 
#The Crone House

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**The Crone House**

By

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2014

All Rights Reserved

http://www.wandilland.com

Victor Allen's Smashwords Author Page

I'm just an average guy with a regular job, neither a journalist nor a scrivener, but I wanted to tell you about this. This thing that shouldn't be, but somehow is.

I've lived in Camden all my working life, and for that long, as I drove to home and work, I wondered about the derelict old house roosting like a broody hen at the center of a cluster of empty lots. I could see it on my left as I drove in, my right as I drove back, some half a mile away from the overpass. One didn't have to be a real estate mogul to notice the depressions in the middle of the vacant lots -now splashed with new grass- where homes had once stood, those homes obviously having been torn down, their occupants scattered to the four winds or moved on to more promising enterprises. All but the one.

Some houses reveal their bad intent by a flaw in their character that can be detected by the eye, but not seen. The Crone House was like that. It stood alone, seemingly purposefully so, encapsulated like a diseased organ by its four foot barrier of thorny weeds, seedy, brittle grass, and chain link fence set one hundred twenty feet equidistant from each of its four ragged sides. It was a wooden structure, two stories, and not so long abandoned that it was sagging. But time and/or vandals had bleached its paint; its broken windows were boarded over (save for one on the upper floor), and stout padlocks and hasps, both species now tarnished, barred entry at all doors. It wasn't so close to the city that its discredited state would excite cries from the NIMBY's to have it torn down, nor so far from the heart of the city that Andy and Opie were still using two tin cans and a string for a telephone.

But it shouldn't have been there. It should have been demolished as part of an urban renewal project, or taken by the city for taxes, or condemned as a peril to life and limb. Any of those things before it had become such an eyesore and a nuisance that those around it had chosen to sell and get out. But had they sold out? Or just left? Their property values had to have gone into a free-fall, yet no-one had ever rebuilt around the house. Was it somehow corrupt? Even haunted? There had to be some bit of mystical local lore to explain it. I had to know.

One weekend I drove down to the house, just casually driving by. There was, I decided, something about it that made it a notch more foreboding than your run of the mill abandoned domicile. On the opposite side of the road, some hundred yards from the house, there was a park where a myriad of children played beneath the (sometimes) watchful eyes of their parents.

Even in such close proximity to the abandoned house, the atmosphere of the park was cheerful and light. Though there were a few children there enraptured by "Angry Birds" and elite speak, most were still kids doing kid things: running, laughing, jumping rope.

I sat on a bench with a group of parents (mostly mothers) and inquired about the house. Rather than being castigated and roundly condemned as some kind of roving pervert, a good number of the mothers had their own inside information on the house, but what I wanted was the real story, and that would come from the kids.

Eventually, I won the trust of the mothers enough that they allowed the little girls playing jump rope to tell me the tale of the Crone House, each flaxen or raven haired child, red, black or white, adding this detail and that rumor and an "I heard that...." until a coherent narrative emerged. As the day wore on, and while under the still mostly distrustful eyes of the mothers, the story came out...

**********

Jenny Flynn took a hobbling step backwards and admired herself in the mirror. She delighted in the high, spiked heels and ornate, blue bride's maid dress which flowed overlong on the floor beneath her. Her blue eyes, black-rimmed with mascara, peered out from the reflection of a small face oozing rouge and lipstick. Not bad for an eight year old, stilettoed Viking princess, complete but for crown and scepter. Not bad at all for the Friday afternoon follies.

Jenny liked to play dress-up, and the guilty lure of her sister, Lisa's, bride's maid dress had just been too much. Even flush with delight, Jenny curdled a little inside at the thought of Lisa returning and finding her pilfering in her personal belongings, especially her unworn bride's maid dress. She cast a nervous glance from the upstairs window of Lisa's bedroom.

No-one. The driveway was empty. Lisa was at her boyfriend's house, that no good rat, Steve Kirk, mom and dad still at work. Reflected in the mirror behind her, the bedroom door was still closed. Plenty of time to admire herself and still put everything to rights before Lisa got home.

Her gaze strayed from the mirror as she reached for a bottle of perfume on the dresser. When she got older, she would use some of this perfume to attract a boy that would treat her good, not like Steve Kirk who was sixteen, and had a car, and treated Lisa like his dog on a choke chain. Maybe that was Lisa's problem. Maybe she needed someone who treated her better.

Jenny unscrewed the top from the perfume bottle.

The door swung open behind her.

Jenny gasped and whirled around, the perfume bottle falling from suddenly wooden fingers. The bottle cracked and shattered on the wooden floor, tiny crescents of glass flashing like razor-edged ice in the sunlight spilling through the window. The treacly smell of perfume caught in her nose.

Lisa stood in the doorway, tall and imposing, her dark eyes blazing. Whatever expression had been on her face was replaced by one of black fury.

Jenny. Standing in front of her dresser, wearing her shoes, her makeup, and her dress with the hem snarled around the shoes and getting torn and dirty. There was a pathetic, pop-eyed expression of terror on her little pie-face. Her mouth was puckered in a perfect circle like a doughnut hole and her hands grasped protectively at the bodice of the dress. Time slowed and stopped like a still from a motion picture, a perfect diorama. They stared at each other, Lisa's eyes dark and catlike, Jenny's wide and terrified.

"What in God's name do you think you're doing!" Lisa shrieked.

She stalked across the room in three long strides, her footfalls jarring on the wooden flooring. She grabbed Jenny by the shoulders and began to shake her, screaming and cursing like a sailor pinched by the shore patrol in a cat house. Scarlet rainbows of fury danced before her eyes, something that always came, but that she couldn't quite make out as the black rage engulfed her. Uncontrollable tremors cramped her muscles into knots.

Jenny choked and cringed against the dresser, her arms thrown upward uselessly.

(....should have known better. Life is a fairy tale and the evil princess always finds out. Should have known better....)

"Haven't I told you never to come into my room!" Lisa screamed. What should have been unworried flesh on Lisa's teen-aged throat had tightened to taut, vertical lines. Her teeth, mere inches from Jenny's face, gnashed and grated.

Jenny started to cry, her tears flung through the air as Lisa shook her. Downstairs, she heard the clock strike four, a quartet of hollow bongs.

(....should have known, should have known, should have known better....)

Lisa's rage seemed to have no governor as she continued to rave and scream.

"Little bitch!" she shrieked. "My dress is ruined! I ought to kill you right now. That would stop your whining and pilfering, once and for good, wouldn't it?"

With one enraged heave, she hurled Jenny to the floor. She kicked and pummeled Jenny, her own dark rage fueled by her sister's cries of agony. Jenny's right arm had fallen in the spill of broken glass on the floor and she felt the warmth of blood and the stinging of the perfume as it eagerly sought the open lacerations.

Jenny had passed screaming now. She gasped and gagged for breath, her helpless face turned upward towards her sister in an unheeded plea as she tried to ward off the savage kicks. Her wild tears had melted the mascara and rouge into muddy brown war paint as the endless tirade above her raged on.

With unexpected suddenness the blows ceased and Lisa was screaming at Jenny to get out before she really had something to cry about.

Jenny blinked the tears from her eyes and saw that Lisa had turned away, her hand absently rubbing the side of her head.

Through the tear haze, Lisa appeared to be haloed in shining silver and outlined in violent black. On either side of her, Jenny could see the eyeless imps with their pointed teeth, red skin, and stunted, dwarf-like bodies, twisted like malformed trees. They grinned at Jenny, and even though they didn't have eyes, she could tell that they were looking at her. For some reason, Jenny knew that Lisa couldn't see them. She probably didn't even know they were there.

Jenny stood up uncertainly, clutching her stomach, and ran from the room, looking back only once at the horribly grinning, blind demons that had laid hold in her sister's mind.

Jenny fled recklessly down the stairs, hugging tight to the rail, tripping and stumbling in the high heels and snarled hemline. At the bottom of the stairs, she lost one of the shoes and continued clumping along madly in the remaining shoe towards her room. She threw herself on her bed and cried in watery snuffles and choking gasps, her heart stuttering like machine gun fire.

In a few minutes her crying dwindled to a few disconnected tears and her breathing steadied. She swiped her hand across her eyes as if waving a magic wand that would make the tears vanish completely. She got up and closed her door quietly. She returned to her bed and lay there silently, thinking about Lisa.

Lisa

Lisa finished sweeping up the broken glass and tossed it in her trash can. Her head ached and the smell of perfume nauseated her. Opening the window had helped a lot, but the sickening-sweet stink was still nearly unbearable.

The headaches had become much worse lately. She sometimes thought they would drive her mad. Well, she wondered, who wouldn't go crazy with a pilfering, crybaby, daddy's girl of a little sister to put up with. What had happened today was not unusual. It had, in fact, become something almost normal lately. What wasn't normal were the headaches and, yes, even the beatings. They had grown worse together, as if tied to one another by a hank of black yarn. And days like today, she really felt that it wasn't her, but something orchestrated from outside of her. Just stress, she reckoned. Aunt Flow was in town, her cousin's wedding coming up, and now her dress ruined (something she would have to deal with), her worries about what would happen to her should Jenny ever decide to show off a rainbow of bruises from her beatings to her parents (which, oddly enough, she never did), the rappings in the walls of her upstairs bedroom at night and the deep voices speaking some language she didn't understand. Though she didn't want to admit it, that was what she really wanted to get away from, and Steve Kirk was her ticket out.

He, too, was a miserable sonofabitch-prick. He treated her badly, used her for his own purposes like a dishrag, then disappeared. All he could think of was sex, sex, sex, and her not even on the pill. But that was alright. Next year she would be sixteen and she would by-god be leaving this place with Steve. Away from Jenny. No more: Oh, isn't Jenny the cutest thing; Lisa, help Jenny with her homework; No, Lisa, you can't go out tonight; Lisa don't you ever talk to your sister like that again. No more Jenny pushing her buttons. No more of that shit.

And no more troubling noises in her bedroom walls at night, keeping her awake and making her afraid.

Lisa knew she might have killed Jenny today. Once it had started, the whole thing had become kind of a blur and, though she might not admit it to herself, that was another reason she wanted to get out.

Lisa put in the ear buds from her mp3 player and turned up the volume. Music gushed into her ears in a steady roar. She sat in her favorite wicker chair and put her feet together primly, a princess trapped in a serf's body.

Lisa hadn't always hated Jenny. Even now, but for the headache that pulsed in her brain like a broken bone, what she had done today might have made her cry. She might even have loved Jenny at one time, but something had changed in Lisa.

Lisa tolerated Jenny. She could never love her again. She might kill her, but she could never love her.

Even still, as the afternoon wore on, she cried for a little bit, and didn't really know why.

Jenny

High, tinkling, fairy tones crossed the room from their source, a music box with a tiny, pirouetting ballerina. Jenny watched the ballerina slowly rotate, the head downturned, the delicate white arms upraised over it as it did its ageless dance.

Jenny watched the music box a while longer. She didn't hear the cars passing on the streets outside, or the exuberant barking of a dog in pursuit of a luckless cat, or the laughter of young children at games of jump rope and Red Rover at the park down the street. Nothing concerned her now but the ringing melody and serene grace of the ballerina.

Until the memories came, rampaging goblins that hammered at the walls of her inner redoubt. Lisa screaming at her, hitting her, cursing and threatening. A picture formed, a perfect slice of time branded into her memory. She had been watching the cartoons on channel 48, her favorite show, when Lisa had come in and changed the channel to one of her corny soap operas. She had been sickly white and hadn't looked very good at all. Jenny had opened her mouth to complain and Lisa had turned on her, screaming.

The image wavered, became tenuous, then vanished completely like the trick ink she had once bought at a magic shop, only to be replaced with another one.

Jenny playing with a doll. Lisa descending on her like some evil angel and smacking her hard across the face for no apparent reason. Jenny still remembered Lisa's eyes, the weird blackness and doubling as if there were someone else inside her head, behind her eyes. For all Jenny knew, there was. She, too, had heard the odd noises in the walls that came from Lisa's room, the troubling, croaking voices speaking some pre-human language.

Lisa hadn't always been bad. Not until the malformed presences had appeared, seeming to have festered up ex nihilo from some terrible, black abyss. Love for her sister had not yet completely curdled, but Jenny still sometimes wished she could get back at Lisa. But not today. Today she had to cover Lisa's tracks.

She looked at the cuts on her arm and concentrated on them. Not too hard, really not that much effort at all, and the crisp, brown scabs began to fade to ocher, then to evanesce, then to disappear, leaving innocent, pink skin. The welling bruises on her arms subsided and the throbbing pain went with them.

No, Jenny wasn't as helpless as she seemed, and one day Lisa had just better watch out.

She turned her attention to the ruined dress, the scuffed and broken high heeled shoes, and actually felt a little guilty. She really shouldn't have been pilfering in Lisa's things. Those items would have to be fixed.

The ballerina finished her dance and the music stopped. In the silence, Jenny heard the tinny, crashing chords coming from Lisa's room, her ear buds turned up so loud Jenny could hear them all the way downstairs. She listened for a couple of minutes, then went to gather up the broken shoe in the hallway.

**********

"Jenny! Come to supper!"

Jenny bounced up from her bed and ran into the kitchen, her face freshly scrubbed of makeup, her cuts and bruises healed. She was ravenous. The unsettling events of the day had already diminished to a mere memory.

Lisa glanced furtively at Jenny as they ate, and not for the first time. It wasn't the first time that Jenny's injuries had faded and she thought it worried Lisa. It was with great glee that Jenny pretended not to notice.

Jenny's parents (Jack and Jill Flynn) talked of the day's work and tonight's bridal shower and bachelor party for the respective participants in the upcoming wedding.

Lisa talked about Steve Kirk and little else.

After supper, Jenny went into the living room to watch thousands of dollars worth of cash and prizes being given away by smiling emcees in Botany 500 suits on TV game shows.

Lisa washed the dishes while Jack and Jill prepared to go out to their parties.

At the door, Jenny's mother told her to mind her sister and be good. She assured her that she would while Lisa beamed sardonically behind her. Her parents left after saying they would be back around twelve. Don't wait up for us.

Jenny watched them leave, now at Lisa's mercy. She could only hope that all the fire was out of Lisa's eyes. She looked around. Lisa paid no attention to Jenny at all. She was busy dialing the phone.

Interested, Jenny sat down in the small rocker across from where Lisa sat with one leg tucked beneath her. Lisa stared at her very hard but said nothing.

"Steve? Hey, it's me."

Jenny listened to the conversation with disfavor, eying Lisa with a look as cold as January in a Siberian salt mine. The gist of the conversation was, "No, Steve. Not tonight. My parents aren't home."

Jenny suddenly thought about something her father, an IT guy, would do with hackers. If somebody was trying to hack a system or a website, he would put in a snippet of code and a hyper-link and "Rick-Roll" them, sending the hacker to a YouTube video of Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give you Up." Jenny thought it was the funniest thing she had ever heard. She thought about what Lisa had done today and closed her eyes. She concentrated very hard and tried to "Rick-Roll" Lisa.

She opened her eyes.

No luck.

Lisa was still on the phone, swinging her one free leg. She told Steve -apparently also un-"Rick-Rolled"- that he could come over if he promised to leave by eleven. Jenny was heartsick.

Lisa, he's only using you. I'm only eight years old and I know that.

At that instant Jenny wanted to rip the phone from Lisa's hand and rid her of Steve Kirk forever. In that same instant, the phone slithered and ran ever so slightly, as if it had partially melted and quivered.

The phone fell from Lisa's hand.

At the same time the phone had quivered, Lisa had felt its texture change from rigid plastic and metal to a warm, soft jelly. A giant, invisible hand of great strength pulled at the phone and wrenched it from her hand. The phone fell to the floor where it started to emit high pitched trills and squeaks.

In that one second while the phone trilled and buzzed, Jenny knew that she had done it. She had felt that something inside her surface. She had wanted Lisa off the phone, and suddenly, she was. Jenny felt ridiculously pleased with herself, like one of those chimps that has just solved a monkey puzzle by placing all the rings on a peg in descending order of diameter.

Lisa stared at the phone for a full five seconds in uncomprehending surprise. She looked up slowly at Jenny. Jenny had not moved and she saw the stark dread in Lisa's eyes. Lisa looked away and hurriedly picked up the phone.

"Steve? Steve, are you still there?"

A squawking noise came through the phone.

"Yes.... Yes! Come right over. I.... I dropped the phone." She stole a timid peek at her bemused little sister. "Alright. I'll see you in a few minutes."

Lisa turned on Jenny, windy and blustering. "What are you staring at," she said, flapping her arms. "Go on. Go to your room. And don't you dare tell mama Steve was here."

Jenny calmly got up and walked to her room, but when she passed Lisa she favored her with a crimped little smile.

No matter how she tried to hide it, Lisa knew. And was afraid. Jenny idly wondered what she would think of the surprise she had left for Lisa.

In her room, Jenny pulled out Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and read for a little while. The doorbell rang. Steve was here and Jenny listened as they went into Lisa's room. She heard their muffled voices through the bedroom door. After a time the voices stopped and Jenny heard the door being latched.

Jenny walked over to her music box and wound it up. The ballerina went through her timeless dance while Jenny watched and listened, hoping to hear nothing else.

**********

Lisa knew she was in trouble when her father told her he had been reading the newspaper. It was his fulsome way of telling her she had been caught in some wrongdoing, as in "I read in the newspaper that you had been seen...." drinking, out too late, hanging around with the wrong people, pick your peccadillo.

This morning she had a pretty good idea of what her father had read in the newspaper. Steve had been out of the house less than a minute last night when her parents arrived home. Now, standing in the narrow hallway with her father, she stiffened herself for the predictable reprimand.

"I was reading in the newspaper that Steve Kirk was over here last night after we left," her father told her perfunctorily, tapping the rolled up newspaper in his hand gently against his thigh.

Lisa, being somewhat adept at turning a smart remark, considered several but decided to keep quiet. She was in Dutch already. She stared stonily at her father, her thoughts on Jenny.

"Well, is it true?"

"If you already know," Lisa said, "why ask?"

Oh, she knew who had perpetrated this perfidy. It might have been that insufferable old creeping Moses from next door, Mrs. Tomlinson, but Lisa didn't think so. Only Jenny would pick her for this royal ream job. The little tattletale was going to rue the day she decided to fink on Lisa Flynn.

"I asked," her father said with fractious patience, "because I want to hear it from you." Tap, tap went the newspaper on his leg.

There was no use denying it. "Yes, Steve was here." Then she added hurriedly, "but we didn't do anything."

"Now that I don't doubt. You may be indiscreet, but I don't think you're stupid."

Lisa gaped at her father.

"You know you're not allowed to have boyfriends over unless either your mother or me are here. What would the neighbors say?"

Lisa couldn't believe her ears. She thought it was a line only used in the movies. She opened her mouth to say so, but her father interrupted her.

"Not another word. Except for your cousin's wedding, you're grounded for a week."

"But...."

Her father eyed her sternly. "You want to go two for two?"

Lisa closed her mouth. Bright little dots had begun to shoot across her corneas like neon insects. Her father was still speaking.

"When your mother and I go out again tonight, we're not going to have to worry about Steve Kirk, are we?"

"No sir."

Jack Flynn walked away and Lisa wondered if a quick rap right in the mouth would do wonders for Little Caesar. She was left alone to contend with her headache and churn with rage about Jenny.

**********

"Lisa?"

Jenny stood in Lisa's bedroom doorway, small and pale, her blond hair laying like a loose sheaf of straw on her shoulders. She held a tiny, silver pinwheel that would throw off magical rainbows when held up to the wind and light. Lisa was brushing her hair crossly when she turned and caught sight of Jenny.

"I didn't tell."

"Don't lie to me," Lisa rasped, her voice a sandpapery croak. "I know it was you." She cast a look towards the corner where her now untorn and unspotted bride's maid dress hung from a hook. The broken high heels were miraculously whole, and the construction of the shoes themselves seemed to have changed from gaudy plastic to soft, dyed leather.

"You think you can buy me off with this fucking fairy godmother routine? I don't know how you do this shit, but it ends tonight. I'll make you wish you'd never learned to talk."

"You won't," Jenny said softly, her eyes conferring the look a judge gives to a convicted felon. She held the pinwheel up in front of her lips and gently blew on the silver leaves. They spun slowly, catching the light, gathering energy.

Like a bolt from the blue, a bright flash issued from the pinwheel with a fizzing sound. The hairbrush in Lisa's hand suddenly thickened and squirmed like a living thing. A limp, dead weight made her hand sag and it was only when looked that Lisa saw the triangular head and forked tongue of the viper in her face. The snake started to twine itself around Lisa's neck and she heaved it away, falling on the floor at the same time with an unflattering thud.

There was a second thump as the snake hit the floor. Lisa saw it start to slither away in its undulating "S"'s when, in a tenth of a heartbeat, the brown body contracted and rolled itself into a pink, plastic handle with black bristles. A perfectly ordinary hairbrush.

Jenny watched, captivated by this potent magic. She smiled at Lisa, just as any little sister will smile with adoration at their older sibling. Then she walked away.

Lisa watched her go, Jenny terrifyingly tall from Lisa's vantage point on the floor. She seemed to hear buzzing in her ears and angry rumblings around her, but that was most likely from the thunderstorm trapped in the dome of her skull. Whatever it was that Jenny had, it had to be dealt with, sooner rather than later. Lisa would sneak up behind her if she had to, but she would put an end to it.

She rose from the floor and looked at Jenny's receding back thoughtfully, while somewhere behind her, she distinctly heard the low rumble of something chuckling with delight.

**********

That night, the dinner dishes done, Lisa dried her hands on the dish towel and padded to her room. She sat on her bed and closed her eyes, noting with satisfaction that she was steady and calm. The decision was made. There would be no backsliding.

Steve, her parents, her friends played no role in her machinations. Only Jenny.

Only one step away was the yawning chasm that Jenny had seen, but Lisa had only glimpsed; the eyeless imps and stunted demons that had turned Lisa's soul out and made a home in the void.

Jack and Jill were gone. The autumn moon was her ally of the evening, riding high in the sky and projecting weird, elongated shadows into her darkened bedroom. Tiny mites of dust suspended in silver-silk moonbeams glittered and spun in a willowy, fairy waltz

Lisa tiptoed down the stairs and walked into the kitchen. She had put on the blue bride's maid dress Jenny had magicked back to virgin perfection. If all went according to plan, this would be the only chance she got to wear it. The passionless face of the moon stared coldly through the window at her, a silver coin pinned against the black velvet of a cloudless sky.

