PseudoPod

• Author : Sandra M. Odell
• Narrator : Alasdair Stuart
• Hosts : Alex West and Andrea Subissati
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Geneva Benton
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PseudoPod 586: ARTEMIS RISING 4: For Fear of Little Men is a PseudoPod original.

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For Fear of Little Men by Sandra M. Odell

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Alton who longed to be a kobold and keep treasure in his stone shoes. . .

That is until one came to live under his bed and he learned what horrid little creatures they truly were.  The wicked thing smelled of licorice and MaeMa’s kisses when she went too long without brushing her dentures.  It hobbled around in its stone clogs in the dark of night, knocking over books,tumbling shoes off the rack.

“There is a kobold living under my bed, Mama,” he said when his mother came to see what the fuss was all about.  “I saw it with my torch.  He pinched me here, and here, and even here.”

“There will be none of that, young man,” Mama said as she tucked the brushed cotton quilt under his chin.  “You go to sleep this instant, and in the morning you will pick up your room or else.”

That night Alton realized mamas did not know what it meant to have a kobold living under one’s bed.

The next night Alton asked for an aspirin for his headache, then curled on his side with the quilt tucked under his chin and his toes safe and warm in wool socks.  He waited.  Very still.  Very quiet.  The house settled to sleep with creaks and pops and groans, what Aunt Bethany called “night talk” before she left without saying good-bye.

No sooner had Papa begun to snore than Alton heard the clunk-thump of uneven steps under the bed, the sound an ice hammer cracking up his spine.  The moment the kobold crawled from under the bed and reached up to give him a pinch on the backside, he whipped over quick as he could and grabbed the miserable thing around the throat with both hands.

The tiny hunchback was brittle leaves and chicken bones.  Alton brought his thumbs together and squeezed until they met his fingers on the other side, a thrill of excitement shivering down his spine.  The kobold’s eyes bulged, and its spindly neck snapped with a tinder crack.  It twitched once, twice, and then sagged limp and still as a bag of rocks in Alton’s hands.

When he stopped shaking, Alton pulled up his socks and snuck downstairs for a knife to see if a kobold really was filled with rocks.  It wasn’t, and Mama walloped him good the next morning for making a sticky mess on the sheets.

Only Alton knew where to look for the fae, some more fair than others but all gimlet-eyed and not to be trusted.  Hook-nosed gnomes in the grocer’s bins, and pixies peeking around the corners of pews.  Mulchins under girls’ skirts during school, tickling tender panty-bits with sticky feathers until the girls squirmed in their seats on long sunny days.

No one believed him, no one ever believed him, so Alton taught himself in secret late at night when no one was around.  He read everything he could lay his hands on – paperbacks, encyclopedias, plays, TV listings.  Leprechauns, phooka, the foul-humored fir darrig with their backwards hands and four-foot long beards.  He compared the satyrs of Greece to the fauns of the British Isles, and wondered if the kilyakai of Papua New Guinea were more or less common than sprigash.  No detail was too small to note in the pages of his ever-growing collection of carefully organized composition books.

The depth of his studies left Alton with little time for extracurricular activities, and the expectations of others were constant impositions.  “A boy your age should be on the field, not behind the stacks reading poetry,” Papa said the day he signed Alton up for the local youth football league.

Alton set down his cup of juice.  “But I don’t want to play football.”

“Listen to your father, dear,” Mama said, and set to organizing the league carpool.

The majority of Alton’s schoolmates were equally understanding.

“Dool-a-girl?” Brenton Panes said on the busy street corner, turning the composition book every which way.  “What’s a dool-a-girl?”

Alton kept his voice as low and reasonable as he could, hands balled into fists at his sides.  His head throbbed; sweat ran down his collar, every breath heavy in the muggy afternoon heat.  They had caught him on his way home from the library.  He was more annoyed than angry with the three upperclassmen; the redcaps leering from their jacket pockets were another matter entirely.  “It’s pronounced doo-lah-garl and is from Australia.  I would like my book back now, Brenton.”

The rugby captain ham-handed his way through the pages.  “Is this what you’re doing with your time in the library, Waddlemouth?”

Brenton’s cohorts Peter Willich and pig-eyed Allan Hembridge snickered.

Alton took a slow breath.  “I’m studying, that’s all.  I can do what I want with my time.  Now, if you don’t mind, I really do need my book.  My parents are expecting me home in time for dinner.”

Brenton eyed Alton with the superiority of the popular.  “Are you a fairy, Waddlemouth?  You a poo pirate?”

“As much as you are,” said Alton, and as the color of truth rushed up the other boy’s cheeks Alton dashed forward, snatched the precious black and white book, and bolted down the street.

He made it halfway down the block before the others realized what was said and took off after him.  He tore across the street and rounded a corner smoke shop, drivers standing on their horns and brakes.  His heart pounded as he dashed around another a corner in search of sanctuary from the inevitable, the composition book clutched to his chest.

Then they were on him.  Peter took him low and Brenton came in high, slamming him to the walk as they pummeled and kicked and called him a “miserable gay-boy” and “fuggin’ Paddy poof” and other things that hurt less than their fists.  Three on one was a losing fight.  Alton protected the book with his body and waited for the worst to be over.

When an East Indian shopkeep finally chased off the dirty crows, Alton made it to his feet and gave the man a fake name and phone number to ring his parents.  He limped off before the ruse was discovered.  The memory of the redcaps’ maniac laughter grated like fingers down the chalkboard of Alton’s soul.

At home, he complained of a sour stomach and went straight to his room.  A grig was perched on his windowsill, twiggish and coy, singing to the coming night.  Alton made it to the sill in two quick steps and slammed the window shut on the beastie’s eggshell head.  Quivering with warm release, he wiped up the mess with a handful of tissues, and hid the refuse at the bottom of his waste can.

Mama let him stay home from school the rest of the week.

For all his devoted scholarship, a book could not adequately detail the care needed to peel away the smooth birch bark of a hamadryad’s face, or how it was best to pinch and give a sharp twist when tearing the wings from a sylph’s back.  Alton took prodigious notes.

Upon completing his year thirteen, the young man collected his award from MaeMa’s meager estate and spent a heady ten months on the continent hunting and dissecting fae before settling to university.

He could have hoped the rush of exploration would survive the snobbery and intolerance of school, but hope, like nobility, shouldered a heavy burden.

“I wasn’t stalking her, I was trying to help her,” Alton said as he tromped down the library steps.

“By followin’ her home from the pub, an’ waitin’ in the bushes for an eyeful through her bedroom window?” Xavier gave back.  “Face it, Alton, you’re not the type o’fella that has a girl sayin’ no an’ meanin’ yes.  You’re lucky she didn’t press charges.”

Around the commons, the semester’s cliques lounged in shady fellowship beneath stout oaks and leafy elders while the slow spicy red of Bossa Nova music spilled from an open window like thick silk.  Alton would have liked to find a bench in the sun where he could catch up on Nandor Pogány’s Magyar Fairytales From Old Hungarian Legends, but the inescapable fae presence curdled the moment and his mood.  He hunched his shoulders and kept his head down.  “Yeah.”

He realized after the fact that Xavier had asked a question.  “Come again?”

“What’s this helping Megan, anyway?  Hey, let’s get a quick nosh before class.”

They opted for curry noodles and a table in the sun.  Alton sorted through varieties of the truth while he picked out the shredded carrots.  “Have you ever had the feeling you’re being watched?”

Xavier glanced up from his plate.  “You mean like watched, or watched watched?”

Alton sipped at his water.  “The latter, I suppose.  Something like that, anyway.”

“Not really.  Why?”

Alton tipped his bottle in the direction of a hamadryad dozing in the comfortable embrace of her oaken self, the people around her none the wiser.  “Take a look over there and tell me what you see.”

“A tree and some people.”

“What else?”

“Uh . . . Nina Dobson’s talking on her cell.  There’s a Paki with a throwing disk.  Is this multiple choice?”

“What about the tree?”

“What about it?”

“Is there anything different about it?” Alton said carefully.

Xavier took his time answering.  “Not that I can tell.  It’s an oak tree.  Big, woody, got leaves.”

“What if I were to tell you that the tree is . . . alive?”

Xavier snorted.  “I wouldn’t call the Times, that’s for certain.”

Alton leaned across the table.  “I mean it.  It’s alive.”

Xavier rolled his eyes.  “So, it’s alive.  What’s that have to do with being watched?”

“Because it’s the tree that’s watching, y’see?  Something inside the tree.  Part of the tree, actually.”

Xavier dropped his voice as he cut a look at the crowd once more.  “You mean like a camera?”

Alton sat back.  A familiar headache picked at the tender spot between his eyes with a thin, black claw.  “No, not a camera.  A hamadryad.  It’s . . . a fae.  Of a sort.”

Xavier shook his head and laughed.  “You’re mental.  We went from your skulkin’ after Megan, to being watched, to naffin’ faeries.”

“It all makes sense if you think about it.  Hear me out, Xav, I’m not so mental as that.  I wasn’t stalking Megan, I swear.  I thought she was in trouble from a gancanagh.”

Xavier rubbed his teeth with a crumpled napkin.  “Never heard of ‘im.”

Alton’s fork kept unconscious time with the black claw, tearing tiny holes in the waxed paper plate.  “Not a him, not directly.  A gancanagh is an it that looks like a him, a fae from Ireland.  They’re known for taking a fancy to a woman, having a go with her, and then leaving her so desperate for more that she pines away until she dies.”

He looked for a glimmer of understanding in Xavier’s uneducated skepticism and continued, “I can’t really say how it managed its way to campus, but I knew that if the gancanagh got its leg over with Megan she was as good as dead.”

The memory of the slender, foppish fae was as vivid in daylight as the reality had been three nights ago outside Megan Holmes’ flat.  Lucky for her, Alton had been nearby to scare the wretched thing away.  He’d kept watch at Megan’s window the rest of the night in case it returned.

Xavier folded his empty plate around his fork.  “What was the hamadryad-thingie doin’?”

“Nothing at all.  It wasn’t there.”

“So, what’s with being watched?  You’re saying that this gay fella-“

“Not gay, fae.”

“-had an eye for Megan, and that’s why you were following her after she turned you down?”

Alton gritted his teeth in frustration.  “That has nothing to do with it, and I wasn’t following her.  I saw the gancanagh and wanted to help, that’s all.”

Xavier shook his head and stood.  “If you say so, but you sound off your chump and then some.”

Alton followed his former confidant to the waste bin.  He should have known better than to expect Xavier would believe him.  Alton looked at the hamadryad now watching him with wide, green eyes and slender leaf lashes.  “I am not mental.”

“We’ll see who’s mental the next time Pitch catches you so much as lookin’ cross-eyed at Megan.  Tell him about your faeries and see what happens.  C’mon, let’s get on to class.”

Much later, under the righteous cover of darkness, Alton returned to the commons and hammered an iron spike between the hamadryad’s eyes, pounding the metal head flush with the soft inner-bark.  It groaned and shuddered, sticky sap oozing from the wound.  Smiling and shivering, he sat at the nearest table and listened with eyes closed until the screams died away.

Alton kept to his own company after that, and welcomed the white collar freedom of an interpreter position after graduation.  Work was plentiful, allowing for numerous opportunities to travel and other benefits sublime.

One Tokyo summer was a celebration of contract negotiations finessed in a sushi bar over katsuo offered o-makase, and the subtle differences in the deaths of kami and kamui.

In Mexico City, he walked the half-lit autumn streets with his shirt inside out to confound the chaneques.  Their blood splattered the whitewashed walls like currant jelly.

Alton furnished his leased one-bedroom flat on Manhattan’s Upper West Side with simple lines and filled the bookshelves with Keats, Shakespeare, Service, and Trumbull, hearing his mother’s disapproving whisper with every selection.  New York City was no London, but it did have its own charms.  And fae.  During the work day at the office, Alton ignored the brownies in the storage cupboards when others were about. He choked them to death when no one was in sight, hiding the messy tissues in the waste paper basket after he cleaned up.

On the nights when the weather was reasonably fair, Alton donned a light jacket, pocketed an umbrella, and hunted proper.  To do the deed, he usually carried a stubby iron dagger that relied more on force than an edge to penetrate, a pair of needle nose pliers, and a bundle of plastic sandwich bags.  He was never happier than when he found what he sought, a pleasure reminiscent of a quilt tucked under the chin.

He cut out the eyes of what he was certain was a mazikeen on the Lower East Side.  He never discovered why it was alone in Riverside Park.  The memory of how it flowed and heaved lingered in his palms for months.

While waiting for a cab one evening, Alton realized the iridescent ripple in the direction of the reservoir was not a trick of the rain but a naga-sanniya slithering back to its watery home.  The next night Alton lured the dreadful thing to the surface of the water with a bottle of wine and the smoke of a clove cigarette.  The snake-woman savored the wine, breathed the essence of cloves, and barely made a sound as Alton skinned it alive.  He rolled the tender ribbons of the remains into the black water for the honest bottom feeders.  The skin he took home as a trophy, rolling and unrolling it with a slow hand in bed for many nights afterward.

He was not completely blind to the discarded gristle of the human condition during those sojourns.  He would have preferred to avoid people all together, but cities defied reason and people were often inconvenient.

He was forced to take a brick to a drunk who refused to surrender a bottle of Thunderbird with a gleefully pickled cuchulain within.  The affair left him queasy for days.  The unfortunate events with the little Paki girl and the imun living in her pink sneakers left his bowels in nervous misery and kept him home from work for a week.  He heard the girl’s mother calling her name, and the uneven clunk-thump of something running away in stone shoes, in his sleep.

What is the nature of God when innocents are made to suffer and die? he carefully scribed one cold December evening, while the desperation of someone’s daughter and a bloody two-by-four bruised his memory.  Perhaps evil is nothing more than a collection of blind men blaming the fellow next to them every time they lift a cheek on the pew.

He lay shivering in bed all the next day, his hands filled with brittle leaves and chicken bones, a pile of messy tissues beside the empty electric kettle.  Watery sunlight sliding between the drawn bedroom curtains hurt his eyes.

The voice was gruff with a distinct Brooklyn twang.  “What?  You not happy jerkin’ off like the rest of the kooks?”

Alton whirled around, knife in hand.  The Elder Mother creaked and moaned piteously at his back.  The headlamp around the brim of his hat clashed with the intruder’s torch, birthing strange shadows in the cold, March rain.  “Pardon?”

It was the first thing that came to mind, a brittle, mumbled word.

The other took a step back, resting a free hand on a bulge at its waist beneath a red poncho.  “What’s say you drop the knife and bring those hands up, ‘kay?”

That’s when Alton recognized the dark uniform under the red and the brim of the patrolman’s hat.  This was a bad time to be interrupted.  He probably looked quite the sight, soaked to the bone and covered in splinters and sap.  “You startled me, Officer.  I didn’t hear –”

“Yeah, I noticed.  I said drop the knife.”

“No, no.  Let me explain, just for a moment.  This isn’t –”

The beat cop took a step to the left.  He reached a hand under his poncho.  “I ain’t gonna tell you again, drop the knife.”

The words drummed in Alton’s head in time with his pulse.  The world swelled, distorted, the officer a twisted giant looming over him in the night.  Alton tightened his grip on the sticky knife handle.  He raised both hands to shield his eyes from the golden lance of the flashlight’s beam, the headache raging behind his eyes.  “You don’t have to take that tone with me.  This is no ordinary tree.  I –”

The Elder Mother groaned; leaves rustled and whispered overhead as a branch drooped low.  The officer pulled his nightstick, and Alton lunged forward.  He struck high and sure, burying his knife in a meaty tree limb that sagged under the impact.  A too-human scream gouged a jagged hole in Alton’s thoughts.  Red flowed slick and wet in the headlamp’s light, poured over his hands, turned to rubies that collected in his galoshes.

The red fae swung at him, reaching for the signal horn on its shoulder.  Afraid of what might answer the call, Alton brought the knife up and down with sharp insistence, over and over, until the red faerie slid off the blade to the cold, wet ground.

The policeman gurgled at his feet, red bubbling up from the jagged hole in his throat.

And then Alton’s legs were running, taking him along.  He had to get away, far away.  A fire built in his belly, cramping and twisting until he was hunched over and sobbing as he ran away, far away.  Run, Alton, run!

He couldn’t escape.  The noise, the colors, the blinding pain.  Falling over a curb, suicidal raindrops cold against his face, the red hand of God flashing on a yellow post, commanding him to STOP.  Fumbling with the metallic clatter of his keys in the lock.  Icy porcelain against fevered cheeks.  Knobby fingers pinching his bum.

The world swelled, a pustule of rage lodged between his shoulder blades.  For days Alton huddled beneath a pile of blankets, sweating through the pain, screaming when there was nothing else he could do.  “Mama!  Mama, I’m sick!  Mama!”

She didn’t answer.

Day in, day out, fae danced widdershins around the bed, laughing, pointing, red cap teeth slick with blood on a blade.  What had he done to deserve this?  He hadn’t meant to kill, but it was only a man, another innocent in the war.  Unfortunate.  Unavoidable.  “Stop laughing at me!  It’s not my fault!  Mama, make them stop!”

She still didn’t answer.

Somewhen, he knocked the phone off the hook when the ringing became too much to bear.  The monotone operator was his only friend until she left without saying good-bye.  They all left without saying good-bye.  Aunt Bethany, Maema, Mama, Megan.  Bitches, all of them.  No one loved him, understood him.  He cursed MaeMa in the kitchen, and cried when Mama didn’t give him an extra biscuit with tea.  Cursed Megan when she turned and found him at her window.  Why didn’t she believe him?  “Help me!”

White-hot pokers thrust through the meat of his legs and hatpins jabbed behind his knees.  He drew his legs tight against his body, screaming without sound, trying to think beyond the threshold of pain that tumbled into loneliness and oblivion.

Alton screamed again and this time managed a grunt, phlegmy and shallow but a sound.  Sound, yes, sound was good.  Pain was pain, everywhere and all over, from his teeth to his bum to his toes, but sound meant he was alive.

Sound could not penetrate the dark of his own making.  Alton opened his eyes.  The world was a blur of gray and black lit by a feeble light somewhere overhead.  He struggled to stand and bumped his head on a low beam that hadn’t been there when he lay down, a faerie trick he was certain.

Going forward on hands and pin-sore knees, Alton crawled through medicine ball sized wads of paper and massive plastic buckets until he passed under a thick curtain into a larger space.  A cave?  A hall?  His eyes were weak and his swollen fingers lacked sensation that was not pain.

He hobbled in shadows, twisted with loathing, calling out, “I’ll find you!  You can’t hide forever, you wretched imps!”All that came out were grunts and gibbered howls.

Alton staggered around the cavernous expanse, tumbling over stacks of this and piles of that.  When it became too bright and his eyes swelled with miserable tears, he staggered back to the cubbyhole and dragged himself back inside, covering his shivering form with a plastic tarp like a degenerate on the street.  “I hate you.  I hate you.”

And every time he returned to his cubbyhole after that, the words became his anchor as he cried himself to sleep.  “I hate you.”

He needed to find the red faerie who did this to him, cut it, skin it, crush it and hide the tissues.  As Alton shambled around the larger chamber in search of an exit back to the world he knew, a spear of yellow light from the cliff above his cubbyhole struck him full in the face like the fires of Heaven.  Cursing and snarling, he tottered over to the curtain and pulled himself up as far as he could.  Surprise turned to anger when he realized something fleshy held the light and kept moving it out of reach.  Alton pinched the massive beast as hard as he could until the light fell away with a clatter and comforting dark returned once more.

From outside the chamber came the thunder of giant feet taking massive steps.  Alton dropped down the side of the cliff and squirmed into his cubbyhole, putting his back to the far wall and covering himself with the tarp.  The steps came nearer and a sheet of light crossed over the curtain but did not penetrate.  The ceiling creaked as whatever lurked at the top of the cliff shifted; voices rumbled low and threatening.  Blind men mumbling prayers, lifting cheeks on the pew.  Alton listened and fingered the bits of hate rattling about in his stone shoes.

The post PseudoPod 586: ARTEMIS RISING 4: For Fear of Little Men appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Livia Llewellyn 
• Narrator : Lucy A. Snyder
• Host : Lucy A. Snyder
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Geneva Benton
• Discuss on Forums

“Cinereous” was originally published in Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages in 2013.

This is an alternate narration from our host, Lucy A. Snyder. Enjoy!

Cinereous by Livia Llewellyn

Paris

October, 1799

The nails on the heels of Olympe Léon’s boots are the only sounds in the silence of night’s chilly end. Click click click through indigo air, like the metallic beat of a metronome’s righteous heart. As always, when she sees her destination at the end of rue St. Martin, rising black and monolithic against the encroaching country and graying sky, her heart and feet skip beats. She thinks of each single drop of blood, spurting and squirting from the bright flat mouths of the necks, and her small calloused hands and wide bowls to catch them all. Olympe, like all the assistants, is very proud of her training, and very afraid of losing her place, very afraid of sinking back into the city’s bowels, never to return. She never misses a drop.

Read the full story here: http://pseudopod.org/2018/03/09/pseudopod-585-artemis-rising-4-cinereous/

The post PseudoPod 585: ARTEMIS RISING 4: Cinereous (Alternate Narration) appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Livia Llewellyn 
• Narrator : Ibba Armancas
• Host : Lucy A. Snyder
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Geneva Benton
• Discuss on Forums

“Cinereous” was originally published in Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages in 2013.

Cinereous by Livia Llewellyn

Paris

October, 1799

The nails on the heels of Olympe Léon’s boots are the only sounds in the silence of night’s chilly end. Click click click through indigo air, like the metallic beat of a metronome’s righteous heart. As always, when she sees her destination at the end of rue St. Martin, rising black and monolithic against the encroaching country and graying sky, her heart and feet skip beats. She thinks of each single drop of blood, spurting and squirting from the bright flat mouths of the necks, and her small calloused hands and wide bowls to catch them all. Olympe, like all the assistants, is very proud of her training, and very afraid of losing her place, very afraid of sinking back into the city’s bowels, never to return. She never misses a drop.

The building has no name. It never has. Inside the courtyard, men in effluvia-stained coats scurry back and forth to one of the three large guillotines sitting on the worn packed earth. Scientists and doctors and handlers, each carrying out their part of the Forbidden Experiment. Olympe and the young assistants are forbidden to venture beyond the warren of labs and rooms on the ground floor. The rules of their mysterious, tight-knit society haven’t stopped her, but after two years, she has still only seen glimpses of the eight labyrinthine stories that loom in a perfect square around the courtyard, occasionally flashes of people moving up and down the wide staircases, and the constant winking of the stairwell candle flames high above her like trapped stars in the artificial night. Most floors are reserved for research. The top two floors, merged long ago into a single high-walled prison, is where the Forbidden Experiment has taken place for over twenty years now, and only handlers are allowed inside. Thick-limbed men swathed in heavy layers of leather and chain mail, with animal-faced masks and gloves of unyielding steel, unlock the doors to the top floor once every week, and venture into a metal bar-ceilinged warren of broken rooms and passages, untamed flora and small creeping fauna, a facsimile and perversion of the natural world, open to the elements yet contained and confined. And after a time, each handler emerges with a young boy or girl who howls and shits and pisses and bites like a wolf, a child who has had no interaction with the civilized world since birth. Les enfants sauvages. Some are sent to labs on the middle floors for dissection and vivisection and resurrection, some are taken to the basement levels for electrical and mechanical experiments beyond even Olympe’s delicious imagination. And those tagged for the living head experiments are sent to the courtyard, to the guillotines and to her.

Olympe hangs her coat up in one holding room, and slips on her laboratory overcoat in another. She cannot describe how proud she feels when she buttons up the faded, fraying fabric. Out there in the world there are women who read books, who study, who are scientists and doctors as much as they can be, considering women are nothing more than failed men, walking fœtuses who never developed into their full male potential. Olympe, the brothel-raised daughter of a long-dead revolutionary and a long-dead whore, is very aware she will never be one of those women, those forward-thinking academic lights of France’s glorious new future, but at least she is more than what awaits her outside the double steel courtyard gates, and it never fails to thrill her. True, the great men who conduct these incredible experiments tend to recruit uneducated yet comely young women and men like herself, who don’t protest when a suck or two is requested of them, but Olympe is pretty and clean and always willing to comply. And she’s smart. As she grabs her copper bowls and heads into the courtyard, she thinks of the top floor, that mysterious jungle of rooms and wilderness, of the cleverly concealed panopticons inserted throughout the rotting passages and hallways from which the scientists can fully observe the enfants sauvages without interaction or detection. Thanks to her strong fingers and nimble tongue, she’s been in those rooms. She’s seen what goes on in the artificial wild, she’s heard what the scientists say. None of the other assistants have. None of them have ambitions quite like Olympe.

Each slender wood guillotine has a name, and something of its own personality, or so Olympe would like to believe. She’s worked at the bases of La Bécane and Le Massicot, both nimble and effective apparatuses, but her heart and hand belong to the swift and silent blade that descends through the center of Mirabelle. There’s just something about the sharp low whomp of Mirabelle’s heavy mouton and blade rushing through meat and bone that satisfies Olympe in a way nothing else does. Already Le Massicot has been at work—Nana is at the neck of a sauvage, her copper bowl catching the blood which will later be sent rushing through tubes and vials in some candlelit room upstairs. Étienne stands slightly behind her, one large hand on each side of the head as he holds it still and upright for display. Blood trickles and pools around his shoes. Before him three doctors crouch, touching the head lightly with calipers and other devices, taking notes as they speak in low tones. They are measuring the lingering signs of a life taken so swiftly by the blade that the head often fails to acknowledge the body’s demise. Olympe has seen the eyes of severed heads blink, seen lips twitch and heard gasps and sighs. The doctors hold vials up to the mouth to catch escaping vapors, peer through pieces of glass into the gaping neck, slide lances and needles into the jelly eyes. The assistants know better than to ask what knowledge they seek, or what use they intend with it. Later, the living heads, as they are called, will be placed in large glass containers filled with viscous liquids, and join other similar containers on the fourth floor. Olympe has seen that secret, many-shelved room as well, seen the hundreds of surprised faces peering out from their amber-colored shells. She knows a good scientist must have a strong stomach and heart, but she has no real desire to return any time soon.

Mirabelle’s wood frame is dull brown, the same color as Olympe’s carefully pinned and bonneted hair. Lorilleaux is at his usual spot beside her, pulling worn leather gloves onto his long hands. When he clamps his fingers around the sides of each head nestling in Mirabelle’s curved embrace, it’s like watching a monstrous spider clamp down on its prey. An executioner stands on Mirabelle’s opposite side, checking the ropes and mechanisms, giving one last polish to the blade. Sometimes the sun makes its way into the courtyard, bouncing between the windows and shining steel until it hurts to see. This morning the sky is cloudy and dull, and a fine haze floats through the air, a mixture of smoke and ash from the building crematorium and furnace fires that are never extinguished. The smell is particularly hideous today—for several weeks, an illness has steadily made its way through the sauvages, a flesh-destroying disease the doctors have yet to discover the cause of or cure for, a bodily putrefaction that gives an extra tang to the feathery airborne remnants of the dead. It coats the back of their throats and settles in their chests—everyone who works outside coughs, swallows constantly, drinks water and spits out discolored globs of phlegm. Olympe stares at the blanket of clouds rolling across the squared acre of sky over her head. It looks like another courtyard, a cold and lifeless mirror of the one below. She lays her copper bowls out on the long table positioned next to the stone platform on which Mirabelle stands. There is always a small space reserved for her, at the end of all the instruments and equipment the physicians and scientists use. Today is busy—there will be three subjects from the top floor coming to each guillotine. And when Olympe isn’t collecting the blood and handing it over to whoever has reserved it, she will be expected to hand instruments to those who need them, refill pens, provide fresh paper, and occasionally bring out trays of coffee and sweets. In her coat pocket, though, is her own small notebook and pencil. When time allows, she scribbles down her own set of notes, just as any good scientist would, even though she isn’t quite sure how to correctly shape all the letters or spell all the words.

