Riding Light Halloween Horror Full Issue

The Riding Light Review

The Riding Light Review A sixteen-year-old boy once imagined riding on a beam of light, and his simple thought experiment played an important role that would later change the world—it ushered in the age of Modern Physics. This boy was Albert Einstein.

Einstein‘s use of imagination fueled his work in physics, which eventually lead to his famous 1905 papers on Special Relativity.

The Riding Light Review emerged out of a desire to push the boundaries of creativity through language, ideas, and story. We believe in the power of imagination, the fuel for our ideas and innovation. This notion inspired the name of our magazine.

Masthead Editor in Chief Cyn C. Bermudez Managing Editor Taylor Lauren Ross Layout Editor Andrea Ellickson Associate Editors Ashley Johnson Melissa Shofner Readers Jamie Hoang R.L. Black Š 2014 The Riding Light Review ISSN 2334-251X This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from individual authors or artists. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or any other means without permission of the author(s) or artist(s) is illegal. www.ridinglightreview.com

Contents Cover Art Adam Domville Interior Art Monique Nitschke Fiction

CREAK Rebecca Ann Jordan

MOTHER COMES IN HANDY Cathy Warner

EATING CROW Thomas Kleaton

SLENDER AND GRAY Jason Marc Harris Poetry

SLEEPING IN THE DARK Jacqueline Jules

PANDORA‘S ECHO Jacqueline Jules

DANSE MACABRE Sarah Grodzinski

HALLOWEEN Sarah Grodzinski

CHILDREN DON‘T PLAY MARCO POLO AROUND HERE; THEY PLAY CHARLIE PYLE. Sarah Grodzinski

GHOST, WALKING Jennifer Martelli

ALL SOULS HAD BODIES THEY COULDN‘T ESCAPE Cathy Bryant

TRICK OR TREAT Greta Ehrig

THE COUNTESS. Wendy Schmidt

GHOST IMAGE Flower Conroy

Artists Cover Art Adam Domville is the writer and illustrator of ATHENIENS, a four-issue limited series that was published in Athens, Greece.

Adam is a versatile artist whose credits include: book illustrations, tattoo art and design, poster art for rock bands, corporate and promotional art, logo design, and commissioned original paintings.

Most recently, his work has been featured in the horror anthology Darkness Ad Infinitum, published by Villipede, and he has contributed artwork for Panels for Primates, which is available at www.comixology.com. Born in Montreal, raised in Greece, Adam has traveled the world and currently lives in Victoria, BC. For more of Adam‘s art, please visit his website at www.adamdomville.com.

Interior Art Monique Nitschke is a designer born in Berlin and living in Hamburg, Germany. Drawing is her passion. Creepy and dark themes are her favorite. She loves to create her drawings with structure, light, and darkness. She loves to experiment with mixed media like watercolor and ink or draw abstract art on canvas. She also finds the human body interesting and likes to study the differences between people. As an emerging artist, she is currently building her website and Facebook page. For more of Monique‘s work, please visit her at www.fiverr.com/keylarainbow.

Editorial When I was a kid, Halloween was a night of freedom. I‘d slip a polymer-blend Wonder Woman costume on over my clothes; the closure tied in the back. My face grew wet underneath cheap plastic: a combination of sweat and saliva—the mask stuck to my face when I spoke, as the rubber band tangled and pulled my hair.

I‘d run outside at twilight with a brown paper grocery bag; re-used stickers covering ―Safeway‖ peeled away slowly. I hit every house methodically while filling my bag to the rim. Then I ran back to my home, dumped the bag, and headed out for more. There were three to four iterations of my candy compendium. I ran the streets well into the evening, like the don of a Trick-or-Treat Mafia. My siblings and I would gather our booty together. We‘d search through every piece, check for tampering, separate out the good (chocolate, Now & Laters) from everything blah (non-chocolate, orange-wrapped candies), and barter for our favorites. Afterward, I sat with my spoils and watched Elvira’s Movie Macabre or the Tales from the Crypt marathon. Of course, that lead to nightmares and tummy aches, but that was the price for freedom.

As an adult, Halloween is still one of my favorite holidays. I love the costumes. Any reason to dress up as a favorite character is a good reason. But it‘s the stories I love the most: fiction, film, television. I love it all. I watch and read horror and weird tales year round, but Halloween gives me an excuse to mass consume it. I had a lot of fun reading through all the wonderful submissions we received for this special mini issue.

I am pleased to present The Riding Light Review‘s first Halloween Horror Issue. In this issue we feature original short stories from

Rebecca Ann Jordan (―Creak‖), Cathy Warner (―Mother Comes In Handy‖), Thomas Kleaton (―Eating Crow‖), and Jason Marc Harris (―Slender and Gray‖). We have poetry from Jacqueline Jules (―Sleeping in the Dark‖ and ―Pandora‘s Echo‖), Sarah Grodzinski (―Danse Macabre,‖ ―Halloween,‖ and ―Children Don‘t Play Marco Polo Around Here, They Play Charlie Pyle.‖), Jennifer Martelli (―Ghost, Walking‖), Cathy Bryant (―All Souls Had Bodies They Couldn‘t Escape‖), Greta Ehrig (―Trick or Treat‖), Wendy Schmidt (―The Countess.‖), and Flower Conroy (―Ghost Image‖). We also have artwork from Adam Domville (cover art: ―Grapejuice‖), and original artwork from Monique Nitschke (Interior Art).

From monster houses and a supernatural hand that can write novels to family troubles and creepy dolls, we hope you enjoy this very special issue.

Happy Halloween!

Sincerely, Cyn Bermudez

Becoming a Nonprofit Currently, The Riding Light Review in the process of establishing our 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. Our mission is to publish and promote exceptional and eclectic art and literature, to reach beyond the magazine by supporting and promoting diversity through the exploration of innovative ideas in literary and visual art forms.

For more information, please visit: www.ridinglightreview.com

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CREAK Rebecca Ann Jordan

Singing Queen at the very top of his lungs, he glides by on a skateboard twice a day.

I am much too old for him, but I always hold my breath.

In the mornings he comes pounding through faster than the speed of his own life, as if the pulse of his voice, like the pump of his skinny but marvelously strong young thigh, can propel him forward

faster, can churn through the obstacles easy as grinding tiny rodent bones beneath the surge of an oncoming train.

Doesn‘t he know that he parts the wind, his nose like a knife, to either side of him? It doesn‘t even rustle his golden hair. Except for me, he has no obstacles.

There is a triangle made by an aspen tree: its trunk, its branch, and a mop of leaves; beyond the tree is the tan concrete. This is the triangle I watch whenever I‘m awake, for this is where his voice first flutters through, and he first appears. Sometimes, if I am dozing (as I often do these days—I‘m old, remember), his voice penetrates whatever dreams are percolating within my walls and I start awake and inhale a rush of breeze through my windows and look to the path where he rides his skateboard, and then I am too late to see him, and I punish myself by going back to sleep. But even then, I can still hear a receding lyric, an ode to women of a certain below-the-torso voluminous persuasion, and my dreams are sweet, because my last thought before drifting off is that maybe he‘s singing about me. *** This is not a normal feeling, from what I hear. People are pests.

They chew at your boards, spill their droppings, and generally make a mess of things before they decide to move on.

Let me try to explain anyway. There used to be a little girl who lived within. She would bound—yes, bound, using the full extent of her body‘s capacity—outside whenever she heard, or thought she heard, a mockingbird. It was here that her father, before he died, had brought home a tiny, broken-winged mockingbird, and told her something I can‘t remember now, so she must have found a connection with him in the birds. Her mother hated the noise, and hated when the girl bounded outside naked—I forgot to mention that the girl threw a fit whenever she had to put clothes on—and would go howling like a banshee whenever there were mockingbirds.

The girl was afraid the house was haunted. We tried to hold our breath, to hold ourselves together and keep from creaking wherever she went within—me and the memories of what lived within me.

We always let splinters stick straight up whenever that girl‘s mother walked by barefoot, and other horrible things homes are never supposed to do to their occupants. That was likely why she had the floorboards ripped up and completely redone with tile, and that is why I don‘t remember much of the little girl or her mother besides that. Not even how she died.

But I do remember some things. The girl once pressed her cheek to the wall and we imagined we leaned against her to hold her up, enveloped her in the arms we didn‘t have to protect her from the thunderstorm hammering on our head.

Plus, I saved some splinters, just in case. *** Today, he is entreating to the known universe to find him a lover to ease the ache in his bones. All the creaks in me come at once, like an ill-timed fart. His wheat-gold hair appears in the triangle between trunk, branch, leaves. Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk rush his wheels, closer and closer. And then he stops, still belting at the top of his lungs, singing so hard his voice wavers in and out of the right notes, but I don‘t mind; I‘ve never been a student of music and he actually stops in front of me. His feet are bare, shoes tied at the laces and slung around his neck. His soles sizzle on the concrete. I wonder if the concrete can feel people above it, the way I feel people within me, and am immediately jealous. A chunk of stucco slides off of me and I have never felt so embarrassed—if I have ever felt embarrassed before at all.

To my great relief, and great disappointment, he does not seem to notice. He does something fancy with his feet and tucks the skateboard under his arm and runs a hand through his sweatdampened hair. The sweat beads, trickles down beside his ear, takes a turn along his jaw, and hangs quivering at the end of his chin.

He looks at me as the music blares from his throat.

I let my door swing open, and make it look like a breeze did it.

Naughty, whispers the breeze, tickling all through me. I decline to dignify this with a response.

More hollering: He wants everything, as soon as humanely possible. He shields his eyes and looks at my roof and makes his body stretch its full length. I suddenly wonder with redoubled jealousy where he lives and which walls have seen him naked, which walls have absorbed his singing and woven it into their histories. But he is not looking at my roof. He is looking above it, at a bird. I don‘t know if it‘s a mockingbird or not, but I hate it. If it lands on my rooftop I will scorch its toes.

He slips his shoes on, untying the laces, and croons as he glides away: ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk, in descending order. *** I begin a critical self-assessment in preparation for the next time he stops. There is nothing that can be done about the weeds in between my toes—I mean, tiles—but while I try to find remnants of glue and nails, I employ the wind to sweep all the dust out from within. The breeze sniggers at me—Naughty old place, naughty naughty—like a nagging mother. But I do need the help.

