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Cover Art: Martin Blanco (http://www.martinblancoart.com/)

Art for The Key to Grief: Luke Spooner / Carrion House

Cosmic Horror Monthly – First Printing

www.cosmic-horror.net

Greetings dear reader,

It is February and 2020 is behind us, right? Right? At any rate, we’ve a great issue put together for you this month. Be sure to get some sleep before you devour this month’s tales, there won’t be much to find afterward.

We start things off with a jarring tale of horror and handwashing called Sanitize. Then we unravel the mystery of a desert monster through a series of letters in Nomad’s Land. Moving quickly, we find another lost legend through the eyes of a group of cross-country runners in Dead Sprint before learning the tragic tale of a young woman and an incubus in Visitor. Before we’re through, we’ll head down deep into the crypt for a rare find called The Key to Grief, you won’t believe it until you read it.

We are glad you are with us this month. Your support means the world here at CHM. A note to the writers out there: We have gotten some incredible submissions so far, but there are a lot of spaces left. You have until the end of this month to submit and possibly see your own work in the very magazine you now hold!

Good luck,

C.R.

*~*~*

Sanitize

By P.L. McMillan

My eyes hurt from being so wide for so long, as I stared, unseeing, at my computer screen.

I had already washed my hands. I had already scrubbed down my desk with one of the sanitizing wipes I kept in the bottom drawer. My stomach tightened, twisted, roiled. I stared, yet could take nothing in. The computer screen was just a blur.

I had already washed my hands; I could still smell the soap. I had already wiped my desk; I could still smell the chemicals. My palms tingled. My eyes flicked down, escaping my control for a moment. Maybe I let them. My whole head felt fuzzy and my scalp was tingling now. I looked over my keyboard, over my hands which lay poised on top of the keys, over the still glistening surface of my desk, over the mouse that sat beside my right hand, over to the corner of my desk where Jordan had sat as he blathered on and on about some report he’d wanted me to start before releasing a sneeze so wet that I had physically seen the specks of internal Jordan juice spray out onto my desk.

What kind of barbarian didn’t cover their mouth when they sneezed?

He’d laughed and apologized and I had kept my calm face on, waited until he left, then wiped down everything, then washed my hands, once, twice, three times in the bathroom—smiling at Carol as she entered, pissed, then briefly rinsed her hands under water without soap. I made sure to use twice the amount of paper towels to open the washroom door.

That meant I was clean. I had washed my hands. I had sanitized my desk.

My traitorous brain asked me, what about your clothes?

I was suddenly very nauseous.

I looked at the time displayed on my computer screen. 3:51.

I opened a browser and began typing in, “can germs survive on clothing,” and forced myself to close it.

I looked down again. My hands were shaking over the keyboard—just slightly. My face felt hot, but my body was cold. I looked farther down, to the bottom drawer where my sanitizer wipes were hidden. Would they damage the fabric if I were to wipe them over the shirt I was wearing?

I could hear my own breathing, ragged and harsh. I sucked in a breath and held it. Could Lee hear my racing, thunderous heart through the cubicle wall we shared? I forced my eyes back to the computer screen and tried, in vain, to focus on the report I had been working on when Jordan had disrupted my day.

Caught in the white noise cycle that my brain refused to leave, I found myself leaving the office before even realizing I had decided to flee. My mind whipped around and around: germs on my clothes, in my hair, my face, how far could a human sneeze spread, how much could it coat?

My phone rang when I was three blocks away, just entering the little park at which I sometimes ate lunch. It was Sanjay. I slipped past a group of school kids, roughhousing in the middle of the path, and found that my favourite bench beneath the old poplar tree was empty. I sat. I answered my phone.

“Sanjay,” I said, a part of me hoped he could hear the tremble in my voice, hear how close I was to crying, so that he would know how serious this situation was.

“Babe, what’s up? You sound upset.”

“Jordan, that asshole. He sneezed all over me. I mean all over me, I had to leave work—”

It all got out of control when I said it out loud and my voice cracked. I clenched my free hand into a tight fist to stop its trembling.

“Take a deep breath, Paige. You’re okay. You’re going to be fine,” he said.

I could tell he was annoyed. He never understood. He used to take me seriously, when we first started dating, but now he just fazes me out.

“Listen, I was calling because my mother is going to be in town—”

“I think I should go home and wash my clothes. I think I should shower too, you know, just in case?”

He sighed. Loudly, deliberately. He wanted me to know he thought I was being silly.

“Aren’t you afraid your boss is going to get mad at you for skipping out early? This is what? The third time this month? Doesn’t he notice?”

“I—”

Had I left early three times this month? I looked at my watch. 4:18. It wasn’t really early. I got off at five usually anyway. It was only an hour.

“Do you think I’m okay?”

“With your boss? I don’t know, hun. You shouldn’t be leaving early so often. I know germs freak you—”

“No, I mean about the fucking sneeze, Sanjay. It got on me, I know it did.”

Another dramatic sigh. I realized I was biting my thumbnail. If the germs were on my hand, then I’d just put them in my mouth.

Isn’t the tissue of your mouth more susceptible to absorbing toxic material? Something about being a mucus membrane of some kind? my brain whispered.

“You washed your hands, right? Then you’re fine. Humans have immune systems for a reason.”

I opened my mouth to confirm. Then stopped. Had I washed my hands? I tried to reel in my memories, recount my actions from when Jordan sneezed to when I ended up here on this bench. My thoughts whipped away from me; it was like trying to grab a hold of a wet bar of soap.

“I can’t remember. I don’t think I did, I don’t remember doing it.” My heart was racing again.

I looked down at my treacherous hand as it lay, clenched on my thigh. It was tingling again. Why hadn’t I washed it?

“You did, babe. You definitely washed your hands, you’re always washing your hands,” he laughed, such an easy-going sound.

I stared at my fist as it pressed into my thigh. If there were germs on my hand, wasn’t I spreading it to my leg? I jerked my hand off my thigh and placed it on the cold metal bench seat instead.

“I didn’t,” I breathed into the phone. “I don’t think I washed my hands. Why didn’t I wash my hands? I need to get home, but if I touch my steering wheel, I’ll have to sanitize the inside of my car and my housekeys too.”

“Paige, listen to me.”

White, sharp pain sliced through the storm inside my mind.

“Babe? Paige? Are you okay? What happened?”

I hadn’t realized that I’d cried out in that moment. Everything seemed to freeze as I unfurled my fingers from where they’d wrapped around the edge of the metal bench. All sounds filtered away, even Sanjay’s voice in my ear. The park filtered away, lost in the tunnel vision I had on my right hand. There was the tiniest spot of crimson on my middle finger. Just above the middle crease.

“I have to go,” I gasped.

I didn’t hear his response. I hung up the phone, still staring at my finger.

I’d cut myself on the bench. I looked at the dark green metal slats. In some places, the paint had chipped away, revealing rusted metal. Was the underneath as rusted as—tetanus shot, when did I have one? I had to have had one, right? —digging through my purse with my left hand—hand sanitizer would help? Or was simple soap and water best? That pain in my jaw, could it be lockjaw already or from clenching it?

I was out of the park, my finger stinging as I rubbed hand sanitizer over it. I wouldn’t run. I could feel people’s eyes on me and could only imagine what I must look like. My eyes were stinging as sweat ran down my forehead. I raised my arm up so I could rub at my eyes with my shirt sleeve.

Now the germs are in your eyes. Did you forget? Jordan sneezed all over you, my mind said.

I couldn’t hold back the sob that exploded from my throat. I didn’t stop trembling the whole way home. To break through the whirling frenzy, I began to plan out my steps. Over and over again, like a mantra.

Get home. Strip. Clothes in washing machine. Shower. Clean finger. Bandage. Sanitize car. Sanitize car keys. Over again. Home. Strip. Washing machine. Shower. Clean. Bandage. Sanitize. Sanitize. Sanitize.

That’s what got me home.

I could ignore the hot flashes dancing across my skin. I could ignore the way my limbs were shaking. I could ignore the taste of copper on my tongue. I could just concentrate on my mantra and I would get home.

My phone was ringing. Loudly. Right next to my ear.

My eyelids scraped like sandpaper as I opened them. I stared up at a darkened ceiling. I shivered on the cold floor, straightening my aching body. My phone went silent, then immediately began to ring again. I pushed myself up into a sitting position. I was in my front hall, still dressed in the clothes I’d worn to work that day. My purse was lying by my feet, its contents spilled out everywhere. Only a faint light filtered in from the front door’s window, a false mellow light likely from the streetlight in front of my house—night had fallen.

The ringing stopped, then resumed. I picked it up, flipping it over to reveal a newly cracked screen. The screen brightness blinded me but I managed to answer it.

“Paige? Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling all night!”

It was hard to concentrate on Sanjay’s voice. My head was throbbing so hard that I could hear it. A low rush of tide that filled my ears with static, then receded with a wave of pain. I reached up, fumbled, got the light switch, clenching my eyes shut against the enveloping light.

“Paige? Paige? This isn’t funny!”

“Sanjay, I think I’m really sick,” I rasped.

“I can’t believe this. You need to start your sessions with Dr. Cage again. You’ve regressed so much since you quit therapy, I just can’t handle it. You know I’m extra stressed with this new project,” he said sounding exasperated.

I put my hand down to lean on it and immediately recoiled. There, just beside me on the floor, was a small pool of brownish, chunky bile. I retched a bit at the sight of it.

“— you have to know you’re being irrational, right? I know you’re better when I’m at home, but I can’t leave work just because you might have a panic attack. I told you this morning I might have to pull an all-nighter with the team. You have to get in control of yourself for once, be more self-aware—”

“I have to go, I’m so sorry, Sanjay,” I said and hung up.

I raised my right hand with the intention of pressing it to my forehead to check for fever but froze. There was a small amount of dried, crusty blood on my palm and fingers and where the cut was, my skin had discoloured into streaks of green, purple, yellow and was mottled with tiny bumps. The colouring and bumps ran around the middle joint of my middle finger like a ghastly ring, and streaked downwards to the middle of my palm. I pressed my left index finger against the palm of my right hand. The bumps were hard and firm, my skin was tender and hot. Touching it, even gently, caused a prickle of pain to dance over the entirety of my hand.

I stumbled to my feet, rushing to the kitchen. I turned on the sink, the faucet turned as hot as it would go, and scrubbed my hands beneath the water, dousing them in disinfectant hand soap. When I dried them with a dish towel, I saw that the rash had spread to my wrist. It had moved so fast. How was that possible? The angry buboes on my arm were twice the size as those on my hand and finger. I grabbed my phone and dialed.

“911, what is your emergency?”

I spent the time it took for the paramedics to get to my house rubbing hand sanitizer all over my hand and arm. The panic had subsided, replaced by a terrible chill and a strange rushing feeling, like an internal undercurrent, in my head. I couldn’t remember what I’d said to the dispatcher. I had no sense of time between the end of the call and when my doorbell rang.

Holding my right arm out from me to avoid it touching any other part of my body, I opened the front door. A man and a woman, wearing blue uniforms and solemn expressions, stood on my stoop.

“Ma’am? You called in for assistance?” the man asked.

“It’s my arm!” I held it out, the dark discoloration had crept up my forearm to the crook of my elbow in jagged trails.

They stepped across the threshold and into my narrow hall. The woman glanced down briefly but no reaction crossed her face.

“I’m Rick and this is Emma,” the man said, setting his bag down. “Can you tell us what’s happened?”

“Yes, I—this afternoon Jordan sneezed on me and—but I don’t know if that matters. I went to a nearby park and cut my hand on the bench. It was a metal bench; I think it was rusted. I can’t remember when I had my last tetanus shot,” I started.

Emma held a hand up.

“Calm down, ma’am. Why don’t you sit down? How about in the kitchen?” she nodded at the open doorway.

“I am pretty sure it was rusted and I rubbed hand sanitizer on my hand, but I don’t know if that would have helped. I don’t think it did,” I continued in a rush, leading the way into the kitchen and sitting at one of the chairs that encircled the small wooden table by the fridge. “I think I passed out when I got home. I woke up on the floor. And I saw—I saw this!”

I laid my arm out on the table so they could see. Emma had sat across from me, Rick sat by my side. He took a blood pressure cuff from his bag.

“I’m going to go ahead and take your blood pressure, okay?”

“Ma’am, are you currently on any prescription drugs? Have you missed any doses today, maybe?”

“No, I am not on anything. I think maybe I need antibiotics, yes? I think I need to be taken to the hospital!”

I couldn’t understand why they weren’t examining my arm. The infection or whatever it was had widened to the point that it covered the width of my forearm and the entirety of my palm. Maybe this was a regular reaction, something they’d seen before?

“Look at me, ma’am,” Rick said and I did, squinting at the bright pen light he held at my eye level, flashing it in and out of my vision. “Dilation seems normal.”

“What about this? You need to examine my arm!” My voice was rising in volume and pitch.

“Your arm? I thought you said you cut your hand?” Emma said.

“I – I did! I did! But it’s spreading! It’s in my arm now!”

“What’s in your arm, ma’am?” Rick had leaned back to pack his light and blood pressure cuff away; he wasn’t even looking at me.

Not even a glance at my arm.

“This!” I gestured at my limb.

Emma sighed and the two paramedics exchanged a look.

