I am not — have never been — given to flights of the fantastical.  To be sure, from time to time, like many of my contemporaries, I have been enthralled by Poe’s tales and those of Lovecraft and Hodgson.  But they were fictions, diversions from the mundane, nothing more.  Certainly, I never for a moment believed these entertainments were attempts to render true experiences.

Yet, now I have the gravest reason to doubt that judgment, for I myself have been witness to an event of such extremes that it cannot be counted as anything but lying beyond the precincts of the natural world.  And because it is so far from reality as normal men understand it, I can only confide the particulars in this journal.

The story begins shortly after Christmas last when my dear friend Hugh Fletcher was having tea of an afternoon in an Oxford Street cafe not far from Cavendish Square Gardens.  He and I had met while both at Eton and become virtually inseperable mates.  We maintained our close bond after graduation when my path took me to the London School of Economics while he pursued his dream of studying art.  The choices fit our personalities — I, the pragmatic, materialistic qq one; Hugh, much the romantic, fond of poetry and the serendipitous.  And, I should say, a painter who possessed genuine talent.  At the age of twenty-six, he was beginning to gain a modest reputation in the city for the quality of his work, which was on offer at a small gallery in Vauxhall.

On the day in question, as Hugh recounted it to me, while having a second cup of tea and reading from a newly purchased edition of Shelley, his attention was drawn to a young woman who had risen from her table in a far corner of the cafe and was preparing to leave.   

“She was singularly striking,” he told me, “tall, ivory-skinned, with great, dark tresses cascading around her face, encircled with the lush collar of a rich fur coat.  It would have been sufficient,” he went on, “just to savor her unrivaled beauty as she passed a few feet away, but as she neared the door, she turned and locked her smoke-grey eyes with mine.  It lasted only an instant, but the effect was profound.”

The woman then exited the cafe into the chill late afternoon as snow was just beginning to fall upon the city.  Hugh said he did not hesitate a moment, but leaped from his seat, shrugged into his chesterfield and rushed into the street.

“I could not explain my actions, save that I knew I must not allow her to get away.”  Within a block, as he weaved rapidly among the sidewalk throng, he had caught sight of her.  And as he neared her at a corner, though he was behind and she had not seen him, she stopped and turned.

“It was uncanny,” he told me. “With certitude, I sensed that she knew of my approach, that she expected it.”

To be sure, Hugh was taken somewhat aback, further unsettled by the way those eyes of hers bored into him, seemingly able to discern his innermost thoughts.   He stammered an introduction and expressed his fervent desire that she agree to sit for him while he painted her portrait. 

Her name, she replied, was Lizbeta: and at first, she demurred, explaining that she was not a professional model and that her time in London was limited before she must return to her native Romania.  But Hugh was insistent, pressing his case and proferring one of his business cards, which she accepted.

“I returned to my flat in a fever,” he said, “and spent the night unable to banish her from my thoughts.  And when I fell at last into fitful sleep, it was she who dominated my dreams.”

The obsession persisted upon his awakening, depriving him of an appetite, prompting him to pace nervously about his atelier, unable to concentrate on finishing a modest commissioned still life he had begun. 

At precisely 10:00, as Big Ben tolled the hour, Lizbeta rang his studio bell.  Hugh welcomed her with delight, noting that in the morning sunlight spilling into the room, she was even more ravishing than she had appeared the day before. 

“Although she still insisted she was an unworthy subject,” Hugh related, “she had found me flattering and persuasive enough to agree to a sitting.  But, of necessity, it would be a single sitting.   She had no choice, she said, having been summoned to return to Bucharest the following day to deal with pressing family affairs.”

With little time to lose, Hugh hastily arranged his studio, positioning his easel and mounting a freshly gessoed canvas upon it.   He bade Lizbeta to recline on a divan of brocade and mahogany, posing her in such a way that the sunlight brought out the finest qualities of her lustrous hair and perfect complexion. 

“I knew that I had but a few hours with her, so I rushed with a speed I did not know I possessed to block in the essentials of the painting and begin rendering her likeness.”

And paint he did, using every available ray of light until the late afternoon shadows deepened and Lizbeta made ready to leave.  Hugh expressed his dismay at her departure, so smitten had he become.

“I inquired when she would return to London so that I might present her with the painting.  She did not know, so I asked if she might leave a shipping address.  She promised to send it as soon as her business in Bucharest was completed.”

And with that, Hugh said, she turned her mesmerizing grey eyes on him a final time and left.

Now commences the strangest part of this tale.  Hugh immediately returned to the canvas, feverishly working his brushes and oils, attempting to reclaim from the memory of Lizbeta each curve, every contour, line and shadow, the very essence of her extraordinary beauty.  Using what lamplight he had at hand, he pressed on into the night, until exhaustion overtook him and he slept.

The next morning he arose at first light and without hesitation, returned to his obsession.  Since I hadn’t spoken with him in several days, I rang him up at the noon hour just to make idle conversation.  Instead, he implored me to come to his atelier immediately to view his latest work.  There was in his voice a tone of urgency such that I left my office at once.

When I arrived, Hugh barely took the time to let me into his studio before he was at his canvas again.  And as he painted, he recounted the whole story of his encounter with Lizbeta. It took but one glance at the woman’s image to understand why he said it had been “branded on my soul.”  Her face and figure were perfection and her eyes possessed a depth of power and mystery that was mesmerizing,  indelible.   

But it was not only his desire to capture the woman’s  every nuance that was driving him forward.  He could not account for it, he said, but his paint was thickening, becoming more viscous and hard to handle. 

“When I apply it to the canvas, it pulls at the brush — more so, it seems, with every passing hour — as if it doesn’t want to let go.  I’ve never encountered this before, but it is imperative that I complete the painting as soon as possible.”

It was clear that his distraction was total, so I took my leave with a wish to see the portrait once he’d completed it. 

The rest of my day was crowded — appointments through the afternoon, a dinner engagement with a client that led to brandy and cigars at my club.  By the time I reached the door of my apartments, it was almost midnight.  And no sooner had I entered than the telephone began to ring.  It was Hugh, frantic.

“You must come at once!”

“But the hour . . . , ” I protested.

“At once — do you hear me?!”

Quickly, I rushed to the street, hailed a cab and was delivered presently to Hugh’s studio.  The trip was short, but it gave me enough time to conjure dark thoughts about my friend’s obsession and his grip on reality.

When I arrived I found the door to his atelier unlocked, which I thought was odd, so I entered with a degree of caution, calling his name repeatedly but with no response.  I could see very little because the only light in the room was provided by a floor lamp Hugh had moved beside his easel, which was positioned in such a way that the back of the canvas was turned toward the door.  With my trepidation growing, I walked slowly forward.  Perhaps, I thought, Hugh was so absorbed in his work that he neither heard me enter nor call out to him.  But as I neared the easel, what caught my eye was not my friend.  Instead, beyond the edge of the painting in the pool of light thrown by the lamp were his palette and one of his brushes, both gleaming with wet paint, lying on the floor.  They did not appear to have been placed on the parquet but rather dropped or cast down. 

My heart by now was pounding in my chest.   I fought against my worst fears overwhelming me as I stepped around the easel and turned my full attention to the canvas. 

Now, you who know me have always judged me a sober, eminently rational individual.  So, too, do I consider myself.  I ask you to weigh what I recount next with that in mind.

I was aghast at what I beheld.  At first, my eyes refused to believe, but there was no denying what was in front of me.  It was the figure of a woman in an emerald-green gown reclining on the very divan that sat a few feet from me, just as I’d seen Hugh painting hours before.  I say the figure of a woman because this was not Hugh’s careful rendering of the ravishing Lizbeta, but a grotesquerie — a withered, gnarled crone whose grey hair hung in matted ropes, framing a face, shrunken and deeply creased.  Her mouth was open in a hellish grin, baring teeth blackened with rot.  And the astonishing eyes that my friend had found so compelling were now but sightless sockets.

But what was most horrifying, what caused me nearly to faint dead away, was that held tightly in the outstretched grasp of  this corpse was the figure of Hugh himself!  Against all reason and the laws of God and Nature, there was my friend clutched firmly in the embrace of two stick-like arms and bony fingers that curled around him more akin to the long talons of a bird of prey.  His countenance was that of a man overwhelmed by hysteria — eyes wide with anguish, mouth open in a plea for salvation, and one arm thrust out towards me, fingers extended to their extremity.  My mind reeled.  If only I could find it within myself do something — anything — to help him!

At that moment I hit upon an idea.  It was improbable, yes, but no less than what I saw upon the canvas.  Perhaps, I thought,  if I could paint out the hideous figure of the woman, its power over Hugh would be broken  and he would be restored to the world.  Swiftly, I retrieved the palette and paintbrush from the floor.  I gripped the brush and dipped it into a thick pile of a deep blue paint.  I recalled Hugh’s description of how the pigment had grown thicker, and I noticed this myself straight away. As I neared the tip of the brush to the canvas, to a spot over the hag’s face, I had the sensation of an electric shock course through my fingers and hand, and the bristles were pulled as if by a magnet onto the painting’s surface.  Reflexively, I jerked the brush away, though the tingling in my hand lingered.  I thought this a passing strange occurrence, but I concluded it must have been a momentary episode of static electricity and nothing more, so I again lowered the brush toward the painting. 

This time the effect was more pronounced.  As the tip of the bristles came into contact with the canvas, not only did a sharp tingling ripple into my hand but extended part way up my arm.  At the same moment, I beheld a large globule of the thick paint flow up the handle of the brush until it touched my fingertips.  Again, there was the sensation of a magnet’s pull, this instance stronger than the first.  And this time, with amazement, not only did the paint continue to ooze upon my fingers, but I saw the tip of the paintbrush bristles actually penetrate the surface of the canvas!

Horrified, I used my left hand to tear  myself free of the force which was growing in power.  Deeply shaken, I realized what Hugh’s fate had been and that I dare not risk a third attempt to alter the painting.  And, I can confide in these pages, I was overcome with raw fear, so much so that I hurled the palette and brush to the floor, and, with a long, wrenching backward look over my shoulder at the image of my friend frozen in his eternal torment, I turned and, God help me,  I ran!

Nick Young is an award-winning retired journalist whose career included twenty years as a CBS News correspondent. His writing has appeared in the San Antonio Review, The Green Silk Journal, Short Story Town, CafeLit Magazine, Fiery Scribe Review, Sein und Werden, Typeslash Review, 50-Word Stories, Sandpiper Magazine, Pigeon Review and Vols. I and II of the Writer Shed Stories anthologies.

“Hey, you alright?”

Nick opened his eyes to a dim swamp-green haze. He lurched to his feet, weaving his fists in the direction of the voice.  Pain shot through his skull, and he grabbed the side of his head. His fingertips traced the edge of a sticky crater under his matted hair. His vision doubled and he staggered falling backward against iron bars. He slumped to the floor. 

When Nick’s eyes opened again, he lay motionless. His body ached and the wound hiding under his hair throbbed. He studied his environment.

 He was surrounded by cavernous walls glowing faintly with a blue phosphorescence.  Heavy brackish fog snaked throughout the cave and disappeared into blackness at the far end. There was a sourness to the air making his eyes water.  Thick oxidizing bars pressed against his spine blocking the only exit he saw.  This was a cell, and he was the captive.

A man with greying skin and untamed white hair emerged from the recesses dragging a tattered blanket and humming to himself. Nick watched him scamper in and out of the darkness until he stopped and squatted at the edge of the shadows. He placed a tied bundle of fabric on the cave floor and worked the knot. Unfolding the loot, he pulled out a broken stick and set it aside, then he rummaged through a pile of yellowing bones. He lifted one, held it to his eye and peered through the shaft. He showed it to the stick and giggled, “Oh, it’s a good one.”

 He secured the bundle and set it aside, then gently picked up the stick and carried it along with the bone and blanket to an outcropping of blue rock. He nestled the stick in the blanket next to him.  He sniffed and turned the bone between his fingers.  Placing it in his mouth, he rolled it back and forth like a fine cigar, every so often offering it to the stick.

 The old man sucked and chewed at the bone. He shook it trying to dislodge the last bits of dried marrow at its center.  Nick turned away in disgust.

The old man caught the movement and darted to Nick’s side.

“Hi,” he said, grinning, the scent of carrion wafting around him. Nick grimaced. The man pressed his papery skin against Nick. “I’m Hazen,” he said, nodding so fast Nick thought his head might pop off and roll across the floor. Hazen pressed his palms on the warm flesh of Nick’s arm and leaned closer.

