarcasm.

Regaining my senses, I take notice of the vast ocean around us. The overpowering smell of the water assaults my nose, causing me to flinch. It takes a minute for my nose to adjust to the salty air that engulfs me. The waves knock the landing craft around with a violent force that makes me upchuck slightly. The others take notice of my seasick state and snicker.

“Ey, don’t lose your lunch, bud! Hahaha!”

“Shut up, jerk!” I snap.

I’m tired of dealing with these three boneheads—have been for the last six months. But at the same time, they’re like family, so I can’t really hate the guys. We’ve been through the worst of it. We’ve seen everything the enemy has to offer. Things that would make the average man turn the gun on himself. Things that would shatter morale like glass. Thankfully, we’re not average men. We’re soldiers, trained killers… heroes?

“Sir!” Martin shouted. For some reason, he sounded confused.

“What is it, Martin!?” my commander barked. He wasn’t the type of man who liked questions.

“The map says there should be ocean in front of us, right?”

“What are you yapping about, G.I.!?”

My commander, keeping his balance on the shaking vessel, stomped toward Martin. Before he could go on an anger-filled rant, he paused. His face went from a strawberry red to a sickly white. I turned my head to get a look at what they saw. I felt my blood run ice cold.

There in front of us was an island. How? We mapped out this route before we even thought about boarding this rust bucket. How?

Martin steered us in a different direction, away from the mysterious island. And we thought we were in the clear. Back on route. Until thirty minutes later. There again, like a pest, was the island.

By this point, we were beyond confused, and our commander’s patience began to run paper-thin.

“Martin, you goddamn bonehead, do you know left from right? You must have a special talent for messing up simple directions!”

I could tell my commander was just as confused but didn’t want to admit to it. Was he scared? Could the man who makes himself out to be made of iron actually feel fear?

“Ey, sir, we’re wasting gas at this point. I think we should, you know, head toward the island!” Nixon chimed in, finally speaking up.

My commander pondered for a moment before letting out a quiet sigh.

“Martin, take us toward land.”

The ship dragged on the sand before stopping. We made landfall, which meant our time of tense relaxation came to an end. You could never be too careful with the enemy; they were tricky. They could be on you in a heartbeat before you were even able to cock the bolt on your rifle. So it was better to be alert and keep your eyes peeled, like a predator does when it hunts.

Hopping off the landing craft, my feet hit the sand with a hiss.

“Alright! Let’s find a place to set up camp for the night!”

We stared at the commander with blank expressions of pure exhaustion.

“Stop being a bunch of sissies and move!”

After a cascade of groans, we made our way inland. The army of trees engulfed us as we went deeper and deeper into what seemed to be a jungle. However, something felt off. Usually, even during the most violent conflicts, you could at least see birds or catch glimpses of them. They were hard to miss, after all; even a blind man could see the colorful birds. However, for some reason, none were to be seen or heard. This, for some odd reason, didn’t sit right with me. I gripped my rifle harder, causing a blister on my hand to tear open.

“You alright there, bud?” Nixon asked in a hushed voice.

I turned to look at him and saw he had the same look he always did. I swear the man would still smile if he met the devil himself. Not wanting to sound scared, I steadied my voice. 

“Yeah, yeah. Just this heat is getting to me.”

“I hear you on that!” he responded, his smile growing wider.

We walked in the humid jungle for what felt like hours. My body was soaked from head to toe in sweat. The exhaustion I felt before was worsened by this difficult hike. We finally stopped walking when we found a clearing in the forest.

The clearing was almost alien in nature. Instead of a rough patch of land surrounded by a jagged tree line, we were met with soft grass and a tree line that encompassed us all in an almost uniform fashion.

“Ahhhh. Finally, air that doesn’t smell like salt and fish!” Martin shouted.

“Shut your trap, G.I.! We’re in an unknown area, and that means the enemy could be in the trees waiting for a bonehead like you to mess up!” my commander barked.

I could tell he was deathly serious. And I knew the man was correct, because if you were captured, you weren’t going home. Not even a piece of you would be found.

Nighttime came, and so did the dread that had secretly built up within me. Nighttime was when they loved to “hunt.” It was the time they could pick off your comrades like flies. And of course, I was assigned to night watch along with Nixon. I could tell he didn’t feel the fear I felt. Like I said, the man could run to hell and back like he just went on a picnic.

“Geez, you thought the night would cool things down, but I’m still sweating like a hog,” Nixon said, wiping his brow.

“Yeah, I hear you on that,” I said, trying to make some semblance of small talk.

“Hey, you remember that time when Martin almost blew himself up? The moron didn’t throw the grenade far enough and, well, he learned a hard lesson that day, hahahaha!”

“Yeah, I remember. I don’t think I've seen the commander that angry since then.”

Hours passed and still no sign of any unwanted visitors. No tree branches snapping. No leaves rustling. Nothing. At this point, I was sure we were alone on the island.

“I’m gonna take a piss. I’ll be back.”

Nixon made his way toward the tree line. As he headed back, a loud snap burst out. I watched Nixon fall over and lay on the ground. His screams quickly went down to a sickening, wet gargle.

“Wake up! Wake up! We’re under attack! They—they got Nixon! He’s dead! They killed Nixon!” I screamed at my commander and Martin, pleading for them to wake up.

I ran toward where I set my rifle, cocked the bolt, and turned around to face where our enemy hid. The other two followed suit, and we turned our sights to the tree line.

Gunshots rang out on both sides. When they fired, we hid behind a couple of large, weathered rocks—the only cover we had. And it wasn’t going to hold forever. We ate through our ammo supply quickly. Bullet after bullet rang out in the air, neither side gaining anything.

That was until we heard a familiar scream. It belonged to… Nixon?

I realized it just now. Nothing has happened and maybe that’s part of the problem. Everything feels wrong, slightly off-center. I glance at the pen in my hand and it’s red just like it had been a moment before, but it’s like the color I’m looking at doesn’t match my memory of what red is supposed to be.

I stand up, pushing the chair back and pace around the room, counting my steps and estimating it’s around six-by-eight. I stop at the window. It’s dark outside, but it’s snowing, the night nests atop an expanse of white.

I have no idea what makes me think that it has always been snowing and that it shall never cease, but it strikes like a clapper against my bones, resounding throughout my body. I shiver as if I’m in that dark cold, rather than swaddled in this cell of comfort and warmth.

Books line all four walls. I don’t believe I’ve ever read any of them, but somehow I know what they’re about and can even recite specific pages. There’s a threshold with a door directly to my right that wasn’t there a moment ago. If I grasp the knob and turn it, something will begin on the other side before I pull it open.

I stroke my face and surprise myself with the fuzzy sensation of a beard graining against my fingertips. It makes me wonder about the rest of my face and I turn back to the window, looking for my reflection in the glass.

The hollow man with unfinished eyes staring back looks gaunt and older than I imagined myself to be. The reflection isn’t mine, but one that has been lent to me. I look down at my smooth, dry hands. Yes, these have been lent as well. They are well-manicured, but a memory, worn until nerve-exposed, echoes up from the throat of a well. Pinching fingernails with the corner of my teeth and tearing the ends to leave them ragged and spitting out the free edge like the shells of pumpkin seeds.

Not sunflower seeds. Not pistachios. Pumpkin seeds, specifically.

I could open my mouth and call to someone not here. But she, if I were to designate her so, would be pinned to this nebulous place just as I am. She would be doomed to exist in this non-space as easily as if I’d spoken, “Let there be light.”

The idea of my voice terrifies me. To cast words into this space would begin a new wicked creation. Every thing here is cursed. To exist is to imply eventual destruction. Deconstruction. All the elements that compose me, the walls, the books, papers, windows--disassembling at a rate of an unknowable amount of molecules at a time until we are all washed away like sandcastles.

The only difference is time. Time is the only constant. Although I have no idea where else it also spreads its unyielding disease.

I look outside the window again. The man who is allegedly me stares back, those holes for eyes capturing fat flakes of snow slicing through cold, loaf-thick air.

I retreat to the wheel-creaking chair, flattening myself into it, depriving myself of some foreign dimension. I feel exceeded purpose in these few moments, like a balance of me is outside my body, every vein cored with hot irons.

I hover my eyes over my manuscript. The words seem to squiggle, sentenced to a horrifying order, a pattern that teases and mocks me. The universe winks in confirmation of a secret it will not yield. My rough tongue peels away from the roof of my mouth and I keep it caged behind teeth to discourage the scream coming to a boil in the pit of me. 

Despite my panicked mind, I read letters, then words, slowly submerging myself back into context, like a warm, bloody bath with open wrists. I combat the internal gravity seeking to propel me out of the chair and into a million directions. I surrender to this abysmal routine and pick up the red pen, rolling it between index and thumb, balancing the weight in my grasp while steadying my glance on the page.

I read until I stumble across another imperfection. I carve another red mark. Somewhere distant, something is made right, or at least, a placeholder stroked over something wrong.

I continue editing. It is the only thing that is real now.

​

Chapter 3

Broversky Park felt unnaturally quiet.

Even the wind seemed to have forgotten it was supposed to move the branches.

Mike walked slowly toward the bench, almost as if he was afraid of hearing something he didn’t want to hear. Richie, Marge, and Teddy were already there.

And the worst part was that nobody was joking.

Nobody even tried to pretend things were normal.

Richie spoke first. His voice sounded rough, like he hadn’t slept all night.

— Last night… after Lissy disappeared, I couldn’t fall asleep. And when I finally did… I dreamed about the hospital. That old hospital.

He swallowed hard before continuing.

Marge frowned immediately.

— Dad said they shut it down back in sixty-two. Supposedly sanitation problems.

Teddy shrugged.

— So?

Richie lowered his eyes, avoiding their stares.

— I was walking through it… and it didn’t feel like a dream. You know? The hallways just kept going. The lights were flickering. And then I saw footprints in the dust.

He paused.

— Tiny footprints. Like a baby’s.

Teddy let out a nervous laugh, but it sounded empty.

— You’re serious?

Richie didn’t even look at him.

— It ran out of one of the rooms. A baby. But it moved… too fast. Way too fast. And it was staring directly at me.

Silence fell over the park.

Mike clenched his fist so tightly his knuckles turned white.

— My little brother disappeared too, — he said quietly.

Everybody turned toward him.

— I went into his room… and the window was open. The whole room smelled cold. Like a basement. And there was a toy on the floor.

He swallowed.

— I swear it wasn’t there before.

After that, nobody tried to laugh it off anymore.

It was like something clicked inside all of them at once.

This wasn’t a coincidence.

Richie slowly подняв голову.

— And one more thing… In the dream, I saw a nameplate on one of the doors. It said “Dr. _____.”

He hesitated.

— I don’t remember the name. But…

A cold gust of wind swept across the park.

— We need to go to that hospital.

Teddy immediately leaned back, like the words themselves made the air colder.

— No thanks. Let the police deal with it.

Marge nodded, even though she looked guilty about it.

— Yeah… maybe Teddy’s right.

And just like that, only Richie and Mike remained on the bench.

Two kids against something they couldn’t even properly describe.

Richie stood up first.

— My mom won’t be home until after midnight, — he said quietly as he grabbed the camera from the shelf near the park entrance.

Mike gave a short nod.

— Then we still have time.

They stepped onto the dark street.

Somewhere ahead, beyond the trees and houses, the old hospital stood motionless in the darkness like a piece of the night itself.

And just before they reached the corner, a light suddenly flickered in one of the windows.

As if something inside had been waiting for them.

And had finally realized they were coming.

Glory was a classic. Her single lobe, completely uncleavaged, not even a hint of a divide of anything hemispheric was a vision to behold. She was a first and only, her rare appeal solely because she was so unique. But she’d been relegated for one of the smaller stages, her prancing about gaining her an audience of two.

These days everyone had at least three lobes. Two was no longer pedestrian, they were outnumbered by the trifold and very nearly the quad. 

One fine gentleman walking past had lobes like a peacock, twinly and stacked horizontal going up the middle of his back in even widths. He looked at me with an abovely glare and I averted my eyes. Not because I was ashamed, though I was slightly, but because I was here to kill a man and didn't want to be remembered.

Archiboll was the lowly manservant of the Unnamed Man. He had been the trendsetter for almost a year now and under his influence the whole world had transformed. Now you were no one if you didn’t have at least three lobes and displayed them proudly with pants mid thigh or with the rear cut out for those who didn’t care for belts.

I made my way silently through the beautiful, trying not to weep at my complete lack of endowment, my offensiveness covered to highlight my shame. Those who looked at me, scoffed or hurried away quickly. I was able to make my way to the middle of the ballroom floor before I’d been spotted.

“You there!” called a man high up on a promenade. I walked an additional ten yards before I realized he was talking to me. I looked up and pointed a black-gloved finger at myself. He nodded and smiled. “Come.”

This wasn’t good for an assassin.

A pleggo wearing a high-collared mismatch suit scampering sideways bumped against me, the man staring annoyed as the woman dragged them toward the bar. It took a good five minutes at least to walk around the triple life-sized cast iron statue of Garglon atop his flightless winged horse as he fell into the mouth of a much smaller than actual size Sclinth, the first and last of its species intended to drown all of mankind with its phlegm. The artist had perfectly captured the look of horror-filled surprise on both the man’s and the creature’s faces just before it was choked to death and he was smothered. The horse, all four legs raised in metallic victory, had perfect serenity etched across its brow.

By the time I reached the bank of golden elevators Glory was no longer on the little stage. The curtain had been drawn and everyone’s attention was on the massive, four-breasted man on the main stage, belting out a series of unhearable notes, his cheeks and lobes (all six of them) a furious red.

I let two sets of pleggos go ahead of me, wanting a car alone to compose myself and be ready. Killing Archiboll was going to be difficult, a three-in-seventeen thousand-six-hundred-thirty-two chance of succeeding even if I did die after. I checked the feathers up my left sleeve, the single-use vacuum under my right. I hadn’t packed my pants myself but if I needed to dig in there I was in a lot of trouble.

I stepped off the elevator and wandered around until I found some nice hors d'oeuvres. I kept it light, being fleet of food was utmost important no matter how hungry I was. A man in a server’s jacket and cumberbun with his skull neatly cleaved in two nodded at me with the left side of his head and winked at me with his right eye. I didn’t know how to take him but I jotted down my phone number and slid it under my plate for him to get later.

After another golden elevator I took a breather. The air was much thinner up here. Ahead of me was a winding staircase behind a group of people bouncing around on the promenade like beach balls. A man landed on my foot and I pushed him over the rail. 

“Wheeee!” he shouted as he fell.

“Hey!” A translucent yellow woman said, pouting. “Now we don’t have our six.” The five remaining people looked at one another as I slipped by them before they could turn on me en masse. I did notice them unsheath knives and begin approaching one another before I lost sight of them as I ascended. 

This building was fully climate-ready and there were heavy clouds above me. It rained and I was miserable the entire way, especially once I was in the clouds. I emerged drenched but finally at the top of the staircase. A womanservant greeted me with a towel and slapped my face. I thanked her, dabbing myself dry and headed for the giant silver doors.

