 
# Fiction Vortex

A Speculative Fiction Typhoon

October 2013

Volume 1, Issue 6

Special Horror Issue with

Guest Judge Michael Collings

Smashwords Edition

Edited by Dan Hope & Mike Cluff

Copyright 2013 Fiction Vortex

Cover Image by Viktor Forat

Cover design by Dan Hope

Website: FictionVortex.com

Twitter: @FictionVortex

Facebook: FictionVortex

#  Table of Contents

Letter from the Editor

DeathSong — by Guest Judge Michael R. Collings

Finale in Blue — by Alexandra Grunberg

Too Much Sleep — by Brendan Verville

The Most Qualified Applicant — by Kathy Charles

Blood or Black Tears — by Jennifer Loring

Windows — by Ben Pienaar

Best Friends Forever — by Josie Beecher

Something in Our House — by D.W. Gillespie

Buried Secrets — by Gary Cecil

Not Forgotten — by Jay Seate

About Fiction Vortex

#  Letter from the Editor

Horror, or rather horrifying experiences, have been a part of my life since I was little. I have never liked clowns — they are evil — and Dan Hope is slightly evil for trying to put a clown on this month's cover.

My oldest sisters learned early that mental trauma is a far more effective way to exert dominance, and leaves no physical evidence. My older brother had reached a point where he was no longer gullible enough to believe in things such as toilet gnomes that steal you away into their watery kingdom while you do your business, so naturally my sisters' attentions turned to me, the youngest.

One night a nasty dream woke me up. I tried to ignore my childish fears and go back to sleep, but I remember the moon shining through the window, onto the bed, and on a ghostly white hand that was creeping over the edge of the mattress. Creeping towards my face. When you are four years old, this is a terrifying experience. I mustered what courage I had and smacked the hand away. Before I could celebrate any victory, the hand shot back up and grabbed my neck.

Cue the quick fade to fear-induced unconsciousness and my tale shoots forward twenty-five years. I am talking to my sister about reoccurring nightmares and I bring up this weird one I have about an alien hand strangling me. My sister looks at me, guilt covers her face. Covers her face like simple flour covers a hand and transforms it into a nightmare.

Enough about me. This special issue of Fiction Vortex is strictly horror, for obvious October-related reasons. We give a big thanks to Stoker Finalist Michael R. Collings for being our guest judge. We also have an extra story by him (which didn't appear on our site) for your horrific pleasure. Look to his works, especially his book Writing Darkness for examples of how horror can haunt a reader.

You will notice a particular lack of graphic horror. Like my sisters, the Fiction Vortex staff feels that psychological terror is extremely effective. We could give you detailed descriptions of monsters. We could supply a supernatural scapegoat to pin the source of your fears upon. Yet in the end we know, as well as you do, that true terror isn't from the dark corners of the world, but from the dark recesses of your mind, and that beneath a thin layer of imagination (or even flour) the true monsters are quite human.

Spooky Vortices,

Mike Cluff

Editor-in-Chief

Fiction Vortex

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#  DeathSong

by Michael R. Collings, Guest Judge of the October 2013 Horror Issue

A month had passed since we filed beside the closed casket, barely able to touch a finger to the polished walnut top. It had looked more like a closed organ console than a final resting place.

And since then, I had not dared come here to play. The organ had belonged to him; we played on sufferance at best, his presence surrounding us as we did our lessons on the ivory keys. Long, thin fingers would stab out, pointing the proper key, touching the correct stop. We loved him ... and feared him.

But now I had to play again. The janitor had left; the chapel sat empty as I unlocked the organ loft, my key clicking against the lock. I brushed my hand on the light switch; a bare bulb glowed antique gold.

And I played. Softly at first — preludes he had loved, quiet balanced harmonies of flutes whispering in counterpoint. I raised one hand to the upper keyboard and felt gentle tension in two voices sinking deeper and deeper into each other. I almost believed ... almost hoped to see a finger reach toward the manuals, toward that single stop that would make my heart cry and wring echoes from the silence.

I don't know how long I played. When I feel like that, I enter the organ, become one with it. Time becomes meaningless. But gradually I noticed that my fingers were stiff, my vision beginning to blur. Each note on the page was preceded by a ghostly presence. I stood and stretched. Outside the window above my shoulder, darkness pressed. A wind must have risen. Something scraped against the roof, murmured against the windows in the chapel.

I sat down again. This time, my melodies rang louder, more stridently as I fought a growing weariness. My fingers stumbled on Beethoven, even on Bach. The scrapings outside seemed louder, more insistent.

And then I knew ... somehow I knew that I was hearing more than elm branches scratching tiles. I heard something in the chapel — not much ... only the faintest suggestion of a sound. But it differed from the others. It sounded like ... footsteps, perhaps ... or a body sliding across a wooden pew, then lifting itself to stand in the aisle. It sounded ... purposeful.

"You idiot," I said, startled as my voice echoed above the organ's softness. "There's nothing there. It's just wind."

But I stopped playing, stopped and stood and peered through the opening between organ loft and chapel.

Some shadowy form huddled against the altar. Even as I watched, it shuffled forward, making a soft scraping as of something barely substantial against the carpet.

I jerked back and my foot slipped onto the bass pedals. Through the silence rose a muted roll, a deep unwavering note.

The shadow stopped ... or at least I thought it did. I sat down, flipping frantically through my music for just the right piece. I threw off the brash diapasons and pulled out flutes, melodia, dulciana (named for its sweetness) and began fingering chords and soft arpeggios. In the breaths between chords, I listened. I heard nothing. Even the wind had died.

Then I laughed. What a fool! How many times had I played here at night, with the chapel empty and silent. How many times had I thundered Bach toccatas and rumbled marches. "Don't be silly. There's nothing there."

Even as I spoke, though, I felt it again. A shadow darker than blackness, a coldness spilling from the chapel. And I knew that only music could keep it away. I played softly meditative pieces to diminish the shadow. My mood altered from sadness and loss into fear; I played the organ — but something was playing me, touching stops in me and playing through my soul with deft power.

I threw on louder stops, defying darkness. I pressed the expression pedal, imagining as I did so the louvered doors to the pipe chambers opening wider and wider onto the empty chapel, sounds drowning minute scrapings and scuffings.

I glanced toward the chapel. The splotch of darkness floated down the aisle — a perverse, phantom bridegroom — toward me! sweeping even faster than before.

I stifled a cry and threw off everything except the muted flute and shifted without pause into "Abide With Me." The shadow stopped. But it didn't retreat.

It demanded that I play. Silence drew it closer; strident, vibrant, life-filled music drew it closer. Meditative music stopped it — but nothing drove it back.

The night passed, infinitely slowly. I tired. My fingers slipped. Notes blurred, transformed into disharmony. The shadow would deepen, and I would feel coldness washing my spine. Once I thought I felt fingers on my shoulder, when I fumbled a passage he had drilled me on for hours; I felt the anger.

Finally, I could barely keep awake. The music, the incessant quietness of it, controlled me. I wanted to sleep, had to sleep. I dropped my hands.

And the shadow was beside me, blotting out the glowing light, shadowing the keyboard itself. I screamed and crashed fingers onto the manuals, not caring what I played. I grasped the first thing from my memory — the piece we had been polishing the night he died.

With my right hand, I played the intricate sixteenth-note runs, while my left pulled stop after stop, throwing the organ on full, demanding all that it could give. I plunged my left hand through shadows and formed the opening chords of the Widor Toccata. It is fast, loud, exhausting; it makes my fingers ache and my shoulders knot; it stretches my calves to reach the octave-plus chords on the pedals. But it makes me sing.

It grew darker; I could barely see the manuals. I closed my eyes. The cold swirled closer, joining sounds like branches scraping — but inside my head, painful and insistent.

"Damn you!" I screamed, as I thrust out my foot to begin the melody. "Damn you! Leave me alone!"

My toe touched the lowest C — and I almost strangled on the wave of hatred that swept through me. I played, faster and faster until my right hand must have been only a blur — but I didn't open my eyes to see. I pulled out more stops — bass stops, rumbling giants so low I could almost count their vibrations. But I did so instinctively, without opening my eyes. The cold intensified; my fingers were like ice against the keys. I shuddered in spite of my violence as I pressed myself into the keyboard.

And then I recognized the feeling that surrounded me. Not anger. Not hatred.

Envy. Pure, unalloyed envy. It wrapped my fingers, stiffening them to the forward thrust of the music. It pressed into my mind, blurring memory. It wanted me to stop. The toccata was life, energy, movement — and it ... whatever it was ... did not want me to have that. Power and motion and vitality threatened it.

The shadow spread. Sound and silence, music and shadow struggled, with me at the center, oblivious and uncaring. Only my music mattered.

For the last crescendo I threw on the 32-foot pedal stop. The final chord — ten fingers, both feet, sounds pulling in every voice from the pipes and spanning three octaves lower than the lowest note to three octaves beyond the highest — the final chord chilled with a coldness beyond the frigid envy that filled the loft. I held the notes, pressed fingers into the ivory until they lost color and bleached as white as the keys. I closed my eyes tighter, shivering under vibrations that rattled windows in the chapel. The building itself shook as I pushed, harder and harder, drawing even more from the exhausted organ, from my exhausted mind. One grand, consummate chord to push back darkness.

I fainted.

~~~~~

When I woke, sunlight had broken through the window behind me. I was slumped against the wall. The chapel was gray. There was no lump of blackness at its center.

But there was a sound ... a low rumbling, like the lifenote that opens Zarathustra and 2001. It entered me, not through my ears but through my back and legs and feet where they touched cold stone walls or wooden bench or pedals. The loft vibrated with it; the chapel echoed it.

I stared. All of the stops had been silenced except the 32-foot bass. Its voice sounded as if from the bowels of the earth, so low as to be barely music. It seemed primal, an earthtone itself.

I straightened and turned off the power. My muscles ached; my fingers, knuckles, legs were stiff and bruised. Even my lungs pained me when I breathed.

But underneath the pain swelled a frantic joy that threatened tears and laughter and exultation. I knew what ... who I had touched. And I knew what I had to do.

Tonight I will return to the chapel. And tonight, I will play his ghost to rest.

Michael R. Collings is a two-time finalist for the Horror Writers Association annual Bram Stoker Award, once for poetry and once for non-fiction. He has written over 120 books, including bestselling horror novels, mysteries, science fiction, non-fiction (with Stephen King as a specialty) and poetry.

A professor emeritus from Pepperdine University, he is a professional editor and reviewer as well, with multiple contributions at JournalStone.com, Hellnotes.com, and in the print journal DARK DISCOVERIES.

This story originally appeared in Wer Means Man and Other Tales of Wonder and Terror (Wildside Press, 2010). Reprinted with permission from the author.

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#  Finale in Blue

by Alexandra Grunberg; published October 1, 2013

Third Place Award, October 2013 Horror Contest

Bernadette ignored the young woman's muffled screams as she added another coat of paint to the canvas. The piece glistened in the light of her tiny studio, the window shut against the pressing darkness of the night outside. The woman's body was tightly contained between the wooden back and the canvas surface stretched taut across the frame, though her minimal bucking caused the brush to jerk off course, just as Bernadette had planned.

 When she was done, she would be left the outline of a moving form against an abstract background, this one done in orange. "Flare in Orange." The body would be discarded, but the life would remain. Life in art. Art from life. It was her third piece in the series, and she was getting quite popular.

It was messy, difficult work, but after years of struggling and starving, it was worth it. Bernadette remembered attending the opening of Angelo Viscari's "River," nothing more than blue liquid moved around the floor of Le Musée de Moderne by air currents, the dull and impressionable public sheep laughing as they trailed the blue behind them while they moved on to the next exhibit, staining the white marble floor with Angelo's so-called artwork. Nothing more than currents!

She remembered Lucas DeJour's naked women, standing motionless at every doorway, children giggling openly as they pointed and adults trying to hide their smirks as they took in the view, while taking plenty of pictures. She took off her clothes every night. It was not art.

"But it's life," explained Angelo, her ex-lover, part-time friend. He smiled at her, his smile condescending, the smile of a winner to the person who jogged across the finish line last, who people cheered as a winner for just competing while laughing at them behind their backs.

"You paint beautifully, but people don't want paint," Angelo was kind enough to explain to her, as he smiled his little smile that burned like red fire through her blood, tightening her throat, shortening her breath, clouding her vision. "They want life. Your work is static. Your work is dead."

Your work is dead.

Bernadette knew that, at that moment, she snapped.

The closest thing to her was a canvas, so she grabbed the thick fabric and pressed it over Angelo's face, pressing harder and harder with increasing resolve and a surprising and frightening joy. He struggled against her, but she was strong in her rage, and he had been caught off guard, still in complete disbelief as he died by her hand. In a desperate attempt, he lunged away from her, throwing himself headfirst into the brick divider of her small studio with a loud and, to Bernadette, satisfying crack.

He fell to the ground, his body limp, his limbs splayed at odd angles, blood seeping through the rug from the freely flowing break of his skull. A paint can, balanced on the divider, fell on its side from the impact, and a lighter, pinker red, splashed on the fabric that sat loosely over his still twitching face as he eased slowly and painfully into death.

Angelo went still, but the movement remained, stained red and full of life. He had given up his life and had become her art. "Rebirth in Red." Bernadette eased her conscience, convincing herself that if an artist could choose their death, what better death than becoming what they loved?

His body was found the next morning, floating in the river by Bernadette's apartment, but she was never considered a suspect as it was never considered a murder. The police ruled Angelo's death a suicide. A common fate for an artist. They all seemed to die so young with so much unfulfilled potential. Bernadette dedicated her piece to him, and critics swore they could feel Angelo's spirit in the violence and passion of her piece.

The next one to go was Lucas. She invited him over for drinks, drugged him, and trapped him inside her specially made frame, large enough for a body to move within, tight enough that he could not escape. She was able to work on her piece, entitled "Life in Purple," this time a whole body instead of just a face, without worrying about her work being judged as static, or dead, though Angelo's grating words still echoed in her ears. When she was done, she hit Lucas repeatedly over the head with her paint can. The critics stated that the faint red hues, almost like a halo, were a lovely homage to her last piece.

When they found his body, in the same river, Bernadette was once again skipped as a suspect, as no one was looking for a murderer. The police decided that Lucas' suicide was a copycat of Angelo's, another example of the unstable mind of an artist. His head injury must have been caused by hitting the edge of the bridge he jumped off of, or the jutting top of a pipe under the water. Journalists hypothesized that they were lovers, and Lucas killed himself in despair over Angelo's death. Bernadette told reporters that, no matter the cause, their deaths were a tragic loss to the art world, and that her new piece would be coming out the next week.

Bernadette did not know this girl, an art student studying abroad who had been inspired by her work and was ecstatic that Bernadette would take time out of her busy schedule to chat with her about art, careers, and life. It was as easy as preparing Lucas, easier actually because Lucas was not exactly a slim man and this girl slid easily into place.

Bernadette poured the last few drips of golden-orange by the girl's feet. Her limited ability to kick still made the paint flow beautifully, a clear struggle trapped in a modern still life. Bernadette picked up the now empty paint can and with great joy and gusto added the final touch of red, the necessary thread tying her pieces together. She sighed as she admired her work. She was not worried about the girl, who was now motionless, still trapped. Young ladies disappeared in Europe all the time.

Bernadette took out her cell phone and called Le Musée de Moderne. Tomorrow night she would install her new piece.

~~~~~

"You can leave now," said Bernadette.

The two workers who had just fastened her canvas to the wall nodded and left her. They were used to temperamental artists, and Bernadette was known to become enraged if someone crowded around her pieces for too long.

The museum was dark now, empty. Compared to the laughter and shouts of tourists, the clicking of cameras and squealing of children that filled the museum during the day, the quietness was eerie. Static. Dead.

Bernadette smiled. The museum could never be completely dead with her pieces hanging, so beautiful, so alive on the wall. And this new piece was really her masterpiece. The museum promised her that, as long as she kept painting, they would keep buying, but Bernadette wondered if she would ever top "Flare in Orange." She wondered if it was because she had used a younger model than the first two paintings. The girl had more life to give Bernadette's work.

The piece was gorgeous, oranges vibrant, and Bernadette swore that she could still see the figure move, its violent bucking manipulating the paint that flowed across the surface freely, dripping onto the floor.

Bernadette frowned.

She walked over to where the painting hung and knelt down, brushing her thumb across the two spots of orange on the white marble floor.

The painting had plenty of time to dry. Maybe these orange dots weren't paint at all, but some kind of cleaning fluid trailing from the workers' boots. Bernadette would have to tell them to clean themselves off before coming into her gallery again.

A third orange drop splattered by her knee.

Bernadette stood up and backed away from the painting. It was more than alive in the art sense, in the way the critics and public loved so much. The paint was wet and writhing over the surface, rivulets of orange flowing and splattering as the figure in the painting thrashed. Bernadette could see the canvas billow and flatten with the movement, the paint flowing around the imprinted image of the girl's body as she desperately tried to escape. Bernadette clasped her hands to her ears, but could still hear the muffled sound of the girl's screams.

Was she still in there? Had Bernadette made some mistake?

No, no. She had thrown the girl into the river when she was through, same as Angelo and Lucas. Another artist gone mad. Another grievous death.

Then why was the painting moving?

"Your work is dead."

Bernadette spun around, and faced the flowing stain of Angelo's head, as it rocked and turned the canvas. Red pooled beneath the piece, paint and blood, reaching out toward her feet. Bernadette stepped back, but had to avoid the purple that spilled from Lucas' hands as his image pressed out from the canvas.

"You are life! I made you life!" Bernadette screamed. "Help, someone help!"

No one came.

"Your work is dead."

The canvas had become soft like putty. Lucas and the young girl had reached out so far their torsos were free from the wall, their orange and purple arms pushing out towards Bernadette, grasped and leaving splattered drops on the floor and walls. Bernadette backed up and heard a dull thud behind her; something pressed against her leg. She looked down to see the wet, red form of Angelo's head, free from "Rebirth in Red," staining her stockings with sticky fluid. Bernadette screamed and kicked it away, then ran from the room.

She had to get out of there. She was losing her mind.

But it was hard for her to run. Her leg, where Angelo's head had rested, felt unsteady and unsupportive. She reached down and grasped her paint-coated calf. The flesh was too soft, like a barely solid goop, like half-dried paint. The fabric of her stocking felt stiff. Like canvas.

She heard something wet and plodding in the darkness behind her. Three somethings making their way to her, trailing their mess behind them.

Bernadette ran, limping, crooked, racing as best she could through the galleries, hearing her art following relentlessly behind her. In her panic, all the halls looked the same. She could not tell if she was heading toward an exit or trapping herself further inside the museum.

She heard footsteps coming up closer behind her, and as she chanced a glance behind her, she fell flat through a doorway into another gallery, landing hard with a faint splash.