Lisa backed away from the window slowly, sighing, her mind wrecked up beyond saving. There was no gilding the lily on this. She pulled open the drawer where the knives were kept and selected a large chopping blade with a sharp point. Uncaring moonbeams echoed from the blade and threw spears of light on the shadowed wall adjacent to the window. Lisa held the knife at arm's length, fascinated at the shadow it cast. Overly large, powerful, monstrous, its magic to steal life to be tested against Jenny's sorcery.

Trailed by that demonic presence, Lisa walked towards Jenny's room, turning out lights as she went. She extinguished the lamp at the foot of the stairs, leaving the house in darkness save for the light in Jenny's room.

The clocks struck nine, its hollow chiming covering the sounds of Lisa's advance. It was time.

**********

"Jenny?"

Lisa's voice was serene, composed and gentle. "Jenny, come out. I've got something for you."

Jenny heard Lisa calling, but it was the way she was calling that made her nervous. Lisa never spoke gently. Although immediately suspicious, she was also aware of a chill that passed through her. The night wind pressed its icy palm against the window pane and rattled the glass while the frost-hardened night penetrated the walls of her room and settled its cold on her like a second skin. The house creaked around her in some dark corner.

With a heavy heart and fear like icy needles pricking her, Jenny walked to her bedroom door. Disobedience might bring on another beating.

Lisa stood just outside Jenny's room, wearing the bride's maid dress, her hands behind her back. For a moment Jenny wondered why the lights were out.

"Lisa? What's wrong?"

Lisa continued walking forward slowly. She looked unflinchingly at Jenny as if she were something to eat.

"What's wrong," Jenny repeated. "Lisa, what's wrong with you?"

"Nothing, Jenny. Nothing," Lisa said in a friendly voice. Her face was abloom with healthy color and she was smiling. "I've come to make a peace offering. You remember all the times I yelled at you and hit you?"

Jenny nodded uncertainly.

"Well, you won't have to worry about that anymore." Lisa was within a yard of Jenny, facing her. Her dark hair glimmered like oil in the moonlight and her eyes suddenly blazed. "You won't ever have to worry about that again."

Lisa raised the knife over her head.

"No!" Jenny screamed. She lurched backwards and her back slammed against the door frame, rattling her teeth and conking her head with a brain jarring crack. The knife came down in a brutal arc, flashing in the lamplight from Jenny's room, missing her by an inch.

"Nooooo...!"

Jenny slid to a sitting position, cowering and sobbing. Her pinwheel was in her room, her magic gone. The light from the bedroom bathed Lisa in half light, half shadow, her visible eye gleaming triumphantly. In the welling darkness behind Lisa, Jenny saw the vague outlines of the demon-spawned creatures, but thought that might just have come from her brains being stirred.

Lisa raised the knife again.

"No!" Jenny screamed, that high, piercing shriek of a little girl that was like a nail in Lisa's head. "No, no, no!"

Lisa felt it hit her. A great rush of wind and then the invisible hand pushing her, smashing the breath out of her. Her mouth yawned open in a circle of pain and then she was flying across the room, tumbling in mockery of gravity, twisting like a scarecrow in a whirlwind. She crashed into the glass front of the grandfather clock, shattering its pane into a thousand crystal fangs. The chiming tubes bonged and clanged like lunatic church bells.

A ponderous, oppressive weight levied on her chest, the invisible hand crushing her against the fractured grandfather clock. The muffled snaps of her ribs breaking seemed artificially subdued, but the flaring pain as the broken ends pierced her lungs was real enough. She dimly heard a squeaky wheeze like a bellows as the breath was crushed from her chest and out of her mouth, bubbling through the blood from her lacerated lungs.

Lisa was dying and she knew it. A gathering black tide began to veil her vision, but not before she saw Jenny huddled in a protective ball on the floor, her moony, blue eyes staring at Lisa with an otherworldly mix of fascination and fear. Jenny wouldn't be able to hound Lisa in death, and she wished for it to hurry. A last, blood-choked moan of desperation whispered from Lisa's mouth as the last spark of her life ebbed out.

**********

Jenny rose painfully to her feet, hot tears streaming down her face. Her breath gathered in short, hiccuping gasps. A steady buzzing vibrated inside her head and the house canted and yawed before her.

She steadied herself on the door frame, trying to stand on legs that felt like wet sponges. With every rubbery step she took, the broken and sprawling heap of her sister grew larger in her eyes until she stood immediately over her.

Jenny knelt beside Lisa and let the true weeping start. Tears of fear and rage and sorrow and what should have been for the black princess. As she reached out a trembling hand to touch Lisa's still body, an overpowering affection smothered her and she moaned aloud at the injustice of it all.

"Oh, Lisa," she sobbed. "It's not right, is it? I never wanted it to end like this. I never wanted you dead." Jenny moved her face forward and kissed Lisa's toneless cheek, but Lisa lay still with her eyes closed. Jenny was overcome by the recognition of her own mortality and the unconsidered words spilled out of her mouth in a scream before she could call them back or reckon what they would do.

"You can't be dead! You can't be! I won't let you be dead!"

Jenny touched Lisa and an immediate yellow glow flamed around her hands. A heavy silence collected in the silver gloom, ablaze with the shining metal of moonlight. Along with the silence, a tension built in the haze; an intangible force that was electric and vital. Jenny felt the hair on her neck rise.

"Lisa....?"

Lisa's grip tightened on the knife handle. She whipped it violently upward, catching Jenny just beneath the chin. The blade sliced through flesh with an incongruous whisk sound that belied the damage it wrought. Blood spurted in a gaudy, crimson flood. The metallic smell of blood was in Lisa's nostrils. Blood was in Jenny's hair, Lisa's hair, on the knife, their clothes, the floor. Jenny never had a chance to cry out. She simply slumped backwards on her back.

"So!" Lisa trumpeted in wicked triumph. "Thought you would get by with that didn't you, you little whore!"

Jenny's body was slumped backwards, her back folded over her lower legs where she had knelt by her stricken sister, her blood-matted blond hair pooling stiffly on the floor. Lisa towered over her, raving in an obscene parody of victory. Her own body moved in grinding lurches, powered by surreal animation. Jenny's glassy eyes stared upward sightlessly as the tirade went on.

Now unchecked by Jenny's magic, the demonic horde was at last visible. Lisa finally saw the eyeless imps and dancing devils with scaly red skin and huge, orange eyes that glared like twin incinerators. They grinned at her with their sharp, white teeth.

Taking it all in -Jenny lying dead and bloody on the floor, the dancing devils, her own implausible reprieve from death- Lisa started to chuckle, then to laugh. She ran her fingers along the knife blade, softly at first, then more firmly. More blood ran through her fingers and splotched on the floor in crazy, Rorschach inkblots.

Headlights blared through the windows, picking out the carnage in an unflinching, white spotlight. Gravel crackled, a radiator fan spun and stopped. Jack and Jill were home.

Lisa stopped laughing and turned to the light, her eyes shedding their dead sheen and taking on the grisly glow of the imps' eyes. She gripped the knife more firmly, ignoring the pain in her hands. There could be no peace now.

A lunatic's grin cracked her face like a hard blow as she took up a position behind the front door, the one her parents would come through. Even before the door handle turned, the walls were filled with bellowing and shouting and evil laughter, rattlings and poundings that shook the house like a wrecking ball.

Lisa's knife glinted in the moonlight as she took the final step into the black valley.

**********

By the time the story came around to the end, most of the little girls had drifted away to more absorbing distractions, leaving one lone, blond girl of about eight to finish the tale.

"And when the police got there," the little girl continued, "they heard all the noise and went in the house, guns drawn. They found the parents, knifed to death just inside the doorway, but not Jenny or Lisa. The screaming and bellowing went on and the walls kept shaking while the cops were there. They stayed just long enough to make sure that there were no signs of life. I've even heard that one of them went upstairs to check, even with the walls shaking around him. He never came back to work again.

"The whole time the bodies were being removed, the shaking and pounding and laughing went on. No-one ever found out where the noises were coming from, and nobody could stand to stay in the house for very long. In the end, I think the city just decided to padlock the house and put a fence around it. It wasn't much more than six months before everybody around it had moved out. Even the hobos and homeless wouldn't stay in the abandoned houses and they were eventually torn down."

"And," I asked, "are the noises still there?"

The little girl looked at me without artifice or cunning.

"Maybe," she said. "I don't know. I wouldn't go in there."

"And what," I asked her, "do you think happened to Jenny and Lisa?"

Instead of answering, she simply pointed at the window on the upper floor of the house, the only one that wasn't boarded over.

I let my gaze follow her pointing finger. Standing there, quite plain to see, was an old woman with brittle, gray, scouring pad hair that streamed down to her shoulders. The blue of the bride's maid dress she wore was faded, threadbare, and torn, and her eyes were sunken and as dull as chipped marbles. Her face told the story of a thousand nights of terror, each one etched into a different line on her slack face. She seemed to be looking right at me and I'm not ashamed to say I was frightened. Then she was gone, in her place only a tattered white curtain moving tantalizingly in the breeze.

I turned back to my host and was surprised to find that she had vanished. Looking up and down the street and at the other little girls, I satisfied myself that she was, indeed, gone.

A little shaken, I approached her mother.

"Where did your daughter go?"

"My daughter," she said curiously.

"The little girl I was talking to, yes. Your daughter."

"She's not my daughter. I've never seen her before. I thought she was your little girl."

The woman must have seen the bewildered look on my face because she asked me: "Is something amiss with her?"

"I'm not sure," I said. I looked at the weed troubled fence around the blighted house, the locks and boards on the windows and doors, and the solitary curtain waving in the open window on the second floor. "I think maybe she finally got back at her big sister."

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed The Crone House. One of twenty tales of Lost Loves, aliens, bankers, weird sisters, werewolves, spontaneous human combustion, pagans, evil government conspiracies, and more, in A-Sides! And, please – good bad, or indifferent - I encourage you to leave a review. I'd greatly appreciate it.

Since you're already here, you might want to go a little further and check out some of the excerpts. Good reads that cost less than a cup of bad coffee and cheap at twice the price! They're only a mouse click away.

To the Excerpts:

#Katerina Cheplik

#Essex

#The Lost Village of Craven County

#Xeno Sapiens

#We Are the Dead

#Wandil Land

#A-Sides

Again and always, thanks for reading.

## Excerpts

##

Essex

by

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved

From Essex...

1955

Essex Pass lies buried between Pisgah Park and Bald Head mountain in the southern Appalachians of western North Carolina. At 5500 feet it is a shorter and older sibling to the high mountain passes of the Rockies, and a lifeline to the seven hundred people who inhabit the mostly anonymous towns erected on the cold broadsides: towns like Judas Point and Prairie's End. Snow chokes the roads for six months of the year and the tracks laid 150 years ago by the N and S railroad are the only commercial artery that flows to the towns as winter's slow heartbeat pulses at the edge of life.

Neal McAlister stood up in the cab of the loco. At age twenty, with a six months' pregnant wife at home, he had remained mostly silent on his first run after eight weeks of training in Atlanta as a fireman, a mostly useless position perpetuated by union rules and held over from the not too distant days when locomotives had been fired by coal. He was relegated to the front of the train with the engineer while the brakeman and conductor tried to catch forty winks in the caboose at the far end of the one hundred car freight train.

His initial anxiety had been subdued by the constant, low key thrumming of the diesel engines which were, in reality, generators that powered the electric motors which actually moved the locomotive. After a time the powerful, steady vibrations became less cacophonous than soothing, but his uneasiness at being the new guy remained.

He wasn't yet seasoned enough to have a colorful nickname and his picture tacked up on the bulletin board at the depot in Stella, NC. Not like the conductor, who was called Bobo for no apparent reason that Neal had been able to figure out. Neal's companion in the engineer's cab was an easier study. His fleshy jowls and ruddy features lent themselves to his own affectionate nickname of Hogjaw. The brakeman, a middle aged man with a U of red hair and a leonine head was Hub, a simple variation of his given name, Herbert.

They hadn't been distinctly unfriendly to him. A little distant, a little doubtful of the new guy who came to them from a succession of menial, low paying jobs. Railroading was still dangerous work and the old crew weren't yet ready to believe in the new guy until he proved himself in some fashion or another. Neal had grimly resolved to make this work. He had more to think about than himself.

The train had been making a steady thirty five miles per hour on a fairly level grade for the past thirty minutes. The snow-covered plains of the desolate landscape had been long unscarred by buildings, electric lights, or even natural features. All was blameless white glory, glowing heraldic blue in the cold light of the full moon. The clatter and clank of the steel wheels on the rails and the perpetual swaying of the freight cars were sleepily hypnotic in the wasteland.

Neal peered out of the tiny window at the side of the locomotive. Picked out in the brilliant beam of the locomotive's headlight was a white on green metal sign mounted on standard Highway department steel posts. The reflective sign glowed with an unaccountable brightness. Drifts of snow had piled up against the robotic legs of the sign and the occasional capricious wind blew sprays of snow from the tops of the drifts.

Essex Pass

3 Miles.

"Best sit back down, Neal."

Neal looked at Hogjaw. It was the first time he had spoken in an hour. His face in the feeble bulbs of the cabin had taken on a tense, drawn look that seemed impossible in so much flesh. His pressure on the throttle eased and the steady thrumming of the electric motors spun down. The cascading effect of thousands of tons of freight avalanching behind them shook the locomotive and Neal quickly sat down as the inertia threatened to spill his legs from beneath him.

Hogjaw applied the brakes with an ogre's hiss of compressed air. The train began to glide to a stately halt, taking a full half mile to ease into motionlessness.

Hogjaw stood and wrapped himself in a heavy coat, leaving the locomotive's massive diesel generators at a rattling idle. He pushed past Neal and stepped off the engine, down the steel steps of the locomotive and onto the snow covered ground before Neal even had a chance to ask what was up. He stared out the window, unsure whether to get up and follow, or stay put.

Hogjaw stood just off the tracks in a foot of snow, a blue hued blob in the moonlight, blowing on his cupped hands with hot breath that condensed into a cold mist on contact with the subfreezing air. Neal wondered why he hadn't put on his gloves.

Neal stood and swung around the steel pole that connected the cab's floor to its ceiling next to the steps. As he descended he looked toward the rear of the train and saw two dark figures floundering through the snow toward Hogjaw.

Hogjaw gave Neal an offhand glance, equal parts distrustful and impatient as Neal swung down into the crunching snow. Neal ignored the look and wished only that he hadn't left his coat on the seat of the engineer's cabin. He stood his ground amid the hostile glances as Bobo and Hub trudged up.

As boss of the freight, it was Bobo's place to give Neal an approving look.

"You want to get your coat, or do you want no part of this?"

Nervous and awkward amidst these hardened, middle aged men with bristly faces and dark, fleshy circles beneath their eyes, Neal forced a steady reply.

"What's going on?"

Hub made a derisive, blowing sound.

"He ain't got the beans for this," Hub said. He looked at Neal. His expression was earnest and past condescending. He emphasized his points by shaking a finger the size of a Polish sausage in Neal's face.

"This is likely gonna be your first and last trip. You best go on up in the cab and hide. Let the menfolk do what has to be done." There was no challenge in Hub's eyes, only inflexible belief.

"Don't count me out yet. All I want is a clue."

Hub sighed heavily and only the ghost of a look passed between the three men. Without another word Bobo opened his satchel and began pulling out cloth wrapped bundles. Hub and Hogjaw each took a bundle and waited. Bobo took a bundle for himself and offered a parcel to Neal. Neal took it in slightly trembling hands and unfolded the cloth.

The cold dampened down the smell of oil as Neal unfolded the cloth. He knew even before he saw it that the steel of a handgun would be glinting up at him, glistening cold black and blue in the moon and snow-slashed night. He shook from the cold and a new unease dried the spit from his throat. Minutes ago he had been warm and mostly comfortable, whiling away his time in the workaday world. Now he shivered in the cold and snow-ravaged night only minutes later, among armed strangers who were secretive and hostile and wouldn't tell him what was going on. He laughed shakily.

"What's the gun for?"

"Dangerous times," Hogjaw said hollowly. "Dangerous places."

Neal looked around at the white nothing.

"Here?"

Bobo pointed ahead of them at the brightly lit tracks slowly moving up the steep grade before perspective narrowed them to a converging point in the distance.

"Up yonder. Essex Pass."

Neal looked from face to face, trying to find a trace of humor or some sign that this was an elaborate prank. Finding neither, he stared down at the gun. A good one, a 9MM he reckoned, though he had never held or fired a gun in his life.

"You really expect me to use this?"

"If you have to," Bobo said.

"For what?"

"You'll see," Hub promised. "And once you see, you can never say. That's just the way it is. If you can't live with that, you can leave us after the end of the run. It's just the luck of the draw, kid. You got the short end. If you're with us, you're with us. If you're not, just keep out of the way and try to stay alive. Keep your trap shut about things you don't understand."

"Don't be so hard on the kid," Hogjaw said. "Hard enough times ahead tonight."

Hub looked disgusted. "This guy's just like old Bird Cole. He ain't never been nowhere and don't know nothin'."

"Take this," Neal said, re-wrapping the gun and handing it back to Bobo. Some bad business was up ahead. He didn't stop to think what he had counted himself out of, only that his knees knocked with cold and fright at the thought of some unknown dangerous doings that were well out of his league. He kept his eyes averted from Hub, expecting some crisp jibe at his lack of manhood, but Hub remained silent. He had bigger fish to fry.

"Cold out here," Bobo said. "Go on and get back in the cabin."

Neal climbed back up the metal stairs, thinking that if he were a real man his booted feet would make the metal clang. But in the cold his tread didn't even make them squeak. He sat back down in the cab amid the mocking silence of the stairs.

He sat on one of the thinly cushioned benches as the men outside talked. They spoke for a few minutes, their icy breath pluming bright and shiny in the crackling cold.

"Whatchoo wanna put the kid up here with us for, Bobo," Hub complained. "He ain't gonna be worth a tin cup bailing out a battleship."

"Kid alone in the caboose," Bobo mused. "A man alone would be easy pickings. Just make sure he stays out of the way."

The men climbed the stairs into the loco's cabin, the steel steps ringing out as if in a cheer.

They pushed past Neal with barely a glance. Hogjaw took his customary position at the throttle. Bobo sat at the left side of the cabin, staring resolutely from the window on that side. Hub sat on the bench next to Neal. Neal sneaked a glance at him. A tight little smile crimped Hub's face, but not one of good humor. It was full of a deep unease. A short, tense tic jerked at the corner of his right eye, causing him to look almost as if he were winking. All three men had their sidearms within easy reach.

The air brakes snapped and hissed as they were released. There was no sound of conversation for the electric motors to muffle as they loudly spun up. The rapid, throaty, rum, rum, rum of the electric motors torquing up and the metallic rattling of the diesel generators joined in screeching chorus with the clank and crash of cast iron drawheads losing their slack and accordioning out as the locomotive began to inch forward. Steel wheels bit against steel rails, striking orange sparks into the white night.

Hogjaw had the throttle pushed to maximum, urging the behemoth forward. Against all prudence, he seemed to be urging the metal monster to accelerate up the steep incline to Essex Pass. The engines grumbled and complained but tried valiantly to comply like an iron horse under his master's whip.

Rum rum rum rum.

The control panel voltage meters had danced up to 610 volts, nosing in and out of the red, danger zone. The already muted bulbs of the cabin burned down even more as the train improbably gained speed up the incline. Shadowed faces became darker and grimmer as the train snaked between the bulking mountains straddling either side of the pass. An ominous shadow fell over the train as the moon was wiped from the sky by the hostile mass of the mountain.

The pass was less than a mile away now as the train passed twenty-five miles per hour. Craggy, black rock faces peered out from ledges of white snow drawn above them like aged eyebrows. Some of the snow showered down in shallow spills triggered by the vibrations of the passing train. The freight cars swayed dangerously from side to side behind the locomotive, their massive springs squeaking. The wheels clattered rapidly over the expansion joints in the rails and angry sparks spat from rough spots in the steel ribbons.

The train entered a wide bend to the left, still accelerating. Thousands of tons of freight hastened through the black heart of the night at forty mph, the contained kinetic energy of a small, nuclear explosion held in check only by the thin ribs of rails. The stink of diesel fuel and burnt ozone drifted through the cab. The electric meters stood riveted to the far right, past the danger zone. Neal felt the viscera-rattling vibrations through his feet and legs and rear, so strong that a wave of nausea gripped him.

The mountain on the right suddenly dipped and Neal saw the faint glow of a dozen or so lights nestled down in the dark valley. Orange light, not like electric lighting. More like oil or kerosene lamps. Kerosene lamps shining dimly from some tiny little village swallowed in the dark belly of the mountains.

The train cleared the bend. Directly ahead of them, no more than five hundred yards away, a ten foot high barricade of flaming, creosote-soaked cross ties lay across the tracks. Thick, roiling billows of greasy, black smoke boiled angrily into the night. Twenty foot towers of orange and yellow flames raged and screamed their hot fury. Oil bubbled and festered from the cross ties while gases boiled and hissed and flared. Within seconds the roar of the flames would be enough to drown out the onrushing train. Thirty seconds more would take then crashing directly into the flaming mass, yet Hogjaw hinted at no intention of slowing down. If anything, he pushed harder on the already maxed out hand throttle, trying to urge just a little more juice out of the engines.

Neal gripped the rail next to the steps and held on.

"What the hell..." he began.

"Shut up!" Hub snapped. "Sit down and stay out of the way." Hub looked tensely at Bobo.

"Ready?"

Bobo nodded.

Eyes shining with singular purpose, Hogjaw sat steady at his post, one meaty hand on the throttle, the other on the pistol in his lap. Bobo opened the door on the left hand side of the cabin and stepped down onto the second step. Hub did the same thing on the opposite side. Frigid air whistled into the naked cabin like a hurricane, flapping the pages of the engineer's log and flipping the brim of Hogjaw's engineer's cap up. Snow churned into the cabin and stung Neal's eyes like icy grains of sand.

The train churned toward the barricade, keening through the night, motors whirring and wheels pounding. To his right and below, Neal heard the misplaced, ululating whinny of a horse. He snapped his head around and looked down.

Riding parallel to the train, half a dozen riders dressed in black capes and cloaks kept pace with the speeding train. Long snakes of tangled hair streamed out behind the riders. Ghost white faces shone like blank bone above tangled black beards. Eyes glinted like coal chips in black-shadowed eye sockets. Galloping hoof beats thundered in the night.

