A laptop computer was found in the city sewers on Monday, April 22nd of 2013, after screams were heard echoing from below. As far as authorities could tell, there was no owner. All picture files on the hard drive were corrupted, and forensics failed to reconstruct all but one of them. The reconstructed photo partially revealed a terrified man in his late teens or early twenties, and some sort of face behind him.
Analysts have disputed whether or not that actually is another face, or simply image noise created as a result of the reconstruction of the photo. Apart from the single image, all that remained on the laptop was a cryptic word file left open, unsaved. Some see this as the suicide note of a deranged lunatic. Others see it as a prank. All that is known for sure is that over the past three months, there have been over twenty disappearances, all leaving no trace.

**********

I just hope I can finish this. I need to tell it. I can’t NOT tell it. But I don’t have time to finish it. And that’s what’s horrifying. Because, if I don’t tell, then it might get the rest. I HAVE to. I’m on very limited time, but I’m gonna be as detailed as possible. So it doesn’t get the rest. Please bear with me, please listen to me.

I guess it all started three months ago, when we found that secret room. The room in the sewers with the little trap door under the rug. When that happened, everything went wrong. But I’m getting ahead of myself, I have to tell the full truth. Or else it will get the rest.

I’m nineteen years old. Me and my three best friends have always been fond of the sewers. We would go down there and explore, at first using rope, then chalk signs, then nothing at all as we learned every twist, turn, and passage to the point where we could find our way around in pitch darkness, something we’ve had to do on at least three occasions when our flashlights died.

Now, what’s strange, is that we never found the room. It was when James asked to join us that the room was discovered. James was more of an acquaintance than a friend, but we often found him hanging out with us. We never told him about our excursions to the sewers; most people thought of that as strange. We had known James for probably six months before he overheard us speaking about the sewers.

Of course, he wanted to know what we were talking about. So we told him, about how we went down into the sewers every now and again to explore. He, of course, wanted to join our next expedition. We said it was fine, and we went early the next Saturday.

James wasn’t very good with darkness. We found that out the hard way. Or maybe it was the darkness coupled with claustrophobia. I don’t know. But, once we got into the deeper levels of darkness, where the daylight ceased to exist, and the tunnels became black, he began to hyperventilate.

At first, it was almost unnoticeable. His breathing got quicker, and he moved closer to me. Then, without warning, he began to breathe wildly, and he dropped his flashlight. It hit the ground and went out, and just like that, he was sprinting, sprinting and screaming for help, down the dark tunnels.

We chased after him. Following his screams, we started to lose all of our sense of direction. We went deeper than we thought possible. We thought we knew these tunnels. But there was one small niche, that we had never noticed before, that led into an even older series of tunnels. We had to crawl on our stomachs to get through it, and it opened into a tunnel not much bigger than that. We had to crouch down to the point of being on our hands and knees to traverse it.

It’s in those same sewers that I’m sitting now, with hundreds of white Christmas lights strung up around me, and stretching down the tunnel. These won’t last forever. The battery I’m running them off of can only keep them lit for a few hours. But they keep me comfortable, and serve as a warning. The thing can’t stand to be in light. It’s coming for me, I know it. But the lights will go out before it can get to me, so I’ll know.

I’m hiding here because this is the last place it will expect me to go. It’s looking for me. But it wouldn’t think that I would go into its sewers, its very back yard. I know that it will find me, and soon. But I just hope that this will prolong the inevitable. Long enough for me to get my story out. I’ve got my phone programmed to dial 911 in two hours. And I’ve got a camera, with night vision, ready to record when it shows up. So the cops will know, to stop it.

I just hope they can.

We eventually tracked down James, and he was sitting outside a big rusty door. It looked like it hadn’t been touched in years. Somehow we convinced ourselves to open it and oh my god I just wish we hadnt this crap would have NEVER HAPPENED IF NOT FOR THAT STUPID DOOR OH MY GOD IM GONNA DIE AND

I have to stop. Panicking won’t do anything to help me. I’m past help. Have I told you our names? There was me- Curt, and then James, Alan, Josh and Chris.

Writing down facts help me calm down. Just bear with me. I’m almost there.

We went in the door. That was a mistake. In the room, was an ancient chair, and a threadbare rug. Not much else, except a table full of disturbing instruments. And a calendar. The calendar was old and faded, and a dark yellow, but I could just barely make out dates in the faded ink.

The calendar was dated for 1903. Over a hundred years prior.

The table had what looked like torture tools set on it. I recognized a thumbscrew. Josh cut himself on some kind of twisted knife-hook-thing. Hammers and nails. I shudder thinking of what some of the other instruments were used for. There was what looked like the remains of a skeleton on another table in the corner of the room.

A rectangular table with Metal rings at each corner, and decayed ropes through those metal rings. I felt sick.

We decided then that we needed to get out, but Alan tripped over the rug and kicked it to the side. There was a trap door under it. Again, curiosity got the best of us, and we opened it, against James’s protests. It was pitch black down there. An old ladder led down, but that was it. We shined our lights in, and there were several things that might have once been human remains, but were now nearly dust.

At this point, something came over James. He climbed down the ladder into the hole, against our protests. After a moment, his light flickered and then died. Nothing but silence from down below. We were just beginning to panic when he casually walked into view.

He smiled up at us.

His eyes were just empty bleeding sockets.

We all just stood there in stunned silence, and then our lights wavered and flickered out. Mine flickered back on for a split second, and we saw some THING standing behind him. I don’t know what it was. Yes I do.

It was IT. The thing that’s been hunting me and my friends.

It looked very angry. It looked horrifying. It was dead blue skin and decomposing face. I could see its skull through its cheeks. It looked female. It had long decayed hair, and a bony frame. What looked like slashes in its dead cheeks, and gashes around its empty sockets. It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I think, that if I would have seen it for more than a split nanosecond, I would have gone insane. Gone insane or dropped dead.

The light lasted for a fraction of a second, a fraction of a second that has haunted me every minute of every day since then, and then everything was dark and James was screaming. I ran. Everyone else ran too, but I was the first. We scattered. Floundering in the dark, in the unknown. I don’t know how long I was down there. It felt like centuries.

Eventually, I made it to the surface. It was pitch dark in the dead of night. I remembered that we had gone in during the early morning hours.

I went home. It was four o’clock in the morning. All I remember is turning every light in the house on, blasting Looney Tunes on the TV, and then passing out.

The next day, I found out that only Alan and Chris had made it out the previous night. We went to the police and they organized a manhunt. Twenty people went into the sewers that night. Me, Alan, and Chris were not among them. We vowed to never step foot in those tunnels again. The manhunt never found that room.

We never told them about it. We agreed to tell them that we had found a section of sewer that we hadn’t explored before, and gotten separated and lost.

The search was unsuccessful. After a week, the police were forced to call it off. And the rest is history. Over the next several months, everyone who went into those sewers has disappeared, without a trace. Alan, Chris, gone. I’m the only one le

Oh fuck I think a light just went out. The darkness is coming, and I think I can see her or it whatever the fuck it is shit

Im the only one left you cant go into the sewers. They need to find the room and SHUT THE TRAPDOOR and SHUT THE OTHER DOOR so it cant get out

oh god the lights are going out oh shit oh fuck fuck look for my camera and shut the doors PLEASE YOU HAVE TO 54der6ugybioijmn5d46yubi

**********

Police found a dropped camera deep within the sewage tunnels. No one has spoken about what footage is on the camera, and all to see the footage have committed suicide soon thereafter. Police are currently working with city records to conduct a coordinated search of the sewer system to find the location spoken of in the file….

**********

Detective Alexander Sherridan sits down in front of the television. He had requested a copy of the tape that has so disturbed anyone who has watched it, and now he has it. He feels apprehension building. Should he watch this? Some think it is cursed. However, Sherridan is not a superstitions man. He puts the tape in and presses play. A young man comes on the screen, the same from the picture. He is screaming, while behind him the lights are rapidly going out, moving in sequence towards him. What he is screaming is mostly incoherent, and what Sherridan is able to make out is simply more of the same of what he said in the word document– “close the doors.”
Suddenly the last lights flash out spectacularly, and there is a small glimpse of the laptop before the camera goes dark. What ensues are some of the most horrifying screams that Sherridan has ever heard, but he only barely registers these. He refuses to believe what he thinks he saw. To be sure, he rewinds the video, and plays it again. And again. And again.
Finally, he pauses it and goes forward frame by frame, until he sees the image he feared. Just as the lights flash for the final time, there is a woman grabbing the young man. Except he is not sure that she is a woman. It has no eyes. They look like they were gouged out at some point. There are slashes in her face, or what is left of its face. It is mostly decayed bone, with some skin stretching over it. The teeth are worn nubs. Sherridan averts his eyes. He can’t look at this thing anymore.
He notices at that moment, in the background, stand other things. People that have disappeared. All decaying. All with no eyes. They seem to be looking directly at him, accusingly almost. He tells himself that that is impossible, as they have no eyes. Then he notices motion.
The woman holding the young man pulls her face in some caricature of a smile. Then, she begins digging her fingers into his face. He begins screaming, as she literally rips his eyes out of his head. Sherridan runs forward and presses the power button on the TV. Nothing happens. The woman/thing continues to rip the eyes out of the man’s head, and Sherridan begins screaming with him, as he feels his sanity begin to slip. He rips the plug to the TV out of the wall.
Nothing happens. He retches as the thing pulls the remains of the eyes out, and begins pressing them into her own sockets. He turns and runs full force towards the wooden baseball bat mounted on the wall. He grabs it. He intends to destroy the TV. As he runs back towards the television, the he raises the bat. Just as he’s about to swing and destroy the screen, the thing winks at him with its new eyes.
Whatever vestiges of sanity that are left in Alexander Sherridan shatter at that moment. He drops the bat and stumbles backward into the next room. All he knows is that that thing knows where he is and how to get to him. And he knows that he doesn’t want that to happen.
As he presses the barrel of his police issue Glock into his temple, he vaguely recalls some urban legend or quote or something he’d heard somewhere about how if someone dies a violent death, their spirit stays there, angry, forever. “Fuck that,” he says out loud, before squeezing the trigger.
On the television screen, all that is seen is a terrified young man in a bright flash of light. Nothing more.

Credit To – Matt M.

“Come play with me.” That line…it’s a cliché for the horror genre, is it not? You all know what I mean, the unsettling apparition of a child, or maybe just the voice, beckoning to you. What is it about children that gives them the ability to be so damn creepy? Maybe…maybe it’s the fact that, generally speaking, children are helpless and anyone with a nurturing side to their personality wants to help them and care for them. I mean, if any one of us saw a child in trouble, I’m sure we’d rush to help in whatever way we could…and in normal circumstances, if a child said “come play with me” someone might just pass a ball around for a minute or two, maybe play hopscotch. Children are innocent, right? Safe enough to play with a child, right? I’m telling you you’re wrong.

This isn’t something I like to tell people, in fact it’s something only my mother and I know, but over the past few months it’s been building up inside of me…this urge to tell…someone. I need to tell someone what happened, even if it was nearly thirteen years ago.

This isn’t a story I’d consider telling people, but not because I’m afraid they’d think me crazy. I couldn’t give a damn about that. I don’t tell people this because it brings back some pretty painful memories for me, and even now as I’m writing this, it’s hard to talk about.

Anyway…I’ve avoided this long enough, it’s time. When I was a small girl, I lived in a trailer park with my mom and dad. I was an only child, and I had a normal life, for the most part. I don’t remember much. As I said, I was a small child. What I do know is that one night, my mother and father got into a big fight over dinner which resulted in my father throwing whatever my mother had cooked outside the back door and yelling at me, kicking me across the room at one point. The man had a temper, that was no secret, but he wasn’t usually like this, at least not around me. I don’t blame him or hate him for any of this, and to this day I’ll do anything to defend him. I love my father. However, this incident was a turning point for my mother. The next night when my father went to work, my mother told me we were going on a trip. She packed a small bag of my clothes, one of hers, and told me to grab anything else I might want. All I took was a small stuffed cat named Buttons that my father had given me for my first birthday. She called a cab and we went to a motel room for a few days. After that, she told me that we’d be moving into a new home called a “shelter.” She said there’d be other kids there, probably some of them around my age, and that I’d like it there.

She was right about there being other kids my age, and the house was beautiful. It was huge, with a playground out back and lots of room to run around. What I remember most though was the staircase.

I made friends quickly with all the kids there, but the one I liked talking to most was Sarah. Sarah was quiet and she always wore a dress and always stood at the top of the stairs and talked to me. She never did anything else really, and she didn’t talk to anyone else. I never went up to her, I just stood at the bottom and we’d talk like that. Sarah didn’t really like the other kids very much because she said they weren’t like us. She said they didn’t know what it was like to think like us. She didn’t really like that I played with the other kids, but she didn’t try to stop me either. She said she only wanted to play with me.

Not long after moving in, I met three kids that lived in the house next door. One of them was my age, the boy, and the two sisters were a little bit older. My mom said it was a good idea to get out of the house and go play with them for a while, so I did. They invited me to come inside and see their playroom, so of course I did. That sounded awesome! I’d never had a “playroom” of my own…a room especially made for playing? It sounded great!

The room itself was fairly empty except for a toy chest in the corner and several toys strewn on the carpeted floor. The walls were bare white, like the rest of the house, and the windows stood without a curtain just opposite the door. When we were in the playroom, the oldest sister walked over to the window and stared out, shaking her head. “Do you know what happened over there?” she asked. I walked over to where she was and looked to where she was pointing. She was pointing at the shelter, right in the window facing the one in the playroom. I shook my head. What did she mean? What happened there? “Do you wanna know?” She asked me, her brother and sister silent now. I simply nodded, keeping quiet so I could hear the story. “A long time ago, there was a little girl named Sarah who lived there…that was her room,” she said, pointing to the room across from where we stood. “Well…one night there was a fire. No body made it out. She almost did…they said they found her body at the top of the stairs, and that’s where she died.” I felt like I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to look out the window anymore. I couldn’t. “They remodeled the building a couple years ago,” she said, matter of fact.

“Stop being a know it all with your big words!” her brother said.

“Oh…” I said. That’s all I could say. Lucky for me, it was starting to get dark, and my mom came over to bring me back with her. I didn’t want to tell her because she might not let me play with my new friends again. I didn’t want to tell Sarah either. I stayed as far away from the stairs as I could.