“Ma’am,” Rick said and reached out, taking my arm in both of his hands before I could pull it out of his reach. “You arm looks fine. Now if you did cut it on that bench, I would recommend going to your primary care doctor tomorrow and they’ll check when your last tetanus shot was and all of that.”

“That’s not true, there is something wrong with me! Look—look at my arm!”

He sighed and forced a smile.

“There’s nothing wrong with your arm, ma’am,” he said. “Look for yourself.”

He lifted my arm off the table, squeezing it slightly in his hands. At the pressure, several of the larger bumps on my forearm burst, spilling a clear viscous material speckled with rust-coloured flecks. Instantly I could smell the faintest citrusy scent, it was almost pleasant. I jerked my arm away from him, the burst bumps stinging. My mouth gaped as I watched the paramedic lean back in my kitchen chair and run a hand through his thick blonde hair. I could see the drops of thick liquid glistening on his head. The red flecks caught the light and seemed to spark a brighter crimson.

“It’s a really awful thing to waste our time. There are real emergencies out there that require our attention,” Emma said, standing. “Come on, Rick.”

I looked back at him. He was staring at his hands with a wide-eyed look of bewilderment. His partner walked past him, unaware, and stopped in the hallway.

“Rick?” she said.

I looked at his head. Where the goopy discharge used to be were now holes. I thought I could hear – just faintly—a sound much like frying meat. Then he began to scream. He kicked back, flipping himself and my chair back onto to the kitchen floor and then he rolled onto his side, seizing. His partner scrambled to his side, rolling him onto his back, struggling to pull his clawed hands from his face.

It was insane how fast it happened. The skin on his head slumped downwards, pulling away from his skull like jello, sliding down the sides of his face, and revealing bone. His eyes, naked orbs, spun in their sockets as he continued to scream. Globs of skin dropped from his hands, dripping like a fleshy rain until they went limp, lying in their own pools of gore on my kitchen floor.

The room was filled with the same strange sweet smell. Emma shrieked when she saw the naked skull where his face should have been. His feet beat a soft tempo on the floor before going still. She scooted away from him, shaking, then she looked at me. I tore my gaze away from his skull, his unseeing but staring eyeballs, the pools of pink flesh that haloed his head and lay in pools around his skeletal hands.

“What the hell? What the hell did you do?” she shrieked and lunged at me.

I tried to dodge her grasp, I tried to jerk my arm away from her, but she was faster. She grabbed my arms, tightly, her long nails digging viciously into my flesh. Dozens of plump boils burst along my arm, coating her left hand and wrist, but she didn’t seem to notice—or see.

There was so much of it, it was dripping off my arm in great slimy dollops to land with small slaps on the floor. I gagged, trying to pull away.

“What is wrong with you? What did you do to him?” she was screaming.

“I don’t know – it’s the rash! Don’t you see? You have to wash your hand! You have to get it off!” I stood so fast, I almost knocked her to the floor.

I ripped my left arm free and used it to grab her wrist, pulling her to the sink. She jerked away from me, slamming against the counter, and her hands flew to cover her mouth as she looked at me with such a frightened expression that I froze. We stood perfectly still for a moment, locked together in fear. I watched the clear fluid sink into the flesh on her hand. Her skin wobbled, then sagged lower and lower before it dropped to the floor with a thick sound.

Her eyes followed its plummet and then she jerked her hands away from her face, holding them up to eye level. Side by side, she examined her whole hand and the one reduced to glistening bone. I think she would have opened her mouth to scream except that she must have gotten some of the liquid on her lips, her left cheek, her chin. The bottom half of her face dripped away from her skull, joining the rest of the jiggling flesh on the floor. With a low keening sound slipping from her throat, Emma’s eyes rolled back into her head and she slumped to the floor.

Then the kitchen was quiet except for the humming of the fridge and the soft susurrus of flesh being softened, separated, stolen from bone. My legs threatened to give out so I sunk to my knees, wrapping my left arm around myself while holding the right as far from me as I could. It had spread. While I’d been watching Emma’s face fall from her skull, the disease or the infection—whatever it was—had crept up my upper arm. It had spread far enough to disappear beneath the rolled-up sleeve of my shirt.

With trembling fingers, I pulled my collar down and revealed more tainted flesh across my chest and bordering the base of my neck. The bumps that had burst had closed already, had grown larger, full again to the brim with the clear, thick, poisonous brine flecked with crimson. I moaned and let my head fall back with a thud against the counter, tears threatening.

Somewhere in the hall, my phone began to ring again.

If I called the CDC, what would they do to me? Quarantine me. Keep me locked up until they figured out how to help me or I died.

What if you don’t die? Would that be worse? My mind whimpered and I shivered in answer.

Still, I couldn’t let it spread any further. I had to see a doctor.

I planned it out in steps. Clean the infected flesh. Wrap it up in bandages to avoid leakage of any kind. Drive to the ER. Explain it all, explain everything.

I ignored the phone and whispered my mantra out loud as I walked around the cooling bodies on my kitchen floor.

Clean. Wrap. Drive. Explain.

Clean. Wrap. Drive. Explain.

The sterile smell of chemicals that saturated the air at St. Joseph’s Medical Center helped steady my nerves. The bored looking nurse in pink scrubs behind the desk did not.

“And you say you got some kind of an infection from a park bench?” she repeated in a monotone voice for the fifth time.

“Please, you have to help me! It’s not normal! Paramedics came to my house and when they touched it – when they —” I knew crying wasn’t helping, wasn’t making me seem reasonable at all, but my nerves were fully shot through.

“Can you quiet down, Miss?” the nurse sighed. “You’re being disruptive.”

“You have to get a doctor to see me now! I can feel it leaking! I don’t know if the bandages are thick enough, it’s all I—”

“Fill this out. A doctor will see you in a while.”

She shoved a clipboard across the counter at me.

“It has to be now! The infection is spreading!”

“You have to fill this out, Miss. Everyone does. Please sit down and return it once it’s done.”

She swiveled in her seat to turn her back to me and began to peck away at her laptop. I took the clipboard in my uninfected hand and gingerly made my way to an empty seat as far from anyone else as I could.

Though I had only just wrapped my arm in bandages, damp patches were appearing in the cloth. When I sat, I felt one of the larger abscesses pop and the thick, warm liquid began to trail down my ribcage and onto my belly. Everywhere was the smell of lemons.

I stared down at the form. My right hand—the dominant one—lay swaddled in an inch of bandage. I put the back of my left hand up against my forehead. No fever. No aches in my joints. No shivers or cold flashes. No sore throat or cough. Even the infected skin felt the same as the rest. There was nothing to show that I was sick, possibly dying, except for the marks, except for the toxic growths that laced my limbs like weapons.

I yanked myself out of my thoughts with a snap at the sound of a scream and looked around the waiting room, my heart in my throat. A heavily pregnant woman had just walked up to the front desk, three children orbiting her legs as she did. She shooed them away as she spoke to the nurse and they dashed into the waiting room like snotty comets. I grew tense, watching them circle the seats and the other people waiting to be seen. I shrunk into myself, back into the chair, curling my legs under it. One of them, a little girl with long pigtails, ran past me with an ear-piercing giggle. Then her brother raced after her and tripped over his own feet, landing right in front of me. He began to howl. The dozen other people in the waiting room looked up from their phones, their magazines, the TV mounted to the ceiling. They looked at him and then set their stares on me. My skin prickled.

They’re wondering who that cold woman is, letting the kid cry and cry, and not offering to help, my mind whispered.

They stared. I stood. The mother had turned and was watching me. I stepped over her son, stumbling in my haste to get far from him. She made a clucking noise on her tongue and began to waddle over. They were all staring. All staring as she stumbled, off-balance due to her magnificently bulging belly, and fell against my right side. Out of instinct, I reached out to steady her even as I felt every single pustule pop along my arm, shoulder, and side. The bandages were soaked through. My clothes were slimy. I stumbled away from her with a shriek, falling to the floor in front of the nurse’s desk. As I scrambled, I left a glistening trail along the floor.

“What is your problem, lady?” the pregnant woman asked as she knelt awkwardly and yanked her son to his feet, leaving sticky handprints on his arms.

The nurse was at my side. She reached down and grabbed my arm.

“Miss, if you’re going to cause a fuss, I’m going to have to call security and you don’t want that, do you?”

She gripped my forearm, oblivious to the rivulets of ooze squeezing out from between her fingers.

“Oh God, you have to wash your hands now! You have to get it off! It’ll kill you!”

I felt lost, swept away, completely out of control. The nurse dropped my arm and raised her hand between our faces, spreading her fingers apart.

“There’s nothing there. Look! There’s nothing there. Do you understand that? What kind of medication are you supposed to be on, anyway?” she said as ribbons of clear, liquid infection stretched between her fingers.

“What’s going on here, Angela?”

The nurse and I looked up. A doctor in mint-coloured scrubs stood in front of us.

“Nothing, Dr. Tanaka —”

“They’re going to die! You have to listen to me! Her, and her, and— and the kid! It’s all over my body and if it gets on you—”

“Now, now. How about we let Angela take care of everyone out here and I take a look at you, okay?” he said with a smile, completely unfazed.

“Doctor, I—” the nurse started and then stopped when he flashed her a look.

She stood and made her way to check on the pregnant woman. The doctor watched me stand shakily and then led me around the front desk, down the hall, and into an examination room. I was babbling. I couldn’t stop. My words flowed over the stolid doctor like rain drops, unnoticed.

“Take a seat, Miss…?”

“Paige MacDonald, but—”

“Medications?” he pulled on some gloves and set to work, unravelling the sodden bandages from my arm, letting them fall into the biohazard disposal bin by the counter.

“None, none at all. I’m not crazy, it’s right there!” I gestured at the raw, gaping holes that ran the length of my arms—ruination from the pregnant woman’s fall against me.

He hummed to himself, turning my arm this way and that.

“And you think you have an infection because you cut your finger? Are you experiencing any fever? Aches? Sore throat?”

“This! This is the evidence right here. Right here!”

“Do you have someone we can call?” he said, staring at my arm as if all was perfectly normal.

The screams started. A part of me was waiting for them this whole time so I didn’t even flinch. Dr. Tanaka did, jerking upright, ramrod straight and eyes wide.

“Just wait here, all right? Just wait, wait one moment.” He was out the door before I could say a single thing.

I didn’t wait. It was clear to me that he didn’t understand what was going on. The paramedics didn’t take me seriously, the nurse hadn’t, and now the doctor. The more people who didn’t take me seriously, the more people who would die.

The screaming had ended abruptly, but I could hear a panicked babble of conversation. I slid off the examination bed and slipped into the hall, running past the mob who were crowded around the three prone figures on the floor – two adult-sized and one child-sized. They didn’t even see me escape the hospital, clutching my right arm to my chest, and dripping ichor the whole way out.

I drove home, hardly aware of the streets I took, my head was crowded with thoughts of what steps I should take next. Nothing seemed plausible. Everything seemed hopeless.

I didn’t even notice the front door had been unlocked, until I was already in the front hall. It wasn’t until I saw Sanjay standing in our kitchen, his face pale and drawn as he stared down at the two bodies lying on the floor, did I realize I had parked next to his cheery red sedan when I’d gotten home.

“Paige,” he said, breathlessly. “Oh, Paige. What the hell happened here?”

“You have to get out of here, Sanjay! You have to leave. It’s not safe. You can’t be near me, I’m sick!”

He turned haunted eyes to meet mine.

“You have to go; you have to get far away from me. Please, Sanjay,” I pressed myself against the wall, wishing I could push myself through it, wishing I could disappear.

“Paige, calm down. Tell me what happened. How all of this happened,” he made a sweeping gesture with a shaking hand.

I forced myself to take one deep breath, and then another. If anyone would believe me, Sanjay would. He loved me.

“It was the park bench. The one I always sit on. I cut my hand—this one.” I held out the offending limb. “And it made me sick. I passed out here, on the floor, and when I woke up, I was covered in this.”

I held my arm out, stretched it out so he could see the extent of it, all the while wondering how much farther it had spread beneath my clothes.

“I called them, I wanted help. I thought they could help me. But, when they touched me—when they came in contact with the stuff, the infection, they…they died. You can see it with your own eyes. Their skin—like acid and—”

It was no use. I was crying. Sobbing so hard I was choking. He took a step towards me and I reeled back against the front door.

“No! Not any closer!” I cried out, sinking to the floor.

“Paige,” he stepped out into the hall. “There’s nothing on your arm. There’s no infection. You know that, right?”

I tucked myself into the corner next to the door, feeling more and more of those cursed abscesses pop and leak their poison all over my skin. The poison that—somehow—turned everyone’s skin into soup but mine.

“It’s all over me, Sanjay, it’s everywhere!”

I held my arm in front of my face. The green, purple, and yellow was deeper, darker. It blazed within my skin like a sickly storm, ready to let loose a rain of toxic pus.

“Paige, let me help you. Please.”

I looked up and saw, to my horror, that he had come closer, that he was reaching out to me.

“No! Get away form me!” I cried, recoiling as much as I could.

“Babe, listen to me. You’re just having a panic attack, okay? There is nothing on your arm. Nothing. Now let me help you!”

“Get out! I hate you! I hate you, Sanjay, I hate you! I never want to see you again! Get out! GET OUT!” I screamed, every lie breaking my heart as I saw him flinch at the words.

Still, it had the effect I wanted and he backed away, his hands held up as if in surrender.

“I can’t leave, Paige. There are two dead bodies in the kitchen. We have to call the police.”