Lorilleaux lets out a quick gasp, and Olympe turns. Something is wrong, she realizes, and her heart skips another beat. Across the courtyard, Mirabelle’s first visitor of the day approaches. A handler has one of the diseased sauvages locked in an iron jacket attached to a long pole at the back, which he uses to push the body forward—a device the handlers created when the creatures are ill, when they don’t want contact with the body. The sauvage lunges and stumbles on twig-thin legs, reaches out with broken-fingered arms, as all the creatures do. But, giant strands of spittle hang from its cracked black lips, and its pallor is that of a month-old corpse, as if every particle of health had been siphoned away. And its movements are slow, Olympe notes; sluggish and confused as if fighting off a fever or waking from the too-long grip of a terrible dream. One low continual moan issues from deep within its ribcage, not the high healthy roar she’s used to hearing. Around the handler and creature, physicians and scientists scurry, already throwing out theories and furiously writing down notes. One of those physicians is Marie François Xavier Bichet, favorite student to the now-deceased founder of their society, Pierre-Joseph Desault—whose own head, it is whispered, now sits blinking and gaping in some forgotten corner of the building. Bichet never appears in the courtyard unless occasion merits, unless some important discovery is about to be made.

Olympe steps to the end of the table and grabs a bowl, hugging it to her chest like a shield as the phalanx of chaos approaches. The blade rises to the top of Mirabelle, and the executioner locks the déclic and release handle into place. Lorilleaux is several meters away, on the opposite side of the table. Olympe likes his gentle disposition, but she’s never seen anyone who can make a living lifting heads from dead bodies yet tremble like a girl at the sight of anything worse than a bruise. He’ll never be a doctor. The handler has unlatched the pole from the metal chest plate, and another handler is removing it from the sauvage, who claws and paws at the man’s mask, trying to scrap through the layers of protection to get at the flesh inside. Seconds later, the man forgotten, it swivels its head like a mad dog, snapping and biting at the soft bits of ash floating around them like dead fireflies. For what reason it does these things, Olympe cannot fathom. The men scribble faster, and Olympe reaches into her pocket, touches her little notebook as a reminder that she’ll do the same thing later, when she has the chance. There is no time now, though: the first handler is maneuvering the creature’s head into Mirabelle’s curved base while the executioner lowers the lunette over the top of its neck. The second handler stands at the back of the bascule, holding the creature’s constantly flailing legs together with one massive hand as he keeps it against the plank with another hand flat at its back. For the first time she can recall, Olympe is revolted at the sight of so much physical corruption and decay. Black and blue discolorations entirely cover the almost skeletal body, and there are perhaps a hundred shallow and deep cuts on the creature, yet no bleeding or discharge. Her lips curl slightly—it can’t be possible, but it looks as if some of the vertebrae are poking out of the skin.

And now the first handler steps back, and the executioner motions them forward. Lorilleaux and Olympe take their places, she with her copper bowl to the side, and Lorilleaux with his spidery hands reaching out to clasp the creature’s jerking head. He makes a wet grunt of disgust as his fingers sink into the filthy tangle of hair and soft skin. For once, Olympe can’t blame him. Everyone waits. Lorilleaux buries his nose into his shoulder and violently shudders. She knows he’s swallowing his own bile. Beneath his grip, the head keeps moving. Finally he lifts his own, and gives a single definitive nod. The sequence of events is practiced and swift. Once Lorilleaux nods, the executioner shouts out as he pulls the lever. Mirabelle’s blade shoots down swift and straight, right through the creature’s neck. Lorilleaux pulls the head away and holds it up for immediate inspection, while Olympe takes one step in and holds her copper bowl under the neck, catching as much of the blood as possible. As she holds the bowl, scientists will take samples from the flow, attempt to measure the rate, thickness and amount of drainage. It’s all clockwork, performed perfectly by them every day without fail for three years. Nothing will go wrong.

Lorilleaux gives his nod. The executioner shouts out, and the head in Lorilleaux’s grasp twists. The blade comes down and severs the neck—Lorilleaux drops the head, whipping away his hands as he shouts in pain. The head bounces down onto Olympe’s feet, and instinctively, she drops her bowl and reaches down to grab it, her fingers outstretched like she’s seen Lorilleaux’s a thousand times. As her hands move down, the head turns: suddenly, there is pain, unlike anything she has felt before. An animal roar erupts from her throat, and she raises her arm, the head still attached, its teeth moving back and forth across her fingers like a miniature saw. She can feel the blood in her veins grow cold, the world turn black at the edges, and everything grow dull and murky and slow. Men surround her, using the calipers and any other instrument they can find to pry the horrible object from her body. And then it is over, and the head is gone. Olympe raises her hand to her face, steaming rivulets of red running down her palm and disappearing in the sleeves of her clothes. One finger is crooked, broken and almost torn in half at the knuckle. When she speaks, it’s as if the timorous, child-like words are coming from any place other than her mouth.

—I’ve been bit.

Activity at the other guillotines has ceased. Olympe finds Nana at her side, guiding her across the eerily silenced courtyard to the holding rooms. Lorilleaux runs ahead, his blood-spattered boots echoing back and forth between the stone walls. The air feels too warm, and the ash, the ever-constant smell of burning flesh, the thick scratch at the back of her mouth—Olympe halts, bends over, and vomits. Bits of black spatter against her boots. A frisson of terror washes through her. Those black clots are her blood, darkened from sitting in her stomach for hours as it curdled into something else. Nana waits until she’s finished, then guides her forward again, through the holding rooms and into a corner of a makeshift medical lab, where a physician is already bandaging up a sobbing Lorilleaux. He’ll never be anything more than an assistant. He can’t handle danger or pain. Olympe sits down, props her elbow upright against the table, and studies her finger. Already the edges of the wound are drying out, cracking slightly. Moistening a rag with her spittle, she wipes the blood away and leans in, squinting. A low moan escapes her lips, barely a feather’s breath. Tiny veins of blue and black thread away from the edges of the bite marks, a network that spreads as she watches, imperceptibly slow but sure. Around the lines, the flesh blossoms in a soft pale gray. Olympe grabs a roll of clean linen and quickly begins wrapping her hand. The doctor attending Lorilleaux doesn’t protest. They all know how hard she works, how quick and smart she is. Olympe takes care of herself. Several tears drop onto the cream fabric as she pins the ends tight, then rolls down her stained overcoat sleeve. She’ll be fine, she tells herself as she rises from her seat, ignoring Nana’s steady hand. She’s going to go far.

After a few sips of water, Olympe makes her way outside and back across the courtyard to Mirabelle. Already the blood has been washed away with buckets of scalding water that sends steam curling into the air, and the remaining assistants and doctors are placing equipment into straw-filled barrows to be wheeled inside. The tracks of another wheelbarrow lead to the doors at the rear of the courtyard, where the remains will be sent first to the morgue, and then, in pieces, to other labs on other floors. Bichet and a group of the older scientists gather at the far end of the table, staring at a liquid-filled amber container set at its edge. Hair floats in the liquid like seaweed. Normally Olympe wouldn’t dare approach these important men, who know her only as a pair of disembodied hands holding a blood-filled copper bowl. She sidles along the table, her uninjured hand touching the edge casually, as if it’s not necessary to keep her balance. When she gets to the edge of the group, Bichet straightens, and waves her closer. The men move aside: they’re making way for her. Little trickles of sweat run down the sides of her face. It feels like her body is pushing all the fluids out, squeezing out every last drop of moisture, to make room for the gray blossoms and the black veins.

Bichet reaches out and grabs the top of the container, twisting it around with his nimble surgeon’s hands. Olympe crouches down until her chin rests on the tabletop, as though she were five again. Seaweed waves of dark hair make way for a face, bruised and contorted. The eyes are clouded over but open, and they blink, and they see Olympe. Tête vivante, someone whispers. Thick globs of blood stick to its lips, preserved by the fluid. Some of that blood is hers. A part of her will always be in that jar, trapped between the lips of something that is not dead or alive. The mouth opens in a soundless cry, and a piece of tooth floats out, disappearing in the waving hair. Olympe turns and runs from the table stumbling across the courtyard back to the holding rooms. Behind her, loud laughter floats and tumbles and mixes with the snowy crematory ash.

Time and the day and the ashes in the air sift past Olympe in an increasing haze of detachment and low-grade pain. She hovers near the door of the holding room, watching the handlers walk to and fro with their living cargo. None of the sauvages that they take to the guillotines are ill, as far as she can tell. Men walk back and forth between the assistants, jars and dishes and bowls filling and emptying. Heads, feet, bones, blood. A farmer’s market of grotesqueries and abominations. And in the distance the fires eat away at the remains, vomiting out the bits onto their heads. She stares into the distance. Her face is somewhere else. She can’t feel her lips. Everyone in the courtyard coughs, hocks, spits. Something happened today that she should be weeping about, but she can’t remember. She holds up her bandaged hand. The nails are black as beaded jet. They look oddly fetching.

Light gray flakes float around and against her skin. A lone idea flares to life in her mind. It’s the ash. They got sick, all of them, every person and sauvage in the building, from the airborne remains of the burning dead. Olympe shivers hot and cold with the incredible scientific significance of her thoughts. All those smart men in the building, and she alone knows. She’s figured it out. Life into death, into life, into death. Ouroborus. That’s what the—

Nana is helping her into her scarf and coat. Is the day over already? It feels as if she only just arrived. Beyond the doors, the courtyard is pitch black, silent until tomorrow morning when the blades spring back to life. Life. Something about life. Someone walks her through the thick double gates. His face is familiar, plump and delicious. Red wet fruit in a desert. Outside, the world is quiet and calm. She hears the muted roar of the furnace far behind her, all the machinery hidden within the building that keeps it alive to gobble up all in the name of Science. Rue St. Martin lies before her like a dried-up river, pointing a dim, insurmountable way back into Paris proper. Lights twinkle overhead in the black of night, tumble down and brush against her face. Olympe sighs. She used to remember what those are. She breathes them in as she drags her feet down the raggedy sides of the road.

A lamp post or tree trunk is at her back. When did she stop walking and sit down? The night is cold. She should feel it, but she doesn’t. She should care, but.

She is going to go far.

The ash.

It was the bite, and the ash.

Olympe wills her numb fingers to begin a laborious creep through the layers of fabric, toward her notebook and pencil, though she cannot feel their progress or lack thereof. No matter, she must somehow write down her scientific observations and present them to the others in the morning, before the disease spreads further. This knowledge will be the society’s salvation, its debridement, and her way out. Olympe will be taken seriously, taken under wing. Respect, at last. She will become a scholar, a doctor, a brilliant beacon of light and an example to all women of France. She stares down. Her hand is a hand that is not her hand and it is all the way on the other side of Paris or perhaps even the world and she does not know what it is at all or what it holds. At the quiet end of the street, the building stands tall and funereal against scrabbly trees and darkling sky. The river of Time rushes steadily into and through her, filling her up until all she sees and feels and hears is a great slow blanket of nothingness: and everything stops.

Disconnected images well up into her mind, images of each silky shining drop of blood out there in the dark, spurting and squirting from the bright flat mouths of open necks, and her small calloused hands and the wide bowl of her mouth to catch them all. Warm red, squirming and streaming behind the outlines of the shapes so rapidly approaching her. Bright red, to push the gray of the world away.

The post PseudoPod 585: ARTEMIS RISING 4: Cinereous appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Christine Lucas
• Narrator : Andrew Leman
• Host : Karen Bovenmyer
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Artist : Geneva Benton
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 584: ARTEMIS RISING 4: The Drowned Man’s Kiss is a PseudoPod original.

“The Drowned Man’s Kiss” is inspired by the works of the Greek Poet Nikos Kavvadias: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Kavvadias

In his poem “Esmeralda” there’s this verse: “Come sweet dawn, the drowned man kissed you.” And the story was born from that, playing as it went with the theme of the cursed dagger, which also features in another of Kavvadias’ poem, “To Machairi” (The dagger).

Longtime listeners or backers of our Pseudopod 10 Year anniversary will be familiar with the artistic work and madcap visions of Jonathan Chaffin of Horror In Clay.  He makes fine horror-themed tiki mugs, art, and ephemera. He made a Cthulhu tiki mug, before that was a thing, and a cask of Amontillado and an Innsmouth Fogcutter.  Now, he has a warning for you. Somewhere in the infinite multiverse, or just on the other side of this shadow, the King In Yellow awaits. “The Pallid Mask” from Horror In Clay is a 8in tiki mug inspired by love for the linked short stories of Robert W. Chambers, and every subsequent writer caught by that fateful play.

The mug is available on Kickstarter, and will ship in August. The mug is part of a collection with companion pieces like a custom-written D6 tabletop RPG module and a Mai Tai glass from the mythic “Shores of Carcosa” restaurant.  Learn more on Kickstarter by searching for “Pallid Mask” or at Horror In Clay.

The Drowned Man’s Kiss by Christine Lucas

Last night, I dreamt of the drowned man again.

It starts with a murmur. A prayer, slithering through a sleeping shipmate’s lips. Or perhaps a confession, or a memory caught in the fog of the ghostly hours before dawn. It lingers little down here, in the stale air heavy with the stench of urine and unwashed bodies. Soon it rises higher, amidst the sails and the riggings, hungry for fresh air. Then comes the scratching against the ship’s hull. Grip by grip, claw-like hands dig into the wood dragging upwards God knows what.

I lay still on my hammock, squeezing my eyes shut. I don’t dare to steal a peek at the narrow stair leading upwards, to the main deck. But I hear the slow drip of water—stagnant, black water mixed with putrid drool and I gag at the stench. Once, when I was a young fool, I did dare a glimpse. Never again. I’ve seen enough of the corpse sprawled across the upper steps, its torso reaching downwards, the rest out of sight. Grey, bloated flesh bathed in the milky light of early dawn. Bone grinds on bone as he turns to seek me out amidst the slumbering sailors. One eye dangles on its decaying cheek, the other socket a dark nest for crabs.

Gnarled hands, their flesh stripped off by water and fish, dig into the wood. First they drag the corpse forward step by step, then they dig into the lower deck’s planks and slouch closer, an arm’s reach each time. Should I dare a peek, there would be no pelvis, not groin, no legs to see below the drowned man’s waist. Only the white-washed remnants of his backbone, and long tendrils of muscle, sinew and entrails.

Madonna forgive me, with every slosh, with every pull of those fleshless hands I pray that he’ll turn towards one of the others. He never does. And I lie there, helpless and exposed like a gutted pig. I cannot move. I cannot scream. I cannot die. And I part my lips when his tongue probes my mouth, cold and slimy like a dead minnow. My heart struggles against my ribs, my stomach heaves and I wake up, breathless and bereft of the dead man’s embrace.

Someone will die today.

Mere superstition, Papa-Nikolas deemed such beliefs back at home, during his Sunday sermons. But common folk know them for omens of certain death: waking up to the drowned man’s kiss or to the ship’s bell double toll. Illiterate sailors’ superstitions across the Aegean Sea. They could be, I guess. But I know such beliefs to be older than Papa-Nikolas’ Christ, older than the twelve slumbering gods beneath their white marble temples. I cannot–will not–shrug them off. I know few men worthy of respect–retired sea captains, stony-faced, hard-eyed, every wrinkle a reminder of a conquered storm. And they all revere these omens and the one who sends them forth—the one who still lurks in the deep.

The breeze carries below deck the scent of spices and the cries of dock workers. I climb up. Someone will die today. My fists clench. It won’t be me.

I wash down the dream’s aftertaste with gulps of tsikoudia from my flask. Droplets drip on my beard and the strong, bittersweet spirit burns my throat and awakens memories of my small island north of Crete–memories of home.

I miss home. I miss Ayse. Without her, I have no home to return to.

The memory of her smile coils like a noose around my throat. I climb the steps to the main deck faster, towards the sunlight. The harbor of Algiers offers plenty a distraction: the loud, colorful crowd clad in djellabas, hooded robes of many styles and sizes. The aromas of cumin and garlic mingles with the stench of animal dung. The docked corsair ships hoist Barbarossa’s banner and ragged captives are herded away to the slave markets. Under the rule of the Barbarossa brothers, slave-trade has flourished across the Barbary Coast.

Our line of trade is safer, although not as profitable: hashish and opium, and sometimes mastic gum from Chios. Captain Yusef looks at me with Ayse’s eyes—so much like them, and so filled with hatred. Would she look at me the same way now? And does he know? He mustn’t. I’m still alive, am I not? But perhaps he suspects. I shan’t give him an excuse today–not with the drowned man’s kiss still on my lips. So I avoid his gaze and my sin—again.

I hurry to join my shipmates unloading the cargo.

With the cargo unloaded and coins in my pouch, I head to town, for some decent food and–damned lice–a visit to the baths. Amidst carts and kebab merchants’ stalls, I elbow my way through the crowd, one hand on my dagger, the other on my pouch. Each step takes me closer to the gathering I’d hoped to avoid: not the slaves, not the corsairs, not even the fast-fingered urchins. My heart flutters when I near the women waiting at the docks.

Clad in dark kaftans, some with their heads wrapped in sebniyyas, some unveiled, they flock away from the ruffle. Their faces light up with every docking ship, looking for those who sailed away: fathers, husbands, sons. This breed of women knows no country or religion across the Mediterranean. They are brides of the sea, a sisterhood of mourning and waiting, from the mother of the last cabin boy to the wife of the most feared corsair.

Ah, Mana… you were one of them, once… Long-dead, now, my poor mother, may the Virgin bless her soul. How long did she wait before giving up, when the sea took my father? How long until she dried her eyes, with no grave to cry over?

How long did Ayse wait for me?

Ayse. My love, my sin, the blood upon my hands. Shame has long erased her face from my memory, but not the scent of her hair—cinnamon and spice—and the way her body coiled with mine. Rare, precious stolen moments of peace, drowned by the thoughtless fool that I was. I blink. Damned sand makes my eyes water. I need shade. There. A door to an off-way shop. I’ll be safe there. Alone.

Two steps down into the cool interior and into another world. I half-heartedly browse through the collection of dusty old swords and moth-eaten uniforms of a dozen Mediterranean armies–Byzantine vamvakia and Saracens’ helmets and Crusaders’ breastplates. A parrot squeaks somewhere outside. Mixed scents flow into the shop: coriander and garlic and camel dung. At the darkest corner, behind dusty bookcases, on the highest shelf above a pile of carpets, I spot a wooden box, under the protection of the khamsa amulet: Fatima’s Hand.

My hands ignore silks and velvets and move upwards, to the box. A blackened hand guides mine, dead blood drawn to shed blood.

“How did you find this? It’s not for sale.” A steady, heavily-accented voice. The shopkeeper appears from behind a cobweb-covered bookcase, his step noiseless as a cat’s, clad in a sand-colored djellaba. Dark-skinned and wrinkled, with small, cunning eyes over a graying beard.

“Why?” I pop the lid open. Amidst a handful of blue nazar talismans lies a dagger, its blade the length of my palm. I pick it up; well-balanced. Damascene steel? Worn heraldry on the hilt: the outline of an anchor with a fish tail curled around it.

A good dagger can come handy. Bad dreams can be just that: dreams. That bastard Yusef is real flesh and blood.

“How much?”

He snatches the box from my hands. “Choose something else.”

“I want this one.” I point the dagger’s tip at him. “How much?”

He raises his arms in defense and his chin in defiance. “Not that. It’s cursed.”

“Cursed?” I cock an eyebrow. The drowned man sighs over my shoulder; claw-like nails trace my jugular. My skin breaks in goosebumps. I manage a half-grin. “You’re not getting one dirham more than it’s worth.”

“I’m not haggling, you fool!” He holds out the open box. “Put it back, if you value your soul.”

My soul? Hah! I lost my soul long before I stepped into this hole. I toss a dirham to him. “No. The curse. Tell me about it.”

He catches it in mid air with surprising speed. His eyes gleam, much like the eyes of the ship’s cats stalking the hashish-eating rats. He measures me from matted hair to bare feet. “Fine, effendi. I’ll tell you.”

Effendi–sir. Such a change in attitude one dirham can make… After the sea robbed me of father, ship and future, such crumbs of respect warm my heart. Even coin-bought respect.

“That dagger ended in my shop with a long trail of blood behind it. Not any blood, no. Legend has it that those wielding it will murder those they love most.” He nods. “Yes, effendi. It’s true. Husbands have killed wives and mistresses, men their brothers and fathers.”

Then that bastard Yusef is safe. I stifle a chuckle. “And whom have you killed?”

“No one.” He meets my stare. “I’ve never handled it, only kept it inside the box, where it can do no harm.”

“Nonsense. If it’s so dangerous, why didn’t you throw it in the sea?”

His wrinkles deepen, his eyes widen and the blood leaves his lips in one heartbeat of absolute terror. He sucks in a deep breath.

“I keep it where I can watch it; I’ll never sell it. Not for one dirham, not for one thousand.” He holds up the box again. “Please. Choose anything else at half price.”

The offer is good. I don’t care. This is an exquisite blade, and the curse–if indeed there’s one–can’t affect me. Everyone I’ve ever loved is already dead.

Ayse…

I blink shame away. I’ve yearned for few things in my life: the sun on my face, a ship under my feet, a warm meal after a hard day’s toil, and her—family, life, old age with her. I can’t have her. But I’ll have this. I want this. I point it at his neck. “How. Much.”

He sighs. When he speaks again, his voice is weary. “The Prophet, peace be upon him, has warned us against murder. I will not sell it to you. I won’t have the blood of your victims on my hands.”

“As you wish.” I tuck the dagger in my belt and flee. He doesn’t try to stop me.

In the shadows of the back alleys of Algiers, my father and grandfathers and all my forefathers, well-respected captains and navigators, turn their backs on me. First a murderer, now a thief. Virgin be blessed, Mana, you rest in God’s arms now and can no longer see your son’s shame.

As I flee, every dog in Algiers howls.

One of my younger shipmates never returns. He got a blade in the gut during a tavern brawl, I’m told. No, in a brothel, someone claims. The fool tried to pull down a whore’s yashmak. But no one can be that stupid; everyone knows that those veiled whores might show their tits for a dirham, but never their faces.

He’s dead. I’m not. I’ve survived another visit from the drowned man.

Later that night, I hear more whispers from the nearby hammocks: Captain Yusef considers expanding to privateering and slave trade.

I roll over and shrug it off. Neither this ship nor this crew are fit for piracy.

Not even Yusef can be this foolish.

We’re two days off Algiers, heading southeast, to Crete. Madonna be blessed, no more bad dreams since we left port. I seek solace in the wind-blown realm of masts and riggings and sails, unless the boatswain orders me elsewhere. My kingdom in the clouds, between the seagulls’ flight and the dolphins’ graceful leaps. There, memories and guilt disintegrate under the sunlight.

Sometimes, I think I spot the mermaid’s tail breaking the surface far off, on horizon’s trail: Panaghia Gorgona, the Madonna Mermaid. With one hand she holds the infant, with the other she wields the storm. It’s the sea herself, some old folk say, while others claim that she’s a deity older than both the Trinity and the twelve. But all agree, and add in whispers, that a host of drowned sailors follows her trail in the deep. Perhaps my nightly visitor is one of them, the harbinger of her will, delivering her justice to those who fail her.

Is my father among her drowned host?

Is Ayse? My son?

My vision blurs. I seek the comfort of my cursed dagger in my palm. There’s no mermaid, no God–no forgiveness.

That night, the drowned man returns.

Come morning, I’m proven wrong. Yusef is that foolish.

Under overcast skies, we’re ordered to follow a small Venetian ship. That bastard Yusef will be the death of us all. Most of us come from sun-scorched coastal villages with brittle soil, scrawny goats, and wells rare enough to teach us the value of fresh water. We are no fighters; we’re goatherds and fishermen turned sailors and smugglers, aboard a ship wrecked enough to attract the least possible attention.

Yusef envies Hayreddin Barbarossa’s infamy and riches; he won’t listen to reason. He doesn’t understand that this barque with the much-mended sails isn’t a galley. We’re not battle-trained seamen, and he’s not Barbarossa.

My mates mutter and take their time following Yusef’s orders. Even the boatswain seems disgruntled, his face drawn, his hands in fists; he’s an olive-skinned Egyptian of few words. When he speaks, he speaks right. As I climb down from the main mast, he tries to talk sense into the captain.

There are enough thugs loyal to Yusef; dogs of a kind pack together. I make my way to the side. I won’t have any of them stand behind me.

A few feet away, the boatswain attempts to reason with Yusef.

“…but what if they carry gunners and bombards? What do we have? Grappling hooks and belaying pins? The men–”

A slap against the face. Stunned silence. The boatswain takes two steps backwards. Wipes his bloody lips. Gawks at the captain. Yusef has never hit him before.

“You have your orders,” he barks.

Yusef pulls a belaying pin from the nearest bulwark and holds it out, pointing it to each man around him in turn. He spins around, until he spots me. He points the pin straight at me. It can crack my skull with a single blow.

“You! You, lazy Greek, always sleeping late, always loitering where you thought I couldn’t see you.”  He wags the pin as if he’s wagging a finger to an unruly child. “You’re bad luck, you. If it hadn’t been for my dear late cousin’s pleas, I wouldn’t have taken you onboard.” His voice hardens. “But she’s dead now, isn’t she?” A shadow slithers behind his eyes—Ayse’s eyes. If he didn’t suspect I was involved in Ayse’s death, he does now.

And he’ll kill me for it. Or to scare the others into submission. Or both.

I won’t waste my breath. I meet his gaze and my sin, and keep my right hand on my dagger. My fingers trace the faded heraldry on the hilt. I lick my lips and taste the briny taste of the drowned man’s tongue. I ball my fists, balance my weight. Yusef’s eyes cut too deep. No. Not like this. Not by Yusef’s hand.

“Hah!” Yusef snorts and signals at his thugs. “This dog thinks he’s a man.” Hefting the pin like a club, he charges.

Perhaps it’s the wind that clouds his vision. Perhaps it’s my newfound clarity that steels my arms and guides my moves. Perhaps it’s those eyes that remind me of the man I once was, before this superstitious drunk I’ve become, terrified of bad dreams. I sidestep right in time and elbow him in the back hard enough to send him face down on the deck. I manage a kick against his ribs. Something cracks. He curses.

“Next time, I’ll kill you.” My voice rings calm–controlled. It scares me more than any of Yusef’s threats. And still it thrills me, and I’m drunk by this absolute hopelessness, in which all routes stretch open. Even mutiny against a bully, against a curse, against Sea and Fate.

“Get him, you dogs!” Yusef attempts to get up.

I kick him again. He rolls over onto his back.

At the edges of my vision, his thugs make their move. One of them, a huge Turk, is only a few steps away. He wields a grappling hook. A well-balanced punch on the stomach from the boatswain, and his grin becomes a growl. He drops the hook, retreats a few steps. His gaze darts between Yusef and the boatswain. I cannot tell whom he fears most; his bully of a captain, or the tough–but never cruel–boatswain? The rest of Yusef’s lackeys aren’t more successful: they ‘trip’ and land face first on the bulwark, they step on carelessly ‘forgotten’ caltrops or halt their advance at the sight of drawn hand fids.

Yusef pulls himself up, his face twisted. He hefts the pin and charges again. Before he can manage a blow, I grip his wrist overhead, and punch him on the mouth. A cry–shock and shame and rage, and Yusef spits out blood and chipped teeth. I release his wrist and push him back. He stumbles, rosy froth on his mangy beard, and grips a nearby line to keep his balance. Through incoherent curses, he draws his scimitar.

I draw my dagger.

He chuckles. “Such a small …knife you have there.” He spits at me, and blood lands on the blade of damascene steel.

