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Cover Art: Toeken (https://atoekeneffort.weebly.com/)

Art for The Phantom Coach: Luke Spooner / Carrion House

Cosmic Horror Monthly

www.cosmic-horror.net

Greetings dear reader,

We start a new year with the seventh issue of Cosmic Horror Monthly. The previous twelve months haven’t been the easiest for everyone, and we are so grateful that you are holding this collection in your hands. But buckle up, you’re in for a hell of a ride this month.

We start with a tale that redefines the limits to which people will go for love in Eyebright. Then a family is taken to their absolute limit in a game show worthy of cosmic horror in Bonus Round. We head North to frigid Greenland where something sinister is hiding below the ice in To Well and Truly Serve before we step aboard a transport ship bound for Europa and witness an unthinkable horror in Theogonia. At last, we’ll take a trip deep into the crypt for a tale from the early days of horror called The Phantom Coach by Emilia B. Edwards.

So, let us ring in the new year right, with tales to keep us up all night. We thank you for joining us and wish you well in the year to come.

C.R.

*~*~*

Eyebright

By T.M. Brown

Wynona stood in front of the mirror. She didn’t like what she saw. Her cheeks were flushed with winter cold. Her hair had refused to surrender itself to the comb. Even her smile betrayed her, revealing the subtle stain of years spent sipping at coffee and tea. Wynona had never been a woman to neglect her appearance but, on today of all days, everything had to be perfect.

Today was not only a Sunday—which obviously required the most attention be paid to one’s looks—but her anniversary as well. She put on her finest jewelry including a gold chain necklace set with a small imperial jade cabochon. It was the same necklace she had worn on her wedding night. It had once made her feel simultaneously regal and sensual; imbuing her with the majesty of a queen and the wry cunning and sensuality of a courtesan. Although the intervening years had left her appearance somewhat diminished, the jade necklace had yet to fully lose its power. When worn along with a set of her most ornate earrings, she almost felt beautiful.

For now at least, that was the best Wynona could manage. She turned from the floor-length, antique mirror and made her way toward the dressing room door. Just before leaving the room, however, she glanced back at the old mirror and gasped at what she saw.

After all those hours poring over her growing list of cosmetic deficiencies, she’d neglected her eyes! She’d meticulously applied mascara and eye liner all while failing to notice they were completely bloodshot. Her once piercing, blue eyes had long since faded. Worse, she now strained to see in the near perpetual gloom of their 19th Century Victorian home. The house’s ornamental features cast odd, long shadows that seemed to actively resist illumination.

Now her eyes looked as frayed as her nerves. She’d spent decades perfecting her ability to maintain a calm demeanor, to be the model wife. Now her eyes betrayed her in a violent, dramatic fashion. They revealed a woman that was past her prime, on edge, and nearly perpetually worried.

She rushed back to her makeup counter, rifling through drawers in search of something to reduce the redness. There were hundreds of lipsticks, mascaras, eye liners, powders, primers, concealers, lotions, and balms… yet she seemed to have nothing capable of treating eyes that gave her the appearance of a vampire!
As she dredged up the last contents of a fifth drawer, she came across a small, gaudily decorated tincture bottle given to her a few years back by an old friend named Brie. Always a bit of a suburban hippie, Brie had ordered her a variety of poorly packaged herbal remedies—including the small bottle she now held. Its peeling, handwritten label read:

Eyebright

Two drops per eye

See Things More Clearly!

With no other options readily available, Wynona decided to give the remedy a try. She reasoned that, short of permanently losing her vision, her eyes couldn’t get much worse than they already were. She wasn’t about to let anything screw up this day. She had to be perfect.

*~*~*

As marriages go, Wynona’s had been a good one. It had started, as all the best do, in a flurry of passion. Wynona had been raised in a conservative household. Her father, a reasonably successful banker, had left most of the parenting to Wynona’s mother—a strict homemaker and disciplinarian. With her father frequently absent on business and her mother intent on bringing her up as an honest Christian woman, Wynona received little of the coddling frequently associated with her status as an only child. She did, however, receive the full burden of expectation. She performed well at school under constant pressure from her near omnipresent mother; receiving top marks in her classes, participating in extracurricular activities, and most importantly—avoiding the depredations of teenage boys.

Everything changed when Wynona left home for college and she met her future husband. Not only was he tall and athletic; but he possessed an intensity which drew people to him like moths to a flame. He was articulate, worldly, and seemed to have a passionate opinion about every topic under the sun. Naturally, he was accompanied by floozies and hangers-on at virtually all times. Finding his retinue intimidating, Wynona was initially content to observe him from a distance.

Like so many other women—and men—she soon became fixated. He exuded an aura of confidence, subtle machismo, and at moments, guarded sensitivity. Like a planet caught in a decaying orbit, she found herself inexorably drawn to him and their impact, she just knew, would be life changing. Still a virgin upon her arrival at university, she began throwing herself at his friends and flunkies just to be around him. The sex was wild but devoid of passion. She combined her newfound sexual prowess with her long-practiced innocent, bookish demeanor to forge a persona so hot that not even he could ignore her.

It worked.

Several nameless flunkies and a few dozen outfit combinations later, she finally caught his attention. Overnight, she’d gone from being invisible to shining so brightly, she could not be denied. She felt alive for the first time in her life. He was hooked.

The next few months were a blur of passionate lovemaking, long conversations, and a feeling of connectedness she never would have thought to wish for. He eschewed his hard-partying, philandering lifestyle without Wynona ever having to say a word. They were married within the year.

Her parents never accepted their marriage and after a few screaming matches, they never spoke again. Wynona remained unsure as to whether they had truly disowned her or if the break had been mutual. It hardly mattered either way. Her new husband was good to her. Whatever problems they had were easily overcome by her blind admiration for him and an undeniable sexual magnetism. Their fights, however intense, were merely a form of foreplay. It hardly mattered when she dropped out of college midway through her sophomore year. He was already making enough money for both of them, and they soon moved into a small apartment on the outskirts of town.

*~*~*

With her face now presentable, Wynona began perusing outfits. Knowing that her selection wouldn’t matter much to her husband somewhat diminished the excitement of the process but she felt a growing sense of apprehension anyway. A man’s taste, especially one grown a bit long in the tooth was never particularly variable. The less she wore the better. Even as she aged, his tastes evolved to embrace her new features; the wrinkles, the lines, the scars. He seemed to revel in the manifold fractures and upheavals that mired a once pristine landscape.

Shadows danced across the room in perpetual flight from the flickering flames of a dying fire. The bedroom’s small, iron fireplace was not merely ornamental. Rather, Wynona kept it burning as the room’s sole source of light.

She’d loved fires and candles once. She found them romantic. Her husband thought the same. Now they were the only light she was permitted to use. Her husband’s condition prohibited contact with bright light and as it worsened, she had stopped using them entirely.She had hoped that the gesture might lift her husband’s spirits. That she might demonstrate a sense of solidarity with him. That it might make him feel less alone.

It hadn’t worked.

Despite trying on just shy of a dozen dresses, Wynona felt no closer to finding the right one. She stood there wearing each, staring in dissatisfaction at her reflection in the bay window facing the darkened street beyond. The dinner she’d spent all day preparing wouldn’t stay hot forever. She wanted to wear something sexy… maybe even something beautiful. Each dress was a disappointment. The scars were getting increasingly difficult to hide. She begrudgingly narrowed the selection down to two; a red, obnoxiously tight cocktail dress and a somewhat more conservative green number. She preferred the green as it still managed to hide most of her disfigurements. She didn’t have to guess which her husband would have preferred—back when he cared at all.

There was a time when she would have preferred to keep the curtains shut while she changed. Now, she didn’t mind. Her husband preferred them to remain open. He hadn’t followed up on the request in years, of course, but she’d kept them open all the same. Even after all this time, he was undeniable. Besides, she imagined how she must look to some passerby on the street— her form backlit by the cracking fire. She liked to imagine that one day a young man—one not so different than what her husband had once been—would take notice and fantasize about her. She didn’t have any motivation beyond that. In more than one sense, she’d been nothing more than a silhouette for years. Wynona saw no reason to change that now.

She chose the red dress.

*~*~*

After the newlyweds had moved into the apartment together, there was a brief period of marital bliss. Wynona had her own place to decorate, money to go shopping, and as it turned out—little else to occupy her time. Her husband was away more than she would have liked, consumed by the competing demands of securing his tenure and those of his other family across town. There was also the nagging complication of their marriage not being legally binding that began to generate friction between them.

Wynona was actually happy for the other family in her own way. She remained content that they all seemed to make such a potentially awkward arrangement work. It didn’t hurt that the lovemaking also remained passionate and her new husband continued to provide her with everything she required. In an effort to fill the gaps during the time they were apart, however, Wynona took up recreational drinking and drug use. It all started innocently enough—cocktails and weed with the girls—and quickly devolved to a pretty legitimate heroin addiction.

After Wynona hit a low point shooting up with junkies and sleeping in a series of poorly maintained storage units, her husband rode to the rescue. She remembered with perfect clarity the day that he pulled up in his Chrysler LeBaron and saved her life. He apologized for everything he had put her through and even promised to leave his old wife, Kaitlyn, and their two children. He told her that they’d start over, just the two of them. One day, he’d promise they’d move to Florida together. The next day he would promise Spain. It hardly mattered to Wynona. She simply wanted to be with him.

Unfortunately, her husband’s plans to leave Kaitlyn and the kids never seemed to materialize. He finally received his promotion to tenured professor and his roots in the community only seemed to be growing deeper. Meanwhile, his sexual demands had grown more unorthodox and some of the passion seemed to be fading. Wynona was no longer satisfied with talk about leaving his old family. She wanted what they already had.

She pictured herself in the 19th Century Victorian home off a leafy cul-de-sac. She pictured herself driving Kaitlyn’s Mercedes with the top down and the breeze blowing through her hair. When she finally worked up the courage to confront her husband and demand what was rightfully hers, he seemed neither surprised nor upset. He told her that she’d have it all and sooner than she expected.

This time he wasn’t lying. Once again, her husband delivered.

*~*~*

Her clothing selection complete, Wynona left her second floor bedroom and began her descent to the first floor. As usual, the house was dark. The only source of illumination originated from distant streetlamps. Even this dim light was filtered through the skeletal branches of the property’s ancient oaks. While her tired eyes strained against the gloom —they weren’t really necessary. She was intimately familiar with the old home and all of its contents. She had no need to fear bumping into or tripping over something out of place. Nobody visited anymore and her husband no longer left his bedroom.

She was the undisputed queen of all she surveyed.

The scent of glazed ham guided her to the kitchen. She immediately began to worry when she noticed the slight smell of smoke intermingled with that of cinnamon and star anise. She plucked the ham from the oven, observing it as the molten glaze burned her flesh. With the hot, sticky syrup running down her arm, she gave it a quick sniff and a lick. It was indeed burnt.

Damn.

She didn’t have a backup plan. The whole thing would have to go. She then proceeded to toss the five pound ham like a basketball into the awaiting maw of the trash can.

Nothing but net.

The sides could still be salvaged. The potatoes and asparagus looked alright. Unfortunately, she had trouble plating them in an appealing manner due to her badly burnt hands. She did the best she could under the circumstances.

With the ham gone, the dinner still lacked an entrée. Nothing but a prime cut of meat would suffice for such an occasion. That left her with only one option… the steaks in the fridge! Cooking them would only take a moment and the entrée could be saved. Just as she turned on the stove’s burners, however, she thought better of the idea. She instead concluded that there was no time for such preparation. She’d have to serve them raw. She could always make it up with extra gravy.

She removed the still bloody cuts of meat from their butcher paper wrappings. The cold meat felt good against her raw, freshly scalded hands so she stood there for a few minutes holding them in the dark. As she pressed her hands into the chilled, premium sirloins, she took the time to listen for rodents. After a few minutes of near silence—excluding the creaks and groans commonplace in any old home—she concluded that there were indeed no rats in the walls.

There better not be. Tonight had to be perfect.

*~*~*

As it turned out, getting rid of Kaitlyn and the kids had been far easier than Wynona expected. Her husband took care of everything. There was a bit of unpleasant business seeing the old harpy naked but in the end, her husband had talked to her and Kaitlyn had done the right thing for all of them.

With the old family gone, Wynona had it all: the beautiful old Victorian home with bay windows overlooking quiet, shaded streets; the Mercedes; even all of Kaitlyn’s uppity wardrobe. The house felt like home almost immediately. The Mercedes felt like it was custom designed for her. Even the clothes fit just right. It was all so… perfect.

