Mother’s Merry Girls – Part One by K. Wallace King

In the spring of 1967, I dropped out of high school, certain I was smarter than anybody else in that low-slung brick building and departed my Midwest home. I put out my thumb on highways and small-town roads with the poetry of Ferlinghetti, music of the dead. and girls with flowers in their hair, my ultimate destination. Though there were other reasons I left the only home I had ever known, Calvin was the tipping point. Black-haired and red-lipped, Calvin was our new minister—an over large-man with a handsome pompadour and a steamed velvet voice. In the pulpit of Tabernacle Presbyterian, he was mesmerizing. When his big hands gripped the lectern tight and his pretty lips pursed like an open kiss, every woman in the congregation leaned forward in her pew.

But down in the church basement, it was me Calvin’s eyes followed, over those hair-sprayed updo’s as they offered him plates of homemade cookies. He could see I was meant for a deep, abiding, soul-scorching love. And soon, it was me he began driving in his Oldsmobile 98 to the field behind the crumbling farmhouse on the dead-end road.

It was in the cornfield, between the fluttering leaves, that Calvin’s groping fingers got stuck in the zipper of my skirt. “Dammit,” he mumbled.

I told myself his fumbling was just his way of coaxing my soul closer to his. “Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips,” I recited as Calvin finally extricated his fingers from the zipper.

“What?”

“Prometheus Unbound. We’re reading Shelley in my English class. He’s chained to a rock, and birds are eating his liver.” Calvin’s sweat was dripping into my eyes, so I closed them. His naked chest made a sucking sound when he got off me.

“Are our souls one now?” I asked, opening my eyes to the sun in my face. All I could see of Calvin was a looming, backlit shadow.

“Your soul belongs to Jesus,” he replied, pulling up his pants.

I looked up at him, my skirt still around my waist. “But I want you to have it.” A stick was poking my right thigh as I pulled my skirt down.

On the far side of the cornfield, the school band kept fumbling through the opening bars of The Saints Go Marching In. “Do you love me as much as Jesus?”

“Don’t talk like that. Listen, remember our secret vow?”

“I guess.” I swatted away a fly.

“Do you?”

“Do you love me?”

“Sure. Now stay here until you hear my car leave, okay?”

“Okay.”

I lay there in the cornfield, stick poking, sun blinding, until the I heard the Oldsmobile rumble away.

***

Only a week later, I heard that Calvin had become engaged to Valerie Wiendensocken, my English teacher. When I was seven, her little brother had tried to drown me in the community pool, and her father owned the biggest Cadillac dealership in the state. I cried so much and so hard that my eyes became slits, and my face puffed up like a pumpkin.

I paced the cornfield where we had merged our souls—or at least where I’d offered mine—until I tripped on a rock, falling hard and biting clean through my lip, chipping my front tooth. I sat there in the dirt, blood streaming from my mouth. I guess I swallowed the bit of tooth enamel. All I could think about was how much I hated every Wiendensocken and how much more I hated Calvin.

On hands and knees, I smeared the blood dripping from my lip all over that rock, cursing Calvin to the blank, dumb sky. Then I prayed—not to Jesus (who didn’t love me)—but to the dark angel who had tumbled out of Heaven (he always seemed more interesting, anyway), for real, true love to find me, soul to soul.

When my mother noticed my broken tooth, I refused to go to the dentist. I was marked forever. A visible wound. Like stigmata.

***

One afternoon, I was forced to accompany my grandmother to the hair salon, where I picked up a magazine. What is a Hippie? inquired the cover. Smiling faces adorned with vivid sunbursts danced under a rainbow of dazzling primary colors. The TV news claimed San Francisco was overrun with drugged-out kids in filthy jeans, running amok and setting fires in the streets. But elsewhere, I’d heard it was the capital of poetry, music, and self-expression.

As I flipped through the pages, it was a revelation. Inside, young people were living free. In that moment, I knew that if I didn’t escape my small town, I’d end up baking cookies for other versions of red-lipped lies.

At midnight—which seemed the perfect time for departing one world and entering another—I climbed out of my window and walked three miles to the highway. Until then, the farthest I had ever traveled was to Cincinnati, which my grandmother called The Paris of the Midwest.

As I walked, fallen leaves crunched beneath my shoes. I was really going. “Here I go, going, going,” I whispered to the night sky. It was so dark—no moon. A frigid breeze blew on that April morning before dawn, but I kept walking, head down against the wind. I would get there, hell or high water. Hell was just fine with me; it couldn’t be much worse than what I was leaving behind.

***

The last eight hundred miles were with a trucker who let me sleep in his semi-trailer on the plastic-covered mattresses he was delivering. I managed to lift myself out of my body in exchange. He fed me and didn’t ask questions. If he saw anything reflected back in my eyes, he kept it to himself.

Most of the details of that journey have faded, but I distinctly remember the day the rear doors of the trailer opened, and he said, “We’re here.”

I climbed out into a world smothered in fog. The tops of buildings disappeared as if forgotten, and distant lights blinked on and off through the mist, like winking eyes. Whenever the fog parted, I glimpsed the mammoth bones of the great bridge, only for them to vanish again, as if I’d only dreamed them.

Then the sun rose, hanging on the horizon like a red eye over the churning bay, black as oil in the early light. The fog curled around me as I threw back my head to the seagulls squawking overhead.

“Here I am. I’m here!”

In my happy delirium, I hadn’t noticed the truck’s engine starting. I turned to see the taillights blink before winking out, leaving me alone in an empty warehouse parking lot. It was then I realized that everything I owned in the world—except what I was standing in—was still in the truck.

The mist had turned into a light but determined rain. Within minutes, I was soaked through.

I began walking. Where else could someone wet, friendless, and penniless possibly go but toward a bridge called The Golden Gate?

***

Shivering, water squishing in my shoes, I discovered that the more determinedly I walked toward the bridge, the more it seemed to disappear. At last, the great span was hidden by streets as steep and winding as a rollercoaster. As the rain and mist grew heavier, my exhilaration faded proportionately.

I descended yet another street into a forest of buildings. People rushed past me on the sidewalk, but none wore flowers in their hair. The glimpses of faces under umbrellas were harried or blank. No one paid me the slightest attention. I had been walking for what felt like hours, and by now, I was so drenched I wasn’t sure I hadn’t started to melt.

I was sloshing past a café, its lights glowing bright behind a rain-streaked window, when a young, bearded man with an umbrella stepped out and, astonishingly, spoke to me.

“What a wet little bug you are. Come inside. Let’s get you something warm.”

The rain dripping into my eyes rendered his face a damp blur, but the golden glow from the café window backlit his head like a saint in stained glass. Too tired to argue, I didn’t resist as he guided me by the elbow.

Inside, the café was crowded nearly to bursting, a deluge of chattering voices rising, ebbing, and rising again. People smiled as the bearded man wove me through the crowd, mostly young, though we squeezed past an old woman perched on a stool, smoking the very end of a cigarette. She sucked in deeply and exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. Her dress was dirty and torn, and I couldn’t help but turn my face away at the smell. She was rank, fetid, fusty—but confusingly, after we passed, a faintly pleasant scent lingered. I thought of my grandmother’s old-world roses, so dark red they could almost be black.

The woman didn’t seem to notice me, and I soon forgot her as I was guided to a booth near the back of the café. A tall, eely girl flopped down beside me and began drying my hair with a cloth napkin.

“Drink this,” said someone at my elbow, and I lifted a tiny teacup to my lips. The steam rose into my nose, and I hesitated, overwhelmed.

“Give her sugar.”

Someone dropped a cube of sugar into the strange, thick coffee. I took a sip and almost spat out the bitterness, but the people in the booth were watching, smiling. I forced myself to swallow, though the lump of sugar was still in my mouth. My tongue curled around its sweetness.

“It’s good, real good, isn’t it good?” asked a Black man with glasses, the lenses pink as grapefruit. The people at the table clapped.

“Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine, sunshine,” sang the Black man. “You are my sunshine.”

“Stop rubbing her head, Peppermint,” said a woman in cowboy boots and a green dress. “She’s not a doll.”

“She is, though. Yes, she is a doll,” said another man who had scooted next to me—or more of a boy-man. His head was crowned with an explosion of tight, bright blond curls, and he had only a bit of fuzz on his upper lip. His eyes were so shiny, I wondered if they were made of glass.

“Give me your hand, Doll Girl. I want to marry you.” The boy-man grabbed my hand.

“Dolly Girl,” said the Black man, leaning over my shoulder. Behind the pink lenses, his eyes glittered golden.

“Dolly Girl,” repeated the eely girl, smiling. “I’ll braid your hair with ribbons.”

“Dolly Girl,” whispered the boy-man in my ear. I wanted to pull my hand away, but he was holding it even tighter.

The lights overhead began to flicker, and someone shouted, “It’s time!”

“Lock the door, lock the door,” people chanted. “Time for Her.”

A girl with a red flower in her hair stood up from another table. The crowd parted as she crossed the floor. She placed a hand on my shoulder and looked down into my upturned face. She was beautiful.

I watched, mesmerized, as her lips formed words. They seemed to float in the air, carried by her breath.

I’m your momma

I’m your poppa

I’m your grandma too

I’m breakfast, supper,

Dinner,

All your dreams

Coming true.

You were going

She

Is coming

Coming,

Doll Girl,

For you.

The girl’s hand cupped my chin, and I couldn’t look away. I stared into her black stone eyes. In my mind, the words never and always formed.

“What poems are inside you, Dolly Girl?”

“I don’t—”

She let me go, and it felt as if everything keeping me upright tumbled—click, clack, click—like bones reduced to sticks dropped carelessly on cold, hard ground.

When she moved away from the table, I started to follow, but the boy-man grabbed my wrist.

“Let’s go,” he whispered. But my stomach was fluttering oddly, as though I’d swallowed a jar of moths.

“That’s one of those weird chicks that comes with the old lady,” he said, still gripping my wrist. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Something’s wrong with me,” I tried to tell him, but he pulled harder.

I turned as he opened the door, searching for the beautiful girl with the red flower and black stone eyes. Just before the door closed, I saw her standing beside the raggedy old woman.

K. Wallace King

K. Wallace King’s recent short fiction appears in the August '24 Issue #50 of Cosmic Horror Monthly, The Opiate, Underland Arcana, Chthonic Matter, Nightscript, Orca, and the 2024 double Shirley Jackson Award winning, Aseptic and Faintly Sadistic, an Anthology of Hysteria Fiction, among others. She lives in Hollywood, California, where the handprints of dead dreamers are pressed into the sidewalks.

February 6, 2025February 8, 2025

Man with a White Cane by Christopher Woods

Would you mind if I shared your park bench? No? Thank you, then. Yes, this is quite nice. I love Chapultepec. You must also love it. Am I right? Yes? It keeps us coming back, don’t you think? Like an old song. Yes, that is how I like to imagine it. Like an old song. A kind of lure about it.

Tell me, do you know parks in Europe? No? Well, I’m sorry that you don’t. But if you are very careful, there is still time for that.

Why? Because I have to tell you something. If a bus stops here, pretend you were expecting it. Yes, I am quite sure that this is no ordinary stop. You see, at my age, the unusual becomes the pattern. I have seen or heard most everything.

For now, I can tell you this. I feel quite certain the infamous bus will make a stop here soon. Why? Because I know. Last night, I dreamed it stopped again. Oh, it’s always stopping somewhere, you might say. And I would agree.

This time, however, I saw it. I was, in fact, a kind of witness. I see very well in my dreams. The tired old brain doesn’t forget all the things it has lost. Memories, sight itself, the all of it.

My dreams are the colors of carnivals. I don’t know how it is for the rest of the blind, but when I dream, colors are an electric bright. They intensify. You cannot imagine. Trees are a glowing green fire. Buildings pulse. A compensation, you say? Maybe. You could say that.

But let me tell you about my dream. I was walking down Reforma, taking my usual cane-tapping stroll through the kaleidoscope. Everything lovely. Beyond loveliness, really. A song in my heart. Then, I heard the bus coming. It came close by, then veered away. Passed on.

No stopping for me, of course. But listening to it pass, I decided that, in an odd way, it reminded me of an ambulance. They are always around, you know. They pass you for someone else most of the time. But there’s no doubt that one day or night, one will stop at your door. Or at your feet.

As I was saying, I was old news for the bus. But I knew it would stop for someone else. Unexpectedly, always. But if it should stop here today, there is something I need to ask you. A small favor. Would you be kind enough to lead me up the stairs?

You’re very kind, thank you. Oh, and one more thing. An even smaller request. Don’t lead me so quickly that I might miss a step. Some do, you know, always ready to be rid of a blind man. No, I ask you to do it calmly, like you’ve done it before. A thousand times. There is salvation in this, I assure you.

Salvation? No, the temporal kind, you might say. Some say it’s just as good. But remember this. When we get on the bus, don’t look anyone in the eye. No one. I warn you, don’t look at anything in particular. Do you understand?

No matter how much you might want to look at something, say a woman’s thighs, try to resist.

Why? Because it’s a giveaway, that sort of thing. And the thieves are wise to it. You must be on guard. Always. You must be very careful. If you’re not…

Listen to me. I am not just another madman who floats through this park. I tell you all this for a reason. Once, I too was young. It’s not so impossible to imagine, is it? In fact, I was about your age when it happened. You don’t mind me touching your face, do you? Hands, in my case, are like map readers. It happened, like I said, when I was still young. And on the bus. I had been sitting on a park bench on the other side of Chapultepec. Thinking too much, probably. Worrying. About money, and the fact that I didn’t have much. Or, considering ways to patch things up with my girlfriend. Oh, we were a battlefield, but it kept things molten between us.

Thinking I would buy her some flowers or take her to a film. Thinking so hard that I only vaguely heard the bus approach. The tires squealed and the door swung open. I was young, muddled, and naïve. Unsuspecting. I stood, an uncertain general making plans for peace with my girl. I stood and got on the bus, by God.

By then it was already too late, but I couldn’t know that. The bus pulled away. We moved through the traffic. I saw the park outside the window. Every blink a postcard. Couples walking hand in hand, birds landing in trees, the venders, the very pace of this place. I took it in, the film of it all.

I was such an easy target. They came up on either side of me and held me down. I was powerless. And they did it. They cut out my eyes.