“Get away from me. I don’t give a shit who you are.”  He shoved Hazen backward. “Don’t touch me,” he growled. Hazen skidded across the rocky floor scrubbing the flesh off his knees. Nick jumped up and gripped the bars of the cell. “Someone better get down here, now!” Hazen dragged himself from the ground, stumbling.

“Stop,” he pleaded. He grabbed Nick’s hands pulling and prying at them.

“Hey, I know you’re down there!” Nick’s voice reverberated through the corridor.

“No, stop it, they’ll come. Be quiet,” Hazen tugged frantically at Nick’s arm. Nick rammed his elbow across Hazen’s cheekbone, blood splattered through the air as his skin split. Hazen dropped to the ground moaning and cupping the side of his face. Red seeped through his fingers and ran down his wrist. He rocked back and forth whimpering.

“Thought we could be friends,” he said looking his bloodied hands. He touched the wound on his face, wincing.

 “Pathetic. There’s nothing I want from you,” Nick said glaring down at the crumpled body on the floor.

“But I know how to stay alive,” he whimpered. He gathered his stick and blanket and crawled into the shadows of the cave.

#

The wound on Hazen’s cheek had clotted and was a dry brown smear when he re-emerged from the back of the cave. He draped the tattered blanket over his shoulders as he moved along the cave wall, tannin tainted mist swirling in small eddies behind him.

Nick was still gripping the bars and staring down the corridor. He listened to the muffled whistling, stomping, and uproar of a crowd in the distance.

“What’s down there?”

Hazen kept one eye on Nick as he approached the front of the cage and peered through the bars.

“It’s the Game Room.”

“What the hell is the Game Room?”

 “Can you remember, before here?” Hazen whispered as he pulled the blanket tightly around his shoulders and looked at Nick.

“Don’t mess with me,” Nick spat. Hazen shied and backed away.

“Look around. This isn’t Earth.” Hazen ran his hand over the sparkling blue cave wall.

“Make sense or I’ll crack the other side of your face.”

Hazen winced and paced the room. “Can’t we be friends?”

“You’ve already got one.” 

Hazen looked at the stick in his hand. His voice thinned, “I been here a long time.” He picked at the wound on his cheek. “No one stays.”  His hand trembled through his snarled hair as he paced the void in the center of the cave, his eyes darting. He raised the stick to his ear. He shook his head. “No…I can’t. It’s mine,” he whispered.  His pace quickened as he argued under his breathe. A few moments later, he stopped and nodded. Hazen placed the stick on a glimmering outcrop of rock then walked toward Nick.

 “Here,” Hazen stammered, “you… can have it.” The rotting blanket dangled from his hand like a prized pelt.

Nick slapped the offering to the ground. “Get that away from me!”

Hazen shrieked as the blanket sank to the mud. He pulled the blanket from the floor and stroked it against his cheek.

 “I just want someone to talk to…another… person,” he whispered.

His focus drifted as he mumbled into the tattered fabric, “A silver lining…mom said find the silver lining.” He nodded, staring into the blackness at the back of the cave.

Nick grabbed him by the shoulder.

His vision cleared and he stared at Nick. “You have a choice,” he said, “you don’t have to go to the Game Room. Stay here. Stay with me.”

Nick dropped his grip and stormed back to the bars, bellowing down the corridor. Hazen stumbled to his side. “It’s not so bad here,” he rattled.  His eyes jumped between Nick and the darkened hall, “stay…please.”

Nick’s demands boomed and echoed through the thick air and bounced off the hallway walls.  “Stop, you got to stop,” Hazen pleaded.  Nick shouted louder. Hazen slumped to the floor at Nick’s feet. “Please, don’t call them,” he moaned.

“It’s about damn time.” Nick glared at three advancing shadows against the hallway wall. “Results,” he said, and looked down at Hazen. The spot at his feet was vacant. He looked over his shoulder, but the old man was gone.

Nick dropped his grip on the bars as the figures drew close. The slick skin of their towering frames glistened in the pale light. Folds of skin connected their arms to their torso, like the wings of a bat, and rippled with their every step. Nick stared into the gaping hole hiding behind a mass of urchin-like tentacles dangling from the center of their faces. They spoke in clicks and snaps as they stared down at Nick with tiny coal spot eyes.

Nick backed away.

“Hazen?” He scanned the shadows behind him. The barred door swung open, and the creatures entered the cave. “Hazen!” Nick screamed and scrambled backward.

In one flowing movement, the creatures surrounded him with their fleshy wings and shoved him into the hallway. The door slammed shut.

Hazen pressed his hands over his ears until Nick’s screams faded down the corridor.

#

Nick peered down the grid that lie spread before him. He was the only human lined up for the game. All the players stood on the starting squares like pawns in a life size game of chess. He did not recognize any of the creatures assembled here, but he could tell they were also here against their will.

Nick turned his attention to the playing field. It reminded him of old coliseums he’d seen on television except the ground was divided into a giant checkerboard of colored squares. Some squares were yellow, some red, others were covered in a grassy mat, but most of the squares were made of textures he’d never seen before.

His thoughts turned to Hazen cowering on the floor muttering about staying alive. He had to find a way out, now. Blood surged through his legs, and he bolted from his square, heading for an archway twenty yards behind him. Before his third step touched turf, he slammed to the ground jolting and convulsing. A small black ball whizzed and circled above him, electricity zipping across its surface ready to strike again. Nick crawled back to his designated square.

As the crowd packed into the stands, they taunted and jeered the players.  A whistle sounded and a hologram appeared. It demonstrated a mock game and a visual set of rules. Nick’s jaw tightened.  The object was simple- get to the other end of the game board alive.

When the Grand Marshall, king or whatever it was called, rolled a multicolored die, the player that was up, had to move through the squares to that corresponding color. Easy enough, except according to the hologram half the squares held things that could kill you. The yellow squares, at least, were safe zones.

Violence erupted down the line, and Nick watched three electrified balls whiz past him. Another whistle blew and the crowd exploded. The game had begun.

Each player took their turn and stepped onto the squares. It was Nick’s turn and he looked to the Grand Marshall. Hazen was sitting at his feet.

“You son-of-a-bitch!” Nick lunged toward the stands. A black ball snapped to attention spitting white hot sparks and drove him back to the game.  He glared at Hazen.

 Hazen buried his face in his blanket. “I tried to help,” he cried.

The Grand Marshall rolled the die. Nick made his choices and survived. Hazen watched each player as they advanced across the board. Bloody corpses littered the grid, and only a handful of players crossed the halfway line.

It was Nick’s turn again. He glared at Hazen then looked to the board. Hazen absently chewed his fingertips and rocked back and forth gripping his blanket. The Marshall rolled. Nick had to get to a rust-orange square.

He studied the board. His first two jumps were yellow squares, safe zones. He made the moves easily. Then he contemplated his options. The square in front was covered in weeds and grasses. The squares on either side of the grass were covered in a red powdery clay. He stared at the clay, then back to the grass. He wiped his forehead and stepped toward the clay on his right. He stopped. Something rippled below the surface. Two serpentine heads poked from the clay, hissed and spit venom at each other, then darted below the surface again and out of sight.  Nick jumped to the grass and froze. Nothing happened.

Hazen sighed. The Marshall looked down at him, made a clicking noise then reached out his large smooth hand, and stroked Hazen’s head.

Nick still had another move to make to reach the orange square, but the end of the game board was in sight.  Another roll and he would walk off the grid and deal with the old man. He should have warned him.  He tightened his fists, glancing at Hazen sitting like a dog at that monster’s heels.

Nick let out a breath. Sweat rolled down his forehead and he wiped it away. The crowd hooted and stomped rattling the stands.

A red clay square was in front of him. To the left, the square bubbled with a pungent gel, the vapors burning his nostrils. He looked to the right. That square was a solid block of concrete. He looked at the red clay again and didn’t see any movement, but he didn’t trust it. 

“Come on, come on…” Hazen whispered, chewing at his nails. Nick eyed the cement one more time then scowled at Hazen. He jumped, landing firmly in the center of the mortar.

Hazen’s mouth dropped. It happened so fast that Nick still had a smirk on his face when his body hit the ground. As his feet landed on the cement, laser wires sprang from below and sliced through his flesh. He hit the ground like a carcass in a slaughterhouse.

#

Hazen pulled the blanket tightly around his shoulders and rocked in the darkness of the cave. He heard them coming and looked up. The creatures chattered back and forth as they opened the cage door. They whistled and clicked in Hazen’s direction and slid a large bowl toward him.

 Hazen poked through the gift, passing by black entrails and yellow leathery hide, until he saw the glint of crimson. Human muscle. He held it reverently as he gave thanks to his mama for teaching him to find the silver linings. He offered the first bite to the stick.

Roseanne Rondeau fell in love with sci-fi, ghosts, and speculative fiction at a very young age and enjoys writing these types of stories. She lives in New Hampshire with her family and has been published in Midnight Times, Alien Skin Magazine, and Nocturnal Lyric.

The fresh smell of sea air wafted its way through the car window as I arrived at the familiar retreat. My home from home.

Over the horizon the I spotted the endless blue of the North Sea, appearing as if from nowhere behind the tall hills and cliffs of the east coast.

Thornwick Bay lies in the heart of the Flamborough clifftops, a picturesque painting of the East riding Yorkshire landscape. The site attracts families and tourists interested in hiking, sightseeing and dog walking. At just 4 miles north east of the popular coast of Bridlington, there is opportunity to head out to the pebbled beach depending how volatile the blustery weather is on the day.

            The site holds many activities such as swimming pool and clubhouse complete with arcade games that enjoy gulping your spare change as holidaymakers down their expensive alcoholic drinks. The entrance to the park is a long stretch of road, equipped with fishing lake and walkway that heads up to the local pub – The Viking, a pub from yesteryear serving exceptional food and strong cask ales.

            The most prominent feature of the area is the old lighthouse that stands tall on the cliff tops staring out to the North Sea. First lit in 1806, the lighthouse has a history of guiding vessels to both Bridlington and Scarborough with the white giant standing at almost twenty-seven metres tall. At the summit, the steel railings of the balcony and huge lantern face.

            Some places in the world, a person can just make a connection, an unexplainable bond with the landscape. For me, it’s Thornwick Bay, the place that I hold dear to my heart. This place which is home from home. This place that terrifies me to the core.

So, why have I come back?

*

I first visited the site when I had been six-years old and returned every year since until I was thirteen.  Back in those days, mobile phones had just shown glimpses that one day they would take over the world, Woolworths still sat on the Highstreet and Michael Owen was giving the Argentinian defence nightmares in the World Cup of 98.

It was also when Thornwick Bay wasn’t being run by a larger enterprise. The clubhouse still had the green and purple carpet where your shoes stuck to the spilt beer, the fish and chips were served in old-fashioned newspaper and the only thing to do as a kid was play on the muddy grass.

            My sister and I were excited. Nothing beats being a kid going on a cheap caravan holiday with cotton candy and sugared doughnuts. We were a middle-class family. Rarely did we go abroad, instead mum and dad saved for two of these caravan holidays every year. We didn’t crave plane rides to exotic places, maybe because we didn’t know any different.

            Mila was eight at the time. The five-year age gap causing irritation from time to time. Whenever a friend was over from school, mum told me that I had to somehow involve Mila, which was a pain because all I wanted to do was talk about girls and play Resident Evil or Cool Boarders on the Playstation.

            Mila on the other hand with her brown pigtails and chubby face was finally coming out of her Disney princess and unicorn phase, falling into that stage where interests changed, yet couldn’t pinpoint what to do to stimulate her mind. The result was that Mila developed a fascination in trying to get involved in everything I was doing.

            On holiday though, I enjoyed her company. She was my little sister after all.

*

            For as long as I can remember, I’ve been what many would describe as a loner.

            Approaching forty-years old, I’ve never married or had kids. Regretfully, I don’t think I will ever have the chance to bring a family to the seaside to thrive on that British childhood that Mila and I had.

            When I pulled up outside the caravan I’ve rented for the weekend, I just sat for a few moments, taking in my surroundings. I’m back. Back where it happened. Back to the place where mum and dad pledged they’d never return throughout their lives. This place that drove mum to her early grave.

            Beside my caravan is a small park, made up of a few swings, a slide and seesaw. There were a few kids with their families, but the park was quiet being in October and out of season.

            There was cold in the air, the waning voice of winter on the horizon, the smell of cold. Inside the caravan I dropped my overnight bag thinking about the closure I needed. That bag signified that I was coming back, and that thought was futile.

This place has haunted me since that summer in 98, and now was the time to build up the courage, to rip off that bandage of guilt.

