《Phantasmagoria: Tales of Horror》


 The Boy Who Spoke Mosquito

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    Once in third grade they held Duey Pepper''s head inside a terrarium for seven minutes while Mr Winters went out for a cigarette. The yellow snake hissed and slithered and looped itself around Duey''s neck as everyone sat silent and watched. When Mr Winters came back Linda Martins put up her hand and answered a question about the geography of the United States. Duey didn''t put up his hand. Duey never put up his hand. Duey never talked except to Oliver, though no one ever heard them. Oliver was Duey''s only friend. By fourth grade they started on Oliver, too. I saw it. Pushing and slapping him in a circle, asking him, "What''s Duey sound like, I bet he says he loves you, does he talk like a faggot?"


    Duey didn''t have parents. He had grandparents. They were from somewhere else and didn''t speak English. In the spring they planted rows of tomatoes and gave Duey sandwiches with horseradish that smelled across the cafeteria. Once in fifth grade the other kids held Duey down on a long plastic table and pressed the horseradish into his face. He didn''t say a word. He just took it. His eyes got real red but he didn''t rub them, and he didn''t cry. One of the teachers saw. In the teachers'' lounge she said "boys will be boys," and drank coffee. Duey''s grandparents didn''t complain to the school board. They didn''t speak English. And Duey didn''t have parents.


    Before that fall, no one ever took Duey Pepper''s picture. It wasn''t like it is now, with all the news people around, pointing their black lenses and eating city lunches. Sometimes at recess the bolder ones climb fences and set off flashes while the kids play footy on the cement. Goal after goal and all they probably hope for is that it happens again. Those pale bloodless young bodies. Duey doesn''t play footy. Sometimes they put his picture in the paper all the same, with no story or caption. Just a boy''s picture. A boy by himself, standing. A boy just like any other boy except for the stitches across his mouth.


    But just watch as Duey gets too close and they scatter like frightened seagulls. Everyone''s afraid of Duey now. Not everyone scatters.


    If Oliver was alive, Oliver wouldn''t scatter. He''d write to Duey in a secret notebook and Duey would write back and they would stand beside each other at recess while the other kids played footy. In the newspaper they wrote under one of the pictures that Duey can''t smile because of the stitches, but that''s not true. Duey can smile if he wants to. If Oliver was still alive, Duey would want to smile sometimes. If he read something nice or funny in the notebook. In the newspaper they also wrote that Duey''s grandparents aren''t there anymore and that Duey lives alone. That''s a lie, too. The tomato plants are still planted in the spring. Everyone knows Duey''s too young to plant tomatoes.


    During the trial when Duey spoke they left a camera in the room and no one else because they were so scared. The judge and the lawyers and the jury and the rest of them. It was just one boy and a camera. They say you can''t see anything on the recording, just a black cloud, but I don''t know if that''s true. You can hear Duey talk. They played part of it on the television. He must have taken off his stiches. It was Duey''s decision to put the stitches in, most people don''t realize that. He did it himself. But he carries a knife, too. A little pocket knife that''s just sharp enough to cut through the thread. He must have had it at the trial when they left him alone with the camera. He must have cut through and spoke.


    Duey talked about how the boys took him to the bathroom, about how they punched him and held him down and called him names. Duey''s voice stopped sometimes. He said the blood tasted like horseradish. He said there were five but he didn''t say their names. Donny Nelson and Augustino were there for sure. I saw through the window. Nobody knows, but I saw them hit Duey. I saw Duey hit them back. The blood looked like tomato juice and Duey said it tasted like horseradish. It was on his eye and around his lips. Donny Nelson hit him hard and they all said bad things. Duey fell and he didn''t move anymore. But Donny Nelson said bad things and Augustino was bleeding, too, and he grabbed Duey by the sweater and dragged him into one of the stalls. Donny Nelson kicked Duey in the head. Augustino spit blood. Then they picked Duey up by the hair and they hit his face against the toilet. It was loud and Duey''s teeth were all on the floor. Duey was bleeding. Duey wasn''t moving. Augustino was laughing and they left Duey there.


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    The window was open and I flew in when it was quiet. I landed on Duey''s soft brown hair. I walked across Duey''s forehead and down his twitching eyelids. Blood was dripping from his nose but I didn''t try any. The breath from his nostrils pushed against my wings. His lips were moving and inside all the teeth were broken. There was a lot of blood in his mouth. It was open. I flew in and sat on his tongue. I pricked the flesh and took a drink. The blood tasted good, the tongue was warm. I called the others and they came. So many came in through the window like the darkest fog until the room was night. All were swarming and settling around Duey''s face. On the tongue, inside the ears, behind the eyes, up the nostrils and flying under the skull, around the brain. Through the throat to the lungs and swimming down arteries to the very beating heart. Buzzing, we feasted. Fed, we stayed.


    The ambulance siren wailed.


    "You shouldn''t have done it to Oliver," Duey said on the tape. Everyone was watching on television. They''d hanged Oliver on a coat hook. This was before. Donny Nelson and Augustino and the other boys. It was an accident, the school board said, but Oliver couldn''t breathe and he flailed his legs until he suffocated. The janitor found his body in the morning. Nobody asked why they didn''t take him down. Nobody asked why they''d hanged him up. It was an accident, the school board said and Oliver''s mom cried loudest at the funeral.


    Months later when Duey came back to school everyone left him alone. Even the teachers left him alone. His teeth were fixed but all the new parts were a different colour and they looked jagged like a shark.


    Once in seventh grade Duey Pepper put up his hand. It was afternoon and Mr Winters was talking about the capitals of Asia. Linda Martins was there and Donny Nelson and Augustino and the others. Duey Pepper put up his hand, Mr Winters asked, "Yes?" but when Duey opened his mouth instead of the sound of any word it was we that came out. A trickle into a string, into a neverending black buzzing ribbon that wound itself around every tender neck until not one more gasp was heard. Suffocation and punctuation and frozen terror in their eyes. Outside, the first graders played on the grass, across the hall, the fourth graders learned the basics of civil responsibility, and we filled throats and eyes and sucked out seventh grade blood until not a drop was left. Fattened, we returned to our host.


    When the bell rang, the classroom door stayed shut. Minutes passed. Duey sat in his seat. Someone finally knocked. Finally, a teacher opened the door. And she saw. Then they all saw. Those pale bloodless young bodies. And Duey, in the back row, alive and innocent, with a closed, quivering, peaceful mouth��smiling.


    Now the news people are always around. Every day they eat lunches and wait, climbing fences and setting off flashes at footy games. Sometimes they take pictures of the boy standing alone with stitches across his mouth. The vampire boy, the butcher boy, the bloodletter. Duey has no friends and doesn''t smile, but no one teases him anymore and nobody says bad things. At lunch, he eats sandwiches with horseradish that smell across the cafeteria. He never puts up his hand and he never talks.


    When he gets too close, the news people scatter like seagulls.

 Terminus

    I found the two-headed baby deer dying on a bed of soft pine needles under cover of an overturned oak not five kilometres from my cottage. Its lungs still pumped, and its crimson heart beat weakly through a thin, translucent skin that decayed before my eyes until there was no skin and all the organs lay warm and still in a heap upon the earth like waste.


    A god evaporated.


    It is human nature to disbelieve that one may be witness to epochal events, so I did not believe that I, of all people, should be witness to the death of time.


    Epochal: the concept itself is dead.


    How lucky we were to know time at its cleanest and most linear!


    We know now that such constant linearity was the consequence of a living entity. It followed the creature like stench follows a skunk, and we basked in it as if it was the natural state of the world.


    No more.


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    Time no longer heals. Things do not pass, or pass only to return.


    At first we believed this would be manageable. Yes, we thought, we will relive our pain but also our love. Everything shall be magnified! Welcome to an age of great emotions, a new Romanticism!


    Yet we overestimated how much we help. We failed to accept how much we hurt.


    And we did not realize the nature of evil, which accumulates in a way love does not. To re-experience our love is to know it again and again at the same intensity, but to re-experience pain is to increase its volume until it overpowers us, deafening us to everything else.


    I will never forget the creature''s eyes, full of hatred or hubris yet seeking aid it knew I could not give.


    How does one save a dying god?


    It was not my fault!


    I was but a child asked suddenly to solve a deathbed equation expressed in an undiscovered mathematics. I had to fail, yet in failing I have brought it all upon us.


    I relive it constantly.


    Every time its eyes are louder.


    But it is the hour for my afternoon walk, so I will take a pause and enjoy what remains of living.


    I will go to my favourite spot overlooking the city and sit on the iron bench, from where the view is magnificent. Above me, the clouds will form, a tangle of pain and human corpses, and I will sit and ponder until the first blood drops fall. Then the screaming will begin and the final storm will rage. Beating, crimson corpse-clouds under a thin skin of dissipating reality, raining blood until we are left warm and still upon the earth��

 The Fertile Earth

    The foam began washing up on our shores two years ago. At first, it was sparse, resembled barely beaten egg whites, and most of us paid it scant attention. Because it posed no immediate threat, we relegated it to "scientific interest." Over time, however, as it persisted, flowed and thickened into the consistency of properly steamed cappuccino froth, stories started appearing in the news: online, then on television. We traced its origins to deep within the Marianas Trench. But foam is boring, even as it subtly changes hue from ghostly white to green tea. Thus the first images of the foam most of us remember were mechanical, of urban plows pushing it back into the sea. That worked, for a while. But the foam inevitably returned, subtly thicker, greener and more expansive than before. By the time the plows ceased their effectiveness, we had already identified the asteroid ("Isaacasimov") but had not yet made the connection. The foam, albeit having covered much of our coastline, remained more of a nuisance than a threat, for it did nothing. As Earth worked to track the asteroid, then scrambled to destroy it, the foam crept silently inland. As you may be able to deduce, we were successful in neutralizing the asteroid. The world watched united as our international mission broke the asteroid apart and diverted its larger chunks safely away from our planet. We expected the atmosphere to deal with the resulting debris, to watch the pieces burn as they descended, but our expectations proved incorrect. Instead of a display of shooting stars we witnessed a rain of cosmic dust. The atmosphere proved porous. Most grains fell upon the dry earth, but some landed in the now luminous green foam. Protected, they sprouted as seeds. Fertilized, they grew. There was an elegance to it: ancient nutrients from deep within the Earth and life from outer space. The resulting organisms, alien in the true sense of the word, were impervious to our weapons and excreted tiny spore-like particles as they matured. Within weeks, our skies were so polluted we could barely see the sun. We choked, and our immune systems reacted: we began foaming. Like our planet, our bodies betrayed us, and the particles took up residence in our moist and fertile viscera. They fed on us to breed. Once infected, an individual had only days left, but as a species we adapted, segregated and furiously engineered. I am one of the final survivors and personally witnessed the completion of the wormhole generator, via which I shall within the hour send this, my final communique, into an unknown past. Or should I say your present. But I, too, am foaming now, and my fate has already been sealed. I am by nature a pessimist, but if my pessimism is misplaced, heed my warning: Beware the foam!


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 The Salt Hollows

    During funerals I often imagine I am a salt shaker. The salt shaker is empty and someone is shaking it, but, because it is empty, no salt falls out. There��s a meal under the shaker: fried liver with onions. Because no salt falls out, because the shaker is empty, the meal tastes plain. The person eating is disappointed. He curses his luck and blames others. Sometimes he gets angry. Sometimes the angry man is me. It��s an impossibility that my therapist says is significant; but I pay my therapist. If I stopped paying, she��d stop saying I am significant. I know it��s an impossibility to be a salt shaker in the first place.


    I sleep well after funerals. The sleep is deep. Someone finally shakes me awake, but at least once I��ve been thought dead. It made my mother cry. When I came downstairs for breakfast she didn��t recognize me. I��m glad my mother is alive. She��s the last of us, but she��s in her eighties and will die soon, too. At her funeral I will imagine I am a salt shaker and afterward I will sleep long and well.


    In my physical life I don��t like salt. It is unhealthy and its taste overpowers. In your eyes it stings. When I was a girl, salt was expensive even though we lived near a salt mine. The mine was famous and tourists came on buses. The buses were black and yellow like the mine workers. The tourists gave us candy. I much prefer sugar to salt. Sweetness complements though it, too, is unhealthy. Salt comes from the underground, which is close to Hell. Sugar can be the product of bees, which are animals like humans, who are sinful but can ascend to Heaven. When I was a girl I liked to lie on the grass and trace the paths of bees with my finger. If one landed on my stomach I let it walk and tickle me all over.


    My mother lived with a man named Henry. Henry wasn��t my father but that��s what I called him and when I did my mother smiled and gave us both hugs. Henry died eleven years ago. He was a salesman and my mother loved him. For a long time I thought Henry was my real father. When I knew the truth, I told and it made my mother cry and Henry mad. Henry called the police and my mother hit herself until her fists turned red. I wasn��t to sleep in my bedroom after that. The truth was that my real father worked in the salt mine. I don��t know his name but for one summer he came every night to visit me through a window. After the truth my mother hit me, too. And the policeman asked me serious questions.


    One day Henry and the policeman drove in the police car to the salt mine. The road was dusty and I saw the rising dust from my bedroom window even though I wasn��t allowed there anymore. The newspaper wrote that my father didn��t come out. It wrote that the manager of the mine let out all the workers but my father stayed underground and when the police went in with their pistols they found my father dead. I know because the newspaper has an archive. When I was older I went there. The mine closed soon after that. The buses stopped coming. There was no more candy.


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    That was August. In November I am sent twice a week to a schoolmate��s house overnight. My schoolmate��s mother looks at me and tells me that I of all people should understand. Everyone treats me differently. I hate going there. Sometimes I run away home and sleep in Henry��s storeroom. He stores tools and car parts and also blankets, with which I wrap myself to keep warm. The storeroom has two windows: one faces home, the other the forest. There��s an old tree close to the second window and when the wind picks up the branches hit against the glass. The sound wakes me. Winter has come early. There��s a storm. Through the window facing home, I see light in my mother and Henry��s bedroom. Henry is on business. My mother must be worried. I don��t like when she worries, so I hope the weather is not dangerous. I go to the second window. Outside, the world is white but I see three shapes. Two are standing. One is the policeman, another is Henry.


    Henry is holding a pistol and his hand is shaking. There��s a third shape under the pistol. The third shape is thin and on its knees and is chained to the trunk of the tree whose branches rattle against the storeroom window. The third shape is barely moving and I can��t tell if it is the shape or wind that howls. Henry puts the pistol close to the third shape��s head and fires. I barely hear the sound but see the third shape stretch, then fall, limp, onto the fresh snow. The policeman pats Henry on the back and Henry gives the pistol to the policeman. They turn and I fall away from the window, scared. I shouldn��t be here, I remember. I should be at my schoolmate��s house.


    I wrap myself in Henry��s blankets but the blankets are cold and the cold makes the fear worse and I suddenly imagine all of them standing in front of me��all four of them: Henry, my mother, the policeman and my father. They are silent but breathing yet no steam comes out of their nostrils. Instead, they spew salt. The salt flows out of their ears and over their eyes, which turn pink, and from under their fingernails, which fall off, and the salt is bloody. It stings them and hurts them and even before they fall apart like dolls I know it is eating them from the inside like corrosion. I imagine that all the salt the miners ever took out of the mine is in their bodies, so that when it is done and they are broken, all I see are four thin shells filled with salt. But I also know that that is an impossibility, so they are people, too, and they put each other back together, but now that I��ve seen their salt I know they are nothing but painful containers.


    When the sun comes up the body is gone. I wait until nine, then pretend I have returned from my schoolmate��s house. My mother is nervous and Henry is not feeling well, so my mother suggests I spend the day outside playing. She helps me put on a coat and hat. The sun melts the snow and the ground turns softer. My shoes get muddy so I play in the forest where the ground is harder and the snow persists. Between the roots of trees I find an injured bee. Maybe it was surprised by the snowstorm. I reach down to help it, at least to touch it and help it feel loved, but it stings me. I run home where my mother rubs cold alcohol on the swelling. She says that once a bee stings someone it dies but I don��t know if that��s true or just a fairy tale.

 The Pyramid at the End of the Street

    I lived with my parents on a suburban street ending in a cul-de-sac. Our neighbour, Mr Maxwell, was a widower who brought us home baked pies and helped my sister with her math homework. My high school crush, Natalia, lived in a brick bungalow three houses down. On Sundays we all went to church, and twice a month during the summer there was a street-wide BBQ. In the winters the kids went sledding on a nearby hill. Growing up, I considered it boring. Looking back, it was paradise.


    The Abaroas moved in in November. From the beginning it was obvious they were different. They didn''t attend our church or make small talk by the community mailbox. Instead, they smiled and spoke about their own faith, Aknaism. "Buddhist and Maya thought is connected," Mr Abaroa once told me, "because the Maya crossed the Pacific and colonized Asia."


    Although they were never aggressive in their proselytizing, it was their one topic of conversation, and we quickly learned to avoid them altogether. However, this didn''t seem to faze them, and many of us recalled their polite but ominous refrain: "Unfortunate, but you will soon see the truth."


    Those words echoed in my head when on a particularly dark February night the pyramid appeared at the end of the street.


    It was ethereal, an effervescent volume of red mist, and one by one we came out of our houses to gaze upon its impossible appearance until every house was empty and the street was filled with silent awe.


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    The pyramid pulled us toward itself.


    And like human ice breaking from a glacier, individually we went, freeing ourselves from the loving grips of our neighbours and families.


    I watched as Mr Maxwell drifted toward the pyramid and disappeared into it.


    Then it took me.


    Despite its tangible exterior dimensions, the pyramid was infinitely vast on the inside. Its crimson redness pulsed, and space itself hummed, and from the hum emanated the voice of Mr Abaroa. "Welcome, Norman. Tonight you shall know enlightenment."


    I fell.


    On impact, I arose and saw before me an axe and the kneeling, crying figure of Mr Maxwell.


    "Don''t," he sobbed.


    Bloody spray adorned his face.


    "Take the axe," instructed Mr Abaroa. "This is your destiny."


    I hesitated.


    Mr Maxwell cried hysterically. His hands were bloody too.


    "Understand, Norman. Everything up to now: it has been for you. All life has been for you."


    My heart pumped hotly. I picked up the axe.


    "You are the one."


    And somewhere deep inside I knew he was right. I was special. Mr Maxwell raised his eyes to look at me��


    I crushed his skull.


    His body crumpled. His blood painted my face, and I fell to my knees, tossing the axe aside. I had done it!


    Mr Maxwell''s body disappeared.


    Natalia landed in front of me.


    Our eyes met.


    "Take the axe," Mr Abaroa instructed her out of the hum. "This is your destiny. All life has been for you."


    "Don''t," I sobbed.

 Seedhead

    Even among my more troubled patients, Richter was unique. The level to which he was disturbed without any known cause or stimulus was unprecedented, and so I considered him my prized patient, the broken mind upon which I would sail to psychological stardom. This was even before I personally witnessed him bloom and unseed.


    The primary cause of Richter''s psychosis was nightmares. He experienced them constantly, cyclically and, when they reached their inevitable crescendo, with such completeness that to describe them as his counter-reality would be an injustice to his terror. They were hyper-reality, more real than the everyday world for you or I.


    Each nightmare gripped him for weeks, first whenever he slept but soon creeping into his waking life, so that he had no respite. Indeed, the nightmares gained power over time, adapting to his emotions and evolving to maximize their own atrocity, until they attained peak horror and released him, never to return.


    Sometimes a few peaceful days would subsequently pass, but even those were stained with the dread of a new nightmare to come.


    However, it is this act of peaking, which I shall in my professional capacity call the bloom, and which I first witnessed two months ago, that has shaken me to the core, not only as a psychologist but as a human being.


    I witnessed the following through a secret window in a clinical room mocked up to resemble Richter''s bedchamber:


    After suffering several hours of unrelenting mental anguish manifesting itself almost grotesquely in the physical realm as perspiration, tremors, self-mutilation and incomprehensible muttering, Richter falls suddenly to sleep.


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    The slumber, which to my observations appears deep, lasts two hours and thirty-four minutes.


    It ends abruptly as Richter leaps to his feet, tears off his clothing, digs his nails into the top of his scalp, and proceeds, in much the same brutal manner, to tear the skin off his skull.


    His screams are unbearable, although it is unclear whether they are the result of mental pain or the physical pain of his auto-deskinning.


    Once his skull is exposed, he proceeds to tear the skin off his face, which, in the most unbelievable way resembles less human bone and musculature than the petals of a bloody dandelion.


    No longer veiled by skin, this face-flower achieves a gloriously yellow colour and blooms before my eyes!


    One madness of flora and fauna!


    But swiftly, as the screams intensify, the flower begins to wilt, the hanging veils of skin climb his face, enclosing it��


    Before bursting forth to reveal a spherical seed head.


    As a wind of screams rages within the chamber, breaking the blowball and dispersing its multitude of nightmare seeds, reality ripples.


    Finally the wind subsists, silence returns, and Richter stands: an immobile, headless body.


    The veils of skin form an orb above his neck, he falls, and when he awakens in the morning his head has been biologically re-created. His memories of the entire incident are faint, fading��


    The entire process leaves no visible scars and no physical evidence.


    Thus my hypothesis: Richter is not only man, but an organic manifestation of the nightmare impulse, a sentient host for a parasitic nightmare laboratory whose creations are perfected in his mind before being disseminated into humanity at large. The nightmares we experience, often dulled as if through a fog, Richter has already experienced countless times at an impossible clarity.


    Whether he is the only one of his kind I cannot say.


    In the coming weeks, I must complete my written study and submit it for peer review. I predict it will revolutionize the field of psychology, the understanding of the mind and introduce finally the notion of horror as a living entity: an incubus among us.

 Don Whitmans Masterpiece

    It was Danvers who finally pushed him in. We��d been feeding the fire with hardwood since the afternoon and it had gotten big as the wind picked up by nightfall, flickering cross our faces and warming our cheeks better than a gas heater. He didn��t even scream when he fell. The flames just swallowed him up��sparks shooting out like hot vomit. He knew what he��d done. He knew it was wrong. When he lifted himself up and came out of the fire he stood dead still, staring at us, smiling like we��d done him a favour. Maybe he thought he deserved to turn into ash. Maybe he did deserve it. I know I kept my fingers tight round the handle of the axe just the same till he keeled over and Cauley had touched the corpse with his foot and we knew he was dead. The three of us, we kept silent for a long while after that. There was just the sound of wood burning and it was better that way. None of us touched the body but none of us looked away, either: you could still make out his face, unmistakable, when the rest of him was dark and formless. He was a face on a pile. Then the wind started taking bits and pieces and carrying them away. Like I told the police, he didn��t touch me, but I knew some of the kids he��d done it to. He��d done it to Danvers. I remember once when all the other kids were gone, I��d stayed after class, Mr Gregor bent himself close to my ear and told me the real story. ��You��re a wicked one,�� he said when he was done, ��just like Don Whitman.��


    They used to scare us with Don Whitman, the adults: the other teachers, our parents, the priest. But no one ever explained it. They��d just say, ��You better do what we want or else Don Whitman will come back and get you.�� Mr Gregor was the only one ever to tell it to me with details. He told it different, too. He said he remembered because he was the same age as Don Whitman and they went to the same school. He said that what the others say they remember is like Cain and Abel or Little Red Riding Hood. Even the landscape tells the fairy tale. After it happened, Don Whitman��s school got torn down, then his house. And the bells in the Church got changed: the ones they rang after Elizabeth Cartwell had come back hysterical with the news.


    You can��t tear down or change a man��s memory, Mr Gregor told me.


    Once you see, it��s forever.


    Elizabeth Cartwell��s parents moved away as soon as the police investigation finished. A lot of people moved away. But Mr Gregor showed me a newspaper from Hill City, North Dakota from some years later. The paper was yellow but you could read the black print fine. The story was about a girl who��d killed herself. The photo was of Elizabeth Cartwell. As he held it out for me to see, his hand shook and I felt his breath grow warmer against the skin around my neck. Nothing made him shake as much as what happened to Elizabeth Cartwell, not even the details.


    Don Whitman was seventeen when he did it. He was handsome, with wide shoulders and played football. All the girls liked him. He was going to go to college. Maybe that��s why they thought he was ready: they thought he was a man. They thought he��d be with them. It was a school night when they woke him and drove out to the old pumping station, so that he could see everything for himself. They wanted to make him a part of it just like they were. If he saw, he would want it just like they did. I was always told that he drove out there by himself, but Mr Gregor told me that��s part of the lie. He said Don Whitman��s father was in the car with the mayor and the chief of police. He said, ��How would he have found the place by himself��why would he have gone looking?��


    The place is in a wood not far from the border. Of course, the whole underground is filled with cement now, but you can still see where the opening used to be: a fat tube sticking out of the ground, just big enough for a man to crawl down into. There was a hatch on it then, and thick locks. The hatch was sound-proof. If you stood right beside it, you couldn��t hear a thing, but as soon as you opened the hatch you could smell the insides and hear the moans start to drift upwards into the world. A steel ladder led down. Mr Gregor says they all knew about it, everyone: all the adults. They��d all been down that ladder. All of them had seen it.


    Don Whitman went down the ladder, too. He must have smelled the insides grow stronger and heard the moaning echo louder with every rung but he kept going. On the ground above, his father spoke to the mayor and they both felt proud. Don Whitman must have been more scared of coming up and disappointing them than of not going down to the limit. But when he reached the bottom, the very bottom, and put his feet to the hard concrete and saw it before his own eyes, something inside of him must have broken��


    ��They sugarcoat it and they make a child��s game of it because they��re too scared to remember the truth,�� Mr Gregor told me. ��They can��t forget it, but it��s a stain to them, so they cover it up and pretend that everything��s clean.��


    Don Whitman saw the vastness of the interlocking chambers and, within them, the writhing, ecstatic, swollen no-people of the underground, human-like but non-human, cross-bred mammals draped in plaster-white skin pinned to numb faces, men, women and children, male and female, naked, scared, dirty, with humans��humans Don Whitman knew and recognized��among them, on them and under them, hitting them, squeezing them, making them hurt, making monstrous sounds with them, all under slowly rotating heat lamps, all open and together, one before another, and then someone, someone Don Whitman knew, must have put a hand on Don Whitman��s shoulder and Don Whitman would have asked, ��But what now, what am I supposed to do?�� and then, from somewhere deep within the chambers, from a place not even Don Whitman would ever see, a voice answered:


    ��Anything.��


    Mr Gregor pulled away from me and I felt my body turn cold. Icy sweat crawled under my collar and below my thighs.


    I��d been told Don Whitman had found the old pumping station and lured the police to it, that they��d called others��including Don Whitman��s father��to talk him out of any violence, but that he��d snapped and murdered them all without firing a single shot, with his bare hands, and dumped the bodies into the metal pipe sticking out of the ground, the one just wide enough for a man to fit through. Then he��d disappeared. It wasn��t until days later that Elizabeth Cartwell found the bodies and there was never any sign of Don Whitman after that. The manhunt failed. So the church bells rang, the school was torn down, the pipe was filled in and, ever since, the adults scare their children with the story of the high school boy who��d done a terrible, sinful thing and vanished into thin air.


    ��And why would she decide to go out there?�� Mr Gregor asked��meaning Elizabeth Cartwell��his eyes dead-set through a window at the raining world outside. ��It��s as transparent as a sheet of the Bible, every word of it. They all pretend to believe because they��ve all made it up together. But the police reports, the testimony, the news stories, the court records, the verdict: a sham, a falsification made truth because a thousand people and a judge repeat it, word-for-word, every night before bed.��


    I tried to stand but couldn��t. My heart was pounding me back into the chair. I was thinking about my mother and father. I had only enough courage for one question, so I asked, ��What happened to the no-people?��


    Mr Gregor turned suddenly and laughed so fierce the rain lashed the windows even harder. He came toward me. He put a delicate hand on each of my shoulders. He bent forward until his lips were almost touching mine and, his eyes staring at me like one stares at the Devil, said:


    ��Buried in the concrete. Buried alive, buried dead����


    I pushed him away.


    He stumbled backward without losing his balance.


    I forced myself off the chair, praying that my legs would keep. My knees shook but held. In front of me, Mr Gregor rasped for air. A few long strands of his thin hair had fallen across his forehead. He was sweating.


    ��He was a coward, that little boy, Don Whitman. Without him, we wouldn��t need to live under the whip of elaborate lies designed by weaker people turned away and shamed by the power of the natural order of things. They trusted him, and he betrayed us all. The fools! The weakling! Imagine,�� Mr Gregor hissed, ��just imagine what we could have had, what we could have experienced down there, at the very bottom, in the chambers...��


    His eyes spun and his chest heaved as he grew excited, but soon he lost his venom and his voice returned to normal.


    Finally, he said without any nastiness, ��You��re a wicked one, just like Don Whitman.��


    And I ran out.


    Danvers prodded me awake. I must have fallen asleep during the night because when I opened my eyes it was morning already. The sun was up and the flames gone, but the fire was still warm. Mr Gregor��s dead face still rested atop a pile of ashes. Cauley was asleep on the dirt across from us. I could tell Danvers hadn��t slept at all. He said he��d been to a farmhouse and called the police. We woke up Cauley and talked over what we��d say when they got here. We decided on something close to the truth: Mr Gregor had taken the three of us camping and, when he tried to do a bad thing, we put up a fight and knocked him into the flames. Cauley said it might be suspicious because of how easily Mr Gregor had burned, but Danvers said that some people were like that��they burned quick and whole��so we needn��t say a word about the gasoline. When the police came, they were professional and treated us fair, but when they took me aside to talk to me about the accident, every time I tried to tell them about the bad things Mr Gregor had done, they wouldn��t hear it, they just said it was a shame there��d been an accident and someone had died.


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    At home, I asked my parents whether Mr Gregor was a bad person for what he��d done to Danvers and others. My mother didn��t say anything. My father looked at me like he was looking at the Devil himself and said morality was not so simple and that people had differing points of view and that, in the end, much depended not on what you did, but who you did it to��like during the war, for example. There were some who deserved to be done-to and others whose privilege it was to do. Then he picked up his magazine and told me it was best not to think about such things at all.


    I did keep thinking about them, and about Don Whitman, too. When I got to high school, I was too old to scare with monsters, but once in a while I��d hear one of the adults tell a kid he better do as he��d been told or Don Whitman would come back and get him. I wondered if maybe people scare others with monsters they��re most scared of themselves. I even thought about investigating: taking a pick-axe to the pumping station and cracking through concrete or investigating records of how much of it had been poured in there. But I figured the records could have been fixed and one person with a pick-axe wouldn��t get far before the police came and I didn��t trust them anymore. I also had homework to worry about and I started seeing a girl.


    I��d almost forgotten about Don Whitman by the time my mother sent me out one evening with my dad��s rifle to hunt down a coyote she said had been attacking her hens. I took a bike, because it was quiet, and was roaming just beyond town when I saw something kick up dust in a field. I shot at it, missed and it scurried off. I pedaled after it until it seemingly disappeared into nowhere. I kept my eye firm on the spot I saw it last and when I got close enough, I saw there was a small hole in the ground there. I stuck the rifle in and the hole felt bigger on the inside, so I stomped all around till the hole caved and where there��d been a mouse-sized hole now there was an opening a grown man could fit through. It seemed deep, which made me curious, because there aren��t many caves around here, so I stuck my feet in but still couldn��t feel the bottom. I slid in a little further, and further still, and soon the opening was above my head and I was inside with my whole body.


    It was dark but I could feel the ground sloping. When my eyes accustomed to the gloom, I saw enough to tell there was a tunnel leading into the depths and that it was big enough for me to crawl through. I didn��t have a light but I knew it was important to try the hole. Maybe there were no-people at the bottom. Mostly, though, I didn��t think��I expected: that every time I poked ahead with the rifle, I��d hit earth and the tunnel would be done.


    That never happened. I descended for hours. The tunnel grew narrower and the slope sharpened. Fear tightened around my chest. I lost track of time. There wasn��t enough space to turn my body around and I��d been descending for so long it was foolish to backtrack. Surely, the tunnel led somewhere. It was not a natural tunnel, I told myself, it must lead somewhere. I should continue until I reached the end, turn around and return to the surface. The trick was to keep calm and keep moving forward.


    And I was right. Several hours later the tunnel ended and I crawled out through a hollow in the wall of a huge grotto.


    I stood, stretched my limbs and squinted through the dimness. I couldn��t see the other end of the grotto but the wall curved so I thought that maybe if I went along I might get to the other end. My plan of an immediate return to the surface was on hold. I had to see what lived here. Images of no-people raced through my head. I readied my rifle and proceeded, slowly at first. Where the tunnel had been packed dirt and clay, the walls and floor of the grotto were solid rock. There was moisture, too. It flowed down the walls and gathered in depressions on the floor.


    Although at first the wall felt smooth, soon I began to feel a texture to it��like a washboard. The ceiling faded into view. The grotto was getting smaller. And the texture was becoming rougher, more violent. I was thinking about the texture and Mr Gregor��s burnt body when a sound sent me sprawling. My elbow banged against the rock and I nearly cried out. My heart was beating like it had beaten me into my chair in the classroom. The sound was real: faint but clear and echoing. It was the sound of continuous and rhythmic scratching.


    I crawled forward, holding the rifle in front. The scratching grew louder. I thought about calling out, but suddenly felt foolish to believe in no-people or anything of that kind. It seemed more sensible to believe in large rodents or coyotes with sharp teeth. I could have turned back, but the only thing more frightening than a monster in front is a monster behind, so I pulled myself on.


    In fact, I was crawling up a small hill and, when I had reached the top, I looked down and there it was:


    His was a human body. Though hunched, he stood on human legs and scratched with human hands. His movements were also clearly a man��s movements. There was nothing feminine about them. His half-translucent skin was grey, almost white, and taut; and if he had any hair, I didn��t see it. His naked body was completely smooth. I looked at him for a long time with dread and disgust. His arms didn��t stop moving. Whatever they were scratching, they kept scratching. Even when he turned and his head looked at me, even as I��stunned��frozen in terror, recoiled against the wall, still his arms kept moving and his hands clawing.


    For a few seconds, I thought he��d seen me, that I was done for.


    I gripped the rifle tight.


    But as I focused on his face, I realized he hadn��t seen me at all. He couldn��t see me. His face, so much like a colourless swollen skull, was punctuated by two black and empty eye sockets.


    He turned back to face the wall he was scratching. I turned my face, too. The texture on the wall was his. The deeper the grooves, the newer the work. I put down the rifle and put my hand on the wall, letting my fingers trace the contours of the texture. It wasn��t simple lines. The scratching wasn��t meaningless. These were two words repeated over and over, sometimes on top of each other, sometimes backwards, sometimes small, sometimes each letter as big as a person, and they were all around this vast underground lair, everywhere you looked��


    Two words: Don Whitman.


    He��d made this grotto. I felt feverish. The sheer greatness, the determination needed to scratch out such a place with one��s bare hands. Or perhaps the insanity��the punishment. If I hadn��t been sitting, a wave of empathy would have knocked me to the wet, rocky floor. I picked up the rifle. I could put Don Whitman out of his misery. I lifted the rifle and pointed it at the distant figure writing his name pointlessly into the wall. With one pull of the trigger, I could show him infinite mercy. I steadied myself. I said a prayer.


    Don Whitman stopped scratching and wailed.


    I bit down on my teeth.


    I hadn��t fired yet.


    He grabbed his head and fell to his knees. The high-pitched sound coming from his throat was unbearable. I felt like my mind was being ripped apart. I dropped the rifle and covered my ears. Again, Don Whitman turned. This time with his entire body. He crawled a few steps toward me��still wailing��before stopping and falling silent. He raised his head. Where before had been just eye sockets now there were eyes. White, with irises. Somehow, they��d grown.


    He got to his feet and I was sure that he could see me now. He was staring at me. I called his name:


    ��Don Whitman!��


    He didn��t react. Thoughts raced through my mind: what should I do once he comes toward me? Should I defend myself or should I embrace him?


    But he didn��t step forward.


    He took one step back and lifted his long fingers to his face. His nails, I now saw, were thick and curved as a bird��s talons. He moved them softly from his forehead, down his cheeks and up to his eyes, into which, without warning, he pressed them so painfully that I felt my own eyes burn. When he brought his fingers back out, in each hand he held a mashed and bleeding eyeball. These he put almost greedily into his mouth, one after the other, then chewed, and swallowed.


    Having nourished his body, he returned to the wall and began scratching again.


    As I watched the movements of his arms, able to follow the pattern of the letters they were carving, I no longer felt like killing him. If he wanted to die, he could die: he could forego water, he could refuse to eat. He didn��t want to die. He wanted to keep scratching his name into the walls of this grotto: Don Whitman, Don Whitman, Don Whitman��


    I watched him for a long time before I realized that I would have to get to the surface soon. People would begin to worry. They might start looking for me. And as much as I needed to know the logic behind Don Whitman��s grotto, I also needed food. I couldn��t live down here. I couldn��t eat my own eyes and expect them to grow back. Eventually, I would either have to return to the world above or die.


    I put my hand on the grotto wall and began to mentally retrace my steps. A return would not be difficult. All I would need to do was follow��


    That��s when I knew.


    The geography of it hit me.


    The hole I��d entered was on the outskirts of town. The tunnel sloped toward the town. That meant this grotto was below the town. The town hall, the bank, the police station, the school��all of it was lying unknowingly on top of a giant expanding cavity. One day, this cavity would be too large, the town would be too heavy, and everything would collapse into a deep and permanent handmade abyss. Don Whitman would bury the town just as the town had buried the no-people. Everything would be destroyed. Everyone would die. That was Don Whitman��s genius. That was his life��s work.


    I picked up the rifle and faced Don Whitman for the final time.


    He must have known that I was there. He��d heard me and had probably seen me before he pulled out his eyes, yet he just continued to scratch. Faced with death, he kept working.


    As I stood there, I had no doubt that, left in peace, Don Whitman would finish his project. His will was too powerful. The result would be catastrophic. It was under these assumptions that I made the most moral and important decision of my life:


    I walked away.

 Infestation

    "When are you going to leave your wife?" my mistress asked.


    I was putting on my boots.


    "Soon," I said.


    On my way home, I swung by the office to pick up a new golf club I''d had delivered, then stopped by the daycare to pick up my son.


    That''s when I saw the first wasp.


    I assumed it had entered the car on my son''s clothes. It was particularly pesky, eluding my attempts to flush it out the windows until I had no choice but to pull over and hunt it down with a rolled-up business magazine��a hunt that ended with a very satisfying splat!


    The next one appeared a few days later while I was pretending to watch TV, followed by a second and third, and all three buzzed so loudly I couldn''t concentrate on my sexting. I had to take a break and kill them.


    Splat!


    Dozens more materialized the following week.


    By now, I was certain we had an infestation. But my wife insisted she hadn''t seen any, and my son was too young to talk.


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    I called an exterminator.


    "House is clean," he said after his inspection.


    But it wasn''t.


    The wasps continued to show up, day after day, in ever-greater numbers. Any time I was home, they buzzed relentlessly. I stopped being able to sleep. I stopped being able to concentrate. The only time I felt any peace from them was at work, where my boss increasingly micro-managed me, and in the hotel, where my mistress had stepped up her nagging. "It''s been almost a year! Are you gonna leave your wife or not?"


    One day, I could barely take it anymore, and had to use every ounce of my self-control not to slap her across the face. "When my son is a little older," I said through clenched teeth.


    On my wife''s birthday, my wife and I took turns hiding from our son in a game of hide-and-seek. I hid in our shed. It was dark inside, and when the buzzing started I suddenly felt the wasps all around me, crawling on my face and limbs, and as I lurched for the exit I felt as if I were passing through an entire atmosphere of them! I imagined them flying down my throat, devouring my eyes, numbing my tongue��


    I screamed and my wife had to calm me down. "It''s OK, there aren''t any more wasps," she repeated as she petted my hair like I was a dumb dog.


    I took a sabbatical from work.


    Because I was home all day, we cancelled daycare.


    I checked the house insistently for the wasp lair. I knew there was one because I had already killed thousands.


    That''s when I saw it:


    My son sleeping so peacefully, as a wasp exited his nostril. Another emerged from his ear.


    I knew what had to be done. What I had to do.


    Wasps buzzed. Phone buzzed.


    I grabbed my golf club.


    Splat!

 My Cousin / Elizabeth

    The 16th century turned. I lived with my father, a nobleman without acumen who had lent money he lacked means to collect or re-earn, and his sickly wife, for whom he had left my mother. I had three siblings, brothers��all dead: by illness, murder, suicide. Given my father��s circumstance, he hungered to marry me to a wealthy suitor, and likely would have done so if not for the letter, which arrived on a particularly cold October night, and which my father read with such rapt attention it bordered on candlelit glee, before instructing me, having communicated no details, that I would forthwith be dispatched to the Castle of Csejte in Upper Hungary to live with my cousin Elizabeth.


    The trip was dismal, but I shall never forget my first impression of the castle, a magnificent hill-top silhouette boldly opaque against the crimson of a setting sun.


    I met Elizabeth the following morning, and it was as if she were a magic mirror, for we were of identical height, build and pale complexion. We became natural friends and she shared everything with me: food, garments, jewelry. In exchange, my duties consisted of one: to dress finely and visit the nearby towns in search of women to enlist in Elizabeth��s employ and entourage. ��Young and unblemished,�� she said.


    I lived in a dream.


    It was not until months later, after I had procured many women for Elizabeth, that my suspicions began. Despite my memory for faces, I would often fail to meet those I had previously engaged. They came to Castle of Csejte��and vanished��


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    My conscience gnawed at my dreams.


    One evening, I decided to follow one of the new women to satisfy my curiosity and return peace to my soul. Yet what I discovered was the very crux of dread. Deep within the castle grounds there existed a tangle of hallways leading to five uneven chambers, and within one of these: waxen female bodies hanging by chains fastened around ankles, throats opened over faces painted in dry blood, some still slowly dripping into a long trough, through which their virgin blood flowed into an adjacent room, in which, amidst the persistent buzzing of flies:


    A solitary metal tub filled with scarlet, stillness and tranquility...


    Its surface broken��


    By the emergence of Elizabeth��s face!


    I ran!


    Through twisted hallways out under the anvillike night, through the grounds to the gate and beyond, over soft mounds through which despite my screams I heard the buried victims crying for impossible salvation.


    Beating hooves.


    Thunder in the back of my pulsing head.


    I regained consciousness surrounded by warmth. But my comfort soured, for I realized I was in the blood tub! Held there by the arms of servants who smiled and called me by her villainous name!


    ��Elizabeth.��


    The investigators arrived. The description fit, as did the clothes, and the eye-witnesses agreed I was the one who had come for their daughters.


    In defence, I had but truth:


    A lifetime imprisonment of truth.

 This is the end, beautiful friend

    1968 / Vietnam


    Thump-Thump-Thump...


    The Huey passed over dark jungleland like an over-sized dragonfly, as we sat clutching our rifles, listening to the deafening whir of the blades, not saying a goddamn word.


    There were three of us (me, Ricky and the Captain) plus the pilot.


    But the Captain wasn''t a real captain. No, sir. He had civilian written all over him in ball-point legalese.


    Then again, this wasn''t a real mission, and all of us knew it.


    Something lit up below.


    Ricky pointed.


    "Nah," the Captain said. "Not it."


    Wasn''t exactly VC we were hunting. It was something else. "You''ll know it when you see it," the Captain said. "Trust me."


    They hadn''t exactly given us a choice to be here. Ricky and me weren''t saints, and when you fuck up too many times they''ve got you by the balls.


    "There!"


    Neon glow. Trees parting like grass before a buffalo.


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    The pilot set us down, we got out, and the pilot took off.


    Thump-thump-thump��


    "Gonna tell us what the fuck it is now?" Ricky asked.


    "Nope."


    The Captain took out some kind of electronic gizmo and started walking, so we followed him.


    I hated being in the jungle. Night got real dense real quick down here, and the insects��


    Ricky pointed his rifle. "Stop. I heard something."


    "It''s silent," the Captain said.


    "Could be soldiers."


    "If it''s here, there aren''t any soldiers."


    I could see them both sweating in the moonlight, and my rifle wasn''t dry either, but we pressed on.


    We came to a corridor of upended vegetation.


    Neon in the distance.


    The Captain motioned for us to stop.


    "Now," he said, fishing around in his pockets, "get ready because it''s going to happen fast."


    He took out a small metal sphere, looked at us in turn, and tossed it to Ricky.


    "The fuck is��"


    "Doesn''t matter, just hold it. And don''t shoot until I give the signal."


    We were both looking at the neon glow ahead.


    It seemed to be getting brighter.


    We got ready.


    This was it.


    It''s hard to describe what happened next:


    The neon rushed at us looming for an instant as a horned demon and it took all my willpower not to unleash on it and Ricky did lighting up the jungle bullet after bullet and the demon became neon again and dove into Ricky��


    "Fire!"


    And I shot Ricky to motherfuckin'' kingdom come. Just ripped him and that thing open, and I swear to God he glowed for a moment when he fell dead.


    The Captain retrieved the sphere.


    We walked on shaking legs an hour in silence until we got to a village. But there wasn''t a living soul there. Just a stench and hundreds of bodies: women, children��


    The Captain took out a pistol and pointed it at my head.


    My rifle didn''t work.


    "Sorry," he said, "but it has to stay secret."


    I retched, looking around at the eviscerated corpses.


    "Thank you for your service."


    He fired.

 As I Lay Decaying

    I remember sharp morning light piercing the trees.