Quickly, so quickly. The film I was watching suddenly turned on its side, blurred, then was gone. There was nothing but blackness. And the promise of much more blackness to come, of course.

Now you understand these dark glasses, and this white cane I call my staff. Who knows, maybe I am some kind of prophet. But this staff doesn’t divide an ocean. No, this staff divides the darkness.

Last night, as I told you, I dreamed about this. About you. I walked through the kaleidoscope of the city. In the park, I decided to sit down and rest. I found a bench, like this one.

I sat and listened to the sounds of traffic. My hearing is so intense. At times, I feel like the avenues are inside my head, that cars are driving on the inside of my skull. It is another kind of compensation, I know.

Then, I heard someone approach. A youthful gait. A young man came and sat down next to me. His greeting was slight and muffled. Uncommitted, so like your own.

I could tell he was thinking hard about something. I could almost hear his thoughts. Money? His girlfriend? We didn’t discuss it. We were both so busy watching our own films. Then, I heard the bus. Coming at us, bearing down hard.

Oh, I knew it wasn’t stopping for me. I was old news. But this young man was unsuspecting, always the best prey. When the bus stopped, he stood, not thinking where he was going. Or what would happen after he took a seat, and the bus began moving again.

That is how my dream ended. Me wanting to tell him, to warn him. I wanted to shake him loose somehow. But I couldn’t. My dreams, no matter how brilliant their colors, always leave me tongue-tied. So, my only choice was to go with him, follow him onto the bus. Later, when the eye thieves were done with him, I could console him. Maybe I could lead him home.

Now, do you understand? Good. Here, take my glasses. I won’t need them. Wear them when the bus stops. Keep looking straight ahead, like I told you. Don’t give yourself away.

With any luck, they’ll think they’re already done with you. Why, if God smiles, they’ll go after someone else.

Christopher Woods

Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Chappell Hill, Texas. His photographs can be seen in his Galleries. His photography prompt book for writers, From Vision to Text, is forthcoming from Propertius Press. His novella, Hearts in the Dark, was recently published by Running Wild Press. His poetry chapbook, What Comes, What Goes, was published by Kelsay Books.

February 6, 2025February 8, 2025

The Bones by D. Bedell

One

September rains christened the old cemetery with a bleakness that blackened the gravestones, tumbling among the trees that had grown wild with neglect. The sporadic communion of sun did little to dispel the clinging mist and refused to warm the ossuaries of the once proudly provident, now in impoverished exile. To Vasquez, a Sage of the Charon Order, it felt like the breath of a lover in a dream.

The crumbling house across the narrow dirt road leading from the cemetery to the town still had remnants of furniture. Vasquez sat in a tattered brocade loveseat he had pulled to the unbroken window. The rivulets of the day’s drizzle etched the glass, blurring his vision of the stone sentinels marking passages. His damp clothes added to the mustiness of the deserted homestead, avoided by the righteous as an unnatural place, likely cursed by sins it had witnessed. He did not believe in curses, nor that the unnatural was suspect. Still, he always felt some uneasiness with the dead—the province of his Order.

Maybe it’s all the same. Fifty-fifty.

Long shadows wove light and rain into ominous veils. It was twilight, and the fire he had made from broken furniture scraps sent tendrils of steam rising from his clothes. The fireplace drew well, and flickering light cast his outline on the parlor wall, a note on a score unplayed.

He waited.

Two

The cemetery’s namesake began as a rough clapboard village. Six months after the first board was nailed, the cemetery made it settled country. The town disappeared after a virulent flood, and graves routed by the Acheron torrent testified to the diaspora, the dead unsettled in their wandering, unmoored without the stones above to anchor them.

Vasquez felt welcome in the parlor—built by a prominent pioneer as a practical display of the prosperity of the time. Over the years, it was a house beset no less by the elements than the eccentric excesses of its occupants. The cemetery across the road completed its reputation as a place where haunts quibbled in the darkness.

The first guests glimmered by the fireplace—a couple flowing in and out of the flames with practiced familiarity. Vasquez watched the parlor fill with ageless apparitions, gathered for their appointment in the ruins of Samarra. He wondered if he should move the loveseat out of the way so the dead would conduct their orchestrations unimpeded—a poltergeist parody of indifferent serenades, unheard in the susurrations of the living. With languid jest, Vasquez crossed himself, a nod to the old traditions of the Order.

Not serious, yet.

Still, the prescience of a prudent seer led him to pull his necklace from under his shirt, letting the reliquary rest above his heart. Reaching into his pocket, he retrieved a pack of Chesterfields and a book of matches. The exhaled smoke bloomed into the parlor, wavering among the glimmers. He placed the pack and matches on the loveseat, an offering should any guest want a smoke.

The rain had stopped, and the night grew cool, anticipating the coming October frost. Vasquez added another chair to the fire, and the glimmers seemed glad of the glow, gliding in the aura unfelt. Moonlight remained elusive, hidden behind clouds lingering on a small wind.

Peaceful.

It was time to dig up the guest.

Three

The graveyard was wet, the shovel hissing softly as it cut through the damp layer of leaves. The dirt got drier closer to where the coffin should be. Opening the casket was the least favorite part of the ritual for Vazquez. Most remains were bare bones and dust, but sometimes the desiccated skin cling like parchment, crumbling and tearing in his hands, leaving a taint that lingered. There was only one guest to free tonight; the parlor was already crowded with gossamer revelers drawn by his invitation.

His shovel struck the rotting wood of the temporary tomb. Clearing the dirt away, he found the lid’s edge and pried it open. It disintegrated in his grip, collapsing into the box and showering its contents with debris. He reached inside, pulling the remains from the grave and stacking them carefully beside it. The bones gleamed white through shreds of tattered, moldy clothing under the fleeting moonlight. Satisfied, Vasquez climbed out of the hole, carrying the bones across the road to the parlor, leaving the shovel behind for next time.

The fire had burned to embers. He placed the bones on the loveseat, then added a table leg to the fireplace. The wood began to smoke, and he leaned in, blowing softly on the coals. Three breaths, and a flame flickered to life. He fed it more wood, stoking the fire in preparation for the ritual.

It was the ritual to establish a place for the unsettled dead to anchor their essence. The glimmers in the parlor bore witness to his success in the unnatural awakening. Vasquez worked with quiet confidence, preparing the bones and cleaning them to bareness with his hands.

The bones cracked as they burned, releasing the spirit from the last stygian tentacles of mortality. Vasquez settled into the loveseat, his gaze falling to the empty pack of Chesterfields and the spent matches scattered on the floor. He smiled.

Good to know.

D. Bedell

D Bedell is a former naval officer and defense industry technical editor. He has a B.A. in Writing from Missouri State University and an M.S. from the Center for Defense and Strategic Studies. He lives in Florida and writes expository fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared in Floyd County Moonshine, Susurrus-A Literary Arts Magazine of the American South, Veterans’ Voices, 7th Circle Pyrite, and SciFanSat.

February 6, 2025February 8, 2025

Niece by Jennifer Ruth Jackson

I see her. The mirror’s mouth yawns into the past. She’s twirling from the ceiling (no chandelier, all necktie) looking forward like a motivational poster. I touch the gilded edge; reflection becomes a photograph, becomes an invitation, becomes temptation. She runs her swollen tongue over blue lips. She croaks out a word, then cackles. The glass begins to crack. I trace the lines and cut my finger. I repeat the motions twice more. She rocks like a metronome, swaying toward me. Her palms reach out to tap the wall. A bang, a firecracker of a knock, sounds near my head. The shards rattle and tinkle in their positions like ice in bourbon. One more swing and she’ll be free. I see her face through my blood smears, track her flowing dress and waggling tongue, and grab the blessed pendant just out of view. She pauses like a VHS tape, palms inches from the mirror. She careens backward like a wrecking ball, and her wordless shriek sets off my tinnitus better than a gun fired in a vehicle. Her red-lightning eyes bulge with rage and lack of oxygen. Her hands clench into fists. She thrashes like a fish on the line. But I can’t free her. I mouth the words she knows by non-beating heart, the words she’d rip from my vocal cords if ever she is out. Forgive me, Aunt Josephine.

Jennifer Ruth Jackson

Jennifer Ruth Jackson is a poet and fictionist with cerebral palsy. Her work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, Algebra of Owls, Apex Magazine, and more. Domestic Bodies, her literary poetry collection, came out in 2023 from Querencia Press. When she isn't writing (or engaging in activism), you can find her crafting a variety of things or playing video games with her husband. Follow her on Bluesky and Instagram.

February 6, 2025February 14, 2025

Not an Exorcism by Martin Lochman

The house didn’t look like the kind of place one would imagine could be haunted. Sure, it wasn’t that malicious supernatural elements resided exclusively in decrepit manors, generational farmhouses in the middle of the fields, or abandoned psychiatric hospitals built at the turn of the last century, but the idea that they would manifest in a modern, two-story, cul-de-sac building with solar panels on the roof, a perfectly trimmed yard, and a newly laid driveway was simply difficult to accept. On the other hand, the mere existence of ghosts was, by definition, a largely unexplored territory, so closing your mind to eventualities, however improbable, was a pretty short-sighted strategy.

Robert pulled into the driveway behind a brand new Škoda Kodiaq that made him feel a little more self-conscious than he would have liked, and switched off the engine. Pulling down the sun visor, he checked his appearance in the little embedded mirror. Bloodshot sclera, dark circles under the eyes, hair that stuck out in all directions—he objectively looked like crap. For a fleeting moment, he caught himself wondering what the clients were going to make of his appearance, but then dismissed the thought as inconsequential. They were desperate—they probably wouldn’t care if he showed up buck naked as long as he helped them get rid of their problem.

And he was dead certain he could do that.

He pushed the sun visor back up and flinched. A man in a plain white t-shirt and black sweatpants stood right in front of his car, staring through the windshield at Robert. It took Robert a good couple of seconds to realize that the strange look in the man’s eyes was actually unabridged hopelessness.

“Mr. Kadlec?” Robert asked carefully as he got out of the car.

The man frowned as if he was trying to recall something important, then blinked and slowly nodded.

“Hi, I’m Robert. We spoke on the phone?”

Kadlec’s features brightened, and he started toward Robert with his right hand extended in front of him. “Oh, yes. You are the exorcist.”

“Not quite,” Robert said as he accepted his counterpart’s hand. Kadlec had a firm grip, though he clearly didn’t know when to let go. He would probably have kept shaking hands forever if Robert hadn’t indicated the house behind him with his chin and suggested, “Shall we?”

“Of course. Please, come in.”

Kadlec led Robert through the main door and into a spacious living room with the view of a small garden behind the house. The first thing Robert noticed—was assaulted by, really—was the smell. Rather than being localized in one specific spot, it permeated every cubic centimeter of air with the same unyielding intensity. Robert recognized it, naturally—it was the stench of the world beyond seeping into our dimension—though that didn’t make it any more bearable.

The second thing that came to his attention was the overall state of the room. It stood in stark contrast to the meticulous facade that could be seen outside. The walls and the ceiling were filled with scratches and stains that resembled mold, the furniture was cracked and splintered, with the upholstery on the couch slashed open. In a nutshell, Robert had been to drug dens that looked better than this.

Finally, his eyes rested on a woman who stood in front of a large painting suspended on one of the walls. She was facing away from both men as they entered the room, and since she was wearing a tank top, Robert easily made out scratches and bruises across her upper back and neck.

“Honey?” Kadlec said gently.

She recoiled as if he had just touched her with a hot iron, but didn’t turn around.

“It’s looking at me,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

The two men approached her from the side. Robert glanced at the painting—it depicted a rural house by the river, with lush green forests and snow-covered mountains in the background. A beautiful, evocative work of art by any standard, but the exquisite detail with which its author treated the canvas wasn’t the most notable thing about it at the moment.

No, that label belonged to something that had never been part of the painting in the first place: a terrifying, distorted face in one of the windows of the house. Robert leaned closer without obstructing the woman’s view, and several seconds later, the eyes, as red as blood, slowly blinked and looked straight at him.

The woman—future Mrs. Kadlec, if Robert remembered correctly from the frantic conversation with her fiancé—finally broke her intense gaze and registered Robert.

“Hi. My name is Robert Wain, but please call me Robert.”

“Hello,” she spoke, a bit louder than before, but still below what Robert considered normal conversational loudness. As she met his eyes, he was only slightly surprised by the empty, detached look in them. Trauma had a tendency of extinguishing life, hope, and everything positive, stripping people down to mere shells of their former selves, and by all indications, this poor woman had been through a great deal of it.

For a moment, it looked like she was going to say something else, but she remained quiet.

Robert waited until her stare passed the uncomfortable mark, then cleared his throat. “Anyway, I am here to—”

“He’s the exorcist!” Kadlec exclaimed, and Robert stifled the urge to roll his eyes. No matter how many times and in how many different ways he tried to explain that what he did had nothing to do with sending evil spirits back into their natural dimension, people just didn’t seem to understand.

“Sure,” he said, forcing a reassuring smile.

Kadlec shifted from one foot to the other and licked his lips.

“Thank you again for coming,” he said afterward. “We have tried everything we could think of—spilling salt everywhere, putting up crystals and tokens, offering sacrifice. We even had a priest from the local parish cleanse the house. Nothing worked. And it’s only getting worse.”

He paused, wrapping his arm protectively around his fiancée, careful to avoid the bruises.

“It attacked us last night,” he continued. “Pulled Milena straight from the bed and dragged her around. I tried to stop it, but…”

Robert nodded. As much as what his clients were experiencing fell into the category of unknown and unknowable, there was a pre-established pattern—or a timeline, if you will—that these supernatural occurrences largely followed. They began as something that could be easily dismissed or overlooked: sudden drafts, flickering lights, knocked over vases, or brief sounds that couldn’t quite be localized. After this introductory period, the duration of which was contingent on, among other things, the number of people living on the haunted property, the symptoms intensified to the point where the presence of an otherworldly entity became undeniable. It wouldn’t affect the inhabitants physically, at least not directly, but it would certainly test the limits of their mental health (plus, if someone had a weak heart, the consequences could indeed be tangible).

The third stage was when matters turned from bad to worse. Depending on the degree of malice toward the ordinarily living (there was no such thing as a good spirit), an entity would either “only” stick to a systematic destruction of the dwelling or also start harming its inhabitants.

