One Rainy Day

A man sits at his desk, stooped over a leather-bound journal. His posture is stiff, his eyes fixed on his work. What was once a nice suit drapes loose upon his body, shrapnel-stained and coated with ink. The man is a writer. He is, however, a clumsy penmanship, too eager, too jittery. Too on the verge of falling apart. He can barely read his own words. He would prefer to use a computer or tablet or text-to-speech, but he knows better—knows that to change the world, his Bible must be written by hand.

A second man steps out of the shadows. He floats to the first as a phantom of torn coats and wide-brimmed hat, and in one fluid motion, produces a gun. He presses the barrel to the back of the first man’s head.

It is raining outside.

“Mr. Carver,” the second man says. His gun shakes. His hand is covered in fresh wounds. One of his fingernails is missing. “John. It’s time to put the pen down.”

“I’m almost done,” John says. He sounds far away.

“I know.”

And I walked naked through that liminal space, my arms outstretched to part the before from the after, all breath stopped in forever anticipation. No cold, no heat, no birth or decay. I was between Between, a fragment space that not even Death can enter. Only God. Only me. Only the last breath escaping dying lungs. I felt Death watch us, his eyes upon me, black tongue running across black teeth, his face pressed against the glass, waiting for his turn. He—

“John!” The second man says the name like a beg. “John …. John, please. We can still fix this.”

“But—”

The barrel of the gun digs deeper into the back of John’s skull, leaves a red mark 45 millimeters in diameter.

“I don’t want to do this. I want to throw up.” Underneath his coats and pistol, the second man is pale, sickly. His breath smells like copper and stomach acid. He wonders if this is how all the mice felt during his first tests. Ready to fall apart but incapable.

The desk is a disjointed state of terrible mess and brand new. There are no gouges in the wood, no dents or scratches from dropped keys or fumbled steps, yet it carries decades of hand-written words. John sets his quill into an inkpot. He runs his finger across the smooth wood. He purchased the desk from a department store three days ago and assembled it himself, using the little L-key wrench that came with. He remembers—or he thinks he remembers—that the young woman who swiped his credit card asked him if she needed to call an ambulance.

Three days ago, he had been a young man, clean shaven and ready to change the world. A business deal. A partnership. John Carver had money; Jay Irving had Aevum, an experimental drug that could kill aging in a single breath. Now both are old. John’s beard is full, his skin is cracked and bubbling like old asphalt. His hands cramp from writing, but he is almost done.

Outside, it is raining.

“What color is the rain, Jay?” John asks.

“We have to burn it all. All the research, all the evidence. Maybe if we erase it, the monster won’t notice.”

John looks out the window. His desk faces it, is jammed so close to the wall that he can lean forward and press his forehead against the cold glass. He is like Death. He is waiting, but not for a turn.

“There are no monsters anymore, Jay. Only rain. But the rain can’t hurt you. And the—”

“Stop!” Jay barks. He tries to sound threatening but steps back instead. Genie wishes run through his head, every hope a twist into ruin. The mice didn’t start screaming until after they took Aevum. “Stop. Let’s just, let’s just stop. Go to the nearest bar. Have a burger. I’ll buy you a beer. There’s a football game on, The Saints are playing, I think. We can be normal for another hour.”

John shakes his head. “We’re not supposed to be normal. We’re supposed to change the world.”

is not the king we claim him to be, but a cog in an ancient, golden clock that is God’s to unwind at his will. The gears are made of gemstone glass. The hands point to the heavens. It all smells of iron, or maybe, the place between iron. We walked through that infinitesimal space between molecules, so small the electrons were planets in the night sky. They twinkle brighter than Venus on a summer morning.

“What time is it?” John asks. His eyes hurt from squinting. He needs glasses. Three days ago, he had perfect vision, but the need for Walmart cheaters runs in his family. Both his parents need the help to read, as had his grandparents when they were alive.

“Quarter to six.”

John shakes his head. “No. What’s the real time? What year is it? How long has it been raining?”

“I don’t know.” Jay shuffles, twitches. His body cramps from nerves that want to snap in half. He’s had nothing but coffee and Advil since the accident.

“I think it’s been 22 years,” John says. “My watch stopped working when we woke up.”

“It’s been three days. It’s quarter to six.”

“We didn’t age when we were there.”

“Help me, John!” Jay shouts. His voice cracks. He’s so tired he wants to shoot himself. He’s so scared he’ll go back. “Help me stop the monster.”

Raining is outside it.

John looks out the window, watches the rain, hunts for words between the falling drops. The two men are in a cabin, out in the middle of a Wyoming forest so remote John has to write by candlelight. The trees are gnarled, ancient things that fight to paint the sky with dark leaves. The sky is rain clouds. Fog whispers between, skittering and hiding, waiting. John finds his words in the wisps, his next paragraph. He reaches for his quill.

“I can do it,” Jay says. “Shoot you.”

“What color is the rain, Jay?”

“I think I need to. I think it’s why he sent me back.”

John gestures to the space next to him. “Come. Watch. Help. Keep me company. Tell me what color the rain is.”

“I don’t—”

Jay looks out the window. It’s dreary outside. He spent what felt like a day hiking to this cabin, fighting branches that snag and muddy ground eager to make him slip. His clothing is torn, his shoes so dirty their only hope is to be thrown away. Three days ago, he had looked brand new, a biochemist on the verge of saving the world. He wonders why so much can change in 22 years. Water beads against the window, runs down it slowly, like it might be mixed with syrup. The candlelight makes it look yellow. The stains on his face are red. He pretends it’s all mud, but he knows better.

There’s a bar 48-hours away by foot, one with greasy food and cold beer. He believes if they leave now, walk briskly, they can be there in 20 minutes.

“It’s red, John.”

“I thought so.”

I found God sitting in a rocking chair, squeaking with each rock. He was asleep. I didn’t mean to wake him, but he feared the ticking of my watch. Time isn’t supposed to move, not there, not anywhere—not without his permission. He was angry, furious, a thousand images of my father with a closed fist, but then he saw the blood and the pain. My father could be a compassionate man, when he wanted to be. We can all hug just as easily as we can hit. I tried to breathe but had to stop, because lungs don’t work in Between. God smiled, nodded. When he wasn’t looking like my father, he looked like a creature made of light and jelly all stuck together. I think he comes from a prism planet.

“What do you think?” John asks. He knows that Jay is reading over his shoulder. Some day soon, everyone will be reading his book. His Bible will be titled Aevum.

“You need to burn it.”

For the first time in years, John turns away from the window, from his work. Jay holds a gasp. Recognition plays a painful game across his face. He sees his business partner, but he also sees a corpse. John’s skin is brittle, flaking away to show exposed muscle beneath. His eyes glaze with dead-fish scales. He smells like a rotted bone being chewed apart by farm dogs.

“Jay,” John says. He looks disappointed. He sounds old. “A deal is still a deal.”

“We died, John.”

“No. We only almost did.”

Jay wants to scream. Instead he finds himself begging, pleading for reason when facts don’t matter: “We have to burn it all. Throw my research into the sea. We can’t do this to innocent people.”

“God wants us to.”

“I didn’t see God!” Now Jay does scream. His voice rattles with black tissue. “Just that black skull. It was so dark. So cold. We have—”

Because Jay is stuck, an old man with old ways, John initiates the hug, pulls his business partner in close. His body is cold. So is Jay’s. The two men embrace in a single, heavy sob while the gun falls to the floor. It hurts them to cry. Jay knows he needs to grab the .45, kill them both to end the rain, but he is afraid. There’s a piece of bent plastic sticking from his thigh, and if he shoots himself in the head, he will go back. Death is waiting.

Is outside raining it.

“You saw me, Jay,” John whispers. “Only me. I promise. The monster can’t hurt you anymore.”

“John….”

Jay lets the word fall. Something slaps against the roof of the cabin. The room shakes. Jay jumps, but John only shrugs. Sometimes body parts fall from the sky. Sometimes the rain is more than rain. The rain has to be more than the sum of its parts for the world to change, for his Bible to make sense. Between has to become the present. The newly-dead have to walk again. But only the newly-dead—Death has already claimed the long gone.

John is of the newly dead. Jay is of the newly dead. Now they walk. Now they remember. In a few short years, with a little dose of Aevum, all can become newly dead. That last exhale will last forever.

“I’m afraid,” Jay says.

John nods. He turns back to his desk, his window. There’s a severed arm bleeding on the front lawn. “I know. But you don’t have to be.”

“The monster—”

“Death.”

“Yeah.” Jay gulps. At some point, the gun returned to his hand. It is heavy. He wipes at his face, feels scabs against his skin, feels four-days worth of beard get stuck in the scabs. A broken leg thuds to the ground in a swirl of fog. “Yeah. Him.”

John grabs his pen. “You killed him, Jay. Not the other way around. That’s all.”

There is good in this world, with its many ticking clocks converging into broken cogs. Sometimes, we even sparkle. I remember, once upon a time, I wedged a lifetime into a single breath. A hundred years in a single gasp. Nothing moved but everything mattered. The cosmic shook around me, breaking the placid into colors I could paint with. I am not an artist, but even the clumsy hand knows how to put Spackle over a nail hole. A touchup there, a touchup here. I saw it all, and God showed me the way. He paused Between so someone else could understand. I’m still there, I think. On a fundamental level I’m—

The gun presses against John’s skull again. It’s warmer now, more desperate. John rolls his shoulders, tries to find a comfortable spot so he can finish his book.

“Do you remember what our business deal was?” Jay asks. He is back to being a phantom, a cold man in a cold coat with congealing wounds. Rips in his skin turn to scars. Broken bones heal in strange ways because they were never set. Everything about him is stiff. “The pills we took right before the truck hit us?”

“No.”

“I don’t either.” Jay frowns. “I think it was important though. I think we were going to change the world.”

Now John laughs; he laughs so hard a tooth falls from his mouth. A little drop of blood mingles with the ink on his page. All Bibles require blood.

“Jay,” the old man says, a little drool falling from his mouth. Strokes run in his family. Are hereditary. “What do you think I’ve been doing here?”

Outside is raining it.

The lawn is covered in body parts, broken, bleeding things that thump into the dirt with enough force to move the world. Jay tries not to look at them. The arms and legs he can stomach, but not the organs. Not the strange, peeled faces that aren’t attached to skulls. Everything is a mess, and all he has is an old, rusted gun. He isn’t even sure it will fire. It needs to fire twice.

“I’m going to do it, John. I’m going to pull the trigger.”

“Death won’t go easy on you just because you’ve helped him.”

Jay nods, closes his eyes. The gun is heavy, the heaviest thing he’s ever held. He hasn’t eaten in years. Headaches pound behind his eyes, and his tongue swells with rigor mortis. Moths have eaten most of his clothes. He almost laughs, because there isn’t a living thing around for miles. Only the dead. They pound against the roof like hailstones.

“I’m sorry,” Jay says.

“I forgive you,” John agrees. “Just one more year, and it will be finished.”

Jay pulls the trigger.

Is raining it outside.

a God too. Dead but not dead, lonely but not for long. I waved at the sky and it turned to shrapnel plastic, split metal and little puffs of fire. It’s so easy to create when you know how, when you’re given the opportunity. God smiled at me. He offered his hand. I know a business deal when I see one. Beside us, so far out of reach I think we all forgot him, Death pounded on the glass. When I was a kid, I remember being told not to try and go in the attic. It was dangerous up there, not scary but dirty. Boring. Stupid. So of course I spent all my energy trying to get up there. I stole a ladder from the garage one night, and I ascended that little hallway door. Dust fell upon my face. Death is like that. He wants the one thing he cannot have, but that thing isn’t worth the effort. Let him keep his kingdom in the living room. Let me expand the attic for everyone. We can be as we are. Forever.

Bodies begin to fall from the sky. They smash into the little cabin, and the world becomes a raucous thunder of breaking bones. Glass shatters. The bodies stand on tired feet, naked corpses that try to scream but don’t have lungs or teeth or tongues. They shamble. Death reaches his hand through the glass. He reaches for John Carver.

It is strange, but while God and I make our deal, our pact to change the world for the better, I am reminded of my last real memory. I think it is real. I think it is a memory. I am in a car, driving with a person who I hope will one day be my friend. We are talking about something so important I lose track of what I’m doing. We are excited. There are so many ways to change the world. I want to do that, change the world. Make it better, or if not better, at least less scary. I want the chance to forgive everyone that wronged me.

John Carver scribbles his final words. His face breaks into ecstasy. Blood water pours into the cabin through a thousand holes in the roof. The room stinks of gunpowder.

There is a truck. It is in the wrong lane, or maybe I am. We’re heading towards it. I’m about to change the world.

Death grabs John’s soul and pulls. It blunders out of him with all the force of a tired breath. Jay watches the car crash in slow motion. He’s still holding his gun, a relic of a time long gone. He’s old. He’s tired. He lets the gun drop. It’s no good to him anymore, not when he’s been dead for a thousand years.

“Is it always so messy?” he asks.

Death nods.

“And did we matter? Did we change the world?”

“Yes,” the black, dust-made skull says. Jay is surprised at how nice the end looks. It seemed so scary all those years ago, so violent and angry. A monster shrieking against glass. He wonders who has changed, him or it. “Yes, you did. Everyone who lives changes the world.”

“Burn my work. Kill it all, and take it with you.”

“Thy will be done.”

Death reaches out a cold, skeletal hand. Jay grabs it. His watch ticks a single second. John’s body crumples to the floor. Rainwater wilts his book to mush. Blood and pain fade to black.

It outside raining is.

Portraiture

The girl stepped from of a dust-worn carriage and into the night. The trees were deep, the air chilly with fog. Animals made animal noises—but in a hushed fashion. Monsters lurked in the woods this far outside Nantes. Aalis closed her eyes, breathed deep, but instead of the familiar scent of Atlantic salt, found raw earth, dead leaves, and gloom. It was a lost path, yet this was where his letter said to stop.

“Lady, I don’t recommend this,” her driver said from his perch, and not for the first time. He hid behind a struggling lantern and a white horse. “The respectable do not live out here.”

“I cannot afford the respectable.”

“You’ll be able to tomorrow.”

Aalis rounded on the man. He was a brackish sort with a scowl as starched as his doublet. He served the rich aristocrats of the city. She was a poor aristocrat. “If I am not back in two hours, you have my permission to leave.”

“It will take him more than two hours to paint you. And Master Douais will have my head if I don’t bring you back.”

She held up two fingers. “He is the best, sir. The absolute best.”

Today, tonight, before her life fell further apart, Aalis deserved the best.

“At least let me accompany you. You’re only 16.”

“I am old enough for Master Douais.”

Aalis felt 16 going on 30. She stood tall but slender, with long, brown hair that spilled every-which-way no matter how often she brushed it. Her nose was hooked, her lips full. A red, puffiness rimmed her eyes from crying. She had grown fast, and then she had grown up even faster. Tomorrow, she would age another ten years.

The artist’s letter said there would be a cobblestone path, and now that her eyes were adjusted, Aalis found it. The stones were yellowed with mold. She took her first, careful step. Her long skirts threatened to trip her legs. She was not dressed for a walk through the forest, because portraiture demanded gowns and jewelry. Aalis was wealthy enough for both, but only if they were kept modest. Her dress swallowed her body in excess fabric around the shoulders, sleeves, and skirt, but the color was brown with only dashes of red to make it look regal. She wore a silver necklace with a ruby to match. The chain was cheap, not silver but polished steel, and the gemstone was misshapen. Both belonged to her mother. Aalis owned exactly one beautiful dress. It was white.

For his part, the driver huffed and cursed. He then promised to go find her if she was not back in two hours, “or else!” The trees soon swallowed his threats. They were as thick as mud, their branches so intertwined they blocked much of the sky.

It felt like shrinking, and it felt like time travel, but Aalis followed the artist’s path which soon arrived at a clearing, and then at his house. Dead trees grew around it like hands protecting something fragile. No lights shone her invitation. The home had a small, impoverished look that spoke of peasantry, yet it was two stories tall and built like a castle. Bricks made up its walls, and dark tiles its roof. Its windows were large and grand; its door was heavy enough to stop King Francis himself.

Aalis took it all in with her first real sense of unease. Her driver was minutes away by foot, she was alone, and the artist was a strange man in a strange forest. He painted his best work in the dead of night.

The door slid open. A small candle burned from further inside. Aalis saw the outline of a man appear in the doorway, and when she raised her hand, he beckoned her forward. She stepped from the cobblestone path. Her shoes were made for fashion first and function second, pointed at the toe and easy to snag on roots or rocks, but the grass around his house was dry, more like dirt than meadow. The closer she got to his house, the easier it was to keep walking.

Aalis reached the door and curtseyed. “Master,” she said. Her voice whispered with nerves.

“Malo,” the artist said. “My name is Malo.”

“Aalis du Roux.” Aalis looked away. “For now.”

Malo eyed Aalis in a way that sent her sixth sense screaming: of monsters and ghosts, of wolves tearing into cattle. Yet she was star-struck too, because she had seen his paintings. He was the best.

“You are too hungry,” he said. He gave her a slow wave, an almost-polite dismissal. “You do not belong here.”

“Please!” Aalis begged. Her fear of danger became fear of rejection. “I followed the rules. I paid ahead, and I came alone. I burned your letters.”

“You—”

“I want to remember myself as I am now, before things get worse!”

Aalis forced herself to meet Malo’s gaze. His eyes were dead, but so were hers. So were most peoples’. If it wasn’t the war with Italy, then it was something else. Poverty, sickness, dead brothers or dead husbands. The monarchy. The rich aristocrats spoke of Renaissance, but they built their rebirth on the backs of others. Her shoulders ached from the strain.

“It is too easy to die, Master Malo.” Aalis swallowed. She wasn’t sure if it was fear or sorrow that made her want to cry. “But I’ve seen your paintings. They will not.”

“You accept my terms?”

“I do.”

Malo nodded. He stepped aside. “You may enter.”

Aalis did. Malo’s home was cold, colder than the woods outside, and she crossed her arms against the chill. The lighting was bad, the smell strange. She caught whiffs of chemicals, things she recognized and things she did not. Before her father died, he owned a paper mill, and she had wandered its rooms on a few occasions. Malo’s home was like that, only damper. The ceiling was low, like she had stepped into a cellar instead of a castle, and the floor needed sweeping.

“This way,” Malo said. “I will paint you.”

Malo looked strong, and he looked sick. He was tall, so tall his head almost touched the ceiling, with a gauntness to his face, shoulders, and chest. Everything about him was pale. His mouth was so thin it might as well not be there. All of the rich men in France kept their hair long with manicured beards, but Malo was bald and clean shaven. While Aalis wore her best dress, he wore a simple grey undershirt and a black jerkin. The jerkin was stained with paints. He seemed to like the color brown.

A single candle lit the next room, which was disheveled from floor to ceiling with paintings. Aalis sucked in a breath. Malo jerked at the sound.

“What?” he twisted about to look at her. His eyes were a deep, cold blue.

Time was short, but Aalis couldn’t help herself. She approached the nearest painting for a better look. It was of a white rabbit, so realistically depicted that at first she thought it was a living, breathing animal. From far away it appeared it be sleeping, but as she got closer, she saw that it was dead. Two trickles of blood ran from its neck to soil its fur.

 “Why would you paint a dead rabbit?”

Malo hovered close. Aalis flinched. “To forget,” he said. “I remember too well, but when I paint, I forget.”

 “I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to.” Malo gestured towards a door. “This way. My studio is over there. Your canvas is ready.”