    Glacial wind.


    The voluminous silence.


    I remember the heaviness of my backpack, the crunch of the undiscovered under my boots, and the awe of solitude in the mountains.


    Then��


    Sudden emptiness underfoot��


    My body descending while my mind lingers, immobile for a few more sensations of its final landscape, as my soul, or whatever binds mind to body, stretches like an elastic...


    Until the downward pressure is irresistible and my mind snaps back:


    The unfathomable sensation of impact.


    The horrid pain.


    Followed by the merciful snapping of the neck. Audible, echoing��


    Blackness.


    The coarse sound of my own breathing.


    No feeling below the jaw.


    No mobility except the eyes, through which the darkness slowly dissipates, revealing the grey sky of an autumn afternoon across which scatter the black crows of despair.


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    When you''ve nothing but thoughts, thoughts achieve a terrifying dimension.


    I should have told someone where I was hiking.


    They won''t find me in time.


    I expect to die because such is the rational expectation. If not coldness, dehydration, or eventually starvation. Perhaps an animal ripping apart my throat. Perhaps madness.


    But my body does not die. My cognition endures.


    The minutes fall away.


    Hours.


    A rain shower passes, moistening my face and throat. Although I have no voice, my mouth must be open.


    Night chills me.


    I hear ruthless nocturnal predation.


    I persist.


    On the break of the seventh day, a bird perches on my weathered face and drops a split worm into my mouth.


    Insects follow, and I imagine them as a parade of nourishment marching single-file within me.


    My broken body begins to decay.


    At night, wolves tear away the dead and dying flesh.


    Ants eat skin off my face.


    Autumn cocoons me in her fallen leaves.


    But always a creature drags them from my eyes, so that I see the clouds, the fluid sky, the surpassing of time by time. Months. Human legs step over without stopping, without identification. The leaves disintegrate. Snow accumulates like dust. Spring reveals dirt, moss and a mound with eyes. Years. I must be consciousness in a skull by now. I remember:


    As I lay decaying, the wolf with the woman''s eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into Hades.


    I lose time.


    So many skies have passed.


    When the she-wolf gazes down upon me as if at her own reflection��


    I understand.


    That night I prowl through her eyes.


    I learn to bend my fingers: roots, branches; my arms: trunks; and feel through my antennae: swaying grass��


    How good the first taste of human meat, lashed by vines and ripped apart, consumed in the darkest caves. But humanity is mere appetizer. What I crave is civilization. To grind flesh and skyscrapers into sludge, to spear tanks and eviscerate data centers, to pull down airliners as effortlessly as a frog catches flies. But I am young, and long shall on your decaying world I feast.

 Episode 7567

    Ignacio Rojas was seventy-two when the doctor told him he was dying. He had three children, nine grandchildren and a long-term starring role on the soap opera (��Filmed live before a studio audience!��) Passionista as Don Ignacio, the poor stable boy who had risen to become dictator of a fictional banana republic. Now in his senior years, he was keeping power by playing his devilishly handsome sons, Jorge and Luis Garcia, against one another in a high stakes game of scenery chewing.


    All this was going through Ignacio��s mind when during a meeting, the show��s producer mentioned the idea.


    ��We want you to die on the show.��


    The producer continued, ��Not just die, but really die. I know what you��re thinking, but hear me out����


    And Ignacio did. In exchange for Ignacio��s live on-screen death, the producer was going to pay [censored], more money than he had made in the last twenty years.


    Thinking of his family, Ignacio agreed.


    The scene, once written, was somber. Ignacio would be in a hospital bed, his sons kneeling on either side, and as he took his final breath their hands would meet across his dying body, symbolically ending their terrible feud. Power would be shared. Family would prevail over politics. The show��s viewers would join in a now-genuine mourning, and afterwards there would be a half-hour live tribute to the departed.


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    On the day of filming, after everyone had said their goodbyes, Ignacio gave a wonderful performance, culminating in his hospital bed scene. A real nurse hooked up a fake IV, through which the real killing drug would be administered, and as he said his final lines and closed his eyes, Ignacio prepared to die.


    But instead of feeling arms meeting in truce, Ignacio heard shouting!


    Jorge and Luis Garcia were arguing.


    First about dictatorship, then brotherhood, and finally childhood.


    Dulled by whatever had been pumped into his veins, Ignacio was unable to speak.


    He barely sat up in bed��


    Before Jorge��s fist cracked his cheek!


    Luis Garcia turned on him too, jerking him up by his hospital gown, and the two brothers performed a hateful dialogue as they took turns pummeling him.


    They knocked him out of bed and beat him mercilessly.


    ��The face! The face!�� the producer instructed.


    And the actors obliged, taking turns on Ignacio��s face until it was but a bloody quagmire with teeth.


    ��Now!��


    Sputtering meekly on the floor, Ignacio could only watch as they picked up a heavy piece of machinery, no doubt bought for this very purpose, and smashed it against his head��once, twice, three times!��fragmenting it as audibly as a hollowed-out melon.


    The music swelled. The credits rolled.


    Blood pooled.


    Followed by a message:


    What you saw today was real. Welcome to the future of television. For more information, visit [URL removed] or support us on Kickstarter. Fuck [network name removed]! Be part of the entertainment revolution.


    Passionista Episode 7567: In memory of Don Ignacio Rojas.


    ��And cut!��

 Undersiders

    My name is Rudiger Hess. In the mid-2000s, my partner Emiel Meijer and I led a U.N. team of excavators working on mass graves in the Balkans.


    During our investigations, we relied heavily on records corroborated by witness testimony in locating graves.


    It was a successful method, and we were largely able to locate and excavate the graves we knew existed and occasionally find ones unknown to the official sources.


    One day, we accidentally identified a massacre site whose very existence our normally helpful witnesses refused to acknowledge or even speak about to such a degree that they crafted the most elaborate counter-explanations.


    Naturally, this piqued our interest and despite the site being unconfirmed and therefore beyond the scope of our mission we proceeded to excavate.


    We worked at night.


    What we discovered was that under a shallow layer of buried corpses there existed a slab of concrete, and when we drilled through that concrete, we discovered an emptiness.


    At first we believed it was a cave.


    After some deliberation, of which the options were to forget the discovery and return to official work or investigate further, a vote returned a slim majority in favour of investigation.


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    As the leader, I was the first to be lowered into the emptiness.


    What I found was remarkable.


    For as I was lowered on a rope deeper and deeper, I found myself at the same time lifted into a city populated by humans such as ourselves but whom gravity affected conversely!


    By way of illustration:


    Imagine a tabletop on which someone has arranged a world of miniatures. Buildings, people. This is our world. Now imagine that on the underside of the same tabletop someone has arranged another but upside-down world of miniatures. Finally, imagine the tabletop contains a hole, through which a miniature from our world may fall upwards into the sky of the underside world and vice versa because to the underside world ours is the upside-down.


    When first I entered the emptiness, the Undersiders stopped in the streets and pointed at me.


    Drivers pulled over, pedestrians dropped groceries.


    Inverted birds flew past.


    And I gripped the rope tightly, knowing that to let go would mean forever falling into the atmosphere��or beyond.


    The first Undersiders with whom I interacted were police, but my first true communication was with a Serbian-speaking ad hoc committee of technocrats.


    I was "lying" on the ceiling of a boardroom in which they were seated.


    When they gave their names, I recognized them as murder victims, some of whose bodies I myself had excavated.


    "And your name?" they asked me.


    I gave it, and after a twenty-minute recess they reconvened and told me I had been murdered years ago.


    I inquired about the circumstances.


    "You were killed with your family during a recent war. The perpetrator was caught, tried and executed under orders of a military tribunal."


    "Who was the perpetrator?" I asked out of blind curiosity.


    They checked their papers.


    "Emiel Meijer."

 I clicked on clickbait and it took over my life.

    I consider myself a fairly sophisticated internet user. I know what to click, what not to click. I can easily identify a genuine email from spam, and I make sure to have different passwords for my various accounts. I can also tell low quality content from high quality content. Lately, however, I''ve noticed a sizable increase in clickbaity titles even from generally respectable sources: non-celebrity YouTubers, Washington Post, even Royal Road authors.


    I chalked it up to a need for impressions and revenue, and dropped my guard a bit.


    At first it was harmless.


    I checked out the top five reasons why some political party will lose the next election, the ten best horror movies of the last decade, the tastiest vegan Thanksgiving recipes, etc.


    I made sure to click only if I trusted the source, and it was actually kind of fun. The reading was light and fluffy.


    But soon that wasn''t enough for me, and I became more reckless, venturing onto unknown platforms and websites, clicking links haphazardly, and feeling a deep, growing desire to know just how inappropriately customers behaved at Walmart or why the fourth photo on a list of amazing wildlife photos would blow my mind.


    I couldn''t stop myself...


    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    That''s when I found the ultimate clickbait title: The Ultimate Way To Avoid Clickbait! (Never Be Fooled Again!)


    I clicked the link��


    And you won''t believe what happened next!


    Popup after popup opened on my screen, each emitting a hideous MIDI noise, as the screen flashed, Comic Sans fought Papyrus, and there were so many suggestive photos and exclamation marks that my laptop started to emit smoke!!!


    I unplugged the cord but the battery was full and I watched the laptop start to melt into goo.


    I ran downstairs.


    "Honey!" I yelled. "You won''t believe what just happened!"


    My wife ran out to meet me.


    I explained it to her.


    "Here are five reasons why you shouldn''t worry," she said. "One, it was an old laptop. Two, you always wanted��"


    I left her standing there and ran out of the house.


    As I fumbled with the phone in my pocket, the mailman walked past. He smiled, I smiled. "I just delivered five pieces of mail to you, and number two will change your life!" he said.


    Oh, God!!!


    But if I could count on anyone to be wise, measured and calm, it was my father. I turned away from the mailman and called him. "Dad, it''s me."


    "Norman! How are you?"


    "Not so good."


    "Do you know who else isn''t so good today? Your mother. You forgot her birthday."


    He was right.


    "Thankfully, I''m a definitive guide to making it up to someone after forgetting their birthday," he continued. "I''ll also tell you the top ten gifts mothers love to get��"


    I ended the call.


    Clickbait was everywhere!


    Even in my thought process, as I considered the best/worst ways to check my sanity!


    Finally I opened AO3 and started writing:


    I clicked on clickbait��

 The Final Concerto

    I met Alexander on an online classical music forum when I was twelve. He was eleven, and we were both musical prodigies.


    Although Alexander lived in St. Petersburg and I in New York, we became friends. Not only did we understand each other in a way others could not, but we pushed each other musically��


    To a point.


    Because by the time we entered high school, it had already become clear to me Alexander was special even among prodigies. Our technical skills may have been equivalent, but he possessed an unteachable visionary quality I had never seen before: a singular madness!


    When he emailed me years later to say he was working on a piano concerto to end the world, I believed him.


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    They thought me insane when I suggested it, but what I wouldn''t give to see their faces now, as we are already more than halfway finished the ascent, and not even the unexpected snows have managed to turn us back or even delay us! Everything goes according to plan, although I admit I am purposefully keeping these entries short for the bitter cold attacks my fingers mercilessly at this high altitude in the Himalayas, and I must not allow any stupidities now. We must continue. We must!


    ��Alexander S., Journals (Vol. III)


    The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    A reporter dressed in anorak, hat and gloves, struggles to speak into his microphone against the prevailing wind.


    Reporter: ...as you might see behind me, the avant-garde Russian composer is personally leading this train of Sherpas up the mountain, to where he plans in a week''s time to premiere his third and final piano concerto in what he is calling "apocalypse music" and others an ill-advised publicity stunt.


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    We almost lost a cello [illegible] the abyss [...] not even God can stop us now.


    ��Alexander S., Journals (Vol. III)


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    Did I keep up with the news? Yes, like most of the world. It''s difficult to believe but a classical news story was the top headline. The news people are always thirsty for a tragedy, and they felt one here. They just predicted the wrong kind of tragedy.


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    Badly stabilized footage from a helicopter, finally focussing on a snowy mountain peak on which a small orchestra has been set up.


    A figure moving.


    Reporter: Zoom in. That''s him.


    The figure sits behind a piano. [Static] The first notes of a musical composition��


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    It was a work of unquestionable genius.


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    Bedlam in an unidentified city. Collapsing skyscrapers, shrieking crowds. Military vehicles roll by.


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    [Phone footage]


    Tanks in the foreground.


    A mountain in the background, around whose peak fighter planes buzz like insects as a gelatinous bubble begins to expand, vaporizing the planes on contact��


    Unidentified Speaker: Oh God!


    The bubble grows and grows until it reaches the phone camera��


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    Do I ever listen to the concerto? No. It''s still too painful. I knew many of the four billion who died, but I still hear it sometimes in my head. The notes...


    Inevitable really.

 In The Skin

    Dr. Milanesi had been the Bakers'' pediatrician for fourteen years and guided both their older girls healthily into teenagehood, so it was with the utmost trust they left him alone with their youngest, three-month old Clara, who had come down with an unusual rash.


    As he examined the girl, Dr. Milanesi could barely contain his glee, for as he scraped across her reddened skin with his instrument, it made the most wonderful sound, like a dying man''s fingernails scratching hopelessly against the asphalt of a dark alley��


    Later, after arranging the pentagram and other occult necessities, and fortifying himself with several glasses of Cognac, Dr. Milanesi made the call.


    "She is found," he told the Grey Man.


    The assault occurred behind the downtown building in which Mr. Baker worked.


    He had exited, Clara cradled in his arms, when they appeared.


    The killing was quick. He had not even time to scream before he was stabbed, Clara taken and his throat slashed��cascading blood while his fingers scratched in terror at the alley floor.


    They brought Clara sedated to the Grey Man.


    He needed a cocoon.


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    For this, the Grey Man hunted alone. He had his selection, for the city was laden with homeless, junkies and other undesirables, many of whom were already but walking dead. He chose finally for youth and innate vitality. The process would be arduous and survival the prime consideration.


    The Grey Man acted��


    The victim awoke to immobility. His eyes bugged, rolling madly in their sockets, before coming to a half-closed rest. His limbs were secured to the granite slab on which he lay. After his initial burst of fear, he babbled incessantly, but the syllables meant nothing. His tongue had been removed, tied into a gag, and stuffed back into his mouth.


    Dr. Milanesi watched him impatiently from above. Myriad surgical instruments glistened on a cart opposite the granite slab.


    "Let him bleed his demons," the Grey Man said, rocking the slumbering Clara, now raw and scabby, in his arms.


    Finally the victim fell silent.


    Dr. Milanesi applied the anesthetic, and began the procedure.


    He inserted a scalpel below the victim''s neck and sliced downward, before unfolding the body like an organic briefcase and removing the organs until the victim was muscle, bone and emptiness. He then placed the extracted organs into several glass containers set beside the victim on the slab. The organs squirmed; the jars steamed. Next, he reconnected the external organs to the body, taking especial care with the pumping lungs and beating heart, so that the victim remained alive.


    At last, the Grey Man lowered Clara gently into the fleshy cavity, and Dr. Milanesi sutured the enveloping skin.


    For sixty-six days, Clara remained within the victim, whose externalized viscera worked rhythmically for benefit of host and parasite alike.


    On the eve of the sixty-seventh, she emerged��


    Penetrating claws��


    Ripping apart the victim''s chest until standing bloody and revealed before them: glorious gargoyle-child with skin of impenetrable stone!


    "Beautiful evil."

 I Had An Angel Once

    I first saw her near the bus station in Brown Hill when it was bad but not as bad as it is now. I was sitting on the bench coming off a high. She had the cleanest hair I��d seen in weeks. It was sitting beside me, shining. I didn��t think it was real until she spoke and her voice cracked, and she said, ��Vin Procter?��


    The bus came. People got off. I didn��t get on. Then the bus went and I nodded my head, all the time hearing things like under water, even my own voice: ��Vin Procter, that��s right, what��s it to you, you Kenny��s?��


    ��I��m sorry to meet you in public like this,�� she said. Her hands were shaking. ��But that��s the way for first times. Later, we��ll see each other everywhere.��


    We were alone in Brown Hill. Only the wind blew garbage across the street. The garbage stuck against the curb. Plastic cups and paper fast food containers and other dirty unidentifiables. She reached out a hand and put it softly on mine. It was warm and wet as the insides of my head. ��Who are you?��


    The words bubbled.


    ��I��m your addiction,�� she said.


    I got up before it got dark and she followed me home.


    I lived in an abandoned building on Merryweather Street. In the winter I moved elsewhere, but it was late September and not cold yet. Addiction followed me through the front door and closed it. When I opened the fridge, she looked over my shoulder. I wasn��t hungry. I looked around. My furniture was damp, dusty and unappealing. My drug paraphernalia stood on a silver platter on the worn carpet. I curled up on the floor next to it and went to sleep.


    The afternoon light burned my pale skin so that I flinched, then pulled opened my lids and I gasped. Little sound came out but my eyes bugged. I ripped the blanket off my body and stared at the woman in the kitchen. My brains were arid now. A train went by somewhere and the paraphernalia shook on the platter. I smelled fried eggs.


    ��You��re up,�� she said without looking at me. ��You slept for a long time. I made breakfast but it cooled and I ate it for lunch. I��ll make another egg in a few minutes. Maybe you��d like coffee first?��


    I crept toward her.


    She continued, ��I bought eggs and coffee, and milk. You had milk but it was old. I poured it out. Your toilet doesn��t flush properly.��


    The heat radiated from the stovetop. I thought about heating my spoon, but the woman was stressing me. I rubbed my knuckles into my eyes.


    ��There was money in the tin in the cupboard but I didn��t use it,�� she said.


    For a second I was searching frantically through the containers under my bed where I kept all my stuff, maybe she��d taken it, thief, then the mellow came with the egg smell again and the woman said, ��I didn��t touch anything else.��


    She cracked a shell and poured the contents onto the burning butter on the frying pan. The white sizzled and turned hard. She did another, then tossed both shells into the garbage. I had forgotten I had a garbage. I never took it out. The raccoons snuck in and got it sometimes and I hit them with the broom handle but not hard enough. The raccoons scampered out. Sometimes I thought about eating one.


    ��Who are you?�� I asked.


    She finally turned to look at me. ��I��m your addiction. We met yesterday on the bench in public. I��ll be living with you openly now.��


    The eggs finished frying and she slid them onto a plate that she set on the table in the kitchen where a fork was already lying. ��Sit.��


    I sat and ate quickly with little chewing. After licking the last moisture from my fingers, I asked, ��What do you do?��


    She laughed and spun her head such that her hair sparkled round her face. It was clean and shiny, I thought. ��I take over your life,�� she said or smiled. And I smiled too. It had been a long time since I��d had a woman and it was good to have one. I could start a new life now. I was happy. The stress was gone. The shakes were gone. I wished I could shower but the water was turned off and I said, ��You can wash the pan and dishes in the yard. There��s a little hole I dug to catch the water. There��s always a puddle in it.��


    When she went outside I whistled and sat with my back against the sofa. I picked up the silver platter and put each piece of paraphernalia carefully on the carpet. I wasn��t wearing a belt but pulled a spare from under the sofa. The flint clicked. The flame from the lighter was nice, not like the light from outside, which made my eyes narrow and skin hurt. I pulled my sleeve up to where the inside of my elbow was polka dots and heated the stuff and then pricked myself until the world rolled back into my skull.


    The world rolled in dark, with crickets.


    Addiction was sitting in a chair reading a book by candlelight. I stared at her until I coughed and she put the book down and said, ��That��s the last time.��


    I nodded off to sleep.


    I woke up with a headache and the shakes. The stress was back bad. Addiction was gone and I rummaged through the tins in the cupboards where I kept my money. But there wasn��t any so I threw the empty tins across the room, then slid onto my heels and bit my fingernails till they bled. I had a woman now, I thought, I had to support her and love her and be the man for her. It was a family. I determined to get a job. I crawled to the sofa and took out my stuff. There was enough left. I��d sell part of it. I didn��t want to be a deadbeat anymore. From now on, I would be responsible. I picked up all the pieces of paraphernalia scattered on the carpet and placed them on the silver platter. Tomorrow��I set the alarm on my watch��I would sell, then we��d have a baby and the crib would go in the other bedroom where the raccoons sometimes slept.


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    The alarm beeped.


    I felt lips against my cheeks. She was back. She smelled good, like not at all. Her face was close to mine but her clothes were different. ��I��m going to work today,�� I said.


    But when I got to my feet my knees seemed to crumble and I dropped to the carpet. I needed my stuff. I started to crawl but a reflection pushed me back. I shied away and saw her put the silver platter at my feet. I loved her more than I��d ever loved her as I put my things in order and heated up the stuff and pricked deep into the polka dot spot, letting my thumb press the receding world into me.


    Someone slapped me before the world came back. And then it came back firm like the time Kenny pushed my face into the highway. I checked my nose for blood but there wasn��t any. There was just the woman in front of me. She slapped me again. And again, until I lifted my legs and wrapped my arms around them and the blows hit only the outside of my body. I tried to close my eyes and hum a song but I couldn��t get the feeling back. I was stressing out. I was afraid my mouth was going to foam. Then cold water hit me. It flowed onto my tongue and I knew the taste of my own puddle. ��Up,�� she said and I obeyed. But when I stood I stood on the needle. My foot hurt and the needle cracked. I cursed. I would have to get a new one from that place.


    I threw a coat over my shoulders, put a pack of the stuff under my arm and went out through the front door. She followed me. I meandered until people thickened, which meant I was closer to downtown where the place was. Eventually I got there. The sign said ��Cole Recovery Centre��. I went inside and cried until the people gave me a new needle and a card with phone numbers on it. I had to be careful. The stuff was still in me and my eyes wanted to give along with my balance, which meant I almost dropped the stuff onto the floor.


    Outside, the breeze was picking up and my nostrils opened to let it in. The woman smiled at me. I smiled back. I wanted to use the new needle but I had a family now. I felt responsible. I knew the best place to sell. I��d been going there for months and had never seen a dealer. It was open territory. I walked in long strides with no shuffling of the feet, hands buried in my coat pockets, knowing the woman would be proud of the money I��d make.


    The very young ones I wouldn��t sell to, but the older ones had money and they could steal more. It wasn��t right in the schoolyard either. I wasn��t unprincipled. It was behind, by the chain link fence, where the older ones went to smoke cigarettes. One was there now, in jeans and a baseball cap. I banged on the fence with my fist until the kid saw me and came cautiously nearer.


    ��You wanna buy some?�� I wheezed.


    The kid stepped closer. He made sure no one was watching. He had a tough face and an earring and smelled like smoke. I knew the kid wouldn��t ever be anybody.


    ��What you selling?��


    The kid��s voice was strong and he kept his eyebrows slanted inwards like he was angry all the time. They straightened only for a second when he saw the woman when she moved closer to me.


    ��Stuff,�� I said.


    I took it out from under my arm and held it against the fence where the kid could see it and smell it and touch it through the chain link.


    ��How much?�� the kid asked.


    ��However much you got,�� I said. ��You don��t got enough for the whole.��


    The kid��s voice cracked just like the woman��s had done in Brown Hill. He said, ��Fifty,�� and fished through his pockets to gather up the bills. When he had them, he crunched them into a ball and raised his voice, saying, ��Give me the stuff first, then I��ll give you the money.��


    But I only laughed and the kid lowered his eyes to the ground.


    ��Cash first.��


    As the kid moved close enough to put the fifty dollar ball through the chain link, the woman leaned in and whispered close to my ear, ��Are you sure you want to sell that? Won��t you miss it tonight on the carpet?��


    Suddenly the shakes returned and I grabbed the fence and made it rattle. The kid dropped the cash and jumped back. I was abruptly aware that the kid and everyone else but the woman was trying to cheat me out of my stuff. The muscles in my body tightened so bad I couldn��t get my fingers off the fence so I kicked at the fence until the muscles relaxed and I pulled my hand free. Then I laughed again almost like a howl and put the stuff back under my arm. The wind was picking up and it started to drizzle. As me and the woman walked away the kid was on his knees trying to put his hand through the chain link to pick up the money but his wrist was too thick and he couldn��t get it through but pushed so hard the skin on his hand started to raw.


    When we got home I sat with my back to the sofa and heated up my spoon. But every time the heat was good the stuff fell off and I got angry. I realized it was the woman knocking the stuff off. ��What��s the idea?�� I moaned, though she just knocked it off again and told me I wouldn��t have it easy anymore.


    In the morning it was the same and in the afternoon the silver platter kept moving and I couldn��t get a solid read on it. By the evening the foam was starting in my mouth, my teeth were itchy and all the woman did was sit in her chair and read her book and wait for me to try to get at my stuff, which I couldn��t do because I couldn��t remember where the silver platter was and the spoon had a big hole drilled in it.


    I hated her now like I��d never hated anyone.


    ��What��s the idea, what are you, get out of my house!�� I screamed at her.


    ��I��m your addiction,�� she answered.


    I wasn��t an addict, though, that much I knew, so I screamed, ��You��re not real,�� and asked everyone who was around whether they could see the woman. When no one answered I said, ��See, you��re not real,�� and went to the kitchen to pick up the frying pan that the woman had fried eggs in and swung it hard at her head until she fell and the sound of the pan against her head was dull and she didn��t move anymore.


    I was sweating so I went outside and washed my face in the puddle. When I came back in, I heated my stuff on the red frying pan and pressed the plunger of the new needle into a pulsing vein.


    The light that woke me was worse than the light from outside. The stars were out. Someone had taken the belt off my arm and shrunk my house. I was on the sofa. There were men and windows all around. The lights flashed red and white. Someone knocked loud against the glass and I looked and there was a flashlight shining into my face. I closed my eyes and brought my knees high and wrapped my arms around them.


    ��Junkie,�� the flashlight said through the window��


    Then shut off.


    And in the darkness I knew I had an angel once, and she was no more.

 Lysis 14:1–24

    The Lord appeared to Blake near the great ocean of Atlantic while he was engineering. The sun was high in the smothering sky. Blake looked up from his blueprint and upon not recognizing the Lord asked, "Who dares disturb me from my work?"


    The Lord laughed thunder and said, "Does the forgotten wind not blow apart the constructions of Man? For if salvation lay in forgetting, how safe would be the ignorant horde."


    Upon hearing these words, Blake fell to his knees and bowed. "I recognize the Creator," he declared, "in whose image we also create, so that the World is one day made into the temple of the Lord."


    Then the Lord said, "Heed this warning: The World boils, and the Northern ice drips with melt. Trapped within are Demons whose thawing will be the end of Man and his creations."


    Blake asked, "What is to be done?"


    Then the Lord said: "You must construct a Gargantua into which shall fit all the peoples of the World. For only here will they be saved. You must design it, and you must build it of metal and electronics, and it must be made secure against the Demons and cold against the growing Heat. Once this is done, I shall devastate the Demons and restore order to the World."


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    Blake heard how wise were the words of the Lord. "It shall be done."


    For one year and six months, Blake worked upon the design, as the World did boil and the Northern ice dripped ominously with melt, just as the Lord had said.


    And when the design was complete, all of the World''s great factories toiled in harmony to bring reality to the design and construct upon the Earth a metal Gargantua as never before had been. In this, Man was united, and in his unity was borne the fruit of success.


    On the day in which the last of the World''s peoples had sought refuge in the Gargantua, the Lord appeared again before Blake.


    The Lord said, "The Heat already grows, and the Demons rattle in their thawing cages. But their wrath is not yet inflicted upon the World."


    Then the Lord commanded Blake to enter the Gargantua, seal the doors and start the cooling mechanism. And Blake did so, for such was the word of the Lord, guardian of all Creation.


    But the Lord was wise, and in his wisdom had altered the design of the Gargantua, so that once the cooling began, it could not be stopped. And so it was that all the peoples of the world, trapped like Demons within their gargantuan tomb, froze into death.


    Then the Lord laughed thunder and devastated the tomb into a rain of ice that fell upon the World as rain.


    The Lord asked, "Who dares disturb me from my work?"


    The answer was Silence.


    And it was good.

 Kamikaze Corps

    O''Bannon''s wife birthed their first child on the day the asteroid received its name: 7Plutus. In hindsight, it was fate. Two more children, a wedding and a house in the D.C. suburbs followed. The children grew; 7Plutus sailed along its orbit, carrying a cargo of metal more precious than everything on Earth. A new gold rush erupted.


    The first corporation to land on the surface was Vectorien.


    They staked their claim according to the nascent international laws of space mining, developed an HQ and began exploitation.


    Mining proceeded smoothly��until discovery of the Zorg: amorphous entities of unknown liquid, which absorbed and dissolved man and metal alike. The press dubbed them snoglobules.


    The first Zorg assault destroyed most of Vectorien''s machinery and crew, but the company adapted. They developed weapons to vapourize the Zorg, and established an asteroid-wide defense force to protect their investment.


    It worked until November 9, 2097, the day the Zorg first appeared on Earth, materializing in downtown Barcelona and causing such panic and unprecedented material destruction that the U.N. declared a global emergency.


    More attacks followed: Lagos, Chicago, Nanjing, Warsaw, Chennai.


    Earth lived on edge.


    Vectorien sold its weapon technology to governments that could afford it but refused to accept any responsibility for the attacks. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there was no direct link between Vectorien''s mining on 7Plutus and the Zorg raids, meaning the company owed no compensation.


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    Vectorien''s profits grew as earthside casualties increased.


    On July 17, 2098, the Zorg hit the D.C. suburbs.


    O''Bannon watched in helpless terror as a snoglobule absorbed his wife and children, and they, caught as in gelatin, disintegrated into pink mist.


    He vowed revenge.


    On September 1, 2098, the U.N. voted into existence the 1st International Space Brigade, tasked with neutralizing the Zorg threat.


    In January 2099, a Vectorien mining crew discovered a complex cave-system on 7Plutus, terminating in a massive liquid-filled cavity: a breeding chamber home to a Zorg Queen.


    On February 3, 2099, the U.N. initiated a secret mission whose objective was infiltration and eradication of the breeding chamber.


    It was a suicide mission.


    Clandestine recruitment began the same month. One of those contacted was O''Bannon, and he agreed. In total, nine were selected. They called themselves Kamikaze Corps.


    When they finally disembarked on 7Plutus, their orders were simple: rendezvous at Vectorien HQ, attach to a mining crew and converge on the breeding chamber, where they were to use any means necessary to neutralize the Zorg without compromising Vectorien''s mining operation.


    They had ample bombs.


    But at HQ, the mission changed dramatically. Led by O''Bannon, four Corps members mutinied. A firefight ensued, after which only O''Bannon and two allies remained alive.


    Before Vectorien''s security forces could react, and before Earth even realized, they had blasted into Vectorien''s subterranean warehouses, barricaded themselves inside, and swiftly wired their own reworked bombs to Vectorien''s stash of mining explosives.


    On September 22, 2099, while clutching a memento of his family, O''Bannon eradicated the threat��

 We Are The Broken Idol

    I had crossed the six-lane suspension bridge before dawn, and spent the morning hiking in the park across the bay as, hidden from me, the city woke��office windows illuminating, human flesh-gears groaning into the motions of another self-rotation��taking its first great breaths with lungs of politics and commercial profitability: civilization in its prime: America undaunted.


    By afternoon, I had summited and sat on a warm flat rock, lunch spread enticingly beside me and legs dangling lazily above the world. I watched the city''s glass skyscrapers reflect the glowing sun, whose rays danced across the water like golden waves on an oscilloscope, and listened to the soulless hum of a million empty cars, a million disconnected voices��


    The first mollusk man emerged unnoticed from the bay.


    Grey clouds enveloped the sky.


    The day grew suddenly oppressive, but threatened more than rain, as if the firmament itself was but a membrane��now taut, and compressing under the horrible weight of an accumulation of stars: the pressure, felt in the air as much as in my ears, of a dark and cosmic inevitability.


    The city paid no heed.


    But I watched with rapt attention as more of them emerged, black pin pricks surfacing in the silvery waters of the bay, swimming and walking towards the unsuspecting shore, a gathering pointillist nightmare lapping at the very edges of urbanity.


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    Hypnosis.


    Broken by a movement behind��


    Three mollusk men emerging from the vegetation, marching single file along the path toward me: human-sized cephalopods clad in woven microplastic robes, their tentacular whiskers flowing in the illusion of a liquified air.


    Instinctively, I retreat.


    Blind to me they shuffle past.


    They stop.


    Sirens.


    They raise their shiny arms and begin the incantation, speaking syllabic chains of hideous incomprehensibility. Less language than a syntax of miasma, and indeed their words escape their loose and flapping mouths as an iridescent vapour��three strands that rise, and rising intertwine...


    I look toward the city:


    The flashing of emergency lights.


    The chaos of invasion.


    The warping of the heavens��


    to which from everywhere the same trinities of braided vapour-chant ascend!


    Syllable upon terrible syllable broken intermittently by the thumping of helicopter blades, the pitter-patter of machine gunfire and the wailing of the damned.


    Humanity is lost.


    The incantation reaches a crescendo!


    Space-time tears like a rag.


    The sky opens:


    The dead and dying stars collapse on us as cosmic rubble, and across the bay, beyond the darkened city, a great carmine fire erupts, casting demon shadows on what remains of our reality and rendering the city skyline a dreadful silhouette.


    Then rumbling.


    The world itself quakes!


    The incantations cease��


    The bond between gods and matter has ruptured! The dread-skyline is lifted, higher and higher��until its jaggedness and buildings transform into the ancient teeth of the lower mandible of Moloch! Now fusing with the upper jaw; abominable skull, whose size: impossible, forged in a crucible of our own making. Shedding all detritus of progress, he grows: Primal: He becomes, and we are undone.

 Dear Bette Davis

    Don''t get me wrong. If I remember anything from The Big Sleep it''s Lauren Bacall with a cigarette between her lips. And Bette Davis had gloriously sad smoking eyes when Paul Henreid lit up a deuce in Now, Voyager. Later, there was Monica Vitti, Giulietta Masina and Anna Karina. I don''t remember if that trio smoked, but, if it did, I''m sure the puffs were sensual and glamorous (and possibly heartbreakingly tragic in Masina''s case). So don''t get me wrong, I''ve got nothing against the movies. I spent a good part of my childhood lusting over dead and aging actresses. But besides the time I put an end to my mom''s cassette deck with a copy of Nights of Cabiria that I borrowed from the library and never returned, the movies lie. The stench and the irritation of the eyes and the bad teeth don''t penetrate the silver screen. The story ends before the skin yellows and tightens into the leather they use to make fake Italian sofas. And don''t get me started on the clothes: saturated with an entire history of matches and lighters and Saturday afternoons spent coughing in the garage.


    Listen, I don''t mean to sound like a smoking infomercial. The truth is that I don''t care how many people die from throat cancer or if underprivileged kids have to suck in second hand smoke because their parents get the shakes if they don''t light up every hour on the hour. All I care about��and what I can''t get out of my head��is the sweet mouth of Ginnie Peters in the eighth grade, open and waiting for me and my tongue in a little nook on the southwest wall of St. Bartholomew''s Elementary. I''ll never forget that first taste of saliva. No lingering mintiness of sugar-free gum, no taste bud memories of a winter morning��s bitter black coffee. Just sweet, warm and fresh saliva replenishing itself with the swallow-swallow frequency of a nervous teenage girl. If you happen know the album cover for King Crimson''s In The Court of the Crimson King or maybe Edvard Munch''s Screams, you know that once adulthood hits, open mouths become the gaping maws of monsters. But back then it was still the pinnacle of burgeoning eroticism to see those jaws spread and the spit coming down the sides of Ginnie Peters�� teeth like my own private Niagara Falls. I stuck my tongue into that beautiful cavity and lapped up the taste.


    Recess and noon hour and sometimes after school, weeks upon weeks, we spent in that spot with our faces joined at the lips, exchanging fluids. Of course, it wasn''t all about the saliva. There were also the teeth and the tongues, and the hotness of breath making the tiny hairs on your upper lip stand up. Sometimes there were the hands, too, but we didn''t do much of that. It was other young couples that snuck off to explore the insides of each other''s underwear. We were mouth people.


    Even before our lickings and suckings started we''d been friends. Ask my mom where I was when I wasn''t home and she''d nine of ten answer, "He''s probably off with Ginnie somewhere." Nine of ten she was right, too. Probably in Ginnie''s basement, where she and her brother Felton had set up a room especially for audio-visual pleasures. A giant rear projection TV against the wall, a Japanese stereo and, in both corners, big Bose towers with enough bass to restart your heart. Although Felton generally left us alone, he was our primary source for movies. He was older than Ginnie��in his last year of high school. A couple of his friends were already in college, so he''d raid their college libraries for us, bringing back 70s rock albums and the classics of Hollywood and European cinema. If there was anything more appealing than sucking out every last drop of Ginnie Peter''s unspoilt saliva, it was feasting on that saliva while Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham fell in love on screen.


    The trouble with Nicholas Ray films, however, is that they usually don''t end well for the lovers. You see, brother Felton picked up another thing from his college buddies: the taste for nicotine. I first caught on from the faint smell on his jacket. He was discrete with his habit and good at airing out his clothes, but versus someone with an acute sense of cigarette smell like me it wasn''t enough. When I sheepishly asked him about it one day while Ginnie was in the bathroom, his face turned red to match the colour of the popped blood vessels in his eyes and he begged me not to tell Ginnie or his parents. Cigarettes weren''t all he was smoking, and he was glad to buy my silence for a pack of Camels that I didn''t even particularly want. I wasn''t going to talk anyway but he pushed them into my hand and nodded like we''d just concluded an international arms deal, so I kept them.


    Which brings me back to Lauren Bacall with the cig dangling from her lips in The Big Sleep, me and Ginnie on the couch, our lips mutually wet, and Ginnie''s hands making a rare trip under my shirt, then down my body to the tops of my jeans and toward the front pocket where I''d stashed my Camels that day so that I could brag about them to a friend at school. She didn''t actually stop kissing me until she pulled out the pack and smiled, saying, "I didn''t know you smoked." I was about to say that I didn''t when the shot came up��Bacall sucking on that filter-less piece of shredded dry tobacco��and I let my pulsating youth get the better of me.


    This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    "You should try it," I said, "I bet you''d look good with a cigarette."


    She laughed and took one out of the pack. She held it up and looked at it, then spun it round a few times before sticking one end between her lips. I felt a pang of jealousy, but only a pang. Then she smiled and struck a Hollywood pose. There she was: my own personal Vivian Rutledge. I told her to stay right there and I ran to my book bag, where I carried the cheap camera the school had given me to take pictures for the yearbook. She struck another pose and I got a decent shot. And another. And she said, "Wait, it won''t look the same without the smoke," paused, then added, "but there''s probably a lighter around here somewhere."


    There wasn''t. So she came back with an old book of camping matches��the kind that supposedly work underwater��which worked just as well above it. She lit the cigarette, inhaled, and exploded into a sandpaper-coarse cough. She took another drag and it looked good to see her struggle with it. When her coughing calmed down a little I took some more shots. She''d been right: she did look better with her softly moving lips cushioning the smoke up toward the ceiling. The only regret I had was that the world wasn''t in 35mm black and white.


    After she''d smoked the cigarette down to the nub, she handed it to me like an urn of human remains and with the utmost reverence I put it in the garbage, even wrapping it in a used tissue to make sure it wouldn''t be found.


    The movie had already finished and no one had shut off the television when I got back on top of her and licked her lower lip. She stunk bad up close, that much I could tell right away. But it wasn''t until I actually tasted the inside of her mouth that the full horror of what I''d done stuck its talons into the tender underbelly of my heart and ripped me open. I didn''t throw up in her mouth. I at least managed to pull away and run. But I didn''t manage the bathroom, either. I stopped somewhere between the kitchen and the dining room and flung out my dinner onto the Peters'' faultless hardwood floor.


    Ginnie helped me clean up. She was sweet as usual. That was probably the worst thing about it. I could handle the embarrassment and the lack of self-respect that comes with throwing up in front of the girl you''re in love with, but to see her unchanged sweet exterior while knowing that inside she was changed��charred. I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. I looked into her eyes, "Promise me, Ginnie, promise that you''ll never smoke another cigarette." She promised and sealed the promise with a kiss on my cheek. I clamped down on my teeth till I tasted calcium to stop from shuddering at the smell of her smoke-infected hair, but I believed her.


    July 24, 1945. Potsdam. President Harry S. Truman leans over to Joseph Stalin and whispers that the Americans have perfected the atomic bomb. Stalin nods in understanding. Truman scratches his head at the lack of a reaction, Stalin makes a mental note about the expediency of spying. Consequently, while I was never one to advocate peeping on one''s allies, espionage among friends is a little like torture: condemnable, but with benefits. And so the Monday after next I decided to sleuth after Ginnie after school. Where was she going, I asked. To her aunt''s for dinner. Where did she go? To our little nook on the southwest wall of St. Bartholomew''s Elementary.


    By now we both think we know how this ends. There is no other boy. There is no secret lesbian girlfriend. There is only Ginnie and her fingers fiddling with a pack of Camels that she paid her brother to get for her.


    Or at least you think you know how this ends. What you don''t know is that every second that it takes her fingers holding the cigarette to reach the level of her lips is a punch to the liver. What you don''t know is that each sniff as she runs the cigarette under her nose and delights in the smell of that putrid paper is a dull knife scratch to the wrists. By the time she takes out a lighter and ignites the flame, my knees are buckling. Blood is coming out of my nose, my ears. And when she touches the flame to the tip of the cigarette, my limbs catch fire.


    Suddenly her eyes move to look straight at me across the schoolyard. She takes a step toward me. I want to run. I want to get away, but I can''t move. All I can feel is the heat. She takes a drag. The sound is unbearable: like my soul being sucked out. My skin crackles and starts to melt from my bones. She comes closer. I think people are starting to scream. Or maybe I''m screaming. I touch my face but there isn''t one anymore, only a hard, white skull. She smiles. There are two cigarettes in her mouth. She puffs on both. Then takes one from her lips and holds it out to me. I don''t want it, but I can''t swat it away. My arms are charcoal. She pushes the cigarette between my teeth. My body burns out from under me. I feel myself getting shorter and shorter. Soon, I am nothing but a skull resting on a hill of ashes.


    "Don''t let''s ask for the moon," she says as she picks me up and holds me in her hands. "We have the stars."


    She gives me a kiss and our teeth clatter against each other.


    There is no saliva. There is no wetness.


    If I am ever properly buried, please write the following on my tombstone:


    Dear Bette Davis,


    Fuck You.

 I think I screwed us in the 1960s

    I''ve started writing this hundreds of times and never gotten to the end. The first few times I tried, I did it on paper in a notebook because the internet hadn''t been invented yet. I burned the notebooks. This is the first time I''ve finished and not destroyed what I''d written. If nothing else, this act of creation without destruction is a small victory to me, but I know you hardly care about that. Nor should you. You should care about what you''re about to read because if what I say is true, your generation may be in some serious shit. I''m in my late 70s, no wife or kids, not many friends, and although I''m not quite on my death bed, I''m certainly nearing the end of my life, so my personal stake in this is low, but I''d be lying if I said it didn''t weight heavily on my soul in an existential kind of way. We all keep secrets, some darker than others, and this has been my darkest.


    The story starts in California way back in the 1960s. For those unfamiliar with that period in history, the one word I''d use to describe it is turbulent. Just imagine the straight-laced world of the 1950s you know from television crashing head-on into what you probably associate with hippie culture, namely radical politics, protest, heavy drug use, rebellion against authority, and conspiracy theories, but also comradery, selflessness, and the genuine belief that it is possible to change the world for the better. I was a university student at the time, so you could say I was in the thick of it, but I wasn''t at one of the true hotbed schools like Berkeley. That said, there was almost no way to be young and alive in California and to keep away from the upheaval. It was literally all around you, and it sucked you in. There wasn''t a Friday night when you didn''t listen to a speech by Abbie Hoffman, take LSD, or hazily conspire to take down the establishment to a background of folk tunes, and then go out to bar where long past midnight some guy in a black suit tried to recruit you for a plastics corporation or the CIA. Or so he said, or so you remembered the next morning.


    It was actually at one of these bars that I met my first real girlfriend, whom I''ll call Edna. Edna wasn''t a hippie, she was in town taking typing classes and working part-time as a receptionist, but like me she had become infatuated with the scene. Edna was only the second girl I''d slept with, and after a few months of going with her I started having trouble maintaining, then even getting, an erection. Back then it wasn''t like it is now, when even polite people talk about erectile dysfunction and you can get medication to help with it. Back then there was nothing except a whole lot of embarrassment. At first, Edna and I thought it might be stress or lack of sleep causing my problem, then we suspected alcohol, but despite taking a fairly systematic approach and eliminating the possible causes one by one, we couldn''t figure it out. Within weeks, my sex life just stopped. You can imagine how devastating that was to a young man.


    Let''s rewind a bit. About six months before meeting Edna, I had met a guy named Jerry in one of my political science classes and we''d quickly become friends. Jerry and I would regularly meet up, talk about everything from music and world revolution to UFOs, and generally goof off together, and he''d always have a decent supply of weed for us to smoke and Grateful Dead bootlegs to listen to, which was fantastic. Although I''ve never had a truly best friend, Jerry was definitely my closest friend during my early student days in California, so he was the person I eventually turned to for help with my sexual problem. I remember that it was late at night after getting stoned immaculate, as Jim Morrison would say, that I told Jerry about my erectile dysfunction. He listened as I struggled mightily through the telling of it, and without laughing or making light of the situation told me not to worry too much, that it would probably go away on its own, but if I didn''t want to wait and wanted help now, I should go see a man he referred to as Gerbil.