The next night, the other family who lived in the house told us she and the kids would be gone for a couple of days. This meant that mom and I were, more or less, alone. I wasn’t feeling well, so a little break from other people would be nice. I laid down on the couch and mom turned the tv on for me, sitting at the other end of the couch. She asked me if I wanted to go upstairs to our room…I said no. I wanted to stay downstairs.

I must have fallen asleep. I can still remember that breathing was hard, my nostrils feeling crusty from running so much during the day. I woke up in the middle of the night to the fire alarm going off. Mom woke up around the same time I did and picked me up, carrying me outside. I heard sirens of fire trucks in the distance. I was pretty out of it when they got there, but I still remember what they said to my mom after they’d gone inside. They’d said “we couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary…I don’t know why the alarm went off.” How could it have been set off by just nothing? My mom said it was “probably just the weather” and took me back inside. I remember as she carried me back to the couch that I saw Sarah standing at the top of the stairs, watching me. I started to cry.

A week later, my mom said she found a new place for us to live, she said it would be our own apartment, not like the shelter. I was relieved…I hadn’t talked to Sarah since those kids told me about her, and I wouldn’t go upstairs alone. I hadn’t seen her since the incident with the fire alarm. However, I would hear her voice sometimes as I lay in bed at night. It was like she was calling out just to me. “Come play with me.”

The new apartment was close to the school I’d be going to kindergarten at and, like mom said, we had our very own place. There were three floors, each with one apartment per floor, and ours was on the very top. For several months, my mother and I lived peacefully in our new apartment, and I began to forget about Sarah. For several months, we were happy. I missed my father and thought about him all the time, but for the most part I was happy here.

Then the nightmares started. Each and every one were the same. It started as simply me lying in bed at night. This made it initially difficult for me to tell if it was a dream or real. In the dream, I would start to drift off…until the smell of smoke came to my nostrils. At this point, I would jump out of bed, coughing slightly, and looking around. I would cry out for my mom and I could hear her calling for me, but I couldn’t get to her. I stayed in the room for the longest time, waiting for my mom or the firemen to come save me. After a while, it became obvious that no one was coming to get me, and I was starting to get light headed. I managed to get out of my bedroom door to see that most of the apartment was engulfed in flames. In the dreams, I only made it to the top of the stairs before I passed out on the floor from breathing in too much smoke. The last thing I hear over the crackling of the fire before I wake is a voice. “Come play with me. I will find someone to play with me.”

The summer before I was to start first grade, my mother announced that we would be moving, yet again, to another town altogether. I wasn’t excited. This meant I’d have to make new friends and start over again. Secretly, part of me hoped it would make the nightmares go away. Mom said that we had until the end of July to move in to the new apartment, but that she wanted me to see it before we moved in. She took us both on a road trip to a town totally unfamiliar to me, and what seemed to be a long way away from what we called home. The town was bigger than what I was used to, and I remember being excited because we passed three playgrounds on the way to the new apartment. She took me inside and we looked around. This place was my favorite of all of them. It had windows everywhere that made it look bright and sunny and above all, happy. I couldn’t wait to move, and I was sad that we couldn’t move in right then and there. After a while, mom said we had to go back home, so we went and the car and drove back the way we’d come. As we pulled onto our street, it didn’t take long to notice that something was wrong. Lined up in front of our building were two fire trucks and a police car, all with lights flashing. My mom parked on the other side of the road and went over, telling me to stay in the car. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but I remember staring up at the black smoke still faintly smearing the sky and feeling my blood turn cold. It was coming from our apartment. When mom came back to the car, her face was drained of all color and she couldn’t speak right away. When she finally spoke, it was more to herself, and she could only get three words out. “Why just ours?” I thought I saw Sarah up in the blackened window of our former home.

Today, I sit at my computer writing this and thinking about her. I’m shaking, and I don’t know why. It’s months before my nineteenth birthday and I’m living with my dad, attending a community college in the area. My dad remarried years ago and now has a little girl from his second marriage. She’s quite a bit younger than me—six—and she reminds me a lot of myself at her age.

I guess she’s the reason I started to write this. I haven’t been able to get the events of yesterday out of my head. I was watching her while my dad was at work and I was outside with her while she played on the swing set. I heard the phone ringing inside, so naturally I went to answer it. This isn’t the part I can’t shake off. The thing is…when I went back outside, Rebecca looked at me and said “we have to go inside.” When I asked her why, she only said four little words before running back up the steps and in the house. Four little words, but they were enough to bring chills up my spine.

“Sarah wants to play.”

Credit To – Ashleigh Margaret

This is the third installment in the Tower of Sorrow series.
Part One: Yon Black Edifice Hath Called Me
Part Two: First Steps
Part Three: Tight Spaces
Part Four: The Driver

-

I lie in the now open trunk, peering up at the dark figure standing over me. He drops his smile and sighs heavily, “Here, let me help you.” He reaches his hand out to me and I cringe back into the trunk. His skin is a sickly grey and his fingers are long and gnarled.

“Seriously guy?” he huffs.

“F-fu-fuck you,” I mutter just above a whisper.

“I hate this fucking job,” he grumbles, snapping his fingers.

Before I even have the chance to process what he’s just said, I’m standing on the road next to him. He reaches out his ugly hands and starts brushing off my clothes. “There now,” his grin returns, “much better, and no worse for the wear I suppose.”

“How did you – ,“ he shoots up his hand and waves a finger lazily at me.

“There will be plenty of time for questions. As for right now, I have a job to do and we need to get going. There are some very impatient individuals awaiting your arrival.” With a wave of his hand the passenger side door swings open.

“No! Not just no, but fuck no!” I growl. “I’m not going anywhere near that rusty hunk of shit until I get some answers. Who are you? How did I get here? Who’s waiting for me?” I can feel my hands curling into fists as my anger rises to overtake my fear.

“Look, we don’t fucking have time for this okay? There are things in this world and others that your feeble human mind just couldn’t possibly understand. Some of those vile things are right on our fucking heels. We have to go now! Just trust me!”

“Why in God’s name would I trust YOU? For all I know you’re some kind of psychotic serial killer, or some shit!”

He barks laughter, “God? Really? What exactly do you think you know about God? That motherf-” His sentence is cut off by an impossibly loud clap of thunder. It shakes the ground and causes my ears to ring. Looking up, I see a long shimmering blue line zig-zagging its way across the night sky. As I watch it begins to expand outward, exposing an orange and yellow light. In the distance I can hear inhuman shrieking and growling. My gaze is broken when I feel a hand squeezing my shoulder. I look back to the dark figure only to see him standing exactly where he was before. I whirl around and am face to face with the rotting corpse of a woman. The top left portion of her head is missing; her left eye hangs limply on her cheek as the socket that once contained it is no more. Her skin is pale and patches of it hang off of her like peeling paint. Violently her head snaps one hundred and eighty degrees and she is flung away from me into the desert. I look back to see my kidnapper’s hand raised and upturned with a violent smirk covering his face.

“CAR! NOW!” the figure bellows. This time there is no hesitation. I break into a mad dash and slam the car door behind me. The figure ducks into the car throws it in drive and peels out onto the highway. Screeching down the road he swerves this way and that to avoid even more of the ghastly walking corpses that are trying to overtake the vehicle. In the rear view mirror I can see swarms of black winged creatures pouring out of the now enormous hole in the sky. They claw, bite, and attack each other trying to get into our world. Their bright green eyes pierce the night sky as they swoop, dive, and tumble towards us.

“What the fuck?!” I shout over the screaming engine of the car.

“You just had to say His fucking name, didn’t you?! Fucking humans!” he yells, smashing his fists on the steering wheel.

Credit To: J. Brown

“It’s not too bad, is it, sweetie?”

Humbly dressed and brown haired, Wilbert Snow smiled at his daughter, and Mary gently smiled back from the living room. Mary’s father, Wilbert, was searching for a home set on a few acres of land that he could potentially build a vegetable garden on, and after a tedious hunt, he found one that would hopefully please Mary’s taste. It was a dreary journey for both Mary and her father. Mary’s father had his own difficult times, but he made sure that Mary would always have her mind on something joyous and kind. When Mary’s mother passed away a few years ago, she was devastated. Since Mary’s mother passed away from an unknown illness in their old house, Mary’s father decided it would be best for both of them to leave and move to a new home. A new garden with lots of land for Mary to play in, and a new place to start fresh memories is what Wilbert wanted. It would definitely take both of them some time to get used to Flyde. The nearest village, Hambleton, was only a few miles away.

“Dad, this house seems so old. Why here?” Mary scoffed. Mary’s father glared at her from the doorway with packed boxes in both hands. “Are you going to complain, or are you going to help your dad get stuff out of the car?” Mary’s father returned. Mary shrugged and proceeded to help unpack the boxes. She didn’t really like the thought of moving to a place where houses weren’t present for miles, nor did she like the thought of living on a big piece of land partially surrounded by forests. The only thing she did like had nothing to do with the house, but that summer was just beginning. Mary had just finished her second year in high school, and she couldn’t wait to relax at home. She was longing to see her friends that she’d left behind when she moved out of her previous home. She only ever had a few friends, but they were true friends.

Mary peaked out of the window in an attempt to see why her father was taking so long to bring in more boxes and saw him talking to a woman. Mary stepped out the front door and onto the porch to observe her father closely. “Hey, Mary, come say ‘hi’ to your aunt Tori for a second.” said Mary’s father. Mary was quite shy, even if it was family she was going to greet. “Oh, wow! You are just so gorgeous, aren’t you?” Mary blushed at her aunt’s kind remark. Mary didn’t really see herself as pretty, although; she did appreciate her aunt’s compliment. Without a doubt, Mary was quite lovely. Curly orange locks of hair fixed around her face, and she was undeniably smart for her young age. Coping with a family death kind of puts a sense of responsibility on the people who experience the loss, and that’s most likely how Mary carried through such difficult times.

“So, aren’t you just loving the new house, Mary?” Tori inquired.

Mary was hesitant to give an honest opinion of how she really felt about the old, two-story Victorian- style home. “Um, well…I think it’s pretty, but it might take some getting used to.”

Her father let out a soft chuckle. It was great to see her father happy again. He had spent all his savings on this house; the least Mary could do was be grateful. “You are just so clever, aren’t you? Now, you can run along and explore. I’ll help your daddy put away the rest of the boxes.”

Mary felt relieved that she could take a break from unloading what seemed like a thousand boxes. Exploring wasn’t really on Mary’s mind, but she figured it would be good to know where she could plant that apple tree she had been wanting to plant ever since she was little. She kissed her aunt, hugged her father, and set off to roam her new surroundings.

The land was mainly flat with a few hills sparse in between. Medium stalks of wheat occupied most of the plains; although, the lush white flowers were visible from a great distance away. There were small clusters of trees that were subtly separated by a few hundred meters or so. The closest patch of trees to the home was standing on top of a small hill. It wasn’t too far from the home, but far enough that Mary could feel safe in the event that a tornado struck. She hated the thought of a tree falling on top of the house. Other than that, she loved trees. In fact, this patch of trees would be perfect for her to plant her apple tree in. Making her way up the steep slope, Mary noticed the silence and serenity as she stared up at the aged trees. The wind blew softly, revealing a rustle of the leaves above, and the smoky smell of moss that swayed from the branches.

She made it to the top of the slope, turned to face the field she traveled, and saw her aunt and father still unloading boxes from her father’s car in the distance. The house was closer than she had originally thought. With the sun at the highest point in the sky, Mary wanted to take advantage of the light and search the woods for a nice planting spot. She didn’t want her father to find out about her apple tree; she wanted to make the best apple pie for her father. Mary made her way between the porous-barked trees and into a small area. It could have been the perfect place to plant a tree, but there was hardly any sunlight passing through the tangled branches above. Mary steered around searching for a substantial spot to plant her apple tree, and she began to notice oddities in the environment.

Mary stepped back to examine the wall of trees that stood around her. It was quiet. There wasn’t any chirping of birds, any buzzing of bugs, no flowing of air, and no sound of any kind. It was a different kind of silent. “I’d better get home.” She thought to herself. She worried about how her father was feeling. “Maybe he thinks I got lost and called the authorities to come find me.” With this in mind, she walked back the way she came from. As she brushed through the path she created earlier, she couldn’t help notice a subtle interruption in her mind. She peered through the gloomy darkness, but could not see anything other than trees and shade. Only a soft touch of light existed here. Even though she could not see anything, she felt like someone was there. She hadn’t felt this feeling in a long time, not since her mother passed away.

She hastened her way out of the woods, down the hill, through the fields and to the house. It was dark out. Mary wondered how long she had actually been in those woods, and why she hadn’t noticed the time. She banged on the back door afraid to look behind her. “You’re finally home from your adventure? You had me a little worried.” Mary’s father opened the door and patted Mary on the head. Mary didn’t know how to reply. Her mind was still being interrupted by an odd feeling. With her father at the doorway, she gained the courage to look back at the woods and noticed nothing but a perilous view of the land she traveled. She stepped inside, and her father closed the door behind her. As soon as he closed the door, the strange feeling went away; she felt safe. She couldn’t wait to go to bed after such an exhausting day. She had noticed that everything was unpacked minus a few boxes of utensils in the kitchen. “Dad, can you show me which room is mine?” Mary requested. Mary’s father was excited to show her the new room he had Mary’s aunt decorate for her. “Oh, Dad, I love it!” Mary gave her father a big hug. It had various shades of nature painted throughout the room, and a bed with lace comforters centered the space evenly. The walls were painted a neutral olive color; her favorite color. The thing Mary really liked about the room, though, was that it was on the second floor. She had always wanted to live in a two-story home ever since she was a little girl. “Good night, Dad.” “Sweet dreams, Mary.” The two exchanged hugs and Mary’s father left the room. With the lights out and moonlight shining in, Mary expected to feel uneasy, but she felt safe. It wasn’t long before she fell asleep.

The next morning, Mary woke up to bright sunbeams peeking through the sheer curtains. She could smell breakfast cooking and heard the laughter of her aunt and father from downstairs. Mary combed her hair, put on a clean, simple dress, and went down to the kitchen. “Look who’s finally up. You got a good beauty sleep in?” Mary’s father teased. “Dad, you know sleep just makes your face all puffy and unflattering.” Mary’s aunt chuckled and prepared a plate for Mary. “Well, Mary, I’m leaving back to the States tomorrow night, so I want us to do something together before I go, okay?” Mary’s aunt placed Mary’s plate of food on the dining table and slipped her twenty pounds. “Happy Birthday, Mary.” Mary had forgotten it was her birthday and couldn’t believe she was turning 16. She wanted to go into town, but she didn’t think her father would approve. Quickly eating her breakfast, Mary slipped the money into one of the front pockets of her sundress.