I knew he wouldn’t leave. He wouldn’t leave as long as he thought he could fix things. He never listened to me. He always thought he knew best and, in this case, it would get him killed if I didn’t do something. I stood so suddenly that he flinched back.

He’s afraid of you, my mind cried out mournfully, he thinks you did it.

I turned, yanking the front door open with my good hand and ran out of the house, slamming the door behind me. I was in my car by the time he made it out to the front yard. I squealed out of the driveway, steering with just one hand, and sped off.

The car was quiet except for the sound of my heavy breathing, of the humming tires on the road, of the rushing wind. I’d left my phone back home. My shoulders slumped with the weight of the day. I found my way from the streets onto the highway. The road stretched onward forever into the night, lit only occasionally by pale buttery streetlights. The moon hung as swollen as that pregnant woman’s belly in the black sky void of stars.

I switched hands on the steering wheel, using my left to scratch at a slight tingling on my left cheek. I felt a few of those damned bumps, still hard and small, only just gestating. Still, I felt fine, as healthy as ever. I felt perfect. I would be fine. Everything could be fine. As long as I kept away from people, away from everyone. Sanjay was safe and I could keep others safe. I felt like I’d been preparing for something like this my whole life.

I took a moment to turn the radio on, filling the car with noise.

Now, scratching my neck and popping some of the riper abscesses, I drove on.

End.

*~*~*

P.L. McMillan is an accomplished horror writer whose stories have appeared in a wide array of anthologies and magazines. To her, every shadow is an entry way to a deeper look into the black heart of the world and every night she rides with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, bringing back dark stories to share with those brave enough to read them. You can find out more about her here: plmcmillan.com

Nomad's Land

By Brenda Kezar

Dear Megan,

Writing an actual snail-mail letter is weird. I think the last letter I wrote was to the Shriners, thanking them for my fourth-grade circus ticket. But you were so angry when I left. I promised I’d write, and I want you to know I’m going to keep all of my promises to you.

I know you were against this trip, but I really felt I had to do it. I owe it to myself to have this one last adventure before hanging up my travel-writing shoes for good. I’m looking forward to spending the rest of my life with you, and I’ll be a better man for getting this last trip out of my system.

As I write this, I’ve made it about halfway to my first destination. I’ve shown drawings of the worm to every local I meet, at bus stops, train stations, villages, and markets. Every single one of them, without fail, has had a story to share. Everyone knows someone (or someone’s second cousin’s best friend's ex-husband) who was a victim of the worm. There’s no doubt among them that the Mongolian death worm absolutely does exist.

I’ve already recorded three GBs of interviews. I’m not disappointed that I’m only collecting the research and not writing the feature. There’s nothing I could do with this data anyway. I couldn’t fake a belief in the worm if I tried, but I’m sure the editors back at the mag will eat it up and find someone skeezy enough to write it. Chaz or one of the other bottom-feeders will make some overblown bullshit story out of it, I’m sure. The headline will scream, “Attack of the Deathworm,” or something ridiculous like it.

We continue tomorrow on camels. Wish me luck. You know how awful I am with animals.

Love,

Kyle

*~*~*

Dear Megan,

Today my guide and I traveled to a small desert village to speak with a man who supposedly survived a worm attack. His face was a twisted wreck of angry lumps and furrows. It looked like someone had bashed his face until it was putty and then tried to reshape it back to normal. Or like one of those psycho-killers in the slasher movies you like, Freddy Meyers, or whatever his name is.

He claims he had been digging for water when a worm hidden in the sand sprayed him with venom. When pressed, he admitted he hadn’t actually seen the worm, but he was sure that’s what had caused his injuries. I’ve been contemplating other causes. Natural gas vent? Some sort of geothermal feature? I plan to visit the location of the attack and look for clues. There is a caravan that will travel past the “attack site.” My guide and I will travel with them.

As far as everything else goes, I am doing as well as can be expected. I’m getting plenty of sleep, and the food isn’t too bad. The people are very gregarious and love to share, I think I might actually have gained a few pounds! I may have to let out my tux when I get home.

My only complaint is the sand, it gets everywhere: in my shoes, my clothes, my food. I scratch my head and sand cascades onto my shoulders. My teeth are always gritty with it. It’s almost as if the desert is trying to swallow me.

It’s trips like this that make me appreciate my big soft bed, and you lying in it beside me. I miss you so much already.

Love,

Kyle

*~*~*

Dear Megan,

My hands are shaking so badly I can barely write, but I’m too excited to sleep.

Remember the caravan I told you we would travel with? On the third night of our journey, the entire camp was woken by the bellowing of a wild camel. It had stumbled into our camp and gotten tangled in one of the nomad gers (tents). By the time we reached it, it was flat on its back, thrashing its rope-tangled legs in the air like a flipped-over bug.

I don’t think I’ve accurately captured the noise by describing it as “bellowing.” It was more like screaming, though even that doesn’t do it justice. I’ve heard a lot of noises in my travels, from city sirens to the squall of big cats hunting, but none of them caused such a visceral reaction in me as the screams of the camel. It was a sound of pure fear and pain, and I could feel the camel’s suffering in every cell of my body.

Like the man I interviewed, the flesh on its face and legs was twisted and knotted, red and swollen, and all the fur was gone. The poor thing was blind and struck out at us. It had to be put down. Normally, nothing is wasted in the desert, but when people believe the worm is involved, all bets are off. They considered it tainted and just wanted to get it away from camp as quickly as possible.

When they started to tie ropes around the animal's legs to drag it away, a small, hard object was found embedded in its right front leg. The discoverer dropped it in the sand and stared in horror, wiping his hands on his deel the whole time. With a collective gasp, the entire crowd drew back as if he’d dropped a snake at their feet. A few of the braver men finished the job of ridding the camp of the camel while the rest of the crowd slunk away.

Once everyone disappeared, I fished the object out of the sand. It was a tooth, half the length of my pinky, triangular in shape, and serrated along two sides. It reminded me of the shark teeth I saw in Samoa, but how in the hell would a camel, thousands of miles inland, end up with a shark’s tooth embedded in its leg? Obviously, the nomads are attributing it to the death worm, but what’s really going on here? I’d like to think they were having a laugh at my expense, pulling the American’s leg, but there’s no way they could fake the fear I saw in their faces.

I pocketed the tooth and retired to my tent.

When my guide and I woke the next morning, we were alone. The whole caravan had disappeared in the middle of the night, while we slept. Another mystery: how is it possible for a hundred people and their livestock to break camp in the middle of the night without making a sound?

I’m anxious to get the tooth to a lab. I haven’t told my guide that I have it, because I believe he might abandon me if he knew, and I’d rather not get left alone to wander the desert. Another caravan is passing by as I write this, and even though my panicked guide tried to convince me to join it, we are staying one more night. I want to see if I can find the area where the camel was attacked and search for clues before moving on again.

I’m sending this letter with the second caravan so it will reach you sooner. I’ll write again and let you know if I find anything.

Love,

Kyle

*~*~*

From: Kyle Ray "KyleRay@AdventurerMagazine.com"

To: MeganLovesKyle@Cablemail.com

Subject: MISS YOU!!!

I’m so excited to be able to email you. The mail here is so incredibly slow! Have you received any of my letters yet?

Of course, the reason I can email is not all good news. Don’t panic, but I woke up this morning in the hospital. The doctors say I’m fine, but I only have a vague memory of what happened.

I was in my tent and had just drifted off to sleep when the strangest sensation woke me up. At first, the sand beneath me just shifted slightly, as if it were settling. Then it rolled and lurched. It was like when we tried to sleep on that crabbing boat during that big storm! Before I could get to my feet, the sand beneath me suddenly rolled away like the tide going out. The rug I was lying on dropped into the space vacated by the sand, and the sand rushed back in and covered me from the waist down. I’m not sure if it was the rug or the sand that did it, but the skin on my legs was nearly torn off! My guide, woken by my shouts of pain, began screeching, “Olgoi-Khorkhoi! Olgoi-Khorkoi!”

Thankfully, he grabbed me by the arms and dragged me out of the tent instead of running away like the other locals do when they believe the death worm is around. He threw me on his camel, and we abandoned camp. After a couple of miles, he stopped and forced what seemed like a gallon of Arkhi down my throat. I passed out and woke up here.

As I said, the wounds are superficial. The doctors are mostly worried about the risk of infection so I will be staying for a few days. Please don’t worry about me, I’m fine. Staying here in the city with an internet connection will give me time to do some research. I have to assume my accident was caused by some sort of seismic phenomenon. Maybe it’s all geothermal: the old man, the wild camel, and the presumed sinkhole trying to open up beneath me. Perhaps there is some sort of Yellowstone being born in the Gobi.

But that still doesn’t explain the tooth.

The hospital has no phones, and my cellphone is dead, but it is charging, and I will call you as soon as I can. I can’t wait to hear your voice again.

Love,

Kyle

*~*~*

From: Kyle Ray "KyleRay@AdventurerMagazine.com"

To: MeganLovesKyle@Cablemail.com

Subject: Miss you even more now

It was so great to hear your voice, even with the shitty connection. I've never had a call drop that many times but it was worth it.

As I was being discharged, I met another survivor of the worm. Rather, I met his friends actually, who were visiting him in the hospital. When his accident happened, they all had been scraping around for dinosaur bones, a common side-income for some of the locals. They sell the bones they find to tourists; sometimes they even make them into jewelry, just like the Samoan shark teeth.

On a side note, maybe that’s where the tooth in the camel’s leg came from? Somehow, it got embedded in the camel’s leg when it fell into the sand, onto a fossil bed? That’s a terribly boring end to the story of the mysterious “shark-bit camel thousands of miles from the ocean” story, but it certainly makes sense. Sometimes that’s how these things pan out.

Anyway, the man suffered burns on his arms, hands, and feet. The wounds were different from the first man’s, though. The first man’s skin definitely looked like some acid or caustic chemical had been sprayed on it; the man in the hospital, his skin was blackened in places, charred, and marred by Lichtenberg figures, like he had been injured by high voltage. There are no electrical lines or transformers in the desert, so it has to be from lightning.

The man hasn’t woken up since the attack, so I was forced to interview his companions. They, of course, blamed the worm, though none of them saw anything. One minute they were all scraping at the sand, the next, the man was on the ground, writhing in pain. By the time they reached him, he had passed out. He hasn’t been conscious since.

As I began to leave, they took the opportunity to try and sell me some of the day’s finds. I wasn’t interested, at first, but imagine my surprise when they pulled a fulgurite from one of the packs. I had heard of petrified lightning before, but I had never actually seen it.

They contend the fulgurite was stuck to his clothes where he lay on the sand, and that it was created from the electrical discharge from the worm. A lightning strike would explain their companion’s wounds, confirming my original hypothesis. When I pointed this out, one of the men shook his head and pulled something from his pack.

He unfolded a bundle of wool cloth to reveal a patch of shed snakeskin wider than my palm. The scales were small and sort of a deep, dirty red, with a few odd-looking black bristles protruding here and there. He quickly wrapped the parcel back up and returned it to his pack.

I was skeptical, of course. I asked him, “If this is really from the worm, why did you keep it? Isn’t that bad luck?”

He shrugged and answered that he knew he’d be safe as long as they made it to the city. The Mongolian death worm never comes to the city. He knew several traditional shamans who would pay the equivalent of a month’s worth of dino-bone income for worm parts.

I traded my hiking boots and watch for the patch of snakeskin. I’m dying to get them to the lab in Sainshand, but first I’m going to visit the location where this man was injured and see the site for myself. His companions refused to guide me to the spot, and my former guide has vanished, but they did draw me a very clear map to the dig site. I think I can find it, and afterward, the road to Sainshand is easy to find and ought to be smooth traveling.

Wish me luck, love! Hopefully, my time in the Gobi is drawing to a close!

Love,

Kyle

*~*~*

Dear Ms. Landry,

It is with great sadness that we return Mr. Ray’s belongings to you. Please accept our deepest sympathies in your time of loss.

The staff at Adventurer Magazine

*~*~*

Kyle’s backpack was tattered, blackened, and smelled of soot. Inside, Megan found one last letter:

Dear Megan,

I found the spot easily. It was flagged with a purple woolen banner just as the men had said. I spent two days sifting the sand like an archaeologist and found nothing but small dinosaur bones. I was ready to give up when I came across another section of snakeskin, this one nearly the size of a car door! I’m going to spend a few more days out here searching before I head for the lab. The more I can give them to analyze, the better.

One weird thing, though. Just before I retired to my tent tonight, I stopped to admire the sunset. Not far from camp, I saw the sand sort of shift and roll. I didn’t think much of it. The wind constantly has the sand in motion. But as I turned to retreat inside my tent, I realized the wind was blowing the other way; the rolling appeared to have been going against the wind.

I think the locals are rubbing off on me. Is superstition contagious?

Love and miss you,

Kyle

End.

*~*~*

Brenda Kezar is a speculative fiction writer and member of the Horror Writers Association. She lives on the dark tundra of North Dakota with her muse, an evil corgi named Honey Booboo. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications and podcasts, including Dark Moon Digest, Daily Science Fiction, Silverthought, Welcome to Miskatonic University, The Overcast, Tales to Terrify, and many others. To learn more, visit: www.BrendaKezar.com

Artist: Tracy Whiteside

Dead Sprint

By Mike Weitz

Dawn broke.