The front of her body was soaked blue, as the currents of Angelo's masterpiece flowed around her, and then over her. She began to sink. Bernadette knew that the blue liquid was only inches deep, and yet her body continued to submerge itself into darkness. She kicked out, desperate, and the blue flowed around her beautifully, the struggle for life sinking into art, deeper and deeper until the currents flowed red.

~~~~~

The next day, Le Musée de Moderne was packed with critics, reporters, and tourists, all reveling in the glory that was Bernadette's complete gallery. Many were surprised that Bernadette did not attend the opening, but few were concerned. Her body would not be found until days later, floating in the river by her apartment, her dress stained red, purple, and orange. Another unstable mind. A common fate for an artist.

But her legacy would live on in her paintings. "Rebirth in Red," "Life in Purple," "Flare in Orange," and the greatest of all, "Finale in Blue."

Critics swore that it was a self-portrait, a final flight into immortality before she abandoned the mortal, static world. Janitors claimed that at night the piece seemed to move, the canvas pressing outward, the paint still flowing around her form, though journalists wrote their stories off as unnecessary publicity for an already popular collection. The pieces were so alive. The public flocked to see the work that possessed so much talent, sorrow, and beauty.

But much sooner than anyone could have expected, the popularity faded. People stopped going into Bernadette's gallery. People started actively avoiding it. They claimed the novelty had worn off. They claimed the work had too many sad stories attached to it. They claimed the pieces were haunted. They claimed a thousand different reasons.

Because no one would admit that, as hard as you tried, it was impossible to ignore the sounds of muffled screams.

_Alexandra Grunberg is a New York City based author and actress. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Pantheon Magazine, Perihelion Science Fiction, and more. Her story, "_Any Ending _," won third place in Fiction Vortex's August contest. You can find links to her stories at_ alexandragrunberg.wordpress.com _._

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#  Too Much Sleep

by Brendan Verville; published October 4, 2013

Linda was over for her weekly visit at my cabin, her pant legs still wet from the long canoe ride, and we were trading ghost stories. Strangely enough, out of the hundreds of conversations we had shared there in my cabin, we had never tried to scare each other as we were, or even touched upon the spiritual realm. We usually just cooked food, talked about nature, listened to music on my transistor radio, or made love. Maybe there was something about that night, like a thickness, without a single breeze to scratch the branches outside, or an animal to grace the well-worn trails. Or maybe it was because the sun had set so quickly, and it was too dark for Linda to travel home. So we curled up on my grandpa's couch with the lights as dark as the windows, and wondered what we should do.

 "That radio is a dinosaur," Linda said to me. She was right. Even a "grizzly man," as Linda liked to call me, knew that the cinderblock sized contraption sitting on my shelf would be refused by any pawn shop, even if it was given away for free. "Did you know that they make radios now that are—"

"Hey, that sounds like outside talk," I interrupted playfully. She laughed, but did not persist. She knew it was a lost cause with me. Sometimes she would come over and mention in passing something from the news, or a new technology that interested her, and I would always cut her short. Twelve years ago I had left the world, to distance myself from those distractions, politics, money, technology. I wasn't that old of a man, only in my late thirties, and Linda was just a little older than me, old enough to understand my strange fascination with the wilderness, and my reluctance toward society.

The childhood summers at my grandpa's cabin were some of the happiest memories I still keep, fishing in the lake, hiking up the hills, chasing squirrels up and down trees. He had built the cabin with his own hands, and then later settled there to live a life of simplicity, completely alone, yet content. After my grandpa died twelve years ago, leaving the cabin in my name, I vowed that I would live completely self-reliant in the forest like him, growing my own food, hunting my own meat, and finally rejoining the nature I had been born into as a dandelion seed. If only that cold wind hadn't stolen me away and dropped me into an even colder world.

I only kept the radio around for Linda, in case we wanted to listen to some music. Hell, I didn't even have power. The radio ran on batteries and the lamps in my cabin were oil. Still, she enjoyed visiting my cabin. She felt like she was going back in time whenever she stepped through my door. She was used to it by now. You see, whenever we met, she always crossed the lake to visit me, but I never crossed to visit her. She stopped trying to convince me to visit the town on the other side of the lake. Even though it only had a population of a few hundred people, I considered that town civilization, the same civilization I had given up years ago.

Linda was my final connection to the outside world, the one guilty pleasure I could not do without, even after all the things I had given up for my life in the wilderness. And although I forbade her from bringing her gadgets and her newspapers into my cabin, I loved to hear her speak.

That night Linda stared longingly out the window, at the dark trees that appeared as cracks in the wall of the forest. She shivered to herself and I felt the aftershock up my own body.

"I can start a fire if you're cold," I told her. I reached over to brush the gray hairs away from her forehead. She looked at me with a set of deep green eyes, which I imagined had once been a stunning olive color in her youth.

"No, I'm not cold," she said. "I just remembered an old story I once heard. It scared the hell out of me when I was a little girl. Maybe you've heard of it, the story of the gaunt man."

"Doesn't ring a bell. "

"It's an old Japanese folk tale about a tall, spindly man that lives in the woods, disguised as one of the tallest trees. He only shows himself to children as they hike through the woods at night. He follows them home and steals their souls from their bodies as they sleep, and then traps them inside the trees for all eternity."

"Jesus, that's pretty grim," I said.

"The trees at night have always spooked me. I know it's ridiculous. I think my dad only told me the story so I wouldn't go outside at night, or else the gaunt man would get me."

"I know I've heard a story like that," I said, trying to clear her mind. "It plays off the belief that when we go to sleep, our spirit leaves our body to wander the earth. One day a man sat down under a tree in the forest to sleep, and he decided to leave his body to explore. When he returned to enter his body, it was missing. A deer came by and told him that a cougar had eaten him. The man's spirit entered the deer's body instead, and he lived for many years as an animal in the woods. Then one day his path crossed that of the cougar, and he ran into a lake to escape, but he drowned, or something. I can't really remember it now."

"What's the moral of that story?" Linda asked with a laugh.

"Just because you can swim as a human doesn't mean you can swim as a deer," I offered her. "That's about the only scary story I have."

Linda tapped an elongated nail against her lip. She rested her head on my shoulder and tucked her legs under our blanket. "I got another. I don't know where I heard it, but someone once told me that when you die you're visited by three spirits, who judge your sins and prepare you for the afterlife."

"Like the ghosts of Christmas past?" I laughed, but she was too consumed in her own thoughts to hear me. "Wait, speaking of ghosts," I said, pushing up from the couch. She watched me with interest as I rooted around in an old bureau and returned with a faded Polaroid picture. I handed it to her and she squinted in the darkness. I brought over a lamp and we looked at it in the halo of light. In the picture, my father and his brother were inside the cabin, standing by the fire and holding the head of a deer up for the camera to see, their trophy from a day of hunting. Standing beside them was a faded image, blurred, yet still crisp enough to make out. I didn't even need to point out the period attire, the head, shoulder, and the clear facial features for her to see it was the transparent figure of a man. She gasped and looked me in the eye.

"Is this—"

"My grandpa," I said. "This picture was taken only days after he died. My dad and his brother came out here one weekend in his memory, and this is what they found. Their father posing in the picture with them."

"Oh my God! That's so ... _creepy_!" she blurted. I almost had to tear the picture out of her hand to return it to the drawer. "Do you still think he's here?"

I looked around the living room as if expecting to find my grandpa leaning up against the fireplace. "I don't know. I sense him sometimes, but that may be because all this stuff was once his, and it still holds his scent ... his _energy_. If he was still here you'd think he'd say hello some time."

A crack of lighting lit up the room and we both jumped. We looked at each other with our hands on our hearts, smiling and breathing hard. She hurried to the window and looked outside. Already there was the pitter of pin and needle raindrops on the glass. She cursed and hurried to find her coat.

"Whoa, I thought you were spending the night," I called after her.

"I left all the windows open in my house. I didn't expect it to rain tonight," she said, opening my door. "And we both know when it rains here, it _rains_."

I followed her outside with my collar turned up. We strode down the hill together and onto the wooden dock over the lake, now choppy with dark ripples of water. Linda's canoe bobbed in the surf, tied to a post with a length of rope. The rain was picking up now, and the clouds had covered the moon completely, snuffing out all natural light. We only had the soft haze of the houses on the other side of the lake, where people sat around electric TVs and glowing light bulbs.

I had a flash of the first day I'd met her, there in the lake, right outside my front lawn. I was swimming and she happened by in her canoe. I remember coming to the surface near her boat, surprising her so much that she dropped her paddle. My face tensed with a smile, but then dropped again.

I kissed her sadly and she sensed my distress. "Come across with me," she said.

"Linda, you know I can't."

"Come on, I can't walk home alone, not with all those dark trees. Who will protect me from the gaunt man?" She prodded me with a smile, and that smile was so lovely I swooned into her.

"I don't know."

She nodded her head, the raindrops trickling down the length of her bangs and the wrinkles on her face. She kissed me again and climbed into the canoe. Before she could go, I felt my body duplicate into two separate doubles. My double stepped out of my body as if it were only shrugging off a coat, and stepped into the canoe with Linda. She squealed happily and threw her arms around him. Both of them selected a paddle and set off across the dark lake, which might as well have been an ocean for me, standing on the dock, watching them go. This private island would be the death of me, surely.

~~~~~

A week later I was in the woods behind my cabin in the late afternoon, watching a deer through the telescopic lens of my rifle. I thought about Linda and the last time I had seen her, stepping into her canoe in the rain. I hadn't seen her since then. More than a week had passed and she had missed our date together. I had waited by the shore of the lake, hoping to catch a glimpse of her canoe, but it never came. What worried me was that she never missed a date. I couldn't call her because I didn't have a phone, and I wasn't about to paddle over to her side. Was she angry with me? Had something happened to her?

I cursed myself for not getting into that canoe. It hadn't been the first opportunity I'd passed up. It used to be that my promise to my grandpa was enough of a conviction, the promise to take care of his cabin and live there for as long as I could. At the end of his life he worried so much about his land, and it later became my major fear, a shared burden that was passed down for me to carry. To leave it for a day would be to abandon it, and with the abandonment of the cabin would be the abandonment of my duty. My isolation from society was nothing short of a sacred oath, like something a monk would devote his life to, knowing that it was for some greater good, not yet fully realized. If I was to cross that lake, it would be like undoing all the long years I had proudly carved into those cabin walls. It would be like a smoker disciplining himself for a decade and then suddenly giving into temptation. After that, what is there? I had gone too far to give up now, and that was what killed my grandpa in the end. Once he had disciplined himself to that point of no return, his destiny was already sung, and when he did pass, he died in the upstairs bedroom of his cabin, without a single loved one at his bedside.

As I held my rifle, I thought of my grandpa, and how he had first taught me to handle it, with the stock comfortably nestled against my shoulder. I sat on the upper bough of a tree with my legs dangling down, listening to the pops and cracks of an animal in motion. Then a deer strode into the clearing ever so carefully, a female doe, older, with a thick pelt and murky eyes. I watched the deer through my sight, counting my heartbeats. I held my breath and applied pressure to the trigger. I thought about the deer head from the ghost picture, and how Linda had responded to it, shaking excitedly like a child.

The deer looked right up at me and I choked on my breath. It didn't move. It just stared at me with those dark eyes. I knew that if I stayed completely still it couldn't sense my presence. Then it spoke to me in a deep and raspy voice.

"She's not coming back," the deer told me.

I panicked and squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck the deer in the shoulder and I watched its flesh ripple as if a pebble had been thrown into a body of water. It collapsed to the grass without a sound. I didn't stop to gather the carcass. I didn't even look back at it. Jumping down from my perch, I sprinted back to my cabin and charged inside. With the gun still in my hand, I collapsed on the couch. I tossed it aside and it skated across the hardwood floor, to rest by the hearth of the fireplace. I put my head in my hands and gulped for air as my world spun behind my eyelids.

I needed a splash of cold water on my face, so I stood up to find the kitchen. The room spun and I caught myself against the dining room table. Right when my vision started to clear, I watched a man materialize at one of the chairs, only a shadow at first, and then slowly gathering dimension and shape, as though developing on a sheet of film. I jumped back with my heart seizing in my chest. It was my grandpa as a younger man, as I remembered him from when I was a boy, and he was as solid as me. His blonde hair was slicked back and he wore a crisp vest over a red turtleneck sweater. He smiled at me brightly and offered me to sit with him. I plopped down hard into an open chair.

"How're you doing, son?" he asked me with a voice that didn't quite match his lips. The voice sounded distant as if it were underwater or imprisoned inside a seashell.

"Gran?" I croaked, and he nodded his head. "Are you really here?" At this point all feeling had trickled off my body to pool around my heels.

"I've always been here," he said. "You have to cross the water. Nothing keeps you here, or me."

"What're you saying?"

"Sometimes we stray too far from our roots, and can't go back. We all carry darkness with us, and hers ran deep. It's what carried me to this dark corner of the world, but I couldn't escape it. Not really. It's when we sleep too much, and hold fast to these dreams, that we're not sure what's important anymore, what's truly _real_."

Before I could speak, my grandpa was already fading out of existence. I watched him go, and felt my energy return to my body. I bolted outside and looked out across the lake. Usually I could see the houses on the other side, but today they were obscured by a heavy mist over the surface of the water. I'd never seen anything like it in all my years at the cabin. I stood on the edge of the dock, wondering how I was going to get across. As if to answer my question, a lone canoe came drifting into view, empty and somewhat unsettling. It bumped with the dock and I reached over to grab hold. I fell inside and struggled to right myself in the chaos of splashing water. I found a lone paddle and waded forward into open water, putting my grandpa's cabin at my back. I hadn't left my little island for twelve long years, but strangely enough, I didn't look back, not that I could see anything in the thickening fog.

I felt like I was out there for hours, which didn't seem right, judging by the size of the lake. I watched as the fog turned to a solid grey, and then into a black screen. The sun had left me with nothing but a chilled wind and a wet pair of pants, too cold for comfort. The lake was so still and quiet. I had never heard it that silent, not without the incessant chirping of the crickets. The dip of my paddle into the water hardly made a sound. I started to breathe through my mouth, just so I could hear something.

Finally the mist cleared and my canoe grinded with the shore. I fell onto cold grass and inhaled the night air. I looked up, and illuminated in the soft light of the moon, was Linda's cottage, only a doll's house from where I was, but I knew it was hers. She had often pointed to it from across the lake, sometimes through a set of binoculars for a better look. The house with the red trim, and the cherry tree in the yard. It was her favorite tree in the garden, she told me. A strange grove of trees separated me from the house, which I hadn't noticed before. I walked slow, watching as the naked trees scratched their branches together. Then I was right underneath them, their bodies nothing short of brick towers, and their arms like the complicated workings of a spider web, weaving and knitting into one collective canopy over my head.

Then something moved to the left while all the trees blew to the right. It appeared as only a crooked figure stepping out from behind one of the trees, and once it joined my path, I saw that this creature was all legs, and they were long. It moved toward me with the delicacy of a spider, another set of thin lines extending from its body in the shape of arms. Long spindly fingers curled and uncurled within its hand. In the night it was only a black figure without any real substance, but I could see what appeared to be a roundish head set atop its twig of a body. I could see the reflection of light in its eyes, only dimes from where I was standing.

I watched panic-stricken, rooted to the spot as the creature slinked toward me without ever making a sound. It stopped a few yards away, standing fifteen feet tall at the least, its legs spread, and its arms hanging low to the ground, fingers curling and uncurling. It was hunched over, head bowed as if in prayer. It stood perfectly still. One might have mistaken it for a tree growing out of the very path, if it hadn't spoken to me of course.

"We don't speak of such stories, not even when the trees are not themselves, when they are shadowed," the gaunt man said. His voice was but a whisper, a breathy exhale of air, which mimicked the sound of the wind through the trees. "Don't we know such stories act as prayers, drawing the darkness in rather than the light?"

I had nothing to say. I stood below the creature, waiting for it to do something, anything. Even its fingers had stopped moving. I blinked my eyes a few times, and the more moisture I brought to them, the more the creature resembled a tree in the middle of the path. After awhile I realized that its spread legs were actually two different trees touching, and the arms were only low hanging boughs with branch-like fingers. The head was nothing more than a knot in one of the trunks.

I slowly navigated around the trees and ran the rest of the way to Linda's house. It was dark, and all the windows were closed. I ran past the cherry tree, and into the house, skating up the stairs as if I was on a track. I passed through another door and there was Linda, sleeping in her bed with the moonlight spilling in through the un-shaded window, throwing crazy shadows across the ripples of her blankets. And I was lying in the bed with her, at least my body was, my arm around her waist. I looked at the window and the pane of glass was still speckled with fresh rain.

I hurried to Linda's bedside, my hands reaching out to touch her face, but passing right through. I saw that she wasn't breathing, and her skin was so pale, her mouth hanging slightly ajar.

"I went home with her that night," I said out loud. "She didn't go out in the dark alone." My face filled with tears, and I didn't know if they were real or not. I wasn't even sure that the fingers that wiped them away were real. They _felt_ solid.

I kneeled by the side of the bed for some time, staring at Linda's vacant face. I wondered whether I should reenter my body and try to shake her awake. I wondered whether I should call an ambulance or perform CPR, but I couldn't sense the slightest flicker of life in her face. I stood up and floated out through the window, hovering above Linda's tidy little garden and cherry tree. I was sad that I hadn't visited this garden earlier, that I hadn't helped her trim those hedges or plant those flowers into the soft soil. I was sad that I hadn't seen her at her best, happily standing below that tree, picking the cherries like candy, maybe saving a few for her pantry, or popping a few into her mouth right then and there.

Even though the wind had died down and the night had gone still, the cherry tree waved at me, its branches clicking against Linda's bedroom window. It seemed to groan at my presence, every bud and leaf on its body trembling with life. Light filled my senses and I placed a hand on the trunk, so warm to the touch. I felt her stir inside her earthly shell, her voice coming to meet me across a long distance. I smiled and pressed my face against the bark, feeling her lips kiss my cheek.

Something insisted on rooting me to this world, at least for a little while longer. Everything I needed was there in nature, only not in the nature I had always envisioned on my distant island, forever swimming in the lake and chasing squirrels. I found everything in the warm embrace of a cherry tree in the rain soaked garden of my deceased love. And to think a town was right there at my back, where people still shopped in stores and woke up to the morning news. It had been there all along, and just like my grandpa and his cabin long faded on a crumpled Polaroid, so had I.

Brendan Verville is an English student in Denver, Colorado. Good horror stories were some of his first introductions to reading, and then to his writing. His love of the macabre has gotten so bad that he can't enjoy a dream unless it's a nightmare, just so he can experience the relief of waking up from it. Recently his works have been published in the Metrosphere and From the Depths literary magazines. "Too Much Sleep" is dedicated to fellow ghost storyteller, Phil Gudgel, who first showed him Slender.

(Back to Table of Contents)

#  The Most Qualified Applicant

by Kathy Charles; published October 8, 2013

Allison White exited the Columbus Circle subway at a brisk pace, heels clacking noisily on the pavement. She was confident in the direction she was going, her stride full of purpose. She had to be. Her very livelihood depended on it.

Allison was a woman who knew things. She knew how to screen a phone call in a professional and courteous manner. She knew how to groom a Bernese Mountain dog and feed it a veterinarian-prescribed diet. She even knew how to change a light bulb in a chandelier. That task had been particularly challenging, not so much for its complexity, but for the sheer height of the damn thing, hanging at least twenty feet above a living area bigger than her whole apartment.

 Now she needed to know new things. Like how to hail a cab in peak hour traffic, a skill rarely called upon in L.A. where drivers ferried studio executives — men who had little reason to travel their own course — from one meeting to the next. She would need to know which deli could deliver at a moment's notice, how to get the best seats at Broadway's hottest shows, and whether the Midtown Tunnel or the Brooklyn Bridge would offer the fastest way to JFK Airport. Allison was confident she would find her feet in no time, if only someone would give her the opportunity. What she needed more than anything was a break.

"Can you spare some change?"

The beggar leaned forward and shook his paper cup hopefully. Allison didn't make eye contact, didn't even slow her pace. _I handled that well_ , she thought proudly as she continued down the street without breaking her stride. _I know how to handle things._

Allison had been on the East Coast for three months, so far with little luck. The recruitment agencies didn't want to take her on, even with her A-list experience and impeccable references.

"This is New York, darling," one uptight manager with an even tighter ponytail had helpfully informed her. "We do things differently here. The needs of our clients are, well, a tad more sophisticated than your West Coast counterparts. The needs of our clients are _significant_."

"Of course," Allison had found herself eagerly agreeing, buying into the bi-coastal snobbery. "I'm originally from New England. I liked living in California, but I agree — the lifestyle is _very_ superficial."

"New England is _not_ Manhattan," the woman sneered before abruptly closing her file. "Come back and see us in five years, once you have some _real_ experience."

Experience was hard to come by if no one would give you a job. At her darkest moments Alison regretted leaving California, thought she had made a terrible mistake that her career would never recover from. _Employers don't like gaps in a resume_ , she thought painfully. The longer she stayed unemployed the harder it would be for her to find a job. Then there was her age to contend with. At thirty-five she felt positively ancient, no match for the fresh-faced kids straight out of college who were hungry for experience and willing to work for nothing.

Allison needed a way to pay the rent, and she needed it fast, or she'd be back in Maine living with her parents, working at her Dad's hardware store and dating the local fishermen on Saturday nights. Grist for the writing mill, sure, but far from the creative, literary life Allison had in mind for herself.

California had been bearable until he broke up with her. She should have known better than to date a screenwriter; they were as self-absorbed as actors, with a much greater chip on their shoulders. She had attempted to make herself indispensable to him: reading his scripts and offering much-needed encouragement, refilling the stationery cabinet with online orders from Staples, and making sure the fridge was full of microwave meals so he wouldn't need to leave the house. She thought she was ingratiating herself to the point where he couldn't live without her, but the truth was she had over-shot the mark. She was crowding him, he had said. He needed space to breath. But if she wanted something casual, a no-strings-attached partner that could be called upon at a moment's notice, he would be open to that, provided his schedule was clear.

It was probably for the best, she thought as she made her way toward Central Park. If she were honest with herself she would have admitted that not only his talent but also his prolific nature caused her enormous unease. He found writing so easy, practically pounded the keys with abandon while she sulked in the bedroom, unable to put even one word to page. She didn't have the hubris for success in Hollywood, but she could arrange a dinner party for twelve guests with only twenty-four hours notice, a skill that could be utilized in any city brimming with affluent dwellers. Within twenty-four hours of being unceremoniously dumped she had booked a ticket to New York City, figuring a move to the home of _Vanity Fair_ and _The New Yorker_ might reignite her literary ambitions, or at the very least give her a new pool of men to cull from. They say you should never move to a new city with a broken heart, and definitely not without a job. Allison had done both these things.

_Sometimes I'm my own worst enemy_ , she thought ruefully as she made her way to her appointment, the incessant honking of the New York City cabs putting her even more on edge. After her disastrous experience with the recruitment agencies Allison had been forced to trawl Craigslist for positions. Most of the ads for personal assistants were thinly veiled requests for sexual partners. Allison had found this out the hard way. An "upwardly-mobile businessman seeking executive support" had turned out to be grocery store owner in the Meatpacking District with a foot fetish. Another asking for a "driven, ambitious, career-minded woman" was actually a recruiter for a high-class call-girl ring. She had actually seriously considered that proposition for a brief moment. College students did it, so why not her? She might even get a red-hot memoir out of the experience. The idea had played fitfully on her mind as she continued to send out her resume into the black hole of job-hunting, until finally one day she received an email that buoyed her out of her prostitution-considering reverie.