By the time I hear the cheerful warble and the ka-thunk ka-thunk of skateboard rollers, I have at least managed to bleach out the place where the stucco fell off, and my floorboards are not quite as dusty as they once were, and the breeze has managed to blow over some weeds pushing up through my tiles and make them look like mere incongruities in the grout.

Ka-thunk, ka-thunk-a-thunk-ka-ka-thunk-thunk. I wonder at the unusual rhythm until I hear he is not singing, but laughing: ―…Hahah! Yeah.‖

Another voice: ―So where the hell are you taking me anyway?‖ ―Right here, ass-twat.‖ They are old enough that the cussing does not shock them (it certainly does not shock me), and young enough that they can wear it like a badge, like a rite of passage. Still, they grin at each other through the little triangle between the trunk, the branch, and the leaves of the aspen.

They stop before me. My boy is carrying a case of beer, a lighter, a candle, and now his skateboard. The other boy is carrying a case of beer, a rolled-up sleeping bag, and a skateboard.

They approach. I hold my breath and let my door creak open. ―This looks super sketchy,‖ says the young man who has followed my young man. ―What‘s the point of this?‖ ―There‘s no point. That‘s the point. Dance, dance you fuckin‘ scaramouche.‖ Halfway through the phrase, he passes into me. His scent will remain, faintly, as long as I can possibly hold it in my rotting boards: bittersweet bodyspray, cinnamon, his mother‘s pruned rose petals (perhaps), and faintly of budding, salty sex. I nearly shudder apart.

They come in. Kick around some debris. Make lewd jokes at each other, each worse than the last, as they head up the stairs. Two bottles of beer have been opened. I hold my breath and creak. ―Yeah, Mark,‖ my boy says, ―This place is haunted. Other day, I stopped and saw this creepy girl peeking out the upstairs window.‖ ―Cheesy. On Halloween? Fuck you,‖ Mark says, and grins, and shoves my boy the rest of the way up the stairs. His shoe flies off and slaps my tile. His bare toe catches a splinter on the stair; a drop of bright, warm blood stains my second story.

This development is so earth-shattering that we can do absolutely nothing in response.

Yet.

Upstairs, all the beer gets swallowed. It is coming dark, the time when I am usually too old to be awake, and let the cold sort of get into my bones and jostle me how it wants. Tonight I am awake. I watch them light a candle, shoot off some texts on their phones, a way to look at each other under the flickering light without looking like they are looking. ―Hey,‖ my boy says, ―look at this.‖ He hands over his phone to Mark, who inches closer. My boy‘s breath ruffles Mark‘s thin hair. ―Oh, I‘ve seen this. This is dumb,‖ Mark says, but reaches to take the phone from my boy, and touches his hand. They drop the phone upside-down, so the light from the screen doesn‘t touch them; only the candlelight illuminates my boy‘s hand as it slides, practiced, around Mark‘s waist. Mark‘s head jerks up; his forehead hits my boy‘s chin. They cuss, and laugh, and kiss. My bones crack, straining for things I have always seen but only been a part of in the barest of ways: sometimes bare asses on kitchen counters, sometimes raw shoulders on carpets. I have always leaned against them at these times, holding them up, and have even felt their racing heartbeats.

My boy and Mark fumble with each other‘s clothes. The delicate dance is done; they dive into each other without further coyness.

Outside, a mockingbird repeats a loop of car alarm-laughter-sirenbabbling brook-sobbing.

I lean against them, and hold them up, and try my best not to be jealous. Jealousy, I am told, does not become inanimate objects. *** Mark sleeps, afterward. I watch him for a long time. My boy is holding his breath, too. He picks himself up and walks naked through my veins, empty beer bottle at his side. My floorboards are no obstacle to him, even the ones that try to trip him so I can feel his skin against mine. My floor, I mean. He parts my stench with the very tip of his nose; it slides past him to either side, never touching him. He hums, a vibrating cadence in the high, soft places of his throat. Outside, the mockingbird pauses and then echoes him. He gives a full, delighted smile. They practice singing with

each other. I try to harmonize; all I manage is a grunt and a fart somewhere deep in my piping. Something green and brackish oozes out of the upstairs bathroom drain. My boy doesn‘t notice, but he does stop singing, instead humming to himself and hammering at his bare knees, the slaps making fine vibrations ripple up his skinny, strong thighs.

The breeze manages a full sentence: He’s too young for you. But was it the breeze? Or the mockingbird? Or something else, some other memory nestled deep under layers of paint and plaster?

My boy sits on an old mattress downstairs. He puts his lips around the beer bottle, though there is nothing left. His bare feet press against my tile; I am cold, but I feel his soles. I try to press against him, to let him know I am here, that I will protect him, that I will bathe him in warm, clean water, that I will hold the rain out and keep the wind from nagging at him. I am so incensed that I would make all manner of lies to hold his soles right there, to just press my tiled souls against his and pretend he can feel me the same way I feel him.

Mark creaks down my stairway; I do not care if he thinks I am haunted, but my splinters do not want to taste his toe-blood. He stumbles down, ungainly, with the candle almost guttering in his hand. ―Fucking awful noise, that bird is making. What kinda bird sings at night anyway?‖ My boy stops humming. I feel a swell of emotion I am most definitely not supposed to feel. ―Let‘s get out of here. Place is creepy.‖ My boy smiles and gets off the bed. Finds his shoes. Puts them on. ―Fine. If you‘re scared.‖ I recognize the feeling inside of me. It is the feeling of a mockingbird, of howling like a banshee, of something beyond jealousy—irrational rage. The little girl is still inside of me, and no matter how hard I try to hold my breath she squeezes the air from my lungs and insulation. The candle goes out.

―Holy shit!‖ ―Mark?‖ ―Yeah.‖ ―I guess that settles it.‖ They both take out their cell phones. My boy‘s battery has died, but Mark has his. By the light of the screen, they go to find their clothes.

The mother yells to put her clothes on. The girl screams like a banshee. She is touching things that are not hers—the girl, who isn‘t me, who is me, who never was me—and the two parts of me are splitting into five, into ten, into two hundred souls who once whispered ―home‖ beneath my eaves, who pressed their lips to the windows and imprinted the word there, the mother who hates mockingbirds not least among them. They are too many ghosts to contain safely beneath my tile, safely behind my insulation and nails and screws and plaster. I crack. We crack. We rush in a gust of bone-cracking air.

Told you so, whispers the breeze.

Mark screams. Outside, the mockingbird practices replicating it.

Our boy manages to make it to his feet before we cave in on him.

Our splinters bite into his shoulders, his earlobes, his chest and hips and thighs. We drink him in. We do not need to wait for his song any longer or the twice a day ka-thunk-ka-thunk-a; we creak in time to our own rhythm. He sings within us now, vibrating in our foundation.

Rebecca Ann Jordan is a speculative fiction author and artist. She has published poetry and fiction in Infinite Science Fiction One, Fiction Vortex, FLAPPERHOUSE, Strangelet, Swamp Biscuits & Tea, Yemassee Journal, and more. Becca regularly columns for DIYMFA.com and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing from California Institute of the Arts. See more of her work at www.rebeccaannjordan.com.

PANDORA‘S ECHO Jacqueline Jules

Curious, Pandora lifted the forbidden lid expecting gold or silk, not the howling creatures that flew in her face like bats from a cave, carrying crime and destruction, poverty and disease— all the headlines that flap in our hearts, disturbing our sleep. ―What have I done?‖ Pandora sank to the stone floor sobbing, bare shoulders bleeding, safe world punctured . . . till cries from the ornate box forced her to rise and take one more look inside where she found a tiny creature, weeping, with wings raised.

Still curious, Pandora lifted the furry child.

Pressed his warm beating heart against her own.

And in time, he taught her to fly in the dark, to hear the high-pitched echo of hope stubbornly bounce off rocky walls.

SLEEPING IN THE DARK Jacqueline Jules I don‘t remember when I stopped switching on the nightlight.

Somewhere between 12 and 15, it became possible to close my eyes in the dark, unafraid of monsters under the bed.

Somehow in adolescence, the unknown became a blanket, cool and comforting, compared to the red eyes and fanged teeth of imagined trolls.

It‘s better to sleep in the dark where you can‘t see the shadow of claws rising over the bed.

Jacqueline Jules is the author of the poetry chapbooks Field Trip to the Museum, published by Finishing Line Press, and Stronger Than Cleopatra, published by ELJ Publications. Her poetry has appeared in over one hundred publications, including The Potomac Review, Soundings Review, Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, Christian Science Monitor, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Red Booth Review, Gravel Magazine, OffCourse, Third Wednesday, Imitation Fruit, Connecticut River Review, Pirene's Fountain, and The Poetry Friday Anthologies. She is also the author of two dozen books for young readers, including Zapato Power and Never Say a Mean Word Again. You can visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com.

MOTHER COMES IN HANDY Cathy Warner

It started off like any other Halloween: with a party. Ever since the neighborhood discovered I was Frank Einstein, writer of the popular Nights of Eternal Death book series, I‘d felt a certain responsibility to provide the proper mix of humor and horror.

Passing out Tootsie Rolls and Snickers bars while dressed in a pumpkin-appliquéd sweatshirt simply wouldn‘t do anymore.

My daughter Sabbath was peeling grapes with her switchblade for the bowl of eyeballs while my son Damien popped ice cubes with plastic spider rings frozen inside into the skull ice bucket. I stirred tomato sauce into spaghetti for our brains with blood entrée, poured pretzel skeleton fingers in bowls, and pulled the pulverized organ dip—sour cream and black food coloring—out of the refrigerator.

Sabbath, with her spiked collar heaving at her neck and chains jingling at her waist, looked at the clock and lectured me. ―Mother!

We only have ten minutes. You aren‘t dressed and the bats are still outside.‖ ―Relax, ‖ I said. ―It‘s a party. Everyone will be late. ―Damien, pumpkin, do me a favor,‖ I said, ―and get the ladder out of the garage and bring in the bat house from the redwood tree. I‘ll hang it just as soon as I‘ve got my costume on.‖ I shoved the brains in the oven and set the temperature to low. ―And take off that mask first. You won‘t be able to see a thing.‖ The kids decided I should dress as Elvira, buxom witch of late night television. I didn‘t approximate her figure, but I gave it my best shot. I tossed the black dress on the bed, took off my apron, and peeked in the pocket just to make sure mother‘s hand was still there. It was: freshly manicured and sporting coffin-black acrylic nails for the occasion, courtesy of Sabbath.

