Beneath The Surface: 13 Shocking Tales of Terror

Shroud Publishing Presents

Beneath The

Surface 13 Shocking Tales of

Terror

Edited By

Tim Deal

“...spooky, gripping, insightful, pulpish, and just downright fun...” -Tom Piccirilli, author of THE COLD SPOT and THE MIDNIGHT ROAD

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Beneath The Surface

Beneath The

Surface 13 Shocking Tales of

Terror Edited By

Tim Deal

SP

Shroud Publishing

A Shroud Publishing Anthology www.shroudpublishing.com

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Beneath The Surface The First Anthology From Shroud Publishing

You are holding a limited edition small press anthology in your hands.

This book is a result of hard work and creative effort. Enjoy it and celebrate the possibility of all things.

Designed and Printed in the USA

SP

Shroud Publishing First Edition

Second Printing June 10, 2008 Copyright 2008 Shroud Publishing All Rights Reserved The individual copyrights of the respective authors herein reverted back to the original copyright holder upon publication of this anthology.

Cover Art by Markus Vesper http://www.markusvesper.de/ ISBN: 978-0-9801870-0-7

Shroud Publishing LLC

121 Mason Road Milton, NH 03878 A Proud Member of the HWA and NEHW www.shroudpublishing.com

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Table of Contents INTRODUCTION, Tim Deal

5

1. THORGUSON, Scott Christian Carr

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2. RAW MATERIALS, Derek M. Fox

13

3. STONE CREEK STATION, Scott William Carter

27

4. THE DRAWER, Malon Edwards

39

5. HANGING ON HER EVERY WORD, Ian Whates

45

6. HER SWEET SOLACE, J.T. Glover

57

7. THE APARTMENT’S BEST FEATURE, Philip Roberts

67

8. SECRETS (NEVER TOLD), Richard Wright

77

9. THE MONEY TREE, Justin McMahon

89

10. MULÓ, Efraim Z. Graves

109

11. KISS OF LIFE, Marie Brennan

115

12. THE RELIC: FATHER SANTIAGO’S BONES, Angeline Hawkes

119

13. THE DEEP END, Tim Deal

129

Bonus: WHERE THERE’S SMOKE..., John Bushore

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To my parents, Ann and Jerry Deal, and my Uncle Chris, all of whom departed this world much too soon, with much left to see and do...

-TD

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Beneath The Surface

Introduction

Tim Deal

I

n 1973 my parents went out to see a movie by a then-little known director, William Friedkin, based upon a novel by William Peter Blatty.

When they returned later that night they were disturbed and exhilarated by what they had experienced. I was six-years-old at the time and can still remember the aura of fear and excitement my parents exuded after seeing The Exorcist for the first time. A few years later, The Exorcist came to television, and I was sent to bed early, as my parents were afraid that the shocking images would be too much for my young impressionable mind. However, I was far from safe from the dreadful impact of that movie, because as my parents watched it, the horrible sounds of a possessed Regan MacNeil slipped through my bedroom door and quickly paralyzed me with terror.

Never before had I heard a human being make such unnatural sounds and I was immediately fascinated and repulsed by poor little Regan’s affliction- that is, until I discovered the premise behind The Exorcist and that Regan’s affliction was nothing less than demonic possession.

At that time in my life I had assumed that I had a good handle on all the terrible things that could happen to me in life, be it a bike accident, a good

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whipping from my dad’s belt, or — at the very worst — a nuclear attack by those damn Russkies. However, with the addition of demonic possession I quickly learned that there was a world of potential malevolence that could be dealt upon me unseen. This upped the stakes considerably.

As an adult, I have continued to discover a multitude of tangible and intangible evils that could plague the world at any time, and, ironically, I now seek them out by way of fiction. My fascination with fear is deeply rooted in the thrill I first felt after Regan’s guttural exclamations permeated my bedroom door. The Exorcist made me realize that there are a great many things that lay hidden beneath the surface of our mundane lives, and while I may not always want to face these things in the real world I enjoy experiencing them vicariously through books and films. The thing is, I don’t want to live in a world where everything has been discovered, or everything can be explained. Such a world holds little appeal to me. Thus my love of the horror genre is born.

Over the past few months I have had the privilege of reading hundreds of stories that offer a glimpse behind the veil of the supernatural.

These tales ranged from the subdued to the fantastic and detail everything from serial killers to specters and all that may fall in between. As I sifted through these submissions, I was stricken with the vast diversity in characters, locations, and plot devices- all testament to the depth and richness of the imaginations behind them. The imagination that is able to conjure the horrors within our genre underscores the massive realm of possibilities we exist in. If we can imagine it, then — in some small way — can it not have an origin in reality? Or perhaps, by our belief in it, does it then become real, somehow?

There exists, for many of us, a land of the fantastic lurking just beneath the surface of the everyday world. In the following pages you will be able to take a glimpse into that land thanks to the talents of fourteen writers who, as you will find, have honed their craft down to a deadly level. I have handpicked the following stories because of the diversity they represent in tone and construction. The writers represent all walks of life and station, but share a common feature that will become evident on these pages: a wildly dark imagination fertile enough to offer us more possibilities and more opportunities for discovery.

-Tim Deal, January, 2008

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Thorguson

by Scott Christian Carr

E

ven now, Commander Thorguson remains one of my most important sources of information for happenings about the ship. The chain of command and its privileges are a boon that I’ll not disregard in any near future; its importance is not lost on me. If nothing else, I’ll take to my grave the knowledge that a ship is the sum of its men, otherwise just a shell. Just an empty shell and nothing more.

Even in death, Michael Thorguson remains by and far my best man. I write this now because I feel that I should. Because, when all else is said and done, some record should be known, some attempt made to explain the sad fate of the Paramus, and the unfathomable, unforgivable actions of its Captain.

It has been upwards of seven hours, and all of my crew are dead. I alone endure here on the ocean’s floor. The ship is finally empty, but for myself and— Dear God! How rational I sound, how utterly and damnably rational.

My petty attempt at disclaimer no more does justice to my crew, than does it ease the burden of my waterlogged soul…

But no rationality, no reason, no explanation on my part, could ever be more than just blasphemy. Idle wordplay. For my deeds there can be no excuse, for my actions no retribution. Who could ever know the vile

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machinations and unholy delusions of this captain’s mind, alone here with only the water and the dead? Who could know that just hours ago I fought savagely to claw my way from the very bottommost circle of hell, grasping and scratching at any shred of sanity that might drift my way?

Who could know the trials of a ruined man in his empty, broken vesselall alone with his thoughts on the ocean floor?

Did I say alone?

There... That knocking again, can you hear it? Through the hull, back by the engine room. I think it’s louder now... I’m sure that it is. Damnation, but why won’t it stop? Is all that too much too ask? To let me at least die in silence? Is that too much?

Clang! Clang!

A watery fist slowly crushing my wrecked submarine in its grip. Water leaks from the ceiling and the walls, all around me, pooling in deep puddles on the floor.

“Damn you, Thorguson, let me be! Why can’t you leave me in peace?

Why don’t you leave me alone? Why must you torture me like this?” *** The Paramus sank fast. Faster than you would have thought, faster than all my experience had prepared me for. In less than a minute the engines had clogged, the ship had filled with water, and my entire crew had drowned.

All but me.

All but me… Of course. I had been in the lavatory. How ridiculous that must sound. How preposterous, how horribly awkward- that an entire ship had died, an entire crew had drowned, while their captain sat on the crapper. Excuse me if I don’t laugh.

I’ve only Thorguson to blame. Only Thorguson to thank, for my situation. For saving my life. Thank you, Michael. Thank you for leaving me stranded here on the deep-sea floor. Thank you for blowing the air tanks, and dropping the bulkheads, and sealing the vents with your last, airless ounce of strength. Thank you for forcing the water back out where it belongs, though you knew you were already dead.

Thank you for not letting your Captain drown on the toilet. ***

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Look at you out there, Michael. Lying there on the sand, your hands floating, ever reaching towards the water’s break, leagues and leagues above us. Just look at you out there, I’d swear that you were angry with me. I’d swear that you blame me for this, that somehow you are convinced that any of this could possibly be my fault.

That pale, waterlogged look of resentment on your face, ThorgusonGod, but it’s ugly. Would that I could wipe away that ghostly sneer.

Don’t look at me like that! You would have done the same! And don’t you even try to tell me that you wouldn’t have. Seven hours alone in here with the dead… Seven hours! Damn you Thorguson… I’m sorry.

I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t bear to have you in here with me. Any of you. My crew. My dead, drowned crew. I just couldn’t bear it.

Damn you Thorguson, don’t look at me like that!

You can see me, can’t you? Peering at you through the periscope, you see me watching you. It’s cold out there, you say? Well, what do you want me to do? Let you back in? Ha ha, you always were the funny one, Michael.

Damn that banging, why won’t it stop?

The others are just as dead. Why don’t you take a lesson from them, Commander? Can’t you see them? They’re out there with you. Isn’t that Miguel behind you, in the murky shadows?

When I crank the periscope all the way left, I can just make out Sebastian’s boots.

They’re all out there, you know. Why can’t you be like them and just leave me the hell alone?

What is that infernal banging?! *** Again I’m compelled to look at Thorguson. He draws me over to the periscope and forces me to stare.

Look at him out there, I swear that he’s laughing at me. I’ve got to keep tabs on him, he’s a sly one, that Thorguson. Always was. Just look at him, half-floating there, ten yards from the ship.

Bang... Bang...

Louder now, and more of it.

Bang... Bang...

“Go to hell, Thorguson, you monster! If you’re not already there...

He sat up!

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My god. Dead Commander Michael Thorguson sat straight up, tilted his head, and locked his dead, fishy eyes on mine!

My hands go weak, my grip loosens on the handles of the periscope. I fall backwards in horror, landing gracelessly in an icy puddle of brine.

He’s alive out there! I don’t know how, but he is- they all are… Somehow they’re all still alive!

Bang... Bang...

Thorguson’s voice whispers hotly, somewhere deep in my mind.

‘Of course we are,’ he says as the infernal banging grows louder, penetrating my mind and my heart and my guts. Thorguson smiles, ‘Why did you put us out here, Captain?’ *** They’re trying to get in. My God, they’re trying to get in here and drown me. My crew. They want their revenge. My poor dead crew. They’re trying to kill me.

They know that I put them out there, and now they want to take me with them. They’re breaking their way in, pulling and smashing at the hull and clawing their way in. It’s only a matter of time now…. *** The Paramus shifts ever so slightly in her unsure footing on the ocean’s floor. Ever so slightly, but I can feel it.

They’re pushing the ship now, rocking it, trying to find a way in. Trying to get to at me.

The banging and clanging are louder, the pounding is terrific. Deafening and constant. All around me. And not just thudding any more— creaking, bending metal; groaning metal; ripping metal.

The Paramus has rolled over onto her side. *** Water sprays from a hundred leaks in my poor ship’s hull. I’m up to my waist in icy brine, and there’s nothing that I can do but wait. Wait for it all to be over.

The ship continues to move, to rock, to slide. I can feel it. The periscope is jammed in its place, and when I look into it, all I can see is blackness.

But I’m sure that Thorguson is watching, waiting, laughing. The end is

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near.

And all I can do is wait.

And wait.

And wait… *** I’ve figured out what they’re doing out there. They’re not trying to get in, as I first suspected. They’re not trying to get to me. I know that now, for certain.

I know what they’re up to.

I know what is happening.

I know what they want.

I now know for certain just what Hell is- just where Hell is.

The Paramus is balanced on the brink, and they’re dragging me straight down to it...

Scott Christian Carr is the Senior Writer and Co-Creator of The Learning Channel (TLC) paranormal television series “Dead Tenants” and the Writer/Producer of the upcoming A&E television series “The Mole People.” He is the Creator of the scifi feature film “The NUKE Brothers” His novel of superhero family dysfunction “Champion Mountain” is available from Double Dragon Publishing and his fiction has recently appeared in Horror Quarterly, GUD, Pulp Eternity, The Dream People Literary Magazine, as well as the Raw Dog Press trade anthologies Of Flesh and Hunger, The Wicked Will Laugh, Demons and Scary! © 2007 Scott Christian Carr

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Beneath The Surface

Raw Materials

by Derek M. Fox

B

ad move booking that room, but gullible as most are, you accept what you get when all you have to go on is a picture in a brochurephotographed from the best angle of course.

Mrs Casely sounded very up-market on the phone; a mother figure who couldn’t do enough for them. Colin booked a week with an option on a few extra days.

“No trouble at all,” Mrs Casely said. “Doesn’t put me out in the least.

Dates are fine. I’ll pencil the extra days in my book.

“Daren’t be without my book Mr Rawson,” she said, “helps me keep tabs on who comes, who goes. Accounts have to tally or the doctor, my husband, he’s retired now, wouldn’t like it.”

Had it not been for the infernal accident on the way down to Salcombe they would have arrived much earlier than late-afternoon.

The M5 after Birmingham had heaved up a nearly solid dotted line of traffic especially over Bristol’s Avon Bridge. Lacking awards for patience, Colin grumbled. Vicky feigned sleep until she was empowered to state, “COLIN! Give it a rest OK.” Blue eyes flashed, her dark, shoulder length hair flicked. “This is vacation time, less stressful. It’s hot. I don’t need

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your carping. We can’t alter a thing. Next services pull off, or take the nearest exit and head the pretty way.”

“Vacation time!” Col seethed. “Try telling the rest of them that.” A line of traffic, all shapes, sizes and colours resembling a kid’s plastic beaded necklace disappeared into fume-hazed distance.

Eventually they did pull off, allowing Colin “to cool it.” One hour on, they drove on lanes leading to Dartmouth where, Colin told Vicky “we’ll pick up the signs for Salcombe.”

Unfortunately, to his disappointment and Vicky’s added frustration, they were entangled in the accident and yes, another line of stationary traffic. Blue lights flashed in the just-wide-enough-for-two-vehicles country road, cars only, not box vans.

They eased past the van, tilted alarmingly on the edge of a deep ditch, the legend: DOC’S REMOVALS – ANYTHING, ANYWHERE SAME DAY, contradicting the intention. The shocked, pallid driver had to be the guy sitting in the back of an ambulance drawn up behind. A police sergeant scribbled notes.

Colin eased past a crumpled mess of black BMW embedded into a giant ash tree, sunshine lancing through a canopy of branches to highlight an obvious tragedy. The scarred, formidable tree hadn’t moved.

“Oh my god,” Vicky oozed on a breath as she strained to see. “I doubt anyone came out of that alive.”

Colin, speechless for once, stared at the wreck; apart from blood staining its spider-webbed windscreen he was struck by the grinning doll with orange lips that dangled from the driver’s mirror.

He flicked their little mascot— a tiny corn dolly Vicky had bought a while back when down this way. “For luck,” she’d said skipping from the tiny gift shop.

A hot, sweaty traffic cop tapped on the car’s roof and motioned them past. In the rear view Colin saw the cop’s puzzled look before he resumed his frantic signals.

“What’s with him,” Colin said acidly, “have I grown horns or what?” *** The Old Post Office looked tired; like it was 18th century old as Mrs Casely told Colin when they arrived: “You would be surprised the tales it could tell.”

White, weather-beaten stucco had met them, wisteria disguising less

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pleasant aromas; rust from leaked guttering stained the eaves from which unsightly growths of swallow’s nests clung. On a wide, neatly trimmed lawn trimmed by rose beds and enclosed by tall trees and hedges, stood a child’s swing, a helter-skelter, a box full of balls. A sand pit had been dug, plastic buckets and toy spades scattered alongside cars and trucks – like the motorway. Like the lane, the accident.

Above the main door a plaque was screwed to the lintel. Eroded by climate through countless seasons, if inspected closely it read: THE OLD POST OFFICE – We collect; we deliver.

Had Colin and Vicky noticed it would have struck a chord.

Colin’s image of Mrs Casely proved how easily mistakes are made.

She was old, her doughy features worsened by orangey-red lipstick on accentuated narrow lips, her facial looking as though it failed to do what it said on the tin. Short, Colin guessed, five-two, and garbed in a taupe coloured silky caftan that reached her ankles. Colin thought of the dumpy table lamp of his mother’s, its frilled shade patterns defying belief. Light from a high circular window made the patterns dance. He looked away.

Her sagging breasts and belly became a confusion of fat as she moved towards them, and her sausage-shaped, bejewelled fingers extended for a handshake.

Her gaudiness emphasised similarities of one who’d practised the ‘oldest profession’ too many times. Dangling silver earrings flicked, an unmatched necklace with small silver skull attached had caught in a fold of the dress.

Given its distinct pine polish aroma the place held a suppressed odour that hinted at Age Concern— old clothes and artifacts belonging to the ‘nursing home brigade’.

Without offering refreshments, through a yellow-toothed smile she said, “You look exhausted. I’ll show you the room once you’ve signed my register.” She brushed past them, a whiff of some potent perfume lingering. Vicky didn’t recognise it, an eye-opener inasmuch as she had enough perfume at home to restock counters in a department store.

About to sign the book, Colin noticed other signatures.

“Yes, we’re quite full,” the woman confirmed. “Lucky I could fit you in.”

Colin and Vicky were alerted by a repetitive squeak, like rubber on a polished floor, just the other side of a partially open door.

Mrs Casely smiled, “Hubby’s wheelchair, annoying when he moves around. I’ll introduce you later.”

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“Ah, right.” Colin signed her book and replaced the pen in an ornate silver inkwell before collecting the two bags.

“Those are interesting.” Colin was fascinated by the blank stares of some half dozen heads, three with animal characteristics (domestic?) while the rest human, affixed to oak panelling behind the reception desk.

“Real?” he queried.

“For show.” She smiled, smoke grey eyes beneath a fringe of dyed blonde hair begging further question.

“There’s more.” The caftan rippled along with the rest of her.

Vicky’s edgy smile surfaced. “Our room…please?”

“My dear, I am sorry. Do follow me.”

The perfume made their eyes water as they followed her up the wide staircase pausing briefly to appraise sepia photographs. Most depicted a man, grinning into the camera, one half of his face shaded beneath a wide brimmed pith-helmet. Here too were dead animals, the man’s pose declaring: ‘Check out what I bagged today.’ Another picture of him and a woman lounging in cane chairs, the woman a younger version of the landlady raising a glass of something for the benefit of the camera.

“Photographs of our expeditions, well Reggie’s really,” she offered.

“It’s where he found the heads.”

So they are real, Colin thought. What the devil have we gotten into? The idea of taking additional days here nosedived.

Size-wise the interior was fairly big, short corridors and creaking boards expected. Colin accepted its old worldliness, maze-like qualities exciting as they turned left and right, left again. The available wall space was cluttered with artists’ impressions of foreign climes and with what Vicky saw as grotesque artefacts; grim, dusty masks, mouths agape, black eyes welded or sewn shut.

Vicky squirmed and thought of shrunken heads, yet these looked mummified similar to ones seen in museums. All of mixed race.

The sun drew a straight line down the corridor’s length, stained glass window hues painting unsettling patterns of red, green and stark blue across walls and floor. Jewellery sparked, each piece appended to a lip or an ear. Was that a stainless steel nose ring? A lip ring affixed to the head hanging by the spear? Closer inspection convinced Vicky these were modern, sort-of pseudo-art nouveau pieces.

“Colin,” she whispered. Mrs Casely turned. Vicky disliked the woman’s penetrating stare. Thankfully she turned from them to straighten a photograph and Vicky gestured for Colin to check out the jewellery.

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“Not o-l-d,” she whispered.

Colin’s smiley-face t-shirt contradicted baleful masks. Small wonder the smiley face didn’t frown.

“Later.” With Vicky in front he negotiated the narrow passageway with the bags.

The room doors stood wide, others ajar, each room passed sparsely furnished— a bed, a dresser, little more. The lack of life was puzzling since he’d been informed the place was full. No clothes casually thrown across beds, or shoes beneath dressers, beneath the odd chair. Very peculiar. And that smell for Christ’s sake. Masked by the pungent, caustic stink of polish and air spray.

As to the rooms: (have you ever walked in a room, empty or otherwise and detected an aura?) Aromas aside here was an aura that smacked the one time presence and taste of whomsoever occupied the space; a suggestion of shape, smoky, gone in a blink.

The moment Mrs Casely, sewn-on smile present, ushered them into a room (the number “6” etched on a brass plate screwed to a pitched pine door), Colin and Lisa distinctly felt it was not for them.

“I’ll leave you to get settled.” A ringed forefinger pointed to a leatherbound folder. “Rules and regs, fire exits, mealtimes, the usual; there’s a small bar in the TV lounge to the right of reception. Anything else, please use the telephone over there. The number is 28, that’s two-eight. One of us will answer. Meals other than breakfast must be ordered, assuming Sam can cope. He has off days but its surprising what he is capable of.”

A brief finger wave saw her off. Colin closed the door.

“Yeah, we might well be surprised,” he said. “Wonder if hubby shoots the meat for dinner.” He grinned. “If it’s anything like the animals down there we’ll eat out.”

“Col, can we leave?” Vicky’s normal breezy attitude waned. “I didn’t like the pictures or those head things, masks whatever. Are they plastic and just for show like Mrs Thingy said?”

“Yeah I reckon they are. Hey, check out the room.” Colin inspected fitted wardrobes, extra pillows stored inside, a pull down ironing board, trouser press and a hair dryer. “Unbelievable, the other rooms aren’t a patch-” “Colin, go and tell her we’re leaving.” Uneasy eyes sought his. “I don’t want to stay. There are other places in Salcombe, let’s find one. Pay her in full if you have to.”

Vicky flopped on the bed which proved quite comfortable and bouncy.

She stared at the varnished floor, grimaced at stains. A scatter rug’s pat-

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tern reminded her of the same weird patterns on Mrs Casely’s attire. She thought of a map and hoped Colin would do as she asked without moaning.

Colin bounced on the queen-sized bed. “Yes! Great. It doesn’t squeak either.” He threw her a lascivious glance. “Come here, Victoria. Let’s make slow, meaningful love.”

It was the last thing on her mind, Vicky busy scratching her left arm.

Colin leaned in closer. “Twist your arm a little this way, let me see.”

“Probably a bite or I might have scratched myself on one of those spears or an arrow head sticking out from the wall.”

“It looks bad.” He sounded serious.

“What? You’re joshing. It is a bite right?”

He looked too solemn to be joking. Vicky removed her blouse and stood before the wardrobe mirror.

“Oh hell, what is it?” Twisting her arm, she saw a deep cut, the skin puckered about its edges. Gingerly she felt it, appalled when a patch of skin came off. “My arm looks…looks thinner.”

Her look as she questioned Colin was of the scary ride type. “Get something, do something! Don’t sit there like a dummy. Go find the antiseptic cream, a bandage, a plaster. I’ll have to get this checked.”

“Hon, it’s Sunday, where- ?”

“The hospital, idiot,” Vicky snapped.

“The nearest is Torbay. That’s miles.” Colin located the zipper bag and brought out a tube of cream and a large plaster. “Bathe it in lukewarm water. I’ll put this plaster over it, keep it clean. Check it in the morning.” He scrutinized it. “It’s weeping a bit.”

“Weeping with what, blood?”

“Er, no it’s like yellow stuff.”

“Oh no, it’s gone septic! We…we’ll find a chemist, has to be one open somewhere.”

“Is it sore?”

A brief silence, thinking time before she admitted: “Well no, actually it isn’t. But how did I do it? What’s caused it?”

Colin examined it, carefully pressed the skin around it. “Does that hurt?”

“No.” “Look, go and wash round it. Use a clean handkerchief. And Vic, your arm isn’t thinner, optical illusion through the mirror I’d say.”

She disappeared into the small bathroom, Colin frowned, his thinking

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haywire. “You OK?” he shouted.

“Yeah, yeah, just let me do it.”

He checked the wardrobes, the narrow dressing table drawers, nothing sharp; besides neither had been in them yet. “At least there’s a kettle.”

And a tray with a mix of tea bags, coffee and hot chocolate packets, milk and cream mini-cartons. Distracted by children’s voices through the open window, the squeak of chains, he thought: Swing. Or a wheelchair on a hard floor. Tugging a lace curtain aside he saw the swing moving backwards and forwards with nobody on it. He craned a little more, the angle causing a pain to shoot through his shoulder that fetched him upright.

“That hurt.” He massaged his shoulder, the pain eased. No one pushed the swing.

Now at the opposite side he instinctively stepped back as something peppered the glass, like a sudden shower of rain. Giggles sounded, “What the–? If that is somebody’s kids–” Colin noticed sand adhering to the glass. A second look was long enough for him to catch a fleeting glimpse of some small person in a blue t-shirt and shorts streak from the sand pit and dive into the bushes.

“How the heck can a kid throw this high?”

About to stalk downstairs and catch the culprit, he was halted by Vicky shouting: “Colin, get in here!”

Jesus, now what? Hurrying into the bathroom he met her broad smile.

“Look.” She held out her arm. “See, the wound’s gone.”

Perplexed wasn’t in it. “I don’t— I mean how can—? Vic, this is unreal, we both saw it!”

Whichever way he angled her arm the mark had gone, not a blemish. It must be the room, the way the light angles. About to hug her, Colin paused listening as corridor boards protested.

“Another guest; there is life around.”

There followed a quick scurry; giggling from children.

“Excuse me a mo’.” Colin opened the door and shot into the corridor.

The giggles lingered. “Now look you kids, a joke’s a—” He stared left, then right. And again. Not one door had slammed, nor did other passages angle off. Where had they gone?

A residue of golden sand sounded gritty under his Reeboks.

Back in the room he slouched in an easy chair by the bed, looking up as Vicky entered naked apart from a discreetly held towel. “Had a quick shower; hey what’s with you, lover boy, seen a spook? Wouldn’t be surprised here.”

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“Kids messing about earlier, they threw sand at the window. Wanted to catch them but no luck.”

“Find out which room they’re in. Dial twenty eight,” she mimicked Mrs Casely, “have her tell them. It is her guest house.”

“You wanted to leave and I agree.” Colin was disturbed by what he’d seen and heard. He rechecked the window: sand stained the glass.

“Leave? Don’t be daft. Give it time.”

“You’ve changed your tune.”

“Get showered, or… better still— ” She let the towel fall and struck a pose, “make slow, passionate love to me, honey.”

Colin forgot kids and tugged her onto the bed. *** Around eight they strolled into Salcombe, enjoyed a few beers, wandered around the harbour, hung on conversations from the upper-class yacht fraternity. They tried to join in and were ignored, the real ignorant walked away.

Devon cider is potent as Vicky discovered: a couple of glasses of Scrumpy made her giggly; she didn’t protest at being left when Col got it into his head to chase a kid dressed in a blue t-shirt and shorts who threw out taunting giggles as he darted around corners.

He came back breathless. “I lost the little— He’s the one I saw back at the Post Office. Dare bet he threw the soil. I will have a word when we get back. You hungry?”

“Not especially, you?”

“No.” Natural light had diminished, nascent sunset through gathered mist hazing the picturesque view; streetlamps stretched shadows across the sea wall, reflections of brightly coloured boats drowned in choppy water, the breeze cold. Colin looked up positive he saw a family, two adults, two kids, watching them. Their eyes seemed to reflect orange-red, the same shade as Mrs Casely’s lipstick.

He nudged Vicky. “Look over there.”

“At lamp posts!” She questioned his judgement. “You, lover, are seeing things. You’re smashed like me.”

Colin checked his watch, 10.45. “Let’s get back. We’ll have a drink in the bar, watch some TV. Meet the other guests.”

22

Beneath The Surface ***

Apart from a single outside light encased in a pseudo Edwardian lamp casing, the Old Post Office reposed in darkness and lacked a welcome glow from its two storeys.

“Ooh, spooky.” Vicky giggled. “Probably have to be in bed by eleven.”

Floorboards protested as they edged down the corridor towards the lounge and bar. “It’s this door I think.” Colin stopped, held up a hand, “Listen.”

Vicky questioned with her eyes. “Yeah, so what am I listening for?”

Her eyes widened in the muted glow from a security light; panelling looked shabby here, ceiling paint peeled. “That’s just it, Vic, there’s nothing to hear. No voices, no sound apart from the damn boards. Where is everybody?”

Colin opened the lounge door which surprisingly didn’t creak. A smell of decay, of old things assaulted them. Vicky stifled a scream as car headlights picked out eyes, the open jawed face of a lynx screaming from a shelf above a silent television.

“It’s stuffed,” Colin said. “No worries.”

“Like me this afternoon.” Vicky snorted, her hand covering her mouth as though any mention of it was sacrilege.

“We could perform in here if you like,” Colin suggested. “No one will disturb us.”

“No, it smells like something’s dead.” Vicky gestured to the lynx. “Is it that thing?”

Colin went to the small dimly lit bar and checked the offers. “All bottled stuff and cans on the shelves, a few spirits…”

“That I do believe.” Vicky buried another giggle.

“Hey, here’s a note.” Colin scanned it and read: “‘Please obtain your choice of drink, enter in book…’ There’s a price list.”

“Her and her bloody book,” Vicky slumped on a settee arm and immediately slid onto a cushion whose stuffing oozed out. She picked bits off it and flung it high.

“WHEEE,” she shouted.

“Vicky be quiet, you’ll wake everybody.”

“I need to. Like what is this place? There’s nobody, no life. Apart from footsteps this evening and that kid you saw, oh and the others you said you saw. Where are they?” She stood with difficulty and staggered into him.

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23

“Let’s get you to bed.” As they negotiated the stairs the heads on reception appeared to swivel in their direction. Colin stifled Vicky’s laughter by forcing her head into his shoulder. He winced, his earlier discomfort troublesome.

He’d said nothing, not wanting to worry Vicky. Once they’d found Number 6 after a few wrong turns, Colin prevented her from banging on a few doors, wake folks, shout “FIRE!” The masks on the landing had dissuaded her, Vicky sober enough to be wary of the wrinkled age-old features now more disconcerting as she picked out other adornments of modern jewellery.

The stink followed them, it permeated the room. Colin clicked on the bedside lights, and before Vicky had slumped on the still rumpled bed unmade since their bout of lust, he noticed a mess of fibrous-like slivers, soft to the touch and worrying. *** In the night vehicles from the car park at the bottom of the road hurtled up the narrow road directly outside, their lights disturbing. Boards in the corridors protested; masks shrieked from dark mouths, eyes once sewn shut flicked open, baleful orange-red light issuing from them.

Colin awoke, his eyelids welded as if they too, had come under the needle. Vicky slept on, slightly snoring. From downstairs came the squeak of a wheelchair.

After showering, alarmed that his accrued summer tan was flaking, he guessed that what he’d found in the bed had to be shed skin. He started to whistle. The sound woke Vicky whose bleary eyes eventually concentrated on him.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“Not especially.”

“Have a shower, and we’ll show ourselves at breakfast.” *** Mrs Casely, like a matronly school ma’am, stood by a dumb waiter, arms folded as she surveyed a dining room full of people. It included a family of four, the boy dressed in the same blue clothes as yesterday.

Above the aroma of bacon and egg Colin and Vicky puckered their faces at that ‘other’ smell.

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The woman smiled, “Good morning.” She offered a menu. “I’ll be back directly to take your order.”

“Where’s all this lot come from?” Colin whispered to Vicky, forced to nudge her arm for attention as she gawped around.

Mrs Casely took up the same stance; behind her the dumb waiter squeaked and rumbled as a meal was delivered from the depths. Colin wondered if the woman and her ‘invisible’ hubby lived underground. Dreams of yesterday tormented: action replay of the accident they’d passed, the traffic cop staring; the family who had so obviously watched them last night despite Vicky’s denying seeing them.

He glanced across the room, noticed sand on the boy’s clothing, the blonde girl child’s too; it pattered on the floor as they shifted and wriggled.

Their hair was matted with it; her cocked, permanent, lifeless smile forced Colin to look away.

The man, presumably Daddy, looked at them and smiled revealing a mouthful of decayed teeth; likewise the woman who brushed back her hair to reveal an oozing, scarred face. Eyes glowed orange-red.

As did every other pair of eyes—where they made a pair that is. Colin scanned the room the whole area alive with melted eye sockets the colour of a rotting blood orange. The stench became nauseating.

This time it had done worse than what it said on the tin.

“What is this place?” Colin grabbed Vicky who shrank lower in her seat. Heads swivelled towards her, adorned with modern jewellery, through noses, ears, lips.

A medicine ball of fear settled in Colin. “WHO ARE YOU?” he yelled.

He pointed at the smug looking landlady. “What are you? Who are all these…these— ?” Certainly not real, living, breathing people.

Sheltering behind him, Vicky edged out of the room.

From the reception area they scooted for the door thoughts of possessions left upstairs on indeterminate hold.

The way was blocked… by the creatures whose heads had graced the boards behind the desk yesterday, at least the animals, domestic, all twisted and torn and stinking, their bodies emaciated, corrupted by a death from which they had somehow returned.

Behind them a wheelchair squeaked; glimpsed through the window, the sand pit erupted as small hands heaved child bodies upwards from orange light into the glare of day, all eyes blacked out; protection against streaming daylight spearing the cherry tree.

Colin and Vicky whirled, her scream bitten back.

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Colin stared into the face of the man (man?) seated in the wheelchair.

Had the horrors of what they had witnessed not been mind-bending, the whole charade would have been comical.

This… creature grinned through a dismembered face, his skull visible through a flaking membrane of transparent skin. Bony fingers flicked switches on the chair causing it to spin, each movement mesmerising. Patterns swirled, formed pictures… … of a man in a pith helmet… dead animals, a fat woman dressed in a taupe coloured caftan, the distorting map on it suggesting a road atlas, traffic jams, ambulances, police vehicles, a box van, a twisted BMW. And death.