Hogjaw laid on the air horn and added its long, ear slitting bray to the roar. He held the cord tight, no sign of let up forthcoming.

"My side! My side!" Hub cried.

Bobo reeled across the cabin and stood by Hub, crowding onto the step with him.

Shocked by this skewed re-enactment of an 1880's train robbery where the Indians and bandits had been replaced by black clad cossacks and the steam engine supplanted by a three hundred ton, high tech diesel-electric monster, Neal watched in slow disbelief as one of the riders swung toward the train. There was a rattling clatter not five feet away from him and a now riderless horse peeled away from the train.

"To your right! To your right," Bobo yelled over the screaming of the wind. Hub spun to his right and fell backward against Bobo. A crackling shot rang out. A high pitched yell was cut off in mid shriek and a black shape went tumbling across the open doorway and plummeted to the ground, tumbling through the snow and plowing gouges in its unsullied white.

Neal watched the man's body bounce and skid and roll away from the train in a bone-breaking tumble. If the shot hadn't killed him, the subsequent fall would. He snapped his head back front and saw the flaming barricade looming in front of the train. This close he could feel the heat from the flames blowing into the open doors, mixed hot and cold. The smoke smelled thick and cringing and oily. Orange flame glow flared in the engine's cabin, overwhelming the already dim lights and painting stroboscopic shadows of men in a life and death struggle splashing on the inner walls of the cabin.

Bobo and Hub struggled to right themselves from the attack and keep from falling to the ground themselves. Bobo hugged the railing like the last, providential handhold on a precipice, his feet dangling inches above the ground speeding by below him. Hub had hold of Bobo's heavy coat, his red face colored an impossible purple by the orange of the fire. Bobo's legs air-danced in a mad dash and he was finally able to swing himself back up onto the step.

Neal stood without thought to grab onto Bobo and Hub. His eyes fixed on the doorway on the opposite side of the cabin. A wild figure swung into the wind split chasm. A pale, unhealthy face glowed sallowly in the fire glow. The man grinned a sickly grin and Neal saw in the erratic light that the man's teeth had been filed into points. The figure held onto the doorway with his left hand. In his right he held a long, thick bladed knife.

Forgetting about Hub and Bobo, Neal lunged for the gun in Hogjaw's lap at the same instant the train crashed through the barricade in a tornado of orange sparks and splintering wood.

The mass of the barricade was too pitifully insignificant to slow the train an inch, but enough to knock everyone off their feet. Hub and Bobo fell in a new, interlocked tangle on the loco's step. Hogjaw pitched forward in his seat, completely oblivious to the threat on his left. The unwelcome boarder stumbled but remained upright, shielding his eyes from the tumbling timbers and flying sparks with his left hand.

Neal lunged forward on his hands and knees, scratching for the gun in Hogjaw's lap. He cried out a garbled, nonsensical warning from deep in his throat and Hogjaw finally looked to his right. His eyes widened in surprise and curiosity as he saw Neal on his hands and knees, his right arm stretched toward him.

Neal snatched the pistol from Hogjaw's lap and used both hands on Hogjaw's right shoulder to push himself up and away. He skidded backward until his back hit the bench. Hogjaw pitched sideways off his seat, just in time for the intruder's arcing knife blow to hiss through only empty air over his head.

The train careened through the night, leaving the demolished barricade burning in exploded fragments behind it. The intruder gathered himself for another blow.

Neal pointed the gun and pulled the trigger, knowing that Hogjaw's only hope was that it was primed to fire.

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

Three quick shots echoed in the cabin. The reports slammed back and forth in the tight space, seeming to stretch the metal of the cabin with their savagery. Blood and flesh sprayed from three sudden holes in the intruder's chest. The slugs knocked the intruder backward in stuttering steps toward the open doorway. The intruder flung his arms out and slapped the door jambs, but the slipstream was too much. He held on for a split second, then slipped backward into the night like a piece of litter tossed from a car window.

Instead of rapidly returning darkness in the doorway, Neal saw something else. The gun fell from his hand and bounced on the floor. His heart hammered harder and a new kind of fear -not primitive fear for his life, but fear of a more intellectual kind- stole the last of his strength.

A towering, white body literally filled the doorway; some light being of immense proportions. An intense, diamond-fire glow radiated from the being's forehead, but the white face was hideous. A huge, hooked Indian nose stood out above the fleshy lips. The lips were okay on the thing's right hand side, but on the left they curved down grotesquely almost to the tip of its pointed chin. Eyes as pale and cold as arctic ice stared at Neal with a narrow cunning. The white light in the doorway that surrounded it seemed to shimmer liquidly as with some kind of energy. And then, as capriciously as it had appeared, it vanished. The doorway was as pitch black as it had ever been.

Hogjaw was up from the floor in an instant. He crossed the darkened cabin in a flash and knelt down by Neal. Too stupefied for immediate reaction, it took a few moments for Neal to register that Hogjaw was shaking him and screaming in his face.

"Did you see it?" he demanded. The wind had whipped Hogjaw's hat away and his steel gray hair swirled in the wind.

"The face," Neal whispered weakly. "The white..."

"Aww, shit...," Hogjaw muttered. He seemed about to say more when a rattling and banging announced the arrival of Bobo and Hub into the cabin.

"Hogjaw! Get on that throttle! Now!" Bobo reached down and hoisted Hogjaw from the floor.

"He seen it, Bobo," Hogjaw said and his face was as white as a ghost's. "Holy God, he seen it!" Hogjaw's trembling lips began to move in silent prayers. Bobo slowly shifted his gaze from Hogjaw's face to Neal's.

"Did you see it, boy? The white star?"

"White star? I don't know. Something white..."

Bobo and Hogjaw lifted Neal from the floor and sat him on the bench while Hub closed the doors. The flaming barricade was well behind them now and the entire episode of the murderous horsemen, though only seconds before, seemed like it might have happened a year ago. Bobo and Hub sat on either side of Neal on the bench while Hogjaw retook command of the train and steadied it down.

"What happened back there," Neal asked shakily. "That man. I shot a man!"

"That man would have killed you," Bobo said. "You did nothing no other man wouldn't do. Here, let's get a blanket on you."

Neal hadn't realized it, but he was shivering openly, his body spent with cold and an adrenalin rush. Hub pulled a blanket out of an overhead compartment and draped it on Neal. Neal wanted to talk about what had just happened, but was unable to force words through his chattering teeth.

"Don't, Neal," Bobo admonished. "Don't even think. Don't play it over in your head."

Bobo turned to Hogjaw who was already on the radio.

"How long?"

"Forty-five minutes, maybe," Hogjaw said. "Too late for him, though." And the oddest thing about that statement, Neal was to reflect later, was that Hogjaw had sounded sympathetic.

Hub had poured a cup of hot coffee from a thermos and Neal slurped it down gratefully. It suddenly seemed too hot in the cramped cabin and Neal tried to throw his blanket off and stand up, but the two men gently, but firmly, held him down.

Neal's eyes roved from one man to the next. "Tell me what's going on," he asked in a near whisper. "I just killed a goddam man and I'll have to answer for it. I've got a wife and a kid on the way! I can't go to jail!"

The three other men exchanged a silent look.

"Finish your coffee, Neal," Hub said gently. Neal looked at him as if he were crazy. Hub gave Neal a hopeful look and he slowly drank the last of his coffee, looking between Bobo and Hub.

Then they told him how it was and why he could never say what had happened that night.

By the time the train chugged to a halt at the depot the next stop down the line, Neal was already off the train and running for the office. The silent patrol car sitting in the depot parking lot told the rest of the crew all they needed to know.

By the time the rest of the crew trudged in after Neal, he was in tears, the patrolman standing by him as if wanting to give comfort, but knowing his job prevented him from doing so. Neal looked at Hub, and Bobo, and Hogjaw.

"She's dead," he said. "How could you know?"

The three crewmen remained silent. They had already given him his answer.

They watched him as he climbed into the passenger seat of the patrol car, a young man whose entire life had been irrevocably altered in an instant.

"That's the last we'll see of him," Hub said knowingly. The other men silently agreed.

But they were wrong.

Two weeks later, after a proper period of grief and mourning, he was back. He walked slowly and deliberately into the depot with his satchel in his hand, still a twenty year old kid, but with an indefinable aging to his features, as if he had been through hell itself and made his way back not whole, but alive. He stopped by the bulletin board and looked up there, the first smile in two weeks creasing his lips. Someone had found a photograph of him and pasted it on the board right there amongst Hub, and Bobo and Hogjaw. Written on the bottom border, the nickname,"Deadeye".

Condolences passed among the crew and they boarded the train. And this time, on the approach to Essex Pass, nobody had to ask Neal to take up his position.

He had brought his own gun.

## 1961

##

Doyle Rathmun couldn't believe his luck. Twenty-four hours before he had finally been pinched and locked up in a twelve-by-twelve holding cell with a bunch of drunken southern sots, now he was a free man. On the run, but free.

He'd started his Southern odyssey a week before, fleeing his home town of Boston during the first snow fall of the year, when the native Bostonites engaged in the singular Bostonian ritual of flocking to the ice cream shops. The cops had begun to get too close. A string of rape murders that had started with an eighty year old woman named Joanna Michaud and ended eleven corpses later with twelve year old Susan Kelly had somehow been tied to him.

The Boston PD had eventually netted a sad, simple minded man named Albert de Salvo for the run of murders. But even the thick, Boston cops already suspected that De Salvo, if he had committed any of the murders, certainly hadn't committed them all. The twelve stranglings had been evenly divided between strong, young women, and defenseless old women and children. De Salvo looked good for the murders of the healthy women, but the steely eyes of the law had already looked beyond De Salvo for the murderer of the elderly women and children.

Doyle knew his own mouth was to blame, recalling that he had bragged to one of his coworkers at the rubber plant, one George Nasser – a man as twisted and sadistic as he- that as long as a woman had "two tits, a hole, and a heartbeat," she was within his range of acceptability. And once the cops, in their plodding, foot dragging way, had finally chased down enough leads to get a bead on a few suspects, a remark like that would likely land him in their net. They had already scooped up Nasser for questioning.

On the run from the heat in Boston, he had driven south in his '58 Chevrolet. It was the first car he'd ever owned or driven, a virtual land yacht with huge, wide-whitewall tires, automatic transmission and standard AM radio. He had no real aim or plan other than to put distance between himself and the Boston PD. He was no career criminal; had never spent a day in jail. Maybe the killing was caused by the steel plate in the back of his head, compliments of a Chinese mortar shell in Korea. The bone had never completely mended, leaving a two inch indentation that was covered only by steel and skin.

He made his way more by accident than anything else to this mountainous area of North Carolina. When the local legal beagle had put the light on him just as darkness was falling, he had remained cool. Nobody knew him here.

He watched in his rear view mirror as the heavy southern cop squeezed himself out of the cruiser and meandered up to his driver's side door. He lingered near the rear of the car, taking down the license number on a notepad.

"Evening, officer," Doyle said cheerily. "What seems to be the problem?"

"I need you to turn off your engine and step out of the car, please, sir."

Doyle's cheerful exterior wilted a little.

"Officer, I..."

"Do it now, please, sir."

The look in the officer's eyes left no room for argument. Doyle switched off the engine and stepped out of the car.

"Somethin' I need to show you," the officer said. "Step to the rear of the car, please, sir."

Doyle accompanied the officer to the rear of the vehicle.

"You've got a taillight busted out."

The unbroken lens of the taillight gleamed at Doyle even in the growing twilight. He turned to face the officer and saw that he had his pistol drawn. Before he could react, the officer swung the heavy butt end of the pistol against the taillight lens and it crashed out with a sad tinkle. It was so cliché it would have been funny had Doyle not realized his chances of getting out of this were becoming extremely remote.

"You got Massachusetts plates," the officer said. "They let folks in Massachusetts drive around with a broken taillight?"

"Officer, we can work something out..." but before he could finish, the cop had interrupted him.

"That's gonna cost you, son."

So now they came down to it.

"How much?"

"How much you got?"

"Oh, hey, now," Doyle protested with a cadaverous smile. "You have to leave me something so I can get out of here. Never darken your lovely state with my presence again."

"You makin' fun of the great state of North Carolina?"

Doyle backpedaled. This cop was no weak old woman with a heart condition or a little girl without the strength to resist him.

"Look," he said. "I've got thirty-five bucks. It's yours."

"Goddam right it's mine," the cop said.

Doyle pulled his battered wallet from his back pocket and extracted three tens and a five. The cop took the bills and tucked them in the breast pocket of his uniform.

"You know what I think," the cop said. "I think you're one of them northern boys come down South to stir up trouble with the darkies. Get 'em riled up so's decent folks can't feel safe at night while you go back home where you got 'em all penned up in the middle of your cities."

"Nothing like that. I'm just passing through."

"Well, tonight you'll pass through a holding cell, enjoy some Southern hospitality, courtesy of Castonmeyer county." The cop wandered over to the other side of the car and smashed out the second set of taillights. "We can't have you drivin' around with no taillights, even if you are from Massachusetts. I'll have Royce Reid come up here, haul your vehicle in. Tomorrow, you'll be in front of the magistrate, trying to figure out how to pay the tow bill, the fine, and the repair bill for your taillights."

He'd been handcuffed and shoved into the back of the cruiser to await a hearing before the magistrate the next morning. And the cop had told him if he couldn't raise the needed money, he'd likely be a guest of the state of North Carolina for the next month. Doyle had been issued his prison blues and escorted to a holding cell filled with greasy haired southern thugs and more real, live black people than he'd ever seen in his life anywhere besides the television. He'd been taciturn in the cell, unwilling to speak for fear his heavy New England accent would mark him for even more special attention.

Before dawn the next morning, a screw came around to the holding cell with a list and began calling out names.

"Darrow, DeBerry, Herrick, Nichols..." The call out continued until the guard got to Doyle's name.

"Rathman," he called out.

Blinking, scared, and uncertain of what to do, Doyle filed out of the cell with the rest of the call out.

They trudged into the cafeteria and had a dreary breakfast of oatmeal, toast and fatty sausage. Falling in line as the roll was called again, Doyle puppy-dogged the line as they loaded onto a bus and drove off to parts unknown. Mountains and fields rolled by outside the lightening windows. Farmland mostly, lots of barns and a few grimy cinder block and brick buildings. Even as a first time prisoner, Doyle thought it odd that only one armed guard rode on the bus with them. Twenty minutes later, the bus rolled into the small town of Prairie's End and the bus hissed to a halt at the corner of two fairly large streets.

The cons, unshackled, filed out the door and stood at the corner of Garner and Qualls streets. After the last con filed out, the bus door shut and the bus pulled away with a roar, leaving the cons in the backwash.

Looking around with wide eyes and finding no shotgun toting guards, Doyle turned to Crispin Cyrus, one of his erstwhile cell mates.

"This is a setup, right," he asked, thinking of the venomous act that had landed him in the cooler. "They let you out so you can run, then put a bullet in your back?"

"No, man," Crispin said. "Work release. This is the Slave Corps for the hayseeds. You wait here until some cracker picks you up in their truck. Then you go with them to do whatever it is they want done. Paint their house, work in the fields, bale hay, prime tobacco. You usually gets a good meal and a few cents in your pocket. Five o'clock, they gots to have you back here for head count. Don't shit on a good thing, man. If you tries to run, they's no place to go."

They waited as a succession of trucks with fat farmers and ruddy rednecks pulled up and the drivers shouted from their widows.

"Need two to drive a dual axle and bale hay."

"Here, boss," the cons would shout, raising their hands.

"You," the drivers would say, pointing, "and you."

The smiling cons piled into the beds of the trucks and went off to work.

Who can run a splitter?

Me, boss!

Who can dig a ditch?

Me, boss!

Who can lay brick?

Me, boss!

And so it went until the last cons had been trundled off to whatever labors they were most qualified for.

When the call came for a man to do electrical work, Rathmun shouted out.

"Me, boss!"

"Climb up, boy."

Doyle climbed into the bed of the truck and watched the last couple of cons recede into the distance. The truck was an old one, early forties vintage, and it labored and wheezed up the mountains. This high the air was cold and Doyle shivered, even though he was of hardy New England stock and used to it. He didn't know how he had ended up in work release, but it was a godsend. He had to think.

As signs of even the most rudimentary civilization disappeared behind them, Doyle waited for the truck to slow on one of the steep upgrades. As the truck faltered down to fifteen miles per hour, Doyle jumped from the truck and fell to the road, lying there as if injured.

The driver stopped and carefully allowed the truck to roll backward to where Doyle lay. He heard the ratcheting of an emergency brake and the engine being switched off. Secreted in Doyle's hand was a large steel nut he had found in the bed of the pick up truck. God knew where the massive, rust coated thing had come from, likely some sizeable piece of farm machinery. The important thing was it weighed nearly a pound, it was cold steel, and it was a weapon.

The driver, an old man with a trusting face who was pushing eighty, leaned over Doyle, his eyes concerned and friendly behind Harold Lloyd glasses.

"You okay, son?"

"My ankle," Doyle said with a sheepish grin. "Goddam, I don't know how I managed to fall out of the truck. This is really embarrassing. Help me up, will you? I think I can walk it off."

The old man leaned down and gave a good effort to help Doyle up. Careful to keep the large nut hidden in his hand, Doyle pushed off the ground to help the old gent. He flung his left arm around the old man's neck and hobbled convincingly to the passenger side door of the truck.

With a sudden grunt of effort, Doyle squeezed the arm looped around the old man's neck and pinched him in a headlock. Simultaneously, he brought his right hand with the massive nut in it around in a great, looping right hook. The old man's thin skull caved in just above his brow ridge with a crack and a spray of gouged flesh. Doyle let the old man's sudden dead weight slither from his grasp as he crumpled to the road.

"That's for your Deputy Dawg, old man."

Leaving the old man's lifeless body, Doyle jumped into the driver's seat of the ancient truck. He was mortified to discover an extra pedal on the floorboard and a shift mechanism on the column. As a Bostonian he had ridden the commuter trains most of his life and driven only sparingly. His own car was an automatic and he had never driven a straight drive in his life. He would have to take a crash course and he hoped that wouldn't be literally.

He turned the key and the engine sputtered. The whole truck jumped and rattled like a massive, shivering dog before the engine died. Doyle looked down. The clutch. He pushed the furthest pedal to the left in and keyed the engine. It groaned and turned over for a few seconds before catching into rocky life.

Good. Good. Now what?

The brake. He eased the emergency brake down and the truck began rolling alarmingly backward down the steep grade.

The clutch! The clutch!

He let the clutch out. Unknown to him, the driver had placed the gear lever in reverse when he stopped the truck. With the sudden engagement of the clutch and its already backward momentum, the truck abruptly accelerated in a series of jumping fits and starts. Doyle stabbed at the floor pedals, hitting brakes, clutch and, finally, the gas.

Already rolling backwards at twenty miles per hour, the sudden acceleration twisted the steering wheel in Doyle's hand and he careened backward down the steep grade, the front wheels lazily turning until the entire rear of the truck slipped off the road and began rolling down the heavily wooded side of the slope. Doyle wrenched up on the emergency brake and heard the stretching whine of the cable breaking. He pushed the clutch in to change gears but the sudden loss of engine compression only made the truck roll even faster down the slope. Trees and bushes flashed by him as the steel stallion bounced and reared and bucked, snorting oily, blue exhaust and whinnying in squeaks and groans. He released the clutch and when the grinding gears engaged they slowed the truck enough for Doyle's head to snap back into the window glass behind him. The engine died with a hiss and Doyle might have continued in free descent had the truck not crashed with finality into a large tree, snapping his head back once more.

Seeing stars, Doyle climbed out of the truck, struggling to push the heavy door open against the force of gravity, hearing the cooling engine ticking, smelling burnt oil and exhaust. He slipped down on the steep slope as his feet hit the ground and the door swung backwards with a mighty squeal. It banged heavily shut, just missing Doyle's head.

He stood up, supporting himself on the truck's fender, and looked around in this strange land. Steep hillsides draped in rioting fall color craned around him, deep valleys beckoned below. Now a murderer in two states, his only choice was flight. Whatever bureaucratic slip up had allowed him to be placed in work release would soon be discovered, as well as the dead body of the old man. And Doyle believed the crackers who would be coming after him with dogs and shotguns would likely have no desire to bring him in for "justice". They would deliver it themselves.

He slipped and slid downhill for a way before he came to a clearing that allowed him to see into a tiny little hamlet, not the same one he had come from, tucked into a little fold of a valley like a lost coin that is luckily found shining like gold. It was beautiful, wreathed in low lying fog and sparkling with new morning dew, almost as lovely as the mountains of New England. Still quite distant, maybe six miles, he could see a few houses and a careless dirt road leading into the town. And it was downhill. He had to find a place to hole up, to think, to hide. He would be easy pickings alone in the unfamiliar hills.

He traveled steadily downhill, trying to keep the town always in sight, panicking slightly when he had to scale sudden rises that blocked his view of it, breathing a sigh of relief when it finally showed up again. It crept closer by maddeningly slow increments and it was only after the sun began its skid into the west and he heard the first, distant howling of the dogs in pursuit of him that he was convinced he was closer. Two more miles, maybe.

He forced himself to hurry, panting, hoping to have the town within reach before darkness hid it from sight. Once there he could steal a car, maybe get across the border into Tennessee or South Carolina. He couldn't think of anything beyond that.

The dogs were closer, that was certain. Not within sight, no, but their frantic baying and barking was more distinct, not safely muffled by distance. Before now, the howling had been merely benchmarks to measure progress. Now he counted the howling as second hands marking time toward his escape or recapture.

Time had hastened as steadily as his heartbeat. His prison blues dripped with fear sweat. The sun would fall quickly in this part of the world, first impaled, then devoured by the mountain peaks. Already the woods were shadowed, even though blue still lingered in the sky.

Doyle picked his way down another steep slope, the sound of howling dogs now a sharp discord. He reached the bottom of the hill only to look up and find his view of the town blocked by another hateful rise.

"Christ," he muttered, despair cracking his voice. He began laboriously climbing the slope, knowing that when he reached the summit the town would be spread out before him beneath the last pink of the darkening sky behind him.

He crested the rise and there it was. Lights shone from the windows of houses only a half mile distant. Soft, yellow light, like candles. Save the lights, he saw no sign of life in the town. No cars, no streetlights. He frowned. He had come this far, he had no choice but to force himself forward.