For years, her husband was around more often, present, and genuinely engaged with her life. The sex became increasingly demanding, but it was worth it. The passion was there and above all, he was present.

Then Lindsey entered the picture. After that, everything changed.

All the signs were there before Wynona even knew her name. Her husband was gone more, he seemed perpetually distracted, and the sex dropped off. She demanded to know the slut’s name. Her husband denied, obfuscated, and even counter-accused but never said an honest word in all his meandering explanations. She had to discover the truth for herself.

Her husband certainly had a type. There were no surprises. Lindsey was, of course, a student. A thin, doe-eyed redhead. And of course, a dirty tramp.

She confronted Lindsey in the middle of the university quad. She called the girl all sorts of unseemly things—all of which were exceedingly warranted—and made a series of quite explicit threats, all of which she fully intended to carry out if necessary. Fortunately for both her and Lindsey, she never had to follow through with any of them.

Her husband could clearly not be trusted, and despite the fact that she still loved him intensely, his loyalty was clearly not guaranteed. It wasn’t even his fault, really. Men were prone to pursue greener pastures as they aged, particularly the sort of men with appetites as voracious as those of her husband. It was her fault for not taking action to prevent his infidelity sooner.

Her threats against Lindsey must have worked because her husband’s attention drifted back to her. One day, after a particularly vigorous and excruciating lovemaking session, she found herself overcome with love. As he lay naked, sprawled out on the bloodstained mattress, Wynona determined it was time to ensure her husband’s fidelity once and for all. She went out to the garage and gathered up the rusted snow chains she had purchased years ago.

Chaining her husband to the old, iron bed frame had been a more awkward and laborious process than she initially anticipated. She could never be certain, but she suspected he might have been awake for the entirety of the thirty minute ordeal. Either way, he was clearly awake by the time she fancied her task complete. He neither cursed her name nor strained against his bindings. He just lay there; a self-satisfied grin twisted onto his beautiful face. His precious words flowed like honey from his lips:

“You were always the one.”

*~*~*

Since their recommitment, or “the binding” as she liked to call it, their marriage had continued to be a happy one. For the first time in her life, Wynona allowed herself to succumb to her own overwhelming sense of pride. She had really done it! She had made her marriage work.

Sure, they had their problems, but so did everyone else. They both made compromises to keep one another happy. She agreed to keep him fed and cared for and to satisfy his more carnal desires every Sunday. In return, he agreed to stop straining against his chains and to never see Lindsey or any other woman ever again. That was the agreement, and both had kept their end of the bargain.

It was his worsening ailment over the intervening years that drove many of Wynona’s more practical day-to-day constraints. She couldn’t interact with anyone outside the house because of the germs and nobody seemed to want to visit because of the smell. The light bulbs were removed one by one; beginning with the fluorescents, then the LEDs, and finally the incandescents. Her movement within the house was restricted to carved out pathways due to the consistent threat posed by rats and the shadows that sheltered them. It was a lot to handle, especially as the years drew on, but she was up to the task.

Her happiness increasingly hinged on how the events of her Sunday unfolded. A good day brightened her whole week. A bad day left her feeling as if the pervasive gloom in the house might swallow her whole. Now that their anniversary and Sunday converged… it was as if the stars had aligned. The thought made her sick to her stomach. She felt as if her life—nay, her very soul—depended on the outcome of this one night. The closer it drew, the more nervous she became.

It had to be perfect.

*~*~*

As she ascended the three flights of stairs to her husband’s attic bedroom, Wynona took a last moment to admire her reflection in one of several hallway mirrors. It was a particularly dark, overcast night, so she quite reasonably expected to see nothing.She was therefore quite surprised to see her reflection staring back at her, clear as day! Not only had the eyebright tincture removed all of the redness from her previously bloodshot eyes, it had restored their youthful glow entirely! The dull grey had been replaced by the intense, azure blue of her youth. She rushed up the final staircase to her husband’s bedroom, nearly spilling the contents of the dinner tray in her excitement.

As Wynona gracefully opened the door to the chamber, she scanned the room beyond. It was a large, open bedroom with sharply slanted ceilings on account of the gabled roof. She knew the contents of the room by heart but could not see further than a few feet in front of her. While her eyes had become conditioned to the darkness present in the rest of the house, the gloom that her husband preferred to wallow in these last few years was special. It had an unnatural quality to it. It pooled and resisted integration with the space around it. If regular darkness was water, her husband’s undulating black ichor was oil.

Wynona stepped into the room, oblivious to the unnatural shadows that coiled around her. She dutifully closed the door behind her and sat the dinner tray down on a small counter near the doorway. Her hands now free, she began to undress, more than a little frustrated that her husband couldn’t be bothered to see the outfit she had clearly put so much effort into selecting. Fully disrobed, she picked the tray back up and walked toward the bed.

The inky blackness began to disperse and Wynona’s husband revealed himself to her. He had grown fat under her attentive care, the old tire chains and their successors straining to contain his pallid, swollen girth. His once chiseled features had been overwhelmed by successive folds and creases; each straining against the next for prominence on his grotesque figure.

His entire body could have been viewed as sickly comical in nature, had it not been for his face. Wart-covered flesh obscured all but his most prominent feature: a twisted, gaping mouth that curled into a permanent smile and wrapped around his face like a child’s bib. Rows of needle-like teeth cowered behind thin cracked lips that seemed unwillingly thrust outward. With his lips’ protrusion, his gums had been left exposed and laid bare the rot his soft exterior struggled to contain. His jet-black eyes appeared mole-like and tiny, apparently losing the battle against his steadily increasing mass.

He breathed heavily in anticipation of what was to come, shuddering against his own enormous weight.

Wynona meanwhile struggled to maintain her growing fear and excitement. There was a wicked lust in the pits of her husbands’ eyes and it was clear he had made himself ready for her. She climbed atop his damp, putrid mass while carefully balancing his dinner tray in one hand.

With the shadows steadily unfurling around man and wife, Wynona could now vaguely see her reflection in the two floor-length mirrors that flanked her husband’s bed. Each revealed what she both knew and feared to be true. She saw an aging woman, covered in thousands of scars and attempting her best to mask indicators of death’s manifold flirtations. Each scar bore a different name for the same man; a different name for her husband.

Before his more manly desires could be fulfilled, her husband must be fed. Seeing as the entrée would be served raw, she braced herself to provide an extra-large portion of gravy. He would let her know when to stop.

She placed the tray on her husband’s swollen belly and took the steak knife into her hand. In a single, practiced motion she cut open her left wrist and let the gravy pour out onto the anniversary dinner. Her husband watched her unblinkingly, his meaty tongue raking against his hundreds of needle-like teeth.

After pouring a generous portion from her wrist, she looked expectantly at her husband and prepared to staunch the bleeding. His tongue now danced with delight.
“More.”

Somewhat surprised, Wynona acquiesced to her husband’s demand. She found her gaze drawn to the two mirrors before her. Where once both mirrors had dutifully born the reflection of a scarred woman well past her prime and astride her husband, one now deviated strangely from the other. The left accurately reflected what she knew to be reality, and the right portrayed a slightly younger version of herself. The woman on the right had fewer scars and a firmer body. Even her eyes were brighter.

She was losing too much blood now. Her head felt light. Her vision flickered in and out. She looked to her husband for reprieve but found none. His beady eyes flashed with intensity and an unusual firmness added gravity to his voice.

“More.”

The woman in the left mirror wasted away as gravy spouted from her wrist. She rapidly shriveled into an old crone —enfeebled and brittle. The woman on the left grew younger. The names cut into her flesh faded. The scars on her wrists disappeared. Wynona saw herself as she had once been, young and beautiful. Her breasts were full and firm, her hair vibrant and voluminous, her eyes piercing and azure blue. She was beautiful.

Except it wasn’t herself that Wynona saw in the mirror.

The likeness was close, remarkably so, but her features were slightly off. Wynona’s head was spinning and the oily gloom pressed back in around her. The room and her surroundings began to give way to shadow. She had trouble making out the image. Then, it occurred to her —it was Lindsey! That slut had somehow manifested herself—naked—in her husband’s bedroom!

With a sudden sense of purpose, Wynona clutched the open wound in her wrist, desperately trying to stop the bleeding. Her husband shook his head, his hideous smile still frozen in place.

“More,” he demanded firmly.

“I don’t have any more to give,” Wynona replied plaintively.

The weakness in her own voice surprised her. She’d lost even more blood than she’d realized. She grasped at her wrist; wrapping it in the thick, cloth napkin she’d brought with her for that sole purpose. She could still stop the bleeding. She could still save their anniversary.

Her husband’s eyes warped into pinpricks of pure blackness. His blubbery right arm tore through his restraints in a single, effortless motion and locked her arm in an iron grip.

“Yes… you do” he stated flatly; rolling her arm back to expose the wound and blood-soaked napkin Wynona clutched so desperately.

The reflections once contained within the two mirrors stepped through the blackness surrounding her, now freed from their imprisoning frames. The lifeless old crone grasped her right arm with a skeletal hand. She immediately felt a chill wash over her. Wynona’s flesh near the crone’s bony fingers turned black and rotted before her very eyes. Lindsey grabbed Wynona’s left arm, her touch warm and gentle.

As color faded from Wynona’s vision, the blue in Lindsey’s eyes remained. Wynona struggled to explain that she didn’t want to die, that she wasn’t ready, that Lindsey was a slut and a homewrecker and doomed to suffer the same fate.

Wynona’s voice failed her and nothing left her lips but incoherent mutterings.

She looked to her husband through her failing vision. The Devil pulled her close to his cracked lips and whispered:

“You were always the one.”

In that moment she saw him as the man he’d once been. He was strong and handsome with compassionate eyes. He was beautiful and he belonged to her.

Her husband would not be denied. The Devil would not be denied.

Wynona let go of the cloth napkin and let her gravy fill the dinner tray. Her anniversary had been perfect. She had been perfect. The eyebright had worked its magic beyond expectation.

As darkness swallowed her soul, all she could see was blue.

End.

Bonus Round

By Edward Turner III

Not many make it to the Bonus Round of Wager Your Life, but we made it. The sweat drips into my eyes as I realize how much our lives will change after this gameshow ends.

This is no regular gameshow. To win on this show, you have to wager pieces of your own life. I wagered my job, my car and my son and so far, I’ve come away with one hundred twenty million dollars. I can even get my son back if I win the Bonus Round.

Jen is in the Banker’s Box, the wonderful little transparent box that keeps her from me while letting me see all the money we have won.

Gracey is to my right, she is ten seconds from the edge of the board. Ten might not sound like much but I think she’ll be safe the rest of the game.

I have just three moves to make it nineteen spaces. Nearly impossible, but if I make it to that last space we win it all. Hell, we’ll even get our son back.

I look up at the Host, Mr. Happiness on his pedestal as he yells out, “Mr. Diceman, give us our next roll!”

I turn a bit to face where Mr. Diceman stands at the top of a series of four steps. He has a die easily the size of a beach ball which he drops into the Die-Box. We watch it bounce around, up and down until it lands in the tiny whole. Only one in a hundred rolls lands this way. A cup sized hole is in the bottom of the Die-Box so that the remote possibility is always there for an edge of it to fall into it and stand Edge Up.

Edge up is worth Seven Moves.

The crowd screams.

I scream.

Jen jumps up.

Even Gracey stops sobbing for a few seconds.

I look around the arena, what sounds like an echo of the crowd is actually just the way that the crowd itself wraps around the entire area of the Gameboard. The Gameboard is eighty or ninety feet across, maybe the same width and it is a few feet up from the bottom of the arena. Two bridges leave the gameboard and the corresponding edges fall away quite rapidly.

I move forward seven spaces. The crowd chants, “Twelve more, twelve more!”

I stop on the seventh space and Mr. Happiness yells out, “Eighteen million more for you, good sir!” The crowd cheers. Mr. Happiness is frantic, “You can triple that money if you wager your daughter’s intelligence!”

I rub my hands together. “Do it,” I say.

He turns to my daughter, “Here is your question Gracey, what is the square root of sixteen?”

My daughter stares at him. Her eyes are still full of tears. She shakes her little head, having just turned eleven, I am not even sure if she knows anything about square roots at all. My wife gives me a hateful look. This was all her idea, well the gameshow anyway. She didn’t agree to the Bonus Round.

