Copyright © 2021 by CHM LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Illustrations:

Cover: Pietro Rotelli / www.pietrorotelli.com

The Obsession of Edmund Cawley: Maxwell Marais

I Have Seen the Yellow King: Alvaro “AlvarInk” Maldonado

Sublime Architecture for the Proper Devotional Praise of Dagon: Maxwell Marais

Free Beer: Desmond Rhae Harris

The Secret of Kralitz: Luke Spooner / Carrion House

Cosmic Horror Monthly

www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

The month of September has an illustrious history for Cosmic and otherwise Weird Horror. H.G. Wells published The Cone in 1895. Lovecraft published The Colour out of Space in 1927. Clark Ashton Smith published The Death of Ilalotha in 1937. Now, in 2021, we have collected a handful of new tales sure to provide the flood of euphoric terror that you are craving. Light a few candles and pray to the Old Gods for rain.

This month, two established abominations are hideously reimagined by new voices in I have Seen the Yellow King and Sublime Architecture for the Proper Devotional Praise of Dagon. We explore true madness in Release and Sweet Illusions, and learn the value of friendship in a truly terrifying debut tale called Free Beer. Then, a deep dive into the very bowels of the crypt for a dark tale with which I doubt you have been acquainted.

Enjoy.

Table of Contents

Release 4

I Have Seen the Yellow King 10

The City Walls 26

The Obsession of Edmund Cawley 28

Free Beer 35

Sweet Illusions 52

Sublime Architecture for the Proper Devotional Praise of Dagon 61

The Secret of Kralitz 68

Release

By Richard Zwicker

I awoke, hovering over the bridge of the Foroth starship. Though the bare floor, the controls, and the turned-off viewer screen were plain, I found them mesmerizing. Objects, shades of color, symmetry—I could see them again, something I couldn’t do during my years of enslavement as an energy cog. Encased in their tubes, I had known only darkness and a fuzzy lightheadedness as my life force powered the Foroth engines. The day I was taken from Earth prison and marched to the engine room, the Foroths said, “Your physical needs will be met. You will never have to make another decision. Once in place, let go of your mind. You won’t need it.” I didn’t need my muscles either, which atrophied from disuse. Madness, the only salve, came quickly. But I showed the Foroths. Despite their ingenuity in prolonging human life, I died!

My spirit freed, I could once again form words, sentences, and thoughts. I could consider actions, though in spirit form, I wasn’t sure of my capabilities. I watched a three-meter tall stick figure shamble to the ship’s main computer, then bend over and input information. Foroths have only four fingers, but they are elongated like a mosquito’s proboscis, making any digital manipulation look sinister. After finishing, he straightened and shambled away.

“Why did you come all the way to Earth to take human criminals?” I asked, a question long on my mind.

It stopped and turned its head 180 degrees to face me.

“To assuage our collective guilt,” it said, in perfectly modulated English.

“What did you do?”

“Selfish things.”

“Then we are brothers.” My words came in a torrent. “I was in real estate. I cut corners on a hotel and it collapsed, crushing 215 people. It was my bad luck that the prison in which I was to serve a life sentence was built to code. I wasn’t happy, but I accepted it as justice. Then you guys came and offered to take Earth’s worst criminals and force them into energy tubes. Where’s the justice in that? Does that take care of your guilt?”

“It helps.”

It didn’t help me.

And I didn’t really feel as if we were brothers. It was a short time I was aware that I was doing wrong. Mostly I was ignorant of lawbreaking, and I know that’s not a legal excuse, but it’s a mitigating factor, surely.

I was hundreds of light years from the Earth president who made this arrangement and the prison guards who turned their backs, but I could force a measure of justice over the Foroths. Why else was my restless spirit here? “I will haunt you until your heart explodes!” I screamed, though I was not certain Foroths had hearts. It turned and walked away. The only thing more unflappable than a Foroth was a titanium wall.

As I brooded, I felt another presence. Could it be?

“Heide?”

“I’m here, Joel.” Her reedy voice had no visible source, and I thought: I’ve forgotten what you look like! I hadn’t seen my wife since our convictions. Then slowly, her waist-length hair, slender body, and piercing eyes materialized.

“Can you see me?” I asked.

“Yes.” She sounded detached and resigned.

“After all these years, we’re free.”

“I never envisioned this as the afterlife.”

I had never envisioned any afterlife. Sure was strange to have died at the same time. Maybe the ship had had some kind of accident, causing our deaths. The important thing was we were out of the tubes and together.

“They will pay,” I said.

She was on a different wavelength.

“Maybe this is Hell.”

“No!” If I had one talent, it was rationalizing my actions. “No matter what we did, we didn’t deserve to die inside the engines of a Foroth starship.”

“Neither did those people in our hotel.”

I felt the thread of my thought slipping. It had been so long since I’d had one. What was so complicated about avenging a wrong?

“We will size up the situation and take whatever advantage it offers,” I said.

She looked around. “I’m not seeing any advantages.”

“We’re ghosts! This ship is like a haunted house, except instead of spending a night, the Foroths are stuck here for months, maybe years. We have them at our mercy.”

“To do what? There is only our crime and our acceptance.” Her body hung like a lonely cloud.

I reached for her, but my hand passed through. “The past is gone. The future is still there if somehow, we can achieve closure. Now, for the first time in years, we can do something about the present. Help me.”

“I am here,” she repeated.

We sank to the bridge. I hadn’t noticed before, but it was dark, the only light coming from the control panel. No one else had been there since the Foroths left. We floated to the no-frills living area, which was darker than the bridge, but somehow we could see. Another advantage of being spirits. I’d heard that Foroths slept supine on the floor of their closet-like quarters, their long, thin bodies contracting down to only a meter. The door of each room was closed, but we could pass through. Not one room was occupied.

“Where is everyone?” I asked. No one answered. As we drifted through one of the endless corridors, we found a Foroth standing against the wall like a sentinel. It could have been the one I’d seen before, but they all looked the same. I blurted out a blood-curdling moan, which it ignored. I felt ridiculous.

“Let’s just open one of the hatches and be done with them,” I said. But we lacked the solidity to unlock a hatch. I could think of only one other thing a spirit could do.

“I will possess this Foroth.” The thought repulsed me, but it would be fitting if I overwhelmed his mind as they had done to me.

“Don’t people have to allow spirits to possess them?” asked Heide.

“In that case, we’ll see if I’ve lost my persuasive touch.”

I braced myself and entered without resistance.

“It’s a robot!” I said. I could no more manipulate its limbs than I could open an airlock. What if they were all robots? What if we were ghosts haunting a ship with no living beings, except for the poor souls serving as cogs? We didn’t even have a guarantee this ship would ever reach a destination with sentient life.

Hungry for information, we returned to the bridge.

“Computer,” I said, hoping it responded to voices. “How much time in Earth days has passed since humans were taken from Earth and put on this craft?”

“Twelve years, three months, and seven days.” The answer was without inflection, identical in tone to what the Foroth had said.

“How many Foroths are on this ship?”

“None. Once nominally manned, this vessel is now run solely by AI.”

“What is the ship’s current destination?”

“Exploration of the Andromeda galaxy. Estimated arrival date: two and a half million years.”

So dying had been no release, just another door to an endless, empty corridor. Maybe this was Hell. After all, had I ever done anything not determined by self-interest? Had anyone? But people change. That’s what makes us people instead of cold, hard facts. But the Foroths had stolen my chance. Prisons are supposed to rehabilitate, not just… imprison.

If we were dead, why weren’t our spirits at rest? There had to be a reason. Perhaps there was a path to redemption.

“How many living humans are aboard this ship?” I asked the computer.

“Forty.”

I turned to Heide. “That will be our unselfish act. We will free the other humans.”

“What good will that do?” she asked.

“It will give them the option of ending this.”

“What can we do without substance?”

“I’ll figure something out. I always do.” The one thing we had was time. All Heide had were doubts.

“You go and tell me what you see,” she said.

“We both have to go there. The thought of that place roils my senses too, but it can’t hurt us now.”

She was adamant.

“I’ll go check it out.” After all, I knew everything about the inside of the engines, and nothing about the outside. I also thought it was odd that my spirit had materialized on the bridge, rather than inside or just above the engines.

“Heide, where did you first materialize?”

She shrugged, like a caterpillar. “You were the first thing I saw.”

It didn’t make sense, but this being my first day as a ghost, how could it?

“Stay here. I will come back for you.” I immediately remembered every promise I had broken, but I meant this one.

Armed with purpose, I felt pulled as I drifted back to the engines. Their energy generated a dull light, where I could just make out the rows of tubes. They emitted a soft roar that sounded like a perpetual ahhhhhh! It was almost soothing, but it never became like the hum of a new refrigerator that one got used to and stopped hearing. These engines you’d always hear. They’re your heartbeat. I started feeling nausea and the weight of existence. How could I, when I didn’t even exist?

As I got closer, I saw each tube contained a human. Their skins were pale and pocked, their eyes unseeing, their bodies alive. I couldn’t open the tubes from outside, nor could they be opened from the inside, so there was no use trying to possess their bodies.

I wanted to return to Heide, but then I remembered her words: “You go and tell me what you see.” Why would she say that when she knew what they looked like as well as I did? It was because her sentence had been twenty years on Earth, not life. The Foroths had not taken her. How could I have forgotten that? But I already had the answer: when the brain can’t accept reality, it creates a tolerable fiction. I hovered over a body that looked a little like mine, the way a corpse at a funeral never quite looked like the deceased. The Foroths said I would never make another decision. I would prove them wrong. They could stretch my life for millions of years, but I would never return to that energy tube. I watched my sunken chest rise and fall like idiot waves, back and forth. Then, for the first time since I’d found myself hovering over the bridge, I felt the substance of my body, the weight of my crime, and the yawning abyss of centuries to come.

End.

*~*~*

Richard Zwicker is an English teacher living in Vermont, USA, with his wife and beagle. His short stories have appeared in “Hybrid Fiction,” “Heroic Fantasy Quarterly,” “Mystery Weekly,” and other semi-pro markets. Two collections of his published short stories, “Walden Planet” and “The Reopened Cask,” are available on Amazon.

I Have Seen the Yellow King

By Guy Riessen

“It’s brilliant, don’t you think?”

“Yes, the way he’s captured the evening light, gracing the leaves and grass blades with the most delicate strokes. The rich color-palette on the left evokes a happy end to the day. But there’s also a definite finality marked by the intense black and cobalt-blue he’s used on the opposite side of the canvas, as if the final curtain is being drawn slowly across the stage of life.”

“And the way the woman’s dress practically glows in the last rays of the setting sun as they glitter through the leaves. Diaphanous… is that the word?”

“Indeed. Like translucent gold.”

The man and the woman stand together, shoulders nearly touching, their heads tip slightly toward each other, like lovers on a park bench.

He wears a dark suit, almost black, with thin gray stripes, his red hair slicked and combed with Brilliantine. His brogued wingtip shoes peek out from his neatly cuffed and sharply creased pants legs.

She is a little taller than he is; her straw-yellow hair bobbed just below her ears. It’s cut higher in the back, and curves down to her jawline. Her green, sleeveless dress drapes freely across the curve of her hips and down to her knees. A gold-brocade belt is cinched at her thin waist, a fox fur slung across her shoulders, carefully appearing heedless.

The woman places her hand on his shoulder, her voice drops so low that Horace must step closer to overhear. “But the faces….”

“Disturbing. But it’s a Morrow, and I think that’s the point. The fact that people in Morrow’s paintings never have faces is intentionally dissociative, to make the viewer question their own place in a fleeting world, perhaps. The day is at its end, but what of night? It leaves me with a sense of uncertainty, of disorientation.”

Another man steps into the white-walled gallery room; the overhead spotlight grazes the top of his short curly black hair as he moves close to the large canvas. He speaks in a quiet voice, “Maybe it’s an effort to draw the observer into the art itself. By leaving the faces blank, the viewer is invited to insert their own face, or the faces of people they know, into the painting? Perhaps the personal implications are intended to be as ephemeral and malleable as the people you see each day on the trolly.”

“Do you know the artist?” The woman asks this new man who wears dark tan slacks and a darker vest. The sleeves of his dress shirt are uncuffed and rolled up to his elbows, a crisp bowtie at his neck.

He partially blocks their view, but steps aside, still peering intently at the painting as he answers, “Not exactly, no. I’m the curator, but no, I don’t actually know the artist. They only make contact through the post, and everything else is handled through an account manager at New York Trust. The paintings arrived crated from a shipping company with only instructions on how to re-crate the unsold canvases, a contact at the shippers, and an account number for sales deposits.”

“How odd,” the woman says, a finger just to the side of her lips.

“And mysterious,” the man says, gently stroking the woman’s hand that rests on his shoulder.

“Mysterious, not unlike the people in the painting, yes?” The curator says, his head turning toward the couple.

Horace Morrow steps back, moves into the unlit corner of the room away from the faceless abomination turning in his direction. The curator’s face is fleshy planes and angles, curves and bulges—twisted ropy tissue, pulpy topographic features that churn to a featureless blank. Where eyes should be, there are only shallow pink pits sketched with broken capillaries as Horace’s eyes flick around from hairline to chin. The curator’s nose flattens into a mottled expanse of veins that pulse and hover just below skin made translucent by the bright gallery spotlights. What might be thin but smiling lips appear only as a ragged slash across the curator’s face. Horace turns his horrified gaze away.

*~*~*

—What a tragedy. He lived in your building, didn’t he?

—He’d lived there for years. Rented the entire top floor.

—Really? And no one knew who he was?

—Oh, I knew his name, Horace, or sometimes he went by Mr. M. … but that was all I knew about him. Never had any idea we had a painter in the building at all, let alone someone so famous.

—He’s the one that never painted faces, right?

—Yes. That seems very odd, don’t you think? Not that I’m one to criticize artwork or anything. No one in the building really knew him, and I for one never saw anyone go upstairs except him. No visitors, no family. He was courteous enough when we crossed paths on the stairs or on the street, but he always seemed to be in a hurry to excuse himself. And he never made eye-contact.

—I’ve heard artists are sometimes like that… living in their own world.

—I wonder… what will happen to all his art?

—I don’t know.

*~*~*

“Play tonight, sir! Have you seen The Yellow Sign? Talk of the city. You’ll wanta see it before all your friends do, eh?” The young boy’s voice is high and reedy, and he pushes a printed flyer into his hand. “There yeh go, sir!”

Horace Morrow looks down at the boy’s leather britches, an older brother’s pair, held up by black suspenders, and clamped at a waistband that is a few inches too big around. The folds of the leather are a deep raw sienna but creased and cracked with lines of lighter transparent earth, mixed with cobalt and spinel-black at the bottom of the boy’s legs where water had splashed the leather.

He doesn’t look at the boy’s face; he’s afraid of what he wouldn’t see. He rarely looks at faces at all anymore, so he nods and mumbles, “Thank you.”

“Play tonight! Two weeks only! Play tonight!” the boy shouts as he moves off down the sidewalk.

Horace turns away, as one of his neighbors pushes their way out of the common entrance, pretending to study the flyer while really he only stares at the mica-speckled concrete walkway—a titanium-white that could be speckled with a flick of a broad brush dipped in thinned chromatic black. To that could be added broad strokes of ochre and mars yellow mixed with ivory black.

He studies the intermingled color of the sidewalk, imagining the feel of the canvas-bite against paint-clotted bristles. The neighbor hails a cab at the curb. From the voice he recognizes Mrs. Heathwite from the second floor, and Horace looks up as the cab pulls away. He folds the flyer neatly in half and slips it into the pocket of his russet-beige overcoat.

He walks into the lobby and up the five flights of stairs to the door of his flat. There is just one door on the landing; his is the only apartment on the top floor, the last before the building, and man, gives right-of-way to sky.

*~*~*

—Propopagnosia.

—What’s that?

—It’s someone who can’t remember faces.

—Like when you forget the name of that gentleman you saw at the party last week?