He nearly fell headfirst down the last slope, his body outrunning his churning legs. He found his balance and the ground suddenly eased its precarious slant and leveled out. He hurried forward, slipping through little copses of trees, the houses of the town now real and substantial, not miniatures seen at a distance.

He gave a backwards glance in the darkness toward the sharp sound of the dogs baying and shrilling. Despite his headlong rush, he had to stop and look.

Outlined against the darkened sky at the crest of the slope he had just traveled, he saw flashlights and lanterns. Silhouettes of braying dogs and shouting men scurried back and forth at the top of the rise, illuminated by the lights. Gaunt silhouettes of rifles and shotguns were visible. He watched for perhaps a full minute before it dawned on him what was wrong with this scene.

Doyle could have been no more than half a mile from them, possibly even visible to them, even in the darkness. He had escaped from one of their prisons, killed one of their own people. Yet they refused to make the final effort to come the last half mile after him. They paced restlessly back and forth across the top of the rise, both men and dogs, but none would come closer. No-one took a pot shot at him, no men shouted. After a few seconds of excited activity, the lights and the men stood still, the dogs stopped baying and pacing, as if standing sentinel.

Again, Doyle didn't question his luck. He turned and plunged forward, but more slowly. He slowed to a casual walk, catching his breath, letting his heart slow. The woods were still fairly heavy around him, but the town was plainly in sight. This close he could finally make out more than just impressions. Somewhere in the distance behind the houses, he caught the flicker of burning fires. Then the smell of smoke, but odd. Not like charcoal, but a thick, meaty smelling smoke, like grease that has gone rancid on a charcoal grate.

He stumbled slightly and caught himself. He looked down to see what he had tripped on and was surprised to see snow on the ground. This far south, even in the mountains, there shouldn't be snow in October. But this snow was crunchy. He stopped and looked more closely. His stomach racked into a noxious coil. Not snow. Bone. Chips and dust and powder and fragments and even full specimens. Bones ahead of him and to the side of him, as far as the eye could see, a pavement of bones all the way into the town. White bones, not sun bleached or time scarred, but white. Boiled white; stripped white.

It was then that he saw the unsound, yellow eyes of those who had been hiding and waiting for him. They came from their concealment behind the trees and closed in on him from all sides. Doyle smelled stinking, diseased breath, foul body odor, sour, rancid clothing. Scant night light glinted on teeth filed into tearing points. He tried to run but got no more than three steps before they fell on him, subdued him, and carried him into the town, gagged and bound, and still alive. Behind them, the men and eerily silent dogs turned and walked back to where they came from, leaving the night totally dark again.

Even hell on earth has its benefit.

## 1963

William Keane awoke as tipsy as a kid on Christmas morning, but happy June sunlight shining through his window made a lie of that. Yet it was still a day all the ten year old boys and girls in Judas Point anticipated with the same high spirits. Coincident with the first weekend after school let out, it was the kids' first step into adulthood. No longer would they have to be constantly chaperoned by adults, or remanded to return home by seven in the evening even on the long, summer days when the sun lingered in the sky until nearly nine o'clock. After today, the young boys could go fishing, or bike riding, or treasure hunting, or all the other things ten year old boys do without the onerous and joy-killing shadow of an adult hanging over them.

What actually went on at the "commencement" was a closely guarded secret from those who had yet to attend, but older kids would always drop subtle hints about the commencement, enough to scare and captivate those uninitiated tenderfoots.

There was talk of burnings and piercings and spooky stories with the adults sitting out in the audience in their Sunday clothes, all glassy eyed and hanging onto every word of the stories. The stories, William figured, were always embellished to frighten the younger kids, and they worked. William had convinced himself that it was like a trip to the doctor. You didn't know what he was going to find, and sometimes you got a shot. But there was always a reward after the pain, even if it was nothing more than feeling better. He felt a little heave of pride in his heart. Today, he would know the secret.

"Will-Yum," his mother called.

"Already up."

He smelled coffee in the percolator and frying bacon and eggs. He threw the covers back and rubbed his hand over his close cropped crew cut. He walked through the living room and saw his sixteen year old beagle, Baby Pig, slurping coffee out of his mother's cup. She was nearly toothless now, giving her gray muzzle a sunken, puckered look like old people without their false teeth in. Numerous skin lesions peppered her coat and there were hard calcifications of bone on her ribs. She was skinny now, not muscled up as she had been many years ago. She was no longer able to jump up onto the bed or even furniture and she had her own little dog bed she now slept in. Scattered around her dog bed were the remains of chewed cigarette butts.

"Mom! Baby Pig is drinking coffee and smoking again."

"Leave her be. Let her enjoy herself. She hasn't got that long left."

Baby Pig looked up at him with her still bright, brown eyes and seemed to smirk at him before going back to lapping her coffee.

William went over to the stove and poured himself a cup of the "Black Drink" his mother had steeping in a pot. There was some good natured rivalry in the town among the Indian kids who called it the "White Drink" while the white kids called it the "Black Drink." It was all the same thing. Brewed from the leaves of yaupon, and various toxic seeds and flowers, the specific recipe itself was handed down only from mother to daughter (his sister knew how it was made), and it was as much a part of William's morning meal as the coffee his parents drank, and had been for as long as he could remember. As a younger kid, it had sometimes made his hands and tongue tingle, but the poison administered in low doses over so long had so saturated his tissues by now that he rarely felt its effects anymore.

"You have to look your best today," his mother said with a smile. "My little boy's growing up."

"Aw, jeez, ma."

"Are your nails cut?"

"Last night." All the parents in town were fanatical about keeping their children's fingernails and toenails cut. Most of the labor in town was farm work and not favorable to long fingernails, anyway, even among the grown women. Biting, also, was strictly forbidden and woe was the kid who resorted to using his teeth in a schoolyard brawl.

"Your dad will get off work early today. You've got a couple of hours to get ready. Soon's you finish your breakfast, you'd better get hopping."

While William dressed, he heard his father come in; the squeak of the door, the thump thump of his booted feet on the floor. The floorboards creaked as he walked down the hallway to William's room.

"Your mom's frettin' a little," he said from the doorway. "All moms do, I guess, when their kids take one more step away from them. Dads, too, I won't kid you about that. You'll be brave for her, no matter what, right?"

William was a little disturbed. This wasn't like his dad. Hesitant, openly concerned.

"I'll be okay, dad."

William's father smiled.

"I know you will." He turned to go, looking back once.

"We'll be leavin' soon as I get changed," he said. "Time to wrap it up."

They walked to the school, where the ceremony would be held in the auditorium. There were maybe twenty kids who would go through the ceremony today, and they walked -some a little grimly- with their parents down the narrow streets. Older brothers and sisters who had already gone through the ceremony congregated in superior little groups, giving knowing glances to the younger kids on their way to the ceremony.

William saw his own brother, Ken, four years older than William, with a gang of his teenage buddies, giving him the wise old eye that said "I know something you don't." William had tried without success to get Ken to tell him what would happen, but Ken had adamantly refused to part with his hard won knowledge.

"You'll find out soon enough," he had told him ominously.

Among the throng of folks streaming to the auditorium, William saw the Kellis sisters, buxom teenage farm girls from the spread across the way. Once, William recalled, he had been hanging around with Ken and some of his friends down by the railroad tracks.

The two Kellis sisters had been walking along the other side of the tracks, trying to ignore the taunts of the teenage boys.

"Hey, Lynne, why don't you show us your candies?"

This had gone on for some time, until one of the Kellis girls had finally called back.

"Come on down here and we'll show you what we got."

Interested looks passed among the teenage boys and Ken, the bravest of the gang, had ventured down to the Kellis sisters while the rest watched with breathless anticipation.

Sauntering with a false swagger up to the girls standing between two idled boxcars, his grin had quickly turned to a look of chagrin when the sisters fell on him, got him down, and rubbed dirty sand from the rail bed into his eyes. Ken had run back, fighting back tears, while the Kellis sisters laughed.

Thinking of that now, William was able to forgive his brother's superior attitude.

Just outside of the school, there was a small, tasteful statue of the town's founder, Judas Wakalona, a full blooded, Cherokee Indian. Judas, his father had once told him, was not his real name, but one given to him by his own people.

"Why," William had asked.

"You'll find out," his father had told him, "when you're ten years old."

That day, William knew, had come.

********************

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Available at http://www.wandilland.com

**A-Sides**

The Laughing Lady (Bookends II)

By

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2014

All Rights Reserved

I might never have found myself in this spot if three things hadn't happened: If I hadn't heard the woman screaming behind my house last night; if she hadn't worn that dress; and if I hadn't known her a long time ago.

So I'll tell you the second thing first, the first thing second, and the third thing last.

I noticed her, of course the very pretty, very dark-haired lady who supervised the little Sub Shop in our store while I was concealed away in the sporting goods department. Curiously enough, I don't recall speaking to her for the first couple of years I worked at the big box store. It was sort of like if an empty cab drove up, out I would step. I was that invisible.

It was common enough to hear her laugh ring through the workplace. Some of it was, I supposed, PR for the customers, some of it real. Since I didn't know her name I simply thought of her as The Laughing Lady. We passed each other on our assorted errands, not speaking or acknowledging each other. She was just one of a hundred other people drudging away in obscurity.

Until she wore that dress.

Our normal work uniform was a T-shirt, blue jeans and a baseball cap with the company logo on it. But one day, as I sat out front on the employee's bench taking my break, she walked up from the parking lot. Gone the way of an honest evangelist were the hat and the blue jeans and kicks, in their places a Victoria Falls of shining black hair, a simple, black, tiered peasant skirt that stopped an unassuming inch above the knee, and a pair of high-heeled sandals (I wouldn't have believed it possible but, yes, there really is such a thing). Her blouse was an eye-burning, multi-colored palette of diagonal stripes that formed a bodice that crossed her bosom like a double set of bandoleers. I suppose there's a haute couture name for such a contrivance, but I didn't -and don't- know it. What I did know was that I could never look at her the same way again. We didn't speak even then, and she swept by me like a freshly born spring wind as I scooped my clattering jaw up from the ground, sadly pondering that I would have to bandage it later where it had scraped on the sidewalk.

Had she never spoken to me, all might have been well -at least for a while. Some notes will always come due- but speak to me she finally did a few days later. What she said doesn't really matter because -as threadbare and cliché as it sounds- the moment I turned and full-on looked her in the eyes for the very first time, that was it. In one stumbling instant I wondered how I could have passed by this woman year after year and not noticed she was breathtakingly gorgeous, a troubled white rose fretting in a thicket of wire grass. There was a thing indefinable, and bewitching, and provocative in those deep-green, all but brown eyes, and it took me but a moment to mark it.

She had the eyes of a little girl.

She was lithe and cream-skinned, maybe ninety-five pounds soaking wet and wearing a beach towel and a gold chain, as if her preferred breakfast was comprised of a carrot slice and three kelp strands. But the willowy look suited her. Trim ladies didn't fool me. I once had a similarly trim girlfriend many years ago. We worked third shift at a hosiery mill and one summer morning after work, we decided to go to a local water park. When she came out of her house sporting a bikini fashioned from three eye patches and a couple of hanks of twine, buddy, my cap snapped. So I knew what might be decorously concealed beneath the sedate jeans and loose smock of my little sandwich maker. I spent many a moment trying to get a look at her without her catching me (which really wasn't difficult, since she hardly ever glanced my way). I had seen those legs. It was hard to believe those pins wrapped in blue denim had been rolling for better than four decades.

Though her pale skin hinted at Celtic or Gallic roots, her dark eyes and hair, and almost Roman nose told a different tale; a story of a bloodline further east. A bit of the Wallachian or Moldavian in her, a thin trickle of Romany blood from centuries past.

I was smitten -badly smitten- for no good reason I could dope out or discern. At least not then. Charisma is a word you hear, but until you have firsthand knowledge of it, you can't really know what it means. And when God doled out her share, she got it paid to her in spades. She was like a queen bee, but instead of drones it was an unpromising mix of fifty know-nothing duds and ten watt bulbs buzzing around her every day. Of course, my opinion was a little colored. I was more attracted to her than any woman I had ever known, and this from a man who has known the company of a wide and varied array of ladies over many years. I'll not tell you how old I am, but the candles on my birthday cake look like the firebombing of Dresden, the Great Chicago Fire, or the eruption of Krakatoa. I thought with better than half a century churning in my wake, such things as crushes were long past me. Still, I knew if she came into the store barefoot, wearing a bulky flannel nightgown, with her hair rolled up in beer cans, I would have turned to look. You know, there is nothing more beautiful in God's Creation than a woman in the moonlight, and I would be lying if I didn't admit that only a man who was a fool wouldn't wonder what it would be like to look down and see her face in that moonlight, her eyes closed, lips partway open, that ink-black hair untidy, tousled across her brow and forehead. And I'm no fool.

She fascinated me, but getting her to talk about herself was like giving CPR to a corpse, or trying to teach color to the blind. She was outgoing, but always left aside the best of herself for someone else. It was a sad recognition that I was never going to be that someone else. I was never going to be her fair-haired boy; she was never going to have eyes for me.

We were, I guess, friends, but always a little distant. She may not have even realized it, but there was always some barrier between us: a cart, a counter, even something as inconsequential as a clipboard or a piece of paper, but always there. And that bothered me. I didn't know then why she seemed always a little afraid of me. It was ever down there, buried so deep you could barely see it, skulking beneath the sparkle; that mistrust in her eyes from some previous, great hurt that had become a slothful, unevictable squatter.

Since I worked only part time I would once in a while, only half teasing, hit her up to let me come to work in the sandwich shop full time. The last time I did that, she looked up at me, eyes bright and coy, and said: "If you had to work for me, you wouldn't like me anymore."

"I'd like you less," I answered, "for letting me starve to death."

But that was okay. I didn't want to not like her.

And I liked her very much. Some things just stick with you, small sketches that seem trivial to most, but mark the beholder deeply. Like the time she came out of the store shaking out that mane of coffee-black hair. She caught me looking at her and, in saving my soul from perdition by telling the truth, she gave it a little extra flip, knowing I was watching. But that was just her, and just me. Dark haired women have always monkey-hammered my brain into hot oatmeal. Even if I just acted normal I would be fool enough, but she rocketed me into full-metal moron territory. I would think of the times I heard her laugh carrying through the store, and wonder who it was that caused it, and think: if only I could make her laugh like that. But we did laugh now and again and my best times with her were when she would smile, the lines crinkling up at the corners of her eyes and the bridge of her nose, and I knew we had shared a genuine chuckle.

Of course, we were both sinners and saints in this thing. I tried not to be up her ass all the time, as my dear, departed mother was fond of saying, but sometimes I just couldn't resist speaking to her. And that could be a problem. Most times she was lively and laughing, but when she did lose it, she lost her shit completely. More often than I want to confess, I'd say something that would set her off to the point that if I were to go running through the store on fire, she would sprint after me with a pack of hot dogs and a bag of marshmallows, and those watching would acclaim her actions. There were other moments she was so sweet that honey would have seemed vinegar in her mouth. But I suppose it's fair to say that about all women, isn't it? If they weren't dynamite and blasting caps, gunpowder and matches, we wouldn't love them so, would we? If I was a writery sort of fellow, I might have written down all these things I could never say to her out loud. But I'm not, so I never did. Until now.

Even so, events pile up, and the thing that started the train wreck for fair was when we had to attend some mandatory work function. Who could have guessed that something that started off so well would end so badly?

At a pleasant enough lunch, we sat at a table supplemented with one of those stylishly trendy kiosks that let you order from the table without need of a server, as if the passably fashionable sit-down restaurant we had walked into had somehow unluckily devolved into Jack in the Box before we even got settled. She asked me if I wanted to use it.

"If I'm going to pay ten dollars for a hamburger," I said, "I'm not going to order it from a clown's head."

And that, I guess, was the last smile I ever got out of her.

After lunch we ended up sharing an elevator. It struck me again how tiny she was, standing there by the lighted panel. She told me she didn't like elevators and when I asked her why, she said she was "afraid of the drop." A peculiar thing, but not so curious that it should have made a sudden chill raise goose pimples on my arms.

Which brings me to the first thing.

I heard it last night, the woman screaming behind my house. I sat upstairs at my computer, finally contriving to let it all out, pecking out this very thing you're reading now, when I heard the scream drift through the open window above my back porch. I stopped abruptly, listening, my hackles raised, not quite believing what I had heard. A screaming woman is not a reassuring or usual sound and I was taken aback by the inconsistency of the thing. Such a sound didn't fit my world view, where women were at home or at work, being watched over and cared for by husbands or fathers, not beaten and raped and killed by predators. And it was that cognitive dissonance – that belief that what I was hearing was incompatible with what should be- that made me stop typing, move my chair back, and listen.

The scream came again a few seconds later. It seemed to have moved a little from left to right, coming from somewhere in the one hundred-yard-deep woods that set apart my back yard from the fields of the next door neighbor. It was just loud enough to be upsetting -not so far away that it would be useless to try to render aid, and not so close that I could have seen what was happening and helped. It seemed to be... baiting me.

I got up from my desk, chilled, and walked across the creaking boards of the next room to the open window above the back porch, looking out into the darkness of a moonless night. I could see nothing save the hulking trees in the woods, fat and lazy with summer growth, the stars pulsing dimly in the humid murk above their crowns. The scream came again as I leaned my palms against the window sill, straining to hear. The sound had moved again, now coming again from my left, but no closer. And this time I sensed something a little off key. Yes, it sounded like a woman screaming, but not exactly. And a screaming woman would likely not be moving back and forth and voicing those screams at precise, eight to ten second intervals. Still, it was a close enough thing that I grabbed my cell phone, walked downstairs and outside into my back yard, and called the police. I would never forgive myself if, after everything, it actually was a woman screaming for her life.

I waited a harrowing ten minutes for the police to show up, listening to the screams track back and forth every few seconds, but unable to see anything. Sometimes the screams moved away, sometimes they came so close that I believed they were coming right from the edge of the woods that came up onto the cleared lawn of my back yard, the maker slyly hidden just inside the tree line. Then they would move off again.

Finally, with no sign of the police after ten minutes, I could stand it no more. I waded into the woods, exhibiting as little good sense as I usually did. As a young man, when I normally wandered around like a gasoline-soaked scarecrow looking for a spark, fist fights and gun-play were a weekly feature and I wouldn't have thought twice about such a foolhardy effort. But I wasn't a young man anymore, and still I rushed blindly into what might have been real danger. I carried no flashlight, no arms, bumbling through the blackberry thorns and poison oak hither and thither, wearing nothing for protection but a pair of navy-blue sweat pants.

I could have been no more than twenty yards into the woods when I heard the scream again, off to my left. I jerked my eyes that way and saw it for the first time. The summer-sweat streaming down my arms and bare back turned clammy and cold.

Whatever it was was low to the ground, lissome and muscular, sable and blending with the black pastels of the night. A pair of green-brown eyes stared back at me from twenty-four inches above the ground, a tapetum reflecting back far more light than was available. I couldn't see it, but I had the impression of a stalking quadruped, crouched, its tail swishing back and forth. When the scream came again, there was no doubt it issued from this creature. I was looking right at it.

I froze, still as a gravestone, fear speeding my heart like the jolt of a cattle prod. With what seemed synchronous thought, I began to slowly back away and the creature moved in the opposite direction, weaving sinuously through the undergrowth, shuffling aside dried leaves and slipping through low hanging vines, its passage plainly heard in the windless night. Neither of us, this night at least, wanted to push the confrontation.

By the time I backed out of the woods, I was shaking and sweating uncontrollably, my legs as soft as hot taffy. I turned to hurry back into my house when the Deputy Sheriff's cruiser pulled into my driveway.

The deputy was a big man and as I told him what had happened, the screams started up again. I felt foolishly relieved. At least there was some confirmation of what I had reported. We both stood there, listening as the screams moved back and forth with little pattern, the deputy's face betraying the same consternation mine had: it was impossible to believe it was a woman screaming, but equally impossible to just dismiss it out of hand. The deputy clicked on his flashlight and shone it into the woods, its critical beam picking out nothing but more shadow. Even with his badge and his gun, the big man reassured me very little.

Some two hundred yards to the north of my house, a dirt road ran adjacent to the fields that curved around the woods behind my house. Probably in contravention to every police procedure known to man, the deputy had me ride with him down this dirt road to a spot where the cleared fields butted up against the woods on my property, but on the opposite side.

We stood silent in the muggy night, the deputy's cruiser spotlight playing over the nodding heads of wheat. It happened to land on movement in the field. There it was, moving around in the field, its back below the tops of the wheat, just out of sight. We could see the wake it left as it began to move off. We stood there for twenty more minutes and heard no more screams. The deputy drove me back to my house and left. There seemed to be nothing else we could do.

I didn't hear the screams anymore that night, but I didn't sleep, either. A more reasonable man would have closed his upstairs window, but I didn't. I didn't think I was meant to.

Instead, I spent the next few minutes searching the interwebs for an animal sound that mimicked a screaming woman.

And I found it.

As I listened to the electronic file faithfully playing back the primeval sounds on the cool, digital circuits of my computer, I was possibly more chilled than when I had heard the actual screams. I played it over and over again, trying to make sure I wasn't injecting any bias into it. But it was unmistakable. I could have recorded the sound myself with a tape recorder out of my window that night.

The most terrifying thing was knowing it had been only twenty feet away from me. And it was still out there.

It was the sound of a Mountain Lion screaming.

Now for the third thing. When I said before that she always reserved the best of herself for someone else, I didn't necessarily mean a different person, but perhaps a different incarnation. She never appeared to truly dislike me, but was always wary of me. It seemed a conundrum I would never riddle out. The puzzle began to fit together a little better when I finally admitted to myself that I had known her before. Not years ago, but lifetimes ago, and, when you think about it, why should that really be any different? It's one of those inexpressible things that you really can't explain, like seeing a ghost or discerning Jesus in the butter. You could never tell anyone for fear of being labeled disturbed, but it is real enough.

Never one to throw in much with the idea of kismet or past lives, I could no longer deceive myself about vague memories that had floated up from time to time over the years like spirits emerging from some blackened ruin in my brain. Ghosts that formed body and blood and wrote a dark story of early, seventeenth-century Wallachia, a place I've never seen. I recalled the place not from dreams, but from the first time I looked directly into her eyes. I knew instantly that she was that unformed spirit in my mind, now given substance by cordial flesh.