Aalis regarded the next painting. It was of a woman’s neck. Her clothing was gone, ripped or stripped away, revealing just a white shift and bare skin. Two trickles of blood flowed from her throat. The blood was so well painted that Aalis believed if she touched it, it would stain her fingers.

“Maybe I should go,” Aalis whispered.

“I will paint you.”

Aalis backed away. She turned for the door and watched it close on its own. The wood creaked as it shut, and the lock clicked loud enough to echo, even though the rooms were small and cluttered. The harder she peered through the dark, the more paintings she saw. Each one depicted a neck; each one depicted blood.

“I will paint you,” Malo repeated. “As you are right now. You will change, grow or shrink with time, but the painting will not. It will remember if you forget.”

“What if I don’t want to change?”

“Then you must learn to die.”

Malo grabbed Aalis by the arm. The movement was slow, lazy and without force, yet his hands were as strong as iron. She couldn’t escape him. Like a gentleman escorting a lady, Malo lead Aalis to his studio. When she stepped through the door, it closed on its own behind her.

The studio was pitch black, but Malo lit a few candles. The flickering of yellow lights made his skin all the more pale. Aalis swallowed. Malo followed the movement of her throat. He reminded her of a cat stalking a mouse.

“Do not be scared,” he said. “It will not hurt.”

“Please,” Aalis tried, but she was in his world, his court, and she could not escape.

“Change hurts. Remembering hurts. What I do is neither.” Malo held out his hand. “Come. Sit.”

His studio wrapped around them with cramped mess, an easel on one end, a hundred or more canvases strewn about the sides, and a great couch on the other. Malo gestured to the couch. Once upon a time, it had been gorgeous, an expensive piece of furniture fit for a king’s chambers, but age and use took their toll. Its fabric was brown, its cushions visibly lumpy. Scratch marks covered the backrest, and long rips showed the wood behind. Aalis both did and didn’t recognize it. The paintings she saw months ago had featured this exact place, this exact seat, but it had been depicted as brand new. Beautiful.

Feeling his dead eyes on her, Aalis approached the seat. The closer she got, the more rips and stains she saw. People fought on this couch. People bled.

“Sit how you want to be painted,” Malo instructed. He slid behind his canvas and watched. His eyes never blinked. Aalis wasn’t sure he even breathed. “In any position you like. I will paint the couch as it once was, when I first bought it.”

“It … it is old,” Aalis said. “Very old.”

“Yes.”

Malo grabbed a brush. Aalis sat as gingerly as she could, trying to avoid the worst stains while also not looking at them. Her heart drummed with fear. All around her hung paintings of throats and blood. Most were of women, always naked, always pale as death, but a few were of men. Aalis recognized beard styles that no one in modern France would ever wear. A few were of animals, a dormouse there, a deer there, but like the rabbit in the first room, they were dead.

Some of his paintings, the biggest ones, were covered with burlap tarps.

 “What are those?” Aalis asked.

Malo followed her gaze. He seemed surprised. “I don’t know. I painted them to forget, and I covered them to keep them forgotten.” He turned back. “Are you ready?”

Aalis shifted positions, crossing one leg over the other and adjusting the middle of her skirt to better show off the red in it. She then flicked at the fabric of her neckline, making sure just the barest hint of the white shift underneath poked through. All the rich ladies were doing that now.

“Do I look scared?”

“Yes.” Malo cocked his head. “You looked scared from the moment I saw you outside my home. Scared and hungry. I do not know what you look like happy.”

The candles flickered. The couch felt sticky. Aalis both wanted to laugh and scream at the same time—she couldn’t remember the last time she felt happy. Not since that letter. “Sorry,” the man in black had said, dressed like a member of the court but walking with an executioner’s gait. “Sit down before you open it.” So they sat. So they read. So they all collapsed with sobs. Her brother was dead, slain in Pavia for King Francis, a thousand and more kilometers away to end a war that began anew one year later. Their family fell apart. Her father grew distant, angry, and then sick. Her mother cracked at the seams like a woman made of clay.

When typhoid finally finished with her family, what was left of it went to Aalis. The business became shambles. Her mother withered into an angry stranger who spoke in Bible verses. Aalis’s suitors grew older in age and worse in quality, each one eager for just the one part of her before taking over the paper mill.

Circumstance forced her to pick one. He did not love her. She did not love him.

“My life is hard, and it will only get worse,” Aalis said.

Malo nodded. “Yes.”

“I am scared.”

“Yes.” Malo touched his brush to the canvas. He made a single tap. Aalis couldn’t even tell what color paint he was using. “But now you look mad instead of afraid. Is that okay?”

Aalis nodded. She wanted to cry, and found that she was. “I think maybe that’s all I have left to give.”

“Not all.”

Malo worked his brush, making a half-dozen chopping motions—stabs instead of strokes. Aalis expected his hand to fly, to create her clone with something akin to magic, because he only had an hour left before it was time to go. But just as fast as he grabbed the brush, he put it back down. He turned his gaze towards her throat.

“I will finish later,” Malo said. His eyes were so, so cold. “I will have it delivered to your home.”

“But—”

“I do not forget.”

Aalis needed to run. Her hand found a stain on the couch, crusty with brown and still lingering with the smell of blood. She screamed. Malo approached. As Aalis put her hands in front of her face, Malo kneeled. He grabbed her wrist. His fingers were as gentle as nails.

“I paint everyone twice,” he said. “One for you, and one for me.”

“No!”

“These are my terms. It will not hurt.”

Malo shifted Aalis’s skirts aside so he could kneel over her. She pushed at him, but his skin felt like bricks. His body was as unmoving as a castle wall. Up close he smelled like nothing, like he wasn’t even there, yet he also stank of old dirt and older blood. His eyes glowed blue, his frown deep with difficult work. His hands worked at the neckline of her dress, yanking the extra fabric towards her shoulders. He pulled at the shift underneath so it was more visible. Aalis watched. She made herself look into his eyes. They were dead, but hers were not.

“Interesting,” he said. He slipped his palm around the necklace Aalis wore. The jewel shined with bloody crimson. “Do you know this shape?”

Aalis breathed deep.

“It’s a heart. A human heart. I have never seen a ruby this shape before.” Malo let the jewel fall back into place. Then he repositioned it, so it was exactly where he wanted it. “It is a queen’s gem. You will make a good picture.”

Malo smiled. It was his first smile of the night. “You do not look scared,” he said.

Then he gripped Aalis by the face and shoulder. He opened his mouth wide. It was a black chasm with fangs. His tongue was bloated and blue, like a leech.

The vampire bit, and for an hour, he drank. He did not breathe. His heart did not beat. Aalis watched with disgust in her eyes and a scream on her lips, but she did not fight back. She did not fight when that letter came, and she did not fight when she overheard her father wishing it had been her instead of his son. She would not fight on her wedding day. Life was cruel. She deserved nothing.

When the hour ended, Malo sat up. He wiped the fresh blood from his lips and bid Aalis leave.

“I will forget,” he said.

“I will not.”

“Then you will hurt.” Malo looked at her as uncaring as ever. Her blood stained his hands. “But you will learn to live. You hunger, and now you are no longer afraid.”

Aalis walked out of her own accord. She crossed the artist’s front yard, and she marched down the yellow, cobblestone path. The forest night stretched deep with gloom. Soon she saw the glow of a lantern, and the white flank of an impatient horse. The driver said nothing as she stepped into the carriage. He took her home. She snuck inside, removed her mother’s dress, and got into bed. Aalis spent the rest of the night remembering what it was like to be alive. What it was like to have a family uncracked with change. She missed being a little girl, helping her mother with the housework and playing with dolls made of paper. She would wrestle with her brother and tattle when he won, and she would sit by her father in the living room while he read aloud to her from the Bible. Love had once thrived in her home.

Aalis remembered, and for the first time, she wondered if she could fight. Make change her own. Let love thrive once again. She deserved nothing, but she wanted the best, and maybe that was good enough. She did not belong with the dead. Her mother’s misshapen ruby gleamed against her throat, now crusted brown in spots with her own blood. Aalis grabbed it. It was hers. She was no longer afraid.

A week later, Aalis Douais received a package addressed to Aalis du Roux. She opened it and marveled at the work, at the absolute perfection of the portrait. It was like staring at her twin. If she didn’t know better, she thought she was looking into a mirror.

She barely recognized herself.

Playing God

The holy trinity of bad ideas are loneliness, power, and vodka, and Frankie Stalone had all three in spades. Enough to dig himself an entire mausoleum with dirt to spare. So he wandered. Down broken hallways that smelled like war and looked like genocide, because his legs knew where to go even if he didn’t. Some primal, shambling part of his soul wanted to play God, and he had nothing better to do. He’d spit in Death’s face while he was at it. Satan too, if he could find the red bastard.

“Fucking shit!”

Frankie slipped on a pool of blood and into a revenant. The corpse toppled. It tried to catch itself but didn’t have the dexterity, so it hit the floor and bounced.

“Thought ya’ll got all the blood!” Frankie bellowed.

The revenant crawled itself back into a standing position. Its bones creaked, ready to snap. It wore grey scrubs and the remains of a white lab coat that hadn’t been white since the attack. Blood prefers brown over red. When the dead scientist resumed its hobble, its arm spun into its forehead in a poor-man’s imitation of a military salute. Frankie grinned. He saluted back.

“Good job, son. Real damn good.” He dropped his hand. “Now grab a mop and take care of the blood. You were supposed to have this all cleaned up last month.”

Instead of heading towards a janitor closet, the revenant stumbled along the hall, towards the cafeteria. Its broken arm flopped with every step.

“Fucker!” Frankie called after it. “Gave you an order!”

The zombie tripped over a broken pipe.

“Insubordinate!” Frankie roared. “That’s a demotion!”

The zombie wandered around a corner. Frankie swore again, then called out one last order. “And stay the fuck out of my kitchen!”

Frankie considered the necromancer lab and his liquor closet to be separate places, each with its own rituals and prayers, but the last few months had brought the two together. Dried vomit acted as glue. Empty bottles as trip hazards. The room was huge, cathedral-like in size and scope, but instead of murals and glass pictures, the walls were covered in tubes, racks, energy cells, bits of green stuff, and dead bodies. It had a chemical smell that Frankie couldn’t place but assumed was carcinogenic. Half the lights didn’t work; the other half were stained with blood. The monsters made a real mess when they died. Frankie made a real mess when he worked. Fair was fair.

The room ran on dead bodies. Corpses lay everywhere, the newest ones torn apart and scattered around, the oldest stacked against the left wall like they were guns ready to be picked from a rack. Their arms crossed over their chests like ancient mummies. Their eyes were gone. Decay made them all look like dry-rotted rubber, though only the mummies felt fake to the touch. The recent dead still had a human texture to them.

“Fucking hate this room,” Frankie said as he kicked parts aside, heading to the rack. “Fucking hate you, too.”

He picked one at random because after so many months alone, everything in this room was reduced to meat. The corpse was heavy, but Frankie knew how to heave and ho. He slung the body over his shoulder and walked it to the machine.

On his way there, he stepped into another pool of wet blood. All the human blood had dried up by the third day, but the monster blood remained forever wet. Frankie watched it stain his shoe. In the strange, yellow-and-green room, it almost looked like barbeque sauce.

“Hmm,” he said. He followed the blood to an alien body part. He gave it a nudge. It wiggled like fresh Jell-O, only putrid beige instead of lime green. “I’m a cook, you know.”

Frankie picked up the piece of alien meat. “Cooks need ingredients.”

The machine was a strange, twisting ball of black panels and clear, plastic tubing. It wasn’t quite circular—it had over a thousand pointy edges to it—but the effect was a circle with more circles. Cables attached it to the ceiling, most thicker than Frankie’s leg, others thinner than his fingers. They liked to take turns leaking. The smell was more of that cancer-stench mixed with grease.

The lower part of the ball had a slot for bodies, and Frankie stuck the corpse inside. He tossed the alien piece of meat in with it.

“Good enough,” he said.

Frankie walked to the computer station. He couldn’t do much with it. He was the most powerful man in the universe because the toy was his, not because he knew how to work it. All the necromancers died in the attack, and they left their manuals locked behind passwords. His gut told him green meant go, and so far, green made the machine go. If the button broke, then he’d have nothing. Just booze and boredom.

Frankie pressed the green button. The spaceship-sized ball of flat panels sucked the corpse up, into whatever strange world existed inside. The alien goo went with it. Lights flashed, and a headache exploded behind Frankie’s right eye. He had tried helmets and safety glasses and headphones; he had even tried pushing the button and running out of the room. No matter what he did, the machine gave him a splitting headache that made his teeth rattle.

“Fucker,” he spat.

Despite the headache though, running the machine made Frankie feel powerful. Like he could survive this shit and get out unscathed. Only God could thwart Death and make the dead rise. God and Frankie.

After a few minutes of painful thinking, the machine spat out a new revenant. It fell from the machine with no good graces, but it got back to its feet without Frankie’s help. Its empty, skull eyes turned towards him.

“Well now soldier,” Frankie barked. “I need you to grab a mop and a bucket and clean up this here place. Can you do that?”

Frankie expected the zombie to fall over or apart, but instead it tipped its head. Like a nod. Frankie cocked an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

The zombie shuffled off, through the door and down the hallway. It hung a right at the nearest junction, towards a custodial closet. Or about a thousand other rooms. The station was huge.

Frankie shrugged. “Bet it gets stuck in a chair like the last one.”

Bored with his toy, Frankie left the necromancer lab. Next stop was the liquor closet, where he’d drink until his headache was gone or he passed out.

Frankie woke up in a stranger’s room, turned on his shoulder, and vomited. Stomach acid burned his gums, and a headache throbbed behind his eyes. His back was covered in sweat. Frankie was a sweaty drunk.

“Fucker,” Frankie said, to no one and everyone. He ran a head through what was left of his hair and pulled out a clump of it. “Fuck.”

He heaved himself out of bed and stumbled down the hall, trying to figure out where he was. It had taken him long to realize that if he passed out in other people’s rooms, he could vomit his hangovers onto the floor and not need to clean up.

Frankie was in the civilian section, a few hallways from his own room. They had all been together at first, the low-paying cogs that kept the station running while the scientists did their thing. Cook, clean, fix, mop, unclog toilets, order supplies, pay bills. The lab coats worked on their science, and the military kept everyone in line. Less ray guns, more plastic handcuffs and metal sticks. It was a four year stint where the prisoners ran the prison, but only the sections they were allowed to run. The pay was fantastic. Hard to turn down triple-digit salaries for four straight years, even if it meant living on a hunk of metal spinning a million kilometers per hour around a pulsar. All the shielding kept the cancer at bay. There were only six windows in the entire station.

Tempers didn’t flare, but they did swell as the years passed. Gambling became pissed-off gambling; drinking because pissed-off drinking. It was almost a reprieve when the first zombies showed up, the necromancers finally succeeding with their science. It made it so everyone could hate them instead of each other. That lasted a solid six months until the attack. Then it was everyone against the monsters. Then everyone was dead. Well, everyone except Frankie.

“Never thought I could ever hate a place more than Sheet-Metal Florida,” Frankie mumbled. He found the showers and washed the booze from his pores. The steam helped his headache. If that shower broke, that’s when he’d kill himself. Until then, he was holding out hope he could make it to the end of his fourth year. Another cargo ship would come to pick him up. Him and the rest of the bodies.

The station smelled different—less gore, more bleach. Frankie walked down hallways that always tripped him up with alien blood and did not stumble. He shoved his hands into his pockets. He wrinkled his wide, tired face into something of a bemused scowl. The station was clean. Well, not clean, but cleaner. Nothing could ever truly clean these hallways. Not after the attack.

“The fuck is going on now?”

He wandered into his kitchen. It was his kitchen then, but it was really his kitchen now. Brightly lit and stainless steel from top to bottom, Frankie kept it cleaner today than the day he arrived. There were few things left to savor on the station, so he picked this. His kitchen and his cooking. Stove number six with the back right burner. Powdered orange flavoring and vodka. When he ate, he chewed with his mouth open, and when he drank his morning coffee, he made sure it was hot enough to burn his tonsils. The vodka was just a bonus.

For a short five minutes, Frankie smiled big and wide, like all his problems were gone. Then the door swung open and a dead body walked inside.

“What in the fuck?” Frankie yelped, dropping his food and reaching for a knife. His kitchen was full of weapons, but his shaking hands found a soup ladle.

The revenant swayed itself into a dizzy salute. It had a vomit-stained rag in one hand, and a blood-stained mop in the other. It left footprints so gross with dirt and gore that they were black.

“You,” Frankie said. He put his cookware down. “It’s you. From yesterday.”

The revenant tried a nod, but it moved its head too quickly and three teeth fell out.

“Well get out. This is captain’s quarters. You ain’t allowed.”

Half bowing, half falling over, the zombie shuffled out the door. It swung its mop in a wide arc, spilling dirty water all over the place.

Frankie almost swore again, until he realized what this meant. He had spat at God, and the wad had found its mark. Right in the Father’s stupid eye. Death too. He had got them both. A tired, sore-covered grin cracked across Frankie’s face, so big it almost touched his ears. The holy trinity of bad ideas watched him pour another ounce of vodka into his morning OJ.

Six hours and just as many shots of vodka later, Frankie stomped into the necromancer cathedral, a ray gun strapped to his hip like a cowboy six shooter. His first revenant stood behind him, armed with a mop. Its eyeless head stared at the machine that had brought it back to life with a slack-jawed idiocy that Frankie aimed to fix.

“Just want to talk,” he said as he scanned the ground for alien parts. There were hundreds to choose from. He chuckled. “Just need to cook first.”

One little piece of alien flesh let the dead follow orders, so what would two do? Frankie grabbed hunks of monster meat and tossed them into the machine. He then found a dead scientist. The woman—what was left of her—wasn’t much to look at. Her neck was broken, and most of her stomach and legs were scattered around the cathedral, but Frankie could strap her to a chair and make her work the computer. He didn’t need to her to move, just work.

“Come on, missie,” he said, propping her up so he could pluck her eyes out with a knife. “Get you in tip-top shape in no time.”

Like the first zombie, the god-hating sphere sucked the corpse into its Tabernacle stomach.. Lights flashed with green headache. Frankie touched the handle of his gun. He felt hot, sweaty, and gross, and also more powerful than he had ever felt in his life. He knew within the very depth of his bones that this would work. The machine finished giving Death the finger, hissed one last complaint, and spat out a body.

The first thing the zombie did was fall over. Frankie ran over and picked it up. “Come here, you,” he said. “Let’s see if you work.”

He plopped the zombie in front of the computer terminal.

“Make it work,” he said. “Captain’s orders. Help me.”

The dead scientist had no control over her neck or legs, but she could use her hands. She tapped hidden screens and menus open, entering passwords that not even Death could take from her. Soon the machine was running again, and this time without all the strange headaches. Frankie tossed more bodies in, each with bits of alien meat. First it was two chunks, then three, then four, then seven because bad ideas never take things slow.

“Troops,” Frankie said, hands behind his back, gait uneven with drink. “We are the best the army has to offer. You, me, but mostly me. Now, I want you to fix this place up! Make it work!” He turned to an engineer, someone he had hated in life but now saw as his new best friend. “And you, Private Withers. I want you to fix up the laundry machine. I’m fuckin’ sick of doing all my clothes by hand.”

With an uncanny resemblance to living people, Frankie Stalone’s platoon marched from the necromancer lab and into the wide facility beyond. They got to work. He stopped drinking at a reasonable hour, and for the first time in many months, fell asleep without the need of a blackout. But he locked his door, because the even the most foolish of Gods do not trust their creations.