—Maybe more like if you saw that gentleman the next day on the trolly, except you wouldn’t even know it was the same person you saw last week.

—Huh. How do you know he suffered from prop… propag….

—Propopagnosia. The term is old, from the Romans or Greeks or something. It’s not anything new, but they really started seeing it in shell-shocked soldiers after the war… anyway, I heard there were old medical files from his time as an art student at Miskatonic University in his effects in the flat.

*~*~*

He can clearly remember the moment when he stopped seeing faces. He was twenty-three and lived just a block away from the Miskatonic University campus, in a tiny one-room apartment that was more than half occupied by his easels, rolls of canvas, paints, brushes and color-spattered rags. His mother had died in childbirth, but his father had died the year before Horace had moved to Arkham, Massachusetts; he’d left Horace a small amount of money. Money that Horace attempted to stretch as far as possible so he could devote all of his time to painting.

He is sure he could see faces up until that point, but when he thinks back to that time, all those faces, all those noses and eyes, cheeks and mouths smooth themselves out into featureless veined expanses of twitching, writhing flesh. He can no longer even conjure the memory of them in his mind’s eye.

Horace shudders and turns his thoughts away from the faces he can’t remember, fingering the sharp corner of the folded flyer in his coat pocket.

The moment his propopagnosia originally manifested, oddly, marked the moment of his success—when instead of becoming a fatal flaw, his inability to paint faces became an intriguing mystery in the art world. The unintentional became the inexplicably purposeful, as critic and art-lover alike were drawn to the enigma of a faceless subject.

The teaching hospital, a part of the Miskatonic School of Medicine, which operated out of a wing of Saint Mary’s, had posted a flyer on the bulletin board at the art supply store where Horace purchased his paints and canvas. The flyer announced the medical school’s offer to host a limited number of artists at the surgeons’ anatomical sessions. They would accept a maximum of one painter and one sculptor. All that had been required was to drop a brief application into the box on the counter.

He’d been surprised and delighted when he received word from the shop owner that he’d been the painter accepted to the program, which was to run each night for one week. Horace had diligently arrived early to each class before the dissections continued, the aspiring surgeons working with single-minded focus on their cadavers.

Horace had sketched, the movement of his charcoal quick and loose across the paper, as the medical students worked their way up from the feet, peeling back the skin and fatty tissue and revealing the muscle beneath. It was one thing to study drawings in George B. Bridgman’s anatomy book, but it was quite another to see the shroud of flesh pulled back to reveal the hidden mechanics that drove human motion.

Late each night he would pour over the sketches from the dissection class. He’d paint without break, through the morning and into the late afternoon, turning the charcoal studies into full-color oil paintings before he’d collapse into his bed and catch a couple hours of sleep. Then he’d leap from his mattress, splash his face with water, and head back to the basement morgue awash in the thick and cloying odor of formaldehyde.

The final evening’s class had concerned exposing the cadavers’ facial structures, the jaw, nose and throat. Horace sat as usual, eagerly leaning forward on his lab stool, sketchbook propped on his thighs and held at an angle with one hand, while he quickly roughed the charcoal drawings with his other.

The students had just exposed the larynx and vocal cords, moved up to the jawline, and drew out the carotid artery with probe and forceps. Finally, one of the young interns had drawn their scalpel along the cadaver’s hairline and began to peel the face back from the muscles and bone beneath. The student had slipped his gloved hands under the bloody flesh and layer of fat; he’d lifted and tugged, as if removing a latex mask.

Horace had felt a moment of lightheadedness, of disorientation, his vision distorted like a mirror at the county fair funhouse, and the next thing he remembered was choking awake to the throat-tightening and burning vapors of smelling salts under his nose.

He had closed his eyes tight again, waving one hand so they knew he was awake and would pull the vial of ammonia away from his face. He’d heard the muffled sound of barely concealed laughter.

Someone in the back had said, “Figures it would be the painter.”

“Can you hold up two fingers, Mr. Morrow?” The voice came from his right, and after a moment he’d recognized the voice as the professor’s.

Horace stopped waving his hand and tucked in his fingers and thumb, leaving two up in a V.

He heard the professor chuckle and say, “Very good, young man. But if you ever have an art show in Britain, you’ll want to turn your palm the other direction if you want to avoid a pub brawl.”

More laughter.

Horace had opened his eyes again, his vision blurry and watery from the ammonia. He had squinted at the professor who leaned over him.

Except instead of seeing his professor’s grinning face, he had found himself staring into a knotted expanse of pink flesh that crawled and squirmed where a face should be.

He had blinked several times, fast, to clear the tears from his eyes, but the vision didn’t change. He had glanced from professor to student and from student to student, feeling gorge rise in his throat. Their white medical smocks had been starkly visible. Scalpels and probes were gripped in five-fingered hands and clearly glittered in the brightness from the lights hung above each cadaver.

But no one had a face.

*~*~*

—Propopagnosia, huh? You know, that’s interesting because I heard he never painted people’s faces in his artwork. The faces never had any features at all. Just flesh-colored blank ovals balanced on necks.

—I’d been to one of his shows, actually, a month ago or so. Although before he died, no one even knew if the artist was a man or a woman, but everyone attributed all sorts of scholarly and philosophical reasons why the faces were left blank, and it turns out he just couldn’t really see faces.

—Did he ever speak at the gallery openings? That’s a silly question… you just said no one knew if the artist was a man or a woman. I guess I was wondering if he ever spoke from behind a curtain or to the press or something.

—I don’t think so, no. But an article said that sometimes the galleries would discover written artist-statements packed in the crates of artwork, but they simply said things like, “I want my work to stand on its own, without the preconceived notions created by thinking you may know the artist behind the pieces.”

*~*~*

Horace has been standing in line for nearly thirty minutes, staring at the flyer in his hand; the edges of the paper wrinkle in his damp palms. People swarm like faceless flies, buzz about the sidewalk as they pass the red velvet rope strung between the brass posts. All the activity is too hard to ignore and his eyes keep flicking upward to stare into the veined and crusted skin that stretches across pitted sockets where eyes should be. Things move beneath the raw membrane, things that Morrow cannot see directly, but which churn and contort, distend and bulge, threatening to split the gauzy tissue and birth the abominations beneath.

The couple in front of him leave the box office window and he steps up to take his turn.

“How many, sir? We’ve only got a few in Section C with three or four together. Otherwise, I’m sorry, but you may have to split your group,” a young woman’s voice says from within the small oak-paneled room. A gray metal register stands on the dark wood counter; one delicate hand hovers over the ivory white keys. Her other hand rests near a small metal box filled with crimson tickets printed with black ink.

“Oh, thank you,” Horace stammers, “but it’s just for me. One is fine”

It sounds like she’s snapping gum, and Horace can smell the distinct odor of Adams Black Jack, but he keeps his eyes low so he won’t have to see her jaw work up and down, up and down, without teeth or lips, featureless skin pulling and stretching from nose to jaw, veins throbbing just beneath the surface as they coil, stretch and bunch.

“’Kay.” Snap. Snap. Horace imagines the young lady’s mouthless jaw working beneath the translucent flesh, strained taut then bloated in billowy waddles, the sound of popping bubbles folding into the bulbous, pulpy tissue.

“I said, what section, sir?” Horace struggles to pay attention as a white sheet of paper with a drawing of the theater seating slides across the counter and into his view. Many circles on the page, indicating the various seats, have been colored in with a cerulean blue ink.

Snap. Snap. He points absently to one of the uncolored circles and fishes his billfold from his pocket.

The lady passes his change back, says, “See you tonight, dear. Hope you enjoy the show.”

Snap. Snap.

*~*~*

—If he lived in your building all this time, how could you not know him?

—Oh, I knew him, but he was very private. Polite though, and when he was introduced, he always asked to simply be called “Horace.”

—I see.

—Even if he’d told me his name was Horace Morrow though, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Would you?

—No, I supposed not unless something like this tragedy happened, anyway. The art world is a pretty rarefied atmosphere, isn’t it?

--One never guesses one is living in the same building as the famous unless they go about declaring it. And then you’re like as not to think that’s gauche.

*~*~*

Carefully timing his arrival to avoid seeing people, the cab drops him at the front of the theater just as the house lights flicker the final call before the show. Eyes down, he watches the bright circle of light where the usher’s flashlight illuminates the carpet as he is shown to his seat.

He breathes a sigh of relief into the faceless dark as he seats himself and the curtain raises on the first scene. Shifting uneasily, he wonders why he’s done this to himself. Why would he come to a play where he must stare down to a stage where fleshy blobs will dance like rotted, gelatinous chestnuts atop the cavorting bodies of strangers?

Averting his eyes, he listens to the dialogue. It takes a few minutes before he realizes nearly all the actors wear heavy black cloaks with hoods drawn low to hide their faces. All except the jester in tatterdemalion ribbons and cloth, who dances and cavorts, back to the audience and in front of a raised dais on which sits an actor swathed in thick layers of yellow robes.

Ah, clearly that robed figure must be the King in Yellow, Horace thinks. The dialogue rolls and clatters about the theater, at once both nonsensical and yet mesmerizing. In the audience around him he can hear people gasp, cry, and titter in delight to what seem to be the same lines. He tries to focus on the words spoken on stage, but they don’t make sense. The shouts and fractured lines of the robed actors are confusing, yet they also draw his attention ever closer to the King that sits upon the throne.

Horace shakes his head, scrubs at his cheek and frowns in concentration. As the words rattle through his mind like bones and teeth in a mojo bag, he tries to force himself to look away… away from the yellow-robed figure now rising from the throne, now walking to the edge of the dais with his arms outstretched. The King chants a strange language, harsh and dissonant to Horace’s ears.

A stage light suddenly snaps on, and the King is bathed in a dazzling light that limns his hood and shoulders in a brilliance that’s hard to focus on, and yet there, awash in the radiant glow, the King turns toward him as if he were alone in the audience.

Horace cannot look away. He’s held by the resplendent light and the discordant and disorienting chants now taken up by the black-robed figures arrayed in a crescent before the King while the Jester, crouched at his side, clutches at the fabric of the yellow robe.

Horace cannot avert his eyes. The entire theater feels balanced on a thinly stretched sheet of rubber that dips and flexes.

The King in Yellow pushes his hood back, revealing a stark white mask which seems to smile upon him alone.

No, Horace thinks, not a mask.

And he gasps as, for the first time in more than a decade…

Horace sees a human face.

*~*~*

—He had a new opening, just a week and a half ago, at that new gallery.

—The one on West Derby?

—That’s the one. Same opening night as that new play at the theater downtown, The King in Yellow. I remember quite specifically because they were both on the same society page in the paper. Not many people attended the gallery, what with the new play on such a short visit from New York.

—You think his poor opening might have caused some kind of severe depression? Maybe led to what happened?

—Well, his shows had always been lauded before. Could be hard for anyone used to adoring praise.

*~*~*

“You look different than you did onstage,” Horace says flatly. His stomach clenches as he looks at the actor in the mirror. The man wipes some kind of cloth across the flesh of his face, digging the corners of the fabric into the veined pits where his eyes should be, stretching the skin across the bulbous folds where a nose should sit. Horace looks over at the costume racks where several cadmium-yellow robes drape on heavy metal hangers.

“What?” says the actor as he sits at the brightly lit dressing table. He takes a deep breath and then lets loose with a guttural laugh. “Ah, yes, the mask. Funny, my good man.” He waves absently at the wall where a dozen white masks hang, roughly painted with a titanium white and a coal-black symbol across each broad forehead. The Yellow Sign, Horace remembers the emblem from the flyer and the play. Funny that the yellow sign is painted in black….

“Mask?” Horace mumbles, looking to the wall at his left.

“Devil of a time projecting my emotional voice through it.”

“Oh. Yes, of course. I imagine it is,” Horace says, staring at the masks. He starts to turn toward the actor at the table, then glances sharply back. It looks for a moment like the masks are smiling, frowning, arching their eyebrows in surprise. But he looks more closely; it must have been a trick of the light. All the masks are similar, emotionless, and appear to be solid, not flexible enough to even sag on the hooks.

“What kind of material are they made from?”

The actor doesn’t pause what he’s doing, but answers, “Hmm? Wood of some sort, I guess, very light though. It’s like acting through a pillow strapped to my face, honestly.”

“How do you keep it on? During the performance?”

With a flick of his wrist, the actor screws on the lid of a glass jar filled with some kind of pale, thickly viscous goo.

“They’ve got a fabric tie-thing… what they’re hanging from there, actually.” The actor pauses for a moment then adds, “Plus the robe’s hood is pretty heavy and mostly keeps the mask from flopping forward.”

Horace is silent for long enough that the man, finishing what he’s doing in the mirror, stands and turns towards him. Horace drops his eyes immediately, but he still sees the smooth, featureless flesh in his peripheral vision, above the collar the actor buttons and tugs a tie around.

“Was there something else, my good man? You want an autograph, perhaps?” The man chuckles.

Horace pauses for a moment and then blurts out, “Why yes. There is something I want. I really loved the play, you see. And if I could….” He pauses again, eyes toward the floor.

“Yes?”

Horace clears his throat and says, “I’d like to buy one of those masks.”

“What?” The man laughs again. But his laugh dwindles off as Horace pulls out his billfold and extends a handful of one-hundred-dollar bills.

“Oh. I say.” The actor takes the proffered bills, trying to appear like he’s merely waving them, and not counting them. He runs his fingers across the edges, making a sound like a fingernail across corduroy.

“You, my friend, are obviously a true fan, sir! I’m never one to want to disappoint. I’d even say it’s an actor’s obligation to do what he can for his adoring audience. And would you look at that, I think maybe I’ve dropped one of the masks backstage after the performance and accidentally crushed it underfoot,” the actor says dramatically. He takes the first mask from the wall hanger and hands it to Horace. “I’m sure the production manager won’t miss it. There are, after all, still eleven left.”

“Now then… about that autograph,” the man starts, but Horace turns, flings the door open, runs down the short hall and through the exit.

“Hey, you get your autograph, buddy?” the guard stationed outside the door asks. But Horace is already turning the alley corner and heading onto West Pickman street. He runs for two blocks before he stops, out of breath, and rests with his back against a red brick wall. After a moment, he spies headlights in the distance and raises his hand to flag a cab.

*~*~*

—He wore some kind of a mask, they say.

—Yes, I know. That’s very strange, isn’t it?

—Why do you think someone would wear a mask if they were going to kill themselves?

—For that matter, even if it was foul play, why would you put a mask on the person you were going to kill? That just makes no sense at all.

--You think it was some kind of occult ritual?

--What’s that?

--I don’t know, really. I’ve been reading about the explosion of spiritualism. It’s in the newspapers quite a lot recently. But maybe it’s some kind of pagan thing from down in New Orleans or something? Silly of me to bring it up when I have no idea what I’m talking about. But maybe?

Shared laughter

*~*~*

With his canvas on the easel, Horace sits on the painter’s stool. He has the mask-tie wrapped tightly around his head and tied at the base of his skull. He looks into the mirror clamped to the easel leg. He shudders and rocks back from the mirror, away from the image of squirming ropey knots of muscle sliding beneath featureless mottled flesh that looks back at him from hollowed sunken flat eye-pits, and nearly topples from the stool. He doesn’t understand. Why can’t he see the mask of the King in Yellow?

Horace scowls at the floor; with only a single tie, the mask had slipped forward, balancing awkwardly on his chin, exposing portions of his face and ruining the effect the King in Yellow mask had had on stage.

Horace didn’t have a hooded robe to hold the top of the mask in place. Why hadn’t he thought of that? Did the actor mention that? Probably not. Unlike the masks, there had only been a couple robes on the costume rack, so he wouldn’t have sold one even if Horace had thought to ask. Had he asked though? Horace presses at his temples where the mask had slipped forward. Stupid, stupid, he shouts in his mind.