Light spilled in from the eastern rim of darkness.

Things began to awaken.

One by one, decade-old vehicles assembled in the lot. The boys were not in any hurry. They sat tight in their cars and kept their music playing. Knees danced antsy jigs. The coach was late.

Marcus Shrader and his younger brother Aaron were the only two in the same vehicle. They did not exchange a word.

Marcus sighed and dialed up the volume. Aaron hunched over his phone, staring for a reply from a girl.

An old Toyota Camry puttered into the neighboring stall. Marcus waved at its driver to get in with them. Stubbornly, the driver waved back. Marcus threw up his arms.

“Fine, whatever then,” he mumbled.

Aaron thought about the girl’s top lip, the perfect shape of a bird in high flight. He inhaled deeply, catching imaginary traces of her mint-orange perfume. A distant awakening next to his thigh, and he checked his phone again.

A sun-faded Monte Carlo slunk into a stall three down from any of the other parked cars. Its operator, Alex Dentwood, threw the shifter into park and flung his seat back.

Coach arrived. The boys watched his pickup bumble into the lot. No one got out of their cars until he did.

A few moments later, there they were, all reluctantly congregated at the trailhead. Eight young men formidably dressed against the elements. Aaron was the only freshmen on the team and lacked the seasoned sensibility to wear gloves. To compensate, he balled the sleeves of his sweatshirt and breathed into them. It was that kind of cold. The kind that cut across his face and nipped at his ears.

While Coach ran them through it, the boys tried to ignore the milky vapor of their exhales as they stretched and bounced about. The only one who refrained from this activity was Alex. He shifted sluggishly from foot to foot, wiggling his limbs and shaking his head a little, suffering out the kinks.

“All right, then,” Coach rapped in his bumblebee voice. “Easy twelve. Longest run of the year. I’ll see you Shelton at the turn around, make sure on pace.”

Coach spoke so fast he skipped words. It got Aaron smiling. This late in the season, he knew the reason why. Coach just couldn’t help it. He was all about the run.

“Here we go. Money in the bank, boys.” Coach raised his stopwatch. “Nobody works harder.”

The boys lined up where the pavement broke to limestone dust. Even by this point, they hadn’t exchanged a word. It was just too early, and too damn cold.

“Stick together now,” Coach instructed. “I don’t want any horseplay, and if one falls back you all do, see? Last thing we needs’ another ’88. Whatsa’ matter Alex?”

“Nothing,” Alex snapped, correcting his hunch and stepping up to the line.

“Right, then. Last one. We do this right, run our best race right here in October. Right boys?”

The boys grumbled.

“Somebody got a phone?”

“I do,” said Gary Eckeler, the only senior on the team. He was orderly with a radish face that always seemed to be flexing.

“Right. Doc’s on call.” Marcus said with a shudder. They called Gary Doc because of one occasion the year before when he had expressed a slight interest in medical school.

“I’ve got mine too,” Aaron said.

“Shut it, Freshie,” lashed a sophomore, Mitchel Stockly.

“Boys!” Coach called to order. “Come on, now, on the line. Here we go, money in the bank.”

He raised his stopwatch again.

“Set? Go.”

*~*~*

The first mile went by the way life passes; step by step, second by second, and then all at once, it was behind them.

They ran in a rat pack. Alex took point. Stockly, Marcus Shrader, Ray Jones, another sophomore so gangly he appeared malnourished, all covered his flank. Behind that trio, Doc (Gary) Eckeler jogged next to Aaron Shrader. Behind them, Kohana Tahatan, a short Native American boy, kept pace with graceful form. Anchoring the lot, weighing them all down, was the insufferable meat wagon of a runner, Cory Conkler.

It became clear to everyone before the second mile marker that Conkler could not keep pace. Around that time, Ray broke the silence.

“Hey, Cockler! Speed up!”

“Screw you,” Conkler whooshed, some ten yards behind. Then, completely indignant, “Seriously though, guys. Can we ease up?”

“Hell no!” Stockly hissed. He was a canned up ferret of a teenager with bushy eyebrows and cinnamon stubble, who was even shorter than Doc. Words came out of him like puffs of steam. “Panthers don’t slow down. Nobody works harder.”

“Slow down guys,” Doc reprimanded. “Come on. Gotta stick together.”

Kohana fell back first. He was the quietest by far. His silence had a way of broadcasting itself.

Following him, they all decelerated to an eight-minute pace. Seconds later, up came Conkler barreling along. His rotund body thundered over his duck-flat feet. One of his shoes was partially untied, strings like Mexican jumping beans. He fell in line next to Kohana.

The rest of mile two dragged by. Between the third and fourth, Conkler’s breaths became increasingly labored. Soon enough, he started lagging once again.

“You guys seriously keep going,” he gave up at last. “I’ll be fine.”

The others looked separate ways. Alex pushed the pace.

“I’ll stay with him,” Kohana volunteered, tone dipping slightly. As he fell back, the others looked between Doc and Alex for a final decision.

Neither said a word.

*~*~*

On mile four, conversation spurred in the larger group.

“Dude, Stock, I can’t believe Coach is letting us run this trail,” Ray said.

Stockly knew exactly what he was talking about.

“Dude, that shit ain’t real.”

“The ‘88 thing? Yeah it is!” Alex fervently cut in. “Seriously. My dad remembers it.”

“What happened?” Aaron asked, and for once Stockly didn’t pounce.

“Years ago,” Alex began. “Back in 1988, only two guys on the team made state. These twins. I forget their name.”

“Dickeys, man,” Ray filled.

“Right—anyway—well, you guys know the story. They went for a run out here same as us and got murked.

“What?”

“They disappeared, Freshbait!” Stockly hammered. Aaron looked to his brother for support. Marcus was studying the trees. His face was clearly pensive though, and Aaron managed to siphon some love from that.

“My dad remembers it.” Alex repeated. “He was just a kid then, but he said the Feds came in and everything, got the whole town searching. They didn’t find shit though. Not even bones.”

“…So, what happened?” Aaron asked.

“Nothing,” Stockly said.

“No, dude, it’s obvious,” said Ray. “They ran off trail and got ate up by some animal. You know, mountain lion.”

“Okay, Raymond.”

Stockly and Ray were similar in terms of temperament. Neither had much of one at all.

“Well?” Ray challenged, “What do you think happened?”

“I told you. Shit ain’t real.”

“Yes, it is, dude!” Alex insisted. “I’m telling you, my dad—Doc, Marcus, help me out here. You guys are math-heads. What do you think?”

As Marcus and Doc were reluctant to discuss, the boys mulled it over listening to the scratchy treading of their feet.

“I’m pretty sure it is real,” Marcus finally said.

“It is,” Doc concurred. “You can look it up online. In all likelihood, they probably did get eaten.”

“Could have been something bigger than a lion,” Marcus surmised. “My folks say there’s black bears out here.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Stockly said bitterly. No one was sure if he was serious or not.

“Let’s take a quick break up here,” Doc said, surprising them. He was never one to suggest stopping. “Been tryin’ to hold it,” he explained. “But man, I really gotta piss.”

*~*~*

The team took their pit stop in the crook of a straightaway where the trail curved around to the west. By that time, they were deep in the Molgrove forest, a national conservation area the trail passed through on its way to Shelton.

Sinuous trees hunched over the boys. Autumn leaves crunched beneath them in wind-sewn lines like the ribbon tails of kites.

Aaron unrolled his sleeves and checked his phone again. He lowered it with a set jaw, hating his sudden obsession.

“What time is it?” Marcus asked.

“Six-thirty-eight.”

Aaron shot a furtive glance at his dark-faced brother who always seemed so much taller, although at 15 and 17 they were about the same height. Suddenly his mind entertained a fantasy where Marcus asked him what was wrong, and he played it off coolly with a slick set of lies. He wished he knew what it would feel like to impress Marcus.

Ahead of everyone, Alex hawked and spat. He picked out a well-rounded rock on the trail and kicked it, cracking off a tree trunk into a thicket. His gaze lingered on that trunk.

“Hey guys,” Alex called out. “What’s this?”

Alex pointed as his boys gathered around him, except for Doc of course, who was still letting it out.

“Some kind of carving,” Marcus observed.

Ray and Stockly stepped in. The brush was forced back revealing the full inscription of native emblems, as well as a thin snake-trail behind, winding deep into the woods.

“The fuck?” Alex said with new shrill alacrity.

“Dude!” Ray exclaimed. “Look!”

Behind the first, several other trees were engraved with similar inscriptions. The lettering, though sharp and severe, was at the same time slender and seamlessly arced. Its curvature seemed to strike Marcus in particular (for he possessed a decent background in woodworking.) They were so flawless that it appeared more as if the runes were burned into the trees by means of an iron brand.

“Looks native,” Aaron said.

“Shut up, Freshie.”

“No, he’s right,” Marcus backed. “It’s Indian for sure.” Marcus looked at Stockly as if he was a hopeless case. Aaron restrained his adoration.

“Yeah, man,” Alex agreed. “But like, what—” His words seemed to trip on their way off his lips.

“Dude!” Ray repeated.

“What, Jonesy?”

Ray’s voice ratcheted up with excitement.

“I bet that’s the Dickey’s trail, man! I bet this is how they disappeared! They went down that creepy tribal trail and got got.”

“What?” the boys retorted in unison.

Ray kept going, unable to contain himself. His mind seemingly too spontaneous for his own good. All it took was one flint spark of discovery to streak his brain with new ideas like a venous flash of lighting in a midnight sky.

“I’m telling you guys, this is it! We gotta go down there and find ’em.”

“Hell no,” Stockly shot down. “You are bat-shit, Jones.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, seriously. That’s stupid, dude! It’s just a horse trail, probably just leads to some heritage site.”

Ray said nothing. Apparently, that wasn’t enough for Stockly, so he turned his tongue on everyone.

“You know what? I take it back. It might look Indian, but I ain’t never seen marks like that. I mean, look at ’em. They look wicked, man. It’s a warning if I ever saw one. Like—don’t-tread-holy-ground type stuff. Or maybe they were carved in by some outlander, tweaking out of his mind. You ever factor that Jonesy? That there’s some crazy backwoods hick in there, waiting for us? Christ, what the hell are we even talking about here? Some goddamn wild corpse chase?”

“Dude. Chill out, Stock.” Alex said, extinguishing him. The others looked to their leader for a verdict.

That’s all it boiled down to, Aaron anticipated. Whatever Alex says is what we’ll do.

Doc came bounding back in.

“Let’s keep moving.” he said.

“Dude, Doc, check this out,” someone said.

Doc stepped in cautiously, eyes darting between the boys for signs of foul play. Stockly doubled down.

“I’m telling you guys, we go down that trail, we are asking for it. Think about every horror movie you’ve even seen.”

“What?” Doc said. “What the hell are you even—”

“No, dude!” Ray exclaimed. “I’ve got it! What if it’s like some kind of shrine?”

“What?”

“You know, like a sanctuary. Like where the Indians go to kneel and bring offerings. Pray to the sun god or whatever for health and good harvest.”

Stockly scoffed and shook his head. Marcus and Alex shared a chuckle.

“Very intriguing, Ray,” said Doc. “Now, come on.”

“No!” Ray asserted. “I mean, the signs might be whatever, but I’m telling you, that is the Dickies trail!”

“So what? Why the hell would we take it?”

“Uh, adventure. Discovery. To close the case, man—and not to mention rewards.”

They all looked at Ray like he was on something. They looked at each other, unsure of what to do with him.

“Seriously!” Ray carried on. “What if we did find their remains? We’d be heroes, man. They’d put us on the news. And I bet the family would pay us like—”

“Like what?” Marcus said.

“I don’t know! Something! A sack of money or some shit.”

“Sack of money!” Marcus howled.

“This is ridiculous,” said Doc. “Come on. Coach is waiting. He’s already gonna know we stopped.”

He turned to leave. Stockly and Marcus turned with him, but Aaron and Ray waited for Alex. The top runner stood with his back to them, looking after the snake-trail the way a land-dweller looks out to sea.

Ray grinned. He looked as if he was expecting to receive a lecture but that isn’t what happened. All Alex said was, “Half a mile. Three and a half minutes.”

“But Coach—”

“He won’t care. We’ll just say we had to slow down for Conk. By the time we get back, we’ll probably run right into him and Ko, or at least catch up to ’em.”

“Yes!” Ray cheered. “Come on Doc, it’s fuckin’ adventure time.”

“I’m telling you guys,” Stockly started.

“God, quit being a little bitch, dude.” Alex said. “That Dickeys thing was 40 years ago.”

“Yeah, Stock,” Ray chorused. “Quit pussing out. Just look at Freshie. He ain’t scared.”

Aaron became suddenly aware of his being mentioned but said nothing. He stepped in behind Alex, happy to assume the role of someone braver than Stockly. Aaron grinned at his older brother, and Marcus knew he had no choice.

“All right,” he caved. “Half a mile, Doc. If you think about it, we’re just doing a little extra. Nobody works harder, right?”

Marcus crossed the invisible line of dissidence. Stockly followed suit, looking down and shaking his head.

It was now everyone versus Doc, and he was livid. His bloodshot eyes were wild and turbulent…and trapped.

“God, I hate you guys,” he snarled. “Impulsive buncha’ hooligans.” He crossed to their side, but not without letting the rage rush out. “So, what’s the big plan, Alex? We just run until we find something? What do you expect to find? Bones? Really? You said it yourself: it’s been forty years.”