I‘d possessed mother‘s right hand for thirteen years: it arrived about six months after my husband, Boris, left me––while I was gigantically pregnant with Damien––for an anorexic model with pomegranate lips named Persephone. Last I‘d heard they had one of those bicoastal marriages living six months here, sixth months there.

My gnarled, elderly neighbor Stan was our savior back then. He bought me a case of Kleenex at Costco, cooked dinners, and dug holes in the backyard for Sabbath to bury her Barbies while I napped with newborn Damien. Sabbath was three then and still hadn‘t begun talking. His name was her first word. ―Say Uncle

Stan, say Stan,‖ he‘d coaxed. ―Say Tan, say Tan,‖ Sabbath had babbled and bit the knees of his pants.

The FTD florist delivered Mother‘s hand one day along with a bouquet of thistles. Her hand, gripping packets of floral preservative, was nestled in green tissue paper. The freckles arranged like Stonehenge around her index finger were familiar, but I wasn‘t one hundred percent positive the hand was hers until I examined the palm. Mother never did have a lifeline.

Stan stopped by after the delivery and admired the thistles. ―Wait till you see this,‖ I said and showed him Mother‘s hand. ―I thought you‘d like it.‖ He pressed his palm to hers. ―Wherever did you find it?‖ ―Oh, I‘ve got a few connections,‖ he said, smiling his pitchfork smile. A week later, he moved to Bulgaria and I haven‘t seen him since.

I found it such a comfort to keep Mother close when I wrote my first book: Night of Eternal Death: The Beast with Five Fingers. I would reach in my pocket and stroke her warm flesh when I needed inspiration. I hit a major block in the second book and rested her hand next to my computer monitor. Words just flew out of my head.

I wrote seventeen more books with her hand just resting there, until one day, it jumped onto the keyboard and began to type. Her index finger hit the h. Then she scurried across the keyboard, middle finger on the e. Crawled back to l. Her pinky pounced on the p. She tapped on the m and then shuffled over to the e again.

Of course I‘d help. I couldn‘t bear to watch her hunt and peck like that. I placed my left hand on the keys and positioned her hand over the home row—j-k-l-;—with my right hand atop.

The four of us ate dinner together regularly––quality family time I had to pay Sabbath ten dollars a night to endure. Despite my injunctions for proper table manners, Mother played with her food.

She particularly enjoyed deboning chicken and tugging the leaves off artichokes. We were discussing Damien‘s school play, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, two weeks before Halloween when the phone rang. I let the answering machine pick up. ―Morganne, angel pie, it‘s Edgar Poe.‖ My editor. I took the call, our voices broadcast to the room. ―Your book is fabulous. To die for, honey.‖ ―You don‘t say?‖ Mother‘s hand and I were in the middle of book fifty-one. I hadn‘t sent him a thing. ―God, the part with Karloff and the leeches.‖ ―Ominous, right?‖ I guessed.

Mother‘s hand crawled under a napkin. ―Hysterical.‖ ―But in a most menacing manner.‖ ―Here‘s what I‘m thinking. This is book one in a brand new series.

It‘s going to outsell Nights in a flash,‖ he said. ―Oh, really?‖ Sabbath slipped Mother‘s hand and the napkin into her lap. ―Definitely. In fact, I think we‘ve exhausted the old concept. Let‘s drop it.‖ I heard a clap under the table, and then Sabbath coughed.

Could it have been Mother‘s hand? She had been acting strange: jittery in the evenings, exhausted in the mornings. Had she sneaked out when I was sleeping and written a book alone? ―What do you know about this?‖ I asked Sabbath after I hung up. ―God, you‘re a paranoid Nazi. So what if Grandma‘s hand wrote a book and it‘s better than yours? Do you think you‘re the only one in this family perverse enough for print?‖ I had my reputation to consider and when I thought about it I knew there wasn‘t room for two of us writing under one name. I couldn‘t let Mother dictate a new series, as if I were simply her secretary. Her book would just have to be a fluke, an experiment that failed. ―Look, I‘ve got presents for you,‖ I said when I put her hand to bed that night.

She jumped in her box, a pirate treasure-chest affair with gaudy glass jewels and red satin lining, and explored the walnuts, nutcracker, and pick I‘d placed inside. Then I snapped down the lid and fastened a padlock. She knocked and knocked. ―I‘m sorry, Mother, but I must end this nocturnal composing.‖ We worked on book fifty-one in the mornings. She helped Damien with his homework in the afternoons. Every night after dinner, I massaged her hand with Oil of Olay, and then I tucked her hand in my apron pocket for our midnight walk with the three-legged bobcat I‘d adopted. *** That night, I set my rhinestone-studded glasses on the bedside table and was about to pull off my sweatshirt when I remembered that Cousin It napped in the ratted bun I wore. He didn‘t like being flung to the floor. Gently I removed the sleepy white rat and set him in one of the cages lining my bedroom wall.

Rodent care provided welcome relaxation after the struggles of writing. Cleaning cages put me in a meditative state; some of my best plot ideas came as I scooped fresh wood shavings into the trays and filled the bowls with dried corn, apple cores, and oats. As an added bonus, my posture had greatly improved since I began wearing a rat or two on my head throughout the day. The rats relished the attention; periodically Gomez or Morticia or Uncle Fester would peer down and wiggle a whiskery kiss.

I slipped on my Mistress-of-the-Dark dress and was just deciding which rat I‘d wear to the party when I heard a crash downstairs and Sabbath yelling, ―Damien, you stupid idiot! Mom told you to take off the mask.‖ I ran downstairs to find a stepladder, the bat house, and Damien— still in his Wolf Man mask—scattered on the dining room floor.

The bats circled frantically, nearly bashing against the French doors. I knelt near Damien, pulled off the rubber mask, and wiped away his tears. ―Hey, sweetie, you okay?‖ ―I‘m fine. Really, Mom,‖ he gulped. ―I‘m sorry about the bats.‖ I righted the stepladder and hung the bat house from the bottom of our Phantom of the Opera chandelier. When I finished, Damien flipped off the switch and we all stood still in the dark. There was rustling in the drapes and then the rapid flap of wings. ―Something hit my mask,‖ Damien said. ―Out of my hair, you little buggers,‖ Sabbath said. ―Hold still,‖ I said. ―We don‘t want to hurt them.‖ The air whooshed and I felt wings brush near my head and catch on my hair. Gradually, the flapping ceased. ―Okay, kids, I think they‘re all back in now.‖ Sabbath flicked the lights on.

Damien grabbed a flashlight from the china cabinet and peered in the bat house. ―Mom, I can‘t tell Dracula and Barnabas apart. But I think they‘re all inside.‖ I scanned the room. ―Thank you, dear. Let‘s put the ladder away.

We‘ve got a party to host. And, Sabbath, that was no reason to scream at your brother.‖ Damien took out the ladder and Sabbath stomped back into the kitchen lashing her whip at the floor.

Just as the first guests arrived, I turned on a black light and took the lid off an aquarium of mosquito larva I‘d been incubating for the party. The bats swooped through the dining room echolocating for their dinners.

From the dining room, blindfolded guests negotiated the long hallway through wet string and barbed wire suspended from the ceiling. In the playroom, dry ice steamed from the punch bowls.

Damien and his friends Monster Mashed, had mummy-wrapping races with Ace bandages, and pounded stakes—pin-the-tail-on-thedonkey-style—into a life-sized beanbag Dracula. Sabbath‘s friends smoked clove cigarettes, concocted hair-loss and paralysis potions, and enjoyed bobbing for apples with razorblades in our boiling cauldron. Her idea, and new that year. *** It was nearing midnight and time for our party to end when I went upstairs to get the baby rats––favors for the young people. It was too quiet in my bedroom: no little crunch of sunflower seeds, no rustle of whiskers, no licks and flicks of grooming, no squeak of the exercise wheels. I flipped on the light. The male rats lay heaped in their cages, lifeless red eyes open. Babies huddled in the corners of the cages behind their mothers who were stretched full length in the wood shavings, tails limp.

I opened a cage and picked up Tabitha. Her white head flopped to one side. Endora, Samantha, and Frankenstein‘s Bride appeared to have broken necks as well. I lifted MaMa from her cage and in the

bedding I found a black fingernail painted with a tiny tombstone and the letters RIP. Mother‘s hand—I‘d left it on the bed in my pre-party haste. Why she spared the baby rats: Halloween spirit or latent maternal instincts, I don‘t know. I put on my apron and began to gather the frightened babies who clung to the cage mesh. I tugged carefully at their tummies with one hand, unfurled their little toes with the other, and then gave them a reassuring stroke and deposited them in my pocket. Once I had them all, I closed the door behind me, returned to the festivities, and presented the trembling rats to our guests, who squealed in delight.

After everyone left, I asked Sabbath and Damien to clean up.

Sabbath spewed at me about how she already did the housework, cooked meals, paid bills. How I sat at my computer and babbled to Mother‘s hand all day like an imbecile and how I didn‘t appreciate a single thing she did. ―Sabbath, spare me the drama.‖ I gritted my teeth. ―I would love to discuss the ten million reasons I make your life miserable some other time. But right now, I have to track down my mother‘s damn hand!‖ I looked in her favorite places first. She wasn‘t in Damien‘s room playing with his black widow terrarium or sharpening knives at Sabbath‘s desk. She wasn‘t in the bathroom cleaning the grout between tiles with a stiff toothbrush. I pulled a chain and the ceiling fan in the living room began to spin. Her hand didn‘t leap from one of the blades onto my shoulder. It wasn‘t swinging from the mini-blind cords in my office, typing at my computer, or reading the Braille versions of our first six books.

I went back to my bedroom and ransacked it—dumping drawers and flipping furniture to the floor. I finally found mother‘s hand hidden in one of my ski boots on a high shelf at the back of the closet. It felt clammy and pale and smelled like mothballs. I hurled it at the wall and it landed with a thud in a pile of my underclothes.

I screamed at her. ―How could you? After everything I‘ve done for you!‖ Prepared to shake Mother violently, like she‘d done when I was a baby, I picked my way across the littered floor. But her hand was bleeding. There were teeth marks in the fleshy pad of her thumb. ―It serves you right, attacking my rats like that,‖ I said.