Balancing his palette on his lap, he scooches to the stool edge, reaches over his head with his left hand to hold the mask in place, and picks up his brush with his right. Carefully, he dabs the bristles into the cadmium yellow and leans forward to look in the mirror.

“Yes!” he says, his voice oddly muffled.

The face, the lips, and the mouth are clearly visible in the mirror and mimic the “Yes” perfectly. His own lips and mouth! He feels giddy, anxious to start.

Horace moves the brush tip in a slow arcing stroke, not quite touching the canvas yet, but tracing the edge of his right cheek and jawline, the cheek muscles bunch subtly with his smile.

His palette slips from his knee, and clatters to the floor. Flecks of paint scatter like stars around the three legs of the easel.

The writhing, wormy, blighted expanse of blank folds of skin shouts from the mirror as Horace shouts back. The brush drops from his fingers as he slips from the edge of the stool, dropping to the floor where he curls into a ball, crying. His tears and paint mix and smear distorted, grotesque rainbows onto his smock as he shudders on the hardwood floor.

*~*~*

—It was the fire department who broke down his door. This Saturday afternoon.

—What a horrid way to spend your weekend, called to find something like that!

—Not just the firemen though. The police were called first and once they had an idea what was going on, they called the fire department. Had to use an axe. Mr. Morrow had several locks and sturdy hinges.

—Well, he did value his privacy, you said.

—Really more of a recluse even beyond his desire for privacy, I think. You know, he wouldn’t even make eye contact with me when we would say hello in the lobby.

—Some men, and artists I bet even more so, are like that. Really shy when they talk to gals.

—It did rather lend an air of mystery to him. Like I said, I had no idea what he did for a living. I wondered if he might not be independently wealthy even!

—And he was handsome too?

--Yes, he was quite handsome, actually. Although his hair was often in quite a tousle. And his clothes were nice, but somewhat rumpled. As if he couldn’t be bothered to look in a mirror before he stepped out. But even that lent its own sense of charm, to be honest.

Shared laughter.

*~*~*

“Can I see one?” Horace asks. Holding out his open palm, his eyes look only at his hand.

“Sure Mack, but you break it, you buy it,” the shopkeeper of The Outdoorsman laughs.

Horace stares at the brass fishhook that glitters in his hand.

“It’s a joke, Mack. How’re you gonna break a fishhook?” the shopkeeper says, slapping Horace on the shoulder. The man laughs some more, then moves back behind the counter.

“Ah. Yes, that’s funny.” He holds the fishhook up to the light and walks closer to the storefront window. He watches the afternoon sunlight glint from the shank, curve along to the point, and finally twinkle from the barb. He pulls a pair of pliers from his coat pocket and grips the bend in the fishhook and pinches it to a sharp angle.

“Oh, whoa there, Mack! You really are gonna have to buy that one. What kind of fancy tricks you want to use while fishing’s yer own business, but you can’t just go around damaging store property like that!” Horace hears the slap of the counter flip-top open.

Horace pushes the crimped angle of the bent hook against his fingertip, testing its sharpness. Then he works the point and barb back out a little wider again with the pliers. Horace says, “How many of these do you have? I need a hundred or so.”

The sound of the shopkeeper’s footsteps slow then stop as Horace holds the hook up into the golden sunlight again. Rather than the smooth curve of a normal fishhook, the bottom is now sharply angled and shaped like a V. It looks like a brass check mark with a barbed point on the short end.

“Uh. Sure Mack. Sure.” The laugh comes again. “I think I’ve gotta hundred of that one, size three-oh, I think.” The shopkeeper takes the bent fishhook, looks at it, and hands it back to Horace. “Yep, that’s a three-oh. I can set you up,” the shopkeeper says as he heads back toward the counter. “Whatcha fishing for anyway? Bass? Haven’t seen that particular hook-trick before. Interesting though, I gotta say. Can’t see as how that’ll work better than a regular hook, but you’re the fisherman, right?”

“Fishing? Oh, right. Yes, bass.”

*~*~*

—Do you know how they found him?

—What do you mean? He was in my building… I heard he was just collapsed on the floor.

—No, I mean what tipped the authorities off?

—Oh that! Nasty business. Mr. Jenkins, he lives a floor above me, and right below the attic flat on the street side. There, can you see Mr. Jenkin’s flat, with the curtains blowing through the open window?

—There?

—Yes, that’s the one. He called the exterminator because of a dreadful smell. He thought it was coming from inside his own apartment, of course. Like some rats or something had died or dragged something into his walls, but even more chokingly strong. That’s how he described it to me, chokingly strong! Can you imagine? Even with this cold weather, he’s still keeping the window open like that to air his place out. It must have been truly horrendous.

*~*~*

Horace peers through the eye-slits. It’s different this morning, he doesn’t sense the constricted vision, the narrow view he saw yesterday. Or was it perhaps the day before?

He shrugs, not knowing where such a silly thought came from. Why would his eyelids constrict his vision? No one ever notices how their eyelids obstruct their sight like fleshy curtains that raise and lower on a play, do they?

Even though they must, by virtue of physics?

No. People look right past them as if they weren’t even there. It’s all in the mind… filtered, strained out. Like the rumble and clank of the streetcars, dizzying cacophony when one first moves from farm to city, blotting out all other sounds, but soon fading so completely from the mind that one can hear the notes from the gramophone drifting through the apartment window across the avenue even during rush hour.

He sits, feeling the warmth of the sunlight from his window. Outside, the morning rush hour is starting, and he hears the car horns and streetcars on the street below.

He stares into the mirror clamped to the left side of his easel and looks at a face he’s not seen for a very long time. His palette balancing on his knees, he perches at the edge of his stool.

No, that’s not true. He has seen his face recently; why it was, in fact, not that long ago at all.

The sable bristles of the brush held loosely between his thumb and forefinger ever-so-slightly dip down, and dimple the shiny chestnut brown bead of paints forgotten on the rainbow-hued paint-spattered wood of his palette.

Yes, he’d seen his face up there on the dais, lit ablaze by the golden stage-lights.

But that doesn’t make sense. He was in the theater audience that night. He’s never been on a stage, he thinks as he gazes into the mirror, watching the curve of his nose, the arch of his brow, as he slowly shakes his head.

Plus, hadn’t he just seen his face a couple days ago… or was it three? Four? When he still had to hold the mask to his face to keep it from slipping?

Mask? That doesn’t make sense either. He had been looking at his face, not a mask… just like now. He leans toward the mirror and watches himself, watches his face.

He smiles.

He frowns.

He sneers, arching a disdainful eyebrow.

The movement stings, pinches, but he doesn’t mind. Not really. It’s a minor annoyance to be put off for now, ignored until more convenient, like the dryness of his throat. He’ll take care of that and his grumbling stomach shortly, once he has a good start on his self-portrait.

He must take advantage of this wonderful noon light filtering into his studio.

He sits. Palette balancing. Brush loosely held. He stares into the mirror.

The candle gutters and goes out with a trailing wisp of smoke that coils upward from the crimson-embered tip. But even without the candlelight, it’s not too dark. The first light of a rose-pink dawn softly kisses the clouds outside, casting a warm glow through the window.

The white blank expanse of the empty canvas next to the mirror bounces a pleasant light onto his face, and Horace peers at his pink full lips. He might have to add just a bit more crimson to his palette, he thinks, looking closely and noting that his lips don’t look cracked or parched at all, regardless of how they may feel as he squeezes his desiccated slug of a tongue through the narrow gap between his teeth to press against splintery wood.

He sits. Peering at the mirror, he watches the reflection of the delicate smeared reds and purples of the evening sky outside cast tints and hues through the window which crawl across his round cherubic cheeks.

The pain is distant as he crinkles a smile, his teeth white in the gloaming. He feels his cracked lips split, tastes coppery blood. But no, he looks into the mirror, his lips are fine. Beautiful, actually.

He sits. Eyes staring.

He sits.

He sits.

*~*~*

—Don’t you think the newspaper reporting has been remarkably sparse considering the sensationalism of such a famous painter’s death.

—It is a bit strange. There was an article in the Daily morning edition yesterday, but it was retracted in that evening’s paper. It initially mentioned that the coroner had to bring in a surgeon from Saint Mary’s to remove the mask that the poor man was wearing. But in the evening edition, after the retraction, it didn’t mention anything about the autopsy at all, only that there would be a closed-casket service on Sunday.

—That’s not the half of it.

—What do you mean? Half of what?

—The mask, of course. My sister is a nurse at Saint Mary’s; she was there when they brought him in.

—Really? They took him to the hospital?

—Oh, he wasn’t alive when they found him; he was quite dead and stinking up even poor Mr. Jenkin’s flat, remember? But they took him straight away to the hospital. The problem was he was wearing a mask and there was a lot of blood.

—Whose blood? The painter’s?

—Yes, they thought it was the painter’s. But they couldn’t take the mask off the, uhm….

—The painter’s dead body?

—Indeed. So, at Saint Mary’s, my sister helped to get him onto a gurney, and into the classroom morgue they have there in the basement. It’s a teaching hospital, you know.

—Oh? I didn’t know that.

—Anyway, my sister, she said there was a lot of caked and dried blood, all coming from under the mask.

—From under the mask?

—Yes, that’s why they needed to get the mask off. They needed a cause of death. And there was all this blood. They needed to discover what had happened. The receiving doctor had to use a fluoroscope because they couldn’t tell how the mask was affixed. What they saw was absolutely awful!

—What did they see?

—On the interior of the mask there were what looked like more than fifty fishhooks with their ends, the part you attached to the fishing line, pounded into the inside of the wooden mask. The hooks were all facing in different directions but all with the barbed part hooked deep into the flesh of his face.

—Oh my!

—The mask had slits for the eyes, but there was no hole for the man’s mouth. No way to eat or drink. My sister said they had to use a scalpel to remove his face from his skull.

—Oh! Did the hooks kill him? Blood loss?

—No, my sister said dehydration. Toxins build up in the blood until the organs literally shut down one by one. Takes five or six days, but what an awful way to die. I think I’d rather drown than die from lack of water.

—Couldn’t he have just shifted the mask to one side or something?

—The mask was designed, with the way the hooks were placed and whatnot, so it couldn’t be removed without removing the poor man’s entire face. They had to slice all the way around the mask and peel his face off, leaving nothing recognizable at all.

—Oh! Like his paintings!

—What, dear?

—His paintings, they don’t have faces.

—You’re right, I hadn’t thought of that! But that’s quite enough, I’ll get the heebie-jeebies and won’t sleep at all tonight.

Shared laughter.

—Let’s move on to something less morose then?

—It’s why I called on you in the first place, dear. You’d never guess, but I won that raffle over at Pascals!

—What? Really? I bought a couple tickets when I went in to pick up some ground beef on Tuesday, but I never win those things.

—Me either! I was so excited!

—So… it was tickets to that Broadway play, right? Playing at the old theater on Pickman avenue?

—Yes! It’s two tickets for the Yellow Sign… have you seen it?

End.

*~*~*

Guy Riessen is a Quebec author transplanted from California in 2018; he lives in Montreal with his wife, daughter, and a Cat of Ulthar. The first novel of his Lovercraftian Thriller series, Piercing the Veil, is available on Amazon. His dark fiction short stories have been published in several anthologies and magazines. You can follow him at www.guyriessen.com.

The City Walls

By Alex De-Gruchy

Beyond the city walls are the things never to be seen

The things which will be forever and which have always been

An ancient stone bulwark looming against the callous sky

Amongst stars the swollen moon glares, a dire and sanguine eye

In its fierce wake rolls lamely a pale and feeble sun

Acrid rain from sickly clouds brings ablution to no one

From atop the temple’s great spire the hallowed bell rings out

And all below bow heads in prayer and dispossess their doubt

There are no memories of life before the city walls

Blessed were we by the creator with these rigid cauls

Man was not meant to witness the churning chaos outside

Hearts steeled against the cries and howls, in our faith we abide

The mad carve into their flesh as they babble of songs sweet

Of dead, husked worlds and silent halls and voids never replete

Through night-cloaked streets steal hooded shapes who would bring a new way

This fatuous façade sundered in blissful disarray

The things which will be forever and which have always been

Have shown me such grand wonders and beauty in the obscene

Do not shrink from my red hand, come and see what I have seen

*~*~*

The Obsession of Edmund Cawley

By David Barber

I

First there was the business of the pentagram, and the symbols painstakingly chalked around it on the cellar floor; then the lighting of candles, and the blood and other fluids – he resented magic being so unclean – and lastly, the spoken words. That had been difficult. A gentleman saying such things aloud.

Now, after a lengthening silence and a sigh, there was just a mess that would need cleaning up before his housekeeper came in the morning. Edmund sat down at the desk and opened his journal to the last entry.

24th November 1888. Experiment 37. As per 32, except symbols writ sinister.

There were just too many variables. It could be something in the words, intonation of the voice perhaps, even time of day. Or In libro de daemonium was just fraudulent. He did not dwell on that.

He saw that he had gotten a bloody fingerprint on the page.

After a while, he reached for his pen. Again, no result.

He let the journal slap shut. Perhaps he was tired, the air seemed heavy and dim; it felt like thinking with someone else’s thoughts.

Later that evening, still nodding at his desk, he was jerked awake by banging at the street door. He opened it, admitting a whiff of London night air, smoky and sulphurous. A figure, muffled against the cold, stepped from the dark.

“What do you want?” the visitor asked him.

II

The parchment pages had stiffened with age, and Edmund Cawley remembered the crackling sound they made when he first opened In libro de daemonium, and pored over its faded Latin script, its drawings of strange birds, gargoyles and geometric shapes. At first there had been a smell of burning, long trapped between pages with charred edges, but there was also the vagrant hint of another odour, harder to identify. Sometimes he would press his face to the opened book and inhale deeply.

Enquiries lead him to think the volume in his possession had never been published. A private grimoire perhaps, with no way of identifying its anonymous author. He might have the only copy in the world.

While the country celebrated Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, he gradually became a recluse, avoiding his friends, neglecting his duties at his Club, hardly going out. Instead, he struggled with Harpers’ Latin Dictionary and what Latin grammar he remembered from his schooldays, tempted by the book’s enigmatic contents.

He had sat himself down by a sunlit window, with Harpers at his elbow and pen in hand, ready to begin translating In libro de daemonium, but somehow he felt ill at ease and could not settle. Perhaps strong sunlight would further fade the ink, he rationalised. From then on, he only worked with the curtains closed, or at night, hunched over the book with a hand lens, and a mercury glass reflector behind the lamp on his desk.

Frustratingly, the pages were littered with abbreviations, possible misspellings, and archaic usages not found in Harpers. It occurred to him to involve an old friend from Oxford who was now a Classics teacher at Eton. It would make sense, but he felt oddly reluctant. After some thought, he came up with a tale of legal manuscripts found tucked inside an old family bible, their translation being in the nature of a hobby for a middle-aged bachelor with time on his hands. Still, he was careful in his letters to give nothing away, only asking for help with difficult words and phrases.

Progress was slow, but steady.

III

Edmund shook his head. “How can you expect me to believe you? You might be anything. A copy clerk from the look of it.”

“A clerk, very good. But believing is what’s expected all right.”

There seemed nothing to fear from this shabby little man, all thick boots and frayed cuffs, his scrawny neck and cheeks raw from cold-water shaves. Still, Edmund’s heart laboured in his chest like a steam engine.

“If you won’t tell me your name, then at least prove to me what you are.”

“Ah, but proof’s what you want most. If you got proving for free, then you wouldn’t need to buy.”

The man prowled the room, examining things, picking up a paper knife, a silver-framed photographic portraiture of Edmund’s mother, studying them, then quickly losing interest. He rattled the lock on the cellar door.

“Not down there,” said Edmund, alarmed.

“You’re a clever gent, but buying all them peculiar things, maybe you was spied on. And the blood, where did that come from? You might have come to the notice of the wrong folk.”

Edmund ignored all this. “Hypothetically then, if I tell you what I want, you tell me what it might cost.”

