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Cover Art: Illustrator fcomin

The Sixth Guardian: Maxwell Marais

The Green: Desmond Rhae Harris

Cosmic Horror Monthly

www.cosmichorrormonthly.com

Greetings Dear Reader,

In November 1919 the H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dagon” was published in The Vagrant before going on to appear in Weird Tales four years later. That story is largely responsible for my love of and fascination with cosmic horror. November is also National Novel Writing Month. Storytelling is one of the oldest pastimes and the one of the very few that are sure to last until existence is finally snuffed out by the awakening of the blind idiot god himself. I hate to think of where we would be without all of the writers that submit to us every year. This month, I raise my glass (of Château d’Issan) to you! May your word counts this month be limited only by the amount of ink in your pens!

This month’s lineup is a special one, featuring a Best Horror of the Year Vol. 10 (ed. Datlow) selection in “Fail-Safe” by Philip Fracassi and an exclusive interview with the unique and insightful Gemma Files. We head out to sea with a haunting tale called “Beyond the Blue Veil.” Then, we’ll dive into two works of Lovecraftian cosmic horror with “The Sixth Guardian” and “Creydamoc.” Things get weird when a fungus takes over in “The Green” before we learn the consequences of faster than light travel in “Reverse Engineering.” At last, we’ll journey deep below the surface for an original weird tale called “Beneath the Forest” then continue down to the crypt for a classic and personal favorite of mine: “The Diary of Philip Westerly.”

Enjoy.

***

Welcome to Cosmic Horror Monthly

A monthly tome of terrifying tales, lovecraftian, cosmic, and weird.

Beyond the Blue Veil

By Kurt Newton

The faces of the men, whom I’ve come to recognize from the months spent on this voyage, began to reshape themselves.

17th March 1886

The HMS Windborne has been adrift for three days now. The storm that blew us off course and into this God-forsaken latitude and damaged our ship was like none I’d ever witnessed. Its formation was imbued with an almost demonic character, as if a great puppeteer were manipulating the elements of sky and water, and we were merely play-toys for its amusement.

I must admit now that some of the things I saw at the height of the gale were indeed true manifestations and not simply the phantasms of an overworked mind or the blurring of my vision from the pelting rain and the stinging of the ocean spray. Things I dare not mention in this log for fear of future recriminations against the state of my sanity.

I have yet to speak openly about this with the men, but I can see it on their faces - as they sit in silence, their bodies still fatigued from the battle that nearly sank us to the bottom - that, they too, bore witness to things they choose not to speak of, and like myself, are trying to stave off the thought that something is not quite right; that what began with a strange blue apparition rising above the ocean waves, a seemingly harmless veil of swirling mist like a maelstrom turned on its side - a maelstrom that ultimately pulled our ship like a magnet into the belly of the storm waiting on the other side - was but the tip of an even stranger set of circumstances yet to come.

18th March 1886

“Land ho!” Our prayers have been answered. Our barrelman has spied an island thirty degrees to our south. A gentle wind has also returned and we now steer in the direction of the lone green speck in the distance.

The crew’s spirits have lifted, buoyed by the prospect of fresh food and water. They are in desperate need of rest and relaxation. May God grant us these amenities and welcome us back into his good graces.

19th March 1886

This is going to be a lengthy entry, so bear with me while I detail the events of the last twenty-four hours.

As mentioned in my previous and rather optimistic log notes, we had come upon land, a small island in the vast ocean blue. As the HMS Windborne drew near, it had become apparent that the island was unspoiled by man’s touch, as virginal as any crew could hope to find. Such ominous beauty yawned before us, a verdant landscape as lush and long as any coastal neck. We circled round in search of a spot on which to land our skiffs. At last, we dropped anchor, having found the most pristine of beach heads with sand the color of pink quartz that sparkled like diamonds in the noonday sun. Before the first of the crew departed, I gathered the men and thanked God for the bounty about to be bestowed upon us.

A celebratory playfulness imbued the men as they rowed ashore. Protocol demanded I remain aboard ship with the Quartermaster and Navigator. And it was divine providence that I had. For no sooner had the men dragged the skiffs into shallow water, they were met by a tribe of naked creatures that could only be described as hominid-like. Flat heads with brutish features, long muscular arms - they were more apish than human. Yet they were waving frantically.

At first, it appeared the natives were on the offensive, a race of primitives defending their land, but their actions were to the contrary. Their grunts and gestures, although a meaningless jumble, did not impart a predilection toward violence. Their warnings appeared anguished and sincere, as if the island held a danger not readily seen.

I watched the events unfold through my spyglass and made the decision to call the men back. The Quartermaster rang the ship’s bell. The skiffs were boarded and the men reluctantly returned, but half the men remained on the island. The ones who’d returned had made the correct decision, because a series of unbelievable events quickly unfolded.

The men who had stayed behind began to exhibit the traits of the natives, as if caught in some hypnotic spell. The men began to grunt and drool, their arms hanging low, and their statures bent as if by physical pressure from within. The fear and confusion on their faces was heart rending. I speculated it was a pox of an unknown kind, airborne perhaps, that infected the weakest of the men and brought about their swift regressive symptoms. Unbelievably, however, the sickness was not isolated to changing the men’s behavior; there were physical changes as well. The faces of the men, whom I’ve come to recognize from the months spent on this voyage, began to reshape themselves. Their heads began to flatten, their features became thick and pudgy like bare-knuckle fighters, and their arms grew noticeably more muscular. All of this occurred in a matter of minutes. If I hadn’t witnessed it with my eyes, I would have not believed such an illness existed, an illness that could change the very shape of a man.

Which led my thoughts to the most wild of speculations: what if the natives on the island were once men such as us? Perhaps they had experienced a similar fate? Who were they and where had they come from? These were questions, perhaps, to which we will never find the truth. Thankfully, only half our crew was affected. The two skiffs and their men were pulled aboard and we set sail immediately, leaving the island behind to those who were now its caretakers.

Among the crew, my decision to leave was not a popular one. The grumblings grew louder the more water we put between our ship and the island. Add the strain of fatigue and hunger and it was a perfect storm for mutiny. I commanded the Quartermaster to secure the firearms and alcohol. It was an uneasy time, but there were enough chores and duties for the now limited deck hands to perform to keep their minds off commandeering the ship. Come nightfall, however, mutiny became the least of my concerns.

One of the men, the ship’s cook, who went by the name of Burgess, began to exhibit the same symptoms witnessed on the island. What was believed at first to be an overboiling of mood and temper - a disagreement among crewmates often attributed to blowing off steam - had escalated with the dawning realization that the same disease that had forced us to strand half our crew on some God-forsaken island had followed us on board, stowing away in the bodies of the men who had escaped.

A level head was needed as panic among the crew quickly spread. When a second crew member began to exhibit the same peculiar behaviors, an Us versus Them mentality inevitably surfaced. While the numbers were in their favor, the remaining crew quarantined the two below deck. Some chose not to touch the infected, using their swords as buffers. Some even suggested the infected were a threat and needed to be sacrificed to the sea for the well-being of the rest. As Captain, I reminded the men of our duty to both God and our good conscience. My belief was that the infection, however transmitted would somehow be negated once we returned to the very same place that initiated these strange events that had befallen us. The blue veil, I began to refer to it; that unusual phenomenon that sucked us into a storm and into this unpredictable realm. We must return to the very spot and, hopefully, reverse whatever was happening to the crew. I pointed to the night sky to make my case.

As discussed previously, after breaching the blue veil, it was noticed by our navigator that the configuration of the stars was the same but their alignment was off, and only now was I able to put forth the reason why. Star fields shift over time, and if my navigator’s calculations were correct, we were in a time that precursed civilized man. Perhaps our presence here had rebirthed the ancient primitive in every man that civilization and civilized behavior buries deep.

The crew, though scared, took my theory to heart, and with renewed vigor, steered our vessel back the way we had come. It was now a race against time. And though I liked to believe that faith mattered in times of trial and tribulation, I suspected our situation would get much worse before it got better.

Thankfully, the seas were kind, the salt air a pleasant reminder as to why we became sailors in the first place. There is none such peace to be found than the steady rise and fall of ocean waves. With morning’s arrival came a remarkable vision upon the horizon ahead: the blue veil we had previously encountered in what seemed like eons ago but was a mere five days prior.

But, as fate would have it, the crew’s time had run short. The changes experienced by the two crewmen in the ship’s cargo hold was now spreading throughout the remaining men - even the two men who had stayed with me on the ship as we sat anchored outside the reef watching the events on the island unfold. The men’s regression spawned behaviors only fear and uncertainty can manifest. Fights broke out over the limited food and water. The more naturally aggressive members of the crew intimidated the weaker members into submission with threats of violence. But among the strongest, the Quartermaster included, the scuffles were more than mere territorial posturing. Blood was spilled and a deckhand was brutally beaten, his life extinguished in a fight for dominance and leadership. The ship’s crew had become a tribe, much like the tribe on the island we had stumbled upon.

While the men’s attentions were focused on their savage initiations, I had secured the ship’s wheel on a course heading straight toward the center of the blue veil. As I was the last of the crew to remain unchanged, I then locked myself in my cabin in the hopes that all of this madness would subside once the blue veil had been pierced.

20th March 1886

And here I sit, while a storm tosses the HMS Windborne from side to side and buries her in wave after monstrous wave, a captive on my own ship. Not to mention the hideous apparitions and ghostly creatures that have returned to haunt us, true monsters of the deep that have come to feast on the souls of seafaring men who dare to pierce the blue veil only to drown in the horrors of the unknown. And it appears what remains of the crew of the HMS Windborne will soon join them.

The men outside my door have no interest it seems in keeping the Windborne from capsizing. Perhaps the knowledge they once possessed has disappeared along with their humanity. But above the din, I hear not their angry tones of aggression but what sound like cries of desperation - a mewling like that of blind, helpless pups after their mother has slipped away - as if beseeching me to be the captain that I am and take control of our floundering vessel.

Unfortunately, the light from my oil lamp has revealed to me something more disheartening than the fate of the Windborne. My hands have begun to grow thick and unwieldy, my arms have become heavy as lead. I can feel my face changing, my forehead pressing down, my lower jaw protruding. Even my lips, teeth and tongue are reshaping, reforming, returning to their ancestral origin. As the last to remain unchanged I believed I was immune. I believed God had reserved a special place for me as this voyage’s one saving grace. But no. Perhaps there is no God and we are all at the peril of our circumstances, and our one true purpose, above all, is to simply survive what nature rains down upon us.

In the hopes that my penmanship will still be legible, I write these last few lines in haste. I speculate that even if we successfully pierced the blue veil and returned to a civilized time, could the damage be undone? That said, even if we managed to return to our former selves, after what has been revealed would we be able to live with this knowledge of who we truly are inside?

My mind is now made. Whether by the fading intellectual in me or the brute I am about to become, the choice appears simple: a change of course is the only way forward.

In a moment I will unlock my cabin door, the last few pages of this ship’s log torn from its binding, rolled and stuffed into a rum bottle and sealed with wax. I hope to toss this last testament into the blue veil in the hopes that it will be found on the other side and serve as a warning to others who may venture near.

I trust my men, however impaired, will recognize that I am still their captain, one whose primitive heart carries the same blood as our ancestors; one who now feels the same tug and pull of the island, like a whisper of fate luring us to a new dawn. Or, perhaps, a very old one.

I trust the captain in me will serve me well as I endeavor to right this ship and shepherd us safely home.

End.

***

Kurt Newton’s weird fiction and poetry have appeared in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Weird Tales, Weirdbook, Vastarien, Nightscript, Spectral Realms and Lovecraftian Micro Fiction, Vol. 6.

Fail-Safe

By Philip Fracassi

...her eyes bulbous, her muscles doubling in size, squeezing into the restraints. She screamed at the pain, pure fury. She thrashed and kicked wildly.

The door was thick. The room, well-made. He knew. He’d seen. Every step.

He never heard his mother screaming in the night. He knew she was, it was obvious. He’d seen her with the cameras. Father had made him watch when he was young. Father had worried he didn’t fully understand. Fully believe.

But he did.

When it was over, and his mother returned, those were his favorite times. His and hers both, he imagined. She was never happier than after. She would hold him and squeeze him tight, and he’d laugh and she’d pepper his cheek, neck and forehead with kisses.

Father would stand by, watching, smiling, looking haggard and wistful. After giving them time, he would join as well, hugging them both. Kissing them both greedily.

He loved his parents. Loved them dearly.

Deep down he worried, secretly, that he would wake up one morning and find himself alone. That the room would take them from him. He was only a boy still, sure, only twelve. But growing. Learning.

When father had first built the room he had watched. Had helped, even. In those days, mother had been held elsewhere. By men he did not know. By friends. But she always returned, happy and healthy and hugging and kissing, just like now. He liked it better now. Liked her being home, with he and father.

The room was not large, but it was well-built. It had many fail-safes. Father explained these as he built them into the room’s design. There were the walls. Steel. Thick, slick, impenetrable from the inside. The door also steel. One foot thick of it. Handleless. Released by internal bolts hidden behind the steel-plated walls.

The restraints were particularly impressive.

Crafted to hold, but not hurt. That’s what father had said. To keep her, and us, safe, he’d said. He’d nodded, feeling like he was learning, feeling like he was getting older, wiser. Helping.

“Then there’s the gas,” father had said, showing him the vents high in the walls, just below the ceiling. Far above where even her unnaturally-lengthened hands could not reach them. “That’s our last line of defense,” he’d said, ruffling his son’s unkempt hair. “That’s if it all goes to hell.”

He’d nodded, but his father could see he didn’t fully understand. He knelt down, took the boy’s arm, looked into his eyes.

“If she gets free of the restraints,” he pointed to them lying listless on the smooth concrete floor, “she still can’t leave the room, see?”

He nodded, growing.

“If she gets to the door, does some damage, then I hit a button, and whoosh!” he’d said, expanding his hands in a circle to show the spreading affect. “She gets the gas.”

“Then what? She goes to sleep?”

Father nodded, dropping his eyes a moment, then finding the boy’s again.

“She’ll be dead.”

The boy thought about this. “And we’ll know she’s dead, because of the cameras.”

His father smiled broadly, his eyes sparkling with pride. “That’s right, son. The cameras.”

They were in the half-constructed room at the time, and his father had pointed to two high corners where reflective orbs were tucked. The boy waved, saw a distorted reflection high above of another boy – a smeared, tiny boy – waving back.

“We’ll watch her and make sure she’d dead before we come in,” he said, then put a firm hand on the boy’s shoulder. “She’d want us to be sure.”

The boy knew this was true, because she’d told him so a hundred times herself. She told him to always be sure, if something were to go wrong, to always be sure he’d killed her. “I might lie,” she told him. “I might pretend.”

“Like a game,” he’d said.

His mother smiled and nodded, stroked his hair away from his forehead. “Like a game you must always win.”

As he and father had left the room, now deemed ready, his father stopped by the heavy steel door, the shining heads of the sliding bolts poking inch-high from the edges of its frame.

“One last thing,” his father said, taking off his lab coat and hanging it on a bent steel nail next to a mask and a tarnished yellow rubber suit. “And this is the most important thing of all. If anything goes wrong, and I’m not here, for whatever reason...” he paused. “There’s one last fail-safe.”

The boy waited, knowing his father would always be around, but willing to hear him out.

“It’s a timer, see? I start it every time your mother goes in the room. If, for any reason at all, I don’t stop, or reset, that timer in 24 hours, the room fills with gas.”

“Whoosh!” the boy said, mimicking his father’s hand gesture.

“That’s right,” he said. “That way, if something, well... if something goes amiss, then all you have to do, see, is wait it out. You don’t have to do a thing. Just wait 24 hours, and that timer will tick off, and things will be handled inside. The gas will go off, and the gas is poison. Poison that kills. You got that?”

The boy nodded, then remembered something from his lessons. “Like the cat.”

His father’s eyebrows came together in confusion.

“Schroeder’s cat.”

His father thought a second, then laughed hard, out loud, a wonderful laugh that filled the steel and concrete room he and his friends had just completed.

“Schrodinger!” his father bellowed, still laughing. Laughing so hard he was wiping tears from his eyes. “Schrodinger’s cat. Not Schroeder. He’s from Peanuts.”

His father continued laughing, wiped his eyes once more, and rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder, leading him from the room.

“But yeah, sure I guess. Like that.”

***

They had tested the room many times. His mother inspecting every inch of the walls, the floors, the vents, the cameras. Inspecting the restraints, the heavy steel cuffs, the chains and cables that held them, the clasps that bound them fast to the wall.

The first night they were all a bit nervous. His mother had only been with father’s friends on nights like this. They were infrequent, yes, but regular. His father seemed calm, however, and they both helped secure her to the new restraints. She watched them closely, studied them, tested them. She yanked her arms against them hard, making them clink. The boy took an unthinking step away.

“Not that testing them now matters,” she’d said that first time, smiling sadly at his father. “I’m half the strength.”

“If that,” father agreed, but nodded. “They’ll hold. They could hold a mad gorilla.”

Later, he and father sat outside the room. His father watched the monitors closely, the boy sat on a stiff couch behind him, reading a comic book.

“There,” his father said.

The boy set down his comic, stood and walked to the monitors. He watched in grainy color, like a television, as his mother turned. Her eyes, then her skin. She looked up at the cameras, watching them watching her. She went still, sort of... slumped. The boy held his breath.

Then she went mad. A whipping tornado wrapped in flesh, all teeth and nails and fire. Her mouth opened, chin dropping impossibly, her eyes bulbous, her muscles doubling in size, squeezing into the restraints. She screamed at the pain, pure fury. She thrashed and kicked wildly.

“Holding just fine,” his father said, sounding relieved, and a bit proud. “Holding just fine.” He turned, looked at the boy, smiled.

“She won’t be getting to us tonight.”

***

In the months since his mother’s first night in the new room, things had gone perfectly. He enjoyed having his mother home more, even though some nights he couldn’t see her. Because she was still there. Still home. It was comforting.

His father’s friends had come over and watched a few times, assuring themselves of the safety of the room. He listened while his father explained the fail-safes to them. He patiently explained the gas, and the timer.

The men watched, and some shifted their feet. A few turned away from the monitors.

The boy could not see his mother on the screens, but he knew she had already turned. They called it turning because she turned a little and she was one thing. But then she kept turning, and was herself again. Turning and turning forever.

“Here,” his father said, and flipped a switch.

The room was filled with screams. His mother’s screams. They were terrible. They reminded the boy of a screeching eagle he had seen on television. Screeching so loud it echoed in the room around them, swirling around their heads.

“She could talk if she wanted,” Father said calmly. “She could sound just like herself. But not when she’s angry like this. Not when she’s hungry.”

“Turn it off,” one of the men said, the biggest one.

His father flipped the switch, and the screeching stopped, leaving the room so thick with silence that no one dared speak a moment. Holding their breath.

“Should he be here?” another man said, tilting his head toward the boy. Another man turned his body to look at him, eyes narrowed, and by doing exposed the small screen on the desk. The boy could see his mother naked and twisting, bleeding from the wrists, teeth large and snapping, black tongue whipping across her pale lips.

His father looked at the man, then at his son, then back to the man, holding his eyes. The man seemed nervous and swallowed, and said nothing more.

When they all seemed satisfied, they waited until the morning, waited until mother was okay to let out. Father went in, dressed her, treated her wounds. After a few minutes they came out. His mother seemed tired, as always, but pleased to have it behind her. She looked at the boy and winked, wrapped up in a coarse green blanket. The boy tried to wink back, it was hard doing just one eye, but she smiled so he figured he’d done close enough.

They all talked then, for a long time. The boy got bored and wandered across the basement and up the stairs to the house. He went outside, listened to the sounds of the neighborhood. Cars rolled by. Kids laughed somewhere he couldn’t see, behind a neighbor’s house, maybe. A man was watering some bushes with a hose. It was sunny, peaceful. The boy turned and went back home.

***

Once the routine had been established, he felt like they were just any other family.

One evening they sat around the dinner table. Mother had prepared fish and salad. They didn’t eat meat.

The boy drank his milk. He drank a lot of milk, because his parents assured him it would help him grow. And he wanted to grow. Wanted it more than anything. He would be thirteen in two days, and he couldn’t wait. Thirteen meant manhood. Thirteen meant adult.

He watched his parents eating, smiling, content. His father was opening a bottle of wine, which is what his parents drank instead of milk. He looked at his mother closely, looking for signs. He’d been trained what to look for, although he knew it was unnecessary, because his mother knew first, knew way before he and father knew. They depended on her in a way, to tell them. To let them know she would be needing to go into the room.

If she didn’t tell them, they might not know in time. That’s how fast it happened. One second, a loving mother. The next, death.

“Mom,” the boy said, picking up a green bean with his fingers and biting off the tip. His mother looked at him, cocked her head.

“You have a fork.”

He took another bite. She always said that about the fork.

“Do you think...” he said, flushed with the embarrassment of the young and ignorant. “Will I be like you one day?”

The boy knew there were others like his mother. Hundreds. He also knew you could become like her if she attacked you. Spread into you. Mostly people died when attacked, but some lived, and then they turned too. Like vampires, but real.

His mother’s eyes went to father’s, who looked at his son with deep concern, then at her. Their eyes met a moment, then his father turned, paused, gathered his thoughts.

“Well,” he started, “the truth is, son, we don’t know. Not yet.”