Miss White,

Thank you for your interest in this position. Impressed with your resume. Can you come for an interview? Address below.

All the best,

BENNETT M. AMBERSON

She had applied for so many jobs she couldn't even remember which one this was. She backtracked her steps and found the advertisement.

"Philanthropist seeks indispensable assistant. Support required for completion of important project. Absolute professionalism and discretion required." The address was the Upper West Side.

Allison strolled past the park, enjoying the warm air, the sun and the way the light played on the leaves. The light in New York was different from Los Angeles; it was softer, easier on the eyes. The L.A. sun would burn you up in a New York minute.

She consulted the map on her phone then looked up, seeing her destination for the first time: an old, opulent four-story brownstone with large glazed windows that overlooked the park.

Stockbroker, she thought as she approached. Or maybe a hedge fund manager. A nice change at least from the spoiled, bratty A-list of Beverly Hills. The doorman smiled amiably as she approached.

"Miss White?" he enquired cheerfully.

"Yes, hello," Allison replied, smiling broadly. First impressions were always important, especially with the rest of the help, with whom Allison made it her duty to strike up an alliance. Although such a gesture in this case would probably be short lived, Allison thought grimly. The doorman looked a hundred years old, though a spritely one hundred, she had to admit. She'd heard her father pronounce many times that working kept a man young. The day he retired was the day he'd drop dead, he was often fond of saying.

The doorman ushered her in with a slight quiver in his step. "Mr. Amberson is expecting you."

Allison stepped through the doorway into the foyer, spied the gleaming steel elevators at the end of the hall.

"Top floor," the doorman croaked, as if he could read her mind.

"Thank you, Mr...?"

"Just call me Harold," he said with a smile, graciously putting her at ease.

"Harold. I hope to be seeing much more of you," she said with a laugh.

"I'm sure you will," he said kindly. "You look like a good one."

"Why thank you," she said, her spirits suddenly lifted by this show of support. "Let's hope so."

Allison made her way to the elevators and pressed the button.

A brownstone with an elevator. Nice.

The doors opened and she stepped inside, pushing the button marked clearly with a 'P.' Suddenly she felt even more tense for a reason she couldn't clearly discern. Maybe it was the way the elevator doors closed, snapping shut with a speed she didn't think she had seen before. Maybe it was the color of the elevator, a dark smudgy brown resembling dirt that made her think of being buried alive. She put her growing unease down to pre-interview jitters. She couldn't afford to be this anxious; it would completely jeopardize her changes of being hired. She needed to be the very epitome of grace and ease. She resolved when she got home to up her dosage of St. John's Wort to nine a day. Six obviously wasn't cutting it anymore.

The elevator pinged and the doors opened. Immediately Allison's tension began to subside. The penthouse apartment was markedly different to the rest of the building; a sleek, modern fit out of brushed chrome and marble floors and minimalist furnishings.

"Miss White?"

Allison turned in the direction of the voice. Mr. Amberson was strode confidently toward her, hand outstretched.

"Hello!" she said, putting on her best stock cheery voice. "It's very nice to meet you."

She shook his hand, noting with a sense of growing excitement that Mr. Amberson was, by any standard, a very handsome man. With his slim face, chiseled features and strong chin, he bore a passing resemblance to a German actor she had seen in a movie recently whose name she couldn't remember. His hair was a light sandy brown swept casually to the side, his eyes blue and playful. His tailored black suit sat perfectly on his slim, almost athletic frame, and when he smiled he showed all his teeth, in a way that was cheerful and welcoming. Allison was immediately relieved. Even if he was a weirdo, he was a rich weirdo, and any sexual advances, she would be ashamed to admit, wouldn't entirely be unwelcome.

"Please. Take a seat."

"Thank you."

Allison followed Amberson to the leather sofas, sat down next to a plush black velvet cushion. She placed her bag on the floor and looked around.

"You have such a beautiful apartment."

"Thank you."

"How long have you lived in this building?"

"Since it was built."

It must be one of those newer brownstones made to look old, Allison thought. The exterior and the lobby were definitely turn-of-the-century style architecture.

"Well, it's gorgeous," Allison gushed. "You must have a lot of famous neighbors in the building"

"Actually, I don't have any neighbors."

Allison looked at him quizzically. He folded his hands, looking uncomfortable.

"I, uh, own the whole building," he said modestly.

"Oh."

"I plan to get other tenants soon, but for the moment I like the privacy."

Allison detected a hint of a British accent.

"Are you from England?"

"Originally, yes."

"I've always wanted to go to England. My favorite writer is Shakespeare."

"Oh?"

Allison blushed. What a stupid, common thing to say. Shakespeare, indeed. Mr. Amberson rescued her from her embarrassment.

"Do you have a copy of your resume with you?"

"Yes, of course."

Allison bent over and removed a blue folder from her bag. She handed it to Amberson, who flicked through it casually then deposited it on the coffee table between them without a second glance.

"Harold has already told me much about your background."

"Harold?" Allison asked, confused. "You mean the doorman?"

Amberson laughed. "Harold is more than a doorman. He's been with me for a very long time. He helps me attend to matters such as this."

"Oh." Allison understood completely. Bennett Amberson was obviously from a wealthy family, one that Harold had worked with all his life. It wasn't uncommon among the rich to have servants who had been with them their entire lives. He might have to look for a new servant soon though, Allison thought. Harold was getting on in years.

"I was very impressed with your credentials," he continued. "Los Angeles is a perilous place. I do not like to travel there too often if I can help it, but unfortunately my business requires that I be there from time to time."

"It certainly is weird," Allison said with a laugh. "I much prefer the East Coast. The people here are much more hospitable."

Amberson grinned. "Yes. Quite. So, tell me about you, Allison White. Apart from the credentials, which are quite in order. What are your interests? Your hobbies?"

"Well, I'm a writer," she offered sheepishly. He raised an eyebrow.

"A writer? Well, that _is_ interesting. Would I know any of your work?"

"Probably not. I write short stories, mainly."

"Ah. Are you well known?" he asked, a hint of concern creeping into his voice. Allison shook her head vehemently.

"Oh no. I did have a story published in Cosmopolitan magazine last year, but nothing recently. I'm actually taking a break from writing to focus on my career. So don't worry – you won't find any thinly veiled tales about a highly accomplished man living on the Upper West Side with a charming manner."

She blushed, embarrassed by her overt display of flattery. She wondered if it was too much, but Amberson smiled.

"Well, that _is_ a disappointment," he said flirtatiously. "So what do you write about, Allison? The futility of existence? Man's inhumanity towards man?"

Allison cleared her throat clumsily. "Um, no, I write about ... well, love, I guess."

"Love?"

Immediately Allison felt foolish. "Well, love in contemporary society," she added, attempting to add heft to the topic.

"As admirable a theme as any other," Amberson said. "Perhaps the most admirable. For what are we without love?"

_What indeed_ , Allison thought with a small quiver of excitement.

"Well, down to business," Amberson said, slapping his knees for emphasis. "What I am looking for is someone who can be part of a very important project. Someone who could be part of the very lifeblood that sustains me. It is not your usual assignment, but it is also not without its rewards, in my opinion anyway. I hope that you would have an open mind in these matters."

"Absolutely," Allison said without hesitation. She was used to accommodating strange requests. There was the actor who asked her to procure an escort for the evening and an Eight-ball of coke. She had reminded him gently that she was a personal assistant, not a pimp, and had been unceremoniously dismissed while the actor was in a drunken stupor. Then there was the studio executive who sent her to the Hustler store on Sunset Boulevard to purchase a month's supply of his favorite lubricant, which happened to be cherry flavored. But she wasn't about to tell Mr. Amberson that story. Discretion was part of her duty to her employer. Their secrets were hers until the grave.

"I'm so sorry," Amberson said, suddenly standing. "I've been terribly rude. Can I get you something to drink? Some water? Wine perhaps?"

"Water would be fine."

Amberson disappeared into the kitchen. Allison picked up a copy of _The New York Times Review of Books_ from the coffee table, attempted to flick through it nonchalantly; her mind was racing. She wasn't normally one to entertain flights of fancy, but her head filled with fantasies of spending an eternity with Mr. Amberson, living a luxurious lifestyle as his friend, confidant, perhaps even as his wife, just like in a movie. For the first time in her life she would be truly indispensible. She would make sure of it this time.

"There we are."

Amberson placed a tall glass of water on the coaster in front of her. Allison picked up the glass, took a small sip, then placed it back down.

"Thank you."

"So, Allison, let me ask you a question. What was it that attracted you to this position?"

Allison had been asked this question many times. It was a standard query in the employer arsenal. She began to recite her well-rehearsed answer.

"Well, I think of myself as a career assistant. I enjoy being an integral component of a person's life, helping them to achieve their goals."

"Uh huh, and what about your own goals? Your own dreams?"

Allison paused. She had never been asked this before.

" _My_ dreams?"

"Yes."

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

"Um, well, I guess I would like to keep writing, maybe work on some more short stories."

"You _guess_?"

Allison shrank back. Something in Mr. Amberson's tone had inexplicably changed. There was a hardness there now, an edge she hadn't previously detected. She knew that tone well. It was judgment.

Oh God, he thinks I'm pathetic. I am. I AM pathetic.

Allison pulled nervously at her cuticles, a habit she had long tried to kick and was now showing itself at the worst possible time. Amberson's gaze didn't waver. He leaned forward, clutching his hands in front of him, dark eyes fixed on Allison's.

"You see, Allison, it strikes me that the reason you are here today is not because you want to help other's fulfill their goals and achieve their dreams and blah blah blah and all that other stuff you spout. The truth is that you are here to hide."

"I am?"

Mr. Amberson nodded.

"You see, in my experience, of which there is plenty, people like you function under the misguided notion that you are fulfilling a noble, honorable role, helping others in their quest to achieve a successful, abundant life experience. But really all you are doing is robbing yourselves. You deny yourself the right to this life of achievement because, quite simply, you are scared. Scared that if you were to attempt to create this life for yourself you would fail miserably. You are also, might I add, lecherous."

"Excuse me?" Allison rankled, her voice filling with anger. Mr. Amberson persisted, undeterred.

"You, Allison White, are, for want of a better word, a leech. You grab on to the achievements of others and think that if you assisted in any way, albeit even a small one, you can call those achievements your own. You hide in the shadows of great people and believe this imbues your own life with a sense of purpose. But it does not. Your life has no purpose, there is no meaning to it, and quite simply, any dreams of literary greatness are all for naught because you do not have the strength or willpower to go after what your heart truly desires. I, however, suffer from none of these afflictions. I am very astute at getting what I want."

Allison made a move to stand but found that she could not. Her arms flopped ineffectively to her sides, her legs splayed. She gazed blurrily at the glass filled with water on the table.

She tried to speak. Her mouth felt slack and numb.

"I, I..."

Amberson leaned forward, cocking an ear compassionately towards her.

"Yes, my dear? You wanted to say something?"

Allison's head fell down. She struggled to keep it upright, like a baby trying to lift its head for the first time.

"I... I..."

"Yes, Allison. Tell me. Tell me what you truly want."

Allison mustered as much energy as she could, as if she were taking her last dying breath.

"I want..."

"Yes?"

The word tumbled from her lips. "Love."

Amberson smiled. He reached out and stroked her face gently.

"And I shall give it to you, Allison. In spades."

Suddenly he was over her, arms reaching down. Gently he plucked Allison from the sofa as if she weighed little more than a bag of feathers, and carried her across the room.

"You're tired, Allison. You work too hard."

"I do," Allison murmured. It was true. Even though she was only thirty-five she felt a hundred years old.

"You need to rest. Believe me, I have much experience in this. I have had many assistants."

Allison gazed helplessly at the ceiling as she felt herself being carried to some other place. She attempted to speak, her eye still firmly fixed on the prize, the thing she needed most in the world.

"Do I ... have the job?" she enquired sleepily.

"Oh, yes. Absolutely."

Allison smiled. "When do I start?"

"Now."

Allison buried her face into Amberson's chest, could hear his heart beating against her ear. Suddenly everything became dark. They were in another room now, one without windows. It was cold in here, too cold, like a freezer. Allison shivered.

She looked up. It _was_ a freezer. Large slabs of meat hung on hooks all around her. She squinted, her eyes adjusting to the lack of light, and in the darkness she started to see faces, but they weren't animals. They were people.

Everything she had known had been trivial, compared to this. She knew this innately. She knew this when she felt the sharp, tingling sensation on her arm, like a bee sting. This would be her most important job yet. If anyone needed her, it was Mr. Amberson. His very life depended on it.

"There, there, Allison White. The struggle is over for you now."

"Thank you," she murmured, and Amberson heaved her up high, hoisting her against the wall as if she were no heavier than a rag doll. She looked into the eyes of the boy on the wall next to her, a young man in his twenties, his face pale white, his eyes blackened sockets, and when he looked at her he smiled.

Allison smiled too. In the darkness of the room she felt a beautiful softness envelop her, every ambition she had ever held seeping from her body like blood from an open wound, and when the hook slid into Allison's back, splitting her flesh as easily as tearing a piece of paper, she barely even noticed.

The boy beside her twitched, an involuntary spasm. _College graduate_ , she thought. _This is his first job_. From his bare arms ran two long tubes, red with his blood. She felt a pang of jealousy. He had found his true purpose so early in life. He would be spared the indignities of the working world.

"Harold..."

He was standing in front of her, needle in hand. Mr. Amberson had gone, retreated to some private part of the apartment, the seduction complete. Now it was down to business. Harold swiftly approached her, no longer the doddering old man she had encountered downstairs. With one quick movement he inserted the needle, as he had at least a hundred times before, perhaps a thousand. She watched with curiosity as the blood spilled out, running down the length of the tube to fill an IV bag that had been wheeled into place beside her.

"Thank you Harold," she said.

"My pleasure, miss. Oh, and congratulations. Welcome to the company."

"Thank you."

Harold busied himself with checking the IV, securing the needle in place with a bandage. It seemed like a good job, Allison thought. Sure, she was part of the rank and file now, but Amberson had taken a special liking to her, she was sure of that. Maybe one day, if she was good and diligent and always did as she was told, maybe one day Harold's job would be hers.

Ambition is a hard thing to kill.

_Kathy Charles is the author of 'John Belushi is Dead' (Simon & Schuster). You can find her at_ Goodreads _._

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#  Blood or Black Tears

by Jennifer Loring; published October 11, 2013

Second Place Award, October 2013 Horror Contest

"Why won't you talk to me, Marcela? Don't you like me anymore?" Soledad said.

"Nothin' to say you don't already know."

A large, red egg of flesh had swelled over Marcela's left eyebrow. Probably her mother's work. Soledad had visited Marcela in half a dozen shelters all over the city, and every time there was a fresh injury somewhere on her little body. The girl crossed her arms over her chest, her knees pulled up as far as she could manage. A defensive, protective pose. The children trusted no one but each other, and even that trust had an expiration date once they exhibited symptoms of adolescence. Most didn't expect to live that long when so many things could go wrong for them on the street.

 "She hit you again."

Marcela tugged at her fingers until her gaze fell upon Soledad's own hands. "You're marked."

"Marked? What does that mean?" Soledad followed the girl's stare. Crimson ridges where she must have scratched herself in the night rose from her skin. "Oh, I wake up with them sometimes. Need to trim my fingernails, I guess." Soledad smiled, but Marcela was having none of it.

"You know the secret stories. You pretend like you don't remember, but you made yourself forget."

"And ... how do you know this?"

She shrugged. "My cousin Solana tells me."

"Do I know your cousin? Have I talked to her in one of the shelters?"

"Don't think so." Marcela examined the job fair bulletin tacked to a corkboard, then studied the windows, anything to avoid Soledad's eyes. "Been dead a year now. She was a teacher. Somebody stuck her when she tried to break up a fight." For all the emotion she expressed, Marcela might have been talking about the ham sandwich she had for lunch. Pain was easy to control when you pretended it didn't hurt.

"Marcela, I'm very sorry about your cousin. But you said she tells you things. How is that possible?"

"She just learned to talk to me. Spirits don't know how to talk to the living at first. I could see her lips moving, but I couldn't hear her voice. Now I can." Marcela frowned. "You know how it works."

Ice-tipped needles pricked at Soledad's arms. "What does she say to you?"

Marcela squirmed in her seat. Still she refused to meet Soledad's gaze. "It ain't over for you. You should know the Weeping Woman don't keep her end of the bargain. And you ain't kept yours."

Soledad's limbs trembled with an atavistic fear, though she did not know why a child's words should affect her. She'd seen similar defense mechanisms in other kids a hundred times. Marcela's world was a room without doors, permanently barring adult entry.

"Tell your cousin I appreciate the warning. I'll see you again in a couple of weeks, okay?"

"Grown-ups never believe." Marcela's voice was as bitter as a January wind. "But you did once. You will again."

~~~~~

She stands by the window, her cornflower skin illuminated by moonlight. Her eyes are as endless as the ocean from which she comes. She brings a gift of flowers, so many flowers of white, pink, and gold that they drip like sun-dappled water from her arms. Curtains of dark hair flow around her as if she is still beneath the sea, every part of her rippling and glistening.

_Please believe in yourself as I believe in you_ , she sings, and it is wrong, all wrong, because she never speaks to adults. She is the savior of the children alone.

Say my true name. Say my name and I can help them.

_I don't know your name_ , Soledad replies, but she would not say it aloud even if she did. This is not the angel. This is not the Blue Lady.

Her beautiful face turns as white as a drained corpse. Her eyes melt in their sockets like candies and dribble down her cheeks. Blood tears from the empty black cavities spatter onto her skin. _Ay, mis hijos!_ she wails, her fingers curled into claws. The talons find the scarlet rosary around her neck and she swings it, seeking young flesh to strike. _Mis hijos! Mis hijos!_ She swings again, and Soledad lifts her hands to shield her face; the rosary cuts into her skin—

~~~~~

Marcela was no less sullen than she'd been the last time they spoke; perhaps more so, if it was possible. Bags as dark as bruises smudged the skin under her eyes. She curled her legs up under her cot and picked at the cheap cotton blanket.

"You look tired, Marcela." Soledad recalled a story about a boy who learned to sleep with his eyes open. He'd been raving about demons coming for him. She hadn't been surprised to learn of his death not long after, when a fire broke out in the shelter. A gang hit, the police said, but none of the kids believed that. Gangbangers wanted to see you die up close and personal. They didn't set fires.

"She talks to me all the time now."

"Who? Your cousin?"

Half a nod. "She say you did this. You brought this on us."

The words stung like a slap, and Soledad blinked a few times. She didn't want to lose her composure. "What does Solana say I did?"

"She say you gotta own up to it and make it right. We didn't do nothin' to deserve this. We already got nothin' left 'cept our lives, and the Weeping Woman will take those too if you don't face what you did."

"Marcela, I know it's easier to believe that demons and not people are hurting you and your friends. But sometimes people—"

"I know what people do," she snapped. An intensity that hadn't been there moments ago lit up her red-rimmed eyes. "I know my mama is a crackhead and that's why we out here in the first place. I know gangbangers shoot kids. But I know something else, too." Her lower lip quivered. "I know the Weeping Woman can take over people's souls. Like she take over my mama. Like those gangbangers. Anything she can to kill us."

"Why would she want to kill you?"

"You know why." Marcela turned away and flipped open a spelling workbook. For her, the conversation had clearly ended.

Soledad tucked her notebook into her bag and rose to leave. Outside the atmosphere resembled a thick, hot stew more than breathable air, and rainclouds blotted out the sun.

She murdered her children, and God refused her entry into Heaven until she found them. Now she roams the world, forever searching, and disposing of those she finds who do not wear her children's faces.