*

I’d entered the caravan just as nightfall came knocking.

            I remember it was night because I recall the moon being so large and the vast number of stars in the clear black sky.

            Mum and dad were watching a movie – some thrilling detective movie by the look of it. There was a smell of burning and a half-eaten pizza on the side.

            They’d told us to be back by nine – no later.

            I walked in with mud on my hands and a distant look on my face.

            ‘You guys have fun?’ mum asked, not taking her eyes off the TV.

            I couldn’t reply.

            Had I had fun? I couldn’t remember.

            After a few seconds, which felt like hours in the silence, mum turned to look at me.

            Her smile cut short: ‘Will? Where’s Mila?’ she asked.

            I looked back and shrugged, ‘can I have some of that pizza?’ I asked moving forward.

            ‘Will, where’s Mila?!’ mum asked again.

            Dad had finally embroiled himself in the impending volcanic conversation. He’d jumped up and circled the exterior of the caravan finding no sign of my sister.

            All the while, I was gnawing on burnt yet delicious cheese pizza.

            ‘She out there?!’ Mum called.

            Dad came back in and shrugged.

            ‘Will, where is your sister?!’ mum finally erupted.

*

I settled down and had a cold beer with whiskey chaser on the side in the clubhouse bar – aptly named: The Lighthouse. As it flowed down, I could feel the nerves beginning to calm, only ever so slightly though. I couldn’t get her out of my head. She’s waiting, I can feel it. I must take my mind to another place.

Focusing on my surroundings, I concentrated on the bar. Gone is the homemade pub grub of the old clubhouse, now replaced by modern and generic food that is overpriced and clearly straight from the kitchen freezer.

Outside, children played on the larger park, field, and sandpit. It’s cold as ice, but kids don’t feel the cold, do they? Or maybe they do … I would imagine Mila certainly did.

In the distance, the lighthouse flashed, its beacon drawing me in.

I’d put this off for far too long.

The memory of what happened that night is still blurry, like a smudge on a camera lens, there’s a picture there, only I can’t make it out.

After a few more drinks I decided that it was time. Time to face the past, to face my demons.

Over the field I walked in the perishing night, my shoes trudging in the soft moist grass. At the end of the entrance road, I turned left and down the long stretch of country road flanked by tall foliage swaying in the icy gusts. Soon I passed The Viking pub, seeing the smokers stood outside laughing and joking. If only they knew what dwells here, deep in the crust of the cliffs.

Those caverns hide a dark secret don’t they, Will?

Before I knew it, I’d arrived at the lighthouse and fear gripped my senses.

*

Mila was found the next morning.

            She was floating face down in the shallow water on the rocky beach. It was the owner of the café that had found her. She’d screamed so loud that a hiker on the cliff came running to help.

            Mum and dad were inconsolable as expected. Me? I had been in a trance since the night before wondering why I hadn’t had breakfast and wondering what all the fuss was about. It would be days later after we arrived home that reality would sink in. I’d fall into a despair that any other feeling would be inferior. Mila was gone and she was never coming back. Mum and dad blamed me; I could see it in their eyes. They never out right told me as much, but I could see it.

            The doctors had said the trauma of what happened blanked out my memory and that’s why I couldn’t explain what happened to poor little Mila.

            Even now after all these years later, as the memories slowly come back do I question what happened that night.

*

Making my way past the lighthouse, I stood on the cliff top.

            Peering down I saw the hard waves crash into the protruding rocks below. On the cliff was a steep walkway down, manmade in the earth and dirt with wooden steps. As the terror of what I might find down there gripped hold of me, I contemplated turning and running , just like the coward I am.

            As I did, I looked up and saw the small girl at the top of the lighthouse. She was stood on the balcony, holding onto the rails with white hands. It was hard to tell whether she was stood or floating but either way she was looking down at me with pale blue eyes, glinting like the stars behind her head.

            A thrust in my heart told me what I already knew that the figure was my little sister.

            There was a gash on her head and her body looked … unnatural.

            Like a contortionist, her limbs were crooked.

            The way she had been found.

            After few rotations of the gleaming light of the lighthouse, the apparition of Mila disappeared.

            Whether my mind had played tricks or not, seeing Mila was a warning that if I didn’t face the thing tonight, then I would be haunted forever.

            The thing in the cave that took her from me.

            With the last pluck of courage, I started my descent down the steep steps down the cliff side and toward the beach. Toward the cave. 

*

Mila and I had been playing on the park.

            As the night drew in, I suggested we head back to the caravan to mum and dad.

            But Mila, being the age of inquisitiveness said that she was wanted to see the lighthouse. Checking the time, we had another hour or so before we had to be back. I’d said we had to be quick because the sun was setting.

            Once there we’d looked out to sea, breathing in the freshness that only the coast can bring. That’s when Mila pointed down to the beach.

            ‘What’s that, Will?’ she asked.

            Following her finger, I squinted.

            In the sea, something was floating.

            A body.

            At first, my mind processed it as maybe a wide sheet of material or something else. But I quickly calculated that the navy leather clothing and grey hair was in fact a person. An old man by the look of it.

            ‘We need to get help,’ I said.

            ‘We can help, Will!’ Mila yelled.

            Looking around, I saw no one in the area. No one to help.

            I nodded, starting down the steps, with Mila close behind. Rushing onto the beach, we ran straight to the sea and found nothing. The thing floating in the water was gone.

            Frowning I looked back at Mila, ‘we should get back, Mila,’ I muttered.

            Something felt off. I couldn’t explain what but certainly felt it.

            ‘I don’t get it,’ Mila said. ‘Have they sunk?’

            ‘We’ll get back to mum and dad and call the police,’ I said taking her hand.

            I turned and started to pull Mila with me and that’s when I saw the movement in the cave to my left.

            The old man was staring at us

*

Inside the cave I made my way over the rocky and slippery surface, the familiar feel of sliding on the moss underneath my feet.

            When I got to the end of the cave, I looked out at the blustery waves, the tide spraying up before me. Around me the shadows hid deep in the cave interior, nothing but the occasional flash of the lighthouse providing any light.

            ‘I know you’re here,’ I said.

            Only the splashing waves answered.

            ‘I said, I know you’re here,’ I said again.

            And then he came, moving from the darkness to my right-hand side.

*

Mila and I entered the cave, calling out after the old man.

            At the far end of the cave, he sat upon the rock, a statue glaring out to the ocean. From the back of him I saw the long grey hair drop to his shoulders beneath a white cap and he wore a navy leather jacket.

            ‘Were you just in the water?’ I asked.

            For a moment the old man just sat.

            Without turning, he said: ‘I’m always on the water.’

            ‘You looked like you were in trouble …’

            ‘Here, to the water and then to the lighthouse,’ the old man replied. ‘Then I get to see beyond the light, until I venture here again … back to the water.’

            ‘Do you need help? Is there anyone we can get for you?’ I asked.

            ‘Help? I’ve been alone so long, yes, so very long. It gets awfully lonely in that lighthouse.’

            ‘Lighthouse? I didn’t think there were any lighthouse keepers left these days?’

            The old man fell silent. Then he turned. He was old in the face with a bushy white beard, his skin weathered. As the light from the lighthouse came around, Mila and I saw something that made our knees fall weak. On the right side of his face was exposed skull and bone. His eye socket was black. The left eye was glazed over with a milky white glaze.

            ‘Yes, it gets awfully lonely here,’ the old man said.

            Mila screamed. Her sound echoing off the cave walls.

            ‘Aww, don’t scream, child. Do you want me to show you what is beyond the light?’ The old man asked, stood, and held out a gloved hand.

            I turned to run, grabbing Mila by the arm. We skittered over the rock until I lost my grip. Then a noise that I have never forgot, one that has haunted my life since that night.

A quick yelp followed with a dull thud.

            Turning back, I saw Mila laid on the rock, blood seeping from her head.

            Creeping up from the dark, the old man appeared, moving unnaturally.

            Mila looked at me with terrified eyes, the blood from her head falling into the rockpools.

            Slowly, she held up her hand for help.

            I turned and ran.

*

I’d read about the old folklore tale long after those adolescent years.

            The lighthouse keeper who had tragically died when the isolation had become too much to cope with. Since then, he had wandered the caves in search for company. Or so the old tale had gone.

            Knowing the truth, I’d thought of myself psychotic.

            Years later, I’d wanted to tell my parents the truth. They’d never had the closure of what happened to their daughter. Only I held the key to the secret, and I’d kept it to myself in fear of being locked up in an asylum.

            Saying it now makes me still wonder what is real and what isn’t. The ghost of a lighthouse keeper searching for company.

            And he’d found it with Mila.

            I’m so sorry for being such a coward.

            ‘I’ve come to see her,’ I said.

            The lighthouse keeper said: ‘She’s great company, the little one. We have shared so many stories.’

            Tears warmed my cheeks in the blistering cold.

            ‘She’s my sister,’ I said. ‘I should have protected her from you.’

            ‘You should have. You could have.’

            ‘Let me see her.’

            The old man turned and faced the cave wall. Out of the shadows, Mila stepped forward, the blood matted on the side of her face. The same innocent expression etched on her like the last time I’d seen her alive. She looked upon me with crystalised eyes.

            Collapsing to my knees I pleaded: ‘Forgive me, Mila. I’m sorry that I left you.’

            ‘You have nothing to be sorry for,’ Mila said. ‘I’m keeping Edward company now.’

            ‘No, you lost your whole life because of me.’

            Mila placed her palm to my cheek. The cold was unbearable, making my face go numb.

            ‘You’ve wasted your whole life, Will. Why don’t you join us here in the lighthouse? You loved it here at The Bay, a home from home you called it. We can show you what’s beyond the light. Will, it’s so beautiful, something you’d never be able to comprehend until you see it. Would you like that?’

            I thought about the meaning of my life.  

This place had meaning.

            I nodded.

            ‘Come,’ Mila said holding out her hand.

            I stood and reached out as Mila backed to the shadows of the cave.

            I followed eagerly.

            ‘Mila! Mila! Where are you?’ I called out, the echoes hitting the waves.

            As I walked into the shadow I was transported to the clifftop. Above the lighthouse swirled. Next to me, Mila held my hand as we looked down the same way as we did all those years ago.

            ‘Are you ready to see what’s beyond the light?’ she asked.

            Turning to her I said: ‘I’m afraid.’

            ‘There’s nothing to be afraid about, dear brother.’

            Taking a deep breath, I stepped forward. Mila let go of my hand as I fell over the cliff side. On my way hurtling down, everything drew into slow motion. The light from the lighthouse, the sound of the waves, everything moved at a snail’s pace.

            I watched the night sky.

            The lighthouse grew smaller.

            As I felt the otherworldly impact and sudden pain, I blinked.

            Standing on the lighthouse, I gripped the steel balcony. Down below on the beach, my body was still and staring up at us.

            Next to me, Mila took my hand again. It wasn’t cold anymore. Mila felt warm to touch.

            Behind, Edward sat in the lighthouse, a broad smile upon his face as he watched us.

            ‘Are you ready to see what’s beyond the light, dear brother?’ Mila asked.

            Over the horizon I saw the lights of Thornwick Bay. I’d be here forever, in my home from home.

Ethan works for a utilities company in South Yorkshire. Currently he is editing his first novel that he hopes to be completed this year. The works of Stephen King and H.P Lovecraft are influences behind his fiction.

You ever fantasize about that one hot teacher? She’s usually blonde, beautiful and damn sexy. She styles her hair into a loose bun with individual strands of soft yellow curls framing her face. The two top buttons of her white blouse are never fastened. Revealing just enough cleavage to tease while still remaining respectable.

Well, no one ever had thoughts like that about Mrs. Thornton, our biology teacher.

Of course I can’t read other people’s minds, but Mrs. Thornton sort of discouraged lustful thoughts. If not through her physical appearance (She was plump, without being fat. She held her body rigid, but she didn’t move stiffly) then with her forceful personality.

She inspired fear in all of her students with this mystical idea of adult authority. We would never reach that kind of adulthood, her attitude implied, no matter how many years we gained. No matter if we obtain mortgages and car payments, children and grandchildren. Her authority was as unattainable as the clouds in the sky. And just as untouchable.

It was under that authority I married my childhood sweetheart during my senior year in high school. I’m African American, medium brown skin, and clean shaven. My wife Jen Lowe was white. Mrs. Thornton was all to happy to express her disapproval at the time.

“Greggy,“ she called me. A name I absolutely detested. “Now that you’re a married man, I hope you’ve given some thought about manual labor. Something involving your other muscles.”

How I hated her.

