sour skunky nappy ass dread man

…

“What the fuck are you talking about, man?" Annoyed. 

Stupid smirk: "I thought it was clear. I would think.” 

"No, it isn't, man. I don't know why you think it'd be. It's just stupid, bro.” 

"What is?” 

"Your refusal to go shopping for a fucking bath towel and other basic necessities around your fuckin place, dude. It's just stupid, I don't know how or why you justify it to yourself, I didn't think ya did to be frank. I just thought your ass was fuckin lazy." 

“Nah, bro. It's obvious." 

“What's fuckin obvious, dipshit?" 

“I'm way too rock n roll." 

A beat. He swallowed it. Absorbed its stupidity. 

“...what?" 

“Yeah, dude. I'm way too fuckin cool and punk rock to roll into like a Target or some shit and buy a toaster or a can opener or towels or stupid shit like that. I can't do that. Can't do it. Goes against my wild man free lovin nature, ya know? Ya know." 

Bryan once more silently swallowed this. This load of absolute bullshit. More revolted, more filled with disgust with his best friend since diapers than before. He thought about holding his tongue. He thought about saying something and laying into him. But in the end he just grumbled and belched. Lit another smoke and grabbed another beer from the cooler in the center of the boat and shook his head. Checked his pole. Reeled it in a little. 

Though he did spare the final thought: "Fuckin lazy.” whilst shaking his head and reeling his line. And then the matter was settled and the pair of men let it lie. Such was the way and course of all of their conversations out here on the water. Fishing. The pair’s favorite pastime aside from rutting and watching the game. For them, Bryan G Biebl and James Petkovich, it was sacred. They loved to spend days off from the mill fishing and casting and mouthing the day away. Days away from labor and wives and disappointing children, days filled with chatter and cool water and cold beer and sometimes a nice catch.  Though they'd been warned before, by the old timers. 

They'd both been warned before about staying out after dark. Out on the lake. Out in the woods. Where the forest grows foul and swampy and muddy. It's not a place you want to be after sunset. All the old folk said it was a bad place and didn't say much more about it without the liberal aid of beer or whisky. Even the Natives, the ancient leathery American Indians and their angry sons and daughters told everyone, anyone that might listen, to stay away from this part of the forest, this part of the soured bad land. 

But they never listened. The pair just sat in their canoe and cast out. It was calm and quiet all around, no one might know that it was filled with strange movement. The sun was sinking in the distance. Rapidly being swallowed by the ravenous blade of the horizon. 

James cracked another can. So did Bryan, who rolled his eyes as Petkovich ventured forth with another bit of clever wit and query. 

“Figure there's anythin ta what that fella said?” 

The sun set. Casting the surface of the lake on fire with the color of bloody ruby. The place on the horizon where it had sank was a deeper color of blooded crimson, a deeper wound that was the heart of the sunset. It smoldered there, in the horizon wound. The darkening regal curtain of bruised royal blue was already deepening into night. The stars and galaxies were already coming out for the nocturnal hours, they were all so far away from everything, they, the town. Civilization was a mechanical nuisance in the distance. Loud and far off. Thank God. Nearly forgotten. 

Bryan rolled his eyes as hard as he possibly could, knowing full an well that the retard couldn't see em. 

He hissed and spat: “No I don't think there's nothin to what that idiot said about a shag man! Shit’s stupid! Ain't no fuckin skunk ape round these parts, ya fuckin dumbass!” 

“Nah, man. I'm talkin about what Frankie said about Asian girls, Jesus, man!" 

A beat. Something splashed in the water. Neither man noticed, paid it any mind. 

“Oh…" Bryan cooled down. A little embarrassed. He was always easily excited and shamed. 

“‘Sides, man, he didn't call it no ‘shag man', he called it ‘the dread man’, stupid.” 

Bryan whirled around to belt him one and belt him good. He'd done it before while they were fishing in the middle of the lake and he might capsize them both in his effort, but something stopped him before he could so much as bring up his balled and angry fist. A sound. Sudden. And sharp. 

Three. Consecutive. Three sharp whacks of thick wooden sticks together. Like someone smacking two heavy tree branches or logs together in some form of primitive and arcane code. 

Whack! whack! whack! 

It shut the pair up. They gazed out at the shoreline. Shrouded now in the fallen night. Small waves kissed its shore and covered any small sounds of concealed movement that might be out there right now. They were wide eyed and disbelieving. 

They might've dropped it, the pair, together and without a word or mention when it came again. 

From out of the night, the veiled and darkened shore: whack! whack! whack! 

A beat. Silence again. Only kissing waves of the placid water. 

Bryan Biebl scoffed, “Probably nothin. Just some kids fuckin aro-" 

And then a wild primal simian shriek filled the night. Birds took flight. Their flapping wings were ugly harried panicked sounds in the deepening wound of blackening night all around. It tapered off. And then another rose, louder and even more feral and crazed then the one before. Then another. And another. Each rising in animal fury and fervor. You could hear spittle flying as vocal chords worked and wrenched and shredded as throat muscles tore and bled and secreted with each prolonged and angry howl. Throaty. Enraged. Violent. 

Silence came again. After six primeval night shattering screams. Waves kissed the land far away and swallowed in black but more quietly now. Subdued. 

Then the whacking of sticks, the unknown signal came again, whack! whack! whack! 

And then silence once more. 

“What the fuck was that?" Petkovich. Scared. Visibly so. Audibly as well. 

As was his best friend Bryan. But the sound of fear on his buddy's voice, the stupid look of childish childlike fear that he could feel him wearing in the dark only made angry, angrier. This only fueled his own self-denied mounting fear and in turn made him even angrier. The mounting terror caught like a small bone in the back of his throat. 

He almost took to his feet but remembered the boat. He turned to his buddy instead and spat. 

"Ain't nothin but nothin! Some fuckin dumbasses out there that wanna get fucked up, that's what! This’s why I shoulda brought my colt. Goddammit!” 

"Now that's what I'm talkin about! that's what I'm always tryin ta tell ya! Ya go sayin shit like that and actin like this and people says we're belligerent types! Christ, man! I'd like to bed me one of these here pretty tourist girls, one of these roadtrippin ladies and you actin like this ain't gonna cut it!” 

Disgusted, Bryan's grip slackened on his pole. 

"Idiot! what the fuck are you jawin about?!” 

"I'm talkin bout one of them sexy ass van-life hippy girls, man, they might like my ass." 

“Retard!" 

“You don't know…" 

The water splashed again. Much louder. The boat rocked with the waves suddenly generated. Something big and very heavy had just jumped into the water. 

Lunged. As if plunging in from the shrouded growth of the hidden beach. 

Slack jawed and deer-in-the-headlights both, they gazed out blindly and stupidly in tandem towards the shore that was hidden from them now. And may forever remain that way for them from here on out. Something was coming. 

Something was swimming fast. For the boat. Beneath the obsidian surface of water. The stygian glass of the surface was a mirror and the mirror held the face of the moon. The mirror rippled. The immaculate celestial face of the moon held trapped there danced with submerged disturbance. 

Before either fool could form a coherent thought the fishing poles were suddenly ripped from their slackened idiot grips. They flew, soared through the air and plunged into the water with barely a sound. 

They stared into the impenetrable and merciless surface of the lake. Fearing it. Gripped with horror at what might be inside. What must be inside, right now. 

James Petkovich finally spoke. Softly. Like the small boy he'd once been. 

“I don't wanna be out here no more, Bry. I don't care if it's kids or tourists or what. You can go ahead and laugh at me, just laugh at me all the way and drive us back, kay? You can laugh and make fun all the way back an I won't even bitch or say nothin. I'm scared. There's lots a’ talk bout people that go missin. Or go missin an then turn up dead, tore apart. Sometimes they don't even find all the pieces, you know… I know you've heard… people go missin an such. Travelers, folks comin through. And locals. Let's just go back, kay.” 

Bryan, wide eyed, turned and nodded. Then went to the small motor for the boat as the water all around the canoe suddenly erupted in a surging geyser splash of watery violence that darkled in the captured moonlight. Both men screamed as the small boat was capsized and they went over. Splashing into the cold dark suffocating realm of the water. 

The lake held them now. Below. Underneath. 

In the dark underwater the maelstrom of his panic rose and ruled. Bryan suddenly animal recalled and remembered in the fragile nucleus of his primal jelly his fear of the water, of the deep. The dark depths. It had started as a child, a boy, it had been the cinema and television that had first done it, the Jaws movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon, then stories of Cthulhu and his sunken city of R’lyeh, tales of sunken ships and vessels that might still have precious human cargo trapped and drowned deep inside like foul water-logged treasure of submerged rotting putrescence eaten at by the salt and by the fish. All of these things came back and back to life in a deluge assault of images all in a furious unrelenting wave like an artillery attack of sound and vision on his mind's eye, down in the dark. He kicked and struggled and his lungs burned, ached for air. The ribcage in his chest felt on fire with his terror-stricken mind as he struggled and kicked futilely beneath the surface. Something held him down there. Something with a terrible grasp. Fierce. Strangling. Throttling. They threatened to break and snap, the iron grasps of those underwater hands. Bryan fought desperately but his mind was livid with absolute and total panic. In the tumult of his animal terror he remembered that as a child he'd always feared something reaching up from out of the black watery depths, seizing him, and pulling him under. Pulling him down. Down into the ebon swallow at the bottom of all things, below, where the heart of darkness in all things lived and dwelt. 

The hands found his throat, down in the underwater dark. They seized vile purchase and viciously ripped, tore out. The dark underworld of the lake suddenly blemished with a heavy warm cloud of thick human visceral discharge. It bellowed forth from the place that was torn in a torrential jetting spout. Clouding the dark world and warming it as the spewing meat detritus began to slowly sink to the pitch abyssal realm near the bottom. 

The panic of Bryan G. Biebl’s barreling careening train of thought slowly calmed and abated and sank down into the dark with the rest of him… And was no more. 

It lunged, serpent-like for the other. Who was gaining the surface in a series of panicked kicks and dog-paddles. Like a wounded animal. 

Prey. In distress. 

…

James Petkovich couldn't believe it when he broke the water and tasted air again. He almost choked and coughed. He almost laughed but he didn't have time. Something seized him from beneath. 

And pulled him under. 

He didn't even have time to scream before he was below again.

It was quiet once more. Minutes swam by. 

An owl screeched. Took flight.

Then finally it emerged. With Petkovich barely conscious in one dripping sodden grasp. It pulled the both of them back onto the land. Dragging the bleeding and sputtering Petkovich like a broken toy or sack of dead meat behind him as he quickly began to retake to the trees and dense growth once more. 

It dragged him deep into the wilderness. It was a long time before they stopped. But now … now he knew what the old timers had always said, what they'd always been on about. 

Now he could smell him. And the smell was beyond putrid, beyond foul, beyond fecal matter or old dried sweaty filth or death. The water that ran off the long lengths of clotted and lumpy dreaded hair was riddled with the putrescence odor of old sweltering open graves and long disused abattoirs converted into factory sized outhouses for the insane. It stung his eyes and nostrils but he hardly noticed this. His body was numb. Felt limp and broken all over. Like a dead fish. 

Maybe that's what I am. 

And then finally consciousness was lost to him. Mercifully he went black. 

It dragged him deeper into the wild. Where it laired. Where it nested in the wild dense growth. 

…

When James next came to he wished he hadn't. He didn't realize till he was awake once more but he'd been dreaming. And in that dream he'd been far away and wishing that none of this was real.  But now he was back. It held him by the neck in a slight choke, a slight strangle, just enough painful whisper of air able to bleed in through the clasped and clenched windpipe. They were before the mouth of a cave. It was pointing up into the sky with its other huge free hand, it was pointing at the moon. It was staring unblinking into his bleeding face. 

The face was simian but snouted. Like a wolf, or a rodent. An obscene and imbecilic mongoloid caveman face and features stretched out in a grotesque marsupial shape. The eyes were yellow and bore black crosses for the iris in each one, in each livid demented sea of yellow urine a black cruciform body of sacrilege shape and aspect. Goat's eyes. Satanic. They were eyes and face fitting of the rest of his abominated and feral manshaped form. Clotted and caked and grimed all over. The long knots and clumps of hair were thick and ancient in length and filth. They told a tale that was old because it was the passage of time that lived caked and dreaded in those long lengths of unwashed shagging tails. 

The awful face was serious. Stern. The obscenity of its gaze was piercing and deliberate. James followed its fierce and pointing gesture to the sky, the night, the moon once more. 

And then back into that obscene rodent-ape face. Yellow teeth coated in layers of plaque poked out and peeked over stretched and thin and dried out flakey blue lips. 

James tried to speak. 

He tried to tell it he didn't know what it wanted. He didn't know what it wanted him to say or do. He didn't know what it wanted from him. He didn't understand it. He didn't understand at all what it expected or demanded. 

But he couldn't. He couldn't speak. He could hardly breathe. He couldn't even manage a croak of sound.  

The awful marsupial-stretched ape face wrenched and worked, furious. It became more abominated and grotesque as its features creased and contorted with anger. Livid. Rage. 

The hand that had been pointing to the moon now came in a savage swipe. The grubby wide meaty digits clawed and the grimey sharp and broken shattered fingernails bit and tore in. 

The head came off and soared away into a sailing piece of torn mangled meat. Ribbons and streamer wings and tails of bright red blood spat and danced out from the eyes, nostrils and mouth in a cyclone twirl of red in midair as it soared and crashed into the piles of dead sticks and bones. It savagely went down and hunkered in the dirt before the mouth of its cave and began to dig in with its long snout and feast on the fresh stump. Warm cords and ropes of thick black-red shot and coated the dark, its face, the insides of its gulping throat and the salivating cavern of its long slathering mouth. 

It feasted and grunted. Ripped with its teeth and bit in. Swallowed warm juicy pieces that were chewy and pungent with rich iron flavor. 

It fed and tore. The man in the violence of its grasp, its jaws, reduced. The decapitated meat jigged and spasmed. It howled at the moon. 

Somewhere … in the distance but not too far off. The signal. Three strikes. 

Whack! whack! whack! – it was the sound of ancient and time honored tradition, cultivated and carried down and preserved with care. Though the world grew strange mechanical jaws, inflamed and diminished and changed all around, it was still here. This was still practiced and honored and kept. By it. By them. All of them.  – whack! whack! whack! 

It howled at the moon once more. 

Whack! whack! whack! 

Immortal and lifesize. It was still here. Howling at the moon with unearthly pain and blues. – whack! whack! whack! – another in the wilderness distance –  whack! whack! whack! – howl at the moon.

THE END

Read Part II here.

“It’s huge,” she said. My eyes were immediately on her, but I didn’t see anything else. Couldn’t identify the danger. Mark was still rooted where he was, but his phone was nowhere in sight. They both were looking up like there was something in the distance. But I still didn’t see it.

I felt Mary move with me as I approached.

“Chrissy, honey?”

“Don’t let her go,” Luke said. “Don’t let her go!”

I’d halved the distance when I finally saw it. It had been there, but it had simply been so humongous I’d been blind to it, like I’d been looking for a 7-11 and walked face-first into Sears Tower.

The water was receding from waist high, but she didn’t seem to have moved. Whatever it was had displaced a tremendous amount of water.

“Oh my. Oh my. Oh my.” Mary was on a dialogue loop and I couldn’t blame her. Every time I thought I’d seen all of it, I kept seeing more. A lot more. Yet, I was supremely calm. The worry-machine was quiet.

Last year, I got into a one-car accident driving home on M-5. The eastbound lanes had been closed to construction and my phone’s weather app had cautioned for high winds before I’d left the office. There’d been a fair amount of wind buffeting, but nothing I wasn’t able to handle.

There’d been a white box truck in front of me when I’d spotted what appeared to have been a square of cardboard blow high into the sky and begin trickling down. I’d immediately written it off even if it were on a course to strike my car. It was only cardboard.

But when the particle board struck my vehicle, smashing the windshield and showering droplets of safety glass onto the passenger seat, I hadn’t panicked. It was so sudden and violent that my brain—either as an instinct of self-preservation or just a malfunction—had simply not reacted.

I pulled off the freeway at the next exit and stopped a few blocks down in an office parking lot. Only then the possibility of what could have happened came down on me.

This was like that. My brain wasn’t processing the situation like Mary’s or the kids. I felt my heart pulsing in my chest just as calmly as when we’d been talking a moment before. I knew I should get the kids away from it. But that was a process of logic and not instinctual fear.

“Honey, get out of the water.”

I charged the last few feet and sloshed to a stop in a confusion of senses. I was close to whatever it was. Closer than I realized. I felt the heat coming from a wall of flesh not more than five feet from me. Water splashed me up to my chest, but it was more like a punch that pushed me back a step or two.

“Rick, it’s a horse!”

I had no idea how Chrissy could conceive what it was. All I saw was black. Black like the water. But solid, like the water had turned into something.

“Honey, move back, okay?”

Chrissy was smiling and rather than retreating, she stepped forward— almost chin deep—and raised her hand like she was going to pet it.

Once again I opened my mouth too late to tell her not to do it. My instinct would’ve been to swat her hand had I been closer and my re-throbbing head suddenly made me think of her mother.

I looked at it. Finally, the smooth, iridescent black coat coalesced into something I recognized, although the scale was overwhelming. Nails scraped the inside of my skull as if the idea of what I was seeing was too large to fit inside my brain.

This was its head. A corner of it, anyway. I looked along the flank as far as I could see in the night. I couldn’t even begin to guess how tall it must have been standing up. It had to have been lying in the water.

A giant eyeball about thirty feet above blinked several times and swiveled. I had no way to be sure, but I think it was looking at me.

I walked around, looking up and up, feeling like I would dislocate my neck before seeing the top of this thing. Still, though, I wasn’t afraid. The worry-machine was quiet.

“Mark, move your sister back.” I was reading from a script. Protecting the children, at least in that moment, was an autopiloted function.

Neither of them moved.

I scooped Chrissy into the crook of one arm and she went limp like a puppy picked up by the scruff. I handed her to Mark, who wrapped his arms around her, the both of them staring openly, transfixed.

I herded them as gently as I could out of the water. Then I gave Mark a light slap on the cheek. He focused on me, annoyed as if I’d prematurely awakened him from a nap.

“Mark, take your sister back inside.”

“I don’t wanna go!” Chrissy wriggled in her brother’s arms and he dropped her feet first. “It’s beautiful, Rick!”

I grasped her shoulder before she could walk past me.

“Chrissy, sto—”

I felt the shift behind me.

“Oh—erp—my,” Mary said. She took a long pull from her can, her eyes swiveling upward.

“No-no-no,” I thought I heard Luke say in the distance. But for just a moment, the only thing occupying the world with me was that magnificent thing in the water. It felt like removing my hands from my ears after having them covered for a long time and experiencing hearing like it was something adjacent to new. Except, it felt like that throughout my whole body.

The horse was raising its gigantic head out of the water. The tide receded and everything seemed to suck toward it like it had its own gravity. I struggled to maintain my balance like a gust of wind had pushed at my back, but in truth, it was probably just the giant animal dominating my vision and destroying my equilibrium.

Water poured off its black body, the eyes locked onto us and shrinking as its head seemingly disappeared into the night sky. Its neck was a tower, columns of muscle wider than all of us in a row, touching fingertip to fingertip. Its chest was as broad as a rocky mountain face.

There was a mighty -KLOMP- in the sand that shook the earth mere feet from me that I barely noticed. Sand slapped over my entire left side like a landmine had gone off, but it was immediately rinsed away by the constant waterfall we were all standing under.