Frankie never played with sober dreams, but the mind of a functional drunk runs smoother than a suicidal one. He dreamed in vivid colors, and each color was red with blood. The aliens attacked during the third year. They arrived on a chunk of space debris, what looked like a small asteroid from afar and a large, misshapen tumor from close up. It crashed into the military barracks with a shotgun-blast that rattled the entire station.

Chaos came next. Ray guns, screams, blood, death. For his part, Frankie hid in his kitchen until it was safe to come out. He had food and water and a corner for a bathroom. He hid for what felt like weeks but was probably only a few days. Time lost a lot of meaning during the attack, and it never regained its footing. Thankfully, Frankie had booze for that.

But he saw the aliens before he hid. They were creatures made of mouths and teeth, the color of inflamed gums and pissed off at anything alive. They walked like apes, with two large forearms that looked more at home on a praying mantis. Each arm split down the middle, and inside was a mouth, complete with fangs and a tongue. They had no heads, but their torsos found room for more mouths. If they had eyes, Frankie never saw them.

“Again,” Frankie said to the half-woman/half-zombie at the computer. “I think we got it this time.”

He was dressed in his normal scrubs but wearing an admiral’s hat, which he found in the admiral’s quarters after the resurrected corpse let him in. The admiral was a tall, skinny man, and his clothing did not fit. The hat would have to do.

The revenant waved an affirmative. The more alien parts in them, the more the dead acted like living people. Too little and they were like the woman, capable of obeying orders and nodding yes or no. Too much and they returned to their alien nature. They howled and thrashed until their bodies exploded with mouths and teeth that had no business on a human body. Frankie had to vaporize four in the last few months of experimenting, and he had the scars to prove it. The aliens liked to bite.

This next one though, it would be the sweet spot. He had done the math, or rather, he had made a reanimated scientist do the math for him. Numbers do not lie, and neither do the dead. Frankie trusted his soldiers. This next one, it would work.

“I won’t be alone no more,” Frankie said.

He waved a dead mechanic to his bidding. The revenant picked up a fresh corpse, this one a young scientist with most of his body intact. The missing pieces could be plugged with medical putty. Frankie wanted someone he could talk to, a necromancer that knew the proper theory as well as he did. They could drink and be best friends, and they could swap stories on thwarting Death and God until a ship came to save them both.

“I won’t be alone no more,” Frankie repeated.

The revenant propped the body into the machine, along with a precise amount of alien matter, weighed on a gram scale. Frankie nodded to his mangled secretary, and she nodded back. It was like talking but not quite. This would be the real deal.

Time passes in fits and starts for the nervous, and so Frankie waited with alcohol on his breath and a thudding in his heart. The machine worked the corpse. Green lights flashed on the outskirts of his vision, and the thicker tubes leaked with fluids that smelled like cancer mixed with grease. The revenants watched and waited.

Just as the machine was winding down, it occurred to Frankie that he forgot to pluck out the zombie’s eyes.

“Aw fuck,” he said, reaching for his gun. “Aw stupid, shit, fuck!”

The dead woman nodded in agreement.

“Well you shoulda told me before ya hit start!”

She nodded again.

“Fucking idiot. See if you ever get promoted in this man’s army.”

Well, best case nothing happened. Worst case, Frankie had to vaporize another zombie into dust. They’d try again. There were more alien bits all around. Plenty of ingredients, the flesh still jiggly, the blood still wet.

The revenant fell from the machine like the others, landing on its knees. It didn’t look any different. Mangled, scrawny, uncoordinated. Instead of crawling to its feet, it slammed its head into the ground and pounded at the floor with its fists like a toddler throwing a tantrum. Then it screamed.

“It can talk!” Frankie shouted. He whooped with victory. The zombie woman with no legs nodded. “It can talk!”

The revenant’s scream was human, or close enough. It had a light voice, small and thin like its body. It sparked a twinge of a headache behind Frankie’s left eye. He ran over to great his newest creation, to welcome it to the world. The zombie, meanwhile, beat at the floor until its hands bled.

“There, there son,” Frankie said. He picked the zombie up into a big, bear hug. The zombie gargled something halfway between a curse and a shriek, and Frankie patted it on the back. He tried to make the gesture feel like a military admiral and a worried father all in one. His breath smelled like whiskey. “It’ll be okay. Just a little tense is all.”

“You!” the zombie said.

“Yes!” Frankie roared in its face. “Yes it worked!”

Reanimation had given the revenant’s features a strange once-over. It tightened every muscle into what had once been a fairly normal corpse now looked like a thousand rounds of plastic surgery gone wrong. Its eyes were green with necromancer magic, and its lips were a bloodless grey. The corners of its mouth stretched all the way to its ears.

“Son,” Frankie said. “You’re the best damned thing I’ve ever seen. Or at least, in the last year.”

“You hurt me,” the revenant said. It eyed Frankie up and down. “Hurt every organ I have.”

Frankie gave it another pat on the back. “That’s called being alive! We just spat in God’s face. Death too. You want a drink?” Frankie gestured at the table behind him. “It’ll make the hurt go away.”

The zombie rolled its neck, its shoulders. Frankie could hear its muscles threatening to rip. “No,” it said. “I want the hurt to stay.”

“Yeah?” Frankie blinked. “Well, if you insist.” Then he laughed, because it had been over a year since he had talked to anyone but himself, and it felt so good to not be alone.

With a movement too precise to be human, the zombie ripped at its torn scrubs, revealing missing pieces of skin and bone underneath. A monster had gotten it good. Ripped a chunk right out of its ribs.

“I can see everything wrong with me,” the revenant said. “There’s so much.” It turned to Frankie. “I can see everything wrong with you, too. There’s even more.”

“Hey now!” Frankie said, his hand turning into an angry point. “You watch yourself. I brought you back. You should be grateful.”

The revenant shook its head. “I was never gone. You just hurt me.” It laughed. The sound was of aliens tearing each other to pieces. “You weren’t supposed to spit in Death’s face, Frankie. Only God can do that.”

Frankie took a step back. A touch of fear worked its way through the booze in his system. It made his blood feel cold. “How’d you know my name?”

“I know everything,” the revenant said. “I see everything.”

“Yeah.” Frankie shrugged in apology. “I forgot to take your eyes first. Like a rule or something.”

The zombie looked Frankie up and down in the same way Frankie might examine a mediocre piece of meat. Sure it was edible, but he could do better. But that was back in Sheet-Metal Florida. On the station, any meat was gift, a cause to celebrate. Frankie laughed and hollered, but the zombie did not. Children don’t know how to be grateful. Neither does the Devil.

“Come here,” Frankie said. He grabbed the revenant by the hand and tugged. “Let’s have a drink. I haven’t had a drink with another living person in almost a year.”

The zombie lurched forward but did not fall. Its tight face burst into an evil smile, one with too many teeth. It waited until Frankie was mid pour before it spoke: “Frankie. It’s been three years.”

“What?”

Before the attack, that kind of statement would have seen Frankie drop the bottle, but muscle memory knew what to do. Frankie poured himself a stiff drink.

“You’ve been here for three years, alone,” the zombie said.

Frankie shook his head. “Nope. Signed up for four years. Spent two before the monsters showed up, then another year alone. Got one more left.” He took a swig and delighted as the raw bourbon burned his mouth. He had found that bottle in the admiral’s quarters—for special occasions only. Like today. “Aw fuck,” he said. He looked around in a quick panic. “Only brought the one glass.”

“We can share,” the zombie said. “I do not mind.”

“Okay!”

Frankie handed it the glass, and the zombie took a careful taste. Bourbon dribbled out a hole in its mouth, where a stray alien tooth and aimed for its jugular and missed.

“It is good,” the zombie said. He raised the glass. “To God.”

Instead of taking it back, Frankie grabbed the bottle. They clinked glass.

“To me,” Frankie said.

The zombie shook its head. “Not you, Frankie. You are further from God than I am, and right now, I am a monster.”

“Hey!” Frankie turned his spare hand back into an angry point. “You got a real attitude, you know?” He pointed to the military hat on his head. “You see this? You know what this means, son?”

The zombie laughed. It was not a kind sound. “That you are a thief.”

“I’m the captain!”

“And the president,” the zombie said. It took a drink, which spilled down its neck. “A king, a sultan, a warlord. You are the last human in the universe. But you are not a God, Frankie, and Death is very, very mad at you for trying.”

“What?”

“Follow me.”

When Frankie didn’t move, the zombie snatched the bottle from his hands. Frankie yelped, because the zombie moved too fast. Like it was a monster and not a corpse. The strained skin on its hands looked ready to burst, and underneath wouldn’t be muscle and bone but mouths with teeth.

Frankie reached for his gun. “I’ll kill you before you kill me,” he said. “My soldiers will help. This is my ship.”

The zombie smiled, and its smile went all the way to its ears. Its teeth were jagged and sharp, like a monster’s. “Watch this,” it said.

Frankie still had his spare hand in a point, so the zombie mimicked it. It pointed at each revenant in the room. One by one, Frankie’s small army of dead bodies crumpled back to Death.

“I can see how they work,” the revenant said. “I can see everything.”

The muscle memory in Frankie’s hand finally went out, and he dropped his glass. It hit the ground and shattered. The smell of bourbon filled his small corner of the room, just thick enough to mask the cancer and grease, but not the blood. They had spent hours cleaning, but it would take a lifetime to remove all the blood.

“Now follow me.”

Frankie still had his gun, but he didn’t see much choice in the matter. He followed his zombie through the ship, down broken hallways that used to smell like war and look like genocide. The blood was gone; the ghosts were gone too. Lights flickered off as they went. The temperature in the facility began to drop.

The station had an observatory of sorts, but it was never used because no one actually wanted to view the pulsar. It flashed too fast, burned the eyes too much. Even with all the shielding in place, the neutron star hurt more than it inspired wondered. Frankie hadn’t been there since his third or fourth day on the station. That was almost three years ago. Or over six. Time had lost all meaning during the attack, and it never regained its footing. The zombie lied, but so did vodka.

Frankie slipped in a pool of wet blood. The revenant caught him.

“Almost there.”

They entered a room that was once so bright it caused instant sun burns. Now it was black. Frankie felt his legs go loose. His cracked, tired face turned into a horrified grimace. Everything was gone. The pulsar, the stars, everything.

“Here,” the zombie said, handing Frankie the bottle. “It’ll help.”

Frankie took a gulp. The bourbon burned at his gums. He ran his hand through his hair and pulled out more. It was greasy and smelled like old sweat.

“Why?” Frankie asked.

The zombie shrugged. “You played God, and you spat in Death’s face. They got mad. So they called me.”

“You?” Frankie blinked. “Who are you?”

Now the zombie grinned. “You know. I think you’ve always known, Frankie. And now I’m here to make a deal, because that’s what I do.

“You can die right here, right now. I’ll make it swift and only a little painful. I deserve some fun too. Or I can leave. I’ll take this bottle with me, and you can spend the next two years alone until the cancer takes you.”

Frankie looked at the bottle, at the zombie. He remembered he had his gun, and drew it on the zombie. “What about this?”

“That’s option two.”

“Can I have the bottle back?”

The Devil thought, shrugged, nodded. “I like you, Frankie. I hate you, but I like you too. I think you’re the right kind of human. Stupid. Sad. So spiteful it’s like a drug. But you went to places you weren’t supposed to go. You found a bad idea, and you grabbed it with both hands and yanked.”

Frankie took a swig. The alcohol warmed the fear in his blood. “I don’t want to be alone,” he said. “You didn’t have to kill everyone.”

Now the Devil grinned. “I didn’t, but I wanted to. We forgot you. Would have kept forgetting you, but you spat where you shouldn’t. God’s pissed. Death is too. Now I’m here, and this is your deal. What will you pick?”

Frankie blinked a drunk’s blink—slow and thoughtful with no thought behind it. “What’s death like?”

“Horrible.”

Frankie sagged. Outside, the universe was nothing. Empty. So cold and quiet it hurt to look at. “Worse than being alone?”

“It’s about the same,” the Devil said.

Frankie jiggled his bottle. “Maybe this will kill me first, before the cancer.”

The Devil nodded. “Is that your answer?”

“Yeah.”

“Then shoot me.”

Frankie shook his head. “I don’t wanna.”

The Devil knelt. He put a hand on Frankie’s shoulder. It was the last comforting hand Frankie would ever feel.

“That’s not how the deal goes, Frankie. You shoot me, or I eat you. Now pick.”

“No!”

“Pick!”

Frankie tightened his hand on the half-empty bottle of bourbon. Then he fired his gun.

The Disappearance of Dilly Wisconsin

A drone flies over what is left of Dilly Wisconsin. It takes about a minute for the footage to turn from high-def to grainy, because things like cameras no longer work there. Once you hit Main Street it’s a dead zone. The drone climbs higher, higher, until the town is a patchwork of rooftops and the military jeeps are green ants, but that dead zone extends into the clouds. Maybe to space. The drone breaks. The YouTube video ends. I restart it, the volume of my laptop at max. I’m desperate to hear a sign of life. An insect buzz or a bird chip. A dog barking, even if it’s in pain. Something. But there’s nothing, no animals or insects, no people. I bet if you took a soil sample, you wouldn’t find a single microbe in it. Hell, I bet in a few months, not even the plants will be around. A town of 500 people disappeared, and all that’s left are scattered questions and empty houses.

I hope the military doesn’t find anything. I hope they clean up, sweep up the glass and take down the prison bars, but I hope they don’t find anything. There are some places government and guns should not go.

Outside, a parrot taps at my window with its beak. Google says it’s a conure, a small bird that got hit with every color of the rainbow at least once, and twice with yellow. It is not a talking bird.

“Eat the glass,” she shrieks through my window. “In the cage! Eat the glass!”

“Go away.”

“Eat the glass!”

“Shut up!” I grab the T.V. remote and toss it at the wall, hoping the thud will scare her. The remote bangs with enough force to spill the batteries, but the bird doesn’t even blink. Just continues to tap at the glass and shriek.

“Eat the glass! I don’t want you to die! Eat the glass!”

“No!”

“In the cage. Eat the glass. In the cage. Help, help, what is that?”

The bird laughs a human sound, and I do too because there’s not much else to do. I get up and open the window. She flutters in and lands on my shoulder to cuddle against my neck. She’s affectionate, for a bird. I move to pet her, and she nibbles at my fingers before flying to the ground to knock around the batteries. Playful, too. Google says conures can live up to 15 years, and I don’t know what to do with her. Some days I like that she proves it all happened—that I’m not crazy—others I want her to fly away and never return. She always does though.

Sometimes I think about stuffing her down the garbage disposal.

“You ever gonna tell me your name?” I ask her.

“Eat the glass.”

“That’s not a name.” I look back at the Youtube video. The drone hovers passed a window, or what’s left of a window. There’s not a speck of glass left in Dilly Wisconsin. That disappeared with the people.

“Eat the glass,” I say.

“Follow the eye,” the bird says. “Follow the yellow-brick eye.”

I shake my head. “The eyes were blue. And it wasn’t bricks but concrete.”

The bird screams, a mimic of five hundred people dying at once. Today is one of those days I want to stick her down the garbage disposal.

“I want to forget,” I say.

“Me too,” she says.

Sometimes, I worry we’re both still stuck there and we don’t even know it.

*

My memory of getting to Dilly is hazy but not gone. I drove there. The weather was nice, the sky cloudless. I listened to country music on the radio. It took about an hour, because Dilly is out of the way of everyone, sitting almost smack-dab between Sparta and Mauston. It’s one of those Wisconsin towns that’s surrounded by farmland, all the barns round like little stadiums instead of red squares with pointed roofs. There are more bars than churches, and more lawns than houses. It’s the kind of place you dream of leaving instead of moving to.

It was early in the week when I drove there, so Monday or Tuesday. I was in my work van. But that’s where things don’t add up, because we don’t service Dilly. I do internet installs for local joint called Frontier Internet, and while we’ve branched outside of the bigger cities some, we don’t go much further than Hillsboro. We certainly don’t go near Dilly. That’s Charter/Spectrum territory.

The closer I got to Dilly, the more it all felt like a dream. I was driving the speed limit yet going too slow; I was moving to adjust the radio, and my arm was too heavy. About five minutes from town, it occurred to me I should get out and walk the rest of the way. Just leave my van and tools and phone behind.

That’s where the gaps in my memory begin—or at least, that’s where I started to notice them.

I think I shuffled more than walked to the gas station that sits at the entrance of Dilly Wisconsin. It struck me as funny, because that worn-down Gas n’ Grub reminded me of a front gate. Walking to it, through it, by it, it was like walking through the entrance to an amusement park. Come for the rollercoaster; stay because you can’t leave.

There was an old beat-to-shit car parked at the pump with its front door open. The windows must have been down, because I could see right inside. As I got closer, I saw that the windshield was gone. The gas pump was on the ground and sputtering money into the dirt, so I turned that off. That’s when I tripped over the shoes.

“What?” I said, and that kinda woke me up. I hadn’t talked in over an hour, and hearing a voice sent my nerves screaming. “Where am I?”

I reached for my phone. It was in my back pocket. “Who am I?”

Bill. My name is Bill Schindler. Not sure why I almost forgot.

I clicked through my phone. Reception was bad, and I couldn’t pull up the internet at all, but I figured I could make a call. I found my boss and tapped his name. Maybe he could help.

The call connected, but instead of Lee’s bored, drawling voice, all I heard was T.V. static.

“Oh,” I said. For just a bit, everything made sense. Then it didn’t again. “Huh.”

The gas station was full of stuff but empty of people. I found another pair of shoes on the ground, these for a woman, and a purse on the counter. Someone had broken the front window from the outside in, because glass covered the floor. I crunched over it as I made my way to the fridge. That was broken, or at least, the sliding glass door was.

I grabbed a water. It was warm, but I didn’t care.

“Hello?” I called. I opened the water and took a swig. It didn’t taste funny, probably because it was from a bottle. Later, when I had to drink from a tap, that water tasted funny. Dilly had grainy water.

“Hello?” I tried again, this time louder. I gave the glass on the ground a little nudge. “Where am I?”

I poked my head behind the counter and found another pair of empty shoes. I also saw more broken glass. Some of it had price stickers on it, like it was for sale.

There was this nagging fear that I needed to go back to the van, but I couldn’t remember where I parked it. Like, I knew it was on the side of the road, but I couldn’t remember which road. I checked my phone again, this time for the date and time, but the numbers didn’t show. Just T.V. static. It was still pretty bright out though. I think only an hour had passed.

Unless I had been there more than a day already.

Dilly’s Main Street is only a few miles long, if that. Roads are pretty wide. I remember the yellow lines separating traffic were blue instead of yellow. Fire hydrants were also blue, as were the curbs marking places not to park, not that there were many of those. The first house I walked to, or maybe it was the third, someone had spray-painted the sidewalk out front blue. It was fresh too, because I could smell the paint. Must have been done yesterday or the day prior.

Part of me wondered if I helped. I checked my hands for paint but they were clean.

The house wasn’t much to look at. Small, old, and in need of some new windows. All the glass was gone, replaced with metal beams that looked like electrical conduit. Or prison bars. I jiggled the front door but it was locked; I then headed to a bedroom window and looked in. Was a kid’s room, painted mint green and covered in toys, mostly plastic figures from stuff I didn’t recognize. Few books. Seemed normal, if you ignored the make-shift prison bars on the window.