Still, after two years we were baby free and living a reasonable happily ever after. That is until Jerry invites us to Thanksgiving Dinner.

“How about it, Greg?” Jerry says on the phone. “I’ll do the cooking this time.”

That right there tells me something is wrong. Normally, I invite him to Thanksgiving. It’s part of an unspoken pact we made when we both lost our parents at the age of sixteen. Not to mention, I’m also the better cook.

“You? You know how to roast a turkey?” Unbidden, I picture Jerry with his spiky blonde hair and impish grin, pulling a hot burning mess out of the oven, flames leaping everywhere.

“No, of course not. Don’t go crazy over this, but do you remember Mrs. Thornton?

“Yeah.” My fingernails immediately rises to my teeth to be gnawed on, and I force it back down again. Such a stupid, childish reaction to a long ago memory.

“We got married last month. She’s going to do all the cooking.”

A beat of silence while my mind digests this.

“Fuck no.”

“Fuck yeah.”

“Well, good for you then, Jerry. Good for you. You know I always thought Thornton was such a …” Suddenly I feel Jerry’s anger radiating from my phone. I swallow the rest of my thought and let my words to trail off.

“Bitch?” He replies coldly.

The term I’m actually thinking of is lesbian. But Jerry would have been offended by that too. I keep silent.

He laughs. “I’m sure she’d agree with you. She’s well aware of her reputation at our school.

“So, she’s changed?”

“Let’s just say she was covering up her true nature. The real Thornton as you call her is a kind, sensitive and yes even a sensual individual. She brings that side out of me as well.”

Really? I think to myself. She must be involved in some serious BDSM then. Now I picture Ms. Thornton in dominatrix gear. Shiny black hair pulled in it’s usual tight bun. Her chunky body stretches unbearably tight in a leather corset. Her spit-less mouth is hard and unyielding. Except instead of holding a black whip in one hand, she wields a kitchen carving knife. You’ve been bad Greggy!

Part of me wants to chuckle at this image, but instead I accept his invitation.

A week later I’m standing at the front door of Jerry’s apartment. Jen is still back in the parking lot, unpacking a Turkey Tetrazzini casserole for our hosts. Even when invited to Thanksgiving, she still doesn’t understand that she’s not responsible for the turkey this time. It’s something I find both endearing and irritating about Jen.

I could just knock of course and enter. There’s no need to wait for Jenifer. Yet, part of me hesitates. I’m not sure why, except I do know really. Because I feel like I’ve just been sent to the principal’s office and behind that door was some monstrous version of principal Garret, just waiting with a wooden paddle for my ass.

You’ve been bad, Greggy.

I shudder.

Jen joins me, her frizzy, red curls bouncing up and down as she rushes to my side.

“I wonder what she’s like now.” Jen asks as she stands with me before the unopened door.

“Don’t know. Jerry says she’s changed a lot.”

“What’d she say when she found out we hooked up?”

I shrug. “I don’t think she approved at the time.”

“Why? Was it the black or white thing or cause we’re too young?”

“Probably a little of both.”

“Really?” Her brown eyes sparkle and her lips split into a wide grin. “I hope it does bother her then. I hope she clenches her ass a little tighter each time we …”

She stands on her tip toes and kisses my slanted smile. That’s my Jen-ger fire.

“They’re taking a long time to answer the door,” she says as she settles back down.

“Oh, well …The reason could be because I haven’t …uh, knocked yet.”

Jen raises both eyebrows at me. “You’re twenty one years old and you’re still afraid of her?”

That does it. I grasp the door knob, and the door surprisingly swings open unlocked.

Jerry comes bounding toward us like an enthusiastic puppy dog. “Hey gang. Nice to see you. Can’t wait to start the festivities huh?”

We shake hands, then I watch carefully as Jerry and Jen press their lips on each other’s cheeks. The two of them had dated a few times in high school before she met me.

He’s married, I remind myself.

Yeah, but dude is Mr. Thornton now. Who could blame him if …

“Where’s your wife?” I ask with a tight smile.

“Oh Becky? She’ll be down shortly. Wants to make an entrance, I guess. Can I offer you something to drink? A tour of the place?”

Becky? Becky Thornton? I never knew her first name. It sounds ridiculously casual when combined to the dark, brooding name of Thornton.

Jerry gives us a quick tour of the apartment. It’s modest but clean. When we’re done, Jen offers to keep an eye on the food in the kitchen while Jerry and I escort ourselves to the living room, beer cans in tow. Truth is she wants to make sure we continue our male tradition of bumming in the living room with the football game on.

There is a wide screen television available but no one turns it on yet. Not with the elephant in the room. I decide to dispel it immediately.

“So you’ve done it, dog.” I lean across the coffee table and fist bump him. “You had sex with a teacher. That’s every guys’ dream.” Just not with Mrs.Thornton.

He may have detected my unspoken subtext. “It’s strange how love can come for you from unseen corners. Sometimes, there’s a special someone who can see you, Greg. I mean the real you, when no one else can. I used to think I was a piece of shit. It effected everything I did. Caused me to be a real grind. Becky saw through that crap and she wouldn’t allow me to feel sorry for myself. She saw the adorable, fun-loving kid in me. She loved me even when I couldn’t love myself.”

“You seem happy.” I mean it.

He smiles and takes a sip of beer. “Put the blame on Becky”.

At that moment a woman enters the room carrying a tray loaded with hors d’oeuvres. I don’t recognize her at first, she is so demure, so quiet. Her hair is tied into a loose braid that lays almost sexily across one bare shoulder. She wears a blue dress. While her body is still thick, there is a looseness to it that I never saw before. Flowing where there once were blockages. Yielding, where she was once was hard. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Mrs. Thornton?

“Greg,” she says when she sees me. She put the tray down on the coffee table and takes both of my hands in hers.

There should be butterflies and flowers entwined in that braid, I think to myself.

“Mrs. Thornton.” I reply. The name still slides out despite her remarkable change.

“Please call me, Becky” She peers over my shoulder. “And Jenifer. How nice to see you again. You caught quite a catch with Greg.”

They exchange hugs and kisses and we all sit down.

At first no one says a word. It’s just too weird. This former teacher who had to be at least in her mid thirties, lurking among us and dressed like a Disney Princess. But Becky manages to soothe our nerves. We talk about marriage, the prejudices against youth and age, (not racial refreshingly enough.) The societal pressure to have children. How hard it is to save money on minimum wage jobs.

Surprisingly Becky isn’t condescending about any of it. If Becky ever was the teacher I remember, the one that used to assign me the job of fetching coffee and picking up after the other students, there is no sign of her now. I allow myself to relax.

And then the fire alarm goes off. A loud BRRREEEEE sound that causes my heart to skitter in my chest.

“What the fuck?” Jen says and rushes into the kitchen ahead of Becky. Jerry and I exchange glances and follow the girls.

It’s just like it was in my imagination. Except instead of Jerry holding the burning bird, it’s Becky with the blackened turkey on a tray. Her face is in total shock.

“It’s ruined.” She screams over the alarm.

Suddenly I picture the four of us in a parody of a Rockwell painting. Instead of happy, warm, white faces sitting with delight at the table there’s Becky with the burnt up bird. Jen snickering behind her cupped hand. Jerry attacking the smoke detector with a broom stick. And my black ass taking it all in. Call this artwork, Freedom from Fucked Up Idealism. I laugh out loud.

Becky seizes on me. Eyes fierce and full of hate. I take an involuntary step backwards.    

Then Jerry rescues me by circling Becky in his arms. It’s like he’s roping a horse at first, but eventually Becky stops struggling and relaxes against him.

“I wanted everything to be perfect,” she whispers.

“I know you did.” He kisses her nose.

**********

Becky isn’t the same after that. We sit down to dinner, Jen’s turkey tetrazzini, now the star of the show. Plenty of unburnt side dishes. No reason why we can’t continue as before. But I sense a darkness in Becky. An inability to realize that this is just one of those things you recall with fondness later in the years to come. Remember darling when you burnt up the turkey? Ha ha ha.

She begins with little comments.

“Sit up dear, you’re slouching”

Jerry, who is in the middle of one of his crazy stories, straightens up with hardly a glance at his wife.

A few moments later, “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

“Babe, will you let me finish?” To Becky’s point, all that mashed potatoes in his mouth looks pretty disgusting, I think inwardly.

“I would if you could tell the story correctly. What would help is if you chew and swallow your food first.”

Now he rolls his eyes. “Babe, just stop it. Okay, stop it.”

Becky seizes on him the way she did to me earlier. Eyes blazing.

“Gerald …” Gerald? “Let’s discuss this in the kitchen, shall we?”

Suddenly I feel sorry for …Gerald?

“Fine.” He throws his napkin on the plate and the two of them go to the kitchen.

Soft murmurings drift toward us. Jen and I strain to hear what’s going on.

“Wow. I hope I don’t ever get that bitchy.”

“You have.” I say distractedly. I’m still thinking about that Gerald name. How it’s sudden use seems like a threat and why is that?

She gives me a playful shot in the arm.

When they return Jerry/Gerald is noticeably subdued. He shuffles to his chair face down, lips pucker forward in a frown.

Becky looks maliciously pleased …as if she just roasted Jerry’s cock and ate it.

“Jerry, you cool?” I ask.

“Leave me aloooone!” He wails. The wounded cry from my own childhood when Mommy gives me or one of my brothers a pow-pow for bad behavior. He turns around in his seat so his back is facing us.

My mouth opens wide. I blink.

“What did you do to him?” Jen whispers.

“We had a discussion about how rude it is to correct your wife in public.” Mrs. Thornton continues while attacking her meal as if she were merely commenting on the weather.

“What the fuck?”

“No cursing if you please. We are all adults here.”

Three of us are adults. I look at Jerry. There is a tear running down his cheek.                   

“I’ll speak to you anyway I like, you Disneyfied skanky-ass bitch. What the fuck did you do to Jerry?”

“Jenifer,” Becky says brightly or really Mrs. Thornton. Because that’s who she is now. “I want to see you in the kitchen. Now.”

“Bet ya’ ass, I’ll see you in the kitchen. I’m not scared of you.” She shoves her chair so violently from the table that she almost tips over backward.

The situation is moving too fast. I wish there is a pause button I could push so that I have time to think.

“Jen,” I shout at her as she rises.

She turns on me. It’s that same headlight glare she gives me, when we get into our own little tiffs at home. Don’t you dare stop me, that glare says.

So, I don’t. Instead I return my attention to Jerry. I snap my fingers in front of his face. He ignores me completely.

Jen and Thornton depart for the kitchen. I hear the same soft mutterings as before. But no shouting from my Jen-ger fire. No sounds of cussing or the crash of broken dishes. That alone makes me nervous. I’d relax more if I could hear the angry noises of them arguing.

Jen returns to the table with that same headlight glare. So, she’s still in there. I tell myself. I close my eyes with relief. Mrs. Thornton also returns with that same pleased, just ate roasted cock for dinner expression.

“Jenifer, do you have something to say?” She asks pointedly.                                             

Jen’s thumb creeps into her mouth. Her other hand tugs on her left earlobe. “I sorry,” she replies around her thumb.

“Good girl” Mrs. Thornton replies. “Maybe we can now enjoy the rest of our dinner in peace.”

“Hell no.” I rise from the table. “I don’t know what you did to my friend, or my wife. But the shit stops here. You understand? Bring back both of them!”

Mrs. Thornton hardly glances away from her meal. “Let’s discuss this in the kitchen.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Now she looks up. Some dark emotion briefly crosses over her face and then passes. Apparently my refusal isn’t part of her game plan.

“Why not?”

“Because you do something to them in the kitchen. I don’t know what. Cut off their cocks …”

“I cut off your wife’s cock, Greggy?”

My face grows warm. I’m not sure what I hate more. That she stings me with my own suggestion that Jen has a cock, or the use of my vile nickname.

I get up and walk around the table until I reach her. I lean my head towards hers. “Undo the shit you did to my wife and Jerry. You do that or I’ll …”

“What? Call the cops?” She interrupts.

But I see the trap. What could I possibly tell the police? Excuse me officer, but Thornton here turned my wife and friend into mindless idiots. Please put her in jail.

She raises her hand. “No, that’s quite alright. It’s a shame you’re not as brave as your wife.”

“What?”

“Because you’re afraid of me. That’s obvious.”

“I’m not afraid of you.” On its own my left hand starts to tremble so I pound it on the table once more for emphasis. Jerry jumps at the sound.

“Then prove it. Let’s discuss this in the kitchen.”