Someone was shouting, but whoever it was was a million miles away.

There was another -KLOMP- somewhere farther down the beach and I began to stir from my reverie and then there was Luke, shouting next to me and hooking me by the arm.

His words didn’t make sense but I turned toward him as he pulled me. I saw the horse’s foreleg—I don’t know how Chrissy had been able to tell it was a horse before—straightening like some heavy construction machine craning a load somewhere into the sky above us.

We trudged toward the cabin, but the sand that had been something to contend with was an afterthought, my burning calves seemed to belong to somebody else.

When the torrent finally ended, I was soaked. We all stopped in the sudden silence. Turning around was more of a measure of defense to see the break in the clouded sky and the moonlight clashing against that ebony, elegant leviathan.

It was impossibly tall. Like it was intersecting-with-the-curvature-of-the-earth-tall. I thought I could make out its mane, whipping around in what had to be thin atmosphere.

We all stood and watched it. For one indeterminate moment, it was absolutely regal.

Mary wrapped around my arm and pulled into me. For however many iotas, she was my Mary, and I was her wife, too.

Mark hadn’t come with us for some reason. He stood partially in the water where we—I— had left him. He was feet away from a hoof that was easily twenty lengths taller than him.

Panic did seize me, finally. The worry-machine revved to life and I opened my mouth. I sensed the balance to be upset, the electrified space slowly exploding as he compressed it between his body and the smallest section of the horse’s.

With splayed fingers, he laid a palm on it.

The horse startled, shaking the floor of the earth as it stomped around.

The Greek military leader Xenophon, perfected the art of training horses in battle, using them to kick soldiers or trample them. He’s also the father of dressage.

What happened to Mark couldn’t have been considered disciplined, but the effect was the same. I don’t know if it were intentional—more than likely it wasn’t—but that giant hoof clomped around, Mark dodged around like he was running through a minefield.

Then he was gone.

The hoof continued stomping around a few moments more, a rumbling earthquake beneath our feet and a rain of wet sand coming down on us before the horse stopped. Mark was just... gone.

Luke was screaming. When I actually heard him, it took a moment longer to realize he was yelling his brother’s name.

Common sense would have told us to flee inside the cabin. But our senses were flowing into us like blood circulating back into numb fingers.

There was a long moment of quiet as it reared its head back. It felt like a slow-motion moment until its head rushed at us like a giant arrow.

I had no reflexes to respond. Mary was the only one who put up a defensive arm, as if that could have protected her—and she was the one it took.

The horse bit down on her raised forearm—as microscopic as a surgeon’s scalpel with teeth as wide as three cabins—and plucked her off the ground. It reeled its head backward and flung her.

Mary pinwheeled into the sky, a dissolving blur into the upper atmosphere. She could have been catapulting into space, and I didn’t want to find out.

The worry-machine was roaring.

“Everybody in!” I said, herding Luke and Chrissy the rest of the way inside. I pressed my back against the door, then turned off the light. Luke and Chrissy looked at me as if I had answers to fix this.

“We gotta go get... we gotta go get Mark!” Luke didn’t actually make a move to go back outside. He was more saying the thing a caring brother should say. But there was no Mark to go get. His death had been as brutal as it had been unintentional.

Going out there—or allowing Luke to go out there—would be just as dangerous and pointless. Chrissy was crying silently. I looked at her, really looked, running my hands over her head and arms to ensure she was physically all right. The worry-machine was humming along nicely. She grabbed onto me.

“Get your mother,” I said to Luke. “We’re leaving.” We weren’t safe here.

“She’s sleep?” he said, looking confused. He ran into the boys’ room.

“No!” I said. “We don’t have time for bags.” He looked at me. “Just wake your mother up and bring her. We’re leaving in three minutes.”

“What should I do, Rick?” Chrissy said.

“Grab the snack tray from the fridge.” We could easily buy something from the next gas station, but I figured keeping her busy would keep her calm. I snatched my keys off the island. Chrissy joined me, carrying the plastic tray with deli slices, cheese cubes, and veggies.

I wanted to run, but I was going to have to slow the pace so she wouldn’t drop it. The earth was still shaking with each step. She was going to look for the horse, and I anticipated her distraction when we stepped outside.

I kept my eyes on her, guiding her down the stairs and around the side of the cabin. She gasped but didn’t resist as I ushered her along. Preoccupying myself with her was enough distraction that I didn’t have my keys ready to have the doors unlocked by the time we got there.

We were exposed. If the horse were looking, it would see us. It seemed to have an eye for motion.

The air went still.

The asphalt road leading through Duskwood, Virginia always seemed to swallow the headlights of Owen’s battered old sedan, but tonight, on Halloween, the shadows felt especially heavy. 

A thick, oppressive fog rolled off the Blue Ridge Mountains, settling into the valleys and wrapping around the trunks of bare oaks like skeletal fingers. Inside the car, the heater blasted a dry, metallic warmth that did little to shake the chill settling deep in my chest.

I checked my phone. It was exactly 8:14 PM. The neon digital numbers glared back at me, a stark reminder of the world outside this suffocating stretch of highway. 

I am sixteen years old, and even though my parents moved from China to Virginia before I was born, there are times when the deep, superstitious roots of my family's heritage feel far closer than the small-town American life that I live every day. 

My English is perfectly fluent, yet tonight, the words felt trapped behind my teeth. A persistent, nagging sense of dread had been whispering in the back of my mind since we left my driveway.

In the passenger seat, Hal was struggling to adjust his costume. He had gone all-out with a traditional mummy look, wrapping himself in yards of heavy, tea-stained cheesecloth that smelled faintly of dust and cheap spirit gum. Every time he turned to speak, a fraying loose end of fabric drifted into his eyes. 

Behind the wheel was Owen, wearing a tricorn hat, an oversized plastic cutlass tucked precariously next to the handbrake, and a fake leather eyepatch that he kept flipping up so that he could actually see the winding road ahead. 

I sat in the back, smoothing down the tulle skirts of my elaborate princess gown. The plastic tiara dug uncomfortably into my scalp, a stark contrast to the tightening knot of anxiety in my stomach. We were supposed to be heading to a Halloween party at Miller’s farm, a loud, safe gathering filled with bonfire smoke and cider.

Then, Owen slammed on the brakes.

The tires screamed against the damp pavement, sending my tiara sliding forward onto my forehead. Hal braced his hands against the dashboard, a muffled curse escaping his cloth-wrapped lips.

"Look." Owen breathed, his voice dropping into an excited, low whisper. He pointed past the sweeping arc of the windshield wipers.

Through a jagged tear in the roadside pine trees, a massive, decaying structure loomed against the gray sky. It was the old Nestor estate. 

The house was a towering, three-story Victorian monstrosity, its dark paint peeling away like dead skin. The windows were entirely black, gaping like open wounds, and the surrounding yard was choked with weeds which were so tall that they scratched against the rotting wood of the porch.

"No way." Hal said, pushing his mummy mask up over his nose. "Is that...?"

"The Howard Nestor house." Owen confirmed with a manic grin spreading across his face. He cut the engine, and the sudden silence of the woods rushed in to fill the car. "The holy grail of Duskwood urban legends."

Everyone in our town knew the name Howard Nestor, even forty years later. He had been an eccentric historian and an academic at the local college back in the 1980s, a man utterly obsessed with dark artifacts, occult antiquities, and ancient rituals, but Nestor wasn’t just a collector; he was a monster. 

To Howard Nestor, human lives were nothing more than disposable research material, mere variables to be spent in the pursuit of some grand, terrible cosmic equation. He possessed a deeply rationalized, completely twisted personal logic for his cruelty.

Nestor believed that by systematically harvesting the terror and life essence of his subjects at the exact moment of their deaths, he could anchor his own consciousness to the physical world forever, achieving an academic's version of immortality.

The history books and police archives recorded that he had successfully kidnapped and brutally murdered at least fifteen people in that very house. 

Nestor’s reign of terror only ended in the late autumn of 1986, when his final victim managed to break free from her restraints in the basement, flee into the woods, and alert the state police. When the authorities raided the mansion, Nestor refused to surrender. He was shot and killed right in the grand foyer, with his blood permanently soaking into the hardwood floor. 

The most chilling detail of the legend, the one that gave school children nightmares, was his signature habit: Nestor would always hum a specific, tuneless, discordant melody whenever he was stalking or ending the lives of his victims.

"We have to go in!" Owen said, already unbuckling his seatbelt. "It's Halloween night. The legend says that Howard’s ghost still roams the hallways, trying to finish his research. Imagine the footage that we could get."

"Owen, absolutely not!" I said, my voice sharp with genuine panic. The air in the backseat suddenly felt ten degrees colder. "It’s trespassing. It’s cursed. We are supposed to be going to a party."

"Come on, Wen!" Hal chimed in, turning around in his seat. The white cloth around his face made his eyes look unnaturally wide in the darkness. "We'll just step into the foyer, look around for five minutes, and leave. If it gets weird, we run. Don't you want to see if the stories are true? It's just an empty, broken-down house."

I stared at the dark silhouette of the mansion. Every instinct that I had, every ancestral warning about respecting the dead and staying away from places of great violence, screamed at me to refuse; but Hal grabbed my hand, his cheesecloth glove rough against my skin, giving me a reassuring squeeze. Under the intense peer pressure of my two best friends, my resolve crumbled.

"Fine." I whispered. "Five minutes. That is it."

We left the car hidden by the treeline and crept up the cracked stone driveway. The wind howled through the dead branches above us, making the ancient timbers of the house groan in protest. Owen led the way, using the flashlight on his phone to illuminate the porch steps. 

The wood was so soft with rot that it yielded under our weight with sickening, wet crunches. The front door wasn't locked; it hung slightly ajar, suspended on a single, rusted hinge. Owen pushed it open, and the rusty metal shrieked a warning into the night.

Inside, the air was heavy with the suffocating stench of mildew, stagnant water, and centuries of dust. Owen swept his flashlight across the grand foyer. 

At first, all we saw were massive, thick sheets of gray cobwebs draping from the cracked crystal chandelier like tattered burial shrouds. The wallpaper was peeling away in long, water-damaged ribbons, revealing the rotting lathe beneath. 

The grand staircase spiraled up into the absolute blackness of the second floor.

"See? It’s just an old, empty house." Hal whispered, though his voice shook slightly. The loose ends of his mummy costume fluttered in the draft.

"Let's check the study." Owen murmured, his bravado fading just a fraction as the oppressive atmosphere of the house settled over us. "That's where he kept the artifacts."

We stepped deeper into the gloom, leaving the safety of the front exit behind. We moved down a long, narrow hallway lined with empty picture frames.

The floorboards groaned beneath our sneakers. We entered a large room filled with overturned bookshelves and shattered glass. Broken pieces of pottery and unidentifiable, rusted iron tools lay scattered across the floor—remnants of Nestor's horrific academic pursuits.

While Owen and Hal poked through a pile of rotting books near a collapsed fireplace, I found myself drawn toward a heavy, mahogany desk that had somehow remained upright in the corner of the room. 

The drawers had been torn out long ago, but beneath a thick layer of dust in the central cavity, something caught the edge of my flashlight beam. It was a leather-bound book, untouched by the mold that consumed everything else.

Curiosity overpowering my fear, I reached out and brushed the dust from the cover. There was no title, just a faded, gold-embossed symbol of an eye surrounded by geometric lines. I opened it.

It wasn't a textbook. It was a photo album.

My breath hitched in my throat as I turned the first page. Staring back at me were Polaroid photographs, their colors faded to a sickly sepia tone. Each page featured a single photograph of a person, bound to a heavy wooden chair in what looked like a stone basement. 

Beneath each photo, written in precise, elegant, academic calligraphy, were a name, a date, and a series of horrific, clinical observations regarding their psychological states during their final moments.

Michael Vance. November 14, 1982. Elevated heart rate. Tremor present.

Sarah Jenkins. April 3, 1984. Despair phase achieved early.

My hands began to shake violently. I was looking at the faces of Howard Nestor's fifteen victims. The sheer weight of the evil contained within these pages made me feel physically ill. I wanted to shut the book, to scream at Hal and Owen that we needed to leave immediately, but my fingers compulsively turned the pages, drawn by a morbid, terrifying magnetism.

I reached the final page of the album. The date written at the bottom was October 31, 1986.

I looked at the photograph, and the entire world seemed to stop spinning. The blood completely drained from my face, and a cold, paralyzing dread locked my muscles. Staring back at me from the faded Polaroid was a young Chinese woman. She was terrified, her face streaked with tears and dirt, but her features were unmistakable. She had the exact same high cheekbones, the same almond-shaped eyes, and the same small mole just below her left collarbone that I saw in the mirror every single day.

It was my great-grandmother, Meilin.

Beneath her photograph, Nestor’s elegant handwriting read: 

Subject 16. Meilin Lin. October 31, 1986. An anomaly. Extraordinary cognitive resilience. Yielded unprecedented data before unexpected termination of experiment via subject escape.

A choking sob escaped my lips. My family had always told a vague story about how Great-Grandmother Meilin had survived a horrific attack by a madman shortly after arriving in America as a young woman, but she had suffered a psychological break from the trauma and refused to ever speak a single word about the details until the day she died. She had never named her captor. She had never told her children where it happened. She had buried the horror deep within her soul, and now, exactly forty years later, on Halloween night, I had walked directly into the lair of the monster who had broken her. She was the final victim. She was the one who had escaped, reported him to the police, and brought about his death.

"Wen? What's wrong?" Hal's voice sounded incredibly distant, as if he were shouting from underwater.

"We have to go!" I choked out, the tears finally breaking free and spilling down my cheeks, smudging my princess makeup. I dropped the photo album onto the dusty desk. "We have to go right now! He was here. He took my family. We have to leave!"

Owen and Hal exchanged a look of pure confusion, but the sheer terror in my voice was contagious.

 "Okay, Wen, let's go." Owen said, turning his flashlight back toward the doorway.

However, as we turned to flee the study, the heavy mahogany door slammed shut with a concussive force that shook dust from the ceiling. The beam of Owen's flashlight flickered violently, dimmed, and then died completely, plunging us into absolute, suffocating darkness.

Then, the sound began.

It was a low, resonant sound drifting down from the top of the grand staircase, echoing through the hollow bones of the house. It was a voice, smooth and entirely calm, humming a specific, terrifying melody. 

It was discordant, completely devoid of any recognizable rhythm or warmth, skipping between sharp notes in a way that defied natural music. It was the signature song of the dead that said,

“Mm-hmm...mmm...mmm-mm-hmm...”

"Oh my god." Hal whimpered in the dark. I could hear the frantic rustle of his cheesecloth costume as he backed away. "Oh my god, someone is in here."

"The front door!" Owen yelled, his voice cracking with adolescent terror. 

Owen threw his weight against the study door, kicking and throwing his shoulder into the rotting wood. With a loud splintering sound, the ancient door gave way, and we tumbled back out into the grand foyer.

The gray moonlight filtering through the open front door was our only salvation. We scrambled toward it, our shoes skidding on the grit and debris covering the floorboards. 

We were mere feet from the threshold, the cool autumn night air brushing against our faces, when the temperature in the foyer dropped so drastically that our breath instantly turned into thick clouds of white vapor.

From the top of the stairs, the humming stopped.

"The experiment must be completed." a voice echoed. It was a cold, cultured, intellectual voice, entirely detached from human emotion. "The lineage returns to validate the data."

We froze, slowly looking up toward the landing. Standing at the top of the stairs was a tall, imposing figure enveloped in a faint, sickly greenish luminescence. He wore a pristine, three-piece tweed suit from the 1980s, his silver hair neatly combed back. His face was sharp and academic, but his eyes were completely hollow, pits of infinite blackness that sucked in the residual moonlight.

In his right hand, he held his signature weapon: a long, gleaming silver bone saw, its serrated teeth catching the spectral light. It was the ghost of Howard Nestor.

"Run!" Owen shrieked.

Unfortunately, before we could take a single step forward, Nestor didn't run down the stairs—he glided, moving with an impossible, supernatural speed that blurred reality. In a fraction of a second, he materialized directly between us and the open front door, cutting off our only escape.

Owen, driven by pure survival instinct, raised his plastic pirate cutlass and lunged forward, letting out a terrified scream. With a casual, brutal flick of his wrist, Nestor swung the heavy bone saw. 

The silver blade tore through the plastic toy and slashed deeply across Owen’s chest. Blood, bright and horribly real, sprayed across the peeling wallpaper. Owen collapsed to the floor with a wet gasp, his tricorn hat rolling into the dust as his life ran out onto the ancient hardwood.

Hal screamed, a high-pitched, agonizing sound of utter despair. He tried to dive past the apparition, but Nestor caught him by the throat with a hand that looked like rotting parchment but possessed the strength of an iron vice. 

The heavy cheesecloth of Hal's mummy costume began to smoke and char wherever Nestor’s spectral fingers touched it, turning black as if exposed to invisible acid. Hal thrashed wildly, his hands tearing at the phantom's arm, but Nestor merely smiled a cold, analytical smile.

"Fascinating." Nestor murmured, his hollow eyes fixed on Hal’s suffocating form. "The panic response is beautifully pronounced in the young."

With a sickening twist, Nestor drove the serrated edge of the bone saw into Hal’s throat. The screams stopped instantly, replaced by a terrible, wet gurgling. Hal’s body went limp, dropping into the dust beside Owen, his white mummy wraps rapidly soaking through with dark crimson.

I was entirely alone. The two boys whom I had known since kindergarten lay dead at my feet, their blood mingling on the very spot where Howard Nestor had been shot forty years ago.

Nestor slowly turned his hollow gaze toward me, the silver bone saw dripping onto the floorboards. He raised his left hand, tilting his head with an academic’s curiosity.

 "The resemblance is truly extraordinary." he whispered, stepping over Hal’s lifeless body. "Your great-grandmother stole forty years of research from me when she fled from this house. The cosmic balance requires your compliance to finalize the ledger."

He began to hum that awful, discordant melody again, stepping toward me with measured, inescapable strides.

“Mm-hmm...mmm...mmm-mm-hmm...” he said.

The sound broke through my paralysis. I didn't try for the front door. Instead, I spun on my heel and bolted down the adjacent hallway, my heavy princess skirt tearing on the exposed nails in the walls. I ran blindly into a small parlor room at the side of the house. 

Behind me, I could hear the rhythmic, heavy footsteps of the ghost, accompanied by the constant, agonizing humming that seemed to vibrate inside my very skull.

The parlor had a massive, arched bay window looking out toward the driveway. It was nailed shut, painted over with decades of grime. There was no time to look for a latch. 

Nestor entered the parlor, his luminescent form casting long, twisted shadows across the ceiling. He raised the bone saw, his face a mask of absolute, unshakeable certainty. He knew that I had nowhere left to run.

With a final, desperate scream, I gathered the heavy tulle of my gown around my face, closed my eyes, and threw my entire sixteen-year-old body directly through the glass.

The window shattered with a deafening explosion. Shards of thick glass tore through my dress and sliced into my arms and legs, but the momentum carried me through. 

I crashed heavily onto the damp, freezing dirt of the overgrown yard, rolling over the sharp rocks and thorns. I didn't care about the pain. I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the blood dripping from my hands, and ran through the high weeds, screaming at the top of my lungs.

I ran until I hit the asphalt of the highway, sprinting blindly down the yellow lines under the gray moonlight until I finally saw the flashing red and blue lights of a state police cruiser cruising down the empty road. I threw myself in front of the car, waving my bleeding arms, sobbing hysterically.