And when she has taken all the children in the world, will God relent at last?

~~~~~

Soledad is ten years old. She lives in a miniscule one-bedroom apartment with her father now that Mama is dead from the cancer. Without Mama's income, and with the medical bills that quickly devoured their savings, the car, and virtually everything else they owned, they could no longer afford the mortgage on their house. Daddy sleeps on the couch because he believes girls need their privacy. He works twelve hours a day, sometimes more, at the convenience store on the corner. He graduated from an Ecuadorean university and used to do something important, until his boss fired him when he took too much time off to care for Mama. She hardly ever sees him anymore, but when she does, he always brings her a new book, or a fresh box of crayons. He is the brightest light in her universe.

But even the brightest lights in the universe will one day blink out.

It is the middle of the night when a loud knock on the door rouses her from sleep. Maybe Daddy forgot his keys; it happens sometimes when he's tired. He hates to work late, but he takes the extra shifts so he can send her to a good school. "You're too smart not to go to college," he tells her. "I want you to get out of this place."

When she opens the door, a police officer stands in the hallway.

"Soledad Vargas Rodriguez?" he asks. A lump the size of a fist has formed in her throat. Full names always herald the delivery of bad news. She's seen it on TV plenty of times, heard it whenever she or Daddy was in trouble with Mama.

"Where is my father? Is he okay?"

"I'm sorry, _novia_."

The policeman kneels down. His face is round and kind, the last kind face she will see in a very long time.

"Some bad people hurt your daddy. I need you to come with me now."

"Can I see him? Please?"

He lowers his head. Soledad believes he genuinely _is_ sorry.

"Your daddy passed away."

Now the lump in her throat pushes the tears up, making her lips wobble as hot, fat droplets splatter her cheeks.

"How can he be dead? He was at work."

"Some men came into the store and ..."

She doesn't want to hear any more, despite her question. The policeman apparently sees this in her face and stops speaking. He stands up and holds out his hand.

"We'll have someone come for your things. Let's get you somewhere safe."

The cops place her in a temporary shelter while she waits for a foster home. They turn her case over to a judge, and she does not see the kindly policeman again, though he gives her a lollipop and a hug before he leaves. When someone — a caseworker, she assumes — brings her pink Barbie backpack stuffed with clothing and a few books, she puts the lollipop in a hidden zippered pouch inside. She wants to save it as a reminder that there are still good people in the world because she already knows she will begin to forget that in no time at all.

Lying on her shelter cot that night, she sees the burning man.

His mouth moves silently, forming words no living ears can hear. A soft blue glow, comforting in any other context, only highlights the horror that has befallen him. Flames lap at his charred skin, and holes in his chest and stomach leak blood. She knows what happened now.

But they cannot hear one another, and she watches him burn until he flickers out, leaving the image seared into her mind no matter how hard she tries to pretend she never saw her dead father in flames.

~~~~~

Soledad rubbed her eyes. She'd dozed off with her laptop on and running hot against her thighs. The screen saver flashed a slideshow of the Miami skyline at sunset. When she squinted against the glare of the screen, it looked like the city was on fire.

She switched it off, closed the lid, and set it on the bedside table. Marcela's words had etched themselves onto her brain despite her best efforts to shrug them off. The kids felt helpless, victimized by nearly every adult that had passed through their lives. Marcela was merely lashing out at one in whom she perceived some kind of vulnerability. As a professional, Soledad was supposed to believe that, but it didn't explain the things Marcela knew.

Soledad stuck her fingers between the slats of the blinds above her bed. Raindrops on the glass reflected lights from the bar across the street, and a puddle of neon shimmered in a pothole below.

A black Jeep sat outside the building. She could make out a figure in the driver's seat but it did not move, did not honk the horn for whatever companion it might be waiting for, did not pick up a cell phone or drive around the block to kill some time.

The driver lifted its head. And though Soledad could not distinguish any of its facial features, she needed only the sensation of ice at the base of her spine to realize it was staring at her.

When she awoke again just before dawn, her alarm bleating its single tone over and over, she peeked outside once more. And when she saw that the black Jeep with its driver had not changed its position in three hours, she turned all of the lights on, showered with the bathroom door locked, and left for work through the building's back door.

~~~~~

The girl had changed; that much was obvious as soon as Soledad sat down in the folding chair across from her cot. Her familiar shielding posture was more an attempt to fold into herself. Fresh red scratches marred her arms and hands where her mother had grabbed at her in a crack-induced rage—

Do you still believe that?

—and the bags under her eyes threatened to swallow her face. She was no longer sleeping.

"You don't look well, Marcela. I think we need to get you to the free clinic."

Despite her evident exhaustion, Marcela's eyes darted nervously from side to side as though tracking something Soledad could not see.

"Your mother hurt you again."

"Not my mother." Unfazed by the shelter's stifling heat and buried inside an ill-fitting hoodie, she rubbed her arms. Ceiling fans circulated the stale air but did nothing to cool it.

"Then who?"

"You seen the Jeep last night, didn't you." It wasn't a question. "She sendin' them to keep an eye on you. She come at night. She seen my face. Her fingers are like claws. I can feel her inside of me, clawing."

Soledad chided herself for not seeing the signs earlier. This was obviously mental illness.

"You watched the news when you was in the shelter." Marcela's voice was barely above a whisper. Her fingers dug at invisible nails beneath her skin. "You kept waiting to hear they arrested the kids who murdered Armando Rodriguez. But no one cared about an immigrant from Ecuador. The case went cold."

Soledad pressed her hands into her lap so Marcela could not see them shaking. "Marcela, how do you know about my father?"

But she continued as if Soledad had never said a word, "The cop who was nice to you, he tried to find them. But the one in charge made him stop."

"You can't know this," Soledad said, not meaning to.

"Solana talks to him. He say he didn't mean to scare you that night in the shelter. He just wanted to say goodbye."

"Excuse me, Marcela." Soledad darted from her chair and into the hallway, tears already falling, the pain as fresh as that night fifteen years ago. She pushed open a metal side door and escaped into an alley, her breath hitching in her chest. Soledad sucked in the viscous air and thought she would suffocate.

She swiped at her eyes. She'd been a stupid, selfish child, and there was only one way now. But then, there had always been only one way.

~~~~~

She runs away after two nights in the shelter. She's heard stories at school about kids in foster care, that they are beaten or just disappear into the system. She will not be like them.

She cannot go to another shelter, because they will just send her back to CPS. She sleeps on playgrounds, in abandoned buildings with other homeless people, wherever she can get a few hours without the cops taking her into custody. It is the first chance she's had to grieve. She weeps in great torrents that will flood the world if she cannot stop, and she's not at all certain she can.

One night she huddles in the corner of an abandoned hotel lobby as a storm rages outside — quite possibly a hurricane, though no one has bothered to notify the homeless or even attempt to evacuate them. Wind howls and batters the roof and walls like a great wolf demanding entry, blowing leaves and rain in through a broken window as a threat of worse to come. She fears the roof will collapse on all of them as soon as they attempt to sleep. A boy about her age, maybe younger, shuffles over to her corner, away from his parents who argue on the other side of the lobby over their last cigarette.

"I'm Ric," he says. "You're new."

Unimpressed with his powers of deduction, she gives him a noncommittal stare, but he doesn't go away. At last she relents. "I'm Soledad."

"You heard the stories?"

"What stories? Everyone's heard stories." She is already exasperated with him and just wants to sleep, collapsing roof or not. The storm is like her grief, infinite and unassailable. They can understand one another.

"The secret ones. The ones that teach you how to live out here. I can help you, if you wanna stay alive. I can tell you what you need to know."

She expects him to disclose which streets belong to which gangs and what colors not to wear on any of them. Which pimps haunting those streets are looking for virgin snatch, though most any little girl will do. But he doesn't. Even when everyone else has long since fallen asleep and the wolf at the door shrieks and blows the roof tiles off, Ric whispers to her tales of demons and angels and spirits, and the lives at stake.

"God," he says, casting his gaze toward the ceiling where a chandelier once dangled, "ain't up there no more. Don't know where he is, but he sure ain't helpin' us. It's up to the angels now, but they're outnumbered. They need our help."

Ric's surreal words turn over in her mind long after he returns to his parents. She can almost see the river that turned to gore when the demons touched it; she can hear the screams of dead children, their bones floating on the crimson water. She envisions a scarlet rosary as sharp as a blade, and eyeless sockets that spew blood or black tears.

"There's no stopping that demon," Ric says. "Not unless you're a Special One, and there hasn't been one of those in years. Not that any of the girls would ever tell me. They keep it a secret."

"It's always a girl. Crazy, huh?"

Her father's killers are kids; she knows that much from the bits and pieces she's gathered. Fourteen-year-old gangbangers looking for their blood in. Ric's stories give her an idea, though. Everyone has heard the legend, dared each other at slumber parties, but Soledad doesn't believe it, not really. Your mind can make you think you're seeing things if you're scared enough.

She needs to find a mirror and put her theory to the test.

~~~~~

There is still enough daylight streaming through the shattered, dusty windows to illuminate the lobby and the staircase to the second floor. One of the rooms might be unlocked, or the door torn off. One of the mirrors might still be intact. She climbs the stairs quickly, the lobby darkening below her as she ascends into the dying light. Most of the doors are closed, locked or swollen shut from the relentless tropical moisture. Some have been kicked in. Silver shards of mirror glass, splintered by fists or bullets, lie on the stained and faded carpet like shafts of moonlight.

Somewhere in the middle of the second floor, she finds an open room with a cracked but intact mirror. Soledad waits for the last of daylight to retreat from the window. She sits on the edge of the stripped bed, where mice have chewed holes into the mattress and made nests, and stares into the glass.

"Bloody Mary," she says, her voice swallowed by the darkness. Louder: "Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary." The words transform into a chant, and she feels herself drifting away into a space somewhere between reality and dream. The wall around the mirror glows, faintly at first like embers. Then the embers roar into life, creating an orange inferno that ignites everything in the room but the mirror itself. The glass remains dark, a gateway to Hell if there ever was one.

_I can help you, if you wanna stay alive. I can tell you what you need to know,_ Ric had said. But she wouldn't be out here if not for those gangbangers, who had not cared if Armando Rodriguez's death left behind an orphaned little girl.

A woman's ashen, eyeless face appears in the mirror. Empty sockets weep blood or black tears, Soledad cannot be certain. She hears herself gasp but it sounds so far away, as if she's left her body. She has done a bad thing, a terrible thing. The face preoccupies Soledad's dreams from that very night, the ones she tries to disregard as she grows older, buried beneath the guilt and shame and finally the layers of conviction that what she has done is not only acceptable, it is _just_.

The woman in the mirror is the scourge of the street kids, the commander of the demons Ric described last night. Soledad would recognize her anywhere. She feeds on children's fear, the only thing every one of them can count on. She feeds now.

Her fingers curl around the red rosary at her neck. Glutinous tears run down her white cheeks like oil slicks.

I have children for you. Please listen.

The woman lowers her hand.

The ones who killed Armando Rodriguez.

_Ay, mis hijos, mis hijos..._ she wails in Soledad's head, though her lips never move.

"If you let me live, I will help you find your children."

Mis hijos...

The infernal radiance dims, and the apparition fades into her oblivion once more. Though the Woman has not said it, Soledad understands she accepts the bargain.

She wishes for a moment that Ric never told her the secret stories. There were no angels looking out for her father. If they haven't simply given up by now, they are losing badly. There is nothing they can do for her.

The next afternoon around lunchtime, Soledad searches dumpsters behind the fast food restaurants for a hamburger or even a slightly wilted salad. A bank of discounted TVs in a storefront window across the street captures her attention. The news flashes images of four bodies lying beneath an underpass strewn with gravel, beer cans, and miscellaneous garbage, shot at an angle to obscure their faces from the camera. She does not need to see them. Broken glass glitters beneath their corpses.

"...police say the young men are suspects in the brutal slaying of an Ecuadorean immigrant at a convenience store last month. Armando Rodriguez was shot several times and then set on fire just two blocks from his home. The victims' identities have not been released pending parental notification."

Soledad smiles to herself and nods at the bloody-eyed woman watching her from the reflection in the glass.

She will always know my face.

~~~~~

After biting the bullet and handing herself over to CPS, a decent family adopted her and eventually put her through college. It was what Daddy would have wanted.

And she kept her word. Her cases frequently fell through the cracks of the system, or ran away from their foster homes and lost themselves in street life. The state had the worst social work reputation in the country; perhaps she wasn't the only one who had made a deal with the Devil. So much misery, an endless red river of violence and death, of bones and the screams of dead children, upon which the Woman could feed.