The boy finished the green bean, took a drink from his heavy milk glass. “When?”

“Soon,” he said, looking troubled. “When you’re... when you’ve become a man.”

“I’m almost thirteen now!” the boy said, excitedly, knocking a knife off the table with his elbow. It clattered to the floor.

“It’s more than just age that makes a grown-up.”

The boy crinkled his nose. “What, you mean when I’m a dad?”

His father laughed, his mother smiled, but it was a sad smile, the one she used before she went into the room. The one she used after she told him everything would be all right.

“No, not that kind of man. When you reach puberty. There will be... signs,” he said, then hurriedly added, “but it’s nothing for you to worry about.”

The boy smiled, set down his milk, and burped.

“Because we can build another room. Just for me,” he said. “Right? We’re good at it now.”

His father looked down at his plate, set his fork onto the table.

His mother said nothing.

***

They were watching television when mother announced she would need to go into the room.

Father looked at her, then at his son. He turned off the program, a documentary on the migration of birds.

The boy sulked. He didn’t want his mother to get locked up tonight. He pursed his lips and walked out of the living room. His mother called after him, but he kept walking, into his bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

When he was bored enough, he ventured back out, expecting his parents to already be downstairs. But they were there, waiting.

“You okay?” his father said.

He nodded, sniffed, wiped at his mouth. He turned to his mother.

“Will you tuck me in first?”

She set down her magazine, stood up and went to him. He was too big for her to pick up, but she hugged him hard, and he felt her hot breath on his neck.

It smelled foul.

***

He snuggled underneath his covers while his mother stood over him, stroking his forehead. The light in the ceiling gave her a halo and left her face in shadow. Her bob of hair made her head seem bigger than it was, expanding the black shape of her face upward and outward, tiny wings at the tips.

“Will you sing me to sleep?”

She nodded, reached out and switched off the light. He felt her weight on the bed. He wondered how much time she had.

“What shall I sing?” she asked, her voice a husky whisper. “How about Jesus Loves Me?”

He shook his head, then realized she probably couldn’t see him. Her eyes sparkled in the dark.

“Sing the hush one.”

She placed a hand on his arm, squeezed it. She sighed, then sang softly, almost in a whisper.

***

Hush little baby, don’t say a word,

Mama’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.

***

He closed his eyes, let his mother’s voice float into his mind, fill his body. Let himself drift.

***

And if that mockingbird won’t sing,

Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.

***

And if that diamond ring turns brass,

Mama’s gonna buy you...

***

She stopped, and he opened his eyes. He was almost asleep, and he felt annoyed that she’s stopped at his favorite part.

“A looking glass. Like Alice.”

Her hand tightened on his arm. She was a dark shape at his side, unmoving, unseeing.

“Mom.”

The dark shape did not move, did not speak. The hand on his arm squeezed...

“Mom.”

***

While his mother was being held in the room, the boy forged on alone. His father made sporadic appearances to make him breakfast, lunch, dinner.

He did his lessons on his own. He played in his room. Watched people walk by on the sidewalk through the front window. Read comics he’d already read, enjoying them just as much as he had the first time.

Late that night his father came upstairs to tuck him into bed.

“Everything is just fine, son. Nothing to worry about. Almost over I think. It’s all pretty routine now, eh?”

The boy nodded, closed his eyes.

“Goodnight then.”

He heard his father leave. After a moment, he heard the sound of the basement door opening, his father’s footsteps going down the stairs.

As the sound of his father’s steps grew more faint, then vanish, exhaustion took hold and the boy fell asleep, dreaming of cells inside his blood, forming and re-forming, clustering like galaxies, and he a universe.

***

He woke with a start in the middle of the night. The house was deathly quiet.

He knew his father would still be in the basement, watching his mother, held safely inside the room.

His small bedroom was pitch dark. There was no moonlight, no lights from other houses, no light from the street. It was a small, quiet neighborhood, and late at night, like this, it was as if the whole street just turned off. Click.

The boy was thirsty, and he had to go. He figured pee first, water after.

He went to the bathroom, peed, washed his hands, and walked into the hallway. The lights were all off, but his eyes were adjusting. He went to the living room, going past his parent’s room, which he noticed, without surprise, was empty. Then to the kitchen.

He got a glass, stuck it under the sink, let the water get cold. He filled the glass and drank down the whole thing.

The door to the basement was slightly open. Light was coming through the slit.

The boy frowned. This was unusual, because his father usually locked the door to the basement when mother was in the room. Not to keep the boy out, but as a “precautionary measure.”

He stood for a moment. Heard nothing. Nothing at all. He decided to go downstairs.

At the bottom of the stairs he saw his father, standing over the monitors, looking tense. He turned quickly, saw the boy standing there. His eyes were wide, his face haggard.

“What are you doing?”

The boy shrugged. “I was thirsty.”

His father licked his lips, looked at the monitors again, then at the steel door that led to the room. Where his mother was.

“Dad?”

His father raised a hand, a “stop” sign.

“Stay there. Just... stay there. Okay?”

The boy was confused. He was always allowed to go by the room. His parents never hid what happened in the room from him, hid what happened to her. They wanted him to know, to be aware, to fear it, but not fear her. It was the only way, they used to say. “We all have to be in this together,” his mother would say. “Or we will all die.”

His father pressed something on the wall by the door, and there was a sharp hiss, and a sound of metal sliding on metal, and the door clicked open, pushing outward a couple of inches.

Without looking back at his son, the father opened the door wide, looked inside.

“Dad,” the boy said. This was not procedure, he knew. This was not procedure in the slightest.

There was no sound coming from the room. No screeching, no gurgling chatter, no panting. None of the usual sounds mother made.

His father turned to him once more.

“I was wrong. I need you.”

The boy approached.

“No!” his father snapped, holding up a “stop” hand once more. “Wait until I’m inside. Then come over here and watch. Open the intercom if you have to, but watch the monitors. When you see me wave at you, open the door and let me out. Understand?”

The boy nodded.

“But only if your mother is still restrained. If she’s not restrained, do not open the door. No matter what. Okay?”

The boy nodded again. “Because sometimes she pretends.”

The boy’s father looked at him a moment, sadly, desperately, as if wanting to say something more. Than he lowered his head, controlling his nerves.

“When I wave.”

The boy’s father went into the room. The heavy steel door sealed behind him.

***

The boy walked slowly to the desk where the monitors and the intercom sat. He pushed aside the rolling black chair his father always sat in, looked at the screens.

They were black.

He pressed the small power button in the lower corner of the monitors. Turned them off, then on. Off, then on. A small red light by the button proved they were on, and powered.

Then why are they black, thought the boy. And how was he supposed to see his father wave?

He thought a moment. He looked at the steel door, at the large rectangular black button next to it, as big as his whole hand. He had pressed it before. He knew how to do it. How to open the door.

He looked at the other machinery on the desk. There was the black intercom box. Next to it was a switch, which turned it on, or “opened it up,” as his father said. There was a long green box with cables running out the back of it, toward one of the walls containing the room. The boy knew this box controlled the gas. There was a clear plastic tab that flipped up, and under the plastic tab was a black button. When you pressed the button, the gas in the room was released, and everyone who breathed it would die. Everyone, human or not.

There was a thin black screen on the box. It was a timer. The boy saw it was counting down. It was at 11:43:06. A second later, it showed 11:43:05. Next to the timer was a knob and a switch. The knob, he knew, made it more time or less time. The switch turned it on or off. He left it alone.

The boy pulled the chair to him and sat down. He waited, humming to himself, hoping the screens would come back to life. Show him what was happening inside the room.

He moved his hand to the intercom switch, flipped it. He listened carefully. But there was nothing. Some light static, maybe a sound of some shuffling, some movement. But nothing else. His father wasn’t yelling for him. His mother wasn’t screeching. It was as if the room was completely empty.

After a few minutes, he stood up and walked over to the couch that sat against the wall, facing the steel door. He sat down, then lay down.

Then the boy fell asleep.

***

“Hello?”

The boy stirred.

“Hello? Can you hear me? Sweetie? Can you hear mommy?”

The boy opened his eyes, looked at the steel door.

Still closed.

He stood up, rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand, and walked over to the desk. He was so tired but he knew he should stay awake. His father might need him.

He sat in the black swivel chair, his eyelids heavy, his shoulders slouched. He looked at the green box with the timer counting down.

08:22:02... 08:22:01... 08:22:00...

There was sound coming from the intercom. Breathing, he thought. Heavy breathing. And... giggling? Like his parents were playing a game. Which didn’t make sense. None at all.

“Hello? Can you hear me? I see the light is on in here, so I think you can. Honey, if you can hear me, I need to tell you something. Listen carefully, okay?”

“Okay,” he said out loud, even though he knew she could not hear him.

“Your father is in here. He’s... he’s hurt. But I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me. It was an accident. I’m...”

There was a pause. It sounded like whispers.

“I’m fine. I’ve turned back and I’m okay. So it wasn’t that. He had an accident. He came in, and he fell, and he hit his head. He needs a hospital I think. Okay? You understand?”

The boy yawned, looked desperately at the blank monitors. He waited. His mother’s voice came again, louder, as if her mouth was much closer to the microphone.

“Baby,” she said, “I need you to open the door.”

***

He was up in the kitchen, looking for food. He was hungry, and still tired. Sleeping on the couch had been uncomfortable, and he had woken often to the sound of his mother’s pleading, demanding voice.

He thought about trying to call his father’s friends. The men who had taken mother before they had built the room, who had handled her. But he did not want to call those men. He needed time to think. A man made his own decisions. Even the hard ones.

He split a bagel, put it on a plate and into the microwave, heated it for 30 seconds, then slathered peanut butter on both open halves.

There was orange juice, and he poured himself a tall glass.

Feeling better, chewing on the sticky bagel, washing it down with cold juice, he debated his options.

He knew what his father would say. His father would say to let it ride, to wait for the gas. The gas would kill them both, and then he would be safe.

He would also be alone.

He had no other family. No relatives. He did not go to school and had no friends from the street. His parents gave him lessons every day, teaching him science and mythology, math and languages.

No, there was no one to turn to. No one at all.

He finished his breakfast and went to get dressed.

***

The basement was cold, and he was bored.

Sitting at the desk, he watched the timer ticking down. 02:34:46... 02:34:45... 02:34:44...

The intercom had been silent, the cameras showing nothing, the monitors black as empty space.

Anything could be happening inside the room.

His parents could both be alive and well. Trapped, perhaps injured. But themselves. It was possible.

Or his mother might have turned, and not turned back. It usually took at least a day, sometimes two, before she became herself again. Before he could trust her not to pretend. Not to trick him.

His eyes fell to the timer, watched it sullenly. His stomach rumbled. He was about to get up, find more food.

His father’s voice came through the intercom.

“You there, son?”

He froze a moment, then looked at the top of the desk, ran a finger along the grooves in the tired old wood. His spine was itchy.

“I’m okay, son. I was... hurt. I’m still hurt, but I’m awake now, and feeling better. Much better in fact.”

His father’s voice was ragged, and his words were coming too fast. His breathing was heavy.

“Listen, I have a feeling our time is growing short in here. I don’t... according to my watch, anyway, I’d say we have only a couple hours now until the gas releases. Is that right?”

The boy looked at the timer. Getting close now, he thought. It’s almost my birthday.

He rested his head on the desk, his ear flat against the rough wood, his feet lazily kicking air.

“Son. Please. We’re fine. We...”

More whispering.

“Your mother is still restrained. The keys... I don’t know where they are, but your mother is still restrained. And I’m hurt, but I’m okay.”

The boy slipped down from the chair, walked to the door. He pressed his ear against the cold metal, listening. He could only hear the sound of his blood rushing through his head, like a seashore.

He banged a fist against the door. Once, twice. His father’s voice came screeching over the intercom.

“That’s right! Oh thank god! Son, listen, you need to turn off the gas. Do you understand? Or...”

His mother’s voice interrupted him. It was loud, insistent.

“Do you want us to die, baby? Do you want to be alone? If you don’t open the door, we will die. We will die and you will be totally alone. I don’t mean to scare you but that’s the truth. Please, do you hear me?”

There was a brief silence. The boy pressed his palm against the steel, his lips trembled and he cried.

***

There was no time now.

He waited, watching the timer tick slowly down.

00:03:13... 00:03:12... 00:03:11...

There was no way to stop the gas other than green box. Opening the door, he knew, would not stop it. The only way to stop it was by turning the little knob and resetting the timer, or shutting if off completely by flipping the small black toggle switch. He took a deep breath, his decision made.

He had no intention of stopping it.

He moved away from the table, crossed through the chilled air of the small basement toward the room.

There was a loud pounding. Men yelling savagely.

He looked quickly to the stairs, toward the sound. There must have been another fail-safe he didn’t know about, one that alerted his father’s friends. For a brief moment he panicked, then relaxed. The door leading from the basement to the house was locked, bolted. No one could get in without breaking it down, and it was thick, and solid. It would take time, and tools.

The boy took a deep breath. His parents had been quiet for the past hour or so. Waiting. Hoping.

He did not know what was inside the room. He had some ideas, some possible outcomes, in his mind.

His mother, hideously pale skin streaked with blue veins. Anger and flaring nostrils, yawning jaw. Her eyes...

His father, poisoned by her, but alive. Reborn in her monstrous flesh. Waiting, biding his time. Pacing frantically, his amped-up nerve endings flexing for the very first time, feeling as if the air around him was feeding energy into his altered bones, his sensitized flesh. A six-foot-tall rabid dog.

If he opened the door they would run at him, reaching. Tear him apart.

But there were other options. He could imagine a few different potential outcomes.

They could be lying there dead. Human or monster. Maybe half-turned. Maybe half-eaten.

Or, perhaps, the room could be empty.

Or the room could be gone.

He wanted to believe it would be his parents. Just his mom and dad. Tired and injured. Hungry not for flesh but for freedom, air, food, water. They would run to him and embrace him. Kiss him on his face, wipe away his tears, rub his back soothingly. Take care of him. Protect him. Everything would be like it was, and they would all be happy again.

Once he opened the door, once he went inside...

He put his fingers on the smooth black panel that released the heavy bolts of the lock. He counted down in his head. His face burned, there was a throbbing pain behind his eyes.

...sixteen...fifteen...fourteen...

He smiled wearily. He would be thirteen soon. He would change. One way or the other.

...nine...eight...seven...six...

There was the faintest sound of frantic scratching on the other side of the door. He could hear it through the steel. Desperate, monstrous, his parents clawing for life. He loved them so much.

...three...two...one...

He pushed the large black button, felt the click of the release vibrate up his arm. Metal slid on metal, the heavy door hissed open.

He pulled it further. The room was pitch black and silent.

He stepped inside, ready for whatever reality awaited him. Regardless of the outcome, he would be a man.

End.

Philip Fracassi is the author of the award-winning story collection, Behold the Void, which won “Best Collection of the Year” from both This Is Horror and Strange Aeons Magazine.

His new collection, Beneath a Pale Sky, was published in 2021 by Lethe Press. Booklist called it “a must read.” His upcoming novels include Boys in the Valley and A Child Alone with Strangers.

His stories have been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Best Horror of the Year, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, Dark Discoveries, and Cemetery Dance.

Philip’s work has been translated into multiple languages, and his books have been favorably reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, LOCUS Magazine, and Rue Morgue. The New York Times called his work “terrifically scary.”

As a screenwriter, his feature films have been distributed by Disney Entertainment and Lifetime Television. He currently has several stories under option for film/tv adaption.

For more information on his books and screenplays, visit his website at www.pfracassi.com. He also has active profiles on Facebook, Instagram (pfracassi) and Twitter (@philipfracassi).

He lives in Los Angeles, California, and is represented by Elizabeth Copps at Copps Literary Services (info@coppsliterary.com).

3rd Place: Turniphead

By Taylor Hood

While the villagers of Allborough chant so loud they cause my swollen, sensitive ears to ache, it is nothing compared to the pain pressing against my temples, this red demon agony like a dying star ready to explode, sending out shockwaves of nausea to the furthest reaches of my being.

The mob do not cease their baying as they carry me to the village green, leaving my suitcase abandoned, clothes, rations, and train ticket scattered across the pavement. Rows of carbon copy houses with gleaming facades pass me by as wanted posters bearing my name flutter through the streets.

In a window reflection: a swathe of suited villagers writhing beneath me, and my features which brand me as an outcast. My head, bruised like a turnip and topped by tufts of greasy black hair; bulging, bloodshot eyes; nose askew; skin streaked with stretch marks.

At the green, they strip me naked. I wriggle maggot-like as they hoist me by my feet with ropes to a gnarled oak. As I hang, I prepare for an early death. The same fate that befell Black Geoff, Crowface—all who hesitated.

They pelt me with turnips, cauliflowers, potatoes, and the familiar insults are given new weight. Finally, the village elder cries, “No Allborough without all of us,” the children taunt, “Turniphead! Piñata-boy!” and the rods of purging are unsheathed, poised to strike.

The destruction begins. My bulbous body blemishes instantly, as though I were being splattered with paint, not beaten by batons. To my surprise, a mix of pleasure and pain has me begging for more. Like squeezing a boy-sized pimple.

The liquid that spurts out of my lesioned skin is not blood—it is oil-in-water emulsion. A prismatic shower so beautiful and breath-taking I forget myself and the hurt being done to me.

The wad that is my right hand breaks away, tumbling to the variegated lawn. I groan more with relief than bewilderment as tentacles erupt from the hole at the wrist.

Fingers fly and lumpen limbs pinwheel through the air, ejecting gnawing gnats and biting bats. In the chaos I witness the tentacle wrap around a man’s neck.

My belly bursts open like a party bag, releasing a gut-spray of jewelled genii and infernal ethereals.

Out of me writhe more protean horrors whose names and natures I am astounded to know.

As I recognise them for my companions met in many books in lonely hours—

A crack resounds in my head, and the world trembles.

I float safely heavenward, leaving the town in tumult.

Rise bodiless into the universe.

Free, at last.

End.

The Sixth Guardian

By Mark Howard Jones

For Eddy C. Bertin

“When our lives could be snuffed out at any time by the accidental footfall of a behemoth from a hidden realm, existing beyond the reach of our poor senses… we need help.”

From two or three miles down the railway track the town looked grey and old. It almost looks dead, he thought, as the train drew closer.

The classical architecture of the station reminded him of an ancient mausoleum instead of a mundane transit point. It felt hot and claustrophobic inside the vast structure.

His twisted childhood—stolen by the coldness and cruelty of his uncle—had brought him back here, despite all the promises he had made himself.

He wanted to gaze on that hated face just one more time, mainly because he wanted to assure himself that the old bastard truly was dead. But, as his only living relative, there might also be something in it for him, even if it was simply a delayed legacy from his poor, dead father.

He left the bulk of the station behind him and passed the tall, narrow houses that lined the wide road.

The sunlight drew hard shadows under the bridge over the grey, sluggish canal.

His uncle’s house was further from the station than he remembered. The intervening span of years had obviously warped his memories. Or maybe it was just the stifling summer heat that made the journey seem longer.

For the last 30 years, the old man had led the life of an anchorite. Most presumed his allegiance to be to the martyr of the cross, but Jan knew the truth was very different. He’d never understood his uncle’s occult predilections, despite being forced to participate in them, but he knew he wanted nothing to do with them.

The tall grey house at 27 Schemeringstraat stood in contrast to those around it. Those on either side were freshly painted and looked well cared for. While his uncle’s house appeared unkempt, like an unwashed old man. ‘How appropriate’, thought Jan.

He pulled up the old brass knocker and let it fall. The metal felt pleasantly cool but oddly greasy. It made the dull sound of a sledgehammer hitting a coffin lid.

He was about to knock again when the door opened and a small elderly man peered up at him.

He took a second or two to focus on the visitor. “Yes?”

“I’m Jan.”

“You have come for the funeral?” The dusty-skinned man gazed straight at his mouth, awaiting a reply. Evidently he was deaf, thought Jan.

“Why else would I return to this place? To fall down dead myself and allow the worms to gorge themselves on my bitter memories?” Jan made sure he enunciated every word carefully.

The old man kept staring at his mouth, not moving an inch. “Out of the way please,” said Jan, losing patience.

It was barely any cooler indoors that it had been in the street. Once inside the bare hallway, he left his holdall near the door. Draping his overcoat across it, he entered the open door on his right.

Nearly two dozen pairs of eyes turned to him as he entered the large room. Except for the door, nearly every inch of wall space besides a large ugly sideboard was taken up with a chair. Each was occupied by a withered, black-clad figure.

Jan took in the room quickly before stepping across to the antique catafalque in the centre of the space. The coffin containing his uncle’s body lay on top.

He had been a tall man but the huge black coffin lent him a dignity he had lacked in life. His enormous vulturine nose stood proud above his withered cheeks. The corpse reminded Jan of a plundered statue of a pharaoh that had been taken from its enormous pedestal and laid on its back ready to be dragged away.

He was tempted to lunge forward suddenly and sink a pin into the waxy flesh, to test whether the life had truly left his body. He had always suspected dishonesty from Bernardus.

Jan wiped the grim smile from his face as he noticed a man at his elbow. Turning, he was met by a short, smartly dressed man who he guessed was in the legal profession. He extended his hand. “Mr.…?”