I close my eyes and imagine the good ending. We enter the kitchen that is still the same modest cooking area it’s always been. There’s no caldron bubbling with magic. No bats flying about the cabinets. But there is the oven, a common every day oven. I’ll open it up, shove her in and crank the temperature to 500 degrees. Isn’t that how it worked in Hansel and Gretel? The witch gets cooked.

The good ending.

I reopen my eyes and stretch out my arm in a you-first gesture. Thornton leaps at my invitation and rushes towards the double doors that leads to the kitchen. Part of me knows my oven plan is useless. In reality I’m walking to my doom, but I still don’t hesitate. Maybe because despite the contradictory evidence, it’s hard to believe this five foot tall woman could possibly be a threat to my six feet and three inches self. But mostly it’s because of Jen. Even though those tearful brown orbs don’t belong to the same woman who gazed at me with admiration when I told her I was going to be the CEO of my own company some day, I can’t disappoint my Jen-ger fire. Despite her changed personality, she can’t ever be allowed to think me a coward.

It’s not like she’s going to cut off my cock and eat it for real, I tell myself. I imagine again Mrs. Thornton in her leather outfit wielding a knife. Goofy and terrifying at the same time.

I steel myself. We enter the kitchen.

          ********

When we come out, my mind is thick. A blur.

I trip over my shoelaces and fall to the floor. That starts Jen snorting,

“I’m telling!” I say hotly as I stand up. I’m telling on you, Jen.”

“I don’t care” she sing-songs. “Who ever tells it, dealts it.”

“That’s about farts.” Jerry says pointedly.

“Enough, all of you!” Mrs. Thornton re-enters. The grownup who’s in charge. I love her. At least I think I do. She’s much nicer then Jen. That’s for sure.

You want to know what happened, right? I know you do. It’s hard to explain ‘cause I not the same no more. I not grown up no more.

She cut me, alright. But not my wee-wee. Eew, that would be gross. That’d hurt a lot too. But she didn’t do that. No, she cut the part of me that makes me smart. Bye, bye grownup Greg. He’s gone forever. I don’t mind much really. ‘Mostly ‘cause, I forgot what grownup Greggy was like.

I sit back at the table and Missus Thornton nods. She’s happy now. She says that if I’m good I can join her in the bedroom later tonight. That might be fun. I tell her okay, but I not smart no more. She say that don’t matter. She say I always was a good student.

Chere Taylor lives in Orlando, Florida and shares her home with her teen daughter, two chihuahuas, five cats and one X-ray Tetra fish. She enjoys reading and writing and tends to have a sneaky respect for the inexplicable. Chere has studied creative writing at Western Illinois University and her fiction has won several contests on Scribophile and the Fiction Factory website. She has been published in several magazines including A Thin Slice of Anxiety and Granfalloon. She also currently has a story under consideration for the Pushcart Prize. 

The brown package had come at the wrong time of day. Loeb stood on the porch half awake and barely dressed in his blue bathrobe. There was a breeze, and the morning’s sunlight was falling in through the old oak that left dappled patterns of white and yellow on their small front yard.

For such a small package it sat heavy in his hands, and Loeb had never seen a piece of mail quite like it; perfectly square, clean and, with smooth edges. He saw no mail delivery stamps and he thought how someone must have dropped it off on their stoop overnight. The only markings he could find were his wife’s name written on one side in careful, elegant, handwriting.  Below that, almost to the edge, were the letters “S & B”.

Loeb smiled to himself at how it had an air of pretension.

S&B.  Stan & Boyd. Sonny & Bono. Satan & Beelzebub.

He stood there for another moment and stretched before going back inside to where the kitchen met the den.

“Julie?” He paused and waited for a response he knew wouldn’t come. “Package came.” Still nothing—but the silence of the house allowed his mind to wander, and he thought back to the time when the house wasn’t as quiet.

Julie would be in the kitchen again, dancing, and dressed in her pajamas. She would grab his free hand to try to make him dance. But he didn’t like to dance, and she knew this. And instead, he would stand, and smile and he would try to make her laugh but would fail.  And she would smile back, and he would grab her by the waist to pull her in and smell her hair and it would smell like almonds.  And then she would see the package in his hands and her eyes would widen, and she would jump into his arms and she would be so light that he would give in finally and dance with her right there in the kitchen, still hanging off of him as if she weighed nothing.   

But now a shadow had passed over her, and there was the silence.  At times he thought he could see the shadows as they came on.  But even if he missed the shadow, he could see the change come to her eyes. How it would come and go and would remind him of how sunlight changes in a field as the clouds shift overhead.  Yes, it was just like that.  She called them “her shadow friends,” and as time went on these friends had begun to visit more often and she had begun to hate him more and to blame him for all the things she thought had been done to her. Loeb kept his hand on the package briefly and then went to go change for a run.

When he got back, he entered through the side door. He was older now. He knew this. He also knew that his body took a lot longer to bounce back from things than it had in the past.  

I’m as old now as my father was when I was a teenager.

Strange concept. The idea of it. That it would always be just him and Julie. That the doctors had confirmed the reality that he now accepted, but that Julie never would. That even after years of trying, even after years of methods and procedures, each more extreme than the last, there was no way out of it. This reality in his mind was simply another example of the universe just being the universe—to dole out servings of cold hard irony, and to bring together two people who were both equally hoping to have many, many children, and who were both equally unable to have any.

As he walked back into the kitchen, the sweat was still running off of him, and he heard the television moaning from the backroom.  The kitchen table where he had placed the package earlier was now empty.

I see you’ve taken what you wanted.

He assumed she had taken it while he was out, and this fact didn’t bother him. Neither did her likely retreat with it back into the downstairs office, the same office which had lately become her place of refuge. What did bother him was the laughter he could now hear coming from that same place of refuge. Laughter that was not his wife’s, and which had came on so soft and distant, that he thought it had come from somewhere outside or up the street. 

Relax. She’s fine. You’ve both been so spooled up lately. All that weight on your backs for no reason.  

More laughter came from the office. This time it was louder, more metallic sounding. It seemed to linger in the air, like so many voices from an old radio. Loeb stared toward the office and imagined Julie talking to no one in particular behind its closed door and then he heard her.

“Loeb, are you here?”

Her voice was muffled from behind the door, and he didn’t answer at first, partly from his lack of desire to deal with her right then, and partly from the fear of the state of mind she may be in. But when she called out again, he finally walked over and put his ear to the door, grabbing its brass handle as if he were going to open it. But he didn’t open it.

“Julie, is that you?”

His question went unanswered with a silence that he had become accustomed to. It was a silence which seemed to grow louder each day, even if their lives had become emptier. She said it was the silence that she couldn’t stand. It was the silence that had caused her to retreat into that office each day—and it was him.

“We can fill it with kids,” she said. “Adopt enough to fill a whole house.”

We can fill it.

And they had tried to. They had filled out the paperwork. They had done the interviews. But the interviews didn’t go well, and the whole complicated process began to stall out. And when Julie fired their adoption consultant, things quickly went downhill. On the final day of what would become their last interview with the last agency on their list, she told the interview panel, if they didn’t approve them right then and there, she would kill herself. They didn’t even get a rejection email after that one. Instead, one week later Julie went back down to their lobby and threatened to kill the interview lead along with her family.

But time moves on, as it tends to do. The silence of the house remained, and Julie began to fill it in other ways.  Her favorite and most regular method was to keep the television on constantly, and loud enough for her to hear it wherever she was in the house, which was more often than not, the office.  Loeb found this annoying at first, but he eventually grew accustomed to the constant noise.  

He had finally told her there would be no kids. No kids, Julie. None of it. At least not until they figured things out. Until she got some help. But she would have none of it. He was to blame. And now, here he was, standing by this closed door, listening for his wife, and hoping she was all there. She had not answered him yet.

“Julie?” He said.

The door opened with a part of Julie’s face showing through the cracks. She looked him up and down with her eyes, as if he had just knocked on the front door to sell her rain gutters. It had been so long since he had seen her eyes–really looked at her eyes, and he had forgotten about the green in them. He thought of that green, and he thought of Italy all those years ago when he had first noticed that about her.

You remember don’t you, Julie?  At the fountain, in the Piazza Navona? But now your face looks so tired. We’re both so tired.

“Christ, Julie. You scared me.”

“What are you doing there?”

Loeb tried to look past her, to see what she had been doing, but she noticed and closed the door to block his view, leaving only a small crescent of her face still visible.

“I heard laughing. I thought maybe you had a friend over,” he said.

She scrunched up her nose. It was in the way that she used to. Then she smiled, and this surprised him, and he smiled also.

“It was probably the t.v. You left it on all morning again,” she said.

Loeb paused for a moment to reach out to her but touched the door instead.  

“Yes. You’re right,” he said, “I shouldn’t have that thing going constantly like I do.  It can get expensive.”

“Mmmm,” Julie responded. Her face changed, and she looked at him like she had remembered something she had forgotten. “We don’t have many expenses like other couples our age. I think we can afford to leave the t.v. on.”

Before he could speak again, she closed the door, and in the background of the house he heard a talk show go to commercial and the sound of laughter again.

The day moved on and Julie hadn’t come out from the office. The house began to retreat into dusk with the waning blue-grey light entering in through the kitchen windows. Loeb stood at their kitchen counter, eating, staring toward the coarse electric yellow light coming in from under the door to the office. 

Up the street a dog barked. He finished eating and walked to the office door once again and put his hand on the cold doorknob and waited.

Nothing, still.  It can’t keep going this way. 

He heard Julie’s voice begin to come through the door in steady rhythms, as if she were having an earnest conversation with someone on the other side. It was a rhythm that she had often used with him in the past, but as she spoke, he could hear another voice intermixed with hers. This one was fainter and more muffled, but it was there, and in a rhythm that seemed to answer Julie’s voice, as if it were responding to her questions.

“Julie?” He heard both voices stop.

“Loeb?  Come in. Come here.”

“Hi. What is it babe?” Loeb said.

“Come here,” she repeated.

Loeb pushed at the door and it relented and opened up, and his eyes bristled as they adjusted from the darkness of the rest of the house to the brightly lit room.

“Julie?” 

“I’m right here,” she said. 

She was sitting cross legged on the floor in a pair of her floral p.j.s behind their dark wooden desk. The package sat open and empty on her lap, and her stomach moved to the rhythm of her breath. She was staring at the wall as he walked over and there was a shadow falling on her face that magnified her pretty looks but made her look tired at the same time. 

“You okay? You feeling ok?” He said.

She looked up at him with an annoyed look that was quickly replaced by a smile. Her face brightened and she scrunched her nose again.

“Come closer, silly. Let me show you something.”

Loeb walked over and kneeled beside her and put his hand on her cheek.  

I still love you. Sometimes we are born at the wrong time though.  Sometimes all the feelings in the world can’t change bad timing. This can’t last, you know? It can’t go on like this much longer. 

“Look,” she said. She was excited and her hands were shaking as she reached down and picked up a small black vial the size of a jelly jar.

“Look,” she said again. Julie placed it in his hands.

It was light, very light and very small, and he didn’t understand how that was possible. 

“That’s it? That’s all that came?” he said.

“That’s it. It’s all I need; that and the instructions. Look. Just—look.” She was almost on the verge of tears from happiness.

 “I don’t understand. That package was so heavy. There had to have been more.” Loeb said.

Julie, giddy, started to laugh. “Loeb. Stop talking and look at the label.”

He looked at the label that was off-white and had the same elegant writing he had seen earlier.

No.6 Pregnancy Balm

“The Morning Star”

The blood rushed to his head and Loeb could feel his ears begin to burn and his face turn red.

Julie reached out and gently touched his hand with hers.

“Here. Read this,” she said as she handed him a piece of paper. “This explains how it works.”

But Loeb pushed the paper away.

“Goddamn it, Julie. Goddamn.”

Loeb could see a shadow come over her face again. It was like a shade closing behind her eyes. The pink of her ears turned white and with a burst of energy that surprised even him she bounced to her feet, propelling herself toward him and began pushing and punching him in the chest.

“Jesus, Julie, relax. Stop. I don’t get it, that’s all.”

“What don’t you get, Loeb?  I’m stupid?”

“I didn’t say you were stupid. But this…” he held up the vial, “this, is stupid.”

He grabbed one of her arms with his free hand, and this seemed to stop her, at least for the moment.

“Come on. Jules. Listen to me.”

Her face darkened even more at the sound of his pet name for her.

“No!” She said, and she pulled her hands free and slapped him in the face.

“Julie. Please. Just relax. Let’s talk about this.”

Loeb leaned forward past her and put the vial down on their desk.  She was crying now, silently crying in quiet fits and convulsions, and he could hear the moaning of the television in the background. He went to hug her since he wasn’t sure what else to do.