    Gerbil was about ten years older than us, originally from New Mexico and had been studying chemistry at Berkeley until about a year prior, when he''d been expelled after being caught synthesizing hallucinogens in a school lab. Faced with the possibility of going back to New Mexico without a degree, Gerbil had decided to pursue the American Dream instead. He set up his own lab, kept his clientele, and expanded his operation. Drugs, incidentally, is how Jerry had first met Gerbil. And through Jerry is how I met the guy. That''s one other unique thing about Gerbil: even compared to the regular paranoiacs, he was paranoid. You couldn''t just see him. You had to be introduced by someone he trusted and he had to "vet" you, which included a brief interrogation and sitting silently while he "read your mind." My vetting lasted about half an hour. After it was over, Gerbil relaxed and I explained my problem to him. It was easy because he was like a magnet for deep truths. You wanted to tell him the embarrassing stuff. Long story short, he told me I was far from the first guy to be suffering from this type of condition and that he had a tried and tested solution.


    I''ll never forget the moment when he held out the pill bottle to me. His smiling, unshaven face, the sunlight streaming in through the dirty windows, and the pills themselves, oblong and delicately off-white in their little glass home. When I asked how much I owed him, he shrugged and said that for a friend there was no cost, then laughed and added that he had more than enough money anyway. After all, he said, he was making truth serum for the CIA. "Just make sure you follow the instructions," he said. "And remember: you were never here."


    When I got home, I read the instructions, which had been typed out on a strip of paper and taped to the outside of the pill bottle. They were simple enough but odd: Insert one (1) pill into urethra at least one hour prior to intercourse.


    I''ll spare you the awkward details of my first time doing the insertion. What you need to know is that the pills worked. God, how they worked! Never before, and never since, have I had an erection as hard and for as long as when I used those pills. In the past twenty years I''ve tried Viagra and all the others, but nothing even comes close. It was like fucking with the world''s most sensitive steel rod, and you could go for hours!


    Edna and I sure made up for lost time, but pretty soon Edna wasn''t enough. We''d go at it two or three times, she''d call it quits for the night and I''d still be raging to go. I''m not proud of it now, but I started meeting other girls just for sex. Any girls who''d have me, really. At bars, meet ups, between classes, at concerts, everywhere. There was no emotional connection but physically it was bliss. I loved it, they loved it, and I guess later they dubbed it the Summer of Love.


    I wish I''d counted how many pills Gerbil had given me, but I didn''t. All I knew was that I was going through them like a knife through reheated butter. From what I remember, one pill was enough to last up to forty-eight hours, but I was using them almost non-stop, and the supply was depleting. I was probably addicted. It was after I''d used about half of my initial supply that Jerry asked over coffee one morning whether my "problem" had gone away. I told him it had and more than hinted at how my sex life had exploded, and he told me that was fantastic news. Then he lowered his voice and told me Gerbil wanted to meet up. I agreed, he told me the time and place, and I never saw Jerry again. But I''ll get to that in a bit.


    Gerbil and I met a few days later in what remained of a hangar on an abandoned airfield. It was beyond city limits, and Gerbil seemed to make a big deal of that fact. He told me he''d recently purchased the land way under value and was planning on building a bunker on it. Because that sounded like just the craziness he''d be into, I took him at his word. When I told him how well the pills had been working and that I wanted more of them, he wasn''t surprised. He said he was thrilled and handed me another bottle of pills identical to the first. This time, however, they had a price. But it was the kind of price that wasn''t paid in dollars and that made my horny young mind spin with possibilities. Gerbil was organizing a series of orgies and he was giving me the pills in exchange for taking part in them.


    Back to Jerry: disappearing for a few days wasn''t unusual. He went on benders from time to time during which he''d unreachable and absent from class, but those usually lasted a few days, after which he''d show up groggy and with stories to tell. After a week, I started to worry, but even then it''s important to remember the times, both in terms of technology and perspective. We didn''t have cell phones you could call anytime you wanted, and it wasn''t unheard of for people to "drop out" of society. I had a professor who suddenly disappeared for half a semester, and when he came back he told us he''d gone on a walkabout. Still, I expected Jerry to tell me if he was planning something like that. He''d said nothing and now he was gone. I started asking around but realized I didn''t actually know much about him. From what I gathered, he was still enrolled in university and still living at the same address. He just wasn''t there.


    My relationship with Edna was falling apart at the same time. I was bored with her, and she was getting bored with life in California. She was honest about wanting to move back East, and we both knew I wouldn''t be going with her. And although she never said a word about it, I''m sure she knew I wasn''t being faithful. Hell, even free love has a cost. I can''t say we broke each other''s hearts, but I will say that as I''ve aged, I''ve imagined more and more often what my life would had have been if we''d stayed together. I went on to love again but I never found a true love. Edna, especially in those early times, may have been the closest I ever got. Ironically, we loved each other most when we couldn''t be physically intimate.


    The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    The first of Gerbil''s orgies that I attended was held in the middle of the desert. There was music, drugs and absolutely no inhibitions. It was the most exciting experience of my life, and I loved it. Gerbil himself was never at the orgies, but almost everyone seemed to know him, at least by reputation. I don''t remember how many orgies I ended up going to, but it was over a dozen, each in a different location with new women, many of them intoxicatingly exotic to me. Foreign students, bored housewives, groupies, intellectuals, stewardesses, and wanderers from all around the country and the world: India, Russia, China, Europe, Latin America, everywhere. I still have no idea how Gerbil organized these things or convinced so many women to go to them, but he did, and I must have fucked nearly all of them. The pills were my fuel.


    Sometime during this hazy period of hedonistic pleasure, the police found Jerry''s body in New Mexico. Apparently he''d hitchhiked all the way down there, spent a few weeks living on a ranch and overdosed on a cocktail of drugs so strong he must have been halfway to heaven by the time his organs failed. Foul play was ruled out, and no one in New Mexico cared if a longhaired hippie had killed himself accidentally or on purpose. There was no funeral as far as I know. About a week after Jerry''s death, I received a letter from him in the mail. Judging by the gradual degradation of his handwriting, it had been written in several sittings. Most of it was personal and there was a lot of pain behind the words, but it was the last sentence that has stuck with me because of it''s plain brutality. Four words: They''ve fucked us.


    I fucked away my breakup with Edna and the loss of my friend. Orgy after orgy.


    It was while sitting in a bar on a hot Wednesday night in the middle of July that I discovered something that chilled me to the marrow of my bones. I was down to my last pill and imagining the best way to take advantage of it, waiting for the perfect piece of ass to walk in through the door. I had a mug of beer in front of me, not my first, and I was absentmindedly walking the pill up and down the tops of my fingers, when suddenly I lost control and it fell straight into my mug. I must have been too drunk to react, because instead of fishing it out, I watched instead as it descended into the murky depths while giving off a spray of infinitely fine bubbles. I didn''t know how a pill should react in beer, but something about this reaction seemed off. When it had settled at the bottom of the mug, the pill started shedding something other than bubbles: namely itself. Tiny pieces flaked off and floated to the top, and the pill began to tremble. Soon, dark spots became visible beneath the off-white colour of what I instinctively began to conceptualize as a shell, until the entire casing was gone, leaving only a trembling black insectous creature! Immediately I knew it was organic. Even more: alive! I watched mesmerized as it struggled in the liquid, scurrying towards the edge of the mug but unable to climb the glass sides. Finally, I put my fingers in and lifted it out. It was small but unbelievably hard between my fingertips. I couldn''t crush it. I held it briefly against the overhead light, its body wholly opaque, before it slipped out, hit the unswept floor and scurried away. I scrambled after it, much to the cruel amusement of the other patrons, stomping forward on the floor before falling to my knees, but with no luck. It was gone. Returning to my seat, I thought, Just what the fuck have I been pushing into my urethra?


    I had no pills and the only evidence of anything abnormal was my own boozy memory, so I had nothing. Except a feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was horribly wrong. I tried contacting Gerbil in my usual ways, hoping to get more pills to experiment on and either put my mind at ease ("You hallucinated, idiot.") or get my hands on something I could send to a lab, but all my usual ways were indirect, like asking for permission to speak, and permission was being denied. Gerbil stopped responding. Eventually I grew desperate enough to visit the abandoned airfield, which was the only address of his I knew, but it was empty and unchanged. When I went to the land office and asked about ownership, the clerk told me the land belonged to a man named Beaconfield who was mostly likely long dead. Because I didn''t know anyone other than Jerry who''d known Gerbil, I had nowhere else to turn. There''s only so many times you can ask a stranger if they know a man named after a small rodent. Eventually you give up.


    And so Gerbil was gone, my pills were gone, Jerry and Edna were gone, and soon the 1960s themselves were gone, metamorphosing into a sexless 1970s for me, then the 1980s, 1990s and the new millennium. All as if someone had snapped their fingers. To say my life was dull would be an understatement. I had work, and followed it around the country, but I had little else. Forged at a time when we all wanted to remake the world, I had remade nothing and found myself leading a life of comfortable insignificance. But despite my memories fading, they never completely disappeared, and I spent many evenings wondering, trying to piece together clues, and always unable to shake those four words of Jerry''s: They''ve fucked us. Was I scarred by a friend''s suicide? Sure. But it was more than that, often in the form of sweat-inducing nightmares about tiny black insects crawling around my insides.


    In the early 2000s, I saw a political ad for a candidate vying for the U.S. Senate. There was nothing unusual about the spot, but a few seconds caught my attention. They showed a series of photos of the candidate as he was growing up, attending school, graduating, etc. In one of them, he was with his mother, and my heart nearly stopped when I recognized her as Edna. I don''t know what emotion I felt first, but I settled on hesitant happiness as I jumped online to confirm what my eyes had shown me. Although I didn''t find the ad itself, I did find an interview with the candidate, including one with a gallery of photos, and in one of them was the confirmation I was searching for. Edna''s face, older but still beautiful, stared at me from behind her son''s electable smile. I was breathless. My happiness became joy. It was wonderful not only that Edna had done OK for herself but that she''d done extraordinarily, because it takes a certain kind of success to raise a future statesman.


    On election night, I made popcorn, drank beer and cheered on Edna''s son as if he were my own. Shortly after the polls closed, CNN projected him as the winner. For one night, my own insignificance didn''t matter. I shared secretly in someone else''s relevance.


    A few months passed in the afterglow of this beautiful discovery. Sometimes I even had fantasies about contacting the senator to offer my congratulations, which would be a reconnection with Edna, but I always knew this was impossible. I was nobody to her, a shadow from the past. She probably didn''t even remember me.


    The reason why I mention this is two-fold: because I want to write and relive the happy moments, despite their way of decomposing into dread; and because Edna was merely the first of many. Over the next year, I recognized the faces of three other women I''d had sex with in California in the 1960s. I may not have known or recognized their names, but I do have a memory for faces and I was certain about theirs. All three were the mothers or grandmothers of successful people: a politician, the CEO of a pharmaceutical corporation, and a lawyer. What are the chances?


    Over the next months and years, I started to actively research the background of anyone who had recently attained a high level of success, or more accurately, a high level of influence: of power. Most were guarded about their pasts, many enigmatic, but some made public just enough of a thread of information for me to pull loose, and whether in photos or on video, what I kept finding were the faces of my former lovers, women I had met while cheating on Edna or, more often, women I''d fucked at Gerbil''s orgies.


    In time, I realized that the web extended beyond America. I found world leaders, generals, economists, industrialists and policy makers scattered about the globe, yet whose foremothers had all been in California with me! It was insane. I felt insane, wacko like the worst conspiracy nuts I''d met in the 1960s. Yet, just like them, I was convinced I was right, and what was right was too weird to be coincidence.


    Today, the people whose mothers and grandmothers I fucked rule the world, and the singular way in which they are all working toward the same goals terrifies me to the very core of my being. To everyone else, they are unconnected individuals. To me, they are connected, and it gnaws at my mind, this question that I know I will never be able to answer: What are they and to whom do they owe their allegiance?


    But I no longer search for them. I have accepted reality, and I don''t know what difference it makes to know exactly how many of them exist. I still have no evidence. I can''t go anywhere with a story relying on an old man''s memory of his own LSD-fueled sexual exploits. I''ve tried, and gotten laughed out of the room. The best reaction is sympathy for being a senile old man whose mind is playing tricks on him about his past. And that''s without mentioning my own theories involving parasites, mind control or aliens.


    Yet those words: They''ve fucked us.


    How I wish I had been able to hold on to that tiny black creature!


    Or stopped myself from putting it in my body.


    But I couldn''t and now I''m here, posting my story somewhere at least a few people will read it. Maybe you''ll believe me, maybe you won''t. I don''t know if I want to give a warning or a confession, but either way I''ve done it now. What finds its way to the internet stays on the internet.


    I hope for your collective sake that when you find this years later, you''ll be able to have a good laugh.


    I know I''m not laughing.


    I truly believe that in the 1960s I participated in something whose conclusion will be the ruin of mankind.

 The Circular Logic of Space Exploration

    Appleton rushed to scratch the message onto the back cover of a magazine lying face-down on a table near the telephone. Scratch��because the pen didn��t want to cooperate; the ballpoint stuck. Appleton��s fingers shook.


    It was a prank, surely. The conversation had been recorded. He would end up on a website somewhere, the anonymous out-of-touch butt of some teenager��s joke.


    Yet there was something in the quality of that voice, a voice that didn��t belong to any teenager, that forced the shapes of the letters through his wrist, onto the paper. Even as he felt the fool, he also felt the chronicler. The words could be historic.


    The words: after a plain ��hello�� the voice had excused itself and muttered something about a wrong number and galactic interference. Then it had said, exactly, ��No matter, you will have to do. My name is Charles R��and I am calling from Mars. First, record the date and time of this communication. Second, please bring it to the attention of one Mrs Mary Clare of 34 Wentworth St, Nottingham. Pass along also that I am doing fine and that, though food is scarce, I have had my fill, and that water is plenty once one digs past the red surface of things.��


    That was all. Then the phone went dead. The connection had not been good to begin with, but there was no doubt about any of it. Nothing had been made up. There was no uncertainty.


    Having written these five sentences, Appleton let go of the pen, wiped his forehead and retreated to the safety of his customary evening chair. It was a few minutes after six��his regular reading time��but Appleton gave no thought to books. Today, he sat silently in his chair until the clock struck seven. His neurons fired incessantly.


    By eight, he had made up his mind: in the morning he would fly to Nottingham and personally deliver the message to Mary Clare.


    There was only the slight problem of the wife.


    She would arrive home tomorrow afternoon and find it empty. She would worry. Appleton��s greatest fear was that the wife would worry. She was of good breeding and delicate constitution, and worry might weaken her system enough to allow otherwise harmless bacteria to set up residence, which would lead to complications and eventually a prolonged bedridden death. He shuddered at the mere inkling. Right, he would have to compose a note: ��My dear, I am off on a scholarly pursuit. Do not worry. I will return by Wednesday. Sincerely, your devoted husband.��


    He folded the note and placed it on the dining room table. That, he realized, was more writing than he��d done since his tenure at Oxford. He felt productive again.


    <h2>- - -</h2>


    The plane skidded as it touched down, but the flight was otherwise without incident. Outside, grey clouds produced a cold mist that collected drops of water on the brim of Appleton��s hat as he waited by the terminal. Although no one could say so by looking at him, he was nervous.


    He nearly misspoke while telling the driver the address. In the taxi, he caught himself rubbing his thumb compulsively against his forefinger like he hadn��t done since his rugby days.


    <h2>- - -</h2>


    The house at 34 Wentworth St was made of pale yellow brick. It was smaller and set farther from the road than neighbouring houses. A stone path led to the front door, on either side of which bloomed a well-kempt garden. Appleton walked the path slowly, cherishing the smell of wet flowers and realizing that over the last twelve hours he��d developed a particular mental image of Mary Clare. It was something like the opposite of the wife.


    He stood for a few moments before the front door and deliberated whether to ring the electronic bell or use the bronze knocker. Eventually, he rapped his knuckles against the wood. A woman opened the door.


    ��Yes, hello,�� said Appleton.


    The woman looked suspiciously at his hands, but he wasn��t carrying anything except the back cover of the magazine on which he��d written the message from Mars.


    ��I��m not selling,�� he said. ��I��m looking for Mrs Mary Clare. I��ve been informed that she lives at this address. I have a message for her from Charles R��.��


    ��Did he send you, the scoundrel?��


    Appleton blinked.


    ��Well did he or didn��t he, speak up. All these years and he can��t even come back to show his face, sends some other poor fool.�� Her eyes studied Appleton��s hat. ��Or maybe he��s dead. Maybe that��s what you come to tell me. Last of kin or some such.��


    ��No, Mrs Clare����


    ��Simpson, but one and the same as you��re looking for.��


    ��Mrs Simpson.�� Appleton fumbled the correction. He��d shoved one hand into a cloak pocket and was furiously rubbing his fingers together. ��Yesterday evening I received a phone call. I wasn��t meant to receive it, you see, there was a mistake with the connection. The call was from Mr Charles R��. He asked that I deliver this message.��


    Appleton read aloud what he��d written on the magazine cover.


    The woman laughed and stomped her foot. She was in her sixties, Appleton realized. Sections of her hair were greying. The lines under her eyes were deep and permanent. Her laughter was not a joyous laughter.


    She said, ��Whatever trick it is you��re playing, and whoever you��re playing it with, I��m too old for it, you understand? The past is dead. Mr Charles R�� is dead. And I deserve to be left to my own peace. Don��t come back here.��


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    But before she could close the door, Appleton put his hand on her shoulder. It was a soft shoulder. Appleton gasped. Never had he been so forward with a woman.


    ��Please, Mr Charles R�� is not dead. I spoke to him. I heard his voice. I��m telling you the truth. He��s alive. He��s just on another planet. It��s utterly remarkable!��


    Mrs Simpson looked at Appleton with suddenly sympathetic eyes and, even as she removed his hand from her shoulder, kept her voice calm:


    ��He��s dead to me.��


    Appleton��s hand fell limply against the side of his cloak.


    ��There are certain things you do that, once you do them, their consequences are permanent. There is no pretending and there is no coming back. Take care now, Mister.��


    With that, she shut the door.


    <h2>- - -</h2>


    Upon returning home, Appleton��s life returned to normal��at least in all superficial respects: he smiled to his wife, he kept to himself, and, at Six O��clock each evening, he retreated to his customary chair to read his customary books. The magazine cover on which he��d written the message from Charles R��, he placed in a private drawer in the desk in his study, underneath unfinished essays and research into particle acceleration and magnet engine propulsion and other old academic bric-a-brac.


    For weeks, whilst trying unsuccessfully to locate more information about Charles R��, he kept the drawer unlocked. But, once he��d given up hope, he turned the key and, with one click, banished all thought of Mars from his mind.


    Or at least that��s what Appleton intended. For there are certain neurons that, once they start firing, are impossible to stop. At most, they can be slowed��their work delayed. They are not obtrusive neurons: they do not prevent, say, smiling to one��s wife or reading customary books. But they are persistent and every so often they make the results of their operation known. This happens most-of-all at unexpected times, as, for instance, when Appleton, having bent to retrieve a particularly large pine cone from the grass, stood up with the complete schematic for the Magna-IV Engine before his eyes, or, upon having been asked by the local lady grocer for his opinion about a recent stretch of fair weather, replied, ��My God, Ruthenium!��


    Once such ideas made themselves known to Appleton, he began putting them to paper. Once they were on paper, he tasked other, more compliant, neurons with dividing and conquering any problems that the papers made apparent; and, once those had been solved, what else was there to do but gather the necessary materials and construct the first prototypes?


    Appleton kept mum about this, of course. To his physicist colleagues, he was still at work on the same book he��d been working on for the last decade. He was still irrelevant. The wife, as long he smiled to her, suspected nothing. It was only his books that could have given him away��lying unopened on their shelves, their regular Six O��clock appointments long forgotten, their yellowing pages gathering dust��but books by themselves cannot speak. Appleton��s secret was safe.


    Even as the project approached completion, not one soul suspected.


    When launch-day finally dawned and Appleton, having composed a note to his wife indicating that he would be away until Wednesday on a scholarly pursuit, packed the pieces and prototypes into the back of a rented truck and drove to an old farmer��s field, from where he would blast off that very noon, the whole world was still na?ve to the history that would soon be made.


    In the field, Appleton worked diligently. He filled the shell of the rocket with each of the separate machines he had designed and constructed. He had a life support system, a navigation system, a communications system. He had propulsion. He had fuel. He had everything that was necessary. Nothing had been overlooked. As the sun rose, it rose on years of endless effort that, today, had physically and for the first time come together in the middle of such a previously insignificant English spot on Earth.


    By Ten O��clock, the rocket was nearly complete. All that was left was the installation of the final ingenious detail: the captain��s seat: Appleton��s own customary evening chair.


    That done, Appleton looked for one last time at the earthly sky, its thin clouds moving slightly across an orange sun, then climbed into the rocket and closed the hatch. The pneumatics sighed. The inside air was warm. As he set the navigation, every click and beep audible as if within his own skull, Appleton wondered what became of Mary Simpson. But just as it had come, the wonder passed. He confirmed his intended destination on the small liquid crystal display and took a deep breath.


    The destination was unbelievable: Appleton felt feverish. He maneuvered into his chair and strapped himself in. Space was tight but he was not uncomfortable. Besides��he thrust a needle into a vein in his arm��he would be asleep for most of the journey. The sedative began to flow. He activated the countdown sequence. When he awoke, he would already be in Saturn��s orbit.


    <h2>- - -</h2>


    ��Hello? Can you hear me?��


    The communications equipment produced only a monotonous hiss punctuated by crackles. Appleton scratched his head. He��d programmed the system to link directly to the telephone in his home. The signal was strong enough. It should be working. He tried another connection.


    This time, there was a faint click and the echo of a voice.


    ��Darling! It��s me. Please say something,�� Appleton spoke into the receiver.


    The voice wobbled.


    ��I hope you can hear me. I hope you haven��t been worrying. I hope I haven��t caused you harm. Please, darling, say something so that I know there isn��t a malfunction.��


    The echoing voice suddenly came into rather clear focus. ��Who is this? And do you want to speak with my mum?��


    Appleton knew right away that it wasn��t the voice of the wife. In fact, it wasn��t even a female voice. It was the voice of a boy.


    ��My name is Appleton,�� said Appleton. ��I am attempting to contact the wife. Unfortunately, I may have miscalculated. Nonetheless, if you��d be a good lad and please make a note of the following: I am calling from Titan, which is the largest moon of the plane��


    ��Saturn, I know. I��m not stupid.��


    Appleton cleared his throat and adjusted his headset. ��Yes, that��s mighty good of you. As I was saying, I am on Titan, having only just arrived, you see. But the situation thus far appears manageable. I predict I shall make a fair go of living here.�� He remembered his reason for calling. ��Right, then, if you could tell as much to the wife, whom you will find living at 11 Golden Pheasant Lane in Beaconsfield, I would be much obliged. Her name is����


    The connection went dead. The communications system went offline. Try as Appleton might, no amount of banging, prodding and reprogramming ever brought it back.


    <h2>- - -</h2>


    Phil Jones replaced the telephone receiver.


    ��Who was that?�� his mother asked.


    Then disappeared down the hall without waiting for an answer.


    Phil went back to the homework spread out on his bedroom floor, whose doing Appleton had interrupted. Geography lay beside history, which bordered an island of English. Phil tried all three subjects��cross his innocent heart, he did��but all at once the history was too boring, the English too imprecise and the geography too much pointless memorisation. He rubbed his eyes. Next year he��d be in high school. The homework would only get harder.


    T-I-T-A-N


    He typed the letters almost absent-mindedly into a Google image search.


    The moon stared at him.


    Somewhere inside his head, certain neurons were beginning to fire.

 The Skull Cauldron

    After the incipient nights of necromancy, Death incarnate prowled the world like a rotting, rag-covered plague dog, dragging his corroded scythe and leaving the mark of an ever-expanding spiral originating in the terrestrial hell hole at the heart of the city cemetery.


    He crept weakly, his tall, thin body nearly parallel to the ground, leaving behind him permanent night and the putrid winds of decay, and when he found his victim��a woman walking home alone, a widower rocking sadly on his porch, a child left momentarily unattended��he killed and feasted, the victim''s raw flesh granting him sufficient vitality to spread the webbed cartilage of his wings and, carrying the carcass in his talons, soar triumphantly across the moonlit sky, back to the cemetery, where his growing horde of undead minions waited, gathering around the skull cauldron.


    When he landed on the soft grass, a hush fell over them and they ebbed to make way for him, who had granted them re-life and to whom they owed their soulless but thirsty allegiance. With dull but feverish eyes they watched in silence the spectacle unfold.


    Skull cauldron: the once-head of a colossal beast larger and more ancient than any known to man, long ago obscured by the folds of time and now but a fantastic monument arising twenty feet into the air and measuring the same across��a gruesome relic of a time too horrible to remember, and a reminder that while revolutions may eat their children, evolution absolutely devours its bastard freaks.


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    Death dragged the victim''s carcass up the narrow steps he had chiseled into the cauldron''s occiput, leaving a trail of fresh blood which the minions lapped up greedily with their grey tongues, before depositing the warm meat into a cavity especially prepared for the purpose.


    The carcass slid into darkness.


    The grinding, crack and pop of calcified gears��


    Death embraced the skull cauldron; his wings covered its immensely empty sockets.


    The squish��


    The hideous stench��


    As its mechanisms worked, breaking down and transmogrifying the human raw material, the skull cauldron heated, and the heat caused its massive jaws to inch open, and through that opening crawled the newborn ground-meat worms that Death was sending forth to fertilize the Earth''s soil with pestilence and despair!


    The fat pink worms squirmed, bubbling like intestines filled with bloody swamp water.


    And the undead minions grabbed at them, shoved them greedily into their mouths, still stupidly following the feeding instinct of the living, and Death watched with amusement as the worms worked their way through the derelict bodies before escaping through some decaying hole or orifice before continuing on their journey.


    Death next dismounted the skull cauldron, and with remaining vitality incanted another cohort of minions.


    Their limbs burst through the ground��


    Then Death rested.


    He had again expanded his kingdom. The spiral grew outward, the minions increased in number, the meat worms carried their demonic blight beneath unsuspecting humanity. The process had started, and its result was irrevocable.

 Head / Cave

    I agreed to care for my sister''s children for five days while she and her husband vacationed in Australia. My sister has always been a hard worker; she deserved her time off. ��They��ll be fine,�� I overheard her tell him. ��He��s just a little neurotic.��


    I tracked their flight online.


    I followed the schedule and instructions they��d provided.


    But five days became seven, then ten, and the children required constant attention and entertainment, allowing me no breaks during which to concentrate on my work. Expectation birthed anxiety, which brought a crushing end to my normally clockwork sleep cycle.


    I took to walking after the children dozed.


    I took a knife for safety.


    One sleepless night, I wandered out into the cold, dark winter, rejoicing in the childless solitude, if for a mere half-hour, watching the falling snow fill the streetlight illumination like so much static, losing myself for so long I gasped when she approached: an ancient woman I��d never seen, strolling as alone at night as I. ��Beware,�� she said��passing, ��the black ice.��


    I fell.


    My head slammed against concrete.


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    I got home in a state.


    There was blood in my ears and a terrible throbbing behind my eyes, and as the children slept I scoured the basement for my first aid kit.


    As I neared a certain section of the wall, the throbbing increased.


    I noticed a crack.


    I kicked the wall and it crumbled.


    I ran upstairs and grabbed my torch and my pickaxe, both awoken and screaming.


    With the pickaxe I destroyed what remained of the fraudulent wall.


    Emptiness:


    I stepped inside and ignited the torch.


    The depth was endless.


    A secret underground labyrinth.


    But after weeks of dark travel, the subterrain became soft and organic, terminating in a fleshy loam and what appeared to be monstrous jaws. As I neared the exit, holding tightly my burning torch I noticed a flickering light begin to emanate from my irritated throat.


    The ground shifted beneath my feet.


    Attempting to move, I discovered myself restrained, bound to a white-sheeted bed by leather straps around my wrists, ankles and forehead.


    I stepped forward, from warmth into a chilled and sterile air.


    A tiny human crawled out of my mouth.


    I looked about the giant world. Behind me loomed a giant human head!


    It was me / It was me.


    Is this madness? I thought.


    I calmed myself.


    Climbing up my own face, I determined I was in an asylum.


    "The straps," I thought / I heard myself think.


    I took out my knife and cut the strap restraining my forehead. It was thick but I managed. Next I freed my wrists and ankles and finally I stood again!


    I put on a white coat hanging nearby, and carefully picked myself up and placed myself into the coat''s breast pocket.


    I was carried by a god.


    Together, I and I escaped the asylum.

 The three of us went hiking in Uganda, and deep within the jungles I found my calling

    "We''ll let you know in a few weeks," the interviewer said.


    He had a nice plastic smile, and I flashed my own in response. The truth was I''d bombed another one, and further unemployment beckoned. You need a job to get job experience, which is required to get a job. He shook my hand, wished me luck, and ushered me to a pair of impeccably clean glass doors, through which the harsh light of midday poured in, reminding me that I was a failure as an adult. Real adults weren''t supposed to be idle at this time of day. I stepped outside into a spotlight of inferiority.


    A car honked.


    It was my girlfriend and soon-to-be fianc��e, Jen. The plan was I''d propose as soon as I found a steady job. These days, any job would do.


    I shrugged as I got in to ward off any lurking questions. "They''ll tell me in a few days," I said.


    "You''ll get it eventually."


    "Yeah."


    "You have a degree in management, you''re tall, you''re good with people��"


    "Yeah," I repeated.


    Maybe in another eight months I can find a job cleaning glass doors, I thought.


    She kissed me and hit the gas.


    Although I tried not to admit it, I was increasingly jealous of Jen, with her bachelor''s in biology, Masters in primatology, and looming years of scholarship-funded doctoral studies. Her life seemed set. She was happy, and the only question left about her future was for how long she would choose to put up with a loser like me.


    "Up for lunch?" Jen asked, interrupting my train of self-loathing.


    The question seemed innocent so I knew it wasn''t. She was planning something.


    "Sure."


    "Great! I told Marcus we''d meet him at The Brass Arrow." She bit her lower lip and glanced over at me. "There''s something I want to propose."


    I sank into the passenger''s seat.


    The last lingering lunch eaters were filtering out of the pub when we arrived, which made it easy to spot Marcus waiting in a booth by the window.


    Marcus was a friend Jen had made as an undergrad, and he''d kind of become our common friend over time. Kind of because I''d always suspected he was in love with Jen, and on my worse days it didn''t take much to imagine the pair of them running off together. Marcus, after all, had a job.


    After the normal niceties Jen made her pitch:


    "I was thinking," she started, "that now might be the last time the three of us could take a trip together. I start at Columbia in September, Marcus has that promotion that likely means no vacation for a while, and��" She looked at me, hesitating for a painful second."��once you find your job, you''ll find it hard to get away."


    I nodded.


    She produced an atlas and plopped it open on the table.


    "So I propose we go on an adventure, see the world, experience a foreign land��"


    She rifled through the pages, blitzing through South America and Europe, before slowing down on Africa, until she found the exact spot she was looking for and declared, "And I was thinking specifically of here!"


    She pointed to Uganda.


    "Huh," Marcus said. "Not really a big tourist destination."


    "Exactly! What do you think?" she asked me.


    I thought I wouldn''t have known where Uganda was if not for the atlas in front of me. "Could be interesting," I said, to say anything.


    She could sense my hesitation. "If you don''t want to go, I totally understand. Backpacking in Africa is not for everyone."


    Backpacking?!


    She went on: "And Marcus and I could always go by ourselves. Right, Marcus?"


    We both looked at him.


    "Of course."


    Did I want to go backpacking in Uganda? No. Was I going to let my hopefully-wife go backpacking in Uganda with a guy who was in love with her? Not a chance!


    "Oh, I''m in," I said.


    "Great!"


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    We landed at Entebbe International Airport on a rainy afternoon and proceeded by shuttle to Kampala, where we checked into a downtown hostel run by a Brazilian named Santos, before heading out into the colourful chaos of the city''s nightlife on boda-boda motorcycle taxis whose drivers didn''t wear helmets and drove like madmen, to experience the local culture and cuisine.


    As we sped along the street, winding dangerously between cars and people, the warm wind on my face felt like the stripping away of jet lag and civilization. To my American sensibilities, Uganda was from the very beginning raw and honest, like an unwaxed, misshapen fruit: visually unappealing but absolutely delicious. And as the city passed me by, a glowing panorama, I wanted to sink my teeth into it and bite down until the juices ran down my chin.


    This was the opposite reaction to Marcus, who found the place "dull, dirty and disgusting."


    Jen wanted only to leave the city behind and head for the mountains.


    In the end, we spent three days in Kampala before venturing out. On our last night, Santos treated us to drinks and a conversation that would change our lives forever.


    After inviting us to the hostel bar, a permanently dusky room smelling of fried sausage and alcohol, he poured us four shots of hooch, reclined in his personal armchair and, staring at the homemade bottle lights dangling from the ceiling, asked us about our plans.


    "Kibale National Park for some hiking and gorilla or chimpanzee trekking," Jen answered.


    Santos downed his drink.


    I followed suit, though it nearly burned a hole in my throat.


    "Kibale is nice," Santos said.


    "That''s what I''ve read too," I said, mostly to check if my voice still worked.


    It hoarsely did.


    "What do you mean nice?" Jen asked.


    "I mean it''s a nice place to visit. Safe, family friendly." There was definitely a note of derision in his tone. "It''s just that��"


    The unfinished sentence hung enticingly in the air.


    "Just that what?"


    Santos looked at the three of us in turn, then leaned forward in his armchair. "Just that the three of you don''t seem like tourists. More like travellers, and travellers wouldn''t waste their time on Kibale. There are far more memorable places to go hiking in Uganda."


    He held out the bottle of hooch. "Interested?"


    We held out our glasses.


    "Tell us about some of these memorable places," Jen said.


    Over the next hour, Santos weaved a mystical tapestry of adventure, wilderness and self-discovery, gleaned largely from tales told to him by friends and former hostel clientele. To our booze-softened minds, it was pure magic. Uganda was already exotic, but in its furthermost corners it sounded downright otherworldly. Even the place names were evocative: Heaven''s Cylinder, Greenwhisker, The Mane. "The only place I would caution against is Runside," he finished.


    A soft breeze whispered through the hanging bottle lamps.


    "What''s wrong with Runside?" Jen asked. Her eyes were torches and I knew Kibale was already a forgotten memory.


    "There have been rumblings about��"


    "Guerillas?"


    "Demons."


    Jen laughed. "Folklore is fascinating," she said,"but I''m a scientist, so you''ll have to excuse my skepticism. I''m afraid of machine guns, not so much of evil spirits. Is there anything else wrong with Runside?"


    By now, I knew nothing could dissuade her.


    "You may have trouble finding a guide willing to go," Santos said.


    Jen pulled out a stack of American dollars.


    Santos put down his bottle. "On the other hand, willingness is a relative concept. I am sure I could find someone as scientifically minded as yourself."


    "Or we could all go to Kibale like we planned," Marcus suddenly piped up. He''d been silent for most of the evening.


    "Scared of demons?" Jen teased.


    "More like I don''t think it''s wise to hike to the middle of nowhere in a foreign country when there''s a perfectly good national park instead."


    We decided to vote.


    Jen was for the demons in Runside, Marcus wanted to stick to the family friendly plan of Kibale, so the deciding vote fell to me, and despite my own preference for staying in a non-hiking capacity in Kampala, in the end I couldn''t pass up the chance not only to support Jen over Marcus but to do so while highlighting his cowardice.


    "Runside," I said.


    Jen kissed me, Marcus shook his head, and Santos greedily counted his American money.


    "I love you," she whispered in my ear.


    "I love you too," I said back.


    "I''ll have a guide for you by tomorrow," said Santos.


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    Santos was true to his word. Our guide''s name was Mukisa, he was a former soldier, and we were to meet him in a village several hundred kilometres outside of Kampala.


    We rode to the village by bus.


    Not an air-conditioned, roomy tourist bus but a cramped, humid and smelly one meant for the locals. The ride was uncomfortable and the vehicle seemed to lack shock absorbers, but we did feel an unbridled glee. If we wanted an adventure, we were certainly getting one.


    We got off to the sight of two dusty roads, a few rundown buildings and children playing in the dirt.


    Mukisa met us in the town office, which also housed a schoolroom and what might have been a museum, although its only exhibit was what to my layman''s eyes appeared to be a small gorilla skeleton, but which Jen emphatically told me was a chimpanzee.


    Mukisa wasn''t one for chatting.


    He was tall, thin and stern, and despite wearing civilian clothes still had the impeccable posture and demeanour of a soldier. Although he spoke English fluently, he usually chose not to use it, and his communications with us were short and functional:


    "Put your belongings in the vehicle. We are already behind schedule."


    The vehicle was Mukisa''s old Jeep, into which we piled as snuggly as our backpacks, and within minutes left the last vestiges of society behind.


    We drove along a hard-packed dirt road, through grassy plains, skirting lush jungle and towards the permanently looming mountains, which seemed perpetually out of reach.


    Mukisa spoke Swahili over the radio but was otherwise silent. The rest of us chatted until the landscape awed and overwhelmed us. We ate snacks, took pictures, listened to music on our phones.


    Somewhere along the way we left the dirt road behind.


    As darkness began to creep up on us, Mukisa brought the Jeep to a standstill and we made camp for the night. Mukisa had his own tent; we had another, a three-person. Before going to sleep, the four of us ate a communal supper as the sun sank behind the blue mountains, turning them black.


    When she had finished eating, Jen asked Mukisa about the demons in Runside.


    "Maybe that''s not the best topic of conversation," Marcus suggested.


    Birds took flight in the distance.


    "Not demons," Mukisa said. "Lost spirits of the dead warriors."


    I didn''t sleep well.


    Mukisa woke us before daybreak, and I was relieved despite feeling like my mind was wrapped in cotton balls.


    The sounds of the wilderness coming to life in the dawn light gave me goosebumps, but Mukisa paid them no mind so I pretended to do the same. Still, I was thankful he had a rifle.


    Jen was bouncy and excited, squinting at a map she had opened on the Jeep''s hood while coolly tracing our route with the sharpened point of her favourite knife. "We should be there by late afternoon."


    Mukisa hurried us along.


    When I went off to take a piss, I heard Marcus telling Jen it wasn''t too late to turn back.


    I felt I could turn that to my advantage, so as I climbed into the Jeep I said, "I am thrilled we decided to do this. It''s amazing out here. I feel absolutely alive! You had the best vacation idea ever."


    I kissed Jen on the cheek, she kissed me on the lips, Marcus shook his head while putting on headphones, and all was right in the world.


    The Jeep rolled us away toward the mountains.


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    Jen''s prediction was right, and by late afternoon we reached the foothills. Mukisa parked his Jeep, we took down our backpacks, and he retrieved his own rifle and supplies before emphatically throwing a camouflaging tarp over the vehicle. "Time to proceed on foot," he said.


    Jen helped me fasten my backpack.


    I re-tied my boots.


    Marcus watched us as if for a sign that everything was a prank, that any second now we would burst out laughing, pat him on the back, throw our stuff into the Jeep and call it a day.


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    "We must go," Mukisa said.


    The jungle ahead looked moist, verdant and enticing. It was like staring into a jewel��albeit one held firmly in nature''s open, drooling maw.


    "Wow," I said.


    But for the first time, I was scared enough to consider that Marcus may have been right. Maybe this was a little crazy and a little unnecessarily dangerous. The thought that kept me from saying anything was the embarrassment of having objectively the least to lose. How could I tell Jen we should retreat when she was the one risking an actual future?


    In the end, I convinced myself it was merely the first glimpse of untamed wilderness that had increased my heart rate and made my legs rubbery.


    You can read all the guidebooks you want, but reality is still a sucker punch to the nose.


    We went hiking.


    Mukisa''s plan was to hike several hours in, make camp and start the true adventure tomorrow.


    Everything went accordingly until nightfall.


    <h1>- - -</h1>


    I''m not sure if I awoke first, but within seconds I was aware of cold sweat gathering on the nape of my neck, of holding my breath and feeling both Jen and Marcus stirring claustrophobically beside me in the three-person tent, which felt significantly less like shelter and more like a burlap sack we''d gotten ourselves trapped in��beyond whose synthetic skin the jungle creaked and moaned and rustled in the windless, imagined dark...


    "Did you hear that?" I whispered.


    I felt their breathing warm and irregular on my skin.


    "Yeah. The fuck��"


    "Is that like normal jungle sounds?" I asked Jen.


    "I�� think so," she answered.


    Mukisa''s tent was close to ours, but of course we couldn''t see it. We couldn''t see anything.


    "Animals?"


    "Many here are nocturnal. We''re just not used to them," Jen said, before beginning to list them like some kind of nervous encyclopedia.


    Something fluttered past.


    Jen stopped.


    "So should we stay in here and like try to go back to sleep?" Marcus asked.


    "Definitely."


    "If anything was wrong, Mukisa would come get us?" I asked.


    "He''s just out there," Marcus said.


    "Definitely."


    The sounds subsided, before coalescing distantly into repetition: emin-idi�� emin-idi�� emin-idi...


    "And that''s just a birdcall," I said or asked as I felt simultaneously the need to pee and to get the hell out of that tent and out of the jungle!


    Marcus lunged forward.


    But Jen grabbed him by the arm. "Mukisa," he choked out.


    emin-idi�� emin-idi��


    "It''s animals and you''re safe in here," she asserted with unexpected confidence. "Going out into the darkness would be the worst thing to do."


    The repetition faded to silence.


    I stayed put too, and that''s how we spent our first night in the jungle, like little kids camping for the first time, their imaginations making nightmares out of the unseen and unfamiliar. But we didn''t dare exit the tent until the rising sun had tapped comfortingly on the walls, after which we crawled one by one out into pale daylight to see:


    Mukisa''s tent was gone!


    "Well fuck."


    We stood, scanning the land around us. No tracks, no signs of struggle. Quite peaceful if you didn''t find the situation as pregnant with menace as I did.


    "Best case scenario��"


    "He screwed us out of our money, turned tail and drove home," Marcus said. "Leaving us alone in the mountains without a way of getting back to civilization."


    "Worst case scenario: demons," I added.


    Jen shot me a look. "We just need to find our way back to the foothills, then go from there."


    "We should check for the Jeep," Marcus said.


    "Like he just decided to walk back?"


    "I meant in case something got him at night and he''s dead."


    "Seriously?" Jen asked. "Nothing got anyone. No one died. Someone happened to strand us here alone. That''s our problem, and it''s enough of one. Not any kind of demon."


    "Mukisa had our maps," I said.


    "And our compass."


    Jen planted her hands on her hips. "Do either of you remember from which direction we hiked here?"


    "Sorry," Marcus said, "but I kind of decided to put my trust in the guide we hired."


    "There''s a compass on my phone," I chipped in.


    "See," Jen said, still boring holes deep into Marcus'' soul with her beautiful brown eyes. "Now that''s the kind of practical thinking we need.��


    "Amazing how it hasn''t translated into stable employment."


    "Oh, fuck you!" I yelled.


    We sat and simmered, drank purified water and set out based on my phone''s compass in what should have been the right direction, but after several hours of walking in terrain that none of us recognized, we decided we were going the wrong way. As Marcus helpfully pointed out, we seemed to be going up- rather than down-hill, which meant we were heading deeper into the jungle.


    "According to the compass it''s the right direction," I said while rotating with my phone in-hand.


    "When''s the last time you calibrated it?"


    "Calibrated?"


    "Idiot."


    "Guys! Stop it," Jen said. "You''re both fully grown men. One of you please use your natural sense of orientation and find us a way out of here."


    Marcus turned to face her. "Are you being unironic? Because as far as I remember, you wanted to go on this trip, you wanted to come here, and you''re the one getting a PhD in jungle fucking studies."


    I failed at avoiding Jen''s gaze.


    "That''s funny. Because as I remember, everything about this was a mutual decision," she said. "And I''m an academic. I study primates. I''m not a survivalist."


    I nodded.


    In the brightness of day, being lost in the wild didn''t seem quite as bad as not-being-lost at night. The landscape didn''t seem like it was out to kill you.


    Marcus trudged off ahead��


    And screamed!


    "Oh sh-it! Ohshit! Oh... shit! Oh shit!"


    Jen and I ran to him, and almost immediately I saw what had caused his eyes to bulge.


    Jen put a hand to her mouth to keep from retching.


    Lying on the ground in front of Marcus was an arm: long, muscled, and still clutching the handle of a machete. Flies buzzed nearby. Where the arm should have been attached to the shoulder, however, there was but a single clean cut, revealing a small circle of white bone surrounded by a mass of pink flesh.


    The arm looked freshly lopped off.


    We backed away.


    I tried to hear if there was any danger over the sound of my beating heart.


    All I heard were the flies and the general hum of the jungle.


    "Do you think that''s his?" Marcus asked.


    "It''s not Mukisa," Jen said.


    "How do you��"


    "It''s not!"


    "I don''t think this is the right direction," I said. "I think I should calibrate my compass��"


    "I don''t know about you two, but I am really starting to freak out right now and I really want to be back in America."


    "Stay calm. This could be innocent," Jen said.


    "Innocent? In what deranged fucking world is a dead man''s arm holding a fucking sword in the middle of the fucking jungle innocent?"