On the kid’s bed were his shoes, sitting next to each other like they were put away.

I walked to the neighbor’s house and found about the same thing, only he had a blue eye drawn on his front door. That was locked, but the prison bars over the window were pretty far apart. I wormed my way inside.

“Hello?” I called. “Anyone here?”

It was strange how normal the house looked. Clean, dusted, stuff scattered about because people lived in it, or used to. The T.V. was on but the volume off. It displayed static. Reception in the whole town must have gone and died. There were pictures on the walls of the people that lived there, but someone had taken a Sharpie to them. Everyone had blue eyes now.

I walked by a bedroom but didn’t go in because it smelled so bad I almost threw up. Instead I rounded to the dining room. Found a square table with four chairs. Everyone was set to eat, chairs pushed in, empty shoes where feet should be. Salt and pepper within easy reach. But the plates were covered in broken glass and dried blood, and the big serving pot in the middle of the table was filled with glass instead of food. Even had a metal ladle wedged in it, all scratched up.

But I think what made me real scared wasn’t the glass or the missing people but the dog’s food bowl. It was filled with glass too. Glass and blood, and it made me wonder what that smell from the bedroom was.

I ran out the house, but I went out the way I came. I didn’t like how that blue eye on the front door looked at me.

There’s a big gap in my memory after that, but I have this muscle memory of checking more houses. Of searching for people and pets and finding nothing but shoes and T.V. static. Personal belongings were defaced with blue paint. Light bulbs were missing, only to be found in microwaves or blenders. Every house had a pair of empty shoes.

It’s not quite right to say I woke up, but my next real memory is walking through a cemetery. Only it wasn’t a cemetery but a forest. All the trees grew in straight, perfect rows, mostly bushy pines but some oaks and maples too. Their branches all crowded together and snarled like a big ball of yarn. Each grew from a grave, blocking headstones or knocking them aside. I couldn’t read any of the writing on them. It was either defaced with blue paint or filled in with T.V. static.

I remember … it took a while to find my way out, because the trees were so close together and thick, like they’d been there for dozens of years. I kept getting lost. Everything was damp and smelled like dead leaves, but I couldn’t find anything growing. No mushrooms, no mold, only grass beginning to brown from lack of sunlight and rain. The trees drooped. Few had bark flaking off, like they were hit with that emerald ash borer infection from a few years back.

I guess it’s weird now, but it wasn’t then—but almost all of them trees had pieces of metal hanging from their branches. Thick pipes that dragged their lower limbs to the ground. They clanged together like dull wind chimes when the wind picked up. I figured the whole town had metal hanging from places it wasn’t supposed to, why not the trees? But now I wonder, maybe they weren’t hanging from the trees. Maybe they were growing from them. Like fruit.

By the time I stumbled out the forest, it was getting pretty dark. Clouds were wooshing across the sky, going too fast to be from wind. It felt like the whole town was moving. I wanted to sit down, but I was afraid I wouldn’t get back up. Everything was all heavy again.

There was a Lutheran church next to the cemetery. It wasn’t very big, taller than it was wide with a really pointed roof. More like a spike than a steeple. All the windows were missing, and the big front doors were burst open. Inside, it was all blue. But I could hear something moving around, something still alive and upset, so I marched for it.

“Hello?” I called. My voice cracked. I was so thirsty. “Anyone in there?”

“Hello!” a cartoon voice squawked. “Help! Help! Hello!”

“What’s going on?”

“Eat the glass!”

I stopped outside the door. My inner ear did a summersault, because all of a sudden I wanted to throw up. I wanted that more than I wanted to go into that building. I could smell dead things in there. T.V. static and blood. It was a good place made bad, and only monsters remained.

But the voice called, “Help!” and I needed help too. I stepped inside.

*

I found the animals. I don’t want to talk about it.

*

There’s another gap in my memory, and I think that one wasn’t Dilly’s doing but my own. Some things you need to forget or you’ll kill yourself. Stuff your own wrist down the garbage disposal and turn it on. The bird remembers though, and it’s those times I throw her outside and scream for her to die. My throat turns to T.V. static.

I woke up inside another house. I, or we I guess, broke in through a window. The bird was trapped in a metal cage all welded shut, and without my tools I couldn’t get it open. She seemed happy to have me though. She rubbed at my fingers when I put them through the little bars, and she cawed a bunch of happy bird noises too. I don’t know how long she had been alone in that church, but it must have been days. She was so thin and sorry looking. Missing feathers and covered in bird shit.

“Let’s get you some food,” I said.

“Eat the glass!”

“Water too. I’m thirsty.”

The faucet still worked, though the water tasted bad. That’s when I found out Dilly had grainy water. It gets stuck between your teeth. I drank it anyways though, because I was so thirsty I didn’t know what else to do. The bird drank a bunch, too.

I raided the pantry and the fridge next. Both only held glass. The food was in the garbage can under the sink. I had to dig passed moldy cheese and spoiled fruit to find the stuff in boxes, but at least they were still good. SpaghettiOs don’t really expire. Also found some snack bars, which the bird ate. I stuffed a bunch in my pocket just in case it took another few days to walk the last half-mile out of Dilly.

“I think we’re lost,” I remember saying as I ate cold noodles out of a can. “Do you know where we are?”

“No,” the bird said.

“Oh. What about the people?”

“They ate the glass. Ate the glass and took the elevator.”

I shook my head. “There’s no elevators in Dilly. I bet the tallest building here isn’t even three stories.”

“You can’t wear shoes in the elevator.”

“Oh. Well that makes sense.”

We had a pretty good talk, me and that bird. I just wish I could remember what we talked about.

We left together, and this time we took the front door even though it had a blue eye on it. With the bird, I was less afraid of the eyes. She made them seem more like drawings than people. The driveway was painted blue, and there was a pair of shoes in the middle of it, with footprints leading to them but none leading out.

By this point the sun was basically set, and Dilly was all black. Not a single light in the whole town. Not even the street lights worked. There were cars everywhere, and none had windows or windshields. I thought about taking one, but I didn’t have the keys and I’m not sure it would have started anyways. Things just didn’t work in Dilly Wisconsin anymore. No electricity, no internet. I’m not even sure a fire would have started.

I do remember breaking into another house, this time to steal a sweatshirt and a winter coat. It was nice during the day, but still pretty cold at night. Wisconsin weather always bites a little bit, no matter the season.

“Huh,” I said when I found the elevator. “You were right.”

“Eat the glass,” the bird said. “Eat the glass, and get in the elevator.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think we should do either.”

The elevator was parked in the middle of the road, on a patch of freshly-poured concrete. It was pretty nondescript as far as elevators go. A sliding silver door, buttons for open and close, and a little sign to say which floor we were on. The buttons had eyes drawn on them, but that was pretty normal for Dilly. We were on the first floor.

As we got closer, the elevator doors opened on their own. There was a working light inside, and more paintings of eyes. The floor was covered in overlapping footprints, most blue from paint, others red from glass.

The bird screamed, and I guess I did too. We ran away.

We’d come back the next day.

*

It took another day to reach the end of Dilly Wisconsin. I don’t remember much of it, only that I spent most of it hungry and thirsty. The bird talked, but she didn’t have much to say. I guess I didn’t either.

Main Street turned into one of those back-end county roads, which eventually found its way to a highway. I figured once we got out far enough, we could make a phone call. Also figured I might find my van, because though it didn’t make any sense, I knew it would be at the end of the journey and not the beginning.

“Almost there,” I remember saying.

“You can’t leave this way,” the parrot told me. “We tried already.”

“No we haven’t.”

“Yes we have.”

I rubbed at my face. I had more than two days worth of stubble growing. I only had two days worth of memory. The rest was T.V. static. Sometimes, when I look out the window now, I see the T.V. static. Black and white noise that crinkles in a meaningless hiss. It hides in glass, like windows and cups, but it’s not in the windows and cups. It’s behind them. I think if you try really hard to find it, you’ll see it too. It’s not a Dilly thing but a universe thing.

We hit the end of Main Street. The town came to an end, but instead of a county road surrounded by forest and dirt, all we found was concrete. It was a parking lot desert that went on forever, as far as the eye could see in every direction. The clouds continued to move too fast, and the sky was the wrong color, and I was crying and my tears were grainy like the water.

“Told you,” the bird said. She sounded like she was crying, too.

“I didn’t want to believe you.”

“Eat the glass.”

“We’re out of food again. I don’t know if I can spend another night looking for more.” I stuck my fingers in the bird’s cage, and she rubbed against them. “I don’t think you can either.”

“Take the elevator.”

I shook my head. “What if we just run back, down the road as fast as we can? It’s only about a mile. Maybe two. If we don’t stop, we can hit that gas station and then we’ll be out. It’s a door.”

The bird squawked. She tried to fly but couldn’t, because she was in a cage within a cage.

“We tried that,” she said. “It doesn’t work.”

“But I don’t want to take the elevator!”

“Eat the glass, take the elevator. Help! Help! What is that?”

We stood there awhile, just looking at that big, concrete wasteland. It never moved. The hours ticked by, and my shadow shifted with the sun, getting longer behind me, but the concrete was always the same. Light grey, flat, no cracks. It was like looking at forever. I wondered how far we could walk before we died. I rubbed at my face and wondered if we had already tried that.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“To the elevator?”

“Yeah. To the elevator.”

There’s another gap in my memory, but I don’t think that one matters much. We found our way back to the elevator. The doors opened as we approached, and it was like walking towards the light. Dilly was pitch black with midnight again, not a star or moon in the sky. No lights anywhere else. But that elevator shined for us, and the air warmed as we approached. Even the smell got better. Less dead animals and dried blood and more blue paint. Blue paint smells better than dead animals and dried blood. I guess it’s like this: If you want to make friends with a starving man, give him food; if you want to make friends with a terrified man, give him comfort. Clever trick. We marched in without a fight. I even took my shoes off.

Inside it was just an elevator, but I got the impression it was bigger on the inside than the outside, if that makes sense. Like if we had to, we could fit all five hundred people in there and not be cramped or dead. The floor was still footprinted with blue and brown, and eyes stared out the buttons, but they were only drawings. A few were pretty lifelike. I guess Dilly Wisconsin had at least one good artist in her before she disappeared.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Eat the glass?” the parrot asked back, but she was just as confused as I was.

There were normal elevator buttons. I could go up or down. Fingerprints stained the up button. I guess Dilly disappeared into the sky.

I saw what happened to Dilly. I didn’t want to follow in those shoeless footsteps.

“Let’s go down,” I said. “Maybe the basement has an exit.”

“Okay,” the bird said. “I think down is up today.”

“That means forward is back.”

“To the van?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “To the van.”

I pushed the down button. The doors closed with a little swish, and the elevator made a dull chime. I felt us move. It was almost pleasant, in a way. Relaxing. Except this primal, lizard part of my brain kept screaming that the elevator was alive—that we weren’t in Dilly anymore or anywhere on Earth. No. We were inside something, like we had marched right into a mouth, and now it was swallowing us whole. If it was human, then stomach acid would come next. The elevator would fill, and we’d drown and melt at the same time. Turn to mush and nutrients, though there wasn’t much to eat by that point. Me and the bird were half-starved to death.

The thing is though, we weren’t in a human. We weren’t even in a monster, because monsters make sense. No, we were in Dilly, and Dilly was inside T.V. static.

There was an emergency stop button on the elevator. I slammed it with my fist. The elevator squealed to a halt, and my ears popped from the pressure. The bird howled a bunch of noises birds aren’t supposed to make.

“Sorry,” I croaked.

“That hurt.”

“I know.” I pushed the open button. “But I want to check something. Something important.”

“I want to go home.”

“Me too.”

It took a bit, but eventually those doors opened. They were slow, grinding and pissed off, but we were in an elevator and it was stuck with elevator logic. The doors slid aside, and me and that bird, we looked out to a universe of T.V. static. That’s all it was; that’s all there ever will be. Just hissing, visual noise. Black and white. No people, no up or down, no nothing. I waited for patterns to form, and I waited for a message or words. Maybe God would talk to us, say He was sorry. Maybe the static would stop, and we’d be able to see the real picture, whatever the T.V. was supposed to show. Heaven or Hell or the Big Bang. We waited, and we screamed, and we cried, and then I pushed the button to close the doors.

There’s nothing. It’s just static. Just formless noise, and maybe it’s alive, and maybe it isn’t, but that’s all it is.

Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking of what might live out there. There were so many eyes in Dilly Wisconsin, so many staring, glaring eyes. On the doors and the buttons and the roads. Something must have looked at that town from the T.V. static. Something must have made all of this happen. But whatever swims through that world outside our own, I don’t want to know it. It’s not kind. It’s not God.

I closed the elevator doors, and it continued to descend. Hours passed. Maybe a day. I was so hungry it was hard to focus. I stank, and the bird stank, and the whole room heated up like we were in an oven. The air cycled up and down like it was breathing. I thought we were gonna die, and honestly, sometimes I think we did. But eventually I stopped screaming, and the bird went to sleep, and the elevator dinged. We were on the first floor again. The doors opened.

We stepped out into a sunny, Midwestern day, about six feet from my van.

I don’t remember driving us home, but I did.

*

Sometimes the bird shrieks for no reason, and sometimes I see things I don’t want to. It took about a month, but eventually the military left. They walled the place off barbed wire and threats of violence. Called it a gas leak. Nothing makes sense. The internet is awash in rumors and conspiracy theories, and at this point, any one is as good as any other. They’re all lies, but so is the truth. Up is down. Dilly is gone. Planes don’t fly over that area no more. I know because Sparta has a little airport, and once when I was over there working on CAT5 hookup, I heard one of the pilots talking. Said they had to change the flight patterns up a bit. Have to head straight south to Viroqua before turning east to Madison.

I’ve spent hours searching the internet for information, trying to find accounts for every person that lived in Dilly. Even if the adults didn’t use Twitter or Tiktok, the kids must have, right? But they’re all gone. Deleted or removed or vanished. I guess the big companies are cooperating with the military. Tonight on the news, they’ll show more footage of tanks and jeeps leaving, and someone will blame a cult. They all went crazy. They all killed themselves. In a decade, we’ll find the grave.

But you can’t dig through that concrete. I know. I was there. You can’t dig through nothing.

I tap at my leg, and the bird flutters over. She likes to be petted. When she isn’t screaming or telling me to eat glass, she’s a nice pet. She doesn’t chase the shadows away, but she makes the eyes look less real. Like drawings instead of people. I like having her around.

“What should I name you?” I ask.

“Follow the yellow brick road.”

I shake my head. “It was blue. And it was concrete.”

“They screamed, at the end.”

“I know.” I let her nibble on my fingers. “We did, too.”

There’s one thing I did find, on my searches through social media. Dilly had one good artist somewhere within her, and I think I found her Instagram account. Her name was Annabelle Shivers, and she was 55 years old. She liked to draw and paint, but mostly she used water colors.

Her last painting was of a broken, old-timey dumbwaiter floating above a forest like a helicopter. The sky was hazy with clouds, but there was a break in them, a place for light. She called it I Think I Found God.

None of her other paintings look like that. She mostly stuck to portraits of her grandkids and the flowers in her garden. Sometimes the neighbor’s cat.

If you stare at her painting long enough, it turns to T.V. static.

The Grimoire Library – Chapter 1

Chapter 1: The Dream. The Door. The Fire.

Norbert was drawing a spider. He was also trying to ignore a monotone lecture on President Roosevelt and Garret’s nonstop kicks at the back of his chair. Well, at least the spider looked alright. He worked his pencil, adding hairs to the spider’s abdomen and a little menace to each of the spider’s eyes. He only had forty minutes to finish, and the picture had to be as real as possible since Chelsea sat in his desk next period and was a huge arachnophobe. She was also a total bitch.

Satisfied with what he had thus far, Norbert dug into his backpack, past unfinished homework and incomplete notes, and pulled out his colored pencils. They were the one thing he never forgot to bring to class.

“Fag,” Garret whispered from behind. He gave Norbert’s chair a harsh kick just as brown pencil touched white paper, sending a thick line across the drawing.

Norbert reached into his bag for a kneaded eraser. The picture was still fixable. He went to work, being as careful as possible while Garret continued drumming, and after a few lost minutes, the worst of the line was gone. He could shade and color around the rest. Norbert looked up at the clock, assuming history was still a thousand years from being over, and saw he only had twenty minutes left. He was running out of time!

“Okay class,” the very short, very bald Mr. Yehle said, turning away from his PowerPoint presentation. “Who can tell me which book convinced President Roosevelt to establish the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906? Hint. You are to have it finished next week!”

Norbert froze, eraser in one hand and pencil in the other. If he stood perfectly still, maybe he wouldn’t be seen.

“Uh … Jack. Tell us all about The Jungle, if you would.”

Norbert went back to work, adding lighting and shadows to his fuzzy arachnid. With two minutes to spare, he finished. The spider looked pretty good, not his best work, but respectable. It would have to do. Just as the bell rang, he flipped over the drawing and wrote, “To Chelsea, from your secret admirer” in squiggly letters.

“What’s wrong with you, Nobhead?” Garret asked as he stood. He towered over Norbert, and his breath stank of cigarettes.

“Leave me alone.”

Garret shoved Norbert aside, making sure to use his elbow so it hurt. A few kids snickered. One looked away. No one actually did anything because this was Wild Creek High, the high school that strove for no bullying but made exceptions in all cases all the time. The teachers called it progress. Most of the students did too. But then, they were the ones doing the bullying.

Norbert grabbed his things. It wasn’t personal, he knew, just part of being in high school. Every class had to have a Norbert, that weird loser kid with no friends. The one that was shorter than everyone and still looked like he belonged in middle school, the one with a goofy name and curly, stupid hair. The one who always wore long-sleeve shirts to cover his wrists and took antidepressants when he got home. No, it wasn’t personal.

It felt personal though.

Norbert waited outside and watched Chelsea walk into Mr. Yehle’s history class, laughing her high-pitched laugh and paying no attention to him. She was the one who had coined the nickname, “Nobhead.” That conversation had went something like, “Hey Norbert, do you know what a Nobhead is? It means penis in British.” Short, sweet, and to the point.

It didn’t take long for a blood-curdling scream to come sailing out the open door. Laughter followed alongside Mr. Yehle yelling for everyone to sit down.

Norbert smiled. The rest of his day would suck, but at least he had this.

*

When Norbert got home, he headed to his room, passing his older sister Michelle and her friends. All were seniors, and no one bothered to acknowledge his presence. That wasn’t personal either, Norbert knew, just part of the hierarchy that was high school. Everyone had a role to play. They were just following the rules.

Norbert’s room was a disaster of scattered clothes and art supplies, with a filthy card table wedged into one corner. Streaks of paint covered it from top to bottom, and old newspaper covered the floor around his work area in a hopeful effort to contain spills. The walls were a light blue, the sheets on his bed a cream white. His comforter was somewhere on the floor because making the bed was stupid when he was just going to unmake it the next night.

He dry-swallowed one of his little red pills, today marking a full month on the new prescription, and approached his card table. On a large piece of cardstock was the start a pastel-smeared version of Saturn, pockmarked with fingerprints and messy blending. Oil pastels were harder to work with than colored pencils. Norbert refused to let them win though, so he sat down and worked a quick hour, smudging different shades of brown, white, and yellow into a windblown circle. Progress was slow, and chunks of kneaded eraser cluttered around the drawing and his floor. His fingers looked like a bad drip painting.

“Hey,” Michelle said, barging in before Norbert could tell her to go away. She gave him a big smile, which meant her friends were gone and he was no longer invisible. “What’cha workin’ on?”
            “School project.  Can’t get it right.”