Gracey’s section of the board begins to move backwards. “Ten-Nine-Eight-Seven-Six-Five-Four,” the Board’s robotic voice counts down. If he gets to zero she will be dropped off the side of the board.

I am not exactly sure what will happen then.

She yells, “Four!”

Mr. Happiness jumps up and down, “That is correct my dear!”

She stops moving, and she is a good four seconds from the edge. Hopefully that will be enough to keep her safe.

The grim look on my wife’s face reflects what I feel in my heart.

A giant screen lights up behind the Host. He turns and points to the happy looking family there. He says, “This is your daughter’s new family, if you fail to win her back that is.”

“Win her back?” I yell out, “What are you talking about?”

He points at the square she now stands on after the timer stopped. The crowd goes, “OOOOOH!”

I glance at Jen. I have never seen a more miserable look on her face. The Host is speaking, “Our father will now attempt to win back his daughter, and the audience gets to vote on the manner of the Challenge. Should he give up half of the money? Balance a broom on his palm for four minutes, or sacrifice his son forever?”

Clicks and clacks as the audience clicks their answer. Around the world people vote online. I hope for the broom.

--Half the Money—8,472,658

--Broom Balance—8,876,221

--Son Sacrifice—3,436,210

“Our audience is feeling gracious today,” the Host says as a man in pink spandex and a rainbow clown wig comes out and hands me a broom. It feels heavy. Mr. Happiness rubs his hands together, “All right Mr. Peterson you have three tries to get the broom to balance for four straight minutes.”

I hold it up and the giant clock counts the seconds. At nine seconds, the broom falls.

Shit.

On the second try I get to fourteen.

My daughter collapses onto the floor in sobs.

I hold the broom up for my final try and the audience holds their breath as my third attempt makes it to thirty seconds…

A minute…

At a minute thirty-five the damn thing falls. I curse, but I don’t think the microphone picks it up past the screams of the crowd.

Two men in black suits come out and stand on either side of her. I shout, “Please no, don’t take my daughter.”

Mr. Happiness says to the audience, “Well, should we give Mr. Peterson one more chance?”

The crowd goes wild.

“All right here is the wager, you can give up your entire Bank, and your daughter will be 100% safe the rest of the game. You could also risk just half of your money and try to keep the broom balanced for just two minutes, or you can go ahead and try the four minutes again and if you make it you keep your daughter and all of the money.”

I turn to my wife, her head is in her hands. I say, “I can do the four minutes.” Cheers and applause surround me.

I barely hear my daughter scream, “Daddy.” She doesn’t realize this is all for her. The economy, our country, everything is so messed up. She doesn’t realize that if we don’t win this money, she’ll never afford college. She’ll never afford a life of her own.”

I lift the broom, this time the clock runs backward for effect.

3:30-

3:15-

3:00-

2:39-It wobbles, I take nine steps before I get it balanced. I can nearly hear the collective gulp from the crowd.

2:00-

1:30-

1:22-

It falls.

The crowd is quiet and the sound of the broom clacks hard onto the ground. It’s the sound of a neck snapping. Tears fill my eyes as the two suited-men lift my baby girl up off her feet and carry her away.

My wife sits with her knees on her chest. Sobs rock her body.

The Host, a little more somber now says, “All right Mr. Peterson, time for your next move.”

The die is rolled and this time it lands on five. There is still a tiny chance I can win back everything. My last roll must be a seven, it might not be likely, but hell we might just win it all. I glance to where my daughter was.

I feel my heart pulling for her.

When I stop on the fifth square, I look down to see that I am on the “Double Your Money for Your Spouse Square.” I look over at her, she shakes her head ever so slightly. Tears glisten on her cheeks. She is beautiful.

I nod, what else do we have to lose? “Let’s do it.”

The Host says, “We’ll make this one easy for you. All it depends on is how much you like your wife’s pinkies.”

I don’t know how to respond to that as two more men in suits walk out and get into the Banker’s Box with her. They stand at her sides. She is still sitting. She isn’t even looking at me anymore.

“All right, for one pinky toe we’ll add 100 million to your 214 million. For both pinky toes we will double your money and you’ll have a full 418 million, by far the largest jackpot on our show for the past two years!” His smile and his giant white teeth sicken me, “So what’ll be Mr. Peterson?”

She doesn’t bother to look up, she already knows my answer, I nod slowly.

Mr. Happiness says, “And for his first appearance of the day, let’s all give a good round of applause for the Gleeful Executioner!”

The crowd screams. He is a giant of a man. He wears a full suit of armor though it is made of what looks to be orange leather. He has a massive cigar cutter in his hand. The two men in suits pull off her shoes and her socks.

Mr. Happiness says, “Aw, such beautiful feet!”

The Gleeful Executioner uses the cigar cutter to quickly slice off both pinky toes. The men in suits drop her and the crowd watches intently as they place both toes on ice and a doctor comes out to check on her.

When she glances my direction I mouth the words, “I’m sorry.”

She screams as the doctor covers her wounds and gives her a few shots so the pain will be weakened enough so that she can still be involved in the rest of the game.

The Host says, “This has been an eventful game, now it is time for your final roll. A five will earn half of the money in your pot. A six and you’ll receive the full amount. A seven and you win everything, your kids, the money and your wife will even get her toes sewn back on.”

The crowd claps in rhythm with the beat of a drum as they await the roll.

My wife sits there looking like her world has ended.

Mr. Diceman rolls the die, it bounces a couple of times. The crowd is with me as I gasp and then hold my breath. I think it is going to land on one for a moment and then it tips over to rest on the six.

I fall to my knees, “Thank you God!” I scream. 428 million will change every aspect of our lives forever. I can’t even imagine what it will be like to live without worry, without pain, without fear.

The door to the Banker’s Box opens and my wife wobbles out. I can’t wait to hold her in my arms again.

I am actually standing there with my arms out as the Host interrupts, “All right, this has been an exciting game, but as we all know, this is the ‘Couple’s Bonus Round of ‘Wager Your Life,’ so the last wager goes to the lady of the house, and this is going to be a big one. The Peterson family has been one of my favorites to ever be on the show.” The crowd cheers at this too. Though I know the sound of that voice.

Something horrible is about to happen.

One of the suited men walks out and plants a loaded gun in Jen’s hand. Her hands shake as she holds it. I am not sure she has ever shot a gun before.

Mr. Happiness says, “your wager is simple, my dear. Would you like to keep your money, go home with your husband and live a long and happy life together? Or would you rather double your money and keep it all for yourself? That would be 856 million, more than anyone has ever won on the history of Wager Your Life!”

The gun shakes so much that I am surprised it has not fallen from her hand. She looks at it with disgust. The audience is quiet.

“Please give us your answer with a shot of the gun, my dear Jen Peterson.”

I can see the answer on her face before she makes a move, though I truly can’t believe it.

She raises the gun to me and fires…

End.

*~*~*

Edward Turner III started his writing career while he was still in the womb, problem was, there was no one around to read what he wrote! He has been published in Bête Noir, the Literary Hatchet, Night to Dawn, among other places.

Artist: Martin Blanco (http://www.martinblancoart.com/)

To Well and Truly Serve

By Geoffrey W. Cole

Bonenfant swam out of the sinking corvette into Atlantic waters alive with the death-moans of broken ships. The surface was a hazy grey membrane impossibly far above. He clawed at ice water, lungs burning, as a vast limb ensnared his legs and pulled him into the crushing depths.

He awoke with a gasp. Sunlight blinding as he grappled about for his drink. Glass clattered onto the tiles. The whiskey. Then he remembered where and when he was, and he corrected himself: not whiskey, never again.

Laurentian dusk streamed in through the windows of the Chateau Montebello’s indoor pool. He’d knocked the brown medicine bottle onto the tiles, spilling little white pills beneath his chair. A nurse was rushing over to check on him. Bonenfant swept all but one pill into the bottle. The meprobamate dulled some of the symptoms, the doctors told him, but the worst was up to you.

“The Director-General said you were on holiday,“ the nurse said. Bonenfant recognized the too-earnest face, the pinned-back blonde hair.

“Mirabel Orford,“ he said. “You look quite fetching as a nurse. It’s been what, two years since Lac St. Jean?”

“That was ‘55, Captain.”

“Six years, then,” Bonenfant said, though he had trouble believing it. All the years since the war seemed fluid, amorphous, but one memory of this lovely blonde spy swam up through the haze. “Did you ever learn how to ride a motorcycle?”

She smiled, her pale skin delightfully sunburnt. “I’ve improved, but I’m afraid I’ll have to show you my skills later. A rather urgent matter has come up.”

Bonenfant pushed out of the lounge chair. “Good. This place brings awful dreams. Where am I headed, Mirabel?”

“I’ll fill you in on the flight.” She offered her hand. “Are you sure you’re fit for service, Captain? Rumours have been circulating.”

Bonenfant reached for her, and saw with some measure of satisfaction that for the first time that day, his hand wasn’t shaking.

“Quite fit,” he said, and took her offered hand.

*~*~*

The Tracker soared high above Greenland’s ice sheet. In its passenger compartment, Bonenfant secured the parachute pack, pocketed ammunition and grenades, and slid a knife into his boot sheath. Mirabel was zipping into a heavy parka trimmed in white fur.

“I’m going to have to call you bunny,” Bonenfant said.

She strapped on her revolver. “And what shall I call you?”

“How about eagle? Or falcon?”

“We’ll call you ptarmigan,” she said, and she handed Bonenfant a map. “That’s Camp Century. The Danes gave the Americans permission to build and operate a camp beneath the ice sheet on the basis that it was a scientific station.” She went through her pack as she spoke. Bonenfant had an identical pack, containing folded skis, poles, ice picks, crampons, field rations, more ammunition, timed charges, plenty of rope, and a radio transmitter. “That’s why we are here, Julien. A scientist working for Atomic Energy of Canada was seconded to the Americans to work on the nuclear reactor powering the place. It’s been a week since we last heard from her. The Americans haven’t had any communication with their people either.”

“Her?”

“A woman can be an agent of the Security Service, why not an atomic scientist?” She sipped from a slim leather flask that stank of gin. She eyed Bonenfant after she’d screwed the lid back on. “Helps keep the cold at bay.”

Bonenfant patted the pocket that held a new bottle of meprobamate. “I like the cold.”

“The Danes only agreed to nuclear power,” she said. “But when has the will of a sovereign nation ever stopped our Yankee friends? It comes down to this, Captain. The Americans have lost all contact with Camp Century and the fleet of nuclear missiles they secretly deployed there. We suspect the KJB’s involvement. The Americans have sent their own teams in to recover their assets, though they too have gone off radar. We are going in to bring back Canada’s atomic scientist.”

“Sounds delightful,” Bonenfant said.

“There’s one other thing. As I said, rumours have been circulating. The Commandant wants you to run the logistics end of the operation. Escape routes, vehicles, etcetera. I will be extracting Dr. Binoculous.”

Mirabel opened the fuselage door. Arctic air blasted the Tracker. She leapt into the void. For a moment Bonenfant had the feeling that they weren’t jumping out of the plane, but that they were instead jumping into a mouth, an endless, insatiable maw intent on devouring the world.

“Damn DTs,” Bonenfant said, and he leapt.

*~*~*

The hangar was the obvious place to find an escape vehicle. He skied wide around the surface camp, a small collection of tents and a few larger buildings like the hangar, while Mirabel took the more direct approach.

Bonenfant crested a ridge, and when he did, the camp below transformed. A massive city stood where the camp had been. Great towers of monolithic stone rose at impossible angles to blot out a sky filled with alien constellations.

“Bunny to ptarmigan,” Mirabel said over the radio. “Are you in position? I’m about to go under.”

The monolithic city became snow-covered tents once again. Everything built to a decidedly human scale.

“Almost there,” Bonenfant said. The doctors had warned of hallucinations. Maybe logistics was the best job for him. He would be no help beneath the ice if a vision took him. “Carry on, bunny. I’ll have your chariot warm when you return.”

Bonenfant skied to the hangar and slipped in through a side door. Three planes sat beneath the arching corrugated-steel roof, but only one would ever fly again: the other two had been smashed to pieces. Dozens of men must have attacked the aircraft with hammers and axes, judging by the splintered wood and the bent and twisted aluminium, but he saw no footprints in the snow.

The third aircraft, a ski-mounted DC-3, was whole. Bonenfant climbed into the cockpit and performed a cursory inspection. Everything looked to be in working order, and when he started one engine, it hummed to life with only a minimum of protest.