“You already know the cost of dealing with my sort.”

“Your sort?”

“What you was thinking privately before. A cheap sharper. A confidence man.”

Edmund laughed uneasily. “Very well, I want proof of the existence of God. Of Heaven and Hell.”

“You don’t want much.”

“Or something contrary to the Laws of Physics.”

“Can’t have a square circle. Some things just can’t be done, not by nobody.”

“Then show me. Show me what you really are.”

“What you see is what you get.”

“Stop playing these games!”

“Games is it? I’ve got some lady friends you might like to meet. There’s Helen. And Cleo. Pretty little doxies to play games with, eh? But it’s still no proof. How about this then.”

He spat on his hand and then offered it like a gift. The sort of creatures found under stones scurried round on his grubby palm. He clamped his hand suddenly to his mouth, as if to stifle a scream, then licked his lips.

“Good trick, eh?”

There was an appalled silence. “You disgusting little man. Get out of my house.”

His visitor shrugged and began to wrap himself for the night air.

“Though you did get a surprise this summer,” he said, as an afterthought at the door. “A letter.”

IV

A few days before his forty-third birthday in June, Edmund had received an unexpected letter in the afternoon post, asking him to visit the offices of Parks and Parks, Solicitors, at his convenience. A distant relative, so distant he had been entirely unaware of her existence, was eight months dead.

The younger Mr. Parks had gone into the rules of intestacy at some length, but simply put, Edmund had inherited a property in Edinburgh.

He visited that city just once, and found he was the owner of a decayed Georgian terrace house bordering the Old Town’s slums, remarkable only for its library, which Mr Parks understood to be one of the largest private collections of books on magic in Scotland. Mr Parks believed that specialist book dealers would pay more for these than the property itself was worth, and was perplexed when Mr. Cawley declined to sell.

V

“Knowing about a letter proves nothing,” dismissed Edmund.

His inheritance, while confidential, was not a secret and surely there ways to learn of it. Perhaps a bribe, perhaps this fellow had clerked for Mr Parks, though Edmund could not see the solicitor employing him. But like everything else this evening, he could think of explanations that were perfectly rational.

“All my doing,” his nameless visitor insisted. “You getting your books.”

“Next you will lay claim to any good fortune in my past.”

“Not just the good fortune.”

“This is nonsense. Why should I believe you?”

“You should believe it. The world’s a heavy thing to move. All those lives pulling and tugging. It takes time to work your will. Obscure things have to be done. Little acts that add up. It took nearly a year to get you to this minute.”

“I don’t...”

“Time, you see. Ain’t the same for your sort and mine.”

“And what sort are you?” said Edmund, frustrated and irritable.

The man scratched at a raw patch on his chin with a dirty thumbnail. “It’s a question all right.”

He unwound his scarf again and hung it over the back of a chair. They stood like two boxers, parted for the moment, but still eyeing one another.

Edmund was the first to speak. “I never understood why Faustus would sign a pact with the devil. It makes the existence of God certain. Unless he thought it was all a trick, but in that case...”

“This Faustus a pal of yours?”

“And I read that magic is just another way of looking at the world, one not reliant on cause and effect, but on contingency and coincidence instead.”

“Books, eh? Bound to be true then.”

“Tell me what would you want in return for proof. Proof, mind you.”

“Nothing. Just as long as you don’t have it neither. That’s the nasty way of things.”

“I don’t understand.”

His visitor suddenly pushed his face in close. “And if you lie sleepless at night and don’t understand?” he hissed. “If you get up of a morning and still aren’t sure? If you start harbouring doubts, a fleet of doubts, did you expect otherwise? Do you think I care?”

Edmund flinched, but recovered himself.

The fellow laughed lightly, all forgotten. “I’m seeing how pitiful your soul is. You wouldn’t know evil if it bit you, if you bit evil. Since you ask, I would guess the price is everything. Your money. Your friends. Your position in society. Everything.”

“What use would you have for money?” exclaimed Edmund. “If you are who you claim to be.”

“I don’t claim nothing. But you’re right, it sounds like something a criminal would be after.”

“Enough of this! I summoned you and I insist…”

“Summoned? Just a friendly knock at the door. Besides, using cats and chickens, it’s an insult. For summoning, real summoning, to do your bidding, wouldn’t you need proper human blood? And lots of it.”

Edmund squeezed his hands together as if offering a prayer to indecision. “I don’t know what to believe.”

“It’s a dilemma, all right.”

VI

The Superintendent is showing the new night attendant round the ward. The man in Room Three is raving again.

“Watch out for that one.” He bangs his fist on the door. “Quiet in there! Unless you want me to shut you up.”

The shouting tails off, but the attendant can still hear muttering.

“What’s the story?”

“The Whitechapel murders. That was him. At least, they found some bits in his cellar.”

The new attendant peers cautiously through the peep hole.

Show me something contrary to the Laws of Physics, he hears quite distinctly, and then much louder: Show me what you really are.

“He’ll bite you if he can,” the Superintendent warns. “Even took to biting himself before we jacketed him up. Something about blood.”

The shouting begins again. Stop playing these games!

End.

Free Beer

By Kirk Vanderbeek

Eric rubbed his knuckles across his upper lip—back and forth—relieving an itch in the dry skin beneath what only the most charitable friend would agree to call a “mustache.”

I was not that friend.

“Let’s try one last garage,” he said, flecks of dead flesh falling like snow and gathering on his wet lips.

I shook my head. “I think we’ve just stolen too much shit from too many people,” I said. “No one leaves anything unlocked anymore.”

“One last garage.”

I shrugged and pulled a smoke from the pack in my jacket pocket, lit it with a flick of my white lighter. Eric stood at the edge of the tree line. He scanned a street we hadn’t worked over in a long time and raised his arm, finger glowing in the moonlight as he pointed to a huge house at the end of a cul-de-sac. It was the biggest house that bordered these woods and I was positive I’d never seen it before.

Eric stepped out of the shadows wearing his older brother’s baggy brown leather jacket, all zip-pers and buttons and faux cool. Eric always walked around in it like he’d invented the idea of wearing the fashioned skin of dead animals.

I looked up at the enormous house as we approached. It made me feel poor as hell, and honestly my family wasn’t even that poor. We ate out at a Ponderosa a couple times a month. I was start-ing college at the end of summer and I sure wasn’t going on any kind of scholarship, so my par-ents must have money tucked away somewhere. But this house? This house was incredible. It had columns that stretched up past the second floor. Actual columns. White ones. Even a second floor was rare here in ranch country.

“Dude,” Eric said, his hand on the doorknob to a garage that was bigger than his whole house. With no resistance, the door glided open. “Apparently someone hasn’t gotten word about us,” he said with a smile.

“Go on,” I whispered and pushed him through the doorway.

“Holy shit,” one of us gasped. Me, I think.

I’d expected the relative darkness of a garage at night, but the first thing I saw when I turned was a line of three arcade cabinets and a pinball machine, lights flashing like a beacon. Metal Slug, Terminator 2, Cruis’n USA, an Elvira pinball machine—un-fucking-real. I turned my head slowly. One wall was home to a CD collection that put Harmony House to shame. Another wall displayed thousands of VHS tapes. Unlocked garages were never like this. A pool table covered in beautiful, blood-red felt stood in the center of the room surrounded by couches and leather recliners that faced a 10-foot-wide projection screen. A fridge and a stocked pantry stood next to the couch. At the far end of the enormous garage stood four vintage motorcycles, huddled together like they were sharing a secret.

I was prioritizing what we should grab before bailing out of there when a rectangle of light popped up on the wall next to Eric.

He ducked. I did the same.

The panel of light swiped across the wall and came to a sudden stop.

“Headlights,” Eric said.

A car door slammed.

Eric ducked down behind the couch and I hurried over to do the same. I closed my eyes and lis-tened. A soft whoosh as the door opened. A click as it closed.

After that it was hard to hear anything over the pounding surf of my pulse. Eric and I locked eyes. His projected excitement. The eyes of a kid hiding behind the couch on Christmas Eve, sure this’ll be the year he catches the fat man in the act.

I’d seen him with this exact same look before.

This “we shouldn’t be doing this, but gotdamn this is fun, isn’t it!?” look.

Only that time, his eyes hadn’t been looking into mine.

I heard the muted snikt of a key’s teeth rattling across tumblers—a clunk as it drove home a deadbolt. Eric raised his eyebrows and grimaced with something bordering on glee. I felt my stomach flutter as my bowels shivered. Shuddered. Gurgled. Not some small sound that would make the kids next to you in class snicker, this was the sound of raw sewage forcing its way up the drain of your bathtub. That’s about how it felt, too. It happened again.

Eric looked at me with justified disgust.

Then I heard a scrape.

A shoe across concrete.

A clack.

Another scrape. Another clack.

High heels?

Then nothing. Not even a breath.

I waited, motionless, too nervous to inhale. Eric had his hand clamped over his mouth to stifle a laugh.

No more scrapes. No clacks. Just silence. And a nauseating smell. Some perfumed-garbage stink this person had brought in with them. I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye, a reflection in an old bar mirror. It showed a teenage girl about the same age as me standing on the opposite side of the couch. It was hard to make out the details of her face amidst the red and gold paint that decorated the surface of the mirror, but from what I could tell she was short, with blond hair that had gone black at the roots a while back. Her skin was either fucked up with fad-ed bruises and bloodied acne blotches, or the Champagne of Beers was doing her face a major disservice.

She took off her sunglasses, dropped them on the pool table and used all of her fingers to scratch her face. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so unpleasant, the way her fingernails attacked the invisible itch that seemed to cover her entire head. Fingernails raked over her chin and down her neck, tracing red lines into her skin as it pulled taut against shallow cheekbones. She made small sounds in the back of her throat. Phlegmy grunts of pleasure.

She worked her fingers under her hair, pushing, pulling, digging at her scalp. As she shifted her flesh around with her vicious scratching and probing, the skull beneath seemed no bigger than a softball. Man, the mirror was really fucking with my eyes because for a second, I could have sworn her eyes were red. Not reddish. Not hazel. Red. Crayon red. Fake blood red.

Then she stopped scratching, paced across the garage, clumsy in high heels, and into the house. The door locked behind her.

I let out a shaky breath and Eric laughed so hard it came out like a wheeze.

“Dude,” he gasped, “I thought I was gonna lose it when your stomach did that.”

“We need to go,” I said. “Before she comes back or sends her dad in or whatever.”

“She? You could see her?”

“In the mirror over there.”

“She hot? D’you recognize her?”

“No. Who gives a shit? She’s home and we’re hiding in her fucking garage.” I stood up. “Let’s go,” I whispered.

“All right, take it easy. She’s inside, she locked the door, she didn’t say shit. She didn’t even run out of here. She has no idea we’re here. We would’ve known if she did. She would have freaked out.”

“She was weird.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. She, like, didn’t move at all for a minute and then she just scratched her whole fucking head like some kind of animal.”

Eric stared at me in silence.

“Just so I’m clear on this,” he said, “you want to run screaming out of this garage, empty-handed, because some girl stood still and then scratched her head.”

I started to respond but realized it wasn’t worth my breath. I’d just leave and if he wanted to stay, cool. I walked past the arcade machines, reached for the door that led outside and discov-ered that the deadbolt required a key—even from the inside. Hell, so did the doorknob.

The locked door rattled as I tried to open it.

I looked back to see Eric amassing a small collection of VHS tapes in his arms.

“We’re locked in.”

“Huh?” He pulled out a copy of Home Alone, the first one, not the new one, then slid it back into formation. “Jesus, these are alphabetical,” he said. “Who does that?”

“Eric, this door’s—we’re locked in, man. Put the fucking tapes down and help me figure this out.”

While I fiddled with the door again, uselessly, desperately, I heard the pop of a beer can and turned to find Eric in front of the open fridge with a foaming beer in his hand. The entire fridge behind him was packed from top to bottom with nothing but beer. Brown bottles, green bottles, clear ones, shiny silver cans, white cans—more than a dozen different brand names beamed at me from across the garage, begging for my undivided attention.

What can I say? I was 18 years old. So was Eric. Free beer was the find of the year.

Eric tossed me a can.

“Are you just trying to get caught?”

He smiled and held a finger to his pursed mouth. He tapped it against his chapped lips.

“Sh-sh-shhh…”

The familiarity of that gesture.

That finger to his lips. The other on hers…

“Sh-sh-shhh… you’ll wake him up…”

The cold of the can in my hand crept up my forearm. Ice in my veins. Eric chugged his beer and strolled my way, scooping the girl’s colossal sunglasses up from the pool table. He popped them onto his face and scratched his head. His shit-eating grin quickly turned into a grimace.

“Gotdamn,” he said and pulled them off. He brought them to his nostrils. Recoiled. “Fuck. These things stink.” He tossed them back onto the pool table and brushed past me. “Why was she even wearing sunglasses? It’s pitch black out there.”

He tried the knob and ran a finger over the keyholes, frowning. He knocked his knuckles against the door’s small window. “Must be ‘cause of this. So no one can just smash the window and un-lock everything. Kind of complicates things for us though, huh?”

“Okay,” I said, embarrassed at the rising panic in my voice. “Let’s just—I don’t know—let’s just smash this thing out and climb through.”

“How skinny do you think you are, dude? This window’s, like, maybe six inches wide. And it ain’t much taller.”

Eric extended his chin, stretching out the skin of his neck so he could scratch himself—his eyes half-closed with a kind of animal pleasure as he scratched and scratched and let loose a snow-storm of dead skin. He went back to the fridge and started filling his pockets with bottles. Then he grabbed a paper bag from a nearby shelf, shook it open and filled that up too. He motioned for me to do the same.

“All right,” he said. “Plan B. We grab as much beer as we can, and I’m gonna pick out a few of these albums real quick, there’s some fuckin’ gems in here, and then we’re gone. See that little gray panel by the door to the house? That’s an automatic garage door opener. There was one at my aunt’s house back when she was still married to that dude with money. So anyway, we grab whatever we want, push that sucker and run home. We’ll be in the woods getting wasted by the time anyone reacts to the garage door opening.”

“All right, then push the button.”

“Let me grab one more bag of beer. Calm down. For real.”

The anticipation was brutal while Eric filled the last bag. I was surer with each passing second that the window was about to brighten with the flashing lights of a squad car, or someone was gonna come bursting through the door to the house, cocking a Remington to unleash a blinding cloud of shot into my face. By the time Eric was finally standing next to that gray button and nodding in my direction I’d already run into the safety of the woods a dozen times in my mind.

“On your marks, get set,” Eric whispered. The second I heard the click of the button, I stutter-stepped toward safety, a dumb thing to do even if the garage door had started opening. Which it hadn’t. My skull gonged against the immobile sheet of aluminum.

Eric tried to stifle another laugh and failed miserably. He stepped back, clicked the button again, added another notch to the night’s failure column.

“Well, that changes things,” Eric said. He looked up at the ceiling, pointed. “The whole thing’s tooken apart. Right there, look, s’posed to be a chain or a pulley or whatever that lifts the door.”

I looked but had no idea what he was talking about.

“Why spend all the money to get one of these things and then take it apart?” Eric asked. “Fuck it. Plan C.”

He pulled a beer from one of his bags and cracked it open while I tried to force the door up on its track. It wouldn’t budge.

“Just sit down for a minute, have a beer and let’s think this through.”

Four beers later, Eric’s new plan to get wasted until the morning delivered some glorious solu-tion to our problem was starting to sound pretty good. Two more beers followed quickly. By the time we’d established a designated piss bucket beneath the dartboard I was actually having fun. I hadn’t slipped into a buzz this potent in a long time. Kicked back in a couple of recliners, rows of empties stretched out on the table between us, we felt like kings. Never mind the fact we were camped out in someone else’s castle. A buffet of free beer was ours for the taking, and I hadn’t even drunk the same brand twice yet. I kept skipping from one continent to the next. Twelve ounces of Germany, a pint of jolly old England, a damn big dip Down Under and, ahhh man this was fun.