The Kadlecs were clearly suffering from a particularly nasty case of stage three.

“Maybe we should sit down,” Robert said and indicated the dilapidated couch and armchair on the other side of the room.

Kadlec nodded and gently steered his fiancée away from the painting. Robert gave the horrifying face on the canvas one last look—it blinked again and grinned, showing shark-like teeth—and followed them.

The couple collapsed onto the couch, which squeaked in protest, only for Kadlec to get to his feet again.

“I’m sorry, where are my manners?” he told Robert, who sat down in the armchair. “Can I get you anything?”

Robert shot a glance at the liquor cabinet in the corner. Unlike the rest of the furniture, it appeared to have been spared the spirit’s rampage, and its content was clearly of the expensive variety. He could do with a glass of something neat and strong to numb the nerves for what lay ahead. Two fingers, or maybe only one, just enough to—

He shook his head, using every ounce of his willpower to stifle the growing urge.

“I’m good, thanks,” he said, smiling amiably.

Kadlec wordlessly acknowledged his reply and sat back down. He put his hands on his knees, rubbed them for a couple of seconds, then folded them across his chest. Nervousness competed with impatience in his features.

“So, how does this work?” Kadlec asked after shooting a glance at Milena. “Do you have specialized tools, like the board—what’s it called?”

“A spirit board?” Robert said and shook his head. “No. I am not here to negotiate with the spirit, or send it back to where it came from. I am here to destroy it, once and for all.”

Kadlec frowned.

“But how can you do that if you can’t—”

“Touch it?” Robert smiled. “You’re absolutely right. Nothing can hurt it in its current form, because it’s not playing by our rules. But if I make it play by those rules, make it obey the laws of our reality, then it will be just as vulnerable as you and I.”

The frown on Kadlec’s face eased somewhat, but the narrow line between his brow remained.

“The reason…” Robert wracked his brain for a better explanation. “…the entity can operate in the way it does is because it’s not fully in our world. It’s reaching in, but it’s still anchored in that other…place. I can pull it here entirely, make it tangible, and most importantly, killable.”

“How?” Kadlec asked dubiously.

“In short, I have a gift,” Robert said, hoping it hadn’t come out sounding too sarcastic.

The truth was that while it paid his bills and maybe even allowed him to save some money for a rainy day in an economy that saw unemployment reach unprecedented levels, his ability was far from a positive aspect of his continuous existence. Ever since it had first manifested in his early twenties, he couldn’t sleep—at least not without external help, which was problematic in and of itself—and he couldn’t hang on to a meaningful relationship for longer than a few days. The unorthodox nature of his exploits also tended to attract the attention of unsavory characters on both sides of the law, forcing him into situations he didn’t have a lick of interest in being in.

On the other hand, he would have hesitated to call it a curse—at least for the time being.

“Like a sixth sense?”

Robert chuckled despite himself—four out of five of his clients referenced the famous film when he was explaining what he could do. Personally, he didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. Sure, there was a nice twist at the end that almost no one saw coming, but other than that, it was a rather mediocre horror flick.

“More or less,” he said. “Except apart from just seeing the ghosts, I can also punch them.”

He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out his hunting knife, its blade hidden in a worn-out leather sheath. Alarm flashed in Kadlec’s eyes; Milena, conversely, didn’t so much as flinch.

“What are you going to do with that?” Kadlec asked.

“I did mention I was going to kill the spirit, didn’t I?” Robert pulled the blade out of the sheath, checked both sides, and put it back in. “I’d prefer to shoot it, but it’s difficult to get a gun these days. The new laws and everything.”

Kadlec nodded, but Robert could see the doubt gnawing at the man as clear as day.

“Look, I know what you’re thinking,” Robert said, setting the knife on the coffee table in front of him. “It’s not murder. Yes, the spirit will look and possibly sound like a human being, but trust me, it’s far from it. Hell, it doesn’t even bleed—at least not in the conventional sense.”

Kadlec looked at Milena, but the woman’s gaze was fixed on the painting again. He licked his lips, then sucked in a breath through his teeth. He was clearly one of those people who was afraid to take any action for fear of potential consequences, even if the said action was bound to make their life considerably better.

Robert frankly hated working with those—not because they balked at the slightest sign of difficulty, but because by the time their nature became apparent, it was too late for him to back out of the deal.

“Listen,” Robert said sharply. “This thing destroyed your home, attacked your future wife. And it’s only getting started. If we let it, it’ll do much, much worse.”

He wasn’t exaggerating, at least not by a lot—though less common, spirits were known to cause mortal injuries or drive people to suicide when no action was taken against them. Some experts in the field (as much as the paranormal and everything surrounding it could be considered as such) were also convinced that there was a stage four of the spectral incursion, during which the spirits actually possessed their victims, suppressing or completely annihilating their consciousness, but to date, none of them had been able to provide a shred of concrete evidence beyond poorly documented cases that could be easily explained as temporary mental episodes.

Robert himself wasn’t sure which side of the debate he was leaning toward more. Lack of legitimate evidence aside, possession didn’t make much sense from a practical perspective. Why would a spirit want to confine itself in a meatsuit that, by design, severely limited its options in terms of influencing the world around it when it could remain intangible and continue building its power and reach? Then again, wasn’t it a mistake to assume that the spirits’ motivations were anything like those of humans?

Robert’s stern tone finally snapped Kadlec out of his indecisiveness. He clasped his hands together and squeezed until his knuckles turned white, then said, “Okay, so I stab the thing when it appears?”

“If everything goes well, I’ll be doing the stabbing,” Robert said. “But the spirits struggle, and sometimes, it becomes very difficult for me to pull them in. It drains me both physically and mentally. If that happens, I will need you to step in. Either kill it yourself—I recommend going for the neck—or hold it down long enough for me to get my bearings. You are a big guy, so it shouldn’t be a problem for you.”

Kadlec slowly nodded, evidently trying to visualize the scenario in his head. He looked around the room, then at Robert, that crease between his brows making a comeback.

“Where will it appear?” he asked.

“Somewhere close,” Robert made a wide sweeping gesture with his hand. “I cannot materialize it in a precise location, down to a centimeter, but it will definitely be in the living room.”

“Okay,” Kadlec said, his voice considerably firmer than before. He exhaled loudly and stood up. “Should we get started then?”

Look at that, there might be some fight in you yet, flashed through Robert’s head, but the smile he gave Kadlec was nothing but sincere. Robert briefly considered Milena—she had been quiet throughout their entire exchange. Last night’s incident that Kadlec had mentioned earlier must have really done a number on her.

With Kadlec standing next to the couch akin to an attack dog ready to be let off his leash, Robert cracked his neck, relaxed his arms and legs, and leaned back in the armchair. He took a few deep breaths, in through the nose, out through the mouth, then closed his eyes, focusing on blocking out the stimuli of the physical world around him and opening his mind to everything and anything that wasn’t part of it.

He reached out, carefully at first, like dipping his fingers in water of an unknown temperature. The spirit was there, just at the edge of his grasp. It was small—smaller and weaker than it had any right to be, considering both the damage it had caused and the aura, for the lack of a better word, that surrounded it—but that wasn’t the only thing that made Robert pause. The supernatural entity also didn’t react the way it was supposed to upon contact. It didn’t recoil, retreat, or push back, and there was no discernible feeling of surprise or curiosity from its side that usually accompanied the reaction. Whichever it was, it simply remained in place, like it didn’t care what Robert intended to do to it.

He shifted closer, ready to drive his mental hooks into a body that wasn’t really a body, but the spirit still didn’t move. What the hell was it doing? Playing possum? That didn’t make sense. Why would it feign death or incapacitation when it could easily fall back to its home realm?

Unless it’s bait.

The thought manifested somewhat lazily, a gentle suggestion somewhere at the back of his head that first struggled to get the full attention of his conscious mind, but ultimately hit him like an avalanche.

A chill ran down his spine, and his focus slipped. For a moment, the lines between physical reality and the world-in-between-the-worlds blurred. Kadlec was saying something, and even though Robert was unable to make out the words, the mixture of surprise and horror underlying his voice was enough to let him know that something was really wrong.

He opened his eyes.

The scene made no sense to him at that moment, but his lizard brain identified the impending danger a split second before the knife made contact with his body. He didn’t have time to evade it completely, but he managed to shift in the chair just enough so that instead of his heart, the silver blade ended up in his shoulder.

The pain was excruciating, nonetheless.

While he cried out in agony, Milena, her blank stare completely disconnected from the current situation, yanked the knife out of the wound. It hurt even more than when it went in a moment ago.

She was about to stab him again when Kadlec grabbed her knife-wielding arm by the wrist.

“Milena, honey, what are you doing?” he asked, and it dawned on Robert that this wasn’t the first time Kadlec posed that question.

She turned to look at her fiancé, and while Robert couldn’t see her face from where he was sitting, Kadlec’s was an open book. Shock mixed with disbelief and the first echoes of unadulterated fear, and when he addressed her again, his voice took on a whiny undertone.

“That’s. Not. Milena,” Robert said through gritted teeth. His shoulder was on fire, rendering his entire arm completely unusable.

“What?” Kadlec looked at him, his expression a textbook definition of dumbfounded.

If they had time, Robert would have gladly explained at length what he himself had realized the moment his knife had ended up lodged in his body. That there were two spirits, not one, hence why the aura had felt so off. That possession as a stage four was a real thing. That his ability clearly had limitations, because he hadn’t detected the spirit currently pulling Milena’s strings.

And most importantly, that for the first time since he could remember, he was, without a shadow of a doubt, way in over his head.

But there wasn’t time for any of that, because not-Milena was taking advantage of Kadlec’s confusion. Instead of wrestling her hand free of his grasp, she reached for the knife with her other hand, and in one fluid, horrifying motion, drove it just below his ribs.

Contrary to Robert’s expectations, Kadlec’s only audible reaction was a quiet gasp, though admittedly, that small sound perfectly encapsulated the slew of emotions he must have been experiencing at that nerve-wracking moment. Surprise turned to incredulity, turned to horror, as not-Milena withdrew the knife and he staggered back, looking down at the wound that was already bleeding profusely. He had enough presence of mind to put pressure on it with his hands before he collapsed on the floor in the middle of the living room.

Not-Milena looked back at Robert. There was something in her gaze that hadn’t been there before—a glint that he couldn’t quite decipher—but it disappeared with her next blink. She raised the knife, her intentions crystal clear.

“Shit!”

Out of options, he pushed off from the floor with his feet and leaned back, knocking the armchair over. The maneuver didn’t go exactly as he wanted it to—he slammed the back of his head against the hard ceramic and painfully twisted his injured arm when rolling out of the armchair—but at least he hadn’t ended up being stabbed again.

Still, by the time he scrambled to a somewhat upright position, not-Milena had crossed the distance separating them and was thrusting the weapon in the direction of his abdomen. Fortunately, the spirit didn’t seem to have a lot of experience with knife fighting, or driving the meatsuit wasn’t as easy as one would assume, because its attacks were rather straightforward so far. That, of course, didn’t mean they were any less lethal, just that he had a fighting chance to evade them.

As he staggered back, the blade having narrowly missed his torso, he risked a quick glance around. The door to the small hallway and the main entrance at the end of it was diagonally to his right, too far away to reach safely, but the door to the adjacent kitchen combined with a dining room was basically within an arm’s reach to his left.

Kitchen it is.

The room, which was, just like the rest of the house, equipped with ridiculously expensive furniture and appliances in varying degrees of damage and decay, featured, among other things, a rectangular table with chairs surrounding it in the middle. Robert learned of its existence by first bumping into it with his back, and once he pivoted to the side and recognized what it was, its tactical value became instantly apparent. He knocked over one of the chairs to slow not-Milena down and rushed around, putting the table between himself and his assailant.

Twice she lunged to the side to get to him, but in both cases, he mirrored her movement, maintaining the stalemate. As far as he could tell, the spirit was indeed limited by the physical characteristics of the body it was inhabiting, which was also probably why it had waited for the right moment to attack Robert, rather than doing so on sight. Not that it would do him much good now—he basically had only one usable arm—but at least not-Milena wasn’t going to jump over the table in one leap, or throw it aside.

So, if she can’t do anything…

He realized he had completely forgotten about the other spirit a second before a porcelain mug with the words Finish Me Off written on it took off from the table and bumped into his head. The impact wasn’t strong enough to shatter it, nor cause Robert real injury, but it distracted him long enough for not-Milena to get halfway to him.

He swore again and attempted to gain the lost distance, only to trip on a wooden cutting board that most definitely hadn’t been there before.

He landed harder than from the armchair earlier, but he knew he couldn’t let the agony shooting through his upper body paralyze him. Breathing hard, he rolled onto his back. Not-Milena was already advancing toward him, the knife—his goddamn knife—raised in an icepick grip above her head.

He waited until she was almost on top of him, then kicked as hard as he could, connecting with her midsection. The spirit inside Milena might have been immune to kinetic energy and laws of physics in general, but her body certainly was not, and she was knocked back, crashing into the chairs by the table and onto the floor.

Robert allowed himself a long second to feel wrong about his counter-offense—after all, he had never hit a woman in his life—then scrambled to his feet. He wanted to run, but his lungs were on fire, his legs full of lead, so the best he managed was an unsteady wobble.

Heading back into the living room, then the hallway with the main door beyond, he was intent on getting to the relative safety of his car. He had no idea what he would do after that—call the police, or an exorcist, since this actually was right up their alley—and he didn’t care, as long as he got out of the house alive.

He made it five steps before the second spirit tripped him again, this time with a small wooden statue of Buddha he remembered seeing on a shelf next to the painting when he had entered the living room. To add insult to injury, as soon as he fell on the floor, beside himself with pain, the little Buddha clocked him from the side right below the eye. Stars erupted in his vision; he blindly reached out to seize the statue and break it to pieces, only to find something soft and pliable instead.

He withdrew his uninjured arm and used it to prop himself up. Blinking rapidly got rid of the stars enough that he could see more clearly, and he discovered he was lying next to Kadlec’s body.

The big guy lay on his back, his face frozen in a permanent expression of disbelief and panic. His hands were still on the wound—the poor bastard had probably fought to the last moment to stop the bleeding, even though he must have known that absent external help, he had no chance in hell succeeding.