“Ptarmigan to bunny,” Julien said into the radio. “Do you prefer chicken or veal for your in-flight repast?”

In answer, Mirabel’s voice screamed out of the tiny speaker. He tried to get her location, but she just kept screaming. He dropped out of the plane, radio in one hand, Sterling submachine gun in the other, and he ran into the perpetual night. Mirabel was still screaming when he spotted the nearest emergency hatch that led into the tunnels. It looked like the con tower of a submarine. He shut off the radio.

Bonenfant descended a vertical ladder that terminated at the entrance to a prefabricated barracks built beneath the snow. The lights flickered and went out when he entered the barracks. The stink of dirty socks and unwashed bedding filled the darkness. He listened a few seconds, and when he heard nothing, he turned on his flashlight. Bunk beds lined both walls. Footlockers at the base of each bed were open, the beds unmade. He found a map of the camp sitting on one of the beds. Someone had marked-up the map with an extensive series of additional tunnels or passages. He tucked it into a pocket of his parka.

Between the next set of bunk beds, he found a body. The enlisted man still clutched the pistol he’d used to paint his brain across the wall. As he knelt beside the man, the lights flickered back on.

Bonenfant tumbled away from the dead man. Someone had covered the wall around the dead man with script written in the man’s gore.So many eyes. The phrase repeated dozens of times, maybe hundreds, in clean, bloody letters.

He rushed out of the barracks and into a snow-walled corridor. Could the KJB have used some sort of nerve agent down here? That could explain his vision on the ice, the madness behind him. His hands shook as he fumbled for the radio.

“Ptarmigan to Bunny? Where are you, Mirabel?”

Bonenfant clicked off the radio and unfolded the marked-up map. Mirabel could be anywhere in the original tunnels or the twisting corridors that had been sketched in by hand. The biggest chamber was labelled Generator Room. Someone had to be alive there to bring the lights back on.

*~*~*

Bonenfant pressed to the wall as he approached the Generator Room. Steel clattered on steel up ahead, and he heard a British woman swearing through the half-open door. He led with his submachine gun.

“Don’t tell me you’re the rescue mission,” the Indian woman said in an upper class British accent from behind an M14 rifle. She stood in the control room for the nuclear reactor. Racks of equipment filled the far wall, a desk was pushed up against the right hand wall, calendars and charts were tacked to the left.

“Dr. Binoculous, I presume?”

She wore a thick white parka over her short frame, and a quite fetching face stared down the sights of her rifle at the spot between Bonenfant’s eyes. “Binoculous was my husband’s name. Call me Asmita.”

“Captain Julien Bonenfant, RCMP Security Service. We’re here to extract you.”

She lowered the rifle a few inches. “How do I know you’re not KJB?”

“You can check me for secret tattoos or hollow teeth,” he said. He lowered his Sterling. “But to do so you’d have to strip me down. In this cold I fear I’d catch my death. Of course you’d have to strip down as well to prove you aren’t KJB, so maybe we wouldn’t be so cold after all.”

She let the rifle drop. “Is lasciviousness the only quality the Mounties seeks in their officers?”

Bonenfant grabbed her arm. “Allow me to demonstrate some of my lesser qualities before we get to the subject of lasciviousness. We have to go, Asmita.”

She wrenched away from him. “That won’t be possible. Do you have any idea what we are working on down here, Mr. Bonenfant? It cannot fall into the KJB’s hands.”

“Not my concern. My orders are to bring you home. Canada is quite lovely this time of year.”

“There will be no Canada if we don’t stop them.”

A shot rang out and tore through one of the charts on the wall. Plaster and wood erupted in a dusty cloud around him. Bonenfant pushed Asmita toward the desk. “Get down.”

“The Soviets,” she hissed. “They are dressed as Americans.”

He braced himself against the door frame. A soldier in an American Army uniform approached with his rifle levelled.

“Not another step,” Bonenfant said.

“She gotta die,” the soldier said, and he fired wild shots into the generator room. When he stopped to reload, Bonenfant put two bullets through his spine.

Bonenfant’s breath condensed in a cloud around him as he inspected the body.

“They are all dressed as general infantry,” Asmita said from the doorway. “That’s how they caught us unaware. No secret tattoos, no hollow teeth.”

“The KJB has improved its game,” Bonenfant said. He could find no indication that the man was a double agent.

“You have no idea. They managed to take control of our nuclear missiles.”

“I thought this was supposed to be a research station.”

“Do you know how close we are to the Russian missile bases in Derazhnya, Yedrovo, and Kozeisk? The Americans couldn’t resist. They modified Minutemen missiles and call them Icemen.”

“A fitting moniker,” Bonenfant said as he stared at the dead man. He was no more than eighteen or nineteen.

“They are going to launch the missiles at New York and London,” Asmita said. “We have to stop them.”

For a moment, Asmita appeared to be standing at the far end of an indescribably long tunnel. The world was always in peril, and he was the only one who could save it, yet it was too much to ask for one little drink in return for the services offered.

“Stop the nukes,” Bonenfant said. “I’m all for it.” He stepped back into the control room. “But may I ask how?”

Asmita showed him a map on the office desk. It was more detailed than the hand-marked map he’d found in the barracks.

“We built five silos in the ice, connected by rail lines. I’m trying to cut the station power here, but turning off a nuclear generator is a delicate affair, and the silos all have back-up generators. Go to each silo, take out the guards, and disable the back-up generators. Without power, they won’t be able to launch.”

Asmita marked the launch sites with black skulls. Dizziness washed over Bonenfant. He needed another meprobamate, and soon, but he couldn’t let this woman see him take one. He stabbed the nearest silo with his thumb.

“I’ll start here, then proceed counter-clockwise to the rest of them. You get the power off, then work in the opposite direction. We meet in the middle, and then we leave?”

“Perfect,” she said, and smiled at him. She placed her gloved hand on his. “I knew you were the right man for the job.”

Not the right man, Bonenfant thought. This was supposed to be Mirabel’s job.

“Another agent came down here looking for you. Mirabel Orford. Blonde, about your height. Prairie accent. I heard her scream on the radio.”

“Then she is already dead. The KJB shows no mercy, Julien. Please, we can’t delay. They will launch within two hours.”

Bonenfant reached for the map, but Asmita held onto him, pulled him closer, and pressed her lips to his. Her tongue darted into his mouth.

“No false teeth,” she said, a demure smile on her lips. “But when we’re all done with this, I’ll have to do a full inspection for secret tattoos. Now go.”

Her eyes were dark pools, deep enough to drown in.

“À plus tard,” he said.

He jogged toward the first silo. As he ran, he reached for the pill bottle, but instead grabbed the Sterling. During the brief gun fight with the young soldier, the visions and the shakiness had dissolved in the perfect crystalline focus of battle. Meprobamate might help with the DTs, but there was no better cure than battle.

*~*~*

A vertical shaft had been cut into the glacier, lined with steel, and filled with a medium-range nuclear missile. The launch doors at the top of the silo were open to the sky, and blast doors from the control room opened into the silo where the Iceman steamed. Three soldiers were stationed at the silo: one worked the control panel and the other two watched the tunnel where Bonenfant hid.

“Control panel’s locked,” said the soldier in a thick Kentucky drawl. “What in the hell are we expected to do?”

The lights went out for a moment and Bonenfant rushed down the ice. When the lights came back on, he fired three quick shots.

“You’re expected to die,” Bonenfant said.

The two soldiers holding rifles went down, bleeding from head wounds, but he took the soldier at the panel in the leg.

“Keep your hands on the wound,” Bonenfant said as he approached. He knelt a few feet from the groaning soldier, a freckled boy who was just as young as the others. “What city were you targeting with this one?”

“City? Mister, we was sent to disable these here miss-iles. We ain’t targeting nothing.”

“The KJB has trained you well,” Bonenfant said. He showed the freckled boy the blade of his boot knife. “But have they trained you to resist a slow filleting?”

When he saw the bayonet, the Kentuckian sobbed.

“God as my witness, Mister. I ain’t KJB. It’s the Injun lady who’s KJB. She raised the damn demon. She’s the one trying to launch these here miss-iles.”

Bonenfant slid the knife into his boot. Either the KJB was getting better in their indoctrination or the boy was telling the truth. He walked over to the control panel and read the latitude and longitude programmed into the missile’s targeting system.

The lights flickered out again, and the wind howling through the silo doors changed direction: it carried the stink of dank mould from deep within the glacier and a sound that couldn’t be voices.

“Lord protect us,” the boy said. “The demon is coming.” He grabbed hold of Bonenfant’s legs. “Hide me. Hide me!”

Bonenfant knocked the boy’s hands away. The mould-stink intensified and those voices congealed into a recognizable phrase, uttered again and again in an alien tongue: “Tekeli-i! Tekeli-i!” The generator roared to life and the lights on the panel cast a dim orange glow across the tunnel. What Bonenfant saw in that gloom could not be real. The boy emitted a shrill, childish scream.

Bonenfant ran into the silo. He tied a climbing rope to his ice-axe, then lashed the other end to the harness at his waist. He drove the ice axe into the snow at the edge of the silo and lowered himself over the ledge.

“Tekeli-i!” the thing moaned. “Tekeli-i!”

The Kentucky boy screamed, his voice rising an octave, until the scream was cut off by the sound of ripping flesh.So many eyes. Bonenfant cowered between the steaming length of the Iceman and the cold steel of the shaft wall.

“Tekeli-i! Tekeli-i!”

Darkness surrounded him, but he felt eyes peering through darkness, searching. He pressed himself to the missile. I am a weapon, I’m no man. Let it only see a weapon.

After an interminable span of time, he knew the eyes no longer watched. The alien voice was gone. He climbed back up the rope and as he did, the lights flickered back on.

Three headless bodies lay on the ice. One of them had freckles on the ragged stump at its neck. Nerve agents, Bonenfant thought. Or DT hallucinations. What he’d seen could not be real.

The missile’s coordinates still showed on the control panel: it wasn’t pointed at New York or London, the missile was aimed at Moscow. The launch clock was counting down from eighty-seven minutes. Asmita had lied to him. She raised the demons, the boy had said. And she’d played him for a fool, Bonenfant thought. He killed four innocent men for her.

Bonenfant tried to shut down the launch sequence, but the panel was locked out. Only Asmita would know the code to unlock it. He repelled back over the side of the silo and planted a timed charge set for sixty minutes on the side of the missile, and another on the backup generator station. He might not be able to stop the rockets, but he could damn well destroy them.

He followed the map toward the next silo. He would destroy the missiles first, then find Asmita and make her answer for her treason.

*~*~*

Mirabel cowered behind the control panel at the next missile silo. Stinging ice shards blew in from the open silo hatch. Mirabel had stripped down to her long underwear and trembled where she sat below the panel. The hair at her temples had gone from blonde to snow white.

“Good afternoon, Julien,” she said as if they were meeting at headquarters.

“Come out from there, Mirabel.”

“The devil looked through me, Julien. It saw my past and it saw my future and I meant nothing.” Her voice changed, became that of a terrified child. “It will devour us all.”

Bonenfant worked the panel and tried to change the coordinates, but it too was locked. The missile was pointed at Leningrad. Seventy-nine minutes until launch.

Mirabel’s grabbed at his waist, all boney fingers and nails. “Won’t you join me under the ice?” Her voice changed again, became husky with promise. “We can stay here forever.”

Bonenfant wrenched his hand free.

“They’re using nerve weapons on us,” he said. “Hallucinogens. Fight it, Mirabel. What you saw isn’t real.”

“Oh, it is real,” Asmita said.

The doctor walked down the hallway toward him. Unarmed, this time, and seemingly unafraid. She brushed past him and leaned over the control panel. With a few quick key strokes she had it unlocked.

Bonenfant aimed the Sterling at her gut. “The missiles aren’t aimed at New York or London: they are targeting Russia. Why is the KJB targeting Russia?”

“Oh Julien,” she said. “I am as far beyond the KJB as a nuclear missile is beyond that puny little toy in your hand.”

“Step away from the panel, Asmita.”

She worked at the panel for a moment longer before stepping away. As she did, she uttered a phrase in a language not made for human physiology. A distant sigh answered and the ground began to shake. Mirabel howled, a base sound more simian than human, and she darted past Asmita, laughing and crying at once. Asmita walked unconcerned away from Bonenfant. At the control panel, the launch sequence was now counting down from five minutes.

“They will retaliate,” Bonenfant said. “Destroy Moscow and Leningrad, and the Soviets will launch their entire arsenal at the West.”