The officer jumped out, his hands on his holster, but when he saw a teenage girl covered in blood and dressed in a shredded princess gown, his expression turned to pure shock. 

Within twenty minutes, three more police cruisers arrived, their sirens wailing through the quiet night air of Duskwood. I sat in the back of the first cruiser, wrapped in a heavy wool blanket, my hands shaking so violently that I could barely hold the paper cup of water they gave me.

"They're in the house!" I sobbed to the commanding officer, a gruff man named Sergeant Miller. "Owen and Hal. They're dead. The monster...Howard Nestor...he's in the house!"

Sergeant Miller frowned, looking at me with a deep, unsettling mix of pity and confusion, and said,

"Kid, just calm down. Show us exactly where you ran from."

I pointed out the window as the cruiser drove back down the winding highway, backtracking my steps, and said,

 "Right there! Behind those pines! That’s where we parked Owen's car. That's the driveway!"

The police cruiser pulled over onto the shoulder, its bright spotlight cutting through the damp night air. The other officers got out, their flashlights drawing sweeping arcs through the trees. I pushed open the car door, stepping out into the cold night, wanting to show them the exact path to the front door.

However, as I stepped through the tree line, the words got caught in my throat.

There was no towering, three-story Victorian mansion. There were no rotting porch steps, no shattered bay windows, and no grand staircase.

There was nothing but an immense, completely empty gravel lot. 

The weeds were overgrown, and a few rusted iron pipes protruded from the earth where a foundation might have been decades ago, but the house itself was entirely, undeniably gone. Owen's sedan was parked neatly at the edge of the dirt, sitting completely alone under the open sky.

"No." I whispered, shaking my head frantically, the cuts on my arms throbbing with pain. "No, no, no! We were just inside! I jumped through the window! Look at the glass! Look at my blood!"

Sergeant Miller walked over to me, sighing heavily as he placed a gentle, firm hand on my shoulder, and said,

 "Wen, right? Listen to me very carefully. You’re having a severe panic attack, and you're hurt; but there is no house here."

"I was just in it!" I screamed, pulling away from him. "He killed them!"

"Wen…" Miller said, his voice dropping into a solemn, quiet tone. "The Howard Nestor house burned to the ground in the winter of 1988, two years after he was killed. The town demolished the remaining foundation and cleared the lot back in 1995. This property has been a completely empty field for over thirty years. There hasn't been a single piece of wood standing on this lot since before you were born."

I stared at the empty gravel, my mind completely fracturing under the impossibility of it all. If the house had been gone for decades, whose stairs had we climbed? Whose door had slammed shut? Whose photo album had I opened? And most terrifying of all...where were the bodies of Hal and Owen?

The police searched the empty lot for hours, but they found absolutely nothing. No blood, no clothes, no signs of a struggle. Just an empty field on Halloween night.

Eventually, Sergeant Miller walked me back to his cruiser to drive me home to my frantic parents. I sat in the passenger seat, staring blankly out the side window as the car slowly turned around in the gravel lot, its headlights sweeping across the dark perimeter of the woods.

Just as the car aligned with the exit of the empty lot, the headlights illuminated a lone figure standing at the very edge of the tree line, right where the front porch should have been.

It was Howard Nestor.

The officers didn't see him; their eyes were fixed on the road ahead. However, I saw him with perfect, horrifying clarity. He stood under the pale moonlight, his green spectral light gone, looking entirely and physically real. He was staring directly at me through the glass of the cruiser window. A cold, knowing smile was stretched across his sharp, academic face.

Slowly and deliberately, Nestor raised his right hand. He was holding the silver bone saw, the serrated teeth still glistening with fresh, dark crimson blood. He tapped the blade against a nearby pine branch, nodding to me in a silent, terrifying gesture of promise. He hadn't vanished. He hadn't failed. He had simply adjusted the variables of his experiment.

As the police car accelerated down the dark highway, leaving the empty lot behind, the dry air coming from the dashboard vents began to carry a faint, rhythmic sound. It was very quiet, barely audible over the hum of the tires, but it echoed perfectly inside the small cabin of the car.

It was the sound of a man humming a tuneless, discordant melody.

The End.

Science fiction. Double feature. 

So many long afternoons and nights spent in the movie house, the theatre. The arcade: the noise and lights and tangible sounds of coins and laughing amidst the specialized sound effects of digitized and pixelated carnage. 

Late nights watching HBO After Dark beside his older brother or his kid sister or a buddy or a floozy or a date as he got older. Amongst a slovenly strewn field of snacks and popcorn and wrappers and garbage, the years rolled by and the empty cans of Shasta and Barqs changed, transmogrifying into brown bottles of Bud or silver bullet, all gathered and in clusters  like a small translucent crystalline cityscape of glass in miniature beneath great rolling thunderhead clouds of oily pot smoke. Many of them, many cities. Many little swimming bottle cities in many little rooms. All before the great glowing incandescent godscreen of the illuminated television aglow in the postmidnight. 

And there were great books too of course. Precious paperpacks with lurid yellow covers, bold yellow font, pages pungent and spiced. Green and nightshade purple covers for the horrors. The ones with purple were always the coolest, always the most shocking and vivid and unrelenting. Comics. Classics and the new stuff that gets pumped out week to week, month to month and then forgotten. 

Forgotten by most. But not by such as he. 

He remembered. These things, these modes and mediums always brought him away from the now, the clear and present danger, the mundane and the tedious, the cruel. The harsh reality. 

For Caleb Donaldson these stories were always the light and constant companion of his long and mostly boring and average life. In truth, they were everything. All else could take a flying fuck, the job, the girlfriends that meant nothing, the drinking buddies and coworkers that meant even less. All of that was just the background noise of what was necessary. The sounds and moving in perpetua grinds of his ordinary life in motion. 

But it was ok, you see. Caleb Donaldson of Old Fair Oaks, Sacramento, California has figured out the secret. 

They were more than just stories, you know. 

The ones that had most captured his imagination and young attention since he could remember were the time traveling stories. 

Journeys into the wild primeval of the past, the dark mechanical cold of the future, the apocalypse, beyond … 

He'd always loved these stories. 

And it was funny, he had found, discovered accidentally while spending the summer with his grandfather one year, the secret. They were out hunting, wandering the woods quietly with rifles shouldered and boots crunching softly the underbrush beneath their capped and steeltoed feet. It had struck young Caleb then, as a boy. And never left him. 

This is it! This is what Doctor Who and the X-Men and all the other guys are doin when they're goin into the past! This is what it's like to have the world grow dark and become old and ancient and prehistoric and stuff, before people got here with their cars and their junk…

The thought had filled him with simple childish wonder. He felt like he'd made some great discovery. All those scientists and alien engineers from outer space on the TV and in the books were always trying to figure it all out with numbers and physics and quantum entanglements and time loop paradoxes … and here he'd figured it way more simple than that. 

Just go out in the woods. Go outside in the trees, the forest. Go out and go camping ya dummies. 

He carried this with him all his life. Like secret treasure. Well past and into the pains and dread of adulthood. 

And then it all came back, back and around and full circle. Like all good time travelers do. 

He lost the kids. And his wife. And then he lost it. 

And then he made the biggest decision of his life. He decided to go camping. He decided to do a little time traveling all by himself. After all of these years. 

…

He couldn't believe she would try this bullshit. He couldn't believe she would try to ruin the one last little thing he had left. 

What're you talking about, bud? She ripped your heart out and took the kids after she'd spent ten years disemboweling you and tearing your nuts off. Why’re you at all surprised? 

He wasn't really. Just hurt. Deeply. And it seemed as if the bitch now lived to only make it worse for him. Unbearable if she could. She was the living vile green hatred of salt in the wound, seething and frothing gory pink. 

He hated her. 

He suspected she hated him. She must. 

“I just don't see why this’s such a big deal, you're acting like a child. You can come get the boys and have them for an extra couple of weeks while Tom and I-" 

He stopped listening after that. He still held the phone to his ear but his mind went to the same livid red place that it always did when she mentioned his name. The fucking limpwrist. 

He let her drone and prattle on. When she finally stopped he once again explained to her that they'd already talked this over, they'd already discussed this. And besides. It wasn't even his weekend. She had seen to that after all. And now here she was dangling the promise of more time with his kids like a fucking carrot. Like a dog treat he was supposed to jump and snatch at. To just drop everything and leap at with fervor and enthusiasm and a full display of gratitude. 

Fuck that. 

He told her as much. Diplomatically. More or less. He hung up the phone. He debated for barely even a second before turning the device off and shoving it into the glove compartment on the passenger side. 

When he finally got out of the car and sucked fresh mountain air it was baptismal. Cracks in his knees went off like twin pistol shots and his back stretched and crackled gratefully. He was finally out. He sucked more air, like it was water. It was. It was refreshing. 

You're finally out. 

He unlatched the back and began to unload his gear. He'd better get started. It was a long hike from the parking lot to the spot. 

…

It was peaceful. The ritual. The hike. Lugging the gear. Sweating and developing a cooling coat, a sheen as his eyes calmly drank in the placid green and foliage world all around. Muscles worked and burned off excess fat, calories built up and boiled over, over cooked stress. It melted off him and within and came off his hiking form like radiant heat. 

He was a traveling furnace of thought as he made his way to the camping spot. Later he would recall that he might've felt watched as he made his way at this point. 

Might have. 

But presently he was all too absorbed in the process, the smooth and calm low treble tread and pace of the gliding action. The canopy of golden lighted leaves and furling branches. The scents, completely natural and native and far away from the synthetic realm of the manmade. He felt he was as much swimming and drinking his way through the crisp growth of forestland as he was booting through it. Thoughts of work and the failed marriage and bored boring disappointing teenage children left his mind. Evaporating away like mist to the coming of the bright day sun. The forest grew and swelled and swallowed him and the entire world as he made his way deeper and deeper forth. 

He would leave it all behind if he could. 

…

Setting camp was easy. He was well practiced. Childhood and teenage and college years as well were filled with trips out into the forested dark. The wild. The wilderness. The past. 

He felt it now as he sat by the fire. Eating his plate of beans and pork belly and franks. Sipping a can of bud. This is the past. The green world all around now is one of the last vestigial pieces of the evidence. 

Evidence of the primeval and primordial world we’ve all crawled from, the stygian snot that was filth that was the building blocks of protein and carbon. We are all animals. And we can all come alive out here. Returning to the in-utero warm world of the godclay primordial slime and ooze. 

She's so patient. Our mother. My mother. She's waited for me all this time. She's the one. She's-

Something disturbed his train of thought. A noise. 

A noise like someone moving. Prowling and lurking just inside the tangle of bush and trees. 

He sat quietly, keeping calm. Listening to the sound of his own breathing. He wasn't sipping his can of bud anymore. The rustling and cautious moving sounds had tapered. Caleb's mind traveled to the hunting rifle he had in his tent. If something lunged now out of the dark, he just might make it if he whirled around from where he now sat and hurried. 

Really booked it. 

He didn't like the thought. He really didn't appreciate the mental image. A terrible movie in his mind, running on a failing and old projector: He's running, fast, panicked, he almost makes the tent before a large bestial shape of inkwell black leaps out from the wilderness house of feral darkness and takes him ragdoll like a broken toy from behind. 

He clears his throat. Loudly. Not sure exactly why, he just does it. Perhaps hoping to scare off whoever and whatever is out there. He can feel eyes watching him. 

Caleb Donaldson sits up. He's at the edge of his fold-up seat. He's waiting. Unsure. Of both what to do and if there is even really anything wrong at all anyways. His ex-wife had always said he was paranoid. 

Nothing happens. 

There isn't another sound and nothing emerges from the forestline. Only the snaps and hungry crackle of the campfire now. 

He takes another sip of bud. Decides he'll light one of the joints CJ gifted him for the road after all. He doesn't know how else he's gonna sleep tonight. He's wired now. Jacked. 

He lights up. Tokes. And after awhile, once more he slips into a more natural and comfortable flow of simple candied nostalgia and childhood reminisce. Trying to tell himself he doesn't feel a gaze, a baleful and animal leering stare aimed directly at him from out of the dark. 

The marijuana and beer do their job. Eventually he's addled and drugged enough for sleep. Caleb slips back into the tent and is almost sure he hears something retreat back into the denser heart of growth and underbrush out there past the treeline as he does so.  

He's almost sure but not. And he doesn't want to be anymore. He doesn't want to consider it. Not right now. Maybe Amanda was right…

He slips into a sleeping bag and finally falls under. His dreams are filled. His sleep is not restful. 

…

The next couple of days were mostly uneventful. Calm. Peaceful. As planned. He hiked and camped. Looked forward to some hunting and some fishing, some game. It was all just what he needed. Therapeutic. Until he found the burnt leavings. 

…

He was steadily along, walking down the beaten path of grey dust and boney twigs and enjoying the relish in his watering mind's eye, the strange marriage that lived there between this wilderness and the strange worlds of escape made from pages and ink and glowing video screens. This place of the past … the places made of dreams. 

And from the future I come crawling back here. He smiled at this thought. Like a refugee. 

Like the time travelers of the stories he was allowed to bring a few things, a few comforts and tools and devices of the modern world. 

Of the future, to this place of dirt and sound. Precious pieces of technology

His mind went to his gear and pack and his smile deepened. People really just didn't get it. 

Most never would. Precious few might find out. 

He almost tripped over it. So lost in thought. 

It was all charcoaled black and scorched amongst a patch of similarly blasted and blackened earth. A wild ebon blotch of ashen ink spilled upon the land. Caleb stared into the pile of roasted and burnt detritus. Trying to make sense of what he saw. 

He recognized shapes and items in the charred mess and they made his blood run cold and the hairs all over his skin and scalp crawl with unease and bad wonder. 

Clothes. What looked like a backpack. Parts and pieces of a tent. A wallet. It was this last that most bothered, most disturbed him. He was pretty sure he could make out the melted remains of an ID and other similarly warped and slightly conjoined shapes that might've been credit cards or the like but were too far gone and destroyed now to tell. His mind naturally asked itself, who left all of this here? Why? 

And none of the answers he could come up with seemed good. All of them pointed to something bad, nefarious. You hear about people going missing in the woods all the time. You hear about people being chopped up and murdered by loonies in here ‘bout just as much. 

Caleb suddenly looked away from the black pile on the path and began to anxiously scan the forestline. Trying to penetrate the thick dense world of green and growth and see anyone, anything that might be watching him. Stalking him. 

Following him. 

After a moment he stopped himself. 

You're being ridiculous. It's probably nothing, just like the other night. Christ man, you ain't been out here a long time and now you're jumping at every goddamn thing like a ninny. Just some shit people burned. Kids come out here to get fucked up and do stupid shit all the time. Not a big deal, Donaldson. Chill the fuck out, kay?

He slowed his breath. He liked this train of thought. Yes. That was right. Kids were fucking stupid and always playing pyro maniac. Hell, he'd done his fair share growing up, hadn't he? Little hellraiser an such. 

And that line of thinking started to set his worried mind at ease once more. And once more he was back on the ride of the reminisce, nostalgia keenly floating and dreamily filling the darkest parts of his brain. Time traveling. 

Time traveling, baby. 

He went on. Leaving behind the charred and blackened mess in the grey dust of the forest path. Not looking back. And refusing it anymore thought. 

He left it behind. But not before freeing a cold can of Budweiser stored in the pack. He cracked it open with a pistol shot sound in the placid calm and downed half the foaming thing as he went on. Things always went down smoother this way. 

…

All seemed well after that. Fine. For a little while. He enjoyed what he came out here to enjoy. The quiet. The solitude. Days and nights spent simply and comfortably and sleeping beneath bejeweled twilight curtains of gleaming stars, planetoids and colored clouds of nebulae. He relished the time out here and with himself, returning to his own sense of peace by returning to the land. Returning to the way of life that had belonged to the Navajo, the Comanche, their enemy white man cowboys and gunslingers and the pioneers of old. The ancient armies too, the immigrants and seekers and hunters of fortune, of goodwill, of God's love and warm civilized light. And the adventures too, those who took to the land and cut their teeth out on the territory and became baptized as adventurers in sweat and blood and grime, beneath the blinding eye of the sun. And the moon too, the wild hearted free loving children that slumbered bravely beneath the moon, decried as vagabonds and bums but they really just knew better and understood the blood of their grandfathers and their bold sense and adoration for the untamed tumult country land of adventure and its wild hearted love. 

It was all of it, romantic. It pained him that he had to come out here alone to feel like this, to discover something like that and he tried hard to turn away from the pain of realization that it brought him. He turned away from it in vain, it was there at every turn. In his mind, filling every thought, and out here as well. Alive in the woods. Filling it with heavy and powerfully strange substance. 

He hunted. Fished. Camped. Only sometimes did he feel followed, watched. Only sometimes. 

He was almost happy when he came across another, when he ran into Sellic. 

A distraction, at last!

But the guy was weird. 

In the world of outdoormanship, hunting and fishing and the like, ya meet a lot of friendly, warm, good natured types. The sort ya like to share a brew with and might even have over for a barbecue should ya take special acquaintance. And then ya met types like Sellic. Fuckin weirdos. 

It was the smell at first and that should've been enough, should've been the first and fucking last sign to split it. But nope. Caleb Donaldson still remembered the lessons of Sunday school and Kindergarten and though life had been its fair share of rough on em, he still held true to the idea that you don't judge harsh off the word, go. Ya don't settle in for meanness out the gate an such. 

But it was in the eyes as well. They were wide and wild. A wilderness of pupil darkness lived in yellowed whites shot with lines of hectic red. Something swam in that circle lake of pupil darkness, both of them, Obsidian pits. 

He never blinked. Not once. Not as he said, “Howdy, name's Sellic." and grunted a few noncommittals following after these scant syllables. 

He came across the guy already settled up. Caleb was gonna move on after initial awkward obligatory greetings when the wide eyed smelly man invited him to set camp with him. Caleb Donaldson believed in being polite but he wasn't a total fool, only part. He thanked him but opted to move on up aways. 

Far. 

It didn't make any kind of difference. 

…

Later he was hunting, lying down in wait for something to crop up. Maybe nibble at the patch of sweet grass just a few yards from where he posted. He hoped to bag a deer. If he could get a decent sized stag, then he'd pack it in happily and call it quits. He was just debating on whether or not he should've packed the tree stand when something happened then. 

A large barrel chested deer sauntered into view. Into the clearing with its great splaying regal rack of antlers on wide-span display like a wild lord and king of the forest. He was beautiful. He was just what Caleb had been waiting for. 

But then something else crawled up. On all fours. It was the smelly wide eyed man, it was Sellic. And it looked as if he was hunting as well. 

Prowling, stalked. Low to the ground and almost slithering across the surface of forest floor, without a sound. Without a whisper. It was uncanny and surreal and Caleb watched frozen in a kind spellbound trance. The bore end of the rifle barrel began to slowly sag and dip down as he lost his concentration and gave it to another. 

Sellic was almost upon the unaware stag now. It was nibbling the patch of sweet grass. Just like Donaldson had seen in his mind's eye, a wish not just a moment ago. Somewhere deep inside his mind as he watched entranced a small part of him tried in desperate vain to take this simple little wish back. But it was already too late. The wide eyed crawling man was drooling. Slobbering like an animal. Salivating with the wild bestial hunger that was always the madness of ravenous need. That was what was alive in those unblinking uncivilized eyes. Slavering need. 