The dagger vibrates. I feel it through my palm, through muscle and sinew, up to my hair that stands, down to my toes that curl.

Thirst. Need. A call to arms. A call to kin.

Madonna, help me.

But it’s not the black-clad visage of the Virgin that enters my thoughts; it’s a monstrous tail, and she comes bearing the storm.

The wind dies down. The sails hang loose. Lightning cracks over still waters. Cool drizzle starts to fall, and dead lips brush against my ear.

Behind me, someone murmurs—a prayer, a confession, a forgotten shanty from a ghost ship gliding by?

Thin fog rises from the sea. Distant echoes come with the fog and join the murmur. Whispers in tongues we once knew but have long forgotten, lullabies and limericks and prophecies and warnings. And a name—no, many names for the One who has none: Tiamat, Tethys, Thalatta.

Yusef raises his scimitar as if to strike, but then lowers it again, his eyes wild. Some men mumble prayers, others spit thrice on the deck to avert evil, others dare a glance overboard. From somewhere near the prow comes a great splash. Now sea water drizzles over us, and a lad leans over the railing to see. Is it a whale? A dolphin, mocking the affairs of men with its grace?

You know what it is, do you not?

The lad throws his arms in the air and falls onto his knees, his face deathly pale.

“P-panagia G-gorgona,” he mutters, making the sign of the cross.

Madonna Mermaid.

More men fall on their knees. Faithless thugs and goatherds-turned-to-sailors alike mumble prayers in half a dozen languages. The boatswain remains silent, but holds the nazar amulet on his chest in a white-knuckled grip. Yusef doesn’t pray; never has.

“Stop that!”

No one listens. He takes one step as if to charge me, but pulls back when I raise my dagger. The next one closest to him is the lad who saw the mermaid. He’s still on his knees, rocking back and forth, his arms crossed on his chest, reciting a prayer to the Virgin. Before I can stop him, Yusef kicks him hard on the chin, sending him on his back. The boy falls and lays still, breathing but passed-out.

My vision blurs. “How brave of you. Such a threat, a praying boy.”

I move towards him. So does the boatswain, picking up the grappling hook Yusef’s thug dropped moments ago. Yusef spins to face me, the tip of his scimitar cutting half-circles in the air, between the boatswain and me.

Then scratching starts; I feel it first under my bare feet. Then I hear it–everyone hears it–through every plank and board, from the hull upwards. Scratching, grazing, scraping, something claws its way up from the deep. Blackened fingers with claw-like nails–the drowned man’s hands. Not one, now, but legion. The praying stops. One of Yusef’s thugs, dark-skinned, thin, his upper lip trembling under his thick moustache, howls like a madman. His eyes roll around, wild as if he’s smoked all the hashish in the cargo hold. Flailing his arms, froth on his lips, he jumps overboard. His muttering turns to a high-pitched sound before we hear a splash. It too turns to a gurgle before all sounds stop.

No one dares to look overboard.

The scratching resumes.

The men huddle together, like a bundle of trembling chickens in their pens. The boatswain stands his ground, holding the hook high. Yusef waves his blade at everyone and no one, cursing, his sword arm shaking.

They are coming for me. For us. Not in dream, but in waking, and I don’t know how to stop them. But this is not a dream in which I lie still, in which I cannot move. Now, I can see. I can bleed. I can die. And I can think, before the drowned man’s lips rob me of breath and life. I glance at my blood-stained dagger. The mere suggestion of throwing it to the sea had filled the old shop-keeper with dread. Why? What does that insignia mean, that fish-tail curled around the anchor? To whom does it belong to?

Yusef screams and charges me, his scimitar high. Mostly out of reflex, I fall to one knee and plunge the dagger upwards, into his gut. I push. And turn. And push. And turn, until the scream stops, until the scimitar falls, until his body collapses limp on the deck, the dagger’s thirst quenched by the sacrifice.

The scratching stops. The fog dissolves. The wind picks up. Amidst nervous whispers and suspicious stares, I remain on my knees, my shoulders slumped, my rage spent. The dagger almost slips my bloody grip; it yearns to return where it belongs. I hold on to it. Not yet. An arm’s length away, Yusef’s glassy eyes are fixed on me, one final reminder of my sin.

He’s dead. Whom will I hate now?

The wind-blown man, my shipmates call me. The call me other things too, but I choose not to listen. I hear they’ve made the boatswain their captain–a good choice. Not that it matters to me–since that fateful morning, I’ve spend my days in my kingdom of sails and riggings. They leave me alone; I know that the next time we reach port, they’ll leave me behind.

Sometimes, I think I spot the mermaid’s tail in the distance, reminder of unpaid debts. I promised Ayse I’d come back to her; I even meant it, at the time. But I didn’t. The lights of distant ports–Morocco, Alexandria, Algiers–kept calling me away. Neither war nor storm or misfortune, only the siren’s call of one more journey, feeding off my soul’s restlessness.

When I did return, it was too late. Great is the shame of an unwed mother in our island, no future for sailors’ whores and their bastards. Her bloated corpse, its hands still clutching the infant on its chest, had washed ashore beneath the Aghios Nikolas chapel–the patron saint of sailors. Was our child stillborn, or did they drown together when she threw herself into the dirty harbor waters?

Is the drowned corpse that visits me a man’s corpse at all?

I didn’t know she was with child when I left; I swear, I didn’t.

The dagger remains strapped on my belt. I suspect now that it carries no curse, but a purpose—is there even a difference? Its purpose becomes a curse to the hands of those who choose it: to return to the One it belongs to, one kill at a time.

But I have finally found my own purpose, the route I’ve avoided much too long. When the drowned man returns, I will kiss him back. And then I’ll return the dagger to its rightful owner, and seek Ayse and my son beneath the waves.

At last, I’m going home.

The post PseudoPod 584: ARTEMIS RISING 4: The Drowned Man’s Kiss appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Brandon Massey
• Narrator : Dominick Rabrun
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
• Discuss on Forums

“After the Party” was first published in Brandon’s collection Twisted Tales in 2006.

After the Party By Brandon Massey

When Terry was halfway along the twisting, dark country road, he looked in his rearview mirror and saw a frightening sight: the flashing blue lights of a police cruiser.

“Damn, I don’t believe this,” he said. “He better not be coming for me.”

But at two thirty in the morning, his was the only vehicle on the desolate road. It was a pretty fair bet that the cop was coming for him, and him alone.

Terry took one of his hands away from the steering wheel, blew into it. His lips curled. The sour smell of alcohol was thick on his breath.

“Shit,” he muttered. But he wasn’t surprised. At the Halloween party, he’d had a lot to drink. Three Heinekens … two Rum and Cokes … two Hennesseys . . . and more. His memory of exactly what he had drunk was foggy—as it always was when he was smashed.

On the stereo, an Outkast song thumped at a bone-jarring volume. Listening to loud music was one of his tricks to make it safely home after he’d had too much to drink. It kept him alert.

But the music wasn’t enough to save him tonight. He should have known better than to be out on the road in a drunken daze on Halloween night. Johnny Nabb (his uncle referred to all cops by that dubious name, and Terry had picked it up) would surely be out in force, cruising for suckers like him.

He’d fallen right into the trap. Shit.

The cop car veered up to his rear bumper, and sounded a sharp horn that made Terry jump. The beacon’s blue lights whirled around, shining into Terry’s car like some crazy disco strobe light.

Biting his lip, Terry slowed his Nissan Maxima. He pulled to the shoulder of the road.

With a trembling hand, he shut off the stereo.

The last time he’d been pulled over was two years ago, for speeding. He’d gotten away with a fine and a slap on the wrist from the judge. He’d never had a DUI, in spite of driving home drunk at least a dozen times. DUI was a serious trespass in Georgia.

But if you got away once without being caught, you always thought you could pull it off again. His apartment was only twenty minutes away, after all, and the country road was a shortcut, and it wasn’t as though he was falling-down drunk. He floated in that dreamy, slow-motion world that existed somewhere between Tipsyville and Truly Wastedland.

But he was definitely over the legal limit, and he knew it.

He should have accepted Nikki’s invitation to stay at her place for a while, to sober up. But she’d gotten on his last nerve at the party, following him around as if she were a lovesick puppy and getting all in his mix while he tried to hang with his boys. He couldn’t tolerate another minute of her company. Clingy females like her made him sick. They reminded him of his mother.

Still, her company would’ve been better than his upcoming date with Johnny Nabb.

Behind him, the police car waited like a hungry beast, headlights glaring. The cop was probably running Terry’s license plate through the system. He wouldn’t find anything, but the thought didn’t comfort Terry. Driving While Black was enough to land your ass in jail for something—anything Johnny Nabb could dream up to nail you. And his being drunk didn’t help his case at all. Although he was rapidly sobering up.

The worst part was that he was still dressed in his costume. He’d gone to the party as Blade the Vampire Slayer. He had the long black-leather jacket, the boots, the gloves—all the gear. Instead of a real sword, a plastic blade dangled from a loop on his belt.

He could only imagine being hauled to the county lockup dressed like this.

He never should’ve gone to the stupid party in the first place. He should’ve rented some horror movies and stayed home. But he’d been excited about showing off Nikki, who, for all her clinginess, was fine as hell, and looked great in her tight, black-leather vampiress outfit.

The fellas had asked him about her all night, and it had stroked his ego to respond, “Yeah, man. She’s mine, I’ve got that girl strung out on me …”

What the hell’s taking that cop so long? he asked himself. The asshole still hadn’t gotten out of the car. He was probably sitting back there chomping on a doughnut, knowing that he was making Terry sweat and enjoying every second of it.

God, he hated cops.

Not a single vehicle had passed since he’d been pulled over. Thick, dark woods crowded both sides of the road. There were no streetlamps out here, and a cape of purple-black clouds concealed the moon. The only light radiated from the police car’s headlights.

Anything could happen out there, between him and the cop. And no one would know.

Okay, don’t think about stuff like that, he warned himself. You’re freaking yourself out. There’s still a way out of this.

He remembered the Certs in his cup holder. His hands shook so badly it took three tries for him to pop the mint into his dry mouth.

He might not fool Johnny Nabb into thinking he was sober, but he had to try.

Behind him, the cruiser’s door finally swung open. A tall, beefy cop climbed out. He strutted toward Terry’s car, as if he had the world on a leash.

Remember, be respectful, and enunciate crisply, Terry told himself. You can talk your way out of this. You’ve got to convince this cop that you’re sober.

The police officer tapped on the glass with a fat finger.

“Mister, please roll down the window, will ya?” The cop had a thick Georgia accent.

Terry pressed the button to lower the glass. Chilly air swept into the car.

“Yes, sir?” Terry asked.

“I spotted ya weaving over the line back there.” The cop hooked his thumb behind him, then bent closer. “You been drinkin’, buddy?”

“No, sir. I’m only tired, it’s late.”

“Where ya comin from?”

“Um … a party.”

The cop’s penetrating blue eyes raked over him. “A costume party? What you got on there?”

“Uh, I’m supposed to be Blade. You know, the vampire slayer from the movie?”

“The flick with that black boy, Wesley something?”

“Yeah, that one.”

The cop grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant smile. “Gimme your license and registration, Blade.”

Here we go, Terry thought. I’m fucked. First, I hand him this stuff, next he’ll be asking me to get out of the car to take a Breathalyzer test, which I’ll fail, and after that, I’ll be riding in the back of his cruiser on the way to the Clayton County Jail.

Terry dug the registration out of the glove compartment and slid his driver’s license out of his wallet.

The cop snatched the items out of his grasp and stuffed them into his pocket without so much as a glance at them.

Something isn’t right here, a voice cautioned in the quiet, sober part of Terry’s mind. Something about this policeman isn’t quite right.

But when the cop stepped back and commanded Terry to get out of the car, Terry hesitated only a second before he obeyed. He was a law-abiding citizen, and the policeman was an authority figure. No black man in his right mind resisted arrest or caused conflict with an officer. Look at what had happened to Rodney King.

“Wait by the car, Blade,” the officer said with a smirk. He strolled back to the cruiser.

Terry stood beside the car. He didn’t feel drunk anymore. Nothing sobered you up as much as knowing that you probably were going to jail.

Beyond the circle of light cast by the cop car’s headlamps, the night seemed to shift, like a living thing. Terry found himself staring at a spot in the dark woods, maybe a hundred yards away. He had the oddest feeling that something was out there, watching him, just as he was watching it. He felt the weight of a sentient creature’s gaze, like a pressure on his forehead.

It’s an owl, he thought. Or a raccoon. Something like that. The forest is full of living shit.

But he shuddered.

He was almost relieved when the cop returned.

“Okay, tell it to me straight,” the officer said. “How much did you drink at the party?”

Terry shrugged. “A couple of beers. Not much.”

“That’s all, eh? The punishment for DUI is stiff in Georgia, buddy. But there are worse things than a DUI. Much, much worse.” His pale lips twisted into a strange smile.

“I’ve never had a DUI,” Terry said. “You pulled up my record, you know it’s true.”

“You mean, you’ve never been caught,” the cop said.

Terry didn’t respond. Why had he thought he could fool this guy? Johnny Nabb put the hook on suckers like him all the time. He wasn’t special.

The cop threw open the door to Terry’s car. He removed the key from the ignition, and then slammed the door.

“Are you taking me in to the station?” Terry asked. “Aren’t you supposed to give me a sobriety test first?”

Without answering, the cop pressed the button on the key chain to activate the door locks. The locks snapped down.

“Do I have to get someone to tow my car?” Terry asked.

The cop wound up his arm like a baseball pitcher. He hurled the keys into the woods. They tinkled somewhere in the darkness.

“Hey, what the hell are you doing?” Terry asked.

A deep laugh bellowed from the policeman. Laughing, he turned to Terry, and in the bright light, Terry saw the purplish bite marks on the side of the cop’s pale neck: two small puncture wounds positioned on the jugular vein.

Terry didn’t believe his eyes. Surely, he wasn’t as sober as he thought he’d become. He had to be imagining things.

“The master will be pleased with you,” the policeman said, in an oddly formal voice, as though he was repeating words that he had memorized. “Quite pleased, indeed.”

“What are you talking about? What’s going on? Is this a joke?”

Chuckling, backing away, the policeman shook his head. “Good luck out here, Blade.”

“Where are you going? I thought you were arresting me!”

Still laughing, the cop hopped in his cruiser.

“You can’t leave me out here!” Terry ran toward the car.

The vehicle sped forward. He jumped aside and grabbed at the passenger door handle. But his sweaty hands slipped away.

The patrol car shot down the road. Soon, the red taillights dwindled into darkness. Deep silence fell over the night.

“Help!” Terry shouted. “Someone help me!”

His shouts echoed into the woods, uselessly. There was no one out here to help him. He was alone.

Well, not quite alone.

His gaze shifted to the dark patch of forest that had claimed his attention earlier.

Something had been out there watching him. It was still watching him. He felt it as surely as he felt the cold October air on his face.

“Who’s out there?” he asked, in a cracked voice.

The darkness did not reply. But something out there, a large, shadowy shape, edged closer.

Within a heartbeat, it was rushing toward him.

I don’t believe what I’m seeing, but it’s got to be real, because now I’m pissing my pants.

Weak-kneed, he reached down, and drew his flimsy plastic sword …

The post PseudoPod 583: After the Party appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Robert W. Chambers
• Narrator : B.J. Harrison
• Hosts : Alasdair Stuart and Alex Hofelich
• Audio Producers : Chelsea Davis and Graeme Dunlop
• Discuss on Forums

“The Yellow Sign” was first published in the collection THE KING IN YELLOW in 1895.

Longtime listeners or backers of our Pseudopod 10 Year anniversary will be familiar with the artistic work and madcap visions of Jonathan Chaffin of Horror In Clay.  He makes fine horror-themed tiki mugs, art, and ephemera. He made a Cthulhu tiki mug, before that was a thing, and a cask of Amontillado and an Innsmouth Fogcutter.  Now, he has a warning for you. Somewhere in the infinite multiverse, or just on the other side of this shadow, the King In Yellow awaits. “The Pallid Mask” from Horror In Clay is a 8in tiki mug inspired by love for the linked short stories of Robert W. Chambers, and every subsequent writer caught by that fateful play.

The mug is available on Kickstarter, and will ship in August. The mug is part of a collection with companion pieces like a custom-written D6 tabletop RPG module and a Mai Tai glass from the mythic “Shores of Carcosa” restaurant.  Learn more on Kickstarter by searching for “Pallid Mask” or at Horror In Clay.

If you enjoyed this replay, you should seek these out:

PseudoPod 491: The Second Act

PseudoPod 558: Toward the Banner of the King

PseudoPod 574: While the Black Stars Burn

The King in Yellow is available on Gutenberg for free download.

The Yellow Sign by Robert W. Chambers

“Let the red dawn surmise What we shall do, When this blue starlight dies And all is through.”

I

There are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte Cécile bend my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o’clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage and Sylvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small green lizard, murmuring: “To think that this also is a little ward of God!”

When I first saw the watchman his back was toward me. I looked at him indifferently until he went into the church. I paid no more attention to him than I had to any other man who lounged through Washington Square that morning, and when I shut my window and turned back into my studio I had forgotten him. Late in the afternoon, the day being warm, I raised the window again and leaned out to get a sniff of air. A man was standing in the courtyard of the church, and I noticed him again with as little interest as I had that morning. I looked across the square to where the fountain was playing and then, with my mind filled with vague impressions of trees, asphalt drives, and the moving groups of nursemaids and holiday-makers, I started to walk back to my easel. As I turned, my listless glance included the man below in the churchyard. His face was toward me now, and with a perfectly involuntary movement I bent to see it. At the same moment he raised his head and looked at me. Instantly I thought of a coffin-worm. Whatever it was about the man that repelled me I did not know, but the impression of a plump white grave-worm was so intense and nauseating that I must have shown it in my expression, for he turned his puffy face away with a movement which made me think of a disturbed grub in a chestnut.

I went back to my easel and motioned the model to resume her pose. After working a while I was satisfied that I was spoiling what I had done as rapidly as possible, and I took up a palette knife and scraped the colour out again. The flesh tones were sallow and unhealthy, and I did not understand how I could have painted such sickly colour into a study which before that had glowed with healthy tones.

I looked at Tessie. She had not changed, and the clear flush of health dyed her neck and cheeks as I frowned.

“Is it something I’ve done?” she said.

“No,—I’ve made a mess of this arm, and for the life of me I can’t see how I came to paint such mud as that into the canvas,” I replied.

“Don’t I pose well?” she insisted.

“Of course, perfectly.”

“Then it’s not my fault?”

“No. It’s my own.”

“I am very sorry,” she said.

I told her she could rest while I applied rag and turpentine to the plague spot on my canvas, and she went off to smoke a cigarette and look over the illustrations in the Courrier Français.

I did not know whether it was something in the turpentine or a defect in the canvas, but the more I scrubbed the more that gangrene seemed to spread. I worked like a beaver to get it out, and yet the disease appeared to creep from limb to limb of the study before me. Alarmed, I strove to arrest it, but now the colour on the breast changed and the whole figure seemed to absorb the infection as a sponge soaks up water. Vigorously I plied palette-knife, turpentine, and scraper, thinking all the time what a séance I should hold with Duval who had sold me the canvas; but soon I noticed that it was not the canvas which was defective nor yet the colours of Edward. “It must be the turpentine,” I thought angrily, “or else my eyes have become so blurred and confused by the afternoon light that I can’t see straight.” I called Tessie, the model. She came and leaned over my chair blowing rings of smoke into the air.

“What have you been doing to it?” she exclaimed

“Nothing,” I growled, “it must be this turpentine!”

“What a horrible colour it is now,” she continued. “Do you think my flesh resembles green cheese?”

“No, I don’t,” I said angrily; “did you ever know me to paint like that before?”

“No, indeed!”

“Well, then!”

“It must be the turpentine, or something,” she admitted.

She slipped on a Japanese robe and walked to the window. I scraped and rubbed until I was tired, and finally picked up my brushes and hurled them through the canvas with a forcible expression, the tone alone of which reached Tessie’s ears.

Nevertheless she promptly began: “That’s it! Swear and act silly and ruin your brushes! You have been three weeks on that study, and now look! What’s the good of ripping the canvas? What creatures artists are!”

I felt about as much ashamed as I usually did after such an outbreak, and I turned the ruined canvas to the wall. Tessie helped me clean my brushes, and then danced away to dress. From the screen she regaled me with bits of advice concerning whole or partial loss of temper, until, thinking, perhaps, I had been tormented sufficiently, she came out to implore me to button her waist where she could not reach it on the shoulder.

“Everything went wrong from the time you came back from the window and talked about that horrid-looking man you saw in the churchyard,” she announced.

“Yes, he probably bewitched the picture,” I said, yawning. I looked at my watch.

“It’s after six, I know,” said Tessie, adjusting her hat before the mirror.

“Yes,” I replied, “I didn’t mean to keep you so long.” I leaned out of the window but recoiled with disgust, for the young man with the pasty face stood below in the churchyard. Tessie saw my gesture of disapproval and leaned from the window.

“Is that the man you don’t like?” she whispered.

I nodded.

“I can’t see his face, but he does look fat and soft. Someway or other,” she continued, turning to look at me, “he reminds me of a dream,—an awful dream I once had. Or,” she mused, looking down at her shapely shoes, “was it a dream after all?”

“How should I know?” I smiled.

Tessie smiled in reply.

“You were in it,” she said, “so perhaps you might know something about it.”

“Tessie! Tessie!” I protested, “don’t you dare flatter by saying that you dream about me!”

“But I did,” she insisted; “shall I tell you about it?”

“Go ahead,” I replied, lighting a cigarette.

Tessie leaned back on the open window-sill and began very seriously.

“One night last winter I was lying in bed thinking about nothing at all in particular. I had been posing for you and I was tired out, yet it seemed impossible for me to sleep. I heard the bells in the city ring ten, eleven, and midnight. I must have fallen asleep about midnight because I don’t remember hearing the bells after that. It seemed to me that I had scarcely closed my eyes when I dreamed that something impelled me to go to the window. I rose, and raising the sash leaned out. Twenty-fifth Street was deserted as far as I could see. I began to be afraid; everything outside seemed so—so black and uncomfortable. Then the sound of wheels in the distance came to my ears, and it seemed to me as though that was what I must wait for. Very slowly the wheels approached, and, finally, I could make out a vehicle moving along the street. It came nearer and nearer, and when it passed beneath my window I saw it was a hearse. Then, as I trembled with fear, the driver turned and looked straight at me. When I awoke I was standing by the open window shivering with cold, but the black-plumed hearse and the driver were gone. I dreamed this dream again in March last, and again awoke beside the open window. Last night the dream came again. You remember how it was raining; when I awoke, standing at the open window, my night-dress was soaked.”

“But where did I come into the dream?” I asked.

“You—you were in the coffin; but you were not dead.”

“In the coffin?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know? Could you see me?”

“No; I only knew you were there.”

“Had you been eating Welsh rarebits, or lobster salad?” I began, laughing, but the girl interrupted me with a frightened cry.

“Hello! What’s up?” I said, as she shrank into the embrasure by the window.

“The—the man below in the churchyard;—he drove the hearse.”

“Nonsense,” I said, but Tessie’s eyes were wide with terror. I went to the window and looked out. The man was gone. “Come, Tessie,” I urged, “don’t be foolish. You have posed too long; you are nervous.”

“Do you think I could forget that face?” she murmured. “Three times I saw the hearse pass below my window, and every time the driver turned and looked up at me. Oh, his face was so white and—and soft? It looked dead—it looked as if it had been dead a long time.”

I induced the girl to sit down and swallow a glass of Marsala. Then I sat down beside her, and tried to give her some advice.

“Look here, Tessie,” I said, “you go to the country for a week or two, and you’ll have no more dreams about hearses. You pose all day, and when night comes your nerves are upset. You can’t keep this up. Then again, instead of going to bed when your day’s work is done, you run off to picnics at Sulzer’s Park, or go to the Eldorado or Coney Island, and when you come down here next morning you are fagged out. There was no real hearse. There was a soft-shell crab dream.”

She smiled faintly.

“What about the man in the churchyard?”

“Oh, he’s only an ordinary unhealthy, everyday creature.”

“As true as my name is Tessie Reardon, I swear to you, Mr. Scott, that the face of the man below in the churchyard is the face of the man who drove the hearse!”

“What of it?” I said. “It’s an honest trade.”

“Then you think I did see the hearse?”

“Oh,” I said diplomatically, “if you really did, it might not be unlikely that the man below drove it. There is nothing in that.”

Tessie rose, unrolled her scented handkerchief, and taking a bit of gum from a knot in the hem, placed it in her mouth. Then drawing on her gloves she offered me her hand, with a frank, “Good-night, Mr. Scott,” and walked out.

II

The next morning, Thomas, the bell-boy, brought me the Herald and a bit of news. The church next door had been sold. I thanked Heaven for it, not that being a Catholic I had any repugnance for the congregation next door, but because my nerves were shattered by a blatant exhorter, whose every word echoed through the aisle of the church as if it had been my own rooms, and who insisted on his r’s with a nasal persistence which revolted my every instinct. Then, too, there was a fiend in human shape, an organist, who reeled off some of the grand old hymns with an interpretation of his own, and I longed for the blood of a creature who could play the doxology with an amendment of minor chords which one hears only in a quartet of very young undergraduates. I believe the minister was a good man, but when he bellowed: “And the Lorrrrd said unto Moses, the Lorrrd is a man of war; the Lorrrd is his name. My wrath shall wax hot and I will kill you with the sworrrrd!” I wondered how many centuries of purgatory it would take to atone for such a sin.

“Who bought the property?” I asked Thomas.

“Nobody that I knows, sir. They do say the gent wot owns this ‘ere ‘Amilton flats was lookin’ at it. ‘E might be a bildin’ more studios.”

I walked to the window. The young man with the unhealthy face stood by the churchyard gate, and at the mere sight of him the same overwhelming repugnance took possession of me.

“By the way, Thomas,” I said, “who is that fellow down there?”

Thomas sniffed. “That there worm, sir? ‘Es night-watchman of the church, sir. ‘E maikes me tired a-sittin’ out all night on them steps and lookin’ at you insultin’ like. I’d a punched ‘is ‘ed, sir—beg pardon, sir—”

“Go on, Thomas.”

“One night a comin’ ‘ome with ‘Arry, the other English boy, I sees ‘im a sittin’ there on them steps. We ‘ad Molly and Jen with us, sir, the two girls on the tray service, an’ ‘e looks so insultin’ at us that I up and sez: ‘Wat you looking hat, you fat slug?’—beg pardon, sir, but that’s ‘ow I sez, sir. Then ‘e don’t say nothin’ and I sez: ‘Come out and I’ll punch that puddin’ ‘ed.’ Then I hopens the gate an’ goes in, but ‘e don’t say nothin’, only looks insultin’ like. Then I ‘its ‘im one, but, ugh! ‘is ‘ed was that cold and mushy it ud sicken you to touch ‘im.”

“What did he do then?” I asked curiously.

“‘Im? Nawthin’.”

“And you, Thomas?”

The young fellow flushed with embarrassment and smiled uneasily.

“Mr. Scott, sir, I ain’t no coward, an’ I can’t make it out at all why I run. I was in the 5th Lawncers, sir, bugler at Tel-el-Kebir, an’ was shot by the wells.”

“You don’t mean to say you ran away?”

“Yes, sir; I run.”

“Why?”

“That’s just what I want to know, sir. I grabbed Molly an’ run, an’ the rest was as frightened as I.”

“But what were they frightened at?”

Thomas refused to answer for a while, but now my curiosity was aroused about the repulsive young man below and I pressed him. Three years’ sojourn in America had not only modified Thomas’ cockney dialect but had given him the American’s fear of ridicule.

“You won’t believe me, Mr. Scott, sir?”