Michelle walked over and put her hands on Norbert’s shoulders, leaning over him in an exaggerated fashion. He didn’t like being touched, but since she was his big sister, that gave her the right to annoy him. “Looks fine to me,” she said.

“It sucks.”

“It’s fine. Few finger prints here and there, but you can get rid of those no problem. Just draw the rings over them, and—”

“I can’t get it right! I keep making a mess because these stupid pastels smear everywhere.”

“You could wipe your fingers clean.”

Norbert sighed. “What do you want?”

Michelle grinned. She stood a head taller than Norbert, with long, black hair that went well passed her shoulders when she didn’t have it in a pony tail, which was almost never. Her eyes were brown, her clothing an immaculate level of disheveled-lazy in autumn colors. She wrapped Norbert in a big, overly-tight hug that sent her earrings jingling.

“Well baby brother, I’m glad you asked!” she said. “The senior year book committee is going to host a contest to design this year’s cover. Everyone is sick of our stupid mascot and his stupid grin.”

Norbert shrugged. Rocky the Alligator was an oafish-looking character who wore a backwards baseball cap because he was invented in the early ‘90’s. No one liked him, partly because he failed on every level of looking cool and partly because alligators weren’t known to live in Colorado.

“And you want me to draw a cover for you.”

“Could you? Please, please, please?”

“Why?”

“Because this is the first time the student body has been given a chance to change the look of Rocky. Don’t you want to be part of Wild Creek history?”

“No.”

“Oh come on. High school is supposed to be the best time of our lives!”

“If that’s true, then I should just k—” Norbert cut himself off. He wasn’t supposed to joke about that. “Sorry,” he said. “But seriously, why do you want me to do this?”

“To give you a chance to do something for the school that doesn’t involve moping around and being alone?”

“But I don’t care about our stupid school.”

“You should!” Michelle’s tone turned serious. “We were able to talk dad out of sending us to St. Mary’s, but if you don’t start pretending to give a shit, he’ll reconsider. I overheard him talking to mom last time your grades were emailed out. Do you want to go to that shitty Christian school? It ruined our sister.”

Now it was Norbert’s turn to look panicky. St. Mary’s didn’t have any art classes. None. They also made all their students attend church every day, wear uniforms, and play sports. His older sister Jane was forced to go, and now she was off at a Christian college pursuing a business degree, what Norbert’s father called, “practical.” Norbert Sr. wanted all of his children to get practical degrees, like in business or accounting, not to waste their time drawing and painting.

He also thought little of Norbert’s medical condition, which didn’t help.

“Plus,” and Michelle gave Norbert another big smile, “I think you could do something really cool. I don’t trust anyone in my class to come up with a good cover. All of our pictures are going to be in that book, and I want the cover to scream, ‘Class of 2013!’ Not, ‘Class of 1992.’”

Norbert felt something akin to pride at that. The depressed part of his brain knew Michelle was only manipulating him into doing what she wanted, but he pushed it aside. Normally that was hard; today it wasn’t.

“I’m sorry school is so hard for you,” she said, not looking at him. “I’d … well, you know….”

Norbert did. It all came down to the hands they were dealt, the roles they were forced to play.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll draw up a cover, maybe two if I find some good ideas.”

“Awesome!” Michelle gave Norbert another hug, though this one had nothing to do with annoying him. “Do something mean and scary. Something badass.”

Mean and scary? Norbert could handle that.

*

Norbert spent the rest of the night working on homework, trying his best to catch up on what he’d been ignoring. He read his history assignment and even took a few notes, though when he got to biology, all of his resolve faltered. Even with the threat of St. Mary’s, he just couldn’t make himself memorize the circulatory system. It was too hard, and the more he failed, the more he felt like a failure. He dropped the book on the floor with a loud thump and picked up his English textbook, though that didn’t last long either. Grammar was boring.

Frustrated, he went back to his desk and picked up his oil pastels. He was going to finish something tonight, even if that meant getting no sleep at all.

A few hours later, Norbert crawled into bed, half of the ringed planet done to his liking.

*

Norbert was dreaming—knew he was dreaming—but this didn’t feel like a dream. It was like he was awake. He looked at his hands, legs, and feet and saw that everything was where it should be. He felt his face and was alarmed at the touch. Dreams weren’t always accurate when it came to that particular sense. Smell or taste too. Norbert breathed in deep: dust, stale air, and a faint hint of mildew.

Unease bubbled in the back of his mind. Nightmares came with antidepressants, but this was less like dreaming and more like teleporting, only he wasn’t sure how to teleport back. What if he was stuck?

Norbert looked around. He was standing in a big room filled with black, wooden bookshelves. A dirty-faced oil lamp hung above his head, casting a fragile light that struggled against all the dark. The floor was made out of some kind of grey stone, the bricks large and strangely warm. Wherever he was, the place was spooky. It felt like a breeding ground for monsters, giant spiders, and slimy tentacle creatures. He wanted to leave.

Norbert stood in place, urging himself to wake up. Nothing happened. He closed his eyes and pictured himself laying still, breathing deep, what his therapist told him to do when he felt a spiral coming on. That also didn’t help. Pissed, and now a little scared, he pinched himself as hard as he could, until the pain made him stop. He opened his eyes.

He was trapped.

Fear crawled into him, skittering down his throat and into his chest. He told himself this was just a side effect of his new meds, that it wasn’t real. It was just a dream. That almost helped until Norbert felt a prickle on the back of his neck.

He was being watched.

Norbert ran. Oil lamps and bookshelves watched him go, rows upon rows of them, his surroundings never changing. He glanced back every few steps, but nothing was ever there. Just lamps, dark shelves, and swimming shadows. Eventually his body burned itself out, and he collapsed, light-headed and covered in sweat.

Norbert let himself even out before getting back up. He wondered what time it was. Dreams had a sense of lasting a long time, but they almost never did. This one though, this one had been going on for real hours, and he didn’t like that. It wasn’t natural. Yet it was still just a dream, and even if his mind concocted nightmare creatures to chase him, that didn’t make them real. He was safe, or as safe as he could be while trapped in his own head. Once his alarm rang, he would wake up.

In the meantime, he might as well explore. He was alone, always had been, and wooden shelves couldn’t hurt him.

Norbert marched to the nearest lamp and plucked it off its chain. It was heavy and warm, and the oil had a slight acrid smell to it. He approached another shelf and saw that it too was covered in thick, leather-bound books. This wasn’t a dungeon, it was a library. A gigantic library, perhaps the biggest library in existence. He couldn’t hope to guess how many shelves he passed already, but it had to have been hundreds. If all of them held books, then he was standing in the medieval equivalent of the Internet.

“I am in the most boring place to ever exist,” Norbert whispered. He frowned. Of all the places his mind could create, it went with a giant, spooky library? That seemed like a huge waste of potential, especially when he had the likes of Disney World to visit.

He grabbed a book and flipped to a random page. The text was gibberish, strange squiggles that seemed to read up to down instead of left to right. Norbert continued to flip, hoping to land on a picture or two, but the best he got were large patterns made of overlapping circles. They weren’t even cool patterns, just busy and complicated for the sake of it. He put the book back and grabbed another. It held the same kinds of writing and boring patterns, and he put that one back too.

Norbert walked down a series of aisles, grabbing books at random and glancing through them. The further he went, the stranger the books became, though he couldn’t find any clues as to what they were about. One gave him a deep paper cut, and he dropped it in disgust. Not only was this the most boring place to ever exist, it wasn’t even useful. Just half-assed patterns and repeating shapes.

“The most vivid dream I’ve ever had, and I can’t even give myself See Spot Run.”

Norbert grew bored as he moved from shelf to shelf and row to row. He stopped grabbing books, now only paying attention to their spines. At least one had to contain an Earthly letter. When he found one with nothing on its spine at all, he shrugged. It was different. He opened to the first page and saw Roman Numerals counting downwards like a table of contents, though there were no words to mark the chapters. He sat down to steady the large tome better.

The first few pages were blank, so Norbert skipped ahead until he found a pattern. This one was much simpler than those in the other books, some sort star with a Celtic weave crisscrossing its center. It was cool, and as Norbert followed it with his eyes, he traced it with his finger, trying to memorize it for later. He might be able to do something fun with it. Off to the left, a small, vertical caption read, “Pyre.”

When he completed the circuit, the symbol flashed red before returning back to normal. Norbert scowled. That was anticlimactic.

Norbert dropped the book and continued to meander, not even bothering to look at the shelves. He wondered if he should just lie down and go to sleep, try to dream within a dream, when he came across a door. It was huge, made out of the same stone as the floor, and barred shut by a thick piece of black wood. Writing covered it from top to bottom, from squiggles to pictures to somewhat-recognizable letters, making it look like a drunken piece of modern art. Yet there was something off about the door, something that combined dread with curiosity. Norbert needed to know what was behind it, yet he also never wanted to see it again.

He got closer and looked at the patterns. There had to be thousands of messages carved into it, and while he couldn’t read any of them, he got the feeling they all said the same thing. He set his lamp down and started hunting for English, positive that he would find a note written specifically for him. The door promised answers.

It took Norbert an hour before he found a three-word phrase in English, written vertically and in small, tight letters.

NEVER OPEN EVER

Norbert stepped back, almost tripping over himself. The phrase wasn’t a warning but a scream, and he knew with all his heart that something terrible was locked behind the stone portal.

Just as he was turning to run again, his alarm went off and the library was gone.

*

Norbert entered his first-period art class oddly refreshed. Whatever that dream was, it had at least served as seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. He still yawned though. No kid should have to function at 8:00 in the morning. He found his table and unloaded his picture of Saturn, plus a dozen oil pastels. It was time to finish this stupid thing.

Pop music played from a small radio while students filtered in. Most were sophomores and juniors, but a few seniors marched in too, taller than everyone and laughing at jokes only 17 year olds could understand. Two more freshman followed them. Because that was the charm of the art room: It accepted anyone and everyone. The rules were relaxed. Little paintings covered the walls, all done by graduated seniors eager for whatever came next, and even the ceiling tiles had paintings on them. Norbert looked up and found his replica of Salvadore Dali’s Burning Giraffes from his advanced art class. That had netted him an A.

But while the rules were relaxed, they only slackened a little. The sophomores kept to themselves, the juniors found their own table, and the seniors all crowded to the desk closest to the radio. The two freshman, meanwhile, retreated to the back of the room, away from Norbert.

He was alone.

Twenty minutes passed in a frustrated blur as he worked the rings around the ringed planet. The picture was due at the end of the period, but Norbert was finding it hard to concentrate. It was like writer’s block, but for his fingers.

He yanked out a fresh sheet of notebook paper to doodle. Sometimes that helped. Mostly it was an excuse to not pay attention in class, but sometimes a short stick figure or two kept him focused. He had dozens of ideas swimming around in his head too, all the spooky things he had dreamed last night. There was the door, and that feeling of being hunted. Or those old books, oozing dust and God knew what else.

There was that symbol, the one shaped like a star with strange crisscrossing patterns.

Norbert looked at his paper. He had already drawn it.

“What?” he whispered. Anxiety tickled the pit of his stomach. The drawing was perfect too, like a photocopy of what he had seen last night. He had even scribbled out the word.

“Pyre,” he said.

The symbol erupted into flame.

“What the fuck?” someone shouted.

Norbert sat transfixed, watching the flame dance. First it was yellow, then red, then yellow again. When it found his picture of Saturn, it flashed white and began to char it to pieces. The pastels stank as they melted.

It wasn’t until Mrs. Shaw was dragging him away that Norbert snapped out of his daze. He yelped, jerked out of her hand, and ran towards the growing flame. He had to fix this! Someone yelled to get a fire extinguisher. A senior tried to give him a high five. Norbert yanked his sweatshirt off and threw it over the fire, beating at it with both hands, but the fire beat back, stinging his fingers. His sweatshirt coughed up a small cloud of black smoke.

“Fuck!” Norbert hissed. He stared at his mess, waiting for it to erupt again.

“Norbert,” Mrs. Shaw called. “Norbert are you okay?” She approached him and knelt. Her face was narrow, her hair long and grey. She liked to wear long strings of beads in place of more normal necklaces, because every day should be as fun as Mardi Gras, whatever that meant. “Are you hurt?”

“What?”

“Are you hurt?”

Norbert looked at his hand. It throbbed an angry shade of red. His index finger also had the aftermath of a paper cut. The wound had closed, but the skin was still uneven where it had ripped last night. In his dream.

“I think … I think I need to go to the nurse,” Norbert said. His voice sounded far away, and someone had turned his legs to jelly.

Mrs. Shaw said something else, but the words were lost as everyone tiptoed back into the classroom. Norbert heard his name said over and over, the topic of ridicule, confusion, and perhaps wonder. He had started a fire. He was crazy. He was stupid. He was going to go to jail. He should do it again. The voices became a meaningless cloud, and all Norbert could do was stare at his ruined sweatshirt.

“Okay,” Mrs. Shaw said to the class. “Show is over. Everyone back to work.”

She grabbed Norbert by the shoulder and gently led him outside. Her face was pale, but she gave him a smile that said everything would be okay. He almost believed it.

“Norbert,” she said when they were in the hallway. Empty lockers covered the walls, and cheap fluorescent lights flickered in the ceiling. The school had gone quiet. “Did you … were you playing with ….” Mrs. Shaw shook her head. “Did you start that fire?”

“No,” Norbert said. He couldn’t have. It wasn’t possible.

“Okay.”

She made him walk, and he followed because he didn’t know what else to do. Nothing made sense, only that his hand hurt and he wanted to cry.

They almost made it to the nurse’s office when Wild Creek High’s principal and security officer met them in the hallway. Mr. Walters, or Principal Walters depending on who was talking to him, was a stout man with jet-black hair and a thick, oily beard. He looked ready to kill someone. Office Drey was a tall, skinny man with thin glasses and an expression that somehow balanced itself between bored and stern. He looked ready to go home.

He barely spared Norbert a glance when he asked: “Alright. What happened?”

Mrs. Shaw wrinkled her nose. “You could at least ask us if we’re alright first.”

“Know you aren’t,” Mr. Walters barked at Norbert. The two were well acquainted. “If what I’ve heard is true, you’re in a lot of trouble. A lot.”

“Nurse’s office first,” Mrs. Shaw said. “And a call to his parents.”

“I think Norbert should empty his pockets first,” Officer Drey said. “And then he can go to the nurse’s office.”

“I….” Norbert stammered, stopped. Fear coursed through his veins, and tears blurred the three teachers into jagged spires.

“Do it,” Mr. Walters said.

With hands that shook, Norbert did as he was told, overturning his pockets and piling a pen, pencil, and his phone into a sad little tower. He tried to pretend he wasn’t crying, and the adults pretended to ignore him.

Office Drey shrugged. “Nothing that would start a fire.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Mr. Walters said.

“I told you!” Mrs. Shaw shouted, her voice shrill, her hands fists. “I cannot believe you two!”

“What happened?” Officer Drey demanded, ignoring the art teacher. He even carried a little notebook and pencil. “Tell me what you did.”

Norbert looked to Mrs. Shaw, hoping she’d save him, but she only nodded. Her face was as white as his. It occurred to him then that she didn’t believe him. No one did. Because he was Norbert, and this was high school. This was his role to play.

“I was drawing,” he mumbled. “A picture of Saturn, and then the paper just lit on fire. I don’t know what happened.”

“You could at least tell a believable lie.” Mr. Walters gestured not to the nurse’s office but in the direction of his own. “You got from here until my office to come up with something better.”

“It’s not a lie!” Norbert clenched his fists. His burned hand hissed with pain, as did the little paper-cut scar on his finger. “You just think it is because you’re supposed to.”

Mr. Walters snorted.

“Listen,” Officer Drey said. He got down on one knee so he was eye-level with Norbert. “This is serious. Someone could have gotten hurt, okay? So tell us the truth, and we’ll do everything we can to help you out of this.”

“I—” Norbert began.

Now it was Mrs. Shaw’s turn to snort. “Wow Jack. So much for believable lies.”

“You’re not helping.”

But Mrs. Shaw was already steering Norbert back to the nurse’s office. “You can continue your good cop, bad cop game later,” she barked. “When Norbert’s parents are here.”

Norbert heard a sigh, and when he looked over his shoulder, he saw Officer Drey and Mr. Walters heading towards the art room. Mrs. Shaw moved to block his view.

“Don’t worry about them.” She said. “Sometimes the biggest bullies aren’t the kids but the adults.”

“Yeah,” Norbert whispered. That realization hurt worse than the fire.

To find purchase the full novel, head over to amazon.com here

Fishing for Ghosts

“Who’s a good boy? You are! Yes you are!” I whisper into the lure. It’s a homemade hook, a bit of joy mixed with a bit of glass that looks sort of like a stuffed squirrel at a distance. The joy is pink; the glass is sharper than a silver bullet. I attach it to my tip down and let the rod do its thing. I then repeat this process with a second tip down, though I bait this lure with, “I love you, yes I do! Yes I do!”

I say the words in an exaggerated voice. I’ve never met a dog that didn’t love that voice.

Their ghosts love that voice, too.

The rest is a game of waiting. It’s peaceful waiting though. The aether laps beneath my feet, and the graveyard earth shifts in pleasant ways. It smells like autumn and feels like spider webs. My rods dangle from their bramble puppets, each weighted with just the right amount of exorcise to tip down and snag a biting ghost. It’s more engineering than magic, but it is magic. Anything that does 90% of the work without help is magic, at least in my opinion.

My shack is a haphazard warm. There is beer—of course—and there is a little radio spitting static and the voices that live just beneath the static. It’s a home-made structure, mostly built of grainy wooden planks decorated with knotholes. Nothing special, but it keeps the frost at bay. Bent nails pockmark the walls, acting as cheap hooks for jars and tools that threaten to fall but only threaten. Nothing actually falls in my shack. Spirits drift up, but never down.

Well, some drift down, but I don’t fish for those anymore.

I only have the two tip downs, so for my third grave, I use a bog-standard fishing pole. It’s also homemade, a gift from dear-ol’ dad. May you rest in peace, pops.

“I’ll love you forever, little man,” I whisper into my final lure. A little piece of my heart breaks away and attaches to the glass point. It glistens red like a drop of blood.

The fishing pole is a brackish piece of corpsewood, yellow at the bottom like a femur but bleach-white everywhere else. Well, except the very middle. That bit’s made of stainless steel from when I first broke it some thirty five years ago. Caught me a nasty haunt, one of them drift-down types. “Never again!” I said, but time and beer have a way of making “never again” turn into “eh what the heck?” which is why there are two pieces of stainless steel holding pop’s old fishing pole together.

He’d shake his head and sigh. Goddamn do I miss him.

I cast, and my lure plips through the dirt, and into the aether. The smell of apples cuts through my shack before turning back into old leaves. I smile, because that’s how you know its prime dog season. They like to play in the leaves. Like to chase after squirrels and bark at birds and get in the way when it’s time to set the table. Always a good scrap or two for the dogs during autumn. It’s the best time to grill in the backyard.

Static hisses through the radio. The dead grumble, and Her flute leads them on. It’s a faint sound, the melody so distorted that it’s less a song and more a part of the wind. She’s far, and as long as She’s far, I’m safe.

So I settle back, place my rod within reach, and pop a beer. I close my eyes and let the sounds of the aether do their thing. I’m in no rush. I’m much too alive for that.