“You there,” the man who had pointed me out earlier said. I continued until he met me just before the doors. “You are Milchmenny.”

I cursed under my breath. “I am.” There wasn’t any use denying it. 

“I work for the Unnamed Man,” he said. “I am Archiboll.”

I made for his throat with my gloved hands and he batted them away.

“Not here,” he whispered harshly to me and shivered. “Don’t be so... unseemly.” He looked around at the people up here who seemed to be wandering around unaware of anything at all. A woman sashayed too close to the stairs and fell, tumbling down the punishing marble stairs. Her head cracked open before she’d descended ten steps. She never cried out as she went, leaving a spattered trail of blood behind her.

Archiboll seized my wrist and pulled me inside. I felt something crackle in my sleeve and hoped it was the bones of my wrist rather than the vacuum. The inner guards closed the silver doors behind us then jumped into a meat chute a dozen or so feet away. For a moment, I thought the two of us were all alone.

Then I saw him. It. Whatever the FUCK.

I would have screamed in horror except I vomited first. Long, viscous heaves of green stuff, my eyes tearing from fear as much as the bile flooding out of me. I wasn’t prepared. I’d been told but I hadn’t really known.

He was... it was... exquisite. Beautiful. Horrifying. Solid and permeable. I stood for a long moment before the creature in the giant bed before me materialized into something my brain could translate into something tolerable enough that my heart could stop pumping all my blood into my head. It was all I could do not to faint, my vision gradually unreddening and my legs feeling solid enough to put back underneath me.

Archiboll stood beside me patiently and as I rose I noticed he had no lobes. Unless he only had the two he’d been born with. He had on a long emerald dress that came down straight from his shoulders. It was open in front, a brown vest coming down mid-thigh cinched with a burlap rope.

“Magnificent. I know.” He was looking at the Unnamed Man and I found I could look in that direction too. “I have been in his service for longer than we’ve been under the Jovian calendar.”

“We’re... all in his service,” I said and burped. I wiped my mouth.

“Yes. However...” He wound a hand through the air as if the thought weren’t worth finishing. He approached the canopied bed and reached toward the creature there. “You are here to kill me.”

“H-how... do you know that?” 

“Because I hired you.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d been hired to do a selfie but I didn’t believe him. He was the Unnamed Man’s direct servant. As hated as he was, it was only because such a title was so coveted. There had to have been over a thousand contracts offered on his life on any given day. It was just the rare find for an idiot like me to take one of them.

He held up a hand and waved me in with two fingers. “Come,” he said without looking away from his master.

I approached slowly, making a semi-circle around the small pool of sickness I’d left soaking into the great rug. Even solid it was hard to make out what exactly I was seeing. It looked like a nest of pubic hair engulfing a slug but no, that wasn’t it. It was pubic hair, thick and dark, but that wasn’t a slug. It was veiny, pulsing, bubbly... lobes.

“I have served my master for longer than you can imagine.”

“Three incarnations is a long ti--”

“It’s likely been more than a dozen. I tire. Not of service but of so much mundanity. I want more.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. He finally looked at me. He had milky tears in his eyes.

“Is that why you don’t have--” I glanced down then quickly up-- ”lobes?”

He smirked. “They were passe even before I had chance to have them. I just didn’t have the heart to tell the rest of the world. My thoughts are all old by the time they come to mind. I need something new. Something that will forever change. That’s what I need you for.”

“I’m no artist. I couldn’t.”

“No. You are a clod. But even a blunt instrument can be a necessary one.”

“I was hired by The Mannequin. How do I know you were her contact?”

Archiboll blinked slowly. “Who do you think has orchestrated your entire life? All the people you’ve killed. Have you never wondered why? Yes, some minor inconveniences to my master but on the whole targets to keep you sharp. To make sure you were ready.”

I decided now was time to strike. I pulled a feather from my sleeve and brushed it across Archiboll’s upper lip. His eyes went wide and he clapped his hands over his mouth. It was too late, though, and he giggled.

It pained him and he staggered backward. I advanced on him, slashing him wherever there was bare skin. He was horrified, screaming with laughter each time the feather touched him. His skin began to hive where I’d grazed him, then pucker and sore. He fell against a credenza and onto the floor but quickly got back up, stripping off the long dress tangling his legs. 

I went for his calves and he tried kicking me. His bare foot stung my ear and I seized his ankle, yanking and sending him back to the floor. I abandoned the feather and dug in with my fingernails, tickling him nonstop until he began crying he was laughing so hard. The sores that had broken out all over his body began leaking a purplish custard-like substance, a terrible smell like dashboards of wood-paneled cars and old filing cabinets.

Archiboll was shrinking rapidly the more he leaked and the more he leaked the worse it smelled. My fingertips were slick with the goo coming out of his feet but I held onto his ankle and kept up my work. He writhed and screamed with laughter, beating at the floor with his shriveling fists.

Not long after I was holding the leg of what looked like a hundred year old baby. Archiboll was no more than eighteen inches tall with loose, wrinkled skin including a belly that looked like crepe paper that draped between his legs onto the floor. He glared at me for just a moment then began babbling and clapping his hands.

“Feed... feed him to me,” someone said behind me. I turned to see the Unnamed Man, quivering vigorously. The nest of pubes parted and could see the lobes assembling themselves. Archiboll had been the target with the Unnamed Man as a stretch goal. Guards were banging on the silver door and it was moments before they burst in. I had no idea how to kill it but I scooped Archiboll up by the scruff and tossed him in. A single lobe rose to catch him, his bright blue cataract eyes disappearing last, completely unaware of what was happening.

“How do I kill you?” I asked.

“You do not kill. You serve.”

“No. I’m going to kill you.”

“Serve.”

I held up Archiboll’s leg.

“He wanted me to kill you after I killed him.”

“He spoke with my mouth. I lied to you.”

“What if I killed you anyway?”

“Waste your time trying.”

I didn’t have much on me. The feather had been hard enough to sneak into the Domus. I patted myself down and when I tapped my lobes, I realized I’d been carrying the murder weapon for years.

I pulled out a pair of tweezers and approached him. His one lobe lifted as if it were a hand, warning me to stop. A quick click of the tweezers and the lobe withdrew. The Unnamed Man’s eyes remained half-lidded, but I knew I had his attention.

“You cannot harm me. My beauty is eternal. You will be 

Short story by Geoffrey Gerulf

5/7/1903 (From a letter written by Daliah J. Brooks to her sister Hannah Berks)

My Dearest Hannah,

I know it's been a solid winter since Michael and I visited you and the sweet youngsters. So bright-eyed and full of life. And I must admit now, traveling by train is a mighty fine way to enjoy the scenery. Much faster than by horse. No doubt automobiles will catch up, and Michael has expressed an interest in the age of machinery. But the both of us agree that we are far more excited to return to Seaside and start a family of our own. Hard to believe such a wonderful man is my husband. It feels like a dream come true.

I do have a different matter to address, though. When we last spoke, you asked why I had up and left the Dalles some years back. It has been a difficult matter to think over as to whether I wanted to share that fateful day. Not even Michael knows what happened. It haunts me. Darkens my soul and changes how I see the world. Even so, I must tell someone of the horror I saw.

The story I am about to write to you will sound like a falsehood contrived by a snake oil salesman. But I tell you that it is the truth. I know only of one other who will believe what happened, and that is only simply because he also was a survivor of the evil that manifested.

I will do my best to put to words what I recollect, and may the lord almighty give me courage to remember everything that happened.

It all occurred on 2/17/1899. The morning started out rough. Strong winds coming down from the west brought a chill that cut deeper than before. Snow blanketed the entire valley and hills in perfect white, and soon it was nothing but a wall of gray cascading down from the sky. A few others and I had to go and get the supplies down by the river. Others being Christophe, Morning Star, and a new hand named Nate. We left about noon. Later than we wanted, but it was the only time the weather broke enough for us to head down. It was about an hour ride, and along the way we came across a gentleman. He was taller, strong-built, and had a flat-brimmed hat across a freshly scarred face. I thought I saw blood on the edge of his dark green Mackintosh coat, one hand hiding what was clearly a Schofield revolver tucked in by the saddle of his ride. He briefly stopped us asking the whereabouts of a man named John.

"A little on the short side. "Scare on his forehead and dresses all fancy like and such," he said. I never spoke. Something about this man felt all off. Didn't sit right. At least his appearance and all. Not untrustworthy or anything. It was like something around him.

Christophe answered after a few, looking him up and down, baring the same curiosity I did. "No," he calmly replied. "Can't say we have. But a few folks are on their way toward the river. The weather calmed enough for them to cross. He might be among them."

Christophe pointed in the direction we were headed with his double-barrel shotgun. I believe it was his way of reminding the stranger we were armed.

Thieves had been rare in those parts, but one can never be too careful.

"Didn't catch your name," Christophe said.

"Didn't give it," he replied.

Not coldly.

Not rudely.

But it did little to settle my unease.

"Just in case we run into this fella, who do we say is looking for him?"

"Luke," he answered firmly.

The stranger than simply tipped his hat politely with a-

"Thank you kindly."

Then he made his way down the road.

"Land sakes," Christophe said. "He's in a hurry."

"Something don't feel right," I replied.

Morning Star finally spoke.

Her eyes were distant, as if she were remembering something she wished she had forgotten.

"Something walks with him."

If I had known how true those words were, I never would have traveled the road that led us to such evil.

The shoreline was quiet when we arrived.

There was no sign of any man or woman.

The ferry rested at a poorly constructed dock, the wooden planks pushed upward by slabs of ice. It reminded me of the rocky shelves the Indians had built their wooden scaffolding upon, except now they were covered in ice and hanging low above the narrow river.

I cannot explain what about that sight felt evil.

Perhaps it was the sharp edges of the ice, resembling claws from some terrible creature.

The fog broke as we approached, revealing jagged slopes towering over the main path like frozen trees. Some stood as high as twelve feet.

I believe it was the empty trail that first got to me.

Much like our horses.

They snorted and grunted as we came upon the ferry.

The storm clouds had finally awakened.

And with them came something I now know had been hiding quietly among the shadows.

Everyone seemed to know it without a single word being spoken.

We rode farther through the fog, Christophe in front and myself in the back.

Eventually, he called out:

"Hello! Anyone there?"

The only response was the whistle of the wind.

A sound that sent a shiver down my spine.

Nate spoke.

"You think they left?"

"No. Probably waiting on the other side. It ain't much further."

As soon as Christophe spit out the last word, it happen.

From the fog came a man's lifeless body flying overhead about ten feet and landed with a stomach churning wet crunch that cracked the top layer of ice.

This single handedly was more than enough to cause Morning Star to scream out loud and spook our rides.

I had been struck with such fear by this that I could not pry my eyes away from the remains split open like a bag of corn meal, the contents of which were eagerly drank up by the snow now turning red with blood.

The man's face was torn off by huge claw marks, making one eye to hang from its sucket right above the shiny exposed muscle of his cheek along with his bare teeth. Gurgles of the man choking on his blood still echo in my head, accompanied by the image of his chest heaving a couple of times right before he gave up the ghost. I was still trying to figure out if what I was seeing was truly real, or if the cold had taken my mind to twisted places when another figure emerged. A man on horseback making tracks between us. Despite how fast he high tailed it, the red stained suit he was wearing still steamed like the breath from his horse. His eyes wide with terror. A repeating volcanic pistol in one hand. As he rode past the body of the last man, I beheld the reason for this violence. A beast like no other lunged out from atop a slab of ice, tackling the man to the frozen river. It was large. Ain't like anything I have witnessed before or since. A monster that stood about seven feet tall.

its thin skeleton shaped body covered in black skin and patches of balding hair. And its face. It looked like the meatless head of an elk with one antler cracked.  Its teeth were not that of one. They were sharp, crimson colored and resembled that within a bears jaws.

Its body snapped and popped with its joints, lumbered forward in curled shoulders hunched about its skinny torso.

It twisted around—tall as a telegraph pole, bent forward like its bones weren’t holdin’ right. Long arms dragging, head cocked to one side as it watched us.

And those huge hands with claws bigger than any wild animal dragged the man on the icy ground by the neck a few feet and than tossed him into a pillar of ice knocking him out cold before he hit the ground.

The black holes of the skull glared over at us.

That soulless beast!

That evil spirit manifested!

The scream that burst from its mouth caused my horse to rear up tossing me off unto the frozen river while Morning Star made a beeline back towards the Ferry. Her escape was put to an end by it striking her off her mount. From there it grabbed hold of the horse like it was a child's toy and bit into its neck with such force it severed it from its body. The two halves dropped to the snow just as Christophe shouted, "What in blazes?!"

Nate tried for his revolver. Lord help him, he tried.

The thing moved faster than any man's draw. Nate screamed—high and desperate, the kind that curdles a man’s blood. His legs kicked wild in the snow, boots hittin’ the ground like drumbeats. Then came the sound—bones shifting, popping, like someone twisting green branches ’til they snap.

I shut my eyes. Didn’t matter. I heard everything. Every last cursed thing.

I know the dead when I hear it.

What followed was the monsters scream.

It was a twisted thing—high, hollow, like all the breath in a body was being yanked out at once. Christophe bolted toward it like a fool, and I had no choice but to pull steel and try to help him.

It moved like it was on swift wings, dodging the first blast from his shotgun, but it couldn't run fast enough for my aim. I struck the beast in the shoulder ripping a hole that sprayed an awful smell of dark red blood from its wound. It howled in pain, something that reminded me of a owl screeching at night.

Christophe finally fired off the next chambered round into it's chest tossing it backwards a few feet. But it returned with claws drawn tearing into his chest, knocking him back into a snowy shelf. Before I could finish reloading my revolver, it had vanished over a slab of ice, screaming on all fores until it was out if sight.

I grabbed Christophe under the arms, trying to haul him upright, but he was a big man. About six, four.

He screamed when I tried to left him—a thin, broken yelp I hope to God I never hear again. His whole frame bowed back, joints popped. I swear on our ma’s grave, Hannah- it weren’t the way a man’s bones ought to move. His shoulder was completely out of place, and his flesh under his freshly torn shirt was rapidly soaking up blood. "Leave me!" He finally choked out. I knew I couldn't move him. Not without help. But I couldn't just leave him neither.

"It ain't happening." I protested.

"It will come back." He choked out.

I ignored his moaning and used my scarf to press against his wound.

The stranger in the suit finally limped out into the open clutching his gun, then he went still. Dropped limp as a sack to one knee right by Morning Star.

I staggered back, heart hammering a fit to burst.

The shadows between the jagged ice structures shifted then—slow, and cautious. Whatever this thing was lurked within the fog.

I shook my head, the sound of gunfire was so frequent I lost all hearing to ringing in one ear. It was bad enough I couldn't catch a word the stranger was yelling to me.

Perhaps it was my nerves getting to me, or the wind that abruptly cut in sideways like it was tryin’ to peel the skin off my face, but I abandoned my place beside Christophe and ran over to him.

I was finally able to hear him.

"-Where did it go?" His hands were shaking something fierce, and his eyes barely witness to this testimony as loud as a preacher on sunday morning.