Now that he’d won, Alex became merciful. He held no grudge against this kid, took no delight in beating him.

“Look, relax man. I’m just curious. Like I said, half a mile.”

Doc said nothing, smoldering in his shoes. After a few seconds, he turned to the snake-trail and growled,

“Let’s just get this over with.”

*~*~*

One minute down the trail, the forest began to close in.

The boys ran in single-file, as the path was much too narrow for even two-abreast. Quietly unnerved, each adolescent peered into the twisting thickets and the crooked web-work of trees as if they were staring into something sentient and impossibly vast.

Aaron daydreamed in a fatalistic sense about what he would say to the girl if he had to offer any last words. Tucked inside his sleeve, one hand clutched his phone.

With the passing seconds, the woods only thickened. A minute and a half in, trees bent together in a tunnel of tattered wings. Branches locked arms in hammocks above, weaving themselves into a corridor so dense the sky was all but shrouded.

Claustrophobia pressed. Each runner realized he was shoulder-to-shoulder with the woods and the alteration was penetrating.

Aaron squinted. He could have sworn he glimpsed air bending between the trees. He blinked it away and looked up.

There it was again, better recognized as a translucent ovoid shape, a meter wide and two long, hovering above the underbrush. He reached a hand up impulsively, but the shape shrank back and disappeared.

“Hey. Did you guys—” he started. “Did you just?”

“Satisfied yet, Alex?” Doc heckled. “This enough adventure for you?”

“Naw,” Alex returned. “Little further.”

“I—seriously, you guys,” Aaron stuttered, trying to grasp what his mind had recognized in the trees. “I think I—I just saw something.”

Stockly snickered behind him.

“What? Mountain lion?”

“No. Something else. Like—it was like—” But he could not begin to describe it.

“Uh oh boys, Freshies freakin’ out!” Stockly announced. “Better turn tail before he uhaagh—”

At that moment, something clapped a hand on Stockly’s vocal chords and cut him off with sharp, violent completion. He’d been running caboose, and just ahead, Aaron heard the high whine of a stick slicing through the air, followed by a vacuous retraction.

The team skidded to a halt.

“What the hell?” Alex clamored, pushing his way back through them. “Stock?”

He was nowhere to be seen.

“Stock. Come on, dude,” Alex demanded. “Not cool, man.”

The woods radiated with silence.Each runner checked his breathing. Aaron looked all around him. While it was totally silent, somehow it felt at the same time, it was much too loud.

The team scoured the surrounding area. Ray and Doc bent over their prints. Alex and Marcus searched the thickets. Aaron looked up into the canopy.

Marcus confronted his younger brother.

“What did you see?”

Aaron shook his head deliriously. “I—I don’t know, I—some—some kind of mirror or—”

“What?”

“I don’t know, all right?!”

“Let’s go back,” Doc said.

“Yeah, sure,” Marcus agreed, wary of the trees that were all too close.

“What about Stock?” Ray asked.

“Forget him.” Alex said. Then, projecting his voice, “You hear me, asshole? If this is your idea of a joke, keep it.”

“But why would he joke?” Ray said, his voice hoarse and brittle. “How would he joke? He screamed one instant and was gone the next. Stock—he didn’t even want to do this.”

“Come on!” Doc urged, jogging up ahead. “No more dicking around. Let’s just get the fuaaaagh—”

In one instant, Doc was motioning them to follow. In the next, a gnarled crimson tree branch shot into his torso with such jarring force, his body bent sideways in a limp C shape, before the branch rappelled back, ripping him out of reality and into the same refractive oval Aaron had seen hovering over them.

Nobody moved.

Nobody breathed.

It was too immediate, too extreme for them to process. Gary Eckeler existed, and then he didn’t and no trace of him remained. The second or so between his being and not being seemed so absurd it had to be a mistake. That couldn’t be what just happened.

“What…the…what?” Ray stuttered.

Marcus shook his head and blinked and shook his head again. “No way, man.”

“Guys,” Alex rasped. “We…just…run!”

Alex took off at a dead sprint, plowing through the empty space where Doc had just been standing.

The other three watched for a split second of bewilderment. Then they got with the program.

The forest stooped. Walnut blurs reeled by. Sprigs twisted out into the path, bony fingers reaching to ensnare.

Alex only looked ahead of him. Marcus fell in behind, followed by Ray. Aaron tailed, his legs red-hot, mind set aflame.

“Marcus!” he pleaded, whooping in the air.“Marcus, wait!”

Ray bridged the gap to Marcus and attempted to pass. The older boy felt hot breath huffing at his heels.

“Move!” Ray heaved, but the trail was too narrow. There simply wasn’t room.

Aaron watched with renewed horror as Ray came up from behind and shoved his older brother into the ditch.

“No!” Aaron cried out. Marcus hit the ground hard but used his momentum to summersault back onto his feet. He stumbled back onto the trail, wet leaves falling off him as he moved.

“Marcus!” Aaron gasped again. “Are you—”

The hand of hell returned. This time, Aaron discerned the appendage more clearly as that of waxen flesh, leathery and boiled like the scar tissue of a burn wound.

Marcus did not even scream.

Cutlass fingers plunged into his abdomen. As Marcus folded over it, the red arm bent around him like a fishhook before elevating his skewered body up into the rift.

Staring up in horror, the last Aaron saw of his older brother was a scant view of his shock-stricken face, mouth gaping, arms reaching, eyes wide as a ghoul’s. Blood droplets fell against his cheeks.

Behind Alex, Ray ran heavy-footed, visibly gassed from shoving Marcus.

Aaron sprinted blindly up the woodland throat, fear devoured by rage. With everything inside, he wanted to shove Ray off the trail as well. Feed him to the thing.

But there was nothing the freshman could do. He wasn’t fast enough to outrun what was happening before it happened again. Even now, as shadows fled and the forest opened up to the adjacent gravel trail, he felt radial impulses fire in the nether regions of his mind, signaling the portal’s return.

Ray tapered more. Aaron saw him as a diver treading water above a dark, circling shape. It occurred to him that in sacrificing Marcus, Ray’s life had been preserved only another minute at best.

Up at the finish line, the great portal descended.

Alex skidded to a halt, eyes boxed-in with horror. Ray caught up from behind and braced a hand on his teammate. With one eye closed to the burn of trickling sweat, Ray stared at the phenomenon with the other and slowly shook his head.

Once again, a crimson arm emerged. It came slowly this time, weightless and fluid like an eel. A moment later, a second arm appeared. The hand of each was coned in the shape of squids in jet propulsion. Back and forth the appendages swayed, unraveling toward the boys.

“Any ideas, Ray?”

Ray just kept shaking his head.

Aaron’s legs shut down again as he watched the serpents strike. Ray met his death in disbelief. His appendage reared before striking him head on, plunging into his gut. Same as before, the arm whiplashed back like an amphibian tongue, wrenching in its catch.

The other arm went for Alex, but he leapt to one side in the nick of time, tangling himself in a hackberry bush.

The arm countered with unnatural speed. It shot downward staking him to the earth. Alex dropped his jaw to scream, but the red fingers pierced his lungs. In the next instant, they stole him away as well.

Aaron stared.

The portal hovered in place, waiting for him. This was it. No different from the Dickies, no one would ever know what had truly transpired.

Unless.

Aaron unballed his sweatshirt sleeves. He stared at his phone, ignoring the unread text message that had been waiting patiently—a text full of generous emojis. Instead, he focused on the no service icon in the corner of his screen. No way to make a call, but there was still one thing, one way he could make known what happened.

He pressed his thumb to the icon for the camera app, then tapped record and approached the portal cautiously.

What do I say? What the hell do I say?

The red arms did not appear, even as he crossed the plane where they had taken his last two teammates. Gulping, he thought of the way an anaconda lies dormant for hours and often days after it feeds. He’d seen that somewhere on TV, could only assume the others were undergoing a similar, faster form of digestion.

“This,” he rushed out, voice chalked and raspy. “This is…what got us.”

He lingered on the portal a few more seconds then tapped the red button. No service to send, but at least he had it documented. Now, only one thing left to do.

Ten meters away, his nerve nearly abandoned him. But this was all he had left. His only hope that anyone might uncover the rampant red horror that had befallen them.

Staring into the portal, his eyes narrowed with rage. Aaron hurled his phone overhead. He cringed in the moments following, expecting a red arm to fire out and obliterate it. But it didn’t. The phone sailed up and down to a clatter on the gravel trail behind.

Aaron stood panting, staring. He wiped one sleeve across his face, smearing his brother’s blood.

He looked down for a moment, thinking. Then he pivoted around and ran the other way.

*~*~*

Kohana and Conkler got along well enough. They took their time jogging at Conkler’s comfortable pace, which meant they were barely jogging at all.

Unlike the others, Kohana didn’t mind Conkler. Something about his vocal incessancy soothed him the same way a white noise machine softens the burden of insomnia.

As Conkler thumped, Kohana flitted next to him, paying attention with half his mind, letting the other half wander. He nodded at the appropriate times, muttered an acknowledgment when cued. Otherwise, he was content to let Conkler monologue.

In slow and steady enough time, the conifers multiplied, their limbs reaching closer and closer to the boys as they entered the Molgrove forest. Cool wind slipped between the patchwork. Strewed light filtered in from overhead.

While Conkler complained about the uselessness of dieting, Kohana breathed deeply through his nose. He was growing tired of the run. Not physically, just bored.

“You know what I mean, Ko? Hey, can I call you Ko?” The permission seemed very important.

“Sure.” Kohana said. Suddenly Conkler looked taken aback.

“I mean look, I’m not blind. I know everybody does, but like—I mean—has anyone ever asked you?” He wanted to start framing things up like it was the world against the two of them.

“No, I—It’s fine, dude,” Kohana stammered.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok, man. I’m just saying, I’ll call you whatever. I’m not like one of those freakin’—you know—dudes who label everyone their own nicknames and stuff. That shit’s annoying.”

“Yeah,” Kohana agreed. It reoccurred to him that the poor boy had not even the faintest idea of how to conduct himself.

Conkler droned on and Kohana tuned him out entirely. Such forced communication left a cold kiss on him. He retreated into a comforting thought.

It was his grandmother quilted up in her ceremonial apparel. He imagined her hunching over the stove, tending to a pot of her famous chili. His grandmother never wore her regalia unless they were attending a reunion, but he often imagined her in them, because that’s who she was to him. She was Matta, the one who had raised him on the importance of culture and family. She’d even gone so far as to teach him the language of their tribe.

Kohana smiled. He opened his mouth and could almost taste Serrano peppers in the wind.

The two hustled around the bend of a straightaway. Kohana’s hunger expounded. He looked at the melting colors in the trees, attempting to take his mind off it.

“I’m just saying, dudes have different body types, you know? I mean, I try my hardest every freakin’ race, but it’s just—” Conkler cut himself off and attempted to make eye contact.

Kohana squinted at the path ahead, triggering Conkler into apologetics.

“I mean, look dude. I’m not trying to piss you off. Am I being annoying? You can just tell me and I’ll shut up. Like, seriously, no offense taken. God, I wish people would just tell me sometimes. But no, everybody’s so bottled up and PC these days—not you though, Ko. I mean you’re like quiet in a cool way. I mean, it’s not like you’re the cool kid or whatever, I’m just saying—”

“What’s that?”

“Huh? What?”

“Up there on the trail.”

They hustled over to it and stood above the phone with the awkwardness of two strangers staring down at a lost child.

“Yikes,” Conkler said, scooping it up. “Someone musta’ dropped it.”

“Who?” Kohana asked. “Can you tell?”

“Hell no, bro. I can’t access without the password. Must be Doc’s or the Freshie’s. They’re the only ones who brought ’em, right?”

“I think so.”

“It’s gotta be. Ain’t seen no one else on the trail and it can’t have been here long. But like, how the hell do you lose a phone? Think you’d feel or hear it, right?”

“Hmm.” Kohana started looking around and stopped just as quickly.

“Well, maybe not though,” Conkler said, thumbing a film of powder off the screen. “I mean, with that many guys, I guess their feet could—hey what are you—what the hell’s that?”

Conkler joined Kohana on the edge of the trail overlooking the signs and the snake-trail.

“Uhm, ok.” Conkler leveled. “Now, I’m freakin’ out. Look at those, man. Like some voodoo shit.”

“No,” Kohana said.

“What?”

“I can read them,” he said quietly. “They’re all written in Toccän.”

“What?”

“The language of my tribe.”

“Oh shit. No way. Really?”

Kohana said nothing.

“Well, come on man. What do they say?”

“We should go.”

“What? No, come on dude. What if—come on, don’t shell up, just tell me, man!”

Reluctantly, Kohana pointed to the signs one by one.

“Salvation in sacrifice. Oppressed by white man. Sheltered by the hand.”

For the first time that Kohana could recall, Conkler was speechless.

“And that one,” Kohana faltered. “That one says Lair of Rodimalec: Red Hand of Eternal Wrath.”

End.

*~*~*

Mike Weitz is a passionate scribbler of horror, sci-fi, and literary fiction. With a Bachelor's degree in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Weitz spends his evenings writing in the basement of his home in Bellevue, NE where he lives with his wife and children.