*

A tip down jingles with a catch, and I set my rod aside to yank the bramble puppet up. Hooked, line, and sinker is a wriggling dog snout, fluorescent purple and yipping loud enough to wake the rest of the dead. It’s eyeless and more ooze than form, like turned yogurt stuck to the bottom of a quart, but I can make out enough details to know it was a Yorkshire terrier. I smudge its jaws aside to work the lure out of its mouth. Once free, its little barks turn into whines, which are quieter yet more annoying.

“Oh hush you,” I say. It does not hush. They never do.

In my cooler, next to the beer, is a round-bottom flask. Its neck is about an inch in diameter, but it bottoms out to something closer to six inches. It’s clear, heavy, and sound proof. I bring the complaining ghost to the edge, and it sucks the little Yorkie in without a second thought. Perfect fishing silence returns to my shack.

I add more bait to the tip down, set it back up, and return to my spot, my dad’s fishing pole between my legs and a beer to my right. The radio spits more static. Her flute is almost impossible to hear.

*

It takes another beer before my tip downs jingle, one right after the other. I plod over to them, yanking first a well-worn mutt with a blue glow, then a golden retriever with an orange shine. Both are prime catches, the kind of dogs with easy attitudes and wagging tails. Neither fights back as I bring them to my flask. The Yorkie tries to escape, but he’s too small to get out, and with the other two, they form a makeshift pack. Three is always better than one when it comes to dogs.

The goal is thirteen. It’s a prime number, and one that distills down to the perfect mason jar. The kind us backwater moonshiners call our, “special elixir.” We can thank the Morrison Sisters for that. What kind of moonshine depends on the dogs—Happy dogs skew towards rum while bitter little ankle-biters like the Yorki make a good whiskey. Real big dogs ferment into scotch. A mix of anything and everything blends into a kind of flavorless vodka, which I enjoy with orange juice on Sunday mornings. Praise God. One of these days I’ll figure out how to make brandy.

Not today though.

*

Something yanks at my pole with enough force to tear it from my hands.

“Jesus Fuck!”

I manage to catch it before it falls into the aether. The handle is death-cold, and whatever’s got hold tears back and forth like a wolf trying to break a deer’s neck. I pull, and it pulls right back, almost putting me off balance. Dirt flies everywhere. My beer falls to the ground with a thunk and a glub-glub noise. Half my trinkets crash to the ground, and one of my tip downs tips right the hell over. The radio spits static mixed with bad flute.

“Fuckin’ fuck!”

Panic takes hold, because this feels like one of them drift-down type spirits. Somethin’ real bad, like a bear or a mountain lion. Or worse, a human. My skin threatens to crawl off as I reach for a knife. The ground cracks apart. I can hear the aether twisting like a tornado, a violent swirl sucking at all life. Dirt spills in, and the smell is mold. I’ve never fallen into the aether before. Not sure anyone has and lived to tell the tale. It’s cold and black, and the dirt that sits between this world and the next doesn’t like to be disturbed. It wants to close in, wants to become a still grave. It wants me to scream and drown and die, and then it wants Her to find what’s left.

Before I can cut the line, it slackens. Everything stops with it. The fear, the screams, even the hope. My beer dribbles its last while my radio cuts out.

“Easy now,” I whisper. “Easy now.”

My dad’s old fishing pole jerks in my hand.

I slide the knife up, ready to cut the line and whatever bad spirit has hold, and find myself giving the reel a gentle wind instead. Just a few turns. The gears click like rattling teeth. Whatever I’ve caught doesn’t fight back, so I keep going. Up and up, with just a little play here and there. Sometimes the big dogs fight a bit—not the wolves, but the German Shepherds and Rottweiler’s. Once caught a Husky that threw a real howling fit, so bad it almost knocked the shack over. Most dogs are good, worth a pet and a smile, but not all. The bad dogs bite, and the spirits they distill into bite as well.

“Come on,” I say, and already I can tell the ghost is at the edge, ready to spill over. My heart quickens. I mouth a quick prayer.

I yank up not a dog but a crow.

“What in the hell?”

It’s a dark ghost, like if black could glow, and it doesn’t ooze or droop but spirits around with wings that rotate like a windmill. It caws as it flies, loud bleats that dig into my ears, through my skull, and into my forehead. Little headaches explode behind my eyes. I stumble around, one hand on my pole, another flailing with the knife. I can see my lure in the crow’s mouth, not snagged but bitten. The ghost took hold on its own. It can let go at any time.

I cut the line. The magic fades from the string in a burst of silver. Now it’s just fabric and glass.

Instead of dropping the lure and returning to the afterlife, the crow flutters to the tallest corner of my shack. It finds an empty nail and perches. Or rather, it hovers right above it. Ghosts can’t stand, but this one floats and hops like if it were alive. It gives my lure another playful yank, and the line swishes into the wall. It doesn’t even make a sound.

“Caw!” the ghost shrieks. Pain follows.

“No,” I say. I point at the hole. “Go back down there.”

“Caw!”

I stare at the crow. It stares back. Even as a ghost, it holds its form, with piercing green eyes and wings so dark they shimmer. Most ghosts don’t get so lucky. Most fade as soon as they die, turning into clumps of jelly. Dogs lose their tails and eyes first, then their ears and paws. Rodents jumble into puddles so fast it’s almost scary, yet they retain their noses and whiskers for a long, long time. Deer shrink. A deer ghost will look like a Christmas tree ornament for years before it melts into something that’s more antler than form, and even the doe grow a few points in death. Birds tend to look like eggs made of runny yogurt. Taste like it too.

Cats reincarnate like the cheating bastards that they are.

Humans—but I shake that thought away. I don’t fish for drift-down ghosts no more.

The crow makes like its preening its feathers, which is a strange sight as its beak is more thought than shape. Its feathers ooze around it, through it.

“Caw!” it shrieks when I raise my knife. Pain blossoms behind my eyes.

“You’re supposed to be dead!” I say.

“Caw!”

I look into my cooler. There are two beers left, and my flask, which is nowhere near its thirteen ghosts. If the crow won’t go back to hell, maybe it’ll distill into a spirit or two. I don’t like mixing animals—never been a fan of what the kids call a WOP—but I don’t trust this ghost as far as I can throw it. It smells like a drift-down type.

“Nice and easy,” I say. I pocket the knife and hold my hands out. The crow jerks its head in a way that could pass as a nod. I, meanwhile, stand there like a scarecrow. I look like one too, with faded jeans and a torn sweatshirt over an old button-up. I smell a bit better though. Fishing clothes last longer than farm decorations, but only a little.

“Nice. And. Easy.”

The crow lets me reach into the cooler without screaming more headaches at me. It’s wary though, alert and thinking in ways ghosts aren’t. I snag the flask, and because I’ve earned it, I reach for another beer too.

“Not sure if I should drink you,” I say to the crow. “Not supposed to catch your types, whatever you are.”

“Caw,” the crow says, but it isn’t a shriek. The headache it sends my way is light. The ghost hops from one nail to another. One of its eyes changes colors from green to blue. “Caw.”

“Shut up.”

I pop my beer. It hisses, and the crow darts towards it. I offer my own headache-inducing yelp. The ghost flaps around my hand with its windmill feathers, a freezing ball of jelly and claws sharp as needles. I bat at it while I try to run and hide. Every tap with its beak, every brush of its wings, causes my shirt to freeze and crack. Beer spills down my sleeve, and what doesn’t turn into blonde ice drips onto my pants.

“Fuck!”

“Caw!”

I drop the beer to put my hands over my ears. The crow flaps a circle around the shack, kicking up dirt and knocking my second tip down over. The lights turn off, on, off, on. And then the ghost heads for my beer. It pecks at it. When that doesn’t work, it tries to stand on it, though it can’t because it’s a ghost.

“Caw!”  It screams. It looks at me, all huddled on the ground and feeling like I just lost a fight. My arms hurt. My head pounds. I’m bleeding, though I’m not sure from where. “Caw?”

I’ll be goddamned. It sounds like a question.

“What?”

The crow rubs its head against the beer bottle. Instead of moving the glass, it drifts through it, turning it to ice.

“Caw?”

“You can’t be serious.”

It takes a bit of will, but I stand and brush myself off. The crow watches me with eyes that keep changing color. Blue and green then blue and orange then red and white then teal and purple. One minute it looks like a living bird, the next a ghost orb, the kind you’d see at a cemetery. I check myself for cuts and bruises and find half a dozen, but nothing I can’t fix. Ain’t the first time a ghost bit me.

The crow waits patiently for me to regain my senses, and when it sees that I am ready, it offers another chirp. This one doesn’t hurt.

“You can’t have any,” I say. I shake my head. “Sorry. Ghosts don’t eat or drink. That’s for the living. You should know that.”

“Caw?”

The crow oozes at the bottle. When that doesn’t work, it floats around it, approaching the glass from every direction. The glass doesn’t budge though. An angry ghost can knock things over and make stuff move, but a confused one can’t do nothin’ more than be confused. Or sad. Or dead. The crow blinks. It is crying.

“You gotta go back,” I say. My voice trembles. I’ve been fishin’ for ghosts for decades. Learned it from my father who learned it from his. You can do a lot with a ghost, though we always just drank ‘em. Kick back, relax, and as long as you mind Her, what more could anyone want on a Sunday morning? Then once you’re done, head to church to purify. God forgives the sorry. Then wink and do it again next week.

But seeing this crow sulk around my beer bottle makes me feel worse than dirt. Worse than the aether, which churns beneath the dirt, smelling like autumn leaves and feeling like spider webs.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” I tell it. It flutters to my chair. If I sat down, it would be at my shoulder. I bet it used to sit on its owners shoulder when it was alive, and they’d share a beer and a story. I bet someone loved it once. I bet someone loved it forev—

“I’LL LOVE YOU FOREVER, LITTLE MAN.”

The voice is flutes and death and infinity all rolled in one. I am trapped in the aether, and it is trapped around me. Everything is cold. Everything is tornadoes and drowning. I scream a soundless sound, and I blink a lightless blink. Up and down merge together while the crow caws headaches into my skull. Some part of me curses for not fixing the radio, for not listening for Her, but the rest turns into panic. The rest falls.

The rest dies.

“THAT WAS YOUR TRAP. THAT WAS YOUR LIE.”

She appears in front of me. Her face is a patchwork of skin sewn together with pink thread. There is no light in her eyes. Her hair flows around her face like weeds, and her nose threatens to fall off. Only her lips are complete, contorted into the most gorgeous frown I have ever seen. She could kiss the life from an angel. The rest of her shimmers in and out of existence as flutes play terrible sounds around us.

I cannot see her army of the dead, but I can feel it. I know it is there, and I know I am doomed to become part of it.

“YOU PREY, AND NOW YOU ARE PREY.”

“I’m sorry.”

“YOU ARE NOT.”

“I—”

“YOU ARE NOT!” Her voice is a rage so thick it could end the universe.

“Caw!”

A headache rips through my head. For a split second, I can see the inside of my shack. It’s hazy and dark, and the ghost of a crow rests near my head, staring into my face with eyes that burn bright with red fever.

“YOU DID NOT LOVE HIM FOREVER, AND YOU ARE NOT LOVED FOREVER.”

I’m crying. I have no form, and I have no voice, but I am crying. She’s lying to me. Her song is lying to me. I did love him, and I am sorry. Everything else is gone, but those two things are not.

“YOU WILL NOT FIND HIM HERE! YOU WILL NEVER SEE HIM EVER AGAIN!”

“Please.”

“Caw!”

The world returns. The ghost is screaming at me. My mouth tastes like copper. I try to raise my hand, but it’s heavy with sleep. My shack reeks of autumn. I can hear flutes outside.

“I—”

“THE DEAD MARCH, BUT YOU WILL CRAWL. THE BETRAYERS CRAWL.”

“No,” I plead. I am a ball of sobs and excuses, and my voice is a whisper. “I did love him. I still do.”

“LIAR!”

“Caw!”

I’m sitting with a knife in one hand and a trowel in the other. They’re both bad blades, one made of bone and coffin wood, the other glass and empty words. They’re strong magic though, the kinds of things that let me go searching for ghosts. Because there’s one ghost I want to find, one I’d do anything to see again, even if just for a moment.

“HE SCREAMS AT WHAT YOU DID TO HIM. YOU WERE THERE, AND HE REMEMBERS. EVEN NOW HE REMEMBERS. HE DOES NOT LOVE YOU, NOT ANYMORE.”

“He was sick,” I say. And he was sick. His kidneys were so busted he could hardly control himself, and he growled if you touched his belly. We had to keep him outside that last month. We had to do a lot of things we didn’t want to. But I miss him. It’s why I use that spell when I go fishing. Because maybe he’ll bite hold, and maybe I can tell him I’m sorry.

“YOU GREW SICK OF HIM.”

“No!”

“Caw!”

I’m standing in my shack, one foot on the ground, the other in the aether. Pain explodes through my head. I’m bleeding from my ears. The crow hovers at my shoulder, flapping and cawing and sending waves of cold death through my body. Everything hurts. My fingers are white with frostbite. I’m holding my knife in one hand and pressing its blade into my wrist. All I need is a little more pressure, and I can go back. I can tell Her she’s wrong. I can—

“Caw!”

“Stop.” The word is a whisper.

“Caw!”

I look at the crow. It has three eyes now, each as red as blood. Its form shifts. Its beak melts into a mouth, one filled with fangs.

“Help me,” I say.

“Say it,” the crow says. Its voice is feminine and far away, and I understand what I’ve caught and what I’ve done. “Say the spell.”

“You’re a witch’s familiar.”

“Caw!” The crow shrieks a headache at me, and I press my knife into my wrist. Blood spills. “Say her words! Make her come here! Tell me you love me because I miss her like you miss your dog.”

Through tears I do as the ghost asks: “I love you forever, little man.” My voice cracks, and I fall to the ground.

I look into the aether, and for the first time, I see my own reflection in it. I’m tired and hurt, with sixty years of wrinkles swimming through my face. I was thirty when I put Bailey down. He was eight. Only eight. The good died young, and I stayed living and searching, fishing and drinking. I am dirt, and the best I can manage is sorry.

The crow caws a headache. I grip my knife. It’s a different color in the aether, black instead of silver. The dirt shifts beneath me. It wants to close up, it wants to cover bodies.

“Goodbye,” the ghost says. It hops from my shoulder to the ground. It shakes its head and raises its wings. “When you said her words, you looked like her.”

I let the knife go. It hits the dirt, sinks, and is no more.

“I didn’t mean to,” I say.

“And when you said you were sorry, I believed you.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“If I see your companion, I will let him know. I think he will believe you, too.”

“His name was Bailey.”

The crow nods. “I will find him.”

The crow’s mouth disappears, replaced with a black beak. It blinks its third eye away. It’s a ghost, and it’s dead, and I watch it fly back to Her. The graveyard earth shifts and pours until the hole to hell is no more.

My radio spits static.

Faerie Wine

They say to never drink the faerie’s wine. The berries are cursed, the vintage enchanted. The taste is caldron stained. Why, even the bottle is a trap! For every sip taken, it must take one back. Or so they say.

The best thing one can do with a bottle of faerie wine is accept it graciously and, when the giver has left your life forever, bury it in the back yard, underneath the oldest tree. If there are no trees, a bush will suffice. If there are no bushes, then the bottle is to be regifted with a firm warning to never, ever drink it. A bush should then be planted, not because a bushless lawn is cursed but rather, it is a sad patch of grass to look upon. Bushes attract squirrels in their branches, moths in their leaves, and mushrooms in their shade. Life begets life, and kindness more kindness.

Or so they say.

Or rather, so Abigail’s grandmother used to say. But now Nana is dead. The shortest teller of tall tales—for Nana barely hit 5’0 on a good day—can no longer tell Abigail what they say; or what I say; or what you say; or what anyone, anywhere says, for that matter. Her last message to the world, her last story, resides on a small gravestone wedged into fresh earth, the letters carved in Gaelic. It’s not a message for Abigail but the fairies and the witches and the trees. No one in Abigail’s immediate family knows what it says, and the few aunts and uncles learned enough to read the dead talk refuse to.

It is not a message for them.

“Or so they say,” Abigail mutters. She can still say things too, but she doesn’t want to. She’s too sad for that.

 But let us return to the bottle: It is made of glass, as all good wine bottles are. It has a cork, blackened with berries and night sky, and a label with writing much too small to read. When Abigail squints, the letters swim. The color is both pink like the sky at sunset and purple like the sky at sunrise. It is heavy, heavier than a bottle of wine should be.

At the bottom of the bottle, molded into the glass, is a small door. When flipped upside-down, there are few details, just a frame and a little grains in the wood, but from the front, when tilted at an odd angle, Abigail can see a doorknob.

It looks twistable.

They had buried the bottle together, two years ago and underneath a full moon. Abigail was 12 then. It was a bright, sunny day. The two were playing in the back yard when Nana received a package from someone called, “The Acquaintance,” a mystery person long dead with a grudge not forgotten. He put them both to work. Nana had not been happy about her gift, but Abigail had been more than eager to help bury it. They made a game out of it, one with many strange rules like, “No you can’t use a shovel. The bottle will know. It must be your fingers and your palms, and you must get dirt underneath your nails.”

That had been an easy one to follow.

They also needed both a cat and a squirrel to watch. This proved harder, but Nana had a way with animals. They found a squirrel named Tag willing to munch on a nut and bark between bites and a snooty black cat that would not give up her name at all. Her tail swished throughout the entire ceremony.

Spells were cast, or so Nana had said, and by 2:00 in the morning, the bottle was gone, buried like a coffin with a promise that it would be forgotten. The squirrel barked, the cat nodded, and Abigail’s parents yelled loud enough to wake the village once they realized their daughter was not in her bed. It was way passed her bedtime. It was passed Nana’s bedtime, too.

Abigail uncorks the bottle. She thinks, that should have been harder, but then, she thought digging it up would be harder, too. Nana had wanted the bottle buried deep those few years ago, unfindably so, yet Abigail hadn’t even dirtied her new black dress in the excavating. A few pawfuls of dirt and there the neck was. A quick tug, and up the rest of the bottle came. The dirt fell off it like rain, happy to be away from the strange glass with its strange writing and its strange weight.

“I miss you, Nana,” Abigail says to the empty room. It’s what all the adults are saying one floor below. And this is what all the adults are doing, too.

She brings the bottle to her lips. She takes a drink.

She feels the effects immediately, though they aren’t what the TV said they should be. Instead of becoming woozy or silly, Abigail feels like she is shrinking. She isn’t actually shrinking of course, but her body argues that it is smaller, her limbs tiny and brittle, like the smallest push might snap them in two. She sits on the floor. She watches the room watching her. Nothing else happens, and this gives her the courage to take another drink.

The taste is like her favorite juice mixed with fire and iron. It makes her eyes go wide and her tongue try to dance away, yet Abigail enjoys it. It reminds her of those sour candies the bullies like to bring to school and trick everyone into trying. They are gross at first, but only at first. They end sweet.

Abigail takes another drink, and her body continues to shrink in spirit. Her emotions and mind do as well. Everything is smaller. In a way, it’s nice to be small. Small sorrow is easier to handle than big sorrow, and Abigail is sick of big sorrow.

A breeze blows through the closed window, rustling the curtains and the little trinkets collecting dust in the little room. Nana called it her study on Monday and Wednesday and Friday and her junk room the rest of the days of the week. Wooden shelves with ornate, rusted-out metal bookends dot every wall, many holding moldy diaries or wooden dolls. A few carry empty jars. A cluttered desk hugs one corner and a rocking chair that squeaks too loudly to make it good for napping lives in the other. The breeze sends the chair into a fit, and Abigail gets up to steady it.