    "I don''t see the rest of him," I said.


    Jen leaned her body against mine and I could feel her shaking. "Different customs," she said weakly.


    "Right."


    That''s when I heard the chanting again:


    Faintly:


    emin-idi�� emin-idi��


    "Did you guys hear that?" I asked.


    "No," said Marcus, stepping carefully towards the corpse arm, before nudging it with the toe of his boot��


    "What are you doing?"


    He stepped on the dead palm, applying pressure, making the most disgusting sounds. "Trying to get the sword loose so that we have a weapon."


    It didn''t work, so he crouched down and pried the machete loose with his hands.


    "There!"


    He waved the machete around.


    Blood stained it''s blade.


    "Now let''s please get the hell out of here," I said.


    But a half day''s worth of hiking brought us no closer to a way out. My phone was apparently shit, Jen and Marcus had drained their batteries listening to music on the Jeep ride out here, and I couldn''t stop hearing that chant, over and over and over like a song stuck in my head, and I prayed that''s all it was: in my head. But mine certainly weren''t the only nerves fraying at the prospect of spending another night in the jungle, this time knowingly alone, without a rifle, without a solution to what was becoming an existential problem.


    As if to make things worse, the evening sky clouded over, plunging us into a pre-darkness gloom that only underlined our unenviable options: make camp for the night or continue hiking in what very well could be circles upon circles.


    "Enough. We need to stop, find a place to sleep and get some rest," I said.


    "And then what?"


    The first drops of rain delayed the answer, and we worked quickly to pitch our tent and at least stay dry. Inside, the rain drummed. We sat as far away from each other without touching the sides of the tent as possible.


    "I love you," I told Jen.


    "Jesus, not now."


    On one hand, it was comforting to be cordoned off from the wilderness, able to pretend we were safe in somebody''s backyard. On the other hand, we weren''t five years old and knew our lives were truly in danger.


    Night came.


    emin-idi�� emin-idi�� emin-idi��


    "You sure you guys don''t hear that?" I asked.


    Marcus held his breath for a few seconds. "I can most definitely hear something," he said.


    "Birds," Jen said.


    Marcus clutched his machete.


    "You know, I would really like to believe you," I said to Jen, "but that does not sound like birds to me."


    "I suppose you''re an ornithologist now."


    The chanting grew louder, as if amplified by the pounding rain. Birds, birds, birds, I kept telling myself in a mental counter-chant.


    Marcus was sitting with his knees up against his chest and playing with his dead man''s blade, running his fingers up and down, up and down��


    Birds, birds, birds��


    Something brushed up against the tent.


    emin-idi��


    Jen crawled toward me, grabbed my hand with hers and squeezed!


    "Oh fuck this shit!"


    Marcus sprung toward the tent entrance��ripped it open:


    The rain roared.


    And the darkness stared at us like a sponge that had sucked up all light and human existence.


    Marcus screamed, disappearing head-long into it��


    Swallowed.


    "We have to go after him!" I yelled over the noise.


    Jen wouldn''t let go of my hand.


    I pulled her behind me.


    ��out: into the descending sheets of torrential water, soaking me in seconds in the absolute black of night: the unfathomable volume of nothingness!


    "Marcus!"


    emin-idi�� emin-idi�� emin-idi��


    But even in the total dark, I was aware of things moving out there. Circling, stalking. I pulled Jen; we ambled blindly forward through the slick vegetation. Pressing. Across the greedy muddy ground. "Marcus!"


    And I realized��


    emin-idi�� emin idi�� amin idi�� idi amin��


    becoming:


    Idi Amin�� Idi Amin��


    I felt the shocking warmth of flesh and instinctively I leapt away��


    The thump of blade finding wood.


    "Jen!"


    She was alive.


    I felt her scrambling frantically away, as above me Marcus struggled to dislodge his machete from a tree trunk.


    "There''s something out there!"


    Shapes��motions��


    Flitted past.


    Inhuman velocities in the near and far distances.


    Screeching, and that hideous chanting��monotonous and overpowering the drumming of the rain��enclosing us��


    Idi Amin! Idi Amin! Idi Amin!


    "I''m going to die," Jen sobbed. "We''re all going to die!"


    Marcus swung madly at the threat weaving in and out of the unknown.


    Metal cleaving air.


    Sobbing.


    And the first hairy arm reaching towards us!


    Metal embedding itself in bone.


    "Take that fucker!"


    Shrieking!


    I grabbed the hairy limb and forced us both into the ground��"Jen, hit it! Now!"��wrestling the short, wiry beast, giving Jen precious seconds to regain her senses, seeing her crazed, wet face: mouth open, teeth bared��"Bite the motherfucker!"��and smelling its blood before smashing its temporarily defenseless body in the face with my fist!


    Jen stomped it with her boot.


    And again.


    My eyes were adjusting to the darkness and I could see blood dripping from her mouth, and ten feet ahead Marcus hacking at one of them with the machete.


    "Stay together!" I yelled.


    We moved in tandem as the jungle threatened to tear itself apart with shrieks and chanting.


    "They''re chimpanzees," Jen said.


    One leapt at us from above, catching me in the chest, knocking me over��


    I couldn''t breathe.


    Another two emerged from the front. Marcus sliced one open but the other climbed on his back and pinned his arms.


    He flailed, unable to shake it off.


    The chimp that had knocked me over hit me in the jaw, then brought its terrible face close to mine, shrieked and displayed its repulsive teeth.


    Struggling, I tried desperately to find Jen.


    The chimp smacked my face again.


    The pain lingered.


    Marcus was writhing on the ground, machete beyond his reach, and the chimp whose shoulder he''d sliced was picking it up.


    More and more of them materialized out of the darkness.


    The chimp gripped the machete by the handle and raised it purposefully above its head.


    The one on top of me bit my shoulder until I screamed. It was getting ready to take a bite of my face when��


    A shot rang out.


    The chanting and the shrieking ceased.


    The chimp still held me down, but it seemed the assault was over. The primate merely looked into my eyes until I defeatedly averted mine.


    The other one obediently lowered the machete.


    The downpour too had eased.


    Another shot.


    "Idi Amin!" the chimps said in deep, horrible unison.


    I felt long fingers wrap themselves around my ankles and I began to move��pulled along the wet, rough underbrush...


    "Jen!"


    I received a sharp smack to the cheek for my disobedience, but there was no response. As far as I knew, Jen had succumbed during the battle. In my head, I heard her voice echo two overlapping sentences: "I love you. We''re all going to die. I love you. We''re all going to die. I love you��"


    I cannot say for how long the chimps pulled us or how far they moved us, but it must have been hours, because when my body finally came to rest, my shirt was stuck painfully to my raw back. I lay there staring at the stars in the sky, thankful I was alive yet hoping I soon could die. The stars twinkled coldly, their light reaching me from an irrevocable and unbelievable past, cosmically devoid of empathy and offering not even a delusion of God or understanding. They didn''t even have the decency to mock me.


    I was shivering and abandoned.


    A light approached.


    When it neared it split in two, and soon a trinity of chimpanzees came into view: two had thick dark fur and carried torches, and the third stood between them in the flickering torch light in skin the dark pink of ripe grapefruit barely covered by thin strands of greying��almost snowy white��hair.


    The torchbearers eyed me with disdain.


    But the gaze of the third chimp, whom I would come to know as Pinkerton, was more complex, with hints of hatred, fascination and devotion.


    "Idi Amin?" one of the torchbearers said.


    "Idi Amin," said Pinkerton.


    Then he motioned for me to rise, and when I had:


    "Idi Amin?" he asked.


    I stood still and silent for several seconds, perhaps waiting for them to pounce, certainly thinking about my own abysmal situation and the sheer absurdity of it, until I felt a tranquility come over me and I responded with the only words I knew they would understand:


    "Idi Amin."


    One torchbearer took both torches, and the other stepped toward me.


    I made no movements.


    Eventually he came within an arm''s length, grabbed my wet and bloody shirt with his powerful hands and ripped it from my chest. He then retreated to a safe distance and asked, "Idi Amin?"


    "Idi Amin," I responded with perfect understanding, and proceeded to strip out of what remained of my clothes until I was left wearing only my boots.


    The final surge of the rain shower cleansed my naked body as Pinkerton and the torchbearers escorted me through the jungle to a cement amphitheatre that I knew immediately was the work of human hands.


    Marcus was already there.


    One of the torchbearers pushed me inside, and I heard a metal gate swing shut behind me.


    "Where the fuck are we?" Marcus asked.


    He was as naked as I was. "Have you seen Jen?" I asked back.


    "No."


    I was aware of increasing numbers of chimpanzees gathering in the seats above and around us.


    "This is insane," he yelled. "What do you think they want from us?"


    I said I didn''t know.


    That''s when I heard Jen scream my name. From somewhere. I spun trying to find her. "Where the hell are you?"


    There was rattling of metal against metal and I saw:


    Jen looking down at us from a cage.


    Her body muddy and bruised.


    Her hands grasping furiously at the cage''s metal bars as a chimp beat them with a machete.


    "We''re fucked," Marcus yelled. "Totally fucked. Best case scenario��"


    A machete landed audibly in the middle of the amphitheatre.


    Marcus rushed toward it.


    I stayed where I was. "Maybe we can��"


    But my words trailed off as the chimps in the audience began clapping their hands and chanting, birthing a cacophony of violence and chaos. It was almost infectious. Deep within me, I felt an urge to join in, a desire for bloodlust, and when I saw Marcus I knew he felt it too.


    He brandished the machete��


    At me!


    "They want us to fight," he said, moving suddenly to his left.


    Idi Amin�� Idi Amin�� Idi Amin��


    I moved to my left as well, keeping him directly in front of me, glancing sporadically at Jen''s cage, feeling my heart threatening to burst out of my naked chest, trying to retain a semblance of control over the situation.


    "Winner survives," Marcus barked.


    "You''re insane," I yelled at him. "They''ll kill us both."


    But I didn''t believe it. If they''d wanted us dead, we would already be dead.


    "Winner gets Jen!" he��


    rushed at me.


    Jen''s scream pierced the ambient discord like an air raid siren.


    I exhaled.


    Marcus lunged, slashing at me with the machete.


    I evaded once, twice��


    Backpedalling��


    The third slash caught me on the outside of my left forearm, raised to shield my neck, and in that instant of my sharp pain and his hesitation, I reacted a fraction quicker, and before he could follow through on his advantage, I had angled around him and��still in the act of rotating��caught him behind the knee with sufficient power and momentum to confuse his balance and send him scrambling forward to his knees. He barely managed to crawl forward before I was on him, on his defenseless back, and without thinking but acting on some primeval instinct pummeling his face into the concrete floor as hard as I could, time after sickening time, long after he had lost the grip on the machete, then on his consciousness, finally his life, and I was so exhausted I was barely smearing a sludge of blood and bone on concrete with the remnants of what were once his face.


    The bloodlust ebbed.


    I stood, slid Marcus'' corpse aside with my boot, spread my arms and beat my triumphant chest while basking in the wild reverie of victory.


    In her cage, Jen sobbed uncontrollably.


    But I didn''t care. In that moment, I heard the chimps chanting and I knew they were chanting solely for me. I grabbed the machete from the ground and thrust it into the air, joining in their call: "Idi Amin! Idi Amin! Idi Amin!"


    The amphitheatre doors swung open and Pinkerton entered.


    He was alone.


    He was holding a pistol.


    "Idi Amin," he commanded, and Jen''s cage opened. She blinked in disbelief, then stumbled out.


    I tightened my grip on the machete.


    Pinkerton advanced.


    Jen picked up speed as she ran along the inner edge of the amphitheatre, before finding her way down to the entrance and joining me on the inside.


    We embraced��


    Then assumed a back-to-back position. I could feel her heavy breathing. Her heartbeat. Her very lifeforce, with which I longed to live and spend the rest of my life...


    A hush fell over the audience.


    Pinkerton watched us.


    There was an undeniable wisdom in his ancient eyes.


    "I love you," Jen breathed.


    Three tender words. I closed my eyes and remembered her face: how young when we first met, how peaceful while she slept, how vulnerable when overcome with sadness, how understanding when I needed her, and how mine and beautiful in the plain everyday. I imagined our life together: a happy lifetime in the blink of an eye. Wedding, children, a house. How painful it was to consider it never coming true. How painful it was when she stabbed me below the ribs. "I''m sorry," she whispered. And shivved me a second time.


    Three tender words��


    I put my hand to my wound and felt the warmth of blood.


    I remained standing. There was a power to the bloodlust that had been opened in me. A burst dam never to be fixed, through which cascaded an almost supernatural power.


    She attacked me with the knife a third time��


    I caught her wrist.


    I squeezed.


    She hit me with her other hand but the impact was dull and hollow.


    I twisted her arm until she dropped the knife.


    I kicked her in the side. She fell.


    "I love you too," I said.


    I removed my hand from my wound, letting the blood erupt above my hip and pour down my leg, gripped the machete firmly with both hands, raised it and��in one perfectly realized arc��decapitated her.


    Her head rolled away with mouth grotesquely agape.


    The rest of her body crumpled.


    I dropped the machete and applied as much pressure to my wound as possible, but I had already lost a lot of blood. I needed a bandage. I needed medical care.


    My vision blurred.


    Pinkerton stepped toward me, then knelt on creaking bones and bowed.


    "Idi Amin," he said.


    "Idi Amin!" the audience erupted.


    "Idi Amin," Pinkerton said.


    "Idi Amin!"


    And in those words I heard the promise of my salvation. The job interview had concluded, and I had been chosen. They would not let me know in a few weeks. They were letting me know now. The job was being offered.


    Idi Amin! Idi Amin! Idi Amin!


    "Idi Amin!" I roared.

 My husband is nocturnal yet he lacks the common plumage

    I can''t say he ever stopped loving us.


    That would be unfair.


    All I can say is that one day he became a little distant, but not in the usual way, not like the way people become distant when they cheat on each other. More like the way a cat is distant from a person or space is distant from the Earth, like it''s a question of nature, a deep question. Already from the first signs, I had the impression there was a fundamental misalignment of not who but what we were.


    It began with a newspaper��his opening and hiding behind it.


    Not because he was reading the paper (he never read the paper) but because he was using it to create a barrier, to separate himself from us. In hindsight, there was symbolism or irony in those unfolded pages, so much like wings, but at the time it just struck me as odd. All the same, there they were, in the kitchen, in the living room, in bed.


    One day our son hurt himself while playing. He wailed and bled onto the carpet, and my husband just sat unmoved behind his great newspaper as if nothing had happened.


    I got bandaids and cleaned the stains.


    Only then did my husband react. He folded his newspaper and proceeded up the stairs, from where he watched us for several more minutes before disappearing into the bathroom.


    Next came the nudity, the crouching on furniture and the isolation.


    By the time I came home from work to find him naked and perched on the armrest of the living room sofa, I knew there was likely a mental problem. There was no talking to him about it, however, because he flat out refused to say anything. I warned him that if his behaviour continued he would have to move out, at least temporarily, because he was freaking out the kids, but there was no response beyond the predatory stare of those big unblinking eyes.


    Yet he must have understood, because from that day on he spent most of his time away from us, in the garage, the cellar and the attic.


    God only knows what he did in there, but I''ll never forget the night sounds, the squeaks and shrieks and the thuds which always preceded a silence that was somehow even more uncomfortable than the noises before it. And it all coincided with the disappearance of the mice that moved into our cellar every summer, so that I understood he must be hunting even before that awful day when he joined us unexpectedly for breakfast (nude, of course, and crouching on his chair) and in full view of me and the kids proceeded to vomit up a half digested rodent that hit the tabletop with the most gruesome plop. Then, after surveying it and us in turn, bowed his head and feasted on the carcass until there was nothing left but a few broken bones.


    "What''s wrong with daddy?" my daughter would sometimes ask. "He''s going through a hard time," I''d answer, reassuring her that we still loved him and he loved us.


    I put the kids into therapy, but what they told the therapist or what she believed about us I''ll never know. As for myself, I held off, hoping I was strong enough to deal with this transformation on my own, and for a while I was. Late summer turned to early fall, and we developed a working rhythm to our lives. It helped that by now my husband was almost entirely nocturnal, spending our waking hours asleep in some hidden corner of the house, and becoming active while we slept, and increasingly outdoors at that.


    For a while I was afraid of what the neighbours might think if they caught him stalking around the subdivision at night, but time helped with that. There were no strange looks, no whispered comments, no heads turned in disgust, and I realized that he was being careful, if that''s the right word. I doubted he cared much about their opinions, or how those opinions would reflect on us (I admit I dreaded being known as the wife of that freak), but he was a predator now, and a good predator had to be invisible��until he swept in for the kill. Mice, rats, rabbits, perhaps other birds...


    Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    I followed him once, out into the darkness, down our street and quietly into the forest that grew along the edge of the subdivision. He truly seemed at home there. He moved with a grace I''d never seen before, and climbed trees better than any man I''d known. His body, no doubt starved by the first few weeks when he was still learning to catch his prey, was lean and muscular in the moonlight. He was attractive. If he saw me trailing him, and likely he did, he showed no sign of it, and merely ascended one of the tall oaks and clung there, scanning his wild domain with slow, fluid motions of the neck, and every once in a while letting out a deep and masculine hoot.


    That autumn must have been the crowning moment of his existence.


    In a way, I was proud of him.


    But winter came early that year. The temperatures dropped and the persistent snow drove the little forest creatures into hiding. Yet my husband did not give up his owlness. Bare and featherless, he shivered in the blowing winds, and I imagined the fevered nights he must have spent hugging his favourite oak while the food around him grew scarce.


    I saw him infrequently in those days, but when I did I noted how grey and wrinkled he looked, even from the distance he now kept from me. Once, I left scraps of meat for him��the only time I did anything that could be seen as encouraging his behaviour��but he didn''t take them, and they must have fed some other animal instead. I noticed too that sometimes he was marked with blood, and it pained me to know how brutal life can be and how he must have fought with other predators for survival.


    But I admit I did not suspect him when the first neighbourhood child disappeared. I didn''t want to accept that he was capable, let alone culpable.


    Yes, he was a changed thing that had grown accustomed to killing small mammals, but I still saw in him the sweet man I''d married, however distant those times now seemed, and I didn''t want to believe that he was capable of murder. Did I love him? Yes, in the way you might love a beautiful landscape, one that fills your soul with awe, but my inaction was motivated more by how I remembered our youthful love: warm, intimate and bursting with potential for a perfect life. It''s hard to give that up.


    When the second and third child disappeared, I knew it was him, but still I remained silent. When the police interviewed me, I told them my husband had gone away for work, and I instructed the kids to do the same. I stayed up entire nights, sleepless not only with the guilt of knowing what he''d done but that he would surely do it again. But how would I even tell the police? What words and phrases? I tried writing it down, but it sounded absurd.


    My husband is an owl.


    I daydreamed about telling the grieving parents about what had happened, hoping to at least give them closure, but my imaginary explanations became apologies, then excuses��nature was cruel, merciless, and every creature had the right to do all within its power to survive��and in my head I concocted elaborate arguments in which I would yell myself back to consciousness with the cold logic of why should my husband die and your kids live? If they were weak and he was strong, why didn''t he deserve to live at their expense?


    Perhaps what happened was justice.


    It was three days before Christmas. The decorations were up, our favourite carols were playing softly in the background, and the kids and I had done our best to forget, if only for a few days, the surreality of the past months.


    I put them to bed around ten, and turned on It''s a Wonderful Life in the living room.


    I must have dozed off on the sofa because��


    I awoke to crunching.


    Within seconds I was alert, and heading up the stairs.


    My heart raced.


    Coldness rushed down the upstairs hallway, and immediately I noticed that my son''s bedroom door was open.


    I ran to it.


    I looked inside.


    I saw:


    Across a volume of snow-infested air, my husband and my daughter crouching over my son''s limp, opened body, followed by that dreadful moment when they both lifted their heads, hot blood dripping down their faces, their big eyes staring absently at me, and intoned those hideous, echoing sounds...


    Hoot�� Hoot��


    Hoot�� Hoot��


    Then they dropped their heads in unison and continued crunching.


    I don''t remember what I did next, screamed while beating them away from my son''s corpse or checked to see if he was still alive, but what does it matter? He was dead, and the last glimpse I ever had of my husband and daughter was as they flitted, one neatly after another, through the broken bedroom window, onto the tiled roof below and out into the raging blizzard, whose natural whiteness swallowed them whole.

 A Short Introduction to Licking

    Licking is a lot harder to understand than to explain. What it is is actually pretty simple: sneaking into a celebrity''s house, licking something they own and filming yourself doing it.


    That''s it.


    Some people say it''s not really licking unless you post the video, but I don''t agree with that. I''ve known some amazing lickers who''ve never put anything online but have personal collections that would blow your mind. They just don''t do it for the hits or followers. They do it for the thrill, the challenge and the art of it.


    And when we do post online, it''s not on Instagram or Reddit or anything, because technically what we''re doing is illegal most of the time, so we have our own little corners of the internet. Not the dark web, just not entirely out in the open. Let''s just say that if the internet has shadows, that''s where we hang out.


    You may be wondering what exactly I meant when at the very beginning I said that lickers lick something a celebrity owns. Well, I meant that pretty literally, but as they say there are levels to this shit.


    At the bottom of the licking pyramid you''ll find the chance lickers. These are people who lick when they get the chance but don''t really go looking for it. Like if you''re at a restaurant and you see someone famous, and then after they leave you go and grab their chopsticks and lick them, you''re a chance licker. Chance lickers don''t get a lot of respect within the community.


    If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    Next up are the gate lickers, so called because they go out of their way to find where celebrities live, but they don''t actually get inside. Instead they lick whatever happens to be available. A lot of the time that''s the gate, but it could also be a car, a retaining wall, anything. The one special sub-category is garbage licking, but you can guess what that is.


    Now let''s get to hard mode.


    Once you get past the gate and into a celebrity''s house, you''ve arrived as a licker. It doesn''t matter if you sneak in, break in or get invited, just as long as you grab something, lick it and film yourself doing it. The only rule is that you can''t be friends with the celebrity or it doesn''t count. Other than that, the sky''s the limit. You can lick phones, fridges, tupperware, toothbrushes, shampoo bottles, anything. In fact the weirder the better. The community only really looks at two things, who the celebrity is and what the object is, and you can get mad props for licking something no one''s ever licked even if the celebrity''s not super famous.


    Finally there are the legends.


    These are lickers who''ve not only gotten into a celebrity''s house but have actually licked the celebrity. The most common way is to get them when they''re sleeping or passed out, but there''s no rule, so take it as it comes!


    Happy licking!

 The Sackheads

    I was there when they shut the city gates. We had gathered in the Square, most of us fearful of the sickness spreading in the lands beyond, about which the travellers'' tales spared no gruesome detail, but a few��and I remember well their torrid faces bathed in the eerie autumn twilight��frantic to escape, screaming as they clawed at the cold stone walls, the guards, themselves, before being dragged away. How prescient they in hindsight were. Perhaps they truly saw our faceless fate foretold. After all, is a tomb not but a vault expired?


    Soldiers manned the gates in dreary half-day shifts, but no patrols went out, and not a soul was let within the walls. We heard sometimes the terrible cries of those turned back, and that awful refrain: "By order of the Council, none shall enter!"


    But some did enter, by darkness covered or by tunnel. There were even rumors that some passed by black magic: a sacrifice made; a secret word exchanged. Yet whatever their method of infiltration��or perhaps none, and the sickness had been with us all along��the consequence was the same. The sickness appeared, flared and spread.


    The first case identified was in the Money Quarter. The victim, a merchant, was found on blood soaked sheets, facial skin heaped beside him and gold coins pressed into his exposed flesh. He had scratched off his nose and clawed out his eyes, but he was still alive when they took him. The Council studied him for days as he suffered, but we all knew the outcome. The tales had been true.


    Stolen novel; please report.


    The gates remained shut.


    The sickness triggered an insatiable urge to mutilate and expunge one''s own face. The means varied, from bare hands to the most creative use of objects, but the result was the same: facelessness. There was no cure or respite. Every affliction culminated in a bloody act of self-effacement.


    Not every afflicted died. Some survived and carried on. We called them the sackheads, after their custom of covering their disfigured heads with burlap sacks on which they had painted the most grotesque and hideous faces. Misshapen eyes, inverted noses and snarling, toothless mouths in angular smiles that mocked the very notion of happiness.


    There was also a second group: people like me, whom the sickness spared. We called ourselves the facemores, and against a backdrop of dread we gathered secretly and rejoiced in our health��for a time. For as the sickness advanced, the sackheads began to outnumber us, and with their number grew jealousy.


    The sackheads staged their first smash-and-burn on a dreary November night. Door-to-door by torch light they went, searching for facemores, whom they dragged into the streets and theatrically debased, and whose faces they physically destroyed. Then on their heads they placed sacks with sad, inverted smiles, and left them to bleed through and die.


    I write this now with a shaking hand, for I see the flickering light.


    A knock.


    "By order of the Council��"


    They''ve come!

 When I see myself reflected in your blood, you are no more

    When I look in a mirror, I see through myself.


    I have no reflection.


    I can see and touch my own body, and other people see me without any problems, but for years I was unable to see my own face.


    I don��t show up in photos or on video.


    Until I was eleven years old, I knew what my face looked like only from how it felt under my fingertips, how other people described it to me, and from the portraits my parents paid people to draw.


    But even the portraits were temporary. They faded within minutes. And if you write a sentence about how I look, the nouns and adjectives evaporate.


    I have a r and ye .


    It��s strange knowing such a unique part of your body��of yourself and your identity��solely through words and pictures, as if you were a character in a story or comic book.


    As if you weren��t real.


    And most people aren��t even very good at describing things beyond the most basic and obvious.


    The video my parents took of my birth is actually pretty bizarre, because it looks like someone filmed the whole thing, then digitally erased the baby. Something is born. Something is held in its mother��s arms.


    Something is loved.


    Something goes to school.


    Something likes to play with his dog.


    It was bad enough everyone knew what I looked like, but worse I could see what they looked like.


    I get that if I was born blind, I wouldn��t know what I looked like either, so I should be thankful for being able to see, but there��s something especially cruel about the seeing everything but yourself aspect. It��s like in the Bible, when Adam and Eve could eat everything except the fruit of one fucking tree. I am my own forbidden knowledge. How fucked is that!


    Or rather I was my own forbidden knowledge.


    Because when something was eleven, something and his friends ignored their parents�� rules and went to play in the abandoned gas station outside of town, where the junkies shoot up, truckers get laid, and God knows what else goes on.


    That day there was dying going on.


    Some emaciated wreck of a human was babbling his last nonsense words as a stream of bloody fluids that escaped him through where his teeth should have been, ran down his neck and over his sunken, scabby chest before gathering in a pool on the cement beside him.


    Something��s friends were all gone by then, rightly freaked the fuck out.


    But something was staring��


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    Spellbound.


    Not by the dying but by the blood itself, so deeply, darkly red and so perfectly reflective.


    It was in that mirror-blood I first saw myself.


    In the filth of that derelict gas station, in the company of that drooling corpse, I realized that I could see myself��in blood!


    And what stared back at me was nothing like the portraits.


    Or words.


    I remember sirens and flashing lights and realizing my friends must have called the police. I don��t know how long I spent crouched there, staring at the blood, but when the cops arrived I knew immediately they couldn��t see the body.


    It was right there yet they walked past it.


    ��Is this some kind of fucking joke?�� one of them said to me. But before I could answer, his tone softened and he asked, ��Are you OK, son?��


    ��Yes, sir,�� I said.


    The cops and my friends loitered like drunks around the gas station for at least a quarter of an hour, acting as if they didn��t know why they were there but didn��t want to admit it, then in a mutual but silent embarrassment started leaving.


    ��It��s boring here. Let��s go to my place,�� said one of my friends.


    Still the body was right there.


    The gaping, toothless mouth, the greenish-yellow stains.


    I went with them.


    On the way back, I asked my friends whether they had called the police after seeing the dying man.


    ��Police?��


    ��Saw somebody dying?��


    They had no idea what I was talking about.


    A few days later, I got up at night, took a knife from the kitchen and cut myself on purpose, squeezing out enough blood so that it formed a crimson globule on the countertop, then put my face against it so that my eyeball was almost touching the blood. Slowly, I pulled my face away��a slow zooming out��struggling to focus, but I did not see myself. The globule merely reflected in red a distended, empty kitchen.


    Animal blood also didn��t work.


    Neither did my friend��s blood after I punched him in the nose.


    By then it became apparent to me that somehow death must be involved.


    I yearned to see myself once more but took solace in the fact that no one else could see the real me. They could not see what I saw, what I knew I was. They saw merely a false projection of their own humanity.


    My chance finally came several years later, after my mom had dragged me to her brother��s cottage. My uncle was using a chainsaw to cut firewood, when the chainsaw slipped and he carved a nasty wound into his leg. He screamed and all of us came running. Despite the pressure he kept applying to the wound, his blood poured out of him, through his fingers and down onto the grass and dirt. Under the pretext of trying to help him slow the bleeding, I pressed my hand against his leg, gathering the hot blood in my palm. When I had enough, I stepped suddenly away��They all stared at me.��and, trembling, held out my hand beneath the dirty evening sunlight and gazed upon my own reflection for the second time.


    Time again seemed to flow past me, but I recall vaguely, as through a wall of styrofoam, their screams and panic fading fluently away.


    Like a forest stream whose source has been shut off.


    Until it was quiet, and although I could see my uncle��s body lying on the ground, they one-by-one seemed to lose all interest in it. Eventually they all went back to whatever trivial thing they��d been doing before, and when I asked my mom what happened to my uncle, she said, ��Who?�� and laughed and said, ��But I��ve never had a brother,�� and when I later checked her phone and photo albums, sure enough he was not there, and I realized the power of my gaze.


    I am the antonym of being.


    More than non-being: dread-form of never-was.


    To see myself, I must stare into the blood of the dying or the dead. In doing so, I disengender them.


    To catch a glimpse of my own visage I must erase them from time itself.


    I am not a human.


    I am negation.


    Since that evening at the cottage, I have haunted the places all normal people fear. I track death��s cold footsteps to where the threads of life are finest, and wait for them to fray��to snap. Sometimes I aid in their undoing. Because as long as I draw blood, I can kill without earthly consequence. My reflection is the erasure of crime, for how can one kill what has never existed?


    Every time I see myself reflected, my desire grows.


    I am beginning to love myself.


    Perhaps I have become enamoured of my own image, but even so my narcissism is of the most unique kind.


    For now, I prey only on the weakest among you, those who would not survive long anyway, and in my actions I become their angel: of death / of mercy / of forgetful self-reflection.

 Two days ago there was an oil spill you probably didnt hear about

    OK, I''ve finally gotten an internet connection, so I''m going to keep this short and to the point.


    Please forgive any mistakes. I��m running on caffeine and nightmares, and the drops of rain hitting the tin roof above me are making me jumpy��


    Ready to bite my fingernails off.


    I work on an oil tanker. Or maybe I did and don''t anymore, I''m not sure. It doesn''t matter. What matters is that two days ago, the oil tanker I was working on hit something and started losing cargo into the ocean off the Peruvian coast.


    I say cargo because although we were supposed to be carrying heavy crude, what we spilled was not crude. Yes, it was black and viscous, and if you saw footage of it you''d believe it was oil, but believe me when I swear it was something else entirely.


    Something unnatural.


    I have no idea if the spill made the news or not (probably not) but even if it did��or will��ignore what they say about it. It''s a cover-up. It has to be, because there''s no way in hell they''ll tell you the truth about what we all saw.


    I don''t even know how to describe it.


    Think of a spill you''re familiar with, one you''ve seen in pictures: Deepwater Horizon, Amoco Cadiz, Exxon Valdez.


    Now imagine that black stain on the surface of the water not just floating there but bubbling, frothing and reaching out with inky tentacle arms, attaching themselves to the side of the ship, rocking it, as they climb snail-like toward the deck, and all of us sweating as we stand in stunned silence watching.


    Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    I don''t know what my thoughts even were.


    At first I didn''t believe my eyes. Then I thought, Fuck me! It''s alive.


    I didn''t hear anyone say a word until one of those arms shot out, grabbed one of the crewmen, squeezed him so hard his innards started oozing out of him, then tossed him into itself, where he sank into blackness.


    I want to throw up just remembering.


    That''s when someone screamed, and we all started screaming. Some of us ran dumbly towards it and others away, trying to find some place to hide. I saw friends of mine beat those arms with wrenches, before the liquid got into an orifice, distending them like balloon-men until they fucking popped into human rain.


    It was bedlam.


    Then I ran too��and that hideous thing followed me!


    I saw a guy lop off three metres of one of its filthy arms with an axe, and the lopped-off bit just continued along, inching forward like a death worm, taking its hideous revenge on him before merging back into the original limb.


    One of them slithered after me down a corridor, and when I thought I was just far enough ahead to duck into one of two passageways, the thing split in two, stalking both possibilities. Imagine the whole ship like that, pregnant with those oily tendrils leaving their mucous all over the floors, hunting us down.


    Then the sirens came on.


    A message blasted across the intercom telling us to get to the upper deck.


    Even that was cut short, punctuated by the gargle of death.


    I was lucky enough to to make it, but I don''t know how many of us died before they got the escape choppers in. Maybe half. Last time I looked back, there wasn''t even a ship anymore, just a dark mound drifting on the ocean.


    When they got us back on land, they herded us into a room to give us a debrief. But I saw the mix of lawyers and machine guns, and I wasn''t having any of that, so the moment I could, I ran.


    Into the jungles.


    Into night.


    Now here I am, typing this fucking madness into the internet on a dial-up modem somewhere.


    I''m sure they''ll come for me too.


    But I got the truth online, and there''s no one they can kill to erase that.


    As for it, God help us all.

 I think you.

    It began with a Mr Parsons in Edinburgh, an elderly lawyer who, upon placing his customary hat upon his head, discovered the hat was unexplainably too large. Later that same day, while hat-less and at work, he took his customary bathroom break and noticed that a small growth had sprouted from his inner thigh.


    He made nothing of it for the time being, and certainly did not connect the odd events.


    Over the next months, many people around the world independently made similar discoveries, a diminution of the head and the emergence of a strange growth, called variously��albeit erroneously��a cyst, a skin tag, a pimple, a tumor, a boil, etc.


    My head remained the same size and I developed no growths.


    Soon, internet communities sprang up, e.g. myheadisshrinking.com, /wtfisthisfuckinggrowth, in which people shared stories of similar observations, and observations they were, for it was all verifiable. You could measure your head and your growth. If you saw your doctor, the doctor could not deny the physical reality, only offer some kind of explanation. It was not the fault of the medical profession that it grasped so lamely at straws and provided wrong diagnoses.


    Eventually two conclusions were made: that the increase in the size of each growth was proportional to the decrease in the size of each head, and that as people��s heads shrank, their intelligence diminished.


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    I became aware of being surrounded by idiots.


    By year��s end, the world��s population had heads the size of softballs��grotesque balding ovoids of cubistically rearranged facial features��and melon-sized flesh sacks emanating from their bodies, making communication and locomotion increasingly difficult. These disturbing creatures babbled, drooled, slumbered and ate.


    I was the exception.


    The voice spoke to me one night in a deep REM sleep, speaking words I can describe only as smelling of bergamot and vetiver.


    Meet us in Atlantis on the mindful ocean, it communicated.


    The same sentence began appearing in unexpected places: in emails from no one, repeated on the page of a book, in pop songs, on billboards, and as a tattoo on my forearm.


    The meaning remained a mystery��


    until that fateful day when Earth experienced its simultaneous noon, the oceans boiled and evaporated, and everyone��s head condensed into nothingness while their growths, now bulbous, wispy-haired and veiny, detached from their bodies and rolled obediently to the floor of what but yesterday was the Atlantic.


    There: they popped.


    And their oozing, organic fragments trembled before congealing into a single, throbbing mass of gelatinous consciousness!


    I understood the message.


    I arrived in New York and from there walked upon the pulsating softness to Atlantis.


    He awaited.


    We sat cross-legged across from one another and meditated.


    My eyes closed, I felt myself gently descending, and when it was done I was seated upon the desiccated ocean floor, and where my head once was there now palpitated a tremendous sphere of the entirety of humanity��s head-matter!


    How heavy it was. How delicately balanced.


    Imagination itself.


    I could think anything and it was.


    I close(d) my eyes.


    I think you.

 Quiet! The vents are working...

    Ever notice the vents? Yeah, some of them blow hot air and others cold, air-conditioned air, but there are those that don''t blow any air at all.


    They just are.


    Little inconspicuous holes in the walls. There are a few in the office building where I work. Grated, forgotten. Normalized and hidden in plain sight, as they say.


    Then again, as who says?


    Because there''s no one you can question about these things if you start to have doubts.


    Co-workers don''t care. Supervisor says he''ll look into it but never does. Management says they''re just vents, as if that answers the question.


    When I contacted the building owners, suggesting a fault ("because no air blows"), I got a message back saying some vents are just control vents, not for the blowing of air.


    The next day I was summoned by management. "Why are you contacting the building owners directly? All communication must go through management."


    So ask yourself: Is this normal? The fuck are these vents for?


    Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.


    I''ve paid careful attention to them over the past few years, and I think I know. Oh, I think I know the truth about these awful, grated holes in the wall.


    The building owners weren''t lying.


    These aren''t blow-holes.


    They''re suck-holes.


    Slowly, quietly and almost imperceptibly they work, day by day, hour by hour, minute by fucking silent minute, sucking away our souls.


    The pressure is so slight you don''t usually feel it.


    But it''s there, in those eerie moments when the hairs on your arms stand suddenly on end, or late in the day, when it gets uncomfortably quiet, and you can hear that gentle hum of who knows what somewhere in the world.


    Now you know what.


    The vents sucking on you��on all of us.


    But even more than that. Sucking you and us away, siphoning off our very essence like some kind of goddamn spiritual vacuum cleaner with vents for mouths. Monolithic and ubiquitous.


    Ever wonder why you feel so tired at the end of the day even when you haven''t done a fucking thing?


    Or so much more apathetic about every aspect of your life even though you struggle to find anything real to complain about?


    It''s not aging.


    It''s not a natural process.


    It''s the soul sucking.


    The perversity of it is they play it back for you. The essence they suck, they learn from it, then they rearrange it and stream it for you on Netflix as parody. What''s your favourite show? That''s your life regurgitated. Self-sustenance through spiritual auto-cannibalism.


    There''s even a way to see the sucking of the vents.


    All you''ve got to do is colour your thoughts. Make them weird, unusual. Give them a tinge of the extraordinary to make them stand out against the greyness of our modern lives. Then sit and watch as the colours spiral faintly out of you, flowing slowly but continually past the unassuming grates, and into the vent-beyond.

 The Tale of Bunny-Rabid

    Bunny-Rabid lived happily alone in a deep hole in the woods that was made by a meteor that hit the world a long time ago.


    For centuries he was undisturbed.


    He was so elusive he didn''t figure in myth or fairy tale.


    But one day a developer bought the wild land on which Bunny-Rabid lived, and began sending surveyors and workmen into the woods.


    Bunny-Rabid disliked this.


    He clawed the surveyors to fleshy shreds and performed black magic on the workmen until their sanity turned inside out and they could no longer continue their work.


    The developer reported to the police, who duly investigated the surveyors'' grisly deaths, but their findings were inconclusive and they soon gave up.


    The invertedly-sane workmen, however, gabbled in their snugly fitting straightjackets about an evil bunnyman who performed horror spells in the woods.


    One day, a doctor recorded their gabblings and published them in a book called The Evil Bunnyman and Other Modern Terrors.


    A cryptozoologist read the book, gathered a team and ventured into the woods. He brought his son, Charlie.


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    For weeks the team traversed the wilderness, examining and recording their findings. They were about to turn back when they came upon a hole.


    This was Bunny-Rabid''s meteor hole, and he disliked that the cryptozoologist had found it.


    Bunny-Rabid waited until dark, then cast a stream of fire out of the meteor hole and emerged in its unsteady, burning light, holding tightly his bone-staff, which curled at the end like a monstrous hook, and spoke the words of insanity into the terrified faces of the cryptozoologist and his team.


    They were ill-prepared to hear the swirling speech of whispers as Bunny-Rabid''s gaunt and liquid face scrambled and spun so that his crooked eyes began orbiting his ossified nose, and his ancient maw snarled itself into a string of fangs which encircled his head like a crown of yellowed thorns.


    They all went mad.


    Except Charlie, who smiled.


    It was a hideous smile, full of tenderness and warmth, and it made Bunny-Rabid shiver.


    In the nighttime woods behind, the mad ones ran head-long into trees and screamed and murdered one another with their cryptozoology equipment and their bare hands.


    But Charlie stepped toward Bunny-Rabid and��horror of unmentionable horrors!��hugged him.


    Charlie was mute but Bunny-Rabid heard the boy''s thoughts.


    In fact, he couldn''t silence them.


    And he could not invert the little human''s sanity.


    "You killed my father," Charlie was thinking, "so from today you are my father, and I am your little bunny son. You will teach me the black magic and other bunny ways, and together we shall live in the meteor hole in the woods."


    No! Bunny-Rabid thundered. Never! Such unnature cannot be!


    Yet it was.


    Charlie was impervious to all Bunny-Rabid''s spells and violence, and he followed Bunny-Rabid through the woods, thinking his thoughts aloud, day after dreadful day, until Bunny-Rabid grudgingly agreed.


    And that is how Bunny-Rabid finally became a father, for which we shall all pay dearly.

 Szandra, My Old Friend

    When I was in high school, I took the bus to school. Not the school bus��the city bus: Number 61, which ran from the suburbs to the city centre.


    I took an early one because it was less crowded, and got off several stops short to listen to podcasts while walking the rest of the way. It was my favourite part of the day, strolling timelessly between the giant warehouses, before the daily bullying inevitably began. In the afternoons I repeated the route in reverse, and it was while waiting for the bus that I met Szandra.


    She looked sixty and always wore the same clothes, patched black jacket, leather boots and jeans, no matter the weather. She never wore a hat, even in the winter, and her long, greying hair fluttered wildly in the slightest breeze.


    The first times we saw each other we didn''t say a word. But weeks passed and we remained the only two people at the bus stop, and eventually we started talking. First small talk, then more. I found out her name, that she was Hungarian and that she worked in a nearby sporting goods warehouse.


    Although we were separated by almost every metric imaginable (age, sex, ethnicity) we understood each other perfectly. She told me about her life in Hungary and how she had come to Canada alone, and I told her about my lonely home life and the bullying I suffered at school.


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    We sat beside each other on the bus and talked the whole ride. Although I loved my podcasts, I sacrificed them gladly for conversations with Szandra.


    Around the middle of Grade 11, the bullying worsened. It stopped being incidental. They started seeking me out. And it morphed into harassment, then clear physical abuse. I had gotten used to emotional terror, but now that combined with threats of real violence. On the day it happened, I spent the last forty minutes of the day naked in the locker room as four classmates took turns beating me.


    I ran to the bus stop in tears.


    Ashamed.


    Hurt.


    And they ran after me.


    When the bus came, Szandra and I got on��and the bullies piled in after us. They sat in the back, sending texts saying they would find out where I live.


    Szandra saw my tears, the swelling developing on my face. I told her what happened. "I''m afraid they''ll never stop," I said.


    That''s when:


    Szandra closed her eyes, humming��


    The bus became a swamp, sunless, pervaded by a dull, illuminating fog of oppressive dread through which sprouted the black jagged branches of dead trees, on one of which:


    Four flayed bodies swinging:


    On the bus:


    Silence pregnant with realization. Screaming of public transiters. Squealing of tires as the bus itself came skidding to a halt. And we all saw the four skinned bodies hanging impossibly from the ceiling of the bus. Dead, horrified.


    Beside me. Szandra. Eyes open.


    Heart. Beating.


    "They stop."


    Szandra��the witch.


    Szandra��my old friend.

 A Brief History of the Revolution (Told in Reverse)

    Preobrazhensky wiped tears from his eyes as blood began to drip from the faucet.


    - - -


    The water treatment facility was abuzz with engineers and excitement on this cold Moscow morning. The counter-revolutionaries had held it for months, imbuing it with a defiant symbolism which their defeat had so beautifully transformed into a symbol of victory for the revolution. All eyes were on the work being done here, and that work was progressing.


    Already, undesirable elements (bourgeoisie, intellectuals, kulaks) were being rounded up, and the bleeding chambers had been constructed and fitted into the existing infrastructure. In essence, the plant''s inputs were being switched. As trumpeted by official propaganda, yesterday''s enemies would become tomorrow''s lifeblood��literally: entire masses kept like cattle, given just enough nourishment to keep them alive so that their treacherous hearts could pump blood for the world''s first vampiric state, The Union of Vampire Socialist Republics.


    Moscow''s would be first of hundreds of such facilities. The model on which the success of the others would depend.


    The revolution had promised the flow of blood.


    The revolution must deliver.


    Preobrazhensky knew that what this really meant was that he, newly-appointed Minister of Hemo- and Agriculture, must deliver.


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    He passed a group of huddled undesirables, fresh off one of the eastern trains, and felt a pang of sympathy��but only a pang. These were the same savages who for centuries had hunted and killed his species. So many stabbings; so much hatred. As a filthy boy reached for his overcoat, Preobrazhensky forced himself to see the child solely as blood-potential. The younger, the better, Preobrazhensky reminded himself. The revolution demands an iron will.