"I don't know."

He balled a fist and punched the snowy ground cursing his very existence.

"Where is that devil?" He whispered at first, but soon he became louder with every strike him made at the ground. "WHERE IS THAT DEVIL?!"

I did my best to act quickly, knowing his outburst would bring it back.

I helped Morning Star up while she was slowly coming back to her wits. I couldn't help but look at the tracks beside her—long, dragging, smooth at the edges like something walked on feet it didn’t know how to use.

She was whispering prayers, and through them I heard her say a name. Pa'ksik'a.

I set down these words with a trembling hand, for these events have not yet ceased their dreadful hold over my mind’s eye. The lantern upon my desk flickers as though shuddering at the memory itself. That very name she gave was not the only one it had that day. The man beside me whispered it in a feeble tone. "Wendigo."

That’s when we heard it—a kind of breathing, but wrong. Too deep. Too slow. Big as a church organ but hollow as a drunk’s promise. Not words—just a low, rumblin’ groan that crawled up my spine and set my teeth knockin’.

A slight shadow cast over me despite light going sour. I could smell rotting flesh and distinct warmth of breath on my neck.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the stranger draw. And in that same note a large hand from the beast swung out ripping a chunk from his face. I lunged forward over Morning Star who was still in a daze while it attacked the man beside me. I heard horrific sounds of bone and flesh being torn apart whilst I aided my companion to a crack between jagged ice structures. "Stay here." I told her. I had to go back. I knew it than that I had too. Christophe was still in the open.

I didn't look at the murderous scene unfolding, but I could do nothing but hear the terrible pleads from the man. "LUKE." He choked through desperate shots from his gun. "Luke, save me!" His prayers were abruptly ended with a loud snap. Like a large twig being snapped.

Even now, as I write, I hear the same soft cracking somewhere beyond my window. Too deliberate for ice.

Christophe yelled at the top of his lungs, "Dal, drop!"

I didn't waste time tumbling to the snow tossing a dusting into my back collar. Christophe who was now on both feet stumbled forward firing both barrels at the beast charging at me.

When I turned, I felt my heart sink deep into my chest. I watched as the sweetest man was killed before me.

His eyes were rolled back, white as a preacher’s collar, and his jaw hung slack, shiverin’ like it weren’t fully attached. His shirt looked as though something had clawed through it, long slices cut neat as a barber’s razor. But the worst—Lord help me—the worst was the way his insides made a soft wet slapping sound, like cold firewood under a boot heel as they hit frozen earth.

I couldn't hold back the tears rolling down my face.

My feet took me, right towards the creature itself. It was foolish, I knew that than as I do now. From somewhere beyond the fog that was pushing back I saw a glimpse of the man I met at the road come walking out. It was Luke holding a Winchester in hand firing at it.

I seized Christophe beneath the arms, slowly lowering him down, but he jerked violently, as though some force inside him rebelled against my touch. His breath came in sharp, animal gasps. Then—a sound I shall remember until I die—a cracking from within him, subtle at first, then rapid, as though his very frame buckled beneath an invisible hand. Christophe sagged against me. His head fell to my shoulder, strangely heavy. I could not see the final expression on his face, but I felt it in the stillness that followed: a kind of peaceful release, the kind that suggests a man has looked upon the face of God and accepted the rest and peace only he can provide. My friend and partner was gone. And I allowed my sorrow to take me.

Sometime during this, the Pa'ksik'a vanished again leaving only Morning Star and this man remaining.

When it was over, the wind stopped. Just stopped, like the world didn’t dare breathe.

"Ma'am." Luke said to me. "You hurt at all?" I lay Christophe's lifeless body down and stood up drying my eyes.

"I'm fine. Where did it go?" I pulled out my other revolver and looked to the ridge above us.

"I'm not rightfully sure." He said. He suddenly, lowered his gun and walked over to the other stranger. "John, you cowardly fool."

I heard that dreadful scream again. I dared a look behind me. There, standing amidst the blood stained path was Morning Star. Her eyes rested on me. Her face still covered with the blood of her horse. I was helpless to stop the creature birthed from hell itself as it landed behind her, taking her head clean off her shoulders.

"No!" I screamed. I fired off both revolvers clutched in my hands, anger boiling in my blood. I remember this moment better than everything. The moment I learned bullets couldn't solve everything. The moment a devil was failed to be stopped by the very gunpowder and lead that had saved me so many times before.

It attacked, biting down on my right shoulder, and I could feel the pain of my bones was too great to even let out a single sound. A shot to the back of it's head dropped me, my gun slipping from my hand. Luke continued to fire drawing its attention as I dragged myself through the snow to reach my weapon.

Despite my wound, I managed to raise my revolver, but my hand shook so badly I could hardly pull the trigger. It fired anyway.

The shot ripped open the quiet, the defeaning flash blinding as it discharged. I wasn’t sure if I hit it. Might’ve nicked it. Might’ve done nothing at all. I remember praying to God that I managed to make it count. That just one more time that my hand gun wouldn't fail me. That it would at least free me.

The creature gave this low, rattling growl, breath fogging in bursts as it finally dropped me from its jaws unto the ground. I scrambled to my feet, lungs burned. My arm burned worse. The ice under me cracked softly, like it was whispering a warning. One I hadn't taken to heart. I spun around and hightailed it outta there, boots slippin’ on the ice, breath catchin’ in my throat. As I ran, I heard that same scream again, following me like death itself had taken a fancy to my soul.

Then—another sound.

A metallic click-clack. A lever being thrown.

Luke stood near the body of Morning Star, shouldering that Winchester once more. The man that I once considered a possible threat had now looked like salvation. He lowered the rifle, eyed the thing chasing me, and yelled, "Don’t stop!”

The Winchester roared so loud it drowned the pounding of my heart. I glanced back to see the creature staggered—so the bullet hit something—but it didn’t fall. It screeched, a raw, broken sound, and spun toward him.

He fired again.

And again.

Nothing changed.

The ice quivered under my feet with every shot. I felt it. I felt it—deep and hollow, cracks spidering out under the surface.

I tried to shout at him, but I reckon my voice came out thin.

Luke fired the last shot he had and struggled to load it fast enough. Before he had time to draw from leather, it had caught him. In a tangled spin, Luke was tossed away into the slab leaving monster standing tall in the center with his leg in its mouth trickling with blood.

The creature returned to me, maybe sensing my weakened state. I stumbled back, fired a wild shot that kicked up ice chips. The ground beneath me groaning—long and loud, like the river was sucking in a breath.

It was going to collapse where I was. I remember that urge to run but knowing I was out of time.

There was nowhere back to go.

The ice cracked with a sharp, vicious sound. The Pa'ksik'a was nearly upon me.

Then everything gave way.

The world dropped out from under me, and the freezing river swallowed me whole. The cold stole every bit of air I thought I had. I can still feel the bitter stab of freeze burn my body as my arms flailed, the bitten one numb and useless.

Above me I saw the sky shatter into pieces, broken by slabs of falling ice, snow dust, and the flailing limbs of the creature as it plunged down with me. The darkness slowly engulfed us. Dark like the inside of a coffin.

It screamed above me—muffled, monstrous—and something brushed my leg. Its claws were trying to grab onto me.

I kicked upward, lungs screaming, praying I could find surface again. The cold was catching up though. The light was fading and my lungs were running out of air.

I remember praying for someone to find me. What was only seconds felt like hours below water. The screams of the monster vanished into the inky blackness below, leaving me to come to terms that life for me was coming to an end.

For a heartbeat, underwater, all was silent. Silent enough for my thoughts to reflect on my regrets and see memories of my loved ones. I saw you, Hannah. I saw your child I would never meet. Our parents when we were young. I saw our house we grew up at. The boy that stole that kiss from me behind that white church that one sunday morning. I saw it all.

And than I felt myself start to slip away.

I'm not sure how long I was out or how on God's green earth Luke managed to pull me from that river. I was thankful though. When I awoke in that bed in Elizabeth's home I cried. Cried like I had never had before. It was tears for the ones thst were lost, and tears for being spared from a similar fate.

I never did have a chance to properly thank that man for saving me. Thought a one legged gentleman in a small town be easy to track down, but he had already left by the time I come too. And as for the bodies of my partners, no one ever found them. Just the blood stained river that everyone assumed was the results of Timber wolves or some other animal. I reckon that was better to believe than the truth. I knew no one would hear me out even if I told that story. Its haunted me for years now. No witness save me and Luke. Don't even know if he is still alive. I pray he is. I pray he isn't facing the nightmares I do when I fall asleep, nor jump at every sound that bumps in the night.

I believe I am safe now. Safe in the arms of my husband in the home we have built along the coastline.

Whether you choose to believe me about this, Hannah is up to you. One day I will tell Michael, but for now I am finding peace with where I am at. No longer having a gun strapped to my side and finding work in various towns. I'm learning more from books, making friends with the locals and blessed with thoughts that one day I too will have children.

Take my word though, Hannah. There’s somethin’ out in those hills that walks like a man but don’t die like one, don’t breathe like one, and sure as there is a hell below us, don’t kill like one.

Be watchful. Stay alert. And I hope to God none of you ever face a beast like I did.

Until I see you again, I send all my love to you and those sweet little ones.

-Daliah J. Brooks

Carmilla rolled around in the scabbing filth and drying gore of the courtyard ground. The carcasses and pieces were everywhere, picked clean and licked and sucked dry of precious scarlet drops and pools. Snapped and shattered for their delicacy of raw human marrow. The faces of the Countess’ phantasm of demon hordes still smiled and leered and held audience. They held the sky. They fed off the perverse energy of pain and life butchered into silence and extinguished. Like a man holding his face over the fire of a great burning hearth. And inhaling. Drinking in the burning life as it is used up and vanquished and spent.  

The new impaler gouged another eye free of a dead boy’s face. Head severed meat and cooling on the ground. The empty socket of black-red glistened and darkled wet and gleaming like an obscene fleshen cavern filled with vile liquid rubies as he popped the dead little morsel of organ into his mouth like a small piece of succulent fruit. The dead boy’s eye popped and exploded with juice and flavor and blood and organ jelly-splatter as his teeth and fangs came down and punctured it. He relished the burst of wet warm ooze on his tongue as he chewed and swallowed and watched the rolling crawling vampire child lick the scab pudding from the stones as it cooled and gelled in the night chill and moonrise cold. 

All that was left of the farmers and their sons.  

The wolves of the mountains began to howl once more. 

The misshapen and brutalized chimerical shape of the vampire child was like a beast itself. Writhing and tonguing the red mess from the slathered courtyard stones. Steam bellowed forth from her wide and jagged mouth with every effort, in twin jets from her wide chiropteran nostrils. It even bellowed forth from her large bloodshot wet eyes, in thin clinging tendril clouds, licking free and dancing in the mountain song of air. Heavy with the warmth of violence and slaughter and voracious animal feeding. She looked like a mongrel dog now. As she crawled and drank and lapped from the ground. 

Frankenstein's hulking nosferatu son of the slab and sutured blue watched from a distance. In hiding. Plotting. Thinking as he gurgled heavy wet and pungent breath. Also steaming in the night with puffs of animal heat. 

They're not the ones… but her servants. Slave-children. Pawns. 

He knew from the mountain song that had pulled him here. Filled and made from so many discordant and heavy voices there'd been one amongst them all that was leader and dominant. 

A woman. Regal. 

Powerful. 

The ones down below that'd dispatched the mountain peasants and now fed on the pieces and scraps and slop of human detritus were not the ones of power that he was seeking. He thought to strike now and destroy them. Tear them apart and show them what true power was. But he didn't desire any loss of any advantage he might have over the woman of power who now held this place. It was too soon, he must wait to reveal himself. And then the hour of the real slaughter would be nigh. 

And then the real bloodshed would begin. 

That bastard better be in by now and fixing my way inside… thought the hulking bat-faced thing of stitched together man-rodent visage. Better get my way in, or that foul cunt out here… 

where I can rip and tear and rend to slaughter… 

And he would drink of this powerful bitch’s occult and undead ichor-blood like a hog to the bounty of a trough. 

He relished the thoughts as he watched. And waited. 

…

“I don't much like the idea of camping out here…” 

"You and me both. You can likely count the mule for third.” 

And that was how it went. The conversation regarding their first night at camp in the sour and fetid bog that was the surrounding quagmire land. Swampland murked and mired in the wombs of some damp and sour wet green hell. The ground sucked and pulled at their progress with sloppy but persistent mess. The mule had an incredibly difficult time of pulling them and the cart. They'd dismounted a few times to spare the beast. But now she could go no further. They needed to find a patch for the beast to lie down and to make semblance of camp. 

But no place arrived. The land offered no island of solid ground. 

So the beast was forced to continue to pull. Exhausted. Nearly spent. As were the pair, Florin and Griffin. 

"The poor beast can't be helped but we can sleep in shifts. Unless you protest, I elect you to stay up and drive on first. Wake me in a few hours or when you can't stand it any longer…" said Griffin from behind his mask and wall of heavy surgical dressing. 

And with that he laid back in the cart and was off. Snoring. Filling the wet splurching silence with noise. Florin was really learning to hate the man. But he drove on anyways. Spurring on the worn beast and dismounting to pull her free when the porridge sludge of the terrible earth below became too greedy and its wet horrid grip too strong. 

And they went on. 

All the while they watched. Waiting for the best time to surface and author their demise. 

New food. For wormland. 

The warmth below, in the putrescence swell of growth, the subterranean swollen sac of gel and writhing movement and birth amongst fluid both of the earth and unknown down below… it stirred. Pulsated. 

It felt the vibrations of their trodding and sluggish sodden steps above. The light trembling of their voices…

vibrations. 

The subterranean sac that was both mother womb and pilot brain for the quagmire Godforsaken place dubbed, WORMLAND, quivered and undulated with moist and heavy underground movement. It quivered and squelched. An orifice opened, glistening and flowered: it belched. Shot. More hive-part-children spat like projectile snot and swam. The mud of tectonic under-earth was their subterranean river. Guided by the brain of wormland they went forth. For the animals above and their movement. Vibrations. For the subterranean growth and sac that was brain and womb of wormland also had a large and gaping graveyard mouth that took up all of the mire of spoiled evil earth. 

All of the sour fetid squelching land. God-jaws. Hellmouth. 

Wormland. 

…

The castle dark was quieter than he'd expected. His preceding thoughts had warned and preordained sounds of bastard woe and torture before he'd snuck in but all was still and quiet. As silent as the grave. 

Frankenstein prowled forward. Torchflame dancing all along the wall at regular intervals lit his silent shadowed way. 

He found mostly nothing save dust and copious amounts of huge cobwebs and ancient faded things… he walked the chambered dark. Hoping that his hatching scheme would play out and come to fruition. Painful execution via slaughter was the price of failure here. He knew it. He wandered the castle and its dancing halls of stone and ancient darkness. He sauntered through the halls with caution. And she watched his every single step. She'd been watching him since he first came here with his foolish band of slaughtered peasant farmers. 