“Y-O-U,” the voice said, sounding like it issued from the sepulchre of Hell, “You should understand that I… I am the Doctor…Baron of the Dark World.”

He rose up forcing Colin to reel, push Vicky into the wall and to step quickly sideways to escape snapping animal teeth accompanied by guttural growling. At the same time he glimpsed a top hat crowning the grimy grey of a skull, found he could not break the gaze from glittering, orangered eyes: fire eyes.

On the patio children danced, giggled and oozed towards Colin and Vicky the word “playmates” followed by: “We got new mates…wanna play, new mates? Do you, really?”

“KEEPER OF THE DEAD,” hissed Mrs Casely, wavering before them, all stinking and appalling, no amount of scent capable of extinguishing the smell. Sausage fingers spooned meat, raw, bloody meat, into her mouth.

Vicky’s arm opened up, skin curled back from bone…and as suddenly Vicky yelled: “It’s an illusion, WE SHOULD GO BACK.” Blame the spellbinding patterns on the woman’s dress yesterday; on the scatter rug in their room, swirling colours that had somehow lulled them into believing what they wished. But then nothing in life is ever what it seems.

“WHAT IS THIS PLACE?” demanded a shocked, appalled Colin; shocked because his skin was shredding, body stiffening. He croaked, “Vicky, RUN.” They creaked up the stairs, each riser more difficult than the last: on the walls pictures lived, tiny negative-like hands dripping skin and flesh reached out to snare them. The passageway to their room erupted as more hideous, stinking dead oozed from the plaster and lath, foetid, bony claws reaching, tearing, cracked voices demanding: “JOIN US.” All horribly

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garish as sunlight stabbed the coloured window.

The cut in Vicky’s arm dripped. She inspected it, and cried out as more flesh peeled away. The Casely-thing slithered in her wake…chomping.

“New flesh,” she cackled, “I like a taste before you come over.”

“C-O-L-I-N-N-N” Vicky screamed, “I WANT TO GO HOME.” *** In a country lane scant miles from Salcombe, South Devon a tow truck driver flicked on his winch to commence hauling a wrecked BMW from the base of a scarred ash tree.

The driver scratched his head and said to the policeman lolling against the cab blowing smoke rings, “Wonder where the bodies went? Freakin’ bafflin’ I’ll tell yer. Even you lot are dumbstruck.”

“More to the point,” said the policeman, “where’s the box van? That thing’s disappeared as well.” *** In the driveway of ‘The Old Post Office’ the pallid faced man cleaned the muck of his van and smiled at the legend: DOC’S REMOVALS – ANYTHING, ANYWHERE SAME DAY. The scratches would paint over; pity he’d damaged it, but then for the cause, what the hell, he’d do anything. Accidents happen!

The text message from the Doctor told him to collect and take home a young couple delivered here because the woman didn’t want to stay and play with the kids in the sand pit… A lopsided smile sneaked out. “Looks like a new branch will be starting up in the Midlands.”

The woman with the orange-red lipstick paid him in meat, raw naturally, later watching as he eased two apparently dead bodies into the van.

“Colin shouldn’t have been so impatient to get here,” said Mrs Casely, picking her teeth with a sharp pinkie nail, “idiots like him cause accidents.

At least their relatives have a hell of a surprise coming when you deliver.

Victoria did say she wanted to go home! They say home is where the heart is.”

“Too right,” said the man, “plus liver, kidneys and all things tasty.”

Laughing she handed the man a small doll. “Vicky bought it on an earlier visit to Devon.” Holding it to the light she added, “Given the right light this resembles me don’t you think?”

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“Nah,” he said, “you’re better lookin’.” He slapped her fat backside, laughing loudly when his hand sunk into rotting flesh, “There y’go Mrs C, something to remember me by ’til I call again.” He winked.

“Hey, when I placed them there dolls county-wide it brought a goodly number o’candidates. A powerful man is the Doc.” He squinted at the plaque above the door: “‘The Old Post Office – We collect; we deliver’. A good slogan.” He climbed into the box van. “Has been for years.”

“Keep your eye out for accidents,” the woman directed.

“Sure will.” The man popped his right eye out, breathed on it, polished it on his overall and angled it towards Mrs Casely. “See ya gal.”

Mrs Casely went inside to tally up ‘her book’: two in, the same two out.

“Yes,” she said, “they can look forward to a dark future.”

Derek M. Fox is a novelist and short story writer with eight books in print ranging across thriller, suspense, historical (fact and fiction), supernatural thrillers and horror. Fox teaches Creative Writing in colleges and via distance learning. His first novel Recluse went to reprint. A second novel, Demon, followed. An anthology: Treading on the Past, was nominated for a British Fantasy Society Award. Stories from his collection, Through Dark Eyes (USA) earned honourable mentions from Ellen Datlow editor of ‘World’s Best Fantasy and Horror’ who stated: ‘Derek Fox is a name to watch.’ Extensive studies on Lord Byron produced two companion works, Heart of Shadows and Sinister Quartet. A horror thriller, Jackdaw followed. Recent tales have seen publication in collections including a German/Italian anthology. A new collection of 18 stories In Fear and Dread was published in April, 2007. Work in progress is a psychological thriller WONDERLAND. © 2007 Derek M. Fox

28

Beneath The Surface

Stone Creek Station

by Scott William Carter

W

hile cleaning out my office, I pulled the old Rand McNally atlas off the shelf and the book fell open to the two-page spread of the United States. I closed my eyes and made a blind stab at the map; when I looked down at the book, my finger had fallen in the middle of Oregon. The problem was that when I lifted my finger, there wasn’t a town there, just a mountain range and some lakes.

Still, I was determined to follow my method, so I turned to Oregon in the atlas, and located on the more detailed map the spot where my finger had fallen. There were a couple of small towns in the area, but one caught my eye: Stone Creek.

It was impulsive. It was insane. It wasn’t anything like me at all, always deliberate, always cautious. But that was the point. If you’re serious about starting over, you can’t trust yourself to make a clean break. I could never stay in Denver, not on the heels of a failed marriage, and every place I thought of to start over reminded me of Anne. Didn’t we have a cousin who lived in Palm Springs? And Everett— that was near Seattle, where we went with her parents on that cruise up to Alaska . . . I needed something fresh, something new, and the only way to get it was to give myself

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over to lady luck. For once in my life.

Two weeks later, I was coaxing a ten year-old Honda Civic up through the Cascade Mountains, my possessions distilled to a box of books in the trunk and two suitcases in the backseat. The last round of budget cuts at the university had finally forced me to do what I should have done when the ink was still drying on the divorce papers, but I wouldn’t miss the job. Teaching aspiring journalists had been a way to pay the rent, nothing more. After weaving my way along the main highway for an hour, tall pines lining both sides, I came upon the hand-carved wooden sign that read, “Welcome to Stone Creek.” By then, the sky had melted to black and a full moon rose over the trees.

I passed a Ma and Pa grocery store, a post office, a gas station with a single pump, and a garage with a sign above it that read, “Bob’s Auto Repair,” except that only half the letters were visible because the sign was coated with rust. All of these places were closed. There was also a diner called the Wooden Spoon, and by the light shining through the closed blinds, and the dozen dirty pick-ups and SUVs in the parking lot, I assumed it was open.

On my way to the door, I shivered and stuffed my hands in my leather jacket. With the blinds down, there was no way to see inside, but I heard a man talking loudly. I reached to open it and saw the sign there had been turned to “Closed.”

I hesitated, then shrugged and turned the knob anyway.

When I stepped inside, the bell over the door ringing, a dozen old men turned to look at me. The decoupage tables had been pushed to the edges of the room, leaving an empty space in the middle of the black and white tiled floor where chairs had been arranged in a circle. One of the men, a thin fellow with vanilla-colored hair and a stooped posture, was standing; the others were all in their seats. In their faded jeans and wrinkled plaid shirts, they had the look of ranchers or hunters, a few wearing cowboy hats. They were all white and old, between seventy and eighty I guessed, faces and hands wrinkled and liver-spotted.

A radio played faintly from the kitchen. Sinatra, it sounded like. The room smelled faintly of cooking grease. They looked at me as if I had just walked in naked.

“Can I help you, son?” the one who was standing asked.

“Um, yes,” I said. “I’m looking for . . .”

This was when I noticed that two of them had shotguns on their laps.

“Yes?” the one who was standing prodded.

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“Um, for Graber Inn,” I said.

The one who was standing looked at a guy three to his right, a small, white-hair man who shifted in his seat. He had a long, pinched face, a tuft of white hair on his chin, his glasses tinted. He wore a tan vest over a white shirt, a square bulge in his front pocket that must have been cigarettes. He wasn’t one of the ones with a shotgun — shotguns I was carefully watching to see if they moved from their owners’ laps.

“I’m John Graber,” he said, his voice soft and crackling like a radio tuned to a weak signal.

“Are you the owner?”

He nodded. “We’re closed, though.”

“Permanently?”

“Just for the weekend. Renovations. Been scheduled for months. You didn’t call ahead?”

“No,” I said, laughing, unnerved at how everyone was staring at me. “Is there anywhere else I can stay?”

Graber frowned and looked at the man who was standing.

“Most of the town’s closed for the weekend, son,” the man who was standing said. “Best to head back to the highway.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, see, I really want to stay in Stone Creek.”

“Why?” I knew I should have gotten out of there, but the more they wanted me to leave, the more I wanted to stay. Looking back, I’m not sure why I was so determined to start with Stone Creek, except that it was something to grasp onto when nothing else in my life seemed worth grasping. “I’m . . . a travel writer,” I said, “and I’m doing a story on small towns.”

“Not much here worth writing about,” Graber said.

I laughed. “My editor says differently.”

One of the men with a shotgun, a burly fellow with a double chin, cleared his throat. He had the kind of mean-ass stare that would have made children wet their pants. “Come back next weekend,” he growled.

“We really have no place to stay,” Graber said. “The Inn is a mess.”

“Oh,” I said, backing toward the door, deciding to see just how far their lack of hospitality would go. “Well . . . I’ve got a tent in my car. I’ll just camp in the woods for the night.”

“This ain’t no state park,” the man with the shotgun snapped.

I nodded. “Yeah, well, what the government doesn’t know can’t hurt them, right?” I waved, turning toward the door. “It’s not too cold. I should be all right.”

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“Wait a minute,” Graber said, sighing.

“John—” the man who was standing said.

“It’s all right, Larry,” Graber said. He looked at me. “I do have a room you can stay in.”

“We shouldn’t do this,” the burly man with the shotgun said.

“I won’t be any trouble,” I said. “Just a bed and some clean sheets is all I need.”

Others were starting to speak, and Graber held up his hand to silence them. “Go left on Bogs,” he said, “through the town, and stay on it for five minutes. You’ll see a yellow mailbox. There’s a key under the Buddha statue.”

“John—” the burly man with the shotgun said.

“Let it be, Fred,” the tall man said. “You go on now, son. We’re having a—a town meeting here, that’s all. Might be a couple of hours before John comes back.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sorry to intrude.” I nodded at Graber. “Thanks for making an exception.”

He nodded. Most of the men were frowning at me. I headed outside, feeling a little bad about lying to them. The moon was bright enough that I saw my shadow on the gravel. Getting into the Honda, I saw a crack appear in the blinds.

I eased the car onto the main road. I was planning on heading to the motel when I felt the itch. It’s the itch that every reporter feels when he senses a story. My first instinct was to ignore the feeling, which was what I usually did. But seeing the old guys back in the diner reminded me of Dad. He would have been about the same age. Dad had been so happy when I decided to follow him into journalism, and equally as disappointed when I told him I didn’t think it was something I was cut out to do.

“You won’t guilt me into this,” I said aloud.

I drove a little farther, to the edge of town now, then remembered something he had said to me shortly before he died, and about six months before we stopped speaking to one another. He had discovered that I had been in Honolulu a year earlier when Senator Brown’s daughter lost her legs to a shark on Wakiki Beach, and he wondered why I hadn’t gotten the story.

When I told them I had been on vacation, he had wrinkled his nose in that distinctive way that made me feel like used cat litter and said, “A good reporter is always on the job.” In all my life, I could never remember Dad saying he was proud of me. Never once did he pat me on the back and say I was doing well. It was always, “You didn’t get that ending right,” or, “Is

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this really the truth of the story?”

A good reporter is always on the job.

“Shit,” I said, and took a hard right into the parking lot next to the auto repair shop. There was some space behind the building, where my car would be out of sight from the main road, and that’s where I parked. When my headlights fell on the dumpster, a black and white cat sprinted through the hole in the chain link fence.

I walked briskly back to the diner, staying in the shadows. I circled around to the parking lot side, to the last window. Heart pounding, I cupped my ear against the cool glass. There was a conversation going on, one voice lapping right up against another, but I could only make a few words. “ . . . train . . . last time . . . make sure of it . . .” “ . . . why can’t we . . . a few of us . . .”

“No! The risk . . . “ “ . . . got to be this way . . . “ “ . . . easy for you . . .” “ . . . we agreed . . . vote stands . . .”

This went on for ten minutes, but I never could get a good sense of what they were talking about. Suddenly the voices stopped and I heard what sounded like chairs and tables scooting along the floor. The front door rattled, the bell rang, and I ducked behind the building. The shadows were so deep there it was like stepping into a black cloud. I banged my shin against a gas meter and I had to bite my lip to stop myself from making any sound. I massaged my leg, expecting any moment a cacophony of voices, a slapping of backs, a see you next time, Bill and Bob and Lou. But instead I heard only the crunching of feet on the gravel. Then this noise stopped, the door closed and then there was only the sound of the pines stirring in the breeze.

I remained absolutely still.

“You all ready?” one of them said. I recognized it as the voice of the tall one, Larry.

There was a murmur of ascent.

“All right, then,” Larry said. “No sense waiting. Got good moon.”

I heard them walking on the gravel again, and then it changed to the duller sound of them walking on asphalt, the footfalls moving away. Cautiously, I peered around the corner and saw them walking down the center of the street, two or three abreast. Several had flashlights trained on the ground. I watched them as they walked to the edge of the town, and I

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wondered if this was some sort of ritual that concluded their meetings, a pleasure stroll before getting in their cars and going home to their wives.

I expected them to turn and head back, but instead they kept walking, not along the curve of the road, but straight into the woods.

Afraid they would reappear, I hesitated, then decided what the hell. I reached the woods perhaps a minute after them. Winded, my sweaty shirt sticking to my chest, I lingered there until my heart stopped pounding in my ears. A thick wall of ferns blocked my passage. I heard the crackle of twigs and dry leaves in the distance, and I plunged through the ferns.

Moonlight breaking through the gaps in the trees allowed me to see a narrow trail, tall grass crowding the way. I was wondering if I might have lost them somehow when I heard a murmur of voices directly to my right, off the trail. I turned in their direction, having to force my way through a wall of prickly bushes whose branches scratched at my exposed face and neck like sharp fingernails, and then I was in the open again.

The canopy of pine trees blocked most of the light, but I made my way by targeting the occasional spot of moonlight, one after another. I heard the voices, and this time they were louder and more distinct, so I slowed, careful to watch where I stepped. I came upon a dry creek bed a dozen feet across, pines crowding both sides like spectators at a parade. Leaning out into the open, I saw flashes of light up ahead, in what appeared to be the middle of the ravine.

Watching the lights, I became aware of a peculiar shape up ahead, in the middle of a circular area that must have once been the pond that fed the creek. It was some type of house. As I approached, I saw a flat area out in front, a long, narrow deck. Then I saw the two dark bands stretching in front of the structure, and suddenly the shape made sense. It was a train station. The dark bands were train tracks — tracks that only extended as far as the edges of the creek bed.

“Hold it right there, mister,” a voice said behind me.

I slipped forward into the ravine, and had to sit to stop from going down. When I turned, one of the old men from the diner was standing there, a bald, heavy-set fellow in overalls, a shotgun in the crook of his arm. I was relived to see he wasn’t pointing it at me.

“Damn,” he said, shaking his head. He had a slightly protruding forehead, his eyes lost in shadows. “Larry thought he heard something, but . . . What the hell are you doing up here?”

I swallowed. “Well . . .”

“Guess it don’t matter now,” he said. “Come on, head down there to-

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ward the others.”

“Look,” I said, “I didn’t mean anything. I’ll just go. I’m--” “That ain’t gonna happen now,” he said. “Don’t make me ask again.”

Frowning, he shifted the shotgun in his arms. I walked down into the ravine, him trailing behind. The bottom of the creek bed was littered with rocks under the grass, and my foot came down painfully on them more than once. As we neared the other men, I saw them turn on the platform, heard the hollowness of their footsteps on the wood. When they shined their flashlights on me, I could only see them in silhouette. I stopped when I reached the train tracks — real train tracks, shiny and new.

“You were right,” the one behind me said.

“Damn, son,” Larry said. He was standing in the middle of the bunch.

I wondered just how the hell I could get out of this situation. “Look, I . . . called my editor on my cell phone before I came up here. She knows where I am. I was just . . . just looking around, and--” “Calm down,” Larry said. “We’re not gonna hurt you. It’s just unfortunate you’re here, that’s all.”

“He can’t be here when the train comes!” It was the burly guy with the shotgun. Fred.

“What do you want do want to do?” Larry snapped. “Shoot him?”

When Fred didn’t answer, he said, “None of us here are killers.”

“But the vote . . .” It was Graber, the Inn owner.

“The vote is the same,” Larry said.

“But he might talk,” someone else said, a man who hadn’t spoken before. “People might come looking.”

Larry was silent a moment. “Well, we’ll just have to trust he’ll do the right thing. Come on up here, son. Train might be here at any moment, and there’s something we need to tell you. Point your flashlights away from him, boys, so he can see.”

Train? Wondering just what kind of pack of loonies I was dealing with here, I stepped over the tracks and climbed onto the platform. With the flashlights directed away, I got a better look at the station in the moonlight, and I marveled at the craftsmanship. There was a ticket window, several benches, and a sign hanging from chains with shiny brass letters: “Stone Creek Station.”

“Did you guys build this?” I asked.

“Yes,” Larry said.

“Why?” Before he could answer, a far-off whistle pierced the stillness. Every-

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one backed up, fanning out along the platform. I turned along with them, hearing other sounds now: the churning creek of wheels, the screech of brakes, the hiss of steam, getting louder. I expected a joke, a guy with a boom box maybe, but then I saw a black oval appear above the end of the tracks to my left.

Thinking it was something in my eye, I blinked several times, but the spot didn’t go away; instead, it grew in size, blotting out the forest behind it. A light appeared in the blackness. The screeching became deafening, the whistle came again, and then a shape emerged from the rift.

I saw a headlight. Black chrome. A smokestack.

A train.

The steam-driven locomotive pulled to a stop in front of us, smoke rising from the stack, a single red passenger car in tow. A band of yellow lights extended along the top edge of the passenger car. The interior was lighted, and I saw the shadowy silhouettes of passengers, perhaps a dozen of them, sitting at the windows.

At first, I thought perhaps the windows were tinted, but I realized with a cold chill that it wasn’t so: I could clearly see the green-felt seats and the yellow walls; only the people were fuzzy to me, borderless, their distinctiveness washed out and grayed. It was as if each of them wore a black nylon netting stretched tight over their bodies.

A door at the rear of the passenger car opened and these dark apparitions filed onto the platform. I backed away, but the others stood their ground.

When the figures reached the group, each of them stopped in front of a different man.

“Son?” I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. I knew the voice even before I turned and saw him — a lanky, sixty-year-old man with big hands and a full head of gray hair, his gold-rimmed bifocals low on his nose. He was dressed in a white, button-up shirt left open at the collar, red suspenders, and pleated brown slacks. It was what he usually wore, except sometimes the shirt was blue instead of white. He was wearing it the last time I saw him, when I told him to go to hell.

My mouth went dry, and when I tried to speak, my throat constricted so that the word came out as more of a gasp.

“Dad?” I said.

Even in the moonlight, he seemed solid, as a real person should. He definitely didn’t look like the apparitions that had emerged from the train; then I saw that there were no more apparitions. All of them had become

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real people, men and women alike, some old, some young, even a child or two among them. They were talking to the men from the diner.

“How have you been doing?” Dad asked.

“Fine,” I said, swallowing.

“And Anne?”

I didn’t answer. What was I supposed to say? We got divorced, Dad. She cheated on me and she had ever reason because I was never much of a husband. That what you wanted to hear? I learned from the best. You didn’t teach me much, Dad, but you certainly taught me how to fail at being a decent human being.

But I didn’t want to ruin the moment. Something amazing was happening, and I didn’t want to ruin it. I tried to bottle all the bitterness inside.

“She’s fine,” I said.

“Good, good, glad to hear it,” he said, though he didn’t sound like he cared all that much one way or the other. “What paper are you working for now?”

The fear I’d felt seconds earlier was gone, replaced by a rising irritation.

I didn’t like the direction the conversation was going. It was falling into a familiar routine.

“Various places,” I said.

“What paper?”

“Did I say I was working for a paper?”

“No reason to get angry.”

“I’m not angry,” I said, though clearly I was. And then everything I’d been pushing down deep inside broke free. “What, you want to hear that I’m out of work? Well, it’s true. I’m a bum. I was certainly never good at being a reporter, but you already knew that, didn’t you? It probably makes you happy seeing how miserable I am now, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said stonily. “How could you think that of me?”

I turned away. A mild sense of panic swelled up inside me. I didn’t know what was happening, but I sensed that it was an opportunity that might never come again. Here was a chance to mend things, and I didn’t want to squander it.

“I’m sorry,” I said, turning back to him. “I’m sorry about what happened, you know.” My throat was tightening. It was hard to get out the words. “Really, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about not speaking to you. About not coming to the hospital. But you understand, don’t you? I couldn’t. I thought I was a failure in your eyes.”

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“I only wanted you to live up to your potential,” he said.

I don’t know what I expected him to say, but that certainly wasn’t it. I opened my mouth to answer, then shook my head and laughed at the absurdity of it all, us repeating the same lines we had said dozens of times before, now, in this place. Wasn’t this supposed to be one of those fairy tale moments when the father realizes how wrong he has been to the son, when he apologies and asks for forgiveness, when all past hurts are healed and all past wrongs are put to rest?

“I don’t believe you,” I said. “You’re dead, and you still won’t change.”

“I only wanted the best for you,” he said.

“Why couldn’t you just tell me you love me for who I am?”

“You shouldn’t need me to say such a thing. You should be stronger than that.”

It was then that I realized that no amount of hoping or expecting or wanting could get someone to be other than who they were. People may change or they may not, but they had to do it on their own. And once they were gone, even that possibility died, too. All you could do was come to terms with the memories — to accept the choices you made and make the best of them. For the first time, I also realized that I had been doing my best my whole life to fail as a journalist, because I had been sure I could never be as good as my father.

The train whistle sounded.

Dad was opening his mouth to say something else, but I didn’t give him another chance to hurt me. I grabbed him and hugged him. I couldn’t have said whether he felt like my father, because I couldn’t remember the last time I hugged him, but he felt as I imagined he would: thin and frail, a man who was much bigger in print than he was in real life.

Then, as I turned to smile at him, his image faded and became shadowlike. My arms slipped through him as if he was made of air. I saw his head dip as he nodded at me, then he joined with the other apparitions filing toward the train. Some of the men around me were weeping. One by one, the shadow-things climbed aboard, slipping into their seats, a few waving hazy arms, a few pressing cloudy faces up to the glass. The engine churned to life, the wheels turned, and with a screech the train lurched forward and disappeared through the dark spot on the other side of the tracks.

When it was gone, I turned, and there were all the men gathering around me. There was happiness. There was grief. I saw hope and despair. Life was complicated. I realized that death should be no different.

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“How long have you been doing this?” I asked.

Larry, looking drained, stepped up to me. “I’ll answer all of your questions,” he said. “But first you got to promise you’ll help us with something.”

“What’s that?”

He looked at his friends gathered around him, then back at me. A stiff breeze rifled through the trees, making the sign hanging above us creak.

“Help us destroy this place,” he said. *** The next day, armed with cans of gasoline and a dozen fire extinguishers, we returned to Stone Creek Station. The place didn’t seem so impressive in harsh light of a noonday sun. Within an hour, we had burned it to the ground.

They told me they had woken ten years earlier, all with the same vision: to build the station in this specific place in the woods, and to be there on a full moon in November. Why the vision came to these particular men they didn’t know, except, they figured, all of them had recently lost somebody important. Each of them saw that person when the train appeared. Every year, they had returned to the station, a few of them dying off along the way, until ten years had passed. Though they had been old men when they started, at least they had been living. Now they had spent their whole year waiting for the next time the train appeared.

They could either keep clinging to the past, or finally get on with their lives. Wait any longer, they realized, and there would be no lives left.

So the vote was taken, the ayes had it, and I was there when the vision was turned into a smoky ruin. When I told them who I was, the truth this time, they said it was fate that had guided my hand on the atlas. They said I was there to share this truth with other people, so they could see there was no good in wanting the memory of someone you love to come to life.

Because all that you regretted before, you would still regret when that person went back to being a memory again.

I insisted I was no longer a reporter. I told them it wasn’t something I wanted to do. And they said if that was true, then why did you follow us?

So here I am, back to journalism. I may never win a Pulitzer, but I’ll also never ignore that itch again, the one I feel when I’m on to a story. One last thing: If you take the time to open an atlas, you may have trouble find-

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ing Stone Creek, Oregon. Although I said I’d write about what happened, I also promised I wouldn’t reveal the real location or their real names. I did visit a real town in a real state, and it may have been Oregon, but it also may have been Washington or California or Idaho. Hell, it may have been on the East Coast. I’m not saying. But I got the story. I got it for me. Dad may not have liked the way I told it, but it was the truth the way I saw it, and I’m finally okay with that being enough.

Scott William Carter’s stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, and Ellery Queen, among other places. His first collection is forthcoming from PS Publishing, and his first novel, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, is forthcoming from Simon and Schuster.” © 2007 Scott William Carter

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The Drawer

by Malon Edwards

H

ideo Watanabe was nothing like his coworkers.

He did not begin his workday every morning at seven like they did because his only wristwatch was a vintage, lightly-aged pink gold Rolex Tudor (circa 1930, nine carats and thirty-seven millimeters long) with gold dial, hinged case and nickel fifteen-jewel movement that didn’t move.

He did not greet the senior members of his securities department with a smile, an ohayo gozaimasu, and a bow as his coworkers did because his soft and meaty hump, curved spine, and forward-hunched shoulders forced his confused coworkers to return his perpetual bow each time he ambled about the office with splayed feet.

And Hideo Watanabe certainly did not traverse the crowded, noontime Tokyo sidewalks with his dark-haired, dark-suited and dark-tied male coworkers (intent to pull their order tickets and receive their food at Yoshinoya or Matsuya in less than ten minutes by dodging, with determined haste, the loose groups of gossiping, stocking-clad and high-heeled office ladies) because his teeth were too crooked and gray, the armpits of his wrinkled white shirts were too foul and yellow, and the hair on the top of his head was too oily and thin.

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Repulsed by Hideo Watanabe on a visceral level (his body odor caused an olfactory recoil which often triggered a violent rise of gastric juices), no one, including his boss, questioned him when he arrived at work well into mid-morning, refused to utter a word to anyone in the department, and pushed his desk into the corner of the office lit by the epileptic-fit-inducing overhead light panel.

And just the same, no one noticed when Hideo Watanabe discovered the unusual capabilities of his desk’s top right drawer.

Despite his eccentric nature, or possibly because of it, Hideo Watanabe was a creature of habit. Each night after dinner, he filed down his ingrown toenails, bathed his corn-encrusted feet in saltwater, and poured scalding water on his short-furred, meaty hump. Once his bathwater cooled, he climbed into his futon, ejaculated with seventeen slow strokes of his hand, and fell into deep slumber at exactly nine-thirty.

And each morning, Hideo Watanabe dressed with the uninspired languor of a mate-less forty-five year old hunchback (whose mother woke at five-thirty to prepare his lunch), and then some time after nine boarded the Chiyoda Line at Abiko Station to Tokyo for a job he showed up to after getting a twelve thousand yen foot massage in Shinjuku from a twenty year old girl dressed as Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bebop, complete with ankle boots, gun, and yellow halter top bunched with cleavage.

As a creature of habit, Hideo Watanabe made sure each morning his mother did not deviate from the contents of his daily lunch: white rice sprinkled with flakes of seaweed and topped with a bit of salted salmon, a few slices of pickled daikon, and a bit of tamagoyaki, an omelet made with soy sauce and chopped green onions. He refused to place his food in the office refrigerator because he was certain someone would nibble from it.

Still, it was somewhat out of the ordinary for Hideo Watanabe to open the top right drawer of his desk, reach in for the exact same lunch he ate everyday and pull out a ceramic white bowl of steaming rice seasoned with pepper and sesame seeds, topped with a large fillet of grilled eel glazed with a sweet soy sauce.

As for how a rectangular slab of grilled eel sitting on a bed of rice got into his top right desk drawer, (nestled between a box of paper clips, a defective stapler and his DoCoMo cell phone with Hello Kitty key chain), Hideo Watanabe was not quite sure. Yet, just the same, he ate the food.

Hideo Watanabe was hungry and could not allow 12:07 p.m. to pass without partaking in some sort of meal.

Although Hideo Watanabe was a smelly, ugly and repugnant wretch

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of a man, he was not without reasoning skills. This is not to say he was a genius; rarely did Hideo Watanabe engage a higher state of cognitive thought. Yet, it did not take Hideo Watanabe long to realize as he had reached into the top right drawer of his desk for lunch he had happened to be thinking about how eel would cure his natsubate, the seasonal listlessness he’d had since the early warm days of summer turned cloying, hot and shirt-plastered-to-the-back humid.

Of course, once Hideo Watanabe discovered the ability of his desk’s top right drawer, he wished for the usual sort of things to appear within: one hundred million yen; the used and stained panties of a schoolgirl; an ice cold, thirty-thousand yen bottle of Niigata sake; a two hundred ten millimeter Maboro no Meito sashimi knife crafted by swordsmith Teruyasu Fujiwara the Fourth. None of these were satisfactory though, so instead of quitting his job and moving with his mother, his salted salmon and rice lunches, and his one hundred million yen to some tiny no-name island off Kyushu, Hideo Watanabe decided to continue showing up at work late and not speaking to his coworkers until he imagined the one thing in his drawer which would truly make him happy.

In the meantime, Hideo Watanabe became as intimate as one could with the interior of an industrial gray top right desk drawer: he emptied it to measure its dimensions and gauge just how large an imagined item could be, he sealed its cracks with rubber cement in case he decided to conjure some sort of liquid within, and he cleaned and disinfected it, only being satisfied with its pristine condition when he could bring himself to slice his tongue upon its sharp inner edges.

A patient man, Hideo Watanabe was prepared to endure the next twentyfive years in the corner of his department as he endured the first twenty odd years, so the thought of spending just a fraction of that time determining the perfect item for the drawer to produce was not a discouraging one.

And then one night, a little girl climbed out of the drawer.

Now, knowing he would not be fired for putting in an eight hour work day and no more (unlike his coworkers who routinely worked eleven, twelve and thirteen hour days), Hideo Watanabe usually left the office at five p.m. every evening for Nishi-Nippori Station to catch the 5:16 train home. However, quite certain his coworkers rummaged through his desk when he left the office (usually seeking a lighter before going out for drinks with their boss at a nearby izekaya), Hideo Watanabe realized if he wanted to keep the drawer secret he would have to put in longer hours.

As a result, Hideo Watanabe soon found himself hunched and shaving

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over his sink at five-thirty in morning, crammed chest-to-shoulder-to-hipto-ass-to-groin with salarymen and office ladies on the Chiyoda Line on his way to work at seven in the morning, and at his desk entering data into a spreadsheet at ten-thirty in the morning, dismayed he had missed his massage with Faye Valentine (better known as Ryutsu Keizai University student Akiko Midorikawa) for the first time in ten months.

This way, Hideo Watanabe could also take his one meal of the day out of the drawer at 12:07 a.m. without the bother of curious eyes.

But quickly realizing his sudden and swift paranoia would be purged only if he ate and slept overnight at his desk (some of his coworkers were known to pull all-nighters before stumbling off to a capsule hotel and a few hours sleep), Hideo Watanabe conjured a pillow, blanket, and even learned to focus his thoughts well enough to have a folded and pressed, crisp-starched white shirt appear in the drawer on the days the stench of the shirt he wore bothered even him.

So when the little girl opened the drawer from the inside, curled her short, pudgy fingers over its front edge, bobbed her head through its opening, and found purchase on its side edges with her equally short and pudgy toes, Hideo Watanabe was snoring because it was 3:27 a.m.

But when the girl leapt whole and fully formed from the drawer and landed with a squeal of delight, Hideo Watanabe sat up with a start.

Through sleep encrusted eyes, Hideo Watanabe saw that the little girl wore a peach-colored sun dress which ended just above her plump knees, was barefoot, and had straight black hair ending just below her chubby cheeks. Wiping the sleep from his eyes did not wipe away her pert nose, softly rounded chin, pale white unblemished skin, and a pink rose bud mouth, though.

When questioned about her name and age, the little girl answered Minako and san sai, three years old. When questioned how she got into the drawer, Minako smiled, lifted onto her tiptoes, touched the small of Hideo Watanabe’s back with a pudged finger, and straightened the curve in his hump before climbing back into the drawer.

And, of course, when Hideo Watanabe opened the drawer, the little girl was not there.

The following day, his coworkers could not help themselves with their double takes because Hideo Watanabe did not sit at his desk hunched, nor did he amble about the office with splayed feet, but put one foot in front of the other with a bit grace instead.