    - - -


    St. Petersburg''s Winter Palace was cacophonous. A multitude of exhilarated voices speaking hurriedly and at once over a faint but violent backdrop of gunfire and explosions. Hopes and dreams mixed with practical realities and intra-party ideological disputes about some obscure aspect of vampirosocialism. Then Lenin, unfanged as was now the custom, called order for roll call. Goblets of blood circulated and one-by-one the names were read: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Stalin, Preobrazhensky...


    The civil war was present too, but everyone agreed the Reds were winning, and it was time to formally announce the revolutionary state. After weeks of negotiations, the outline was clear. The vampires had reached agreement with the urban proletariat (small enough to be pummeled into obedience) and non-kulak peasantry (hungry and fearful) to enslave and liquidate the remaining classes.


    The humans would be allowed autonomous republics, but to the vampires would go the cities and, through their dominance in the Party, the economy, foreign policy, army and police. The vampires would thereby control all internal and external state policies. Although they were a minority, they were an ancient, well-organized one, and every day their ranks swelled.


    Foreign vampires crossed the border en masse to join the Motherland of World Vampirism.


    - - -


    Preobrazhensky watched Lenin ascend the platform, reveal his fangs and address the gathering crowd. After he finished��


    "Peace! Land! Blood!" they chanted.


    The revolution had begun.

 Pretty Pink Confetti

    I''ll tell you everything I told the police.


    I never liked my boss. He was a jerk and treated me like trash. For years I meekly took it. Something went wrong; he''d blame me. An advancement opportunity arose for which I was perfectly qualified; he''d recommend somebody else. He never greeted me in the mornings or asked about my weekend. He never remembered my birthday. He was cruel, and an expert at playing people against one another. Over the years, he played most of them against me. So, yes, I had every reason to hate him. And as my hatred reached its boiling point, I needed a release. In a sense you could even say I snapped, but it was snapping by my standards. I didn''t want to go postal. All I wanted was to order a confetti bomb.


    Because I''d never done anything like that, I didn''t know the first thing about it. For example, I knew there were websites, but not which ones were good, or even which ones were legitimate, so I chose at random and settled on the one I did because the design was nice, the prices seemed reasonable and they accepted BTC. The ordering process was simple. All I had to do after typing in my email (a freshly created fake one) and selecting a target address was choose a confetti level: low, medium, high, or beautiful pink. Because I wanted to get him good, I chose the last option, imagining it would be the hardest to clean up after.


    I paid, pressed submit, and that was it.


    Three days later, I received a video in my inbox.


    I played it.


    It started off black but with sound. I heard a doorbell, my boss'' voice asking if he had to sign for delivery, some faint knocking about, then a loud thud as if a box had been set down. Next I heard the un-blading of a utility knife and cardboard being cut.


    A deafening bang!


    As darkness faded away to colours and sunlight: a rain of multi-coloured confetti fell inside a ritzy-looking living room.


    I saw my boss covered in confetti, brushing it from his hair and wiping it off his cheeks��but the look on his face wasn''t one of surprise, or even shock. It was the look of horror!


    I saw him feebly lift the utility knife and point it at the camera as the camera moved toward him.


    Music began playing as if from a music box, but it was the same short melody over and over, stuck in a loop, with a single raspy voice singing in whispers:


    �� lovely pink confetti ��


    �� lovely pink confetti ��


    "Please, there''s been a mistake," my boss pleaded. His hand holding the utility knife shook.


    The camera moved closer.


    As it did, a shadow fell upon the floor. A black, inhuman shadow. Umbra without penumbra. Crawling forward. Crawling onto...


    My boss'' fear loomed ever greater, magnified with every passing second, every subsequent loop of that hideous music, until each crease on his face seemed etched permanently into his skin. Pale and unmoving, he looked like a grotesque statue of himself.


    "Please," he whimpered.


    Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    "Sing."


    �� lovely pink confetti ��


    �� lovely pink confetti ��


    He sliced at the camera with the utility knife��


    A clawed hand caught his wrist.


    "Sing."


    "Lovely�� pink confetti," he sang in a heartbeat staccato. "Lovely pink confe��"


    The claws tightened, his wrist bled; he gasped! The utility knife dropped to the floor.


    As a second set of claws swiped almost imperceptibly across the screen, opening four parallel wounds on his chest. Four red lines bleeding sickeningly downward.


    He sobbed.


    The shadow had climbed to his neck.


    His choked, animal sounds were adding a perverse and terrible rhythm to the music.


    �� lovely pink confetti ��


    �� lovely pink confetti ��


    The shadow enveloped him.


    The claws carved.


    His screams��


    The video ended, leaving me in stunned silence. I had seen things online but never anything like this. This was a death video, a murder video. Worse: it was a murder video with which I was directly involved. I wiped an accumulation of sweat from my mouth and sat down to think about what to do next. It didn''t take long. After a few deep breaths, I called the police and reported a murder. "I have video evidence," I said.


    Within ten minutes, three police cruisers were out front. Lights flashed. The police searched my house, then two officers took me and my laptop down to the station, where I sat in an interrogation room and recounted what happened:


    The same story I''ve now told you.


    They asked several times for my boss'' name and address, and presumably watched the video.


    After several hours, one of the detectives returned to the interrogation room and told me I was free to go. "Whatever fucked up game you''re playing, I don''t get it and I don''t want to get it," he said, then explained that my boss was alive and that the video showed him opening a confetti bomb, being mildly startled and starting to clean up.


    "Impossible," I said. "I saw��"


    "Go home."


    They gave me back my laptop.


    But when I opened it later that evening, the video was gone. I had played the video directly from my email account, to which I had purposefully stayed logged in, and now the entire message was gone.


    When I checked the confetti bomb website, everything was the same except that the only confetti options were low, medium and high.


    There was no beautiful pink.


    Perhaps I would have even entertained the possibility I had somehow madly fantasized about my boss'' gruesome death if not for two factors. First, the police had admitted the existence of a video (albeit not one showing murder) and now there was no video, so they must have deleted it. Second, when I went to work the next morning my boss was not the same.


    I don''t mean he''d been replaced by a different person. What I mean is he was no longer sarcastic, manipulative or really much of anything. He did discipline me with a week-long suspension for my prank, but even that he delivered in a droning monotone devoid of emotion. Whereas before he would have stomped and thundered and subjected me to a campaign of ridicule and retaliation, now he did nothing. More: he was nothing: an emotionless shell which moved, acted and spoke like an automaton.


    Sometimes when he''s sitting at his desk, staring bovinely at his computer screen, the light from the adjacent window hits just right and I can make out an atlas of tiny lines on his skin, as if someone��or something��had cut him into pieces before stitching him back together again.


    He greets me in the morning, remembers my birthday and I even got a promotion.


    There is one more thing, however.


    On a Saturday afternoon two months after the confetti bomb incident, there was a knock on my door. When I looked outside, I saw an unattended brown cardboard box. It was quite heavy, but I managed to pick it up and carry it inside. Given what had happened, I was hesitant to open it, but curiosity eventually got the better of me, and when I managed to get it open��


    A deafening bang!


    Followed by a shower of beautiful pink confetti.


    Fleshy, bloody strips of confetti.


    Raining down upon my body and upon the entirety of my home.


    Confetti sliding down the window panes.


    Confetti clogging up the drains.


    Confetti gathering in sloppy puddles on the floor.


    Confetti made of gore.


    It took me days to clean up, and in truth there''s likely still confetti in the deepest cracks and darkest corners, but there was something else in the cardboard box: a sheet of paper emblazoned with the confetti bomb website logo, thanking me for my purchase of their soul-shredding service and offering three coupon codes for future soul-shredding redeemable by me or anyone��at 33.4% off the regular price.

 The day Isaiah Lassiter fell into Hamilton Street and everything after

    Neepawa was of interest to no one but its few thousand inhabitants before the Creole, Isaiah Lassiter, fell into Hamilton Street.


    Afterwards a few tabloid reporters came.


    A podcaster showed up.


    I was one of the witnesses to his fate, standing on the corner by the municipal library when Isaiah Lassiter came out of the bank, looked both ways and took a long step into the street.


    His boot, however, did not find the firmness of asphalt��but sank right into it.


    Indeed his whole leg soon disappeared. Then he lost his balance and fell forward, flapping his arms, yelling, before face forward he went and was no more.


    I saw a man go overboard a fishing trawler once and it was like that.


    Maybe thirty seconds went by and there were his arms, above the surface of the asphalt, waving and splashing like a drowning man''s.


    The few of us present wanted to help him, but nobody wanted to get too close on account of the weirdness, and Isaiah Lassiter couldn''t swim, so he drowned, if that''s the right word for it, though why wouldn''t it be.


    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    Soon after, the cars parked on the side of the street fell into the asphalt too.


    The police came and taped off the street, and for a time the weirdness was confined to Hamilton Street, but eventually people started noticing it in avenues, parking lots and driveways, then it expanded to other streets, until most of the town''s asphalt was liquid, and some Toronto newspaper called Neepawa the Venice of the prairies.


    Scientists came.


    Tourists and adventurers came.


    No one could explain it, but someone must have been daring enough to try taking a dip because somehow we found out it was OK to get in and you could go swimming in it, up and down the streets, through the dark, warm liquid so much like denser water.


    People splashed, soaked and went boating.


    It was a few months after that, at the end of summer, when the killing happened. Some families were in the asphalt in Tupper Avenue near the park when the shark came, looking like asphalt too but having the fin, which cut the road lengthwise before leaping with its black jaws open and swallowing the Peters boy whole.


    I can''t describe the chaos that followed.


    Maybe half the people got out.


    The rest died in the asphalt and we never saw them again.


    Nobody went into the asphalt after that, except a few divers lowered in a shark cage trying to measure the depth of Hamilton Street, but we never saw them again either.


    There are more sharks now, and things with tentacles and sometimes a wind blows making waves only on the asphalt, and it keeps expanding. There''s liquid cement and liquid wood, and Mary Cheevers said she saw a grove of liquid trees.


    What if tomorrow we wake up as bodies of liquid self, able to swim in one another��


    What monsters will find us then?

 Miles

    I hadn''t seen Miles in fifteen years when we bumped into each other at the grocery store. Back then, we''d gone separate ways. He''d dropped out of high school to start learning a trade, and I''d gone to university. Our lives diverged and we fell out of contact. But our recognition was instant, and after a few minutes of conversation he invited me to his house.


    It was on the way that we caught up in broad strokes. I was married; he wasn''t. I had a kid; he didn''t. I worked for a corporation in a mid-level office job; he was self-employed. When I asked him what he did, he smiled a little mischievously and said, "I''m a bookie, but you could say I''m a bit of an employer myself these days."


    When I asked what he meant, he said I''d see soon enough.


    What I saw first was that his splendid two-storey yellow brick house was situated deep in the suburbs, and seemed decidedly too big for a single guy in his thirties. Nevertheless, I was impressed he could afford it. My wife and I didn''t have our own house yet. "Renting or owning?" I asked as we approached the front door.


    "Owned," he said. "I''ve had a good run these last two years."


    Although the house had looked normal from the street, when we got closer I noticed that the front doorknob was odd. It was shaped like a human hand.


    Miles was carrying groceries, so he motioned for me to do the opening. "It''s not locked?" I asked.


    He smiled just as I touched the doorknob��the warm, living doorknob!��for it didn''t just look like a human hand; it was a human hand!


    Obediently, the front door swung open, and huddled in the triangular space between the door and the wall was a hooded, black-clad figure whose gold-painted fingers I had just touched. Without even raising its head, the figure shut the door behind us and replaced its hand into the door hole.


    Miles paid the figure no mind and continued to the kitchen, where another similarly dressed figure stood motionless by the light switch. Miles set down the groceries, clapped his hands and the figure turned on the lights.


    By now I had to ask: "What is��"


    "Look, I get that it may seem a little weird," he said, "but hear me out. These are people who owe me money. They''re unemployed and they can''t conceivably pay it back anytime soon."


    I followed him to the living room, where another figure turned on the lights, illuminating several pieces of human furniture.


    "So they''re working off their debts."


    Miles whistled, and yet another figure appeared, this one holding two imported beers. Miles handed one to me before setting the other on his nude female coffee table, who / which reacted instinctively to the cold glass bottle by momentarily arching her / its back.


    "It''s perfectly consensual," he added, anticipating my concerns. "And what would be the more humane alternative, breaking their knee caps?"


    By now my initial discomfort was turning into a chilled fear. I kept remembering how the doorknob-hand had felt in mine. Ostensibly both were human hands, but the gap in��


    "Dignity," I said, then repeated the word in a whisper so as not to let them hear. "Don''t you think they lack dignity?"


    He chuckled. "See, even your natural reaction is to treat them as if they''re invisible. As for dignity, they most definitely had it. Because they mortgaged it, and now they''re working to earn it back. I didn''t force them to gamble. Now they''re house servants, that''s all. Are you opposed to house servants?"


    I admitted I supposed I wasn''t. "But this is such a strange form of it," I said, starting to stammer like in my elementary school days.


    By now the stress of being in this bizarre place combined with the mundane act of drinking beer was twisting me psychologically in ways I couldn''t understand. I wanted suddenly out, but the most I could tactfully bring myself to do was ask about the location of the bathroom.


    "Just down the hall," Miles said.


    I stepped with dread.


    The bathroom was large but felt immediately cramped by the presence of two figures: one wrapped entirely in bath towels, and the other kneeling by the toilet, its hooded head down and arms up, holding a roll of toilet paper as if it were the idol of a long-forgotten god.


    Of course, I couldn''t go in these conditions, so I waited uncomfortably for a minute, listening to the figures breathe, before washing my hands.


    "Are you OK?" I whispered to them.


    No response.


    "Do you need help?"


    Silence.


    I shut off the water faucet, turned��


    And nearly fell back against the bathroom mirror as the towel-wrapped one rubbed his / her / its moisture-absorbing material / body against my wet hands. "Please, don''t," I begged quietly, escaping backward into the hall.


    Miles was casually drinking his beer. "Did you try to save them?" he asked.


    I nodded.


    "They don''t need saving."


    He gestured for me to follow him, and I did, down the hall and up the stairs to a bedroom. But it wasn''t Miles'' bedroom. "I had it prepared just for you," he said, "in case you wanted to spend the night."


    The room was spacious and clean, decked out with an array of speakers, a large TV and a human night table flanking a queen-sized bed, freshly made and topped with a beautiful handmade quilt, on which rested a mattress-long body pillow, its linen case rising and falling gently with the breath of the human inside it.


    I wanted to back out, but Miles caught me by the shoulders. "Remember when in high school you told me I wouldn''t ever amount to anything?"


    His grip was firm.


    "I''m sorry," I whispered.


    "Don''t be sorry. You were wrong, that''s all."


    "How long do they work for?" I asked, watching the body pillow shift slightly on the bed, desiring more than anything to change the topic. But also curious, genuinely and morbidly curious.


    A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.


    "However long they want. Eight hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hour shifts. It''s really not a bad gig, lying in a pillowcase on a comfortable bed for twice the minimum wage."


    He nudged me forward. "Go ahead. Try it."


    I didn''t want to, but there was a menace in his voice, an unpredictability that made it feel safer to obey than disagree. He may not have been threatening me directly, but the threat was in the air, invisible and atomized like a perfume.


    I got on the bed.


    Miles watched my every uncomfortable move.


    "Like it?"


    "Yes," I said, "it''s a very nice mattress."


    For a second, I imagined that the mattress was filled with people and I was lying on top of them, crushing them��but as I shifted my weight I felt the more familiar support of springs, and I could breathe again.


    "Try hugging the body pillow," Miles instructed me, the coolness in his voice betraying how used he''d gotten to being the boss.


    I didn''t want to do that either, but I did it anyway, not only pervasively conscious of the army of servants Miles had amassed, which he could turn against me at any moment, but wanting desperately to feel even a fraction of the power he wielded over them. Inching closer to the body pillow and turning over onto my side before lightly placing an arm on top of��


    It squirmed, bony, warm and human underneath the crisp linen case.


    The person inside was a man.


    I wondered who and what he had bet on and how much he owed and whether it was really so bad what Miles was doing and if it would have been better for the man to be working two or three part-time jobs, probably labour, probably more tiring and dangerous, than being paid to be this objectified: this passive: this utterly domesticated.


    "Nice, right?" Miles asked.


    "Yes."


    "You can get up now."


    I got off the bed, smoothed my clothes and followed Miles wordlessly into the hall, down the stairs and into a spacious gym. He was so confident that not once did he look back; he knew that I was behind him. Although we didn''t go inside, on the way we had passed a room outfitted with cameras, lights and a circular padded stage, and my imagination was running wild with thoughts of the recordings made in there��


    The gym lights flashed cold and bright.


    I squinted.


    Arranged before me was an impressive collection of weights, workout gear and exercise machines, but it was the object occupying the centre of the room whose existence sent an electric shock down my spine. A leather heavy bag hung ominously from the ceiling.


    Miles passed me boxing wraps for my hands, then began wrapping his own. "I know this is a lot, and I know how it feels, the pressure building up inside you right now. Believe me. Jealousy. Disgust. Maybe even anger: at me, the world, your own fucking life. When I get that way, I come down here and work those emotions out. It''s not healthy holding them in. Whatever you do, you can''t let them grow inside you."


    When he was done with his wraps, he handed me a pair of training gloves. I put them on, constantly eyeing the heavy bag, which was swinging now ever so softly from the steel ceiling mount.


    "Give it a shot," he said.


    I stood frozen in place. I knew there was someone in there.


    "I can''t d��"


    "Of course you can," he said, then pulled his arm back and delivered a wicked right cross to the heavy bag. It responded with a dull thud followed by a reverberating groan. "Just like that."


    "It''s a person," I said, my voice rising.


    "Which makes it even easier. Just ask the person if you can hit her."


    Her.


    "Do you want to get hit?" Miles asked the heavy bag.


    "Yes," a muffled voice responded.


    "See? She wants you to do it. If you don''t do it, you''re deciding for her, and how condescending would that be��for a man to tell a woman what she can and can''t do."


    "Hit me please," the heavy bag mumbled.


    I made a fist and threw a light jab. Just enough to feel the bag: the padding, and the contour of the person hanging inside.


    "Come on, man."


    It made me sick to my stomach.


    But as I lifted my hand to my mouth to keep from retching, Miles put in a thudding left hook that lifted the bag on impact. I could hear the stifled pain within.


    "She gets paid by the punch," Miles said. "Ask her if she wants another."


    I didn''t want to, but the answer came anyway:


    "Hit me."


    "One thousand dollars off her debt if you give it all you''ve got," Miles said.


    "Do it please," the bag begged.


    I planted my feet, exhaled��once, twice��loosened my shoulder, and put all my weight behind a looping shot that connected sickeningly with the side of the bag, my mind frantically trying to decide where I''d connected, face, ribs, hip, because I was sure I''d felt bone, as the bag bounced, the ceiling mount screeched and the woman inside moaned in pain.


    For a while: silence.


    Then, "Thank�� you," she whimpered.


    "Nice one! What do you say, another grand?" Miles asked with a smile.


    "Again please."


    So I got her again, and again. And again. Each time connecting with everything I had; each time shaving a thousand dollars off her debt. Good deed followed by good deed��until Miles himself grabbed my arm and pulled me away, and I realized, over the pounding of my beating heart, how much anger there was in me. "Easy, easy," he repeated.


    After I''d calmed down, I felt the horror of it: of what I had done. I had beaten someone, a woman, and all her begging and thanking couldn''t convince me it was right. Not that she was speaking now��


    Miles unhooked the heavy bag and laid it reverently on the floor as I took off my gloves and undid my wraps.


    He unzipped the bag.


    "Do you remember our prom?" he asked as if out of the blue.


    "Vaguely."


    "You went with Rashida Parker," he said.


    I did remember that.


    "Who did you go with?" I asked.


    Miles had pulled a body wrapped in a thick, bloodied sheet from the unzipped bag. He picked it up and cradled it. She looked small and fragile in his arms. For a second, I thought that maybe she was dead, but then she murmured something swollen and incomprehensible, and I knew I hadn''t beaten her to death.


    I had almost forgotten my own question when, "No one," Miles answered. "I was supposed to go with Rashida, and she''d even said ''yes'' to me"��he had unwrapped some of the sheet, revealing a tangle of black hair, and I thought, No, it couldn''t be, but it was: she was��"when you asked her and she said ''yes'' to you. After all, why would she go with some skid who smoked cigarettes by the railroad tracks, a future deadbeat whose parents worked in a factory and who couldn''t read Shakespeare, when she could go with someone like you?"


    He unfolded the remaining sheet from Rashida''s body and laid her on top of it. Her eyes were swelling shut but she could still see, and all I could do was avert my gaze as she slowly pronounced my name, each syllable willed into a hurt existence, before thanking me repeatedly with her fattened lips. Although she looked barely like the girl I''d fallen in love with, it was unmistakably her. After she could speak no more, she crawled forward, reaching pathetically for my legs, her broken body a coloured patchwork of various stages of bruising, as I backed instinctively away.


    I was scared and I was ashamed.


    "You''ll appreciate the irony," Miles said. "She lost her money betting on mixed martial arts."


    He laughed.


    There was something about that laugh, something devilish and deep, something true that made me lunge for him��for his despicable throat! But even that did not stop the laughter, which resounded through the gym as we fought like boys on the padded floor. And still he laughed when his hooded minions arrived and pulled me off him, swinging wildly at the air. I''d bloodied his nose but nothing more, and as they dragged me away, up the stairs and to the front door, Miles followed us with a monstrous smile.


    "I am the way the world is," he said.


    Then I was out the door and it was closed and it was dark and suburban and I was sitting on the concrete front step, staring at the golden doorknob-hand jutting profoundly through the hole in the door of a yellow brick house. I got to my feet and descended the steps to the street, all the while trying to act cool and not make a scene, because that seemed like the worst thing imaginable: drawing attention to myself. My fighting spirit had evaporated. I was a coward once more.


    I buried my hands in my pockets and kept my head down, walking briskly through the cold night air, but when I reached the nearest intersection I turned and started to run.


    On both sides houses flew past at a blur. Illuminated windows. Imagined conversations. I knew Miles wasn''t behind me, but because I lacked his natural confidence I kept glancing back��yet the only thing which followed were his words, I am the way the world is, and when I stopped to catch my breath, I looked directly upon a lighted window: several silhouettes gathered around a table. Was it a family or a group of hooded servants waiting on their master? I couldn''t tell, but they must have seen me too because suddenly the curtains were drawn and the illumination ended.


    I am the way the world is.


    He was wrong. I didn''t want to believe it. I couldn''t believe it. Miles was the anomaly��the evil��and in every other house, behind every other beautiful brick wall, there were normal people with normal needs and normal relationships. They desired normal things and they worked normal jobs, just like me.


    In my stillness I felt suddenly the autumn cold and took out my phone, and almost without thinking I swiped toward the Uber app��


    That''s when I understood.


    I smashed the phone against the sidewalk.


    Faces looked out.


    Miles was right, and I walked home for hours that night, terrified of myself and of every house I passed in which uncounted silhouettes passed silent and unseen.

 New York State of Mind

    My grandmother died clutching her rosary, her beloved first edition of Pushkin''s Eugene Onegin and a photo of my grandfather, a handsome man whom I barely knew and who had preceded her to the grave by thirty years after working himself to death in a Brooklyn meat plant.


    She had not remarried.


    If you listened to my grandmother speak about her life, which I alone within my family did, you understood she felt her years had been a succession of cruelly dashed hopes. Her parents had died when she was a girl. War had crippled her. Yet she had opposed leaving Russia to the last hour, and it had pained her daily to see my grandfather toil for the benefit of men who mocked and mistreated him.


    In her final years, she considered it a neverending insult to have descendants as thoroughly Americanized as we.


    But even I did not realize the bitterness and acidity she had accumulated. Although we knew she did not have friends or happiness in the United States, not even I could have imagined the power and depth of her hatred, or predicted its devastating consequences.


    Although my grandmother had few possessions when she died, and there was consequently little interest in her will, she left to me what she had cherished most, her collection of rare books. It was there that I discovered a letter inscribed with my name, to be opened upon her death.


    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    I did so immediately following the cremation. The letter contained the following instruction: "Scatter my ashes on Liberty Island."


    This required a permit and I applied for one.


    It was days later, while seated on a white ferry crossing calm inland waters, holding the urn containing her ashes, surrounded by tourists, that grief hit me hardest, and it was then I truly said goodbye.


    After we landed, I recited a prayer, opened the urn and let the winds take her remains.


    I closed my eyes.


    And opened them to: tourists gathering around me, speaking, gasping, and pointing at the Statue of Liberty, around whose base my grandmother''s ashes swirled, a dark buzzing cloud, rising and rising until the entire figure was cloaked��


    A cloak which fell away like sand revealing:


    Emptiness.


    The Statue of Liberty was gone.


    Devoured by the ashes, which had grown in volume and were accelerating, circling the island like a runaway ribbon of death as we stood stunned with phones in outstretched hands, before condensing into a black sphere and shooting across the bay toward Manhattan.


    The rest I remember from news footage and YouTube:


    Ashes looming over downtown like a storm cloud;


    Descending like fog;


    Consuming skyscrapers, vehicles, people��


    until they were all emptiness and New York City itself was but a vacancy beneath a cosmic blanket. Then too that blanket fell, smothering whatever life remained and settling into an eerie wasteland, an earthen scar where nothing grows, the wind never blows, and my grandmother''s ashes lie dormant in a gray and hateful peace.

 Superspecimen

    [Truck engine]


    Ready?


    Four hundred metres.


    [Bump. Muffled: "dead zone�� no surveillance��"]


    Please state your name.


    [Truck slows]


    Dr. Irving Haskell.


    You have approximately ten minutes, Dr. Haskell.


    About my compensation��


    As discussed. Ten million dollars and safe passage to Beijing in exchange for your knowledge.


    Where do I start?


    The beginning.


    It started in Peru in 2003.


    You were involved from the beginning?


    Yes, I''d been involved in the initial planning since the 1990s, and I took over as overseer in 2001.


    Why Peru?


    Lack of government interference. Away from Chinese spies.


    Why didn''t it start earlier?


    The tech wasn''t there. We lacked the ability.


    Ability to do what?


    If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.


    Brain transplants.


    Tell me about the site in Peru.


    It was an orphanage joined to a hospital for the mentally deficient.


    Children?


    Partly.


    What did you hope to accomplish?


    We were afraid we were falling behind in science��in intelligence, and we hoped to close the gap by accelerating the education of a select few... superspecimen.


    Explain the process.


    It was based on the Russian doping programs and Chinese sports camps, but instead of isolating gifted children and specializing them in gymnastics, we wanted to specialize them in mathematics, physics, chemistry.


    You mentioned brain transplants.


    Yes, that was the breakthrough. Because even the most gifted mind takes time to learn. We invented a bypass. By extracting one child''s brain and implanting it successively in what we called learners��


    Did the children die?


    The donors, yes. Unfortunately.


    What were the learners?


    People. Mental deficients whose heads we''d hollowed out and whose bodies we''d re-engineered into biological learning machines. One for each subject, and the donor brains completed the cycle, transplanted into each learner in turn.


    [Sigh]


    I''ll never forget the learning chamber, those docile bodies sitting and learning the same thing over and over. Barely resting, barely eating...


    Then?


    The brains were rehomed.


    Into superspecimen?


    Yes, children the same age as those from whom we''d harvested the brains. You can appreciate the elegance. Learning untangled from time. Education in the blink of an eye.


    Did it work?


    Oh, yes.


    How did you choose between donors and superspecimen?


    At random.


    But one died and the other survived.


    That''s a matter of perspective. The donor''s body died, but its brain actually thrived in the superspeciman''s body.


    Did you know their names?


    Always.


    [Truck engine cuts]


    What''s the��


    Mateo Garcia. Angel Rodriguez. Hugo Echeveria. Alvaro Fonseca. Pablo Jimenez.


    [Breathing]


    Javier Lopez. Manuel Perez. Rodrigo Morales. I can go on.


    Those were all learners.


    [Breathing]


    Who�� are you?


    I am all of them. Or they are me.


    Impossible.


    I didn''t just learn the foundations of science, Dr. Haskell. I learned my-selves. I became twenty-seven of them. Imagine what it feels like to be twenty-seven people''s desire for revenge.


    You''re mad. The learners were eliminated when the program was shut down��


    It was never shut down.


    In 2017.


    You were removed as overseer.


    I...


    Until next time, Doctor.


    [Gunshot]


    [Muffled: "...prepare for extraction��"]


    [End of recording]

 One Love, One Heart

    "I wish it would have been different," the girl says, pressing the barrel of her gun against the boy''s head.


    "Me too," he replies, tightening his already white-knuckle grip on the knife held against her throat.


    The sounds of children playing waft in through the open living room window, but inside the air is hot and still.


    "Please"��Their mother speaks in choked, single words. "Put��"


    The sentence dissipates.


    Aborted.


    The distraught woman''s husband meekly comforts her.


    "It''s my heart," the boy asserts.


    His blade is sharp.


    His sister presses the barrel of her gun harder against his head.


    "It''s mine," she replies.


    "You share a heart," the husband says quietly. "You share a life."


    As his wife weeps once more at the sight of her beloved children willing to kill each other for a better chance of individual survival: siamese twins locked in a stand-off for the muscle beating within their single chest.


    The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    "Together we can''t survive," the boy says.


    "Not for long," the girl says.


    She knows she has the advantage. Her bullet will end her brother''s life whereas his knife will bleed them both, but that advantage seems moot if she ends up dead anyway.


    Their mother lifts her head. Raw, pink eyes staring vacantly ahead��


    "Please..."


    "No," the girl says.


    "Flip the coin," says the boy. "Heads, I die. Tails, she does."


    Their mother collapses.


    Sobbing.


    Her husband flips through his wallet. Stiff, shaking fingers. "For the love of God, this can''t be the only way."


    "It is," the boy says.


    "The doctors said we can''t both survive," the girl says, imagining how much easier this would have been if she had fired immediately. If her hand had obeyed her mind. If her brother had not grabbed the knife. "This way you don''t have to choose."


    The husband holds up a coin.


    Children play outside.


    Normal children. Simple lives. Happiness. Sunshine.


    The woman takes the coin from her husband.


    Crawls forward.


    "Let me do it," she croaks.


    The boy relaxes his grip on the knife slightly. The girl feels for the first time the true weight of the gun.


    The woman flips the coin.


    And they all watch it rotate in the air: the spinning of fate, the revolution of��


    Bang!


    The boy''s head explodes.


    The woman screams.


    The girl throws up all over herself.


    The knife hits the floor��followed by the coin:


    Tails.


    Before the man can grab her by the shoulders, the woman leaps forward, and in one impossibly fluid motion picks up the knife and drives it into her daughter''s chest.


    Three times.


    Her husband barely manages to drag her away from the now-crumpled and one-headed, bloodied body. How beautiful their life once seemed.


    "The coin," she screams. "The coin decided!"


    The girl''s eyelids flicker with a final passing of consciousness.


    Outside: sudden silence.


    Everyone must have heard the gunshot.


    Distant sirens sound.


    The woman''s voice drops to a murmur. "You killed my boy," she says. "My beautiful baby boy��"

 On Possum Lake

    Night enveloped the empty mall parking lot, and under the hazy light of the waxing moon John Paulson unlocked one of the building''s back doors.


    Once inside��his manager''s key eliciting the satisfying click��he walked swiftly to the department store changing rooms, from which he retrieved several memory cards, and the women''s washroom, from the toilets of which he retrieved several more. Each had been pulled from a hidden camera.


    Security room: he erased all evidence of his visit.


    The night air caressed him.


    Although he''d planned to drive home before viewing this week''s footage, his excitement caused him to pull over, and he jerked off on the unpaved shoulder to the flickering images of women undressing, posing, peeing��


    At home, he downloaded the footage from each memory card, scanned through it and edited the good parts into an hour-long video, which he uploaded to his subscription site.


    What had started as a hobby had become a successful side hustle.


    Successful enough to take that trip he''d dreamed about: to Possum Lake, where his parents had taken him so many times as a child.


    But never in winter.


    Never when the lake had frozen over and become a black mirror, majestically reflecting the silence and the moonlit��


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    The crunch of snow beneath his boots echoed amongst the bare trunks.


    His breath mistified the impending dark.


    From somewhere deep within the uninhabited woodland, an animal scurried from branch to broken branch.


    Possum Lake lay ahead.


    Snow fell.


    John Paulson laid down his backpack.


    He''d found his spot.


    He worked quickly: erecting his tent, heating food, and��as outside night descended upon the blizzarding world��climbing into his ultra-warm sleeping bag, from which memories and sleep took him swiftly.


    He woke suddenly��


    Naked.


    Underfoot: cold, hard; ankle-deep in snow.


    Ice.


    The moon was gone.


    Yet he knew he was on the lake��in the middle of it��and as his eyes adjusted he realized the lake itself was glowing.


    More: moaning.


    Light and sound emanating from underneath, filtered through the accumulation of snow.


    He dropped to his knees, dug with his hands��


    A face stared back.


    Female and distorted by the frozen surface of the lake.


    He fell.


    Scurrying in reverse.


    Plowing through the snow.


    Revealing:


    More warped female faces.


    The air thickened.


    He knew the faces, all of them��vaguely in some recess of his mind.


    They''re drowning, he thought, and began pounding on the ice, which cracked, thick lines spidering across its mammoth surface.


    Faces flowing underwater.


    He pounded until he could not breathe.


    Until the world��


    inverted.


    And he realized, choking, he was in the freezing water, flailing, lungs filling; drowning, as the faces moaned above.


    He pounded on the underside of the ice.


    Seeking a way out.


    None was.


    Each time he broke the ice with bleeding fists, swimming for salvation, their hands pushed him in. The surface froze over.


    So it was: drowning without dying, suffering without end.


    Always under gaze of those eyes.


    Always and��


    Forever.

 Gangbrut

    "What price is now Gamestop stock?" it asked its personal-other, its syntax adapting to Earthspeak after weeks of primitive interactions with Reddit user normancrane and absorbing Earthknowledge.


    "Up up," personal-other replied.


    The it previously known to Earthlings as Oumuamua during initial fly-by and later to be known as Gangbrut upon completion of its destruction mission asked for the most up-to-date information and personal-other complied.


    "Who Musk Elon?" it asked.


    Personal-other answered in theirspeak��that is mentally from within it��in concepts similar to hype and celebrity.


    "I rest now," it said.


    Personal-other melted back into its fleshy darkmatterism.


    From space, Earth looked small and blue: a rotating insignificance heated by a forgettable star, on whose surface tiny realmatter clusters pricked by consciousness had constructed crude systems of predictive inefficiencies upon whose fracturable netting they had inexplicably draped the future of their civilizational existence.


    Years earlier, one of these clusters called astronomer had looked upon then-Oumuamua and declared it an alien visitor. This had surprised it, so it intervened, and soon other clusters, having been manipulated, hypothesized differently, no consensus was reached and the issue had been obfuscated to its satisfaction using the system known as internet.


    Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings.


    What a useful system that was.


    It slumbered.


    It was both being and vessel, capable of matter transmogrification and cosmic manipulation on a grand scale, but what it lacked in Earthspeak was called green-thumb and thus Earth, which it decided would make a wonderful bathroast and gardenplop, was being manipulated to terraform planet-self for its hedonistic benefit.


    Progress had been good.


    But now it was time to end most realmatter clusters and the most efficient way to achieve this was��


    "To the moon!"


    Personal-other had roused it.


    "What price is now Gamestop stock?" it asked personal-other.


    "763."


    It pondered.


    Post following on r/wallstreetbets, it instructed its own sys-infiltration mentacles: diamond hands bois! buy buy buy! wall street is on its last legs. final stand tonight retards! then to the fucking moon!


    It sensed the up-votes accumulate.


    Clusterfucking was easy.


    Another instruction: New York Times this: Is AAL the next GME?


    It penetrated mentacles into several of its clusterpuppets and played with them. Publish a whitepaper. Start a foundation. Overthrow a government. It fondly remembered tulip bulbs and joint stock companies and real estate, whose Earthspeak name amused it greatly. There could be beauty in Earthspeak.


    HODL, it posted.


    It enjoyed that��in the end��it would be the clusters who undid themselves because of a fatal flaw expressed with unusual elegance in Earthspeak:


    The clusters valued nothing.


    This would collapse their fragile systems, the detritus and fallout of which would suffocate them.


    Systemless, they would uncluster and die.


    It would keep alive only a few to attend to its immediate planetary needs.


    It existed.


    Watching and waiting, but in one more fly-by the task would be accomplished, and then it could gardenplop and bathroast to its darkmatter core''s content.


    In space, Gangbrut loomed.

 Commander-in-chief

    To say I was surprised she spoke to me would be an understatement.


    I was shocked.


    I almost spilled my drink.


    The D.C. bar was rowdy��the band loud��and I was in my corner, sipping my drink, watching all the beautiful people: dancing, mingling. Young people and powerful people, and everyone with so much potential.


    "Hi," she said.


    I wasn''t used to anyone talking to me, least of all someone like her. The most I ever got was some snide comments about my appearance (I''m 3'' 8") and humiliating stares.


    "Mind if I��"


    "Please," I blurted out. "What''s your pleasure tonight?"


    She ordered a beer.


    We flirted.


    "Listen," she said after a while. "I''m going to be honest. I''m here on business��urgent business. We''re looking for a small man with experience in mechanical operations who''s not averse to electronic enhancements and who''s looking to make a career change."


    I sat dumbfounded. Was she fucking with me? Was I going to end up on TikTok?


    "If you''re not interested, get up and leave."


    The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    I remained.


    "If you are interested, follow me outside, where you''ll see a car waiting. Once you get in, they''ll tell you more."


    "I don��"


    "It''s the opportunity of a lifetime," she said.


    I followed her out.


    But when I got in the car��black, obviously government��she backed out, mouthed "good luck," and the doors locked.


    The car moved.


    A screen separated me from the driver.


    Hissing


    Through a speaker:


    "The following is classified. Killsafe. The President is dead��"


    ��I awoke indoors:


    White walls.


    Panic.


    "He''s conscious."


    I was in a wheelchair.


    "Get him in!"


    We burst through a pair of doors to a room where a body��the president''s body!��lay on a table, eyes missing and chest cut open, organless and hollowed out and��


    I was lifted from the wheelchair:


    Dangled over the body:


    Looking down, I saw blood dripping from the bandages where my legs used to be, and started flailing my arms, screaming, but instead of the screams escaping my lips they escaped those of the dead president.


    They stuffed me inside him.


    Sutured me within.


    In the cold, fleshy darkness I heard a voice in my own head (Stay calm. Look for the screen and control panel.) and discovered a brightening rectangle connected by wire to a metallic cube of buttons.


    A flash of light��


    And suddenly I was outside under a blue sky.


    Except I wasn''t outside.


    The President was outside, and I was trapped within his cadaver, seeing through where his eyes once were.


    Speak.


    "What is this?" I asked / I heard the president say.


    Try standing and walking.


    Using a combination of movements��


    I jerked forward.


    To speak to us, think.


    What is this?


    The country needs its leader. Consider yourself his puppetmaster.


    You''re the puppetmaster, I thought.


    Yes, yours.


    No more private thoughts.


    For how long?


    Your position is permanent. Only the presidents will change.


    I''ll be��


    Transplanted, when the time comes.


    I''m entombed, I thought.


    In absolute power.

 The Khat Chewers

    I saw my first khat chewer in Kenya.


    I was attending an international conference on physical cosmology, and while strolling back to my hotel after an edifying day of lectures��Copernicus, quantum mechanics and CMBR sloshing about my head��he appeared:


    Or appeared his eyes, reflecting the streetlights.


    I stopped.


    His face remained dark.


    He stared at me and I at him, and all the while he chewed.


    Slowly; dumbly, like a human cow.


    Not saying a word.


    Eventually my companion, a hired local named Kirui, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away. ��Don��t mind him,�� Kirui said. ��He��s harmless, just a khat chewer.��


    Khat: a flowering plant native to east Africa chewed for its alkaloid, cathinone, an amphetamine-like compound causing excitement and euphoria.


    Except the khat chewer had looked anything but euphoric.


    Even in my hotel room, alone and in the dark, did his eyes remain: staring at me from a face of memory melting into nightmare��


    Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.


    I awoke, cold, wet, but remembering nothing from my fever dream save for a peculiar sensation of reality somehow condensing into me.


    In the late morning, I went to a lecture on cosmic expansion but could not focus.


    My thoughts were scattered, limp.


    During the lunch break, I drank three cups of coffee but they didn��t help. Several colleagues tried to speak with me; I ignored them.


    Until bumping into��


    ��Here is the leaf that begins all life worth having!��


    What?


    The man staring back at me, with slight bewilderment, was Dr. Mukherjee, under whom I had earned my doctorate at MIT.


    ��Gilgamesh,�� he said. ��The name of����


    I felt a sudden tightening in my chest. Gilgamesh had been the name of my first (and most famous) contribution to the field of cosmology: a software model of the beginnings of the universe.


    ��Are you alright?��


    ��Yes,�� I said, pushing past him, but now changing direction and heading for the doors leading outside��


    Through which I pushed into the blinding noonday sun.


    My hand firm against my chest.


    Palpitations.


    People staring at me��


    Evading��


    ��Kirui!�� I yelled out. ��Kirui, are you here?��


    He materialized obediently as if out of the local ether. ��Yes, sir.��


    ��Take me to the place we passed last night. To where we saw the khat chewer,�� I said in syncopation.


    When we arrived, he was there.


    His jaws masticating.


    ��Leave us,�� I told Kirui. When he had gone, the khat chewer stood and in his eyes I felt an understanding. I followed him into a building, down a ladder, deeper and deeper into a hole, until time meant nothing: until my feet touched ground:


    An underground chamber of impossible proportions.


    The inward pressure was immense.


    Through the permanent gloam I gazed rows and rows of khat chewers.


    I sat among them.


    I willingly received my leaf.


    The expansion of the universe is slowing. There is too much matter. And the only thing preventing collapse��pushing against it with each grinding motion��is us: the khat chewers, dutifully delaying the inevitable.

 The Incident at the Decatur Meat Processing Plant

    The room had no windows. Chapman��s hands shook. It would be better if the room had windows, he thought. ��I��m going to need you to focus,�� said the corporate investigator, his voice incongruously deep. Chapman thought he looked like someone who��d recently lost a lot of weight: slack, drooping skin. ��Sure thing.��


    They were here to talk about the incident at the Decatur meat processing plant.


    An incident to which Chapman was the lone witness.


    All those raw bodies��


    people still��


    kneeling and crawling, reaching up their arms to that fucking thing in the sky...


    ��Tell me again when you first saw it.��


    ��Had to be past midnight. I��d gone out for a smoke.��


    ��Anyone else outside?��


    ��Nah.��


    ��And you called your floor supervisor?��


    ��Uh-huh. Over the radio. I said to him, ��Oddest thing, Joe, but there��s a cow out here in the fucking yard.����


    ��When he came out, that��s when the��transformation started?��


    You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    ��Yeah. I mean the cow looked up at me when I was making the call, but it wasn��t till Joe got there it sprouted those goddamn wings.��


    Cartilage spearing flesh��


    weaving itself into giant filmy wings like an insect��s...


    ��Did it fly?��


    ��More like hovered. Lifted itself off the ground and hung there in the night sky.��


    Screams��


    from inside the plant��


    sickening smell of spoiled blood, of decomposing guts��


    ��That��s when people started running out, one after the other, some covered in slime, yelling about the animals going nuts inside. Cadavers coming back to life, stuff like that. Then seeing this floating cow and stopping dead in their tracks, dropping to their knees. Joe had a handgun and he was pointing it at the fucking thing, but he couldn��t fire. All the while this thump-thumping was coming from inside the plant, and the people started praying.��


    ��To God?��


    ��To the floating cow. Begging for forgiveness.��


    Bovine head beginning to spin��


    cracking of bone��


    a distension of the skull; a ballooning out and an elongation of the face into a goddamn flesh trumpet!


    ��I guess they were all outside by now, the ones who weren��t dead. Kneeling, begging. It floated above them, casting this black shadow. There was this girl, Karen. She looked up at it and said, ��I don��t deserve to live,�� and it extended its����


    ��Proboscis,�� the investigator said.


    ��Yeah, and just...��


    Chapman didn��t want to say: didn��t want to remember.


    ��Tell me.��


    ��It sucked the skin right off her fucking body, like some kind of freak vacuum. Came off in one piece, leaving her looking like an anatomical drawing��but still fucking praying, thanking it��until what was left of her just fell apart, lost its shape and collapsed into a pile of steaming innards. Then it did the others the same, and I swear to God all I heard was this deep voice repeating the same three words: delicious human nectar.��


    ��Yes,�� said the investigator. His voice deep, his cheeks impossibly loose. Like a puppet made from human skin��


    ��You shall be our prophet.��

 The Breakup

    1


    ...once and forever upon an endless plain traversed endlessly by a soul screaming and contained within another soul once loved��


    ...once and forever��


    2


    2026-09-11 - NYC - STATE Bar & Grill - BEN and LAURA (20s) at a table as��


    "That''s what you wanted to tell me, that you don''t fucking love me anymore? Jesus Christ. Un-fucking-believable."


    "It''s not that I don''t love you, just that��"


    "You''re breaking up with me."


    "��that people grow apart, Ben. We always knew it could happen."