Get up and go, get out of here, a voice inside Robert’s head yelled at him, but despite the adrenaline coursing through his veins, he reacted somewhat reluctantly. He was halfway through the motion when not-Milena appeared right in front of him and knocked him back down. Before he could do anything, anything at all, she was on top of him, pinning him to the floor, the blade on an unmistakable descending trajectory.

Time seemed to have slowed down, and Robert’s perception of the situation shifted—he was suddenly an uninvolved observer, watching himself from an unspecified angle. An arm was raised to meet the knife above the body, but it wasn’t his arm or body, not entirely. There might or might not have been a sharp sound originating in his throat. A cry, a curse, or something else? He wasn’t sure. It felt as if the body on the ground wasn’t his, yet at the same time, a thread stronger than the universe itself bound him to it. Was this what dying was like? Where was the highlight reel of the defining moments of his life? The light at the end of the tunnel? Were those going to manifest only once the knife found its way to the vital organs beneath the laughably delicate tissue?

The eerie experience lasted until it became clear that he was wrong, and he wasn’t going to die, at least not just yet.

“Jakub?”

Her voice, filled with terror and a half dozen related, wholly negative emotions, snapped Robert’s senses back to the status quo. He hesitantly lowered his hand, while keeping his eyes on the knife that was now suspended in midair, like a physical manifestation of the sword of Damocles. Milena—and Robert was sure that it was really her in the driver’s seat at the moment—followed his gaze, her expression growing even more petrified as she scanned the weapon.

“Oh, God!” she whimpered, looking back at Robert and then at Kadlec’s body next to him. “Oh, my God. What have I done?”

“It wasn’t you,” Robert said gently and wiggled around slightly. She took the hint and moved off him, sitting on the floor.

“I killed him,” she said quietly, and the rise in intonation at the sentence made it sound like a question.

“It wasn’t you,” Robert repeated, a bit more firmly this time. “Listen to me, Milena. It. Wasn’t. You! You were under control of a malicious…entity. A spirit. It killed Jakub. Not you.”

She looked at him, her eyes narrowing in focus, and it was as if he was seeing her for the first time. The dim lighting of the room—it was getting dark outside—cast shadows under her eyes, yet she somehow appeared more alive, more genuine than before. Fragile. Robert felt a sudden urge to embrace her, but she was still holding the knife, and he didn’t want to do anything that might prompt her to use it, even if unintentionally.

“They are angry with you,” she said in a low voice, and a sick feeling settled in the pit of his stomach. “So angry. They…” She looked away from Robert for a moment, then back at him. “They want you dead.”

“Why?”

It wasn’t exactly what he wanted to say, but the syllable got out of his throat completely on its own account. An instinctive reaction, like hands going up to meet a punch.

You know why, a part of him—the part that he didn’t at all want to listen to—said, and he gritted his teeth to prevent nausea from overtaking him. Over the years, he had spent more than enough time thinking about his ability and exactly what he was doing with it; he had considered both from every angle and in every context imaginable. One thing he had always glossed over, however, had to do with the consequences—not for him or the people he helped, but for the other side. After all, the world, his world, had stayed exactly the same whenever he was done. Nothing had been added, nothing had been subtracted, so why worry?

Except the other side had clearly had enough.

Milena snapped her head to the side, as if she had just heard a particularly intriguing noise.

“Milena?”

She ignored him at first, and only as he addressed her again, his voice tinged with urgency, did she turn back to him. Her eyes were wide with fear and something much more sinister.

“It’s still in me, isn’t it?” she said slowly.

“I…” Robert hesitated. The truth was, he didn’t know. It made sense that the spirit was indeed still in the meatsuit, having been momentarily stripped of control by Milena for one reason or another (the sight of Kadlec’s corpse providing a spike in willpower seemed most likely), though he had no way to confirm that. Okay, maybe that wasn’t entirely true—if the entity was actually out of her body, he would be able to sense it with his ability if he focused hard enough, but he was extremely hesitant to do it, with the knife still very much in play.

“Yes, it is,” he said and quickly added, “But don’t worry. We’ll figure something—”

“It killed him,” she said, and Robert was taken aback by how firm she sounded all of a sudden. “But it won’t kill anyone again.”

She looked at the knife, and he felt his pulse quicken, adrenaline once again kicking in. It was only when she transferred it to her other hand, switching to the point-up grip with the sharp edge facing her, that he understood she wasn’t planning on attacking him. Just as he yelled out, “No!” she raised her arm and in one fluid motion ran the blade across her neck.

Robert had stabbed and slashed dozens, if not hundreds, of spirits in the past two decades. He had felt them struggle and writhe and thrash in his grasp as he delivered the killing blows. He had gotten pieces of the weird approximation of flesh and guts his ability manifested on him countless times. None of that compared to the horrifying, visceral reality of watching Milena bleed to death right in front of him. This whole thing had gone wrong, so terribly fucking wrong, and he couldn’t deal with it.

Bile rose in his throat, and he vomited around the same time Milena collapsed next to her fiancé. When there was nothing more he could expel, he dragged himself to the nearest wall and leaned with his back against it, his throat raw and his mind empty.

He had no idea how long he stayed like that, a living statue in the company of the dead. Space and time had lost all meaning, and the only thing that remained was the steady sound of his breathing.

What eventually roused him out of this state of timeless non-existence was the pain in his injured shoulder. He ignored it at first, but it throbbed and burned, pressing uncomfortably against his awareness. He relaxed his arm completely, hoping to mitigate the agony, but the effect was minimal.

Coming to the inevitable conclusion that the injury wouldn’t get better on its own, he got to his unsteady feet. He had never felt so awful, not only physically, but especially mentally. Two people were dead, and as much as he tried to reason otherwise, he had played a significant role in their demise. If he had decided to sit this gig out, or if he had paid more attention to Milena’s unusual behavior after his arrival, then maybe…

“I’m sorry,” he told the corpses. He barely even recognized his own voice—it sounded hoarse and dry, like it belonged to someone much older.

“I am so sorry,” he repeated, and it dawned on him that he had no idea what he was going to do next. He was tempted to simply leave; get into his car and drive as far away from here as possible, but his fingerprints, blood, his damn puke were all over the place. Hell, it was his knife that had killed two people. On the other hand, how was he going to explain any of what had happened to the police? It’s not like he could tell them the whole truth—that would earn him a one-way ticket to the nuthouse at best.

At worst? He didn’t even want to imagine.

Desperation welled up within him as his mind frantically scrambled for a way out, even though intellectually, he knew full well there was none.

Then his eyes landed on the little Buddha on the floor a handful of steps away, and that desperation mutated into rage. The big spirit might have been out of play, dead along with Milena, trapped in her corpse, or otherwise incapacitated—Robert was convinced it was one of the three simply because if the otherworldly community was indeed as angry with him as the future Mrs. Kadlec had said, he should have had loose objects from the entire house falling down on his head the second she had taken her last breath—but maybe the little bastard that had baited him and tripped him was still around. If that was the case—and he really hoped it was—he was going to pull it out and beat it into oblivion, if that was the last thing he would ever do.

He picked the statue up, feeling its weight in his hand. It wasn’t as heavy as he had originally thought, but he didn’t mind—it meant it wouldn’t be over too quickly.

He walked over to the sofa, ignoring the knocked-over armchair, and sat down. Giving the Buddha one last squeeze, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Using his ability wasn’t quite the same as flipping a switch, but there was a reassuring familiarity to it that made the process smooth and almost soothing, regardless of the circumstances.

Come out, come out, wherever you are!

The pessimist in him had braced for disappointment, but the small spirit was still there. A rush of excitement swept through him as he reached for it—this time, however, it scuttled away at the last moment. Robert didn’t mind. On the contrary, it appealed to the blood-thirsty hunter in him.

He repeatedly attempted to seize the spirit and yank it into the real world, yet every time, it evaded his efforts. What had begun as an exciting game became an exercise in futility until he had to begrudgingly admit that it wasn’t scared or trying to escape. It was toying with him.

And that made him even angrier.

After the spirit had slipped from his grasp once again, he furiously followed it, pushing his ability to the absolute limit. He reached out further than ever before, way past what he thought himself capable of, until what was connecting him to his body and the world, his world, was nothing but a footnote at the edge of his consciousness. Even though he couldn’t use his senses, he knew he was getting closer to the boundary between the dimensions. Perhaps the spirit wanted to flee back to its native realm after all?

Not today, flashed through his head as he finally seized it, a feeling of triumph briefly overshadowing everything else. Just one more moment and he could express the volatile concoction of emotions impatiently bubbling under the surface.

Just one more moment and—

Robert was about to materialize his catch when something impossibly strong breached the boundary, enveloped his mind, and in one swift motion, pulled him into the world beyond.

***

If he still had lungs, vocal cords, and a mouth, he would have yelled himself hoarse. If he had his arms and legs, he would have kicked and punched and scratched, until his fingers and knuckles bled. In the non-space where he currently found himself, which was defined by the absolute absence of everything he could conceptualize, he couldn’t do anything but simply be. He was a soul without a body, an abbreviated version of himself that was as undefinable and uncountable as his surroundings.

The worst part—orders of magnitude worse than the form his entire being had been reduced to—was that he wasn’t alone. They had appeared almost immediately after the transition, a rather swift, if not painless, process was over. Swarming him like ants swarm an unfortunate beetle, they pushed and poked at his very essence.

And they were indeed very, very angry.

Martin Lochman

Martin is a Czech science fiction and speculative fiction author, currently living and working as a University librarian in Malta. His work appeared (or is forthcoming) in various venues, including New Myths, Kzine, Theme of Absence, XB-1 (Czech SFFH magazine), and others. His debut collection All Quiet in the Milky Way: Ray M. Holler’s Adventures vol. 1 was published in 2023. You can find him on his website

February 6, 2025February 8, 2025

My Brother’s Keeper by Jeff Clulow

Why could I not remember this place?

The morning sun lit the mirror of the lake and set ablaze the snow-capped peaks of the surrounding mountains. Miles away in the Massif des Écrins I heard the crack and rumble of ice shearing from rock and the occasional thunder of cornices collapsing in the warmth.

We’d spent so many of our holidays here, our little family, in the auberge beside Lac-Saint-Patrice. It’s where my parents first met on a hiking holiday, he from his home in North London, she from her native Lyon. They’d both fallen in love with the alpine landscape and the more intimate scenery of each other’s smiles. They’d married, raised children and hoped to imbue in us a similar love for the outdoors by way of regular family holidays to this place—this place I could not remember.

At least, that’s what my father told me.

“We were happy once,” was another thing he told me. He said this often, as if it was a revelation, some lost history, scratched out and forgotten. He wanted to assure me I was born out of love, not sadness. He repeated the phrase over and over, perhaps because he thought I could never accept the fact as truth, not in the aftermath. But I never doubted him. I just couldn’t remember a time before it all fell apart, before Lorens died. Life, for me, began after.

I explained this to him once, and I remembered his reply. “The mind forgets what the heart regrets.” Yet what I could have regretted so deeply was beyond me.

This place, and that past, had not entered my thoughts for many decades. Until last night.

I was working late at the university, resisting boredom and the loneliness of my cramped apartment by researching the topic that has obsessed me for a lifetime: nature versus nurture. It’s one of the last big questions; one with no empirical answer: are we born innocent, a clean slate, a tabula rasa? If so, then it is the world that shapes the evil in our hearts. Or do we enter the world corrupt, and so shape the world in our own image?

It’s a question that may never be answered.

Am I good? Am I evil? Is this why the subject pulls at me so? Am I searching for my own absolution? When I look into my soul I see no answers. I sense a form of goodness, innate and protean, but there’s a shadow here too. Something old and formless.

From my bookshelf I had pulled a dog-eared volume of essays by Rousseau. I hadn’t read it since my undergraduate years. As I opened the book, a photograph fluttered from its pages to the floor. Stooping with a groan, I snatched it up. It looked unfamiliar at first, yet as I recognized it, something pulled at my insides, a stitch of nostalgia that tied me to a time long past, to something that was, and is no longer. I had once used this old black-and-white print as a bookmark.

The photograph must have been taken by my father because he was the only one missing from the composition. It struck me how beautiful my mother was as a young woman. I had forgotten the thick, raven-black hair, the graceful brushstroke of her dark eyebrows and lashes that framed the pools of languor that were her eyes. In the photo I snuggled next to her, my eyes lifted to hers in adoration. Hers were turned away from me and rested on the infant sitting in her lap. Lorens. He was the only one who faced the camera. Eyes squeezed shut in mirth, he was captured mid-chuckle. Chubby, cherubic and lovable, he was joy made flesh. Jove as a baby.

I sat at my desk, resting heavily in my chair, the photograph shaking in my hand. I thought without thinking, my mind drifting through clouds of patchy memory in search of the past. An hour must have slipped away before the impulse seized me. It was more of a whim than a conscious decision, a plan without forethought, a sudden need. I locked my office and drove to my apartment. There, I packed a few things: a raincoat, some warm clothes, my old leather hiking boots and a knapsack. It was late when I left Villeurbanne, but the roads were quiet. I drove southeast, turning off the well-lit motorway at Bourgoin-Jallieu. Within a few hours I was driving along unlit country roads. Tomorrow I would call the university to advise them of my absence. It wouldn’t be a problem. I no longer have students. I give the occasional lecture, nothing more. This suits me. I find students, like most people, invasive and needy. They steal my time and contribute little in return. I am better alone. It gives me space to think, to indulge myself in research of my own choosing. My only qualification for this continuing arrangement was a paper I’d written some forty years before. It questioned whether good and evil exist in the natural world or remain human constructs, ways to feed our righteousness and our guilt. The paper excited debate and is still quoted and referenced today. The university enjoys the renown this brings and so they keep me on, happy to have me haunt the hallways filled with youthful faces, a white-haired specter with armloads of books. Perhaps they think I add a sense of antiquity to the place—of gravitas—as much as the stern-faced busts of Voltaire and Descartes. Like them, I am a man who once was. I am become a name. A footnote in a thesis. My absence will not be a problem. Such is the privilege of age and reputation.

Here beneath the mountains, I planned to visit the dark ages of my childhood, to peer into the blind spots of my past. I was hoping that the permanence of the geography might trigger a recollection in my inconstant mind. I longed to remember what happened before death visited our family, before my mother fell inwards upon herself, shutting me and my father out.

