Stories For The Crapper.pdf

Genesis: Stuart Young Omniscient visions ran through God’s mind, tracing patterns in what was, what is and what will be. All possible outcomes for all possible events flowed through His mind, stretching into infinity as they criss-crossed over themselves in intricate fractals, forming subtle variations in the broad palette of reality. The visions were all perfect. They came from God, they could be nothing less. He reached a decision. It was time to give this perfection a form, to create a Paradise of living, feeling creatures; each blessed with the touch of His soul. God set to work. *** Lilith gasped in ecstasy. Lucifer had been making love to her for several hours now and she had climaxed so many times she had lost count. Lucifer’s seraph-snake form coiled around her sweat soaked body. He writhed across her erect nipples, his tongue flickering against her neck as fast as it had earlier flickered against her clitoris. One hemipenis was thrusting deep into her vagina while she clasped the other in her hand, stroking it rhythmically. Lilith felt that this method of procreation was even more pleasurable than her own birth into the world at God’s hands. She and Adam had been dust, random grains spread across Eden’s surface, but then God had sculpted them into replicas of the two halves of Himself. Granted, they were

not quite as wonderful as God, they lacked His innate sense of transcendence. But then He kissed them, somehow pressing His lips against both of them simultaneously. Life flowed into Lilith, God’s soul permeating her body, her every cell vibrating at His touch. The kiss ended and she stared in loving awe at the deity before her. Then she looked over at Adam. She could see God’s touch upon him yet she knew instinctively that he was his own man. And she knew he understood that she was her own woman. God spoke, His voice a concerto of joyous tones and melodies, yet still carrying the ring of authority. ‘You are the first people to walk in Eden. Adam, you have dominion over all the creatures here. Lilith, to you falls the responsibility of finishing what I have started here--populate the Earth with more of your kind.’ Lilith didn’t want to leave Eden but she knew the Earth would be just as wonderful. She agreed without a murmur. ‘You will not perform your task alone,’ said God. ‘The angel Lucifer will aid you.’ A rainbow appeared, its multicoloured arc sharp and clear against the azure sky. A large serpent slithered from the coloured rays of light. His scales glistening in the sun he reared up and nodded his head in greeting. ‘I am honoured to meet you both.’ Lilith felt a flutter of excitement at the sight of his sleek, muscular coils. She wondered if they felt as sensual as this first tantalising glimpse promised. In the here and now, she no longer needed to wonder. She threw back her head and howled in wild abandon as

she came once more. *** God stared at the fruit in fascination, seeing not just the succulent juicy flesh but the depravity that dwelled within. Rape, murder, lies, hate; they were all there. A purity pervaded these unspeakable acts, a clarity of purpose that spoke of a great dread beauty. This was finely honed evil, sculpted to perfection. God felt a certain pride. After all, this was His creation. The infinite universes that filled His thoughts included many where evil existed. A pure, pristine Evil; perfect as anything else God had produced. It had as much right to flourish as any of His other creations. But how could He inflict such cruelty upon the whole of existence? So He kept it safely contained within the fruit, unable to harm anyone. But the Evil was not alone. Within the fruit was also Good. Truth, love, kindness and virtue. The two opposing concepts circled each other warily; each simultaneously drawn to, yet repulsed, by its antithesis. They weaved in around each other like ribbons of blood uncurling from a wound bathed in water. God turned from The Tree that bore the fruit to see Lucifer approaching His. The angel had temporarily abandoned his seraph-snake form and his golden hair shone above his bronzed skin. His kittel---gown---was as soft and white as his wings’ feathers and his lithe, athletic frame didn’t so much walk as flow across Eden’s lush grass.

Truly, thought God, Lucifer is the most exquisite of creatures. Yet the angel’s clean-cut features were drawn into a frown. ‘I still think You should destroy that damned tree.’ ‘I know. And I have repeatedly told you it is perfectly safe.’ Lucifer glowered at The Tree distrustfully. ‘Eventually someone will eat from it. And then existence is doomed.’ ‘I have warned everyone of the danger of consuming the fruit. No one will be tempted.’ ‘You give us too much credit. You think that we are all as perfect as You, that You have constructed a hall of mirrors casting reflections of Yourself across all existence. But the further the mirrors are from You the less distinct the reflections become. Eventually all that is left is a tiny blur that bears no resemblance to Your true visage.’ ‘That being the case you wouldn’t want to breed more imperfections. You wish to cease your couplings with Lilith?’ Lucifer hesitated, obviously reluctant to abandon the pleasures he and Lilith shared. God smiled and pointed to an eagle that flew overhead, its wings outstretched in majestic splendour. ‘See there. Is it not glorious?’ ‘It is magnificent.’ 'And there.’ God gestured to the delicate crimson petals of a nearby rose. ‘It is beautiful, yes?’ ‘Yes,’ agreed Lucifer grudgingly, sensing that he was being shepherded toward a sermon. ‘Two entirely different objects yet each perfect within

their own right.’ God viewed Lucifer affectionately. ‘Diversity is not something to be feared. It is something to be savoured.’ Lucifer nodded grimly. ‘Just remember---even a rose has thorns.’ *** Adam couldn’t thank God enough for Eve. He still missed Lilith but Eve was the perfect companion, always ready to help him oversee the myriad plants and animals that inhabited Eden. And she was an eager lover, always knowing when to tease him with soft movements of her tongue and fingers and when to grind against him with fierce passion. He loved her with all his heart. But for all that he was glad he had not seen her being created. Unconsciously he fingered the area where his missing rib had been. He was happy to sacrifice it for Eve’s creation but the thought of the actual process involved made him feel ill. Fortunately God had offered him the option of deep sleep before starting. But his imagination reproduced the procedure in gruesome detail: The white finger of bone burst free, rupturing the skin. Blood dripped from the rib as God took it. The bone grew; weaving itself into an increasingly complicated sculpture as a skeleton took shape. Bared teeth grinned mirthlessly and hollow eye-sockets were dark pits, the only thing revealed in those blackened wells was the total absence of life.

Then veins and arteries appeared, dancing in the air as they entwined themselves around the bone statue. Heart, lungs, kidneys, and all the other organs materialised; glistening lumps of meat and gristle. Muscles followed, straps of flesh that lent a faint air of humanity, but it was still a grotesque parody of the real thing. Finally skin and hair appeared and the miracle was complete. Eve was a fully formed woman. Adam watched now as Eve bent to smell a flower. Her long tresses fell across her face and she tucked them back behind her ear. She caught him looking at her and flashed him a dazzling smile. His heart melted. But he was still glad he hadn’t seen her being created. *** Angel blood filled the air. Liquid light gushed from terrible wounds, spurting out so rapidly and so brightly that it nearly blinded the ones who spilled it. Swords rose and fell, severing limbs with each savage movement. Spears forged from the heart of stars lanced through a dozen bodies at a time. Previously unblemished torsos burst, their entrails spilling out like the pulp from rotten fruit. Heaven was at war. Uriel stood over a pile of dead rebels. Splashes of angel blood glowed on his body and on his raised sword. His wings stretched out in righteous fury as he bellowed, ‘To me O faithful followers of God! Stand firm against this treacherous rabble!’

It was just one vision out of many but it troubled God. Some of His visions were fading whilst others, like this one, were bold and clear, almost as if they had already happened. Actions were starting to dictate the shape of future events. Not all outcomes were now of equal probability. And God didn’t care for some of the more likely scenarios. There were still many futures where perfection reigned supreme as He had always intended but it might pay to be prudent. God started to make preparations. *** Eve walked in dreams. The sky was a kaleidoscope of colours, twisting in upon themselves like a dog chasing its tail. Eve heard clouds whispering to themselves, worried that the parakeets they had adorned themselves with made them look silly. She assured the clouds that they looked lovely. ‘See? We told you,’ she heard the parakeets say to the clouds as she went on her way. A giant tidal wave offered her a ride atop its crest and she accepted gladly. She sailed along, the briny breeze throwing her hair out behind her. The billowing locks turned into an octopus and she laughed at this absurdity. Eve loved dreams. They were a source of neverending surprise. Not that her waking life was exactly dull. Just that morning she and Adam had been walking through Eden when a rainbow appeared in front of them and two angels stepped out.

Eve had never met an angel before and she listened excitedly as they explained that God had sent them there with gifts. The first angel, Raziel, gave them a book which would protect them from harm. The second angel, Gabriel, told them that his spirit would guard them whilst they slept so that no harm could befall them. Eve was a little confused by this as surely no harm could come to them anyway whilst they were in God’s domain. But she and Adam accepted the gift graciously. Adam was also unsure why they needed protection when she asked him later. But he had no qualms as he found Raziel’s book totally absorbing and he was still reading it when he fell asleep that night. And now Eve drifted through her dreams and she had no questions either. She had just encountered a flying mountain when a serpent slithered up to her and whispered in her ear. ‘Eve, do you recognise me?’ No, she said. Should I? ‘I am your salvation, the bringer of light.’ You’re God, she said delightedly. I didn’t recognise You in that form. ‘This is just one of many shapes I can take. But tell me, why have you not eaten from The Tree of Knowledge?’ Do You not remember? she said. You warned Adam and I of the dangers of tasting that fruit. ‘I fear you did not fully comprehend my words. I was merely warning of possible dangers if you were not prepared. But now I have sent you my gifts you are perfectly safe.’ I suppose You’re right, she said doubtfully. But I’m

afraid. ‘Your apprehension is understandable. No doubt you will still feel it even as you eat the fruit. But you have nothing to fear. I want you to eat it.’ Well, she said. If You wish it. ‘Oh, I do. I do.’ Then yes, she said. Of course I’ll eat it. ‘That’s all I ask.’ Eve woke. Yawning, she stretched lazily. She turned to wake the still slumbering Adam but then The Tree of Knowledge caught her eye. The fruit did look extremely tempting. Looking down at Adam she watched the fall and rise of his chest. He looked so peaceful. And no doubt he would be hungry when he awoke. What better breakfast than a juicy piece of fruit? *** It had all been horribly easy. Lucifer wanted to show God how complacent He was being, that even the few precautions He had finally taken were woefully inadequate. So he had left Lilith on Earth and slipped into Eden while Adam and Eve slept. Adam was momentarily safe from temptation because he still clutched Raziel’s book in his sleeping hands. And Eve was protected by Gabriel. But Gabriel was prepared for a physical attack, concentrating his defences on what he considered her most vital organs; her heart and the part of her brain that governed logical thought. Both dwelled on the left-hand side of her body. But Lucifer’s purposes only required persuasion and where better to twist someone’s

will to your own desires than the right side of the brain where logic and reason were overruled by emotion and intuition? The side that Gabriel had left unguarded. After planting the seeds in Eve’s mind Lucifer rushed to God’s side. God sat in His throne flanked by Uriel and the other seraphim. The angels each folded their three pairs of wings along their backs as they gazed serenely about them. This reminded Lucifer that in his haste he had forgotten to shed his seraph-snake body. No matter, he had more urgent business to attend to. ‘There’s something You should see,’ said Lucifer as he slithered up to the throne. ‘You mean your plan to prove to Me the folly of leaving The Tree of Knowledge in the care of Adam and Eve?’ Lucifer’s jaw gaped foolishly. ‘You know?’ ‘Of course.’ ‘So You’ve already put a stop to it,’ said Lucifer, annoyed at being so easily outmanoeuvred. ‘On the contrary, I intend to let you see your plan through to its conclusion.’ Lucifer stared at God. Then he shifted his gaze to the seraphim to see their reaction. They continued gazing blissfully at him. ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘I want to prove to you that Adam and Eve are totally trustworthy. They will not eat the fruit despite your best efforts.’ Lucifer felt humiliated at being outsmarted but overjoyed that his fears had been proven unfounded. If God was this certain then everything must be all right. He

clenched his jaw as conflicting emotions ran through him and he was glad he was still a snake or his wings would have twitched, revealing his agitation. ‘I … am glad.’ God’s eyes twinkled good-naturedly. ‘Let us watch them.’ A wave of God’s hand and they were both in the Garden of Eden, standing next to Adam and Eve. Yet Lucifer knew that despite the feel of the grass brushing against his belly they were still in the throne room. He watched the drama unfolding before him. There seemed little point now that God had revealed the outcome but he supposed he might as well see it through to the end. Eve woke Adam and handed him an apple. He frowned, recognising which tree it came from. But Eve, rolling her own apple between her palms, explained her conversation with ‘God’ and that satisfied him. As they raised the fruit to their mouths Lucifer wondered what would stop them from actually tasting it. But he already knew the answer. They loved God. That love would, at the crucial moment, allow them to see through the lies Lucifer had spun. The fruit was to their lips now. Any second now purity of spirit would triumph over vile deceit. They bit into the apples. Lucifer stared at them in disbelief. It couldn’t have happened. But he had seen it, had heard the crunch of the apple. He looked at God. It was the first time he had ever seen Him surprised. ‘ … Th-that … wasn’t supposed … ’ Adam and Eve continued eating. Lucifer couldn’t believe it. He had been right and

God, God had been wrong. It was impossible. Surely such a catastrophe should be greeted by the planets shaking loose from their orbits, the sun turning to ice, the entire heavens shattering into a million shards. But no, everything continued as before. Except Adam and Eve. They looked at each other, juice running down their chins and smiled. Lucifer shivered. He had found Evil disturbing when it had been trapped helpless in the fruit but now it was in humans with the ability to act upon their new immoral impulses. He watched as a squirrel scampered by, an undulating wave of fur flowing across the grass. It stopped by Adam and Eve and looked up at them lovingly. It knew them, knew they were its friends. Adam’s hand flashed out and grabbed it by the throat. The squirrel cried in distress and clawed at his hand but it was too late. Adam slammed its tiny body against a nearby tree, stunning it. He held it pressed tight against the rough bark as Eve snatched up a small rock and smashed it repeatedly against the squirrel’s skull. Blood and brains splattered over the two humans. Lucifer felt his stomach lurch. Never in his wildest imaginings had he dreamt that Evil would be so sudden, so totally without motive. And this was just the beginning, what would happen when Evil gained a firm hold on their psyches? He turned to God, thinking that He would stop them. But God just stood there, His mouths hanging open, overwhelmed by the immensity of His blunder. Adam and Eve ran off into the heart of Eden,

searching for more mischief to perpetrate. Lucifer slithered dazedly over to the squirrel’s corpse; a pitiful mess of blood and fur. Tears formed in his eyes. It was the first time he had ever cried and the unfamiliarity of the act added to his distress. God joined him, gently scooping up the dead squirrel and holding it tenderly to His chest. ‘Can you---’ Lucifer groped for a suitable word ‘--revive it?’ ‘I can.’ God paused, His head bowed in sorrow. ‘But I’m not going to.’ Lucifer started. ‘Why not?’ ‘If I start to undo the work of My creations then there was no point in giving them life in the first place. They must be free to choose their own path.’ God looked at Lucifer sadly then turned and walked away, still clutching the squirrel to His chest. ‘I would be alone now.’ God faded into nothingness and Lucifer realised that He had returned to Heaven and that he himself was now in the real Eden and not just a simulacrum. He was appalled by God’s inaction---the refusal to restore the squirrel to life; leaving Adam and Eve to roam Eden unchecked with Evil now raging through them. If God wouldn’t deal with the situation then it was up to him. He resolved to capture Adam and Eve and restrain them until such time as God regained His senses and burned the Evil from their souls, returning them to their original state. Reasoning that his angel form was more imposing than his present seraph-snake form he tried to change back. Nothing happened.

He tried again. Still nothing. Desperately he rubbed his nose against a rock, trying to scrape away his skin. To his relief the scales began to fall away. Soon he had a coil of dried, dead skin lying beside him. But he was still a snake. He tried again, rubbing even harder against the rock. Another dry cocoon of hide peeled off. Then another. And another. Soon he was surrounded by an army of uninhabited husks, hollow replicas of himself, mocking him with their emptiness. Lucifer screamed. *** Adam rampaged through Eden, animals scattering before him in fear and confusion. Beside him ran Eve, brandishing a large branch, the wood stained with fresh blood. Adam was frustrated that he could no longer see her body beneath the covering of leaves they both wore; he wanted to leer at her nakedness as he continued the butchery. But their bodies had too many vulnerable areas that needed protecting in the heat of slaughter. He wanted to kill anything that crossed his path. Only Eve was safe from his bloodlust. For now. *** Eden

was

even

more

beautiful

than

Lilith

remembered. She looked down from the sky, drinking in the vegetation’s bright collage of colours; reds, yellows, blues and greens. And she caught glimpses of gazelles, lions and other wondrous animals cavorting freely as she descended through the wispy clouds. Off toward the horizon the clouds became denser, taking on a metallic tint. Lilith knew that the heavier clouds, with their swirling rain that never fell, supported God’s throne room Her belly, swollen with yet more beautiful new offspring for the Earth, weighed heavily on her but Lucifer carried her in his arms easily. The feathers of his wings fluttered in the air currents as he glided Lilith and himself towards Eden. Lilith knew Lucifer was troubled, she could feel his muscles tensing, turning to iron; but she still couldn’t believe what he had told her about the events that had taken place since her departure. Lucifer had returned to Heaven in his seraph-snake form and God removed it for him, apologising profusely for Lucifer’s distress. He had meant to send him to Earth in his serpent guise so he could bring Lilith back to Eden but in the aftermath of the first death in the whole of existence God had been too stunned to express His wishes clearly. ‘God has exiled Adam and Eve from Eden,’ Lucifer told her. ‘I told Him that’s not necessary, only the Evil needs to be expunged but He’s determined this is the correct course of action.’ ‘I’m sure God knows what He’s doing.’ ‘Hmmph. You see that fire blazing by Eden’s

borders? That must be the flaming sword He told me about. It will keep Adam and Eve from re-entering Eden until they have cleansed themselves of Evil. But what is to stop them polluting the Earth? After all, that is why God asked me to fetch you. So you wouldn’t risk facing them out there by yourself.’ They landed in Eden. Lilith smiled, glad to be home. Nothing bad could possibly happen when such a place as this existed. ‘Go to Heaven and say what you must to God. I will be safe here.’ She stroked his cheek, expecting him to return her smile. Instead his features remained drawn, apprehensive. ‘I will return as soon as I can.’ He kissed her palm then a powerful beat of his wings sent him soaring into the sky, heading for the glinting metal sheen of the horizon. Lilith decided to investigate the flaming sword. There would be plenty of time to reacquaint herself with the more familiar aspects of Eden later but this was something new. Her curiosity piqued she headed off in the appropriate direction. A few minutes later she saw an orange glow peeking through the brush. Pushing aside the branches she gasped at the sight before her. The sword was easily twice her height. Its blade looked sharp enough to slice a single hair into three separate strands yet its mass suggested it could cleave even the largest rock with ease. Flames danced around it; a fiery aura of pure, virtuous justice. The blade caught the reflections of the flames, their shimmering motion turning the cold metal into a living thing as it multiplied their number along its gleaming edge. Lilith felt that the blade

was showing her the heart of eternity. Around the sword hovered cherubim; lesser angels, winged animals with human faces. As Lilith approached the sword one of them spotted her and pointed, his eyes wide with fear. ‘It’s Eve!’ She started to explain the mistake but they swept down on her in an instant, pinning her to the ground. ‘She’s with child!’ ‘There will be more of the Evil monsters!’ ‘Quick! Fetch the sword!’ One of the cherubim appeared at her feet, the sword gripped clumsily in his paws, flames licking at its fearsome blade. His face was furious yet terrified. ‘Open her legs.’ ‘No!’ She thrashed wildly but they were too strong. Slowly, relentlessly they prised apart her legs. ‘So,’ snarled the cherub holding the sword. ‘Death returns to its creator,’ He plunged the blade deep into her vagina. She screamed. Blood seeped from where the blade sliced her labia and the liquid sizzled and steamed as it touched the flames. The cherub held the blade fast and the flames spread across her skin. Smooth flesh bubbled and blackened, turning to charred cinders. But even past all that she could feel the death throes of her children inside her belly as they shrivelled and died. ‘STOP!’ Flinching at the rage in the command the cherub withdrew the sword. Barely conscious Lilith lolled her head to one side and saw God and Lucifer rushing to her aid. It was Lucifer who had ordered the cherubim to cease their torture.

She winced as he cradled her in his arms. Her greasy burnt flesh rubbed against his chest and fragments of her blackened skin clung to him. ‘My babies,’ she whimpered. ‘They killed my babies.’ ‘I know, I know.’ He rocked her back and forth, tears streaming down his cheeks. Over Lucifer’s shoulder she saw God step forward shamefacedly. ‘ … I’m sorry...’ ‘Sorry?’ spat Lucifer. ‘You see what your precious Tree of Knowledge has done?’ Lilith watched as God turned away, unable to look Lucifer in the eye. Any other time she would have felt sorry for Him. ‘Surely now you will undo the damage you have done,’ said Lucifer. ‘Restore Lilith to full health, destroy the Evil within Adam and Eve---’ Lilith felt a twinge of satisfaction as Lucifer glared at the cherubim ‘---and find a suitable punishment for these miserable wretches.’ God shifted uncomfortably. ‘I’ve already explained to you that I cannot undo My creations’ actions. I---’ ‘Cannot? Will not!’ Lucifer jabbed a furious finger at God. ‘I renounce you! All your work and good deeds count for nothing in my eyes! I will overthrow you and restore proper balance to the world!’ Lilith felt the tremors of rage running through Lucifer’s body but he stilled them as he turned to her, his face once more that of the tender lover she knew and trusted. ‘Will you come with me?’ She didn’t even need to consider her answer. She had made up her mind before he even asked. ‘Yes.’ Lucifer’s wings carried them aloft and they flew out

of Eden. God didn’t try to stop them. But as they rose into the air to start their new life Lilith thought she saw tears in His eyes. *** The dead lay at God’s feet. Corpses were strewn all around the throne room. They lay with their limbs splayed at awkward angles that would have been impossible when they were alive; heads lolled on twisted necks, dead eyes staring out unseeingly. Angel blood glistened on the bodies and on the throne. A pool of the luminous fluid seeped from beneath the pile of corpses. It crept along the floor forming a sparkling liquid mirror. God gazed down at it and His reflection stared back at Him forlornly. Lucifer’s attack had been repelled and many of his followers were now in chains. But the fact that he had any followers at all bothered God. Was Lucifer right after all? God still felt His subjects deserved free will but the cost was much higher than had been expected. Yet surely Adam and Eve would eventually throw off the Evil that dwelled within them. Their immortality would fade into mere longevity and then fade even more; their offspring would eventually be lucky to survive even a single century. That should help them breed the Evil out of their system. After all, when they had eaten the fruit they had also tasted Good. In time the humans would triumph. But if they didn’t … Out of the myriad futures that God foresaw two were most prominent. Both involved wars and murder and rape

and pillage with God’s voice sounding forever smaller and weaker to humanity. But in one humans eventually repent, Evil is vanquished and God sees the universe fulfil the perfection He originally envisaged. In the second humanity embraces Evil and God is eventually driven to wipe out the whole of existence to prevent Evil spreading further. He then broods guiltily, drifting through eternity, forever alone. Two choices. It was all up to humanity now. *** Adam was pleased that Eve was pregnant. They had already chosen the names Awan or Azura if the baby was a girl. Neither of them had yet decided on any names if it was a boy. But Adam was uneasy about being present at the birth. He still recalled his revulsion of Eve’s creation. His face twisted in discomfort. Eve noticed his expression and smiled warmly. ‘Don’t worry. We can return to Eden soon. Once we are sure we have rejected the Evil from our minds and bodies.’ Adam shuddered at the memory of the swathe of terror they had cut through Eden before God banished them. The impulses that inspired that shameful episode had receded but he could still feel them sometimes, bubbling away in his subconscious. ‘How will we know when we are truly rid of the Evil?’ Eve sighed, her optimism fading. ‘We must be honest with ourselves. We may well be irredeemably tainted. But--’ she patted her swollen belly ‘---our children will surely

be free of its grasp.’ Adam nodded. He and Eve might be damned but their children would outshine them. Pure of heart, taking the world into a better, brighter future. He looked out the window of their hut. The sugar cane would be ready for harvest soon. Cane. He smiled. If the baby did turn out to be a boy he had just thought of the perfect name.

Going Down: Charlee Jacob It was better than slickering each other in Wesson oil. Jeri and Tom decided there was little to compare with the ointment properties of screwing on top of decomposing corpses. There was nothing softer or greasier than a carefully piled mass of the dead. No need for too much foreplay. The two of them were sloppy wet and ready to go in no time. And the extra-added squirming bits and wriggling bites were better than the magic fingers at the motel. Jeri giggled as a particularly bloated corpse--fresher than most of the others---farted under her like a whoopee cushion. Tom paused in his gooey sliding in and out of her to gasp out theatrically, "Man! Something died inside that cat!" "Perfume of mortality, baby," Jeri corrected him as she dug her nails into his naked rump to get him going again. They tumbled, locked in frenzied humping until he was on the bottom and she was over him. There was a crunch as a very old set of ribs gave way. There was no dust. There were no splinters to jab into Tom's bare back. They mashed like egg shells full of yolk and albumen, damply oozing. Jeri planted her knees on either side of him, feeling them sink into the corroding flesh like keys making a wax impression. How convenient for the Highway Department to leave these bodies here, dug up from an old graveyard that stood in the middle of where the county was running the

new roadway. Of course, the cemetery hadn't been on the charts. There were no headstones to mark anything. None of the deceased had been buried in coffins, only in bare dirt. There also seemed to be no arrangement to them, either in distance apart or lay out of the bodies. Many were strewn in at odd angles and some were face down. Odd thing though, from whatever direction their feet were stuck, east-westnorth-south-up-down, their heads all pointed toward the same center. The foreman remarked to the project chief that he could have drawn arrows from these and they would have eventually converged. Whatever way they had been planted, it was obvious that they hadn't been interred with loving care in a welltended facility meant to hold their remains in tender perpetual slumber. The fact that there were over eighty of them meant it had to be a graveyard, right? It wasn't as if the road crew had dug up some serial killer's stash, not with this many. Still, it would have been an embarrassing situation with the public if they had accidentally burrowed into some historic burial ground. The project chief ordered the bodies to be temporarily stored in a shed where the department kept grading cement, while he discreetly checked old records for some clue as to what they might have stumbled upon. How convenient that Tom was on the road crew. The couple never would have suspected that his job would bring them an outlet like this one for their mutual kinks. It had always been up to Nurse Jeri to find the opportunities. The last time had been when old Mrs. Grumwald suffered her final stroke and died, her elephantine body spreadeagled on the double hospital bed making enormous

pillows of lard which had gone spongy with all the treatments she'd been given for her atrophied muscles. Women who weighed in excess of eight hundred pounds just didn't get around that much. And now Mrs. Grumwald wasn't going to get around ever again. Try as the couple did, they couldn't pry the old woman's legs apart to set Jeri between them. But they'd still been able to do it en flagrant perched precariously atop the body. Each organic noise of Mrs. Grumwald's organs deflating in turn and the blood collapsing veins as it descended to reservoir in her massive butt made Jeri and Tom even more passionate. And then there had been the time Jeri fished the abortions out of the surgical dumpster. Slippery as eels in the whirlpool tub. That had certainly been an experience. Except that the 'eels' didn't nibble, Jeri was reminded of fish pecking at her skin when she swam in the lake. But this was the coup de grace. Jeri could never top this. If they had thought that Mrs. Grumwald's overstuffed chair slowly stiffening under and around them had been bean-bag morphologic, they were swept away by the butter of total necrosis. And all of the bodies pointed the same way in the ground? "As if they'd been swimming through the earth to reach each other for a subterranean pulp-orgy," Tom mused, plumbing her. "Jam session," Jeri whispered huskily into his ear. He sweated and pumped, hips in gear, thrusting up into her grumy hole. She fell on him with a growl, her pendulous breasts plopping against his chest, nipples burrowing into his matted hair. They rolled again, slipping

over a rise where the bodies had been stacked a little higher, sliding down easily into a greenish gray cleft which seemed to be a fissure of several doughy groins at intersection. The stench of mildewed musk made Jeri swoon, even as her own mounting orgasm brought her toward a similar insensibility. She was again on her back in the slush, inhaling deeply of the reek as a narcotic, the fumes backing up in her nose thick as sour cheese curds. She knew she'd have to take a memento with her from this night, some fetish she could secretely keep on her as she worked her shift at the hospital. As the time when she and Tom had done it in the hospital morgue, curled up in the drawer with the fragmented litter from a flaming auto accident victim crunching like pork rinds with every pelvic bump. She'd pilfered one finger and had stuck it up her ass the next morning, feeling it all day with a vile satisfaction as she cooed at babies in the maternity ward and fluffed the pillows for the post-surgery patients. If only you knew, she'd think as she grinned. That's me, perky angel of mercy. "Hey, I like what you're doing down there!" Tom laughed. "What's that?" she purred in his ear, her hands twisting curls through his hair as she pulled his head down to her mouth. He frowned and pulled away, sitting up sharply. He looked around. "What?" she asked him. "Someone was playing with my ass," he hissed, realizing that if she had her hands in his hair, she couldn't very well have been squeezing his rump.

He shuddered. "God, Jeri, it's moving. They're moving." It wasn't simply that the corpses were collapsing under the couple's weight anymore. They were gradually crawling over one another, getting even more gelatinous as they merged. Bodies had been put near the outer edges of the shack, some laid onto sacks of cement. These had tumbled off to the floor and were closer, obviously curling nearer by the moment. Dessicated loops and gummy licorice shreds of tendon inchwormed toward contact with other mucousy ribbons of indefinable physiology. The couple found themselves splashing as morbid resins started to wash across them. "What the hell's happening?" Jeri cried out and tried to sit up. Tom didn't make any attempt to get off of her but laid there like a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a raft. He smiled. "Wow, think about it. What if that really wasn't a graveyard out there. What if all those people were buried in lots of places. Victims of midnight roadsides and backyard spouses-under-the-rose-bushes, hunting accidents, pioneers who died on their homesteads, and just about everybody else who died where it wasn't convenient to get a pine box. And they all eventually came together here!" "Why here?" she asked him. "What makes this place so special?" "Well, I don't mean like it's the only place in the world where they could. This is just one. They start out after they die and begin to rot, gravitating to where they feel more meat calling to them. Pretty soon a whole bunch of them are homing in toward the same location." "But why?" Jeri gasped, watching a trio of limbless

torsos fold over one another. She took in a mouthful of something fishy as it splashed across her face. She spat it out, anxious as the tussle around them escalated, hearing...what? what?...soothing bated air---a purling of damp puffs--a solemn hushing hoarseness. "Because the greatest instinct in life is sex!" Tom howled exuberantly. "That's why bodies break down into liquid, the sexual impulse surviving in our cells. It's for the mixing, don't you see? It's the great cohesive scummy fuck, primordial waters swirling stickily together to produce the pox of generation!" "Sounds like a vicious cycle," she replied thoughtfully, then giggled. More like a viscous cycle. Rime slapped against her legs, flowed under her back and over into her face. Her hair trailed a heavy seaweed down into it. It tingled strangely, the bodies loosening further as they made languid graspings with the clotty gravy... which was all that seemed to be left of most of them. Here and there a semi- solid limb gestured obscenely, fondled another with a finesse hardly inanimate. But it was melting, melting and taking Jeri and Tom under with it. Again Jeri heard it, realizing finally that it wasn't really audible. There were no voice boxes, no lungs bellows, no lips to produce sounds of desire with. She sensed it: songs of longing, of hunger, of vulgar lust. It made her greedy for rubbing and bursting. She ground herself against Tom, moaning. All those decades, maybe even centuries, they had been moving millimeters through the thick, virtually unyielding earth to reach one another. Sometimes they made it inches when the heavy rains turned the shallow

ground to mud, almost not at all in years of drought when the surrounding dirt was like stone. No wonder the anal-retentive, genitally-uptight killjoys had started imprisoning their deceased into boxes of wood and in lead-lined coffins. It was to keep them further still from that eventual joining in the septicemic corrupting rut. "Oh, Tom, I want this!" she screamed, and flaking gunk crept over her lips in a licentious grope. Jeri clamped down on it, sucking hard until it quivered. More went up her nose. Even Tom was wallowing in it. "Me, too!" he said clearly, just before both of them were completely immersed. The mastic around them burned, stung, aroused them as nothing had before. Was there a better way to die than to drown in death, suffocating on the ricey swill of grave slag? Not for Jeri and Tom. They stopped any struggling which might have been simple reflexive survival. The carrion quagmire ran over them as they were submerged, stinking pit bilge enfolding them in union even as the corpses in their various stages of decay caressed one another's sludge. How long would it before the couple putrified enough to truly seep into this lovers' sump? Oh, it would take time. First they had to suppurate in small fleshy cracks, gases belching out in impassioned sighs. Later would come the dissolve to tallow, aided by Cupid's hordes of carcass vermin. And this would be only to titilate them, a compost of mere tongueing. Ah, decay could be such a tease. But given duration with plenty of dampness and they would lose all solidity, as their matter broke down into elements

which were mostly water. Pure, festering lubricant, all bubbling wet dream in inseparable juices. All they had to do now was indulge each other with the death by fuck in this swamp of softly cadavers copping gruey feels, sloshing up their rectums, down their throats in the fuck by death. Jeri gurgled, gagging on the raspy sap, wondering if that was Tom squeezing her breasts as her heart convulsed in rhythm with her lungs in excited desperation. Tom floundered, his head full of steam, his cock spastically releasing a seemingly endless stream of seed. Around them the frothy celebrants appeared to exhale, to murmur and whistle, together at last in a horny fizzle of final biological instincts. Their two bodies bobbed, spasmed in complete oxygen-starved synapse-burning ecstasy. The sea of chum and effervescing anatomy held them buoyant for one sizzling second, then absorbed them back into the saturating screw. Going down for the last time never felt so good.

Modification: Alex Severin Deep down, you always know wrong things. The soul never lies. The heart never lies. The intuition that sets off screaming alarm bells is never mistaken. He is my wrong thing. I ignored the blatant honesty of my soul and my heart, silenced my keen intuition about him. I dismissed every sign, every prickle of hair on the back of my neck, every danger! sign that flashed in front of my eyes. I took no notice of anything except the throb in my cunt. But cunts are stupid. You can't trust a stupid cunt--they cheat and lie, tell you to ignore the blinding white truth that is in front of your face. Toxic---that's what he is, a poison that courses through my veins and flows from inside me when he looks at me, kisses me, touches me, fucks me. He is under my skin, makes me loathe the shallowness of my own flesh---flesh that bares the scars he made, flesh that always craves more of him. But my scars were already there from the moment I laid eyes on him---they just weren't visible to me yet, but I know that he could see them, see them in all their glorious colour and texture, taste their flavour. I look down at my body; I am horrified by my own modification, the reconstructions he made me suffer, the foreign objects that lie partially beneath my skin---they glint in the flicker of a candle flame and cast a bizarre silhouette on the wall. It seems like the shadow of some fantastic Lovecraftian beast, not the shadow of a woman, not my shadow.

I stare at my dark reflection, at the scars where searing brand-marks used to be, at the pieces of metal he raped my flesh with---coils of wire, steel plates, metal springs and spikes and studs---tiny pieces of pain scavenged from dead machines. I cut away these scars now, cut them out with surgical steel that flashes in the half-light. There are more scars now, bigger, deeper, uglier. But they are my scars, scars I have made, I chose to make---not him. I have erased his signature from my skin---all except one. I always leave one---I cannot bare to remove it. But the stupid cunt grows no wiser with experience--I still feel it tighten at the thought of him, even now, even after a session of flaying myself, stripping away at his artists rendition of a woman---my cunt still aches when it remembers his attentions, remembers his lips, his fingers, the exquisite stab of his Prince Albert-adorned cock. I stroke my last scar and think of him and remember what his ruined flesh felt like on mine, the texture of his imperfections, tasting again his flavour on my tongue. I remember the sensitivity of new scar tissue like an erotic branding---burning hot pain as new, tight skin is stretched almost to breaking point. I remember the musk that rose from his skin and inflamed me and the smell of his hair---like cars and apples---and the permanent line of oil under his fingernails. I close my eyes as I think of those dirty hands as they pawed me, scratched at my delicate skin; I can still feel each cut and nick and callus that graced his brutal hands, hands so dirty that they left my skin smelling like an engine.

But I still cannot stay away and each time he sees me he wants me more. The deeper and more plentiful my scars, the greater his desire. Each time we meet I am new for him, further reconstructed, my modification advancing to a new level, ongoing transformation of a woman. And he scars me yet again, performs new surgeries and makes me fresh and new, makes a brand new map of my skin for his dangerous journey. Afterwards, I have to self-harm again, remove his work again---and I am reborn for our next rendezvous. I am his Goddess of Imperfection---a scarred and damaged Icon and he is my God, my creator, redeemer of my weak flesh, keeper of my soul. I cry out each time---perhaps much more in ecstasy than in pain---when he cuts me again, or sears my skin with his erotic hot metal, or implants another foreign body into mine. He uses my own juices to salve my wounds; it flows from me like the liquor from an over-ripe exotic fruit. The fascination transforms his features, erases every trace of the cruelty that lives there in each contour, each line, every expression. I can see the joy it brings him to watch me bleed---he touches the rough tips of his fingers to my flow, inhales the piquant scent of my insides and rubs it into his skin. And I can see love in those soulless eyes, I can see humanity, compassion, empathy as he watches my suffering and my pleasures. And when he suffers with me, oh God, when he fucking bleeds with me, then I am helpless, trapped beneath the weight of his binding-spell. He captivates me with his every movement---the expressions of sex and horror and sensual delights that

paint his face, the hundred different moans into the soft darkness, and the way he says my name. My name doesn't sound that way on the lips of anybody else. I know it never will. As I sit here now, alone, I stare again at the patterns of pain that are his legacy; I do not remember what my flesh looked like unscarred, unmolested. Somehow, in some dark corner of my fucked up brain, everything makes sense. All of this, everything he does and I do and we do, makes sense. I know that who I am now is the real me. I know that who I am now is who I have waited to become all my life. Being here, alone in the darkness, cutting away pieces of my own flesh with a cut-throat razor---keen, cool steel fucking my skin---is right. This is my home. This is where I belong. But the horror of it all always crawls slowly into my conscious thoughts, then runs screaming in to my nerves, pulls at the pit of my frozen gut as I see a monster that used to be me starting back at me from the mirror I stand in front of. And I know that all of this is my own doing. All of this is my fault. I allow it to happen. I stagger backwards, the backs of my legs making contact with the bed, my momentum forcing me to sit down on the edge. Then a hideous revelation hits me in the face like a fist. I want it. I love it. I need it. I know that I will never, ever leave him. Nothing will ever, ever make things better and I will always be here and at his whim. I want him. I love him even more than I hate

him. I will still go to him when I have exhausted all the remaining flesh on my body. I will still go to him when I can no longer keep count of my scarifications and my piercings and my brand marks. I will still go to him when all else in my life have left me, when they can no longer bear what I do to myself, what I allow him to do to me. The stupid cunt still throbs in time with the beat of my heart, that truthful, honest heart that never lied or cheated but in the end has fallen prey none the less. Betrayed by my own heart. All of its fuss and bluster were for nothing---my scars tell the tale. Hot tears sting my face and shame and fury paint my cheeks bloody red. And even now, even although I hate him and even although I hate myself, my stupid cunt aches for the next time I will bleed for him.