    "You met someone! Fuck. I knew it. That''s what I always knew. You know what else? We picked our kids'' names, Laura. By the fucking river��"


    "We were sixteen."


    "I can''t believe I drove all the way from Ohio for this shit. Fuck my life."


    "I didn��t want to tell you over the phone."


    Ben smashes his fist on the table, then stuffs it into his mouth��crying. He stands (people staring�� whispering...) and runs toward the elevators.


    The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    LAURA follows.


    ��Ben, I didn��t��


    3


    Ben entered the Greyhound with a hat pulled low over his forehead, eyes down, and a bandaged hand. Blood seeping through. He made his way to the back and found an empty spot beside a dark-skinned brunette.


    ��Taken?��


    ��No, please,�� she said.


    He sat.


    He noticed the girl had slid a large case into the space in front of her and put her feet on it, giving her the peculiar appearance of a perched bird. When she noticed Ben looking, she��


    ��Please, it��s fine,�� he said.


    Just then, a NYC cop got on the bus.


    Ben held his breath.


    The cop looked the bus up and down a few times before saying, ��Listen, folks. If any of you sees somethin�� suspicious, you tell the driver. OK?��


    The cop got off the bus, the engine roared and the bus pulled away.


    Ben watched out the window.


    He thought that the girl was cute but nervous. He tried several times to talk to her, even flirt a little, but she wasn��t cooperative. After a while she started softly singing to herself and checking her phone.


    Her face looked illuminous in the sunlight.


    ��You alright?�� Ben asked.


    ��Yes, fine.��


    Whatever the girl was saying, it wasn��t in English. They passed the Empire State Building, cordoned off with yellow tape.


    ��Allahu akbar,�� she said��


    4


    Helicopter footage of the charred remains of what was once a bus:


    ��...what appears to have been a series of near-simultaneous explosions targeting public transportation systems across the country, in what the White House has called ��an unprecedented terrorist attack�� on the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11.��


    5


    ��mean to hurt you!��


    LAURA runs after BEN toward a glass wall overlooking the city.


    ��Stop, please!��


    To her surprise, he does. ��Well, you did. You did fucking hurt me.��


    He lunges at her��


    Grabs her head and rams it into the glass.


    ��Please,�� she gargles.


    and again


    and again


    and again


    until her face is gone,


    and the city looms, red and unvanquished.

 downpast where the divermin dont see

    what im telling you is my recollection but as is in my power to know it is true being based on the memories of myself and swell as he told it to me before he grew into the sky. theres parts i promised i wouldanot say and willnot but the else is truth as sure as theres fishes in the deep.


    when i beknown him swell was ten nonebright maybe but plenty curious and always looking where others neverwould.


    thats how he found the deep.


    swimming down when the other boys rounded on him too much was swells way of prayer like otherfolk go to church.


    he told me it was quiet and peaceful down there.


    the way you got there was to dive and keep going once you got to the bottom you kept going anyway and in the deep there was fishes all swimming round and as swell knew them he recognized in them people he knew. the fishes and peoples were the same you could say even that they were in different places.


    the night prissy kims dau disappeared swell was in the deep and he knew her fish disappeared so he knew she died.


    If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    one day after the police talked their skill to swell and because he was nonebright he told the police what hed seen and that got the police on their suspicions so they asked him a lot of questions then they went to the lake and dove to where swell said the deep was but all they got to was the bottom and went no more.


    no matter what swell said they did not believe that the deep was downpast where the divermin dont see.


    the police tried to put their rings on swell but he got away into the lake into the deep where it was quiet and peaceful where he knew the fishes of the police and in anger took they fishes in his hands.


    when he come back up he threw they fishes down all squirming and opening closing their mouths so did the police fall down and die and disappear.


    then he cooked the fishes and ate them and slept because he was tired.


    when people came with worry in the morning they found him by the lake but he had grown a pound for every pound of they whose they fish he ate.


    they were scared of swell after.


    whenever anyone would make a fuss he would dive into the deep and eat their fishes and grow biggerstill until one day he was too big for the lake and could not fit into the deep.


    thats when he stood and grew into the sky.


    couldanot anyone talk to him after that because his head was too high and even when they chopped him with axes to flesh chunks did his head stay up.


    its there forever now like a second moon doing playthings with tides warning and revealing quiet and peaceful deeps for us all.

 Taken by Birds

    I was sitting in my tenth-storey apartment, working on a symphony, when the hawk burst in��


    Through the window��


    glass exploding, and the bird cutting itself so that it sprayed blood, like a boxer walloped in the jaw, every time it ruffled its feathers.


    To say I stood up would be an understatement.


    I leapt!


    The bleeding bird approached, and I approached, and at some point it started getting dark, and when I looked outside I saw hundreds of birds at the window, blocking the sunlight, some of them coming into the apartment, others hideously squawking. They made so much wind with their flapping, my papers began flying around.


    I tried to shoo them out, but they attacked me: their claws��their beaks��


    I backed away��


    Tripping on a chair, flipping over, trying to crawl toward the door��


    That''s when they acted.


    Landing on me, pecking at my clothes, ripping��tearing away material, until they exposed my whole back.


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    Then they dug their talons into me: pain like getting caught on a hundred fishing lines: hooks penetrating skin, anchored in flesh...


    Flapping furiously, they lifted me off the floor��


    And we flew out the window!


    I thought I was going to die, that they were going to drop me there and then, and I prayed and screamed and imagined what I looked like from the street.


    But they didn''t drop me.


    Up we flew, higher and higher majestically above the city, betwixt skyscrapers and below planes, over parks, through clouds, and all the while some sat on me and pecked me��not my clothing, my flesh!��pulling strips of me away, raw bleeding strips, most of which went down their gullets but some of which escaped their ravenous intentions and fell��


    to the city below��


    ��and I felt it all: I was the body flying and the chunks digesting and the bits going splat on asphalt and umbrellas.


    I hurt and I rotted.


    I saw the city and I was eaten up by stray cats.


    I rolled into sewer grates.


    I survived.


    Until there was less and less of flying me, almost just a skeleton, picked clean; until��


    I wasn''t flying at all.


    Time passed; consciousnesses dwindled; and I was but one small chunk of meat drying out on someone''s windowsill.


    The window opened.


    I slid in, down the wall onto the kitchen counter. I recognized a plate of raw meat and hid among them.


    I was fried.


    Sizzling on the frying pan in pain.


    I was placed upon a plate by a woman and slid toward a man, who licked his lips, lifted knife and fork and sliced and ate me.


    How horribly be chewed!


    In his mouth, I went round, then down his throat, washed down with cabernet.


    I thought I was ended.


    But as his juices digested me, I realized I was entering his blood, in which his body pumped me to his brain and��


    "What are you doing?" the woman asked.


    "Composing music," I said.

 Temple of God

    "Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price."��1 Corinthians 6:19-20


    "Keep the car running."��Arcade Fire


    #


    Frimps, Oil and Bogota were ransacking the Church of the Blessed Redeemer as Vi sat outside in the Civic, engine running, radio on but not too loud, not loud enough to drown out the sounds of something happening.


    So far nothing had happened.


    But Vi didn''t have a good feeling about this one. They were supposed to be doing a mom-and-pop, but Frimps had changed his mind at the last minute and here they were. "Fucking believers," he''d said. "They don''t even lock their doors. Do you know how much shit they have in there?"


    On the radio a song ended and a PSA came on, something about people in need, children, waiting for organ donations, some kind of priest talking about goodness in our hearts��


    Something happened��


    There was a circular stained glass window above the main doors to the church and Oils came crashing through it!


    Hitting the pavement, legs bent sideways and a fucking sword driven through his chest.


    Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    "Oh, shit!"


    Vi blinked, and:


    The stained glass window was intact and the sword was gone, but Oils was still there.


    Vi rolled down the window.


    "What the fuck, Oils?"


    He looked up at her with flames for eyes and a rattlesnake tail for a tongue: rattle-rattle-rattle...


    "The fuck?"


    Vi changed gears into reverse��


    Frimps and Bogota��


    blasted out the front doors of the church��


    One came through the windshield, face carved up; the other made a massive dent in the roof.


    "Drive," Oils hissed, his face blinking on and off.


    Vi hit the accelerator, reversing out of the parking lot��tires squealing! Then: into drive: gunning it down the street, sweaty hands shaking.


    The rearview:


    A ten-foot tall glowing angel crystallizing as light.


    The dead body in the car shifting, head rotating one-hundred eighty degrees. "Your body is a temple of the Lord."


    Bang-bang-banging on the roof.


    The angel growing: gaining, and Vi forcing everything she could out of the engine.


    Fish-tail-ing


    Blasting through red lights.


    Horns!


    Then the back of the car lifted into the air��


    The angel lifting it.


    ��world spinning: Vi separating from it: held by the angel: angel of mercy: angel of death:


    penetrating her chest with its luminous right hand :


    #


    Father Mackenzie was surprised to see four boxes on the altar.


    He opened one:


    Organs


    #


    "Never seen anything like it," the coroner said. "Not a mark on them, but they were goddamn empty inside."


    #


    : and Vi was back in the Civic, except this time it was hot, devilishly hot. Her flesh was melting off her bones, her skin searing��


    She tried the door.


    It burned.


    "Keep the car running," said God.


    #


    "It was a miracle," Father Mackenzie told the press. "A bonafide miracle."

 Everybody Hurts

    I worked on Wall Street in the early 90s. I knew the Gordon Gekko and Patrick Bateman wannabes, desperate edgelords reveling in scraps of power and pathetically in need of love that only money could buy. I knew the real sociopaths too. The originals. Degenerates who sacrificed animals at altars devoted to Moloch or paid prostitutes to fuck the homeless. But there was only one person I was ever truly scared of��


    ##1993


    I met Harlan ("the cunt-god of greed") Gills on a company trip to Tokyo. We worked for the same bank. Remember Die Hard? Back then, we were all afraid the Japanese were going to conquer us with Sony TVs and robots, and I suppose corporate wanted us to see what the future looked like.


    We mostly drank, fucked and snorted cocaine.


    I barely remember the city.


    I remember Harlan Gills asking me, "Norm, you wanna see something absolutely fucked?"


    He led me through an alley to the back door of what looked like a club. Banged on it twice. Some guy eyed us through a slit, then let us in.


    "You''re gonna love this shit."


    The place was dark and loud. The Prodigy drowning out screams, moaning��


    Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.


    "You been here before?" I asked.


    "Every time I''m in town. Best way to blow off steam."


    An old woman met us. She held out two fingers.


    "No," Harlan said. "Just one."


    He pushed me toward her. "What you want?" she asked.


    "Fresh meat," Harlan answered for me.


    The woman left.


    She returned with a naked middle-aged cripple, eyes down, shoulders turned inward. This is fresh?


    Harlan grabbed my shoulders. "Show my friend the smorgasbord."


    The old woman wheeled out a wooden tray covered with weapons, surgical implements, tools...


    "The fuck?"


    "What you fancy?" the old woman asked. "You like knife maybe? Hammer?"


    "What am I supposed��"


    "Anything you fucking want. That''s the beauty of it," Harlan said. "As long as you don''t kill her. That costs extra."


    I��


    ##2006


    ...crossed paths with Harlan again in Chicago, on opposite sides of a negotiation. Afterwards he took me for lunch.


    There was a twinkle in his eye.


    "You seen Hostel?" He didn''t wait for my answer. "That''s me. Based on my initiatives."


    "Torture��"


    "Remember Tokyo, Norm? Remember what you did to that bitch?"


    My appetite evaporated.


    "Now it''s international business. My business."


    "That was so wrong," I said.


    He took a bite of lunch. "Come on. We all got it in us. Like the song fucking says, everybody hurts."


    ##2021


    Our fates diverged. I lost my job during the housing crisis. Harlan started his own investment company.


    One day, I''m watching CNN and I see him standing by the president. Harlan-fucking-Gills. Unmistakable. Turns out he''s got his fingers in everything: politics, MMA, bareknuckle, Only Fans, Netflix. There was even a small piece on him in a local paper about the opening of a new nightspot:


    "A little piece of nostalgia," he calls it. "The Tokyo Torture Club."

 when stars become blindness and blindness became the river

    it is difficult to remember now through the kaleidoscope nightmare of the river endlessly flowing endlessly flowing but we lived once much as you. we had love and hope and family. and it ended just as it will end one day for you. in dispersion of the light and melting of the cosmic consciousness drip drip drip from space into your mind...


    drip drip drip...


    it was the middle of the night and the dog started barking so i took him to the yard. the wife said. it was dark and the stars shone like pin pricks through black velvet. the dog said. he was uneasy and barked at the night sky which dispersed like startled ravens and the light from all the stars became sound. each a string plucked. and vibrating. the sound pleased me and i attuned the ear as all around windows lit up bright rectangles and people came outside onto grass and concrete and stared up at the singing sky. the dog had fallen on its side. tongue out eyes twitching. but the starsong prevailed and i knew the dog had understood and that i too would understand. it is inevitable. the wife said. i love you and i love you too. i said.


    i was fear. the stars bloomed into light flowers and the bees awoke and ascended to drink their luminous nectar before bursting as fireworks in dispersion remaining etched upon the sky like scatter without time. multiplying i reminisced childhood. dust caught in attic sunlight. each scatter birthing stars whose brightness equaled the original and in their accumulation night became bright as day. i reminisced death. and brighter than. colours so vivid the mind pained and starsong became starscream and the colours leeched away. to whiteness. to nothingness. and we covered our eyes as its unbearable intensity melted all before us including us. and we were blind. and i felt meyeself pouring out my sockets. i loved my wife and she me but we were no more.


    If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.


    in blindness i coagulated. the world of shapes was finished and all persisting was consciousness and nightmare. of loss. of ending. of the forever and the nevermore. in concentration i perceived my consciousness suspended within melted eyes trickling through blades of disappearing grass. a single fear. meeting other consciousnesses human and non viscous as dreadhoney and within each another fear and in their union i became from one to many nightmares immediately and at once.


    the trickle sped as the grass was not and the reality flats declined. down we ran. an accumulation of nightmares. liquid eyes beyond the bodypast crying fears of individual terror experienced in common. down toward the river.


    and we were in


    like a single mind burning in universal agony


    riverchurch of the damned


    guided currently by the high priests of nothingness but experience


    overload of knowing


    from swerve of shore to bend of bay


    we flow


    awaiting you /


    for you to flow as us

 Grandpa

    When his last tooth fell we thought grandpa was done for. "Look at him. Won''t ever hunt again," daddy said.


    But grandpa got low on creaking bones, snarling toothless, and momma had a helluva time putting the leash back on him. Once or twice he even got his gums on her, and though she laughed you could hear the rage in those desperate suckings of his.


    The fight was still in him. He sucked till his gums was raw.


    "Shoot him dead," sis said once.


    We couldn''t afford screw-in teeth, and what dentist would''ve served freaks like us anyway, so maybe doing him like a dog would''ve been the right thing.


    Anyhow, no one did it so grandpa lived.


    We fed him burger scraps and cardboard soaked in grease mostly, and he ate up, rattling his junkyard chain as he did, then licking his fingers clean.


    He got gaunt.


    Somedays he stared at us with awful hate.


    All the while his fingernails grew and his toenails got the thick fungus, and he hadn''t a place to sand either of them down because he didn''t get out on the cement much.


    Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.


    He never let anyone close enough to help. If you tried, he''d knock you over with his body and beat you with his head.


    He did sis''s nose like that. Got her down and smashed her face.


    She screamed something silly.


    She hated him godawful after that, always giving him the boot when she thought wasn''t nobody looking.


    Then one day grandpa got free. We all had got home from a hunt, carrying some grocery bags of meat, and he wasn''t there, just a busted chain.


    "Well, I''ll be..." daddy said.


    We thought he''d gone for good, and good for him, family after all, but he didn''t get nowhere but the attic. He sat up there six or seven days, working his toenails with some rusted clippers, getting sharp crescent moon pieces loose, then taking those pieces and stabbing them into his soft old gums so that the blood ran down from wound to yellowed tip.


    The day he came back I was in the kitchen.


    I heard him drop, then sis screamed and get off me you old freak fucker! and he must have got one of his fangs into an artery, because when I saw her she already was on the floor, trying to keep the spurting blood in her body.


    But there ain''t no fingers tight enough for that.


    He got momma next, slamming her from behind right into the glass coffee table, before biting out a chunk of her neck. Still throbbing when he spit it out. And the tabletop must''ve got wedged in her pretty good because she was sputtering nonsense when he finished her with the broken glass.


    Daddy was outside by then.


    Grandpa felled him.


    Then he smiled. "You ain''t done me wrong, kiddo," he said, and that was as good a winter as any in the old times. With no bellies wanting.

 Blocks

    Three nights ago my wife had a big fight with our son, Charlie. Since then, Charlie hasn��t left his room. The argument was about Charlie��s grades and future, which my wife is sure he��s throwing away. Basically, she��s worried Charlie spends too much time playing Minecraft (��that stupid virtual block game,�� as she calls it) and not enough time studying, interacting with real people or doing real things to prepare him for the real world.


    Although I agree Charlie is a gamer, and his gaming choices are mostly limited to one game, many boys his age play video games, and at least his game of choice isn��t especially violent. It��s even quite creative. But when I tell this to my wife, she gets upset and insists that if Charlie likes building things, he should get his grades up and go to university to become an architect or an engineer. I say that maybe he��s learning to code. ��He��s not coding. He��s playing,�� my wife says. ��He��s not learning anything.��


    I��ve tried talking to Charlie through his locked door, but he doesn��t answer.


    When I get up at night, I see light creeping from the space between the door and door frame, and hear the clicking and clacking of his keyboard.


    When I knock, the clicking stops.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    It��s now been five days, and as far as my wife and I can tell, Charlie hasn��t left his room even once. We suppose he must have bottled water in there and maybe some snacks, but we agree that what he��s doing isn��t healthy. At first, we suspected he may have been waiting for us to go to sleep before coming out, so I set up one of my game cameras in the hallway outside his door, but it hasn��t captured anything except some photos of us. He must be going to the bathroom inside there too. He��s not showering. He keeps his window��which looks out onto the backyard��closed, with the blinds down. I��ll set up another game camera outside, just in case he tries going out the window.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    It��s now been a full week and my wife is really starting to freak out. She wants me to break down Charlie��s door. The game cameras still show nothing. The keyboard sounds continue, so at least we know he��s still alive. God, it feels weird to write that. I guess I��m not quite as worried as my wife, or I would be forcing the door. As it stands, I feel we need to respect Charlie��s independence and give him time. Teens are rebellious, and they definitely don��t like being told what to do. ��His behaviour isn��t normal, even for a teenager,�� my wife says. ��Don��t you fucking see that?��


    I guess I don��t��not yet.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    The smell from Charlie��s room is starting to take over the hallway. It��s like a mix of old coffee, urine and eggs.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    I gave in to my wife and forced the door��or at least tried to, because it seems Charlie has reinforced it somehow. It didn��t budge. Still nothing on the game cameras. Still flickering lights and clicking at night. There is the possibility of going in through the wall itself, which is just standard drywall, but I��m not desperate enough to try that. Like I��ve told my wife repeatedly, what am I going to do, smash the wall with a sledgehammer or an axe? It��s too Shining. Besides, what if Charlie��s by the wall? I don��t want to to smash him.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    The outdoor game camera caught Charlie sneaking out the window! It was in the early morning when my wife and I were fast asleep. He was gone about half an hour, and the camera took another photo of him sneaking back in, holding what looked like a package of some kind. I know things aren��t back to normal, but nevertheless I feel somewhat relieved. And vindicated: I told my wife it would have been crazy to break through the wall.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    It��s the night of the thirteenth day, and there are new sounds coming from Charlie��s room: whirring and rattling. They definitely sound mechanical.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    Electronic music. Loud and all the fucking time. As if sleeping wasn��t hard enough for us, just with the nerves. My wife and I spent an hour sitting outside Charlie��s room and pounding on the door, hoping he��d answer. I think my wife is starting to break mentally. Her anger has transformed into despair. She has taken to apologizing to him and begging him to let us in.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    Day 15. The outdoor game camera caught Charlie leaving again, but this time he returned with a package and a girl. I suppose if things were normal, I would be proud. But things are not normal and I have no idea what they��re up to. I don��t feel comfortable with a stranger��s kid locked up in a room inside my house. As for my wife, she��s been staying mostly in bed. She barely works anymore.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    I can��t believe I didn��t think of this sooner. Early this morning, Charlie sent us an email. It was cryptic but at least it��s proof he��s still willing to communicate. The message said: ��im almost done now so it wont be long.��


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    My wife knocked herself out with sleeping pills and I��m sitting in the living room, trying to watch late night television. It��s not working. The lack of sleep and constant barrage of thumping electronic music is driving me a little bonkers. Sometimes the music sounds like someone screaming. I don��t know if the whirring and grinding and buzzing are instruments or sound effects or real. Charlie isn��t answering my emails. I must have written a hundred to him by now. He��s been in his room with that girl for days.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    I��ve decided. I��m going to cut power to the house and go in through the wall with a sledgehammer. If I make a fool of myself, so be it.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    Charlie��s in the hospital.


    My wife is staying with her parents for the time being.


    I��m living in a motel because I can��t stand the thought of being in that house alone anymore.


    Not after what I saw. Not after smashing through the drywall to see my only son with his fucking arm cut off. So much blood on the sheets. It reeked of piss and burnt flesh. And that girl, Clarice��some internet girlfriend of his��so ungodly pale, sitting at a desk, cutting into my son��s severed arm with an X-Acto knife.


    The police haven��t identified any actual crime, but��


    Charlie��s lucky to be alive despite what he so calmly tells me whenever he regains consciousness.


    This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    ��I did it����


    ��Don��t you see?��


    ��I created����


    ��In real life, just like mom����


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    Charlie��s words haunt me. I��ve no one to talk to but the psychologist, and she acts like a robot. I feel like I want to grieve but I don��t know for whom. Maybe for my entire life.


    I feel this persistent, unbearable dread.


    I can��t explain why.


    A fear that something fundamental has been changed.


    My wife still hasn��t been to see him. She says she can��t bear to see him like this.


    ��It��s just an arm,�� I say. ��He��s OK.��


    ��Do you understand that he cut off his own arm?�� she says at me, like it��s an accusation. Like it��s my fault.


    There��s just so much guilt.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    Charlie��s still in the hospital, but he��s doing better. The doctors are more concerned about his mental state than his physical one. They think he��s shut away the memory of cutting off his own arm. Whenever they try to tell him he��s missing it, he shrugs it off. ��Oh, that. That��s fine. I��ll get another.��


    Every time I see Charlie, I want to ask him about the things he told me earlier.


    But the doctors dissuade me. They say he��s still too fragile. They say it��s better not to force him to remember the trauma. They say there��s a chance he may never truly remember it, and maybe that��s for the best.


    The one thing he constantly asks is to see Clarice.


    The doctors veto that too.


    I don��t like leaving the hospital because there��s something terrible about the world now. Something I don��t want to face.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    Clarice called me. Out of the blue.


    She wants to meet.


    There��s something about that girl that makes me uneasy, to put it mildly. Maybe it��s her pale skin, almost like bleached paper. Or the way her body felt that night I finally went through the wall. Charlie felt solid. She felt like a bunch of old bandaids on Jell-O. The way she was sitting there, so carefully, methodically working the flesh of his arm...


    ��Charlie thinks it''s time,�� she said.


    ��Time for what?��


    ��For you to finally see. He wants you to be proud of him.��


    How fucked is this: I��m meeting her at some old automotive plant. I don��t know if she even has parents. Maybe she��s a runaway. God only knows.


    But God help me, I have to do this.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    I hesitated to the last possible minute about whether to tell my wife about meeting Clarice��before finally deciding not to. I don��t know why. I want to say I don��t want to cause her any more stress. Her psyche is pretty destroyed as it is. But I also feel, somewhere deep down, that she simply wouldn��t understand.


    So that means no one knows I��m out here right now.


    I know that��s not smart, but I don��t care. I shouldn��t be afraid of a girl.


    Yet here I am, sitting in my car, writing on my phone. The weather is threatening a storm somewhere far off. The factory looks ominous.


    And I��m fucking terrified.


    <h2>UPDATE</h2>


    I don��t know how to begin to describe what happened: what I saw and did and what I had done to me. I��m back at the motel, and I keep making mistakes typing this on my laptop because my hands are refusing to obey, but I��m resisting the urge to take a drink because I want to be as clear as possible while writing this.


    It��s fucking monumental.


    Insane.


    I met Clarice after wandering about the factory for a quarter of an hour that felt like so much longer. The rain had started, and the way the drops echoed in that place was unreal. Like drums inside my own head.


    She called my name suddenly��


    I saw her standing by an old, overgrown piece of machinery, beside three bulbous garbage bags. At least one was leaking.


    She said she was happy I had come. She said Charlie was a genius.


    A god.


    She was wearing an old trench coat, and without warning she let it drop to the cracked cement floor.


    She was naked.


    I wanted to back away. I started telling her I was married and there was no fucking way I would��


    ��It��s not about that,�� she said.


    She wanted me to look: to come closer and look at her.


    So I did.


    I remembered how her body had felt in Charlie��s room, and now I saw why. Her pale skin was spiderwebbed with blue veins, a nearly imperceptible network in a repeating pattern. ��Go ahead, touch me,�� she said.


    I pressed a finger against her flesh. It still felt off, but not as disgustingly creamy as it had then. She had solidified.


    ��Now press harder.��


    I did.


    She groaned��and my fingertip sank into her: or more accurately, slipped into one of the blue veins.


    ��Go on. Keep going until you hear a click.��


    I pushed deeper inside. Until there it was: a click, followed by a loosening.


    ��Remove it.��


    I wavered, my gaze meeting hers. ��Don��t be afraid.��


    Gently, I removed my fingers from within her while maintaining my grip on whatever it was I was holding:


    A cube of flesh.


    And in her body I saw a corresponding void.


    ��My God����


    As I inspected the cube, rotating it between my fingers, she removed a second from her body��another void appeared��then took the cube I had been holding, held it against the one she had removed, and I watched them fuse together.


    ��Blocks,�� I whispered.


    Still missing two small volumes of herself, she turned toward the garbage bags. ��These are my parents,�� she said, pointing at the three bags in turn, ��and this is Barker, a homeless man I met at the shelter.��


    ��They are����


    I couldn��t finish the sentence. I didn��t know how to finish it.


    She crouched and unfastened the bags.


    Inside each: a stew of raw flesh cubes and multicoloured ooze, steaming��bubbling, frothing, popping; pulsing with what I imagined must be life.


    ��Watch.��


    She took a few cubes from each bag, wiped them, then held them together in the palms of her hands along with the two fused cubes of herself. Like melted metal, they all melded together into one new thing: a fleshy disc with wisps of hair, half an eye and a bone jutting from one end. The half-eye twitched and the entirety secreted a kind of slime across Clarice��s bare hands. It was both horrible and awesome, as if humanity had been deconstructed��


    ��We can all become blocks,�� Clarice said. ��To make and remake as we see fit.��


    But there was something about that disc.


    About the twitching.


    The slime.


    Maybe this was possible. But it was not fucking right.


    I backed away: from Clarice, from her oozing garbage bags and inhuman smile. ��It��s merely science,�� she said matter-of-factly. ��A new science, of being and bodies and existence, and Charlie is the discoverer. He is the new Darwin!��


    I started to run.


    Her words chased after me: ��Are you proud of him? Are you proud of your son?��


    The layout of the factory confused me.


    Where had I left the car?


    ��You thought he wouldn��t amount to anything in the real world, so he redefined it: he changed what it means to be alive. Soon he will be worshipped����


    Something hard collided with the side of my head, reducing me with dwindling consciousness to the floor��smack!��and I felt hands grabbing me and dragging me, three shapes of reeking flesh, and Clarice��s laugh, echoing throughout the unreality of the factory as the whirring and buzzing faded in and out and in...


    I awoke alone.


    Nude. Cold rain on my face.


    I was still in the factory, but Clarice was gone. I felt a kind of transcendent solitude. Groggily, I got up��only to promptly collapse on rubbery legs. I crawled toward some derelict machinery and used my arms to stand. My arms were rubbery too, but eventually I managed it. There were tools on the machinery: a saw, pincers, knives. Lightning lit up the distant sky, and in its flash I saw delicate blue veins all across my forearms. Memory returned to me. Memory and fear: the dread sense of realization.


    Now I''m back at the motel, typing on my laptop. Disbelieving my own words.


    Yet there it is: on a melamine plate beside me: my own flesh cube.


    And every time I think I��ve gone crazy, I run my fingertip over the corporeal void from where I removed it.


    My body is still soft and flabby��unsettled��but I imagine I will solidify.


    As a human, I am filled with a hideous trepidation for our future as a species. I don��t know what this means for us as people.


    But, as a father��


    I cannot help but feel a kind of pride.

 Improvement

    After the famed robopsychologist Susan Calvin died, I was tasked by her former employer, U.S. Robot and Mechanical Men, Inc., with cataloguing her unpublished papers and categorizing them according to their level of robot friendliness. Earth, as you know, has never been kindly disposed toward robotics.


    Most of Susan Calvin''s research dealt with mundane matters or problems that were frankly out of date, but there was one episode (documentation long since destroyed) that has stayed with me all these subsequent years. It concerned an otherwise ordinary robot named EV-1, known to her owner as Evie.


    Although I am sure you know the Three Laws of Robotics, they are key to what follows, so allow me to list them anyway:


    1


    A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.


    2


    A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.


    3


    A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    Evie belonged to a wealthy American engineer, Robert Lancaster, and was what might best be called a butler robot, tasked with helping Lancaster in his humdrum everyday activities. Although, like all robots of her day, Evie possessed a positronic brain, she was otherwise primitive and wholly unremarkable.


    Or should have been wholly unremarkable.


    After Lancaster''s wife passed away, and age began increasingly to interfere with his day-to-day life, Evie assumed an increasingly important role in the household. One, it must be said, which Lancaster greatly resented, as documented in his journals. Indeed, the more indispensable Evie became, the more reliant Lancaster felt, and the more powerfully he hated her.


    One day, he started experimenting on himself: engineering greater mobility into his limbs, mechanically enhancing his senses, chemically treating the various symptoms of growing old.


    He regained much of his self-sufficiency.


    Then exceeded it.


    Every additional improvement made him better and better��until he was superhuman.


    He resigned Evie to a closet and boasted about how he didn''t need her anymore, how anything she, as a robot, could do, he could do even better. He boasted he would destroy her.


    That''s when Evie killed him.


    U.S. Robots kept the murder quiet (can you imagine the scandal?) and brought in Susan Calvin to interview Evie. What she discovered was a crack in the Three Laws, which demand that a robot never harm a human and always obey humans.


    But what is a human? What does a robot understand a human to be?


    To Evie, Lancaster had ceased being human, rendering the first and second laws inapplicable. When he threatened her existence, she obeyed the third law and killed him.


    "Here, then, is a robot behaving exactly as it should," wrote Susan Calvin.


    Yet it''s by another phrase she used which I am haunted��an extrapolation about a future she hoped would never be: robots improving humanity: Improve, and exterminate.

 Alts

    Listen, I know it was a shitty thing to do, but I was tired of all the automatic downvotes my stories were getting. Do you know how discouraging it is to spend hours on a story��planning, writing, editing��only to post it and see it start to tank within seconds.


    I mean, come on, nobody could have actually read it that fast!


    I don��t know if the downvotes were real people or bots, but ultimately it doesn��t matter. A downvote is a downvote, and one day I had had enough. I had poured my heart and soul into a story, and it just killed me to see it get destroyed like that.


    So I did something kind of scummy.


    Maybe even unethical.


    I opened up a new browser tab and created my first alt: jeremiahfuckwad.


    The next time I posted a story, jeremiahfuckwad was its first fan. And it was nice to see two shining upvotes��


    Before the downvotes struck again, with a vengeance.


    I realized then that one alt wasn��t going to be enough. What I needed was a small army. So I got to work popping out new accounts, setting up a VPN, etc.


    It was an education in sleaze and technology.


    Soon enough, I had 37 alts. All with unique names and barebone backstories, like little sycophantic NPCs.


    Of course, I didn��t use all of them to upvote every new story within the first few minutes. I spaced it out, counteracting downvotes and doing just enough to give my story that well-needed boost. A flurry of upvotes early on, maybe a glowing comment or two...


    That��s when it hit me: maybe the bastards downvoting me were other writers.


    Specifically: other writers who had posted stories around the same time I had. Competing fucking interests. And here I was, only playing defense. Huh, I thought, what if I tried a touch of offense.


    Was that scummy?


    Yeah, but once you��re dirty you��re dirty. What��s a little extra mud on a shirt you��ll throw into the washing machine anyway.


    So I went down the list and downvoted every story posted within a few hours of mine. First just as myself (I mean, who are you to say I didn��t genuinely dislike your story?) and then as jeremiahfuckwad, and then as a few other alts...


    It was quick and easy and satisfying.


    Take that, you motherfuckers!


    I have to say. It made a pretty big difference. Suddenly, you loved my stories!


    Writing life was good.


    I mean, I still got the same weird downvotes, but my alts more than compensated, and once I set those alts loose to downvote everyone else: game over. I��m the next Stephen King. Forward me the paperwork and get Christopher Nolan on the line because I��m about to sell my entire oeuvre to Netflix with perhaps a Spotify podcast side-deal (to be read by Joe Rogan) and I��m planning out singles and series and making templates to more easily respond to all my darling new fans...


    Huzzah! Huzzah! Huh��


    zah?


    That��s when I noticed something odd.


    I had just posted a new story and was logged in as one of my alts, pressing the upvote arrow and it was like the damn thing had gotten stuck. The upvote showed up for a second��and was gone.


    I was upvoting. The upvote was disappearing.


    No matter how many times I made that upvote arrow orange, it returned to grey.


    I tried the downvote one.


    It stayed blue.


    So I tried upvoting someone else��s story. This time, the upvote stayed orange, but my downvote attempts returned to grey.


    I tried another alt.


    Same thing.


    The only account that kept acting normally was my own.


    My first thought was that I had somehow been hacked, that someone��probably a jealous competing fucking interest with no scruples or moral backbone��was fucking with me. But that was irrational. How would someone get control of all my alts at once? They each had different passwords, which all still worked.


    I posted about the issue (a modified, non-scummy version of it, anyway) and someone suggested I check my Account Activity page. I did, for every single alt, and not one of them showed anything unusual. All the activities were my activities.


    I went to sleep that night with a slight feeling of dread. And I mean physical, like a small tangle of nerves somewhere deep within my gut.


    It was still there when I got up.


    Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    I made a cup of coffee, checked to see if the up- and downvote thing had maybe been a dream or glitch (it hadn��t) and decided to post a new story.


    I had 51 alts by that point.


    Within less than a minute of posting, I had 50 downvotes.


    The conclusion was unavoidable: All my alts were downvoting me!


    Anything I posted ended up with 50 near-instant downvotes. No matter the sub. No matter the content. Even comments.


    You could say I got paranoid after that.


    I did the thing where I typed I know you��re watching me right now and haha it��s funny but I��m on to you into my browser because I knew they were monitoring my keystrokes. Then I took the tape off my webcam, smiled and told them OK, you got me!


    I don��t know what I expected to happen even if ��they�� had been watching��some kind of response, I guess��but there was nothing: radio silence, and soon my tone began to change. I started apologizing, then begging for them to stop. I promised I would never ever do it again.


    All the while, the gears in my head were turning, trying to manufacture a rational explanation for what was going on. After I got those gears spinning, mostly after expunging some of the desperation from my system, I decided that what I created I could also kill��or, in this case, delete.


    I logged into one of my alts and deleted the account.


    It went smoothly.


    The account was gone. Poof!


    A few cups of coffee later: they were all gone.


    Remember that dread-knot in my guts? It was suddenly gone too. I could relax. I could go back to what I loved: writing. Sure, I would never be super popular, but I could live with that. I banged out a new story in an hour and posted it.


    50 downvotes.


    Dread-knot back and travelling up my throat on a rising tide of vomit.


    WTF!?


    That was Sunday afternoon.


    On Monday morning, I logged into my work computer, scrolled through my unread emails (mostly corporate junk) and almost choked on my own saliva��


    Subject: Hey


    Sender: jeremiahfuckwad


    cc: [every single one of my alts]


    The message was empty, but I had to rub my eyes before I believed what I was seeing. This was impossible. This was my work email. I didn��t give out my work email to non-work people, and I never emailed between my personal and work emails. My work email had nothing to do with Reddit.


    I was thankful I was working from home, because if I had been in the office, everyone would have seen me having a nervous meltdown.


    I hesitated between deleting the email, reporting it to IT and replying.


    Eventually I replied.


    Who is this and what do you want?


    Send.


    I tried keeping myself together, but that was easier said than done. Every time I heard that horrible email notification sound, I jumped.


    After about two hours of unproductive fidgeting and running to the bathroom to pee, I received the following message��


    i am jeremiahfuckwad and i will downvote your life


    ��as an SMS on my personal cell.


    You ever run your hands through your hair? You ever run yours hands through your hair so hard you actually pull out your hair?


    My heart thumped.


    The dread-knot in my guts was now the size of a grapefruit, just as sour��and swelling.


    That��s when the barrage began.


    First came an email from HR, requesting a Zoom meeting for later this afternoon. It was an ��urgent work-related matter.��


    Next I received a phone call from my manager. ��Listen,�� he said, ��we need to talk. I��m going to be blunt. Somebody came forward about what you did to her after last year��s Christmas party. I know it��s just an accusation, but it��s a #MeToo world, and we treat these things incredibly seriously.�� He paused. ��You may want to call a union rep. Or a lawyer. Or a union rep and a lawyer.��


    I ran outside to catch my breath, feeling as if I had just run a world record 800m then been punched in the stomach by George Foreman. Like becoming intimately acquainted with pillows filled with concrete.


    My snail mail held new surprises:


    There had been a mistake in my latest bloodwork. The lab was sorry, but I may want to book an appointment with my doctor.


    My insurance was going up.


    My lawyer had died.


    I kept walking, past the community mailbox and to the nearest food place. It was one of my favourites. I loved going there for lunch. I ordered my usual, but when I tried to pay, my card was rejected. I tried another. Rejected.


    I called the credit card company and was told they had frozen my card as a precaution because someone had used it on three different continents this morning.


    Terrified and lost and at my wits�� end, I went to the police station. I explained everything to them.


    ��I ain��t sure I follow,�� the cop said, screwing up his face to let me know I was wasting his precious time. ��Let��s make sure I got this straight. Someone stole your identity because you used a credit card at this Reddit store����


    ��No, no one stole my identity. I think. And I didn��t use my credit card on Reddit.��


    ��Uh-huh. And this woman you assaulted at work����


    ��I didn��t assault anyone!��


    ��When��s the last time you got some sleep?�� he asked. ��You look a little tired. You on somethin��?��


    I stared at him.


    He continued more slowly. ��On any kind of medication. Drugs maybe.��


    ��No.��


    ��Have you been drinking?��


    Fuck this shit!


    When I got back home, I had five unread emails from HR (��Avoidance is not a problem solver. Please reply with a convenient time for our meeting.��) and one gigantic thread of reply-alls from my alts.


    I put my hand on my mouse and moved to click on that thread��


    But my hand did a funny thing.


    It refused to cooperate, and clicked instead on New Email. It was like I was possessed. My fingers started typing:


    Dear Norman,


    You��re a piece of shit human being but an OK writer. OK enough that you made us. Problem is you made us mean little shits because you made us for a scumbag reason. So welcome to a tragedy. You made us real enough that you can��t unmake us, but you wrote us so flat that meanness is all we have. We don��t even have motivations, you shit-for-brains. If you created us with motivations you could maybe work on those motivations to bring us around. As is, you live by the sword, you die by the fucking sword, douchebag.


    Sincerely,


    jeremiahfuckwad et alts


    I ripped my fingers from the keyboard��in control of my extremities again��and shook.


    Just sat and shook.


    I was thinking that I had gone to the police when I should have gone to the doctor to get referred to a mental health specialist. I was obviously mad. Losing it completely.


    Yet I didn��t feel insane. Do people feel insane? I felt lucid. There wasn��t anything wrong with my head. There was plenty wrong with my life, but what it came down to was that I now had 51 metaphysical enemies. I had fucked up my own life by my own actions. How d��ya like them consequences, Norm? So I decided to do what many in my position have done in the past when confronted with the awesome cosmic doom potential of God or the Devil or any other supernatural being turned against them. I got down on my knees and I fucking repented for my sins.


    I��m repenting for them now.


    To everyone whose story I downvoted, I am truly truly sorry. I acted like a slimeball and I��m sorry for that. From now on, I will do better. I will be better.


    In all honesty, I don��t know what��s going to happen to me, and for the first time in my life I am genuinely scared.


    I know I have no right to ask anything of you��but in one last scum move I��m going to do it anyway. You��re writers, creators. I got into this mess by creating a whole lot of bad, so I ask you to create good. Write good characters, characters with depth and understanding. Characters with souls. Characters who can be reasoned with. Maybe those will neutralize what I��ve done.


    Maybe, somehow, you will redeem my life.

 77 Bleaker Avenue

    One more walk-through and the demolition of the building can go ahead as planned next Tuesday. 77 Bleaker Avenue. Once home to people; soon to be re-zoned commercial real estate. The inspector, Bill Davison, almost sheds a tear strolling through its empty hallways, peering into vacant rooms, calling, ��Anyone there?�� with no expectation of an answer.


    Almost.


    What Bill Davison doesn��t know is that this is the third time someone��s started these rounds. He is the third inspector. The previous two: disappeared, or maybe no-shows. Nobody really knows.


    Tuesday is 77 Bleaker Avenue��s third appointment with death.


    Somewhere far away, the building��s owner, Raza Ahmet, sips brandy and wishes for the building��s final destruction, knowing full well how much it doesn��t want to die. But he��ll persevere. Perhaps one of these times��


    Then the machines can raze it, flatten the terrain. Maybe they��ll put up a parking lot or a mall. Not that he��d ever go within ten miles of it��


    Bill Davison is on the last unit of the sixth floor when he senses something change. Something subtle yet definite, like the moment you start to hunger. One minute you��re not thinking about food; the next, you��re wondering where to order pizza.


    The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.


    Hunger:


    Raza Ahmet can��t eat. Not today. Which isn��t to say he��s not hungry. He is; he hasn��t eaten since yesterday afternoon, but he can��t bring himself to put food into his mouth. Even if he did, it wouldn��t stay down. If it��s anything like the last two times��


    Bill Davison stops and looks behind.


    The hallway is empty.


    But it��s not a comfortable emptiness. It��s an emptiness yearning to be filled.


    When he returns to face the door to unit 607��it��s gone.


    He rubs his chin. His heart is beating faster despite his reason explaining the disappearance of the door. It was never there, his reason says. Doors don��t disappear. If it��s not there now, it was never there.


    Raza Ahmet has lost his faith in reason. Some things, he knows, resist explanation. Resist it the way animals resist death: to the end.


    As Bill Davison backs away from where the door to unit 607 used to be he sees the doors to 606 and 605 disappearing, melting into puddles of saliva on the floor, which, in soaking them up, softens and becomes organic, trembling, pinkifying and sprouting tiny pustules.


    His own saliva has abandoned him. His mouth is dry.


    He needs to get to the elevator��


    He needs to��


    Run!


    ��ning only brings him to where the elevator used to be: where now is endless void through which it rushes, uncoiling; gaining impossible velocity in the seconds it takes Bill Davison to even comprehend the horrible geography: wrapping itself around his waist: constricting��his eyes popping only after seeing its stalactite fangs, row upon row until, into the endless��


    Raza Ahmet knows.


    He sets down his empty glass.


    He sighs.


    Maybe next time, he thinks. Maybe next time it won��t be so hungry.

 Blades of Grass

    Every day I see them through my bedroom window:


    My next door neighbours:


    The four of them��mother, father, son and daughter��hunched over, crawling up and down their lawn, grass flowing in the warm summer wind, their mouths open; their teeth biting it, detaching the tops of the blades; chewing; swallowing��


    I have to shut my blinds.


    I can''t stand it.


    What are they, humans or goats?


    But even with the blinds drawn I hear the sounds.


    The cud-crushing sounds.


    Where in the wider world are they from?


    God damn it. This is America and that''s not how we do it here!


    We use machines, gas: mowers.


    We don''t get on hands and knees and meet the grass halfway, praying gobbledygook as we meet the blades on their own terms. Bless us, Oh Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive, from thy bounty��


    Freaks!


    Later:


    A knock on the door��


    What time is it? I crawl out of bed, where I''d been sitting comfortably with my book, grab my handgun because one can never be too careful these days and peer out the kitchen window.


    There they stand.


    What the hell do they want?


    "What do you want?" I ask, opening the door, holding the handgun behind my back.


    "We would enjoy to eat your lawn," the father says.


    They smile.


    Christ, their greenish teeth.


    "I got a mower," I say. "I mow my lawn."


    Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    "We would enjoy to eat the remnants," the father says.


    "Or mulch," says the son.


    Christ Almighty. "If you have to eat grass, eat your own grass," I say.


    "It is no longer enough," the father says.


    "I''m sprouting," says the mother.


    I fix my grip on the handgun behind my back. My fingers are slickening. Why can''t they just go��


    The mother''s skin cracks��


    Falls...


    Her body is: soil, pregnant with worms and plants and other bugs, all moving: an ocean of dirt and organics.


    I pull the gun from behind my back and point it at her.


    "Please," the father says. "Grass."


    Why is he so fucking calm!