“She’s just gutted, son,” was the only explanation my father could offer in his North London way. In my immaturity, I took him at his word and believed that my mother had been secretly sliced open and her organs removed. As I came to understand the expression as imagery, the more appropriate it seemed. My mother had indeed been gutted: she had no stomach left for the world, no lungs to give her breath for speech or laughter, no heart to help her feel. Gutted was right.

My father tried to insulate me from the worst of the damage. I was sent to a boy’s boarding school in Chatres and, in many ways, I never returned. My mother never called or wrote to me. I’d hoped that after Lorens, her heart might let me in. Perhaps she saw the shadow in me. Perhaps she was made to love only one of us.

She moved back to Lyon, to live with her sister or a cousin, I think. My father visited her but she was beyond consolation. He tried as hard as he could, offering love without reciprocation, support without thanks—a vessel slowly emptying itself. In each other’s eyes their grief would always be mirrored; their loss, their sense of guilt, shared. Together they would never heal. So my father drifted back to London, to a life before marriage—a life that didn’t hurt. By the time I left school our little family had crumbled and fallen apart. Like a cornice in the sun.

The first flurries of snow melted on my windscreen. From Bourg d’Oisans the road began its slow climb into the Alps, along the pass of the Col du Lautaret. In the darkness I saw nothing of the forests or the grandeur of the mountains. I phoned the auberge from the road and, mercifully, the concierge was still awake. A room was made up and a cold supper prepared. As I pulled into the car park, my headlights swung across the emptiness above Lac-Saint-Patrice. My sleep was troubled by old dreams. I woke at the sound of my mother’s whisper in my ear, her hand upon my shoulder. Rousing, I knew the dream was a falsehood, its knowledge painful. My mother had never woken me this way. Soft words and gentle hands were reserved for Lorens.

It was early as I laced my hiking boots. The auberge was still quiet. At the breakfast buffet in the empty dining room, I wrapped some fruit and boiled eggs in a serviette, stowed them in my knapsack, then crept outside. A chill dawn washed the sky with pink and lavender. Soon the sun would crest the mountains. For now, the trees and lake brooded in darkness. Silence hung in the vastness of the landscape as if frozen.

There was light enough for me to find my way down to the gravel path that circumnavigated the lake. I began to walk, with mounting vigor and purpose as the light improved. The air was sharp in my nostrils. Some distance from the auberge, the path narrowed to a rocky track. It rose and fell behind stands of tall firs and birches that hid the lake. I slowed, glancing through the trunks to catch the occasional gleam of flat water. If I had walked this track before, I couldn’t recall.

By the time the sun had painted the landscape in all the glory of its true color, I was at the halfway point around the lake. Here the hourglass shape of the lake narrowed, and a rocky outcrop looked over the water in the direction of the auberge. The old building itself was screened from view by a rise of trees. The distance from shore to shore was no more than a hundred meters and I had a sweeping view of the lake in all directions. I drew in a lungful of crisp air and became lost in the scene. It was a masterwork. And still, I could not remember it.

I leaned back against a rock, pulled a boiled egg from my knapsack and began peeling it with a thumbnail. In my periphery flashed an intrusion of color, something brash and inappropriate that trespassed against the blues and greens of water, trees and sky.

Looking up, on the opposite shore of the lake, I saw a little boy, no more than a toddler. He wore an anorak of vivid yellow and matching gumboots. In his hands was a long, windblown branch which he held out over the water like a fishing rod. He slapped the water with the tip of the branch in some private game. In the still air, snippets of a rhyme or song drifted toward me. The little fellow seemed delighted at the splashing and at the ripples he was now causing to widen across the lake.

I returned to the peeling of my egg. Piece by piece, the shell came away as, piece by piece, a dark thought formed.

A mother would have realized the danger in an instant. But too selfish to ever have children, I was slow to understand, too slow to read the situation. I looked again. The child stood on a shallow bank of grass, close to the water’s edge. He was perhaps only four, maybe five years old, and unlikely to be a swimmer. Concerned now, I placed the egg back in the serviette and dropped it into my knapsack. I searched the distance, trying to see the auberge through the trees. An adult or parent must be nearby, perhaps watching from the terrace. I craned for a better view but couldn’t make out the terrace or the building itself. Even if someone was observing the boy from an upstairs window, they’d be too far away to prevent catastrophe. I couldn’t even see the roof, which only meant the auberge was hidden behind the trees, behind the hill. This little fellow was all alone.

I squinted against the glare of sun on water, looking for someone nearby. I searched the shade beneath the foliage of the trees, between the trunks. Just a short distance from the boy stood a tall willow that veiled the lake shore. Its branches cascaded down to the same water from which its roots no doubt drank. Between the partings of rope-like limbs, I glimpsed shadows. One such shadow looked different. It was tall, slender, and motionless in the gloom under the tree. I focused my attention on it. My eyes watered. I blinked.

The shadow moved.

I glanced at the toddler by the lake. He was happy, still immersed in his game.

Looking back to the shadow, I saw it move again. It was person shaped. Someone was standing in the shade of the tree, watching.

Relief washed over me. It must be a parent, disinclined to take part in the childish game, but performing their duty of care, nonetheless. Of course, they’d stand in the shade of a tree to stand guard. I would too. I shook my head at my over-reaction and bent to collect my breakfast just as the shadow broke cover.

I stood upright in time to see the figure step into the sunlight. It was another boy. He looked to be a good four or five years older than the first. No parent, no adult at all, and not quite a teenager. He stood motionless, as before, watching. Something about this boy prickled my skin. Although the smaller boy’s happiness was clear to see, the older boy’s mood was unreadable. For several minutes he stood with eyes fixed upon the smaller boy. Perhaps it was the distance, or my untrustworthy eyesight that caused me not to see any expression in the newcomer’s face.

He walked over to the younger boy and stood beside him at the edge of the lake. He gazed with ambivalence at the tip of the branch splashing the water. The younger child must have heard him by now, must have been aware of his presence, but his game continued. It could only mean that they knew each other. This should have brought me comfort, yet a fear floated up from the depths, unfounded and irrational. I was scared for the little one and I didn’t know why.

The older boy placed a hand on the toddler’s shoulder. I was right, they knew each other. My only hope was that the older of the two could swim, and that he was there to keep the younger boy safe. I took a bite from the egg I’d peeled and continued watching.

The older boy removed his hand from the other’s shoulder and walked a short distance along the grassy bank. Then he stopped and pointed at something in the water, calling out to the smaller boy. A fish perhaps?

The younger boy’s sounds of glee traveled to my ears across calm water in still air. He dropped the tree branch and stumbled towards the older boy, clumsy in his yellow gumboots. He stood beside the other, leaning forward to peer at whatever was in the water.

The two bent low over the lake, the elder pointing, the younger following the direction of the other’s finger.

It happened in an instant.

I saw no push from behind. There was no violence, no display of force. All I saw was the older boy’s hand, not the one he’d been pointing with, but the other one, the one hidden behind the smaller boy’s back. It was now raised palm outward as the smaller boy tumbled into the water with a cry.

Although I hadn’t seen it, I knew what had happened. All it took was a nudge.

The yellow anorak buoyed the little mite up. Through mouthfuls of water he squealed, hands raised in appeal. The older boy looked on, impassive. The water couldn’t have been deep because the little boy seemed to gain a foothold, his shoulders rising above the surface of the water. He blubbed, stricken with fear and cold. The older boy looked about now, up and down the shore, and his eyes seemed to rest on the discarded branch. In three quick steps he had it in his hand and held it out to the younger boy. I had imagined the worst. Foolish old man. It was all an accident, and now the older boy would drag the younger one to safety.

The little boy reached for the tip of the branch, his footing unstable. At the last moment, before his fingers closed around it, the older boy whipped the branch away. I felt my mouth fall open; my heart shuddered to a stop. Again, the older boy held out the branch and again he pulled it away at the last second. What was he thinking? Was this a game to him? His face still displayed no emotion and for a moment I considered he might be unbalanced, without conscience enough to understand what he was doing. The child in the water was screaming now, wild with fear. My short-lived relief sank into the depths, replaced by a searing anger. I screamed, too, but a cold, mid-morning breeze left the peaks and blew across the lake toward me. It bent the tops of the fir-trees in my direction and stirred the surface of the water. The harrowing cries from the opposite shore of the lake still reached my ears but my entreaties were blown back in my face.

The little toddler again found a foothold and was struggling from the water. The older boy lowered the branch in his direction and the toddler grasped the leafy tip with shaking hands.

But the older boy didn’t pull him in.

Instead, he pushed.

I shouted into the wind as the poor little chap fought back. The older boy snatched the branch away from the toddler’s hands and thrust it at his throat and face. He pushed hard, leaning out, forcing the younger child into deeper water.

I looked at the path on either side of me. Which way was quicker? I attempted a hasty calculation of the time it would take to reach the other side of the lake and put an end to this brutality. I’d never make it. Could I run? I hadn’t run in years. If I could bear the pain of grinding hips and arthritic knees I might reach them sooner, but not by much. A roar of frustration left me. The little toddler knew the danger he was in. He was fighting for his life now, thrashing the leaves and stems away from his face, pushing with all his strength against his assailant. He turned, trying several different routes to reach the bank, to avoid the thrusts of the branch, but the other boy moved quickly in front of him, blocking his escape and forcing him back. The wind carried the little boy’s desperate screams across the lake. Better that I stay where I am, in plain sight. I still had a good view up and down the lake. The screams were torture. I clapped my hands over my ears. My best hope was for someone from the auberge to appear, or another walker on the path. I could wave a warning, shout a message. If I could only get the older boy’s attention, he’d know he had a witness. It might shame him into stopping.

I called against the wind through cupped hands. I threw stones, I waved my arms and still the cruelty continued. The little boy was exhausted now. He splashed around in the water, listless and terrified. He sobbed. He cried for his mother. His begging tore at me, but the older boy remained stonily unresponsive. How callous. How heartless. Now, he hooked the end of the branch into the hood of the toddler’s yellow anorak. He held it out straight, preventing the younger child from climbing out, immobilizing him and forcing him to tread water. He held it this way for some time, draining the younger child’s energy while he splashed and floundered. All I could see was the yellow hood and tiny hands that flailed above the water. There came a spluttering and gasping for breath, a last waterlogged plea for mercy. Then the yellow hood sank below the water.

I breathed in shallow gasps. My eyes remained on the older boy. He flashed a look to either side and over his shoulder in the direction of the auberge. He was checking his crime hadn’t been observed. But he didn’t look in my direction. It was then, to my amazement, that he pulled on the branch, lifting the younger child to the surface, dragging him toward the grassy bank. The toddler moved. He was alive yet.

Both hands on the branch, the older boy regarded the child in the water. There was a cough. The smaller boy writhed, still pinned by the branch tip in the hood of his anorak, but the older boy didn’t pull it free. Instead, he lifted the opposite end until it was vertical and moved his hands upwards along the branch. He stiffened and drew himself to his full height. Then he arched his back and drove the branch downward, plunging the little boy under the water by the hood of his anorak.

I screamed another unheard plea into the wind. The older boy leaned upon the branch, using his weight to drive it down and keep his victim submerged. He remained like this for some time. Five minutes? Ten? I watched little fingers and yellow gumboots froth and splash the surface of the water until they stilled.

The older boy relaxed and let the drowned child float to the surface. With a final thrust of the branch, he pushed the body away from the shore. It drifted towards me, slowly sinking, the yellow anorak blending into the blues and greens of the lake. There was bubbling, and the child in the water was gone.

I slumped back against the rock, my anger cooling. I only felt grief, a sorrow as deep and cold as any lake. My grief was for the little boy in the water, but something else besides—something larger, more universal, a wearying, leaden sadness for us all. If children can murder, what hope is there for any of us?

Here, near the closure of my life, I finally had my answer. We do not enter this world as a blank slate, as tabula rasa. Our slate is written upon—filled with every preordained sin, every evil of which we are capable. We are all guilty of that first, most barbarous of crimes. We all carry Cain’s mark. We are all sons of Adam. Our higher purpose is in not giving these evils action. We are here to choose. This is our only redemption.

Against the skin of my face, I felt the wind drop. Looking up, I saw the surface of the lake become a mirror once more. The boy watched the water where the smaller child had been. He seemed lost in thought. Whether it was remorse or gratification I could not tell.

I stood, raising a hand to shield my eyes from the glare of sun on water. With the other, I pointed in accusation.

“I saw you!” I shouted. “I saw what you did!”

My voice reached him, and he looked up, his brows gathering. He lifted a hand to shield his eyes as I did.

Something in the cosmos gave way, like the shattering of floodgates, a river bursting its banks. From far away I heard the deluge roar as the watershed of memory broke open. The mind forgets what the heart regrets. It surged toward me in a mountainous wave, apocalyptic with revelation. All that I had hidden, all that I had dammed up, now came flooding back.

I remembered.

I remembered this place.

I was a boy of nine again. I stood beside Lac-Saint-Patrice on a summer morning. With one hand I shielded my eyes from the sun. In the other I held a windblown branch. I looked across the water and the years, to the opposite shore.

There, his hand shielding his eyes in the same way, was an old man.

An old man looking back.

Jeff Clulow

Jeff Clulow is a prizewinning author of dark fiction and horror. His stories have reached the finals of the Aurealis Awards, the American BookFest Awards, and the National Indie Excellence Awards. He has been awarded an “Honorable Mention” in the Robert N. Stephenson competition for short fiction in horror and is the winner of the 2023 Asylumfest Mayday Hills Ghost Story Competition. Jeff lives and writes in Sydney. Find him on his website.

February 6, 2025February 8, 2025

The Rinse – Part One by Nicholas Woods

I often wondered, why me?

Why do we exist when we do?

Our time on this one Earth, chosen at random.

Why me?

Why now?

At the end.

Footsteps crashed through leaves and a desperate hand grasped nearby bark so roughly she was sure she’d stripped skin free. A sound crackled like a whip, not behind her, but above her, so loud that she sucked one single breath into her lungs before continuing her sprint.

Michelle Parker rounded a corner, head glancing back for only a second, as if she was being chased, before crashing right into something.

She didn’t even scream before the thing she barreled into was grabbing her.