Soledad turned off all the lights in the apartment and stepped into the bathroom. She knew without looking that a black Jeep patiently waited on the street three floors below her window. Fear permeated every cell of her body, and it was fear that she needed most. She pulled the nightlight from the outlet below the light switch and tossed it into the garbage can. Then she gazed into the mirror one last time.

~~~~~

It wasn't long, months or perhaps just weeks, before time became an amorphous, meaningless blur. Only dawn and dusk marked its progress now.

Had so much of it passed already? Marcela, a nine-year-old child just days ago; now she walked past with a backpack slung over one shoulder, a college student catching the bus to campus. She strode with an effortless grace, unbound from fear, a prisoner released from death row. She never turned away from the homeless lining the sidewalk, and often fished into her pockets for a spare coin.

Marcela should no longer recognize her, and yet something in her eyes, eyes forever haunted by her former life, suggested the grimy woman with the matted brown hair and sliced-up arms was familiar to her. No, it couldn't be. The woman she thought of would be only thirty-four. This one looked at least fifteen years older than that. And yet in the silent exchange between them, Marcela's eyes seemed to say _thank you_ , and her mouth turned up in a tiny smile, before she vanished into another humid morning, the sun shining down on her like the light of angels.

But that light grew dimmer each day. A dense film was forming over Soledad's pupils. She tried to learn how to sleep with her eyes open, because she could not bear to be lost within her own mind, to see that demonic face on the screen of her eyelids. Black Jeeps drove by several times a day, slowing as they passed so she could see the reflection that was not her own in the tinted windows.

The Weeping Woman was always scratching. Always feeding. Always hungry.

Jennifer Loring has been published in numerous magazines, webzines and anthologies, and received an honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror for her story "The Bombay Trash Service." Jenn is a member of the Horror Writers Association (HWA) and holds an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. In addition, she is a staff writer/columnist for HorrorNews.net, as well as an editor at Red Adept Publishing. Jenn lives in Philadelphia, PA, with her boyfriend and a turtle named — what else? — Ninja.

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#  Windows

by Ben Pienaar; published October 15, 2013

First Place Award, October 2013 Horror Contest

Usually if I get someone outright delusional I refer them to a specialist. Minor self-delusions are fine — in fact almost everyone does that to some degree. I'm fine with almost anything, in moderate measures, but when someone comes to me genuinely believing in the impossible ... I must refer them.

Take for instance the young man who sits before me now, Dane Fynes. All signs show him to be a reasonable teenager. He's well dressed, has a clear and present gaze. A rational attitude, but with an open mind, and he has just the right amounts of introspection and self-consciousness.

And yet he believes the impossible.

 "So these windows," I ask him. "They can be anywhere at all?"

"Yes." He nods seriously, half smiling as though he knows how ridiculous it all sounds. "I mean, they appear, you know, it's not like they're always there. Some windows in my house are normal one day, then for a while they change, and then a bit later I look over and it's just the same again."

This patient is different, for the same reasons I mentioned before. He is rational in his approach to everything. In fact, it was he who suggested in the first place that he might be delusional or schizophrenic, not I. The dangers of him doing something drastic, therefore, are low.

"Can you describe exactly what you see? Is it the same every time?"

He nods. "Yes, I mean no. Each window gives me a different view of the same place, you know? My bedroom window looks out on a huge field, with huge oak trees scattered around and long grass. The kitchen window shows a big lake with an island in the middle, and the one in my grandfather's apartment looks out of the lake from the island. Then there are the car windows. Those are weird, because the view moves with the car, as though I was driving through this place. Usually it's these jungle pathways. The bathroom window view has mountains in the distance, and my dad's office has a desert, but in the end it's all the same place."

"Oh? And what place is that?"

He smiles. "Paradise," he says.

I wait. Sometimes in therapy the best thing you can do is wait. In English culture especially, conversational silence is rarely tolerated. If a silence arises, everyone present starts thinking of possible conversation openers, and if nothing is said after four seconds, someone will usually blurt something out on the fifth.

"It's incredible," he says, after ten seconds of contemplating the ceiling of my office. "I see animals, usually. If I ever see people, they're either strangers or someone I knew who died. I've seen my grandmother a couple of times, and she always waves. My uncle just kind of looks at me and winks. Whoever they are, they look really happy. I guess it makes sense. I mean there's so much stuff to do there, as well. Almost any window I look through, somewhere in the view I see a well. Like those stone ones you get at farmhouses. And every now and again I see someone take something out of the well."

"What kind of things do they take out?"

"Oh, anything. Anything they want. My uncle always takes out whiskey or cigars. Kids always seem to take out candy or junk food or toys. Different people take different things, but sometimes they just kneel by the well and pray, I think, and then walk away. I think they get what they pray for," he adds.

"When did you start seeing these windows?"

"About a month ago. I know what you're going to ask me, but I haven't had anyone I know die recently — my grandma and uncle were years ago. And I'm not suicidal or anything either, and I don't have strong desires to see either of them again, I just kind of miss them."

"I take it you've been to another psychiatrist?"

He chuckles and looks a little sheepish. "Yeah. But that guy was a quack. Maybe that's harsh, but he barely heard me talk for ten minutes before he prescribed a bunch of drugs. What the hell is that all about?"

I nod and smile. "I can't speak for the quack, but personally I believe you'll be able to get to the bottom of this all by yourself, Mr. Fynes. Do you honestly believe these things are real?"

He seems to consider it for a minute. A car honks outside, and he turns to stare out my open window. A strange look comes across his face and he seems transfixed. My window looks out on a brick wall.

"You're seeing it now?" I say, more a statement than a question.

He nods and smiles again. His gaze is fixed on something very far away, and for a moment I'm sure I can see something reflected in his iris — something green and bright — but then it's gone.

"What do you see now?" I say, unable to keep the fascination from my voice. It's a rare thing to see someone who has completely rational thought processes faced with delusion.

"It's weird. I'm trying to see the bricks, you know? Because I know the bricks are really there. But all I see are these long, rolling hills, and these partying people." He laughs.

"What time of day is it?"

"The same. It's always the same time of day as it is on this side. So right now, about three o'clock, I'd say. Weather's always the same as well."

"And what do you feel, right now?"

His eyes are glassy, but I can tell he's thinking, hard. It is a sort of comfort, to know that despite his delusions, he still has a capacity for reason. I've always wondered, if I ever went insane, would I be able to approach my own insanity with the same objective reasoning as I approach that of other people?

"Same thing I always feel," he says. "I want to go there. I'm thirsty and I want to drink from that stream. And lie down in the sun. I feel like all I have to do is jump out that window and I'll be there."

For a moment, it seems as if he's about to stand up, but he holds himself back with apparent effort, before turning and smiling self-consciously at me. It is a worrying point to end the session on, but I have faith in the boy.

"I want you to promise me something, Dane," I say. "You will not attempt to jump out of any window ... yet. In fact until our next session I'd like you to do your very best to ignore all windows completely. If you see these visions, avert your eyes. Spend a lot of time outside, or with the curtains drawn. Do you think you can do that?"

"Uh, sure. So, what exactly did you mean by 'yet'?"

I smile. "That is for next week." I'm planning to show him ground floor windows until he sees his vision and then have him go through it. Then, I'm sure, he will be able to start the process of recovery.

But now, the day is over. Dane and I shake hands and then I watch him go, feeling strangely elated. After he's gone, I walk over to my window and stare out of it for a long time, seeing the bricks but also, in my mind's eye, trying to imagine the incredible paradise he sees with the same view. It strikes me that there are some mental 'illnesses' that aren't really that unpleasant at all.

The next three days are very strange. It becomes a habit of mine to look out of windows, any windows, all the time. Just sort of dreamily, thoughtfully, with nothing specific in mind. This is a problem, of course, because before I know it I find myself staring wistfully out of my office window while patients spill their life stories and deep emotions to me, and I can't for the life of me keep track of it.

On the third day I see something. I keep my bedroom window open all the time, and usually wake up with warm rays of sunlight spilling over my face. Today is no different, but when I open my eyes and look out the window I don't see my garden; I see paradise. Real paradise, exactly as Dane described it to me. Rolling valleys, glistening streams and waterfalls, and such happy people. I even see the well, sitting in the shadow of a great oak, and my own mother, who died four years ago, sitting by it and waving.

I wave back, and close my eyes, certain that I can hear the sounds of the place. For a moment, I hear children's laughter, but then it is gone and when I open my eyes, the scene is gone. My garden is there, and the sunlight, and that is all. I notice I've gotten out of bed and walked over to the window without even realizing it.

Needless to say, I'm shaken. I spend the following three days trying desperately to take my own advice and ignore the fantastic sights beyond the windows, but it's impossible. I close every curtain in my house, but still I can see the heavenly glow creeping from behind the drapes. Sometimes I hear laughter and music and look eagerly for the source, only to find that I'm standing near a large window. The car is the worst. I must drive, staring straight ahead, because the temptation to explore paradise is immense. Once I saw a huge lake down a path to my right and barely resisted the urge to swing the wheel and drive to it.

One terrifying day, my front windscreen showed the other world. I slammed my foot on the brakes, shocked, and for a minute I was certain that I'd been transported into heaven. Perhaps I'd been in a road accident, I thought hopefully. I opened the door and broke out into the day, only to find myself confronted by a hundred tooting horns and angry motorists. When I got back in the car, the windscreen was clear.

Finally, Monday comes again and I wait in my office for the last session of the day, Dane. He's late, and in the meantime I sorely resist the urge to look out my window. Today I'm going to let him go through a ground floor window, and though I curse myself for a coward, I know that now I'm partly doing it because I want to see what happens to him, first. I'd never have questioned it before, but now I wonder what will happen. Maybe I'll see him go through the window, and run into those yellow green fields to join the celebrations. Maybe, if I don't see the scene myself, he'll just step out of the window and disappear. I make up my mind that, if that does happen, I'll follow him a second later.

But Dane does not arrive. I wait for half an hour, and there is no knock on the door. My heart begins to beat faster and I fidget. _He's gone through a window_ , I think. _He's gone without me._

I pace the room, I ask my secretary twice if there have been any messages, and then I dismiss her for the day. Eventually I call him myself.

There is no answer. _He's gone_.

I know where he lives: He spoke of moving out of home recently and into a tenth floor apartment on Galston road. That in itself is worrisome, because on the tenth floor there really are no safe windows one can jump from.

I pull up at the front of the building and head inside, my heart already filling with dread — but strangely, horribly — it is not from fear that he has died, but that he has disappeared. That he left the world and me behind. Will the visions stop when he's gone, I wonder, with another stab of worry. Will I be left here alone, with no way to paradise?

I take the lift to the tenth floor, where I find a hallway with ten doors on either side. A maid is pushing a trolley loaded with cleaning equipment door to door.

"Hi, sorry, would you happen to know which room belongs to Dane Fyne?" I ask, smiling despite my fear.

She looks worried at first, but then sees my warm expression and says "One oh one seven, sir," and points me to the door second from the end. It is not closed properly. Is he expecting me? Did he leave in a hurry and forget to lock it? I thank her and make a show of knocking on the door and waiting, and then I duck inside as soon as she enters another room. It's a nice place, if small, and for a minute I marvel that such a young man could afford something like this.

"Dane?" I call. I already know he isn't here by the silence that falls when I close the door behind me. But no, it isn't total silence. I hear the sound of flapping curtains coming from his bedroom. I feel the cool draught wafting through the open bedroom door. I hear laughter.

"Dane?" barely a whisper now. I know he's gone.

I enter his bedroom. The bed is a mess, with the covers flipped from when he got out, I notice, on the side nearest the window. It's a large window, too, easily big enough for a grown man to step through. I'm amazed they make windows so large on the tenth floor, and then I see that the mechanism on the frame meant to keep the window opening too wide has been disabled; a screwdriver and the loose screws lie by the bedside table.

My eyes move, inevitably, to the view, and I suck in a deep breath of fresh air. Not city air, but the air of heaven. I see it all, and not from a bird's eye view but near the ground. The grass is barely a meter under the sill, I'm sure.

In this part of paradise, there is a great forest to the right and I see an ocean far in the distance. The sun is setting on the horizon. Another gust blows into my face and I take it into my lungs, tasting the salt. Somewhere, far in the distance, I see Dane. His back is to me and he seems to be walking dreamily toward the sea.

Barely aware of what I'm doing, I take off my shoes, thinking only of how good it will feel to have the grass and the soft sand between my toes. I step up onto the solid metal frame, my heart beating harder now, not from fear but from exhilaration, excitement.

I stand there, my arms bracing me, and extend a foot. Below it, I see only a short drop onto infinitely soft, dewy grass. I let one of my hands go and swing forward, already feeling the hot sun of heaven warm my skin.

I'm an instant from letting go of the window frame when the phone on the bedside table rings and I stop myself at the last minute. I swing there for a moment, undecided, yearning to let go and just forget it all. But what if it is Dane's mother or father? I must tell them what happened, I owe them that at least. I push myself away and step back into the room. It isn't like paradise will go anywhere, after all.

"Hello, Dane Fyne's apartment here," I say, feeling completely absurd.

"Hello? Is that you, doctor?"

I freeze, staring at the ruffled bed. "Dane?" I say, my mouth dry.

"Oh, thank god. Sorry I must have worried you so much, after last session and the open window and all. I tried to get hold of you, but you weren't in your office, so I figured you might have got really worried and gone to my place."

"Where are you?" I said, steadying myself against the wall.

"I'm on my way, now. I'm really sorry I didn't make the session, but it's okay. I mean, sort of. I climbed out of a bus window today, if you can believe that. The vision was just so strong, I had to. Don't worry, I only got a few grazes, nothing serious, but when I hit the road on the other side, I knew it was over. Doc, that was what you were planning, wasn't it? To take me through a window so I'd see what happened? Well it worked! I don't see them anymore, I'm cured!"

I was silent.

"Doctor? Are you okay? Sorry if I worried you so much, but like I say it's been a big day. I keep looking out of windows and expecting to see it all, but I don't anymore. It's gone for good."

"Ah, yes. That's excellent, Dane. Maybe one more session, just to be sure, unless you're totally confident..."

"I really am, Doc."

"Well, perhaps there's no need, then. Sorry for my intrusion, but I was a bit shaken."

"Yeah, well. It was a close one. This morning I even unscrewed my window so I could jump out, and then I remembered what you said and I stopped myself. Thanks so much, doctor. It's horrifying to think about, isn't it? What might have happened."

"Yes," I said. "Truly horrifying."

_Ben Pienaar was born in South Africa and moved to Australia in 2000, where he lives and, more importantly, writes his days away. He also works two jobs to finance his crippling addiction to coffee, and spends his free time reading until his eyes hurt. After countless submissions, he got four stories published, 'Beyond,' 'Dreamer,' 'Fair Trade,' and 'Till Death.' The rest of his stories can be found on_ freenightmares.wordpress.com _. He writes obsessively, in the hopes that if can only pass his nightmares on to others, they might leave him alone._

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#  Best Friends Forever

by Josie Beecher; published October 18, 2013

_"Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream..."_ Mommy stared down at me through the darkness, with only a miniature Spongebob shedding bars of yellow light over in the far corner of the room. I always wished the nightlight could be closer, but the socket decided to live far away from my bed. One night during a thunderstorm so loud I'd thought the house was falling into pieces, I asked it to move closer to me ... to protect me from whatever may be hiding in the darkness surrounding my bed, but it didn't listen. I huddled under my Juniper Jade covers and felt a little safer, a little cozier. My Little Pony had been my obsession since my cousin decided to throw her old hand-me-downs into my room. She hated Juniper Jade, so by default, I fell in love with her.

 _"What comes next, Kyla baby?"_ She'd done that for me since the day I'd been born, or at least for as long as I can remember. Even though I was already eleven years old at that point (number one twice, I remember a birthday card saying), I'd beg my mom to sing to me every night until I was tired enough to fall asleep. At least then I had a distraction from the creaky floor and the closet that sat almost directly in front of my way-too-big-for-a-kid bed.

"Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily..." I whispered, forcing my eyelids to push against each other. My entire face scrunched up and I suddenly thought of Cole. He was too old for Mommy ... I didn't know why she'd been so happy to be with him at first. They only ever fought and when they weren't fighting, they hardly spoke. She told me that she loved him, once. I was crying in my room because I was scared of the noises I kept hearing under my bed (short, quick thumping noises, kinda like someone was tapping the underside of my bed to get my attention) and Mommy passed my room with tears falling from her eyes too. I thought she heard the noises and was scared just like me, but after having a long talk about how grownups have fights sometimes I figured out that she'd been crying because of Cole ... not because of the girl under my bed.

_"Life is but a dream."_ Mommy breathed in that wispy, tired way that she did every night. It made me smile and she smiled back, brushing the black hair out of my eyes. I could hardly see her through the dark, but I knew the smile was there.

_"You coming to bed anytime tonight?"_ Cole pushed open my door, and a wave of light flooded in. I didn't mind the light, but I shielded my eyes from him. He always took Mommy away from me ... and he always took the light out of her. I needed her light to fall asleep, but I rarely had it anymore. I didn't know why she always flocked to him whenever he called, but it didn't matter. The reason didn't matter, the reason never mattered — it was just that she did it. She left me behind in the dark. I may have had my Juniper Jade covers to hide under, but it was a big bed, and Juniper Jade never scared away the monsters.

_"Yeah, in a few."_ Mommy closed her eyes and forced out the words. She stopped smoothing the hair away from my face and pinched the space between her eyes. The light drained from Mommy's body, and darkness devoured the entire room. Spongebob didn't stand a chance. I wanted to yell, I wanted to scream at Cole — make him go away and never come back to do this to us, but I couldn't. It'd only burn out Mommy's light even more, maybe even extinguish it.

"A few what? Weeks? Days? Hours?"

I bit my lip as I watched my Mommy's mouth curl into a sigh. I could feel her stomach shrink into a little ball, shriveling away with the smile I put on her usually glowing face. I squeezed my blanket tighter and imagined Juniper Jade's mouth curling into the same sigh, her purple mane standing on end. I didn't like the thought so I let up on the blanket and just bit my lip harder instead. It hurt and I tasted metallic blood, but it didn't hurt nearly as bad as the knot in my stomach did. My whole body started to shake, but I tried to hold it back. Mommy didn't need another reason to squeeze the space between her eyes or rub the place just above where her glasses sat.

_"Cole, you know damn well what I meant. Just go to bed and I'll see you there when I feel like it."_ She talked with her eyes pressed shut, her face scrunched up like I had earlier. She was still pretty, though. I'm sure I looked like a chubby, wrinkled hamster when I did it.

Cole didn't say anything; instead he slammed the frail door as hard as his little muscles could. The room went pitch black again and Spongebob's smile glowed brightly once more; I could almost hear him laughing. A few porcelain dolls sitting on the shelves Daddy put up slid closer to the edge, but stopped just short. I imagined the walls doing Mommy's sigh, sick from the impact, and I sat up against my headboard. I didn't like the thought of those walls looking down on me; I didn't like the dark ... I didn't like that I couldn't see Mommy anywhere.

"Mommy?" I whispered. "Mommy ... don't go..." I felt the air in front of me for her familiar soft skin, but I only scraped the edge of her nightgown. I heard my throat let out a small whimper, urging the silk to come back.

"Mommy, please ... don't leave." I reached out into the air again as my abused door was opened, the light flooding in once more. I didn't shield my eyes this time.

She shook her head and looked at me with scared eyes. I hated this part of every night, the two seconds right before the light from the hallway was cut off and I was left behind with only Spongebob to protect me.

"Mommy..." I said again, but she wasn't listening. Cole yelled from down the hall – words I didn't understand or didn't want to understand – and she left me behind. The light was gone. She was gone, and I immediately knew I wasn't alone.

I clawed at the underside of my covers and held my breath. The dark infected every inch of my room. Spongebob's weak light was just enough to see the monster in my closet and keep him there, but the little girl that lived under my bed could do whatever she wanted. Sometimes she even let the closet monster out.

_"Kyla and Markie sitting in a tree..."_ Fingernails tore at the wood floor under my bed. She always waited for Mommy to leave. I stayed hidden under my blanket, but her grinding fingernails didn't stop. _"K ... I ... S ... S ... I ... N ... G."_ She spat each letter like a boy, pushing out every breath and gagging on it. It was hard for her to crawl around; every little movement she made seemed to make her lungs more and more like grapes. I used to feel bad for her, and I wanted to help, but I made the mistake of telling her that. That was the night she tried to steal my legs.

Cole was the only one that ever saw the bruises on my arms and legs. I was still dripping wet, just a scratchy towel over my oddly shaped body, when he told me to deal with it — ignore the pain, ignore the girl clawing at me, and eventually she'd just stop when she was through with me. He told me to not even tell Mommy, and I never would have. If she had seen all the scratches and bruises and the blood, she would have gone to my school in a rage only to find out that no one ever hurt me there. She'd find out that nobody even knew my name, and after she found that out, I can't even imagine what she'd think of me, her only daughter, her angel. To the entire school, I was just the girl in the back of the room, the sweaty girl that always wore long-sleeves and fell asleep every moment she had the chance.

The room went quiet, and that's how I knew she was watching me. Sometimes if I pretended to be asleep she went away, so I pressed my eyelids together hard enough to see the little firework show behind them.

_"Kyla baby, come on out."_ Tugs on my blanket. I held on. I was safer under there.

"Go away..." I whispered. "Go away, go away, go away."

_"But I just wanna be your friend, Ky."_ That's what Daddy used to call me. I bit my lip harder, forcing back the icy tears. _"Do you want to see Daddy again?"_ Her hands groped the end of my bed, pulling herself up. I could see her grayish blue skin even when I shut my eyes.

"Yes." Tears escaped. "I miss him so much..."

_"I can take you to him."_ She eagerly spat the words. _"Just come out from under there and we'll go see him now."_

"I know you're lying." I tugged the blanket, trying to force her back onto the floor.

_"Friends don't lie to friends. We are friends, aren't we?"_ She didn't wait for an answer. _"We're best friends. We'll be best friends forever."_ I felt her snakes for fingertips searching for my hands. _"I know life is hard without him. Life is hard with your mommy and her boyfriend."_

"Stop. Go away, please..." Her voice was in my head, bouncing and vibrating like a dodgeball with a trapped bird inside.

"But I can take this all away. Just come with me."

I opened my eyes and watched my shaking hands let the blanket fall. All I saw was dark and Spongebob glowing faintly in the distance. The closet door was open.

_"Come with me,"_ she whispered from the closet, a blue hand waving me over. Cole and Mommy were yelling in their room. Cursing. Screaming. Throwing things. I crawled to the end of my island of a bed and let my feet touch the cold carpet.

"To where?" I breathed the question, walking toward Spongebob's light in front of the closet.

_"Wherever you want. Name it."_ I stood in front of the closet, my body rattling. The closet monster grumbled sort of like Cole just waking up. _"Step in and I'll take you to your Daddy."_ There was a smile in her voice, and those pearl eyes were on me. A hand took mine as Spongebob's light died. It felt like holding a dozen freezepops. I wanted the feeling to blanket me just like Juniper Jade did a few minutes before. Cole was yelling louder, but I didn't hear Mommy at all.

"I want to be in the dark forever."

"Aren't you afraid?"

"Being afraid with open eyes is better than being afraid of opening your eyes."

_"Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream,"_ she sang, tugging me in. _"Put a pillow over her face and listen to her scream."_

"Stop it."

_"Burn, burn, burn your house ... Burn it to the ground."_ She pulled at my arm harder, but I tugged back toward my bed. _"Watch it as it goes to flames and their bodies won't be found."_ She laughed as I tried to pull away harder. Her skin felt like it was tearing, but she didn't let me go.

"No, no, no..."

Light flooded the room and Mommy picked me up from off the floor. I couldn't hear what she was saying through her tears and through the sound of things breaking in the next room. Something about leaving? I thought the house was coming down.

We were sitting in the car together, looking at the house. I could see the light on in Mommy's room, but my room was dark again.

"Are we leaving?" I asked, just to make sure.

_"Yes."_ Mommy sighed. _"We'll be staying at grandma's for awhile."_

"Are you afraid?" She looked startled by the question, gripping the steering wheel a little tighter with her stubby hands. All she did was nod vacantly and start the car.

Pulling away, Mommy started to sing, _"Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream."_ I hummed the rest with an empty head, closing my tired eyes. The wind groaned an empty threat — _"...best friends forever..."_ — and I told myself it was just the wind. Only the wind.

_Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Middle-earth, Josie Beecher is a freelance writer/poet living in California with her husband and their two fur-babies. When she's not writing she spends her time slaying dragons, baking cupcakes, jogging, and exploring in between the words of other writers. Her work has been published in Teen Ink Magazine, Penny Ante Feud, and The Poetic Pinup Revue. "Orange Girl," her first poetry collection, was published in January 2012 by Black Coffee Press. You may read more of her work on her blog (_josiebeecher.blogspot.com _)._

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#  Something in Our House

by D.W. Gillespie; published October 22, 2013

11:13 PM

Dan sat among the dolls and toys and games with his head drooping heavily in his hands. He wasn't quite into a deep sleep before being summoned from his bed by his three-year-old daughter Kate, but he was close enough. Her voice drifted through the electronic monitor in a softly prodding tone, calling him to her bedside. He was used to being beckoned thusly, though not like this, not gentle and easy, but he was too tired to register how different this scene was.

Dan held firmly to the stance that Kate was too old for the baby monitor, but the truth was, the gadget wasn't for Kate. It had been a long day at work, and an even longer evening at home, and Dan wanted nothing more than sleep. Overhead, an endless cycle of shadows danced on the ceiling, a parade of unicorns and shooting stars and clowns, dear God, why clowns. Of all the things to soothe a child to sleep, the thought of garish, smiling clowns was enough to give him nightmares.

It was, wasn't it? The clowns did give you nightmares.

The voice in his head was his, of course, but it was a different brand of interior monologue, the kind that didn't like to show itself in the light of day. This voice always spoke in whispers, always when the house was dark and still and full of secrets. Even Dan, as dense as he could be, knew exactly what that voice was. It was nothing more than the deepest part of his imagination, that tiny part of every person that holds sway over the tired, sleep starved mind. During the waking hours, this voice was brushed away as easily as wiping a strand of hair off your forehead. But in the dark, its influence grew and swelled until it drowned out all rational thought. When the sun was up, Dan heard only the clear, elegant voice of reason, but in the midnight hours, he heard the cracking death rattle of despair.

"I had another dream," Kate said matter-of-factly.

Dan grimaced. He knew why he was there, knew that his duty involved smoothing the edges of nightmares down to dull, painless nubs and ensuring that all was still sound and sane in the world. This was the duty of all fathers in the late hours of the night, but it was never quite that simple with Kate. Ever since she was eighteen months old, she had what doctors called night terrors — a good name that, but not nearly enough to capture the essence of the moment. The first night was burned into his memory like a brand, and he doubted that it would ever fade.

It was the scream. Not the scream of a baby that's suddenly aware of its wet diaper or empty belly, but the terrified yowl of an animal being eaten alive. That was his first thought as he sprang into consciousness already on his feet, that somehow a cat or a raccoon or a stray dog had crawled into the bed with them as something tore pieces of its flesh away in great, gory ribbons. As he darted into the bedroom, that's exactly what he expected to find, because the simple fact was, he couldn't imagine — couldn't _fathom_ — a child making such sounds. But she did, and he and his wife Shelly both stared at her for a solid ten seconds before waking her, such was their amazement and dread.

In the time since, Dan often thought back at that moment with striking clarity, realizing now what neither of them would have ever admitted to the other. That first glance at their darling girl writhing and shrieking was so awful, so very horrific, that neither wanted to be the first to touch her, as if that terror could somehow be passed from person to person as easily as the flu. It seemed just as silly now as it did then, but silliness didn't change the truth.

These episodes continued throughout the next year in fits and starts. Sometimes weeks would pass without incident, then — boom — three in one week. Shelly immediately had appointments made with an increasing series of dead ends: the family practitioner, sleep specialists, neurologists. All gave more or less the same answer. No one understands night terrors, and there really is no way to prevent them. Some grow out of it, some never do, and what you're left with is learning how to deal with it.

So, that's what they did, they dealt with it. They all put on their happy faces and pretended that it was just part of the agreement parents made with the universe. You take the good with the bad and you make it work, and the rational, sane voice of the sunlit hours carried Dan and Shelly through their long days at work. But at night, that voice grew weaker and weaker, and as soon as Dan's head hit the pillow, he felt his gut tighten and his heart race, and the whisper grew.

It's going to happen again tonight...

That year, more so than any in Dan's life, felt like a waking dream, so like a ghost among the living. There was no one to confide in; any talk with Shelly inevitably turned sour as she accused him of blaming Kate. Never before had he felt so isolated, and even now, after everything else that had happened, he wondered if the episode at work was inevitable.

_They made you do it,_ the night voice whispered. _They planned it ... just think, after everything comes out, there's nothing to stop them kicking you to the curb._

"No," Dan muttered aloud. He wouldn't hear this. He loved his family. He always had, and he knew that even good men make mistakes.

"Daddy?" she said.

"Sorry honey. I'm just talking to myself."

That didn't matter now. What he had done, what he was doing, that was all secondary to this moment. While it was true that the episode at work — and that was how he thought of it now, _the episode at work_ — threatened to dissolve the very foundation his family had built upon, that didn't matter, not at eleven o'clock on a Thursday, not crouched sleepy and shirtless at the end of his daughter's tiny bed. Now, the only thing that mattered was her, was to listen and soothe and give comfort and sanity to a dream that had none.

Several times over the past few months, Kate had spoken of her dreams in the daytime with shocking clarity and vividness. These quiet moments with his daughter disturbed Dan more than he cared to admit, but not because of what it revealed about her. Her words flung him back into his own past with a desperate suddenness as violent as a head on collision, and all at once, there he was, sitting bolt up in his own bed, the warmth of his own urine soaking through the Ninja Turtle sheets, darkening the cotton, making him feel guilty and scared and helpless despite the fact that he was too old to wet his bed, too old to be afraid of the darkness.

There were clowns ... you remember that don't you?

He remembered, and even though Kate never mentioned clowns, she still spoke of things that made his skin crawl. Once she told him she saw a baby with a towel over its face, but the towel was moving and she knew the baby was suffocating, and she reached forward to help just as spiders — dozens of them — began crawling over the sides of the fabric. She spoke of dark things, places that didn't exist, that couldn't be real, but that had distinct geography and precise details. There was a man that worked at a grinder, his back to her as he hunched over a table, grinding away at something metallic and blood slicked, and as she approached, he turned and showed her the hole that was his face, charred around the edges but full of webbed cocoons within. She told of this, and other things on the way to daycare or in front of the TV, never with the wondrous voice of a child who has invented something hidden and magical, but with the distant monotone of someone who survived an atrocity.

Dan was glad these conversations happened during the day when his own voice of reason was at its peak, and he never hesitated to explain them away as easily as fanning a moth out the door. But tonight had gone off the track from the beginning, and only now as he began to shake the dust from his own mind was he realizing that. For the first time, she had not awoken screaming, and she was explaining what she had seen, and no matter how he tried to interject, she would not stop.

"There was a man," she started after Dan walked in, "a very old man. I can't remember his face, just his voice."

"How do you know he was old?" Dan asked, aware that his wife was probably listening on the monitor.

"His voice," she answered as if her answer needed no further explanation. "He was sitting on my bed when I woke up."

"You just had a dream honey. You didn't wake up until it was over."

She continued, ignoring what he said. "He said he wanted to talk to me. He said he needed to tell me something important. He said that something bad was going to happen. He said a monster was coming..."

"Katey, baby, there are no monsters."

She turned and looked at him. "I said the same thing, and he said that monsters are everywhere. They hide in drainpipes and under bridges and at the bottom of lakes, but they usually can't hurt you. The only way they can hurt you is if you do something bad. Doing bad things calls them. He said it was like throwing fish into the ocean for sharks."

"Listen to me Kate," Dan said as he set his hand on top of hers. "You didn't do anything bad, so even if there were monsters..."

"He didn't say I did anything bad."

The silence between them grew and swelled and filled the room. He didn't know how long he stared at his daughter, but he was filled with the sudden feeling that this night's episode wasn't real at all. Somehow, Kate had heard him and Shelly arguing and created whatever this was. He felt heat rising in his face, and he turned away from his daughter's unbroken gaze.

"There are no monsters."

He left the room without kissing her forehead, something he never did, and stepped back into the blackness of the hallway. By touch and memory, he glided down the hallway, passing through the sliver of moonlight thrown through the sidelights that flanked the front door. As he did, the moonlight flickered once as if something had passed in front of the moon. He stopped and peered at the slitted windows for a moment, gazing at the front porch and listening to his heartbeat in his own ears.

Nothing stirred.

"She okay?" his wife asked as he rolled back into bed. Her voice was groggy from sleep, and Dan realized she had not been listening in on the conversation.

"Fine," he said with a curt voice, still clinging to the remnants of the argument from before bedtime.

_That's a fine way to be,_ a voice within whispered. _She all but catches you in the act, and you get to act all huffy..._

Dan forced the voice to silence and closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep, wanted to be free from thought, free from this endless day. There were things to take care of, but they would wait. There was a way out of all this, and he knew his onetime mistake with a certain co-worker of the opposite sex could be fixed.

_No,_ he thought. _Not fixed._

Hidden.