The second night the little girl climbed out of the drawer was much

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like the first: her squeal of delight woke Hideo Watanabe from sleep and she refused to answer his questions. Instead, Minako crooked her pudged finger for Hideo Watanabe to squat at eye level. When he did, she touched the crown of his head, tightening his scalp and filling his bald spot with thick hair, before climbing back into the drawer.

And, like the night before, Hideo Watanabe opened the drawer to emptiness.

The following day, his coworkers again could not help their stares, wondering in hushed tones if Hideo Watanabe had paid for the best and most expensive hair transplant they had seen.

The third night the little girl climbed out of the drawer played out like the first two: again her squeal of delight woke Hideo Watanabe, again she refused to answer his questions, and again she beckoned him with her index finger. When Hideo Watanabe stooped before her, the little girl peeled back his thin, cracked lips, touched her fat thumbs to his teeth, and removed the decayed gray as she arranged them into neat rows, all before climbing back into the drawer.

This time Hideo Watanabe did not move to check the drawer, but frowned as he ran his tongue along his smooth, clean and painless teeth.

The following day, Satomi Nakagawa (whose sweet and slender legs Hideo Watanabe pictured during his seventeen slow strokes each night) was chosen by the other coworkers to ask Hideo Watanabe about his attractive new appearance, and compliment him on his blush-inducing natural musk scent. Always one with a heavy tongue (even when not confronted by his masturbation fantasies), Hideo Watanabe stammered his way to the toilet to study his reflection in the mirror and sniff his armpits, wondering at which point during the last three days the little girl made him smell better.

Flushed with pheremonal excitement, Satomi Nakagawa hovered outside the door to the toilet for twenty minutes to ask Hideo Watanabe if he would go to an izekaya with her and the other coworkers after work. In response, Hideo Watanabe cursed the little girl for her unwanted gifts and vowed not to lose his ingrown toenails or his hairy back next.

So when the little girl opened the drawer from the inside at 3:27 a.m. the fourth night and her pudgy fingers curled over its front edge, Hideo Watanabe chopped them off with the Fujiwara sashimi knife.

And when Hideo Watanabe voided his bladder and bowels because she refused to scream or bleed, the little girl sprang from the drawer and affixed herself to the side of his face with her pristine little white teeth.

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With a swiftness no human could produce, the little girl incapacitated Hideo Watanabe, then took her time devouring him to maximize the intensity of his screams. She savored his choice bits (his kidneys, his misshapen testicles, his blood-engorged heart), taking bacchanal pleasure in both her feast and Hideo Watanabe’s agony.

Once Hideo Watanabe’s screams ended and he was nothing more than a few rust-colored spots upon the floor, the little girl climbed back into the drawer. But not before she murmured: “Watashi no hikidashi.”

“My drawer.”

Malon Edwards lives in Chicago with his wife and two children. His speculative fiction has appeared in Underground Voices, Thieves Jargon, juked, Susurrus Magazine and Creative Brother’s Sci Fi Magazine. © 2007 Malon Edwards

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Hanging on Her Every Word

by Ian Whates

W

hen Paul arrived home Laura was in the conservatory. As soon as he opened the door he knew that something had changed, and that it could only be a change for the better.

Music; she was listening to music. Afterwards, he couldn’t have said for certain exactly what it was: something light and classical, Dvorák’s New World, perhaps? He didn’t pay that much attention. The fact that she was listening to anything at all was enough. Gone was the oppressive, cathedral-like silence that had greeted him so often, gone were the flat dronings of TV-channelled voices — their home’s intermittent soundtrack and, of late, the only alternative to the silence. Instead, the vibrant sound of an orchestra drifted through the rooms once more. He kicked off his shoes and hurried inward, drawn by the music.

She looked up as he came across the lounge, favouring him with a dazzling smile that caused the words of intended greeting to congeal in his throat and emerge as a still-born sob, daring him to hope that all the darkness of recent weeks was past.

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He wanted to hug her, wanted to sweep her up in his arms, but was afraid of overdoing it, afraid of shattering this precious prospect, of disturbing the moment in any way.

“Hello, love,” she said as if nothing was wrong, as if nothing had ever been wrong.

“Hello,” he replied inadequately. He hovered on the threshold of the two rooms, worried that if he came any closer the fragile semblance of normality might disintegrate before his eyes.

She looked at him querulously and then smiled again, before returning her attention to the objects scattered upon the table.

The late afternoon sunlight slanted in through broad conservatory windows, catching the extremities of her fine hair and igniting the dark blonde so that her head appeared framed by a golden nimbus. He drank her in as she sat huddled over the table: the snub, slightly upturned nose, the full lips, the elegant contours of chin and throat, and the gracefully curling eyelashes – each individually highlighted in tender detail by the sunlight.

Tears threatened the corners of his eyes as he smiled; an expression of joy and relief. He had not seen her this animated since… since it happened.

Laura always played classical music when she was doing something creative, claiming it helped her to focus without being invasive. To find her here, at the table, tinkering with something or other, was so typical and yet so unexpected. More than he could have hoped for. His gaze naturally slid downward from her profile to what her hands were doing.

She was bending fine silver wire strands and weaving them to create the figures of animals. Tools lay close at hand: pliers and wire cutters, casually discarded beside the already completed form of a small bird, perhaps three or four inches long. The bird winked silver fire at him from outspread wings, reflecting the sun’s illumination, which fell on it intermittently as the leaves of the maple tree beyond the window were caressed by the gentle breeze, first one way then the other.

Laura was currently working on what was obviously destined to be a cat, about the same size as the bird.

Uncertainty forgotten, he stepped fully into the room to stand beside her.

“They’re beautiful,” he exclaimed in wonder.

“Thank you,” she responded, glancing up and smiling again, sending his heart soaring a few degrees higher.

“What are they for?”

She didn’t look up this time, but continued her delicate work.

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“They’re for the baby. I’m making him a mobile.”

The words struck like a physical blow, causing his hopes to wither and his heart to plummet back to earth once more.

“Laura…” he said slowly, every word ashen, “you know that Aaron’s…”

She looked up sharply. “Oh, I know. Don’t worry, I know he’s gone.”

She stopped working, put down the cat and turned to face him, reaching out to clasp his hands. A gesture that once would have seemed so natural now almost startled him, causing him to flinch for a fraction of a second.

She seemed oblivious, thank God. “It’s something that Greg wanted me to try.” Dr. ‘call me Greg’ Santini, her therapist. “He thought that making something for Aaron might help to channel my grief.” The smile wavered, one corner of her mouth trembled and he was afraid that everything was about to come crashing down again.

“And it’s working,” she continued, moisture welling in her eyes. “I really feel that I’m doing something constructive; for him… for love.”

A single tear crested the bottom of her right eye and trickled down her cheek, but the smile returned, delicate and brave.

He did hug her then, pressing his cheek to the crown of her sun-warmed head, a tear of his own welling up to disappear into her hair.

Importantly, wonderfully, she hugged him back.

Paul went out to water the plants while Laura returned to her work.

Theirs was a corner plot, with a deceptively large garden that wrapped around to cradle the building. Laura was out of sight but not out of mind as he began, training the hose at the base of the broad-leafed Gunnera that stood by the pond. He worked his way around the borders, methodically administering a heavy spray of water to plants and shrubs, habit stepping in to guide his actions whenever distracted thought failed to.

The grass needed cutting, he noted, but it could wait another day or two. A brown mound in the centre of the lawn caught his eye. It proved to be the body of a female blackbird, doubtless abandoned there by Felix or one of the neighbourhood’s other feline residents. Clearing the small body away brought him into view of the conservatory, where Laura still sat, head down, concentrating on her wire figures. He glanced in at her, half-fearing that she might abandon her work at any moment, signalling a return to the dark reticence of recent times.

He still didn’t trust this abrupt transformation, this apparent healing, didn’t dare believe in it; but at least he now had reason to hope.

As he brought the hose around the corner, she came into view once

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more. On impulse he directed a stream of water at her. It spattered against the window, drumming an irregular refrain. She looked up, startled for an instant, and he was afraid that he had overstepped some ill-defined mark, but then she smiled and poked her tongue out at him – an echo of the carefree woman he used to know.

Hope gained new strength.

That evening was the best they had shared since losing Aaron. Laura even snuggled up to him on the sofa and didn’t object or shrink away when he snaked an arm along the seat’s back, behind her head, his hand resting lightly on her shoulder. *** The next morning she was up before him, moving with genuine purpose; the old Laura, getting dressed with hurried efficiency.

“Going somewhere?” he asked from the bed.

“Hmm? An appointment with Greg,” she responded without pausing.

“On a Saturday?”

“Yes. He feels we’re making real progress at last and doesn’t want to lose the momentum. He works the occasional Saturdays, for special cases.”

“And you’re a special case?”

“Guess so.” She flashed him a quick smile.

By the time she left he had managed to rouse himself, leaving the sanctuary of the bed and reaching as far as the kitchen and the kettle.

“Have you seen Felix?” he wondered as she blurred past him.

“No, can’t say I have. He’s probably making the most of the good weather. Either that or he’s got himself locked inside next door’s garage again.”

She kissed him on the way out; a quick peck on the lips, so ordinary, yet so magical. “Won’t be long,” and she was out the door.

As he dressed, gazing at the bed still resonant with Laura’s presence even as the house was emptied by her absence, his eyes fell upon the book by her bedside. He hadn’t noticed her reading it, hadn’t noticed her reading anything, but there it was; a paperback with brown, textured cover, the corners slightly dog-eared. A small, sepia photograph formed the cover’s centrepiece – the portrait of a distinguished-looking Edwardian gentleman.

He picked it up, reading the title: The Spirit in Perpetuity by Edward L.

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Leary. Curious, he flipped the book over and read the back-blurb, finding there reference to mysticism, travels in Africa, and the Makonde.

That last sounded vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t think why.

His reveries were interrupted by the doorbell. He put the book down with a guilty start and, realising he was only half-dressed, pulled on the first top that came to hand, before hurrying down the stairs, thinking it must be Laura Perhaps ‘Greg’ had not been at his office after all, so she was back early and had forgotten her key.

But it was only the plump and freckled girl from two doors away, wanting to know if he had seen her dog, which had managed to escape.

Again.

After getting rid of her, he went on the internet, referencing Edward L. Leary. The presence of the book played upon his mind and he wanted to know more about the author.

There was disappointingly little about the man, although one site did carry a brief biography, which expanded slightly on the book’s tantalising blurb. Apparently Leary had spent a long period in Africa, principally in areas that now formed parts of modern day Tanzania and Mozambique, where he had studied the Makonde, a people still resident in both countries. He evidently developed a particular interest in their religious beliefs, becoming involved with an extreme sect who were feared or perhaps revered (the account was a little hazy on the detail) even by other Makonde.

There had been some sort of scandal, possibly involving this sect, which resulted in Leary leaving Africa and returning to England in something of a hurry. Again, frustratingly scant detail was provided.

Other sites added nothing new, rehashing snippets of the same biographical information. Nor could he find anything more about Leary’s mysterious sect, although there was plenty of information about the Makonde’s beliefs in general. It transpired that they practiced a form of ancestor worship, holding that ancestors were capable of influencing the world, affecting such practical matters as the weather and harvests. As far as Paul could make out, the whole thing centred around the concept that our own ancestors live on inside us all, their personalities submerged but always there. He wondered what extreme variety of this tenet Leary’s elusive sect had adhered to.

An aside caught his attention as he followed yet another line of research to its inevitable dead end: the name Leary was generally believed to have derived from the Irish O’Leary, a name that cropped up in his own family background, none of which shed any further light on Edward L. Leary

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himself.

At least he solved the puzzle of why the Makonde had sounded so familiar. They were renowned for their wood-carving, a practice developed as a manifestation of their religion. A typical Makonde carving would be a mask or statuette depicting a number of faces and part-bodies emerging and blending, supposedly in representation of the multiple ancestors dwelling within us.

The statuette that stood on a bookshelf in the bedroom was a Makonde carving, he now recalled. Laura had brought it home from some craft or antique fair a while ago, enchanted by its intricacy and detail. Paul found the way that the various depicted forms melted into each other vaguely unsettling, but he tolerated it for her sake and had come to barely notice the thing.

By the time his wife returned, the computer was switched off and Paul was in the lounge, reading the newspaper. She popped her head around the door.

“Did it go okay?” he asked.

“Fine, thanks. Greg seems really pleased with everything.”

“Good.” He endeavoured to ensure that his voice betrayed no suggestion of disapproval.

“Just popping upstairs for a shower.”

“A shower?”

“Yes,” she called out, already halfway up the stairs, “I didn’t have time for one before I went out this morning.”

He shook his head and smiled, then tried to recall if she had ever not found time to shower before. Not as far as he could recall. But, of course, that was the old Laura.

Paul waited until he heard the shower and then waited a little longer, until he felt certain that she would have stepped within the umbrella of water and its isolating cloak of noise. Only then did he pick up the phone and call Dr. Santini’s number.

He had met Santini once, at the initial consultation after Laura had first been referred to him. There was no doubt that the good doctor cut an imposing figure, though he was somewhat older than Paul had envisaged, surely not far from retirement.

A large part of him resented the fact that this man, this stranger, had been able to get through to his wife when he could not, but that part vied with his overwhelming relief that she could be reached at all.

Santini answered the phone himself. Perhaps he didn’t expect his sec-

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retaries to work on a Saturday even when he chose to. Or perhaps he was simply too mean to pay the overtime. His rich, reassuring voice gave no clue to his advancing years.

“Dr. Santini? It’s Paul Mellor, Laura’s husband.”

“Paul! Yes, of course, and please, call me Greg…”

So he asked about Laura’s progress and about the wire animals she was working on with such fervour.

“You understand that I can’t speak about specifics, even to you, but the indications are very promising…”

Of course Paul understood. He expressed his gratitude for the recent transformation, and then mentioned the book, which was so very different from the thrillers and escapist novels Laura usually favoured.

“Ah yes, the Leary. That was my idea,” Santini explained. “I lent it to Laura. Something different, you see, something to kick-start things and engage her brain, to make her think.”

“Yes, yes I see,” Paul said, even though he didn’t.

“I hope you didn’t mind me dragging her away from you this morning.”

“No of course not,” Paul lied.

“But it’s vital that I monitor Laura’s response closely at this early stage.”

What was it about Santini that he took such exception to? Was he really jealous of this man, old enough to be Laura’s father and then some?

Paul ended the conversation when he heard the flow of water cease upstairs. The brief chat left him no more reassured than before.

Laura joined him in the lounge, sitting opposite and flicking through the newspaper supplements.

“Interesting book you’re reading,” he said after a while.

“What?”

“The paperback by your bedside. I couldn’t help but notice it.”

“Oh, that. Yes, Greg gave it to me. Not my usual sort of thing, but I’m rather enjoying it.”

Despite the casual words there was a tension in the air, as if the mundane took an effort that it had never needed before, or was it just him? He almost spoke about things then, almost broached the subject of her illness and asked what she was feeling with regard to Aaron’s loss, with regard to him, to them, their relationship and their marriage, but he shied away.

Even the illusion of normality was too precious to jeopardise.

After lunch, Laura returned to the conservatory and her wire figures.

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The cat was finished, and she was now working on what promised to be a dog. He left her to it.

By mid-afternoon, when he interrupted her with a drink, the dog was completed and had taken its place at the far edge of the table beside the bird and the cat. Laura was just starting the head of a fourth figure; too early to tell what it was going to be as yet. A frame had appeared from somewhere – or had it always been there and he’d simply failed to notice?

A four-spoked bracket of gleaming chrome, the spokes gathering at a central point from which a slender chain emerged. Currently redundant, the short length of chain snaked limp and haphazardly beside the frame. Four spokes; so presumably this latest figure was to be the last.

He finished his drink and decided to mow the lawn. Every other stripe he trod, the three blank-faced wire animals were in plain view. By some trick of design or light they seemed to be looking at him through the conservatory window whenever he glanced up, even when Laura wasn’t.

That evening Laura surprised him again, by insisting on cooking. Not that she couldn’t cook, it was simply that she hadn’t, not for a long while.

He was banished from the kitchen and told to relax, to leave everything to her. Not averse to being pampered, he did as instructed, uncertain whether to feel proud, delighted, or amused. In the end he settled for simply feeling happy.

Left to his own devices, he wandered into the conservatory to view Laura’s handiwork. The fourth figure was completed: a man, made to the same scale as the animals. He found this figure vaguely disturbing, without being certain why, but was more than happy to let it pass without comment, if it furthered Laura’s return to him.

She went the whole hog with the meal: candles, soft music and all the trimmings.

“My way of saying thank you,” she explained, coyly.

“What for?”

She looked him in the eye and said, “For putting up with me.”

He loved her more than ever.

One bottle of red wine evaporated as they ate and he opened a second, which was well on the way to joining the first before they left the table and retreated to the sofa. Paul felt more relaxed and happy than he could remember. Laura went to clear up, again refusing his help. Naturally he protested, though not with any great conviction. The wine had gone to his head and he drifted gently into contented sleep in front of the TV, dimly aware of the sounds of washing-up in the background.

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*** He returned to consciousness slowly and confusingly – one of those awakenings that leaves you disorientated and groping for tangible referents. The world seemed to be swaying.

He knew this was the bedroom but had no recollection of how he came to be there. His perspective was skewed, puzzlingly elevated. Had something in the meal disagreed with him? Everything seemed out of kilter.

His head hurt: a tight, nagging pain.

The room was strangely lit – a subdued amber glow, constantly roiling and flickering; a light that had nothing to do with electricity. Candles, he realised. Dozens of them spread throughout the room. Squat tea lights arrayed along bookshelves and the dressing table’s top alongside taller, phallic columns of wax that thrust upward from every available surface.

Then he saw her: Laura.

She was wearing the yukata that he had brought back from Japan, which she still insisted on referring to as a kimono. Red dragon emblazoned on black silk, its sinuous form snaking sensuously across the wearer’s back, a single taloned foot reaching around to caress her stomach.

Her hair was worn loose and somehow conveyed a sense of wantonness.

Perhaps it was not the hair but rather her posture, the way she stood, with silk wrapped around skin, or the way she held her head. Never had she looked more beautiful, more desirable.

He thought his eyes were locked on his wife, yet apparent movement behind her drew his attention to where the Makonde statuette stood, now surrounded with candles. In the uneven light it seemed to have come alive. The entire stunted column rippled, as if the myriad partial figures that coated its skin were writhing, struggling against each other and fighting to maintain their place on the totem’s carved surface.

Only then did he become aware of another presence in the room; a figure standing in the doorway – a man, naked and relaxed.

Recognition brought horror, with bitterness swirling in its wake. Greg Santini.

As he watched, the figure moved, and the motion broke the illusion.

Not Santini after all, but a much younger man, although the realisation brought no joy.

He was looking down upon himself, Paul Mellor.

Confusion threatened to overwhelm him, as he struggled to make sense

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of what he was seeing, only to realise that that he couldn’t, not yet.

He had never noticed how similar Santini’s features were to his own.

The fickle candlelight had briefly blurred the distinctions of time’s passage and revealed the close resemblance. Santini could almost be an older version of himself.

Beyond any doubt, this was his own body that he was watching, yet there was something in the movement that seemed fundamentally wrong, that was not of him, that echoed Santini’s assured and fluid grace.

Paul tried to turn his head, then lift an arm, but couldn’t.

The man stepped into his wife, grasping her around the waist and bending to kiss her neck, whilst she leaned back, melting into him, lifting an arm to caress the back of his head, running fingers through his hair and pulling him closer.

Paul recalled bitterly her self-imposed isolation, her unwillingness to let him touch her in recent weeks and the distance that had grown between them as a result. All of which was in total contrast to the way she yielded so completely to this other. She turned her head, craning backwards.

For an instant, just before their lips met, she looked towards the point from which he watched. What was that he could he see in her eyes? Triumph? Amusement? Regret? Then the lids closed and she lost herself within the kiss with this stranger, this man who had usurped his place.

A hand snaked inside the yukata, pushing the silk to one side, to cup and then massage the milky mound of Laura’s exposed breast. She pulled free of the kiss, though not of his arms, moaning – a deep, animal sound – then she twisted around within his embrace. The garment, catching on her lover’s forearm, came completely undone. With a single shrug of her shoulders it dropped from her body, sliding to the ground. She clung to Paul/Greg, answering his need with her own, pulling him into another kiss as she rubbed herself against him, his hands kneading her buttocks, then lifting to rake nails down the length of her back.

This time her moan when the kiss ended, when he dropped his mouth to her breast, was a cry of need, of want, of anticipation; it was also a word, a name: “Edward,” which she gasped with more heat and demand than Paul had ever heard her voice before.

Paul to Greg to Paul, the man’s face flickered and danced in the fickle light, as the mouth slid across his wife’s flesh, from breast to breast, nipple to nipple.

The wine had been drugged, a part of his mind grudgingly accepted, recalling how he had slipped into sleep so easily. What else had been done

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to him?

Strands of thought began to collide and gel, giving birth to insight. An obscure sect of ancestor worshipers, whose practices made them feared and revered even among their own people… Paul, Greg… common ancestors buried in the both. One ancestor in particular. For that ancestor to surface, to claim control, to be resurrected, the resident spirit had been deposed, the dominant personality transferred elsewhere. It must have happened to the now-aging Santini at some point in the past, in his youth, and now it had happened to Paul, with his own wife the instrument, the accomplice to this ultimate betrayal.

Laura was far more than mere accomplice, he realised, as one leg snaked up to circle her lover’s hips, pulling herself onto him and him into her. Rather she was co-conspirator, willing collaborator, having doubtless been beguiled and seduced by the Svengali-like Santini.

Was his own ancestral memory now animating his body, or had the essence of Edward/Greg also been transferred, moving into the vacancy left by his eviction?

The two bodies melded, entwined, moving inexorably towards the bed.

Paul/Greg/Edward lifted her and propelled her backwards, the pair collapsing out of Paul’s line of sight.

If he was no longer in his own body then what was he, some sort of nebulous spirit? If so, why did he feel so restricted, so stiff and limited in movement?

Something intruded on the periphery of vision. A silvery figure swayed gently in and out of view, catching and reflecting the dull light of the candles. Instinctively he tried to turn his head again but had to be content with moving his eyes. The bird; Laura’s wire bird, but made suddenly huge, as big as he was.

Realisation hit home; he remembered Laura’s four wire figures, then thought of the dead blackbird on the lawn, the absent Felix and the neighbours’ missing dog, wondering what purpose their sacrifice had served.

Part of the ritual, necessary preparation, or merely practice?

Despair and horror welled up within him.

Although he could no longer see Laura and Edward, he could still hear them; the creak of protesting bedsprings, the rub of frame against wall, and above all else the moans and gasps of his wife.

Only he could hear his own scream.

Paul knew that Laura’s voice, transformed by such raw and unsuspected passion, would haunt him for however long his spirit was destined to lin-

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ger here, suspended above their bed. He knew too that in that time he would die a thousand deaths, hanging on her every word, tormented by her every sound.

Ian Whates is the vice chairman of the Northampton Writers Group in the UK, which is chaired by author Ian Watson. He is also the Development Director of the BSFA. (British Science Fiction Association) and has recently taken over editing the BSFA magazine, Matrix. Ian has published 16 short stories in the fantasy, horror and science fiction genres to various publications in the last 19 months, including to the deliberately controversial anthology Glorifying Terrorism, edited by Hugo-winner Farah Mendleshohn. His most recent sale is to Solaris Books for a new anthology and his stories have recently appeared in the science journal Nature (July 12th 2007), and the ezines Fusion Fragment (July 2007) and TQR (October 2007). Š 2007 Ian Whates

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Her Sweet Solace

by J. T. Glover

D

eanna slumps against the wall outside the kitchen, heart twisting like a downed power line as she listens to her faithless mother cry out. Tears drip from her bulging eyes, and she wonders why the neighbors haven’t called the cops. Then — silence, the scrape of a Bic lighter, and the rank smell of one of her mother’s Dorals.

“God, I’ve been needing that,” her mother says, voice jagged. “You don’t know how badly I’ve needed that.”

“Oh, I know,” comes a hollow voice, a Darth Vader voice that fits too perfectly. “Believe me, I know.”

In her mind’s eye, Deanna sees the tableau again. Short North High out early after a fire drill, she has snuck in through the basement, gleefully imagining her mom’s shocked face when she jumps out at her, and now she crouches in the hall, peering around the corner. Her mother lies naked on the kitchen table, legs spread wide, feet planted flat on the green plastic tablecloth. Between Deanna and her mother is a man covered in purple flame. His head bobs at her mother’s crotch, and she is moaning. ***

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Deanna sits by Mirror Lake, pitching stones into the water when no one’s looking, the setting sun occluded by the red brick mass of Campbell Hall. After sneaking back out of the house, she drifted through the quiet streets of Harrison West, past the Victorian mansions of Neil Avenue, eventually stopping near the rock-lined pond on the Ohio State campus.

Most of the benches were filled with smooching couples, but eventually one opened up, overshadowed by lindens and grubby with sap. It suits her mood just fine, and everyone ignores her — pallid girl with lank brown hair, camo coat not quite ratty enough for cool, eyes permanently squinted from nights spent online or reading the latest Jim Butcher.

What do I do?, she thinks, worrying at a nail. Dad hasn’t even been gone a year. This is crazy. What the hell was that thing she was...

Deanna grinds her teeth, the tang of bile welling up in her throat. She saw something in her house. A man — no, a thing — covered in purple fire, going down on her mother.

Purple fire, she thinks. This isn’t fucking Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is my life, and— “There’s no fucking demons,” she growls, stomach clenching.

The sudden silence from the next bench over suggests it’s time to move on, before someone decides to make trouble. So she heads up the path to the library, hands in her pockets, just wanting to be able to deal. Everything she planned to do tonight suddenly hazy and unimportant, from studying for the French exam to practicing for Tuesday’s piano lesson with Miss Colette. The library looms in front of her, great pile of pale Indiana limestone rubbed smooth by time and long-dead masons, and she wonders if she’s losing her mind.

Most people who see demons are schizo. Who says you aren’t?

A group of ROTC cadets jog past, cadence booming off the library’s façade, and she stares after them, absently wondering how she’s supposed to judge her own sanity. She looks at her palms, at the half-moon divots that have crusted into sticky scabs. They don’t prove a damn thing — just that she clenched her fists.

Suddenly Deanna yawns, jaws cracking, thinking of food for the first time since lunch, and she wishes she had a boy to hold her. The anger draining away, she worries for her mother. Whatever she saw, her mother has to be in danger.

So what do I do? How am I supposed to ask her anything?

She can’t, of course. If she’s going crazy, the questions will start, and then pills and a rubber room. If she’s not crazy, then... what? Deanna stares

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at the moon rising through the trees, yellow and gravid like a rotten grapefruit, trying to solve a problem with no answer. *** This time Deanna enters through the front door, and the house is silent.

The yellow glow from the streetlights leaks into the living room through the Venetian blinds. The furniture she’s grown up with — the aubergine couch, the glass top coffee table, the blue corduroy easy chair where her daddy used to watch Law & Order and drain cans of Genesee — has become a foreign landscape. Devils and bad ghosts wait around every corner.

“Mom...?”

No reply, so she walks down the hall. The door to her parents’ bedroom, now her mother’s, is half-closed, the lights off. She stops, trying to decide whether to push the door all the way open.

“Deanna, come in here,” her mother says from within. “Please don’t turn on the light.”

Deanna hesitates, then walks into the dark room, bumping her knee against the rickety chest of drawers just like always. She edges over to the bed and gingerly lowers herself onto the duvet.

“Baby,” her mom whispers, and now Deanna can hear it in her voice, the cracked tone her mother gets after crying. “You’re way late. What happened?”

“I... I’m sorry, mom. Christine and Tara asked if I wanted to go catch a matinee at the Lenox, and then we went over to Stauf’s for coffee.”

“Okay. I just worry, that’s all. Your cell phone?”

“The battery’s dead. Sorry.”

To this her mother doesn’t respond. Deanna can’t see it in the darkness, but she senses her fumbling around on the nightstand. In the brief flare of the lighter, her mother’s face is an Egon Schiele war of grief and shame, desire and sorrow. The grooves left by her father’s death, by the smoke she sucks into her lungs, silence the careful, frightened questions Deanna planned on the walk home.

She’s startled when her mother’s hand covers her own on the bed sheet.

Slowly, hesitantly, Deanna grips her mom’s hand back and they sit there in silence. Her nose itches at the smoke, and she can imagine the blue cloud around her head, but tonight she doesn’t say anything.

“Dinner’s in the fridge if you want it,” her mother says. “It’s not much,

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but I made a little potato-bacon casserole this afternoon.”

So Deanna gets up and starts to walk out of the room, running a frustrated hand through her hair, stops when her mother speaks again.

“I wish your father were still here, sweetie. I miss Friday nights.”

Deanna smiles in spite of herself. Before the tumor came, he had been adamant about Friday nights, regardless of what plans her friends might have. Pizza, beer for them and Coke for her, and board games. Every goddamn Friday night — Monopoly, Axis & Allies, Scrabble. She’d hated it at the time, of course. Her mom had tried to get them to start again a few months after he was gone, but they’d both felt the hollowness.

“I know, mom. Me too.”

She walks down the hall to the living room and into the kitchen, mulling things over. Nothing in her mother’s voice but sadness like Deanna hasn’t heard from her since the terrible night in the hospice when he took that slow, final breath.

What the hell, she thinks. She’s grief-stricken. I’m crazy. Great fucking family. Thanks for leaving us, dad. Way to go.

Deanna opens the vintage 1970 refrigerator’s olive green door and peers around, trying to find the casserole. From the other end of the house comes the sound of muffled sobbing, and Deanna turns toward it, unsure what to do. That’s when she sees the wrinkles and blisters in the tablecloth.

She looks closer, and her face writhes through a half-dozen expressions-twisting like plastic exposed to high heat. *** Saturday afternoon, and Deanna stands looking through the grubby windows of Magickal Kingdom, hands wrapped around her backpack’s rough nylon straps, but soon she’s going to have to make a decision. Gray clouds threatening overhead, and it’s not exactly the nicest block of High Street. Most of the other businesses nearby long closed, beer bottles and dead condoms mounded in the doorways. A scruffy guy in an Indians jacket stands at the bus stop across the street, legs spread wide and nodding at her as he points at his crotch.

The bells hanging from the door tinkle as she pushes it open and steps inside. It’s not as dark as it looks from the sidewalk, and glass lamps with colorful shades give the place a warm, inviting feel. Still, she gazes apprehensively at the shelves, higgledy piggledy with jars and incense and all sorts of things she doesn’t recognize, unsure where to go next.

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“Can I help you?” asks the large, acne-scarred woman behind the counter, perspiring heavily despite the cool day.

“Yeah,” Deanna says, scrounging in her coat pocket for the list she wrote out that morning as she sat at the battered old library table, surrounded by herds of dusty books. “I need a whole bunch of stuff. Maybe it’d just be easier if I gave you the list.”

The woman smiles pleasantly and takes the sheet of paper. She starts to read it, then wrinkles her brow and looks up at Deanna.

“I don’t want to sound rude, but how old was the book you got these ingredients from?”

“Well, it was—” “Because no one uses measures like this anymore. I mean, everyone uses some kind of measurement, but the Craft isn’t about seven drams of clarified Abyssinian goat’s milk, whatever that is.”

Deanna doesn’t say anything, not trusting herself to speak as she feels the quivering in her lips, just nods.

“Hey, hey, I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, or stop you from doing what you’re trying to do. Why don’t you tell me what you want, and maybe I can put something together?”

She looks at the woman, wondering if she has ever watched anyone being used by a demon — what one old French grimoire called an Amator diabolicus — her very life draining away in the guise of sexual release.

The shopkeeper sits there, silver-ringed fingers folded on the counter, and she looks as if she was born into the wood-and-raffia necklace that hangs down over her velvet dress. A nice woman, yes, and maybe a good confidant for lonely outsiders, but she hasn’t seen everything.

“It’s a banishment ritual,” Deanna says. “Just trying to get rid of some negative influences.”

“All right, lots of ways to do that. Given the feel of this list, I’m guessing it’s pretty serious. Let’s start with the ferric salts...”

Twenty minutes later, Deanna is considerably more impressed, watching as the woman grinds dozens of ingredients together in a stone mortar, all the while talking knowledgeably about the properties associated with each.

“So these are ingredients that have been used for a long time?” Deanna asks, starting to hope.

“All my herbs and minerals are traditional. This isn’t a food chemistry lab and we aren’t making Twinkies,” she says with a laugh. “Much of what’s in here was used by the alchemists and ceremonial magicians of the

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Middle Ages, near as anyone can tell. Some were even used to summon and banish demons. Whatever you’re trying to get rid of, this is potent stuff.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got serious problems.”

“Yeah, well, this is serious magick,” the woman says with asperity as she finishes her grinding and pours the mortar’s contents into a paper bag.

“Just be careful how you use it. I don’t want to see you in here again because your boyfriend has moved to Manitoba and refuses to speak to you.

Now, do you know just what you’re going to do with this stuff?”

“I’ve got some ideas,” Deanna says, smiling for the first time since looked into the kitchen, “but maybe you can give me a pointer or two.” *** An overcast Sunday afternoon, muggy already, though it’s not even June, and even the grass doesn’t want to move. Deanna stands quietly beside her mother, mood blacker than her dress, staring down at the grave, wishing she could feel the calm she usually feels here. Whatever was right in the world last Sunday — whatever small fragments of her life she had managed to put right — has been derailed completely.

Other families walk the Union Cemetery, and a small group of mourners have gathered at the other end, the pastor’s drone floating over the tombs.