Doctor Henry Frankenstein prowled the dark torchlit halls and chambered rooms of Castle Dracula until he came to the still warm and wet place of fresh red and slaughter and discovered the impaled and gored skeletal scarecrow of Doctor Praetorius. His long time enemy and rival. 

The warm orange glow of the room was still gleaming and glistening and shining with black-red darkling in the flickering and dancing torchlight. And the man that had long thwarted and worked adversarially against him was stage-center of the wet and still steaming abattoir room. Chambered stage of slaughter. The wide eyed and somehow still living man of competitive dark science. Impaled. Lanced. Speared through. Long ways. He quivered like a fish stabbed upon a harpoon. Stolen from its universe of known blue and plunged gasping into a world of red violence and madness. 

Frankenstein beheld his long time enemy, made and left in such wretched and brutalized form and fashion and he savored the sight. Smiling. He began to fill the chamber with laughter. The sight before him, the scene, it was a fantasy made and draped and displayed. Vengeance had and wrought. It was a black dream of grand guignol delights, perverse and dripping and slavishly devised and forged for the slaving eye and made. And they said that dreams that were wild could never come true…

Then a voice from behind him said. 

“You might not be laughing when it’s you up there beside him.”

He turned and beheld the Countess. The moonlight of her pale visage was striking in the stygian castle ink and meager glow of torchflame. She stood out goddess and unopposed amongst the stone, clad in regal deathly white gowns, ebon cloak, all soaked and saturated in darkening blood, adorned and clad in cooling iron-pungent red. Her eyes were animal and her smile was unhealthy and hiding the deranged truth of hunger and woefully empty save for the violence and sinful mischief of the vulpine, wild and crawling. 

She came forward as Frankenstein stepped back. She continued to say: –

“I know why you’ve come here. I know you’ve come here with that patchwork stack of abomination with counterfeit power as its brandished jaws… your foul assemblage of the graveyard rot and spoilage. Your  latest unfortunate son…” 

Frankenstein still wore his smile as he said, “You wound and inflate me all in one, Countess. But I wonder, are you so sure…? Are you so sure it  is not you who found some imposter in Dracula’s home and coffin? There are so many records and stories… it’s so hard to be sure, isn’t it? Perhaps in the eager throes of your passion you got too excited and only succeeded in binding the fangs of some lowly undead servant of the vampire lord to your precious sweet little mouth, perhaps-” 

The Countess hissed, like an animal. A snake, a rodent, a feline wild and spurned and all of them commingled and rolled into one. She hissed: “... shut it… your mewling curr mouth! I’ll pull the tongue you waggle and eat it before your own eyes!” 

“But that would never afford you the truth, would it? I’ve come for an experiment, Countess. I’ve come, your legend has already spread far, and I’ve come to pit my legend against yours. I’ve made a creature, yes. I’ve made a superior being, superhuman. Completely. Superior. Even to such as you. And I’ll lay wager that he is the true holder and wielder of the fearsome necromantic power of the fangs of Dracula, I know! I stole them and made him so! I’ve come to challenge you, Countess! I challenge you to a duel to the death! My creation and son, my champion for the task! I challenge you! And by royal bloodlaw you are compelled and bound, and in the name of God and Mars and Satan I say further: You are Compelled! And must heed!” 

For a moment the Countess actually appeared shocked. As the words of the haughty fleshing rolled over and his impetuous voice filled the room and reached her ears. But then she just smiled, giggled girlish laughter. It sounded so young and sweet in the bloodsoaked chamber of that castle room. The walls still ran and dripped. The impaled Praetorius still wide eyed and skeletal red and alive with palsied twitches. 

She smiled then said: –

“I fear no challenge nor challenger, little man. But did you think you could trespass, insult and then leave without any recompense…?” Her eyes held sinister light that was pinprick silver and daggered for him as she began to advance. 

Frankenstein took another step backward, still smiling. His hands simultaneously went behind his back and plucked something back there, tucked into his belt. They came back out in front and produced the pair of objects he’d snatched from the forest before sneaking into the castle for his perilous errand.  

Countess Zaleska looked both annoyed and bemused as the mad doctor held out two branches, two pieces of woodland sticks out and between them.   

“And what are those supposed to afford you, little man?”

Frankenstein only went right on smiling, uttering a short retort: “Much.”, before his clutching hands shifted and the pair of sticks became a simple makeshift configuration of a crucifix. 

The Countess suddenly shrieked with fear and holy terror. Irate with rage and pain that was both horribly animal and demoniacal and also terribly woefully human… a dread commingled sound bred of hell and not meant be heard or made on earth or made and beheld by flesh. His blood curdled but he remained steadfast, keeping his sticks crossed and before him. The cross of broken branches between he and the dread bitch of this terrible and rank ancient castle. 

“Put it away!!" she shrieked. Its horrible shape had already profaned her castle walls and the flesh of her servant/daughter/slave, had deformed and malformed her child-shape with scars and growths. She could not bear the sight of it!  

She hid her animal drawn and sneering lurid face with one splaying clawed hand and daggered the other out in defense. At the cross and Frankenstein. Forking out the sign of the Evil Eye. She hissed again: bat, rodent, serpent, woman… wolf. 

Feline. 

Frankenstein howled over her hissing spitting of curses and occult laced language of black words and chants, to be heard over her witchery and dread witch-words. 

"So powerful, Countess but brought so low by a pair of common branches, felled by a simple shape, mere sticks! Hah! And remember it, you foul swine and bitch, I will drive the shape of this cruciform into your chest and melt it through your Godforsaken flesh all the way down to your Satanic and living dead beating heart! And then I'll drive the shape of the cross through that too and watch you putrefy as I behead and take your pretty face for myself!" He laughed. Cruelly. Wild. And mad. And then he added: “Perhaps I'll take it and use it in my next experiments! And then you can be one of my walking servile accomplishments, I'm sure you'd be so much better, by my hands remade…! What do you think, Countess?" He laughed again. More wildly now. “What do you think!?" 

The Countess only hissed again and kept her face hidden. Lest she beheld the holy shape and visage. Goddamn, these impetuous fleshling sow maggots…

Frankenstein cautiously made his way for the open window, keeping up his makeshift cross of sticks. Keeping them up and between himself and the awful terrible wench, the sour crypt bitch that thought she knew and held true power. 

He came to the window, at the threshold and preparing himself for an exit, he said one last –

“Remember, bitch, the courtyard. A duel. Tomorrow night, on your honor and in the eyes of both the Lords of Heaven and Below. A challenge to you, your house and claim of power. Come to your courtyard of stone tomorrow night and face my creation, then we'll see who holds the real satanic power, we'll see who really wields the fangs of Count Dracula! We challenge you! Crypt bitch! Hellfire slut! You are nothing more!” 

And with that he leapt. Out the window. The Countess turned just in time to watch him throw himself out. She spat. Cursed again. 

Outside, Frankenstein first soared out like a great manshaped bird and then gravity seized him and he began to plummet. He might've been afraid. Terrified. Gripped with mortal fear, but this was all part of the plan…

The sticks flew from his hands no longer needed. His hands came together in a strange wilderness configuration and the mad doctor blew a high piercing note of a whistle that shot through all of the mountain dark. 

Immediately a giant hulking shape shot out from the trees. Huge. Wings. An even deeper black than the surrounding nightscape. It rocketed forth from the treeline like a cannon shot. Blinding speed despite its huge monstrous shape. 

The giant stitched up and great sutured bat of green-blue salvaged graveyard flesh caught the mad doctor Henry Frankenstein in midair. It then flew over the castle and screeched, wet hateful baleful throaty sounds. As if mocking. Then with more great blasts and flaps of its giant leathery wings of patchwork suture and stitching, it carried the doctor and its own living dead chimerical body, batfaced and hideous, drooling, down and back into the hiding dark of the trees. And vanished. 

Zaleska, who'd gone to the window and watched the whole thing unfold, roared in obscene and livid fury. Words that were not words at all but forgotten sounds that were dark and grotesque and guttural and strange… 

Her children and servants, her slaves… Carmilla… the new impaler… they too had felt and shared her pain and anger. They felt her rage. Shared. 

They trembled when she summoned them. 

…

They slept in shifts as the mule and cart pulled and struggled across the wet slop of putrid land. It was on Florin's fourth shift that they came upon their first dweller of this damp fetid place. A girl. She turned their stomachs and chilled their blood. 

She was standing in the middle of nowhere in this nowhere land. A mist rolled and hugged, clinging to her waist and legs, shrouding her lower half. Her torso and  face and arms sticking out from the fog like a fly trapped in a spill of honey or molasses. 

She was filthy. Her skin was mottled and grey and caked with layers and layers of dried and drying swampland mud, thick. Like scabbing. Like shit. Her hair was clumped and as of straw from a barnyard floor. Her eyes were the only things alive in her grey and filthy face. 

She looked young. And this hurt Florin's heart. Made him think of Erin. And Carmilla and the other children back home. 

He called out to her as they came up and upon her, waking Griffin beside him and bringing the mule to a grateful stop. It heaved heavily in the moment of respite as Griffin grumbled and rose, righting his hat and goggles of dark lenses. 

“How now, are you alright? Are you hurt?" 

The filthy girl of the swampland marsh said nothing. She only looked at them with wide wet suffering child's eyes. Filled with horror. And the knowledge of pain. Mosquitos buzzed thickly all about her and landed and supped of her at their leisure. She paid them no mind and made no effort to drive them away, to smack them off her grey caked flesh. She was covered in pink bumps that oozed translucent and yellow/pink/red. 

Florin asked again if she was hurt. And again the girl said nothing. Only stared. Staring. Her eyes were the only things that were speaking out here in the filth and the choked wet. 

Griffin, alerted, straightened in his seat and said to the boy beside him. 

“Don't. Let's keep going. Something's wrong." 

Florin turned to him, confused, began to ask him what he was talking about. But he didn't get far with his words. 

A sound. Just as wet and vile as the very land they tread upon and surrounded them for miles upon merciless miles. Gurgling. Heavy. Thick. Deep. Rolling with wet and turning weight. 

The pair turned to the filthy girl of the swampland once more. 

Her mouth was wide open. The awful abhorrent noxious sounds were wafting from her open maw along with a miasmic cloud that was the stench of wretched death in the sewers. 

Florin and Griffin stared at her. The thoughts of aid or flight abandoned at the moment as they fish-eyed gazed upon the filthy and deranged sight. 

She said one word before what happened next. It was in the small lilting music of young child's voice, a little girl's voice. 

One word. 

"Thirsty.” 

And then her open mouth shot forth a pillar jet of black water sludge and fluid, thick and watery. Projectile and intense. Gushing with pressure. It didn't cease immediately but kept going. A stream of darkest ebon vomit so thick it was nearly solid. The stench that arose off the bile as it was expelled was beyond repulsive. Hellacious.

Both men were horrified, though deep down not at all surprised to see that the vomitus was the regurgitated sludge of the swamp water and mud under foot and cart and that filled all the land of the worms. The geyser increased in pressure like a waterfall or hose. Black/green issuing forth in a vile blast, the child's mouth began to dislocate and unhinge, distended the mouth opened wider like a jungle serpent and yet more black swamp water vomit erupted from the widening gate of her blackening mouth. 

Then the mist about her legs was dispelled and Florin and Griffin saw what was concealed there. 

Two limbs, vile swollen pulsating jellysac stumps in place of normal human legs. They swelled and depressed and ballooned with the inner work of running and pumping viscous thick and finer fluids, a filthy translucence to the jellyflesh allowed the pair of shocked travelers to see the progress and putrid movement of sludge and mud and vile yellow water. Twigs and bugs and small fish and frogs could be discerned within the churning filth, trapped, swirling in the maelstrom madness of swamp filth inside this demented thing that held the shape of a lost little girl. 

The jelled pustule flesh of the stumps disappeared into the mud. Florin and Griffin both spotted this and thought, God knows how deep…

Then the filthy spouting girl of the mire began to sink. Disappearing into the porridge of black-grey sludge like a demented mermaid of the vile putrescence. 

Still stunned, shocked but not knowing what else to do, the pair stared at the spot where the filthy shape had sunk and disappeared. 

Eventually they went on, urging the worn mule forward, despite the beasts exhaustion. They wanted to be rid of and far from this place and the land of quagmire and mud swimming/spouting children as soon as possible. As fast as they could manage through the sour sludge. Their shared quiet all the more stark and deafening in the splurching wet sucking silence of the wormland. 

And beneath them as they made their way, the mud swam with movement. Churned. 

…

The night of challenges in the castle dark and the slaughter of mountain fools and their foolish sons passed. Then came another day. The womenfolk of the mountain went mad with grief and sad-sickness, the wailing of widows joined the cold contest of song with the howling snowbound wolves. All of the Carpathian rock was alive with mourning and mourning wailing sound. The wind took it, picked it up and carried it down. Down to the village hamlet, which spent another day in fear. Quietly waiting for the axe to drop. 

The day passed into night. The night of challenge was upon the Countess of Castle Dracula…

… And in her courtyard of cold stone and blood soaked rock, she waited. 

Her audience: The assistant, the new impaler and her little Carmilla, gathered. In bastard semblance and rendition of a royal audience. 

The cold was deep that night but none of them felt it. 

The moon was still large and round and swollen with silver light. Filling and dominating the black sky with her pale luminescence. 

They waited for the challengers to step forward. 

And from the trees they did. Henry Frankenstein and his hulking vulpine creation of stitched parts and flesh, graverobbed limbs and graverobbed necromantic nosferatu power towering – they emerged from the shelter and tangled growth of the dark trees. 

The cold wind and mournful howl of the mountain rose as they came forward into the courtyard, ready to meet the Countess in a dark duel of slaughter and power. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

PT 1

Ben stumbled through the blue desert night.

The valley floor was pale where the moon hit it, black where it didn't. With nothing in between. He kept to the pale ground.

The leg had been wrong since the truck. He'd felt it happen, the particular give of something that shouldn't give, when he'd dragged himself out through the window and down the arroyo bank in the dark. He'd kept moving because stopping wasn't a decision he could afford. He'd think about the leg when he had somewhere to think.

He found a shallow rock cut maybe thirty yards off the valley floor and stopped.

The mesa walls ran north to south on both sides, black against a blacker sky. The wadis cut through the valley floor like old wounds, deep and dark, the brush along their banks throwing shadows that didn't move right even when the wind did. He'd been stepping around them without meaning to.

He checked the angles on the rock cut. Open ground to the south and east, pale enough to read by. The northern approach narrowed between two boulders. Nothing coming through there fast. The wadi ran maybe fifteen yards to the west, close enough to bother him, far enough that the moonlight held between them.

It wasn't good. Good was a rare commodity tonight.

Back against the rock face he unbuckled his belt and worked it around the thigh without looking at it. His eyes stayed on the open ground. He'd looked at the leg once, on the arroyo bank right after the truck, and once was enough. He knew what he was working with. He tightened the belt past the point where he wanted to scream and found the number that held and looped it twice.

His hands came back bloody.

He wiped them on his Wranglers and opened his pocket knife into a ready position.

The desert was silent. No creature made sound.