I carried her hand to the bathroom and set it on the counter. She drummed her fingers while I hunted for the hydrogen peroxide and Band-Aids. ―This is going to sting,‖ I said as I poured peroxide on her palm.

Her hand flinched and I blew on the punctures. I smoothed a Band-Aid over her swollen skin. Then I set her to work folding clothes in my room while I uprighted furniture, books, and lamps. ―I can‘t trust you anymore,‖ I said when we finished. ―I‘m afraid you‘re restricted to your box permanently.‖ Her fingers clutched mine but, using the nut pick, I pried them loose, threw her hand in its box, and locked it. ―It didn‘t have to be this way, you know.‖ I thumped on the lid. ―This is all your fault.‖ I cried myself to sleep. *** A tugging on my arms and the sensation of cold woke me up. I was handcuffed to the headboard. There was a fierce pinch on my neck.

I couldn‘t see it, but I felt mother‘s hand, her thumbnail piercing my skin as she squeezed her nutcracker tighter and tighter around my Adam‘s apple. I screamed in tiny gurgles and thrashed. I caught a glimpse of Sabbath at the foot of my bed. ―Help,‖ I gagged.

―Spare me the drama, Mother.‖ Sabbath‘s white teeth glinted beneath her spiked hair. She raised the handle of her whip and lashed my ankles. ―Grandma and I want to write those new books, and you‘re going to help us.‖ *** It took a long time to surface from the blackness and I can‘t remember what came next. It is only now, after many years of my left hand typing alongside mother‘s right, and Sabbath‘s hands laid over both of ours, that I remember that night at all.

Cathy Warner‘s ―Mother Comes in Handy‖ was inspired by a recording she made with her mother of ―The Beast with Five Fingers‖ by W.F. Harvey on a reel-to-reel recorder (complete with sound effects) for her spooky twelfth birthday party forty years ago. She is the author of Burnt Offerings (poetry, eLectio 2014), and her writing has appeared in literary journals including Oyez Review, PMS, and So to Speak. She earned an MFA from Seattle Pacific University and serves as literary editor for Image journal‘s online ―Good Letters.‖ Cathy blogs, edits, and leads writing workshops in West Puget Sound. Her website is www.cathywarner.com.

DANSE MACABRE Sarah Grodzinski

Growing up on Beacon Street I thought the mailman was a ghost.

I heard his soft feet nuzzle the ground his pallor skin fell faint with freckles.

One time, I climbed the apple tree by the graveyard and looked out and saw him in the confines of tombstones, lurking, a shadowed body in a tallboy frame.

I heard rumors he could dance.

That the floor beneath him fell.

When he lifted his legs everyone else stopped moving.

I spied on him, thought: if the dead can do anything they can dance.

I fell asleep by the cornfield the swaying rhythm of the stalks brushing against my collarbone reminded me of a salsa.

I felt him shake me awake that evening, I screamed and he smiled, asked me if I believed in ghosts.

HALLOWEEN Sarah Grodzinski

The funhouse mirrors stretch my gums around the sides of my lips.

My enlarged head rolls, like giant tufts of a watermelon.

On Beacon Street, Halloween is a time of deceit.

The kids scoff at parents that decorate their children with masks, scour the streets and egg the neighbors‘ cars—the yolk creams around the tires.

Every year the funhouse is my place of solace.

I grew up listening to Sal the Clown‘s maniacal laughter, her wide jaw spun into a cavity of tombstone teeth.

On nights when my father yelled at me or the kids at school were unkind, I‘d take a book and bury my face into its tunnel of words.

I became adept to the minutes when the jack-in-the-box leapt out of his home, I could time my pages by the flashes of lightning, and the funhouse mirrors distorted my huge lips as I read the chapters until the devilish laughter of Sal became my own.

CHILDREN DON‘T PLAY MARCO POLO AROUND HERE; THEY PLAY CHARLIE PYLE. Sarah Grodzinski

It was the quiet kid you had to look out for on Beacon Street: one day he was writing science fiction stories, the next he was gone.

We wouldn‘t discover Charlie Pyle until three years later, his body buried under sediment worms crawling the sockets of his skull.

I think one of the Benson twins found him.

But the police snatched his corpse before you could say ―investigation.‖ That was the last we ever heard of him.

Until last Halloween when Miss Cooper awoke at 4 a.m. and came running into the police station screaming that she‘d seen his ghost.

I‘d never seen the hair on an old lady stand straighter.

I never told anyone, but later that next evening, I crept into Miss Cooper‘s ratty old place and I took the Ouija board my grandfather left me, and asked Charlie how he died.

The air felt colder for a moment, and I listened, there was a rattling on the window and I tried to open it but it slammed shut.

I ran out of her house in a sprint, the sweat dripping cold down the back of my neck like ice.

Sarah Grodzinski has an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University, where she concentrated in pedagogy and poetry. She teaches writing at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania. Her poems have been published in Misfit Magazine, Off The Coast, Nerve Cowboy, and Sediments Journal.

EATING CROW Thomas Kleaton

Halloween night brought candy corn for Scott and retribution from the crows.

Her back to the kitchen door, Rita Marple hesitated, ruffling Scott‘s hair with her fingers. A nurse working the evening shift at Mercy Medical, the hospital in Hillsboro, she was pretty in her light royal

blue scrubs and white shoes. The afternoon sunlight formed a halo around her long blond hair, and Scott, nine years old, adored her. ―Remember, sweetie, I left you and Lyle a plate of fish sticks along with macaroni and cheese in the refrigerator. All you have to do is place them in the microwave for three minutes.‖ Her lips creased downward at the corners, as if she were mulling over some perplexing problem. ―Don‘t eat too much candy, and please try to not agitate your father. He‘s going through a tough time right now.‖ He’s not my real father. Scott focused on the scarecrow hovering over the cornfield. It hung there in its denim overalls and red and black checkered shirt, hay stuffing spilling from the legs and shirt cuffs.

There was no mouth in its gunny sack face, and the dark hollows of its eyes stared back at him, giving it the appearance of a tattered Egyptian mummy. A floppy black felt hat roosted on its head.

Shabby work gloves completed the look. The neck and pockets bulged with cracked corn, and two crows were already perched there, pecking kernels with their beaks and gobbling them down.

Scott turned away, feeling the scarecrow‘s gaze upon his back.

Inhaling the crisp scent of the pine trees, he stepped out onto the veranda. He waved goodbye to his mother as she got into her Honda and disappeared down the rutted dirt road. Reddish-brown silver maple leaves fluttered down around him, the treetops swaying in the gathering breeze. They skidded across the porch and piled up against the exterior of the house. Halloween was here at last, and he couldn‘t wait for the darkness of evening.

Scott stared through the glass of the kitchen door, his thoughts elsewhere.

Scott had never understood why his mother married Paul. A heavyequipment operator and part-time farmer, Paul landed in the hospital with a fractured ankle after getting his foot jammed in the treads of a bulldozer in a failed attempt to leap to the ground. By the end of Paul‘s hospital stay Rita had agreed to a dinner date, and

by Thanksgiving, they were engaged.

Scott pondered this.

That was six years ago. Now his mother didn‘t smile much anymore when she was around Paul, and Scott could sometimes hear them arguing late at night if he pressed his ear to the wall.

Paul‘s routine lately was to come in and flop down in front of the TV with a six-pack. Or a twelve-pack. And Lyle? Well, Lyle, seventeen, was a special case. Lyle, who liked to trip Scott up when their mother wasn‘t looking, and who had once locked Scott in the closet one Saturday afternoon when their parents weren‘t home until he cried. He remembered Lyle chanting, ―Crybaby, crybaby, listen to the baby whine.‖ Stupid jerk!

The scarecrow was one of the few projects Scott had worked on with his real father, before the accident that left his mother a widow at age twenty-nine. Scott‘s stepfather, Paul, never volunteered to do anything with Scott.

Except for the crow thing.

Scott twisted around, wary, when he heard his stepfather‘s footsteps coming up the hallway. Paul already had the twelve-gauge pump shotgun in his hand. ―What‘re you doing, boy, daydreaming?‖ Paul, scowling, pushed by Scott, opening the door and stepping onto the back porch. ―Go in there and get me a cold one.‖ Scott did as he was told, taking a six-pack of Miller Lite out of the refrigerator and placing it in a small Igloo cooler the way his stepfather liked it. Paul was leaning back in the rocking chair and resting the barrel of the shotgun on the porch railing when Scott came back out. Thunder racked the house as Paul fired on the crows descending on the cracked corn in the scarecrow‘s pockets.

They flapped their black wings and cawed. Paul pumped another shell into the chamber.

Just like tin ducks keeling over at the county fair shooting gallery, Scott thought.

It was almost dark when Paul came in, toting a cooler full of empty cans and spent cartridges. Ten minutes later, Scott heard the TV come on in the living room, followed by the scraping of a beer can pull tab. *** Scott was finishing off his fish sticks when he heard the Mustang pull up in the driveway, its dual exhaust pipes burbling in the cold October air. He was decked out in a costume of his favorite superhero, Iron Man. Lyle came racing out of his room as the horn of the Mustang trumpeted in the dark. Lyle was dressed in jeans and a black leather jacket covering a t-shirt that said I See NO GOOD REASON to Act My Age. His black hair, curling at the tips, drooped to his shoulders. He chuckled and slapped the back of Scott‘s head as he strode by. ―Cut it out, fartbrains,‖ said Scott, his voice rising. ―Put a lid on it, you little twerp,‖ Lyle said. ―You take it back or I‘m telling Mom.‖ Scott punched at Lyle‘s leg.

He brayed at Lyle, ―Take it back!‖ ―What‘s going on out there?‖ said Paul. They both glanced toward the living room. They could hear Alaska State Troopers blaring away from the TV in there. Slugging beers down one after the other, Paul seemed to be drinking more than usual. Paul hollered, ―Don‘t make me have to get up out of my chair and come in there, you two.‖ Lyle bent until, hands on his knees, he was face-to-face with Scott.

Lyle was smirking. He whispered into Scott‘s face. ―Later, twerp.‖ He brushed past Scott.

Paul bellowed again as Lyle shuffled through the door.

―And be sure you‘re back by midnight, Lyle!‖ Scott waited until he heard the car door slam and the whine of the tires spinning on gravel before scooting into his room and leaping onto the bed. He beat at the covers and gripped them with his fists.

Why did Mom have to go and marry that horse’s ass Paul?