Walking is hard after two glasses of faerie wine. The legs tend to fight each other, and the knees become too scared to do anything more than wobble. Thus, Abigail doesn’t so much as walk to the chair as fall into it. She lands hard, bruising her arms, but the wine does not spill. Faerie wine is good for that. She does not cry, and faerie wine is good for that, too.

Still small, but now rocking comfortably to the squeak-toy moans of what is a haunted chair, Abigail brings the bottle to her lips. She readies herself for another drink and, curious, bored, sad, and lonely, looks inside. The glass door jiggles against its hinge. The knob twists back and forth, like it is locked but only barely.

“Huh,” Abigail says. Huh, she thinks.

 “Drink me” the bottle says, but not out loud. Faerie wine cannot actually talk.

Abigail drinks, and the ghost possessing the rocking chair speaks a riddle in the language of ghosts: What howls at the moon when it is not full?

The knob twists and turns, and the glass tumblers give way. The door opens. Abigail peers into a world very much like own yet different, off in a way that is both pretty yet upsetting. She is looking at the tiniest sliver of garden, at a shaggy willow tree buzzing with insects. The sky is slate blue and the tree is fluffy, yellow-green. She tilts the bottle, and the door moves with it, scanning over the garden. There are flowers and bushes, red-bricked walkways and statues of scary monsters. Bugs infest everything. Abigail can’t hear them, yet her mind conjures the noise, and it does a very fine job of it. They buzz like a thousand flies examining a corpse, the sound swelling in time with the stench.

Flies talk to each other through their wings, and so it is true of these faerie insects. Whispers hover through their swarm, each bug remarking on the little girl looking down from the heavens.

“The door is open!” one fly flies. “We are free!”

“To the door!”

“To the door!”

“To the door!”

Abigail does not hear the bugs, and as she moves her spyglass around, she doesn’t notice them. Oh they are there, and they are gross, but one bug is the same as another to a sad girl from another world. She is more curious about the strangeness in the garden, the reason it doesn’t look right. It’s not the statues of monsters, with their drooping tentacles and howling faces, nor is it the plants she doesn’t recognize. It’s the sky and the grass. It’s the horizon.

The answer, of course, is in the subtleties. In faerie, the horizon is darker than the foreground. Abigail moves the spyglass back up and watches slate-blue fade into ocean-blue. In our world, where magic knows how to behave itself, it is the opposite.

A bug appears in the bottom of the wine bottle. Abigail flinches. It swims in a strange circle, its wings fluttering like propellers, its body glistening when it shouldn’t. Up close it is beetleish with fly wings, thick and round and dopey. It reminds Abigail of the snitch from Harry Potter, only black instead of gold. And with a face, of course. The faerie beetle has eight, spider eyes.

It should be noted that faerie beetles are extremely poisonous when they swarm.

It should also be noted that Nana did not like Harry Potter or his wizarding adventures, which were wrong in literally every way they could be wrong about.

“Yuck,” Abigail says. Her voice is tiny. The beetle is not.

Abigail stands. Her legs prefer to sit and do their best to fight back, but she succeeds in balancing on her feet. The haunted chair offers another thankful riddle: What is the thing I stole when you were looking right at it?

Abigail cannot find the cork.

“Where?” She asks, but the word tastes slurred in her mouth. She doesn’t like the feeling. It’s gross.

The bottle vibrates as two more beetles worm their way through the glass door. They swim in circles, chasing each other like a merry-go-round. How come they don’t drown? Abigail wonders. Wondering in her head is easier than talking out loud.

The cork is not on the ground or the shelves or even the chair. Panic rumbles in Abigail’s stomach, because faerie wine has many rules to it, but Nana only told her a few. She doesn’t know what to do now that it’s been opened. She doesn’t know how to stop feeling small. Another beetle crawls through the door. Abigail looks inside, and all she can see are a cloud of buzzing, black insects.

Where is it? thinks. She sets the bottle down to search the floor on her hands and knees, but it immediately threatens to tip.

“Oh no!”

Abigail grabs the bottle and shakes it. This succeeds in upsetting the beetles but not stopping them.

One leaves the confines of her swimming pool and begins to march up the side of the glass. “I want to bite!” she whispers with her wings. “I want to eat!” Poison leaks from her eyes.

Abigail screams, but no one comes to rescue her. The adults are downstairs, being sad and drunk, and she is upstairs. Her companions are a ghost and the wind. The ghost does nothing; the wind blows. The bottle continues to fill with beetles.

There are, of course, plenty of ways to plug a bottle of faerie wine, assuming you have a bit of magic about you. Abigail does, though she doesn’t know it. Nana also has plenty of enchanted items in her study, odds and ends that would work nicely as wine corks, at least temporarily. Abigail knows none of this though. The ghost does but it is unhelpful.

The wind also does, but wind has poor eyesight. It makes to nudge an ink pot and hits the frilly curtains protecting the windows instead.

Still screaming, Abigail rushes to the curtains and yanks one down. The plastic curtain rod falls with a crash that goes unnoticed below, and Abigail wads up the parchment-yellow fabric and shoves it into the bottle. The first beetle reaches the fabric and stops. She pokes at it with her hands, and she looks at it with her eyes, and finally she spits on it with her poison, but the fabric holds. It isn’t that it’s magic—it’s not—but that the beetle is small.

Abigail sets the bottle on the ground and sits beside it, cross-legged. Slowly, over the course of an hour, it fills with beetles until all the wine is gone. They squeeze against the glass, their wings buzzing and breaking against the weight of their brothers and sisters. The bugs curse and howl in their bug language, but Abigail cannot understand them.

Huh, she thinks. I guess more than just water can be bottled up.

This thought makes her feel better, and as she forces herself to her feet, she puts on a blank smile. It looks convincing. Faerie wine is good for that, too.

Abigail returns downstairs. It is more socially acceptable to be sad and alone and drunk around people. The beetles can wait until tomorrow.

Man in a Hurry

The store stank of gunpowder and cat litter. Four bodies lay on the ground, each torn apart and soaking into a growing pile of Tidy Cat. The 45mm bullets hit bodies and just kept going. Whispers filtered in from outside. Someone pounded on the door. A window shattered, and a large brick slid across the floor followed by a river of glass. And the worst part was, nothing made sense anymore! Nothing. Guy was in a hodunk town in Iowa called Frankfurt—population 4,000 on the dot—holding a SCAR L military rifle and wondering how the absolute fuck he was going to get out of here alive.

He had 196 rounds. That left 3,996 people.

The pounding intensified, angry fists competing with Guy’s makeshift barricade of charcoal bags heaped onto a small shopping cart. It would hold for another ten minutes if Guy was lucky. He did not feel lucky.

“Essentials,” he said. “Pretend it’s a ruck march.” The rifle had a strap, and he let it dangle as he ran deeper into the store, looking for a backpack. He could fill it with water and energy bars. After that, well … he wasn’t sure what came next. Des Moines was 140 miles away, and that was a hellova trip on foot. It didn’t help that his phone had stopped working as soon as he entered the town.

His CO had joked when he said he would take the scenic route. “Scenic? Ain’t nothin’ to see in Iowa, rockchewer. Just corn and rednecks.”

“Fucking bullshit,” Guy muttered.

Jake’s Convenience Locker lived up to its name. Guy grabbed a hiking backpack on his way to the grocery section, where he found a wall of glass-door fridges stocked with energy drinks. He popped the local brand called Sprintfurt. It tasted like cherries boiled in piss, but it had a 100mg of caffeine. He dumped another dozen of the things into his bag. Guy didn’t plan on sleeping anytime soon.

Backpack fit to burst, Guy ran for the exit. He wasn’t good, but he was in control. That mattered more. It was how he lived through Iraq, and it was how he’d live through this.

He put two bullets through the door.

He stepped over two bodies.

*

It all started with red and blue lights, a siren, and a short deputy officer with a uniform so primed and pressed it looked like a costume. “Documentation,” the cop asked. He chewed on the word like it was gum. He rested his hand on the butt of his pistol, either a sign of insecurity or paranoia. Or racism. Guy didn’t think there were many black folk around here.

“Sorry,” Guy said. “Got my wallet in my pocket, and the paperwork in the glove. Gonna reach for ‘em.”

“Come on, come on. Let me see your documentation.”

To be fair to the cop, Guy had been going 20 over. However, the roads were empty. No trucks or cars or people walking along the side. He hadn’t even seen a bird fly overhead in the last hour. It was like he had entered some ghost road, one so peaceful it made his skin jittery. It wasn’t right. Guy shoved his hand into his pocket, and the cop shuffled on his feet. Maybe he was high. Not like there was anything else to do around here.

“Here,” Guy said, handing over the license.

“This is expired,” the cop said.

“Bullshit.”

“See, it says right here. Expired February 20^th, 2018. What day is it? Well? Do you know what day it is, because I know what day it is.”

“April 20^th.” Guy took his license back. There was no way it was bad. But when he looked again, it was. “This doesn’t—”

“Come on, come on. Out of the car and hands were I can see ‘em.”

“Fuck.”

*

Guy kept his shots short and sweet. The gun responded to the slightest press of his finger, almost eager to go off, and the residents of Frankfurt crumpled around him. Many were carrying knives or bats, though a few had their own weapons, mostly hunting rifles. They were strangely bad shots. Guy had met his fair share of rednecks, both in the army and out, and most could hit a bulls eye from a hundred feet once they had a few beers in them. These ones though, they couldn’t hit dirt if they were aiming at the ground.

“Just one more thing that don’t make sense,” Guy said. He reached down to loot a corpse of her pistol. It was a cheap 9mm, and it fit comfortably in the waistband of his jeans.

The woman was pretty, or had been. Brown hair. Blue eyes. Pale skin. She was wearing a yellow sundress with two big red stains on it. Guy sucked in a breath. He had only shot her once. He was sure of that, because he had to be careful with his ammo. Yet she had two wounds, and big ones too: One in her chest, where the SCAR had done its work, and one in her gut. Guy didn’t do gut shots. He had a scar from one, and even these batshit rednecks didn’t deserve that kind of misery.

“What is goin’ on!?”

Well. Shoot first, questions later. It wasn’t ideal, but it was either that or die. Guy was not going to die in Iowa.

“Well Golly!” the town’s only mechanic shouted from somewhere behind. “I found him! I found him over here!”

Guy ran. That mechanic had come to visit him in the jail with bad news about his car. He had been wearing someone else’s face.

The worst part about Frankfurt was that it looked like a perfect little town. Idyllic. The houses were modest with big yards, and half the trees had tire swings hanging from them. On his trip in, Guy swore he smelled pies cooling on windowsills. The place was clean, the church big, and everyone smiled. But the smiles were wrong, too wide, too distended, like everyone was secretly a snake. Everyone’s breath smelt like stale meat.

Guy cut through a yard, stopping just long enough to watch an old man light a cigarette. When he smiled, his grin went all the way to his ears.

“Good luck, son.” The man said. “No one ever makes it to tha road, but youa almos’ there. ‘Bout two miles lef’.”

“What the fuck is going on?”

“Shouldn’ cuss,” The man shook his head and reached for a bucket hanging by his side. Guy leveled his gun. He didn’t want to waste the ammo, but he didn’t want to leave this one alive, either. “Frankfurt’s a ni’ place. No one cusses here. Not ‘till you shauw’d up.”

The man dumped the bucket over himself. It was brown and red, and it stank like a sewer.

“Two mile,” he shouted. “Watch fer deer!”

“Golly!” the mechanic called again.

Guy ran.

*

Guy hadn’t been surprised that the jail stank. All jails stink. This one though, it smelled like ten-week old death. And like all bad things, it reminded him of being in Iraq. Guy shivered. He knew it was funny in its own way, because he had come to Iowa to escape this shit, not get dragged back in. His CO would laugh at the irony.

“Just corn and rednecks,” he said to himself.

“Yeah, yeah,” the cop said. He opened the jail door and shoved Guy in. The door closed with a heavy clank and the rumble of rusted tumblers.

“You didn’t even read me any rights,” Guy said. “This whole thing is bullshit. Just charge me a fine or—”

“Rights?” The cop demanded. “I know your rights. Got ‘em memorized from the book. You want ‘em? Well, go ahead and sit down. Just go ahead. I’ll recite ‘em to you word for word. Right from the book down to the punctuation mark.”

Guy looked at the cot. It looked clean enough, yet it was where most of the bad smell was coming from. He decided to remain standing.

“You’re supposed to read them while you arrest me, not after.”

“Don’t you tell me how to do my job!”

The cop moved further into the jail, towards a desk. He twirled his keys on his hands. Guy told himself he was being paranoid, that this would work itself out—it was PTSD and concussions and every other bad thing that had happened to him overseas. The smell wasn’t real.

Except it was. It burned, and his eyes watered. The cop sat behind his desk, propped himself up, and began to read the paper. The major headline read, “Headless Deer Found Outside Cuddle Family Property.”

*

The SCAR burned; the barrel smoked. It was eager to shoot. Guy ejected another clip and loaded his last one. 50 rounds left, and then he’d have to switch to the 9mm. Nothing still made sense, but he had passed that two mile road and was now deep in an Iowa forest and heading east. If he kept going, he was sure to find a road or a farm or something. At the very least, that mechanic was now dead. He had dogged Guy for three full miles, screaming “Golly!” at the top of his lungs until Guy put a bullet in his throat.

“Okay,” Guy said. He stared into the dark woods. “Ruck march.”

In a way, it wasn’t much different than the swamps of Louisiana. Big trees, big dirt, and paths worn down by animals. Guy could march for hours in this. No alligators, muck, or mosquitoes the size of his fist, either. A cool breeze filtered through the trees, rustling leaves and the beads of sweat running down his face.

He felt safe.

“Ain’t safe though,” he reminded himself.  He opened his bag and grabbed an energy drink. “Not by a long shot.”

Guy marched deeper into the forest. If he got out of this alive, no one would believe him. Pleasantville meets Cannibal Holocaust in the middle of fucking nowhere, and then the only cop was so stupid he left the keys hanging on a hook outside the cell door. It was the town drunk who had let him out, a fat man reeking of gasoline and slurring the word, “goat” as he fought with the buttons on his jacket. Guy had slipped passed him and found the SCAR in the jail’s weapons locker.

It was all too good to be true, yet Guy was still alive, still whole. He was in control.

He marched for what felt like another mile before the quiet forest gurgled with noise. At first it sounded like the whoops of a coyote, but knew coyotes from his time in Louisiana. These weren’t right. They were too slow, almost giggly. He leveled his gun. The sounds were out front and getting closer, heading in a straight line. Whatever they were, they wouldn’t be happy once they got here.

The trees rustled again, not with breeze but with people. The family stepped out of the leaves as a single unit, each naked from the waist down and wearing a shredded flannel shirt, except the lone woman who wore a faded crop top. She cradled a baby and wiggled her fingers at it. Then she wiggled them at Guy. Mud covered them in thick patches, like they had been sleeping in it, and each wore a severed deer head as a kind of helmet. It hid the tops of their faces but left their hanging jaws visible. Their tongues were long and swollen purple. They whooped and jumped, and one strummed a chord on his guitar.

Guy shot him through the right lung.

The rest charged. They didn’t carry weapons, yet they scared Guy more than anyone else. These people passed batshit long ago. They laughed as bullets blew pop-can sized holes in their chests, their blood bouncing through the air, their legs carrying them forward. They moved like people on PCP. Or zombies. A man with a thick beard stretched his grimy arms out wide in a bad imitation of a hug.

“Get the fuck back!” Guy shouted as the man tried to bury him. Guy scrambled back and swung the SCAR like a baseball bat. It hit the man in the jaw and took it clean off, spraying blood and yellow teeth onto the ground.

“Oh tha’s good,” the man slurred as he fell to the ground. “He’s a real—” Guy stomped his face into pulp.

The man’s family clapped. Guy returned to shooting, terror overtaking fineness. They kept coming, and the bullets kept flying. Lead tore apart the forest, turning dirt and bark into little brown fireworks that fizzled out into pools of blood. The gunshots rang loud, only now they sounded like church bells. Everyone died with a too-big smile on his face.

When the SCAR clicked empty, the forest was stained crimson and smelled like gunpowder and vomit.

Guy dropped the rifle and reached for the 9mm. Only the woman still stood, clutching her baby close and surveying her dead family. She shook her head, and the dead deer covering her face twisted about until it faced backwards. Guy took aim.

“Reminds me of a song,” she said. “Sad song. Always makes my daddy cry.”

“Turn around,” Guy said. “Turn around, and go home.”

“You want to hear it?”

“Turn the fuck around or I’ll kill you!”

“It’s called ‘No One Dies Here.’”

The woman began to hum, and Guy ran passed, torn between shooting her in the back or simply putting a round into his own skull and calling it quits. The forest became a blur of stinging branches and large tree roots that threatened to trip him every other step. Sweat ran down his face and into his eyes. When his sides burned and his breathing labored, he forced himself to stop and drink another energy drink. His eyes felt like sandpaper, and his nerves twitched in ways he didn’t like. He was one bad cough away from falling to the ground or losing his mind. For all he knew, both had already happened.

It took most of the night, but Guy eventually found the edge of the forest. He stepped out, the ground going from dirt to gravel to concrete, and stopped. He screamed.

*

Frankfurt waited for him. The entire town clapped while church bells rang and the faint smell of an apple pie carried on the breeze, cooling in some windowsill in the middle of the night. A coyote that wasn’t a coyote whooped from deep in the forest. The entire town had come to see, their jaws hanging wide and clothing stained with blood. Chunks of flesh dangled where the SCAR had done its work, but no one acted hurt. Their too-large mouths cheered like Guy had just won some kind of prize.

Guy took aim with the 9mm. His hand shook. Sweat smeared his vision.

The crowd parted. A man Guy did not recognize parted the crowd, followed by the deputy from before. This new man also wore a police uniform, though his came with a shiny, golden badge. An empty holster dangled from his right hip. Guy took a step back. The man took another step forward.

“I told ya, Atii, I told ya he’d make it. Well, didn’t I tell you? Well didn’t I?” the deputy said. He grinned like this was all his idea.

“Boy howdy, you sure did, Barry!” Atti said through a wide smile. “Mhmm, mhmm!”

Atti was tall, well over six feet and too skinny to be real. The closer he got, the more he looked like a walking skeleton. The skin on his face clung so tightly to his skull that he had no wrinkles, and his eyes and mouth looked like they were made of plastic. He held out his hand for a shake.

“Stay back,” Guy whispered. “Get the fuck away from me, or I’ll—”

“Now calm down, sir. Calm down. I think there’s been a misunderstanding.” Atti made an awkward gesture with his hands. “See, this here’s Frankfurt Iowa. Why, we’re the most pleasant town around!”

“I’ll kill you.”

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.”

Barry laughed. “You hear that, Atti? He thinks he can kill you! Do you believe it? Funniest thing I ever heard.”

Guy continued to fall back, and the sheriff continued to march at him. He smiled. Guy waved his pistol.

“Sir, if you’d just put that down and listen, we could be on our way home.”

“Go away!”

The sheriff shook his head. “Afraid I can’t do that, either.”

Soon they were back in the forest, with thick trees blocking the sky and fake coyotes shuffling in the bushes. Leaves crunched beneath Guy’s feet. He tried not to trip over tree roots or loose stones, and he tried to keep in control, but everything was spiraling away. He waved his gun, going from the sheriff to the deputy. Would it even work? He had six bullets. He took aim at the deputy. The sheriff was the bigger threat, but he hated the stupid cop. This was his fault.