“Where have you been?” James Parker glanced behind her, wild fear in his eyes.

“Is it happening?”

“Come on, we have to hurry.” James pulled her through the remnants of the forest before the trees gave way to a clearing with a cabin ahead.

Something cracked in the sky again, sending James and Michelle to the ground, an invisible wave of energy knocking them off their feet. Michelle recovered, the cabin’s front door mere feet away, but she needed to see it. Needed to look at the sky one more time.

High above the horizon spread a gaseous ripple, no larger than a full moon in harvest season. Its deep red color gave it the appearance of an angry eye, with amber and emerald haze swirling behind it.

James pulled her into the house, and for a moment she was grateful, because if he hadn’t she might have never peeled her eyes away from that awful sight.

They moved across the living room, passing a small electronic device left on the kitchen table—a Geiger counter, its radiation detection meter sitting in the green. But if one looked closely, they could see the needle ticking, slowly at first, but gaining a pulse that beat toward the red.

At the end of the hallway sat a lone metal door, a massive painting of an English Airedale Terrier leaning against the wall off to the side.

Michelle raced down the steps into a basement, watching her footing, passing by Phil Parker, twice her age in his early sixties, who sealed the metal door shut. Her instincts pulled her gaze to the walls lined with food and water, before moving back toward James’ father, who sat down at a computer system and a radio microphone.

A news broadcaster’s voice came over the stereo. “Everyone is being told to seek shelter. Concrete or metal structures.”

Michelle looked at James. “Are we safe in here?”

But Phil was the one to answer her, turning in his chair. “This room was built to survive beyond a blast range of a hundred kilometers.”

James, usually so strong, so carefree and sure of himself, choked on his rushed words. “From a bomb, or a nuke, but—”

“That’s not what this is.” Michelle tried to keep her voice level. If she could find steadiness in her words, perhaps the rest of her body would follow suit.

Phil nodded, attempting comfort. “I know darling. But we’re safe down here. We just have to…hang tight.”

James exhaled. “But for how long?”

Michelle’s eyes drifted back to the food and water.

***

We made it three hundred and eighty-eight days.

The door to the cellar creaked open, the metal hinges tight from disuse. Michelle walked through the dusty, empty house, her eyes going to the Geiger counter on the table. She replaced the batteries, the meter showing what she already knew. Green. Safe.

The next several days flowed like a strange dream, a detached sort of waking up after a long, disorienting nap. She tried not to dwell on the fact that most of the world, God only knew the numbers, was gone.

Phil tried to salvage his garden, the vegetables and herbs there long dead. James made repairs around the house, and Michelle helped where she could, all the while avoiding looking at the Ripple, which appeared even brighter and deeper in color than it had before.

Then, the sun would grow white and hot and angry. They would have to run inside the basement, again and again. When the radiation levels cooled, they would emerge, and attempt to rebuild.

Again and again.

The reasons that had led Phil to prepare for an off-chance inevitability that had become a reality were never dissected. Michelle was, in the end, just grateful that the man had whatever godly foresight or fear or paranoia that made him prepare. The cabin had a well they could pump for water, and James could hunt in the forest for meat. The white solar flares that penetrated the earth seemed to be slowing, giving them more time in between to rebuild.

Michelle thought the tension in her chest may finally release. She didn’t have any family of her own. There was no one to mourn except for her friends and those at work that she cared about and she tried her best not to think of them. They were gone, and perhaps, no, for sure, they were the lucky ones. Uncertainty brought its own kind of terror. And she thought she at least was starting to understand the nightmare she was in.

Then, one day, she woke up shooting from her bed, racing for a toilet, heaving the night’s meager rations from her stomach into the bowl. A cup of water, three minutes to relieve herself onto a plastic stick, and two pink lines were all it took.

The thought of starving didn’t scare me.

Or radiation poisoning.

Or the sun’s white fury melting the skin from my bones.

Nothing, compared to this.

***

SEVEN YEARS INTO THE END OF THE WORLD

What do you tell a child about the world ending?

Tell me, I’d love to know.

“Just a little further!” The boy didn’t petulantly beg.

There was sincerity and maturity in his request. Perhaps that’s what made it so hard to refuse. The week before, he wanted to see the lightning struck pine tree, a mile away from the cabin. Before that, he asked to see the wooden woodpecker house, half a mile away. Since he had turned six, each week he wanted to venture further and further. He was asking more questions. Questions Michelle didn’t have the answers to.

“No, Joseph. We need to get back. It’s going to get dark soon.” Michelle took the boy by the hand. They made their way through the forest, back toward the cabin. “Grandpa will be up soon; he’ll want to read with you.”

In the last few years, Phil had grown accustomed to sleeping during the day so that he could keep watch at night. They had only one incident with a Roamer in the past few months, but those types were desperate, dangerous, and Phil claimed to feel more content keeping watch while the parents kept a normal schedule with their son.

Michelle looked down at Joseph. Her son was so full of curiosity, so seemingly knowing, but of what reality she couldn’t guess. All she wanted in the entire painful universe was to show her son a beautiful world before he learned about the one they were truly in.

“Wanna race back to the cabin?” Michelle found the smile she had learned to wear, a convincing excited façade that displayed anything other than what she truly felt inside.

With a nod, Joseph ran towards the cabin, Michelle on his ever-quickening heels. The moment he reached the door, she grabbed him. “I got you!”

A fit of giggles took him before he slipped from her grip and moved inside.

The cabin’s interior no longer appeared as it once had. Colorful sheets were torn to stream from ceiling to banister, hand-crafted paintings and beautiful pieces of artwork torn from books and magazines now lined the walls. Her goal was a kindergartener’s classroom on steroids, and Michelle thought she’d hit the mark well.

“Where’s Dad?” Joseph asked, looking around.

“He must still be at work.”

At work. James’ day job consisted of foraging for supplies, avoiding exiles, bandits, and Roamers. Working with other survivors on the mountain to trade goods for their water supply. While others had various items to offer, their cabin had one of the few wells that was dug deep enough to avoid radiation when solar flares struck.

When those unfortunate days came, Michelle made a game out of it, getting Joseph downstairs with the rest of the family in a manner that not only didn’t frighten him, but made him happy and excited. It was all she could do.

Joseph moved up to Michelle. “There’s a picture in your room of Dad and Grandpa, when Dad was little. Where were they?”

Michelle’s heart froze. She knew the photo. Were they in Chicago? She was pretty sure.

“I want to go there,” Joseph said, and Michelle realized she hadn’t responded.

She took a deep breath and kissed her son’s head. “One day, we will.”

It wasn’t exactly a lie. Maybe they would, somehow. For seven years, she hadn’t so much as gone down the mountain. James barely went past Auberry, the small town at the foot of the pass, unless scavenging was incredibly desperate. It was just too much of a risk to go much further.

That evening, James returned home, washing himself outside before moving into the house, a dark expression on his face, which he tried to cover up. He wasn’t as good at pretending as Michelle was. That was okay. He had his job; she had hers.

Earlier that day, James had mentioned he thought it was time Joseph learned to use a rifle. The boy was getting bigger. Michelle had found James in the bedroom before he went out for the day.

“Look, I thought about what you asked the other day, and I just don’t think it’s a good idea.” Michelle saw the frustration in his eyes but remained strong. “No guns. It’s too early.”

James took a breath. He’d never yelled at Michelle, never lost his temper, though if he had, she probably wouldn’t have blamed him. The things he had to do, the things he did on a regular basis for the family, were enough for anyone to need twenty-four-hour therapy. But James had no one. Except for her. Yet he was soft with her, even when he was in a tough place, and if his mood was especially dark, he would take time to himself until he was better.

His eyes found hers, steady. “He needs to learn some simple skills. Self-defense.”

Michelle fought the urge to snort. The idea was almost comical. “At his size, who is he going to be defending himself against? That’s our job.”

“He’s big enough to pull a trigger.” James went quiet, guessing the words would rock Michelle. And they did. He continued. “And when was the last time you practiced your shooting?”

It had been a while, she had to admit, but she stayed focused on the part that mattered most to her. “He’s just a boy.”

“He’s getting older, baby. Asking more questions. We’re going to have to tell him something about the world.”

In her heart, she knew he was right. Speaking to a child about the normal world would have been difficult. What does someone tell a six-year-old about disease, suicide, and murder? But now, with the world the way it was, it seemed an impossible task. One wrong word, or rather, one truthful one, could rip the veil of childhood from his eyes and replace it with a lens she never wanted him to see through. But perhaps it was inevitable.

That night, she looked over at Joseph, who sat at the dinner table next to a quiet James while she stirred soup on a portable gas heater. Footsteps creaked on the floorboards, and Phil entered the room.

“Was that you I heard running around earlier?” Phil directed a mock-stern look at Joseph, who only stifled a grin.

“Sorry, Dad.” James wiped at his face, clearly exhausted, but knew sleep was far from near.

“Don’t be.” Phil settled into the table. “I like the noise. Funny. Your Mom and I bought this place, well, to get away from the city. Get some peace. Three months in, we looked at each other like we were crazy.”

Michelle turned to look at James, both sharing the same thought: Thank god you did.

Later, Phil read to Joseph from Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. Michelle listened while she cleaned, one section resonating deep within her.

“‘Fern says the animals talk to each other. Dr. Dorian, do you believe animals talk?’

‘I never heard one say anything,’ he replied. ‘But that proves nothing. It is quite possible that an animal has spoken civilly to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention. Children pay better attention than grown-ups.’”

Michelle looked at Joseph, and his brown eyes stared back at her.

After reading, she tucked him into bed, kissing his forehead.

“Are you going to sleep?” Joseph asked, that curious tone in his voice searching for more.

“No, we are going to be up a while.” Michelle stood, moving towards the door.

“Doing what?”

“Grown-up things. Get some sleep.” Taking one last look at the boy, who’d settled into his blankets, she closed the door.

Michelle moved downstairs, and out of the house, then into the exterior garage where she knew James and Phil would be waiting.

The garage functioned nothing like it once had. It was now the base of operations for everything they had to do to survive. Weapons lined the walls, cleaning supplies for the guns neatly stored, as well as ammunition that Phil had stockpiled.

Michelle entered the room to find James at the center table, cleaning a pistol, while Phil moved in the background, a long-range radio held to his ear. “Three gallons for how many carrots? No fucking way, Rich. Yeah, yeah, okay, now you’re talking. And some sweet potatoes.”

James stepped towards Michelle, the anticipation in his eyes making her nervous. “What’s going on?”

“There’s something you need to hear.” James motioned her over to the radio controls. Michelle watched as he dialed into a nearby keypad.

A voice sounded over the speaker. “Thank you for calling the Co-Op information channel. Please enter your designated pass-key to receive the latest local information.” James typed in their family’s designated code.

Michelle’s gaze went to a sticky note above the keypad that read, 6, 7, 8 months since last big one.

Once the passkey was accepted, the neutral voice spoke again. “Thank you Independent house, Parker family, St. Paul’s Mountain. Here is the local forecast. Radiation activity in your area is clear. There have been increased reports of criminal activity and Roamers gathering in the southern towns of Prather and Auberry.”

James scribbled on the notepad: Roamers gathering?

The voice continued its log, “Eighty percent chance of solar flare expected October thirtieth.

James’ hand found paper once more: Storm in three days?

Michelle felt her throat go tight. Three days. They were prepared to go down at any minute, but the thought of going into that cellar was difficult to accept. Solar Flare radiation was different from other forms of disastrous radiation. The cosmic rays and radiation emitted from the sun during a Solar Flare storm would be devastating while it was active, but the moment the sun settled and the ejection was over, the radiation would clear up quickly, unlike the effects of a bomb or nuclear power plant meltdown. But while the storm was hot and white, they would need to be locked downstairs for as long as it lasted.

Michelle sat in the chair, her thoughts racing, her eyes moving along the notes and taped information around the equipment.

Her eyes found a map of St. Paul’s Mountain. On the west side stood the Parker cabin. Four names were written in various other spots around the mountain, noting the other independent families, each of whom had some sort of shelter to protect against Solar Flares. Whether they were as updated as the one in Phil’s cellar, none of them knew, as this was not information freely given on the rare chance the independent survivors got to chatting.

On the far side of the mountain was a drawing of a collection of buildings with the words CO-OP, 58 members, written below. Underneath that the mountain were names of other cities and their population changes San Jose: 971,233, 459. Fresno: 545,277, 240. And so on. Michelle found it difficult, still, to comprehend such devastation.

Michelle turned to James. “Roamers are gathering? They never come up the mountain.” There was little for the Co-Op exiles to forage, and Co-Op rangers would shoot any of them on sight if they were seen. At the start of the Co-Op’s formation, they had set out rules. Many similar to the laws society previously held. Punishment for the simplest infraction was banishment from their shelters, their food supply, and, most importantly, their equipment that detected solar flares.

“Only one reason to gather in mass. They must have caught wind of the storm coming. I think they’re finally going to try.” James didn’t hold a trace of worry in his voice.

Nicholas Woods

Nicholas Woods is a writer and filmmaker out of Westwood, California in Los Angeles. Nicholas' second feature film as a writer and director, Echoes of Violence, premiered at Cinequest Film Festival in 2020 and was released in 2021 featuring Frank Oz (Star Wars, Knives Out). Nicholas's feature film debut The Axiom was distributed through Vertical Entertainment and sold by DevilWorks, with over 1 million streams world-wide. It was accepted into the acclaimed Sitges Film Festival / BIFFAN Film Festival, and was distributed globally hitting the top-grossing horror films on iTunes for the first 3 weeks after its release In February 2019.

February 6, 2025February 8, 2025

Them by Elliot Pearson

Crackling static merging with the sound of the rain outside and the snapping wick of the burning candle within.

A piano note…

Stops.

Scratches.

I rush over to the record player…the music cannot stop, must not stop, to keep them out…examine the needle that had slipped into the run-out groove. Covered in dust.

Pull it off the needle between thumb and forefinger. Capturing the weightless clump in skin oil. Wipe it off on my jeans. Carefully, but swiftly, put the needle back in place, and it drops.

A second piano note…

Starts.

I sigh with relief. Then listen out…

Nothing.

Nothing yet.

Creep silently to the steel door. Listening harder. Slowing my breath until I end up holding it still and silent.

Nothing behind the door.

I breathe again.