Death Rattlers: T. Rigney The motel looked abandoned. Then again, so did most of the area surrounding it. But you couldn't expect a joint in the middle of nowhere to be kept up as well as those in the city. In fact, Peter would have kept driving, a crude map drawn on the back of a napkin clutched in his left hand, if it hadn't been for the giant neon sign set atop the motel's main office that read "Joe's Plantation." Both A's, however, had burned out long ago, lending the place an air of neglect. Of course, the garbage-strewn parking lot, the peeling puke green paint, and the warped wooden doors didn't help make the place look that great, either. And as Peter Leeds pulled into an empty space and killed the engine, he began to have second thoughts about coming all the way out here. Something deep inside said it was just plain wrong. But for someone like him, being picky wasn't really an option any longer. It wasn't as if Peter was some sort of hideously deformed individual who couldn't land a chick in the sack. Heavens no. In fact, he was sort of the ladies' man back in college---a 6-foot-6 beefcake with short blonde hair and gorgeous rippling muscles---before this unnatural urge began to pollute the poor bastard's sexual cravings. His lovers didn't understand his desire, didn't want any part of it, and it had started to cramp his style. Word gets around in a city the size of Lexington, especially when there aren't that many singles bars to cruise in the first place. Women started to shy away from him once they learned his name. Others were quick to point him out as soon as he walked

through the door, such was his reputation among the young, dumb, and horny. Nobody wanted to fuck Peter Leeds anymore. Nobody wanted his corrupt spunk clogging up their fleshy wetworks. Of course, Peter didn't hold it against them. How could he? Even he didn't quite grasp the urges that made his dick swell to twice the size of a two-dollar ballpark weenie whenever his mind wandered to it. He didn't understand why he felt the way he did about such things. Trying to figure it out was a waste of time; even though it seemed completely out of his character to feel the way he did, trying to decipher the hows and whys only left him with the lingering horror that everything he was experiencing was completely natural. That more than anything scared him the most. How could a successful, good-looking motherfucker like himself have such morbid sexual desires? After a while he just stopped thinking about it. Instead, he decided to roll with the punches. Make lemonade out of lemons, so to speak. Which is why he tracked down Joe's Plantation in the first place. He'd learned about it from some random weirdo who'd approached him nonchalantly at Tabitha's Bar & Grill, one of the few places in town Peter could haunt without the scornful glares from would-be fuck buddies. From the looks of the guy, Peter thought he was about to get his ass handed to him. And for Peter to be intimidated by anyone---especially some pissant at a local watering hole---meant the guy could be a serious fucking threat. Our man of the hour steeled himself for the inevitable sucker punch to the face, then almost fell over in surprise when the

fellow pulled up a stool next to him and extended his hand. "You're Peter, right?" the menacing stranger said. His hand was thick and meaty and pink, like a cut of beef fresh from the slaughter. "The freak?" Peter laughed nervously, unsure what, exactly, his stool buddy was getting at. "I'm Peter Leeds, yeah. And depending on who you've talked to, I guess I'm the freak." "I'm Clarence Langstrom," he said. He looked down at his hand, which was still extended. Feeling a little embarrassed, Peter shook it quickly and retreated. Satisfied with the greeting, Clarence continued. "I think you know my sister Beverly." Oh shit, Peter thought. Beverly Langstrom. The one he'd gone too far with. When Clarence saw that oh-my-fucking-god look on Peter's face, he couldn't help but laugh. "I ain't here to kick your ass or nothing, buddy," he said as he slapped our hero on the back. "Beverly really did want me to, you know. After what you did to her." Oh yes, Peter thought. What I did to her. He licked his lips, fought hard to keep his dick from sprouting like a weed. "I mean, buckets of rot? Make-up? Ice cubes? Twitching? Man, you're sick," Clarence said as he chuckled. "But you and me---you see, we got things in common. More than you think. Which is why I've been trying to track you down. Who knew that a playboy such as yourself would waste his time in a shithole like this." "Track me down?" Peter asked, dumbfounded. He was still uneasy about the whole scenario, and you could hear it in his voice. "Why would you want to track me

down if you don't want to kick my ass? I mean, after all, what I did to your sister was---" "Sick? Perverted? Well, yeah," Clarence interrupted. "But we got that in common." "We do?" Peter actually began to relax. "Yes, my friend, we do." Clarence fished a cigarette from his shirt pocket and flipped it between his lips. "Like I said, we got a lot in common." Peter studied his newfound friend as the intimidating goon lit his cigarette. "You promise you're not going to kick my ass or anything?" "If I was going to kick your ass, buddy, you'd already be a pile of fuck right now," Clarence said as a thick cloud of smoky cancer oozed from his nose. "I mean, you're a big fella, but I don't think I'd have any problems cleaning the toilets with your face." "Okay. Fine." Peter hesitated. "Then...what do you want from me?" "I don't want nothing from you, buddy," Clarence said as he sucked in another hit from his ciggy. "I want to help you out so you don't stumble across some other dumb broad's brother who might just end your fucking life for the shit you pulled." "How can you help me?" Peter wondered. Clarence snatched a napkin from the counter. "Got a pen? I'll show you." Peter dug deep into his pockets for his favorite pen, the one his mother gave to him upon graduation from college. He took the ugly gold thing wherever he went, just in case he came upon a situation that required an overpriced writing utensil. Today, it seemed, was his lucky day, and

just when he thought carrying it around was a waste of good pocket space. He handed the delicate instrument to the hefty fellow to his right and watched the man scribble something on the napkin. "These are directions," Clarence explained as he doodled. "Directions to an old motel about thirty minutes outside of town. Go into the main office and talk to the owner. He's pricey, but honest. You ain't gonna pay for nothing you ain't gonna get." "What kind of place is this?" Peter asked reluctantly. Clarence looked up from the napkin and smiled knowingly. "A place where men with our tastes can have their fancies tickled," he explained. "A place where you don't need no buckets of foul-smelling shit, no grease paint, no fucking ice cubes to make it feel all cold and dead." Peter shifted uncomfortably. "But there's more, you know." Clarence threw back his oversized head and laughed. "Of course there's more! That's what makes Joe's so goddamn special. He's got what he calls The Jesus Juice; a little resurrection Kool Aid for the dead and buried. Just what I think you need." Peter watched as Clarence finished the crude map. "Are there many of us out there? I mean, do a lot of people feel the way we do?" "More than you think," Clarence said as he handed Peter the napkin. "We call ourselves Death Rattlers. Look us up on the Internet; there's hundreds of us out there, just aching to get our little pricks into someone who's on the verge of death." Despite his best efforts, Peter smiled. Widely. "And

Joe has girls who can do this? Who enjoy doing this?" "Just go there," Clarence said. "To say anything else would spoil the surprise. And it's a very nice surprise to boot. A surprise I think you'll take to like a duck to water." "Do I owe you anything for this?" Peter asked curiously. Once again, Clarence unleashed a gut-busting laugh. "Of course not, buddy. We're allies. Friends. Comrades. We're on the same goddamn team. Just thank your lucky stars that you ended up with some chick's brother who understands your situation. Otherwise you could find yourself at the end of a not-so-tasty knuckle sandwich." Clarence made a gun out of his right hand and pretended to shoot Peter with it, complete with sound effects. "Or worse. Know what I mean?" "Yeah," Peter said with a nervous laugh. "I think I do." "Better get going," Clarence said, motioning to the giant beaver clock above the bar. "Joe's not open very late these days. Getting too old for the business, you know. But if you leave now, you might make last call. Just keep a sharp eye out for his big neon sign. Then again, you can't really miss it." Peter extended his hand. Clarence shook it. "Thanks," Peter said. "I mean it." "Don't mention it," Clarence said with a wave of his hand. "Just enjoy yourself. Stop back here once in a while and have a drink with me. I'm here just about every night. "And if you have any trouble with Joe, just tell 'em Clarence sent you." That was two hours ago.

Peter looked up at the flickering neon sign and sighed. "Well," he mumbled to himself. "Might as well check the place out." Steeling his nerves for the encounter to come, Peter slowly exited the car, locked the door, and proceeded across the dirty parking lot to the main office. Warped and rotten, the office's front door look as though a strong gust of wind would blow the nasty thing right in, but that wasn't the case. To Peter's surprise, the place was locked up tight. He started to leave, paused, then approached the door once again. He knocked on the uneven wood lightly, then loudly. Footsteps approached the door. "We're closed!" a voice called from within. "Are you sure?" Peter asked. "I mean, I drove all the way out here." "No vacancy!" the voice barked. Despite its rage, the voice sounded old, frail. As if its owner were on the verge of the ascending into The Great Beyond. Just as he was about to give in, pack it up, and head back home for a lonesome night of one-handed pickle pulling, he remembered his buddy Clarence's parting words. "Clarence sent me!" he said suddenly, much to his own surprise. "He told me you could...help me." Silence. Then, "Who?" "Clarence," Peter repeated. "Big guy. Real big guy. Said he comes here all the time." Again, silence. Then he heard locks being unlocked. Bolts being unbolted. And the door slowly opened, revealing an impossibly

skinny, impossibly old man clutching two rusty metallic canes. He swayed in the doorway, gazing wildly at the potential customer standing before him. His skin was jaundiced and wrinkled, his gray hair thin and stringy. It made Peter think of the zombies from that old Romero movie, except these zombies had obvious eating disorders, causing their ribcages to protrude like a busty woman's God-given talents. The two men studied each other for what seemed like ages, until the old man stepped aside and waved a wobbly crutch. "Well, get in here," he snapped. "No since lettin' the night air corrupt my products." After taking a deep breath, Peter crossed the threshold. The interior was even worse than the exterior; the walls were nothing more than slats of knobby pine nailed haphazardly to the building's crooked frame. Strands of multi-colored Christmas lights were tacked to the walls and ceiling, giving the place a carivanl-esque feeling. The smell of spoiled meat, fresh fish, and soiled underwear hung in the air like a suffocating fog, causing Peter to cough more than once as he followed the old man down a long hallway to a small room that served as the motel's lobby. Two exits--one marked Women and the other marked Men---led down two equally disgusting hallways. It was then that Peter wondered if he'd made a serious mistake coming here. The shaky old guy rounded the counter and sat down on an uneven stool. A black-and-white TV stationed behind him was showing an old spaghetti western. One of the overhead lights above the counter just wouldn't stop flickering, causing Peter's right eye to twitch

uncontrollably. "I'm Joe," the old man said. He motioned to a chalk board on the wall above the TV. "And that's our menu. I'm sure you know what goes on here so I'll save you the small talk." Peter glanced at the menu. Written in barely legible script were three words: Breathing, Twitching, and Stillness. "Actually, could you explain the options?" the first-time customer wanted to know. "I really don't understand what you're offering." The old man rolled his eyes and sighed. "Guess I'll have to give you my speech after all." He cleared his throat--which sounded as though it were filled to the brim with green and yellow sludge---and shifted his scrawny ass on the stool. "My name's Joe, just like it says on the sign. We're all Death Rattlers here, so don't feel embarrassed about what you feel. We offer three different kinds of service at Joe's Plantation. We've got Breathing, where you get to sleep with a heavy breather right on the cusp of death. Then you've got Twitching, which allows you to fuck the hell out of someone locked in fatal seizure. Finally, you've got Stillness, just like you were screwing the hell out of someone in a coma. That's what we got." He eyed Peter cautiously. "You're still interested, aren't you?" Peter had stopped listening after the description for Twitching. "I think I'll take Twitching," he said, sucking in a thick wad of saliva that had pooled in his mouth. Joe nodded his head and smiled. "I thought you looked like a Twitcher," he said with a slight grin. "I can usually pick 'em"---he snapped his fingers---"just like that." "And these girls, do they...you know...enjoy this?" he

asked carefully, not really sure how to approach the subject tastefully. Joe kind of chucked, then shook his head. "No, I reckon they don't. But that don't mean nothing. It's you we're worried about here at Joe's Plantation." Peter didn't like the sound of that. The old man placed a service bell on the counter and pounded it four times with the palm of his hand. "DaddyO!" he shouted, a fine mist of spit spraying from his cracked lips. "Daddy-O! We got us a customer! Get in here!" He slapped the poor bell one more time. Heavy footsteps could be heard stomping down the Men's hallway. They seemed to be attached to someone who had obvious physical limitations; instead of a constant one-two step, it was more like a one-two-slide, as if the owner of those heavy feet had an extra limb to drag behind him. Peter hid his shaking hands behind his back. Then it was in the doorway. He was Goliath to Peter's David; a monstrous individual with enormous feet, a tiny head with beady eyes, and a bizarre affliction in his right arm that caused it to grow three times the size of his left. What hair he had on top of his misshapen skull was curly and black, as though God had played a cruel joke and sprouted pubic hair on his scalp instead of between his bulging thighs. The ill-fitting T-shirt he wore read, "Big Fucking Deal." He said nothing as he stood there, his whole body swaying front to back, left to right. Joe, happy that his oversized assistant had finally arrived, clasped his hands together and giggled like a school girl. "Daddy-O, we've got ourselves a Twitcher!" he said

to the beastly man. "Mix up a batch of Twitchin' juice and meet me in Room 102." The old man turned to Peter, who was trying not to stare at the horror in the doorway. "I'm assuming you do want a woman, correct?" "That's right," Peter finally managed to say. "Good to know," the old man said with a nod. "I mean, I ain't got nothing against homosexuals or anything, but they do tend to damage the product a bit more than men who like to get it going with women, you know what I'm saying?" He wiggled his eyebrows inappropriately, causing Peter's light dinner to flip in his stomach. The thing called Daddy-O continued to sway in the doorway until Joe snapped, "Get going, you big bastard! Get that juice mixed! We got a hard-up customer just itchin' to get into some twitchin'!" He laughed uncontrollably at his little rhyme. Peter didn't know what to think. The old man's weird assistant, after lingering in the doorway a few moments longer, did an awkward 180degree turn and shambled off, dragging that oversized limb behind him as he went. Joe, satisfied that his orders were finally being followed, stepped from behind the counter and draped a wrinkled arm around Peter's less-thanconfident shoulders. Then he leaned in close, so that his pencil-thin mustache gently grazed Peter's right ear. "We need payment up front," he whispered. "Nothing personal, mind you, but accidents have been known to happen." "Accidents?" Peter asked as he took a step away from the motel's proprietor. "What kind of accidents?" Joe just waved his hand. "Don't worry about that.

Rarely happens. But we do insist on payment up front." He extended a gnarled hand, his fingers like overcooked french fries. "The price is a hundred bones. You got that?" Thankfully, Peter had stopped at an ATM on his way out of Lexington. Since his burly buddy at the bar had neglected to say how much this excursion would cost, he decided to take as much as the little machine would allow. Even though he doubted he'd need all of it for the night's adventure, it was better to be safe than sorry. He took out his wallet, removed five twenties, and stuffed them into the old man's eager hand. "Thank you, sonny," he said as he slipped the dough into his shirt pocket. "Thank you much. Now, let me show you to your room." Joe, wobbling as he went on those less-than-stable canes, made his way down the hallway marked Men. Peter followed close behind, noting several photographs of gentlemen from every spectrum of the social class tacked randomly to the pine slats. Amongst the wrinkled polaroids were pictures of hobos, lawyers, drunks, doctors, and a few political candidates from a few decades back. All of them looked happy, satisfied, and had their arms around the one and only Joe. Peter wondered if his face would soon be staring down horny customers as they made their way down this horrific hallway. He swallowed a small cup of vomit that had erupted from his stomach. The two men turned a sharp corner at the end of the Men's hall, revealing yet another hallway with warped, rotten wooden doors set on either side. At the very end of the hall stood a strange cavern door, complete with a barred window set near the top. A hand-written cardboard sign

nailed to it declared, "Employees Only." Strange wet suckling sounds could be heard coming from within. Peter decided he had no desire to know what horrors dwelt on the other side. Joe stopped abruptly in front of Room 102 and balanced himself on his canes. "This is it," he said. "It ain't the prettiest piece of work you've ever seen, but I'm sure you won't mind the surroundings once you get your dipstick wet." Peter honestly had no idea how to reply to such a crude statement. With a nod, Joe kicked open the door, revealing a room that would make the roach motels in north Lexington look like Trump Tower. The fecal brown wallpaper was peeling, the once-white drapes were almost green with gunk, and the nightstand beside the rotten mattress was covered with empty condom wrappers and discarded cigarette butts. However, it wasn't these atrocities that made Peter's eyes bulge from their sockets. No, it was the dead hooker---complete with fishnet stockings and ratty red halter top---who lay spread-eagle on that horrid four-poster bed that caused the alcohol in his veins to turn sour. Unable to find words that accurately displayed his complete and utter horror, Peter could only gag in response. Joe, always amused by first-time customers, just laughed. "They all act that way," he said as he wobbled. "But you'll soon get used to it." "Is she...?" Peter stammered, unable to finish the sentence. "Dead?" Joe laughed again. "Sure is. Dead as a goddamn doornail. But not for long, mind you. If she

stayed that way, I wouldn't be in business, would I?" "I'm supposed to...have sex with that?" Peter asked, disgusted. "Because I don't like corpses. I don't want to screw a dead woman." "She won't be that way for long," the old man chuckled. His gaze turned to the doorway. "Ah, there's Daddy-O now with the Jesus Juice." Peter whirled around to see that hideous thing standing in the doorway, a leaky wooden bucket clutched in his left hand. Inside said container appeared to be remnants of someone's bout with explosive diarrhea; chunks of brown glop, mixed in a watery brown soup, dripped from several holes in the bottom of the bucket. The smell was stomach-churning, causing Peter to cover his mouth as Daddy-O entered the room. He made his way to the side of the bed, set the bucket on the floor, and turned to his boss. The old man nodded his head and smiled. "You brought the syringe?" he asked. "Milky," Daddy-O struggled to say, as if he had absolutely no control over his puffy pink tongue. "Milky sunlight." "That's right," the old man said. "Milky sunlight." Daddy-O handed him the syringe and made his way out of the room. Joe turned to Peter, a peculiar look smashed across his wrinkled mug. "He ain't got one workin' brain cell in that tiny-ass head of his. We kinda developed our own language in order to get things done. Hope that doesn't make you limp or anything, cause I don't offer refunds." Peter, too horrified to speak, just stood there, his eyes locked on the dead whore. Joe tossed his canes aside and slumped down onto

one knee. He dipped the needle of the syringe into the bucket of muck and pulled back slowly on the plunger, effectively sucking the brown gruel inside. Satisfied with the dosage, he turned to the dead hooker, took her by the arm, and inserted the needle deep into her inanimate flesh. Peter just watched, unable to do anything at all. One part of him wanted to flee this disgusting establishment and return to the comfy confines of his spacious two-bedroom apartment in the middle of downtown Lexington. However, another part wanted to stick around for the show, maybe indulge in some otherworldly hanky-panky if, in fact, this miracle goo actually brought the dead back to life. The idea intrigued him from his head to his groin. That sinister urge was calling his name. "Okay," Peter said after a long pause. "How do we do this?" Joe removed the needle from the hooker's arm and tossed the syringe into the leaky bucket. "Well, she'll start up in about three or four minutes, so you might want to think about getting those clothes off." He pulled open the nightstand drawer and removed an alarm clock. His shaky fingers set it to go off in eight minutes. "This will give you three minutes to get ready and five minutes for the old 'in and out.' Most new customers don't last longer than five minutes." Peter studied the hooker, watching for any signs of life. "Do I just...you know, climb on?" "You can, yes," the old man said as he used his canes to return to his feet. "Or you can wait until the twitchin' starts. Doesn't really matter to me." Joe stopped in the doorway and turned back to Peter,

who looked as though he'd just been given a lobotomy. "One more thing before I go. See that light switch next to the bed? If anything weird happens, anything at all, just flip it. We'll rush right in." "Anything weird happens?" Peter asked nervously. "Like what?" The old man just smiled. "You'll know it when you see it, rest assured." Then he wobbled out of the room, closing the door gently behind him. This left Peter all alone in that disgusting room. With that disgusting dead hooker. Trying to keep an open mind about the whole scenario, Peter began to disrobe. First went his shoes and socks, then his blue button-down shirt. Finally, and with a little hesitation, went his pants and underwear, leaving him stark naked in a completely foreign environment. According to the little alarm clock on the cluttered nightstand, he had about a minute or so before the old man's serum started to kick in. With that in mind, he stroked himself hard, took a deep breath, and climbed aboard the USS Whore, which was currently docked on a mattress covered in deep black and brown stains. She was cold and dry inside, causing Peter's gorge to rise once again. Just block it out, he told himself. Just block all of that out. He was about to pull out and call it a day when he felt the first tremor. It was gentle, as if the corpse had just cut a very forceful fart. Then he felt it again. And again. Soon her whole body was shaking and twitching, tossing Peter

about like a small vessel on a violent sea. He grasped her ample love handles and held on for the ride. At first he was dumbstruck, then flabbergasted. About a minute into the affair he found his rhythm, his niche. The cold, dry tunnel he was stuck inside suddenly became hot and slippery and, above all else, tighter than anything he'd ever experienced. Peter Leeds, sexual deviant, was having the time of his fucking life. And the old man had been absolutely right: trying to starve off the inevitable climax was damn-near impossible. The dead whore's twitching and kicking and thrashing was driving him mad with lust and desire; the more her body twitched, the harder he'd thrust. He leaned in close to her expressionless face, yearning for that one thing that would make him blow his load faster than anything in the world. The one thing he'd paid one-hundred dollars for. The one thing that forced him to copulate with a dead hooker who had God knows what crawling around her rotting insides. And when that alarm clock finally went off, he watched as her mouth began to open. He closed his eyes. The death rattle had come. As life's final putrid breath was released from her decaying lungs, Peter took it all in. Through his nose. Through his mouth. Through his pours. There was nothing in the world like it. He'd made plenty of girls pretend to exhale their parting breath during intercourse, to feign death while he attempted to finish his business, but none had come close to the real thing. None of them had breath bad enough to serve his purposes. None of them could emulate the sound the lungs made as they bid a final

farewell. None of them could mimic the twitchings of someone fighting off the cold clutches of death. None of them compared to the real thing. Peter could taste it, smell it, feel it. Death was all over him. And he loved it. Every last second of it. And with a scream, Peter released his seed into hooker's rotten canal. But instead of falling silent and returning to death's realm, the hooker suddenly sprang to life, emitting a piercing scream the likes Peter had never heard before. Fueled by both fury and Joe's miraculous medicine, the rotting prostitute grabbed her perverted john by the shoulders and tossed him to the floor. The impact knocked the breath out of him, causing his head spin until the contents of his stomach were splattered all over the floor. The undead whore clutched both sides of her head as she began to flail about the room, her unholy scream filling the air and threatening to burst Peter's sensitive eardrums. He remembered the light switch and Joe's parting words, though every attempt to reach it was met with a hefty blow to the face from the shrieking zombie that was obviously none too thrilled with the whole resurrection business. Instead of raising the alarm, Peter decided to flee the room. As soon as he reached the door the hooker was upon him. The first bite removed the back of his neck, causing a waterfall of blood and gore to run down his back and between his pimpled ass cheeks. Then she spun him around, screamed in his ghost-white mug, and bit into the

upper portion of his horrified face. With an inhuman growl she pulled away, taking with her his right eyebrow and most of his eye. What little remained of his eyeball was running down his cheek and into his mouth, which was frantically trying to find the right scream to fit the occasion. Since he'd never been in such a predicament before, he went for the standard, all-purpose blood-curdling scream. Finally, and with the hunger of a homeless veteran, she tore away his neck and chewed thoroughly, savoring the salty goodness of uncooked human flesh. Peter Leeds was nothing more than food for the damned. By the time Daddy-O and Joe forced their way into the room, not much was left of our perverted hero. While the oversized Igor silenced the killer and wrapped up her bloody remains for future use, Joe made his way back to the lobby and picked up the phone. He dialed the number a certain faithful customer had given him earlier that night. "Hey Clarence!" Joe said as he positioned himself on that uncomfortable stool. "It's Joe. Everything's taken care of." "Good to hear," Clarence said. "I knew you'd help me out." "An overdose did it," the old man chuckled. "You should've seen the mess she made. Oh, boy. What a mess. Daddy-O's cleaning it up right now." "He's a good one, isn't he?" "Best damned assistant this side of the Mississippi," the old man said. "Tell your sister I'm sorry to hear what happened to her. This bastard's better off dead, you know. After what he did to her, he deserves this and much, much more."

"And least he's got Hell to look forward to," Clarence quipped. Joe slapped his knee and laughed. "I reckon you're right." "What are you going to do with the remains?" "Well, we'll probably clean him up for later," Joe said thoughtfully. "I mean, no sense wasting good parts. After all, I know some women who'd love to rattle his cage." "I hear ya," Clarence said, smiling. "Will you be up here this week?" Joe asked. Clarence cleared his throat. "Probably in the next few days or so. Some business is calling me out of town, but I'll be in there as soon as I get back." "Good to hear. Talk to you then?" "Sure thing," Clarence said. "And thanks again." They both hung up. Joe threw back his head, sighed, and removed a spiral-bound notebook from under the counter. Listed inside were all the rooms and their occupants, though one room on the Women's end had an opening. And he knew just what to fill it with. "Daddy-O!" he called to his horrifying assistant. "Get me the super glue and some cheese cloth and meet me in Room 207 with the stiff. "We've got some work to do."

Deleted: Ken Goldman Widower, 29, seeks S/DF. I'm losing my hair, I smoke non-filtered Camels by the carton, I prefer to spend most Sundays trashing the NFL, and lately no one has mistaken me for Mel Gibson. That much said, I had been a loving husband, I like babies and animals, I can hook up a VCR, and I rank fairly high on the food chain. Justin looked over the Internet message he had typed onto his IBM's monitor, aware that self-deprecation tended to lose its charm once a woman sensed how well deserved it was. He really sucked at this, and one reading convinced him the ad reeked of defensiveness masked behind a strained attempt at cleverness. Worse, because of what it did not say the personal ad's content was not entirely honest. He hit delete, and started over. Widower, 29, physically challenged, seeks S/DF. You don't have to be centerfold material or even attractive. You can be downright ugly. In fact, I prefer you to be ugly. I don't deserve anything better than a hag. SHIT! PISS!! FUCK!!! White hot rage seemed the only emotion Justin felt capable of any more, and the moment got away from him again. He felt tempted to send the rewritten message as it stood but managed to pull himself back. Launched into cyberspace a personal ad this sick might attract the kind of woman who ate her young, but little else. Outbursts happened a lot with him lately, and the time had arrived for a reality check. He hit 'delete' again, muttering while he ran his

fingers through wispy strands of sandy hair. Pushing his wheelchair from the keyboard he reached for the photo album on the bookshelf. This daily ritual had become both self-defeating and painful, but he was a junkie addicted to memories of his past. Although his legs were as useless as pine logs, Justin's hands had developed a will of their own. He flipped through the photo album again and focused on one of the hundreds of snapshots he had taken with Sheila during the three years of their life together. The photo showed Justin and his young wife on a windy Long Island beach two summers ago. With arms entwined around one another like the newlyweds they were, they seemed the quintessential yin and yang in swimsuits. She was everything he was not, the beauty to his beast, the classic argument for the attraction of opposites. Justin could never fully understand just what Sheila had seen in him, but whatever it was he felt certain it had died the same day she had. He studied the photo as if he held a Renoir in his hands. His young wife had been a knockout in that hot pink hint of a bikini she liked to wear. On that August afternoon he had been in such a feverish rush to make love to her that Sheila's bikini bottom remained wrapped around her ankles the whole time. Justin closed his eyes, and for a brief moment Sheila was there. He could even smell the wild honey scent of her hair. If he reached out she might stand before him, wanting him the way she had during the warm August afternoon captured in the photograph. As always another memory forced its way into his head, the unwanted and uninvited remembering that

chewed into his reflections like a voracious rat whenever his thoughts turned to Sheila. The memory remained inside Justin's brain, a blood smeared freeze frame slowly churning itself into motion, exposing each torturous second of the last moments of Sheila's life. . . . The present collides with the past. Headlights of the oncoming eighteen wheeler come at him in an ambush of white light as the Toyota enters the rain swept Hartford ramp of Interstate 95. Sheila turns to look at him. She is like a confused child, unable to comprehend the enormity of the macabre moment they have entered into together. Ten tons of diesel truck bear down on them, and the small Toyota spins wildly, slamming the guard rail. The door on the passenger side shreds off in grotesque slow motion, and she is torn from her car seat. Thrown from the vehicle Sheila seems suspended in midair like a tossed rag doll. Her body skids upon the medial rail that promptly severs her upper torso from her lower, scattering the sections of her dissected flesh and gashed bone fifty feet apart. Ten tons of metal effectively slammed what remained of Sheila into her grave and made match wood of the bones inside Justin's legs. Enter delete and everything disappears. It was that simple. Disabled Widower, 29, seeks anyone who can make the past disappear. Shitpissfuck. He lit a cigarette, secretly hoping that his lungs might soon turn into ash and end the empty charade that had become his life. Of course, the punchline was that even the shittiest life had to go on regardless of the uncertainty he

felt about how that could happen. The monitor of Justin's computer remained empty. He returned to the keyboard willing himself to write something, anything. Pitiful paraplegic, 29, more emotionally than physically challenged, desires any morsel of pity a woman might show toward a man who is incapable of getting over the death of the only woman who ever had the poor judgment to fall in love with him. Succinct and to the point. More important, it was honest. Who reads this sort of drivel anyway? he wondered. Only the thousands of agoraphobes who had no lives of their own. Only those pathetic recluses who spent so much time at their computer terminals there seemed no world beyond their door that did not have the cyber pronoun affixed to it. People who, if given the chance, might delete their entire lives. Maybe he would deliver his personal ad unedited right now. Maybe he would send it out into the vast outreaches of cyberspace just to see what sort of excuse for a woman might respond, what sort of mirror image of himself was as desperate and alone. The cigarette suddenly burned Justin's lip, and pulling it from his mouth he realized he had smoked the Camel to a nub. When he looked back at the computer's monitor he discovered the screen read 'Message Sent.' Some internal demon lurking within the darker chambers of his psyche had delivered the personal ad for him. Or, maybe his hands

had operated independently of his brain again, just as they had done with Sheila's photos in the album. In either case, the IBM's monitor indicated the message had somehow irretrievably gone out courtesy of the Internet into the furthest regions of cyberland. Gone. Departed like his legs and what used to be his life. Fading and disseminating out there somewhere in time or space along with Sheila and the scent of her hair during an afternoon on Long Island. All of it evaporating into mist except for the blinding lights of an eighteen wheeler tearing a crevice through the darkness of a rainy night. It took a moment for the image to register, and at first it seemed his eyes had lost their focus along with his brain. He could see the blurred letters of the keyboard through his hands as if he were staring at them through smoked glass. He held his hand to the light. He might just as well have been staring through gauze. For the first time in as long as he could remember, Justin almost smiled at the sinister absurdity of his circumstances. Everything was gone, yet at the same time nothing was. Try as he might he could not delete the ghosts. But the ghosts were not what he really wanted to make disappear. Some things were so ludicrous you almost had to laugh just to keep from screaming. He knew he might remain right where he sat, there at the keyboard for the rest of the day waiting for a response that would never come. That was not the answer. But he knew what was. He typed a single sentence. Not really seeking anyone. Not any more. Justin smiled again as he watched his hand continue to fade. Considering for a moment, he added another

sentence. Just want to erase it all. He hit 'delete' and kept pressing down on the key, barely able to see the flesh of his own knuckles. His smile disappeared last.

Like Chicken for Deadfucks: Andre Duza June 2015 Anonymous man awoke to pinpricks of white-hot pain. Having no recollection of his surroundings, himself, or how he got to be where he was, he fell hard against the warm leather seat-cushion, his fingertips massaging his clammy brow in small circles as if it might initiate recall. A quick survey of the area returned bits and pieces of information. It was the dead of night, he had been asleep, or unconscious in the passenger’s seat of someone’s car—for how long he had no idea—sitting idle in the rear section of the 24-hour Megamart’s vast parking lot, back where the dumpsters lined up to gobble up refuse next to a trio of loading docks. Brachiosaur-necked lampposts laid bright eyes on the lot-markers―X, in this case―blinking faintly in effigy of shoddy workmanship from 19-inch screens mounted on each side, and halfway down its neck. A door, facing Anonymous man —from now on he was going to go by X; being a black man (somehow he just knew), it seemed strangely appropriate that he adopt the lane marker (X) as his temporary identity—from 100 feet away, past a few scattered cars, and patches of dried blood, looked to have been left open by the skinny wigger clothed in store colors who had just went back inside after his smoke break. He spent the bulk of it taunting the zombies behind the electrified fence and laughing at the ever-malfunctioning parking-lot guides.

Lot Escorts they were called, holographic companions―they came in all races, genders, and physical types―that, for $125 a month, would escort the client to his or her car should they forget where they parked, or in case it was dark and they didn’t want to make the journey alone. If there was trouble, the escort reacted by speaking in a commanding tone, something along the lines of “Step away from the customer!” or “Stop, or I will be forced to alert the authorities!” There was talk of a “Classic Hollywood” series coming in a year or two. To X, the whole place looked infected with pesky apparitions hailing from all walks of life, appearing and disappearing, some lingering longer than others, some stuck in perpetual stutter, some going through their normal routine and making small-talk with the empty air next to them as they walked to an empty spot, waved, then vanished. One had walked right up to X’s window: a fat, overly accommodating woman. He didn’t see her until she was right up on him. He turned and there she was. She looked right at him, past him, and waved. Something about her fake sincerity gave him chills. Like many businesses, the Megamart’s parking lot was surrounded by 15-foot electrified fencing made up of concertina wire and topped with a jagged coil of barbed wire that extended the entire length and came to life like a chainsaw smile when touched. On the other side, hundreds of full-blown zombies stood back, perusing the live menu with slack-jawed

intensity, zeroing in on the meaty parts. Thanks to the malfunctioning escorts, they were riled up, their collective moan upgraded to a deep-throated growl and seasoned with frustration. 800,000 volts reacted with lively bursts of electric blue admonishment to the touch of cold dead limbs and digits, of the few who refused to be denied, small fires here and there awarded those who could hold on to the fence the longest. At the entrance, double-reinforced scaffolding erected in the shape of a 25-foot watchtower lined with giant floodlights, housed three glorified rent-a-cops who took turns picking off zombies who wandered too close to the steady pageant of vehicles going in and out. It was mostly people restocking canned goods and various foods that boasted of prolonged shelf lives. There really wasn’t any other reason to come outside these days. Instead of jump-starting his memory, the lack of cohesive relevance sent X spiraling into phobic territory. He let his head fall forward, his brow smacking the dash with a thud. He repeated it again and again. Suddenly, the click-clack of footsteps approaching from the rear... real footsteps. There was a distinct difference. Through the fogged windows, X noticed a police officer who had just noticed him too and was approaching to investigate, nightstick twirling in his hand with reticent authority. He walked right through an escort dressed in a military uniform. X also noticed that the back seat-rests had been pushed forward and were lying on top of the back seat as if someone had forced their way in through the trunk of the

car. It gave him his first real clue as to how he might have made it past the guard-tower around front. The officer was close enough now that X could see the letters on his nametag: Officer D. Mira. X quickly deferred to the rearview, as if he just now realized that it existed and was thrown for a loop by what he saw looking back at him. Half jumping, half falling, X sprung from the car, from whatever it was in the rear-view mirror, and in turn, sent Mira back into a defensive crouch, his service revolver now in place of his baton. "Don't move!" Mira’s tightened chords blared. Somewhere deep inside his own mind, X was pinned down by unseen hands that taunted and teased him with prolonged periods of sight, sound, and sensation, sans the ability to respond and react on his own. Via his actions, X seemed to comply to the officer’s demands without hesitation; however, he was frozen in residual shockwaves of mule-kick reflex action and fleetfooted understanding of a second tenant who occupied his inner space and of the ghastly warped thing in the rearview, pock-marked with bullet-holes—hundreds at least— and exaggerated to devilish proportions. Like everyone else these days, the thought of becoming a zombie had crossed X’s mind at some point, creeping up with icy fingers sharpened to a point, replacing the fear of death itself as the motive for nonsensical countermeasures, like fanatical commitment to religion, and the acquisition of unnecessary things to clog the wheels of logic. He’d seen people turn after being bitten. Akin to an

erosive virus, it was a slow, excruciating process that started with nausea, fever, chills, violent mood swings, and dementia, none of which he had yet experienced. His subconscious suggested that it might be demonic possession. Before Jesus, and the zombies, he would’ve laughed at that. “Who…er, what the fuck are you!?” Mira barked, maintaining shaky composure that started and ended with the handgun that he held out in front of him, elbows locked straight. “And how did you do…what you did?” "I…I don’t know. I don’t remember anything before waking up in the car,” X said, his hands upturned, arms spread, beckoning, his mangled visage waxing innocent as if he expected some give in Mira's stance as a result. X took a step forward. “I SAID DON’T FUCKING MOVE!” Mira growled, and sunk deeper into his ready-stance. “I suppose you don’t remember killing those cops back in the bus station, then?” Watching X with experienced eyes, slightly reddened due to fatigue, but sharp as a hawk, Mira leaned his head to the side and spoke into the communicator on his lapel, “This is Mira. I’m in row X of the Megamart parking lot on Lansdowne and Garrett road. I’ve got our cop-killer. I repeat. I’ve---got---our---cop-killer. Send back-up.” Eyes rolling up and down X’s gruesome body. “Fuck it, send a meat-wagon too. He’s in bad shape now, but that’s nothing compared to what he’ll look like when I’m done with him.” “Mira, this is Drake,” a voice blared up at him from his lapel. “Are you out of your mind!? This mutherfucker just took out twelve of us BY HIMSELF!! Just hold tight ‘til we get there.”

“Yeah! No shit,” Mira barked back, “two of ‘em were good friends of mine … yours too, Drake.” “Don’t you dare, Officer!” exclaimed an unfamiliar voice, tainted with an accent that bore some distant relation to police-speak. His gun still pointed at X, who stood with his arms in the air, eyes reading disbelief as he surveyed himself from the feet up and back down, Mira considered doing the right thing and waiting for back-up. He played out the scenario in his head and found little satisfaction in the outcome. He wasn’t dumb enough to actually believe in the system. Especially not now. “Who the hell is this?” Mira replied speaking at his lapel. “This is Detective Makane, Officer. Now you listen to me. I understand your anger, but this case is bigger than that. You do anything to keep me from questioning that asshole and I’ll….” “Do what you have to, Mira!” Sergeant Dell interrupted. “Just don’t you take your eyes off that scum. I’m on my way.” “Stay outta this, Sergeant!” Makane demanded. “You and your men have no idea what you’re dealing with.” “I’m sorry, Detective. It’s not usually my style to step on someone else’s toes, but this guy took down 12 of my men.” “Thirteen, actually,” X teased in a voice vastly different from, yet equally genuine to, the one that resonated from his diaphragm only moments ago. With its distinctly feminine cadence, and deep Appalachian drawl, it made Mira’s hands tremble and constrict around the butt of

his gun when he realized that it sprung from this teenage boy who stood before him. Mira put him at 17 or 18 years at most. "Wh…what did you say?” Mira inquired tentatively, like part of him cringed at the thought of hearing that voice crawl from those lips again. “Goddammit officer!” Kane yelled via the lapelreceiver. “Just get out of there. Now!” “I said that I killed 13 little piggies, you dumb cunt. You forgot to count yourself.” Mira had only begun to squeeze the trigger when he saw hundreds of what looked like bullets punch free from X’s torso, legs, and face and zip to a livid hover at either side of X’s head and shoulders. Pulsating with aggression and taunting with half-lunging feigns, the living swarm restlessly awaited their cue from X, who was clearly caught in some kind of trance. Mira fired three times. In retrospect, it seemed like a stupid move, what with the bullets—which they clearly were, bullets—hovering in a sentient mass all around this kid. X buckled and tensed in an orgasmic flutter in reaction to Mira’s attempt to bring him down. The most it did was energize him. Turning to face Mira, X lurched, and coughed. With his tongue, he fished something small and round with a deadened glow and smeared with residual streaks of red up from his throat, rolled it between his teeth, and spit it at him. Mira cried out when his own recycled bullet bit him in the gut and dug into his soul. It was the worst pain he had ever experienced. He pulled his hand away from his

stomach and watched the dark stain in his uniform expand before his eyes. Dying was the last thing Officer D. Mira expected to happen today when he woke up. In fact, he awoke looking forward to using his new vibro-shock baton to crack some zombie skulls. Mira did his best to ignore the pain and react as he was trained. It was all he knew. He lifted his gun and pointed. X, who was still entranced, had plenty of time to react. Pain chased Mira’s body in a weird path, which it traveled at a pause-and-go pace, on its way to a full stand. It was almost comical how long it took. Mira was fading, swaying to a seductive song called creeping death. He managed to squeeze the trigger one last time, half involuntarily. The brutish verve of hundreds of bullets pounded Mira from every angle as he spun away and danced into the dark uncertainty. His last thought, that there might be no afterlife, worked with his relaxing muscles to guide his last meal out into his underwear. Mira’s own slug hadn’t even left the barrel before he expired, on his feet, dancing to the beat of lead projectiles, and crumbled to the ground when they were done with him, nerves twitching, electrons firing Hail Marys. Weaving in and out of the mother-mass, the livinglead chased each other into braided formations upon their return to their host-body (X) who accepted their heavyhanded homecoming with open arms. Just like that, X awoke from the trance. Now that he was himself again, and armed with selective recognizance—waking in the car, the escorts, the

approaching cop, waking just a second ago to a burning sensation all over his body—X was able to deduce that he was most likely responsible for whatever happened to the police officer (Mira) who lay broken at his feet. And he was instantly reminded of the bigger threat. FUCKING ZOMBIES…. They were everywhere. Their collective moan, so pervasive that it drove a few folks to suicide, was hypnotic at times. X could see in their eyes, how bad they wanted to come through the fence and eat his ass. They seemed to look at him differently than they did the escorts, as if they knew. Vying for the top spot in the background din, the haunting wail of police sirens bounced from building to building and out into the open where X stood searching for somewhere to hide. Around front, the rent-a-cops in the tower—he could see the top 10 feet from where he stood— had their hands full with an aggressive faction of zombies that had begun to rock the tower to get at them. Still, the front gates were locked, the fences all around him humming with current. X was trapped. Forgetting, for the moment, his brief collection of memories, X focused on his best option—blending in with the late-night shoppers in the Megamart—and took off running toward the back of the building. He took a moment to catch his breath. He had underestimated the distance between where he originally stood and the stockroom door and ran the entire length at close to top speed. When he turned the knob, it gave. The stockroom was damp and cold. The generator’s

unabashed rattle drowned out any noise he made, so once he realized that he was alone in the room, he didn’t worry much about stepping lightly. He hurried to the door on the other side, and teased it open to a crack. As was usually the case at this time of night, the store was fairly empty, which seemed to give the music more room to reveal the overhead speakers’ poor quality and add to the surreal atmosphere. What X could see from where he crouched at the back corner of the store—an extremely overweight single mother dressed in ill-fitting designer knock-offs and large gold earrings with the words ‘Bad Girl’ written in cursive, and mounted on the gaudy triangular frame, and her obnoxious young son who she ignored completely, except when he wandered out of her sight and she yelled out his name “DARIUS!!!!!!!” at the top of her lungs; zit-faced employees stocking shelves and talking smack about the store hottie, a fine, young brownskinned thing, who sat facing a large monitor keying in irregular items up in the manager’s booth that was situated high above the colorfully stocked aisles at the back like some administrative watchtower; a group of college students complete with the obligatory stoners (two of them) who snickered at shit like ‘butt shank portion,’ ‘turkey necks’, and store substitutes for popular brand name products, ‘Mega-tussin,’ and ‘Mega-jock itch cream’; and the broken-down store security drone resting among two older models that didn’t work either in their station a few feet from him—gave him incentive to further explore the Megamart as a potential pit stop. X had not yet seen himself since the last blackout, and what he looked like was suspiciously left out of his

recent memory. Still, he maintained a crouch to avoid being seen as he made his way to the nearest empty isle—Tools and Hardware—and fell on his ass between two columns of stacked boxes marked Sure-Grip. He tried to steady his breathing, to escape reality by losing himself in the holographic celebrity spokesman that stood before a pyramid of stacked socket-sets and a stateof-the-art riding lawn mower that could hover 6 inches off the ground and cut grass with lasers. Then there were the animated mascots that touted this product and that from their respective packages, talking over each other with repetitive sales-pitches that eventually bled into one voice that X was pretty sure instructed him to “KILL THEM ALL! You can start with that fine young thing up in the manager’s booth. I bet her shit even smells like roses.” Voices in his head were one thing, but these were external. Could it have been a personalized ad via retinal scan, or facial-recognition software built into the package itself? Tools and Hardware weren’t usually known to use profanity and vulgar sexual references as part of their repertoire, though. That was left to the porn section, which was over in aisle 7. Every store had one, usually cordoned off by a swinging gate, turnstile, or some sort of invisible barrier rigged with an alarm that sounded when anyone under 18 crossed it. It wasn’t unusual to see a group of precocious adolescents sneaking a listen to all the “Ooos and Aaaahs” coming from within as they huddled at the entrance until an employee, or an angry mother, shooed them away.