The man spoke in a low voice that was intended to be confidential, though his voice could be heard easily by all the occupants of the still, hot room. “I am Julian Walton, your uncle’s solicitor. There are certain matters to be taken care of over the next few days, Meneer de Vries.”

The man’s heavy voice exactly matched the pronounced bags under his eyes.

Jan nodded. “Yes, yes… of course. Your note caught up with me in Edinburgh. I do understand…” He gestured towards the coffin. “What did he die of?” he inquired, only half interested.

“His heart gave out,” the solicitor informed him.

“Impossible - he didn’t have one!” snorted Jan. Hatchet-like faces turned towards him with disdain. He stared them all down.

Jan looked around the room at the disappointed, decrepit faces. Every visage looked as if it was made of melting wax, with two marbles glistening above their pendulous noses, as if pressed unwillingly into the grimy material.

He noted sourly that all those in attendance, who he assumed to be all his uncle’s acquaintances (for he certainly had no friends), were all ready for the grave themselves. He was the youngest one there and even he was fast approaching middle age. Anything filled with the vitality of youth had wisely steered clear of the old man.

He remembered from his childhood that a kitten he had brought into the house once lasted a mere four days before it died. He’d been heartbroken. By way of consolation, his uncle had given him a book about the occult with black covers and grubby pages. It was presumably meant either to explain why the kitten perished or to toughen Jan up to the point where he no longer cared about ‘lower’ beings. It failed to do either.

The sun was now no longer shining through the window. Outside, the grey sky flowed overhead. It did little to alleviate the heat.

Jan loosened his collar. Trust the old bastard to die in the middle of a stifling summer, he thought.

On the huge, dark wood sideboard stood a heavy picture frame. The photograph showed him with his father. A dark figure stood at his father’s shoulder, as if waiting to pounce on them both.

Uncle Bernardus always had the air of a bird of prey. He’d been tall - taller than his brother - but always shabby in appearance. This added to the impression that he was a half-starved vulture.

Jan looked away from the image. He was surprised Bernardus had kept the photograph. It reminded Jan of the most terrifying moment of his childhood.

It was the evening that his uncle had come into his room and announced, with an awful attempt at a smile covering the lower half of his face, that Jan’s father had died. “I am your father now,” he had added.

Jan shrank inside and begged with God to kill him. But, as usual, the deity ignored him.

Walton and his even more elderly assistant produced a bottle and glasses from a large wooden piece of furniture. Everyone was furnished with a glass, which were then filled to the halfway point with a tawny liquid.

After what seemed like an hour, Walton turned and spoke. “To the memory of our benefactor, Bernardus de Vries.” The old man raised the glass of pale brownish liquid and made another toast. “To all those born with blood.”

“…and bone,” muttered the ancient fool next to Jan, touching his withered lips to the glass without drinking a drop. Jan noticed him lower the glass and tip its contents onto the carpet.

Jan was puzzled by the toast and by the reference to Bernardus as a benefactor but, after a cautious sniff, he downed the liquid in one gulp. It tasted rich and grapey but he wasn’t able to place it. For a second, he hoped he hadn’t unwittingly bought into some sort of occult suicide pact with his vile, dead uncle and his hangers-on.

After a few uncomfortable minutes, Jan decided he would survive. “I need some air,” he announced to Walton before taking his leave.

In the hallway, he gazed down ruefully at the hideous tiled floor. It depicted an all-seeing eye, gazing up at all who passed. It sat in the midst of a stylised serpentine design that nodded towards some early 20th-century art movements.

Jan had always hated it, and noted with pleasure that even more of the tiles were criss-crossed with dirt-encrusted cracks than he remembered. As he swung the heavy front door open, he wished it had been ground into pieces by the passing years.

***

At a small bar nearby, Jan ordered a jenever and a beer. After a few mouthfuls of the near tasteless beer, he took the opportunity to phone Saskia. He’d insisted his wife stay away from this poisonous place.

When she asked how long it would be before he could return, he answered “Not too long. A few days at most.”

He hung the phone up’ proceeding to enjoy the cooler air rising from the canal as the day crept to a close.

He had some more questions for his uncle’s English solicitor, but he wanted to ask them without a room full of vultures eavesdropping.

***

The following morning Jan found himself in Walton’s office, hoping to clear up the small matter of whether or not he was going to inherit anything from his uncle. He supposed that he was.

Walton looked even dustier than he had the day before. Jan supposed that the light was better here.

“Your uncle left very specific instructions as to his funeral and eventual interment in a private cemetery just outside the city.” Walton placed a thin brown folder of papers in front of Jan, who flipped it open at once. He hoped some revelation of hidden wealth that was coming his way would leap out at him. The papers remained stubbornly confusing at first glance.

Walton’s treacly voice began to warp itself around Jan once more. “The will is to be read immediately before the funeral service which, if you care to glance at the chart enclosed, will be in two weeks’ time.”

“Two weeks?!”

Startled by Jan’s outburst, Walton’s raised his gaze. “Yes. As I said, the chart left by your uncle indicates the most propitious date for his burial will be the 23rd of this month.”

Jan stared at the calendar-like chart that Walton had indicated. It contained an odd graph to one side and unfamiliar markings crawling across the dates on the calendar.

“Yes, I see.” Jan sighed. There was no way he was staying in that old mausoleum of a house for another fortnight. He would phone Saskia later; they would just have to make other plans.

“Can you tell me, Mr Walton, if I can expect to benefit from my uncle’s will in any way?”

The old solicitor shook his head. “It would be highly unethical of me to discuss the contents of the will with anyone prior to its reading, Meneer de Vries. I’m sure you understand.”

Jan didn’t understand… or didn’t care, at least.

“However, I believe that Vrouw Kantner is safeguarding a small legacy for you. One that is completely outside the terms of the will and therefore unaffected by it.”

Jan nodded slowly. “I see.” Vrouw Kantner had been his uncle’s housekeeper… and much more, he’d always assumed. He hadn’t seen her at the gathering around the coffin earlier. He’d imagined that she’d moved on years ago, or died.

As if he could read Jan’s mind, Walton added: “She still lives in the house.”

Jan scooped up the folder from the desk and shook the old man’s hand.

Confused, the solicitor began “Oh… but there are other matters that we must… as your uncle’s only living relative… umm...”

Jan nodded. “Perhaps tomorrow. After all, I’ll be around for the next two weeks,” he said, knowing full well that he wouldn’t be.

***

This bleak town was where he had grown up—if one could truly use that phrase about his childhood. It was more accurate to say that he reached a kind of premature maturity, at which time he realised that escape was the only real option.

The grey sky lowered overhead as he walked back briskly to the house. The house from which escape had once seemed impossible.

His young life had been an endless round of harsh discipline, deprivation and fake devotion to his uncle’s obscure occult obsessions.

He remembered the insane, endless incantations. And how he had been forced to kneel in ‘prayer’ hour after hour by Bernardus. Sometimes he even imagined that his fingers still ached from the odd hand gestures he had been forced to adopt, his fingers twisted at unnatural angles.

Jan had understood none of it and had viewed it simply as his uncle’s peculiar brand of cruelty. He also remembered being struck hard if he stumbled over the gibberish he was forced to repeat.

And every night that maddening music; a violin that sounded like a dentist’s drill. When he asked about it in the morning, he received only a cold stare in response. He’d supposed it had come from Bernardus’ own room but he had no proof. His uncle had once even claimed it was his own ‘over-imaginative young mind.’

As Jan approached the door of the house that he imagined he now owned, he noticed a bent old man hurrying to intercept him. Jan slowed for a moment in astonishment at the sight. The man looked like an odd black bird that had grown in size and now insisted on pretending it was human.

Then it spoke. “Meneer de Vries, if you please. Will you now be taking over your uncle’s role?”

Jan didn’t remember seeing the man at the house earlier. Taken aback, all he could mumble was: “What?”

“Are you an adept at the sacred geometrics, too? We need someone to lead us, you see. We all need a benefactor.”

Jan shook his head. “No. I’m sorry. I don’t know what you mean.” It occurred to him that Bernardus had gathered a group of followers since the last time he was here, despite Walton’s claim that he had been a recluse. A coven of some sort, no doubt, thought Jan.

“But… but… We need someone, Meneer de Vries.” The man had placed his unpleasant, nicotine-stained fingers on Jan’s sleeve. Despite his previous resemblance to a bird, the man now looked more toad-like.

All Jan wanted to do was get away from him. “Look. I don’t really know what…”

The man’s grip grew stronger. “When our lives could be snuffed out at any time by the accidental footfall of a behemoth from a hidden realm, existing beyond the reach of our poor senses… we need help.” The man had used particular emphasis saying the final word.

“Old man, make some sense, will you?” Jan had lost patience and began to pull his arm away.

The old man staggered back a step or two. The rebuff seemed to run through him like a small electric shock. He stood muttering to himself. “Not the one. Not the one. Not the…”

Jan stared at him for a second before putting the key in the lock. He left the man standing in the street with a look of stunned finality on his face. When the heavy door clunked shut behind him, Jan let out a delayed breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding.

***

Once inside the house, he went from room to room looking for his uncle’s former housekeeper. She was nowhere to be found on the ground floor, and every bedroom except his was nearly bare of furnishings. There wasn’t even any indication as to where his hated uncle used to sleep.

Giving up in frustration, Jan went to the room that Walton had furnished for his stay. He still hadn’t recovered from the rigours of his previous day’s travel. He lay down on the large bed and napped on and off until early evening.

At just before seven there was a knock on the door of Jan’s bedroom. Rising form the bed, he opened it to be confronted by Vrouw Kantner. Despite his fruitless search earlier, here she was. Jan was slightly shocked to see that she was now wheelchair-bound.

The Vrouw had always been a woman of few words but her silence as she sat in front of him was unnerving.

Suddenly, she took one clawed hand from the rim of the right wheel and picked up a parcel that lay in her lap. She looked at it for a moment before thrusting it towards him.

“Your father wanted you to have this.” Her voice was almost a whisper. “Now that you are old enough—and your uncle is no longer with us—I can fulfil the promise I made.”

Jan took the parcel from her. It was wrapped in a thick brown paper that was discoloured like it’d been sitting, waiting for years.

“Well… uh, thank you.” The woman had never helped Bernardus to abuse him but then she’d never tried to stop him either. Jan still felt uncomfortable in her presence.

“So, how have you been, Vrouw Kantner?” he asked, awkwardly.

The woman raised both arthritic hands from their grip on the wheelchair and spread them in front of her. “As you see, Master Jan.”

He pursed his lips in sympathy. Before he could utter any uncomfortable platitudes, Vrouw Kantner had spun her wheelchair around and headed back into the darkness that swallowed the end of the corridor.

He closed the door and laid the parcel on a small side table then carefully unwrapped the crisped, old paper. It was obviously a book and Jan was already fearful of what its pages might contain. The volumes he’d been allowed to read in this house had been a far cry from those that most children were accustomed to.

He looked at it for a few seconds before daring to open the front cover. He recognised at once the small, crabbed letters of his father’s handwriting. Each page was dated at the top. He’d had no idea his father had kept a diary. Though he supposed it was something most fathers would be unlikely to share with a seven-year-old boy.

The diary pages cracked and tore as he turned them, drinking in the entries, struggling to understand.

The book spoke insanely of star-born things, fallen to earth and now entombed in their chthonic lairs. It mentioned depraved ancient cults devoted to their worship as near-deities… and to their protection.

The words seem to burn into his mind. At last, he was able to decipher the code. The words he’d heard issuing from Bernardus’ twisted mouth during his bleak childhood were all here. All the phrases he’d been forced to repeat, while kneeling on the hard floor before his brutal uncle, now made some sort of sense.

The word ‘Cyaegha’ was part of almost every sentence spoken during those rituals. Jan now discovered the awful truth behind the word, that it was a creature of dreadful power, worshipped as a god by some and capable of bringing eternal darkness to humanity.

Some of the images Bernardus surrounded himself with were of the foul entity under the hill, he now realised.

At first, Jan’s rationalist outlook fought against the truth contained in the words. But an older, perhaps wiser, part of him could not deny the dreadful certainty revealed by the shapes made of discoloured ink.

He wept for his father’s fear and courage. He could only imagine what a struggle it had been to battle Bernardus secretly while also keeping his small son safe and untainted.

His father could only speculate on exactly what Bernardus intended with his ceremonies. Maybe he had wanted to harness the power of the slumbering deity somehow… or, worse, to release it from its captivity.

But one thing was certain from his father’s words. He had done everything in his power to thwart his brother and prevent him from attaining his goals.

One section of the diary made it clear that his father had been given custodianship of a sixth Vaeyen, one known to very few and protected diligently down the years by men like Willem. He referred to it as ‘The Keeper of Light and Fire,’ and there was a vague suggestion that it was somewhere within the house.

Jan read that these powerful guardians, demonic servants embodied in carved statue, both protected and imprisoned the dreaded star-born thing beneath the hill. It was always supposed that there were only five Vaeyen. But now he knew the truth and it was imperative that he seek out the sixth.

The diary ended the day before his father’s death. The final entry mentioned Willem’s fears that his brother was growing stronger.

Jan lay on the bed for an hour as the sunlight faded. It was difficult to believe all that his father’s diary said. If it had been written by anyone except his father, he would have dismissed it as a lurid fantasy.

Had his father, in truth, been the caretaker of a lost Vaeyen? It appalled him to imagine that this dark, cloistered place, filled with misery, could be the front line in a battle that must be won—and quickly—if the world was to survive.

His suspicions that Willem may have been killed by his own brother were underlined by his father’s avowed role in trying to halt the sorcerer’s deviant plans.

He picked up the book and re-opened it many times, refreshing his memory and trying to glean even more from his father’s words. The phrases ‘under Bernardus’ very feet’ and ‘beneath the eye of Cyclops’ stuck in his mind.

Had his father hidden the precious Vaeyen from his brother? If so, those who worshipped the god may be glad to have it back. It was bound to be very valuable to them.

It soon dawned on Jan that the clues could only lead to one place in this hellish dwelling. Jan headed downstairs to Bernardus’ study. He was convinced that his father had secreted the object in a location where it would have the maximum effect on his vile brother.

The dark wooden door faced him defiantly but Jan resolved to invade his uncle’s former sanctum boldly. Gripping the handle, he turned it and pushed hard.

The door almost flew open, revealing a room crowded with furniture and books. On the wall hung prints and fabrics bearing arcane symbols and images, which Jan glanced at with renewed repugnance.

Jan took two steps inside, fighting back memories of his past, and let his gaze drop to the floor. He pulled the heavy carpet aside with some difficulty. There, etched into the floorboards using God only knows what magical means, was the curious circular symbol that his uncle had spent so much of his time sitting within. At its very centre, was a huge eye, returning his gaze.

On several occasions, Jan had been forced to help his uncle in his rituals. They had lasted hours, with the stench of foul incense and the man’s rancid sweat filling the air.

There was still a faint whiff of the incense latched to the furnishings.

Jan ran his fingers along the floorboards. They were solid but old, and he needed some tool in order to force them up. A sturdy metal poker that had been left by the fireplace would do, he decided.

The wood splintered with an alarming crack. Jan was sure the rest of the house must have heard it. Then he remembered that the cook didn’t live in the house. Besides her, there was only Vrouw Kantner, hidden away in her bolthole somewhere.

He swung the poker high and hard. Again the floorboards cracked and split, complaining loudly as they flew apart. Sweat dripped from his forehead, making small pools on the dusty boards.

He dug his fingers under the last board and tugged with all his might. Inch by inch, it came free and he pushed it to one side.

When Jan gazed down into the space between the floor joists, he sucked in a great heaving breath.

There, lying on his side, was his father’s corpse. He recognised the remnants of dark hair and the badge sewn on to his favourite jacket. There wasn’t even the decency of a shroud or other funeral wrapping.

His father’s head bore a terrible wound that had undoubtedly killed him. Bernardus’ story of a heart attack had obviously been lies.

The desiccated fingers clutched at a two-foot-long carving of a bird-like creature. It had to be the sixth Guardian mentioned in his father’s diary. All these years it had lain beneath his uncle’s feet - no wonder the old fool’s magicks had never worked.

Jan chuckled in delight. His father had defeated his uncle even after his death. He presumed that the evil occultist had no idea his brother’s corpse and the mechanism that had frustrated his life’s work lay beneath his very feet.

Even after all these years under the floorboards, the sculpted figure was an almost fierce white. It seemed to repel dust and decay.

Jan reached down to touch it, wondering who had snatched his father away from the fire of cremation to bury him here? He had his own supporters, no doubt,those who were opposed to his uncle’s foul dealings. Maybe Vrouw Kantner was a secret ally after all. Maybe she had arranged to have him buried here, to guard the Vaeyen even after death.

As his fingers closed around the neck of the sculpture, it sagged. His nails dug into the dried material and he watched, appalled, as it crumbled away before his eyes.

As the dust of the false Vaeyen began to rise, the mirage of his father’s corpse faded like mist in sunlight. He had been tricked.

Jan cursed his own stupidity. How could he have allowed himself to be trapped like this?

Bernardus’ sorcery was reaching out to control him even now. Even in death, he had won. Jan imagined the evil old man’s corpse grinning in its long, black coffin.

A deep cold began to invade the room, stealing the sticky warmth of the summer and squeezing the air from his heaving lungs. Beads of sweat began to freeze uncomfortably on his skin.

Ice crept impossibly across the inside of the the windowpane.

His frozen fingers refused to move any longer as he fumbled with the door. He slumped down onto the floor as he felt the cold grip him tighter. A darkness invaded the room, dissolving its details like an acid as it came.

In his confusion, he thought he saw Saskia’s soft brown eyes looking down at him. He blinked and her gentle gaze was replaced by the terrifying stare of an enormous orb, looking into him, replacing his memories with confusion and pain.

Cold fingers stabbed towards him out of the darkness. No, not fingers ... something much worse.

The god under the hill. That dreaded thing. It had failed to seduce him when he was younger but now here it was. Even from his coffin, Bernardus had summoned it.

As the cold stabbed further into him, he gasped, expelling his last breath. Cold filled him. Darkness and cold.

So deep. So cold… under the hill.

End.

***

Mark Howard Jones was born in a town in south Wales where it once rained fish. He has had dozens of short stories published around the world, some of which are collected in Songs From Spider Street (Screaming Dreams), Brightest Black (Screaming Dreams), Dreamglass Days (ISMs Press) and Flowers Of War (Black Shuck). A regular contributor to Weird Fiction Review in the U.S. and to PS Publishing’s Black Wings series in the U.K., he is also the editor of both volumes of Cthulhu Cymraeg. His novella ‘Still Life With Death’ was published in the 2020 anthology The Book Of Yig: Revelations Of The Serpent (Macabre Ink).

Gemma Files

Interviewed by Carson Winter

Gemma Files is the author of the Shirley Jackson award-winning novel Experimental Film, The Hexslinger Trilogy, and many, many more. Her latest collection, In That Endlessness, Our End (Grimscribe Press) is a brilliantly weird collection starring lost Canadian films, haunted Airbnbs, and creepypasta-inspired party games. It also might just be my favorite collection of the year. Gemma writes inspired horror fiction with some of the sharpest prose you’ve ever seen, with some of the strangest hooks at their heart. We were lucky enough to talk to her about film, the power of a great narrative voice, and the universality of the Weird.

CW: Experimental Film is often regarded as one of your more well-known works, but I was shocked to discover that your first short story was published in 1993. How do you think your work has grown and changed since then—and how has it stayed the same?

GF: Yeah, it’s pretty crazy to think I’ve been active as a writer that long, isn’t it? Coming up on thirty years of publication. I think that when I started out I was a lot more visually oriented in general--the two things I was consistently inspired by were graphic novels (Vertigo in particular, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman et al) and films, the way they mix action with dialogue with diegetic sound and music, except that with comics you can also overlay characters’ thoughts and a sort of god’s-eye POV narration that, I suppose, mimics the author’s own voice. I was also very apt to break sentences in the middle and re-paragraph to create beats of action; my stuff read like a monologue, something intended to be spoken out loud, almost like poetry. I used a lot of interjective fragments in brackets, as well. These days, I don’t do as much of that stuff, though I’m hoping to start doing more of it again, now I’ve noticed the difference.

What really distinguishes my older stuff from my more recent stuff, however, is that back then, I didn’t have the wealth of life-experiences to draw upon that I have now. My stuff read a bit more like opera, because I was describing and exploring emotions I hadn’t yet felt from the inside-out. Also, my perspective was that of an outsider who resented her outsider-ness, who was constantly caught between the binary reactive poles of Fuck All Y’all and What The Fuck Is Wrong With Me? Whereas these days, although I’ve never received a diagnosis, I pretty much accept that I’m neuroatypical (Asperger’s), so most of that back-and-forth stemmed from internalized ableism, as the kids would say. I’m on anti-anxiety meds, I’m a mother, I’m a professional, I’m an adult; I’m just not even half as horny, angry and punkish as I used to be. Not to mention that the world really IS falling apart, and it’s not as cool as I once thought it would be. I’m a pre-crone at the Apocalypse, scribbling down details.

CW: Your latest collection from Grimscribe Press, In That Endlessness, Our End was one of my favorite short story collections of the year. Reading through it, I saw a lot of parallels drawn between the modern weird horror story and the modern creepypasta, all pulled off masterfully. As a writer often lumped into the “literary” end of the genre, how do you feel about creepypasta? Did it influence you at all in this crop of stories?