~~~~~

12:15 AM

"Daddy..."

The voice was close, right next to his ear in fact, but it seemed to travel miles in the few inches between. There was a surge of panic in his gut as he rolled over.

"Daddy," Kate said again, more insistent this time. Why had he panicked before? There was something off, but he couldn't put his finger on precisely what.

"Katey?" he moaned. "What is it?"

"There's something in our house."

The words echoed passed through his mind almost completely unheeded. All of it was so unreal, too much like a dream to possibly be real. But why?

_She never gets out of bed,_ some slightly more rational and awake part of his mind said. _She figured out early on that you and Shelly could hear her through the monitor, so she never got out of bed._

This realization pried his heavy eyelids open, and his daughter's face came into focus. Beams of moonlight through the blinds patterned her tiny face with the kind of minute details that never seemed to show up in dreams.

Not a dream.

"What did you say?"

She leaned closer, peering slightly over one shoulder toward the yawning blackness of the open bedroom door. Most nights, Dan locked the door, though he could never say why. There was always a twinge of guilt when he spun the latch, a feeling of leaving his daughter to her fate, but he did it all the same. Tonight, however, after the first trip into Kate's room, he must have forgotten.

"There's something in our house," she repeated, this time in a whisper barely loud enough to hear. All at once, the world came into focus and he threw the covers off and leapt from the bed.

"Who?" Even in the center of the rush of panic he felt, he knew in some small way that she must have been dreaming. He felt like a sleepwalker who suddenly snaps into consciousness in his front yard. His normal, boring world had somehow tipped off its axis, and he felt himself spinning. "Who's in our house?"

"Not a who," Kate answered back flatly.

By now, Shelly was awake and sitting up.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"Kate heard something," he said as he crossed toward the open door. Shelly scooped her daughter up just as he passed into the hallway, which was thick with blackness. He flipped on the light, still more annoyed than afraid, but committed to the task of setting things right as quickly as possible. As a dull yellow light filled the hallway, he rubbed his eyes and stepped blearily toward her room. Inside, he found nothing, so he carried his search into the next room, then the next, flipping on lights and searching for something he knew he would never find. After checking the hall bathroom, he was beginning to feel a slightly silly, even annoyed, when he felt a sting in his foot.

"Ow," he yelped as he pulled his foot up and grabbed it. He was sure he had stepped on a shard of glass, some long forgotten remnant of a shattered cup, but as he peered at the high arch of his foot, he saw it was an ant.

"The hell?"

He flicked it off impatiently and inspected the tiny bite, which was no bigger than a pinhead. Just then, his still blurry eyes noticed more movement on the baseboard. Kneeling for a closer look, he was shocked to see a line of ants working their way slowly down the hall. He traced the perfect line back to the source, shuddering at the sheer number of them. Never in the six years of living here had they seen much more than a random spider or roach here or there, but there were hundreds of them, tiny and black invaders marching like soldiers. He felt oddly violated at this sudden and inexplicable intrusion.

"My God," he said in disgust. The path led back toward the foyer, and as he turned the corner, he remembered the shape that seemed to pass in front of the moon earlier that night. His hand shook feebly as he reached for the porch light, and he realized that for the first time since laying his daughter down, he was completely awake.

Part of him — the whispering night voice — expected to see something standing just outside the thin panes of the sidelights, but he refused to let this voice control him, and when the bulb lit, he felt vindicated to see nothing but the same empty porch he expected to see. He glanced down and saw that the path of ants led to the bottom pane of glass just six inches above the polished oak floors. A crack had formed there, just large enough for an army of ants to find their way in.

In seconds, he had fetched a broom and a roll of duct tape from the utility room. Using his teeth, he bit off a small strip of duct tape and covered the hole, fairly certain that it would hold until the morning. Then, he wasted no time in sweeping the silent army up into a pile and pushing them all helplessly toward the front door. He clicked the deadbolt and swung the door wide, sure that this odd episode was over, when he gazed down at the welcome mat. There was a patch of mud there, nothing extremely out of the ordinary, but noticeably out of place. It hadn't rained all week, but this looked fresh, as if the family had trudged in during a storm. Just past the mat was a small, barely visible trail that petered out after a few steps.

Footsteps?

"No," he said aloud. Just a smudge of old dirt.

_Not quite,_ the night voice whispered. _Oh, you want it to be a smudge of dirt, but you and I both know you're looking at footsteps that belong to ... something. The same something that your daughter dreamed about, and the same something that put that crack in the window..._

Dan slammed the door, silencing whatever else his awful imagination wanted to show him. Back in the bedroom, he heard his wife's slow, calming breaths, and he knew she had nodded back off. Kate, whom he assumed was asleep next to her mother, rolled over and stared at him. He lay down on the bed next to her as she began to whisper.

"Did you see it?" she asked.

"I saw ... ants," he answered. "Is that what was in the house?"

She rolled back over. "No. Not ants."

For a moment, he considered taking her back to bed. Instead, he leaned back into his pillow feeling itchy and restless, like something was crawling all over his bare skin. He didn't think he would ever be able to sleep, but a short time later, he did.

~~~~~

1:58 AM

Dan awoke sweating. The room was hot, and Kate had drifted over to his side of the bed. Now, in a mass of sheets and pillows, the pair of them felt sticky with sweat. He threw back the covers and stumbled into the bathroom, tripping on toys and cursing as he went. Sliding the door closed behind him, Dan leaned over the sink and began drinking deep handfuls of water from the tap before taking his cupped hands to his face. The cool water ran down his back and sides, and he leaned back, stretching and taking in deep breaths. Moments later, he stood over the toilet, emptying his bladder and swaying back and forth like an old man suddenly deprived of his cane.

Damn, he was tired, and in that moment he couldn't even remember why it had been so hard to drift back off. Something had happened — one of Kate's dreams maybe — but he couldn't figure out what it was. He was just reaching down to flush the toilet when he heard the first footstep over his head.

He froze, his hand still on the mirrored handle of the toilet, and after a few seconds, he was certain he had imagined it. The house, like all houses, breathed at night, settling and cooling, emitting noises that would make a jumpy man sit up in bed. But Dan wasn't a jumpy man, and he knew the sounds of a settling house. This wasn't settling; this was a footstep, and that meant one thing. Something was in the attic. Seconds ticked away, and still he stood motionless for who knows how long, and still, the only thing that broke the silence was his own pounding heart.

Dan had just begun to ease his grip on the handle when he heard it again, this time farther away. It was followed by another step, and another.

"Jesus," he said. "This is really happening."

His eyes focused on the vent above the toilet and stared transfixed on the source of the sounds. The vent led straight to the attic through an exhaust fan. As he watched, something began to press through one of the tiny, plastic slats of the fan cover, something black and awful that he couldn't quite place until it forced its way out. It wriggled halfway out and hung there for a second, trapped between the ceiling and the floor as if caught in zero gravity. Finally, it worked free and dropped to the floor. Dan recoiled as the centipede righted itself and began crawling across the tiles looking for a safe haven. It went for the toilet immediately, and edged around the bowl and out of sight.

The footsteps had stopped once again, and Dan began to backpedal into the bedroom, moving instinctively away from the source of the sounds. He turned and glared at the bedroom, barely lit by the bathroom light, and he wasn't surprised to see Kate was sitting up again.

"Do you hear it?" she asked.

"Did you?" he replied.

She nodded her head. For the first time this night, he could see she was afraid, and it jolted him back into his rightful role as a father. Despite how scared he was, he wouldn't be pushed around his own house. Deep down, he hoped there was still some explanation for all this, though it seemed less likely by the minute. Still, he wasn't ready to give in to panic, not yet at least, not while his daughter sat shivering in the bed next to him.

"Shelly," he said as he nudged his wife into consciousness.

She turned, fear immediately rising in her eyes. "Wha?"

"There's something in the attic," he said matter-of-factly, his tone hiding his own aching fear. "Probably a bird or something. Maybe even a raccoon fell onto the roof from a tree."

The confusion on her face was as clear as the weariness. "Just leave it."

"It might be tearing something up. I'm just going to check it out." Upon realizing that she didn't need to be awake for any of this to occur, he added, "Kate's scared."

That did it. Shelly sat up and leaned toward her daughter, concern shining in her tired eyes. "It's okay," she said, soothing as she pulled her daughter down into her embrace. Kate's tiny blue eyes still cut through the dark of the room, as she leaned backward, never letting her gaze break from her father's. The words of his wife chased him from the room as those eyes smoldered in his mind.

"Daddy won't let anything bad happen."

~~~~~

2:02 AM

Dan slipped on a pair of tennis shoes over his bare feet as he crossed the utility room and into the garage. He completed this simple task like a young boy who is told to get dressed before going somewhere he doesn't want to go — school or church or grandma's. It was deliberate and slow, clearly a man trying to run down the clock.

Run down the clock on what?

The night, of course. Whatever was happening here would never happen under the sane gaze of the sun. Still, that was a long way from here, and there was no denying the simple fact that he was the man of the house. It was his job to check out suspicious noises, just as it was his job to fish dead mice from the crawl spaces or wade ankle deep in the collective slurry of the family's shit when the septic tank pump died. These were the hallmarks of _the man of the house_ , feminist theory be damned.

Now, as he often had in his life, Dan found himself questioning the unquestionable. "Why are things the way they are?" or some such. Usually, these questions — driven by three or four beers — were just enough to make Shelly smile and roll her eyes in that, "Oh, you men," sort of way. But Dan knew there was a deeper truth there, just hidden under the layers of Stainmaster carpet and satin finish avocado paint, and he knew it was a truth that Shelly would never dare talk about.

Why are we still together?

"Not now," he said, desperately trying to silence the voice in his head. "I don't have time for this now. This has nothing to do with all that."

Really? I think this might be exactly what this is all about. I think you've convinced her. It wasn't a very persuasive case, certainly nothing that would hold up in court. It worked, just the same, and I think we both know why. She believed you because she wanted to believe.

"There's something in the house. What the hell does that have to do with..."

I don't know any more than you do ... but she does.

"Kate?"

That's right. She knows something's eating you, and if you don't get it out and deal with it ... well, before your precious sun comes up, it will eat you up, every single bite...

He slammed the door to the garage, shutting the awful, whispering voice inside his head. Now, with a sudden sick clarity, he realized where he was. The garage was just as he left it, with one very noticeable difference. The ladder to the attic was down.

Dan's mind clawed at the thousands of threads that swirled in the span of a second, desperately fighting to find an explanation as to why it would be down.

Only, there wasn't one.

He was the only member of the family that ever went into the attic, and it had been months since he had climbed the ladder himself. When was it? Christmas, maybe longer.

Dan couldn't answer that question, but when he reached to the tool rack lining the wall and snatched the claw hammer from its perch, he squeezed until his fingers threatened to burst at the seams. The attic light was off. Above him, the opening of the attic was a yawning black mouth as still and empty as a dead man's.

Just close it. Close it now, and whatever is up there will have to stay up there. There's no other way out, and in the morning, it will be gone; you know it will because it's not real — it can't be.

Dan agreed that this was the first good thing his internal voice had said all night. He reached down to grab the folding staircase, and the lights went out. There was no sound, no pop of a light bulb overhead, no scream of fear, just a feeling so incredible, so impossible, that his mind could barely even grasp what had just occurred.

In the second or two it took him to readjust, he stood there, grabbing the bottom step like a statue. But when he heard the shuffling overhead, a burst of fear and adrenaline snapped him back with an almost painful suddenness. He threw the step upward with all his strength, forcing the staircase to fold like an accordion. A rush of relief was cut miserably short when the staircase stopped dead in its tracks three feet from the ceiling.

He scrambled, grabbing with both hands and readjusting his angle, sure that all of this was just user error, the simple, understandable mistake of a man working in total darkness. He was wrong, and this fact became painfully aware as the step began to force itself slowly downward, bending his arms as easily as folding paper. The stranger in the attic was pushing the stairs down from above, and there appeared to be nothing he could do to stop it.

There was no time to formulate a plan, no chance to abandon his attempt and run for it. The stairs lurched forward, breaking his grip and sending him stumbling backward onto the concrete floor. He heard the thump of the bottom step hit the ground, then he heard something else hit near his feet. Something heavy and unmistakably wet. The air was suddenly hot and close, and a stench filled his nostrils and burned his eyes. It smelled like the bottom of a dumpster in the middle of July, and he gagged.

There was movement, something quick dashing toward the door, bolting into the house. Slivers of moonlight shone through living room windows, and in the dim light he saw something tall and slumped shamble off in an unknown direction.

Not unknown ... to the bedroom. It's going for the easy targets first.

Even with such an awful thought in mind, he found himself slowly rising to his feet. Shuffling like a blind man, he groped for the switch on the wall and flipped it. Nothing. His hands traced toward the left, for the breaker box on the wall. He found it, and flung it open. He could hear something deeper in the house now, footsteps heavy and thudding.

_You're still the man of this house,_ a voice said, but its tone was not nearly as confident as the words, _and they're still your family._

Hands trembling, he ran his fingers down the line of switches, at first too fast to catch any breakers that might have tripped. Willing himself to slow down, he tried again, this time finding the one he needed. With a flick, the light returned.

Scanning the room, his mouth dropped as he spied the unmistakable tracks of mud and filth that must have landed inches from where he had laid sprawled on the concrete. The trail led up the stairs and into the house, and he followed, hammer held in front of him like a priest clutching a rosary. The footsteps were sporadic and uneven, but the trail was easy enough to follow. A cloud of fetid air seemed to cling to his face, as if her were wearing a used body bag around his head. The grimy tracks led directly into Kate's room, running underneath the closed door.

It's in there. It's waiting for you.

Gently, he swung the door in and gasped. Her room, which seconds before had been as tidy and neat as a three-year-old's room could be, was in shambles. The tiny table where he and his daughter held tea parties was overturned. Dolls were scattered, toy boxes tipped, but the worst was the pair of teddy bears that rested at the end of her bed. She had picked them out herself at a store where you could customize the doll however you wanted and give them names. One of them, the pink one, was officially named Mommy. The other, a darker green hue, was Daddy. Now, the pink one still sat in its usual place, but the green one rested on its side near the edge of the bed. It sat in the center of a pool of black muck that he could neither name nor place. It looked like mud, but there were pieces of mulch and sticks, and even as he watched, it jumped and writhed with bugs. There were beetles, large black ones, and cockroaches. At one end, a centipede crawled out blindly, its antennae fanning out in smooth arcs. The awful mound of filth shifted a bit, tilting the bear onto its side, and he realized in a grotesque moment of clarity that there was something bigger near the bottom.

However, he didn't have time to speculate on what it could be. Whatever had done this, it was inside his daughter's closet, rooting around and breathing heavily. Dan stepped back in retreat, and the floor creaked under his foot. Then he saw it, a hand ... no. Not a hand. Not exactly. It was the suggestion of a hand, something that wanted to be a hand, but it was wrong, so very wrong.

Dan ran, and in an instant, he knew it was chasing him. He never glanced back, but he knew it had him. The stench filled his mouth and nose, invading his lungs, firing his taste buds with the horrible tang of rotten buttermilk and old, dead things, and when he flung open the bedroom door and slammed it shut behind him, he was certain it would splinter around him as the beast crashed into it. No crash came. No splinters. Nothing. Just his beating heart and the slow, gentle breathing of his wife. Then, a thin, weak laugh on the other side of the door as it shambled back down the hallway.

Shelly was asleep. _My God,_ he thought. _People still sleep. There are people in this world who are still able to sleep. I'll never be one of them again._ Movement from the corner of his eye turned his head. He knew what he would see before he looked.

"Daddy," Kate said. She was already standing next to the bed. For some reason, she looked much older than she had several hours ago.

"Kate," he said, his voice much more desperate than he meant for it to be. "Come here."

He was tired, unbearably so, and from the way she fell into his arms, he could see she was too. Her head fell instinctively onto his shoulder as he slumped to the floor, his back still toward the door. In moments, he knew she would be asleep, and despite all that had happened, he wondered if he would as well.

"Kate," he said softly. "I need you to listen to me."

"I'm so sleepy," she said.

"I know honey, but I need you to help me figure something out. Your dream, the one we talked about earlier ... you said that bad things happened when people hurt each other."

"That's what the man in the dream said."

"But it doesn't make sense ... people hurt each other all the time. Strangers rob and shoot each other..."

"No," she said. "Not just strangers. When people hurt the ones they love the most. When they know how much it will hurt, and they do it anyway. That's what calls the bad things. That's what let them in."

A tear forced its way out of Dan's clenched eyes.

"Is there any way to stop it?" he asked.

"I don't know Daddy." She leaned forward rested her head on his shoulder. "It was just a dream."

~~~~~

3:15 AM

When he awoke, Kate's head was still on his shoulder, but he was laying flat on his back with her sprawled on top of him. He reached, groping across the carpet, trying to find some sense of where he was, who he was, why he felt such a sick, empty dread in his stomach.

_Something happened,_ he thought. _Something bad._

His hand brushed the door, the same he had been leaning against. It was open wide, the cool air of the hall rushing in to meet him. None of it had been real. It was a shared dream, a collective mania brought on by one too many horror stories, too many bad dreams. He cradled her as he shuffled to his feet to lay her in the bed. Shelly was there, still breathing deeply, still asleep. Carefully, he set his daughter down next to her and curled in behind them, pulling them both close.

_Guilt_ , a voice inside him said. He waited for more to follow, but that was all, a single echoing word.

He glanced over Shelly, looking for the digital clock to check the time, but the familiar red glow was missing, no doubt turned the wrong way. Leaning back toward his side of the bed, he looked for Kate's monitor, which was always plugged in there, a glowing blue beacon of sanity in the darkest hours of the night. The light was out. There was only blackness.

Power ... out?

The stench of death began to fill his nose, instantly causing his eyes to well. It was the smell of every dead thing that had ever existed, the opposite of life, the herald of evil, the monster that carried children away in the night and left them mangled and forgotten in ditches and landfills. Through the weak moonlight shining through the blinds, he saw it rise up from under the bed, stretching high above them and practically filling the ceiling, and the laughter that droned from it was the voice of madness. Dan gripped his wife and child, pulling them toward himself with all his might.

_You can end this,_ a voice inside screamed. _It wants you._

Dan didn't need to be told this. He knew all too well, but all he could do was clutch them tighter.

"Dan," Shelly said. "You're ... hurting me."

"Daddy!"

Dan didn't hear a word they said, just that laugh, an endless nightmare that would forever ring in his ears, and as he continued to squeeze, the nameless thing leaned down and began to do its work.