A hand gripped Guy’s shoulder. He stopped. His blood turned to ice. He could smell the dead deer on her head and the filth on her body, and he could feel her infant squirming against his back.

“Thankya, Clara,” Atti said. His hand fell towards his holster. Up close it wasn’t empty; it carried some kind of thin stick or twig. “My name is Atticus. Atticus God, and we got a place here in Frankfurt just for you.”

Guy’s voice caught in his throat. A shot rang out, thin and weak. He twitched. His finger was on the trigger, and a small hole smoked in the tree trunk to the right of Barry’s neck. The sheriff smiled, and his stupid deputy laughed. Guy took aim, but the woman grabbed his wrist and forced the gun to the ground. Her hands were cold. Her baby squalled into his back.

“Did you like my song?” she whispered.

“I’ll forgive that,” Atticus said. “Because we’re a forgiving lot here in Frankfurt. But first you gotta do something for me. See,” he pulled the stick from his holster. It was made of wood and looked gnarled and old. Someone had spent a long time sharpening it into a knife. “I need you to smile.”

“No,” Guy whispered, or maybe he mouthed. He stared at the knife that couldn’t be a knife, because it looked like a wand. All around him, the people of Frankfurt clapped. He was back in the town again. Blood leaked down the right half of his face.

“You want to hear another song?” Clara asked.

She let his hand go, and Guy put the gun to his chin. The barrel was cold. He closed his eyes.

“This one’s called, ‘Now You Live Here Too’.”

Guy pulled the trigger.

He did not die.

The Museum of Curses

The event of a century appeared as fast as its sign: One Night Only. The building it overtook was small and falling apart, one of those on-again, off-again restaurants with six different names and just as many owners, making The Museum of Curses lucky number seven. The first—and only—tour started at 8:00 p.m. and went until Midnight. No pets or children allowed, and the easily scared need not apply. $6.66 to enter. Cash only.

Since I am neither child nor cat, I found myself near the front of the line around 7:30, standing under a stranger’s umbrella with three other people crowded beside us. The rain fell in a constant drizzle of cold, cheerless drops, but the light from our four phones kept our spirits high. Or at least amused. It was, after all, the event of a century.

“Can’t find anything about this place online,” a man to my left said. He was young and wiry, perhaps 25 or 26 with a wild mane of blonde hair. He looked like he belonged in a band. “Weird.”

“Spooky,” another would-be patron agreed, shivering with his hands in his pockets. His skin had a grey color to it, and water beaded off him in careful streams.

I nodded. The woman we were sharing the umbrella with did as well. Her face was hardened with wrinkles and age, but her eyes beamed with amusement. I put my phone away, eager to continue talking now that our silence had been broken, and almost jumped when it clinked against something foreign. Puzzled, I pulled out a small, wooden spoon. The wood was coarse and warped, like it was whittled by someone new to the craft.

“Huh,” I said to everyone.

“Why do you have a spoon?” the woman with the umbrella asked.

“I don’t know.” I looked around hoping someone would fess up to the joke, but all I saw were confused, wet people.

Without being told, everyone checked their own pockets, though I was the only one with a souvenir.

We talked the remaining half hour away. When it was time to enter, oily lights appeared behind the museum’s windows, and a small woman in dark clothing stepped out. Like most of us, she wore a hoodie, though unlike us, hers was black and embroidered with golden symbols. Black, dressy pants completed her uniform.

“None of you should come in,” she said, her voice a chirp, her face a glower. It was a good act. “This is not a place for mortals.”

I shrugged. The woman offered a polite clap. When none of us turned to leave, the actress sighed and said, “Tickets please.”

Our huddle of bodies formed a coherent line, and the actress-turned-clerk took our money, though she refused to make change. The grey man spent $10 to enter, and the woman with the umbrella $20. She grumbled, as did the rest of us, but we paid the fee one way or another.

“Here,” the actress said, handing me a ticket. Up close, her features were soft yet squished, her eyes large and her ears larger. Freckles dotted her cheeks.

“Thanks,” I said. Like the grey man, the ticket cost me $10. No one brought exact change.

She smiled, and as I walked by, I glanced over my shoulder. She was cute. She gave me half a wave, and it was then that I noticed she had a large, fleshy tail jutting from the waist of her pants. It fell to her upper calves and looked like it belonged on a rat. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, so I said nothing, but I think she saw me looking, because she made it curl around her leg. I’m not sure how she controlled it.

The lighting in the Museum of Curses was predictably dark, though the space appeared oddly huge. I had never been to any of the original six restaurants, but the building was small, barely capable of holding two dozen tables let alone winding, brick corridors or carefully marked doors. A silver chandelier hung above us, candlelight flickering at the shadows.

“I don’t know if I like this,” the older woman said, folding up her umbrella. She stowed it in her bag. “This is really weird.”

“I dunno,” the man who looked like he belonged in a band said. He was taking pictures with his phone. “It’s kinda cool. Like one of those escape rooms or something.”

We spent a few minutes gawking at the doors, reading the different plaques which promised themes like “Magic,” “Jewelry,” “Prosthetics,” “Places,” and “Mystics.” No one came to give us a tour, and the cute actress with the freckles didn’t make another appearance.

“Do you think she’s coming back?” I asked. I wanted to know her name.

“Who?”

“The lady that took our tickets.” I shrugged. “Never mind.”

The woman with the umbrella grinned, my cheeks flushed, and in the end, we opted for the closest door marked “Magic.” There were so few of us that splitting up seemed unnecessary. And though no one said it openly, it felt safer to stick together. The place was spooky.

The “Magic” door opened with an oily squeak, and we funneled into a dark room that truly did resemble a museum, albeit one with most of the lights off. Artwork—curses—sat on banisters or hung on walls, some encased in glass, others with velvet ropes around them. As soon as I stepped inside, something crunched beneath my feet.

I bent down and picked up another wooden spoon.

“I don’t get the joke,” I said. The spoon looked like the first one, though splintered down the middle. When no one offered to take it, I set it back.

We approached the first exhibit and gasped and cringed in equal measure. A large jar of perhaps ten gallons sat atop a marble banister and held dozens of severed, bloody hands. Crimson ooze pooled at the bottom, and despite most of the hands being gnarled and old, the blood was still wet.

“How is this a curse?” the band member asked. “It’s just kind of gross.”

“There’s a plaque,” the grey man said, pointing. “But I can’t read it.”

“You can’t?” the woman said. “I can.”

“It’s in like Chinese or something.”

The woman shook her head. “No. It’s in English.”

“Bullshit.”

I approached, leaned over, and read:

The cursed hand is cast aside
to wither and die every time
a new spell is cast in this life.

“That’s stupid,” the band member said. No one disagreed with him.

The grey man pulled out his phone and skimmed through it. His face puzzled as he looked between his phone and the plaque until he shrugged and visibly relaxed. “Don’t get it,” he said. “Phone has English, and that ain’t English.”

“It’s English,” the woman insisted.

“Bullshit.”

The next curse was similar to the first, a severed arm sitting on a long table. It looked goopy, almost melted, and its plaque said it contained no bones. Its fingers sagged to one side, like they would fall off if the skin wasn’t keeping them attached.

“Can’t believe you guys can read that writing,” the grey man said.

“Can’t believe this cost me $20,” the woman muttered.

The final two curses were a witch’s broom and a necromancer’s staff, both behind velvet ropes with, “No Touching!” signs next to them. The witch’s broom had a wooden spoon tucked into its bristles.

Bored, and a little unnerved, we left the Magic wing and returned to the main hallway. I spotted the actress pushing a cart into the room labeled, “Animals” and decided that should be our next destination. The older woman shook her head, and the band member nudged me in the ribs. They grey man grumbled that the room was probably filled with black cats.

“I like cats,” the band member said.

“Me too,” the woman agreed.

I pushed the door open and stepped on another wooden spoon. Inside, the lighting was once again dark, though instead of banisters and plaques, there stood a single cage made of bronze wires. The cage rested on a thick, oak table and was perhaps 5’ tall. Inside stood a large bird with a red-scab head and a hooked beak. A golden, square bell was strapped around its neck with a leather collar.

“That’s it?” the band member said. “It’s just a vulture.”

“Where’d that girl go?” I asked. The room was small, and I didn’t see any other doors. “I saw her walk in here.”

The woman chuckled. “Maybe she’s the real curse.”

“Ooooh!” the band member taunted. He waved his hands like a ghost.

The grey man marched over to the bird and stuck his finger into the cage, between the bars. The vulture looked at him with the fiercest, “you’re an idiot” face I’ve ever seen before squawking loud enough to raise the dead. Its voice was horrible, and the bell around its neck clanked and clattered like someone rummaging through a bag of nails.

“Says its bad luck,” the woman said. She grabbed the grey man and pulled him away from the bird. “He’s the angel of death. Also, his name is Risky.”

“Cute,” the band member said.

“Stupid,” the grey man said.

We left the exhibit, though not before I found another wooden spoon, and returned to the main hall. I checked my phone. The time read 10:00, and my heart skipped a beat because that wasn’t possible. We had only been in the Museum for perhaps 20 minutes.

I explained this to everyone, and they all voted we should leave at once. I agreed.

We headed for the door, and the grey man walked through first. As soon as he was out, he turned around and closed the door.

“What the hell?” I heard him shout from behind. “Why’d I just do that?”

“Because you’re rude?” the woman asked.

She reached for the knob and gave it a twist, but it wouldn’t open. The grey man tried from the other end, banging the door loudly against its frame. It wouldn’t budge.

“They can’t just lock us in here,” the band member said. “That’s like, I dunno, kidnapping or something.”

He kicked at the door, and half the candles in the chandelier went out. The woman let out a little scream, and I bent down to pick up yet another wooden spoon. This one felt hot to the touch.

“We should call the police,” I said, though the band member was one step ahead of me. He thumbed through his phone to make the call, and we waited for it to go through.

On the second ring, his phone died.

The woman tried next, and her phone repeated the process. Another candle burnt out. The shadows grew thick, and the brick corridors sighed a cold temperature. It was like being in a dungeon.

“I’ll get help,” the grey man shouted from the other side of the door. We could hear his footsteps as he ran off. It was the last time any of us would ever see him.

We waited for what felt like an hour, though my phone flashed 10:10. In an effort to do something, anything, the woman suggested we try another door. Because the Museum was once a restaurant, it had to have multiple exits for bringing in food and drink.

“Let’s try the ‘Places’ one,” I said.

The band member shook his head. “You see that girl go in there?”

I scowled, though part of me still hoped I’d run into her. I wanted to know what was going on. And what her name was.

I stepped through the door first and once again my foot landed on a wooden spoon. I kicked it aside. The woman entered next and immediately started screaming. Fear swallowed everyone. In truth, I wasn’t sure what to be afraid of; the room itself consisted of another dark hallway with candles to light its path. More doors marked the walls, each glinting with a gold plaque.

“Don’t you see it!” the woman shrieked. “It’s right there!”

I followed her gaze to an empty part of the hallway, and the band member marched forward. The woman only screamed all the louder.

“It’s right there!”

“There’s nothing there,” the band member said. He waved his hands around and kicked at the ground, sending clacking echoes up and down the hallway. “See?”

“It looks like a demon.” The woman shook, and I put an arm around her to steady her. I could hear her heartbeat.

“It’ll be okay,” I said. “Let’s just find the back door, and everything will be alright.”

“Yeah,” the band member agreed. His face was white with fear, but he put on a smile for all our benefits. “It’s all smoke and mirrors. Like a movie set.”

The woman sobbed but nodded, and we set off down the hallway, the band member out front. When we hit the first door, he leaned over and read the plaque.

“Cursed House,” he said. “It doesn’t say what the curse is.”

“I can guess,” I said.

The woman shook and clutched at my hand. She looked sick. “It’s following us,” she hissed. “The demon.”

I looked over my shoulder but couldn’t see anything.

The door swung open without our help, and we stepped inside, hoping for a way out but knowing there wasn’t one. The Museum of Curses was its own curse.

Dungeon floor turned into choppy grass and dying weeds. A crescent moon hung in the sky, casting dim light onto an old, decrepit two-story house that wouldn’t fit in the small building if it were torn down and brought in piece by piece. It was half a mansion, though uncared for and covered in rot. Green mildew practically glowed in the strange light. A wolf howled in the distance.

“What is this?” the band member asked. He waved at the air again. “It can’t be real.”

“I bet it’s filled with wooden spoons,” I said.

There was another plaque in front of the house, affixed to a moldy piece of fence with rusted hinges, but we turned and left. The curse wasn’t important.

The next door was labeled, “Cursed Cave,” and we entered that to similar results. The ground changed from worn brick to gravel, and the candle-lit ceiling turned into a dark starscape. The moon, however, was different, no longer waning but waxing. A cave mouth the size of a semi truck sat before us, heaving and wheezing stale, misty air.

 “Do you think they’re using mirrors?” the band member asked. “Like, is it a prop? A miniature?”

The woman shook her head. I could see her looking at something out of the corner of her eye. The demon. “It’s real,” she said. “I don’t think we’re in Milwaukee anymore.”

I walked to the plaque and read:

Unnamed Cave in northern Oregon
Find the gold and find the light
wander the dark and never sight
the clock is ticking, ticking right
then left and left and never life.

“It has to be a miniature,” the band member said. “Can’t fit a cave in this tiny building.”

I shook my head. “You can’t fit most of this Museum in this tiny building. I don’t get it.”

“What time is it?” the woman asked.

The band member checked his phone, but it was still broken. I checked mine and found another wooden spoon. “It’s 11:00. I think each exhibit takes an hour.”

“So we have one left,” the woman said. “And then the demon will go away?”

“Sounds like it,” the band member agreed.

We left the room, and the band member ran down to the next door. He laughed and hollered, “It says, ‘Haunted Planet coming soon.’”

“I believe it,” the woman whispered.

I did too.

The main corridor was darker when we returned, though not completely black. Two candles still flickered, and the shadows stabbed and thrust about the floor, almost like they were trying to kill us. The woman shook so hard I thought she might need a doctor, and the band member’s face grew pale, like he had just seen a ghost. Given we were just at a haunted house, he probably did.

Seven doors remained, though “Jewelry” and “Prosthetics” were closest. I wasn’t in the mood for either.

“I’m going to wait here,” I said. To punctuate the point, I sat on the ground. The shadows inched towards my hands, but when they touched them, nothing happened. They were just regular shadows.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” the band member said. “We should stick together.”

The woman nodded. Tears glistened in her eyes, and sweat beaded her forehead. “Please,” she said. “Just pick a door, and we’ll go.”

I shook my head. “I’m sick of whatever game this place is playing.” I didn’t mean to shout the words, but I couldn’t help it. I was confused and scared, but mostly I was angry. I clenched my hands into fists and snapped another wooden spoon that hadn’t been there a moment before. “The place can’t make me scared if I sit in this spot and wait until midnight.”

The woman opened her mouth to argue but the band member stopped her with a curt, “Fine.” He marched to the door marked “Jewelry” and threw it open. I couldn’t see what was inside, but it was apparently interesting, because his face changed, and he leaned in closer for a better look. “Huh,” he said, his voice barely making it out the door.

“Here,” the woman said. She reached into her bag and pulled out her umbrella.

“What’s this for?”

“Protection?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. It was nice standing under it though. It felt safe.”

“Thanks.” I took the umbrella and opened it. She winced, because that was supposed to be bad luck, but we were already cursed. A little more couldn’t hurt. “The demon can’t get you under here,” I said. “Because it isn’t real.”

The woman smiled. “And no more wooden spoons.”

I nodded.

My nameless friends entered the next room, and the door shut with a thundering slam, like I was hearing them die. Another candle in the chandelier went out. I shivered, and the shadows attempted another round of stabbing. Time passed in starts and stops, my phone not making sense of the numbers or the surroundings. Eyes watched me from somewhere in the distance. As it turned out, the place could make me scared if I sat in this one spot and waited.

When the door opened, I stood, ready to apologize and rush us all to safety. Instead, the actress walked out. She looked back and forth, her beady eyes wide, her ears twitching underneath her black hoodie. Her rat tail swept out behind her, curling at the tip from some mechanism I still don’t understand.

“It’s you,” I said with a blush. I didn’t know what else to say.

“Oh,” she said. She reached into her front pocket and pulled out a golden watch on a golden chain. It looked like it might be older than everything in Milwaukee. Maybe even the entire state. “You still have 40 minutes left in the tour. It’ll go faster if you check out the exhibits.”

“What’s your name,” I asked.

She put her watch away and gave me a strange look, like I might not be real. Or maybe she wasn’t real.

“Triss,” she said. “Why?”

I shrugged. I wanted to tell her she was cute; I wanted to ask her what the fuck was going on. I am easily scared though, so instead I looked at the dusty, dungeon floor and said, “I just wanted to know your name.”

“It’ll go faster if you look at the exhibits,” she repeated.

She fumbled with something in her pockets, some ugly piece of bronze, or maybe flesh, and her tail flicked back and forth like a cat’s.

“Am I cursed?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. She wouldn’t meet my gaze. “We all are though.”

“I keep finding spoons.”

The actress—Triss—brushed a lock of hair underneath her hoodie and winced. “That’s a shame.” Her tail flicked. Her mouth almost curved into a grin. “I hope you don’t like soup.”

“I love soup.” I almost asked her if she wanted to go get soup.

“That’s too bad. It’ll be really hard to eat from here on out.”

“Oh.”

She stood in the middle of the darkening corridor clutching her darkening object, and I stood a few feet away, trying to find the right question. I wanted to leave. I wanted to rewind time to when I was safe. I wanted to know more about this museum. I wanted to know more about her.

Instead my phone ticked 11:30. Triss’s golden watch did too, because she looked at it, muttered a curse, and ran to the door marked “Animals.” Maybe it was time to feed the buzzard.

“Wait,” I shouted. My hands formed fists, and butterflies ruined my stomach. “What’s … what’s your curse?”

Triss laughed. Her voice sounded like music. “No one listens to me.”

She left, and two hours later, my clock struck 12:00. The older woman and band member fell out of the “Jewelry” room with a thousand stories on their lips, all of which entered one ear and left the other. It didn’t matter. They were done, and the tour was over. We were safe.

“Come here,” I said, and the woman stepped underneath my umbrella. The band member squeezed in beside us. “I think we can go home now.”

“I still see the demon,” the woman said.

I bent over and picked up a wooden spoon. “Huh.”

“Fuck,” the band member said. “I wonder what my curse is.”

We left through the front door, stepping out into the rain and the streets glistening with lamplight. The world felt clean, yet I felt dirty. The band member shivered. The woman sobbed. I looked over my shoulder, hoping for one more picture of Triss. She was cute. She was cursed, but so was everyone.

“You get her name?” the band member asked.

“Yup,” I said.

“She cursed too?”

I nodded. “But I think she lied to me. She said no one would believe her, but I do.”

The band member kicked at the ground. Sirens sounded in the distance, but not for us.

“Love is a curse,” the woman said. “A blessing too, but also a curse.” She glowered at a spot in the road. “The demon is still here.”

“I think I love you both,” I said. I blushed so hard I thought I might melt, but it was true. Something about this tour changed me. Cursed me. But it was true, and it still is. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” the woman said.

“Me either,” the band member said.

We shook hands then. We introduced each other.

His name is Jean-luc.

Her name is Emily.

My name is Alex.