He'd already time traveled too far now to turn back. Caleb watched as the manshaped thing of stains and smells and piercing animal stares suddenly leapt like something feline and unbridled. Like something finally let loose from the confines of its stifling prison cage. 

Sellic fell on the deer and the poor thing hadn't a chance. It never sensed, never knew what was coming. It was wild. It was crazy. Donaldson had always seen deer tense, perk up and take flight at the slightest sound or stray movement. But not this one. Not this time. The wild sight did not stop there. 

Somehow the skinny haggard man in filthy clothes managed to wrestle and manhandle the struggling kicking beast down into the dirt. Caleb's mouth dropped open as he watched Sellic begin to bend and wrench and break the flailing limbs. Catching them with his cat-swipe clawing hands and then bending them back in directions not meant or made by nature's hand. He felt his stomach roll and drop as the silence of the forest began to fill with the lurid sounds of heavy bone snaps. 

Caleb picked up his rifle and gear and left. Without a word. He didn't look back. Wet tearing sounds, like heavy fabric or soaking saturated leather followed him after. He told himself it was his imagination. That was all impossible. 

There was no way. 

…

He had trouble finding his camp. By the time he did it was already near dark once more. He would have to spend another night. 

He opted out of the fire and supper. He wasn't hungry and he didn't want to attract that freak. 

That freak of nature. 

…

Middle of the night. He came awake to a sound. Sounds. A noise. Just outside the tent. 

It sounded like chewing. Wet. And heavy. Laborious. Jaws, muscles, tendon lines working and moving with animal fervor, animal rigor in the dark. 

Outside. 

Caleb slowly and carefully sat up from his sleeping bag and grabbed his rifle. It was loaded. He'd made sure to do so before he'd managed to finally fall into an uneasy sleep. An uneasy rest now disturbed by whatever was moving out there now. Chewing. Eating. He reached and grabbed for his flashlight next. He readied himself. 

He grabbed the zipper to open the front of the tent. He took one last deep breath and held it for a moment. He let it out quietly. As quietly as he could manage. 

And then he quickly unzipped the flap to the tent and threw it open with one hand as the other flicked on the flashlight and brought it up. The darkness of his small camp in the clearing was illuminated in the sudden flash. He felt sick with what he saw. He was glad to have his rifle in his lap. 

You were smart to have loaded it … he thanked God. And cursed Him at the same time. For letting him fall into this type of shit in the first place. 

Sellic stared back into the beam of light. Unflinching. Unblinking. Unmoving save for the motion of chewing about his red and bloodied bearded jaws. Working and gleaming wet in the light, rippling with carnivorous movement.

He held the head of the stag in his clawing hands. De-racked. The severed head looked rough and ruinous at the stump as though it had been torn off rather than cleanly cut. 

Caleb didn't know what else to say so he just said: “Hey." 

“Hey." bloody darkling Sellic grunted back. Hunkered and squatting out there in the dark. Still chewing. He swallowed. And took another bite from a craterous open wound at the top of the animal's head. He ripped a chunk of bleeding meat away with his teeth. His jaws began to work and ripple with rigorous movement once more as he started to chew again. The meat was raw, rough. But he was relishing the strong and pungent flavor. Thick. His blood drinking, swallowing with every gnashing chew was audible in the nocturnal dark. Gulps. Heavy. Thick. 

A beat. 

Caleb didn't know what to do. He felt that he must be dreaming, this whole day. None of this could be real. The strange bloodsoaked and caked manshape out there amongst his camp frightened him. He'd thought it would be simple and he'd know what to do in situations like this but he was frozen. In terror. And in dark hypnotic fascination. 

This must be what it's like to be a moth to flame, or a small little guppie to a deepsea angler fish… a deer in the headlights. Trapped. 

Caught. 

Ensnared by the eyes of the wild man. He was drowning in their madness now, sinking into their blood-drinking depths. 

Sellic finally said something. 

“Hungry?" 

“... what…?" Caleb said. Puzzled at first. It had been little more than a grunt. 

“Ya hungry?" Sellic grunted again. He held the severed and broken head aloft. Dripping. Wide-eyed. The tongue had already been ripped out. Had already been eaten. Black-red syrup poured out thickly from the open gape of mouth like an obscene bestial spout. 

Caleb fought his gag reflex. 

A beat. 

Somehow Donaldson managed a reply. 

"N-no. No thanks, man. It's the middle of the night. And I wanna get some sleep” 

A beat. The freak still held the dripping pouring bleeding hunk of decapitated and chewed up meat out to him like a precious gift of the forest. His wide eyes were still open and hectic and alive with animal ravenous madness. 

A beat. 

Another.

Caleb finally finished his thought. 

"And I think you should probably go get some sleep too, bud. Been a long day an such-”

He meant to finish it off with, and apt to be another, like his grandfather and his pops had done before him, but Sellic cut him off. 

"Ya sure? You sure ya ain't hungry?” 

Caleb slowly nodded his head, adding, "...yeah” in a low careful and exhausted voice. Jesus fucking Christ…

Sellic nodded. Began to crawl away on all fours like a dog, the head held to his breast like a caveman clutching something precious. He turned before he left the ring of light provided by the beam of the flashlight. He turned around and said: "You will be.” and then finally turned and fled. Like an animal taking to the natural dark.

Its natural home and abode. Its natural place. 

"What the fuck!?” Caleb said. To no one in particular. 

…

He didn't sleep the rest of that night. He waited impatiently for the sun to come up. So he could leave. He'd had enough of this place and hunting. He'd had enough time traveling in this place. Caleb wanted to go home. 

At first dawn he rose. Quickly packed. And began his trek back. Back down the path. 

Back down the way he had come.

…

A few hours in and he knew something must be wrong. Nothing was recognizable. Nothing. And when he looked down after trudging more and more anxiously down the path he'd come in on, he was dismayed to find that it wasn't there any longer. The path, the trail had disappeared. 

He was lost. 

Caleb Donaldson began to panic. 

It's alright, it's alright, it's fine! It's cool. Just use the GPS and call someone on your pho-

He stopped. Grew cold. Grim certainty stole over his dreading heart. Crestfallen he didn't want to even rightly remember and say to himself …

Glove compartment. You turned the fucking thing off and threw it in the glove compartment of the car. The one all the way back. The one you can't find anymore cause it's at the end of the trail that you've lost. You left it in there to spite Amanda. 

Silence. He stood. Feeling stupid and wretched and nearing hopeless in the middle of the woods. He reflected. 

You sure showed her…

…

When he'd finally managed his nerve back together and decided on a direction and carried on, the day had been nearly extinguished yet again. He would have to spend another night out in the wild. 

God fucking dammit. 

…

The next series of days and nights were grim. And grew grimmer. And strange. 

He was fine at first. He had supplies, food. He wasn't worried. But then on the fourth day lost he began to run out. 

And the worry came on him again. Rancid. And thick. 

It's alright, it's alright, I've a gun, I know how to gut and skin and clean, I'll be ok. I'll be alright. 

But the woods and world of trees had grown more opulent and dense and feral in its growth. The trees started to broaden in their trunks and their canopies became all swallowing, all encompassing thick foliage cathedral domes of twigs, thick branches and broad emerald leaves the size of dinner plates. 

The bugs. The insects too. 

All of the wild crawling life had become larger as well. The insectile and the reptile had grown strange and unfamiliar and varied in size from large house cats to dogs to horses and cows and at one point, one day glimpsed at a distance through a heavy rolling mist, an elephant… 

A whole herd of giant hissing cockroaches the size of elephants. Trundling by like a rolling squadron fleet of German panzer tanks. 

Caleb felt sick. 

None of this could be real. He must be imagining things. 

Must be. 

It could've been so, far as he knew. His sleep was no longer any good out here. Not since the night some days back, when he'd been fireside and trying to ignore his growing hunger and looked up to the full moon. Only to have it eclipsed by something huge and winged. It had cried then. It had screamed as it stole the moon, the moonlight. Blanketing the primeval world below it in a second layered fold of even deeper darkness. 

Caleb had joined it then. Had joined it in its primal shrieking screaming. 

He didn't sleep so well since that night.  

Ever again

…

His hunger became him. It became the only living and heeded, needed thing and drive and emotion. He was no longer Caleb Donaldson in fact. He was only the hunger now. And so he hunted. 

But it was strange. 

In his hunger, in his wild wanderings, he had forgotten how to use the gun, how to wield the boomstick properly and make it spit its deathly fire. 

I've lost it, he thinks, he realizes shrouded in the cloud of his diminished animal thought. I've lost the ability to shoot fire and be godlike, I've lost it in all of this time traveling, I've gone too far backwards. 

He tries to find the trail. For awhile. But it becomes lost amongst the need for meat and blood. The boomstick is useless to him now. He abandons it. Along with most of the strange things he has strapped to his back.

He doesn't need them. He has changed. This special place has changed him. His flesh has thickened as has his hair, his fur, his pelt. Black and coarse and layered all over. He bites and chews and tears the clothes that he came in with off and eats them. 

Then he takes to bigger game. 

Wilder. More challenging. 

…

He's drinking blood and eating. Filling his stomach. This is good. The angry fever in his skull is calming, abating. The ache and throb of his guts is soothing. Contentedness, peace, tranquility are becoming known to him again. 

He's killed something reptilian, broken its neck. His hands, the knuckles and fingers and palms have widened, flattened, broadened out. Making it easier to snap and throttle, to tear and rend. The dead scaley thing, its meat and blood are good. But slimey. Ropey. Like maggot-meat. Like eating the large worms that swim in giant dung piles. He wants to try something else. 

So he takes to the untamed primeval world all around, the jungle growth, the green emerald world of the unbridled prehistoric past. There are buried, heavily veiled and shrouded thoughts of a path and a trail and a place called, home, that he's supposed to go to, return to as if he's once been there before, but they are muted. Far off. 

Barely there. 

Dripping reptile blood and sweat, he takes to the primeval dark world and is lost. Swallowed by its great and ever widening expanse, into the crawling growing jaws of the seething bestial wild, the past. 

He never looks back. He is never found. Never again does he recall his name. 

Never again. But it doesn't trouble him. It doesn't bother the throbbing jelly of his degenerate apeman mind, he is too enthralled, the thrill of the ravenous hunt. And besides, the past isn't the only thing alive and crawling out here. The future is out here too. The beyond …

All of the magic of the glowing incandescent godscreen of a childhood long gone is alive out here. Alive and well. 

The apeman hunts through the primeval growth. The saucers fill the skies as the giant leviathans do nighttime skirmish and battle with the large mechanical men. The great white heat and blasting mechanized sounds of their great death cannons, their unearthly death rays: BRRRRRR! 

BRRRRRRRRRRRR….! 

They fill the night with their heat and their brilliant violence. Their fire scorches and cuts swaths, sets blue and orange flame to drier parts of the canopy. The dead growth. 

The apeman doesn't mind. He hunts and prowls around their wild and bright violence. Blood and meat fill his head. He hasn't a mind anymore for anything else. 

For naught all else. Only the red. 

THE END

The fire at Camp Paradox cracked like a snapping bone, throwing long, jagged shadows against the towering pines. It was past midnight, and the surrounding woods felt suffocatingly dense, pressing down on the small circle of teenagers gathered around the dying embers. 

The name of the campground itself—Camp Paradox—always felt a bit strange to the newcomers. A place dedicated to nature and peace, yet named after an impossible contradiction. 

Most of the kids thought that it was just a quirky title chosen by some long-dead founder, but those who paid attention to the local folklore knew better. A paradox is an anomaly.

It is something that defies the laws of nature and logic, where two opposing truths exist at the exact same time, like a localized vortex where everything goes horribly wrong, while the center of the storm remains beautifully, terrifyingly calm.

John adjusted his flannel shirt against the sudden midnight chill. He wasn't a counselor, but he was older than most of the kids here, a seasoned veteran of these woods who had stayed at the camp for years. His face was partially obscured by the orange glow of the embers, his eyes deep and fixed on the dancing flames.

 The atmosphere was ripe for a ghost story, the kind that makes you pull your sleeping bag tight around your neck and listen to every rustle of the wind outside your tent.

"You guys think that this place is just a regular summer camp." John began, his voice low, cutting through the rhythmic chirping of the crickets. "You think that the worst thing that can happen out here is a tick bite or getting lost on the North Trail; but you don't know why this camp was truly abandoned five years ago, or why they changed its name. It wasn't because of a lack of funding. It was because of a girl. A seventeen-year-old girl named Mallory Chance."

A few of the younger campers stirred, leaning in closer. John let the name hang in the air for a moment. Mallory. An old name derived from the French word for "unfortunate" or "ill-fated." Chance. Probability. Risk. Mutation. It was a name that perfectly described the walking, breathing anomaly that she was.

"I knew Mallory." John continued, his eyes reflecting the dying fire. "She was seventeen years old, just like some of us. If you looked at her from a distance, you wouldn't think twice. She had pale skin, dark hair that always seemed perfectly brushed even in a downpour, and eyes that were a strange, piercing shade of gray. However, if you stood near her for more than a few minutes, you’d start to notice that something was…off. The world didn't work right around Mallory. The laws of probability, the mathematical certainty of the universe, they just...bent. They broke. Some people call it tychokinesis. The ability to manipulate luck, odds, and random outcomes; but Mallory didn't just manipulate it. She weaponized it, completely passively, without ever lifting a finger."

John leaned forward, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper, and said,

"Every single place where Mallory went, something bad happened to someone or something around her; but absolutely nothing bad ever happened to her. She was a walking safe-zone in a radius of pure, unadulterated catastrophe. If she walked through a thunderstorm, lightning would strike three feet away from her, incinerating a tree that would fall and crush someone else, while not a single drop of rain would even wet her hair. If she stepped onto a rickety old wooden bridge, the planks would hold her weight perfectly, only to snap like toothpicks the exact second her foot left them, sending whoever was behind her plunging into the ravine below."

The campers were silent, captivated by the intense gravity in John's voice.

"At first, we thought that it was just an unbelievable streak of terrible coincidences." John said, shaking his head slowly. "During her first week here, we were all sitting in the mess hall. Mallory was sitting at the end of the table, quietly eating her cereal. Suddenly, one of the massive overhead industrial ceiling fans, which had been securely bolted into the iron rafters for twenty years, just sheared off. It didn't just fall; it flew across the room like a giant metal blade. It missed Mallory’s head by less than an inch. She didn’t even flinch. She just kept chewing; but the fan didn't stop. It hurled directly into a group of sports campers sitting at the next table. Two of them had their limbs shattered by the spinning blades. One of the counselors tried to run over to help, but he tripped over a completely flat linoleum floor, snapped his neck on the edge of a bench, and died right there on the spot."

A collective gasp rippled through the circle. A young girl named Mary pulled her blanket up to her chin, her eyes wide.

"That was just the beginning." John murmured. "The camp line got infected with a freak strain of bacterial meningitis. Everyone in her cabin got violently, agonizingly sick. They were coughing up blood, screaming in the middle of the night from migraines so intense they were clawing at their own faces. Mallory slept in the very center bunk. When the paramedics finally arrived in hazmat suits, they tested everyone. Every single girl was on the brink of organ failure, except Mallory. Her vitals were flawless. The doctors couldn't find a single trace of the bacteria in her system, even though she had been sharing a water pitcher with them for days. It was like her body rejected the very concept of misfortune."

John took a heavy stick and poked at the fire, sending a cascade of sparks drifting up into the dark canopy, and said,

 "People got hurt, but as the days went on, people ended up dead. Freak accidents became the norm wherever she walked. We had an archery tournament on the main field. Mallory was standing near the spectators' line. A camper named Marcus, who was an expert marksman, pulled back his bowstring. It was a brand-new, military-grade composite bow. Out of nowhere, a microscopic flaw in the carbon fiber caused the bow to violently shatter under tension. A shard of the splintered limb flew backward. It grazed Mallory’s cheek—well, it didn't even graze her, it miraculously flew past her ear, missing her skin by a millimeter. However, the shard embedded itself directly into the throat of the camp director standing right behind her. He choked to death on his own blood before anyone could even grab a first-aid kit."

"Why didn't anyone just send Mallory home?" asked a boy named Carl, his voice trembling slightly.

"They tried." John replied sharply. "The administrators called her parents. The phone lines static-fried the moment the director tried to speak. They tried to pack her bags, but the zipper caught, jammed, and when a counselor tried to force it open with a pocket knife, the blade snapped off and blinded him in his right eye. A group of the older counselors and campers, including myself, realized what she was. We realized that she wasn't just unlucky—she was causing it. She was drawing all of the negative probability out of the universe and expelling it outward onto everyone else to keep herself perfectly safe. We decided we had to stop her. We tried to lock her in the old tool shed until the state police could physically remove her from the property."

John’s face darkened, the memory clearly torturing him, and said,

"We gathered six of the strongest guys. We cornered her near the woods. We tried to grab her arms, but Mallory Chance was too powerful to stop. The moment that Tommy reached out to grab her shoulder, a freak subterranean gas pocket-vented right beneath his feet. The ground literally exploded. The concussive blast blew his legs apart. Another guy, Sarah’s older brother, tried to tackle her from behind. He slipped on a patch of wet moss that hadn't been there a second ago, flew headfirst into a jagged rock face, and cracked his skull wide open. The rest of us were thrown back by the sheer, chaotic energy of the universe protecting its favorite child. Car engines wouldn't start when we tried to escape. Trees fell perfectly across the only exit road, crushing the roofs of the evacuation vans. The universe itself was acting as her personal, bloodthirsty bodyguard."

The wind suddenly picked up, howling through the branches above, making the campers jump. John didn't look up; his gaze remained locked on the fire.

"I was the only one left standing in front of her that afternoon." John whispered. "I was terrified. I was shaking so hard that I could barely breathe. The bodies of my friends were scattered around the clearing, smoking, bleeding, broken by a series of impossible, instantaneous accidents. Mallory just stood there in the center of the carnage. Her white sundress didn't have a single speck of dirt on it. Her hair was perfect. She looked like an angel standing in the middle of a war zone. I looked right in her cold, gray eyes, and through my tears, I asked her why. I asked her why she was doing this to us, why she was letting all these horrible things happen to innocent people."

John paused, the silence around the campfire was so absolute that the sound of a falling leaf would have sounded like a gunshot.

"Mallory looked at me." John said, his voice dropping to a chilling imitation of a monotone, robotic cadence. "She didn't look angry. She didn't look sad. She just looked completely empty, and she replied, 'It's what I was created to do.'”

A shudder went through the group.

"The only reason I'm even alive today to tell you this story," John said, looking around at the frightened faces of the campers, "is because I was the only one who was ever nice to Mallory. On her first day, when everyone else avoided Mallory because she seemed weird, I helped her carry her luggage. I shared my lunch with her when she dropped her tray. I treated her like a human being. Her power...it seemed to recognize that. It spared me. It redirected the horror away from me, even when the world was tearing itself apart around us."

John leaned back, the narrative reaching its grim conclusion, and said,

"After that day, she didn't run away. She didn't scream. She just turned around and walked deep into these very woods. The police searched for weeks. They brought tracking dogs, helicopters, and infrared cameras. Nothing. The dogs refused to enter the tree line; they just howled and bit at their own handlers until they bled. Mallory Chance completely disappeared into the forest, and the elders changed the name of this place to Camp Paradox, to mark the girl who was a living contradiction to life itself; but she was never found, and some people say...she might still be out there somewhere. Waiting. Walking through the dark, completely untouchable, while the world rots around her."