I had met her in a tavern, a black-haired vixen with a smile that could light up the dark side of the world. Time had not touched her fairness with its withering hand. It had been only a few years prior that Wallachia had been completely under Ottoman rule, and a tavern, if one could be found, would have been a good place to get arrested. But the oppression of the Ottoman empire was slowly eroding, and it was a time to celebrate.

I am not sinless now and was less so then, and I found her as seductive and bewitching then as I do now, and she, me. Leave aside that I had a wife and children at home. Being with her was like dancing on knives, or walking through fire, or diving headlong from a precipice. She was as wild and unbroken as the nail marks she clawed into my back, and I looked with more than eagerness to the times I could steal away and feel the heat of her body against mine, or bury my face in her hair, or run my fingers down the pink bloom of her cheek, or hear her laugh. And she made me laugh, too. She was hot-blooded and hot-tempered, unbridled and full of life in a time when life was cheaper than dirt. She was the drug that made my life worth living in a part of dismal, seventeenth century Europe which had yet to be lit by the newly budding Renaissance. It was a place where familiars still prowled and witches were hanged. It was the black time; the Burning Times.

Then, as now, she was a closed book. What I knew of her life when she wasn't with me was a secret. And so it was that her secrets didn't sit well with others of the town. Such beauty, they whispered cattily among themselves, was not natural. That she was unmarried and childless was the pinnacle of scandal. It was rumored, far and wide, that she had dishonorable liaisons. She was a free-spirited threat to the town's loathsome, swamp-donkey women, heartless harridans, and court eunuch, Pope's whores, clown-suited as the town council, whose piety stretched a mile wide and an inch deep. And they intended to punish her for it.

I was nearly caught many times, but managed to steal away when discovery was at hand. Our trysts were always at night and nobody got a really good look at me. But tongues started wagging. Where was she when the Great Cat that had begun to plague the town was seen? Livestock had been slaughtered, children frightened. The attempt was a ham-fisted one to paint her as a familiar. Wallachia was home only to some rather small, wild cats, nothing so large as a cougar or a panther. No-one I knew had seen such a cat, and I dismissed it as political theater, but the seed for her destruction had been planted. Wallachia had thrown off the shackles of the Sultans only to hang the anvil of the Holy Roman Emperor around its neck, with its inquisitions and imprisonment of heretics, and its burning and hanging of witches.

I couldn't discount the stories entirely. Indeed, I was not with her every moment and knew nothing of her life outside of our time together. In one of my only noble gestures, I tried to persuade her to leave, at least for a while, until things had settled, but she refused. I told her that powerful forces were aligning against her. They meant to have her head, and I couldn't help her. My job was such that I couldn't be associated with her and risk not only myself, but my family. Like Icarus, I was only a man, with wings of wax, and I was flying too close to the sun, about to plunge into the killing sea with her.

She didn't want to listen as I tried to explain the ugly realities of life to her. I don't think she really believed it could be that bad, and was content to think that everything would, somehow, turn out alright.

I wasn't there when she was arrested at the tavern and hauled away, charged with adultery and witchcraft. She was tried and convicted that night in a candle-lit sham of a drumhead court, convened specifically for that reason. The judge made his pronouncement and she was sentenced to hang the very next afternoon, when the crowd would be the largest. Yet when I heard, I didn't protest. I had too much to lose.

The assemblage was restless the next afternoon as she was rudely shoved up onto the rickety gallows, its unsound wood gray and sad, the hooded hangman standing by. I saw confusion and hurt in her eyes more than fear, the sadness that was the lovelorn's unhappiest harvest. The whispers flew amongst the crowd. Who was it? Why didn't she tell? What kind of a coward would let a good woman, if indeed she were good, to suffer the gallows and not reveal himself? She looked into the crowd, her scared eyes searching for me, perhaps expecting me to step forward and put an end to this. But she never saw me. No eye, neither hers nor the crowd's, fell upon me. I was invisible and beyond suspicion. I was respected and respectable with a good, necessary job. A decent, family man with children and a loving wife.

There were catcalls and tears, advocates of her good nature and detractors out for innocent blood. I suppose I was the last one to see the hopelessly lost look of betrayal in her eyes before the hood was placed over her head and the noose secured. It was this, this look in her eyes, that I had recognized those many centuries later. The crowd quieted as the moment approached and I heard her softly sobbing beneath the hood: small as a child, her fragile wrists bound with thick coils of rope, alone, and finally afraid. The lever groaned back with a clank, the trap door banged and clattered.

Then the drop.

As I said, I didn't sleep last night and I didn't expect to hear her laugh today when I came to the store, working the twelve-thirty to nine shift. And I didn't. Perhaps it was one of her days off, but I didn't think so. Some things weigh like a black spot on your heart and I knew it was going to be my last day. I even thought about going around and saying goodbye to everyone at work, but I didn't. The only one I wanted to see was already gone. The place seemed downright cheerless without her laughter, and I knew now it was best for her when she laughed alone. When the door closed behind me, it was already dark and I didn't even look in my rear view mirror.

On the drive home, I pondered over why she never outed me, but I can't dwell on it for long, because the only answer that makes any sense is too bittersweet and shameful for me to deal with:

Maybe -just maybe- she loved me.

I didn't sleep as I lay down, because I was thinking. They say each trip back is a chance to improve yourself and I hoped that, in this life, at least, I was a better man. That this time I would do better by her than I did the last.

The screams are very close tonight, coming from just beneath my back porch, close enough that if I got up to look, I would see her on the ground, looking up. But I stayed in bed, listening as she scaled the tree by my back porch and landed on the roof with an easy creaking of wood. The soft thud of padded paws thumped lightly on the sill as she slipped through the open window, the curtains silent silk gliding along her back. I heard the catty fall of her pads as they crossed the room next to mine, tolling like the tell-tale heart that beats accusingly beneath the bed of every villain. I felt the sinewy weight as she crawled up onto my bed like a serpent, the sultry heat of her body as she nestled down beside me, a thing I had looked forward to in happier circumstances lifetimes ago.

I feel the warm fog of her respiration on my neck, the wet, black-velvet nose on my cheek. The soft growling and intake of breath -almost like a purr, or a low chuckle- are directly in my ear. I turn my wide eyes to see her final embodiment: Fur black, like her hair, green in eye and red of tongue, white in tooth and claw. So this is what happens when the world goes pear-shaped, the trap drops, and your life is whittled down to a few, final ticks of breathless anticipation. I wonder if I will see her ears laid back, or hear the snarl as she lunges for the killing strike.

Because all things come around in their own good time; all debts get paid in this life or another, and I wouldn't beg for redemption, even if I wanted to.

You see, I was her executioner.

And I miss her laugh.

**********

This and nineteen other top notch short stories -featuring aliens, weird sisters, lost loves, bankers, forbidden archeology, government conspiracies, werewolves and more - are available in A-Sides!

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##  The Lost Village of Craven County

By

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved

From The Lost Village of Craven County...

He had expected something just like it, but that didn't keep him from being afraid when he awoke and heard the footsteps outside of his trailer. Whatever it was, it could bode nothing but ill. No human being would be here in this place at three in the morning when the blood struggles through cold, pinched veins.

He could hear whoever it was tramping with bold defiance around the trailer. Around and around, stopping here and there as if inspecting something. Twice, the rustling of leaves stopped directly beneath his window, the dark, shadowy thing only the breadth of sheet metal away from him.

He had thought he would know what to do when the time came. Too much of a strange nature had happened to him over the past years for him to balk at a strange noise that might be only a roving 'possum. Except he knew that wasn't what it was.

His eyes were playing tricks on him. Eerie, phantom shadows leaped and swirled in the dark corners of the trailer. The wind leaned against the walls, squeaking and stretching the thin metal skin. The kerosene heater was burning low and its guttering flame gargled and sputtered.

The rustling noises receded from his trailer and he let out his pent-up breath in a trembling sigh. He hadn't realized he had been holding it, his eyes wide and glazed, his white-knuckled fingers gripping the hard mattress.

He stayed that way until the rustling footsteps had been silent for five minutes. The heater's glow had diminished to a sullen red ring and the trailer's temperature was falling. It was either get up and put more fuel in the heater or spend the rest of the night not only scared, but cold.

His first thought when he sat up was not of his fright, but of how the cold would bite into him when the insulating blanket's seal was breached. He pulled the ragged, care-woven quilt around him as he placed his foot on the frigid trailer floor. Metatarsals, stiffened by the cold, recoiled in protest as they were forced to yield to their weighty new burden.

He navigated the camper's narrow corridor, wobbling sleepily between the beds that ruled both sides of the aft section. His heels made jarring thumps on the linoleum covered floor beams. His feet and ankle joints popped like lady finger firecrackers.

The heater was a useless lump of metal, cold to the touch, the last of its fire extinguished. There was a fifty five gallon drum of kerosene outside, but Mark's fear of fire ever since the night his barely know classmate had been consumed had not allowed him to bring an extra supply inside. An uneasy calm that was only the result of sleep induced half-awareness settled on him.

He was at the door, his hand on the light switch, when he saw the man standing outside. His finger froze on the switch. The figure was obviously a man, but something was hauntingly, in its most literal sense, familiar about him. Mark could ferret out no details in the moonless night, only the outlines of long sleeves and long pants snapping in the stiff wind. It was the slight rightward tilting of the head, or the barely hipshot stance that nudged some part of his mind towards recognition.

Fresh fear burned in his heart like a powder keg set afire by a stray spark. The figure stood alone, almost complacent in its study of the trailer. It showed no sign of retreating, rooted as firmly as any tree to its spot in this darkly enchanted glade.

A two foot hickory club with a leather thong attached to it leaned against the wall by the door. It was an inch and three quarters thick along its entire length and sturdy as concrete. Kim's father had made it in high school, intending for it to be a table leg. As he had turned it on the lathe, a worm-eaten flaw had emerged, rendering it useless for its intended purpose. He had given it to Kim when she and Mark had moved to the city. She had carried it as she walked to work at the Burger King in the days before they could afford a car. Mark could only guess at how many attacks Kim had thwarted with it, simply by clunking it heavily on the sidewalk as she walked.

He closed his cold hand around it, hefted it, and found its weight good. He gripped the metal door handle. He levered it up and pushed. The door was stuck in its frame and he had to shove it before it would jar loose from its moorings. It swung outward with a grudging squeal, banging into the thin, aluminum and wire screen door. The night was split by the raucous twangs of the screen's metallic voice.

"Who is it," Mark called, his voice sharp and brittle as kindling in his mouth. The wind was an Arctic intruder, prowling his home on soundless feet. "Who's out there?"

Save for the chilling cries of distant night fowl, there was no reply. The figure's stoic complacency was eerily threatening. Mark turned the outside light on. The feeble glow opened a useless parasol of light that lit only ten feet beyond the rickety wooden steps. He stepped onto the top plank. The make-do staircase wobbled and groaned, tilting sideways three inches. Mark raised his club and smacked it into the palm of his left hand, but was unable to put any real menace into it. He imagined himself, wrapped in a blanket like a feeble woman, shaking with cold and fright, threatening shadows from his stoop like an old man with a cane.

"Come closer, asshole," he challenged, swelling his voice with a tinny belligerence that was contrived, wondering if anything he could do would make a difference. "Come closer and see if I can't scramble your brains for you."

Any human would have answered the slur with a threat of its own, run, or come closer. This figure did none of those things.

Dartlike cold prickled Mark's bare feet as he eased down the steps, club at the ready. He stepped onto the earthen floor of the forest. Fallen leaves, thick with a coating of frost, stuck to his heels.

He thought he knew who it was that awaited him in this place of thick shadows, mirrored lives and endless nightmares. It was the dark Narcissus from the sinkhole.

He moved towards the shadowy figure like one mesmerized by a rara avis, unaware of the darkness that cloaked him as he retreated from the safe glow of his lights. Dried weeds, snap-happy as arthritic bones, grated across his naked shins. The rip saw of the wind sliced through him, whipping the folds of the blanket up and away as it searched for ingress. Rocks and hard knots of earth frozen into erratic shapes bruised and slashed the soles of his feet.

The figure remained rock still until Mark was within thirty feet, then began to move backwards. Not walking in any sense that Mark could see. It just seemed to recede away, like the water as Tantalus tried to draw a drink. Trying to catch and hold the phantom would be as impossible as Sisyphus rolling his stone up the hill.

The figure drew him onward, away from the false safety of his trailer and its logical, man-made walls, and into the lightless, ancient woods where nothing of man's constructs had prospered. It was a fatally hypnotic need to know that pushed him ahead. A humid raft of wind, cold and sharp with the sting of water droplets, bit his eyes and he knew he was near one of the sinkholes. There was something in the sinkholes, perhaps something as wondrous as a wall of gold sunken in its depths, or something as dark and corrupting as a legion of lost and tortured souls that would arise at his bidding, their only need his ability to flesh them out; to make them breathe again.

A clearing emerged from the velvet wall of night and Mark saw the faint glimmer of starshine mirrored on the rippling surface of the sinkhole, as delicate as a rue anemone. It twinkled and faded, glowing bright then dim as the wind stirred the waves. There were new fingers and freshets of ice under his feet, channels carved by the ever-advancing water. His toes were frozen wooden blocks, his nose a dripping chunk of ice. He still held the club in his hand, but he drew no courage from it.

Any time now the figure would slip from the edge of reality, tumbling backwards into the fantasy world of the sinkholes. It was at the edge now, and fading. It grew shorter, first its feet, then its legs disappearing.

Mark trudged forward, gathering speed, needing to see more than just the hazy form of his nemesis. Deep in his mind, warning bells clanged, ordering him to halt his headlong rush. The sinkhole was too close, the ice too slick.

The figure was only head and shoulders now, peering above the center of the sinkhole like some creature from a horror movie, its body submerged. There had been not a breath nor ripple of water as it had slipped silently and completely into its numbing depths.

The lip of the sinkhole was ten feet away, now five, yet Mark never diverted his eyes from the puzzling enigma of the man in the lake.

The figure slipped elusively away. Its shoulders went under, then its chin. For a fraction of a second Mark thought he saw the flash of eyes before they, too, submerged, leaving not even a ripple to mark their passage.

Mark's leading foot suddenly slipped on a frozen slate, plunging his right leg knee-deep into the paralyzing waters. A cold as painful as the sting of a jellyfish shot down the pathways of his nervous system and violent shudders instantly wrested control of his muscles.

He jerked his right leg from the freezing water and his balance failed him. He fell to his left, throwing his right arm out for equilibrium. The heavy club in his right hand swung out and its inertia added the final touch to his loss of stasis. As he toppled, the club was thrown clear somewhere in the woods. He heard it snapping off small branches in flight before landing with a crackling thud. The blanket fell away from him and he landed hard on the packed earth, naked to the cold except for his cotton briefs.

Somehow, both of his feet had managed to find their way into the sinkhole, and he yanked them out. That old, pre-adult dread of something grabbing an exposed limb blotted out his pain. It had been an irrational fear in childhood, now it wasn't. He had seen the thing himself. It could grab him, pull him down with its skeletal arms, hold him under until his lungs filled with water, all his struggles useless. It had happened before, he was sure of it.

His feet had already numbed to the biting cold settling upon his exposed body. The hair on his chest stung as the wind tore at it. His shoulder where he had fallen ached like frostbite. He pushed the pain aside as he searched for his quilt. His only thought was to wrap himself in the quilt, restore some warmth to his body. He had fallen into such cold water once before, and he knew it could kill him in less than fifteen minutes.

His groping hand happened on the blanket and he wrapped it around his quaking shoulders, sitting huddled on the ground. He didn't trust himself to make it all the way back until some warmth returned to his body. Just a couple of minutes, he told himself.

Clear mucus ran from his nose, trembling on his upper lip as the chattering castanets of his teeth clicked together. He stared glassily at the wind-lapped surface of the sinkhole, expecting the phantom to return and take him as he sat swooning and immobile. The circle of trees around him writhed into arcing life, bending and stooping, whipped by a freshening wind. Frozen bark cracked and thick trunks creaked like bone-dry boards. Leaves loosened by fall's imperative fluttered down, some of them falling on the surface of the sinkhole where they floated, odd little boats with no passengers or cargo.

Frozen starshine refracted and trebled in his watering eyes, as ephemeral as the figure itself had been. Time had somehow sped up and he had been out in the subfreezing temperatures for more than three quarters of an hour, first drawn by the figure, then seduced by his own memories. No good thing could come of it. 'Scilla had said whatever was here cried out to be worshiped, or fed. There was no God here, only something with a ravenous hunger for pain. And if he fed it would it not grow? Become even stronger?

The light in his eyes burned brighter, swelling into more than starshine. He blinked and shook his head, trying to drive out this new nightmare. But it was no nightmare, unless it was a waking one. Near the center of the pond, a silver-white light burned, coming to life near its unknown floor. It rose from the depths like the lambent, shining eye of a sea monster.

The disc of light was eight feet across and rising slowly as if on currents, bubbling and pushing the water ahead of it in a gurgling wave. The water roiled and eddied, as if some huge creature were turning beneath the surface. Some pre-human, Lovecraftian abomination with the head of an alligator and the body of an eel, with two gigantic saucers of light for eyes.

A second flat disc of light slowly came into view, turning from flat profile to hazy full face, slightly glazed and shimmering from the lapping waters. The flat, glassy saucers drifted up with laconic stateliness, as subdued as the headlights of a funeral procession.

The two spherical lights filled the width of the pond. They never surfaced completely, only drifted dreamily inches beneath the wave crests. Mark watched them, a new rime of fear icing his heart.

They came in a rush, all their former docility and sluggishness gone. In one second they went from enigmatic, shining questions to active dangers. Their advance was preceded by a slight dimming as they pushed a new depth of water ahead of them in a bow wave. The reflected light from the saucers ran over and over the wave crests, running into a backwash like a wake. Rushing liquid hissed and foamed.

Mark yanked himself up from the ground with a screech of still-locked tendons in his knees. He staggered backward in a daze as the first wave of dark water crashed over the bank. The icy spray broke apart and washed over him. Spinning water droplets glittered like sparklers in the night, congealing into streaks of shining ice on his skin. His hair froze to his scalp in icy spikes. He waited for the thunderous tremor as whatever was under the waves crashed into the granite walls of the sinkhole. He stared with dreamy apprehension at the sullenly glowing lights that had begun to pulsate slowly, like a tediously beating heart.

The crash never came. In its place, the water bubbled and swelled. With a heart as heavy as the weight of the endless depths, he realized that it was coming out. It would drag its behemoth, slimy bulk from the black fathoms and take him to sate its endless hunger.

Mark squeaked out a strangled, incomprehensible cry and turned to run. His legs were too cold and the muscles had stiffened. The blanket swirled around and between legs that moved as rigidly as wooden bowling pins. There was a groaning, sub-bass rumble in his head that almost overpowered the ghost's whistle of the wind. It was the voice of the beast only he could hear.

He blundered blindly with no light to show him the way but the dim bulb outside of his trailer. And even that light was intermittently masked by hanging vines and the ebony bones of naked tree limbs.

He raced, white-livered, through the woods, passing the crumbling relic of the church. An orange, Halloween light burned from within, lighting the frost-covered windows with a macabre glow. Its crossless spire strained against the purple blackness of the night sky. Goose flesh from more than the cold crept down his chilled body as a maniacal cackling that was the voice of all-consuming madness shrilled out of the church's open doorway. It was the sound a crazed deacon might make as he poured gasoline over the pew cushions and hymnals while the congregation sat stunned at gunpoint. He would have already shot a couple of the parishioners as a lesson before setting fire to the doused paper and fabric. Mark heard the screams of the trapped parishioners, yelling and yammering like a congregation trapped and set ablaze by a madman.

Thorns and prickly shrubs blocked his path, as if they had moved stealthily to impede him like the living trees in The Wizard of Oz. One reaching branch hooked his blanket and ripped it from his back. He stumbled on, tearing his gaze from the haunted church, past the open foundation of a destroyed building. A groaning wind blew out of the ground from the wishing well that had magically blown away its cover of boards and vines. Its endless blackness led, perhaps, to an underground cave filled with Native American artifacts and life-sized horses carved from the finest gold, with emeralds for eyes and dried scalps dangling their curly, blond and brown locks from golden pegs wrought into their beaten flanks. A place he had seen before when he was eleven years old, dragged away from his tent one night when he was camping in his back yard by crazy Willy, a drunken reprobate who suffered from emphysema and cirrhosis.

"You comin' wid me, boy," Willy had breathed into his pale face, wrinkling it with gin fumes. His one gold tooth had gleamed like a pirate's earring in the moonlight, his face emaciated and cragged by the wages of disease.

"Willy goan show you somethin', boy," he had grinned, the last of his sanity faintly gleaming in those rolling white eyes.

And Mark had gone, following the crazy, drunken old wino deep into the woods, watching him as he staggered over a bolt set into a wooden door in the floor of the forest. Willy had unsteadily scraped leaves from the bolt, then had Mark help him haul the door open. A disturbed cold had bellowed from the hole as the door had squeaked back on its rotted hinges. Mark had followed Willy down into that cavern he had just thought of.

Willy had died two weeks later, and Mark could never remember where or in what woods around his home those fabulous treasures had lain secreted. But he had never forgotten they were there. Could this have been the spoiled land that Willy had brought him to?

Mark looked away from the hole. The light of the trailer was close beyond a newly opened clearing. He ran as fast as he could, the pitiful cries of damned souls at his heels, the destructive crashing of the beast from the lake not far behind. He stubbed his numb toes on the stairs as he misjudged their height and his teeth clenched in unendurable agony. His hands shook so badly that the door handle jittered in his fingers and he had to steady them with his other hand to get the door open.

He fell through the doorway, the meager heat inside the trailer shocking to his numb body. He slammed the door shut behind him.

The noises stopped.

It was as if someone had lifted the needle from a record. The night was as still and silent as it had ever been. Still shivering, Mark wiped the condensation from the glass window in his door and peered outside.

Just within his field of view and off to his left, the steady shape of the church was dark and quiet, as brooding and lifeless as castle lions. He looked at the wishing well. The harsh wind had died to nothing and he tried to see if the parched weeds around it still whipped in that alien, subterranean wind. They showed no movement, rigid as steel beams. He couldn't see the sinkhole at all.