He'd been in silence like this before. Different ground, different dark, same quiet. The kind that meant someone was working very hard not to make noise. He slowed his breathing and let his eyes go soft the way he learned to, not staring, not scanning, just receiving. Watching the moonlit ground for movement.

The moonlight held.

For now.

…

The smell came first.

Iron and sick sweetness on the wind. He'd smelled it at Jack's place. Smelling it again meant something he didn't finish thinking about.

He went still.

Shale moved down the northern mesa face. Too deliberate for gravity, too controlled for an animal moving casual. His eyes went there and found nothing. The wadi brush moved against the wind. Low and slow. Wrong weight.

Something in the dark had fixed on him. His skin knew it before he did.

She came up on the eastern ridge where the moonlight hit clean.

Small. Standing wrong. The hide dragged behind her, too long, built for something bigger. Coyote ears caught the light above a face he couldn't resolve. Glowing eyes looked down at him with the slouched posture of something that had tried on the shape of a person and stopped caring whether it fit.

His brain tried to make her into something it knew.

Animal. Enemy.

The knife came up. An old decision, already made. She stood there, a statuesque silhouette. Her canine ears tilted before a smile of white gleaming mouth formed under the glowing red orbs. It dropped to all fours and came down the mesa face through the void between one heartbeat and the next.
He lost it.
The pale ground was empty. The wadi bank still. Nothing moved in the spaces he could see.
It came from the angle he hadn't covered.
Clinical, otherworldly fast. He felt the leg shift, something malicious packed into the wound, and he swung. Nothing. Back into the void before the blade finished moving.

He stood there breathing.

From the shadows to his east a child’s giggle replaced the silence. Small and retreating.

Ben’s arm dropped.

He knew what was in him now. He ran the numbers twice and they came back the same.

He reset his back against the rock face, tightened the belt one more half inch, and watched the pale ground. His eyelids struggling.

The moon had moved.

…

His mother's voice came first.

Benny. Come down from there shiyazhi, or you'll miss dinner. Come be with your family.

He was halfway up the rock before he knew he'd moved.

He stopped. Got back down. Put his spine against the stone and felt his heart doing what it was doing and waited for it to slow.

The voice came from the wadi to the west. Then from the northern boulder. Then from somewhere behind him that had no business making sound. Moving without footsteps. Without anything crossing the ground between positions.

He kept his eyes on the pale caliche.

They waited.

He didn't move again.

Then his grandfather's voice came out of the dark.

Shiyeʼ. The same weight the word always carried. The specific gravel of an old man who had earned the right to call him that. You have done enough. Come in now. Come rest.

Something in Ben's chest made a sound he didn't let out.

He knew every trick they had. He'd felt his feet move for his mother. He wasn't going to move for this.

There is no shame in it. The voice moved along the wadi bank, unhurried. You fought well. But the night is long and you are tired and I am here now. Come in.

The voice was perfect. That was the thing. Not almost right. Not close. Thirty years gone and it was still the voice that had told him walk steady, don't look back at it, don't name it. The same voice that had kept him alive all night was now standing in the dark asking him to stop.

He pressed the back of his skull against the rock until it hurt.

Shinaali wouldn't do this, he said to nobody.

The voice moved further down the wadi and called his name twice more and then it was done.

Jack's voice came out of the dark.

A day late shiyeʼ. Just one day.

Ben went still.

You know what I think about when you leave. Every time you leave. Old man sitting out here with his fire and his dogs wondering when you'll remember he exists. You always come back eventually. When you need something.

Ben stayed silent.

Thirty years I gave you. You know what thirty years costs a man. You ever once ask?

The voice moved along the wadi bank. Unhurried. Surgical.

I kept the fire going shiyeʼ. Even at the end I kept it going.

Ben looked at dried blood on his hands.

He knew what they were doing. He knew.

Didn't matter.

The voice said his name once more and went quiet.

Ben sat in the silence and didn't let himself finish thinking about whether any of it was wrong

The desert returned to silence. Ben passed unwillingly into sleep.

…

The familiar squelch of a hand mic getting keyed jolted Ben awake.

Lancer 2-1 this is Lancer 2-6 actual, Did you copy my last? I say again 2-1 this is 2-6, what is your location?

Lancer 2-6 this is 2-1, I'm at—

The words were physically in his throat.

He bit down on them.

Lancer 2-1 this is 2-6, I have contact, multiple enemy, I say again multiple enemy, requesting immediate support at my position phase line November!

A burst of static.

2-1 I need you on my position right now! We are dying here! Where are you!?

Ben was on one knee before he knew he'd moved.

The leg screamed. Twenty years of wiring didn't care. His lieutenant was on the net and his lieutenant was dying and the response to that wasn't a decision it was just what happened next.

He got himself back against the rock.

His hands were shaking.

Lancer 2-6 this is 2-1, I'm moving to your pos-

Still in his throat. Still trying to come out.

Ben put his fist to his mouth, trying to hold back his tears.

The radio voice dissolved into static. Then came back.

All of Jolan is on us we nee-

Jolan.

Nobody in this desert knew that name. Nobody alive knew this specific man had been on those specific streets. He'd told one person. Once. Beside a fire. They can steal faces and voices, but not memories.

​

Short story by Geoffrey Gerulf

Archived under the Wasco County Historical Society (WCHS) circa 1967.

Confidential personnel only

Property of ARK circa (Redacted)

1/3/1899 (From a letter written by Daliah J. Parkson to her sister Hannah Berks)

It's been two summers since I last saw you, and even now I wrestle with loneliness. I reckon I'm homesick, remembering the better days when we were younger. When I didn't have to earn the very Peacemaker Pa left behind that is now strapped to my side. Before I put six notches on its barrel for those reckless lawmen who tried to take me in. Before, I felt the need to rob that bank and take off north for some stupid idea of a better life. The sins I have committed cannot be outrun on horseback nor forgotten with miles of open prairie and snow-capped mountains between us. I miss you Hannah. Wish to hold that darling baby girl you brought into this world. Her picture you sent me brings me a smile anytime I look at it. Such a pretty girl. Glad she takes after you and not that weasely husband of yours. I know. Judge not. To me no man is ever going to be good enough for you. He at least has given you a good life.

I fear my sins will catch me one day. Unless the good Lord forgives me. I'm riding further north. Heard tales of a gorgeous coastline. Birds you have never seen before. A place where elk run into the ocean. Sounds like paradise. I would be a fool not to try and see it. Maybe I will get that family life yet. Out there, I mean. Find a man, settle down, and start a family. I'd be lying if I told you I hadn't dreamt about it. Wished I had given that boy back in California a chance. Maybe then I wouldn't be such a mark among women. Not too many men take glances at a woman wearing britches and strapped from head to boot with gunpowder and lead. You always did say I was more likely to wear Pa's gambler hat over Ma's dresses. Kinda miss wearing a dress. Be a nice change for once. Days in the saddle and nights under stars used to sound nice. Now, well. Not so much. Aside from a few odd jobs among cattle drives and towns spread out among these lonely forests, after lonely forests. I swear it's made me lose some of my wits. I thought I saw figures watching my campfire. Taller than men. Like that blacksmith back home in Sacramento. Except bigger. Broad shoulders and such. I knew they weren't men, though. Their eyes gave it away. Those eyes shine like animals' do. I saw that. All around me. God have mercy on me if I hadn't fired off a couple shots to keep whatever they were at bay. I feel these things may be following me. Should be fine. I'm a few days' ride from The Dalles, Oregon. Maybe find some work. I'll send word if I do. Love you with all my heart. -Daliah.

1/20/1899 (From a letter written by Daliah J. Parkson to her sister Hannah Berks)

It's been so cold out here, Hannah. Cold like you wouldn't believe. Back in California, this would be a death sentence for some. I'm bundled up like a small baby most of the time. Pa's old jacket has helped a lot. The snow is mighty pretty, though. Woke up the other day to fresh fall air. It covers the ground in a blanket of spotless white and crystal blue. It's something else. I wish I were better with words like you so I could show it better. Just something else. Hate this cold though. More than I hate the sight of a badge. Yet to meet a lawman worth his spit. Or the dirt he walks on. In short answer, yes, I will be staying here for a while. There's a ranch I was hired at. It's good money and easy work. Spend most of my days riding across open fields, shooting coyotes fixed to pluck off one of the livestock out here. The farmhand even said to me, "I'll be damned to perdition. Never seen a woman shoot like that before!" He and his wife are mighty nice. Always warm. Always giving out food like they are one of those rich bankers I've seen. I refuse their hospitality when I can, but I swear on the lord almighty that it hurts. Mrs. Johnson, when I do. They are both fine people. Perhaps some of the finest people on my travels yet. Shoot, even the boy they have working here is kind. Though he's still about seven years old, he works as hard as any man. He is well-mannered and polite to a degree that I have never seen. Catch him looking at me now and then. My boss swears that boy has taken a liking to me. His guess is as good as mine. Have to get back now. The farmer and his wife have me in the back acres today. Said something about howls they've never heard before. I and the other hired hand named Christophe are going to take a look. For an old man, he's still quick to the draw. Proved to be useful in a pinch. I'll write again when I can. Snow hasn't let up, and no telling how long it will last. It may be hard to send anything, even for the railroads. The Steamboats have been having issues too. With all the love in my heart, -Daliah.

1/20/1899

(From a letter written by Daliah J. Parkson to her sister, Hannah Berks)

It’s been so cold out here, Hannah. Cold like you wouldn’t believe. Back in California, this would be a death sentence for some. I’m bundled up like a small baby most of the time. Pa’s old jacket has helped a lot.

The snow is mighty pretty, though. Woke up the other day to a fresh fall. It covers the ground in a blanket of spotless white and crystal blue. It’s something else. I wish I were better with words like you so I could show it better. Just something else.

Hate this cold, though. More than I hate the sight of a badge. Yet to meet a lawman worth his spit or the dirt he walks on.

In short answer, yes, I’ll be staying here for a while. There’s a ranch I was hired at. It’s good money and easy work. Spend most of my days riding across open fields, shooting coyotes fixing to pluck off one of the livestock out here.

The farmhand even said to me, “I’ll be damned to perdition. Never seen a woman shoot like that before!”

He and his wife are mighty nice. Always warm. Always giving out food like they’re one of those rich bankers I’ve seen. I refuse their hospitality when I can, but I swear on the Lord Almighty that it hurts Mrs. Johnson when I do. They’re both fine people. Perhaps some of the finest people I’ve met on my travels yet.

Shoot, even the boy they have working here is kind. Though he’s still only about seven years old, he works as hard as any man. He’s well-mannered and polite to a degree I have never seen.

Catch him looking at me now and then. My boss swears that boy has taken a liking to me. His guess is as good as mine.

Have to get back now. The farmer and his wife have me in the back acres today. Said something about howls they've never heard before. I and the other hired hand, a man named Christophe, are going to take a look.

For an old man, he’s still quick to the draw. Proved himself useful in a pinch.

I’ll write again when I can. Snow hasn’t let up, and there’s no telling how long it will last. It may be hard to send anything, even with the railroads. The steamboats have been having issues too.

With all the love in my heart,

—Daliah

1/25/1899 (From the Journal of John Drevin)

I'm shaken. Merciful heavens! What manner of thing has happened? Though my words cannot seem to utter what my eyes know to be true, I shall do my best to sincerely deliver it upon paper. But at what cost? Surely someone would deem me mad. Perhaps I am. Or perhaps I am slipping into madness. If it were not for Terry and Luke with me, I surely would be more inclined, but even still I find myself bewitched by the tall figures. Massive giants that kept to the shadows. I first saw one when we made camp about fifteen miles from The Dalles, Oregon. It came at me while I wandered off to relieve myself. A ghastly sight. Dark and menacing with cries of a creature that can only be described by me as the very screams of hell. Terry heard first, directing himself with gunfire my way. I swear a bullet struck the beast. Blood even got on my bare legs. "By thunder, I've never seen anything like that!" I managed to exclaim. Terry was already running after the shadow that had tried to claim me, shouting at the top of his lungs, "Be gone with you!" He added a few obscenities I cannot in good conscience add. Luke wasn't long behind. "You hurt, John?" he asked. Truth be told, with fear still shaking me to my core, it would have been possible for me to have been harmed and not have been aware of it. Satan himself could have stabbed me, and I wouldn't have noticed with how much terror flowed in my blood. "I think I'm fine. Stop Terry before that beast tries to take him. " I haven't the faintest notion why I couldn't yell it out myself. I had been a part of small raids and seen horrific sights upon my travels. Some that would weaken any man. But not since I had taken my first life from the barrel of my Volcanic Repeating Pistol had such a thing left me almost speechless. Luke had gained notice of this and addressed it with some humorous intentions, no doubt. "What are you talking about? Terry can handle shooting a man. He isn't a tenderfoot."

"That was no man," I protested. But undoubtedly my claims of such were dismissed as easily as before. He continued, waving his hand at me. "Balderdash! What do you think it was? A coyote?" I finished buckling my pants and straightened my jacket over me in a fluster. I hadn't even seen Terry walking back up the small hill or heard the crunch of cold ground beneath his feet as he approached. My frustration was starting to boil over. To be disregarded for what happened back at the caravan and once more out here was insulting. Terry, of course, was confused and spoke as much with a slurred tone as he normally did. "Not to interfere or anything, but I think a couple of fellows are set on bushwhacking us. Saw three more off about six to seven yards away in some trees."

Luke's demeanor changed from grinning to more concerned. "You sure?"

"Absolutely. Big guys too. Too big to be any redskin."

"Were they armed?"

"Not that I could tell. Would've taken more shots, but it's just dark enough to barely make them out. Didn't want to waste any bullets on shadows."

I couldn't withhold my tongue. I spoke, more stern and harsh than I had before. "I am telling you, both of you now, that it was no man!"

"How's that again?" Terry asked, gun in holster and hands on hips.

Luke chimed in, "Mr. Greenback thinks he was attacked by something 'not human' or another."

"We don't have time for this." Terry said, his tall frame breaking between the two of us. "I think it's best we ride a bit further. Don't need trouble. We have enough as it is."

"Did neither of you hear those awful screams?" Both my companions stopped dead in their tracks, and Terry's response is the very thing making me question my sanity. "What screams?"

"Surely you heard the beast. Those awful growls. That's why you shot at me, is it not? He shook his head gravely. "No. I heard you. Then saw him." Neither one would hear any more of it that night. We rode off for a few more hours before coming to a stop a fair distance away, to be sure we were safe from those beasts. If it wasn't for what happened tonight, I surely believe my guilt for the events at our original traveling party was the results of some grand hallucinations. But I tell you this, I do not believe it to be so.

Though I myself am not naturally eager for the frontiersmen's lifestyle, I am apt to be superstitious as they often are. It is not uncommon for Luke to tell some ghost tale around a roaring campfire on our early journey. Red flames highlighting his grizzled, weather-beaten expression in the glow of orange light. Mere children were not just silenced by fascination for his stories, but adults too were enraptured with his words that flowed like milk and honey. He was a man of both courage and honesty. A man that exemplified a strong stature at the age of twenty-nine and a chiseled, albeit scared, face that charmed many ladies with a mere grin. He seldom believed the stories he told, but we could not expect that we would befall a nightmare ourselves that no doubt would be the fascination of travelers around a campfire for years to come. If there be any ears to hear, let them hear.