Gazing at the waxing gibbous moon through his bedroom window, Scott sat on his bed in the dark. They lived in the country, a ranchstyle house with mocha wooden siding. It sat off the side of a winding dirt road three miles long leading out to the highway. It was another eighteen miles to Hillsboro, the nearest town. *** The moon draped its silvery light over the countryside like a pall.

Timmy glanced up at its white roundness, and the thought of the man in the moon watching his every movement made him shiver.

Soon it would swoop down on him, chortling with glee as he tried to hide in the house, behind the trees, somewhere… The silhouette of the scarecrow in the cornfield around back stood out in dim relief against the white stars spilled across the black sky. Crickets chirped their melody around him, and squat candles inside the jacko‘-lanterns his mother helped him carve lit the porch boards with a flickering orange light. Mrs. Burdon, Timmy‘s mother, would soon pick him up to take him trick-or-treating in Hillsboro. Timmy was Scott‘s best friend.

Trick-or-treating. It conjured images in Scott‘s mind of hissing black cats, vampires, and grinning skeletons. Witches and werewolves. And candy. Lots of candy. Maybe even some of those delicious caramel apples Miss Trent, his third-grade teacher, had brought to the Halloween party that afternoon.

He pictured Lyle lying prone on a silver platter like a roasted pig.

The platter was centered on a massive dining table, one of the caramel creations protruding from Lyle‘s mouth, as if he had just been bobbing for apples. He giggled. He decided he would sit on the front porch and wait for Mrs. Burdon. Creeping across the dim hallway, he peeked into the living room, where the TV was still

blaring. His stepfather lay there, dozing, one hand still wrapped around a Miller Lite.

Scott tiptoed out onto the porch. The latch of the door clicked into place as the cool night air washed over him. Shivering in his costume, Scott collapsed onto the porch steps.

He looked up at the black pine branches swaying in the blacker sky.

A barn owl hooted somewhere off in the distance.

He imagined the gnarled limbs reaching for him, and chills ran down his backbone.

He bit his lip. What’s taking Mrs. Burdon so long?

He was out in the yard. Alone.

Shadows danced behind every tree, and he wondered where wild animals went when it got dark.

He could hear the bears creeping up on him, their jagged claws ready to swipe…

Headlights flashed around the bend, and he relaxed, the familiar drone of Mrs. Burdon‘s Dodge Caravan comforting him. As he climbed inside, warm air from the heater blew around his feet.

Crawling over Timmy, Scott took the seat nearest the window.

Scott wondered if scarecrows could see in the dark. *** Paul was awakened by a rustling noise on the tin roof. He shook his head, groggy. The TV was still booming. He snatched the remote, turned the TV off, and listened. Silence permeated the living room. A dull rumbling echoed through the house as something rolled off the roof into the yard below.

Frickin’ squirrels.

He fought to stand up, the urge to empty his bladder overwhelming. He stumbled into the bathroom and shoved the door closed behind him.

Something thumped against the house as Paul was coming out of the bathroom. Glass tinkled, and the solitary front porch light went out.

Damn teenagers. Lyle better not be in on this. Paul reached into the closet just off the foyer and grabbed his twelve-gauge pump shotgun from where he‘d stashed it earlier. He retrieved a green metal ammunition box from the upper shelf and slipped several buckshot shells into the magazine. He seized his Stinger flashlight from its charger in the kitchen, turned off the hall light, and unlocked the front door. He cracked it, and then slipped out into the darkness.

He smiled to himself as he thought about the knowing grins on the faces of his coworkers when he told them tomorrow about how he‘d run those punk teenagers off his property.

The trees stood as stark sentinels in the moonlight, shadows of their former selves. A light wind sighed through the treetops. The jack-o‘-lanterns cast their eerie light into the yard. The mailbox sat askew on its post. He looked down. An ear of corn lay among pieces of shattered light bulb, its brown husk resembling a rolledup newspaper.

Paul lurched into the yard, leaves crackling under his feet. He jacked a shell into the chamber of the shotgun. He directed the flashlight‘s beam out over the rows of corn, steadying its movement as he swung it from left to right. He paused.

A lone pole stood barren in the center of the corn.

The scarecrow was gone.

Paul aimed the shotgun toward the moon and squeezed the trigger.

The barrel belched reddish-yellow flames. The blast rumbled off the house, reverberating through the woods. He pumped another shell in.

―I know you‘re out there, punks,‖ he bawled, swinging the flashlight beam around him in ever-increasing arcs. ―Step on out and I‘ll cut you some slack. If I have to come in after you, it‘s going to get rough. Now come on outta there!‖ Only the sighing wind answered.

A rustle amongst the corn stalks captured his attention. He killed the flashlight.

The moon bathed the cornfield in cold radiance. Paul staggered to his right, slinking into the row of corn nearest where he‘d seen the stalks quivering. Straining to hear the slightest movement, he held the shotgun at shoulder level in front of him as he sauntered down the row. Listening, he cocked his head.

One row over, a pattering of feet grew closer.

Paul stood up. ―Alright, you little bastards, come on outta there.‖ Paul slurred his words.

He lifted the shotgun at an angle and aimed at the next row. He snapped the flashlight on.

The row of stalks to his left opened and he glimpsed coarse black feathers protruding through buckshot-tattered red and black fabric bearing down on him like shafts of sunlight penetrating dark thunderheads. Paul tottered backwards, tripping over his own feet in his intoxicated state. The shotgun fired into the air and the scarecrow was on him. Two tiny, luminous yellow eyes met his own. A pointed beak flashed out of the scraggly hay stuffing and Paul screamed. A shadow of flapping black wings settled onto a darker shadow on the ground and things didn‘t last long for Paul Marple after that. ***

Scott waved goodbye to Mrs. Burdon and Timmy as she turned around in the yard, his eyes following the red tail lights down the road. It was ten p.m., and his mother would be getting off soon.

He peeked into his plastic sack again. Tonight had been a good haul. His arm ached with the weighty pile of M&Ms, Three Musketeers, and Snickers bars he held. Drinking in the calmness surrounding him, he remained motionless in the dark. The porch fixture was out, but a sliver of light escaped from the cracked front door. The pumpkin faces floated there, grinning at him like twin Cheshire cats.

Scott clambered up the steps, crept inside, and eased the door shut behind him. He crept over to the living room to see if his stepfather was still asleep. The TV was silent, the screen black.

Empty beer cans languished on the table like relics. He scooted on into the kitchen, paused at the refrigerator to grab a Coke, and then combed through every room. Paul was nowhere to be seen. Scott opened the back door. The moon was high overhead. The yard and woods behind their house glistened in its light. Scott heard the Mustang barreling up their road now, its engine rumbling through the pipes.

Rats! Lyle’s home. That asshole!

A shadow passed over the small strip of grass in front of him, and he heard a sound like wet sheets flapping in the wind on a clothesline…

(The man in the moon) Something banged off the roof and Paul tumbled onto the grass like a rotten sack of potatoes, his shirt in disarray.

Paul‘s face was missing.

Scott screamed, scrambled into the house, and clawed at the deadbolt. He rocked on his feet, panting, his arms splayed out against the back of the door. He skittered down the hallway to his bedroom and slammed the door behind him. Spiderman stared at him from a poster on the opposite wall. The window was raised an

inch or so, and he crouched beneath it parting the curtain with his hand. Headlights splashed across his bedroom wall. The throaty exhaust died. Lyle and his friends got out. Scott could hear glass bottles clinking.

Scott‘s heart leaped into his throat, and then began hammering.

The scarecrow leered at him from the rocking chair with dead yellow eyes.

He could hear snatches of conversation carried on the freshening breeze. ―…Yeah, man, this sure is some good beer…‖ ―…if your dad comes out here?...‖ ―a frickin‘ idiot. He‘s probably sitting in there drunk right now…‖ ―Wish Scott was home. We‘d have somebody to slap around…‖ Scott cringed at the last, and sank down even lower.

Lyle spotted the scarecrow on the porch. ―Well, lookee here. Somebody‘s been sleeping in my bed, and they‘re still in it.‖ Everyone snickered. Lyle took a long draw on his beer. ―I never did like that frickin‘ scarecrow, anyhow. It belonged to Scott‘s dad.‖ Another voice: ―Let‘s burn it!‖ Someone laughed. ―How about a little fire, scarecrow?‖ said another high, keening voice. A lighter flame erupted in the darkness.

Swigging beer, Lyle and his three friends advanced on the porch.

Scott stared, wide-eyed, at the scarecrow. The shirt was moving, shaking all over. He saw the sleeves lift, the torso beginning to twist. ―Burn, witch, burn,‖ Lyle said, stepping up on the porch. He lowered his arms, reaching out to snatch the scarecrow into the yard.

Dragging his sack of candy with him, Scott backed away from the window.

When the screaming began, he placed his hands over his ears and withdrew into a corner of the room. Scott sat, trembling, and waited to see if his mother would come home.

Thomas Kleaton is a freelance horror writer who has had stories published in Dark Eclipse Magazine, The Horror 'Zine, and Spooky Halloween Drabbles 2014, as well as the paperback anthologies Bones; Serial Killers Tres Trias; Cellar Door: Words of Beauty, Tales of Terror; The Horror 'Zine Summer 2014; and What Has Two Heads, Ten Eyes, and Terrifying Table Manners?

GHOST, WALKING Jennifer Martelli

All it takes is that second for you to look into the shadowy corner of the room, even if you didn‘t mean to, and the ghost of the ballerina detaches herself and starts toward you: she‘s been waiting to catch your eye, and though you can‘t see hers yet, you see a flash of cheek, the sheen of smooth shin as one crosses the other. It isn‘t until she tilts, near trips, (in black pumps, not pointe shoes) that you know she‘s dead. There‘s so much strength left to her: her walk creates a breeze blowing her skirt, but not her straight black hair.

Her long arms steady her and her eyes like silvery fish--now you can see them--home in the way the archangel‘s did on Mary, the way bad luck does and there is no time to look away.

Jennifer Martelli was born and raised in Massachusetts, and graduated from Boston University and The Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. She‘s taught high school English as well as women‘s literature at Emerson College in Boston.

Her work has appeared, or will appear, in the following publications: The Bellingham Review, Bitterzoet, Sugared Water, Slippery Elm, Tar River Review, Bop Dead City, burntdistrict, and Right Hand Pointing. She was a finalist for the Sue Elkind Poetry Prize and a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry.