“Dad, can I please go into town with aunt Tori, please?” Mary begged.

“Now, you know I don’t want you going into town getting influenced by those city kids.”

“But, Dad, please? Tori will make sure I’m only looking around. I’ll be good.” Mary smiled. Her father returned the smile. “Oh, fine. You’d better behave yourself, okay? And another thing, I need you to do me a small favor.” “Dad, on my birthday?” Mary whined. “Yes. It’s not anything tedious. I just need you and your aunt to get some of those flowers from the back and bring them to me; I want to make your cake look special.”

“Okay, Dad. I like how you make it a surprise.” Mary stated facetiously.

Mary’s aunt giggled as they made their way outside. Walking through the short stalks of wheat and to the lush green grass, Mary began to ask Tori a few questions. “Tori, how come my dad picked this place of all places?”

“Well, you see, the price was very low, and for the size of the land, it was a price your father couldn’t ignore.”

“But what about school and stuff? How is that going to go? Like, does a bus come here?” Mary’s aunt laughed. “No, girl, I was told by the land owner that buses stopped driving through this area around the time your mother moved away from here with your father.”

“Wait. So my mom lived in that house?”

“Yep; she grew up there, but when she found out about her pregnancy, she couldn’t bare facing her parents with the news. She was too young to have a child in her parent’s eyes, so she left with your dad to America. She told me all about it.”

“Wow. That’s why Dad came here. It was probably because she had good memories here before she got the sickness when we lived in the city.” Mary began to remember her mother’s humble smile and soft rosy cheeks.

Mary’s aunt didn’t want Mary to feel sad about her mother, so she quickly changed the subject. “I wonder how many flowers your dad wants.”

They began picking flowers and chattered the details of city life until Mary noticed something in the corner of her eye. She looked up the hill and in the clear daylight stood a baby sheep atop the crest. “Tori look, it’s a lamb!” Mary shouted with excitement. “Oh my, isn’t it cute?!” Mary’s aunt replied.

Mary ran towards the top of the hill to greet the baby sheep. “Mary, don’t run after it; you’ll scare it off.” To no avail, the lamb walked towards Mary. Mary was taken aback since she considered the logic that her aunt was instilling in her. Mary stopped in her tracks and watched the little lamb prance its way down the hill. The little lamb stopped a few feet away from Mary and looked as if she was familiarizing herself with Mary’s scent. Mary began to slowly walk towards the lamb with her hand out. She knew that animals had to get familiar with scents. With the lamb only inches away, she placed her hand on its snout and caressed gently. The lamb scooted in closer. It liked the attention.

“It looks like a girl, Mary. Her mom might be looking for her and you don’t want to be around for that.” Mary’s aunt said jokingly.

“Can we bring her back and introduce her to my dad?”

“Mary, you know your dad isn’t very fond of animals. He won’t approve of it being near the house.”

“Okay, fine. Let me tell her goodbye.” Mary demanded.

Mary turned to the little lamb and said, “Don’t worry, okay? I’ll come back here soon.” She then smiled and walked toward the house. Mary couldn’t help to look back at her new found friend. She wanted to see where it was going, so she turned around and noticed the baby sheep was still standing where she had left it.

Mary’s aunt decided to take Mary’s father’s car because she was going to need the gas left in her own vehicle to drive to the airport the next day. It was about a ten minute drive before she saw the village of Hambleton, Lancashire. The village wasn’t as much of a city life as her old home in the United States, but it definitely had more life than the new place she called home. There were houses with neatly trimmed lawns and towns’ people walking the sidewalks in front of the stores. They had stores like any other well-developed town had. Mary and her aunt went for decorations to spruce up her room a bit more. Mary’s aunt insisted that Mary save her money and let her do the spending. It was Mary’s birthday after all. Tori was a pretty laid back aunt and let Mary wander off into the store to look for things that she liked.

With a small shopping basket in hand, Mary toured around the shop searching for seat cushions that would fit in nice with the theme of her bedroom. Dabbling the comforters and bed sets, she spotted a boy walking her way. “Hello, Madam, is there anything in particular you’re looking for?” A young boy in his late teens approached Mary in what appeared to be the shop uniform. His name tag read “Daryl”.

“Um, well…I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for?” replied Mary timidly.

“I can certainly help you with your search. Do you have a certain colour you like? We’ve got bed sheets, comforters, pillows, and curtains of all sorts!”

Mary couldn’t help but blush at Daryl’s enthusiasm. “I would like to know if you sell these pillows separate from the bed set.” Mary asked while picking up a mousse colored pillow trimmed with lace.

“I’m sorry; Madam, but we only sell that with the complete set.”

Mary frowned slightly and Daryl saw her dismay. He was charmed by her chocolate-hazel eyes and red hair. “I know that it would be expensive to purchase it this way, but I know of a place a few shoppes down that has almost the same design and specialises in pillows specifically.”

Mary chuckled at the thought of a store that only sold pillows, but it sounded like a great place to get exactly what she wanted. “That sounds great! I’m gonna let my aunt know. Which way is it?”

“I could show you. I’m almost off of my shift, and plus, I need to get a few pillows for my mum.”

Mary was nearly embarrassed on how straight-forward Daryl was being. It was quite obvious he liked her. Mary was not used to this kind of attention, so she reacted how any other girl would act; she ignored him most of the time. She didn’t want to be shy, but it was in her nature, especially around boys. She planned on leaving to the pillow store with only her aunt, but as soon as they stepped foot out of the shop’s exit, Daryl came running out. “You two ladies almost left without me.” He said with a chuckle.

“Who is this young man, Mary?” Mary’s aunt questioned.

“Tori, this is the guy that told me where the pillow store was, and Daryl, this is my awesome aunt. You can call her Tori.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Tori. Shall we see this shoppe? It’s just up ahead.”

Both Mary and Tori snickered at Daryl’s loudness. He was a very enthusiastic teenager. They arrived at the pillow shop a few moments later and noticed it was closed for the day. Mary’s heart sank. She wanted to go in and find the mousse colored pillow that would have gone great with the olive walls she had in her room. “Well, we can always come back first thing tomorrow before I leave, Mary.” Suggested Mary’s aunt. Mary nodded with agreement and began to walk away. Something in the window caught her eye. It was a pillow that was split into the two solid colors: Sky blue and green. It had an apple tree in the center that was fully blooming with apples. “I have to come back, Tori. You mean it?”

“Of course I mean it. We’ll come back here tomorrow and hopefully we’ll have Daryl here to give us a tour of the shop.” Mary’s aunt winked at Mary. Mary hid her face with embarrassment. Mary and her aunt said their goodbyes to Daryl and made plans on when to meet the next afternoon. Daryl went in for a hug, but Mary quickly put out her hand for a polite handshake. She wasn’t used to that kind of culture. That’s how the towns’ people greeted and departed from each other here. Everyone was so friendly. With that, Mary and her aunt got into the car in front of the shopping strip and drove home.

Once they arrived to the house, Mary dashed inside to put away the few antique findings in her room. She was placing Chinese-inspired tea pots on her windowsill while admiring the clear sky. It was getting dark and only a few stars were beginning to reveal themselves. She looked down to notice the little lamb was still standing where she had left it. Mary grabbed a coat and headed for the field. She walked up to the little lamb and sat beside her. “See. I told you I would be back. Sorry it took so long, though.”

The lamb laid next to her and released a small sigh. “I know I took so long, but there was this boy, and he was just so charming. He gave me this feeling that I’ve never felt before.” Mary laid down to look up at the sky fading to an indigo. She spoke of her day to the little lamb and how she had moved here. She caressed the lamb’s soft wool and began to feel sleepy. The stars were plenty now.

“Mary!” yelled her father. Mary woke up on the couch to her father cursing up a storm. “Why in the hell were you sleeping outside?!”

Mary looked around to notice that it was daylight. “I didn’t sleep outside, Dad, chill out.”

“Chill out? You were outside, in the goddamn field with your fucking clothes off! How the fuck do you want me to react, Mary?!”

“What are you talking about?! What, in my right mind, would I be doing outside naked, huh?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe having sex with that boy from in town! I knew I shouldn’t have let you go. You’re already turning into a town slut.”

“Dad, I didn’t do that, and you know it!”

Mary let out a loud cry. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing from her father. She could see her aunt in the background with a worried look on her face.

“Now, Wilbert, you can’t say she was doing that with that boy. You didn’t see her doing that did you?” Mary’s aunt defended. She had been confused as to why Mary was in the field with no clothes, but she knew that Mary wouldn’t have had sex; she was too timid and very respectful to her father. “I have to leave today, but I will not leave you two like this. I will be damned if what’s left of my family gets torn apart by an accident.” Mary’s aunt sat on the couch beside Mary and wrapped her tighter in the covers.

Mary was shocked at the whole situation, and she wondered why she had fallen asleep outside. She knew she had clothes on when she went outside that night because it was cold. In fact, she even grabbed a coat on her way out. Mary’s aunt grabbed and hugged her all the way to the car. She promised Mary she’d take her back to the pillow shop.

“We’re going to go get that pillow you wanted so much, but I want you to avoid that Daryl boy if you see him, okay?”

Mary nodded her head. Everything that her father said to her was still racing through her mind. She didn’t even want to look at that boy, let alone talk to him again. They arrived to the shopping strip and nearly power walked to the pillow shop in an attempt to avoid Daryl. As they approached the entrance, Mary could see Daryl inside. He looked up and spotted her through the display window. He waved enthusiastically, but Mary didn’t return the gesture. Entering the store, Mary and her aunt went directly for the pillow with the apple tree art and immediately to the check-out counter. Mary glanced over her shoulder to check if he was following her, but he wasn’t. He just had a confused, but focused look on his face as he browsed the pillows.

“Hello, Madam; that will be 25 pounds.”

Mary had just enough, but Mary’s aunt quickly pulled out some money and paid for it. As the woman handed Mary the bag with her pillow inside, she dropped it. She bent down to pick it up.

“Oh, I got it, Mary.” It was Daryl.

Mary snatched her pillow away from him. “Go away! You are ruining everything.”

“What did I do?”

“My dad hates me because of you!”

Daryl stood there puzzled as Mary and her aunt walked out to the car. Mary had a guilty feeling for yelling at Daryl that loud in public, especially in a peaceful village like Hambleton. It couldn’t be changed, though. The drive home was quiet. Mary stared out the window and examined the breathless sky. A thick, gray haze spread over the horizon. The sun peeked through and revealed itself as only a slightly glowing spot. With the weather like this, it was sure to rain that night.

The drive seemed much longer than the last time, but she was home. She was quite sluggish from the ordeal with her father and Daryl, but she felt a little better now that she had the pillow she wanted. Making her way up the stairs, she heard the sound of rustling coming from her room. Scared that her dad was going through her things, she swung the door open. Mary’s pillow fell to the ground. She was in awe. Her room was destroyed. The walls cracked, curtains torn, cloths thrown from corner to corner, and there stood the little lamb in the center of the room. It was wearing one of Mary’s sundresses. Although the lamb destroyed her room, she had an idea of who was behind letting the animal in.

“Dad, why did you bring that animal in my room? I told you I did nothing wrong!” yelled Mary.

“What are you talking about? You know damn well I don’t like animals. You think I would let one in this house?!”

Mary took consideration of this, but still believed her father wanted to get some sort of revenge on her behavior. Mary took her father by the arm and pulled him towards her room.

“Look! Why did you put my dress on an animal? That’s gro…”

Mary couldn’t believe her eyes.

“Mary, what are you talking about? Are you trying to upset me again? You’ve done enough of that already.”

Mary’s father walked off, leaving Mary alone in confusion. Her room wasn’t destroyed, and the dress that the lamb wore was neatly placed on the bed. She didn’t know what to think anymore. She was relieved her room wasn’t destroyed, but worried about her mental health. With the smarts of most adults, she knew she could tell if she was going a bit mad, but that wasn’t the case at all. Maybe it’d been the rough day. Maybe she needed to get some rest. She turned on the night lamp and fell in bed. Her eyes got weary the more she grew tired, and eventually she could focus on sleep rather than the events that occurred earlier that day.

TAP~TAP!

Mary immediately opened her eyes and focused them at the window. She couldn’t see a silhouette, rain, hail, or bugs. Her heart began to race. TAP! The sound was a little louder this time. With all curiosity, she had to take a look outside. Pulling the curtains back quickly, nothing was there to surprise her. TAP! It was a tiny rock. Mary looked down and saw the cause of the noise. There was Daryl standing with a mousse colored pillow in one hand and a pebble in the other. Mary was relieved, yet confused at the same time. Mary opened her window and whispered to Daryl.

“What are you doing here? How do you know where I live?”

“I just saw you and your aunt leave in this direction, so I knew this was the only house closest to Hambleton for miles. I wanted to give you this pillow as an apology. You know, for not selling you the one from the bed set.”

Mary smiled. She couldn’t help herself from noticing his effortless charm. She debated on the thought of letting him in, but knew that was a bad idea. It would only confirm her father’s belief that she was with Daryl. “It’s okay if I can’t come in. I just really wanted to apologize. I can toss you the pillow if you know how to catch. I know how well you Americans are at catching with baseball and all.”

Mary was slightly offended, but took it as an insulting joke. She chuckled anyway.

“Well, thank you. I’ll catch it, but I don’t know if you’ll able to throw it this high, though.”

Daryl smiled. He was enamored by her sharpness. With Mary’s challenge accepted, he tossed the pillow toward her window and Mary caught it.

“Good night, Mary.”

“Night, Daryl.”

Daryl waved goodbye and Mary shut her window with a sense of accomplishment. Oddly, she didn’t feel quite right. She looked out the window to watch Daryl make his way out the backyard. The presence now interrupted her feelings. As she heard a vehicle drive away from the front yard, she looked up and into the distance. Against the purple sky were the dark hills that rolled along the surface of the earth. Peering into the horizon, she noticed a white figure standing on a hilltop. Her temples began to flutter. She knew the lamb had wanted to spend time with her. Maybe this was guilt she was feeling. Seeing the lamb earlier was only a figment of her imagination built up by frustration, right? Mary shook off the feeling and went back to bed.

Knock-Knock.

Mary woke to a soft knock at the door. It was her aunt Tori. She missed her flight and had to reschedule a new one for another time.

“Are you awake, Mary? I got you some orange juice.”

“Yep, I’m kinda awake.”