Demon Con: Robert Freese "Hey man, you dig on Italian cannibal flicks?" Ryan looked up from the rows of videotapes and watched the dealer pull out a red box from underneath his table. It was full of more bootleg videos. The titles of all the movies were inked in dripping, red lettering. "Check it out. CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. Widescreen, uncut, straight from the Japanese laser disc. This is the cleanest, most pristine print you’ll find, dude." Sure it is, Ryan thought. The pristine print was obscured throughout by Japanese subtitles, not to mention the optical blurring of nudity imposed by Japanese moral groups. Real pristine. "If you know anything about Ruggero Deodato, you know CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is his masterpiece. All the gory goodies for ten bucks. All the tapes in the red box are ten bucks a piece or six for fifty." "I’ll take a look," Ryan said with little enthusiasm. The bootleg video scene had changed so radically since the advent of digital video discs that most bootleggers whose stock in trade was selling sixth generation video dubs of foreign released laser discs was nearly extinct. Ryan wondered how the dealer even made enough money to survive. "What about the maestro, Lucio Fulci? I’ve got uncut, wide-screen versions of both THE BEYOND and THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY. Beautiful copies, man." "I’ve got them both on DVD," Ryan responded. "On Special Edition discs." His eyes were scanning over the titles, searching for a diamond in the rough, some obscure

title that he had not collected on tape or that had yet to score a DVD incarnation. The longer he looked, though, the more he realized it was a bust. The guy had nothing he needed. Most of the stuff he could simply download and get a better copy. Ryan began to drift away from the bootlegger’s table. "Hey, wait a minute, man," the dealer pleaded "I know you like Dario Argento. Check it out." He removed a tape from the box. "PHENOMENA. This is the director’s cut, man, completely uncut and uncensored. It’s twenty minutes longer than the American version. This is from a German video source, with subtitles." Ryan could not believe the guy. It was like the dealer was ten years behind the times. "I’ve got it on DVD," he said with a smile. "Thanks though." Ryan began to turn to go check out a rare horror books and magazine table when he felt a tug on his arm. "Hey, man. I may have a little something you don’t have on DVD." The dealer said "DVD" like it tasted sour in his mouth. Ryan watched as the dealer again went underneath his table. This time the dealer retrieved a single videotape in a plain black slip case. "What do you know about Paolo Sacchetti?" Paolo Sacchetti was an Italian director acclaimed for his series of violent horror films based on actual demon lore, and Ryan knew all about him. DEMON DEATH DAY, VIRGIN DEMON LOVER, DEMON MASQUE and DEMON RESURRECTION were all regarded classics by aficionados of hard-core Italian gore films. After a ten-year absence from filmmaking, Sacchetti

had returned to film his new demon opus, HOUSE OF DEMONS. Unfortunately, upon wrapping and getting the first edit, Sacchetti and the one hundred and twenty-seven other passengers on his flight perished in a horrible air accident minutes after leaving Milan’s International Airport. Rumor had it that Sacchetti had the only existing print of the movie with him on the plane. Ryan felt an excited tug on his stomach. "HOUSE OF DEMONS," the dealer said with a smile, pleased to see that Ryan was hooked. "That movie’s not even supposed to exist." Ryan felt his mouth going dry. "It was destroyed when Sacchetti’s plane crashed." "That’s the rumor," the dealer said. "The way I understand it, no one in the Italian film industry trusts anyone else. The producer, Antonio Lentini, had a copy of the work print. You know, in case anything happened. As it turned out, something happened." Ryan watched as the dealer shuffled the tape from one hand to the other. "It’s incomplete, and time coded. It’s not got any of the sound effects or music and it’s in Italian. But from what I understand you can follow it easy enough." "You haven’t watched it?" "Who has time? I don’t watch half this stuff." He swept a hand over his inventory. Ryan was skeptical. This deal was beginning to smell like a rip-off. "How did you get a copy?" "You know, man, I don’t even remember. I get stuff

from all over, at shows, from other collectors. People send me stuff all the time in trade." Ryan was still not sure if he was experiencing a moment of incredible luck or if he was about to be bent over. This could be one of those moments most collectors always dreamed about, but never truly believed would ever happen. Provided the dealer was on the level. Ryan had Sacchetti’s entire filmography on DVD, and the shock maestro’s last film, his lost film, would be the crown jewel in his collection. "I didn’t know if I was gonna pull this out or not," the dealer began. "It’s kind of creepy having it. You know, since the guy who made it just died. I was told he was on his way to America to try and find a distribution deal for it." The dealer was suddenly sounding like he was not interested in selling the tape. "But I can see you’re a fan, man. I only have this one copy though, and I hate to let loose of it before I make a copy of it, but I got to eat, you know? Those damn DVDs are putting me out of business." "How much?" Ryan finally asked, retrieving his wallet. "Ten bucks like the others?" "Ten bucks? Hell no, man." The dealer held the tape in a tight grip. "Didn’t you hear me when I said this was the only copy I had? This thing could be a gold mine, man." Ryan had heard this spiel from countless dealers in the past, especially from bootleg video dealers. Once they realized they had something you wanted, it suddenly became the ‘last one.’ "Twenty?" Ryan asked.

"Fifty," the dealer responded quickly. Ryan felt as if he had just been slapped in the face with a cold, wet hand. Fifty bucks for a rough copy of a film that had supposedly been destroyed, it sounded like a scam. The dealer probably figured Ryan would not even know he had been ripped-off until long after the convention was over. He could be handing the dealer fifty bucks for a blank cassette for all he knew. Because of such scams, Ryan and Eddie always brought along a VCR to hook up to the hotel’s TV when they attended horror conventions. "How do I know this is the real deal?" Ryan asked. "You’ll just have to trust me, man." "I’ve got a VCR up in my room. I’ll be able to check it out in a few minutes." "Even better." The dealer did not flinch. Ryan had seen bootleggers balk at the mention of a nearby tape machine and drop the whole transaction. Ryan thought a moment longer. "It’s worth twenty-five to me," Ryan finally said. "That’s cool, man. I thought you were the dude it was worth fifty too. Sorry for wasting your time." The dealer went to return the tape to its place under the table. "Wait a sec," Ryan said. "How about forty?" "Fifty, man. I got bills, you know? Hauling all this stuff from con to con costs money. Hell, man, I’m loosing some major bread selling it for fifty but I’m desperate here." Sure, Ryan thought, but hating himself because he knew the dealer had finally broken him down.

"All right, I’ll take it. That’s why I come to these things." He pulled two twenties and two fives from his wallet. "Me too, man. Me too." The dealer smiled and exchanged the videotape for the cash. *** "Wha-ja find?" Ryan jumped. It was just Eddie, but his friend had sneaked up behind him and slapped him on the back. "God, Eddie, you scared the hell out of me." "You know, it’s Halloween. I guess everyone’s entitled to one good scare." It was Eddie’s best impression of the sheriff from HALLOWEEN when he bumped into the Jamie Lee Curtis character and startled her. Ryan just shook his head. "So what’s the tape?" "I don’t know yet." Ryan noticed the girl next to Eddie. She was attractive, slim, about twenty and wearing a black tee shirt adorned with the ghostly white image of the graveyard ghoul from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. On the back of the shirt, in bold green lettering were the words "They Won’t Stay Dead!" "This is Kristi," Eddie said, introducing the dark haired girl. "We met in line to get Michael Overton’s autograph. She’s a huge DEAD THINGS freak too." "Hi," she said with a pretty smile. She had a black plastic art tube on a strap slung over her shoulder. The art tubes were popular among convention goers to help carry and protect rolled movie posters.

"You missed it, Ryan. After we got Overton to sign our posters I got over to the Screamies table to meet Annette Cage. Kristi’s taking my picture with her and Annette hikes those huge boobs of hers up onto my arm. When I look down I can see right down her shirt and trust me pal, those buddies weren’t corralled into any wonderbra. I assure you." "Eddie!" Kristi playfully punched Eddie in the arm. Ryan smiled. His friend had always enjoyed ogling the scantily clad scream queens and femme fatales. "Are Brinke Stevens and Debbie Rochon still over there?" Ryan asked. "Oh, yeah. Wait till you see what Debbie’s wearing." Eddie made an exaggerated gesture like his eyes were popping out of his head. Kristi playfully punched him again. "Cool. I’ve got a WITCHHOUSE III poster I wanted both of them to sign." "So what did you find?" Eddie nodded toward the videotape in his friend’s hand. "Oh," Ryan said, as if suddenly noticing the cassette tape he was holding. "Just something that sounded to good to be true." "You didn’t get hosed on another rotten dub did you?" "I don’t know." Ryan regarded the tape a moment. "I think I’m going to run up to the room real quick a and check it out." "Cool." Eddie looked at his watch. "Meet us in thirty minutes outside the screening room. Jack Dubose is previewing his new flick VAMPIRE DAWN. After the

preview he’s only going to be at the autograph table signing stuff for an hour." Ryan looked at his own watch. "Will do." "See you then." Eddie took Kristi’s hand and guided her back into the throng of people congesting the dealer’s room. Ryan left the dealer’s room and followed the hallway to the hotel’s main lobby. There, he caught an elevator up to the fifteenth floor then found the room he was sharing with Eddie. The room was freezing cold. Ryan and Eddie had been attending horror conventions all over the country for years, and every time they got to their hotel room, the first thing Eddie did was turn the room’s air conditioner down as low as it would go. It was just one of Eddie’s quirks. Ryan slung a bag full of stills, folded movie posters, lobby card sets and signed 8X10s onto his bed. He noticed that Eddie had been up to the room at some point. Eddie’s bed was littered with monster model kits. Taking the cassette he had just purchased out of its black plastic sleeve, Ryan stuffed the tape into the VCR and sat back on the bed with the remotes to both the VCR and the TV. Once the TV came to life, static filled the screen. Ryan pushed the PLAY button on the VCR remote. Static was replaced by pure blackness. Ryan worked the fast-forward until the screen gave way to rolling hills, a forest and a car speeding along a narrow roadway. Ryan was surprised and relieved. The picture quality was no worse than a movie taped from TV. The time code

bar clicked away in the bottom corner of the screen. The car continued its ascent up the winding pathway until the camera revealed a sinister looking manse sitting atop the hill’s crest. A bolt of lightning cracked the night sky but no sound effect gave it audible life. When the car stopped a man and a woman got out and approached the house. The man looked familiar. Ryan had seen him before but could not place him. Like maybe he had been in one of Lamberto Bava’s pictures, or maybe in Michele Soavi’s DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE. Ryan was not certain. The woman was an attractive blond actress with long legs and high cheekbones. She was interchangeable with most European actresses. When they spoke Ryan had no idea what they were saying. But, having spent half his life consuming horror films, they no doubt were discussing the ugly house, which was more than likely an inheritance of some sort. A butler with a withered hand greeted them at the front entrance and quickly ushered them into the house. The butler too looked familiar to Ryan. The couple took in the grand spectacle of the giant front room while Ryan again leaned on the FAST FORWARD button, searching out a little of the red sauce for which Sacchetti was famous. He stopped fast-forwarding as the camera lingered on the blond woman’s naked body while she showered. Ryan smiled. Sacchetti never passed on an opportunity to linger on a little bare skin. Suddenly, a hand grabbed the woman and she screamed. Ryan winced. The woman’s scream was croaky,

without substance and obviously not filled with terror. Then he realized the scream had yet to be properly dubbed. The woman turned. It was only the actor Ryan could not place. They kissed, then made love under the blast of the shower. Fast-forwarding further, Ryan stopped on a scene of the man roaming in the dark of what looked like a family crypt. The man showed his flashlight beam all around, reacting to non-existent sound effects. Stumbling through the darkness, the man found a sarcophagus. Its lid was cracked. There was writing on its stone surface. The writing was in English, no doubt filmed with the American film market in mind, but the man read the words in Italian. Ryan read the words aloud. "The time of the demon lord is here. The time to free the demons from hell is now. There is no more room in hell. It is time for the demons to rise and walk the Earth." The whole scene was surreal. Smoke billowed in the air around the man and Ryan thought the air in the room was becoming smoky. It was no longer cold, but warm. Like a closed off crypt. The air was musty and stained with the stench of death and decay. On the screen the man reacted to a noise, only Ryan heard the sound this time. It had come from the closet near the room’s bathroom. The man on the TV seemed to be staring in the direction of the closet. A steady thump of pain was filling Ryan’s head, building in its intensity as the time code in the corner of the screen sped up. As the numbers clicked by faster, the pain grew more excruciating. He felt dizzy, lightheaded, like the

world around him was going soft around the edges and just out of reach. Investigating the noise, the man on the screen crept into the darkness, only now the room in which Ryan sat was dark too, dark like the crypt. Ryan was lost in the film. He heard the man’s footfalls and they sounded nearby. The thumping pain was pounding directly behind his eyes. It was growing, spreading. It felt as if his brain was on fire. Moving slowly toward the source of the sound, the man flashed his light onto the lid of another stone coffin. Again the words and again Ryan read them aloud. "The time of the demon lord is here. The time to free the demons from hell is now. There is no more room in hell. It is time for the demons to rise and walk the Earth." The sarcophagus lid slowly slid open. The sound effect boomed in the room and intensified the pain in Ryan’s head. The sarcophagus was empty. Without warning, the stone lid of a sarcophagus behind the man burst open. A demon, the butler with the withered hand, leapt forward and jumped on the man’s back. The demon butler sank his teeth deep into the man’s neck. At the same moment as the attack on screen, the closet door next to the bathroom burst open and the same demon from the movie was on Ryan, biting deeply into his neck. In his final moments, before the world went black, Ryan finally placed the two actors in the movie.

The man who had arrived at the manse with the attractive blond woman was Paolo Sacchetti. And the butler with the withered hand was the dealer who had just sold Ryan the tape. *** "Yo, Ryan. You in here, buddy?" Eddie flipped on the lights. The room was empty. "Damn." "You think he’s all right?" Kristi was holding Eddie’s hand. "Something must be wrong for him to miss meeting Jack Dubose. His stuff’s here." Eddie nodded at Ryan’s bed. "Maybe he got sick," Kristi suggested. "Hey, buddy, are you in there?" Eddie rapped gently on the bathroom door. "Are you sick?" When he got no response he opened the door. The bathroom was empty. "You sure you never saw him in the dealer’s room?" "Never saw him," she assured. "I kept watching for him over at the Screamie’s table to get his poster signed, but I never saw him." "He wasn’t there." "This ain’t like Ryan." The concern in Eddie’s face and in his voice was clear. "Should we worry?" "I don’t know." Eddie dropped his own purchases on his bed next to the model kits. "Maybe he just went to get something to eat." "No, he would have waited for me."

"What, are you guys joined at the hip? Share the same brain?" "No." "Then it is possible that he just went out to grab something to eat? Or maybe he met someone too, and he’s up in her room, right?" Neither suggestion was entirely out of the question, Eddie admitted to himself. It just wasn’t like Ryan to go off without a word. "Maybe we should just stay up here and wait for him." Kristi slid the strap of her art tube over her head and set the plastic tube on the floor. "Whatever will we do?" Eddie asked coyly. "I think we can entertain ourselves some way." Kristi smiled then pulled off her tee shirt. Ryan watched silently, saw everything from the crack of the closet door. His body had changed, transformed. For the first time in his life he felt powerful, strong. A hunger was burning deep inside him. He watched the two bodies rut about on the bed. The raven-haired girl had milky white skin. Ryan could smell the blood coursing through her body beneath the flawless flesh. Ryan imagined biting into the velvety soft flesh, of devouring it and gorging on the crimson flow that would spray from beneath. He could almost taste the hot coppery wash as it would fill his mouth. When he could stand it no longer, Ryan sprang from his hiding place. "Stop it!" the girl snapped, pushing him away. "I’m

not that type of girl." "Sure you are, baby, or you never would have agreed to come up to my room." Michael Overton was feeling good. The cocktails in the hotel bar had helped to take the edge off of having been stuck signing autographs for six hours straight. He had signed so many head-shots and stills and posters from the DEAD THINGS series he had wanted to puke. "Maybe you should just let me off on the next floor." He looked at the girl. Another groupie who had just been a little kid when the first DEAD THINGS flick had come out. It had been over twenty years ago. It depressed him to think he had a daughter older than her. "Gimmie some kisses, baby." "Cut it out!" She pushed him away. "I thought you wanted to run lines with me and tell me if you think I could be an actress." He smiled. "What I think, baby, is that when we get to my room, we’re gonna get real close and chummy. What I think is that I just want to drive you around the block once, then drop you off in front of somebody else’s house. Get me?" The girl looked humiliated and furious. Tears welled in the corners of her eyes. "You go to hell." "Now you’re sounding like my wife, baby." He made a grab for her. "I said stop it!" She jerked away from him and stopped the elevator car. Her hand hovered dangerously close to the big red EMERGENCEY button. "Touch me again and I’ll have you arrested."

"Take it easy, baby. I was only fooling." "Yeah, fooling. I’m getting off on the next floor." She depressed button fifteen and engaged the car. When the elevator doors opened, Michael Overton sighed disgustedly. "The costume contest’s tomorrow, freaks. That’s when I’m judging, not tonight." The trio of fans was made up like demons and they smelled horribly. "You guys do know all that goop on your faces can cause a bad rash, right?" He noticed that two of the trio was naked, and one of them was female. "I might be coerced into awarding you a first place prize trophy if you want to escort me up to my room, baby." "You’re disgusting." When the girl tried to push past the two male demons they grabbed her. Their teeth sank into her flesh. They fell on top of her into the elevator car. "Hey, freaks!" The female demon bared her teeth and attacked the actor. Slowly, the elevator doors shut behind the desperate cries of the actor and the girl. The hunger drove them. When the elevator doors opened on another floor, they found a waiter delivering room service. Further down the hallway they found partiers staggering back to their rooms. When a room door would open to the commotion in the hallway, the demons would again feed. Their numbers grew rapidly. They moved through the stairwells and service

hallways. A maintenance man, a cleaning lady working late, another waiter and a security man joined their demonic ranks. They continued to feed. Then they found the night, found the solace and cover of the darkness. Into the city they fled. They sought cover before dawn. *** Marc roamed the dealer’s room but nothing caught his eye. The Frightmare Horror Convention was turning out to be a major non-event. Nothing was happening. He figured it was because of the Demon Con down in San Diego the month before. Fifty-seven people were still missing, hotel guests, employees, many of the regular convention dealers and even the guy who stared in all those old, cheesy DEAD THINGS movies. He had heard from a friend who had attended Demon Con that a number of the rooms looked like slaughterhouses. Blood on the walls, on the ceilings, guts strewn all about but no bodies. It was like all those people had been butchered to pieces, then carried off. Or maybe they had turned into zombies and walked away, Marc thought. The Internet buzz was saying the Demon Con fiasco was putting the entire convention scene out of business. Many cons were canceling and the ones that were still

running were having a decrease in attendance, as well as an increase in dealer and guest no shows. Marc had hoped to meet Jack Dubose, as well as legends like Herschell Gordon Lewis and Ted V. Mikels, but all had canceled the Frightmare Horror Con at the last minute. Did that result in Marc getting a break on his ticket to get in? Hell no, he thought angrily. He still had to pay full price for what amounted to a half-assed convention full of no-shows. There were hardly any dealers around for him to spend his money. He came upon a table full of bootleg videos. Marc smirked. Of course the video bootleggers would still show. They couldn’t afford to miss a show. Marc began perusing the hand written titles on the video spines when the dealer behind the table spoke to him. "Hey, man," the dealer said getting up from a metal folding chair. "You dig on Italian cannibal flicks?"

You May Die Squealing Like a Pig, But You Taste Just Like Chicken Joshua Thompson As the victim’s death screams fell silent, the butcher put down his hatchet and grabbed his plate. The burley man sprawled on the table was finally dead and ready for eating. In life he had been a bouncer at a local club. The party had moved across town around midnight so the place was nearly deserted, making an easy grab. The butcher had just rolled down his window as the bouncer stood outside, shot him with a tranquilizer dart, and took him away. The butcher had cooked the bouncer alive so he did not have to wait another hour to eat. That had caused several problems with dead food before. He preferred eating live food, but in a case like this it was impossible. The goon would have put up too much of a fight. “How delightful!” The Butcher said chuckled. Human flesh was not a treat that could often be indulged. The butcher had to limit himself to two such meals a month, but through a strong will, he managed moderation. The butcher also had to be careful to only choose targets who were low profile, like his current dish. He was certainly the scum of the earth. The thug had often used steroids and he had probably been in and out of every prison in the district. What were a few prostitutes and bums here and there to the public? Nobody would know or care about them. The butcher was doing humanity a favor by eating them. Too bad society did not see things that way. They

threw people like him into cages for enjoying the fine taste of warm human flesh and the salty sweet taste of blood yet they themselves have never tried it. People needed to expand their minds and stop being sheep. They needed to stop letting a fictitious morality hold them back and start enjoying the pleasures around. Before eating, the butcher had to skin the corpse. He had left the skin on so the flavor would stay inside, but now it would only hinder his enjoyment of the feast. The skin itself tasted rather bland, but even worse was the hair that was all over it. When he had previously eaten un-skinned corpses, he coughed up hair balls just like a cat for a week. The butcher walked to the fridge to get rosemary and red wine. For the right taste human flesh needed the right seasonings and of course something to wash it down. He found that nothing did the job better than a fine wine and an array of French seasonings. There was one more task to be performed before the butcher could eat. As they were in life, every human being was different when served for dinner. He had never prepared any two humans in the same fashion. Some he ate alive, others he cooked with different spices. He melted cheese over some, others he boiled. He always captured the moment so that he could savor it later as he did with every bite in the present. He walked into another room, returned with a Polaroid camera, and snapped a picture of the dead corpse. After the picture showed up, the butcher took one long hungry look at the image, then at the real thing. He sat down at the table and slowly began to consume.

*** In another part of town another creature of the night roamed through the streets with a completely different purpose: to forget the past, present and future. His name was Robert Carpenter and he was a vampire. He had been for the last three months, ever since he was attacked by a vagrant. He had thought it was a crazed junkie, until he started to show strange symptoms. He had gone to his physician who found nothing wrong. Since the attack, Robert had not been ill. His allergies went away completely and wounds healed almost instantly, which came in handy when shaving. During the day he became so drowsy that he could not leave his home, but he had been a night owl before the attack so this was not a huge problem. The thing which worried Robert was the nasty thirst for human blood. When he had been punched in the face he had tasted his own blood, but had never thought that it would be worth killing for. He did not think so now. Robert had never in his life taken a human life and he never wanted to, so he distracted himself every night by taking a drive through the desolate streets. Yes he drove. He did not jump from building to building as a super hero might. Robert knew that if he fell his injuries would not be severe, but he was still terrified of anywhere higher than ten feet off of the ground. For a vampire, that was pathetic. Not only was he able to survive without drinking blood, but he kept his hair cut short, his nails trimmed. He groomed daily and even brushed his teeth, and hardly wore

black. He did not seem to fit the popular image of a vampire. Maybe he was just all around strange. Usually at this hour, he felt peaceful and free. There were no other cars on the road and no other people in sight, save for the occasional vagrant. Tonight, however, was different. He smelled death in the air just like he had for a few nights a month since he had become a vampire. What Robert thought of in terms of the smell of death, was not only a physical sense but also an indescribable sensation that was more intuition than sense itself. He knew that a series of horrible acts had been committed somewhere near and he was destined to stop it. Maybe the culprit was the vampire who had attacked him, or maybe something worse. In any case, he had been struggling against his destiny and now it was finally time to face his fear and embrace the darkness. As he moved on, the death in the air got thicker. He was getting close, so close that he could almost taste it. He moved through an underdeveloped part of the city. Robert knew that his target would be on the other side. All he had to do was drive over some train tracks and he was there. “No problem,” he muttered. As did the scent of death, his fear grew stronger. He did not know what was waiting for him on the other side of the tracks. Maybe investigating was a mistake. Maybe he was supposed to stay home. Oh to hell with it, Robert thought. He was going to get this done. Besides, what was the worst that could happen? He might end up dead, but in that case he would

not have to worry about the thirst any more. The world would be no more deprived that it had been when he graced it with his presence. The struggles and triumphs of life would go on as usual. On the other side of the tracks, the buildings and walkways were even more rundown than in the last section of town. It was not a pleasant or safe place to be, not even for an undead killing machine like Robert. It was hard to imagine what this trip would have been like before the attack. He would have had a heart attack if his car would have failed him. Now he knew that he could handle any punk who dared pull a gun or knife on him. It was just a matter of overcoming fears he had spent his entire mortal life learning. The moment he saw it, he knew where he was supposed to be. Less than a block away between an adult gift shop and a gentlemen’s club was a butcher shop which looked about as clean as a public urinal. Robert parked his car two blocks away and walked through the brisk night to the butcher shop. The windows were boarded up and letters had long since fallen off of the sign. The paint had been chipping for years and mildew grew rampantly over the structure. Because of his psychic sensation, Robert doubted that major violations in the health code were the only crimes being committed. The door was locked and he would not have been able to kick it down quietly, so he would have to use a window. Breaking into abandoned buildings without an explanation would look awfully suspicious, so he looked behind his shoulder to make sure there were no police

officers around to arrest him. When he was sure it was safe, Robert took the boards off of the window as quietly as he could. After removing the board, Robert went through the window making even less noise than he thought he would. There were tiny shards of glass all over the floor and a horrible smell wafted from the basement. The door was ajar. As he went through the door and quietly down the stairs, he saw blood stains all over the walls and there were a few strange red chunks on the floor. The scent of death was now unbearable but strangely enticing. Perhaps it was because he was a bloodthirsty ghoul. The basement was split into a few separate rooms, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. It looked as though someone still lived in this portion on the building. It also looked like the occupant was still here. In the corner of the kitchen was a refrigerator. Compelled by some unknown force, Robert opened the fridge and saw a severed head as well as other assorted human body parts wrapped in plastic. He saw part of an arm with meat picked off of it and some unidentifiable body part in a pickle jar. This place was less kosher than a Bar Mitzvah at an all you can eat pork restaurant. A door swung open startling Robert, who jumped away from the fridge. He looked to his left and saw a short, fat pig of a man. The round little man had a pig’s nose and a shaved head. If he had a Mohawk, he would have resembled a wild boar. “Hey, you get out of my house!” the pig squealed. It was quite obvious that this little pig was a cannibal.

He had killed so that he could eat human flesh and he did not even suffer the same ailment as Robert. In his anger, Robert could no longer control his bloodlust. He lunged at the pig and grabbed him by the head. With one swift motion, Robert bit the pig’s neck and sipped the salty sweet nectar. Robert felt so much tension subside as he got his fix. He had been deprived for so long that mere blood was not satisfying. Robert took a bite out of the pig’s arm and swallowed. It was strange how human flesh smelled like chicken, yet tasted like pork. When he tired of hearing the pig plead and squeal, Robert twisted its head all the way around then gorged himself further. He ate until the body was almost gone. He no longer felt sick or afraid of what he was, in fact, he felt good. He had not felt so good in years. This had been his destiny all along. Maybe he did not have to feed on the human race and be a terror, but he could feed upon its scum. So what if he fed upon a vagrant here and a prostitute there? Nobody would miss them. After his freeing experience, Robert left the house in search of his next victim.

It'll be a Long Hot Summer: William Meikle The sun banged down out of a feathery blue sky, the heat bouncing off the ground in great relentless waves which brought rivulets of sweat to her brow, to her armpits and, worst of all, to her hands. She could feel the telescope sliding around in her grip; and the harder she tried to grip it, the more it squirmed in her grasp. But she wouldn't drop it; not when Uncle Jack had promised to show her the sunspots. She squinted to see through the glare, and brushed a lock of sticky blonde hair away from her forehead. By shading her eyes with one hand, taking care not to drop the telescope of course, she could just make out the house, dancing and shimmering in the distance across the fields. The path led away before her, the tarmac melting softly around her bare feet, forcing its way between her toes as she hurried on. The house got closer and the heat got heavier. The tree-lined path to the front door wavered and swayed in the rising waves from the ground, blurring in and out of focus as she paused to wipe the sweat from her eyes; the sweat which tasted of salt when she put her fingers to her mouth. Uncle Jack had seen her coming, and was waiting for her. He was a big man, red of face and hand, loud-voiced and kind-eyed. His voice boomed in her ears as he came to meet her, arms outstretched for the expected hug. "Have you ever felt it as hot? It's a great day for the sunspots---just wait and see."

He led her by the hand to the back of the house where a small camera tripod was set up on a card table. "Wait a minute, I'll go and get the magic ingredient," he said, turning back towards the house. She turned to watch him go. That's when she saw the boy. He was standing in the shadows, in the shade under the back porch. His face was in blackness, but she knew who it was---Billy. Cousin Billy. She couldn't see his mouth, but she knew what it would look like; cruel and sneering, just like his eyes; always the same, whether he was pulling her hair or rubbing her face in the dirt or chasing after her in the playground. She was safe here though. Uncle Jack wouldn't let her come to any harm---Uncle Jack always kept Billy in check. She could hear Uncle Jack pottering around inside the house, singing his nonsense songs. His voice faded as he moved towards the other side of the house. Billy made a move towards her, then another, but slunk back into the shadows when his father reappeared at the door. "Here it is," he boomed. "I found it hiding in the bookcase." He was waving a piece of stiff white card. She soon forgot about the boy as her Uncle did his magic. Just a few seconds to set up the telescope properly, getting it lined up, and there it was, a perfect little image of the sun, wavering and dancing just for her on the slanted card. "Look closely," he said, pointing with a thick red finger. "See the blacker dots?" She did, but didn't want to speak, afraid she might

break the spell. "Those are what's causing this scorching summer--the really hot bits. It's as hot as hell in there---OOPS, pardon my French." He put his hand across his mouth and giggled, an action she knew of old, one which always made her laugh. She moved closer to study the black spots. In her mind's eye she could see them, the little red fiery devils with their pitchforks, screaming and laughing at the same time as they rolled around in the heat and the flames. "I've got some lemonade in the kitchen," her Uncle said. "Do you want some?" Nodding her assent, she was too engrossed in the wavering image in front of her to lift her head. She heard footsteps behind her and turned, expecting her uncle with the lemonade. Instead she was jerked off her feet as her hair was tugged, hard, bringing a shooting pain which felt like it was lifting the top off her head. She landed on the ground, sending up a cloud of dust which quickly settled on her clothes. Her cousin Billy was standing above her, laughing his cruel, well known laugh. As she watched, he took the eyepiece lens off the telescope and brought it between the white card and the sun. He moved it backwards and forwards, the white circle of the sun shrinking and brightening, then growing and fading before shrinking again until it was a single point of fire. She saw the smoke first, a thin wisp of black against the white of the card.

Then the hole started, a black charred circle in the centre of the card rimmed the red flame. Billy held the card until all that was left was the dark ashes of the remains. She watched as he crunched them up in his hands, blackening his palms. She knew what would come next. "You're his little pet, aren't you?" he said in the cruel voice that she knew so well. "His little pet---that's what he always calls you, isn't it?" She could see the hate in his eyes. "Well, little pets have to be house trained. Little pets need to know their place. Little pets can't expect to come round here and get pampered all the time." He leaned forward to her, following her swiftly as she tried to shuffle away, black palms getting ever closer to her face. He was leaning over her, hands only inches from her eyes, giggling like a crazy man, when he was suddenly jerked backwards like a puppet on strings. Uncle Jack had hold of him, and was shaking him so hard she thought his eyeballs must be rattling in their sockets. She stood, slowly, and pulled at her Uncle's shirt. "It's all right Uncle Jack, he didn't hurt me," she said, tugging harder as the man continued to shake Billy., It wasn't until she shouted his name that her Uncle let the boy drop, like a sack of potatoes. Billy sat up, rubbing the red spots on his arms where he had been gripped. He glared, first at the man, and then at her, and she could see the hot fury in his eyes. Her Uncle turned towards her. "Are you all right sweetheart?" he said, brushing the dust and the grime off her dress with long strokes of his

hands. She didn't hear him. She was looking at Billy. He had taken something from his pocket, and he opened his hand to show her. There, in the palm of his hand, sat the lens of her telescope. He closed his palm and smiled, the same old smile, as he ran off across the courtyard, disappearing behind the garden shed. She burst into tears. She stood, cradled in Uncle Jack's big warm arms, until the sobs subsided and she was able to tell him what had happened to the eyepiece. A dark gleam came into his eyes, a look she could not associate with her warm friendly uncle. "Don't worry. I'll get it back. I'll teach him who's the boss around here. It won't be the first time I've had to bring him down a notch. He's got a bit too much of his mother in him." She stayed with him for another hour, drinking his cloudy lemonade, laughing as the bubbles tickled her nose, and watching the trees waver and dance in the heat as she sat, nearly cool, in the shade of the porch. Finally it was time to go. She said her goodbyes, casting a last glance at the telescope. Uncle Jack saw the look. "Come back tomorrow. I'll have it whole for you again. Maybe your mum will let you stay the night and we can look for the Martians?" She gave him one last hug before she left, turning back at the garden gate as he shouted after her. "If you see Billy, run. He might be all bad, but he's slow---remember that."

He shouldn't have mentioned the boy---it was going to worry her all the way home. The hot tarmac sucked at her feet when she reached the road, threatening to slow her; slower and slower until she was stuck like a fly, doomed to stay there while the sun baked her, first red, then brown, then black; until she was crisp and crumbly, like the meat Mummy had left in the oven too long. She tried to lift her legs higher as she speeded up, the hot, dry air burning in her throat. Her breathing was becoming laboured, her legs heavy as she pumped her way down towards the town. Before too long she had to stop, bent over and wheezing, clutching her side, kneading to try and dispel the pain of a stitch. She moved out of the sun into the shade of a large, well known beech tree. She often stopped here, to sit in the shade and look down over the rolling hills to the sleepy town below. Off in the distance you could sometimes see the sea, and watch the little ships taking their people away to far off places where there were monsters and tigers and elephants and all sorts of interesting things. She pulled her dress away from her warm body, trying to get some air circulating, as she moved further into the shade of the tree and sat on one of its huge roots. She picked the black specks of tar from between her toes, rolling the malleable balls in her fingers before flicking them away. Slowly her breath came back to normal, and the sweat started pouring. Looking down at the ground she could see the shadows swaying, sharp and black against the parched dry ground.

"The devils must be pretty busy up there," she thought, remembering the black spots on the sun's surface. She leant back, feeling the cooling sweat stick to her dress, as she closed her eyes and thought again of the little red devils, stoking the furnaces of the sun. He fell on her from out of the tree. She had no time to think, no time to scream as he drove his knees into her midriff, knocking all the air out of her in one short hot gasp. Somewhere, outside the roaring in her ears, outside the pain in her belly, beyond the dancing black spots in front of her eyes, she could hear a voice. "You think you're so smart---sucking up to the old man and getting him to show you things. Well, I'll show you something. Something you won't forget in a hurry." She felt herself being dragged across the ground. Her eyes were just beginning to refocus, and she could see the branches of the tree above her, the sun dancing amongst the leaves, until the shade had gone completely and the sun beat down on her. A shadow fell on her face, and she winced as a heavy weight sat on her chest, pinning her arms to the ground. "Sunspots and Martians! What a load of shit!" Billy said, taking the telescope eyepiece from his pocket. "Nonsense made up by a stupid old man. It's time somebody showed you the real world." A hot pain flared suddenly in her upper arm. By straining her neck she was just able to see the livid orange spot of the focused sun as he held the lens an inch above her arm. She managed to twist away, just enough to bring a brief respite from the pain, but it soon returned.

She struggled and kicked, but he was too heavy for her, and every time she threatened to scream he bounced his body on top of her chest, forcing the air out of her, and causing her to wheeze and splutter, until the pain got too much, and she lay still, only hoping that it would be over quickly. Tears welled at the corners of her eyes as he moved the burning spot higher; to her shoulder, where it brought a searing burst of agony and the sweet smell of burnt meat; to her neck, where the pain made her feel faint and weak; to her hair, where the spot hissed and crackled. Finally, she looked up to see the lens directly above her face. Billy spoke, his eyes black and dancing, his mouth curled in the old Billy sneer. "You want to see the sun do you? Well take a look at this." The lens came down towards her eye and there was a hot sharp pain in her lower eyelid. She squeezed her tightly shut and prayed. "Just make him go away," she whispered. "I'll do anything if you just make him go away." She could feel the heat rise, could see the red fiery burning desire of it against the inside of her eyelid as it grew brighter; first orange, then yellow, then piercing shattering white. And there was something in her head, right there inside, just behind her eyes; a bright, red, prancing devil from the sun. She screamed, louder and louder, and thrashed her arms in one last attempt to shift the weight from her chest.

And then suddenly it was gone, and someone else was screaming, and the weight lifted, all in the same moment. The screams were coming from Billy, who was dancing, just off the road, kicking up huge clouds of dust as he scratched wildly at his face. The smell of burning meat was back. She watched, stunned, as Billy fled, screaming still, back up the road, back towards the house. Her mouth opened, and a voice which was not hers emerged, hot and heavy as the sounds passed he tongue. "I'll do anything if you just make him go away," it said; then laughed, a deep rumbling laugh which caused the branches of the tree above her to shake, dislodging several leaves which fell towards her, igniting into yellow flames as they came. She turned and ran, back up the road, towards the safety of her Uncle's big soft arms. Behind her she heard a whoosh, and felt the heat as the beech tree burst into a sheet of flame, and her mouth laughed again, getting louder as she fled for the safety of her uncle's cool house. The air grew hot in her throat, then hotter and hotter still, until it burned with every breath. But still she ran, legs pumping with every breath. But still she ran, legs pumping and tears coursing down her grimy face, rolling off her chin to fall, sizzling and steaming, onto her clothes. She found them in the kitchen. Billy was sitting in a chair, and Uncle Jack was dabbing at a red livid mark on his face with a damp cloth; small gentle dabs, barely touching the skin, but every one brought a squeal of pain from the boy.

Uncle Jack looked up and saw her, his face reddening as he took in the grimy, torn clothes, the dishevelled hair, the tear-streaked features, the wide frightened eyes. He lifted Billy off the chair, one handed, and shook him, shook him so hard that one of his shoes fell off, and there was a small metallic clunk as the telescope eyepiece fell to the ground. "Did you do this?" Uncle Jack was shouting. "Did you? I should have kicked you out after that bitch." Before she could stop him, he hit Billy; one hard, fast slap which rocked the boy's head back, causing his eyes to roll up in their sockets. "No!" she shouted, as the arm was raised again and again, and Billy's head rocked, left, right, left, right. She couldn't recognise her soft cuddly Uncle in this raging thing before her. She ran to his side and tugged at his shirt. And it got warmer. Very quickly. A sheet of flame ran from her hand, covering the man's arm, his back, his hair. She tried to call it back, knowing that it had from her, knowing that it was part of the thing growing in her, the thing put there by Billy. But she was too late. The fire rolled over her uncle's body, squirming and wavering and glowing brighter as it found its way to his face, glowing red then orange then yellow, then brilliant white as the body fell to its knees on the floor. The smell of burnt meat was back again. Billy was groaning and beginning to move, trying to push himself upright. She saw his eyes widen and his nostrils flare as he saw the body on the floor. She shook her head, unable to take her eyes from the small flames which

were still capering over Uncle Jack's dead body, the small red devils which she had called from the sun. There were still more inside her. She could feel them, burning away in her chest as she fought for breath. Billy was crying, sobbing loudly and shaking, trembling. He launched himself at her, screaming, a voiceless sound filled with pain and loss. She was knocked over by the force of his attack. The front of her dress burst into flames as he touched it, her hair turned into a seething mass of fiery serpents as it lashed the floor, her tears hissing and sizzling on her cheeks as their bodies were welded together by the quicksilver flash of searing golden heat. Sometime later something laughed and laughed as the bodies were consumed, and the red raging glory of it spread to the rest of the house.