“What time is it?” I asked Eric, sliding a couple cans of Milwaukee’s Worst off the bottom shelf for old time’s sake. Even with the world at my fingertips I was still happy slumming it.

“Almost three.”

“It’s not even three yet? Jesus, no wonder I’m so wasted.”

I flopped back into my leather recliner. We’d stopped worrying about making too much noise a few beers back. Hell, there’d been a couple times we’d laughed so loud I was pretty sure the neighbors could have heard us. Through the magical miracle of alcohol, we were actually hav-ing fun together for the first time all year.

“What a score this place turned out to be,” I said. A loud burp bubbled out of me. I didn’t even bother trying to stifle it. This place was ours. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been this drunk before.”

“We were pretty wasted at the lock-in,” Eric said as he added another album to the top of his pile. “That night was nuts.”

He was talking about our senior all-nighter, a casino-themed party our school had thrown three or four months ago. It was the same shit every year for the new batch of kids about to escape into the real world. A barely-chaperoned sleepover in the school after a night spent gambling fake money on cheap plastic roulette wheels, getting secretly drunk on smuggled booze.

That was the night I woke up to rustling sounds coming from a nearby sleeping bag.

My girlfriend Kelsey’s sleeping bag.

Her hair spread out on the floor beneath her head.

A head above hers. A finger to his lips.

“Sh-sh-shhh… you’ll wake him up…”

“You still hanging out with Kelsey?” Eric asked, like he’d been reading my mind. Or playing out the same memory in his own.

I nodded. Took a swig of beer.

“Yeah? You don’t seem too excited about it.”

“I mean, whatever. We’re still talking, yeah.”

“I thought you guys decided to take a break a couple months ago.”

“We did.”

“Right on. Why’d you change your mind?”

“Habit, I guess.”

“Fuckin’ romantic,” Eric said with a laugh.

I added another empty to my army and wobbled to the fridge.

Blood pounded through my veins in such a rush it made me lightheaded.

I clanked through the beer options and realized it was true. I was with Kelsey out of habit. Sheer laziness. And these were the exact same reasons I was still friends with Eric, even after he’d drunkenly fucked my girlfriend five feet away from me while they thought I was passed out.

Just sheer laziness. Comfort in discomfort.

I grabbed another can of Milwaukee’s Worst.

A lazy, habitual, comfortable choice.

I put the can back on the shelf and grabbed a bottle with a label covered in writing that looked like graffiti. Fuck comfort, I was gonna drink this shit.

“Duuuuude.”

I turned to see Eric marveling at the green contents of a plastic bag he’d found. He held it up, his jaw hanging open. In his other hand: a multi-colored glass pipe and a lighter. A big Grinch-y grin spread across his face.

Eric opened the bag and inhaled greedily, moaning. Groaning. “I’m so glad that chick came home and locked our asses in here.” He broke off a chunk, stuffed it into the bowl and flicked the lighter. It sparked but didn’t light. He tried again. All spark no flame, so I pulled the white lighter out of my jacket pocket and tossed it to him. He ignited the contents of the bowl and took a deep breath. His eyes went wide and rolled back in their sockets.

“Oh, shit.” He coughed. Spit flew from his lips. He tried to light the bowl again but he couldn’t steady his hands, so he dropped it on the table and leaned back in his chair like someone who’d just OD’d.

I picked up the bowl, raised it to my lips and asked Eric a question I’d thought a thousand times but never said out loud.

“Why’d you fuck Kelsey?”

Then I flicked flame through the weed which burned and crackled and glowed orange and popped as seeds and stems burst and something else something yellow or white or white-yellow or I don’t know what ignited and turned to smoke and filled the shaft of the pipe and neared my lips and I breathed it all into my lungs and it spread through them like warm liquid cold liquid like a glass of hot milk like a cup of cold mercury and I coughed and I watched a cloud come out of my lungs in one burst and then another and I filled the sky with clouds that blotted out the stars and the whole goddam world was in my lungs and out of my lungs and hanging in the air and it was mine for the taking to put in my pocket or roll up or spread out into a sheet to save between the pages of a book or lay in or on or under because hell when I stopped to think about it I was floating up there too up above the smoke and Eric was in here somewhere if I could just get the lights turned back on then he’d be right there in fact he’d probably be right in front of my face less than an inch away his dry skin flakes mingling with my flesh like ash and then he’d speak and I’d scream from surprise and oh shit this wasn’t weed this couldn’t be weed this had to be something more and I should try to get back into my body back on that chair in someone else’s garage I was in someone else’s house and I was in someone else’s head and body and world and I needed to think focus breathe to stop spinning and breathe and breathe and

open my eyes

open my eyes.

I opened my eyes.

An old man was standing in the garage

framed in a black rectangle

reaching out a withered hand.

His back was to me.

He was naked.

No he wasn’t naked.

He had on a dingy pair of underpants.

No he didn’t. He was naked but the skin of his ass looked like yellowed underpants, sagging from his skeleton. Patches of yellow, stripes of gray and maroon. He had no eyes. Black eyes. Red eyes. His eyes were closed and his back was turned to me and one hand was fumbling on the surface of a workbench and the other was scratching his ass, scratching some itch beneath the skin of his ass, his fumbling fingers pressed against wet clay masquerading as flesh and scratching an itch in his muscles in his bones. I could hear the wind howling and this naked man making a noise with his throat like a tree branch scraping across a bedroom window in the mid-dle of the night. Or maybe he was howling and the wind was scraping tree branches across the garage. I sunk into a smell, drowning in a bog of stench like in some movie I remember watch-ing as a kid. That rot again. Same as the girl, only worse. I could taste it like an old liquified banana squeezed into my mouth and nostrils with forceful hands. I closed my eyes and watched stars and stripes collide bombs bursting in air to give proof through this night that I was still there and fuck it was beautiful and then I remembered there was a naked old man in the garage with me and Eric and I opened my eyes and

no one was standing in front of the workbench

my eyelids scraped across dry eyeballs

no one in front of the workbench

eric sitting in the recliner opposite mine with a vacant look in his

eyes and bliss on his face

thrusting his hips

licking his lips

sitting forward and picking up the bowl which had somehow gotten back onto the table he pulled the lighter to his fingertips and hit the bowl and passed it to me and smiled as heat hit my lips and smoke hit my brain and the room spun into new focus and layers unfurled and all the stuff stuff fucking stuff everywhere blurred into one enormous ball of color before the spectrum divided itself and every incredible possession in this cave this cavern this palace this garage? stood out in sharp focus demanding my attention and so I gave it

and no one was in front of the workbench

wind roared on the other side of the garage door rattling the world’s hinges

this garage floated in the center of the universe and in this garage floated

me

I reached for the feel of familiarity and gripped steel and looked between my legs to see that I was riding a motorcycle across the rim of the world tilting my head to the side to dodge passing comets and earth was actually a beautiful marble and not the gray shithole it so often seemed to be and passing traffic honked at me as three other motioncyclers with bikes like mine swerved into my lane to join me on my journey and they raised their hands in a gesture like a thumbs-up only their hands were mine and their bikes were mine and I was on the ground after all and I was in front of the pinball machines on my feet and I was staring at Elvira’s cleavage and I was in there I was nestled between her enormous soft breasts safe in her shade and I was hard as a tree and growing harder pressed against the pinball machine the lights flashing on and off and the sounds pinging and a silver ball bouncing between bumpers and up ramps and down loops and whirring through the works of the world that I was playing with hands that once belonged to me and above the arcade machines hung a slew of unlit neon signs so I flicked a switch and the wall came to life with a neon woman scissoring her legs up and down and up and down and a

neon sign that flashed the words FREE BEER over and over with

an arrow pointing to the fridge

FREE BEER FREE BEER FREE BEER FREE BEER FREE BEER

and I filled my beer with another hand and I was sitting back in the recliner and looking up at Eric as he said

“Because she wanted me to.”

I grabbed my high by the reins, pulling back just enough to slow its mad gallop and squeeze my legs around the saddle. All the colors were still brighter than bright and the texture of the air was different. I could taste my own teeth. But I could also think. I could move on purpose. I shook my head, a mistake, lines blurring. I focused on Eric as he said it again.

“She wanted me to.”

I turned my head slowly, maintaining control of the shape of the room.

No one was in front of the workbench.

A workbench covered in an array of tools I’d never seen before, blades and bludgeons and

something was different.

Not a presence but an

absence

A black rectangle.

The door leading into the house was open.

“And so did I,” Eric said from somewhere inside my head. “We both wanted to. So we did.”

I looked at him. A face in a chair. No, a person, a whole person in a leather jacket on a leather chair. Dry skin, leather, more leather. All skin.

“Gotdamn, that was definitely not weed,” the skin in the skin sighed. Eric. Eric sighed. The air around him rippled, slowed. Stilled.

I took a deep breath, pulled the reins a little harder and slowed to a trot. To a walk.

Whoa… whoa…

whoa

“Has that sign been on this whole time?” Eric pointed a shaky finger at the flashing FREE BEER sign and it spooked the horse into a little gallop before I pulled the reins back and got control again.

“That’s fuckin’ hilarious,” he said. “Free beer. It’s like—”

The sound that came out of the house is hard to describe with a word. It was a thud, sure, but it had personality somehow. Maybe a screech? Whatever it was, it sobered me up—a bucket of cold water in a black and white Western.

I was back in my body. I wanted to be anywhere else.

Eric scowled at the black rectangle.

“How long has that been open?”

I tried to answer. My tongue was glue, my teeth toddler hair.

We stared in silence at that emptiness. That entrance. That

exit

We heard a sudden rush of oncoming footsteps, bare skin slapping ground, getting louder and louder. We both reacted with surprising speed, launching ourselves onto the floor, leather re-cliners between us and the open door.

I was still holding my beer. It hadn’t even spilled.

The footsteps smacked into the garage and stopped.

A sudden sense of déjà vu struck me and I was sure we were back in the exact same moment we’d been in before. Or rather still in that moment. Hiding from the girl who’d just come home. I turned my head, expecting to find a teenage reflection in the mirror and found instead a pair of bruised, atrophied legs. A flaccid penis stuck to a scrotum so squashed it looked empty. A loose belly below a chest, thin and sallow, that showed no ribs beneath its saggy surface. A neck like wet sheets hanging from a fencepost. The head of an old man, backlit, twitching, his facial fea-tures extended grossly towards the floor, lower lip dangling like a fishing lure, waggling back and forth with each twitch of the skull. I couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the light or the drugs still worming through my brainstream, but I watched his fingers stretch and contract as though the bones inside had somehow extended, causing his fingers to elongate by an inch, two, three, then retract, fingers collapsing until they looked like deflated balloons. A word popped into my head, one of those words you’re forced to learn in class but should never use in real life—phalanges. It meant finger bones but it was a perfect word for deflated fingers.

phalanges

The old man stilled his twitching head. Raised it. His eyes turned and turned and turned, their wetness reflecting tiny dots of light in the dark. His neck swelled. A posturing lizard bloating its dewlap. Another word you should never use.

His eyes moved again. No. Something moved where his eyes should have been.

His tongue poked out of his mouth. No. Something poked out of his mouth where his tongue should have been.

His toes stretched out, calves swelling. He

not he—it

walked slowly towards the pool table, penis and pendulous little belly coming to rest against its edge. He paused. It paused. Judging by the look of horror on Eric’s face I was not hallucinating the presence of this naked man this naked thing in the garage with us. I looked at the beer bottle in my hand. Condensation collected on my fingers and rolled to the floor.

Eric turned to me, eyes wide. Face drained of all color.

From the other side of the pool table, flesh dragged across the floor.

Eric extended a single finger and slowly raised his hand to his mouth. Pressed finger to lips.

“Shh,” I whispered.

And again. Louder.

“Shhh. Shhhh!”

Eric’s flaky forehead wrinkled in confusion.

“Shhh! You’ll wake him up!”

The release I felt screaming that sentence in the silence was orgasmic. I wanted a cigarette. I took a final swig from my beer and threw the bottle at Eric. It bounced off the side of his skull and before it had even landed on the floor the motion blur of the naked manthing was on top of Eric. The beer bottle spun in circles as a hand reached into Eric’s mouth and effortlessly pulled out his tongue, so much bigger than I would have thought, and discarded it with a wet thwack on the floor. As the bottle came to ironic rest against the edge of his tongue, both of Eric’s elbows were hyper-extended, cracked, broken. On all fours and with terrific I mean horrific animal fe-rocity the old man gripped the thigh and ankle of Eric’s left leg, swung the lower half of his de-crepit body forward with shocking speed and strength, snapped Eric’s knee to the side. Eric’s shoulders writhed in useless agony as the old man crawled like a crab over to his other leg and repeated the same knee-shattering motion. A wail came out of Eric’s throat and rattled over the bloody wetness where his tongue used to be. Sprawled out on the floor like a broken toy, Eric’s eyes fluttered and scanned the room erratically. His jaw moved, damming and releasing the flow of blood.

The blur of violence ended and the old man squatted beside the crushed cockroach that used to be my friend. A stink of decay rose from his bent form as he reached a hand forward and ran it lovingly through Eric’s greasy hair and across his cheek, yellow fingernail picking at a scale of dry skin with parental concern. Another finger worried over the hole Eric’s splintered bone had poked through the flesh of his forearm.

A sound slipped from the man-thing’s mouth. Like twigs rubbed together. Like a mother’s con-cerned tsk-tsk-tsk over a feverish baby’s crib in the middle of the night.

In one graceful movement it flopped onto its back. Forearms and fingers swelled, kneading into its belly, its crotch, behind its knees, scratching subdermal itches. Eric and I watched with wide eyes, mine more focused than his, as little hisses of pleasure and contentment escaped the crea-ture’s mouth. Out of one of its ears, something red and wet showed. Like a vole peeking out of its hole to scan for safety. Glistening. Alive, but not in any traditional sense. Like a plant. That’s exactly what it was like. A red root peering out from flesh. I noticed more. The “tongue” I’d seen earlier, a writhing red root. Same for whatever moved where eyes should have been. The clicks of pleasure increased in pitch as the scratching reached a feverish speed. And suddenly the thing was perched back up on its old-man-haunches, scrotum dangling down to the floor. I watched as a bright red root poked out of its anus before twitching and retreating inside.

Eric’s desperate eyes landed on mine.

Is this what you wanted?

“No.”

This did not come from my mouth.

“No. This will not do.”

These words came from somewhere within the monster. English words that sounded less like they were spoken and more like they were clacked out on wooden blocks of infinitely different pitches. Horrible and somehow beautiful.

“Lo-tee-ahn. That is what we need. Much lo-tee-ahn.”

A gentle pat of Eric’s cheek and the old man was up and padding quickly through the garage, beyond the black rectangle into the house.

A wet gurgle bubbled up out of Eric’s throat. Might have been the word “help,” if the word help was the squelch of a foot sucking free from mud. His eyes wandered the room, closed, fluttered open, found me. More blood, black now, gushed down his chin.

I closed my eyes. The fireworks returned. Bursts of color exploded on the insides of my eyelids. The drugs still had a say in my oh can you see—

Reins.

Pulled taut.

Slowed to a trot.

Hold it.

If the drugs still had this much control, maybe this recent horror was part of an ongoing halluci-nation.

I opened my eyes and the naked old man was back, perched beside Eric’s body like a gargoyle, lovingly rubbing lotion over Eric’s face and neck. Blood and lotion combined and congealed into pink foam. Eric’s eyes were closed. His broken arms still moved, shoulders circling to make snow angels in hell.

The old man slipped Eric’s useless arms out of his leather jacket, gripped and ripped his T-shirt, rubbed handfuls of lotion across Eric’s shoulders, chest, stomach. He chittered with excitement the whole time. Words formed amidst twig-clicks, hard though they were to hear over the roar of the wind outside. “Lo-tee-ahn. That is what the skin needs. Lo-tee-ahn will help.”