“No, you don’t. No, you don’t. You don’t get to move past this like you usually do. Not now. You know exactly what this is all about.”

She turned back and picked up the vial from the desk. Loeb grabbed her hand, trying to take it back from her.

“No. But that’s the thing. I don’t, Jules. I don’t know what this is all about. Except that this looks like scam to me. I’m more pissed that some company could take advantage of you like this.” 

“Doesn’t matter.”  She said, shaking her head. “It’s going to work. They said the Program would work. They showed me how. They showed me everything. I saw how it all worked and it was beautiful.”

“Ok. And who’s ‘they’ anyways?”

“What’s the point? You don’t care.”

“I do care. S & B. That’s on the label. Who are they?”

“The Company. The ones that run the Program. There’s an online questionnaire to start, and later they email your initial profile back to you and you go on from there to the next steps. They work with you through the whole thing.” 

Her face looked tired, although there was a strength to her voice that seemed to propel her forward. He knew that this strength was derived from anger based on that same emptiness and silence that she blamed him for. She had never received what she had wanted and had been promised. It was the thing that she considered taken from her.

“Julie. Listen to me. What could they possibly offer that could solve our issue with a single product? What kind of questions could they possibly ask that could give them any insight into our situation?” 

“They ask the things you would expect, Loeb—family history, life goals, medical history, how long you’ve been trying, what the particular issue is, things like that.  Later, they go into more personal things. In the end, I talked to them for hours, for days, but afterwards it was like a giant rock had been lifted off of me. It felt so good, Loeb. It felt so good. I felt so unburdened by it all.  And then they analyze the specific chemistry of your body and all your genetic predispositions based on the blood and saliva samples you send in—”

“Blood samples. Julie, seriously do you hear yourself now? Do you?” 

“Whatever, Loeb. Then they customize the first phase of the treatment plan—”

“I know it was disappointing for you. I know you wanted this bad. Maybe we talk adoption again. There’s always another way.”

“We’ve already tried all of that. If you had really wanted that it would have worked out, but you really never did, did you? I know you always thought it wouldn’t be the same, and anyways, it’s too late for that now.”

“What do you mean it’s too late? What does that even mean? Listen to me. You’re an educated woman. But you should know better. You’re just having a rough time of it lately. Just take a breath.”

“I hate you.”

With that Julie turned away and began to read to herself from the pamphlet, looking occasionally at her watch, before looking back to the instructions again, and then back to the watch. He stood there, watching as she took a bit of cream from the vial and spread it on her stomach, then placed the vial down and went back to silently reading from the pamphlet. The conversation was over, so he walked back to the kitchen and the door slammed behind him.

It was well past midnight when Loeb woke up in the living room where he had fallen asleep earlier in the evening. As he went to the kitchen he saw the same flow of light coming again from under the office door, but also the occasional quick shadow of busy movement from inside.

Still at it. 

From outside came the sound of aluminum cans hitting the ground. It was close, and Loeb walked into their bedroom to the window that had a full view of the front street. But before he could get to it he found his wife, fast asleep and naked, laying on the comforter of their bed.  Loeb’s mind quickly went back to the movement he had just seen coming from under the door of the office. He had seen light, he was sure of it, maybe not the movement, maybe he wasn’t remembering that part right, but the light, yes, he was sure he had seen light coming from under the door. But when he ran back to the office, this time with baseball bat in hand, no light came from under the door. And of course, when he opened it, all he found was darkness, and no one there.

I’m remembering wrong, that’s all. I’m just tired.

He heard the sound of a car starting now. It was loud and sounded like an older model accompanied by the whirring noise of a worn or loose fan belt. Loeb ran back to the bedroom where Julie still lay sleeping, unmoved by the noise, and he looked out the window.

The car had its headlights off and was idling out front of their house. The front end had a deep red rust color with the back half an ugly pea green.  Heavy exhaust billowed from the muffler, and its cab was completely dark, save for the red glow from the cigarette of the driver.   The car revved its engine again and began to slowly accelerate, rolling down the block and away from their house, before coming to a full stop. Loeb looked down at his sleeping wife and walked to the porch.  As he got there, he paused to look at the still idling car, which began to slowly accelerate again, as if it were reacting to his presence. He could still see the red cherry of a lit cigarette. Loeb took a step down the stairs but as he did, the car gunned the gas, and took off in an explosion of noise and fumes, and sped off, disappearing past the darkness of the intersection by the corner of their house. Silence returned to the night.

“Dick,” Loeb said out loud to himself and he walked back inside. He found his wife, awake and naked standing in the hallway just outside their bedroom, staring past him toward the front door.

“Jesus. What are you doing?” He said.

Her eyes shifted back to his face and she spoke slowly.

“Living with my choices Loeb. That’s what I’m doing.”

Loeb shook his head. He was too tired.

“Julie, I can’t do this now. It’s late.”

Julie looked at the door again and this time kept staring at it as she spoke.  

“You can’t wait for them, Loeb. Even if you’re excited and you really, really, want them to come.  That’s the very first rule they tell you.”

“What rule? What are you talking about, Jules?”

“You. I’m talking about you,” she said. “They just saw you outside hovering like an idiot and they probably didn’t deliver the next treatment. So now I have to wait until who goddamn knows when. And I’ve waited long enough. You’ve already made me wait long enough.”

Loeb looked at the front door and then back at Julie.

“Who. Tell me who that was out there, Julie.”

“Maybe if I call them they’ll come back, I don’t know.”

“Is this still about the cream? Was that them just now? Do you have any idea how shady that is?  They weren’t delivering anything. They were casing our house. That’s probably their endgame here—that would make more sense anyway,” Loeb said.

“Well, they weren’t Loeb.  No one was casing our house. They were here for me. To help me.”

“Julie, it’s a scam. You know the only thing that will help our situation? Science. Modern science. And we’ve already tried all of that. So internet cream won’t fix it. Nothing will fix it. Nothing will either of us. Ever.” Loeb stopped speaking.  He had gone too far and softened his voice. “Listen, don’t you think it’s just a little weird that a company would swing by late at night in a crappy car to deliver the goods? You don’t think that’s strange?” he said. 

His voice trailed off.  He heard the television again.

“No.” Julie said. “What I want isn’t weird at all. You may think so, but I’m trying to fix something that’s been broken for a long time now. Something you broke. I want a baby, Loeb.  They said it’ll work, and I can feel it working. I can feel it filling in something that wasn’t there before.”

“But Julie, do you hear yourself?”  Loeb continued speaking softly and placed one hand on her face. “You’re an educated, intelligent, modern woman, but you’re also talking crazy.”

She began to cry again.

“I’m crazy? I’m trying to do something here and all you can do is sit there and judge me and sit in this goddamn house waiting for something. Well there’s nothing to wait for Loeb, because this house is dying, and I will not sit in its silence another day with all that weight falling on me. I won’t do it anymore! A baby. I wanted a baby!”

All of her anger, all that buried anger, came spilling out now, and everything else seemed to drop away from around them. There was nothing left. Nothing else to say; nothing left for them to do really. And so she walked back to the office, and she closed the door behind her.

The next day Julie didn’t leave the office. Loeb left the television on for her. He went for a run. He ran errands. The day went on as it should, and at its end he was tired even though he had no reason to be, and so he walked into the bedroom and found Julie, who had finally left her sanctuary, already there, fast asleep on top of the covers.  She was naked, except for a thin wrap of gauze wound tightly around her belly.  Deep pockets of shadow sat below her eyes. He looked at her face and then back down to gauze that had cream around its edges. 

We’ll work through it.  We always do.

“But it only works if I’m involved in some way, Julie,” he said out loud.  He watched her blonde hair rising and falling with each breath as she slept; the rising and falling of it.  

It all keeps going around us, doesn’t it? Going and going. None of it ends, until the breathing stops. It’s all a miracle no one understands, really.

  Loeb lay next to his wife, and he felt his tired body start to let go to sleep and separate from itself like he could float above it—like he could look down at the chaos below him before floating back off into nothingness he had come from.  He thought about this feeling for a while, and then he fell asleep.

He woke up sometime later in complete darkness. His head hurt. He could see nothing but could smell cigarettes. For a moment he wasn’t sure where he was. It was like a light switch had been turned off inside him. He had been blindfolded, and he realized his arms hurt as well, and they were spread apart above his head in the shape of a “v”. His head began throbbing more with pain and he could feel the slow movement of liquid, likely blood, down his face. His mouth was unbound, and he felt it was the only free thing of his that was without pain, and he let out a slow strange noise that grew in the air. He seemed to hear that sound outside himself, and he was surprised that he could make a sound like that. Then he felt hands and he smelled cigarettes, and he could no longer feel the pressure of the blindfold on his eyes and could see again. Around him on the walls were mirrors, all partially covered by white cloth. A large mirror sat on the floor in front of the bed, uncovered and facing him. There was a slash of blood on the wall next to him, and in the corner an old man sat watching. The Old Man’s skin was yellowed and tight and sat like a mask on his face. He looked over at Loeb and smiled, showing teeth that were orange and black, either from long term neglect or decay, or both. Loeb watched him take a drag from a cigarette. 

Julie walked out from the bathroom.  She had a knife in her hand, and she looked at Loeb and began to walk towards the side of the bed.   

“Julie, who is that? What are you doing?” Loeb said.

She reached the bed and smiled, lifting the knife above Loeb’s feet before pausing and then jamming the knife into the bedpost where it remained. She pulled the bedspread down from the rest of his body, and he realized he was naked. She made tight folds with it around his ankles.

“Honey, what are you doing? Who is that? Why is he here?”

Julie said nothing. She began to walk along the wall staring into the mirrors as she went.  The Old Man took a folded piece of white cloth from the nightstand and covered the mirror on the floor.  He took out a small vial of liquid from his pocket and poured it onto Loeb’s stomach.  Loeb tried to break free, convulsing as the Old Man began to rub the liquid into his stomach, and thighs, then down to his legs.

Again, Loeb tried to free himself, but the ties wouldn’t give, and he collapsed onto the bed.

“Julie, let’s talk about this.  If you’re caught up in something, it’s ok. We can get through that.  But don’t do anything you can’t take back.” 

Julie took the knife again from the bedpost and slowly traced the outline of his chest cavity with its tip.

“I told you already, Loeb, they’re here to help. They made a promise. I made a promise. They’ve given me what I wanted. It’s all very clear and specific. The debt has to be paid with the blood of the father.” The Old Man smiled as she said this.

Julie, her eyes glass-like, dead, looked at the knife in her hand before bringing it to the center of his chest.

“You don’t need to do this. I love you. I can help you; I can show you.”

She moved the blade to Loeb’s lips to quiet him, then down his chin and back to the center of his stomach.

“You’ve already helped by just being here, Loeb,” she said. “We’ll all be fine soon.”

“Look. Look. Look. Please…we can fix this.”

The Old Man was still watching, still smiling, as he reached over to take a pillow from the bed.

“Shush now,” he said as he placed the pillow down over Loeb’s face.

“Don’t worry Loeb. Don’t worry, I love you too.”

Later that morning a strong wind will pick up and the blue light of dawn will come through the green leaves again. In all the front yards, tired parents will watch their wide-eyed children play, and the older couples, whose children have moved on and had children of their own, will drink coffee on their porches.  The sound of the morning will visit the air again. Then we will watch the cold, low sun burst through the trees and turn all the shadows into color. That light will dance on the grass in the yards around us and it will dance in the empty streets. All the lovely people will think to themselves how the day will be warm, quiet, and bright.

M.P. Domingos is a writer living in Northern Virginia in a house full of people and animals. He writes when he can, often on an old computer, and edits at night after the kids have gone to bed. He has previously published poetry in the Dillydoun Review and Rue Scribe. You can find him on Twitter at @mdomingoswriter.

Ivy had never heard of Robert Stanley Narr until she snuck into his apartment to steal some books.

“This Narr guy was famous for writing sci fi in the 50s,” said her brother Gabe. “He hoarded all these old trash magazines and paperbacks you’ll love for that blog you’re writing. What’d you call it, the Gutter something?”

“The Gutter Archivist.”

“Yeah, that one. You little genius.” He gave her a one-arm squeeze. “Just wear the t-shirt and lay low. You can take whatever you want as long as nobody sees you put it in your car.”

The t-shirt was a vivid lime green jersey with the words Haul-Ur-Junk Crew Member printed across the chest in gigantic black letters. It was so big on her she could have slept in it. That day, Gabe’s boss was allowing her to hang out with the crew as “temporary help,” but with her skinny white-girl arms and scuffed glasses she doubted she’d be much of that. Narr’s apartment was two thousand square feet of junk packed nearly to the ceiling, and to reach it she had to follow Gabe up five flights of stairs.