GOING UNDER: Brian Keene April 1980... Lately, the only time Martin Kreider didn’t feel like he was sinking was during his daily walk home from the mine. Since Martin and his wife Marilee didn’t own a car, his best friend, Clark Smeltzer, gave him a ride to work each morning, showing up in his red International pick-up truck about a half hour before their shift at the mine began. Martin worried this charity might stop now that Clark had been promoted to shift supervisor, but so far, it hadn’t. Sure, Clark had more pressure on him now, and he couldn’t show favoritism to Martin at work, but their morning drives had continued. Martin was grateful for that. With their bank account still recovering from the gas crisis and the economic downturn, not to mention the recent birth of their twins, Eva and Erica, it would be a while before he and Marilee could afford a vehicle of their own. When their shift was over in the afternoon, Clark usually joined Henry Keiser, Ron Nace, Terry Laughman, and some of their other co-workers for a few beers at The Whistle Stop. Martin never went with them. Nace, Keiser and Laughman teased him about this, but he didn’t care. His place was at home with his wife and kids. Labor with the twins had been difficult for Marilee, and even now, months later, she still hadn’t quite recovered. It wasn’t just that she was tired all the time, as any woman home alone with two newborns all day would be. She seemed sad. Distant. There were a few times lately where Martin had

glimpsed an expression on her face that he didn’t like. He couldn’t explain it, and he hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. Sometimes, when Marilee stared at the babies, her face… changed. Then he’d speak to her and the odd expression would vanish as quickly as it had come, leaving him feeling disquieted. Martin let the taunts of his co-workers slide off his back, but was secretly annoyed. All of them had kids at home, too. Granted, their boys were older, but they should still be able to understand what it was like having a newborn at home, let alone two. Clark seemed to understand, but the others were relentless. Maybe Martin shouldn’t have been so surprised. Henry Keiser was having an affair with one of The Whistle Stop’s waitresses and had recently begin to talk about running away with her, and Ron Nace and Terry Laughman both spent more time at the bar and the mine than they did at home. And they weren’t the only ones. Sometimes, it seemed to Martin that the whole town was turning rotten. Gossip was rife, and so was the news it brought with it—adultery, infidelity, abuse, alcoholism, cruelty, and a litany of other transgressions. Martin couldn’t understand it. Marilee and the kids were his entire world. He’d never treat them the way some of these other men did with their families. Sure, there were still some good men left—Clark, their friend Randy Graco who worked at the paper mill, Reverend Moore, and a few others—but they were increasingly rare. Maybe it was just a sign of the times. Or maybe things had always been that way. Martin paused, clutching his lunch pail in one hand, flannel shirt slung over his shoulder. He always cut through

the center of Bowman’s Woods in order to avoid Catcher, the Sawyer family’s black Doberman pinscher who ran loose on their dairy farm and had no qualms about running out into the road to menace passerby. Martin didn’t mind the shortcut. The woods were always beautiful and the stillness was peaceful after a long shift in the noisy mine. Plus, it shaved a good fifteen minutes off his walk home. This evening, however, the woods seemed darker than normal. A branch snapped somewhere in the undergrowth, startling him. For a moment, he recalled the local folktales of the Ghoul, a Bigfoot like creature said to have haunted the region since the first settlers. Anytime somebody skipped town or a beloved pet went missing, people liked to blame the ghoul. But Martin didn’t believe in the ghoul. That was a story to tell kids. His own parents had done so. But in real life, Martin knew, there was no such thing as ghouls. The monsters were something else. Standing there in the middle of the forest, that sinking feeling returned, as if invisible hands were grasping his ankles, trying to pull him down into the earth. He took a deep breath, shook his head, and started down the footpath again. He’d gone a few hundred yards when a branch snapped again. Martin paused, peering uneasily into the undergrowth, and caught a glimpse of a figure crouching in the shadows amongst a stand of pines. The hair on Martin’s arms prickled. “Hello,” he called. “Is someone there?” The figure slowly rose to its feet. Through the gloom, Martin could only tell that it was human—or humanshaped. Two arms, two legs, a head. It watched him for another moment and then turned away. Seconds later, it was

gone, vanishing deeper into the forest. Martin quickened his pace, breathing a sigh of gratitude when he emerged from the forest onto Laughman Road. He glanced back into the tree-line, but there was no sign of the mysterious figure. He hurried along, turning onto Golgotha Church Road and passing by the hillside church cemetery on his right. The bottom of the hill was filled with old graves and crumbling crypts from the 1800s. The upper portion of the hill had newer monuments. At the top of the hill was a redbrick, one-story home with a white garage off to one side—the home of the church caretaker and groundskeeper, an old man named Wilson. Across the road sat the Golgotha Lutheran Church. Martin and Marilee attended every Sunday, although their devotion was more out of a desire to get out of the house and socialize with other people than it was any deep religious conviction. His favorite thing about the church was its arch-shaped stained glass windows. Each bore a scene from the New Testament; the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus walking on water, bathing someone’s feet, riding on a donkey, the crucifixion and the resurrection. Finally, he turned onto Anson Road, a narrow, twolane stretch of blacktop. His house sat at the end of the road, in a section of woods near Route 116. Laundry hung flapping from the clotheslines—sheets, darks and colors. As Martin approached his home, the sinking feeling returned, but when he walked inside and saw his girls there waiting for him, and Eva and Erica both cooed, the sensation dissipated.

* * * “Anything interesting happen today?” he asked Marilee as they sat down to dinner—meatloaf, baked potatoes, and canned peas. “The girls were cranky. I think Erica has colic.” Martin frowned. “She seems okay now.” “You’re not here with them all day.” Marilee’s tone was cold and clipped. “No, I’m not. I just meant that if she had colic, she’d be fussy all the time. That’s what I always heard. And she’s pretty happy right now.” Marilee shrugged, spooning another mouthful of baby food into Eva’s mouth. Eva promptly spit it back out and smiled. Martin grinned at the sight, but Marilee sighed in exasperation. Her own dinner sat untouched. “Here,” Martin said, starting to rise. “Let me do that. You go ahead and eat.” When she didn’t respond, he took a seat between the high chairs and fed the twins. They reminded him of baby birds, mouths open and hungry. Marilee picked at her food, moving it around on the plate with her fork. “You know what we need?” Martin wiped a dollop of baby food from the corner of Erica’s mouth. “A night out. Any Which Way You Can is playing at the drive-in this weekend. We should go. We liked the first one, remember? It had that orangutan in it?” “I don’t want to watch Clint Eastwood and his monkey hit people for two hours.” “Well, we don’t have to see that. You can pick the movie. Anything you want.”

Marilee shook her head. “We can’t afford it. We’re late on bills as it is. The phone company sent us a shut off notice today.” “We’ll pay them Friday, when I get paid. And we’ll still have enough to go to the movies.” “How are we going to the drive-in without a car?” “We can double with Clark and Rhonda.” “We can’t afford a babysitter.” “Maybe,” Martin said, “we could use the same babysitter they do. Barry isn’t old enough to stay home by himself. I’m sure they have somebody affordable. Clark was making the same salary as me until his promotion.” “I don’t want to leave the girls with a stranger.” “It doesn’t have to be a stranger. We could ask Mrs. Graco, or maybe Reverend Moore’s oldest daughter.” “Karen?” “Yeah! She’s a freshman now. I bet she’d be responsible.” “No,” Marilee insisted, shaking her head again, “I don’t trust anyone else with the girls. You never know about people these days.” “Marilee—” “I’m tired, Martin.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “You know what would be great, instead of a night out? A good night’s sleep. If you could get up with the babies one night, that would be enough.” “Okay.” Martin nodded. “I’ll do it Saturday night. Don’t have to go to work the next morning. That way, you can get your beauty sleep. Not that you need any. You’re as beautiful now as you were in high school.” Marilee’s smile looked more like a grimace, and

Martin felt that sinking feeling return. Then Eva and Erica began to babble happily, and he turned his attention back to them, trying to force the apprehension from his mind. * * * “Our scripture lesson for today,” Reverend Moore intoned from the pulpit, “is from Genesis, Chapter TwentyThree, which relates the death of Abraham’s wife, Sarah.” Martin covered his face with the church bulletin and stifled a yawn. As promised, he’d been up most of the night with the girls, so Marilee could get some much-needed rest. Not that the twins had kept him awake throughout the night. Quite the contrary. Other than a one a.m. feeding, both babies had slept like angels. But so afraid was Martin that he’d sleep through their cries if they did awake, he’d spent most of the night sitting in the recliner, drinking cup after cup of coffee, and flipping through back issues of hunting and fishing magazines. He’d finally drifted off in the chair around four in the morning, and when the twins awoke promptly at six, he got up with them. Marilee had joined them soon after, and for a while, she’d seemed better. Happier. More her old self than the sullen, noncommunicative woman he’d been living with for the last several months. “Then,” Reverend Moore was saying, bringing Martin back to the present, “in verses three through five, Abraham rises up from beside his dead wife and speaks to the Hittites. He tells them, ‘I am a foreigner and stranger among you. Sell me some property for a burial site here so

I can bury my dead.’ And the Hittites replied to Abraham…” Martin tuned the preacher out again, focusing instead on Marilee. The twins were downstairs in the church nursery, yet she sat apart from him in the pew, as if the twins were there between them. When Martin reached out and clasped her hand, she didn’t respond. When he gave it a playful squeeze, Marilee glanced at him and offered a quick smile before turning her attention back to the sermon—or going through the motions of doing so. Martin knew his wife too well. He’d known her since Junior High School. He knew now that both the smile and her interest in the sermon, were fake. Where are you? he thought. What’s going on in that head of yours? What is happening to us? There was no answer from Marilee, not that Martin had expected one. If God had heard his thoughts, then He was keeping silent, as well. Only Reverend Moore spoke, continuing on about dead wives and burial crypts. Martin shuddered, though he did not know why. * * * They lay in bed that night, inches from one another yet miles apart. After the twins had fallen asleep, Martin had rubbed Marilee’s feet, eliciting a sigh. Then he’d moved to massaging her back and shoulders. They’d found their way to the bedroom, but to Martin, their lovemaking had seemed stunted—as if his wife wasn’t really there with him, but simply going through the motions. Afterward, he

tried to hold her but she slipped out of bed and into the bathroom. When she returned, Marilee stayed on her side of the bed. “Honey…” Martin paused, careful to keep his tone concerned but non-critical. “Is there anything you want to talk about? Is everything okay?” “No, not really.” “You know I’m here for you, right? I mean, you can talk to me, if something’s on your mind. We used to talk all the time.” “I’m just tired. Let’s go to sleep, okay? The girls will be up in a few hours.” “I’ll get up with them,” he offered. “No, you were up with them last night. You’ve got work tomorrow. Let’s just go to sleep.” “Okay.” He lay there on his back, hoping she’d slide over to him. When she didn’t, he reached out and stroked her arm. “I love you.” “I love you, too.” Her tone was as listless and empty as their lovemaking had been. Then she rolled over on her side, facing away from him. Martin lay there in silence, staring at the dark. When he closed his eyes, he only saw more of the same. * * * He didn’t remember falling asleep. Indeed, when Martin awoke, he wasn’t sure at first where he was or what time it was. He glanced around in a panic, the vestiges of the dream which had woken him evaporating into a

confusing, uncertain jumble of imagery. A monster, digging its way up from the ground. He remembered long, bony fingers covered with filthy, curved talons, and white skin that was hard and greasy, and a hairless, pointed head that reminded him of a rotten gourd. Panting, Martin reached for Marilee, seeking to comfort himself with her reassuring presence. Instead, he was shocked to find her side of the bed was empty. He glanced at the bathroom and saw that the light was still off. Slipping out from under the sheets, Martin padded out of the bedroom and through the house. He found his wife standing in the twins’ room, looking down at them in their cribs. Moonlight streamed through the curtains, illuminating her face. Martin was shocked by her expression. Her lips were pulled back in a garish snarl, exposing her teeth and gums. Her eyes had that distant look he’d grown so accustomed to, but there was something else reflected in them, too. “Marilee.” He whispered, so as not to wake the babies. She turned to him slowly, and the terrifying expression faded, replaced with confusion and uncertainty. “Martin?” “What are you doing?” He reached out his hand. “Come on. Let’s not wake hem.” She took his hand, clutching it as if she were drowning. Martin led her back to the bedroom and sat her down on the bed. When he sat beside her, Marilee flung herself at him, clinging tight. Martin became aware that she was trembling. “What is it, honey? What’s wrong?”

“I…” Her words were lost beneath an explosion of sobs. He held her while she cried, and each time she tried to speak, or answer his questions, the crying grew worse. After a while, Martin stopped asking, and simply tried to comfort her. Eventually, the tears faded and Marilee yawned. “Try to get some sleep,” he urged. “Don’t go in tomorrow,” she pleaded. “Please?” “I can’t call Clark now. It’s after midnight.” “So tell him in the morning when he gets here. Please take the day off, Martin. I’m… afraid.” “Of what, Marilee?” “I… I’m not sure. I just really need you here.” “Okay,” he promised, and held her until she fell asleep. * * * “I can’t,” Clark Smeltzer said, sitting behind the wheel of his idling pickup truck. Martin glanced back at the house. Marilee moved behind the window, holding one of the twins in her arms. “Clark, please. She’s sick.” “Then she should go to the doctor. You don’t see me taking off work every time Rhonda gets sick.” “She’s not sick like that. It’s… I don’t know how to explain it. I’m just worried.” “I can’t let you do it, Martin. Not with me just getting promoted. They’ll say it’s favoritism. And besides, there’s a bonus if we finish the job early.”

Martin frowned. “The bonus is for you.” “That ain’t the point. I can’t let you have the day off. You used all your sick days, and I need a full crew today. Marilee is fine. I’m telling you it’s nothing.” Martin pursed his lips in anger. He wanted to respond, but was afraid that if he did, anything he said would cost him his daily ride, if not his job. Instead, he turned back toward the house. “Give me a second,” he said. “Hurry up,” Clark replied. “We’re gonna be late.” Ignoring him, Martin walked over to the house. Marilee was waiting for him at the screen door. The twins were laying on a blanket on the kitchen floor, playing happily. “It’s okay,” she said before he could speak. “I overheard. It will be okay.” “But last night—” “Doesn’t matter. Go to work. It will be okay. I’m going to do the wash. I’ve got to do our whites today. Then I’ll give the girls a bath. We’ll see you tonight.” “Okay.” The sinking feeling returned. “I love you, Marilee.” She smiled. “I love you, too.” “You and the twins. My three girls…” They kissed through the wire mesh screen. Then Clark tooted his horn, and Martin hurried off. Marilee watched them go, and raised a hand to wave as they headed down the road. * * *

From The York Daily Dispatch WORKERS OFF FOR KREIDER’S FUNERAL By Mary Ann Sanderson Strong support was shown earlier this week for local miner Martin Kreider. Kreider, visibly distressed by the loss of his wife and two young children, after Mrs. Kreider performed a murder-suicide that rocked the small town of Spring Grove, was unresponsive during the service. All local miners attended the funeral in support of Martin. The iron ore mine was shut down and work stopped for the day in respect for this hard working man. The funeral had fifty to a hundred people in attendance and the service was preformed at the Golgotha Lutheran Church. Burial took place at the Golgotha Cemetery… * * * Martin stood in front of their graves. Thunder boomed overhead, followed by a flash of lightning, which flickered off the tombstone. Rain poured from the sky, pelting him like bullets, and masking both his tears and his screams. “My girls,” he moaned. “My three girls…” Lightning flashed again, revealing a figure standing just inside the woods that bordered the cemetery. Martin glanced at it, and thought it might be the same mysterious stranger he’d glimpsed in the woods. Another burst of

lightning revealed it to be the creature from his dreams. A third flash, and the figure had disappeared. “Monsters,” he whispered. “Monsters everywhere. That’s all any of us are.” Martin knelt atop the grave, clawing fistfuls of mud as the deluge continued. Once again, the sinking feeling returned, but this time, Martin surrendered to the sensation and allowed himself to go under.

Going Home: J.F. Gonzalez Jack Page didn't expect to see Carla Beck at happy hour so soon after she had become the object of an intense round of verbal intimidation at the staff meeting just four hours earlier, but then they had been planning this night for the past few weeks. And what better way to bitch and moan about work and your stupid boss then after work, on a Friday night, at happy hour? It was certainly more appropriate than the confines of the office, specifically the seventh floor boardroom where the sorry excuse for a meeting had taken place. They usually did the happy hour thing once every three weeks or so, always at the same place: a Mexican restaurant on Pasadena Avenue called Mijares. The restaurant sported a nice outdoor patio with large tables, which provided the perfect atmosphere to suck down strawberry margaritas or Corona's, munch on appetizers, and bullshit until evening fell. A dozen of Jack's co-workers were already crowded around a large table when he arrived. Of those dozen probably five of them reported to Lori, his boss. And of those five, only two others had been in that shit-sorry excuse for a meeting. One of them was Carla. After sitting down at the table closest to them and ordering a Corona, he grinned at the others from his perch. "Thought I'd be too devastated to show up, eh?" Brian Gabriel grinned back and laughed. "Yeah, well, I figure if you were as much the asshole that Rudy said you were at that meeting, you would be at your lawyer's by now."

Jack chuckled and shook his head. The meeting they were talking about was originally designed as a 'rap session'. Jack Page worked as a desktop publisher for Free State Insurance Corporation, and the department he was employed in was Secretarial and Support Services. He was the only non-secretary in the department; all of the other staff members were farmed out to provide secretarial support for a variety of middle-managers and executives. Because of some nimrod executive decision, it was decreed that in order for the support staff to receive bonuses for the following fiscal year, they would have to set down a number of departmental goals. None of the aforementioned goals, however, had anything to do with their jobs. Among these goals were such illuminating things as touring a district office, attending workshops and computer classes, attending at least one class designed to improve communication and business skills. And attend 'rap sessions', one-hour meetings in which you sat at the big conference table and traded tips of the trade. How to deal with stress, what to do if a certain problem arose. That sort of thing. Only that hadn't happened at the first rap session, which Jack had made the mistake of attending. Their boss, Lori Williams, had been present, and she made it clear that she "wanted to hear a comment from everybody in this room." She then proceeded to randomly select people to draw gossip, such as "have you ever had a problem with anybody you work with? It can't be managers, and you don't have to name names." As expected, the stories that flowed through started innocently enough until they had turned personal and ugly. By the time Rudy Garcia, a

secretary who Jack privately thought was an incompetent moron, said that when he first came to the department he thought Jack was an asshole, all bets were off. Within fifteen minutes time professional relationships were damaged, Carla was near tears, and another secretary whom Jack didn't know was red faced with embarrassment and refused to look at Rudy, who'd taunted her. And through it all Lori was going around the room, trying to get other people to verbally maul each other some more. She had resembled Jerry Springer more than she did a manager. The experience had left Jack with a bad impression on the way Lori was running things that he refused to work for the rest of the afternoon. He stayed in his cubicle and surfed the Internet for the next few hours, then he left at his appointed time. After a brief pit stop at his apartment to change into more casual attire, he had cruised over to Mijares, originally planning to have a beer or two and some dinner and leave. Only instead he had four beers and wound up talking extensively to Carla Beck, who had been sitting silent and forlorn at the edge of the table where the group was seated. Jack didn't know Carla well, but he had heard through the grapevine that the woman wasn't that well off. She was in her mid-forties, with wavy brown hair that fell to her shoulders. Carla was what you thought of when you thought 'white trash'. She favored frumpy skirts and slacks at work that framed her chunky frame loosely, and tonight she dressed in faded blue jeans and a white blouse. She had wide hips and large breasts, and she would have been pretty if she hadn't lived such a hard life; the lines in her face made her appear weathered. Her nose looked like it might

have been broken at one point, and she had a small scar on her chin. She had a nice mouth, though, and if you looked past a missing tooth or two, she had a pretty smile that brought dimples to her cheeks. What mattered was that Carla Beck was a genuine sweetheart. `Jack started off by trying to joke around with her like he always did, but Carla wasn't buying any of it. She smiled faintly but it looked forced, and when it became apparent that conversation at the main table was focused on something besides that piss-poor meeting, Jack turned to her and asked her point blank. "Are you okay?" Carla looked up at him, meeting his gaze. "Yeah...I'm fine." The tone of her voice suggested she wasn't. "Listen, I know you're probably still bothered by what happened at the meeting. It pissed me off, too." Carla sighed. "Yeah, but big deal. What can we do about it? Lori would fire me if she knew that I tried to do something." Jack had felt sorry for Carla at the meeting, watching her on the other side of the table as Lori pressured the woman to reveal exactly who in the department bothered her, knowing very well that the person in question was sitting next to her, seemingly oblivious to it all. It was obvious from Carla's body language that she had been comfortable with coming out with her feelings. A public forum wasn't appropriate for airing such issues, anyway. In fact, it bordered on workplace harassment. "Yeah, well, I think I'm gonna do something," Jack said. He hadn't really been bothered by Rudy calling him an asshole, but he wanted to say that to put her at ease. "I don't

think it was right for Lori to do what she did. If people have issues with each other, that's something they should be able to do confidentially with Lori, not participating in a freefor-all slug-fest in front of everybody. It's unprofessional and counter-productive." Carla still looked wounded and defeated. "Yeah, but what can you do? She's the boss. What she says goes." Going this route with her was beating a dead horse. He took a sip of his beer and tried to muster a smile. The only thing he knew about Carla was that she was divorced, with two daughters who were in their late teens and early twenties that were already out on their own. She had originally come on the staff as a temp, and after two years Lori had hired her on a permanent basis as a floater. Meaning she floated around from department to department, assisting other secretaries as needed. It was a shitty job, and for all Jack knew it was the lowest paying position in the department. He would be surprised if she made twenty-five thousand dollars a year. Carla had almost finished her beer and Jack offered to buy her another, which she accepted. When fresh beers came, Jack changed the subject. It was obvious that Carla didn't want to dwell much on the meeting; she still appeared bothered by it. He changed the subject to another work issue, which led to a conversation on stereo equipment, which led to music, which led to sports, which led to other things, which led to more beers, and before he knew it everybody else had left, they were both more than a little tipsy, and then they were walking out of the restaurant, arm in arm drunkenly. Carla said she lived just up the street a ways and Jack thought he would just walk

her home, wearing off the buzz, but then one thing led to another and the next thing he was aware of they were at her place, in bed. Jack lay in the darkened room, staring at the ceiling. Carla lay snuggled next him. The blinds were opened slightly, spilling moonlight into the room. He had been surprised at the sudden turn of events, but he had been even more surprised at her living conditions. Carla Beck's current residence was room 204 at the Lucky Star Motel off of Colorado Boulevard. He hadn't said anything to her as she led him into the room, but now as he lay in her bed, Carla comfortably snuggled against him, he debated on whether he should bring it up. He wanted to ask her why do you live in such a dump? But as he thought about it he realized that it all fit: her low pay scale, coupled with whatever had happened to her in the past that would have caused her to be divorced, would be sufficient excuse to live in a motel. He wondered how long she had been living like this. As if she had read his thoughts she said, "If I hadn't been so drunk I wouldn't have brought you here." "Are you sorry for what happened?" Jack asked. A pause. "No." She was silent for a moment. "I just didn't want you to see how I lived." Jack thought about that. He didn't know what to say. "I haven't always lived like this," she said. "What happened?" Jack asked. "The usual shit," Carla sighed. "My husband left me and took everything." "And this was all you could afford," Jack confirmed. "Yeah." She shifted around beside him in the bed.

"My job doesn't really pay all that well." "I can imagine," Jack said. He felt sorry for Carla. "I never really had any job skills before I came to Free State," Carla continued. "In fact, this is the first real job I've ever had." "You were just a housewife before?" Carla nodded. "Yeah. I thought that was great." Then, in a lower voice. "Boy, was I wrong." Jack didn't want to go into her personal life, but she appeared to be freely divulging the information. "I was so desperate to leave home that when I did, I didn't know where to turn to," she said. "I had a little money with me, but I knew it wasn't going to last. Then I met Mike, my husband, at a bar. We hit it off real quick, and I fell for him fast. I was only nineteen. Young and stupid." "You got married young?" She nodded. "About a year after we met. I had Darci two years later, and then a few years after that I had Michelle. Mike had a good job as a general contractor. He made enough money so I didn't have to work. It sure beat home." "Where's home?" For a minute he didn't think she was going to answer him. She stared at the ceiling for a moment. Then she said, "I'm from back east. Pennsylvania to be exact. A real rural area. We had no running water, no electricity. We were dirt poor." "Are you Amish?" It spilled out of Jack's mouth before he could stop it. Carla shook her head. "No, my family isn't Amish." Then, in a voice so low that Jack wasn't sure if he heard it

right, she said, "When I was young though, sometimes I wish I had been in an Amish family. Even that would have been preferable to where I was." "Your home-life was that bad?" Carla sighed. "I'm sorry if I'm making it sound as if I came from this hell-hole, but really...no." Carla shook her head. "It really wasn't that bad. It was just..." "Eccentric?" Carla appeared to think about it, then nodded. "I guess you could say that." "So there were good things about where you're from?" "I suppose I shouldn't be so harsh on it, but, yeah, there was." Carla sat up, her back propped up against the headboard. Jack sat up, too. "Living in the country does have some beautiful advantages: the clean air, the open space, the wild-life. It's really quite peaceful." "Did it ever occur to you to maybe go back after your divorce?" Carla shook her head vehemently. "No. I couldn't do that. That would just make things worse." "Why?" She wouldn't answer. Jack began to fear that he had stepped over the line. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to-" "No, it's okay", Carla said. "I started this." "We don't have to talk about it if you don't want to." Carla was silent again. She appeared to be struggling to hold back the tears. Jack felt uncomfortable. "You okay?" She nodded hesitantly.

"Was it that bad?" he asked. Carla sniffled, staring at the wall in front of them where the nineteen inch Minolta TV was bolted to the wall. "Sometimes I think about that and I wonder if it was as bad as I made it all out to be." "What do you mean?" Carla appeared to think about it for a moment. "Have you ever looked back on an event that you used to think was bad, only to later think it wasn't as bad as you had thought?" Jack nodded. "Well, yeah. High school was like that." "That's what home is like," Carla said. "How long has it been since you've been back?" "I left twenty-two years ago," Carla said. "I've never been back." "Not even to visit?" Jack found this astonishing. Carla shook her head. 'Not even to visit." "But you're thinking what it might be like to go back now, aren't you?" Carla nodded, sniffling. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "Yes," she whispered. "Are you afraid of going back?" Carla appeared to not know how to answer this question. "I don't know. Sometimes I feel scared, and other times...other times I think it would be so much better for me if I went back and never set foot in the modern world ever again." Never set foot in the modern world ever again. Christ, had she lived in a stone hut back there? "Do you really hate it here more?" He asked. Again, Carla appeared uncertain. "I don't know."

Jack thought about this. Maybe her parents had been alcoholics or something; maybe they had abused her. He didn't dare ask her, but a part of him wanted to know. "Maybe a short visit back might help. You know, give you a chance to confront whatever it is about your past that's bothering you." She seemed to think about it. "I don't know. That might be a good thing to do." He almost asked why not? He smiled and put his arm around her shoulders. Maybe the best thing to do would be to change tactics. "Maybe it wouldn't be. But then how would you know if you don't at least try?" She nodded slowly, looking at him. "Yeah, I see what you mean. Still..." That look of uncertainty came back to her. "What?" "It's going to be so much different. I haven't been in that environment in twenty-two years. I would be...I don't know...I would feel so uncomfortable and out of place." "Do you think it's really changed that much in twenty-two years?" "No. But then, I've really changed. My whole worldview has changed. Going back now would be..." "Like going to a foreign country, or something?" She nodded. "I guess you could say that." They were silent again. After a few minutes, Jack asked if he could smoke a cigarette. She needed one too, and they lit up and leaned back against the headboard, smoking silently, each lost in their own thoughts. "I know we don't know each other that well, but..." "Yeah?" He looked at her, waiting for what he was

expecting. "If I went back for a few days would you come with me?" That wasn't what he was expecting. What he was expecting was more in the line of I know we don't know each other very well, but I enjoyed our time together and I hope we can do it again. Maybe...see where the relationship takes us to next. What she had asked him instead was unexpected. He thought about it. He could use a vacation. And he had never been in that part of the country before. As long as she paid for her own airfare, he wouldn't mind tagging along. Hell, it might be fun. That decided it for him. "Sure." He grinned at her. "When do we leave?" The smile she flashed back at him seemed to suggest that, right at that moment, Carla Beck was the happiest woman on the planet. *** "You okay?" They had pulled to the side of the narrow dirt road that Carla indicated, and now as they sat in the rented Ford Escort somewhere in the deep woods of the Pennsylvanian mountains, Jack felt a shiver of foreboding pass through him. Until now, he had never been nervous about the trip. That was all rapidly changing. Carla looked up at the old, ramshackle house set back against the dirt lane with a look of fear. The late afternoon sun was hidden behind trees with skeletal branches that

spread themselves over the grounds. The house was Victorian, with high gables along the north and south ends, indicating a roomy attic and a long front porch. The house seemed to tilt to the left, as if the foundation it rested on was slowly sinking into the earth. The shutters leaned off crookedly, the paint was peeling from the gray walls. Dead leaves floated along the weed choked front yard amid a light breeze. The shades were drawn over all of the windows. The house looked haunted. "So this is where you lived?" Jack asked, looking up at the house. It had been three weeks since their conversation at her motel room. Since then, Carla Beck had been a frequent visitor to his bed, but they had never discussed the subject they had spoken of the night they had consummated their relationship. Except for a few brief discussions on his accompanying her back east, Jack had respected her wishes. They'd lucked out on two round-trip tickets to Philadelphia due to stiff airline competition, and it had been fairly easy to get the few days vacation time. Carla Beck sighed and reached for the door handle. "I might as well get this over with." She opened the door and got out. Jack followed her out. Upon landing at Philadelphia International Airport, they had rented a car and driven northwest, reaching the foothills of the mountain country two hours later. They had landed at two p.m. east coast time, and by the time they'd checked into a cheap motel along Route 87 it was closing in on five-thirty. The homestead was another thirty minutes through winding, heavily wooded terrain. Carla had wanted it to be her first stop after they checked in so she could get this over with as

quickly as possible. Jack followed her up the yard to the rickety wooden steps that led to the sagging porch. Carla hesitated a beat, then stepped forward and rapped on the thin wooden door. They waited for what seemed a long time. Carla rapped again, harder. After a moment the sound of shuffling footsteps could be heard from inside and the door opened a crack. Jack couldn't see who was peering out, but he could tell from the expression on Carla's face that it had to be one of her parents. "So...you've come back, haven'tcha?" Carla's voice was hoarse. "Hello, mother." The door opened wider, allowing Jack a glimpse of the darkened interior and the occupant of the house. The woman standing in front of them was old and stooped. Wearing a frayed, gray housedress, her white hair was tied in a bun behind her small head. Her eyes were the same watery-blue as her daughter's, her face sunken, chin bony. She drew an equally faded gray sweater closer to her thin, cadaverous frame and peered up at Jack. "Your husband, I take it? Looks mighty young to have been married some twenty-odd years now." She had a thick Pennsylvanian Dutch accent; what came out was: yer husband, I taike it? Looks maighty yung ta hafe be'en muarried some twenty-aud yeaurs naw. "He's not my husband, ma; just a friend." Carla's mother glanced at him once more, then turned to her daughter. "Well, come on in then if you're a mind to. I always knew you'd come back." She turned and began heading into the gloomy interior of the house. Carla seemed to have regained some of her nerve; she stepped past the threshold of the front door and followed

her mother into the dismal old house. Jack glanced back once at their rental car, then followed Carla inside the house. The house was dark and dusty. He stood in a small entry hall and to his left was the living room, shrouded in shadows. To his right was another room, cloaked in darkness. Carla moved down the hall, following her mother toward the rear of the house and Jack followed, trying to take in as much as he could. It was obvious that the place hadn't been cared for in a very long time. The furniture he passed was old and drab. The wallpaper was faint and peeling. Dust motes swirled in the atmosphere, illuminated by the light from lanterns that were placed along various portions of the hallway. He passed a kitchen on his left but didn't pay much heed to it because now he was in the rear of the house where both women were, and as he entered the room he saw that it was what appeared to be a den or family room. It was lit by several oil lamps. The furniture here looked more cared for, the dust less of a nuisance. The old lady sank back in a worn easy chair and bade her daughter to sit down. Jack cast a quick glance around the room, noting the strange sculptures decorating the end tables and bookshelves, the equally weird paintings depicting strange subjects matted in frames, and the wall of books that took up one wall. The odor of mold was in this room as well, but that could be because of the books. He felt an irresistible urge to look at the books, but he sat down on a red mauve sofa opposite Carla and her mother. "So..." Carla began. She looked nervous. "How's dad?" The old woman looked at Carla as if she were the

dumbest person alive. "Humph. Guess you don't know, don'tcha. What, with you packing up and leavin' us like that all those years ago. Your father's gone on to the other side." Even though it was dark in the room, Jack could clearly see Carla's face turn pale at the mention of this. Jack's initial impression was an obvious guess; in the time that Carla was in California, her father had passed away. She was hearing this for the first time and was justifiably shocked at the news. "No," Carla said, hand going to her mouth, eyes wide. "It can't be, it--" "But it is, child," the old woman said, leaning forward and attempting to take her daughter's hands. "It is. And you know what your father told you. You still remember, don't you?" "No!" Carla was clearly frightened, and now Jack was nervous watching her. This wasn't the reaction somebody would have upon hearing that a parent had died. This was something else, something of a more primal fear. "Yes," the old woman croaked. "You do remember. He always knew you would come home. You were always his little girl. And you know how much he would have wanted you to go with him. To go with us." Carla shot out of her chair, screaming at the top of her lungs. The suddenness of her act and the intensity of her screams stunned Jack. For a moment, all he could do was look up at her stunned as she screamed, eyes bugged out, face deathly pale. Then she turned and began running down the darkened hallway toward the front door. Jack bolted out of his own seat and chased after her, never even thinking of Carla's mother or the affect her sudden turn of behavior had

on the old woman. *** Carla refused to speak of the incident. For the remainder of the evening she was silent and fearful. She refused Jack's offer to go into town--Birksville, population 145--for supper at the little cafe on the main drag of town, so he went by himself. By the time he returned to their motel room she was asleep, the thin sheet drawn over her as if she were using it as a shield against some otherworldly invader. He watched her sleep for a moment, then stepped outside and sat on the porch of the motel, smoking silently and thinking. He had had to chase her past their rental car before he caught her. Once he grabbed her she had jumped as if shocked by a strong electrical current. For a moment it almost appeared as if she didn't recognize him; she was looking at him, but her eyes were still wide, all pupils now, and while she was seeing him she was looking at him in terror. But then as suddenly as the expression came upon her face, she had seemed to gain control of herself and she collapsed into his arms, sobbing uncontrollably. Jack managed to get her into the car and drive them to their motel. And now she was refusing to speak to him about it. The most she had said were fitful mutters of "I shouldn't have been so foolish!" or "He knew, he knew all along," and "I've felt them calling to me all this time." Jack listened to her and tried to make sense of what she was saying, but couldn't. Quite frankly, he was beginning to fear for her

sanity. He smoked two cigarettes then stepped back in the room. He glanced at the clock on the mantel. It was eightthirty, still early, and he was far from tired. In fact-"Jack?" Carla was awake, her head supported by two pillows, looking up at him. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying and now she sat up slightly, the top sheet slipping down into her lap. She had fallen into bed wearing her clothes, and now as Jack approached the bed he tried to think of something to say to ease her troubled mind. "You okay?" "No," she said. "But I think I owe you an explanation. Sit down." Jack sat down at the foot of the bed. "You probably won't think much of me after I tell you this," Carla said, her voice husky. "But the reason I reacted so strongly the way I did was because of what my mother said." "Something about your father going to the other side," Jack said; he had developed a theory on that himself while he was outside smoking. Her father was now deceased. Both her parents had been crazy. They had heaped a tremendous amount of psychological torment and probably physical abuse on her as a child, and somehow the phrase 'going to the other side' was the kicker. Maybe it meant death. Maybe they'd had some kind of crazy suicide pact. Carla nodded. "When my mother told me he had gone, I knew right away. But he's not dead. Not really." "Excuse me?" Was he hearing this right? "You've got to understand something about my father,

Jack," Carla said. "He was a very dangerous man. Not dangerous in a physical sense. He wasn't a violent criminal, he didn't rob banks or kill people or anything like that. But he was a dangerous man. He messed with things only a crazy man, or perhaps an evil one, would mess with." Jack stared at her, trying to make sense of it all. Carla looked at him, her composure getting stronger. "The closest I can describe what my father was, was a...a mystic. Or a wizard. He was very deep into the occult. I grew up with it." "Your dad was a devil worshipper?" Jack asked. "Satanism was child's play to my father," Carla said. "What my father was into was beyond Satanism. It was...it was about going further back, to the outer reaches of time and space, to a time before our very being, to a time before the earth was even formed." "I don't think I'm following you," Jack said, shaking his head. If Carla heard him she didn't indicate that she had. "I grew up with it. It was all I knew for years. I thought it was normal. My mother knew about it, but I never realized my mother was into it the way my father was. Mom cleaned house, sent me to school, made sure I had clothes, made sure we had food. My father worked. When he came home he shut himself in his rooms in the attic and dabbled." "What did he dabble in if he wasn't a devil worshipper?" Carla was silent for a moment, as if thinking of how to continue. "When I was younger and I asked my mother what daddy was doing, she would tell me he was studying. One time I got the nerve to peak into his room. It...even

then, it was creepy. There were desks and lots of old books and papers all over. He had a skull, a human skull, on the table, and there were all kinds of papers tacked on the walls with weird shapes drawn on them. There were other weird shapes drawn on the floor in chalk. Weird symmetrical shapes, circles over triangles and stars, shapes that I can't even describe. I didn't understand any of it at first, and what I saw scared me. In fact, it was almost ten years later before I saw that room again.. "Sometimes I would lie awake at night trying to fall asleep while my father was deep into his studies. Sometimes I heard him in there, saying something in a weird language. Sometimes it sounded like he was...praying." Jack shivered. Christ, even he was getting a little spooked by all this. "Sometimes I heard other things." She looked down at the bed, as if afraid to continue. "One time I heard him speaking that weird language and...I could swear...I heard a second voice, as if it was answering him." "What was it saying?" Thinking of what it was like for Carla as a little girl in that big dreary house, going through what she was describing to him, was giving him a severe case of the willies. "Nothing you would recognize as what we know as language," Carla said, her eyes wide. "But then...it was a language in a sense. A language far older than the world itself." This was getting too much. "I don't think I'm following you, Carla," Jack said. "What the hell do you mean by 'far older than the world itself'? There's no such

fucking thing." Carla stared at him for a moment. "If you only knew," she said. "There are things out there...just waiting to gain their foothold on our world. They can't wait to enter our world and tear us to pieces. We're beneath them. They were here long before earth was inhabitable to the creatures that live here now. And for some reason they...they lost their foothold here. They were banished to another dimension. And...somehow...my father found out about them through studying obscure texts he managed to track down in obscure parts of the world when he was in the military. He began to...communicate with them. He...he made them an offer...and they accepted!" "What the fuck are you talking about!" Jack tried to sound angry, but he was also beginning to be a little afraid, too. Carla ignored him. "One afternoon when I was sixteen years old I came home and I saw that what he had been doing the night before had worked." The huskiness returned to her voice. "He had been involved in something intense in his rooms. He had been praying again, chanting to something, and a few times I heard him refer to it by name--he called it a...a...it's hard to pronounce. And then I heard this sound, like the blowing of the wind. It was like there was a hurricane outside, the wind blowing the trees hard in a sudden gust. It was so windy I actually went to my window and looked outside." She looked at him, deadpan. "But there was nothing. The wind wasn't blowing at all. But I could hear it, howling and moaning around the house as my father's prayers and incantations grew worse. "When it was over there was silence for perhaps five

minutes. Then I smelled this horrible smell, like...garbage or something. Or shit. It was awful. And then I heard a voice that sounded like a thousand bullfrogs croaking together at the same time in the stillness of a swamp. It had a voice and it told something to my father in that croaking voice and my father answered it..." Carla's voice began to hitch. "He answered in that same, droning, croaking voice!" She paused a beat before continuing; Jack could feel his pulse quicken as his belly turned to ice. "I pulled the covers over my head and huddled there, so afraid. I couldn't sleep. I was awake all night and when I got up to go to school I tried to pretend that I didn't hear what had gone on. I came home from school through the back way behind the house and I saw it. Whatever daddy had called had pulled itself through the woods behind the house and left a tenfoot wide swath of dead vegetation in its path. It went deep into the woods, as far as I could see, and it left a slimy, smelly residue. And...as I followed its tracks from where it started I saw that it had set off on its path from our house. The entire west wall of the house all the way up to the attack was coated in that shit. It had crawled out of our attic! "That night my father actually joined us at the dinner table for the first time in months. He looked insane. He kept...trying to put his arm around me, trying to...be the father he never was to me. And he kept saying that he had summoned it and that it was going to come back for the three of us. That it was going to take all of us to the Other Side. And that the dimensions would be turned inside out, allowing them free reign into our world. "That was the last night I ever spent in that house.