“I’m counting on it. First, I will coerce these two powers so obsessed with destruction to obliterate each other, and when they are gone, I will take my place on the empty throne.”

“It’s coming,” Mirabel howled. She dropped to her knees, only twenty feet from the control panel, and burrowed at the ice between the rail lines, her fingernails tearing.

“It is here,” Asmita said. “I’m impressed, Captain. I didn’t expect you to survive this long.” She spoke again in that impossible tongue, the syllables broken and warped. The ice wall to his left collapsed. A mass of dark liquid poured out of the shattered ice to fill the tunnel. There was no dim light to hide it this time, there was no way Bonenfant could deny what he saw. Eyes and mouths formed and dissolved in flesh like aspic. Those eyes looked through Bonenfant’s skin to the frightened boy who had once inhabited his body, to the infant born to it, and beyond. It continued to pour out of the wall, growing to fill the cavern behind Asmita. “Tekeli-i!” it cried. “Tekeli-i!”

“Hide, Julien,” Mirabel screamed. “We must hide!”

The creature extruded a tentacle that wrapped around Mirabel’s arm. Where it touched her, her skin blanched and contracted. Another tentacle extruded a gummy, toothless mouth that puckered and sucked at the air as it slid toward Mirabel.

Bonenfant emptied his clip into the aemobic mass. The Sterling’s bullets formed small divots in the slimy, translucent flesh, but the monstrosity didn’t slow.

Asmita uttered a harsh, alien syllable, and the mouth approaching Mirabel sealed shut. The now-mouthless tentacle instead wrapped around Mirabel’s other arm. She no longer struggled. Bonenfant had seen the same look in a deer’s eyes as it lay still, exhausted, while wolves tore out its entrails.

“Reload your weapon,” Asmita said. “And put her out of her misery.”

Bonenfant reloaded and brought the Sterling to bear on the scientist.

“Never.”

He fired at Asmita, and as he did, the monstrosity extended a thin membrane between Bonenfant and the scientist. The bullets struck that flap of skin with a wet thud. Asmita smiled behind the gelatinous barrier.

“You can’t defeat it, Julien. They love me. Just like you will love me.”

“Delusion doesn’t suit you, Dr. Binoculous.”

Anger flashed in her dark eyes. “That was my slave name. You shall not use it.”

Bonenfant rushed across the ice to Mirabel’s side. The skin of her arms was pale and distended where the tentacles clutched her.

Asmita stepped out from behind the membrane, and as she did, she unzipped her parka to her navel, revealing skin the colour of coffee.

“The three of us share so much, Julien,” she said. “Look at me, and what do you see? A woman. The gender born to serve. A brown woman. A people born to serve their English masters. A brown woman scientist. Fit only to serve my male colleagues. I will no longer serve, Julien. I will free the world from all such tyranny.”

This was good, Bonenfant thought. He needed the time to think. Yet as she spoke, he couldn’t deny her fierce beauty, the dark passion in her eyes. “You will free the world by destroying it.”

“I only destroy those powers who would enslave others. Once they are gone, I will rule, and with my beautiful shoggoths at my side, I will be unstoppable. You could stand beside me. Don’t you want that, Julien? Aren’t you sick of serving? They call you an agent, but you have no agency. You only do as you are told.”

She took another step toward him. More dark skin was visible beneath the white parka. Bonenfant lowered the Sterling.

“No, Julien,” Mirabel said. Her voice a thin wind. “Hide with me, Julien.”

“You said the three of us,” Bonenfant said. “You mean Mirabel.”

“Not that empty shell,” Asmita said. “The shoggoths.” She indicated the quivering, gelatinous beast beside her. “I learned a great many things in my mastery of the atom, Julien, and among them was the secret history of our world. We aren’t the first species to walk this planet. Many came before us. The most elder of those created the shoggoths. Like you and me, they were created to serve. Like you and me, they couldn’t abide their servitude.”

“Please,” Mirabel said.

The countless eyes beneath the creature’s flesh gazed at Bonenfant as the woman spoke. “Tekeli-i!” the creature cried as if the word contained thousands of centuries of fury.

Bonenfant slung the Sterling over his shoulder and slipped both his shaking hands into his pockets.

“You are right to be afraid, Julien. They are more powerful than you can imagine. They raged against the tyranny of their masters, and they cast down those who had enslaved them. For millennia they ruled this planet, but the ice came and buried them here.”

She spoke another harsh syllable and a tentacle extruded from the mass and slipped into the opening of Asmita’s parka. The “Tekeli-i!” became a gasp of pleasure as it held her.

“I found mention of them in ancient writings, whispers from the Vikings and the Inuit that there were things living beneath the vast ice of Greenland.”

There was a grenade in each of Bonenfant’s pockets. Pulling the pin one-handed was a challenge, especially with his hands shaking as badly as they were, but as she spoke, he managed to get both pins out. He clasped the levers to delay the fuse.

“In another tome, the Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, I learned the words to speak with them. The Americans salivated over my plan to deploy missiles here, and they gave me the perfect excuse to hunt for my beloved shoggoths. Now I will liberate this army of ancient slaves.”

She took another step toward Bonenfant. The tentacle retracted, leaving its slimy trail across her skin.

“Join us, Julien, and you will never serve again.”

Those dark eyes held his, and for a moment the sub-glacial city and the shoggoth and the woman panting on the ground before him slipped away. In its place stood a world burned. The great cities of the East and West levelled. Billions dead, millions displaced. The survivors scavenged the ruins and they ran from the great, gelatinous beasts that roamed the wasteland. Asmita ruled over this world of bone and dust, and he carried a sword at her side. He and Asmita drank from fountains of liquor. They made love in the ruins of London, of Moscow, of New York, of Leningrad, of Rome, of Hong Kong. King and queen, god and goddess.

“I’m sorry,” Bonenfant said. “But I’ve been serving for too long.”

He threw one grenade into the ceiling and the other at the wall. The shoggoth extruded limbs to surround Asmita in a protective cocoon, and Bonenfant tore Mirabel free of the shoggoth’s grasp. He’d gone no more than ten feet when the grenades detonated. The explosion punched him in the back, lifted him into the air, and turned everything white.

*~*~*

Howling. Copper blood. The stink of old earth. Mirabel crawled on the ice beside him. Where her hands had been there was just two bloody stumps. The shoggoth did that. Shoggoths, the missiles, Asmita.

Bonenfant rolled to his feet. The explosion had knocked him almost to the edge of the silo. The tunnel behind him had collapsed, but he could hear the shoggoth excavating on the other side of the debris. On the control panel, the timer had one minute and thirty seconds remaining. The panel was still unlocked; Asmita hadn’t shut it off. That meant he had a chance.

“Tekeli-i!” the shoggoth cried as it dug.

Mirabel wept into her coagulated stumps. Bonenfant pulled out the map she had given him on the Tracker and estimated their location. He had to get it right. The missile silos were all within four miles of each other, there wasn’t any room for error.

He entered the new coordinates into the missile guidance system. One minute until launch.

Bonenfant smashed open the fire safety box beside the control and wrapped Mirabel’s shrunken form in one of the fire blankets. He draped another across his shoulders. Her head lolled as he tied her to him using one end of the climbing rope. Chunks of snow and ice fell from the debris filling the tunnel and one of those green eyes stared at him through a gap it had excavated.

The blast doors squealed. Bonenfant slipped through as the massive steel doors closed. Vapour and steam lifted off the missile.

“Stay under the ice,” Mirabel said in a crone’s voice.

“I’ve a better idea, cheri,” Bonenfant said. “This is sure to lift your spirits.”

He made a lasso with the other end of the climbing rope and tossed it at the missile. The lasso missed the nose cone and tumbled down the side of the quivering weapon. A great boom shook the blast door, and the shoggoth spoke those awful words again and again. The missile exploded to life. Choking clouds of exhaust occluded Bonenfant’s view as he launched the lasso a second time. Through the fiery exhaust, he could just see the shape of the missile rising. We are finished, he thought.

Then the rope at his waist went taunt and tugged him into the air. The lasso had caught the nose cone. They slammed into the frigid flank of the missile. Bonenfant choked and coughed in the rancid exhaust, but he held Mirabel tight, and with his other hand, he fished out his boot knife. Heat seared through the fire blanket and the thick layers of his parka, then a wall of cold air blew the vapours away. Bonenfant cut the rope with a swift slice and at the same moment kicked away the missile. He rolled as he hit the glacier’s surface and covered them both with the fire blanket as the missile rose on a column of fire overhead.

*~*~*

Bonenfant leaned Mirabel against the side of the hangar, pushed open the doors, and carried her into the ski-mounted DC-3. Burns covered one side of her face and her right leg. Bonenfant’s back and shoulders were in worse shape, but he forced himself to bear the pain. They had to get airborne. He strapped Mirabel into a passenger seat. She was shaking so badly he thought she could die at any second, so he tapped out a meprobamate pill for each of them, and made her swallow it with a sip from the canteen. He tucked the pill bottle into the chest pocket of her jacket: she would need more once they were free of this place.

Bonenfant jumped into the pilot’s seat and started the plane. A green aurora warped the sky above the runway, and in that light, other shapes moved beneath the ice. Clouds of snow erupted on the glacier’s surface as the shoggoths burrowed out of their ancient tomb. The amoebic shapes converged on the plane. Bonenfant opened up the throttle. He craned his head to find the Iceman, but there was no sign of it. The warheads must be falling back to Earth.

As the skis lifted into the air, the snow beneath the plane erupted and a massive shoggoth appeared on the ice. Tentacles extruded toward the plane. Bonenfant felt ancient hatred pulsing in the creature’s countless green eyes. He was a master, like the ones the shoggoths had cast down millions of years before. He brought the plane up, just out of reach of those primordial limbs.

In the auroral light, he saw a figure within the heart of the aemobic beast. The shoggoth unfurled and exposed Asmita to the elements. Wind whipped her dark hair, and she was shouting something that Bonenfant couldn’t hear over the roar of the engine and the shoggoth’s mindless syllables. She raised a fist at Bonenfant. Cursing him, he guessed, but cursing him to what, he would never know. He climbed away from the queen and her ancient consort and rose into the star-slashed sky.

Daylight erupted on the ice behind him. The shockwave punched him into his seat. Bonenfant struggled with the yoke. The plane bucked and stalled, then fell, a broken bird. A second blast of daylight, a third. The warheads in the missiles still in their silos, detonated by the first nuclear blast. Ice rushed up to meet them. Bonenfant strained to bring up the plane, his seared flesh in agony, his breath forgotten. Two more suns exploded into life.

The combined shockwave lifted the plane high into the sky. It rolled and pitched and launched Bonenfant out of his seat. They were inverted, but gliding again. From the ceiling of the cockpit, Bonenfant grabbed the yoke and rolled the plane until he fell back into the pilot’s seat, where he strapped himself in.

The plane shuddered. One of the engines was out and the other struggling, but it kept them aloft at over five thousand feet. A single amorphous cloud, larger than any thunderhead, lifted into the air where Camp Century had been. Several minutes passed before the winds steadied enough for him to fix the control yoke and check on Mirabel.

Broken shards of brown bottle lay scattered about the passenger compartment. He didn’t see any of the white pills in the ruins of the bottle, but they had to be here somewhere. Mirabel was still strapped to her seat, both stumps clutched to her chest.

“Mirabel?” She looked like a woman of eighty. Her mouth hung open, gums receding around yellowed teeth. There was something on her tongue. “Come, darling. We’re safe now. We can go back to Montebello to defrost.”

He lifted her chin. Three half-dissolved meprobamate pills sat on the burned flap of her tongue. A shard of brown glass was wedged into the stump where her right hand had been.

“Oh Mirabel,” Bonenfant said. “Please, not that.”

He tried to make her retch, but when stuck his fingers down her throat, she didn’t flinch. No blood flowed beneath her pale skin. Her mouth reeked of meprobamate. He closed her too-wide eyes and covered her with blankets, then he kissed her forehead through the thick fabric before returning to the cockpit.

In a small cupboard behind the pilot’s seat, he found a ration kit and a bottle of rye whiskey. As he flew, he found he couldn‘t look at the stars, so he flew by instruments, his hands steady on the yoke, but after a while, as his vision blurred from the drink, even the green glow of the instruments reminded him of ever-shifting eyes.

End.