Even her favorite stompy boots, the black ones with all the straps and buckles that made her father laugh, can’t comfort today. When her mother wraps one arm around her shoulders and starts snuffling, it’s all Deanna can do not to shove her down.

What’s wrong with you?

Her mother’s arm starts to shake, and then she’s sobbing, and Deanna finally puts an arm around her, grimacing but unable to help herself, two images warring in her mind. Her mother and father, laughing on the trip the three of them took to the Hocking Hills in the autumn two years ago, a smear of dirt across her dad’s face from when he tripped and fell down, and her mother wiping it away. Her mother and the fire-coated creature in the kitchen, coupling, pleasure in her father’s absence, him not even a year gone.

“Oh Deanna,” her mother says, voice trembling, “I miss him so much.

It’s so hard.”

This sets off a fresh storm of tears, her mother’s face twisting into a mask out of Greek tragedy. So Deanna wraps both arms around her, staring

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through the fence at the steady parade of cars and SUVs on Olentangy. She holds her mother’s shaking, running-to-flab frame, and wishes she were anywhere else.

I need to be sure, she thinks, her face tightening into a jack-o-lantern grimace. I need to know for sure.

Deanna opens her mouth, trying to frame the words, and then she is crying too, the big whoops that she had thought were all gone a month after her father’s death. It’s like her chest is cracking down the middle, her guts twisting around shards of glass. In that moment, she hates her mother, her father, and every living thing, everything that has ever made her feel.

She thrusts her mother away and runs for the car, ignoring her mother’s call.

Why can’t you just leave me alone? Why couldn’t you just leave each other alone? If I hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t hurt like this. I wouldn’t feel anything at all. *** Wednesday afternoon, school not out early this time, and Deanna edges past her mother’s Chevelle, stepping carefully to avoid the loose gravel in the driveway ruts. She stops at the basement door and checks her coat pockets again. The iron knife is there, as is the packet of herbs. The words she will need are burned into her brain after days of staring at them every spare moment, scrawled on an index card gone soft and velvety after repeated handling.

She lifts hard on the basement door knob and pulls back, the door swinging open without a sound. She steps inside and soundlessly traces the paths she has walked for years. Boxes of newspapers in one corner, the hidden fort of a pirate queen; the furnace and its verdigried copper pipes, the dragon she’s jousted with a thousand times; the old coal chute, the cave of her dreams. Soon she’s at the top of the stairs and slipping into the living room, and then— Disappointment. From the end of the hall comes the unmistakable, glottal sound of her mother’s snores. The tension slips from Deanna’s shoulders, and she walks down the hall, no longer troubling to be silent, and looks into her mother’s bedroom. Mild shock as she realizes her mother lies naked atop the covers. As Deanna’s eyes adjust to the light, she starts to pick out the clothing scattered around the room: jeans in a rumpled pile, panties hanging off a dresser knob, and the half-torn blouse that lies balled

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on the floor.

Then the smell hits, rolling through the air like a storm cloud: the thick, heavy funk of her father’s cigars. For months the Romeo y Julietas have lain untouched in their box in the kitchen, slowly going stale, neither she nor her mother quite able to junk them. Somewhere in the house, someone is smoking one of her dead father’s cigars, and the unease that has lain coiled in her stomach ignites, becomes something else entirely.

Got you now. Wherever the fuck you come from, you’re going back.

The demon is sitting at the kitchen table and facing the living room when Deanna walks around the corner, and she grits her teeth as she comes to a stop, staring at him. The cigar’s tip glows brightly, rafts of smoke already layered up to the ceiling. But for the purple flames, which seem not to touch the cigar, he could be an average man — a little darker complected, with thick, brushy black eyebrows, but average.

“Deanna,” he says, looking straight at her, “you should think about what you’re doing.”

Stung, she clutches removes the packet from its pocket, raises the knife above her head, and begins.

“Te evoco, Diabole, in forma—” “One more word and you hurt your mother more than you will ever know.”

And so she pauses, the ancient words bitter like oil on her tongue.

“I’m not here to hurt anyone, child, least of all your mother.”

“I saw you, fucker,” she hisses. “You’re an amat—” “Yes, an amator diabolicus, if you want to say it in Latin,” he says, removing the cigar from his mouth and resting it in the ashtray. “Do you have any idea why I’m here?”

He’s trying to fool me, delay me, she thinks, looking at his wry, earnest face. I can’t fail my mother, I can’t fail my father.

“You’re a monster,” she says as she raises the packet into the air and points her knife at him, “and you’ve been feeding on my mother.”

“Your mother was the one who called me,” the demon says softly. “Last week I passed near the place where your home touches my world, and her need shone like a beacon. She burns, Deanna, but she still loves him so much. She would never go against his memory. Are you still sure I’m so evil?”

She looks at the creature staring at her so calmly, and begins to wonder.

“If you banish me, I’ll leave,” the demon says. “Not because of your

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petty spell, but because I won’t stay where I’m not wanted. Others in this city would welcome me, but I’ve seen your mother’s wounded heart.”

“And how do I know this isn’t a trick, that she won’t wither away to a pale husk in a month?”

The demon laughs politely.

“I’m not a vampire. I’m... you don’t really have a name for us. Think of me as a comforter. At worst, a leech sucking away bad blood.”

“And why should I believe that?” she says, hands starting to shake.

“Has your mother seemed ill, unhappy in the last week? Has she even vaguely looked as if she were wasting away? Deanna, she doesn’t even remember I’ve been here after I leave. One day she’ll be whole again and I’ll move on, because her need will... not taste as sweet,” he finishes, shrugging awkwardly. “Your kind often hates the sound of that, but it’s the truth.”

“Why did you have to come?” she whispers.

“That’s not what you want to ask, is it?” the demons says, a compassion greater than human lighting its face. “You want to know why your father died, and I don’t have the answer.”

Deanna sits down opposite the demon, planting her elbows on the table, dully watching the purple flames dancing around its head. A minute passes, then another. After a time it looks away from her, eyes shifting nervously from side to side. It picks up the cigar and twiddles it back and forth.

“And this isn’t hurting her,” Deanna says at last. “Not in the slightest.”

“I’m not saying that, but it sure as hell isn’t hurting her worse than the smokes,” it says, pointing at the pack of Dorals on the table. “Those are going to be the death of her — not me.”

Silence for a moment, and then she nods.

“All right. But be more discreet. And keep your damn hands off my father’s things from now on. You’re not my father.”

“Never said I was,” it replies promptly. “Look, if there comes a time you want me to go, you can do your little ritual and I’ll go. Your mother’s a sweet treat, but Columbus has plenty of grieving, solitary widows. There are car accidents. There’s cancer. There’s a war on.”

Deanna nods again, stone-faced, though she feels the smallest bit of relief inside.

Things could be worse. At least I don’t have to deal with an asshole stepfather.

She reaches into her father’s cigar box and takes out a Romeo y Julieta,

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twirls it around, sniffs it. Then she picks up the trimmer and tries to judge the right place to cut.

“Not too far up,” the demon says gently. “You want to leave most of the cap on, or it will unravel.”

“Thanks,” she mutters.

At last Deanna snaps the cutter closed and the tip falls to the table. Then she lights a match and rotates the cigar like her father used to, thinking how awkward it feels. Eventually she puts it in her mouth and inhales the thick smoke, trying not to cough. She tries again, this time only puffing on it, and the demon nods once before picking his own cigar back up. They sit at the kitchen table and watch each other warily as the light changes and afternoon becomes night.

John (J.T.) Glover has been published in City Slab and Goblin Fruit. The majority of his life has been spent in Seattle, with extended stints in various places, including Columbus, OH and Richmond, VA. By day he is an academic librarian, shushing cell phones and helping students with research projects great and small. © 2007 J.T. Glover

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The Apartment’s Best Feature

by Philip Roberts

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hey put on an air of consideration, as if they really had a say in the decision. As if circumstances and poor planning hadn’t cornered them in their current financial woes. Pat suspected that the agent showing them the apartment knew exactly how sure of a sale it really was.

“As you can see it’s fully furnished.” Her hand swept across the room filled with flea market furniture. When Pat gently pressed on the desk, he could see the apprehension followed by quick relief in the woman’s eyes that the desk didn’t break under the strain.

“And if you follow me, I’ll show you the bedroom.”

Nancy clung a little tighter, and Pat squeezed her hand. They moved through the doorway together behind the agent, stopped short by the sight of the grungy, yellow-brown mattress atop a plywood frame. The dresser wasn’t in much better shape, though Pat had to admit that it did look like it could hold a lot of clothes.

“As you can see the bedroom is furnished as well, and the closet space

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is quite extensive.” She motioned almost as if on a game show, displaying to the contestants what they might win. Before they really had a chance to get a better look at the bed she was moving them along to the bathroom, which, much to Pat’s relief, was rather well kept. The stains were limited to those one can’t really expect to avoid after enough years.

The tour brought them back into the living room, Pat and Nancy still hand in hand. He tried not to think about how it had come to this while knowing exactly how it had. Nancy nudged him, and Pat tried to figure out if it was because of something the agent had said or if she had gleaned his thoughts, as she had a habit of doing. When he glanced over at her, his eyes avoided her bulging belly as much as possible.

“So Mr. and Mrs. Morgan, what do you think?” the agent asked them, head tilting closer in anticipation.

“What do we think?” Pat pulled Nancy a little closer.

“We think it’s within our price range and we think we’ll take it.”

“Excellent,” the agent said, the relief of having the ordeal over with far from hidden. A half hour later the papers were signed, the deposit and first month’s rent handed over, and the move-in date set.

That date was for two days later, and as early as they possibly could, Pat and Nancy walked through the front door of their new apartment with all of their possessions in hand, which included only four suitcases. The first order of business was taken care of within the hour, a task that ended with the two of them standing in front of their horrendously dirty mattress.

Neither wanted to actually touch it, their hands as far from the thing as possible while they put not one, but two sheets onto it for good measure.

Once the procedure was completed Pat was given the job of testing it first. “I bet the springs are terrible,” Nancy said as Pat pushed down.

“Only one way to find out,” Pat said with a smile before leaping on.

He landed with a plop, the mattress firm yet yielding enough, and he was almost too amazed to answer when Nancy asked him how it was. “You’ve got to feel this.”

When Nancy crawled onto the bed, the first silver lining broke through the surface of an otherwise terrible apartment. “God, it feels so wonderful.

I can’t believe it held up this well.”

“Can’t judge a mattress by the stains I guess. Never would have guessed it myself.” He turned to face her, the two of them side by side on the bed, and Pat couldn’t quite say what it was that brought it on so fast, but just looking at her was more than he could take, and he wasn’t the only one who felt it.

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They embraced within the heat of a passion unfelt since her stomach began to show. The strain of recent developments and continual downturns melted in the rekindled flame that burned almost brighter than it ever had before. Only after they held each other on the bed, their clothes discarded, bodies slick with sweat, did Pat realize how much they had needed it. He tried to tell himself it was them that needed it, and not their relationship.

“It’s been too long,” Nancy said, her head on Pat’s shoulder, legs intertwined with his. “I hadn’t realized how long it’s been.” Something told Pat she had known how long it had been, just as he had known.

When their clothes were back in place, they spent the remainder of their time putting away the few possessions they did own. Once that task was accomplished, they drained the rest of their savings to buy food and a select few dishes and utensils. Pat had to remind himself that his paycheck was just around the corner, just as he tried to forget about all the other expenses they still had awaiting them.

The apartment was all electric, not that they had the money to start up service just yet. The company wanted a fifty dollar deposit, and so candles gave them light, and when the early spring temperature dropped into the thirties that night, they held close to each other on the couch until it was time to turn in.

Before they had even made it to the bed they were pulling off clothing, reprising a moment Pat had thought was too spontaneous to recreate, and yet they managed somehow, lost in ecstasy, the acts itself almost blurred in Pat’s mind until once again they embraced, warmed by their physical exertion and the thick blankets on top of them. But more than that, Pat felt wonderfully content and at home in a way he never thought he’d be able to achieve in the cheap apartment. The bed was like a welcoming committee, such an unexpected surprise, and that night Pat drifted easily and swiftly off into a sleep so deep he nearly didn’t wake when the alarm on his watch began beeping the next morning. He honestly didn’t want to get up, too at home, but eventually he made himself rise.

He was nearly out of the door when he heard Nancy’s soft, sleepy voice, and Pat echoed her, “I love you,” before slipping into the day.

Much to his surprise, he was tired. Apparently his wonderful sleep hadn’t been quite as refreshing as he had thought. Staring at the computer screen in his cubicle, Pat had trouble keeping his eyes open. His head tilted down, the wonderful return to his new bed the only thing that kept him going.

When he arrived home he found Nancy waiting for him with a dinner

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prepared. Even before he sat down to eat, he knew the hidden motives.

“When are you going to talk to your boss about a raise?” she asked him.

He didn’t want to have the conversation he knew they needed to have.

The due date was only a little more than a month and a half off and their accounts were depleted. He flew towards an expensive future no matter how hard he tried to avoid it; he understood how helpless he was.

“I will,” was all he was willing to add to the conversation. Nancy’s eyes told him that she wouldn’t pester him about it anymore — not that evening, at least — but the question was far from dropped. Pat happily took the reprieve.

Some part of him said that he just needed to get it over with and ask for that raise. They needed the money. He knew he liked to avoid thinking about it, but they really did. Nancy had already quit her job, and without the additional money she had brought in they barely had enough to make it by each month. Once all the additional expenses a child brought began, they wouldn’t be able to keep up. But Pat didn’t walk into his boss’s office the next day. He told himself he would later.

“I can’t believe how tired I am,” Nancy said when Pat got home the next night. She leaned her head back on the sofa to smile at him; her stomach a more noticeable presence than ever. “You look pretty worn out yourself.”

“Yeah. I’m not sure what’s wrong with me.” He kissed her forehead and swung around the couch to take up a seat next to her. He almost asked her how she was as his eyes lingered on her stomach, but the words never came. *** Two days later Pat received his paycheck, and a day after that the electricity flowed into their apartment for the first time. When Nancy looked at the check her eyes rose to meet his, but she didn’t ask it. Pat didn’t speak to his boss that week or the week that followed. He blamed this on the weariness that seeped deeper into him with each day as the event grew closer to him. That was the problem, his mind said, and once the child came and the transition was over with, he’d see that things weren’t as bad as he feared they’d be.

Three weeks after they’d first walked into their apartment Pat woke up in the middle of the night and kicked the sheets off of him. When he pushed himself up from the bed, the cool air of the room helped refresh

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him. He stood beside the bed and stared groggily down at Nancy, apparently undisturbed. His body cooled, sleep beginning to part as he looked at the clock beside the bed. When his eyes shifted back to Nancy he saw something, but whatever he noticed didn’t repeat, and within the darkness of the room, he couldn’t even say for certain what it had been. The best his mind could give him was that something had ruffled the sheet stretched across the mattress.

He crawled back onto the bed, the mattress still warm, but the warmth felt wonderful now, soothing away his concerns and cradling him back into his sleep.

The next morning his alarm didn’t wake him, nor did the phone calls a few hours later. He didn’t pull himself out of bed until after noon, Nancy still asleep beside him. When he realized the time he stumbled from the bed on his way to the phone. It was okay, they told him; after all, sometimes it happens. He apologized with his head in his hand, the very concept of asking for a raise suddenly beyond him. A half hour later he walked into his office.

Nancy was still asleep upon his arrival back home that evening. “It’s six?” Nancy asked him, her heavy eyes staring dumbly between him and the clock beside the bed.

The bathroom was Nancy’s first destination. Once the door was closed Pat looked absently back at the bed, his head tilting downward while he frowned at the sweat stain where Nancy had been. A section roughly the size of her was soaked through. Even more than just the wetness, Pat stared at the center of the stain, where the partially transparent fabric appeared almost pink. He reached out his hand and ran his fingers over the warm stain.

Nancy left the bathroom, and with her reappearance Pat broke his attention away from the stain.

“I can’t believe I wasted the day,” Nancy grumbled.

“Want something for dinner?”

Pat used up what little food was left in the apartment for their dinner, and made a mental note to go shopping the next day.

Only two hours passed before Nancy crawled back into the bed, asleep within the first five minutes. Pat chose to go out that Friday night, something he needed more than he had realized. Had Nancy known he was spending money they really didn’t have on something like drinks, he would have never lived it down, especially given that he still hadn’t bothered to try for a raise, but Pat needed it.

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As soon as the first drink was in him the familiar thoughts crept up.

They hadn’t wanted it, or he hadn’t. A 99.9 percent chance, they had told him, and he had been lucky enough to fall into the ill-begotten 0.1 percent.

He had wanted to suggest it right from the beginning, the word on his mind non stop during those first few months, but at the same time he hadn’t wanted to be the first one to speak it. Nancy never did. She whined and moaned about how hard it would be on them, but that was all. He understood that no matter how much she complained, she still wanted the kid.

He made it through four drinks during the two hours he spent at the bar, just enough to help loosen up his mood. The sought-after relaxation that only alcohol could achieve numbed his mind and his troubles.

The night was comfortable, only the hint of a chill in the air as Pat walked back from the bar.

As soon as his door opened he felt the wave of heat pouring out of his apartment. Pat squinted against it, his eyes burning. As soon as he breathed in he began coughing. The word fire jumped up at him, but once through the door, if there was a fire going, he couldn’t see it. No smoke hung in the air or anything else to indicate it, and so Pat moved to the air conditioner.

The heat wasn’t on. Pat pulled open the window, refreshed by the chilly air that poured into the room.

Nancy was asleep, a blanket wrapped around her. Beads of sweat lined her face, but her expression didn’t reflect any discomfort. He got undressed, still curious what had caused the heat, but before he climbed into the bed he paused to look closer at his wife. Nancy’s stomach looked smaller to him. He leaned his head down, inspecting the bulge where his future child slept, and tried to decide if her positioning was what made it look small. Because of the poor lighting and alcohol he had had, he chose not to linger on it.

The bed felt almost hot, far hotter than he thought it should, but Pat didn’t think it was particularly uncomfortable. He stretched out and let his mind drift away from the day. The bed was welcoming, and right as Pat’s thoughts trailed off, some part of him thought he felt the bed pulsing beneath him. It hummed with life, but rather than fear it, Pat’s sluggish mind smiled at the reassurance it brought him. Everything would be okay, it whispered to him without words, and Pat fell asleep to those sentiments. *** Her scream woke him. It pierced through his dreams and forcefully

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wrenched him from his slumber. The sunlight was the first thing Pat’s mind took in as he stood, Nancy’s panicked voice saying things his mind couldn’t process. The second his eyes saw her he took in the flaw in the image, though this information didn’t become fully realized at first.

Dark red flared across her wet cheeks, both of her hands pressed against her stomach. She stared at Pat, whose mind tried to reassemble itself into coherence faster than it was capable of.

“It’s gone.” The words reached something within Pat and switched on the rest of his brain because he knew what she was talking about. Half memories of a dark, hot room flickered, along with the image of Nancy on her back.

In his endeavors to dress himself in five seconds Pat made a mental note that wouldn’t sink in until they had already reached the hospital. His eyes surveyed the scene and shoved the images into a back file for later use. Less than two minutes after Nancy’s scream first woke him Pat was hurrying out the door with her by his side. He almost carried her to the car, his arm wrapped around her. She mumbled things he couldn’t understand, and his desire to get her to the hospital as fast as possible came before the need to know what she was saying.

The ER nurse stared at them and asked them what was wrong. Pat looked to Nancy, positive without being positive what had happened. Nancy told the nurse all she knew, and they were brought back into a room so a doctor could ask them more questions.

Their child was gone.

Nancy sat on the bed with her back against the wall, arms wrapped around her stomach while the two of them waited for their doctor to arrive.

An hour in the ER had ended with a call to their private doctor and a move to another room in the main hospital. Pat sat on a chair beside the table and stared at his wife. He hadn’t spoken to her since waking up, what little he had said aimed at either a doctor or nurse. He had listened to everything she told them, and contributed with what little information he had. Mainly, he saw a picture in his head.

There were a few pictures that he shifted between. The first was a wet stain with pink in the middle of it. The second was the bed as he was dressing, a much broader yet similar area of wet fabric where Nancy had been, only now the transparency was more apparent. Small drops of red accompanied the pinkish hue beneath the fabric, drops that had probably come from the bad rashes on Nancy’s back. He hadn’t seen them before she showed them to the nurse, her back bright and painfully red, scabbed

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over sores spread across it.

“It just recently developed over the past week,” she said, though Pat began to recall seeing the hint of inflamed skin earlier than that.

The final picture Pat kept seeing was the loose fabric shifting as if a breeze had blown through the room, but no, that wasn’t what had made it shift.

“Nancy?” Her head lifted to focus tear stained eyes onto him, and Pat had no words to say. He didn’t know what he could say to ease even the smallest of her sadness. He knew what she wanted more than anything else, and he tried to tell himself he wanted it to. He tried to ignore the other side of him, so gleeful to be free it made him sick, or he wished it did.

When he didn’t speak, her eyes left him, her chin on her knees as the tears kept streaming down her cheeks. They looked up at the sound of the door. Dr. Winn walked into the room with a clipboard in hand. As soon as Pat saw the man’s face, the hesitation in his eyes, he understood that this man couldn’t tell them anything. *** Pat pulled the car into a parking spot in front of their building. Her expression wouldn’t leave him, her eyes so vacant and lost. Given enough time she would overcome it, just as she had overcome other tragedies in her lifetime. Pat had no doubt about that, but then there was more to this than simply overcoming it, at least for him.

He had told them he was going to get some of their clothes and other supplies. They wanted Nancy to stay in the hospital for a few days so they could try to figure things out, but Pat understood that they knew all they were ever going to know, they just didn’t want to admit it.

Something bizarre had happened, and Pat was willing to believe peculiar possibilities in order to understand it.

After so many hours, the sweat had dried. Four small drops of blood were all that remained of the image he had been witness to that morning.

The pocketknife was already in his hand when he pulled away the sheets to reveal the grungy mattress beneath. He kept the knife raised as he reached down to touch the surface, as if the mattress would come alive and attack him. He didn’t laugh at the idea.

It pulsed rhythmically below his hand, and Pat understood it was breathing, or something similar enough. He pulled the fabric up and cut into it.

Immediately a wave of heat poured through the growing hole. Pat’s eyes

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took in what existed below it on some level while his hands continued with their efforts until a large hole had been torn loose.

It’s skin, his mind told him. Beneath the fabric cover, the mattress was covered with skin. The dark pink flesh didn’t move anymore, as motionless as fabric would be, but Pat could feel the warmth from it. The hole he had cut didn’t reveal any openings in the flesh, no hole for it to breathe through or mouth of any kind. He couldn’t help but reach his hand down, the expectation growing steadily worse that he’d see an eye open to stare at him.

The skin shuddered from his touch, the substance rougher than human flesh. It felt thick, and holding his hand there, a soothing calm washed over his mind. He yanked his hand back with a cry of disgust clogging his throat. His palm tingled, the nerves alive like nothing Pat had felt before.

It had taken his child. He didn’t know how it had done it or what it had done with his kid, but this thing was to blame.

His knife tore into the surface. Blood flowed from the wound as the skin violently shook. Once the knife was free he stabbed it again, this time sawing through the surface. He thought he heard a sound, like a voice screaming at him, and Pat wasn’t sure if the creature emitted it from some mouth he couldn’t see or if it planted this cry directly into Pat’s mind. If it had any means of fighting back, it chose not to use them.

He thought of Nancy most of all and the emptiness within her face as she sat on the bed. His knife pulled loose a patch of skin, already sawing into more of it. The shuddering had ended, whatever gave this abomination life gushing out of it. When he pulled back most of the surface was torn away, chunks of bloody skin discarded on the floor around him.

The knife dropped from his fingers. Only part of Pat understood what he was doing when he plunged his hands inside it. He pulled loose more sections of skin, pushed aside what he knew were organs. The voice reached him, a choking gasp as whatever had been producing air for the baby died along with everything else.

Pat closed around slick objects and tore them loose, frantic now, the strained gasps growing louder, the piercing cry trying to fight its way through clogged air passages. His mind didn’t react to any of it, conscious thought a distraction he didn’t want.

From beneath a thin red layer of soft tissue Pat saw the movement.

He tried to ignore what he knew was his baby suffocating as he grabbed his knife and gently tore into the sack. Clear liquid discharged into the exposed remains of the creature. Pat’s hands delved into it until his fingers

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wrapped around the form within.

The choking scream cut through the quiet of the room. Pat lifted his child into his arms. He tilted the baby boy to the side, what little remained of the substance splashed onto his shoes, the air passage clear enough for the baby to cry.

Pat stumbled back against the wall, his boy gripped against his chest, and stared at the carnage in front of him. He didn’t really see the eviscerated thing he had murdered, its death almost forced out of his mind, the experience too much for him to absorb all at once.

The slick, squirming form in his hands groped hands through the air, still crying. Pat knelt to grab a discarded shirt to clear away the substance on his child’s face. The baby looked normal, from what he could see.

More normal than he would have ever hoped given that it had been pulled through its mother’s back and absorbed into whatever the hell the mattress had been.

Staring into his baby’s face, Pat thought only of Nancy. He saw the child through her eyes, the financial worries and questionable future forgotten.

He turned from the corpse, the only thing of importance held tightly within his arms.

He didn’t care what everyone would say and even less about what they would think. It didn’t matter what would happen when they returned here and saw whatever it was he and Nancy had been sleeping on. There was only one thing Pat cared about, and nothing was going to stop him.

He wrapped a towel around his son.

“Come on,” he whispered to the upturned face of his little boy, “let’s go see your mother.”

Philip M. Roberts writes within several different genres, but primarily in horror and dramatic fiction. His writing has been published in Twisted Dreams Magazine, Dark Energy Webzine, Dark of Night, Byzarium Webzine, The Horror Library, Tabard Inn, All Hallows, and Chilling Tales. © 2007 Philip M. Roberts

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Secrets (Never Told)

by Richard Wright

05.00 he stone cracked at precisely the moment of her cardiac arrest.

Returning from the hospital three days later, cursing a heart that had powered her through ninety-two strong years for failing now, she stumbled past her small cottage on withered legs, making directly to the cave in the woods. Treading gingerly, scared that the effort of picking her way through grasping trees and tackling the dark downward slope into the cave might trigger another attack, she forced the familiar journey of minutes to last for a full half hour. The agony of delaying the confirmation of what had happened was worse than the invisible nails that had gone through her chest and arm seventy-two hours before.

On finally reaching the cavern at the back of the long passage, she saw the damage, understood what was happening, and knew her life was ending. The doctors were wrong, despite their beeping, flashing gadgetry, their modern magics. She did not have months left to live. She would be lucky to see many more days. If she had to guess, and it was vital that she did so, she would say that her life was measurable in hours. Only her imminent demise could cause the irregular pillar of stone that her small

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torch played over to weaken, and only her ultimate passing could cause the horror trapped within to escape into the world.

There was time still, if she acted swiftly. Time for a new guardian to offer up a lifetime on behalf of the future. With the pragmatism that had defined her years of devotion, she acknowledged both that her death was proximate and certain, and that the rest of the world would follow her to the grave if she failed to act.

Wincing, she ran her left finger along the sharp edge of the cracked stone, slicing her flesh. The presence of blood teased her captive, the pillar rocked with needy excitement, and she scuttled back in alarm. Her chest clenched, and she clutched herself in fear, her eyes never straying from that moist, deviant crack. Give me strength, she prayed, though not to the God of Christians and hypocrites.

Staggering now, she worked her weak way back to the mouth of the cave, taking care on the whispering, shale-strewn floor of the passage.

The open air refreshed her, restoring a little calm and quelling the needle pains stitching through her torso. There was no time to enjoy the calm of the forest. The pillar had rocked before her. It was almost free.

Flicking her bleeding finger at the clearing’s fertile soil, she counted off a meticulous twenty-eight drops of red life, and stopped. Spat forth on fragile breath, the words of power stored deep in her soul emerged from her lips, sculpted into strange shapes by her iron will. Dancing in the frosty air, the words touched each crimson droplet in turn before sinking into the frosted ground and vanishing, spent and used.

The drops of blood boiled, expanding in the dirt with spitting fury, taking on new shapes and holding them. Bone and muscle appeared, feathers and skin bursting forth to cover them, until twenty-eight perfectly formed magpies stood before her, heads tilted in attentive concentration as they awaited instruction. They had bright eyes, the better for the quest ahead of them.

Tired now, the old lady waved a weak hand. The tiding of magpies took to the air in a furious storm of beating wings. South they wheeled, and she watched them fly. “Find her, sweets,” she said. “Find our champion.”

Closing her eyes, she remembered the first time she had seen the cave, six decades ago, when the call had swept over her. She remembered the old woman who had welcomed her, who had soothed back the consuming madness. Back then she had been a young woman, full of life and futures not yet lived. Now, she in turn was the hag. Goddess, she wondered, where did the years go?

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The thought clenched at her heart in mourning for the life the Duty had torn away. As pain crushed through her, she retreated into the darkness of the cave to prepare for her short struggle with the Reaper. *** 06.30 Loretta hit the motorway long before it would become a steel quagmire of rush hour traffic. She smiled at the signpost marking the route, which simply said ‘The South’. No further elaboration was required. In her head the words were snarled and contemptuous, full of the northern venom reserved for soft, privileged southerners.

She felt smart and efficient in her pinstriped business suit, though she knew her slim build and short brown hair made her look distinctly boyish. Though her striking green eyes were feminine, her long, narrow nose countered their benefits, demanding a certain attention as it jutted from her face. Today she didn’t mind. While the theory of gender equality had spread through the business community, its practise lagged sorely behind.

An air of masculinity helped get results. Her nine o’clock meeting was going to decide the future of the small software company she and her partner Robin had set up three years ago, and she was forsaking no advantages.

Truthfully, she would rather Robin had attended in her place, but when he began to talk technical jargon he might as well be speaking in tongues where most people were concerned, when the pressure was on he too often did exactly that. Intelligent firewall software made for poor small talk.

While software design was his passion, and his contribution to their business, Loretta was happy to accept that sales, marketing, and branding fell within her own particular range of gifts.

Far above her car, a single magpie soared, pacing the lonely scarlet tail lights below.

Behind it, two more followed.

As the car approached a roundabout, the first bird drew in its wings and plummeted.

As Loretta turned the car on to the roundabout, statistics and pictograms whirling about in her head, something hit the roof of the car hard. Looking up in fright, sure that whatever it was had punched through metal, she saw to her relief that the ceiling was intact.

Loretta, on the other hand, was not. From nowhere, grief flooded through her system, such profound sorrow that she had to fight to breathe,

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her fingers clenching around the cold plastic with such force that she was sure they would leave grooves when she was next able to release them.

The road blurred beneath her headlights as she started crying. Vast, uncontrollable waves of grief smashed through her, making her writhe and gasp. There was nothing wrong to have brought this on, yet her body clenched with an unfettered emotion she had experienced only once, with the death of a child not yet conceived.

Above her, two magpies drew in their wings and dropped.

Loretta missed her exit from the roundabout, was fighting just to keep the car from spinning off the road. She wanted to pull over before she crashed, but couldn’t do that while she was still on the roundabout. Fear syringed into her gut, mixing into the sorrow, adding nausea and panic to the brew, and Loretta wondered if the toxic brew of emotions would kill her before the inevitable crash did.

Two more thumps on the roof of the car stole her sorrows with shocking suddenness, and Loretta gasped cold air as her pains were sucked out through the pores of her skin. Replacing them from below came a swirling, inexplicable joy. She wondered what was happening to her, why she was smiling so hard that her cheeks already ached. Whatever it was, she could travel on now, thoughts of death banished, worried only that her occasional incoherent laughter might give other drivers cause to look twice and wonder.

As she crested the north curve of the roundabout, following it back round to the south, the paralysing, suffocating sorrows returned, again forcing her to miss her exit as she grappled not to plunge off the tarmac.

On curving northward, deep joy pulsed through her once more.

Confused, knowing only that driving south might kill her with a grief she had thought long buried, she took the northward exit, back the way she had come. Later, when she neared the exit that would take her home, she felt sorrows threaten until she was safely past it.

With the traffic thickening around her, she kept on northwards, not knowing why, knowing only that her choices were gone. *** 10.00 Wings angling against the wind, three magpies swooped across the car park, eyeing each vehicle in turn, eventually finding the one they sought and landing gently beside it, on tarmac rimed with morning frost. Hop-

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ping up to the passenger door, they cocked their heads in jerky curiosity, making alien calculations and assessments. When they were certain, they leaped forward as one, vanishing as they hit steel, leaving only three small drops of blood dribbling down the steel-blue paintwork to mark that they ever existed.

In the driver’s seat, Loretta woke from sinister dreams, jerking forward in her seat, unsure what had disturbed her. Checking the clock as she rubbed the stiffness from her neck, she realised it had been almost two hours since she had pulled into the service station, terribly afraid, frantic with the desire to analyse, to stop simply reacting as her gut ordered.

Strange urges had clawed into her, and making her feel like a puppet dancing on strings of pure emotion. Sitting there, praying and thinking, the constant stream of pure feelingfinally wore her out, and she had dropped off.

Sleeping on it left her no closer to understanding the irrationality that made her captive. She still had no idea what was compelling her to park facing north, why even glancing southwards brought tears to her eyes.

Trembling, she put her hand on the door, needing fresh air, a chance to stretch her legs after her sleep. At that moment she froze, a prickling of her skin telling her that she was not alone.

Turning to the passenger seat, she shrieked, shoving herself back against the door. A girl sat there, smiling up at her. All of seven years old, she looked as though an animal had been at her. Her chest was shredded, her drying organs exposed and still. Her left arm clung to her shoulder by only a single shred of slowly stretching flesh. Once blonde pigtails were streaked with browning blood. Through her white-faced shock, Loretta realised that the dress, once patterned with flowers, was stained with crusting reds and blacks. The girl swallowed, though she was obviously dead, and tried to smile through jellied blood and missing teeth.