Lotion.

An inane thought flitted through my brain, the memory of an English teacher telling us never to make fun of someone for mispronouncing a word because it meant they’d learned it by reading. This memory, combined with the creature’s twiggy lisp, made me feel an odd twinge of pity. Then the curious red root poked out of its asshole and simple revulsion replaced pity.

“So many questions (ques-tee-ahns) in those eyes. Pain. Yes? Pain. Cannot be helped. To col-lect. To cause pain. Cannot be helped.”

I watched as Eric’s shoes, socks, jeans, boxers were removed. The creature filled its hands with lotion and chittered mispronounced justifications. I thought about shutting my eyes again, hop-ing the drugs could make the monster disappear, but found it impossible not to watch.

“So many things here. Wonderful things. Colorful plastics, bright lights, metals, rubber. I came to study. Sent to learn. Bring back information. But the stuffstuffstuff. So wonderful. Abun-dant.”

The bottle belched as more lotion was squeezed into greedy hands.

“Fine to observe. Better to be. So many nice things to have. To hold. So easy to get. Once I be-come. To consumeconsumeconsume feels so good to—”

Eric gurgled out the strangled start of a scream.

“Sh-sh-shhh. I become you. Collect. Collect. Consume. Consume. What your world has done with its raw materials. Ahhh…” A rattle of wet branches substituted for a sigh.

Eric’s cheek was caressed, comfort provided with one hand as the other slid across a selection of knives wrapped in black velvet. “It is beautiful. I love it. You. I love humans. Lovelovelove. To be humans. All that matters now. But so many of you to collect. Never enough. A collection is never complete. The old are easy. But you. Teenager. So beautiful. Such fun. We must be so very careful…”

It slipped a blade silently from the velvet wrapping and I noticed for the first time a stitched-up seam down the old man’s side. The sewing was so clean, performed by such an expert that it was no more visible than a line of white crayon across a white page, revealed only by a reflec-tion of light at just the right angle. This molten thread of flesh looped around its ear, down its neck, forked off to one elbow as the other branch continued down the torso, across the hip and down the leg, ending somewhere in the yellowed gnarl of toes on its left foot.

It lifted Eric’s hair on one side of his head and brought the blade to the edge of his hairline. Eric didn’t make a sound as the blade sliced through scalp, behind his ear, gently, gently, down the side of his neck.

It mumbled to itself as it worked.

“So satisfying to collect. To consume. To become. But so so itchy to be human.”

The creature dropped the blade and scratched its body with spastic motions of arms, legs, head. Fingers raced across flesh and pressed deep deep deep to scratch beneath the flesh. Scratch whatever lived inside this skin that used to belong to an old man.

Another cloud of rot and stink and death spread into my nostrils. My locked muscles quivered. My eyes blurred in and out of focus. Small jolts of drug-fueled adrenaline flowed randomly through my veins in an exhausting ebb and flow. I watched as the creature slithered back onto two feet and ambled out of the room, chittering in awkward English. Hard to say for sure, but it sounded like it said it was going to “slip into something more comfortable,” followed by a sound like a fork in a garbage disposal. A laugh.

It ran into the house, the door left open behind it.

I’ve since tried to convince myself that in the moment I glimpsed my window of escape, my black rectangle, I considered bringing Eric with me. Carrying him across one shoulder, or drag-ging him by his broken legs.

Anyway, it’s a lie.

I stood up. Knees popped. Taut muscles resisted. Eric’s eyes were closed and his chest was still. Maybe he was dead. I hoped he was. Death was a gift by that point.

I grabbed my white lighter off the table and walked toward the black rectangle.

The drugs surged through me.

I felt fucked up again. Not riding-a-motorcycle-through-space-fucked-up, but out of my own skin

(an unfortunate phrase)

for sure.

I suppose I planned to sneak through the house, room by room, shadow to shadow, but it felt like there were too many things crawling through the dark with me towards me on me in me so I bolted like a spooked horse. I dropped the reins and let all the fear and chaos run rampant, pro-pelling me through the house.

I listened for the sound of slapping feet in pursuit.

Nothing.

The house was too big. Too fucking big.

I turned a corner into some sort of humidor. A word I didn’t know at the time. Movement. A young boy. Naked. Skin swelling as it was filled by a red mass. Limbs distending as the small vessel was overfilled.

Behind the boy, rows of limp flesh suits hung from cloth hangers in the climate-controlled room.

The boy turned in my direction.

I ran.

Out the front door and across the porch and down the steps and down the street and into the woods where every branch that scraped me in the dark as I ran until morning arrived was a red root reaching out of someone’s skin to stop me.

I slept until two in the afternoon the next day. No. It was the day after next when I finally woke up. I didn’t have any nightmares in all that time and that’s the truth. I was so riddled with a drug and booze hangover it was hard to get two thoughts to stick together. My brain felt like the ash-es of an incinerated ball of paper. If I bothered it too much it would blow apart.

By the time the sun hung low in the sky, I could leave my house without too much fear of throwing up. I had to see that house again. Convince myself it was real. I wandered the woods with only a vague memory of where it was. I couldn’t find the right fucking cul-de-sac to save my life. Maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. I was ready to give up and head over to Eric’s house. I could already feel the inevitable flood of relief that would flow through me when he opened the door and said something like, “Dude, you were fuuucked up the other night.”

Then I spotted the house through a tangle of branches. Not as big as I remembered, but still a castle compared to the rest of the houses around here. Some evil little coil of guilt and shame and fear tied itself up tight inside of me. I waited for it to loosen then stepped out of the woods.

I could tell the house was vacant before I’d even reached the driveway.

I pressed my face to the small window in the door to the garage. All I could see was the reflec-tion of my own face until I blocked out the rest of the world with cupped hands. The garage was empty. Almost. Power strips hung from the wall where arcade cabinets had been. A rug sat on the floor near where I’d hidden, huddled, two nights ago. And, inexplicably, one neon sign re-mained on the adjacent wall. Still plugged in, flashing its ridiculous message: FREE BEER.

Six days later, while a halfhearted attempt to find my missing friend continued, I was 75 miles south of my shithole town, across the state line for college orientation weekend. I’d never been that far away from home before.

Kelsey, still my girlfriend, still my comfortable can of familiar beer, was there too. It’s not that I was following her to college, it’s more like I had no real plans about it and she did, so I just jumped onto hers. And to be honest, within hours of being on campus she was already cramping my style. I sensed a real chance to change there. Become a better version of myself.

That first night, Kelsey and I snuck out of the dorms we’d been put up in and met at a house party some guy had told her about that afternoon.

A few beers deep, I ducked away from Kelsey to find a bathroom, but gotdamn if the line wasn’t halfway down the hall. I slipped out a back door that opened onto an unfinished deck covered in cigarette butts and empties. I stumbled down the steps and into the relative privacy of the shad-ows at the edge of the yard, backed up to a strip of trees that passed for “woods” on this edge of campus.

Over the hiss of my relief I heard a crunch of footsteps in the dark. I watched a figure make its clumsy way through the woods, sunglasses on, clad in a brown leather jacket. My stream slowed to a stop as I watched Eric make his way through the trees. No, not Eric. The creature wearing Eric.

Back in the house, I stood at the edge of the crowd. Condensation collected on my fingers and dripped from the bottle of beer in my hand as I watched Kelsey talking to the same dickhead jock who’d told us about the party.

She laughed at something he said, flashed her bedroom eyes, tucked a loose strand of hair be-hind her ear.

She ran her finger along the jawline of her left cheek.

A red fingernail dragged across the surface of her smooth skin.

Her skin was impeccable.

She really was beautiful, no matter which way you cut it.

I smiled as I realized that if things with Kelsey went south, I could always seek out the biggest, newest house on the edge of town and take her out there.

Introduce her to someone—something—I’d met once before.

She’d make a stunning addition to any collection.

End.

*~*~*

Kirk Vanderbeek is a writer of fiction, poems, screenplays. He lives in Southern California with his wife and son. You can typically find Kirk hunched over his laptop in any number of nooks or crannies into which he’s managed to squeeze himself, pecking away at his current project. Disturb him if you must, he’s awfully friendly.

Sweet Illusions

By Keily Blair

The rusted gates that led to the fairgrounds creaked open like the maw of a beast, and the erratic music of the carnival irritated Micah’s ears as he approached the ticket booth. An ad in his hands showed bright, colorful tents, gleaming new rides, and a smiling, little man at a ticket booth. The real experience revealed faded tents, rusty old rides, and the crooked, yellow grin plastered on the man behind the counter. Micah’s fingers twitched in his pockets, echoing his silent wish for a set of noise-canceling headphones to block out the jarring noise. The Ferris wheel and some drop ride loomed over the booth, and his eyes followed their paths as his stomach twisted in knots. His younger sister chatted below him, excited and tugging at his shirt even though she knew he didn’t like to be touched.

The man took his money and slapped on his wristband. Micah focused on the bit of something stuck in the man’s teeth, avoiding his watery, bloodshot eyes. The feel of the man’s clammy fingers made his skin crawl. He produced a small bottle of hand sanitizer from his pocket, squirting a dollop into his hands as the man watched him.

“Nervous?” the man asked.

Micah didn’t respond, though he tucked some of his dark hair behind his ear with shaky fingers. Sometimes such questions caught him off guard and forced responses from him, honest ones met with laughter. He was no one’s joke.

“Come on, Ella,” he said.

His sister gripped his hand, and he stiffened at the touch. The ticket seller’s grin widened at this, mocking him.

The salty, rich aroma of roasted peanuts mingled with the sweetness of candied apples and caramel. Cotton candy machines whirred, spinning sugary, sticky confections. Popcorn popped in various machines, only to be smothered in rich, buttery oil for wide-eyed youths. Micah’s mouth watered, and as if on cue, one of the workers leaned out of her booth, holding a bright red candy apple by the stick.

“Everybody gets one free,” the worker said. Her red mouth cracked the caked, white makeup on her cheeks and around her eyes. Dyed, green hair framed her features.

The apple’s candy coating glistened in the sunlight. Micah shook his head and slipped his hand out of Ella’s grasp.

“None for me,” he said.

The woman’s grin shrank before stretching far enough that Micah feared her face would split open. She shoved the apple closer to him, just under his nose and inches from his lips.

“Not even a taste?” she asked.

Ella reached up and snatched the candy apple.

“Mama says he can’t eat junk,” she said. “It’s supposed to help his condition.”

People crowded behind them, standing in line for the free candy apples. Micah tugged his sister off to the side, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.

“You aren’t supposed to tell people,” he said.

“No one would know anyway,” she said. “Without those goofy headphones of yours.”

He wiped the sweat from his brow. Carnival music blared in his ears, and his fingers tapped a certain rhythm against his hip, a steady one-two-three that always calmed him when the stimulus became unbearable. His mother had taken the headphones away for the day, claiming Micah needed to get out and socialize more. A retort died in his throat when Ella looked up at him with wide eyes, her mouth reddened by sucking at the candy.

“It’s so good,” she said.

One candy apple wouldn’t kill him. He turned back to the booth, only to find the line had grown in only a handful of seconds. The woman caught his eye, flashing her toothy grin, teeth thin like needles, long and glinting in the light—

He blinked, and shook his head. When he looked again, the woman had returned to serving customers. The grin she flashed revealed pearly, flat, human teeth.

Ella took huge, crunching bites out of her apple, covering her cheeks in the shards of candy. Micah wiped at her cheeks the way their mother always did, earning a scowl from the girl.

“We’ll let your stomach settle before you ride anything,” he said.

“You have to ride with me!” Ella said.

Stunned, Micah looked down at his sister. She appeared not to have noticed his surprise and spoke with a mouth full of candy.

“It’s no fun without you.”

Despite himself, a small smile crept over his face. Light danced off Ella’s curls like flickers of flame, and her wide green eyes softened at the sight of one of his rare, genuine smiles.

“You’ll regret it if we go now,” he said. “How about the hall of mirrors first? It’ll make us look funny.”

She snorted.

“You already look funny with those glasses,” she said.

He rolled his eyes and tugged her along. The savory, sweet aromas lingered in the air, tempting Micah with every inhale of breath. One booth featured funnel cakes, the fried dough sizzling in pans of oil. Another boasted fried pickles and tangy lemonade. Steam and smoke filled the air with a cornucopia of pleasant aromas.

Free candy apples waited for guests at every second or third booth, sticky and gleaming. Each time Micah attempted to grab one, Ella would tug him onward toward the center of the busy carnival. The entrance vanished from sight, buried behind countless booths and tents.

Large tents filled the center of the carnival, stretching toward the sky in an array of reds, yellows, and blues. Various tents caught Micah’s eye, but he’d promised a hall of mirrors. Surely the carnival had one somewhere.

Ella pointed at something, and Micah’s gaze followed. Bright red spray paint bled onto a wooden sign, declaring, “Tent of Mirrors.” Micah tugged Ella by the collar toward it. She followed him with the heavy steps of a child resisting, giggling and munching on her candy apple until nothing remained but a core on the stick. He brushed aside the flap of the tent so she could walk through, and he followed.

A maze of mirrors stretched on into darkness. Half of the tent’s lights were out, and the rest bathed the mirrors in a dull, yellow glow. Bare ground rested at their feet in place of a tent’s tarp. Ella tossed her stick onto the dirt, and as Micah leaned down to get it, she ran off into the maze.

“Catch me if you can!” she said.

He left the apple core where it fell, heart pounding in his chest. The moment he entered the maze, the giggles stopped. The footsteps fell silent. Row after row of mirrors reflected contortions of his body. One skinny, one fat. Another short, another tall. Something moved in the corner of his eye, and he spun around.

“Ella?” he asked.

No answer. The musty air of the tent pressed in on him, closing in until his chest heaved with each breath. He took off down one row, kicking up dust as his image blurred in the mirrors. A shadow flickered across them, running alongside him. She had to be just ahead of him. Just a few more steps.

Micah stopped to catch his breath, bending over with his hands on his knees as he sucked air into his aching chest. His body spent more hours in front of the computer, playing role-playing games with dragons and monsters than sprinting out on the track at school. Still, maybe he could’ve run a few more laps during physical education instead of faking sick and sneaking his handheld game console out of his locker on the way to the nurse’s office. Still, his father had always been more of a gamer, and Micah had found games to be the only way to connect with him and other people for a long time.

Micah sat on the ground, allowing a whimper to escape. His father wouldn’t have had any trouble with Ella. He always knew where to find her, how to catch up to her. Micah was not his father, no matter how much he wanted to be.

When their father died a year ago, Micah had tried to fill his shoes. The grief ate him, but not the way it ate Mother. Days passed without Mother making sandwiches for Ella’s lunch, and Micah made them. He went to Ella’s school plays, praised her when she made straight As on her report card. He taught her how to play video games, read to her every night.

Now, she was lost.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Here.”

The voice didn’t belong to Ella. Movement caught his eye, and he looked up into the mirror a few spaces before him. The figure casting the reflection remained hidden behind the next row, but the image showed a man with an elongated jaw swinging back and forth, his tongue stretched to an impossible length, brushing his chest. He waved a hand with black nails filed to appear like claws.

Micah rolled his eyes. Freaks and clowns may have been scary when he was five, a full decade ago. He was way too old for games and mirror tricks designed to scare him.

“Have you seen my sister?” he asked. “She’s only eight, so could you knock off the mirror act? She’ll never get any sleep like this. We thought this was a house of mirrors, not a haunted house.”

The man snickered, his reflection pointing further down the row.

“Take a left at the end of the row,” he said.

Micah didn’t bother to thank him. He hurried forward, glancing off to the side to see the real man where he stood. No one was there. Concern for Ella drove him on, leaving the mystery of the reflection to hover in the back of Micah’s mind like a gnat. A soft giggle rose from behind one row to the left. After one sharp left turn, Micah stood face-to-face with Ella once more.

“Shoot,” she said. “You found me.”