But just then—steps. Steps in the wet grass.

How many, I can’t be sure.

One.

Two.

I turn back to the record player. All looks well.

I blow out the candle.

Go back to the steel door and slide the shutter open.

I squint, gazing out.

The footsteps have stopped.

But then I see a shape through the rain. A silhouette atop the hill against a colorless night sky.

As my vision further adjusts to the light, or lack thereof, I see another.

Two.

And another.

Three.

And another.

Four.

Crackling static merging with the sound of the rain outside.

A piano note.

Stops.

I close my eyes. Feel my body envelop itself.

An awful moan—not mine—something like a dying black dog caught in a bear trap.

My eyes open.

Now their faces are before me, eyes pitch-black and lidless.

My mouth gapes and my heart leaves me.

No matter how hard you try, you cannot keep them out forever.

Elliot Pearson

Elliot Pearson is a writer of speculative fiction and poetry. His work has appeared in such publications as Star*Line, The Banyan Review, and The Stygian Lepus. After working as a teacher in Spain and Mexico, Elliot now lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and is working on his first novel.

February 6, 2025February 14, 2025

Beach Bodies by Jim Mountfield

Grady eased his motorbike down the plunging road while the sea revealed itself below. The cleft containing the road, quarried out of the rocky shoreline, offered no shade. The sun blazed from the strip of sky overhead and doused him in heat and ultraviolet rays. But the pain in his foot tormented him more. Yesterday, riding, he’d stupidly worn flip-flops and burned his shin against the motorbike’s exhaust casing.

The road ended at a small parking lot. He secured the bike, then headed for a shack containing a bar, which was perched beside some steps descending the final yards to the beach. By now, he craved a pint of Bintang.

Inside, he clambered onto a stool at the scuffed, heavily graffitied counter. A mirror hung on the wall behind it and showed him his face in unflattering detail. It was red, wrinkled, and littered with broken capillaries. For decades that’d been his appearance—even during his thirties when he’d worked as a roughneck in the Libyan and Nigerian oilfields. The African sun, the backbreaking labor, and the booze had marked him long ago.

He ordered a Bintang.

“Holiday?” inquired the barman, curiosity piqued by Grady’s age.

“No,” he replied. “Business.” This seemed an appropriate moment to conduct business, so he removed Elizabeth’s photo from his shirt-pocket.

No joy. The barman couldn’t remember seeing her. Dutifully, he took the photo around the bar’s other customers. He was inured to the responses—bemusement, indifference, irritation, looks that silently asked: Who are you, creepy old man, and how dare you interrupt me while I’m on my smartphone? Often, because of language barriers, he got incomprehension. This was particularly true of the Russian youths, who, since their country’s invasion of Ukraine, had left home and holed up in Bali to escape being drafted. Occasionally, someone was interested enough to question him and nodded politely when he explained about his daughter who’d been missing for the last half-year.

A young Englishman was talking at an upright smartphone. He reviewed a plate of nasi goreng he’d been served as pub-grub, his voice so solemn he could have been reviewing something from the Arts de la Table Menu at London’s Ritz. Patiently, Grady waited until he finished filming, then asked him too.

Again, no joy. He returned to the counter. Trying to lift his mood, he twisted on his stool and gazed westwards, between the timber columns supporting the bar’s roof, out across the sea to the line where the water’s dark turquoise gave way to the sky’s bleached blue. His spirits didn’t revive. Damn you, girl. I know you’re here somewhere. You can’t stay hidden forever. He stared at the horizon more intently, as if Elizabeth was floating there, waiting to be discovered.

He saw something, but not Elizabeth.

It was a straggling chaos—like a gigantic spider whose body constantly pulsated, outwards, inwards. Whose many limbs constantly stretched, broke off, fell into nothing, and were replaced by more limbs sprouting at ever wilder angles. He closed his eyes, but the hideous, sprawling image remained, seared on his retinas.

Then it wasn’t there. Grady dared to open his eyes. It wasn’t anywhere.

Shakily, he drained his Bintang, left the bar, and went down the steps to the sand. A pod of surfers bobbed on the sea, waiting their turn as, one by one, they rode in on each large wave. Along the beach’s landward edge lay a row of lithe, nearly naked bodies, like surplus shop mannequins dumped in an alley behind a department store. Most had an arm bent upwards at the elbow and a hand grasping a smartphone above them.

Once he’d composed himself again, Grady worked his way along the sunbathers, showing the photo, asking. From under sunglasses, eyes squinted up at him resentfully. The girls probably thought this was a ruse whereby he could ogle them at close quarters. Also, he sensed his physical condition offended them. Yes, he mused. I’m an affront to your youthfulness. A reminder that no matter how many yoga sessions and beauty treatments you do here, you’ll still look as shit as me one day.

Then he limped southwards. The beach gradually narrowed and ceased altogether at a muddle of boulders. Beyond the boulders, he couldn’t see anything more of the shore. It curved inwards, forming a bay. But a cliff to his left, crags bearded with precariously growing trees, blocked it from view.

He listened as the waves struck the boulders and slathered them with foam. Then he saw the apparition again in the air ahead. It was too riotous now to resemble a spider. It was more like a vast splatter of ink, tendrils of it wriggling off in all directions.

What, he wondered, is happening to me?

This vision finally passed too. He’d seen many versions of it in recent days, not just in the air but superimposed on things around him. As a multicolored splodge of oil on a puddle outside a garage. Or a strangely tentacled swirl of dust approaching on a highway. Or an amorphous, squirming combination of street light and curtain-shadow on the ceiling of his hotel room. What was it? Something conjured by a physical malfunction in his brain—a tumor, a blood-clot? Or by a psychological one—madness? Or could it possibly have an external origin?

Whatever caused it, it was manifesting itself more often. And if it was an external phenomenon, perhaps he was getting closer to its source.

He headed back. Above one section of the beach, a grassy shelf extended to the base of the cliff. On this, he noticed a local man operating a film camera on a tripod, so he scrambled up to him. Grady saw on the camera’s LCD that the man was filming the surfers. Each would get footage of their exploits on the waves today that they could upload to their social-media accounts.

This local man said he hadn’t seen Elizabeth either. Then Grady asked him what lay beyond the boulders, inside the hidden bay. Was there more beach?

“No beach,” he replied, slightly too brusquely.

Grady looked back at the way he’d come. Something caught his eye, not at the level of the beach but up on the ridge of the precipice beside it.

He retrieved his motorbike and ascended the road. While the cleft’s rock walls crept by him, he felt like a bug climbing the inside of a drainpipe. At the top, he found a track that followed the cliff-edge, though it was difficult to know where that edge was exactly because a dense screen of stunted trees and thorny bushes grew along it.

Finally, he located what he’d seen from below—a trawler catamaran. Concrete pillars had been set against its hull to hold it upright. Vegetation pressed against it too, branches growing at skewed angles across it, showing it’d been there a long time. Perhaps the locals had planned once to turn this shoreline into a thriving tourist area. Perhaps an entrepreneur had parked the boat on the clifftop intending to create an eccentric shipboard restaurant, not one that floated, but one with a spectacular view. But the plan had come to naught. This stretch of coast remained an outpost visited by only the most adventurous backpackers and influencers. Abandoned, the boat had become an oddball landmark.

On his phone, Grady studied the last picture Elizabeth had posted of herself. He zoomed in on the cliff behind her. Yes, at one point, distantly, a boat was perched on top of it. He couldn’t inspect the sea-facing side of this boat because the wall of snarled undergrowth made it inaccessible. But it had to be the same craft. In the picture, the sea was on Elizabeth’s right, meaning it’d been taken on a beach south of here, not north. And south implied the hidden bay, the place where the cameraman claimed there was no beach.

Grady followed the track further. He calculated he’d drawn level with the bay when he spotted amid the tangle of trees and bushes a gap that opened onto a narrow path. He chained his bike to a tree-trunk and ventured through the vegetation. After a few yards, the path reached the edge, dropped away, and transformed into a flight of stairs. The stairs had been hewn out of the cliff-face, though sometimes stone slabs and now-rotted planks had been laid to make them firmer.

Because of their unevenness, Grady’s injured foot, and the intrusion of clawing, scratching branches—misshapen trees cloaked the cliff-face too—going down those stairs was an ordeal. And a few times, the thing tortured him again. No longer did it materialize in the sky. Now, it appeared as angry, writhing conformations of shadows cast by the sun as it poked between the trees. Terrified the sight of it would cause him to lose his footing and fall, he halted each time and waited for the manifestation to fade.

He drew on all his willpower to keep going. He couldn’t give up now, not when it was possible Elizabeth was below.

At last, wheezing, drenched in sweat, foot so sore it could have been jammed against the exhaust pipe again, Grady cleared the bottom stairs and emerged from the lowest trees. He hobbled across another shelf of grass and arrived on a band of smooth, pale sand that arced off to his left and right. For a time, he stood listening to the rumble of incoming waves and the rustle and hiss that accompanied their disintegration into breakers. He savored the feeling of solitude, of not having other people around to remark on his agedness and decrepitude.

So, this was the hidden bay. With an apparently empty beach.

He turned and started northwards. He fixed his gaze on the boat on the clifftop, hoping he’d come to a spot where his view of it exactly matched the background of Elizabeth’s picture—the spot she’d stood on six months earlier. His foot ached more than ever and walking on the shifting, sliding sand was laborious. Soon he was panting again.

Then he trod on something solid. The sand had given way to an expanse of rock. It was a huge slab about twenty yards long, though he couldn’t tell how wide it was because on one side it disappeared beneath the swarming breakers. From above, it must resemble a tumor that’d burst through the beach’s soft skin. Grady crouched. The rock looked almost metallic, its gray color imbued with a faint silveriness. He touched it. The surface wasn’t hot, despite the sun beating on it all day, but after a few moments, he detected a subtle warmth. It seemed not to come off the rock’s topmost layer, but from inside it. He felt like he was holding his hand against the casing of a tumble-dryer and feeling the heat from its drum.

Another thing. The surface wasn’t flat, but mildly lumpen and carbuncled, and was imprinted with runnels that were a few inches across and deep. He raised his head to see how far those runnels extended.

But then he forgot about the rock. Ahead, past where it ended and the sand resumed, he’d spotted a one-story building standing on the grassy shelf behind the beach. Two wooden shafts sprouted crookedly from the sand in front of it, maybe the poles of a long-disappeared volleyball net.

Grady limped towards the building. By the time he’d passed from the rock onto the sand again, he could tell it was a shell. The windows in its concrete walls lacked glass and it had no roof. Not that it was a ruin. It’d never been finished. Someone had started building it—a hotel, probably, from its size—but then, during construction, abandoned it.

He came close enough to see half-a-dozen concrete steps rise from the beach to a doorless opening in its seaward wall. He also observed figures on the sand between the entrance and the two poles. One was sitting, the others lay on their backs. The seated figure he identified as a young woman. She was meditating, legs folded under her in the lotus position. A selfie stick was planted upright in the sand before her, the smartphone on it filming her.

He asked excitedly, “Elizabeth?”

Approaching the figures, though, Grady realized the girl wasn’t his daughter. He came closer still, saw what was wrong, and thought, Thank God that’s not Elizabeth. He also experienced a rush of nausea that made him spew up the beer he’d drunk in the bar.

The girl wore a bikini. The sun had turned her bare skin hideously red and baked it so dry it was corrugated and fissured. Peeling strands of it formed a gruesome beard under her jaw. Her parched hair poked out of her scalp like stalks of straw. Momentarily, Grady thought her torso exuded extra breasts, then recognized these as huge, globular sun-blisters. She was wildly emaciated too, her face sunken and skull-like.

The figures reposing beside the girl were even worse. There was a boy with spindly limbs and a ribcage that jutted high above his wasted stomach. His skin was so sun-ravaged it’d metamorphosized into a hard, scaly crust, making him look almost reptilian. Next to him lay the mummified remains of a woman. Her flesh had dried and shrunk and taken on the color and texture of hard toffee. On her face, while the tissue contracted, her mouth had expanded into a great, gaping maw of teeth. Tendons as straight and sharp as piano wire protruded from her shriveled throat. At her side, a smartphone was half-buried in the sand between the splayed, root-like fingers of her hand.

Meanwhile, the phone on the selfie-stick wasn’t filming the girl at all. It was cracked and begrimed and surely couldn’t be functioning.

Grady wiped threads of regurgitated beer from his chin. “Fuck,” he exclaimed. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Then, assuming the girl was alive, since a corpse couldn’t maintain the pose she was in, he spluttered, “I’ll get you out of this sun.”

She didn’t respond, so he grasped her under the armpits, hoisted her, and wrestled her up the steps. They passed through the opening into a large, square space intended to serve as a hotel lobby. It was roofless and the walls cast only narrow strips of shade. He dragged the girl into one of the strips and lowered her. When she lay on the ground, he realized shreds of her skin were hanging from his fingers and suppurations from her sun-blisters had wet his shirt and shorts.

Grady needed time to get his head around this. Some kids had arrived here and set up camp and…yes, afflicted by sunstroke, or drugs, or both, they’d gone crazy. They’d burned themselves in the sun, and starved, and the beach was so isolated nobody had witnessed their craziness and summoned help. It occurred to him he should do that now. His heart sank when he took out his phone and looked at the indicator icons at the screen’s top—no signal bars, no Wi-Fi. The phone on the selfie stick outside had been incommunicado even before it stopped working.

He had another thought. Others might be here—including Elizabeth.

He left the girl in the shade and approached an opening in the lobby’s far side. Things crackled between his feet and the sandy floor and, looking down, he found himself tramping on desiccated fish-skins, eggshells, feathers, little animal-bones. Is this, he wondered, all they’ve been eating? He avoided some dried lumps he knew were pieces of excrement.

He entered a passageway with empty doorways lining its sides. The absence of a roof and doors made him feel he was in an outdoor maze, one whose sides weren’t formed by hedges or shrubbery but by concrete-block walls. These walls, closer together, created more shade and the heat felt a little less fierce. In the slightly cooler temperature, he noticed a smell—a musk of putrefaction. From nearby came a whirr of busy flies.