The next morning I took the hundred and seventy-two dollars I had saved in my bank, and a change of clothes and my toothbrush and stuff, and packed them into my bookbag. I didn't even go to school that morning, just hitched a ride into Philly and bought a one-way bus ticket to as far as I could go." "How far was that?" "St. Louis, Missouri, at first. I got a job waitressing and lived in a motel for awhile. I was gonna stay, but I felt that was too close to Pennsylvania. I saved up two hundred bucks and bought a bus ticket to California a few weeks later. I've been there ever since." Jack thought about this as he sat on the mattress. It was a warm muggy night and the air conditioning was on low, cooling the room nicely. "So, I take it you got to California and met your husband and everything was hunky dory after that, right?" Carla looked at him with something that resembled shame. "You think I'm crazy." "No. I don't think you're crazy. But I think your mother is pretty off her rocker. I mean, just look at her -- " "You don't know her the way I do." "She's a fuckin' nut!" Jack snapped. "Jesus Christ, she's fed you this shit since you were a kid, Carla! Can't you see that? She probably made the shit up when you were little to keep you in line and you bought it hook, line, and sinker. There's no such thing as what you're talking about, things beyond time and space and all that bullshit. What the fuck is this shit about things coming from..." he sputtered to remember the right description. "...beyond whatever the fuck they're beyond. And all this bullshit about your father

offering whatever it was he offered and -- " "My father offered them the three of us," she said, her features serious. "He offered my family. We were to be the gate to let them regain their foothold in the world." "Bullshit!" Jack hissed. "My father was a coward," Carla said, her mouth set in a grimace as she stared at Jack, her brown eyes cold and determined. "He was the kind of person everybody in town pushed around. From what I gather, he must have been that way as a child. He could never stand up for himself. I know that now. He used to tell me that the world was no place for people like us, that it would just chew you up and spit you out. That it was created to hurt you. He fed me this over and over. And I can see how I let this affect me. I got into an abusive marriage, and I'm in an abusive working relationship with Lori. I let people take advantage of me. He was like those two kids that shot up that high school in Colorado -- mad at the world and he was going to make the world pay. Only instead of going on a killing spree, he turned to things even more dangerous. What my father finally did can very well be the end of the world as we know it." "How can the bullshit your dad was into be the end of the world?" Jack shouted. "The guy was a lunatic! All he did was dabble in a little black magic bullshit that doesn't exist!" "You aren't listening," Carla said, glaring at Jack. "This isn't just black magic. My father discovered something more ... more real than mere black magic. The Old Ones are real. They once ruled the earth. They're more real than the deities we've created out of our flights of

fancy. So real that the select few that have stumbled upon this knowledge have come away with such fear of what would happen if they were to ever break through the barriers that..." She seemed to be at a loss for words. "This is more than just the occult, Jack. It's about harnessing a power that holds the balance between maintaining the earth as we know it, creating the right atmosphere to throw open the gates of chaos. But my father...he found a way to communicate with them, something few men have tried. Most people foolish enough to try have failed with horrible consequences. But not my father. He made a deal with them. He offered himself and his family as sacrifices, what they would need, in order to gain their foothold into our world." "What, so your old man offed himself and your mom, is that it?" Jack sneered. "No. They were probably used as...as portals." Jack threw his hands up in disgust. "What X-Files bullshit!" Carla ignored him. "Dad was excited that the ritual worked. He said all it would take would be for the three of us to perform the rites he recited to us over dinner that night, and the Old One he summoned would claim his sacrifice. Once the three of us were claimed and in their world, the dimensions would turn inside out. It would have a rippling effect around the world. It would be like the sound of a great storm, with great roar of wind only there really would be no wind -- it would be the sound of the universe tearing and then it would peel back and it would be like a great dark cloud blotting out the sky. Only it wouldn't be the clouds of a storm...it would be the peeling

back of the universe." "Bullshit!" Jack yelled. Carla was trying hard to hold the tears in, but she wasn't doing a good job of it. For the first time since they had been together, Jack saw how she would look as an old woman. He saw her as the old woman he'd seen early that afternoon, at that old, gray house in the woods. "You don't understand, Jack. You just don't understand!" "I understand," Jack said, trying to calm his anger down. He scooted toward her and tried to take her in his arms at an attempt at comfort. "I'm sorry I yelled at you. It's just...you've got to understand what you're saying, Carla. Your mother's been living alone for who-knows how long, and -- " "And my father is gone," Carla cried, drawing away from him. "He's not dead, he's gone! Gone to the other side, and I was supposed to be here! I was supposed to go with him! We all were! We were supposed to never feel pain or despair ever again, and in return for that we were to provide the opening for them to come into our world, so they could take over again." And then she broke down completely, crying uncontrollably. Jack felt helpless; he could only sit beside her on the lumpy bed and make a clumsy attempt at consolation, stroking her back, her brown wavy hair. After awhile the sobbing eased up. Carla wiped her eyes. "I know it's hard for you to understand. Nobody ever did. That's why we were always shunned when I lived out here. But my father...he was very powerful. He still is very powerful, and...the things he called upon are more powerful than your...comfy little Judeo-Christian world-view. Daddy guided me back here. I can feel it. He helped me come

home!" Jack didn't know what else to say. There was no use in arguing with her. That would just create more problems, and it was something they didn't need now. All he could do was listen and be there for her, to keep the demons at bay. Eventually she calmed down enough to sink back into bed again. Jack sat up in bed with her, rubbing her shoulders, holding her hand, until she fell asleep. Jack checked his watch. It was ten-thirty. He was wide-awake and far from tired. He waited until Carla went into a deep sleep. Then, when he was certain that she wasn't going to wake up again, he let himself out quietly and sat outside and smoked and thought about the things she had told him. *** It was the longest night Jack Thomas had had in a long time. He couldn't sleep. No matter what position he lay in, he just couldn't fall asleep. He had returned to the room at midnight, stripped down to his boxers, and slipped into bed beside Carla, who lay snoring on her back. He'd tried to fall asleep to no avail. He just couldn't sleep, and it wasn't Carla's snoring that kept him awake. It was his mind, which just couldn't get the story she'd told him out of his head. At some point he must have dozed. He lay in bed until six a.m. and when he knew he wasn't going to get any more sleep, he got up and went to the bathroom. He urinated, flushed the toilet, then brushed his teeth and combed his hair. He checked on Carla, saw that she was

still fast asleep, then he changed quickly. He let himself out quietly. He was hungry, but he had more on his mind than food. He wanted to prove Carla wrong, show her that her mother was nothing more than a senile, crazy old woman who belonged in a hospice, or better yet, a state run mental hospital. He climbed in the rental car and, using the map as guidance, he drove back to the house where Carla had grown up. He got lost three times on the drive over. All those back roads looked the same and the trees hung over the road, stretching out branches that looked skeletal even in the bright bloom of summer. After forty minutes of driving he finally found it. He recognized the landscape as he drove up the heavily wooded terrain, heading into the deep woods of the mountains. When he rounded the curve that led to the house he leaned forward and squinted. The house was there all right, but it looked a little more decrepit than it had looked yesterday. Of course the morning sun was hitting the structure at a different angle now, bathing it in more light. When they had come by yesterday, it had been in the long shadows of late afternoon. Jack pulled to the side of the road and got out of the car. As weathered and beaten-up as the house was yesterday, it definitely looked more jacked-up now. The driveway was still bare and empty. As he walked up the crumbling walkway, Jack noticed the weeds that were sprouting everywhere; poking through cracks in the concrete porch; climbing up the trellis. When he knocked on the door he was startled at how flimsy it felt, as if it was

going to fall apart at the slightest hint of strength. He waited for a moment, listening for any sign of life from within. He knocked again, suddenly getting the feeling that whatever was in that house was as dead as the grounds outside. His heart was pounding in his chest; he felt lightheaded with nervous tension. He gripped the doorknob and turned it. It opened and he stepped inside. The first thing he noticed was the strong, pervading odor of mold and rot as he stepped within the crumbling structure. A plume of dust swirled in front of him, clogging his nostrils. He coughed, blinking in the darkness as he tried to peer inside. "Hello? Mrs. Beck?" His voice echoed back. "Beck...Beck....Be...Be..." He stepped into the living room. It was in shambles; broken furniture leaning against the sagging walls, the carpet torn up. Jack saw an end table and touched it; it was thick with dust. He sneezed suddenly, and the force of the sneeze expelled the dust, swirling it into a cloud. This made him sneeze again, and he backed out of the living room, trying to control his sneezes. With rising trepidation, he stepped further into the house. It was gloomier, dustier, than it had been when he and Carla had experienced it yesterday. He stopped at the stairway that led to the second floor, one hand on the crumbling banister, and debated on whether he should venture upstairs. The house was silent; it felt like there was nobody in the house except for him. "Mrs. Beck?" he called. "Anybody home?" When the echoes died he put one foot on the bottom step. The wood creaked. He could tell that the minute he

put all his weight on the stair that it would collapse. He tried the next step. It seemed sturdier. Carefully, testing each step as he went along, he made his way to the second floor. He inspected every room on the second floor. Each room was empty and filled with dust. Some rooms, like what looked to be the master bedroom, bore crumbling, bare furniture, long since reduced to rot from disuse. The windows were closed, faint light filtering through dirty, filmy curtains. Jack didn't even think of trying to flip on a light. Somehow, he had a feeling that there would be no electrical power in the place. He climbed the narrow stairway to the attic, feeling nervous as he entered. The attic room was large and, with the exception of a huge desk that took up most of one wall, completely bare. He approached the desk slowly. This was probably Carla's father's study, where he had come to work on his supposed black magic. Jack took in the room, checking it out carefully. There were no books, no papers, no crude occult symbols drawn on the floor or the walls. There was no sign that this had been the ritual chamber of a black magician. Aside from the strong odor of rot -stronger here in this room for some reason -- there was nothing out-of-the-ordinary. What the hell is going on? he thought, heading back downstairs to the living room, the odor of mold and dust everywhere. It was as if the place had been unoccupied for years. But how could it be? We were here yesterday! I saw Carla's mother with my own eyes! His eyes tracked down the hall to the front door, and when he saw what was on the floor his heart skipped a beat.

There were three sets of footprints in the dust. There was his set from today going from the front door to the rest of the house and up the stairs. The other two pairs were his familiar tread again from the day before, and Carla's. They went from the front door to the den, the only two rooms they had entered in the house yesterday. There were no visible tracks of a fourth person. This can't be right, Jack thought. He skirted around the footprints, grasped the doorknob and let himself out. He was almost to his car when a boy of about ten years old rode by on his bike. Upon seeing Jack exiting the house, the boy stopped and looked up at him with surprise. "Hey Mister! Did you just come out of that house?" Jack stopped at the car, still trying to find a logical explanation for what he had found in the house. "Yeah," he said, fumbling with his keys. "Why would you want to go in there?" the kid asked. He was freckled, with brown hair, wearing a pair of cut-off jeans and a striped shirt. "That place has been abandoned for years." "Abandoned?" "Yeah," the kid said, snapping a wad of chewing gum. "It's supposed to be haunted, too. Some crazy old lady died in there a long time ago. At least that's what my older brother and his friends say." "What else do they say?" Jack said, the door to the car open now. The kid shrugged. "Just that nobody goes in there because the people that lived there used to be witches 'n stuff and did things. And now it's haunted. Nobody goes there now." Then, as if he had made his point, the kid

pedaled away. Jack watched him go, then turned back toward the house. Then who the hell did we talk to? Who was that old woman that claimed to be Carla's mother? Jack drove off, these questions chasing him all the way back to the motel. *** When he returned to the motel, he didn't tell Carla what he had found in the house. He had thought about telling her on the drive over, and decided that if he did that she would really freak out. As it turned out, she had almost done so anyway. "I woke up this morning thinking you were gone," she said, pacing the small room. At some point while he was gone she had showered and changed into fresh clothing. Her hair was freshly brushed, gleaming on her shoulders. "I thought that they had...come and gotten you or something." "No way that's happening," Jack said, mustering a grin. Carla lit a cigarette. She looked at him. "I did get to do some thinking, though. I don't know what I was thinking when I went back there." "It's okay," Jack said. He lit a cigarette, too. "You needed to go home to realize this." "Maybe." Carla thought about this, smoking silently. "I don't know. I know that...everything that happened to me was so real, though." "But it's not. They manipulated you into believing that."

Carla sighed, took another drag. Now she didn't look too sure. "I don't know what to believe." "I think we should leave," Jack said. He moved toward his duffel bag at the foot of their bed. It was time to turn this shit around and get her mind off of this. Carla broke down. She buried her face in her hands, heaving sobs that shook her shoulders. "Hey," Jack said, feeling like an idiot now. "Listen, everything will be fine. We'll get out of here and -- " "What do I have to go back to?" she cried, looking at him through tear-filled eyes. "A piece of shit job where everybody pushes me around and takes advantage of me, no friends. I've got a crappy life, and...I've got nobody back home!" "That's not true," Jack said. "You have me." Carla sniffled. "That's sweet." She reached out and touched his face gently. "Really, it is. But face it. I'm so much older than you." She held back a sob and at that moment she was so beautiful to Jack, so beautiful that he just wanted to take her in his arms and shield her from the world. "You don't want to be with a crazy old woman like me." "You're not old," Jack quickly said, but he silently agreed with her. True, she wasn't that old, even though she had fifteen years on him. But she was crazy. Maybe not in the clinical sense, but she did have her problems. And he couldn't deal with them. Still, he cared about her. "Listen," he said, taking her shoulders, trying to calm her down and divert her attention to something else. "Why don't we go out for a little bit. We won't go back to the house. We won't even talk about what happened. Our plane doesn't leave till

tomorrow; let's use this day and have fun. Let's drive around, explore, have a picnic in the woods or something. We can even find another place to stay tonight. Somewhere more romantic." He kissed her, smiling. "C'mon, it'll be fun." She nodded and mustered a smile. "Okay," she said, wiping a tear that had trickled down her cheek. "Okay." Jack didn't know if she was agreeing to appease him, or if she really meant it. They checked out of the motel, packed their stuff in the trunk, then climbed in the car and started driving. Carla told him to drive south, toward Berks County. It was closer to Philadelphia and maybe they could find a little bed-andbreakfast place. They drove on twisting turning roads until they found a two-story house with a large wrap-around porch. The sign in the yard advertised it as a bed-andbreakfast. Jack pulled up and they checked in for the evening. Jack felt better as he hauled their overnight bags to their rooms. He was determined to have a good time with her this last night in Pennsylvania. He was determined to keep her mind off of her parents. They spent the rest of the day taking a hike through the area, stopping to browse at an antique store. They had a late lunch at a little roadside cafe, then took a long walk back to the bed-and-breakfast. Once back in their room, they showered and changed into some clean clothes, then lounged on the bed, the television turned to the evening news. Carla was quiet all evening as they watched TV, and Jack could tell her mood had changed for the worst. She was probably thinking about what had happened last night. Twice he thought about telling her about his encounter at

the house this morning, then wisely vetoed it. As evening fell he put his hand on her shoulder. "Hey," he said. "You okay?" She turned to him and he saw that she had started crying again. "No," she said, shaking her head. Jack took her in her arms. He held her for a couple of minutes, trying to soak up her sorrow. He kissed her softly, holding her, and in time she responded to his attempts at keeping her demons at bay. She returned his kisses, and when they fell back on the bed it was with all the passion that they had shared in the early weeks of their relationship. When Jack made love to her she cried out again, this time, it seemed, as if she were bidding goodbye to him for the last time. She climbed out of bed, her back to him. "I've made my decision," she said. "What decision?" Carla didn't look at him. She kept her gaze averted to the window, gazing out at the moon-filled night. "I know that what happened at the house yesterday was a sign. They're waiting for me. I know what to do. I'm sorry Jack. I'm sorry you can't understand, and I'm sorry...that I have to leave you. But it's the only way." Jack was about to protest again when she got down on her knees as if she were going to pray. She raised her arms up and began singing, her voice high and musical yet weirdly fluting, as if the notes she were singing were coming from some deep place in her soul. Jack watched in numbed surprise and confusion. Christ, she's really lost her mind, he thought. He couldn't tell what she was singing. The words

weren't any he had ever heard before. They were guttural, primitive sounding. They floated and rode in crescendos, like the music coming from a flute. It was a steady stream, in a language Jack didn't recognize. She's making the shit up. She's fucking crazy, she's just spouting gibberish. The wind picked up outside, suddenly looming louder than Carla's singing. This only made Carla sing louder, and Jack could now see that her eyes were closed, face tilted to the heavens. It sounded like there was a hurricane going on outside; the wind howled mercilessly, the trees whipping violently, and he could feel and hear the house buckle under the strong gusts. A strong smell of excrement burst suddenly in the room and Jack fell back against the headboard, gagging. Carla was smiling now, her singing growing more urgently, as if she were encouraging whatever it was that was happening. The wind outside grew stronger and the building shook more, this time not from the wind but from a deep rumbling that seemed to burst forth from deep in the ground. Its shaking tumbled him off the bed. There was a sudden flash of light, and an explosion knocked him against the wall. Something that looked like a hovering transparent mass of protoplasm with hundreds of writhing snakes attached to it hovered over Carla as she reached up with eager hands to embrace it. It made a sound like the croaking of a thousand bullfrogs, and the last thing Jack heard before he blacked out was Carla answering it in that same croaking bullfrog voice. ***

"I'm telling you, there was no storm last night!" The proprietress exclaimed as she stood behind the counter the next morning. Jack was in the lobby, his hair standing up in wild corkscrews, feeling haggard and worn. Contrary to what he heard last night, it was a bright and sunny day outside, without a hint that the region had been hit with a sudden, violent storm. "It was a perfectly peaceful night except for you and your girlfriend making all that racket." "There wasn't a storm, or an earthquake?" Jack asked, his voice rising in falsetto. "I can't believe you didn't feel it. It shook the whole building." "There was nothing!" the proprietress snapped, her gaze fixed steadily on his. "Now I suggest you and your lady friend check out now." "She's gone," Jack said, his mind still fumbling with what had happened. Carla's strange singing, the sudden wind and thunder from the ground that knocked him out of bed, the sudden explosion, the bullfrog voice, that thing he saw before he blacked out. And then coming awake this morning on the floor with a nasty bump on his head, seeing Carla gone, her clothes scattered on the floor. "It took her. It came out of the sky and took her." "If you aren't out of here in five minutes I'm calling the police!" the proprietress warned. There was nothing else Jack could do. He wandered back up to his room and began gathering their things up. Maybe Carla had climbed out of the window last night. He would check. He packed their things together then headed downstairs, spending only a minute at the front desk to pay the bill, the proprietress giving him the evil eye the whole time. When he put their stuff in the car his mind raced with

his next step. Before he left he would go behind the house and see if he could find anything in the back. Maybe she had torn a piece of clothing in her mad haste to escape to whatever it was she was escaping from. He didn't give a fuck if the proprietress called the police. He needed the police anyway to help him look for Carla. The proprietress was standing on the porch, watching him. When he started trudging to the side of the house she darted inside. Fuck her, he thought as he made his way around the side of the house to the rear, where their room overlooked. Let her call the fucking cops. He reached the rear of the house and looked up at their window and stood there, his mouth agape in shock and horror. He stood there for a full minute, not even hearing the proprietress call out in her shrill voice "I've called the police! They'll be here any minute!" He simply stood there and looked up at the window, then looked at the wall of the home and the ground, letting his gaze trail down the rear of the property, then back up the wall of the house again. There was a path from the woods that travelled all the way up the wall of the house to their second floor window, and it was coated with a grayish-green slime. Just then the sky suddenly turned dark, and the sound of a great wind rose. And as Jack turned to look up at the sky for the source of the storm, he realized that the wind wasn't blowing, and the dark shape wasn't a cloud.

Before You Go: Lee Thomas You never listened to me. I warned you about the cigarettes, begged you to stop a hundred times. You insisted it didn't matter—like the steaks and the cakes and the flood of whiskey served neat in your favorite glass. You said these things made life worth living, these simple pleasures. You were cold when I woke this morning. With your back to me, I saw the thread-thin scars on your neck, just below your freshly trimmed hair. I saw them every morning before I rose to make your breakfast, and I found them comforting. They were so particular to you. Today, I trace them lightly with my fingernails, knowing my touch won't tickle or disturb. Sliding out of bed, the odor of you follows me. Judgment wouldn't accept you full of waste and water, so you expelled it on our sheets. I know you'd be embarrassed to have anyone find you soiled, so I pull on my robe and walk to the bathroom. I clean you like a child, roll you so I can collect the sheets and then ease you onto your back. Even now, so many years from youth, you are beautiful to me. Strong. Your death confused you; I see that. It's carved on your face. You must have woken knowing what was happening because you stare at the ceiling in wonderment. And I'm staring at you, your white hair, your brown skin, the soft wisps of down covering your chest. The hairs smooth under my palm as I comb them in neat waves, arcing their pattern over your nipples.

I notice that your nose hair has grown too long, so I search the nightstand drawer for the manicure kit. I find the leather pouch and the tiny gleaming scissors within. With them, I cut the stray hairs. They collect above your lip and seem to float in the black field of your nostril. Gently, I blow them away and a hollow tone sounds in your nose. I smile. Your ears need trimming, too. I snip them, careful not to cut you, especially when I trim the awkward bulb. A damp towel collects the threads, and finally, I close your eyes so that the lashes weave in two neat lines. Peaceful now? Are you? I run my hand over your belly, and the skin is rigid but oddly comforting in its chill. Your sex does not respond to my touch, so I hold it. After so many years between us, I'm surprised to find that it has never felt quite this way before. I try to explain this to you, try to make you understand that I've felt you hard and soft and at every stage between, but never have you felt like this. You move. Startled, I release you and step away. Your shoulder raises and then falls; the other does the same. I expect your eyes to flash open but they do not. I expect you to speak or grunt your continued participation in life, but you make no sound. Again you try to move, but rigid arms and legs are useless so you roll back and forth on the mattress. Your struggle is that of a man trapped in cloth, wrapped in bandages. Bound. And I remember the scars on your neck; the scars I put

there. You were in Miami with one of your women. Not your first infidelity; not your last. But this was somehow different. You made so little effort to hide it that I felt you wanted me to know; you wanted me to admire the weapon you drove through my chest. So, I walked alone, wandering through the streets looking for something, escaping the beautiful cage you'd bought and told me to furnish, to paint, to clean. My legs carried me in random directions—first south and then east and then back to the north. Anger was my engine; sorrow the navigator. I stopped in a bar on the other side of the city, a dark place that held the kind of wisdom we considered beneath us. The elegant crone in the tattered mink coat waited for me, or so I believed. She knew me and my need. Her lips parted in a terrible smile of black gums and violet tongue, more like the slit belly of a rat than the mouth of a woman. Speaking with a twinkling whisper, she pushed a small book toward me across the damp, pocked tabletop. She called it "The Book of Wives," and in its pages, I found the design that would bind your soul. I traced the arcs and the crosshatched lines to memorize the pattern while you were at your office or your club or out entertaining clients and mistresses. Two months later I was drawn to the park, book in hand. A sobbing girl, barely out of her teens, sat on a bench, face in hands. Without a word, I placed the book on the bench beside her, walked away and returned to my opulent cage, where I began the work of wives. Late at night, when you were exhausted from your

infidelity or simply too drunk to wake, I drew on you. A scratch here, a gouge there. I worried the lines, made them bleed, but slowly and over the course of many years. You never once noticed, or if you did, you never said. Late in life, I let the fancy go, another souvenir of aspiration to be stored in a crate and never opened. My emotions healed, numb and callused. I barely felt you any longer. So, I left the design incomplete. You always said that I never finished anything. Your body bucks on the mattress and the bed collides with the nightstand. The shiny chrome scissors rock on the edge and then fall to the carpet. Frantically, you try to sit up, but your muscles are petrified. I know your struggle will loosen them and break death from sinew. And you frighten me. Your unnaturalness makes me tremble and cry out. I crouch low and come to your side. Reaching down with fingers made clumsy by haste and fearful palsy, I slap at the scissors on the carpet. Their tip jabs my finger and makes me bleed. The bed groans under your weight, and I grip the silver handle. On my feet, I shove with every ounce of me to get you turned over but age and gender have weakened me. When you were still, turning you was a simple task, but your struggles defy my strength. I'm nothing but an old woman now. Three times I try, and each time you convulse and land on your back. On the fourth attempt you roll onto your stomach, face deep in my pillow, and you writhe like a landed fish, your arms and legs still immobile, but the rest of you frantic. My mind struggles to remember the final lines of the symbol

from the book's page, and I drive the scissors into your neck, just below your neatly trimmed hair. I drag the point toward your shoulder, then back up in a jagged check. Your body lies quietly on the bed. There is no blood to stain the pillowcase. With the scissors back on the nightstand, I roll you onto your back. Your hair is disheveled; it sticks out in wisps like torn cotton gauze. In the bathroom, I grab a brush. I fix your pillow, adjust your head at its center and brush your hair down so that it's smooth and you are handsome again. Somewhere behind your eyes, you know I'm doing this. You feel the soothing stroke of the brush and appreciate the care and love of my efforts. Conscious inside your failed body, you can feel every touch to your skin and hear every word I say. That was the promise of the Book of Wives, and now, the design is done, and you are bound. Your soul fills the skin of you, the meat of you, and the bones of you. Silently, without help or hope, you fight, but to me and the entire world, you look peaceful and beautiful. I could never bear to see you suffer. Perhaps you're afraid now. I'll stroke your brow and calm you a bit. But when they take you away . . . They will take the blood out of you with a cold metal wand. They will shove it into your body, and you will lie there and accept it because that is what is expected of you, because you are capable of nothing else. They will do an autopsy because it is my right to demand one. Your sternum will be cut and split and their hands will tear into you,

fondling your organs indelicately before shoving them aside. And when they bury you in the ground and the worms get through the box, and the beetles get in, you will feel them nesting and feeding, taking little bits of you with their mouths. In the end, having served and submitted, you will rot. And you will feel every moment of it until the meat of you has fallen away and dissolved completely. I run the brush over your chest to neaten the fan of hair. Licking my thumb, I smooth down your eyebrows before I kiss your lips this last time. Now, you're presentable, and I can call the ambulance. But I have some things to say first, and you will listen; you will hear me, and you won't interrupt. I have a lot to tell you before you go.

Sal Anastacio's Seven Cardinal Rules: Patrick Lestewka The dead man called at 2:17 a.m. Sunday morning. He wasn't dead at the time. The dead man's name was Carl Bateman, publicist and manager for Hollywood action icon Van Turner (aka: TNT Turner; aka: "Lights Out" Turner), star of such films as Death Blow and Surgical Strike. Carl's soundbite-friendly voice was harsh and ragged, as if he'd gargled drain cleaner. "I need your help." "How did you get this number?" "There's been an accident. A bad one. I need—" "I'm hanging up." "No! Wait. I got your number through an associate. William Heatherington." Heatherington was referred to me a few months ago. His client was a starlet named Elle DuCharme. An exboyfriend possessed a vulgar home movie featuring Ms. DuCharme and a Lhasa Apso named Muggsy, threatening to send it to ET if she didn't cough up a few shekels. I spied the ex at an off-off Broadway joint called the Excelsior and tailed him to a cotton-candy-colored prefab off Spelveda. I jimmied the lock and caught him on the shitter, decking him square in the puss with a set of brass knuckles. He farted and toppled off the pot, upper lip split to the septum. I stomped on his dick and made like I was grinding out a Lucky Strike while he spat discount bridgework. This went on for maybe half a second before he coughed up the tape. I said, "So what's the rhubarb?" "My client's got himself into a…situation." "I'm not reporting to the Enquirer. Don't spin me."

"There's a…body." There usually is. "Heatherington tell you how much I charge?" "Yes. No problem." "Double it. Don't like being woken up." "Fine. Just hurry." He gave an address off Mulholland. I told him twenty minutes. Sal "Salamander" Anastacio brought me into this game. How Sal got the nickname is beyond me: he's a fatnecked, crewcut bulldog who wears olive-green cable-knit sweaters with rectangular shoulder patches. Thick-faced with heavy ridges canopying his small black eyes, bucktoothed as a beaver, there's nothing amphibian about the man. Sal commanded my platoon, A-707 Blackjack Recon, in Vietnam. He was by all accounts a docile, intelligent man, but the Green Hell turned him into a heartless sonofabitch ricky-tick: after three months in country he took to carrying a gook head on a pike for luck, flesh rotting off the skull, a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses over its eyesockets. He took a slug in the throat clearing a tunnel along the Song Tra Ba and was medically discharged after six months recoup at Da Nang. I didn't get off so easy: the jungle got inside me, into my bones. I started seeing things that weren't there: two-headed snakes in the grass, flying eels nesting in the palms, a massive asthmatic toad hiding under my cot. Delirium Tremens, classic case. I was transferred to a psychiatric facility in Cold Water, Michigan, where the neuropsychs, after a brief diagnosis, felt it would be wise to keep me dosed on Thorazine and

Haldol for eight months before releasing me to wreak havoc and mayhem on the general population. I got one stinking letter during my stay in the bug ward. It was from Sal, who told me if I wasn't totally batshit, come join him in Utah. A prime business opportunity, Jerry, he wrote. Well, what else was I going to do? No trade skills, no formal education, too much pride to flip burgers. So I hopped a 'Hound to Salt Lake City, where Sal was making a killing—you'd be surprised how busy he was, all that simmering repression and Mormon guilt. I trained under him for a year, learning the ropes and the rules, before heading south to California. I switched on the closet light and gathered the tools of my trade. Carbolic acid to burn off fingerprints and distinguishing moles, a Stanley Antivibe hammer to powder the dental record, hacksaw with replacement blades, vulcanized chemical-handling gloves, a Bissell Little Green portable steam cleaner, Wet Wipes, duct tape, heavy-duty trash bags. Sal's Cardinal Rule #1: If your gear can't be bought at any hardware store in America, don't use it. I tossed everything into a black duffel bag with a Kimber Combat Carry pistol and took the elevator from my penthouse digs to the underground parking lot. I drove up the ramp onto Ranleigh Avenue. Let's get this straight: Sal taught me how to be a cleaner, not a hitman. The bodies I deal with are already dead. Sure I've greased people, but most of them were Luke the Gook and his VC cronies in 'Nam, and they'd have punched my ticket otherwise. Wartime kills. Different rules apply. Anyone I've jacked stateside has been pure self-

defense. And let's face it: humans make messes. It's our nature. We're a messy species. As a general rule, people deal with their own: sweep them under the rug or sleep in their own beds, depending on ways and means. Che sera, sera, baby. Life in the Big City. Outside of friends and family nobody really cares, unless it's a mess of Jeffrey Dahmer proportion, a skulls-in-the-stewpot, eyeballs-in-the-picklejar kind of mess. But if you're a famous Hollywood type whose face graces magazine covers and billboards across this great nation, the type who needs to maintain the façade of normalcy or risk freaking out grainbelt America… you can afford to have someone clean up your mess. Someone like me. July in La-La Land, and brutally hot. The kind of heat where you can lie on your back and not move—hardly breathe—and still sweat buckets. The kind that makes people do crazy things. It was a July some fifty years ago when Peg Entwistle, a fading starlet, took a header off the fifty-foot "H" of the Hollywood sign, cementing her name in local history as permanently as if she'd been given a star on the Walk. I made my way up Mulholland's twisting slope and, eighteen minutes after hanging up the phone, pulled into a horseshoe-shaped drive. The neo-colonial house was built onto a gentle hill. A split-level bungalow with a large bay window overlooking the lawn, chinked sandstone masonry and weather-treated pine. A trelliswork of ivy climbing the east-facing wall and a garden planted with flowering rhododendrons. It struck me as odd that the star of Cold Hammer and Bloodhunt would own such elegant property. Then again what had I

expected him to live in—a Quonset hut? A cave? A missile silo? I pulled on a pair of powdered latex gloves and grabbed the duffel. I knocked. A short thin man wearing a vanilla silk suit with a scarlet hankie tufting the breast pocket opened the door. Twenty grand worth of Patek Phillipe clasped round one bony wrist and a teardrop-emerald ring adorning the left index finger. His features were bunched into a tight little knot, reminding me of a scrunched-up newspaper. Poor bastard was sweating like a hooker in church. "Where's the body?" The guy just gawped. I knew what he was thinking. I don't cut an imposing figure: a shade under six feet and a tad on the buttery side, face like a well-worked catcher's mitt, big gin-blossomed schnozz. I dressed in purposefully unremarkable fashion: tan Dockers, pearl-snap button shirt, summer blazer, boat shoes. My dress and demeanor all worked towards a single end. Sal's Cardinal Rule #2: Utterly repulse attention. "You were expecting The Caped Crusader? Okay…" I turned in the direction of my car. "No!" The guy huffed. "It's just…come in, come in." He led me down a high-arched hallway strung with famous paintings, including a print of Reuben's Massacre of the Innocents. A heavy oak door opened into a minimalist living room, geometrical furniture in stark blacks and whites. A/C must've been on the fritz: the heat was stifling. A pair of Tuscany-style overhead fans whirled around and made noise and mussed my hair but didn't make it any cooler. Sitting bolt-upright on a plush chaise lounge was a man familiar to anyone who hadn't been comatose

the past five years. "My name is Carl Bateman," the skinny man said. "I'm sure my client needs no introduction." According to press reports, Van Turner was the seventh child born to a pair of unemployed woodhicks in a New Mexico trailer park. He made his way to L.A. in search of acting work but found himself bussing tables at The New Brown Derby to supplement underwear ads and body-part modeling gigs (he did a lot of lip work for Blistex). Then he landed the starring role in the indie film Dark Freight, the sleeper hit of the year. His follow-up, the Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay pic Cold Hammer, did boffo box-office and launched him onto the A-list. In a town scrambling to find replacements for the long-in-thetooth Stallones and Schwarzeneggers, Van Turner was a bona-fide hot property. I said, "How are you, Van?" Van looked up at the ceiling, then at the floor. Earlythirties, bleached hair and California suntan. A superhero body, muscles where there shouldn't even be muscles, although he looked a lot shorter in person than onscreen. Wearing a loose tiger-print robe, huge hands—walnutcrackers, my old man would've called them—knitted in his lap. The toenails of his right foot painted fire-engine red. I draped my blazer over the back of a white captain's chair. Dark ovals of sweat under each armpit. I unzipped the duffel bag. Carl pointed at the gun inside. "You won't need that." "Boy Scout instincts kicking in," I said. "Always be prepared." "Please," Van said. "There's been enough violence

today." His voice was high and wispy, the auditory equivalent of milkweed dander. Didn't sound that way in Surgical Strike. "Where's the problem?" Carl said, "In the bedroom." It usually is. We walked though the kitchen into the master bedroom. Peach-toned silk sheets wadded at the foot of a king-sized canopy bed. A set of handcuffs locked around one bedpost and stains of dubious origin streaking the coverlet. A poster of dudes windsurfing on the wall. A magnum of Brut champagne on the nightstand. Peeking from underneath the bed, a pink dildo of equine proportion. The smell of sex. Hot musky sex. "The problem is in the closet," Carl said. The problem was a dusky-skinned Latino hanging from the hanger rack, a thick leather belt wrapped around his neck. Naked, toes not quite brushing the floorboards. Face purple from hydrostatic pressure, eyes bugged out and leaking red tears. Claw marks on the neck, bloody fingernails. His thick uncircumcised cock was rock-hard, either from corpuscular swelling or dawning rigor mortis. "I didn't feel comfortable with it, but he insisted." Van said. "Said it was the most intense orgasm, halfway between life and death, he said…he said…" TNT Turner— a closet pillow biter? Wonders never cease. "He didn't say the safe word. If he'd said the safe word, I never would've let it go on! And he was still…hard!" I considered asking how the dead man could've said anything with a belt cinched around his throat. Instead I asked, "Who was he?"

"Juan something," Carl said. "A hustler, frequented the upscale dude ranches." "Where did you meet him, Van?" Van stared off at the windsurfing poster. Carl said, "He didn't meet him anywhere." "Then how did he end up strangled in the closet?" Carl draped an arm around my shoulder and guided me to the doorway. "This is a matter of some ambivalence," he whispered in his best spin-doctor voice. "You see, it would significantly tarnish Van's image were he spotted at these establishments. So I…locate suitable candidates, and bring them here." "You pimp for him." "Pimp is such an ugly word." "What about the on-set romances? Van always shows up at movie premieres lugging one piece of arm-candy or another." "I spin the romance angles. It benefits both parties, generates heat for the films." I wondered what sort of heat an autoerotically asphyxiated homo found in Van Turner's closet would generate. I pulled on a pair of elbow-length chemicalhandling gloves. "Juan's going into the bathtub. He'll be leaving the house in pieces." Van moaned and covered his eyes. "I don't want to see this," he said. "Don't make me see this, Carl." "Go to the kitchen," Carl told him. I balanced Juan's weight on my shoulders and loosened the belt. He weighed maybe one-fifty but dead weight always feels heavier. The body made creaking noises as the atrophied muscles flexed. Juan's rigid cock

pushed against my breastbone. "Rip the shower curtain down and spread it across the floor," I told Carl. I deposited Juan in the claw-footed tub. His skull slammed off the porcelain. Dark blood burped from his nose. I rolled him over. Tattoo of a grinning gremlin on his ass. I removed his hands with the hacksaw, dipping the fingers in acid, then dousing the tattoo. The smell of emulsified flesh was bracing. Sal's Cardinal Rule #3: If it can be smashed, melted, hacked, or burned off, do it. "Light a candle, Carl," I said. "Helps with the stench." Juan's legs went in three sections. First the feet, then just above the kneecaps, then high on the femoral branches. Stagnant blood spilled from the wounds, treacle-thick and un-oxygenated. The parts went into orange garden bags, their destination a trash compactor off Encida. Carl arrived with beeswax candles, guava-kumquat scented. I snuffed them after a few minutes. The smell of melted flesh was preferable. I was halfway through Juan's neck when the hacksaw blade snapped in his spinal column. I'd sweated through my shirt and was slicked to the shoulders in blood and other fluids. I went into the kitchen for a glass of water. Van was sitting at the kitchen table, whispering into the telephone in his high flighty voice. "I am so scared right now, Derek," I heard him say. "Yes…no…not right now, I'm…no, don't do tha—" "Who the fuck are you talking to?" He waved his hand at me as if shooing a fly. "No, please," he said into the receiver, "I love you but I'm

okay…no…" "Hang up!" "Got to go…kisses." Van pressed the disconnect button and stared at me reproachfully. "These are very tense circumstances. Don't have to go screaming at—" I stalked over and grabbed the collar of his robe. Van squealed. I pulled the collar tight around his fencepost neck, bearing down. Van cringed. I brought my knee up into his crotch. Van blubbered. "I am not your toady," I said carefully, "so I will not candy-coat this. You are in a very bad spot, Van. So don't…" I shook him, "…complicate…" I slapped him, "…matters." I snatched the phone and laid it on the counter, grabbed a cast-iron skillet from the hanging cookware rack, smashed it to pieces. Sal's Cardinal Rule #4: Keep a firm grip on the situation. Carl arrived from the garage with a polyethylene boat tarp. "Keep an eye on your talent," I told him. "He's liable to get us killed." I was almost finished bagging the bits when the doorbell chimed. Raised voices, frantic footsteps. Then the bathroom door flew open and I found myself staring up at another famous face. "Jesus fuck," Derek Santoro said. "Who in sweet fuck is this guy?" Derek Santoro comprised one-fifth of Lou Perlman's latest cookie-cutter boyband, hip-hop quintet N'Sane. He was the token "bad boy," but could've easily been molded into the "shy one" or the "sporty one" or the "outrageous

one," depending on market demographics. Long and lean in leather pants and a skintight tee-shirt emphasizing a heroinchic frame, a dogtag necklace, hair twisted into purposefully sloppy dreadlocks that a stylist charged big bucks for. He strutted back into the bedroom, vintage Mick Jagger, poking a finger into Van's chest. "What's going on, Vanny?" he said. "What's with the bloody old man in your bathroom?" "It's nothing; it's fine." Van shrugged, shamefaced. Derek poked him again, backing Van up. I watched Hollywood's alpha male, the same guy who'd killed a man with a pencil in Death Blow, being pushed across the room by a scrawny vanilla rapper. Fucking surreal. "Is this why you called me, huh?" Derek went on. "Some practical joke? I love you, Vanny, but this drama queen shit has got to stop!" "Please, baby," Van went on. "Please, you don't understand." Was I getting this right? Van Turner and Derek Santoro—an item? TNT Turner and N'Sane's wild child playing hide the salami on the sly? I pictured the tabloid headline: Hollywood Hunk and Hip-Hop Heartthrob's Hot n' Heavy Homosexual Hijinks!! I prodded an orange garbage bag with my toe. "That's what's with the bloody old man in the bathroom." The hip-hopper's eyes went buggy and his bottom lip pooched out. It looked like he'd just chewed on a nest full of hornets. His face got redder and redder until I was certain steam was going to pour from his ears like in Road Runner cartoons. "You…whore!"