He grabbed her by the shoulder and steered her toward the exit. Dirt crusted the rear of her new white shorts from where she’d sat on the ground. Mother would ground him for weeks for letting Ella ruin her expensive clothes.

“Don’t leave my sight again,” he said.

“Or what?” Ella asked. Her eyes flashed with wicked delight.

Micah urged her on. They left the tent, only to find a large crowd drawing near. Ella pulled Micah along to follow the people. A man in a smart, tan suit stood on a platform with a curtain draped behind him, serving as a crimson background. His tall, thin body towered over the crowd, and Micah looked for heels or platform shoes or something that could give the man such an unnatural boost in height. The air around the man shimmered, and for a moment, Micah saw a patch of green, scaly flesh on the man’s cheek. In another instant, it was gone.

“Did you see that?” he asked. “His face was green, wasn’t it?”

Ella furrowed her brow and pursed her lips like Mother always did when Micah said something “strange.”

“You’re weird,” she said.

Micah’s chest throbbed in the familiar, dull ache of hurt. His eyes avoided her probing gaze. Thankfully, a hush fell over the crowd, and Ella turned from him as the man spoke.

“How about an old favorite?” he asked.

Micah’s gaze remained on the ground. Ella gasped beside him.

“It’s a dove!” she said.

He chanced a glance at the trick, only for the blood to drain from his face. A large insect perched on the man’s hand, mandibles opening and closing with an audible click. Its metallic body shimmered in various shades of purple and green, and its eyes bulged from two stalks on its head. As the crowd laughed and cheered, the insect tore a piece of green, scaly flesh from the magician’s hand and gulped it down. The magician’s crimson lips stretched into a wide smile as he gave a hearty laugh, showing off his blackened, needle-like teeth. His watery eyes bulged from their sockets, and a forked tongue flicked out from between his teeth to taste the air. Large wings reminiscent of the beetles Micah had collected as a child protruded from the man’s back.

In Micah’s panic, he took in the crowd’s laughter and cheering. No one saw what he saw. Everyone saw a lovely dove and a delightful, tall magician. He swallowed a scream as the man spoke again.

“Why don’t you go and greet our audience?” he asked.

The giant insect flew over to a woman nearest the stage, and she shrieked in delight as it landed on her shoulder. It leaned over and took a small chunk from her ear, and the crowd gasped, only to clap with glee. Blood dripped onto the woman’s light blue blouse. The insect crushed a gold earring in its shiny mandibles.

“It’s giving her kisses!” Ella said. “I want it to come to us!”

Micah pulled Ella away. He dragged her out of sight of the crowd and the monstrous magician, over by a trash can. His stomach cramped and churned as he gripped the edge of the can.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

He leaned over, vomiting into the trash can until nothing remained of the breakfast his mother had forced into him.

“What is your problem?” Ella asked.

“We need to go home,” he said.

The look of stern disapproval returned on her face.

“Micah Trevor Wilson,” she said. “Did you forget to take your medicine this morning? Are you having one of your episodes?”

Micah wracked his brain for the memory. Had he forgotten? There were so many to keep up with, and it was the day he filled his pill tray. Then again, when had he ever hallucinated before? That wasn’t one of the symptoms, unless he wanted to add schizophrenia to his growing list of diagnoses.

He took in Ella’s frown, her shimmering eyes on the verge of tears.

“You always do this,” she said. “You always act weird and make us leave places. Can’t we just have fun for once? Daddy never made us leave places early.”

He closed his eyes. The words stung, but he wouldn’t show that. Ella needed him to be strong. He had to escape the carnival without alerting the strange creatures. How many of them were monsters like the magician? The man in the mirror and the woman with needle-like teeth? He swallowed, though his scorched throat protested.

A quick glance around showed that their path became muddled by following the crowd. The tents appeared to all be the same, sprouted from the ground like giant mushrooms feasting on decay. The carnival workers lost their human disguises, and he tried not to stare too long at any one of them. Some had hair the color of violets, some had eyes black as the mouths of caves his father used to explore, and all had wings copying some form of insect—butterfly, beetle, dragonfly, and more. The grotesque forms weaved in and out of the crowds, delighting some with horrors Micah couldn’t begin to describe. Why couldn’t they see?

Few people noticed them standing near the trash can, but Micah knew that would soon change. They weren’t enjoying themselves, laughing and smiling like the other. A fake, awkward smile stretched his lips.

“Come on,” he said. “The wristbands last all day, and we can grab some protein bars for me to eat. I’m famished.”

“Then we can ride the Ferris wheel?” Ella asked.

“Of course,” he said.

She beamed and grasped his hand. They wandered through the crowd. Beads of sweat dripped down Micah’s forehead and burned his eyes as they avoided the creatures loafing about. None of them noticed the way his hands shook or the way his gaze darted from monster to monster. From time to time, they approached him with an offer of a candy apple, but he refused, claiming he’d already had his free one. After a half-hour of wandering with no luck, Micah turned to Ella.

“Okay,” he said. “We can ride the Ferris wheel. Maybe we can see the exit from up high.”

A squeal of delight pierced his ears as Ella dragged him over to the creature standing before the spinning wheel. Its body appeared female, human, but its head held bulging eyes and a proboscis in place of a mouth. Deep purrs of satisfaction rumbled in her throat as she pierced the neck of the patron. When she removed the proboscis, blood oozed out of the wound and dripped onto the man’s jacket. He blushed a deep red, rubbing at the place where the wound was and smearing blood all over his neck.

“Yuck,” Ella said.

Micah’s eyes widened, but the creature paid no attention to them.

“I hate when adults flirt,” Ella said. “They won’t kiss, will they?”

The man stumbled away as the Ferris wheel stopped, and the creature’s voice rang out despite her lack of a true mouth.

“Wristbands?” she asked.

Micah and Ella flashed their wristbands, and Micah slipped by the creature into one of the Ferris wheel’s seats. Ella bounced in the space next to him, rocking the seat. The wheel rotated, lifting them high into the air. At the very top, Micah dragged his gaze from Ella to the rest of the carnival to search for the exit.

The tents stretched on almost as far as the eye could see, but beyond that, there was darkness.

A chill gripped Micah. His fingers tightened on the bar, locking them into their seat, eyes bulging in their sockets. A laugh escaped him, bitter and hysterical. Ella laughed as well, joining in with a merry and beautiful smile. Micah laughed until tears ran down his face as the Ferris wheel lifted them a second time. Once again, the darkness waited for them at the edge of the carnival, and Micah’s gasping laughter turned to sobs.

The moment the ride ended, he grabbed Ella and took off down the center of the carnival. The creature in front of the Ferris wheel called after them, waving a candy apple in one clawed hand. Micah ran, urging Ella along. Adrenaline pumping through his veins pushed him farther and farther. Tents blurred all around them, and angry shouts rose when they bumped into patrons. Finally, they stopped.

Darkness loomed before them. Micah reached toward it, watching as his fingers disappeared in its inky depths. Void.

He dropped to his knees. Ella’s words left her between deep panting breaths.

“What is your problem?” Ella asked.

Footsteps approached them. A long shadow fell over Micah, vanishing into the void. Scaly, green hands reached out in front of Micah, holding two bright red candy apples.

“I think he’s just hungry,” the creature said.

The free candy apples. They were the cure to the insanity Micah teetered on the edge of. One bite, and it would be over. Micah gazed at the treat.

“You’re not leaving so soon, are you?” the creature asked.

The creature looked at Micah with expectant, knowing eyes.

“I’m sorry, Ella,” Micah said.

Micah’s breathy laughter escaped him, and he reached for the candy apple and took a bite.

End.

*~*~*

Keily Blair holds a BA in English: Creative Writing from UT Chattanooga, where her nonfiction won the Creative Nonfiction Award. Her fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies such as The Dread Machine, Trembling with Fear, Night to Dawn, Good Southern Witches, and is upcoming in Dream of Shadows and others. She is currently at work on a fantasy novel and an occult horror novella. You can find more details about her work at www.keilyblair.com. She lives with her husband, dog, cat, and four guinea pigs.

Sublime Architecture for the Proper Devotional Praise of Dagon

By Shenoa Carroll-Bradd

Originally printed in The Idolaters of Cthulhu: 2015

Being the odd one out is hard, especially when the group you’re excluded from is your own family. Family is supposed to be the one unbreakable bond, the unshakeable foundation. But, as I’m quickly learning in my studies under Master Architect Ramsey, foundations are not everything. Sometimes, the pillars that look the strongest can bear the least weight. He’s teaching me that strength comes from many different parts of a design, and that there are invisible supports in every room and, as I suspect, in every heart.

This was important to keep in mind as I watched my family change over the last year. Before the great and terrible water god took up residence in our harbor, my family was nice, normal...and honestly, sort of boring. But the good kind of boring, where no one ever disappeared or died unexpectedly, or started growing gills and leaving wet patches on the furniture.

My mother used to pester me with questions about my architectural studies, which I often found annoying. Now, she only asked if I was sure all the time I’d spent in class wouldn’t be better served by attending their nightly devotions.

I kept telling her I couldn’t, that I had too much homework to do, but that wasn’t always true. I hated to see the look of disappointment in her increasingly bulbous eyes as she, my father, and little sister, Abby, donned their hooded robes and walked to the cliffside temple.

I went along once, just to see what all the fuss was about, and in the hopes my mom would finally stop asking. As we approached the cliff, dozens of hooded figures left their homes, as well, all headed in the same direction. Focused as I’d been on my studies, I hadn’t realized the whole town were now followers of He Who Moves the Tide. Just what I needed, another reason to feel like a stranger in my own village. No one spoke, but our shuffling footsteps echoed in waves as we entered the temple.

Well, temple was a bit too grand a word for it. The meeting place was more like a deep cavern, carved out of the rock by wind, waves, and time. Pools of standing water pocked the floor, and crusty salt deposits made everything sharp to the touch. We all had to crowd together to listen to the priest, who stood in almost total darkness toward the back of the cave. His words battled to reach us over the chorus of pounding surf below. Those around me leaned forward, concentrating, straining to hear.

I don’t remember much of what he said, something about dwellers in the deep and ancient things biding their time, waiting for the right epoch to rise. I nodded along and murmured agreement whenever the crowd spoke as one, answering the call-and-response cadence of the priest’s sermon. Most of my focus was spent inspecting the cavern floor and walls, and the low, jagged roof overhead. My mind squirmed with the possibilities, the sheer untapped potential of all that as-yet-unworked stone. I found myself smiling, giddy with anticipation. A little hand squeezed mine. I looked down to see Abby smiling back at me. I patted her hooded head.

This could work. I might not be able to offer my love and blind devotion to Dagon, as everyone else had, but I could be a part of their faith and serve in my own way.

Toward the end of his sermon, the priest called for any newcomers to step forth and be welcomed into the briny arms of the congregation. I didn’t hesitate. I accepted my hooded robe, sipped politely from the holy goblet of sea foam, and was declared one of the deeply blessed.

My parents beamed, and my mother even cried, wiping her eyes before licking her fingertips clean.

After the service concluded, I approached the priest and told him of my wishes, laying out how precisely I intended to honor Dagon. At first, I feared he would be offended by my presumption, as I’d only been a member of the faith for twenty minutes. But he seemed genuinely pleased by my initiative and gave my plans his blessing.

I left the architectural college and instead devoted my days to carving, chiseling, and planing the open cavern of the temple, then stayed to attend the services at night before returning home with my family. My hands blistered, then calloused over, but I think I did my finest work in those months. I leveled out the floor and incorporated flowing rivers and the essences of waves, so that the sea water that found its way up into our temple could follow the carved channels back out. I shaped the walls to better carry the priest’s words to the ever-expanding audience of devoted, and worked the ceiling with scenes and shapes described in the sermons, filling the space above our heads with Dagon’s inescapable presence.

Once I finished my work on the temple’s main room, the priest showed me several narrow tunnels branching out from the back of the cavern, where only he had been allowed before. I was flattered that he would show them to me, and knew my parents would be proud to learn of my rise in the temple. I began work on transforming the tunnels as I had the meeting room, incorporating drains and runnels into the floors to prevent puddling and stagnation from the general moistness of the devoted.

The longer my family attended the nightly services, the paler they grew, and the more their eyes bulged. I remained the same, physically, at least, while they and most of the village began to take on characteristics of the creatures who were blessed enough to share the deep ocean with Dagon. Delicate webs began to grow between my parents’ fingers, and a shadowy arc appeared on Abby’s thin neck, something I feared might be the precursor to gills.

I divulged this to no one, but I never truly devoted myself to He Who Waits Beneath the Waves. The time I spent in the temple and the efforts I put forth in his name were all actually for my family. I did it for them, to make them proud, so that we could finally have something to share again, some activity in which we could all partake.

As I worked deeper and deeper in the tunnels, I began to hear an occasional voice rumbling up through my feet from some underground sea. The words never coalesced into something I could understand, but I felt power in them, and that’s where I believe the nameless priest received his sermons.

As the temple expanded and became better suited to deliver the word, larger waves of devoted began attending, arriving from outlying villages to join our congregation. The sermons changed as our numbers grew, putting more emphasis on personal sacrifice, and how nothing we owned or loved truly belonged to us, but was a privilege extended by our watery lord.

I was blessed to work on chambers along the halls. Some seemed simple, meant for storage, or perhaps as bunks for the devoted who traveled long distances to join us, and for the most part I was allowed to realize my own designs. But the last chamber was dictated to me by the priest, with instructions that came directly from below. This room was designed with deep drains in the floor that lined up with natural fissures leading down to the ocean, and a large stone altar set in the middle. I did my best with it, pouring my love for my family through my hands and into the stone, but as I carved and shaped, I couldn’t fight the terrible dread that rose like a fresh tide. I could not think of a scenario in which this room would be used for anything wholesome or good.

With hope and luck and a dash of naivete, I prayed to Dagon that it was meant as a birthing room. The expectant mother might recline along the stone table and bring her child into the world, directly into the congregations’ arms, and the drains would allow for easy and convenient clean up.

Not long after the altar’s completion, the blacksmith of our village was selected for a great honor. He was chosen to meet Dagon and become a direct servant of his, an honor so great most of us could not believe his luck. The priest led him back into the tunnels for his reward, and we returned to our village to celebrate his choosing and wish each other such fortunes in the future.

After that, the forge remained dark, silent, and cold.

The next chosen was an old baker, and then a mother of four, and then it was my father’s turn for the honor. We all wept and drank our own tears, and my last glimpse of him remains clear in my mind. He was so happy, so proud, his fish-belly white face nearly glowed with joy at being selected.

As I tucked Abby into her perpetually damp bed that night, she squeezed my hand with her tiny, freshly webbed fingers. “I’m gonna be picked next,” she declared with an eager grin. “I just know I am. ‘Cause I love Dagon thiiiis much!” She spread her stubby white arms as far as they would go.

I kissed her slippery forehead and said goodnight.

A week after my father was chosen, I hovered in the temple’s entryway, trying to work up the nerve to ask the priest about the odds of Dagon calling for my sister to join him next. She was small and easily distracted, after all. Weak, prone to tantrums. Hardly good servant material for a great sunken god.

We were all gathering for the evening service when a group of strangers rode into town. A shrill call sounded from the ocean below, and the devoted funneled away into the tunnels like rats. All except for me, who could not understand the keening. I lost track of my mother and Abby, and soon found myself left unarmed and alone to face the intruders. After my months of work, my slavish devotion, still I was abandoned.

The strangers appeared in the mouth of our temple cave, dishonoring it with their heavy armor and naked weapons. The largest one bore an ax, and he grabbed me by the front of my robe.

“Where is your priest?” he growled.

I am good with my hands, but not with my tongue. I’ve never been a skilled or speedy liar. I gestured behind me and squeaked out, “Through the tunnels. Probably in the altar room, at the very end.”

“Any traps between here and there?”

I shook my head numbly. Why would I design traps for my own people? My work was meant to improve their lives and ease their worship.