GF: I actually do really love a good creepypasta, that’s for sure. When it’s done “right,” it’s one of the most entertaining forms of modern mythology I can think of, a vibrant offshoot of three (?!?) generations’ worth of people raised with/on the Internet. And maybe I find it so attractive because I didn’t get an iMac at home until I was 25, but it also might have something to do with my fascination with dead/dying technology in general, with ephemera, with the liminal: Stuff that falls between the cracks, and sticks there. The pentimento of it all. But that’s hardly something lacking on the literary end of the scale, either--I remember arguing once that you could lump M.R. James’s “The Mezzotint” and Susan Hill’s The Man in the Painting together under the heading of epistolary/docu-dramatic storytelling, as examples of single-frame found-footage movies. I’ve always loved the idea of framing stories inside of stories inside of stories, like a series of letters and diary-entries compiled by a curator whose motives you might be forced to question...what are we being shown, and how, by who? Was something left out, and why? That stuff goes all the way back to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to H. Rider Haggard’s She, and I love it dearly, even if the ultimately unreliable narrator remains a trope I can take far more easily in short story form than I can as the lynchpin of a novel.

CW: One thing that may surprise readers is that your work has been adapted to television before. Can you tell us a little about The Hunger and how the opportunity came to be?

GF: Okay, so: Back in the day, Tony and Ridley Scott put The Hunger together as an opportunity to introduce various European directors they had their eyes on to the North American scene...these were people who, like the Scott brothers, had started out doing mainly commercials and were poised to trade up to features, like (for example) Marcus Nispel, who eventually ended up doing the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot. Each episode would therefore act like a short film where the director could make their mark, a potential Hollywood calling card. They decided they would shoot out of Montreal, as a co-pro between Showtime in the States and Showcase up here, and they wanted to take advantage of the Canadian film production tax credit system, which mean they had to have a certain amount of behind-the-scenes and subsidiary Canadian content: supporting cast-members, writers, crew, plus a certain amount of Canadian IP to balance out the mainly-American key cast and the known-quantity IP. So in and amongst the Graham Masterton and Poppy Z. Brite adaptations, you had stories written by me, David Nickle, and other Canadian horror writers (a lot of us located through Don Hutchison’s Northern Frights anthology series). They ended up picking up the rights to adapt five of my stories, all chosen on the basis of either how much sexual content they already had or how much they thought could be shoehorned into them. Many of my stories were rejected for being too queer, too weird or too gross, which was pretty hilarious, especially because one of the ones I adapted myself was full of apparently allowable lesbian content I later had to take out when their American star refused to kiss another girl. At any rate, I made more money than I’d ever made before and learned a lot about runaway production, both useful things, in hindsight. And I don’t hate the result, so that’s nice.

CW: Which of your stories do you think is most successful at executing your vision and why?

GF: Oh man, that’s hard. I like to think most of them are successful, at least successful enough to sell. ;) I do have my favourites, though.

CW: As a film critic, you must have some really interesting perspectives on the horror genre. In regards to cosmic horror though, is there a film that captures the genre better than any other?

GF: The films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa sometimes approach a sort of cosmic horror that I find very persuasive, particularly in terms of Kairo (also known as Pulse). Kairo posits a sort of soft apocalypse spreading from/via the Internet, as more and more people visit a website that simply asks: “Do You Want to See a Ghost?”, only to find themselves driven to suicide or literally fading away, Hiroshima-shadow style, in the wake of their interactions with an afterlife so jam-packed with eternally lonely phantoms that it’s spread a leak which is slowly contaminating our own universe, closing the gap so that dead people and live ones become gradually indistinguishable. I’m also terrified by outer space, those huge distances, the way that time bends under gravitational pressure, the way that things can be simultaneously finite and infinite. This means that watching movies like Interstellar can be a bit of a chore, even though they don’t qualify as “horror” per se.

CW: Your dialogue has very natural speech-like rhythms. This is in contrast to many of the original giants of weird fiction, who often seemed to be willfully archaic. I always think of your work as pulling the weird down to earth and eliminating an invisible class divide. Do you think there’s an inherent elitism baked into weird fiction? How do you balance insane circumstances with your realistic depictions of people?

GF: The way I approach things these days has a lot to do with the inherent problem of speculative fiction, no matter the genre: You’re stuck having to tell a story everyone knows isn’t true, but hopefully in such a way that you persuade your audience it could be true, thus forcing them to care about the characters stuck inside of it. The best way I’ve found to do that is to always bake in at least a few grains of something real, something that’s actually happened to me, which is why making the main characters as much “like” myself as possible helps a lot. So I begin with a narrative voice I understand intimately and then move outwards, varying jargon and rhythm as I go. Sometimes I jot down turns of phrase and sentence structure that I like, and usually I end up using them somewhere. I do like archaic language too, though...the 1860s Western slang of the Hexslinger series, for example, or the piratical/Celtic/West Indies dialogue from Trap-Weed,” “Two Captains,” “Drawn Up from Deep Places” and “The Salt Wedding.” But it’s true, a lot of that is more dark historical fantasy than big-W Weird.

I’m not sure weird fiction has to be elitist, because--and this may seem trite, but go with it--the Weird is part of everybody’s cognitive inheritance. We all have certain fixed ideas about the universe and our place in it, about ourselves, about what is and isn’t possible; weird fiction’s purpose is to bend, stretch and prospectively break those strictures, to make us question and revise our own beliefs, to put us in danger of losing our faith and/or our minds. And it sure doesn’t take a degree from Harvard to feel like nothing we were taught applies anymore, like our version of reality was never “real” enough to matter...people are having those sorts of existential crises right the fuck now, all across the world. People taking horse paste because they think viruses are worms, people who genuinely think the end of the world is a good thing, people who think the truth of other people’s identities can somehow undermine their own. People who think war is peace and freedom is slavery, etcetera.

CW: What is your relationship to cosmic horror and are there any works that have personally influenced you?

GF: I seem to find cosmic horror everywhere, even when I’m not looking for it, and that might well be just because mortality remains the central mystery of life; we spend our lives orbiting a big black hole and nobody knows where that hole goes, though everybody knows we’re eventually all going into it. Some recent narratives I’ve tripped across containing more or less cosmic horror include David Peak’s Corpsepaint, Mark E. Fitch’s “Solitude,” Siren Narnia’s “Vision,” Ambrose Ibsen’s Transmission, DeAnna Knippling’s The House Without A Summer, T. Kingfisher’s The Hollow Places...it’s the spice of existential dread, really, and all dread is (to some degree) existential. That’s what having these big brains gets us.

CW: Despite having an absolutely incredible collection out this year, I hear you have yet another one on the way. Can you tell us a little about this project and how you think it compares and contrasts with In That Endlessness, Our End?

GF: Dark Is Better has been a longish time coming--I placed it first with a different publishing house, then withdrew it after over five years on the “coming soon” list. It’s very much a horror collection, not that Endlessness isn’t, and contains a lot of stories first published in fairly obscure venues, as well as more recognizable staples of my work like “each thing I show you is a piece of my death,” “This Is Not For You” and “Slick Black Bones and Soft Black Stars.” I like to think it’s a bit of a spectrum of darkness, a chiaroscuro spread. I’m very pleased with it, and I devoutly hope everyone else will be, too.

***

Creydamoc

By William Couper

He slithered down the three steps like he’d never walked before. His feet poured down the steps like foul muck from a tipped bucket.

“I told you I didn’t want to climb the bloody dunes,” Grant huffed as he slogged up the treacherous side of the dune. Further complaints died on his lips when he looked out over the water.

It hadn’t been there yesterday. Had it been there before they went out for their morning walk? He had been running late and hadn’t looked out at the wide expanse of the sea while getting ready for their constitutional. There was no way he could have missed the large shape.

The object was so huge and imposing that it could not be mistaken even for the biggest ocean liner or container ship. It was more like an island in scale. It cut out a large portion of the sky, even though it must have been at least a mile out to sea. The shape it formed was hard for his mind to rectify. He could see foaming breakers smashing against the relatively narrow base of the object, it widened up to two uneven points before sloping in again. The top of the object was at an angle off straight. Outside of the geometric nature of its eccentric form he could not make out many details.

“You don’t have a clue what it is either, do you?” he said.

Niamh didn’t answer him, she frowned and stared out at the sea. The way her eyes roved and scanned it was as though she were struggling with something. She looked puzzled and faced him, a question in her eyes.

“What are you talking about?” she said.

Uneasiness froze his jaw and rendered his tongue a useless clod of muscle. Everything about the object struck him as wrong. That she didn’t know what he was talking about caused a searing cold spike to spear his stomach. For an uncomfortable length of time, he stared at her, wondering if she was playing a trick. Her expression was guilelessly honest.

“Let’s go home. I’ve had enough exercise,” he said and started sliding back down to the sandy path below.

“But we’ve got another fifteen minutes.”

“I want to go home. I’ll see you when you get back.”

Her confused and annoyed response was lost to him as he hurried home. He tried not to think about the huge object floating off the coast.

***

Shauna Burton was cold when she went back inside. It had been half past four when she woke up without warning and felt compelled to put on her shoes and walk down the street. The shadow moving against the inkiness of the sky was impossible to miss, both rising and cutting forward through the choppy sea into position.

A dank smell lingered in the air for hours, like stagnant water. She wrinkled her nose reflexively, but she kept watching the monolithic object move closer to the coast until it came to a stop. There was no sound. Unusual, as the seagulls never seemed to sleep. None of the birds were visible in the sky. The haphazardly shaped thing in the water demanded her attention. She wanted to run away screaming but was frozen still.

The early morning damp chill closed around her and still she did not move. Early workers passed her and gave her strange looks, seemingly unmoved by the massive thing standing sentinel in the churning waters a mile off the coast. How could they not notice the palpable malevolence it exuded? She did not answer any questions, responding was pointless, and kept her gaze on the thing as the first dim light of dawn illuminated it.

The mottled grey-yellow-beige colour of its surface made her want to be sick. Huge as it was, she felt that it wanted to hide, to remain concealed. The same could be said of the tiny objects that dropped from it and moved with disconcerting speed through the water. They were so fast that they left brilliant white trails of foam in the otherwise grey water.

She had felt a stab of breath-stopping terror when she lost sight of the things and it broke the spell. She hurried, shivering and wet, back home.

“Where did you go, Shauna?” her father said. He looked worried.

“Why are you still in your jammies?” her mother said.

“Wanted to go out,” Shauna said. “Do you know what that thing is in the water?”

Her parents looked at each other in confusion. They didn’t seem to understand what the thing could be any more than she did.

Her father shrugged and went through to the living room.

“What thing?” he called back.

Shauna glanced her mother, who returned a helpless expression. In annoyance, Shauna went through to find her father staring out to sea, scanning the horizon, ignoring the thing dominating the view. Her mother followed Shauna and went to the window.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, love,” her mother said.

Shauna gaped at her parents. Their expressions were innocent, baffling.

At a loss, and unwilling to risk an argument, she left the living room. She ignored the overlapping questions and went upstairs to shower.

It was almost time for her to head out for work. She could not get the vision of the object out of her mind; she dreaded going outside and seeing it again. There was no choice, she could not afford to phone in sick. She was so close to moving out. A few more months of saving and she could start looking for a flat.

The cold in her bones was not dissipated by the warm shower spray.

***

“I thought this holiday was supposed to let us spend more time together,” Niamh said, sitting down to eat breakfast.

Grant had not eaten the toast and fried eggs that he had made himself. The moment he sat down he began thinking about the thing in the sea. He tried to avoid thinking about it by facing away from the huge living room window. The sea view had once been the best part about the house, but with the object sitting silently and evil in the water he could not bear to look. It was impossible to dislodge it from his mind.

“I just suddenly didn’t feel well,” he said and indicated the congealed eggs on the plate.

“You haven’t caught something, have you?”

He had hoped that his excuse would not trigger Niamh’s fear of germs. It was a stupid thing to wish, because it was such an overriding part of her that it was a source of frustration for them both.

“I don’t think so, just feeling a bit out of sorts,” he said.

“Are you sure? Do I need to phone the doctor?”

“It’s just a bit of a dodgy gut. Nothing to get worked up about. You know it happens occasionally. I’ll be fine by this afternoon, and we can get out for a proper walk then.”

She examined him, looking sceptical. It was obvious he was lying. He would not feel any better by the afternoon, but he could not tell her that any more than he could explain why.

A light thump.

“Are you going to get the post, then?” he said, when she did not break her scrutiny.

It was a short-term deflection at best. Her expression told him that she would not forget to continue the conversation later. A small reprieve from her questions was good enough. Whether he would be able to give coherent or sane answers later was another matter.

“Why are we still getting political stuff from Robert Creydamoc?” Niamh said, holding an envelope between thumb and forefinger as though it was caked in filth.

“Gloating because he won despite no one voting for him?”

“Of course somebody had to vote for him. We just don’t know anyone who did.” She tossed the envelope in the bin and thumbed through the rest.

“Don’t you find that a little bit strange though? You would think at least one of our acquaintances might have voted for him. Even had a complimentary word. Not one of them had anything good to say about him.”

“Something in his weird, vague campaign made sense to enough people.”

Creydamoc had won the seat for their district the day before, by a surprisingly large majority. He’d lived in the town for about a decade. This formed part of his platform for election, on how an outsider had been integrated into the town. The rest of his talking points had been of elevating the town and making it more secure. No one seemed to know what he’d meant. There were rumours about unpleasant encounters with Creydamoc that Grant had expected would damage his campaign. The strange public appearances where Creydamoc did not seem to know how to form coherent sentences and even blurted bizarre collections of noises should have alienated more people, or so Grant had thought.

“I don’t know what. I couldn’t understand a word he said,” Grant said.

Thinking and talking about Creydamoc made him feel anxious.

Niamh shrugged and looked through the rest of the letters. While she muttered, tutted and dismissed the other communications, Grant found he could no longer stop himself from looking at the thing in the sea.

***

Shauna found herself walking down to the waterfront after work, as if drawn there in some kind of trance. The closer she got to the shoreline, the more uneasy she became. A large part of her discomfort came from the looming object off the coast but there was more than that. The number of people in town, already unusually small, dwindled as she made her way. She wanted to stop and turn back but something kept her moving in that awful direction.

The promenade was deserted. No people, no cars, no birds. The lack of seagulls perched on the fence and streetlights or the occasional tern skimming the water’s surface made her think coming down here was a mistake. Something in the air was off.

Perhaps visiting her grandmother would give her comfort.

She felt ill by the time she arrived at her grandmother’s and hardly had any energy to knock on the door. When she did there was no answer. Nothing unusual there, her grandmother was hard of hearing, and it often took several efforts to get her attention. The old woman had refused numerous attempts to get a mobile phone, going so far as, with surprising grace, throwing one she’d been given as a gift in the bin.

When her third attempt did not get a response, she flipped the letterbox open and called in. Still nothing and now she was becoming concerned. Calling through the mail slot normally worked.

The nasty smell of sewage and stagnant water told her to turn around.

She gasped when she saw the man standing in the street. He glowered at her with watery-grey eyes. There were things about him that made her innards contract. His head was misshapen and the brown object she thought was his hat looked melded to his skull. He seemed to struggle with his downturned mouth, as though the flesh was trying to slide down his face onto the pavement. His whole appearance had the look of half-melted wax, running together into one mass of slurry. Just when it looked like his form was going to lose all coherence he managed to reform.

An alien sound came from him. A gurgling grunt that came to language by a circuitous route that sounded like: “What do you want?”

“None of your fucking business, mate,” she said, looking for a way to quickly bypass him, while panic distorted her thoughts.

He shuffled closer to the gate, and she reflexively backed up against the front door. The terror of being trapped by this man in her grandmother’s front garden overtook all thoughts. It was a small space, that would provide little room for escape once he got too close.

She darted for the gate, dodging when he made a grab for her. She put a good twenty feet between them, before looking back. He smiled at her, showing off a mouth full of objects that looked like a collection of teeth taken from a dozen different people and animals.

The horrific smell intensified. She looked behind her and saw there were two more people. A tall man in a black suit and a woman wearing a grey dress. These two newcomers had the same trouble maintaining their cohesion.

Their intentions were clear. She hoped they would be as slow to react when she ran past them. The woman lunged at her, but it was a pathetic attempt and Shauna was in no danger of being caught. Droplets of thick liquid flew off the ends of the woman’s fingers. Black stuff that audibly splattered onto the tarmac. The way the woman’s fingers seemed to diminish made Shauna’s stomach churn.

One of the other front doors opened and another melting person stepped out, eyes fixed on her. He slithered down the three steps like he’d never walked before. His feet poured down the steps like foul muck from a tipped bucket.

She had seen enough—too much—and she ran onto the next street and kept going up the hill until she could go no further without bending over to vomit.

***

Why was she talking to the man? Grant had been seeing these people for the last few weeks and had been unsettled by them. Niamh talked to the man whose peaked cap kept threatening to melt into his forehead and acted as though it were normal. When she touched the man’s forearm and her fingers sank into the flesh, Grant thought he might be sick.

“What a nice man,” Niamh said when she came back inside.

“Didn’t you notice something weird about him?”

“He’s a bit reserved perhaps, but I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.”

Grant’s gaze was caught by the black stuff dripping from Niamh’s hand. It looked like slimy oil mixed with sand and the small drips splashed against the floor with surprising volume. Niamh seemed unaware of either, as she scratched her nose with a contaminated finger, leaving a thick smear.

“I think you should wash your hands,” he said.

She gave him a dubious look, “Why? What is wrong with you? You’ve been acting all nervous and out of sorts for weeks.”

The number of those melting people he had been seeing had increased since his time off. He could not stand to be around them and was glad that his work had taken him out of the town. They roamed the town like zombies, seeming to do nothing other than stare at the town’s inhabitants.

“Please,” he said. “It’ll only take a few moments.”

She rolled her eyes and went into the kitchen.

He took the opportunity to look out the window, something he had become even less keen on in the last month. The huge monolith-thing still floated off the coast and no one ever mentioned it, even Niamh seemed ignorant of it. The same way no one cared to mention the larger melting people who stood sentinel on the streets closer to the waterfront. They were tall, easily over seven feet, dark and silent, never moving and never socialising. They seemed to exude the potential for something terrible.

Grant noticed one standing on the corner of his street. He scrambled away from the window in a fit of panic. It had not been there while Niamh had been outside. There was no way he would have missed it out in the open. Why was it there?

Niamh came rushing in, drying her hands. “What’s wrong?”

He pointed feebly at the window, unable to speak. She hurried to look out. In a few moments it was clear she had no idea what was going on.

“Don’t you fucking see it?” he cried.

“The thing in the sea you haven’t stopped talking about?”

“Are you fucking with me?”

“No, but I’m beginning to think you’re fucking with me, Grant.”

He glanced out the window again. The thing was still there, grotesque, huge and glowering. He looked at Niamh, she looked genuinely confused and frustrated. He backed away from her and rushed upstairs. He locked himself in the bathroom.

***

No one, not even her parents were worried about what had happened to Shauna’s grandmother. There had been no answer the dozen or so times Shauna had tried. Part of her wanted to return to the beachfront and confirm what she feared, but she couldn’t bring herself.

She had avoided the streets with the tall things for weeks. It became more difficult with each passing day. They had worked their way further into the town and away from the promenade, appearing a week after the melting people had effectively taken over.

She got her telephone out to take her mind off the grim things populating the streets. Just looking around the internet was not enough, though. She flicked through her contacts and hit the dial button.

“Hey, you pain in the arse,” she said.

“It’s the failure to launch! How are you doing?” Chrissie said.

“Been better.”

“Things are still weird on the old homestead?”

“You have no fucking idea.”

“That thing still in the sea?”

After discovering most people either downplayed or refused to acknowledge the huge object in the water, Shauna had taken a picture and sent it to Chrissie a week after first seeing it. Her reaction was the same as Shauna’s, and her comments on the melting people and the larger sentinels made Shauna feel less like she was going insane.

“And the melting people are still taking over, too,” Shauna said in a whisper.

“Is there any way you can get out of there soon?”

“I don’t have enough money. And I’d need time to line up a job, too.”

“You could try going to university.”

“Even if I had any qualifications, that’s going to be months away. Whatever’s going on, is happening now.”

“You could stay here.”

Chrissie lived on the other side of the country and Shauna had spent some weekends there.

“I don’t think your landlord would be happy emptying the place out when we all suffocate,” Shauna said.

“It’s not that small.”

“Thanks anyway. I just need to keep my head down and get through whatever this is.”

“I’ll start looking at alternatives for you. Sounds like it’s only going to get worse. Somehow I knew that place would end up a full-on nightmare.”

Something moved, at the edge of her peripheral vision. She ignored it.

“Your parents were fucking psychic. They might’ve thought your dad was moving away because of work, but they subconsciously knew something was going to happen here,” Shauna said.

“You always give my mum and dad too much credit. Dad still has to phone me to help him with his passwords and I’m not even sure my mum can read.”

“And you’re too hard on them. I like your mum and dad. They’re more fun than my parents.”

The movement continued and she realised it was following her. She kept her eyes ahead.

“You need to fix that speech impediment. You always say ‘fun’ when you mean ‘fucking annoying.’ It’s a real problem,” Shauna said.

“And you’re the one living up to being a pain in the arse.”