Mary’s aunt handed Mary a small coffee mug filled with orange juice. This was a good day already. It definitely was better than the day before. Mary sat up in her bed only to discover a small painting on her wall in the very corner. Small, but visible, the painting was slightly similar to Mary’s apple tree pillow, except the tree had no leaves.

“Tori, I think you forgot to paint the leaves.” Mary giggled.

Mary’s aunt looked over to the far corner and stared back at Mary. She stared at Mary for a few moments with what appeared to be a confused look on her face.

“Yeah, I guess I did.” Mary’s aunt replied hesitantly. She patted Mary on the head and fluffed her pillows.

“Good night, Mary. You try to get some good sleep now. I have to leave early in the morning. I want you to be there when I leave.” Mary hadn’t realized that it was still only a little past midnight. She began to wonder why her aunt randomly gave her orange juice in the middle of the night.

“Tori, thank you for the orange juice, but what was it for?”

“I’m surprised you didn’t ask for more. I assumed you were thirsty. You’ve been asleep for an entire day.”

Mary was taken aback by this. She never liked to miss out on a day’s event, even if recent days had not been so well. With the darkness outside, she couldn’t help but to feel tired. She’d slept a whole day, yet the gloomy weather had reinforced her sleepiness. Mary’s aunt closed the door and went to her bedroom to get some rest before her flight in a few hours.

Staring at the ceiling fan, Mary began to dose off. She had various things on her mind: Daryl, the apple tree painting, her father, how things would be if her mother hadn’t passed away. Suddenly, a shuffle from the end of the bed abruptly interrupted Mary’s thoughts. She was frozen in fear, not able to move. She began to move the covers closer and closer to her face and as slowly as she could. She didn’t want to see who was there. The rustling stopped. Mary halted her movement in fear that she had been spotted moving. The figure made its way to the side of the bed. Mary’s mind racing through thoughts of how to escape, but she couldn’t think of anything that seemed plausible. I have to turn that light on somehow. As the figure leaned in closer, she could see what looked like a woman’s silhouette peeking from the edge of the bed. Mary had to do something and do it quick. She jolted out of bed, straight for the light switch and turned it on. There stood the little lamb wearing one of Mary’s dresses.

“Why the hell are you in my room, and why are you wearing my dresses?!”

The little lamb stared back in silence.

Mary had yelled in frustration.

“Get out of my house now!”

She attempted to open her bedroom door, but it wouldn’t budge.

As Mary began to build up more anger, she thrashed at the door hoping for it to open.

Abruptly, the lamb let out a loud cry.

Baaa baaa baaa baaaaaa baaaa

Mary thrashed harder at the door, yelling for someone to help her.

Baaaai baaa biiii baaaa ooooo

Mary became helpless and resorted to self-defense. She never wanted to hurt an animal, but it would be the only way to stop this.

Baaaaiii baaanna biiii baaik oooo

Mary grabbed the iron off of the dresser just by her bedroom door and raised it. She swung down as hard she could. The little lamb’s eyes stared up at Mary with anger. The lights went out.

Aaii wannaa bii like yooou

The iron hit the ground. Mary looked into the darkness. She backed away slowly to her bedroom door staring at her bed with the figure beside it. The figure rose from its crouching position. A wiry presence stood tall, facing Mary. Mary’s eyes began to water as the figure stepped closer. Long nails softly ran across Mary’s face and down to her neck. The figure leaned in closer. Mary closed her eyes. Even though she couldn’t see its face, she knew it was menacing. As the presence grabbed a hold of her neck, Mary’s father broke into the room.

“Mary, are you alright?!”

He flicked on the lights and discovered Mary lying on the ground nude crying every last tear she had. He quickly grabbed the bed sheets and covered her up. He yelled for Tori to come and watch Mary as he called the police. The room was a complete disaster. Piles of feces smothered the carpet floor, curtains torn, mirrors broken. The only thing that wasn’t tampered with was the bed and the sundress that lay on it. Mary pleaded with Tori to take her back to the United States with her. She wanted to leave this place behind. Mary’s father was standing in the corner shedding a few tears with a somber look on his face.

“Tori…” Wilbert began. “Please take care of my daughter; she doesn’t have much time.”

“What about you, aren’t you coming with, Wilbert?”

“I can’t. My life is here in this house. This is where it all started.”

“What do you mean, Wilbert?”

“…her mother acted this way since her pregnancy. I thought it would end when she died.”

“Wilbert, she was sick. You couldn’t help it.”

“People don’t just eat away at their own flesh, Tori! She didn’t have a disease! Oh, God. I thought they killed that sheep a long time ago. Take Mary far away from here!”

Tori kept silent. She was shocked by her brother’s breakdown. He was losing everything he worked so hard to get. She grabbed Mary’s clothing and packed them into her luggage. She gave her older brother a kiss on the forehead and made her way outside to the car with Mary close by. As she packed the luggage in the trunk, she could hear her brother weeping a pain that very few have ever felt. A pain he had kept in for a very long time. Mary was still in a daze as they drove to the airport, but came back to her senses as they pulled up to the entrance. Tori checked in her luggage, bought Mary a ticket, and traveled to her flight. Several hours flew by as they rode the plane into the United States. They made it to New York City. The dark curtain of brown and blue covered the sky, not one star present, the streets were vacant with only a few cars passing by Tori’s apartment complex every hour or so.

“I’m glad I got to move in with you. I hope Dad can come here soon.”

“Yeah, Mary, hopefully he will. You’ll need to get some rest. You’ve had a long night.”

Mary lived through the years going to high school and making new friends. She appreciated the life she had now. A doctor’s visit once in a while and even going on university tours in order to see what her future plans were. It was quite difficult to think that she had left Daryl and her father behind, but she was coping pretty well. Her life was better now. Things were slowly getting back to the way they used to be. Every now and again, she discovers only a few dresses missing from her wardrobe.

Credit To – Alexander Contreras/YakuYabai

Author’s Note: This story is a part of the By the Fire’s Light series.
Part One: By The Fire’s Light
Part Two: The Wanderer of Blazes

Detective Carl Rourke pushed his chair back from his desk and rubbed his eyes.  The book he had been reading fell on the desk with a small plop.  He stood up and moved to his window and was surprised to find the sun had gone down.  Turning to the clock on his desk, the little red digital numbers told him it was nine o’clock.  He laughed.  ”Shame your dead, Connor,” he said, picking up the book again.  ”You’ve got a great writing style.”  He tapped the book against his hand.  ”And I think I understand what’s going on now.”

For the past couple of weeks, Rourke had been looking for leads in the case of the death of Connor Russell.  A young woman, Cassandra Brighton, had seen a “faceless man” look out the window after Connor pushed himself out of his burning building.  She had subsequently died in a fire as well.  Connor’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ellen Kennedy, had just died in a bizarre car accident that had ruptured her gas tank and caused it to go up in flames.  And this book of Connor’s “By the Fire’s Light” held the key.  In it Connor described a tall faceless man with tentacles that went around and stalked people and killed them.  Usually in relation to fire in some way.

It seemed simple enough to Rourke.  Some psycho fan of Connor’s,  or of this Slender Man, was acting out on one very bizarre fantasy.  And just like the “real” Slender Man he was branching off onto anyone who had seen him, stalking and eventually killing them.  With this in mind, Rourke had had a special watch set up on Meredith Grolinsky, the woman who had witnessed what she called a tall, slender and tentacled man walking away from Dr. Ellen Kennedy’s burning car. If this psycho stayed true to form, he would go after her next.  When he did, Rourke would be ready and waiting.

Rourke rubbed the back of his neck and flipped the lights off on the way out of his office.  He paused and considered taking Connor’s book with him.  Shaking his head, he kept going.  He actually wanted to sleep tonight, and a faceless monster would not aid him in that quest.  ”Call me if anything happens with Grolinsky,” he called to Deloran, the desk sergeant, as he headed out.

“Will do,” Deloran said, with a small wave.

As Rourke slept that night, his sleep was undisturbed by dreams, good or bad.  A shrill screeching from his smartphone at 3 am, however, pulled him from his dreamless slumber.  ”Rourke,” he said groggily, brushing sleep crust out of his right eye.

“Detective Rourke, this is Sergeant Deloran.”

Rourke shot straight up, his sleep falling from him like his blanket.  ”Someone made a move against Grolinsky?’

A pause.  ”We’re not sure.”

Rourke growled in frustration.  ”What do you mean you’re not sure?  Either someone made a move or they did not.”

“Her furnace exploded.”

Rourke nearly dropped his phone.  ”I beg your pardon?”

“Fire department isn’t sure how yet.  Could have been a defect in the furnace.  Could have been foul play.”

Rourke put a hand to his temple.  ”Fire again.”  He slowly shook his head.  ”Connor’s stove has a gasoline leak and explosion.  Cassandra Brighton dies in a fire caused by faulty wiring.  Ellen Kennedy’s car is wrecked and the gasoline tank ruptured resulting in a fire.  And now Meredith Grolinsky dies in a furnace blast. There is no way this was an accident.”

“She’s not dead.”

“She’s alive,” Rourke said, incredulous.  He was already up and searching for the pants he had tossed on the floor on his way to bed.  ”Where is she?  Where was she taken?”

“She was taken to Mercy.  She’s in critical condition, with burns over 90% of her body.  But she’s alive.”

Rourke was jumping into his pants, hopping up and down on one foot with the phone still held to his ear with his shoulder.  ”Alright, Deloran, call the hospital and get them to keep the ambulance drivers there if you  can.  Or call the drivers back or whatever. They probably won’t let me see Grolinsky, but she might have said something they overheard.”

“Will do,” Deloran said on the other end.

Twenty-five minutes later found Rourke pulling into the emergency room parking lot at Mercy.  Deloran had texted him on the way over and directed him to speak with the nurse at the desk.  She would be able to tell him where the drivers were.

Rourke took a quick look around the emergency room waiting area as he walked inside.  Chairs that looked comfortable but might as well have been padded with granite formed a square that was broken up every ten chairs or so by a small wooden stand.  On the stands were stacks of magazines from three months ago, with the very exciting topics of bass fishing and home living.  The walls were painted a neutral beige, probably an attempt to try and calm any panicked people who were unlucky enough to be sitting here. A mother with a hyper-active little boy with a gauze bandage around his wrist sat at one end of the room. On the opposite end, nearer Rourke, a young woman with long black hair sat bent over, face in her hands.

Turning from the waiting room, Rourke made his way over to the desk.  A nurse in blue scrubs sat behind the counter.  Her name badge told him her name was Amber, and the little smiling sun on it told Rourke she would be happy to help him. She looked up as he walked up.  ”Detective Rourke, here about Meredith Grolinsky,” he said, flipping out his badge.

Amber nodded and stood up.  ”We stopped the drivers before they left.  There in the break room down the hall there, third door on the right.” She pointed down the hallway Rourke should take.

“How is Ms. Grolinsky?” he asked, whipping out a small notebook.

“She’s in critical condition.  We have a couple doctors trying to stabilize her now.”

“I heard she had burns over 90% of her body.”

Amber nodded.  ”That is correct.  It’s really going to be touch and go for the next couple hours. If she pulls through she’s got a good shot at recovery.  If not…”

Rourke nodded.  ”Any family come with her?”

Amber nodded to the young woman bent over with her face in her hands.  ”Her daughter came in about ten minutes ago.”

Rourke made a mental note to try and talk with her on the way out.  Then, giving his thanks to Amber, he walked down the hallway to the breakroom.

The door creaked as he pushed it open.  A young woman and man looked up as he walked in.  ”You the detective?” the young woman asked, leaning back in her chair.

“Yes,” Rourke said, flipping out his badge again.  ”Detective Carl Rourke.  I wanted to ask you a few questions about the woman you transported here.”  He whipped out his notebook again, pen in hand.  ”Can I get your names?”

“I’m Robert Fitzgerald, she’s Peggy Yorick,” the young man said, leaning forward.  ”What’s the
deal, you think someone tried to murder this chick?”

“The deal is, I am just trying to gather the facts about what happened,” Rourke said.  He hooked a chair with his leg and pulled it out.  Sitting down, he looked up at the twosome.  ”Was there anyone you saw at the house when you arrived that looked out of place?”

“Crowd of gawkers,” Peggy said, reaching into her coat.  She pulled out a cigarette and tapped it against her hand.  ”That’s nothing unusual though.  Especially when a house goes kaboom in the middle of the night and there’s half a dozen fire trucks and police cars outside.”  She shook her head.  ”Can we hurry this up?  We have to go back on shift in thirty minutes and I want to get a smoke in.”

“Of course,” Rourke said.  He turned to Robert. “You didn’t see anything unusual?”

“Crater where a house used to be.  Otherwise no,” he said, yawning slightly.

“Hm,” Rourke said, making a note.  He looked up again.  ”Was Ms. Grolinsky conscious at all when you brought her in?”

“Very briefly,” Robert said.  ”Screaming her head off.  Considering how we found her, I’d say that’s reasonable.”

“Kept going on about the fire until she blacked out after we had in her the back of the van,” Peggy said, the tapping of her cigarette becoming more insistent.

“Anything specific?” Rourke said, his voice becoming slightly more tense.

“She said something about seeing something by the light of the fire,” Robert said, running a hand through his hair.   “I think.”

“I saw it coming by the fire’s light,” Peggy said, almost without thinking.  Robert and Rourke glanced at her.  She shrugged.  ”That’s what she said.  ’I saw it coming by the fire’s light.’”

Rourke wrote down the phrase in his notebook.  ”It?  Not him or her?  You’re sure?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure,” Peggy said with a wave of her hand.  ”Is that it?”

“Yes, that’s all for now,” Rourke said.

“Good,” Peggy muttered getting up.  She exited without a backward glance.

Rourke raised an eyebrow as he stuffed his notebook back in his jacket pocket.  ”She’s all choked up,” he said getting up.

Robert gave him a bemused look.  ”It’s the nature of the job.  You don’t last long if you don’t build up a few walls.  I’m sure you’ve learned that too.”

Rourke nodded his assent. Then, he left the room as well, making his way back to the emergency waiting room.

The black haired woman that was Meredith Grolinsky’s daughter was standing at the nurse’s desk.  ”They’re taking her back to a room now,” Amber was saying.  ”You’ll be able to see her for a few minutes, but only for a few.”

Rourke walked up to the desk.  ”Is she going to pull through then?”

Amber turned towards him and gave a half-hearted smile.  ”They’ve stabilized her as best they can.  It’s going to be something of a waiting game for the next twenty-four hours.”