“Yes, I will.”

“You will lawf at me, sir?”

“Nonsense!”

He hesitated. “Well, sir, it’s Gawd’s truth that when I ‘it ‘im ‘e grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted ‘is soft, mushy fist one of ‘is fingers come off in me ‘and.”

The utter loathing and horror of Thomas’ face must have been reflected in my own, for he added:

“It’s orful, an’ now when I see ‘im I just go away. ‘E maikes me hill.”

When Thomas had gone I went to the window. The man stood beside the church-railing with both hands on the gate, but I hastily retreated to my easel again, sickened and horrified, for I saw that the middle finger of his right hand was missing.

At nine o’clock Tessie appeared and vanished behind the screen with a merry “Good morning, Mr. Scott.” When she had reappeared and taken her pose upon the model-stand I started a new canvas, much to her delight. She remained silent as long as I was on the drawing, but as soon as the scrape of the charcoal ceased and I took up my fixative she began to chatter.

“Oh, I had such a lovely time last night. We went to Tony Pastor’s.”

“Who are ‘we’?” I demanded.

“Oh, Maggie, you know, Mr. Whyte’s model, and Pinkie McCormick—we call her Pinkie because she’s got that beautiful red hair you artists like so much—and Lizzie Burke.”

I sent a shower of spray from the fixative over the canvas, and said: “Well, go on.”

“We saw Kelly and Baby Barnes the skirt-dancer and—and all the rest. I made a mash.”

“Then you have gone back on me, Tessie?”

She laughed and shook her head.

“He’s Lizzie Burke’s brother, Ed. He’s a perfect gen’l’man.”

I felt constrained to give her some parental advice concerning mashing, which she took with a bright smile.

“Oh, I can take care of a strange mash,” she said, examining her chewing gum, “but Ed is different. Lizzie is my best friend.”

Then she related how Ed had come back from the stocking mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, to find her and Lizzie grown up, and what an accomplished young man he was, and how he thought nothing of squandering half-a-dollar for ice-cream and oysters to celebrate his entry as clerk into the woollen department of Macy’s. Before she finished I began to paint, and she resumed the pose, smiling and chattering like a sparrow. By noon I had the study fairly well rubbed in and Tessie came to look at it.

“That’s better,” she said.

I thought so too, and ate my lunch with a satisfied feeling that all was going well. Tessie spread her lunch on a drawing table opposite me and we drank our claret from the same bottle and lighted our cigarettes from the same match. I was very much attached to Tessie. I had watched her shoot up into a slender but exquisitely formed woman from a frail, awkward child. She had posed for me during the last three years, and among all my models she was my favourite. It would have troubled me very much indeed had she become “tough” or “fly,” as the phrase goes, but I never noticed any deterioration of her manner, and felt at heart that she was all right. She and I never discussed morals at all, and I had no intention of doing so, partly because I had none myself, and partly because I knew she would do what she liked in spite of me. Still I did hope she would steer clear of complications, because I wished her well, and then also I had a selfish desire to retain the best model I had. I knew that mashing, as she termed it, had no significance with girls like Tessie, and that such things in America did not resemble in the least the same things in Paris. Yet, having lived with my eyes open, I also knew that somebody would take Tessie away some day, in one manner or another, and though I professed to myself that marriage was nonsense, I sincerely hoped that, in this case, there would be a priest at the end of the vista. I am a Catholic. When I listen to high mass, when I sign myself, I feel that everything, including myself, is more cheerful, and when I confess, it does me good. A man who lives as much alone as I do, must confess to somebody. Then, again, Sylvia was Catholic, and it was reason enough for me. But I was speaking of Tessie, which is very different. Tessie also was Catholic and much more devout than I, so, taking it all in all, I had little fear for my pretty model until she should fall in love. But then I knew that fate alone would decide her future for her, and I prayed inwardly that fate would keep her away from men like me and throw into her path nothing but Ed Burkes and Jimmy McCormicks, bless her sweet face!

Tessie sat blowing rings of smoke up to the ceiling and tinkling the ice in her tumbler.

“Do you know that I also had a dream last night?” I observed.

“Not about that man,” she laughed.

“Exactly. A dream similar to yours, only much worse.”

It was foolish and thoughtless of me to say this, but you know how little tact the average painter has. “I must have fallen asleep about ten o’clock,” I continued, “and after a while I dreamt that I awoke. So plainly did I hear the midnight bells, the wind in the tree-branches, and the whistle of steamers from the bay, that even now I can scarcely believe I was not awake. I seemed to be lying in a box which had a glass cover. Dimly I saw the street lamps as I passed, for I must tell you, Tessie, the box in which I reclined appeared to lie in a cushioned wagon which jolted me over a stony pavement. After a while I became impatient and tried to move, but the box was too narrow. My hands were crossed on my breast, so I could not raise them to help myself. I listened and then tried to call. My voice was gone. I could hear the trample of the horses attached to the wagon, and even the breathing of the driver. Then another sound broke upon my ears like the raising of a window sash. I managed to turn my head a little, and found I could look, not only through the glass cover of my box, but also through the glass panes in the side of the covered vehicle. I saw houses, empty and silent, with neither light nor life about any of them excepting one. In that house a window was open on the first floor, and a figure all in white stood looking down into the street. It was you.”

Tessie had turned her face away from me and leaned on the table with her elbow.

“I could see your face,” I resumed, “and it seemed to me to be very sorrowful. Then we passed on and turned into a narrow black lane. Presently the horses stopped. I waited and waited, closing my eyes with fear and impatience, but all was silent as the grave. After what seemed to me hours, I began to feel uncomfortable. A sense that somebody was close to me made me unclose my eyes. Then I saw the white face of the hearse-driver looking at me through the coffin-lid——”

A sob from Tessie interrupted me. She was trembling like a leaf. I saw I had made an ass of myself and attempted to repair the damage.

“Why, Tess,” I said, “I only told you this to show you what influence your story might have on another person’s dreams. You don’t suppose I really lay in a coffin, do you? What are you trembling for? Don’t you see that your dream and my unreasonable dislike for that inoffensive watchman of the church simply set my brain working as soon as I fell asleep?”

She laid her head between her arms, and sobbed as if her heart would break. What a precious triple donkey I had made of myself! But I was about to break my record. I went over and put my arm about her.

“Tessie dear, forgive me,” I said; “I had no business to frighten you with such nonsense. You are too sensible a girl, too good a Catholic to believe in dreams.”

Her hand tightened on mine and her head fell back upon my shoulder, but she still trembled and I petted her and comforted her.

“Come, Tess, open your eyes and smile.”

Her eyes opened with a slow languid movement and met mine, but their expression was so queer that I hastened to reassure her again.

“It’s all humbug, Tessie; you surely are not afraid that any harm will come to you because of that.”

“No,” she said, but her scarlet lips quivered.

“Then, what’s the matter? Are you afraid?”

“Yes. Not for myself.”

“For me, then?” I demanded gaily.

“For you,” she murmured in a voice almost inaudible. “I—I care for you.”

At first I started to laugh, but when I understood her, a shock passed through me, and I sat like one turned to stone. This was the crowning bit of idiocy I had committed. During the moment which elapsed between her reply and my answer I thought of a thousand responses to that innocent confession. I could pass it by with a laugh, I could misunderstand her and assure her as to my health, I could simply point out that it was impossible she could love me. But my reply was quicker than my thoughts, and I might think and think now when it was too late, for I had kissed her on the mouth.

That evening I took my usual walk in Washington Park, pondering over the occurrences of the day. I was thoroughly committed. There was no back out now, and I stared the future straight in the face. I was not good, not even scrupulous, but I had no idea of deceiving either myself or Tessie. The one passion of my life lay buried in the sunlit forests of Brittany. Was it buried for ever? Hope cried “No!” For three years I had been listening to the voice of Hope, and for three years I had waited for a footstep on my threshold. Had Sylvia forgotten? “No!” cried Hope.

I said that I was no good. That is true, but still I was not exactly a comic opera villain. I had led an easy-going reckless life, taking what invited me of pleasure, deploring and sometimes bitterly regretting consequences. In one thing alone, except my painting, was I serious, and that was something which lay hidden if not lost in the Breton forests.

It was too late for me to regret what had occurred during the day. Whatever it had been, pity, a sudden tenderness for sorrow, or the more brutal instinct of gratified vanity, it was all the same now, and unless I wished to bruise an innocent heart, my path lay marked before me. The fire and strength, the depth of passion of a love which I had never even suspected, with all my imagined experience in the world, left me no alternative but to respond or send her away. Whether because I am so cowardly about giving pain to others, or whether it was that I have little of the gloomy Puritan in me, I do not know, but I shrank from disclaiming responsibility for that thoughtless kiss, and in fact had no time to do so before the gates of her heart opened and the flood poured forth. Others who habitually do their duty and find a sullen satisfaction in making themselves and everybody else unhappy, might have withstood it. I did not. I dared not. After the storm had abated I did tell her that she might better have loved Ed Burke and worn a plain gold ring, but she would not hear of it, and I thought perhaps as long as she had decided to love somebody she could not marry, it had better be me. I, at least, could treat her with an intelligent affection, and whenever she became tired of her infatuation she could go none the worse for it. For I was decided on that point although I knew how hard it would be. I remembered the usual termination of Platonic liaisons, and thought how disgusted I had been whenever I heard of one. I knew I was undertaking a great deal for so unscrupulous a man as I was, and I dreamed the future, but never for one moment did I doubt that she was safe with me. Had it been anybody but Tessie I should not have bothered my head about scruples. For it did not occur to me to sacrifice Tessie as I would have sacrificed a woman of the world. I looked the future squarely in the face and saw the several probable endings to the affair. She would either tire of the whole thing, or become so unhappy that I should have either to marry her or go away. If I married her we would be unhappy. I with a wife unsuited to me, and she with a husband unsuitable for any woman. For my past life could scarcely entitle me to marry. If I went away she might either fall ill, recover, and marry some Eddie Burke, or she might recklessly or deliberately go and do something foolish. On the other hand, if she tired of me, then her whole life would be before her with beautiful vistas of Eddie Burkes and marriage rings and twins and Harlem flats and Heaven knows what. As I strolled along through the trees by the Washington Arch, I decided that she should find a substantial friend in me, anyway, and the future could take care of itself. Then I went into the house and put on my evening dress, for the little faintly-perfumed note on my dresser said, “Have a cab at the stage door at eleven,” and the note was signed “Edith Carmichel, Metropolitan Theatre.”

I took supper that night, or rather we took supper, Miss Carmichel and I, at Solari’s, and the dawn was just beginning to gild the cross on the Memorial Church as I entered Washington Square after leaving Edith at the Brunswick. There was not a soul in the park as I passed along the trees and took the walk which leads from the Garibaldi statue to the Hamilton Apartment House, but as I passed the churchyard I saw a figure sitting on the stone steps. In spite of myself a chill crept over me at the sight of the white puffy face, and I hastened to pass. Then he said something which might have been addressed to me or might merely have been a mutter to himself, but a sudden furious anger flamed up within me that such a creature should address me. For an instant I felt like wheeling about and smashing my stick over his head, but I walked on, and entering the Hamilton went to my apartment. For some time I tossed about the bed trying to get the sound of his voice out of my ears, but could not. It filled my head, that muttering sound, like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay. And as I lay and tossed about, the voice in my ears seemed more distinct, and I began to understand the words he had muttered. They came to me slowly as if I had forgotten them, and at last I could make some sense out of the sounds. It was this:

“Have you found the Yellow Sign?”

“Have you found the Yellow Sign?”

“Have you found the Yellow Sign?”

I was furious. What did he mean by that? Then with a curse upon him and his I rolled over and went to sleep, but when I awoke later I looked pale and haggard, for I had dreamed the dream of the night before, and it troubled me more than I cared to think.

I dressed and went down into my studio. Tessie sat by the window, but as I came in she rose and put both arms around my neck for an innocent kiss. She looked so sweet and dainty that I kissed her again and then sat down before the easel.

“Hello! Where’s the study I began yesterday?” I asked.

Tessie looked conscious, but did not answer. I began to hunt among the piles of canvases, saying, “Hurry up, Tess, and get ready; we must take advantage of the morning light.”

When at last I gave up the search among the other canvases and turned to look around the room for the missing study I noticed Tessie standing by the screen with her clothes still on.

“What’s the matter,” I asked, “don’t you feel well?”

“Yes.”

“Then hurry.”

“Do you want me to pose as—as I have always posed?”

Then I understood. Here was a new complication. I had lost, of course, the best nude model I had ever seen. I looked at Tessie. Her face was scarlet. Alas! Alas! We had eaten of the tree of knowledge, and Eden and native innocence were dreams of the past—I mean for her.

I suppose she noticed the disappointment on my face, for she said: “I will pose if you wish. The study is behind the screen here where I put it.”

“No,” I said, “we will begin something new;” and I went into my wardrobe and picked out a Moorish costume which fairly blazed with tinsel. It was a genuine costume, and Tessie retired to the screen with it enchanted. When she came forth again I was astonished. Her long black hair was bound above her forehead with a circlet of turquoises, and the ends, curled about her glittering girdle. Her feet were encased in the embroidered pointed slippers and the skirt of her costume, curiously wrought with arabesques in silver, fell to her ankles. The deep metallic blue vest embroidered with silver and the short Mauresque jacket spangled and sewn with turquoises became her wonderfully. She came up to me and held up her face smiling. I slipped my hand into my pocket, and drawing out a gold chain with a cross attached, dropped it over her head.

“It’s yours, Tessie.”

“Mine?” she faltered.

“Yours. Now go and pose,” Then with a radiant smile she ran behind the screen and presently reappeared with a little box on which was written my name.

“I had intended to give it to you when I went home to-night,” she said, “but I can’t wait now.”

I opened the box. On the pink cotton inside lay a clasp of black onyx, on which was inlaid a curious symbol or letter in gold. It was neither Arabic nor Chinese, nor, as I found afterwards, did it belong to any human script.

“It’s all I had to give you for a keepsake,” she said timidly.

I was annoyed, but I told her how much I should prize it, and promised to wear it always. She fastened it on my coat beneath the lapel.

“How foolish, Tess, to go and buy me such a beautiful thing as this,” I said.

“I did not buy it,” she laughed.

“Where did you get it?”

Then she told me how she had found it one day while coming from the Aquarium in the Battery, how she had advertised it and watched the papers, but at last gave up all hopes of finding the owner.

“That was last winter,” she said, “the very day I had the first horrid dream about the hearse.”

I remembered my dream of the previous night but said nothing, and presently my charcoal was flying over a new canvas, and Tessie stood motionless on the model-stand.

III

The day following was a disastrous one for me. While moving a framed canvas from one easel to another my foot slipped on the polished floor, and I fell heavily on both wrists. They were so badly sprained that it was useless to attempt to hold a brush, and I was obliged to wander about the studio, glaring at unfinished drawings and sketches, until despair seized me and I sat down to smoke and twiddle my thumbs with rage. The rain blew against the windows and rattled on the roof of the church, driving me into a nervous fit with its interminable patter. Tessie sat sewing by the window, and every now and then raised her head and looked at me with such innocent compassion that I began to feel ashamed of my irritation and looked about for something to occupy me. I had read all the papers and all the books in the library, but for the sake of something to do I went to the bookcases and shoved them open with my elbow. I knew every volume by its colour and examined them all, passing slowly around the library and whistling to keep up my spirits. I was turning to go into the dining-room when my eye fell upon a book bound in serpent skin, standing in a corner of the top shelf of the last bookcase. I did not remember it, and from the floor could not decipher the pale lettering on the back, so I went to the smoking-room and called Tessie. She came in from the studio and climbed up to reach the book.

“What is it?” I asked.

“The King in Yellow.”

I was dumfounded. Who had placed it there? How came it in my rooms? I had long ago decided that I should never open that book, and nothing on earth could have persuaded me to buy it. Fearful lest curiosity might tempt me to open it, I had never even looked at it in book-stores. If I ever had had any curiosity to read it, the awful tragedy of young Castaigne, whom I knew, prevented me from exploring its wicked pages. I had always refused to listen to any description of it, and indeed, nobody ever ventured to discuss the second part aloud, so I had absolutely no knowledge of what those leaves might reveal. I stared at the poisonous mottled binding as I would at a snake.

“Don’t touch it, Tessie,” I said; “come down.”

Of course my admonition was enough to arouse her curiosity, and before I could prevent it she took the book and, laughing, danced off into the studio with it. I called to her, but she slipped away with a tormenting smile at my helpless hands, and I followed her with some impatience.

“Tessie!” I cried, entering the library, “listen, I am serious. Put that book away. I do not wish you to open it!” The library was empty. I went into both drawing-rooms, then into the bedrooms, laundry, kitchen, and finally returned to the library and began a systematic search. She had hidden herself so well that it was half-an-hour later when I discovered her crouching white and silent by the latticed window in the store-room above. At the first glance I saw she had been punished for her foolishness. The King in Yellow lay at her feet, but the book was open at the second part. I looked at Tessie and saw it was too late. She had opened The King in Yellow. Then I took her by the hand and led her into the studio. She seemed dazed, and when I told her to lie down on the sofa she obeyed me without a word. After a while she closed her eyes and her breathing became regular and deep, but I could not determine whether or not she slept. For a long while I sat silently beside her, but she neither stirred nor spoke, and at last I rose, and, entering the unused store-room, took the book in my least injured hand. It seemed heavy as lead, but I carried it into the studio again, and sitting down on the rug beside the sofa, opened it and read it through from beginning to end.

When, faint with excess of my emotions, I dropped the volume and leaned wearily back against the sofa, Tessie opened her eyes and looked at me….

We had been speaking for some time in a dull monotonous strain before I realized that we were discussing The King in Yellow. Oh the sin of writing such words,—words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis! Oh the wickedness, the hopeless damnation of a soul who could fascinate and paralyze human creatures with such words,—words understood by the ignorant and wise alike, words which are more precious than jewels, more soothing than music, more awful than death!

We talked on, unmindful of the gathering shadows, and she was begging me to throw away the clasp of black onyx quaintly inlaid with what we now knew to be the Yellow Sign. I never shall know why I refused, though even at this hour, here in my bedroom as I write this confession, I should be glad to know what it was that prevented me from tearing the Yellow Sign from my breast and casting it into the fire. I am sure I wished to do so, and yet Tessie pleaded with me in vain. Night fell and the hours dragged on, but still we murmured to each other of the King and the Pallid Mask, and midnight sounded from the misty spires in the fog-wrapped city. We spoke of Hastur and of Cassilda, while outside the fog rolled against the blank window-panes as the cloud waves roll and break on the shores of Hali.

The house was very silent now, and not a sound came up from the misty streets. Tessie lay among the cushions, her face a grey blot in the gloom, but her hands were clasped in mine, and I knew that she knew and read my thoughts as I read hers, for we had understood the mystery of the Hyades and the Phantom of Truth was laid. Then as we answered each other, swiftly, silently, thought on thought, the shadows stirred in the gloom about us, and far in the distant streets we heard a sound. Nearer and nearer it came, the dull crunching of wheels, nearer and yet nearer, and now, outside before the door it ceased, and I dragged myself to the window and saw a black-plumed hearse. The gate below opened and shut, and I crept shaking to my door and bolted it, but I knew no bolts, no locks, could keep that creature out who was coming for the Yellow Sign. And now I heard him moving very softly along the hall. Now he was at the door, and the bolts rotted at his touch. Now he had entered. With eyes starting from my head I peered into the darkness, but when he came into the room I did not see him. It was only when I felt him envelope me in his cold soft grasp that I cried out and struggled with deadly fury, but my hands were useless and he tore the onyx clasp from my coat and struck me full in the face. Then, as I fell, I heard Tessie’s soft cry and her spirit fled: and even while falling I longed to follow her, for I knew that the King in Yellow had opened his tattered mantle and there was only God to cry to now.

I could tell more, but I cannot see what help it will be to the world. As for me, I am past human help or hope. As I lie here, writing, careless even whether or not I die before I finish, I can see the doctor gathering up his powders and phials with a vague gesture to the good priest beside me, which I understand.

They will be very curious to know the tragedy—they of the outside world who write books and print millions of newspapers, but I shall write no more, and the father confessor will seal my last words with the seal of sanctity when his holy office is done. They of the outside world may send their creatures into wrecked homes and death-smitten firesides, and their newspapers will batten on blood and tears, but with me their spies must halt before the confessional. They know that Tessie is dead and that I am dying. They know how the people in the house, aroused by an infernal scream, rushed into my room and found one living and two dead, but they do not know what I shall tell them now; they do not know that the doctor said as he pointed to a horrible decomposed heap on the floor—the livid corpse of the watchman from the church: “I have no theory, no explanation. That man must have been dead for months!”

I think I am dying. I wish the priest would—

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• Author : Crystal Connor
• Narrator : Stephanie Malia Morris
• Host : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali
• Audio Producer : Chelsea Davis
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“The Monster” was originally printed in Strange Tales of Horror in 2011, and then reprinted in Crystal’s collection And They All Lived Happily Ever After! as well as the anthology Sycorax’s Daughters (where we ran across this)

Content Warning:

Spoiler Inside SelectShow Racial Slurs

The author’s inspiration for this story:

Spoiler Inside SelectShow The idea from this story came from two different incidents. Years ago when I was learning how to rollerblade I was cruising along Alki Beach. I was going faster than I should have because I hadn’t learned how to stop yet. So there was a car pulling out of the marina but he was looking the other way and didn’t see me and because I didn’t know how to stop I sped up. I passed in front of the car with only a half a foot between us and slammed into the back of a mountain of a man who was on the other side of the driveway. When he turned around I instantly regretted it as he had the words ‘WHITE’ and ‘POWER’ tattooed on each forearm and a large swastika tattooed on the side of his neck and he was huge and he looked at me like a concerned parent.

As he was helping to … the grass he bellowed at the driver, “What the hell is wrong with you, you coulda killed somebody!” Ok, so at this point there was maybe nine or ten other Hell’s Angel type of biker guys running from the bar across the street to their brother’s aide. The poor Mexican kid behind the wheel drove away.

Now I am surrounded by a bunch of men with racist tattoos, one of which who is kneeling at my feet and unlacing my skates, everyone is asking me if I was ok and I was so terrified by these guys I started crying. My tears prompted an even bigger man than the one I knocked the wind out of to send his girlfriend, named Spider, back into the bar to get me a glass of water. Another man helped me to my feet and asked me if I wanted a ride somewhere, and I said no, explaining that my car was parked only nine cars down. When Spider came back she handed me a can of lemonade, after promising everyone I was ok, and apologizing to “Mountain” for slamming into him I was allowed to leave.

Never in my life, as I walked barefoot on the hot pavement back to my car carrying my skates and lemonade, had I been so confused.

The second incident was day I sat down and wrote The Monster. There are some parts of my state that do not celebrate diversity and I was in one of those parts and had to stop for gas. The station is exactly like the one I wrote about, when I was going inside a guy was coming out, he wasn’t wearing a shirt because it warm that day, and he is the guy I based Caleb on, down to the last detail.

My heart started beating so fast that I thought I was gonna have a heart attack and this was my prayer please dear God, I can deal with anything he says to me, just don’t let him hit me. Not only did he not hit me, he didn’t say anything to me either. He opened his candy and waited for me because he was holding the door. I said thank you as I walked by him and he just nodded his head, jumped in his pick-up truck and left. I was like what in the hell. That encounter reminded me of the one years earlier and on the drive home I was left to wonder what makes a person abandon their oath? I pledged to protect this country against enemies both foreign and domestic and that’s a pretty big deal but so is walking around proudly displaying a swastika tattoo.

When I got home I wrote The Monster and I’ve been so surprised and amazed by the feedback I’ve received for this story.

The Monster By Crystal Connor

1

After only four days of what was supposed to be a two-week visit, Maleka Davidson was leaving Alabama. Maleka hated this place. She was disgusted by the ignorance of poverty. The stifling heat reduced her to the sin of sloth. Her head hurt from trying to decipher these coded Southern sayings. Just last night, she figured out that the word Bard meant borrowed, Southern translation for the state of Georgia was Jawjuh, and that she was from the Nawth as in, and I quote, “Ya’ people from up Nawth sure do talk funny.” It was almost as if she needed an English-to-Southern-United-States dictionary.

Maleka was tired of eating fried food and drinking either grape or red Kool-Aid made with three cups of sugar, despite the directions clearly stating that only one cup was needed. Maleka was especially terrified of all the large and strange bugs that could star in their own horror movies. Maleka took a break from packing; even the slightest of physical activities made her sweat profusely. She lay on the bed and smiled about the conversation she had had with her uncle this morning at breakfast, revolving around the apparently sacred origins of grits.

“Maleka, y’all eat grits up Nawth?” Bryannah asked.

“Of course we do,” Maleka explained to her 12-year-old cousin. “There are quite a few farms within driving distance of Seattle that grow corn, but that…”

Bryannah looked puzzled and Uncle Emmit angrily interjected before Maleka could continue.

“Ain’t nothing as good as grits can be made from corn! Dontcha read yo’ bible?”

“My bible?”

“Exodus 16:15. What poured down upon hims chirren when they was roamin’ roun’ in dem woods was grits. It says so right in da Bible, ‘It’s the food the LORD has given you to eat.’

“So the manna that God rained on the Israelites on Mount Sinai was really grits?” Maleka asked slowly.

“Ain’t is what I said?”

Why not? Maleka had spent the last year fighting in the streets of a foreign country because someone had misinterpreted the holy writings of an ancient text, so why should it be any different right here at home? Using her toast as a spoon, Maleka took another bite of the buttery, salted grits and smiled. It was no wonder her uncle had mistaken them for ambrosia. Uncle Emmit went on to explain that after the miracle on Mount Sinai, there was no mention of grits for another 1,000 years. Experts, he explained, found evidence that grits were only used during secret religious ceremonies – and were kept away from the public due to their rarity.

The next mention of grits, he continued, “Was found in all dem ashes over there in Pompell in a famous woman’s diary.”

“Do you mean the ruins of Pompeii? What famous woman?” Maleka inquired.

“Herculaneum Jemimaneus.”

“Who?”

“Girl, you just as slow as molasses running downhill in January. Aunt Jemima.”

And if it wasn’t Uncle Emmit’s wild stories that re-invented history, it was her auntie Tammy’s constant complaint of how nothing made sense.

“Look at this damn blue bird sitting his ass upon that Goddamned tree branch! Look at him; that’s a damn shame. It just don’t make no damn sense!” No one offered that birds were supposed to be in trees; everyone just chuckled and shook their heads, and Maleka did the same.

Maleka knew she was going to miss them but she just couldn’t stay in the South. She was mortified that her extended family members, and their neighbors and friends seemed to perpetuate the negative stereotypes of blacks in the South. In her family’s defense, the whites down here didn’t seem much better. With their UFOs, swamp monsters, unfounded fear of the government, pickup trucks, and Confederate battle flags, Maleka couldn’t help but hear that banjo song from the movie Deliverance every time she listened to them talk.

The most unsettling thing about being in the South for Maleka was everyone’s devout belief in superstitions, and truth be told, this was the real reason she was leaving.

The woman who lived across the street from her grandmother’s house always dragged a broom behind her wherever she walked when she left the house, even if it was only to check the mail. When Maleka asked her great-grand-aunt why she did that, she was told, “Cuz she dohn wants deze fixuhs tuh git her foot track.” Maleka knew what fixuhs were before she had a chance to unpack. Fixuhs were evil spirits, and apparently, they were everywhere.

The first night Maleka stayed in her grandmother’s house, she noticed a broom upside down by her bedroom door. When she took the broom into the kitchen to put it away, pandemonium broke out.