“Your mum would have made that sound adorable.”

“You leave my mum out of it.”

Shauna didn’t get a chance to reply, the phone was yanked out of her hand. She whirled, on the defensive. The grinning policeman would have made her stop on his own, but the looming tall thing all but induced a full-on panic attack.

The policeman pressed the screen, ending the call. He put the phone in his pocket.

“Now what were you discussing with your out-of-town friend?” he said.

Shauna blinked at him. A throb of fear clenched her throat. There was no way he could have known he was talking to someone outside of the town. Did he have a listening device?

Defiance and outrage washed away most of her fear. “You can’t take my phone.”

“Yet here we are. I ask again: what were you discussing with the young lady?”

She took half a step back. His invasive knowledge formed a dense weight in her stomach. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

“If you have nothing to hide, then there’s nothing to fear.”

Another step or two backwards. Her eyes flicked to the tall melting thing. This was the closest she had been to one. The stench of stagnant water was a thick miasma. She saw that the thing’s dark skin was not completely opaque, at first she thought she saw its veins twitching beneath the surface, but the movement was not regimented enough. Were those creatures wriggling and burrowing through it? The mottled grey fish or worms left trails in the tall thing’s being that slowly closed over as she watched. Its gaze was the worst, the eyes were not solid orbs, but were split up into lobes like bubbles of muck or oil. The lobes changed size and vanished with unsettling regularity.

“We only want a little bit of information. Is that so bad?” the policeman said.

“I don’t care. My private conversations have got nothing to do with you.”

“That’s for us to decide, young lady.”

Neither the policeman nor the tall thing seemed aware of her edging away. There were now three footsteps between them.

“This is harassment,” she said.

“Just the local constabulary taking an interest in a citizen.”

“I don’t need to tell you anything.”

She spun and ran. She had no idea how far she might get on foot against a police officer in a car. If she made it to the corner, she had a plan.

Instead of calling after her, the policeman laughed. She was confused, but she hardly had the desire to look back.

She had not heard any sign of a following vehicle when she went into Cynthia’s Fashions. Finally, she looked out and confirmed the policeman hadn’t followed. She waited an extra five minutes to be sure.

Going against every instinct, she went back onto the street where he had stopped her. No sign of him. The tall thing still stood at the other end of the street, where it had been when she had passed it earlier. Its head twitched in her direction. She darted out of sight and cautiously made her way home.

***

“I think we should go,” Niamh said.

He looked at her and, for what felt like the fiftieth time that week, wondered if she was messing with him. The invitation to the gala event being held by Robert Creydamoc was still in his hands.

“It’s on the beach, right in front of that bloody thing in the water,” Grant said.

“Will you stop going on about that thing. Nothing’s happened. Everything’s normal.”

She couldn’t be more wrong. A lot had happened. People were disappearing and those melting people, along with the sentinel things, were everywhere. Several of their neighbours had been missing for over a month. He had been happy to get out of the town, especially after his encounters with police and the sentinels. Meanwhile Creydamoc went around the town surrounded by a council of melting people.

“This is bad. There’s no better way for me to say this. Robert Creydamoc has something nasty planned.”

Niamh rolled her eyes. “What could he have planned? He’s not a supervillain. By local councillor standards he’s pretty innocuous. Every time I mention him, you start on these paranoid rants. He hasn’t even had a proper chance to do anything since he won the election.”

“You can’t be serious. You spend more time here than me and you’re telling me you haven’t noticed anything different about this place?”

“More of this nonsense? Do you need to take another holiday already?”

“You thought Creydamoc was a prick, a dangerous one at that, only a few weeks ago.”

“You’re exaggerating. Sure, I was a bit stand-offish about him, but I think he’s been good for the place.”

He wanted to say more, but it was clear she believed every confusing word. It was getting harder to keep his frustration in check. Any time he tried to engage with Niamh about his fears she would smile at him like he was a wayward boy and spout some rubbish implicitly suggesting that it was all in his mind. He knew what he was seeing, and he was not going to be persuaded it was a product of an overworked brain.

She put a hand on his arm and he almost pulled away. Her reaction was slight, but it was obvious that she noticed. Her mild surprise was replaced with sympathy. The kind of patronising sympathy guaranteed to infuriate him.

“We’ll go along and if you still feel uncomfortable at it, we can leave. No questions. You say the word and we’ll leave. I don’t think we’ll need to. Once you’re there, you’ll have a good time,” she said. “Do it for me, will you?”

Defeated, he nodded.

***

Shauna watched the car pull out of the driveway. Her parents were so excited about getting the invite to the gala that they’d hardly needed to think about it. They were baffled when she told them she would rather stand on a roof tack than attend. After a couple of days, they’d given up trying to persuade her.

She looked around the empty house. She had grown up here and until three months ago it had still felt like home. Now she had become dissociated, even alienated.

In her bedroom, she looked around at her belongings and considered what she would do with it all once she was able to move out. Looking at the stuff she would have to get rid of felt like an ice-pick through her chest. Soon, this would no longer be her home but her parents’ home. Would they stay forever?

The light in the room changed. She looked out of the window and found the sky looked like it was made of rust and ash. The clouds had a ragged texture, but not because of any strong wind high up. There was no wind, in fact the air was dead still. Not even a single leaf moved on the surrounding trees.

There were figures shambling down the street, over a dozen of them, slumped, deformed, inhuman. Some of her neighbours had been standing out there earlier but they had all made their way down to the beach along with her parents.

A shuffling mass of melting people and the tall things converged on the front garden. The grey eyes of the melting people and the ineffable dark lobes of the tall things were turned up at her. Several of the melting people showed their disgusting teeth in mockeries of smiles.

Something beat against the front door. They must have started approaching the house the moment her parents were out of sight.

She looked at the thing in the sea and saw numerous objects drop from it. Just like that first day, she could see the things skimming through the waves at high speed toward the shore. Other, dark things with uneven bodies scuttled over the almost vertical surface of the object, agitated, eager ants dancing.

Something knocked at the door again, louder.

She wanted to scream and hide. Her urge was to lock herself in the bathroom to be away from the encroaching entities, but she knew that would only corner her. Her feet felt frozen to the floor.

She took a deep breath, she snatched up her backpack, stuffed clothes and some toiletries into it, and pulled on her jacket.

The door was struck with a repeated powerful banging. She looked up for only a second before grabbing what little food she could carry. Another bang accompanied by a splintering sound. She ran out through the back door.

Some tall things and melting people waited outside the back garden, a tall thing was pulling the wooden gate off its hinges. She climbed over to the neighbour’s garden, a melting person came out of the house, eyeing her. She continued over the next fence and the next as quickly as she could.

Out of breath, she scrambled over a fourth neighbour’s fence and onto the street.

Melting people and tall things were at either end but she kept going, barely looking at them. She was going uphill, towards the outskirts of the town. Higher ground called to her.

***

Even before they sat down, he knew the whole ‘gala’ was wrong. The event was held in a flat area of the beach between the dunes with the monolith looming over the proceedings. He was unsettled by the things scurrying around the surface of the object and the other things dropping into the water. The sky was menacing above it all, as though waiting to do the monolith’s evil bidding. Jagged rips in the slate-coloured clouds revealed dirty amber beyond. His brain felt light and woozy.

Melting people, along with police officers, formed a loose circle around the seating area before the stage. Other melting people mingled with the human guests. One approached him and Niamh. She stood and shook the thing’s hand and it gurgled and burbled unintelligible things at her. She laughed in response. The melting person shot a look at him and retreated.

“That was rude,” she said and used a jarring series of bubbling sounds, he realised was the thing’s name, “—wanted to make sure we were comfortable. There’s going to be champagne in the marquee later.”

He frowned. There was no marquee. There was only this open-air stage occupied by four sentinels.

“I want to leave,” he said aware of the rough desperation in his voice.

She looked at him in shock. “We’ve only just got here.”

“You pr—”

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” Robert Creydamoc’s voice boomed from a loudspeaker.

Grant had thought Creydamoc cut an awkward figure from the moment he first saw him. Slumped and giving the impression of being overweight while also objectively slim. He looked even more slumped now, as though he were collapsing in on himself.

Grant got to his feet. He tried to pull Niamh with him, but she irritably brushed him off. He wanted to drag her out of there, to get away from the object in the sea, the melting people and Robert Creydamoc. The smell of stagnant water was maddening. Niamh and the other members of the audience noticed nothing but Creydamoc. His speech devolved from coherent English, to gibberish to burbling and gurgling. The crowd cheered.

He had never experienced fear like this. The certainty that something terrible was about to happen, made it difficult to breath. His heartbeat pounded in his eardrums.

He pushed his way through rows of seats to the nearest way out. The circle of melting people and police shuffled together and blocked the exit. They grinned at him. More melting people shuffled in from the sea and created a tight surrounding circle.

The object in the sea lurched and dipped. The rolling wave must have been about ten feet tall when it hit the shore. Fizzing salt water washed over his shoes, filling them.

Creydamoc kept talking. The audience was rapt.

Grant threw himself at the wall of bodies and recoiled at the giving sliminess of their flesh. He gagged and whimpered when he found his hands were covered in dark muck.

The object dipped again. The new wave was even higher, and the water struck him in the shins and caused him to stagger.

Over Creydamoc’s unintelligible speech were mutters of annoyance. Grant felt a pang of hope. If they all worked together, they could force their way through the melting people and get off the beach.

The object dipped a third time, submerging almost half-way. The surge of water hit and swept everyone away.

***

From the top of the hill outside of town, Shauna watched as successive waves flooded the beach, the promenade, and streets further into the town. Some buildings crumbled when the foul water hit. She could watch no more. The town in which she’d grown up, where she’d spent her entire life was gone. She turned inland and began walking.

End.

***

William Couper is a writer from Scotland. As well as horror, he writes fantasy, and science fiction. He will even do some non-fiction when the fancy takes him. His work has appeared in anthologies including, Cthulhu Lies Dreaming, In the Blink of an Eye, and Built from Human Parts. He is partial to a good (or okay) film, playing computer games, and a bit of Magic: The Gathering.

2nd Place: The Jockey of Yuggoth

By Erik McHatton

As he leaned into the handle-bars of his Venusian coaster, Elrond Estelburry felt positively alive in the atomized ozone filtering through his helmet. Smoking atmospheric debris raced past him, alight in his accelerator’s wake. Stroking the controls ever so gently, Elrond dug in his heels and urged the coaster toward its limits, frantically trying to stay ahead of his fellow jockeys, who wrangled for position just behind.

Looking back, he saw Reaver break away from the pack. The glow of his afterburners formed an aurora around his black helmeted head as he dropped low and sped past Elrond in a flash.

Snarling, Elrond thumbed over the booster button and resisted the temptation to exhaust its one-time use. No, there was a better way. Pulling the coaster sharply to the side, Elrond thrust out his boot and kicked hard against the track’s interference shield. The resulting pushback threw him into the eye of Reaver’s wake, and he soon found himself gaining on his rival once again. He cursed mightily, however, as he felt the jarring motion of the track’s auto-ref as it pulled him out of his newly won position and realigned him in his lane. He would have sworn he heard Reaver laugh, if he didn’t know it was impossible.

Taking another tack, Elrond recalled an old trick he’d learned during his rookie season and pulled his hands from the controls. Thrusting his arms down, he knocked the bulky blow-vent covers off the sides of the vehicle. Shifting his weight all at once toward the back end of the machine, he shot upward into the shielding matrix’s natural mag-field. Suspended in the field momentarily, the coaster shivering dangerously, Elrond waited until just the right moment before placing both hands firmly onto the track’s invisible ceiling. Aiming carefully, he used all his strength to dislodge the bike before throwing himself violently back into the pilot’s cradle. His stomach lurched as the coaster flew towards Reaver at great speed... directly into the clutches of the hated auto-ref, who waited below like an outfielder standing under a looping pop fly; he was realigned once again.

Frustrated, Elrond clenched his teeth and steeled himself, pressing flush against the interior of the coaster’s carbonite chassis. He’d be damned if he’d lose another race to Reaver. Closing his eyes he pushed down hard with his thumb, saying a small prayer while activating the Yuggothian Booster, an experimental, secret (and illegal) late addition to his ride. Everything went black, and with a squeal of a void-like pitch, Elrond Estelburry, three-time winner of the Venusian Coaster Series, vanished just short of the finish of his last ever Venusian Cup.

He now lies on the shore of an obsidian lake situated on the black planet of Yuggoth, transported there accidentally by desperate, ill-gotten technology. He stares out with deathly eyes from inside his tinted helmet, whose polished surface shimmers with the suggestion of titanous, black obelisks. Vacuously, he beholds the shoggoths as they splash.

End.

The Green

By Macy Harrison

“I was like you, once. I got lost in these woods and, though my family searched for me, they never found me. I died out here and now I am part of the forest.”

Prue dashed across the schoolyard, her galoshes slapping the sodden grass. She hopped onto the sidewalk, and was about to dash down Whittaker Street, when she saw something that made her heart thump and her feet turn to concrete. Simon Banks stood at the corner where Field crossed Whittaker. She always passed by that intersection on her way home from school, and the only way to avoid Simon would be to take the long way around via Sumpter Avenue, but she wouldn’t do that. Prue wasn’t about to miss an opportunity to collect more data.

“Hello, Prue,” Simon called. “Want to play hide and seek in the woods? I can show you all the best hiding spots.”

“Hello, Simon,” Prue said, matching his tone. They had never been this formal before, when they had been friends. “How are you today?”

“I’m great,” he said with a wide grin. “It’s great weather today. Good for the Green.”

The day was overcast and drizzly, as it often was in Western Oregon during the fall. Those with the Green seemed to like this weather best of all. They had not been as active during the dry summer, but as soon as the rainy season hit, they began venturing into town regularly again. Prue thought they probably dried out during the spring and summer, making it more difficult for them to move around. The rain plumped them back up.

“It’s a little cold for me,” Prue said. “Too cold to go to the woods.”

“You should come to the woods with me,” he said. “We haven’t played hide and seek in forever.”

“Sorry, but I have homework. And Dad wouldn’t like me going into the woods without him.” Quickly, she added, “Because of the mountain lions, I mean.”

“Mountain lions don’t bother me,” Simon said, grinning. “You spend too much time doing homework, anyway. You’ve already skipped the fifth grade. If you keep on like that, then pretty soon you’ll have skipped over all the grades, even high school. And then you wouldn’t have anything left to do.”

“I’d still have college.”

He furrowed his brow as if he didn’t know what that word meant and said, “You could come and play with me, I guess. If you wanted to go ahead and get all the other grades out of the way. I’d be happy to play hide and seek with you again.”

“Maybe next time,” Prue said. “I have to finish my homework.”

“Wait. Come and play with me.”

Simon side-stepped, blocking her path. He wasn’t any taller or bigger than she was, but he had the Green on his side. You never knew what someone with the Green was capable of. Prue breathed in—he smelled damp, like a forest floor—and stepped back. She had been avoiding looking directly in his eyes, because the Green was in them, but she had to let him know that she was serious. That she didn’t have time to play. Steeling herself, she looked hard into his eyes, or, more precisely, to where his eyes had been. In their place were two spongey, bright green orbs of something that looked like moss but wasn’t.

“I’m sorry,” she said, suppressing a shudder. “Maybe next time. I really have to get home now or I’ll get in trouble.”

“Dang,” he said, still grinning. “Maybe you can come out after dinner.”

“Maybe,” she said, walking away. “I’ll have to see.”

Prue picked up her pace. As she ducked behind the mulberry bush that bordered Mrs. Walker’s yard, she heard Simon call out to Elias Gonzales and knew that she was safe for the time being.

Wedging the shaft of her blue checked umbrella in the crook of her arm, she crouched down on the soggy turf and pulled a yellow spiral notebook from her backpack. Working quickly so as not to forget the important bits, she recorded as much of her conversation with Simon as she could remember. She titled it “Conversation with Simon Banks #4” and dated the entry. It was good to be exact about these things.

As the rain drizzled off the plastic hood of her umbrella, she flipped through her previous entries. The last one was on fungi. She had made it earlier that day, when she had opted to visit the library instead of going to recess. All of the information had come from a series of dusty, leather-bound books titled Ansler’s Guide to Mushrooms and Other Fungi of the Pacific Northwest.

Prue probably could have found the information she needed faster if the library’s computers still worked, but no one had been able to get an internet connection since the quarantine began. Prue was smart enough to recognize what that meant, that the government who’d sealed off the town were also trying to keep information from them. Everyone else knew it was a bad sign, too, but acknowledging it would mean acknowledging something was wrong, and they weren’t supposed to do that. Not if they wanted to keep peace with the Green.

Prue read the passages she had copied from Ansler’s, mouthing the words as she read: Fungi are eukaryotic organisms, not to be confused with plants or animals of the same designation… Fungi consume nutrients by dissolving and absorbing molecules… They are nature’s most prominent and successful decomposers.

Her eyes settled on that last word. Decomposers. That meant they ate dead things.

Prue didn’t like thinking about that. The people who had gone Green weren’t dead—they could still walk around, and talk, and remember things from their lives. Simon, for instance, remembered her, and remembered how they used to play hide and seek.

No. They weren’t dead. Just infected. They could recover, couldn’t they?

No one had ever come back from being Green, but that didn’t mean it was impossible. There were still a lot of unknowns. For example, no one could decide whether the Green was really a fungus or not. All anyone knew for sure was that it had come from beyond the atmosphere, falling in little globules of clear goo containing green spores, and that anyone who had come into contact with the goo had become Green. Could fungus even grow among the stars?

Some people thought the Green was an alien species, or a government experiment gone wrong. Prue didn’t know if either of these things were true, but she knew that it would take more than rumors to understand what the Green was, and what it wanted.

“We need facts, not hearsay,” she whispered to herself, trying out the sound, imagining saying it the next time someone brought up a crazy conspiracy. It had a nice ring to it—very authoritative.

Prue filed the comment away for later use and read on:

Though some varieties are often misidentified as moss, fungi are not moss. While both mosses and fungi propagate through the dispersal of spores, only mosses are plants. Fungi are not plants…

In the library’s copy of Ansler’s, someone had scribbled in the margin, “Not plants, not animals. What then?”

A few pages after this strange question, the same scribe had written something else: “Is fungus alive? What constitutes being alive?”

Prue was proud that she hadn’t needed to look up the word constitutes, but she wasn’t sure she understood what the scribbler’s questions meant. Surely fungi were alive. The Green could think and move—and how could something that was able to think and move not be alive?

Fungus is alive, Prue wrote in her notebook. All the people who are Green are still alive.

No one, it seemed, had spent as much time trying to figure out the Green as she had. From the very beginning, she had poured over every relevant book in the library, had recorded everything she knew about the Green in her notebook. Everyone else was too scared to study the Green, but not her. She was going to figure out what the Green was and what it wanted.

She felt close to finding answers. She already had so many notes, so many clues. Flipping through the pages of her notebook, she imagined what it would be like when she finally figured out how to make the Green go away. Everyone would be so happy. They would hail her as a hero. Everyone would be saved, even—

Mom. Prue stopping flipping and stared at the page in front of her. It was from a week prior and titled “Conversation with Mom #7”. Prue scanned the page but gave up trying to read once her glasses began to fog. After wiping them on her sleeve, she stuffed the notebook into her backpack, slung it over her shoulder, and hurried away down Field Street.

If Simon was out, then that meant Mom would be too.

***

Prue’s dad must have had the same thought. She found him standing on the back porch, staring off into the woods. He didn’t usually leave the hardware store until closer to sunset.

Prue paused in the living room for a few moments and watched him through the sliding glass doors. She didn’t like how thin he was starting to look, how his knobby, oatmeal sweater seemed to hang off his frame. He reminded her of a scarecrow.

Prue scanned the porch to see if Jamie was with him, but, as usual, she wasn’t anywhere to be seen. All she cared about lately was the ring of military camps encircling the town and how to bypass it. Jamie had just graduated high school that spring, right before the Green came, and had been planning on spending the summer in LA with Stephanie. Though their parents would have preferred she spend the summer preparing for her first semester of college—studying and all that—they were happy that she was happy, and didn’t give her a hard time about it. Jamie had not had an easy time in school. She had been the only gay student—or the only one out, at least—and had borne much because of it. All of her hopes for the future had rested on leaving Whittaker Mills and getting to LA, to Steph. But then the Green came and there was no chance of leaving, no Steph. In addition to losing the internet, no one had been able to place a call outside town since the early summer. Jamie hadn’t spoken to her girlfriend at all in the past three months.

Prue knew the past summer had been hard on Jamie, but that didn’t excuse her absence. Didn’t she know that Mom would likely stop by? Didn’t she care? Prue knew that seeing Mom the way she was could be upsetting, but that was no excuse. If they wanted Mom back, then they had to remind her of who she had been. Of the family that they had been—and were still, Prue hoped. Didn’t Jamie stop to think about how her absence would hurt Mom?

“That’s not Mom,” Jamie had said the evening before, when Prue had wondered aloud whether their mother might come by after the rain. They were home alone and had just finished cleaning up from dinner. Dad was still at the hardware store. Since the Green arrived, they’d eaten little more than the microwave meals air dropped by military helicopters once per week. Mayor Cummings was tasked with doling out supplies; the military people didn’t come into town anymore. Not after that first time, when the soldiers who’d gone into the woods had come out Green.