She was out of breath by the time they reached the door. The scholarly life she’d chosen didn’t leave much time for the gym, she thought.

When the building manager opened the apartment, the stink inside released in a burst, like from an airlock on a space capsule: stale old sweat and moldering cardboard, underlaid with a sweet-toxic hint of cockroach droppings and something worse, something sweet and wrong that made the back of her neck prickle.

But Gabe and his coworkers barreled right in without even a single pinched nose. This was what they did every day: cleared out rancid old hoards from people who’d died or who were about to be sued by the city. They slapped on their work gloves and started grabbing the boxes and bags and heaps of clothes crammed up by the door.

Ivy stole a glance into one box before a crew member whisked it away. Just like Gabe promised, Narr had filled it to the brim with vintage magazines.

The magazines were pocket-sized with titles like Worlds of Science Fiction and Fantastic Tales. Their covers depicted busty blond women with laser pistols and conical bras, burly blond men and monsters with lizard heads snarling over vast, alien landscapes. Underneath them were more magazines and paperbacks with five and ten cents stamped on the cover. Tomorrow the Stars, Rogue Queen, Rocket to the Morgue. As Ivy scanned the room, she realized the hoard of vintage pulp filled the apartment, interspersed with stacks of notebooks and yellowed typewriter paper thrown in heaps.

Her heart hammered excitedly. This place was an archeological find, the strata near the door being the most colorful, moving into the deeper caverns of stranger artifacts, packed so tightly together it was difficult for her to make her way through.

“Some of this looks valuable,” Ivy whispered to Gabe as he hoisted up a box.“Shouldn’t this be going to a museum or collection?” By collection she meant the sort of things she’d seen on display at the local university library. Glass cases of antique papers and letters, secrets kept under lock and key. She couldn’t actually get into the archives to read any of it, of course. To do that, she’d have to enroll in classes, which were way out of her price range, and the community member card program cost too much. Still, the time she spent lurking there helped Ivy recognize rare texts when she saw them.

But Gabe said, “Nah,” and then coughed. The cockroach fog and mold spores couldn’t be getting to him, already, she thought. He unloaded hoards like this six days a week. “The dude is super dead, he won’t care. The order says his family wants it all burned. No one’s going to miss any of this.”

 When she still didn’t seem convinced, Gabe said, “Repeat after me: this is not a steal. We are allowed to be here.”

Ivy nodded, but she stayed quiet. She liked to think of it as a steal. Or a tomb-robbing. When muscling her way through the narrow pathways of the hoard, she imagined herself as a pulp hero, an adventurous scholar headed into a temple to plunder treasures beyond comprehensi

Still, her ‘97 Corolla was small, so she had to be discerning about what she took. The Haul-Ur-Junk crew streamed around her, focusing on dismantling the strata near the front door, and didn’t notice as she disappeared deeper into the hoard. She found her way through to the back rooms, past a kitchen full of rotting food and heaps of take-out containers, where she noticed Narr had covered the windows in plastic tarps. That explained the stale air, Ivy thought. Weird that the man had entombed himself in his own stink.

The reek was most intense in one bedroom, a converted office full of sour body odor and the sweet-wrong smell. He’d probably died sitting right here, and the body remained there for too long before anyone noticed. His black leather office chair was mottled with stains. Ivy imagined Robert Stanley Narr in that chair, slumped back, turning purple for days or weeks, leaking fluids over whatever writing he’d died in the middle of. A single typewriter sat on the desk, one of the fancy manual ones with glass keys. A piece of paper still remained in the machine, with only two words typed on it.

                burn me

Ivy examined the paper. Was it Narr’s demand that his family burn all his works and belongings? Was it an Alice-in-Wonderland style comment written from the perspective of the object, like “eat me” or “drink me”? Or was it a short will and testament, just to say, “go ahead and cremate my corpse, I don’t care”? In any case, it was too short a textual artifact to make for an interesting post on her blog, so she kept moving.

Ivy checked the rest of the room for other items of interest. She saw behind the stacks of junk were multitudes of framed prints: what looked like vintage book cover art without the titles, which she figured were the original publishing mockups. There were even more busty and burly blonds in oil paints, thrashing dramatically along their alien landscapes, struggling with skull-faced aliens and gigantic snakes. (A lot of snakes, actually. Ivy skimmed over the phallic green boa constrictors with growing discomfort.) But as works of art they were vivid, well-executed, in bright oranges and greens and red. Kid-colored visions of space rendered in a capable hand with a dose of adult sexual desperation. Beautiful and ridiculous, Ivy thought.

One print stood out from the others, though. It hung next to the desk, positioned in a strangely clean area, like some sacred object painted in dark, moody oils. No snakes. She maneuvered herself around the heaps of junk to get a closer look.

The scene depicted a rocky alien horizon with the ruins of a city in silhouette. Narrow figures peeked out from between the pillars and slumping towers of the ruins, but the artist had painted them in such shadow that it was unclear if they were staring at the viewer or looking up at the starry sky behind them. Taking up most of the sky was a large purple sphere. It didn’t sparkle, but it had a soft glow around it, like an enormous moon squatting in the atmosphere. To Ivy, it seemed like a good cover for a book called Attack of the Spooky Moon or Death Star Strikes Back. Certainly, a departure from the overall sexy Caucasian astronaut theme. And Narr had actually kept it dusted.

For that reason, she guessed it might be something worth having.

Ivy eased her fingers under the edges of the frame and wriggled it off its hooks. With a bit of wrestling, the print came off, and a chunk of the wall with it. Bits of plaster tumbled down to dust her shoes.

Ivy winced and froze, turning an ear to the other room to see if she’d been caught, but the sounds from the crew indicated they were working on excavating a couch. (How the shit are we going to get this thing down those narrow-ass stairs? Jamal said.)

After a relieved breath, Ivy set the frame carefully down on the floor, near a waist-high stack of boxes full of Space Adventures for Men issues, and then she straightened up to examine the damage. She found a deep hole cut into the plaster, about the size of a safe but without a safe in it. She assumed Narr must have meant to put a safe there at some point, but either nobody would go through the apartment to install it or the general disorder of the writer’s mind had kept him from finalizing the project.

She stood on her tip-toes to peer inside the hole. In the darkness sat a cardboard manuscript box that looked decades old. The cardboard was deeply yellowed, reminiscent of the university archives and their antique secrets under glass. She navigated the box out of its hiding hole and set it down on the cleanest nearby stack she could find.

On top of the box, in a shaky hand, the writer had scribbled, No Escape.

“No escape from your cleaning skills,” she muttered.

Something clattered and hit the floor in the other room, and she heard Jamal laughing that this damn couch was going to take them all day. The noise inspired a neighbor to bang on the walls, and Ivy remembered she did not have authorized entry, no matter what Gabe said, and she didn’t want Gabe or anyone else getting heat for her being there. Better to get out of their way quickly so they could finish.

Ivy scooped up the contents of the half-finished safe and set it down into a Space Adventures for Men box. No time to read the manuscript now, and it would be so much better if she saved it for later when she was at home, nestled among her other salvaged books and artifacts. She tucked the print under one elbow, hoisted up the box, and started inching her way out.

Knowing she’d be too exhausted to make more than a few trips, Ivy made one last check to see if there was anything else she could toss on her load that wouldn’t take up much room in her car. It was then she noticed the plastic on the windows in here, too: heavy dust-covered tarps sealed with duct tape. Several sections of walls had caulking stuck to it, in zig-zag patterns that indicated breaks in the plaster that Narr had gone to weird lengths to seal up. Narr had even covered the central air vents the same way, closing himself into a vacuum of his own fetid body smells. Such germaphobe behavior didn’t quite match the mess.

Ivy wondered if, before dying, the writer had gone insane. Maybe he thought something would come sneaking in through the cracks.

#

At home and now freshly showered after her excursion into Narr’s hoarder tomb, Ivy rushed to get ready for her shift at the call center, taking only a few minutes to sit and shove a quick ramen in her face.

She sat on the edge of her bed in her tiny studio apartment, surrounded by her library. Four cheap plywood bookshelves were filled with her artifacts: books and magazines and journals salvaged from thrift stores and dumpsters. The majority of her collection was comprised of out of print paperbacks and small-press zines that hadn’t been in print for long at all, but the best pieces in the collection were her “one-of-a-kind discoveries” that never had a real audience. Desktop published recipe books from defunct church groups, handwritten journals and diaries that snuck into the “donation” box, typewritten manifestos from angry recluses, love letters from stalkers thrown in the trash. She even had a few found-footage vhs tapes for a category on her blog labeled “visual rhetoric from the gutter,” but overall she preferred things with words. Strange, lonely, poorly spelled words. Outcasts.

As she’d said in her most popular post, in which she cataloged the scraps of a Last Will and Testament unearthed from the bottom of an alley shopping cart, outcast words held a special truth, without varnish and without concern for who was looking at them. Real authenticity, to her mind, was always hidden.

Her new boxes were crowded in a place of honor next to the Narr print, which was propped up against her writing desk née foldable plastic TV tray. As soon as she got off work that day and slept a few hours, she would read and catalog Narr’s salvaged secrets. The Narr artifacts would be among her best posts on Gutter Archivist, as they were the most outcast and strange of all her finds so far. Ivy could hardly wait.

But she was forced to wait, for the day job called. In the fifteen minutes left before she had to head out, Ivy glanced at her news feed, hoping to see an update about the universal basic income bill introduced a week before. All the news talked about was some astrological event. A meteor or unidentified comet thing she couldn’t bring herself to care about. (Space was a rich man’s game. She just wanted to self-actualize a little. How amazing would it be if she had enough money to spend time on her archive and write about all these strange old things she’d collected?) When she found no news of a better future, she turned back to the articles on Narr in hopes of getting enough for an introduction to a post.

Her research turned up enough for a whole month of posts, and she got so absorbed she was almost late to work. She stopped reading only to drive and clock in, and throughout her shift she stole glances at her smartphone under her cubicle desk.

Narr, she discovered, wrote hundreds of pulp paperbacks with titles like Queen of Space and Doctor Galaxy, all shoved out in a matter of weeks to pack bookshelves with thin editions that cost five cents. The photos of him depicted a glowering old white dude, bearded and wearing a captain’s hat while smoking a pipe shaped into a naked lady. Gross, Ivy thought. When he died, he was wealthy enough to leave behind an “estate,” or at least a daughter and a few lawyers still concerned about his works. But the articles about him were more intriguing than his actual writing: they focused less on his books and more on the late-life mental break from reality that ruined his career.

“Hah,” Ivy whispered, slumped down in her cubicle. “I knew he was nuts.”

His madness started with a bad tooth. Narr was prescribed Sodium Pentothal to dull the pain after surgery (doctors gave out weird drugs in the 60s, Ivy thought), and suddenly one afternoon Narr heard voices in his head. It had nothing to do with the drugs, he said, except that they “opened his consciousness.” He thought these voices were actually a galactic hive-mind he called the Large Mass Trans-Neptunian Inorganic Multi-Intelligence 4921 (LMTNIMI 4921). The hive-mind told him secrets and future predictions, but when the “noise of their genius” got too much for him to bear, the intelligences found another way to send him their wisdom.

In a 1992 interview, Narr described the communication as a “hide-and-seek one-way radio game.” He would “enter a fugue state” (which was code for doing more drugs, in her interpretation) and then after waking up the next day, Narr would hunt through his home for secret messages left by the intelligences. The messages came in the form of typed letters stashed in strange places: behind the toilet, in holes dug into the floorboards, under reams of blank paper. They looked typed from his own machine. When asked if this meant he was writing the letters himself, he insisted no. It had to be “idea-particles” from space beamed down and re-assembled into forms he could recognize. The man would not entertain any notion that perhaps he’d just gotten blitzed out of his mind and forgot what he’d written.

The man was so nuts that Ivy started to like him a little. The craziest of all were the articles that talked about his last book, Escape from the Planet of the Damned, which his critics said was “a deranged experiment in self-insertion and new age malarkey.” An image search turned up the same art as the print she’d stolen from Narr’s apartment, only the spooky moon was covered up entirely by huge yellow letters. Supposedly the book included ideas about an impending apocalypse that Narr believed were true.