Her cousin Maybell explained that the broom was placed outside her door to protect her from the hags, and that this protection was necessary because she had seen a hag with her own two eyes. Maleka thought if she drank as much as her cousin did, she would probably see things too. Not only were there hags but also there were signs, omens, dreams, mojo rings, witches, wearing a dime around your ankle, charms, talismans, myths and swamp monsters. Maleka’s sleep was unrestful, and during the day, she was jumpy and on edge.

“You all packed and ready to go?”

Maleka jumped nearly five feet off the bed at the sound of Leticia’s voice, and her cousin laughed until tears rained down her beautiful ebony face.

“Girl,” Leticia said as soon as she caught her breath. “You is just as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full o’ rocking chairs.”

“I must have dozed off; I didn’t hear you come in.” Maleka said through her smile. “Yeah, I’m almost done. I really didn’t have that much stuff to pack anyway.”

Leticia sat on the bed next to Maleka and pushed herself back until she was resting against the wall. Maleka did the same.

“You really can’t stay no longer?”

“Ticia, it’s so hot down here, I can barely think. Hey, why don’t you come up to Seattle? Once I get home and settled, I can buy you a plane ticket. You can stay as long as you like. I think you’ll like it. It’s really pretty, there’s lots of water, and its cool.”

“Girl, I ain’t never been on no airplane before.”

Maleka could hear the fear in her cousin’s voice. The two were the same age, 28, but her cousin had never traveled outside of her county.

“So? There’s a first time for everything. You can catch the Greyhound … I know! What about Amtrak? That’ll be cool … to ride the train across the country; I can even get you your own private cabin!”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, just think about it. OK?”

“I will.”

Both girls looked toward the door as their grandmother walked through it. Fat Mike was behind her, carrying a large Styrofoam cooler that looked heavy, even for him. Her grandmother had packed a feast that would have fed an army for a month.

The cooler was filled with fried-pork-chop sandwiches with mayo and hot sauce, buttermilk fried chicken, scuppernongs, Maypops, onion-and-tomato sandwiches, potato salad and macaroni salad, cracklings and half a dozen banana moon pies.

“Grandma, this is too much food. I’ll be home in just a few days.” Maleka really wasn’t protesting, because her grandmother had packed all of her favorite food, even if it was more than she could eat in just a few days.

Fat Mike went to load her car, and her grandmother sat on the edge of the rickety bed and touched Maleka’s face before she started talking.

“Now don’t you go wandering too far off de road, don’t let darkness catch ya’ and stay out dem woods at all cost. If you hear a chain rattlin’ on de tree, you best be movin’ along, cuz it might be a plat-eye.”

Great, Maleka thought. Just what I need, another Southern monster. She had no idea what a plat-eye was, and she wasn’t going to ask. She didn’t want to know. All she wanted was to be back in the Great Pacific Northwest where all she had to worry about was good old-fashion ghosts, Bigfoot, and the occasional serial killer.

Her grandmother handed Maleka a small burlap sack tied closed with a piece of twine. “Keep this witchya at all times, no matter what happens.”

Maleka took the little bag with trembling hands. She didn’t want to take this with her; she didn’t even want to touch it. This was what she wanted to get away from in the first place. Maleka dropped the amulet of protection into her handbag and gave her grandmother a big hug and kissed her goodbye.

2

On the winding road that seemed to stretch on forever, Maleka saw a filling station that looked like it hadn’t been updated or remodeled in the last 100 years. She even heard the cheerful “ding-ding” as she pulled up to the pump. The breeze in the wake of a passing semi felt good against her sticky skin. She was grateful for the cooler temperatures that were chasing the submerging rays of the sunset.

Maleka bought two bags of ice, a six-pack of Coke, oil, and a road map she had GPS on her cell phone, but she hadn’t had a signal in almost three hours. Maleka also bought 45 dollars’ worth of gas and some candy. The old man smiled at her as she dumped her stuff in front of him to ring up. Maleka returned his smile while looking away from his blue running eyes, wrinkled skin and broken teeth. As Maleka was rummaging through her purse for cash, because Visa wasn’t really everywhere that she wanted to be, the charm her grandmother gave her tumbled out on to the vintage countertop.

Maleka had made it halfway back to her car before the old attendant came chasing out behind her.

“Hey, girl, wait a minute, you done left yo charm.”

Maleka turned to the sound of his voice and almost ran from the man who was holding the small bag her grandmother had given her. When he extended it for her to take, she flinched away from it.

“Oh. Thank you, sir, but I don’t think I need it.”

The man looked at Maleka with a flash of anger and it was clear that he was personally offended by Maleka’s fear of it.

“Your peoples gave this to you for good reason. You need it for protection. I reckon you a long way from home, so I suggest that you take this with you.”

Maleka took a step away from the man and shook her head.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to mess with stuff you don’t understand.”

“Girl you don’t have to believe but you can’t afford not to listen.” The man warned as he walked up to her and dropped the charm into one of her bags.

Maleka slowly turned around and walked away from him, so shaken up that she almost forgot to pump her gas. She drained her cooler, crammed in the six cans of Coke, and replaced the melted ice. She added oil to her car, opened the map, charted her course, and cursed the non-existent signal on her phone. As Maleka was placing the trash into the plastic bags, her attention was once again drawn to the charm resting at the bottom. She tossed all the trash on top of it, balled up the bags, and threw them away. As she sped away, she noticed the old man watching her leave from the window.

Maleka had been driving in the dark for almost two hours. When she first learned how to drive the freeway scared her the most, but when her stepfather took her on her first night drive she was calm and confident.

When they drove at night, there was really no need for his instructions, so he just let her drive. The night lessons were Maleka’s favorite time with her stepfather. He didn’t warn her about the dangers of boys, drugs and alcohol, he did not bitch at her for not doing her chores or getting just a C on her math test, or quiz her about military terminology. It was just she and Dad spending a few hours at night driving under a blanket of stars. Maleka had always enjoyed driving at night; she appreciated the solitude and welcomed the memories.

She could have shot herself for tilting her head all the way back to drink the last of the Coke. She looked back at the road in time to see a deer bolt out in front of her car and freeze just a few feet ahead of her. Despite everything she had been taught and had heard, Maleka slammed on the brakes and yanked her wheel heavily to the right. Her car slid off the pavement and lost traction in the gravel. She tried to right herself but overcorrected, sending the vehicle over the yellow line. As she fought the car to avoid any oncoming traffic on the two-lane stretch of road, the car returned to the correct lane before leaving the road, going into a ditch, and slamming into a tree.

“Goddamn it!”

Maleka put the car in park but left the engine running, afraid that if she turned it off, she wouldn’t be able to restart it. The front of the car was damaged, but not badly enough to deploy the airbags. She rubbed her head, unhooked her seat belt, and snatched her cell phone off the floor in front of the seat next to her.

No service.

“Fuck!” Maleka threw the phone back on the floor with such force that it bounced up and landed on the passenger seat. Maleka pounded on the steering wheel and looked into the rearview mirror.

The deer was still standing in the middle of the road. It turned its head as if to look in the direction behind them before returning its gaze to the car. The deer raised its head to the sky, and Maleka watched the antlers of the large animal retract back into its head.

That’s not what you saw; you hit your head pretty hard, and your vision is blurry. That isn’t what you just saw.

Maleka watched the deer stand on its hind legs and take the form of a man. He started to walk slowly toward the car.

Don’t let darkness catch ya and stay out dem woods at all cost.

Maleka grabbed the rear view mirror and moved it so that she could watch the man approaching as she reached beneath her seat for her gun. Without taking her eyes off of the man in the rearview mirror, Maleka put her car in reverse and then back in drive and back again until she gently rocked her car out of the ditch.

Only when she got the car back on the road did she take her eyes off the man. She pulled away slowly, but as she picked up speed, the front bumper, which was being dragged beneath the car, punctured a tire. The car began to wobble before it took a nose dive to the right, the tire so damaged that she was driving on the rim. She drove another 200 feet before the car died completely. She was on a slight decline, so she let the car coast down a bit, then steered the car off to the side of the road when she felt it losing momentum.

“FUCK!”

A quick glance in both the side and rearview mirrors did not reveal the man’s whereabouts, but she knew he was still coming.

Maleka took a deep breath and let her training take over. Her mother taught her how to shoot with a Smith & Wesson model 29.44 Magnum, and her Uncle Sam had given her a badge marked “expert.”

The wonder nine that Maleka held in her hands was Smith & Wesson’s M&P, with a 17-round capacity, and a velocity 100 feet per second above what was advertised. Maleka had no doubt of the weapon’s capability, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she needed something more.

Keep this witchya at all times no matter what happens.

“Fuck.”

She pulled the lever on her seat until the headrest was lying on the back seat, then turned around, pressed her back into the steering wheel, and waited for the man, deer, or whatever the hell it was that caused this accident, to close the distance between them.

Maleka reached over, opened the glove box, and grabbed the four extra high-capacity magazines. She grabbed the phone off of the passenger seat and shoved the clips and phone into the back pockets of her blue jeans. It wasn’t long after that she saw the top of the man’s head crest the hill.

“Guard me, O Lord, from the hands of the wicked; protect me from the violent …” Maleka’s prayer was interrupted by movement on the edges of her peripheral vision. Maleka was hesitant to take her eyes off of the approaching man, but whatever was on the other side of the road was closer to her than he was. Her eyes slowly traveled to the view outside of her driver’s-side window. Her eyes seemed to almost drag her head with them. Blurs of black and gray shapes became sharp lines, defined images … more deer, methodically taking the shape of man.

Don’t panic.

“Deliver me from those who work evil; from the bloodthirsty, save me.” As if adding an exclamation point to her prayer, she pulled the trigger, killing a beast whose metamorphosis was nearly complete.

The rear window imploded. In the rain of broken glass and shadows Maleka fired six more rounds in rapid succession, crawled to the passenger side of her car, and ran into the deep, tangled abyss that is the Alabama wilderness.

Don’t let darkness catch ya’, and stay out dem woods at all cost.

3

The tree-lined paved road was lit by stars, but Maleka was plunged into absolute darkness once she entered the forest. After nearly tripping and breaking her ankle, Maleka kicked off her flip-flops and immediately gained speed. It was a double-edged sword, as her tender spa-pampered feet quickly yielded to the unforgiving rough terrain of sharp rocks, jagged twigs, and tangled and knotted tree roots that carpeted the floor of the wilderness.

As she ran, she unbuckled her belt and threaded her gun through it so that she wouldn’t lose it. She refastened the belt loose; the gun beat against her thigh as she ran, but she wanted to be able to maneuver her weapon freely when she needed to.

Instinctively, she stopped running. Maleka slowly, blindly, extended her hand out in front of her, and before her arm was fully outstretched, her fingertips brushed against the rough bark of a large tree. Maleka stepped closer, put her cheek against the tree, and then extended her arms outward as if to give the tree a hug. With her arms fully extended, the tips of her stretched and exploring fingers still felt bark on both sides.

Maleka kept her right hand on the tree and used her left hand as a feeler to detect any other large objects in front of her, until the large timber that blocked her path was behind her.

Her fear heightened her sense of awareness, and her deprivation of sight sharpened her ability to hear, Maleka found it easier to just close her eyes rather than peer into the darkness. She controlled her breathing and concentrated on the muted sounds of the forest.

The terrain underfoot became soft. Instead of rocks, pinecones, and fallen branches, Maleka felt leaves, moss, and mud. She stood still, cocked her head, and listened. The absence of sound alarmed her, but she continued to walk, slowly at first, then faster and faster until she was once again running at full tilt.

The ground was soft and soundless, but as she picked up speed, she heard branches snapping behind her to her left. Hoping to achieve the same level of strength, speed, and victory as the Greek Goddess Nike, Maleka ran. And ran, and ran.

And slammed into a low-hanging branch.

There was a flash of bright light around the edges of her vision, her feet swung out from under her, and she landed on her back. Her lower back just above her tailbone exploded in pain as it came into contact with a fallen log, and as her head bounced off the ground, Maleka bit her tongue. Running headlong into a thick branch had caused worse injuries than the car accident.

Maleka swallowed blood and listened to the sounds of the forest. Nothing.

She performed a quick mental diagnostic of her body and categorized her injuries.

She told herself she was fine and slowly sat up. Without warning, it started raining, not the light misty drizzle that she was accustomed to in Seattle, but a hard and heavy downpour of torrential rain of biblical proportions.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Maleka screamed up to the heavens. “Is this your idea of a joke? Well I don’t think it’s funny! Didn’t you hear me calling you for help?”

Maleka was standing, though she did not remember the physical act of standing up. Her hands were balled into tight fists, and she was defiantly staring into the night sky and blinking away the rain. A voice in her head suggested that maybe this was not the way she should be talking to God, but she was so desperately angry and so thoroughly terrified that she couldn’t stop herself.

“Give me a fucking break, answer my prayer, do something! I’m not asking you to part the sea; I’m just asking for a little help. Is that asking for too much? Are you there?”

God did not answer her. She couldn’t hear anything over the rain. She still couldn’t see anything, but she didn’t want to just stand there, so despite nearly having been decapitated, Maleka started running. She counted her steps as she ran. There were 2,112 military steps in one mile with a 30-inch step. Maleka’s running stride was 70 inches, so she knew she had run nearly two miles since plowing into that tree.

The soft mud that had padded Maleka’s footfalls was now an enemy combatant. Encouraged by the rain, the mud became thick and hostile, her feet were buried to her ankles with each step, she had to use force to wrangle her foot free, and before she knew it, she was calf deep in mud.

“This is fucking bullshit.”

Maleka took a deep breath, turned around, and slowly made her way out of the deep mud. A bolt of lightning arched across the sky. In the flash of light, Maleka saw that she was in a small valley. It took Maleka almost a full minute to register what she had seen on the valley ridge.

Her pursuers had morphed themselves into one of the most feared and formidable canines on both the face of the planet and in the depths of nightmares.

The wolf.

Maleka now had to run from a pack of dogs that had the ability to run at speeds of at least 40 miles per hour and sustain those speeds for several miles at a time.

Though there was nothing remotely humorous in Maleka’s situation, she started laughing.

4

Maleka bolted away from the descending predators. It took her ninety steps to reach the slight incline that marked the valley wall. Digging in with hands, forearms, knees, and feet, she scrambled up the hill. When she reached flat land, she stood up and ran. Maleka counted sixty steps before she tripped over an exposed tree root. She reached out with her hands to break her fall, but she kept falling.

Maleka slammed to the ground on her shoulder and began to tumble, roll, and slide. Once again, she was laughing, and she received a mouthful of dirt, leaves, and, to her utter horror, a bug. She hated watching the damsel in distress trip and fall in horror movies, and yet here she was falling for the second time.

Did she see lights? Maleka slid to a stop on her face, stood up, and ran. She did see lights. The lights that shone through the window of the cabin were like a beacon promising a safe haven from this storm.

She could hear the footsteps of the dogs behind her. She thought she heard them running past her as well, and knew that they were racing ahead to cut her off and surround her.

With every breath she took, she inhaled fire. Both of her feet were swollen, cut, and bleeding. Pain exploded from her feet to her jaw with each step she took. Her hands, arms, and face were scratched and cut. The pain in her side was so intense, she might as well have been pierced by the Spear of Destiny. The trees blocked out the light of the moon. It was so dark that she couldn’t even see the tips of her fingers on her outstretched arms. She’d just returned home from the war and was in excellent physical condition; otherwise, she would have been caught two miles ago. She kept running. She ran faster.

She was so close that the warm light glowing in the window offered her enough light to see the edges of her surroundings, but she didn’t look at what was moving within the shadows. She jumped over the four steps of the cabin’s patio and slammed her shoulder into the door, expecting resistance, but with one turn of the knob, the door opened.

The rug slid under her feet and she almost fell … again. As Maleka regained her balance, the only thing she saw was a pair of denim-blue eyes. It took three seconds for Maleka’s vision to pan out, allowing the panoramic view of the inside of the cabin to come into focus.

The man she was looking at was shirtless and tattooed. On his broad and chiseled chest was an eagle in flight, and clutched within its mighty talons was a large swastika. The man was sitting in a chair, his foot on the edge of the table, and his chair was tipped back on the two hind legs. Covering the wall he was against was a large Confederate battle flag – an image that, for the majority of black people living in the United States, is a symbol of racism. His hair might have been red or blond, but his head was shaved. He wasn’t alone. Another man stood by the window, and yet another sat on a small sofa directly in front of the man she had first seen.

Maleka spun around, slammed the door closed, and engaged the deadbolt.

Once the door was closed, she saw a large chair. It was as heavy as it looked, and she had to use all her strength to drag it to the door and position the chair under the door handle. Maleka stumbled a few steps back and turned to face the men she had locked herself inside with.

For almost five minutes, no one spoke.

She pressed her hand to the pain in her side and took a closer look at the guy by the window. He wasn’t standing, as she first thought; he was sitting on top of some type of cabinet. He had a huge sucker in his mouth, and she could smell the cherry scent of the candy from the other side of the room. He had the same denim colored eyes as the one leaning back in his chair. He wasn’t completely bald, because his red hair had grown out a little. It reminded Maleka of a peach.

The thought of such a juicy fruit only served to underscore the dryness of her parched throat. As if reading her mind, he tightened the cap on his bottle of water and tossed it to Maleka. She drank it down greedily. Cool water ran down the sides of her mouth as she drank, as much as she could before she started coughing.

Both of the man’s arms from shoulder to wrist were covered in colorful, incredibly detailed tattoos, but what stood out the most were the flags. On the inside of his upper right arm, near his chest, was a tattoo of a red flag with a black swastika in the center. On the left was the American flag. The man sitting on the couch wore a Dewalt wife-beater and was wearing a ball cap that read, “The South shall rise again.” At first she thought they all looked the same, but it was clear to her that the one leaning back in his chair and the one in the window were related, possibly brothers.

The cabin was just one big square room, the kitchen was along the wall to her left, and the view from that window was of more woods. A large brick fireplace sat in the center of the widest wall, and there was a door off to the side that Maleka guessed to be a bathroom. There were three sleeping bags rolled up in the corner along with three backpacks and a slew of hunting rifles.

Along the wall above the couch hung pictures of Hitler standing in a moving Jeep, bikini-clad blond women displaying tools, and redheads posing with cars. There was also a poster of the University of Alabama football team running on the field. Maleka was surprised to see that poster hanging so proudly, as most of the players in the poster were black.

Finally, the guy in the window swirled his candy to one side of his mouth and asked, “So what the fuck are you running from to make you think you’re safer in here with us than out there with a gun strapped to your belt?”

“A pack of wolves,” Maleka answered.

“No ma’am, you might wanna try that again. We ain’t got no wolves down here.” The candy man explained.

“I know, but they weren’t wolves at first.” Maleka’s thoughts were jumbled and confused, and so were her words. She heard herself talking and was afraid that she wasn’t making any sense.

“See, she told me to keep it with me, then I didn’t think I needed it, so I threw it away.”

“You threw what away?”

“I really didn’t think it would do any good; it’s just a stupid superstition.”

He slowly took the candy out of his mouth and asked again, “You threw what away?”

“The man at the gas station tried to give it back to me, but I didn’t take it.”

“HEY!” he shouted. “Do you hear me fucking talking to you? I’m not going to ask you again. What did you throw away?”

“The charm.”

“The charm?” He echoed. “What charm, what was it for?”

Maleka noticed how his eyes lowered to the gold cross she was wearing around her neck as he asked the question.

“It was to protect me from the monster.”

The man leaning in the chair slowly lowered it back to all four legs, and the one on the couch took off his ball cap and ran his hand through his thick blond hair. As his blond locks unraveled to fall against his sculpted shoulders, Maleka knew without a doubt that this man was a direct descendant of Thor.

Maleka could see the conversation the men were having with their eyes, but she had no idea what they were saying.

“Travis, she’s high. She’s probably from California, and they say they got some good-ass weed out there.”

The three of them shared a laugh as Travis put the candy back in his mouth and leaned against the window.

“I’m not high, and I’m not from California,” Maleka hissed.

Travis shrugged his shoulders. “That might be so, girl, but you ain’t from around here. You say you ain’t high, but you done spooked yourself so bad you ain’t thinking straight, and you ain’t making no damn sense, so I can’t tell either way.”

“I scared myself?” Maleka was furious.

“What you was running from is most likely coyotes.”

“I know the fucking difference between a wolf and a coyote,” she started, but the man in the chair interrupted her.

“Really, Big City? Because you said they weren’t wolves at first, so what were they then, dingos?”

More laughter.

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck you too, you stupid fucking nigger cunt bitch! There ain’t no fucking wolves down here. The only dogs we have out there in our woods are the coyote and maybe … maybe a pack of strays. You was running through the woods at night. It’s dark out there, and the woods has a way of playing tricks with your senses. You was just seeing things.”

“Caleb’s right,” Travis explained. “You fucking people are all the same; you come down South and act like it’s a trip to the fucking zoo. Y’all come down here so that you can laugh at us ignorant, po’ white trash, redneck hillbillies, and point at the dumbass country niggers.”

“Y’all watch movies like Deliverance and think we’re just a bunch of inbreeds sitting down here making moonshine, playing banjos, eating fried chicken and spitting out watermelon seeds. Then the next thing you know, y’all is running through the woods in the middle of the night, shooting at shadows and running from dogs that are expecting to be hand fed.”

More laughter. Maleka started to say something, but stopped. She turned her head toward the door. The others heard it too. Scratching. The door shook gently. Something heavy landed on the roof, and the ceiling creaked in protest under the weight of whatever was walking across it. Everyone looked up at once.

The door shook again, forcefully this time. Travis tracked the footsteps on the roof with his head, leaning farther and farther back until he was looking directly above him.

There was a long deep howl lasting almost 10 seconds before the others in the pack answered the call.

Everyone started moving at once. Maleka unhooked her gun from her belt and reached into her pockets for the extra clips. Without taking his eyes off the ceiling, Travis stood, slowly turned around, and closed the interior shutters.

Caleb grabbed the hunting rifles that had been leaning against the fireplace. The man sitting on the couch flew past Maleka to close the shutters in the kitchen. He closed them in the nick of time. The glass in the kitchen window shattered, but the shutter was not breached.

“Ryan,” Caleb called and tossed a rifle to the man who now stood behind Maleka.

The silence that followed was deafening. With the enveloping hush, everyone looked at Maleka, who was looking at Caleb with a look that said I told you so.

When Maleka had first tried to explain the night’s events Travis thought it was a joke. Now he thought it was her fault. He flew from the window to loom over her.

“You fucking threw the Goddamn charm away? You just fucking threw it away?”

Travis was a whole foot taller than Maleka, and as he screamed down at her, she realized that the candy he had had in his mouth was not cherry flavored but, in fact, strawberry.

Neither his size nor his proximity intimidated Maleka, since both were to her advantage. Her situational awareness was acute. Maleka had mentally established that inside the cabin was her zone of security, and she knew where everything was.

From a very early age, Caleb had developed a healthy fear of women and learned to never underestimate their capacity for brutality nor be surprised by the vicious glee with which they carried out their monstrous deeds. Caleb did not like the way the girl’s demeanor had changed, and though he couldn’t pinpoint what had changed he just knew something had.

“Travis.”

“If you knew it was to keep you safe, why did you fucking throw it away?”

She knew how much room she had to maneuver. She knew how many steps it would take to reach Caleb, understood that he would have to be the next one neutralized, because under no circumstances was she going back outside into unfamiliar terrain while it was dark.

With eight older sisters, a mother who was acquitted for the slaughter of his father, and having served a ten-year prison sentence for killing a woman who was doing her best to kill him, Caleb had firsthand knowledge of how truly cruel and dangerous a woman could be, and he understood that they were in no way, shape, or form the weaker sex.

“Travis.”

“Y’all think y’all so much better than us, so sophisticated and educated.”

Maleka’s breathing slowed. She was unprepared to deal with deer that changed themselves into people and then changed themselves into wolves, but fighting men was what she had been trained to do, and she had seventeen confirmed kills under her belt just this year alone. Her personal best so far.

That was what it was. She was calm, almost relaxed. Travis was a big guy.

Most people who saw him coming would quickly look for the nearest exit, or cross the street. No one ever made eye contact with him, but this girl was looking him right in the eye and didn’t even flinch, and Caleb didn’t like that.

“Travis.”

Maleka slowly slid one foot in front of the other, but kept her hands at her sides, thus assuming a basic battle stance. Close-quarters combat was Maleka’s specialty. Because of her stealth, speed, agility, and ferocity in hand-to-hand combat, comrades in her unit started calling her “the black mamba.” Most people didn’t see her coming, and those who did lacked the necessary training to defend themselves, and perished. And such would be the case with Travis.

Before he realized that he had even stood up, Caleb found himself by his brother’s side. He gently pulled Travis away from Maleka and protectively stood between them.

“What the fuck were you doing out in the woods at night for anyway?” Travis demanded over Caleb’s shoulder.

“They crashed my car.”

“Of course they fucking crashed your car! Dumbass.” Travis was furious and pacing back and forth.

“I don’t understand why you’re so upset, Travis,” Maleka taunted. “You said I was shooting at shadows and running from dogs that are expecting to be hand fed. Maybe we should open the door and give them some doggie treats and scratch their heads.”

For a frightening second, Caleb was unsure if he was going to be able to restrain his brother. He would have loved nothing more than to knock that smug smirk off her face, but Caleb had a feeling that was exactly what she wanted, and he refused to be baited.

“Travis, there are four of us in here and enough guns for us to have three each. We just have to maintain our zone of security until morning, and then we’ll be able to offer adequate cover to reach the truck. The nearest town will be our extraction point.”

Travis and Caleb looked at each other in astonishment, and Maleka fought feelings of frustration.

“Extraction point?” Travis echoed. “Are you in the Army?”

Something else jumped onto the roof. The door bulged in violently as if kicked, but the chair under the doorknob held.

“These ain’t terrorists you was shooting at out there. There ain’t no fucking extraction point, and in case you haven’t noticed, we’re surrounded. The cavalry ain’t coming, and you just fucking got us all killed.”

Maleka was losing her patience with Travis.

“I killed two of them in the street.”

“Did you kill them, or did you just shoot them?”

The voice came from behind her. Maleka pivoted 180 degrees and took three steps back so that her back was toward the door and the three men were in view full.

“You said at first they weren’t wolves, so then, what were they?”

Whatever was on the roof was now jumping, as if trying to stomp its way through. The door was kicked again and splintered along the hinges. The front-room window shattered. The noise outside sounded like breaking tree branches, and a mixture of hyena calls and wolf howls. Ryan burst into hysterical laughter, and Maleka decided it wasn’t such a good idea to have her back to the door.

“Ok, Big-City, if you have a plan to get us all outta here alive, you might want to tell us, because that would be some pretty good fucking information to have right about now.”

Before Maleka had the time to ignore Travis’s hysteria, Ryan asked his question again.

“What were they at first?”

Before Maleka had a chance to answer, Caleb offered his hypothesis. “So what are we dealing with here, werewolves? Well, if that’s the case, we’re all fucked because none of these bullets are silver.”

“Can they fucking do that? The moon’s not even full!”

As Travis’s question drifted slowly toward silence, all of the men turned to Maleka for the answer. She thought that she was going to collapse as the heavy weight of how truly dire their situation was settled upon her shoulders. As if things were not challenging enough, unlike the men in her unit, these guys were not going to just do what they were told, and Travis was already becoming a problem.

Maleka’s plan A was to stay inside the cabin until daylight, but whatever monster had chased her in here, and had been kicking the door and jumping on the roof, had a different idea. Maleka was going to have to come up with a plan B and C and a contingency plan, and she should have done that 20 minutes ago.

Maleka took Caleb’s rifle to inspect it and was disappointed at her discovery. Caleb’s weapon of choice was a Winchester Model 70. A bolt rifle.

This was the perfect weapon for a sniper – and of course to use for hunting – but the mere seconds it took to reload this gun manually would cost someone their life in a combat situation. With a quick scan of all the weapons, she knew she wouldn’t find what she was looking for.