He switched on the overhead light and sat on his bed, pulling an extra blanket around him. He knew his jaw muscles would be sore the next day from the strenuous chattering of his teeth. He huddled inside his blanket, ragged pain edging into his cut feet as his body slowly warmed. Once in a while the serpent's tail of the wind whipped down and made the trailer lean. He would look up, eyes wide, before returning to hide in his blanket, realizing all at once just how small and used up he had become. How this place had turned him from a man to a withered coward with no balls, whimpering like a whipped animal in its den. He had thought it was because of the betrayal of all those who were near to him, but it was this place that had instigated that betrayal. He had been duped.

His glance strayed to the faceless Eleanor on the wall, her eyes regarding him with her self-serving mockery, then to Anna's portrait. The brightness and understated sadness he had so lovingly crafted into her expression comforted him a little. Already knowing what he would see, he stood up slowly and went around the bed.

The blank canvas now had the beginnings of a painting on it. Just the bare outlines of a woman in a black dress, a newborn in a crib in a darkened room, a doorway with another woman standing there...

**********

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, all art is surface and subtext, and the artist dives beneath at his own peril. Mark Wright understands what it is like to lose himself in his art, to go too deep, to cut to the bone and all the way to the cancerous growth of an artist's obsession. Nothing and everything is real: some things too false, some things, like an ex with an ax to grind, too murderously tangible in his fantasyland. The reach of The Lost Village is long, its appetite mean. Nobody would get out alive...

Available at www.wandilland.com

##  Wandil Land

By

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved

From Wandil Land...

## October 14

Summer's fleeting span had passed by the second week of October, bespoken by the yellowing of the leaves on the now fruitless pear trees. As if in compensation, apples hung in heavy, pulsing bunches. Patches of red had erupted like small fires in the Maple trees. When he had gotten up this morning, the water flowing in his sink had been cold, unwarmed by the length of pipes that now ran through the earth which had finally given up its summer heat. At night the chill came on more quickly. The moon, it seemed, had been full forever, rising red and burning bright silver by midnight, but still unable to dim the stars that now shone through air clear of summer haze.

The first pumpkins and sweet potatoes had come in and the corn was gone, the brown shocks now dry as kindling in the fields. White potatoes were plentiful, but peaches and plums were small and scarce. Scuppernongs and Muscadines (what his mother had always called "bullets") were coming on strong. The second growth of cabbage had matured into dense, heavy heads, a little yellower now, but bug free. A surfeit of edible, fall squash glutted the fields. There were bright orange Hubbard squash, white ten toes squash, buttercup, butternut, spaghetti, acorn, and turban squash. Decorative gourds had begun to appear around the town, hanging from porch awnings and scattered about on tables. All the berries were pretty much gone and David had realized as early as three weeks ago that summer was over when the watermelons had disappeared. What came next were the cold weather crops; turnips, and collards, and rutabagas and winter wheat.

The next cross quarter festival was just over the horizon. The Big One. Samhain, Wilma called it. Halloween, Whisper Storm called it, with that familiar, dour note in her voice. God knew, the woman would complain if you hung her with a new rope.

He had slipped away that morning while Wilma was busy. He had managed to avoid a return to the Rose of Sharon tree and felt he could live without seeing it again for a dozen lifetimes. But there were other mysteries in this town yet to explore. His daughter was here, his wife had made her life here, and maybe he was kidding himself in believing that his own life lay anywhere else but here. But he couldn't dismiss the gentle warning Jerry Potter had given him. Potter was a man who was probably at the end of his best years, his story told in the red snaps of broken capillaries in his eyes and his unsteady hands and sallow complexion, but David wasn't willing to dismiss all of his experience from his good years so quickly.

What David really wanted was to see what lay at the end of Yankee Burying road. He wanted to form his own impression of the place without Wilma's all knowing voice in his ear.

He picked his way down the unused trail that wove toward the northeast corner of the farm lands. The wind that blew through the variegated leaves of the trees was cool and dry, though the sun was out. Here, there were no tended fields and somewhere unknown, but always near, the cairns of Avalon. The woods were wild and barbaric. He felt watched, if by nothing other than the animals that lived here. He was trespassing into the abode of some elemental creature; something greater than himself.

Just as he was about to come out at the end of Yankee Burying Road, something made him look up to his right. He saw a fox at the edge of the forest, its bat ears perked up, looking at him like a keenly alert dog. Its eyes were wide and liquid as it regarded him, sitting still as stone. David stopped. He had seen many a dead fox on the side of the road, but this was the first live one he had ever seen. He felt a little pang of wonder. The fox turned and kind of whipped away, moving like a leaping mongoose, its puffy tail trailing, and vanished into the woods. It was a quick, catlike movement that caught David off guard. That same sixth sense that had caused him to look up in the first place dragged his gaze to the left. A yearling deer, antlerless, stared at him silently. It grazed a bit, looked up, grazed a little more, then looked up again. Large, brown, wet eyes looked at David with an almost human expression in them and David's heart stumbled. He heard a grating, chuffing bellow – a scary sound if you didn't know what it was- and the deer bounded into the woods, heeding the call of the buck for its herd. He could vaguely see their bodies moving through the trees. The way the animals had regarded him made David think of stoic Spartans guarding the pass at Thermopylae against the Persian masses, as if human souls inhabited the bodies of the animals. Wilma had spoken obliquely of reincarnation and David almost believed the deer could be Jeannie, free at last from the miserable bonds that had bound her in life; free to run and live in a place where she wasn't hunted.

It was a weird feeling he just couldn't shake.

As he stepped out of the woods, he wasn't sure what to expect, but what he found at the end of Yankee Burying road was more horrific than the Rose of Sharon tree.

The first artifact wasn't so bad, but its sheer size was intimidating. Planted perfectly upright was a sturdy crucifix built from Ash. Sparse, fall parched grass crunched under his feet at its base. It jutted twelve feet into the sky with a crosspiece at least six feet wide. It was massively thick, a foot and a half in diameter. It's gray wood was glass slick and must have been over a hundred years old.

But beyond this lay the real horror.

Growing in six concentric circles for a diameter of fifty yards were vast Oak trees, their trunks as smooth and limbless as telephone poles. They had either grown or been planted in geometric precision. Each was a perfect sixty feet tall, their leafy crowns sprouting directly from the tops of their untapered trunks in mushroom like parasols that interlocked in a visually impenetrable canopy. At the base of each tree was a leaning, gray marker. Etched on the markers, in the same white markings as the stones at the Rose of Sharon tree, were crude crosses and the names and ranks of the luckless, Yankee sailors that had met their deaths here.

Jim Ambrose, Seaman, June 5, 1864.

Evan Ball, Yeoman, June 5, 1864.

Civil war sailors, most likely part of the Yankee blockade, better than two hundred, all counted. Invaders or castaways, their fate had been the same. Shaking his head, David made his way through the brooding giants toward the center of the circle, noting with unresolved horror the old, sun-washed bones protruding from the midst of the hearts of the trunks. A half a skull with its jawbone open and filled with the growth of the trunk -as if it had taken a huge bite from the tree and couldn't quite manage it- jutted out. One eye socket was buried, the other gazing out hollowly in empty air. David saw the green waters of the Atlantic beyond through the empty space between cheekbone and jaw. On some of the trees, the bare flat surfaces of ribs girdling the trunks barely peeked out from the overspreading wood. As he drew deeper into the living relics, he saw long bones -leg and arm bones- wrapped in living, wooden flesh. The occasional, salt tarnished brass button gleamed dully from the imprisoning bark. He got the uneasy impression that the trees had, as saplings, been lopped off, their ends sharpened, and these hapless victims impaled and left to decay. The only thing that kept him fascinated instead of frightened was the fact that – whatever had happened here- had happened well over a hundred years ago.

In the center of the circles he discovered a burrow constructed of broken limbs and driftwood. It was seven feet in diameter and seemed to blend into the ground like the den of some vulpine animal. He stuck his head into its black maw to get a look around and was immediately driven out by its wild, musky smell. A smell of rotten meat and putrefacting vegetable matter. But he had seen enough to realize the den was constructed around a partial section of the ancient, busted ribs of the Yankee vessel. Most of the craft had been eaten away by worms and the bulk of the derelict was either broken up out in the surf or buried in the ground, but he had seen dull brass fixtures and black, rust thickened iron castings scattered in the darkness of the den.

Outside in the fresh air, David moved around to the rear of the den. Previously hidden from view, the black corpus of the boat's anchor was half buried in the soil, the links of its heavy chain trailing from its eye and rooting into the earth. With all the care of a prize winning artisan, someone had carved a sign out of a glass smooth slab of wood and had lashed it to the iron anchor with a chain as stiff and rust coated as the anchor itself. It hung there lopsidedly with a faintly, sardonic air.

IN HOC SIGNO VINCES.

He pushed on, growing cold from the inside. He recognized the phrase, but didn't know what it meant. It was as mysterious and unsettling as the carved word Croatoan from Roanoke Island.

He was now eager to come out on the other side of the eerie killing ground and get out on the sand and into the sunlight. The surf crashed fifty yards away and he walked out onto the sand, feeling the arid breeze drying the sweat on his brow. His forehead furrowed as he saw a cylindrical post about four feet high with something atop it planted in the sand at the surf's edge, too far away to see detail, but obviously something man made.

He plodded warily over to the... whatever it was. As he scanned the beach from side to side he saw two more of the things, one each on his left and right, planted twenty five yards from each other on either side of the center post. As he approached the demarcation line at the furthest incursion of the surf, he looked the first of the things face on.

Fastened to the top of the straight, three inch diameter post with cruciate bindings of vines was a heavy, elaborately carved totem. Though vines couldn't rust or tarnish, if they had been able to, the ones binding this totem would have.

The totem itself was of a triple faced woman, carved untold years ago out of dense Oak. As he faced it with his back to the surf, the carving looking to the left, or East, was a smooth, young woman, the face unwrinkled and the eyes wide and curious. The middle face was a mature woman with a few creases in her face, the forehead lined, the jowls beginning to droop, the deep set eyes looking wisely toward the north. The third face, gazing to the west, what Wilma called the Otherworld, was a wizened old crone, wrinkled and sagging, the nose grown long and hooked, the chin pointed. Nothing could approach from the sea without being observed by one of the faces of the triple goddess. The only way to approach the triple goddess was from behind, the town side. As he had felt at the Rose of Sharon tree, this eerie, spooky relic made his soul tremble. David extended his hand and let his fingers roam over the intricate, wind and sand eroded features of the carving.

"Stanton Dru," A voice said from behind him. "She calls it Stanton Dru."

David whirled around, the sudden shock from this intrusion making his heart hammer. Whisper Storm had appeared from nowhere. She stood before him, back draped by the churning ocean waters, dressed today not in her habitual black, but in something like a gray, sack dress. Like a beachcomber, she was barefoot, her face clear of makeup and unhealthily white.

She seemed tired, less combative today, the fire in her eyes not even embers. Quickly gathering his wits, David saw her wet footprints tracking down the beach, parallel to the surf. She had walked up on him unawares while he was deep in observation of the totem. He hadn't warmed to the woman; couldn't say he really liked or disliked her, but he felt no great joy at seeing her. She passed by David and walked further inland into the shade of the trees. David followed her until she stopped.

"Stanton Dru," David repeated. "What is it?"

"It's her place. Their place. You thought it was all a harmless bit of folklore, some ancient culture kept alive by one dotty woman. Now you know what they're capable of. They wanted Rose and she fought them. Now they want your daughter and they're using you to get to her. She needs to be baptized. She needs to be washed in the blood of Christ."

She looked up at David, her eyes dreamy and misty behind her glasses. "We could do it here, purging her soul in the very shadows of her bloody, Pagan idols. Jesus will still the waters, like He did at the Sea of Galilee."

David put a calming hand on her forearm, willing himself to be patient.

"Not now, Miss Storm. This isn't the time or the place to discuss this. You can't really take this seriously. This isn't the eighteenth century."

Whisper cut her eyes to the impossibly perfect circles of trees where silent skeletons screamed their death agonies endlessly into living wood.

"Even after this, you still think it's a joke?"

"Not a joke. History. A hundred and fifty years have passed. Whatever happened here and whoever did this are long gone. This place is no different from a battlefield where the guns have gone silent."

Whisper seemed to debate saying something, then remained silent. Perhaps her more docile demeanor was her attempt at a peace offering. At her age, she hadn't made the arduous trek for her health. She meant to speak to him alone.

"It happened during the War of Northern Aggression," she said, looking at David. "The rebels knew better than to use our little town as a staging area for the blockade runners. Some things endure even through the horrors of war. But not the Yankee sailors. Maybe their vessel ran into difficulties; maybe they wanted to invade the town. Who knows? But their biggest mistake was not in being Yankees. It was in being Christians. Maybe they saw the abominations carried on by the bloody Irish in this town. Maybe they tried to put a stop to it with their guns and cannon. It didn't matter." Whisper swept her arm around at the brooding trees.

"This is what happened. Men of pure Christian blood. English blood, and they were martyred for it. From that day forward, the sentinels of the Triple Goddess were placed here and none have bothered us since."

"Triple Goddess?"

"Their unholy trinity. Birth, death, renewal. Earth, air and water. Past present and future. Ignorance, learning, wisdom." She gave David a sly look.

"You think me a backwards old woman, intolerant and blinded by my faith. They see me as filled with typical Christian greed. Life isn't enough for us, they say. We want eternity, too. But I'm no fool. I know my enemy."

"How can you know all this," David asked. "Certainly what happened here was horrible, but horrible things happen in war."

Whisper regarded him knowingly. "You saw the sign on the anchor? Do you know what it means?"

"No."

"It was a sign given by God to the Roman general Constantine, the first Christian emperor. There was a great civil war in Rome in the year 312 with Constantine and Maxentius vying for control of the empire. Camped out the day before the ultimate battle and outnumbered by the legions of Maxentius, Constantine saw a flaming Cross of crucifixion written across the sky by God's finger and the words 'In hoc signo vinces' written on it. That night he ordered his legions to paint the sign of the cross on their shields and the next day his army emerged victorious."

"And," David prompted. "What does it mean?"

"'By this sign we conquer,'" she said simply.

David recalled his uncomfortable impression that the sign was mocking. The sign of the cross hadn't been enough to save the Yankee sailors. That made him think of the den he had found and he wondered if Whisper knew anything about that.

"It's the lair of the Green Man," she told him. "Their all encompassing deity. I had hoped he was finally gone, but I've seen him from time to time, skulking through the fields, watching from the trees. But my God protects me and it's my Christian duty to protect others, to warn others, no matter what they think of me. This town is the last unspoiled place in this country and once the heathens are stamped out, it will be the closest thing to heaven we have on earth." She paused. "Someone has to save the children, even if their parents won't."

"Miss Storm," David said, not rising to the bait. "I've been to the cross quarter festivals. There's no sacrifice going on, nothing evil. Can't you just let Wilma be?"

"Do you think they would let you see it? An outsider? I said they were evil, not stupid. They work in darkness, but they hide in the open." She grasped David's right hand with her left and traced an outline around the caduceus on his forearm, his almost new tattoo. "They've placed their devil's mark on you already. But you have the makings of a good, Christian man. I can see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice when you sing in church. But your soul is at risk here. And your daughter's soul." She gently pressed David's arm away from her grasping hand. "Be careful what you wish for, Mr. Moore. You might just get it. I'll pray for you."

She abruptly pushed past David and began to trudge away the way she had come.

"Miss Storm..."

She didn't acknowledge his call as she walked away from the relics of Stanton Dru and back up the beach. He watched her as she slowly shuffled her way up the sand, never looking back.

Once out of sight, David took a last look at the disturbing totems of the triple goddess. He wanted to get out of here, but he couldn't make himself go back into the sunless ruins of Stanton Dru and past the lair of the Green Man.

He walked back along the beach, following in the wet footprints of Whisper Storm.

********************

David Moore had already thought it to himself on his way to Vister: Some things are best left to vanish in the mists of time. Some things are best forgotten. On short acquaintance, Vister seems like any other hidden backwater: peaceful, hard working, maybe a trifle odd. But as he becomes ever more ensnared in the twin webs of the bewitching Wilma, and the fundamentalist Whisper Storm and the ladies of the Crystal Sphere League, he learns that there is more to Vister's strange culture and the tongues that give it voice than he could have imagined. And on that perilous journey to discovery, he finds the dark secret dwelling within him: a secret that will consecrate or condemn him. Welcome to Wandil Land...

Available at www.wandilland.com

##  We Are the Dead

By

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved

From We Are the Dead...

## BEDTIME STORIES

Over her second piece of Margie Saunders' fabulously fattening Pecan pie, 'Scilla had become right at home. Margie's kitchen reminded her so much of her grandmother's home. The ratty old stuffed armchair she sat in fit in perfectly with the homey, dimly lit feel. A prehistoric cast iron cook stove brooded over the humped and buckled floor. A cheap kitchen table balanced on rickety legs like a baby taking its first steps. The stovepipe wove its crooked path through the ceiling after too many twists and turns to be reasonable. Innumerable kitchen utensils and pot holders hung from the hooks and runners like dozing bats. Ricky polished off the last bite of his Persimmon pudding and belched. Margie glared at him.

"Honest to God, Ricky. I don't know why you have to do that in front of company. Bad enough you do it in front of me." She looked sympathetically at 'Scilla, a handsome woman, a little on the plump side.

"Don't mind him," she said. "That moonshine he drinks has left him senseless after all these years. If you encourage him, next thing he'll be stickin' his finger so far up his nose he can stir the little brains he has left."

Ricky smiled benignly. He was unknowably ancient, a stooped, grinning, green slacks-clad gnome. A cloth hat was plopped on his head. He held a cane in his right hand. Hyperpigmentation marks lay like shadowy sunspots against the pale, puffed and shiny skin. His teeth were stained brown from a lifetime of chewing tobacco, but his smiles were frequent and sincere.

"Margie's just kvetching. She's always said I wouldn't have sense enough to poor piss out of a boot with the directions printed on the heel." His anxious gaze fell on 'Scilla. "That pie okay?"

"It's wunnerful," she answered around a mouthful of pecans and Karo syrup. "I've never had better."

Ricky swelled in his chair. "Margie's the finest cook for miles around. She purt near always wins the blue ribbon at the 'coon dog races, though we ain't been in several years. Ain't that right, Margie?"

Margie acknowledged the compliment with a modest nod.

"You get on her good side," Ricky advised. "She'll show you a hunnerd ways to fix cabbage so it don't blow a hole in your longjohns."

Margie rolled her eyes. "Hell's bells," she muttered. "Would you like more tea? Lisa? 'Scilla?"

"Yes, please," 'Scilla answered. "If it's no trouble."

"Not at all," Margie said, picking up a gallon jar of tea. The jar had once held pickles. She filled 'Scilla's and Lisa's glasses. "Slop it up until your back teeth float."

Ricky produced a tin of snuff and wedged a bit into his mouth. He gauged the distance to his tarnished brass cuspidor with a practiced eye. It hunkered on the floor, its faded brass surrounded by juice stained floor panels.

"I'm glad it was somebody like you that took the old Morgan place," he commented. "I'da hated to see it go to rack and ruin like so many of the fine old homes around here. A lot of history in that old place. You can turn it into a real showplace if you're of a mind to. If you need some help with the carpenterin', Phillip Anderson is a plus man. If you can get him to let you in his house to do some hirin', that is."

"I wouldn't think someone who depends on service work for a living to be standoffish," 'Scilla said.

"Oh, he's far from standoffish. Most likely he doesn't want you to see those chintz curtains, lavender sheets, and good shoes in his house. I'll give you directions when you leave."

Ricky spat a thin stream of brown juice at his cuspidor where it plopped home with a ding. 'Scilla looked helplessly at Lisa, who simply shrugged.

"Me and Willie Morgan went back more than seventy years before he passed over last year. House has been empty for all that time, until you bought it. He was a fair plumber, no doubt, and a better than par 'coon hunter, but-not to speak ill of the dead-his brain always seemed to be in a perpetual state of brown out."

"An oddball," 'Scilla asked.

"Not always," Ricky answered. "Everybody's best reckoning was it was the fire that pushed him off the deep end."

"The fire?"

"Back in '28, it was," Ricky said. "The fire started in the old furniture factory. We had no FD to speak of and the only water pumps around were hand pumps on the wells. The whole town turned out in a fucked up Chinese fire drill, hauling slop buckets and milk buckets full of water, but I think we might have done just as much good by pissing on it. The whole town burned flat, except for three buildings. The furniture factory where the damn thing started, Willie Morgan's house, and the place you're sittin' right now. And if it hadn't been for Willie almost killing himself, I might not be alive today."

"How is that?"

"At that time there was nothing but woodland all around except for these two houses and that little dirt road that was closer to a horse trail back then. My dad had gone off to town, helping with the main fire. He had left me at home to get the animals out of the barn just in case the fire did spread up this way.

"The smoke came up the valley, thick with burning green wood and sickening with that turpentine smell of burning pine. I could hear the cows bawling and the horses banging in their stalls, trying to kick them down. I went out to let 'em have their head and their eyes were all white, rolling around in fright, their mouths foaming and their flanks soaked in fear sweat. I remember that, but not much more. The animals stampeded out of the barn, running at me, legs flying and hooves pounding dust up all around. I covered my head and tried to get out of the way, making my way toward the door with the horses shrieking and cows bawling. I made it out into the sunshine that even then was starting to darken. 'Twasn't thirty seconds later that the smoke had put me out. It was God's own mercy that I passed out face first and got down beneath the worst of the smoke."

"How old were you," 'Scilla asked. Her thoughts of rootlessness and dissociation were still very much on her mind and to hear Ricky speak about vintage Americana spanning seven decades gave her a sense of time and place that was comfortable and easy to slip into.

"I was eleven, Willie thirteen. Kids grew up into work faster then. I would put in ten hours a day after school. But we were luckier. We didn't grow up into the ways of the world so fast.

"I don't know how long I was out, slipping back and forth between daylight and darkness. It seemed like a dream most of the time while I lay there hearing the crackle of burning pine straw, seeing the red and orange of the flames moving closer, winking through the smoke. And I saw Willie Morgan, stripped down to the waist, sweat pouring off of him, his eyes flashing with the bright white light of a madman. Big as a grown man even when he was thirteen and had a full beard when he was eleven.

"He had a big old double sided ax and a pruning saw. I had seen that ax many times, hanging in the barn behind his house. It was old and pitted with a splintered handle, but Willie kept that edge sharp. Willie almost always done whatever cutting had to be done. His dad was a mean drunk and most likely would have ended up burying that ax in his leg when he swung it. He never got completely out of the bottle after his wife died, and that was where he was on the day of the fire. He likely never knew a thing about it until after it was all over.