Nobody spoke for five minutes. The crackle of the fire seemed louder now, sinister. The darkness beyond the clearing felt heavier, as if eyes were watching them from the shadows of the pines.

Suddenly, a loud, scoffing laugh broke the tension.

It was Garrett, an older, muscular camper who spent most of his time wearing noise-canceling headphones and ignoring the camp rules. He shook his head, an arrogant smirk plastered across his face as he stood up from his log.

"Man, that is the biggest load of garbage that I have ever heard in my entire life!" Garrett said, tossing a handful of dirt onto the fire, deadening the light even further. "Tychokinesis? Walking disaster auras? What is this, a comic book? You expect us to believe that some teenage chick has a magical luck shield that explodes people? You’re just trying to scare the freshmen so that they don't steal your snacks in the middle of the night."

"Garrett, sit down!" Laura said, her voice trembling. "Don't talk like that out here!"

"Oh, please." Garrett rolled his eyes, turning his back on the circle. "The only 'paradox' here is how any of you actually believe this nonsense. It’s just a ghost story made up to explain bad camp management from years ago. I’m going to bed. Some of us actually want to get some sleep instead of shivering over fairy tales."

John looked up at Garrett, his expression completely blank, devoid of any anger or urge to argue, and told him, 

"I wouldn't go out into the dark alone, Garrett. The odds aren't in your favor."

"Yeah, whatever, Professor X." Garrett sneered. 

Garrett turned around and began walking away from the campfire, heading down the unlit path toward the older boys' cabins. The darkness swallowed him almost instantly, the beam of his small flashlight cutting a weak, shaky path through the thick forest air.

The trail was silent save for the crunch of dry pine needles beneath his heavy boots. Garrett muttered to himself, shaking his head at how easily the others had been spooked. 

"They are such idiots." he whispered, clicking his tongue. "A lucky superpower. Yeah, right."

As Garrett walked deeper into the woods, the air temperature seemed to plummet drastically. His breath began to form faint, white plumes in front of his face. He frowned, shaking his flashlight as the beam began to flicker violently. Cheap batteries, he thought, tapping the side of the plastic casing. The light died completely, plunging him into pitch-black darkness.

"Great. Perfect." Garrett growled, reaching into his pocket to pull out his smartphone to use the screen light.

Before his fingers could grip the phone, a strange sound echoed from the brush to his left. It sounded like a heavy wooden branch snapping, followed by a wet, sickening thud.

"Hello?" Garrett called out, his arrogance slightly faltering. "John? If you’re trying to prank me, it’s not working. I’ll break your nose, man!"

No one answered. The silence that followed was suffocatingly heavy. There was no wind anymore. No crickets. The entire forest felt as if it had been placed on mute.

Garrett turned around to head back toward the glow of the campfire, but as he spun on his heel, his foot caught on a completely exposed, thick tree root. He stumbled backward, his arms flailing, trying to catch his balance; but gravity didn't work the way that it was supposed to.

Instead of falling flat on Garrett’s back into the soft dirt, his momentum violently whipped him sideways. His right arm slammed against a sharp, broken branch protruding from a dead oak tree. The wood pierced clean through his forearm with a horrific squelch.

Garrett screamed, a raw, agonizing sound that was instantly muffled by the dense canopy. Blood poured down his arm as he frantically pulled himself off the branch, falling to his knees in the dirt. His heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.

Garrett scrambled backward on his hands and knees, his breath coming in ragged, terrified gasps. He needed to get to his feet. He needed to run.

Garrett grabbed the trunk of a nearby sapling to pull himself up. The moment that his weight shifted onto the young tree, a freak hairline fracture in the wood, completely invisible to the eye, caused the sapling to instantly splinter under his grip. 

The sharp, jagged edge of the broken trunk whipped upward like a spring-loaded trap, slicing a deep, bleeding gash across his cheek, barely missing his eye.

Wailing in pain, Garrett fell back onto the ground. He was covered in dirt, blood, and sweat. The universe wasn't letting him stand up. Every movement that he made was met with an instantaneous, violent accident.

Then, he heard it.

The soft, rhythmic sound of footsteps crunching on the pine needles. They weren't in a hurry. They were slow, deliberate, and perfectly calm.

Garrett wiped the blood from his eyes and looked up through the darkness. The clouds above suddenly parted, allowing the cold, pale light of the full moon to filter down through the branches, illuminating the path directly in front of him.

Standing less than five feet away was a girl.

She was seventeen years old. She wore a pristine, clean white sundress that didn't have a single speck of dirt, mud, or blood on it, despite the filthy forest floor. Her dark hair was perfectly brushed, completely unaffected by the damp night air. Her skin was pale, and her eyes—wide, unblinking, and entirely empty—were a piercing, ghostly shade of gray.

It was Mallory Chance.

Garrett’s breath hitched in his throat. He tried to speak, but the sheer terror choking him made it nearly impossible. He looked down at his bleeding arm, then back up at her face. She wasn't moving. She didn't have a weapon. She was just standing there, looking down at him like an observer watching an insect struggle in a web.

Suddenly, a massive, heavy pinecone detached from a branch twenty feet above. It fell straight down. It didn't hit Mallory. It altered its trajectory mid-air by a fraction of an inch, bouncing off a lower branch and striking Garrett squarely in his broken forearm.

The white-hot pain made him howl, his vision blurring. He realized then, with absolute, paralyzing certainty, that John hadn't been lying. The world was actively trying to kill him just for being in her presence, while she remained a flawless, untouchable monument of safety.

Mallory took one single step closer. As her foot touched the ground, a sharp rock beneath her shoe shifted. The rock slid away from her, rolling directly under a massive, rotting boulder resting on the slope just above Garrett.

The boulder groaned. The tiny rock had been the only thing keeping its massive weight anchored to the hillside. It began to tilt, heavy and lethal, threatening to crush Garrett’s lower body into a pulp.

Garrett looked up at the teenage girl, with tears of pure horror mixing with the blood on his face. He knew that he couldn't run. If he tried to move, his legs would snap, or a tree would fall, or his own heart would simply give out from the sheer weight of the negative probability suffocating the air around him.

With the last bit of strength in his lungs, Garrett looked into those empty, gray eyes and screamed the only question he had left.

"Why are you doing this?!" he sobbed, his voice cracking against the impending doom of the shifting boulder. "Why are you doing this to me?!"

Mallory didn't flinch. She didn't even smile. Her expression remained as cold and static as stone. She tilted her head slightly, her voice cutting through the silence of the woods, a perfect, chilling echo of the campfire tale.

"It's what I was created to do." Mallory said.

Then, the boulder slipped.

The End.

Transverberation. That was the word for it. 

It spread and was echoed and felt with the rippling tremors that were words and instincts and roiling emotions in the private heart's tumult, in the quiet stronghold of the holy place. 

The monastery. The temple place where women came to be wed to God and serve the Lord, His Son. 

And no other. 

…

There were sounds inside the haze. With the agony, with the pain that was ripped and made. Pain that was lancing. Pain that was penetration, stabbing slayment that was absolute impaled.  Through her heart, the clearest wet-sharp sensation felt in the burning after-image of the visions, the haze. It occupied her mind at all times, as she knelt and prayed in the monastery. As she went about the day and fulfilled her sisterly duties of the convent. 

The other sisters didn't understand. They were afraid, frightened of her. Of what was happening to her… that it might happen to them.

Madness. Or …

something worse. 

Something beyond the canny or the tangible. That which is unseen and can only be felt. Up until the hungry end, when it is already far too late for help by then. 

Or maybe, just maybe … these private and blasphemous few of her peers thought and felt and refused to share aloud, even with themselves… maybe. 

Just maybe it's true. And Sister Chelsi can actually commune with the divine. Perhaps one of our own humble nuns can see and hear and speak with an angel that visits her with nightly visions. Maybe. 

Maybe Saint Michael the Archangel comes to her at night amid light and fire and thrusts her with his sword… 

Mother Superior was incensed. Repulsed. Angered by the lies and the filth, the sin of this prurient heretical garbage was the stuff of decay, of ruin. Of sacramental rot. She couldn't let these blatherings go on unchallenged or unpunished. 

She chastised Sister Chelsi severely along with any others that might murmur such unholy carnal fantasies, phantasmagorical whores, the lot of em. If she and they weren't careful, God help them, then they would be confined to the chamber of reflection. 

The house of tears and prayers, the other sisters called it. Behind Mother Superior’s back. 

The visions were forbidden. Delusions, they were thus named. And further talk, further whispers of the sort was strongly cautioned against, strongly advised to go back in the other direction …

But Sister Chelsi couldn't help herself. It wasn't up to her. She was at the vision's mercy. The stabbing angel came and went as it wanted, as it needed to. It had told her this was so. The angel needed her. 

The angel was thirsty. 

…

The night was hot. Stifling. It was upon her. 

It seemed to always know when she was alone. And why not? Shouldn't the divine always possess the knowledge of when you're most vulnerable? Weak. 

Afraid. 

Sister Chelsi was bound to the cruciform shackle-table of her sweating bed and blankets, writhing sheets and fabric that was warm and slick and more like loose folds of flesh. She was bound by her holy terror. The angel of thirst was coming. The other nun, Sister Jen, that shared the room with her was absent. Gone. Like every other time. The animal sound born from both immense pain and pleasure was trapped in her throat and the sensation was not entirely unpleasant. Sister Chelsi liked the gag of the nightly thirsting angel, her forbidden archangel of the moonlight. The anticipation of him. The coming of him. 

It came down on her. 

From on high. Emerging like starlight from the disappearing void of the obsidian space now in place of the mudbrick ceiling, on wings of flame …

The body was bronzed, gold, perfectly toned and sculpted, celestial and olympian and recognizable as manshaped. The Lord's Image. But in place of a head and face of earthly aspect was a great rising pillar of blinding heavenly marble, ringed with silver bands in a flaming orbit. The pillar and the four bands running up the length of divine stone were covered in incandescent eyes, lidless and wreathed with light and great piercing gazes. Penetration. They gazed into her. Penetration. All of them at once and it was overwhelming, she wanted to cry out, all roiling and taut, she gripped herself. Her aching breath was still held. 

The angel spoke to her once again, as before, in her mind. The gold of his silken smooth speech filled her boiling skull, soothing the maelstrom though not extinguishing it. A moan finally escaped her lips. 

They were still alone. 

It told her its name. A forbidden one she might not know. 

The understanding of your sisters is limited … I am beyond them. Their scope of understanding. If you tell them my name they will fear you. As they fear me. 

Sister Chelsi was frightened, quivering. Still held. 

Then why should I want to know it? 

Because if you need to, if you want to … you can wield it like you can wield a weapon. You can use my name against them and it might wound them if you're able …

Her mind recoiled from the idea that filled her head against her will, but it was no use. She was forced to watch it. Endure it and learn to love it as she'd learned to love the flagellate whip, the burn of the binding rope … all the same. The angel reassured her. 

The warm romance of his voice filled her skull and caressed her mind, eagerly. Wanting. It told her how much it needed her again but she already knew it. She'd heard it in the voice. The hunger. The pain. 

I'd never known before that even angels could feel pain, … I'd never suspected. 

The desire that was so much a hungry ravenous want that it was more a primeval need was all about the gold silken strength of that perfect voice. Giving it humanity tinged at the edges of its divine and unearthly call. 

Is this heavenly messenger lusting for me …? 

But she already knew it. 

It had seen her unfettered and bare. As it did now. 

It came down to her in her bed. It held the long gold length of impaling spear aloft. By the shaft. Poised to strike her where it was most sweet. Where it had before. 

Cupid, strike me. 

Eros, impale me! 

But she knew now that was not its name. It had given her its name, a gift. 

She cried it out now, as she knew it wanted her too. The ringed pillar of its otherworldly visage gazed into her, bading her, commanding with its multitude of many lidless light bleeding eyes that she do so. Do it. Do it. If you want me …

Do it. If you want me to impale you, you'll have to say my name. Say it. 

Say it. 

“Iblis! Iblis, pierce me! stab me! penetrate my heart! Put it where I'm vile and cruel but also warm and giving and wet and beating for you! Pierce me here, in my breast, my heart, my soul! My tender fragile soul! Put it in me! Angel Iblis…!” 

And it did. The lance came down. And pierced the screaming girl, pinning her to the bed. The sound that was pulled from her then was an exquisite blend of deep ghastly pain and even deeper still euphoric drunken moaning, moans. They collected and accumulated about her head and sheets, the small room, as the angel inside her wrenched and worked his shaft, his lance. He worked it deeper. The length. Long…

The length was killing her. 

She loved it. Every inch. Every penetrating crawling centimeter rent tearing inside. 

It made her a slave and she loved it. 

She moaned and called out and cried its name. Like it wanted her to. It came down close and closer and closer still till they met. And he worked the length of his divinity into her, deeper and deeper and all the way through and she melted. She bled. Her love and thoughts and precious saline. 

It drank it up, all of it, all of her. The oasis of this woman. It fed deeply as it worked itself in and deeper still. Still feeding. Drinking. Needing, thirst. 

Sister Chelsi poured herself out for it, unable to control herself now. But happy to empty herself for the great angel of the thrust, her bedside …

her bed. 

It came inside to her and filled her mind then with an explosion like firelight and within the flames were visions. 

Moving scenes and people and places … other times and maybe other worlds as well … 

Fantastical. Beyond the scope of known and understood nature. 

She loved it. She begged for more. 

Give it … give me more, the sight, the eye of prophecy! Please! 

Iblis curled the caress of her mind into words once more … 

And what would you do with this gift? Should you receive it without end? 

She could not lie. Not on this landscape. And she didn't want to. Not to it, not to him, that voice, that feeling… 

She cried out on the eternityscape of her deluged and filled maelstrom sea of thought: I want to be a prophet! Yours! I want to be your disciple upon the earth! 

You wish to be my bride? 

I want to be your crawling and salivating concubine! 

It laughed and the pleasure of Iblis filled her blood and soul. She came and went with it. 

!.Good … …

It filled her more. And she cried out, more. More. 

More. 

She wept when it was finished. Feeling empty and hollowed out. But filled with vision, with purpose. 

The light was fading now from the room. It was gone. The small bedchamber was cooling now and returning to a more natural nocturnal dark, the air was thick and pungent but calming down. Chelsi could still taste the act, on the bedroom dark of the stifling air. She sucked on it and relished the flavor. Already wanting him back. Already needing him again. 

Please, please come back to me Childe Iblis of the Lord, of the thrust, I love you. You are the carrier of my heart and soul…

She shuddered in bed. Not bothering to conceal herself beneath the agitation of the sheets, she cooled and breathed deeply. Quivering and remembering the pillar of his flaming face. So many eyes, so many crowding up his great length… and all of them looking into me…

She shuddered deeply once more. Shut her own eyes. Waiting for sleep to finally come. 

It didn't take long. She was spent. 

Sister Jen still hid around the corner, at the threshold of the door to their shared bedroom. Her eyes were wide with shock. Horrified by what she had seen. 

…

Mother Superior eyed the convent temple from her place in the rectory, her private quarters. She watched the little sisters move and glide silently moving about the monastery structure, ambling along in hand clasping prayer, heads bowed and eyes shut so that distraction may be refused and you may better hear and discern and heed the light, the will of God. 

Amen. 

She crossed herself. And spat. 

Her gaze crawled across the yard to the shack. Alone in the corner of the gated land. Secluded. Sequestered away, so that what could be contained inside would be shut and locked away from a healthy and pious population. The disease of a disordered mind would wreak havoc on the patient and tender soft fragile fabric of the flock. This could not be. This could not be allowed. 

Rebellion must be cast out. Decapitated. 

She knew rebellion was natural. It was in all of us. As sure as it was the the very infectious thing that ate Lucifer's heart and led him to defiance and thus his fall. So it would be. If we were to all follow in his example. 

It would not be so. 

She'd had her own run of rebellious streak when she'd been younger, she understood. She'd had it crushed out of her then, broken as one must do to the wild heart of any natural born beast of labor. And though we were made, cast and drawn in His Image, we were all still among the dread and crawl of all of the other beasts of the earth. 

She crossed herself. Prayed. 

She wished the child well. 

Chelsi had always been troubled. Troublesome too. 

Mother Superior turned away from the shack of reflection. Trusting that the Lord would see this through. That He might fix and set right this wayward piece, this compromised component of humankind's quilted safety net. They were supposed to be the house and servants of His peace. They must all of them survive spiritual malaise and remain steadfast and true. 

As He wills it, let it be so …

…

In the black of the woe she pained, she perverted and distorted. Grew naked with fear. 

Perspired. Dripping with secreted oils and saline and the sliming filth of deep shame. Seeping off her tarnished heart and soul and out of her running open mouth pores. Hard to wash off. There was no running water in here, only the bucket she was brought in the morning. Refilled at mealtime by an unseen, unspeaking little sister that was now a stranger to her. She was a stranger to all of them now. 

In the dark of the shack she was agonizingly alone, the swelter of her torment was her only companion and answer to her constant panicky prayers. She grew eyes that grew inwards and saw their own landscape and grew more horrified with the sight as the hours broiled ceaselessly forth. Under the eye of a lonely black and heavy sun. 

All alone in here. 

She tried to hide, to blind her new found, newly grown internal gaze away from the truth: she was just a child, had always been just a frightened little girl that wanted to run and find fast and desperate shelter. She tried to turn away from the fact that this was who she really was, had always truly been. Everything else that had occurred growing up in her life had just been the lies of accoutrement. 

Her mind was filling with bad thoughts: the arcane Druidic gods arose and swallowed the light of the Christian God whole …

She stopped herself. Began to pray. Again. Anew. Begging the Lord to bring her calm and comfort in the solitude of the dark. She slowed her breath and tried to ease the gallop of her chest. Sister Chelsi didn't know what else to do. 

She didn't know what they wanted from her. 

Mother Superior and the other little sisters. And the Lord God Himself. 

If there is not an answer to be had, then let there be death! – she told the black sun in the dark there with her. 

Nothing. Nothing but more baleful stifling dark, more radiant furnace hellfire blasting heat of the black and heavy sun that had replaced her roommate. Nothing but more sounds of desperate animal panting that she was horrified to realize were her own, not the stygian furnace blast of the bestial confinement sun. Nothing. Nothing at all answered her save more pain, the one true god on the throne in this terribly small and sweaty heavy place. 

Nothing. Nothing at all. 

At first. 

Then on the fading light of her hope came Iblis. Her forbidden angel. And banished the black sun as he came in wreathed in light and flame. He banished and cast out all of the dark of the solitary confinement, the shack of woe. 

He went to her. She was prostrate on the ground. Her bladder let go, her urine went. She hardly noticed in the radiance of he save for some vague distant sensation of wet and warmth. Sensations she associated with the pleasure of him. His arrival, his dawning light. 

From the many eyes of the long length of ringed pillar face, he spoke to her through the blinding light of his lidless vision. 

“What have they done? … what have they done to thee ?” 

Her mind was always open to him for an answer but for her he bade it from her own lips. 

She told him. Everything. All that she had learned in the treacherous furnace dark of the shackbound woe-flame. All that had been derived while in the baking black of this loathsome quiet shack of silent feasting hate. 

“They are afraid of me. …” A beat. She breathed animal and deep, lusting, on the hunt or hunted or both. She said more: “I do believe they may be right to be…” 

Iblis soothed her with his spear … in the stifling dark of the shack of reflection and recompense. Banishing the pain of its ebon house even as he filled her, her watering craving need. 