“What’s the matter?”

Maleka handed Caleb his gun back.

“I was really hoping for a semiautomatic, or at least a gun that could have been easily converted. Even a revolver would be nice. Are there any handguns here?”

“Semiautomatic?” Caleb asked. “I guess if you’re hunting people but we came out here to hunt deer. I got a Colt .38 out in the truck.”

“My state allows the use of semiautomatic for big-game hunting,” Maleka explained. “And the last thing anyone is doing right now is going outside.”

“What’s considered big-game hunting in California … a Colombian drug lord?”

Maleka wanted nothing more than to knock Travis unconscious with the butt of his own gun, but as the best possible defense plan formulated in her mind, she knew she was going to need him.

“I’m not from California, Travis. I’m from Washington. Is there a window in the bathroom?”

“No,” they all answered at once. Finally, God had answered her prayer.

Maleka opened the door to the small bathroom and asked Ryan to drag over the chair that Caleb had been sitting in. She used the chair to hold the door open, then lined the bathtub with sleeping bags.

Because Caleb was the tallest, he was the one she put in the bathtub, and he was thankful for the padding of the sleeping bags, as he would be shooting directly over Maleka’s head from a kneeling position. Maleka wanted the gunfire aimed in such a way as to produce highest the concentration of fatalities. It was one thing to shoot at the heads of unsuspecting elk. It was another thing entirely to be shooting at moving targets that had the ability to change from one creature to another, and whose sole purpose was your demise. Travis’s position was on the ledge of the tub, and Ryan sat on the toilet. They would surround her as she sat on the floor, and her goal was to provide them with enough automatic fire to give them enough time to reload their guns.

With the men in place, Maleka moved the two floor lamps to each side of the bathroom door and used the outlets in the bathroom to plug them in. She directed the swivel heads of the lamps toward the cabin door and turned all the other lights in the cabin off. Just like a cop shining his light into your car window, not only would the bright lights of the 100-watt bulbs blind anyone, or anything, coming through the door, the intense white light directed outwards would provide a safe haven of darkness behind which they could hide.

They sat in the silent dark for almost twenty minutes, and when Travis started talking, it startled everyone.

“Caleb,” he said. “I think you’re the coolest mother-fucking man I ever met.”

The iron shutters on both windows started to rattle. Caleb cleared his throat, but when he started talking, his voice was full of emotion.

“You’ve always followed me. No matter where I went, I knew if I ever wanted my little brother, all I had to do was turn around and you’d be there. In all my life, this is the only time I wish you hadn’t followed me.”

Hearing Travis and Caleb say goodbye was more than Maleka could deal with. She had fought in four theaters in places that you would never be able to find on a map, just to be killed in her own country by a fiend that should not exist.

Keep this witchya at all times no matter what happens.

There was nothing she could do about it now, and Travis had been right all along. She indeed had killed them all. This was so unfair; it was just a stupid superstition, none of this was real. Except it was.

“I’m sorry.”

Maleka wasn’t just apologizing to Caleb, Travis, and Ryan. She was also apologizing to her cousin Maybell who put a broom by her bedroom door to keep her safe from the terrors that lurked in the night. She was apologizing to her grandmother, who had given her a gift that was meant to see her through on her journey, and to the gas-station attendant who knew how important it was when he tried to give it back after she left it on the counter. But more importantly, Maleka apologized to God for her earlier blasphemous display of disobedience.

With a final kick, the door broke in half, flying inwards in two pieces, and as the wind and the monsters rushed in, everyone started shooting.

The post PseudoPod 582: The Monster appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Alaya Dawn Johnson
• Narrator : Dominick Rabrun
• Host : Tonia Thompson
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ was first published in ‘Zombies vs. Unicorns’ in 2010

Love Will Tear Us Apart by Alaya Dawn Johnson

1. I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor

Think of it like the best macaroni and cheese you’ve ever had. No neon yellow Velveeta and bread crumbs. I’m talking gourmet cheddar, the expensive stuff from Vermont that crackles as it melts into that crust on top. Imagine if right before you were about to tear into it, the mac and cheese starts talking to you? And it’s really cool. It likes Joy Division more than New Order, and owns every Sonic Youth album, and saw you in the audience at the latest Arctic Monkeys concert, though you were too stoned to notice anything but the clearly sub–par cheesy mac you’d brought with you.

And what if he—I mean “it”—were really hot? Tall and lanky and weirdly well muscled, with bright blue eyes and ginger hair? So, he smells like the best meal you’ve ever eaten, but you kind of want to bone him too. Can’t have it both ways. You aren’t a necro. But a boy’s got to eat—maybe you could just nibble a bit at the edges? A part he won’t miss, and then fuck the rest of him. Eat an arm or something. He can still fuck with one arm. Not that well, though. Probably wouldn’t like it. Okay, a hand. Who ever needed a left hand? Then you remember that Jack—that’s his name, the mac and cheese—plays lacrosse. That’s probably where he got all those yummy muscles. You need two hands for lacrosse.

A pinky? Damn, you might as well starve yourself.

And you had it all planned out. You and Jack have shared an art class for the last three weeks. You were going to admire the mobile he’s been making (a twisted metal tower dangling with shattered CDs and beer tabs), look deep into his eyes, invite him back home with you to play Halo or smoke hash or whatever, and then devour him in the woods off of Route 25. Those woods are the local hunting range. You’ve done it at least a dozen times before, though not to your actual classmates at Edward R. Murrow High, your newest school.

Liking your meal too much to kill him? That’s a first.

“Pizzicato Five?” you say, catching on to the tail end of Jack’s sentence. “Who’re they?”

His eyes light up. Not literally, but they get really large and you can see the blue of his irises all spangly and flecked around his dilated pupils. Bug eyes, you usually call that look.

“Dude, they’re awesome,” he says. “Harajuku pop. Yeah, I know, you’re thinking about that Gwen Stefani crap, like, ‘I totally thought Jack had better taste,’ but don’t worry, this is the real stuff. It’s all ironic and postmodern. James Bond on a Nipponese acid trip in a bukkake club.”

“Wow,” you say, ’cause honestly you can only deal in monosyllables at this point.

“Hey, we can walk to my place from here. You wanna come over? I have a few of their albums.”

So you don’t get anywhere near Route 25. Which is good. You don’t want to eat him, and you can still smell your leftovers there. The whole thing is weirding you out. You—I don’t know—you like him. Like like him. You think you had a little sister once who would say it just like that. You don’t remember eating her, but you can’t be sure. And what would Jack think if he knew you were some monster who couldn’t even remember if he ate his sister alive?

So you try to be engaging and charming and basically not stupid. You get into an argument about Belle and Sebastian.

“Sure, I like some of their stuff,” he says, smiling as though he knows you don’t agree. “The Life Pursuit has some great songs on it.”

“Twee copies of the Smiths aping Jonathan Richman’s airy earnestness and none of his insanity.”

He laughs, and you stumble on the grass. “Hold back, Grayson,” he says.

Jack gives you a long look, and there you go again, your heart beating too fast, pupils dilating, and you don’t really understand it, but that smell of his? That crusty mac–and–cheese aroma? It just got about a hundred times better. When he breathes in and out, it’s like he’s exhaling the essence of his marrow, the rough gristle in his joints, the blood that pulses as it rushes past the tanned skin by his collarbone.

He’s cutting through some woods behind the school, down an old deer path or something, and you’ve been too busy ogling his ass to pay much attention.

“Hey, what street do you live on again?” you ask.

“It’s off of Boward. I just like to cut through here sometimes. ‘I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.’”

“Dylan?” you guess.

He stops abruptly in between two trees that still have about half their leaves. His smile is sort of sad. “Robert Frost,” he says, and you don’t think this is a good time to mention that you’ve never heard of him. Probably some emo folkie like Sufjan Stevens.

“Grayson,” he says, his hands deep in his pockets. With anyone else it’d be fidgeting, but with Jack right now, the gesture is more like Please fuck me.

“Yeah?”

Your voice is sort of a squeak. You can smell the impending sex like it’s a bum in the park.

Then Jack goes and starts laughing again, and takes his hands out of his pockets. “It’s funny. Everyone thinks you’re weird,” he says. “But you’re all right, Grayson.”

“Hey, you, too.”

And you think, okay, a fuck would have been better, but you sort of like the idea of listening to this Nipponese acid trip album with him. He still smells like the best meal you’ve never tasted.

2. Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict

The sad tale of how I, Philip A. Grayson, became infected with a brain–devouring prion and was subsequently partially cured.

Part the first. I don’t know who I was. I don’t know how I caught it. The prion, I mean—this twisted, misshapen little bit of protein with even less autonomy than a virus, but one hell of a bigger punch. Ever heard of mad cow disease? They told me my prions are only found in bacteria that gestate at the bottom of landfills at high temperatures. It has to enter the host through the mucus membranes. That means it has to be drunk, snorted, dripped, or anally inserted. Yeah, I don’t want to know what the fuck I was doing either. It’s too bad, really, that I remember my name.

Part the second. I’ve killed a lot of people. I ate all of them, brains first. Not because I live off of gray matter or something, but because that’s the best part. Don’t believe me? Just ask the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea. They loved brains so much they nearly killed themselves with this other prion: transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. They called it kuru. Laughing sickness. Talk about dying happy.

Part the third. My prion is too rare to have a name. Like kuru, it mods my behavior in a major way. Well, I don’t know if you noticed, but it makes me want to eat people. Most of the time it gets rid of all of its host’s higher brain functions to make the whole devouring people compulsion work better. Frontal lobes and Joy Division obsessions tend to be pretty incompatible with the sudden overpowering urge to eat your girlfriend’s eyeballs.

Part the fourth. These scientists got to me before the mad proteins had a chance to do more than nibble. They gave me this drug that half–worked. My prions can’t reproduce, and they can’t devour my brain, but they still rattle around in there, jumping up and down on my amygdala every time I smell a human. The prions gave me these hyperactive pheromones, so I can do this thing where I lean in and smile and people go all bug–eyed and it’s like they turn into zombies or something. Well, until I start to eat them. You’re probably wondering why these benevolent scientists would part–cure me and then let me go into the world to seduce/eat people with my mostly intact brain functions. Don’t be stupid—of course they didn’t. When they figured out what had happened, they locked me in some padded cell. I ate the security guard and escaped.

The End

One last thing: About that frontal lobe the parasite didn’t quite devour? I lost enough that I don’t feel too bad about killing people. The way of the jungle and all that. It only bothers me sometimes. Like when they love Joy Division. Like when they laugh.

3. Behind Blue Eyes

Jack’s place is a little intense. It’s a stone mansion on a cul–de–sac of its own, with Pentagon–style security. One ten–digit code to get through the gate outside, a different twelve–digit code to get through the front door. You half–expect the knob to check his fingerprints.

“Dude,” you say when the fort seems to have been breached, “this place is scary.” There’s not so much furniture, but every beige and mauve piece looks like it cost a fortune. Jack shrugs, a little uncomfortable. “My dad,” he says. “He’s obsessed with security. His friends keep calling him about some escaped nutcase that might be in Colorado. He’s gotten paranoid.” You feel sick, but try not to show it. Those scientists have tailed you for a year. What are the chances they’ve finally caught up now?

“What’s your dad do?”

“Ex–CIA,” Jack says. “Shattered his hip five years ago, so now he mostly does consulting.”

When you climb the staircase, you catch a whiff of gunpowder, but the only weapons you see are older—a row of antique and modern swords mounted on the wall.

“You know how to use these things?”

Jack sighs. “Sure. Dad’s made me do weapons training since I could walk. Guns, swords, martial arts. So long as there’s a potential for violent death, he’s interested. It’s all bullshit, really. Fake heroics so you can pretend you’re not really killing people. ‘One, two! One, two! And through and through / The vorpal blade went snicker–snack!’”

“Frost?” you say, though you know you’re wrong and you can’t wait for him to tell you so.

He smiles. “‘The Jabberwocky.’ Lewis Carroll. Dad likes that one ’cause it’s all about slaying an evil beast. You know, I think he’s happy about this nutcase on the loose? Always before it was rabid animals and no–kill tournaments and—Yeah. It’s a fixation.”

He looks away, holds himself too still, and you wonder what he’s not telling you about his dad’s “fixation.” Then he shakes his head and leads you the rest of the way up the stairs. Jack’s room is like a huge middle finger up the ass of the rest of the beige–on–white medicated–Vail–yuppie house. Every inch of wall space is covered with posters. A few sports stars but mostly musicians. Pete Townshend holding up a bloody hand; Gorillaz with their animated tongues lolling; Johnny Rotten grinning like a redheaded demon pixie; all of Devo with their weird space suits and jerky, vacant expressions. There’s a walk–in closet in back, and when he opens it, you see a few thousand CDs and vinyl albums lined neatly against the wall.

“I’ve got a few hundred gigs of MP3s, but vinyl is better, I think.”

And if you weren’t turned on before. “Fuck me,” you say. “This is amazing.”

He grins at you, awkwardness forgotten. “I’m lucky. So long as I practice, Dad tends to leave me alone.”

His killer sound system includes a subwoofer about the size of your torso, so the first notes of the recording are suitably deafening. He lies down on his thick beige carpet and then looks up at you, a gesture that might be an invitation if it weren’t so wary. You wonder what he thinks of you, and if you needed more evidence that something weird is happening here, that would clinch it. Part of the benefit of frontal–lobe–devouring prions is not needing to worry what the hell other people think. That’s a human thing. Not whatever you’ve become.

You sit down next to him. He smiles a little and leans back on his elbows, closes his eyes. You watch him. The floppy ginger hair falls over his forehead, almost concealing a long, thin scar that runs from his hairline down to his left ear. He nods in time to the screeching, childlike vocals, the swinging sixties rhythms, the psychedelic atonality.

“James Bond on a Nipponese acid trip,” you say, softly.

He opens his eyes, and now they’re not buggy at all. They’re hard and fierce and iced. He looks like he might kill you or kiss you. You hold your too–slow breath and realize that you don’t care which.

“I knew you’d like it,” he says.

The air comes out in a rush. You lean back against the carpet and look at the inside of your eyelids. You see red, like always. Muscle and bone and the crunch of your oversize molars tearing through. That’s what Jack would have become if he hadn’t mentioned Joy Division at the end of class. And even now you can feel the heat of him beside you, the soft exhale of his pores, the smell that’s a little sweat and a little detergent and some shampoo with a surprisingly girly flavor—coconut? Hibiscus? How could someone who uses hibiscus shampoo look so suddenly dangerous? He moves abruptly. You wait like you might fall on a blade.

But no, the door is opening, someone else is in the house. Slowly, too slowly, you turn around.

“Jackson,” says the man who must be the father. He wears khakis the color of his furniture, and a brown polo shirt. “Your target is still clean.”

If Jack was icy, his dad is absolute fucking zero. His eyebrows are so large and thick they cast his recessed eyes in deep shadow, like a pit. His mouth is pursed, not enough to be called a frown, but damn if you don’t want to run straight out the window and make excuses later. Jack glances at you and then back at his dad. He turns off the CD, and the sudden silence is louder than any high–decibel subwoofer. You can hear his dad’s breathing, as slow and icy as the rest of him. Ex–CIA. He was probably their go–to for those “enhanced” interrogations.

“Sorry,” Jack mumbles, unrecognizable. “I was getting to it.”

“I can see,” says the ice man. “I’ve just heard from Miller again. That creature they’re tracking definitely passed through here. I need you to be ready.”

“Sorry,” Jack says again.

The dad turns to you now, all cool speculation. You know without even trying that there’s nothing your special pheromones can do to thaw this guy. He thinks you’re a cockroach. He wants to stamp you out. Can he tell what you are just by looking? But no, it’s impossible. If he knew, he’d shoot you on the spot and tell Jack to clean the mess.

Ice man leaves, a slight hitch in his step. Jack takes a deep, shuddering breath and slams the door shut.

You whistle. “He like that every day?”

Jack glances at you and then away. His blue eyes dilate for no reason, and blood blossoms in his cheeks like roses. You swallow.

“He’s… you know.”

You try to imagine life with someone like that. Your failure to do so feels like something broken, something sucking and desperate. Because you know the ice man—as only one cracked soul can recognize another.

“‘But my dreams, they aren’t as empty.’” You can’t sing, so you just say it. But you remember the rest of the line: “‘As my conscience seems to be.’”

Jack starts, like someone poked him, and then sags against the wall. He laughs, but it doesn’t sound like laughter.

“My dad hates The Who,” he says.

“Your dad’s a dick.” For a moment you think he might take your hand.

4. Maps

I said I don’t know who I was, but that’s not strictly true. No invading twist of genetic code is that efficient. My hippocampus has been wiped pretty clean, but fragments remain. Hell, for all I know I remember everything, and just suppress it, like Iraq vets who can barely find Baghdad on a map. But here’s what I think I know. I had a sister. She was younger than me and dumb in that dumb little sister way, which means that she’ll probably grow up to be a neurochemist and invent the cure for spongiform encephalopathy. But I remember her loving Boy Meets World and High School Musical (all three) and the direct–to–DVD Olsen twins movies (in particular Passport to Paris). We had a dad, but I don’t know what he did. No mother, as far as I can tell. Dad had a thing for banana plants. He refused to buy regular Chiquita bananas, but he’d bring home any other variety he could find: tiny brown ones, giant green ones, skinny orange ones with flesh as hard as an apple and as sour as a lime.

He had a greenhouse filled with banana plants that fruited about once every two years, and the fruit was never edible. “They’re going extinct, you know,” he would say to me and my sister in the supermarket, tapping the clusters of normal yellow Cavendish bananas he’d never allow in the house. “A few more years and human carelessness will have destroyed every banana plant on earth.” Why? Some sort of cancer that turns them red and as hard as bricks. I know more details, but you don’t want them. Same old story since Noah: Humans are lousy stewards of the earth.

I don’t remember if I ate him. I don’t remember much of anything until I woke up in that lab. Just snatches. Hunger slicing through my muscles like an itch that could only go away if I peeled off my own skin. Blood like steam off a lake, warm and misted in my nostrils. And meat, raw and salty, filled with bones that caught in my throat and brains that slid down like oysters. Everyone is anonymous when I pull them apart. No one has a name when I eat them. Not even my father. Not even my sister.

Not even Jack.

5. Pulling Mussels (from the Shell)

The girl two seats down from you in the bleachers thinks you’re cute. You are cute—probably even before the prion problem, and certainly afterward. She has short brown hair and a nice–ish smile, though you could do without the braces. Those make nasty marks if she decides to fight back. You decide to smile after the second time she glances over her shoulder and giggles.

You have to eat sometime, after all, and the Jack situation has, in practical terms, made you go hungry. Mac–and–cheese himself is running across the field now, yelling at one of his teammates to pass him the ball as he guns for an opening in the opposing team’s lines. His green jersey is drenched in sweat and clings to his muscles in a way you know makes you look as bug–eyed as the girl with braces. You’ve overheard enough to know that she’s a good mark—here from out of town, visiting some friends. If you do this right, you might get to stay in Colorado for a few more weeks, at least. It’s funny—you usually care about finding a new town as much as you used to care about finding a new supermarket. Just another place to buy meat.

On the field Jack violently checks another player. They fall to the churned–up turf while the ball sails into the net. The crowd cheers, even though Jack gets fouled. The goal is good. Jack is a lot more violent on the field than he is off of it. But then you remember that strange, fierce way he looked at you for a moment yesterday afternoon. You remember the scar on his forehead and his ice man dad.

At halftime he comes over to the bleachers, breathing hard and grinning. A few other students give him high fives. You hang back, knowing he sees you and wondering if he’ll say something. It’s Saturday. You’ve never come to a game before. The whole field smells ripe, hundreds of walking, talking, laughing Happy Meals, and even from a few feet away, Jack smells better than all of them. For a moment you contemplate leaping over the bleachers and just eating him in front of the whole crowd. You’d probably get at least a few bites in before the police come. Maybe they’d even use deadly force, seeing as how you’re clearly a rabid beast, and finally solve all your problems. Saliva pools in your mouth. Jack looks up at you.

You won’t eat him. No matter what.

“Grayson,” he says with a half smile. He climbs the bleachers and sits next to you. “You like the game?”

You breathe very slowly. His arm brushes against yours, slick with his sweat. You have such a raging hard–on you can only hope he doesn’t look down.

“Nice,” you say. “You always that aggressive?”

Jack shrugs, but his grin is pleased. “If I need to be. We’re winning, aren’t we?”

“Guess so.”

Jack looks at you quickly and then away, and once again you’re enthralled by his countervailing waves of awkwardness and ferocity. “Grayson, about yesterday… my dad…”

“He’s not here, is he?” you say, playing at being scared, though actually the ice man does sort of scare you.

Jack laughs. “God, I hope not. Dad barely tolerates extracurriculars. He thinks I should be training… Hey, you want to go into the city with me tonight? I’ve got an extra ticket to Modest Mouse.”

This would be marginally appealing even without the additional bonus of Jack, but you look back down at the braces girl, now chatting with her friends. Your hunger is starting to feel like that first time, a longing that cuts into your muscles and makes the world turn red. You can’t go much longer without a meal.

“Sorry,” you say. “Can’t.”

You know you ought to offer a better explanation. Homework or community service or a part–time job. But you don’t want to lie to Jack.

So you hurt him instead.

“Okay,” Jack says. He looks away. The game is starting again. He walks back onto the field. Deliberately, knowing he’s still looking, you move so you’re right behind the girl. You smile at her.

“Haven’t seen you here before,” you say.

She goes bug–eyed. She blushes. You can smell her blood like it’s already broken the skin. “Visiting from Boulder,” she says. She says other things. You can’t quite hear her. Jack is staring at you from the edge of the bench. Even from here you can see the ice in those blue eyes. Like he wants to kill you.

You arrange to meet the girl—she has a name, but you try not to remember it, easier that way—in the parking lot in an hour. You tell her about some concert you have tickets to, would she like to come? In a converted farmhouse just outside the town limits. You wonder why you always get away with this routine. Like none of these girls or boys ever actually listened to a thing their guidance counselors told them about date safety. Sometimes you want to shake their shoulders and yell, “Hello? Doesn’t this sound strange to you?”

Whatever. You’re hungry.

The game is almost over when Jack’s dad walks onto the field. His limp is more obvious now, but it doesn’t make him less threatening. The referee stops the play and yells at the ice man for a few moments before deciding it’s hopeless. Jack doesn’t say anything, just walks off the field with his shoulders stooped. You wonder what’s happened—did he forget target practice again? You wait for him to come back, but instead he grabs his gear and leaves with his father. He glances at you once. You can’t see his face from so far away, but somehow you know he’s afraid. I need you to be ready, the ice man said yesterday. Ready to kill a monster?

You’re not as careful as you should be when you meet the girl after the game. You don’t check if anyone sees you leave together. You don’t even bother to have a conversation once she gets in the car. The doors are locked. The prions have done their job—she has entered a permanent bug–eyed state. Her pulse speeds up like old faithful when you look at her. You’re pissed that you have to do this. Angry like you haven’t been since you first woke up in the lab. About the normal life stripped away, at the maniac left behind. You want to be at that Modest Mouse concert with Jack so bad your stomach hurts. But you can smell the food beside you, and the urge to eat it now, at the intersection two blocks away from school, is almost overpowering.

It’s dark by the time you get to the woods. By now even braces girl is starting to get a little worried, but you tune her out. You don’t like it when they scream. Really, you don’t like it when they’re alive at all. Best to just knock them out and be done with it. But you hate to mess up the car, so you make up some excuse about the engine breaking down and stop in the middle of the gravel road. You know from experience that no one will find you.

“Hey,” braces girl says, “I think I want to go back home. This is a little—”

“Yeah, hold on, I have to see what’s wrong with the car.”

She nods, nervously. You get out, pretend to look at the engine, walk back around to her side. “Something’s smoking,” you say. “I should probably call for a tow. Could you get out for a second? I think the number’s under the seat.”

She nods, reassured, though you sure as fuck don’t know why. This is the worst part. The last moment they trust you, when some part of them must know they shouldn’t. She opens the door.

She gets out.

6. Dirty Harry

The prudent serial killer’s guide to avoiding the cool, yet bureaucratic, hand of the law.

• Move around! Superheroes call them lairs; police officers call them crime scenes.
• Blend in. In colonial Massachusetts a Quaker living alone with cats had a front–row ticket to a witch trial. In twenty–first–century America, a solitary lifestyle is still a sign of deviance. I’m about seventeen, so I go to high school. Lots of high schools. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to forge credentials, and all the teachers love a good student.
• Vary your targets. I know, the victims are supposed to be the telltale heart of serial killing. The fatal flaw: Every killer likes their type. Bad idea. I’ve eaten big jocks and old ladies. I’ve raided funeral parlors (not recommended: formaldehyde is to corpses what the Kraft factory is to Vermont cheddar). I’ve even put an ad online!

And finally:

• Use your brains! Or someone else will eat them for you.

7. You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)

The girl stares at you. You stare at her. The hunger feels like knives delicately inserted into your stomach and pushed through your spine.

And then she shrugs, takes a step forward, and kisses you. Perfect opportunity. A kiss is like a non–prion version of eating someone. But you just clench your fists and return it. Why not? The braces aren’t so bad. You imagine she’s Jack. That’s better.

“Grayson,” says Jack. “Step away from her.”

The girl breaks it off first, looks over your shoulder, screams. You turn around, a sudden warmth dulling the sharp edges of your hunger. Jack stands in front of the thick row of trees on the side of the gravel road. He has a gun. Despite the prion problem, you haven’t had much interaction with guns in your life. This one looks big and black and shiny. Jack looks like he knows how to use it.

“Funny, I didn’t peg you for the jealous type, Jack.”

He grimaces, but the blush staining his neck and ears probably isn’t caused by anger.

“What the hell are you doing? Are you robbing us?” The girl’s voice is so high she’s nearly squeaking. She’s reaching out, like she might hold you for support. But you look at Jack, his steady hand and his big black pistol, and think that might not be the best idea.

“I’m saving your life,” he says.

For a moment you can’t hear a thing—not your frantic pulse, not your labored breath, not even Jack as he says something to the girl and gestures with his gun.

You wish he would just shoot already. You wish he would just fucking kill you.

But the girl, trembling now, shuts the hood and opens the driver’s side of your car.

“The keys are in the ignition,” Jack says. “Drive home.”

“But the engine…”

“Go.” She shuts the door. The car starts without a problem. She backs down the gravel drive, slowly at first, then so fast she nearly careens into a tree.

You and Jack are alone. He still holds the gun.

“Grayson… it’s true? What they said about you. What you—”

“Yeah, of course it is. Why the fuck else would I be out here?” You close your eyes. “Hurry up, will you?”

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting.”

“I’m putting the gun down.”

“So you can stick me with your samurai sword?”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“Open your damn eyes, Grayson!” The gun is in a holster around his jeans. His hair is spiky with dried sweat, but he’s changed out of his lacrosse uniform. His face is flushed red, like he might cry.

“We’ve got to leave. I put Dad off, but he’ll be here soon.”

He turns without another word and walks deeper into the woods. He’s quiet, though you can’t see how. When you follow him, the cracking leaves and twigs sound like an earthquake. Ten minutes later you reach his car. It’s parked in the middle of a road that’s little more than two ruts of packed dirt. You get in. You’re not sure what else to do. He drives smoothly, carefully, and yet with the same steady fierceness you’ve sensed in him all along.

“Jack, if you’re not going to kill me, you have to let me go.”

“Dad’s decided to get you on his own. He’s been nuts for something like this ever since he got invalided out. It’s not safe for you.”

You have to laugh. “Safe? Do you really know what I am?”

There must have been something in your voice, some tremor, because Jack looks at you now for the first time since you got into the car. “Grayson… they said… ZSE is rare, but there’s a few cases each year.”