“It is too Mom,” Prue had argued back. “She’s just confused. The Green makes her confused.”

“It’s not Mom. It only looks like her.” Jamie shoved their plastic meal trays into the trash bin and crammed the lid on tight. “They’re just shells. They’re not people anymore. Mom’s dead.”

“Shut up,” Prue warned, balling her fists. “That’s not true. You don’t know anything. I’ve been studying the Green since it first showed up. I know way more than you do. You haven’t been doing anything except moaning over not getting to go to California.”

“You think you know more than me, huh?” Jamie placed her fists on her hips. “You’re just a kid. A dumb kid who thinks she’s smarter than everyone else just because she got to skip fifth grade. You don’t even learn anything in fifth grade! You don’t know anything about the Green. No one does. I mean, if the top scientists in the country can’t figure out what to do, then what the hell do you think you’re going to accomplish?”

“They don’t know what to do because they’re not here. They can’t study it up close.”

“Stay away from that shit,” Jamie said, cursing only because their father wasn’t home. “Stay away from the Green. You’re not supposed to mess with it.”

“I’m not messing with it. I’m studying it.”

“Don’t. You don’t need to know anything more than that the people who become Green are gone. They aren’t ever coming back. That thing that comes to the house isn’t Mom. The Green makes her body move around, and it pretends to be her so we’ll let our guard down, but that’s not Mom.”

“Shut up,” Prue said again, clenching her fists tighter as she began to sniffle. Damned if she was going to let her sister make her cry. “You’re the only one who thinks that. You’re the one who’s stupid.”

Jamie scoffed. “Well, the only ones who think they’re still alive are Reverend Peterson and those fundamentalist nutjobs who listen to him. They’re the only ones who believe in all that superstitious crap. Like some ancient deity is going to descend from heaven and save us all. You’re a moron if you believe them.”

“I don’t. They’re not the only ones.”

“Um, yeah. They are.” Jamie shook her head from side to side. “Mom always warned us not to fall for their shit. Man, would she be disappointed in you.”

Those were the words that made Prue snap. She charged Jamie, fists flying, and landed one good blow to her sister’s stomach before being swept into a headlock. Jamie kept her there, applying pressure to her windpipe, until Prue began wheezing. Then she was released.

“Don’t ever do that again,” Jamie said, wiping spittle from her bottom lip. “Next time I’ll break your neck. I swear to God I will.”

Prue coughed twice and then collapsed onto the floor, the tears finally giving way. She hugged her legs to her chest and cried into her knees.

“Look. I’m sorry.” Jamie took a cautious step toward Prue. “Don’t cry, all right. I wouldn’t really break your neck. I don’t hate you that much.”

“Say she’s not dead,” Prue managed to choke out between sobs. “Say you were lying.”

“Yeah. All right.” Jamie ran a hand through her short black hair. “I lied, okay? Everything’s going to be fine. Now stop crying before Dad gets home. You’ll upset him.”

That conversation played through Prue’s mind as she stood in the living room watching her father through the glass doors. She scowled and shook her head as if she could shake the memory away. She dropped her backpack onto the couch and went out onto the porch.

“Has Mom come by yet?”

He jumped a little, then turned back to look at her and shook his head.

“Thought I saw her moving along the edge of the woods,” he said. His eyes returned to the tree line that sat a few hundred yards from their house. “By the time I got the binoculars, whoever or whatever it was had left.”

“I bet she’ll come by soon,” Prue said, resting her arms on the wooden railing. “Simon was out when I left school, so I’m sure she’ll be out, too.”

“Simon, huh?” Dad took a swig from his chrome thermos and winced like whatever was inside tasted too strong. “He didn’t ask you to go out in the woods with him again, did he?”

“Yes. But I told him I wouldn’t.”

“Good. That’s good.” He glanced down at her. “I’m sure Simon’s all right. That—I mean—I don’t think any of them want to hurt us. Still, I think it’s better to stay out of the woods for now. Until we can get a better read on all of this.”

“I know,” Prue said. “I’ve already read lots of books in the school library, and I think I’m getting close to figuring this whole thing out.”

“Mhm. You see that?”

“Where?”

Prue scanned the woods as her father brought the binoculars to his eyes. A few seconds passed, and then he murmured, “That looks like her. Yeah. That’s got to be her.”

“Let me see,” Prue demanded, reaching for the binoculars. He gently pushed her arm away. Undeterred, Prue cupped her hands around her glasses and squinted at the lone figure cutting across the misty clearing that sat between the house and the woods. Her eyesight was so poor that, even with her glasses, she could hardly make out any details.

Prue heard her father’s breath catch in his throat.

“Maybe you should go inside,” he said. “I might need to talk to her alone for a minute.”

“No way. It’s been an entire week since I’ve seen her. I’m not going inside.”

He considered her a moment, and then reached down and plucked her glasses from her face. She cried out, demanded he return them. Without a word, he slid them into his jacket pocket.

“Why’d you do that? You know I can’t see anything without my glasses. Give them back right now.”

“Hush. You’ll upset your mother if you keep on like that.”

“I won’t be able to see her.”

“Hush,” he said again and raised his voice. “Bianca? That you?”

The figure called out a greeting in return. It was Mom’s voice.

“Mom?” Prue called. “Mommy?”

“Here, baby,” called out her mom’s voice. “Come to me, baby. Give me a hug.”

Prue felt her way along the banister, but Dad stopped her, gripping her shoulder so that she couldn’t get away.

“Prue lost her glasses,” he called. “I don’t want her tripping down the steps. Why don’t you come here?”

“I didn’t—” Prue tried to say, but her father hushed her and squeezed her shoulder, squeezed it until it hurt. She cried out and he loosened his grip.

“I’m coming,” Mom called. “Hold your horses.”

It seemed ages before she stumbled up the steps and onto the porch. Once she had, Prue became aware of the overwhelming stench of damp and rot. Where Simon had smelled of the forest floor, her mother smelled more like a compost bin. The smell made Prue’s eyes water.

“Come and give me a hug, you two,” Mom said.

All Prue could see was a Greenish blur. She didn’t know why her dad had taken off her glasses. Unless—but she had seen plenty of people bad with the Green. The ones whose eyes had gone mossy, and whose skin had started breaking out in fuzzy, pale-green patches that looked like the stuff that grew on old fruit. Mom had already sprouted those patches the last time Prue saw her. Surely she hadn’t gotten worse? How much worse was there to get?

“It’s okay, Prue,” Dad said, though his voice sounded tense and he hesitated before releasing her shoulder. “Go hug Mom.”

Prue took three careful steps towards the figure. Two cold, slimy arms encircled her and she shivered involuntarily. She hoped her mom didn’t notice. She hadn’t meant to do it.

“I’ve missed you so much,” her mother’s voice said in her ear. “I wish you were all in the woods with me.”

“We’ve missed you, too,” Prue said. “We wish you were back in the house with us.”

“Silly girl,” Mom said, tapping two fingers against Prue’s chin. They felt soft, like cucumbers that had gone mushy.

Before she stepped back to let her parents hug, Prue squinted and tried to make out her mother’s features. She was mostly Green, a Greenish blur, but there were grayish patches here and there that hadn’t been present the week before.

“Mommy?”

“Where’s Jamie?” Mom asked, embracing her husband.

“Hasn’t got home yet,” he said. “She’ll probably be in soon.”

“We’ve seen her sneaking around in the woods, but she runs away when she sees us.”

“She hasn’t taken it well—about California.”

“I know. It’s such a shame. Stephanie was so nice when she visited last summer.”

“We miss you not being home,” Prue blurted out. “Jamie and I both miss you tons.”

“And I miss you too,” Mom said. “I wish you would all come out to the woods with me.”

“We can’t,” Dad said. “Not now, I mean. Maybe later.”

“I hope soon. I really do. I want us all to be together again.”

“I want that, too. Why don’t we go inside?”

“But it’s so nice out,” Mom said, spreading both arms wide. “It’s good for the Green.”

“But not for eleven-year-old girls.” Dad opened the sliding door and steered Prue inside. “She’ll catch a cold out here in this drizzle.”

“I don’t think so. The Green wouldn’t do that.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “But I’d feel terrible if she got sick. Especially since Dr. Kleinman—”

“What about Dr. Kleinman? I just saw him this morning and he seemed perfectly fine to me. His Green is coming in so nicely.”

“Nothing,” Dad said. “Prue. Why don’t you get washed up for supper?”

“But I can’t see. And I want to be with Mom.”

“Okay,” he said. He steered Prue to the couch. “Sit here then. Just for a bit.”

“Why don’t you give me back my—”

Her words were cut off by the sound of the glass door sliding shut. Dad had returned to the porch, shutting the door behind him, shutting Prue off from her parents’ conversation. She could hear the murmur of their voices through the glass, but couldn’t make out individual words.

Moving slowly so as not to bump anything, Prue slid off the couch. She didn’t like being sent into the house. She wanted to know what her parents were saying. She wanted to visit with Mom.

While trying to feel her away around the couch, Prue slammed her knee against an end table, sending the lamp it held crashing to the floor. As hot, throbbing pain shot through her leg, the sliding door flew open and an oatmeal-colored blur rushed in.

“What happened?” her dad asked. On seeing the smashed lamp on the floor, he added quickly, “Prue, don’t move. There are ceramic and glass shards all around you.”

“I knocked the lamp over,” Prue said. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s why I told you to stay put.” He gripped her beneath her arms, lifted her up, and deposited her at the kitchen table. He pulled out a chair and told her to sit. “Don’t move this time. I need to clean up the lamp.”

“What happened?” Mom asked. She had moved to the threshold of the sliding doors, but Prue couldn’t tell if she had come inside or not. The Green didn’t like entering buildings, for whatever reason.

“It’s okay,” Dad said. “Everything’s okay.”

But his voice didn’t sound okay.

***

Mom stayed until Prue’s bedtime. She didn’t enter the house, but Dad opened the kitchen windows so that she could visit while he and Prue ate dinner. What and if the Green ate, Prue didn’t know, but the words from Ansler’s kept running through her head. They are nature’s most prominent and successful decomposers. She didn’t like the image that came to her mind, of her mother eating rotting vegetation off the forest floor. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think of something else.

All through dinner, she tried to question her mother about the Green—what it liked, what it did all day—but each time she tried, her father quickly changed the subject. Jamie never came home.

When it was time for Prue to go to bed, her father opened her bedroom window so that Mom could say goodnight. As Prue fell back on her pillow, she heard something crinkle beneath it. Sliding her hand into the cold crevice between the pillow and the mattress, she discovered a folded square of paper. She didn’t extract it, though; not yet. She didn’t know what it was, and it might be something she didn’t want her parents to find.

“Would you like a bedtime story?” Mom asked from outside.

“I think Prue’s a little old for bedtime stories,” her father said.

“I’d like to hear a story,” Prue said. Anything to keep Mom there a little longer.

“Nothing too long then. She has school tomorrow, remember?”

“Once upon a time, there was a princess who lived in a faraway land. Her wicked stepmother was jealous of how smart and pretty and kind the princess was, and so she planned to marry her off to a horrible old king who lived far, far away. He was so wicked that he ordered all of the trees in his kingdom to be cut down. He thought they looked too messy.

“The princess didn’t want to marry this horrible king, and so she ran away. Into the woods. Deep, deep into the woods. They were so quiet, and wet, and Green.

“At first the princess was so relieved that she had managed to escape that she forgot to be afraid. But as soon as she realized that she was all alone, and lost, she began to get very scared. How would she survive alone in the woods? Surely she would die, and then she would mold down to her bones. Her shiny, white bones. Wouldn’t it be better to end things quickly, rather than linger on and suffer the long nights alone with no hope of survival?”

“It’s getting late,” Dad said, pretending to look at his wristwatch. “Prue needs to get to bed soon.”

“I’m almost finished. Just as the princess was about to give into despair and drown herself in the river, something miraculous happened. A boy materialized from the forest floor. He was Green from head to toe, all covered in moss and little white flowers.

“‘Don’t fear,’ he said. ‘I will help you and be your friend.’

“‘But who are you?’ asked the princess.

“‘I am part of the forest,’ said the boy. ‘I was like you, once. I got lost in these woods and, though my family searched for me, they never found me. I died out here and now I am part of the forest. The forest is me, and I am the forest.’

“‘You’re dead?’ asked the princess, once more growing afraid. ‘Will I die out here, too?’

“The boy shrugged and said, ‘You might as well.’”

“Bianca.”

“‘But I’m afraid to die,’ whispered the princess.

“‘Don’t be afraid,’ said the boy. ‘Everyone is fated to die. And because we are all fated to die, isn’t it like we are all already dead? We are all part of the forest. Most people just don’t know it, yet.’

“‘Does it hurt,’ the princess asked, ‘being Green?’

“‘Not at all,’ the boy said. He held out his hand to the princess. ‘Won’t you let me show you?’”

“Bianca,” Dad said, speaking louder this time. “I think it’s time for Prue to get to sleep. It’s getting late and she’s a growing girl.”

“We’re all growing,” Mom said. “The story isn’t over. We haven’t found out if the princess will go with the boy or not.”

“That will have to wait for another time. Tell your mom goodnight, Prue.”

“Goodnight, Mom. Will we see you again soon?”

“I will see you again soon,” Mom said, which wasn’t quite the same thing. “Goodnight, baby.”

“I’m going to close the window now,” her father said, his hands on the casement. “But I’ll meet you on the back porch to say goodnight. All right?”

“I’ll be there.”

Dad closed the window then watched Prue for what seemed like a long time. Prue knew thoughts were turning in his head. Thoughts about the story, most likely. He was trying to get them all straightened out before saying anything.

“Your mom,” he began, but didn’t finish. Instead, he took Prue’s glasses from his pocket and set them on her nightstand.

“Why did you take my glasses?” Prue asked. “Does Mom not look okay?”

“Your mom will be fine,” he said. “We’re all going to be fine.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Goodnight, Prue,” he said, leaning down to kiss her forehead. “I love you. Your mom loves you too.”

“I know. I love you both too.”

After a few moments, he clicked off her overhead light and closed the door.

As soon as he left, Prue snatched her glasses from the nightstand. Able to see again, she slid out of bed, the wood floor cold beneath her feet, and went to the window. If she stood to one side, she could just see the glow of the back porchlight. Hopefully her mom would pass through that light long enough for Prue to get a clear view of her.

Several long minutes passed, and Prue wondered if her mom had already left. She was about to give up and return to bed when she spotted a figure bobbing on the edge of her sight line. The figure passed into the light for only a few seconds before disappearing into the darkness. It was not enough time for Prue to get a clear view of her mom, but it had been enough time for her to make out skin mottled Green and black and gray.

Her stomach beginning to feel queasy at the implications of what this meant—they were only implications; Prue could not be entirely sure of what she had seen—she returned to bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. Then she remembered the paper beneath her pillow.

Extracting it, she saw that it was a piece of lined notebook paper folded into a little rectangle. It had her name on it, and the writing was Jamie’s. Prue unfolded the note and read it. She read it several times before getting out of bed and going into the kitchen, where Dad was cleaning dishes.

“Jamie’s gone,” she said.

He looked up from the sink and asked, “Why are you out of bed? Wait—what did you just say?”

“Jamie’s run away,” Prue said, holding up the note. “She left this under my pillow.”

“She left you a note saying she’s run away?” Dad asked, abandoning his dishrag.

“I’ll read it,” Prue said. “’Prue—I wanted to let you know that I think I’ve found a way out of Whittaker Mills and I’m going to take it. There’s a cave near the waterfall that’s supposed to let out about half a mile past the barricade. It’s marked in an old surveyor’s map I found in the library, so I don’t know if it really will lead out of here or not. I haven’t gone all the way down it yet. I have to try, though. Sorry I didn’t tell you. I was worried you might tell Dad and that he might try to stop me. I know you think you can solve everything. You’re really smart and I love you, but you can’t solve this. Please stop trying before you get yourself in trouble. Also, please try to get out of Whittaker Mills. On the back of this note, I have drawn you a map of how to find the cave. I’ll tie a bandana on a tree beside its entrance so you will know it’s the right cave. Once you get out, you know where I’m heading. I love you very much. Please tell Dad I love him too. Jamie.’”

Dad didn’t say anything. He sighed and sat down at the kitchen table and rubbed his eyes.

“What are we going to do?” Prue asked. “Should we go after her? Should we call the police?”

“No. If we call the police, then those military people will know and Jamie could get in trouble.”

“Are we going to go after her?”

“Let me think a minute.” Dad pressed both palms against his eyes. “Damnit, Jamie.”

“She could get lost or hurt,” Prue said, her fingers gripping the note so tightly that they ripped the paper.

“Let me see that map.” After studying it for a moment, he said, “I think I know where this is.”

“Are we going to go get her?”

“We are not,” he said. “Go back to bed. I’ll go find her.”

“But I should go too. I found the note.”

“It’s not safe.” He took his jacket from its peg and put it on. “Be back soon. Go back to bed. You have school tomorrow.”

“But—”

“Don’t argue,” he warned. “I’m not in the mood, Prue.”

“Dad,” she said as he began moving to the door. “Dad. Why did you not want me to see Mom?”

“Go to bed, Prue,” he said, and then he left.

***

Prue stayed up as long as she could. She watched movies in the living room—ones on DVD; the cable had been shut off too—but fell asleep sometime before midnight. In the morning she awoke to an empty house.

Prue dressed herself and went to school as usual. There were fewer students and teachers present than there had been the day before. Because of the faculty shortages, the remaining kids were corralled in the auditorium where they watched movies until the final bell. It should have been a breeze of a day—what kid wouldn’t rather watch movies instead of doing schoolwork? But the remaining students were strangely quiet and subdued, barely even whispering to each other as the movies played. It was as if they understood that this was the end of something.

After school, Prue walked home faster than usual. She was anxious to see if her father and Jamie had returned. When she reached the house, she found it still empty. This was not unusual, she told herself. Dad often worked late. But when early evening came and there was still no sign of her father or sister, Prue began to worry.

She called her dad’s hardware store a few times—landlines within Whittaker Mills still worked, at least—but the phone just rang and rang.

Around six, a soft rain began to fall. After bundling up in her jacket, Prue went onto the back porch to wait and see if her mom would return.

As the minutes ticked by and none of her family appeared, her stomach began twisting itself into tighter and tighter knots. She tried to tell herself to stop being a baby, that everything was probably fine, that her dad was just working late. That he had found Jamie and dragged her along to the hardware store to make sure she didn’t run off again. They would be home soon.

The rain had been falling for about an hour when the first of them came out of the woods. Prue gripped the porch railing and squinted at the figure as it ambled across the clearing. Some moments passed before she recognized him.

“Dad,” she called, racing down the porch steps. She stopped only a few feet from the house, something in her stomach beginning to feel sick.

“Hello, Prue,” Dad said. “Sorry I’m late. We were in the woods and lost track of time.”

“Did you find Jamie?” Prue asked, her voice uneasy.

“Yup,” he said. “She and your mom are coming.”

It wasn’t until he was steps from her that Prue saw he was Green, though in her gut she had suspected it since waking.

“Daddy?” she asked quietly.

“Isn’t this weather lovely?” he said, his eyes pointed at her but not focused.

“What happened last night?” she asked, still speaking in a whisper.

“I found Jamie,” he said, grinning. “She and your mom are coming.”

“Daddy,” Prue said, taking a step backwards. “I’m not sure what to do.”

“Don’t worry. That’s why we’ve come to get you. We can go back to the woods and be together.”

“I don’t think I want to go to the woods,” Prue said, her foot finding the bottom step. “It’s really cold.”

“It’s very nice weather. It’s good for the Green.”

“Daddy,” Prue said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”

“I already told you, silly,” he said. “You’re supposed come back to the woods with us.”

“I’ll think about it, Daddy,” Prue said, pulling the sliding door open. “I really will, okay?”

“Don’t think too long,” he said as she shut the door.

Prue went to her bedroom and got in bed and pulled the covers up around her shoulders. She took her glasses off so she didn’t have to look at anything and cried.

For the first time, Prue wondered if Jamie had been right all along. If her family was really dead, if the man outside was not her father at all. Prue cried harder, louder. She threw pillows and toys from her bed, lobbed them across her room as hard as she could. She slammed her fists down into the mattress and screamed. Angry, confused, sad, lonely—she couldn’t exactly name what she felt, but it encompassed all of these emotions and more. Acid bubbled in her stomach and she felt like she might throw up.

Choking back tears, she slid out of bed. Outside her window, three figures stood on the darkened lawn, facing the house. One was tall, one medium height, and one short. Daddy, Mommy, and Jamie. Prue’s stomach clenched.

Grabbing her backpack, Prue pulled out her yellow notebook. Turning to a fresh page, she began writing.

Daddy and Jamie are Green now too. Jamie didn’t make it to California. What to do? Could call for help.

Yes. That was it. She needed to call someone—a grownup someone—and ask what she was supposed to do. Tapping her pen against her chin, she tried to think of who she could call. There were the Banks, Simon’s parents. Or Mrs. Walker, who sometimes babysat her. Theirs’ were the only two phone numbers Prue knew.

Prue kept the lights off as she snuck to the phone in the kitchen. She didn’t want those outside to be able to see inside—assuming they could see.

She called the Banks first, but received no answer. Mrs. Walker didn’t answer, either. She called both numbers several more times, but all she got was the dial tone. Maybe they were Green now too.