~~~~~

2:46 PM

The bodies were found by Shelly's friend Barbara. The two often met early to get a mile of walking in before starting the day. When her knocks went unanswered, she let herself in with the key hidden behind one of the shutters on the front porch. Kate and Shelly were in the bed, both blue and still clutching each other, an embrace that would never end. At once, Barbara clapped a hand over her mouth, certain that carbon monoxide was to blame. When she turned and saw Dan hanging from the rod in the closet by a necktie, she knew better.

Now, nearly twelve hours after the final moments of the family, no one had many questions about what happened. The 'why,' as the detectives on site knew, might never be answered, but the 'what' was clear to anyone. Barbara knew as soon as she saw him hanging there; a husband goes crazy and strangles his wife and daughter before hanging himself up in the closet. Open and shut. And now, the pictures had been taken, evidence placed in bags, and everyone was ready to call it a day.

A young detective — still shaken from the scene — ducked into the bathroom as the bodies were finally carried out, not because he couldn't handle it, but because he didn't want to. There was a sense of emptiness to all of this, and he knew it would take a while to get out of his system. In other murders, there was usually a bad guy to get, a lead to follow, justice still left to serve, but this ... this just felt so pointless. As he pondered this, his cell phone rang.

"Yeah?"

"We got the records from his cell phone," the voice on the line said.

"Anything out of the ordinary?"

"Nothing that would explain all this. At least not on the surface. There were an awful lot of calls to a Holly Baxter."

"We know her yet?" the detective asked.

"Yeah, they worked together. They went back and forth quite a bit ... maybe 20 calls over two weeks and twice as many texts. The last text he sent her said, 'Can't wait to see you.' That was about a week ago."

"So it just dropped off after that?"

"Yep. Not a single thing."

"We'll be talking to her very soon."

"My thoughts exactly. Any ideas on the mud all over the place?"

"We found a pair of his boots caked in the stuff out in the garage."

"So, he just decided to make a mess of the place before he got down to business."

"I honestly don't know." The detective's voice was heavy and exhausted. "Maybe the lab will tell us something, but I doubt it. Crazy don't work in the lab. Crazy just is."

As he hung up the phone, he took a deep breath and let it out slow. It still didn't feel right, but he suspected it never would. It wasn't neat or poetic or logical. It was just tragic. File it as such and move on.

The detective turned on his heel to leave the bathroom, and walked away. Soon, others followed suit, and before nightfall, the house was empty and as silent as a grave. No one was there to see it, but a centipede — larger than most — crawled silently out from behind the toilet in the master bathroom. Slow and searching, it began to explore.

D.W. Gillespie is a long time horror writer and fan who lives in Middle Tennessee with his wife and two kids. He's been featured in Disturbed Digest, Daylight Dims Anthology, Dark Moon Digest, and several others.

(Back to Table of Contents)

#  Buried Secrets

by Gary Cecil; published October 25, 2013

Max Jensen and his wife, Megan, pulled into the driveway of their new home.

"Isn't it beautiful?" Megan asked.

"It sure is."

 He rubbed her stomach slowly.

"I cannot wait for Kevin to enjoy it, too."

"You mean Katie, right?"

They laughed together.

One week earlier, they signed the papers for the house. It was a white, two-story, wooden Victorian Gothic Revival, from the 1850's. They stole it for an easy two hundred thousand, compliments of the Ohio housing market plummet.

As they went inside, Megan went straight to the couch and plopped down on it. Her bare feet were hanging over the side.

"This is the life. I _seriously_ do not want to go back to work next week. Can't I just lie here all day?"

"Well, you could, but I don't think we would be in this house for long. My job alone can't afford this mortgage. Hell, I could hardly afford a one-bedroom apartment. But then again, you do look mighty sexy on that couch."

She laughed.

He walked to the end of the couch and kissed her feet.

"It has been the longest day, babe. I'm going to grab a shower and call it a night. Meet me in the bedroom?"

"Sure, Maximillian."

"Oh God, don't call me that. My mother used to call me that all the time when I was younger."

She shrugged her shoulders and curled her lip.

"I'll be quick, I promise."

As he walked away, she winked at him.

~~~~~

When he got out of the shower, she was lying down on the bed. All of her clothes were on the floor, and with her right index finger she made a _come here_ gesture.

Max obliged, and they made love. He held her close, falling asleep shortly afterwards.

~~~~~

Megan awoke from her sleep and poked Max on the shoulder.

"Hey, wake up."

He groaned for a moment.

"What's wrong?"

"I heard something. Over there."

She pointed toward the bathroom.

It took him a few seconds to see her hand.

"What did you hear?"

"I don't know, just check it out."

He got out of bed and crept to the bathroom. Then he flipped the light switch up, blinding him temporarily.

"Well, there you have it. I don't see _anything_."

"I'm sorry; it sounded like it was scurrying across the floor. I smelled something too."

"Smelled something?"

"Yeah, it was old and rotten, like curdled milk."

"I don't smell any of that now."

"Me either."

He walked back over to the bed and sat down next to her.

"Whatever it is, it's gone now."

He leaned in and kissed her forehead.

"I love you."

"I love you, t—" She felt something crawl alongside her leg. "Get it off!" She jumped out of the sheets and pushed him back against the wall with her.

"What happened?"

"Something touched me. It was on my leg!"

A moment later, a giant rat scampered out of the covers and onto her pillow.

Max pointed his finger and laughed.

"It's just a rat."

She continued to cry.

"It's not funny!"

"It's a _little_ funny."

"Do something about that thing!"

Max grabbed a white shirt from the drawer. The rat was still on the pillow, as he inched toward it quietly.

Almost there.

When he reached out with the shirt, the rat sped off and was once again, out of sight.

"Damn! I almost had him!"

"I'm not sleeping on that bed."

"It will be fine. There can't be many more of them things walking around."

"All right, but if I feel anything, I don't care if it's your big toe, I'm sleeping on the couch."

Max tossed the soiled pillow onto the ground and replaced it with a fresh one. Then he turned out the bathroom light, and they went to bed for the second time that night.

~~~~~

They slept in until eleven o' clock the next morning. The goal for the day was to start painting the living room.

"I don't want to get out of bed," she said.

"Me either, but we've got to start painting. We both go back to work next week, and if we don't start now, we'll never finish. Plus, the baby-safe acrylic paint we spent hours researching for, would be wasted."

She rubbed her eyes and dangled her feet off the bed. Before her toes touched the wood floor, she felt a slimy and squishy mass spread between them.

"Max! The rat! It's dead!"

She hopped on her right foot to the bathroom, her left foot covered with the insides of the now, deceased rat.

"Did you do that?"

"No, it was like that before I stepped on it."

The rat lay dead on the floor, with its stomach ripped open. An iron-like stink filled the air.

"What could do _that_ to this thing?"

She ran her foot under the water and began scrubbing.

"I don't know. I hope there aren't any snakes in this house, too."

Max disposed of the rat carcass, and they made their way downstairs for breakfast.

The rest of the day went well. They finished painting the living room in a beautiful light jasmine shade and even made some progress on the kitchen.

"I'm proud of you, baby," he said. "You did a great job today."

"Awe, thank you, Max!"

With her left hand behind her back, she reached in for a kiss. When their lips met, she put her hand out to the side and slid the paintbrush down the spine of his shirt.

"Hey!"

"What are you going to do about it?"

He took off his shirt revealing his light skin and muscled body.

"Look, a rat!" He pointed behind her.

She turned around quickly. When she did, he grabbed a wet brush. As she turned back to him, he painted her left cheek.

"Gotcha!"

"Real funny!"

"Oh my, God, It's nine o' clock."

"Time flies when you're ... painting houses?"

"Nice try, Max, leave the rhyming to the poets. I need to shower before this paint dries."

"Can I come, too?"

"Yes, but no fun stuff, mister. You can wash my hair and massage my back though."

"Deal!"

Megan bent over to start the water. Her back split in perfect symmetry, and her caramel skin looked silky and impurity free.

God, she's beautiful.

He put shampoo in her hair and gently worked his hands through her long brown locks.

"This feels great, baby, don't stop."

"I won't."

The lights flickered and then shut off altogether.

"The power must've gone out," he said.

"It's not even raining."

The water ran for a bit more then came to a halt. They were freezing, and it was pitch-black inside the bathroom.

He carefully placed his foot on the rug and got out of the shower.

"Wait, not yet. Look at this."

He pulled the shower curtain to the side. A light peered through the wall like a ray of sunshine through a partly cloudy sky. The hole was just large enough for a small rat to fit through.

"I never noticed that before," he said.

"It wasn't there when we walked through the house with the realtor."

She hunched over and put both of her hands on the wall.

"I'll take a peek."

Her right eye looked inside the hole. "I see clothes and boxes. This is the closet down the hall."

"That's so strange for a hole to be there. I'm really starting to wonder if we have a rodent problem."

She focused her stare. "I think I saw something."

"What?"

"I don't kn—"

"Ah!"

She fell backward, almost pulling the shower curtain with her. Max caught her just before she completed the fall.

"Baby, what ... what is it?"

She broke free of his arms. "It touched my eye."

"What did?"

"I saw tiny teeth. They were black and chipped. Then a red ... tongue, it had to be a tongue, licked my eye!"

Max ran to his bed and felt underneath for his baseball bat. He then put on shorts and grabbed his phone.

"Stay in the room and lock the door. If I don't come back, or you hear me scream, call the cops."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm just checking the closet."

He opened the master bedroom door and tiptoed down the hallway with his aluminum baseball bat gripped in his right hand, and his phone in his left.

~~~~~

He pushed the closet door open with the business end of the baseball bat. The spoiled milk smell was back in the air.

"Anybody there?"

I wouldn't answer if I was you.

"Hello?"

He slashed the bat in front of him, as if he were clearing brush with a machete.

"Baby, you there?"

"Yes, did you find anything?"

"There's nothing in here. I see the hole. It looks like some perverted, peephole kind of deal."

"How would you know about that, Max?"

"I'm just saying, it looks off, that's all. I'm going to check the breaker box to see if one of the switches got tripped. I'll have to go downstairs in the basement. Remember what I said; call the cops if you don't hear from me or if I scream."

"Be careful, Max."

With his phone lighting the path a few feet in front of him, he found the wooden banister and walked down the stairs slowly.

Is the basement to the left or right of the kitchen?

Once in the living room he remembered the basement would be to the left of the kitchen, just past the laundry room. He opened the basement door and flipped the light switch above his head.

The power is out, stupid.

The stairs leading into the basement were extremely aged and creaked with every step. Dust and cobwebs covered the entire room. They had only seen the basement once before, and with the lights on it was halfway presentable. They didn't care for the basement anyway and only planned on using it for storage.

He bumped his right knee into the pointed edge of a broken-down desk. "Damn it!" Shining the light of the phone onto his knee revealed no injury.

Where is that damn box?

He shone the light around the room and saw the gray breaker box in the back right corner. When he reached the box, he noticed a door he hadn't remembered seeing from the house tour. It was a large double-door, and an old filing cabinet was sitting askew in front of it. At the center of the doors, a termite-ridden block of wood rested against one of the protruding metal door handles.

What is behind there? No, what was kept from getting out of there? I gotta get back to Megan.

Ignoring the door for now, he opened the breaker box and saw the electrical switches flipped to the off position. He snapped them back to the on position, and the room filled with light.

"MAX!"

No!

Max sprinted up the shoddy stairs trying to make it to Megan's screams. Just before he got to the master bedroom door, the sour and pungent milk stench filled his nostrils once more.

~~~~~

The door flung open from his kick and directly in front of him was a small human-like figure. It smelled rotten, its clothes worn and ripped. Its skin was filthy, and most of its hair was gone, replaced with leaking, pustule sores. Megan stood on the opposite side of the bed screaming.

He didn't hesitate.

His phone dropped to the ground and with both hands wrapped around the handle of the bat, he took a vicious cut to the back of the thing's cranium. A horrifying thump followed. It fell forward onto the bed and gradually sloped off onto the floor leaving a trail of dark, red blood and brain matter behind on the sheets.

"Is it dead?" Megan asked.

Max walked to the body and turned it over. The blow had sunk in its head, and its eyes bulged out of their sockets. The barrel of the bat gleamed in red and slimy gook. He started to place the bat on the ground when, the body twitched.

He slammed two more towering blows into its face.

"It is now."

The head came undone, and he looked at Megan.

"Call the cops."

~~~~~

They stood in the front yard when the cops and ambulance arrived.

"It's upstairs. Take the first door on the left."

"Can you show us?" the officer asked.

Max held Megan close to his chest. "No, we're not going back inside tonight."

A group of patrolmen and a forensic unit went inside. A detective stayed behind to talk to Max and Megan.

"Like I said, we were in the shower and the power went out. I checked the breaker and heard her scream. When I got to the bedroom, I saw it. It was the nastiest thing I'd ever seen. It scared me, so I hurt it. I hurt it until it stopped moving. I had no other choice, but to do what I did."

"I understand. I'm going to need a formal statement from you two. If my guys give me the go ahead, I can let you rest tonight."

"Okay."

An officer came outside to give the paramedics and coroner the all clear. They walked inside pushing a stretcher.

"Excuse me, folks," the detective said while walking to the side of the porch.

"Sanchez, come here."

"Yes, sir?"

"How's it looking?"

"It's bad. The forensics guys said the body looked over a hundred years old. They have to take it to the labs of course. The head was split in two, real nasty-like. There was a ball bat right next to the body covered in shit. I'm assuming that's the weapon. What did they say?" His eyes glanced toward Max and Megan.

The detective gave him the replay of what Max and Megan told him. The story checked out, and they were free to leave for tonight, but they had to come to the police station tomorrow morning for the official statement.

The stretcher rolled out of the house with a new addition to it. A lumpy black bag lay on top.

"I got us a room at the Holiday Inn, Megan. Let's get out of here."

She squeezed him tighter.

~~~~~

Three days had passed, before police officially cleared them from the case. The sheriff's department released an article in the local paper about their self defense in the now dubbed home invasion.

They pulled into the driveway of the home with the incident still beating close to their hearts.

"It's over now, Megan. Let's get our stuff in boxes and get to your parent's house. I'm sorry this happened. I wanted it to work out."

"You're right. It's okay. We're safe, and I love you, that's all that matters, baby."

She gave him a kiss.

"I love you, too."

As they walked inside the house together, it looked different. A strange, dark place.

"I want to show you something, Megan. It's in the basement. The night when I went down there, I saw a door."

"A door?"

"Yeah, it was actually two doors, let me show you."

"I don't want to go down there."

"It's going to be fine. That old _thing_ is dead now. I think the previous owners kept it behind those doors."

"Fine, but let's make this fast."

Max opened the basement door and turned on the light. "Just down here, and be careful the steps are old."

They walked down the steps, and Max pointed to the double doors.

"That's it."

It was just how he remembered it on that night. He pushed the old block of wood to the floor and moved the cabinet out of the way. When he opened the door, it let out a loud, high-pitched screech.

Megan hesitated, and Max put out his hand.

"Come on, baby."

It was dark inside, with no noticeable light switches around. Two wooden tables with straps on each corner were in the middle of the room. To the right of them, another table, with knives, scalpels, ointments, and medications on top.

"What the hell happened here?"

"I don't know, Max, and honestly, I would like to leave now."

"Okay, give me a second."

Max wandered to the far left corner of the room, to a wooden desk with a picture on top of it.

"Babe, come check this out."

He shined the light from his phone onto the picture. It revealed a handsome man and beautiful wife, with two small children.

"This must be them."

"Yeah, and?"

He pulled the picture out of the frame and observed the back.

In blue ink, it stated: _Howard, Betty, and our most precious creations, Luke and Peter – 1937._

Thump!

The old familiar smell of expired milk lingered in the air, and the door slammed shut behind them.

Gary Cecil is an aspiring author who spends his free time writing horror-themed stories with the support of his loving girlfriend, Sarah, and dog, Millie. He is currently working on his first novel. Gary has worked as a 911 Call-Taker, and has held other various jobs. His greatest memory taking 911 calls was when a man, on a backcountry road at one in the morning, called 911 and said, "The baby came out." It was a heart-wrenching experience, which ended in a man becoming a father, and Gary becoming a seasoned 911 Call-Taker.

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#  Not Forgotten

by Jay Seate; published October 29, 2013

During the Civil War, federal troops came upon a vacated rebel encampment in Virginia. The Rebs had left little behind except for a rather persuasive calling card — a severed head jammed onto the point of a fence post. Three letters — SPY — were scribbled on a scrap of paper and tacked beneath the obscenity. It had reminded one man in the regiment of something he had read in a history book — heads stuck on pikes along London Bridge during rebellious times. To come across such an extreme display of barbarism during this war was rare, but it had made its point to the Union soldiers.

The conflagration had progressed far beyond a nation of innocence, or honor among gentlemen. Gallantry no longer had a place amidst the carnage. In a downpour of anger, it had long since crossed societal rules and boundaries even for war. Dead men were on fields of battle with limbs splayed like broken puppets, left to rot. Following the tempest, the better angels of the nation's psyche would never completely regain control. In the midst of the thousands of discarded dead, the grisly event concerning the supposed spy would have been forgotten if not for the incident that followed, for it was at that place where Anna Rose came for the head of her husband.

A young lad toting salted pork and biscuits from his mother's kitchen to soldiers was the first to see the form of a young woman. Beneath the soft light of the cirrus moon she wore a long cloak, and her feet floated inches above the trampled road. The lad could not have guessed what she sought. She silently crossed the army encampment. Battle hardened men became speechless at the sight of the woman wordlessly gliding past the campfires, her face and hands washed to the shade of ivory. Some of the men followed the specter to the spot beyond the camp where her mission became apparent.

The head still rested on the fencepost as no soldier wanted to touch the foul thing. The woman produced a tapestry bag from the dark expanse of her cloak. While the uniformed onlookers watched in disbelief, the woman pulled the head from the post and plopped it into the bag as if it were a large cantaloupe. She did not go back the way she had come, but rather, disappeared into a stand of nearby trees not to be seen again that night or any other.

In a small Pennsylvania town the following day, a neighbor to Anna Rose Freeman came to pay her respects. Legend has it that Anna Rose had been seen staring out one of her windows for days, pining away for her Jonathan. She would occasionally whirl about the veranda as if dancing with him. After the news of her husband's demise, Anna Rose disappeared, a vigil no longer necessary. The neighbor found the poor soul stretched across her bed as dead as Jonathan. Knowing her beloved husband and she were never to be reunited in a loving embrace, she'd committed suicide with the use of poison. Although her mortal saga ended sadly, Jonathan _had_ returned to his Pennsylvania home from a faraway battlefield in one manner. His decomposing head rested upon the bed next to Anna Rose's corpse.

~~~~~

This tale had been running through the little town of Coventry for almost a hundred and fifty years before I heard it, but once heard it clung to me like something not easily scraped off. Old-timers were not shy about repeating the tale, embellishing it with each telling. Its impact was huge because I had become the most recent owner of the property on which Jonathan and Anna Rose's old house once stood. My presence seemed to reenergize the legend. Small towns, I'd found, had a penchant for whatever melodrama and mystery they could extract from life.

Then things began to happen, things that led me to believe Anna Rose's ghost was more than a fanciful Civil War story. The house I'd purchased was old. There were times when beams and boards would creak and moan without the wind's encouragement. Not a sign of anything sinister; old floors often creaked and heating pipes groaned, but given the little town's penchant for tall tales, it all resulted in more food for an active mind.

At night, in the dark, I listened to haunting sounds, not sure whether they were merely the howling of the wind through the tree branches or something more ... the moaning of restless souls perhaps, those unfortunates with unfinished business that keeps their presence anchored to earth. I told myself my observations were nothing more than a nonsensical reaction to stories of Anna Rose and Jonathan's head and could account for nothing other than to scare the bejesus out of me. But there were also times when an unknown force within the house I now own seemed to take hold. I have found little in life more frightening than when the beams and boards not only creak, but become at odds with their structural integrity.

When it came to Anna Rose, my mind had fallen into a morass of apprehension. Sometimes when we come upon something that is too frightening to handle, we do our best to pretend our eyes are merely playing tricks even if we know better. My first sighting of her was just before twilight near a gate that separates my property from the street. The eerie tales left no doubt in my mind as to who she was. A knot of disquiet twisted inside of me as I observed her from my living room window, still and alone, staring at the house. She stood rigid and motionless, her head titled slightly like a woman lost in thought. I couldn't distinguish her age other than the fact that she was a relatively young woman, one who had not lived long enough to become old and gray-haired. She stood too far away to discern details, but she wore the same garment at each successive viewing — a dark cloak placed over her shoulders covering all else. And there was something more. She carried a large tapestry bag, large enough to hold...