“Who are you?” the black-haired woman asked.

“Detective Carl Rourke,” he said.

“Detective?” she said, her eyes going wide.  ”Did someone do this to my mother?”  She took a step forward.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out, Ms.?”

“Mira.  Mira Gorlinsky.”

“Mira, could you answer a few quick questions?”

“Sure,” she said, swaying slightly as she stood.

Amber caught her hand.  ”Sit down!” she said, pointing to a chair by the desk.  There was a note of confidence and command in her voice that pierced whatever fog Mira was in and she sat down.  She shuddered.  Amber was already in motion, filling a small cup with water and giving it to the young woman.  ”Slow sips,” she said, as she took her place back behind the desk again.  She flicked her gaze to Rourke.  ”Keep it short,” she said.

Rourke nodded.  ”Was there anyone you know of that would have a grudge against your mother?”

Mira shook her head slightly, not looking up from her glass.  ”My father, her husband, is dead,” she said abruptly.  She looked up at Rourke’s raised eyebrow.  ”I just thought it would be your next question.  You know, like on the crime shows.”

Rourke allowed himself a small smile.  ”It’s good to know.”  The phone on Amber’s desk rang and she picked it up. After a brief conversation she spoke to Mira.  ”If you feel steady enough, you can go back now,” she said, one hand over the receiver.

Mira stood up putting the water glass on Amber’s desk.  ”Yes, I’ll be okay now,” she said, her voice firm.

Amber nodded and hung up the phone.  ”This way, then,” she said, leading Mira to a set of closed doors a few feet behind her desk.  ”Don’t even think about it,” she said, giving Rourke a good-natured glare.

“Wasn’t going too,” Rourke said, holding up his hands.   He fished a business card out of his pocket and leaned forward, handing it to Mira.  ”If you think of anything, you can call me at the number on there day or night.”

Mira took the car and shoved it in her jean’s pocket without looking.  She gave a bob of her head, and then followed Amber into the back.

***

Rourke sat in his car for a good half an hour before he actually started it up. His fingers rapped the dash again and again as he tried to make sense of what he had learned.  It was possible this psycho had rigged Grolinsky’s furnace to explode.  But Grolinsky’s words bothered him.  She claimed to have seen something by the light of fire she had been caught in.  But if this psycho had actually stayed around for the explosion, he would be no better off than Grolinsky.  ”Delirium, I guess,” Rourke said, finally starting his car.

As he did, his smartphone began to ring.  Slipping his car back into park, he pulled it out of his pocket.  An unknown number was calling him.  Frowning, he answered the phone.  ”This is Detective Carl Rourke.”

“Oh God, Detective, please come back!” a panicked voice on the other end gasped.

“Who is this?” Rourke asked undoing his seat belt.

“It’s Mira, Mira Grolinsky.  I saw him.  God, I saw him, the man that tried to hurt my mother.”

Rourke’s car was off, keys in hand, and he was already running full tilt to the hospital.  One hand automatically went to his side, where a gun hung in its holster under his coat.  ”Mira, where are you?” he asked as he approached the hospital.

“I’m in the waiting room,” she said, her voice taking on a hysterical edge.  ”They won’t let me back in.”

Rourke bounded into the hospital.  Mira was standing near the doors and she jumped as he entered.  Tears streamed down her face and she was shaking.  Amber was already in motion from around her desk and over to where they stood.

“What happened?” Rourke asked, putting his phone back away.

“She thought she saw someone back there,” Amber said, trying to put an arm around Mira.  Mira shoved her away.

“I didn’t think I saw someone, I did see someone!” she nearly screeched.  ”A tall man in a business suit!”

Rourke’s eyes widened.  ”I need you to let me back there right now,” he said to Amber.  ”That matches the description of a man leaving the scene of a crime Ms. Grolinsky witnessed.

Amber wavered and gave him an uncertain look.  She sighed and beckoned for him to follow her.  ”We have the entire area back here on camera.  We called security when Mira raised the alarm, but they didn’t see anyone on the monitors.”

Rourke strode quickly behind Amber.  He heard Mira fall into step behind him. A strong smell of antiseptic assaulted him as the doors opened before them.  He passed a large cart full of linens, several  curtained off areas, and a few criss-crossing hallways.  They came to a stop by a bay of six separate alcoves.  Amber pointed to the third one from the left.  ”Ms. Grolinsky is in there.”

Rourke cautiously walked over and pushed the curtain softly aside.  Grolinsky was swathed in bandages and hooked up to several IVs.  The machines monitoring her vitals beeped softly.  She did not appear to respond to his appearance.  He let the curtain fall back.  ”Where did you see him?” he asked Mira.

Mira pointed to the opposite end of the room. “I saw him peek around the wall there,” she said.

“How do you know he meant your mother harm?” he asked, walking over.  It was a small bay where some extra medical equipment and IV bags were kept.  The wall jutted out slightly, forming a corner someone skinny could fit behind without being seen.

“I– I don’t know,” Mira said, sounding suddenly uncertain.  ”I just knew.” She blushed as she
said it.

Rourke looked around the room, taking in the cameras in the ceiling.  ”Can the cameras see this corner?” he asked.

“Actually, no,” Amber admitted.  ”But if someone was there, they would have had to step out onto camera to leave. Or to get in to begin with.”

“Hunh,” Rourke grunted.  He walked back over to Mira.  ”Did you get a look at this guy’s face?” he asked.

For a moment, panic crossed Mira’s face.  Then she shook her head wildly. “No, I didn’t get a good look.”  She looked away from him then, back to her mother’s room.

Mira was hiding something and Rourke could tell it.  But he felt it best not to push it for now.  ”False alarm I guess,” he said, smiling at Amber.  ”Sorry to trouble you.”

“No trouble at all,” Amber said, leading the both of them back out.  ”But I think it’s for the best if we leave your mom to rest now,” she said glancing back at Mira.

Mira didn’t look up but she nodded.  Rourke took one last appraising glance of her and then followed Amber back to the waiting room.

***

Rourke stretched as he walked into his office the next morning.  ”Okay, first things first,” he muttered putting down his briefcase.  ”I’ll get a list of Meredith’s neighbors and make some phone calls.”  He opened the laptop on his desk and tapped the power button.  It began to hum to life. As it did, Rourke slithered out from behind his desk and grabbed his coffee mug from the corner.  He looked inside it and made a little face.  Brown residue from the previous day’s coffee clung to the sides and bottom of the cup.  ”Eh, I’ll just rinse it out,” he said as he walked to the break room.

As he ran some water into his cup his phone began to ring.  Sighing, he put the mug down and pulled out his phone.  A number he now recognized as Mira’s was on the screen.  ”Hello, Detective Rourke,” he said answering the phone.  He reached over for the coffee pot as he talked.

“Detective Rourke, it’s Mira Grolinsky,” Mira said.  Her voice was tired.  But it wasn’t the tired of no sleep.  It was the tired of one who was too emotionally stunned to entirely accept what was going on around them.  It was something, unfortunately, Rourke had heard a lot of in his line of work.

“Your mother died last night?” he said, gently.  He placed the coffee pot down next to his mug.

“Yes,” Mira said a quaver in her voice.  A pause.  ”No, she didn’t die, she was killed.  He did it, I know he did.”

“The man from last night?” Rourke asked.  He leaned against the counter top, careful not to jostle the coffee pot.

“Yes.  No. I mean–” She stopped.  ”I need to talk to you in person.”

“That’s fine, Mira, that’s fine. Do you want to come to the precinct?  Or do you want me to come to you?”

“Let me come down there.  I have to get out of here,” she said.

“Alright, let me give you directions.”  He gave her quick directions to precinct and then after re-assuring her again, he hung up the phone.

“Great, another dead witness,” he said, pouring the coffee into his cup.  ”This has career ending case written all over it.”

Thirty minutes later, Mira was sitting down in front of his desk.  There were no traces of tears on her face, but it looked like it had been freshly scrubbed with soap and water.  Her cheeks were still a little red because of the violence of the washing, as were her eyes, likely from the violence of her tears.  Rourke steepled his hands.  ”What did you want to tell me, Mira?”

She looked down into her hands.  ”You’re going to think I’m crazy.”  She shook her head slightly.  ”I think I’m crazy.”

Rourke glanced over at Connor’s book, “By the Fire’s Light” still sitting on his desk.  His eyes widened slightly as he remembered the words Meredith had screamed as the ambulance attendants loaded her up.  ”Why don’t I try to guess,” he said slowly, still looking at the book.  ”The man you saw, you don’t think he had a face.”

Mira’s head snapped up, brown eyes meeting Rourke’s hazel ones.  ”Yes,” she said.  She stared at him for a moment longer.  ”How did you know?”

“Well,” Rourke said, sliding the book over to Mira, “that’s going to take some explaining.”  Briefly he narrated the events of the past few weeks to her.  First the death of Connor, followed by Cassandra Brighton, then Ellen Kennedy, and now her mother Meredith Grolinsky.

Mira turned the book over in her hands.  ”And so, this ‘Slender Man’ has been spotted in some way, shape or form at all the deaths?”

Rourke nodded, then paused. “Well, most of them.  I haven’t interviewed anyone who saw him around Cassandra’s death yet.  But she did die in a fire, like the victims in Connor’s books.  Cassandra thought she saw a faceless man look out Connor’s window.  Your mother saw what she thought was a tentacled man leaving Dr. Kennedy’s car.  And now, you, you think you saw a faceless man shortly before your mother’s death.”  He put a hand to his forehead.  ”I don’t know how he got in or out without anyone seeing him, but I think you really did see your mother’s killer.  I think we have a Slender fan on the loose, and we need to catch him before he gets anyone else.”  He stood up and Mira looked up at him as he did so.

“You think I’m next,” she said simply.  ”He goes after those who witness him and his crimes.”

“I think it’s possible,” Rourke said.  ”I want to assign police protection to you for the time being.”

Mira looked down at the book again.  Her hands wandered over the title.  ”Hm,” she said.  ”Do as you please.”  She stood up and handed him the book again.  ”I have to go arrange for my mother’s funeral.”  Without another word she left the office.

Rourke took the book and put it back in a drawer.  Turning to his laptop, he accessed the police network and found an address for Mira Grolinsky.  He made a quick call and had a patrol car assigned outside of her house.  Then he began to methodically call Meredith Grolinsky’s neighbors, hoping to find clues.

The sun had set once again before Carl Rourke got up from his desk and looked out his window.  ”Another day another dead end,” he said as he shut down his laptop.  He hated this.  This killer had been two steps ahead of him from the beginning.  Killers usually messed up eventually, but he didn’t want to have a double digit body count before he caught this guy.  His smartphone trilled in his pocket.  Taking it out he saw, again, Mira’s number.  ”Well, third’s times the charm,” he said answering the phone.  ”Yes, Mira, how can I help you?” he asked.

“I bought that book today, “By the Fire’s Light”,” she said, sounding oddly calm.  ”And I’ve been doing some research and some thinking.  And I think you’re half right.  I think I did see my mother’s killer.”

“Okay?” Rourke said, confused.  ”Did you have something new to tell me?”

“I think,” Mira said, slowly, “that you have one thing wrong.  I don’t think you’re looking for a man.”

“Well, it could be a woman I guess,”Rourke said with a shrug.

Mira sighed.  ”No, Detective.”

Rourke’s eyebrows knit. And then he realized what she was talking about.  ”Mira,” Rourke said, as if he was talking to a small child.  ”The Slender Man is not real.  He is a fictional entity.”

“Was,” Mira said, still calm.  ”We have summoned him and he has come.”  He heard the scratching of something on the other end of the line, possibly a pen on paper.  ”And what can be summoned can be dismissed.”

“Mira,” Rourke said, still slightly patronizing, “it’s been a long and hard day for you.  Get some rest.”

“I will when I am done.  You take care of yourself, Detective.  Who knows, he might move after you next if this doesn’t work.”  She hung up.

Rourke quickly called the officers in the patrol car currently in front of Mira’s house.  After verifying she was at home, he left instructions for them to watch for any comings and goings to her house carefully.  Then, finally, he left the office for his home, this time with his copy of “By the Fire’s Light” in his briefcase.

Rourke turned on his bedside light as he slipped into bed that night.  He tried to focus on the book in his hands.  He just felt like there was something he was missing.  And it wasn’t that this Slender Man was real.  Unable to concentrate on the book and his tiredness finally catching up with him, Rourke let the story fall from his hands as he closed his eyes, not even bothering to turn off the light.

***

Rourke dreamed.  He was in a closely overgrown forest.  Every which way he turned, he brushed up against tree branches and overly tall ferns.  Something tall moved at the very edge of his sight sometimes, but he couldn’t tell what it was.  He caught a good glance of it to his north (or at least he guessed north from the moss on the trees) and he began to move towards it.

Something touched his shoulder.  Rourke turned around and found himself looking at young man with black hair.  ”Detective Rourke,” he said, quietly.  ”Do not follow it. It will come after you soon enough without you encouraging it.”

Rourke raised an eyebrow.  ”Who are you?”

“Connor,” the young man said.

Rourke cocked his head.  For some reason the name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place why.

Connor shook his head.  ”Don’t question, just listen,” he said, looking over his shoulder.  ”I don’t have much time and this is important.  Dr. Kennedy had the right idea.  It runs on belief.  But there is too much now for one person to deny it existence.”  He shook Rourke slightly.  ”Do you understand?”

Rourke shook his head.  ”I don’t,” he said.  He felt as if his mind had been wrapped in a blanket, warm and stifled.  ”But I should.”

“Just remember then,” Connor said.  ”One person is not enough. Nor two.”  He sighed.  ”We gave the nameless one a name,” he muttered.  ”And he will not give it back.”  He looked into Rourke’s eyes.  ”It is easier to modify a story than to negate it,” he said.  ”Tell Mira that.  It’s too close to her now, I can’t reach her.  I won’t be able to reach you after this.”

Rourke felt the hairs on the back of his neck raise.  There was something behind him.  He could feel it.  He could see it in Connor’s terrified gaze.  Connor’s hands tightened painfully around Rourke’s arms.  Rourke tried to turn and see, but Connor held him fast.

“No,” Connor whispered.  ”Don’t look, not yet.”  He leaned in close and whispered in his ear.  ”I am free, but others are not.  I can’t help them, but you and Mira can.  Please remember.”

Rourke nodded.  ”I will.”

“Good,” Connor said.  ”Now,” and his face suddenly twisted, “wake up!” he screamed, still leaned in close to Rourke’s ear.