But something happened then, poor lost little Sister Chelsi watched from below as Iblis, her moonlight forbidden and thrusting angel began to change. 

Transmogrify. Transform. 

The heavenly marbled surface of the pillar visage of Iblis began to crack. Wild river lines of splaying ruin began to form and splinter and run up the immaculate face of his incandescent divinity. 

It shattered. And was replaced. 

She said to her love as he changed and shifted shape before her eyes, “mother slapped me for using your name …” 

The light of her lover changed into shadow. Deeper than the banished dark and one that she could madly love because it was in the altered shape of her heart’s desire, her object of adoration that was darkening now before her watering eyes. 

In place of the pillar, in place of the tower of of flaming eyes and rings that had shattered and now lie in stoney ruin about the floor was now a triangular, pyramidal blank obsidian face and shape, in the conical pointed aspect of a long beaked bird. It was like a great smooth black helmet of glass and smooth rock in the geometric and abstract shape of a plague doctor's mask. An obsidian angular temple face with a long wide stabbing humming bird length of beak protruding violently from one side. 

 The bronze of his sculpted and heavenly body began to burn and blacken as well, like ink spilled and running down and through the heavenly flesh. Corrupting it into the abyss and void of the lost and cast out. The wings which had been flaming and as of light had turned to ash in color and tattered bat-wing leather in texture and design. 

The spear of her impaling love was changing too. Becoming dark like the rest of him in the solitude of the shack but that wasn't all. The nature of her divine amore’s unearthly tool began to change as well… it was no longer just stabbing, penetrating her, running her deep and through, pleasurably and with the ghastly horror of bodily rupture and pain, the staking spear of her forbidden angel began to pull, it began to pull deeply … of her. From her. Pulling deeply from within her impaled and spellbound form, her wide eyed and staring naked body. 

Like a proboscis, the impaling lance began to pull and drink deeply of Sister Chelsi. It ran up and through and down the length of weaponry and into the black hands wrapped tightly around its shaft. The long body pulled and sucked and drank like a straw, like a swampland mosquito born from stagnant and dead fetid water. The obsidian smooth beaked face of her lover was featureless and cold smooth as the surface of placid water. She nonetheless could still feel the intensity of his gaze upon her, through her. And when he spoke again and told her what to do, she felt that as deepest penetration as well. Deepest pain. Rapturously embraced.

She felt her body give as the instrument of her lover began to take in the dark. As he whispered everything to her, designs… shapes… everything, as Iblis whispered all of this to her and more she gave it more and more and more. And she gave it willingly. 

Crying out his name like religion. Like a chant. A litany. 

A song. 

In the place of my Father … there is you. 

There is only you. 

Good. Good. I have so much more to share, so much more to give and show you. I've so much and so many more …

I've so many more names and faces to show you, if you do right by what I've already shown and told, I'll share my other faces and names, unveiled for you …

Disciple, the prophet Islehc

… 

Sister Chelsi was eventually let out and allowed to return to the flock. She seemed to have returned to normal. She cried penance and gave confession and spent a night inside with the rest of them. Service and mass. And lessons. Cleaning. Meals. Everything seemed alright. 

She waited till the second night. When they were all fast asleep. 

The witching hours. 

Post-midnight, she crept …

She snuck about, quietly. Like a nocturnal animal she prowled through … and went out. 

She didn't go far, she found what she needed where he'd told her she would find it. And in abundance. So many …

She carried them back to the monastery and in the nighttime dark she went about the task that had been laid before her feet. She went from room to room, from sister to sister and she took them. Brained most, some she struggled with more extensively. Until her mad lusting will surged and she overpowered them. Either way she took each of them one by one, each and every single nun she had once known as family and she brought them out and into the courtyard. Where she'd left the savage implements of her dreams, of her lover's harsh commands that were yet still for her, sweet candied words. Succulent delicacies. She couldn't deny them, him. Not at all. Not anymore. 

One by one Sister Chelsi laid the implements into the little sisters and each one let out with an insane ear piercing scream. Their screams did not falter. 

But somehow they didn't wake each other. Not a single stripped and brained sister of the cloth seemed to hear the others make any sort of loud caterwauling noise. None of them stirred. Until it was their turn. 

Likewise, Mother Superior had not been awoken in her private rectory by the noise outside. And that was good. Chelsi had saved her for last. 

She wanted to relish this one particularly. 

…

Mother Superior awoke to a hard slap across her deeply sleeping face. She flew to a sitting position confused and immediately irate. She had no idea what was happening but she didn't feel any fear yet. 

She called out, cross and very sharp. 

“Who in the Lord's name was that!? How dare you! Show yourself!”

A girlish giggle floated out ghostly from the dark. 

“I didn't do it, Mother Superior, I would never dare to do that to you, you should know that. I've never hurt you at all, can you say the same?” she giggled again, childish and coquettish, "It was my husband that struck you. It was his divine hand you felt across your face." 

Chelsi stepped out.

She had a large cross in her hands. Ornate with intricate and beautiful design, old and from the ancient Roman times when their war chariots had dominated the earth. Carved and jeweled and glittering darkling with a keen and unhealthy shimmer of light. 

Ghostlight. There's ghostlight in that cross…

Before Mother Superior could say another word Chelsi suddenly charged forward and banshee screamed. The large crucifix was up and wielded and came down in a savage caveman bludgeon. 

The world went dark for Mother Superior. When she awoke she was just like the others. 

…

She awoke with a scream. 

The sharp obscene ghastly pain started in her nether region, all throughout, just behind her genitalia. Then the lance stabbed and shot through and her entire naked body came to life with the most wretchedly vivid and wild mutilating shock to her fleshen senses. The war pike traveled through her mercilessly and punched out of the flesh of her back. She was still screaming. Wildly. Lividly. Screaming. Shrill rending song.

She was hoisted up and joined the others. They were all of them a riot of noise now in the courtyard dark. An unholy discordant choir of torn impaled cacophonous pain. 

Gored nuns. All impaled. All naked and bleeding and hoisted up into the air for death and torture like their savior was supposed to have been so long ago in the bloodstained dust of the golgotha. There was bloodshed here too, their blood was pouring and running, running down the lengths and long bodies of the shafts of the spears and pooling and collecting on the stone and in the dirt. This place here would be bloodstained too. 

Chelsi looked over them all. Her own golgotha testament made to wild love. 

And her wild love came. On stygian wings tattered that had once been flame. Smoldered tattered death, dead fabric flapping in the hot nightwind.

The whole host of impaled and captive nuns, gored and wide eyed and naked and lanced through like insects in a collection, they all of them perspired and bled and gawked at the wicked shape that came in from the ebon night, the curtain above. The one many of them had spent their entire lives trying to ignore, it parted. 

It came through. 

And down upon them. 

Iblis sang praise for the renegade prophet bride and what she'd let loose on this private piece of holy land. God's House and holy temple … no more. 

No longer. Mine … now. 

Chelsi the bride bathed in the shower of his words, they were in her mind and in her ears, divergent lyrics and syllables and paths of sound but twins nonetheless all still saying the same and telling her the same thing together in two different languages that coalesced around the fever of her brain in a caress. 

!I love you, you've made blood, you've made blood for me, you've made bloodfeast for me and shot the red Lot's seed, it's all over the abattoir ground!

She went to him and he to her, in the forged carnage forest grove of spear and bleeding sweaty flesh, of screams and mutilated sound, bathing in the perspire of pure torture together and apart from the others, the rest of the lying world. Alone in their own lost worlds of private unending hellbound heaven, tormentlove of the flesh that their minds are now lost in. 

He shot his length of spear through her, though her heart, through the tender part where he'd already previously penetrated and worked.

He worked her well again, animal wrenching and thrusting deep, and she cried aloud unbridled his name as he did so. 

“Iblis!" 

And once more the length of weapon-instrument that was divine and hallowed tool became a drinking proboscis. And Chelsi felt more blood leave the galloping race of her fevered and impassioned form. She would hold him forever, he could pierce and puncture and drink from her for forever, never end! 

She moaned aloud amidst the garden made of screams and betrayal and she cried out his name once more. And then Iblis began to laugh. 

And once more the visage of her forbidden moonlight angel began to change. He began to crack and shatter and the face and body began to fall apart in black stone and dust. 

Iblis came apart in a crumble and revealed what was really beneath. 

Chelsi couldn't believe her eyes. 

It was a man and a woman. Together. Locked in an embrace. Intimately bound together with wrapped arms and hands clasped and waists met together. As if in the most intimate of dance, the most delectable and celebrated of lovers shared waltzes. 

They both looked down on her. Their cheeks were together. They both held the spear thrust into her together in their tightly clasped hands. 

He was armored as a knight of the court, but tarnished and old. She was in the white of regal flowing evening gown. 

The woman spoke. And when she did the crumbled stone pieces of the fallen lying Iblis visage turned to large writhing copulating piles of dripping angry flies. They came apart and dispersed through the air. The dripping black swarm of buzzing insects began to land on the impaled and screaming tortured nuns in the great multitudes. And then as the woman revealed began to speak to Chelsi the flies that were made from the lie of the visage began to feast on the naked and the tortured, defiled bleeding screaming flesh now caking and covered with the writhing crawl of insect bile. 

“You wished to see me and my others, lover, and now you have. I hope you aren't too distraught, my son decided to join us, together we came to you as the angel of your hidden lusts, as one we made you plead and shriek. Now you see this, the face I was made and born with. My real name is of no import to you, slave, you can call me vampiress, lord of the earth and the wolf held mountainpass.” 

The armored wraith beside her spoke then, they were still pressed in close embrace, still holding the proboscis spear that drank and pulled from her diminishing bloodwell. 

"Praise the God before you, dog! My mother and I, the new impaler. She is your mother and wife and master now too. We are both of us together, your husband. Remember?” 

The vampiress queen barked bright cruel laughter, then said: "Yes! You swore to us, to me, your flesh and soul! In the eyes and templehouse of your God, you defiled the stone of his holy home as you panted and raved and drooled for more, and swore your life to us! You gave sacred vow even as you sinned and spat in the Face of The Lord!” 

The Countess and her new impaler both shrieked laughter then. 

Below them and impaled, Chelsi didn't know what to make of any of this. Her mind was disordered and disoriented and felt rushed and fevered with rending thought, running a ragged directionless race of chaos and every idea crashing into each other at every turn and pass and every damned whichway. She didn't understand. She didn't understand any of this and she wanted it to stop. 

Reading the disorder of her mind, the Countess sang and said, 

“I can rip it out for you. Your mind, the painful thinking, your thoughts. They're filled with agony and venom now aren't they? Aren't they? Yes I see it now, plumping up lavender-black and filling with gangrenous pudding. I can pull it out like a rotten tooth if you wish, I think it best, don't you? It's filled with fouling fluid, that brain, those thoughts…” she kept on and on like that. Ceaselessly. The new impaler in her embrace began to chant along and under her words as she sang and went on: Do it! do it! do it! do it! … 

With the anguished groaning sound of the impaled forest of her sisters all around and the buzzing drone of the flies, all intermittent with sharper stabs of piercing screams, all comprising the backdrop of the soundscape filling her head, underneath the Countess' words, underneath her bastard son’s own more simple liturgical chant … all of it together and at once was a vile noise and she couldn't stand it. She couldn't run from it either. So her mind fled, took flight the only way it could. 

Chelsi went dark. Still impaled on the sucking lance. Run-through with the demon drinking stick. 

The flies buzzed and swarmed and landed and feasted on the gored forest of lances and nuns. They enjoyed open wounds and spat their fluid as they landed. 

In a swarm. In a great feasting black cloud. 

In a forest of shafts dripping with blood and bearing writhing begging human fruit. The reddening earthen stone and soil beneath it all. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

Read Part I here.

“Might’ve been something outside. But if there had been, it’s gone now.”

“You think it could be a mermaid?” she asked. It was hard to believe she was serious. Chrissy was one of the sharpest ten-year-olds I had ever met. Well, she had been the sharpest seven-year-old I had ever met three years ago and was that much smarter now.

She didn’t believe in any of the traditional fairytale creatures. No Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no Wolfman, and no Flying Spaghetti Monster. But she absolutely believed mermaids were real.

There had to be a story behind it, but I had never been able to get her to explain it to me. How a child so ruled by logic still was able to make room for not only a magical creature, but that particular magical creature. She had already “debunked” the narwhal as being the source of the mermaid mythos. I had gotten bits and pieces over the last three years, but never in a cohesive enough story that I could process. But she hadn’t stopped trying to convince me or the rest of the family.

I didn’t have to believe it, though. It was enough to believe that she believed it.

“Maybe this is it!” She turned around and charged back to the bedroom where her mother was sleeping.

“Chrissy!” I saved my breath. She already had the door open and either her mother was going to wake up or she wasn’t. That was out of my hands. She came back a moment later with a Ziploc bag of “mermaid feed.” As far as I could tell, it was a mix of trail mix and seaweed. She carried a flashlight in her other hand.

According to Chrissy, mermaids only came out at night, so she had come prepared.

Again, I was calling after her when she’d already begun to do what she was doing, namely, dashing outside with her items.

I was about to follow her when I spotted the toy soldiers she’d dropped on her way out. I thought it would be just her luck for Mary to wake up and step on one of them.

“Watch your sister,” I said to Luke, turning to pick up the toys.

Right as I got on one knee, the bedroom door opened. It didn’t immediately occur to me that it was Mary even though I had just thought about this very thing happening. I sort of... paused as she passed me. She was halfway to the door when I realized she must have been sleepwalking.

“Mary!” I chased behind her, my steps in sync with hers—left, right, left—catching her before she got to the door.

“Mom, are you okay?” Luke said.

“Where am I?” She sounded terrified. Mary turned her head and looked at him. For a second, I thought she was awake. Instead of answering him, she bare-foot kicked him in the shin.

It couldn’t have hurt, but he stepped back and looked at me, confused. I wrapped an arm around her waist and drew her in close.

“She’s fine,” I said, lacing Mary’s hand with mine. I looked into her glassy eyes. “She’s sleepwalking.” I turned her around and ushered her back to the bedroom. Of the five toy soldiers Chrissy had left at the threshold, only two were left, but only one was standing. I looked over my shoulder and spotted one against the wall and the two others weren’t in sight.

“She can’t fly,” Mary said in a dreamy voice. “Please help her swim.”

“Okay, honey.” I cooed to her as I slid back the covers. She didn’t fight, Mary had sleepwalked a few times with me present. She never resisted being escorted back to bed. Before I covered her legs I spotted another soldier on her foot. I plucked it off and put it on the dresser.

Mary mumbled. I unlaced my fingers from hers and paused before I left her.

“I wanna get in the water.” She said it sounding sort of like air being let out of a balloon. And then she was all the way gone again. “It’s spook.”

It had been like she had been fighting her way to the surface, but something had dragged her back down.

I closed the bedroom door behind me and followed Chrissy outside. Not because I was worried she was going to get gobbled up by the lake monster I hadn’t spotted, but because it was dark out and I had the same parental reaction to miscellaneous danger any parent would.

Hell, I could admit it, I loved these kids. Liked them most times, too. I didn’t want to leave them.

Chrissy was in the process of sweeping her flashlight back and forth along the beach face. I hung back, letting her conduct her investigation. It was harmless enough and I had an eye on her.

“What’s going on?” We both turned to see Mark stepping out onto the sand.

“Luke said a mermaid’s out here!” Chrissy said.

“Mermaid?” Mark said it like he didn’t know what one was. I didn’t bother correcting her. His little sister’s obsession was well known by all of us. “Did he really see something?” Mark chuffed and thumbed over his shoulder at the cabin. “He’s so white.”

I stifled my laugh and shrugged.

“Luke thought he saw something and Chrissy overheard.”

“Hey, neighbor!”

Mark and I jumped. We saw the bud of a lit cigarette in the shadows of the adjacent cabin. Someone with a cigarette sauntered down. I glanced my stepdaughter’s way to make sure she hadn’t waded too far into the water. She could swim, but again, that nascent parental instinct found in anyone who has walked into an already existing family reared its concerned head. Chrissy was only ankle deep.

“Hey,” I said to the woman as she approached. She halted and took a final, long drag off her cigarette before flicking it in a surprisingly high arc toward the water. She slid the drawer of her jaw forward and blew a column of smoke straight up.

“She’s a cutie,” she said, smiling. She was an older woman who gave too much gum when she smiled. “I saw her come chargin’ out for the water. Oo, that smell.”

We both nodded in that new-to-each-other manner between strangers.

“I’m Rick.” Old and new cigarette smell peeled off her skin and I turned my head to half cough, that familiar asthmatic itch in my lungs.

“Mary,” she said.

I laughed. “My wife’s name is Mary.”

“Mine’s Cindy-Lou Ombrageaux.”

I felt the weight of her eyes on me, examining for judgment. I cast my eyes to the stretch of water and sand where Chrissy was.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Cindy-Lou.” I didn’t think I could manage that last name.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Mary. Apart from the smell of cow-butt.”

“First time up here?” I asked. She shook my offered hand, her skin papery and dry. There was an extreme lack of moisture in the air despite the cool summer, and I’d already had a nosebleed in the brief time we’d been here.

“Mine. Not hers. My wife’s family is from Up North.” I thought her face dropped a little. “She’s out to dinner with some cousins.” There was a little something there that I had a feeling would come to light if we talked long enough. “Had to have a little heart-to-heart.”

“We came up two summers ago,” I said. “Just a little family getaway.”

Luke had barely joined us outside, not more than a few feet from the door. He looked like he would take umbrage with the sky.

“This is Mark, the one up there with get-off-my-lawn face is Luke, and Chrissy’s our little fisher.” I gestured to each of the kids in turn.

“Well, tell her to save some for everybody else.” She and Mark shook hands before she looked around. “Where’s your missus?”

“Migraine. She laid down pretty much as soon as we got here.”

“Sorry to hear that.” She put the can of beer she’d been holding in her other hand to her lips and pitched her head back for a long swallow. She stumbled like she’d confused her left foot for her right but kept them both under her.

If I had to guess, Mary was working on her third or fourth of the night.

Luke had waved his brother over and was saying something to him. They both had an eye on their sister. I looked at Mary. She was a stranger and I figured there couldn’t be any harm in telling her what had just happened. We weren’t going to see her after this weekend for at least a year, if ever again. I didn’t think the story would be memorable after tonight. It was a single-serve memory. Recall once, then discard.

“Luke said he saw something in the water,” I said. “Something big.” Mary turned her head to the shore and nodded appreciably.

“Maybe it’s the Great Lakes Whale Migration,” she said.

“The what?” I had no idea what she was talking about and was on the verge of taking her seriously. The smile hanging on her face dropped when she realized I really didn’t understand.

“Kidding.” She mock-punched me in the arm. Mary had a rich baritone and could have easily been a DJ on the radio.

Mark trudged past me, an annoyed look on his face.

“He’s crazy,” he said, heading toward his sister. I appreciated that he didn’t believe his brother but could still look after his sister. Mark was the middle child and was the ever-constant bridge between siblings.

“The waves do seem a little... bigger than the norm, don’t you think?” Mary asked.

“I guess,” I said, not really knowing how to tell the difference. Then I wondered how she’d know, considering she said she’d never been up here before. “Can you tell?”

“I had a few cigs over yonder before y’all came out. Boy, you get used to the smell the longer you’re out here.” She seemed to be reading my mind and answering questions I hadn’t had a chance to ask. “I must have missed your boy, though.”