"For three solid hours Willie chopped and sawed. I remember hearing the crash and thud of trees falling while I laid there; remembered seeing him shining with sweat, and though I was too far away to have heard it, I imagined hearing his breath coming harder and harder while he raced to make a firebreak. To this day I remember how I was almost hypnotized by how he worked; how I didn't much care about the fire coming ever closer. That didn't seem very important compared to what Willie was doing. He must have felled fifty trees in those three hours, working like a maniac without a single break, creating a small firebreak, but it was enough to stop it from taking these two houses.

"And it must have been right after one of those times I slipped away, but I opened my eyes and he was kneeling down next to me, reaching down to pick me up and tote me into the house. And even then, I could see in his eyes how much of a toll had been taken on him. There was a wild light in them, like a fever, and it never went away in all the years I knew him after that. It was a wonder it didn't kill him, but the fact is he plugged along for another seventy years."

"Sounds like you miss him," 'Scilla said.

Ricky tilted his hat up.

"Can't help but miss someone you've known for seventy years, been neighbors with, got up to the dickens with back before the time there was even electricity in these parts.

"He was a hoot, no doubt. There wasn't nothing Willie was afraid of. Strange things happen all the time-things that nobody can explain-but Willie couldn't leave 'em alone like regular folks. He would go looking for trouble, most often with my dumb ass right there beside him."

"What kind of strange things?" 'Scilla had had her fill of strange things over the past year.

"Here it comes," Margie said. "The big lie."

"Absolutely not," Ricky said. "Margie knows I speak the truth. That's why she's stayed with me all these years. But as part of the town, you need to know this, 'cause you're gonna hear of it anyway.

"As a lad of fourteen, Willie and me were out burning the roads in his dad's old truck. Frank Morgan was the only one with an automobile around these parts and Willie, whenever his dad was laid up drunk -which was most of the time- would take that car and go joyriding.

"Me and Willie both had made a raid on Tom Danle's likker still and were both pretty well lushed up, neither of us caring if the sky stayed up or fell down. We had already been given hell by a bunch of field hands who had their horses and wagon run off the road by this crazy Willie bearin' down on 'em, jammin' the gears and sprayin' dirt and gravel all over hell and half of Tennessee, the motor snortin' and hollerin' like a stuck pig. Bales of cotton and bushels of corn come tumblin' down like manna from heaven when them carts went rolling into the ditch. Them field hands didn't leave us much doubt as to where me and Willie would spend the afterlife. And the way Willie was drivin', I didn't think it would be much longer before I found out for certain.

"This was in October, not much later than this, and it was gettin' on toward dark. I had slipped off during the day and I had no jacket. It had begun to get chilly, like it does, and I begged Willie to get us home. The booze had been my blanket for a while, but it was wearing off. And aside from that, I had something else weighing heavy on my heart."

"And what was that?" 'Scilla had finished her pie and Margie had magically whisked her plate away. She felt cool and uneasy now, with night falling on the Saunders household. The daylight had matured to spun gold, slipping in through the living room and laying its brassy sheen on the TV screen where it rattled on and on, unheeded. 'Scilla's palm was wet with condensation from the glass she held. She set the glass down on a folded paper towel.

"It was October 29th," Ricky said. "The eve of Let To Day."

"Some kind of local holiday?"

Ricky scratched one raspy cheek and stared at the ceiling with his pale, albino-like eyes.

"I don't think I would call it that. More like a local superstition. Folks here in Brighton, even the newbies from East North Carolina and upstate New York don't question it. They just let it be, like everybody else." 'Scilla thought this had the sound of a gentle warning.

"We were headed toward Ira Parnell's pasture," Ricky went on. "Nothing there now but weeds and thorn bushes. But the fence is still there. I used to sit on that fence during the trailing end of the summer and watch the sun go down over the pond. It would shine off the water and back into my eyes and it looked like there were two suns; one in the sky and one sinking into the water. I could almost see myself, a little towheaded kid with a wisp of straw in his mouth, decked out in crappy dungarees, a pretty stiff breeze kickin' up a cowlick in his hair, the sun shinin' the color of apple cider." He smiled whimsically, bringing up the elfin charm that was a part of him.

"I asked Willie where we were goin'.

'"You'll see,' he says. Folks thought it best to steer clear of Willie after the fire. Everyone thought Willie would come to a bad end and they all figured I would go down the tubes with him. And that night he was plain crazy, as crazy as the day he had built the firebreak. Driven by something or to something, I still don't know.

'"We're here,' he says.

"I knew right off it was Parnell's pasture. I saw the fence stretchin' off to my right, looking like black, iron bars with splinters of wood sticking out at the ends like hair. The wind blew a little, sort of sad like it does when darkness is heavy on the land with no electric lighting. Above the wind I could hear the fence creak from time to time. But for mine and Willie's breathing, that was the only sound.

"Willie didn't say anything, just took me by the arm and pointed me toward the side of the mountain that popped up on the far side of the pasture. It was then that I seen the shimmery white mist rising up out of the ground, drifting up from the face of the mountain and rolling on down the hill. It didn't come up in one big cloud, or drift down like a lacy fall of dew. It came up out of the ground, like the earth had cracked open and was breathing in the cold. It shone in the moonlight, a watery silvery blue. It spun around like a wind chime in the breeze, slow as a country afternoon, and started to steal across the field, moving steady, spreading apart like fingers."

He stopped for a few seconds and pried the top off of a Coca Cola. He grimaced slightly as he did so, glancing at Margie sitting across the room in her rocker, arms crossed, nodding gravely at times as if corroborating the tale. Ricky took a long swallow of the Coke and set it on the floor.

"The fog spread out into shapes, like columns about six feet high and two feet through the middle. It came on apace, moving toward us like an advancing patrol, five or six of those curtains of fog. And I started praying. I felt out of place, unwanted and..." he cocked his head, the exact phrasing he wanted eluding him.

"I knew I was seeing something I shouldn't see, something maybe I shouldn't have even known about. There was something. Something watching and waiting. And I felt like if we didn't leave it might get tired of waiting.

"I grabbed Willie by the arm, just gibbering. He shook me off.

'"It's never been this close before. I have to see.'

"That's when I knew he had seen it before, who knew how many times? And I wondered if it wasn't this as much as the fire that had made him crazy.

'"They're gonna be here in a minute,' I told him. And when he looked at me, he was smiling like a moron, hair all out in kinky curls, his beard twisted and tangled on top of that boy's face.

"'I know,' he says.

Ricky looked sagely at 'Scilla, but with an impish gleam of humor in his eyes. But it was a front. 'Scilla could tell he was deadly serious.

"Then the fog was at the car, swirling around like blowing spirits, cold and wet, shining all silvery blue. I thought there was somebody in the fog, somebody or something that I couldn't see, watching me, wondering if it could extend its unearthly arm and drag me into it and take me away back to that hole in the earth it came from.

"And then the fog seemed to trifle away a little and I saw something in the mist. A shape seemed to take form, flesh turned to vapor; a ghostly face in the fog."

'Scilla frowned. Ricky took no notice at all.

"And then it swept down over us, seeming almost to fall on us like some swooping bird, wet and cold and sticky." Ricky took a whistling breath. "My Sainted Aunt, it felt as close to death as I want to be until my time comes."

He sat back and drained the rest of his Coke. He set the empty on the floor. A lawn mower engine, the last of the season, wound down distantly beneath the twilit sky. Moths skirted against the screen.

"And then," 'Scilla prompted.

"Willie fired up the car and blasted outta there so fast he almost cracked us up by driving dead bang into a bigassed old pine tree. There was something in Willie like a streak of rock that can be chipped away but not broken. I could see in his eyes as he drove that something had gotten hold of his poor, scrambled brains, and had dug in and made a home there.

"After a short time, he stood on the brakes, damn near tossing me straight over the hood.

'"I'm going back,' he says.

"'Fine,' I say. 'You do that. But you go alone. My daddy's gonna bust my ass black and blue as it is. If you had any sense, you'd go home, too.' I started to hoof it, afraid to be out in the dark after what I'd seen, but knowing it was preferable to going back.

'"Where are you goin'', Willie hollers, like he can't believe I ain't going back with him. Well, I felt for him some, you know. But nothing could have got me back there. I was just about cryin', begging him not to go back.

'"I have to go,' he says. 'I have to see.' And just lookin' at him you knew that nothing would stop him. And off he roared, leaving me there scared and cold, but glad all the same. Glad to be away from the fog, and glad to know I could make it home before midnight, when Let To Day started. Glad to take the beating I knew I would get."

"Did Willie go back?"

Ricky was silent for a few seconds.

"I don't know," he finally said. "I didn't see him again for a couple of days. I had tried to forget about it, though my dad forcibly reminded me of what had happened by whoopin' my ass pretty soundly. When I did see Willie again, he said nothing about it. And for seventy years I never asked him about it, and he never told me about it."

"Why didn't you see him the next day?"

"It was October 30th, Let to Day. Nobody knows how old it is, or how it came to be. On Let to Day, none dare to venture out of their homes, especially not to work. Most of the town's folk head out of town for a one day vacation. Take in Luray Caverns or Tweetsie Railroad. We're all back the next day in time to give the young 'uns their trick or treat candy. Only those that wish to fall to the Stranger's Discomfort will lift a finger to till the land they've worked all summer."

'Scilla didn't like the sound of that and said so. "Sounds very ominous. What's the Stranger's Discomfort? Diarrhea?"

Lisa giggled and Ricky smiled.

"Nothing of the sort," Ricky soothed. "Just a phrase I picked up from my dad and his dad before him. Just a bit of local color we can call our own. But it's tradition and tradition is mostly a good thing. No need in upsettin' it just on the off chance it's something besides a scary bedtime tale."

He looked wisely at 'Scilla. "Don't worry yourself over some local mumbo jumbo. It's our one excuse to get out of this one horse town and play hooky from work."

"I'm not really in the mood for anything so dark."

"Not much of a dark side to Brighton. Just a rinky dink burg with no claim to fame but a funny holiday and some nice scenery. Folks from all over the country live here, most of 'em like you, only looking for a place to start over."

"I didn't come here for pity."

"And pity you won't get. I meant no slight, 'Scilla. I didn't realize you would take it that way." Ricky put on his most penitent expression. "Forgive?"

"Of course." Staying mad at Ricky would be like staying mad at a kitten in a ball of your best crewel work.

"Might I ask you how you came to pick Brighton as your homeplace?"

"It sounded like a nice place," 'Scilla said in half truth. She didn't want to tell him that she had simply opened a map and picked the first place her finger had landed on. But it was turning out right, more so than she would ever have believed in the days of tunnel vision after George's and Jenny's deaths.

Ricky didn't seem to want to press her on the matter. He clasped his hands across his belly and leaned back like a duke in his home, lord of all he surveyed. 'Scilla was struck by the simple ruralness of the gesture.

"I think I'd better be on my way," 'Scilla said. "I want to thank you for your hospitality."

"You don't have to go," Margie said. "We're happy to have you."

"I don't want to wear out my welcome on the first day."

"No danger of that," Ricky said, standing up with effort. "We don't want you to be a stranger." 'Scilla thought Ricky said this last with a slight emphasis. "We're just down the street."

"Everyone is just down the street in Brighton," Lisa said.

"I won't be a stranger," 'Scilla said. "Count on it."

She said her goodbyes and walked down the street to her house. Lisa chatted with her for a few moments before going on to her own house. It wasn't cold enough for frost yet, but the dew that fell on her arms as she talked to Lisa was like pinpoints of ice.

She had gotten used to lying awake at night until the loneliness abated, but by the time she lay down that night on a makeshift pallet in place of a bed that had yet to arrive, she had almost forgotten about Let To Day. Ricky had made a half-assed effort to shrug it off, but she knew there was more to the story than Ricky had told her. She had often thought that, in her shattered life before this bucolic time, she and her family had been haunted by some stalking terror. But now her family was gone and, she hoped, the stalking terror with it. Even so, as she lay down to sleep, she wondered what it was that Willie Morgan had seen in the water lace shroud of silently spinning fog.

**********

George Walburn has found no comfort beneath fate's umbrella. His life has been one of being gut-kicked and back-stabbed, and the only thing that he anticipates with any eagerness is death. But whatever gods there might be will not be denied their fun. The old voodoo witch doctor, Unk Maum, had told him so. Not even in the supposed serenity of the grave can George find solace. Find out why in We Are the Dead...

Available at www.wandilland.com

##  Xeno Sapiens

by

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved

From Xeno Sapiens...

## 4

Ingrid said, "It's stunning, isn't it?"

Merrifield had seen what was in the incubator on the other side of the three inch thick glass before, but he was still awed by what Ingrid had accomplished in the preceding sixty days.

Inside the incubator- wired with electronic monitoring systems, plastic feed tubes, trays and bottles of chemicals, and God only knew what other kind of bizarre trappings-was a complete human skeleton and the ligaments binding the bones. Just that, nothing else.

The inside of the incubator was in eerie twilight, lit only by black light, carefully monitored and controlled to allow the most effective dosage of UV light to strike the bone. The incubator was more sterile than the chip factories of Silicon Valley. Access to its interior was strictly limited by Ingrid. Not even Merrifield had been allowed inside.

"It's like something out of Brave New World, isn't it?" Merrifield spoke with almost religious reverence. His eyes never left the skeleton.

"Almost," Ingrid said. "But better. This is real."

The skeletal frame was eight feet long from crown to heel. Heavy boned, yet perfectly proportioned for both strength and agility. The codons had come from three different tissue samples. No single cell contained the precise order Ingrid wanted. She settled on a combination of three gene packages made up of some thirty thousand codons and had them assembled on a single RNA strand.

The skeleton's legs were long and graceful. They had come from a United States Olympic track star who had donated some of his cells, having no idea what they would be used for. The skeleton's arms had come from a huge, black pulp logger who stood nearly seven feet tall. The rest of the skeleton had come from one of the largest and strongest men Merrifield had ever known, an Iowa wheat farmer named Charles Weaver.

The pelvic girdle was wide, a must for the huge bands of abdominal muscle Ingrid planned to attach. The ribcage was huge and spacious, plenty of room for a large heart and lungs. Where the ribs met the sternum, the cartilage glistened a ghostly, whitish blue. The skeleton's massive skull lay serenely on the incubator's work table, toothless because teeth were not made of bone. Fascinatingly, incrementally increasing exposure to gamma rays such as would be found outside the protective cloak of the earth's magnetic field had altered the DNA of the osteoblasts, resulting in radical remodeling of the skeleton.

The nasal passages had increased in length, forcing the cranium upwards and backwards, elongating it. The ocular orbits had opened, ostensibly in evolutionary response to the expectation of less diffused light. They stretched, in a cat's eye mask, from the diminutive bridge of the nose almost to the center of where the temple would be on a normal skull.

"How did you get it so large, so fast?" Merrifield asked.

"Enzymes and pituitary hormones. Once the cells started dividing, it took off. It was really amazing to watch it as it grew. It started at the pelvic girdle, then to the skull and down to the legs at the same time, as if it were following a pattern."

"Certainly you had the mRNA programmed in the ribosomes?"

"Sure, but how does it know what shape to take? All we know about the genes is that they instruct the cells to manufacture specific amino acids. That still doesn't explain how it shapes those building blocks." Ingrid shook her head. She crossed her arms against her chest and looked longingly at the skeleton.

Merrifield saw her expression and thought he knew what she was thinking.

"Even with all we know," he said quietly, "some things are still a puzzle, aren't they?"

"They are," she agreed. "But there's no puzzle that can't be solved, is there?"

"Sometime earlier, I might have said yes. Now, I don't know." Merrifield had always believed the project could be done, but he hadn't expected to discover they were making it work with only the slightest idea of how cellular processes worked. It was a more than a little daunting, like mixing highly volatile chemicals in the dark.

"Did you know," Ingrid said, "The skeleton doesn't even have any nerves or blood vessels? It's only now developing marrow."

Merrifield was aghast. "Surely you jest. How are you keeping it alive?"

Ingrid tapped her temple. "ATP active transport and Osmosis. Seth gets a bath in glucose solution most of the day. When we take him out for display purposes, he gets a saline bath and his solution gets changed to keep the sodium-potassium ratio balanced. Occasionally, we have to run the solution through a dialysis machine when toxins build up."

"You named him Seth? Isn't that a little autocratic?"

"Naming him Adam would have been autocratic."

"If you say so," Merrifield responded doubtfully. The project had passed realism for him long before. "What's next?"

Ingrid spoke in her best lecture voice. "The heart and circulatory system. We'll use a heart lung machine temporarily, and he can be fed intravenously. We won't have that big a problem with waste products until the musculature forms, but the liver and excretory systems will be on line by then."

Merrifield nodded. The term Ingrid had used, on line, made him a little uneasy.

"How long?"

"When you said a three year project, you weren't far off. We should have a working model in two years. That leaves us about eight months to fix something in case I blunder."

"You? Blunder?"

"We might as well he realistic. Nothing like this has ever been tried before."

Merrifield still found it hard to believe that a genetically tailored human being was being constructed, protein by painstaking protein, in his lab. He rested a comforting arm on Ingrid's shoulder.

"I'm very pleased. This is a more than we could have hoped for."

Ingrid looked at the skeleton. "It may not look like much to anyone else, but we know what it took to get there."

"It's your baby, right." Merrifield said.

Ingrid stiffened.

"That's a damned funny thing to say to a woman."

Merrifield's remark reminded her of the letter in her scrapbook where the woman had written that Ingrid wanted to give birth to the messiah out of a test tube. It was a serendipity for which she had no great love. The baroqueness of her endeavors was becoming clearer to her each day. She did feel like Victor Frankenstein, seeking the secrets of life itself, needing to dissect its minutiae and cut it into irreducible form. But she had set her goals for this very level, knocking them down one by one like a lifetime game of pitch-til-u-win, trading up at each successful toss of the pellet.

"My apologies," Merrifield said. "It was a poor choice of words."

He studied the skeleton, watching the thin mist rise from the bones that had been coated in dry ice for display. The mist-shrouded bones lay in the darkness of the incubator, glowing like '70's black light posters. Two attendants hovered anxiously over their prize. Instead of picks, shovels and ropes, they wielded plasma packs and drugs. Gone were the top hats and gravedigger capes, replaced by white, antiseptic coveralls. They lent the scene a more macabre aspect than if a certifiably mad scientist had been sifting through the ruins of a charnel pit with a lunatic sexton.

Merrifield suppressed a shudder. Stupid. His ultimate triumph should not be censured in deference to some atavistic loathing that was twenty-four carat horse shit. The pragmatism of the real world was his domain and the shiver and shake of fantasy and horror had lost their forbiddingly enticing sparkle. Still, he wished for a drink.

"You'll keep me informed?"

"You'll know everything," Ingrid told him.

He turned and walked away. Halfway across the room, he turned to say something.

Ingrid was still looking at the skeleton. Merrifield watched her silently for a few seconds, then continued on his way.

## 5

As the winter of 2002 melted into the spring of that year, it bade good bye to the skiers and hello to the trout fishermen in their floppy, crushed cotton hats decorated with colorful flies. While the fishermen cast their lines into the fast running rivers of snow melt, Ingrid's skeleton began to organize into a sentient creation.

Oddly enough to the layman, but an absolute necessity for protein synthesis, a massive liver was the first organ Ingrid developed. The huge, four lobed mass wasn't sexy; it wasn't a glamor organ, but it was a powerhouse, charged with constructing proteins and immunoglobulins, as well as detoxification of the blood of everything from free, toxic iron and porphyrin rings, to urea.

The heart and circulatory system became operational in April of that year. The entire research team took turns gazing in rapture at the large, thick muscle rhythmically beating in sympathy with electronic pulses. Synthetic blood laden with organic chemicals and pituitary extracts circulated by portal circulation to the liver hepatocytes in vessels which were elevated on voluminous plastic bags (as was the heart itself) and kept from hemorrhaging by strict atmospheric controls.

The liver hepatocytes dutifully took the tailored codes for protein production and churned out the proteins that built every structure in the body from CD markers to the organs themselves. Later that same month, genuine blood was introduced, as well as bone marrow cells of a very special nature. These marrow cells were fortified with antigen producing templates for every curable disease known to man and some that weren't. They circulated in the bloodstream and eventually made their way to the virgin marrow of the long bones where they began to differentiate and replicate.

An experimental gene recombinant cytokine – a modification of the chemical Interleuken II- had been developed by a Chinese doctor at the Alamo. It had shown great promise in its ability to recognize and destroy not only cancer-causing viruses, but also pre-cancerous cells. The existence of natural killer T-cells had been known for some time, but now the specific information for production of the killer cytokines had been written into the cellular DNA structure, only waiting to be cloned into a viral serum for the suffering masses.

As each tissue or structure formed, its composition was recorded and amended. Useless substrates of each amino acid -adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine, and uracil- hung forlornly like threads needing to be tied together. One injection of specifically constructed viral DNA could invade the cell nuclei and link up with the inactive DNA threads like two parts of an intricate oriental carpet of wildly differing design being woven together, initiating specific protein synthesis.

The novel arrangement would shut down some genes and activate new ones. With these injections hair or eye color could be changed with nothing more than a hypodermic needle; the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thesis actually made flesh. Flippers or gills, fangs, paws or claws could be substituted for legs or lungs, teeth or hands.

Chromatophore DNA from squids or chameleons could be incorporated into human DNA, resulting in perfect blending with the environment. No proof it would work as yet, but it seemed within reach. Processes at the molecular level cared nothing for rejection. It was pure stoichiometric chemistry. They either bonded or they didn't. And if each substrate could be matched with a corresponding pyrimidine or purine which began the genetic sequence of tailored genes representing other structures, there was no reason for it not to work.

While amateur spelunkers poked and prodded their way through the numerous mountain caverns, an immensely complex system of nerves wound its tortuous way through the maze of bone and blood vessels. White ganglia wormed their way into intricate and beautiful plexi while a thick cord of nerve threaded its way through the hollows of the spinal column.

Unknown to Ingrid, Jake Macmillan (who would be quite insane by the project's end) had been spirited away from the university and safely segregated at Fort Mead, Maryland, laboring endlessly over a new computer program designed to trace codons by mathematical processes that extrapolated on haplotypes instead of its current 'hunt and peck' system.