***

Rourke jumped up in bed.  ”Holy Mother of God,” he said, head in his hands.  ”What was that?”  Without thinking he was already reaching for the notebook he took with him on investigations.  Quickly, he began to jot down the dream.  A sense of urgency permeated him, a feeling that he could not let this dream slip from him.

Rourke shook his head as he transcribed.  ”Lord, Rourke, you are losing it.  Have a dream about Connor Russell, and don’t even realize its him in the dream.  Some detective.”  He glanced over at his clock.  Two in the morning.  Even though he thought he was a fool, the feeling of urgency did not leave Rourke.  In fact, if anything, it was growing stronger.  ”It’s too close to her now,” Connor had said.  Slender Man was obviously what his dream Connor was referring to.

Rourke considered going back to bed, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep.  Not unless he was sure Mira was okay.  He pulled his smartphone off his nightstand and dialed Mira’s number.  It rang five times and then went to voice mail.  He hung up and stared at the floor for a moment.  If it was only two in the morning the same patrol car would probably be in front of her house.  He dialed through to the officers inside again.  They quickly assured him no one had gone into or left the house.

Hanging up the phone and putting it back on the stand, Rourke grunted.  ”That’s that.”  He moved to turn of the bedside light he had left on when he went to sleep. His hand hung there as he stared at the light. The dream may have been just a dream, but Rourke had learned to trust his gut over the years.  And his gut was telling him he had to get over to Mira Grolinsky’s house right now.  He took in a deep breath, held it, and let it out.  ”Fine,” he growled, getting up.

Mira lived in a small community about thirty minutes from his house.  There were about fifteen house arranged around a good sized lake in the middle.  A light breeze brought the smell of the water to Rourke as he climbed out of his car.  He nodded to the officers in the patrol car as he walked over to it.

“Something wrong, Detective?” the young woman said inside. Rourke recognized her as Samantha Layton, a five year vet of the force.

“No, I don’t think so,” Rourke said.  ”Ms. Grolinsky just called, said she had something she wanted to show me,” he said, lying through his teeth.  He’d be damned if he told these officers that a bad dream had prompted him to come here.  ”Keep an eye out, though, okay?”

“Will do,” Samantha said with a nod.  She prodded the young man next to her.  ”Hear that, Craig?” she said, as he started slightly.

Rourke turned from the car and walked up to the house.  A motion sensor light on the garage went off as he walked up the driveway.  His long black shadow stretched away behind him as he rang the bell on the house.  He followed this up with several solid knocks.  Silence met his ears as he waited.  He put his head down and listened.  No, it wasn’t quite silence.   Just there on the edge of his hearing he thought he heard… crackling.
Whipping away from the door, he moved to the living room window.  He peered through the partially open blinds and saw a soft orange glow inside.  He drew in his breath.

Rourke turned back to the patrol car that Samantha was already climbing out of.  ”Call the fire department!” he yelled.  ”And stay back!”  Rourke pulled a Maglite flashlight out of his coat pocket.  With a straight focused blow, he hit the corner of the living room window with the butt of the light.  It fragmented and fell into little pebbles, designed to break in a way that wouldn’t leave shards that could cut people.  He smashed the window again, leaving a hole big enough for him to climb through.

“Mira!” Rourke shouted, flipping on the light as he dragged himself through the window.  A small trail of smoke was filtering into the large living room, past the two black leather couches and easy chair.  He ran, following the trail and the orange glow towards the back of the house.

Rounding a corner, he spotted a glass sliding door that was now reflecting a wall of flames that danced in an almost impossible straight line in front of it.   A table with a golden tablecloth shined brilliantly in the light.  And there, in a corner behind the table, flames surrounding him, stood a tall man in a business suit, towering over the cowering Mira in a corner.

“Halt or I will shoot!” Rourke said, pulling out his gun and dropping the flashlight.

Mira looked out around the man, eyes wide and unbelieving.  ”Detective?” she said, fear and hope mingling in her voice.

The man turned to face Rourke, which was a funny choice of words since he had no face Rourke could see.  Rourke leveled his gun on his extremely skinny center mass.  ”Do not move!” he roared.

The man cocked his head and took a gliding step forward.  And as he did, to Rourke’s astonishment, the flames danced and followed him, gliding perfectly. Training overcoming amazement, Rourke made sure Mira was not standing behind the man and then opened fire. He fired three shot point blank into the man’s chest.

He didn’t even stagger.  He glided closer to Rourke.  Rourke’s eyes widened.  ”Bullet proof vest,” he gasped stepping back.  ”But even with a bullet proof vest, he’d still feel the impact,” a small corner of his mind whispered back.  Ignoring that part of his mind for now, Rourke leveled his gun at the man’s head.  He fired. He watched as the bullet hit dead center where its face should be.  It, because even Rourke had to admit, when a man was hit in the face with a bullet, the bullet didn’t stop and then slowly sink into the face without leaving a trace.  A black tendril whipped from behind the thing’s back and Rourke realized he was about to die.

“No!” Mira screamed, dragging herself from the corner.  She coughed as she ran past the thing, and grabbed Rourke’s arm.  ”Don’t believe in him!”

The thing’s tendrils began to whip angrily as she spoke and it moved forward aggressively.  Rourke looked around him.  The flames had circled them, blocking the entrance back to the front door and to the sliding door that led down to the lake below.  ”The lake,” Rourke said, an idea forming in his head.  He grabbed Mira.  ”Come on!” he said, whipping the table cloth off the table.  He wrapped it around them and ran as the thing struck forward, its tendrils landing where he and Mira had been standing a mere second ago.

Rourke propelled himself and Mira through the flame wall in front of the sliding door.  He felt the flames biting into the tablecloth, felt the heat searing into him.  With a bounce he hit the glass door.  In desperation, he ripped off the tablecloth, Mira helping him, as he grabbed the door.  With a shove, it fell open, and he and Mira were running breakneck down the hill leading to the lake.

“It’s easier to modify a story than to negate it!” he said breathlessly to Mira, as they ran.  ”What is the natural enemy of fire?”

Mira’s eyes widened in recognition.  ”Water!” she said, as they closed in on the lake.  She started to turn to look back.

“No!” Rourke said, waving an arm to keep her attention.  ”Don’t look back!”  And then they were plunging into the water.  It seeped into Rourke’s shoes and socks, making his feet feel like someone had placed weights in them.  Rourke and Mira struggled forward, each helping the other, until they could  no longer feel the lake bed beneath them and they were dog paddling in the water.

“We have to believe,” Mira said through chattering teeth looking back at the house.

“We won’t be enough,” Rourke said, looking back with her.  The thing, the Slender Man, stood at the edge of the shore, the flames following him in a dancing swirling line down from the house.  It stood, black suit melding into and out of the smoke.  But it did not come forward.  Sirens filled the air as a fire truck approached the house.  The Slender Man tilted its head as if listening.  And then, slowly, it seemed to melt into the very shadows made by the flame’s light.

Rourke felt Mira grasp his hand.  ”Well, it was enough for now,” she gasped, trying to stay afloat with one hand.

“For now,” Rourke agreed, beginning to swim for shore.

Credit To - Star Kindler

In mid-July of 1991, when Sam was six years old, he was holding his mother’s hand as they walked barefoot across the baking hot asphalt of the neighborhood pool’s parking lot. He had his other arm through the hole of his inflatable black inner tube, and was gazing off at an angle tangential to the sun.

Something was bothering him, and had been ever since school let out the month prior. Sam refrained from telling his mother about it (and his father was not exactly a prime source of emotional comfort) because he was afraid she would think he was going crazy.

The passage of time for the young always seems so much slower than for an adult, even in the happiest of days. With this secret weighing on Sam’s heart, the past month had felt like an eternity. Finally he screwed up the courage to speak.

“Mom, I’ve gotta tell you something.”

She looked down at him, a kind but apprehensive smile spreading across her face. She knew he was a good boy, but that was rarely a good way for your child to start the conversation. “Go ahead, sweetie.”

“Sometimes, I see things. Like some kind of squirmy bugs.” Sam said, “I don’t think they’re really there. I can kinda see through them, and they run away when I try to look straight at them, but they’re always there. I think they might be inside my eyes.”

Her smile widened and she looked off to the side so as to not let him see it, since this seemed to be a serious issue for him. So many nonsensical worries turned into serious issues for Sam, a trait he likely inherited from her. Most of his issues tended toward the ‘monster in the closet’ category – a battle she had finally won through countless subsequent nights in which he was not eaten by a grue – so she thought something with an actual medical explanation should be easily put right.

“I used to get those sometimes. Lots of people do, actually. I know they look weird, like squiggly little worms or something, but they’re really just harmless little specks in your eyes that people call ‘floaters’. They’re not alive, and they can’t hurt you. They come and go, it’s no big deal.” She ruffled Sam’s hair as they approached the girl guarding the entrance to the pool, and waved their membership cards for entrance.

Sam spent the day doing flips underwater, and sometimes just bobbing along the surface of the pool in his black rubber inner tube. He slowly began to put the visions – what his mother had called ‘floaters’ – out of his mind. She had seen them too, which alone would have taken most of their menace away from them, even if they weren’t harmless like she promised they were. He sometimes wondered if his parents understood how much less scary those closet monsters would have been for him if his they had only acknowledged the monsters existence. Knowing you’re alone with horrors that only you can see is always the worst part.

“But if mom sees the worms and still says everything’s fine, then it must be,” he thought to himself. He found it somewhat odd that she mentioned the worms but not the spiders, or the way they scream when you try to fall asleep – but he supposed it went without saying. Sam stretched out across the tube, and let himself float.

—

Ten months later, when Sam was seven, his parents took him to an Optometrist – Dr. Howard – for an eye exam. After reading off a series of letters, the doctor asked him to read another – smaller – series of letters. This and other tests went on for what struck his parents as an unusually long duration, before Dr. Howard finally stopped and stared at Sam thoughtfully. He leaned down to get to eye-level with the child, as adults tend to do, and said loud enough to make sure the parents heard as well: “Do you know what twenty-twenty vision means?”

Sam shook his head in negation.

“It means,” Dr. Howard continued, “That you see things from twenty feet away as well as most people see them from twenty feet away. That’s normal. Some people see things worse than most people, and they might see things from twenty feet away as well as most people see them from thirty or forty feet away. We call that twenty-forty vision, and that’s when people start having real problems with their eyesight.”

Sam’s mother and father both visibly stiffened, afraid of where this might be going. Dr. Howard glanced briefly their way, held up a hand, then returned his attention to Sam. “Yours, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. You have what I believe to be twenty-six vision. It might be even better than that, but I…” He shook his head slightly, bugged out his eyes, and turned his palms up, “That would be like describing an eagle. You might as well be walking around with a pair of binoculars in your head. It’s basically unheard of.”

Sam’s parents exhaled and smiled slightly, happy that the news was good, and their son was normal – exceptional, even. Sam, on the other hand, felt a spine-tingling ripple of unease wash over him at the comparison to eagles that Dr. Howard had made.

His parents limited his television time, except when it came to informative programs. So if it was raining outside and he was bored, his options were either a book or some educational show. Some weeks ago, he had seen a program on birds. He learned that contrary to what people once thought, birds caught worms not because of hearing or feeling their vibrations – but because of their exceptional vision. They would tilt their heads so their eyes were facing the ground, and watch for the most infinitesimal disturbances caused by a worm’s passing.

This tingle of unease was brought to Sam courtesy of the fact that the worms and spiders had become more well-defined in the past six or seven months, and screamed louder than ever. Worst of all was hearing the doctor tell him that his eyesight was above and beyond normal. Over the past few months his vision had become milky and clouded with the apparitions, causing him much concern. By the time the Optometrist’s appointment came, he could barely read even the largest of letters on the eye exam – making Dr. Howard’s proclamation of exceptional vision even more disturbing to him. Acting on a hunch, Sam had merely been repeating the letters which were being screamed to him inside of his own eyes.

—

By the age of eleven, the world through Sam’s eyes had become a grayish-white fog. He had summoned up the courage to initiate a tearful and terrified conversation with his mother and father. He told them everything, and his dad responded by silently retrieving a flashlight and shining it in his son’s eyes. He mumbled something about ‘cataracts’, but shook his head – he hadn’t seen anything other than Sam’s bright blue irises.

Appointments to Dr. Howard became a bi-monthly event, then had finally ceased. They were replaced by trips to a specialist, who was a two hour drive away, if traffic was moderate. The new doctor seemed increasingly agitated with Sam after each appointment. Sam didn’t know the word the specialist reluctantly told his parents – “psychosomatic” – but he did know that after four of these trips they promptly ended, and were replaced by a much shorter drive to the office of a completely different manner of doctor. This new doctor’s office had a couch, and lots of stuffed animals. All this doctor seemed interested in was talking about Sam’s life and feelings. He took lots of notes, and cast many sideways glances in the boy’s direction.

To make matters worse, there were dots now. Little milky punctuation marks which the worms and spiders left in their wake. While the worms and spiders kept squirming around, albeit slightly more sluggishly than they had before, the dots remained perfectly still. This essentially marked the end of Sam’s ability to view the outside world. Everything now revolved around the screaming circus conducting its daily performance inside of his skull. There was, however, a change in the condition which Sam regarded as horrible and merciful at the same time: They had begun to laugh. It was a terrible mixture of tittering and squealing, but it was undeniably laughter. At least they stopped screaming long enough to laugh, even if the shrill hissing sound did invariably cause his bladder to release.

—

Sam was twelve years old when the white specks which had erased the last vestiges of his view of the normal world began to split open and writhe, and everything suddenly made a horrible manner of sense to him. Eggs. They had been laying eggs. At this realization, whatever tattered remnants of his sanity had been hanging on by a thread simply slipped loose and flew away.

He squeezed his fingers against his palms but kept his thumbs stuck out, curled upward like dull fishing hooks. He raised them to his eyes, and began to dig.

As his thumbs met his retinas, there was a single distant screech – a polite but stern protest. This did not last long, once he began digging in earnest. The screaming became unfathomably louder than it ever had been before, which he allowed himself a moment to be surprised by. It was as if the creatures had discovered a bullhorn stashed away inside of his skull somewhere. He realized this was a noise which, had it been coming from outside his own head, would have been deafening. Deafness would have been a mercy, as it would have meant cessation of the hideous, wailing cacophony being orchestrated for its audience of one.