He grunted and then shook me. “Good. Get out of here.” He released my robes and shoved me backwards.

I stumbled into the wall, clutching at the grooves of my own carvings in order to stay upright. “Please,” I panted. “Don’t hurt them. Dagon’s followers are good people. My people. They’re all here in the temple, as well.”

The intruders glared.

I hurried on. “They’re not bad, just misguided. They’ve had nothing to hang their hopes upon for too long. My sister and mother are among them. Please, show mercy.”

The big man with the ax, if not the leader of the band then certainly the loudest, stood up straighter and put on what I suspect was meant to be his noblest expression.

“The blight of this little cult must be purged, but we are not monsters. No harm will come to anyone who surrenders or stays out of our way.”

My hope sank. I’d seen the feverish light of devotion in the eyes of the followers, and witnessed their rapt attention when the priest delivered his sermons. They would not stand down once the threat to the temple became clear.

The band began to move past me, toward the tunnels I had fashioned with my own hands. Before they disappeared, the one at the end who clutched a heavy mace turned back to scowl at me. “No funny business from you, understood? Don’t set off any alarms or try to follow us in.”

I raised my hands and shook my head.

The stocky man narrowed his eyes and held my gaze for a moment, as if trying to peer into my brain to detect any falsehood. Finally, he seemed satisfied I wouldn’t intervene and disappeared into the tunnels with his fellows.

I let out a long, shaky breath and dropped my hands. “Don’t fight them, Abby,” I whispered into the carved cavern. “Find a niche to duck into. Be a good girl and hide.” Thank Dagon I had designed the hallways with cutouts and alcoves, all the perfect size to shield a small girl.

Screams, shouts, and the unmistakable sounds of fighting echoed up to me. I heard approaching footsteps, then the twang of a bowstring, and the sudden thump of a body hitting stone. A pale, web-fingered hand flopped into view around the tunnel corner.

I watched, transfixed, as a turgid flow of blood seeped from the fallen worshiper. My carefully carved runnels caught the offering and diverted it away to a waiting drain, just as designed. The horrible clamor of battle continued, but I couldn’t make my feet move. I just stood there, staring at the draining blood.

I wish my father could have seen the completion of my work, and how well my efforts served the devoted, even to their very ends.

By Dagon, I think he would have been proud.

End.

*~*~*

Shenoa Carroll-Bradd writes fantasy and horror from her home in southern California. Her short fiction has appeared in more than three dozen anthologies and been produced for audio on several fiction podcasts. She makes some killer vegan bacon and has been learning German in order to sing along with her favorite bands.

For updates on new projects, visit facebook.com/sbcbfiction. For free fiction, information on previous publications, and links to live readings, visit sbcbfiction.net.

The Secret of Kralitz

By Henry Kuttner

Originally published in Weird Tales October 1936

I awoke from profound sleep to find two black-swathed forms standing silently beside me, their faces pale blurs in the gloom. As I blinked to clear my sleep-dimmed eyes, one of them beckoned impatiently, and suddenly I realized the purpose of this midnight summons. For years I had been expecting it, ever since my father, the Baron Kralitz, had revealed to me the secret and the curse that hung over our ancient house. And so, without a word, I rose and followed my guides as they led me along the gloomy corridors of the castle that had been my home since birth.

As I proceeded there rose up in my mind the stern face of my father, and in my ears rang his solemn words as he told me of the legendary curse of the House of Kralitz, the unknown secret that was imparted to the eldest son of each generation—at a certain time.

“When?” I had asked my father as he lay on his death-bed, fighting back the approach of dissolution.

“When you are able to understand,” he had told me, watching my face intently from beneath his tufted white brows. “Some are told the secret sooner than others. Since the first Baron Kralitz the secret has been handed down——”

He clutched at his breast and paused. It was fully five minutes before he had gathered his strength to speak again in his rolling, powerful voice. No gasping, death-bed confessions for the Baron Kralitz!

He said at last, “You have seen the ruins of the old monastery near the village, Franz. The first Baron burnt it and put the monks to the sword. The Abbot interfered too often with the Baron’s whims. A girl sought shelter and the Abbot refused to give her up at the Baron’s demand. His patience was at an end—you know the tales they still tell about him.

“He slew the Abbot, burned the monastery, and took the girl. Before he died the Abbot cursed his slayer, and cursed his sons for unborn generations. And it is the nature of this curse that is the secret of our house.

“I may not tell you what the curse is. Do not seek to discover it before it is revealed to you. Wait patiently, and in due time you will be taken by the warders of the secret down the stairway to the underground cavern. And then you will learn the secret of Kralitz.”

As the last word passed my father’s lips he died, his stern face still set in its harsh lines.

*~*~*

Deep in my memories, I had not noticed our path, but now the dark forms of my guides paused beside a gap in the stone flagging, where a stairway which I had never seen during my wanderings about the castle led into subterranean depths. Down this stairway I was conducted, and presently I came to realize that there was light of a sort—a dim, phosphorescent radiance that came from no recognizable source, and seemed to be less actual light than the accustoming of my eyes to the near-darkness.

I went down for a long time. The stairway turned and twisted in the rock, and the bobbing forms ahead were my only relief from the monotony of the interminable descent. And at last, deep underground, the long stairway ended, and I gazed over the shoulders of my guides at the great door that barred my path. It was roughly chiseled from the solid stone, and upon it were curious and strangely disquieting carvings, symbols which I did not recognize. It swung open, and I passed through and paused, staring about me through a gray sea of mist.

I stood upon a gentle slope that fell away into the fog-hidden distance, from which came a pandemonium of muffled bellowing and high-pitched, shrill squeakings vaguely akin to obscene laughter. Dark, half-glimpsed shapes swam into sight through the haze and disappeared again, and great vague shadows swept overhead on silent wings. Almost beside me was a long rectangular table of stone, and at this table two score of men were seated, watching me from eyes that gleamed dully out of deep sockets. My two guides silently took their places among them.

And suddenly the thick fog began to lift. It was swept raggedly away on the breath of a chill wind. The far dim reaches of the cavern were revealed as the mist swiftly dissipated, and I stood silent in the grip of a mighty fear, and, strangely, an equally potent, unaccountable thrill of delight. A part of my mind seemed to ask, “What horror is this?” And another part whispered, “You know this place!”

But I could never have seen it before. If I had realized what lay far beneath the castle I could never have slept at night for the fear that would have obsessed me. For, standing silent with conflicting tides of horror and ecstasy racing through me, I saw the weird inhabitants of the underground world.

Demons, monsters, unnamable things! Nightmare colossi strode bellowing through the murk, and amorphous gray things like giant slugs walked upright on stumpy legs. Creatures of shapeless soft pulp, beings with flame-shot eyes scattered over their misshapen bodies like fabled Argus, writhed and twisted there in the evil glow. Winged things that were not bats swooped and fluttered in the tenebrous air, whispering sibilantly—whispering in human voices.

Far away at the bottom of the slope I could see the chill gleam of water, a hidden, sunless sea. Shapes mercifully almost hidden by distance and the semi-darkness sported and cried, troubling the surface of the lake, the size of which I could only conjecture. And a flapping thing whose leathery wings stretched like a tent above my head swooped and hovered for a moment, staring with flaming eyes, and then darted off and was lost in the gloom.

And all the while, as I shuddered with fear and loathing, within me was this evil glee—this voice which whispered, “You know this place! You belong here! Is it not good to be home?”

I glanced behind me. The great door had swung silently shut, and escape was impossible. And then pride came to my aid. I was a Kralitz. And a Kralitz would not acknowledge fear in the face of the devil himself!

*~*~*

I stepped forward and confronted the warders, who were still seated regarding me intently from eyes in which a smoldering fire seemed to burn. Fighting down an insane dread that I might find before me an array of fleshless skeletons, I stepped to the head of the table, where there was a sort of crude throne, and peered closely at the silent figure on my right.

It was no bare skull at which I gazed, but a bearded, deadly-pale face. The curved, voluptuous lips were crimson, looking almost rouged, and the dull eyes stared through me bleakly. Inhuman agony had etched itself in deep lines on the white face, and gnawing anguish smoldered in the sunken eyes. I cannot hope to convey the utter strangeness, the atmosphere of unearthliness that surrounded him, almost as palpable as the fetid tomb-stench that welled from his dark garments. He waved a black-swathed arm to the vacant seat at the head of the table, and I sat down.

This nightmare sense of unreality! I seemed to be in a dream, with a hidden part of my mind slowly waking from sleep into evil life to take command of my faculties. The table was set with old-fashioned goblets and trenchers such as had not been used for hundreds of years. There was meat on the trenchers, and red liquor in the jeweled goblets. A heady, overpowering fragrance swam up into my nostrils, mixed with the grave-smell of my companions and the musty odor of a dank and sunless place.

Every white face was turned to me, faces that seemed oddly familiar, although I did not know why. Each face was alike in its blood-red, sensual lips and its expression of gnawing agony, and burning black eyes like the abysmal pits of Tartarus stared at me until I felt the short hairs stir on my neck. But—I was a Kralitz! I stood up and said boldly in archaic German that somehow came familiarly from my lips, “I am Franz, twenty-first Baron Kralitz. What do you want with me?”

A murmur of approval went around the long table. There was a stir. From the foot of the board a huge bearded man arose, a man with a frightful scar that made the left side of his face a horror of healed white tissue. Again the odd thrill of familiarity ran through me; I had seen that face before, and vaguely I remembered looking at it through dim twilight.

The man spoke in the old guttural German. “We greet you, Franz, Baron Kralitz. We greet you and pledge you, Franz—and we pledge the House of Kralitz!”

With that he caught up the goblet before him and held it high. All along the long table the black-swathed ones arose, and each held high his jeweled cup, and pledged me. They drank deeply, savoring the liquor, and I made the bow custom demanded. I said, in words that sprang almost unbidden from my mouth:

“I greet you, who are the warders of the secret of Kralitz, and I pledge you in return.”

All about me, to the farthermost reaches of the dim cavern, a hush fell, and the bellows and howlings, and the insane tittering of the flying things, were no longer heard. My companions leaned expectantly toward me. Standing alone at the head of the board, I raised my goblet and drank. The liquor was heady, exhilarating, with a faintly brackish flavor.

And abruptly I knew why the pain-racked, ruined face of my companion had seemed familiar; I had seen it often among the portraits of my ancestors, the frowning, disfigured visage of the founder of the House of Kralitz that glared down from the gloom of the great hall. In that fierce white light of revelation I knew my companions for what they were; I recognized them, one by one, remembering their canvas counterparts. But there was a change! Like an impalpable veil, the stamp of ineradicable evil lay on the tortured faces of my hosts, strangely altering their features, so that I could not always be sure I recognized them. One pale, sardonic face reminded me of my father, but I could not be sure, so monstrously altered was its expression.

I was dining with my ancestors—the House of Kralitz!

My cup was still held high, and I drained it, for somehow the grim revelation was not entirely unexpected. A strange glow thrilled through my veins, and I laughed aloud for the evil delight that was in me. The others laughed too, a deep-throated merriment like the barking of wolves—tortured laughter from men stretched on the rack, mad laughter in hell! And all through the hazy cavern came the clamor of the devil’s brood! Great figures that towered many spans high rocked with thundering glee, and the flying things tittered slyly overhead. And out over the vast expanse swept the wave of frightful mirth, until the half-seen things in the black waters sent out bellows that tore at my eardrums, and the unseen roof far overhead sent back roaring echoes of the clamor.

And I laughed with them, laughed insanely, until I dropped exhausted into my seat and watched the scarred man at the other end of the table as he spoke.

“You are worthy to be of our company, and worthy to eat at the same board. We have pledged each other, and you are one of us; we shall eat together.”

And we fell to, tearing like hungry beasts at the succulent white meat in the jeweled trenchers. Strange monsters served us, and at a chill touch on my arm I turned to find a dreadful crimson thing, like a skinned child, refilling my goblet. Strange, strange and utterly blasphemous was our feast. We shouted and laughed and fed there in the hazy light, while all around us thundered the evil horde. There was hell beneath Castle Kralitz, and it held high carnival this night.

*~*~*

Presently we sang a fierce drinking-song, swinging the deep cups back and forth in rhythm with our shouted chant. It was an archaic song, but the obsolete words were no handicap, for I mouthed them as though they had been learned at my mother’s knee. And at the thought of my mother a trembling and a weakness ran through me abruptly, but I banished it with a draft of the heady liquor.

Long, long we shouted and sang and caroused there in the great cavern, and after a time we arose together and trooped to where a narrow, high-arched bridge spanned the tenebrous waters of the lake. But I may not speak of what was at the other end of the bridge, nor of the unnamable things that I saw—and did! I learned of the fungoid, inhuman beings that dwell on far cold Yuggoth, of the cyclopean shapes that attend unsleeping Cthulhu in his submarine city, of the strange pleasures that the followers of leprous, subterranean Yog-Sothoth may possess, and I learned, too, of the unbelievable manner in which Iod, the Source, is worshipped beyond the outer galaxies. I plumbed the blackest pits of hell and came back—laughing. I was one with the rest of those dark warders, and I joined them in the saturnalia of horror until the scarred man spoke to us again.

“Our time grows short,” he said, his scarred and bearded white face like a gargoyle’s in the half-light. “We must depart soon. But you are a true Kralitz, Franz, and we shall meet again, and feast again, and make merry for longer than you think. One last pledge!”

I gave it to him. “To the House of Kralitz! May it never fall!”

And with an exultant shout we drained the pungent dregs of the liquor.

Then a strange lassitude fell upon me. With the others I turned my back on the cavern and the shapes that pranced and bellowed and crawled there, and I went up through the carved stone portal. We filed up the stairs, up and up, endlessly, until at last we emerged through the gaping hole in the stone flags and proceeded, a dark, silent company, back through those interminable corridors. The surroundings began to grow strangely familiar, and suddenly I recognized them.

We were in the great burial vaults below the castle, where the Barons Kralitz were ceremoniously entombed. Each Baron had been placed in his stone casket in his separate chamber, and each chamber lay, like beads on a necklace, adjacent to the next, so that we proceeded from the farthermost tombs of the early Barons Kralitz toward the unoccupied vaults. By immemorial custom, each tomb lay bare, an empty mausoleum, until the time had come for its use, when the great stone coffin, with the memorial inscription carved upon it, would be carried to its place. It was fitting, indeed, for the secret of Kralitz to be hidden here.

Abruptly I realized that I was alone, save for the bearded man with the disfiguring scar. The others had vanished, and, deep in my thoughts, I had not missed them. My companion stretched out his black-swathed arm and halted my progress, and I turned to him questioningly. He said in his sonorous voice, “I must leave you now. I must go back to my own place.” And he pointed to the way whence we had come.

I nodded, for I had already recognized my companions for what they were. I knew that each Baron Kralitz had been laid in his tomb, only to arise as a monstrous thing neither dead nor alive, to descend into the cavern below and take part in the evil saturnalia. I realized, too, that with the approach of dawn they had returned to their stone coffins, to lie in a death-like trance until the setting sun should bring brief liberation. My own occult studies had enabled me to recognize these dreadful manifestations.

I bowed to my companion and would have proceeded on my way to the upper parts of the castle, but he barred my path. He shook his head slowly, his scar hideous in the phosphorescent gloom.

I said, “May I not go yet?”

He stared at me with tortured, smoldering eyes that had looked into hell itself, and he pointed to what lay beside me, and in a flash of nightmare realization I knew the secret of the curse of Kralitz. There came to me the knowledge that made my brain a frightful thing in which shapes of darkness would ever swirl and scream; the dreadful comprehension of when each Baron Kralitz was initiated into the brotherhood of blood. I knew—I knew—that no coffin had ever been placed unoccupied in the tombs, and I read upon the stone sarcophagus at my feet the inscription that made my doom known to me—my own name, “Franz, twenty-first Baron Kralitz.”

End.

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