It was a sour thought. Prue placed the receiver back on its hook and then picked it up again. There was only one other number she could think to dial, a number that, back in kindergarten, they were taught to call only in an emergency. If this wasn’t an emergency, then she didn’t know what was. Punching in the three numbers that would summon the police, she placed the receiver against her ear. Her heart leapt when someone finally answered.

“Hello,” the female voice said. “You have reached the Whittaker Mills Police Department.”

“Hi. This is Prue Jenkins—”

“No one is available to take your call at the moment. If this is an emergency, then please hang up and dial the Simpson Police Department at—”

Prue hung up the phone. Simpson was the closest town to Whittaker Falls, but even if she could get a call through to them, she knew that they would be powerless to help her because of the quarantine.

A lump started to form in her throat again, and she did her best to swallow it. Now was not the time for tears. Now was the time to buck up and figure out what to do.

She would lay low until morning. That was it. She would stay inside and hide in her room and then in the morning she would go for help. Surely someone was left who could help her. They couldn’t all have become Green so quickly, could they?

And what if they were? What if she was the last person left in Whittaker Mills who had not become Green?

Before Prue could even begin to process these possibilities, she became aware of a scratchy, metallic sound coming from the living room. Carefully, she poked her head out of the kitchen. In the porch light’s glow, she saw her father standing at the door. He was in the process of unlocking it.

Prue’s breath caught and she stumbled backwards into the counter.

“They don’t come inside,” she whispered to herself. “The Green don’t come inside.”

But what if this time they made an exception? She told herself to stop being silly. That it was her father, her dad, that he wouldn’t hurt her. But her heart was pounding so loudly that she couldn’t hear herself think. She didn’t even hear when the back door slid open.

“There you are, silly goose,” her father said as he clicked on the kitchen light. “We’ve been wondering what’s keeping you.”

Prue blinked, her eyes watering both because of the light and because of the mildewed smell that enveloped him.

“I’m tired of waiting,” Jamie’s voice said. She entered the kitchen and stood beside Dad. Her skin was powdery like his, and little Green patches had begun growing across her eyes. “Stop being a brat and come on.”

“Jamie?” Prue asked, her voice shaky. “Did you make it to the cave?”

“There’s lots of caves in the woods,” Jamie said. “Which cave do you mean?”

“The one that’s supposed to lead out of here,” Prue said, her hand snaking across the counter, feeling for something she could use to defend herself if they tried to take her. “The one you were going to take to California.”

“Who wants to go to California?” Jamie said. “Come on. I want to get back to the woods.”

“You wanted to go there,” Prue said, her finger tips brushing the corner of the knife block. “To see Stephanie.”

“The only thing I want to see is the woods,” Jamie said. “They’re nice and Green.”

“I don’t want to go to the woods, Jamie. Daddy,” Prue said. “I want to stay here.”

“But everyone’s waiting for you. It’s rude to keep them waiting.”

“Stop being such a brat,” Jamie said.

“That’s enough of that,” another voice said. It was scratchy, and hoarse, but still recognizable. “You girls stop your fighting.”

“Sorry, Mom,” Jamie said.

Mom, or what was left of her, stepped out of the shadows and into the light of the kitchen. This time, there was no one around to snatch away Prue’s glasses, no one to keep her from seeing what her mother had become. What they all would become.

Much of her flesh had already rotted off and only a few sparse patches of hair remained on her head. Bones protruded here and there—a few ribs, a fibula. Tibia. Femur. All of them curtained by gray-green flesh going black around the edges. What bones could be seen were covered in a Green matrix that reminded Prue of a spiderweb. It was this matrix, most likely, which kept the entire skeletal structure from collapsing.

The worst part of it all was her face. The half that still had flesh was bloated, and mottled with dark spots. It hung loosely from the skull like it was made of gelatin that hadn’t set all the way.

The right side of her face had rotted off completely, leaving nothing but the skull beneath. The matrix was so thick here that it completely hid the white of the bone. Just layers of Green on Green, wrapping around the contours of her facial structure, becoming a second skin.

Just above where her right ear should have been was a hole, about two inches in diameter. From this hole sprouted a mushroom unlike anything Prue had ever seen. Its cap was as big as her father’s hand, and it was striated with fluorescent-blue stripes that seemed to pulse. Little black beads pocked the circumference, and Prue felt as though they were watching her, as though they were the structure’s true eyes.

“Mommy?” Prue asked very quietly, her hand creeping up the edge of the knife block. “Is any of you left?”

“Hush now, Prue, it’s time to finish the story,” it said, stepping forward and reaching one skeletal hand out to—to what? To grab or to hold? “It’s time to find out what the princess’s answer will be.”

End.

***

Macy Harrison is a horror and dark fantasy writer based in Dallas, Texas. Her work has also appeared in Novel Noctule, and she is currently finishing up her first novel.

Reverse Engineering

By Francis French

It was designed to escape the bubble of television and radio signals that Earth had been beaming into the heavens for hundreds of years. Then, using equipment of unprecedented sensitivity, it could listen for signals from other civilizations.

The ship thumped into the atmosphere with a series of noiseless hammerblows, leaving nothing in its wake except a faint snowfall. It had left Earth twenty years prior; its return was expected. But there was no rejoicing, no party planned for its arrival. Instead, a couple of observers scanned the ship’s ever-slowing jumps through the solar system, noted its approach, and passed on the information. Their work was done, and they expressed no interest in what the ship did next.

For others on Earth, however, this was the moment their interest began. The ship, which they had never bothered to name, had been sent out further than humans had ever ventured before, with a single objective. It was designed to escape the bubble of television and radio signals that Earth had been beaming into the heavens for hundreds of years. Then, using equipment of unprecedented sensitivity, it could listen for signals from other civilizations.

The ship had been so far away, and traveled faster than any signal it could send back to Earth: it was more efficient to return its findings in person. What the ten-person crew had discovered would, therefore, remain a mystery until the debriefing.

Mysteries were unusual on Earth by now, mused Balam, the assigned information-gatherer. She sat in a windowless conference room, scratching an itch in the back of her short gray hair, awaiting the crew’s arrival. In fact, the idea of a hole in the knowledge she was to gather bothered her. Although the returning spaceship had pivoted to a stop mere feet from the room, she had no interest in seeing it. She had no need. She was there to obtain specific information. She felt a vague sense of satisfaction, knowing that moment should be minutes away. Once she had it, she’d pass it on to someone else, who’d know what to do with it.

The door to the room opened, and the crew came in and sat down around the conference table. Their commander, a wiry woman named Helah, had taken the lead and the seat directly opposite Balam. The crew all looked lean and hungry, barely filling their dull, functional work clothes. But long-distance space travelers usually looked this way, Balam recalled. She also noticed an odd scent, like vinegar on metal, and was reminded of the last time she’d debriefed a crew. She assumed it must be the odor of a well-used spacecraft. That crew had smelled the same, and had zipped through their debriefing with clipped efficiency. This time, however, Balam noticed there were only six of the crew in the room. She looked at the doorway behind the crew, but it was clear no one else was coming. She hoped this discrepancy wouldn’t affect the answers she needed.

Small talk wasn’t something Balam felt comfortable with, but she had once been told it was polite to be welcoming. Leaning forward, she put out her hand to Helah for the briefest of handshakes. She avoided looking directly into Helah’s icy blue eyes.

“Welcome home. I trust you are eager to share your findings with me?”

Helah shifted in her chair, and glanced at her crew sitting to each side of her. After a pause that Balam found disquieting, Helah replied.

“It’s a long story. Do you have a while?”

Debriefings weren’t supposed to happen this way. But after she scanned the six gaunt faces looking at her with a firmness she couldn’t decrypt, Balam decided a brief nod was the most diplomatic response.

“I’ll start with the facts,” Helah said. “As predicted, we couldn’t pick up any trace of Earth’s first radio transmissions from 1895. But pretty much everything after that – a surprising amount – we could.”

Helah glanced at the doorway behind Balam, then continued.

“We’d assumed Earth’s ionosphere would have garbled much of the early radio and TV. Some of it was indeed faint and scrambled. But a lot of it we could calibrate until, pretty soon, we could watch early television shows. Inverse square law, signal degradation – no issues there. We could filter out the background noise just fine.”

Balam was pleased. This was one of the questions she’d been instructed to ask. She was ready with her follow-up.

“So, in calibrating the instruments on signals from Earth, were you able to successfully ascertain what signal strength you’d be able to detect once you got beyond Earth’s signals? We’d theorized that you could probably sense the electromagnetic radiation of—”

“We’ll get to that,” Helah interrupted. “Probably. I have another story to tell you first. It’s much more interesting, trust me.”

Balam had no choice but to listen, and she pressed her ankles together, hard, under the table. The debriefing – her only job – might run longer than scheduled.

Helah took a moment to glance at her companions, then continued.

“We were out there for a long time. And we were only supposed to evaluate the Earth signals as a calibration method. And at first, that’s all we did. We flew through two hundred years of strong signals. Then, as predicted, there was a multi-year silence. The silence that followed the war, when I imagine those who were left were too busy surviving, and most technology was forgotten. Right on cue, we picked up the last, ragged signals from the Earth falling into calamity. We could hear pretty much everything from then on back, a century and a half of television and radio, almost back to the 1890s. I was impressed.”

Balam chose not to ask any questions. Helah continued, faster now.

“You know, I never really knew what happened to cause the calamity. I’d never thought about it before. It was never my assigned job, on Earth or in space. And I never got the sense anyone really cared. Something had gone wrong, and now we have – we all have these jobs, so we don’t really think about it too hard. We know we can do better, and we are, and we all work towards our goals, and everything is good – right?”

Balam nodded. It was an obvious statement, and one that no one would question.

A note of impatience crept into Helah’s voice. “But we had so much free time up there between the stars. So I got to thinking. I was picking up all these signals – the only new evidence of what happened on Earth back then. You know, so much information that had been lost down here, or that no one cared to recover. And what was I doing with it? Calibrating. And why? So that years later, I could listen for alien signals out there that might not even exist? It seemed like such a waste.”

One of the other crew members, a sallow-faced man, laughed. Balam didn’t see the humor.

“So I did something that wasn’t one of our assigned tasks. I started listening to the signals, watching the shows. Not because it helped with our mission – but because I wanted to learn what was going on back then on Earth. A lot of it was entertaining. Most of it was garbage. But some of it was informational. News, documentaries – I gained a real sense of what people believed. What was important to them.”

Helah leaned forward. “There was all this talk of freedom. It’s a word I knew, of course, but until you see people live it, fight for it, die for it, it’s hard to understand. I learned about what humans can do when their potential is freed, and what happens when free will is denied. It’s nothing like what we have here on Earth now. It’s been lost. There was this writer named Rudolf Steiner… well, that doesn’t matter. But I learned a lot. I watched show after show of people who knew the motives behind their actions. They chose their actions, in fact.”

Balam said nothing, but looked at Helah like an engineer would examine a broken spacecraft part. No doubt, Helah meant well. But Balam waited for Helah’s crewmates to intervene. That was, after all, the kindest thing to do, as gently as possible, when someone lost track of their assigned task. Instead, strangely, they listened as Helah continued.

“Can you imagine putting the wishes of others ahead of yours because it was your choice? Because you felt a deep desire to do so, not simply because it was just the way things are done? Because you truly believed in fairness, and justice, and personal destiny?”

Helah leaned back in her chair. “I learned about this astronaut named Bill Anders. He was on the first mission to leave Earth orbit, and head to the moon. He learned that the Earth looks completely different when you get a quarter of a million miles away. The moon didn’t interest him much once he got there. But the journey completely changed how he looked at his home planet. ‘We came all this way to explore the Moon,’ he said, ‘and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.’ It’s a quote that stuck with me. Because it took me getting as far away as any human had ever been for me to learn what it truly means to be human. And it is a beautiful thing.”

With a sidelong glance at her crew, Helah snorted. “For a couple of years out there, you could even say I became quite idealistic.”

Balam remembered her training. She owed Helah the opportunity to get back on track. Perhaps asking a direct question would do that.

“Once you were beyond the range of Earth’s earliest radio and television signals, did you detect anything that indicated there are other civilizations out there? The objective of your mission?”

“No.”

Balam relaxed a little. Finally, an answer she could record.

“No, because we didn’t bother to listen. We just came back.”

Balam wasn’t sure if she asked her next question in the hopes of clarifying, or out of a growing sense of alarm.

“Where is the rest of your crew, commander?”

“This is an ugly room,” Helah sighed. “Why don’t we continue this talk somewhere else?”

Balam caught a look from Helah that she had no ability to decipher. She began to reply.

“But this is where we debrief…”

Something primal told her to stop speaking. Helah seemed to have grown larger, her presence filling the room. The other crewmembers were now staring at her too. It seemed wise to leave, although Balam didn’t know where they would go next.

As she obediently rose from her chair, Balam felt she had to ask Helah one last question.

“What’s that in your hand?”

Helah looked proudly at the object she’d removed from her pocket and now gripped in front of her. “I made it. It’s called a gun.”

“What does it do?”

“You’ll see.”

End.

***

Francis French is a bestselling author of nonfiction space history books, primarily with Apollo astronauts, whose work can be found at www.francisfrench.com

1st Place: Nearsighted

By Alex Wolfgang

She hadn’t known she needed glasses, but once she wore them, she wasn’t sure how she’d ever gotten by. Signs were legible from across the road. Leaves were so much more textural than she’d thought. Men sometimes stared at her when she walked down the street. It was nauseating. She kept having to take them off for fear of sensory overload, but things got easier over time.

She first noticed the man behind a copse of spruce trees in the park, watching as she walked her toy poodle. She barely noticed him, didn’t take care to note his features. Just some creep. Those would take some getting used to. But the next day he stood in the next car down of her subway train, his face moving in and out of her field of view as the train turned, just visible through the windows.

At first she wasn’t sure it was the same man, but his features were distinct—grey coat, dark glasses, shining white teeth clenched in a twisted, perpetual smile. She remembered the glasses most of all, uncalled for in the dark subway tunnel.

Two days later, she climbed to her rooftop to admire the city’s skyline like she never could before. There he was. On an adjacent building across the street, his teeth gleamed so brightly she had to look away.

She could have told someone then, but she was afraid.

“You’re just noticing people for the first time,” she imagined that someone saying. “I see the same faces often. The city is big, but not that big. And it’s only natural to notice patterns.”

A few days later she saw him twice. He sat in the very back row of her lecture hall during a mycology class. She tried not to let it affect her teaching, but some of her front-row students squirmed in their seats at her awkward lecture. Once, she turned to look at the hall window only to find him staring through it.

When he turned a street corner later, she followed, only to find him with three doubles in the next alley behind a dumpster. They all turned to look in unison, and she fled.

She considered taking off her glasses then but didn’t. It seemed too late.

At a concert, at least four or five of him watched her from within the crowd. When she pushed through the sweating bodies to confront him, he backed away and re-emerged as seven, then eight.

Within a month, others were dwindling. He was nine of every ten dog walkers, three-quarters of her class. She had to carry on as usual. Once, she tried to explain the situation to a woman on the street, but the woman looked frightened. When she blinked, he became the woman and grinned.

She ran home to find him standing in her kitchen. Her poodle was gone. Sobbing, she took off her glasses and smashed them on the floor.

But the dark, humanoid blob in her kitchen remained.

End.

Beneath the Forest

By Travis Sawyer

Man is much more eager to believe in the hopeless fragility of his own mind than he is to believe in foul hidden-away worlds and nameless horrors beneath the earth.

Modern man has hitherto found it a great comfort to believe that in his efforts to search and discover, to record and catalog, he has left no forest unexplored, no crevasse unlit, and no creature unnamed. It is said that there are no hidden reaches into which human sight has never ventured, and no occurrences which can defy the infallible forces of human knowledge and reason. Man chooses, with great conviction, to believe that there is nothing alien left on earth. This prejudice allows him to recline in feelings of relative safety, secure in the belief in his own omnipotence.

Perhaps it is in order to protect this belief that accounts of things alien and unexplainable are reacted to with fervent denial, perhaps it is just human nature to resist any revelation that cannot be easily dealt with.

Regardless of whether it is a modern prejudice or an ancient impulse, the compulsion to disbelieve that which would require a shift in perception is doubtless what has confined me to this institution. Man is much more eager to believe in the hopeless fragility of his own mind than he is to believe in foul hidden-away worlds and nameless horrors beneath the earth.

But you who read this manuscript I’m sure are less interested in my speculations about human belief than you are in the circumstances which resulted in my commitment to a psychiatric facility. I do not know precisely what compels me to commit this story to paper, perhaps it is out of a desire to share my experience, or my perceived experience as it is referred to, in some capacity, with the world. More likely it is out of a need to relieve the pressure exerted on my mind by its memory. Whatever the reasons may be, the enlightenment of the world to a terrible truth, or simply the medicine of my troubled brain, I will to the best of my ability, in the pages that follow, relive the strange and terrible events that befell me in those horrid caverns beneath the forest.

At the time of the occurrences in question, I was a young man, recently graduated with a degree in botany from a small but richly historied college in Massachusetts. I had accepted a position with the department of natural resources of British Columbia, as it was my aim to conduct research in the field.

My first real opportunity to do so occurred when I was assigned to conduct a survey of the native flora within a certain section of a remote national forest.

The trip there was a long one, up lonely highways where the towns grew fewer and farther between and down winding back roads that looked as if they had been untravelled for years.

At the outset I had been excited about the isolation for all its implications of a natural ecosystem uninfluenced by human activities. Driving further north however, as I watched the green fields and sparse sunlit forests give way to dark looming pines, I began to feel a sense of unease. I felt as if I was traveling to the edge of the world. I dismissed these misgivings as irrational and, as I continued on, slowly grew accustomed to my surroundings.

After three days spent driving, I arrived at the small village that was the last outpost before the vast expanse of the national forest. Upon seeing a faded sign advertising a diner, I was suddenly aware of both the fact that I was extremely hungry, and that I had grown dreadfully tired of fast food. I pulled into the nearly vacant lot and parked my car near the entrance.

A bell rang above the door as I entered. I glanced around the place and saw a few well broken in booths and a time worn bar with metal stools. Besides myself and the owner, there were only three other people to be seen: a couple in the far booth who did not look up from their food, and an old man who eyed me suspiciously from the bar. I sat down at the end of the bar opposite the old man and picked up a menu. I did not feel his eyes leave me as I read.

“What brings you ‘round here?” asked the owner after I had read him my order. He was a large, tired faced man who bore the look of a lifelong denizen of the rural north. A faded tattoo of an anchor and rope showed halfway out of the sleeve of his worn t-shirt. “We don’t see too many new faces up this way.”

“I’m from the department of natural resources.” I replied. “I’m up here to conduct a survey of the forest.”

I heard the old man scoff at me, and I turned in his direction.

“You’d best watch yourself out in those woods,” grumbled the old man, seeing he had caught my attention.

“And what do you mean by that?” I asked him, confused and somewhat intrigued by his statement.

He took little notice of my question and rambled on, “There’s things out in them trees, things that ain’t supposed to be seen by the likes of you and me.”

“What sort of things?” I questioned.

“You just get in and out of those woods as quick as you can and pray you don’t find out.” He replied in a low voice, raising a gnarled finger at me in warning.

“Knock it off Gus,” the owner snapped. “Why do you gotta try to scare the kid with that nonsense?”

“I was just tellin’ him what he might need to know,” the old man complained.

“Yeah? Well, he don’t need to know none of your loony stories,” the owner said.

“I was done talkin’ to him anyway,” the old man grumbled as he laid his money down onto the bar before getting up to leave through the front door.

I was left puzzled and somewhat unnerved by his words.

“You don’t mind nothin’ old Gus says,” the owner said, attempting reassurance.

“Though it wouldn’t do you no harm to be careful in those woods. It gets dark early in the thick of those trees, it’s real easy to lose your way and real hard to find it again. There’s been a few people gone missing in those trees.”

He cast his eyes to the door through which the old man had just disappeared.

“Happened to Gus’ kid.”

The atmosphere had become awkward after that exchange, I ate my meal quickly and left without another meaningful word. As I started my car and drove the short distance to the small motel that I had been told would accommodate me, I found it difficult to forget the old Gus’ words. Surely it had just been a manifestation of backwoods superstition, developed after a life spent in the shadow of such a mighty forest. I tried to dismiss it.

The motel fit the faded atmosphere of the old town exactly as one might have suspected. The room I was pointed to by the disinterested woman at the front desk was a small one occupied by only a twin bed and a small wooden desk. The final rays of the sun, now disappeared over the treetops, shone through a cracked window pane, casting my shadow upon the faded green wallpaper.

I set my suitcase down on the bed and opened it. I took out the map of the forest that I’d been given by the department before I set out on my trip and laid it out on the desk. As I looked the map over, I was struck by the forest’s massive scale. It was countless times the size of the tiny town in the bottom left corner of the map. The section I had been sent to survey was itself of a considerable size, and mile after mile of trees stretched beyond it. Past the trees were a few small mountains, and scarcely any evidence that there might be human beings in that direction.

The words I had heard in the diner echoed in my thoughts. I pushed them to the back of my mind and planned the course I would take tomorrow. I would enter the forest at a point on the east edge of town and travel in a horseshoe pattern that would take me several miles into the forest and bring me out on the other side of the town about an hour before sunset. Satisfied that there was no reason my venture would not be successful, it was time I should get some sleep.