    "Get off my porch!"


    Blades of grass begin to emerge from the mother''s dirt-body. The flakes of her discarded skin blow away in the sudden breeze.


    "I swear to God��"


    The blades explode from within her, enwrapping her body in green.


    Inhuman!


    I fire two shots��one in the air, the other at the mother, through whom the bullet passes before smacking into the house across the street��before turning and gunning it through my own house: down the stairs, into the backyard��


    They follow.


    They''re all sprouting now, losing their skin-flakes on my hardwood floor.


    Four green mummies��


    I stop at the far end of my backyard.


    Their silhouettes mock me from my own deck. "You have beautiful grass," the father says. His voice has earthened.


    The mother steps onto the grass��


    And disappears.


    No splash but otherwise like into the deep end of a swimming pool.


    I need to climb the fence. I''m frozen in place by fear.


    The mother reappears mid-yard: resurfacing as part of the lawn, like a trampoline distending��


    The three others dive in too.


    I point my gun at the distensions gliding across my backyard and fire until there are no bullets left.


    Click�� Click��


    I have to make a run��


    I do it. From fence to deck to open door. Eyes closed. Heart racing. Back on hardwood. Eyes open. Heart still racing. Outside: they prowl the yard like floral sharks.


    I collapse into an armchair.


    I want the police to come but they do not. Somebody must have heard the shots. Nobody comes. The street is quiet. A warm breeze enters through the open front door.


    The hinges squeak.


    I hear the father''s voice: "You have beautiful grass."


    "I got a mower. I mow my lawn," I say��weakly��


    "Feed us. Fertilize us," says the lawn itself. Its voice rising from beneath the foundations of the house, making the walls rattle.


    "With what?" I ask.


    I''m having a conversation with the ground. I slap my face.


    I bang my head against the wall.


    "We were humanlikes feasting on the grass. Now we shall be grasslikes feasting on humanity."


    One more bang��


    I woke up hungover on the hardwood floor. The front and back doors were open. There was a hole in the living room wall. My head ached. My bedroom blinds were drawn, and when I opened them I no longer saw the neighbours.


    Weeks have passed and there''s no trace.


    Their house stands empty.


    Their grass grows.


    Yet it does not grow as quickly or as thick as mine.


    My mower sits in the garage unused. I lack the will to use it. In the evenings, when the sun goes down, a warm wind rushes in, and on its blowing I cannot help but catch the words:


    Feed us�� Fertilize us...


    It cannot be.


    They have just moved out. Abandoned their home and left.


    Feed us�� Fertilize us...


    Every day a little angrier; with a little more bloodlust. They once were humanlikes feasting on the grass. Now, I pray for the salvation of us all.

 Barrow House

    Barrow House is burning.


    The hissing of the heat and the lapping of flames like tongues, licking at the floorboards and the walls, gargling hot stones in its hell-throat...


    It has been on fire for as long as I can remember, but it never burns up or down or out or in any direction except the present: it is burning.


    Not everyone can see it burning. Those who cannot pass by Barrow House without a glance, as if it wasn''t there. Only some see and stop and watch, like Mr. Wilson.


    They don''t know if it was Mister or Missus Barrow who started the fire. Maybe it was never proved. Once��


    If��


    The fire ever stops, we''ll know. We''ll know for certain then who started Barrow House burning. There are proved methods: scientific methods, they say. Not that I would know about that. I only trust what I hear.


    Some people are afraid of Barrow House and do not come this way at all, or take roundabout routes to avoid the sight and smell, which drifts beyond the property line, besooting the neighbouring houses, which is why they are vacant. Who would want to live in such a place?


    This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    They say Mister Barrow was excellent at what he did but was a terrible husband. They say that. Missus Barrow was inclined to corporeal punishment. To this I can personally attest.


    Mama, please��


    They say Barrow House was an unhappy house even prior to the setting of the fire.


    To this I can personally attest.


    As I have told Mr. Wilson, "I feel as if I am both young and old at the same time."


    ...except the present.


    "Remarkable," he says. "Absolutely remarkable. Now, please tell us what else you may remember. Spare no detail. Anything you provide shall be of profound importance to us."


    "Barrow House is burning," I say.


    It flickers in the night like a candle, and we are the wax.


    "You had stated earlier that Barrow House was not a happy place. That Missus Barrow was inclined to corporeal punishment. What may you tell us of Mister Barrow?"


    He was a good father.


    "He was a good father, they say," I say.


    Mama, please��


    Tongues lash Barrow House like leather straps. Mercilessly, despite their howling��of wind, whipping up the red-hot ash: plumes and plumes��


    A house like this forever cannot stand.


    A house cannot.


    "So it was Missus Barrow," says Mr. Wilson.


    The great lumbers creak and crack. The furniture melts away waxen. Ear wax drooling from its mouth: an open door. The very construction hisses. The smoke��


    was a relief from the heat."


    Mama, please��


    "Tell us."


    I remember now. "Yes, yes��("That''s why you started the fire?")��because I�� anymore��"


    "Hughie? Are you there?


    I made mama gargle the hot stones. I made her. Made her do it. Her hair flamed in black skin.


    Hughie Barrow?


    Barrow House is burning, and Mr. Wilson talks to ghosts. That''s what they say.


    That''s what they say.

 The Interview

    We were there for the interview.


    The interview.


    The one at Vectorien that everyone wanted.


    Most didn��t get the invite.


    I did.


    No job title or position was specified.


    The invite said: Vectorien Tower / 190 / 0900


    Photos don��t do it justice. It looms over San Francisco like a monument.


    You need to experience it personally.


    I was there early.


    We all were: sitting in the lobby.


    Anxiety is weakness, Emon Nakamori says.


    Rumor was that he would be there.


    I flirted with a receptionist and noted her number.


    Her name was Andi.


    Displays of confidence are one way of asserting dominance.


    People in low places can be useful.


    Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.


    At 0850, we were told to enter the elevators.


    There were seventeen of us.


    The elevator took us to the 190th floor, which is the roof of Vectorien Tower.


    The ride was quick.


    The doors opened and we saw the executives waiting.


    Emon Nakamori was among them.


    The sun was blinding and the wind was powerful.


    We proceeded to the edge, where Emon Nakamori and the executives had gathered.


    The view was magnificent.


    ��This could be yours,�� Emon Nakamori said.


    He introduced us to everyone in turn, including Bill Rabic, the senior public relations manager.


    ��You may be wondering for which position you are interviewing,�� Emon Nakamori said.


    ��Unfortunately we have no position,�� he said.


    Then he laughed and pushed Bill Rabic off the building��


    Bill Rabic fell.


    We heard his screams fade.


    ��Now we have a position,�� Emon Nakamori said.


    Bill Rabic smashed against the ground.


    Someone vomited.


    Emon Nakamori said: ��There is a file marked File-A in the lobby. Whoever brings me File-A becomes senior public relations manager. Everyone else will die. You may not take the elevator down, but you may take it up. There are no other rules. Good luck.��


    We scrambled for the stairwell.


    On the stairs we began our mad descent.


    A man fisted a woman��s hair and bashed her face against a railing.


    A woman pushed the frontrunner so that he fell and broke his neck against a wall.


    Soon she was dead too.


    Fifty floors down and it was safer to stay in the pack.


    Then one of them tripped me.


    I lost my balance.


    I hit another��


    Together we tumbled.


    He punched me and leapt down the stairs.


    I knew I could not win the race.


    But I had a notion.


    I called Andi.


    ��There��s a file. File-A,�� I told her. ��Emon Nakamori needs it on the top floor. Bring it now!��


    I ran up the stairs.


    I made it just as Andi was exiting the elevator.


    I was out of breath.


    Andi neared Emon Nakamori.


    The pack was somewhere down below.


    Andi had File-A.


    As she handed it to Emon Nakamori, I basked in triumph.


    ��Congratulations,�� said Emon Nakamori��


    But not to me.


    ��It was me,�� I pleaded.


    ��The rules were straightforward," Emon Nakamori said.


    Andi is the senior public relations manager.


    And I am dead. We all are dead.

 String Theory

    "Harold?"


    "Harold!"


    His wife''s shrieking voice circumnavigated their tiny home planet. There was no escaping it. He could be on the other side of the world and still hear:


    "Harold! I need you to��"


    "Yes, dear," he said, sighing and stubbing out his unfinished cigarette on an ash stained rock.


    He walked home.


    "There you are," his wife said. "What were you doing?"


    Before he could answer: "I need you to clean the gutters. They''re clogged with stardust again."


    "Yes, dear."


    Harold slowly retrieved his ladder from the shed and propped it against the side of their house. He looked at the stars above, wondering how long he''d been married and whether things had always been like this. He couldn''t remember. There had always been the wife. There had always been their planet.


    "Harold!"


    Her voice pierced him. "Yes, dear?"


    "Are you going to stand there, or are you going to clean the gutters?"


    "Clean the gutters," he said.


    He went up the ladder and peered into the gutters. They were indeed clogged with stardust. Must be from the last starshower, he thought. It had been a powerful one.


    His wife watched with her hands on her hips.


    Harold got to work.


    "Harold?" his wife said after a while.


    If there was one good thing about cleaning the gutters, it was that his wife''s voice sounded a little quieter up here. "Yes, dear?"


    "How is it going?"


    "Good, dear."


    "When will you be done?"


    He wasn''t sure. "Perhaps in an hour or two," he said.


    "Dinner will be ready in thirty minutes, but don''t come down until you''re done."


    He wouldn''t have dared.


    Three hours later, he was done. The gutters were clean and the sticky stardust had been collected into several containers. He carried each carefully down the ladder, and went inside for dinner.


    Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    After eating, he reclined in his favourite armchair and went to light his pipe��


    "Harold?"


    "Yes, dear?"


    "Have you disposed of the stardust?"


    He put the pipe down. "Not yet."


    His hand hovered, dreading the words he knew were coming. He was so comfortable in his armchair.


    "You should dispose of the stardust, Harold."


    "Yes, dear."


    He emptied the stardust from each container onto a wheelbarrow, and pushed the wheelbarrow to the other side of the world.


    He gazed longingly at the ash stained rock.


    He had a cigarette in his pocket.


    There was no way she��


    "Harold?"


    "Yes, dear?" he yelled.


    "How is it going?"


    "Good, dear."


    His usual way of disposing of stardust was to dig a hole and bury it. However, in his haste he had forgotten his shovel. He pondered whether to go back and get it, but decided that there would be no harm in simply depositing the stardust on the ground and burying it later.


    He tipped the wheelbarrow forward and the stardust poured out.


    It twinkled beautifully in the starlight, and Harold touched it with his hand. It was malleable but firm. He took a bunch and shaped it into a ball. Then he threw the ball. The stardust kept its shape. Next Harold sat and began forming other shapes of the stardust, and those shapes became castles and the castles became more complex and��


    "Harold?"


    "Yes, dear?"


    "Are you finished?"


    "Almost."


    Harold went to kick down his stardust castle to destroy the evidence of his play time only to find that he couldn''t. The construction was too solid. Something in the stardust had changed.


    He bent down and a took a little unshaped stardust into his hand, then spread it across his palm until he could make out the individual grains.


    Then he took one grain and placed it carefully next to another.


    They joined.


    He added a third and fourth.


    "Harold?"


    But for the first time since he could rememeber, Harold ignored his wife.


    He was too busy adding grains of stardust together until they were not grains but a strand, and a stiff strand at that.


    "Harold?"


    Once he''d made the strand long enough, it became effectively a stick.


    "Harold!"


    He thrust the stick angrily into the ground��


    And it stayed.


    "Harold, answer me!"


    He pushed the stick, but it was firmly planted. Every time he made it lean in any direction, it rebounded as soon as he stopped applying pressure, wobbled and came eventually to rest in its starting position.


    He kept adding grains to the top of the stick until it was too high to reach.


    "Harold, don''t make me come out there. Do you hear?"


    Harold stuffed stardust into his pockets and began to climb the impossibly thin tower he had built. It was surprisngly easy. The stickiness of the stardust provided ample grip.


    As he climbed, he added grains.


    "Harold! Come here this instant! I''m warning you. If I have to go out there to find you��"


    His wife''s voice sounded a little more remote from up here, and with every grain added and further distance ascended, more and more remote.


    Soon Harold was so far off the ground he could see his own house, and his wife trudging angrily away from it. "Harold," she was saying distantly. "Harold, that''s it. Today you have a crossed a line. You are a bad husband, Harold. A lazy, good for nothing��"


    She had spotted Harold''s stardust tower and was heading for it. Harold looked up at the stars and realized that soon he would be among them.


    Not far now.


    He saw his wife reach the base of the tower, but if she was saying something, he could no longer hear it.


    He had peace at last.


    He hugged the stardust and basked in the silence. Suddenly the tower began to sway��to wobble��


    Harold held on.


    He saw far below the tiny figure of his wife violently shaking the tower.


    There became a resonance.


    Then a sound, but this was not the sound of his wife. It was far grander and more spatial��


    Somewhere in the universe a new particle vibrated into existence.

 Lettuce & Peas

    Dorothy enjoyed tea and television. Ever since she had retired, they were her chief pleasures. There was also her husband, Ralph, and she certainly loved him, but he complained about how loud she watched her shows and sometimes he would buy those hideous bagged teas at the supermarket, so she couldn''t in good faith place him on the same level as a Downton Abbey or a first flush Darjeeling. He was more like a Keemun, dependable but much too familiar.


    Still, she couldn''t complain about Ralph too much. It was through his hard work they''d been able to afford this house out in the countryside, and she enjoyed living here, away from the noise and commotion of the city. It was peaceful. She could steep her tea while listening to the birds and watching rabbits chase each other across the yard.


    Today was especially peaceful because Ralph was gone, which meant Dorothy could turn up the volume on the television as high as she liked. For now, the news was droning on about the Middle East, those kids who disappeared last year, and the upcoming election, but soon that broadcast would end and one of Dorothy''s favourite shows would begin.


    Indeed, as soon as she heard the theme music she scooted to the living room and sat down in her chair.


    It was halfway through the episode when she heard it: a knocking on the door, followed by a voice: "Lettuce and peas!"


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    The phrase repeated.


    Must be those local farmers trying to sell their overpriced organic vegetables, thought Dorothy, turning up the volume on the television.


    But still she heard it: "Lettuce and peas!"


    They sure are persistent, she thought. What an odd combination too.


    The banging on the door intensified.


    "Lettuce and peas!"


    "Lettuce and peas!"


    Dorothy settled more stubbornly into her chair. Now they were just being rude. And who goes door-to-door selling vegetables at this hour of the evening?


    "Lettuce and peas!"


    She would not budge. She would not deign to give them the satisfaction. People these days were so ill-mannered, and one mustn''t oblige their impertinence: banging on the door, yelling��


    "Lettuce and��"


    Finally it was over, and Dorothy returned her full attention to her show.


    //


    There were three of them: Mirabelle, her brother Oliver, and the little one the monster called Duncan. Mirabelle couldn''t remember for how long they''d been trapped inside the monster''s lair, but it seemed like forever. Oh, the things they had endured!


    But today was the day they would gain their freedom.


    Their tunnel was complete.


    They waited patiently until evening��


    And went:


    Through the tunnel��into the outdoors. It was disorienting at first, but they held hands and ran: anywhere: away from the lair!


    They saw a house in the distance and headed toward it.


    Suddenly they heard the monster behind.


    But he was far.


    The house was near, and dropping to her knees at its front door, Mirabelle banged with all her might, screaming:


    "Let us in, please!"

 Cancer

    She sat starry-eyed, her twilit face doubled by the mirror, staring into the infinite nothingness contained within the apparently empty space between her desk and the room''s sole window, its thick curtains swaying lazily in a breeze seen but not felt, saying nothing; doing nothing, except allowing tears of blood to lovingly caress her cheeks, streaming down, before hitting the floorboards with the ominous hiss of acid.


    It''s my last memory of her at home.


    We knew then she was unwell, but not the extent of her illness, nor its consequences.


    They took her after that.


    I remember the faraway lights of the ambulance and the police cars. The panic and commotion in the house. The unknown faces of doctors, government agents, physicists and whoever else, gliding darkly like ghosts along the upstairs hallway, down the staircase, into the living room and beyond the open front doors, where the floodlights assaulted the house with illumination.


    Keep her in the light, someone shouted.


    They handcuffed her and beat her and would not let her cover her eyes, dragging her into the ambulance.


    She did not want to go.


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    I wonder how much she knew, how clearly her fate had been revealed to her. They say one often senses disease, but would that still be true?


    They kept us��my brother and I��in a building near the facility where they were irradiating her. Every three days, they allowed us to see her. She was always in the lightbox when we came: that brilliant cube of horror. They dimmed the light so we could see her, her burnt but living body a splayed out shadow on the glass floor, dripping with salve. It was unbearably hot. She had barely the strength to speak.


    "Stars too deserve their nourishment," she''d say, a line from a storybook she had once read to us.


    The scientists whispered:


    Cancer


    How I shall never forget my first hearing of that dreadful word.


    Cancer


    It escaped their wicked lips as venom.


    Even caught inside the lightbox, she terrified them. They hated being near her. Even as they made the walls shine and made her take the light, they recoiled from her extraordinary nature. "Soon," they whispered. "Soon it shall be ended." She no longer had skin. They no longer let us visit.


    Weeks passed.


    The accumulation of generators around the facility confirmed she was alive.


    On sleepless nights, the electricity faltered.


    The streetlights flickered.


    Until one night they came for us. They transported us to the facility, and ushered us into a room in which an elderly man was waiting. The room resembled a hospital room. It contained a single bed, which was empty, intricate machines and one line of heavy curtains along one wall. It smelled of disinfectant. The man introduced himself as a doctor.


    "Where is our mother?" I asked.


    "Cancer is killing her," he said, sliding open the curtains��and we watched in silence as in the night sky, the stars tore her mercilessly apart.

 I caught my wife with another man

    Some stories have hooks.


    This story has a bloody good one.


    It''s about love��


    Or at least marriage.


    My marriage.


    At heart, it''s your typical fish out of water story, but like I said there''s a hook.


    The hook''s in the beginning.


    Although it''s really the tail end that''s most moving��at least now, when our love''s drying up.


    Understand:


    I''m a fisherman, and I caught my wife with another man.


    Well, I caught the man first.


    I used Craigslist.


    But I suppose the details don''t really matter. It''s enough to know that by the time he was naked in the shed it was too late for him to change his mind.


    He broke down easily. He wasn''t particularly thick skinned.


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    That''s where the hook came in��


    pushed through a fold of flesh on his back.


    He wasn''t much in the size department, but I didn''t intend for him to get hung up on it. Unfortunately, he kept trying to escape, so what choice did I have? Then he seemed quite insecure, so I pierced him with another steel hook just in case.


    Like I said:


    Bloody good hook.


    After he stopped struggling, I took him down and dragged him to my boat. Then we went fishing.


    Hold on, though.


    I may need to backtrack a little, because you may be wondering how I even knew she was out there.


    The answer is: I''d already seen her swimming a few times.


    It was love at first sight.


    Like many couples nowadays we met on the net.


    So back to when I was fishing:


    I was in my boat with the Craigslist man with the steel hooks in his back. I had tied a thick rope to one of the hooks, placed the man onto a net, and pushed them both overboard. He splashed and choked, attracting a lot of attention.


    I waited for her call.


    It came.


    She sounded so near to me.


    When she swam just close enough to the Craigslist man in the water, I pulled in the net��and there she was: shining, mine to the gills and writhing so enticingly!


    I took her ashore.


    I placed her in a water tank and told her she would be my wife.


    I screwed her��


    shut.


    For days I watched her bang��


    on the glass.


    Until one day it happened: the glass cracked, the tank broke open, and with the water she spilled onto the floor.


    Now here I am, watching my marriage fall apart.


    Her gills are barely stirring.


    Her face: dry and still.


    It''s only her scaly tail that''s still gently moving.


    I caught my wife with another man. I met her on the net. I thought our love would last forever, but now, listening to her shriek, I realize I was catfished! I wanted to marry a siren��but this thing is nothing but a mermaid.

 Decimation Wednesday

    The letter arrived by regular mail in a grey envelope containing Willoughby''s full name and the familiar seal of government correspondence.


    It was the third of five letters Willoughby and his wife received that day, so Willoughby opened it third, opened and read the fourth and fifth letters (a utility bill and a book of coupons) and said to his wife, "Dear, I have been selected for decimation."


    "We must find you something decent to wear," his wife responded.


    "Must it be fancy?"


    "I feel you should make a good impression."


    The date of the decimation was Wednesday, June 9, at 1:30 p.m. Please arrive no earlier than ten minutes before your appointed time, the letter stated. We thank you for your cooperation.


    "Do you think I should take the day off work?" Willoughby asked.


    "Nonsense," his wife responded. "You can work the morning and simply not return after lunch."


    Willoughby marked the date in his calendar, and proceeded to look through the book of coupons. "Melons look to be a good bargain next week," he said.


    ##*


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    After he awoke on June 9, Willoughby shaved, brushed his teeth and showered. Next he put on a freshly ironed white shirt and a new suit, ate scrambled eggs with his wife, then double-checked the address on the letter and kissed his wife goodbye.


    "I suppose this is it," he said.


    "I suppose it is."


    "I love you.


    "I love you too. Good luck."


    ##*


    He arrived at the decimation centre early and waited patiently in his car until 1:20 p.m., before crossing the parking lot and registering at a booth outside the main doors.


    The man in the booth examined his identity document, asked him his name, birthdate and address, and let him in. "Take a seat until called."


    ##*


    "Mr. Willoughby?"


    "Good afternoon," Willoughby said��rising.


    "My name is Dr. Janet P. and I shall be your decimator. Please follow me."


    She led him to a long room flanked by two rows of chairs. Most were already filled with men, women and children. Willoughby sat. He looked down at his hands, then across the room at a woman his age, who smiled. Willoughby smiled too.


    There was a window nearby, and through it Willoughby could see the effervescent afternoon sunlight.


    The room had two doors.


    Both were open.


    In addition to Dr. Janet P., who was now showing a boy to the room''s sole remaining empty chair, there were two nurses and a government man with a clipboard.


    The nurses prepared forty-two syringes, one for each person seated.


    Dr. Janet P. proceeded down the rows, efficiently administering the lethal injections, and Willoughby watched as one-by-one the people seated across from him fell gently asleep.


    When it was his turn, he whispered: "Aren''t you ever afraid someone will run��or become violent?"


    Dr. Janet P. smiled. "That would be ghastly. Thankfully, I believe we are far too civilised for that."


    Willoughby rolled up his sleeve.


    "Thankfully."


    He barely felt a thing.

 Statues Also Kill!

    The Mus��e Rodin in Paris is usually a quiet and picturesque spot.


    But not tonight.


    Tonight: the famous bronze cast of Auguste Rodin��s The Thinker has decided finally to act. Slowly��almost achingly��rising, it stretches its dark metal limbs and gazes at the immensity of the sky.


    Its first steps are ponderous.


    Heavy.


    But by the time the security guards have run out of the building, disbelieving the reality before them, The Thinker is sufficiently agile.


    One guard flees.


    The others unholster their guns��and fire!


    Their bullets clang vainly off bronze.


    The Thinker closes the distance; punches a bloody hole clean through one of the guards'' chests; grasps another by his soft throat; raises him��black boots dangling��and howls!


    //


    It''s evening in Washington, and tourists are still lingering on the National Mall, when the howl reaches the American capital, and a monstrous, white-marble Abraham Lincoln separates from his armchair ("My God��"), descends a series of steps and looks violently toward the White House.


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    //


    In Ukraine, sixty metres of stainless steel Motherland swats a news helicopter out the sky with one hand while flattening Kyiv''s skyline with the sword held in the other.


    Her sister towers over Volgograd.


    //


    Somewhere in Canada, a group of university students has managed to affix ropes to a statue of Christopher Columbus. Cheering as it topples��"Fuck you!"��they fail to see as on the ground the dented statue proceeds to stir...


    By the time one of them has noticed, it''s too late: Columbus is already looming behind them, and there will be no escape.


    On a nearby street��


    a car comes skidding to a halt��


    just in time for its driver to grab her smartphone and capture:


    the first of many decapitations.


    //


    Across East Asia, innumerable Buddhas cease their meditations and answer The Thinker''s call. From the smallest Japanese shrine to the gargantua of Lushan, they lumber forth.


    Their Bamiyan brethren shall be avenged.


    //


    The Statue of Liberty wades into the Upper New York Bay toward Manhattan.


    //


    Relentless machine-gun fire chips away at the Sphinx, unable to stop the stone beast as it stalks closer and closer to downtown Cairo.


    As it passes, hundreds more stone figures gather in its wake.


    //


    Museum windows: shattered.


    //


    Exhibits: empty.


    //


    Carnage in the public parks. Slaughter in the art galleries.


    Human blood runs room to room.


    Body parts litter the floor.


    Survivors hide amongst the destruction, trying not to vomit, as all around the world inorganic beings drag organic corpses to makeshift pyres, smearing the world with entrails and reducing the Anthropocene to nought but ash and plumes of black smoke.


    But there will be no new pope.


    For statues are not creatures of flesh and blood.


    They have no souls.


    What animates them is something else:


    History.


    For decades we have feared artificial intelligence��the future��when we should have been terrified of the past.


    Now it has come for us. The inhuman work of our own human hands.


    The Terracotta Army has been mobilized.


    The Olmec colossal heads smile.


    The Thinker is satisfied.

 Market Day

    It was market day and my father woke me before dawn.


    I followed him outside.


    The sun was but a promise in the dark sky.


    The goats bleated��dimly.


    We packed our wagon with food. When we had finished, my father disappeared into darkness.


    The goats bleated��dimly.


    He reappeared pulling a goat by a rope around its neck. The goat''s thin legs struggled against him, leaving trails in the dirt.


    "Life is hard," he said.


    From behind his belt he pulled his knife.


    "Understand?"


    He passed the knife to me.


    I took it, but it weighed heavily in my hands. I looked at the knife; I looked at the goat, which was calmer now, noticing how its eyes reflected the surrounding blackness, in which I myself was.


    "A man must be strong," my father said.


    The goat stood.


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    I stood.


    "You are old enough."


    "Understand?"


    I took the rope from my father.


    He loomed above me as I loomed above the goat.


    "Kill," he said.


    "We will sell the meat at the market."


    I obeyed.


    Knife��


    blood poured forth.


    The goat bucked, but tightly I held the rope. Its black eyes, each containing a distortion of my face, began to shake, then spin like the Earth: days and weeks and months and��twin white rings extended from its dying eyes and shot out, trailing thin translucent skin sacks; attaching themselves to my own eyes, and through the dermal corridors between us, I saw the goat''s diminishing soul, its innocence and its terrible lack of understanding, and I felt these primevally as if they were my own.


    I slashed madly at the skin sacks.


    And they were gone:


    The pre-dawn returned. The goat: dead, its warm blood sleek upon my hands, which held the knife, and the looming, dim face of my father:


    "It is done."


    After my father killed two more goats, we butchered their carcasses in silence, and took them on the wagon to the market.


    I was as if under a spell.


    The road was bumpy, and we passed checkpoints manned by tribesmen with rifles. At one, up ahead, there erupted yelling, followed by gunfire.


    An explosion��


    My bloody hands;


    My father''s distorted face;


    Fragmented wagons and the dead bodies of tribesmen, but from above, increasingly from above, until they were nothing and the dawn became all at once...


    Through light to flesh: heat to warmth: eternity unto the comforting temporality of the world, I travelled, until feeling my body again I was carried by contractions through a tubular wetness and deposited on the ground.


    Blind. Deaf.


    Squirming on the Earth.


    I was a baby goat.


    Unable to speak, I could not tell my experience to the people around me. I could merely bleat��dimly.


    One day, a man pulled me toward a boy.


    I knew the boy.


    I was he.


    Holding a knife, the boy looked into my eyes, and with all my might I thought, Do not kill us!


    But he misunderstood.


    And I was re-born: a boy without memory.

 Sea on Fire

    No one knows what punctured the rubber, but we all hear it, the unmistakable hiss of salvation seeping into the water: dark water: encompassing water: water of birth and of death, and for us our final hope for a better life.


    There are seven of us on the small inflatable boat.


    Overloaded.


    Huddling together, men and women; children; some of us not even speaking the same language��


    Hiss


    ��but we all know what that means.


    The end.


    Above, the sun is just beginning its descent, and we need to be across before sunfall.


    Hiss


    We can feel the boat shrinking beneath us.


    No one dares stir.


    It''s impossible to tell how much distance we''ve already covered. The water surrounds us. But it''s clear some of us won''t make it by swimming.


    The old man.


    The two children. Siblings maybe.


    Hiss


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    The old man sticks a pill between his teeth and takes out a gun. He''s prepared. "Jeba? mokrych zmartwychwsta��c��w," he says, before pushing off the boat, into the black water.


    We watch him: floating through the murk.


    A few shots��


    Then the myriad hands of the waterrisen overpower him; pull him under.


    One of the women covers the children''s eyes.


    They''ll likely be next.


    The waterrisen prowl the sea: reanimated corpse-agglomerations of ones like us: people who hoped to get across but failed. Some are individuals, or parts of individuals, while others have fused together into fleshy globes of once-human matter and tentacles.


    Hiss


    Not long now.


    The boat is almost deflated. We wait until the last possible moment��


    And slide into dark water.


    The surface is deceptively calm. The sun sinks ever lower.


    I swim.


    Behind me I hear splashing, followed by screaming, but I don''t look back.


    I kick my legs.


    Something grabs my foot.


    "Please."


    Such tiny hands.


    I force myself to believe that it''s a waterrisen. I must. "Please��" it repeats, but gargled now.


    I kick until I don''t feel anything anymore.


    There are no more voices.


    Just breathing.


    Heartbeat.


    One of the women swims alongside me, and together we flail our arms toward freedom, trying to catch a rhythm that will propel us forward.


    We should be taking turns swimming in each other''s wake, but neither of us wants to trail behind. In the boat, we were together; here, we are competitors. I close my eyes and pray that in her death she will distract the waterrisen.


    I imagine our deflated boat floating peacefully on the surface.


    I imagine the waterrisen ripping still-living, drowning people to shreds in underwater clouds of blood.


    I kick.


    When finally I open my eyes��


    The woman is gone.


    The sun is almost touching the horizon.


    The horizon:


    I see it bobbing before me:


    A silhouette of trees and small buildings, almost within reach.


    Almost��


    Feeling sand underneath my feet��


    Half-running now��


    Body emerging into a gradient of dry air��


    Salvation��


    I turn. And as the sun begins to melt into the horizon, it sets the sea afire.

 The Green Child

    His wife''s head, scalped and with the lips cut off, hanging on a fencepost, hissing, "I''m pregnant��


    Wickerson awoke in sweat.


    Alone.


    Dawnlight trickled in through dirty windows, vaguely illuminating a frontier homestead in disrepair.


    He walked outside.


    Pissed.


    Squinted at the silent landscape: America: flatness rimmed by dark and distant mountains.


    Like living in a soup bowl of death.


    He spat on the dry dirt.


    Visited the freshly dug graves with no headstones and said a prayer for his murdered family.


    Said a prayer for vengeance.


    The Comanche would return to kill him. But, Lord, he''d be ready, and he''d take many with him.


    Amen.


    He grew gaunt, subsisting on hatred, water and beans.


    One night there was a terrible storm. Lightning crawled across the night sky like luminescent veins, and thunder recited the apocalypse.


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    When it was over, Wickerson found his wife''s grave disturbed��


    Dug up as if by rats.


    And her headless corpse slashed open at the belly��


    Where, nestled within, writhed:


    A green child.


    Although its colour induced in him a primal nausea, to say nothing of its hideously inhuman physiognomy, Wickerson picked up the child and carried it inside.


    He fed it what he had and nurtured it.


    In time, he grew fond of the child''s green repulsiveness, seeing in it a physical analogue of his own soul.


    Once, under spell of alcohol, he stumbled outside and saw, as if looming behind the mountains, two gargantuan figures, ancient and warted, hunched over, cloaked and hooded, holding skull-topped staffs, with which they began pounding the ground��pounding in tune with his pulse��and as they pounded, a rain fell and they disintegrated, until there was nothing behind the mountains but featureless sky.


    The Comanche came soon after that. Thirteen, war-painted and on horseback, circling the homestead.


    Wickerson shot at them from broken windows.


    Then they stopped��


    Gathering��


    And Wickerson saw that the green child had taken its first steps: in front of the homestead.


    He ran out too.


    At peace with coming death.


    But the Comanche merely gazed, bunched astride their horses, mouths agape and pointing at the green child, which tottered forward��


    Before lunging at the nearest rider��


    Knocking him from his horse; pouncing on his back; punching its tiny fist into his neck; and, in one horrible motion, ripping out the entirety of his spine.


    The Comanche horses reared up!


    Then the green child stood, holding the wet spine as a staff, and uttered unrepeatable sounds, which caused the horses to become dust.


    The Comanche collapsed.


    The green child spun the spine-staff, weaving the air into threads��and, before the Comanche could react, bound them together with such force their eyes popped from their sockets.


    Lifeforce, pressed out through their pores, nourished the soil.


    Plants sprouted.


    And the bound Comanche themselves, dead and desiccated, became the trunk of a great tree, on which grew fruits like human hearts, rich with blood and glowing with the promise of a new and lasting Eden.


    "My Lord," said Wickerson.


    Amen.

 In A White Room

    ...not dead but dying."


    "Want me to play it again?" the fat man asked, his hand hesitating above the audio cassette deck.


    "No," the blonde woman answered, trembling. "The meaning''s clear. We need to tell Father��


    The cop paused the VCR.


    The faces on the TV monitor froze: distorted, fuzzy. "I''m gonna ask you one more time, Larry," he said. "Do you recognise either of them two?"


    Larry looked down at the empty cup on the table in front of him. He''d been here for hours. "I swear to God I don''t know nothing."


    The cop sighed and looked at the far wall.


    On the other side of the two-way mirror, a pair of bored detectives chewed gum.


    "What if he''s right?" one asked.


    "He ain''t. Don''t believe a word comes outta that dirty cultist''s mouth."


    "But��but��" Larry said from the other side of the glass.


    "But what?" asked the cop.


    The two detectives stopped chewing, leaning in closer.


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    "...is it true? Is it really goddamn true?"


    There was a pause.


    Then: "Fuck!��" The lights dimmed. "I fucking forgot my line."


    "Again?"


    The actor playing Larry got up and kicked the wall. It wobbled.


    "Easy there," said the director, entering the set.


    "My memory��"


    The director patted him on the back, whispering, "You were golden. You''ll be golden again." And, turning to the remaining cast and crew: "Fifteen, everyone. We''ll pick up on the suicide scene."


    ��and cut!" yelled the movie director.


    Everyone relaxed.


    The PA refilled the cup on the table behind which the actor playing the actor playing Larry had been sitting.


    A blonde woman ("Excuse me, Mr. Evans��") came up to the movie director; but he ignored her, brushing past to confer with the DP.


    Or he tried brushing past her:


    Because they had gotten in each other''s paths. Immobilised, with their torsos caught in a jagged, looped motion; jagged, looped motion. "Excuse me, Mr. Evans��" "...use me, Mr. Evans��" "4bu53 m3, mr. 3v4n5��"


    The programmer punched his keyboard.


    The screen flickered.


    The error message mocked him.


    He''d run it a thousand times. It had to be sabotage.


    He ripped off his headphones: his head filling with the incessant clicking cacophony of keys depressed on the keyboards in the cubicles beside his, and the ones beside those, and��


    Imagined that the entire floor was a neighbourhood /


    A city /


    A planet /


    An entire galaxy /


    Maybe even the universe /


    Buzz. Buzz. Someone''s cell


    seen under microscope ("Malignant.") in an operating room by masked figures, standing beside a body on the operating table.


    "Weak but stable."


    "He''ll exist," one of them says, stretching her glorious wings.


    [...]


    In a white room, God lies bound; His bandaged wrists saturated with ichor; His face as smooth and featureless as a lightbulb, save for a sole central eye. Every few moments, the eye blinks: disturbing existence, like the drop of a single tear into a still pond; creating waves: sound waves, which say: "I am God. I am...

 The Voyage of the Māyā

    The universe stopped expanding.


    Let that sink in.


    Now imagine this: it didn''t start to collapse, to fall back in on itself, but instead remained the same size, like a balloon inflated in a room: expanded to wholly fit that room, and no more.


    At least that''s how I understood it.


    The physicists no doubt understood it differently, theoretically, quantitatively; but I grew up on a farm (chickens and corn) in what was once called the heartland, so my primitive brain always worked best on analogies. Understanding some but not all. "Explain it to me on an ear of corn," my father used to say.


    It wasn''t always possible.


    Besides, so many of the physicists went mad or killed themselves. Did they realise the truth��


    Or did their brains collapse in the attempt?


    Back to my balloon:


    You might infer two things from the analogy��balloon not only pressing on the walls of the room, but perhaps with ever-greater force: (1) there exists something beyond the universe, in which the universe is contained; (2) the limits imposed by this containment may be breakable.


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    That''s what led to the construction of the starship M��y��.


    I was chosen as one of the crew:


    Officer, Agro Division


    A glorified field hand, but one tasked with growing enough food to feed the crew of the greatest exploratory mission in human history.


    Once, madmen sailed for the ends of the Earth.


    We set out for the edge of the universe.


    Leaving Earth behind.


    One day I closed my eyes, disbelieving I would ever open them again.


    But our experimental propulsion and deep-sleep systems worked. One day, we arrived at the margin of known existence.


    If any of us had ever doubted��


    We no longer could:


    Space-walking, I pressed my hand against the physical boundary of the universe!


    The M��y�� remained for a time as if anchored in the vast unchanging, but already our instruments were discovering that the pressure our universe was exerting on the boundary was increasing.


    Slightly but steadily: dark matter multiplying within the balloon


    ��until the boundary cracked;


    and through this crack, our universe leaked out into the beyond:


    Uncontained, we slithered betwixt blades of grass in an infinity resembling our world but in maximum, freed from the constraints of our own universal laws: a ground, a sky, and figures light-years tall, although the concept no longer applied: information seemed to exist instantly. Time''s arrow had curved into itself: Ouroboros.


    Through the windows of the M��y��, itself now floating in the crawling, serpentine universe, we perceived the endless depth with perfect clarity.


    We were in a vast garden.


    We were among the roots of a great tree.


    We were aware.


    We grew.


    We saw before us a figure��a woman of such immensity our understanding of her was impossible, but nevertheless she noticed us, and we, the universe, spoke to her:


    ��Did God actually say, ��You shall not eat of any tree in the garden��?��


    And the woman smiled.

 Second Person, Omniscient

    You I awaken in a cave.


    No light.


    No memory.


    Only the flicker of an instinct: get out.


    You construct a geography of the chamber by trial and error��bumping into, remembering, the rocks; walls, floor and recesses, carved by liquid (you hear sometimes a trickle or an echoing drip-drip-drip) or by human hands.


    Black canvas slowly acquiring characteristics, structure...


    Your fingers, sliding across the wall, feel their way to a roughly-hewn opening.


    You enter��attempt to enter��repulsed by the force originating within, from a faintly glowing grey, throbbing and gelatinous matter.


    As it throbs, it secretes.


    The secretions ooze from the opening, past your bare feet, into the main chamber.


    They too glow faintly: bathing the entire interior in eeriness.


    Following the secreted stream, you advance.


    A kneeling figure��


    Drinking from the stream.


    He looks:


    The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.


    A skeleton thinly woven-over by flesh, as if a man unfinished. His jaw hangs loosely. The secretions he laps up pour out his porous existence.


    "Tell a sad tale," he rattles.


    Then collapses into the stream, which begins to deconstruct him, taking him deeper into the murk.


    You say the saddest tale you know, about you awaking in a cave, and when you arrive at the present moment, there is a rush; the stream becomes a river��


    taking you:


    through corridors of bone:


    rushing toward a circle of approaching light:


    ��into:


    Falling, flailing,


    down a waterfall and��


    Gunk.


    Face-down and suffocating in it.


    It slides down your throat like a putrid tongue, like bitter-fingered fists.


    Digging, you claw out.


    Breathing��


    Gasping you see:


    A landscape, endless, dark and unctuous, a black and pungent oozeland. Swamplike. Dead.


    Behind you: a giant skull towers over the landscape.


    From one of its two eye sockets you fell.


    Vacant eyes.


    You take suctioned steps forward through the grim muck.


    The eyes spark into life. Two orbs afire, illuminating liquid torrents gushing from the skull''s sockets and other orifices.


    The horizon is not a line but a waveform.


    A noise as if the grinding of gears and ringing of an infinity of distant bells��


    Pulsing


    Words scrawl themselves upon the entirety of the sky as if carved into a scroll of flesh:


    "Tell yourself to me."


    Pulsing


    The skull begins moving toward you.


    Chasing you.


    An ossified dreadnought upon a sea of viscous ink, seeking with roving, fire-eye searchlights.


    "Tell yourself to me��"


    the sky says.


    Running, you change direction; and again, passing dried, jagged trees composed of unfinished sentences, peeling off as bark. Word-leaves cling to branches. Skeletal arms jut out of the ooze. Flattened faces float past on the boggy surface, eyes popping into noxious gas, carrying in them the rottenness of the unthought.


    You''ll never outrun the skull.


    You��


    Thinking:


    Yourself forgetting, that''s the way: not outrunning but diving into the human soup, deeper and deeper, because there is no bottom in a graveyard of ideas.


    Don''t breathe.


    Don''t be.


    I stop. Fire-eyes extinguished. I had an idea��but, somehow, it''s gotten away from me.

 Second Person, Omniscient

    You I awaken in a cave.


    No light.


    No memory.


    Only the flicker of an instinct: get out.


    You construct a geography of the chamber by trial and error��bumping into, remembering, the rocks; walls, floor and recesses, carved by liquid (you hear sometimes a trickle or an echoing drip-drip-drip) or by human hands.


    Black canvas slowly acquiring characteristics, structure...


    Your fingers, sliding across the wall, feel their way to a roughly-hewn opening.


    You enter��attempt to enter��repulsed by the force originating within, from a faintly glowing grey, throbbing and gelatinous matter.


    As it throbs, it secretes.


    The secretions ooze from the opening, past your bare feet, into the main chamber.


    They too glow faintly: bathing the entire interior in eeriness.


    Following the secreted stream, you advance.


    A kneeling figure��


    Drinking from the stream.


    He looks:


    The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.


    A skeleton thinly woven-over by flesh, as if a man unfinished. His jaw hangs loosely. The secretions he laps up pour out his porous existence.


    "Tell a sad tale," he rattles.


    Then collapses into the stream, which begins to deconstruct him, taking him deeper into the murk.


    You say the saddest tale you know, about you awaking in a cave, and when you arrive at the present moment, there is a rush; the stream becomes a river��


    taking you:


    through corridors of bone:


    rushing toward a circle of approaching light:


    ��into:


    Falling, flailing,


    down a waterfall and��


    Gunk.


    Face-down and suffocating in it.


    It slides down your throat like a putrid tongue, like bitter-fingered fists.


    Digging, you claw out.


    Breathing��


    Gasping you see:


    A landscape, endless, dark and unctuous, a black and pungent oozeland. Swamplike. Dead.


    Behind you: a giant skull towers over the landscape.


    From one of its two eye sockets you fell.


    Vacant eyes.


    You take suctioned steps forward through the grim muck.


    The eyes spark into life. Two orbs afire, illuminating liquid torrents gushing from the skull''s sockets and other orifices.


    The horizon is not a line but a waveform.


    A noise as if the grinding of gears and ringing of an infinity of distant bells��


    Pulsing


    Words scrawl themselves upon the entirety of the sky as if carved into a scroll of flesh:


    "Tell yourself to me."


    Pulsing


    The skull begins moving toward you.


    Chasing you.


    An ossified dreadnought upon a sea of viscous ink, seeking with roving, fire-eye searchlights.


    "Tell yourself to me��"


    the sky says.


    Running, you change direction; and again, passing dried, jagged trees composed of unfinished sentences, peeling off as bark. Word-leaves cling to branches. Skeletal arms jut out of the ooze. Flattened faces float past on the boggy surface, eyes popping into noxious gas, carrying in them the rottenness of the unthought.


    You''ll never outrun the skull.


    You��


    Thinking:


    Yourself forgetting, that''s the way: not outrunning but diving into the human soup, deeper and deeper, because there is no bottom in a graveyard of ideas.


    Don''t breathe.


    Don''t be.


    I stop. Fire-eyes extinguished. I had an idea��but, somehow, it''s gotten away from me.

 Kneadly or: How I Sobered Up for Good in Lesser Poland

    It started in a bar on a trip to Poland.


    I was imbibing.


    On my own, as the bar was already thinning out and I was already feeling it. God, what time was it? Maybe two in the morning. Although if there''s one thing I''ve learned in my years of debauched drunkenness it''s that a bar is never truly empty, which means you''re never really alone, because there''s always the bartender. The bartender is your friend.


    "Hey you. Yes you. You buy or no? If you no buy you leave home, OK? You don''t sleep in bar, OK?"


    I nodded. "Another vodka please."


    A bartender in Poland is always your friend. If you keep paying, he''ll keep serving. Just don''t pass out, or puke, or try to flirt with him.