The novel’s main characterwas Howard William Barr, a “writer-psychic” who talked to interstellar intelligent beings via dreams. Barr helped the local government forces identify a rogue planet as it sailed closer to earth’s destruction. At the end of the book, the government destroyed the planet with an “anti-gamma hyper-oscillation ray” and Barr was given a “ticker-tape parade” for his heroism. Ivy was not surprised to learn that the main character was also tremendously handsome, a genius with five doctorate degrees, and popular with women. What fascinating junk, she thought.

She wanted more. Ivy skimmed what chapters of the book she could find online in between calls, and sometimes during them.

One passage she found matched the artwork she’d pried off of Narr’s wall:

They walk now, ceaselessly between the ruins, shells of their former selves,” said the psychic Barr. “The mad sorcerer-king of the Za’hyiil has overtaken their minds and souls with his transmigration of control particles. Damn it, man, can’t you see?” With his masculine fist, he pounded the president’s table. “Those loyal to the Za’hyill still seek out bodies to inhabit and control, as their very aura eradicates any civilization they come near. They are a lurking evil floating dark through space. They are Planet X. They will infect every red-blooded American man, woman, and child to transform us into their zombie slaves.

“Xenophobe much?” Ivy said with a snort. The sound made the team supervisor glare at her from across the isle, so she shoved her phone in her pocket. More for later.

But later was much later than she expected. After nine and a half hours of mind-numbing data entry and talking enraged customers off their self-entitled cliffs, Ivy’s head was dulled with exhaustion. Work had defeated her for the day: no energy for research or posts now.

When she got back home, she couldn’t bring herself to even lift the lid of the manuscript box. All day she’d begun to hope the box contained the unpublished sequel to Narr’s Escape novel. Such an artifactwould be a stellar contribution to her blog. It might even go viral. His estate might sue her! Ivy giggled when she thought about it. But despite her eagerness to get started, she was so tired when she walked through the door that she could do little but peel off her thrift-store khakis and fall face-forward into bed.

Once asleep, Ivy fell immediately into dreams. In them, she walked around a cold, dark lunar landscape between the remnants of a demolished city. Above her was a sky full of stars and a dimly glowing sphere that could have been a moon or a sun or another planet. Whatever it was, it was so gigantic that she could see the craters and outcroppings on its surface. On it, shapes moved, tiny shadows like a swarm of bugs.

She shuffled towards the sphere for a while before she realized she could never reach it, and she couldn’t stop herself. Even when a heap of stone got in her way, she climbed over it awkwardly and kept walking, as if her body had gone numb and stupid. She yelled at herself to stay still, but her body didn’t obey. Around her, narrow, humanoid-shaped figures moved within the ruins, keeping pace with her shambling steps. The sphere above them glowed softly with a deep purple halo.

#

Late afternoon the next day, Gabe called her, coughing something fierce and asking her to bring him a can of chicken soup and some cough drops. He was, as he said, “too near death” to go to the store himself. Ivy fought between supreme disappointment and concern; she figured Gabe’s hauling job had put him at risk for some weird bronchitis, with all the roach and rat infestations he had to walk through every day, but she also hated to think that she couldn’t spend her only day off reading and cataloging like she wanted to.

Ivy hopped in her car right away, toting Narr’s manuscript box and notes with her to read while helping Gabe convalesce. She hoped she could use his laptop to get a post started.

At the pharmacy, all the other shoppers were staring at their phones and asking each other “have you seen it?” Ivy figured it was the meteor or comet or whatever. She’d been too tired to remember to charge her phone before passing out the night before, and her dreams had been so vivid that she now ached like she’d run a marathon. She bought Gabe two cans of soup and a bag of cough drops, because that was about what she had for money left in her account. She wished she could get him more, but he’d have to give her cash if he wanted anything else.

When she got into her Corolla to head out to Gabe’s a few people stood in the pharmacy parking lot, looking up at the flat purple-blue sky, squinting at the approach of twilight.

She found her brother standing at the patio door of his apartment living room, coughing and wrapped up in a blanket like it was a robe. The lime green collar of his Haul-Ur-Junk t-shirt stuck out from the blanket’s edge, and she realized he hadn’t changed clothes since the day before. He looked thin, as if in the last 24 hours he’d shrank a little, collapsing in on himself. Sweat covered his face; Ivy didn’t like his grayish pallor.

She gave him the drops, and he took them with a limp hand. “Thanks,” he muttered. “This cold is killing me.”

“Shouldn’t you go lay down? You look awful.”

He shook his head. “I need to see the sky.”

Ivy shrugged. Gabe was always the outdoor type, and if the sky was making him feel better, she figured that was just as well. He’d crawl into bed soon. “You cool if I hang out for a while and read? I’ll be nearby if you need anything.”

“Sounds great,” Gabe muttered.

After heating up the soup can’s brackish yellow contents, she set it at the kitchen table for Gabe, insisting that he shouldn’t eat while tangled up in a blanket and standing. He laughed, saying he’d probably dump it in his lap. His arms felt like they didn’t work. Her plan was to stay near him just so she could take him to the hospital if things got bad (forget ambulances with their price tag). His coughing was loud, though, so she took Narr’s manuscript box to the empty bedroom, the one that Gabe was trying to find a roommate to occupy. There, she could still hear him; the walls in his complex were thin enough the neighbors’ voices snuck through. (Were they coughing, too? After listening for a second, she realized yes, they were. She thought, maybe something’s going around.) At least the closed door muffled Gabe’s sick noises enough for her to dig deep into Narr’s manuscript.

She sat down cross-legged on the beige high pile carpet and set before her the artifacts of a dead madman.

When Ivy opened the cardboard box, a roach skittered out. She didn’t jump; it wasn’t the first time a box or a book she found came with lives inhabiting it. The roach made its escape, and Ivy turned her attention back to Narr’s artifact, feeling a blossoming thrill of discovery. This must have been how real archeologists felt when getting to open a crypt.

Under the lid of the box, she expected to see a title page of the sequel to Narr’s novel, maybe Return from the Planet of the Damned or something, but the first page was blank. The second one was, too. Her disappointment mounting, Ivy pulled out the four-inch high stack of paper and found that almost every single page was blank. There was nothing to read. No words at all. The sight of it nearly pushed her to tears.

Suddenly, she felt betrayed, duped. Worse, excluded. The more she stared at the blank papers, the more she wanted to throw them against the wall.

Eventually, she did just that. In a swell of frustration, she gave the ream of blank paper a table-flip and sent the pages sailing across the carpet, well into the territory the roach had already traversed. For a moment they filled the air. A slight thump sounded underneath the fluttering as all the papers settled down, and in the scatter she caught the edge of a small square, about the size of a card. An envelope.

Crawling over on her hands and knees, she tugged the envelope out from under the papers. The aged glue on the flap gave up easily; all she had to do was pry one finger under the corner and the seal released. A bit of the paper crumbled away with it.

Inside was one typewritten page, single-spaced.

I was wrong. They’re not out to get you. They’ve already been destroyed. It’s the planet itself. It drew them to it. Something in the soil is poison. It leaks out even in the vacuum of space. An alien virus that can live in nothing. It *is* the nothing. The void. You will look for it. It takes over bodies. It compels you to move long after you’re dead. In a handful of decades, it will reach you. You will be ever moving forward.

I’m sorry.

LMTNIMI 4921

Ivy read the letter over and over, struggling between feelings of disappointment and delight. Not a full novel of mad, rambling nonsense, but possibly a communication from Narr’s intelligences, so that was interesting. Narr, in a drug-induced “fugue state” must have typed this up, dug a hole in the wall, and forgotten about it, the next-day blackout erasing any memory of what he’d written. If so, Ivy thought, it seemed too coherent for someone blitzed out on Sodium Pentothal. She was almost convinced a rational mind wrote it.

Then she wondered, how many other messages had he hidden in that wreck of an apartment. How many more would never be read? Her heartrate kicked up when she realized Narr himself might have never seen these words. How authentic their secrets would be then!

For a second, she was so full of joy it made her sick. Her system just wasn’t used to it.

Her pulse hammered in her ears, a thumping noise, soft and irregular. Too irregular. After a moment she realized the sound wasn’t coming from inside her head. It was coming from the living room.

Ivy looked up, and the letter drifted from her fingers. “Gabe?”

When she checked on him, she found him standing near the patio door where she’d left him, only now the blanket was pooled at his feet. His arms hung at his sides, and he leaned his forehead against the glass. Outside, it was dark, and the lamps around the apartment complex had buzzed to life, spilling a pale blue light over the courtyard. The sky was dark purple, a heavy twilight the moment before hard night fell. Something bothered her about the plate glass. She stared at it for a second until she realized what it was.

Under Gabe’s forehead, the glass was clear. No fogging. Surely her brother had a fever, and he was trying to cool himself down by pressing against a smooth substance chilled by the air outside. Then she noticed the bowl of soup at the kitchen table was untouched. Even though he was just standing there, the position turned her stomach. It was like his body was drooping, numb. But he was active enough to step forward, thumping against the door. He didn’t reach for the handle to get out. He looked broken. A surge of panic flooded her veins. Maybe he’d had a stroke, or something else terrible had happened.

Ivy came up behind him and plucked the blanket off the floor. “You okay, Gabe? You want a different soup?” She placed the blanket around his shoulders, and it slid right off again. He was so limp he’d gotten narrow, even the muscular square of his shoulders had drooped. “Hey, Gabe? Answer me, okay? Should we go to the hospital?”

She leaned in to examine his face as he pounded himself at the plate glass door. His expression was wide-eyed, his mouth hung open, slack at the corners. His eyes turned upwards, almost rolled back into his head.

“Gabe?!” she cried. “Answer me! Can you answer me?” Ivy grabbed his shoulders and shook him. The feel of his body unnerved her; underneath the fabric of his lime green t-shirt, there was no warmth. He felt like a dead rubber dummy.

Ivy struggled to keep her tears in check. All this time, she was playing archivist while her brother was very, very ill. She should have been paying better attention. But now she was, and Gabe most certainly had to go to the hospital. She ran to the door to get her shoes and keys, and to grab his shoes to wrestle onto his feet, but her panic grew to such a degree that she contemplated actually calling an ambulance. Her eyes stung like she was about to ugly cry, but she pinched her face up and told herself she had to make the right decision, do the right thing for Gabe, so she didn’t lose him—

Behind her, glass shattered. The explosion jolted her out of her thoughts, and she spun around. Jagged fragments of the plate glass door hung from its frame as a narrow smear of blood trailed out into the patio. Gabe shuffled out into the courtyard.

She raced over. “Gabe?! What did you do, dude…?” He didn’t turn or acknowledge her. He kept shuffling forward, his head wrenched back so his face was turned up to the sky.

In the blue lamp light, she saw black smears over his cheeks and forehead where the glass had cut him. It had shredded his shirt, and a few dark spots marred the fabric. Ivy told herself it would be okay, there wasn’t that much blood, but then she wondered why. His blood wasn’t dripping. It was thick, congealed. Gabe put one foot in front of the other, staring upwards, but he was otherwise limp, like a puppet pulled by invisible strings. And, Ivy realized slowly, he wasn’t alone. Other figures moved in the courtyard around him.

Ivy scanned the complex to see several open apartment patios, at least ten people in various stages of pajamas or sick-robes stumbling out into the night. The cries of their families and roommates followed them. Where are you going, honey? What are you looking at? They all moved like drones.

Terror spiked through Ivy’s chest. They were all staring at the sky.

She told herself, don’t look up. She had the urge to rush back inside and block the doors and windows with plastic tarps, cover the sills and ventilation ducts with tape so no air could get through.

But Narr had been wrong. It wasn’t air the virus traveled through. It was the void. And it had already gotten to Gabe, so it must be thick in the room she’d just been sitting in. How could she avoid it?

Outside the neighbors were screaming and crying as their loved ones shuffled off. Limp, hypnotized zombies. The light on the grass flickered a little, and Ivy realized it had turned a deep purple color and now moved like flames from above. Sirens howled in the distance. Many of them. If she called an ambulance, would there be any available? Ivy watched her brother shuffle away, mindlessly towards the thing he saw in the sky. The hospitals and doctors couldn’t do a thing. They’d all be moving forward soon.

Her tears drying, Ivy stopped on the lawn, the full terror of it making her numb.

No escape, she thought.

At that point, Ivy stopped fighting it. She looked up at the sky and saw the dark sphere. Around it flickered a deep purple halo, like a smoky eclipse. It was so close, she could see tiny figures swarming along its rocky surface, moving in and out of the ruins. It was so close. As Ivy wrenched her neck to stare up at it, she felt a tickle in her throat. Then she coughed.

Sondi March occasionally summons demons, but in most cases it doesn’t turn out very well. She has a BA in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and she lives in Omaha, NE.