Her chapbook, Apostrophe, was published in 2010 by BigTable Publishing Company.

She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts with her family and two cats.

ALL SOULS HAD BODIES THEY COULDN‘T ESCAPE Cathy Bryant

―Blood soup‖ was really home-made tomato, and delicious. It did have bacon in, though, so we were eating the dead.

Made to bob for unobtainable apples in a tub of cold water rapidly diluting with saliva and tears, frantically biting and trying to get it over with and look like you enjoyed it, a bit like parental love, so-called.

They would come for us later, the parents, at night, we knew, in the dark.

Memories of the finest food and anxiety: nothing to fear in costumes and makeup; you know the real terror waits elsewhere and every treat will be paid for in tricks.

Cathy Bryant has won ten literary awards, including the BulwerLytton Fiction Prize in 2012. She has blogged for the Huffington Post, and her stories and poems have appeared in over one hundred different publications, including Popshot, The Moth, The Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Futuredaze. In 2014, her poem ―The Poetry Diet‖ (from her first collection, Contains Strong Language and Scenes of a Sexual Nature) was featured on BBC Radio 4's Poetry Please with Roger McGough. She is one of the judges for National Flash Fiction Day‘s short flash fiction competition, run by ―Mr. Flash,‖ Calum Kerr. Cathy's new book Look At All the Women is available from www.themothersmilkbookshop.com. She lives in Hope both figuratively and literally—Hope, Derbyshire, UK. See more at www.cathybryant.co.uk.

TRICK OR TREAT Greta Ehrig

Unexpectedly I find myself at home on Halloween night, wondering what to do about treats. Peering into the cookie jar, I pull out the ghosts of past years‘ sweets— restaurant after dinner mints, Christmas candy canes, Valentine‘s Sweethearts, a few packs of petrified Pez, political chewing gum from the George W. Bush era, three airplane biscotti, the Mars bar I won in an astronomical haiku contest, and a fistful of Chinese fortune cookies.

There used to be a day when I planned for this day, buying fine earth ball chocolates and wrapping them in hand written affirmations like: ―In all the world there is no one else exactly like you;‖ ―Respect yourself and others will respect you too;‖ ―Figure out what you love to do and then do it.‖ In a bit of a panic, I finally resort to fruit, take a Sharpie to the delicate skins of clementines, fashioning toothy jack-o-lantern grins. I am still perfecting these culinary sculptures when a tween dressed as

Superman comes to the door.

With a bit of trepidation, I give him a choice, and he, he reaches for the good stuff. ―Hey, Dad!‖ he calls down to the street, ―I got an orange that looks like a pumpkin!‖ His excitement cannot be masked and somehow between the two of us the whole of childhood is saved.

Teaching Artist Greta Ehrig holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University, where she served as editor of Folio literary journal. Her own writing has been published (or accepted for publication) in Southern Poetry Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Iguana Review, Delos, 13th Moon, Blessed Bi Spirit: Bisexual People of Faith, and Louisiana Literature, which named her a semifinalist in its 1999 national poetry contest. In addition, Greta's work has received generous support from Theater J (Washington, DC), the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County (MD), the Maryland State Arts Council, the National League of American Pen Women, and the Lannan Foundation.

SLENDER AND GRAY Jason Marc Harris Before he drove his slime-green Volkswagen out of Ohio past that huge, ivy-draped, cracked grain silo and sped onto Interstate 75 across the Michigan border, Joren visited his advisor, renowned folklorist of Mt. Calisto University, Zenzi Breckon.

―When you‘re in Paulding Thursday, drive up forty-five to Old Victoria.‖ ―The ghost town?‖ ―I‘ve got a lead for you there. Tell the tour managers—they know me—you‘d like access to the shuttered mines.‖ ―I‘m not a big fan of going underground in the dark, especially alone.‖ ―Bring a flashlight. Besides, you won‘t be alone. There‘s a new professor at Finlandia, not much older than you, Ede Vertoten.

Wendigo scholar. She‘s been following the rumors about these missing children. It‘s growing into something like the Satanic Panic of the eighties.‖ Joren sucked in his lips. He didn‘t want to get mixed up in missing children cases. He was wary about crossing the line from urban legends to actual crimes. A bad scene in Wisconsin a few months ago had almost made him want to quit his studies. Those girls stabbed their friend—nearly to death—all because they thought it would get them into some big tree house of Slender Man. Hopefully that was just one aberrant case. ―Not sure I‘m going to have time.‖ ―You‘ll make time. No snow for at least a few days. Joren, I‘m certain your thesis will lead to the definitive book on Slender Man, but you could use more informants. I‘ll let Ede know you‘ll be up there in Old Victoria. It‘s wonderful to collaborate.‖ ―Thanks, but I can‘t be chasing too many things at once.‖ ―Ede shared with me an audio file of an interview with a retired miner. It‘s an account of a child disappearing in the night with the howling of the wind and a sighting of a pale figure.‖ ―Sounds like a variant on Wendigo belief to me.‖

―An alleged eyewitness claims this figure was unusually tall, had a suit, white tie, and a double-set of long arms.‖ ―Slender Man.‖ Joren‘s belly and legs tingled. ―Exactly. Get to know the mine with Ede. I‘ve emailed you her phone number. Ask around in Ontonagon County and see what you come up with. Bring me back a pastie.‖ ―Aye aye, sir.‖ Zenzi returned to his computer, his jiggling fingers tapping the keys, no doubt to appropriate some of Joren‘s fieldwork. The Zenzi-spider grasped graduate students as prey and sucked out their creative juices to feed its hungry spawn, Zenzi‘s bulging bibliography.

Joren would soon be spinning his own webs; he‘d weave tales he collected into academic publications to advance his career. Part of him wished folklore amounted to something more dramatic than scholarship. Was he doomed to make copies of copies?

Joren longed to be a more adventurous scholar. Like Faust. Who wouldn‘t pursue forbidden knowledge that led to meaningful revelations? Such was the delightful curiosity of hidden cults, psychic claims, and diabolic grimoires. As an undergraduate, Joren had investigated claims that H.P. Lovecraft‘s Necronomicon was real and hidden in the UCLA archives. It turned out to be a prank by a bored librarian.

Sustaining Joren was the hope that one day he‘d break the glass between the mundane world and the occult powers that skulked behind curtains of everyday labors.

Past fields, forests, and seventy-eight miles beyond Mackinac bridge, he reached Paradise, Michigan and a pub.

After a trip to the bathroom to return some beer to the circle of life, Joren sauntered over to the old white-haired man eating a large

helping of fried smelt. Joren asked if he‘d ever heard about the Wendigo or maybe Slender Man. ―Slender Man? Nah, nothing like that. But Wendigo? Chippewa have stories about dat and dat. I had a friend lived down the street.

His grandma was Chippewa. Told us we‘d never seen real cold. It was in the cold bad days of her great-grandparents that people starved, and Wendigo spirit would go into them. Then they‘d go eatin‘ folks. Like that Jeffrey Dahmer psycho. Or worse, the one who went after kids in New York, the one folks called the Gray Man.‖ ―The Gray Man?‖ ―Yah, Albert Fish. Cannibal killer. Some say he used to work mines, met Wendigo, and that‘s how he became what he was. Tried to outrun it by going to New York, but once something‘s gotten into you, there‘s nowhere you can really go. It‘s there always, you know?‖ ―What mine did he work in?‖ ―Some say Copper Country, probably in what they used to call Finn Town. Check it out. There are tours there. It‘s called Old Victoria now. ‖ ―Old Victoria? That‘s where I‘m going anyway.‖ Joren took some notes, checked his email, and thought about how there might be a triangulation of stories at work within the Upper Peninsula folklore: Slender Man, Wendigo, and Gray Man. Heck, if the Gray Man weren‘t already linked on the internet with Slender Man, perhaps Joren should make a post himself about that. Then again, that would be intrusive. Non-authentic. But what was authentic? What was meaningful? How to separate manipulative fakelore from traditional folklore? Everything merged into a mess.

Maybe stay off the Internet. Clear the mind.

Joren left the pub and drove north to the sandstone cliffs to be ready for sunset.

He took a turn for one of the overlooks of Pictured Rocks shore, stopped, and hiked several minutes down the trail along the rocky cliffs above Lake Superior. As the wind whistled through bare aspen and beech trees, Joren stared at the lapping water, blue and cold. Joren had once met a tanker sailor in Copper Harbor who told him half his sailor-friends had drowned. ―That third wave,‖ the man had told him. ―Comes up out of nowhere, doesn‘t need storms to come. The lake sloshes around time and time again, and that third wave builds from three different directions twenty feet high, and when you get hit, you‘re overboard.‖ How horrible to drown in hopelessly freezing water. Yet how wondrous to see the third wave, to see Lake Superior unfurl its apocalyptic crest. Such a lake! That wide expanse of water, so ancient with its stories of sunken ships, so indifferent in its claiming of the dead.

Once, with his father, Joren had walked the rocky shore and felt there would always be the company of his family wherever he went. But both parents were dead. He was their only child.

His mother died first, of a stroke from some faulty capillary—a waiting trigger clutched and snapped by the long fingers of Death.

Then his father, skiing amid the dangerous geometry of Mount Bohemia, hurtled over a cliff hidden in wintry mist. Sometimes, Joren wished he really did believe in ghosts, but he‘d never seen any sign of his parents. No portents made him think twice.

As the reddish-orange sun sank to the northwest and the water glimmered with a film of silver, a broad-winged gray owl hooted and drifted along the edge of the canopy of red cedar and white spruce. In the Kwakiutl traditions of British Columbia, the owl was a feathery banshee that called out the name of the one whose death was imminent. Joren wondered if the night bird of prey got too close whether it might seize his shoulders between its talons and lacerate his flesh in some reflex of proximity. Time to go.

But where was the trail? Perhaps it was the setting sun in his eyes, but Joren could not see where the path emerged out onto the cliffs.

His throat clenched, and his neck tensed as his breaths came faster.

Joren had not been lost since he was a boy of ten, spending a weekend in Mendocino amid the coastal range of California.

Unable to match the stride of his father on a morning walk after brunch, he had missed some turn from the trees out into a field, so he wandered amid blue oaks while fog chilled his cheeks, and the condensation mixed with tears that slid around his nose and slicked the long bangs that grew over his eyes. In the shadows, he imagined wolves, snakes, bears, and cloaked men waiting to snatch him away.