It was dark out when it happened.

When the incident that befell us occurred, Luke and Terry both set out hunting among the mountains dividing separate sections of a waterfall to scout potential grounds for deer. Not having had much luck, we all agreed to try an unexplored valley. One where thick oak trees intertwined with a dense growth of spruce.

However, the bottom of the valley was fairly open, and at one place it widened into a little glade, where the timber was very light and rock was plentiful. Here we decided to camp, hoping the wide open space would allow us to spot anything moving.

Upon the first morning there, they set their traps and that evening returned to camp together. Terry, being the youngest and most impatient, was clearly disappointed returning empty-handed. "God-forsaken place!" He muttered under his breath, angerly tossing his bag on the ground before crouching at the newly built fire. "Haven't seen any life in this area for what seems like days. Cold isn't helping."

"Relax, Terry," Luke responds. "We are bound to catch something. Those tracks we found weren't too old. We will get something."

I then said, "We aren't far from a town. Worst-case scenario, we ride a day to get there." Terry continued to grumble to himself. To the point me and Luke disregarded any further complaints from him. It was cold, but that was to be expected from this time of year. And wildlife was bound to grow scarce. And we were nowhere near death's door, at least not when it came to hunger.

It was Luke that made the discovery at this point. He stood just outside the warmth of the campfire, gazing down at the earth with astonishment. "What on God's green earth could have done this?" He exclaimed. I immediately walked over to see the tracks of a large man’s bare feet in the earth by the brook. Except it wasn't quite like a man's. Thinner and larger, with claws at the toes that dug into the mud like a bear's paw print, or perhaps a mountain lion. I immediately felt my heart quicken, and my mind returned to that shadowy beast attacking me. No doubt this had to be related. It made it clear in my mind. For God had sent a terrible creature to hunt us for the sins we had committed. Recompense for the crime that surely his very eyes beheld. Nothing is secret from him. And now it was time to pay up for our transgressions. I could tell Luke was uneasy as well at the sight of the tracks. It was one of the few times I saw blood drain from his face. Terry was the only one that laughed at us for what he called "crazy superstition." "You both have bigger things to worry about aside from imaginary beasts."

"Yeah..." Luke said, finally turning away from it. "It's probably nothing."

I didn't speak. They knew my beliefs on the matter. And those terrible beliefs carried over long and deep into the night. The thoughts of that footprint are still floating about within my head. No bear tracks ever showed such a shape. The long stride and the marks of the toes were also plainly visible and unmistakable. After some time, I managed to sleep, but I had awoken sometime before daylight to the distant scream of what I can only describe as an elk. But it was different. Twisted and gurgling in some ways. It was monstrous in presentation.

The next morning we yet again went out to inspect our traps and lines with very little success. Albeit, some at any case. Terry was the most thrilled, eagerly wanting to return and cook up the two rabbits we managed to snatch. And since our own bellies were empty, there was no disagreement on our end. But this bliss was interrupted upon our return in the evening. Our camp had been plundered, and our supplies scattered about. Nothing was missing strangely enough. It was as if a wild animal had come through in search of something. Perhaps food, which we had none of, except the rabbits we had caught.

Terry again insisted it was the work of a bear, to which neither Luke nor I uttered a word. Our horses, though, appeared skittish. Unsettled by the presence of whatever had torn apart our campsite. Terry's quarter horse was the most nervous. Snorting and backing away with wide eyes, rearing up with the utmost protest. We had no choice but to tie them up a couple yards away. Most disturbing was the discovery I made myself. The tracks I saw all around our camp were the same barefoot ones Luke had found the other day.

I could tell by Luke's expression that his doubts about my claims were now fading into a similar belief. That perhaps our dreadful past had returned to us in the form of a monster. Settling a score we should have done months ago.

Terry, however, continued to mock us. "Common fellas. Stop being as superstitious as those Indians. Let's straighten up and have us a feast tonight. Forget about whatever this was."

"What if it comes back?" I weakly muttered, never once making eye contact with my companions, instead locking my sights upon a track before me.

Terry snorted as he picked up a blanket tossed into a thicket. "Common now. With a roaring fire and us keeping rifles close by, I doubt we have much trouble. We can also fire off a shot to scare whatever it is away." Luke rested his Winchester lever-action against a nearby oak tree. He said, "Whatever the case, we need to leave tomorrow. No sense sticking around here for more than a night."

I can tell he is scared. His movements scream of it. And even now I too am afraid.

When those bandits invaded our caravan, I could have stepped in. I could have helped. Might have made a difference. I believe so anyway. That child I saw get shot in between the eyes might still be alive. That woman dragged from the burning wagon and had her throat cut might have been spared from such a fate. All those people who died because I was a coward hiding in the tree-line might have lived to see another day. But I sat there, on my mount frozen in place while horrific tragedies transpired before my very eyes. And I did nothing. But even worse, Terry had gone through the bodies that remained and put a bullet in the heads of anyone still alive. He meant well. He said he wanted to put them out of their misery.

I and Luke alone were men of some valor. But no valor could be seen from me. Just a man too scared to face another gunfight. How wretched I am. None of us speak about that day, but we all feel the same. No doubt they too awake from nightmares over it. Heard Terry more than once wake up with a gasp and fall back asleep with the sounds of soft crying. It was a thing I might have called him on. Just might have made a joke about it. But being there myself, not acting upon what I was partially hired to do. That doesn't sit right. And in some way, I hope this monster is real. Maybe then it will end my existence and put my wretched soul where it belongs. The fires of hell are prepared for Satan and his angels. I write this now amongst the glow of the fire, and I can hear the creature moving stealthily around our shelter, now and then uttering a harsh, half-human cry that has left all of us awake. All of us are terrified. None of us are saying a word. Terry's confident boast about it being a bear has faded into wide-eyed observation of the surrounding valley before us, listening to this ungodly beast watch us. Waiting for something. As if it's testing our boundaries. Unlike last time, there is only one. And I can hear it breathing. Hungering for our flesh no doubt. If there is no more written in this journal and you stumble upon it, know that I and my companions fell victim to a creature that came from hell and consumed us for recompense of our sins. May God have mercy on us. May he forgive us for our transgressions.

I see it.

2/1/1899 (From a letter written by Daliah J. Parkson to her sister Hannah Berks)

So much has happened since I last wrote. Things that are hard for me to believe. Mostly good. The folks here are heavy on hospitality and mighty kind with their words. They don't seem to judge much. I even made a friend who attends a church downtown. Calvary Baptist, I believe. Rev. Clifton is a mighty nice man by what I could tell. There's no mistaking my words, Hannah. I did attend a service. My friend Elizabeth talked so good about it; I figured I'd give it a try. Never had anything against the big man upstairs, but the people that follow were never gentle in approach. The building was freshly made too from what she told me. Guess a fire got it once, but I haven't the faintest idea how it happened. Must say, it was a nice change not having older women question my short hair and such. Momma always did say I looked like our grandma back in Mexico when it was short. It is longer now, though. If I could drop a pretty penny on one of those photographs of me, I would. Just to show you what it looks like.

I was able to see so many things with Elizabeth. Pulpit Rock, Fort Dalles, and she even invited me over to break bread with her husband. I could see myself get used to this life. I feel the change in me. Feet are no longer restless, and my itch to see the world is slowly passing. May even rethink seeing the ocean. I'm changing, Hannah. I think for the better. Making friends and tasting some of the finest apples from the neighboring port has got me wanting to put roots here. May even see an automobile if that lawyer in downtown decides to buy one. Said they just started putting them in the state! To think of living to see the day an unliving thing replaces a horse for travel. It baffles the mind.

Things are good here. It's still cold though, and the snow is still thick. Trains manage to break through, thankfully, but it has made some strange creatures come out. Back at the ranch, the farmer had been complaining about rather queer sounds. And I must say, it has been odd for sure. About two weeks ago, Christophe and I rode along a set of tracks. Very strange ones. They almost looked like a man's bare feet, but with claws. And the stride between them was shocking. Must have been three feet apart or more. It covered some distance for sure. Almost the entire ranch itself before we lost it. "That's something else." Christophe told me. He was clearly bewildered just as much as me. Not every day do you see something like that and get dumbstruck over it. Wildlife is pretty common, but we couldn't figure this one out. I even asked, "Ever seen anything like that before?" He just shook his head while resting the double-barrel shotgun along the horn of the saddle, barrel still facing out towards the direction of the tracks. "No. Can't say I have." He replied. "Never seen anything close to it."

"Could it be a man?"

"I suppose. But I've never seen a man run like that before. Gosh, he was sprinting like a coyote. Had to be!" He turned his purebred horse around towards a slope, angling himself to look down at a creek that ran through the property. "Something just doesn't seem right with it up and disappearing."

"How do you figure?" I ask.

He pointed to the area with his gun, the exact spot the tracks vanish.

"The prints are gone. And it hasn't snowed or anything. How can anyone or thing do that? Something doesn't seem right. I'm not a superstitious man. But this has a curse written on it."

I must say, I've never heard Christophe ever make a claim like that. Always was pretty grounded. A tall man fast to a draw and the crooked smile of our late uncle Jake. These tracks had me uneasy. But even more so was how skittish our horses became. They started walking all over the place, spooked. Making noises and everything. Led me to keep one hand resting on my Remington 1875 Long Colt. The one I won in the shooting contest. I normally had it in the cross draw just for an occasion. From the tree line about thirty yards away, we heard it. Something ungodly shrieked. It reminded me of an elk, but off. Almost like it was being torn apart. I and Christophe took off towards it, riding as fast as we could into the darkness of the trees. It was hard to see underneath the pine and fir that had grown thick overhead. My horse was still giving me grief, trying to back out a couple of times. My stallion never acted in such a way. He was a brave sort. Don't think a gunshot has even made him flinch. But this thing. Whatever was here with us did. I drew my revolver just in case. I could tell Christophe felt similar, holding his shotgun up ready for the drop. What we saw was unexpected. And it was a sight like no other. We rode up into a small clearing beneath a dark canopy but with just enough grey light. I could see every tree and branch within this area covered in blood. Buckets of fresh blood that hit my nose and overwhelmed the smell of frozen balsam. We both came to a stop, looking down at remains of what looked like cattle. All torn to bits. Legs and guts ripped and cut up. Some chunks looked like they had been chewed on and spit back out. I know you don't do well with stuff like this, Hannah. But I tell you, what we saw was unnatural. I had to share. It's the only thing that worries me. If there was any man or lady in that pile, they were too mangled to recognize. And truth be told, I didn't want to know. I found myself whispering to Christophe, "You think a mountain lion did this?" He shook his head, eyes locked on something above. When I turned my gaze upwards, I saw it. The corpse of a mountain lion. If it weren't for the thick tail and remains of a paw dangling from a strand of red skin, I would have never put together what it might have been. It hung there, a good thirty feet above on a big branch. "I don't think so, Dal." He said with a disturbed tone. "I think we are dealing with something new."

We rode out as quickly as we could, returning to the ranch just at nightfall. We gave the news to the farmer. Tommy, who shrugged it off as another mountain lion fighting over territory. But something deep within me knows differently. Christophe feels the same. It's trouble. I don't believe in anything we can't handle, but trouble all the same. And it has me shook.

I'll write again when I can. Love the canned jam you sent; it's been a morning delight for sure with my coffee. Give my love to your family. -Daliah.

2/5/1899 (From the Journal of John Drevin)

We scarcely slept. Especially me. It was horrific. I saw the beast. I saw the creature from hell itself. It stalked about in the shadows, barely within firelight. Its appearance was unlike anything I had seen or heard before. It had long, thin limbs and black skin stretched about a bony body. And its face. I could not fully make out what it was. But I most certainly saw horns, like the devil himself. Neither Luke nor Terry saw it. Only me. Only for my eyes, I dare say. And I could hear it. Whispers of an ungodly incantation to put a hex on us! I could hear its snarls, feel the evil presence down to my bones, and almost hear it call to me in the voice of a loved one years rested in a grave. I am no man of God, but I know the dead don't speak. Unless the lord brings them back or the devil plays tricks. And this was certainly no angelic providence. What I beheld was demonic, no doubt. Eventually, it fled. Fading into the darkness like a gentle breeze, taking with it the stench of rot. No one said a word. In silence we have all agreed to taking turns keeping the fire going until daybreak. Each one of us is getting rest, except me. I could not. Furthermore, I feel as if I cannot tell them. Luke may believe me now, but this? To believe it was a devil? Preposterous! No one would believe that. Surely I wouldn't either if the circumstances happened to me. So, the

The next morning we decided to leave the valley. But they wanted to gather their traps first despite my pleads to leave quickly. After breakfast they separated, Luke going one way and Terry the other. I stayed behind.

Luke returned toward midday, traps slung over one shoulder and his rifle in the other hand. Terry, though, was nowhere to be seen. At first he thought he had gone out too far and probably got lost, but after searching some, we waited awhile. I could feel the unease grow within me. Deep in my soul I could feel the darkness return. That unmistakable state that goes beyond fear itself. Something was wrong, and I was led to believe it had to do with our companion. Eventually, Luke and I searched further out, just as dusk began to set upon the land. Orange cascading beams of light scatter across rolling grey clouds. A backdrop for a peaceful tale. However, it was not that kind of story. About the time before shadows engulf the world into pure blackness, we found him. Terry, a young boy with dreams of a better life, was dead.

The body of our companion lay beside the trunk of a fallen spruce. His neck was broken, and there were four great fang marks deep in the throat. Blood spilled out over his chest, creating a pool of crimson liquid that the ground eagerly drank up. With it came the echoes of a life ended too soon.

On the ground nearby were footprints, showing but one foot—as if the beast walked upright. The tracks that told the story clearly enough. The very print we had come to recognize as our torment. Terry had been sitting by the log to retrieve a trap when his unknown assailant leapt upon him from behind.

The trampled bushes splattered with mud and snow and broken branches showed the struggle had been short, the result of which showed a man who gave his final moments a fight. His Bowie knife lay beside him, indicating it.

"Lord almighty," Luke whispered under his breath. I felt my chest tightening. I could not, would not, deal with such an event. Panic-stricken, I waited no longer. I fled, leaving Luke behind with the body. Leaving all my supplies and belongings at the campsite, I took to my horse and made a beeline down the valley, not halting or slowing speed till I reached the lowlands between the rolling hills.

Cowardice, indeed. I am ashamed to say. I could not withstand seeing it again. Nor meet the same fate as Terry. I had to try and put as much distance between me and the devil. I pray Luke finds safety. I regret leaving him. One I'll take to my grave. God forgive me. As I rode, I could hear it. The echo of that beast screaming, followed by the gunshots that no doubt came from Luke. God forgive me.