Weitz’s short fiction has previously been published in Nightscript: An Anthology of Horror (Vol. 4), Night Terrors (Vol. 4), and online inEvery Day Fiction and The Scarlet Leaf Review. His novella The Hollowing was published by Pavor Press in July of 2020.

I Saw

By Scott J. Couturier

I saw –

where star-sick voids their blasphemies bled,

gravity running in pools of carnal cosmic red

to sanctify no dead.

I saw –

pustules burst on a huge toad’s hoary hide,

releasing mard of squirming offspring in tide

(they taste good fried).

I saw –

Sentinels of aeon-abased stone crumble after

a million millennia of watch, to crude laughter –

sentience a cruel crafter.

I saw –

A halcyon garden of golden rot-mottled blooms

that blossom gargantuan from the vacant tombs

of olden Gods of gloom.

I saw –

A page from a book never written, a spell of wrack

to soundly sunder your foes, or avert all attack,

an Oath of Thundercrack.

I saw –

Dimly things that should remain unseen, but are

yet discerned by those with a Poet’s dolor-star

fixed to illumine far.

I saw –

All the secrets but no answers, all the old rites,

the endless unclad abysmal soul-soiling nights,

after every harvest blight.

I saw –

my own prying sight in infinite variegated reflection

from foundless mirrors in concurrent concave convection,

each eye in abjection.

I saw –

a placid rill of water flow down a mountainside,

haunt of shepherd-boys: sheep new-sheared glide

in gloaming’s bide.

I saw –

where the camphir-pine grows gnarled, where

manticores lash scorpion-tails on centuried air,

their agitation bare.

I saw –

Many things in Time’s tributary to waken dread.

Dreaming, I fled to Timeless temples in my head,

where decay cannot tread.

*~*~*

Scott J. Couturier is a poet & prose writer of the Weird, grotesque, liminal, & darkly fantastic. His work has appeared in numerous venues, including The Audient Void, S. T. Joshi’s Spectral Realms, Eye To The Telescope, Cosmic Horror Monthly, The Dark Corner Zine, Space and Time Magazine, & Weirdbook. Currently he works as a copy & content editor for Mission Point Press, living an obscure reverie in the wilds of northern Michigan with his partner/live-in editor & two cats.

Visitor

By Rickey Rivers Jr.

[Voice of Anna J. Lee (Mother of Jamie Quinn Lee)]

“I remember her telling us about the experience several times. I just didn’t know what to do or how to deal with it. How can any parent?

“I’ve never been through anything like that, but she had been so detailed about it that I knew she couldn’t be lying. She was scared. Then when the encounters advanced to a sexual nature, I was just...sometimes, you just don’t know what to do.

“Our pastor prayed over the room and the entire house but she was still visited. We tried to help her as best we could. Counseling came next. We certainly didn’t want to put her on medication. She was just a young girl. What could I have done?”

*~*~*

[Voice of William Lee (Father of Jamie Quinn Lee)]

“It’s terrible thing to hear, your little girl going through that. She came to us and laid the situation out plain. You could tell she’d been crying.

“My first thought was to go to her school. I thought she was speaking in code, trying to let us know it was one of the teachers or boys at school, but she made it clearer—this was a home invasion. Not an invasion of our home though, the visitor only came to her.

“She spoke so vividly about the visits. When she left, she called us and said the encounters worsened. The things she told me. [Exhales] I can’t repeat, but she suffered and I hate to say that. You don't want your child to suffer.”

*~*~*

[Voice of Karen Cooper (Friend of Jamie Quinn Lee)]

“No, she wasn’t always like that. We did normal stuff together. Hanging out, going to parties, talking about boys, sleepovers, you know. That was so long ago though.

“She only started mentioning nightmares after one of the sleepovers. The next morning, she came up to me crying and asking me why I didn’t wake up. She said she was trying to get me to help her, but I didn’t know what she was talking about. Apparently, the previous night she’d been visited and had struggled to get my attention. I thought she was making it up for attention, I didn’t know what was going on with her. I only found out later that she had been molested. But then she was saying a supposed [air quotes] night visitor that nobody else could see had been the molester. I started to take her less and less seriously.

2.

[The following voices are of James Benjamin (Journalist) and Strawberry Jane (occupation withheld)]

JB: “Did you know Jamie Quinn?” [Picture presented]

SJ: “Yeah, I knew her.”

“At that time, did she ever mention anything to you about…strange dreams?”

“Sure, but they were only dreams.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Many of the girls who work here have been molested. Some of them get creative with how it happened to them.”

“Did she call it that? Molestation?”

“No, she tried to deny it. Tried to convince folks about what happened. Night terrors I told her—or nightmares or whatever.”

“You didn’t want to believe her?”

“I didn’t say that. You could tell something happened. The look—you could see it in her eyes. The girl was troubled. Well, plenty of us are. [Laughs] But she looked a different kind of troubled, the kind where you could tell she didn’t sleep at night. The kind where you could tell it wouldn’t be long before she went all the way loopy.”

“All the way loopy?”

“Insane, come on slick, you know what I mean.”

“Right, and had any of the other girls had similar stories of molestation?”

“No, not like her.”

“Have you spoken to her lately?”

“I haven’t seen that child in a long time. I don’t know what happened to her.”

“Did she seem to be scared?”

“She looked scared all the time, like a rookie, but different. She wasn’t scared of the men. She told me she was scared to go back to sleep. She wanted to always be awake. She said sleeping was the scariest part of being alive.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I believe that she believes it. As for me, I sleep well after a hard day’s work. I don’t have those problems.”

“Lucky you then.”

“Yeah, lucky me, ha! I guess you can say that. Now, pay up. Same price no matter what didn’t happen.”

“I have more questions.”

[Sighs] “Go on.”

“Did she describe any of the encounters to you?”

“Yeah but they were the loopy versions. She talked about staring up at the ceiling, her door opening and someone rubbing her legs in the dark and then, it leading to sex. Just normal stuff.”

“Normal stuff?”

“Normal around here, except we can see who’s doing it. [laughs] Sometimes they don’t want to be seen though.”

“What do you mean by seeing who’s doing it?”

“We can see the men we’re sleeping with. Jamie Quinn was talking like the man was invisible.”

“So, she did say man?”

“No, I say man. She said the person spoke unisex—whatever that means. Said they were real gentle with her until they weren’t. Sounds like some of the guys around this way. They put on the act of being shy and then they want to manhandle you and that’s when you teach them a lesson. Like I said, some of the girls get creative with their stories. Plenty of us been touched before graduation, you understand?”

“Yes, I understand. Did that happen to you?”

[Exhales loudly] “I thought you wanted information on Jamie Quinn? You said you weren’t a cop, was that a lie?”

“Oh no, not a lie.”

“Then don’t ask questions about me.”

“I’m sorry. Do you have any more information that might be useful?”

“Nah, I don’t think so. She was interesting though, like I said, you can tell when one’s gone loopy.”

“Do you think there’s any truth to her stories?”

“I believe that something happened. I’m just not sure it happened the way she said. We all find ways to cope, hell—some of us force ourselves to forget. Some of us make up scenarios. Some of us try and can’t forget and end up running, like her, but you can’t run from problems forever. Eventually you look back and see those problems are still there. Now, let’s say I believed her. Do you actually think it’s possible to run away from sleep? How long could you run?”

“Until you were tired enough to stop running.”

“Even after a long night that girl still didn’t get sleep, she told me. You should have seen how she looked. Her face told you the scene.”

“What did her face tell you?”

“Everything. She’d been through a lot. Not unusual around here but the look in her eyes was different. That chick used to creep me out with some of her stories. Sometimes I wanted to shake her. She scared the other girls. Whatever happened to her was at least real enough in her mind. And when it’s real in your mind…it’s real enough to scare you. Like I said, we all cope. You just gotta separate that fiction from reality.”

“There can be truth in fiction.”

“Sure, truth is stranger than fiction. Maybe I’ve been living in reality too long to believe it though. The reality here is things like that don’t happen. No invisible visitors, just people who take advantage of folks.”

“Do you believe in sleep paralysis?”

“Yeah, that’s not fiction. I’ve had that.”

“And you believe in molestation. So, isn’t it plausible that both can combine?”

“Sure but…not in the way it happened to her. The way she described it was… [she wraps her arms around herself] too terrible to believe.”

“So, you didn’t want to believe all of what she said?”

“I couldn’t, why would I believe something like that? Matter of fact, why are you asking so many questions about her? Is she okay?”

3.

[Handwritten by Jamie Quinn Lee] (Recovered)

Don’t think of it as a dream. It happened. I was thirteen, lying in bed, asleep but not at the same time. I was awake but not at the same time. My body was stiff, I couldn’t move. I was conscious. I could move my eyes but not my head. My mouth could open and close but not to say words, only to make a weak sound like a baby. I could produce tears, involuntarily or otherwise. I’d get scared enough to just cry, wide open-eyed tears.

Later, I learned there was such a thing called sleep paralysis. Many people have experienced sleep paralysis and some have told tales of being watched by shadow people. They may be tales but I don’t doubt their claims. Some have said they experience the sensation of pain even after waking up. I wish my experience had been that.

I didn’t see shadow people, I didn’t see anyone. There was no pain, not at first. The first time that I can recall, I just couldn’t move, nothing else. It happened again at fourteen, couldn’t talk or move. This time the door to my bedroom opened. I’d been facing away from the door so I only heard the sound of it slowly creaking open. Then, footsteps. I knew it couldn’t be a shadow person because I clearly heard the footsteps approach. This person came to my bed and stood over me for a time. I couldn’t see their face, I strained my eyes but only saw dark. Soon I felt a hand against my foot through the covers. The hand went up my leg and stopped then the motion repeated, from my foot up my leg, over and over again. It felt as if this person was stroking me like a cat. I woke up and my door was closed and the room dark and quiet.

This has happened several times in the past few years. At one point, the stroking went from my foot to the top of my head. Though I could feel every second, I couldn’t move a muscle. Another time, my sheets were pulled off and I could feel two hands touching me. And another time still I felt the bed shift as someone had climbed in. I felt them sniff my skin and hair and then just lie there until I woke up, after which the room was empty.

This was a person. It couldn’t be a shadow person, it just couldn’t. I felt everything this person did to me. I finally worked up the courage to tell my parents of what was happening. I was devastated they didn’t believe me at first. Finally, my dad put a lock on the door and told me to keep it locked when I slept. It did nothing to stop the visits.

These are not hallucinations, though I wish they were. You don’t know what it’s like to feel those hands on you, human-like hands. Maybe it’s a demon or some other kind of entity. I don’t know what to officially call it. I feel like I shouldn’t give it a name.

*~*~*

[Handwritten by Jamie Quinn Lee] (Recovered)

Now that I live alone, I’ve done the following: Slept in different rooms besides my bedroom. Double and triple checked the locks on my doors every night before bed. When sleeping, I keep a weight (twenty pounds) balanced against my bedroom door to wake me just in case. I've watched my diet, cut back on sugars and caffeine. I've taken fewer and fewer showers and baths. I've urinated on myself from time to time as a precaution. I've also hung dreamcatchers.

All of this has been to no avail. The visits have continued. Now more aggressive, as if they’ve been angered. They've advanced to intercourse—very painful intercourse. I'm sure the visitor is upset with me.

4.

[Handwritten by James Benjamin (Journalist)]

It is an unfortunate truth that they may never find her. Yet still the truest possibility beyond fiction. Fiction is funny. And some still don't believe the tale, as if such a truth can't possibly exist in this life, in this world.

I believe the girl. I have too many dead-end interviews leading to the same conclusion. And that is the fact that no one truly knows but her. Those who know her only know slivers of the truth. But like a pie, the pieces should add up to a whole. I believe she remains among the now and the after, a body made astral through phantom intercourse. Some say different, as if to blame the girl. But blaming the girl is wrong.

Sadly, I wish we had a trace of her to go on beyond writing—a limb, a nose, a bloody clump of hair, anything at all. At least that would confirm that some sort of abduction took place. Neither confirming nor denying to the parents is terrible. In that regard, I don't envy the police. "I don't know," is such a terrifying answer to someone seeking solace. And yet that is all anyone has.

I feel for the girl. I feel for the parents, for the public. I feel for their sanity, much less my own. Wrapping your head around the existence of the girl's descriptions makes me afraid to sleep. I do sleep of course, but it's terribly unwell.

I think about her as if she'd reveal universal truths to me. I lay there in my lonely home and pray in the dark. I wonder if I'll ever wake up frozen—if I'll ever feel hands on my legs—if I'll ever leave this world conscious of transport.

I wonder a lot lying there, how afraid she must have been, how afraid I am by the simple idea of the lack of a straight solution to something so fantastic.

End.

*~*~*

Rickey Rivers Jr was born and raised in Alabama. He is a writer and cancer survivor. His work has appeared in The Gray Sisters, Back Patio Press and Hybrid Fiction (among other publications). His third mini collection of 3x3 poems See It Now is available on Amazon. Find Rickey on the web at www.storiesyoumightlike.wordpress.com or on twitter @storiesyoumight

The Key to Grief

By Robert W. Chambers

Originally Published in 1897

The moving finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

-Fitzgerald.

The wild hawk to the wind-swept sky
The deer to the wholesome wold,
And the heart of a man to the heart of a maid,
As it was in the days of old.

-Kipling.

I.

They were doing their work very badly. They got the rope around his neck, and tied his wrists with moose-bush withes, but again he fell, sprawling, turning, twisting over the leaves, tearing up everything around him like a trapped panther.