“ZSE?”

“Zombie Spongiform Encephalopathy.” Zombie. That’s what Jack thinks you are. “You should kill me. Your dad wants you to kill me, right?

“Isn’t that why we’re running away from him?” You don’t even recognize the road signs now. He’s gone far off the highway, down some long country roads bounded only by soybean fields and great tubes of hay.

“Why are you so damn interested in me killing you, Grayson?”

“Why are you giving a ride to a raving cannibal?”

“Shut up!”

“Why, it isn’t true?”

“You sound just like him!”

“Then maybe he’s right.”

Jack abruptly slams his foot on the brake. The car skids a little on the deserted road before shuddering to a halt. When he turns to you now, he is crying, though you can tell he doesn’t know it.

“I watched you decide to not kill that girl.”

Is that what happened? You shrug, deliberately. “I’ve killed dozens of others.”

“Maybe you’ve changed.”

“Maybe I’m not that hungry. Maybe she smelled like brussels sprouts.”

“I don’t believe that.”

You’re very close to him now. Close to his long–sleeved T–shirt, his flushed cheek, his gun. “Why, Jack?”

“I don’t know. ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and Harajuku pop and Ian Curtis—”

Hands and lips and teeth, and you’d forgotten—no, you’d never known—this way of knowing someone, this dissolution of self, this autophagy.

His shirt rips, but you’re careful with his skin.

8. Sounds of Silence

Ian Curtis killed himself on the eighteenth of May, 1980. You might think this ironic of the lead singer of a band called Joy Division, but actually their name is a reference to prostitution in Nazi concentration camps. (Which might explain why their iconic song is called “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”) He hung himself, a death of slow asphyxiation, of utter helplessness for long minutes until he finally, mercifully, lost consciousness. There are certain theories of suicide that propose that the more self–loathing one feels, the more violent the method one chooses.

Elliott Smith (folksinger) stabbed himself in the heart with a kitchen knife. Nick Drake (folksinger) OD’d on antidepressants. A qualitative difference in self–loathing? Please. When you decide to check yourself out, the difference between a gun and a rope is how long it takes to tie the knot.

9. Eat the Music

You stay in motels. And not the kind with friendly signs in primary colors and “Kids Stay Free!” deals on weekends. These motels have sputtering neon spelling “vacancy” and long rows of rooms, identical as LEGOs. The bathroom floors are coated with grime spread thin by lazy efforts to wipe it away. Sheets are haphazardly laundered. The second night, you see a bloodstain that covers half the floor. It blends well enough with the carpet and you don’t tell Jack. You’re hungry and you don’t like to remind him of what you are.

Jack pays for the rooms, and no one asks questions. For a last–minute escape, he’s managed well: a few thousand in cash, a box of emergency food supplies in the trunk, two swords, and three more of those big, black guns. You nearly vomited when he offered to let you use one. Now you just try not to look at them.

You haven’t eaten human flesh in ten days. You might have snapped before now, but Jack bought a haunch of pork from a local butcher. He couldn’t look you in the eye when he handed it to you. “Second thoughts about your charity case?” you asked, and felt the hollow reward of his silence.

Pork works. Not as well as warm human flesh, not even close, but at least you can keep away the worst of it, the insanity you remember from those first moments with the prion. Whatever madness you feel, whatever longings you have, are bound up in what you and Jack do late at night on scratchy sheets, and the only music you share is the hum of the hallway ice machine, the occasional rumble of pickup trucks speeding by on the country roads. During the day there are no lingering glances, tentative hand–holding, butterfly kisses. During the day you’re the zombie and he’s your keeper. At night he’s still afraid of his father, but at least he lets you see the fear. It descends like an army. It makes him pace up and down the room, makes him cry, sometimes vomit. You hate what he won’t tell you, and you hate knowing anyway.

The third night, his father calls. This is not the first time Jack’s cell phone has buzzed, not the first time he’s gone too still and too pale and you’ve wondered how much his ice man father did to him. But this time Jack picks up.

“I’m not coming back,” Jack says. He’s trying to sound tough, but you can see his fears as clearly as you can see his scars in the moonlight.

“I trained you for better than this.” Jack likes his speaker volume the way he likes his music: too loud. I can hear every word his father says.

“You trained me to be a monster.”

His father is silent for a few seconds. “You’re in room 303 of Jimmy’s Truck Lodge in Osler. I’m about ten minutes away. Let me finish this, Jackson. The boys at the agency have orders to kill that creature and anyone with him.”

“Dad, you’re not—”

“You should let me finish this.” The line goes dead. You wonder for a moment what he’ll do, but Jack doesn’t even hesitate. He rushes you out the door. It’s not hard to leave quickly—everything important is in the car. Jack is steady, so iced and cool that you wonder how much longer before he’s just like his father. Maybe that’s what this is really about—not loving you, not a sense of fair play, but one last, desperate ploy to not become a monster.

He gestures angrily at you. “Get in!”

“If I stay behind—”

“And anyone with him, remember?”

“Your dad wouldn’t…”

“Will you bet my life on it?”

“I could bite you. Make it look authentic.”

“Fuck you, Grayson.”

“Why does it matter? I’m a fucking zombie! You think even this cure they gave me will last forever? What the hell is wrong with you? Let your ice man dad kill me, and you can run away somewhere and have a decent life with some decent people.”

Jack isn’t steady now. He punches the door—solidly, enough to hurt. “You’re the only person— Fuck. You know, don’t you? Get in the car. Please.”

You knock him out.

It’s brief and efficient, to the jaw. You know how to incapacitate people. He only has time for one wide–eyed stare before he slumps into your arms, unconscious. You carry him back into the motel room and rip his shirt. You figure the shoulder’s as good a place as any. But when you look down, the light illuminates another scar, still–pink marks from stitches running across his collarbone. You swallow back bile and rip his shirt some more. Hopefully that will be enough.

Ice man is standing in the doorway when you turn around.

“So that’s what this is about?” he says. Of course you couldn’t fool him.

“You wondered?”

“No. Not really. I guess I never… I don’t know what they’ll do to him. Not if they think you two…”

“You stopped me from feeding,” you say.

“That didn’t look like feeding.”

“What would you know about it?”

He cocks his head. Then nods. “Okay. I stopped you from feeding.” You don’t think you’re imagining the hint of relief in his voice, the subtle loosening of tension in his arms. Then he shoots you in the shoulder. You just want this over with, but Jack is moaning on the bed, and you went through way too much trouble for him to ruin this now. You rush the ice man, which surprises him enough that he falls onto the concrete outside. You run past him, feeling the blood dripping down your arm, but not much else. The prions are good about pain. A few other guests have opened their doors at the noise. The ice man lets off another shot. It misses you.

You rush to a large, empty space at the edge of the lot. You don’t want to make this too obvious. It shouldn’t be much work for him to hit your head from this distance. But the next shots are so wide that you can’t even smell the lead.

“Come on,” you mutter when the ice man just stands there. Then he falls down. Jack stands behind him, jaw bruised, gun smoking. There’s a hole in the back of his dad’s head, and you can smell it from here. “You okay?” Jack asks, after you jog up to him. But he’s the one who’s shaking. Someone shrieks. The night clerk talks rapidly into his cell phone.

“I think the cops are coming,” you say.

“Yeah. It’ll probably take them a while.” You both look down at the corpse. Jack hauls him inside the room.

“Hurry up,” he says. You only have time for the brains, but that’s okay. They’re the best part.

10. Shoot Out the Lights

We live in a little cottage in Mexico now, in a village so tiny that only the residents have heard of it. There’s a beach with good fishing, and a market once a month an hour away. Jack spoke some Spanish before, and we’re picking it up well enough. We go into town for the Internet, where Jack sells Mexican handicrafts on eBay.

I bought him a guitar for his birthday, but I ended up playing it. When I practice, he jokes about how good he’s getting. I wrote him one song, and sometimes I like it. I haven’t played it for him yet. Even now, it’s hard for me to guess what will make him go still and icy. Sometimes I think a part of him hates me.

I know Jack will kill me if I eat again. I imagine it sometimes, when I stare too long at some plump girl in a bikini and her smell reaches back into that prion part of my brain and I can feel the old hunger tearing at my skin. I imagine him playing Joy Division, Ian Curtis’s mournful voice almost scraping against the speakers, “Do you cry out in your sleep / all my failings exposed,” and Jack’s tears smear my lips, and I get just that last, ecstatic taste of him before the blade goes snicker–snack.

The post PseudoPod 581: Love Will Tear Us Apart appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : W.E.B. DuBois
• Narrator : Hollis Monroe
• Host : Hollis Monroe
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

“The Comet” originally published in 1920 as the tenth chapter of DuBois’s book, Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil

The Comet By W.E.B. DuBois

He stood a moment on the steps of the bank, watching the human river that swirled down Broadway. Few noticed him. Few ever noticed him save in a way that stung. He was outside the world—”nothing!” as he said bitterly. Bits of the words of the walkers came to him.

“The comet?”

“The comet——”

Everybody was talking of it. Even the president, as he entered, smiled patronizingly at him, and asked:

“Well, Jim, are you scared?”

“No,” said the messenger shortly.

“I thought we’d journeyed through the comet’s tail once,” broke in the junior clerk affably.

“Oh, that was Halley’s,” said the president; “this is a new comet, quite a stranger, they say—wonderful, wonderful! I saw it last night. Oh, by the way, Jim,” turning again to the messenger, “I want you to go down into the lower vaults today.”

The messenger followed the president silently. Of course, they wanted him to go down to the lower vaults. It was too dangerous for more valuable men. He smiled grimly and listened.

“Everything of value has been moved out since the water began to seep in,” said the president; “but we miss two volumes of old records. Suppose you nose around down there,—it isn’t very pleasant, I suppose.”

“Not very,” said the messenger, as he walked out.

“Well, Jim, the tail of the new comet hits us at noon this time,” said the vault clerk, as he passed over the keys; but the messenger passed silently down the stairs. Down he went beneath Broadway, where the dim light filtered through the feet of hurrying men; down to the dark basement beneath; down into the blackness and silence beneath that lowest cavern. Here with his dark lantern he groped in the bowels of the earth, under the world.

He drew a long breath as he threw back the last great iron door and stepped into the fetid slime within. Here at last was peace, and he groped moodily forward. A great rat leaped past him and cobwebs crept across his face. He felt carefully around the room, shelf by shelf, on the muddied floor, and in crevice and corner. Nothing. Then he went back to the far end, where somehow the wall felt different. He sounded and pushed and pried. Nothing. He started away. Then something brought him back. He was sounding and working again when suddenly the whole black wall swung as on mighty hinges, and blackness yawned beyond. He peered in; it was evidently a secret vault—some hiding place of the old bank unknown in newer times. He entered hesitatingly. It was a long, narrow room with shelves, and at the far end, an old iron chest. On a high shelf lay the two missing volumes of records, and others. He put them carefully aside and stepped to the chest. It was old, strong, and rusty. He looked at the vast and old-fashioned lock and flashed his light on the hinges. They were deeply incrusted with rust. Looking about, he found a bit of iron and began to pry. The rust had eaten a hundred years, and it had gone deep. Slowly, wearily, the old lid lifted, and with a last, low groan lay bare its treasure—and he saw the dull sheen of gold!

“Boom!”

A low, grinding, reverberating crash struck upon his ear. He started up and looked about. All was black and still. He groped for his light and swung it about him. Then he knew! The great stone door had swung to. He forgot the gold and looked death squarely in the face. Then with a sigh he went methodically to work. The cold sweat stood on his forehead; but he searched, pounded, pushed, and worked until after what seemed endless hours his hand struck a cold bit of metal and the great door swung again harshly on its hinges, and then, striking against something soft and heavy, stopped. He had just room to squeeze through. There lay the body of the vault clerk, cold and stiff. He stared at it, and then felt sick and nauseated. The air seemed unaccountably foul, with a strong, peculiar odor. He stepped forward, clutched at the air, and fell fainting across the corpse.

He awoke with a sense of horror, leaped from the body, and groped up the stairs, calling to the guard. The watchman sat as if asleep, with the gate swinging free. With one glance at him the messenger hurried up to the sub-vault. In vain he called to the guards. His voice echoed and re-echoed weirdly. Up into the great basement he rushed. Here another guard lay prostrate on his face, cold and still. A fear arose in the messenger’s heart. He dashed up to the cellar floor, up into the bank. The stillness of death lay everywhere and everywhere bowed, bent, and stretched the silent forms of men. The messenger paused and glanced about. He was not a man easily moved; but the sight was appalling! “Robbery and murder,” he whispered slowly to himself as he saw the twisted, oozing mouth of the president where he lay half-buried on his desk. Then a new thought seized him: If they found him here alone—with all this money and all these dead men—what would his life be worth? He glanced about, tiptoed cautiously to a side door, and again looked behind. Quietly he turned the latch and stepped out into Wall Street.

How silent the street was! Not a soul was stirring, and yet it was high-noon—Wall Street? Broadway? He glanced almost wildly up and down, then across the street, and as he looked, a sickening horror froze in his limbs. With a choking cry of utter fright he lunged, leaned giddily against the cold building, and stared helplessly at the sight.

In the great stone doorway a hundred men and women and children lay crushed and twisted and jammed, forced into that great, gaping doorway like refuse in a can—as if in one wild, frantic rush to safety, they had rushed and ground themselves to death. Slowly the messenger crept along the walls, wetting his parched mouth and trying to comprehend, stilling the tremor in his limbs and the rising terror in his heart. He met a business man, silk-hatted and frock-coated, who had crept, too, along that smooth wall and stood now stone dead with wonder written on his lips. The messenger turned his eyes hastily away and sought the curb. A woman leaned wearily against the signpost, her head bowed motionless on her lace and silken bosom. Before her stood a street car, silent, and within—but the messenger but glanced and hurried on. A grimy newsboy sat in the gutter with the “last edition” in his uplifted hand: “Danger!” screamed its black headlines. “Warnings wired around the world. The Comet’s tail sweeps past us at noon. Deadly gases expected. Close doors and windows. Seek the cellar.” The messenger read and staggered on. Far out from a window above, a girl lay with gasping face and sleevelets on her arms. On a store step sat a little, sweet-faced girl looking upward toward the skies, and in the carriage by her lay—but the messenger looked no longer. The cords gave way—the terror burst in his veins, and with one great, gasping cry he sprang desperately forward and ran,—ran as only the frightened run, shrieking and fighting the air until with one last wail of pain he sank on the grass of Madison Square and lay prone and still.

When he rose, he gave no glance at the still and silent forms on the benches, but, going to a fountain, bathed his face; then hiding himself in a corner away from the drama of death, he quietly gripped himself and thought the thing through: The comet had swept the earth and this was the end. Was everybody dead? He must search and see.

He knew that he must steady himself and keep calm, or he would go insane. First he must go to a restaurant. He walked up Fifth Avenue to a famous hostelry and entered its gorgeous, ghost-haunted halls. He beat back the nausea, and, seizing a tray from dead hands, hurried into the street and ate ravenously, hiding to keep out the sights.

“Yesterday, they would not have served me,” he whispered, as he forced the food down.

Then he started up the street,—looking, peering, telephoning, ringing alarms; silent, silent all. Was nobody—nobody—he dared not think the thought and hurried on.

Suddenly he stopped still. He had forgotten. My God! How could he have forgotten? He must rush to the subway—then he almost laughed. No—a car; if he could find a Ford. He saw one. Gently he lifted off its burden, and took his place on the seat. He tested the throttle. There was gas. He glided off, shivering, and drove up the street. Everywhere stood, leaned, lounged, and lay the dead, in grim and awful silence. On he ran past an automobile, wrecked and overturned; past another, filled with a gay party whose smiles yet lingered on their death-struck lips; on past crowds and groups of cars, pausing by dead policemen; at 42nd Street he had to detour to Park Avenue to avoid the dead congestion. He came back on Fifth Avenue at 57th and flew past the Plaza and by the park with its hushed babies and silent throng, until as he was rushing past 72nd Street he heard a sharp cry, and saw a living form leaning wildly out an upper window. He gasped. The human voice sounded in his ears like the voice of God.

“Hello—hello—help, in God’s name!” wailed the woman. “There’s a dead girl in here and a man and—and see yonder dead men lying in the street and dead horses—for the love of God go and bring the officers——” And the words trailed off into hysterical tears.

He wheeled the car in a sudden circle, running over the still body of a child and leaping on the curb. Then he rushed up the steps and tried the door and rang violently. There was a long pause, but at last the heavy door swung back. They stared a moment in silence. She had not noticed before that he was a Negro. He had not thought of her as white. She was a woman of perhaps twenty-five—rarely beautiful and richly gowned, with darkly-golden hair, and jewels. Yesterday, he thought with bitterness, she would scarcely have looked at him twice. He would have been dirt beneath her silken feet. She stared at him. Of all the sorts of men she had pictured as coming to her rescue she had not dreamed of one like him. Not that he was not human, but he dwelt in a world so far from hers, so infinitely far, that he seldom even entered her thought. Yet as she looked at him curiously he seemed quite commonplace and usual. He was a tall, dark workingman of the better class, with a sensitive face trained to stolidity and a poor man’s clothes and hands. His face was soft and slow and his manner at once cold and nervous, like fires long banked, but not out.

So a moment each paused and gauged the other; then the thought of the dead world without rushed in and they started toward each other.

“What has happened?” she cried. “Tell me! Nothing stirs. All is silence! I see the dead strewn before my window as winnowed by the breath of God,—and see——” She dragged him through great, silken hangings to where, beneath the sheen of mahogany and silver, a little French maid lay stretched in quiet, everlasting sleep, and near her a butler lay prone in his livery.

The tears streamed down the woman’s cheeks and she clung to his arm until the perfume of her breath swept his face and he felt the tremors racing through her body.

“I had been shut up in my dark room developing pictures of the comet which I took last night; when I came out—I saw the dead!

“What has happened?” she cried again.

He answered slowly:

“Something—comet or devil—swept across the earth this morning and—many are dead!”

“Many? Very many?”

“I have searched and I have seen no other living soul but you.”

She gasped and they stared at each other.

“My—father!” she whispered.

“Where is he?”

“He started for the office.”

“Where is it?”

“In the Metropolitan Tower.”

“Leave a note for him here and come.”

Then he stopped.

“No,” he said firmly—”first, we must go—to Harlem.”

“Harlem!” she cried. Then she understood. She tapped her foot at first impatiently. She looked back and shuddered. Then she came resolutely down the steps.

“There’s a swifter car in the garage in the court,” she said.

“I don’t know how to drive it,” he said.

“I do,” she answered.

In ten minutes they were flying to Harlem on the wind. The Stutz rose and raced like an airplane. They took the turn at 110th Street on two wheels and slipped with a shriek into 135th.

He was gone but a moment. Then he returned, and his face was gray. She did not look, but said:

“You have lost—somebody?”

“I have lost—everybody,” he said, simply—”unless——”

He ran back and was gone several minutes—hours they seemed to her.

“Everybody,” he said, and he walked slowly back with something film-like in his hand which he stuffed into his pocket.

“I’m afraid I was selfish,” he said. But already the car was moving toward the park among the dark and lined dead of Harlem—the brown, still faces, the knotted hands, the homely garments, and the silence—the wild and haunting silence. Out of the park, and down Fifth Avenue they whirled. In and out among the dead they slipped and quivered, needing no sound of bell or horn, until the great, square Metropolitan Tower hove in sight. Gently he laid the dead elevator boy aside; the car shot upward. The door of the office stood open. On the threshold lay the stenographer, and, staring at her, sat the dead clerk. The inner office was empty, but a note lay on the desk, folded and addressed but unsent:

Dear Daughter:

I’ve gone for a hundred mile spin in Fred’s new Mercedes. Shall not be back before dinner. I’ll bring Fred with me.

J.B.H.

“Come,” she cried nervously. “We must search the city.”

Up and down, over and across, back again—on went that ghostly search. Everywhere was silence and death—death and silence! They hunted from Madison Square to Spuyten Duyvel; they rushed across the Williamsburg Bridge; they swept over Brooklyn; from the Battery and Morningside Heights they scanned the river. Silence, silence everywhere, and no human sign. Haggard and bedraggled they puffed a third time slowly down Broadway, under the broiling sun, and at last stopped. He sniffed the air. An odor—a smell—and with the shifting breeze a sickening stench filled their nostrils and brought its awful warning. The girl settled back helplessly in her seat.

“What can we do?” she cried.

It was his turn now to take the lead, and he did it quickly.

“The long distance telephone—the telegraph and the cable—night rockets and then—flight!”

She looked at him now with strength and confidence. He did not look like men, as she had always pictured men; but he acted like one and she was content. In fifteen minutes they were at the central telephone exchange. As they came to the door he stepped quickly before her and pressed her gently back as he closed it. She heard him moving to and fro, and knew his burdens—the poor, little burdens he bore. When she entered, he was alone in the room. The grim switchboard flashed its metallic face in cryptic, sphinx-like immobility. She seated herself on a stool and donned the bright earpiece. She looked at the mouthpiece. She had never looked at one so closely before. It was wide and black, pimpled with usage; inert; dead; almost sarcastic in its unfeeling curves. It looked—she beat back the thought—but it looked,—it persisted in looking like—she turned her head and found herself alone. One moment she was terrified; then she thanked him silently for his delicacy and turned resolutely, with a quick intaking of breath.

“Hello!” she called in low tones. She was calling to the world. The world must answer. Would the world answer? Was the world——

Silence!

She had spoken too low.

“Hello!” she cried, full-voiced.

She listened. Silence! Her heart beat quickly. She cried in clear, distinct, loud tones: “Hello—hello—hello!”

What was that whirring? Surely—no—was it the click of a receiver?

She bent close, she moved the pegs in the holes, and called and called, until her voice rose almost to a shriek, and her heart hammered. It was as if she had heard the last flicker of creation, and the evil was silence. Her voice dropped to a sob. She sat stupidly staring into the black and sarcastic mouthpiece, and the thought came again. Hope lay dead within her. Yes, the cable and the rockets remained; but the world—she could not frame the thought or say the word. It was too mighty—too terrible! She turned toward the door with a new fear in her heart. For the first time she seemed to realize that she was alone in the world with a stranger, with something more than a stranger,—with a man alien in blood and culture—unknown, perhaps unknowable. It was awful! She must escape—she must fly; he must not see her again. Who knew what awful thoughts—

She gathered her silken skirts deftly about her young, smooth limbs—listened, and glided into a sidehall. A moment she shrank back: the hall lay filled with dead women; then she leaped to the door and tore at it, with bleeding fingers, until it swung wide. She looked out. He was standing at the top of the alley,—silhouetted, tall and black, motionless. Was he looking at her or away? She did not know—she did not care. She simply leaped and ran—ran until she found herself alone amid the dead and the tall ramparts of towering buildings.

She stopped. She was alone. Alone! Alone on the streets—alone in the city—perhaps alone in the world! There crept in upon her the sense of deception—of creeping hands behind her back—of silent, moving things she could not see,—of voices hushed in fearsome conspiracy. She looked behind and sideways, started at strange sounds and heard still stranger, until every nerve within her stood sharp and quivering, stretched to scream at the barest touch. She whirled and flew back, whimpering like a child, until she found that narrow alley again and the dark, silent figure silhouetted at the top. She stopped and rested; then she walked silently toward him, looked at him timidly; but he said nothing as he handed her into the car. Her voice caught as she whispered:

“Not—that.”

And he answered slowly: “No—not that!”

They climbed into the car. She bent forward on the wheel and sobbed, with great, dry, quivering sobs, as they flew toward the cable office on the east side, leaving the world of wealth and prosperity for the world of poverty and work. In the world behind them were death and silence, grave and grim, almost cynical, but always decent; here it was hideous. It clothed itself in every ghastly form of terror, struggle, hate, and suffering. It lay wreathed in crime and squalor, greed and lust. Only in its dread and awful silence was it like to death everywhere.

Yet as the two, flying and alone, looked upon the horror of the world, slowly, gradually, the sense of all-enveloping death deserted them. They seemed to move in a world silent and asleep,—not dead. They moved in quiet reverence, lest somehow they wake these sleeping forms who had, at last, found peace. They moved in some solemn, world-wide Friedhof, above which some mighty arm had waved its magic wand. All nature slept until—until, and quick with the same startling thought, they looked into each other’s eyes—he, ashen, and she, crimson, with unspoken thought. To both, the vision of a mighty beauty—of vast, unspoken things, swelled in their souls; but they put it away.

Great, dark coils of wire came up from the earth and down from the sun and entered this low lair of witchery. The gathered lightnings of the world centered here, binding with beams of light the ends of the earth. The doors gaped on the gloom within. He paused on the threshold.

“Do you know the code?” she asked.

“I know the call for help—we used it formerly at the bank.”

She hardly heard. She heard the lapping of the waters far below,—the dark and restless waters—the cold and luring waters, as they called. He stepped within. Slowly she walked to the wall, where the water called below, and stood and waited. Long she waited, and he did not come. Then with a start she saw him, too, standing beside the black waters. Slowly he removed his coat and stood there silently. She walked quickly to him and laid her hand on his arm. He did not start or look. The waters lapped on in luring, deadly rhythm. He pointed down to the waters, and said quietly:

“The world lies beneath the waters now—may I go?”

She looked into his stricken, tired face, and a great pity surged within her heart. She answered in a voice clear and calm, “No.”

Upward they turned toward life again, and he seized the wheel. The world was darkening to twilight, and a great, gray pall was falling mercifully and gently on the sleeping dead. The ghastly glare of reality seemed replaced with the dream of some vast romance. The girl lay silently back, as the motor whizzed along, and looked half-consciously for the elf-queen to wave life into this dead world again. She forgot to wonder at the quickness with which he had learned to drive her car. It seemed natural. And then as they whirled and swung into Madison Square and at the door of the Metropolitan Tower she gave a low cry, and her eyes were great! Perhaps she had seen the elf-queen?

The man led her to the elevator of the tower and deftly they ascended. In her father’s office they gathered rugs and chairs, and he wrote a note and laid it on the desk; then they ascended to the roof and he made her comfortable. For a while she rested and sank to dreamy somnolence, watching the worlds above and wondering. Below lay the dark shadows of the city and afar was the shining of the sea. She glanced at him timidly as he set food before her and took a shawl and wound her in it, touching her reverently, yet tenderly. She looked up at him with thankfulness in her eyes, eating what he served. He watched the city. She watched him. He seemed very human,—very near now.

“Have you had to work hard?” she asked softly.

“Always,” he said.

“I have always been idle,” she said. “I was rich.”

“I was poor,” he almost echoed.

“The rich and the poor are met together,” she began, and he finished:

“The Lord is the Maker of them all.”

“Yes,” she said slowly; “and how foolish our human distinctions seem—now,” looking down to the great dead city stretched below, swimming in unlightened shadows.

“Yes—I was not—human, yesterday,” he said.

She looked at him. “And your people were not my people,” she said; “but today——” She paused. He was a man,—no more; but he was in some larger sense a gentleman,—sensitive, kindly, chivalrous, everything save his hands and—his face. Yet yesterday——

“Death, the leveler!” he muttered.

“And the revealer,” she whispered gently, rising to her feet with great eyes. He turned away, and after fumbling a moment sent a rocket into the darkening air. It arose, shrieked, and flew up, a slim path of light, and scattering its stars abroad, dropped on the city below. She scarcely noticed it. A vision of the world had risen before her. Slowly the mighty prophecy of her destiny overwhelmed her. Above the dead past hovered the Angel of Annunciation. She was no mere woman. She was neither high nor low, white nor black, rich nor poor. She was primal woman; mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life. She looked upon the man beside her and forgot all else but his manhood, his strong, vigorous manhood—his sorrow and sacrifice. She saw him glorified. He was no longer a thing apart, a creature below, a strange outcast of another clime and blood, but her Brother Humanity incarnate, Son of God and great All-Father of the race to be.