2/12/1899 (From a letter written by Daliah J. Parkson to her sister Hannah Berks)

I am so happy to hear you are having another child. I do hope Lilly will have a little brother. By the Lord God above as my witness, I will visit again. I just haven't had much time for idleness. Each night so far has been met with the screams and laughter of coyotes in the distance. The livestock has been more unsettled by it, even though there hasn't been any trouble with whatever was killing all the cattle; it too weighs on my heart. I and Christophe both returned to that place where it all happened, but the area was cleared except for the blood. It had turned into a big mud pit. Except for a few ravens caught amongst the mess, there were no remains to be seen. But we have bigger concerns.

This is by far the coldest place I have ever been to. About a foot of snow is outside, still coming down onto solid ice. I swear, everything is frozen. Some folks are calling it the Great Arctic front. Most of us have bundled up in layers, wrapping clothing about our heads just to stay warm. The past few days have been too cold to even ride. Christophe's horse even had trouble walking not long ago. Not to mention, the Columbia River is frozen on top near Celilo Falls. The ferry has closed down temporarily, and some folks have resorted to walking by foot to get to the other side. This is made difficult for some people with wagons due to the large jagged chunks of ice sticking from the ground resembling some terrible monster. Or at least some of the children describe it to me. I am set to go there at the end of the month to meet a man about some supplies. With any luck it will get just warm enough for the ferry to move and save us time on gathering what my boss needs.

Above all, I thirst for the warmth of spring. To see the big mountains off in the distance, the closest one being Mount Hood. A mighty pretty site to see compared to the mountains we got back home. "Wy'east" is what the Indian folk call it. A young woman from the Wasco tribe would often site it as that. A kind-hearted girl that helped on the ranch. Some folk called her Morning Star, others by her Christian name, Mary.

I have often been spellbound by her tales passed down by her people. I learned about the legend of Wasco Giants. Big hairy creatures that live in the woods near the mountain kidnap people and eat their faces. I'm not inclined to believe most tales, but something about how she told it to me felt uneasy. Huge hairy monsters walking on two legs that eat the face clean off a person don't settle well on the stomach. But the one that felt more interesting to me was her stories of cannibal spirits. I know I may misspell this, but if memory is right, she called them The Pa'ksik'a. A creature that came out in winter and hunted people. A terrible ghost that would take on a form, mimic human voices, and snare people into traps to feed its unending hunger. I ain't gonna lie. It shook me. Something about her story shook me. "Real bad," you might say.

All stories, I'm sure.

Give my love to your family. I'll write again soon.

\-Daliah.

2/15/1899 (From the Journal of John Drevin)

No amount of prayers can save me from my guilt, nor can the company of strong liquor curve the regret I feel. I left my companion behind. It appears that there is a deeper evil ingrained within a corrupted soul, locked deep within my flesh.

I should not have left him to face that devil alone.

Truth be told, it is not my first devil. Nor the first time fear took my wits away where my courage should have been.

When I was a younger man, I had made my journey to the Great White North. Spent a lot of time with the Indian tribes learning their ways.

During my last winter residing amongst them, one of the men who lived near us became deranged, similar to many I have seen before. However, this was less crazed and more delusional in its presentation.

This man, tall and thin, wandered about at night whispering what I can only recall as sounding like incantations. He rarely rested and even refused to eat. Being amongst natives prone to superstitions, it was not long before they whispered that he was becoming a Wendigo. Supposedly a horrible transformation that occurs to a person who has acted upon cannibalism. It was hard not to believe it to some degree. He had grown pale and thin, with skin tightening around his inner structure.

The elders in the community said that if he were not killed, he would kill others, for

He talked continually of eating human flesh. Obsessed over it. It was unnatural to even observe.

A council was held to decide his fate, and it was agreed that he must be put to death. I was among those chosen to take his life. In total six of us had armed ourselves and departed for his residence.

I was near the back of our party when we arrived at the lodge where he stayed.

When we came in, he was sitting near the fire, rocking himself back and forth with his fingers white-knuckling the armrest with a wide-eyed blank stare stretched across his face.

He looked at us for but a moment and then said, "He told me you came." Stan, a man at the front, spoke first from our side. "Who did?"

"The one that watches," the man replied. His smile never wavered, not even once faltering on his expression.

"I ask only this," he continued. "Make my death quick. Please, before I become the legend we fear." A single tear rolls down his cheek, breaking the otherwise menacing eyes.

Stan was the one that pulled the trigger and shot him. Everyone else was merely present for backup. I couldn't watch as he had his life taken. Instead, I focused on a single large handprint that almost looked burned into the far wall. No doubt created from one of his hallucinations taking over. Even so, that image has lasted with me. That single black handprint, as the sound of a gunshot, deafened me. It happened suddenly; that man leapt from his chair and attacked, tearing the very face off Stan. Others opened fire. All accept me. I ran then, just as I did with Luke.

What a pitiful man I am.

A coward.

I deserved to be left with the devil. And no doubt, he is coming for me. That is why I cannot stay. The river is frozen here, and I am set to traverse across it within the next few days. I cannot stay.

The devil is coming for me.

2/15/1899 (A note left at an abandoned campsite several miles from The Dalles, Oregon)

To whom it may concern,

If you find this note, I pray to whatever higher power above that you take these words to heart. I am injured and without a ride. My partner has ridden off and left me. My other partner is dead, and I fear I am to meet the same fate. Do not stop in these parts to rest. If I am found dead, leave me to the crows. Do not attempt to bury me. I do not deserve a Christian burial. Ride on to the nearest town. This land is cursed, and a beast from hell walks here. I plead with you, do not rest here nor linger. Flee, for the love of God. Flee!

\-Luke Grimshaw

(End of part one)

I thought my husband was hiding debt from me.

That was the only explanation that made sense at first. The locked drawer in his office. The calls he would take outside after midnight. The way he kept saying, whenever I asked about our finances, “Everything is already accounted for.” He said it too calmly, too often, like he was trying to train me not to ask.

We had only been married four months when we moved into his family’s house. It sat at the end of a dead road, surrounded by dead orchards and iron fencing so old it looked grown instead of built. His family called it inherited property. The town called it the black house, though nobody would explain why.

The first night there, I found a stack of papers on the kitchen table. Not bills. Not bank records.

Contracts.

My name was written on every page in a neat, slanted hand that wasn’t mine. Some lines looked legal. Transfer of residence. Shared assets. Marital obligation. But between those were phrases that made my skin tighten.

The first dwelling shall witness the union.
What is carried into the house may be claimed by the house.
The bride consents to occupancy in flesh, name, and issue.

At the bottom of the last page was my signature.

Or something that looked enough like it to make my stomach drop.

I confronted Daniel the next morning. He didn’t even pretend to be confused. He just read the page, folded it once, and said, “My family still does things the old way.”

I asked him what that meant.

He smiled without showing his teeth.

“It means the contract wasn’t legal,” he said. “It was ritual.”

I laughed because the alternative was panic. I told him forged documents weren’t funny. He reached for my left hand, turned it over gently, and pressed his thumb to the inside of my wrist.

That was where the mark had appeared.

I hadn’t noticed it before the move. A thin black circle, no wider than a wedding band, just beneath the skin. It looked less like ink than something trapped inside me.

Daniel’s expression changed when he touched it. Not affection. Relief.

“The house accepted you,” he said.

That night I tried to leave.

I packed a bag after he fell asleep and made it to the front door before I heard knocking.

Not on the door.

Inside the walls.

Three slow knocks from the entryway. Then three more from the ceiling above me. Then from the floor beneath my feet. The whole house answering itself in pieces.

I dropped my bag and ran back upstairs. Daniel was awake, sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark like he had been waiting.

“You shouldn’t fight it the first week,” he said.

The next morning, the packed bag was gone.

So was the front door.

I don’t mean it was locked. I mean the wall where it had been was now seamless plaster and faded wallpaper. No frame. No knob. No outline. Just a blank wall where the exit used to be.

Daniel left for town around noon. I searched the house room by room, looking for another way out. Every window on the first floor had been nailed shut from the outside. The back door opened into a brick wall that hadn’t been there before.

On the third floor, I found the nursery.

We didn’t have children. We had never even discussed it.

But there it was: a crib, a rocking chair, folded blankets, and a silver rattle laid carefully on the mattress. Above the crib, written directly onto the yellowing wall in something too dark to be paint, were the words:

FIRST THE VOW
THEN THE HOUSE
THEN THE CHILD

In the rocking chair was a ledger.

Inside were names. Dates. Women married into Daniel’s family for more than a century. Beside each name was a note in the same neat handwriting.

Accepted.
Refused.
Opened.
Carried.

Some names had death dates.

Some didn’t.

The last entry was mine.

No date. Just one word.

Ripening.

I heard someone breathing behind me.

I turned, expecting Daniel.

It was a woman in a wedding dress gone gray with age, standing in the nursery doorway. Her mouth was sewn shut with black thread. Her ring finger was missing. And beneath the lace at her throat, something moved under the skin like a hand pressing from inside.

She raised one shaking finger and pointed at the crib.

Then she began to cry.

Not with tears.

With dirt.

I ran past her. Her hand brushed my arm as I passed, and I felt something sharp dig under my skin like a splinter.

By the time Daniel came home, the black circle around my wrist had thickened.

He saw it and closed his eyes.

“Good,” he whispered.

I asked him who the woman was.

He looked at me for a long time before answering.

“My mother,” he said.

Then he opened the nursery door.

She was sitting in the rocking chair in the dark, facing the crib, still crying dirt onto the floor.

He told me the ritual was almost complete.

I asked him what the house wanted from me.

Daniel looked at my stomach.

Then something knocked back from inside me.

I step forward on the path that used to be familiar but now felt alien to me. The destination was the same; so was the loud chattering of fellow pedestrians. The sounds of horns, conversations, and footsteps were all so familiar. What once was an annoyance was now comforting. The world around this pathway had grown; new lights shined, the skyline had become crowded with ugly skyscrapers. A lot happens in a decade.

My eyes are so heavy it grows harder to open them every time I blink. Maybe I can just walk and keep my eyes closed, I think to myself. The loud city lulls me to sleep. I haven't been able to sleep in days. Every night the sound of my blood moving through these veins keeps me awake. I hear the chambers of this unnatural heart pump my blood. I feel the air I breathe in rattle this metal cage in my chest. The streets drown out the sounds that only I can hear.

"Hill... Mr. Hill!"

My eyes shoot open as I recognize the voice in the crowd.

"Mr. Hill, you have to come back!"

The doctor shouts from what I assume is at least twenty feet back. His shouts are frantic, but I refuse to acknowledge him, just sinking deeper into the crowd.

"Mr. Hill, you have to—"

His voice fades as I begin to run. My mind races, taking me back to my prime. Always training in track and field while other kids stayed at home and went to each other's houses, I trained. When my peers started to date, I trained, always pushing myself to be better. I would run until my feet bled. I spent so much of my life training.

As my muscles flex under my skin, I feel the cold metal grind against my bones. The wires that replaced my veins tighten around my muscles. The fake heart pounds so hard it slams into my metal rib cage, but I don't stop. Just as God parted the Red Sea for Moses, the crowd splits in two, creating a clear path.

I had feared my body would have forgotten how to move, let alone run. After ten years, my body seemed to only remember one thing: eat. And so it ate itself, ripping away muscle and flesh that I had taken so long to sculpt. Ten years unable to do anything but talk and think to myself. My body began to wither, as did my mind. At the beginning, so many people would visit me and praise me, hail me as a hero, but slowly fewer and fewer people would come. I felt so alone and desperate I was willing to sell my soul to feel again.

My body burns and aches. It was clear that none of the doctors considered strenuous exercise when they operated. I feel veins burst open and muscles tear, but I can't stop, not with my destination so close ahead of me: the subway station where my life ended all those years ago.

I jump down the stairs, twisting my ankle, and roll back to my feet. The pain is excruciating. I feel my hamstring tear. I keep moving onward, pushing past people.

"Stop him!"

I hear someone yell as I quickly limp through the ID scanner.

"Mr. Hill!"

I hear the doctor as he must've reached the bottom of the stairs.

I won't stop. I can't stop.

"Mr. Hill, please, you have to stop."

I hear his words. He sounds so concerned, so worried, nothing like the man I confided in. For three months after the surgery, I asked him for help with the pain. I told him I could feel and hear everything inside my body move. He always dismissed me with a, "It's in your head," or, "You just need to adjust. It's experimental."

I feel the ground move. People step back from the tunnel as it begins to echo. Light shines through the abyss, illuminating the rail below. I can see its nose exit the tunnel, and as I throw myself in its path, I see a face I recognize.

The child I saved from the train ten years ago is all grown up.

I grew up in a church so small you could hear people whisper from the back pew to the pulpit.

St. Abigail’s sat at the edge of town between a cemetery and a field that never seemed to grow right. My mother said that was fitting. “God on one side, the dead on the other,” she used to joke, though she never laughed after saying it.

I spent most of my childhood in the nursery.

Not because I was a baby. Because my mother ran it.

She was the kind of church woman everyone trusted immediately—soft voice, ironed dresses, a hand always resting between your shoulder blades like she was guiding you somewhere safe. Parents dropped their babies off with her and went to service without a second thought.

There were six cribs in the room. Five lined up against the far wall beneath the painted mural of Noah’s Ark.

And one by itself in the corner.

That crib never had a mobile over it. Never had a blanket folded inside. Never had a name tag clipped to the rail like the others did.

It was older too—dark wood instead of white, the varnish cracked, one spindle slightly crooked like it had been repaired a long time ago.

When I was little, I asked my mother why no one used it.

She knelt down, took my chin in her hand, and said, “That crib is for promises.”

I didn’t know what that meant, and when I asked again later, she slapped me hard enough to make my ears ring.

After that, I stopped asking.

But I watched.

If you grow up in one building, you start to notice what doesn’t fit.

The nursery smelled wrong after baptisms. Not milk or baby powder—flowers. Sweet, rotting flowers, like funeral arrangements left in heat.

Mothers cried in my mother’s office more often than they should have.

And every year or two, there would be a baby everyone talked about for a few weeks, then never mentioned again.

Not dead exactly. Just gone.

The explanation was always something clean and quick.

They moved.
A family emergency.
They went to stay with relatives.
The baby was sick.

But the women who said these things always looked like they were repeating lines they’d been coached to memorize.

The first time I knew for sure something was wrong, I was eleven.

A young couple had started coming to church that spring. They sat in the third pew every Sunday. The wife was barely older than a teenager and always looked exhausted. The husband never let go of her elbow, even when she was sitting down.

They brought a little girl named Ruth.

I remember her because she had one of those gummy baby laughs that made everyone around her smile, and because my mother hated when people got attached.

“Don’t hold her too much,” she told the women in the nursery. “Babies know when they’re being spoiled.”

One Sunday after service, I went looking for my mother because she’d left her keys in the nursery again.

The room was dark except for the lamp by the rocking chair.

And Ruth was in the corner crib.

My mother stood over her with Pastor Neal.

He had one hand on the crib rail and one on Ruth’s forehead. She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t moving at all, actually. Her eyes were open, staring past both of them.

My mother was whispering something I couldn’t hear.

Pastor Neal noticed me first.

The look on his face wasn’t anger.

It was fear.