He dug until his milky-gray view of the world turned to fire, then ultimately blackness. As warmth rolled down his cheeks and ended in a quiet, sickening slosh on the wooden floorboards of his parents’ kitchen, Sam fell to his knees.

Horror and agony yielded to merciful relief the likes of which most will never know. Blindness came as a blessing, freedom from that which had so horribly oppressed him. There, on his knees, Sam tittered and ran his fingers along his now-vacant eye sockets. His laughter devolved steadily into screams as he began to feel a squirming sensation work its way up from the floor, ascending his form with frightening alacrity. Even without eyes, he could see the error of his ways.

The same documentary which taught Sam about how birds hunt worms went on to discuss the common goldfish – and how they could and would grow to match the volume of their bowls.

Upon achieving freedom from globes far too small for their goals, the floaters screamed in triumph through mouthfuls of their former host’s bloody flesh, and began to grow.

Credit To – Dave Taylor

This is the third installment in the Tower of Sorrow series.
Part One: Yon Black Edifice Hath Called Me
Part Two: First Steps
Part Three: Tight Spaces

-

Dragging this unconscious sack of meat to the car, I have to wonder how the hell The Collective could possibly believe it would be of use to us. I mean, one whisper from our foe was enough to knock the poor bastard unconscious. Now, here I am lugging it to this car so that I can drive it halfway across the country to The Collective’s front door step. Sometimes I loathe this job and I’ve never been fond of human beings. I dump it into the trunk of my car carelessly. With a groan I flop into the driver’s seat, turn the engine over, and begin the long drive. Of all the worlds The Collective could choose, why this one?

I’ve been around humans before. I’ve walked in this world and seen the way they live. It’s atrocious to say the least. They spend their insignificantly short lifetimes trying to earn this crap they call money. It’s just little scraps of paper with some stupid green print on it. Utterly worthless! They lie and cheat and steal to try to gain more of it. They will even go so far as to kill each other over it, the damn fools! Don’t even get me started on how they treat each other, either! It’s like each individual in their society truly believes that they are the alpha and omega. Like each individual is somehow a god and the rest are just too damn oblivious and stupid to be reverent. They claim to love each other, but will in turn step on those they “love” as quickly and thoughtlessly as those they “despise.” It’s disgusting. Then of course you’ve got their stupid arguments over “what’s out there?” If they knew the truth their puny little minds would liquefy and run out of their sniveling noses. Some of them even go so far as to think that they actually KNOW. They call themselves preachers or scientists or what the hell ever other stupid titles they come up with. It’s absurd. They spend their lives dedicated to beliefs in their stupid gods or their scientific theories. They have no idea what’s really going on.

Before all of the maniacal death and destruction started, I had visited their sorry little reality many times. They couldn’t even comprehend who or what I was. I’ve been called an alien, a monster, a ghost, a shadow man, a demon, et cetera. The list could go on for eternity. I’ve never killed any of their kind, though at times I would have loved to. I’ve never “abducted” any of them, until today that is. Yet they go on with their stories of anal probing. What purpose would that even serve? Doesn’t everybody already know that humans are full of shit? It’s gone on since their sorry little species stopped climbing trees and started walking upright. I suppose for them it’s some form of entertainment or some such garbage. To me, it’s simply degrading. Sometimes I have to wonder why I even bothered to look in on them. I suppose it’s kind of comical to watch them wage their little wars. It’s like they grow up and then when they have some semblance of authority, they regress back to being toddlers. They fight over the dumbest things.

I know what my assignment is and I know that The Collective values this thing, but I just can’t comprehend it. So many other species have fallen to the evil that is consuming the worlds. How could a hero or a savior come from such an inept and weak species? How could one human being turn the tide in a war that’s been going on for so long? They can’t even see past their own insignificance far enough to realize that their world is but a drop of water in a vast ocean. This human had better be worth all my trouble. If it weren’t for The Collective, I would have been eradicated with the rest of my people. I owe them my life, but at times like this, I wish that debt was already paid.

I’m broken from my reverie of disgust by a thumping sound coming from behind me. It sounds like the hairless ape in my trunk is awake and struggling. Now the fun begins. I slam on the brakes and throw the car into park. I turn off the radio and sure enough I can hear it back there moving around. With a sigh, I open the car door and get out into the cool night air. I suppose nights like these in this world are enjoyable. Another loud bang brings me back to my task. Fumbling with my keys, I make my way to the trunk and pop it open. I can smell the nauseating stench of its fear wafting out of the trunk. Just to have some fun, I put on my best “psychotic killer” smile. I can’t help but chuckle as I say, “Oh, I see you’re awake.”

Credit To: J. Brown

I love jigsaw puzzles. So when I found one on my phone that allowed me to make any size puzzle I want with a snap of a picture I was hooked. I started by taking pictures of random shots in my room, clicked “cut” then “mix” and poof, I was off wasting time. After about 30 minutes of putting my “room” back together I decided to take a picture of myself to cut up and puzzle.

I decided to cut the picture for the puzzle at an expert difficulty. It was pretty awesome seeing my face split into hundreds of different puzzle pieces, each one flaking off one by one like an ember to the floor of the screen. After an hour of reconstructing my face I notice something in the background of the puzzle that resembled an unfamiliar black leather jacket hanging at the top of my closet door. Two more pieces revealed what looked to be a medium length, auburn colored wig while another piece showed eyes apparently painted on the back of eyelids. The final piece of the puzzle showed a face missing its mandible. I’ll admit. I was a bit unhinged at the sight of it…a bit puzzled even.

Coincidentally, my mandible would wind up being the last piece of his puzzle too.

Credit To – StupidDialUp

“I just wanted to say, none of you have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“What’s that, lady?”

“I couldn’t help but overhear—”

“How hard did you try?”

“Don’t give her a hard time. She looks like she has a story.”

“I do. It’s not a story you’ll like to hear, though.”

“Try us.”

“I’m just saying, you all talk like you know these big secrets about what goes on in this city, but you don’t know shit. There’s only one secret. Only one secret that matters, anyway.”

“Are you going to tell us what it is?”

“I am. Not because you deserve to know it, but because listening to you talk made me angry. This story is your punishment.”

“You hear that? We’re going to be punished.”

“I, for one, am petrified.”

“Should we beg for mercy?”

“Ignore them, Miss. I’m very interested in whatever you have to say.”

“It was a few months ago, just before Christmas. It happened because I was the last one leaving the theater. And because I had been Antigone…”

***

It was opening night. For the understudy, it was also closing night.

She would still have a part in the chorus, of course. But tomorrow Evangeline would come back and claim her rightful place as the lead and the understudy would go back to being, well, an understudy. Learn the lines, watch the lead, perform your own small role, and wait, that was the game. Still, the understudy thought, at least I got one night in the spotlight.

Not that they could afford decent lights. They couldn’t even afford a real stage, just an empty room with a performance space marked off. The house manager had added another row of seats in an act of delusional optimism (they could barely fill the ones they had) and now the chorus couldn’t move without elbowing each other. And the costumes didn’t really fit and there was no money to pay any of them and the heating in the old theater did not work anymore, leaving players and audience alike shivering even with as tightly packed in as they all were…

But people still showed up, and the show still went on, and even the understudy couldn’t help but smile a little when she saw the Xeroxed playbills: “Antigone,” with the director’s name right under it and Evangeline’s right under that and the understudy’s own name (in much smaller print) toward the bottom. It was a good show, in spite of everything. A classic.

The understudy was the last cast member to leave. Everyone else had gone out to celebrate, but she found she wasn’t in the mood. She carefully folded and hung the bits of her costume in the single communal dressing room so that Evangeline would have nothing to complain about when she came back from whatever “emergency” called her away on opening night. Glenda, the house manager, was waiting at the door and the understudy thought she might be annoyed at the holdup, but then the older woman smiled and whispered, “There’s a man here to see you.” As if were the most amazing thing in the world.

The understudy picked up her purse and headed for the back door, but Glenda added: “He says he’s a critic.” The understudy stopped. “He says he won’t leave until he meets you. I think he really liked the show…” There was a note of pleading, and beneath that a note of insistence. The understudy wavered for a moment and then turned back toward the front. She tried not to notice Glenda’s smug, pleased expression as she did.

As advertised, a man was waiting in the lobby. He wore a shabby suit of indeterminate color, and a brand new fedora hat. He was not a handsome man; in fact he was profoundly ugly. But when he saw her he grinned in a way that made him look, for a second at least, tremendously appealing. He fanned himself with his playbill and pantomimed a swoon. “Antigone,” he said, enjoying each syllable. The understudy told him her real name, but he waved it off. “Tonight, you’re Antigone. The finest Antigone I have ever seen. I first saw the play in 441, at the Dionysia in Athens, and you were a better Antigone tonight than I saw there, or anywhere since.”

She gave him a non-committal look. He smiled again. “Can I walk you out?” he said.

The correct answer, the safe answer, was no, because simply because a man claimed to be a theater critic (of no particular publication that he had mentioned, she noted) did not make it a good idea to wander off down Taylor Street with him in the middle of the night. And no was the sensible answer, because she had to rest after the premiere and because she felt a headache coming on. And she opened her mouth to say, “No, thank you,” but, somehow, it came out as, “Yes, that sounds lovely.”

The strange man took her by the arm. Outside it was cold and the sky was that distinct shade of black that it only gets in December in the city. The uneven rows of tall buildings with their dark windows pushed higher and higher over them. Lights flashed here and there. The critic began walking downhill and the understudy (for some reason) went with him. He was still talking about her performance. She blushed, but feigned modesty. “I’m only the understudy,” she said. “Our real lead will be back playing the part tomorrow.”

“No she won’t,” said the critic. “Evangeline will never play Antigone again, or any other part.” He said it with such conviction that the understudy was briefly speechless. She felt cold and afraid all of a sudden. Eager to change the subject, she said:

“You haven’t told me your name.”

“Pan,” the man said. He kicked a bottle into the gutter.

“Like the Greek god?”

“Not like him. I am him.”

They stopped walking; the street was deserted, though on the cross street below she saw the glare of headlights and bumper-to-bumper traffic. She gave him another sober look. “Where are your hooves?” she said.

“In my shoes.”

“And your horns are under your hat, I suppose. It’s not a very good line. Anyway, you told Glenda you were a critic; I thought Pan was a nature god?”

“The god of the fields, and of the summits, and the streams and the forest. The god of the shepherds, and the flocks, and the leaves and the grass. The god of the beasts and the spirits and the great far wild places where men are afraid to go but feel compelled to journey anyway. The god of the shadows under the boughs of the trees and the secret places in the furrows of the earth.”

The understudy had been about to laugh at him, but when he was done speaking she found she couldn’t.

“But,” he said, smiling again, “also the god of theatrical criticism. So you see, I am a critic. The first and the best.”

“God of theatrical criticism? I’ve never heard that. What sense does that make?”

“Because in those days plays were dedicated to the great god Dionysus, and I was his favorite companion, so who better to judge which playwrights were worthy and which were not? And because before the Athenians built their theaters the first actors gathered on the slopes of the green hillsides where I spent my days, and they wore the skins of goats, and they would drink and dance and sing in divine ecstasy and pour libations in my honor, and I liked that very much, and blessed their revels.”

He was standing very, very close to her now. The long shadows of the winter night had not improved his unhandsome features, but he had a certain quality (perhaps his voice, perhaps his expressive features, or perhaps just what they call je ne se qua) that made him compelling to watch and be near. He even cupped her face in his rough palm, and she did not object.

“But you don’t believe I really am the Great God Pan, do you, little Antigone?”

“No,” said the understudy.

“Then I’ll prove it to you.”

“How?”

“Come with me.”

It was a stupid suggestion. Stupid, unsafe, illogical, insane. Anyone in their right mind would say no.

She said yes.

The man(?) took her by the hand and drew her away with him; not in the direction they’d been going but down the side street, and then down an alley. It was pitch black but he knew his way. In the dark it seemed to the understudy that his legs were twisted in some unearthly manner, making his gait long and wide. They encountered no one in the trash-strewn alley. The buildings they passed were just dark, blank shapes, black against black overhead. The understudy felt drunk and addled, somehow. Her mind could not focus on any one thing, and the world swam in front of her eyes, as if a film covered everything. It seemed they were moving very fast. When he finally stopped, she was out of breath. He pulled her close (his suit seemed to be made of some coarse hair, and it had a barnyard musk about it) and said, “We’re here.”

She looked around and gaped; she recognized this place. It was the grove. But that was clear on the other side of town, miles away? How could they get here on foot, and so quickly? The leaning trunks of those huge, primeval trees offered no answers. The man with the crooked legs led her down the crooked path as she wavered on her feet, dizzy and uncertain (crooked of mind, she thought). He took her to the place with the stage. In the spring there was a music festival here every year. In the middle of winter it should be empty, but now torches lit everything with blazing orange light. The man sat down and actually pulled her onto his lap. She did not object.

“How is my Antigone feeling now?” he said. Under the brim of his hat his eyes appeared very strange. The understudy groped for words and came up with:

“‘In just spring…when the world is mud…’” She was reciting something from memory, but she did not know what. She giggled, then, uncontrollably. Her head throbbed. She felt as is she’d drunk a great deal of wine.

“That’s good,” said the man. “Now we’re going to see a play. You showed me such sights on your little stage tonight that I thought I should return the favor. This play is called, ‘The Cyclops.’”

“I know that one!” the understudy blurted out. “By Euripides. It’s a satyr play.”

“Yes, and here are the satyrs.” He pointed to the stage with a gnarled finger and the understudy saw shapes converging there. They were men in costumes (at least, she thought they were costumes) of animal hide, with hooves that tromped the boards. They wore masks, but not masks like the understudy had ever seen; though simple painted wood, these masks had faces no human mind could conceive. The chorus (for that’s what the satyrs were) gathered at center stage and, at the strange man’s signal, they began to dance. Not just dance, but cavort, and leap, and even writhe, wretched and mad, heads wagging and eyes rolling. The understudy did not like the way that they moved; it was not natural. She particularly disliked the way that their legs bent. It hurt her eyes to look at them, but the strange man did not let her look away.

“‘It’s spring, when the world is puddle-wonderful, the little lame balloon man whistles far and wee …’” he whispered to her. They were not the lines of the play, but lines from something else. The understudy knew them but could not remember where they came from or why they seemed important just now. The strange man shifted under her, and she felt the coarse hair of his bent legs rub through the fabric of her jeans and heard the stamping of his hooves as he kicked his shoes away. Onstage, the chorus finished their dance and then the chorus leader stepped forward. The understudy knew the play’s the opening lines:

“Unnumbered are the toils I bear, no less now than when I was young and hale…”

And the chorus joined him: “Here we have no gods, no roll of drums, or drops of sparkling wine. Dear friend Dionysus, where are you while we do service to the one-eyed cyclops, slaves and wanderers we?”