He got the rope away from them; he clung to it with bleeding fists; he set his white teeth in it, until the jute strands relaxed, unravelled, and snapped, gnawed through by his white teeth.

Twice Tully struck him with a gum hook. The dull blows fell on flesh rigid as stone.

Panting, foul with forest mould and rotten leaves, hands and face smeared with blood, he sat up on the ground, glaring at the circle of men around him.

"Shoot him!" gasped Tully, dashing thesweat from his bronzed brow; and Bates, breathing heavily, sat down on a log and dragged a revolver from his rear pocket. The man on the ground watched him; there was froth in the corners of his mouth.

"Git back!" whispered Bates, but his voice and hand trembled. "Kent," he stammered, "won't ye hang?"

The man on the ground glared.

"Ye've got to die, Kent," he urged; "they all say so. Ask Lefty Sawyer; ask Dyce; ask Carrots.—He's got to swing fur it—ain't he, Tully?—Kent, fur God's sake, swing fur these here gents!"

The man on the ground panted; his bright eyes never moved.

After a moment Tully sprang on him again. There was a flurry of leaves, a crackle, a gasp and a grunt, then the thumping and thrashing of two bodies writhing in the brush. Dyce and Carrots jumped on the prostrate men. Lefty Sawyer caught the rope again, but the jute strands gave way and he stumbled. Tully began to scream, "He's chokin me!" Dyce staggered out into the open, moaning over a broken wrist.

"Shoot!" shouted Lefty Sawyer, and dragged Tully aside. "Shoot, Jim Bates! Shoot straight, b'God!"

"Git back!" gasped Bates, rising from the fallen log.

The crowd parted right and left; a quick report rang out—another—another. Then from the whirl of smoke a tall form staggered, dealing blows—blows that sounded sharp as the crack of a whip.

"He's off! Shoot straight!" they cried.

There was a gallop of heavy boots in the woods. Bates, faint and dazed, turned his head.

"Shoot!" shrieked Tully.

But Bates was sick; his smoking revolver fell to the ground; his white face and pale eyes contracted. It lasted only a moment; he started after the others, plunging, wallowing through thickets of osier and hemlock underbrush.

Far ahead he heard Kent crashing on like a young moose in November, and he knew he was making for the shore. The others knew too. Already the gray gleam of the sea cut a straight line along the forest edge; already the soft clash of the surf on the rocks broke faintly through the forest silence.

"He's got a canoe there!" bawled Tully. "He'll be into it!"

And he was into it, kneeling in the bow, driving his paddle to the handle. The rising sun gleamed like red lightning on the flashing blade; the canoe shot to the crest of a wave, hung, bows dripping in the wind, dropped into the depths, glided, tipped, rolled, shot up again, staggered, and plunged on.

Tully ran straight out into the cove surf; the water broke against his chest, bare and wet with sweat. Bates sat down on a worn black rock and watched the canoe listlessly.

The canoe dwindled to a speck of gray and silver; and when Carrots, who had run back to the gum camp for a rifle, returned, the speck on the water might have been easier to hit than a loon's head at twilight. So Carrots, being thrifty by nature, fired once, and was satisfied to save the other cartridges. The canoe was still visible, making for the open sea. Some where beyond the horizon lay the keys, a string of rocks bare as skulls, black and slimy where the sea cut their base, white on the crests with the excrement of sea birds.

"He's makin' fur the Key to Grief!" whispered Bates to Dyce.

Dyce, moaning, and nursing his broken wrist, turned a sick face out to sea.

The last rock seaward was the Key to Grief, a splintered pinnacle polished by the sea. From the Key to Grief, seaward a day's paddle, if a man dared, lay the long wooded island in the ocean known as Grief on the charts of the bleak coast.

In the history of the coast, two men had made the voyage to the Key to Grief, and from there to the island. One of these was a rum-crazed pelt hunter, who lived to come back; the other was a college youth; they found hisbattered canoe at sea, and a day later his battered body was flung up in the cove.

So, when Bates whispered to Dyce, and when Dyce called to the others, they knew that the end was not far off for Kent and his canoe; and they turned away into the forest, sullen, but satisfied that Kent would get his dues when the devil got his.

Lefty spoke vaguely of the wages of sin. Carrots, with an eye to thrift, suggested a plan for an equitable division of Kent's property.

When they reached the gum camp they piled Kent's personal effects on a blanket.

Carrots took the inventory: a revolver, two gum hooks, a fur cap, a nickel-plated watch, a pipe, a pack of new cards, a gum sack, forty pounds of spruce gum, and a frying pan.

Carrots shuffled the cards, picked out the joker, and flipped it pensively into the fire. Then he dealt cold decks all around.

When the goods and chattels of their late companion had been divided by chance—for there was no chance to cheat—somebody remembered Tully.

"He's down there on the coast, starin' after the canoe," said Bates huskily.

He rose and walked toward a heap on the ground covered by a blanket. He started to lift the blanket, hesitated, and finally turned away. Under the blanket lay Tully's brother, shot the night before by Kent.

"Guess we'd better wait till Tully comes," said Carrots uneasily. Bates and Kent had been campmates. An hour later Tully walked into camp.

He spoke to no one that day. In the morning Bates found him down on the coast digging, and said: "Hello, Tully! Guess we ain't much hell on lynchin!"

"Naw," said Tully. "Git a spade."

"Goin' to plant him there?"

"Yep."

""Where he kin hear them waves?"

"Yep."

"Purty spot."

"Yep."

"Which way will he face?"

"Where he kin watch fur that damned canoe!" cried Tully fiercely.

"He—he can't see," ventured Bates uneasily. "He's dead, ain't he?"

"He'll heave up that there sand when the canoe comes back! An it's a-comin! An' Bud Kent'll be in it, dead or alive! Git a spade!"

The pale light of superstition nickered in Bates's eyes. He hesitated.

"The—the dead can't see," he began; "kin they?"

Tully turned a distorted face toward him.

"Yer lie!" he roared. "My brother kin see, dead or livin'! An he'll see the hangin'of Bud Kent! An' he'll git up outer the grave fur to see it, Bill Bates! I'm tellin' ye! I'm tellin' ye! Deep as I'll plant him, he'll heave that there sand and call to me, when the canoe comes in! I'll hear him; I'll be here! An we'll live to see the hangin' of Bud Kent!"

Ahout sundown they planted Tully's brother, face to the sea.

II.

On the Key to Grief the green waves rub all day. White at the summit, black at the base, the shafted rocks rear splintered pinnacles, slanting like channel buoys. On the polished pillars sea birds brood white-winged, bright-eyed sea birds, that nestle and preen and flap and clatter their orange-coloured beaks when the sifted spray drives and drifts across the reef.

As the sun rose, painting crimson streaks criss-cross over the waters, the sea birds sidled together, huddling row on row, steeped in downy drowse.

Where the sun of noon burnished the sea, an opal wave washed, listless, noiseless; a sea bird stretched one listless wing.

And into the silence of the waters a canoe glided, bronzed by the sunlight, jewelled by the salt drops stringing from prow to thwart, sea weed a-trail in the diamond-flashing wake, and in the bow a man dripping with sweat.

Up rose the gulls, sweeping in circles, turning, turning over rock and sea, and their clamour filled the sky, starting little rippling echoes among the rocks.

The canoe grated on a shelf of ebony; the seaweed rocked and washed; the little sea crabs sheered sideways, down, down into limpid depths of greenest shadows. Such was the coming of Bud Kent to the Key to Grief.

He drew the canoe halfway up the shelf of rock and sat down, breathing heavily, one brown arm across the bow. For an hour he sat there. The sweat dried under his eyes. The sea birds came back, filling the air with soft querulous notes.

There was a livid mark around his neck, a red, raw circle. The salt wind stung it; the sun burned it into his flesh like a collar of red-hot steel. He touched it at times; once he washed it with cold salt water.

Far in the north a curtain of mist hung on the sea, dense, motionless as the fog on the Grand Banks. He never moved his eyes from it; he knew what it was. Behind it lay the Island of Grief.

All the year round the Island of Grief is hidden by the banks of mist, ramparts of dead white fog encircling it on every side. Ships give it wide berth. Some speak of warm springs on the island whose waters flow far out to sea, rising in steam eternally.

The pelt hunter had come back with tales of forests and deer and flowers everywhere; but he had been drinking much, and much was forgiven him.

The body of the college youth tossed up in the cove on the mainland was battered out of recognition, but some said, when found, one hand clutched a crimson blossom half wilted, but broad as a sap pan.

So Kent lay motionless beside his canoe, burned with thirst, every nerve vibrating, thinking of all these things. It was not fear that whitened the firm flesh under the tan; it was the fear of fear. He must not think—he must throttle dread; his eyes must never falter, his head never turn from that wall of mist across the sea. With set teeth he crushed back terror; with glittering eyes he looked into the hollow eyes of fright. And so he conquered fear.

He rose. The sea birds whirled up into the sky, pitching, tossing, screaming, till the sharp flapping of their pinions set the snapping echoes flying among the rocks.

Under the canoe's sharp prow the kelp bobbed and dipped and parted; the sunlit waves ran out ahead, glittering, dancing. Splash! splash! bow and stern! And now he knelt again, and the polished paddle swung and dipped, and swept and swung and dipped again.

Far behind, the clamour of the sea birdslingered in his ears, till the mellow dip of the paddle drowned all sound and the sea was a sea of silence.

No wind came to cool the hot sweat on cheek and breast. The sun blazed a path of flame before him, and he followed out into the waste of waters. The still ocean divided under the bows and rippled innocently away on either side, tinkling, foaming, sparkling like the current in a woodland brook. He looked around at the world of flattened water, and the fear of fear rose up and gripped his throat again. Then he lowered his head, like a tortured bull, and shook the fear of fear from his throat, and drove the paddle into the sea as a butcher stabs, to the hilt.

So at last he came to the wall of mist. It was thin at first, thin and cool, but it thickened and grew warmer, and the fear of fear dragged at his head, but he would not look behind.

Into the fog the canoe shot; the gray water ran by, high as the gunwales, oily, silent. Shapes flickered across the bows, pillars of mist that rode the waters, robed in films of tattered shadows. Gigantic forms towered to dizzy heights above him, shaking out shredded shrouds of cloud. The vast draperies of the fog swayed and hung and trembled as he brushed them; the white twilight deepened to a sombre gloom. And now it grew thinner; the fog became a mist, and the mist a haze, andthe haze floated away and vanished into the blue of the heavens.

All around lay a sea of pearl and sapphire, lapping, lapping on a silver shoal.

So he came to the Island of Grief.

III.

On the silver shoal the waves washed and washed, breaking like crushed opals where the sands sang with the humming froth.

Troops of little shore birds, wading on the shoal, tossed their sun-tipped wings and scuttled inland, where, dappled with shadow from the fringing forest, the white beach of the island stretched.

The water all around was shallow, limpid as crystal, and he saw the ribbed sand shining on the bottom, where purple seaweed floated, and delicate sea creatures darted and swarmed and scattered again at the dip of his paddle.

Like velvet rubbed on velvet the canoe brushed across the sand. He staggered to his feet, stumbled out, dragged the canoe high up under the trees, turned it bottom upward, and sank beside it, face downward in the sand. Sleep came to drive away the fear of fear, but hunger, thirst, and fever fought with sleep, and he dreamed—dreamed of a rope that sawed his neck, of the fight in the woods, and the shots. He dreamed, too, of the camp, of his fortypounds of spruce gum, of Tully, and of Bates. He dreamed of the fire and the smoke-scorched kettle, of the foul odour of musty bedding, of the greasy cards, and of his own new pack, hoarded for weeks to please the others. All this he dreamed, lying there face downward in the sand; but he did not dream of the face of the dead.

The shadows of the leaves moved on his blonde head, crisp with clipped curls. A butterfly flitted around him, alighting now on his legs, now on the back of his bronzed hands. All the afternoon the bees hung droning among the wildwood blossoms; the leaves above scarcely rustled; the shore birds brooded along the water's edge; the thin tide, sleeping on the sand, mirrored the sky.

Twilight paled the zenith; a breeze moved in the deeper woods; a star glimmered, went out, glimmered again, faded, and glimmered.

Night came. A moth darted to and fro under the trees; a beetle hummed around a heap of seaweed and fell scrambling in the sand. Somewhere among the trees a sound had become distinct, the song of a little brook, melodious, interminable. He heard it in his dream; it threaded all his dreams like a needle of silver, and like a needle it pricked him—pricked his dry throat and cracked lips. It could not awake him; the cool night swathed him head and foot.

Toward dawn a bird woke up and piped. Other birds stirred, restless, half awakened; a gull spread a cramped wing on the shore, preened its feathers, scratched its tufted neck, and took two drowsy steps toward the sea.

The sea breeze stirred out behind the mist bank; it raised the feathers on the sleeping gulls; it set the leaves whispering. A twig snapped, broke off, and fell. Kent stirred, sighed, trembled, and awoke.

The first thing he heard was the song of the brook, and he stumbled straight into the woods. There it lay, a thin, deep stream in the gray morning light, and he stretched himself beside it and laid his cheek in it. A bird drank in the pool, too—a little fluffy bird, bright-eyed and fearless.

His knees were firmer when at last he rose, heedless of the drops that beaded lips and chin. With his knife he dug and scraped at some white roots that hung half meshed in the bank of the brook, and when he had cleaned them in the pool he ate them.