“I am the future,” she whispered, her voice soft and musical. “Unless you go north. Go north for me.”

Then she wasn’t there. Loretta decided that she must have blinked, or fainted briefly, though she knew deep down that she had done neither. As she watched, the girl had ceased to be there, and the simple wrongness of that made her want to be sick .

Winding down the window, leaning out and gulping cool fresh air, she accepted for the first time that she might have lost her mind. ***

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07.30 (the following morning) Four magpies wheeled against a clear blue sky, circling high above the truck stop, cawing anxiety at one another. An ancient heart was fracturing.

Time was slipping away.

An hour after setting off from the car park the previous day, heading steadily north, Loretta’s car simply died. That did not deter her. In the future, a little girl waited. Loretta had seen her stilled lungs, and parts of her heart.

Abandoning the car, she began walking, knowing that this was somehow supposed to fix everything that would break, but not knowing why.

Nobody stopped for her, even when she had the presence of mind to hold out her arm, and she spent the time endlessly testing herself. Beginning with her birthday, she ran facts and figures around in her head, looking for errors or nonsense substitutes, all the time wondering whether her certain madness would even allow her to recognise the faultlines that might lurk in her mind. As the brisk wind rushed across the fields on either side of the road to play rippling games with the back of her jacket, she scanned the cars and passengers for strangeness and apparitions, certain her ordeal was not yet over, still unable to turn herself south for more than a few moments at a time.

Loretta didn’t cry. She was beyond tears. The last time she had felt so divorced from reality was when she and Robin were told they would never have children, that her womb was dry and barren. Days had passed before she had pulled herself back to reality, time that she could account for with snatched memories of staring, weeping, and Robin’s terrified eyes.

Since then the company had been their baby, and she had lavished it with attention. Now, Loretta wondered if she could be suffering from delayed shock, even a nervous breakdown, years after the loss of all the things she had believed existed in her own personal future.

As dusk fell, she stumbled into an all night truck stop, where she had finally fallen asleep in the diner, her head resting on the table next to the cooling coffee intended to keep her alert. Seeing her exhaustion, the waitresses had allowed her to slumber.

Waking an hour ago, from a panicky dream of crisis meetings where everybody but her had brought boiled sweets and refused to speak anything other than Mandarin Chinese, Loretta had freshened up as best she could in the public toilets, eased the cricks from her back, and wandered outside

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to wait. Blisters from walking so far the previous day in shoes designed for the office had turned her lengthy stride into an agonised hobble. She knew she would not be going far on foot , and waited for a solution to present itself. Whether she was trapped in a mad fantasy of her own mind’s devising, or the victim of something stranger still, she was certain she would not be waiting for long.

She had learned the hard way that she was destiny’s bitch, that her own wants and desires meant exactly nothing.

The magpies dropped from the sky like spears from heaven, each vanishing as they crashed into a truck some way from the bench she had perched herself upon.

Loretta heard the noise, and rose to limp wearily towards it.

The truck was easy to identify. The boy chained to the front grill was filthy and torn, his stomach flayed open and flapping, his grey intestines dangling to the ground, where they gathered a moist coating of dirt. He looked like an urchin from a Victorian nightmare. Blood drying in his tawny hair made it spike at odd angles not worn since the days of punk.

“North,” whispered the boy, his teary eyes pleading. “For me, for the future, go north.”

Why were the messengers children? Was it because she would never have any of her own? Whether coincidence or contrivance, it did the job.

“Are you all right miss?” A burly, bearded man, his hair a deep red, leaned through the driver’s window. Loretta shook her numb, resigned horror away, trying hard to summon a smile for the trucker. He grinned back, showing nicotine stained teeth. “Hey,” he offered, “you looking for a lift? I’m hauling this sucker...”

“North,” she finished for him. “Yes. Thank you. Take me north.” *** 20.30 Loretta winced as a branch flailed at her, slapping her rudely across the face, seemingly possessed of its own malevolent will. She swallowed tears of confusion and pain, her weeping feet sliding around inside her shoes and making her whimper with each slow step.

Night fell two hours ago, and she was lost even then. When she had entered the woods, a mile on from the village where the trucker had left her, she had done so because the road curved eastwards, away from the direction she had to follow, away from the only notion giving her warped

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new life meaning.

North. She had to keep going north. Now she was not even sure she was following the compass truly any more. She could have turned away from her route countless times in the dark, though she thought it unlikely that she was completely turned around — the sorrows she felt were her own, far different from the slashing grief the south bequeathed her.

The trucker, who called himself Hippo and had been hurt when she could not summon the energy to ask why, was sweet, offering her a sofa to rest the night on. Her two talking ghost-corpses had added an urgency to her ill-defined quest that forced her to refuse. Whatever she was travelling to accomplish, she knew that time was drawing short.

Exhausted, on the verge of tears and hysteria, she shoved past the shadows of the trees, each step introducing her to dark shrubs that yearned to trip her. Closing out the desolate night, she imagined herself in Robin’s arms, pictured the morning when the postman had brought notification that they had their loan for the business, the day she had collected the award for best start-up last year. In her mind, she was everywhere but the tight-woven wood she struggled through.

In the numbing gloom, she could not see the five magpies perched on separate trees stretching away in a straight line ahead of her and to the right. She was doing better than she imagined, having only wandered from her secret route by the tiniest margin. The difference was still enough to risk her missing her destination by over a mile if she continued. The five birds that had followed her silently since she had left the road vanished, the single drop of blood that comprised each one falling to the branches they rested on. As Loretta despaired of ever finding her way again, the trees lit up with an eerie glow, forming a path of silver markers pointing her on her way.

Though inured now to miracles, Loretta cried when she saw the shining signposts, and stumbled giddily towards and past them, grateful in the knowledge that now, surely, she was near the end. *** Midnight Swaying slightly, tired and vulnerable, Loretta stared at the cave from her vantage point between two twisting trees. Moonlight painted the clearing separating her from it in haunted, silver strokes, and she felt as though she had stumbled upon a twisted fairy tale. She snorted, stepping forward

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to confront the source of her lucid madness.

Above her, six magpies prepared to descend, to deliver the gentle, golden nudge that would take the woman into the cave, into the presence of their mistress. They could feel the weakness of the one that had made them, a stark and trembling contrast to the powerful prisoner of stone.

They could feel that‌ They felt no more. Ancient force blasted from stone in the cave, invisible and deadly, rushing down the passage and out, a precursor of things to come. It was not strong enough yet to take the life of the woman who might contain the threat for another lifetime, but could still six smaller hearts mid-flight. The birds died silently, their wings stilled, their bodies plummeting. Loretta was the true target, and the prisoner of the ages had aimed its lance well.

Loretta screamed as the first bird smashed into the ground beside her, and kept screaming as she found herself showered by silent corpses. Skipping backwards, her ankle caught on a root and she fell, still shrieking.

Her dive was a graceful, stiff-backed curve, and stars shot from the back of her head to a place behind her eyes as her skull rapped the trunk of a tree. There was a whirling confusion of images and notions – the future, the north, the skies raining death on trespassers, and something crawling and evil within the fairy tale cave.

Then she passed out.

In the darkness, the old woman leaned against a damp, lichen-covered wall, too scared to move lest that be the effort that finally collapsed her paper-thin heart. She faced the cracked rock, knowing it had done something, had lashed out. In her arrogance, she believed it had tried to strike her down, and that she had withstood the blow. There was no need to check outside. If the woman were there, six magpies would have lured her in with golden promises of what the future could hold if she dared to save it. The old woman knew she would not have long to wait, and then the burden could be passed on. Soon, now.

Very soon. *** 06:00, the following day Dawn broke. Inside the cave a dying crone awaited a woman who lay unconscious less than fifty metres away. The rock before the old lady was crumbling in time with the fluttering of her heart, which spasmed like a

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dying moth beneath her shrivelled breast.

Outside the cave, the final seven magpies hopped anxiously back and forth, kept from entering the cavern by a curtain of knife-sharp despair hanging transparently across the opening, cast there by the one who wanted so badly to rape the world. Eventually one hopped to the prone woman lying beside the tree. It pecked her cheek, abandoning subtlety, drawing blood.

Loretta jerked upright, her hand flying to her face, finding her feet with surprising ease despite the nauseous throb pounding the back of her head.

The birds circled behind her, forcing her to turn her back on the cave’s hungry mouth. Bewildered by the boldness of the animals, she half expected them just to vanish as the corpse-children had.

Instead they danced towards her. First one hopped forwards, then another hopped past that, forcing her to step back as the seven birds danced a complex containing pattern that pushed ever closer to the cave.

Even though she refused to turn around, her darting eyes occupied with her feathered tormentors, Loretta knew when she was at the entrance. A crawling energy swept her as she passed through it, igniting an empty terror that would have sent her fleeing if the magpies had not at that moment launched themselves. One moment they stared up, black beady eyes frighteningly focussed in the morning light, and then they took to the air, hurling themselves up at her face, wings beating like sheets in a gale, and all she could see was eyes, and feathers, and sharp beaks, and claws, and as she pulled her arms up to her face and stumbled backwards she wondered at how much this was going to hurt.

Wet warmth spattered over the back of her hands, and everything was silent.

Loretta dropped her arms. She had crossed into the cave, and the invasive, probing sensation was gone. So were the magpies. Turning her hands over, she found seven dark droplets staining her skin, watched as they sank into her pores leaving no sign that they were ever there.

Before fear had time to grip her afresh, a comforting warmth spread up her arms, pooling briefly at the top of her chest before rising up her neck and into‌ Knowledge filled her, and she sank to her knees in the gloom with a gasp. The future was laid before her. She saw the death of innocents, saw the mass graves, full of adults and children, saw the fires and the cracked black earth, saw the prancing lunatics with their sharp blades, and the mutilated victims trying to survive without arms, or legs, or both, left

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to starve and die. Loretta saw it all.

As she raised her head and struggled to her feet, she knew she could stop it. Her heart was the key. No, that was wrong. Her heart was the lock.

As tears ran down her face, at what she had seen and what she knew was being asked of her, she thought of Robin, and their hopes. With fresh weight sloping her shoulders, she turned and stumbled into the darkness. *** Deeper inside, the old woman heard footsteps and smiled as hope rushed into her. Taking slow, deep breaths, she forced herself to remain calm as she looked across at the cracking stone. In a few moments those cracks would melt back together, forming a seal that would buy the world another fifty, sixty years, until the cycle could repeat itself.

A slow breath in. A slow breath out. A slow breath in.

The woman stepped out of the passage into the wider chamber, her ragged suit softening the crisp edge of her silhouette and making her look wild and dangerous. That was good. Wild, dangerous women had always stood guard here. “You’re late,” she told her replacement with a chuckle.

There was a pause.

“I have a question,” the newcomer said, and the old woman nodded with surprise. Only one? “How long?” The silhouette pointed at the crumbling stone. “If it gets free, how long does the world have?”

The woman frowned. “Fifty years, while it plants its seeds. Perhaps a little more.”

The newcomer nodded, her jaw set. To the old woman’s horror, she stepped back into the darkness. “Good. That’s time enough.”

Not daring to move, feeling the pulse of excitement running through the stone as her captive sensed the shift in the dynamic, she swallowed her disbelief, clutching for the argument she needed. “The children. You saw the children.” It was always women, the nurturers, those born to protect the children.

The newcomer’s lips twisted, and she ran an absent hand across her belly. “Not my children. I won’t know them. Everything life has waiting for me will have happened. If I’m even alive, it won;t be for long. I can handle guilt. I won’t stay here, rotting in misery and loneliness. I can’t be the mother, won’t be the crone.”

So saying, she turned, and walked away.

Wheezing now, the old woman fought for the strength to call out,

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though she had no idea what she might say. Despair rushed along her arteries, being sucked back through her veins to her heart. It had been for nothing. Her life, her long span of days, wasted.

What could she have done with those years?

Who could she have been?

No. The Duty would not end like this. Not after so much sacrifice.

With a heave, the old woman pushed herself from the wall. It was the last move her failing heart would countenance. As sick disappointment flashed across her eyes, the strength went from her legs and her heart stopped, dropping her to the floor with a brittle snapping of bones.

The stone crumbled, and what emerged was essence and potency in a gelatin mass, the infection that would eliminate sanity, and hope, and compassion, and unleash humanity upon itself.

Outside, Loretta heard the shrill shriek as it oozed through the cracks and evaporated onto the air, a kettle set to boil away humanity’s slender sense of self. The cry echoed from the cavern, driving her to her knees amidst the thicket. With her hands to her ears she waited for it to end, and when there was silence she climbed cautiously to her feet.

Nothing happened to her. For a long moment she waited to be overcome with guilt for her choice.

Nothing happened.

Sniffing, she turned and began to trace her path back to the village, where she would call Robin and pick her life up. She would live every day as though it mattered, knowing that she was no longer destiny’s bitch. For the second time, she had been threatened with the loss of the future she had dreamed into being. This time she had been strong. She had not given up on her future, and never would.

Not for the world.

Richard Wright is a Glasgow, Scotland-based writer whose short fiction has appeared in several anthologies in both the UK and US, including the British Fantasy Award winning Hideous Progeny (Razorblade Press, 1999), and the Bram Stoker Award winning, The Darker Side (ROC publishing, 2002). His novelettes appear in the Pendragon Press anthology Choices, and the Cutting Block Press anthology Tattered Souls. © 2007 Richard Wright

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The Money Tree

by Justin McMahon

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop Here is a strange and bitter crop —Abel Meeropol

E

llis Bradley, teacher of English Composition at Ocean High, in Milford, Massachusetts, found the Money Tree quite by accident, and when he found it, he likely would have bet all of its strange and wonderful fruit against anyone who claimed that he would one day feel compelled to set it ablaze, and be forced to murder a man who was trying to keep that from happening.

On a glorious morning in late May, only a week before summer vacation, everything Ellis Bradley thought he believed about the world proved false, and he was shown undoubtedly that never is a foolish word and that money does indeed grow on trees (on one particular tree, anyway).

Also, on that same morning, Ellis’s wife of eighteen years left him and was, at the very moment Ellis was on his way to his strange fate, speeding

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away in his car with their eight-year-old daughter in the passenger seat, a Penske moving truck following closely, filled with most of their possessions. A thing like that might make such a morning seem less glorious, but not to Ellis.

Pauline Bradley — formerly Pauline Vance, daughter of Easton Vance, the third wealthiest man in Massachusetts — while exceptionally pleasant to look at, was arguably the most vile creature the good Lord ever allowed to walk the earth. Ellis often referred to her as the “fiery-faced quintessence of all that is abominable,” which Polly took as a joke, but which Ellis meant whole-heartedly . . . he only regretted that the words were Edgar Allen Poe’s and not his own.

You may wonder what the husband of such a wealthy woman was doing teaching high school English, and often Ellis did wonder. Well, that wasn’t quite true . . . he knew he was teaching high school English because Polly’s father despised Ellis and forbade Polly to entrust Ellis with so much as a penny of his money. What Ellis wondered so often was why he was still married to this woman. The wondering never went far, however, because Ellis, like so many unhappy people, simply accepted his fate, and tried to pretend that Polly’s father was only joking when he referred to Ellis as “that pie-eyed waste of sperm.”

Not long after their wedding day, Polly seemed to adopt her father’s opinion of her husband and, though they remained husband and wife, they seemed to loath one another so deeply, it was a wonder they never came to blows. But, since Mr. Vance was Catholic, divorce was out of the question, and if Ellis had tried he truly believed Easton would have had him killed, and never mind the irony.

So, as Ellis watched his wife of eighteen years drive away in his car with their daughter and a moving truck in tow, he did so with a faint smile on his lips, and as he walked to work, he did so with a spring in his step which hadn’t been there for roughly seventeen years and six months.

As Ellis walked to work, he tried to remember what it had been like to be in love with Pauline Vance and, though he could remember almost every detail of the time they’d spent together, he couldn’t seem to attach any emotion to it.

He tried to be upset that she had taken their daughter and their other belongings (and yes, the allusion that their daughter might be one of their belongings is quite intentional), things Ellis had even bought with his own eighteen hundred dollars a month.

He couldn’t do it. He kept catching his face starting to itch and twitch

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and before long, the sense of loss he was hoping to discover in himself kept turning into a smile. He tried reminding himself that he’d utterly wasted almost twenty years of his life, years which, in other circumstances, might have been his best.

Well . . . that thought seemed to cause a distant sort of anger, the way the air in Milford might seem a little charged when there are thunderstorms in Boston. Even so, his smile only faltered the tiniest bit.

When Ellis tried to replay that morning’s gruesome scene in his head, he found it was mostly mottled. It was the way he’d felt last year when he’d gone to Atlantic City for a friend’s bachelor party. He’d sat in front of a penny slot machine for an hour and a half, betting away his modest earnings and becoming frustrated, then angry, then downright pissed. After anger came self-loathing, which spawned depression. Then he’d hit an eight-thousand-dollar spin and suddenly that rueful hour and a half seemed no more than thirty seconds, and of course he’d known he was going to hit something big. Just known it.

The funny thing was that, after all the horrible fights he and Polly had had, after all the sadistic, vile things they’d said to one another in anger over the last two decades, the thing which brought it all to a grinding halt had essentially been due to something Ellis had wanted two years before and actually put his foot down about.

He’d dreamed, ever since he realized that he would one day like to be married and have babies and buy a house, that, when he did have those things, he also wanted his milk delivered every morning in glass jugs. For no better reason than that it’s so fucking quaint! As quaint as a Scottish Terrier in its winter sweater, as quaint as actually roasting chestnuts over the fire at Christmas, as quaint as white picket fences around gingerbread homes and children with neatly coiffed hair, saying, “yes, sir,” and “no, ma’am.”

And, of all those perfectly quaint things, all Ellis had ever wanted was to have his milk delivered in glass jugs every morning.

It turned out there was just such a business in Somerville, and it was called (laugh if you want, Ellis sure did) Vairy Dairy.

Unfortunately (or so it seemed at first), Polly didn’t find it funny at all, and she didn’t like the idea of her milk jugs being filled by people who knew who and what she was.

“And, forgive me, but what exactly are you, Polly?” Ellis had asked her.

“For Christ sake, Ellis, I’m practically a celebrity! Someone could

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poison me!”

Ellis thought, but didn’t say Well, now that’s actually an idea, why didn’t I think of that? He’d wanted to say it, but he didn’t want to fight. He wanted milk. And he got it.

Again, unfortunately (or again, so it seemed at the time), after he noticed the way his wife looked at the twenty-something delivery boy (and the way he looked at her, the saucy little bastard), Ellis sort of lost his appetite for milk.

And ironically, on the morning Polly left him, when he’d been just about to hop in the shower (it was already running, steaming up the bathroom) he’d had an overwhelming craving for a tall glass of cold milk. When he walked downstairs into the kitchen to get it, wrapped in his towel, his skin balmy from being in the bathroom, he’d found that very delivery boy in his fucking kitchen, kissing his wife’s neck from behind, one hand cupping a breast, the other down her panties.

Of course Ellis had known his wife was bumping uglies with the delivery boy, but it had been easier to ignore when it hadn’t been happening in his kitchen. So he’d finally let Polly fucking have it. Let both of them have it, actually; he gave “that milk-fucker” a nice black eye. Luckily, when the milk-fucker looked like he was going to retaliate, Polly had restrained him, or that morning might have gone very differently, indeed.

Yes, he’d let her have it. The words, “spoiled whore” swam up out of his mottled memory, spoken in his own squeaky, angry voice. His voice always squeaked and cracked when he was really angry, which of course was usually very funny to the person at whom his wrath was aimed.

It wasn’t as if Ellis had never called her bad names before, but his time she knew it was true, and Ellis thought that maybe that was what had really gotten to her. So she left. End of story. She took Pollyanne (that’s the daughter, of course) and Ellis didn’t give half a shit about that. That girl was her mother’s daughter, through and through, and Ellis hated her almost as much as he hated her mother.

And now here he was, a newly-made bachelor, walking to work with a new spring in his step, his briefcase swinging jauntily back and forth, on a glorious May morning in Milford, Massachusetts.

Even at six-thirty in the morning it was already hot, the warmth bringing out all the smells of the morning; the tulips which lined the sidewalk, the wet earth and grass, oak and cedar, the leather of his briefcase, and the detergent he’d used to launder his plaid, button-down shirt.

As Ellis walked he began to whistle. The song was Little Miss Can’t Be

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Wrong, by The Spin Doctors, though even someone who knew the song well would not have guessed it by his almost tuneless whistling. As he whistled, he became aware that this new spring in his step had also become a spring in his bladder, and if he didn’t tone it down, he could add piss to the menagerie of early-morning smells filling his nostrils.

At first he figured he could make it to work (it would only take him another ten minutes) before his bladder was completely out of his control. He hated to piss outside. Someone could catch him. He wasn’t worried about being arrested, or that people might think he was disgusting. His reasoning was far less logical. He’d never been caught in the act before, but he knew that if he was, it would be the detestable vulnerability of being caught with his zipper down and that sensitive piece of his anatomy clutched lovingly in his pale hand that would really make the situation unbearable.

And that line of thought led him to another, even less pleasant one: perhaps that was why he had stayed married to a woman he truly hated for so long. Maybe he had stayed only because he knew she could never hurt him; he’d never been vulnerable with her.

Fortunately, the urge to piss was quickly becoming a necessity, and that thought lost a whole lot of its potency when he realized that if he didn’t step off the road for a bit he’d be showing up at work with a dark stain on the front of his khaki trousers . . . then the kids would really have something to torment him about.

He made an ungraceful little leap over the tulips and onto the grass (wincing as he felt a few, little droplets make a hasty escape into his underwear) and headed into the trees. As he walked away from the road, he began to hear the gurgling of the Charles river which of course only added to his urgency.

He unzipped as he walked, glancing back over his shoulder until he couldn’t see the road anymore, and could only just hear the cars passing.

It was only when he finally stopped walking and finally let loose on some oily-looking shrub, that he realized he’d been holding his breath.

“Ahhh,” he let out his pent up breath in a sigh of ecstasy, relishing the temporary blankness of mind which accompanies good orgasms and good pees. He had his face turned upward, his eyes closed, as if he were paying homage to some unthinkable god. When he looked down, he stopped pissing instantly, causing a painful burning sensation and a spark of anger, like he’d been close to orgasm and was denied the prize.

That feeling was quickly overshadowed by the realization that he was pissing on a hundred-dollar bill which was caught in the unfortunate shrub

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he had chosen as his toilet. He was about to reach out and grab the bill (and never mind the wet stench, it was still money) when his eye happened upon four more bills ensnared in the shrub.

“Holy shit!” he breathed, a smile starting to spread on his face. He had a fleeting, but funny image in his mind of some clumsy bank robber, on the run with a bag full of cash; as the robber runs, looking back over his shoulder for the authorities who are in hot pursuit, his bag catches in a shrub, and riiiiiiiiiiip!

Ellis squatted to get a closer look at the bills, not bothering to zip up, wanting to make sure his eyes were telling him the truth. He grabbed one of the bills he hadn’t pissed on and freed it from the curious shrub. When it came loose, it did so with a strange ripping sound, and he thought he’d ripped the bill. The bill seemed to be in tact, and more importantly, it seemed to be an honest-to-God hundred dollar bill.

He figured the bill must have been stuck in some sap on the shrub, and that must have caused the ripping sound, but as he examined the bill, he found a weird, green nubbin on the edge... and (stranger, still) a pale, green stem.

“What the?” he muttered, unaware in his excitement that he’d said one of the most moronic things someone could ever say in a baffling situation.

If he’d been more on his mettle, he might have scratched his forehead in wonderment, picturing a cartoon thought bubble protruding from his balding head, filled with a great big question mark.

Instead, he only pulled lightly at the stem, which came off easily, along with the little nubbin it was attached to.

He looked back at the shrub, and realized that he’d underestimated the number of bills. There had to be twenty or thirty of them. And they weren’t ensnared there, as he’d first thought (and really, who could begrudge him that thought? The truth seemed strange enough to suggest insanity).

No, the bills were not ensnared. They were all hanging from little green stems, which seemed to be part of the shrub. He also noticed that the one he’d unknowingly pissed on had begun to yellow and curl at the edges, like a petal on a rose which had been picked and not watered.

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

Ellis prided himself on being the type of man who could roll with the punches; adaptable, creative, a good improviser . . . and, on any other day, he would have colossally misjudged his own character.

Not on this day.

Here was a shrub which sprouted hundred dollar bills in profusion,

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and who knew how long it would flower? All summer, if it was like many other fruit-bearing plants, but this one bore money, not tomatoes, and all bets were off.

So, for once in his miserable fucking life, Ellis did not over-think the situation. He began picking hundred dollar bills off of the shrub and stuffing them in the pockets of his khaki pants, smiling an unpleasant-looking smile all the time, until there wasn’t a single bill left.

Then he continued his walk to work.

When he was back on the paved road, a car passed him and the elderly lady behind the wheel slowed, and stared at him disgustedly. At first he figured she must somehow know about the Money Tree (as he was already calling it in his head, capital letters and all). He was just about to run (as casually as possible) back to the Money Tree and guard it with his life if need be, when a little breeze kicked up, and he felt it drift through his open zipper, and caress that precious part of him, which was still hanging out of his pants and swinging jovially in the breeze.

Normally, Ellis would never have tarried on his way to work, never would have risked being tardy to a class full of teenagers whom he had spent almost nine months lecturing on the importance of punctuality.

But today was not like any other day, and today Ellis made a brief stop.

Brrrriiinnnng, went the bell over the door as he walked into the 7-Eleven.

Behind the counter was a dumpy woman in a red 7-Eleven vest, hiding in a corner (as far as hiding was actually possible for a woman of her girth), stuffing her face with a hot dog.

“Can you guys break a hundred?” Ellis asked her, catching her completely by surprise (despite the fact that she must have heard the bell ring when he’d walked in the door).

“Aaaa, bu’ ‘oo go’a buy suffin,” replied the woman, spraying bits of sauerkraut onto the plastic lid of the rotisserie.

“Do you have champagne?” Ellis asked.

The woman pointed a thick, mustard-stained finger toward the back corner of the store, and stuffed the last three inches of the hot dog into her maw.

“Thanks.”

Ellis knew precisely shit about champagne, but he knew enough to figure you couldn’t get anything too extravagant at a 7-Eleven. Nonetheless, he picked the most expensive one ($12.99, the price tag proclaimed) and

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brought it up to the counter, aware that he was sweating profusely and that he couldn’t stop smiling.

He set the bottle on the counter top, pulled one of the curious bills from his pocket, and set it down next to the champagne, and waited for the moment of truth. He didn’t wait with any real trepidation, though. Somehow he just knew the bill was genuine. He knew it.

Ms. Dumpy, the checkout girl (the name tag on her swelling bosom read Amber Lynn) picked the bill up and held it up to the light. Then she set it back on the counter, pulled out one of those magic markers and drew an invisible slash on the bill. Ms. Dumpy, apparently satisfied, pounded a few buttons on the register, which went ding, and rattled open, and she began counting out his change.

As Ellis accepted his $87.01, he was aware of, but couldn’t contain, the lunatic grin which was spreading across his stupid face.

And, when he told Ms. Dumpy to keep the change, and the champagne, she could not contain hers either.

Ellis hadn’t counted how many bills he’d pulled off the Money Tree, but he guessed he still had close to two thousand dollars in his pockets.

The big question was whether the Money Tree would continue to bear fruit after reaping.

Well, that wasn’t the only big question.

Who else knew about the tree? That was a good one. Ellis liked to think he had discovered a wonder of the world, that he alone knew of its existence. But that was dangerous thinking.

Could the tree be transplanted? That was another good question. A valid one. Ellis allowed himself a brief daydream, wherein, years from now, the tree had grown tall and strong in his back yard and during the Reaping Season (which, if he had his druthers, would be all summer), he’d be outside with his gardening gloves and a bucket, carefully picking, every day. If, at it’s current size, the tree replenished itself every day, he’d have around $180,000 by the end of the summer. What if, as the tree grew, it began to bear more and more fruit? Ah, what a lovely question!

Of course, transplanting is dangerous business. If the root system was damaged, it wouldn’t matter how much care he took once the tree was planted in his back yard. It would die, and all the plans he was already making for the money would die with it.

Forget about work today, Ellis, some deep part of his mind advised.

Just go straight back to that tree. What if it’s already sprouting again?

What if someone happens by before you do? What if they decide to try and

98

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transplant it in their own yard? Think about it, buddy. It’s no more than twenty yards from a major road. You found it simply because you had to take a piss at the right time. Anybody could find it. And then you’d be out of luck. Just go back. Sit. Wait. See what happens. If it continues to sprout hundred dollar bills, it really won’t matter that you’ve compromised your shitty job, will it?

No, it wouldn’t matter, and Ellis had already considered that. But if it didn’t continue to sprout hundred dollar bills? Another valid question.

Because, as he’d already thought, this tree grew money, not tomatoes, and all bets were off.

So Ellis set his resolve (weak as it often is) and went to work. But all that day, as he attempted to explain the intricacies of gerunds and clauses and prepositional phrases to a group of teenage kids who could care less, his mind was never far from the Money Tree.

And when the final bell rang, Ellis was out the door and running down the street before it finished ringing.

When Ellis reached the spot where nature had called to him that morning, his face was purple, and each breath he took seemed to want to tear his lungs to shreds.

At least my fly is zipped this time, he thought with a smile which looked more like a grimace of pain.

As he tried to catch his breath and still his heart, he looked carefully both directions, up and down the road, waiting for the moment when no cars were coming, and certainly no pedestrians, before he left the road.

When he saw his opening, he ran as fast as he could, ignoring the searing pain in his chest, and the resultant reeling turmoil in his stomach.

He was desperately afraid that the tree would just be gone, either because, by some fell magic, it had only appeared there that once, for his benefit, and had moved on to some other place, or some other world; or because somebody else had found it, and successfully transplanted it in their own back yard.

It was those unfounded concerns which caused Ellis to explode in a very unpleasant-sounding cackle when he saw that the Money Tree was still right where it had been that morning, and that, furthermore, it had sprouted a fresh crop of hundred dollar bills. He fell to his knees before the Money Tree, cackling and drooling and on the verge of either fainting or vomiting . . . and he didn’t care.

“Yes!” he yelled through bursts of laughter and ragged gulps of air.

“Yes, yes, YES!!”

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He opened his briefcase and immediately began picking the bills and stuffing them inside . . . but this time, he counted them.

When he had picked the tree bare (all the time, trying to look in every direction at once to make sure there were no interlopers), he had counted forty-two bills. Add that to the eighteen he still had in his pockets from that morning, and that came to six-thousand dollars. Six grand, which had taken him all of about twenty minutes to accrue (even counting the time he had spent pissing on the damn thing, instead of picking its fruit).

At the school that day, he’d made seventy-two dollars before tax.

Today was Friday, and thank God, as they say. He had the whole weekend to figure out how he was going to keep this wonder from any prying eyes (or prying fingers). Either way, he had already decided he would not be returning to work on Monday. No, sir. He had found a new job, one which was infinitely more fulfilling and more rewarding than any he’d ever had.

But Ellis realized he had a problem as soon as he kicked off his shoes at home, and settled down on his couch, TV remote at the ready . . . he couldn’t relax, not when he knew that anybody could be stumbling upon the Money Tree, anybody could be taking what he already believed in his heart was rightfully his.

On the wall above his television, Ellis had hung a Salvador Dali print, the one with the liquid-rubber clocks dangling over tree branches and lying on the ground. Polly had hated it of course. But it was the only thing Ellis had put his foot down about, aside from the milk.

Now, as Ellis sat on his couch, his briefcase open next to him and overflowing with hundred dollar bills, it occurred to him that the painting was surely mocking him. Time was a bitch, a stubborn, old bitch, and how it mocked him!

Did it ever occur to Ellis that there were surely others who knew about the Money Tree, and visited it regularly? No, it did not. He believed in his heart that he was the only person on God’s earth who knew about it, and therefore he had been entrusted the sacred task of protecting it at all costs. If too many people found out about such a thing, complete anarchy could ensue. If too many people realized that they no longer had to force themselves out of bed before the sun five days a week and simmer in the balmy hell of jobs they hate, that they could relax finally and still provide themselves and their families with the things they needed, and the things they wanted . . . well, it couldn’t happen, simple as that. It just couldn’t.

As Ellis sat on his couch, sweating in his cool, air-conditioned house,

100 Beneath The Surface his right hand unconsciously caressing one of the many bills in his briefcase, he made a decision: he would attempt to transplant the Money Tree.

Tonight. He would make it his forever.

That old bitch, Time, continued to remain as stubborn as ever. After an hour of waiting, an hour which seemed to last several days, Ellis was sure he was already too late. Someone had beat him to it. He would arrive only to find a gaping hole in the ground and some severed roots. But he had set his inconsiderable resolve on eight o’ clock. And he would wait. It wouldn’t be full dark by eight, but it would be by the time he reached the Money Tree, walking from his house.

He had tried watching television, but everything seemed to be about money; debt consolidation, mortgage refinancing, game shows . . . so he sat in silence on his couch, already wearing his work gloves, a shovel laid across his lap, a planter bucket on the floor next to him.

And he waited that way, calm on the outside, reeling on the inside, for the next three and a half hours. As soon as the hour hand on his clock reached the eight, and the minute and second hands had tied the race to twelve, he left the house, and didn’t even bother to close the door behind him.