Grady steeled himself and entered the first of the unfinished hotel rooms. The sun fell on half of its floor and showed the same litter of food-debris and lapidified turds. Whereas in the shaded half, he made out an ominously human-shaped mound. He knelt and placed his hands against one end of it and started brushing sand away. His shaking fingers exposed the hard dome of a forehead and the sharpened ridge of a nose. For a vile moment, one of his fingertips blundered into a socket and, at its bottom, touched something round and soft. Then his fingers crossed cellophane-like skin, binding the remaining scraps of flesh against the skull. He uncovered teeth. Like the dead woman outside, the teeth took up far too much of the face.

He checked the quills of hair sticking from the edges of this death-mask and groaned with relief. The hair was blonde. So, this wasn’t Elizabeth either.

Grady heard a cough. “Fuck!” he shouted and sprang back, lost his balance, and landed on his backside. The cough sounded again, and he realized it hadn’t come from the corpse. Rather, it came from a far corner, obscured by the shade, which seemed to contain a pile of rags and dirt. The pile shifted. It extended two limbs across the ground towards him, and he suddenly understood a person was huddled in the corner. A living person who was now stirring.

Slowly, on all fours, another woman came at him. She was skeletally thin, her face burned by unrelenting exposure to the sun, strings of rancid hair trailing around her shoulders. As she crawled over the sand-covered contours of the corpse, she raised her head, and he saw the cloud of a cataract filling one of her eyes.

Her other eye goggled at him in horror. Instead of another cough, she released several hoarse screams.

Somehow, those screams were the worst experience yet for Grady. Numbed, he sat on his backside while the woman shrieked into his face. Then his numbness gave way to a desperate urge. I need to get out of here! He scrambled to his feet and lurched into the passageway, where immediately he crashed into someone else.

The figure staggered back from him. It was a man—a young one, presumably, though it was impossible to tell his age from the condition he was in. Skin was flaking off his face and pieces of it formed oversized dandruff on a matted beard hanging down his chest. Grady looked deeper into the hotel’s interior. More figures were shambling out of the doorways along the passageway, as emaciated and as disfigured by extreme sunburn as the others. Tottering towards him, summoned by the girl’s screams, they resembled ambulatory scarecrows.

Grady tried running the other way, back through the lobby, but the bearded man had fastened a claw-like hand on his arm. Also, he held forward a smartphone, the sun glinting on its shattered screen. “Fuck, man, you’re ugly.” An Australian accent was vaguely discernible in his parched voice. “So fucking old. It must be hell for you, skin all cracked and wrinkled like that.”

“Seen yourselves lately?” Grady roared, almost hysterically, and swung a punch. It caught the man’s jaw, and he dropped like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Grady’s years in the oil fields had made him handy with his fists, but this man looked so flimsy a child could have felled him.

He glanced back. The passageway was filled with them now, a shuffling, nightmarish parade of apparitions, stick-thin, rank with filth, faces blackened and blistered. The nearest ones were almost within arm’s reach of him. He ran through the lobby and careened down the steps outside. There, he saw the boy with the crusted skin had revived and was crawling blindly on his hands and knees, more reptilian, more lizard-like than ever. Then Grady raced back along the beach, oblivious to the pain flaring in his foot each time it struck the sand.

As he dashed onto the expanse of rock, a major wave crashed over its edge and sent breakers fizzing across it. Something made him stop running. He stood watching the water’s progress. It poured into the rock’s runnels, filled them, coursed through them. Only now did he see how the runnels covered the entire rock in a giant, labyrinthine pattern, simultaneously intricate and chaotic. While the white foam followed the countless straggling grooves, it took on familiar forms. He knelt, mesmerized by the ever-changing configurations of the sea-foam as it drizzled through the rock. Configurations he’d likened earlier to spiders, ink blots, oil spillages, dust swirls, dancing shadows.

He stayed there a long time. Several times more, a large wave doused the rock in water, filled its runnels, created the patterns that’d haunted him during the past weeks.

He became convinced he could commune with it.

Gradually, he was enlightened. He understood how an entity resided within this rock. For eons it’d been buried, until some natural cataclysm, a tsunami perhaps, had uncovered it. He also understood how it’d lured the youngsters here and how it existed with them parasitically, draining of them of their life-energy whilst feeding them comforting delusions that they remained young and beautiful, that they were still uploading photos and videos to eager social-media audiences on their smartphones, which in reality had ceased working long ago.

One, two, then several shadows fell across him and a familiar, Australian-accented voice croaked, “That skin of yours, man. So wrinkled, so fucking ugly!”

A crowd had followed him from the hotel, clambered onto the rock, and formed a circle around him. Among them was the youth he’d punched, his beard now splattered with blood as well as befouled with flakes of skin. He extended his broken phone, believing he was filming.

Grady couldn’t move or speak. The force in the rock had made him its captive. Another big wave hit and again, in the surrounding rock, foaming water created the tumultuous shape that’d obsessed him.

The one-eyed woman who screamed at him was present, too. “Don’t worry,” she rasped. “We’ll help you. We’ll free you of it.”

But why had it brought him here? Was it because it needed something to keep its livestock content for a while? Was he meant to be a distraction, an entertainment for them? An object they could vent their bloodlust on because, while draining these young people, the entity had also made them insane?

He knew he should get up and flee, but the entity kept him paralyzed. He continued to kneel while the noose of ravaged bodies tightened around him. As they closed in, they lunged down at him, scratching, clawing, gouging.

One pair of hands sank long, sharp fingernails into the sides of his face. Before pain fogged his vision, he peered up at the person the fingers belonged to and recognized her gaunt, scorched features.

Grady cried, “Elizabeth!”

***

He regained consciousness and found himself spreadeagled on the beach, his wrists and ankles bound to pegs that were driven deep into the sand. He was beside one of the poles and from its top something fluttered in the sea-breeze. Watching it, he admired its ragged tentacles as they wove this way and that. They made riotous shapes that, to him, were somehow familiar and reassuring.

But then he became conscious of an excruciating, burning sensation across his naked body while the sun blazed on it. Realizing the thing fluttering above was a substantial area of his skin, removed with non-surgical haste and eagerness, Grady screamed.

Jim Mountfield

Jim Mountfield was born in Northern Ireland, grew up there and in Scotland, and has since lived and worked in Europe, Africa and Asia. He currently lives in Singapore. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion, Blood Moon Rising, Death Head's Grin, Flashes in the Dark, Hellfire Crossroads, Horla, Horrified Magazine, The Horror Zine, The Hungur Chronicles, Schlock! Webzine, Shotgun Honey, The Sirens Call, Witch House, and previously in The Stygian Lepus, as well as in a dozen anthologies

February 6, 2025February 8, 2025

Crystal Comes Home by Lee Clark Zumpe

Crystal scrambles down the side of Snake Den Ridge, playfully skipping through a mountain laurel tunnel. The harvest moon splashes the sky with swirls of orange and purple twilight, and composes a symphony of weird and wonderful shadows, which flutter throughout the forest. The little girl stops at a small outcropping of bald rock the locals call Grim Knob. She admires the spectacular view. Her gaze darts across the valley below. The dim streetlamps from the tiny village of Emmett’s Cove twinkle in the distance, and an icy breeze whistles through the Eastern hemlocks at her back.

Carefully, she gets down on her hands and knees and crawls over to the edge. She peers over the craggy ledge hesitantly, gazing down the side of the steep cliff. She lays flat on her stomach, rests her chin upon her folded arms. It is a long way down to the boulder-strewn banks of Cold Spring Branch. She can barely hear the distant voice of the talkative creek drifting up into the chilly night.

In a minute, she is racing down the trail again, smiling.

Crystal immediately recognizes the vestiges of old Otis Greely’s pioneer cabin with its three courses of saddle-notched chestnut logs. She traces the stone wall that encircled the farmstead, now overgrown with thick vegetation and inhabited by graceful shadows. She has roosted upon that wall dozens of times, her little legs dangling, while admiring the patches of Dutchman’s pipe and bellwort skirting the trail. Many afternoons she has spent simply watching Yellow-bellied sap-suckers flirting with a nearby tuliptree.

Very few things about this place frighten her anymore. Over the years, she has fostered a deep intimacy with the quiet forest.

Continuing down the side of the ridge, the night grows colder. Stars shiver above the treetops as arctic winds rove across the Appalachian highlands. Too early for snow, but the promise of a cold winter is more than a whisper on the icy breath of October. As Crystal draws closer to Emmett’s Cove, she notices the familiar scent of pine-smoke. The thought of huddling beneath a blanket in front of a stone fireplace conjures up a comforting sensation of warmth in her soul.

The forest grows darker around Dwain Bryson’s place, where sinister pools of uncanny gloom rally to blot out the moonglow.

Crystal approaches the cottage discreetly, focusing on the splinters of sterile fluorescent light seeping through a crack in the drapery. The air here is still and stale, the ground beneath her bare feet sodden and cold. Shielded by an ancient stretch of hardwoods untouched by the logging industry, tucked neatly between two sheer bluffs in an eerie grotto, the secluded plot engenders a sense of unnatural dread in its few visitors. Regional folklore claims the native Americans avoided the place in centuries past, fearful of malignant spirits rumored to haunt it.

Dwain Bryson always shrugged off such superstitious nonsense.

She peeks through the crack in the drapery, studying the small kitchen. A mountain of cookware and plates sits upon the countertop, leaning precariously over the washbasin. Flies hover over a wastebasket overflowing with scraps of raw meat. Crimson droplets speckle the floor.

A stewpot bubbles incessantly on the woodburning stove.

It is just as she remembers it.

Crystal slips inside the cottage unnoticed, creeping through the pools of darkness betrayed by lantern light. Carefully, she creeps from room to room, anxiously trying to find the owner of the place.

The stench billowing from the kitchen makes her gag and choke.

She finds Dwain in the Secret Chamber below the cottage. She glides down the steps stealthily, desperately trying not to disturb him until the time is right. He works frantically, his back to the wooden staircase, his bulky arms in constant motion. Dwain has put on weight. Too much stew.

A steady stream of blood dribbles off the side of the cutting table and onto the floor. Crystal notices the crimson-tinged mop propped against the stone wall in the corner, the carton of discarded bones draped by cobwebs.

She sees the little bleached skulls of twenty children lined up methodically along a shelf on the far side of the room.

“Hello daddy,” Crystal says.

Dwain whirls about, bloodied butcher knife still firm in his hand.

“I’ve come home,” she says.

For an instant, a spark of recognition glimmers in the man’s eyes at the sound of her voice. He squints, trying to identify the little girl cowering in the darkness, but shadows zealously cloak her face. His eyebrows twitch and his brow wrinkles. His lips part as if he might speak, but the words elude him.

“Don’t be afraid, daddy,” Crystal says, an innocent smile blossoming on her face. “I know you won’t hurt me. You promised.”

Dwain Bryson grunts and slowly raises the knife into the dead air of the Secret Chamber. His left hand stretches out menacingly across the darkness, fingers writhing like baby copperheads. The dim glow of recollection quickly gives way to a rush of rage and bloodlust.

Crystal bolts back up the steps screaming, and Dwain takes off after her.

Outside, clouds have eclipsed the harvest moon temporarily and the malevolent murk enveloping Dwain Bryson’s cottage spread gravely through the forest. As Crystal clambers back along the trail, she can hear his heavy breath close behind; his ponderous footfalls sound like angry summer thunder rolling through the mountains. She bounds over rotting logs, fords a slender creek on moss-covered stones. Retracing her steps, she climbs up the steep ridge.

Dwain coughs and sputters a curse under his breath.

She dashes by the stone wall of Otis Greely’s place as the moon casts aside the wispy veil of clouds. Moonglow bathes the forest, and Dwain hesitates, his heart pounding in his chest. He staggers alongside a tuliptree, hands gripping his knees. His butcher knife falls to the forest floor. His health is poor, but he knows he must not allow this girl to slip through his fingers. Only one child escaped him in all his years, and she did not run very far.

Crystal catches her breath as she ascends through a rosebay rhododendron tunnel. Dwain trails her, lingering in some shady tangle farther down the slope. She misses playing hide-and-seek with her brothers and sisters in the Appalachian backwoods; misses hearing her mother’s stories told beside the campfire. She misses wandering through the woods collecting wildflowers to place on her grandmother’s grave.

Dwain bursts out of the darkness and lunges at her, and Crystal yelps. She dodges him narrowly and sprints off down the trail.

“I’ll catch you yet, girl!” Dwain barks, shambling after her as quickly as his legs will carry him.

Finally, Dwain emerges from a snarl of mountain laurel and looks down upon the little girl. Crystal backs reluctantly toward the edge of Grim Knob, eyes fixed firmly to the ground. The wind tosses her blond hair delicately.

“Thought you could get away from me, did you?” Dwain growls. “Ain’t no one can hide from me in these woods. They’re my woods.”

“But daddy,” Crystal whimpers.

“Don’t call me that, girl! I ain’t got no children, not no more.”

“Don’t you recognize me, daddy?” Crystal lifts her head, and the moon paints it full of life and innocence. “It’s me, Crystal.”

Dwain sees the face of his daughter and he shudders. He shambles forward waveringly, staring at the little girl. He wants to run his fingers through her hair, hold her tiny hand, kiss her forehead. He wants to tell her he is sorry for what happened ten years ago.

But he cannot do any of those things, because she knows.

She knows what he did to her mother during the harsh winter a decade ago. Knows how much he had savored the taste, how he had grown addicted to it. She knows what became of her brothers and sisters over the years, what atrocities he had committed to feed his obsession.

Dwain charges Crystal, his eyes pulsing orbs of scarlet rage; his arms outstretched and fingers clasping as they had been ten years ago. Crystal stands patiently as he approaches, shivers as his feet slip on the cold rock. He sails straight through her and plunges over the ledge.

Crystal sheds a tear and glances up toward the star-speckled sky. As the echo of Dwain’s dying cries fade in the distance, she, too, fades and joins the weird and wonderful shadows set aflutter throughout the forest by the harvest moon.

Lee Clark Zumpe

Lee Clark Zumpe, an entertainment editor with Tampa Bay Newspapers, earned his degree in English at the University of South Florida. He began writing poetry and fiction in the early 1990s. His work has appeared in a variety of literary journals and genre magazines over the last two decades. Recent publication credits include Space & Time, Lovecraftiana, Illumen, and The Literary Hatchet. Lee lives on the west coast of Florida with his wife and daughter, and one high-maintenance cat.