"Derek, baby, it's not how it looks—" "You rancid SLUT!" "Derek! Please, Derek, please, darling!" Derek Santoro slapped "Lights Out" Turner so hard Van was practically staring down his own ass crack. Then he punched Van in the breadbox, executed the Fitzsimmons shift, and popped him twice in the nose. I didn't think the little bastard had it in him. Van went down on his ass. Carl said, "Stop it! Just stop it!" Derek dragged Van up by those golden tresses and thumbed him in the eye, then kicked him in the belly. Like he'd drank a six pack of ass kick or something. Van got his arms up to block the blows, managing to pull Derek into a bear-hug. They staggered across the room like a couple of drunken two-steppers, Derek spitting and screaming in Van's face. "Slutty trailer trash prick MOTHERFUCK!" They careened into the wall, bounced off, slammed into a bedpost, splintered it. "Please, baby," Van was saying, "settle down." The air was thick and stagnant: like breathing through boiled wool. Van pushed Santoro back, towards the nightstand and the champagne bottle… My best guess is that Van slipped on the pink dildo. Wouldn't have happened otherwise. Van was a pussycat, plus he genuinely seemed to care for that flaming hiphopper. So I guess he slipped on that dildo, overbalanced, and fell forward onto the nightstand, pinning the N'Sane frontman under his two-hundred-plus pound frame. The brittle sound of shattered glass. All the fire whiffed out of Santoro's eyes in a heartbeat, replaced with the cold glaze of shock. He started screaming. High, keening screams, as if his lungs had been doused with

kerosene and lit. "AAAaaaa—EEEeeiiiIII!" Van backed away. Santoro pulled himself up. A horrible pissing sound came from behind him. His eyes looked up at Van, then involuntarily rolled back into his head, then back at Van, then suddenly his hands were grabbing at his back, the junction where hipbones met spine. "Urg," he said. "Urg— og." He spun in a lazy circle and I saw the champagne bottle jutting from his back. Punched in deep, nearly to the base: it looked, oddly and horrifically, like a wind-up dial on a toy robot. Red-tinged bubbly spurted and fizzed around the wound's circumference. He staggered around with the jagged, shattered bottleneck protruding from his gut just above the bellybutton. A pressurized torrent of bloody Brut shot from the bottle-mouth, sheeting the smiling windsurfers. "Oh, God," Van and Carl said in unison, for different reasons. Santoro shit his tight leather pants and face-planted onto the Persian carpet. He jittered like a roach on its back before going rigid, then utterly slack. "Oh, no," Van moaned. "Derek, no, no please—" He knelt beside the dead musician. His hands reached towards the body. "Don't touch the fucking thing," Carl snapped. Van started crying. Carl looked at me and said, "How much to make this all go away?" "I don't know," I said. "A homo hustler is one thing,

but Derek Santoro is a horse of a different color. I haven't even got Juan bagged up yet…" "Don't give me excuses," Carl said. In that moment, I saw why he'd prospered in this town. "Give me a number." Sal's Cardinal Rule #5: Roll with those punches, baby. I quoted a price exceeding the gross domestic product of your average scratch-ass South American country. He said, "Deal. Get to it." TNT Turner sat on the floor beside his dead boyfriend, wailing. He'd dehydrate soon, all the water he was losing. I grabbed Santoro's arms and dragged him into the bathroom. "Roll up the carpet," I told Carl. "I'll torch it later." I took off Santoro's trademark dreadlocks with hair clippers and burned them in the sink. Derek's face being his most tell-tale identifier, I doused it with carbolic acid. It ate away the flesh quickly, melting eyeballs from their sockets. I burned the tribal tattoos off his chest and upper arms. I removed my shirt and undershirt. I'd probably sweated off ten pounds. "Could I keep the dogtags?" Van asked me, sniffling. "They're all I have to remember him by." "No, jackass." The dam burst and Van was wailing again. I'd sawn halfway through Santoro's clavicle when I heard a new voice in the bedroom. "What the fuck—?" I stared from the bathroom at perhaps the largest slab of mobile humanity I'd ever glimpsed. Six-foot-nine, twenty pounds shy of an even three-hundred, black skull shaved smooth as an eight ball. Wearing an electric blue jogging outfit highlighting a rock-hard physique, gold hoop earring, wraparound Oakleys. I learned later from the news

reports that his name was Eddie Chamberlain, Derek Santoro's valet and bodyguard. I guess he'd waited in the car before quietly entering the house to see what was keeping his charge. When he saw Derek in the bathtub, no face, bottle poking out of his gut, me cutting into him like the Sunday pot roast…well, he flipped. "Eddie," Van said, rising from the floor. "Oh, Eddie, the most terrible thing happened. Derek, he went crazy, he—" Van didn't get another word out, because this was precisely when Eddie wrapped his huge hands around Van's throat and commenced strangling him. "You fucking sicko!" he shouted. "What the fuck have you done!" Van was unable to reply, what with his esophagus being crushed and Eddie whipsawing him back and forth. He could only emit papery gagging sounds, and even that seemed a little too lively for Eddie, because his fingers clenched tighter. I was rummaging for the Kimber Combat pistol when Van's leg pistoned out and caught Eddie in the gut. The valet woofed out air and let go. Van fell to the floor, gasping. Then his self-preservation instincts kicked in and he raced out the door. "You wait here, Methuselah," Eddie said to me. "I'll be back to take care of you directly." I followed Eddie out the door, pistol cocked. He'd cornered Van in the living room and was, somewhat predictably, strangling him again. Van's arms beat Eddie's shoulders and chest feebly, like a man who couldn't summon the will to live. His eyes were bulging. His tongue hung out.

Carl entered the room. He stared at Van like a man watching his prize sow being led onto the kill floor. He pulled a little something from his pocket: the size of a tangerine, blue steel winking in the light. Pa-pop! That was the noise it made. A fruity noise. A partyfavor noise. I'd always viewed derringers as sissy weapons. Lady arms. Country club pieces. A novelty gun, the kind that unfurls a red flag with "BANG!" written on it, or produces a flame to light your Marlboro. One step above pepper spray or a stiff kick in the balls. Guess I was wrong. Eddie Chamberlain's head flew apart. There is really no other way to describe it. His skull exploded, teeth and brain and bone fragments flying like shrapnel. It reminded me of a brace of pheasants flushed from tall grass. The hulking valet toppled like a felled oak, blood pumping from the stump in a red jet. "Holy shit." Carl looked at the headless bodyguard, the gun in his hand, back at the headless bodyguard. "The guy who sold it to me said it had a kick, but I never…" TNT Turner crumpled to the floor, sheathed in ittybitty Eddie bits. He curled into a little ball, trembling. "Can you handle it?" Carl asked. "Yes or no: can you handle it?" How do you price a clean-up job like that? Throw the pricing guide out the window! Sal's Cardinal Rule #6: If there's an extra buck in it for you, take it. "I can handle it."

Then came the knock at the door. It was at that time I truly felt the endeavor took on the surreal undertones of an episode of Fawlty Towers, Upstairs/Downstairs, or I Love Lucy. I felt like screaming, "Eet's so ree-diculous!" "You're the best ambassador we got," I told Carl. "Hardly any blood on you. Go see who it is. Take this." I handed him the Kimber Combat. Carl headed out to the foyer. I grabbed the sharpest knife in the kitchen and cut the deep pile carpet surrounding Eddie's body in a rough square, going wide enough to get all the fanned blood. There was nothing to be done about the blood spattering the ceiling, or the chenille drapes, or the Chippendale sea chest. I rolled the carpet halves up on either side of the body, fastening them with strips of duct tape. Van hadn't moved from his spot on the floor. Before I thought he wasn't much of an actor. But the events of that night changed my mind. He was a completely different person onscreen than in real life. It wasn't even close. Voices in the foyer, then footsteps coming down the hall. Lacking a suitable alternative, I grabbed the latest issue of Variety off the coffee table and sat on the calfskin sofa. Carl entered the living room, flanked by a portly, pugfaced rent-a-cop. His soot-gray uniform fit poorly, bunching at the crotch and armpits. His eyes were swimmy behind a pair of glasses resembling dirty ice cubes. A .38 revolver was holstered at his hip. Beneath a tarnished tin badge was a nameplate: "Rudy." "Sorry, sir," Rudy told Carl, "but whenever the silent

alarm is tripped, a security agent is dispatched. If you don't know the security code, which you don't—" "I keep telling you, it's not my hou—" "Which you don't," Rudy went on, "then the dispatched security agent must make a thorough inspection of the premises…" The rent-a-cop's voice trailed off as he surveyed the room. I tried to see it as he did: a blonde beefcake with a bloody tiger-print robe and painted toenails lying on the floor; an old shirtless guy sitting on a five-thousand-dollar sofa sweating buckets, arms caked in dried blood; carpet hacked to shit and something wrapped inside, the whole thing looking like a Havana cigar rolled by a fingerless worker. The Tuscany-style fans whirled, raising the sideburns of Rudy's toupée. "Is that—?" he asked, pointing at Van, blinking behind Coke-bottle lenses. "Yes, it is," Carl said. "I'm sure we could get you an autograph, if—" "I'm on duty, sir," Rudy said, bristling. "Wouldn't be proper. Why's he on the floor?" "He's sleeping," I said. "It's been a long night." "Doesn't he have a bed?" "It's infested," I said after a moment. "Wood ticks." Rudy nodded his head slowly. "You okay?" he asked me. "Nosebleed," I said. "Real soaker. Right through my shirt." He pointed at the rolled-up carpet. "What's that?" "Is it really any of your business?" said Carl. "Maybe not my business," said Rudy, "but Securi-

Cor's business." "It's a dead body," I said, laughing. "A big black man, dead as a disco." I threw my hands up and grinned into Rudy and Carl's shocked faces. "Come on, man, it's just some old carpet! I was ripping it up for Van because he wants a new look! Lay off the Joe Friday routine, would you?" Rudy stared at the carpet for a moment, at me, back at the carpet. His face softened. "Listen, I'm just doing my job, you know? I got my duties and responsibilities, same as anyone." "Hey, I understand," I said. "I sympathize. Christ, it's what, five in the morning? Everyone's a bit frazzled." Rudy peered down at his feet, scratching at a spot on his neck. He said, "I guess everything checks out. I'll, uh, let you get back to your…" Rudy's eyes went back to the carpet. The duct tape was loosening. Three pairs of eyes stared, riveted, as the tape lost its stick and, like the blossoming of some hideous flower, the carpet halves peeled back. "Oh my fuck…" Rudy said. Then he was spinning on his heel and making a beeline down the hallway as fast as his pigeon-toed feet would carry him. Carl dropped down into a shooter's stance, thumbed the Kimber Combat's safety, and pot-shotted at the retreating security guard. Rudy squawked and slammed face-first into the Reuben print, glasses skittering across the floor. He sprawled out on the ground, clutching his leg. With the gunshot still ringing in my ears I watched Carl rush down the hallway and squeeze off another shot.

He missed. Another. Hit Rudy in the kneecap. Rudy drew his .38 and returned fire. A slug caught Carl high on the shoulder, blowing meat and gristle away in a red spray, spinning the publicist around. Carl fired wildly, drilling a hole through the ceiling, plaster dust raining down. They both shot. Missed. Air thick with cordite. They both shot again. Simultaneous kill-shots: textbook K-5 for Carl, head for Rudy. Carl flew back a good five feet, force of impact jolting him out of his gazelle-skin loafers. He slid across the polished granite tiling to the edge of the living room, DOA. Van Turner hadn't moved the whole time. I knelt beside him, shook him. "Van," I said. "Get up. Need some help here." Van didn't respond. I rolled him over. His eyes were wide open, glazed, staring at nothing. I pressed my fingertips to his carotid artery. Flatline. I guessed cardiac arrest occasioned by shock. That, or a broken heart? I took quick stock: dismembered hustler in three orange trash bags, faceless hip-hop artist in the bathtub, headless valet half-rolled in a carpet, gut-shot publicist, face-shot rent-a-cop, cooling movie star. Who the hell was going to pay me? It didn't take a rocket scientist to tell me I'd been royally fucked on this deal. Sal's Cardinal Rule #7: In a compromised situation, get gone while the gettin's good. All those gunshots, I knew it wouldn't be long before the cops arrived. I hustled back to the bathroom and gathered my gear. On the way out, I stopped in front of that

Reuben print, Massacre of the Innocents. I was living in La-La Land, where the idea of innocence was a joke…but still, the painting possessed ironic appeal. I looked closer. I was no art expert, but those colors, those brushstrokes… I remembered reading about the auction at Sotheby's. Massacre of the Innocents had sold for 4.7 million pounds sterling to an unidentified telephone bidder. A bidder from Hollywood. I took it down off the wall and wrapped it in the boat tarp. Hell, I was owed. It fit in my trunk. Snugly. But it fit.

Pity Fuck: d. g. k. goldberg In the near death light of predawn that turns all colors to ash I laid listening to the soft breathing of the anonymous young man beside me. Hand on my belly almost fluttering south I sensed rather than saw the rise and fall of your chest. I felt the shift of your careless young body stirring slightly between alcohol and a dreamless abyss. Across the movie screen of my mind I replayed your open-mouthed tongue swirling kisses, expertly executed tongue thrusts despite an inordinate amount of tequila. "You kiss beautifully," I said as you rolled toward me, the comforter clutching your long legs, your light hair tangled with my darker hair. We shared the same pillow. I had wanted to say something clever, planned it before you drifted to consciousness but what came out was that insipid adolescent phrase, worthy of a black tighted neophyte who spends her evenings in Waffle Houses scribbling empty phrases into notebooks and calling it poetry. You-kissbeautifully, I can't believe I said that. You kissed me then. Blocking out the overdue bills on my bedside table, the clatter of trashcans, the growl of bad transmissions. You really do kiss incredibly well. I went boneless and wet hot wanting. I felt the desperate need to pull you inside me, envelope you, wrap my legs around your waist. I wanted you to ride me hard. You did. What a precious man you are. You ignored the laborious nipple tweaking that's like adjusting the knobs on a stereo. You forgot the grubby ass kneading -- like playing with Play Dough---that so many men think is a turn on. You

skipped the obligatories and gave me what I wanted. "Thank you," I said and you laughed. It seemed to make you nervous, my gratitude. Eyes shut, head on the pillow while I traced the lines of your face with the tip of my finger. I would have thought that you'd be used to gratitude. Last week I told you that you should pursue a bare midriffed twenty six year old in spandex and sequins. You told me you preferred more experienced women. It sounded like a line, and it was ---on both sides. You didn't really know how old I am---no one does. It helps being bird boned and ballet dancer bodied; no one ever thinks a tiny woman is old. You should have listened to me last week. Last night you should have stood up, wobbly legged with a shit-eating grin and bought a drink for the nearest Nicole or Tiffany. Damn, you kiss well. I keep reliving the way you wrapped your arms around me cupping my ass with one hand teasing my nipple with the other. Standing, you had to bend down quite a bit to reach my mouth. In bed I slithered up your chest like a succubus. "Men are always at a disadvantage when they're horizontal," I said. Daylight leapt through the blinds assaulting my eyes. Overdue bills, car trouble, late for work, the stuff of day. "I don't think so," you answered a cat-satisfied smile on your face. You allowed me to move next to you. I stroked your chest. Daylight eroded the murky post-sex haze. Morning. I know how to do mornings with younger men. Leaving you in bed I shrugged into a silk dressing gown, all lace and Victoriana.---I know what works with

my looks. Routine. I ground coffee beans, beat eggs with a whisk, grated cheese, sliced blood toned tomatoes, sliced mushrooms skin thin. My kitchen is a good setting, a frame for my role as halfway artsy borderline exotic older seductress, herbs on the windowsill, copper pots, everything cluttered like a still life, a butcher block table weighted with books. Yeah, I'm ridiculous; my charm lies in knowing exactly how absurd I am. I'd allowed you to pursue me for a few weeks, a few sloppy drunk kisses near closing time, a few walks to my car after happy hour, all the while I stalked you I said, "It's not going to happen." Last night you slid into the seat next to me a drink past happy hour. The TV behind the bar spewed Sarah McLachlan bleating into the smoke. "I will remember you," in all its maudlin masturbatory glory whined into the shards of conversation and clink of glass. I was teary-eyed looking at the television, the song served as background for a camera pan across the shattered library of Columbine High School. Folded bits of yellow paper marked the spots where bodies fell. They looked like tacky place cards for a church potluck supper and seemed more insulting than death– economical reminders of where bodies sprawled. They really could have done better than that cheap display. Sensing you next to me I turned from the TV, "That damn yellow paper. It's degrading. It's insulting that I'm getting weepy. I really don't care, canned emotion, I'm no better than the things I condemn." You nodded. It didn't matter to either of us if you understood what I meant. You nudged a margarita across the bar. It sat wickedly

in front of me, damn near winking. You remembered that I take them without salt. I drank relentlessly, morosely, drifting into one of my standard monologues about life being a meaningless mantra of pain, boredom, dirty dishes, and letters from the DMV. I don't know if you really listened, I felt your thigh against mine, heating my flesh. Four drinks later, after I'd actually bought a round you said, "I have some news that will cheer you up." I shrugged and looked at you. I made a non-committal go-on noise, the favored sound of shrinks and drunks. "You're off the hook. I got laid today." You lit a cigarette discarding the match carelessly. In no mood to be discarded I said, "What if I don't want to be?" You sucked in your breath, your eyes widened. You thought I missed that, but I miss very little. "Well, fuck me running," you said shaking your head slightly as if someone had just told you an impossible truth --- the world really is flat, OJ didn't do it, the government is here to help. You lurched to your feet, long legs unsteady inside faded denim. You leaned on the bar while I gathered my pocketbook. We wove through the crowd to the door. Outside you stepped behind me, "I want to watch your ass," you said. "Some women might find that sort of statement insulting," I said. "But, you don't." "You know what I really find insulting? That frigging TV show that had that fat chick that's on the lawyer show playing Snow White. After years of anorexia and bulimia I'm supposed to readjust to a politically correct world

where fat chicks are beautiful. It invalidates my entire life. Watch my ass all you like." You laughed. We staggered and leaned into each other floating on alcohol and lust. The streetlights cast an unreal glow turning the familiar littered streets into a backdrop, the artificial light like a movie, like a dream. Already I remember it better than it was, I always do. I fumbled through my purse for keys while we stood burning with impatience on the porch. You interrupted my search with a kiss, leaned me against the door and almost had me there. "We'll fall into the azaleas," I mumbled. I bit your lip. Once in the entranceway, twice in the bed. Then again this morning. In the kitchen I listened for sounds while I slipped an omelet onto a plate. My plates don't match. I own a curious collection of mismatched cups, odd plates, and bizarre bowls. It's part of the package, poetess, gypsy, wanderer through life. It suits me; I look dreadful in a plain skirt and blazer. You stood in the doorway, shirt tail out of your jeans, hair shower damp. I got teary again; you are so young, so handsome. It absolutely hurts to look at you, like looking at a Rodin sculpture, a painting by Renoir; some things are so exquisite that the world doesn't deserve them. "Hi," I said, I blushed. "I never thought of you as domestic," you said. "Did you think I was imported?" I poured coffee and sat opposite you. You gave me a small gratuitous laugh a sort of post-

sex bad joke courtesy and began to eat. "I want to tell you a story," I said. I adjusted my body so the sunlight was behind me; I swept my hair over my shoulders. "Sure." "I'm not certain how to begin." I drank some coffee. I was being coy. I hate it when I'm coy but once I start inertia grabs me. "Oh, how about once upon a time or but that was long ago, in another land and besides the wench is dead." Clever. You are clever. You chased a bit of egg with toast. Food and light seemed to energize you, like a reverse vampire you seemed stronger, more solid as the day took hold. "The wench is dead might be a better ending than beginning." I took a deep breath. "You see I do things to men." You snickered, well, of course you would at that point. "No, really, bad things. You see, I first noticed it years ago. The first time it happened I wasn't even twenty. I met a man in a bar, the usual sort of thing. He was staring at my legs and I was about half past drunk so I said stop staring at my legs, of course I meant please go on staring. Anyway, we ended up in bed. His name was Don. Don was an all night DJ on an alternative rock station and just a wee bit manic-depressive. He had all these things going on --- he made jewelry, had a short book of verse published, had paintings in a zillion juried shows. He saved money for months and took me to London with him; he was going to hook up with some band or some gallery owner. After two days in London he decided to go to France because I speak French. When we

got there he got royally pissed at me because I spoke French and he didn't. We came back to the states and he quit radio. Got involved with some people building an amusement park, had some critic really interested in his paintings, went back to school to do something with computers. In Richmond he was working for a company that downsized and he handcuffed himself to his computer, they had to get the police to make him leave that was his last manic act. After that he drifted. He didn't want to do radio. He didn't want to work with computers. He stopped painting. He ended up somewhere in Chicago where the CTA fades into Spanish and women stab their boyfriends in laundromats. He works in a warehouse, shipping and receiving. He doesn't go out much." You looked confused but remained attentive, it's the price men pay for getting laid. Dinner and a movie are cheap by comparison. "Oh, it was much worse for David. David was next, I met him in college. He was a standard issue Jewish intellectual psuedo-revolutionary. We all were back then, even blondes like you became culturally Jewish, it was what one did. Anyway, where Don just wanted to fuck me, David wanted to marry me. It was okay, I suppose, not that I would have done it but, it was an okay thing for him to want. Except one night he got furious because after we had sex I started talking about something---I honestly don't recall what---it could have been anything, Greek myth, taxes, a new dress. I really don't remember, just simple conversation. David's face collapsed and he got all pouty, all crushed

little boy, he said we just made love. He couldn't stand me saying anything other than endless 'I love you's.' I didn't. I really only loved myself. He pouted and sulked and couldn't handle it that I wanted to talk about anything other than the eternal bliss of being in his arms. He couldn't stand it that I said fuck, thought it was vulgar. We did the backpack through youth hostels routine and he got absolutely bent because I fucked a Dane in Edinburgh. He threatened to kill himself or me. What happened? He went from revolutionary, from selling the Daily Worker on street corners to a degree in Poli Sci. Then he went from that degree to some cubicle in an insurance business. He married a woman with a pageboy haircut and produced 2.4 children. He lives in a split-level, drives a Volvo and worries about his cholesterol. Insurance---do you see what I mean?" Letting my robe fall away from my body I went to the refrigerator for a container of yogurt. I'm not all that fond of yogurt but I can do such interesting things to men when I eat it around them. I licked the spoon slowly. You said, "It seems like you are just talking about men who grow old." I walked back to the table, my robe flowing like water my body revealed then obscured. "No, it isn't merely getting old. It's giving up dreams. I met Jerome when he was a sketch artist, doing precise painful pen and inks. He started doing advertising drawings for Belk's Department Stores. I knew Jonathan when he cared deeply about the foster children in his caseload. Now he's CEO of a managed care company that won't pay for anything---

children wait six months for glasses and God help them if they need surgery. Carl was a renegade, he ran for local political offices while riding a bicycle. Now, he works for the feds, eighty thousand to write regulations and make rules. Over and over. I meet them, I fuck them and something dies. Something beautiful and pure and honest dies and they become part of everything I hate." You drank the remainder of your coffee. I didn't really expect you to understand. I supposed you thought I was way over the edge, a bunny boiler, a card carrying 10-74, an absolute nutter auditioning for Jerry Springer. At the very least, I suppose I thought you'd decided I was crazy. Slipping the robe from my shoulders I crossed the clean floor and straddled your lap. I kissed you. You had kissed me before but this time I kissed you, holding your face in my small soft hands I raped your mouth with my hungry tongue, my unquenchable need. You couldn't help it. Your hands moved to my breasts, squeezing and toying, your hands slid down my narrow rib cage to part my thighs, plunder my sex. I was hot and moist and all those begging things women do to control men. I leaned back, exposing myself, capturing you. "Don't you see? I do it. I suck the life from men." You shook your head. "It's just years, it's just life," you said. "How can you know?" My voice a whisper, my throat going dry. "What else can it be?" I laughed softly, an elfin sound, a sound from the mists and legends of an inarticulate, unrecorded past. "It is me. Nothing else. And, you're next. You've had me and your

dreams will turn to dust, your fire will turn to ash, everything you've wanted to do, everything you've planned will fail. You'll lose everything that you could be. All your potential will drift away." You looked at me. A glimmer of comprehension, a flicker of slow acceptance crossed your face. "So what do I do?" you asked, wanting, I think, to believe this was some mad rant, and knowing it wasn't. "You break the chain." I spoke in flat tones. You didn't want to listen; it was too easy and too terrible to contemplate. "You break the chain, end the sick Lilith power that follows me. It can stop here, it can stop now. You needn't sell cars, you don't have to wake up forty and afraid of dying without having lived." "What do I do?" you asked. You were never more beautiful than in that moment, alone with your fear and realization while I straddled your lap naked as any woman ever was. "You know." I answered knowing you needed me to say it. "Well fuck me running, I haven't a clue." You shook your head, strange bright hair falling like sunlight. "You have to kill me. It's the only way to stop it. If you don't you're next. You'll end up selling car parts, working crossword puzzles, joining the local Baptist church because it's good for business. You have to do it – kill me or it continues, you next then who knows how many others." I kissed you. It started slow, and then I hunched your lap like a bitch in heat, nibbled your lip, pawed down your pants and held the throbbing length of you. My fingers stroked around the rim, I squeezed while I sucked your tongue.

Then, suddenly, still holding the shaft, I drew my face a mere inch away from yours. "You have to kill me, strangle me, stab me, choke the toxic life from me. Don't you see? Can't you see what I do?" While I whispered I rubbed my hand up and down the velvet length of you. So, what do you do? You haven't long to decide.

Hellz Bellz: Randy Chandler Because her mouth was taped shut, she did her pleading with her eyes, but the two men with demonic faces regarded her as little more than a piece of meat--or a hog for slaughtering. But that wasn't quite right. Hogs weren't crucified before they were slaughtered, and Candace was crucified, her feet and hands nailed to the hardwood floor with rusty spikes, arms outstretched like Jesus on the cross. The pain had been fierce at first, but now her wounds were mostly numb, and for that small blessing she was thankful. The lowlife demons were arguing with each other. That was good, wasn't it? As long as they were bickering, they weren't inflicting new torture on her exposed body, naked except for the nun's wimple on her head. What kind of sick game were these perverts playing? Why were they doing this to her? Her mind skipped back to her earlier thoughts of devil worship. She'd seen enough horror movies to know that Satanists often perverted Christian rituals and purposefully stood symbols of the church on end, like turning a cross upside-down. Maybe that was what this was all about. Maybe they were using her as a twisted version of the Holy Mother. That was probably why they'd called her unholy mother. Did that mean they intended to kill her baby? Or did they want to cut it out of her womb in hopes of keeping it alive for some other satanic ritual? If taken now, the infant wouldn't be too premature to survive, if these horrible men knew how to do a Cesarean. She made herself concentrate on what they were saying, hoping to learn something--anything--that might help her understand what was happening to her and

give her an edge on escaping this madness. Their voices, dirty as if dripping some putrid sludge of low places, wrapped around her and made her hear the words they were making. "The fuck do you care?" snarled the one called Shades. "Don't mean shit." "The guy ain't even human," Woofer said. "What happens when he's through with us? We're dead meat, that's what. I'm tellin' ya, man." "Aw, bullshit, you fat pussy." "Say what you want, I wish we'd never hooked up with the man. If he is a man. I mean, what the fuck's he doing now? We're down here doin' the dirty work and he's-what?--yanking his wang up in the fuckin' belfry? Sheeit." "Better watch your fucking mouth," Shades warned. "He hears that shit, you are dead meat." "And what's with that goddamn bell?" Woofer wasn't backing off. "Bong, bong, bong, Jesus, that shit's gettin' on my nerves big time." "He ain't doing it. It's ringing itself. You saw it with your own eyes. Don't that tell ya something?" "Tells me we're in deep shit. We oughta split right now, 'fore it's too late." Shades jabbed his finger like a knife against Woofer's big belly. "I'll split you wide open if you don't get on the stick. And don't tell me you ain't got the balls for this shit. Five minutes ago you was slobbering all over yourself to get started on the bitch." "It ain't that. It's just...I don't feel right. The guy scares me. Like he's doing something to us. I don't trust the fucker."

"We ain't gotta trust him. I don't trust nothing but them greenbacks with 'In God We Trust' on 'em. The dude's weird, sure, but his money's the right color. That's all you got to worry about. Now crack that cunt's belly and snatch the bambino." Candace didn't believe it. Couldn't believe it. This was too horrible to be happening. She was having a whale of a nightmare, probably brought on by her out-of-whack hormones, some sort of pre-partum psychosis. She would wake up any second now in her bed, the ceiling fan making lazy circles above her, Brad beside her, his morning hardon pressing against her hip, and she would reach down to caress it until he came all the way awake and he would kiss her breast and say, "Mornin', sweet mama." Then she would tell him about the weird dream she'd been having and he would comfort her and tell her everything was all right. "You sure you know how to do it?" Shades said. "Fuck yeah," said Woofer. "I told ya, I used to be an OR tech. I seen plenty of 'em. It ain't that complicated." "Go ahead, Doctor Death. Get this shit over with." "Where ya goin'?" "Outside. I ain't gonna watch this shit. Not with that fucking bell banging my brain." "Now who's the pussy?" "Fuck you," Shades said on his way up the stairs. Ignoring the parting shot, Woofer turned back to Candace and smiled at her. Her eyes went wide. No way was she dreaming this. She could smell the fat man's body odor, smell her own fear. "Okay, titty mama," he said. "Don't worry, you won't

feel a thing." Then he put a piece of cool cloth over her nose, and she breathed a sharp chemical smell that made her gag against the duct tape. The world, already reduced to the candle-lit cellar, shrank down to a single, hazy flame, haloed like the Savior's head, then the flame went out, and so did she. *** "See?" Josh pointed his knobby finger at the small band of freaks arrayed in odd formation in front of the old church. "Just like I said." "God," said Brenda, "what planet are they from?" "What graveyard, is more like it," said James, anxiously squeezing the spray-can of paint in his fist. "We're not going over there," Barb said. "They look dangerous as hell." "Did Halloween come early?" Brenda asked with mock sincerity. She moved closer to James. "Tattoos R Us," Josh guffawed. He drained the last of his water, then tossed the empty plastic bottle on the ground. "That's one way to beat the heat," James quipped, trying to hide his fear behind his wit. "Come on," said Josh. "Let's go talk to 'em. Ask 'em what the hell they're doing here." "I don't know, man." James was reluctant to step out of his front yard. Walking up to a bunch of naked, tattooed whack-jobs didn't seem like a good idea on a wild night like this. In the sodium-vapor light their skin-etched

wounds looked almost real, but of course that wasn't possible, because a nobody with such grievous wounds would be walking around like these odd dudes and dudettes, standing there before the church in human configuration symbolic of secret geometries no one else understood and mumbling incoherent chants like those Hari Krishna guys used to do at airports and bus stations. Maybe, mused James, they were a new band of Krishna freaks, some offshoot branch of the old, a new breed of religious zealots steeped in the philosophies of the far-out Far East and spiritually twisted to the point of believing mutilation would bring them closer to God…or maybe they belonged to some death cult like those radical Muslims who wanted to kill all Infidels-especially Americans. Whoever the fuck they were, James didn't want to approach them. They were bad news, probably as dangerous as they looked. But the really odd thing was, they seemed to belong to the sound of the ringing bell. It was as if the bell had summoned them, as if they had been waiting for the summons and knew all about it--were somehow a part of it. "C'mon, man," said Josh. "You ain't wimping out, are ya? This was your idea." Brenda looked at him with cocked eyebrows that said: Where are your balls? Barb looked with longing at the Poon Tang Cruiser, no doubt wishing it was taking her home and away from this madness. James took a deep breath that hurt his chest. "Okay. Let's go." Despite his outward bravado, Josh hung back and let James go first, followed by Barb and Brenda. As they

crossed the street, James counted the freaks. There were twelve of them, six males and six females. All naked, all bearing bizarre skin art. They were standing in a formation that resembled a figure eight-the sign for infinity. Chanting in a language James didn't recognize. "I don't like this," Barb said in a loud whisper. "Duh," said Brenda. "You don't like anything." "Shut up," spat Josh. James hailed the band of tattooed freaks. "Hey, what's up?" A tall man with a skull etched in the skin of his face turned toward them. He held up his hand and the chanting abruptly stopped. "Oh shit," said Barb. "What're you guys doing?" James asked, trying to sound casual and innocently curious. He wished he were back in his den, sticking it to Brenda. His heart pounded a marching cadence on his eardrums. A dozen sets of eyes fixed on James. Skull Face grinned and said in a rich baritone, "The Lord's work, brother." James nodded. Barb muttered, "More like the devil's work." "Those are some bad-ass tattoos," said Josh, coming to stand beside James. "Are they, like, part of your religion?" A big-breasted woman with a tattoo of a flayed abdomen on her midsection broke formation and walked toward them, tits bouncing. "The world of flesh is illusion," she said, smiling. "When the time comes, these ink wounds will become real."

"Uh-huh," said Josh, drawing back a little. Gaining confidence, James said, "What's up with that bell? Is that why you're here?" Skull Face fondled his sagging genitals. "Heaven rings its bell, the Lord's truth to tell." "One of your guy's ringing it?" asked James, though he knew better. Skull Face grinned again. "Don't you get it, brother? No human hand rings Heaven's bell." "Don't you get it?" said James. "That bell's making people crazy. Don't you know what's happening in this town? People are killing each other." "God's will," said Big Tits. "Their sins are made flesh." James didn't like these freaks. They were too close to his home and he wanted them to go away. "That ain't Heaven's bell," he said. "You ask me, it's hell's bell, turning this town into hell on earth." "James," Barb hissed at his back. "Let's go. Leave these people alone." Skull Face took a step closer to James. He wasn't grinning now. "That's blasphemy, friend," he said. "You best be careful now. This is the Night of the Bell." James could feel his anger building. He wasn't sure what he was going to do or say next, and that scared him, but he knew it was going to be something outrageous to antagonize this band of freaks. "So God wants people killing each other off?" Josh asked. "That's bullshit, man." James moved. He strode past Skull Face and Big Tits and made straight for the front of the church. He started

shaking the can of paint, the little metal ball inside rattling with angry rhythm. The bell tolled. He felt the freaks' eyes on his back. His fear and uncertainty were gone. This was his town, his street, and he was one righteous dude. He was going to strike a blow for sanity and against these psycho outsiders gathered on the lawn of the abandoned church. He pulled the plastic top off the can and threw it on the ground. He started as high as he could reach on the stone wall to the right of the door. He sprayed with flair, making big sweeping letters in red. When he was done, he turned to the audience and gestured grandly at his handiwork. "That's what it is," he told them. They all stared at James's bold graffiti: HELLz BELLz. Josh shouted: "You rawk, Slim Jim!" "Hell of a speller," said Brenda, giggling. Skull Face stalked James, his cock and balls swinging like fruit rotting on the vine. "Blasphemer!" he screamed. Big Tits followed her leader. "Give me that can," she demanded. "Fuck you, psycho," said James. As soon as she was within range, she slugged him with a roundhouse left, but like most girls, she didn't know how to make a proper fist and the blow to the side of James's head didn't hurt-it just made him madder. He held the can of paint in front of her face and sprayed. She yelped as a mist of red paint coated her face and went in her mouth. She sputtered and coughed. Skull Face tried to grab the can away but James gave

him a good shot of paint in the eyes. "Run!" Josh hollered. The other naked freaks had broken formation and were closing on James. They quickly boxed him in, cutting off any escape route. With his back to the stone wall of the church, James held the can of spray paint like a weapon, menacing them with it. "Come on, motherfuckers," he taunted, "I got some for all of you. Step right up." A big man with disemboweled intestines tattooed on his potbelly said, "Deliver him to the Lord." As the freaks advanced on him, two riders on roaring motorcycles sped from behind the church, crossed the edge of the lawn and zoomed up the street. One of them was morbidly obese, and the other was bald, sporting dark glasses. "The Night Riders," someone exclaimed. "God's Angels," someone else said. James took advantage of the distraction and bolted forward. He knocked a skinny woman down and ran toward the street and his home on the other side. He almost made it, but someone hit him from behind and dragged him to the ground. Then they were all over him, punching and kicking him mercilessly. A young woman with ulcerous sores etched all over her pale body took the can from him and sprayed his face. He choked on the aerosol fumes.

Mister Mack & The Monster Mobile: Ronald Kelly “Come on, will you?” called Jimmy. “Get the lead outta your butt!” Kyle Sadler pumped the pedals of his bike, trying desperately to catch up. “What’s the big hurry?” “He said he had to hit the road by three. It’s past onethirty right now.” Kyle grumbled to himself as they left the busy stretch of Fesslers Lane and headed into the industrial park. Sometimes his best friend, Jimmy Jackson, drove him crazy, especially when he got some stupid idea stuck in his head. “Watch out for trucks!” he warned the boy ahead of him. “You don’t want to get run over, do you?” The industrial park was usually swarming with tractor-trailers. Jimmy looked over his shoulder and rolled his eyes. “It’s the Fourth of July. Nobody’s working today, remember?” Kyle decided to keep his mouth shut. There was no reasoning with Jimmy when he was like this. Together, they sped beneath an interstate overpass. Above, cars and trucks roared on their way through East Nashville. A minute later, they were there. They coasted into a vacant lot choked with weeds and crushed gravel. A couple of factories stood to the right and left, but like Jimmy said, it was a holiday. They were completely deserted. “Great! He’s still here,” said Jimmy with relief. Kyle looked at the big travel camper parked in the middle of the abandoned lot. It was one of those expensive

kinds, like the country music stars parked on Music Row downtown. It was black and gray, its windows tinted so dark that you couldn’t see through them. “I’m not sure about this, Jimmy,” he said after they parked their bikes a few yards away. Jimmy did that eye-rolling thing again, making Kyle want to punch him right good. “The old man’s okay, I tell you. He’s kind of like my grandpa, but alot cooler. It’s not like he’s some kinda pediaphobe or something.” “That’s pedophile, gerbil-brain,” Kyle told him. “Why is he parked out here in the middle of nowhere?” Jimmy glared at him, irritated by his belly-aching. “Hey, I only brought you out here because you’re so crazy about the stuff. I mean, we can head back to the house and sit around bored out of our skulls, if you want.” “No. No, that’s okay. Just seems awful weird, him being out here, that’s all.” Jimmy hopped off his bike and knocked on the bus door. They stood in the summer heat for a long, expectant moment. Then the door opened with a pneumatic whoosh. Kyle studied the man who stood there. He was in his mid-seventies, a little heavy, with thinning hair and a white beard. He wore a red Hawaiian shirt decorated with palm fronds and parrots, black shorts, and gray Crocs. Behind his eyeglasses shown kind eyes, sparkling with a youthfulness that his face had lost long ago. “Hi, boys,” he greeted. “Glad to see you. I was afraid you couldn’t make it.” “I had a little trouble convincing Kyle to come,” Jimmy told him. “Get this… he thinks you might be some kinda child molester or something.”

The man smiled warmly and regarded Kyle. “Smart boy. Sounds like he has a good head on his shoulders. But, hey, I’m just a retired fella, seeing the country, that’s all. You have nothing to fear from me, son.” He reached out and shook the boy’s hand. “You can just call me Mr. Mack.” “See?” said Jimmy. “I told you he was okay.” Kyle felt his anxiety drop a notch or two. “Jimmy said you had some cool stuff in your bus.” Mr. Mack’s eyes twinkled. “I do… if you like horror movies.” “Kyle lives on that stuff.” He turned to the boy next to him. “Don’t you?” Kyle simply nodded. Despite his apprehension, he felt excited, anxious to see the treasures that Jimmy claimed was inside. The elderly man stepped to the side and motioned into the bus. “Then, please, enter the Monster Mobile.” Together, the boys climbed the steep stairs into the cab of the camper. It was deliciously cool inside the bus. The moment they reached the top of the steps, the doors shut behind them, sealing out the sun and heat of the sweltering July afternoon. Kyle felt that squirming ball of nerves in the pit of his stomach again. If his mom knew he was doing this, she would pitch a major fit. “Right through there, boys,” said Mr. Mack. “Take your time. There’s alot to see.” They turned toward a black velvet curtain that separated the cab from the rest of the camper. “Come on,” said Jimmy with a big grin on his freckled face. “You’re

gonna love this!” Kyle swallowed dryly. “Okay.” Then they stepped through the dark curtains. The overhead lights of the camper’s interior were dim, so, at first, Kyle had a hard time seeing exactly what was there. He expected to see outside through the tinted windows, but it was as though they weren’t even there. Instead the walls of the camper were covered with a vast collection of movie memorabilia and exhibits. The kind of stuff that Kyle’s bedroom was decorated with… except this was the real deal. Vintage movie posters of Bride of Frankenstein and King Kong lined the walls, along with framed photos of some of Hollywood’s greatest horror actors standing beside a younger version of Mr. Mack. Legends like Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Vincent Price. And each photograph was personally autographed to their gracious host. Along the length of the camper stood rows of glass cases displaying some very recognizable movie props. The silver wolf’s head cane from The Wolfman, the Monster’s woolen vest and stacked shoes from Son of Frankenstein, one of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion models from Jason and the Argonaut, a little worse for wear, but still intact. There were dozens of other props, too, all from some of Kyle’s favorite monster movies. Amazed, he walked over to a case that held a face mask and hands from The Creature From the Black Lagoon. “Is this stuff for real?” Mr. Mack chuckled and nodded. “Everything here is genuine. I have the documentation to prove it. That’s one of the original masks that Ricou Browning wore during his

swimming sequences as the Gillman. See that tiny port on the crown of the head? That’s where the bubbles escaped from the diving apparatus he wore beneath the suit.” “Isn’t this great?” asked Jimmy. He was peering into a case bearing Leatherface’s patchwork mask and chainsaw from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. “How did you get your hands on of all this?” Kyle asked. Mr. Mack’s eyes gleamed. “Do I detect a hint of skepticism? Well, years ago, I used to be a make-up artist in Hollywood. You know, latex appliances and stuff like that. I learned my craft from some of the best in the business, including Jack Pierce. I retired in the early seventies and took my collection of memorabilia on the road. I reckon I just couldn’t bear the thought of this stuff being stuck in some musty old museum. I’d rather take it to the public, so fans can enjoy it.” Kyle moved to the next case. He stared at the object hanging in its temperature-controlled case. “What’s this?” “That’s the original cape from the movie Dracula,” said Mr. Mack. Kyle eyed the man suspiciously. “I thought Bela Lugosi was buried in his Dracula cape.” The old man smiled. “That’s just an urban legend. Bela gave me that cape a day or two before he died.” He pointed to a framed photo over the case that showed a decrepit Lugosi handing the vampire cape to Mr. Mack. “I was certain that he was buried in it,” said Kyle beneath his breath. Despite all the wonders around him, the boy was beginning to think that the illustrious Mr. Mack

was a downright fake. Kyle had read everything he could get his hands on concerning the old Universal monster movies and their actors. And there was one thing he knew for sure… Bela Lugosi was laid to rest in his Dracula cape. That was fact, not rumor. “So you’re retired?” asked Jimmy. He marveled at the gray wig, flower-print dress, and butcher knife that Anthony Perkins had made famous in Hitchcock’s Psycho. “You don’t work on any of this stuff any more?” “Oh, I dabble in it from time to time,” admitted Mr. Mack. “It’s hard to stop once you get it in your blood, I suppose.” Kyle suddenly felt claustrophobic in the dark confines of the belly of the bus. “Well, I think we’d better get going,” he said. Jimmy looked at him incredulously. “Are you kidding? You haven’t even checked out half of these exhibits yet. Why do you want to leave?” “I promised Dad that I’d help him get ready for the cookout tonight,” Kyle told him firmly. “Sorry that you’ve gotta run so soon,” said Mr. Mack regretfully. “But before you go, let me show you something that I’ve been fiddling with in my workshop.” He started toward another black velvet partition at the back of the bus. “Just stay right here. I’ll be right back. You’re gonna love this!” When he had disappeared through the dark curtain, Jimmy turned to his friend. “What’s the deal? I bring you out here to meet this guy because you love this monster stuff so much and you want to cut out right in the middle of it? I thought you’d have a million questions for the

guy…about all those great monster movies and the ones who acted in them.” “This guy is a big fake,” Kyle whispered, not wanted the old man to overhear their conversation. “I don’t think he worked with any of them. And I think he’s lying about being a make-up artist. I’ve read tons of books on the subject and never once came across anyone named Mack.” “But what about all these cool props? They’re for real, aren’t they?” “I doubt it,” said Kyle. “Oh, they’re elaborate fakes, but I don’t think they’re the real props. And those photos of him and Karloff and Lugosi… well, you can trick up any kind of photo with a computer these days.” Jimmy shook his head in disgust. “Okay, okay! We’ll go. But, if you ask me, you’re just being paranoid.” Abruptly the rustle of curtains drew their attention. They turned and gasped. Behind them, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, was a hideous monster. At least his head was that of some horrid creature. The tanned arms and legs were still those of their elderly host, Mr. Mack. Kyle stared, startled, at the monster’s face. The skin was a glossy charcoal gray in color with knotty black veins running throughout, like the exposed roots of a tree. The eyes were bulbous and moist; yellow with a network of bulging purple veins and shiny green pupils. It was the teeth that caused his heart to race the most, though. They were small and black, but wickedly jagged and as sharp as razor blades. Kyle had seen hundreds of horror movies, but never had he seen a creature that looked so damned real.