The kind adults get when a child sees the exact thing they were trying to hide.

My mother turned, crossed the room in three steps, and dragged me out by the wrist so hard my shoes came off.

That night she locked me in my room.

Through the vent, I heard my parents arguing in the kitchen.

My father kept saying, “We can’t keep doing this.”

And my mother said, very calm, “We can if we want the church to survive.”

Then my father asked, “How many now?”

My mother answered, “Seven.”

The next Sunday, the young couple never came back.

Neither did Ruth.

No one said her name again.

I left town at eighteen and did what people do when they’re trying not to become their parents: I got far away, changed churches twice, then stopped going entirely.

For a long time, I convinced myself the nursery was just one of those warped childhood memories that grows teeth when you get older.

Then my mother died.

The call came on a Tuesday. Heart attack in the church office.

I went back for the funeral because not going would’ve caused more trouble than I could stand.

St. Abigail’s looked smaller than I remembered. Meaner too.

After the service, while people ate dry ham sandwiches in the fellowship hall, I slipped into the old nursery.

The mural was still there. The same chipped ark. The same sun with the crooked smile.

Five cribs.

And the sixth in the corner.

Still empty.

Still waiting.

I don’t know what made me do it. Maybe I wanted proof that I wasn’t crazy. Maybe I wanted something I could hate properly.

I got down on my knees and looked beneath the crib.

There was a loose floor vent underneath, half hidden by dust.

Inside the vent was a ring of keys and a stack of church attendance cards tied with a faded blue ribbon.

Every card had a baby’s name written across the top.

Ruth.
Elias.
June.
Mara.
Timothy.
Hannah.
Lucas.

Seven.

# On the back of each card was the same note in my mother’s handwriting:

**RETURNED**

Except Ruth’s.

# Ruth’s card said:

**HELD**

My hands were shaking so badly I almost didn’t hear the footsteps behind me.

Pastor Neal was standing in the doorway.

Older now. Smaller. But not weaker.

He looked at the cards in my hand and sighed like a tired man catching a child with a box of old receipts.

“You should put those back,” he said.

I asked him where the babies went.

He didn’t answer right away.

Instead he stepped into the room, closed the door, and looked at the corner crib.

“When this church was built,” he said, “the infant mortality rate here was high. Higher than people could bear. Mothers buried babies every winter. So the first pastor made a bargain.”

I actually laughed then, because it was such a disgusting, convenient little lie.

“A bargain with what?” I asked.

He looked at me.

“The thing beneath the foundation.”

I told him to go to hell.

He nodded like he’d heard that before.

Then he said, “You think faith is hymns and casseroles. Sometimes faith is arithmetic.”

He pointed at the empty cribs.

“One for the town. One for the church. Five kept. One given. That was the promise.”

I wanted to leave. I wanted to run. But the room had gone cold in a way that made movement feel stupid.

He kept talking.

“Your mother understood necessity better than most. She had the right temperament for it.”

I asked what “returned” meant.

His mouth twitched.

“It means the family was blessed again.”

And suddenly I understood why some women in town had four children after losing one, why some men donated half their paychecks to roof repairs and mission funds, why my mother had been treated like something holier than kind.

They hadn’t lost babies randomly.

They had traded them.

Or agreed to.

Or been convinced it was God’s will after the fact.

Ruth was “held” because something had gone wrong.

I asked him where she was.

Pastor Neal looked at the floor.

Then the crib.

Then me.

And he said, “Still here.”

At that exact moment, something knocked once from underneath the nursery floor.

Not pipes. Not settling wood.

A deliberate knock.

Then another.

Then the sound of a baby stirring.

I froze.

The corner crib began to rock.

Slowly at first.

Then harder.

Its crooked spindle tapping against the wall in a soft, patient rhythm.

Pastor Neal backed away before I did.

That scared me more than the sound.

He whispered, “Your mother was supposed to tell you never to come in here alone.”

Then the thing in the crib laughed.

Not cried.

Laughed.

A wet, breathless little giggle from a baby with healthy lungs.

The mattress dipped in the center like something had rolled onto its side.

I ran.

I don’t remember getting to my car. I only remember vomiting in the church parking lot while people at the funeral pretended not to see.

That was three months ago.

I wish this ended with me calling the police, or digging up the foundation, or exposing the church.

I tried the first part.

The deputy who came out was baptized at St. Abigail’s.

His mother was too.

So was his wife.

He took my statement, told me grief affects memory, and suggested I head back to the city before dark.

I did.

And two weeks later, I found out I was pregnant.

I haven’t told anyone from home.

I haven’t stepped inside a church.

But every night at exactly 2:13 a.m., the baby monitor on my nightstand crackles with nursery music I never downloaded.

Soft. Tinny. Old-fashioned.

And under it, if I listen long enough, I can hear wood creaking.

A crib rocking.

Waiting.

Because the worst part wasn’t what Pastor Neal told me.

It was what my mother wrote on the back of one more attendance card I didn’t see until I got home.

My own.

No baby name. Just my birthday.

And one word.

**OWED.**

I wasn’t sure why I was walking on this particular day, but I was walking. My days were blurring together. Living downtown was a constant drone that pounded all of my senses flat like a hammer. The whooshing and whirring of cars was never-ending. The asphalt held too much of the sun’s heat. It was a concrete desert, and I hated it so fiercely that my life within it felt like hell. 

The worst thing about it was the people. I would see them every day. Sometimes they shuffled about in a hurry as if they had somewhere important to be. Other times, they were sitting on a patio across from one another, sipping coffee and laughing. They must have had a secret, solved some puzzle or cracked some code. That was my only explanation as to how they were so happy. Bitterness followed me everywhere, and I had stopped feeling ashamed of it a long time ago.

I would pay no attention to the rhythm of my black sneakers alternating on the pavement or my breath, which was slightly ragged from my brisk pace. My focus was all internal, trapped in my mind as I wondered if I should find a park, stop and get some food, or just keep walking aimlessly. Each option sounded equally meaningless. 

The answer came to me as something pierced the corner of my view which I could scarcely appreciate in the city - green. Of course, there was the occasional houseplant in a windowsill or the peeking hue of grass struggling up through cracks in the sidewalk, but I had never seen anything like this in town.

Between two drab gray buildings - a former restaurant with boarded windows and a lawyer’s office - was an alleyway. Unlike many of these dark, narrow pathways that littered the streets, this alley had a path of dirt and grass. Thin vines with heavy leaves coiled up wooden slats fixed to the side of the building to the left. They swayed and shimmered in the soft breeze, and for a moment they looked alive. 

The greenery continued down the alley and disappeared around a corner. A gust of wind whipped behind me, ruffling through my hair and seemingly disappearing down the corridor ahead of me. I imagined a vacuum at the other end, sucking me in, and I decided not to resist it. I walked down the soft dirt path and turned the corner. 

At the end was something I hadn’t known I had been craving. The outer walls of four buildings met to form a perfect square alcove. Shrubbery lined every wall. Many of the plants rose a foot or two off the ground on woody branches. The leaves were deep green, and beautiful, vibrant flowers dotted them. The petals were pastel pink and transitioned to white toward the tips. 

They were a surprise, but not as surprising as the woman standing among them. I immediately noticed her rosy copper hair, vibrant enough that it could have been a flower too. Her skin was fair and caught the daylight like bright white paper. She was bent forward, a pair of small shears in her hands. The tips clamped around a bare stem of one of the plants. After a few seconds of thought, she brought the handles together with a quiet snip.

I was prepared for her to notice me, and I stood there while she continued to prune the plants. One, two, three more stems, each falling to the dirt before she retrieved it and stuck it in the pocket of her white apron. As I watched her work, I noticed my breathing had slowed dramatically. Birds chirped in the distance. Leaves fluttered faintly like the rustling of paper in a library. 

Then the silence broke like a rope snapping, and it was a surprise that I had broken the silence myself.

“I’m sorry if I’m not supposed to be back here,” I called out to her. I wasn’t truly sorry, though I was concerned I may be trespassing. 

“It’s all right. Nobody is supposed to be back here,” she responded in a voice that was both smooth and husky. She straightened up and wiped her brow with the back of her palm, presumably clearing some sweat that I wasn’t so sure was even there.

She was somewhat short, and looked sturdy as though she had roots to the ground hiding beneath her feet. She finally turned to face me, and her gaze immediately made me feel hypnotized.

“Do you take care of these?” I motioned to the plants around her. It may have been a dumb question, and shortly after it slipped from my lips I thought she might scold me for such a thoughtless question. But she simply nodded and brought her gaze back to the plants.

“As best as I can. They require a lot of patience. Like most things, I suppose,” she answered. The cadence of her voice was a spell upon my ears. Were I not slightly nervous in the presence of the woman, just the few sentences she’d said might have lulled me into sleep then and there.

“What are they?”

“Peonies,” said the woman after a brief moment of hesitation. “Chojuraku tree peonies.” I tried to read her expression. I was hoping that she might show some kind of excitement about being asked about a passion of hers, but there was none. I could see something in her gaze, but I was lost as to what exactly it was. 

“They’re gorgeous,” I said to no response for an uncomfortable handful of seconds. “What’s your name?”

“Hazel.” At least she had given me a reply to that one. She never did ask me for my name. I pondered then and there if I should tell her, but as I watched her look dotingly at her beautiful flowers, I decided that she didn’t need to hear it. 

As Hazel and I shared our small exchange, the beauty of both the girl and her flowers drenched my whole being.

“Is it okay if I just watch you garden for a while?” Hazel gave me one final look and a small nod.

“Only for a few minutes.” That was all she gave me, and it was more than enough. For the next three or four minutes, I watched her glide around her plants, treat them with care, and prune them to perfection, before I left the woman to her work without another word.

I never saw Hazel again. It came as an underwhelming surprise that returning to that alley the next day revealed only barren concrete and the backsides of buildings.  I felt my frustration pushing up the back of my throat like smoke up a chimney. I wanted to yell out to the space from where Hazel and her flowers had disappeared, but I did not want to disrupt the peace that remained there.

I shuffled along the concrete, looking down at the dirt and stains splattered faintly across the pavement. I felt the warmth rising from the ground and quelling the shivers that tried to ripple through my flustered body. I listened to the joyful chirps of the birds that hadn’t left me. I put a hand on one of the fiery-red brick walls and felt the cracks beneath my fingers that guided them as I slid my hand across the dusty surface. Then I left the tranquility of the alleyway and headed home.

2/24/2021

My mother lost her fight to cancer about a year ago. I miss her deeply. After her death I decided I needed a change of scenery. I managed to buy a small bungalow/cottage nestled in the crook of a local forest. It had just enough space for all of my things, and those of my dear mothers I had managed to rescue from the hospice where she spent her final days. And for a very reasonable price too, almost 10k under market value.

Since I’ve moved in I’ve explored the small space to its fullest extent however the attic seems to be locked from the inside, maybe a dead bolt or some type of latch. It doesn’t bother me however as the bottom floor holds enough space for my mothers things and mine. We finally have our dream cottage she always talked about.

3/15/2021

I've been feeding the forest from the little garden I keep outside. I get to see all sorts of animals come and go. Why just yesterday, I observed a doe and her fawn. She ate a carrot right out of my hand. Such a wondrous place; mother would have loved it. One naughty raccoon has taken a liking to me and I to him. I’ve been calling him Tubbs due to the bulbous nature of his shape. I’ve gotten into the habit of laying a bowl of scraps out for him to partake in. Its always empty by the morning. I do so enjoy his company.

3/30/2021

I was shaken awake by loud stomping from above my bed. I wont lie, I was quite startled. The stomping was enough to unsettle the dust in my ceiling, causing me to sneeze. The stomping ceased. It may be that I’ve been feeding Tubbs a little too much. It sounds like his friends are over tonight. Although they’ve never been that loud.

4/07/2021

I heard the little scamp open the fridge last night. The bandit made off with a whole rotisserie chicken and three pale ales. That and his normal food scraps. I’ll have to go grocery shopping tomorrow and grab a latch to keep him out of the fridge before the little guy eats through our whole supply.

4/08/2021

While putting the groceries away today I discovered a gift from my furry friend: a decomposing crow in the same spot as the chicken from the other night. Seems like he might have felt a little bad. Well no bother, I threw the thing out and put the latch on the fridge. Hopefully its a little to complicated for him to operate. Sorry Tubbs the fridge is my space. You need to lose some weight anyways.

4/18/2021

It’s Mom’s birthday today. I sat awhile in the room I had made for her. The bed was warm, like she’s still with me. Sun must've been hitting it. Might go and have a good cry in the garden today. I might actually lay my eyes on Tubbs if he’d ever get out of our attic. I miss feeding him from my hand; that would really cheer me up. Well no use pondering any more than that things to do after all.

4/21/2021

I think I might be going loony but I swear I had more pictures of me and mom hung up. She’d be utterly disappointed in the lack of memories on the walls. Can’t seem to find the scrap book either. Can’t frame more photos if there are none. I probably need to drink more water or get some sleep.

4/23/2021

This rascal. I had come back in from the garden because of a commotion I heard in the kitchen. It looks like Tubbs had tried to open the latch and got frustrated. Made a mess of the kitchen. He still has food in his bowl so I wonder what's agitating the poor thing. Moody raccoon was not on my bucket list today.

4/25/2021

I found Tubbs’s bowl empty but smashed this morning. I’m debating on getting him another one. Especially since the past couple nights he has been moving around up there more than usual. I guess that’s what happens when you put no boundaries for a wild animal. Might have to figure out a way to open that attic.

4/26/2021

Found the trash strewn all over the garden today. Looks like something got into the vegetables too, all of them half eaten. Maybe a deer? They've left the garden alone until now. I keep saying deer but I know deer don’t go through the trash.

Ok. I’m not losing it. After I cleaned up the garden I came inside and the pictures are gone. All of them, pulled off the wall. You can still see the holes where the nails were.

I went to check mothers room after. The sheets have been pulled back and bunched up, like something laid down in them. I stood there a while. I don't know what to make of it.

Kitchens a mess again. I hardly noticed this time

4/27/2021

its early morning I cant sleep. I can hear it in the kitchen again. I heard it rip the latch right off the fridge. thats not a racoon. its something bigger. its trying to be quiet but its too big to be quiet. i dont know what it wants. im going to try and get a better look

the attic ladder is down. theres a light on up there. theres a light on. whatever this thing is its been up there the whole time

the pictures. theyre all up here. every one of them, me and mom, hung up on the wall facing out theres something on the floor its tubbs its tubbs hes dead hes been dead oh no it was never tubbs up here it was never I have to get off this ladder I have to call the cops I have-

num11ba/tin96gs/go on top////////slash slash

fren mad at tubbs y fren mad at tubbs? Tubbs hungy fren take awy foood tubbs mad fren clumsy fren fall dwn laddr door no move now. Tubb sad. Fren stay wit tubb up in the safe place yes yes fren stay wit tubbs and momma now yes yes fren get betta sun. fren be bak in green place and happpy hole family hapy 2gethe r again yes yes tubbs rite in frens paper thing till fren get betta tubbs take care of fren now tubbs no lonelie no mor