As Ellis power-walked down the street in the dying sunlight, he was too aware of what he must look like with his shovel and planter bucket and gloves . . . in fact, what he looked like was a landscaper at the end of a long, long day. But, since he knew he was up to something, he figured he must look guilty. He felt guilty. He couldn’t quite explain why, but he felt guilty. He wasn’t breaking any laws (unless there were some sort of law about removing plant life from public property, and there probably was, but that might be overlooked in light of the type of plant life being removed).

Still, Ellis barely breathed until he left the paved road and headed into the forest. And he didn’t breath easily until he saw that the Money Tree was still where it had been that afternoon. He also saw, in the almost nonexistent light, that the tree had sprouted another crop. And this time it looked like there might be fifty or sixty bills.

Ellis decided that, before he got to work, risking the life of the very thing he meant to save, he ought to harvest. If he’d thought about that before he’d left his house, he would have brought a bag with him, but he hadn’t thought about it. So he picked them (this time the total came to sixty-six bills, bringing his grand total that day to twelve-thousand, two hundred dollars) and put the bills in the planter bucket, meaning to put the

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tree in on top of them.

By the time Ellis had finished his harvest, it was full dark, but for the light of the sliver of moon hanging in the sky, not visible above the tops of the trees surrounding him.

It was still hot outside, despite the lack of sun, and Ellis was already sweating heavily. He swiped a gloved hand across his forehead, leaving a streak of reddish dirt there, which looked like a bloodstain in the moonlight.

He set the planter bucket aside and picked up his shovel. The diameter of the bucket was about two feet, and its depth was about the same. He estimated as best he could (he was an English teacher after all, and math had never been one of his strong suits) a two-foot diameter around the tree.

He drew a rough circle in the dirt with a gloved finger and then began the dig.

He did not get far before he realized that it was going to be impossible.

He put the tip of the shovel in the dirt, put a foot on the blade for leverage and, as soon as he put his weight down on it, to take his first shovel-full of dirt, the shovel began to thrum as if it were electrified. Before he could let go of the handle, the shovel seemed to explode and he was thrown backward into the dirt, his hands burning and throbbing.

He noticed first that the wooden handle of the shovel had been reduced to splinters, though the metal blade remained in tact, sticking up out of the ground.

Second, he noticed that his burning hands were beginning to feel rather wet and slippery inside his gloves. He took one of the gloves off and started to feel faint at the sight of a great gout of blood draining out of the glove. He took the other glove off, grimacing with pain. Both his hands were dripping blood, though there didn’t seem to be any marks at all on the gloves themselves.

He wiped his hands on his pants, trying not to scream at the shot of pain that went racing up his arms to his brain as he did so, and looked at his hands. In the dim, milky light of the moon, he saw that the word NO had been slashed into each of his palms in ragged, capital letters.

This time he did scream. The sweat on his face seemed to freeze and chill his entire body, and he started to shiver.

A year ago, Polly had gotten it into her head that their daughter should read the Harry Potter series. “It might give her some culture, get her imagination excited,� Polly had said. And she volunteered Ellis to read the books

102 Beneath The Surface aloud to little Pollyanne every night before bed. The girl tired of the story quickly, but Ellis had been hooked and read each one to the end.

In the second book, The Chamber of Secrets, there had been a mysterious diary, in which a piece of a soul belonging to the foe of foes, Lord Voldemort resided. A little girl found the diary, and was possessed by Voldemort. Everything had turned out okay in the end, of course, but the moral of the story had been never to trust a powerful magical object which could think for itself. Good advice, it seemed for witches and wizards in Rowling’s story.

Now it seemed to Ellis that Rowling’s advice was not limited to the realm of fiction. For certainly this tree was a powerful magical object, and clearly it could think for itself. It did not want to be usurped. It refused with that simple negative: NO. And, seeing as the word was carved into Ellis’s hands, he wouldn’t soon forget it.

For a brief moment, Ellis considered running home for a sleeping bag, and camping out next to the Money Tree. One thing stopped him from doing so and it wasn’t the realization that he was quickly becoming obsessive, possibly to the point of lunacy . . . because that realization never hit him. He decided against camping out there because he was now as afraid of the Money Tree as he was awed and lured by it.

Ellis took off his long sleeve shirt, under which he wore a white tank top, and used the metal blade of the shovel to tear it into two pieces, which he tied around his bleeding hands. It wasn’t an easy job. Besides the fact that both his hands were still gouting blood, he was also shaking uncontrollably. On his first attempt to rip the shirt for bandages, he actually put a decent gash in his left forearm with the shovel blade.

It took him almost twenty minutes to bandage his hands and, when he reached the road, cradling the planter full of money in his arms, like a baby, it took him another ten minutes to decide to keep heading home instead of going back to see if the Money Tree had flowered again.

What if it flowers each time you turn your back? What if there’s already another seventy or eighty bills dangling from the tree, waiting to be picked?

In the end, though, Ellis’s new fear of his wonderful discovery (not to mention the burning pain in his hands) got him headed home, where he would disinfect his wounded hands, wrap them in gauze and try to get some sleep.

He would visit the Money Tree again first thing in the morning, and

Beneath The Surface 103 after that he thought he may even spend some of that money.

That night sleep did not come easy for Ellis. He lay awake until after he heard the clock in the living room strike four, and when he fell asleep, it was a restless, uneasy sleep, punctuated by awful dreams in which he went back to the Money Tree in the small hours, and when he got there he saw that the tree had grown tall and strong. But instead of hundred dollar bills dangling from its branches, there were human heads, fresh blood dripping from the severed necks, their tongues lolling from their purple lips, their eyes wild, frightened, and each one with a bloody, ragged word carved in its forehead. In the dream, that word was YES. Just before Ellis woke, he realized that he recognized all of the faces . . . because they were all his, frozen in his last moment of unimaginable agony.

Despite the awful dream (which of course began to seem less disturbing when he awoke in his bedroom, under the glow of the digital clock on the nightstand), Ellis got out of bed as soon as he awoke, put on his shoes—he had gone to bed fully clothed—grabbed a plastic trash bag from under the sink, stuffed his $12,200 dollars inside and was on the road by six-thirty.

His plan was to pick whatever the tree had sprouted since the night before and buy the first thing most people would buy after receiving a large sum of money . . . a new car. It wasn’t as if it would be an unnecessary purchase, either; Polly had taken his car.

This morning, it did not occur to Ellis that he may look a tad suspicious, and that was ironic because this morning he certainly did look suspicious.

He was unshaven, his hair was filthy and in a serious state of disarray from tossing and turning in his dreams, his forehead still bore the reddish dirt mark he’d left the night before after trying to wipe the sweat from his face with his dirty glove, the gauze he had wrapped his hands with had several red flowers blooming on them from fresh blood and he was carrying a trash bag filled with hundred dollar bills.

And he was talking to himself.

Well, singing, actually. As he stepped off the road (fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it—unnoticed by any law enforcement officials), he was singing tunelessly in a thick whisper, to the tune of Over The River And Through The Woods: over the tulips, across the grass . . . soon I’m gonna be RICH! He was still singing even as he knelt in front of the Money Tree, the trash bag open between his legs, when he realized that there wasn’t a single bill growing from its branches. He knelt there anyway for several minutes, his mind blank, perhaps hoping he was imagining things. When

104 Beneath The Surface he allowed himself to believe that the tree was indeed bare, he got angry.

“EEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!” he screamed as he stood.

His anger was only exacerbated by his irrational desire to lash out at the Money Tree, to begin tearing at its leaves and branches; even in his excited state he thought that would be a very bad idea . . . the tree would probably kill him for it.

He began kicking at the dirt, sending little rocks and branches flying in all directions, and when his raging foot happened upon a rock that was too big to be kicked aside, he screamed again, part anger still, but part pain, too.

He whirled around in an almost laughable parody of a pirouette, and faced the Money Tree.

“Pay me!” he yelled at it. “Pay me! PAY ME!!”

When he stopped yelling and took some time to think, he realized there could be only one reason the tree was bare. Someone else knew about it, and had beat him here. Well, he’d just have to be more careful. Visit more often. Stay longer. Maybe even arm himself.

He would still go buy his car. His good credit and a twelve-thousand dollar down payment should get him whatever he fancied. But after that, he’d be right back here. Whoever it was who thought they could take what wasn’t theirs to take would not get another chance. Ellis would make sure of that.

If Ellis had realized that he was going insane, he might have sought help and things might have gone differently. But then again, if everybody who began sliding down that rocky slope in their minds realized what was happening before it was too late, this world would be a very different place . . . perhaps even a less interesting place.

As Ellis stood at the entrance to the GMC dealership, looking no more sane than he actually was, his garbage bag full of cash slung over his shoulder, the gauze on his hands a little redder, another thought occurred to him. This new brainstorm had nothing to do with the fact that, if he actually walked onto the lot and tried to purchase the Hummer he was planning on purchasing, the people would be more likely to call the police than to sell him a car.

What if the tree hadn’t been picked bare by anybody? What if it just refused to flower? What if he was being punished for his attempt to uproot it? What if (and oh God, what a terrible thought this was) it never flowered again?

Ellis was unaware that he was shaking his head back and forth, and

Beneath The Surface 105 muttering under his breath, “no . . . no.”

Just like that, he knew it would be a horribly reckless idea to spend all the money he’d picked, before he was sure the Money Tree would continue to bear fruit. So, instead of trying to buy himself a brand new Hummer (which of course he never would have succeeded at anyway), he set off at a run, right back to the Money Tree.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Ellis crooned, as he gently caressed the leaves and branches of the Money Tree which still had not sprouted a new crop.

“Never again. Never, I promise. My love. My precious.”

Ellis lay down next to the Money Tree, and fell asleep with one hand grasping the trunk of the tree, and he did not wake up until almost eight o’ clock that night.

And he awoke to find that the Money Tree had finally sprouted a new set of bills. He picked them all (there were eighty-three of them) and stuffed them into his trash bag, doing the math in his head and coming up with $20,500. As he picked, he repeated two words over and over again in an ecstatic whisper: thank you.

He would sleep here tonight, that’s what he’d do. He felt certain that he could make it home and back before the tree sprouted again.

“I’ll be right back, darling,” he said to the tree. And as he left he whispered three words he hadn’t even spoken to his own wife for almost eighteen years: “I love you.”

When Ellis reached his house he bolted inside, locked the door and made for the hall closet where he had a big, down sleeping bag. He set the garbage bag down and opened the closet door, but before he reached for the sleeping bag he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror which hung on the inside of the door (a strange place for a mirror, but its odd placement is pivotal in this story).

The sight scared Ellis badly. It scared him because he did not recognize the man staring back at him. He had, in fact, never seen this man before in his life.

This man’s hair was totally gray (except where it was clotted with dirt) and Ellis, while he was getting on in years (he was rapidly approaching his fifties) had always prided himself on his full head of jet-black hair.

More importantly, though, this mirror man was clearly insane. His unblinking eyes bugged and glittered violently, though the left one ticked every so often as if it were trying to blink. And this man was smiling, a wide, nasty smile which showed far too many teeth.

Ellis screamed, he couldn’t help it, and the mirror man screamed too,

106 Beneath The Surface but the smile never faltered a bit.

Ellis did not believe that the man in the mirror was anybody but himself.

But the sight of this new him caused a major change in his behavior.

He was still insane (and would remain that way until the end of his days), but his insanity took a different direction.

He did not grab his sleeping bag. Instead, he only grabbed his garbage bag of cash, and a box of matches.

He was out the door and down his driveway when he turned around and went back to the house. He went to the kitchen, grabbed the biggest knife he had and headed back out the door.

As he walked back to the Money Tree (and yes, this time he walked quite calmly instead of running) he looked every bit as suspicious as he had that morning, and more suspicious, clutching a large knife in his bloody hand.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, you can decide that for yourself), he again remained unnoticed by anyone.

When Ellis reached the Money Tree, he saw that there were probably more than a hundred bills hanging from its branches.

This time he did not pick them.

He was whistling Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong again, tunelessly, but the words to the song had changed just a little in his head: been a whole lot happier since the tree is gone . . .

The night was very dark, the moon tucked away behind a thick sheet of cloud, and that was good; maybe no one would notice the smoke curling into the sky until Ellis was long gone.

His hands still burned and throbbed under his makeshift bandages, and the pain seemed to be traveling slowly up his arms to his shoulders. A saner man might have worried that he had blood poisoning. The bandages were almost completely soaked through with blood, now; a saner man might have wondered why the wounds hadn’t stopped bleeding after more than twenty-four hours.

Ellis began whistling a different tune (Whistle While You Work) as he grabbed the cash out of his garbage bag, crumpling it up and laying it around the base of the Money Tree. A saner man might have remembered the dire warning the Money Tree had given him when he’d tried to uproot it, but Ellis only whistled, and worked.

It did not take long to build a pyramid of hundred dollar bills around the tree. When he was done he finally did stop for a moment, though not to think. A saner man might have been wondering if this really was the best course of action. But Ellis was only listening to a new voice which had

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sprouted up inside his head.

If you go through with this, I’ll kill you.

A saner man probably would have realized that the voice in his head was actually someone else’s voice, spoken quietly in the night, just a few feet behind him.

Ellis might be insane, but he had set his resolve and no ghost in his head was going to change his mind.

Ellis took the empty garbage bag and draped it over the Money Tree, the way the axeman covered the condemned man’s head before the execution.

He took the box of matches from his back pocket and without hesitation, he struck one and touched it to the bottom of the pile of bills. The sound of the match head scraping across the rough surface of the box masked the sound of a twig breaking behind Ellis, as the owner of the voice Ellis had thought was in his head, snuck up behind him.

The fire bloomed quickly, like a flower in time-lapse photography.

Ellis began to smile widely as the flames waxed and waned, danced and darkled.

Just when Ellis was really starting to enjoy the spectacle, his head seemed to explode with pain and the world seemed to grow a little dim as he fell to the ground. When he landed, his head cleared a little and he saw that he was being straddled by a startling-looking man. As the man’s hands closed around Ellis’s neck and began to squeeze, Ellis recognized him.

It was the Mirror Man, the one he’d seen staring back at him from the mirror in his own house. This realization comforted Ellis, despite the fact that he was being slowly choked to death. He was certain now that it was the man in the mirror who was insane, not him.

Ellis most certainly was insane; but there was a resemblance between the two men; they both sported a head full of wild, gray hair, and both of them had two wide, glittering eyes bugging from their heads . . . and both of them had bloody, makeshift bandages wrapped around both hands.

In fact, the bandages (or, rather, the wounds beneath them) were surely the reason the man hadn’t been able to choke Ellis to the point of unconsciousness yet. As the man choked Ellis, he began to scream at him.

“TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK!! TAKE IT BACK!!!!”

“You’re insane,” Ellis said to the man who was choking him, but since Ellis’s windpipe was being constricted it sounded more like, “yig igsake.”

The thing which drove that point home for Ellis was the mad smile on the man’s face. Ellis didn’t realize that he had a very similar smile on his own

108 Beneath The Surface mug.

The flames meanwhile, continued to grow, feeding on the oxygen-rich air the way a spider might feed on a big, fat housefly . . . which is to say, greedily. The flames had reached the plastic garbage bag and it began to curl and squirm, emitting an ugly black smoke.

When the flames got through the plastic bag and began feeding on the leaves of the Money Tree, there was a popping sound, which was probably the result of a slightly flammable sap in the leaves, and that sound momentarily distracted the man who was choking Ellis.

The man’s grip on Ellis’s neck faltered a little as he turned his head to look at the tree.

Still smiling his insane smile, the man screamed, “NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!”

Ellis took full advantage of this reprieve. He shifted slightly to the left, and removed the kitchen knife he’d put in the right back pocket of his khakis, wincing as he did so—when he’d fallen the knife had dug into his meaty buttock.

Ellis wrapped both hands around the handle of the knife and drove the blade into the man’s stomach, just below his ribs. The man was still screaming his pleading negative, and it was cut short in an unpleasant gurgling noise as the knife went in.

“OOOOOOOOOOOOeeegghghh.”

Ellis felt the man’s blood cover his hands and forearms in a warm blanket. The man slumped to the side, and Ellis crawled out from under him. The man was staring at the knife, which was still protruding from his stomach, swaying sickeningly back and forth . . . the man, however, was still smiling.

Ellis walked around, behind the man and grabbed him under his armpits as if he were going to help the man to his feet. Instead of helping him to his feet, Ellis dragged him backward, grunting with the effort it took—the man was quite a bit larger than Ellis—and threw the man on the fire.

His hair caught first. Then his shirt. Ellis watched for a minute or two.

Eventually, the heat began to contort the man’s face, his lips began to peel back, and Ellis thought that if there was still a skeleton left when the fire burned out, it would look like it were smiling.

Ellis walked back to his house, treading lightly on his right side, the side with the injured buttock. He did not worry that he might be caught and arrested for murder. He did not fret that he’d just set over twenty-thousand dollars on fire. He did not fret about what the kids at school might think of

Beneath The Surface 109 his bloody hands when he returned on Monday (which he fully intended to do).

He only limped along in the dark, smelling of blood and smoke, whistling tunelessly . . . this time the song was Man In The Mirror.

The morning dawned cool and breezy. The weather people promised rain to a world full of people who were still sane enough to care about such things. The city of Milford, Massachusetts was just waking up, saying hello to the world. In every house there was the sound of slippered feet on wood floors, bacon sizzling in frying pans, coffee pots gurgling and bubbling. Those who had the paper delivered were reading the third missing persons story in less than two months. The first man to go missing was a father of three, who worked in the marketing department of the GM dealership. The second missing person was a girl of nineteen who attended the university in Boston, and who was majoring in Psychology.

The third was a construction worker named William Storey, who had left home looking “harried and worrisome,” according to his wife, only the night before. In the paper, William’s wife is quoted, saying, “he just ran right out the door without saying a word to anybody. I called after him as he ran down the street, asked where he was going. His last word to me, as he ran away, was ‘tree.’”

In the forest, just north of the Charles River, about twenty yards from the road, there was a blackened patch of ground, and in the midst of it was a tiny seedling, vibrant green against the black earth, growing right through the eye socket of the charred remains of a human skull. The skull, like all skulls, looked as if it were smiling.

Justin McMahon has made his living playing music for the last five years, and has been writing and submitting short fiction for the last year and a half. “The Money Tree” is the first of Justin’s stories to make it past the publisher’s desk and into the hands of the public. He lives in Reno, NV with his dog, his guitar, his books and his word processor . . . and many other things of much less importance. © 2007, Justin McMahon

110 Beneath The Surface

Muló

by Efraim Z. Graves Maspeth, Queens, New York, June 15, 1939 Dooriya

I

can hear him. The Messenger is here! Death sends his creatures to me as a punishment for our sins. I, Dooriya Patin, cursed by the murder of my husband on a full moon night, when I found him sleeping with that whore, Gitana Wantipo. Now I have his power, and I will never give it up! I am the whisperer of the Muló, and the justice of his majesty shall feast on the treachery of the sinful among us!

I walk to the window, kick the dog, curse the night. I can see him in the Tree of the Departed, where those New York vigilantes, who said he had murdered a young white woman at the circus, hanged our first chief, Bavol Radconi. But I saw her pale body, as he brought her to me on that night. It was raining, and his dark eyes had shown more fear than I have ever seen in a man before. ‘Dooriya, what am I to do? My bear, Sasha, has mauled this girl to death! She wanted to be in the act, but Sasha turned into a demon tonight. He picked up her tiny body and crushed it like a spawning salmon.’

I tried to fix him a potion to ward off the curse of this woman’s death,

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but it did not prevent the revenge of her father. They came with clubs, guns and knives. It was a night of horror untold in our short history in this new country, the United States of America. The newspaper said Chief Radconi had raped and mutilated this girl, the daughter of a wealthy banker on Manhattan. The police never searched for the men who murdered Chief Radconi, and soon after, when I heard the call of the owl — just like tonight — I brought the Muló to life once more! Depression followed the death of our chief, and they are now living in hard times, just as we are.

And the murderers? The Muló found each one, and exacted revenge for the Roma. Who is it that needs revenge? Whose death will be avenged?

Listen! He calls. Who-who-ah-whoo, who-ah-whoo! *** Manhattan Island, New York, June 16, 1939 Chaine The professor stands at the head of the class and looks right at him. He can tell it is going to be he who is called upon to answer this question, as Mueller’s left forefinger has pushed his spectacles down to the end of his nose, and his beady, bloodshot eyes peer behind their lenses to focus on his head.

They are studying the culture of the Hindu Harijan, or Untouchable caste, and this teacher-from-hell knows he, Chaine Radconi, is a Gypsy.

Gypsies are originally from India, and so, Anthropology 205, at City College of New York, has become Chaine’s personal torment, with Professor Max L. Mueller as his sadistic master.

“We all know about the invasion of the white European tribes into the Indus Valley of the dark-skinned Dravidian people, and how these people were all forced to flee, among them the Gypsy flock of wanderers. Mister Radconi, as you and your people were products of this migration, how do you explain the dreaded caste system?”

Chaine knows he is being baited. The stupid textbook they use speaks of the Aryan Invasion in 1500 B.C., and then another invasion of the darkskinned people in 500 A.D., when the “dark-skinned” caste-believers took over again. Chaine believes it is simply a device to pave the way for British colonialism in the twentieth century. As a scholar, Chaine has been reading other texts to prove this AIT (Aryan Invasion Theory) wrong. Mueller is a German-American, and he is closely following the rising power of the

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Nazis in his fatherland. These white “Aryans” are always looking for a way to conquer us, Chaine thinks, until he feels Mueller standing beside him.

“Mister Radconi! Are you going to bless us with your considered opinion?”

Chaine stands up. He clears his throat, hitches-up his worn pants, and stares directly into the smaller man’s close-set, steel blue eyes. “I believe what’s in our book is the product of Christian missionaries who had no profitable reason to correctly interpret the Hindu people’s history, just as they have misrepresented the American Native tribes in this country. Why would they concoct such a theory as a white invasion? Look to yourself, Professor.” *** There is a hush in the class. They sense what is coming. It has been building for weeks. The only student who is feeling compassion for Chaine is a tall Negro woman named Audrey, who lives in Harlem, but she knows she dare not jeopardize her standing in the class by speaking up for the Gypsy. India, it seems, is not the only country to have a caste system.

She is a member of the only race who can consider itself a step-above the Gypsies.

Mueller puts his hands on his hips and smiles. “Aha! The truth comes out at last. How dare you speak against the people who have given you a home, you ungrateful scalawag! What do your people have? Are you not Untouchables? Gypsies have no political or military strength, and no geographical territory with which they can identify. Nor have they a history, or a religion, or a language which is familiar to those around them. Your people are steeped in superstition, thievery, and black magic. How dare you speak for others! You will never pass this course, young man, and you will never be part of this society!” *** Harlem, New York, June 17, 1939 The steady stream of be-bop jazz pours over their bodies as they sit inside a booth in the dark at the “Bunny-Hop Club,” across the street from the Studio Museum on 125th Street. The proprietor, Benny Jubilee, allows patrons to get high on ganja in the back room, and that’s where Chaine and

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Audrey have been for several minutes. Now, after they have grooved their way back to their table, they are in a much better, although slightly altered, mood than they had been when the first came in.

Chaine enjoys the way this woman looks. She is from the Caribbean, and her long lashes cover her brown eyes in a tropical paradise, the way palm fronds cover a sensuous coconut tree. When he tells her he is the chief of his tribe, she looks impressed, even though they both are making their slow way up the caste system of America. However, under the influence of the hemp, and feeling a bit nostalgic for the magic ways of their ancestors, they begin a conversation that will change their lives forever.

“Audrey, I want you to help me show this Nazi that our magic is real. He was right about that, you know, about the power of the Muló. Our magic has kept our people protected for thousands of years. Maybe we are a pariah to others, but we remain strict in our beliefs. We are pure in our bodies, we are honest to those who are honest with us, and we remain strong because of our magic.”

“All right, Chaine, honey. I’ll help you. Just tell me what I must do.”

She touches his arm, and their eyes meet in a union of a different kind of magic, the enchantment of new love found. *** Manhattan, New York, June 18, 1939 Mueller Herr Hitler and his Nazi troops! He is making news around the world.

Mien Kampf is a work of genius! What better way to explain the pollution of our shores by these derelict races? This is why our country has become so soft and weak. We let them breed like vermin in our midst. It won’t be long before we come to power in this country, and I won’t have to keep up this charade of objective reason. I know the truth, and just as he has stated, ‘The Aryan Brotherhood will set us all free!’

But, what’s this? A note from a student. Audrey Jubilee. The whore wants to see me at her father’s tavern in Harlem. She says she enjoyed how I made a fool of the crazy Gypsy in class. She says she will play on my organ like a sex-crazed monkey! Oh, why not? They are made for sex, these black Pariahs. I will show her what a real ubermensch is made from!

114 Beneath The Surface *** Harlem, New York, June 19, 1939 Mueller Lying across the hotel room bed, his body is prepared for sex with the black bitch, Audrey. As he waits, his breath becomes more rapid, and the blossoming of his manhood rises in the expectation of those full lips around his . . . when . . . Professor Mueller sees the door open a crack . . . then he sees the old woman. She is wearing a red kerchief, gold-hoop earrings, and she has few teeth, but as she walks inside the room, the air becomes colder, or so he believes, and his manhood begins to shrink.

“Gitano in Spanish, Gyphtos in Greek, and Gjupci in Macedonian. This term perpetuates the misconception that we originated in Egypt. Roma are also called Zigeuner in German, Tsigani in Russian, Zingari in Italian, and Tigani in Romanian. These names are variants of the Greek word Athinganoi, meaning ‘don’t touch.’”

She speaks to him, but for what reason? Is she here to plead that Gypsy Chaine’s case? If so, she is going to leave at once.

“Do you know how we communicate, Herr Professor? We know when someone is ill because of our vurma, secret spots around the world where we meet to hear the information of pending death, or pending birth, or . . . pending murder.”

“Murder? What the hell are you talking about, old woman?”

Dooriya grins then, and she pulls open a box at her feet. The greathorned messenger is out and sits on her arm, staring at them both like a true professor of wisdom. “I know you have seven children, Herr Professor. And, do you know that we Gypsies are known to steal children? We need them for our animal acts and our shows of magical wonder!”

He feels a cold chill run up his spine. “Get out of here! Out, you crazy woman!”

“If our Chief Chaine Radconi is not reinstated in your class, then your children will be stolen wherever they are, and they will join us on our merry way! Even so, my friend, you will forever be an untouchable!” *** Manhattan, New York, June 20, 1939 Chaine

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Professor Mueller enters. His eyes are frantic as they search the students’ faces, as if they contain some hidden repulsion. He tiptoes, between the rows of students, with his hands raised high over his head. I extend my index finger out . . . there!

Max Mueller begins to scream, as if my touch is burning his very soul.

He falls to the ground, writhing in agony, and the class begins to laugh, and I look over at my lover, and we smile our kindred beam of the mysterious.

James Musgrave (Efraim Z. Graves) is an author and college educator in San Diego, California. His recent non-fiction title, The Digital Scribe: a Writer’s Guide to Electronic Media has been internationally published.

He has a M.A. degree in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. He has published short fiction in many literary journals, including: San Diego Writer’s Monthly, FirstDraft, Beneath the Surface Horror Story Anthology, Sniplits Audio Short Stories to Go, Back Channels, Pacific Review, California Quarterly and Cowles Mountain Journal. He has also been published at CIC Publishers with four novels: Sins of Darkness, Russian Wolves, Iron Maiden and Lucifer’s Wedding and a collection of short fiction, The President’s Parasite and Other Stories. © 2007 James Musgrave

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Kiss of Life

by Marie Brennan

I

n faraway lands, the tale is a romantic one. She sleeps in her tower, in the castle surrounded by thorns, awaiting a prince who is brave and true of heart, for only the kiss of such a man will end her slumber and bring her back to life. She has waited for many centuries, they say, and many princes have gone, fighting their way through the dark wood and climbing the thousand stairs to the tower room, but none have been pure and noble enough to wake her.

Some tellers say that, distraught by their failure and this judgment of their character, the princes fling themselves from the tower window and fall to their deaths below.

If that were true, the courtyard of the sleeping castle would be littered with bones.

Closer to home, the stories change. The princes, they say, do not die of broken hearts and wounded pride. They do not reach the tower room at all. Long before they have a chance to lay their mouths against the perfect rosebud lips, long before they catch sight of the graceful, slender hands, they fall prey to the creatures that wait beneath the thorny boughs of the wood. And if they survive their trials there, then they meet their ends at the hands (or claws, or jaws) of the beings that walk the halls of the dark-

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ened keep, more foul by far than their forest-dwelling kin. And if they win their way past these as well, they perish in battle against the guardian who stands on the stairs of the tower — but most never make it that far. The curse on the castle and its sleeping resident was placed by a powerful, jealous sorceress (or fairy, or stepmother-queen), and she vowed, as she was slain by knights, that her victim should never wake; and her blood flowed out and became the monsters of the wood and the hall, and her malevolent spirit the guardian on the stairs.

In the village that once served the keep, they tell another tale, and that is the darkest of all.

They tell their tale to any who pass through, but most princes and knights and wandering adventurers dismiss their words as the superstitions of credulous peasants (forgetting that their own peasants’ tales set them on their road to begin with), or else assume that the villagers do not want the curse lifted — for then they would lose the one thing that distinguishes their collection of squalid hovels from the thousand others like it.

The idealistic young prince who approaches the wood now never even had the opportunity to disregard the peasants’ tales, for he took a vow, when he departed on his quest, to speak with no one until his task was done. A foolish vow, which lengthened his road by months and leagues; he searched in many wrong places, all unknowing, before finding his way here. He is not quite so young now, and his idealism has tarnished along the way. But at last he has found the wood, and beyond it lies the castle, and in the castle’s topmost tower sleeps the lady whom he seeks.

He rides into the wood, his sword unsheathed.

The impassable forest of thorns disappoints him; it is dark and overgrown, to be sure, and thickly populated with briars, but the spines on these are not the sword-length blades he had been led to expect. He makes his way through with no more difficulty than an ordinary tangled forest might give him, and sees no horrors along the way. There is no sign, in all the wood, of any prince or knight slain here before him.

The villagers go blackberrying in the wood every year; they could have told him it was safe.

On the other side of the wood he finds the castle, walls cloaked in ivy, gate hanging open. Sword still in hand, the prince steps through.

The courtyard stones are cracked by frost, and grass has grown between them, but there are no scattered bones, no fallen blades, left by despairing suitors. Above stands the tower, the tiny panes of its window glinting in the light — shut against the elements, not left open by one leaping to his

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death.

The villagers never venture as far as this, but they know the courtyard is clear.

The great door of the keep also stands open, and dead leaves have drifted into the hall. They crunch dryly under the prince’s boots as he walks in, the only sound he can hear. The light is failing now, the day having passed while he navigated the wood, and so he pauses to work flint and steel, until a spark catches in the torch he brought with him — he knew there would be darkness. By the torch’s flickering light, he searches the corners for threats, but finds nothing.

The villagers could have told him that.

He begins to question this all as he looks for the stairs. Where have all the others gone? Is it mere fiction, that men have come here before him?

Could it be he is the first? All the stories agree that the questors have never returned, but perhaps they never reached this place at all. Perhaps they perished far from here; the road is, after all, dangerous. Or perhaps they came, failed to wake the sleeper, and refused to return home with their shame.

Perhaps there is no sleeper.

But he never asked the villagers for answers.

He finds the stairs and climbs, half-wondering if there is a guardian lurking here who will devour him, bones and boots and all, half-wondering if the tower room will be empty when he arrives.

Nothing meets him on the stairs.

As he opens the heavy door at the top of the stairs, he is of two minds.

One envisions triumph and fame, the tale of how a youngest son, lacking any hope of inheritance at home, won a beautiful princess and restored her castle— their castle— to its former glory. The other fears mockery, the jeers of those around him when they learn he spent years on a foolish, pointless quest.

All thought vanishes when he opens the door.

The dusty, half-rotted curtains around the bed stir slightly as the air is disturbed. The prince scarcely sees them, eyes fixed instead on the figure lying atop the mouldering coverlet, hands neatly clasped across her breast.

Amidst the decay, her hair shines like incorruptible gold. Her long lashes lie against her cheeks, hinting at the beauty they hide, and her perfect rosebud lips await his gentle kiss.

There is a sleeper, and there is a curse — and the villagers know well the nature of both.

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The prince drops his torch to the floor, where it dies swiftly, unnaturally.

In the sudden gloom, he walks toward her, boots automatically lifting over the debris that blocks his way. He spares no thought for the debris; all his attention is fixed on her. She is a beauty beyond compare, and his skin aches, as though too small to contain his adoration. Trembling in anticipation of the sight of her eyes, he bends over and gives her the kiss of life.

An instant later, he stumbles backward, no longer recognizable as the idealistic young prince who set out on a noble quest, nor even as the older, more travel-weary prince who climbed the tower stairs. He is scarcely recognizable as human. His skin has shrunk tight against his bones and his muscles have withered away; he collapses to the ground, a skeletal, desiccated thing, dying among the scattered bones and rusted blades of all the other brave young men the villagers could not persuade or prevent from coming to this tower.

The sleeper sighs once, but does not wake.

The curse still holds, for which the villagers give thanks every morning.

Her prison of sleep still contains her. But one day it will fail; one day, she will absorb enough life from others to open her terrible eyes, to rise from her bed and walk again. On that day, the skies will darken, and she will come forth from the castle once more, sweeping the bones of her suitors before her, bestowing her ravenous kiss on all who cannot flee her path.

But that day is not today. For now, she sleeps, waiting for her next kiss.