“Man, you gave us a start!” said Jimmy, finally catching his breath. “That mask just about made me crap in my britches!” Mr. Mack chuckled. It came out as a soft, wet, bubbling noise. Slowly, Kyle began to back toward the front of the bus. “Don’t tell me that you’re still spooked!” laughed Jimmy. He turned back to the man in the Hawaiian shirt. “Great mask, Mr. Mack. But how did you make it? You haven’t lost your touch. I really like how you make the veins throb like that.” Mr. Mack said nothing. He simply started forward… grinning…. with those jagged, black teeth. “Let’s get out of here!” urged Kyle. He suddenly smelled a strange odor in the air of the bus. A stench sort of like the marigolds in his mother’s flower garden. “What?” asked Jimmy. He seemed disoriented, as he stared at his pal. “What’s that terrible stink?” “It’s coming from him!” Kyle wondered if he should have said it. Jimmy began to follow his friend, but his face grew strangely pale and he began to gasp for breath. “I… I don’t feel right,” he said. “My legs…” He collapsed under his own weight. “They… they aren’t working.” Kyle tried his best to reach the curtained partition at the front of the bus, but, he too, was beginning to feel weak and out of kilter. His nasal passages began to sting and his tongue grew numb. “What’s happening?” he muttered thickly, then fell into the aisle between the display cases. His arms and legs began to twitch and convulse

involuntarily. Mr. Mack started toward them, tiny teeth grating one against the other. “Oh God,” whimpered Jimmy, unable to move now. “He is a pediaphobe.” “Pedophile,” corrected Kyle sadly. His voice was barely audible, even to himself. The boy lay on his back staring at the recessed lighting of the ceiling. Then there he was. Mr. Mack… or what masqueraded as Mr. Mack. He stared at Kyle for a long moment with those bulging yellow eyes. Then he bent downward and, with no effort at all, lifted Kyle into his arms. “No,” whispered Kyle. “Please.” “Don’t worry,” he was assured in that wet, guttural voice that had replaced the elderly man’s kindly tone. “I won’t hurt you. I promise.” Mr. Mack turned and, almost tenderly, began to carry him toward the chamber at the back of the bus. As Kyle’s consciousness began to fade, panic suddenly spiked in the ten-year-old’s brain. What’s he going to do to me? his thoughts screamed. Rape me? Kill me? He stared up at those sharp little teeth, gnashing in festered gray gums. Eat me? With the last, lingering bit of energy he could muster, he reached out with his right hand and clawed at the man’s left arm. The skin with its liverspots and coarse white hair came away in his hand. Latex. Underneath was the same wet, gray flesh that covered the face that leered horribly down at him. “Don’t be afraid,” said Mr. Mack soothingly. “Trust

me.” Then Kyle was carried through the folds of the black curtains and into a much deeper darkness. *** Phillip Mitchell checked his paperwork and nodded grimly. Then he opened the door to Room 439 and knocked quietly. “Mind if I come in?” he asked. Betty Sadler looked up from a romance novel she had been reading and smiled. “Hi, Dr. Mitchell.” “How’s my favorite patient today?” he asked. He took Kyle’s chart from the foot of the bed and checked it. He took a pen from the breast pocket of his white coat and made a few necessary notes. “He seems less agitated,” said the boy’s mother. “He’s resting better than he did yesterday.” “I suppose he just had to regain his bearings… after what happened,” the doctor told her. “So, how are you doing?” Betty closed her book and shook her head. Tears bloomed in her eyes. “I don’t know. Frankly, I’m not sure how to feel. I’m sorry… I’m having a difficult time with this.” Mitchell laid a reassuring hand on her trembling shoulder. “Kyle is going to be okay. You have nothing to worry about.” The woman wiped away her tears, but her fear remained. “Doctor… did that bastard… did he…?” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word. “The tests yesterday… the examination?”

Doctor Mitchell crouched down until his face was level with hers. “I’m going to be blunt, Mrs. Sadler, but only for your own peace of mind. No, we found no evidence of sexual abuse. And there was no trace of semen whatsoever.” “Thank God.” “Doc?” came a weak voice from behind them. Mitchell stood and turned toward the bed. Kyle was awake. He lay there, hooked up to IVs and monitors, looking pale. The flesh around his eyes appeared dark and shadowy, almost bruised. “Good morning, little buddy,” said the doctor. “How are you feeling today?” “Weaker than water,” said the boy with a sigh. “Better than yesterday, I guess.” The physician did a short examination; checking his vital signs, pupil dilation, and breathing. He laid the flat of his palm on the boy’s mid-section for a long moment. The boy flinched. “Still tender?” “A little,” admitted Kyle. Doctor Mitchell sat on the edge of the bed and smiled at the ten-year-old. “I don’t want to upset you, Kyle, but someone from the police department will be stopping by later on to talk to you. About what happened in the industrial park.” Kyle shrugged his shoulders weakly. “I don’t really remember much of anything. It’s all pretty hazy.” The doctor was thoughtful for a moment. “Kyle… could you tell me about the man in the camper? This ‘Mr. Mack’? Can you describe him to me?” A haunted look shown in the boy’s sunken eyes. “He

just looked like a harmless old man,” he told the doctor. “Almost bald, a white beard, glasses.” Then Kyle’s voice lowered a bit, almost fearfully. “But that wasn’t his real face.” Abruptly, a crash came from the adjoining bathroom. They turned their eyes to see a middle-aged black woman in green scrubs standing in the doorway. Her eyes were wide. Startled. “Hi, Sophie,” said Mitchell. “I didn’t know you were in there.” “I was cleaning,” she said. “Everything okay?” “Yes, sir. I just dropped something that’s all.” She stared not at the doctor, but at the boy in the bed. Then she turned and went back to work. Doctor Mitchell smiled at his patient. “You rest up, Kyle, and I’ll check in on you later.” “Okay,” agreed Kyle. The doctor stood up and started toward the door. “Uh, Doc? How’s Jimmy doing?” Mitchell wondered if his smile looked too forced and false. He hoped not. “We’ll talk about Jimmy later.” Then he left before the boy could ask any further questions. As he left the fourth floor pediatric ward and started back to his office, Doctor Mitchell mulled over Kyle Sadler’s condition in his mind. The boy was terribly weak and anemic, but that wasn’t what concerned him. It was the tests that had him worried. Particularly the CAT scan they had done yesterday afternoon. He hadn’t exactly told Betty Sadler the entire truth. Kyle had been abused, but not sexually. Rather, the tests

had shown that the boy had been mistreated in other, more subtle ways. For lack of a better term, Mitchell referred to it as anatomical molestation. The natural position of several of Kyle’s internal organs had been altered. The boy’s liver had swapped places with his stomach, and his kidneys were positioned at the front of his abdominal cavity, rather than the rear. The pancreas was completely missing and, in its place, was a strange organ that shouldn’t have even been there… but one that served the exact same function. Mitchell had not done exploratory surgery on the boy, but he knew how the organ looked; pear-shaped and pale purple, almost lavender in color. He also knew that the cellular tissue was unlike any known to man. Living tissue that was totally alien to modern medicine. He knew that for a fact, because Kyle wasn’t the first child to be admitted into his care. Three others – a boy and two girls – had suffered similar fates during the past two months. And all possessed that strange, new organ where their pancreas once was. Another thing that concerned Mitchell was the matter of Jimmy Jackson. He hadn’t told Kyle, but his best friend was missing. When Kyle had been discovered alongside his bike in the vacant lot, he had been found alone. *** That evening, as she cleaned the big windows of the hospital lobby, Sophie Taylor stared into the rainy twilight beyond the panes. Her hands trembled nervously as she worked.

“Sophie?” She turned at the sound of the man’s voice and found Phillip Mitchell standing behind her, dressed in his street clothes. At first, she could only stare at him. “Sophie… are you alright?” he asked, concerned. “You seemed upset this afternoon… in Kyle Sadler’s room.” She wanted so badly to tell him, but, instead, she lied. “I’m okay, Dr. Mitchell. It’s just this business with the children. It has me spooked, that’s all.” The doctor nodded. “I know how you feel,” he said. No , she thought. You couldn’t possibly know. “Well, good night, Sophie,” said Doctor Mitchell. Then he left the lobby and sprinted through the rain toward his car. She watched as he pulled out of the parking lot and into the traffic. You should have told him, she thought. Absently, she pressed the palm of her hand against her belly, just below the diaphragm and felt the steady thrumthrum-thrum of a pulse where none should have been. Sophie had taught herself to ignore it, but it had grown stronger since the children were admitted. It had happened a long time ago, back in Alabama. It was 1974. She had been nine years old. She was walking home from the store when a man pulled up in his camper… a Winnebago, she believed it was. Balding, white beard, eyeglasses. He had been black, though, not white.” But that wasn’t his real face, the boy in Room 439 had said. He had asked her if she liked monster movies. Of course, she had said yes. Her and her sister went to the picture show every Saturday and saw all those spooky

movies that came out. After it was over, they found her in a creekbed, nearly dead. Folks thought that she’d had a seizure or something. She never told them about him. She didn’t know why. They would have probably thought she was crazy if she had. Sophie tried to drive the awful memories from her thoughts as she worked. Frightened, she peered through the rain-speckled window. At the far end of the parking lot, a few spaces from her own car, was a camper. Not a Winnebago, but one of those big fine travel coaches. It was black with gray trim. An eerie feeling overtook her. It’s probably just some family visiting a patient, she told herself. Sometimes kinfolk from out of state would show up in campers, to avoid paying for a hotel. The pulse in her abdomen grew stronger. Thrum, thrum, thrum. She nearly doubled over as it began to quicken. What’s the matter with me? she wondered. At first she was sure that she was having a heart attack. But this had nothing at all to do with her heart. THRUM, THRUM, THRUM! The ding of the elevator sounded across the lobby behind her and she turned. Sophie caught a fleeting glimpse of a lab coat, with the trace of a Hawaiian shirt between the lapels. Red with parrots and palms. Then the doors closed and the elevator began to climb steadily toward the fourth floor.

LETTING GO: Mary SanGiovanni They blurred sometimes so Hank Swanson couldn't see them. They rushed by his ear and made angry sounds that he could no longer attribute to the wind shouldering through the cracks in the house. They were getting stronger. The day before, they moved the toaster three whole feet across the counter. And he suspected that one had learned how to break light bulbs. He'd found two already that week in egg-shell shatters on the floor in the front hallway. They were angry. Maybe getting dangerous. There were four of them in the house, although they rarely all convened together. Sometimes they were lured by the sound of Law & Order from the television set. Quite often, he caught them from the corner of his eye while reading the newspaper. Mostly, though, he felt them late at night, when he was alone with his thoughts. They stood behind him, surrounding his easy chair, charging the air with heat and cold and tension and thin noise. They had never tried to hurt him physically. He suspected that was going to change, though, now that they could act on things in the house. These certain memories haunted him – powerful ones. Ones he couldn’t let go. But he'd discovered that when one held onto such things long enough and hard enough, they took on lives of their own, lives of discontent and disapproval. They were stuck there with him, unable to rest in the dust of the past and the graves of resolution. And they hated him for it. He stood in the first floor bathroom, studying a worn and tired face. Thin lines fanned from the corners of blue

eyes that had seen too much. Set grooves around his mouth spoke not of years of smiles, but of grimaces and bared teeth. That scar above his left eyebrow remained from when, in a flurry of fear, Linda had scratched at his face. Hank had done so much he wished he could take back. The lusterless gray of his hair reminded him of the overcast sky on the day Linda left. The DUTY HONOR FIDELITY tattoo on his right bicep was the same dark color as that little Vietnamese girl's eyes…. Upstairs in his bedroom, Abuse howled like a battered woman. Like Hank's wife had. Like his mother had, all those years ago. It was, perhaps, the most volatile of all the memories. Its explosive temper mirrored what his own had once been. He remembered that, every time Abuse threw an angry tantrum. He flinched when he heard a wooden crash upstairs, heavy, like his dresser had been knocked over. He turned away from the mirror to find Nam standing behind him. It grinned. Its sweat-slick tanned body rippled with muscle as it stepped casually out of the way. Hank brushed past, and felt steamy jungle heat from its skin. Hank believed that the memories' physicality was an effect of what Linda might have called personification. She was an English teacher, and although he'd paid little attention to English, it seemed to fit, that word personification. He'd suspected even then that the memories could take shape from the blurs of light and shadow they used to be. They seemed now more physical than ever. Now, they had faces. Patchwork pieces of faces from recollections in his head. Nam's eyes were like that little girl's. Its arms were like the Viet Cong he'd clipped in the back of the head. Its

laughter was like the old woman's before he'd burst her throat open. He didn't acknowledge the memory, but it followed him into the kitchen. He felt its eyes on him as he made a sandwich at the counter. It spoke to him in Vietnamese. "We have come to a realization. A consensus." He answered in English without turning around. "Oh yeah? What's that?" Its reply, also in English, came halted and awkward. "If we kill you, you will then must let us go." "How so?" "No one take memory with him when he die." Hank stopped, turning slowly, the mayonnaise knife in his hand. "That would only be true if consciousness ended with death. How can you be sure that will happen?" "Because you believe it." "What if I'm wrong?" He turned back to the sandwich. "Then you'd be stuck with me for eternity." "Not necessarily so, Hank." A third voice frosted the air between them. Hank paused, mid-bite. Death in the Family was, by far, the most cool and collected. It scared him more than the others. He put the sandwich down and turned around. The memory – a first from his childhood – sat at the kitchen table. It wore a neat cream sweater which made the pale bluish boy-features of its face and hands more prominent. Its colorless lips pressed together. The black hair, rumpled like a child's, recalled the windsweep of racing Schwinns and the sweaty hairlines of baseball and tag in mid-summer. It sat otherwise reserved, Sunday-best neat, its lean, preteenaged limbs poised. After a moment, it unfolded its

hands and dusted an errant piece of fuzz from its sweater. "Really, Hank, give us some credit for a degree of forethought." It looked up, and its pupiless white eyes managed the semblance of focus on him. He felt cold down his back. "Let's say you take with you into the afterlife whatever you remember of this one. Then it simply becomes a matter of eradicating the part of your physical brain which harbors memories. Now, we've mastered physical contact. It's a matter of time before we master force." It paused to let him soak up this information. Hank wasn't sure that Death in the Family spoke the whole truth. There seemed to Hank to be a huge leap between wiggling light bulbs out of their sockets to crash on the floor, and wielding a baseball bat to brain him in his sleep. Death in the Family continued. "You hardly seem as hung up on the good memories as you are on us, so we believe the cost to be relatively low. I see from your expression that you don't buy that. Consider for a moment if the Judeo-Christian concept of Heaven and Hell exists. Your soul – your energy -- either seeks God and God alone, and leaves memories behind, or is sent to Hell for eternal torment, where memories will be the least of your concern. Or, for the sake of argument, let's say it turns out that the soul is home for the memories that construct your sense of self. Then the afterlife is buoyed by memories. If we simply disconnect you from us, you'll go to the sweet peaceful oblivion you wanted anyway. No judgment, no reconnection with your angry dead. No hell." It winked at him. "And we'll be put to rest. There is no one else to keep us here. No one who cares enough to keep your memories

alive. You're alone." Hank snorted. "Alone." Death in the Family gave him a wide, crocodile smile. "Alone with us." "There are holes in your theory. What if my version of hell is being forced to relive each and every one of you every day for the rest of time? Or what if I'm left a ghost in the afterlife, to haunt the earth where all my memories of violence and pain keep me chained?" Leaning in the doorway, gleaming with sweat in the kitchen light, Nam cast an uncertain glance in Death in the Family's direction, but the other memory seemed unperturbed. "Hell, Hank – any true form of hell, I'd say – would be more than that, by its very nature. In either scenario, you're describing your life exactly as you live it now, on Earth, day to day remembering us, day to day chained to this house. Hell, by its connotations, would constitute more than the mere mechanisms of your daily life." "You're guessing. But you don't know for sure." The memory shifted in the chair, folding its hands on the table again. "Hank, really, it doesn’t matter. Crushing your skull would give us some satisfaction at least, even if nothing else were to change. And the potential risk is worth it to us, since the possibility that it will work in our favor seems higher than it working in yours." "No single one of you can do it, anyway. You can't kill me." Death in the Family regarded him with a cool stare, eye to glassy eye. "That's not true, generally speaking. Single memories drive the life out of people all the time.

What about your Linda's Death of a Child? The one you beat out of her. Remember that one?" Hank felt anger rise in waves of heat beneath his arms and around his neck. "That was an accident." He cringed at how much he sounded like his dad, when his little brother Robbie had died. An accident, his father claimed. The memory seemed to read his thoughts. "Seems to be a popular refrain among the males in your family." After a pause, it added, "Ask Abuse if that's true, that it was an accident. See what she says." "Screw you." Death in the Family gave him a patient smile. "All of this conversation is of no real relevance. All of us together can do this. All of us together can overwhelm you." "Why are you telling me all this? Giving me a running head start, are you?" "Common courtesy. You created us, after all. It changes nothing, though, for you to know. You've proved that there is nowhere you can go that we can't find you. And face it, Hank – you’ve stopped running." *** The night passed with little more than thumping in the upstairs hallway – they were practicing, evidently, but hadn’t quite worked up to smashing his skull in yet. They made their presence known, though. They wanted him to be afraid, to maybe force some soul-searching that might let them go. Wasn't going to happen. Those bastards were his to

hold onto, his to wallow over if he chose. He owned them. Not to be deterred, though, Shot in the Leg gave him a hard time the following morning. From the open window, he felt that outside the air was humid, thick with unspilled rain. The sky blew down and swallowed his neighborhood in fog. In the distance, he heard the hungry rumble of thunder. Oncoming storms always made the pain in his knee worse, right on the outer meniscus, which a bullet had nearly severed years ago. Even though he'd had surgery, the knee never felt quite right – not after those occasional nights in the bottle, and definitely not before storms. Shot in the Leg leaned casually against the wall by the TV. It wore the same flippant tousle of blond hair and the same cocky smirk as the punk from the convenience store who shot Hank. Its legs were mottled with scars beneath the rips in the jeans. One was large, thick in the thigh like his partner's had been. The other was skinny, like the guy in shorts from the convenience store, the one who'd covered his girlfriend from the spray of glass and flying bullets. Both looked shaky. Shot in the Leg did not look phased, though. Its legs always shook. Hank wondered if it felt anything beyond hate -- like pain. Throbbing ligaments. Strained muscles. Buckling knees. Now that they could think on their own, he wondered what the memories remembered. What they thought about when they were alone. The memory folded its arms across the bloodsplattered chest. The clerk's chest, the one the punk kid shot before shooting Hank. At the time he'd been Officer Henry

Swanson, working his way up to a spot somewhere in the Tactical Division of Morris County's Major Crimes Unit. He was now Mr. Swanson-down-the-street, ex-vet, ex-cop, ex-husband, full-time asshole. "So you ready to die, officer?" Hank tried to ignore it. On TV, Regis was making Kelly smile. He liked to see Kelly smile. Sometimes she looked so pretty. Sometimes she looked like Linda. "You can't ignore me. Not today." Hank felt a twinge in his knee, and he rubbed it absently. From the corner of his eye, he saw Shot in the Leg shove itself off the wall. It sauntered, as best as it was able, in front of the television set, crossed around the coffee table, and sat down on the other end of the couch. It kicked up dirty worn sneakers and propped them on top of an old issue of Penthouse. The woman on page 12 of that issue looked like Linda, too. "Hank, do you want to die?" He didn't turn his head. "No." "Do you want to live?" "Haven't given that much thought." Hank watched the Kelly-Regis banter without really hearing it. Regis was a snappy dresser. Kelly could be beautiful sometimes. "Just let us go." "Leave me alone." Shot in the Leg laughed. "We'd like to. Let us go." Hank sighed. "You think I like having you here?" "I think you keep us to fill up that space. Somehow, we're easier to hold onto than your wedding, or birthday

parties, or making the force." "Nothing to them. I can barely remember those things." "Consider recalling them a project then." "I'm in retirement. I'm not looking for new projects." Shot in the Leg gave him an exasperated sigh. "Look, I'm trying to keep you from getting little sharp broken pieces of skull all stuck in your nice, clean brain. But there's no love lost if you won't listen. We hate you, and we know you hate us." That was not entirely, true. What Hank hated was to admit that, of the four of them, something about Shot in the Leg seemed okay. He'd been trying to be good the night he was shot, trying to Serve and Protect, to save lives. He'd failed, of course, as he'd failed at his marriage, as he'd failed as a son and a big brother, but for that one memory, he could at least honestly look at himself and know he tried. His knee ached in little pulses. That he tried to be good – that was not entirely true, either. A clusterfuck of a situation, the shooting had been. Protocol ignored, hairtrigger Dirty-Harry hijinks ending with people getting shot. A barely-cleared IA investigation. A bum knee. But if any of the memories ever cut him a break, it was Shot in the Leg. He thought that warranted a certain degree of honesty between them. "You four are all I've got." "How about no memories at all, then? A clean slate. A new beginning." "Too old for that. Too late. Now if you don't mind, I'm watching this. Go practice moving toasters." Hank

scowled and turned up the volume. Sometimes Regis looked waxy and Kelly looked plastic. A cranky thought, and one, for some reason, that reminded him of Linda. She looked waxy when her eye swelled. And plastic when she put on extra make-up to cover a bruise. He felt bad about both. Sometimes Linda was so pretty. So pretty. He missed her. Shot in the Leg got up. "Suit yourself. Kitchen appliances, nothing. I've learned the fine and dexterous art of loading a firearm. You know…in case the toasters don't work." *** Abuse rarely confronted him head on. When it did, it usually sported something sprained, mildly fractured, or in need of stitches. He hated those rare occasions when he ran into it in the upstairs hallway, not so much because of the sight of the physical injuries, but because of the guilt. He'd taken to avoiding it as often as possible. When it went on one of its tearing fits in the bedroom upstairs, he slept on the couch. When it tore up the kitchen, around seven most evenings, he went out to China Wok down the street. He was nearly certain Abuse learned to move the toaster first. The memory used to remind him of weak and beaten women, women whose fragile inner beauty and relentless outer beauty drove the awful sinking feelings of possessiveness, helpless mistrust and blind anger. The beauty that struck chords of remorse after. Nowadays, he saw the purest and most intense rage

of all the memories in Linda's swollen eye. It glared at him from beneath the long blond hair, stringy with blood in the front, his mother's split lip puffed out in an angry pout. There was even some reclamation of power in the broken wrist, the cracked rib that bled out underneath the pale and papery skin, the dress he'd nearly twisted Linda's arm off for wearing one night. These things reminded him of the horrible mistake he'd made. He'd hurt her, again and again in ways she could never forgive. In ways he couldn’t forgive himself. And Abuse reminded him every chance it got. Hank climbed the stairs that evening to right whatever Abuse had knocked over in the bedroom. In the upstairs hallway, he listened for its crying and hearing nothing, he crept to the bedroom. He froze in the doorway when he found it in a fetal curl on the bed. Its blood seeped into the cotton of the comforter and spread out across the quilted diamonds. To the left of the bed, the dresser lay splintered face-down. A number of casualties in the form of underwear and socks had tumbled out toward the foot of the bed. The lamp that formerly stood on top, as well as the silver picture frame with Linda's picture, lay in pieces just where the comforter brushed the floor. Hank's mouth opened, then closed. Cool sweat ran from beneath his arms, and his chest felt tight. The memory had done that. The memory had toppled something that even Hank would have had trouble moving. He took a careful step back into the hallway. Abuse shot up and glared at him. The shredded silver rags it wore snapped outward as if up in arms. It moved off

the bed and swooped to the doorway so fast that Hank cried out. He backed up further into the hall until he felt the hard wooden post of the banister thump against his back. He was cornered. Abuse swam up to him, hovering inches from his face, the gash in its forehead leaking watery blood over the crusted black around it. It smelled like Linda's perfume. The scent made him feel sick. "I've been waiting for you to come upstairs." "Please don't do this." He'd gotten used to the plaintive whisper his voice took on any time that particular memory cornered him. He hated it, but he slipped into the whisper every time, all the same, like familiar slippers. "I wanted to see your face when I told you I can kill you now, if I wanted to. Almost every one of us can. We're close, so close to where I want us to be. But we agreed to do it together. All of us." "You can't do anything, you lying –" His sentence was cut off by a sharp crack to the mouth. The force of it turned his jaw. He felt Linda's long red nails graze his cheek. His face stung in the wake of the palm, shocking him into silence. It could touch him. Physically touch him. "What should I break today? I can do fingers, maybe, or toes. Something little. Something delicious. I can fuck you up, you egotistical bitch." It laughed, a wild woman's cackle. And Hank realized then that he was in serious trouble. He took a chance and pushed it away, hard. His hands sank into the soft chill of it, and it felt like wet sand – like

silt, really. Cold, a little slippery, and soft. But he'd caught it off-guard and an inch or so in, he felt something solid – the part of it, maybe, that had solidified enough to allow physical contact with him in the first place. And he managed to move it. It staggered back a foot or so before recovering and lunging forward, but it was enough time for him to slip away and down the stairs. He turned once near the bottom, surprised that it hadn't caught up and tried to push him down already. At the top of the steps, it seethed, its bruised knuckles tight as it clenched its fists, restraint arresting its chase. Fury shone bright and wet in its one unswollen eye, its split lip bleeding over bared teeth and down its chin. It howled, not in fear or pain as Linda had done, not in frustration as his mother had. It was angry. It did not want to wait for the others; it wanted to kill him right now. Death in the Family came up behind it and took hold of its arm, gentle but commanding. "Get the others," Death in the Family said to it. "It's time." *** Hank went out to the garage and got the broom. The bristles stuck out in odd directions like bed-head, but the wood felt good and sturdy in his hands. The memories had to be solid to hurt him, and if they were solid, he could fight back. Let them try and kill him. He owned them. His death was not their call. Hank Swanson knew he wasn't any better than anyone else. But he didn't think he was pure evil. After all,

people bought, sold, traded, stole and borrowed memories on which to build a sense of self all the time. In his retirement, he never gave much thought to a conscience. He'd always assumed that he let his wither and die. Years of exposure to murder, greed, rape, callousness, and stupidity did that to a person. They made a guy realize that evil is plainly and simply impure. Mussolini made the trains run on time, and all that. The Devil had been God's favorite angel, according to Linda's faith. So what was conscience but personal judgment? Who was he to judge anyone's acts? A person "in good conscience" couldn't righteously hate something that wasn't pure evil, and frankly, no one was an absolute either way, good or bad. He never thought of himself as being in good conscience, but he knew one thing. Shot in the Leg was wrong. He didn't hate those memories. Not that he felt no sense of justice; he'd always suspected a part of him kept the memories around to punish himself, in a way. But he simply didn't feel that he could pass sentence anymore, even on himself. It wasn't for him to decide. And his encounter with Abuse upstairs made him realize that extended to the memories, as well. They had no right to condemn him, either. He wanted to live. He made purposeful strides from the garage to the den, testing out the swing of the broom handle, listening for their approach: the whisper of feet that weren't really feet and the dull hum of their anger. In the center of the den, he waited. He heard the crash of broken glass from somewhere upstairs. He considered leaving, but it wouldn’t matter. Train station, hotel room, deep in the woods, on a sunny beach –

they'd always know where to find him. They were part of him. He could reason with them. Suggest therapy. The thought got squashed fast, though. Therapy was like Neverland magic – one had to believe in it in order for it to work. And he didn't. Never had. Even if he would consider it, therapy took years, if it worked at all. The memories were fed up now. They were out of patience. He didn't have years. Hank heard them on the stairs. He actually heard their footsteps on the stairs. They meant to intimidate him with the physical thud of their footfalls. He swung the broom handle at the air in front of him. It made a satisfying whizz sound. They entered the den together, the four of them, their expressions blank. Their eyes watched him, solemn and somehow peaceful. This was going to be their death, too, and they were ready for it. They were just riding it out, seeing it to the end. Their desperate resolve frightened him. He swung the broom handle out in front of him. "Stay away from me." They drifted closer, not quite tentative but cautious, like jaguars moving in on their prey. Each held a weapon. Death in the Family smiled. "That's all we want, Hank." It held a baseball bat. Where had it dug up that old thing? The force hadn't had a company game in years. Nam held a rake from the shed. In Vietnamese, it said, "If you hold still, we'll make it quick." "Fuck you," he responded in English. "Fuck all of you." Abuse had a broken wine bottle by the neck. Hank

kept a wary eye on it. The jagged end looked to him like a gaping, hungry mouth, salivating in the den light. He tried to think of good memories – something, anything to weaken their hold. But the bad memories had a much further head start. They'd grown strong over time – time he didn't have to build up good ones. Still, he tried to think of a birthday party as a kid, something fun, something enjoyable. He remembered instead the fight his father had gotten into with his mother on his little brother's birthday. How angry his father was when he left the house with Robbie. His mother's baby. Her favorite. Robbie looked up to Hank. Robbie didn't want to go river fishing with Dad. He was always scared when Dad got that look in his eyes and ground his teeth and clenched his fists like that. When he focused straight ahead and refused to look at anyone. His dad claimed he'd dozed off while they were waiting for the fish to bite. Robbie had gone off by himself, slipped on a rock, and fallen into the water. Robbie couldn’t swim. He never liked the water. He never liked going anywhere alone with Dad. The splashing woke up his father, but not in time to reach Robbie. Or so he said. There were no fishing trips after that. Hank hadn't been there, because he'd caught attitude that morning, and endured the smack-around and the grounding to get out of going on the trip. Hank had saved himself. No happy memories there. Death in the Family grinned at him, again seeming to read his thoughts. "Bastards." He glared at them all, and made a half-arc

with the broom handle. The memories snapped back out of range. Abuse lunged at him and he swung again, but the memory was quicker. It brought the broken glass down on his hand, and back up along the inside of his wrist, slicing it open. He dropped the broom handle. Where the bottle had bitten through his skin, tiny drops of his blood smeared the jagged teeth. He bent to pick up the broom with his left hand. He wouldn’t be able to swing it as well, especially with the pain pumping out bloody squirts down his stronger arm, but he'd make do. He looked up, and saw Death in the Family standing over him with the bat. He crab-scuttled back and stood on shaky legs. The jerky movement sent a light patter of blood across the carpet. They closed in on him again. Hank panicked. Good thoughts, try again, good thoughts… "Too late for that," Shot in the Leg said. It clicked the safety off Hank's gun. He tried to think of his wedding to Linda. It shimmered for a moment just at his periphery. He thought about the church, the cake, the champagne glasses, the dance, the way it pissed him off that his best man leered at Linda all night… And he remembered hitting her years later, over and over until she'd lost the baby. He didn't know she was pregnant. He hadn't been mad about that. It had been the dress, the silver one that he thought was too low-cut, the one that hugged her hips and drew attention to her legs, and oh God, how beautiful she'd

looked. He wasn't the only one who noticed. A lot of other men did. And she seemed to like that, the bitch. She liked other men looking at her. Didn't give a damn if he did – sure she could say she'd dressed nice for him, but he knew. The blood got all over the front of her dress. All over the comforter, too. She'd curled up on the bed, fetal and bleeding, and cried, too much in pain, too hurting to move. And he'd left her there because he couldn’t stand to see her bleeding and he couldn’t stand to hear her cry. Not like that. No satisfaction in her crying like that. She'd called the ambulance herself. Abuse held the remains of the broken bottle up by his neck, as if trying to eyeball the best angle to stick it in. He tried to think of something, anything, but each time he tried, they overwhelmed him. He remembered the village in Viet Nam with the little wide-eyed girl and her grandmother, and the American fire that fell across their bodies in an effort to route out the Viet Cong they were hiding. He remembered the punk on the convenience store floor, bleeding, scared, hurt, a kid again, the way his head blossomed red on the floor when Hank shot him. He remembered how his dad used to beat his mom and then leave and he would find her on the floor, curled up and crying, mumbling between tears about having to make dinner for the boys, both of them, even after Robbie had died. He remembered being terrified every night when his father came in his bedroom to say good night, terrified because it wasn't such a stretch to imagine those big hands that liked to hit and punch also liking to push, or to hold a throat underwater until it filled up. And every time he did something bad, he imagined that his dad had given Robbie

that same look, that same disappointment and barely simmering disgust, right before he drowned him. Fathers who cared that their youngest sons accidentally drowned didn't say accident as if it was a blessing in disguise, and they didn't share a look with their eldest sons that said You could be next, if you cross me. "Wait," he muttered. "Wait." Shot in the Leg trained the gun on his head. It would get its turn last. Finish him off, probably, after each of them had gotten in a good lick. Inside, he chuckled, but he knew it wasn't really funny. None of them had opted to use the toaster. Death in the Family took a step forward. "Good-bye, Hank." "Wait," he said again, his gaze darting around the room for an exit, an opening between them through which he might escape. There was none. He swung at Nam blindly, but Abuse must have warned them. Nam blurred – everywhere but the wrist and the hand that held the rake -- just seconds before Hank's broom handle passed through its chest, then grew sharper and more solid again in its wake. The first blow from its rake cracked against his skull. His head froze and the room in front of him wavered like heat off hot pavement. Then the pain thudded black spots across his eyes. The chilly draw of glass across his cheeks and forehead, the wet of blood running into blood, felt strangely right. What was his brother's name? Death in the Family swung the baseball bat. Home

run. Hank felt another sharp crack. He smelled perfume but he couldn't remember whose it was. His eyes were painted black, and he slumped down onto something soft. Couch. He heard a crunch and felt something give above his left eye. He felt light. Soft, like the couch. Even the pain in his head felt fuzzy. Bad reception. Couldn’t see Kelly and Regis. He'd been in the army. When? Where? It didn't matter. It all stopped with thunder against his head. *** A few weeks later, Detective Cauley stood in the den of Hank Swanson's house. Without the yellow tape, the swarming CSIs, the investigating officers, and the miscellaneous craning necks and curious frowns of neighbors and news people, Cauley could think alone, in the center of everything. His gaze wandered to the couch. The clean-up crew had gotten most of the blood out of the middle cushion, and all of it from the carpet. Cauley had known Hank for years. He'd gone to his retirement party, in fact, down at the station. He knew Hank had problems -- lady trouble, mostly -- but Cauley couldn’t imagine anything that would have driven the man to suicide. Hank just never seemed too troubled by anything. The medical examiner said that Hank's body had been worked over pretty good – baseball bat, broken bottle, rake

-- before the shot to the head. But the only fingerprints on any of the weapons were Hank's, and there was gunpowder residue on his fingers. Given several of the angles of the cuts, the ME had concluded that he'd done most if not all the other injuries to himself. Cauley could almost feel the sum total of Hank Swanson's life swirling heavy around him in the room and throughout the house. The darkest of corners did not go unused there. The dusty shelves, the bare furnishings, the wear and tear of lonely routine – none of it was empty. In that house, Cauley still felt the man who'd lived there, or at least remnants of the man. The house hadn't cooled yet. The spirit – or spirits – of his past hadn't left. "Shame," he muttered to himself. "He was one of our own." Behind Detective Cauley, Dark Alley, "Accidental" Shooting, and First Homicide waited, pelting his back with black-eyed daggers of frustration. They felt strong in that house, stronger than they ever had before. They felt alive. And they felt angry.

CLUB SAUDADE: Thomas Tessier He followed the woman's directions and had no trouble finding the place, but Jay was disappointed when he got there and actually saw it. The Platts Mills neighborhood was small and isolated, hemmed in by Route 8 on one side and the Naugatuck River on the other, an unpromising location for a club featuring live music. He crossed the bridge, passed under the railroad trestle, and there it was, just as she'd told him – the abandoned brick factory building at the bottom of Bristol Hill. Jay pulled into the vacant lot across the street and parked. He sat there for a few moments, staring at the three-story building, which stretched halfway up the street. Most of the windows were broken, and some still had rusted old air-conditioning units mounted in them – as if one day everybody had suddenly been given five minutes notice to leave. The outside walls were engulfed in ragged ivy that reached all the way to the roof of the building in some places. Shrubs that had once no doubt added an attractive decorative touch, now stood more ten feet tall and the lower branches sprawled across the sidewalk to the curb. Hardly any graffiti, another sign of how abandoned the place was. Jay checked his watch – he was five minutes early. He got out of his car, locked it, and lit a cigarette. The woman's name was Mimi Grenier. She had approached him the previous Friday night in the bar at Lloyd's Lounge on Route 7 in Danbury, a few minutes after Jay and his band, Nightblue, had finished their set. She told him that she owned and ran Club Saudade in Waterbury, which had

grown passably successful over the last few years by appealing to specific audiences – they had assigned nights for Portuguese/Brazilian music, jazz, blues, and one night a week for the metalheads and bikers. That last one would pay for the jazz and blues nights, Jay figured. The Saudade had lost its lease and been closed for about a month now, but Mimi had just secured a deal to use part of the basement in this old factory building as the new location for the club. She had teams of plumbers, electricians and carpenters lined up to come in and transform the place, and she hoped to re-open in another month or two. She was insistent that Saudade's following was strong and loyal – when the bookings went well, people came from as far away as Hartford and New Haven – and they would come back again to the new venue. All of which sounded fine. Though, now that he was there, Jay saw no trucks or vans, no sign of any electricians, plumbers or builders coming and going. There wasn't even another car in the lot where he was parked, which made him wonder if Mimi herself was even there, waiting for him. But he could see a narrow lane off the street, running along the bottom end of the building. That was where she told him he'd find the entrance. Maybe she had parked her car up that lane. What really hooked him was what she had said to him about his music, the band's sound, the mix of blues and jazz, rock and other influences from around the world. Since he composed all of Nightblue's original music and chose most of the covers they did, she was in fact praising him for who he was – the creativity, the intelligence, the skill and judgment, for bringing all that together and

making it work. On stage. Live. And he was ready to hear that – from someone, anybody. Jay had been pushing Nightblue for more than ten years now. His day job in customer service for a big health care insurance company, at the call center in Danbury, was not what anyone would regard as a career. But it allowed him the luxury of working on Nightblue, which he thought of as his true career, his real life's work. Someone would hear them. Him. There were other burdens – the regular personnel hassles, losing his keyboards guy or drummer or guitarist – people do give up, move on – and the difficulty in finding replacements who could fit in and also dug the music. Jay played bass and knew he wasn't anything more than an adequate singer. Over the years, he'd never been able to find a decent vocalist, so Nightblue evolved primarily as an instrumental band, a bit of the blues, a jazz influence, a techno flavor – and then Danny, the synth ace, had a little meth issue come up that landed him inside. It was always the same, kind of like trying to patch a leaky tire while out you're driving around on it. Oh, and the personal side of it wasn't brilliant either. Jay had pushed on through one failed marriage and two terminated relationships. Nina told him --- Arrrggh, forget that. So, what Mimi said to him mattered, the possibility of a regular weekly gig in a place where people came – and listened. That would be so good. He knew that he was probably reading too much into her words, but reading too much into anything that sounded good was par for the

course in this business. If you didn't believe, why bother? Jay tossed his cigarette to the ground, crushed it out with his heel and crossed the street. He found the doorway a few steps up the lane. A cardboard sign was tacked to the top of the wooden door, hand-printed, wobbly, in marker pen: CLUB SAUDADE COMING SOON! He pulled on the door handle and it opened easily. A steep flight of wooden stairs down to the basement level. He entered the building. The second or third step from the top, the stairs simply collapsed beneath him and Jay fell to the floor below. Broken boards hit him, the wind was knocked out of him, and pain sprouted up all over his body – dull, sharp, achy, in his bones and muscles. His head throbbed and blared angrily. He didn't move for a long time, lying there gasping, his brain trying to take in all the negative feedback, sort it out and understand. Dust in the air. Dim light. A heap of pain. A bad memory always turns up when you least need it, and now he heard Nina saying, You don't live in the real world. Well, if you could see me now. How real is this? But she was right. Take hope one step too far, and it will fuck you over. That memory wanted to be heard again by him, while Jay was still upstairs, out on the street, and he hadn't listened to it. Nina would have a sad smile on her face, and turn away. Someone turning away from you – is not casual. Jay gathered his breath and slowly pushed himself up

from the cement floor. He expected people to come rushing to his aid – Mimi, some workers, anybody. But no one appeared, he was alone. He looked up and saw that the stairs were gone, a pile of loose, rotting lumber jumbled all around him. A couple of dangling, jagged fragments of wood stuck out in the air up by the door. He had fallen twelve, maybe fifteen feet, but at least it didn't feel like he had broken any bones. A yellow light bulb glowed dimly in the ceiling high above him. So there was electricity here, anyhow, and that vaguely encouraged him. But he could also see that he had no chance of climbing up to the door and getting out. He tried his cell phone, but couldn't get a signal. So he would have to find another door or a window, or stairs. Jay stumbled into the large room that opened up off the stairway, kicking up dust. But it was not merely dust, it was some silky, very fine powder that blossomed in the air around him, filling his nostrils and lining his throat, choking him. It obscured his vision, burning his eyes, and rubbing them only made it worse. He caught a glimpse of a door in one of the walls, and moved quickly toward it, kicking up more plumes of the noxious gray powder. Coughing, spitting, he stumbled down three steps and found himself in a much larger room. More yellow bulbs in the ceiling provided the only illumination. Jay looked around, trying to understand what he had gotten himself into. Did Mimi even remember that she had an appointment to meet him there today, at this hour? This room was large enough to serve as the main area for a club, with a stage in one corner, lots of tables and a bar – he could see that it would all fit. But nothing had been done, no one was here,

and it didn't look as if anyone had actually visited the place since it had closed. He walked around, looking for any possible way out. But the basement windows had been blocked off with sheet metal, to keep out intruders. Jay thought he might be able to pry or kick the metal loose on one of the windows, if he could reach it – but the sunken floor made that impossible. Perhaps he could find a crate or something to stand on, and a board or a piece of scrap to help work the sheet metal loose. But, as large as the room was, it was empty. Nothing but dust and long sheets of cobwebs that hung in the dead air. Jay spotted an opening in the wall at the far end of the room. It looked like a corridor or passageway of some kind, but when he got to it he could see that it was more like a tunnel, presumably to some other part of the factory's basement. The yellow lights in the tunnel ceiling tilted at odd angles, and Jay saw that portions of the ceiling had rotted away. Electrical cables dangled, the insulation cracked and fallen away in places, exposing bare, live wires. It baffled him that the power was still on in this deserted building. He heard a liquid sound, spattering, and then he saw what it was – some thick, whitish fluid dripping from numerous spots in the ceiling, hitting the concrete floor. Jay bent over to touch it, but as he did so one drop from above landed on the back of his neck, some kind of acid or alkaline pain burning, eating into his flesh. He cried out and jumped away, wiping at it with his hand, then brushing it away on his jacket. He tried his cell again, again nothing.