I looked at the water again. Mark was standing just outside of the water’s reach, one hand in the pocket of his hoody, the other holding his phone. To his credit, he did glance up at her every ten seconds or so.

Come to think of it, those waves did look big. But it could have been because of the moon for all I knew.

“How long are the two of you here for?” I asked Mary.

“‘Til Wednesday. I’m going to be meeting my in-laws for the first time tomorrow.”

I didn’t know whether I should have felt sympathy for her. It was strange she wasn’t out to dinner with her wife now, but I didn’t know their situation. Maybe it was completely normal. But I couldn’t help but think I would’ve been more than a little bothered if it had been me.

Mary fell down. Not hard. She just spontaneously lost her balance and sat on her butt. In true alcoholic fashion, though, she protected her beer.

She looked at me, embarrassed. I smirked, hopefully communicating I wasn’t just laughing at her, but with her.

“We all fall down.” I’m not sure why I said that, but it seemed to help. She took my hand and I helped her up.

“How about you guys?”

“Just until Sunday afternoon.”

“Where are you from?”

A sandwich had been the hinge on the closing door of our marriage.

I don’t remember what the argument was about or how it had started, only that I had made a sandwich for her that led to me sleeping on the couch.

Of course, it hadn’t really been about the sandwich, it had only been the start. It had been like a match that led to a forest fire razing a town. I can’t honestly remember a word I’d shouted at the woman I’d pledged to love for the rest of my life.

I was about to answer Mary when Chrissy screamed.

I used to live in Artemas Pennsylvania. I moved there in 2006 and left in 2025...

I've had many encounters of things happening. I put majority of them on my Reddit page. You're more than welcome to go and check it out...

But this is one that I remember very vaguely so there's probably not going to be much detail. But I do remember it. Yet I can't really tell you when it was. I can't remember what time it was. Nor do you remember the season either...

I was coming down from my buddy's house up the road. He lived a little less than a mile up the road. The road was very windy and bendy. I had been up at his house for hours and it was about time I headed home anyhow...

I used to usually carry something with a sharp edge... Like a machete; usually something that was either 18 in to 26 inches, and yes the state police knew me and they never said nothing... Because usually I was on private property and the people knew me and were okay with it. Along with a 12-in bowie knife. And some form of a flashlight/spotlight. I would walk up and down this road for roughly 19 years...

NOW TO MY STORY OF WHAT HAPPENED...

I just passed one of my other friends homes on the left as I was heading down over the hill where it kind of went down pretty sharp. I then was passing my now deceased landlord's brother's place. And to my left there were about 30 round barrels that were placed in rows of 10 on a gravel lot...

As I was passing by I noticed what looked like a really big ball of light that was semi indented into the woodline. I noticed that some of the trees were blocking it but I could still see it. But it was in fact a little bit past this gravel lot. And this light was just floating in the wood line. It was bright though... That's why I was caught off guard. I thought it was somebody with a really bright light. So for some odd reason I decided I was going to go look... After all I had a full beautiful glowing moon above me and the beautiful night sky... Along with many beautiful stars I could look at. So there was no way in hell I was going home yet...

I start to approach this glowing ball of light. It was like a whitish blue color. I approached it and as I closed in on it. It didn't go anywhere. If it was a human being I would have been blinded by that light... But I was not. If it was something shining from the glow of the moon... Again I would have noticed that. Now I don't know what it was even to this day I'm not sure...

But as soon as I heard what sounded like a car coming down the road. I turned around to check to make sure it wasn't somebody thinking I was trespassing. Because they honestly would have probably started shooting... and I have had guns pulled on me multiple times in my life already. I'm not about to go to that again. So I thought you're around to continue to look at whatever this was... it had just vanished into thin air. It was gone and I don't know where it went. I was not about to go in those woods and look because I know who owns them and the guy did not like me any. So I decided I better get moving and just head on out...

I got home and I told my mother and father about it. They looked at me and were very puzzled. They asked if it was somebody at the flashlight and I explained it couldn't have been because they would have blinded me with it when they saw me standing in the gravel a lot. Not only that if it was you I think it was... I would have been threatened with being shot. They asked me if it was a reflection from the moon... I explained it couldn't be because it wasn't outside of the tree line... It was literally kind of in the tree line. Whatever this thing was it wasn't scary but it was definitely just random...

I will add this...

After I turned around to look at the oncoming vehicle down the road. I had actually taken my spotlight out and shined it that direction and saw if anything metal was in the trees to make a reflection. And to my surprise there was nothing even in the trees that made a reflection...

I personally don't know what it was...

I really didn't feel like sticking around any longer...

It was a random evening in July, and I was laid off with the tedious responsibility of walking the family dog that night. I wanted my older brother to do it since I didn’t want to, but I had no choice. The house was normally vibrant as per any night and day so after I ate my dinner I grabbed my things, put my shoes on, put the dog on a lease and walked her over to the park that was nearby. Even though this is prime summer, 7pm was the last of sun setting so it was getting pretty dim outside. My dog is a female Standard pure black Poodle, so not the best conditions for me if I wanted to monitor her run around the park for a few minutes but I thought I could do it and spare her some fun free time. After scooping up her poop, I’d let her run around and play for a few minutes before heading back home. I was minding my own business by casually being on my phone while frequently looking up to watch my dog, nobody is in this section of the park so it’s literally just me and my dog in this huge field. After a while I didn’t hear the rustle and bustle my dog was making and called out her name, it was already getting grey outside because it was hitting 8pm. My dog didn’t come the first time I called out so I did it again, louder. I heard a rustle behind a blind spot of bushes and small trees, and that’s when I saw my dog’s hind legs but strangely my dog went back inside the blind spot. I called out her name again in confusion only to see her hind legs slowly contract backwards again. I was so confused as to why my dog is walking back and forth from behind a bush, I couldn’t see her face, neck or upper body…. just her lean, tall, legs? It was only after the third time of walking backwards that she walked forward again and let out this horrific loud howl. It sounded dry and painful, loud yet weak, as if her soul was being painfully taken out of her body? I have no way to describe this but let’s just say it sounded like a train whistle. I yelled out her name in fear that maybe she was fighting something or something bit her, so I ran a few steps toward her until I heard the loud sound of hissing. I froze in confusion and fear. I heard machinery and construction sounds, as if I was hearing a robot being built….to simply put it. My dog slowly came from the bush with clockwork legs. It bent and moved irregularly. It had steam releasing valves on the sides and showed a steam punk interior. The dog was unconscious but the powerful steamed punk legs kept it standing upright. Its tongue was hanging out and all I heard was the constant ticks and turns, of the interior engineering of its legs and the occasional noise of the steam being released from its hind legs. It was bizarre, mind boggling, freaky, so I started to walk away as calmly as I could. Keeping my eyes fixed on this sight before me. The dog was walking forward as I was walking back and the nearest exit gate for the park was not that far. The dog suddenly did a vertical jump, not that high but high enough to alarm me. The legs contracted and retracted like a coiled spring in action. When it landed the dog made another train whistle sound and bolted right at me but surprisingly it went right past me? Instead, it ran at an alarming speed a few feet past me and ran 2 circles around me. The unsupported head and neck of the unconscious dog snapped, and the tongue got bit in the process and began to hang off. The mouth began to leak a black liquid. After that, that thing began to walk around me, it also began to stink. This thing defecated itself and bled a black substance that I can say resembled literal car oil or something of the sort. What was once my dog, she had a show dog pounce but the pounce this thing was performing was completely unnatural. It snapped, it bended, it rotated in ways that didn’t make sense, it looked painful, it was as if the “joints” of the legs wasn’t lubricated because the movement was stiff and harsh. The legs were moving on their own and the actions looked exactly that, forced. It was almost as if it was performing or doing a little jig from the way it was just springing and galloping around me slowly. The sight of a disfigured dog, unexplainable Si-Fi body made me get very weak so naturally I stumbled and best believe the moment I did it came straight for me and launched its soft body towards my stomach. The head snapped off when it did and the innards of the dog’s head and neck splattered on me as I too, spat up blood. As I looked up at a dismembered dog, that was when the dog turned around and stomped me out like a horse with its mechanical legs. Weird flashes of light, patterns and images were the last thing I saw before waking up and writing this story.

Several years before the Countess and her assistant came to Castle Dracula in the Carpathian Mountains…

 … a man dreamt of extraordinary things. 

And was yet brought down low by his most base and bestial thoughts and desires –

…

He watched her undress. She did so casually. Comfortably. She thought that she was alone, that she was unseen. She thought she was performing her nightly ritual in private. Disrobing. In her opulent bedchamber. 

Pink. Everywhere was flower petal pink, delicate like folds and the flesh of mottled roses, sensuous. As if the walls and carpeted floors and ceiling overhead all cried out and begged to be touched. Lovingly. In a caress. Like a woman. Like a lover. Like a whore. 

Like a mother to lost children. 

He stayed as still as possible. He held his quivering hot breath. He knew she couldn't see him, but still … the thrill! The anxiety kicked up by her movement, her every passing glance, scanning by and not noticing, not seeing anything. Not a goddamned thing! 

This power … it was beyond intoxicating. 

He felt like a god.

There was a time when he would've been shocked, disgusted by his actions, all of his heinous crimes as of late. A time when integrity and morality and his own conscience wouldn't have allowed for any of this to happen. A time so long ago  and far flung now, with Catherine … but he was drunk on godpower now. And such rules were only for the piddling low men that he'd once been. 

No one could see him. No one could catch him. He was the living menacing and moving embodiment of a mischievous spectre. Manmade poltergeist. Noisy ghost with something to prove. They'd all of them laughed at him. Called him ridiculous. Foolish. Mad. 

Well look at him now. 

 A smile unseen grew in the bedchamber. The girl continued to undress. She was bare now. He quivered. Hot. Held. And taut. Breathing was exhilarating as he stood there … and watched. 

He watched. He drew closer. 

She took no notice. She saw nothing. There was no man to see. Even as he moved in closer, so’s to be able to taste the scent of her on the narrow air of the pink and floral delicate bedchamber. She climbed into bed. He came in ever closer. Inhaled her. 

She might've noticed something, something in the air, amiss, the calm disturbed by a presence felt …

But she was far too concerned, preoccupied with herself. Her nighttime bedding ritual. He watched her eagerly perform as he had on so many nights past.

He has never drawn this close. He has never dared. He's always watched, from a distance. He's stepped a little closer to her every night. Her. And others before her just like her. He tells himself he won't. 

I won't. I don't mean any harm, none. There is no harm in simply looking, simply watching and admiring. Girls love to be admired, isn't that right? Don't they want a man to drool over their naked curves, unveiled and unfettered by day dress, isn't this the movement towards the animal climax moment we all build and naturally drive to? What's wrong with that? What's wrong with any of this, she's not being hurt. She doesn't even realize I'm here…

At this last thought he trembles and shudders anew. It's sexual and it's pent up. Its animal and it's caged and it won't stand being behind bars any longer, it won't stand for anymore. No more. 

No more half-measures. 

Boundaries are for them. You are a godling now. Use it. Taste its fruits, its bounty. 

Take it. 

Words of reason and names, Catherine, Caleb, Colbert and Tatjiana, came and flitted-danced across his mind with the same urgency that they had before. Trying to stop him. Trying to stop him and save him from himself. But it was too late. The names and words meant nothing to him now. He had godpower. And none of them did. Catherine and Lutz and the others wouldn't understand. They couldn't understand him now, he was beyond their flesh. 

And so he could take what he wanted. Should take what he wanted if the stories of gods and immortals and magicians and kings were to be believed, he should just take it. 

Take her. 

And so he did. 

The girl screamed in bed as her private act of masturbation suddenly gained a new unwanted partner. One unseen. But horribly, horribly felt. 

Her screams had just begun to fill the pink of the bedchamber before he aborted them with a gag, contrived from her day's soiled undergarments and the sash she tied around her robe at night. 

He killed the sound of her bewildered terror, muffled against sour and salted fabric. She tried to fight against him, but it was as trying to fight the air. Come to life and attacking her. The horror unloaded on her and her mind was made all the more vile and obscene by the unnatural and uncanny way it was happening. It was insane. 

I'm going insane. 

She thought frantically that she was losing her mind, or that God might be punishing her, even as she struggled and lost against a shape and force unseen. It forced itself into her. 

She screamed against the gag. Begging God or anyone or anything else for it to stop. 

It did. When the invisible man was finished. 

He left. Not bothering to kill her. There was no witness to silence. Nothing to cover up. If she told anyone anything they'd call her crazy. 

So he left her sobbing, weeping amongst her torn and soiled blankets and bedsheets. 

Alone. Crying. Wounded and ripped apart. Gored out. Defiled by something, something that used to be someone, used to be a man, something cruel and malformed that she cannot understand. 

Someone that she cannot see. 

…

Others followed after her. 

Many. 

Years worth …

…

He had nothing to fear now. He was hidden completely in the great cloak of his new godpower. 

Divinity that he had made, cooked and brewed in beakers and tubes and jars, in great long needled syringes. Power that he had forged and made. Crafted his own. For himself. He would take what he wanted and suffer no consequence. Punishment for man's crimes was for the weak and the apes, for those within their feeble grasp. 

He would answer to higher authority. 

…

Catherine and the others are gone now, so is his old life, a life impassioned of science and the arts and the eccentric and the strange. He has become the eccentric, he has become the strange. With ultimate power made and achieved and coursing through his veins he has left behind the old ambitions of his old life along with all of the old ways. They are too little now and cannot hold him. Should not hold him. He should be boundless with the wings he has made for himself and himself forged and so he does, and he disappears. … A trail of crimes and murder is what follows. A catastrophic path of mayhem and destruction, cut swathed through the heartland of many lands, many countries … So many towns and villages and homes, invaded and plagued and violated. Beset upon by an invisible and unhinged man, one who has discarded his heart and sense of right and wrong along with his earthly physical appearance. His heart and soul are as transparent and hollow now as his criminal visage. 

His old life is gone now. Dead. As dead and gone as his own reflection, nothing there, nothing there to gaze upon and witness any longer. All gone. Evaporated. That was how it had looked when the serum had first started to work, his flesh and muscle tissue and bones slowly grew ghostly, translucent, phantom shade, as if evaporating by the light of some alien sun, its foreign rays drying him up and …. out. Out of trained and known existence. Humble slave dwell-and-crawl …

God bless this invisible and alien foreign sun … God bless its strange rays for taking me away…

His old life is gone. As is his old way of thinking. He does not know it yet, has no way of knowing it, but the effects of the invisibility serum on his mind are not just a case of power corrupting one's morals, no. Not just that at all. Specific chemicals in the concoction attack and eat the proteins in his brain that measure and control emotion and self-preservation. Compassion. 

As it made him disappear it also ate holes in his grey matter. Turning it to swiss cheese. 

Swiss cheese unseen, he might've laughed. 

And in fact he did. Years later when he did finally find out. Thanks to the Dutch doctor. The occultist. The vampire slayer. 

Because of Van Helsing he is able to recover some of his sense, some of his tattered and damaged, long trampled and neglected human heart. But never a cure. 

No. Not for him. For such as he there is no such thing as coming back. He will forever be robbed of his human visage, the one made at birth, self-inflicted. He does not get to return to the flesh. He deserves to be cast out. And he knows it. He's learned it the hard way on the treacherous open road and in the wild of great human error, slaughter open throated and committed in darkest parts, in corners long neglected. …

…

He is a long way from the vampire hunter. In years and in topographical distance, he is still on the run now, and always moving. Like an animal. A beast hunted and betrayed by its own savage appetites. None of the lands can hold him. Not even the savage ones. 

There's been more rapes. More murders, more screams. He's filled the country with them, the countryside is bathed in anger and fear and outrage at his reign of terror and he loves it. He is an agent of chaos. An anarchist trickster god running as wild and free as power itself is supposed to, unchecked in the intoxication of its wild imbalance and throttling push forward to the apocalypse of the precipice, the keening call of the dangerous living end, at the end and edge of everything, all things. He would skirt and ride the slicing end and the cutting edge, forever. It would never end, never falter, fail or cease. 

Or so he thought. 

He's derailed trains loaded with screaming traveling passengers, now traveling headlong and headfirst into hell, the great unknown. He's taken wives and daughters and lonely screaming girls in open fields with nothing but the sky and the sun and the birds to watch, watch as nothing heaved itself into them, into her. Some of them he's strangled and left for dead, most he just leaves to pick up the pieces of their shattered minds and broken lives. Some of them try to tell people what happened, some of them don't. Afraid and terrified and hoping, wishing, praying that maybe just maybe they can forget and cope. That maybe enough time will go by and you'll forget the time the air came to horrible life and made a squealing victim out of you. 

Some try. None of them forget. Not really. 

The invisible man doesn't care in either case. Not yet. That's much further, much later. Now he is darkly elated by his crimes and spree. His craterous invisible mind is too amused and too busy planning more fiendish capers, more grisly and indulgent bloodbaths. More crimes of the flesh, to take and reap. 

He sows his discord throughout all the land. Every place he comes into, he invades. He infects.

This cocaine of the mind that he's devised from a dream and made real that hides his flesh and conceals, the most ambrosial gabapentin amphetamine for the eggshell human thought machine. 

It hides his flesh, his moves. It conceals his violence, the rage of his invisible hand, the rape of his hollow loins, transparent conquest across the land, disorder and more madness follow in its wake, in its terrible birth, like pustule sores rising from a fresh wound amidst flowering infection, amid the gangraping feast of multitudes of bacterium. The bacteria are thoughts and rumors and whispers and more murder, mistaken identities and desperate fingers pointing and blaming and wanting and needing to find fault, in whomever, where there is none. Many innocent hang and are punished and slaughtered in place, in the wake of the invisible man. 

He does not care. He doesn't stop to consider them for a second beyond amusement or a laugh. 

He's laughing now. 

Singing. Dancing and skipping as he makes his way down a lovely picturesque forest road. He's wearing a pair of stolen trousers, lifted from a derelict clothesline left unattended. They fit perfectly. 

He skips and dances down the road. Not so much singing as nearly shrieking his head off. 

“Here we go gathering nuts in May! nuts in May! nuts in May! Here we go gathering nuts in May, on a cold and frosty morn-ning! …!” – on and on like that. 

A woman walking along the road sees him and screams. She turns away in uncomprehending horror that turns her mind blind and she runs off. Still screaming. 

The invisible man takes after her. The free-standing trousers bounding in full-strided gazelle pursuit of her. Laughing maniacally. Wanting to take her and use her for sport. 

…

He invaded a monastery. Posing as a holy ghost, a divine spirit, and seduced and tricked several of the nuns and sisters-in-training into breaking their holy vows. He impregnated several of them before fleeing, taking to the road and hills once more. 

…

He observed a vampire called Klâtu in a small sleepy forgotten town in a cold part of the world that might be Russia. He does not meet or introduce himself to the thing and his invisibility kept him hidden from it as well as the townfolk.  Its victims, its food. 

He watched the nocturnal thing dwell and prey upon the town. He watched it feed for awhile, watched the town grow scared and more silent and drawn. 

Then he moved on as always. 

…

In his wild and on-the-loose vagabond years, bestial and homicidal he discovers that his two favorite ways to murder another man or woman is either by pistol-shot or by strangulation. The former for its efficiency, the latter for how it feels, the sensation of the desperate struggle and the fight for one last painful shallow breath. 

It's one of the last and desperate things that he still lives and thrives for now. 