In the short span of two months, July and August, Seth's excretory and respiratory systems developed. The research team collectively held its breath as the oxygen exchanger was removed. The lungs were kept from collapsing under the pressure of one and a half atmospheres by the oxygen saturated fluid within them. Telemetry showed rapid fire neurospasms from the Vagus nerve vainly attempting to control a diaphragm not yet developed. The exchanger was quickly reinstalled and oxygen levels returned to 115% of normal.

Seth's development now entered the realm of the lab techs, who constantly monitored glutathione levels in the harsh, supersaturated oxygen environment. Lecithin and sphingomyelin ratios were recorded, slowly inching towards the day that Seth's lungs could provide his own oxygen.

Towards the end of August, Ingrid and Alex went out again, just to keep in touch with the real world.

"Did you ever think we would come this far," Clifton asked.

Ingrid shook her head. "I didn't know at first. I believed it could be done, but not like this. With every new system that forms, I get the feeling the whole project was predestined for success. Like it was something that was always meant to be."

"You're not taking much credit."

"I don't feel much like taking credit today," she said sadly. "I had somebody removed from the project. I know you've heard about it."

Clifton didn't bother to pretend he knew nothing about the hostile face-off. Johnny Clark was a rather uninspired organic chemist who had risen through the ranks by virtue of some distant nepotism with Merrifield. Clifton had never liked him, preferring to keep his distance from the fawning, morose youth who had his head so far up Merrifield's ass he hadn't seen daylight in years. Clark was a backstabber, a whining, wheedling gold digger who didn't know his ass from a taco and had the IQ of a bowl of grits. He used his relationship with Merrifield to grease the axles for him. As far as Clifton could tell, he had never contributed one iota to the project.

"He was sneaking around the incubator today," Ingrid said. "Trying to get in. 'Just to have a look', he said. That much I can believe. I don't think he has the balls to try sabotage or the brains to try and sell information."

Clifton grunted knowingly. Ingrid was fanatical about access to the incubator. Clifton knew that just one bacterium in the environment of the incubator could reproduce and spread like herpes at a '70's key party, jeopardizing the entire project. And with oxygen levels at 115% of normal, the danger of a major conflagration was an ever present danger.

Ingrid didn't know it, but Merrifield had been livid when he heard the news. Distant relative or not, Merrifield had no great affection for Johnny Clark, and he was far more concerned that sterility might have been broken than with what happened to Clark.

Clifton had witnessed Merrifield's rage. His face had flared a bright crimson and his wild gesticulations and bulging blood vessels had been reminiscent of a man suffering an attack of apoplexy.

"Who does this little shithead think he is," Merrifield had raved, acid dripping from every word. His jaw muscles jumped and sweat popped out on his meaty forehead, glittering like chrome flecks.

"I will have his frigging head for this," Merrifield had roared, each word as precise and cutting as the guillotine's blade.

Clifton had sat through the tirade, offering not a soothing word or placating gesture. He well knew, when Merrifield was in such a mood, it was best to let him wear himself out. After a few minutes of vigorous screaming, Merrifield plopped down in his chair and sat there, panting. He jabbed a finger at Clifton.

"I want him out of here," he said, speaking in harsh bursts. "I want him gone before I have to see his face again. Tell him if I ever see him again, I'll put him against the wall and cut out his heart. I'm making it your responsibility to make sure he understands that. Got it?"

"I'll see to it," Clifton had said.

"You'd damn well better," Merrifield had snapped. He was grumbling under his breath when Clifton left to attend the messy details of giving Clark the boot.

"I had to do it," Ingrid said. "I hate the thought I've become so hard and unforgiving I had to make an example of somebody, but I won't let everything I've – we've\- worked for, go down the crapper because of a low level lackey who thinks he's privileged."

"If you're looking for sympathy," Clifton said, "you won't find it here. You did the right thing."

"You don't have to patronize me."

"Good Christ, Ingrid," Clifton said, irritated. He rolled his eyes. "Do you need a picture drawn for you? You're the brains of this project. You're perfectly within your rights to shitcan somebody who goes against directives. Clark is fucked for life, now. The only hopes he has of ever having another decent job is to keep his mouth shut. And he will, if he knows what's in his best interests for staying out of jail."

"You think so?"

"I think so," Clifton said, recalling the uncontrollable fury Clark's action had engendered In Merrifield today. Days like today, Clifton didn't care much for Merrifield, but he knew he would never cross him. Call it cowardice or self preservation, it all came down to keeping your head firmly attached to your shoulders.

By November of 2002, Seth's visceral digestive organs had developed. He began to look less like a partially dissected med school cadaver and more like a human being. At this stage of development, Seth had begun to replenish his own blood supply and the constantly hovering lab techs took the opportunity to monitor the quick destruction of fetal hemoglobin and its transformation into HgbA and HgbA2. Massive amounts of bilirubin and urobilinogen were produced and neutralized by the same high doses of UV and gamma ray radiation that Seth had been constantly subjected to. Even before his birth, life had found a way and his body had adapted to external environments.

That same month, a penniless and disgruntled Johnny Clark still had had no luck finding a job as cushy as the one from which he had been so ignobly dismissed.

He recalled an old and dusty family skeleton and began making inquiring phone calls to the Natural Christian's Salvation center. He was told politely but firmly that Josh Hall was redeeming the hell bound and could not be bothered. The caller was welcome to try again once Mr. Hall had established his quota of converts for the month. Clark hung up, saying he would be in touch.

Seth's musculature began to take shape. Band over band of thick, striated red muscle appeared in fleshy sheets, enveloping already functioning bone, nerves and blood vessels.

Eyes (Clifton's own clones) put in their appearance by late December of 2002. They stared blackly straight ahead, unmoving and unblinking, unable to interpret any images.

The pons, cerebellum and medulla had already formed, being, really, only extensions of the spinal cord. The cerebrum had yet to develop.

Ingrid had devoted a great deal of time to the development of a 'community brain', a cerebrum that combined vast comprehensive ability with some super normal brain functions.

Drawing on some little known (and mostly hushed up) work by Kensington and Hart, she had isolated and synthesized some of the rarest genes ever classified. These genes controlled the functions of certain talented pituitary glands. Under stress, these glands produced chemicals with names so long and twisty they were usually referred to by-only their acronyms: RTGH, DFGH and BUPL. These chemicals produced many definitely desirable effects: Cryokinesis, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, telepathy, telempathy. Such traits were not supernatural, but extremely rare and impure, and were now within trembling reach.

During the long nights in which she could find no sleep, she thought of something Hubert had once told her in reference to Josh Hall: "They's so many people wants to grow up and slay the dragon in this world. But most times that dragon will just turn around, and eat you right up."

Josh Hall had said she was a dragon, and now she was on the brink of calling his hand. The real dragon was the straitjacketing of minds closed too long. For too long people had thrust themselves into the jaws of chance. They lacked vision.

Now winter, with its snow and ice, had again settled mistily on the Appalachians. Ingrid found it hard to believe, but an entire year had passed. She wasn't a prisoner; she came and went as she pleased. Yet the disturbing fact remained. She remembered nothing at all that didn't concern the project. Even her occasional nights out with Clifton had become less frequent. She was a little embarrassed to realize nothing more had come of it.

But in the near future, an event would occur that would show her that their relationship was more intertwined than mere business.

## 6

"Would you watch what you're doing, for Christ's sake?"

Clifton jerked around at Jimmy's urgent shout. Jimmy and another tech had quickly retreated as far from the Helix depolarization chamber as they could. They stared at it with the frightened eyes of children.

The magnetic flywheel had somehow broken out of its race atop the machine and was spinning uncontrollably. Ever widening loops and swirls of caustic alkali solution whirled through the air in arcing streamers...

**********

Headhunted by a national conglomerate to engineer humans for deep space travel, geneticist Ingrid Milner can read between the lines. She is wanted for a Frankenstein project; to fabricate a genetic werewolf. She works in secret, but she is not unknown. Set against her is the enigmatic Josh Hall, a fire-breathing minister with a sordid past. As the forces build against each other, a new player emerges, one part and parcel of the overwhelming coalescence of insanity and hubris. Nothing so powerful can be contained, and it will lash out...

Available at www.wandilland.com

##

## Katerina Cheplik

by

Victor Allen

Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved

From Katerina Cheplik...

## 22

"I went home to visit one weekend after you had left for Colorado," Sharon began. "I wouldn't have told you then, but I was terrified. You had been the only friend I could count on. I didn't have many of those left.

"Mama and I were so far apart and we had always been so close. I had lost Vince, I had lost you, and I was close to losing my family. And when you've lost everything, you belong to the devil.

"Oh, I know people won't believe me when I tell them, but I came face to face with the devil one night. He came into my room, through the window and stood by the end of my bed. He was huge, Bernie, and red with a kind of black sheen to him, like someone who has been badly burned. His eyes were dark, oh, awful dark, like gargoyle's eyes. I wasn't even scared, as if I had expected it all along. He taunted me, told me I belonged to him. He looked down at me with those black eyes and called me his child.

"I told him to leave and he laughed at me. He was, I don't know, liquid in the dark, the way he moved and the way the moonlight shone off his skin. I argued and moaned and cried for at least an hour, but nobody ever came to my room. Not mama, or daddy, or my brother Kevin. It was like something kept them away. I told him I would never be his.

"'But you already are, my child,' he said. 'Once you've let me in, I never go away.' His voice was horrible, a deep, rumbling bass like an underwater earthquake. Then he left, going out the window. I watched him go, so huge and scary, sort of skipping away toward the road on those cloven hooves. Sparks jumped on the pavement before he vanished into the woods. I listened to the sounds of branches snapping and crashing for a long time before it stopped. The next day, I went out and looked in the road and the hoof prints were still there, struck into the pavement like the hoof prints at Bath. They were still there the last time I went home, and probably will be until the town paves the road over."

Bernie said nothing. Sharon wasn't scared, but very intense, as if reliving the episode. He had no choice but to believe her. The devil didn't waste his time on sinners. He went after the pure at heart.

"I had a long talk with mama that morning. Besides you and Father O'Donovan, she's the only other person I've ever told about it. Mama and I came to a reconciliation. I had put my faith in earthly things, the princes of the world, not where it belonged. Not with you and my family and the people that really cared about me. I did what you did. I redefined myself and brought back the little girl I didn't see in the mirror anymore."

Bernie's heart broke when he realized she was crying.

"I'm just so afraid he'll come back, that he'll never leave me alone, that I'll have to fight him again and again, every single day of my life. That he'll take everything I love just to get to me.

"So when you ask if I want anything for myself, I can say yes. All I want is to love and be loved. Is that so much to ask?"

"Shh, baby," Bernie said. He stroked her hair, feeling warm tears on his shoulder. "It's not so much at all."

"All I want is for you to hold me tonight. Will you do that? Just hold me?"

"Yes, " he said in a trembling voice. "For as long as you want."

And he did.

23

And now my soul is poured out upon me; the days of affliction have taken hold...

24

Mother and child had fled their home in the late hours of the night. The little boy was crying, half-asleep, not knowing why his mother had spirited him away from his daddy. He was cold, only slightly comforted by his mother's warmth. The gamin smiles of the stars were blurred through his tears. His head bounced painfully with every half-running step his mother took.

The rushing cold stung Carolyn Table's eyes, burning and raw from sobbing. Her feet and nose hurt. Jeremy was heavy, but she couldn't put him down to walk for himself. Even with her stumbling, he wouldn't be able to keep up. She glanced fretfully behind her from time to time, as if some fearful fiend in the person of her drunken, bullying husband close behind her trod. But Frank had passed out an hour before, drunk and abusive to her for the last time.

Frank kept his utility hatchet on top of the kitchen cabinets, and she had spent the better part of that hour with it in her hands, debating murder or flight.

I'll kill you if you ever leave me, he had said, a shotgun held unsteadily in his hands. His eyes were black slashes, puffy and glassy as those of a barfly. His sweat stank yellowly of alcohol. He had hit her three times by then, the last blow bloodying her nose and making stars burst through her head. He had grabbed her roughly and hauled her to her feet, pawing at her blouse. She had jerked away from him.

Get away from me, you bastard, she had hissed. I'm calling the police. You've hurt me for the last time.

He had stalked her, hitting her again. The heavy class ring he wore plowed a bloody gorge high on her cheekbone. He yanked the phone cord out of the wall. The plastic connector popped out and shattered into winter icicle shapes. She stayed still on the floor while he kicked her in the belly, stifling a grunt of pain that would only further enrage him. He kicked her again, rolling her over. He cursed and roared and drank, tipping a bottle of Vodka, draining it. A few minutes later he toppled over with a titanic crash.

She had pulled herself painfully up, wincing at the fiery stab of a broken rib. She glared murderously at the man she had once loved. Her hatred was blacker than an ocean abyss. It would be so easy to take the shotgun from him, hold it against his throat, and pull both triggers. She had reached for it, intending to pull it from beneath him. He had stirred slightly and she had yanked her hand back. It would have to be some other way. She couldn't risk his waking up.

She had held the hatchet in an upraised hand, even testing her aim once or twice against his head, knowing all she had to do was follow through once with all her strength and cave his skull in.

But in the end she had chosen flight with her son. The car keys were in Frank's pocket, but she dared not roll him over to get at them. They lived in a tumble down shack on a backwoods lot that belonged to Frank's father. They had running water and electricity, but not much more than that. The nearest pay phone was a half a mile away. She would call the police from there, then take a cab to the bus station. She had hoarded her last three measly paychecks for the month for just such an occasion. She handled the finances and Frank had been too drunk over the past month to even notice it.

Cold, wet grass slashed at her bare ankles. She inhaled through her mouth, parching her tongue and palate. Jeremy wept, but she didn't mind that as long as he was safe.

She reached the end of the long, dirt driveway and struck asphalt at a secondary road. The glow of Red River's city lights pushed up into the night sky over a wall of pines. She set Jeremy down. An automobile swooped down the hill behind her, lighting up the road with cold, white brilliance. She waved her arms wildly at the approaching vehicle, thinking she must look like a scarecrow version of Sylvester Stallone from the Rocky movies with her swollen nose and disheveled hair. The car eased to the left and flashed by her, never slowing. She turned after it passed, watching its red taillights recede over the top of the upcoming hill.

She hoisted Jeremy up and started walking again. She would have welcomed a good Samaritan, would have sold her soul for someone to help her for just these few minutes. But the chances of happening on someone on this backwoods road late at night were almost nil. Oh, there might be a couple necking in a car, or some teenagers on a 'ghost hunt', but of someone with a kind heart and a car, she felt was a futile hope.

So she was surprised instead of afraid when she saw the man stumbling down the road just at the top of the rise. Hopeful and a little fearful, she hailed him, crying out like a charwoman begging for alms.

The shadowy figure of the man crossed the road to her side, moving closer. The figure appeared to be a teenager rather than a full grown man. His face was a pale bone in the moonlight, his eyes unfocused. He walked slowly, not as if drunk, but very, very weak. Carolyn felt the sturdy weight of the hatchet in her purse. Jeremy stirred fitfully in her arms.

"Do you have a car," Carolyn asked when the boy got close enough to hear her rasping, blood-clogged voice.

"A car," the boy said weakly. "No, no car. Are you in some kind of trouble?"

Carolyn reeled away from the man's voice. His breath was foul beyond description, like someone suffering from a bad throat infection.

"I have to get to a phone," she said uneasily. "If you don't have a car, I need to get going."

"No, wait," the boy said in that deathbed voice. "I've been sick with the flu. I felt a little better tonight so I decided to go out. Can your boy walk? Are you okay to walk?"

"Jeremy? Do you feel awake enough to walk by yourself?"

"I guess so."

"I'll walk with you to a phone," the boy said. "I need to get back. I'm weaker than I thought. If you need a place to stay for the night, I'll call some of the girls' dorms and see if they can put you up."

He turned and Carolyn saw him in profile, handsome despite his pallor. His thick hair was pulled back from his forehead very much unlike the way teenage boys wore their hair today. She judged him to be eighteen or nineteen. His nose was a sloping protrusion between cheekbones as sharp as arrow points. Moonlight fell over him in a cold glow. She felt safe with this wan, weak fellow.

They started walking, a cozy trio with a tiny boy between the two adults. No cars passed as they moved up the hill. They had reached the top before the man introduced himself as Tommy Hopson, grinning at her madly with long, sharp canines surrounded by thick, liver-colored lips.

25

State street was dark an hour later when Tommy walked down to Katerina's house with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He looked like a typical college student going to wash a load of late night laundry.

He felt strong, the bundle over his shoulder light as a feather, more precious than gold. It was his offering for his new life. He had been picked to bring the sacrifice. He remembered the woman clawing at him ineffectually, pathetically slashing at him with a pitiful little hatchet that found only thin air when he had snatched Jeremy from her.

Monster, give me my child!

Perhaps he was a monster. The moon filled him with a vitality and sureness he had never felt, probing its unearthly light into the darkest corners of his soul, freeing pockets of mindless, dark malevolence.

His mouth was splashed with crimson and his eyes glowed like Venus in full phase. He mounted the steps to Kathy's door and dropped the bundle. It hit the boards with a dead thump. A small, pale hand flopped out of the top of the bag, its tiny fingers curled. The door cracked open and Tommy walked in, dragging the bag with him.

The wind freshened and whistled through the night, whipping the trees into writhing titans tilting against the night.

## 26

William Davis awoke with a deadly chill clinging to his bones. His heart raced and his limbs trembled. The screams still echoed in his head. The memory of a nightmare as vivid and lurid as any he had ever had still pealed its dread toll in his brain.

He sat up in his bed, his head in his hands. He glanced fearfully at the dark rectangle of his window. Moonlight streamed through the bars, turning them half- light, half-dark, like the terminator across the face of the moon. He thought of witches racing through the skies on brooms, their brittle hair streaming out; of monsters hiding greedily in the dark shadows of roadways, waiting to pounce; of vampires promising a world of glamor and allure, then draining the blood and the soul from their victims.

He pulled his covers close to his chest and sat there the rest of the night, his eyes wide, wary and scared. He waited for the first rays of the sun to seal the nightmare away in a burial vault it could not escape before moon rise.

27

The light in Frank Table's house was still burning when he came around two hours later. His head thundered and his stomach was queasy with the beginnings of a grand mal hangover. His swollen mouth and tongue were as dry as talc. He squinted in the harsh light, shading his eyes with one hand.

He hefted his upper body from the floor and rolled sideways, still not willing to try to stand. He supported himself with his arms, his palms flat on the floor. The phone lay on the floor, the blue, plastic receiver off its cradle. The cord curled and looped like a snake. An empty Popov vodka bottle lay between his hands.

His greasy black hair had fallen over his forehead and stuck there, feeling like a crust attached to his skull. He looked up. His wife stood above him. The shotgun with which he had threatened her was held in her hands, both barrels carelessly pointed toward the bridge of his nose. She wore the same loose fitting, black dress she had been wearing when he had decked her. He could have sworn he had broken her nose, but it was unswollen and straight. Her dark hair shone like ink in the naked light. She looked like a dark angel let loose on the earth to strike down the iniquitous. She stared at him with eyes that were black gashes, as coldly unemotional as those of a space alien. Her skin was pale as a dream. He opened his mouth to speak, his eyes blinking, his brain still not focused enough to understand.

"Carolyn, I..."

He never got the chance to finish. The shotgun roared, flames belching from both barrels. Its voice was a shout, its words a hail of lead pellets. Frank's body rolled off his arms and flopped on the floor with a headless clump. Bright red dots and slivers of gray brain matter peppered the wall behind him.

Carolyn dropped the gun on the floor, gliding toward the door with somnambulant, bridal-march steps. She appeared to drift down the porch steps and into the front yard.

He awaited her, looming mighty and omnipotent. His eyes burned radiant in a face that was a study in cold dispassion. She came to him, a child enraptured by the strength of a father. She fell on her knees, staring up worshipfully. He had given her the strength to do what she should have done years ago.

"All I have," she whispered in telling, adoring tones. "All I have is yours."

He took her hand and they became as one, a spinning, phantasmagoric whirl in the face of the helpless night that screamed uselessly against a force it could not contain.

28

Marilyn had lain awake most of the night, afraid to open her eyes for fear of seeing the man who had come for her last night. She had been able to drift off for brief periods, but the little rest she got was fraught with frail dreams in which soft footsteps tripped lightly outside her window, and voices that were no more than whispers plotted just on the other side of the thin pane of glass. She thought she recognized Tommy's voice.

And beneath it all, like the portentous rumblings of earthquakes and magma pits that boil unfettered in the bowels of the earth, another voice overriding all. It was only hinted at, never arrant or shrilling, but full of soporific power. It was as if the man she had seen had taken the world as his own, glowering over it possessively like the Roman gods of old. The moon was a blazing jewel in his forehead, the stars his all-seeing eyes. The clouds that boiled across the night sky were his facial expressions, showing one time black humor, another time rage as ominous as a runaway asteroid.

The murmuring voices outside were insidious, hypnotic.

Choose, Marilyn, they whispered. Choose the night. Choose a life of freewheeling abandon where every lust is sated, every dream of power fulfilled, every hunger satisfied. A life where the gala runs all night, breaking off at cock's crow. Be one with us. Immortal, invincible. A queen in a world where those who have spurned you dare not tread. Vow your vengeance on those who cannot fulfill Shylock's bargain. Their hands are stained where they have torn out your bleeding soul. Our hands are clean. Choose a world where vengeance will be yours. Be forever young and beautiful. Come, Marilyn. Come learn of the night.

She opened her eyes and looked at her window. A face, pale as snow, with wide, burning eyes, was pressed against it. Tommy grinned in at her with teeth like tusks curled inside the scarlet blush of his lips. Who, Marilyn wondered, could be so mad as to choose that life?

You could, Marilyn, her mind taunted her. You could choose it easily.

With the last of her tattered will she rolled away, closing her eyes and shivering beneath her covers. There was an angry rattling at her windowpane and the voices continued like unhappy winter winds. They whined and pleaded and moaned for what seemed like an eternity, but finally faded away...

**********

Youth is innocence, remembered in bloody cuts, scars, and insensitive barbs, but, still, the uncomplicated, wide-eyed time of your life. Sharon Hurley has weathered the storms of her troubled past and emerged into the sunny, lee waters. But life is not static, and life is not fair, and some have a cross to bear. She doesn't know why, but before Sharon can find true peace, she must pit her life -her very soul- and stand against the dark, demimondaine, Katerina Cheplik...

Available at www.wandilland.com