Marie Brennan holds a joint B.A. in anthropology (archaeology) and folklore & mythology from Harvard University. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology and folklore. She’s been writing fantasy since she was nine or ten years old, and blames this fact on Diana Wynne Jones.

Her novels include Doppelganger, Warrior and Witch (both from Warner Books), Midnight Never Come (forthcoming from Orbit Books, June 2008), and an untitled Victorian sequel (forthcoming from Orbit Books).

Her short stories have been published in numerous speculative fiction magazines such as Aberrant Dreams, Talebones, and Fictitious Force. Š 2007 Marie Brennan

120 Beneath The Surface

The Relic: Father Santiago’s Bone

S

by Angeline Hawkes

ophia heard her eighteen-year-old daughter’s screams echoing through the putrid dungeon. “What are they doing to her? Filthy swine! She’s innocent, I tell you! Innocent!” Sophia screamed.

“She’s just a child!”

“Not anymore, Senora.” The jailer laughed. The door swung open, revealing the chamber where her daughter lay bound, arms and legs apart, to four posts in the ground. Four men waited their turn to rape her. They were disgusting men, pockmarked and filthy, probably chosen for the most hideous impact they could make upon the poor girl.

“Pigs! Bastards! Get off of her!” Sophia shouted.

“Mama!” Maria screamed. The door swung shut again with a loud iron clang that sent chills over Sophia’s flesh.

Sophia slumped in her chains weeping. “She’s innocent! Innocent!” Her jailer only laughed. Sophia could no longer stand. Her feet were crushed, her face battered, bruised and swollen beyond recognition. Her teeth were shattered – the ones they hadn’t extracted. But, nothing seared her heart like the cries of her child. Those few seconds of her daughter’s cries would

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haunt her for eternity.

Witches, the Father said they were. He said he’d found physical evidence— marks— and said that she had confessed. Of course she had confessed! She would’ve confessed to anything to save her daughter. They promised Maria could go free. Promised her that she was the one they wanted, not her child. She was the one that the villagers were concerned about. Confess, they said, and Maria can go home tonight. They lied. Her daughter was still being tortured. Her daughter was still being beaten and used in unimaginable ways by disgusting animals that had no morals and cared not if a woman be witch or nun. All they cared about were the primal callings of their groin. What more did they want? What more could she give them? She knew she was a dead woman. All the court needed was the word of Father Cyril to pass the sentence upon her for witchcraft. Why wouldn’t they just let her daughter go? Maria had no part in any of her activities. Maria’s only crime was having her for a mother.

The four men emerged from the room laughing. Sophia’s jailer watched them go. The look on his face was neither compassionate nor understanding. “I’ll bring you the girl,” he said, not out of compassion, but out of a sick sense of wanting to watch Sophia’s heart break at the sight of her daughter. Sophia waited as he dragged Maria from the room — bruised, bloodied, and naked. Maria clung to her mother, weeping loudly. The jailer tossed a rough shift at Maria and she tugged it over her head quickly, ashamed and humiliated.

Maria said nothing. There was nothing to say. She had cried. She had screamed. All of her words failed to help. She knew her mother worked in herbs and potions and often cast spells and curses for people who sought her assistance. She knew her mother fell into the “witch” category of Father Cyril de Santiago’s Inquisitors. She knew her mother had confessed to save her from their evil clutches and tortures. She also knew that her mother had been lied to by holy men who claimed to represent the almighty God. Maria knew that she’d die with her mother.

“Mama?” Maria asked after she’d grown weary from crying. “Mama?

Do you know any spells to stop the pain of the fire?” She looked into her mother’s eyes, barely visible beneath their blue, swollen lids.

“No, little one. I don’t. If I did, I’d use all of my skills to protect you from the pain.” Sophia sighed sorrowfully. “But, I don’t have a spell to protect one from fire.”

Maria nodded her head. She knew that, she just had to ask. “When do you think this will end?”

122 Beneath The Surface “I don’t know. Pray that it’ll be soon, or they’ll kill me before they get the chance to burn me alive. They’d hate that now wouldn’t they? Fat buggers.”

Maria began to cry again. “Oh, my bonita Mama.” She stroked her mother’s blood-encrusted hair, the matted mess stuck to Sophia’s open wounds on her face.

“Don’t cry, child. I’m what they say I am, though I see no bad in it, nor harm. My ways are old ways— ancient. I’ve helped many people and I feel no guilt for it,” Sophia said. “These pigs, these priests, they’re the bad ones— evil— they should burn in the fires of Hell.” Sophia spit the words and bloody spittle flecked her chin. “I make potions to ease a woman’s pain in childbirth, these repulsive priests allow a child to be raped! And they say I’m the evil one!”

Tears welled in Maria’s eyes. She knew her mother wasn’t evil. The true evil lay with these misguided men who abused their power.

Days passed as they languished in their prison, until; finally, at last, as expected, a guard came and read the sentence. Sophia and Maria were condemned as witches and would be burned at the stake. Their ashes to be scattered in the wind over unhallowed ground. Maria wept. Sophia seethed, forcing herself to remain calm lest she bring more torment to her precious child.

The appointed time arrived. Their hair was chopped short and they were dragged to the stake, each one tied on one side in the middle of the courtyard. Father Cyril de Santiago stood before them. Sophia could see his eyes blazing hatred beneath fat, drooping lids, his puffy, grotesquely fat face smiling.

The heap of bramble and branches, hay and straw, were lit. The tongues of fire clawed and consumed the fuel offered. Sophia looked into the crowd and saw the faces of her enemies – and the faces of her friends. She also saw those women who worked alongside her in the ancient arts and saw them silent and unmoving – but telling her with their eyes that they were joined as one to give her strength. She’d need strength to do what she planned in her last moments on this earth.

Sophia smiled. She started to untie her ropes little by little. “Maria?” she called to her daughter over the flames.

A weeping Maria answered, “Si, Mama?”

“Help me untie my ropes. I’ve one last gift to give to our murderers.”

Sophia continued to tug, yank and pull at her ropes. Maria struggled with the knots, until Sophia felt the frayed strands fall from her wrists. She

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remained in her bound position. The flames were licking at their legs, the screams of her child piercing her heart like no other pain could. Heat— pain— she smelled the stench of her own flesh burning and fought against the all-consuming agony.

“Father?” she called.

Father Cyril looked at her, hoping for— hoping for what? Sophia wondered what he could hope for— he already had her confession.

“I cannot hear you witch, speak louder!”

“Come closer, good Father. My voice fails me!”

He seemed to laugh, but holding his robes close, came as near as the flames would allow. Sophia felt herself growing weaker, but garnered the last of her strength. She smiled at the fat priest and at once lunged forward, dragging him into the full blaze— his swirling priestly vestments catching fire instantly, causing him to shriek like a stuck pig.

Sophia held him around the throat. She threw back her head and bellowed, “Spirits of the Realm! Spirits of the Air! Hear me! Hear my prayer!

I curse this man who burns the innocent! I curse this man to his very bones! Let him that is of the church who touches anything of this man, be it property, flesh, or bones— let that man feel the fires of this charade— let them feel the flames that consume my child on this day!”

She choked the priest until his eyes bugged. Suddenly, hands yanked him from the fire, people shouted and extinguished him, and carried him off.

Someone ran a sword through Sophia’s heart, and her head fell to her chest as Maria’s screams continued to rise above the orange inferno.

Father Cyril de Santiago died within the hour. *** The Reliquary curator finished reading a toned-down version of the story from the tour brochure. “Father Cyril de Santiago is considered a martyr. He died serving the church in the mission to cleanse the world of heretics and those who dabbled in the black arts in the year of 1478.” She brought out a small, hinged gold box from behind the cupboard door. “Father Cyril de Santiago’s bones are still cursed. We have in our possession one of Father Santiago’s bones. A partial femur. It survived two church fires over the centuries and is charred, but the relic is still able to help those who suffer.”

The curator cleared her throat. “We ask that anyone connected to the

124 Beneath The Surface church in any capacity, please do not touch the relic. If you attended Catholic school as a child, or a Catholic university, we ask that you do not touch the relic. We’re unsure as to what extent the curse reaches. The heretic who cursed the bone was vague in this respect.” The curator smiled.

“Yeah, since she was busy burning at the stake, I’m sure she didn’t have time for lengthy definitions,” someone sarcastically muttered in the crowd.

The curator frowned.

“The curse is very real. We rarely take this relic from its box, but since you’re part of a special group, you’ve been promised access to several relics otherwise off limits to the general public. Please say your prayer, ask for your blessing, lightly touch the relic, and proceed to the left so that those behind you may also offer their prayers.”

The line proceeded slowly. The curator’s cell phone rang. She apologized and left the group for the privacy of a small room. The door closed.

One by one the group passed the relic until the last visitor was gone. The charred femur of Father Cyril de Santiago sat in the blood red velvet-lined box, on the table in the center of the room.

Brother Franco, new to the Reliquary, crossed the room to lock the open relic cupboards. Somewhat surprised, he noticed the relic in the box, left unattended on the table in the dimly lit room.

“Who left this out?” he whispered, lifting the box from the table.

The curator came in, loudly closing the door behind her. It echoed in the empty, spacious building.

Hearing the noise, Brother Franco jumped, lost his grip on the ornate box and sent it dashing to the ground. In mid-air, he snatched the bone from certain destruction.

“No!” The curator threw her hands to her face and screamed.

Brother Franco held the charred femur, looked at the broken box on the floor, and looked at the curator questioningly.

The horror he saw on her face, was, in an instant, replaced with a mass of swirling colors, then blackness, then a grayish haze as Brother Franco found himself sitting chained on a cold, straw-strewn floor.

He blinked. He raised one arm and examined the chain and cuff. He rattled his legs and arms. Where was he? The overpowering fumes of feces and death penetrated his nostrils as his eyes adjusted to the lack of light.

Lying in the filthy straw to his left was a man, more raw flesh than anything else.

“Where am I?” he asked the man, whose eyes rolled into his head as a

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response.

A guard came to the door. “You! On your feet.” He pointed at Franco.

Brother Franco shuffled slowly to the door. The guard unlocked it and swung open the heavy iron bars. “Out with you,” he said, roughly pushing Franco forward.

They took him to a room, better lit, but just as cramped and repulsive. A priest stood in the corner near a large, burly man wearing a mask. My god, Franco thought. Is this some sort of torturer?

“Where am I?” he asked the masked man.

“Silence, devil’s cohort. You don’t speak until the Father says.” The burly man slugged him across the jaw, knocking the slim Franco to the ground.

Brother Franco picked himself up. “I, I, I’m a monk.”

The priest in the corner grew red-faced. “One of Satan’s monks, perhaps, no monk of the Holy Father’s!” he hissed and the masked man hit him again. Franco peered up at the two, bewildered.

“Do you know why you’re here?” the priest asked.

Franco rubbed his jaw. “Well, apparently, you’re under the impression that I’m in league with the Devil in some capacity.”

The priest’s eyes grew wide. “Such large words for a peasant! Who gives you your silvered tongue?” he hissed from between blackened teeth.

“Silver tongue? No. Just a son of the Father. I claim no silver tongue.”

“Satan gives you your words!” the priest screamed.

“This is crazy.” Franco frowned. “Where am I?” “Now he feigns ignorance!” the priest said. “Where should you be, peasant-dog?”

“At Saint-Chappell. I pray for those desiring God’s blessings. The previous Father passed away unexpectedly and I’m there temporarily until a new Father can be appointed.”

The priest grew enraged. “What’s this outrage? Do you mock me? Do you mock the sacred church?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“You!” The priest pointed with a thick, fat finger. “Are a heretic – a collaborator with Devils! You’re a demonic messenger. Your crimes are well documented. You’ll be punished!”

“Crimes? What crimes?” Franco demanded. “I’ve committed no crimes.”

“Liar!”

“I’m a monk assigned to a duty where I can best be used by God.”

126 Beneath The Surface Franco waved his arm for emphasis. “Who you are and where I am, I have no idea!”

The priest began to laugh, softly at first, then uproariously until his fat gullet shook. “You’re bewitched! Possessed! What you say is accursed!”

Franco started to speak, but the priest interrupted. “You’re a peasant!

A farmer! You’re not a monk! You’re a foul man who works for demon masters and fornicates with succubi concubines!” the priest shouted and grew so red that Franco thought the fat beast might have a heart attack and die. Though, at this point, Franco thought, the priest’s dying wouldn’t help his position any. Somehow they’d hold him responsible.

He shook his head in bewilderment. “This is ludicrous,” he said, but then decided everything he said was causing more himself more trouble and determined to remain silent.

“We’ll torture you no more, pagan,” the priest said. “Tomorrow you burn, but you welcome that, don’t you devil? You who has danced handin-hand with Beelzebub and his wizard legions?”

Franco looked at his bare feet and grew aware of their distorted state.

He’d been so disoriented that he hadn’t even noticed the state of his body – bruised and swollen, battered and broken. The guards half-dragged him back to his squalid cell.

Thrown into the foul straw, reeking of vomit and urine, he crawled to his former spot. Franco stared hopelessly at the dying man near him. What was all of this? How did he get here? Was it some sort of witchery as the bloated priest had proclaimed? Was this some form of Jobesque treatment or Daniel-in-the-lion’s-den kind of test by God? Was God sending him through a Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego sort of trial by fire? If so, Franco hoped a merciful angel would appear in the fiery flames to save him just as the angel had rescued the Biblical men of old. How could one find themselves in another time and country? It made no sense. Franco drifted to sleep.

When dawn yawned and brought her slivered rays of sunlight through the heavy bars and into the dank cell, his mental searching had brought him no closer to the answer to his questions.

A guard threw open the door and barked his name. Franco hobbled out on crippled feet. He made it as far as the room where he was questioned before collapsing from agony. The guard whistled to another and the two dragged Franco roughshod over the stone floor, and outside into the cold morning air. A stake surrounded by a pile of bramble and wood stood near the prison. Spectators were gathering.

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Franco grimaced as the guards stood him upon the wood. They secured the rope around the stake. Slowly, fires were tossed on the wood. It crackled and popped. The flames inched ever so closer, little by little, towards Franco. The orange tongues lashed at him, burning him – quickly — engulfing him, leaving him beseeching his Heavenly Father for deliverance. *** The curator threw her hands to her face and screamed, “No!” But she was too late.

Brother Franco caught the charred bone in his palm and turned to look at her with questioning brown eyes; and, then, he slumped to the floor, eyes open, hand cradling the precious relic protectively, head resting on his outstretched arm.

The curator ran to him, removed the relic, and placed it in the broken box. Quickly she locked it away and returned to Brother Franco. He breathed raspily. The curator dialed the emergency services. Brother Franco’s face contorted in – in what? Horror? Agony? He let out a blood-curdling scream and then, eyes rolling into his head, he was silent. She performed a bumbling attempt at CPR as the medical personnel piled in and took over. Wringing her hands helplessly, blaming herself, she watched as they worked over Franco’s lifeless body. The Father, who oversaw the running of the church reliquaries, arrived huffing his way up the stairs while the medics were working.

He whispered to the curator, “The relic? Is it safe?”

“Yes, Father.”

“You told no one?”

“Only you, Father. I told no one else.”

“Good. Good.” He nodded, and then crossed the room to where Brother Franco lay on the gurney lifeless. The Father began to pray, administering the Last Rites for the good Brother. The medics ceased their work.

“That’s it. I’m afraid there’s no more we can do for him, Father,” a medic said.

“Thank you, my son. We know you tried your best. It was Brother Franco’s time. He’s in God’s hands now, and in a much better place.”

The medic nodded. “I’m sorry.” They began to file out, leaving a trail of refuse from medical supplies strewn over the marble floor.

The Father looked at the curator, and then at Brother Franco before the authorities rolled his body away. It was so unfortunate, but a genuine relic

128 Beneath The Surface was far too priceless to dispose of, even if it was cursed by witchcraft.

Sometimes one had to overlook such things.

“God must’ve wanted him home,” the curator said, tears on her cheeks.

The Father nodded, but he was quite certain it wasn’t God who’d sent Brother Franco home. It was a vengeful witch and the curse of Father Santiago’s bone.

Angeline Hawkes received a B.A. in Composite English Language Arts in 1991 from Texas A&M-Commerce and was named 2007 Alumni Ambassador for the Literature Department. She has publication credits dating from 1981. Angeline’s collection, The Commandments, received a 2006 Bram Stoker Award nomination. Her newest fantasy series is entitled: Tales of the Barbarian Kabar of El Hazzar. Dead Letter Press published Blood Coven, co-written with Christopher Fulbright. Her story, “In Waters Black the Lost Ones Sleep”, appears in Chaosium’s anthology, Frontier Cthulhu. Angeline has seen the publication of her novels, novellas, fiction in 30+ anthologies, several collections, and short fiction in various publications. She is a member of HWA and REHupa.Visit her websites at www. angelinehawkes.com and www.fulbrightandhawkes.com. © 2007 Angeline Hawkes

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130 Beneath The Surface

The Deep End

by Tim Deal

T

he humidity killed his iPod just as the Editors were lamenting the sadness of “Smokers Outside a Hospital Room.” This left Perry victim to the tinny strains of Tricia Yearwood struggling to escape the broken and buzzing speakers of the aging bus. The heat plastered him to the cracked vinyl, and his discomfort was worsened by the collective carbon dioxide emissions of a dozen or so passengers joining him on the rural route. It smelled like late night Waffle House— bacon, grits, and the sulfur of undercooked eggs.

The bus squealed to a halt and the driver announced “Homerville Falls!” Perry grabbed his backpack and squeezed off. The absence of a breeze provided no respite as he shouldered his pack and headed towards the outskirts of town, but he was happy to be free from the perspiring flesh and noxious diesel.

He hiked down the worn country road surrounded by thick kudzu, which seemed to consume the forest edge. Passing a boiled peanut stand, he wondered what in the hell a boiled peanut tasted like and why anyone would boil a peanut in the first place. There were no clues given neither by the rusty and tarnished cooking implements that apparently were used in the process, nor by the slack-jawed tween whose daisy-dukes and tube top

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were overflowing with her adolescent flesh.

The noisy chorus of insects ebbed and pulsed as Perry reflected on the 1,500 plus mile journey that was nearing its end. It was less than a month ago that his dying father coughed out the revelation that Perry’s grandmother was still alive— a fact made shocking by a lifetime of lies to the contrary.

“Alive and in Georgia.” His father had managed.

After falling back into unconsciousness, his father later awoke with a series of other revelations that explained and perhaps justified his previous deceptions. Perry’s grandmother had spent her life as a whore and a drug addict. She had bounced around as a member of several religious cults.

She had been arrested for selling counterfeit food stamps, and perhaps worse, had attempted to recruit her family and friends into Amway.

Be it the morphine or a dying man’s guilt, Perry’s father asked him to find the woman and inform her of his death. No apologies, no explanations, just a simple announcement: “Your son is dead.”

The sign for the Eternity Pond Trailer park looked about three decades old and in need of fresh paint. Perry followed the dirt road beyond the sign until it opened up in a massive forested clearing. The kudzu was especially thick here and all but blotted out the sunlight, shrouding the scores of dilapidated mobile homes in an oppressive gloom.

As he entered the trailer park, Perry noted a line of old tables covered with assorted backpacks, purses, shoes, and clothes. A rough “For Sale” sign was taped to the front of the table.

The park was set up in a rough semicircle surrounding an algae-covered pond, which was presumably its namesake. Rows of chairs representing a myriad of shapes and styles were set in seeming semi-permanence around the edge of the pond.

It was obvious that little effort was made in the park’s upkeep and if it were not for the occasional sign of human movement, Perry would have assumed the park was abandoned.

Perry had found his grandmother’s address through a simple online search, but none of the trailers were conspicuously marked. He approached an elderly man who was staring fixedly into the darkness of the pond.

As he drew closer, Perry was stopped in his tracks by the unclean stench of the old man’s body. It was as if he hadn’t bathed since the park was founded. Gagging slightly, Perry tried to get the man’s attention.

“Excuse… excuse me sir?” He said.

The man slowly turned and gave Perry a wide toothless grin. There was

132 Beneath The Surface something wrong with him, something that was difficult for Perry to pinpoint. His eyes were a bit too bright. His skin was too smooth and youthful. It was as if a young man were trying to masquerade as an old one.

“Deeper than you can imagine, young man.” He rasped absently.

Perry tried to clear the thickness from his throat and asked for “Nora Ramsay’s” trailer. He was surprised when the man immediately pointed to a lime green trailer not far from where they stood. Perry thanked him and went to meet his grandmother. He had assumed that she had since died and his task would have ended here.

At this point he almost wished that it were the case.

He approached the singlewide mobile home. It was rooted in thick weeds and the structure was shedding its aluminum siding like a snake sloughs off its skin.

How could anyone live in these conditions?

His sole desire was to deliver his message quickly and then jump on the Amtrak back to Vermont. With trepidation, he rapped on the trailer’s flimsy door.

A few minutes later, the door opened, assailing him with the gutwrenching smell of food long gone bad.

His grandmother stood there, a blank look upon her smooth face. The resemblance to his father was unmistakable, and her hair was the same ginger color as his own— surprisingly showing no sign of graying. She wore a dingy white t-shirt that said “God Accepts Knee-mail” that was covered with a rainbow array of dubious stains.

“Ms. Ramsay?” He asked.

Her bright eyes opened wider.

“Yes.” She replied. “I suppose that’s me.”

And he poured out the story; his father’s lung cancer, his dying words, and the 1,500 plus mile trip from Killington. As an addendum, Perry indicated his need to get back on the road very soon.

“Nonsense,” she said. “You must stay a while. You are family after all.

We must… reconnect.”

Perry was stricken by the far away sound of her voice. She sounded heavily medicated.

In this moment he wanted to be anywhere but here. The remoteness of the location, combined with the oppressive humidity, the decrepit state of the park and the sour odor of its inhabitants left him feeling as if he was mired in a bad dream. The surrealism created a pervasive sense of disassociation.

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But then there was his father, laying there dying, drowning in his own fluids. His father, who did his best for him, bought him his first guitar, paid for the lessons, went to every show. His father, who had one simple request before he died. His grandmother stepped aside, and Perry held his breath and entered the trailer.

It was worse than he could imagine. The smell of rotting food was combined with the repugnant odor of human waste and animal decomposition.

Perry immediately keeled over and noisily lost his lunch on the linoleum tile. He did his best to steady himself but failed, his outstretched hand stiff-arming the floor and planting in the remains of a putrefied cat.

Perry looked at the cat, then looked at his hand and felt his world slip away from him. He made a half-hearted turn back towards the door but his legs failed him. Instead, he collapsed to the stained floor; his sight plunged into a fitful darkness.

It must have only been a few seconds and Perry’s vision returned to him with horrible clarity. His grandmother, who was otherwise completely unfazed about the whole ordeal, was holding a murky glass of liquid in front of his face.

“This will make you right as rain.” She said with the same distant affect as before.

Perry got up on his hands and knees and crawled his way towards a brown plaid loveseat.

God accepts knee-mail, he thought as he fought his nausea to make it to the loveseat.

Once seated, Perry was better able to survey the trailer around him.

While his grandmother stood motionless with the glass of liquid still outstretched in front of her, Perry looked around.

“This will make you right as rain,” she repeated.

The trailer had not been cleaned in years.

According to the faded calendar on the wall it was still October 1987, and the coffee pot, had since been taken over by blue-green mold. Next to it, (presumably) a basket of fruit had disintegrated into a multi-colored, viscous gel. Perry could make out the rough shape of a banana, but the rest was a mystery. It was the land that time forgot.

And still she stood there with a stupid grin on her face and the outstretched glass of murky water.

“Right as rain,” she said.

And those bright, bright eyes…

Oddly, the entire kitchen and dining area were filled with glasses, con-

134 Beneath The Surface tainers, tubs, buckets, and a host of other conveyances, some of which still contained the same murky liquid that sloshed in Perry’s face and promised a cure for what ailed him.

Whatever it was that would make him “right as rain” looked like it had been doing so for his grandmother for some time.

“I’m not thirsty,” he said, and rubbed his eyes. “Sorry about your floor.”

His grandmother’s face twisted into exaggerated disappointment.

“Not thirsty?” She croaked.

“Your son, my father is dead.” He said. “Don’t you have anything to say about that? I mean, don’t you care?”

A moment of cognition seemed to flash in her eyes as if some part of her addled brain were considering the impact of his questions. She smiled at him earnestly, revealing a badly stained set of dentures.

“We were not close, your father and I.” She said, choosing her words carefully. “He did not always approve of my… lifestyle. It’s been so long though. So very long.”

Perry steeled himself to stand. He had done what he had come here to do, and he needed to escape the filthy confines of his grandmother’s trailer home.

“Please,” she said, “don’t leave yet. Sometimes we celebrate.”

“Who celebrates?” Asked Perry.

“We do. The park. My neighbors.”

“I don’t want— look thank you anyway, but—” Perry stood to leave, but his grandmother’s face took on a pitiful visage.

“But you’re all the family I have left,” she whimpered.

Perry sighed and fought back the urge to vomit again. *** The trailer park was illuminated by a seemingly impossible number of Citronella tiki torches, bathing the pond in a flickering orange glow.

Each of the park’s one hundred and fifty elderly residents had brought their own, stabbing it mechanically into the soft earth just beyond the rows of chairs.

Each went back to their homes and returned with empty buckets, bottles, plastic tubs, and Tupperware containers. They then dutifully sat down in a chair of their apparent choosing.

Perry watched this bemused, tugging from an old bottle of Jim Beam

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his grandmother had graciously provided. She stood beside him conspicuously vibrating with excitement.

“It will be quite extraordinary, you’ll see.” She chattered.

At this point he could give a shit. His earlier trepidation had since been replaced by a bourbon-fueled ambivalence. He had resolved to stay the night. He’d camp outside near the pond and then leave in the morning. Whatever this “celebration” were about it was important to his grandmother, and his acquiescence was a small matter in the face of his father’s death.

A karmic deposit, he thought.

A crooked armature of a man joined them, a bright red fez sat on his head sporting a wide assortment of buttons, pins, and ribbons.

His grandmother, full of deference, introduced him has Walt Kalinsky, the president of the trailer park association. Walt’s eyes were wide and bright and threatened to pop out of his skull while his dentures rattled in his mouth like a Yahtzee cup before the roll. He carried a leather-bound book in one hand and an empty gallon jug in the other.

And his hands were unusually smooth, Perry noticed.

Walt motioned for Perry and his grandmother to step forward to the edge of the pond.

“Esteemed Eternity Pond residents,” said Walt, “our dear neighbor Nora has brought us the pleasure of her grandson’s presence.”

The crowd applauded politely.

“I would like to take this opportunity to welcome him to our community.” Walt paused.

The crowd suddenly filled with a series of murmured “welcomes.”

“In accordance with the bylaws of the Eternity Pond Trailer Park Association, we will now invite Mr. Perry Ramsay to become an honorary member of our community.”

Perry slugged back another gulp of Jim Beam and smiled and nodded to the crowd. His grandmother leaned in and whispered: “We have a silly little custom here.” She said. “When we invite you into our community we ask that you take a dip in the pond, think of it as a baptism of sorts.”

“The pond? Nah, I’m all set.” Perry replied.

He noticed that all eyes were on him. His grandmother had taken on that disappointed look, and Walt gave him an embarrassed smile and then apologized to the crowd with his eyes.

“Just a little dip?” His grandmother implored. “It would mean so much

136 Beneath The Surface to me.”

Perry looked around at the crowd. Walt’s bug eyes stared at him expectantly. His grandmother had adopted the same hurt look as before, and the crowd was waiting for something to happen.

It was, perhaps, the shear embarrassment of the situation that caused him to move.

“What the fuck.” He shrugged, and kicked off his shoes. After taking another swig of the Beam, Perry peeled off his shirt and socks and stepped into the pond.

It was like bathwater warm from the Georgia sun— and not at all unpleasant.

Perry decided to make a show of it and dove into the murky water and began an exaggerated, if not clumsy, butterfly stroke. The crowd cheered, his grandmother beamed, and Walt nodded approvingly.

He’d become a part of their ‘community,’ make his grandmother happy, and in doing so bridge a twenty-year gap between his father and her. Everyone deserved forgiveness, even his drug-abusing, Amway-distributing, whore of a grandmother.

It was probably Mr. Beam talking, but Perry felt absolutely elated. He had his reservations at first, but the feel of the fresh water on his skin enlivened him. He swam harder towards the far end.

Deeper than you can imagine…

Maybe it was the bourbon, or perhaps the two weeks of traveling, but Perry’s endurance began to give on him. Just how deep was this pond anyway?

In a panic, he stopped swimming aggressively and stretched his feet towards the pond’s muddy bottom.

Nothing.

He then noticed for the first time that Walt had begun reading from the leather-bound book. “…belu, en haptu belu. En amreke val n’bia…”

Perry, treading water, looked around at the crowd and saw a predatory look upon their faces. “…belu, en haptu belu. En amreke val n’bia!!!”

Walt’s voice had become something else— something much more sinister.

But Perry didn’t have time to focus on that, for the water below his feet began to move and churn as if a school of carp were darting in an out of his legs.

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“Grandma!” He yelled, the tone of his voice betraying his fear. He felt like a toddler, a child, and his pleas were met with the wild-eyed looks of the spectators around him.

The orange-hued water around hum began to bubble with the activity of movement below.

The crowd rose from their chairs and approached the water, their eyes wide and bright and full of an unnatural hunger.

Perry swam towards the bank, but it seemed so far away to him and his body felt so heavy. He floundered in the water gasping for air and struggling to stay afloat.

Deeper than you can imagine…

Suddenly, the light from the torches reflected off of something slick and glistening that broke the surface. In the moment that he saw it, Perry could make out a mottled salmon-colored appendage.

He gasped, and the crowd grunted with satisfaction. He glanced up and saw them eagerly race towards the water, their arms full of empty jugs and containers. They moved with the energy and vitality of people a quarter their apparent age.

“No pushing!” Yelled Walt. “There will be plenty for everyone.”

Plenty? Perry thought. Plenty of what?

Something firm and unyielding wrapped around his feet and squeezed with enormous strength. Without the ability to tread water, Perry panicked and thrashed at the darkness around him. The crowd responded with excitement, their grunts and cries reaching frenzied levels.

“Oh God!” he screamed. “Oh God, oh God, oh God!” The fetid water filled his mouth as quickly as he could spit it out. The appendage that pinned his legs began to cut into his flesh and pull him under. The pain flashed in an instance, reached maximum intensity, and then left him numb.

The water around him filled with his blood, black in the torchlight.

Completely helpless to resist, Perry screamed until his lungs filled with water.

As the thing in the pond pulled his flailing body beneath the surface, the last image to register were scores of fanatical trailer park residents filling their containers with the blood-tainted pond water. His grandmother, though, lacked the patience.

She rested on all fours, her face planted beneath the surface of the water, gulping thirstily.

Feeling right as rain…

138 Beneath The Surface

Tim Deal is the author of more than 100 articles, stories, and essays published in a variety of mediums and publications spanning the globe, under various pen names. He is a former Police Officer from New Hampshire and a former Counterintelligence Agent with the United States Army. In his spare time he enjoys traveling, reading, hiking, music, art, history, and single malt whiskeys. Š 2007 Tim Deal

Beneath The Surface 139

140 Beneath The Surface

A Bonus Tale: Where There’s Smoke. . .

by John Bushore

P

am had always been afraid of bugs, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed killing them. Far from it. Bug swatting was Bill’s job. The problem was that three-year-old daughter Holly had become terrified of any insect since being stung by a bee in the yard last week and Bill, her husband, was out of town. So when she saw a large spider walking along the wall near the ceiling in Holly’s bedroom, Pam knew she must take care of it before the little girl woke from her nap. She went out to the kitchen and returned with rolled up section of newspaper.

Holly’s fear had become a major issue, living in an old farmhouse as they did, since bugs were such a major part of living in the country.

Creepy-crawlers by the dozens made their way into the old farmhouse – Pam’s dream house, it even had the white picket fence – she and Bill had bought six months ago, in the winter. Having been raised in the city, she hadn’t expected the plague of insects that showed up in the spring. There was nothing to do about it now, though, but live with the little pests.

Returning to the bedroom, she looked at two-year-old Holly, asleep in her crib, and remembered the honeybee that had stung the little girl on her tummy. It had gotten into the house on a towel from the clothesline – a

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towel later used to dry her daughter off after a bath.

No, Pam didn’t like killing bugs, but if she didn’t get rid of it, her daughter would scream and fuss. Pam almost wished for a can of insecticide but she and Bill had both agreed they didn’t want anything in the house that could harm Holly’s developing nervous system.

Bill and Pam had met in Florida on spring break, six years ago, when he’d been majoring in agriculture and she was a nursing student. A blueeyed, natural blond, she’d been a knockout in a bikini – Bill’s reaction had told her that — and she’d been attracted by his confident manner. Well, that and his wavy hair and those deep brown eyes. She had given up nursing and become a farmer’s wife, bugs and all.

She took careful aim, closed her eyes, and brought the rolled-up newspaper down like a hammer driving a nail. When she opened her eyes, the spider had been flattened into a smear. But the wall – why had it suddenly begun humming?

Maybe she’d knocked a wire loose; she knew that electricity could sometimes make a hum. The noise died down after a few seconds and she considered hitting the wall again to see if it repeated. But it was probably just something loose in the wiring; Bill had warned her that, as much as she had fallen in love with the house, there might be a few things that would need to be renovated, including the electrical system. It could wait until he got home to take care of it.

She wiped the bug splatter off the wall and went on tidying up the house while Holly napped. Later, she went out and puttered in the vegetable garden she’d begun in the side yard – she’d make a farm wife out of herself yet, for Bill’s sake – while Holly played nearby in the shade. Out here, honeybees were welcome guests – as long as they didn’t get too close.