It was then I knew any rational view of the world must be given up. How many dead might wander the earth searching for resolution before letting go of the world? A visible spirit hovering in this world, delaying eternal rest, required investigation. I took it upon myself to research the true history of my property in the county's Hall of Records. I found that Jonathan Freeman had indeed been a Union soldier who was probably executed as a spy by Southern troops. An obituary revealed Anna Rose had married Jonathan only a year before her death. His bride was known for her "gift of the spirit," what might be called precognition today. Little more was said or written in existing archives other than the fact that she had indeed committed suicide, convinced her husband would never come home to her. It wasn't much information, but enough to feel some empathy for her if not pity. I had hoped to find pictures of the star-crossed Mr. and Mrs. Freeman, but short of that, there was one helpful item amongst the remnants — a photograph of the original house. Traditional for its time, it was a two-story, white-washed clapboard with a long porch and large windows, and bore no similarity to the house I now occupied.

Unfortunately, the picture was without writing or dates, but a man and a woman stood on the porch in posed _American Gothic_ positions common to that of early photography. The man wore a dark suit, while the woman was clad in a white dress and gloves that came above her elbows — a wedding day photo, perhaps? Could it have been the Freeman's, a man with a new house and a new bride to live in it? The couple were little more than specs as the photographer's intent was to capture the structure rather than its inhabitants. I asked for a magnifying glass in hopes of identification. It told me only that the twosome was in the prime of life and that the woman could very well have been the long departed Anna Rose. Curiously, I felt like an intruder into the domestic tranquility of the couple and, as silly as it may seem, that my intrusion might even anger Anna Rose. I nervously put the picture back where I had found it and tried to shake the feeling I had stumbled into the Freeman's private lives at a time before the Civil War was raging, a time before Jonathan left and Anna Rose began her sorrowful vigil.

Not ready to give up my quest, I did more than look through musty small town records. Unable to dispel my curiosity, I sought Anna Rose Freeman's burial site. The old cemetery rested on the side of a hill too steep to farm. There was a pleasant view of the isolated town below with its many church steeples rising above the elms and the oaks. If Robert E. Lee had chosen to march on Coventry with his boys in butternut, this would have been the high ground from which the Yanks could have formed a skirmish line and made their stand. There were no fences or signs to sequester the graveyard from the outside world. All that remained among a few empty beer cans, coated candy wrappers that would last until the Second Coming, and weeds were a hundred or so old stones to mark locations of final repose. Some were for the sons of Coventry who had left to fight in the Civil War, but most were for ordinary villagers. A few names struck a familiar chord as families often stayed in an area for generations, but whoever tended the graves of these souls must have been long dead. Maybe superstition played a role given Anna's legend, for I also knew most of the locals had little to do except repeat gossip, even if it was one-hundred and fifty years old.

Anna Rose's headstone was simple with no ostentatious words of scripture or poetic sentiment, just her name and dates of birth and death, and one curious engraving. _Seek no longer the beloved_ , it read, so forlorn, so sad and final those words and dates, nothing more to come, nothing more to add. I knew there were secrets buried beneath the stone as I looked at the patch of unkempt earth in front of it. I couldn't keep from asking myself the obvious question. "Did they bury Jonathan's head with Anna Rose?"

The day darkened. I shivered as the breeze ruffled my hair and whispered against my exposed skin. It grew stronger, flapping the collar of my windbreaker and the legs of my slacks. The trees swayed gracefully like dark ballerinas moving to a rhythm only they could hear. It occurred to me that all of us, the living and the dead, had shared the same wind, trees, and the elements of nature. We came from the same earth and our roots always reached down into it.

I wondered why Anna Rose had returned as I looked at the patch of unkempt earth in front of her stone. Why wasn't she settled in her grave? What had awakened her from eternal slumber? I looked down at the village once more. The size had changed little in the last century and a half according to population records. It wasn't hard to envision the day Anna Rose was laid to rest just six feet below where I stood. I closed my eyes for a moment and the horror of the inside of a coffin was vivid in every detail. I imagined her lying within the oblong box, hands placed together as if in prayer, but her rest being something other than peaceful. The feeling of melancholy dissolved as an uneasy feeling of being watched by eyes piercing through time and space overtook me, eyes commanding me to take action.

My mind had fallen into a morass of grief, desolation, and worst of all, apprehension. It seemed as if the ground began to stir and tremble as my imagination went into overdrive. I would have sworn it pulsed like the retinue of beating hearts beneath my feet. I couldn't bear to look at Anna Rose's grave any longer for fear it was she who watched, the one who wanted ... what?

I had to move before I became rooted to the ground with the weight of fear, or worse, drop dead on the very spot where Anna Rose's earthly remains lay a mere few feet below. If not for the sloppy conditions from heavy rains, I might have run from the cemetery all the way back to the relative safety of my house and locked all the doors like a hunted man attempting to burn this preoccupation from his brain before it exploded. That would not solve the issue that plagued me, however. I vowed to end any further research about this enigmatic couple. I lived on the land once belonging to two people who had entered into local folklore and that should be that.

Of course, that wasn't the end of the matter. The inscription on Anna Rose's tombstone had gotten into my head like a lyric of music that goes around and around until you think you're going to go crazy with it. Many believed that ghosts sit on your bed at night and stand behind you in the mirror. My most believable research concerning the supernatural had described them as merely ectoplasm with no knowledge of space or time. It sounded harmless enough, but my ghost didn't feel detached. Further, I read that a spirit could sometimes move from place to place as well as create physical manifestations of its emotions, possibly malevolent ones. Additionally, there were cases where an entity could command a psychic force over people or objects. That seemed to fit not only the legend, but also the apparitions I had experienced.

The next time I saw Anna Rose, I retrieved my binoculars for a closer look, but by the time I returned to the window, she was, of course, gone. I could have alerted the authorities, that all-purpose concept of power and control, but I knew even they could not help in this instance. I wondered if anyone in neighboring houses might have seen her, but she would surely have vanished before action could be taken. Was she meant for my eyes only? The moment _that_ thought crossed my mind, I felt as if the ectoplasm of a restless spirit seeking stability had passed right through _me_. Was I seeing and feeling things others couldn't?

With each sighting, the figure edged ever closer up the drive that leads to my house. The third time she appeared, I decided to confront the trespasser. I opened my front door, bounded down my steps, and trotted toward the solemn figure. I looked away for a moment, just a moment, to make sure the path before me had no obstacles. And when I looked up, I stared, open-mouthed for she had vanished once again.

The incidents affected me profoundly, forcing me to think about my own mortality. I had never been concerned about the existence of an afterlife.

Until now.

Now, when I seemed to be ... haunted.

It was clear this phantom either belonged among the restless dead, or I was loosing my mind, now cluttered with long dead history. Although my sanity might be in question, I was also angry that a manifestation would play such a coy game with my senses and make me feel the fool. At this point, I made a concerted effort to block out this nimbus of unreality that surrounded me. But then I would see her again. As such occasions can induce a habit to the mind; I finally _expected_ to see her.

The sightings were usually as dusk approached, not the time of day I would have preferred to see an apparition nearing the house like some impoverished waif wanting to be taken in. Goosebumps rose on my arms as she came closer, the hood of her cloak now pulled over her head to mask her features, sending new chills to tickle the hair on my neck. I had decided Anna Rose must want her house back, or the place where it had stood, hers having been turned to rubble long ago. Could she have hoped to reunite with a complete Jonathan within? One hundred and fifty years was a large chunk of eternity to share with merely a head. Or could it have been more sinister than that? Judging by her hooded appearance that simulated The Grim Reaper himself, maybe she wanted someone to replace Jonathan, or the part of him she was not able to recapture. Could some malevolent force want to stretch forth its tentacles around me in a supernatural embrace? Could her goal be, God help me, _possession_?

I now considered it no coincidence that one hundred and fifty years had passed since the final date on her tombstone, the day Anna Rose took her life. In my research, I had discovered myself to be the only single man to own the property since before Anna Rose's time. All of my suppositions were certainly fuel to feed the funny monkey in my brain, my anxiety working as a conduit. I didn't envy the couple's fate, but I envied the passion Anna Rose seemed to possess for I haven't been very lucky at love, you see. My talent never quite equaled my aspirations, but that didn't mean I was ready for a courtship with a ghost. Had the long-dead Anna Rose, still hungering from her loss, returned for me? Could the extraordinary gift of _sight_ have somehow enabled her return when the situation was right?

At dusk and beyond, a strange mix of fear and curiosity held me to this place. In the hallway, a grandfather clock continued to tick away the passing moments with mechanical precision while all else seemed distorted. Then a bizarre thought came to me about the state of mind to which I had descended. I must have been attempting to give my house the characteristics of the one I had seen in the photograph. Better than to believe the house was truly organic, twisting and turning into shapes from the ancient past.

In the evenings I had become a receptacle of fear, starting at the slightest sound, glancing constantly into dark corners. Something seen, then unseen. There, then not there. As I sat at my desk thrumming my fingers, trying to distract myself with paperwork of some sort, a gust of wind rattled the windowpanes. The walls groaned. Every creak sounded like a footstep. My eyes traveled the room. I could almost hear a shuffling at the front door and see it cant slightly off plum before slowly opening. Anna Rose would stand at the threshold. If I closed my eyes for a moment, all would be well, like the rational ticking of the clock that now sounded a bit like nails being pounded into the lid of a coffin. But still, I wondered if a preordained dance summoned by a historical choreography kept me tied to a power that asserted itself from beyond the grave.

Then came the evening of actual contact. Thunder that sounded like a cannon volley rattled the rafters. Razorblades of lightning slashed into my bedroom, but it wasn't the sound and fury that bothered me most. Wind was banging the gate where Anna Rose first appeared. A loose vine slapped against a drain pipe. The ground seemed to be trembling below me and the sky splitting overhead. I felt like a kid in a dark house on Halloween. I didn't dare to look out the window for I feared the sight of something standing in the yard beside the shrubs, something near the house, or even peering through the window. I turned away and attempted to guide my thoughts in another direction. The patter of rain that might have lulled me to sleep failed to follow. I eventually succumbed to the lateness of the hour, but on a storm filled night, the boundary between dreams and reality can be porous. In a dream, cold lips brushed against my cheek and forehead. I gasped and opened my eyes. I was alone in a room that was as cold as the touch had been. I was convinced Anna Rose was about to take dramatic action for at the time of the most recent sighting, she was at the porch steps in possession of not only the cloth bag, but something else as well, something very sharp — a carving knife held in a clawed hand.

My fear was no longer abstract. It now had weight and substance. I could feel it with every nerve ending in my body. The next evening, the sun disappeared as if running away from the world, taking with it the light that didn't want to be left behind. There was heaviness to the air that had nothing to do with the weather, a charged density. I tried to close my eyes and find some semblance of rest while the pounding of my heart seemed audible. I found myself in that dim zone between sleep and wakefulness. I sensed something extraordinary was about to happen. If I fell asleep, would I feel a hand on my shoulder?

The stillness of the house pressed around me. It was like the moment of silence that precedes a scream. Could this whole business conclude with my sanity slipping away? The fabric of my life was tearing apart like rotted silk and I powerless to stop it? The frightening word "possession" entered my mind again. I was neither a drinker nor a druggie, but this was one time I believed a drink or a hit would have calmed me. As it was, there seemed to exist unresolved information the living might inherit from the departed as I continued on a mind-bending ride to the edge of madness.

Then a creak in a floorboard; Anna Rose was near. Was she lingering in the darkness by choice or by necessity? I awaited the sound of hinges squeaking or the click of a latch, assuming objects such as these were a hindrance. Or might it be a soft knock on the door to be followed by a presence looming up in the night like some fearful monster, casting a long shadow in the dimness of the moonlit room, if she could cast a shadow. And when it came, would I feel the coldness of dead lips on my flesh, or something more spectacular like clawed fingertips hooking into my flesh and pulling me into some unimaginable place? Would it be like a jolt from an electrical wire when she revealed the contents of her bag? I shoved a corner of my quilt into my mouth to keep from screaming.

As the night outside quieted, I believed I could actually hear the house breathe. In the dimness of the shadowed bedroom, I felt the air around me compress. If I'd entered Anna Rose's coffin, the atmosphere couldn't have been more oppressive. I was a puppet with Anna Rose pulling the strings. Was my fate to be determined by a woman who was both above the earth as well as below it? What could I do but lay still in the gloom, listening and hoping the horror would pass. Could I ever sleep again without taking action before something tore loose inside of me that could never be repaired? I'd developed the kind of fear you feel when a voice inside you whispers that evil is not only real, but nothing can save you from it. I had become like an addict who fears both dreams and reality, a slave to my perceptions.

My trusty clock stopped ticking so abruptly that its silence sliced through the room like a scythe. I knew I was irretrievably slipping into the abyss. If I succumbed to the inner darkness that beckoned me, all would be lost. It was at that moment when a strange notion engulfed me, one that couldn't be banished. I wanted no more nights forfeited to the unknown. There was no remedy for this kind of fear except motion. I decided what I must do.

~~~~~

A week has passed since I waited for that knock or a kiss, or something far worse. And here I remain a century and a half after Anna Rose was laid to an uneasy rest, the most recent in a long line of caretakers on land sold many times over. But I am no longer considering giving up my domicile in the quaint little town of Coventry. The house seems to have righted itself, its angular verticality restored. The quandary over what would satisfy Anna Rose has been resolved in part. Even though the situation isn't perfect, it appears that acquiring both me and my property has soothed the wandering wraith.

Before she had the opportunity to take control in whatever manner she chose with her tapestry bag and knife, I decided to remove the curtain of fear before me by paying another visit to the cemetery under the veil of darkness. My nocturnal labors took less time than I would have thought because rain had softened the ground part way. Under a moon emerging from behind clouds like a big, spying eye, I began to dig. In the gloom, the gravestones had become horizontal slats of shadow. I halfway expected to see Anna Rose's spectral presence standing next to one of the tombstones observing my progress. The only sounds were that of a slight breeze and my labored breathing from the physical exertion I was unaccustomed to. The only time I wavered in my task was when my head disappeared beneath the ground's surface and I could no longer watch for ... whatever, as a cold moisture oozed up from the soil, seeping into my garments like a wet vapor. I wondered where the expression _six feet under_ came from, definitely not from this cemetery above Coventry. I could swear I'd passed that depth a foot ago. Maybe those who buried Anna Rose thought she needed a few extra feet considering her unique circumstance. It wasn't until the fresh pile of dirt made the hole seem another two feet deep when I finally heard the sound of my shovel splinter rotted wood. I worked quicker until the sought-after item was found. I crossed myself in spite of my heretofore agnosticism, just in case I had committed a sin against either the earth or spirits, or both.

I scraped away as much dirt as I could for fear the lid would totally collapse under my weight and make a mess of whatever was left of Anna Rose. I then knocked the corroded lock loose and opened the lid on creaky hinges that broke off after a mere foot of stress. Pushing the lid aside, I beheld what was left of Anna Rose, which wasn't much. A gag reflex kicked in as I looked upon the fleshless, toothy grin and the hollowed-out eye sockets. Her apparition had certainly been more recognizable than her remains. Nature's cleanup had performed its duty and fed on this death long ago. Her coffin and clothes had deteriorated to the point of near nonexistence. Her bones would have fallen apart if not for the few scraps of leathery skin remnants as brown and dry as a chamois. My imaginings about a claw hand and knife were dispelled, at least for the time being, now that her body was free to accompany her spirit.

For transport, I carefully wrapped her remains in a tarpaulin and tried to repair the disturbed earth from which one of its own had been taken. I was a few aches beyond bone tired, but my mind was racing. The hardest part had been the return trip with Anna Rose's remains bumping around on the backseat of my car. "If I've overstepped my bounds by taking you, Anna, let the woman I've been seeing take the breath out of me for daring to help," said a confused man trying to justify what he'd done. In the gray ghost of the approaching dawn, I couldn't bear to look in the rearview mirror due to the lingering fear she might toss aside the canvas shroud and attempt to physically complete whatever her mission might have been. I had seen it happen in too many movies.

I realized few things in my life would ever be the same after that night in the graveyard. I had reached a border that would separate the future from everything that had gone before. My soul would never again belong to me alone. With my help, Anna Rose journeyed beyond the veil of death and into my living room, earthbound again in body, of sorts. It's not as if she can have the joy of life, but she can at least sit near a window and survey the land she and Jonathan shared. With a little ingenuity using wire and superglue, she hangs together pretty well, and I found her a dress at Goodwill for modesty's sake. Now I can talk to her every day about this, that, or the other. That is something at least — having the company of a man who is all in one piece.

Could she be grieving still, or do all one hundred and fifty year old corpses possess the same mournful, downcast countenance? I whistle a tune now and then thinking Anna Rose might appreciate music. Once, while in another room, I thought I heard her bones clacking around as if dancing. I ran in expecting to see the dress whirling about, but she was back at the window, Jonathan's head still securely in her lap.

Oh yes, Jonathan's head. It had been buried with her in a metal box, leaving it in somewhat better condition than she. It still had its hair. Even though his toothy leer can be offsetting, it seems only right it should rest in Anna Rose's lap after she went to so much trouble to retrieve it.

If the Freeman's remains should be discovered within the confines of our home, it will surely add a fresh chapter to the tale of restless spirits and give credence to the theory that the past is never completely dead.

Seek no longer the beloved.

The words ring hollow because the freeing of her earthly remains from the grave has not concluded Anna Rose's search. The words "until death do us part" must not always apply. I am convinced she is beckoning for assistance in finding the rest of Jonathan. Unless there was a happy, heavenly reunion after death, which apparently wasn't the case for Anna Rose, what must it be like to spend eternity with only part of a loved one? I believe she wants Jonathan to join her in a final dance to erase the horror of his demise at the hands of warring brutes. Although her eye sockets are as vacant as a parking lot after closing hours, I believe she can see. At times, I feel I could open the dress she's wearing and witness the beating of her heart.

An image of an old kitchen preceding the one where I now stand sometimes overwhelms me. A woman in a bell-shaped skirt stands over a wood stove, the smell of bacon frying and chicory coffee brewing fills my nostrils. Anna Rose, preparing breakfast for... The vision and the aromas vanish as nearly as soon as they arrive. Now that I have permitted her access to the house, I anticipate continuing incidents until our destinies become clear.

Somewhere I read it wasn't true that the insane thought themselves sane. They often do not fight their affliction because there are pleasures and beauty in madness. One thing for sure, I have developed new sensitivities. There have been sweet justifications in my actions. The clock still ticks away slices of time, but real time only matters to flesh and blood. Eventually, I will be informed how this reunion is to play out because I believe the cadaver of Anna Rose is very nearly ready to speak to me.

_Jay Seate has written everything from humor to the erotic to the macabre, and is especially keen on stories that transcend genre pigeonholing. In addition to his novels and novellas, his short stories and memoirs appear in numerous magazines, newspapers, anthologies and webzines. Learn more about him and his publications at_ troyseateauthor.webs.com _._

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#  About Fiction Vortex

Fiction Vortex, let's see ...

A fiction vortex is a tornado of stories that pick you up and hurl you through a barn to find enlightenment on the other side. It's a whirlpool of fascinating tales so compelling that they suck you in, drag you down to the bottom of your mind, and drown you with incessant waves of glorious imagery and believable characters.

Nope.

A fiction vortex is an online speculative fiction magazine focused on publishing great science fiction and fantasy, and is run by incredibly attractive and intelligent people with great taste in literature and formidable writing prowess.

Not that either. But we're getting closer.

Founded in the 277th year of the Takolatchni Dynasty, Fiction Vortex set out to encourage people to write and publish great speculative fiction. It sprang fully formed from the elbow of TWOS, retaining none of TWOS's form but most of its spirit. And the patron god of writers, the insecure, the depressed, and the mentally ill regarded Fiction Vortex in his magic mirror of self-loathing and declared it good, insofar as something that gives writer's undue hope can be declared good. Thereafter, he charged the Rear Admiral of the Galactic 5th Fleet to defend Fiction Vortex down to the last robot warrior.

Now we're talking.

Take your pick. We don't care how you characterize us or the site.

Fiction Vortex focuses on publishing speculative fiction. That means science fiction and fantasy (with a light smattering of horror and a few other subgenres), be it light, heavy, deep, flighty, spaceflighty, cerebral, visceral, epic, or mundane. But mundane in a my-local-gas-station-has-elf-mechanics-but-it's-not-really-a-big-deal-around-here kind of way. Got it?

Basically, we want imaginative stories that are well written, but not full of supercilious floridity.

There's a long-standing belief that science fiction and fantasy stories aren't as good as purely literary fare. We want you to prove that mindset wrong (not just wrong, but a steaming pile of griffin dung wrong) with every story we publish. It's almost like we're saying, "I do not bite my thumb at you, literary snobs, but I do bite my thumb," but in a completely polite and non-confrontational way.

We've got more great stories online, with a new story twice a week. Visit our website FictionVortex.com, follow us on Twitter: @FictionVortex, and like us on Facebook: FictionVortex.

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