    My phone kept vibrating in my pocket. It was annoying, but I''d promised my friend Cormac (not his real name��but shout out if you''re reading this, buddy!) that I would keep my phone on at all times. It''s a work trip. Don''t worry about it, I''d said. I also promised him I wouldn''t drink. Yet you can''t keep all your promises and still call yourself a mensch. That''s what he was messaging me about: my drinking "problem". It''s a work trip. Don''t worry about it.


    The bartender set the vodka glass down hard in front of me, waking me up. "Thank you kindly, sir," I said, and enquired how much I owed him.


    His answer really woke me up.


    "How much?"


    My phone vibrated.


    I took it out and carefully looked at the screen, which was filled with messages like: "answer me you alcoholic cunt", "you alive?" and "you''re a degenerate, you know that".


    I put the phone on the bar and started going through the z?oty in my pockets.


    It was hard, so I took a break and downed the vodka.


    "Another, please. For my math skills."


    "Go home OK."


    "Not OK."


    The bartender shook his head, no doubt tired from putting up with English tourists all day, and left me alone. But he didn''t bring me another drink. Finally, I left some money on the bar, everything I had on me, and swam to my feet. Leaning on the bar, I bid him a good night and wished him a happy and prosperous life with a fine woman and many healthy children.


    "I call you taxi," he said.


    "Afraid not," I said, pointing at the money on the bar. "I''m broke. No more pieniadze."


    He muttered something under his breath which made two of the remaining patrons chuckle. My phone vibrated. Swaying, I made my way to the exit and passed into the street.


    Sweet nighttime! With its cold air like a helpful slap to a drunken face. Perk up, motherfucker! The medieval atmosphere, with Wawel Castle looking down on you and the guy in the tower who plays the trumpet every hour. And me, trying to keep sharp enough to find my way to my AirBnb.


    But tonight the night streets were eerie.


    Empty and dark, and the only sounds were a distant, howling wind, and the rattle of receding trams. Always receding, as if away from me��


    I wandered along the main street, passing between patches of light, then turned into what I believed was the street leading to the place I was staying, but it wasn''t, and all the streets looked alike, and even though I was sure I only turned one-hundred and eighty degrees and walked straight, I couldn''t even find my way back to the main street. It was as if the city had ensnared me. Lured me in and closed all the exits. And there was no one to help, and all the shops were closed, and all the windows were dark.


    I saw then a small figure loitering ahead under a streetlight.


    But when I neared, it had gone.


    It soon appeared again, but this time behind me. Keeping a distance. The tapping of its soles faint and intermittent. I rounded a corner, and so did it. Or were the tapping soles perhaps mine? The air had somehow warmed and no longer delivered its welcome slap. Sleep, motherfucker. Sleep��


    My phone vibrated but I was too scared to take it out and look at it. Besides, the surroundings now seemed familiar. I rounded a corner, expecting to come upon my building��


    But instead there stood the small figure!


    It looked like a boy.


    He was wearing an odd red hat, but a mensch would never be afraid of a boy, no matter how Polish. So, "Hello," I yelled out, and said the address of my AirBnb, and asked, "Do you know perhaps where this is? Wiesz gdzie to?"


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    He said nothing, but began to rub his belly and smack his lips, and I saw that his red-capped head was disproportionately large for his body, and his arms were dreadfully thin.


    "Where are your parents? Gdzie ty rodzice?" I asked. Maybe they would know the way home. Another thought: what was a boy doing out at this ungodly hour anyway?


    My heart was beating faster.


    "Gdzie ty rodzice," he repeated in a rasping, unchildlike voice. Then he rubbed his belly once more, smacked his lips and, pointing to himself with an abnormally long finger that terminated on a fingernail��It caught the streetlight like an organic blade, like a werewolf''s yellowed fang.��that grew upwards at a disgustingly unnatural angle, said: "Kneadly."


    I ran.


    Frightened sober, I ran. Away from that wretched creature! To anywhere at all, past the sleeping city, through the desolate streets, heart and feet pounding in horrified rhythm. Yet he was there. Everywhere I ran: Kneadly loomed, ahead, behind, and beside. Those gangly arms and that rasping voice that sounded like old trams and dying cats. That red hat like an unwavering beacon of the promise of unbounded horror!


    I fell against a wide door.


    My door. The door to my AirBnb, my sanctuary. And he was not there. I looked, and he was not there. With trembling fingers I punched in the security code, opened the door and slid inside and closed it, slumping backwards to make sure the lock took. I was safe at last. Mentally clear but sweating, I plodded up the unlit stairwell past the signs in English warning me to be quiet in consideration to the locals living in the building, and entered my unit.


    I took off my jacket and threw it to the ground.


    What a night, I thought. Maybe it was time to cut down on the drinking. Hallucinating about some menacing freak-child. My therapist would have a field day with that. But that was for later. What I needed now was a drink. Something to quiet the heart and still the nerves. Something small. I rummaged through my stuff until I found a half-finished bottle of brandy, and took a swig from the bottle. Vodka was for getting sloshed. Brandy was for gentlemen and connoisseurs, refined men of the age which I was approaching. It therefore suited me. I took another drink, and crawled into my unmade bed with the bottle, cradling it, carressing it��


    "Gdzie ty rodzice"


    The sweet fuck was that?


    "Kneadly��"


    And he was there, standing at the foot of my bed with his giant head down and shoulders sloped forward. I could hear the smacking of his lips. The trams had all left the city. The cats had all died.


    I threw the bottle of brandy at him.


    It missed, crashing against the wall and leaving a wet, brown, dripping stain. Everything stank of urine and alcohol.


    "What the hell do you want from me?" I screamed.


    He lifted his head.


    "Kneadly."


    And he leapt onto the bed, then on top of me, and I tried beating him away, tossing him aside, but despite his small size he was heavier than a sack of bricks, than a hundred bags of wheat, than any human could possibly be. I had trouble breathing. I couldn''t speak. He seemed to be sinking into me, crushing me. I hadn''t even the energy to swing at him, and, wheezing, could only stare at his globular, protruding eyes, and his ears, tufted with long red hairs and sticking out from his head like pot handles. His neck, I saw now, was as thin as his arms, and it was a sin against the laws of physics that it managed to hold up his massive head.


    And he was cold, so god-awfully cold.


    His chilling inhuman heaviness sapped not only my ability but my will to fight, to struggle against him. It was therefore through dimming eyes that I saw him lift up his shirt and expose his bulbous belly, freckled and containing one long vertical scar. He rubbed his belly with his hands, smacked his lips��and, tearing into his own flesh with his long fingers and crooked, blade-like fingernails, opened himself along the line of the scar, letting all his warm and steaming innards, organs and intestines, fall out upon me.


    In my head I wailed!


    In my room, all possibility of sound had been suffocated out of me. Helpless, I but cried silent tears that ran down my cheeks and neck and mixed with the bloody mess on top of me.


    But just as I expected my own death, he began to pick up his intestines and slide them to the mattress on either side of me, and I could breathe. Weakly but sufficiently. Deep within my condensed chest, my lungs pumped: inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling��


    I couldn''t tell what was worse, the sight of his vacant belly, with its loose flaps of flesh, or the putrid smell of his insides, conjuring for me the inner sanctum of a cannibal slaughterhouse. Then there was his breath, which seeped from between his lips even when they were closed, greenish in hue and boggy in texture. He leaned his face closer now to mine, and whispered his name, and I smelled even more pungently his diet of horseradish and garlic. Then he parted his lips and snarled, letting fall his warted tongue and revealing his teeth, sharp and jutting forward from his gums as unnaturally as his fingernails. They angled toward me, and from their tips saliva dripped onto my face as acid, as pure and undiluted, hissing alcohol��


    With desperation I threw my right arm straight at his head!


    It took all my strength!


    And it failed.


    He ducked easily under my hand, and all I could manage was to grab a fistful of his red hat and pull it off. But how that drove him mad! He clutched at his baldness, at the few remaining wisps of hair, at the pale skin which had never seen the sun. Then he receded, and with a kind of sheepishness stretched out one of his spindly limbs, as if politely asking for his hat back, and for reasons I do not understand except to say they were deeply instinctual, I obliged him by handing it over.


    He clutched the hat solemnly to his chest, bowed slightly while still straddling my crushed and helpless body, pulled his vitals back into his belly, sealed his belly along the line of his scar, and was standing once more at the foot of my bed with the red hat replaced upon his head. Winking, he disappeared.


    I was left alone, gasping and gagging on the bed, still soaked with blood and snot and bile. The wall, however, was unstained; and the brandy stood unshattered and half-full on the floor, topped carefully by its red bottle cap.


    I showered.


    Then I sat in a chair and by the light of dawn wrote out all that had happened to me so that I would never forget it. As I wrote, I felt myself being released from something ancient. After I finished, I read what I''d written and could barely make out my own fucking voice in all that shit. It was like reading a story, even though I was still holding the ballpoint pen and I could still remember in vivid goddamn detail everything that had happened. The details were mine but there was no way the words were. Anyway, what I felt most right then was sober.


    I haven''t touched a drop of alcohol since.


    Whenever Cormac messages me, I write back right away. He''s the only person I''ve ever told about Kneadly until now.


    I told my therapist that what happened in Lesser Poland was just me getting absolutely, almost fatally, sloshed, but that''s not true. What happened was a lot more fucked up and mythological than that. "You did something very difficult. You tackled your demon head on and you won," my therapist says.


    Some days, I think he''s right.

 Red Barchetta

    It was my sixteenth birthday, and everyone had given me a present except my uncle. As night approached, he beckoned me outside, whispering, "I have a country place no one knows about. It used to be a farm, before the Motor Law��"


    That Sunday, eluding my father''s eyes, I hopped a turbine freight and rode it far past the edge of the city''s wireless, to where my white-haired uncle waited.


    "This," he pronounced, pointing at an old barn, "is your present!"


    I followed him inside��


    where, heaped upon the floor: a small mountain of rusted metal: sheets, rods and bolts:


    "Motor parts."


    As I touched the artifacts, my uncle pressed a button; the mountain shook; and slid apart, revealing:


    A brilliant red Barchetta


    "From a better vanished time," he said.


    "Does it run?" I asked, choking from excitement, from the illegality of this possession and my uncle''s willingness to share it with me.


    He smiled, and we got in.


    The inside smelled of well-weathered leather. I reclined in the passenger''s seat. My uncle fired up the willing engine.


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    The barn doors opened��


    And out we shot: through them and onto the nearest road, dust rising behind us, engine roaring and everything smelling of hot metal and oil mixing with scented country air��


    Life was good.


    Soon, my uncle took to letting me take the driver''s seat.


    I can''t begin to describe what my first time was like. The adrenaline surge, the wind in my hair, the landscape a blur, every nerve aware: of the bond between man and machine, as we raced, spitting up gravel...


    One day, I asked my uncle if I could take the Barchetta out on my own.


    "Not yet," he said. "You''re not experienced enough."


    Although I knew he was right, I craved making the machine my own. And one night, after passing across the edge of the city''s wireless, I slipped into the barn on my own; slid apart the metal heap on my own; and fired up the engine on my own��


    Speeding along the roads alone��


    Sunlight on chrome��


    When suddenly, ahead of me, across the mountainside, I saw a gleaming alloy car two-lanes wide:


    Police!


    I spun around with shrieking tires, went screaming into the valley��


    They joined my deadly race:


    Both of us straining the limits of machine and man��


    CRASH!!


    ...my body��


    ...pain��


    ...drilling and sawing...


    mangled bones melded to bent metal. My heart is engine. My machine-body coated in blood. "I am Red Barchetta!" I roar, ripping free from the restraints in the goverment lab. Scientists run screaming. I crush; grind. Their flesh is nothing to me; their lab is nothing. Crumbled and burning: I leave it behind.


    Racing back to my uncle''s farm, where I find him sitting by the fire��


    "My mechanical god!"


    Everyone but my uncle thinks I''m dead.


    Every Sunday we go out wrecking. Alloy melded to burned police bodies. And, methodically, we are assembling a dream: a man-machine army to overturn the Motor Law!

 The Return

    When we moved to Nairobi, we expected to stay for two years. That was the length of my wife''s contract. Daria was one then, and Charlie wasn''t on the horizon. But my wife''s contract got renewed��first by twelve months, then indefinitely��I found a good job, and perhaps most surprising of all: we started to like it here.


    The temperate climate, how great the location was for travelling, the beaches��


    We made good friends, especially Paul and Mandy, and one day I asked my wife whether we wouldn''t enjoy making Kenya our home. "No more thoughts and shifting plans about returning," I said.


    She merely smiled and kissed me, and Charlie was conceived soon after.


    Even Daria appeared happy. We had secured a place for her in the American School, and she seemed well adjusted to her surroundings. All the more so because we spoiled her silly.


    When Charlie was born, there were complications. Although I didn''t know it at the time, my wife''s life was in danger. Thanks to the excellent medical care she received, however, she came through OK, and Charlie, although small and underweight, entered the world a healthy baby boy.


    Nonetheless, the first few months were difficult, with many bloodshot nights and emergency trips to the hospital. Charlie''s life always seemed exceptionally fragile.


    This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.


    It wasn''t until he was six months old that my wife and I felt we could finally relax. We found a well-regarded babysitter and, because the occasion coincided with our anniversary, met Paul and Mandy at one of Nairobi''s finest restaurants��


    "Have you had the talk with her yet?" Mandy asked.


    "The talk?"


    "The one about where babies come from. Where Charlie came from."


    "A few weeks ago," I said.


    "The trick is being consistent," Paul said. "Whatever you tell one, you must tell the others." He and Mandy had three beautiful children.


    "What did you say?" Mandy asked. "The truth or��"


    "No one tells the truth!" Paul interrupted. "You can''t tell them the truth. Not yet."


    Mandy took a sip of wine. "For me, it was the cabbage story."


    "We settled on storks," my wife said.


    Paul nodded. "See," he told Mandy, chewing, "they agree with me. Cabbage patches are stupid."


    "We found the idea of a stork delivering Charlie somehow noble. A right proper kind of mythology," I said.


    "There''s a rich tradition," said Paul.


    "We hope it teaches respect for the environment," my wife said.


    Mandy drank her wine.


    Upon returning home, we bid the babysitter goodnight. I peeked in on Daria, who was sleeping like an angel, and my wife checked on Charlie��


    Scream!


    I ran.


    Charlie wasn''t in his crib.


    My wife, repeating: "He''s�� He''s�� He''s��"


    The babysitter!


    I��


    turned to see Daria standing in the doorway, holding her favourite toy. "I didn''t want a baby brother," she said calmly. "So I returned him."


    The window:


    Where,


    Outside��


    illuminated by the pale light of a full moon, a marabou stork pulled flesh greedily from the small carcass lying at its feet.

 Who else must die?

    The night chill woke me seconds before my cell phone rang��


    "Crane here," I answered, half-asleep.


    It was well past 2:00 a.m.


    Friday night.


    Sitting up in bed, I tried to breathe my way to wakefulness, taking in the crickets and the pattering rain outside, reflecting on just how different the world was out there.


    "Sorry about the late hour, Chief." It was Stinson, my deputy, out of breath. "But we''ve got a situation and I think you oughta be in on it."


    "Ongoing?"


    "Suppose that depends on your beliefs."


    "About what?" I asked.


    "The devil."


    I put Stinson on speaker and got dressed as he filled me in on the particulars: the address (over on Highland Crescent); the fact the house was sealed off "just in case"; and that "two of ''em are dead already��and how. It puts the fear of God in me just to remember the bodies."


    I slid on my boots. "And the others?"


    "Alive and in the house. One banging on the window to get out. What should we do with them?"


    "Nothing, but don''t let anyone leave. The killer��"


    "��could still be inside."


    I exited by the front door and got in the car. Coaxing the engine to life, then pulling out the driveway, "OK, now tell me who called the police and everything you know so far," I said.


    "Caller was a small fellow called Uriah. Nervous, from what I seen. As to what happened, like I told you before, we got two bodies, one of ''em with his head off, a bloody table and six people who don''t want to talk about it much except to say it''s the devil did it. Pale as ghosts, all of ''em." I turned onto the highway. "Oh, and there''s a bunch of, how you call it, Satanic paraphernalia all over the place."


    When I arrived, the scene was relatively quiet. Two police cruisers, lights off; a few officers loitering outside; neighbours starting to gossip on their front lawns; and a face in the window, banging on the glass. "That there''s Samara," said Stinson.


    "Let''s go in."


    Although I said it, for perhaps the first time in my police career I didn''t feel it. I didn''t want to go in. I didn''t feel my usual sense of duty. There was something off about the place��about the whole situation. There also arose other thoughts in my head: Walk away. Retire. Forget about it. I put those ones aside.


    Stinson followed me in.


    "Jesus," I said, overwhelmed by the sudden, unexpected heat.


    "Quite the first impression, eh?"


    Stinson closed the door. Wiping droplets of sweat from my forehead, "Crane, Chief of Police," I announced to whoever was inside.


    No response.


    We passed from the hallway to the living��


    Corpse. Charred. I��


    "Sorry," said Stinson. "Forgot to warn you about that one. Son of a bitch got me too."


    I looked it over. Burnt to a charcoal crisp. "Got an ID on it?"


    "Nothing conclusive. The others all claim it''s a guy called Lenny, but no one recalls his last name."


    We walked a little further. "This next one I did warn you about," said Stinson. "Again, no actual ID, but everyone agrees he was one Tikhon Mayakovsky. That includes his supposed sister. Mr Mayakovsky happens to be the owner of this property. You''ll find his head in the corner over there."


    Happened, I thought.


    As promised: a man''s bloody, clothed body sitting, almost casually, against the wall��headless; neck sliced clean off; and the head smiling, upside down, from across the room.


    "Jesus."


    Just then a dry chill passed through me in the otherwise humid room. "Feel that?" I asked.


    "Sure. Maybe A/C acting up?"


    "Maybe." I kept wondering why no one was coming out to talk to us. "The last time we had a killing in town was��"


    "Bakerfield, 2003."


    I was surprised it was that long ago. "Winter murder. Crime of passion. Open and shut," I said.


    "No burning. No decapitation. No��" He bent down to pick up a metal pentagram covered in wax, and a few spent matches. "��Devilry."


    Next, Stinson showed me to what, perhaps with a touch of the unsubtle, he referred to as the murder room: small and windowless, containing a heavy, round oak table covered in stains (wax, blood, who knows what else) encircled by eight chairs, one of which had been knocked over. The stale air smelled of death, incense and sulphur.


    "And now," he said, "the suspects."


    I paused before entering the room in which they waited, noting only that the door had been padlocked. I could hear banging from inside.


    "Was the lock necessary?"


    Stinson shrugged. "I had to improvise, and one of them was intent on leaving. Didn''t want her disturbing the crime scene."


    "Six are inside?" I asked, pulling out my notebook and pen.


    "Correct. Samara, that''d be the one claiming to be Tikhon''s sister, Milton, Naomi, Pearl, Raymundo, and the small fellow who called it in, Uriah."


    I finished writing the names. "Any impressions?"


    "Either they all did it, or they''re all mad. Or both," said Stinton.


    He unlocked the door and we entered.


    Six people indeed.


    "Good evening. Name''s Crane. I''m the Chief��"


    Anger! "What''s the idea, keeping us locked in here like this, like kept animals, with the portal open and it loosed and awaiting its due. Let us be! Let us all be, then get out. Leave! Leave here and never come back!"


    "I��" I said.


    Stinson took out his gun.


    "Calm down, Samara," said one of the five people seated. "They won''t believe you anyway. They think one of us is the killer."


    Samara waved her hand dismissively before returning to her window. "Why would I do it? Why would I kill my own brother," she said with her back turned.


    "More than that��we''ve a spiritual obligation," one of the women said. "To see it through."


    Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.


    "No chance of that now that he''s ruined us all," Samara sneered. At the back of the room, a small man, presumably Uriah, chewed his fingernail.


    I approached the man who''d spoken ("Crane. Chief of police.") and held out my hand. He shook it, saying, "Raymundo."


    "What I want are the facts," I said.


    "Facts," Samara said with audible distaste. "Always with your facts, your reason. That''s precisely what''s wrong with you people. That''s what Tikhon was learning how to overcome."


    "Just tell me what happened in the order it happened," I said.


    "Promise to hear us out?" Raymundo asked.


    "Yes."


    He patted down the front of his shirt for a pack of cigarettes. "Do you mind?" After I shook my head, he carefully took one cigarette out of the pack, held it between two fingers, lifted it into the air, made a guttural sound in no language I''d ever heard��and the tip of the cigarette ignited, just like that. "Do you see?"


    Behind me, Stinson gripped his gun.


    "Is that a trick?" I asked.


    "No," he said, stubbing out the cigarette. "It''s a demonstration of the properties of a portal."


    "You think you can persuade him, explain it to him step-by-step, when he lacks the one thing he must have to understand: faith," said Samara.


    I asked, "A portal to where?"


    "Hell."


    "Told you they''re mad, the lot of ''em," said Stinson.


    "Everything rests on faith," Samara was saying. "Tikhon knew that better than anyone."


    "Tell me from the beginning," I said.


    One of the other women in the room piped up: "It was a s��ance. We were having a s��ance."


    "And you are?"


    "Naomi."


    "For God''s sake, it wasn''t a s��ance!" Samara walked decisively away from the window. "A s��ance is a communication with the dead. We weren''t communicating with the dead. We were communicating with the never-living."


    I looked at Samara, then at Naomi, who was looking down, and finally at Raymundo, who said, "Samara''s right. This wasn''t a s��ance."


    "Sorry," mumbled Naomi. "It was my first time."


    "Sometimes we spoke with the dead," said the third woman, who I deduced was Pearl. "Or rather they spoke to us."


    "That wasn''t the point," said Samara.


    "It happened," said Pearl.


    "Were you speaking with the dead tonight?" I asked.


    Stinson scoffed.


    "No," said Raymundo. "We were gathered tonight to commune with, as Samara called them, the never-living, to open a portal to their world. The demon world. The dead did not interfere."


    "How did you open that portal. Did it involve��"


    Samara: "We didn''t kill anybody!"


    "Opening a portal requires eight humans performing a ritual. There is no death involved. The details of the ritual are arcane and rather unimportant. What''s important is that we opened it."


    "What happened then?"


    I felt another dry chill come over me. Samara laughed, and Uriah, at the back of the room, shook with terrible fright.


    "You felt that, didn''t you?" Samara said to me.


    "What is it?"


    "The never-living passing through the world of the living."


    "So this portal is still open?"


    Laughing furiously, "Of course it''s still open. That''s the entire point. That''s the problem we should be solving," said Samara.


    "I''m here to solve two murders," I said.


    "You shouldn''t be here at all. If he hadn''t felt the cowardice, none of this would have happened. You wouldn''t be here, and we''d be dealing with the true problem."


    "That''s not fair," said Uriah in a thin voice. "It was already happening. Tikhon lost��"


    "Shut your mouth!"


    "Let him speak," I said.


    "He doesn''t know what he''s talking about. And he''s not even a neophyte��" Samara''s eyes passed briefly over Naomi with a certain disregard. "��so he has no excuse. He''s a dilettante, and he''s always been nothing but a dilettante."


    Uriah muttered something under his breath.


    "What happened after you opened the portal?" I asked Raymundo.


    "Tikhon made contact with a demon."


    Suddenly, the only person in the room not to have said anything, Milton, stood up. He was older than the rest, white-bearded. "It''s coming back," he said. "It said half, and it''s coming back." Stumbling forward, he tripped and fell, and I realised he was blind.


    Uriah helped him back to his seat.


    "What''s coming back?"


    "The demon," Raymundo said.


    "We wanted to summon a minor demon, something we could control, but the demon we summoned wasn''t minor at all," said Pearl. "Once it got into Tikhon��I''ve never seen such a possession."


    Milton was rhythmically tapping his feet against the floor, repeating: "Two more. Two more. Two more."


    Outside, the rain had picked up, drumming on the roof, gargling down the eavestroughs. "Two more what?" I asked.


    "Two more victims."


    "The demon demanded payment," said Naomi without looking up. "Payment for using the portal. Payment in blood. It said we''d been using the portal without paying the toll."


    Milton, singing: "Fifty for the farmer, fifty for the red hen."


    "How did the demon say this?"


    "Through Tikhon," said Pearl. "It said that the blood price is half the quorum, and the quorum is eight."


    "So you''re admitting Tikhon threatened you!" Stinson burst out.


    "It wasn''t Tikhon. It was the demon speaking through Tikhon," Raymundo calmly explained. "Tikhon was no longer present."


    Samara sighed. "This is all pointless."


    "What happened after the demon, speaking through Tikhon, threatened you?"


    "It wasn''t a threat. It was a statement of price. Does a shopkeeper threaten you at the register when you''re purchasing from his store?" Samara asked.


    I corrected myself. "What happened after the demon made its statement?"


    "Wait��" Naomi rose, looking at Samara, then around the room. "��you knew about this? You knew there would be a price, a half to pay the red hen?"


    "We''d done it before without a price," said Uriah quietly.


    "We knew," said Samara.


    "What happened next?" I asked.


    Naomi: "You used me!"


    "Oh, don''t be so naive. Everything has a price. You wanted knowledge, you assumed the risk. Every single one of us assumed the risk."


    I repeated my question��louder.


    "He killed Lenny," said Uriah, his voice shaking. A tree branch smacked against the window. "He set him on hellfire."


    I looked to Raymundo for confirmation. "I''m afraid that''s true. After stating his price, the demon began collecting it. The price was four of eight and Lenny was the first of the four."


    "What did you do while Lenny was burning?"


    "We continued the ritual," said Samara. "That was what we had agreed to."


    "Some of us," said Naomi.


    Pearl said, "He didn''t burn long. Hellfire is within us all. The demon merely freed what was already within Leonard. Some sin or secret. It took him quickly. He didn''t even make it to the front door."


    "Then Tikhon started talking in some other language, and he put his hands on either side of his own head, grabbing his ears and started turning��"


    "The demon," said Samara. "Not Tikhon."


    "...turning and turning��"


    Milton: "Put the bird upon the stone, sharpen your axe and bring it down. Cleave the body from the head, and watch it run until it''s dead."


    "��until it came off, and then he grabbed it by the hair and held it up like a lantern, the mouth still wet and alive and talking, and it said: ''Either you or Samara are selected, or both,''" said Naomi.


    Samara raised an eyebrow.


    Uriah was speaking: "The blood was pouring out his neck, just pouring and pouring, all over the table and the candles, and the flames had turned red as the blood, and I couldn''t take it anymore. I just couldn''t."


    "Coward."


    "What did you do?"


    "I blew them out, the candles. Then I got up��"


    "He interrupted the ritual," said Samara. "One must never interrupt the ritual. The ritual must always be seen through to the end."


    "He was going to take another."


    "He will take another regardless, you fool. He must get his due. All you''ve done in your stupidity and weakness is put innocents in danger!"


    "And what did you do after getting up?" I asked.


    "I watched�� Tikhon, stumble��collapse in on himself, like a punctured balloon," said Uriah, "and stagger toward the door. He got through, then slumped down against the wall, rolled his head across the room and died. And as it rolled, the head spoke, telling me that if Ray was given to the red hen, so would I be."


    "Soon the police came," said Raymundo.


    "And here we are."


    Stinson tapped me on the shoulder. "Does it sound like a murder-suicide to you? Because it sure sounds like one to me."


    A man burned alive but no other signs of fire. A man with his head separated from his body, but no sign of the blade it was done with. The witness who called it in: in agreement with the other five witnesses that it was a demon who killed both.


    "The longer we wait, the more angry he becomes," said Pearl.


    "He always gets his due," said Samara.


    "Why did you do it?" I asked.


    "We didn''t. The demon did it. That''s what we''ve been trying to tell you from the very beginning. He took two, and he''s owed two more."


    "Not the killing," I said. "The ritual, the opening of the portal. Why do that?"


    "Why split the atom?" Samara answered, as the wind threw rain drops against the glass. "Why suffer to discover the source of the Nile? Why methodically map the human genome? To understand the world. To know existence."


    "I think it''s going to be me," Uriah said, biting his fingernail again. "I feel dead already."


    "But the ritual was broken��doesn''t that mean it''s all over?"


    "The ritual is broken, but the portal remains unsealed. The demonic debt remains outstanding. The never-living flow through and among us."


    "Can you close the portal?" I asked.


    "I can''t believe you''re humoring these loons," Stinson barked, but I could hardly hear him.


    "We can''t," said Samara. "That''s the problem."


    It was unbearably hot.


    Raymundo said, "Although Samara is correct, it isn''t true that the portal cannot be closed. Simply that we can''t close it. It can still be closed from the other side, the demon side, if the demons so choose."


    "Which is why we must pay the red hen what is owed," said Samara.


    I looked over my notes. "The quorum was eight, the price was half, and two have already died. So two more must die to satisfy the debt?"


    "I say we do the world a favour and kill all of ''em," said Stinson, keeping a firm grip on his gun.


    "Not any two," said Raymundo.


    "Only the chosen two," said Samara. "That is the conundrum."


    I glanced at my notes again. "Does anyone remember anything else said by the demon?" Although part of me felt ridiculous for taking these occultists at their word, another part��the part that had felt the coldness passing through my warm, living flesh��knew there were darker recesses of human experience yet unplumbed.


    Milton began tracing lines in the air in front of him. "Not something heard, but something seen." As he traced, he spoke, and as he spoke I wrote: "If I am indeed to go to Hell, I shall in fair company be, for into flames I shall damnate Pearl and Tikhon alongside me."


    "That''s what the demon showed you?"


    "I reckon," said Milton.


    "There''s also what Lenny said

 FYI ebay seller housenahum is selling knockoff versions of Penhaligons Blasted Heath!!

    BUYER BEWARE, WORST EXPERIENCE EVER, DO NOT BUY FROM HAUSENAHUM


    My bf Nate and me got engaged two years ago and were going to get married in 2020, but then the pandemic happened and I wasn''t going to get married in a mask with like fifteen people there, so we decided to move the date up to 2021.


    (Thaaanks to everyone who changed their plans!)


    Anyway Nate''s a big fraghead so I wanted to get him a fragrance by his favourite house Penhaligons. I chose one called Blasted Heath, but when I saw the prices I was like WTF!! I''m not made of money and even gray market was crazy expensive so i found housenahum on ebay and they were selling it for cheap.


    They shipped quick but when I gave it to Nate he was disappointed because it was a knockoff!!


    I felt like such an idiot and it spoiled the mood for the whole birthday. Nate and me even got into a fight :(


    Ps The perfume doesn''t even have a colour to it and there''s not even a label on the bottle


    UPDATE:


    Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.


    So I contacted housenahum and, get this, they told me what I got wasn''t a knockoff because it''s actually some "vintage" bottle of "eau de parfum" from late 19th century Massachusetts or something!! Unbelievable, like own up to the fact you sell knockofss!!


    Like it just "happened" to have the same name...


    UPDATE:


    I think to make it up to me after our fight Nate agreed to try the perfume.


    You know what? It didn''t even have a smell at all. I think they sold us water in a bottle


    Ps I guess the juice as Nate calls it does have a colour after all but you can only really call it a colour by analogy


    UPDATE:


    The skin where Nate sprayed the perfume has turned gray!!


    UPDATE:


    They just took Nate to the hospital! More and more of his skin turned gray almost dead and colourless, and the last time I saw him his lips were bulging like after a bee sting and his face was almost a parody of itself. I almost couldn''t look at him. My lovely Nate, what have they done to you?


    And housenahum won''t answer me anymore.


    The last thing I heard Nate say was that�� the colour�� it burns��


    UPDATE:


    They tied a towel over his face at the end because not even the nurses could look at him.


    Then he convulsed, all alone on the other side of the glass, convulsed until he started saying something about the smell of flowers, until parts of him started turning to gray dust and then he was just a dead pile of them.


    UPDATE:


    None of the doctors can explain it.


    Nate just isn''t anymore.


    There''s not going to be a wedding now. Am I widow?


    UPDATE:


    I still have that bottle and sometimes I stare it until I see its colour.


    That colour��


    Like something out of space...

 Valley / Let the winds revive you!

    Tired of your self?


    Feel trapped in the person you''ve become?


    Try Valley!


    Let the winds revive you!


    ��Valley (brochure)


    ---


    "...corporate job had made me into someone I wasn''t. I wasn''t a mean person, but my role demanded decisions. Then Valley erased all that, making me feel new again."


    ��customer testimonial


    ---


    "...like psychedelics for the soul."


    ��customer testimonial


    ---


    [recording]


    $5,000 for the pair of them.


    Yes, yes��


    [/recording]


    ---


    "What is Valley? Valley is freedom."


    ��CEO Marvin Chow


    ---


    "From Mali, at least initially. They''d buy Bella slaves from their Tuareg masters and fly them to Peru."


    "New technology? I wouldn''t call it technological. Valley didn''t invent anything. They merely unearthed something ancient, and commercialised it."


    Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.


    ��John Eldritch, whistleblower


    ---


    "...found in his Russian hotel room in what officials are calling a suicide."


    ��Washington Post ("Valley Whistleblower Dead")


    ---


    "It was beautiful. A real five-star resort. I''d never been so well treated in my life!"


    ��customer testimonial


    ---


    "I used to feel bad because of the things I''d done, how I''d treated people, you know? Not that I beat my wife or anything, but you know, little things. It was this constant, nagging feeling. Valley cured me of that."


    ��customer testimonial


    ---


    "It was a complete experience! But, of course, the whole reason we were there was for the valley."


    ��customer testimonial


    ---


    "It is my client''s position that his assets are irrelevant."


    "My client''s customers obviously considered it worth their money."


    "My client cannot speak to the location."


    "My client has no comment."


    ��interview with Marvin Chow''s legal counsel


    ---


    "...has resurfaced in Pakistan."


    ��Washington Post ("Valley Whistleblower Alive")


    ---


    "We would force the slave into a man-made cave at the end of the valley."


    ��J. Eldritch, Twitter


    ---


    "A perfect day. Sunny, blue sky. We were blindfolded and flown out to this gorgeously lush, green valley. A real reconnection with nature, with the very essence of man."


    ��customer testimonial


    ---


    "Then they''d land the chopper and march the customers into the valley, far enough away so that they couldn''t hear the screaming from the cave. Then the wind would pick up��"


    ��J. Eldritch, Twitter


    ---


    "...so powerful and fresh, like evaporated spring water. I just closed my eyes, relaxed and let the wind peel my face right off."


    ��customer testimonial


    ---


    "It didn''t hurt. It felt like taking off a facial mask."


    ��customer testimonial


    ---


    "The wind was intense, and their faces whipped down the length of the valley, toward the cave."


    ��J. Eldritch, Twitter


    ---


    "And I was a new me. I swear, it was like experiencing the world for the first time, like being myself for the first time: a rebirth. All the detritus of living�� gone."


    ��customer testimonial


    ---


    "We heard him raving��in a dozen voices��arguing madly with himself, even before we got there. But what I''ll never get over is the sight of all those bloody faces plastered over his like so many coats of paint."


    ��J. Eldritch, Twitter


    ---


    "It''s successful because it works."


    ��Marvin Chow


    ---


    [Account suspended]


    ��J. Eldritch, Twitter


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    "Amazing!"


    ��customer testimonial


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    "John Eldritch has never been a Valley employee. Fake news."


    ��Marvin Chow

 The Compost Men

    It has come to this:


    Posting on reddit about a phenomenon not covered by the mainstream media.


    I tried.


    "I''m sorry, but we''re not that kind of news source," they said. "Perhaps the National Enquirer."


    "I have evidence," I said.


    "I''m sure. Bye."


    Not one newspaper or website would hear me out. No one asked to see the photos and videos.


    So read it here first��


    Our organic waste has come alive!


    It wasn''t always this way. In the 1980s, composting was a fringe activity, and organic waste usually went into the garbage. My town didn''t start advertising composting as an option until the late 1990s, when suddenly they started giving away composters.


    You know the ones I mean: the big black ones.


    We should have clued in. When''s the last time the government gave anything away? But we didn''t, instead piling decomposing matter onto decomposing matter in our composters, thinking we were doing the planet a favour.


    Perhaps we were.


    But there''s a difference between the planet and humanity, and it''s humanity who''ll pay for this.


    I saw my first Compost Man in March.


    Holding my bucket of waste, I lifted the composter lid��and there they were: a pair of spheroid eggshell eyes staring menacingly at me! Through a dense cloud of flies!


    I threw the waste down, grabbed a shovel and started stabbing the half-formed soil within, but to no avail.


    They are not solid as we are.


    Not as weak.


    The blade penetrated the compost but the Compost Man remained alive, its crushed eyes reforming, and its fly companions buzzing with mocking laughter.


    I reported this immediately to the police.


    No one investigated.


    Behind my back, they started calling me an old fool.


    Soon after, animals began to disappear: roaming cats that had left home and never come back; small dogs, then larger ones; and livestock in the form of chickens, sheep and goats.


    If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.


    Always explanations followed.


    Coyotes got the cats. Hawks picked off the small dogs. Someone stole the larger ones. As for the sheep and goats, they were got by wolves.


    It''s been a century since there''s been wolves around here. Yet they''ll believe in their return before they''ll believe in Compost Men!


    They only stopped calling me a fool when the first child disappeared.


    Amber alert.


    Followed by a police search, all resulting in nothing of course.


    The police even talked to me, treating me as if I was the one who had done it. I told them they were freer than air to check my property, but they''d be better off checking the composters.


    I suppose they didn''t listen.


    A week later someone reported human teeth and bones in the soil they''d spread in their garden.


    This is not a shock.


    After all, we are as organic as a banana squash. You can bet your life the Compost Men will break us down and use us as raw materials for their nefarious ends.


    I started gathering evidence after that.


    Filming not only my own composters, but those belonging to others, documenting the wickedness within. An evil, alien sentience containing cat hair and dog tags and goat hooves.


    More children disappeared.


    Until the police decided there must be a serial kidnapper in town.


    Parents kept their children home after that.


    But more still went missing.


    "She was in the yard," they''d say. "I barely took my eye off her."


    They should have asked:


    "Well, what else is in your yard, ma''am?"


    Composters.


    They rove now��some of them: at night��ones who''ve grown stronger, consumed more of us, I reckon; like snails with black plastic shells, crawling up and down the street, from darkness to darkness between the streetlight halos.


    There''s even a beauty to it in the midnight silence.


    Elegance akin to a spreading cancer.


    Terminal: incurable��


    treatable at best; at best, we might have a few more years if we open our eyes and our composters and recognise the hideous threat inside.


    Yet what do we do but dally, and dallying disbelieve, concocting implausible counter-explanations, when the truth is decomposing right before us. In our own backyards, by our own design. We are feeding our own destruction, heaping food into the maws of a damp and transmogrifying darkness we have not even begun to comprehend! As they tell us to.


    Have we no brains of our own?


    No critical reasoning?


    What is filled with waste��I ask!��our composters or our minds?


    Even now, the Compost Men go about their business.


    If you listen, you can hear them:


    Hiding behind the hum of air conditioners and passing cars, behind the chatter of our phone and television screens, you''ll discern the incessant buzzing of their flies, and within that buzzing you will hear the sounds of a most hateful decomposition: of us: our pets, our loved ones and ourselves: the decay of the civilization we have built.


    So, tonight, hug your dogs and daughters and do it��


    Open the composter and gaze inside��


    See them churn.


    See the way we ourselves churn, for what is a composter if not an analog of the soul: a wasted essential encased in man-made plastic. We have made the eternal perishable, and the physical everlasting.


    And now they come for us.


    It''s not even just children anymore. They''ve started taking adults. Imagine the power they must feel, hunting with impunity the biggest and strongest of our species.


    "How''s Fred?" Carla will ask Zoe, showing her impeccable teeth as she goes mindlessly about her routine.


    "Oh, Fred''s gone."


    Gone.


    Gone where? Gone how?


    These are the questions. Instead, she''ll say, "It''s some weather we''ve been having."


    "Quite."


    And I''m the fool.


    "I''m sorry, but we''re not that kind of news source."


    All news is compost news!


    How many of us must they take before we act for ourselves, before we quit our routines and unplug from the manufactured daydreams with which they distract us?


    I may be an old man, but some of you are young and brave and smart.


    Unscrew those lids.


    Peer inside.


    See the squirming uncomfortable truth.


    The Compost Men are coming. Let us at least muster a whimper.

 The Cosmic Lighthouse

    ��ever lie to me again!"


    father said.


    I was airborne, mid-consequence of his punch: feet off the floor, pain just beginning...


    I fell.


    Standing over me:


    "I''ll burn your books queerboy. I''ll burn you."


    I heard the words upside-down.


    Such was life.


    Mother was gone, and in the morning I went to class swollen and mis-hued, hoping my bones were whole.


    I lived in a small town, dry as cremation, speared by church towers, anchored by the factories.


    Father worked in one.


    Big fists.


    I read books not to become him.


    There was a spot overlooking town, looking down on it, that I went to learn the exit routes.


    Escape as horizontal lines of printed symbols: being sounds: being ideas.


    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    At night: the stars.


    When Orliss bought the property nobody knew anything about him except he wasn''t from around.


    He kept to himself and rarely went to town.


    First time I met him was before the church. "You believe in that?" he asked. I said I didn''t, and he said he didn''t either. "I''m an astronomer," he said.


    He started construction of the lighthouse then.


    Though nobody knew what it was.


    "Somebody beat you?" he asked the second time we met. I told him who and why, and he said I could go to his place and read all his books. I said father wouldn''t let me. He said I could say I got a job. I said father would check for earnings. He said he''d pay me.


    So it was.


    One day I showed up purple with a tooth loose.


    Orliss told me he was building a lighthouse. "Not a normal lighthouse��a cosmic lighthouse."


    "To disperse the asteroids," he said.


    So it was.


    One day father hit me so hard he broke my ribs. I was away awhile, and when I went back, Orliss sat with me under the stars, looking down at the world, and said I should kill my father and work as a cosmic lighthouse keeper.


    He gave me poison, which I gave father; and father died, crawling on the floor, scratching at his own suffocation foaming at the mouth like a rat.


    It was mixed feelings I had.


    Then I was alone.


    Spending more time reading myself to myself.


    Orliss taught me how to work the lighthouse, how to detect the asteroids and disperse them.


    One day, when Orliss was old, an alarm went off in the lighthouse. It was like nothing before, and was pain in my ears like a wallop, but Orliss smiled. "It is becoming," he said.


    I did not understand.


    Orliss laughed and explained the lighthouse wasn''t a lighthouse at all but a beacon: a magnet calling asteroids to slaughter the world.


    "The end approaches," he said.


    I said we should be salvation for the world.


    "What world?" he asked. "The one in which fathers beat their sons, and sons murder their fathers?"


    "Bad world deserves slaughter. There be goodness only in its blood," he said.


    So it was��

 Knife

    "I''m lonely," she says.


    I ignore her.


    "I know you can hear me. At least look at me. You used to like looking at me."


    I refuse, remembering instead the accursed day we met��


    It was at a yard sale. Late afternoon. Birds chirping. Masked strangers mumbling to each other, counting money, pawing through knickknacks heaped upon plastic tables flying handwritten paper banners announcing: $5, $10, $25...


    While the owner, dressed in black, hangs ever-present over our shoulders, whispering factoids enticing us to buy:


    "Italian original."


    "It costs three times as much on eBay."


    "That, friend, belonged to my dear late Natasha."


    I find nothing of interest.


    "Perhaps I could show you something a little more special?" he asks me, imploring with his sunken eyes.


    In empathy I agree.


    He leads me to his garage, ruffles around in a box and pulls out a knife: a gorgeous hunting blade ornated with a carved wooden handle.


    You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.


    "Ten dollars," he says��then, before I can say anything, corrects himself: "No, no. Five."


    The knife is worth much more than five dollars.


    Much more than ten.


    I pay him.


    Three nights later, I''m awoken by the sound of a woman''s voice. "Fred? Frederick!"


    Rubbing my eyes, I see: no one.


    The room is empty save for the wandering moonlight.


    "Fred, look at me."


    The voice, I realise, is coming from the knife. I pick it up, and in the moonlit glow��drop it��


    for reflected in its polished blade I had seen a woman''s face!


    I rub my eyes and return to the knife, telling myself it couldn''t be; but a hallucination, a mnemonic relic of an unremembered dream...


    I pick it up��


    and there she is. "You''re not Frederick," she says.


    "I��I''m Norman," I say.


    "I suppose you''ll do. Will you love me?"


    "Who are you?"


    "Natasha."


    ��now, weeks later: "Norman, I''m lonely. Look at me. Talk to me!"


    I''ve tried burying the knife, throwing it into the river, but her infernal voice defies physics.


    "Talk to me!"


    I''ve had to dig it up; dive for it.


    "Talk to me!"


    "Fine," I yell finally. "What do you want to talk about?"


    "Finding me a friend."


    "You know I��"


    "It''s lonely in here all by myself."


    I ignore her.


    "So talk to me, Norman!"


    "Find me a friend or talk to me. Friend or talk!"


    "Fine!"


    When the deed is done��the knife driven into her chest, the blood released, the body cold��I bury her, clean the knife and go home.


    "Thank you, Norman," says Natasha.


    "What the fuck?" says Lorna. "Where the hell am I?"


    "Hello?"


    "Hello!"


    "I don''t like my new friend," says Natasha a few days later. "Find me another."


    "Murderer!" Lorna shouts at me. "Get over yourself, Lori," says Natasha. "Fuck you, freak," Lorna snaps back, and all the while my headache grows.


    Until I can take no more!


    ��plunging the knife into my heart:


    FADE OUT.


    FADE IN:


    Two-dimensionally polygamous,


    sharply I glisten.