Pam stayed busy and managed not to think about the noise.

But that evening, after Holly was in bed, Pam put her ear to the wall. It was hard to tell, since it was a warm night and the air conditioning churned away in the window opening, but she was sure a faint hum came from inside. What if there was a problem in the wiring? Could it cause a fire, right here where her daughter slept?

Pam had been burned out of her home as a child, in a blaze that had killed her sister. Fire had been her greatest fear ever since then, much worse than bugs. Many a night, she would be unable to sleep until she’d gotten up and checked to make sure the stove, or the iron, or some other electrical device, had been turned off.

Pam dozed fitfully that night, alone in the queen-size bed, listening in

142 Beneath The Surface fear that the noise would grow louder, and sniffing for smoke. She got up several times, went and felt the wall to see if it was warm. Finally, she brought Holly back to her own bed.

By morning she was distraught and decided to check the attic, since the humming came from the top of the wall. She brought Bill’s stepladder in and dragged it upstairs into the hallway, beneath the attic hatch. Climbing the ladder, she tentatively lifted the plywood cover and shoved it aside.

She eased her head up and looked around.

Dirty gray insulation filled the spaces between ceiling joists, which were crisscrossed by narrow boards for walking about without stepping through the plaster ceiling. She listened for a hum, but couldn’t hear anything above the noise of the attic fan. Spider webs hung everywhere and the space wafted stale air, old dust and some other aroma. It didn’t smell bad, sort of animal-flavored and sweet, which surprised her; she’d been sure the attic would stink of dead rat carcasses because Bill kept bait up here, where there was no danger of Holly getting to it. No corpses were evident, but she could see dry, little rodent turds on the walkway boards and the insulation showed meandering troughs where the little vermin presumably traveled to and from their nests. Shuddering, she dropped back down, pulling the covering back over the hatch. She’d just wait until Bill got home.

Once again, it didn’t seem so bad during the day, but she brought Holly into bed with her again that night. At least that way, if the house should blaze up during the night, she could get them both out.

She read a bedtime story and Holly fell asleep halfway through, her thumb in her mouth. Pam looked down at her little girl – curly haired, adorable and about to have her third birthday party. She had her mother’s blue eyes, but those tresses came from Daddy.

Pam went to her daughter’s room and listened to the wall. Again, she heard a faint droning vibration. Tentatively, she raised her hand and rapped her knuckles on the wall. The noise rose to a steady buzz. When it died out, she tapped the wall and it happened again.

In the morning, morning she called an electrical contracting company.

She couldn’t live another night in dread. *** The man from the electrical company — more of a kid, really — showed up in the afternoon, during Holly’s nap. “I’m Jake,” he announced with a lopsided grin. Long-haired and lanky of body, he wore jeans and a shirt

Beneath The Surface 143 with some sort of racing logo on it. He took an immediate interest in Pam, or at least to her breasts, because his eyes kept straying to them.

Pam, in shorts and a tee shirt that she now regretted wearing, took him to the master bedroom, where he walked around, tapping on the wall. The buzzing noise seemed to increase. “Hmm.” He rubbed his chin.

“What?”

He held up his hand and shook his head. “Not yet. Let’s step outside and be sure.”

She followed him out the front door and around to the southeastern corner of the house, just outside her bedroom. “Up there.” He pointed at the eave.

Pam raised her eyes and saw a small group of insects hovering about over Holly’s second floor window, a few dozen maybe. Others were landing and taking off from a small hole, the size of a quarter. “Wasps?” She backed quickly away, not stopping until she reached the small greenhouse that sat next to her garden.

“Nah. Honeybees.” He walked over to join her.

Now that she was a safe distance away, she looked back up at the bees.

“In a house? I thought they lived in trees or hives or something.” She glanced over at him quizzically, and caught him staring at her face. His face flushed and she realized he wasn’t a letch; he just couldn’t keep his eyes off her. Suddenly she was flattered. He was just a kid, but it still felt good to be admired.

He grinned. “Usually they do. But if they find the right size cavity inside a wall, they set up house.” He nodded like a simpleton. “What the bug-people call an in-festation.”

Pam felt a knot of fear in her stomach. Her first thought was of Holly.

Being a nurse, and a city girl besides, Pam had rushed to the doctor when Holly’d been stung last week. Luckily, it had turned out that the redness and swelling were only a natural reaction. But the doctor had mentioned that there would always be the possibility of anaphylaxis if the little girl were to be stung again.

“How do we get rid of them?” Pam’s mouth was dry.

“I’ll have to get a beekeeper out here.”

“Why? Can’t you just spray them with insecticide or something?”

“Oh, no.” Shaking his head, he grinned even more widely than before.

“Against the law to kill honeybees. Federal law.”

“Okay, so what do I do?”

“You ain’t got to do nothing. First the beekeeper – I always call old

144 Beneath The Surface guy called Frank who has a few hives — will blow some smoke in there.

The bees smell the smoke and think the hive is in danger. They all fill their bellies with honey in case they have to abandon the hive when the fire gets too close. They’re a lot calmer with a full belly.”

“And then what?”

“He’ll drum the whole lot of them out.”

“He’ll what?” Pam was beginning to think she’d called the wrong electrical company. She needed someone with more experience, maybe. ”It’s really something to watch.” He shook his head in obvious appreciation. “See, bees mostly live in a dark hive, where sight isn’t all that important, but they’re really sensitive to vibration. So a real good beekeeper sets a box right outside the hole and then drums on the outside of the wall.

It draws the bees out and into the box. He smokes ‘em while he’s at it and I guess they’re afraid their house is burnin’ up and they need an new one.

That drumming brings them out like ducks come to a duck call.” He raised his arms and drummed lightly on the wall with his fists.

Pam could hear the buzzing noise increase. “Won’t they attack him?”

“Nah. Bees are okay if you know what you’re doing. Anyway, old Frank will prop a box by the wall on a ladder, drum on the wall and the bees will just walk out of your wall and into the hive.” He imitated a walking insect with his fingers, much like Pam did when playing “Eensy Weensy Spider” with Holly.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

She frowned. “Are you sure?”

“I’ve seen him do it.”

“How much will it cost?” She knew that Bill might be upset if it was too steep.

“Depends on the size of the infestation.” He pulled a flashlight from his belt, which also held various tools and a cell phone. “I’ll go up and take a look. So’s I can give Frank an idea what he’s up against.”

He started back toward the front and she followed him. “You’re not going up there are you?”

“Sure am.”

“But shouldn’t you wear one of those things: those bee suits?”

“Nah,” he said. “It’ll be all right; I’ll just take a quick look.”

She followed him out and he took a ladder from his truck and then she escorted him upstairs into the hallway.

“This seems dangerous.” Pam eyed the hatch. “How do you know

Beneath The Surface 145 they’re not killer bees?” She didn’t know much about them, but had heard enough to be scared.

He grinned and opened the ladder. “That’s just a bunch of hype. They ain’t reached this part of the country yet.”

“But— if they are killer bees— you might get them riled up.”

“Nah.” Jake climbed the ladder. “I’ve done this a bunch of times. Even killer bees don’t attack unless the hive is threatened or they feel an odd vibration or a smell that makes them think the hive is in danger. But regular bees will attack by the thousands if they feel threatened, too. And once they get riled up, they won’t back down to anything, ’cept fire. Any kind of bees, the whole hive will up and fly away from a fire.” He pulled out his flashlight, turned it on, and then pulled himself up through the hatch.

“You just stay down there, where it’s safe.”

She heard him moving about the attic, his steps receding along the walkway boards toward the eave. Then he whistled. “Wee-ooo. Lady, you got yourself one godawful mess of bees up here. Hundreds of thousands, looks like.”

Pam felt her throat constrict at the thought of it. “Please, be careful.”

“I’m okay.” The voice echoed in the void. “I’m coming back out now.”

Then, like a car horn sounding right behind you when you didn’t know the car was even there, a loud tune erupted. Pam wasn’t familiar with it – one of those rap or hip-hop things— but it was loud.

“Goddamn cell phone,” came from above, muffled by the reverberating, beating bass of the music. Then came a faint clatter, as though something had fallen. Another, louder curse broke loose. “Oh, fuck.”

A deep, resonating hum sounded, quickly building. Through that and the cell phone music, she heard Jake coming back toward the hatch, staccato beat of shoes on the boards above. More swearing punctuated the footsteps, followed by a sound like a hand slapping flesh. She followed his progress across the attic by his cursing.

“Shit.”

“Ouch.”

The hum of bees had become a roar now, competing with the musical tone for acoustic dominance of the house.

“Damn.”

A great clatter and thumping approached the attic hatch, punctuated by a crashing sound.

“Oh my. . . Jesus. . . Eeyaaah!”

146 Beneath The Surface At the same moment, plaster erupted from the ceiling of the hallway and a foot stabbed down through until an entire leg stuck down into the room.

“FUCK!” screamed Jake as his leg gyrated wildly in the air, dancing to the musical beat for a moment before the cell phone abruptly went silent.

The drone of bees swelled to a crescendo as the young man shrieked, “I’m stuck! Help me.”

Pam took an instinctive step up the ladder, but then a solitary speck dropped down through the opening and stopped six inches in front of her face, undulating like a yoyo at the end of its string. Two, tiny, dead-black eyes hovered before her. A sectioned, brown and orange body lay behind those multi-faceted ovals, held up by small diaphanous wings that blurred into a spectral aura of flying menace. She could clearly hear its individual sound. She’d listened to many bees before, as they buzzed around gardens and lawns, emitting a drone not unlike the purring of a cat. This was different. Whining like a revving engine, it held a warning as distinct as that of a growling tiger.

The bee hypnotized her for a moment and the chainsaw-like buzzing and profane screaming from the attic seemed to fade into the background.

Then fire lanced into the back of her neck, rousing her from her paralysis, and she slapped at the afflicted spot. She felt a small body crunch beneath her fingers, even as another shot of blazing venom lanced into her left ear.

Forgetting she was on the ladder, she stepped backward and fell into a heap as more bees stung her bare arms, hands and face.

She landed on her back, staring up at the gaping hatch as bees dropped through by the dozen. The seemingly unattached leg at the edge of her vision jerked like a marionette as the man above screeched in agony. But through all that tormented screaming, clear despite the droning battle cry of vengeful bees, a plaintive cry made Pam forget her terror and the pain of multiple stings.

“Mommy!” Holly sobbed.

Rolling over, Pam scrambled desperately to her feet and rushed into the master bedroom. She snatched Holly up, wrapping a blanket around her.

Holding her little girl tight, she ran back into the hall, knowing it wouldn’t be safe for them to remain in the house. Returning to the hallway frightened her, but she knew they must get out of the house; the bees would be able to get into any room through the tiniest of openings.

Bees swarmed onto her clothing and flesh as she staggered down the hall. Passing under the denim-clad, bee-covered leg jerking about, she briefly wondered why Jake had stopped screaming. Taking the steps down

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as fast as she could with a squirming Holly, she made her way to the kitchen and out the back door. More and more venomous barbs found her flesh, especially her face, as she ran.

As the door slammed behind her, she slapped bees away and began to feel safe. No bees would get through the screen door; it would keep insects in as well as out. But where to go now? Her car keys were in her purse back in the bedroom, along with the cell phone she needed to call the paramedics. Maybe poor Jake could still be saved. And she would need treatment, too; multiple bee stings could be dangerous.

There was nothing for it but to walk to the nearest neighbor’s house, half a mile down the road. Starting off, she hadn’t gone ten steps when she heard buzzing above her. Looking up, she saw a line of bees coming from the house and forming a cloud so thick it appeared to be a billow of smoke. Oh my God! They’d sensed her presence outside and must now be boiling out of their eave entryway.

She ran for the nearest shelter, Bill’s greenhouse. It would be hot inside, but there were screened openings and a vent fan to cool it down. Twenty yards away, it offered her only chance of escape. And it was totally insect proof.

Reaching it, after being stung many more times, she slipped inside, opening the sliding door only wide enough to get in and closing it quickly behind her. Once inside, she sat Holly down on a chair at the potting bench. Around her, she could hear bees slamming into the glass walls like popcorn cooking off in a kettle. Swatting as many bees from herself as she could reach, she set Holly down and took off the blanket. The little girl’s face was red and streaked with tears “Mommy, I gots a boo-boo.” she said, baby-talking in her distress.

“Let Mommy see, dear.”

Holly held out her arm and Pam saw a red welt, with a bee-barb stuck in the middle. A jelly-filled mass of slimy tissue still clung to the sting, pulsing as it pushed extra venom into the wound. Little bastards, she thought, scraping the whole thing out of Holly’s flesh with a fingernail. Then she kissed the wound.

Holly whined, pointing at her thigh. “And here.”

In all, Pam’s daughter had four stings. Not bad, considering that she herself had been stung many dozens of times, but each one of Holly’s injuries seemed more painful to Pam than the sum total of her own. A few more bees crawled about while she tended to her daughter, but Pam killed them all quickly.

148 Beneath The Surface Finally, she got Holly quieted down to a whimper and then began to scrape the stingers from her own skin. It seemed to be growing dark in the greenhouse. She glanced about. Bees, tens of thousands of them, had covered the glass structure, emitting little buzzes of anger that swelled into a monster’s roar. Crawling over one another in an excited frenzy, they blocked out the sun, combining into an angry beast intent on reaching her.

She scooped Holly up and sank down on the chair, feeling faint. Holly snuggled close. “Mommy, I don’t feel good.”

“I know, honey.”

She looked up at the blanket of bees clinging to the greenhouse. How long would the swarm hang about? What did she know about bees? Not much. If they were killer bees – they probably wouldn’t settle down for a long, long time. They’d go into their hive at dark, for sure, but sunset was hours away.

“Mommy, I’m thirsty.”

“I don’t have anything to give you, sweetie. You’ll just have to wait.”

“But my throat feels funny.”

“Funny?” Pam’s own throat suddenly tightened. “Funny how?”

“I don’t know. Just funny.”

She sank down on the chair, feeling her daughter’s forehead. No fever, but that wouldn’t be a symptom anyway, if it was what she feared. “Do you feel sleepy?”

“No.” Holly snuggled up to her. “I just don’t feel good.”

Holly had never shown any allergies, but that held no comfort for a nurse/mother who knew all the terrible things that happen to children.

Anaphylaxis, the evil twin of a prophylactic immunization, was set up by a first sting, but didn’t show symptoms until the person suffered a second sting, even years later. It could be deadly; it usually came on fast, and Pam had no medicine in the house to counter it. She cursed herself. There had been a week to buy a bee-sting kit, but she’d been too damn busy buying curtains and things for the house. She had to get Holly to a doctor.

But outside, the bees waited.

Feeling lightheaded, Pam looked around the greenhouse for something that might protect her from the bees if she made a dash to the house. Bill kept insecticides in the potting bench cabinet, but nothing that would kill bugs instantly. And even if she found a can of “knock-down” spray, it wouldn’t be enough to take on a full hive of vengeful bees. Next to the bench stood a can of kerosene for the small heater in the far corner. And

Beneath The Surface 149 in that corner hung Bill’s raincoat. It would offer some protection if she wore it, but her face and legs would still be exposed if she wore it and bees could easily come inside the loose garment. But it might. . .

She became aware of an engine noise growing nearer, dimly heard above the roar of the bees. Then she heard tires on gravel, followed by the squeal of brakes. She looked out through a relatively bee-free spot in the glass and saw a battered old pickup, trailing a cloud of oily smoke— Mr. Pearsons, their elderly neighbor from the next homestead down the road.

He often dropped by to check on Pam while Bill was out of town. Thank God he’d decided to come today. She’d call to him and he could go for help.

The old farmer left his engine running and got out of the truck, slamming the door. Pam stood up, still clutching Holly and began calling loudly. The old man didn’t seem to hear. She remembered, then, that he was hard of hearing. Several bees took off from the outside of the pane she looked through, and the light inside the greenhouse grew stronger. The swarm was on the move. By that time, Mr. Pearsons was through the yard gate and halfway to the front porch, hobbling along on his cane and totally oblivious to the cloud coming toward him.

Pam screamed a warning, waving her free hand. The old man didn’t seem to notice, even though not far from the greenhouse. She shrieked louder, but it did no good.

Mr. Pearsons wore bib overalls and a long sleeve shirt, so the bees went for his head, initially. He slapped his free hand to a cheek and stared around through thick glasses. Pam had no idea if he could even see his tiny attackers. Moments later, he dropped his cane and started slapping his face and ears wildly. He turned clumsily and began to limp back toward his truck but fell almost immediately. Pam pulled Holly’s face close, so she wouldn’t see.

The dear old man thrashed about on the ground, unable to rise. Bees came in from every direction, like flecks of metal attracted to a powerful magnet. His head became grossly distorted, buried under living layers of bees. He screamed at first but then became oddly silent. He suddenly rose to hands and knees and crawled toward the truck. Something dropped from the bee-covered head and, with horror, she realized that the old man’s dentures had fallen out. Closing her eyes, she pulled her hand to her mouth and bit her fingers, but it didn’t block out her mind’s image of a mouth and throat packed with a blockage of angry, stinging bees. That kid, Jake – that was why he’d stopped screaming while still obviously alive. He’d

150 Beneath The Surface been choking to death on living bees.

When she looked again, Mr. Pearsons had ceased movement. The swarms covering his head and hands pulsed as bees jostled for a chance to use their stings.

Pam sank back down in the chair and cried for a time, until Holly slumped against her. She raised the child’s head. Holly’s eyes were half closed and she seemed lethargic. “Honey, are you sleepy?”

No answer came. Pam checked for symptoms of anaphylaxis, struggling to hold onto a nurse’s detachment long enough to help her toddler.

Holly’s face seemed normal, maybe a bit pale, but not flushed. On her arms, a nettlerash had appeared around her swelling puncture wounds – a classic symptom.

Pam’s eyes darted around and settled on the old pickup. It offered hope, but the bees were so thick around the old man’s body and the pickup truck that she’d be dead from hundreds of stings before she could reach it. Not to mention that she couldn’t drive a stick shift.

The smoke rising from the truck’s exhaust caught her attention. What had Jake said about bees and smoke? Wood smoke would distract them because they feared fire. Fire! If she could just make it to her cell phone, Holly might live even if Pam didn’t make it back out of the house.

She set Holly down and searched the cabinet again. Bill always kept a matchbook in there. She grabbed it and opened it to see just three matches left.

She put on the raincoat, buttoned it, and snatched up the can of kerosene. When she put her hand on the door handle, she turned and looked down at her unconscious Holly. “I love you,” she said, then slid open the door and stepped out, closing it behind her. Luckily, no bees got inside, as far as she could tell.

The can banging painfully against her calf, she ran for her life— and Holly’s life. She could hear dozens of bees coming after her. God, could she survive long enough to save Holly?

She reached the house before the bees arrived and twisted the top off the kerosene can. Splashing liquid over the side of the house below the hive entrance, she drenched the dry, wooden siding, and then threw the can aside. While she opened the book of matches, bees began attacking her exposed legs. She ignored the painful stings. The attack was not as ferocious as she had expected; maybe the smell of kerosene confused the swarm.

Just as she tried to strike a match, though, a bee entered the raincoat’s

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hood and landed just below her left eye, quickly stinging. Instinctively, she dropped the match and swiped at her face. She killed the insect with the back of her hand, but she’d lost the time she’d gained in her quick dash from the greenhouse. Bees were hovering just outside the hood, waiting for a chance to attack.

She crouched down, hiding her face beneath the hood and tore off another match. This time she managed to strike it and toss it down into a puddle of kerosene at the base of the wall. The match hit the liquid and went out, as though tossed into water.

With trembling hands, she ripped loose the last match and struck it.

With great care, she pushed the tiny flame forward. Her hand had nearly reached the kerosene when a small breeze blew the flickering flame out.

Bees stabbed her legs with their venomous barbs again and again and she could feel others moving around inside the raincoat. Fingers fumbling, she searched the ground for the first match, the one she’d dropped without striking it. She found it. This time she held the match very near the kerosene as she struck it into life.

Flame swept up the siding, giving off a cloud of noxious smoke. At first the bees increased the fury of their attack but, as the wooden structure of the house caught fire, more and more broke off, flying back up into the hive.

Pam didn’t hesitate. She ran into the house, where only a few bees meandered aimlessly about. Grabbing her purse and cell phone, she hurried back outside. As she darted toward the greenhouse, she noticed that a huge cloud of bees had formed above the house, buzzing furiously. More and more insects joined them, streaming up from the side of the house, which was engulfed in flames.

Moving slowly and quietly, so as not to catch their attention, she skirted around the swarm. A small section of the insect cloud moved a few feet toward her, and she froze. They rejoined the main crowd. She went on to the greenhouse, pulled Holly out and tucked her up under the loose raincoat. Pam fought down panic, knowing that her little girl was poorly protected and, if she attracted the bees’ attention now, all might be lost.

She moved in a calm, measured pace through her garden and out the front gate, passing Mr. Pearson’s body. Hundreds of dead insects lay about him, along with dozens who crawled aimlessly, their guts hanging out where they’d lost their stingers.

When she got near enough to her car, parked beside the barn, she unlocked it with the remote and ran. She yanked the car open and buckled

152 Beneath The Surface Holly in the passenger seat, not bothering with the safety seat in the rear.

Running around the car to get in herself, she risked a glance back at the house. The swarm was gone, vanished somewhere into the sky like the cloud of smoke it resembled.

She slid in, started the engine, and sped away in a spurt of gravel. When she reached the highway — where the car didn’t rock so much — she called to arrange for a paramedical truck to meet her halfway to the hospital, knowing the paramedics would have bee-allergy medications.

After she hung up, she realized that she hadn’t even reported her house being on fire. Behind her, a column of smoke rose into the country sky, but it meant nothing to Pam. Her whole world lay on the seat beside her.

End. John Bushore has had dozens of stories and poems published in both online and print magazines and anthologies. He is a 3-time winner of the independently-judged James Award from Sam’s Dot Publishing and his story, “Going Native,” has been included in “Exotic Gothic,” a text anthology for an international studies course in Gothic and Horror Literature. His S/F suspense novel, “Friends in Dark Places,” was published in 2006. He also writes for children as MonkeyJohn. © 2007 John Bushore

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Special Novel Excerpt: HIRAM GRANGE AND THE VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED

by Tim Deal Due out in Summer, 2008 Wickedness is afoot in the sleepy little village of Great Bay, New Hampshire, and Juniper “Junebug” Briggs isn’t going to stand for it. After helping make Great Bay a pillar of New England Godliness, she refuses to sit idly by while the town falls into sin and decadence. However, when an errant pastry truck slams Junebug into an early and unceremonious afterlife, it would seem that Great Bay’s most vociferous moral advocate would be silenced before she even gets started— that is until she returns from the grave with the singular mission to punish Great Bay’s eccentric and diverse cast of evil-doers. Now it is up to absinthe-drinking, opium smoking Hiram Grange to set things right.

Chapter One

J

uniper “Junebug” Briggs stuffed her thick thighs into her best black nylons, pulling them up past the translucent skin that revealed a roadmap of blue varicose veins. She huffed and grunted at the effort, and then pulled her favorite dress — the navy blue one punctuated by tiny white daisies — over her head.

This was a Sunday dress, a church-going dress, and Junebug’s soft round face creased into a smile as she regarded herself in the full-length bedroom mirror. Today would be her three thousand one hundred and twentieth consecutive day at church, and that didn’t even include weddings, funerals, or baptisms. She sighed with satisfaction but internally cautioned herself that by taking pride in her piety, she was in fact, being impious. Heh, now that’s a tongue twister, she thought.

Junebug was sixty-five years old, but her soft white skin and stout physique belied her age. In addition, she had been dying her gray hair a rich blue-black color for fifteen years. As she primped and posed in the mirror, her dark eyes glimmered like two polished buttons stuffed deeply into dough.

156 Beneath The Surface God has indeed been good to me.

She took an impatient look at her watch.

“William, can you put your gnomes down for five minutes and take Benedict out for walkies? We need to pick up the coffee cake on the way!”

William Briggs sat at the kitchen table hunched over a ceramic garden gnome and several jars of paint; his knees bumped the underside as he shifted position. He was every bit as tall and gaunt as Junebug was short and plump. The sound of her voice paused his brush in mid-stroke, and he released a frustrated breath. This would be William’s two thousand and eightieth consecutive trip to church- one for every week of marriage to Junebug.

William looked down at his half-painted gnome. It was to be the latest in a series of twentieth century pop culture icons- in this case Alex De Large from Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. He was especially pleased about his ability to fashion a rudimentary codpiece from some white felt.

“William! The Dog?” “Putting the leash on now dear.”

William found Benedict sleeping on the plastic-covered couch in the living room. At the sight of the leash, the beagle jumped excitedly to the floor. This was the Brigg’s second beagle. The first, John Paul, was accidentally run over by Sam Rutherford, one of the town selectmen. It was an accident that William readily forgave, but one that Junebug would not.

In fact, Junebug never really agreed that it was an accident.

On his way out the door, William paused to pull a small flask from the deep recesses of the cupboard. Yes, it was only ten in the morning on a Sunday, and yes he was about to go to church, but damn it he was a good and patient man and deserved his vices, and Bushmills was one of them.

Chapter Two

S

tewart Leakey sat in the Hilltop Steak House in Saugus Massachusetts, just north of Boston, staring at his congealing soup. He had passed this restaurant with Mia and Carson on innumerable trips to Lake Winnipesauke in New Hampshire. Carson had loved the cow statues that stood facing Route One and had always begged his dad to stop. However, in the interest of “making good time”, Stew had gently refused.

Now alone, Stew had little interest in making good time, but instead wished he could turn time on its ear.

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He had reviewed the offer letter from the Great Bay Town Selectmen’s office about three more times since sitting at HillTop. It was a fair offer, decent pay and benefits for significantly less work, but he could not help but feel that he should have retired from police work completely. Instead he had accepted the position as Chief of Police for a tiny New Hampshire Seacoast town where the biggest crime seemed to be lobster poaching.

The question was, though, what else could he do? He’d been a cop for fourteen years, and a patrol lieutenant for three of those. Other than a six-year stint in the Army, Stew had no other experience from which to draw from. He had been wearing a uniform for his entire adult life.

Stew did have a fondness for cooking, having been obsessed with Food Channel for as long as the channel had existed, but a career as a chef was unrealistic. He should probably consider himself lucky that Great Bay even offered him the job, considering his embarrassing last year of duty in Boston. Thankfully, the town selectmen had been “sympathetic” to his situation and extended the offer anyway.

Stew had always loved New Hampshire, and had escaped to it with his family whenever they could get a free weekend. They’d visit Portsmouth for Market Square Day, go to the State Fair in Hopkinton, and last year they even made it up to Lincoln for the New Hampshire Highland Games.

It was there he had bought Carson a practice chanter so he could learn bagpipes and eventually play on the Boston Police Pipe Band when he grew up.

When he grew up…

The thought of Carson choked him and stung his eyes. He had told himself that he had cried enough, but is such a thing even possible? He bowed his head as the waitress circled round.

“Is your soup okay?”

“Yes fine. It’s fine.”

She was at least astute enough to realize that Stewart did not want to be disturbed and moved on.

Stew wiped his eyes and stabbed the thickening soup with his spoon.

The substance’s ability to hold his spoon erect cheered him up a little. It was these kind of things- these nonsensical, mundane but not-so mundane silly little things in life that caused him no end of amusement. Like the way businessmen would slip out of a public restroom with a guilty look on their face and clutching a newspaper. As if to say: “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.” Or the garish look of lipstick on a cigarette, or on a wineglass, sending the unintended message that its wielder is not really

158 Beneath The Surface put together as well as her tailored suit implies.

He and Carson used to share these unspoken and subtle observations with a wry grin or a quick glance. It would drive Mia crazy because instead of being an audience to human nuance, her thoughts were always consumed by much deeper things- important things.

But this made her the perfect balance to Stew’s childlike whimsy, and as they say, opposites attract.

And sometimes they are brutally ripped apart…

Stew put the offer letter into a manila folder and slipped it into his briefcase. He motioned for the check and then paid it. Outside, he took a good long look of the noisy traffic, the endless rows of restaurants, gas stations, and retail stores and soaked it all in. He was leaving the city and all of its grime, clutter, and density for a picturesque New Hampshire village by the bay and a new life.

He got into his battered Volvo, cranked it on, and resumed his journey north. While a bit overwhelmed about the finality of this move, Stew was bolstered by the opportunity to be among new people and new sites. As he fought with traffic to get onto the on-ramp to I95 North, Steward Leakey, the new Great Bay Chief of Police, looked forward to long and uneventful days in New Hampshire.

Chapter Three

M

itch rounded the narrow corner and dry-heaved out the window.

He was late and that meant his ass if Mr. Gagne found out. The old man had already used the “three strikes yer out” speech on him twice, and this would, technically, be his sixth strike.

It was not as if Mitch made huge bank from driving a bread truck, but his rent was late, his power bill was on its third and final notice, and he owed Smitty for a dime bag he had fronted him. Losing this job meant a mailed check and no Friday payday. Losing this job meant an eviction notice, his power shut off, and a world of grief from Smitty. He could handle the eviction notice, as it would give him another five days to pay, but no power meant no Xbox 360, and grief from Smitty equated to an empty bong and no more credit with which to fill it.

Mitch had one more stop to make before getting the truck back to the bakery in Portsmouth, and that was at The Great Bay Convenience Store and Deli. Tyler Grendel worked there on Sundays, and he was pretty cool about deliveries. Mitch could slip in and do a half-assed delivery and then

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have the truck back to the bakery before Gagne was the wiser. Tyler would never tell the old man, he was good that way.

If anyone was to blame for his late start this morning it was Niko Dyonisus. The crazy Greek threw a massive bash every spring to celebrate the end of the colder months, and Mitch had been at Niko’s house until sunrise. Niko always had legendary parties with endless booze, live music, and tons of girls. Mitch had always wondered how Niko got away with having so many underage girls at his parties- the guy was well into his forties and had no teenagers of his own. Regardless, it made for a fruitful night for Mitch- one that he was suffering for as he made his rounds.

He had hooked up with Mira Becks well into the early morning hours.

They both were blindly drunk and were fueled by alcohol-induced passion, but Mitch thought there just might be a chance that Mira may actually like him. That is, if she even remembered him. The only way for him to find out was to finish up his rounds and then head back to Niko’s to see if she were still passed out on the floor where he left her. There was always the possibility that the reverend would make a move, he had been hitting on Mira all night long. But Mitch was sure that Reverend Broom had Sunday services to attend and probably slipped out around the same time he did.

He hit the gas and rammed the truck into fourth. If he was going to get back to see Mira as well as see this week’s paycheck, he had no time to waste. Great Bay was the only thing standing in his way of possible further sexual bliss as well as continued employment and he wasn’t about to fail.

Chapter Four The slimy son of a bitch…

The sickening heap of human waste…

M

arjory Minks stood on the back deck of the massive blue gambrel overlooking the bay. The powerful currents churning beneath the Sullivan Bridge reflected the anguish that swirled in her heart. Her right hand gently rested on her pregnant belly, while her left still clutched a small red suitcase.

As of this moment, Marjory had been a citizen of Great Bay for exactly seventeen minutes, and the thought filled her with a mixture of anger and relief. She had visited the village before. This was one of their summer homes along with Cannes and Lake Tahoe. She and Kirk would come up

160 Beneath The Surface to Great Bay every other summer and spend long languid afternoons relaxing with a good book. It was their unwinding spot.

The cheating piece of shit…

She had shared this view many times with Kirk, usually over a bottle of wine and soft whispers. They would sit out on this deck on a balmy summer evening and watch the sun set on the lobster boats moored in the Bay. In fact, it was on this deck that she softly urged Kirk to give her a child. He agreed without hesitation, bolstering her belief that their love was something rare. They were both well-into their forties, and the prospect of a child this late in life was both frightening and exciting. There would be risks for her, but with his promised support, she had felt that they would make it though the process together, regardless.

Now, pregnant and alone, Marjory cursed herself for being so naïve.

Kirk had traded her in for a newer model, and despite all the talk about starting a family, he was merely appeasing her until he found the next branch to grasp on to. All of her efforts to maintain a firm body, coupled with her natural beauty were not enough to keep him interested. It was the number behind the name that interested Kirk, as well as the novelty of new-ness.

Despite the mascara currently running down her cheeks, Marjory carried an elegance and beauty that, to most observers, knocked about ten years off of her forty-six. It was Marjory’s looks that secured her a spot on the Cuisine Channel. “Cooking with Minks” was a runaway success, and coupled with several (ghostwritten) book tie-ins, and DVD sales, she and Kirk had created a niche empire within the realm of food. Kirk had produced the show, among many others, and had pulled her out of the back office to host it. It didn’t matter that Marjory could not cook anything beyond toast to save her life; she had a look and easy-going manner that resonated with viewers. It certainly resonated with Kirk, who married her a mere months after first meeting her.

Marjory took a deep breath and let it out while soaking in the amazing view. Great Bay was a long way from New York City, and if nothing else, it would serve as the launching point to a new life- one without cooking shows, without the chaos of the city, and most importantly, without Kirk.

This was her house now, thanks to the detail-oriented attorneys at Fisk, Langley, and Coen, and she and the baby had a whole new life to face together.

She turned, walked into her house, dropped her suitcase in the living room and went to the kitchen. Fishing through the cupboard, she found an

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old bag of microwavable popcorn. She hastily read, and re-read the directions, popped it in the microwave, and pressed a few buttons.

Exactly six-minutes later, she opened the bag and frowned.

She had burned it.

Of course.

Copyright 2008, Tim Deal. All rights reserved.