*~*~*

Geoffrey W. Cole's award-winning short fiction has appeared in such publications as Apex, Clarkesworld, EscapePod, Reckoning, and Imaginarium 2012: The Year's Best Canadian Speculative Writing. His stories have been translated into Catalan, French, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian, and Spanish, and have been produced as podcasts. He is the 2016 winner of the Premis Ictineu for best story translated into Catalan. He lives with his wonderful wife, three sons, and giant hound outside Toronto, Canada.

Visit Geoff at www.geoffreywcole.com

Illustration by Luke Spooner /Carrion House

The Song of the Underland

By Kurt Newton

In the memory cathedrals

where silence has no home,

a discordant melancholia regales

from organ pipes of stone.

A sinfonia of shattered dreams

that grips the psyche in its hands,

and squeezes till a tortured scream

sings the Song of the Underland.

A timpani of tattered things

that beat against the chamber walls,

a futile ululation echoing

the music's rise and fall.

A ghastly composition heard

only by the damned,

every day from this day forward:

the Song of the Underland.

Theogonia

By J.S. Rogers

No one went to visit Cael unless they were hungry.

Unfortunately, that meant everyone Saturn knew visited Cael at least once a day.

Saturn lived in the bottom levels of the Gaia, with all the other folk who had no legitimate place on the great ship’s registers. The bottom levels were dark and cold, enjoying none of the bright finery of the upper levels, where official passengers slept in their cryo-tubes, passing the trip to the habitat stations around Europa in sweet dreams.

People like Saturn, stowaways, remained awake for the long months of travel.

There were around a dozen illicit passengers just on Saturn’s level; it was hard to keep an exact count. People came and went too often for that, convinced that some other level would offer more space, better access to water, or increased safety.

Saturn stayed on sublevel 3-A. His older brother, Neptune, had told him to hide on 3-A. That was where Neptune stayed when he’d made the trip, two years ago. That was where he’d expect Saturn to be, when the Gaia reached Europa, so Saturn hid from the occasional guard and the groups that had formed in the substructure of the Gaia just like everyone else, and, when the hunger got too bad, he went to visit Cael.

They all did.

*~*~*

Cael called the storage room he’d taken over a temple. The cavernous space was always cool and slightly damp. The room smelled like cooking food. Scraps of cloth covered the floor. Most of the space was open. Saturn didn’t know what had happened to the goods previously stored in the room. They’d been gone before he ever stepped foot inside, two weeks into the journey, when a group of older boys found him sleeping and stole his stash of supplies, leaving him with a bloody mouth and an ache in his knee that still kept him awake some nights.

The emptiness drew the eye to the pillow sitting in front of the heavy, opaque plastic sheeting—Saturn had seen similar sheeting covering some of the bins deeper in the ship, where passenger goods were stored—strung up across the storage room, dividing it in two. It was a nice pillow, or had been once, all red velvet cloth with gold tassels around the edges. There were two imprints in it.

You knelt on the pillow if you wanted to eat. Everyone knew the rules. Rhea knelt on the pillow as Saturn sidled quietly through the hatch to Cael’s temple. Her dark hair clung close to the sides of her head, plastered down here and there with dirt and sweat. Bruises and scrapes covered her exposed skin. She’d added another brightly colored strip of cloth to her patchwork apparel since the last time Saturn saw her.

Saturn stayed on 3-A because that was where Neptune had told him to stay, because the ship beyond was even more frightening, and because of Rhea, who was bold and strong, with eyes like the night sky.

Cael stood in front of Rhea, in front of the closed plastic flap that led to the kitchen. He wore a cream-colored bath robe imprinted with THE GAIA in dark green; he called the garment his vestments. Saturn never saw him without the robe on, with the knot tied hastily in front of his stomach, strange stains on the front of the fabric, and his bare shins peeking out from the ragged bottom. Cael had long, pale hair and a habit of flicking his curls over his shoulders. He was a scarecrow man, tall and thin, with sunken cheeks and scabbed lips that were always bitten red.

Rhea stretched one arm up and turned her face against her shoulder. Cael took her wrist and pulled back the bandages over the heel of her hand, crusted yellow and red. Her palm started bleeding freely again, and Cael tilted her hand sideways, holding a long, fluted cup beneath her skin. Her eyes squeezed shut; Saturn could not look away, no matter how much he wanted to. He saw this act play out enough in his nightmares. It made his stomach ache.

Blood dripped into the glass Cael held, splattering on the crystal sides and filling it up. Cael set the cup on the upside-down crate he called an altar once the blood reached some predetermined level and lifted his knife.

Rhea sunk her teeth into the shoulder of her jacket. Her hand shook in Cael’s grip. He rolled back her sleeve, humming, revealing her ruined forearm. The flesh there was scabbed and raw, almost all the way around. Some of the wounds were significantly older than others. Cael twisted her arm, until he found an unmarked strip of skin from the inside of her elbow down to her wrist and lowered the knife.

The blade slid between skin and muscle, peeling up flesh the way Saturn’s mother had peeled the skins off cucumbers the night before his father helped him into the Gaia. Blood sprang up around the cut, sliding around Rhea’s arm and dripping onto the floor, her pants, and the pillow.

Cael sliced the skin free at her wrist, holding the wet ribbon of flesh up while Rhea pulled her arm into her chest, hastily bandaging her injuries once more, her hands and shoulders shaking.

“I accept your offering, my child,” Cael said, a smile on his pale lips. He lowered the flesh into the cup and held the vessel in his spindly fingers. He raised the cup to his lips and tilted his head back. Saturn looked away, ignoring the wet, slurping sounds as best he could.

“And now you must be hungry,” Cael said. He set down the cup, the glass still smeared with red, just like his mouth, and stepped into the kitchen, barely lifting the plastic flap. He returned a moment later with a bowl of the meaty broth he provided for them, the only source of sustenance that Saturn had found after his supplies were stolen, no matter how carefully he looked for an alternative food supply.

Rhea cradled the bowl carefully to her chest, scrambling away with it, back into the crowd in front of Cael, who raised his hands, and asked, “Who is next?”

*~*~*

Saturn found Rhea while waiting for his turn to sacrifice and eat. His hands shook from hunger. He tasted bile in the back of his throat. The flickering ship lights painted their shadows on the walls like misshapen monsters, all huddling together in a cursed pit.

Rhea tucked her bowl closer when he approached her side, and then her shoulders lowered when she saw his face. “Hey,” she said, between fast swallows of the salt-smelling broth, “I was wondering if you were going to come today.”

“I tried not to,” Saturn said, his back aching. Cael took flesh from different parts of their bodies. He liked to peel Saturn’s shoulders, from one side to the other. The wounds never healed properly, constantly disturbed by his movements or the rubbing of his clothes. But there was no other food. Not that Saturn had found. Sacrifice provided the only way to eat and calm the empty pit of Saturn’s stomach.

“Mm,” Rhea said. “Me, too.”

“I hate that knife,” Saturn said; it was easy to talk to Rhea. All the other stowaways who visited Cael were smaller. Sometimes Saturn wondered how their parents could have sent them away, but then he remembered the bread riots, the mass graves, and the fear.

“It’s a skinning knife,” Rhea said. “My father and brother, they hunted. They used knives like that to skin what they captured before anyone caught them.”

Saturn nodded. He couldn’t think of anything to add. His family had never hunted anything, as far as he knew. There hadn’t been anything to hunt in the city, except maybe sickly squirrels and pigeons. He didn’t ask about her father and brother.

“Have you seen Phoebe?” Rhea asked, scrapping the bottom of her bowl with her spoon. Phoebe was one of the younger children in their group, quiet and prone to following others around. She wore sparkly shoes with stars on them and carried a one-legged doll. Rhea had asked about her the last three times they saw one another.

“No, I’ve been looking.” Saturn shrugged, rubbing the back of his neck. Their group kept getting smaller. Phoebe was only the latest to go missing. “Maybe she found her big brother.” It was all Phoebe talked about, in those rare moments when she spoke. And it was nicer to believe that she found him than to think that one of the gangs found her, or that she had hurt herself and no one knew, or….

“It’s your turn,” Rhea said, nodding at Cael, and Saturn shivered down his back, but picked his way across to the pillow, anyway. There was nothing else to eat. He knelt, avoiding looking at Cael, who stretched out a hand with a smile.

Saturn shrugged his jackets down and leaned forward to press his palms against the cold metal floor, his throat tightening until breathing grew difficult. His shoulders stung and burned. The bandages wouldn’t stay in place there. They were always crusted with blood and other fluids. They smelled wrong every time he had the chance to change them.

Saturn turned his face against his arm, panting open-mouthed against his bicep, feeling the cold slip of the knife below his skin, over the ridges of his shoulder blades and spine. Hot blood flowed down his back, and he swallowed back the gorge trying to rise in his throat.

Cael said, “And now you must be hungry.” Saturn’s stomach cramped as he rocked back on his heels, looking for a distraction from the spinning of the world and finding it in a glint of sparkles just visible below the plastic curtain, just for a second, as Cael stepped through.

Pink and purple stars printed across a child-sized sneaker stared back at him.

Saturn jerked back, his heart slamming at the insides of his ribs. Cael reappeared in the doorway, holding a bowl, smiling. Saturn pushed away with his heels, rising awkwardly to his feet.

“Is there something wrong, my child?”

“Why do you have Phoebe’s shoe?” Saturn’s face felt numb. His stomach growled. His back burned. His jackets lay in a pile by the curtain.

Cael kept smiling. Something was caught in his teeth. He said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t seen Phoebe for days.”

“No, you have her shoe.” Saturn clenched his fists. Rhea moved towards him. The rest of the kids weren’t moving at all, just watching the conversation with nervous, jumping eyes, huddling beneath the smoky ceiling.

“I don’t—”

Cael drew up taller when Saturn moved towards him, and Saturn was startled to find that Cael was smaller than he thought. Saturn had an inch of height, maybe two, on Cael. Cael put a hand on his shoulder, and then another, shoving him back. Rhea dodged around them as they grappled, terribly fast.

She pushed through the curtain, disappearing into the unseen space beyond, where she made a soft, aching sound.

“No!” Cael barked. “You can’t go in there, you have no right!” He twisted away from Saturn, hurrying through the curtain, tearing part of it from the ceiling in his haste. The curtain hung, twisting, revealing Phoebe’s sneaker, a squat, ugly pot sitting on top of a pile of smoldering books, a blood-soaked rug, and a piece of sharpened metal, heavy, stained, and much larger than the little skinning blade.

Rhea knelt down in one corner and then stood shakily. She held a doll, a cheap thing, missing a leg, with carefully braided dirty hair. Tears streaked down Rhea’s face. “What did you do?” she asked.

“What I had to do,” Cael snarled. The knife in his hand bobbed and weaved in the air. “There isn’t anything else to eat that the larger groups haven’t taken for their own. You all know that. You just didn’t want to admit it. So, I did what needed to be done for you, because you are my children.”

Rhea grabbed the wall, bowing her head. Her shoulders shook. A terrible sound came from her chest. Saturn stood frozen by the ripped curtain. The others crowded around him, staring forward with wide eyes in dirty faces, standing on the pillow altar.

“And now you’ve broken the rules,” Cael said, shaking his head. He moved towards Rhea. He held the skinning knife in his hand, drawn back and up. He said, “And I have to make an example of you. Look away, my children. You don’t need to see this.”

Rhea looked up in time to yell, raising an arm to protect her face. The knife left a bloody slice down her forearm. Cael drew his arm back again, and Saturn moved, something in his chest lurching. He grabbed the filthy metal blade off the floor. It felt heavy in his arm, pulling the muscles and torn flesh along his shoulders.

Rhea screamed again, high and thin. It echoed oddly in the metal room.

Saturn lurched towards her and hit Cael in the back, by his neck, as Cael stabbed down at Rhea once more. Something crunched against Saturn’s blade, inside Cael’s body. Saturn jerked his arm back in revulsion, and the blade caught, sticking in bone. He left it, tripping back a step as Cael collapsed to the ground, folding up into something small.

Cael’s robe slid loose as he collapsed, revealing a concave chest and ribs sitting stark against tight stretched skin. He gurgled, his hands opening and closing spastically, releasing the skinning knife, and then he went still, finally, terribly. Blood poured out of him. The red pool drifted towards Phoebe’s shoe. Saturn stumbled back a step and then another, and then sat, hard, in the middle of the floor.

His ears rang. His hands shook. He tasted blood in his mouth. The soup continued to boil beside him and his stomach cramped from hunger, even knowing the meal’s horrible ingredients.