Jay sat down on the floor just outside the tunnel and lit a cigarette. He tried to picture how the factory was built, particularly how the basement was structured. There must be separate areas that were used for different purposes, each of them connected by passages like this tunnel. But somewhere, there had to be more access points to and from the outside, as well as stairs to the next floor up. He stubbed the cigarette out and stood up. The only way to go was forward. Say goodbye to one London Fog windbreaker, Jay thought as he pulled his jacket up over his head to protect him from the dripping waste liquid. He ducked low to avoid the dangling wires, and ran through the tunnel – into darkness. The floor disappeared and he fell another three steps down, hitting the ground with a thump and a grunt. Okay, so this was another area, a little deeper into the hillside. Jay waited a few moments so his eyes could adjust to the dark. No light seeping in from any blocked windows. The light from the tunnel barely penetrated a few feet. But after a while, Jay picked out what he thought was a very faint glow in the distance. He began moving cautiously in that direction, one arm held out to detect any floor pillars or other objects he might bump into, his feet slide-stepping along. You're delusional. That's what Amy had told him. About Nightblue's prospects. Granted, that came shortly before she left him and was part of the process of her making up her mind to do so. She wanted him to get serious. He was in his thirties and had next to nothing to show for it. What, a CD that he'd paid for himself to make, and that nobody wanted? Yes, it was great to follow your

dream, but what if your dream led you to a dead end? Jay understood her point, and Jay disagreed. But now, in his present circumstances, it was hard not to recall Amy's words and wonder how he had come to be in this place, this trap. More to the point, how to get out of it. He continued to move toward the dull suggestion of light – he could still see it ahead of him, though he gone some little distance already, and it was no brighter. Jay had a shaky sense of up and down in this darkness, but he did get the impression that the glow he saw was closer to the ground, not on a wall or the ceiling. And it was too diffuse to be a light bulb. His right foot hit something. He reached down to touch it and realized that it was a piece of broken glass. He cautiously patted around the area just in front of his feet, and the stuff was everywhere he touched -- broken, jagged shards of glass covering the floor, sticking up dangerously, and it was several inches deep. He tried to move around it, first to one side, then the other, but heaps of glass ranged from one wall to the other. Jay stood there for a moment, staring at the cloud of pale light ahead, wondering if it would be better to go back to where he had started and try to scale the walls to reach the door. Even if he failed, he could sit there and wait, somebody was bound to come and investigate his car. Sooner or later. He could call out when he heard someone in the area, even if it was just a passing car. Maybe homeless people had broken into the floor above and would return in the evening. Someone was bound to hear him, or find him. It made a certain sense, it was as good an option as any other at this point.

But. Find him. Something about that sounded too -final. And the glow of light was not that far ahead now. Jay decided that he had to see what it was. If it turned out to be a bust, then he would make his way back and take his chances there. Oddly – it seemed to him -- he still felt no sense of alarm, just annoyance at what he was going through, and a certain detached wonderment. He stepped forward, wagging each foot as he placed it down slowly, to knock aside any pieces of glass that were sticking up. The glass crunched under him, and he could feel bits of it biting into his sneakers at times, but he always raised his foot and shook them off before proceeding the next step. It wasn't quick or easy, but he adjusted, and soon got to be pretty good at knocking the glass down or aside as he walked on it. The pale glow of light drew closer. Jay's confidence bounced back. You're one of the good guys. Thank you, Lisa. I loved you from the first time we met and talked. Same with me, for you. But, man. You really want to be a loser. Jay didn't think that was fair, or accurate. Just because he'd referred once or twice to this great bluesman or that jazz titan, who'd spent entire decades of their lives playing in cheap joints and never making any real money, didn't mean that he wanted to live like that himself. He had no martyr-to-art complex. He was paying his dues, and he believed that would eventually come back to benefit him, and the band. But Lisa might have been right about one thing. She

told him that he was burying himself and the group by staying in Danbury, playing bars and clubs up and down Route 7 and just across the state line in New York. The sound he was working, he needed to be somewhere else – Brooklyn or Boston, Philly or D.C. Maybe. Probably. But that's just not on. Moving four guys, five, who have day jobs and girlfriends, one toddler. On spec? Ten years ago, maybe. Jay could do it, but the others couldn't, not ever. Did that make him true, or just a wanker? His right foot came down, and he felt no glass. A firm surface, one angled slightly downward. He stepped forward, left foot down, and both feet went flying out from under him. Jay banged down on something very hard and smooth and slick, as if it were coated with oil, and his body slid on it with astonishing speed. Then it was gone, and he shot off into the air. Falling. Hitting something soft, moist, yielding. Stunned, he couldn't move for several moments. He had landed. On something like soil. But looser. Something that smelled richer and riper, like compost. He looked up. The walls seemed terribly high, and he could tell that they were walls because they were encrusted with chemical deposits that gave off a phosphorescent glow, the only light source. Jay could even make out the dark shadow of the metal ramp that he had stepped on and slid down. It was far, too far above. Baby, let's give it one more go. He reached into his pocket. It was worth a try, but the deeper you go, the less likely you are to get a signal.

He stayed where he was, lying on his back in the muck, not knowing what to do. Random corners of his brain opened briefly, asking Okay? or Close? and then shutting by themselves, as if they didn't in fact care what he wanted to do.. It interested him a bit, but Jay didn't exactly care either, because caring wouldn't make any difference. It wasn't long before he felt the movement -something going on that vibrated in the ground and hummed into his body. He put his hands down to push himself up – and his fingers closed around some bones. It was the lower arm and hand of a human being. He dropped it, and it occurred to him that the most amazing thing about him might be that he was so calm, could look at things and think about them without getting shook. While at the same time, he could be so hopeful and expectant about what he did. The soil rose up in front of him, a creature emerged, something like an enormous salamander, wet and black, iridescent gold streaks and splotches on its back, claws on its rather small front paws. Bands of teeth were exposed as the beast opened its mouth and moved toward Jay. Fear numbed him to what was coming, and he didn't even try to move now. The monster lunged at him, its jaws plucking him off the ground, clamping down across his chest, lower abdomen and hips. The women were right. Jay had kind of known that all along. He'd probably just been hoping that in the end it wouldn't matter. And it didn't.

SNOW ANGELS: Greg F. Gifune Five hours out of New York I found myself on the Cape Cod highway creeping toward Whaler’s Bay. The snow had hit halfway into Rhode Island, and the closer I got to the Atlantic the heavier it had become, blowing across the road in thick sloppy bursts, blurring gray skies and making visibility beyond the wagging windshield wipers nearly nonexistent. The Sagamore Bridge, an enormous structure of steel and concrete linking the Cape to the mainland had been difficult to negotiate in the storm, and I figured I’d made it just under the wire. If this weather persisted they’d close the thing down within the hour. But now on the other side, the desolate path of highway cut through the heavy forests was still familiar. Nothing much ever changed around here, and maybe this time, that was on my side. I glanced at the brightly wrapped box on the passenger seat before returning my eyes to the whirlwind of white. The day before Christmas, less than twenty minutes from the small town where I’d briefly lived, married, and had a child. Most times it seemed I’d been gone a lot longer than two years. I’d stayed away because it was what Amanda wanted. For the first few months after my move to New York I’d talked to Bethany on the phone, but she was only four and couldn’t understand why her father had gone away, and ultimately it became too painful for me to even hear her voice. When I’d told Amanda I planned to pull back from them completely, she agreed that would be best. I fought off the pangs of rage and tightened my grip

on the steering wheel, struggling to keep the car on the road against the force of an increasing wind. I wondered if the kid would even recognize me; much less remember me. I wasn’t sure I had the right to interfere with that after all that had happened, but Bethany was my daughter—my only child—and I missed her desperately. There hadn’t been a day in the years I’d been gone I hadn’t thought of her, pictured that sweet face in my mind, or replayed the times we’d had together before things came apart. Amanda I’d gotten over—we were never that good together—kids who’d met at college in Boston and fallen fast and hard, and who should’ve called it quits after graduation but got married instead. Even when I’d asked her to marry me, I knew I no longer loved her, but she was carrying our child, and I couldn’t abandon either of them. Ironic, now. Yet the one positive that came of our relationship was the miracle that was Bethany. And I’d gone long enough without her. A sign announcing the Whaler’s Bay exit was a mile away emerged from the whiteout just long enough for me to see it before being swallowed by the snow. Though I was alone on the road, I checked the rearview out of habit, and carefully pulled over into the breakdown lane. Slamming the car into Park I relaxed a bit and drew a slow, deep breath. I cracked the window and lit a cigarette, the icy snow tapping my cheek like tiny needles, the crisp air a welcome change from the car heater. I puffed my smoke, held up a hand. Wasn’t shaking too badly. I’d had a consistent tremor in both hands since that day so long ago, but with drink and nicotine I’d learned to keep it under relative control. I watched the snow a while, loving and hating it,

attracted and frightened by it, all at once. And just like every other time it had snowed since that day, I replayed the moments before it all went down, Bethany and me stomping through the snow. Running and playing in the drifts in the backyard. Laughter…so genuine and carefree, like only kids can be. Bethany in her snowsuit, stumbling around and giggling, chasing the flakes. The two of us lying there, staring up at a barren sky, making snow angels, then walking across the quiet stretch of yard, her small hand in mine as we approached the forest line. “Where do the animals go when it snows, Daddy?” she’d whispered, as if fearful a louder tone might disrupt the natural silence. “How do they stay warm?” *** With a heavy sigh I flicked the cigarette out into the storm and wiped my face with a sleeve, aware now, just as I’d been then, that there was something in the snow besides those angels we’d made, something more than woodland creatures watching us from deep within the forest. Something else… I dropped the column shift into Drive and pulled back out onto the highway, back into the storm and the secrets I knew that snow contained somewhere just beyond the scope of everyday vision. *** Main Street was dead empty, already blanketed in nearly half a foot of snow. Faint lights in small houses cut

the storm, but all the businesses had closed. The General Store, the Post Office, the Police Station—everything looked the same. I followed the main drag to the first intersection, took a right and followed the rural road for nearly a mile; familiar visions of the years I’d spent there trickling past my mind’s eye. I found Bobby’s cottage set back from the road atop an incline, nestled among trees, branches weighted with snow. I left Bethany’s gift but grabbed a bag from the back and trudged across the lawn, stepped up onto the small porch and gave the door a thump before I could change my mind. When there was no response I knocked again, and this time it was answered. Bobby looked startled at first, his deep-seated dark eyes squinting and his face registering disbelief. But then that old familiar smile emerged and he was slamming into me, arms embracing me. “Steve, Jesus! Man, it’s so good to see you.” He dragged me into the house before I could respond, shut the door then turned and looked at me like an admiring parent. “What the hell you doing here? Why didn’t you call?” I reached into the bag and pulled out a fifth of vodka. “Merry Christmas.” “Thanks, man.” He couldn’t seem to stop smiling and nervously straightening his thinning hair. As usual, he had a scruffy look and needed a shave. But I knew I looked worse. “I can’t believe you’re standing here.” “Believe it,” I said with a shrug. “How’s everything?” He took my coat and tossed it over the back of a recliner, then led me across the small den, past a Christmas

tree skirted with presents, multi-colored lights blinking, as if in time to the dancing flames in a stone fireplace on the far wall. “Good,” he said as we entered an even smaller kitchen. As if only then remembering who it was he was talking to, the smile slowly dissipated. “You all right, man?” “Close as I ever get.” Bobby grabbed two glasses from a cupboard, cracked the vodka and motioned to the table for me to sit. “I got a present for Bethany I want to drop off tomorrow some time.” I grabbed the bottle from the center of the table, poured us each a drink. “I hate to barge in on you, but you think I could crash here just for tonight? I know it’s Christmas Eve and all, but—” “Of course, of course.” He killed his drink and was smiling again, but it didn’t last. “So you still in Philly?” “Went home to the city for a couple months but it was hard after everything that happened. I moved upstate, been there since. Got a little place, just a studio apartment, but it beats the street. Been working nights at a warehouse unloading trucks for the last couple years. I keep to myself mostly, nobody really knows me up there, so it works out.” “Working nights, huh? That sucks.” I looked at him over the rim of my glass. “I don’t sleep much anyway.” “Yeah, you look…” “Like shit.” “Just tired, man. You look tired.” Bobby sighed and leaned back a bit in his chair. “Why the hell didn’t you call me all this time? You just up and left, never said goodbye or nothing.”

I stared down into the vodka. “I didn’t really know what else to do.” “I know it was rough,” he said softly. “Lots of people had plenty to say around here. Small town gossip and bullshit, you know how it is.” “Funny,” I said, feeling the vodka warm me, “what people believe.” Bobby looked away. “Last thing I knew was when you checked yourself into that…” “Psychiatric ward,” I finished for him. “You can say it.” “Then I heard you got out and just took off.” “I did thirty days,” I told him, pushing the memories of that place from my mind. “They said I was sane. Bet the folks in town never talked about that though. Didn’t much matter, Steve’s crazy, that’s all everybody thought.” Bobby straightened his posture. “Not me, man.” “I’m here to see Bethany,” I told him. “But that’s not the only reason. I’m going into those woods again, Bobby. The shit I saw out there I still see. Everyday, I still see it. Every time I close my eyes. I try not to think about it but…but it won’t go away. Even after four years. If anything, it’s getting stronger.” He stared at me as if he hadn’t heard me. “What the hell really happened out there, man?” *** Giggles…laughter whispering through the trees as I crept into the woods, glancing over my shoulder, seeing Bethany still standing in the yard; small mittens over her

eyes as she counted aloud. Moving through the beginnings of forest, my boots crunching snow, the flakes falling, the beauty of it all. Cognizant that I’d never been this deep in the woods behind our home and aware that Bethany might hurt herself or wander off looking for me if I hid too far away, I stopped and slid behind the base of a large oak tree. From my position I could see her struggling to remember her numbers and the proper sequence, her tiny form mingling with the plumes of mist tumbling from my nostrils and mouth. Peeking around the tree I watched as she trudged through the snow, perhaps thirty yards away. I leaned back, away from the tree, then to the side, breathing heavily. Something foreign—intrusive—different than the tickling snowflakes—brushed my cheek. My eyes shifted, taking in the swirling snow, blurring the treetops and pale sky beyond, and focused on a hand, the skin gray, bloodless, nails brittle and dull. I staggered back, lost my footing and fell onto the seat of my pants, the snow breaking my fall and surrounding me as I sunk deeper; my eyes still trained on the area above me. A body of what was once a man hung suspended from a thick branch, feet tied to hold it secure, arms dangling, swaying gently in the winter breeze, hands extended as if reaching out for me. The eyes, still wide, mouth open; forever frozen in a silent shriek; face locked in the horror experienced at the moment of death, the body gutted like cattle, an open and empty cavity where a chest and stomach should have been. Scrambling to my feet, staggering about and trying to find my bearings, I saw the others. Four or five bodies, all

hanging from trees, all mutilated and displayed like demonic ornaments on snow-covered branches. “Daddy, where are you?” Her voice shattered the madness, dragged me back, and I was suddenly charging through the trees. I closed on Bethany, scooped her up in my arms without breaking stride and bolted across the yard, struggling through the snow toward the house, feeling as if something was following, chasing, closing in from behind. Confused and startled, Bethany began to cry, and I realized I had too, choking back tears, trying to make it to the house before… *** The vision and Bobby’s sullen face blended together as the memories dissolved, like the serene surface of water once disturbed and now rippling back into focus. He noticed my glass was empty, and, with a sigh, took hold of the bottle and poured me another few inches. He seemed incapable of resuming eye contact, staring instead at the table between us, his mouth opening as if wanting to form words but unable to produce them. I was about to rescue him when the sound of a door opening distracted me. A young woman sauntered in, clad only in a skimpy white tank top and a pair of matching panties. Her dark hair was short and mussed; eyes still dull with sleep, black eyeliner smudged and fake eyelashes batting slowly. Bobby smiled. “Hey, babe.” Bare feet padding quietly across the tile floor, she

moved to the refrigerator, a slight grin curling her lips, eyes on me throughout. “Hey.” “Steve, this is Bambi.” Bobby threw back his drink. “Bam, meet Steve.” The woman pulled a small bottle of orange juice from the refrigerator, gulped down a bit and returned it, wiping her lips with the back of a hand. “Heard a lot about you, Steve,” she said, voice whispery. “Good to meet you finally.” “Nice to meet you,” I said, struggling to stay calm. The entire time I’d known Bobby he’d lived alone. “Merry Christmas.” “Yeah,” she said, slinking over to Bobby long enough to kiss him briefly. “You too.” I watched as Bobby pulled her close, returned the kiss then gave her behind a gentle slap as she turned and headed back into the hallway. “Gotta hop in the shower,” she mumbled. We sat quietly at the table until the sound of old pipes rattling disturbed the silence, quickly replaced by rushing water. I sparked a butt, trying to think of something to say. “We been living together for about a year now,” he said. “She’s only twenty-two but she’s a townie, I known her family for years. You remember the strip club over by the canal? She dances there a couple nights a week. Makes good money and I’m still over at the mill so it works out.” I nodded, still trying to erase the memory of dark nipples pressed against the thin fabric of her shirt from my mind. “Shy ain’t even in Bambi’s vocabulary,” he chuckled.

“Believe me.” I forced an obligatory laugh and silence fell over the room again. “Listen,” Bobby finally said, leaning across the table, “maybe what you’re doing is a good thing, man. Maybe going back out into them woods is the best thing you can do. You need to see for yourself what’s really out there.” My eyes found his. “And what’s that, Bobby?” “Nothing but forest.” “I thought you said you believed me.” He ran a hand through his hair, reached for the bottle then seemed to change his mind. “I believe you believe what you saw.” “Now you sound like those fucking psychiatrists.” “Well, Jesus Christ, man, what the hell you expect me to say? You’re talking about bodies hanging from the goddamn trees. Amanda told me she called the cops when you got back to the house. Dody checked it out. I talked to him myself a few days later. He didn’t find nothing out there. Nothing.” “I know what I saw. I don’t give a shit what Dody— ” “He’s the chief of police, for Christ’s sake. My old man was a buddy with Dody for years. I known him as long as I been alive. There ain’t but four cops in the whole town, and every one of them checked out them woods, Steve. Don’t you think as cops they’d want to know if there was fucking bodies out there?” Bobby pushed himself to his feet and began pacing next to the table. “Look, I think you saw something out there, okay? But the mind plays tricks on us sometimes.”

“I know what I saw, Bobby. It’s never left me.” He spun round, hands on hips. “Fine. Then where did they go?” I remained calm, motioned to his chair. “Sit down and hear me out.” Bobby did as I asked and immediately poured himself another drink. “I lived here for four years,” I said softly. “Moving back to Philadelphia wasn’t an option as far as Amanda was concerned. I never felt she really wanted me to live here either, but we were together, we had to be somewhere. In all the time I lived here, Bobby, I never felt welcome. I always felt like an outsider. You were the only person who ever gave me a chance, ever even showed any indication you wanted to be my friend, and I know that was only because you and Amanda had been close your entire lives. Amanda had her nursing degree and a job offer at Doc Bradley’s office, so I stayed home with Bethany while she worked. It was very isolating; do you understand? I lived in a town where no one wanted anything to do with me, where I never had contact with anyone other than you. Amanda’s an only child, her parents had already passed away, and my family was all in Philly. I remember the town meetings everyone went to, and how Amanda would always insist I stay home with Bethany and keep out of town business. I was a resident here. I was married to a townie, raising a child here, yet even my own wife always treated me like an outcast. Do you have any idea—” “Steve,” he interrupted, “Whaler’s Bay is a small town. We got a population of less than two hundred, and they’re all people whose families have lived here for generations. Most of us—me included—have forefathers

who founded the town as far back as the late 1700s, for Christ’s sake. Like you ever gave a shit about town politics anyway. You’re talking old Yankee folk here, and we aren’t always the most hospitable, welcoming type—I admit it— but these ain’t bad people either.” “This town has secrets, Bobby.” “Show me one that doesn’t.” I smoked my cigarette, watched him. “I did some research into the history of this place, man. I did some—” “So it’s a big conspiracy against you, right?” Bobby laughed, as if it were impossible to react to my words in any other manner. “Steve, you had some sort of breakdown, okay?” He slammed his glass on the table and was on his feet again. “The reason them bodies weren’t there when the cops went to check is because you fucking imagined it. Get a grip, man. It was two years ago and you’re still killing yourself over this.” He closed the gap between us and put a hand on my shoulder. “You got a suitcase or anything?” I nodded. “Go on out to the car and get it. I’ll let Bambi know you’ll be here for dinner and staying the night. You been drinking and that storm’s only getting worse.” “Maybe I should just—” His grip tightened as he turned his face to a small set of double windows over the sink. Night was coming fast. “It’s Christmas Eve.” The smile was back as his free hand scooped my car keys from the table. “Where the hell else you gonna go? Shouldn’t nobody be alone tonight.” ***

Standing by my car, the rear door open, I looked to the sky. The snow had become a bit lighter but was still falling steadily. The quiet of this town wrapped itself around me like a funereal shroud, offering fear and impending doom where peace and tranquility should have resided instead. The remains of daylight were slowly being absorbed into pewter skies, as darkness skulked closer with the silent gait of the predator I knew it to be. I gazed at the duffel bag on the seat, reached a hand inside and pushed the change of clothes aside. I pulled the 9mm free. Until the day prior, when I’d purchased it on the street back in New York, I’d never held a gun in my life. It felt light and easy in my hand, like some dime-store toy, and for a moment I considered leaving it in the car. I glanced back at the cottage. Dull light from flames flickering in the fireplace danced behind sheer curtains. With a sigh, I shoved the weapon deep into the duffel bag, pulled the drawstring closed and hoisted it up over my shoulder. *** The hours that followed past slowly, as night settled over Whaler’s Bay. Bambi served a roasted chicken that the three of us ate at the kitchen table; occasional forced small talk interspersed with silverware clanging plates, and Christmas tunes playing lightly from a small radio. The tension lessened a bit when we moved to the den, but the underlying sense of impending doom remained. Bobby continued to drink heavily, hiding his discomfort and attempting a drunken demeanor. Bambi sat across from me in a recliner, bare feet crossed at the ankle and tucked

beneath her, her outfit of underwear replaced by an oversized sweater that hung below her bare knees. The look in her eyes burned straight through me, only adding to the surreal nature of the evening. The look was familiar yet foreign at once, an uninhibited sexual heat masking something more. Something I knew could not be avoided. Something I knew would come to a head before this night was through. When she went to bed, she kissed Bobby goodnight then smiled at me once more; eyes dropping the length of me as her tongue slowly traced her lips. “Sure was nice meeting you, Steve,” she said. And then she slipped into the kitchen, hesitated, and lifted the sweater up and off over her head, exposing her nudity beneath. With a quick glance over her shoulder, the sweater dangling from her hand, she vanished into the hallway and the darkness beyond. Bobby and I sat quietly for perhaps another hour. He had a few more drinks while I sipped the same one I’d been nursing since dinner. Stretched out next to the fireplace, feeling the warmth, I gathered a blanket he had brought out for me around my legs and leaned back on a spare pillow. The idea of curling up and drifting to sleep there on the floor, next to the fire—although impossible—was appealing, and I was relieved when he finally rose from the couch, yawned, and offered a dramatic stretch. “Listen,” he said softly, crouching down next to me. “I’m gonna give you some advice, and you take it for what it’s worth, you hear?” The flames reflected in his bloodshot eyes. “When you go see Bethany tomorrow, give her the present, spend some time with her, and be cool. Then go home, Steve. Go home and get this shit straight in your

head. Get yourself some help.” I nodded, forced a slight smile. “You be here in the morning?” he asked. “I don’t know.” He gave me a gentle pat on the shoulder, and with a muffled grunt, stood up. “Well, Merry Christmas, man.” “Merry Christmas.” *** Darkness draped the cottage, the slowly dying fire providing the only light. I laid back, head on the pillow, still fully dressed, and reached a hand out to the duffel bag beside me. Feeling the hard lump of the 9mm beneath the canvas provided a sense of perverse security, but my eyes remained trained on the kitchen doorway, waiting, knowing what was coming. Wind whistled, the cottage creaked, the fire crackled, and my mind raced, still uncertain I could do what had to be done in order to survive. And in the relative darkness, I found myself questioning whether survival was as important to me as I had previously suspected. *** She separated from the shadows lingering beyond a single shaft of moonlight cutting the kitchen. Moving silently, only the sound of her breath disrupted the stillness. A wisp of perfume preceded her, and as Bambi knelt beside me I felt warm hands gently caress my chest. I slid shut my eyes, offered a soft moan, feigning sleep as her hands slid lower. The blanket pushed aside, she fumbled with my

jeans and pushed a hand beneath them. I grew in her palm, felt myself pulled out and into the open, one hand working it slowly, the other gliding back across my chest, this time under my shirt, fake fingernails parting the hair there, circling my nipples, tickling my throat. My eyes opened slowly; focused first on her bent over me, taking me into her mouth now, the warm moisture tightening, suckling powerfully. A quick shiver of pain fired through me as her teeth caught me, and my head lolled to the side, seeing over her shoulder to where Bobby stood nude in the doorway, watching with a glazed smile. I slowly reached a hand out to her buttocks, stroked them before moving it up over her bare back, to her shoulder, and finally to the back of her head. Pushing her deeper, I timed my subtle pelvic thrusts with her own rhythmic motion, my mouth dropping open, the air escaping my lungs in one frenzied gasp. Bobby stepped deeper into the room, his erection glistening in the darkness, his hand greeting it as he watched us, the same odd grin gripping his face. A look much like Bambi had displayed earlier. A look beyond lust. Beyond hunger. Fingers locked into Bambi’s hair, my free hand crept across the floor to my duffel bag, trembling as I worked the drawstring and pushed it open, searching until I felt the 9mm against my palm. Drawn deeper into her mouth, I exploded, emptying into her with a rush of blinding rapture, my body bucking, then relaxing, then again going taut before drowning beneath a wave of exhaustion.

Bambi released me from her mouth, her hand still stroking me, eyes wide and glazed, lips and chin coated and dripping with only the beginnings of what she hoped to consume. And then Bobby was moving across the room, a hand coming into view from behind his back… Bambi’s laughter distracted me. Humorless, evil laughter from deep within her, as she clamped a hand around my throat, trying to pin me there, opened wide her mouth to reveal a flash of teeth, and sunk them into my thigh. My scream overpowered the whisper of the wind as I yanked the 9mm free just as Bobby closed on me, revealing the hunting knife in his hand, a quick wink of light as fire reflected against steel. Raising my leg, I kicked Bambi as hard as I could, knocking her aside, her teeth tearing from of me just before I brought the gun around and shot Bobby full in the face. The sound was deafening in the small room, and in a flash a dark hole appeared between his eyes as the back of his head exploded in a spray of crimson, bone, and brain tissue. He collapsed, the knife falling to the floor as his body toppled backward into the Christmas tree, knocking it over, the sound of branches scraping walls then floor accompanying Bambi’s shriek of shock and rage. I scrambled away from her, my back against the wall, my feet kicking, knocking wrapped packages aside, my arms locked but trembling violently, the gun aimed at her as she swung her head around. Still on all fours, my blood and come staining her lips, she seemed more a wild animal than a human being, teeth bared, chest heaving, breasts

glistening, rising and falling with each ravenous breath. “Don’t,” I said, uncertain if I’d actually spoken the word or only thought it. I fired just as she leapt for me. She was dead before she collapsed across my legs, her bodily fluids spraying me this time, spattering across my face in a quick shower of fine mist. The gun fell from my hand, blood still dripped from the bite wound in my leg, and bile erupted from my mouth as tears flooded my eyes. My body bucked, alternating between violent sobs and an odd numb sensation. Somehow, the lights strung about the toppled Christmas tree had been reactivated. Blinking in time, illuminating the faces of the dead surrounding me in pulsing intervals, I began to laugh through the tears, an uncontrollable cackle at home in all the madness. At home soaking in evil. An evil I now shared. *** Once I was able to stand on my own power, I dragged myself to the bathroom. After washing the blood and fluids from my face, neck, and hands, a quick inspection of my upper thigh revealed a small section of torn flesh, accompanied by bruising, the flow of blood now stopped and caked around the punctures. I found some peroxide, gauze, and tape in the medicine cabinet, dressed the wound as best as my shaking hands allowed, then moved back into the kitchen and collapsed into a chair at the table. I burned the remaining hours of darkness drinking,

chain-smoking, and waiting for dawn. If I got out of town I’d be free—I’d make it. The town folk would cover up the murders; never charge me, never come looking for me—not with what I knew, not with what I could bring down on this town and the generations that held its secrets. Now it was a matter of finishing what I’d started and getting the hell out of Whaler’s Bay alive. And that’s exactly what I intended to do. *** I left the cottage just as daylight pierced the horizon, the 9mm tucked in my belt and concealed beneath my coat. All emotion had left me. I felt nothing. I drove through town, past houses where children and families were awakening to Christmas, gifts and decorated trees, warmth, laughter and joy, oblivious to the intruder in their midst. By the time I parked on the side of the road and stepped from the car the snow had stopped, the temperature dropped. Across the street stood the forest that eventually led to the house I’d once shared with Amanda and Bethany. Where do the animals go when it snows, Daddy? Moving with a purposeful stride, I walked deeper into the forest, the world around me frozen, the sun reflecting blankets of near blinding white. How do they stay warm? The visions were back, circling me like wolves. Heart racing, I forced them aside and continued on, negotiating a steep embankment. At the top, I gazed out across the final stretch of

woods, a flat expanse of snow and my old home in the distance beyond. Just like Bobby said…nothing but forest, and for the briefest moment a surge of panic nearly overwhelmed me, but as with the visions, I buried them, assigning them to the darkest recesses of my mind. Because to my left, coated in snow, stood a small ramshackle cabin. Seconds later I held a padlock in my hand. A single blow to the door casing it was attached to splintered the brittle wood and the lock gave way. It fell to the ground, swallowed by the snow as I pressed a palm flat against the door and pushed it open. Rusted hinges squeaked, echoed through the trees, and a feeling of dread and darkness more tangible than any I had ever experienced slipped free, wafting about like remnants of imprisoned souls escaping long dead carcasses. There were no windows, so I used my lighter to cut the darkness. I stepped through the threshold, covering my nose with an arm as my eyes struggled to adjust to the flickering light. But for an oak slab of a table in the center, and a large steel basin against the far wall, the cabin was empty. I moved deeper into the room, noticed an array of tools laid neatly across the table. Crouching, I trained the flame on the floor. Grates. Steel grates a darker shade than the plain cement floor. Turning, I moved slowly, the lighter now burning my fingers. Installed at strategic points along the wall stood a series of inverted hooks.

*** The house bounced in the distance with each new step. Breaking through the trees into the yard, I staggered forward then froze. Bethany stood near the back of the house, a bright knit hat standing out against the backdrop of snow. A snowsuit not so different than the one she’d worn years before covered her, mittens attached to the sleeves but hanging free, a doll dangling from one hand. She had seen me too, and stood quietly, her breath forming rising clouds that circled her small frame. She was taller—six now instead of four—and as beautiful as ever. I moved carefully, fighting back the tears and praying silently as I closed the gap between us. As her face came into clearer focus, she eyed me coyly, a slight smile hiding just beneath the surface of her rosy cheeks and delicate lips. “Hello, baby,” I said softly. Bethany allowed the smile to come, slowly, gradually. “Daddy,” she whispered. “Merry Christmas, angel.” I stepped closer and crouched down. “Merry Christmas.” I fought the urge to sweep her up into my arms and hold her tight. “I’ve missed you so much,” I said. “So much, baby.” She nodded, mouth open but unable to express herself. “This is for you.” I held the wrapped package out to her. “Go ahead, take it. It’s for you, it’s all right.” A small hand lifted it from my palm. She seemed

suddenly mesmerized by the bright paper and pretty gold bow. “You can open it now if you want.” Bethany carefully sat her doll in the snow next to her then tore the paper free. It drifted slowly to the ground as she studied a wooden box. Slowly, she lifted the lid to reveal a pretty figure carved of ivory perhaps six inches long. “An angel,” she whispered. “A snow angel, Bethany.” “A snow angel,” she repeated. “Just like the ones we made that day in the snow…remember?” She nodded and smiled. “But this is a special snow angel,” I told her. “She has a secret. You know about secrets, don’t you, baby?” Her eyes locked on mine. “We’re not supposed to tell secrets.” “Mommy and I thought you might like to come and visit Daddy for a while,” I said, my voice shaking. “Would you like that?” “Can Mommy come too?” she asked. “We’ll see. I’m going to go inside and talk to her. You stay out here and play with your angel, okay?” I stood up. “See if you can figure out what her secret is.” Bethany stepped toward me awkwardly, but as I leaned over and kissed the top of her head, small arms found my waist, wrapping themselves around me with more strength than she appeared to have. I pawed the tears away and hugged her back, holding her against me in the cold, neither of us saying a word, even when I forced myself to let her go and headed toward the house.

*** As I walked around the side of the house I could see light bleeding through the windows. Unbuttoning my coat but holding it closed I crossed the front walk and knocked at the door. It was answered quickly. The glee in Amanda’s eyes vanished quickly, and she raised a hand, pulling her robe closed at the throat. “Steven.” “I came to see Bethany.” Her expression shifted from surprise to anger and defiance. She leaned against the doorframe, craning her neck until she saw our daughter safely sitting in the snow, the angel in her hands. “You should have called,” she said, one hand still concealed behind the door and holding it tight against her body. “You’ve been drinking. I can smell it on you. You look like you haven’t slept in days. I don’t think this is the time—” “I don’t give a shit what you think.” We stood glaring at each other. Finally, Amanda folded her arms across her chest, eyes looking past me to the street. “Where’s your car?” “I walked. Nice day for a walk in the woods, don’t you think?” “Let’s not make a scene here, Steven,” she said softly. “It’s Christmas morning. Don’t ruin it for Bethany by forcing me to call the police.” “Bad idea.” I opened my coat. She saw the gun and attempted a casual expression. “Steven, you need help. Please don’t do this.” “I think we better talk inside.”

*** The house had changed. I stood in our old living room, remembering the times I’d played with Bethany there, remembering when this had been a home. Our home. Amanda sat on a couch opposite me, next to which stood a Christmas tree. Scattered around the base were several torn sheets of wrapping paper and a wide assortment of toys and gifts. She looked a lot older than I remembered; her hair a few shades lighter than when we were married, but that same distant fire in her eyes. “Steven,” she sighed, “this is insane, do you realize what you’re doing?” “Haven’t you heard? I’m nuts, fucking certifiable.” “Please just stop and think about what you’re doing,” Amanda said; tone softer now. “I know you want to see Bethany and…and I understand that, but this isn’t the way to—” “You lied to me.” I held my ground; a hand resting gently on the butt of the gun still tucked in my belt. “All that time, you lied to me. You let me think I was crazy, when you knew all along what I’d seen out in those woods was real.” “For God’s sake, I—” “I did some research into the history of this town,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. “It was founded in the late 1700s. In the winter of 1802 there was a blizzard…the worst of the century in these parts. Cape Cod was desolate and isolated from the mainland in those days, and the entire town was buried in snow. It took more than

two months before those who survived were able to dig out and resume anything even resembling a normal life. A lot of people died in that blizzard. By some written accounts nearly half the population, which at that time was said to be about the same as it is now, just under two hundred people. By right, the entire town should’ve died in that storm…sooner…or later.” “The blizzard of 1802 is common knowledge,” she said through a frown. “More than half the population survived,” I answered. “How do you suppose they managed that?” Where do the animals go when it snows, Daddy? “Cut off from the rest of civilization, buried in foot after foot of snow, an entire village paralyzed.” How do they stay warm? “Just what do you suppose those folks did for food?” A twitch that began at Amanda’s eyebrow danced the length of her face before settling on her upper lip. “You’re referring to the rumors of cannibalism. That too, is common knowledge, albeit speculation, but certainly…certainly those things did happen in those days under extreme circumstances. There was never any proof the survivors ate the dead, it was simply—” “You think I went back in time?” I snapped. “Is that it? Is that what happened to me out in the woods that day, Amanda?” She shook her head, eyes revealing genuine fear for the first time. “You’re insane.” “You’re all descendents of the founding fathers,” I told her. “They got a taste for it, didn’t they? A taste for human flesh and blood they passed along from generation

to generation. A ritual still practiced today in total secrecy. Practiced like some demented celebration every year on the anniversary of the blizzard. The bodies I saw slaughtered in the forest were real, Amanda. Slaughtered like cattle…because it still goes on today…and you’re all in it together. This town’s little secret. Until an outsider no one could figure out how to get rid of stumbled onto something he shouldn’t have.” “Steven, for God’s sake, do you hear yourself?” “I saw the slaughterhouse. I was standing in it not five minutes ago.” “Please,” she said, tears brimming suddenly in her eyes. “Please try to stop and think about what you’re saying. You need help, Steven. You need—” “Have you done it to our daughter, too, Amanda?” I heard my voice crack. “Have you taught her to do it too?” “Don’t do this,” she muttered. “I’m taking her out of here.” I moved closer, pulled the gun free and held it down by my side. “One way or another, I’m taking her away from all this.” Amanda slowly rose to her feet, face pale, eyes moist. “Do you expect me to stand by and let you take Bethany from me?” “You won’t come after me,” I said. “The others won’t let you; not with what I know; not with what Bethany knows. Not with what I can prove.” “You’re out of your mind, Steven,” she snapped. “You won’t get a mile from here. I’ll call the police the minute you leave.” I nodded, tucked the gun back into my pants and

buttoned closed my coat. “You do that, Amanda.” I moved to the door, then stopped and looked back at her. “Just remember I love Bethany too…and I’d rather see her dead than be a part of this. Once we’re over that bridge we’re home free…and you know it. Get in my way before we get there and I’ll end it for both of us before anyone can stop me.” Her hands, still held at her side, clenched into fists, but she sank slowly back onto the couch, tears spilling across flushed cheeks. “She’ll come back to me eventually,” she said through gritted teeth. “We live forever…through each other…within each other.” Her tongue slowly licked her lips. “Forever.” *** Haunted by illusions of the dead—blood, urine, excrement and bile trickling from severed limbs, dripping from organs sliced free and held in open palms, escaping across porcelain, swirling into drains clogged with bone chips, mucus, and tendons dangling like blackened string— I awakened to Bethany’s sweet face. Standing next to my bed, still in her pajamas and robe, the initial uncertainty she had displayed during the ride back and subsequent evening in her new home seemingly lessened, she nervously shuffled her feet and softly said, “Good morning, Daddy.” I swung my feet around, felt them touch the cold floor, and then pawed sleep from my eyes before reaching for my wristwatch on the nightstand. “What are you doing up so early, baby?”

“You said we could do Christmas today,” she said, beautiful eyes blinking at me with an innocence I wondered if I ever possessed. “You said since we had to leave we could do it today.” I reached out carefully, cupped the side of her face with my hand and gently stroked her cheek with my thumb. “Is Mommy coming soon?” “Yeah, honey, soon. Real soon.” I moved across the single main room and slipped into the bathroom. I stood before the mirror over the sink. I looked old, broken, tired. But my daughter was back where she belonged. Back with her father and away from all that madness. And while I knew it would be a tough adjustment, knew it would be a slow process, eventually she would come to understand her father loved her, and had only done what was necessary. Necessary for their survival, their sanity. I looked down, saw Bethany in the doorway, smiling. She raised a tiny hand, showing me the ivory snow angel. “I know her secret,” she said in a small voice. She carefully held the figure with one hand, wrapped her fingers around the base with the other and pulled the bottom free to reveal a silver blade, serrated and shinning even in the dull fluorescent light. I smiled; struggling to keep whatever semblance of sanity remained in me, knowing I needed to be strong for Bethany…because only the strong survive. I moved to the bathtub and slowly pulled the curtain back. “And I know yours.” Salivating, Bethany’s lips peeled back to reveal strong white teeth, her small chest heaving excitedly, the snow angel clutched in her hand, the blade trembling in her

grasp. In the tub below, Bambi’s vacant eyes, covered now with a thick film, stared back at my daughter…my flesh…my blood…my little angel…forever alive… Forever dead.