As a boy, he had caught the sounds of vehicle traffic and made his way back to the motel by following highway signs, but out here by Lake Superior, Joren could only hear the blank roll and slap of waves against rocks. Quickening his pace and shielding his eyes from the last rays of sun, Joren searched the trees.

There—some gravel beside a bleached-out stump reflected the dull gray of human industry. He had walked past the trail—he could see now that the bits of gravel pointed the way back into a wider space among the trees whose dark silhouettes guarded the trail. How silly to have panicked. He was not living in some gothic fairy tale where a trail simply disappeared.

Joren arrived at the lodgings near Marquette with no problem, brought his bags to his room, brushed his teeth, and settled down to sleep.

But there was something unpleasant about the darkness that night.

The drapes over his window that opened out toward the lake shifted, no doubt caught by wafting currents of heat from the vent at the base of the outside wall. Through silvery-white fabric illuminated by moonlight, Joren glimpsed something moving outside his window. A shadow bobbed along the window-facing wall near his bed. An animal? Branches in the wind? The cry of some lakeshore bird abraded Joren‘s nerves.

The cry repeated.

A loon? The cry was sharper but just as haunting. Some raptor— hunting like that owl? Was it warning against a stalker in the dark?

Or was it not a bird at all but the call of an eldritch thing that even now waited for him to flinch?

The attack of something like Slender Man would have no cry, for it was a faceless thing with no organs of communication. The shriek of the Wendigo was the wind itself.

Joren believed in neither of those entities, yet there was something essential about the dense unknown of the dark that proved perpetually troubling. An irreducible element of fear endemic to darkness. Perhaps that very terrifying darkness was why he was so devoted to studying fear and folklore.

When he was five years old, Joren woke up to an April breeze that rippled the drapes through the screens of the windows of his room.

The light of dawn filtered from the sky through the trees to his window, and there was enough sunglow to cast shadows that quaked and shifted as though there were silhouettes standing in profile, waiting to spy the child inside.

And then came the cry, keening like a baby abandoned all night, agonizingly alone in the cool dawn, shivering beneath a tree and shrieking to the world. Like the winding down of an air raid or tornado siren before soaring up again, the cry sung an excruciating crescendo and despairing diminuendo, pathetic yet frightening in its tone and terrifying in its unknown intention. Did swollen baby heads, floating beneath the trees, brush their toothless lips against the glass as they searched for a child to carry away to some mysterious crib of hell?

Later, Joren learned from his parents that he had merely heard the wailing of neighbors‘ cats as they yowled to each other out in the yard.

This time, Joren the man would not let foolish fear paralyze him.

He got up and crept to the window. The cry of the unseen animal had stopped, but Joren needed to see what it was, to know the truth behind his fear. He flung open the drapes.

There had been something. Perhaps he scared it away. Whatever it was had just bounded off into the woods.

Joren heard its clump and thump against the ground. Maybe a young moose had stood gazing at something nameless out there in the night before retreating? Foolish fears.

He returned to bed with the drapes once again closed, and he slept the rest of the night.

Joren awoke with a fit of coughing. He had blood in his phlegm, which floated like a purplish lilypad in the toilet. Maybe his sinuses were irritated from hidden mold?

Hysterical tweens on message boards would say this was Slender Sickness—signs that Slender Man was drawing nigh, intent on claiming its victim. Joren smiled at his thoughts.

After cold cereal and tap water, Joren drove toward Paulding.

While he still had reception from Marquette‘s cellular umbrella, he sent a text to Ede‘s phone. Within a minute she got back to him: ―I‘ll be waiting for you at Old Victoria at 4:00 p.m.‖ *** Ede waited by the cluster of log-cabin-style buildings that constituted the core of Old Victoria, what was once called Finn Town, where that old man thought Albert Fish—the Gray Man— had worked in the mines. Slender and shapely, Ede wore a red wool cap and a gray sweater. Joren felt a surge of heat from his hand to his belly when he shook her offered hand. ―Say yah to da U-P, eh?‖

Joren laughed at Ede‘s use of the popular slogan identifying a Yooper. ―Yah!‖ ―Damn, your hands are big,‖ she said. ―Fingers like pink Lincoln Logs.‖ ―Yeah, people always notice that,‖ Joren said. ―So, on to you. Tell me more about your work on the Wendigo and the Satanic Panic.‖ Ede smoothed down her sweater with both hands. ―Let‘s start with why the hell we‘re going to be working together.‖ They talked about links between Wendigo and Slender Man and whether Slender Man were a new incarnation of Wendigo belief or just a bogeyman born from Photoshop and the Internet. ―How‘s this place relate to Wendigo lore?‖ Joren asked.

Ede pointed to the dirt trail leading from the cabins. ―Some say miners buried a man alive in one of the pits back there who was taken by the Wendigo spirit.‖ ―Freaky. What‘s the connection with Slender Man?‖ ―People talk about a thin figure that steals kids on foggy nights.

Offers to take them to Happy Land. They never return. Now that kids have gone missing, they say it‘s this thing again. Gray Man, they call him.‖ ―Why do they call him that?‖ ―Gray from the fog, I guess.‖ ―Albert Fish, the child-killer from New York, was called the ‗Gray Man‘ because of his clothes. Wonder if there‘s some connection.‖ ―Everything‘s connected, right?‖

―That‘s what my girlfriend says. It‘s too New-Agey for me.‖ Joren and Ede walked to the first mine.

A rope hung from a triangular rock by the mine and connected to clumps of purple flowers turned upside down, which resembled little dresses decorating the stalks sticking up. ―Those are Hollyhock dolls,‖ Ede explained. She pulled off one of the clumps and separated the lower section from the upper portion to reveal a paper clip spine. ―Someone used paper clips to connect the buds to the flowers. We used to do that as kids. There would be thousands of these around.

All different colors.‖ ―Creepy though,‖ Joren said. ―Faceless dolls. A message from locals about Slender Man beliefs or Gray Man? Or a warning from some psycho?‖ ―I‘m prepared for whatever,‖ Ede said and patted her right hip. She pulled aside the lower portion of her winter coat to reveal the butt of a pistol.

They moved the plank of wood reading ―Entry Forbidden‖ that blocked the mine entrance. ―Zenzi said we should be able to get in with some tour and get permission—‖ Joren said. ―I have all the permission I need,‖ Ede said, stepping past Joren.

Joren admired her boldness and the curves of her jean-clad behind. ―As long as we don‘t fall into a hole, or the roof caves in.‖ ―Sweetie, you have jitters worse than if you fell in while ice fishing.‖ Their flashlights flickered down the dark, narrow shaft.

Walking with Ede, Joren felt some of the fear of the choking dark that he remembered from childhood. He was six foot four, and partly for that reason when he was fourteen, he was expected by neighbors to escort their children at Halloween under his umbrella of protection. But out in the dark streets near fantastical faces contorting at him from the scabrous bark of trees, he carried an umbrella of fear. Though never so bad as when alone in a room by himself in the dark. Or a cave. Or a mine.

He‘d only been in a mine once before. A California mine, tested by many feet—not boarded up—a mine that had given the world gold, not copper. Copper was poison. Copper fumes seeped into his brain, sapped his strength, and slipped him forward prematurely toward some form of metal-induced Alzheimer‘s.

The supporting beams of the mine creaked, and for an instant he wanted to rush out. ―Look,‖ Ede said, pointing with her flashlight down into the distance.

A blushing cheek and braids of blond hair reflected the light.

Children‘s dolls. ―OK,‖ Joren said, ―let‘s go back up. Nothing down here.‖ ―Freaked out, huh?‖ Ede asked. ―Yes, a bit.‖ Ede laughed in the dark. ―Well, I guess we could break for a light dinner of chips and jerky, but we‘re coming back tomorrow when there‘s plenty of daylight.

Be ready to face your fear of dolls.‖

Joren reflected on her words. Was it his fear of dolls or of darkness he must face? He secretly hoped to discover something horrible out there, if he could survive and prosper from it. ―Look,‖ Joren said, as they emerged from the mine and into view of a rusty sunset. ―Beautiful,‖ Ede said. ―No, the smoke.‖ Joren pointed toward higher trees in the woods where smoke snaked up above sandpaper-bare branches. ―So? Someone‘s got a fire going in there,‖ Ede said. ―No law against taking a look, right? Public property.‖ Ede glanced at Joren. ―If you want. Probably just some teenagers getting high around a fire.‖ Joren felt like one of those stupid lambs-to-the-slaughter in a bad horror film as he trudged through the woods, his boots crunching over twigs and squishing ragged leaves into the developing layer of snow.

They could see the glow of fire ahead as they crossed a logging road.

Somewhere out ahead of them came a shout and two loud thunks.

Joren gasped and stopped, but Ede patted her gun and continued forward.

Joren followed.

They heard the start of an engine and a car roll off somewhere ahead.

The light was dimming from the fire as they continued to walk foward.

As they came into a clearing where piles of branches and stumps dotted the ground, Joren thought he saw some dark spots hovering in the air by the large tree, beneath which was the dying remains of a fire.

Behind the fire at the base of a tree crouched a mutilated boy, long bangs covering his pale face, which was flecked with drops of red.

Ede cursed and waved her gun at the darkness.

Joren looked at the boy‘s face and he remembered the time he was lost in the woods, cold fog whisking around him, home a painful memory and danger a shadow in the dark.

Then Joren saw holes in the boy‘s sweatshirt and the bloody stumps the fabric clung to.

Joren shivered and coughed. ―Jesus fuck,‖ Ede said, ―someone cut off his arms.‖ The amputated arms were nowhere to be seen.

Joren‘s knees buckled in the cold wind.

It was not for this that he had traveled to the UP. This was a massacre, not a magic tale.

Ede cursed at her cell phone‘s lack of reception.

Joren stuck out his right arm to steady himself against a red cedar. ―What was it that cell phone executive said about the UP? ‗There are some places even God can‘t put a signal?‘‖ Ede put away her gun, gripped Joren‘s hand, and pulled him through the woods toward the mine.

―Why the fuck would someone do that?‖ Ede growled. ―People believe Slender Man controls minds,‖ Joren said, ―Makes people do what he wants. Extends his power that way. He can get around more, cause more shit to happen. Remember what happened in Wisconsin?‖ ―People aren‘t crazy as shit here like they are in Wisconsin.‖ Wind rattled branches above their heads.