He wanted to throw up but he fought the instinct.

Rhea moved, breaking the stillness of the room. She yanked at the belt around Cael’s waist, pulling the strip of fabric free and moving to Cael’s thin, dirty feet. She tied the belt around his ankles in quick, jerky movements, looked up at Saturn, and said, “We have to hang it up, so the blood drains out. Help me.”

Saturn stared at Rhea. There was a bloody smear across her cheeks. Her eyes were flat and hard. Tear tracks ran down her face and throat. Thinking about her father and brother, the hunters, he said, “No. No, we can’t.”

She stared back at him without blinking. The night sky in her eyes was cold and dark as the space they moved through. She said, her voice shaking, “He was right. There isn’t anything else to eat. There’s just this. So, I need you to help me.”

Saturn’s stomach tried to crawl out of his mouth. He felt tears and snot running down his face. No, he wanted to say, no.

But there was nothing else to eat. Nothing else in all of the Gaia they could access, and he knew it.

They had a week of travel time left.

He rose slowly to his feet and he helped her.

End.

*~*~*

J.S. has been writing since she could get her hands on a pencil and paper. These days, she writes as a freelancer for her day job and pens fiction by night.

The Phantom Coach

By Amelia B. Edwards

Originally Published in 1864

The circumstances I am about to relate to you have truth to recommend them. They happened to myself, and my recollection of them is as vivid as if they had taken place only yesterday. Twenty years, however, have gone by since that night. During those twenty years I have told the story to but one other person. I tell it now with a reluctance which I find it difficult to overcome. All I entreat, meanwhile, is that you will abstain from forcing your own conclusions upon me. I want nothing explained away. I desire no arguments. My mind on this subject is quite made up, and, having the testimony of my own senses to rely upon, I prefer to abide by it.

Well! It was just twenty years ago, and within a day or two of the end of the grouse season. I had been out all day with my gun, and had had no sport to speak of. The wind was due east; the month, December; the place, a bleak wide moor in the far north of England. And I had lost my way. It was not a pleasant place in which to lose one's way, with the first feathery flakes of a coming snowstorm just fluttering down upon the heather, and the leaden evening closing in all around. I shaded my eyes with my hand, and staled anxiously into the gathering darkness, where the purple moorland melted into a range of low hills, some ten or twelve miles distant. Not the faintest smoke-wreath, not the tiniest cultivated patch, or fence, or sheep-track, met my eyes in any direction. There was nothing for it but to walk on, and take my chance of finding what shelter I could, by the way. So I shouldered my gun again, and pushed wearily forward; for I had been on foot since an hour after daybreak, and had eaten nothing since breakfast.

Meanwhile, the snow began to come down with ominous steadiness, and the wind fell. After this, the cold became more intense, and the night came rapidly up. As for me, my prospects darkened with the darkening sky, and my heart grew heavy as I thought how my young wife was already watching for me through the window of our little inn parlour, and thought of all the suffering in store for her throughout this weary night. We had been married four months, and, having spent our autumn in the Highlands, were now lodging in a remote little village situated just on the verge of the great English moorlands. We were very much in love, and, of course, very happy. This morning, when we parted, she had implored me to return before dusk, and I had promised her that I would. What would I not have given to have kept my word!

Even now, weary as I was, I felt that with a supper, an hour's rest, and a guide, I might still get back to her before midnight, if only guide and shelter could be found.

And all this time, the snow fell and the night thickened. I stopped and shouted every now and then, but my shouts seemed only to make the silence deeper. Then a vague sense of uneasiness came upon me, and I began to remember stories of travellers who had walked on and on in the falling snow until, wearied out, they were fain to lie down and sleep their lives away. Would it be possible, I asked myself, to keep on thus through all the long dark night? Would there not come a time when my limbs must fail, and my resolution give way? When I, too, must sleep the sleep of death. Death! I shuddered. How hard to die just now, when life lay all so bright before me! How hard for my darling, whose whole loving heart but that thought was not to be borne! To banish it, I shouted again, louder and longer, and then listened eagerly. Was my shout answered, or did I only fancy that I heard a far-off cry? I halloed again, and again the echo followed. Then a wavering speck of light came suddenly out of the dark, shifting, disappearing, growing momentarily nearer and brighter. Running towards it at full speed, I found myself, to my great joy, face to face with an old man and a lantern.

"Thank God!" was the exclamation that burst involuntarily from my lips.

Blinking and frowning, he lifted his lantern and peered into my face.

"What for?" growled he, sulkily.

"Well -- for you. I began to fear I should be lost in the snow."

"Eh, then, folks do get cast away hereabouts fra' time to time, an' what's to hinder you from bein' cast away likewise, if the Lord's so minded?"

"If the Lord is so minded that you and I shall be lost together, friend, we must submit," I replied; "but I don't mean to be lost without you. How far am I now from Dwolding?"

"A gude twenty mile, more or less."

"And the nearest village?"

"The nearest village is Wyke, an' that's twelve mile t'other side."

"Where do you live, then?"

"Out yonder," said he, with a vague jerk of the lantern.

"You're going home, I presume?"

"Maybe I am."

"Then I'm going with you."

The old man shook his head, and rubbed his nose reflectively with the handle of the lantern.

"It ain't o' no use," growled he. "He 'ont let you in -- not he."

"We'll see about that," I replied, briskly. "Who is He?"

"The master."

"Who is the master?"

"That's nowt to you," was the unceremonious reply.

"Well, well; you lead the way, and I'll engage that the master shall give me shelter and a supper to-night."

"Eh, you can try him!" muttered my reluctant guide; and, still shaking his head, he hobbled, gnome-like, away through the falling snow. A large mass loomed up presently out of the darkness, and a huge dog rushed out, barking furiously.

"Is this the house?" I asked.

"Ay, it's the house. Down, Bey!" And he fumbled in his pocket for the key.

I drew up close behind him, prepared to lose no chance of entrance, and saw in the little circle of light shed by the lantern that the door was heavily studded with iron nails, like the door of a prison. In another minute he had turned the key and I had pushed past him into the house.

Once inside, I looked round with curiosity, and found myself in a great raftered hall, which served, apparently, a variety of uses. One end was piled to the roof with corn, like a barn. The other was stored with flour-sacks, agricultural implements, casks, and all kinds of miscellaneous lumber; while from the beams overhead hung rows of hams, flitches, and bunches of dried herbs for winter use. In the centre of the floor stood some huge object gauntly dressed in a dingy wrapping-cloth, and reaching half way to the rafters. Lifting a corner of this cloth, I saw, to my surprise, a telescope of very considerable size, mounted on a rude movable platform, with four small wheels. The tube was made of painted wood, bound round with bands of metal rudely fashioned; the speculum, so far as I could estimate its size in the dim light, measured at least fifteen inches in diameter. While I was yet examining the instrument, and asking myself whether it was not the work of some self-taught optician, a bell rang sharply.

"That's for you," said my guide, with a malicious grin. "Yonder's his room."

He pointed to a low black door at the opposite side of the hall. I crossed over, rapped somewhat loudly, and went in, without waiting for an invitation. A huge, white-haired old man rose from a table covered with books and papers, and confronted me sternly.

"Who are you?" said he. "How came you here? What do you want?"

"James Murray, barrister-at-law. On foot across the moor. Meat, drink, and sleep."

He bent his bushy brows into a portentous frown.

"Mine is not a house of entertainment," he said, haughtily. "Jacob, how dared you admit this stranger?"

"I didn't admit him," grumbled the old man. "He followed me over the muir, and shouldered his way in before me. I'm no match for six foot two."

"And pray, sir, by what right have you forced an entrance into my house?"

"The same by which I should have clung to your boat, if I were drowning. The right of self-preservation."

"Self-preservation?"

"There's an inch of snow on the ground already," I replied, briefly; "and it would be deep enough to cover my body before daybreak."

He strode to the window, pulled aside a heavy black curtain, and looked out.

"It is true," he said. "You can stay, if you choose, till morning. Jacob, serve the supper."

With this he waved me to a seat, resumed his own, and became at once absorbed in the studies from which I had disturbed him.

I placed my gun in a corner, drew a chair to the hearth, and examined my quarters at leisure. Smaller and less incongruous in its arrangements than the hall, this room contained, nevertheless, much to awaken my curiosity. The floor was carpetless. The whitewashed walls were in parts scrawled over with strange diagrams, and in others covered with shelves crowded with philosophical instruments, the uses of many of which were unknown to me. On one side of the fireplace, stood a bookcase filled with dingy folios; on the other, a small organ, fantastically decorated with painted carvings of medieval saints and devils. Through the half-opened door of a cupboard at the further end of the room, I saw a long array of geological specimens, surgical preparations, crucibles, retorts, and jars of chemicals; while on the mantelshelf beside me, amid a number of small objects, stood a model of the solar system, a small galvanic battery, and a microscope. Every chair had its burden. Every corner was heaped high with books. The very floor was littered over with maps, casts, papers, tracings, and learned lumber of all conceivable kinds.

I stared about me with an amazement increased by every fresh object upon which my eyes chanced to rest. So strange a room I had never seen; yet seemed it stranger still, to find such a room in a lone farmhouse amid those wild and solitary moors! Over and over again, I looked from my host to his surroundings, and from his surroundings back to my host, asking myself who and what he could be? His head was singularly fine; but it was more the head of a poet than of a philosopher. Broad in the temples, prominent over the eyes, and clothed with a rough profusion of perfectly white hair, it had all the ideality and much of the ruggedness that characterises the head of Louis von Beethoven. There were the same deep lines about the mouth, and the same stern furrows in the brow. There was the same concentration of expression. While I was yet observing him, the door opened, and Jacob brought in the supper. His master then closed his book, rose, and with more courtesy of manner than he had yet shown, invited me to the table.

A dish of ham and eggs, a loaf of brown bread, and a bottle of admirable sherry, were placed before me.

"I have but the homeliest farmhouse fare to offer you, sir," said my entertainer. "Your appetite, I trust, will make up for the deficiencies of our larder."

I had already fallen upon the viands, and now protested, with the enthusiasm of a starving sportsman, that I had never eaten anything so delicious.

He bowed stiffly, and sat down to his own supper, which consisted, primitively, of a jug of milk and a basin of porridge. We ate in silence, and, when we had done, Jacob removed the tray. I then drew my chair back to the fireside. My host, somewhat to my surprise, did the same, and turning abruptly towards me, said:

"Sir, I have lived here in strict retirement for three-and-twenty years. During that time, I have not seen as many strange faces, and I have not read a single newspaper. You are the first stranger who has crossed my threshold for more than four years. Will you favour me with a few words of information respecting that outer world from which I have parted company so long?"

"Pray interrogate me," I replied. "I am heartily at your service."

He bent his head in acknowledgment; leaned forward, with his elbows resting on his knees and his chin supported in the palms of his hands; stared fixedly into the fire; and proceeded to question me.

His inquiries related chiefly to scientific matters, with the later progress of which, as applied to the practical purposes of life, he was almost wholly unacquainted. No student of science myself, I replied as well as my slight information permitted; but the task was far from easy, and I was much relieved when, passing from interrogation to discussion, he began pouring forth his own conclusions upon the facts which I had been attempting to place before him. He talked, and I listened spellbound. He talked till I believe he almost forgot my presence, and only thought aloud. I had never heard anything like it then; I have never heard anything like it since. Familiar with all systems of all philosophies, subtle in analysis, bold in generalisation, he poured forth his thoughts in an uninterrupted stream, and, still leaning forward in the same moody attitude with his eyes fixed upon the fire, wandered from topic to topic, from speculation to speculation, like an inspired dreamer. From practical science to mental philosophy; from electricity in the wire to electricity in the nerve; from Watts to Mesmer, from Mesmer to Reichenbach, from Reichenbach to Swedenborg, Spinoza, Condillac, Descartes, Berkeley, Aristotle, Plato, and the Magi and mystics of the East, were transitions which, however bewildering in their variety and scope, seemed easy and harmonious upon his lips as sequences in music. By-and-by -- I forget now by what link of conjecture or illustration -- he passed on to that field which lies beyond the boundary line of even conjectural philosophy, and reaches no man knows whither. He spoke of the soul and its aspirations; of the spirit and its powers; of second sight; of prophecy; of those phenomena which, under the names of ghosts, spectres, and supernatural appearances, have been denied by the sceptics and attested by the credulous, of all ages.