When the understudy had seen “The Cyclops” before the satyrs had been funny, even when they complained, and the chorus leader had been old, fat Silenus, baldheaded and hapless. But these satyrs wept real tears and gnashed their (sharp) teeth and tore their hides with their twisted fingers, and the understudy did not like to look at them, or to hear them. Their voices were hollow and full of pain. Pain, and anger.

“This is how the play was performed in the old days, before the theaters, before the Athenians, before Euripides gave it a name and wrote it on his scrolls and gave the parts to mere humans in masks,” the man said, whispering in her ear. “But this is still not, yet, the greatest truth you will see. Watch.”

The play went on: Odysseus and his crew washed up on shore and met the satyrs, and gave them wine, and laughed as the satyrs got drunk and rowdy. The understudy would have thought the Greeks would not be as frightening as the satyrs, but their masks, though fully human, show faces line and creased with fret and grief, livid with anger and bitterness, or wan with utter despair. They were the faces of those who had suffered so much that they hated living. And though the understudy saw the strings that held the masks in place and the empty holes where the actor’s eyes peered out, it seemed, in the flickering torchlight, that the features the masks moved…

The satyrs were warning the Greeks that their master was coming, but Odysseus was not afraid. “For surely the ghosts of Troy will moan in their graves if we flee from a single man after standing with shields steady against the fifty sons of Priam,” he said. “If we die here we will die a noble death, or, if we live, we will maintain our great renown.”

And then there was a voice that made the understudy scream and cover her ears. Even with ears covered, she heard the words boom like thunder:

“What means this idleness, your Dionysian revelry? Here have we no Dionysus, nor roll of drums. One of you will soon be shedding tears of blood from the weight of my club; look up, not down.”

And now the trunks of the trees were shifting as if a huge wind were blowing them around, and now a great shape was stepping through, too huge for the whole of it to be seen in the light of the torches. The satyrs all scattered and the Greeks took up their spears, but most of them fell to their knees or clustered together, shaking and crying, as the cyclops loomed over them with its one huge eye and opened its great mouth to reveal rows of gore-spattered teeth. When it took a step the world shook and the understudy screamed again and shut her eyes and the universe was spinning and mad, and the Great God Pan caught her in his arms. When she opened her eyes, the stage was empty; the men and the monsters were gone.

Pan whispered vile words in a language she did not know but still understood:

“Don’t you like my play?”

He no longer seemed even remotely human, and even the twisted, goat-like legs and horns were gone. Now he was a dark, slithering, shapeless thing, twisting and reforming around her all the time. The understudy blinked through tears. “What are you?” she said.

“I am Pan; my name means ALL, for the Hellenites knew that I was no simple god of the fields. I am the heaviest rocks at the bottom of the earth and the tallest peaks at the edge of the sky. I am the deepest roots of the oldest trees that will never die and the beating hearts of the great beasts that swallow eons in their jaws. I am the long hour between day and night when nothing is real. I am frenzy and madness and death. I am a world that doesn’t care, that dashes your minds and bodies against the rocks and watches you break, and calls it good.

“And when they began to fear me they cut down my forests and plowed under my fields and cut my rocks into columns and roofs and statues. And when Thamus reached Pilodes he told them, ‘The Great God Pan is dead,’ but it was not true. You have paved me over and cut me down and tried to drown me in the poison from your machines, but I can never die. I have always been here. And now I will show you the future of your wretched race. Look.”

He pointed to the stage again. Pale, wretched figures, hairless, eyeless things shimmered into view, things that twitched and writhed, blubbery skin rolling across their bones as they danced. Pan whispered more:

“What you are seeing is a piece called the Dance of the Nephilormus. They reenact the great battle that will take place on this spot, ten thousand years from now, between the human race and the nephil, which for them is ten thousand years in their past. Your kind will suffer and crawl the face of the earth and curse their enemies in that war, and they will call out to me to save them, but I will not. I will only do what I always do: endure.”

“Take it away,” the understudy said, sobbing. “I don’t want to see the nephils.”

“The nephils?” Pan laughed, and it hurt her ears. “These are not the nephil that you see. These are the humans!”

And he laughed while she wept and the vile dancers flopped their shapeless limbs across the stage, worshipping Pan with their suffering. And she wondered, is this real, is this happening, or is this a dream? Did I leave with the others and drink too much and now lie, sweating and afraid, in the back of someone’s car? Or has my whole life up until now been a dream and this is finally the waking?

The dancing went on and on, and soon the whole world spun in a mad circle in front of her eyes, blurring into nothingness, and she was left with just the same words, repeating over and over again in her head:

“It’s spring and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan
whistles
far and wee…”

***

“…”

“Jesus!”

“Lady, what are you on? Where can I get some?”

“Go ahead and laugh at me if you want. It doesn’t matter.”

“Miss, are you all right? Do you need a doctor, or a place to stay tonight?”

“I’m not insane. And I’m not on any kind of drugs. What would I need them after what I’ve seen?”

“Well I think she’s full of it.”

“But I don’t understand; what even happened?”

“Pan liked my performance, so he tried to reward me. But the things that a god calls a reward are the things that humans might call a curse. He showed me the truth about the world.”

“And what’s that?”

“That time and place are illusions. That what we call reality isn’t any more real than a play on a stage. If you were smart enough you could see the seams in everyone’s costumes and the frayed edges of the scenery, like he does, and like I can.”

“So where’s Pan now, then?”

“Hey, don’t mess with her. I don’t like that look she has.”

“He’s in me.”

“What?”

“He’s in all of us. His name is ‘Pan,’; it means ALL, because he’s everything. We’re just nsects pretending that we matter, until the day comes when he’ll…”

“Swat us?”

“Something like that. Anyway, that’s all I had to say. I’m leaving. You can all stay, and drink your beer, and tell your ghost stories.

“And pretend that it matters.”

 

Credit To – Tam Lin

“That reminds me of a story.”

“What does?”

“What she just said about being late to catch the train.”

“Me? I didn’t say anything?”

“Well, I’m sure I heard someone mention it, and that reminds me of a story that scared the hell out of me. Do you remember that subway drver last month who went nuts?”

“Remember it? I was on that train.”

“Do you want to tell the story about it then?”

“What else is there to tell?”

“A lot. Plenty of rumors around dispatch about that one. Not that I believe any of them, mind you, but the way I heard it, it happened like this…”

***

That voice was really starting to get to the driver.

“We will depart shortly. Please wait.”

They’d been hearing that for twenty minutes now. The train was stalled two miles into the Transbay Tube. It wouldn’t budge an inch, but the driver’s console showed that everything ought to be working, so it must be a problem with the tracks. She’d called it in, then assured her passengers everything was all right, and then waited. It wouldn’t be so bad if the PA didn’t seem to be on the fritz as well. Every few minutes a woman’s disembodied, mechanical voice chimed:

“We will depart shortly. Please wait.”

She couldn’t turn it off. She didn’t remember ever hearing that announcement before; but then, she’d never had a breakdown like this before either. The train hummed on its electric rails, sealed up inside a steel tube submerged 130 feet below the surface of the bay. Her ears were stopped up from the pressure the water above them. Up ahead, all the driver could see was darkness, the occasional lighting fixtures doing nothing except demonstrating precisely how pitch black it really was down here. She’d made this trip six times a night every night for seven years, back and forth across 30 miles of track between SFO and Bay Point, which meant back and forth through the underwater tunnel six times, and never before had she stopped to consider the crushing weight of all that water. She thought she could hear bolts straining and water dripping somewhere. Just her imagination, of course, but still…

“We will depart shortly. Please wait.”

She toggled the PA switch again; it hadn’t done anything the last five times, but she could help trying nce more. She checked the security monitors; the passengers seemed calm enough, considering the circumstances. Her four-car train held only seven people as they came up on one o’clock in the morning. Two were dozing and one was pacing the aisle. All but one had white earbuds snaking into the sides of their heads, and they would nod now and then to whatever they were hearing. She envied her rider’s calm. If it just weren’t so dark out there she might not be so frazzled. The tunnel looked like it went on forever. And if they had stopped anywhere but under the water. And if that damn voice would just knock it off…

“We will depart shortly.

“No one can hear me but you.

“Please wait.”

The driver blinked. What was that? She toggled the switch again, but of course, nothing happened. Up ahead one of the lights winked out. Or was that her imagination again? She fanned herself with her clipboard; the stalled train seemed hot and stuffy all of a sudden. The air conditioning was still on, according to her diagnostic panel. Perhaps it was just the confinement wearing on her. Would dispatch ever tell her what was going on? She thumbed the call button again.

“Any word on that track problem?” she blurted it out, not even bothering to identify herself first. The only answer was static. She frowned and hung up. She began to sweat, and she pinched the ridge of her nose, eyes squeezed shut. A headache was coming on.

“We will depart shortly, please wait” the automated voice whirred. Then: “They’re already inside. Look at the riders.”

The driver’s eyes snapped open. What did it say? She looked up and did a double take. She grabbed a Windex-soaked rag and rubbed the monitor screens, but nothing changed. Something must be wrong with the cameras? Cars three and four looked fine, but in car two both of the sleeping passengers looked like indistinct, grey blurs. In car one (the same car she occupied, in the driver’s carriage up front) the pacing man looked perfectly normal, but the woman in the backseat with the earbuds in also appeared blurry and distorted, as if a film of cobweb or a tiny fog bank covered her body. The driver looked over her shoulder, peering into the car through the plastic divider; the woman was still sitting there, staring at the blank tunnel wall outside her window, nodding her head to whatever was streaming through the wires in her ears. She looked perfectly fine. The driver chuckled a little at having scared herself, then rubbed her temples. The annoying recorded voice pinged again:

“We will depart shortly—

“No we won’t. We won’t leave until what’s keeping us here lets us go. You are not watching the riders.”

This time the driver was sure of what she’d heard. What the hell? She reached for the toggle.

“You can’t turn me off. No one can hear me but you.”

A tingling sensation crept across the back of the driver’s neck. Her hand froze halfway on the switch. Her fingers trembled.

“Look at the riders again,” the voice said. She hesitated. “Look!”

When the driver looked she squinted and then leaned in, as if being closer would somehow change what was there. Two more of her passengers had lost definition on the video feed, leaving only two still showing up clear. The driver tapped the screens. What the hell? The sight of those blurry figures gave her chills, for some reason. Their images seemed to wriggle and writhe, as if a cloud of tiny insects were crawling over them.

The two sleeping passengers woke and, walking in unison, moved up to the first car. She expected to be able to see them clearly once they’d moved, but the grainy blur stuck to them as they moved. She looked over her shoulder again; both of them were in her car now. One was a teenager, short and fat, the other an old man, gray and thin. They sat side by side in the front seats, though they’d been separate before. The pacer didn’t seem to pay them any mind, but he did finally sit down. The driver watched as he fitted in white earbuds.

“It’s spreading. They’re inside. You have to get out of here,” the train’s voice buzzed at her.

“Shut up,” the driver mumbled. She looked at the monitors again: More passengers had moved up; four were in the second car now. They all sat rigid in their seats, and they all faced forward. None of them spoke. She called dispatch again, but this time there was not even static, just dead air. Outside, the tube lights were turning out one by one, and the train’s lights were flickering too.

“Help won’t come in time,” said the train. The PA warbled’ it was losing power as well. “You have to run. They’re in the wires.”

Now everyone was crowded into the lead car. All seven riders sat side by side in the front-most seats, staring at her. Their unblinking eyes looked flat and painted-on in the flickering florescent lights. She tapped on the plastic divider. “Folks,” she said, working hard to stop her voice from trembling, “they’ll be here to help us any moment. If you could all just head back to your original seats. We shouldn’t crowd the lead car in case…in case of an emergency.”

No one answered. No one moved. The man nearest her removed his earbuds and looked at her. Her CCTV monitors were failing one by on. The faithful voice of the PA buzzed in her compartment, barely audible as the train’s electrical systems slowly died. “They’re turning everything off,” it said. “They’re…sorr—…tried to warn…they’re in the wires. They use the wires to…”

The seven passengers all stood up. The driver went to open the door to her compartment, then thought better of it and locked it instead. Only the emergency lights were on now, and the passengers were dark blue silhouettes in the gray electric haze.

“Folks, just return to your seats. Return to your seats and…and…” Her mouth went dry.

“—oo late.” The PA was overwhelmed by static. “—ired in…—just voices.”

The static cleared for a moment:

“The dead are just voices, but we can travel through the wires, into machines, even into bodies, through the wires, through—”

Seven shapes crowded around the window. The driver tried to shrink back, but there was no room in the tiny compartment.

“The eight want new bodies. I told them not to do it but they wouldn’t listen. I tried to warn you. I tried. I—”

The PA went dead. The consoles were all dark. Outside, the tunnel was a long black passage to nothing. Inside, only one light was working. The driver heard fleshy palms slapping against the divider. Someone was pulling on the door. The flimsy lock jiggled. The divider broke in half and fell in, and then hands were grabbing her, pullin her, dragging her out. They were cold hands. She was screaming now, but with two miles of empty tunnel on either side and 130 feet of water overhead there was no one to hear her. They held her down. “Let me go!” she said. She felt cold all over. She felt something that made her think of the icy belly of a snake slithering across her body. One of the passengers leaned in.

“It’s okay,” he said. Cold breath tickled the driver’s ear. “It’s okay,” the passenger repeated. “We’re not going to hurt you.

“We just want a ride.”

***

“…and then what?”

“That’s it. I mean, someone finally showed up to evacuate the passengers from the trapped train, and when they did they found that driver curled up in a corner, screaming that she wasn’t herself anymore.”

“Wasn’t herself?”

“Yeah, you know, that there was someone else living inside her head now.”

“Oh God, that’s awful. I’m never riding at night again.”

“Man, this whole city’s going crazy.”

“Is it just craziness, do you think?”

“That’s a good question. I mean, look how many strange stories we’ve found right here in this bar. Maybe something terrible really is going on. Under the surface.”

“Like I said, it’s all just rumors. Hey lady, you said you were on that train, right? Did my story…wait a minute, where’d she go?”

“Lady?”

“Ma’am?”

“…huh. That’s funny. She snuck out?”

 

Credit To – Tam Lin