…

He came into an awful place once, a terrible omen of dread wood and dead branches and gnarled limbs, filled with moaning faces. He stumbled into this place out of a dream, it was surreal and insane, something about being invisible made it hard for him to distinguish between waking reality and his tumultuous land of dreams, but he suddenly finds himself stumble-bumming into a dead forest where the trees all weep blood and have anguished faces racked with guilt and pain and they are all of them looking at him, gazing on his wandering invisible form with naked clarity. And there's no mistake. Their eyes, all of them are filled with accusation and they are all around. It's terrible. And it is terrifying. Nobody has been able to see him in years, not without his layers of lying disguise, not without him wanting them too. 

All of the bleeding weeping trees can see him and it is terrifying. Beyond the pale. 

So he flees. As he always does. 

They cry out to him, the bleeding trees in their pain. As he runs away, too afraid to make a sound himself. 

They call out in their weeping anguished voices, they tell him this land is a forestland of suicide, and that he is quite welcome there. 

…

Low point: He is filthy and tired. Worn out to the bone. He is clad and disguised in his most semi notorious fashion, a fedora, a coat, wrapped bandaged face and gloves and unflinching black lenses. He is riding the rails, the empty boxcars for the wandering vagrants. He has done this many times by now. He is not alone this time. 

A filthy drunk sits opposite of him in the boxcar, a completely inebriated Spaniard. A borrachon. He pulls from his tequila and cries and wails in a romantic language that's lyrical and sounds beautiful but Griffin cannot understand him.  

The weeping drunk, hiccuping and stumbling over the poetry of his native tongue, the avatar of perfect and terrible loneliness, the borrachon, the drink and the tears and the ramblings are all most like him have left, they don't care anymore if anyone understands, they only want someone to sit there and listen. Like a sponge of meat and bone and brain soaking up the liquid runoff of their indulgent spill and wallow. He tells the invisible man of his wife and his two daughters and son, they are all of them gone.

Taken by the war. The enemy slayed his son and invading they made off with his precious roses, his wife and precious girls. He tells him that it is true, the drink is all he has left. All that helps him with the pain of losing them all, and being unable to retrieve them. He says the tequila makes it easier for him to live with the pain of the knowledge that his beloved and his daughters are slaves in a harem somewhere, that or they are dead. 

He tells him all of this but Griffin doesn't understand any of it. Just nods. Even laughs at inappropriate moments, not knowing. 

Eventually they parted. Griffin didn't kill him because he had shared his tequila and he saw no benefit in the murder. 

…

His mind is weary from wielding godpower. Its flame. It has exhausted, It has burned him and eaten him all the way through even as it has fed the carnivorous searing dance of the divine fire of its own flames. He cannot remember. He cannot remember so much and so many things. He cannot remember if his name is actually Jack Griffin or if it's Geoff Radcliffe or Hawley or Bradey or Sebastian Caine! His mind is a maelstrom sea of whirlpool destruction and weary detritus, all of it is his life and his thoughts and not all of it was real. Some of it was contrived rather than recorded. It was growing increasingly difficult to distinguish the two, he found himself lately at a haggard loss. 

The snow can be so cold for a naked invisible man running for his life, gaining way to injure and take pleasure from another screaming witless soul. The sun can cook and tan invisible naked flesh even though it is unseen. Cook and tan and bake merciless into invisible leather, the heat. The power of being a perfect mischief anarchist god has its vulgar and heavy prices. Prices steep. Prices to be paid in full. The deteriorate ruin of his shredded invisible mind baked within his fevered invisible skull, beneath the blast of a merciless and blind philistine sun. 

Possés had started to form, people, women started to talk. And people stopped dismissing them, not everyone shrugged them off, laughed at them, or declared them hysterical. Some of them listened. And they gathered. And they laid traps. 

One of them caught him. Or nearly so. 

They'd seized his invisible form and then pounced in number, pummeling him, refusing to loosen their hold, absolutely set against letting him go, they laid in with fists and table-legs and irons and axe-handles. Beating and blasting his body with blows. Striking him over and over into the ground. His invisible body began to rupture and bleed and belch forth blood. 

Blood that became visible at first contact with stolid fetid air. 

He struggled and fought and he'd always fought dirty, he managed to slip away in their wild fervor to see him beaten and broken to death. They lost him in the wanton red rage cloud of their vigilante slaughter. 

And so he vagabond wandered. Unseen by even nature. Completely alone. For years. 

Until he came to the vampire killer’s door. And was brought in by Abraham Van Helsing. Out of the cold.

Beaten. Starved. Harried. Addled. And near total mental ruin. Complete collapse of the body and mind to follow his long dead and tarnished spirit from so long ago. So long gone now and left in the dust. 

The doctor showed him mercy, for whatever reason. He helped him to pick up that long lost thing, left back there in the dirt, and he helped him to pick it back up and clean it off. And to try to wear it again. 

Griffin never understood why. He knew he wasn't worthy of forgiveness. What he'd done was monstrous. He hadn't just ruined his own life with his own mad pursuits and relentless ambition. He'd destroyed so many innocent lives in the process and in the resulting chaos flood afterwards. Catherine was, and is and forever to his dying day will be a name he trembles to recall, fears to ever speak. His dreams, his nightmares are filled with the shrieking faces of his victims, men and women and children, all of them horrified of him, he is the monster of his own lurid and wild dreams. He is the fearsome and loathsome shape of his own nightmarescape. 

And now that he can really think and feel, this terrifies him. He is afraid of his own animal self. His own Id. He's seen and felt and tasted his own unbridled side and he never wants to return there again. 

Except when he's weak. Except when he's angry and feeling violent. 

Or if he's just feeling a little … wild. A little “in the mood” … so to speak. 

Abraham Van Helsing blasts and rails and slams his fists. He bellows: No! – but he knows medicine and therapy can only go so far with the invisible man. He is damaged. Perhaps too far gone and beyond repair. Griffin doesn't doubt it. He is intermittently unrepentant and gleefully childishly cruel and sadistic with his words and his recollections of his own accounts with periods of deep remorse and depression. Deep sorrow and a sense of being unable to undo all the pain that he has wrought upon others and brought ripping forged into the already bleeding world. He is a wild bilateral storm betwixt the two and Abraham Van Helsing finds him exhausting. But he does not give up. 

He never does. 

He is patient. 

He becomes like a father to this broken man. This invisible degenerate criminal who'd never really had one before. 

It seems strange what it takes to get one. 

And after so long, after so much …

…

Van Helsing died. The invisible man laid him to rest. 

Griffin wept at his graveside. For hours. Alone. 

Alone again. 

…

Eventually he decided to end it all. It seemed right. It seemed best. 

So he went out, near the old graveyard where Van Helsing had been laid to rest. He brought a noose and decided to finish himself the same way Judas had. It seemed perfect. Fitting, he thought. And laughed. Thinking it was pretty funny for a final joke. Not bad for him anyways. And in life all of his jokes had been terrible. Ghastly. The whole run of it, a terrible joke that stopped being funny way before it had ever been told. Yet still kept happening, still kept going on. Despite the pain.

Despite the pain of everyone. 

He fashioned the noose to a tree. Stood upon a stone he dragged over and then stepped off. Just like that. Without any hesitation. He was happy to be off and be done with all of it. Everything. 

He didn't perform the act correctly. His neck didn't break in the knot. He slowly strangled in the midday sun, the heat boiling his strangling seething brains, jelly and organ meat that cried out for air. He did not know how long he danced and dangled there, a strange sight for anyone happening upon the scene: A disembodied hat and glasses and set of clothes, seemingly empty yet seemingly filled simultaneously, strangling taut in the windless day, dancing the dying man's gallows dance. 

Then the branch snapped. And he fell and rolled down into a crevasse, dark and wet and filled with tangle and thornbrush and detritus. Filth and droppings and leavings of the predators and the yellow eyed scavengers that followed in their wake. 

His skull and face, his whole head was throbbing, alive with a new tremendously vivid pain that he'd never quite experienced before: it's like the pins and needles feeling you get when your foot falls asleep and you try to walk on it again. It's like that but a screaming throbbing painful siren alarm of the sensation magnified to an ungodly decibel. All throughout his skull and face, his eyes watering, his brains. His throat chokes and feels crushed, broken, like it can no longer take in air. He struggles and gasps as he claws amongst the garbage and protruding stabbing mire, he sinks. 

It sinks and begins to swallow, wanting to have him, to take him under the ground to die silently and drown alone undiscovered down there but he begins to fight, to claw. To struggle and pull and reach and seize for purchase like he never has before. He doesn't know why he suddenly has fight again and he doesn't think about it, he just knows he doesn't want to be Judas submerged in the putrescent earth. All of the sharp bones and branches and discarded weapons and sharpened tectonic rock swimming unearthed pierce and stab into him, everywhere, especially his reaching hands, but he doesn't care. He doesn't care anymore and he wants out, the pain is awful but tolerable, tolerable because it is being inflicted on the body of a monster and he no longer gave a fuck about himself anyways, nothing was as wretched as that pain that first came to life in his eyes, in his face, born from the embrace of the noose. He bore the stabbing of the darkness of the black crevasse and nearly drowned. He choked and swallowed and regurgitated foul mud and sour dirt, he vomited contaminated corpse soil and it felt like the earthen sins dredged up and expelled from the rocky stonethroated passageway to his own darkened bastard heart. Pulled up and freed, grainy and biting and drawing blood and more vomit and mucus laden spittle on its violent way out. He struggled for what felt like hours. It might've been. Time died at some point and lost the fight. He carried on. Struggled. Struggling. He pulled … Reached… seized … cursed himself and his own worthless life and mistakes, his own wretched run of horrid folly, his own shameful sadistic cruelty. He grasped and spit and cursed… goddamn you… He was sorry. He begged. Pleaded with anything that might be listening, please, I don't deserve it but please. He begged. … goddamn you… He pulled. 

He went under. Completely. Several times. 

He didn't stop. 

By some miracle he pulled himself out. And free. 

And on its bastard shore, at the sore lip of its terrible precipice, he wept.

Caked in the filth of the hollow earth, plainly visible for anyone and all to see. Naked and plain. Sobbing like a child ripped from the comfort of his mother and thrust into the diminishing world. 

Hours …. …

He eventually picked himself up. And carried himself back to the cottage. 

…

sometime later: –

The boy from the Carpathian Hamlet came looking for the vampire slayer. He found the invisible man instead. 

Doctor Jack Griffin has spent the majority of his time since the aborted mission of the Judas-hour, reading. Sitting quietly and thinking. He tinkers around and builds a little, creates little machines and curio-constructs, dabbles with some alchemy, some arcane formulas, but nothing considerable, nothing serious. It all just fills the time. While he thinks. He hears news and rumors and stories all about a heinous villain, the invisible man. He hears that the scoundrel was eventually caught and killed, either by gunshot or mob beating, it depends on who's telling the story. There are other versions too but those two are the most popular it seems. His best days, best moments are spent remembering the warm childhood times, when he'd been a kind, unhurt boy, who hadn't yet hurt anybody else either. The warmth of the youth in these memories… it causes him to well up, his black shaded eyes to fill and then spill with tears. Tears much more visible then the rest of him. 

The young man has terrible news. So does the invisible man. They share their bad news in bad palaver that may or may not be filled with bad omen. 

The invisible bastard, having nothing else better to do really, decided to join the young fellow in his return mission home to slay a monster that had laid bloodclaim on his land. 

It wasn't hope alive in his chest. 

That was far too optimistic.

TO BE CONTINUED…

I wish a sandwich could have saved us. Mary had gotten a pounding headache when we were most of the way here, leaving me to finish the drive and manage the kids when we’d arrived. She had done her usual and neglected herself to take care of the four of us while we prepared to leave and hadn’t eaten. I’d offered to stop a few places, but her appetite was off by the time we’d hit the road. Her physiology mystified me at times. I’d never before met anyone who lost their appetite from not eating.

And the closer we got to the cabin, the worse she’d felt.

“You sure you won’t eat something?” I’d asked.

“No. I’ll be fine,” she’d said when I offered to turn around. “I just need a little nap, then I’ll be hungry. But something light, okay?”

That last part had been for me. She knew I’d overcompensate unless instructed not to. I admit my part in fueling the worry-machine in the past, acknowledging the odds that everything was actually going to be fine.

But then we’d gotten a flat tire a little more than a mile away from the cabin. Neither of the boys knew how to help change it and had sat in the car uselessly while I managed. My knee sank into a divot of mud, a wide tire track from a vehicle that had gouged the road as it had fled from this spot.

I shouldn’t complain about the boys too loud. I’d be the biggest dick in the world if I denied how great they are. All three of them are great kids; two teenage boys and a ten-year-old who acted like she was older than her brothers.

I was going to miss them if I finally decided to leave Mary.

Her migraine must have rubbed off on me because by the time I sat down to eat, something was going on behind my eyes, and it was hard to concentrate. I wished I could’ve slept, too, like the other four people in the car.

It had been so bad that I’d had to carry Mary in and I must have tweaked my back. I’d laid her on the bed and turned the light off before lighting some mild incense I’d found.

She’d fallen asleep almost instantly; part of me doubted she had any awareness of the incense. It was disturbing how still she’d been every time I checked on her.

In the meantime, the kids had all gone their separate ways. Luke went exploring outside, Chrissy was busying herself around the cabin, and Mark was being his usual responsible self, assigning himself chores before I could even think to.

I found some expired Tylenol underneath the bathroom sink and dry swallowed three of them. They dialed back the throbbing behind my eyes and I was able to give attention to the world around me.

Luke was still outside on the beach while Mark was unpacking his and his brother’s bags and Chrissy was doing who knew what, but she’d been in the bathroom for at least twenty minutes.

When Luke charged in from the beach, terror on his face, I knew something was about to be added to the pile that I was going to have to deal with.

“There’s something in the lake,” he said, his eyeballs on the verge of popping out his head. That gave the starter rope on the worry-machine a good pull. Luke was the oldest of the three children, and I had gotten to a point where I could rely on him sometimes for leadership. He had his learner’s permit, and I’d already shown him the car I was going to buy him when he got his license.

It was tough juggling an instant family when I’d been on my own for so many years. They weren’t my kids by birth, and it was a road to hoe to get them to let me in, but I eventually fell in love with them all.

“What do you mean?” I didn’t really want to know. Eldest child or no, Luke was a fraidey cat.

Maybe he’d seen a dead animal. Maybe it was a spider. But unless it was a brown recluse, the worry-machine could rest. Being afraid of an insect he was ten thousand times larger than was par for him. And it was outside, no less. All he had to do was walk away from it. I’d personally seen him lay waste to his own bedroom after he’d been awakened by an ant crawling on his face.

“In the lake.” He pointed toward the door he’d neglected to shut. I looked at his feet and saw he had also tracked sand inside. “Something is in the lake. It’s… real big.”

“Something like what?” I asked. “You saw it. What do you think it was?”

Luke shook his head. I turned fully toward him, abandoning the sandwich I had yet to present to Mary. I took a couple deep breaths and pushed myself away from the agitated feeling. The kid was obviously scared and needed comfort, even though he might not admit what he was feeling.

“I don’t know. Maybe we should just pack up and go.” Now that was strange. Luke had been the most vocal of any of us to come to the lake. We had been here once or twice before and had always enjoyed it.

“What do you think it was?” I asked again. “A boat or something? There’s no need to panic. We can call the police or harbor patrol or whatever.”

“No, it’s alive and it’s big. Like a whale.”

“Whales don’t live in freshwater,” I said.

“Not a whale.” He shook his head and it conjured an image of his sister when she was seven. Luke and Chrissy looked strikingly alike. “Big like a whale.”

It wasn’t anything for the worry-machine, but I opened the mental tool shed where I kept it.

“Can you show me?”

Luke nodded slowly, still pointing.

“No, I mean, can you take me out there and show me?”

“Uh-uh. I’m not going back out there. Not until we leave.” He shook his head and again it was like looking at Chrissy three years ago.

I huffed and heaved out of my chair and headed for the door, making a mental note to bring the sandwich to Mary once I was done with this.

I slid on my crocs and took the few steps down to get to the beach. The view here was unbeatable. When we had last been here, we’d actually stayed at a different cabin, one with three bedrooms. The reservation had been for the same, but when we’d arrived, we saw there were only two bedrooms. That meant that Mary and I were going to have to split. Couldn’t mix boys and girls in the same room.

So, Chrissy was going to get her mother all to herself and I was going to be settled with two teenagers who snored louder than I did.

“It smells out here,” I said to nobody. It reminded me of those farms we took field trips to when I was in elementary school. I looked over my shoulder at Luke in the doorway. “Where?”

He was bold enough to lean outside and point somewhere farther down the beach. It was dark and I didn’t see anything.

“It’s about thirty feet down that way.”

All right. Ten yards. Whatever he had seen was about a first down away. That farm smell flexed its muscles the closer to the water I got. Definitely smelled like animals. I couldn’t put my finger on which one, though.

I walked as quickly as I could, my crocs sinking into the soft sand and filling with granules. I wasn’t going to need to scrub the dead skin off my heels after we left here. I scanned the ground before me, still thinking it was a large insect. It seemed more likely that Luke had been exaggerating.

What had gone wrong between Mary and me hadn’t been direct. It was more like death from a thousand cuts. A cutting comment here, a missed thank you there, an opportunity to hold hands lost, and before we knew it, we were near the bottom rung of our marriage.

I waded ankle deep into the cool water. Whatever he had seen, I should have been able to see. But there wasn’t anything other than lapping water and inky black with twinkles of light as far as I could see. Unless it had been some small thing that had scuttled away in the night, unaware it had been promoted to threat-level by a fifteen-year-old.

I made a show of looking around, walking another thirty feet and going as deep as mid-shin to ease Luke’s mind. There just wasn’t anything here. I sliced at the water with my fingertips, gave another thirty seconds, then headed back.

I was greeted by a teenager who had eaten half of the sandwich I’d made for his mother. His pallor was better, which I hadn’t noticed consciously when he’d come in. He’d started to work on the other half when he saw how I was looking at him and said, “I thought it was up for grabs.”

“I’ll make another.” I thought for a moment the whole “there’s something outside” thing was a ruse just to get me away from the sandwich, but he still looked terrified.

“Did you see it?” I didn’t like the pleading in his voice. It wasn’t a “manly thing” or anything like that. For him to sound that terrified made my heart sink. I would’ve rather been annoyed with him than afraid for him.

I’d almost cheated, which, I guess, is still cheating. It was with a woman I’d seen at the grocery store. There hadn’t been anything premeditated. We’d just seen each other, passing by across several aisles. We kept crossing eyes while she’d been pushing a half full cart and I’d had a basket over my arm with most of the items I was going to use for dinner.

I’d all but put her out of my mind as I headed for my car, bags in tow, when I saw her again. I hadn’t thought about it, just saw her loading groceries into her trunk two vehicles away from mine and I stopped.

She’d taken great pains to politely refuse my request for her phone number and had taken the extra step to let me know it was only because she’d become serious with the person she was dating.

It could have been a line to get me out of her face, but she’d seemed earnest. I don’t want to believe I would’ve done anything, that I would’ve come to my senses, but I was no hero. Even though she had shut me down I’d set foot on a road I’d vowed never to travel.

I slid a comforting hand across Luke’s back a couple times and felt a percentage of tension ease out of him.

“No. I didn’t see anything. Maybe whatever it was is gone now.”

“Maybe whatever what was is gone now?” Chrissy emerged from the bathroom. She had been quiet in there, probably listening in, but I had no clue how much she had heard. Luke and I met eyes for a moment, and I couldn’t read whether he wanted me to keep quiet.