The sun stained the sky when he went down to the canoe, but the eternal curtain of fog, far out at sea, hid it as yet from sight.

He lifted the canoe, bottom upwards, to his head, and, paddle and pole in either hand, carried it into the forest.

After he had set it down he stood a moment, opening and shutting his knife. Then he lookedup into the trees. There were birds there, if he could get at them. He looked at the brook. There were the prints of his fingers in the sand; there, too, was the print of something else a deer's pointed hoof.

He had nothing but his knife. He opened it again and looked at it.

That day he dug for clams and ate them raw. He waded out into the shallows, too, and jabbed at fish with his setting pole, but hit nothing except a yellow crab.

Fire was what he wanted. He hacked and chipped at flinty-looking pebbles, and scraped tinder from a stick of sun-dried driftwood. His knuckles bled, but no fire came.

That night he heard deer in the woods, and could not sleep for thinking, until the dawn came up behind the wall of mist, and he rose with it to drink his fill at the brook and tear raw clams with his white teeth. Again he fought for fire, craving it as he had never craved water, but his knuckles bled, and the knife scraped on the flint in vain.

His mind, perhaps, had suffered somewhat. The white beach seemed to rise and fall like a white carpet on a gusty hearth. The birds, too, that ran along the sand, seemed big and juicy, like partridges; and he chased them, hurling shells and bits of driftwood at them till he could scarcely keep his feet for the rising, plunging beach—or carpet, whichever itwas. That night the deer aroused him at intervals. He heard them splashing and grunting and crackling along the brook. Once he arose and stole after them, knife in hand, till a false step into the brook awoke him to his folly, and he felt his way back to the canoe, trembling.

Morning came, and again he drank at the brook, lying on the sand where countless heart-shaped hoofs had passed leaving clean imprints; and again he ripped the raw clams from their shells and swallowed them, whimpering.

All day long the white beach rose and fell and heaved and flattened under his bright dry eyes. He chased the shore birds at times, till the unsteady beach tripped him up and he fell full length in the sand. Then he would rise moaning, and creep into the shadow of the wood, and watch the little song-birds in the branches, moaning, always moaning.

His hands, sticky with blood, hacked steel and flint together, but so feebly that now even the cold sparks no longer came.

He began to fear the advancing night; he dreaded to hear the big warm deer among the thickets. Fear clutched him suddenly, and he lowered his head and set his teeth and shook fear from his throat again.

Then he started aimlessly into the woods, crowding past bushes, scraping trees, treading on moss and twig and mouldy stump, his bruised hands swinging, always swinging.

The sun set in the mist as he came out of the woods on to another beach—a warm, soft beach, crimsoned by the glow in the evening clouds.

And on the sand at his feet lay a young girl asleep, swathed in the silken garment of her own black hair, round limbed, brown, smooth as the bloom on the tawny beach.

A gull napped overhead, screaming. Her eyes, deeper than night, unclosed. Then her lips parted in a cry, soft with sleep, "Ihó!"

She rose, rubbing her velvet eyes. "Ihó!" she cried in wonder; "Inâh!"

The gilded sand settled around her little feet. Her cheeks crimsoned.

"E-hó! E-hó!" she whispered, and hid her face in her hair.

IV.

The bridge of the stars spans the sky seas; the sun and the moon are the travellers who pass over it. This was also known in the lodges of the Isantee, hundreds of years ago. Chaské told it to Hârpam, and when Hârpam knew he told it to Hapéda; and so the knowledge spread to Hârka, and from Winona to Wehârka, up and down, across and ever across, woof and web, until it came to the Island of Grief. And how? God knows!

"Wehârka, prattling in the tules, may have told Ne-kâ; and Ne-kâ, high in the Novemberclouds, may have told Kay-óshk, who told it to Shinge-bis, who told it to Skeé-skah, who told it to Sé-só-Kah.

Ihó! Inâh! Behold the wonder of it! And this is the fate of all knowledge that comes to the Island of Grief.

*~*~*

As the red glow died in the sky, and the sand swam in shadows, the girl parted the silken curtains of her hair and looked at him.

"Ehó!" she whispered again in soft delight.

For now it was plain to her that he was the sun! He had crossed the bridge of stars in the blue twilight; he had come!

"E-tó!"

She stepped nearer, shivering, faint with the ecstasy of this holy miracle wrought before her.

He was the Sun! His blood streaked the sky at dawn; his blood stained the clouds at even. In his eyes the blue of the sky still lingered, smothering two blue stars; and his body was as white as the breast of the Moon.

She opened both arms, hands timidly stretched, palm upward. Her face was raised to his, her eyes slowly closed; the deep-fringed lids trembled.

Like a young priestess she stood, motionless save for the sudden quiver of a limb, a quick pulse-flutter in the rounded throat. And so she worshipped, naked and unashamed, evenafter he, reeling, fell heavily forward on his face; even when the evening breeze stealing over the sands stirred the hair on his head, as winds stir the fur of a dead animal in the dust.

*~*~*

When the morning sun peered over the wall of mist, and she saw it was the sun, and she saw him, flung on the sand at her feet, then she knew that he was a man, only a man, pallid as death and smeared with blood.

And yet—miracle of miracles!—the divine wonder in her eyes deepened, and her body seemed to swoon, and fall a-trembling, and swoon again.

For, although it was but a man who lay at her feet, it had been easier for her to look upon a god.

He dreamed that he breathed fire—fire, that he craved as he had never craved water. Mad with delirium, he knelt before the flames, rubbing his torn hands, washing them in the crimson-scented flames. He had water, too, cool scented water, that sprayed his burning flesh, that washed in his eyes, his hair, his throat. After that came hunger, a fierce rending agony, that scorched and clutched and tore at his entrails; but that, too, died away, and he dreamed that he had eaten and all his flesh was warm. Then he dreamed that he slept; and when he slept he dreamed no more.

One day he awoke and found her stretched beside him, soft palms tightly closed, smiling, asleep.

V.

Now the days began to run more swiftly than the tide along the tawny beach; and the nights, star-dusted and blue, came and vanished and returned, only to exhale at dawn like perfume from a violet.

They counted hours as they counted the golden bubbles, winking with a million eyes along the foam-flecked shore; and the hours ended, and began, and glimmered, iridescent, and ended as bubbles end in a tiny rainbow haze.

There was still fire in the world; it flashed up at her touch and where she chose. A bow strung with the silk of her own hair, an arrow winged like a sea bird and tipped with shell, a line from the silver tendon of a deer, a hook of polished bone—these were the mysteries he learned, and learned them laughing, her silken head bent close to his.

The first night that the bow was wrought and the glossy string attuned, she stole into the moonlit forest to the brook; and there they stood, whispering, listening, and whispering, though neither understood the voice they loved.

In the deeper woods, Kaug, the porcupine, scraped and snuffed. They heard Wabóse, therabbit, pit-a-pat, pit-a-pat, loping across dead leaves in the moonlight. Skeé-skah, the wood-duck, sailed past, noiseless, gorgeous as a floating blossom.

Out on the ocean's placid silver, Shinge-bis, the diver, shook the scented silence with his idle laughter, till Kay-óshk, the gray gull, stirred in his slumber. There came a sudden ripple in the stream, a mellow splash, a soft sound on the sand.

"Ihó! Behold!"

"I see nothing."

The beloved voice was only a wordless melody to her.

"Ihó! Ta-hinca, the red deer! E-hó! The buck will follow!"

"Ta-hinca," he repeated, notching the arrow.

"E-tó! Ta-mdóka!"

So he drew the arrow to the head, and the gray gull feathers brushed his ear, and the darkness hummed with the harmony of the singing string.

Thus died Ta-mdóka, the buck deer of seven prongs.

VI.

As an apple tossed spinning into the air, so spun the world above the hand that tossed it into space.

And one day in early spring, Sé-só-Kah, therobin, awoke at dawn, and saw a girl at the foot of the blossoming tree holding a babe cradled in the silken sheets of her hair.

At its feeble cry, Kaug, the porcupine, raised his quilled head. Wabóse, the rabbit, sat still with palpitating sides. Kay-óshk, the gray gull, tiptoed along the beach.

Kent knelt with one bronzed arm around them both.

"Ihó! Inâh!" whispered the girl, and held the babe up in the rosy flames of dawn.

But Kent trembled as he looked, and his eyes filled. On the pale green moss their shadows lay—three shadows. But the shadow of the babe was white as froth.

Because it was the firstborn son, they named it Chaské; and the girl sang as she cradled it there in the silken vestments of her hair; all day long in the sunshine she sang:

 Wâ-wa, wâ-wa, wâ-we—yeá;
Kah-wéen, nee-zhéka Ke-diaus-âi,
Ke-gâh nau-wâi, ne-mé-go S'weén,
Ne-bâun, ne-bâun, ne-dâun-is âis.
E-we wâ-wa, wâ-we—yeá;
E-we wâ-wa, wâ-we—yeá.

Out in the calm ocean, Shinge-bis, the diver, listened, preening his satin breast in silence. In the forest, Ta-hinca, the red deer, turned her delicate head to the wind.

That night Kent thought of the dead, forthe first time since he had come to the Key of Grief.

"Aké-u! aké-u!" chirped Sé-só-Kah, the robin. But the dead never come again.

"Beloved, sit close to us," whispered the girl, watching his troubled eyes. "Ma-cânte maséca."

But he looked at the babe and its white shadow on the moss, and he only sighed: "Ma-cânte maséca, beloved! Death sits watching us across the sea."

Now for the first time he knew more than the fear of fear; he knew fear. And with fear came grief.

He never before knew that grief lay hidden there in the forest. Now he knew it. Still, that happiness, eternally reborn when two small hands reached up around his neck, when feeble fingers clutched his hand—that happiness that Sé-só-Kah understood, chirping to his brooding mate—that Ta-mdóka knew, licking his dappled fawns—that happiness gave him heart to meet grief calmly, in dreams or in the forest depths, and it helped him to look into the hollow eyes of fear.

He often thought of the camp now; of Bates, his blanket mate; of Dyce, whose wrist he had broken with a blow; of Tully, whose brother he had shot. He even seemed to hear the shot, the sudden report among the hemlocks; again he saw the haze of smoke, hecaught a glimpse of a tall form falling through the bushes.

He remembered every minute incident of the trial: Bates's hand laid on his shoulder; Tully, red-bearded and wild-eyed, demanding his death; while Dyce spat and spat and smoked and kicked at the blackened log-ends projecting from the fire. He remembered, too, the verdict, and Tully's terrible laugh; and the new jute rope that they stripped off the market-sealed gum packs.

He thought of these things, sometimes wading out on the shoals, shell-tipped fish spear poised: at such times he would miss his fish. He thought of it sometimes when he knelt by the forest stream listening for Ta-hinca's splash among the cresses: at such moments the feathered shaft whistled far from the mark, and Ta-mdóka stamped and snorted till even the white fisher, stretched on a rotting log, flattened his whiskers and stole away into the forest's blackest depths.

When the child was a year old, hour for hour notched at sunset and sunrise, it prattled with the birds, and called to Ne-Kâ, the wild goose, who called again to the child from the sky: "Northward! northward, beloved!"

When winter came—there is no frost on the Island of Grief—Ne-Kâ, the wild goose, passing high in the clouds, called: "Southward! south ward, beloved!" And the child answered ina soft whisper of an unknown tongue, till the mother shivered, and covered it with her silken hair.

"O beloved!" said the girl, "Chaské calls to all things living—to Kaug, the porcupine, to Wabóse, to Kay-óshk, the gray gull he calls, and they understand."

Kent bent and looked into her eyes.

"Hush, beloved; it is notthatI fear."

"Then what, beloved?"

"His shadow. It is white as surf foam. And at night—I—I have seen——"

"Oh, what?"

"The air about him aglow like a pale rose."

"Ma cânté maséca. The earth alone lasts. I speak as one dying—I know, beloved!"

Her voice died away like a summer wind.

"Beloved!" he cried.

But there before him she was changing; the air grew misty, and her hair wavered like shreds of fog, and her slender form swayed, and faded, and swerved, like the mist above a pond.

In her arms the babe was a figure of mist, rosy, vague as a breath on a mirror.

"The earth alone lasts. Inâh! It is the end, O beloved!"

The words came from the mist—a mist as formless as the ether—a mist that drove in and crowded him, that came from the sea, from the clouds, from the earth at his feet. Faint with terror, he staggered forward calling, "Beloved! And thou, Chaské, O beloved! Aké u! Aké u!"

Far out at sea a rosy star glimmered an instant in the mist and went out.

A sea bird screamed, soaring over the waste of fog-smothered waters. Again he saw the rosy star; it came nearer; its reflection glimmered in the water.

"Chaské! he cried.

He heard a voice, dull in the choking mist.

"O beloved, I am here!" he called again.

There was a sound on the shoal, a flicker in the fog, the flare of a torch, a face white, livid, terrible—the face of the dead.

He fell upon his knees; he closed his eyes and opened them. Tully stood beside him with a coil of rope.

*~*~*

Ihó! Behold the end! The earth alone lasts. The sand, the opal wave on the golden beach, the sea of sapphire, the dusted starlight, the wind, and love, shall die. Death also shall die, and lie on the shores of the skies like the bleached skull there on the Key to Grief, polished, empty, with its teeth embedded in the sand.

End.

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