A very peculiar dream troubled me that night.

I found myself wandering amongst the trunks of great black trees. I was wrought with a feeling of great unease as if I was being watched by some terrible entity that lurked in every shadow. I lacked the faintest idea of where I was or how I had come to be there, but I felt that I needed to find my way out of the strange forest with the greatest urgency.

As I wandered, the sense of unease transformed into a feeling of imminent danger. I began to hear bizarre screeching sounds from just outside my field of sight. Upon hearing these dreadful noises I broke into a run.

I soon found however, that I seemed only to travel deeper into the forest.

The trees grew wider and taller as the sky grew darker and lower until the two seemed to meet above me. The shadows closed in and the horrible noises echoing out of them grew louder. My chest ached with each breath as I ran deeper into the forest. The trees ceased to look like anything organic, becoming great pillars of black stone.

The sky pressed down farther until it resembled a ceiling for the stone pillars. The sounds from the shadows grew unbearably loud with a quality like metal screeching against metal.

I ran and ran, with each step, I was sure might chest would burst. Then with a sudden tremor, the ground in front of me fell away like a waterfall of soil and stone, leaving only a sheer vertical drop into oblivion.

I stopped abruptly, inches from the edge. I stared for a moment in disbelief at the endless expanse of black nothingness that yawned in front of me before something compelled me to whirl back around in the direction of the forest-turned-black-stone-cavern.

It was the sounds.

They had grown impossibly loud, and they seemed to be closing in. The shadows likewise closed in around me, bringing the screeching and scraping cacophony upon me.

I glimpsed formless black shapes in the edges of my periphery, creeping toward me, patient for the advance of the shadows to allow them to reach me.

One of the forms darted toward me, unable to stop myself, I instinctively recoiled backwards.

I tumbled back into the void.

I sat up with a ragged gasp. I was drenched in a cold sweat, the feeling of falling not gone from my stomach, and the echo of the abrasive noises not gone from my ears.

Never in my life had I endured a dream of such vividity. I blamed it upon the strangeness of my environment and the peculiar warning I had received the previous night, but still it had shaken me.

I fell back onto the mattress and laid my hands over my face as I caught my breath. When the physical symptoms of terror had left my body, I sat up once more and surveyed the room.

Nothing was changed from the night before, my suitcase still lay open on the floor beside the desk, the light of morning streamed in through the window.

It was a cool, dry morning. Only a few wispy clouds hung over my head as I got in my car and drove back to the same diner where the exchange likely responsible for my nightmare had taken place to eat breakfast.

This time the diner was completely empty except for a young man behind the counter who looked as if he would much rather still be asleep.

I ate my breakfast without a word.

My mind was still plagued by the recollection of the nameless shapes that lurched and crawled through the shadows of my nightmare forest. If the sleepy youth behind the counter noticed my tension, he did not show it, and I left without any sort of conversation.

I climbed back into my car and tried to clear my mind as I drove to the mouth of the thin trail that would lead me on my expedition. I rolled down the windows to let in the cool morning air and took a few deep breaths.

I began to feel better as I watched the morning sunlight stream across the branches of small trees and cast dancing shadows upon the quiet old buildings of that little town.

It was just a dream, rational men don’t fear dreams, I thought as I turned off the worn pavement onto a dirt road. After a few minutes spent driving down the sunny dirt road I felt quite at ease. In no time at all the road narrowed and I parked in the grass beside It. I stepped out of my car, taking from the passenger seat the backpack of materials I had packed that morning. I shouldered the bag and looked up at the towering pines that marked the end of where my car could take me. I took a deep breath of the crisp morning air and began down the path into the forest.

The first few hours were relatively uneventful, although I did take note of the fact that there were far fewer animals to be seen than I had expected, which at the time I attributed to some undetermined effect on the local air or water that had taken place since the last survey was conducted a decade prior. After some time had passed however, and I had travelled several miles into the forest, I began to feel uneasy.

I would occasionally be moved to glance over my shoulder by the feeling that I was being watched. Each time I did, memories of the nightmare crept in.

These feelings grew in frequency and intensity as I ventured deeper into the quiet looming pines. Soon another feeling arrived to accompany them. The feeling that I was intruding.

I began to be troubled, without knowing why, by the thought that I was not meant to walk on the cold ground between the mighty trunks of these ancient trees.

I was musing on these strange thoughts when I was jolted to alertness by a strange noise. It had been a noise unlike any other I had heard, some terrible abrasive fusion of a screech and a squelch, like bone rasping against wood, long, loud, and guttural.

After the initial shock of the sound, an awful realization grasped me.

Despite how terrible and otherworldly it was, the sound had unmistakably been produced by a living organism. My mind raced with thoughts of the “Things in the woods” that the old man in the diner had warned me of when a terrified deer burst out of the foliage several yards in front of me.

Running from the direction that the sound had come from, the animal did not so much as acknowledge my presence as it raced across the trail and disappeared into the ferns and bushes on the other side.

For the brief moment it had been in view, I thought I had glimpsed in its eyes an expression of sheer terror.

When I reflect now on what I did next, I curse my foolishness. I still do not know what compelled me to leave the trail and search for the source of that terrible screech. Perhaps it was simple curiosity, but I believe it was more likely out of a desire to prove to myself that my fears had been unfounded, that there were no things not in the forest or anywhere else.

I followed the impulse of the scientific man, and sought a rational explanation for what seemed unnatural and strange. Following this impulse, I turned off the made trail and began to make my way along the path the terrified deer had made through the brush.

As I walked, pushing branches and plants out of my way, I heard other sounds before me. They were quieter, but still unmistakably of the same source as the first.

My mind flailed and grasped in search of any natural explanation for these hideous sounds, but I could not think of a single one.

I was filled with both creeping dread and utter bafflement as I stumbled through the brush. After several long minutes, I broke through the brush and into a small clearing in the woods.

There, on the floor of dead brown needles, I saw it. Looming over the bloodied body of the unlucky companion of the first deer I had seen, was the creature, the thing that I had been warned about.

I stared, utterly frozen and bewildered.

When I awoke, it took me several long moments to get a bearing on my surroundings. I realized I must have fainted.

At first all I knew was that I was being dragged across a floor of rough stone, and I had an intense pain in my right ankle. I then realized with tremendous shock and horror that I was being dragged by the creature from the forest.

The tunnel or cavern I was in was sparsely lit by some manner of bioluminescent fungus or lichen, and I was able to see the creature’s insect-like head with its mandibles clamped around my ankle.

I began desperately considering any possible means I may have to escape.

For a fleeting moment I was terrified that the thing had noticed my awakening, but If it had, it did not show it. I concluded that it must have much poorer eyesight than myself.

I tried to take stock of my situation.

My backpack had apparently been ripped off of me, so I was without any of the weapons I normally kept on my person. It was nearly impossible to think straight while the thing drug me across the abrasive, rock littered cavern floor.

Then an idea struck me.

I did not particularly like it. It involved not only an element of uncertainty but also a time spent waiting, however I could think of no alternative.

I waited for what felt like aeons, but could really have only been a few minutes. The rocks tore my clothes. My flesh burned with pain where the mandibles held me. I strained my eyes in the dim light, searching frantically, when at last my eyes landed upon the object of my quest.

A loose stone on the floor, about the size of a softball, that came to a dull point on one end. I was unlikely I was going to find a better weapon, and I threw out my arm to reach it. The energy with which I flailed caused my body to shift to the right, and in response the creature jerked me forward with considerable force.

I felt a crack in my ankle and a shower of pain, but my fingers closed tightly around the stone.

I steeled myself, adjusting my grip on the stone and facing the point downward.

I took a deep breath and looked at the creature crawling on all legs.

Then, with a loud cry of effort I sat up and brought the stone down, point first on the creature’s head with all my strength.

I felt the stone break through the hard shell of the creature’s skull and plunge down into softer matter beneath with a sickening crunch.

The creature released its grasp on my ankle and let out a gurgling screech as I fell back on the cold stone floor.

I quickly sat up again, ready to defend myself from an attack by the creature, but I saw there would be no need.

The first blow had killed it. I breathed a shuddering sigh of relief, and bracing against the rough wall of the cavern, tried to lift myself to my feet.

Once I had managed to stand up, I limped over, favoring my left foot, to look at the creature.

The old man in the diner had said that the things in the forest were not meant to be seen, and upon looking closely at one of them, I found myself in complete agreement.

The thing that lay on the stones before me, illuminated by the dim glow of the fungi, was a sight never meant for human eyes. It was roughly six feet in length, insect-like in general outline, having six jointed legs ending in bony, hooklike appendages, as well as a mandibled head resembling that of a termite.

Its body however, seemed to possess a fleshy, rubbery quality that distinguished it from being totally insectoid. The dim light glistened off what appeared to be a slimy coating on the creature’s body.

A whitish green fluid ran out onto the cavern floor from the cracks around the stone wedge that was still lodged in the creature’s skull. It emitted a foul acidic smell.

I marvelled at the monstrosity, still in disbelief at the existence of such a creature.

After a few moments passed, a thought crossed my mind and my blood ran cold. The thought had been of the old man’s words.

“Things in the woods.”

Things.

I realized that there was no reason for me to believe that the monster I killed had been the only one, and wherever I was now, I was deep within the territory of its kind. It became apparent to me that I was still in great danger as long as I remained in those tunnels.

Conscious of how little time I may have until another creature passed through the tunnel I was in, I started trying to find my way back out.

Having no other idea of what direction “out” may be, I turned around to head in the direction that it seemed I had come.

I couldn’t move as fast as I would like due to the injury to my ankle. Each step caused a stab of pain to rush up my right leg.

I was encouraged at first by the fact that the floor of the tunnel sloped upwards, and I hoped it would bring me to the surface. However, after what felt like hours of staggering through the cold damp tunnel, it became clear to me that I was far deeper underground than I had thought.

Continuing on my way, I soon reached a fork in the tunnel. This was what I had been dreading, I had no way of knowing which tunnel would bring me to the surface, and which would carry me further into the realm of the creatures.

I was about to choose a tunnel at random and hope for the best when I heard a sound from the tunnel to the left.

It was a persistent hollow tapping. I realized with horror that I had heard the sound before. I had heard it when the creature was dragging me down the tunnel.

Crawling.

Listening closer, I could hear that the sounds coming from the tunnel before me were faster and more irregular, and growing louder. By my reckoning, this indicated two or three creatures traveling down the tunnel in my direction.

My breath caught in my throat.

I immediately ducked into the right tunnel, stumbling along it as fast as I could, dragging my foot behind me.

After a few minutes spent moving at this pace, I stopped to catch my breath.

When my heart stopped hammering in my ears, I became aware of a quiet sound drifting back down the tunnel from the way I had come.

tap tap tap

My heart skipped a beat and then resumed its hammering.

One of the creatures was moving through the tunnel behind me in my direction.

My exhausted limbs blazed with energy.

I lurched and stumbled down the tunnel, heedless of the pain that stabbed up from my ankle, heedless of the fact that the tunnel I now traveled was sloping downward. The only thought that occupied my mind was that in my current condition, facing another creature in the narrow dark tunnel would mean certain death.

I staggered onward. Urged forward by thoughts of mandibles and hooked insect limbs tearing my flesh from my bones.

I took no notice of the fact that the clumps of glowing fungi grew thicker and more frequent, filling the tunnel with a pale green light.

I was nearly at the point of collapse when I turned a corner in the tunnel and was stopped in my tracks with horror.

The stone before me fell away into a steep vertical drop. However unlike in my nightmare, the drop did not lead away into nothingness.

No.

What I saw when I fell to my knees with horror and stared over that cliff was far worse.

The stone wall fell vertically for at least two hundred feet before it terminated in the bottom of a tremendous pit. The pit was lit by the sickly green light from the thick ropes of glowing fungus that hung far above me.

I saw that the tunnel I looked out from was one of dozens that perforated the sheer stone walls of the pit. From these tunnels streamed the creatures.

Hundreds of them.

Thousands of them

They crawled up and down the rough walls, in and out of the tunnel mouths, and they covered the floor of the pit.

At the bottom of the pit, in the center of the teeming, screeching masses of the creatures, was the most terrible sight of all

The queen

It was larger than the other creatures. Much larger. The length of twenty ordinary creatures, its body was a great mass of whitish gray undulating flesh that seemed to glow in the unwholesome light.

The creatures swarmed around its immobile bulk. Before its head was a cluster of creatures who offered it chunks of bloody flesh which it occasionally leaned down and grabbed in its mandibles.

I was sickened by the realization that I had just witnessed what my fate would have been had I not awoken and killed the creature that had taken me here.

The queen let out a low gurgling sound.

Its sides collapsed inward.

A wriggling white larvae emerged from its abdomen, and at once two adult creatures took hold of it and carried it off deeper by way of a tunnel in the base of the wall.

At once I was on my feet.

I turned back and lurched up the tunnel from which I had come, heedless of the creature that may still occupy it, caring only about distancing myself from that foul chamber.

My mind spun as I stumbled, bending under the strain of what I had witnessed.

I heard the sound of my own hysterical laughter echoing off the walls of the tunnel, I felt tears running down my face.

Pain.

Terror.

Then, mercifully, darkness.

I have no recollection of what else occurred that night. I only know that I must have escaped the tunnels, for when I next awoke, I was in a clean white bed in a brightly lit medical ward with my ankle in a cast.

When I inquired as to what had happened to me, I was politely informed by an orderly that I was found by a search party three days after I had ventured into the forest. I had apparently been hysterical when I was found and had told the search party all of what I had experienced, and I had been sent to the Clearview Sanitarium.

I have been kept here for the past two years. I have been told that what I experienced was in reality the sudden onset of a mental condition, aggrevated by the stress of becoming lost in the forest.

My broken ankle has been explained as the result of getting tangled and tripping on a tree root.

My scrapes and cuts have been explained as the result of running through brush and thorns.

My story has been dismissed as a grand hallucination.

My warnings of the rapidly multiplying legions of nightmare creatures in hidden caverns have been dismissed as deluded paranoia.

In short, I have been labeled a madman.

What most torments me in this facility is the knowledge that humanity still remains ignorant to what I have learned.

I have learned that there are places on earth that man does not own. There are creatures that man has not faced and must never face for they harbor no fear of him. Every day that man reclines in the serene illusion that he is master of all the earth, the creatures who live outside his sight grow in numbers and strength. Each day that man remains ignorant he grows weaker in comparison.

I pray this ignorance does not destroy us.

End.

***

“I am a 19 year old writer from Minnesota.

Storytelling has been a lifelong interest of mine, particularly when coupled with all things strange and monstrous. After discovering the works of HP Lovecraft in high school I decided that I wanted to pursue a career in creative writing.

I am currently working on both a dark fantasy novel and a collection of short horror stories that span a wide variety of settings and themes. This story in Cosmic Horror Monthly is the first of mine to be published, and I am excited to continue on my creative journey.”

-Travis Sawyer

The Diary of Philip Westerly

By Paul Compton

Originally published in Weird Tales, September 1938

I refer to the reflection as “he,” “him,” or “it,” for I cannot bring myself to admit that the thing in the mirror is my reflection.

IT HAS been ten years since my uncle, Philip Westerly, disappeared. Many theories have been advanced as to why and how he vanished so strangely and so completely. Many have wondered why a man should vanish and leave nothing behind him but a smashed mirror. But none of these theories or wild imaginings are half so fantastic as the story I gathered from the diary which some whim prompted him to keep.

But first a word about Philip Westerly. He was a wealthy man, and also a cruel, selfish man. His wealth was attributed to this same cruelty and selfishness. He also had many whims. One of them

was keeping a diary. Another was his love for mirrors. He was handsome in a cruel sort of way and almost effeminate in his liking to stand before them and admire himself. This eccentricity was borne out by the fact that covering one whole side of his room was a mirror of gigantic size—the same mirror that is linked with his disappearance. But read the excerpts from the diary of Philip Westerly.

Aug. 3rd. Afternoon: Billings asked for an extension on that note today, but I saw no reason why I should grant him any such thing. When I told him this, he began cursing me in a frightful manner. He said I was cruel and that someday I would be called to account for the way I treated people. I laughed outright at this, but at the same time I felt a vague sense of uneasiness which even yet I have not dispelled.

Night: A remarkable thing has happened. I had gone to my room to dress for dinner and I was standing before the mirror tying my tie. I had begun the usual procedure that one follows, when I noticed that no such action was recorded in the mirror. True, there was my reflection in the glass, but it followed none of the movements that I made. It was immobile!

I extended my hand to touch the reflection and encountered nothing but the polished surface of the mirror. Then I noticed a truly remarkable thing. The reflection in the mirror wore no tie! I stepped back aghast. Was this an illusion? Had my mind and vision been affected by some malady that I was not aware of? Impossible! Then I regarded the reflection with a more careful scrutiny. There were a number of differences between it and myself. For one thing it wore a stubby growth of beard on its face. I was positive that I had visited the barber that very day and passed my hand across my chin to verify this. It encountered nothing but smooth skin. The lips of the man in the mirror drooped in a display of gnarled, yellow fangs, while my own bared nothing but two rows of gleaming, well-cared-for teeth.

I was filled simultaneously with a feeling of disgust and fear, and looked for further discrepancies. I found them. The feet and hands were abnormally large, and the clothing of the thing was old, baggy, and covered with filth.

I dared not stay longer. I tied the tie as best I could and descended hurriedly to dinner.

Aug. 4th. Morning: I awoke feeling jaded and tired. My friend in the mirror is still with me. Ordinarily the reflection of myself, in bed, is caught in the mirror, but not so this morning. Instead, I saw that the dweller within had, like myself, been having a night’s rest. I hope he slept better than I did, for my own night was a series of fitful, restless tossings.

“Good morning,” I said, rising.

When I moved, he moved. As I advanced toward the mirror he drew closer to me. I stopped and surveyed him. He resembled me only remotely—I hope. I smiled, and he responded with a wolfish twist of his mouth. I extended my hand as if I wanted to shake hands with him, but he drew bade as if from fire. I can’t understand the terror which he holds for me. I try not to show my fear in front of him, but I feel that, animal-like, he senses it. I refer to the reflection as “he,” “him,” or “it,” for I cannot bring myself to admit that the thing in the mirror is my reflection. But I scarcely dare write what I do believe it to be. I have always been skeptical about such things as “soul,” but when I look into the mirror —God help me!

Night: I am spending much time in my room now. I’ve spent most of the day here. This thing is beginning to hold a morbid fascination for me. I can’t stay away for any length of time. I wish I could. My wife is beginning to worry about me. She says I look pale. She tells me I need a rest—a long rest. If I could only confide in her! In anyone! But I can’t. I must fight and wait this out alone.

Aug. 5th. There has been little or no change in our relationship. He still remains aloof.

Today my wife came to my room to see how I was feeling. She stood in such a position that looking into the mirror was unavoidable. She stood before the mirror arranging her hair. She noticed nothing out of the ordinary, but he was still there. Damn him! He was still there, and this time he snarled in triumph at me.

One other remarkable thing. My wife hadn’t seen the thing there in the mirror, but neither had I seen her reflection. It was the same with Peter, my valet, and Anna, the maid. Anna would have dusted the mirror had I not stopped her. I must take no chances. A close scrutiny might reveal him to them, and they must not know—they must not know!

AUG. 6th. Three days. Three days of hell! That’s what it has been since I discovered that damned thing. How he tortures me! He has begun to mock me. When he thinks he has given an extraordinarily clever impersonation he shakes with laughter. I can’t hear him laugh. But I see him. And that’s worse. I can’t stand it much longer!

Aug. 7th. We never know how much we can stand until we go through some ordeal such as I am now undergoing. But I feel that my nerve is near the breaking-point.

I have locked the door of my room. Anna leaves a tray outside my door. Sometimes I eat the food she brings, but more often I don’t. My wife begs me to let her in, but I tell her to go away. I’m afraid to tell her—I’m afraid to tell anyone. I know what they do with people who have “hallucinations”. No, I

can’t tell. Neither can I leave. God knows why, but I can’t.

Aug. 8th. It was day before yesterday that I mentioned his mocking me. Today—I tremble at the thought—he is beginning to resemble me! This morning I looked in the mirror and discovered that he had discarded his rags and was now dressed in one of my suits. I ran to the wardrobe and discovered his clothes hanging where mine had been. I turned and faced him. He laughed and pointed toward my hands and feet. They were bloated beyond recognition. I dare not guess how far this change has gone. I can write no more today.

Aug. 9th. The change is complete. He looks more like me than I do myself. He has grown more cruel with the change. He taunts me with my ugliness. Finally I could stand it no longer. I fled from the room. At last I found the thing I was looking for—a mirror. When I came face to face with what I now am I nearly collapsed. Yes, he has taken my form. God pity me! I’ve taken his!

I slunk back to the room in horror. Back to his laughter and the hell that is now my existence. God knows what tomorrow will bring!

Aug. 10th. Seven days since that devil has been in the mirror. I have prayed to God that it may be the last. It will! I know it will! He, in the mirror, senses it too. I see the look of apprehension in his eyes. Damn him! It’s my turn to snarl in triumph now. For when I lay down this pen, for the last time, perhaps, I shall leap through the mirror. And he exists only in the mirror. God help me! I am laying down my pen!

End.