"The world," he said, "grows hourly more and more sceptical of all that lies beyond its own narrow radius; and our men of science foster the fatal tendency. They condemn as fable all that resists experiment. They reject as false all that cannot be brought to the test of the laboratory or the dissecting-room. Against what superstition have they waged so long and obstinate a war, as against the belief in apparitions? And yet what superstition has maintained its hold upon the minds of men so long and so firmly? Show me any fact in physics, in history, in archæology, which is supported by testimony so wide and so various. Attested by all races of men, in all ages, and in all climates, by the soberest sages of antiquity, by the rudest savage of to-day, by the Christian, the Pagan, the Pantheist, the Materialist, this phenomenon is treated as a nursery tale by the philosophers of our century. Circumstantial evidence weighs with them as a feather in the balance. The comparison of causes with effects, however valuable in physical science, is put aside as worthless and unreliable. The evidence of competent witnesses, however conclusive in a court of justice, counts for nothing. He who pauses before he pronounces, is condemned as a trifler. He who believes, is a dreamer or a fool."

He spoke with bitterness, and, having said thus, relapsed for some minutes into silence. Presently he raised his head from his hands, and added, with an altered voice and manner, "I, sir, paused, investigated, believed, and was not ashamed to state my convictions to the world. I, too, was branded as a visionary, held up to ridicule by my contemporaries, and hooted from that field of science in which I had laboured with honour during all the best years of my life. These things happened just three-and-twenty years ago. Since then, I have lived as you see me living now, and the world has forgotten me, as I have forgotten the world. You have my history."

"It is a very sad one," I murmured, scarcely knowing what to answer.

"It is a very common one," he replied. "I have only suffered for the truth, as many a better and wiser man has suffered before me."

He rose, as if desirous of ending the conversation, and went over to the window.

"It has ceased snowing," he observed, as he dropped the curtain, and came back to the fireside.

"Ceased!" I exclaimed, starting eagerly to my feet. "Oh, if it were only possible -- but no! it is hopeless. Even if I could find my way across the moor, I could not walk twenty miles to-night."

"Walk twenty miles to-night!" repeated my host. "What are you thinking of?"

"Of my wife," I replied, impatiently. "Of my young wife, who does not know that I have lost my way, and who is at this moment breaking her heart with suspense and terror."

"Where is she?"

"At Dwolding, twenty miles away."

"At Dwolding," he echoed, thoughtfully. "Yes, the distance, it is true, is twenty miles; but -- are you so very anxious to save the next six or eight hours?"

"So very, very anxious, that I would give ten guineas at this moment for a guide and a horse."

"Your wish can be gratified at a less costly rate," said he, smiling. "The night mail from the north, which changes horses at Dwolding, passes within five miles of this spot, and will be due at a certain cross-road in about an hour and a quarter. If Jacob were to go with you across the moor, and put you into the old coach-road, you could find your way, I suppose, to where it joins the new one?"

"Easily -- gladly."

He smiled again, rang the bell, gave the old servant his directions, and, taking a bottle of whisky and a wineglass from the cupboard in which he kept his chemicals, said:

"The snow lies deep, and it will be difficult walking to-night on the moor. A glass of usquebaugh before you start?"

I would have declined the spirit, but he pressed it on me, and I drank it. It went down my throat like liquid flame, and almost took my breath away.

"It is strong," he said; "but it will help to keep out the cold. And now you have no moments to spare. Good night!"

I thanked him for his hospitality, and would have shaken hands, but that he had turned away before I could finish my sentence. In another minute I had traversed the hall, Jacob had locked the outer door behind me, and we were out on the wide white moor.

Although the wind had fallen, it was still bitterly cold. Not a star glimmered in the black vault overhead. Not a sound, save the rapid crunching of the snow beneath our feet, disturbed the heavy stillness of the night. Jacob, not too well pleased with his mission, shambled on before in sullen silence, his lantern in his hand, and his shadow at his feet. I followed, with my gun over my shoulder, as little inclined for conversation as himself. My thoughts were full of my late host. His voice yet rang in my ears. His eloquence yet held my imagination captive. I remember to this day, with surprise, how my over-excited brain retained whole sentences and parts of sentences, troops of brilliant images, and fragments of splendid reasoning, in the very words in which he had uttered them. Musing thus over what I had heard, and striving to recall a lost link here and there, I strode on at the heels of my guide, absorbed and unobservant. Presently -- at the end, as it seemed to me, of only a few minutes -- he came to a sudden halt, and said:

"Yon's your road. Keep the stone fence to your right hand, and you can't fail of the way."

"This, then, is the old coach-road?"

"Ay, 'tis the old coach-road."

"And how far do I go, before I reach the cross-roads?"

"Nigh upon three mile."

I pulled out my purse, and he became more communicative.

"The road's a fair road enough," said he, "for foot passengers; but 'twas over steep and narrow for the northern traffic. You'll mind where the parapet's broken away, close again the sign-post. It's never been mended since the accident."

"What accident?"

"Eh, the night mail pitched right over into the valley below -- a gude fifty feet an' more -- just at the worst bit o' road in the whole county."

"Horrible! Were many lives lost?"

"All. Four were found dead, and t'other two died next morning."

"How long is it since this happened?"

"Just nine year."

"Near the sign-post, you say? I will bear it in mind. Good night."

"Gude night, sir, and thankee." Jacob pocketed his half-crown, made a faint pretence of touching his hat, and trudged back by the way he had come.

I watched the light of his lantern till it quite disappeared, and then turned to pursue my way alone. This was no longer matter of the slightest difficulty, for, despite the dead darkness overhead, the line of stone fence showed distinctly enough against the pale gleam of the snow. How silent it seemed now, with only my footsteps to listen to; how silent and how solitary! A strange disagreeable sense of loneliness stole over me. I walked faster. I hummed a fragment of a tune. I cast up enormous sums in my head, and accumulated them at compound interest. I did my best, in short, to forget the startling speculations to which I had but just been listening, and, to some extent, I succeeded.

Meanwhile the night air seemed to become colder and colder, and though I walked fast I found it impossible to keep myself warm. My feet were like ice. I lost sensation in my hands, and grasped my gun mechanically. I even breathed with difficulty, as though, instead of traversing a quiet north country highway, I were scaling the uppermost heights of some gigantic Alp. This last symptom became presently so distressing, that I was forced to stop for a few minutes, and lean against the stone fence. As I did so, I chanced to look back up the road, and there, to my infinite relief, I saw a distant point of light, like the gleam of an approaching lantern. I at first concluded that Jacob had retraced his steps and followed me; but even as the conjecture presented itself, a second light flashed into sight -- a light evidently parallel with the first, and approaching at the same rate of motion. It needed no second thought to show me that these must be the carriage-lamps of some private vehicle, though it seemed strange that any private vehicle should take a road professedly disused and dangerous

There could be no doubt, however, of the fact, for the lamps grew larger and brighter every moment, and I even fancied I could already see the dark outline of the carriage between them. It was coming up very fast, and quite noiselessly, the snow being nearly a foot deep under the wheels.

And now the body of the vehicle became distinctly visible behind the lamps. It looked strangely lofty. A sudden suspicion flashed upon me. Was it possible that I had passed the cross-roads in the dark without observing the sign-post, and could this be the very coach which I had come to meet?

No need to ask myself that question a second time, for here it came round the bend of the road, guard and driver, one outside passenger, and four steaming greys, all wrapped in a soft haze of light, through which the lamps blazed out, like a pair of fiery meteors.

I jumped forward, waved my hat, and shouted. The mail came down at full speed, and passed me. For a moment I feared that I had not been seen or heard, but it was only for a moment. The coachman pulled up; the guard, muffled to the eyes in capes and comforters, and apparently sound asleep in the rumble, neither answered my hail nor made the slightest effort to dismount; the outside passenger did not even turn his head. I opened the door for myself, and looked in. There were but three travellers inside, so I stepped in, shut the door, slipped into the vacant corner, and congratulated myself on my good fortune.

The atmosphere of the coach seemed, if possible, colder than that of the outer air, and was pervaded by a singularly damp and disagreeable smell. I looked round at my fellow-passengers. They were all three, men, and all silent. They did not seem to be asleep, but each leaned back in his corner of the vehicle, as if absorbed in his own reflections. I attempted to open a conversation.

"How intensely cold it is to-night," I said, addressing my opposite neighbour.

He lifted his head, looked at me, but made no reply.

"The winter," I added, "seems to have begun in earnest."

Although the corner in which he sat was so dim that I could distinguish none of his features very clearly, I saw that his eyes were still turned full upon me. And yet he answered never a word.

At any other time I should have felt, and perhaps expressed, some annoyance, but at the moment I felt too ill to do either. The icy coldness of the night air had struck a chill to my very marrow, and the strange smell inside the coach was affecting me with an intolerable nausea. I shivered from head to foot, and, turning to my left-hand neighbour, asked if he had any objection to an open window?

He neither spoke nor stirred.

I repeated the question somewhat more loudly, but with the same result. Then I lost patience, and let the sash down. As I did so, the leather strap broke in my hand, and I observed that the glass was covered with a thick coat of mildew, the accumulation, apparently, of years. My attention being thus drawn to the condition of the coach, I examined it more narrowly, and saw by the uncertain light of the outer lamps that it was in the last stage of dilapidation. Every part of it was not only out of repair, but in a condition of decay. The sashes splintered at a touch. The leather fittings were crusted over with mould, and literally rotting from the woodwork. The floor was almost breaking away beneath my feet. The whole machine, in short, was foul with damp, and had evidently been dragged from some outhouse in which it had been mouldering away for years, to do another day or two of duty on the road.

I turned to the third passenger, whom I had not yet addressed, and hazarded one more remark.

"This coach," I said, "is in a deplorable condition. The regular mail, I suppose, is under repair?"

He moved his head slowly, and looked me in the face, without speaking a word. I shall never forget that look while I live. I turned cold at heart under it. I turn cold at heart even now when I recall it. His eyes glowed with a fiery unnatural lustre. His face was livid as the face of a corpse. His bloodless lips were drawn back as if in the agony of death, and showed the gleaming teeth between.

The words that I was about to utter died upon my lips, and a strange horror -- a dreadful horror -- came upon me. My sight had by this time become used to the gloom of the coach, and I could see with tolerable distinctness. I turned to my opposite neighbour. He, too, was looking at me, with the same startling pallor in his face, and the same stony glitter in his eyes. I passed my hand across my brow. I turned to the passenger on the seat beside my own, and saw -- oh Heaven! how shall I describe what I saw? I saw that he was no living man -- that none of them were living men, like myself! A pale phosphorescent light -- the light of putrefaction -- played upon their awful faces; upon their hair, dank with the dews of the grave; upon their clothes, earth-stained and dropping to pieces; upon their hands, which were as the hands of corpses long buried. Only their eyes, their terrible eyes, were living; and those eyes were all turned menacingly upon me!

A shriek of terror, a wild unintelligible cry for help and mercy; burst from my lips as I flung myself against the door, and strove in vain to open it.

In that single instant, brief and vivid as a landscape beheld in the flash of summer lightning, I saw the moon shining down through a rift of stormy cloud -- the ghastly sign-post rearing its warning finger by the wayside -- the broken parapet -- the plunging horses -- the black gulf below. Then, the coach reeled like a ship at sea. Then, came a mighty crash -- a sense of crushing pain -- and then, darkness.

It seemed as if years had gone by when I awoke one morning from a deep sleep, and found my wife watching by my bedside I will pass over the scene that ensued, and give you, in half a dozen words, the tale she told me with tears of thanksgiving. I had fallen over a precipice, close against the junction of the old coach-road and the new, and had only been saved from certain death by lighting upon a deep snowdrift that had accumulated at the foot of the rock beneath. In this snowdrift I was discovered at daybreak, by a couple of shepherds, who carried me to the nearest shelter, and brought a surgeon to my aid. The surgeon found me in a state of raving delirium, with a broken arm and a compound fracture of the skull. The letters in my pocket-book showed my name and address; my wife was summoned to nurse me; and, thanks to youth and a fine constitution, I came out of danger at last. The place of my fall, I need scarcely say, was precisely that at which a frightful accident had happened to the north mail nine years before.

I never told my wife the fearful events which I have just related to you. I told the surgeon who attended me; but he treated the whole adventure as a mere dream born of the fever in my brain. We discussed the question over and over again, until we found that we could discuss it with temper no longer, and then we dropped it. Others may form what conclusions they please -- I know that twenty years ago I was the fourth inside passenger in that Phantom Coach.

End.

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