As they came in sight of the cabins, they dropped each other‘s hands and walked faster.

Ede finally got reception, informed the police, and drove with Joren to his lodging.

Police took Ede‘s report in person. Joren was too shaken to talk much, and the cop didn‘t ask him anything beyond whether he agreed with Ede about what they‘d seen.

After the report, as the officer switched on the lights in his car to pursue some other crime in the dark, Joren watched the twinkle of red and blue catch the glistening sheen of ice on the trees. He thought of the upcoming Christmas holidays he would miss, not only because of skipping vacation to study the traditions of Slender Man but because his parents‟ deaths had left him with no remaining close relatives.

Spending the night with Ede would have to be celebration enough.

In their cabin, after the disorientation and fear of the woods, Joren‘s head ached, and he wondered about the dark spots he‘d seen near the tree above the dead child. Had he burst a capillary in his eyes from the stress? Would he too die prematurely of a stroke in the brain?

Dizzy and tired, Joren held hands with Ede again. She kissed him as they walked inside the warmth of the interior.

―I have a girlfriend,‖ Joren said. ―I know,‖ Ede said, and she pulled her gray sweater up and over her head.

In the tangle of sheets, the panting, the heaving, the lithe feel of her moving flesh, Joren felt for a few moments both free and wild.

But then after the spasm, there was a creeping of fear.

Was Ede deep down still just this maiden of the small towns of the woods, with her nipples like Hollyhock buds, her aureoles like the purple dresses of the flowers, her face a dance of light? Or was she a fiend who savored violent urban legends, twisted cults, and a thousand other faces of evil? And which Ede was Joren more interested in?

As Joren pictured Ede in his mind, her face squiggled from puzzle shapes into a smooth-as-an-egg blank, a cloak of darkness surrounding her body.

A matrix of mannequins. Cotton swab conformity. Ripe fields of collective idolatry. Come with me, Joren, come with me. Come see something beyond this world. The Slender Man is calling.

Outside something screeched in the woods. Joren rose up from the bed and stared out the window. Probably a barn owl this time.

Branches swayed in the night wind, and then Joren heard something scratch at the door. A bear prowling for garbage? The noise stopped. Was there anything really there at all?

He thought of waking up Ede, who rolled onto her side, her eyelid opening slightly like a partly cooked clam.

The way her left eye hung open in bloodshot blurry whiteness repelled him.

Out the window, the glint of approaching dawn silvered the tops of the trees.

Sunbeams streamed through the birch trees, and Joren saw in the bleaching sunlight the hemispheric scars curving around Ede‘s pelvis.

Awake, she looked at him, her lips tightening and her eyelids contracting.

She had all the mundane and pathetic horror of a living thing needing comfort. ―Yes, I‘ve had a child. He died when he was two years old.‖ ―I‘m sorry,‖ Joren said, not knowing what the script was here that he should read from. ―It‘s got nothing to do with you,‖ Ede said.

Joren was silent.

She sighed and turned to the wall. ―I feel sick. I think I‘m just going to spend the day sleeping. If you want to go back to the mine, the park service won‘t be there till the afternoon, so you can do what you want. I‘m sure the cops will track down whatever psycho is out there killing kids. You‘ve come a long way to get scared off now.‖ After a half hour of awkward and depressing conversation, Joren decided to return to Old Victoria. He got to his car unimpeded by man, animal, ghost, or demon, and he drove. He would at least finish the job he had come to do. Find something more to write about Slender Man. Gray Man. Wendigo. Whatever the boogeyman was in this land of coal, iron, and copper.

He would descend into the dark cave and emerge with something to show for his trouble.

He would reach his long fingers into the extent of this horror and come back with something precious to him.

Joren found himself shaking slightly as he drove. The sight of the mutilated boy still didn‘t seem quite real, but the experience bubbled in his blood. And after seeing that terrible thing, the idea of anything else really scaring him seemed silly.

Absurd even.

He arrived, parked, and crunched with determined steps across the light layer of snow. But standing again at the opening of the mine decorated by Hollyhock dolls, Joren hesitated.

Why was he here? He felt like he was on some conveyor belt of destiny. He had always been meant to enter a place like this. If he wanted to know the dark secrets of the earth—and he did—this was the road he had to walk.

He moved forward as intended, one step after another, descending into the narrow tunnel.

Deeper. In darkness was only himself. That was his internal mantra.

Then, he saw the doll heads again in the light of his flashlight.

If he hadn‘t recently seen a dead body, Joren imagined he couldn‘t have stood to be down here alone in the dark. Somehow it helped to put everything in perspective. The body of that unfortunate boy was a real horror, but this was just a phobia.

Scary dolls in the dark.

His academic mind analyzed his reactions, searched details, made connections. Why were these dolls so disturbing? Not even charmingly creepy like the Hollyhock dolls, but just ordinary dolls.

Mere consumer products. Manufactured and discarded. But could they have been collected and hidden here by some imitator of Albert Fish? Or was this the doll depository of strange locals, perhaps a ritual disposal? Or just the playing of kids, like dropping stones down a well? The button-black and sky-blue eyes of the

dolls reflected back up at him. It was eerie. There was no denying that. But why fear them?

The creaking of the support beams changed to an intermittent knocking.

The knockers? Cornish miners had brought their traditions to the UP, stories of how spirits of dead miners tapped on the rocky walls to warn the living against cave-ins.

The knocking increased. A clanking echoed now after every few knocks.

Would the whole damn mine fall down on him? The creaking and clanking stopped. There was silence, pure and deep.

Only the air stirred beneath Joren‘s nostrils. He smelled the wet clay and gravel around him. He took several more steps until he was mere yards away from the doll graveyard.

And then in the white glow of his flashlight he saw the closest doll more clearly than before—a Raggedy Ann sort of country girl scarecrow.

Or was it a boy? With the long bangs like the boy in the woods? Or like his own long bangs, when he‘d been lost in the fog of Mendocino?

The doll‘s dusty head shifted from one side to the other.

A rush of air chilled Joren‘s neck.

Only the wind.

Just as that cliché echoed in Joren‘s mind, he heard a clicking, like a pebble dropped upon gravel, or some cave cricket beginning its song.

Joren shined his light into the midst of the other dolls.

Their slender plastic limbs and heads were intertwined along the rocky floor, forming some pattern, linking into a multi-headed thing that blinked long eyelashes and stared at him with rosy cheeks and dirty lips.

Joren fled up the mine, his mind empty of words, his heart thudding in pure fear.

He moaned as he noticed the shadows that swirled among the rocks near him, and he cringed, feeling how the lighting was all wrong.

Would this tunnel never end?

He banged his knee against a sharp corner.

Tears came to his eyes.

Pain gave him strength. He climbed the final curve out of the darkness into the morning, where a pastel fog wrapped around the trees making the outdoors so strange and luminous. Joren felt he was almost floating above the snow that had deepened since his entry into the mine.

And then he heard a sharp sound—a cry something like a bird, something like a baby, and something the like of which he had never heard.

The cry seemed to come from the very birch tree next to him, tall and skinny, its scraggly branches chaffing in the wind.

He could run to the car and madly stomp on the pedal, risking an accident as fear and black ice caused him to crash; he could run further into the forest, losing himself in the endless shade of bark and needles that riffled in the mist; or he could walk around that tree where something shrieked again, calling Joren to face the fear that had stalked him through the years.

Greater than his fear was rage at knowing he had run for so long from the unknown.

Greater than rage, a boiling curiosity welled up in his chest to see the face of fear.

He heard a whisper in his head.

At last, you can see something beyond the banal labors of this world.

Joren walked to the other side of the birch tree.

And then, Joren was nowhere to be seen.

Yet there was something.

Near where he had last stood, a shape loomed in the silvery fog.

Perhaps a small tree?

Something slender and gray with branches waved toward—rather than away from—the blowing wind.

Jason Marc Harris graduated from the MFA program in fiction at Bowling Green State University and was fiction editor of MidAmerican Review. He holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington and a BA in Literature from the College of Creative Studies, UC Santa Barbara. His publications include Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and (with Birke Duncan) Laugh Without Guilt: A Clean Jokebook (2007). He has published stories in CC&D: The Unreligious, Non-Family-Oriented Literary and Art Magazine, Everyday Fiction, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Cheap Pop, and Midwestern Gothic. See www.jasonmarcharris.com for a few thoughts and creative collaborations, such as radio plays.

THE COUNTESS. Wendy Schmidt

Her pallid lips turn red, her eyes now cast in shadow.

At night the woman rises, to the song of wild wolves.

Their ancient call alone, revives a failing heart.

Her answer sends a thrill, inside the children's hour.

A corpse supposed in death, thirsts for life once more.

Lovers leave their mistresses, to follow in her wake.

The Countess shows no tenderness.

Her ardent bite, forsakes.

To thus such pure anointed ones, who linger in sweet pain.

Her kiss the mark of many, that dwell in dark repose.

Deepest is the hunger, that flows throughout her veins.

When red becomes a river, that tames incessant need, when love becomes a weapon, to do the savage deed.

Creature of the country,

that bred the first of them, she drifts along the hillside, where evil finds a home.

And rests inside her castle, until she's been reborn.

Wendy Schmidt is a native of Wisconsin. She has been writing short stories and poetry for the last ten years. The Four C's: cat, chocolate, coffee, and computer are her chosen writing tools. Her pieces have been published in Daily Flash 2012, Haunted Object, No Rest for the Wicked, Verse Wisconsin, Chicago Literati, City Lake Poets, and a number of fiction and poetry anthologies.

GHOST IMAGE Flower Conroy Knock, knock?

Who‘s there?

How should I know I‘m the image of a ghost— Or maybe it goes something like this: A priest, a rabbi & a hooker riding a unicorn enter a bar & the bartender says, Hey you holding the door open—& you look up, it is an adjustment to your eyes stepping from daylight into the underground dive‘s smoke & yeast belly— what do you think you’re doing you’re dead?

Flower Conroy’s first chapbook, Escape to Nowhere, was selected as first runner up in the Ronald Wardall Poetry Prize and was published by Rain Mountain Press. Her second chapbook, The Awful Suicidal Swans, was published by Headmistress Press. Her poetry is forthcoming/has appeared in American Literary Review, Poydras Review, Jai Alia, Sierra Nevada Review, and other journals.

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