He did not glimpse the glory in her eyes, but stood looking outward toward the sea and sending rocket after rocket into the unanswering darkness. Dark-purple clouds lay banked and billowed in the west. Behind them and all around, the heavens glowed in dim, weird radiance that suffused the darkening world and made almost a minor music. Suddenly, as though gathered back in some vast hand, the great cloud-curtain fell away. Low on the horizon lay a long, white star—mystic, wonderful! And from it fled upward to the pole, like some wan bridal veil, a pale, wide sheet of flame that lighted all the world and dimmed the stars.

In fascinated silence the man gazed at the heavens and dropped his rockets to the floor. Memories of memories stirred to life in the dead recesses of his mind. The shackles seemed to rattle and fall from his soul. Up from the crass and crushing and cringing of his caste leaped the lone majesty of kings long dead. He arose within the shadows, tall, straight, and stern, with power in his eyes and ghostly scepters hovering to his grasp. It was as though some mighty Pharaoh lived again, or curled Assyrian lord. He turned and looked upon the lady, and found her gazing straight at him.

Silently, immovably, they saw each other face to face—eye to eye. Their souls lay naked to the night. It was not lust; it was not love—it was some vaster, mightier thing that needed neither touch of body nor thrill of soul. It was a thought divine, splendid.

Slowly, noiselessly, they moved toward each other—the heavens above, the seas around, the city grim and dead below. He loomed from out the velvet shadows vast and dark. Pearl-white and slender, she shone beneath the stars. She stretched her jeweled hands abroad. He lifted up his mighty arms, and they cried each to the other, almost with one voice, “The world is dead.”

“Long live the——”

“Honk! Honk!” Hoarse and sharp the cry of a motor drifted clearly up from the silence below. They started backward with a cry and gazed upon each other with eyes that faltered and fell, with blood that boiled.

“Honk! Honk! Honk! Honk!” came the mad cry again, and almost from their feet a rocket blazed into the air and scattered its stars upon them. She covered her eyes with her hands, and her shoulders heaved. He dropped and bowed, groped blindly on his knees about the floor. A blue flame spluttered lazily after an age, and she heard the scream of an answering rocket as it flew.

Then they stood still as death, looking to opposite ends of the earth.

“Clang—crash—clang!”

The roar and ring of swift elevators shooting upward from below made the great tower tremble. A murmur and babel of voices swept in upon the night. All over the once dead city the lights blinked, flickered, and flamed; and then with a sudden clanging of doors the entrance to the platform was filled with men, and one with white and flying hair rushed to the girl and lifted her to his breast. “My daughter!” he sobbed.

Behind him hurried a younger, comelier man, carefully clad in motor costume, who bent above the girl with passionate solicitude and gazed into her staring eyes until they narrowed and dropped and her face flushed deeper and deeper crimson.

“Julia,” he whispered; “my darling, I thought you were gone forever.”

She looked up at him with strange, searching eyes.

“Fred,” she murmured, almost vaguely, “is the world—gone?”

“Only New York,” he answered; “it is terrible—awful! You know,—but you, how did you escape—how have you endured this horror? Are you well? Unharmed?”

“Unharmed!” she said.

“And this man here?” he asked, encircling her drooping form with one arm and turning toward the Negro. Suddenly he stiffened and his hand flew to his hip. “Why!” he snarled. “It’s—a—nigger—Julia! Has he—has he dared——”

She lifted her head and looked at her late companion curiously and then dropped her eyes with a sigh.

“He has dared—all, to rescue me,” she said quietly, “and I—thank him—much.” But she did not look at him again. As the couple turned away, the father drew a roll of bills from his pockets.

“Here, my good fellow,” he said, thrusting the money into the man’s hands, “take that,—what’s your name?”

“Jim Davis,” came the answer, hollow-voiced.

“Well, Jim, I thank you. I’ve always liked your people. If you ever want a job, call on me.” And they were gone.

The crowd poured up and out of the elevators, talking and whispering.

“Who was it?”

“Are they alive?”

“How many?”

“Two!”

“Who was saved?”

“A white girl and a nigger—there she goes.”

“A nigger? Where is he? Let’s lynch the damned——”

“Shut up—he’s all right-he saved her.”

“Saved hell! He had no business——”

“Here he comes.”

Into the glare of the electric lights the colored man moved slowly, with the eyes of those that walk and sleep.

“Well, what do you think of that?” cried a bystander; “of all New York, just a white girl and a nigger!”

The colored man heard nothing. He stood silently beneath the glare of the light, gazing at the money in his hand and shrinking as he gazed; slowly he put his other hand into his pocket and brought out a baby’s filmy cap, and gazed again. A woman mounted to the platform and looked about, shading her eyes. She was brown, small, and toil-worn, and in one arm lay the corpse of a dark baby. The crowd parted and her eyes fell on the colored man; with a cry she tottered toward him.

“Jim!”

He whirled and, with a sob of joy, caught her in his arms.

The post PseudoPod 580: The Comet appeared first on PseudoPod.

• Author : Mário Coelho
• Narrator : Maui Threv
• Host : Alasdair Stuart
• Audio Producer : Marty Perrett
• Discuss on Forums

PseudoPod 579: All My Nightmares Are Named Heather is a PseudoPod original.

Content Warnings:

Spoiler Inside SelectShow Self harm, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, toxic relationships

One night I woke up talking to myself, whispering the title of this story. That was the embryo, and now you’re reading the full creature. This is for those who know insomnia and what it is to never have a dreamless night.

Dedicated to Marcos. Sleep well, my friend.

All My Nightmares Are Named Heather by Mário Coelho

She’s always this close when I wake up, less than a palm’s distance bridging our noses. Big eyes, darker than this penumbra. Pupils lightly flickering, like the TV static behind us. In these roadside motel rooms, everything rustles and murmurs. The carpet is pregnant with aborted cigarette butts and dead smells—sweat and barely washed bedding.

“You were dreaming,” she says.

“I was.” My voice, hoarse. Blind fingers reach out for the bedside table, grab the glass. A bit of water left overnight. Tastes like dust.

I was. Running along a creek. Bare feet cut. Biting my cheeks. Breath heaving. Dry tongue lapping out her name. Heather.

“Who’s Heather?” she asks.

“I told you.” These post-nightmare conversations of ours, dirty laundry beating against the washing machine. Cycling. Hushed, like the drowned out buzzing of the late-night driving outside. “She’s no one. Nothing. A bad dream I don’t know.”

“We only dream of things we know.”

Sarah’s right. I hate that she is, because my brain’s still whirring and my words lag, lost. Heather’s someone ingrained in my headache. A mishmash of all the women I’ve seen, a hodgepodge of flesh pressed together into anonymity. I never see her face, not really. I see her mouth open and her gasp escape, I see the cuts in her face and legs. Her wide-eyed flight–is she running from me?

“Are you jealous of my nightmares?” I ask.

“You’re theirs, every night.”

“I’m yours too.”

Sarah’s sad, slight smile. A contour of faded, smudged lipstick. She forgot to take off her makeup again. We always go to sleep in a hurry and leave with haste. We live in a haze; art conventions to book presentations, second category artists chasing morsels of monetary appreciation. Sleeping in run-down motels, eating run-down food in run-down diners. Driving on run-down roads, where pets turn into road-kill. Fido’s jaw slackening over his brains. Mr. Whiskers a gushy, warm ball of blood and fur. They still move, but it’s just maggots or rats.

That’s the last time Sarah painted. We stopped the car and I got out for a piss and a smoke, and she used the hood as a stool and painted the rotting fur ball. Carcass to canvas.

“Someone is grieving him now,” I said, puffing out smoke. Or cold.

She blinked. “Or someone abandoned him.”

That’s the gap between us. To me, failure is asymptomatic. To her it’s asymptotic. My words are unchanged, but hers are uncharged. She lost that starving gleeful drive, the boundless optimism soaking her brush in blues and whites. Now she paints in black and red. Or not at all.

I haven’t written a line in three years. And she paints rotting animals.

“I’ve got to pee,” she says. “Get hard for me.”

But I know she isn’t going to piss. I wait until she tiptoes into the bathroom to grab my dick, and then she closes the door and I hear her muffled retching. Maybe she’s turned bulimic, but we’ve always kept our mental illnesses private. I get hard as her vomit splashes the sink. It’s not attractive, but it’s Pavlovian.

She comes out wiping her mouth. I take off the covers. She slips inside them, I slip inside her, and she kisses me. It tastes acrid, and of copper and perfume. We fuck silently. The next door guest is fucking too. Saw him in the hallway before, sweaty arm over a younger girl. I don’t know if she’s moaning or crying. I breathe in tune with the man’s grunts.

Sarah bites my ear as I finish. Licks my five o’clock shadow. “Still thinking about Heather?” she whispers.

“No.”

But I am. Sarah falls asleep, still wrapped in my sweat. This fucking of ours, I don’t know if makes us deplorable or stagnant.

I fall asleep too. And Heather’s still there, running ahead. I run behind, trailing the red footprints she leaves on the wet ground.

“Heather, wait!” In my dreams I half-scream, half-whisper. “Wait!”

She looks over her shoulder. “Sam!”

I can’t recognize her face. I see its features, and they’re familiar but somehow blank. Like someone is hiding her from me.

“Heather! Stop!”

“Sam!” Despair drips from her voice. She almost trips, and her head fades from view, but then she’s up with a start, sprinting farther as I creep closer. I can almost see what she’s really like. A slender nose. Dark, bruised, crying eyes. Her lips mouthing: “Sam, she’s behind you! Run!”

I look behind. The headboard, faded wood glazed by shutter-cut streetlamp light. Sarah’s chest moves slowly up and down, prickled with perspiration. Her head lays on her hand.

She’s staring at me.

“We have to do something about this,” she whispers.

I reach for the glass. Empty. I lick the sweat off my lips. “What do we do?”

“We keep moving.”

Our Plymouth rumbles down the road. Around us, dew-kissed woods glisten under a gray morning. Sarah wears her sunglasses, hiding the dark circles under her eyes from the reflection in the rear-view mirror. We pass little towns with listless people, stop for gas and Sarah buys a Snickers bar. Munches it carefully, like she’s going to puke any time again.

“You okay?” I ask.

She’s covering her mouth. “Yes,” she says, nodding. “Just a toothache.”

“Yeah. Vomiting every night can’t be good for them.” Like vomit itself, I regret my words as soon as they come out.

Sarah’s mirrored lenses stare at me. I can’t see my shame in them; I’m impassive as always. “What did you say?”

“It’s one of those personal taboos of ours, isn’t it?” Don’t know what’s making me press the subject. Then Heather flashes before me–a ghost in the windscreen. “One of those unspoken things.” My voice, is it shaking?

Sarah is looking at my hands. My fingers are white from gripping the wheel hard. I relax them. She says nothing.

“Are you pregnant?” I blurt. “Haven’t seen you take the pill.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” she says.

“I think I do.”

“No, you really don’t.” She lays her head against the window and licks her lips. Her teeth are spotted with blood, or lipstick.

She’s still quiet when we get to our destination, a small gallery struggling to appear filled with bored small town dwellers. The mayor is shaking everyone’s hands when I park the car. Next to me, a pair of teenagers take turns sucking on their cigarettes and each other’s mouths.

The mayor escorts us inside. “Sam Russell and Sarah Rose, writer and painter!” he says. “This is true love, folks.”

I spew out my barely-rehearsed presentation, my sales pitch. Sarah hangs her pictures and sits by them, hands on her lap, sunglasses still on. Old people buy a couple of books and a portrait, more interested in seeing new faces than anything else. The mayor promises to fix potholes.

“Is there a lot of swearing in this book?” an old lady asks, brandishing a copy of ‘Nightmare Parasite’, by Sam Russell. I’m about to say yes, or no, when I realize I can’t remember which is right. I’m left there, tongue frozen against the roof of my mouth.

She takes my silence for an answer, and adds: “She’s beautiful.”

“Who?”

“Your wife.” The old woman strokes her scarf, sighing wistfully. “We’re all somebody’s beautiful wife, at some point.”

“Or maybe forever,” I say. I strain a smile. My heart thrums.

The old woman laughs, shaking her head like she’s remembering something I’m not. “Oh, never trust a writer’s flattery.” She squeezes my arm. “I bet she’s thinking of you, when she paints.” I glance at one of Sarah’s paintings. A smashed dog’s skull, red-speckled black tar. “And I know you were thinking of her when you wrote this book.”

“I don’t think this is a love story.” I spin the pen between my fingers and look at the book cover. A hanged woman swaying from a tree, drawn in a murky, earthy style. Sarah did it. “Who should I sign it for?”

“Joe. Joe Maragos. He’s always loved mystery novels, my husband. Had a couple at his bedside in the end,” the lady says. Her lip quivers, then her voice. “He passed away in June.”

I avert my eyes down to the book. She’s not just mourning Joe, she’s also prematurely mourning herself. When our spouses go, along with them our last fibers of stubborn, irrational immortality. I remember writing about this, somehow. I remember knowing it. Or faking it.

I open the book while she sobs, jot down a quick Joe Maragos, may he live in our stories, unwritten. Make a pretty lie, and people will find comfort in it. My more honest sentences are the barest. Like how I dedicated the book to Sarah. A simple “For Heather”.

I drop the book, it smacks down on the edge of the table and pirouettes to the floor spine-first. Joe’s wife gabbles something, but I can’t hear her over the rumbling silence in my head.

“For Heather”

I grab another copy of ‘Nightmare Parasite’ and speed walk towards the door, leaving a mumbling, knee-creaking Joe’s wife behind. I excuse myself through the sparse crowd and nod at Sarah, who remains sitting still.

It’s cold outside, hoarfrost-covered pine trees line the other side of the road. The scent carries over, dappled with car-exhaust. The teenage lovebirds are still smashing tongues, covered with specks of slow-falling snow.

“Hey, guys, can I bum a smoke?” I ask them.

Their lips smack apart. “Huh, sure,” the kid says, fumbling around his pockets to hand me a cigarette. “Lighter?”

If anything, I’m heavier. Already miss apathy. “Sure.”

“Want one more for the road?” the kid asks, lighting my cig.

“Nah, I’m trying to quit. Thanks.”

I get in the Plymouth, take off my boots and jacket and turn on the heating. I read ‘Nightmare Parasite’ as the windows fog up. The writing is composed of crisp, clear cynicism. I can see the hows and the whys, but I can’t remember writing it. The words start to blur, and my brain congeals to a slow.

Inside the glove compartment, my dopamine friend: Ritalin– Adderall’s hipster brother. I swallow a pill and chase it with a drag. Sharp focus and disinterested restlessness hit me an unsettled amount of minutes later.

A horror novel – neither novel nor horrific – about a couple being chased by the man’s dead ex-girlfriend.

She was always in his nightmares, running. That was her sustenance, nightmares. She ate them one by one, with no teeth of her own. Until he was always dreaming of her.

Sunlight stays frozen in gray as the hours go by. The teens fondle each other against a beat-up Ford, ignorant or ignoring the glares of the odd old person coming in or out of the gallery. Hunger blunted, heart racing, I speed read half the book. Before the Ritalin crash stabs me between the eyes and slurs my brain, I replay in my head a passage from the last chapter I read:

 

‘We keep moving,’ she said.

The man simply nodded, too weak for more than laying down in bed in the fetal position. She stroked his cheek. Silver-lining was that the creature would eat most of his nightmares; wouldn’t let him relive seeing his mother dead, mouth bloody and agape in a last, toothless grin.

 

I open the window to get some air, and catch a lungful of Sarah. A blend of ink, my smoke and her vanilla-scented deodorant. “People were looking for you,” she says.

“Yeah, sorry, I wasn’t feeling too good.”

“Something you ate?”

“Maybe.” I lick my teeth. “The books?”

“The mayor bought them all. He’ll transfer the money, it should be available tomorrow. I think he feels sorry for you.”

I wait until Sarah circles the car and gets inside. “Why’s that?” I ask.

Sarah shrugs. “You just have that look.”

That’s something we have in common. The vacuity of words, how we sync them in a blank page or canvas. There are many meanings behind that look, but she means none of them, and I get the one I want. We’re lazy readers, feeding each other’s plots.

“Hey, have you actually read this?” I ask, brandishing the book.

She glances at it. For the first time in my short memory she wavers. “I . . . can’t remember.”

“I thought so. We struggle to remember things lately, don’t we?”

“I think we’ve just been really tired.” She puts the pack of Ritalin back in the glove compartment and closes it. “You shouldn’t take these, they screw up your sleep.”

Continuous vacuities, flowing into semantic spam. “Sarah, I think something serious is going on. This book, my book . . . You have to read it. I think it’s about us.”

Joe’s wife, a foggy figure through the windshield, waves at me as she walks by, cradling my book against the cold. Sarah doesn’t even look at her when I wave back. “They say all writers write about themselves,” she says.

“This is different. I don’t think this is just about me, I think this is for me.” I let my mouth hang, voice dragging, and stammer: “Like a diary of sorts. To make me remember.”

“Hm. And is it working?”

I look away. “No.”

“Because it’s fiction, love. That’s all it is.”

“There’s more, Sarah. There’s Heather. I dedicated the book to her.” I show it to her, and her neatly-trimmed eyebrows wrinkle together. “Sarah, who is Heather? Why can’t I remember?”

“Who is Heather, Sam?” Sarah’s voice is pitched in acid. Her accusations, these aren’t the kind of vacant words I’m used to. She’s smearing the tabula rasa before handing it to me. “Why is she in your nightmares?”

“I don’t know!” Did I yell? Sarah’s taken aback, a crossroad of anger and surprise. “I don’t know . . . I think she’s an ex-girlfriend, and I think she’s dead. But . . .  somehow she feeds off my nightmares.”

“Heather is a dead girlfriend you don’t remember, and she’s eating your dreams.” Sarah struggles to contain her sarcasm. “Yeah, they should be calorie-dense.”

“I . . . Yes, it’s not the most lucid thing I’ve said.”

“It really isn’t.” She sighs, then winces and sucks on her lips.

“Toothache?”

“It’s nothing.” Another longer sigh. “Look, Sam, when we first started dating, you told me you were a method writer. That I remember, because it was the snobbiest thing I’d ever heard. Whatever it is you did to write that book, I don’t care, but it is not you, and it is not real.”

I’m going to say I don’t remember, and then there it is: Heather, again a ghost briefly in the windshield.

I don’t know what to say. “I don’t know what do”, I say.

Sarah’s face slacks and softens into that sad half-smile of hers. “But I do, Sam.” No emptiness there, and I hunger for her lullaby. “We keep moving.”

Into another motel room swiveling in lamp-made twilight. Heather is here with me, coalescing amid the twigs and tree trunks as she runs. I run after, trailing her familiar litany, hollow echoes thumping against the dirt and leaves.

She stumbles and falls in the dark. I stop.

“Why can’t you leave me alone?” I ask, or implore. “Why can’t I dream of anyone else?”

She mumbles, covering her mouth. Pebbles stick to the back of her hand like canker sores. She laughs, and cries, and when she moves her hand, I see her mouth is dark-red, toothless.

“Eating my nightmares,” I say. “With no teeth of your own.”

But I’m talking to a wide-eyed Sarah.

“Dreaming of her again,” she says.

I fumble around for the bedside lamp. Sarah’s pupils constrict under the light.

“Where’s the book?” I ask. “I have to finish it.”

Sarah lowers her chin in almost predatory worry.

“I think you left it in the gallery.”

“No, no.” I slide into a t-shirt and jeans, shaking my head against post-sleep nausea. “Must have left it in the car. I’ll be back.”

“You won’t find it.” Whatever else she’s about to say is swallowed back with the vomit. Her bulimia, my night terrors, the bickering children we’ve never had. She’s nodding or holding it in and I’m up in a run, boots untied. I reach the end of the hallway just in time to hear her slam the bathroom door.

Outside, a finger-cutting breeze drags the stench of cooking sulfur from a nearby paper-mill. That’s how we sleep on the cheap. Each week stinks differently. The smell is ingrained in the car seats, wafting off as I fumble about for the book. I check the glove compartment, under the seats, beneath the wheel, in the trunk, nothing.

Nothing but Heather, blood pooling out from where her teeth should be, a microsecond in the rearview mirror. I stumble backwards out of the car, my ass hitting the concrete hard. I wait until I’m not wheezing anymore, until the air reeks again.

“Leave me alone!” I shout.

No one to hear me, or no one wants to. Behind me, a window turns dark. Tonight I’m somebody’s fear. The crazed hobo, making you check if you’ve locked the door.

Sarah’s right, we have to keep moving.

I run back to my room. I don’t even get hard when I hear Sarah’s familiar retch, our own version of a ring for sex bell. This dread has me swaying up and down like a marionette.  Feels like Ritalin shakes. Her door is barely ajar, and I shouldn’t, but I need her.

I open the door. Sarah is bent over the sink, yellow-red bile streaming out of her, dotted in white.

Teeth litter the sink.

Sarah looks up. Vomit and blood streaking down the corner of her lips. Sunken eyes, gaunt cheeks, like her face is caving in.

I take a step back.

Sarah sighs. “You can’t leave,” she says in a clotted voice. “I love you. You feed me.”

“It’s you. Not Heather, it’s you,” I say. I blink hard, to see if this is just a different nightmare.

“Nothing has to be different. I made you forget her, I can make you forget this too.”

“The book, it’s real. Heather was with me, you took her place. You took her . . .”

I trail off as Sarah nods and grabs a tooth from the sink, plunging it into her gums. “They’re all that’s left of her,” she says, stabbing another tooth against her mouth. “Don’t run from me, Sam. You did it once already, and it didn’t do you any good. Don’t make it hard for me.” She licks her swollen lips. “I’ll always be with you.”

I run out of the bathroom, down the hallway, out into the reeking cold and into my car.

I drive off, hitting a dumpster on the way out and speeding through the trash explosion. I can’t keep the wheel straight, and the car barely stays within the lines. Road marks turn into suggestions, lampposts into comfort. I drive fast, anywhere that’s far and away from her.

Half an hour in, my fingers are steady enough to turn on the radio. To hear someone else would be nice. Sarah’s voice is the only one that’s clear in my mind. Everything else is a sonic splotch. No memories, no words, no one else but her, leeching off of me, eating away all that I am, all that I was. I don’t have any other nightmares, because she is all of them.

The radio doesn’t work. There’s nothing but static. How many days, weeks, months and miles have we driven in silence? We never heard the news, traffic forecasts, not even music. My parents, they’re an anonymous one-size-fits-all blur. Where did I live before? Is my name even Sam?

Heather, a surfacing contour in my memory. Her cascading laugh, whittling down on the phone. Her thumb, caressing the back of my hand, three strokes each time. All these things Sarah ate up are coming afloat, and I have to blink away tears to keep my eyes on the road.

Pain is caffeine, for a while, then my eyelids turn heavy anyway. The gas meter arrow points halfway down. I can’t fall asleep, Sarah will be with me if I do. Staring, devouring me until her teeth fall out and she puts them back, again and again.

I get the Ritalin from the glove compartment. Chew it up. It’s grimy and bitter and it will wake me up faster this way. Hours drag by. My already faint hunger turns to nothing. I keep driving these nowhere roads surrounded by pines. Should I find somewhere with people? Pay some working girl and sleep next to her?

No, Sarah killed Heather. No one is safe with me. I have to keep moving. Until she starves from my lack of sleep, or a vein bursts open in my brain.

Forced insomnia, keep me alive.

My body moves by itself, and it’s like I’m watching it from the outside. Hazy recollections of gas stations, paying with crumbled up bills and munching on the sugary snacks that keep piling up in my car. Faces turn featureless, voices flattened down. I try to imagine music in the radio static, but I can’t remember a single song. Day recycled into night, my car seems to sink so low into the road it’s like I’m driving through solid gray.

Is it the fifth day? Is it the sixth? I’m out of Ritalin now, moving on to an EC stack: adding ephedrine from bromantane to gas station coffee. The man behind the counter must have thought I’m a walking allergy. I had to stop a couple of times to barf the donuts and candy bars lumping my insides. Now I don’t stop anymore, and the window is splattered with the barely solid chunks of my digestion.

Night again. Snowflakes rotate around themselves. I feel an uneasy kind of peace, more like resignation. I barely notice the wheel spinning out of my hands and the car swerving madly.

“Oh, my love . . .” It’s Heather speaking, crying. “She is always here too, don’t you see? Coming after us. She won’t stop. I am sorry, Sam.”

“Heather,” I croak. “I miss you.”

“I missed you too,” Sarah says, staring at me through the window.

I don’t hear my scream, only the thump of my foot against the door, throwing me into the passenger seat and smashing my head against the glass.

Sarah licks her lips in a shut-eyed shudder. “I missed you, and I was so hungry . . .”

“Sarah, please, let me go . . .” I say, slurring in insomnia.

Her sad smile I used to love so numbly, showing just a hint of Heather’s teeth. She shakes her head, both denying and wistful. “You were quick to forget me, once. Why can’t you forget her?”

I put the car in reverse. As it grumbles back to life, Sarah shakes her head again. “You’ll fall asleep again eventually, and I will be there.” Her voice trails off as she gets smaller and farther away, the headlights outlining her against the tree behind her. “Don’t go, Sam.”

“I won’t,” I whisper, and stomp on the pedal.

The hood smashes against her legs, crumples her down and folds against the tree. The whiplash snaps me back and forth, cracking something in my torso. I take a second to realize I’m still awake, lungs struggling to expand against bruised or broken ribs.

I pull myself out of the car. Sarah’s a few feet up ahead, curled up in a ball and moaning. No, vomiting, dragging her fingers on the pavement. I limp towards her until my knee buckles and I fall face-first. The asphalt feels like sandpaper as I drag my cheek across it, pulling forward on my elbows and knees, coughing saliva.

Sarah’s bent legs twist into place, like a dead spider coiling itself to life. She sighs, like the bones jutting from her arm are a mere inconvenience. No worse than forgetting to buy milk or the phone dying mid call. She retches again, scattering more teeth in a puddle of vomit.

“Just go to sleep, Sam,” she says.

I’m close to her now. Blood dribbles out of her temples, mingled with tar. She smells dead, but sweet. Perfumed road-kill.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I hear myself meaning it. “I have to let you go.”

I kiss her. She laughs lightly between my lips.

Then I palm her pooled-up vomit and began popping Heather’s teeth into my mouth, like Ritalin pills. It tastes like sour milk. My ribs sting as I tense up to hold my own guts in.

“No, no!” Sarah screams, unfreezing herself and reaching for the teeth. I cover the vomit puddle and shove it in chunks into my mouth, pushing teeth and bile down my throat. Sarah claws at my scalp, rips it open, pulls my hair and smashes my face against the ground, splashing vomit around.

I keep swallowing Heather’s teeth, until all I’m putting between my broken lips is tar and dirt. Sarah tries to put her fingers in my throat, and I bite until it tastes like iron.

Her weight is off me. I half-raise myself and stumble towards the car. I manage to get in and close the door, and I’m about to turn the key but I can’t find it anywhere. Lips burning, heart drumming, I wait for Sarah to open the door.

But she doesn’t. She’s curled up against the chipped tree trunk, crying with her head between her knees, clawing at her own hair. Sometimes, as she moans, she touches the inside of her mouth, the gums in which Heather’s teeth should be.

She looks up, pleading.

“I’m sorry,” I barely say.

The keys were next to the gas pedal. I turn the car on and drive away slowly, a cracked headlight blinking Heather goodbye. I wait until I can’t hear her crying, until I don’t hear it even in my head. I let the car slow down and veer off-road to a gentle stop.

I close my eyes, falling asleep.

And then I dream of something new.

The post PseudoPod 579: All My Nightmares Are Named Heather appeared first on PseudoPod.